A View From a Broad (11 page)

Miss Frank, who had never heard of Vilmos Angst, thought the forced landing had driven Miss M loony and shouted for her to get back into the plane and behave like a lady.

But Miss M was beyond hearing, so delirious was she over this opportunity to meet, albeit under peculiar circumstances, the world-famous genius of cinematic art. Who knew where this could lead?

It led, almost immediately, to a large barn located near the farmhouse Miss M had seen from the air. There Mr. Angst was filming his newest epic in total secrecy.

The barn’s interior had been renovated to resemble a medieval sauna, complete with giant crucifix and plenty of fir boughs.

“This film, which I shall call
Thighs and Whispers,’
Angst explained, “represents a departure for me. It will be a comedy of manners, in which pain and guilt and man’s inborn need for humiliation and despair will play only a minor part.”

“That’s too bad,” Miss Frank interrupted.

“Actually, the plot is quite simple, since, along with other things, I am eschewing the convolutions of my past work: A young nun, who has run away from a sadistic Mother Superior and a string of petty thefts from the convent treasury, arrives in the middle of the night at the home of a rich and titled dwarf. She begs sanctuary. The dwarf, who has been a recluse for most of his life, preferring the company of his books and pet baboon to the hurly-burly of the world at large, believes the nun to be a messenger, the instrument of God, sent to him for his salvation,
and so agrees to provide the exhausted and kleptomaniacal nun with shelter, hoping to learn, during the night, of the mysteries of her mission. Although somewhat dismayed by the sight of the clearly vicious baboon, not to mention the somber intensity of the dwarf, the nun thanks him for his hospitality and comes into the castle, closing the door on the night and the world outside.

“There, you see? The situation is rife with comic possibility, is it not?”

“It is genius. Sheer genius,” Miss M replied, tuned-in as ever.

“And you,” Angst continued, “you must be in it. Now that you are here, for you not to be part of my work would be unthinkable.”

“But what would I do?” Miss M asked. “You seem to have developed a two-character plot. Three if you count the baboon.”

“You shall be Urtha, Goddess of Fire!” he cried. “Urtha, who figures so largely in the dwarf’s dreams. I did tell you the dwarf has dreams, did I not?”

“No, I don’t think you did,” Miss M replied.

“Well, then, let me explain. . . .”

B
ut at that very moment, the pilot returned dripping with grease and announced that the engine was repaired and the weather fine. They would have to leave immediately if Miss M was to get to Stockholm for her performance.

“But you can’t leave now!” Angst cried. “Now that I have seen you, no one could possibly play Urtha for me but you, darling, you! If you go, I shall have to cut her out of the film altogether. And then what shall I do? No dreams; no movie.”

“Well then,” Miss M replied, “let the baboon dream. Of
his
goddesses.”

“Why . . . why, that’s brilliant!” the world-famous genius exclaimed. “Brilliant! Frieda! Bring me the script!”

As Miss M left the barn, Vilmos Angst was scribbling furiously in the tattered pages of his notebook. “The
baboon
must dream,” he cried again and again. “The
baboon!”

“What was
that
all about?” Miss Frank asked as the two women plodded across the meadow to the waiting plane.

“That is the climax of two thousand years of Western civilization,” Miss M answered proudly.

“That’s our punishment, if you ask me” was all Miss Frank said.

And perhaps Miss Frank was right. As we shall see in Part Two of
The Continuing Saga of The Divine Miss M
.

L
et us talk for a moment about chauffeurs. When you’re out on tour, wherever you may be, the native with whom you come in contact most is the man whose job it is to drive you to and from the airport, hotel, hall an restaurants, the man who also tends to be your guide on sight-seeing junkets and shopping sprees. In other words, your chauffeur.

For a chauffeur, enthusiasm, patience and a keen sense of the ridiculous are very important, especially when driving folks who are longing to see the sights but haven’t the vaguest notion what the sights are, or why, indeed, they are sights at all. Couple this ignorance with the fact that such grimly uninformed travelers are invariably in a hurry, and you can readily understand why the life expectancy of chauffeur, especially in the non—English–speaking countries, is much shorter than that of almost any other worker involved in a service industry. In fact, one of my chauffeurs explained to me that many of the stone markers one sees along the highway are not kilometer signposts, as one might think, but rather dainty gravestones marking the spot where various chauffeurs have dropped by the wayside. I myself saw such a stone engraved:
“HERE LIES LARS SCHAV. HE DROVE JOEY HEATHERTON. R.I.P.”

My driver in England was named Bert, and he was quite extraordinary. Overweight, but underwhelmed by anyone of any station. The only thing Bert ever really tipped his hat to was a good dirty joke. Or a bad one. In fact, Bert
preferred
the bad ones, which made me like him even more. To show you what I mean,
here’s Bert’s all-time favorite:

BERT’S FAVORITE JOKE

Have you heard the one about the fat little boy who was so dumb he thought “sex” was the past tense of “six”? He finally earned his dunce cap when a teacher who thought he was getting too plump asked him how many slices of bread he ate each day.

“Oh,” the lad replied, “I have sex in the morning, and I have sex at night. Sometimes I even have sex for luncheon.”

Well, word got around that the little chap did not want to be dumb anymore, so a very enterprising schoolmate picked up some rabbit droppings and put them in a jar. He went to see the dunce and said, “You want to be smart, heh?”

The dumbo nodded.

“Tell you what,” the rascal said, “I have some smart pills here. You can have ’em for a quid.”

Well, the little boy was ecstatic. He paid the chap a quid and started to chomp on the pills. “Holy mackerel,” he cried, “these taste like shit!”

“You see?” the other replied. “You’re getting smarter already.”

How could I help but be charmed by a man who told with the greatest enthusiasm jokes even older and more gruesome than mine?

Another chauffeur I will never forget was Josef, my driver in Copenhagen. In his late forties and about five feet tall, he was a pint-sized version of a classic Viking god.

One day on a sight-seeing drive around Copenhagen’s famous harbor, Josef stopped in front of an old and graceful yacht that was tied up in the notorious Sailors’ Quarter.

“She’s beautiful, no?” Josef smiled at the boat like an old lover.

“Definitely, beautiful,” I said, “and what a wonderful name it has—
Englen med Sorte Vinger.
What does it mean?”

“The Angel with Black Wings,”
Josef answered.

“Oh,” I said, “that’s a sort of scary name for a boat, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” he said, turning around in the front seat and
gazing at me with his calm blue eyes. “It’s from an old Danish fairy tale about a baby mouse who steals up into the attic to nibble on some cheese he’s swiped from the family larder. Tired and full, he’s just about to fall asleep when a bat flies in the window, directly over his head. In a flash, the little mouse is up and racing downstairs to his mother. ‘Oh, Mama, Mama’ he cries, his heart beating with excitement, ‘guess what I just saw!’ ’What, dear?’ Mama Mouse asks her little baby. ‘Something wonderful,’ the little mouse exclaims. ’An angel with black wings!’

“Oh,” Josef said, “if only
we
could dream up such fanciful interpretations for our visions in the night! I’ve always loved that little mouse for seeing an ordinary bat as something so-mystically beautiful. That’s why I named the boat after his story.”

“You
named the boat?” I asked, surprised.

“Well, I did. Yes. The boat is part mine, you see. Originally it was my father’s. Now it belongs to the whole family. Would you like to see it?”

Of course I wanted to see it and from its gleaning wood hull to its polished mahogany interiors,
Englen med Sorte Vinger
was quite the loveliest vessel I had ever been on. Sensing my enthusiasm, Josef asked me if I would like to see a part of the boat he didn’t usually show to anyone. When I said yes, he opened a small hatch in the middle of the cabin floor that I hadn’t noticed before and climbed down a rickety ladder, motioning for me to follow.

I descended into a small space so dark I could barely see and for one fleeting instant wondered if it was only his boat Josef wanted to show me. But as my eyes became accustomed to the half-light, I saw that the walls of this lower cabin were covered with yellow cloth Stars of David. Suddenly the whole day changed.

“During the War,” Josef said, “we ferried Jews to Sweden. Every star is a Jew we saved. Or tried to save. There are maybe forty or fifty stars there, and we never got caught. My father was the town’s greatest fisherman and a master at masquerade. He would give the German guards his freshest eels, sometimes even a lobster if we had been lucky enough to haul one in. He gave the Germans the best of his catch, and they never caught on to what he was doing. Well, towards the end of the War they did, but by then they didn’t care. They just wanted to go home, like everybody else.”

I was flabbergasted. And moved. Then upset to think how little of what we Americans hear or are taught we really absorb, how little of it really penetrates the heart. For of course I had heard
about the Danish underground and the escape route across water to Sweden, but until the moment I stood in that dark, cramped cabin with Josef it was never real to me, more like a movie I had seen once long ago, then promptly forgot.

I tried to remember where I had first heard about Denmark and the Yellow Stars. Probably in school. Then I remembered I had learned almost nothing in school. In world history I had only gotten as far as Ponce de Leon. (Oh, Ponce! Ponce! The most sensitive and sensible of all the explorers.) Suddenly I wanted to make up for that lack; I wanted to know all I could about World War II, World War I—everything. I brooded. Finally, in utter humiliation and under cover of darkness, I forced myself to buy and read a twelve-pound volume titled
Wars.

I realize twelve pounds is not quite enough weight to constitute truly far-reaching research, but I found out what I needed to know: that what we live through every day is a continuation of the Battle of Jericho, and that there is a kind of Sleazy Nationalism which breeds within the breast of the citizen confusion, dissatisfaction and a burning desire to get what his neighbor’s got or what he
thinks
he’s got or has been
told
he’s got. In other words, paranoia, avarice, acquisitiveness, glory seeking (which is really only vanity, after all) and, yes, folks, let us be brave, BOREDOM on a scale so vast as to be incomprehensible are the causes of war and always have been.