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“Clean?”

“When there is no waste, no seed, then the sex is clean. But to feed the devil, that is what makes it unclean.”

I felt a distinct thrill as she dropped the word. It was the first time anyone beside myself had connected it with Castle. “Is that how Castle described it—'unclean'?”

“Yes. Unclean. Not because of the pleasure, but because of the suffering it brings.”

Still I was puzzled. “But there are other ways to avoid having babies. There are many devices. There's the pill.”

She waved my words aside impatiently. “Yes, yes. And still the babies come. All this is birth delay, not control. Sooner or later, the seed gets through. But this way, with
bhoga,
you know there is greater pleasure when there is no seed. We fool the devil at his own game. We take the joy, but he gets no babies.” She gave a small, triumphant giggle. “Someday maybe there could be nobody in hell at all.”

There was an unsettling dissonance about everything Olga said. Here she was delivering a dire and terrible indictment, a vision of life on earth she might very well have learned from the greatest of the
film noir
directors. And yet, though I could tell she believed all she said, her manner was so buoyant; the smile never left her lips. It was like hearing the words of the prophet Jeremiah sung to a springy little waltz.

“Nobody?” I asked. “I can't believe that. You mean, no reproduction, none at all?”

“Why not? If everybody knew there is greater pleasure and how to have it—then perhaps.”

“And this is what Max told you?”

“What I remember, yes. Oh, I forget a lot. Because at first I never knew how serious he was being. Like I said, he was such a joker. So I didn't always listen carefully. I learn
bhoga
because that is fun. Just some kind of tricky sex, like was all over Hollywood. But other things he tells me, I forget. Until I came back here. Until the war. Then I understood what Max meant. The world is hell.”

These few dark and simple themes, the evil of the world, the blessings of
bhoga
—that was about as far as I got with Olga on the philosophical level of things. On the more physical plane, she and I made whirlwind progress over the next several days—a longer stay than I had planned for Amsterdam. But I make no complaint. I was receiving a short course of study from her in the sex that was “no sex.” She was jubilantly zealous to teach, and, of course, I never found it difficult to drift along in somebody's strong running current. I turned out to be an apt pupil, though I had no idea where this newfound skill might ever be applied.
Bhoga
would have needed a lot of explanation in any company I was ever likely to keep. True, I'd be leaving Amsterdam with a knowledge of sexual postures and practices I could never have imagined; but as enthusiastic as Olga may have been about converting me to her exotic style of sex, I couldn't imagine anyone but another Olga ever getting away with the sort of seduction she had engineered.

In one of our last sessions, for example, we wound up in a contortionistic form of intercourse whose languid rhythm, Olga assured me, could be prolonged through an entire day and night, until hunger displaced sexual appetite and desire faded. She provided some four hours of proof for that claim and was pleased to find that was enough to satisfy my by now less than urgent needs.

“You know,” I told her afterward in the leisurely interlude that always followed, “this kind of lovemaking takes a very long time, Olga. It's enjoyable. The best I've ever had. But I really don't think many people have that much time.”

“Why not?” she insisted. “If there is such great pleasure.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but frankly, I don't believe people care that much about sex. I mean … they care; you could even say they're obsessed. It's always on their mind. But it's as if what they really want is fast food, not gourmet cuisine.”

For the first time since we met, a shade of sadness passed across Olga's face. She nodded gravely. “Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. You ever heard that? Max told me that. That's how the waste happens. That's why the babies come. Quick, quick, quick. I know. I was like that. Max told me I was like everybody else—a wham-bammer. But I learned better, you see? Like you said, people got it on their mind.
On their mind.
Not in their cock.” She reached over to give me a little anatomy lesson, first touching my dozing penis, then the testicles below. “You see:
this
hooked up with
this.
That's what makes the world go round. Here is
bhoga.”
She stroked the penis. “But here is the world.” She hefted the balls. “The wars, the suffering, the stupid misery going on and on from father to son, thousands of years. Here is heaven, here is hell. But the two, they been all mixed up. That's the dirty trick.”

“Whose dirty trick?”

“The devil,” she said simply as a child. “That's what Max told me.”

“You believe that?”

She shrugged. “I am not religious. I never understood what Max was talking about exactly. But he was right—this I know.”

For all her bouncy high spirits, I'd learned not to underrate Olga's seriousness when she spoke of these matters. After one of our earlier sessions, she'd casually told me something of her wartime experiences. Soon after the Nazis overran the Netherlands, she left Hollywood for England, trying to get closer to her family back home. In London she became involved in the Dutch resistance; eventually that
brought her back to Holland, where she ran more than her share of risks. After less than a year with the underground, she was arrested and spent most of the occupation behind barbed wire, enduring all the worst, just barely escaping with her life. A number of her relatives hadn't been as lucky; they perished in the camps. When she spoke of hell and the devil, it was from firsthand knowledge.

In the midst of this erotic and philosophical dalliance, what had become of the “unfinished film” Max Castle had left in Olga's safekeeping, the movie that was “nothing like the things you might be familiar with”? That was, after all, the mysterious object of my visit to Amsterdam.

I soon realized that Olga was using the films, or whatever there was left of them, as bait to keep me coming around day after day. Each time I asked, she promised me she'd set up a screening the next day … or soon after. She had a friend who ran a movie house in town; we could use his projector. I waited patiently for the arrangements to be made.

She needn't have been so cagey with me. I was thoroughly charmed by her and honestly curious about what she wanted to teach, even if it left me wondering what I might ever do with this peculiar brand of sexual expertise. More to the point, I was finally prepared to believe what she'd told me about
bhoga:
that she learned the practice from Castle, that it was important to him, that things he believed were intertwined with the discipline. My strange liaison with Olga was, after all, a kind of research.

I realized that Olga must have embroidered Castle's ideas with notions of her own over the years. But these were quite easy to sort out. Anything jovial and fun-loving that smacked of healthy, happy sex was obviously Olga; she was constitutionally a therapeutic optimist.
Even though the logical result of
bhoga
universally practiced would be the slow extinction of human life on earth, she honestly saw this as a cheery prospect. Humanity on its way to oblivion, making whoopee all along the way. On the other hand, the darker background against which Olga's jolly mission was being carried out I took to be Castle's brooding Germanic presence.

There were other things Olga had to tell me that made a prolonged stay worthwhile. She remembered the Reinking twins. Yes, it was true as Zip had told me, they were always somewhere near by on the set wherever Castle worked and were constant visitors at his home. Like Zip, she'd found them disconcertingly odd—cold, withdrawn, secretive. Unlike Zip, she'd been able to understand the German that passed between them and Castle. Bickering exchanges, cuts, slights, knocks. The twins were also quite nasty to her, as they were to all Castle's lady friends, as she remembered. She once heard them hectoring Castle about his interest in
bhoga,
using the occasion to take a few unkind swipes at her. She knew Castle disliked them; he complained to her bitterly about them many times. The worst was that they interfered with his movies. “Then why did he keep them on the payroll,” I asked. After all, Castle wasn't the man to suffer the opposition of inferiors.

She gave an odd answer. She was under the impression that Castle collected his salary from the twins; he was on
their
payroll. She knew for certain he often went to them for money. What the studios paid him as a director of B-movies was the usual pittance. Olga assumed he was borrowing from the Reinkings to cover his expenses, which ran high. Castle liked his comforts. That was another bone of contention with the twins, who, Castle used to say, were prepared to live in a box like mummies and expected him to do the same. He frequently alluded, with some bitterness, to the abstemiousness the Reinkings demanded of him. “I have left all that behind me,” he would insist.

He also went to the twins for funds to produce his independent films. The twins were tight with him on that score too, sometimes using financial leverage to bully him. But where, I wondered, did the Reinkings get their money? She had no idea. She only knew them as film editors working on studio cheapsters. Not much money in that. In fact, she sometimes thought they worked for nothing, just to help Castle get the effects he wanted and couldn't afford on the shoestring budgets he was assigned. As far as she was aware, their
names never appeared in the credits of any Castle film, something I'd already found out.

Olga also knew a thing or two about the
Sturmwaisen,
the Orphans of the Storm. Castle and the Reinkings came from the same orphanage, an institution outside Dessau that had been destroyed during the war. That was where they'd learned filmmaking. I mentioned the orphanage in Zurich; it was the next stop on my list before I returned to California. She was familiar with the place. Did she know how many more orphanages there were?

“The
Sturmwaisen
have orphanages all over the world, in the United States, in China even. In Zurich, that is the headquarters. Also there is a school here in Holland. Every year I give them money at Christmas. After the war, they took in many children. They are good people, I think. Very sober, very dark. But good.” Then she added something Zip had never told me, though he must have known. “They have a school near Los Angeles. That's where the twins used to live. They were always after Max that he should stay there too, but he wanted his big house in the city. They didn't like that, but Max wouldn't take orders from them.”

“Do you remember where this school was?”

She reflected for a moment. “North, in the mountains, I think. I was never there.”

“Do you remember its name?”

She gave it a try, but not a very helpful one. “Saint … something, I think. Or maybe Holy something.”

“What sort of an organization are they, the
Sturmwaisen?”

“It's a religious thing.”

“Like a church?”

“Yes. With nuns and priests.”

“They're Catholic?”

“No, no.” She shook the question off firmly.

“You're sure?”

“Oh yes. Max told me. Definitely not Catholic. You see the difference? The pope says sex should only be just to have babies, yes? Have lots of babies.” She made a sour, angry face, one of the few times her smile went behind a cloud. “I learned from Max—this is the devil's teaching.”

“But you say there are nuns and priests at these orphanages?”

“Yes. The sisters, they wear the dark gowns, you know. The funny hats. I said once to Max how Catholic it looks. Max said, ‘No, the
Catholics look like
us.
We are much older than them, but they won't admit it.'”

“Do you know what sort of religion it is, what it teaches … anything like that?”

She didn't, not beyond the bizarre sexual doctrines she'd already spelled out for me. That seemed to be all she cared to know about. She couldn't tell me much even about the Dutch branch of the order, which was quartered in The Hague. As a generous contributor, she'd been allowed to visit and meet the children. But her relations with the establishment didn't go much farther than that. There was one thing she was certain about, however. “I think Max was in big trouble with these people.”

“How do you mean?”

“A few times, somebody comes from the orphans. Always two together: a man, a woman. Very sober, very dark. They bawl Max out for something, I don't know what. He wasn't doing something like they wanted. After he meets them, he mopes around for days. I think they don't want him making movies on his own.”

“But why not? They trained him to be a director, didn't they?”

“Yes, but only to make
their
kind of movies.”

“What were
their
kind of movies?”

There she drew a blank. “Not good movies, I don't think.”

“How do you mean ‘good'?”

“Not … nice.”

In the second week of my visit, after my last session in the upstairs room, Olga asked me to meet her the next morning at the movie theater. True to her word, she'd arranged a screening. It took place at a comfortable little art house in the downtown area. Claus, the owner, was an old friend who still remembered her as a star. He was a movie connoisseur who had screened the Castle material for Olga a few times before, the last time some eight years before. We talked while we waited for her to arrive with the film. Claus was reasonably knowledgeable about Castle's films; he was old enough to remember seeing some of the early silents, some that had long since been lost. “Often the stories were trash,” he told me. “But there was always a power, something extraordinary you remembered long afterward. I cannot say why.”