Kino (20 page)

“I saw
Tulpendiebe
,” Mina said. “It's not destroyed. I saw it, in Berlin, on a
Doppelnocken
projector. I saw it. That was you.”

Chester put a heavy hand on Mina's shoulder. “Please,” he said. “Penny is in frail health, and she can't take any excitement.”

“Oh shut your trap, Chester.
Unkraut vergeht nicht
!” She turned her rheumy eyes on Mina. Mina returned the gaze, defiant. “Well fuck me silly,” Penny said, reaching for the bottle of Dewars. She unscrewed it and took a deep drink. She offered the bottle, and Mina poured herself a glass.

“Go on,” Penny said. Chester shook his head.

“I saw
Tulpendiebe
,” Mina said again. “The Dutch town, the tulip craze, the sailor, and Lilly. That first shot of you–you were radiant. You were spectacular.”

“Spectacular is right, girl.
Tulpendiebe
was a work of genius!”

Mina took a sip of whiskey. “I need you to tell me,” she said.

“Tell you what, princess?”

“What happened after Kino was released.” She tapped her finger on the cover of Kino's journal. “You have to tell me everything. Why he killed himself. You used to be famous and in love–how did you end up like this?”

“This will only upset you,” Chester interrupted, reaching for Penny's hand.

“Oh, Chester. It's the little princess you should be worried about. She's in for it now. Just look, she wants to know
everything
. She's begging for it!” Penny got a good laugh out of that, a surprisingly sweet, warm laugh that didn't sound like it should emerge from the mangled old body in the arm chair.

“You want to know how I ended up here?” Penny was still shaking with laughter. “Step by fucking step, you twit! Shit happened, like it always does!”

She spit on the carpet again. Mina had to look away. She was revolted by this old woman, but she also wondered how much of it was an act, some kind of attempt to push her away. What was this strange scene she had walked into, and how long had these two been sitting here in the dark, watching old movies, drinking, smoking, taking drugs? How many years? Mina got up and pulled back the heavy curtains that covered the panorama windows, revealing a view of a desolate garden with a patio and a green pool overgrown with yuck. Beyond it, in the haze below, was Los Angeles.

“Poor child. You know nothing. You know less than nothing. You have no idea what Klaus was like.” Penny shielded her face from the light, then turned away to light another cigarette. The first was still burning in the ashtray. “He was out of his mind, doped up, at the end of his rope! If you believe the first word of that journal, you're dumber than I thought.”

“Hey!” Mina said.

She looked to Chester, but he wasn't going to defend her.

“Hey yourself,” Penny said. “You are in my house. Uninvited. I say what I want. You want to know about the man who made those movies? Klaus only loved himself. He drank, he dealt
Zement
, he could never resist a line or a piece of ass or veal at Horcher, he was terrible with money, he was single-minded and stubborn. He was selfish, decadent, self-indulgent, reckless, unpredictable, and cruel. A megalomaniac.”

“That's what Dad says,” Mina broke in. “Decadent and a bad father and a failure.”

“Oh, your father? Detlef the Dullard? That's what Klaus and I called him, did you know that? Not when he was around, of course. Jesus, he was a boring child!”

Mina looked down at the rug, at a gob of spit that had not yet been absorbed. Her father was not who she'd come to talk about, and the mention of him made her defensive. She wanted to protect her idea of Kino. A megalomaniac, that was fine. But maybe she didn't want to hear the rest, after all.

“He gave his inheritance to charity,” Mina said. “After his parents died and he lost his leg, after the First World War. He didn't want anything to do with the family business and he gave it all away.”

“Ha!” Oma clapped her hands together in delight. “He blew his money on coke and whores, and when the inflation hit, it all became worthless! He didn't give his inheritance to charity, he spent it on debauchery, and when it was gone, he sold his company stock to his brother Heinz. Kino was always a fool with money. Sure, he went broke, but he didn't give a penny to the needy.” She laughed and laughed.

“Well, how would you know?” Mina said. “I mean, wasn't this before you met him? I'm so bored of hearing about what a failure Kino was. That's what Dad always called him, and that's all I ever heard.”

“It's the truth, princess.”

Mina shook her head. “Dad was embarrassed by him because he was never around, because his English wasn't very good, because his friends all had more money, because of the Nazi films, because of the suicide...”

“Penny,” Chester interrupted. “Perhaps you should-”

“Oh shut it. I'm having a grand old time. Charity! It really is too much. This girl needs an education.” She sat laughing to herself, then seemed to remember something. “Chester baby, I believe it's time for my injection.”

Chester shifted uneasily. “Do you think that's such a good idea? Perhaps a little oxy instead?”

This time, a look from Penny was all it took, and Chester reached for the Ziploc bag of brown powder, emptied some of it onto a little spoon he took from a leather kit, and heated it over a Zippo. Morphine? Brown heroin? Mina didn't know; Mina didn't want to know. She averted her eyes while Chester cooked up the dope, tied Penny up and prepared the syringe. The anger Mina had felt earlier had given way to sickly pity. Without wasting a movement, Chester sunk the needle into the translucent, saggy flesh of Penny's arm. Oh yes, he was a professional nurse all right.

Penny gave a ghostly sigh and then it was done. When she opened her eyes again, she gave Mina a smile that was almost gentle.

“There's every reason in the world to feel embarrassed by him. Your father is right, of course–Klaus knew no moderation, no boundaries. When I met him, he was an addict and a whoremonger and a glutton, and it only got worse. He spent all his time smoking that opium. Do you want to hear about the venereal diseases your precious grandfather gave me?” She sighed again. Her rheumy eyes filled with tears.

“But that's only half the story. The bastard was also a visionary genius, and he could have been the greatest goddamned filmmaker the world has ever known. His images haunt me to this day. My medication,” she pointed to her vein, “it's supposed to make them go away. I watch this shit–” waving her hand at Gary Cooper on the TV screen “–to make them go away. Kino's films never brought anyone anything but pain, death, and suffering, and now you to tell me
Tulpendiebe
still exists? How can I bear that?”

She held out her hand, and Mina leaned forward to take it. Under her breath, the old woman whispered something in German Mina didn't understand. She sucked air in sharply and scratched her scalp. “Every word in that notebook is a lie, princess. I know Klaus blamed the entire twentieth century on me, but his downfall was self-inflicted. He was slyer than he let on. He didn't mind when people underestimated him, thought him a jolly fella from the Rheinland with a taste for Schnapps and an eye for tail. It was real and it was also a façade, a way to hide his ambition until it was time to pounce. Do you really believe the tulip boom just occurred to him out of nowhere? Where do you think that came from? He researched everything. Look it up: Claude MacKey,
On the Susceptibility of Crowds
. That story about writing the script on a three-day coke binge? Bogus! Months of hard work. You wouldn't know it from his piece-of-shit lie-ridden journal, but Klaus had a real German work ethic. He was prepared when he showed up at Lang's party. He was trying much harder than he let anyone know.”

Mina shook her head, avoiding Penny's eyes. She felt foolish because she'd believed what she'd read, and now it seemed so obvious that Kino had been exaggerating, working on his own mythology. She should've seen that.

“His cunning served him well at first,” Penny said, struggling with the lighter until Chester handed her an already-lit cigarette. It seemed to Mina that she was getting increasingly lost in her story and the drugs, almost unable to stop now that she had begun to talk. “After
Tulpendiebe
, he thought he could get away with anything. But he was too drunk, too careless. He blamed his failures on me. In his journal, did he mention the plagiarism lawsuit that nearly ruined
Jagd zu den Sternen?
Or the costly reshoots after his failed sound experiments
?
His work grew increasingly erratic and he was developing a reputation at Ufa. It was me who brought in the crowds and filled the theaters, and I was the reason Pommer kept financing his movies. Pabst offered me
Pandora's Box
and I turned him down for Klaus–for
Meine wilden Wanderjahre,
a movie that kept getting postponed.”

She didn't speak for a minute. Mina looked for Chester's help but he just glowered at her. Mina poured herself another glass of Dewar's and looked at her grandmother, waiting. Then suddenly, as if she were a toy that had been rewound, Penny continued to talk, her eyes glancing off into the distance somewhere between Mina and the television screen.

“By the thirties, your grandfather spent his days in a drugged-out haze and his nights in bars and brothels and movie theaters. He got into accidents constantly, fell down stairs, crashed through windows, got nearly run over by streetcars. He managed to break his wooden leg regularly, don't ask me how. Those handcrafted numbers were expensive, too. He was banging every starlet between Danzig and Berchtesgaden,
die Drecksau
. He only wrote in the early morning hours, stoned and drunk, getting his dick sucked by some harlot he'd picked up promising her a part in the next project–the one he hadn't even written yet, the one that was half a year behind. Our marriage had become a farce, a front we maintained for the newspapers and box office returns. No matter how much I sacrificed and suffered for his sake, Klaus had lost all interest in me long before.”

“He says he loved you,” Mina said.

“Ha!” Penny coughed up another mouthful of phlegm and spit. It was a terrible habit. Mina could not believe that Chester went barefoot in this house.

“Why didn't you leave him?”

“You saw
Tulpendiebe,
yes? You saw the windmill, on fire? You saw the ending, the way the tulip notary dies?”

Mina nodded. “He gets crushed. It's ghastly.”

“It really happened. Less than two weeks after the premiere, the exact same thing, right before our eyes.”

“I read about that.” Mina felt reassured. The journal wasn't all lies. This was something she knew. “You were on your honeymoon, in Venice. My honeymoon was ruined, too–”

She wondered if Penny would ask, ask what had happened to her Caribbean honeymoon. They'd sent her an invitation to the wedding but, as expected, there had been no response. Now Mina wondered if Penny had ever even opened the envelope. It occurred to her that Penny might not know Mina was married at all. Didn't know or didn't care.

“That was just the beginning,” Penny went on as if she hadn't heard. “Things in Kino's movies had a tendency to really happen. It was like déjà vu, except that you know it isn't all in your head. It often happened when I was tired, when the light was right and I turned my head just so. I'd recognize the way a group of people were arranged on the street, or lines of dialogue overheard at the butcher. The more I began to notice it, the more I recognized shots, details, angles, and compositions all around me. Once you'd seen Kino's films, these echoes infiltrated the world. Klaus, conceited
Arschloch
that he was, simply shrugged and took credit–he called himself a visionary, and that suited him fine. He didn't understand his power, had no idea how to control it, and he didn't care. His movies set events in motion, I saw that clearly. It was extraordinary. Father and I used to talk about how the new physics might explain the phenomenon, but it only occurred at the edges of subjective perception.”

Mina poured herself another whiskey. She felt she was finally getting somewhere. She was also getting drunk. “I don't know,” she said. “This doesn't sound very scientific to me. Are you sure it wasn't just the drugs?”

Penny grunted. “No, princess. Movies
are
drugs. And besides, Klaus was the one who was high. Most of the time, he was so careless he didn't even notice when I snuck peculiar bits of dialogue or strange props into our movies just to test my suspicions. Structural variation can create vibrational fields, morphic resonance–well, I had my theories. He was heedless. He didn't care about consequences, didn't care if people died, didn't give a damn about what
happened
. Times were hard and he drank too much, smoked too much kif. He was losing his grip on reality.
Jagd zu den Sternen
flopped, and nobody wanted to work with him. His whims were legend. For
Meine wilden Wanderjahre,
he had the entire ensemble jump into the Wannsee in February–only to cut the scene later. He changed the ending of
Land der Gnade
at the last minute. Some actors never forgave him. His career was riding on
Pirates
, and he might not have made movies for much longer if the Nazis hadn't come along.”

“Why did you keep acting for him?”

“Because I wanted to find out how he did it. Kino's movies messed with physical reality, and they were dangerous. I thought I could keep him from doing damage. I thought I could save us both. I was an idiot. There was no saving Kino. He was foolish and out of control. He toyed with a power far beyond his grasp, and little by little, his movies destroyed us both.”

Penny closed her eyes again. Mina was afraid that she had passed out and tapped her shoulder gently.

“She does that,” Chester said.

Penny slapped Mina's hand.

“Don't interrupt me.” She looked at Mina, eyes barely focusing. “Klaus considered himself a conduit. He claimed he knew how to let the images flow through him, arrange themselves to reveal truth, past, present, and future. Oh, he was passionate–that's what had attracted me to him in the first place. But he could have done so much more. He used the movies as a way to ignore everything else, instead of seeing that they were connected to everything around him. He could have changed the world, but Kino only cared about Kino.”