Kino (21 page)

Mina came to with a start, disoriented, slowly realizing that she must have fallen asleep in Penny's armchair. It was completely dark outside now, and she had no idea how long she'd been out. She made sure Kino's notebook was still where she'd put it. Across the cluttered coffee table, Chester was helping Penny to another line of white powder, and the TV was turned to the news. Paul Bremer, the new civilian administrator, had arrived in Baghdad.

“Oh,” Mina said. She had hoped that her battling layers of jetlag would cancel each other out, but instead, she felt a leaden tiredness. What time was it in New York? In Berlin? In Punta Cana? Had she dreamed up all of those stories her grandmother told her about Kino, or did that really happen? Mina felt that she was slowly losing her grip on reality.

“We are not here as a colonial power,” Paul Bremer was telling the cameras. “We are here to turn over power to the Iraqi people as quickly as possible.”

“That man is a lying sack of shit,” Mina said, almost reflexively. She hadn't had time to think about the situation in Iraq for the last few days, and her anger surprised her.

“Of course he is,” Penny said, sucking on another cigarette. “I've heard it all before. They tell you to be scared, they tell you they'll keep you safe, and then they deal death and destruction in the name of God and country. It's always the same.”

“You're talking about Hitler.”

“I saw the catastrophe coming early on, but Kino was willfully blind. We could have made it out of the country in time. Gone to Hollywood along with everyone else. My father died in a concentration camp, all because Kino wanted to make that damned pirate movie.”

That wasn't what Mina had read. This was the worst accusation of them all. “In the journal,” Mina said, “Kino claims that your father wanted to stay.”

“Did you not hear me? Everything you read is a lie!” With surprising speed, Penny lunged forward and grabbed the journal from the table and tried to rip it along the spine. Mina reached out without thinking, and for a second, the women both pulled at the notebook. Mina was stronger and Penny's fingers slipped. The momentum sent her sliding sideways out of her chair. She crashed into the living room table, knocked over pill bottles and puzzle pieces, and landed on the floor.

“Penny!” Chester shouted.

“Now look at what you've done,” Penny said, flailing her arms like an overturned bug. “You attacked me.”

“You were going to rip up the journal,” Mina said. She felt guilty for fighting with the frail old woman. She noticed blood on her arm–her grandmother had scratched her, trying to take Mina down. Mina smoothed the notebook on her leg. “It's your own fault. This is mine.”

“The girl has no manners,” Chester said, helping Penny back onto the couch.

“Of course she doesn't. She's a Koblitz. She's as wild as the best of us.” Licking the blood off her arm, Mina couldn't help but smile. Her grandmother had given her an actual compliment.

“Don't smile,” Penny said. “It's a curse, you'll see. You've got it all ahead of you. Disappointment. Betrayal. Loneliness.” She took a moment to arrange herself in her chair, motioned to Chester for another cigarette, took a deep drag. He seemed reluctant to sit back down, rubbed his hands on his pants, and looked around helplessly.

“Chester baby,” Penny said, “Are you nervous? Why don't you take one of the blue footballs, and leave us alone for a minute, just Oma and her inquisitive granddaughter? I am passing on stories of the past.”

Chester didn't say anything, but he did reach for a pill.

“And you, my dear?”

Mina tilted her head. “Maybe something for my jetlag?”

“Up or down, Mädchen? Your choice.”

Mina needed to sleep. She needed to take a bath, wash herself clean of the airplane. But she also wanted to know everything, think everything through to the end, find out all there was to find out. She wanted to keep up with her grandmother. “Up, I guess.”

Penny nodded, and Chester popped a prescription bottle, shook out two red pills, and dropped them into Mina's palm.

“Have them with some juice,” he said, and pushed a carton Mina's way. She took the pills with a mouthful of cold orange juice.

“Well,” Penny said. “Why don't you go for a swim, Chester darling?” She flicked her hand at him, sending him away. Mina did not understand why he needed to leave, what there was left to say that this man couldn't hear, but Chester sighed, got up, geared up to say something to Mina, didn't, and let himself out the sliding door into the garden. Obviously, he was used to this treatment.

“Now,” Penny said with weary satisfaction. “The son of a bitch didn't want to leave his precious pirate movie behind. Your Kino. Did he care about the Jews? About his homosexual friend? About what happened to my father? About democracy, the book burnings, the beatings in the street? No! All he could think about were his goddamn pirates! I could see the Nazi threat coming for years, just like anybody with half a brain can see these criminals for what they are.” She flicked her hand at the TV, where Donald Rumsfeld lectured reporters about how to fight a war. “It was clear Kino couldn't work for them under any circumstances! But Goebbels kept dangling
Pirates
in front of him even though any fool could have seen that they'd never let him make it. The Nazis thought
Dr. Mabuse
was about them–a movie about a bunch of multi-racial swashbuckling anarchists on a ship would never be acceptable, no matter how much Klaus tried to please them. Thea encouraged him, and even when most of his actors had left the country, he still wanted to believe Goebbels's lies. Here, finally, was all the praise he never got during the Weimar years. Murnau was dead, Lang was gone, everybody was gone! Believe me, girl, Klaus saw what he wanted to see: an opportunity.”

Penny spit again. Mina's heart beat faster.

“Then, the Nazis arrested my father. My father, an intellect, a good man, a thinker! Dragged from our house in handcuffs by the SA! It was a horror. For Kino, it was a wonderful excuse–now we'd have to stay in the country. We couldn't leave as long as there was a possibility he might live, and Kino knew Ufa was his best chance. He'd wanted MGM, but the American studios turned him down, and he signed with Goebbels. Don't you believe for a second that it was for my father's sake. What did I expect? That Kino stopped being Kino?”

Mina chewed on her lip. She infinitely preferred the version in the journal.

“The contract was a trap. As soon as he signed,
Pirates
was scrapped and Kino's Weimar movies were banned. Our fate was sealed–I vowed never to act again, but Kino had to do whatever these swine wanted.”

“At least those operettas he made were harmless, weren't they?” Mina said. “It wasn't like he made
Triumph of the Will
or anything?”

For a second, Mina thought Penny might jump back out of her seat. “Did you listen to a thing I've been saying? There's no such thing as a harmless movie, princess! A screen doesn't just show things, it also hides them. There was no truth in Kino's operettas! They told splendid lies about gaiety and happiness when the reality was death and fear and destruction and oppression. No, Klaus never glorified the Führer directly, but the absurd champagne-and-ballroom fantasies he was peddling were used to distract the masses from the bloodletting. Is that any less dangerous? Less damnable?”

Mina felt a sting when she realized the truth of what Penny told her. Of course–her grandfather had deluded himself, and he had been guilty, and she, in turn, had let him delude her, and this made her feel guilty, too. She knew Donald Rumsfeld was a scumbag, but she had been taken in by Kino, just like Kino had been taken in by Goebbels. She almost expected Penny to blame her for her father's death in the camps, too.

“He wasn't allowed to cut them himself, so his new films never resonated the way his Weimar films did. They didn't have his rhythm, and they didn't have me. And thank God, the images stopped haunting us. Under the Nazis, his films didn't have room to breathe, but people didn't care–they went to see them again and again anyway. People enjoy being lied to, especially when times are bad. I remember Hitler at the premiere of
Luftschiffwalzer
, flush and rosy-cheeked with destiny, grinning and waving that stiff right hand of his. Kino was a success, but he hated himself for it. And all the while, my father's situation grew more and more desperate. And that's not all.”

Penny gave Mina a look that frightened her. “The operettas weren't the worst of it. Did he neglect to mention Dr. Spielmann in his journal?
Die Schwarze Sonne
? Sachsenhausen? Of course he did.”

Mina didn't like the sound of this. She'd heard of Sachsenhausen. It was a concentration camp.

“You see, it wasn't just Kino and me who'd seen the echoes, the images that leaked from his films, the way they caused or anticipated events in the real world. Others noticed them, as well–but it wasn't the kind of thing you talked about if you wanted to be taken seriously. Most people managed to convince themselves that it was just coincidence and went on with their days. But I'm sure now that Goebbels had seen it, too–he was a man with a keen sense for cinema and oh, he was on to Kino. Yes, he assigned him to operettas, but they never stopped trying to uncover whatever it was that had given Kino's Weimar movies their unique power.”

Mina nodded, too hard. She clenched her hands into fists, extended her fingers, clenched them again. Was she feeling the red pills already? She had not even asked Chester what it was she had taken.

“When they first took power, the Nazis set up a number of secret departments that developed weapons for the coming war. Rockets, nuclear research, psychological warfare, you name it. The experimental program of the Propaganda Ministry's film department was called
Schwarze Sonne
–black sun. In the thirties, Kino got occasional visits at the studio from a shadowy SS officer by the name of Spielmann. He asked Kino to shoot short scenes, with whatever actors were at hand, and he took the undeveloped film with him. We never knew where he took the footage or what he did with it, and we had better things to worry about. Once the war started, Spielmann showed up more frequently, and he took Kino with him for days at a time. I was informed that he was gone on top secret Reich business–that was all. Every time they dropped him off afterwards in a black Mercedes limousine, Kino looked miserable, tired and distraught. He wouldn't talk about where they'd taken him. I always asked if he couldn't find out more about my father, but he just glared at me. He'd sit up all night, drinking. Once or twice I saw him cry, and Kino was not a man who cried. He wouldn't talk to me, and I gave up trying. We were already festering in our own private hells, accusing each other for everything that had gone wrong. Seeing him in his pathetic agony only made me hate him more.”

She gazed off into space. Mina didn't speak. She locked eyes with her grandmother, and then Penny roused herself.

“I finally found out what happened when we were debriefed at Camp Evans, when we entered the US
Schwarze Sonne
was a program of secret experiments aimed to isolate and optimize the movies' mind-control properties. Spielmann was a sick bastard, a psychiatrist who dabbled in paranormal research. He wanted to make movies that could turn a crowd into a frenzied mob, cause riots, and drive people insane. He wanted to make movies that could make people kill. Artistic talent, lyricism, it all meant nothing at
Schwarze Sonne
. They wanted to weaponize Kino. They forced prisoners to watch test movies, first at a secret screening room at Castle Wedestein, and, later, in a special section reserved for medical experiments at Sachsenhausen. After the war turned and the Führer became desperate for a
Wunderwaffe
, they projected films into isolation cells on an endless loop until the prisoner lost his mind. They forced their eyes open, drugged them, beat and tortured them, all the while displaying images designed to elicit responses, some harmless, some violent. They starved them and attempted to see if a movie could keep them from eating. They turned prisoners on each other. No matter what the outcome, everybody was executed afterwards, anyway.”

“That's terrible,” Mina said, and then she didn't know what else to say. Gloom settled over the room. She wasn't sure what to believe–the Black Sun? It sounded like the paranoid delusions of a bitter old junkie, but then again, she'd heard about Dr. Mengele's experiments, so why not this? She felt more conflicted about Kino than ever.

But even if everything Penny had told her was true–that Kino had been seduced by Goebbels, that his movies had helped the Germans to forget about their crimes, that his work had been used to torture prisoners–who was to blame? Wasn't Kino as much a victim as anyone? All he'd ever wanted was to make movies, everyone seemed to agree on that. Something else had crept into Mina's feelings about Kino, some new pride tinged with guilt. He was her grandfather and she didn't want him to be culpable.