The Ice Cream Man (2 page)

After filming, a sense of deep and raw satisfaction. As if I’d performed all my own stunts, my life hanging by a thread. But Martin asked me how I selected the rabbit.

“What do you mean, ‘selected’?”

“Didn’t you think of anything?”

“Have you never wrung an animal’s neck before?”

“Did you take the one closest to you or the one hiding in the corner?”

“It wasn’t a choice.”

“There were six of them. You picked up one of them.”

“They all look the same. You can’t even tell them apart.”

“So if you see anything like that rabbit, killing it is as simple as that.”

“What are they supposed to be like, then? Like you?”

I examined his face hungrily, and I wasn’t wrong. How could he be so untouched? Like the sun shining into the yard behind the abattoir the very next morning. Sunshine is the cruelest thing of all. Yesterday he told the director that being an actor wasn’t his calling. Nobody wanted to hear him say that.

“It doesn’t matter, Martin. Anyway, they breed like vermin.”

“The five left are all females. The group will die out.”

“Then why don’t you go and fuck them!” I shouted.

I walked away to keep from bursting into tears.

They don’t use the rabbit. Instead, they serve pork at Tomáš’s birthday party. Tomáš now has only two options: to eat the pork as if it were rabbit, or not to eat the pork at all. He has to choose between being a Jew and being a non-Jew.

We were losing time. While we were waiting for the rain, we’d gotten behind schedule because we weren’t allowed to break the principle of linear time. Perhaps the director would have deviated from his plan if the scene simply featured an ordinary, everyday meal, but the meal was supposed to be a surprise for Tomáš. As it turned out, the rain took us by surprise, though we’d been waiting for it for a while. And, as always, the killing was utterly pointless. Mrs. Němcová had started hinting that there was a pig around here somewhere that we could club on the back of the head.

People have said of the director that everything has to do with his mother. It’s become something of a running joke—mother’s this and mother’s that. Whenever the director gets wound up or latches onto an idea, people whisper things behind his back like “It’s what Mother would have wanted” or “It’s no use, Mother has made up her mind.”

I’ve been given one piece of advice: be careful with your props. Whatever you do, don’t break anything. Don’t even suggest changing anything, not even if it’s giving you fleas. And still everything’s totally nonsensical: in Moravia, they apparently heat their houses in the middle of summer, and the music played at Tomáš’s birthday party in 1942 wasn’t released until 1945.

The director’s mother is demented, just sits in her garden chair all day answering letters and writing opinion pieces. Her reputation is in constant danger. The struggle to preserve her reputation dates from the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the present day, and from the present day to a future that will continue mercilessly long after her death. When the newspapers mention the fifty Hussars, her response is published as a letter to the editor: “I have never had anything to do with the Hussars.” When the war ends: “I have never even set foot in Munich.” Readers are hungry for her letters. Occasionally a piece is published in order to quash all possible gossip and suspicion: “I deny everything, regardless of time and place.” Soon afterward, everything starts over again, laden with juicy details. “Not even the Hussar with the red mustache.”

Can you blame the son of a mother like that for wanting to keep things to himself? And can you blame the actors for
threatening
to alert the minister of culture unless they are given more information about their roles?

As we were waiting for the rain, we tried to get the director drunk. We couldn’t get anything out of him; all he’d tell us about were his years as a student. He mentioned one night in particular—nowhere had he learned so much about film as in a single evening in Berlin before the war. He’d been at a dance in one of the more liberal parts of town and ended up lost, looking for the men’s room that was nowhere to be found in a labyrinth of red-lit corridors. He soon realized this was part of a carefully planned scheme: the sense of urgency building in his groin and the eager, garishly painted lips moving behind each door, whispering, “
Was suchen Sie, lieber Herr
?” Eventually he found it, a small cubicle with barely enough room to turn around. After he’d emptied his bladder and tugged the string dangling from the ceiling, he heard a heated discussion on the other side of the wall. Back in the corridor, he pressed his ear against the adjacent door, and in a matter of seconds, it was wrenched open. “
Sie wollen sehen? Zwanzig Mark, bitte
.” (“You want to watch? Twenty marks, please.”)

To this day, the director told us, he wasn’t sure which parts of this scene were acted and which were what one might call “real life.” It might have been the case that the restaurant’s clientele included people for whom entertainment required ambivalence between intelligence and instinct, fact and fiction. The intent was to capture on film a detailed scene between a man and a woman on a set made up to look like a shabby old back room. The atmosphere was as flat and numb as if this had all taken place a hundred times before. Then suddenly, the actress flew into a rage: according to her contract, she was to be replaced by a body double for all acts of penetration. The cameraman ignored the woman’s tantrum but continued filming, his arms taut with exertion. Her announcement was clearly news to the male actor. And regardless of the surprise, he couldn’t help but take it personally. Because he knew the woman from before? Or perhaps because they were complete strangers?

To hide his annoyance, the man began a long argument with the woman about why genuine penetration was such a crucially important element of the overall performance. The woman could do nothing but wonder at this. Her head was tilted confrontationally, something one would only notice if one’s senses were attuned to the gesture.
Und warum?
The man stared at the woman, his mouth drooping open as if words were unable to describe the artistic truth with which he had now been left feeling utterly alone. This truth now required that he speak in metaphors, as elevated knowledge in our everyday lives always requires, and the truth had chosen him as its defender—a terrifying, dizzying, unexpected honor.

The male actor walked behind a screen, but the director could still see him: in the shadows, the man opened a bottle of mineral water and gulped from it, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He leaned against the wall and ran his fingers through his hair, clasping the base of his nose as if holding back tears; while on the other side of the screen, the woman staggered atop her long legs like a giraffe in net stockings until the man lunged back and stood beside her, having finally managed to grasp the image at hand, and began explaining things to her, his cheeks burning. It’s like a magician sawing a woman in half: the audience must see the woman whole and the saw that will cleave the body in two all at once, in the same picture. If the woman is already in pieces, there’s no magic at all.

The woman rolled her eyes for a moment, turned her back to the man (whose shoulders then slumped), and began harassing the cameraman: isn’t the man’s contract identical to the woman’s in regard to the penetration scene? Which of them had been cheated, and why? Which of them was being paid more? And what were they in fact
being
paid for: acting or doing things for real? The male actor then raised his hand, and he, too, demanded a body double. Eventually the pair hovered on the brink of penetration without ever crossing the threshold, and for that reason they acted very well. The body doubles propped themselves up by the billiard table for about ten minutes, and the man entered the woman from far enough away to make sure the camera didn’t miss a thing. Just to be sure, the betrayed husband stood next to both couples. Perhaps they would decide later which set of reactions to use in the final cut. It was hard to believe that the actor playing the husband might see anything new or thrilling in the body doubles, and, true enough, he seemed to be listening more than looking. From behind the screen came the sounds of something that seemed to touch him on a far more personal level: a woman, convinced of the need for artistic truth, was surrendering completely to a man who, it turned out, had not wept in vain.

The director fell silent. We were sitting on the veranda. Insects with long legs and short wings flew back and forth on the glass cover of the oil lamp. Who had designed them? The director couldn’t bear any analysis. We were all simply to stare into the darkness. It stared back at us many times.
Tausend und tausendmal.
A thousand and a thousand times.

An entirely unrelated scene. I was taken into the village and led into a cellar with a concrete floor dug deep into the ground. Junk from floor to ceiling, shelves balanced against each other, heavy boxes lying around, broken dishes, steel girders piercing the space from wall to wall. The director said that Esther was to crawl across the room through all the junk. In some places, it was so cluttered that she’d get stuck, and the floor was covered with cold, stinking puddles. I looked at the set, the props, and didn’t know what to think. Just crawl for your life, he advised. But where is Esther? When and why? Is this a memory or a nightmare? Trust me, he insisted. But he didn’t trust me, not at all! He assured me that he trusts me, and above all claimed to know how to trust me (
or
in which way I can be trusted).

The camera was in place, but it was all a ruse. He was interested only in the sounds. That evening, back at Mrs. Němcová’s house, I can hear my own voice coming from the director’s room: a combination of quiet hissing and groaning, short moans as if I’m dragging spikes across my own skin. There’s something difficult, embarrassing, angry, compelling about it. The tape is played over and over. Then, in the middle of it, I hear the director’s voice, and I know exactly where his hand is.

Martin Jelínek. An ungodly fusion of spiritual and physical beauty. Martin is portraying a man running for his life. It’s not all that far from the truth. And he’d better act well, as Tomáš’s life depends on it, too. It is every bit as real, as important, as effective as stopping a bleeding wound in a tent at a field hospital. Tomáš shuffles in a gray line of people, lining up for their death; Martin grabs his shoulder and pulls him aside. It’s a skill he has—death won’t notice a thing—and soon the gap left by Tomáš in the line disappears and the gray shuffling continues, neither increasing in density nor thinning out
.
The patrol dogs salivate menacingly, but Martin has risen above their sense of smell.

During a break, he tries to slip out into the forest of spruce trees growing behind Mrs. Němcová’s house. He thinks he’s alone.

“Martin,” I say.

He’s startled.

“Martin”—he tries not to be startled again—“am I disturbing you? You probably want to be by yourself for a while.”

“Of course you’re not disturbing me.”

“You’re just saying that to be polite, but you know what? That politeness is true: you have to believe me.”

“What?”

“I never intend to disturb you, do you hear?
Never
. I never intend to cause you
trouble
. I never intend to
threaten
you in any way.”

He stands stock still, as if his trousers are about to fall down, then answers me in English. “All right.”

I look around, dig the tip of my shoe into the carpet of spruce needles covering the ground, and start explaining once and for all why I’ve never liked spruce forests. From the outside, they look majestic; but from the inside, they look like this: the spruce trees grow so close together that all other vegetation and undergrowth dies away; they even suffocate one another and are nothing but a tangle of twigs until about halfway up the trunk . . . then there are those horrid giant ants scurrying among the needles; the spider webs, thick as the lichen growing up the spruce trunks . . . how I hate this kind of forest! It’s so poor, so homogenous, so inbred, so impenetrable and bleak . . .