Kino (6 page)

Dokters
, that's what my mother used to call the lot of you, in her thick Hessian accent. I hate you and your kind, Herr Dokter, your patronizing nods and absent eyes, always trying to remember where you read something, already thinking about the next patient. You're pathetic and deluded,
ein armseliges Würstchen
. You cannot save a soul.

But of course, you must think the same of me–
eine arme Sau
, a curiosity, a miserable one-legged has-been drunk committed into psychiatric care by his own wife. Let me assure you, Herr Dokter: I wasn't always a pathetic old doped-up cripple. Once upon a time, in another country, I was a young and hopeful cripple. I was a prodigy, the youngest filmmaker in Ufa's history, the toast of Berlin. I still dream of champagne picnics on the Pfaueninsel, the Zoo-Palast filled with an ocean of flowers, just for me. I dream of Studio B and the sets we built for
Jagd zu den Sternen
.

But all of that has been lost, destroyed, buried, bombed, and burnt. I lived my life for light and love, and now the bean counters and brain shrinkers want to break me. I've been held captive by men in uniforms before. My adversaries conspired with history. Men like you, they come and go. World Wars drove me out of my home and took my limbs. Hollywood chewed me up and spit me out. I have been
verraten und verkauft
, locked up, ruined, rejected. My own wife dumped me here like a mangy dog at the pound. The days are getting shorter and there is no way back.
Gottverdammt nochmal
, it's ugly here at the ass end of my life.

Fine.
Abgemacht
. Why the hell not? Keep the pills coming, and I'll write in your dime-store notebook. You'll get your fairy tale. Words are a poor substitute for a camera and an editing table, the might of a studio at my disposal, but words are all I have left now.

This is the simple truth: my wife, that gorgon, that lying two-faced monster, has become my worst enemy. It was she who ruined everything we had and could have had again. For decades, she has turned every triumph into a wound and every opportunity into a disaster. I have not made a movie in twenty years! She ruined my life and my career. Penny cost me everything, and you, Herr Dokter, are just another one of her pawns. Your kind is legion, following orders and taking instructions, always on the wrong side of art and truth. She knew exactly which lies to tell, what to put on the forms when she signed me over into your questionable care–a danger to myself and others and that was good enough for you, wasn't it? You are compliant, like the bastard cops who brought me here, my worthless son, and everybody who ever called himself my friend and then abandoned me when the time came.

But it's darkest before the dawn,
nicht wahr
, and none of you can keep me from my destiny. I have a talent and people have misunderstood me all my life. There are things that are impossible for a man with a prosthetic leg, but if you give me a cast and a crew, I have no limits. I came from nothing, I scaled the Olymp, and I can do it again. Even when the Nazis burned my movies, I clung to hope. You have marked me crazy and yet you ask me to explain myself. Art will prevail! I'll make another movie yet. Cinema cannot be detained! Nothing can stop me, for I am Kino.

Well then.
Es war einmal vor langer, langer Zeit
, my father owned a paint and dye factory on the Main: Koblitz & Söhne Farben AG. As soon as my brothers and I were old enough to hold a pen, we worked at the factory to learn our trade “from the bottom up.” Father was a stern son-of-a-bitch; mother was thin-lipped and distant. They had no imagination, and we were forced to spend endless days in dusty rooms, stooped over balance sheets and quarterly earnings reports. It was slavery.

When the Great War began, Heinz, Jupp, and I were too young and too rich to march off to Flanders, and so we remained sheltered behind a five-meter brick wall and the rows of gnarly oak trees my great-grandfather had planted. Once father learned that the
Kriegsministerium
was paying handsomely for chlorine, a byproduct of dye production, his nationalism reached new heights. He spoke of the tremendous honor of serving the
Vaterland
in its hour of need, and we sold them our toxic waste as a weapon for the trenches. The margins were phenomenal and he transformed the B plant in Hoechst to produce mustard gas.

My parents and the
Bonzen
who came for skat and mother's garden parties pretended that nothing was wrong at all. I never once went hungry while boys just a few years older got mowed down, bayoneted, bombed, gassed, and ground up by the thousands,
fleissig
,
fleissig
, feeding our prosperity with their industrious killing and dying. In the winter of nineteen-sixteen, women came begging for food and my father chased them away with his hunting rifle. In the streets of Frankfurt, people recognized our Daimler and spat when we passed by.

On one particularly cold night, the tanks of chlorine father had installed in the moldy overflow warehouse caught on fire and exploded in a magnificent green flame. An infernal blaze of superheated acid gas raged through both wings of the house, a blinding blast that set the curtains and furniture on fire, followed by the hissing and fizzing of the chlorine. I was in bed, and I remember the sudden smell that turned into burning pain in the throat, nose and lungs, the scalding bite of the chemical digging into the flesh of my leg, fire. My younger brother Jupp was thrown from his bed and landed face-down in a puddle of acid. Heinz led us through the window onto the lawn before our room caught fire. Flames claimed the house, the stables, the maids quarters, even great-grandfather's gnarly oak trees burned down in a hellish conflagration so bright, one could see the blaze light up the night sky from the Römer, over ten kilometers away, or so the
Frankfurter Rundschau
reported the next day.

My parents' charred bodies weren't recovered from the ruins until the next morning.

It was justice–not the human kind, bought and sold, but some sort of cosmic justice, God's will, what the Oriental religions call karma. Along with the poison gas, my father had let the war into our home, and we all paid the price. I came to in a hospital bed next to Jupp's, in a room filled with every available quack who wasn't at the front, a whole flock of
Dokters
, hovering over us, shrugging impotently.

Dokters
. The smell of disinfectant, the snap of rubber gloves. Useless at best, clueless most of the time, always dangerous. When your kind runs out of answers, you call for pills and electroshock. That night after the explosion, they ordered up morphine, and nuns brought wet towels to wipe down our sweat-covered bodies. My leg was disintegrating from the acid, and the infection progressed quickly, threatening to kill me. I watched Jupp struggle in the bed next to mine, trying to draw breath with his decomposing lungs. He was the youngest and liveliest of us, and it took him hours to die. Finally, the
Dokters
had to capitulate before the chemical, and soon, they shrugged some more, folded their hands. They called a preacher for Jupp.

For me, the saw.

It was
Dokters
who pinned me down, applied ligatures to prevent hemorrhaging, pulled up my skin below the knee cap, and divided it with one quick stroke of the double-edged knife, leaving the flexor tendons intact so the stump would retain the power of motion. With the practiced ease of men who had performed hundreds of these procedures during the war, they transected the muscles. They had a special piece of linen with three tails ready that was threaded through the space between the shin and calf bones and tied together to hold the muscles and skin back. The
Dokter
with the oscillating saw stood between my legs and worked quickly, to keep the calf bone from splintering.

And that's it. The leg's detached, a separate thing. You can't feel it yet because everything is pain, but you can see the assistant who takes it away swiftly, to be burnt unceremoniously in the hospital's ovens. Skin and muscle flaps are folded over the stump, and before the wound is dressed, they insert studs for screwing on a peg leg.

Knock on wood.

That was nearly fifty years ago. I still remember every second of the procedure, and to this day, I feel the pain in the absent limb. But I can't for the life of me remember what it was like to have two feet.

Dokters
did that to me. I doubt you ever had occasion to perform an amputation, and for that reason alone, you're even more dangerous than those who took my leg. You are worse than useless. I despise you, and I am frightened of the moment you run out of ideas.

I am the only one who sees these pages half-filled, and I am terrified. One must be fearless to plow through sentences and paragraphs to unknown conclusions. Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?

Heinz and I were the only survivors. We inherited the firm, the land, the money. I didn't want any of it–it was blood money, and I had paid for father's greed with my leg. But the fire hadn't lessened the hatred of our family. Disgusted, I gave my inheritance to charity and left Koblitz & Söhne to Heinz. I kept just enough to get by and went to Berlin to live among the common people: workers, shopkeepers, butchers, tram drivers, waiters. I was free of the pretensions of the rich. Nobody knew me as the son of a
Kriegsgewinnler
, a war profiteer. Berlin, seething capitol of a brand-new democracy that no one wanted. The city promised all I longed for: depravity, chaos, revolution, everything my sheltered upbringing had denied me. I enrolled at Friedrich Wilhelm University and rented a shabby room that smelled of beer and herring in a second
Hinterhaus
on Rosenthaler Platz, from a family of
waschechte
Berliners too polite to ask about my leg. They assumed I was a veteran, like everyone else, not a one-legged shut-in apprentice accountant from the provinces who'd grown up sheltered by five-meter walls, a
Landei
determined to join the twentieth century.

For the first few weeks, I dutifully took the tram to Unter den Linden to attend lectures. At the gymnasium in Frankfurt, our tutors had been stern and humorless Wilhelmine men with moustaches and starched collars who taught the same way other men lay brick or shovel graves: a solemn, joyless duty. Listening to lectures about Greek literature and natural science in Berlin revealed to me that learning was a pleasure.

After classes, I headed west to the shops and restaurants of Friedrichstadt. I'd stop at my bank to furtively withdraw a few marks at a time, just enough to afford a pastry at Rumpelmeyer's or coffee and a soft-boiled egg at a Ku'damm café, where I sat for the entire afternoon. Soon, I took out more money and went for dinner, or to the
Tingeltangel
. I discovered the Wintergarten, just south of Friedrichstrasse station, an opulent world made for pleasure, a temple of delights, a palace of sparkling crowds and thrilling acts. I drank champagne between artificial fountains and grottoes filled with exotic plants, and no matter what happened on the stage–dancing girls in leather and fur, trapeze artists, a woman from Spandau getting hypnotized by a Mexican magician–you could always see the stars through the enormous vaulted glass roof. It was like Walt Disney's theme park–but with tits. Wonderful, classy tits!