What Am I Doing Here? (18 page)

 

Kinski – he himself would be the first to admit it – is not easy. He leaves a trail of smouldering resentment wherever he goes. The love-hate feud between him and Werner – which has taken on legendary proportions in film gossip – is a bit overdrawn.

But they do make a noise in public.

 

When not wanted on the set, Kinski retires to his bungalow, sleeps, reads, cooks, and repels everyone – except Werner – who knocks on his door.

In the afternoon, Kinski arrives at the palace: a sexagenarian adolescent all in white with a mane of yellow hair. Not exactly my idea of a Brazilian slaver, but let that pass. The scene he has to play is one in which, smeared with black make-up and trussed like a pig for the spit, he must crouch and endure the insults of the king: ‘Why have you sent 350,000 warships to my shores?' ‘Why did you kill my greyhound?'

 

I overhear Kinski wisecracking with the set photographer and introduce myself. The arctic eyes swivel round: ‘Oh, you're the one who wrote the book? I liked that book. I'm sorry we had to change it, but I think we're doing something very rhythmical here.'

He changes into a blue Napoleonic officer's coat - genuine but moth-eaten - trimmed with silver braid.

‘Maybe', he turns to me, ‘the film will help the book.'

‘Maybe.'

I go and sit with the continuity girl.

‘He seems in a very good mood,' I say.

‘That is because he has made everyone very angry.'

 

One of Kinski's quirks is that he insists on demonstrating how each shot should be framed. This caused a dreadful scene with the original cameraman, who left Elmina in a huff. A replacement, Viktor Ruzicka, came out at a moment's notice from Prague. An imperturbably cheerful man, he knows precisely how to handle the star, when to be indulgent and when to be firm.

‘Hey, Viktor,' Kinski shouts, ‘do they still have toilet paper in Czechoslovakia? Polanski told me that in Warsaw . . . '

‘Of course we have toilet paper.'

‘Okay?' Werner interrupts. ‘Shall we shoot it now?'

‘That's what we're here for,' says Kinski.

The make-up man comes and dabs more black on his face. Werner, meanwhile, is organising the crowd.

‘Now everyone look at the white man!' he calls.

‘Black and white,' says Kinski.

 

Thursday morning. Nothing is happening. Nana is late for his deposition scene. Perhaps he doesn't want to be deposed after all? But finally he appears, striding across the courtyard in an orange-and-purple
kenti
cloth. He inclines his head to me and says, ‘Good morning, Englishman!' He had been checking that his courtiers were all safely on the bus.

 

A second king, Nana of Elmina, also plays a part in the film and has turned up here unannounced to see how things are going. I suspect he wants to do another act. He is nattily turned out in a crimson robe sewn with purple satin ribbon. Together we watch the deposition scene. He complains of fever.

At Elmina the screenplay called for him to abase himself before Dom Francisco and to fan him. Since Nana had never fanned anyone in his life, this was quite a psychological blow.

‘I am totally confused,' he said. ‘But I will do it for the purpose of the fillum.'

He has also read
The Viceroy of Ouidah.

‘Well, sir,' he says to me, ‘you have written a very roundabout book.'

 

‘You live in England?' Kinski asks.

‘Not much.'

‘I don't even want to change planes in England.'

 

A man with about forty dogs on leashes has been sighted on the outskirts of the village. All the dogs walk proudly ahead of him. The man travels around the villages buying up dogs. He then sells them in the North, where dog is eaten.

 

The houses of the village are built of mud with conical roofs of thatch. One of the shutters is chalked with the words SIMPLE BOY.

Viktor orders it to be shut. From within comes the quacking of a muscovy duck.

 

Picorna is a virus that attacks men and animals, and as you drive into Tamale, there is a notice that reads FEELING THE HEAT? COME TO THE PICORNA ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE FOR A NICE COLD BEER.

Nearby is another, less frequented bar: AYATOLLAH DRINKS BAR NO CREDIT GIVEN.

 

What the eye sees, the hand reaches out for. In Ghana the largest unit of currency is worth about a dollar. To make simple payments, you have to run around with a shopping bag full of banknotes. The girl in charge of cash is dismayed by the ever-swelling numbers of open hands.

Nana of Elmina, never at a loss for a pious homily, has this to say: ‘It's like pig breeding. Some pigs are greedy feeders. Some are nice pigs. You never can tell.'

 

The orders for the day include the following: ‘Attention – 250 Amazons arrive from Accra by night; prepare accommodation at the army barracks.'

The Amazons (Werner called them
Amazones)
are nice girls from Accra with names like Eunice, Beatrice, Patience, Primrose, Maud, and Rhoda. At Elmina there were 700 of them, trained in machete drill by a lion-faced Italian stunt director, Benito Stafanelli. They behaved very badly. They outraged the villagers by singing songs of fantastic obscenity. They went on strike for more money and nearly staged a riot.

At 8.30 in the morning their buses arrive at the palace. We hear shrieks and yells on the far side of the wall.

‘The situation may get out of hand,' says Werner in a sombre voice. ‘Someone will have to pray for us.'

 

The Amazons saunter across the yard and then go off to change, or rather strip, into their Amazon costume: a yellow cache-sex, breasts smeared with whiting, and for a helmet a scarlet gourd dotted with cowrie shells. They carry machetes, shields, and spears. The spears have their tips bent over, but one could still take your eye out.

Waiting – as always happens on a film set – for something to happen, I sit with the girls and overhear snatches of conversation.

‘Take off your brassière, Jemimah!'

‘How can you take up with that coward?'

‘Yeah, but what can you do? He is a human being.'

‘He is only walking by himself. He has no wife.'

‘Women in Europe do not do that, Rhoda!'

 

The day is unbearably hot – about 113° F, 45°C – and the Amazons are wilting fast. They have been called on to make a spectacular charge on the palace. We sit in the portico and watch the rehearsal. Suddenly the girls are hurtling toward us, spears waving, with Werner barefoot in the lead. ‘Come on, girls!' he shouts. ‘Faster! Faster!'

 

We have supper in a white-painted bungalow known as the Casino, and we are drinking our umpteenth beer of the evening when the Amazons arrive. There has been some dispute about their pay. They have already been paid more than their contract, but that does not make them happy. Egged on by Kinski – who declares, ‘I'm for the girls!' – they surround the Casino and raise a fearful din. We draw the curtains, but the wind blows them open. Faces appear through the louvres: ‘You will die.' ‘You think you can stuff a black woman. You'll see.'

 

Werner paces the room in a state of extreme agitation. Usually he puts all such transactions in the hands of subordinates, and now they've bungled it. The Portuguese doctor quite loses his head. ‘I'm an African!' he shouts (he was born in Mozambique). ‘I know how serious this shit is.' Then when he has calmed down a little, he adds sententiously, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans.'

Outside, the Amazons kick and shove the building, which under their combined weight could collapse. One suspects, however, that they are not really trying. But they do burst in. Glasses fly. A girl gets kicked, and the man who did the kicking turns red and white with rage. Not so Werner, who towers above the assembly and announces, ‘My sense of justice tells me – ‘at which the kicker screams, 'You mean your sense of stupidity!'

There is some ugly talk of bringing in the army. Instead, Werner – a monument of sanity in a cast of nervous breakdowns – slips out through a side door and confronts the girls. At the sound of his habitual cry - ‘Girls! Girls!' - the rumpus simmers down. He and their spokeswoman, Salome, immediately reach a compromise. Laughing happily, the girls go back to their buses.

Werner comes back in, exhausted, and says to me, ‘That was only an arabesque.'

 

Next day. Sunday. A day of rest. The door of the Casino is covered with red mud footprints. Another drama is unfolding at the military barracks.

As part of her equipment, each Amazon has been given a foam-rubber mattress, but the soldiers, having shared the mattresses all night, make off with them in the morning.

‘It's disgusting,' Kinski tells Werner. ‘Do something.'

Werner and I drive to the barracks, a collection of rickety wooden buildings, where he must again defuse the situation. Eagerly the girls cluster around him. With a hierophantic gesture, he cries, ‘Girls! Girls! I love you.' A squeaky voice pipes back, ‘And we love you, too!'

He apologises, sorrowfully, for the scene last night. He apologises for the stolen mattresses. ‘If I could take justice from my rib, I would give it to you.' Alas, there is nothing to be done.

Next, the Amazons' bus drivers, claiming that the mattress crisis has delayed them, insist on an extra day's pay.

‘Let's get out of here,' says Werner. ‘Quick!'

Tuesday. There is one more scene to be shot in Africa, a night scene in which the future King Ghezo rescues the Brazilian from prison. I would like to stay, but the plane for London leaves Accra tonight. Besides, I am needed to relay messages to Munich on the logistics of getting the crew plus a ton of equipment from Tamala to Bogotá via Madrid.

 

A few weeks later on another plane I sit next to a New York lawyer whose client, a big Hollywood name, once chickened out of one of Werner's films.

‘Herzog?' the man said. ‘Don't go on a trip with him.'

‘But I have.'

 

G
eorge Costakis is the leading private art collector in the Soviet Union. And his is no ordinary collection, but one of compelling interest to all who would understand the art of this century. For twenty-six years he has conducted his private archaeological excavation – and this is what it has required – to unearth the Leftist art movement which burst on Russia in the years around the Revolution. Russia's revolution is the outstanding intellectual event of the century, and her painters, sculptors and architects rose to the occasion. During the First War the centre of artistic gravity shifted from Paris to Moscow and Leningrad where it remained for a few turbulent years.

‘I will make myself black trousers of the velvet of my voice,' sang its most conspicuous spokesman, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Young women shivered with pleasure at the voice of the man who called himself ‘the cloud in pants'. Characteristically it took a Russian émigré, Serge Diaghilev, to galvanise the fading talents of Western Europe into a show of activity. But by his exile he divorced himself from the source of his inspiration. The Russian soil is a powerful mother and few of her artists survive the trauma of parting.

Those with strong will power stayed. The uniqueness of the Russian situation encouraged in them an almost Messianic belief in the power of art to transform the world. And because the most extreme apostles of modernism had opened their arms to the Bolsheviks, they were able to press their claims. Admittedly they fought each other (with fists) and divided into schismatic groups, each broadcasting its manifestos which read like the anathemas of the medieval church. They called themselves misleading names – Constructivists, Productivists, Objectivists, Suprematists – which often reflect personal vendettas rather than any real ideological split. As a whole, however, the work of the Leftists has a freshness and confidence, which towers over the smartness, the hysteria and the aridity of much European art of the Twenties.

When the full history of the Russian movement comes to be written – and to some extent we must thank Costakis that it can be written – it will probably emerge as the most significant of all. Whatever we think, later generations will look on the twentieth century as the century of abstract painting. Two Russians, Kasimir Malevich and Vassily Kandinsky, are its pioneers, and to understand the movement properly we must place it first in its original Slavic context.

For a few euphoric years the avant-garde flourished, but its anarchic philosophy appeared to contradict the crucial tenets of Soviet Marxism. It attracted official disapproval; was formally sat on, and the paintings disappeared under beds or into the vaults of museums. When Costakis began, Leftist art was quite forgotten. Outside the Soviet Union it attracted a few disparaging comments. Inside it did not arouse a flicker of interest. In 1947 an art critic could denounce Cezanne's dishonest ‘indifference to subject matter' and complain that his fruit and flowers ‘lack aroma and texture'. In those days the non-figurative artist was a pariah.

Costakis was the ‘mad Greek who buys hideous pictures'. He spent fifteen years in the cold and if, over the past ten, his apartment has become an object of pilgrimage, it gives him very obvious satisfaction. In his twenties Costakis bought tapestries, silver and Dutch landscape painting. ‘ . . . Kalf . . . Berchem . . . this kind of thing. Then little by little they all looked to me like one colour. I had twenty paintings on the wall and it was like one painting.' He cannot single out any one event of childhood that inclined him towards works of art, but imagines the ceremonial of the Orthodox Church may have affected him. ‘But this is not the real reason. All my life I wanted to write a book . . . or make an aeroplane . . . or invent some industrial miracle. I
had to do something.
And I told myself, “If I continue to collect old paintings, I will do
nothing.
Even if one day I will find a Rembrandt, people will say ‘He was lucky' and that is all.”' Then, in the dark days after the war, someone offered him three brightly coloured paintings of the lost avant-garde. ‘They were signals to me. I did not care what it was . . . but nobody knew what anything was in those days.'