The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space Read online

  ‘Yeah, but do you actually know him?’

  She narrows her eyes, ‘Why? Why are you interested?’

  Why indeed. I am not very good at this job. I am too obvious, too straightforward, I can’t hide what I want. This is why I never get the girl, or the information.

  ‘I’m trying to interview him. For a paper back East.’

  ‘You’re a journalist? Which paper?’ Her cutlery is paused over her breakfast. Some things I am good at in my job. Like noticing the physical stuff. The way the yolk shines innocently in the sunlight before it gets all torn apart.

  ‘Just a small one. You won’t have heard of it.’

  ‘A small paper back East sent you all the way here just to interview Mr Brecht? Must be an awfully intellectual paper,’ but she is smiling again and my heart leaps and soars. I can do it this time.

  ‘My name’s Stan,’ I say.

  ‘Stan. I’m Hiroko. Maybe we should join forces. I’m trying to get an interview with Mr Brecht too. For my college newspaper.’

  She holds out her hand, and I am allowed to touch it.

  ‘My, you’ve got clean hands for a journalist. Usually they’re all inky and dirty,’ and she laughs at me. I laugh back. I will need to buy some ink if I’m going to see her again.

  And I do see her again. We meet over breakfast and eat toast together and she tells me she’s interested in ‘Mr’ Brecht because of his politics. He is an inspiration to workers everywhere, apparently. She asks me for tips on interviewing him. I used to interview people when I was in the army, but that’s probably not the sort of interviewing she means. Finally, I risk asking her for a date.

  ‘A date?’ She pokes her knife into some left-over jelly. She doesn’t look at me, ‘Sure. Ok. A date.’ The word ‘date’ sounds foreign when she says it.

  I wonder what she is thinking, ‘Tomorrow? Are you free tomorrow?’

  She nods, ‘Of course I’m free.’

  ‘Meet you in front of the Ritzy at seven.’ I try not to sound triumphant.

  ‘Are you going to bring me a corsage?’ She laughs a little.

  ‘Maybe.’ But I don’t laugh. I will bring her anything she wants.

  Brecht receives a letter. He doesn’t receive many letters here, people tend to use the telephone. This letter looks official and he has the old fear that they have found out some secret of his and they will require him to leave. He doesn’t feel protected here in this country, living in a city where earthquakes may strike at any moment, where landslides cause parts of people’s gardens to fall off and into the sea below. This happened in Laughton’s garden just last week and he lost a much-loved oak tree as a result.

  Brecht carries the unopened letter through to the dining room, where Helene is sitting and drinking her morning coffee. She watches as he slits it open. She doesn’t get many letters either.

  Silence for several minutes.

  ‘I have been subpoenaed,’ Brecht says finally, ‘to give evidence at their hearing.’

  ‘Hearing? What hearing?’ She pauses, her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. Helene likes her coffee, and most of it in this country is too weak. So she has to brew her own thick, dark, pungent liquid and the smell of it competes with Brecht’s cigars in their small house.

  ‘Their show trials. Their purges. No,’ he corrects himself, ‘no-one will be shot in the head or sent to a camp. They will just be publicly condemned. And not be able to work again.’

  ‘For what?’ Her voice is calm, unbothered. She is used to Brecht’s outbursts against life here.

  ‘For being a Communist. Which is apparently un-American. Or possibly even a Socialist. I’m not sure they understand the distinction.’

  ‘Ah.’ She does not react to this, but opens a newspaper lying next to her coffee and starts to read.

  ‘Do you know what this means?’ Brecht can’t stop himself from sounding annoyed. Helene’s calmness in the face of all their crises, such as having to leave Germany, then Denmark, then Sweden, is admirable. But sometimes he would like a reaction, a little drama. ‘It means the end of us here.’

  ‘Why? Can’t you just refuse to do it? This is, supposedly, a democracy. People here have rights against the State. Even German playwrights have some rights. Say no.’

  The castle walls rustle in the breeze, as Brecht and Laughton wander around. A tear in the fabric of the mad scientist’s house exposes its cardboard frame. The colours, too, are not what Brecht imagined. The castle is painted purple, the house red and somewhat splotchy around the edges. It seems that film sets are even more fake than stage sets.

  There is the constant sound of workmen hammering, presumably constructing a new set somewhere else. Brecht wonders if God views his work like this. A gigantic, or perhaps a very small, film set.

  ‘You have to appear,’ Laughton’s face looks almost grey with worry. ‘They will stop you working if you don’t show up.’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything, dear Charles. Anyway, there is a whole group of us, nineteen people in fact, who will refuse. We will become causes célèbres.’ He can see the newspaper headlines, the photos of their heroic faces. The workers who stood up to the State.

  ‘Really?’ Laughton doesn’t look persuaded. They amble past a heap of wooden boards lying on the ground. The boards have clearly been there for some time, paint is peeling away from the surface, and the grain of the wood has been cracked apart by the heat of the sun.

  ‘I wonder what that used to be,’ says Brecht. Laughton is a good man, but perhaps he is the wrong man to speak to about such matters. Brecht cannot imagine him being outspoken about his own beliefs or actions.

  Laughton smiles for the first time since they arrived at the studios, ‘It amazes me how these film sets look so fake when you see them in real life, and yet on the screen they always convince.’

  ‘Because the audience wants to believe what it is being shown.’ Brecht can never resist the opportunity to make a point, ‘That is what I hate about the movies. The audience should make up their own minds. But Frankenstein is still wonderful. I will never forget the mad scientist pulling the switch. The whole audience screamed when the monster started moving. And when it offered flowers to the child, I cried, Charles, I admit. I hated it, the shameless manipulation of my emotions. It made me angry, but I still cried. That’s when I thought that it is wrong to make an audience feel emotions that are not real.’

  ‘Emotions are always real, surely?’ Laughton looks anxious again.

  ‘You were not at the Nürnberg rallies. The manufacturing of extreme emotions out of air. Nobody had those emotions before Hitler conjured them up. And he learnt it from the movies, you know. It was more terrifying than anything, even Frankenstein. That’s why I want my audiences to think, not to feel.’

  ‘You can’t stop people feeling, and empathising with other people.’

  ‘Well, alright. But they must think too. And remain clear-headed, even when crying at the monster.’ Brecht remembers sitting next to Helene as they watched the Frankenstein film in Berlin, and is suddenly overwhelmed by nostalgia. Why can’t he be there, in the dusty cinema off Schönhauser Allee? Why does he have to be here in a city so full of film sets and flimflam and fake emotions that nobody can tell what is real anymore? His eyes fill.

  ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ asks Laughton.

  ‘Dear Charles!’ Brecht places a hand on his arm, ‘I was just thinking about Elsa in that film. Who could ever forget her performance as the monster’s bride? The most terrifying hairstyle ever seen in the movies.’

  I’m due to meet Walter. We’ve arranged to meet on a street corner like proper spooks, and when I get there he’s wearing this long mac and pulled his hat down low over his face, so that he looks a bit like a coat stand propped up against the wall.

  ‘Any news on Brecht since your last report?’ He starts to pick dirt out from under his fingernails with one of his matches.

  ‘He’s still working on that play with Laughton,’ I try not to s
ound bored. I guess that’s why Walter arranged to meet me here, to add a bit of excitement to the whole affair. Following people is boring, but I know it beats the hell out of any other possibilities available to me so I hold my tongue.

  ‘You’ve been able to follow them? Every day?’

  ‘Sure. Apart from one day. They went to a studio.’

  ‘Never mind that. You told me Brecht is talking to someone about some music?’

  ‘Yeah, Eisler. He’s written a song for the play.’

  ‘Do they talk about anything else?’

  ‘No. Well, sometimes, they reminisce about Berlin. I guess it’s their equivalent of the good old days.’

  ‘Do they talk about Eisler’s brother?’

  ‘His brother? No I don’t think so. What’s his name?’

  ‘Gerhard. Let me know if they do.’

  ‘Right.’ I stifle a yawn.

  He glances at me from underneath the brim of his hat, ‘You heard about this ceremony at Pasadena campus next week? To give Oppenheimer an award for the Bomb.’

  ‘Yeah?’ As far as I’m concerned Oppenheimer can have every award going for dropping the Bomb on Japan and stopping the war. Should have blown up the whole damn country, not just two cities.

  ‘You know about the demonstration that’s been planned to disrupt it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Really? I’m surprised. It’s your little friend who’s organising it. Seems she’s quite a ringleader. As soon as you told us about her wanting to see Brecht, we looked her up. Interesting, very interesting.’

  ‘You want me to – stop seeing her?’

  ‘Stan… of course not. She’s your friend. And she could be a very useful friend. So, when you meet her tonight and try and charm your way into her panties, just make sure and ask her about this demonstration. We want to know what she’s planned. Otherwise, she may find herself helping us with our enquiries. And buy her a gardenia. She’ll like that.’

  He walks off at this point, leaving me just standing there, thinking about too much and not looking at what’s right in front of my nose, so that a fat woman carrying a lot of bags collides with me and curses under her breath.

  ‘Ma’am,’ I tip my hat at her before walking away in the opposite direction to Walter. That’s the way I’ve been taught by him and there’s no doubt he’s instructed me well. That’s why I told Walter about meeting Hiroko because it seemed relevant to the job. But I didn’t tell him everything, so how did he know about our date?

  I walk along this street, impatient to get home and prepare for the evening, but the façades of LA are endless and I am walking for a long time.

  Helene is always so calm, thinks Brecht, but she has nothing to do here. Hardly anyone knows her for what she really is. She does not fit in with the girls who sip sugary drinks in the diners on Wilshire Boulevard, waiting to be discovered and transformed into starlets. She is so calm because she has faced it all, the murder of her relatives, the imposition of being an exile over and over again in too many countries. And lastly, the baby. His but not hers. She was admirable about that. He can never look down on her, or even scale her heights. She is a mountain of a woman and he is nothing without her.

  But he needs more. Charles is good but he needs the collaborators he used to have, Margarete, Elisabeth, Ruth. People who think in his own language so he is not constantly trying to reinvent himself in new words, which is exhausting.

  He has the newspapers spread out in front of him, and he is searching through them. It is news, after all, a world premiere of a play by Brecht. ‘Brecht’ this time is himself and Laughton. In the past, ‘Brecht’ has been Brecht and Hauptmann, or Brecht and Berlau, or Brecht and Steffin. Or even Hauptmann and Brecht. She may have contributed more than him, on occasion.

  Perhaps he should take Helene home. He is surprised by this thought and stops, the papers forgotten. Home. Where is home? Where there is work. Proper work for the two of them, and for others as well. It doesn’t matter if he gets blacklisted here, he can’t work properly in this place anyway.

  Nothing happens for a long moment as he allows himself to dream about a workers’ theatre in Germany. Then he goes back to the papers.

  But the reviews confuse him. In spite of all his long speeches, they persist in seeing Galileo as a hero who defies the authorities by sacrificing his health to his work and smuggling that work out of the country under the noses of the Inquisition.

  He sighs. A quote from one of the reviews snags in his mind, ‘Condemn Galileo? I can’t. Not when I see him on stage. On paper, it’s another matter. But the words are nothing without the performance, the physical gestures. Only then can we understand the man.’

  Hiroko’s already waiting for me outside the Ritzy.

  ‘Gardenias! My favourite! How did you know?’ She looks happy.

  ‘A lucky guess,’ I grin. I don’t care what happens after this evening, at least I’ve got her to myself for a few hours.

  ‘So what’s the movie? What are we going to see?’

  ‘The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer’, with Shirley Temple and Cary Grant.’

  ‘You have to be joking.’ She sounds incredulous and I don’t blame her. With her charcoal hair and sad, sad eyes, she’s about a million miles from being some vacuous blond bobby-soxer.

  ‘No! It’ll be great. Just pretend you’re back at high school and you’re on a date with the boy you had a crush on. The rest of the audience look like they’re high-school kids anyway,’ I try not to look too obviously at the audience around us. I can’t see any of Walter’s other men, but who knows? Perhaps they’re just better at the job than I am.

  ‘I never went on dates when I was a teenager. There weren’t opportunities for dates at the place where I went to school,’ and I see her hand is shaking slightly as she tries to pin the flower onto her dark dress. ‘Could you do this for me, please?’

  And so I get to feel the warmth of her body through the thin ash-grey fabric and I allow my hand to rest just a moment above her breast. The flower looks wrong now, almost garish against her monochrome beauty, but she looks down at it and smiles. Then she takes my hand and raises it to her mouth and she kisses it, ‘Do we have to see the film?’ she murmurs.

  The feeling of her lips against my skin is the most intimate thing that has ever happened to me, far more moving than any hump I’ve had with some girl who only put out to get something back, like a pair of nylons or a good steak. I want to take Hiroko somewhere private but my room is too shabby and mean for her and I am ashamed of it, and she has to share a room with two other students. So we end up in the café again. At least we can talk there. But we will have to talk quietly so nobody can overhear us.

  ‘What are you doing this Saturday?’ She is sitting next to me, feeding me teaspoons of hot chocolate. The whole length of my arm is lying on the back of her chair, so that she can lean against it. I can take her weight, there is nothing to her, I think. I could hold her up.

  ‘Saturday?’ I have momentarily forgotten about Saturday.

  ‘Yeah! Some friends of mine are going to this award ceremony for Oppenheimer. On the campus. You’ve heard about it?’

  ‘Mm…’ Now I don’t want to think about Saturday and about Walter. Life should just be about beautiful Hiroko and hot chocolate.

  ‘I’m planning a demonstration against it. It’s outrageous! He shouldn’t be given a medal, he should be put in jail for committing murder! A bunch of us are going to wave placards. You want to join us?’ She sits up straight, making a gap between her and my arm, so I nod and she leans back against me again.

  ‘You’re just waving placards? Nothing else?’

  ‘What else should there be? Riots? Bombs?’ She laughs.

  No, not bombs. No more bombs. I rest my face on her hair and breathe in deeply.

  ‘Now Charles, I need you to help me.’ In Laughton’s garden again. The play has finished its run at the Coronet Theatre and will soon transfer to New York. Laughton is using the t
ime off to tidy up the garden at the end of summer. Today he is raking leaves on the lawn.

  ‘Ask away, dear boy,’ Laughton is in one of his expansive moods. For a large man he can move quickly, and Brecht is sweating as he tries to keep up with him.

  ‘I need to rehearse what I am going to say to this HUAC committee. I must give a perfect performance.’

  Laughton stops raking and turns to him, ‘I thought you weren’t going to do it? I thought you’d refused, along with the rest of the nineteen?’

  ‘I have changed my mind,’ Brecht pauses and strikes a match to light the next cigar, but the sea breeze blows it out immediately, ‘this appearance could be an opportunity, not a threat.’

  ‘How?’ Laughton lets the rake fall to the ground.

  Brecht is so delighted by his thoughts that he seizes Laughton’s hand, ‘Because I can make it a performance! I can say the words in such a way as to make a mockery of the whole process!’

  ‘Really?’ Laughton looks extremely doubtful. ‘Will they understand what you’re doing? And if they do, isn’t that even more dangerous than not appearing? Won’t they clap you in prison for contempt of court?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  His cigar is properly lit now, and he breathes in. Laughton takes a step back away from the smoke. ‘No, Charles. They will not have the opportunity to prepare a case against me and arrest me, because after I give my evidence I will leave this country!’

  But this dramatic speech falls flat because Laughton simply stands and looks at him. Sometimes Brecht can’t help thinking that they resemble Laurel and Hardy, Laughton’s big round features and fleshy belly (he has even written an ode to Laughton’s belly) contrasted with his own concave appearance and thin face.

  ‘You’re leaving before the New York run?’ Laughton says.

  ‘Yes. A small sacrifice I must make.’

  ‘Oh, you’re making the sacrifice, are you? Nobody else?’

  ‘You’ll be fine without me. You know what you’re doing, now.’

  ‘Glad you admit it, finally,’ Laughton mutters as he picks up the rake, and Brecht realises for the first time what a formidable weapon it could make.