Necessary Lies(84)
“Where did you meet William?” she asks Ursula.
Ursula hesitates for a moment, but only for a short moment. “Here, in Berlin, at a concert in the Conservatory,” she says quickly, as if speeding through the past could help. “In 1976, at the end of his sabbatical, when he was getting ready to go back home. I walked up to him, asked if I could take his picture. I thought he had an interesting face, something of a sulking child, hungry for attention, but at the same time disgusted with this hunger, above it. I told him that I’ve always been drawn to contradictions.
“’Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Shoot!’ Her lips twist when she talks about this moment that took place almost fifteen years ago. It still pleases her to remember William’s amused consternation.
“The light was rotten and I knew it, but I still took a few shots. I’ll have to repeat them, I said. But this will give me an idea, if I’m interested. I called him the next day to get him to come to the studio. I’m still interested, I said and he laughed. He said he was leaving the next day, that he really had no time. So we went out for a drink, instead, and I knew then that we wouldn’t let each other alone that easily.”
“Why?” Anna asks.
“One of my black hunches,” Ursula laughs softly. “He wasn’t an easy man to leave. It took him longer to know what was happening,” she continues. “He always wanted to believe he could be in charge, that things could be controlled, ordered to stop or to go on. Ours was to be just a passing affair, his last night in Berlin, an unexpected treat. One of those nights when you talk and make love, and then talk some more, happy to be alive. A long night, but not without end.
“He called me two weeks later, from Montreal. He said he saw me everywhere, could not stop thinking about me. ‘You are right under my skin,’ he said. ‘Are you still interested?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He came back to Berlin a month later.”
Anna is listening. She is mesmerised by the soft timbre of Ursula’s voice, the warmth of her laughter.
“We always quarrelled. We were too different, too stubborn, but maybe that’s what kept us together. We made each other alive,” Ursula says.
“You didn’t want to live with him!”
“We would’ve killed each other if we did. I’m not good at compromises. He wasn’t, either. It was no use. We both knew it.”
The coffee maker is sputtering steam. Anna rises to pour coffee into their cups. She opens the fridge to find milk. Ursula is swinging on her stool, back and forth. She didn’t like his latest music, she says, and William knew it. He knew she thought it too abstract, too detached. They were like that with each other. Honest, even if it hurt. He could count on her with criticism like that. “I wouldn’t make a good wife,” she laughs.
How she still likes talking about him, Anna thinks. How he still excites her.
“How did Marilyn find out about you?”
“He told her. He said she was suspecting something anyway, and he didn’t want to lie to her.”
“He didn’t tell me,” Anna says.
“Is this really such a surprise?”
Anna takes a sip of coffee. It is so hot that it burns her tongue. No, it is not a surprise.
“Last time I saw William, it was in August,” Ursula says. “I took him to Berchtesgaden. I was still filming for the documentary. He kept telling me that I should move on, do other things. That there was no point in this constant blame, in dragging the ghosts out.”
In Ursula s story August is rainy and cold in the Alps. “There was a long line-up of cars on the wet, slippery road to Berchtesgaden. The last two kilometres took us twenty minutes,” Ursula continues. “We found a small hotel on the hill, with its stuffed grouse, little hats with flower wreaths around them, and painted boxes on the windowsill. Gemütlich, we laughed. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I was there to photograph the ruins of Obersalzberg, with its maze of underground tunnels, the empty lots where once guards kept watch over the Berghof with its giant picture window. I wanted to go to Kehlsteinhaus, the Eagle’s Nest, a present from Germany for Hitler’s 50th birthday, his mountain retreat.
“That’s where we drove in the morning, an eerie drive, past walls of old bunkers rotting in the damp air, half hidden under green moss. Past these small villages, churches with black steeples, cascades of red geraniums in all windows. The Alpine meadows. Cows roaming free, brass bells ringing wherever they go.
“By the Hotel Türken, where crowds used to gather for a glimpse of the Führer, there was a sign, “This is a private object. Photography forbidden.” I took the picture of the sign. In Obersalzberg we took a bus to Kehlsteinhaus, along a steep mountain road. An engineering marvel, more than five thousand feet above sea level, a taped voice described the origin of the house and the road, completed in twelve months in the years 1937/38. The bus stopped at the feet of the summit, and we took an elevator to the terrace of the Eagle’s Nest. On the terrace of Kehlsteinhaus waiters offered us beer and tea.
“We hiked the steep loop trail of limestone rocks, caught a sight of the blue waters of K?nigssee, and the progress of a giant misty cloud, slowly coming our way. I took pictures of the tourists on the trail, the tables shaped like giant HB Weissbier bottles, a face of a hooded maiden watching us without a smile, the giant fireplace in the main hall.