This is now some chapters later.
Camilla had lied to Stephen also because she
didn't like stereotypes.
Because she didn't like stereotypes,
she presented herself as one, a hairdresser.
She did it as a sort of challenge.
Stephen, however treated her as a person: unique,
the first and only of her kind.
He took in all of her stories whole cloth.
Because she didn't talk any further about her job,
he didn't question it.
He had never known a hairdresser anyway
and had no preconceptions.
He was a romantic enough to enjoy
the story of her poverty, which was true,
and her fiance, her abrupt departure and so on.
His eyes had opened wide, he asked a lot of questions.
She had had to tax her imagination
about the fictitious tea and cake ceremonies of the Swiss.
In truth, Camilla was closer to 30 than to 20,
and had been living most recently
in Berlin for several years.
She was a cutter, but not a hair cutter.
She edited film for an industrial film production
company.
There was no art to her daily work.
Someone else, the editor in chief, made the decisions
and she made the actual physical splices.
But like most cutters, she dreamed
of being an editor in chief.
She knew she was good enough: she had the eye, the instinct,
the sense of rhythm and concision
that governs any film.
But the proper luck had not come her way.
So she labored in the celluloid fields biding her time
until she would be discovered.
That's what she told herself anyway, it wasn't exactly true.
In truth, her talent was evident to many people in Berlin,
but she was frightened of the responsibility
of being an editor in chief.
There is something godlike and metaphysical
about editing a film.
One joins characters together and separates them.
One causes collisions between scenes and this very collision
generates subliminal feelings and ideas.
One creates a rhythm, a musicality from the parts
to the whole.
The director who goes over the rushes with the editor
might say: no, I don't like that,
but often the director allows the editor great latitude.
Personal style, those subsumed to the product is important.
There are many directors who will only
work with a particular editor, it's a matter of chemistry.
Camilla had been offered editor in chief positions
on several occasions; each time she found reason to say no.
Now and then when a friend in the business
was sick or suddenly irresponsible,
she would fill in as editor on a commercial here and there,
and for the news on a television station.
Her friends were aware of her real competence.
When one of them made his first underground film,
he asked her to do the editing.
He praised the result. She had a way
of spreading the action out an infinitesimal amount,
an extra frame or two just at the right junctures,
thereby increasing the tension.
The subtleties of concision and ellipses came naturally to her.
Soon Camilla was in demand for underground films.
There's more words in prose than in poetry.
But there was no money in it, in the poetic department of film
so to speak.
Also the filmmakers, often young, sometimes students,
squabbled a lot and made editing difficult.
Editing has more to do with time than the other film trades.
The apportioning of time and rhythm can be a personal thing.
Everyone involved in the process has a different idea
of what the rhythm ought to be.
So after a while, she played hard to get.
She only worked on underground films
by the best of the young groups in Berlin.
That is how she first met Ingo.
Her friend Mikhail had shot a film on a famous Berlin
painter: Ingo G from the so-called Crystal Group.
And Mikhail asked her to do the editing.
Camilla loved the work of the Crystal Group
because of its sustenance of figurative subject matter
and because of its affinity with surrealism.
Magritte was their biggest influence.
So she took the job.
There was no money, not even bus fare,
and she would have to work at night and in an editing studio
on the other side of town in the Kreuzberg section.
She knew she'd have to sleep there some nights.
And there was one catch.
Ingo G, the painter, the subject of the film,
had insisted right from the beginning
that he have control over the final cut, which meant he
have control over the editor.
Michael had given in.
Camilla was irate.
Giving control to a subject of a film was like an author
giving control over destiny to one of his characters.
Idiosyncrasies, vanities, wish fulfillment,
and false theoretical approaches were bound to take over.
She didn't want anyone but Mikhail
looking over her shoulder, and Mikhail so
respected her choices that he rarely interfered.
Also she and Mikhail had been lovers once,
and they had a certain amount of understanding,
a feeling for one another, and they knew how to fight well.
Before she even looked at the rushes,
she went to the painter's studio.
She would talk with him, reason with him, convince him,
she thought.
She expected a youngish man vain,
an egotist inarticulate but full of passionate and elliptical
theory as some of the painters of her acquaintance had been.
instead, he was older, in his mid-50s,
a thin, quiet man with wavy white hair and dark
deeply lined skin.
He was also shorter than she, which threw her off.
For their appointment, he wore a clean white shirt
and dark dress pants, but his banker's shoes
were paint spattered and had no laces, giving him a homey look.
He greeted her with a nod of the head
and ushered her into the second floor
studio which was also his home.
The first floor housed a dry cleaning plant.
So despite the bitter chill outside, the studio
itself was warm.
She immediately began to sniff the air,
and as he seated her on an old couch
he told her this had once been a perfumery and some of the odors
had remained impregnated in the walls.
If the smell bothered her, he said, rather
gallantly she thought, he would open a window.
No she said, this was fine.
It had also been a photographer's studio
before the war.
And many of the scenic flats--
mostly outdoor scenes, pretentious landscapes,
classical statues--
could be seen leaning against the walls between paintings.
The painter fetched a great putt of coffee
and a bottle of slivovitz and set them on the table.
He poured two cups of coffee and offered some of the liquor.
She declined, smiling her most efficient businesslike smile.
He poured a few drops into his coffee.
They sipped, they stared at each other,
or rather they glanced at each other and Camilla smiled,
this time her Gioconda smile, ambiguous,
unreadable, mysterious.
She turned to look at the paintings leaning
against the walls.
He followed her gaze and their eyes met again.
She started to speak but lost courage.
She was right to be here of course, she told herself again.
She was firm about that.
She was the film editor after all
and would not give up her prerogatives easily.
But the paintings surrounding her were so powerful
and the painter so apparently self-contained
that she immediately began to think from his point of view.
If she were as good a painter as he obviously was,
she too would want to be presented in a certain light;
to wish otherwise would be passive, uncaring,
or simply stupid.
In five minutes of silence, Camilla
could see that Ingo G was none of these.
She took a deep breath like someone about
to embark upon a long journey.
Then she let her breath go.
She raised her eyebrow.
He looked at her with a slight smile on his narrow face.
Was it irony or smugness?
He leaned forward expectantly or just from habit with his elbows
resting on his knees.
Every so often he tilted his coffee cup and took a sip.
If the silence lasted much longer,
it would become an issue.
Silence between people has its own rules, its own pacing,
its own inner and outer limit.
Camilla as a film editor was attuned to that.
But each time she started to speak
and he leaned slightly forward and raised his white eyebrows
to accept her speech, she stopped, smiled briefly,
and looked around again at the paintings.
All this time, not a sound passed between them,
except for the rapid beating of Camilla's pulse.
Had there been no paintings to look at,
she would have spoken earlier.
She would have been firm, even chilly,
demanding even, unswerving from her purpose, which
was to get her own way.
This was one of Camilla's gifts.
She would have made a good negotiator.
She knew how and when to attack and better
how to give in graciously when backed into a corner.
She knew how to flirt with men or women
without giving her goods away.
She had learned this partially from her mother
when following the woman from shop
to shop in the daily tour, butcher, baker, fishmonger,
and so on.
Inside the apartment, her mother had been a formidable opponent,
but curiously the mother had a habit
of giving in at a certain point in an argument even when she
was winning.
That quality had made living with her almost tolerable
for Camilla.
But outside the apartment her mother could not be beaten.
When she thought she was being overcharged, or shortchanged,
or short weighted, she would raise her voice
so everyone in the shop could hear and begin
to ask impertinent questions in sweet tones about the butcher's
sister, her abortion, the baker's usurious loans,
and so on.
When she wanted something she couldn't have,
she flirted, and often Camilla had suspected her mother
of giving something away.
She would disappear into the butcher's back shed and return
disheveled but smiling.
There was always good meat on the table
even in the skimpiest times.
Ingo G's paintings were so striking, she thought.
How does one negotiate with art?
The paintings were large, each about eight feet
high and four wide.
In all of the paintings except for the few still lives,
Ingo had portrayed nude women and clothed men.
Sometimes a woman was the subject
of the painting, the force and center of the canvas.
And sometimes the model sat or stood in the background,
and the man was the subject.
Actually she realized the women were always
the subject of the painting because the women were always
nude.
The treatment of the subject reminded her
of the paintings of baldness.
The women or young girls in Balthazar's paintings
were usually central and oddly provocative.
And between them and the objects in the room,
there was always a great tension, a push and pull,
a quiet but terrifying discomfort
although the discomfort was never shown
on the faces of the women.
The faces of the women were not important;
the physical presence of their bodies took over.
They were central, but the viewer
could feel the unseen power of the unseen male in the room,
the painter himself.
Balthazar's paintings were always a bit perverse.
In Ingo G's painting, the women were nude but dignified
somehow, upright in posture, vulnerable, but protected
by their air of intelligence.
Camilla had the feeling Ingo chose strong models, women
with personality, intelligence, fierce quietude, and then
he made them disrobe.
Then he painted them, and he didn't speak to them just as he
wasn't speaking to Camilla.
He wasn't helping her through this increasingly
terrifying silence.
Camilla took some slivovitz in her coffee.
May I see the rest of the studio?
she finally asked.
She drank the contents of the cup in one quick gulp,
spilling some on her blouse.
All day she would reek of coffee and slivovitz.
She posed several questions about the paintings,
how did he choose models?
How did he deal with two models at the same time?
He had them sit separately at first
to get them down in the Canvas then later
to increase the tension, he posed them together.
For example he said, pointing to the series of paintings
of a Black man, a very tall man, an American
who had been a well-known professional basketball
player in Berlin.
He was an excellent model, Ingo explained, an intelligent man
but also very physical and in exquisite control of his body.
Ingo had posed him with the Polish woman, middle aged,
an immigrant who cooked in a nearby restaurant.
The Polish woman was the granddaughter of a count.
In one painting, the Black man was fully clothed in profile,
sitting erect in a kitchen chair.
The woman was nude, pale, and doughy, and out of shape
with very round features.
She was seen full front.
interesting, Camilla said.
How so?
He asked.
Camilla stepped back from the painting.
Allowing for the striking contrast in skin colors,
the painting should have been quite
ordinary except that not only was
the Polish woman considerably shorter than the Black man,
but she had been placed slightly further back in the picture
plane and was therefore diminutized
and in a way that made Camilla uncomfortable though she
couldn't have said why.
The woman's proportions were off.
Was there tension between the models, she wanted to know?
Yes, the Black man couldn't stand the Polish woman's odor.
She ate garlic by the handful to enhance her health, she said,
and she gave out the odor of garlic from every pore.
The Black man insisted she changed her diet for the length
of time the sittings took.
She refused.
The Black man wanted to quit, but he
had a sense of professionalism and wouldn't just
walk out on a job.
He began to insult the Polish woman, but in English,
which she didn't understand.
She could hear the contempt in his tone of voice,
and she protested but to no avail.
She became sullen and pouty.
This demeanor created the most immediate impact
of the painting.
Camilla couldn't articulate the feelings
she got from this series, but she
did tell Ingo the paintings made her uncomfortable
and she liked them for that reason.
He whispered almost to himself.
They did finally get to the subject of control,
of who was in charge of editing this film.
He immediately disarmed her.
He didn't want to cause any problems or delays in the film,
he told her, seating them again at the table pouring
more coffee.
He was honored, he said, that Mikhail and the group
called the Other Cinema had chosen him.
They were young, they were the future.
I want to leave the project in the hands of professionals,
he said.
He hoped the film would get wide distribution.
It would be good for his career and would sell more painting.
May I be allowed to be present when you start working here?
The first night and a few subsequent nights,
he wanted to see how a film editor worked,
and would she mind if he dropped in occasionally thereafter
to see how it was going.
And might he ask a few technical questions.
Fine she said.
She would phone him tomorrow and set a date.
She thanked him for the studio tour.
It gave her she said some sense of Ingo
and his work she might not have gotten from the rushes.
As she walked down the stairs, she
heard the curiously orchestral sound
of an accordion coming from the inner courtyard.
It was late afternoon.
She would hear that music every afternoon
for the next several years and would never
be able to hear an accordion without thinking of Ingo
and their first meeting.
When she got to the corner, she screamed.
She walked for two blocks and then screamed again.
The sun was out and she decided to walk.
She screamed herself halfway across Berlin.
This is some chapters later.
When Camilla made the decision to leave Ingo,
she didn't act on it right away.
The decisiveness gave her a sense
of power over her own life she had never felt before.
Camilla was always a person who reacted more than she acted.
She'd made some of the most important decisions of her life
in states of anger, for example, anger
that someone had underestimated her, overlooked her, et cetera.
She'd taken her first lover at age 16
because the man, a married man in his 20s
who had just moved into the next apartment
smiled at her the way one smiled at a 12-year-old.
He didn't look her up and down the way that boys at school
did, her long legs, her breasts which showed their shapes
right through her sweater.
Didn't the man, the new neighbor,
see she was a woman already?
Camilla made up her mind to force the issue.
He would look at her and see a woman.
She found out what his schedule was,
and when he left for work in the morning.
Excuse me.
She found out what his schedule was
when he left for work in the morning
and when he returned for lunch, left again,
returned for dinner.
In the morning, she went to the hallway with her robe half open
just when he exited his apartment.
As she bent to straighten the welcome mat,
one breast slipped out of her nightgown.
He didn't appear to notice.
She did variations on this theme several mornings in a row.
He still smiled at her the way an adult smiles
at a child, a neighbor child, a child the adult would rather
not deal with, a child an adult with pat
on the head in passing.
She played sick one week and stayed home from school.
On the first day, she left the apartment door open
when she knew he'd arrived for lunch;
his wife worked on the other side of Brussels.
She sat in her nightgown reading a magazine.
She put her legs up on the footstool.
She brushed the nightgown off her legs.
He didn't look in.
The next day she escalated extravagantly
as only a teenager will.
She took off her nightgown and stood with her back
to the open door.
She ironed a dress.
When she heard his footsteps hesitate on the landing,
she cleared her throat.
He couldn't help but look.
And looking, he couldn't help but admire what he saw:
the long legs, the beautiful behind and hips,
her long waist, the creaminess of skin.
Perhaps he saw and admired, she wasn't sure.
When she passed him and his wife walking
in the park after supper that evening,
she saw that his smile had expanded a few centimeters,
or was that just the play of light on his face of the sun
going down over the hill?
And the wife, she spoke only to Camilla's mother:
good evening, Frau, and a little imperceptible nod to Camilla.
After her mother left for work the next morning,
Camilla decided to omit the breast falling out
of her nightgown routine.
If she were going to live in a foolish comedy,
she should at least perform it well.
She wanted to think what was going wrong.
Was her body not beautiful?
Her mother told her it was.
In fact, she told Camilla it would be her curse.
Camilla stood naked before the mirror.
She lifted her arm slowly in the air
and twisted them like two snakes dancing.
She left one arm raised and with the other
traced the shape of her taut breast.
The sensation made her shiver.
With both hands, she traced her pubic mound
with it's rich red hair, so dark it was almost black.
She had virtually the same body as her mother except her mother
was shorter by several inches.
Perhaps she was [? un ?] femme déclassé.
She gave the effect of détente, of beauty just a bit off.
She knew her mother was renowned in the neighborhood
for having a beauty which was not conventional,
a beauty which was off by an inch or so, her father said,
a beauty which was flawed and therefore
did not show itself to everyone.
It was a beauty that to those who actually noticed:
it caused surprise, double take, consternation.
Camilla once overheard the butcher's fat wife
say to a customer, what does he, the butcher, see in this woman?
She is certainly plain as a weed.
The butcher found Camilla's mother extremely attractive,
so attractive that he neglected all his other customers
whenever she entered the store.
So attractive that he always gave her the best cut of meat
and sometimes forgot to charge her.
So attractive that the butcher and Camilla's mother
sometimes disappeared into the shed behind the store
and left Camilla to tell the customers the butcher
would return in a few minutes.
Perhaps Camilla's beauty was invisible too, or only visible
to butchers.
There was some truth to this.
Isn't it true that like attracts like,
that beautiful women attract handsome men?
Yes, the evidence was all around her.
But her father was a homely man with a silly grin
and a face like an old shoe.
If her mother was beautiful, and Camilla
was convinced her mother was beautiful,
why had she attracted this man?
How had this man, Camilla's father,
had the audacity to approach her in the first place?
And it was true in Camilla's life at school
her odd beauty made it such that even the homeliest boys felt
it was their prerogative to flirt
with her in their awkward ways.
Even the very shortest boys.
Hadn't a boy hardly five feet tall
asked her for a walk in the park after school just the other day
and hadn't she said yes?
But it was also true that the handsome boys,
the popular boys, the flirts, the arrogant ones, the boys who
were full of themselves were interested in her too,
especially since her body had lengthened and lost
its baby fat, and she began wearing dresses that clung.
That night she asked her mother about it, her odd beauty,
the homely boys.
Her mother smiled.
Sex appeal she said.
And sex appeal is democratic, every man
feels like he has a vote.
Camilla decided to repeat her routine at the ironing board.
She thought of it as a dance, though she hardly
moved, an interior dance, a brain
dance, a mental striptease, though she was already naked.
When she heard the neighbor's footsteps on the stairs,
she held her breath.
When the footsteps stopped, she felt the silence
like an echo of the sound.
Her back was to the open door.
She felt a prickly heat break out on her wings, her shoulder
blade.
At any moment she might fly.
Her right knee burned at the scabbed
over wound she'd gotten when she fell in a race at school.
For the first time in her life, she felt wet between her legs
and thought for a moment that she was leaking like a bad boat
and she would sink down through the floor
and down through the floor below that and into the dark basement
where all fluids went.
She felt the thick rush of air of the door
shutting, the neighbor moving.
Excuse me.
She felt the thick rush of air of the door shutting
and she heard the door slam, and before she
could turn she felt him on her back,
the neighbor moving upwards as though he were climbing.
She remembered the neighbor was a short man
just like the boy at school.
He was tearing at his clothes and breathing heavily,
making high tinny sounds with his nose,
when she remembered that he was not a particularly handsome man
either, and that he did not smell particularly
fresh after a morning's work, that he smelled terribly
like fish and that he did in fact sell fish
from a stall six blocks away.
He was turning her over and entering her quickly
without preamble, without even a nice kiss,
burying his mouth in her ear when she remembered that she
had only wanted him to notice her, to pay attention,
to see her not as a child one offers a tiny smile to when
passing in the park, but as a woman, an adult, full blown,
the almost beautiful Fraus, almost beautiful daughter.
That's it, thank you.