Kinski, Klaus Kinski, Klaus - All I need is love (1988, Random House) - libgen.li

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in te rn a tio n a lly famous film star Klaus K in s k irenowned for the demonic intensity of his screen
presence and his unabashed idiosyncrasy—writes a
sometimes shocking, sometimes disturbing, always
arresting account of his life and loves. An actor of
indisputable genius, best known for his brilliant per­
formances as a man out of place and out of time in
classic films such as Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu, and Fitzcarraldo, Kinski is a man· of
grand and terrifying passions (for money, for women,
for fast cars).
In this at once powerful and tender memoir, All I
Need Is Love, Kinski writes with astonishing directness
not only about the circumstances of his personal life—
the dire poverty of his childhood, his enlistment in the
German army at sixteen, his commitment to a mental
asylum—but also about the twists of fortune resulting
in his ascendency as one of Europe’s most successful
and celebrated actors. With unsparing emotional force,
Kinski explores his sexual obsessions and relationships
with innumerable women and, yes, girls, and his feel­
ings for his daughter Nastassja and his son Nanhoi. In
the tradition (or shadow?) of Villon, Rimbaud, Celine,
and Genet, Klaus Kinski has written a frank meditation
on the infernal adventures of his life.
ALL I
NEED IS
LOVE
NEED IS
A /W E /W O I 11
R A N D O /n H O U SE
N E W YORK
Copyright © 1988 by Klaus Kinski
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kinski, Klaus.
All I need is love.
1. Kinski, Klaus. 2. Actors— Germany— Biography.
I. Title.
PN2658.K52A3 1988 79 i .43,028/0924 [B] 87-43236
ISBN 0-394-54916-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
987654321
First Edition
BOOK
DESIGN
BY
JO
ANNE
METSCH
From an unpublished manuscript by Klaus Kinski.
Copyright by Klaus Kinski.
All rights reserved.
To my son, Nanhoi
ALL I
NEED IS
LOVE
O N E
on't move," says my father, bowing before me.
I rarely do what he says. But he speaks so
urgently and pleadingly that I'm curious. What
is he up to? Why shouldn't I go in with him? Does he have
the money to set foot in a store like this one? Before I know
what's going on, my father has entered the delicatessen full
of people.
I stand, shifting my weight from one leg to the other
because my feet are burning in my tight shoes.
I've often wracked my brains wondering why my father
bows to small children. My father claims he was once an
opera singer and started bowing to others while performing
in Japan. I've watched my father make faces in the mirror
thinking he went unobserved, breathtaking grimaces with
hypnotic magic, like Kabuki masks. He rolls his eyes and
opens his mouth as if to sing. His chest expands and sinks
violently, even his jugular vein swells up, but not a sound
D
4
KLAUS
KINSKI
comes from his mouth. "There you have it," I've said to
myself, "he can't sing." This opera singer business is a lie.
No one has ever heard my father sing. He is a pharmacist,
not an opera singer. Nobody knows where he came from or
what he did. I think he was an orphan. Maybe that's why
he bows to small children. I don't know anything else,
except that he trusts no one.
We street kids call him Baldy, Beethead, Bull, or simply
Bulb— his bald head shines just like an electric bulb. When
he shaves it, it sounds like someone scraping a beet. He
really shouldn't use his rusty razor anymore. My mother
herself, who is normally quite handy, has hacked out pieces
of skin from his head.
My father seldom goes to the barber across the street, but
when he does the midget applies his sharp razor carefreely
without ever injuring my father. Once my mother spied on
my father at the barber. She pressed her face to the barber
shop window and breathlessly watched as the midget
whirled nimbly about my father's head. When it was all
over, my father placed sixty cents onto a tray, even though
he had to pay only fifty.
My father always plays the dandy in order to hide his
poverty. That isn't easy because his so-called clothes— all
of which he is wearing at any given moment— could shred
and fall off like the decaying flesh of a leper. That must be
the reason why he moves around so cautiously . Never leans
against anything, never bends an elbow or knee, never
stoops, never sits down, always stands. He has to try to
avoid any strain to his clothing. The thin, shiny seat of his
pants and his worn-out knees and elbows are so threadbare
his flesh can be seen through the weave. His shoes, pol­
ished to a shine, are so brittle they might crumble at any
moment. He always seems to be on the lookout for some­
thing he might bump into. I get the feeling that he floats
ALL
I
NEED
IS
LOVE
5
more than walks, seeming rarely to touch ground. He
doesn't bend his knees as he moves. His monocle is the first
thing about him that catches your eye. It's really not a mon­
ocle, but one lens punched out from a pair of glasses which
he has the nerve to stick in front of his left eye. He can't see
a thing without it. He's blind in the right eye.
It's already been an eternity since he went into the deli­
catessen. I look around in all directions to find a place
where I can piss. I'm losing patience.
He is called Bull because of his big genitals. Bull is also
short for bulldog. My father has the same sad, bloodshot
eyes and droopy lower eyelids. His entire face sags. The
wrinkles on his forehead and neck are like deep scars.
"The jaws of bulldogs and sharks," I've heard him say,
"cannot be opened once they have clamped shut. That's
what makes these animals so dangerous."
Even if I don't believe my father could snap at anyone, I
used to hope that now and then people might be afraid of
him, not just because of his bulldog face but because he has
muscles like an athlete. When a person is poor, his only
weapon of defense is to frighten others. But I fool myself.
A stranger can't see his muscles and will think only fop or
baldy. My father's bulldog face makes no impression on
people whatsoever, except that they laugh at him.
At best my father is viewed as a harmless pig. That makes
me sad. Because I love my father.
I am so dizzy from hunger that a black cloud is beginning
to form before my eyes . . . when my father bolts out of the
delicatessen and a voice screams:
"Stop that thief! Hit his bald head with something! Don't
let him escape!"
The shopkeeper runs me over, sending me crashing into
the fruit stands in front of his shop. I quickly gather some
of the apples that are flying everywhere, even out into the
6
KLAUS
KINSKI
middle of the street. I place them in my apron and run with­
out knowing where I'm headed. Breathing hard and haul­
ing my apron full of apples, I curse our poverty, the steal­
ing, the shop owner, and my father, who created this mess.
The clapping of my shoe soles on the hard asphalt echoes
in my skull. My heavy breathing stabs me in the lungs like
knives. I realize I'm peeing in my pants. It's too late to undo
my fly. I feel the warm flow down the inside of my thigh.
"Where on earth is he?"
I kick any stone that crosses my path even though my
mother has strictly forbidden it, because I only have this
one pair of shoes.
A giant hand grabs me by the collar and yanks me into
the entrance of a building. When I twist around I see it is
my father. He is crying.
"Father, what's wrong?"
Instead of answering he whimpers like a child and hugs
me with such force that I find it hard to breathe. In one
hand he's clutching a chocolate bar.
Was all this ruckus for a bar of chocolate? Was it for this
chocolate bar that he made me wait an hour with a full
bladder and tight shoes? In his clutch, I search him all over:
Nothing. He really has nothing else! So why is he crying?
I try to free myself from his sweaty grip. He doesn't real­
ize in all his emotion that he is practically strangling me.
He wants to say something but is sobbing. Is he embar­
rassed because his take was so small? That's no reason to
cry. Is he ashamed because he was caught committing his
first robbery? Goddamn it! He'll put us all in danger, if he
doesn't pull himself together.
My father never has money, because he never works—
even though he busts his ass looking for employment.
Either nobody wants him or he is quickly fired after he
starts. Why, I don't know. There's always fighting.
ALL
I
NEED
IS
LOVE
7
Was if for this that you sacrificed your best youthful years
cramming Greek and Latin till all hours of the night? To
become a shoplifter one day, to steal a chocolate bar at the
age of sixty and run away like that and cry, because you're
ashamed? "Knowledge counts more than money," you
claim? You're kidding yourself! You are nothing but a
handyman! You will never measure up to a pharmacy
owner. How many years, shit, decades, did you have to
work to pay off your own pharmacy without breaking
even? No, no. You'll always be nothing but a handyman. A
highly educated one. You aren't important; otherwise
somebody would give you work.
He cries about his screwed-up life. I want to do some­
thing for him, help him, protect him. I tug at his balled fists
pressing against his eyes.
"Stop crying, Daddy. Daddy!"
We haven't had anything to eat in three days.
A week ago in the pitch-black hallway, I bumped into
one of those repulsive pieces of furniture, all of which look
like lacquered coffins, that the landlord has cluttered the
house with. I turned my ankle and it's terribly swollen. I
haven't stolen anything since. I am weak from hunger and
feel so nauseous I have to sit on the front stoop a long time
before mustering the strength to limp to the store. I'm going
today no matter what, even if I have to crawl on my hands
and knees.
My mother sits down next to me.
"Are you in great pain?"
"It's no big deal."
"The things my little bunny has to go through these
days!"
"I'm no coward."
"Sorry. At least come inside the house. You shouldn't
8
KLAUS
KINSKI
even be on the street with your injured foot. In fact, it's not
the proper place for my little darling at all."
She, too, is clearly shocked by the nonsense she is saying.
"Where is the proper place for me then, Mommy?"
She is terribly embarrassed, yanks on my hair lovingly,
purrs like a cat, and shifts around wanting to say something
meaningful.
"Is your foot very hot? Do you want me to redo the vin­
egar pack?"
"No thanks."
"We'll all get something to eat today, you can count on
that."
She clings to this hope just like the rest of us; it keeps us
going from hour to hour.
"Yes, Mommy."
What I really want to say is: You can count on the fact
that I won't give up. Never. That nothing and no one will
ever force me to my knees. That one day I will repay your
brave love. That I will see to it that you don't have to labor
like a slave anymore. That one day I will make so much
money by my own wits that I'll even be able to buy you a
winter coat, mittens, and warm shoes. And that you will
drink as much real coffee and eat as many rolls with real
honey as you desire.
Yes, that's what I really want to tell her. But I save it,
because one day I know I will surprise her.
"Everything will turn out well," she utters, close to my
face.
I swallow the lump in my throat slowly so as not to burst
into tears. I can't be soft now. I need all my strength for
what I plan to do.
"Yes, Mommy."
Her mouth cracks a weak, careful smile; she doesn't want
to expose her ruined teeth.
ALL
I
NEED
IS
LOVE
9
"You're not ashamed you're toothless, Mommy?"
"Don't always say that!. . . But it's true. Everyone can see
that I have practically no teeth, though I'm still young.
Sometimes I'm afraid you're ashamed of me."
"Never, Mommy!"
She grabs my head with her strong hands and pushes it
into her lap. I can smell her arousing scent. I rub my face
on her hot belly, brush my lips against her small, fresh tits,
and soon my mouth meets hers. She engulfs me with the
moist flesh of her lips— and her huge, beautiful eyes shine
out from her face like glass marbles.
When I'm alone again, I pull myself together, hobble
across the street as quickly as I can and creep into my spot
beneath the wooden shelves outside the food store, where
the goods are stacked.
I can't afford to make a wrong move, can't lose my nerve.
The space below the wooden shelves is so cramped I have
to crouch severely to avoid bumping the racks, my knees
pressing against my throat. Or more exactly, against my
Adam's apple. I cannot move my head back and forth, only
to the right or left. I have to keep my butt low without
touching the ground to avoid tilting backwards. I'm short
of breath. My apron lies on the ground. In it I collect my
goods.
I can lift one foot or the other from the ground like a
chicken. But I can't pull it all the way in like a rooster does.
My swollen foot gives me a hard time, so I'll try to shift
most of my weight onto the healthy foot. Perhaps the pain
will lessen somewhat and I won't have to scream. If I
have to scream, I'll stuff a potato or something into my
mouth.
The shop owner, whom I recognize by the stinking
cheesy smell of his feet, comes outside again and again to
put up all types of merchandise. The pedant always fusses
endlessly over everyone and everything, his stinky feet are
right under my nose for an eternity.
I avoid the stench for a while by holding my breath until
my head nearly explodes; then I have to inhale the reek
again so as not to totter. The pain in my ankle becomes
unbearable; I have to stuff a cabbage leaf into my mouth to
keep from screaming. I lose consciousness . . .
I don't know how long I've been unconscious, but it's
already dark when I come to, the cabbage leaf is still in my
mouth. In a panic, like a driven rat, I try to free myself from
my torturous position. Without success. Every last joint in
my body has gone dead. My eardrums are about to burst. I
feel a darting pain in my chest. Blood is dripping from my
nose onto my shoe.
For God's sake, how late can it be? What if it's almost
closing time? The merchandise displays might be taken
down at any second. I have nothing in my apron! I grab at
anything my numb hands come across. When I've packed
my apron full of I don't know what, I slowly emerge from
the space, my feet dragging behind me. As I try to stand, I
cry out in pain. Fortunately, nobody is in front of the shop
or passing by.
I'm almost across the street when I'm struck by a motor­
cycle thundering by. It drags me about thirty yards, my
head bumping along the asphalt. My accident is all the
more idiotic because traffic in this neighborhood is usually
light, and I'm normally as cautious as a lynx when I cross
the street. I must be so weak I can't walk right.
By the time the motorcyclist screeches to a halt the con­
tents of my apron have spilled in all directions. Lemons,
cucumbers, carrots, bananas have whizzed through the air.
A small jar of jam lies shattered on the sidewalk.
Passersby yell at the motorcyclist in a threatening way.
He's as pale as a corpse, cowers like a mutt whose tail has
ALL
I NEED
IS
LOVE
1 1
been stepped on, and holds his elbows in front of his head
to protect himself. I myself have a hole in the head.
Whether we get anything to eat depends on the weather.
A rainy day is a bad day to steal. A snowy day is even
worse. When it's freezing, the merchandise displays are
moved into the stores. Then we often sit until late at night
on the bare floor of our room, hungry and with no toys to
play with. When it's a terrible winter day, we don't go out
at all. We own no warm clothes. No coats, no mittens, no
boots. Though suffering from frostbite, we are hardened
against the cold, but my mother worries about all of us,
especially Arne, because he has asthma. Achim doesn't
even know what flu is. Inge is a rock. My father has never
been sick his entire life, and my mother has never owned a
winter coat. I myself am pigeon-toed and am always falling
flat on my face, but I, too, have never been sick.
I stand at the window like a caged animal on its hind legs,
leaning against the bars of its cage and longing for freedom.
If only this house didn't stink so much! Every corner
smells musty. I wonder if the landlord has hidden his dead
mother in it so as not to pay for her funeral expenses. He is
trash: He even counts the apples on the two flimsy trees,
the strawberries in the patch, and the gooseberries on the
bushes. As soon as he notices we are stealing his fruit, he
rages like a wild boar through the garden, harvesting and
stuffing his face. He becomes so desperate that he picks
green apples that are hard as stone. No one could eat those
without getting the shits or even jaundice. He is a pawn­
broker, blackmailer, and bloodsucker.
He has locked away all his food. He has no money or
valuables to speak of. All his doors and cupboards are
locked with padlocks, and the leech carries a bunch of keys
around with him day and night like a guard in a prison. He
never leaves sight of the place and only goes out for short
periods of time to shop!
What can we do? We have no choice but to yield to his
abuse. We can't pay the rent. We have no food or heat. He
knows too much. He knows that we steal. If he exposes us,
we're done for. It's a vicious circle. If my mother gets food
from him on credit, we sink deeper into a mess. If she
refuses, we starve and freeze, because he'll kick us into the
streets. Or he'll turn us in. Or both. What will come of this?
Will my mother have to sleep with him? I think her fear
of becoming a whore makes her withstand any humilia­
tion. She begs him at least to let her keep her wedding
ring. She tells him she's willing to sign an IOU. He tells
her she shouldn't be surprised if he takes the ring any­
way. The bastard pulls my mother's wedding ring off her
finger. A round dent remains, lighter than the rest of her
skin.
Every morning we are covered with bedbug bites. Even
our faces are bloated. I tell myself that the bedbugs are only
mosquitos. They aren't as disgusting. The bedbugs are
everywhere: in the old mattress we got from the junkman,
in the fart-infested sofa, behind the decaying wallpaper.
Our sheets and the walls are smeared with blood. It looks
as if we have all murdered each other. It is our blood that
they have sucked that is splattered everywhere, when we
kill them, crushing them with our asses. The fully grown
cockroaches in our room are the size of baby turtles. We
burn them alive. We stomp on the silver fish with no success
whatsoever. There are too many of them. We have no bath­
room. We wash in the kitchen or at a pump in the street,
scrubbing ourselves with grit.
The winters are so deadly cold that we sleep in our
ALL
I
NEED
IS
LOVE
13
clothes. There is no warm water. If my mother boils water,
it's usually for our frostbite. We stick our hands and feet
into boiling water. We scream. But the frostbitten places
never heal. They break open all the time, oozing and itch­
ing all summer long. When we have briquets and can build
a fire, we squat next to the stove and press our blistered
hands and feet, sometimes even our mouths, against the
tiles.
Our toilet is a hole with a lid. If you lift the lid you reel
from the stench of urine and shit. It's more hygienic to piss
outside anyway. I would rather shit in the bushes, too.
Once I pissed on my sister in my sleep because I dreamed
she was a tree.
There are no electric lights in the room. I have never seen
an electric lamp burning. We have grown accustomed to
this; in the dark we have developed a bat's sense of
direction.
My mother slaves over us from morning till night, thank­
ful when she can wash other people's dirty laundry for a
few pennies. She vents her despair in wild outbursts
addressed to my father: "I can't even feed my own children!
And you? Why are you unemployed? Why can't you keep
your mouth shut when somebody hires you? Why did I
have to meet you, of all people? We move from one
hellhole to the next, living like pigs? Why?"
Sometimes I think it won't be long before my mother has
a breakdown. When she is working, she trembles and
things fall from her hands. What will happen when this
condition worsens? My father never says a word when she
insults and accuses him. At night, when we lie awake in bed
unable to move and suffering from bedsores, my father gets
up, giving us more space. He sits on a chair all night long
or wanders aimlessly through the streets.
* * *
Christmas Eve. The holiday of peace and goodwill. It is
icy cold in the room and so dark we can't see one another.
No one says a word. I don't even hear their breathing, but
I know they're all there.
The past few weeks I've seen people carrying around
Christmas trees and packages all day long. And now from
our window I can see, behind the curtains in the houses
across from us, the burning candles on the trees, the color­
ful bulbs and the glittering tinsel, chains of silver and gold
paper, and the transparent stars stuck to the windowpane.
We have a crippled Christmas tree, but no candles this
year, nor any of the other glitter to decorate it with. Not
even a stand to prop it up. The tree leans tired in the corner
like a cowering, punished child with its face to the wall. The
only decoration we have on our windows is the glistening
frost lavishly spanning the entire pane with infinite, fine
crystals in inexhaustible patterns. They are incomparably
more beautiful than the most expensive curtains.
I imagine how warm it must be right now in the other
houses where the people probably walk on carpeted floors.
What's simmering in the pots and baking in the pans? How
does it smell? How many presents have been opened and
how many still lie mysteriously below the heavily orna­
mented branches . . . Suddenly I'm opening all the pack­
ages myself. I wonder at the erector set, the steam engine,
the checkerboard. I fasten the roller skates and ice skates
onto my bare feet. I sit with my bare ass on the brand-new
sled and let myself be pulled a little way across the carpet.
I press to my cheek and lips the wool sweater that is as soft
as the fluff of young birds. I try on the mittens and take in
the calf leather scent of my new boots and kiss the real
leather soles. I'll take them to bed with me tonight. I cry
over The Little Match Girl and laugh at Max and Moritz,
ALL
I
NEED
IS
LOVE
15
Shock-headed Peter, and The Widow Bolte. I am so lost in the
fairy-tale book that I only come to when the postmaster set
falls on my naked toes. I stamp everything that can be
stamped and stick tiny stamps on my father's head. I kiss
my teddy bear on its mouth and eyes, beat the drum, blare
the trumpet. I shoot the air gun, play the harmonica. I lay
tracks for my electric train around the table, at the feet of
the bed, and through the entire bright, warm house. I gallop
on the rocking horse until my head spins. I crack nuts, stuff
marzipan uninterruptedly into my mouth, and suck on nou­
gat, spice cookies, pepper cake, gingerbread, yuletide log,
dates, figs, walnuts, oranges, mandarins, and all the tree
decorations. I let the fine pastry of the butter cookies and
sugar rings melt slowly in my mouth before I swallow
them. Stop! The goose! How could I forget it? The leg is
mine! What do I mean by one leg, both legs! I tear the wings
and the breast apart and stuff everything down my throat
with mountains of baked red cabbage, spiced apples,
onions, and chestnuts. I guzzle gravy straight from the
ladle. I still have to throw down a few cooked potatoes, dry,
salty potatoes, with nothing on them. Perhaps I've over­
done it. I'm stuffed to my throat. After I burp and let go a
fart I fall asleep in a wonderland— where roasted pigeons
try to flap their wings in my mouth and entire sausages and
hams grow on trees . . .
It is pitch black when I wake up on the icy floor and hear
my mother crying. I slap myself in the face to see if I'm
dreaming. It hurts. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness
again. My mother can't be far away. Yes. She's sitting at the
table. I crawl over to caress her. When I fumble my way to
her, I find both my brothers clinging to her legs. My sister
is standing in her sleep, with her head propped sideways
on the table. At the window, my father's motionless silhou-
ette is etched against the night. He seems to be staring at
the snow.
The pawnbroker has ordered my mother to go to bed
with him if she wants her wedding ring back, and if she
wants to keep him from turning us in. My father, who has
the goodness of Jesus Christ, goes and splits the blackmail­
er's mouth open with his gigantic fists. Now we're sitting
with our bundles on the street. Thank God it's spring. I
pump fresh air into my lungs, as if I had been buried alive.
Four o'clock in the morning. We've been on the move
almost twenty-four hours, stopping at nothing but thirdclass hotels. No one wants us. They have no vacancies,
once they see our luggage. No one wants children, either.
Four of us at that, and looking like we do.
My father goes it alone. The rest of us hide when he rings
the night clerk. He squeezes his monocle into his eye
because he is convinced that he makes a better impression
with it. But he sports no hat and hasn't shaved in days. He
looks like a convict on the lam. What's worse, night clerks
are suspicious of someone who comes in during the wee
hours of the morning without a suitcase, and they all, with­
out exception, want payment in advance. So, shit. We stag­
ger around like drunks, tired and hungry.
At seven in the morning a miserable dive at the Stettin
Train Station takes us in. Six in one bed again. My mother
has her period and is hemorrhaging. Probably because of
overexertion. She has to keep her feet up. That takes up half
the bed. We can't sleep anyway: We are hungry. We are all
too agitated. We continually bang into each other, and it
hurts like a tender wound. My brothers and sister don't go
to school. Not until we have an apartment.
It's a new area for stealing. I have to orient myself again.
ALL
I
NEED
IS
LOVE
17
The traffic in this neighborhood is murderous, so my
mother won't let me out on the street. When we can't hold
out any longer, Arne is sent out to beg for cake crumbs at
the bakeries. He comes back with nothing.
The noise from the street is unbearable, as well as the
smoke from the train station. Sleeplessness and hunger take
their toll. Everyone blows everything out of proportion.
Each fight ends in disaster. Money! Money! Where can we
get it?
Inge, Arne and Achim are sleeping in the bed today,
because they stayed on the floor last night. We take turns,
now on the bed, now on the floor.
My mother struggles with herself over some decision.
She walks decisively into a bakery and buys me two danishes. She is left without money. Now we have to retrace
the distance of the streetcar on foot, about three miles. She
stubbornly refuses to take a bite of one of the danishes.
It's pouring rain. We run into my father in front of the
hotel. He hasn't eaten a thing in days. My mother takes off
her shoes and sells them at the second-hand store next to
the hotel. She gets next to nothing for them. We buy a huge
Warsaw bread and a big bottle of cold chocolate milk and
take it all into the hotel.
Warsaw bread consists of burnt crusts of sheetcake and
everything else that falls off cookies and bread, and what­
ever the bakers scrape together from the shop tables and
floors. The whole thing is stuck together in one mass and
put into the oven once more to solidify. Warsaw bread is
the size of a big, gray military loaf. And you have to be
careful not to bite into pieces of broom straw, pieces of
paper, or splinters of wood, glass, or metal.
* * *
1 8
KLAUS
KINSKI
My father has work! Finally we've gotten out of the hotel!
Third yard in the back. The flat is a real find. The previous
renter committed suicide. It is paradise for us: one fifteenby-eighteen-foot room. A hallway. A six-by-eight-foot
kitchen and a floor latrine shared with the other tenants.
We have a tile stove, too. We cook with gas. It is coin oper­
ated. The sealed stoves are opened once a month by the gas
company, the money is removed, and they're sealed up
again. Our predecessor saved the gas company the work.
He broke the seal open himself, took the coins, put them
back into the stove, and gassed himself to death. Now he's
at the morgue and we're in his flat, also a haven for bed­
bugs. We tear down the wallpaper and whitewash every­
thing. At first we all sleep on the floor. Then we buy an iron
bed frame and an old mattress from a junk dealer. It's full
of bugs as well. We spray it with so much poison that we
ourselves would croak if we went near it. The stink is hor­
rible! We lay our folded clothes on the floor in the corner.
The window looks out directly over the playground of
Grade School 22, where my siblings are enrolled.
Arne has such bad asthma that his face turns blue as ink
when he climbs the stairs to our flat. My father steals the
expensive medicine he needs in the pharmacy where he
works. Arne eats spoonfuls of a yellow powder from a large
dish every day. We envy his powder, because it's some­
thing to eat. My mother has to hide it so we won't scarf it
down.
I am sent to a children's welfare home, because I'm not
in school yet and the others will have more to eat and more
room to sleep as a result. My mother thinks that in the chil­
dren's welfare home I will finally get enough to eat, toys to
play with, and my own bed. But this so-called children's
home is a children's hell.
The torturers who "take care" of us slap us and beat our
hands or heads with canes when we refuse to eat the slop
they feed us. I don't understand what compels these sadists
to force us to swallow disgusting pieces of lard of such vile
odor that I want to vomit at the mere sight of them.
A sow sets a soup plate down on the table before me. It
is filled to the brim and the soup sloshes over. Her hands
up to her wrists are dunked in the gray muck, where white
pieces of fat float around like corpses. I nearly puke.
We have to remain seated until we've eaten everything,
even into the night. One child stayed outside at the table
the entire night. He is dead this morning.
I can't swallow the lard. I can't bring myself to do it. I
hold the piece of fat in my cheeks like a squirrel for hours.
I won't even swallow the spit that collects in my mouth for
fear of throwing up. I breathe only through my mouth to
kill my sense of smell. I barely move. Even a slight breeze
might force me to vomit, throwing up the pig slop all over
again.
"So, has the little devil learned to behave? Have we bro­
ken him down?"
I can't even answer, because my mouth is full. I wish this
slut were dead.
"You won't talk. . . . Haven't you finished eating yet?
Haven't you swallowed your food? . . . Show us. Open your
mouth!"
This is much too much. I barf right into my torturer's
mug. I throw up everything in my stomach. Filthy shit
comes shooting out of my wide-open throat in spurts like a
sewage pump until I'm emptied to my very bowels and
can't pump anything more. Doubled over by cramps, I rush
from the table, as the jail-warden slut nearly chokes to
death on my barf and bawls me out at the top of her lungs.
Now the bloodhounds spread out to catch me again. I am
screaming. What do they get from tormenting us like this?
Why won't they offer even a smile when we are confused?
Consolation when we are sad? A kind word when we cry
for our mothers? I scream until they're all afraid of me. The
head tyrant sends for my mother.
When she gets there, I cling to her tightly as if wanting
to reenter the womb, to become part of her again. It hurts
when she disengages me, and I walk out of the children's
hell holding her hand.
My mother has work. She does it at home. She sews cos­
metic purses. In the stores a finished purse costs a hundred
times more than they pay her.
First she must get hold of a sewing machine. A new one
is out of the question. We decide on an old Singer and buy
it on an eighteen-month installment plan. Naturally it's not
electric. It runs by continuous pedaling.
The biggest problem is that the machine makes so much
noise that the neighbors to the left, to the right, above and
below, protest that they can't sleep at night. That they can't
hear the radio. That they can't eat in peace at breakfast,
lunch, or dinner. They even find no peace on the toilet.
They knock on the walls, pound on their ceilings, stomp
around on their floors, swear from their windows, ring up
a storm at our door, write threats, and complain to the land­
lord. All because of the sewing machine, because my
mother only stops sewing when her feet swell up from too
much pedaling and she collapses over the machine in
exhaustion. Then she wakes up in this position and con­
tinues to sew. If a delivery date is coming up soon,
she leaves the machine only to go to the toilet. She even
eats her meals at the sewing machine. My sister does the
cooking.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. . . rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. . . the sew­
ing machine becomes a nightmare not just for the tenants,
but for us, too. At night the sewing machine wakes us up.
If we can even sleep at all. The first thing we hear in the
morning is the sewing machine. When we come home, we
hear a rattling in the flat: the sewing machine.
We spread old newspaper out on the floor to muffle the
sound. But it doesn't help much. Soon we will have to move
out of this flat as well, because the sewing machine is our
chief breadwinner.
You can understand our neighbors' position. They are all
workers who get up early in the morning and need their
rest. They look at us kids with hate in their eyes, as if we
could afford not to stay up at night to help my mother at
the sewing machine instead of going to bed. We ourselves
never sleep through an entire night, but rather in intervals
of one to one and a half hours. We work in shifts. Two chil­
dren lie down with my father in bed, and two sit on the
floor next to the rattling sewing machine and pass finished
pieces to each other: We cut off the excess lining close to
the seams, or bite off loose threads. The rattling of the sew­
ing machine keeps us in rhythm. (My father stuffs balls of
wax in his ears.) Because his pharmacy is about forty miles
away, he must wake up at four in the morning to wash,
shave his beard and head, and make the two-hour train
trip.
When the purses are finished, fifty, a hundred, five
hundred at a time, depending on the commission, they are
tied into grotesque packages and hauled off to the delivery
spot— which is usually far away and is accessible only by
train, underground, streetcar, and bus, and only after
numerous transfers. One of us accompanies my mother
each time to help her haul the bundle. On every delivery
day she stops in at the shop with whichever one of us is
accompanying her. There we eat hot sausages and potato
salad with a lot of mustard and green, red, and yellow JellO ambrosia.
The delivery date for the purses is the same day the new
orders are commissioned. Women stand in line on the stair­
case in front of a storeroom where the slave trader collects
and issues orders. My mother goes in. I wait with the other
women in line. The line has grown into a throng of people
with enormous, unwieldy packages. A sweating, vile-smelling, writhing mess of human meat. Most don't know each
other, have never seen each other before in their lives.
Some sit on the steps, some stand leaning against the wall.
All of them are bleary-eyed. A few speak to each other in
hushed tones. Some silently puff on cigarettes and stare at
nothing. Women of all ages and shapes are there. A bloated
fat one gasps for air; one with heavy, pendulous tits and
wide hips nibbles on beechnuts and spits the shells around
her. A young one with wet armpits, thick legs, and a pro­
truding ass is wearing a tight-fitting skirt with a zipper
coarsely and clumsily sewn in. She applies color to her
puckered lips. An older, emaciated woman with snowwhite hair clings to the banister to keep from falling down;
one far along in her pregnancy is carefully helped down the
stairs by two other women who undo her skirt so she can
breathe.
"If it doesn't suit you, why don't you walk the streets?"
the slave trader yells behind the closed door. There is a sud­
den commotion in the line of women. Their eyes become
alert. The young woman next to me giggles to herself. Her
skirt nearly splits its seams. She keeps on penciling her lips.
"This humiliation is the worst," the bloated fat woman
whispers.
"Each new experience makes you a better person," the
hussy replies.
My mother walks out the door. In bewilderment she
straightens out her clothes, which are sticking to her body,
as she pulls me along with her down the stairs.
Half days I go to the nursery at the elementary school my
siblings attend. No one there cares about us. There are no
picture books or toys. When we play ring-around-the-rosy,
we plod disinterestedly in a circle like old dwarves. The kin­
dergarten teacher polishes her fingernails, is always going
for a pee and flirting with the men. The only time we are
quick of hearing is when we are called to get something to
eat. Otherwise we dawdle around in stuffy air and give
each other the whooping cough.
I'm now allowed to go out alone in the streets of our
neighborhood. There are many stores to steal from. I steal
food, clothing, laundry, toys, books, lipstick for my mother,
and a puppet for my sister. For my father, I steal garters,
suspenders, a tie, and collar buttons, which are always fall­
ing off and which he, with his worthless monocle, never
finds again. I steal a soccer ball for my brothers, and when
one of us has a birthday, I steal lilacs, roses, or asters in the
parks, depending on the season.
I've been enrolled in school. I think the women teachers
get excited when we bend over for them to beat us with a
cane, our short pants stretching tightly across our bottoms.
I don't know which class is more of a pain in the ass. The
religion teacher calls me to the head of the class after enter­
ing a star next to my name in his gradebook. He gives me
three candies because I have memorized passages from the
New Testament.
24
KLAUS
KINSKI
"In which religion were you baptized, my son?"
(Who does he think he is, calling me his son?)
"None."
"None?"
"None. I wasn't baptized at all. We have no religion."
"That is terrible! How is it possible, then, that you know
passages from the New Testament by heart?"
"I memorize everything quickly."
"But how in God's name can you even enter a church, if
you're not baptized?"
"I've never been to a church."
"And your parents?"
"I don't think so."
"Did your parents forbid you to go to church?"
"No."
"What do your parents say about the church?"
"My father has never expressed an opinion on that."
"And your mother?"
"My mother says that you torture the Jesus child."
I am convinced the religion teacher would have tried to
snatch back his candies if I had not already sucked them
down, so thin and fine. He removed my star from the
gradebook.
Because we don't have a bathroom in the flat we live in,
we bathe in the kitchen. My sister is starting to feel embar­
rassed. Her clothes are beginning to get too small for her.
I live almost exclusively on the streets. In the winter we
lie on the iron grills over the subway routes. Each time a
train thunders by underground, a stream of stinking but
warm air rises to thaw our bodies momentarily. In the sum­
mer the streets are hot and stifling. The public swimming
pools charge an admission. The Wannsee swimming pool,
where we can jump over the barbed wire fence, is eighteen
miles away. The Havel lakes are also too far. At the Griinewald lake there is barely enough room to stand without
bumping into someone else. The so-called kiddie pools are
blacker than a mudbath and piss warm, and sometimes a
turd comes floating toward your mouth.
Sometimes we lie in the gutter to be showered by the city
sanitation's street cleaners. The water is cool and isn't stale,
because it's freshly tanked and used right away. After the
truck passes us, we jump up, catch up with, and lie down
in front of it again, repeating the whole thing over and over.
The drivers of the street cleaners hate us and kick us if
they can. One kid bleeds to death in the gutter because of
our water sports. As he lies, long pipes jutting from the
street cleaner and spouting water through hundreds of tiny
holes slit his throat.
A Berliner's happy work is his small garden in the sub­
urbs. Mine, too. There are so many gardens it's impossible
for me to count them all. Thousands upon thousands. I
know almost all of them and have stolen fruit from just
about every one. But the dogs are a problem.
All night long I've slunk around one garden like a
panther. There has been no barking. No dog has shown
itself. It's three-thirty in the morning. The moon is like a
naked body high up, seen through the hot faces of sunflow­
ers. I can make everything out clearly. I've held a grudge
against this garden for a long time, because there is a small
tree there that holds the biggest apples I've ever seen.
They're almost as big as my head. These apples have a
power over me. I can't sleep another night for fear that the
owner will pluck them from the tree and take them home.
I will have to twist them all off one by one. I must not injure
them. They are so shiny, as if they had been polished. Sniff­
ing in all directions, I make my move. What a slender tree,
I think to myself. I start to reach for the apples when I see
before me, directly before me, a giant dog. It can't be pos­
sible! He's as big as a calf! He's lying under my apple tree.
He doesn't bark, doesn't growl, doesn't let out a single
noise. He stares at me silently with his small, amber eyes.
The dog jumps me. His weight knocks me down. I try to
hold onto him as tightly as I can, without success. His pelt
is bearlike. His teeth snap my forearm like a beaver trap.
He doesn't bite deep, but I'm caught. Though I would love
to choke him to death, I don't hate him. He is too beautiful.
I don't think he hates me either. He's just doing his job.
Face to face, we almost kiss each other. Then I bite him in
desperation. First in the flews (I feel the hot, slobbery meat
in my mouth), then on the nose, making him yelp and
loosen his grip on my arm for a moment. My salvation
comes in the form of the handle of a shovel that falls in my
direction during the scuffle. I shove the handle sideways
like a bit into his open mouth. He bites so firmly into it that
he can't pull his long, sharp teeth out of the wood. Fortu­
nately, I always carry twine in my pants pocket. I put the
dog in a headlock and I tie the twine around its mouth with
my free hand. I dash from the garden bleeding like a
stabbed pig, after I have ripped at least one of the prize
apples from the tree.
The trick is never to climb into the same garden twice.
This time I can see only the tops of tall plum trees. Only the
treetops. I cannot see into the garden itself. No matter how
hard I try to get around and locate the entrance, I keep
bumping into high, thorny hedges of wild roses that block
my view completely.
In one place, the wall of matted thorns is so dense I can
climb it.
ALL
I NEED
IS
LOVE
27
My hands and feet are bleeding after the first few steps;
the thorns rip out pieces of skin and bore deep into my flesh
like dull knives. I'm not interested. I must have those
plums! But the more I work my way up toward the plums,
the stronger the grip the chaos of thick, contorted rose
branches has on me, and I can't imagine how I'll extricate
myself from this. I no longer feel the pain of the thorns, but
I can sense how they jab my body from all sides like a
shark's teeth. I try to give as little resistance as possible, to
lessen their hurt.
I've almost made it. Only one more branch up ahead. I
grab it and pull myself up. Only a few inches more . . . I'm
there . . . What I see takes my breath away: I see naked
women! I'm too excited to count them all, but I guess there
are ten to fifteen. They lie around in lounge chairs, sit on
stools, or lie on towels on the ground and sunbathe. Their
bodies are oiled. Some are deeply tanned, some are still
light, some white. One is beet red and sits in the shade.
They loll about voluptuously. Spread out their legs. Caress
their thighs. Lie on their sides, on their backs, on their
stomachs. Stick out their asses, their tits. The whole thing
is overwhelming me: I think I'm dreaming. The women say
very little. I hear very little. Everything is bright, overlit; it's
like staring into the blinding sun. I get an erection in the
tight-fitting pants I outgrew some time ago. One of the
women, directly under me, has broad shoulders like a
swimmer and flat tits with enormous, almost black coronas.
A meaty pelvis. The flourish of her pubic hair in my mind
is like the thorn bushes I'm hanging in. Another one with
completely white skin has a small, gaping ass. I try to spot
her asshole. A young girl with budding breasts and little
pubic hair walks toward the branches I'm hanging in and
disappears below me. I hear a door bolted. Then a rush of
piss.
My upper body breaks through the brambles, and unable
to move, I am suspended upside-down until night falls.
When all sounds have died, I know that all the women have
gone home. I struggle out of this wilderness of roses.
As I hide momentarily behind a shrub, a man approaches
it. He's two steps away. He appears to be stuffing a handful
of currants into his face. I can hear him smacking his lips. I
can hear his stomach growling. He's unzipping his fly, takes
out his sturdy cock . . . and pisses on me! He spits a pit at
my chest and walks away. He doesn't see me. He picks
some roses, snap . . . snap.
I am prowling through another garden. There's not a
sound, not a soul. I am stuffing my shirt full of velvety apri­
cots, first bringing them to my lips as if they are very young
cunts. In the corner of my eye I see her through an open
window. She can't be any older than me. Maybe twelve.
She sits on the toilet with her legs spread and masturbates.
Her eyes are shut tigh t. . . she groans and comes . . . I want
to climb through the window to her . . . force myself into
her . . . I open my fly . . . in a trance like a horny tomcat, I
piss semen. Clingalingaling. Clingalingaling: A bicycle bell
brings me back to earth.
"Coal! Who needs coal?"
I ring every apartment doorbell. People hate me for it.
The coal seller pays my wage in coal. To make money I sell
it to someone else. The more I haul the more briquets I get.
I can handle up to a hundred briquets on my back; I haul
them until I spit black. I beat carpets, too, and am forced to
breathe their stink and filth. I drag others' dirty clothes to
the laundries. I soak them in tubs, scrub them on the wash­
board until my fingers bleed. I shine shoes, five cents a pair.
A L L
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IS
L O V E
29
I help the trashmen to pick up garbage from the streets. I
pull the carts for the street sweepers when they take a break
or smoke a cigarette. I collect cigarette butts, roll fresh cig­
arettes from old tobacco, and sell them to the unemployed,
pensioners, and invalids. I push cripples and the disabled
around in their little wagons when they want to go shop­
ping or to the park to play poker. I pick up the coins that
are thrown out windows for the organ grinder, and carry—
on my shoulder— the sad, scruffy little monkey chained
to the music box, when the organ grinder has to have a
piss.
I deliver newspapers, bottled milk, and bread rolls in bas­
kets from street to street, house to house, floor to floor, door
to door. Often I get so tired and hungry that I have to sit
down on the stairs in a hallway, holding on to the banister
to keep from fainting. Sometimes I open one of the bags
and scrape off some of the warm, crispy crust of one of the
bread rolls with my teeth. Or I just lick a roll, if it isn't very
crusty. Or I just smell it. Or I hold a warm roll to my cheek
and kiss it. Sometimes my throat is so dry that my tongue
sticks to my gums when I swallow and it hurts. Then I care­
fully open the cardboard lid of the milk bottle and dip my
swollen tongue deep into the cool milk. There's no way I
can drink the milk. Not even one small sip, because the cus­
tomer would notice it. The worst kind of work is helping
the undertaker, who hires me when the survivors are too
poor to pay him as much as he wants. The undertakers,
who always have schnapps on their breath, pay me a few
pfennigs per corpse. This time I am supposed to undress a
dead seven-year-old girl, wash her, and put a little dress on
her that has been laid out. No mother in sight. No father.
No siblings. Just an old man sitting in the corner talking to
30
K L A U S
K I N S K I
himself. The girl is clutching a torn teddy bear whose stuff­
ing is falling out.
"I can't do this," I tell the undertaker.
The undertaker tries to pry the teddy bear from the dead
little girl. In vain. He yanks it, and the dead girl sits up. I
run from the building.
When I don't have work, I break into telephone booths
and cigarette machines. I don't like to do this, because you
never know if you're being watched. I can't afford to get put
into a reformatory. When I carry luggage at the train sta­
tions for money, I make the porters' blood boil. They show
no pity. I wash fish at the markets. I' sell hot dogs, stain
remover, and candy. The dealer simply dumps the candy
out into a mountain on the table. Each customer must buy
at least a half kilo. It's cheap. Next to the candy he piles up
the coins he takes in. He sticks the bills in his underwear
right at his waistline. He doesn't have a cash box, not even
a drawer or a bag. I dump fistfuls of candy onto his scale
with one hand and grab the piled-up money with the other.
When the guy notices what I'm doing, he wants to beat me
to a pulp. I run as fast as I ever have.
We are given notice to vacate our flat because of the sew­
ing machine. My mother takes an overdose of sleeping pills
to kill herself. Arne tells me how my father walked along­
side her crying, as the ambulance attendants carried her
down the stairs on a stretcher. Her head kept sliding off the
stretcher and was battered down the staircase.
After they have pumped her stomach at the hospital and
she's on her feet again, my mother finds us another place
to live. "It's unbelievably expensive. But we'll have light
and sun and planters with flowers and a balcony!" The bal­
cony is three feet by nine and is on the fourth floor facing
the street on the south side. I refuse to think about the sew­
ing machine. No one wants to think about the sewing
machine.
The flat has four rooms and a kitchen. For the first time
in our lives, we have our own toilet and bathroom. The
warm water is heated by a coal stove outside. The rent is a
large sum of money, but somehow we'll manage.
Inge walks past my bed every morning on her way to the
bathroom, in underwear too small for her. When she is sure
that the others are sleeping, she carries on even worse.
When she comes back from peeing, she's wearing only the
little undershirt that barely contains her bulging tits, and
reveals her stubble-haired cunt and her excruciating
cheeks.
What am I supposed to do? Chase her into the toilet? But
what if someone else has to shit or piss and sees me coming
out with her? Anyway, I don't even know if she'll let me
fuck her. Besides, I sleep with my two brothers in the bed­
room between Inge's and my parents'. Only the wall sepa­
rates Inge's bed from Arne's. And the bed squeaks. Achim's
bed stands a yard away from Inge's door, which creaks like
an old cart.
Inge goes to school in the morning. Arne and Achim, too.
In the evening it's impossible, because no one ever misses
supper. After that everyone listens to the radio. I can't take
it any longer! I have to find a way.
I have a kidney infection and sleep a lot. Even during the
day. That's not good. I keep thinking of Inge and grabbing
my hard dick day and night. No one is in the apartment this
afternoon. Where could they all be? Someone's using the
toilet, I hear it flush. Quickly I throw myself onto my other
side and pretend to be sleep. Somebody comes into the
room. I still don't know who it is . . . bends over me . . . lifts
32
K L A U S
K I N S K I
the bed cover . . . gets into bed with me . . . I hold my
breath. It's Inge! I can't believe it. I still have my eyes shut,
but I know it's Inge. Her skin brushes against me. I smell
her. She climbs over me, turns her ass toward me, and pre­
tends that she is sleeping, too. She doesn't move. I don't
either. Her ass is in the way of my cock, which is so hard it
hurts. She still doesn't move. She doesn't pull away or
flinch. This is ridiculous. Something has to happen. We
can't lie here like this forever. I pretend that I'm sleeping
restlessly and throw my arm around her hips. My hand
glides over her tummy to her pussy. I work my fingers
through the rough pubic hair, as she parts her legs slightly.
My finger slides right into the tight, hot slit overflowing
with juice. I keep still for a while, then wiggle my fingertip
slowly. Inge pretends not to notice what I'm doing! She
mutters something incomprehensible as if talking in her
sleep. I want to stick my finger up her hole further, but her
hymen blocks my way. Stealthily I force my fingertip
through the tiny opening. I feel how the skin expands to
breaking. Inge pushes my hand away, as if she's still asleep.
I lick my fingers greedily. Now she's hot; she grabs my
hand and puts it where it was. She rolls over, yawning. I
drive my finger in again. She tosses her head as if she were
having a nightware while caressing her thighs. No sooner
do I lie on top of her than someone opens the hallway door!
Inge jumps out of bed, bolts to her room, and locks herself
in.
I don't talk to anyone; I eat nothing the rest of the day.
At night I stare at the ceiling. Now and then I repair to the
toilet to examine my erection and my swollen balls. Then I
go back to bed and stare at the ceiling again.
Before, we couldn't sleep because of the sewing machine.
Now there are air raid alarms every night. Every night we
A L L
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3 3
are torn from our sleep, three, four, five times to totter down
into the bomb shelter. Now when we hear the alarm we
don't even get up; we just roll over. "Fuck off!" The
bombs come pelting down and crush the houses around
us.
I have a dog. For the first time in my life I have a dog. He
is five months old. A mutt, people say contemptuously, a
cross between a German shepherd and . . . I don't know
what. I am crazy about him. But we have to give him away
because he always barks when I am in school or have to go
to work. The other tenants demand that we get rid of him.
We give him to someone who has a garden in the suburbs
more than twenty miles away from where we live. Tonight,
with bombs hailing and everything in flames, he has come
back. He's sitting in front of the house. He retraced the dis­
tance alone. He smells like gunpowder and fire and ruins. I
kiss his face and press him close to let him know that no
one will take him away from me. We sleep together; we lick
each other. In the morning I have to give him away again—
to someone who takes him away farther than before so he
will be unable to find his way back. Once I had a cat. I
wasn't allowed to keep her either. Why can't I keep a dog
or a cat?
Nearly every time I walk through the street, I bump my
head on something because I'm walking backwards, staring
at girls and women as they pass. I can't do anything about
it: As soon as I see one, I follow her until she turns a corner
or disappears, only to have another take her place. They
come at me from the front, from the back, from the left,
from the right. I'm always spinning like a top so as not to
miss a thing. I'm indifferent to whether they are young or
old, big or small, thin or buxom, light or dark. I don't care
34
K L A U S
K I N S K I
about the texture of their hair or the smoothness of their
complexion. Their effect on me is inescapable.
I'm fifteen and I try to cork every hole I come across. In
the school toilet, in the bushes, hallways, cellars. Some­
times in their little beds.
In the second courtyard from our tenement lives a young
redhead with big freckles on her clear white skin. Her hus­
band is a garbage collector. She is continually lurking
around the front door, as if she were waiting for someone.
Her eyes stare vacantly like the eyes of a skull. I never see
her go shopping or go to work. Only standing around wait­
ing for something. She is bull-legged and always looks
weak, as if she needs someone to hold her up. I've heard
that she claims to have consumption, but I think her prob­
lem comes from a lot of fucking. I have been noticing her
for a long time.
She's standing there again. I stare at her spellbound; her
skull turns in my direction. Her eyes now have a dull gray
sheen. She takes me with her moist hot hand and pulls me
toward her.
Her apartment lies on the ground floor and the bedroom
window, which is always opened, leads out to a slum out
back. Sometimes I hang out there and rummage through
the rubble. One morning I heard a man's groans and a
woman's screams coming from the open window. The man
couldn't have been her husband. He leaves the house at
four in the morning and doesn't come back home until the
afternoon.
The bedroom is clammy and dark, even though it's sunny
outside. It smells like roasted potatoes.
She undresses hastily, like an addict who hasn't had a fix
in a long time. She has an almost childlike torso. All her
ribs are visible and she barely has any tits, only big pink
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nipples. She has an uncommonly wide pelvis, and her short
legs make it seem even wider.
My cock is as hard as a rock. She takes it.
There's no sense in going to school anymore. I'm always
getting into trouble and it's a waste of time. No one asks a
child what it wants to learn. They say that children sup­
posedly don't know what they want. How do adults know
what children want? How presumptuous of them! How do
adults know what will be good for children later? They stuff
our heads with worthless garbage. Rimbaud is right: Why
solve a division problem? Why learn Greek and Latin? In
the end you don't need it anyway. What is the use of pass­
ing an exam? They say you can make a career when you've
passed your examinations. I don't want a career. And even
if you want to have one, why learn Latin? No one speaks
this language. And Greek? What did I ever do for them to
torment me so?
For that matter, why learn history and geography? Of
course one has to know that New York lies in America, but
no one asks for its latitude. History— learning about the
lives of statesmen and their accomplices who became
famous for their crimes and corruption— is torture. Why
should I care who was famous among this rabble?
I'm kicked out of Prince Heinrich High School because I
played hookey from school for seven months and flunked
for the second time.
My mother begs the director of Bismarck High School to
admit me, which he does with grave reservation. After two
and a half months he's had his fill, too.
"Aren't you ashamed of yourself, you monster, to defile
your textbook with such smut?"
I had been drawing cocks and cunts on the Roman stat­
ues pictured in my Latin book. With prepuces and glandes,
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labia and clitorides. Semen squirting from one figure to the
other.
"Perhaps I should have drawn only cocks?"
The Latin teacher wants to punch me in the face. I kick
him on the shin and push him down onto his back. That's
the end of that.
Air raid. The tenants have hidden in the bomb shelter.
My mother and I are alone in a miserable, one-room flat
that she, God knows why, has a key to. It's twilight. We
have nothing to eat. No coal to make a fire. We are hungry
and cold. My mother takes everything off in front of me.
Her panties, too. Then she goes to bed.
"Come to me," is all she says.
For three days bombs blow the houses all around to
pieces.
T W O
am sixteen and must go into the military. When
I read the order to report, I cry. But not because
I'm afraid. I don't want to kill and be killed.
Westkreuz station. I have to transfer trains and ride to the
paratroopers' barracks. I tear myself away from my moth­
er's kiss. She stays in the compartment and looks at me
through the muddied windowpane. Her eyes follow the
train as it leaves the station.
I meet up with another street kid at the paratrooper unit.
We lie in each other's arms a long time, offering mutual
consolation.
They give us all kinds of weapons that are too heavy to
carry and say, "Kill the enemy!" Today is my birthday. The
English beat the shit out of us. My buddy and I barely hit
the ground before we hear grenades exploding. We play:
Whoever pulls the pin of his grenade and can hold it in his
hand the longest wins. Sometimes fighters hang in the sky
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like birds of prey. Then we hop around like crazies and
wave our arms for them to see us and shoot down at us. We
howl when they miss and thumb our noses at them. We
have no idea what we're doing. For us the explosions are
like firecrackers on New Year's Eve.
My friend isn't here anymore, and I no longer have any­
one to play with. I've lost my way. Like a child. It is not like
it was before, when as a child I knew of children who
had lost their mothers in the bustle at the Wansee. Back
then, the child's name was called out through a loud­
speaker; you could hear him or her crying into the micro­
phone. Somebody always came and picked the
child up.
Now the announcement would have to run:
"Sixteen-year-old boy, golden blond hair, huge violetblue eyes with long, dark brown lashes and a big red mouth
like a whore wants to find his buddy."
The thought provokes me to laughter.
"Whoever wants to volunteer for patrol, step forward."
Kiss my ass.
In the deserted houses from which refugees have fled, I
find civilian clothing. I throw my uniform into a garbage
can and put on whatever I can find. A little green-and-white
plaid shirt and oversized women's underpants. The people
must have scurried from their seats at mealtime. The food
on the plates is half eaten, the glasses still half full. Every­
thing is covered with mold.
I head cross-country in the direction of explosions and
live on soggy apples. Soggy apples everywhere, lying
beneath the trees in water. The whole area is flooded with
water and soggy apples. My shit is so thin that I can only
eat crouching. By day I can't even get up to piss. I shit and
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piss lying down, and I get stuck to the ground, frozen in my
piss and shit-filled pants.
This is the sixth night in a row that I feed myself with
soggy apples. There is a cow standing in the beams of bright
light over there on the flooded field, knee deep in soggy
apples. There are cadavers of cows and horses, and pigs,
too. Everywhere you look. But a living cow, grazing on a
field, that's absurd! She is very bright in the light. More and
more light beams burst from high up in the sky and then
float down to the ground slowly before they dissolve into
nothingness just above the cow's head. Maybe they're
doing it for Christmas, I think. It must be Christmastime
now. Perhaps I'm hallucinating from my diet of apples and
endless shitting.
I must try to get close to the cow. Then I'll pounce on her
and cut a piece of meat from her body. Maybe I won't have
to kill her. I'm sure I'll find matches or a gas lighter in a
deserted house. Then I'll make a fire and roast the piece of
beef. Maybe I'll find a pan or a cooking pot.
I rip my frozen pants from the ground. Then I realize that
I have no rifle, no pistol, no knife, not even a pocketknife,
nothing. No rope to choke her with either. So how will I
kill her? I can try to bite her throat. Yes, I'll do that. I'll hang
onto her neck. I've bitten bottle tops off with my teeth. Her
gullet couldn't be harder than a bottle top. I'll just bite out
one small piece and let her run away. If worse comes to
worse, I'll have to eat the meat raw.
To get to the cow I have to cross a barbed wire fence, the
kind you find on fields wherever cows are grazing. I'm not
even within ten yards of the cow when she jerks away from
me and gallops off.
"We'll see who can run faster," I scream as if she had
broken our agreement to let a piece of meat be bitten from
her living body. But I've fooled myself. I'm not in my
asphalt jungle here, and I'm wearing not sneakers but over­
sized, heavy soldier's boots soaked through with water.
Nevertheless, I get up so close to her near a barbed wire
fence that I grab hold of one leg. I dig my teeth into the soft
inside of her leg, where it crosses over into her buttock. At
this moment her anus opens and a stream of green shit
splatters into my face. Still shitting, she jumps the barbed
wire. She misses the jump and tears her udder. But that
doesn't deter her. She storms from fence to fence, trying to
jump over, but each time ripping her udder to shreds. She
bucks like a kid goat, as if she's lost her mind— while I, cov­
ered in shit, sunk up to my calves in the marsh, and wet to
the bone, curse her.
I don't have a compass, so I walk in one big circle right
into the German lines. They capture me and I'm sentenced
to death for desertion. The firing squad is ordered. Tomor­
row, very early, I'm to be shot dead.
The soldier who guards me has the hots for me. "You
shouldn't even give a damn," he says. I say, "I don't give a
damn." When he lets down his pants and wants to screw
me in the asshole, I smash his head to knock him out.
This time I run in the right direction. In the gray of morn­
ing I stumble over the patrol I didn't want to volunteer for.
Boys' cadavers are frozen as hard as iron and contorted like
dummies.
Drumfire. The English are probably preparing for an
attack. I'm lying in a ditch in the only street they could
attack. All the others are under water.
" . . . Bzz . . . bzz . . . bzz." The machine gun bullets cre­
ate zigzag patterns in the sand.
A thick fog. You can't even see ten feet in front of you. I
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have to get up and stretch. Brrrrrrrrt. . . a submachine gun
volley. Four bullets hit me. The guy shot in panic, when I
suddenly popped up from the ground. Now there are a lot
of them.
"Come on! Come!" They poke me with their gun barrels.
At least five aim for my head. Others for my heart. For my
stomach. Only the one aiming for my ass is missing! When
it finally registers that I have no weapon, they send me back
to their own line.
More and more English emerge from the thick fog as I
reel past them into the direction from which they came. My
right forearm swells up as big as my thigh. My head is
bleeding, my arms, my chest. I throw my jacket down.
"Go on! Go on!" they all yell when I try to show them
my wounds. "Go on! Go back!"
They have no time for me. They have enough to do
themselves. The air is filled with whistling bullets and
bursting shrapnel, and the German fighters are swimming
around in it like sharks.
But these guys are walking around upright. Acting cool
in their helmets. Surely they, too, must be tired of throwing
themselves down and ducking. Some have cigarettes dan­
gling from the corner of their mouths.
My pants slip down. My suspenders have popped, and I
can't hold onto my pants with my bleeding, swollen arm.
My body is bare. My children's shirt doesn't even reach my
belly button.
Behind the lines they shove me into a skiff, while they
themselves are wading in water up to their hips. In joy I
start to sing, to laugh, to cry . . . gradually my head sinks to
my chest.
They extract the bullets from my body in the operating
tent. When I awaken from the sedation, a field chaplain is
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winking at me and placing a thin bar of chocolate on my
chest.
"He's still a child," he says, as if to absolve himself. He
lights a cigarette and sticks it between my dry lips. Then
they load me into a hospital train. I don't know where it's
headed. I keep staring at glorious asses, tits, and tummies
as the nurses puff about from one groaning casualty to the
next.
Snowflakes are falling outside. It's Christmas again. Ice
flowers on the window again. Just as I dreamed when I was
a child.
I am given trousers, a jacket, a coat, and a pair of boots
without shoelaces. No shirt. No underwear. No socks. No
gloves. No cap.
"Take your hands out of your pockets or I'll tear them
out!" A Scottish officer with a ridiculous red sea lion's
moustache brandishes his riding whip in the air when he
takes charge of us at the prison camp gate. I am so angry
that I scream back, "I'm not playing with my balls, you red
rat! I'm cold!"
Another prisoner pulls me by the sleeve and whispers,
"Don't let him provoke you. Take your hands out of your
pockets." I take my hands out of my pockets spitefully.
When we trot into our cages frozen stiff from hours of
standing in a lineup, the other prisoner says:
"You'll see, not all of them are like him."
The drying houses in the brickworks are about twentyfour yards long and so low that we must crawl in. We sleep
in two rows across from each other, side by side on the icy,
slimy ground. So close to one another you have to lift your
body from the ground if you want to roll over to your other
side; so close our feet touch and we kick each other. Every­
one has a thin military blanket to cover up with, that's all.
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We eat with our hands from old, rusty cans. Every day,
sauerkraut with water and a can full of tea. I had no idea
there was so much sauerkraut in the world.
The things that go on in the prison camp are outrageous.
Besides bartering, theft, usury, whoring, murder, and man­
slaughter, grown men recite poems, walk from barrack to
barrack, read aloud from the Bible (the devil knows where
they always get them!), read palms, prophesy, always
wanting to convert each other to one kind of shit or
another, and squabble over the last ladle of sauerkraut.
Tobacco is most important, more so than fucking. The
men are beside themselves digging through the garbage
cans for discarded, tasteless tea leaves overused in too
much brewing. The stuff is dried and rolled into cigarettes
with the old newspaper we use to wipe our asses with.
After a while we are given a hearing. They call it the
//interview.,/ The one who sounds me out is from Berlin. He
babbles about his school days, what high school he went
to, in what street, and so forth. Who gives a shit?
He is obese and sticks cigarettes into his mouth one after
the other without giving me a single one. He has probably
never suffered need and has always had plenty to eat. Even
now, even during the war, he has everything. I wish the
plague on the whole lot of them, with their loudspeakers,
yellow lines, and endless barbed wire.
After two months of the brickworks, we are supposed to
be transported to England. On our way to the harbor in
Ostende, the people on the streets spit on us. So what!
By the time we crawl from the storerooms of the freight
ship in England— after German submarines had torpedoed
us in the Channel, almost sinking the ship— the war is over.
They take us to the prison camp anyway.
♦ ♦ ♦
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The camp latrines in Colchester Essex are everyone's
meeting point. They are long, very deep ditches, and you
sit over raw wooden beams and shit. As you shit, every­
thing is discussed, planned, conjured up. Everything is pre­
pared here: break-ins, escapes, conspiracies. It is also the
whores' market. One fuck is paid for with a piece of soap,
tobacco, or cigarettes, depending on whether the asshole,
the cock, the mouth, or the hand is used. The prisoners pro­
duce Vaseline themselves out of mutton fat.
A dead boy is fished out of the shit. Insane Nazis sen­
tenced him to death for treason after the war was already
over, and so he was executed in the latrine. They shoved
him into the shit, where he choked to death.
Colchester Essex becomes a transit camp for freed pris­
oners from Canada and the USA. They bring Lux soap,
jeans, chewing gum, Camels, and Lucky Strikes.
Our group is to be released next. First the sick go. I stand
next to the ice-cold barrack wall all night long to get a kid­
ney infection and to have protein in my urine at my exam­
ination. I munch down a package of cigarettes and hot oily
sardines, and drink my own piss. I get a fever. There isn't a
trick I don't use. But all is in vain. "He stays," says the ass­
hole doctor. There's nothing wrong with me.
Finally, I'm up for the very last transport. I've spent one
and a half years in this human zoo. One truck after another
drives away from this heap of barbed wire.
"Come on! Come on!"
If I had said that I live in Berlin, I would have had to stay
in a transit camp. No one is allowed to go to Berlin yet. I
state some godforsaken place in the sticks. Then I falsify my
discharge papers. Occupation: newscaster! How I came up
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with this perverse idea is beyond me. I've never even lis­
tened to the news.
I own an American duffel bag, blue jeans, a muscle shirt,
a pair of lace-up boots, two bars of Lux soap, a can of Gold
Flag, tobacco and seven dollars.
I trade one bar of soap for a pack of Camels and move
on. Always in any old direction. I sleep in bunkers or in the
bushes.
At the train station a curly head smiles my way. She's
already in the compartment. I join her in the train. During
the trip we practically swallow each other's tongues. I go
with her to the train toilet and set her on the toilet seat. I
don't even take down her panties, I just pull them to the
side. Her hole is warm and wet.
We get off at Heidelberg.
She lives in a cute loft close to the American headquar­
ters, where she does it with everyone. The Americans pay
with food, coffee, chocolate, cigarettes, alcohol, and money.
Naturally with soap, toilet paper, and nylons, too.
Close to daybreak, when she climbs into bed with me
with smeared lipstick, the fucking gets under way. She's
only sixteen, but she knows all the positions and teaches
them to me. I have never lived like this before.
After six weeks I've had enough. When she's with a cus­
tomer, I take my duffel bag and disappear.
The trains are overcrowded; people bulge from the doors
and windows. I bore into a knot of people. I haven't the
foggiest idea where I'm going. In Tubingen I send a telgram
to Berlin. I designate my return address as a theater in
Tubingen. My mother will answer right away, I know.
Maybe she will send me a little money or a few candies, like
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the time at the vacation home, when she sent me spring
leaves. They are green leaves made of sugar candy, like
leaves on trees. They cost very little and always stick
together in clumps to the paper, so I had to eat the paper as
well.
I go for walks a lot and hum to myself. I have no worries,
knowing I'll be with my mother soon. I have food and
smoke, and at night I sleep in the parks.
A secretary at the theater makes an appointment for me
to have an audition. We go to the park on her lunch break
and I show her where I sleep. My bed of leaves is still there
from the night before. We are hidden from view to passersby by the thick bushes. I cover her mouth, as she
screams loudly with each thrust. Her underwear is bloody.
She is so tight I have to push brutally.
I've been back on the streets a long time, reading over
and over the telegram from Arne:
M O T H E R IS N O L O N G E R A L I V E . S T O P
I K N O W N O T H IN G O F T H E O T H ER S .
I don't cry. Everything is colorful, broken splinters. Like
when we were kids looking through a kaleidoscope. You
would have to shake the tube so that the glass splinters
inside would freeze into a new, strange pattern. I don't see
people. Only colorful glass splinters endlessly changing
their crystal pattern. I walk around aimlessly. Near day­
break I go to the park and lay down with my face to the
ground . . . but I wanted to buy her a winter coat and mit­
tens and shoes for her frost boils, and she was supposed to
drink real coffee and eat sweet rolls with butter and clover
honey. And it was all supposed to be a surprise.
* * *
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This morning I recite from William Tell At the point
when Melchtal is told his father has been blinded and
screams "In the eyes, you said? In the eyes?" I choke on my
tears thinking of my mother's eyes. Melchtal's outcries
become my own: " . . . the light will pierce the darkness of
your night!"
I run off stage and out of the theater.
The secretary catches up with me on the street and says
I have a contract. I go back with her, sign the scrap of paper,
am given an advance, and take off forever.
A road show hires me. They do operettas. They can't
sing; I can't either. But anything is fine with me if it gets me
closer to Berlin. I don't believe my brother's telegram. I
don't believe that my mother is no longer alive.
We play in depressing bars. The things we perform are
indescribable. At the highest extreme of stupidity, we do
Charley's Aunt. We ride in the back of the truck, sitting on
iron chairs. I despise this bunch of idiots, but we're moving
north. In one town they even let us into their lousy theater.
Offenburg Park is full of people. I have to memorize the
mentally defective lines of Charley's Aunt somewhere. I go
nuts in the dive where I'm living. A Moroccan soldier is sit­
ting on a bench in the bright sunshine. He greets me, expos­
ing his rotten yellow teeth, points to his fly and to a pack
of cigarettes in his other hand. Then he points to the bushes
behind him. He repeats his gestures again: fly, cigarettes,
bushes. Does he really expect me to go with him into those
scrawny bushes where people are shuffling around in the
middle of flower beds? He must be suffering from syphilis.
Who does he think he is?
On Sunday we give two of our infamous shows. I already
have one of them behind me. Now I'm stealing huge,
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meaty, crunchy cherries on the road in front of the town bar
we're giving our show at.
There's a Moroccan soldier stealing next to me, too.
When he sees that I've gotten hold of a branch loaded with
cherries, he wants to rip it from my hands. I kick him in the
ass. He pushes me into the barrack across the street with
his pointed gun.
I'm surrounded by Moroccans in no time. I don't under­
stand what they're jibbering, but they are acting like can­
nibals threatening me with their bayonets. A couple fumble
with my fly. They're especially keen on blond boys.
A horrible trumpet blare calls the horde to inspection. It
is my rescue. They kick me out of the barrack. The guard
loads his gun. I hear the bolt snap shut clearly. The car­
tridge is in the barrel. He takes aim at me.
"Va-te faire foutre, crasseux!"
The director and his wife sleep in the inn where we've
been giving our disgusting performance for two weeks. We
rehearse Charley's Aunt by day in the barroom. I have at
least two hours before I'm on with my junk and go to piss.
The toilet is on the second floor. Whenever I go to piss I
have to pass the double room where the director crashes
with his young wife. And they're always screwing, in the
morning, after breakfast, during the day, at lunch break,
before and after shows, all night long, always.
It's ten in the morning. The bedroom door is open. I stop
to listen if anyone is around and enter the room. The bed is
messed up. The sheets are completely soiled. Some spots
are fresh, still moist and creamy. I get an erection. When I
turn around, she's standing behind me.
"What are you doing in our room?"
"You have no idea?" I close the door and turn the key.
"What do you want?"
"The same thing as you."
"And what do I want?"
"To fuck."
"You bastard."
Blood rushes to her face. Her raspberry lips turn deep red.
Her eyes are cold and brilliant. She breathes heavily.
Her husband doesn't want to give me an advance; I
punch him in the face. Yet another Moroccan soldier breaks
us up with his bayonet.
I take off before it's dark, with the tuxedo I wear in the
play in my duffel bag. I don't tell anyone I'm leaving.
They'll find out that I'm not around at the evening show.
Only freight trains go to Berlin. I have to buy a ticket to
the next shithole in order to get into the railway station,
which is guarded by the military. When it's dark, I'll run
along the tracks. The freight train to Berlin pulls in at six in
the morning.
Everyone who passes the guarded entrance is searched.
One woman has a bottle of milk in a bag for her small child
that she's carrying with one arm. The sentry shatters the
milk bottle on the boarding ramp. The criminal can't shatter
anything of mine. I have nothing but my duffel bag and
tuxedo, and a pack of cigarettes stuck between the cheeks
of my ass.
I hide in the small brakehouse of a train car on a side
track. I stick cigarettes into my mouth one after the other to
keep from falling asleep. My freight train only has a short
stopover to connect with a few cars. I mustn't fall asleep,
no matter what.
The trip works all the way to Frankfurt. Then the train
comes to a halt. I have been given the wrong information.
I sleep in a bomb shelter.
I wait for days for the real freight train to Berlin. In Berlin
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I take a passenger train to Schoneberg. From there I walk
the few miles home.
Flaming bombs have smoked out the house behind us,
but our flat is still standing, although the windowpanes are
shattered and the frames charred.
Arne describes how our mother perished. He heard it
from a woman who was with my mother when it hap­
pened. American fighters shot my mother in the abdomen.
She smoked a cigarette and worried about us kids as she
lay bleeding in the gutter. Then they dumped some dirt on
her somewhere. The woman couldn't say where, because
there were bombs falling and she had to get into the shelter.
We know nothing of my father. Achim fell captive to the
Russians. Inge wrote from Bavaria.
Now, after the war, it's impossible to come up with some­
thing to eat if you have no jewels or whatever else, or if
you're not a con artist. We cover all the farmers, thirty, forty
miles away, and most distances on foot, for the potatoes or
beets they feed as slop to their pigs. But the farmers want
jewelry or real Persian rugs.
I snooze in the underground, tired from so much running
around and falling down. I wake up in a moving train that
must have circled the city at least five times since I passed
out. A drunken American soldier addresses me. He mutters
some shit like "you German . . . you war . . . boom-boom
. . . no good . . . no boom-boom . . . " I had to scream into
the drunken shithead's mug that it was American war­
planes that murdered my mother, that shot her in the belly!
Where she carried me! But I can't speak English. The only
thing I can say is "Fuck!"
*
*
*
Arne tells me something horrible. He found himself an
ax and hid out behind a tree in the city park. He wanted to
lie in wait for a pedestrian and rob him, because he no
longer knew the difference between up and down. When
somebody came past he could not do it. He trembled like
Raskolnikov after his horrible dream.
A week later I notice I have the clap. I don't know which
kind. I guess I will have to get used to it in the future.
I audition at the Berlin Schlosspark Theater. I lie shame­
lessly: I pretend that I've played Hamlet, though I don't
even know the play. I have no idea if anyone believes me.
Barlog hires me after the audition.
The first role he wants me to play is the page in the pro­
logue to The Taming of the Shrew. The page has nothing to
do but wear women's clothes and hold the drunk kettle
patcher, so that he can watch the performance from his box.
During these stupefying two hours, the page must grab the
bottle from the kettle patcher's hands whenever the kettle
patcher wants to take a shot. Naturally it's not real liquor
but some kind of warm muck. Some kind of piss beverage.
Not even Coca-Cola.
I get fed up after a month. I fill the bottle with vodka.
Each time I grab it from the kettle patcher, I take a swig. I'm
drunk before the show is half over . . . I start to chortle into
the prompter's box. The curtain falls.
Behind the scenes I throw the empty bottle at Barlog,
because he's giving me grief.
At five in the morning I wake up on a bench at the sub­
way station at the zoo. I don't know how I got here. Some­
one hassles me, I shove him away. The old people say this
is the grimmest winter in decades. The thermometer sinks
to thirty below. I still have no coat, and Barlog doesn't care.
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He, like the horrible actors and actresses, is always warm
and cozy with his big thermos filled with sugar tea or coffee
and his sausage sandwiches, or roast beef and cheese, with
his bananas, oranges, and apples, his cookies, chocolate,
and candies.
When I ride the unheated streetcar to the theater this eve­
ning, I cry. I'm not crying because of my poverty or the pain
from the lump of ice that is pushing through a hole in my
shoe. It is rage that is bringing me to tears. The rage I feel
for these theater creeps. Rage at the pathetic wage Barlog
pays me.
After the show I hide in the heated theater and sleep on
two chairs in the dressing room. The porter doesn't blow
the whistle on me. But when Barlog finds out from some
sow, I'm strictly forbidden to do it again.
I bring food from home: barley grits. I cook them several
days in advance. After a couple of hours the grits get as stiff
as bread. Every day before I go to the theater, I cut off a
slice of the grits, wrap it up in newspaper, and stick it under
my shirt.
Shelters are set up in all the districts, and people crouch
there together around iron stoves. They're dying like flies
in their apartments. The so-called shelters are no bigger
than normal rooms. They're always packed. Someone
watches to see that no one stays too long. So I have to shut­
tle from one to the next. The distances are great, so I make
an exact plan: When I've made it to a shelter, I lay down
my frozen rags, which I wrap around my head and hands
like a leper, on the oven until they almost burn — then I put
them back on and rush off bent against the icy wind like an
old bag lady to the next shelter. I can't cover the distance
all at once. Every hundred yards I must find a building
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entrance, a gate exit, a cellar entrance, a subway stair, to
protect myself from the merciless cold.
The harshest cold is past and the sun is shining timidly
again. Only now is Barlog having a coat sewn for me from
a military blanket, after I had requested it all winter long.
The coat is never finished. The costume designer who is
tailoring this monster of a coat for me claims I grabbed her
cunt in the theater sewing room.
When Barlog breaks his promise to give me the starring
role in the next play, I smash the windows of the theater
with rocks. My one-year contract isn't extended. I would
have starved and gone dumb at this outhouse anyway.
From now on I sleep and eat wherever I can. The main
point is neither to starve nor to freeze, and to be able to lay
my head down somewhere— best would be between a girl's
legs. When it's warmer, I'll sleep in the bushes again.
Meantime I've learned that there are such things as acting
schools. I use them to steal books, and I usually steal the
girls while I'm at it. Plus the acting schools are always
heated and the girls sometimes have buttered bread or an
apple or a hard-boiled egg. They are very young girls. One
is hardly thirteen; the oldest, sixteen and a half. Besides dil­
igently learning to be an actress, she's a whore, too, getting
food and cigarettes by the case. They say she had syphilis
but has supposedly recovered. She is very sweet, but a bor­
ing stringbean. I fuck her only once, on a steep hill above
the train tracks at Halensee station.
I take away the youngest girl's virginity in her parents'
apartment. She lives with her mother in a small flat close to
Treptower Park. I think her parents are divorced or some­
thing. I meet only her mother. When I say I want to
rehearse the bed scene in Romeo and Juliet with her daugh-
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ter, and when her daughter undresses and puts on her
nightgown, her mother leaves the house as a precaution.
Elenore Friedrich's acting school is my bed and breakfast
for a while. That is, the apartment she lives in with her
adopted daughter, Jutta. She doesn't require me to watch
the shit going on at the acting lessons. She simply takes me
in. She shares everything with me, food, drink, what little
money there is, and the beds. Jutta shares a bed every night.
I usually come back from roaming the streets and climb
through her bedroom window, left open for me like a tom­
cat. I climb right into bed with her and warm up next to her
iron-hard butt. But before I'm warm, my cock is as hard as
a hammer and we toss the blanket off. Her body flexes and
writhes and rocks and jerks uninterruptedly. I feel her peak
like an electrical surge, as I delve deeper and deeper into
her like a root. When she has wrung me dry and is so
exhausted from coming that she can't let out another
scream, I jump back out the window again and run through
the starlit night. My body, my hands, my face are more fra­
grant than the blossoms in the bushes where I sleep with
my face toward the sky.
Prince Sasha Kropotkin is a criminal. By day he deals in
antique furniture and jewels and will take the last gold
spoon away from an old woman. He takes everything, ear­
rings, amulets, gold borders of family albums, gold picture
frames, even gold teeth. The main thing is that it has to be
gold; he scratches it a bit, drips an acid onto the scratched
spot and always knows immediately how many carats it is.
His take is highest on Russian icons.
He likes young hustlers best— the ones who rob him and
club his mother over the head, emptying their apartment.
He's sitting at the bar with one of them tonight, staring at
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him with his glassy eyes as if the boy were an especially
precious icon, guzzling vodka. He is very rich and always
pays for everyone. Until Gustl breaks it up with her scold­
ing, hammering down on the smartass hustlers, and shoves
Sasha into a taxi. She takes me along, too.
Gustl is a beautiful woman, about thirty. Aside from her
quirky craze for the nobility and her desire to marry the
Russian prince and become Princess Kropotkin, she has
fucked many men. She goes around with Sasha and
snatches up what she can get. She also deals in antique fur­
niture, which she buys from survivors in the rooms of dying
people, then sells on the black market immediately there­
after for a chunk of butter, eggs, milk, or meat. She deals in
worm-eaten crucifixes, Eucharist trays, tabernacles, icons,
even confessionals she has stolen from bombed-out
churches and tombstones from rooted-up cemeteries. She
buys for Sasha and sells jewelry for him on commission,
pimps hustlers for him and is paid a percentage for it, man­
ages all of Sasha's assets in her head, and reminds him day
and night, time and again, that he promised to marry her
once, when he was boozing it up, which means, for Gustl,
that he'll pay all her bills. Sometimes Sasha thrashes her,
and once he even broke her finger. It never healed properly,
and she tells everyone about it, showing Sasha her crooked
finger. Most people laugh. Gustl is clever. She's not afraid
of making a fool of herself, if she can arouse sympathy.
She has a happy disposition, which, as she says, derives
from her Rhineland soul, and she never holds a grudge after
a tragedy that occurs at least once a day.
She brings me along to fuck. I stay and live with her right
then and there. She buys me a toothbrush and razor,
clothes me with necessities, even has a suit tailored for me
from the finest English cotton, and drags me around to all
kinds of parties to show me to other whores. She gives me
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first-class treatment, cooks delicious, nutritious dishes, and
manages to get pounds and pounds of meat at outrageous
prices. In addition, she squeezes my balls dry like a lemon
press. She shows me all the ins and outs I don't know. She
tells me a lot about other men, too. She always gave Hans
Albers blow jobs— but wasn't allowed to swallow his come
and had to give it back to him, mouth to mouth. He wanted
to swallow his own semen. Gustl is really a marvelous
whore. But after a while she gets on my nerves and I only
see her now and then at Sasha's place.
The Kropotkins are one of those White Russian families
that left Russia with all their frills at the last moment and
harbor an endless fear of Bolsheviks in any corner of the
world. Sasha ended up in Berlin with his mother and lives
in constant fear of being abducted by the Russian secret
police. His apartment, stuffed with priceless antiques, the
walls plastered with Russian icons, is protected by steel
doors and barred windows like an insane asylum. Black
marketeers, nobility, fashion designers, thieves, hustlers,
whores, artists, murderers, high French, English, and Amer­
ican occupational officers, even Soviet Russians meet in this
high rise.
Sasha loves me very much. He surely loves my face, my
body, my Slavic soul, but he loves me most because I tell
the truth and don't rob him. He has limitless trust in me and
leaves me alone in his apartment with strands of pearls and
diamonds, rubies and emeralds. I can eat and sleep at his
place whenever I want to; his slinking servant has been
instructed to let me in any time of day or night. But he
doesn't give me any money. He never commissions me.
When I tell him I want to deal on the black market, he
laughs in my face. Instead, he tells me about Russia. About
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, about Tchaikovsky, Nijinsky. He
plays Russian records for me and cries like Russians do
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when they listen to their music. And, like the Russians in
the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, he confesses his
meanness and filthiness when he's drunk, begging me to
absolve him. The man has problems!
Eduard Matzik wants to stage Savanarola with me. It's a
play that makes me want to vomit. I don't want to be a reli­
gious madman, and I don't give a damn who burned Bot­
ticelli's paintings.
Eduard is poor. The springs in his sofa dig into my back
when I sleep there sometimes. His wife is a barmaid. Her
customers deal in weapons and throw their money around.
Sometimes she brings home a few bills, and we can manage
again.
Eduard staged The Snow Queen with the Russians and is
allowed to shop in the PX stores in the Russian-occupied
zone. He brings a Polish goose from the deep freeze. It is as
hard as cement and has to be thawed. I'll do it. I run a hot
bath and take the naked goose with me into the tub. I didn't
know how exhausted I was. I wake up in freezing cold
water after having slept eleven hours. The goose is soft. I
am, too.
Eduard is also a painter. He paints hideous pictures, a
huge, full-figure oil of me, and comic strips for trashy mag­
azines. Besides his stuffy flat, he has a small studio. He
doesn't use it to paint in, but to cheat on his wife.
I go to his studio to be alone. When I wake up suddenly
that night and can't sleep, I go get his wife. But even after I
have fucked her to exhaustion and she has to go home, I
still can find no peace. Someone or something is strangling
me. I sit up on the battered mattress and stare into the black
room in a stupor; there is no light. Slowly I'm able to reach
out for my clothes and feel my way across the dark floor. It
is as if something invisible and lifeless is suffocating me. I
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tear down the stairs naked and put my clothes on in the
vestibule.
"I didn't tell you/' says Eduard, "someone hanged him­
self in that studio. That's why the landlord gave it to me so
cheap. Forgive me."
The next few days I have to sleep on the beat-up sofa
with the springs stabbing me in the back again.
Sasha takes me along to the Parisier bar. I dance with a
Polish whore. She is a stripper in a nightclub close by and
lives in a room around the corner. I dig into Sasha's pants
pocket and take as much as I need for the Pole.
The Pole has a magic technique. My cock is always stiff,
even after I've squirted several times. After each fuck she
pulls me out, turns over, and goes to sleep. It's impossible
for me to sleep, as I wait for her big behind to press against
me again. That's the signal. She needs it five to seven times
a night, that's every one and a half to two hours. She speaks
very little and only when it's absolutely necessary. I don't
understand her gibberish anyway.
A person might think that I only lie around in bed and
pass my time fucking. That's not true. I often seclude myself
from other people for weeks at a time, lock myself into my
room, and don't even go out onto the street. During this
time I do my voice exercises, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen
hours a day. Or all night. When the neighbors complain,
and they always do, I am kicked out of the room. I switch
rooms more than the girls do. I have gotten kicked out of a
number of rooms in a single day.
I go for walks in parks all day long or walk the streets all
night. I'm always reciting some text and rarely notice what's
going on. If I tire during my exercises or doubt I'll achieve
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a predetermined amount of work, I slug myself in the face.
I have to do what I have to do!
Alfred Braun stages Romeo and Juliet with me. With the
salary I rent my own studio for the first time. It's actually a
laundry room on the top floor of a building. But the room
has a huge studio window with a lot of light flooding in. I
whitewash the studio and scrub the floor. I have a cot, a
table, a chair, and my own bathroom where I wash up
under the faucet with cold water. I don't need anything
else. I do what little laundry I have myself. I don't sleep on
my bed at night, but walk through the parks and lay down
when I can't walk anymore and look at the sky. When day
breaks like a long-awaited birth I go back and lay down
with my clothes on. I don't need much sleep— three, four
hours.
The Typewriter by Jean Cocteau. In one scene I must have
an epileptic seizure. The director has never seen an epileptic
seizure. I haven't either. So I go to the general hospital and
ask the head doctor of the psychiatric ward to describe an
epileptic seizure to me. He wants to let me watch how a
patient receives electroshock treatment. The reactions are
supposedly the same as those of an epileptic seizure. The
person's body is electrocuted with high-voltage current and
contorts in cramplike jerks. The teeth chatter suddenly
and with so much force that they would break if a piece
of garden hose weren't shoved into the patient's
mouth. The patient foams at the mouth. The eyes bulge
out.
The patient is brought into the treatment room. She is
very young and very beautiful. But her face and body are
as gray as the street. She's wearing only a hospital smock.
She sits up halfway but doesn't seem to be interested in her
surroundings. She stammers quietly and unclearly. The
doctor says her lover left her. She is suffering from shock
and has gone mad, and they are trying to induce a counter­
shock, which could help her, if all goes well.
"And if all doesn't go well?"
"Then she's out of luck."
Her arms are tied down. The wires are placed on her
arms, her feet, her temples. Like on the electric chair. The
piece of garden hose shoved into her mouth is already bit­
ten through and through. The current is switched on. With
a horrifying jerk her legs spread and she pulls on them so
violently that her smock flies up, revealing her genitals. Her
lower body seems as if it's yearning for love instead of
shock treatment. She kicks violently as if to hurt someone.
I turn and leave the room.
I pull it off on stage. But I can't get the girl out of my
head.
Roberto Rossellini comes to Berlin to cast his next movie.
Count Treuberg, whom I met through Sasha and who is
supposedly Rossellini's consultant and is always meddling
and lying, takes me to him. The waiting room in the pro­
duction office is stuffed with unemployed actors who are all
desperate to play in Rossellini's film.
Rossellini is on the telephone with Anna Magnani in
Rome and has apparently forgotten, or doesn't even know,
that we are all here. After four hours of hanging out in the
smoke-filled room, I am ripping mad. I roar out, cursing
Rossellini and his fucking movie.
Rossellini throws the door open, gives me a friendly
laugh and says to Treuberg, "Chi έ quello? Mi interessa! Fate
gli un provo."
I hate auditions and recitals. Besides, it's utterly senseless,
I can't escape the theater.
Edith Edwards is my partner in The Typewriter. We often
spend the whole night together after the show. Sometimes
I'm at her place in Westend during the day. Even though
she's fifty, she's never had a man before in her life. The first
time I satisfy her with my tongue. And soon I have her far
enough along that I can fuck her with my cock. The
entrance to her vagina is as tiny as the slit in a child's piggy
bank, and she has agonizing pains. Nevertheless, she
stretches around my cock greedily and doesn't want me to
stop.
She's licked girls and women all her life and has only let
girls and women lick her. At grade school, at the girls'
school, and later as a woman. She tells me of her seduction
by the governess. Of a nurse who raped her brutally, who
ruled her entirely, whom she hated on the one hand but fell
for completely on the other hand, and who later committed
suicide because Edith abandoned her. She tells me of
romantic women in her dreams who are like her, like little
girls hiding under the covers, because they're afraid. She
tells me of the uninhibited obsession of a Catholic nun who
abandoned the veil for her. And of her own sister, who was
her idol. And she tells me of her relationship with Marlene
Dietrich, when they were both beginners. Marlene tore
down her panties backstage and made her come with her
mouth.
Jurgen Fehling, the only living genius theater director,
calls on me. I recite for him. For seven hours! It's six in the
evening. The stage crew has already come into the Hebbel
Theater to prepare for the evening show. Fehling sends a
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little usher to me onstage, so I can have a partner in the
death scene of Romeo and Juliet. "You keep your trap shut,"
he says to the stunned girl, "never mind what Kinski does
to you, you remain motionless, like a piece of wood. I don't
want to hear a squeak from you. I only want to hear his
voice." What does he mean by "Never mind what Kinski
does to you"? I hate this man. I would rather fuck the usher,
who smells so arousing, than continue this madness. Hasn't
he had enough after seven hours? He must be sick.
We have to break. In the dressing room I have to read to
him from the telephone book. I read and read and bring
him to laughter and to tears.
From this day on Fehling doesn't let me out of his clutch.
I hang out with him for weeks, watch his rehearsals, go out
to eat and drink, and sit around with him in bars all night
long. He talks and talks: Sometimes my head falls onto my
plate because I am so tired.
Fehling is supposed to become the boss of the Hebbel
Theater.
"When I'm boss, I'm going to cut back on everything, on
scenery, on costumes, and most of all on this pestilence of
stinking officials and all the extra junk," he says excitedly
as we sit in a corner of a dive, "but not on my actors' sala­
ries. They should have everything they need. Everything.
Then I will demand everything from them, and they'll have
the strength to give everything."
Otto Graf wants to do Ghosts by Ibsen with me as
Oswald. I sign the contract and take a five-hundred-dollar
advance. When I tell Fehling my plans, he answers, "You
may not incarnate Oswald yet. It's going to be one of your
greatest roles. You must break the contract. I, Fehling, will
defend you in court. Don't forget: God has plans for you!
And I will carry them out! Do Oswald only under my direc-
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tion. Never with another, especially with Gustav Grlindgens; never let him touch you. That pisshouse whore
doesn't understand shit. He claims there is no such thing as
emotion. Because he himself has none. If you need money,
tell me, I'll give you money."
"No, thank you. I still have some." I shouldn't have said
that. There must be a screw loose in my head for me to
refuse money.
"Good," he says, "let me know if you need anything. I
will always be there for you. I will protect you."
Fehling becomes boss of the Hebbel Theater but is fired
immediately, after making it known that he first intends to
shoot a film in which he himself will play God. After a
speech at the university, the students throw stones at him;
his head bleeds. After that he disappears.
I go to Otto and agree to do Oswald. I need money. Maria
Schanda is Lady Alving. After the scene in which Oswald
goes insane, she holds me in her arms for what seems like
a long time, because she is afraid for me.
Before the premiere, Otto gives me some cocaine: I had
been so congested that I could barely speak. He shows me
how to use it, and I snort some of the white powder. My
breathing passages and vocal cords relax as if by magic. But
the cocaine dries out my mucus membranes and my tongue
is heavy and doesn't obey me anymore. All the while I am
under the deception that I can speak ripping fast and feel
so strong that I could tear trees out of the ground.
Everything goes well that evening. Spectators cry out
during my outburst of insanity. Some rush out of the thea­
ter. One woman faints.
Otto shouldn't have given me the cocaine. He has given
me his small pillbox with a gram in it. After I use up half of
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it, I ask all around who is selling cocaine. The danger of this
shit is that you don't know when to stop. It can be too late
at any moment, and you won't be able to get away from it
ever again. In the throes of paranoia you can die from an
overdose or commit suicide by gassing yourself or by other
means. Some people end up in mental institutions, where
they perish in agonizing madness. Some even become mur­
derers just to get some more cocaine.
I buy one gram at the price of a week's salary and snort
the contents of the packet at one sitting. I realize that since
Otto gave me my first cocaine, I have had no appetite. I
haven't eaten anything in days. I lick the last few grains
from the paper instead.
I order something to eat in a restaurant. When the waiter
wants to give me the bill he looks at me aghast. The soup,
main course, and dessert are in front of me, untouched. I
have simply been sitting, chain-smoking cigarettes, unwit­
tingly. In the toilet, I see my face in the mirror: I am certain
to be hopeless if I don't get a hold on myself.
Ghosts every day. In the boiling heat, Saturday after­
noons as well as Sunday mornings. A girl brings me
sunflowers.
A journalist wants to interview me. Her blouse has one
button too many undone, and she is wearing no bra. Her
pear tits romp around with each step she takes in her high
heels. Her body is young and supple and firm. Her beauti­
ful, narrow mouth seems almost too small for her strong,
white teeth. During the interview, she doesn't look at me
once with her light gray eyes, but I know it will last a long
time.
Forty minutes later we are alone in her apartment in Neu
Westend, near Edith's place. She lies on the bed fully
dressed, very still, not looking at me. She gets up time and
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again to light cigarette after cigarette. She disappears for a
long time in the toilet. When she reappears, she makes cof­
fee and sandwiches. She lies on the bed again and smokes
like a chimney. She utters not a word as I lie next to her.
Each time I touch her, she tears herself away from me.
After two hours of this, I rip her blouse off with one swipe.
Her tits force themselves into my mouth. We tug at each
other's clothes, stumble, fall onto the floor, pant, gasp,
scream as if our lives depended on shedding our clothes.
Naked, we crouch in front of each other, bite each other.
Hit each other. Our bodies. Our faces. Our genitals. Attack
each other dangerously, painfully.
She throws herself onto her belly, her ass juts up, her
cheeks gape wide, as I shove my twitching cock into her
hot, wet cunt.
There is nothing we don't do in the sixteen hours we
spend together. I leave her apartment at seven o'clock in the
morning.
A short time after that I read a notice in the newspaper
that a woman journalist, Ms. So-and-so, committed suicide
with her husband.
Wolfgang Langhoff, the director of Max Reinhardt's Ger­
man Theater in East Berlin, refused to hire me seven
months ago. I had to wait for weeks before I was even
allowed to audition. When the time came, I screamed until
I lost my voice, cried all the tears from my eyes, and
thrashed about until I was bloody. Langhoff didn't even lis­
ten. He pigged out on sandwiches and rubbed out a spot on
his tie where he had spilled some tea.
"Come back in a few years," he said with his mouth full,
"maybe we can do something then. Eat! Eat, eat! You're so
thin people might be afraid that you will go to pieces during
your emotional outbursts!"
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I should have punched his jellyfish face in. But I thought
to myself: One day you'll come crawling on your knees!
And in a couple years, anyway, you'll be dead!
He crawls earlier than I thought. After Ghosts his deal
maker asks me in a polite letter to come to the German
Theater.
Langhoff gives me a one-year contract at three thousand
dollars a month and says I can decide later whether I want
to extend my contract for more years. For a much higher
salary, of course.
The first play he puts on is Measure for Measure. I play
Claudio, who takes a young girl's virginity without marry­
ing her and is sentenced to death for it. (Me, of all people!)
In the prison cell he has visions of worms eating away at
his corpse.
It's hard for me to imagine how worms will eat me up. I
never think of death. I haven't even begun to live.
I slink around graveyards at night and climb into tombs.
The rusted iron-rod hatches are heavy and can barely be
opened. I force myself through the openings. Lean against
the coffins covered with canvas. Listen for something. Put
my ear to the graves and call out to the dead. I must find
the answer. But how?
My sensitivity is chaos. Creepers threaten to strangle me.
I must fight my way out of the jungle. I have no one who
will help me. I will find the scent of the trail like an animal.
During the scene everything happens all by itself. I have
solved the mystery: You must hold still. Listen. Open your­
self, give yourself up. Let everything penetrate you, even
that which is most painful. Hold out. Endure. That's the
magic word! The words come all by themselves, and the
meaning of the word defines the shudder of the soul. Life
takes care of the rest. You can't let the wounds become
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scars, you must let them be ripped open again in order to
hone the wonderful instrument inside, which is capable of
anything.
I pay the price. I become so sensitive that I can no longer
live under normal circumstances. The hours between per­
formances are the worst.
Paul Wegener and I appear in a matinee at the Theater
on Kurfurstendamm. Wegener recites "The Tale of the
Rings" from Nathan the Wise. I recite Cornet by Rilke.
"Lead me onto the stage," Wegener tells me. "I don't
want a sympathetic nurse, the audience mustn't notice that
I'm dying."
With every step, with every breath and in complete con­
sciousness, this half-paralyzed man is dying. Bone after
bone is crumbling, his internal organs— lungs, heart— are
deteriorating. I don't know his illness.
A few days later he is dead.
I rework Dostoyevsky's The Idiot and Crime and Punish­
ment for the theater. I take my stage version to Langhoff,
who wants to have Crime and Punishment staged.
In the meantime Fehling has shown up in Munich. I take
the stage treatment of Crime and Punishment away from
Langhoff, because I want to go to Munich to show it to
Fehling.
I dictate a corrected version of the script to a typist in an
office in Treptow. The girl with whom I had rehearsed
Romeo and Juliet naked on a sofa lives in Treptow, too. I
intend to go see her on my first day at lunch break, because
the office is not far from the little one's flat. But the secretary
robs me of my senses. A fishy smell exudes powerfully from
under her skirt; I can't dictate anymore and grab at the crack
between her legs.
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We leave the room one after the other, as if we are going
to the toilet, so as not to excite suspicion on the part of the
other typists and especially the head secretary. We meet in
the chicken coop in the courtyard. I come only once. I have
to cover her mouth to keep her from screaming.
Her mother works in the coat check room in a nightclub
and never comes home before daybreak. Even though we
haven't slept for a minute, we don't hear the sound of the
key as her mother unlocks the door. She doesn't come into
the bedroom, probably because she thinks her daughter is
sleeping. I choke her screams with the pillow.
At twelve noon, when mother and daughter are sleeping
in their bedrooms, I slip out of the house. I have to find
myself a new typist!
I loathe Measure for Measure. I sniff all over the place like
a dog to find something better. Finally Bertolt Brecht wants
to meet me. I watch a rehearsal of Mother Courage and Her
Children. It's already the third month he's been rehearsing
this one scene. He repeats every word and every actor's
movements a thousand times. I get completely drunk on all
the stupidity. They must all be illiterates!
When he asks me if I want to join his Berliner Ensemble,
I can't think of a clever excuse not to. Brecht is clever
enough to interpret my silence his own way: "I myself
would have to discourage you. I have a fool's license; but
the sense of humor that one must have for you is definitely
not here."
I bust my head trying to think up a way to get out of this
shitty show. I visit Arne on Wartburgerstrasse. I lie in the
bathtub full of cold water with my clothes on and crawl
soaking wet amid the ruins of the bombed house out back,
where I lie in the rubble until evening. I want to get pneu-
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monia. But I don't even get a runny nose. God really must
have plans for me.
Pissed off that I have to go to the theater, I throw what
few pieces of furniture there are out the window. They
smash on the street.
As a member of the German Theater, I receive coupons I
can use once a day to eat at the Theater Club. This club was
set up by the Russians and is open to anyone belonging to
the opera, ballet, or theater. It is for political bigwigs, too,
of course. They have everything in the restaurant, even
champagne and Malossol caviar. So the club is primarily for
bigwigs, and spies see to it that none of us is so daring as
to try to eat there a second time. I don't eat caviar or drink
champagne, because I can't afford it, but I allow myself two
meals a day: lunch and dinner after the evening show,
because then I am usually so hungry. I promptly receive a
warning. The deal maker of the German Theater, who
porks out twice a day himself, saw me and turned me in.
A week later the same dipshit refuses to grant me an
advance on my salary.
You can reach the office by way of stairs and hallways
from the theater dressing rooms. I've already changed into
my costume for Measure for Measure, except for the long
boots, when I grab the dipshit by the tie and slap him until
his bleating compels the other office workers to rush in.
Here comes Langhoff, too, and demands that I take off my
costume, because I'm fired on the spot. I refuse and storm
into my dressing room to put on the long boots. But the
boots are still in the wardrobe. I can't go there because
Langhoff, the dipshit, and the office workers, who are fol­
lowing me around like a gaggle of geese, would cut me off.
So I run my socks to the other staircase leading to the foyer.
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The first spectators are gathering near the cashier's box. I
storm past them out onto the street. People on their way to
the theater are everywhere. Over there! The theater bar! I
know the owner well. Even there, people are eating meat­
balls or having a drink before the show.
The gaggle of geese, with Langhoff at the head, takes a
shortcut, leading from the foyer to the bar. I run right into
them. There is commotion among tables, chairs, customers.
I jump onto a table and scream, "If you want your costume
back, here it is!" I rip the costume from my body. Bite it into
shreds. Piece by piece.
"This is for you! And for you! And for you! There! Shove
that down your throat, if you want to! No one will wear it
after me!"
The dipshit suffers greatly over the shreds of material. I
rip the costume to bits so that it cannot be patched. They
can't prevent me from doing this. I'm standing with my
back to the wall and give anyone who gets close to me a
kick in the head.
I'm naked. The owner covers me up and tries to calm me
down, because I'm crying in anger and disgust over this
brute. The gaggle of geese files out with the rags.
I'm out on the street again and go back to Sasha. "Who
gives a damn?" he says, giving me a shot of vodka. That's
his way. When another gangster like him tricked him by
restringing a necklace worth half a million dollars with fake
pearls, Sasha just threw down a shot of vodka, too. When
I tell him about the bitching at the German Theater, he
laughs.
"Don't you worry about it, and thank the creator for your
talent. Look at me. I would love to trade places with you.
I'm forty-two years old and have done nothing else my
whole life but suck other people's blood, go after hustlers,
get ripped off by them, and get drunk with my icons. Do
you think I'm pleased with this life? You have every reason
to be happy! People will flock to you one day. They'll fight
over you. Don't worry about those who are a threat to you.
Hide your fist from them. They can't reach you. Go find
yourself a new studio. I'll pay for it. Or sleep here and let
me give you something to eat. Or go live in the villa in
Konigsallee."
I don't live with Sasha and I don't move into Konigsallee,
but I find a new studio on Brandenburgerstrasse.
Helga is the girl who brought me my first sunflower to
the theater. Her parents have forbidden her to come visit
me. Her father is a preacher. But she comes back every day.
When her parents no longer let her outside the house, she
marries a student. Now her parents can't forbid her to do
anything. She slips into my bed every morning and stays
until her student comes back from the university and she
has to cook him dinner.
I need sunflowers! I walk many miles to get hold of some.
When they are fresh, I kiss their honey faces. When they're
dried out, I arrange them on the window sill, where they
continue to glow.
I saw a giant sunflower in a tiny garden in Tempelhof. I
can't risk stealing now, and I ask the garden owner if he'll
sell it to me. He gives it to me free.
I will carry it by its light green, ten-foot stem from Tem­
pelhof to Brandenburgerstrasse. Its sticky black face is
framed with fire-gold petals. I myself am wearing corn­
flower-blue jeans and a poppy-red T-shirt. I got them both
from someone who has a friend in the United States. I'm
barefoot, because it's summer.
It's Sunday and the streets are full of people taking walks.
I try to avoid the people by taking side streets. Because
whenever I appear, everyone laughs at me and my
sunflower.
To avoid the aggravation, I break the sunflower from its
stem, press its face to my breast like a child, and run toward
Wilmersdorf.
I try to board a bus, but the driver can't keep himself from
amusing the passengers with stupid remarks about me and
my sunflower. They all bawl in laughter. I jump from the
moving bus.
It gets more and more unbearable on the street. I'm dis­
turbed and hurt to such a degree by the stupidity and bru­
tality of the people who burst out laughing at me and my
sunflower that I, surrounded by pedestrians, see no other
solution than to rip my beloved sunflower into pieces and
run away from there.
Achim is back from Russian imprisonment, and is already
in the slammer again. He stole fur coats with a gang. I visit
him at the jailhouse in Moabit and bring him chocolate and
cigarettes. He is overjoyed to see me again, and we hug and
kiss. He asks me to find him an attorney.
When I go to the attorney on Fasanestrasse, I see a police­
woman pulling and shoving around a crying woman who
is wearing a backpack. Passersby gawk but say nothing.
"What are you doing to her?" I ask the policewoman.
"She's selling on the black market," she answers.
"So what?" I retort. "She needed to, otherwise she
wouldn't have done it. Let her go."
She lets the frightened woman go for a moment and
grabs me by the wrist.
"Your ID!" she screams hysterically.
I free myself from her fat fingers and laugh in her face.
"I have none!"
That's too much for the brain of a cop. She puts her whis-
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tie to her thin-lipped mouth and blows until a traffic cop
lets the cars go as they please and jumps on me without
asking what's going on. Even the passersby are feeling con­
fident enough to call me a "dangerous element." The traffic
cop twists my hands behind my back. I must go to the sta­
tion house, along with the woman with the backpack.
"You have insulted my colleague's badge and resisted the
power of authority!" says a policeman at the station. I can't
help laughing.
"Stop that laughing!" he screams, beside himself, "or I'll
lock you up!"
I laugh even louder.
"What do you want me to do, cry?"
"I want you to shut up and only speak when you're
questioned."
He forces me to laugh so hard that I swallow the wrong
way.
"You're making me laugh, I can't help it."
I am kicked from behind and land in a cell. There are
rows of cages. A policeman walks back and forth in front of
them like a zookeeper. He must have been very depressed
before I was locked up in this cage, because the other cages
are empty. Now he grins and sneers, as if life's treating him
good again. He lets the key ring slide through his fingers
like a rosary.
I scream at the top of my lungs that I know the mayor of
Berlin, who has established a brotherhood with the Presi­
dent of the United States. The officer on duty lets me out of
the cage, regretting the incident.
"What's going to happen to the woman?" I ask as he
pushes me to the exit, trying to get rid of me.
"Nothing bad will happen to the woman," the officer lies
through his teeth.
When I'm on the street again, I piss on the building.
When Achim is released from prison, he tries to do some­
thing a little more on the level. He takes care of dogs, baby­
sits, and he donates blood twice a week. He gets twenty
dollars and a big steak for each donation.
I go with a tour bus to Munich. I have heard of the
famous carnival, it's supposed to be swarming with naked
girls.
There is a van Gogh exhibit in the House of Art. It is the
first time I see paintings by van Gogh. I rush out into the
street crying.
At the carnival I run across Gislinde and Therese. They're
both painted the same. Both are covered in sweat. I dance
with them all night long. I eat both of their tongues up. I
get them both pregnant that same night, too.
Therese's family forces her to have an abortion. Gislinde
keeps her baby. Therese is very sad. She wanted the baby,
even though she knows that I can't marry both of them. I
never speak of marriage with Gislinde either. She's simply
happy about her baby.
I can't just fuck, I have to earn money, too. Fehling is at
the Bavarian State Theater, and I meet with him.
He reads my stage treatment of Crime and Punishment
and says, "I'll do it with you, but not here. I take theater so
seriously that I can only feel pity for these poor provin­
cials." Fehling is as affectionate as he was in Berlin and
radiates the same tremendous strength and warmth. But I
am afraid he will never stage another thing again.
A girl stops in the middle of the street as I board a street­
car and laughs at me with her snow-white teeth. I jump out
of the moving car. I don't know the girl, this is the first time
I've seen her. She says her name is Elsa. Elsa has a brown-
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ish face, long stringy black hair, metallic eyes, a tight
mouth, and greedy, sensual hands.
All of Elsa's relatives hold high posts in the Catholic
church. One uncle is the Pope's right-hand man. As soon
as this clan finds out Elsa is whoring with the devil, the little
lamb is excluded from the flock, as if she had the plague,
and receives no more support. Up until now she had a rela­
tionship with the chief of the American secret service in
Munich, who still has his eye on her. He came over from
the United States especially to hunt down the Nazis hiding
in the Bavarian forest, who disguise themselves in Lederhosen and live as goatherders somewhere.
He pays for her for a while, at least. But that well runs
dry too. She has no time at all for the Ami anymore,
because "we fuck like rabbits," as she puts it. We live in a
home for old women in Schwabing and only get up to get
something to eat. We usually only swallow raw eggs so as
to be strong to keep fucking. When we can't pay for the
shack, we fuck in the English Garden, in the crypts in a
cemetery, and on the walkway around the Angel of
Peace.
Elsa sleeps with a roommate in the same room. I stay in
a Catholic seminary her grandfather founded. We have to
beg in the churches, because the thread connecting the
uncle in the Vatican in Rome with the grandfather who
founded the seminary keeps pulling tighter and tighter. The
booty is one shabby fifty-cent piece from the collection that
the priest fobs us off with at the church door. Imagine how
many churches we have to cover!
We just can't get by on these charities, so two old
madames, Elli Silmann and Ilse Alexander, who run their
agency like a call-girl ring, take care of me. It's like this: I
have to live in the dressing room at Bavaria Studios so they
can keep track of me. Besides, the dressing room costs them
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nothing, because it's included as a kind of storeroom in the
rent of their offices. This dressing room is a nine-by-twelvefoot cubicle where you'd go mad if you had to hold out
there alone. Whenever a director or producer enters the
agency office, one floor below my loony bin, my hair is wet­
ted down and combed and I am paraded before them like a
well-behaved Muppet. I get seven dollars pocket money a
day for this stunt as an advance on an eventual salary. I
split the money with Elsa, beat it down the fire escape, and
fuck her in the forest near Bavaria Studios.
The wife of an American photographer from New York,
Kunz or Schlunz or Punz or whatever the guy's name is,
comes to Munich to make her presence known among the
German film producers. On the studio premises she bumps
into me, of all people. And even though her mother-in-law
is always guarding her so she doesn't nibble on foreign
cocks, we succeed in being alone for a while. She scratches
my face up and curses at me loudly because I don't want to
fuck her standing up against a tree after I've had my finger
in her voracious, drooling cunt out on the lawn. No way.
I can't fuck her standing here. The bushes are too short
and see-through; the pedestrians would be able to watch
us. We try it in a bombed-out synagogue. But it seems to
have become a shithole. Men are standing everywhere
masturbating.
Pissed off, she agrees to come to my dressing room at
Bavaria Studios.
Stupidly enough, we are spotted as we climb up the fire
escape on the outside of the studio hall. The two pimps
have a customer in the office right then and want to display
me like a hooker. They shake the locked door to the dress­
ing room because they're firmly convinced that we've
locked ourselves in. I plug up the keyhole and try to make
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no sound at all. That's very difficult, because the photog­
rapher's wife has already dropped her panties to the floor
and I don't even have the chance to take off my pants,
because she's on her knees ripping open my fly and eating
my cock, not letting me pull it out. I squirt in her throat.
Then she grabs my head and forces my face between her
widespread legs and she comes so many times that I lose
count. Now she's ready, and things get underway. We
change positions like acrobats.
The two pimps come upstairs again and again and rattle
frantically at the dressing room door, screaming that I'm
ruining the chance of a lifetime and so on.
While the clamoring at the door persists, we continue
carefully.
It's dark outside. We can't go on anymore. Besides, she
realizes that she's left her mother-in-law waiting. Before
she can climb into her rumpled dress, covered in come, I
pounce on her once more from behind. She responds to my
thrusts as they become more brutal, penetrating deeper. We
crawl on our hands and knees across the floor to the fire
escape.
Unable to do much in Munich, I return to Berlin. Elsa
gives me The Ballads of Frangois Villon. I read them in the
tour bus. In the gray of the morning as we exit the freeway,
I know: Villon, that's me!
In Cafe Melodie I recite Villon's ballads for the first time.
The students from the college of art paint kinski recites villon in huge letters on the streets. Admission is free. I will
collect money in my cap.
Cafe Melodie is so packed that people are stepping on
each other's feet. The spectators who can't find a way in
beat violently on the windowpanes trying to get through.
When a cop makes his way in, they beat him up.
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I jump up on the nearest table, barefoot and in a torn
sweater and a cap that I pass around after each ballad.
Sasha throws a hundred-dollar bill into the cap, others
one to twenty, poor students fifty cents or less, one even his
last penny.
Walter Slissenguth is there too. He wants to stage his
play The Twins with me.
Hertha, my partner in the play, is from Vienna. She
teaches me all the beer garden songs because I am planning
to sing with a zither. The lessons unfortunately only last
until I get a glimpse of her naked flesh. Fucking in her bed
in Meineckestrasse, we forget that we have to go on that
evening.
In one scene in the play I find myself on a ramp that is
not part of the scenery, staring into the pitch-black audi­
ence. It is my future that I see, and it has nothing to do with
the theater and this acting business. I am so absent that I
forget where I am for a long time. The tremendous stillness
of the audience brings me back to the reality of the moment.
They say I held up the show for ten minutes.
Gislinde is in her ninth month and wants to have the
baby in Berlin, because I can't come to Munich. With my
salary from the theater I rent a seedy but big studio apart­
ment. I paint everything white and buy an iron bedframe
and a mattress, an unfinished wooden table, and two unfin­
ished chairs to be paid for in installments. A washtub for
the baby, little blankets, baby underwear, and diapers.
There isn't enough left to buy sheets. But there is enough
for sunflowers. I put them into mugs someone lends
me.
If the baby is a girl, I'll name her Pola. Pola is the little
girl who follows Raskolnikov around in Crime and Punish-
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merit and hugs and kisses him. Even though he's a
murderer.
My daughter is born. I tell all the hookers I know, who
are marching up and down the street across from the clinic.
They bring flowers to Gislinde.
When Pola opens her eyes for the first time, she looks
about scornfully. A storm is looming outside.
I don't want these goddamn nuns taking my daughter
from my arms again. The nuns get fresh with me. I curse
them. The head nun asks me if I might step into the hall for
a moment. Two policemen are waiting there for me.
"You torturers of the Jesus child!" I scream so loudly that
Gislinde must have heard it, because she packs her things
and we drive away with the baby.
The shows at the theater have come to an end. I have no
money. I can't pay the installments for the furniture any­
more, and the collector empties the apartment. We sleep on
the floor one more night. The next day I send Gislende with
Pola to her mother.
Ivan the Terrible, by Eisenstein. Because I have no money,
I dub the Russian film and two English films with Sabu.
Sasha leases the theater in Kaiserallee for me. I am to
incarnate the woman in The Human Voice by Jean Cocteau.
It's all monologue— a woman speaking on the telephone to
her lover, who has left her. In the end she strangles herself
with the telephone cord.
When I read the script, I think of nothing else but being
this woman. The monologue consists of twenty-four type­
written pages. I memorize it in two days. Then I rush to
Sasha's and recite the monologue to him. It takes all night.
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He wants to hear it again and again. At six in the morning
his mother, in her nightgown, sneaks in and bawls Sasha
out in Russian, because she has learned that he has invested
a lot of money in the theater for me. Stingy tears roll down
her face, even though she herself is a millionaire and Sasha
earns his own millions. The greasy crown of her head
reminds me of the woman pawnbroker in Crime and Pun­
ishment whom Raskolnikov hacks to death. Then Sasha
takes a heavy gold candelabra with burning candles and
throws it at his mother.
"You can't do that, Sasha," I say. "She is your mother."
But Sasha is beside himself. I leave him alone and walk to
Konigsallee. But I can't breathe in his villa surrounded by
all this antique junk that he gathers for his weekends with
the hustlers, never using it.
The Human Voice is supposed to open in four weeks. The
theater has been sold out for two months. Then it's banned
by the miserable military government, which fears a scan­
dal. And the rest of the rotten art and culture scene stands
by and kisses ass.
Sasha sends a telegram to Cocteau in Paris. Cocteau
replies the same day:
JE S U IS H E U R E U X Q U E C 'E S T K IN S K I Q U I
IN C A R N E C E P E R S O N N A G E
JE L E C O N G R A T U L E P O U R S O N C O U R A G E
JE F E R A I D E M O N M IE U X P O U R E T R E P R E S E N T
A L A P R E M IE R E
Time passes. Sasha doesn't want to pay any more,
because he's under pressure from his mother, who knows
about the ban.
Sasha is drunk again and begs me on his knees to rid him
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of his unworthy life. I smash the vodka bottle against the
silk upholstered wall. He makes me sick.
"Take it all!" he says ripping open his safe.
Then he goes to a bar and drinks away his hatred for his
mother and his own shitty life.
I stand before the open safe, which is filled with stacked
money, diamonds, pearls, rubies, emeralds, and mountains
of gold. I don't know why I kick the door shut and leave
the apartment without touching a thing. I will never forgive
myself for it.
I don't want to go back to K5nigsallee. I go to Wartburgerstrasse on foot. The front door is locked. I break the col­
orful glass and ring Arne out of bed.
Arne now works on the editorial staff of a women's mag­
azine and is climbing the social ladder. He had the flat
repaired, bought furniture, has suits, and wants to buy a car
on an installment plan. He doesn't know what Achim is up
to, he stops by now and then. Arne gives me bus fare to
Munich. This back-and-forth business is a pain in the ass,
but I long to see Pola.
Gislinde lives with her family on Mauerkircherstrasse on
the Isar bridge directly across from the English Garden.
Hexi, her younger sister, is fourteen. She doesn't care about
anything but pounding on the piano. She has such a Bee­
thoven face and such a touch that I burst into tears when i
hear her play. Later, when she isn't allowed to play in the
apartment and she can't find a place where she can play,
she kills herself.
Even though the family is nice to me and I have married
Gislinde in the meantime, I don't live in their apartment. I
sleep in the English Garden or beneath the Isar bridge. I am
happy to have the sky above me again; I would die without
it.
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I meet Gislinde once a day. She brings me something to
eat and smoke, she brings Pola to play with me, and some­
times a little money. When no one is in the apartment, I go
with her to wash up and shave. I usually bathe in the icy
cold water of the Isar River. When it rains, I make a bed of
leaves and cover myself with branches. I leave my face out
in the open air, so that it rains on my mouth and eyes. It is
like hands caressing me, and I fall asleep. A storm is the
best. When the nights get colder, Gislinde brings me a
blanket.
A producer who is putting on a Russian play with me
gives us an old baby buggy. I take Pola on walks with me
in the English Garden. The baby buggy is wicker and I stick
daisies in the holes so the whole buggy looks like a bed of
flowers.
In the English Garden I bump into Wanda, a Bulgarian.
She is pushing her baby around, too. Two hours later we're
both lying in the bushes. Everything about her is mother
animal. Her mouth. Her breasts. Her lips. Her ass. Her legs.
Her genitals. With each thrust we burrow ourselves deeper
into the ground. We have positioned the baby buggies in
such a way that we always have an eye on them.
It's pitch black when we get up, smeared with mud. She
doesn't find her panties. I have tossed them far away.
The fashion photographer Helmut von Gaza calls the two
madames at Bavaria Studios from Berlin. He wants to offer
his studio for The Human Voice. As big as an auditorium, it
is part of his twelve-room apartment on Kurfiirstendamm.
The play cannot be banned here, because he will report it
as a private performance. The expensive tickets are sold
under the table.
That same day I travel to Berlin by train. Elsa hocked her
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watch for me at the pawnshop. In the meantime, she has
married the general director of the Bayreuth Gas Company,
who bedecks her with a lot of stuff, but gives her very little
cash.
The Human Voice is sold out for the next few months. I
have no apartment. Arne is using only the balcony room
and the living room in his flat. I occupy Inge's room. I live
on hard-boiled eggs, hot water, and lemons.
But the opening of the play must be postponed again: I
get jaundice. I'm as yellow as a canary when I blow off the
doctor's warnings. I go to Tempelhof to fuck two girls who
want to take care of me. Just as I reach their front door my
strength fails me and I pass out in the gutter. They drag me
into bed and dall Dr. Milena Boesenberg.
She leans over me with her pale, delicate face, with her
fine blue veins and fragile temples and the biggest eyes I've
ever seen. Her soft, beautiful lips hang above me like ripe
raspberries whose skins would rip open immediately,
spraying fruit blood into my face.
I kiss her mouth. She is shocked and frees herself from
my embrace. Her mouth gapes; she gets red in the face.
She has me taken to the hospital. The two girls put some
money down because they want me in a single room. Mil­
ena visits me each day, but she doesn't let me pull her into
bed.
"With such a case of jaundice, you have to be still," she
says gently.
I have to swallow a long hose twice a day to let my bile
flow into a bucket by the quart.
The nurse who checks my temperature every evening
brushes her tits across my face as she takes my chart down
and puts it up again. She acts as if she didn't notice.
She comes again at night. She puts her cunt to my mouth,
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so I don't have to move. When I fuck her with my tongue,
I know she's had men before.
My stay in the hospital is deadening my nerves. I'm agi­
tated and hot-tempered. I don't even have the patience to
read. I'm a caged animal thinking of nothing but breaking
free.
I write The Perfect Crime based on Raskolnikov's charge
of murder in Crime and Punishment. I write the script in the
event that my treatment will be staged one day and I will
incarnate Raskolnikov.
Holbein's painting Jesus in the Grave comes to mind
again. Stiff with a greenish face. The tip of his beard stick­
ing straight up from the soil shoveled over him. Dead.
Croaked. Rotting. Dostoyevsky was deeply horrified by the
painting.
I'll escape the hospital tonight. I can't bear it any longer.
The doctors won't allow me out of bed and I can't pay the
bill anyway. I go on foot to Tempelhof and ring at Milena's.
She has her practice there, too. She is extremely worried,
undresses me, bathes and feeds me, and puts me to bed.
Then she turns out the light.
I'm feeling strong enough again to do The Human Voice.
When Cocteau comes for the opening of his film Orphie a
few months later, he asks me to do The Human Voice for
him one last time. When I'm finished, he says, "Ton visage
est jeune comme celui d'un enfant et ton regard est mur
dans le meme temps. D'un moment a l'autre c'est le contraire. Je n'ai jamais recontre un tel visage."
Because I still haven't healed completely since I fled the
hospital, I'm having constant pain. I chuck down some sort
of tablets I find in Milena's office.
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I wake up in the emergency ward at a hospital where
they think I've tried to commit suicide.
After they've pumped out my stomach and have brought
me back to life, I jump from the window of the second floor
wanting to take off. Before I get over the hospital wall, the
attendants peel me from it like bark from a tree and drag
me back violently.
I throw a shitpan at them and am chained to the bed.
Shortly thereafter they come back with a cop who's sup­
posed to bring me to the public health official. This rat
wants to know everything. He asks me if I'm having a rela­
tionship with Frau Dr. Milena Boesenberg. I piss on him.
He would love to have carted me off to the madhouse,
but Milena suddenly appears and promises to cover all
costs if Mr. Public Health Official would be so kind as to
direct me to a private ward in a clinic instead of the mad­
house. Milena cannot keep her colleague from thinking I'm
nuts. She is just as guilty as he is. She's scared shitless to
admit in front of this toad that she has fucked me.
"What an honor," teases the meat inspector, making his
rounds in the clinic, "to have such a great actor with us."
I kick him in the balls.
"Wittenau! Haul him off to Wittenau!" he screams, pro­
tected by two keepers. The metal door slams shut. It has no
handle. I examine the grill on the window. Even if I'm
strong enough to rip it out, I can't jump from the third floor
without breaking my bones.
The door opens. Four brutes leap onto me and tie me up
in a straitjacket. Then I'm loaded into a VW van made to
look like an ambulance, which is waiting for us in the court­
yard, doors open and motor running.
On the way I can't see much as the windows are made of
thick frosted glass. Only the thin edges of the ambulance
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crosses are somewhat transparent, and I catch a glimpse of
the TV tower.
Wittenau: the infamous mental institution. The van is
halted, checked, and then passed through the heavily
guarded entrance.
I try to make out things by looking through the edges of
the crosses. But everything moves too quickly. I imagine a
huge complex full of madmen. Tarred roads, block build­
ings, and a number of other large and small stone barracks,
probably laundries, kitchens, garbage dumps, the morgue.
Everything is surrounded by high walls.
The van pulls up at the reception building. I am unloaded
right into the waiting hall. They take off my straitjacket. I
move my numbed arms and wrists and massage them
immediately. One of the keepers pushes me onto a bench.
I have to wait.
The waiting hall is high and bare. The walls are painted
a greenish color up to the height of a man; the tile floors
suggest a slaughterhouse. The dim windows are barred.
Bars everywhere. Everywhere doors with no handles. And
the incessant rattling of keys locking, unlocking, locking,
two, three, four locks in a row.
Other inmates are paraded past me by guards. They shuf­
fle along like robots, letting themselves be pushed, shoved,
directed. The staff rushes here and there. They wear dingy
smocks, sleeves rolled up to expose the burly arms of hang­
men, ready to clobber anyone. The inmates wear a kind of
prison getup; long gray shirts and clogs on their bare feet.
Among the new arrivals like myself, some are headstrong
and won't allow themselves to be pushed and pulled
despite brutal slugs and digs. They must be carried. Some
are accompanied by a relative, friend, or acquaintance who
says a hasty good-bye and can't wait to slip away. Most are
alone, flanked only by guards. Some are absent. Some
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weep. One woman cries out. Her scream pierces my heart.
She throws herself onto the tile floor, swinging wildly at
nothing. A door with no handle flies open; keepers carry
the woman away, her feet dragging. There is a method to it
all, as if executions were being prepared. Everything pro­
ceeds quickly and without a hitch.
If only I had something for my headache!
I'm assigned to Ward 3. It must be nearby, we go on foot.
This time there are only two guards and me. I try to orient
myself and note particulars. But everything looks the same.
Stone blocks, blacktop streets. We are here.
On the ground floor I am handed over to another butcher
who has no need to assume I'm capable of resisting. At least
ten doors with no handles lie locked behind us. He sizes me
up with the eye of an expert, not even looking at my face,
as if he is calculating how much I weigh and how tall I am.
Then he throws a folded gray thing and a pair of clogs
down in front of me. He orders me to strip. He grabs my
possessions with resolve and stuffs them into a sack like
trash, as if he were saying: You don't need these anymore.
I am weighed like a side of beef. I am measured. I'm hosed
down with cold water.
In a dim corridor ten iron bathtubs stand in a row like
open coffins. Inmates are pushed into these tubs, which are
filled with ice-cold water. Each must suffer the ice water
until his crisis lets up. If it doesn't let up, there is electro­
shock treatment. And if that proves useless, the victims are
placed in solitary confinement. Their shirts and clogs are
taken away, so they won't rip or bite them into strips and
hang themselves. They are left alone with their excrement,
there is no toilet in the cell. And no food. It is worthless to
feed them. Most become hopelessly insane, if they don't die
first.
I put on the gray shirt and clogs and am led into the ward,
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where permanent staff take charge of me. I am locked in
with about eighty or a hundred inmates. Everything takes
place here: sleeping, eating, pissing, shitting, screaming,
raging, wailing, crying, pouting, praying, cussing, threat­
ening, begging, fighting, agonizing, and the ultimate break­
down of those who have overcome it. The smell is inde­
scribable. It is hell. A real man-made hell.
Someone shrieks. Keepers choke his screaming; an adhe­
sive gag is slapped across his mouth and he is chained to
his bed.
Just don't watch! Don't look at them! I tell myself again
and again. Don't listen to them! Don't inhale that sweet,
nauseating scent that forces one to vomit. I am reminded of
the fat I was forced to eat in hell as a child. God! How many
years has it been? And now this? The adults' hell! But I must
not despair. Never be sad! Sadness would weaken my
hatred. I need to hate! No contempt. Contempt brings you
down. I require terrible, vengeful, destructive, hideous hate!
I talk to myself. Not too loud, not too quietly, just loud
enough to hear myself. I repeat my date of birth, phone
numbers, house numbers, names. I must not grow weary.
The tragedy is beginning to dull my senses like a drug. I
have to stay in shape! I do kneebends. Push-ups. Don't just
stand in one place, walk! Move! But where? We aren't
allowed to stray from our beds.
Food distribution: I don't touch the slop. When the others
note that I'm not eating, they grab my dish. The overseer
marks it down.
My headache becomes so unbearable that I ask a keeper
for pain reliever. He pays me no attention, even when I
repeat the question. Don't be provoked, I say to myself.
Simply turn away, forget that I have posed a question to
this torturer. Forget that I have this pain!
At night the ache invariably worsens. Every time one of
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my fellow sufferers screams, every time someone throws a
rage, curses, quarrels, every time the torturers beat us down
with their fists, every time a dull punch strikes another
Jesus Christ, every time a mouth is gagged, every time I
hear the dragging of someone's feet as he is taken away,
like being dragged to the guillotine, every time someone
cries, wails, begs, farts, pisses, or takes a shit in the middle
of the room.
I pray to God. Yes! I pray to God to intensify my pain!
More! More! We'll see if my head explodes. That is how
Christ must have prayed in Gethsemane: "My God! If you
wish me to bear all this, then give me strength!"
He gives me strength. I won't go mad.
Frans Masareel's linoleum cut comes to mind: The man
in prison who is enlightened by the idea of freedom, which
comes to him in the slammer as a naked woman and forces
her breasts through the bars of his cells so he can drink
from her and grow strong.
I already believe that I have withstood the worst, but it's
not that easy. When I go near the barred windows to catch
a fragment of the sky, an overseer calls to me. I turn around
and cry.
Once the white man locked up an Indian for stealing
something to eat. He broke out of prison on the very same
day and was shot while escaping. "How stupid of him,"
said the sheriff, "I would've locked him up for three days
at the most." And a man who heard the sheriff speak said,
"For an Indian three days without freedom are three
eternities."
A fellow inmate with one leg whispers to me, "You are
not allowed to cry. If you cry, you are not sane."
The overseers sit on tables and note everything in their
notebooks: When you cry. When you laugh. When you
don't eat. When you eat someone else's food. When you
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speak. When you don't speak. When you sleep too much.
When you don't sleep. When you go near the barred win­
dows. There isn't a thing they don't take down.
"Are you a welder?" the one-legged inmate asks. "You
have such strong biceps."
I cannot say that I am an actor. He would think I want to
mock him.
"Yes, I am a welder," I say, so as not to disappoint him.
His story is so heartrending that I forget my own plight.
He had come home after being in a Russian prison camp.
His wife, whom he loved more than anything in the world,
had learned of his imprisonment through the Red Cross,
but she had also learned that he was missing one leg.
Thereupon she took him for dead. So this one-legged fellow
limped all the way home on his crutches only to find her in
bed fucking another man. Naturally he cut loose on them
with his crutch. Then he fell into a crying rage.
They turned him in for mental derangement and danger
to public safety and delivered him to Wittenau on the
double.
"I only want to live long enough to get out of this joint
and kill both of them," he says at the end of his story.
The meat inspector comes every three days. When he
talks shit to me, I turn my back to keep from grabbing his
throat. The next few weeks he doesn't address me. Then
I'm led to him in the examination room. The reason
becomes obvious when I discover Milena, who is shuffling
around near the barred window and doesn't dare look at
me. I refuse to greet her and remain standing after the slimy
psychiatrist offers me a chair.
He demands that I sign a piece of paper in which I state
that Frau Dr. Milena Boesenberg is not guilty of my impris­
onment in the mental institution and that I am obliged to
leave her in peace in the future, which means that I will
neither take revenge on her nor resume contact, let alone
fuck her. If I refuse to sign, I won't be released.
I wonder what this freak has done to become Milena's
pimp. Perhaps she's already sucked his cock? She must be
scared shitless that someone's going to let the cat out of the
bag about her fucking me. This creep has probably already
had his worm in her hole. I burst out laughing.
Maybe this toad thinks I've really gone crazy, because
he's whispering good-bye to Milena and accompanies her
to the door. Suddenly I remember the blackmail and sign
the piece of paper. Nothing can hold me back from doing
what I want to do, once I'm free.
The jellyfish grabs at the paper as if it were a love letter
from Milena, folds it up, and shoves it prissily into his
wallet.
"I would say the thing is settled," he says in a slimy way,
"but I would like to have a few words with you, you inter­
est me."
"But 1 don't want to talk to you! I want out of this garbage
can of human brains!"
I think that only the guard at the door can prevent me
from beating him with the paperweight on the table. I can
already see how the torn steel of the exploded grenade shell
is going to crush against his fatty forehead and eat into it
like shark's teeth. And if I were to hit him another time
between his bulging, myopic eyes, and another time, and
another time, I would crush his skull, leaving only a rancid,
bloody, stinking clump. All I need to do is reach for the
paperweight. But I don't. Not yet.
"Now, there's no need to get all worked up. Everything
will proceed accordingly. I give you my word on that."
Word? What kind of word are you going to give me?
What kind of word could a pig like you have?
I would shit in his hand if he held it out to me.
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"Tell your thugs from the garbage dump that they can
bring me my things!"
"Slow down, slow down. It won't go as quickly as you
think. First your brother must come to speak with me. The
frau doctor has already informed him, he will show up here
tomorrow."
"My brother? What does my brother have to say to you?"
"I would like him to tell me a little about you, I just told
you, you interest me. I am ultimately responsible once I set
you free. And you tell me nothing."
"What?"
"What you're doing with your hands right now, for
example, when you talk. Have you always done that?"
I'm sure the sadist is insane: how could he not be? What
do I do with my hands? My hands are my language, like
my eyes, my mouth, my whole body. I express myself with
them as I always did. I'm about to say: What I do with my
hands you will quickly recognize when I strangle you to
death. But I say nothing. I don't say a single word. I
leave the examination room without a word and am led
back to the torture hall. If it's true that Arne knows
where I am, he'll get me out of here, even if it costs him
his life.
After an eternity, we embrace each other in the adult hell.
Then Arne drives me to Wartburgerstrasse in his new Ford.
He asks me nothing. He understands that I can't tell now.
After I have taken a bath and eaten a good meal, I take the
money and cigarettes he slips me and kiss him good-bye.
He is crying.
It is spring, and I can see how the apples of the girls are
growing under their blouses and can smell their figs
ripening.
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I fight my way back out of a crowded streetcar in a panic.
Even the touch of an elbow sends tears to my eyes.
I walk to Clayallee. The private residence of the English
consul is supposed to be in a side street. A while back a
young student had offered to let me live with him and his
mother in a wooden garden house on the ambassador's
estate. For two months I see no other people besides the
boy and his mother. I am alone during the day. The student
is at the university and his mother spends the whole day in
the ambassador's villa, where she works as the cleaning
woman. She is probably about thirty-five. I always walk
very close to her, because a strong odor comes from under
her skirt. I think she's terribly open. When she uses the toi­
let, it smells of her for a long time.
I am firmly convinced that I've overcome the adult hell
because I've recovered my physical strength again— when
a wasp makes me desperate with its buzzing at the windowpane while I'm sitting at the table looking at the sky
through the window. I open the window so it will fly out,
but it won't fly out. It's completely still for a while. Then it
starts to buzz again, banging its head against the windowpane. Bam! You would think it was drunk. Or it's doing it
so I'll pay attention to it. It wants me to focus only on it.
Maybe it's up to playing games. It wants me to catch it
somehow, knowing full well I won't be successful— touch
it, yes, graze it, without hurting it, of course. Tap its ass . . .
It's buzzing so loud that I have to hold my ears shut. This
goes on for hours. Whenever I take my fists from my ears
the wasp sets in again, as if it were watching me, waiting to
bump its head against the window. I swat at it, but never
hit it. It hides, but I know its eyes are watching me. As soon
as I sit down at the table, hoping I've struck it or that it's
flown away, the torture starts anew. I press my fists to my
ears until I'm sure that it's had its fill. But when I take my
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fists away, it starts up again. It intentionally rams its skull
against the window, especially loud this time.
I remain sitting for a while without plugging my ears, fol­
lowing the wasp out of the corner of my eye, pretending
not to see it. Then I rip the tablecloth along with the ink,
marmalade, and everything else that's sitting on it from the
table and smack the wasp to the floor. It's only stunned. I
pull a thread from the tablecloth and strangle the wasp with
it. I burn it over a gas flame. As its charred body crackles
and glows, I realize it can't help what they did to me in
Wittenau.
No one but Arne and my two friends here know that I
was in the cuckoo's nest. Yet I receive letters originally sent
to Helmut von Gaza, which Arne passes on to the student.
People ask me many questions in their letters. Me, of all
people! A boy who wants to become an actor asks me what
a person must do to be like me. I write back, "God preserve
you from becoming like me!"
"How could they keep him away from me all these
years!" Fritz Kortner says after our first encounter. "He is
the only actor in the world who moves me when I just look
at him! There is no other Don Carlos in the world for me!"
Four years ago at the Schlosspark Theater these disgust­
ing actors laughed at me when I announced I would play
Don Carlos one day.
After a week of rehearsing with Kortner, I have enough
of his dictatorship and unfairness. I scream that he can kiss
my ass.
A girl wants to marry me absolutely right away so as to
prevent being inducted into the Israeli army. Her father has
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a bar in Berlin but is an Israeli citizen. His daughter, who
was born in Berlin, is, too. The thought of marrying
this little Jewess is tempting but impossible, because
I'm married to Gislinde. But it's imperative that I fuck
her.
I walk with her through the forest to Nikolas Lake. She
pulls her tight skirt up high enough to expose her thighs
and black straps and her plump little sack hanging in her
panties. She positions herself only about a yard away from
me, so that a sweet stinky waft comes my way. Standing
against a tree she says, "So? What will it be? Do you want
to marry me? Isn't it a sin that I have to pull a uniform over
this and crawl through the Negev?"
She leads me on with this game the whole way through
the forest to the train station. I can't give her an answer.
I have cunt on the brain. Karajan's daughter can't fuck,
either. She has such a heavy period that it lasts almost until
the next one. Blood makes me horny. But she has tremen­
dous pains.
Paul is an architect and, as he says, has had his eye on
me for a while now. I find out why when I'm invited to visit
him and his wife. After dinner he goes to the bathroom.
Erni clears the table. Even though she could reach the dis­
tant plates much more comfortably from the other side, she
stands next to me, sticking her big, bull ass right into my
face, her skirt slipping up so high that I can see the deposit
in her wet panties. She leaves the messy table like it is and
we run to bed. She has a thicket between her legs. I have a
mouthful of hair and she squirts nonstop. The coronas of
her breasts are like big, dark asters. Paul comes sneaking
into the room naked and lifts the covers carefully to see
how his wife gets fucked by another man. I don't worry
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about it, only the draft bothers me somewhat. When I come,
she flies into a rage:
"You have to hold off longer! What should I do now? I'm
so horny that I don't know what to do!"
"Paul can keep fucking."
"That's the trouble. Paul comes too soon, too. You have
to control yourselves longer. I need both of you. Both of you
for a long time."
Paul and I work hard. The next day at four in the after­
noon we finally have breakfast.
They live on the top floor in a villa on Hasensprung,
which belongs to Paul's father, a famous architect. I don't
live with them, I only go there to fuck: Erni would fuck for
a heart attack. My own.
I fuck Erni alone, too. That is by far more strenuous.
Besides, Paul gets jealous. They both call each other down,
until Erni screams that he sent her out to walk the streets.
Then everything is better again and we fuck as a three­
some.
Paul has the idea to open up a brothel with many girls
and to build a theater for me with the yield. I refuse. There's
nothing wrong with a brothel. But I don't want a theater.
I'm happy when Paul and Erni drive to Frankfurt to com­
plete a building contract. Not because I had to fuck so
much, but I'm sick of playing breeding bull for the little bit
of food or money.
Why am I a whore? I need love! Love! Always! And I
want to give love, because I have so much of it to give. No
one understands that I want nothing from my whoring
around but to love.
A truck gives me a lift to Munich. The driver throws me
out on the Autobahn exit before Nymphenberg. After that
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I march to Bogenhausen and arrive at Mauerkircherstrasse
at midnight. Gislinde's front door is locked and everyone is
sleeping. I'm frozen through and through and hungry. I
scream loud and long until her father opens the window
and tosses the house key down to me. I go into the kitchen
and eat the cold leftovers out of the pots. Then I lay down
on the floor next to the big black dog and warm up next to
her body. Gislinde tells me that some producer was looking
for me and wanted to do The Typewriter with me one more
time. We set the dates. Then I'm told that Edith Edwards is
in a clinic in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. We go for a walk and
spend the whole day together. She smiles as doll-like as
always, only it's hard for her to speak and I don't even
know if she understands me. I try to speak very carefully to
her, one word at a time, like a small child. But she only
stutters unrelated sentences and looks at me imploringly
the whole time, as if she wants to apologize that she can't
speak.
When I say good-bye, she doesn't want to let go of me. I
have the feeling that we'll never see each other again, and
I think she feels the same.
The Typewriter. When I'm lying in Solange's arms and
she's caressing my closed eyes, I think that it's Edith. Per­
haps it's her spirit, who knows. Edith died in GarmischPartenkirchen.
Sybille Schmitz, who was already giving me a hard-on
when I was still a street kid watching her on the movie
screen, brings me a letter from Joseph Kainz, the greatest
actor at the turn of the century, as a present. I sell the letter.
What am I supposed to do with letters?
After having refused forty film offers, I'm happy to have
signed a contract today. The director asks me to give a
young actress her cues during her camera audition. Two
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days later my contract is paid out with the remark: "Your
face is too strong for the German cinema/'
Who gives a damn? The main thing is, I have the money!
I have a suit made and buy a shirt and a handkerchief and
finally some socks, so that I don't have to wear shoes on
my bare feet anymore. I buy Pola some patent leather shoes
and have a wine-red velvet suit sewn with cuffs and a collar
made of lace from Brussels with tiny white lace gloves. I
have the most expensive outfits modeled before me at
Braun and Co. for Gislinde and take the model right along
with me to the Pension Clara.
Letters from court, payment orders, citations, notices,
threats, in short, all letters from official senders, I do not
open. I throw them in the trash can or into the Isar, where
they float downstream for a short time before going under.
So I had no idea that after a scuffle with some jerk who
turned out to be a criminal investigator, I was sentenced to
four months in prison with probation for insulting an officer
and resisting the power of authority. On top of that, I was
supposed to pay a fine. If I didn't I was supposed to check
in at Stadelheim Prison with underwear, shaving things,
and a toothbrush.
The young lawyer Dr. Zumsteg lives in the Pension
Clara. But he can't worry about my case, because he has a
career in the movie world. That is, he wants to become a
famous divorce lawyer. He wants to bring divorce suits into
action, divorce actors and actresses, divorce, divorce, noth­
ing but divorce. He's entirely obsessed with divorce. Celeb­
rities say, "He knows what he's doing," and they all flock
to him.
So he can't be bothered with prisons and recommends,
to my good fortune, attorney Rudolf Amesmeier. He does
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everything over frankfurters and beer. He is able to get me
off, I neither put in my time nor pay the fine.
In the Pension Clara, I live in a six-by-four-foot room
across from the communal toilet. Anyone who's sitting on
the pot can hear everything going on in my room. I sleep
through everything that I need to take care of. But if I don't
show up at breakfast, I don't get a thing to eat.
I have to paint. I must express myself. Not like actors and
pensioners or politicians do. It's mania. Obsession. An
urgency, just like a pregnant woman having to give birth. I
sketch day and night. I use coal, because coal lives, glows,
burns the most. I draw on any scrap of paper I can find, on
cardboard lids, on walls. I hang my own shirt on the wall.
I can't sleep anymore, I waltz sleeplessly for a couple hours
or run through the English Garden all night long. In the
gray of morning, around three-thirty, I'm already sketching
trees, their bodies, their arteries, their foreheads touching
the sky, their souls, their cries, the sky, the clouds, the
grass, bushes, plants, flowers, sunflowers. But also people's
bodies, faces, eyes, hands. Eyes and hands again and again,
they are the most expressive. The most erotic. I can sense
all of creation growing in me, growing through me, through
my heart, my veins, my sex organs feeling like I must
explode. I work eighteen hours a day and in feverish haste,
as if I had the fear I would die of impatience and excitement
to live. I know that everything about life is erotic, every­
thing that lives. I sculpt as well. Then I smash and tear
everything up and burn it all.
Alexander the Great is bullshit no one can understand.
Nevertheless, I accept because I need the money, and I get
an advance. I have three partners, among which is a fifteen-
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year-old with baby fat. She knows nothing about men but
is impatient. Her mother, who owns a dog food factory,
leaves me alone with her daughter entire evenings, as if she
isn't in the know. Her bedroom is full of horrible little
knickknacks.
I don't know if she's afraid of being screwed for the first
time, or if she'd rather have it with the mouth. In any case
I lie with my face under her fat little pussy for hours while
she sucks on my cock. When I stop sucking for just a while
because I need to get some air from time to time, she shoves
her pubic bone against my mouth, making my lip bleed.
And every time I want to climb on top of her, she crosses
her little legs. So I must take another approach. I suck deep
into her cunt and begin to press through her hymen little
by little with my tongue. She allows that. When it rips, I
pull out little pieces of skin piece by piece, with my teeth. I
grapple her little breasts with my fingers. They aren't even
real little breasts, not even real tits, not even tiny ones.
They're just blisters, bumps with soft pink coronas. I circle
my fingertips very carefully around her nipples, pinching
them coarsely from time to time without warning, twisting
them or pulling on them. She convulses. The deeper I pen­
etrate her cunt with my tongue, the stronger her scent of
sweet juice and bitter piss. I myself don't know what I am
discharging into her mouth. Once I get my tongue way into
the soft wetness and the tips of her nipples are hard as rock,
I shove my throbbing shaft into her, as she wriggles in the
throes of a massive orgasm.
As for the skinny divorced woman, she is like poison in
my veins, like morphine or heroin. The more I want to
escape her, because she would ruin me and because I really
don't desire her, the more frequently I catch myself on my
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way to her room, where she waits for me any time of day
or night in her bathrobe, as if she knew I had to come again.
She doesn't even look at me, she's that sure. It goes so
far that I hate her, never say a single word to her and yet I
come to her two, three, four times a day. She simply looks
at me triumphantly with her half-crazed eyes. Sometimes
we cook at her place, but we eat very little; she is nothing
but skin and bones. We both look like addicts. Our feverish,
glistening eyes are deep caves. The wide dark rings around
them stretch all the way to our cheekbones. A burning thirst
dries our throats. Our pulses are abnormally fast; our arter­
ies swell. The weaker we feel, the more immense and
uncontrollable our desire is. My own orgasms are a piercing
pain in my brain.
You can fuck yourself to death in this manner, even
before having a heart attack. My salvation is the director,
who can't hold rehearsals because we haven't shown up for
several days. He threatens not to give me an advance if
things keep going on like this. I don't tell him I'm addicted
to the skinny girl. I tell him I can't stand her. He schedules
my rehearsals with her as seldom as possible, so that I have
little contact with her. She herself must rehearse continu­
ously. He doesn't know that he's saved my life.
A so-called journalist, who supposedly remembers me
from school, comes to my dressing room the day before the
opening.
"I'll be writing a review," he says.
"If you're who I think you are, then you're illiterate and
can't even write grammatically correctly," I answer, shov­
ing him because he bugs me. "Besides, what do you want
to write? Do you want to criticize me? You must be drunk
or crazy."
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I don't think he wrote his critique; I didn't read his shit
anywhere. But he comes by again wanting to write an arti­
cle about me. He just got a job with the evening newspaper
as an apprentice.
"It will be your masterpiece," I say. "You can just skip
your first examinations. I will dictate the article to you, then
there will be some truth about me in the papers for once!"
We go to the editor's office at the evening newspaper and
I type the article myself.
The students at the University of Munich paint posters
portraying my head, with in red and black letters above and
below: kinski recites villon . We hang them up in stores and
in the college departments at the university.
I appear in a bar again and climb up onto a table barefoot.
This time I charge five dollars a seat for admission. I empty
the register into my pocket before the recital.
Gislinde has left for the country.
When her grandmother doesn't want to give Pola to me,
I tear her from her arms. I take a few things to wear in a
paper sack that rips open on the street and I have to clutch
the clothes under my arm. During the day we go to the
English Garden and ride in the horse carriage and on the
merry-go-round at the Chinese Tower. In the evening I take
her to my room in a brothel on Giselastrasse, I bathe her in
the sink and put her to bed. Then I go and recite Villon.
Helga, the priest's daughter from Berlin who brought me
my first sunflowers, is standing in the audience crowding
all the way out to the entrance of the bar.
After the show we walk along the Isar, because Pola is
sleeping in my bed and I don't want to wake her. I take off
Helga's pants and sweater and stimulate her ass in the
moonlight for a long time, before I fuck her from behind.
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Then I jump into the ice-cold Isar where pieces of ice are
still floating around; I dry myself with Helga's long hair. I
must go back to Pola; she might be awake, crying.
Helmut Kaeutner comes to my bar, too, and gives me a
script, from which I'm supposed to recite at the audition for
the film Ludwig II. My character is Otto, the brother of Lud­
wig II. I have no idea who Ludwig II is. I study the script in
the English Garden while Pola rides around on the merrygo-round, straining to make something out of this trash.
At the audition Kaeutner doesn't say a word. I'm given a
uniform to wear and am alone in front of the camera, thank
God. O. W. Fischer, who's supposed to play the lead role,
is sitting behind the camera watching. After the scene, he
kisses me and tells me I'll get the contract.
The producers Reinhardt and Molo give me a miserable
deal, about two hundred dollars in advance, and I'm able
to quit the bar.
I take Pola to Gislinde's sister, who takes her to her
mother.
During the shooting Kaeutner says, "Do it just like you
did at the audition."
At least the idiot talks to me, I think.
I'm broke and walking with Fischer past the studios at
Bavaria. I ask him to lend me fifty dollars. I promise to pay
him back with next week's pay; he can have Molo give it to
him directly. Fischer beats around the bush for a long time
explaining to me in all friendship that he would do it in a
minute, but he doesn't have a pfennig on him, and that as
a foreigner, he doesn't get a salary until we've finished
shooting. I go to Molo, who is also hard up for cash because
of the extended shooting period, and tell him about my con­
versation with Fischer.
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"What did that pig tell you?" he says excitedly. "Fischer
has as much money at his disposal as he wants."
I don't have a place to sleep, because it's too cold in the
park and under the Isar Bridge, and because I don't want to
live on Mauerkircherstrasse. Gislinde takes me to her friend
Ruth. Ruth lives with her parents in a villa in Bogenhausen.
I sleep in the room she had as a little girl, in the attic. Ruth
is sixteen and engaged to a young musician who is always
on concert tours.
At dinner with her family I find out that her father, the
professor, is a hunter who provides the zoos with animals.
My food sticks to my throat.
"And can you sleep in peace?" I yell, throwing my nap­
kin into the soup. "You never have nightmares after you've
caught lions, gorillas, and panthers deceitfully with a net,
or their babies once you've murdered their mothers?"
I storm out of the dining room intent on getting my
things. Ruth comes running after me out of breath. She is
trembling. Okay, so I'll wait until morning.
Tatiana Gsovsky, the Russian ballet master, calls me to
Berlin for the International Theater Festival. Tatiana is stag­
ing and choreographing The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. I am to
be Prince Mishkin. The whole thing is a combination of
pantomime, classical ballet, and theater. The prime balle­
rina, the dancers, and the corps de ballet do classical dance,
I do pantomime and recite a long monologue.
The rehearsals aren't for three months. Tatiana sends me
the contract and asks me to let my hair and beard grow, so
I don't have to wear a wig or paste my face up with mastic.
My long hair period becomes a martyrdom, because the
people on the street aren't used to seeing a man with long
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hair, unless he's an Orthodox priest. I get mobbed and
called down everywhere and only dare go out on the street
in the dark. Not because I'm afraid. I'm just sick of it. At the
Munich train station people spit on me. Others throw rocks
at me. We beat each other bloody.
Gislinde and I get a divorce. She knows that I will never
lead a normal life and it's better to end things now. Gislinde
herself suggests the divorce, even though she loves me.
Because I can't wait until the divorce proceedings take
their course, Rudolf Amesmeier makes it possible for an
early court hearing.
"When did you last have intercourse under wedlock?"
some scruffy louse of a judge asks me.
"Even if I did know with all the whoring around I do, I
wouldn't tell you."
I take all the blame; that way the paper pushing is taken
care of.
The Idiot is a big success and is invited to the Venice
Music Festival. The Italians are so hospitable, so overflow­
ing with spontaneous love, that I feel like an emigrant who
has returned to his homeland. Besides, they have an untam­
able curiosity. Wherever the half-breed in the troupe
appears with me, at Piazza San Marco, on the Canale
Grande, even when I'm sitting with her in a gondola forcing
its way through the remotest alleys, a throng of people
gathers immediately. They talk, gesticulate, call out, laugh,
crowd in close, touch us as if we were exotic flowers.
At the Opera Teatro Venezia an accident almost costs me
my life. An iron rod with a decoration fastened to it and
weighing half a ton dislodges from its safeguard and comes
plummeting down from the gridiron right onto my spine. I
collapse and can't breathe. Some people think it's part of
the show; no one makes a sound.
Slowly I revive and continue the performance. At the end
of the show, three thousand people scream and rejoice,
even though I haven't been speaking Italian. Strangers kiss
me at the stage exit, and little children bring me flowers on
the street the next day.
Our troupe has been invited to North and South Amer­
ica. Tatiana is planning a tour all the way to Japan and Aus­
tralia. But after everyone has whored around, jealousy,
hatred, and vengefulness make living together unbearable.
We squabble over our play in Venice; someone seems to
have pocketed half of it.
I don't leave Venice immediately for Paris, where Jasmin
is waiting for me, but fly with the half-breed to New York,
where she appears with the New York City Ballet. Six
weeks later I fly from New York to Paris.
In the meantime Jasmin has worked hard. She refused to
be a stripper, because she was offered too little money. But
she seems to be making good money now. The dress she's
wearing cost at least a thousand francs.
"So tell me,"
"What?"
"About the men."
She laughs and blushes.
"How many did you have?"
"Let me count. . . "
"I mean per day. Or didn't you work as a whore?"
"I was a call girl, yes."
"Why do you do it?" I ask very softly.
"You ask dumb questions," she mumbles. "Because I
love you." She climbs up to me and licks my ear. "Every
woman has her favorite dick. I love yours. Do you love
me?"
"Yes."
Nothing ever comes of the apartment Jasmin sold herself
for. I fly to Munich to see Pola. Jasmin flies to Berlin to find
an apartment. When I get there, she's dead. She was run
over by a car in Clayallee and died on her way to the hos­
pital. I could go to see her, she's lying in the morgue. I don't
go there. I wouldn't be able to bear the sight of her corpse.
I go back to Paris and rent the same hotel room where
Jasmin told me about whoring for Madame Claude.
When I have no more money to pay for the hotel, I sleep
under a bridge on the Seine. At first the bums leave me in
peace, and I think they accept me. But then my sleeping at
their spot doesn't suit them. They chase me away, throwing
rotten tomatoes at me.
It's icy. I could try to stay warm with the bums, who have
little coal stoves under the bridge, or on the grids above the
subway shafts. I wander around for two whole days until
I'm so tired that I collapse into a deep sleep somewhere.
When I wake up, I'm covered with snow and a subway train
is thundering past my head. I don't know how I got here.
Even my brain is frozen.
It's early in the morning and still dark. A man picks me
up on the street and takes me to his place. I tell him I just
want to sleep; he doesn't make a pass at me, even though
we're sleeping in his bed. Before he leaves his flat the next
afternoon, he makes me cafi au lait and picks up a baguette.
Then I shave and wash up and dry my clothes. When I want
to leave, he asks me if there's anything else he can help me
with. I tell him I need money for the fare to Marseille. I
want to work on a ship. If possible, one headed for Japan
or Australia, or the Fiji Islands. He gives me money for a
third-class ticket and says that I can repay him some day. It
all sounds unbelievable, but it's true. I don't think he did it
just because he likes men. There are people like that, not
many, but they're out there.
He wants me to stay another night, because it's Christ­
mas Eve, but I can't stand this Christmas Eve shit and take
the night train to Marseille.
I'm all alone in the compartment and can finally stretch
out on the wooden benches. Paratroopers of the Foreign
Legion board in Marseille. They're coming straight from
Vietnam. The same train goes back to Paris. Before I can get
off, they're already in the compartment giving me some­
thing to drink and smoke, saying I should stay until the
train is about to return. The compartments and walkways
are so full that we have to sit on each other's laps. I don't
understand everything they're talking about among them­
selves, because it's a sort of slang. But I do understand
when they rip their ribbons from their uniforms, stamp on
them with their feet as if they were crushing beetles, and
pretend to be wiping their asses with commendation letters
from their commanding general. Then they slur out the
"Marseillaise" and fart along.
The train jerks into motion. I have to get off. The para­
troopers send me out through the window.
I go to the Arabian market in Marseille to hock my suit.
I want to buy sea gear with the money and get something
warm to eat with what's left. The Arabs rip my suit from
my body and offer me twenty dollars. They're crazy! The
suit is almost new. I go to the pawnshop to ask how much
I would get for it there. But there is an endless line before
the pawnshop, which hasn't opened yet. When it's finally
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my turn, it closes again. So I go back to the Arabs, complete
the deal, and select a used pair of worker's pants and a
jacket at a stand.
From now on nothing is on my mind but finding a ship
that will take me as far away as possible.
I walk along the outer fence of the dock, which is guarded
by police with machine guns, ready to fire. I walk seven
miles outside Marseille. I stop at an inn. I eat French fries
and drink a glass of wine. Afterward I crash out on my
bunk.
I can't get into the heavily guarded harbor without a spe­
cial permit, and the offices that do the hiring for crews are
flooded with unemployed sailors who fight over any open­
ings. I try to get onto an English or American line, but they
only take English or Americans. I get in as a dockworker
hauling sacks with the Africans. With the money I make, I
go to the whores in Marseille. The girls can't be picky; they
fuck sailors of all races from every corner of the world, who
certainly bring in unimaginable diseases. I not only fuck
them without a rubber, I also eat them out. I want to love
them. I want them to feel that I love them and that I need
love. That I am sick for love.
"You have the mouth of a whore," one says to me before
she kisses me goodbye.
"I know."
A streetcar leaves for my inn every forty minutes. But I
would rather use the money for fucking and walk the seven
miles back on foot.
There is no dock work for the time being, and I make a
little money, a day here, a day there. I even pick garbage
up for a week. My earnings are not enough to make ends
meet. I spend most of it on the whores anyway. The inn­
keeper gives me notice on my room, which I can't pay for
any longer. It's actually not a room but a concrete hole,
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smaller than a cell in a madhouse, with an iron cot, a con­
crete floor, and no windows. But it costs money. I earn my
meals working in the innkeeper's kitchen preparing French
fries, meat, salad, and dessert for the workers and serving
them under his supervision. Sweeping out the kitchen and
the whole goddamn stall, toilet full of shit and all. Chop­
ping mountains of wood. Hauling wine kegs. In return I get
French fries and a salad once a day. The payment for the
room isn't included in the work. I have to earn that on top
of everything, otherwise he'll throw me out.
The men are all sulfur miners, Algerians, Spaniards, or
Poles, working near the inn. They eat and drink away the
money they earn. On days off they have already had their
share of booze before lunchtime. Each of them drinks a liter
of wine at every meal. The work in the mine is killing them.
They know it, so they don't save anything. It's not worth it.
They wear gas masks at work, but to little avail. After a cou­
ple years they all die. One of my friends, who shares his
Gauloises and his last few francs with me, is thirty-seven
but looks sixty. He gives me a colorful Arabian scarf, which
I wear every day. I don't bring whatever they leave on their
plates back into the kitchen, where I usually eat. Instead I
gobble it up while I'm clearing the table or stick it into my
sweater, if it's a piece of meat. If it's French fries, I roll them
up in newspaper and stick them in my pocket.
The Algerian who gave me the scarf has a glass eye. One
day he stops coming in to eat. The other workers are down
and don't talk to one another. My friend stabbed his lover
in the street in Marseille, because she cheated on him with
some other man. Then he barricaded himself in the barrack
in the sulfur mine. When he heard the sirens of the police
wagon, he swallowed some water, stuck the barrel of his
old carbine into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
♦ * *
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I write to Cocteau for money. I didn't even think of look­
ing him up while I was in Paris. He writes back:
My beloved friend,
I would share everything with you. Unfortunately, I own noth­
ing. I live off the generosity of others. I'm sick with one foot
already in the grave. I'm sending you this drawing, which you
can surely sell.
A drawing is enclosed with the letter. It is supposed to
represent his memory of me. He drew me with the mouth
of a Negro and stars for eyes. The workers would never
want to buy this drawing from me.
The wind is about a hundred miles per hour. Not a soul
is outside. I'm sitting on a cliff above the sea where I always
watch the ships go out. The breakers rage up over fifty feet
high, the storm whips the salty spray into my face. The
thunder makes the sky collapse. Lightning strikes around
me. I've never been so happy in my life.
The innkeeper wants to force me to work in the sulfur
mines too. When I refuse, he fires me. From now on I sleep
in a bombed-out bunker or along the cliffs of the coast.
I can't look for work. I have a high fever because of an
infection in my throat. It keeps getting bigger and bigger.
My throat swells shut. I can't swallow anymore. I can barely
breathe.
The miners bring red-hot stones to my bunker and apply
them to my neck. At night one of them is always on watch
next to me. One of them takes me to a family who speaks
the same gibberish he does. I think they're from Portugal.
They give me a lot of lemons. Thirty of them. I squeeze the
juice right into my throat, thirty lemons in a row. It doesn't
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help, I double over in stomach cramps. I want to get away
from these people. They have birds in cages. Once a year
they open the cages and shoot down the freed birds as they
are flying away. Sentenced to death, waiting in their cages
for their execution.
I don't want to go to the doctor because he requires pay­
ment in advance and none of the workers has any money
until next payday. I don't want to go to a hospital, either,
because I wouldn't be able to bear it, and I don't know if
the shithead innkeeper has reported me to the police. I
wouldn't be able to give them a place of residence if they
asked, and I don't want to be reported to the foreign police
for being a vagabond.
The workers get together and drag me to a doctor. He
gives me a penicillin injection that the guys must pay for,
cash on the table.
But I don't recover. I walk to Marseille. I have to find a
specialist, even though I have no money. I'm afraid I might
choke to death. All day long I look for a door sign, building
after building, sign after sign, no one can tell me where I
can find an ear, nose, and throat doctor. My pain is
indescribable.
Around seven o'clock I find a specialist who is just about
to close his office for the day. He is very nice, looks into my
throat, and says he'll operate without pay. I'm supposed to
come again in the morning.
I walk the ten miles back to my bunker and spend the
night with hot stones burning my neck. I'm not getting any
better. At night I slip out to the inn. The German shepherd
knows me and doesn't pounce on me. But he whines so
loudly I have to hold his snout shut. I reach through a tiny
broken window at the kitchen door and push back the bolt.
I will try to perform surgery on myself, if all else fails. I will
try to poke a knife into the swelling. It won't be easy. I must
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do something, if no one helps me and I can't breathe
anymore.
At eight in the morning I run back to Marseille with the
long knife in my jacket, just in case. It is more difficult than
ever to swallow. First I go to the embassy in Marseille. I
write my request on a piece of paper, because I can't speak
anymore.
I have an ulcer in my throat and must absolutely undergo an
operation. Please give me money. I have none. I will pay it back.
I show ID and am given two hundred dollars.
An hour later I'm on my way to the doctor. I have to
swallow. But I can't. I'm not able to this time. Try as I may,
I can't breathe anymore. I hold myself up on a streetlamp
and think, this is the end. I pull out the kitchen knife and
shove it into my throat. Then it happens! The ulcer breaks
open and I puke half a quart of pus into the gutter. I'm free
of everything and feel no pain anymore.
With two hundred dollars in my pocket I could keep my
head above water for a while. I could move into a tolerable
room, have something warm to eat once a day, and wait in
peace for a ship that will take me away. But I have changed
my plans, I don't want to be a sailor having his butt kicked
around on some stinking tanker. I want to save enough
money to build myself a sailboat one day. Then I'll sail
away on it and never come back again. But I know that for
the time being I must go somewhere and make movies.
T H R E E
buy a ticket to Munich. The train leaves at six
in the evening. At noon I sit in a nice restau­
rant, take my time selecting my meal, drink a
whole bottle of Beaujolais. I tell the waiter not to worry
about me and could he please wake me if I sleep past five
o'clock. I leave a generous tip and doze off.
In Munich O. W. Fischer mobilized everything to find me
for Hanussen; they looked for me in Munich and Berlin.
"I need your eyes!" O. W. says to me.
That's really no reason for me, I think. But I accept the
job, which pays far better this time around. After all, I don't
get a rise from filmmaking.
With my salary I rent an apartment in a modern building
with a garbage shaft. The screenplay of Hanussen is the first
thing I throw down the garbage shaft.
Then I buy my first car; that is, I make the first payment
and drive it right off the lot: a used Cadillac convertible.
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At the studios in Bavaria one of the sweet young secre­
taries gets into my pearl-gray toboggan, hardly able to wait
for takeoff. Unfortunately it's pouring rain and we have to
close the cover.
I step on it near an intersection without a light, like I
always do. A truck comes up on our right and we crash. The
Cadillac's heavy bumpers whistle through the air in three
pieces. Not much happens to the truck or the driver. He
only bashes his knee a little. We get out of the Cadillac as
if we had just been in a bumper car.
We take a taxi to my apartment, because the car has to be
towed away.
The foolish accident has an aftermath. At the hearing
Rudolf Amesmeier is continually pushing me back to the
stand, because I keep jumping up and interrupting the
judge.
"Last name. First name. Date of birth. Where.
Address . . . "
"It's all in my file, all you need to do is read it."
"I'm asking you."
Sadism again! I want to jump up. Rudolf pushes me back
into the stand.
"Fine. I'm Mr. So-and-so, born on So-and-so in godfor­
saken So-and-so, living on So-and-so Street."
"State of matrimony?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Are you married, divorced, single?"
"Divorced."
"When were you married?"
"I don't know."
"When were you divorced?"
"I don't know."
"You should be ashamed of yourself."
"What does this have to do with my Cadillac?"
ι ι 6
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"I'm asking the questions here! Previously convicted?"
I turn around to Rudolf. "Have I been previously
convicted?"
"Yes," says Rudolf.
"Yes."
"What for?"
I turn around to Rudolf. "What for?"
"For insulting a police officer and resisting the power of
authority," says Rudolf.
"For insulting a police officer and resisting the power of
authority."
"Aha!"
"What do you mean by 'Aha'?"
"If you say one more word without being asked, I'll give
you the maximum penalty!"
"What law have I broken? Nothing happened to the truck
driver. My insurance will pay for the damage to the truck.
My Cadillac is a wreck. I'm the only one who has a reason
to be pissed off."
"You are an antisocial element! You think that just
because you shoot movies and make a lot of money you can
behave coarsely and arrogantly in street traffic!"
"If only you knew why I make films, and if only you
knew why I was in a rush on the day of the accident."
"If you're going to get fresh with me, I'll have you
arrested!"
I turn to Rudolf. "Can he have me arrested?"
"Oh, cut the trash. Just sit down and let him talk."
"You know what, why don't you give me the maximum
penalty and let me out of here?" I say, sick and tired of this
shithead.
Rudolf turns red with excitement. I tell him this bumbling
idiot of a judge makes me want to barf. He should just give
me the maximum penalty, get it over with, and let me free.
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"Mr. Attorney, did you hear what your client said?"
"What?"
"He himself has requested the maximum penalty. Isn't
that right?"
"Yes, that's true, but . . . "
"I'm finished," the judge interrupts him and shuffles his
junk together.
I get the maximum penalty: five thousand dollars or three
hundred days. Bye-bye Cadillac, I can't afford you
anymore.
Laszlo Benedek, who just did The Wild One with Marlon
Brando, gets hold of me while I'm still shooting Hanussen.
He wants me for Children, Mothers and a General, which
Erich Pommer is producing in Hamburg.
I don't live in the Hotel Bellvue, where the movie clan
always stays. I move into a small inn around the corner. At
six the next morning I'm arrested straight out of bed. The
police can't get it through their thick skulls that there
wouldn't be a warrant out for my arrest, had I filled out the
hotel roster correctly when I checked in. I wrote that I was
born in B.C., that I have neither a home nor any money,
that I have no passport, and that I'm a prostitute. The clerk
wasn't satisfied with my entries and brought me a new form
after I had already fallen asleep. I drew fantastic Chinese
characters all over that one, even on the back side. So she
called the police, and they found me in their files.
The reason there's a warrant out for my arrest is that I
failed to pay the penalty for the accident with the Cadillac.
I'm handcuffed and taken away. Then I'm transported to
the station with others who have been arrested. There I get
a kick in my back and land in a cell.
The next morning all they say is "shut up." They put the
handcuffs on again and take us to the investigation prison.
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Bend over. Spread your ass. Pull back your foreskin.
Measurements. Mug shot with a prison number. Finger­
prints of all ten fingers. Turn in your belts and shoestrings.
"Do you have fleas?" some stinkface asks me, throwing
a ragged blanket in my face that I'm supposed to cover up
with.
"Not yet, you stinkbug, but I'm sure I'll get all the beetles
in the world, if you don't lay off."
I drop the blanket on the floor and kick it away from me.
It smells like farts and sweat.
Two days later Amesmeier retrieves me from the
slammer.
I move into the Hotel Prem, where Ugly Ursula is living,
too. Ugly Ursula is an actress and cabaret artist. She is so
ugly that I only fuck her in the dark, if I don't feel like put­
ting a towel over her face. But her body is so young and hot
and horny, that I think God created her like this intention­
ally to punish all those who make a mad dash for a pretty
face.
I can't do it with her today. I caught bronchitis from that
medieval prison cell I was in. I buy myself some codeine
drops and, impatient as I am, drink the whole bottle down.
When she comes into my room, I'm sitting on a chair and
can't move. I have the impression Ugly is floating in the
room running across the ceiling upsidedown. She undresses
anyway.
Ugly leaves after two weeks. I go to Hamburg's brothel
strip, where the girls sit wide-legged on chairs like mer­
chandise in their dimly lit display windows or lounge
around in enticing positions on couches, luring men inside.
I stand fascinated in front of the showcase. The prosti­
tutes' young faces and bodies are transformed into the faces
and bodies of all the women I've loved in my life. This is
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how it always is when I embrace a woman: Her face and
body assume the expression and form of other women I
once loved or whom I simply desire and don't even know
and have yet to encounter.
The girls in the windows wave to me to come in. But the
smutty comments of the men crowding in groups before the
glass keep me away. I can't bear it when the woman who
will be my lover the next moment is jeered at. I move on.
The street itself isn't lit and I can stand in a corner of a
building unseen, or walk back and forth, if I want to avoid
a gang of men.
I sit down on the gutter and fall asleep. I wake up at day­
break. The red lights in the windows are out. An older pros­
titute calls to me from a window on the second floor and I
climb the stairs to her place.
She talks incessantly. I just smile and don't answer. Not
because she's old and used and I don't feel the least excited.
I'm somewhere else with my thoughts.
"You're surely some rich daddy's boy who came here on
a ship, right?"
I nod. I don't want to destroy her dream of the rich young
man whose yacht is parked in the Hamburg harbor.
"Someone like you certainly isn't a tightwad."
I shake my head. I'm hesitant to talk. When she questions
me further, I have to lie to her. I always shy away from
saying I'm an actor. I'm sad that I'm here. But I don't want
to leave and hurt her feelings.
She takes off her clothes and waits for me to undress.
When I don't do it, because I don't have a hard-on, she
unbuttons my pants. Then she pulls a condom over my
dick, massages it somewhat with her mouth, because it isn't
good and stiff. Then she soaps up the rubber stretching over
my cock, so that it glides better or for disinfection in case
the condom slips, I think to myself.
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I lay down on my back, uninterested, and she straddles
me. When she starts to ride me, she gives a horny gasp and
an affected groan like prostitutes often do to make the cus­
tomers think they're about to come, too. They know it
excites the men, making them squirt sooner.
I get extremely excited. Not because she's moaning so
exaggeratedly and amateurishly, all the time saying: "Come
on baby, give it to Mama. Out with it, I want all your juice."
In reality she doesn't dare to hope for someone else's desire
and her desire to fuck is long gone. Her moaning and
groaning are her own self-mockery. Her skin is cold. She's
freezing. Her body is wasted. Her breasts and belly hang
from her like strange dead creatures. The cellulite of her
legs piles up into formless mountains. Her withered behind
is pinched together frightfully tightly like that of a kicked
dog. Her long pubic lips, worn out by thousands of men, no
longer cover up her hole, which could accommodate my
balled fist.
I'm seized with pain and rage. Rage that this clown of
love has been tossed away. And pain that her games must
go on, because she has no other choice.
And suddenly I see her as she must have been, like the
young whores in the showcases next door, when she could
still be proud of herself, because she knew that men were
horny for her. Their dicks stood straight up at the mere
sight of her. And when she herself was sincere, when she
groaned because she still felt the men inside her and really
had an orgasm. Every woman believes in love during
orgasm.
I throw her onto her back, rip the condom off, and stick
my swelling cock into her hole with such force that she
breaks out into a sweat. Her body gets hot very quickly and
starts to glow. Her eyes get an absent, feverish shine
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beneath her half-closed lids. Her lower body works against
mine like when her ovaries were still fertile and she wanted
to catch the sperm. When she roars out in orgasm, I squirt.
I give her more money than she'd make on ten men. I
want her to have the day off today.
"I'm going shopping now, and then we'll have breakfast
together, okay, darling?" she says, covering up her nudity
so as not to destroy the illusion.
I thank her and point to my wristwatch. "I understand,
your ship is leaving, you have to be at the harbor."
I nod. I give her a kiss good-bye on her old mouth.
Back at the Hotel Prem I make plans to meet the two
maids on the top floor where I'm staying. They're supposed
to lock themselves in my room until I come back from the
studio, so that the porter doesn't see them coming into the
hotel at night. Then they can just start making beds again
in the morning. They're exceptionally talented. Unfortu­
nately, I get the clap again. I don't know from whom, from
Ugly, from the old whore, or from the two maids. I actually
get venereal disease more often than most poeple catch
colds.
Jessica doesn't budge from my side. Since I recited Villon
at the Berlin Convention Center she has been looking at me
nonstop with her feverish Mongolian eyes.
She lives with her child and mother on Olympic Street. I
sleep on a sloping couch there, with pillows that are stuffed
with rags. On this slanting couch that I'm always falling off
of the minute I close my eyes, I come up with the idea for
a tour . . . Villon, Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, Tucholsky, Hauptmann's "The Heretic of Soana," Schiller,
Goethe, Nietzsche, and Brecht.
At first I appear in the Berlin movie theaters, then in the
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university auditorium. Jessica sells tickets at the university
colleges and puts the money into a cigar box, which she
gives to me at night. Then I do the New Philharmonic.
An agent has an offer for Carnegie Hall in New York. I'm
supposed to recite Oscar Wilde's fairy tales in English.
Kortner pops up again and picks me up to go to Vienna
for the film Sarajevo. I'm supposed to throw the bomb at the
emperor. Erika is my partner. We fuck so heftily and with­
out breaks that I'm standing in my sleep during the shoot­
ing as Kortner speaks softly nearby. He thinks I'm meditat­
ing on the script. He's treating me with more care this time.
Anushka, the wife of an Austrian hosiery millionaire and
heir to a Russian dynasty, writes me a letter offering her
help. I have no idea what she had in mind, but I can always
use help. We meet in Salzburg, where she owns a house.
She bores her pointy fists into my armpit glands, into my
ribs, into my groin. Bites my entire body with her teeth.
Pushes her tongue into all the openings a body has and
wants me to do the same to her. Her animal screams never
break off until we move from Salzburg to Vienna. I have no
money. Anushka pays for everything.
For the time being we move from one furnished flat to
the next; it gets more and more depressing each time.
Finally she takes me into a dilapidated old folks' home
where I move into a room behind the secret door in the
library, while Anushka steals food from the pantry in her
husband's villa— where her little girl and mother are now
living— when he isn't there.
A manager for guest shows makes me an offer: The Asso­
ciation of Viennese Undertakers is celebrating its fiftieth
anniversary and is putting on a matinee for its staff. He asks
me if I want to take part in this show, it's going to be a
colorful program. I'm supposed to recite a monologue from
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Grillparzer's King Ottocar's Success and Downfall in which a
general, just as always, babbles phrases about honor and
the homeland on the battlefield.
I buy the nonsense and read through the part of the
speech on the battlefield. At first I really have no idea what
it's all about. I rework the script in a coffee shop, but how­
ever I twist and turn it around, it remains a bunch of bab­
bling on the battlefield about honor and the homeland.
"I can't recite something like this, not even for the Asso­
ciation of Undertakers."
"Fine," the manager says. "Then recommend something
else."
"What about Hamlet's monologue while holding a skull
in the cemetery?"
"That's too morbid for the Association of Undertakers."
"The Faust monologue?"
"It's too long,"
"Leave it to me."
It's all over within three minutes at the matinee. I cry out
the sentence: "The earth has me back again . . . " as I walk
from the stage, a load of money already in my pocket. The
pallbearers and gravediggers sitting in the audience of the
Mozart Hall still haven't grasped that they've just heard
the shortest Faust monologue of all time.
I've got enough money to last me a while, but I can't wait
until the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Association of
Viennese Undertakers.
So I recite more Villon. I appear at the Mozart Hall, which
is already familiar to me. Then the Beethoven Concert
House and Vienna City Hall, which seats 10,000. At the
Meat Market Theater I do "The King Dies" and at the Thea­
ter in Josefstadt "The First Legion." Then I recite "The Her­
etic of Soana," the story of a young Italian chaplain who is
stoned for giving his love to a woman. I want to tell his
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story from the pulpit of St. Stephan's Cathedral. But I'm not
given St. Stephan's Cathedral.
Then, Villon, Rimbaud again, and Villon again and again.
Anushka's husband keeps offering her money if she'll come
back. But Anushka doesn't want to go back to him and
keeps going to the villa to steal food.
We change flats before the next month's rent is due.
Schoenbrunn. The Goethe Monument. Karntner Ring.
Naschmarkt. I can't take it any longer. When Anushka is
with her daughter, I wander around Vienna. It is indeed
true what people say about the "sweet Viennese girlies."
They are all sweet, the girls, the married women, and the
whores on Karntner Ring.
I come out of the big convention hall where I have staged
the lighting for a new show. A brat with a bookbag is walk­
ing on the other side of the street and laughs, staring at me.
I laugh back. We're walking in the same direction, each on
his own side of the street. After a while she comes over to
my side of the street, walks next to me, and laughs. When
I reach my front door she asks me for my autograph.
"Come upstairs," I say. "I have photos of myself up
there." It always works, I think to myself, and get a hardon. She comes up with me.
The furnished apartment at Naschmarkt is creepy.
Anushka had rented it in too great a rush. I only sleep at
Naschmarkt when I can drag a girl along or when Anushka
comes to fuck at night, though she is spending the night at
her daughter's more often now.
"Giddyap, giddyap . . . "
The brat sits on my knees, lets me pat her little butt, lets
me lick her face, sticks her dry little tongue in my mouth
and laughs and laughs. I take off her panties. Her fluffy
pubic hair is as soft as a sparrow in my hand. She even lets
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me nibble on her nipples. But she won't open up. Try as I
may, she won't let me in, not even let me lick it. I touch her
clitoris, she jumps off my knees.
"Only if you marry me."
Then she gives me such a saucy laugh that I can't control
myself and want to spread her open by force.
"Do you know I can send you to jail? I'm not even four­
teen years old."
I get dizzy with desire. I give her the photo I promised
and send her off.
Anushka has become very suspicious because the girls on
Kartner Street wave at me. It's understandable that she
doesn't like to leave me alone as much as before. She's
already setting up an apartment in Judengasse which her
husband will pay for and where she wants to live with me
all the time.
For the time being I'm officially living in the creepy apart­
ment at Naschmarkt, but I also lie with the girls in the
bushes during the day and ride with them as far out as
Ottakring.
O. W. Fischer, who has found out I'm making a go of it
in Vienna, writes to Rott, the director of the Burg Theater:
"see to it that he doesn't behave himself like Mozart before
the Archbishop of Salzburg . . . Kinski is the only true
genius among us. He's the only prince of God's grace!"
Rott talks a bunch of fluff about the planned five-year
contract. I demand the highest of pay and choice of plays.
Five years! That's already frightening enough! But for now
I'm just thinking of Goethe's Torquato Tasso. The play has
been on the theater's program for a while, and Rott lets me
incarnate Tasso according to my own interpretation. He
asks only that I get in touch with the director of the show,
Raoul Aslan, in order to lay out my ideas.
Aslan invites me to his apartment. He gives me such a
bunch of bullshit that I don't even notice at first that he's
got his heavy paw on my leg. He bids me goodbye with the
words, "So think about it, Tasso is like Toni Sailer sweeping
down a ski slope at a hundred miles an hour."
What have I gotten myself into?
Rott provides me with the rehearsal stage in the attic of
the Burg Theater, where I won't be disturbed by anyone for
four long weeks. My partners never come to rehearsal, and
I really get to like the chairs I use in place of the other
actors.
This Rott (Somehow it must come from the word "rot­
ten") has a mind to present me to the audience as Joseph
Kainz's successor; therefore, he wants me to wear the orig­
inal costume Joseph Kainz wore as Tasso, which is now
hanging on a dummy in the theater museum. It makes me
want to puke, and besides that, the costume doesn't fit,
even though Kainz must have been about my build. On top
of all that, it's moth-eaten.
A new costume true to Kainz's original costume is made
of pure silk, and a golden dagger is forged for me. The cost
is outrageous. But Rott has millions in state funds to squan­
der each year.
"We will adjust the entire program of the Burg Theater to
you," he says recklessly during dress rehearsal, more lies
pouring from his mouth. This fixed idea of having bought
me as the new Kainz goes so far that he starts scheduling
photo sessions between rehearsals, where I have to model
in costume for reporters. Like a pin-up. They drag me off to
Vienna's Kainz Monument. In front of the Bust of Kainz at
the Burg Theater. In front of the Kainz portrait at the Thea­
ter Hall of Fame. In front of his grave! It's like an ad for
Coca-Cola, I think to myself, except I don't get any money
for it. It disgusts me. The brownnosers at the Burg Theater
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had only kissed Kainz's ass when he got cancer and didn't
have much time left.
The other actors show up for dress rehearsal in their little
cliques. Most are condescending, "celebrated actors" not
exerting themselves very much. I myself am utterly shocked
to have to do it with real people in the flesh; I miss my
chairs.
After the dress rehearsal Aslan slaps his hands to his
head. His dream of the world champion skier Toni Sailer is
finished.
Kortner sends me a telegram: "I'm asking you to be
Prince Heinz at the Munich State Theater."
Anushka follows me to Munich. We rent a villa in Nymphenburg. I take the streetcar to rehearsal every day. At
night we fuck and beat each other. Since my whoring in
Vienna, I can't convince her that I want to fuck her and her
alone from morning till night, because she thinks I'm wast­
ing my strength on other women.
She cuts at her wrist with an old razor blade, right in the
middle of the street. I bandage her with my handkerchief
and take her home, where we fuck and beat each other up.
Arne must undergo surgery in Berlin for a brain tumor
and I send him my salary. Kortner knows it and often slips
me larger sums. He must do it secretly so his wife doesn't
see it.
On opening day a warrant for my arrest is sent out and
the patrol car is on its way to take me in. The reason is some
sort of fine I forgot or didn't even know about. Because I've
already taken my pay in advance and I think it concerns a
sum of several thousand dollars, Kortner first calls the Min­
ister of Justice to postpone my arrest and then the Minister
of Finance because of the amount to be paid. Amesmeier
intervenes, too, and has an ingenious idea: Every govern­
ment, every state, every county, every city must have a spe­
cial fund that may only be claimed for singular, unforeseen
cases. My case is one of those, because no precedent has
ever been set, at least at the State Theater, for the arrest of
a leading man on the day of the premiere. If the show were
to fall through because of that, the cost to the state would
be greater than if the court fine were paid by this fund.
Rudolf attains his goal. The fund pays my debt. So the state
pays the state with the state's money!
Anushka and I drive back to Vienna. The apartment on
Judengasse is ready and Anushka is resting from the exer­
tion, which was worse for her than for me. I leave for Berlin.
I am arrested at the Austrian border because there's
already another warrant out for me. What law haven't I
broken? Some court wants four thousand dollars from me.
A pigbreeder of a cop shoves me into a cell at the Salz­
burg Train Station. I kick the cell door until they let me call
Vienna, guarded of course. Erika is shooting in Vienna. It's
four in the morning when I rouse her out of bed in her hotel
room. She gets dressed, drives to the telegraph office, and
wires me the money. Half an hour later four thousand dol­
lars shows up at the border police station in Salzburg.
"Don't let them bring you down!" she adds.
I kiss the telegram.
"He's a megalomaniac. He wants to fill the Berlin Sports
Palace!" some jerk writes in the newspaper.
"I will fill it, you shit!"
Berliners rave about Tucholsky's Mother's Hands.
After that The Green Cockatoo by Schnitzler at the Peo­
ple's Theater. The story takes place during the French Rev-
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olution. The Green Cockatoo is the name of a dive in a dis­
reputable area of Paris. But this dive is famous because of a
group of actors. Each improvises on an experience that just
happened. To make it more realistic for the audience, each
one comes in from outside as if the actors themselves were
spectators. I am Henry, the lead character. He is known
among the people in the audience, and especially among
the aristocrats who come out of curiosity, as a genius. Most
of them actually come on account of him. Henry's wife is a
young actress among this bunch of unemployed comedians,
and Henry is madly in love with her. This evening he tells
how his wife cheated on him with a certain count whom
he, Henry, then stabbed. Afterward he has a crying fit and
collapses on the table where the bartender brings him a
mug of wine. Meanwhile the guests applaud frantically and
lick their lips in enjoyment of Henry's artistic performance.
Then the count, whom Henry has just spoken about, comes
into the bar as one of the audience and it turns out that he
really did have an affair with Henry's wife. Henry jumps
on the count and stabs him for good. No one, not even the
spectators in the theater, know what is reality. Then the
guests must flee the dive, because the revolution is raging
outside in the streets. After the first few shows, I really have
to get drunk every night to tolerate my fellow actors and
the unbearable show. I feel a little bit better when I pounce
on the count and stab him.
If you always need money like I do, then you can't be
selective about movies. It's not worth it to watch them
either, and they're all just one big heap of nonsense. What
else can I do but take the money and run?
Anushka is still with me. My whoring is getting out of
hand. From the extras, whom I fuck in the dressing room
and toilet, to my partners, whom I fuck against the wall
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while Anushka is waiting for me on the other side, to the
maid, whom I fuck in our bed. Anushka leaves for Vienna.
Back in Berlin I rent an empty six-room apartment on
Uhlandstrasse. Jessica helps me whitewash the walls. We
round up the furniture quickly. A table, a chair, a couple of
iron bed frames, mattresses, and some kitchenware.
As soon as it's known I have an apartment again, the bill
collectors swarm like a cloud of locusts. I throw my only
chair at one of them on the stairs. Jessica was right when
she advised me on my purchase; it's a sturdy chair, I can
use it again after that.
Whenever Jessica isn't living with me, my apartment is a
brothel. All possible types of women, whom I got to know
at one time or another, ring me out of bed at night and
always bring two or three girls and men along. I don't turn
on the light anymore and don't see their faces. We exchange
girls in the dark and no one knows who's fucking whom.
Jessica comes home from the market with a bag full of
groceries as the usher from the corner movie theater and I,
naked, are standing, stuck together, in the middle of the
room. Until now I have saved Jessica from the sight of what
goes on behind her back. She drops the sack, and oranges,
apples, carrots, and potatoes roll to our feet. And when the
whites of the shattered eggs spurt all over the floorboards
and onto her shoes, Jessica dashes from the apartment,
crying hysterically.
For a moment the usher and I stand there rooted
together, then she moves her lower body rhythmically, and
I reciprocate even more strongly. But I don't want to come
inside the usher. I want to hold back my sperm, drive over
to Jessica's, ask her to forgive me, and shoot it inside her.
When I ring at Jessica's door, her mother appears. Jessica
has taken a sleeping pill and is in bed. I take off my pants
and go to her room, then I squirt my load into her. Jessica
gets pregnant. She knows I can't stay with her and is afraid
of being alone with two children. I can't prevent her from
getting an abortion.
Ingo is one of the boys who crashes and fucks at my
place. He plays guitar like a gypsy. We rehearse the ballads
and songs by Brecht that I will recite at the Sports Palace in
Berlin and at Vienna City Hall.
Bertolt Brecht is dead. I ask his widow, Helene Weigel,
for the texts I'm missing. I can't find them in any of the
bookstores. The music, too, Weigel is an envious bitch who
want to stick her snout into everything she has nothing to
do with.
"I'll put the Brecht program together for you," she says,
as if Brecht had assigned her to do this as he was dying.
"Thank you, Frau Weigel," I say, "I'm putting my pro­
gram together alone." I know the old bag will never forgive
me for it.
The shows at City Hall are sold out. Our audience is
schoolchildren, nuns, policemen, workers, the rich, beg­
gars, military, prostitutes.
Three records are recorded live. But the albums can't go
on sale. The dead Brecht's jealous wife won't give the rights
to the texts, even though all the records are already pressed.
I go into a glove store on Kurfiirstendamm next to the
delicatessen, wiping the salami smell of my hands off on
my jeans. I saw a blonde through the windowpane. She is
pulling a glove onto a male customer's outstretched hand. I
go into the store. While the woman is helping the customer,
I have time to look at her more carefully. She must be about
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seventeen. She moves gracefully and innocently. Her eyes
are a greenish gray. Her blood-red lips are full and halfway
open like a thirsty baby's.
She's finished with the customer and turns to me. When
she looks at me, she blushes red like her mouth.
"What kind of gloves would you like, sir?"
"As tight as possible, I don't care about the color." She
looks at me, understanding that I don't want any gloves,
and drops her eyes, smiling.
She pulls a tight glove over my outstretched hand. I brace
my elbow on the counter, spreading out my fingers. She
puts the glove on my hand. She pulls the leather tight over
my fingers, massaging each of them. I can feel her hot fin­
gers through the thin leather. Who knows what she's
thinking?
"Don't you want to come with me? Don't you want to
give up fitting gloves?"
Her boss comes out from behind the curtain to the back
room; she looks like a frog.
"Is the gentleman satisfied?"
"With your salesgirl, yes. I'll take her with me."
The frog is struck speechless. Before she even has time to
let it register, Biggi and I are out the door.
Biggi doesn't get her month's pay because she didn't give
notice in due time. She doesn't need the pitiful salary any­
way. I have contracts for tours, and Biggi will have every­
thing she desires.
Biggi grew up modestly with her mother and is thankful
and happier about a single flower than an expensive ring.
I clothe her with the most important things. Everything
she selects and tries on suits her well and fits her body as if
it were tailored just for her. She never wants the most
expensive things and always asks the price.
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The tours run amok. Without end. A hundred times over.
A thousand times over.
Biggi is always with me. She never tires of taking care of
every mess I haven't the nerves for, because the shows
demand my all. She sits in the audience every night. She
comes to my dressing room during intermissions to wipe
the sweat from my face and body. She bears all my excesses
and gives me her love, which never runs dry.
We travel by car, by train, by plane. We sleep very little;
the tour often moves on the very same night. During the
first tour I appear 120 times in a row and give five shows in
twenty-four hours on one weekend. More and more shows.
More and more sellouts. And I want more and more money.
So that I can squander more and more.
At first I get five hundred dollars a night, then seven
hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand dol­
lars per show. We check into the most luxurious hotels, live
in the royal suites, drink champagne, and eat whatever we
have an appetite for.
"How many days are there in a year?" I ask my agent.
"Three hundred sixty-five, why?"
"Then schedule me for 365 shows a year."
He refuses to have anything to do with suicidal behavior,
he says.
Biggi is now in her ninth month with her baby and still
accompanies me. Although sleet has made the snowcovered autobahn terribly slick, the speedometer in the Jag
never shows less than 125 miles per hour. I never take my
foot off the pedal; we have to make the evening show. We
speed past the Eastern Zone border police. Through the
lowering gate, they shoot at us.
Just before Kiel, A Volkswagen moves from right to left
in front of our nose without signaling, even though I have
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my headlights on. I try to slow down. We slip and slide; the
Jag is ripped open on the left side by the steel beams on the
median. By the time we get to Kiel, the audience is already
seated and waiting for the curtain to rise. I rush onstage as
I am. After the show we move on. In Hamburg I have to
record albums for Deutsche Grammophon the next morn­
ing. The Jag again slips on the ice, despite our moderate
speed. I regain control. But we then swerve so close to a
tractor trailer that I have to jerk the wheel counterclockwise
and we slide all the way over into the opposite lane, where
another car coming straight toward us is only about 150
yards away. As I am about to return to the right lane, I
notice another car rapidly gaining on me. I try to avoid dis­
aster, without success. The Jag spins around twice and skids
down an embankment, where it turns upside-down. The
Jag is on its head. The backrests of our seats are broken, but
we're still buckled in. When I come to, I can hear Biggi
whimpering. The doors are dented shut, but I am able to
kick a window out. I crawl outside, and just before the car
explodes I rip Biggi from the rubble.
She can't walk on one leg. Besides, she has suffered
shock and is stammering confusedly. I try to calm her down
and take her into my bleeding arms. The trunk flew open
during the wreck and parts of our luggage whizzed through
the cold air. I press Biggi close to me to protect her from the
snowy cold.
Meantime, other cars stop and their occupants rush out
to help us. Somewhat later, the fire department and police
show up at the scene of the accident.
In addition to a wounded arm, I have a bump on my head
the size of a fist. Biggi gets hold of herself and can walk,
too. Nothing has happened to her. The baby kicks in her
womb.
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After formalities are taken care of, a patrol car takes us to
the next town and we take a taxi from there to Hamburg.
I record five albums in Hamburg while Biggi gets a good
rest for once. Then I buy diapers and a pair of light blue
leather shoes with white lace and roll a huge bear on
wheels in front of Biggi's bed, for the baby to ride. We fly
to Berlin a day later.
That same evening Biggi goes into labor. I take her to the
clinic. She has the baby that same night. It's a girl and I
name her Nastassja. Nastassja is the young woman who
burns with passion in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. Nastassja
will sleep in her baby buggy at first. I had it sent from
England. It has big wheels and looks like the ugly Queen
of England's carriage. Pearl gray with a white top, like our
Jaguar, in which Nastassja raced four thousand miles while
in Biggi's womb.
I must go away again. I must fulfill my contracts.
After another two and a half months, I interrupt the
tours. They're killing me, and I don't want to be apart from
Biggi and Nastassja for so long.
We rent a villa on the edge of the Green Forest. Seven
rooms, three baths, a garage, and a big garden with a sand­
box for Nastassja. The villa is a rococo pavilion skirted by
a staircase leading down to the garden where laburnum,
rhododendron, lilacs, and roses bloom.
I buy Biggi dresses, furs, jewelry, perfumes. I have cus­
tom-made suits tailored. Custom-made silk shirts. Custommade gloves, shoes, pajamas. And even custom-made silk
underwear. I have sheets made from cambric with ruffles
and lace, and pillows and comforters filled with the finest
down.
Biggi and I play tennis. I buy our own horses. The table
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in the dining room is so overloaded it sags, looking like a
table in a fairy-tale palace in A Thousand and One Nights.
Setting and clearing it takes two hours in itself: flowers,
mountains of fruit, the various wines, schnapps, liqueurs in
bright cut crystal carafes, entire roasts, goose at any season,
wild game, marzipan, and assorted chocolates and candies.
We eat off the finest Meissen porcelain with gold knives,
forks, and spoons and drink from bright cut crystal chalices.
The dream of the street kid has become reality. But I don't
want it anymore.
The salesgirl at the store where we bought Nastassja's
baby clothes brings the big package to our house. Biggi is
with Nastassja in her room nursing her. I open the door.
The girl has fixed herself up for the occasion and is wearing
a very short dress. Her lips are painted with loud lipstick. I
take the package from her and ask her to stand in the entry­
way a moment, as I search for a tip. When I come back to
the entry way, the girl looks at me as if she's expecting
something other than the bill I'm holding out to her. She
doesn't even see it. In a trance I push the handle to the
guest toilet down mechanically with my right hand, grab
the girl's pussy, and push her into the toilet, locking the
door behind us.
It lasts five minutes at the most. Then I take Biggi the
package and we try the little dresses on Nastassja all
afternoon.
Were Biggi to spy on me or have the least suspicion that
I'm cheating on her, I would have less of a bad conscience.
But Biggi has such great trust in me that she never once asks
me where I'm going or why I often don't come home until
morning. I tell her, "I must go," and that's enough. It's
unclear to me why I'm fucking other girls more and more.
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Because I'm as horny for her now as I was on day one. Even
more so. I get hornier and hornier. And she's getting
hornier, the more often and shamelessly I fuck her.
I receive a letter sealed with an enormous coat of arms.
An English countess wants me to recite the Hamlet mono­
logue to her alone in her castle in England. She offers a
great deal of money. She wants to come to Berlin to hear
my reply.
A week later she calls. I meet her in the Tiergarten. We
walk a long time and talk about Hamlet. She isn't pretty and
she doesn't smell all that great to me. Besides, if I fuck her
right here, and if she pays me right here, I won't have to go
to England where the beer is piss warm and has no foam.
Her Hamlet is a pain in the ass.
It starts to drizzle. I tell her we can seek shelter in the
bushes; we push through the thicket. We find a place where
we can't be seen from any side. She is somewhat embar­
rassed when I undress her and lay her down on the moist
ground. She has her period.
When it's dark, I say I must go. She stays in the bushes.
I orient myself by the Column of Triumph, walk a little in
the rain to get rid of the smell of her blood. I see on a clock
that it is midnight. I hail a taxi.
Everything is asleep at our villa. While I'm taking off my
clothes in the dressing room, I discover blood smeared on
my fly. I slip into the kitchen and rinse out the zipper under
cold water. Then I hang the wet part of the pants on the
heater, crawl into bed with Biggi, and unload once more,
while, half asleep, she wraps her legs around me.
Two weeks later Scotland Yard calls up asking if I know
where the countess is, because she hasn't returned to
England and left only my address with her family. I say I
never saw the countess, that she was going to call me, yes,
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but never did. The countess has disappeared. I hope noth­
ing has happened to her.
Biggi thinks she's pregnant again. She has a miscarriage
on the toilet. She held her hand out underneath and brings
me what she wrapped up in tissue. She is very upset. The
body looks like a small white frog; the arms, legs, hands,
and feet are nearly developed. The head is recognizable
only by its shape; the face is nearly featureless. Where
you'd think the eyes would be, we find two dark points the
size of a pinhole. Biggi is despondent and depressed for a
few days. Then she recovers and I try to occupy her time,
so that she doesn't think about it anymore.
Anna Magnani and I want to do Ghosts together. But we
both have so many filming engagements that we can't set a
date. Films, one after the other: I don't even read the screen­
plays anymore.
The Red Fog is shot in Vienna; to be more exact, it's shot
on the Hungarian border. We live in Vienna. Anushka
offers us her apartment on Judengasse. She loves Biggi and
Nastassja, whom I wrote to her about and sent pictures of.
Nastassja is almost a year old now and is standing up in her
baby crib. She walks for the first time in the public garden
on Karntner Ring.
I'm on location most of the time, fifty miles from Vienna,
and sometimes sleep over in a small border town when the
streets are snowed over or when I'm too tired to drive back
to Vienna at night. It gets harder and harder for me to leave
this small village, which is famous for its stork nests on the
house chimneys and for its wine that makes everyone
drunk and dumb.
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Sonja and I must take speed, because we hang on our
chairs like two cripples between shots and don't have the
energy to eat anymore.
During the shooting these film creeps almost burn me
alive. I must go into the thick, dry reed where I'm supposed
to burn: So the screenplay goes. The reeds are set on fire
with fifty gallons of gasoline. Suddenly the wind changes
direction and high flames close in on me. I kick through the
icy crust of the muddy ground and jump into the water to
douse my clothes and hair and storm through the wall of
fire with my head down like a bull. I stumble many times
in the process, the knifing reeds stab me in the veins of my
forearms. Blood squirts.
"Magnificent," some sadistic shit of a director bleats out.
But the shabby crew doesn't even have a bandage and I
must tie up my veins with strips of material torn from my
shirt. Every day during the filming of this bullshit it's like
this.
Sonja must go to a dentist in Vienna to have a tooth
pulled. I knock out one of my incisors with a hammer, so
that we don't have to separate for a single day. I have to go
to the dentist, too; we can't shoot with a space between my
teeth. Sonja and I drive to Vienna.
It takes us a day to drive the fifty miles, because we take
off on every side road to do a number. I don't go to Judengasse in Vienna. Sonja and I check into a hotel. After we go
to the dentist, we call the producer to say we must wait for
our teeth for three days. Which is actually the truth.
On the way back, we only drive onward when we can't
fuck anymore. When it gets dark we simply drive a few
yards out onto a frozen field. We lock the doors and get
naked. When we are tangled up and covered in sweat and
Sonja kicks her legs in orgasm, pressing the horn on the
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steering wheel with her foot, a patrolman shines his flash­
light into the windows of the car, misty from our body heat.
I jump behind the wheel, stark naked, and tear out so
quickly that he must jump out of the way.
Sonja and I have a couple days off. But her husband, the
conductor of the Berlin Radio Philharmonic, has come from
Berlin and she has to fuck him the following days. Biggi has
gone with Nastassja, Anushka, and Anushka's daughter to
the mountains near Moon Lake. Biggi had asked me to meet
them there.
The keys at Judengasse are with the porter. Because Sonja
can't possibly leave her husband, I. plan to meet Barbara
before taking the 3:10 p . m . train to Moon Lake.
At 2:25 p . m . I am entirely worn out. We don't have time
to wash. The wind blowing through the train and the fresh
snowy air at Moon Lake will rid Barbara's strong odor from
my skin and hair.
Nastassja walks out of the farmhouse where they are
staying. I hold her above my head and spin around until
she gasps in laughter and the ground spins beneath us,
making us fall down. Then Biggi, Anushka, and her daugh­
ter come out. Anushka's daughter embraces me so tightly
that I must force myself free. Biggi notices it immediately.
The little girl kisses me uninterruptedly on the mouth with
wet, open lips. And like an animated puppet, but extremely
agitated, she says:
"I love you . . . I love you . . . I love you . . . I love
you . . . "
It's fine with me, but not with Biggi. Anushka just smiles
slyly.
♦
*
*
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My next film is in Hamburg. We're taking Sonja's car, and
she rings at our house to pick me up. Biggi and I had been
hitting each other. It is the first time we've gone so far.
Since I first met Sonja, there has been a growing tension
between Biggi and me, expressed in cursing and fighting
that becomes more intense as the situation gets intolerable.
I don't think that she knows about Sonja, that she has a
clue, but she is often sad and absent.
Sonja doesn't come into the house; she waits in the car
for over half an hour. Biggi's eyes are swollen with tears,
and she keeps crying. I am desperate and at a loss as to
what to do. But I can't delay my departure, because we
must be in Hamburg late this afternoon. I leave Biggi
behind in this state.
Now Sonja, too, is developing an attitude. When I refuse
to move into the Hotel Bellevue with her in Hamburg
because I'd rather stay in the Prem, she misunderstands my
intention and kicks the car door shut with such force that
the glass shatters.
We don't shoot on the weekends and drive to Travemiinde. When she picks me up Friday evening, she's
pumped full of whiskey. I say I'll drive the car. She refuses.
She goes a hundred on the autobahn; her Mercedes doesn't
go any faster. She doesn't pay attention to the road but
gazes at me with shiny metallic eyes.
I shoot the rest of the Hamburg film at night on an ocean
liner in the harbor. A former dancer takes up my time
between the final scenes. She's from Las Vegas and is truly
hollow. At nine o'clock I show up at the Hotel Prem, where
Sonja has been waiting for me since eight. She just says
"fucking ram!"
Sonja got pregnant in Traverminde. Her husband will fig­
ure out it's not his child. Today is the last day I'll meet
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Sonja. We want to try not to see each other. She confesses
she's had an abortion.
For a while I shoot most of my films for Rialto-Constantin. When I need more money and ask the shithead for a
bigger advance, he says, "O f course, my boy, come to my
office tomorrow."
When I get to his office he has a contract for five more
films prepared, which he lays before me for signature
before he'll give me the promised advance. So I've sold
myself for another year. I have no idea what I've signed. I
have to take on any shit. As I've said, it's all the same to
me.
The more money I earn, the more I spend.
"Why are you making such crappy films? You used to do
better stuff," the trashman calls over the fence of our villa,
as he picks up the trash barrel.
I rub my fingers together to signify cash.
He understands and smiles.
I'm sick of these idiotic films. It's always the same non­
sense. Nevertheless, I make the bosses millionaires and
they get a state premium or something on top of it. People
must like what I do.
The lack of fantasy and the stupidity is boundless, k l a u s
k i n s k i , o u r g r e a t e s t m u r d e r e r say the headlines of the mis­
erable newspaper. One lamebrain outdoes the next. In the
very beginning one of these idoits called me t h e g r e a t e s t
H O P E A M O N G U P - A N D - C O M I N G C O M IC S ! Later I'm TH E L A S T
r o m a n t i c ! t h e w i l d l o v e r ! The list of frenzied comparisons
and characterizations is never ending. Thank God they hav­
en't compared me with the fat Queen of Holland yet. And
suddenly I'm t h e c r a z y m a n , without knowing it.
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The Munich International Theater Festival. I'm not inter­
ested in playing the dauphin in Saint Joan, but I sign on.
First, because I can see Pola again; second, because I'm paid
exceptionally well for the festival; and third because I'll be
shooting a film for television in Munich at the same time.
The rehearsals for Saint Joan are so deadly dull that I
avoid them whenever I can. When I don't show up for
rehearsal, the director's assistant calls in sick. Then we fuck
in the forest near Bavaria Studios, where we root up the
moist humus like boars.
During the shows I do whatever comes to mind; it's the
only way I can bear the deadly boredom of Bernard Shaw.
Biggi has come to Munich with Nastassja, and we rent a
furnished apartment near the English Garden. I have to go
to Vienna to record albums. They stay in Munich.
The recording is scheduled to last until six in the morn­
ing. I'm tired of speaking to a wall alone in a studio. I must
have living beings in front of me if I'm going to sell my
feelings. By four-thirty, I've had enough.
I leave the studio.
Try as I may, nothing will get me out of having to tour
again. My managers insist upon the fulfillment of contracts.
I tell them I want to recite the New Testament, that I want
to rework it into a modern treatment and that the tour can
begin in a month. "No way," the manager screams, scared
shitless about what my version of the New Testament
might be. He recommends a tour featuring the most famous
classical monologues.
"Okay," I say. "I won't read the scripts from the book
like Gielgud did on his tour of America. I'm going to incar­
nate Romeo, Franz Moor, Marc Antony, Tasso, Faust, Danton, and Richard III in original costume." I put the program
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together, selecting twenty monologues. I decide on Tchai­
kovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B minor, the PaMtique, for
the intermissions while I'm changing costumes. The show
will last about four hours.
I study the lines silently, sitting in a chair in the library
of our villa without moving my lips for weeks. All of these
monologues are full of outbursts and cries of despair, but I
don't utter a single audible word or suggest movement the
whole time. I know my voice and its power of expression.
The rest is instinct rising from the soul, from the shock of
the moment.
During these four weeks I don't break my concentration.
But through the intensive work and stillness that I've cre­
ated around myself, which can be shattered by the smallest,
most distant noise, I have become so irritable that Biggi suf­
fers. But Biggi and Nastassja are happy to have me at home.
I am scheduled for one hundred consecutive perfor­
mances, to be held in theaters, arenas, and stadiums in
about eighty cities. After that a second tour of Shakespeare
monologues is planned for Europe, Australia, Asia, and the
United States. I have a lighting and recording technician
who takes care of the music, a dresser who is also my pri­
vate secretary, and a chauffeur who is also my bodyguard.
The opening at the Berlin Sports Palace lasts five hours.
The clamoring lasts over an hour. This show will be the
most exhausting of my life.
Frankfurt. A full-length picture of me as Hamlet appears
on the front page of the daily newspaper. Next to it, another
picture, a nude photo of an enticing striptease dancer. She
strips accompanied by my first Villon recording, "I'm So
Wild About Your Strawberry Lips." So finally, the honor
I'm due, I think to myself.
After the show I stroll down the Frankfurt strip near the
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main train station. The whores let me sign my autograph
on their breasts, on their panties, right on their pussies. But
I have to preserve my strength. Not only because of the
shows. A girl wrote to me in the Frankfurter Hof that she
wants to meet me and included her delicate age. She studies
classical ballet and requested tomorrow at midnight,
because she's taking her mother to the train station at 11:3ο
P.M.
I am obsessed with the idea of forcing myself into this
impatient swan, though I neither know what she looks like
nor how she'll fuck. I will go to bed early tonight and not
get up until the next afternoon.
After the show I jump into the car sweating and race to
Frankfurter Hof. I bathe in a flash, order a raw egg with
honey, and smoke one cigarette after the other, not taking
my eyes from the clock, listening for the slightest sound.
Midnight. There's a ring at the door. I nearly fall on my
face before ripping it open. She has dark brown hair down
to her hips. A pale child's face. Sparkling black eyes, long
silken lashes that are just as black, and a mouth like a burst­
ing wound. She's wearing high heels.
I unbutton her blouse. Her breasts are underdeveloped,
tender things. I pull her to bed. The telephone rings! The
hotel manager orders me to send my visitor from my room.
He says nothing of an underaged girl. I pack my things with
the little one. As we come out of my suite, house detectives
have already posted themselves at the ends of the long
corridors.
It's not easy to find a hotel, because my little one has no
ID with her. I think of the hotel at the railway station,
where I've stayed before and where the staff probably
remember me well, because of my good tips. And I'm right,
the receptionist doesn't even ask for my "wife's" passport.
The porter, to whom I slip a hundred dollars says: "Does
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the gentleman have any special desires?" I make a sign to
the lamebrain that he should keep his mouth shut.
I stand her in the middle of the room and slowly remove
her clothes. Unbearably slowly: the most refined striptease.
I want to relish any surprises to the utmost. I marvel at
everything about her, as if I had never seen a naked girl
before. I rediscover everything. Before I pull down her panties, I finger the form of her pubic lips, which are outlined
powerfully through the thick cotton. She has a high, firm
ass. Sweat pours from her pores, moistening her crack. Her
armpits are wet. I spin her around. I lie on the carpet, look
at her from below, make her walk away and come back
toward me. I bring my face very close to her and sniff. Heat
streams out at me. A twitch goes through her body. I trace
her pubic lips with my fingers. She lets out a fart and pulls
her panties down herself. Her black pubic hair is uncannily
long. She spreads her legs wider and wider apart. I'm held
under a magic spell. She lies on the bed without pulling
down the sheets. She shivers.
Hamburg Theater in Besenbinderhof. The spectators beat
each other up because of me. Five patrol cars surround the
theater. The promoter, Collin, cries backstage.
The cops come to my dressing room after the show, ask­
ing if I want to leave the theater through a back entrance. I
wouldn't think of it! As we drive out of the theater court­
yard, girls break through the cops' blockade, showering the
closed windows of my car with kisses.
The same thing happens ninety-nine times. Everywhere,
excitement, clapping, fighting, hysterical screaming, clam­
oring, crying girls loving me in numbers. Yes! They love me
because I shamelessly expose their feelings to them like no
one else, scorching them and burning into their souls.
The final performance is at City Hall in Vienna. Eight
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thousand spectators. After the show a bill collector is wait­
ing in my dressing room. Who knows who wants money
from me again. I don't even ask him. I throw him out. The
dressing room door is open, the microphones on the nearby
stage are still turned on, and thousands of spectators hear
my rage.
Through my contracts with Constantin Distribution, I
have to travel around like a salesman, wherever they send
me from one day to the next. And I am a salesman, a highly
paid salesman.
My first business trip is to Pakistan and India to shoot my
first Italian film.
Biggi wants to stay at home with Nastassja. Anushka
lives with us for the time being, keeping house and taking
care of Nastassja.
I get a vaccination in my chest at the clinic and fly alone
to Rome, where the Italian cast is waiting for me and where
we board a Pakistani plane to Karachi.
Giorgio, the costume designer for the film, moves into the
seat on my right for the endless flight. The n o s m o k i n g and
f a s t e n y o u r s e a t b e l t s signs haven't even gone out before
he's got his steamy hand on my thigh. I don't want to be
brusque with him, because he is very nice, but I'm hot and
nauseous anyhow, and I can't let him leave his thick,
clammy paw that weighs at least two pounds on my thigh
all the way to Karachi.
In Karachi we have a two-hour layover, board a twoengine plane, and fly over the foothills of the Himalayas for
a torturous eight hours until we're at the first location. The
plane can't land for two more hours because of a cyclone
directly above the airport. When we finally land, the plane
is full of passengers' barf. The airplane has no ventilation.
As always, I try to get rid of the others as quickly as I can,
throw my suitcase into my room, and let a taxi driver jabber
at me in front of the hotel. I know what he's saying and
simply answer, "Show me the way."
The Italian doctor who takes care of our troupe presses a
small tube into my hand and insists that I take one pill a
day so as not to catch cholera. Before our arrival there was
an epidemic, which killed ten thousand people. I put a pill
in my mouth and swallow it with some spit. I have other
worries.
We travel over unpaved, slimy roads, through craterlike
potholes, ditches, and cracks. The junky American Buick is
sprayed with mud, its seats covered in plastic, making you
stick to it if you brace yourself with a hand. I am tossed
from side to side. When I can't see another house or car for
miles, but only camel caravans with hundreds of eagles cir­
cling above them and the electric sun above the green gla­
ciers of the Himalayas, I ask the taxi driver why we have to
go so far to find a whore.
"Special," he says grinning into the rearview mirror. He
has a monstrous gold tooth. He's heading for a solitary,
half-built brick house.
"I wait," says Goldtooth once we reach the shack. I take
in deep breaths of the fresh evening air. A door opens and
a young, towering woman appears, bending at the door­
way. She has to bend down, because she's a giant. She's at
least seven feet tall. Broad like a heavyweight. Her stiff,
erect tits are as big as udders. Her arms are as strong as my
legs. Her hands could choke me with ease. Her dark blond
hair reaches all the way down to her ass and is braided into
a pony tail as thick as a python. Her butt cheeks and hips
are those of a young mare. Her shoe size must be fifteen.
Her vagina must be as big as my head. Everything is in
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exact proportion and fits together in perfect harmony like a
colossal, breathtaking statue by Maillol. Her skin is tanned
but not dark— healthy and firm as a farm girl's. She is beau­
tiful. Neither her body nor her face convey that she is a
prostitute. Her expression is dreamy, naive. She smiles
shyly. Goldtooth was right. She is special.
Her caresses aren't calculated. She doesn't rush in the
least— as if time had come to a standstill, as if there were
no time at all, only love.
The shooting of the film is indescribable. I'm supposed to
be a fanatic Indian rousing the population against the
English. For this reason the makeup artist paints my face up
with a chocolate-colored solution and glues a beard onto
my face. The procedure takes four hours every morning.
After that Giorgio pulls some sort of white robe over me,
the material stinging my skin like flesh-eating ants. Then he
ties a gold belt around me. He wraps a turban around my
head; it provokes a pitiful shake of the head from the
Indians.
Not having read my part because no one gave me the
script or explained it to me and because I don't understand
the Italian director, who's always screaming, I just try to
protect myself from the dust clouds that surround us morn­
ing, noon, and night. The hellish heat burns deep into my
bowels. There's only boiled water to drink. Our food comes
wrapped in dirty greasy paper. I don't want to know what's
inside. I never open it.
I can't sleep in the hotel, can't even stay in my room for
a while, can't even breathe, because the ventilator in the
ceiling is hopeless, managing only a deafening noise. But
most of all, I cannot sleep because I'm always thinking of
the giant and I can't find the taxi driver who took me to her.
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I don't remember his face at all, and all taxi drivers have
gold teeth. I ask them about the giant, but no one knows a
woman as tall as the one I describe.
My blood is cooking. I go anywhere the taxi drivers will
take me: to sleazy houses where pockmarked girls are
brought to me from brothels; to labyrinthine farmhouses
behind high walls where I'm locked in so I don't split with­
out paying and where I feel my way in the dark through
low mud huts over naked women's bodies lying on the
slimy ground. I ravish them without getting a look at their
faces. I can't forget the giant.
During the final shooting in some catacomb of Rome, I
must repeat the scene where I rouse the Indian population.
I have to scream some lines in Hindu without knowing
what I'm even saying. But the director just wants me to
repeat my wild movements and says I can scream whatever
I want. They dub it anyway.
"Why doesn't someone take a hammer and smash your
mug in? It's your fault I can't fuck my giant anymore!" I
scream, pointing at the director.
I haven't even been back for two days and Constantin is
already calling me: "You have to go to Mexico this weekend
to shoot a film about car racing."
"I'll buy myself a Spanish dictionary today," I yell into
the receiver, already hearing the wild roar of Ferraris in my
ears.
That was yesterday. The shithead calls me back up today:
"You must go to Madrid in two days to do a Western."
So I go to Madrid.
On the first day of filming, I refuse to put on a stupid
cowboy hat with a foul sweatband. They should at least
have their rags sent to the cleaners. The Spanish director
flips out and wants to force me to wear the hat.
I tell this artist to fuck himself and take off. Too bad. I
had my eye on Anita Ekberg.
But things don't go as smoothly as I'd hoped. A contract
with a distributor is something like a contract with the
Mafia. You can't cancel a contract whenever you like.
Grumbling doesn't help. And so I'm transferred to a film in
Prague for disciplinary reasons. It's called Golden City.
Olga is seventeen and has curly gold hair. She is the
Czech baby star. The government took her passport away
because she secretly allowed herself to be photographed
nude for Playboy. I have to smuggle her into my hotel. Not
that the Communist busybodies have anything against
fucking, but they have something against individuals who
fuck in hotels they're not checked into.
In spite of Olga's not making a sound when she has an
orgasm, we probably would have been together during the
entire shooting of the film had another woman not entered
my life. Dominique Bosquero, of Italian and French paren­
tage, is a vampire who sucks out the marrow of men's
spines. She calls me up and asks me why I'm not staying in
the same hotel as she. I say, "For political reasons." She
says I should come to her. Olga, who's sitting next to me
on the bed, doesn't understand what I'm saying, because I
speak French with Dominique. I tell Olga I have to meet
some acquaintances who are staying in Prague for the day
and promise to meet her in front of the hotel early tomor­
row morning to take her to Barandorf Studio, as I do every
day.
But on the gray, foreboding morning after our first night
together, Dominique, who also has to go to the studio,
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wants to ride with me. I wonder aloud what we should do
about Olga, because my Jaguar has only two seats. But
Dominique is unperturbed. I tell her we must hurry. Maybe
Olga won't be on time and we won't have to wait for her.
Dominique takes her time on purpose. She knows well that
I will never choose her over Olga.
Dominique gets into the Jag as Olga storms towards us
from the other side of the street, where she had been hiding
behind an advertisement pillar, and tries to pull Dominique
out of the Jaguar by the hair. Dominique retaliates. The
women scratch, kick, and spit on each other amid a babble
of Italian and French curses. Olga slaps me in the face and
walks away crying.
I must go to Yugoslavia to shoot a cowboy movie. The
film in Prague is far from finished, but both films are for
Constantin, who has worked it out that way. Dominique is
outraged because she can't come along. She has various
scenes to film without me in Prague. I try to call Dominique
from Yugoslavia. But it's impossible to call from the boondock where we're filming. I wait fourteen, sixteen, twenty
hours for a connection; when I get through, I can't hear a
single word clearly, or the line is interrupted even before
we've spoken to one another. The next connection takes
fourteen, sixteen, twenty hours. I come back to Prague in a
week. Dominique picks me up at the airport and we make
a dash for bed. After a week I have to go back to Yugosla­
via. I try to call her again. Again the connection takes four­
teen, sixteen, twenty hours and we can't speak to each
other. After another week I'm in Prague again.
I haven't called Biggi even once from Prague. When she
calls me, I lie and say that I'm shooting day and night. I am
a pig. But I am rendered powerless by Dominique, who has
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enslaved me with her cunt. Dominique is obsessed with me,
too; she asks me to stay with her, live with her. I promise I
will.
Fellini wants me in his next film and asks me to come to
Rome.
In Rome Dominique drives me to Fellini's home. Fie
struts around for hours speaking French, because I don't
speak Italian yet. He starts to get on my nerves. It's all so
very important! I whisper to Dominique, "Let's get out of
here!"
Dominique lives in a large sunny apartment in Cassia
Antica, a downward view of all of Rome from her huge ter­
races. Dominique has fun dressing me. She buys me jerseys,
swimming trunks, trousers, shirts, shoes. She earns a fair
amount. She's a friend of Agnelli and owns a lot of jewelry.
I have to go to Yugoslavia in forty-eight hours, this time
to Split. Biggi and Nastassja are coming to visit. I don't want
them to travel alone, so I plan to meet them at the Munich
airport. Biggi and Nastassja are going to spend five weeks
with me and are impatient and happy.
I am nervous and scattered, because I'm wracking my
brains about how to tell Biggi the truth about Dominique. I
must tell her, there's no doubt about that.
The more truthful I am with Biggi, the better it will be for
her and me. But I won't tell her here. Not at the airport.
Later.
The first evening in Split, the telephone rings as Biggi,
Nastassja, and I are having dinner in our apartment. It's
Dominique. She asks me when I'm coming back to Rome
and why I'm behaving so strangely on the telephone. I can't
speak as I want to. Biggi and Nastassja stare at me. And
again, because the telephone connection is bad, I scream so
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loudly the whole hotel must be able to hear me. Biggi
doesn't understand French, yet I can't control myself and
yell "Je t'aime! Je t'aime!" into the receiver. Biggi holds onto
Nastassja so that she doesn't make a sound or bother me. I
can't keep the truth a secret any longer.
" . . . which means you want to be alone, without us?"
Biggi asks after I stuttered that we might not be together all
the time, even though I love them both.
"It means that we must separate, at least for a while."
"You mean that you need peace and quiet, that you must
be alone. I understand. But for how long?"
"I don't know."
"But you'll come back, won't you?"
"No . . . yes . . . no . . . I mean, yes! Of course I'll come
back to you. That is, I'm not even leaving you. I don't need
to be alone. I must go to another woman."
Biggi is eating all the grapes, probably without noticing,
because she wasn't hungry before the phone call.
"Woman? What woman?"
"A woman. I must go to another woman."
"Then you don't love us anymore?"
"My God! I love you as I always have. But I must go to
this woman! Do you understand?" I scream unfairly.
"N o," says Biggi in a husky voice.
"Forgive me. I am a complete idiot. I don't know what
I'm talking about."
"No. You know what you're talking about. Now I realize
what you want to say."
"What?"
"That you love us, but that this woman means more to
you than us. Why did you even have us come to Yugosla­
via? Nastassja and I were so happy to be able to be with
you."
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"I don't know what else to say. My head is one big gar­
bage can where everything is jumbled around."
The telephone rings again. It's Dominique again! Again I
yell into the receiver that I love her. The whole night goes
like this. She calls up three more times wanting to know
exactly when I'm coming to Rome, which I can't tell her.
Biggi and I stay up the entire night. But we can't find the
words to understand each other. Something has been sev­
ered. She doesn't cry but is frightened and defenseless. I
can imagine what will happen if I leave her.
The main thing is that she can't grasp what I've told her.
Biggi is an independent person by nature, capable of stand­
ing on her own two feet. Yet for all these years she gave me
so much of herself without hesitation. I took it, and now
she's suddenly standing there with nothing to hold on to.
She cannot comprehend why I want to leave her for
another woman. She thinks I'm lying when I say I love her.
During those five weeks I fly and drive to Dominique in
Rome nine times— once to see her for only half an hour,
having driven ninety miles and taken two planes.
The production moves from Split to another location.
Biggi's nerves are frayed; she cries all the time. She wants
to get away, immediately. I drive her the 250 miles to Ven­
ice. From Venice she doesn't have a connection until the
next morning; she stays in a hotel on the Lido. I jump into
a speedboat on the Grand Canale, which takes me across
the lagoons at high velocity to the airport. I am the last pas­
senger to board the plane to Rome.
The contract for the Fellini film has been drafted, but the
pay is a rip-off. This Fellini wants to have his cake and eat
it, too. I don't sign the contract and send a telegram: Va fare
in culo. The telegraph office calls up to say they cannot
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deliver such a message. I insist on my wording; the tele­
gram is sent.
Biggi writes to me: Only Nastassja prevented her from
committing suicide in Venice. As soon as the film being shot
in Yugoslavia is over, I fly to Biggi and Nastassja.
Biggi embraces me when I walk through the door, but it
isn't like before. She will never be that way again. We fuck
that night. Biggi is especially bold. She wants to show me
she is just as good a whore as Dominique.
Everything would have gone well but Dominique calls
three times in a row, because we keep getting cut off. I tell
her I'll call her back. Dominique doesn't believe me, so now
I'm getting it from both sides.
Biggi gets aggressive. She refuses to believe that Domi­
nique means more to me in bed than she does. She insists
that the only reason I can't stop my affair with Dominique
is that I don't love her, Biggi, anymore.
"Tell me you don't love me anymore!" she screams all
day long until she's hoarse, bursting into tears time and
again.
I can't tell her that I don't love her anymore. It would be
a lie.
For a week I run to the post office to call Dominique,
because it's impossible to do so at home. Then I fly to
Rome.
Dominique has changed, too. Now she wants to prove to
me that she is the better whore: She does everything in the
book to outfuck Biggi. She asks me for the first time which
positions I prefer and how she can make me have the
strongest orgasm. Every day she asks me what she should
wear and if she should wear panties and so on. She lets me
fuck her in panties with slits— yellow, orange, red, green,
turquoise— which she shows me, standing up, crouching,
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or bending over, convinced that she is outdoing Biggi's
finesse and boldness. She asks me if I want her to invite
other girls over, if I want to fuck her and other girls, if I
want to fuck the other girls in front of her. Or if I want
to watch how she does it with girls. Then she wonders
triumphantly whether Biggi would ever do all this for
me.
"Don't you want to marry me?" she asks hesitantly,
almost fearfully, as we're sitting in a garden restaurant at
Ponte Milvio. And as if I had already answered her, she is
suddenly sad. There is nothing spoiled or perverse about
her anymore; the cynicism with which she usually tries to
protect her innocent helplessness is gone. Now she's just a
lonely little girl born in a mountain village on the FrenchItalian border and longing for love and protection, like
every other girl on earth.
"I can't marry you, Dominique. I would marry you, but I
can't leave Biggi alone."
"You're bourgeois!" she cries, full of hate.
"Don't be ridiculous."
"My whole life I have longed for the man I love. And
now when I've found him, he's too much of a coward to
marry me."
She cries.
"I'm not afraid to marry you, Dominique. Why does one
need courage for something like that? I'll tell you something
that I didn't know until now. I love you."
"But you love Biggi, too."
"Yes. I love you both."
I can't tell her that I love all women, and that because of
that I can't marry any. I don't say anything. I dry her tears,
which are dripping into the minestrone. I cancel our order
for trout and we leave.
That night we sleep on the terrace closely entwined,
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spent. She has had an enormous couch made for us,
because she knows I like best to sleep under the sky.
The breakfast table on the terrace is set. And as the maid
pours out the steaming coffee, bitching that we, as always,
let everything get cold, we embrace each other naked for, I
think, the last time. Below, Rome is beginning to hustle and
bustle.
After breakfast we walk to Via Nemea, a luxury complex
with ten palazzos, tennis courts, and a swimming pool,
where a penthouse has opened up. I rent it, paying for a
year in advance. I have decided to stay in Rome. If Biggi
and Nastassja want to move to Rome, too, the apartment is
big enough for three. Dominique takes me to the airport.
Biggi wants to move into the Via Nemea with Nastassja
and me. We cancel the lease on the house in Berlin and
switch over to a two-room apartment for the time being,
because Biggi wants to keep a place on the forest lake in
Wannsee, where her mother is.
I must do an English movie in London. I rent a mews
house across from Hyde Park and send for Biggi and Nas­
tassja. The house has two floors and is clean and nicely fur­
nished, a truly romantic dollhouse. It's spring again. The
house is surrounded by blossoming trees and cats sitting on
the tops of parked cars, and in Hyde Park, where everyone
runs and plays, Biggi and Nastassja can romp around to
their heart's desire.
I whore around again.
I bring a whore into the mews house. Biggi and Nastassja
have driven to Brighton on the sea. The woman is an Israeli
colonel but wears civilian clothing. I tell her she must show
me her papers, because I've never fucked an Israeli colonel
before and am curious. Even though she has little black
hairs on her upper lip, which excite me, I'm not totally into
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her. Dominique has announced she will be in London half
a day this weekend. I give the Israeli officer only two good
thrusts and send her off.
When Dominique arrives, I'm working, and she must get
back to Rome that evening. The plane leaves at nine. The
shooting with the English is over at twenty to six, and I dart
into the Hotel Dorchester in the garb of an English lord of
the eighteenth century. For fifty-three minutes Dominique
and I hop around in bed. Then she drives to the airport
alone.
David Lean's assistant comes to Shepperton Studio and
says there are still three parts open in Dr. Zhivago. David
Lean, who is in Madrid, has asked me to choose which one
I want to do. "One or the other," I say.
I shoot in Berlin until fall for Rialto Film. The shitheads
threaten to take me to court because, according to my con­
tract, I'm not allowed to work on any other production. At
the end of November I shoot a Spanish film in Barcelona,
where MGM sends me the screenplay and contract for
Zhivago.
Christmas Eve. I buy presents for Biggi and Nastassja and
give the whores of Barcelona all that's left of my pay,
because almost all of them have little kids. On Christmas
Day I'm in our apartment in Wannsee, where Biggi and I go
ice skating.
The filming of Zhivago starts in January. Biggi and Nas­
tassja come along to Madrid, because I'm tied up for
months even though my part is a worthless piece of shit.
We rent an apartment and stay until February. I get four
weeks off with pay.
We go to Munich, where Sergio Leone is showing his first
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western, A Fistful of Dollars, and wants to talk to me about
his second western, For a Few Dollars More.
David Lean's scouts search all of Spain for snow that
hasn't melted yet. Every day we travel and spend the night
in some village inn with creaking floors. The mother of the
boy who is playing the son of Dr. Zhivago and has to ride
in the cattle car to Siberia with Omar Sharif, Geraldine
Chaplin, Sir Ralph Richardson, and me is married to an
American diplomat. Her husband couldn't come along, so
she is accompanying her son.
Her wide hips and hefty thighs are in unbelievable dis­
proportion to her slender torso, as if Mother Nature had
conjoined the upper body and lower body of two different
beings. Her thighs are covered in hair all the way to her
hips. She looms like a satyr. I fuck her standing up in front
of a mirror to see this strange creation as I hump and come.
David Lean has a red Rolls-Royce convertible, and this is
the most interesting thing about Zhivago for me, next to the
satyr. I gape at the car; I had once wished for a toy car,
pressing my nose flat against the showcase window.
"Don't go crazy for it," David says, smiling. "In about
five years you'll be sitting in the back of one."
I don't dare show Biggi the telegram that just arrived. It
is from a friend of her mother in Berlin to tell Biggi her
mother has died. This situation is hopeless: we were quar­
reling and hitting one another when the telegram arrived.
I lock myself into the bathroom and read the words over
and over. Once again I cannot grasp the news of death. I
forget and leave the telegram in my robe pocket. Later I
hear her cry out in the bathroom. I rush to her and find her
slumped over, the crumpled telegram in her clenched fists.
I take her in my arms and carry her to the bedroom. She is
unable to say one coherent sentence all day long. She pulls
Nastassja into bed with her, clings to her desperately, and
showers her with kisses. Nastassja looks at me, puzzled and
at a loss. Pola doesn't make a sound, either, and stands in
the doorway for hours without moving. I walk out onto the
balcony of our apartment on the thirty-third floor and stare
at the crusty brownish sun, smeared like a blood clot above
Madrid's skyscrapers. Biggi is standing next to me. I didn't
hear her come. She isn't crying anymore and speaks with a
soft, controlled voice, yet seems both absent-minded and
impatient, like someone who has a great deal of preparation
to do for something he can't remember.
"I must go to Berlin tomorrow. I'll take Nastassja with
me."
"I'll take care of the plane tickets early in the morning."
"Book the first plane. The first one available, regardless
of whether transfers are involved. There is no way I can be
late for the funeral. Maybe no one else will be there but me.
I have to get some flowers, too. Many flowers, especially
beautiful flowers. Or, what do you think, shall I have a
wreath made?"
"Take your mother flowers."
"My God! I'm sure she doesn't even have a coffin to be
buried in! What sort of coffin shall I get? I want a zinc coffin.
I don't want her to be eaten up by maggots. Is it true that
the dead are eaten up by maggots in the ground?"
"Yes. It's natural. The maggots come out from the earth,
from the decay of creatures, animals and plants. The ani­
mals that feed on worms will also rot, and from this new
worms will be born. But new plants and flowers will be
born, too."
"But I don't want my mother to rot. I want a zinc coffin."
"I will give you money for one."
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"Then I'll buy a zinc coffin. And a gravestone. How will
I take care of all of this on time? What do you think? Will I
get it all done?"
She goes back into the dreary apartment. No one has
turned on the lights yet. Pola is still standing around. I
frighten her when I run into her in the dark. I find the light
switch.
A swallow crashes against the window and falls to the
ground in the corner of the balcony, where it lies twitch­
ing. It must have lost its sense of orientation. I pick it up
just as Biggi comes out on the balcony. She takes the swal­
low from my hands and caresses it softly on the head. I
have never seen a swallow so close up. Its body is gentle
and fragile. But its feathers are rumpled, and its eyes are
crazed. It smells of freedom. Biggi wants to see if the bird
can fly again and opens her hands. Nothing happens for a
couple of seconds. Then the swallow jerks from Biggi's
hand with one forceful flap of its wings and is engulfed by
the cool night sky. Biggi smiles. I put my arm around her
shoulders.
"Will the swallow decay, too, when it's dead, and be
eaten by maggots?"
"Yes. It'll decay, too, and be eaten by maggots."
"Then I won't buy a zinc coffin."
She nestles close to me, and we stay there a long time
without saying a word about her dead mother.
I take Biggi and Nastassja to the airport and am alone
with Pola. Her school vacation is over. I'm afraid of being
all alone, if Biggi and Nastassja don't come back before Pola
leaves.
Thank God Biggi calls from Berlin to say she'll be back in
two days. She wants to order a gravestone and arrange for
wreaths and upkeep of the grave.
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Finally, we get out of the strangling heat of Madrid and
to to Almeria on the sea, where Sergio Leone is shooting
his western. We rent a villa on the beach with a terrace
that's so big you could play tennis on it. The sea roars day
and night, and I can finally sleep again.
The Andalusian gypsies see me as one of their own and
take me to their families. Soon I know them all, from
Almeria to Granada, from Malaga to Seville. The women,
too. From the schoolgirls to the flamenco dancers and
whores. They let me take part in a wedding. The bride is
placed on a table, she spreads her legs, and the mother
pushes through her virginal cunt with her finger wrapped
in a cloth, in the presence of the elders. Then she shows the
bloody cloth around to the wedding guests. I throw a fes­
tival for gypsies on our terrace every week. We wear flower
wreaths on our heads and dance and sing beneath the big
stars hanging down so low that I think they'll fall on my
head. Their flamenco has nothing to do with what the tour­
ists see. The true flamenco of the gypsy is a sexual act. An
act of life and death.
We move into the apartment in Rome and I buy a Maserati. I have the most expensive English velour carpets laid
and the walls covered with pure Italian silk— the curtains
and tablecloths are silk, too— and mount gold doorknobs,
window latches, and faucets in the bathrooms.
Liliana Cavani wants me to incarnate St. Francis of Assisi.
We gape at each other for hours at William Morris's. But we
can't come to terms, because the producer will not pay the
salary I want. A couple days later William Morris calls up
and says I'll get what I demanded. I say okay. That same
day William Morris calls back to say the producer can't
scrape the money together. I smash the telephone down
and tear up my William Morris contract.
Instead I take on an English film in Morocco. In the
meantime Biggi is taking care of things in the apartment,
which she is excited about, even though I smack my head
on the slanted walls a hundred times a day.
In front of the Mamunia Hotel in Marrakech, I have my
suitcase unloaded and brought to my room. I have some­
thing better to do. The first one is a veiled bicyclist. She's
wearing a black habit like a nun. I can see only her hands
on the handlebars, her fingers covered with rings, her
naked feet in sandals, and her eyes burning like coal. I call
to her as if I were hailing a passing taxi. She turns her head
and is nearly struck by a car. The drivers here must all have
been cattle herders. She scribbles a time and an address on
a scrap of paper. Midnight. That's all I can read. The
address is in Moroccan and impossible to decipher. I'll
show the paper to the taxi driver.
It's three. There are still nine hours till midnight. I spend
it at the bazaars, where the street kids pull at me from all
sides, offer me drugs, and ask if I want to make love to
them. I sit on the dusty ground amid hashish-smoking peo­
ple at the marketplace, and listen to the droning of the
storyteller. Then I prop a girl on my shoulders; she couldn't
see a thing in the crowded market. She isn't wearing panties under her torn dress, and her naked crotch sticks to my
neck. She wriggles on top of me as I caress her. The
entrancing gestures of the storyteller; the strong Moroccan
hashish; the bewitching oriental music coming at me from
all quarters; the undefinable odors and the intoxicating
stink of the spiced air; the whispering, calling, screaming,
shrieking, laughing voices in various Arabian dialects: All
of this might have made me forget my redezvous with the
bicyclist. But the crumpled paper with her address falls out
of my pocket, and the half-naked girl on my shoulders
notices it. It's nearly midnight. The girls hangs on to me,
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won't go another step without me. I give her as much
money as I can do without and tell her in sign language that
I'll come back to the same place at the market, at the same
time tomorrow.
The taxi driver can't read the bicyclist's scrawl, either. He
drives in all directions, seeking assistance from every veiled
figure in unlit crooked alleys into which his car barely fits.
At last, at one in the morning, he stops in front of a dilapi­
dated house with a heavy iron door. The door is ajar. I light
a match and feel my way through the corridor, which
smells of cinnamon and mint. The match goes out. I can't
see the stairs and fall down, hitting my shinbone as I curse
out loud. A smaller door cracks open. The dim light of an
oil lamp shines from inside, and I make out the silhouette
of a veiled figure. She steps to the side as if she were order­
ing me to come in. But I don't know if it's my bicyclist yet.
The veiled eyes of Moroccan women all look somewhat
bewildered. She pulls me into the bare chamber with only
an uncovered mattress. She must be my bicyclist. She slides
her habit and veil off and is naked. The disadvantage with
veiled women is that you never know how old they are,
because their eyes still sparkle when their bodies have
already wilted, and you don't know if they're beautiful or
ugly. My bicyclist isn't beautiful in the normal sense, not
even pretty, but it hadn't occurred to me until now. Her
pockmarked face and her whole body look like the face and
body of a beast of prey that has fought many a battle. She
has a big belly and a shaved pussy. Her breasts are small
and hard. She takes off my clothes and pulls me onto the
mattress. Her hole is so hot my cock burns like fire, and I'm
so high that I can't tell when I'm coming. She groans qui­
etly. She clings tightly to the bedposts above her head, dis­
torting her pockface and showing her worn-down teeth. On
the corona of her left breast she has a large scar. When I
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touch the scar with my finger she explains to me in sign
language that someone put his cigarette out on her breast.
I kiss the breast and look at the clock because daylight is
threatening to force its way through the cracks of the rickety
shutters. It is seven. I get dressed and look for some money
in my pockets. She doesn't want any.
Because I can never sleep at night in the hotel, I at least
try to get some during the day on a lounge chair near the
swimming pool, where a cool draft fans from the shady
park at any time of day or night.
On my way to Mamunia, where I fuck a switchboard
operator, two young Moroccans follow me. I had noticed
them when I came out of the hotel and saw them hanging
out in the shadows in front of the door. After I turn into the
first unlit, unpaved path, they come up to me quickly and
hem me in.
I know what they want. At least I think I know. But many
Moroccans carry knives. People are stabbed, and you never
hear a peep from them. But I'm not fearful and march
onward. The one on my right comes so close our shoulders
touch.
"You are beautiful," he says mysteriously, keeping in
step with my cheerful march.
He makes me laugh.
"Yes, you are beautiful, and I desire you," repeats the one
on the right. The one on the left seems to be dumb or can't
speak French.
"I am tired and I want to sleep," I say.
We march in step and move out like three musketeers.
The right one latches onto me. When the silent one sees
this, he does the same. If they are carrying knives, my arms
are no longer free, I say to myself.
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"Are you not afraid?" the one on the right says.
"Why?" I ask as calmly as possible, because I know what
he's getting at.
"Because you don't know if we're carrying knives. There
are two of us. It's a dark night and no one will hear you."
"Why would you harm me?"
"For instance, if you refuse to let us fuck you in the ass."
"Listen, I have nothing against you two, I am simply
tired, I have fucked all afternoon and you wouldn't have
any fun with me. Maybe another time. By the way, I don't
know where we are anymore, where is the Mamunia
Hotel?"
"We're heading that way."
I let them lead me, but I don't believe him. There's no
light in sight, not even from a house, no lantern, nothing.
And the field we're on isn't the one I know. The Moroccan
on the right keeps whispering declarations of desire in my
ear, while the one on the left satisfies himself by squeezing
my arm. At the end of the field, we run into a pitch-black,
unpaved semicircular street. After a few steps, lights flicker
in the far distance, the way you see a coast at night from far
out on the ocean.
"Keep going toward the lights and you'll arrive at the
Mamunia."
"You're a nice boy. Maybe we'll see each other again."
"Who knows . . . "
I turn around one more time, you can never be sure of
these slinking cats.
When I piss on a palm tree, it stings like nettles. I've got
the clap again.
There's no time for me to go to the doctor. He comes to
give me an injection. We're filming in a palace. Between
sessions I slip out with the doctor to the gallery above the
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tea room. I let my pants down and get the penicillin right
in the ass. The director is already calling me back.
After Marrakech, two more films in London. Then one in
Paris. Then one in Italy, on Capri, with Martine Carol.
Martine models one of her furs for me every day, she has
at least twenty. She is especially proud of one of them. The
unborn babies have been cut out of their mother's womb
after she has been beaten to death. Then the babies them­
selves are clubbed to death and skinned. A coat made of
many babies' furs cut out of their mothers' wombs. The furs
supposedly have an especially beautiful shine. Such a coat
costs thousands of dollars. There are only a few of its kind.
Thank God!
Besides her fur fetish, she also collects clothes, houses,
properties, islands, and especially diamonds. Many dia­
monds. Big diamonds. The biggest are the size of pigeon
eggs; she puts them on for breakfast. I feel sorry for her. She
might be able to do without all this stuff if she were only a
few years younger.
An idiotic director has the nerve to ask me time and again
if I'm willing to appear at the Berlin Schiller Theater. I tell
some undertaker who calls me up, "Even if you paid me all
the money in the world, I would rather shoot the most ridic­
ulous movie than set a foot in your cemetery!"
Now I can afford not even to consider the most sickening
German film offers. The Italians offer me up to thirty
films a week to choose from. I accept those that pay the
most.
A film in Turkey: We shoot in a men's brothel. Because
of the endless filming, I come across only five cunts: one of
my partners, two extras, a French barmaid, and a hefty
Turkish waitress who works till four in the morning at an
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outdoor restaurant where fat Turkish women always
appear singing for hours on end and never seem to stop.
After the heavy waitress has kept me cool for hours and I'm
so tired I'm dizzy, I take her in a taxi to where she suppos­
edly lives. That lasts another hour. But even though I can
hardly keep my eyes open and sense a paralyzing empti­
ness in my brain, I'm addicted to this woman. We finally
reach the address she claims is her flat. I'm sure the house,
which looks more like a large trashcan with doors, is a
brothel. We climb up to the second floor. Many doors are
open in the long hallways; I see the dirty, messed-up bed­
ding. From some rooms you can hear men groaning and
women moaning and whimpering, cots squeaking, people
coughing, snoring, vomiting, and after every woman's out­
cry or man's outroar you hear the flushing in the water
pipes of bidets and toilets. The place stinks of semen, piss,
sweat, farts, and fish. My whore whispers to another Turk­
ish woman, who comes staggering out of one of the open
rooms wearing only a short little shirt, with her hand under
her cunt so she doesn't flow onto the floor. Then we're
directed to a room at the end of the hall. She herself is so
exhausted she seems to have fallen asleep. I rip her dress
off and pull down her panties. It takes an eternity, because
she is overweight and so heavy in her tiredness that I have
to move her limbs around myself. Her dirty feet are cold
and stink. Her cunt is big, but stiff and narrow. I pull her
heavy thighs apart. She opens up completely. I fuck her
twice. She moans and whimpers in a sleep of exhaustion.
When I dismount at seven o'clock to be picked up for film­
ing, she opens her eyes, pulls me close to her, and kisses
my cock. She doesn't ask for any money.
Biggi, Nastassja, and I move from Via Nemea to Cassia
Antica, the same street Dominique lives on, but I see Dom-
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inique only two more times. Our house is a solitary palazzo
behind a high wall grown over in roses. It has eight rooms,
four baths, a terrace garden, and a swimming pool and is
part of the largest, most beautiful private park in Rome,
where the choicest tropical plants and flowers bloom all
year round. The owner is a real estate company that
belongs to the Vatican. We have three servants, two maids
and a cook. The only problem is our cook. I have to throw
the soup tureen at him because his grub is inedible. He
stomps his foot in defiance, crowing that Princess So-andso likes his soup very much.
Fate sends me a warning. I don't listen to it. I shoot a
western in Cinecitta. On the first day of shooting, the horse
I'm dozing off on does a half somersault backwards, crush­
ing me against a wall, then falling on top of me with all its
weight. I'm able to give it a kick without getting trampled
to death by its hooves. Then I can't get up anymore, not
even to sit or kneel.
There's no way I'll go to the hospital. Two of the team
carry me to my dressing room. I have them lay me on the
couch and ask them to leave me alone. I just want to calm
down a bit. I get such strong pains that I want to call them
both back to bring me a pain reliever. They don't hear me.
As soon as I try to get up, I collapse into a formless mass,
as if I didn't have a spine anymore. I roll off the couch and
crawl to the door on all fours. I throw my belt over the door
handle and pull myself through. I crawl across the hall to
the wardrobe room.
The wardrobe woman gets someone from production and
an ambulance takes me to a clinic. After X rays the doctor
says my spine is broken. "Cracked," he corrects himself.
That is, the marrow isn't hurt. Another fraction of an inch
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and I would've been paralyzed forever. I must stay in the
clinic.
I call Biggi, who cries and screams in fear. I can't move
my body anymore, the only thing I can do is press the bell
next to the headboard and use the phone, but only with the
greatest exertion. I must relieve myself in a pan a nurse
shoves under me. In my state it's not so easy. I tell her to
come back when the others are sleeping.
After twelve days I've had enough of being a cripple. I
make my first attempts at standing and walking in a corset
and am led shuffling to the toilet.
The western we started is lost. I don't get my salary. The
insurance company doesn't pay a penny; the producer had
gotten some fly-by-night operation. I'm temporarily forbid­
den to take on a film in which I have to ride a horse or exert
my body in the least. I'm not even allowed to drive a car.
"Except a Rolls-Royce," the doctor says laconically. I buy
my first Silver Cloud. Three weeks later I throw my corset
out of my moving Rolls and sign a contract to do Carmen in
Spain, where despite the strict orders from the doctors, I
have to ride a galloping horse from morning till night and
act out a knife fight.
Biggi and Nastassja are in Almeria, too. At night in bed I
cry out in pain and in the morning Biggi must help me up
because I am stiff as a log.
After Spain, Brazil. I fly alone. A great flood has swept
away the miserable shacks of the favelas, taking thousands
of lives. When I arrive in Rio the water is two feet high. I
have pain day and night in the no-degree heat. The
humidity is over 8o percent. I am so drained I won't be able
to enjoy pre-Carnival. Pre-Carnival, without the foolish
costumes, is much more exciting than Carnival itself. You
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can smell and touch the sweaty, glistening bodies of the
Brazilians. The Brazilians, from children to the old, do the
samba wherever they walk and stand, and the drums and
tambourines never grow silent.
I move out of the retirement home called the Copacabana
Palace Hotel into some shitty modern barracks on the
beach. Yet I usually sleep outside. The nights are mild, and
the beach is populated with entangled bodies. No one cares
what anyone else is doing, because everyone is fucking.
The Brazilian climate does my spine good. I feel no more
pain.
Biggi, Nastassja, and I go to Hong Kong. The only one
who isn't worn out by the twenty-five-hour flight to Hong
Kong is Nastassja, who runs through the airplane, waking
even the most ill-tempered passenger to new life. Biggi is
angry because I disappeared with one of the Lufthansa
stewardesses for too long, and because she wrote down her
address in Hong Kong for me.
On the ferry from Hong Kong to Kowloon, Biggi hits me
in the face and falls into a crying rage. I can't do anything
about it. She won't even let me touch her. As cruel as it
sounds, I'm only thinking of Chinese women. My pulse is
beating wildly.
I roam the streets full of whimpering people until I find a
rickshaw and I'm with a Chinese whore in a trot. After my
desires have been satisfied, I sit on a curb with the people
and eat with them from their steaming pots, next to crack­
ling, smoking fires over which fish and squid and crab are
roasted. The filming should take two and a half months. I
will hold to a consistent diet to keep up my strength.
Nastassja has to have her appendix removed. When she
is allowed to get up again, we walk in the Tiger Balm Gar-
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den and sail over to Aberdeen, where boat people float
silently by us like ghosts, like clouds of fog over the
water, offering fish grilled before our eyes on open coal
fires.
At night we sail out on the South China Sea.
As my time in Hong Kong draws to an end, I dart from
one dive to the next. From the girls in Hong Kong to
the girls in Kowloon to the girls in Aberdeen. From the
makeup woman and her daughter to the Filipino manne­
quins modeling their national garb in the Hilton. From
Margareth to Maria. From Hong Kong to Taipei and
Shanghai.
I exchange Rolls-Royces in Rome. When I've had enough
of them, I buy a Maserati. Then a Ferrari. Then another
Rolls-Royce convertible. I switch cars because the door rat­
tles, or because I can't roll the window down fast enough
when a girl walks by, or because the ashtray is full, or sim­
ply because I've had the car for over a week.
I take money for two more films in Hong Kong. At the
last minute, I send the money back and sign for a film with
Edward G. Robinson in Rio de Janeiro. I want to go back to
the Brazilians.
Our first location is in New York, where I have to film
with Robinson for a week. After a couple of boring Broad­
way whores, I redefine my hunting grounds as Greenwich
Village, where very young girls wait in front of rock clubs
for anyone who'll give them money for marijuana. They'll
do anything for it. And because people on the street are
screamed at by the police for loitering, I take as many of
these doll-children as possible up to my hotel room. In the
winter they have only rags on their drug-wasted bodies,
and the first thing I do is clothe them.
They ask for cash to buy winter things themselves. But I
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don't fall for their tricks. I almost miss my flight to Rio de
Janeiro because of one.
Cortina d'Ampezzo: I do a western in the snow. Biggi and
Nastassja are frolicsome and happy. They romp around in
the snow, go ice skating, ride the sled all day long, and ride
in the mountains in horse-drawn sleighs ringing with bells.
But as soon as I'm with Biggi for only a moment, we fight
and hit each other. The reason this time is the black Amer­
ican Vonetta McGee, who is my partner and who has the
erotic body of a boy. Her room is directly above ours.
In the morning, when I come down from Vonetta, I sneak
by the sleeping Biggi to get my toothbrush, razor, and fresh
underwear. This way we can't quarrel. I kiss her and Nas­
tassja carefully in their sleep.
Does Nastassja know what kind of life I lead? She loves
her mother above all, but she loves me, too. And I want her.
I just can't imagine that one day we'll be separated. In
Rome Marlon Brando is banging against Vonetta's door
every night. He's filming Candy and staying in the same inn
as Vonetta. I hope she'll open the door to him every time,
so that I can think about other girls again. But she doesn't,
and the next day in her dressing room in Helios Studio I
have to make up for what she was thinking about all night
while Marlon Brando rammed against her door. Because of
Brando, she moves into the Hotel de la Ville above Piazza
di Spagna. She orders me to come there. The younger sister
of Trintignant's wife is there, too. She wants to drag me to
an LSD party, but I'd rather stay with Vonetta's friend, a
black American singer. Vonetta is pissed off and curses at
me in front of all the people in the hotel lobby.
Visconti asks me if I want to do a film with him. I think
it's called The Damned. His production people call several
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times to ask me to be patient until the dates are set and the
contract can be drawn up.
"Who is this Visconti, anyway?" I ask Gino.
"You'd be better off shooting the next western with
Corbucci."
"Esso," says Rinaldo, public relations specialist, pointing
over his shoulder with his thumb. He means the girl who
just disappeared into the bathroom. I met her a half an hour
ago. Rinaldo brought her along on location in Magliana,
which lies outside of Rome. She accompanied him to a busi­
ness meeting I'm having with him.
"What do you mean by 'Esso'?" I ask.
"Moratti."
"Oh, the cigarette manufacturer."
"Shit. Not Muratti, Mooooooooratti. Petrol. Her name is
Bedi, Bedi Moratti. Her father is the richest man in Italy."
"Interesting," I say.
Bedi comes back from the little girls' room. She has put
on some lipstick and smiles more lovely than before she
went to piss. I scrutinize her more closely. Not because her
father is supposed to be the richest man in Italy, but
because I had observed her in a purely mechanical way.
She has long, silky hair, healthy teeth, a sensitive mouth,
and dreamy, longing eyes. Her body is thin and fragile like
a porcelain figure. But though her expression is so absent
and melancholy and her body seems so elflike, she must be
energetic and tough. She drives the fastest sportscar in the
world. She's wearing a light summer dress like a cloud of
flowers and a diamond of at least ten carats.
Rinaldo slaps me on the shoulder. I was so lost in observ­
ing Bedi, who also seemed to have forgotten her surround­
ings and even forgot to smile at me, that I didn't even notice
the shit-eating director who came up to our table ten min­
utes ago to take me back on location.
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Bedi calls me up at our place that very same evening. She
couldn't have know Biggi would answer the phone. I hadn't
figured on it either, because Biggi never does that.
"For you. A woman," she says.
I can't speak to Bedi long. Biggi has gone to her room and
can't hear me, but I don't want to repeat what took place in
Yugoslavia. I tell Bedi it would be better if she didn't call
anymore and that I'll meet her at Rinaldo's.
A Russian princess offers me a house in the Appian Way,
the oldest, most beautiful street in the world. The house is
occupied by her friend the Countess Vassarotti, and is up
for rent.
I drive with the princess to Appia and check it out. The
house is close to Gina Lollobrigida's. It lies isolated on a
huge estate scattered with cypresses, Japanese trees
hundreds of years old, and orange and lemon trees, grown
over with roses, and oleanders. Ruins from the Roman
Empire are spread out all over the place, and it is sur­
rounded by an ancient wall eight feet high.
The house itself is almost a thousand years old and is
noted in books of Italian monuments. It has four floors,
fourteen rooms, five bathrooms, four fireplaces, a sixtyfoot-long, 30-foot-high salon on the first floor, its own ele­
vator that goes all the way up to the turret, a wing added
on for the staff, and a separate structure with a salon and
four rooms, one bathroom, and two toilets. Below the lush,
low branches of mimosa trees stands a greenhouse in which
rare orchids grow. In the Middle Ages the villa was a
church. What it was before that, no one knows. The struc­
tural walls were built on stones chiseled in the time before
Christ. And on the granite arches and on the stairs con­
structed of marble blocks is the insignia of the Vatican.
Vassarotti lives alone in the house. Her husband was a
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film producer and committed suicide. She lives among
antique furniture so eaten up by woodworms that it caves
in if you lean against it, a jungle of dried flowers, hundreds
of dusty, tasteless paintings, Chinese carpets soaked in
dog's piss, and mountains of chipped, valuable porcelain.
Neither the electric lights nor the elevator works; the
basement of the elevator shaft is two feet deep in water.
Jane Fonda lived here for six months while filming in Rome
and got stuck in the elevator for hours. Roger Vadim con­
tributed by making a pig of himself and a sty of the house.
Once I've thrown out most of the junk, it becomes the
fortress I need. I draw up a contract with the two scarecrows
to rent the place. When I tell Biggi about the house, she
wants to see it right away. And when she sees it, she
doesn't want to leave anymore. Gino pulls at his hair:
"Don't you know all of Appia is contaminated with snakes
and rats? Poisonous lizards crawl into your bed! Mosquitoes
eat you alive! Ants and spiders twitch in your soup! The
house is so old you'll still be working at saving it from the
mold when you are an old man! In three months you'll
come back again and curse me for not stopping you by force
from renting it!"
I let him talk. Biggi and Nastassja shall have their fairy­
tale castle. Nastassja is just starting school in Rome.
I've known for weeks that I must go to Almeria again.
Biggi has known, too, but we haven't talked about it. Now
she wants to come along. I say it's better if we separate for
a couple of weeks. The reason is Bedi, who I'm meeting
more and more often. She accompanies me everywhere I
have to go to take care of business.
Biggi and Nastassja have moved into the house in the
Appian Way. When I get back from Spain, she screams that
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she's packing her things and leaving me forever. I did not
call, send a telegram, or write from Spain a single time dur­
ing the ten weeks I was gone, which was not unusual for
me. I know our marriage is definitively over, but I love Biggi
and try to persuade her to stay in Rome. It's useless.
"You would even go to bed with Nastassja!" she screams,
beside herself, and storms out of the house.
I can't find her the whole day. Nastassja doesn't know
where she's gone and is looking for her. I find a note on the
kitchen table: "I don't understand anything anymore.
Everything has become mean and foreign. There is no more
love."
I find her in a corner of the greenhouse, sitting on the
floor among the pots of orchids spotted like wildcats, hang­
ing above her and standing on long tables. For the first time
I am aware of their beauty. Biggi doesn't look at me. And
as she touches an orchid, amazed like a child, she says, "I
really believed Nastassja and I would live in this paradise.
You have destroyed everything."
"But I got the house for you!"
"That could be. I even believe you mean it. But we can't
stay with you. We can't live in a pitstop you come back to
after whoring. I'm flying to Berlin with Nastassja tomorrow
to find a new apartment."
I take Biggi and Nastassja to the airport. Biggi cries before
they go through the passport check. Nastassja clings to Biggi's legs, burying her face in her lap.
"Why are you sending us away?"
"I'm not sending you away. You didn't want to stay with
me anymore."
It all sounds so senseless, what I say. Because Biggi is
right. I am the one who has been pushing them away for
years without wanting to. She's still crying when they're
already through the gate. Nastassja keeps turning
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around toward me, stumbling along. Tears come to my
eyes.
I call Bedi from the airport. In Fiumicino we board her
father's yacht and go to Sardinia, where her parents own a
mammoth hotel and where her brother's yachts are and her
mother's luxury ship that is as big as a small ocean liner.
Bedi moves in with me at Appia and brings part of her
wardrobe.
I don't know if Bedi is jealous of Princess Ira von Fiirstenberg, but she teases me about the photos of Ira and me
that appear in the Italian newspapers while I'm shooting a
movie with her. Whenever I have to kiss Ira in front of the
camera, I pull her skirt up over her ass without her noticing
it. I wish I had bumped into her when she was fifteen. We
clown around during the shooting. She is so endearingly
foolish that she even winks at me when she's standing
alone before the camera doing a close-up. We wink at each
other. The director gets so desperate that he starts to cry,
just like the American actor who cried when they changed
his lines, which he had already memorized in Hollywood.
In Rome Bedi and I are invited to Romina's birthday
party. Her grandmother, a Mexican witch, reads in Bedi's
palm that we won't stay together. Bedi is terribly disturbed.
Pier Paolo Pasolini comes to Appia in the company of
boys to talk about his next film, Pocile. Pola is with me
because Bedi has to make an appearance at a family affair.
I don't feel like going down to the salon. I call Bedi, who
had called earlier from Milan. I ask Pola to host Pasolini
and his boys while I'm on the phone with Bedi. Gino is
here, too.
When I finally come down, Pasolini has been waiting for
over an hour. I apologize for my behavior and say I have
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been reading his screenplay, but even now I don't under­
stand it. The story is a bit much. The lead, who I'm sup­
posed to be, is a man who is so hungry that he pounces on
a well-built soldier and eats him up. He gets all horny about
his food. Of all the stupid stories I've had to film until now,
this one is bearable enough. But the pay isn't. Gino and I
have agreed to jack up my pay for every film. Therefore,
Gino isn't disappointed either when the contract doesn't
come through.
The Bastards with Rita Hayworth and Margareth Lee, my
agent Gino's wife. Margareth is fucking a woman hairdres­
ser whom she brings along to Madrid. I want to drag the
hairdresser into bed, but she slaps my hand when I fumble
around with her. I take them both over to the Palace Hotel.
I dance with the hairdresser while Margareth masturbates
on the bed. I already have my finger in the hairdresser's
lesbian pussy when the doorbell rings. As I open the door
to scream at the intruder, Bedi stands in front of me. She
kisses me passionately. (She could have called or sent a
telegram!) I extend our greeting in the vestibule of my suite
for as long as possible, so that the two inside can straighten
out their clothes. Before I introduce them to Bedi, I whisper
in her ear: "They are two lesbians. They're just leaving."
The brainless producer Wendtleand comes to visit me at
Appia. My servant (he is the twenty-eighth one), who is
always offended, dives into bed, even in the middle of the
day, if something he himself has cooked tastes like shit. He
headed the staff of the Castle Miami in Rome. But I have to
beat him often, because he has a thick head, which is use­
less to me. So he's crawled into bed again in the middle of
the day, pulling the blanket up to his ears as soon as I enter
the room. I'm not successful at getting the old geezer to
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cook the stuff he's prepared, and I've fired the rest of the
staff again.
"Marry Bedi Moratti," the turd of a producer says. "Then
you'll be a billionaire and we can be producers together."
"If I were to marry Bedi, then I wouldn't need you," I say.
In the past four years in Rome I've bought and traded
sixteen cars: three Maseratis, seven Ferraris and six RollsRoyces. I've invested $250,000 in the house, though it
doesn't belong to me. I have a chauffeur, a gardener, two
maids, a cook, a servant, and a secretary. The staff alone
costs me eight thousand dollars a month. My cost of living
per month is about ten thousand dollars, not including the
Russian caviar and champagne that everyone who visits me
gets, even messengers and gas men. Even the firemen got
champagne once when they doused a brush fire on the
neighbor's estate, having come to my place to look for a
hydrant. It's mainly journalists who guzzle champagne and
gorge themselves on caviar. One German journalist threw
up on the Chinese carpet because she pigged out. Cham­
pagne and caviar come to another six thousand dollars a
month. Clothes, trips, gasoline, service charges, telephone
bills of two to four thousand dollars, and always cars: These
also devour my assets. And though I dash from one film to
the next, doing up to eleven a year and once even shooting
three simultaneously, and though my pay per day has
climbed to forty thousand dollars, I need money all the
time.
The next two films I have been given money for are dead
before shooting starts. The producer's money dried up.
Nothing new, but I hadn't figured on this right now.
Bedi gives me money when she can. But she doesn't have
much cash in her account. Her father pays all her bills, no
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matter how high they are. (Why not mine?) Bedi and I drive
to Milan to get her jewelry. She isn't allowed to sell it. Gino
takes it to a pawnbroker in Rome. He could've gotten much
more, but he only brings me $35,000, so that the interest
won't be intolerable. I will make do for a couple weeks,
until the next film starts.
No servant wants to stay overnight in the haunted house,
as they call it. It so happens that I'm alone most of the time
in one of the fourteen rooms behind walls five feet thick.
The truth is, there are spirits that close in on the house
tightly. At three in the morning, when I can't sleep, I drive
my Ferrari to the freeway and speed up to 160 miles an
hour, closing my eyes and counting to ten.
The next two films are a war movie in northwest Italy and
a gangster movie in Genoa. Bedi comes racing in her Ferrari
through snow flurries and fog on the icy highway from
Milan to Montecatini, Livorno and Genoa. If Bedi can't get
away, I speed to Milan in my Ferrari after filming is done.
Bedi can't go on like this anymore. The nine and a half
months with me have done her in. She breaks down phys­
ically and mentally and must go to a clinic in Switzerland.
I have to go to London.
At the London club Revolution, I bump into Luna, the
longest mannequin in the world. She is, I think, over eight
feet tall. She agrees to come with me to Rome in a minute
even though I'm with Toni. Toni's lower lip droops. I met
her while filming the day before, took her to the Hilton, and
tonight to the Revolution. Toni wears such short miniskirts
that you can see her ass and cunt if she raises her hand to
pick her nose. She's a real London girl and gabs away in
cockney. When she wants me to fuck her, she says, "Give
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me one/' Toni is bitching because she hates any other girl
I come into contact with and is already cursing Christine,
my partner in the movie. Just now, I completely forgot that
I had also promised Toni I would take her back to Rome. In
order not to confuse things and to save what should be
saved, I give Toni money for a plane ticket and tell her I'll
follow in a week.
Luna, Toni, Christine, and I dance until six in the morn­
ing. The band is hot and plays until we collapse. A new
band every night. The boys are still unknown and play for
free. But they get famous fast. Luna knows every guest, and
everyone knows Luna. She is so tall that Polanski, who
comes in at five in the morning, has to stand on his tiptoes
even to kiss her belly.
In London I'm so stoned on hash that I lay down naked
in the icy wind on the concrete balcony of my suite in the
Hilton. When I come to, I eat eleven club sandwiches and
drink three quarts of cold milk. Luna takes a puff of hash
with every breath, even when she's sitting on the toilet.
All hell breaks loose in Rome. Toni's lower lip is hanging
lower than ever, because I work with Christine at Cinecitta
and can't give her enough attention. Christine also comes
to Appia frequently. But Toni hates Luna even more. She,
it seems, has brought her designer, Henry, at my expense!
Henry and Luna traveled with so much luggage that we
need a delivery truck at the airport. Henry looks like a
young Oscar Wilde, has dark brown curls to his shoulders,
wears only black silk, and is silent and pleasant and per­
fectly happy when he has champagne and hash in quantity.
Luna behaves as if Toni weren't there. Neither of them says
a word to the other. Toni doesn't speak to Christine, either.
The first few days she pounds on my bedroom door with
her fists when I've locked myself in with Luna, purring
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"give me one." Then she hardly speaks to me. And when I
say "I'll give you one," she says, "go fuck yourself!"
My house on Appia becomes a drug haven. Toni abhors
all drugs. She is a healthy, unspoiled girl. But every day,
when Luna comes home from the city, she drags along a
band of hippies, who lay siege to the house. Blue clouds of
smoke start to seep through all the floors immediately. Now
Luna has started shooting up hard stuff into her veins with
a hippie, and the bloody syringes are lying all over the
place. I run Luna and everyone else out of the house with
a club. I don't care if they guzzle the stuff for breakfast. But
I'm sick and tired of it. Besides, I don't want to rot in an
Italian prison. Until now I had been finding a crumpled
envelope from Luna on my bed every day: "Kinski is our
God," it would say, and "We thank God that he gave us
this house forever." I really got myself into something this
time! Before Luna packed her things, she smeared the walls
in her bedroom with lipstick: "Kinski is the devil!" Toni
stays. While my chauffeur, Enrico, is dragging Henry's and
Luna's luggage into the elevator, Toni comes out of her
room in her robe, polishing her nails, and stands in front of
the elevator in malicious joy. Toni doesn't know that her
days are numbered, too.
F O U R
utside a small village in the mountainous jun­
gles of South Vietnam, near Da Lat, where the
Moi people live, a four-year-old girl was
unaware of the dirty war that had been ruining her people
for more than ten years. She didn't know who the invaders
were or about the Vietcong sneaking through the jungle.
And she didn't know the reason for the tiger pit she fell into
that afternoon. She didn't see it because the villagers cov­
ered the holes with bamboo reeds. She screamed because
she ripped open her calf in the fall. She screamed contin­
ually. But no one heard her. The nine-foot hole swallowed
her despair. The villagers broke off their search for her
when night fell. The little girl's screams diminished to a
whimper, and then she was silent. But the piglet that was
locked in a bamboo cage at the bottom of the hole to attract
tigers with its scent squealed restlessly. The little girl fell
asleep and heard neither the piglet nor the quiet hissing of
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the tiger that had picked up the piglet's scent and was slink­
ing around the three-by-six-foot hole.
At daybreak the villagers continued their search for the
little girl and discovered the tiger's tracks. The tracks led to
the tiger pit. The villagers crept up to the pit with bamboo
spears, and the bravest of them carefully bent over the
edge to let the others know how big the tiger was. But
only a small child was smiling up at him, sticking
her fingers through the bamboo cage to pet the sleeping
piglet.
Minhoi, the girl from the tiger pit, is nineteen today and
is standing across from me. I embrace her; I want to kiss
her. The mysterious beauty of her unusual face is enhanced
by her aggressive look of a trapped animal dragged outside
her habitat. Irritated and incensed by my persistence, she
frees herself brusquely from my arms. Her long, full hair is
the color of dark-roasted chestnuts. Her eyebrows form two
crescents above the dark stars of her almond eyes. The
evenness of her oval face balances the catlike Asian cheek­
bones. Her ocher-colored skin has no wrinkles, not even
under her eyes. The lips of her shimmering violet mouth
suggest such seriousness that the chatter of the guests pres­
ent is silenced. Her build, like that of most Vietnamese, is
childlike. Her breasts are barely outlined by her minidress,
over which she is wearing a leopard coat that smells of ori­
ental perfume. Her slender hands are hot and soft, and her
fingernails, polished black, are as long as a Chinese prin­
cess's. None of the guests knows how or why she came
here. I invited all my friends, telling each of them to bring
as many people as they wanted. She didn't come with any­
one, and no one saw her enter.
The tables are covered with champagne and caviar and
numberless delicacies. Rock music is blaring from the loud­
speakers. The guests eat, drink, jabber, laugh, dance. Every-
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one does as he pleases. I don't worry about anyone. I only
stare at the girl of Indian and Chinese ancestry.
I'm not mad that she straightened me out so gruffly.
What can I do to gain her love? I know I will fall for her
forever. But an inexplicable fear of losing her seizes me
before I've even possessed her. My brain works feverishly
to devise how I can seduce her as quickly as possible. First
I have to get her out of this bustle. But how? Under what
pretext? Opportunity knocks. She's hungry. Or at least she
seems to be, because she's trying to push her way to the
caviar table, where some guests are behaving like piranhas.
I fight my way through the voracious crowd, pile some cav­
iar onto a golden plate, as well as smoked salmon, pate, and
white truffles, grab an open bottle of Dom Perignon, and
seek Minhoi.
She's standing, warming herself, in front of the baroque
fireplace with the blazing flames that light up the salon
along with hundreds of burning candles. She seems to be
cold despite the heat and her leopard fur.
There isn't a place in the salon— no armchair, no divan—
where Minhoi can sit down. Here's my chance. I tell her she
can eat and drink in peace in my blue room; I lead her down
a half a flight of stairs. I send away the servants in livery
and white gloves who want to heat up the blue room. I
build a fire myself.
In the blue room, the walls are covered with heavy blue
French silk; blue silk curtains streaming down to the floor
frame the windows; the floors are covered with blue
Chinese carpets. The only furniture in the room is a bed; a
candelabrum on the mantel of the fireplace gives off light.
I set the golden plate on the blue silk bedspread and ask
Minhoi to sit on the bed. She prefers to eat standing up.
"Do you have cocaine?" she asks excitedly.
"No. Why? Don't."
"Any hash?"
"No. Sit down and eat."
"Life is unbearable without drugs."
"That's ridiculous, but if you eat nicely, I'll get you
something."
She has almost eaten everything and reminds me of my
promise. I dash up the stairs to the salon as fast as I can
without falling down to get some hash from one of my
guests. One girl gives me a rolled joint. I light it immedi­
ately. As I dart down the seven steps to the blue room, Toni
blocks my way.
"Give me one. Fuck me! I want you to give me one.
Now!"
I push her to the side and tear down the stairs, fearing
that Minhoi might no longer be there in the blue room.
She comes out of the bathroom as I push the door open.
I give her the joint, and she inhales the sweet smoke. Then
she lies down on the bed. She is relaxed.
It's getting light outside. The first larks are chirping. In
the garden the chauffeur is washing the Rolls-Royce or the
Ferrari. The splashing of the water and the sound of the
gardener raking the gravel torment me. I call the kitchen on
the house telephone and tell Clara, my housekeeper, that
she should tell them all to get the hell out, even the crooked
cook. I want to be alone with Minhoi.
Toni has never forgiven me for the rebuff. She hates Min­
hoi even more than Luna. She hasn't said a word to me or
anyone for a week. When I ask her to come eat, she turns
away from me and doesn't sit down until Minhoi and I have
finished eating and get up from the table. After a week she
realizes that her petulance is useless.
Toni is crying. I didn't want to hurt her.
"You want me to give you one?" I ask her not knowing
what to say.
"I'll never let you give me one again as long as I live,"
Toni answers sadly. Snot bubbles from her nose. She wipes
it away with the back of her hand like a street kid. I give
her a tissue. She blows her nose like a trumpeting elephant.
Enrico will take her to the airport whenever she wants.
Minhoi still has her things in Paris, where she has lived
and gone to school since she was fourteen. I plunder the
boutiques of Rome for her and buy everything she likes. If
she can't find her gloves because she forgot them in Paris,
I buy her ten pairs. If her tights have a run, I buy her two
dozen in all colors. If it's too cold for her leopard coat, I buy
her a white mink and sable fur down to her ankles. If a shoe
pinches, I buy her piles of shoes. And if she needs new lip­
stick, nail polish, and all the other junk, I buy her makeup
worth a thousand dollars. I give the Rolls-Royce convertible
away and buy a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
I have a dark blue twenty-four-foot trailer built that looks
like a Cook's wagon-lit with curtains, bedsheets, table­
cloths, pillows, and upholstery of pure silk. The floor is laid
with velour. Its doors and cabinets are made of teak, except
for those in the bathroom and kitchen. Gold doorknobs,
handles, and water faucets. Silk blinds on the windows.
The front room, salon, dressing room, and bedroom are
separated by sliding doors. An air conditioner, a heater, a
TV, a radio, a reel-to-reel tape player, a turntable, and a
telephone are built into the cabinets. There are two tall crys­
tal mirrors. We eat by candlelight.
The trailer is for Minhoi, who accompanies me wherever
I go on location. Minhoi is happy about everything I do for
her. But mostly when she looks at me she is speechless and
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unbelieving, as if I have done something wrong. I still
haven't realized that opulence and money mean nothing to
her.
Although I know it's senseless, I am so jealous I can
hardly bear it when Minhoi phones her girlfriend Berenice.
When she writes letters, I throw them away. When she
receives mail, I throw that away, too. When someone calls,
I say she doesn't live here. I don't want Minhoi to make a
single move alone. I don't want her to go to the city, not
even to see Berenice. I don't want her to leave the estate
alone. I'm constantly afraid of her leaving me.
When she walks around in our garden and I lose sight of
her for a moment, I search for her desperately. I crash
through the grass that's as tall as a man, look in the shrubs
and tattered blackberry bushes, and crawl in the ruins of the
ancient Roman catacombs near the house. When she's not
in the house, where I had assumed she was, I whirl through
all the floors until I find her. I'm even frightened out of
sleep when she rolls over to the other side of the bed.
I feel guilty about my jealousy. I know it's wrong to limit
Minhoi's freedom; I can't live with this tension. What will
happen when I have to spend a day without her? I can't
even begin to imagine.
But the more Minhoi understands my fears, the more she
accepts my love, which frightened her at first, the less she
distances herself from me. To reassure me, she never
answers the telephone, not even when she thinks it's Ber­
enice. She doesn't use the telephone at all anymore. She
doesn't write to her friends anymore. She throws her
address book into the burning fire before my eyes.
I'm looking for her all through the house again. In the
garden. In the farthest corners of our estate. I yelled at her
in jealousy and told her to leave, to disappear from my life.
The greatest lie of all; Minhoi is my life.
I find her in the turret, where I hadn't looked before,
because she's afraid of bats. She didn't turn on the lights.
It's dark. I almost stumble over her. I run my fingers over
her tear-stained face. I kiss her and beg for her forgiveness.
Then I go to the kitchen to get something for us to eat. It is
Sunday and none of the servants are here.
When I come back to the turret, Minhoi is slumped over.
I find an empty bottle of sleeping pills on the carpet. I pull
Minhoi up to make her walk back and forth. I have heard
that it helps with an overdose of sleeping pills. Minhoi can't
walk; I have to support her. She can't speak properly,
either; she only stammers, embraces me tenderly, and
kisses me on the lips. As I shake her in a panic, her head
slumps onto mine.
I fear I have lost my senses. I must get her into fresh air!
I carry her down the spiral staircase to the third floor; the
elevator is not working. On the stairs to the salon, she col­
lapses in my arms. I carry her to the blue room. Her pulse
is racing. She moans, grabs her throat, gasps for air. I throw
the window open, run down the stairs to the kitchen, and
get a bottle of cold milk to counteract the poison. On the
way back I kneel on the stairs. "My God! You have saved
me in the face of death so many times before. If my life has
had any purpose at all, then please don't let Minhoi die.
She's only just taught me to live!"
When I come into the blue room, Minhoi has fallen from
the bed and is crawling across the floor with cramps. What
if the milk fails to counteract the poison? After I've poured
most of the milk down her throat, her condition doesn't
improve; she doesn't vomit.
I call up all the doctors I know. No one answers. They're
all outside in such nice weather. Minhoi can't breathe any-
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more. I massage her heart, press my mouth to hers and
force my breath into her lungs. Then I drag her into the
bathroom and run cold water over her face, her neck, her
chest. Minhoi vomits and overcomes the crisis. I don't let
her out of my arms for three days. She tells me about her
life for the first time.
Now I know why Minhoi asked me for cocaine and hash­
ish the night I met her. Minhoi isn't an addict. She doesn't
drink alcohol, not even wine, and doesn't smoke cigarettes.
She took the stuff a couple times in Paris, LSD as well,
because she couldn't cope with life in Paris, in Europe. At
seven years of age she had begun to understand that her
people and her country were being destroyed. She could
not return to Vietnam, because her family had been anni­
hilated. She was no longer capable of tolerating life without
drugging herself.
But once Minhoi feels secure abut my love and knows
that I cannot live without her and we both understand that
we have lived until now only to meet each other, she starts
to feel good about her own life again. And the little girl
from the tiger pit makes me conscious of why I live. She is
able to do what no other person has ever been able to do.
She is the measure by which I orient myself. She teaches
me how to use money. She convinces me that I don't have
to impress others with champagne and caviar, that a person
has no right to throw so much money out the window; that
we can live without a staff of seven; that we don't need a
chauffeur, who only stands around and is never content;
that we don't need a gardener, who does nothing anyway
but scrape the gravel over the same spot all the time; that I
should fire my secretary, who has me paying the same bills
time and again because I never check the bookkeeping; that
we don't need a cook who takes home the food I pay for,
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while we eat the leftovers; that we don't need to have a
Rolls-Royce and a Ferrari; that we can give up the house in
Appia. She asks me if I've forgotten what I really want; if
I've forgotten my sailboat: my freedom.
I had planned to buy the house on the Appian Way from
the Venetian Count Marcello, the actual owner. Now I
won't sign the contract. Minhoi is right. It's all shit. In a
couple of years I'll be on the sea, where I'll forget the ghet­
tos of people, their prisons, and their mental institutions.
The sums I demanded and threw away for my work were
like a drug to deaden me to a life that was unbearable.
A movie with playboy Hugh Hefner's girlfriend, a very
young girl who is my partner. I play her pimp. I'm still
doing westerns, one after the other. They get more and
more wretched and the directors are more and more inept.
And the more inept they are, the more restive they become.
One of them is Mario Costa. When I refuse to follow his socalled directions, he threatens me.
"I'll see to it that you're deported from Italy."
"What for? I haven't killed anyone, and I have a right to
be here."
"You'll never make a film again."
"You shouldn't have said that, you poor fool. No one on
earth, and especially not a louse like you, will decide when
I stop making films. But you will die before that!"
The past one and a half years Biggi has stolidly hoped we
would find our way back together. I must make it clear to
her that this will never happen. She doesn't know what
Minhoi means to me. I try to explain to her in countless
letters and telephone conversations. She finally allows a
divorce.
*
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Minhoi and I dash around for the marriage papers. When
the official at the office of immigration asks for the name of
Minhoi's parents, Minhoi starts to tremble and hides her
face in my chest. I hold her tightly. She clutches me and
whispers with a tear-choked voice that she is an orphan and
never knew her parents. I gesture to the official that he
shouldn't ask any more questions. The man has a heart, like
all Italians, and leaves the question on the form blank. I am
struck by Minhoi's words.
On May 2, a Sunday, Minhoi and I marry in Rome. At
the Capitol, the wedding is postponed for hours. The pho­
tographer's flashes and the buzzing TV cameras upset the
composure of the justice of the peace.
"When are we going to start?" he yells, because he feels
superfluous.
"When I say so," I retort. "This is my wedding."
But all the photographing gets to be too much for us, too.
I take another swig from the champagne bottle and give it
to a photographer to hold.
"Okay, hurry up!" I holler. Wearing his official sash, the
justice of the peace, a former colonel, starts to declare his
horrible little dictum.
"There's no use in reciting it from the book," I interrupt,
"my bride understands only French."
"I can speak that, too," the colonel answers, pursing his
bloodless lips in delight over formulating his psalm in
French.
"Oh no no no no no . . . not French," I correct myself,
"she understands only Chinese. Can you speak that, too?"
The whole room breaks out in laughter. Photographers
and cameramen seize the moment snapping and shooting
like mad.
"No, I don't," says the colonel with a beet-red face.
"So the best thing is to keep your trap shut," I say, grab­
bing for the champagne bottle I had given the photogra­
pher; I take a big gulp.
"If you can't conduct yourself properly, I will refuse to
marry you," the justice of the peace says as he tries to undo
his sash, without which he apparently can't pronounce his
dictum.
"Tie your belly band up again and finish the thing!" I
scream, beside myself because I've finally lost all patience.
He restricts himself to stating only our names, dates of
birth, nationalities, wedding date, et cetera. Then he asks
me if we agree to enter into matrimony together. I break out
laughing. "Why do you think we are here?"
We sign a document and race the Maserati at 80 miles an
hour with a cop on our tail to George, the most expensive
restaurant in Rome, with the two girls who were our wit­
nesses. After the meal I smash everything up and pay for
the damage. It was worth it. I've demolished the past.
Before daybreak we drive to Munich, where Werner Her­
zog is waiting for me; he has offered me a film in Peru,
Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Biggi lets us have her apartment,
because she has moved to Venezuela, where Nastassja is
going to school for a year.
I meet Helmut von Gaza on the street in Munich. He just
got out of an Italian prison, where he was locked up for
seducing young boys.
"What's become of the others?" I ask to liven him up a
bit.
"Prince Kropotkin was found on his Spanish island,
choked to death with a pillow."
"And Gustl?"
"Gustl married me. So she did become one of the nobil­
ity, before she died of cancer."
Herzog, the producer of the film, wrote the screenplay
and wants to direct it. I immediately ask him how much
money he has. When he comes to the apartment, he's so
shy he hardly dares to enter. Maybe it's just a tactic. In any
case, he stays at the threshold for so long that I have to drag
him in. As soon as he's in, he starts to explain the film to
me without being asked. I say that I've seen the screenplay
and know the story. But he doesn't even listen, he talks and
talks and talks. I don't think he could stop talking even if
he tried. Not that he speaks too quickly. His talk is cum­
bersome, sluggish, fussy, pedantic, choppy. The words fall
from his mouth like rubble. It goes on and on, flushing out
his brain snot. Then he writhes, bullshit machine that he is;
an old model whose off button doesn't function anymore. I
have to punch him in the face. No, I have to knock him
unconscious. But even unconscious, he would keep talking.
Even if someone cut his vocal cords, he would keep on talk­
ing like a ventriloquist. Even if somebody cut his throat and
separated his head from his torso, words would issue from
his mouth like foul gas. I have no idea what he is talking
about— except that he's fascinated with himself for no
obvious reason and is baffled by his own endowment,
which is nothing but dilettantish ignorance. When he
assumes I have seen what a great guy he is, he confesses
that the living and working conditions on location will be
filthy and disgusting, as if he were reading a deserved ver­
dict, and explains just as brazenly and coarsely (licking his
lips as if savoring some tasty tidbit) that each of the partic­
ipants will have to endure unimaginable punishment and
privation, risking death, to follow him, Herzog— yes, with­
out batting an eye. Whatever the cost: "Unto death," as he
obnoxiously expresses himself. The whole time, he keeps
his eyes shut to his megalomania, which he imagines to be
genius. Of course, he admits that he himself gets dizzy from
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his own crazy ideas, which simply take him by storm. Then
suddenly, out of the clear blue, he tries to make me believe
he has a sense of humor about himself. That is, he lets it
shine through "unintentionally"— he shows embarrass­
ment halfway jokingly. Now he's tossing all rules of caution
to the wind and starts to lie: He says he is inclined to boyish
escapades, he really is one of the gang, and so on. And
when he's finished with his confession, he doesn't want to
keep it a secret from me that he could piss his pants right
now from laughing at his own roguishness. And while it's
perfectly clear to me that never in my entire life have I ever
encountered such a humorless, mendacious, stubborn, nar­
row-minded, pretentious, unscrupulous, bumptious, spirit­
less, depressing, boring, and sickening person— entirely
unconcerned, he drives home the most uninteresting high
points, finally falling to his knees like a sectarian, holding
forth fanatically, waiting for someone to pull him up. Hav­
ing unburdened himself of his garbage, stinking all over the
place and making me want to vomit, he pretends to be a
naive child of innocence, talking about his dreamy poetic
existence, as if he weren't living in reality at all and doesn't
have the vaguest idea of the brutal material side of the
world. But I can clearly see that he thinks himself to be
exceedingly smart. That he is lying in wait for me at every
turn and is desperately trying to investigate my thoughts.
That he's racking his brain over how he can cheat me on all
points of the contract. In short, that he has a mind to take
me in.
I agree to do the film anyway, strictly because of Peru. I
don't know where it's located, exactly. Somewhere in South
America, near the Pacific, the desert, glaciers, and the most
gigantic jungle on earth. The screenplay is almost illiter­
ately primitive. That's its chance. The jungle is smoldering
in it and contagious like a virus. It's as if I know this land
with magic names from another life. A caged animal can
never forget the freedom of the wilderness. A bird in a cage
sticks its head through the wires to watch the clouds roll by
above.
I tell Herzog that Aguirre must be crippled, because his
power cannot depend on his appearance. I will be a hump­
back. My right arm will be longer than my left, long like a
monkey's arm. Because my left arm will be shorter, I will
have to attach a halter for my sword to my right breast—
since I am left-handed— and not to my hip, as is customary.
My left leg will be longer than my right, so that it drags
behind. I will move forward sideways, like a crab. I will
have long hair; it will grow past my shoulders before the
filming starts. I won't need an artificial hump. No costume
designer or makeup to mess with. I will be crippled,
because I want to be.
I will readjust my spine. I will be crippled today, now,
immediately, this very moment. Everything will adjust
itself to my condition from now on; costumes, armor vest,
weapon halter, the weapons themselves, helmet, boots, et
cetera.
I design the costume. To show what I have in mind, I rip
a couple pages of paintings by old masters out of art books.
Then I fly to Madrid with Herzog for the armor and weap­
ons. After days of searching, I finally fish out a sword, dag­
ger, helmet, and vest of armor from mountains of rusted
scraps. The armor vest has to be cut to fit because of my
crippled condition.
The trip into the jungle is hellish drudgery. Crammed
into ancient trains, wrecked trucks, and cagelike busses, we
eat and camp like pigs. Sometimes there are corrugated
metal barracks and other torture chambers. Sleeping is out
of the question. We can barely breathe. Neither toilets nor
the chance to wash for many days. I keep my clothes on
day and night, otherwise the mosquitos would eat me alive.
It's as though I am constantly standing under a shower of
boiling hot water. Outside it's just as fatally hot, but death
is inside. Piles of garbage overflowing with globs of grease,
saturated in a muck of human piss and shit. In this hellhole
the population throws out eyes and guts torn out from
slaughtered animals. Giant black vultures as big as dogs
shuffle and crouch around in this horror, guarding it as if it
were private property. Wherever I look: these infamous,
half-built barracks with corrugated metal roofs. If only I
didn't have to look at these half-built cement barracks with
corrugated metal roofs anymore! It's as if everything had
been abandoned in the middle of work. Iron blinds, bars
everywhere in mockery. Mounds of trash, sewage, larvae,
and— TV antennas. (New York, Paris, London, Tokyo,
Hong Kong are all the same, only more infamous.)
It is a long, agonizing road to the wilderness, but no
strain is too unbearable to escape the human hell. And as
we make our way out of it, Minhoi and I feel our hair get­
ting silkier, our skin more supple, like the fur and skin of
wild animals set free, our bodies more elastic like the bodies
of big cats. We feel more sensitive and alert. Minhoi has
never been more breathtakingly beautiful.
An Inca girl is standing on a runway for military planes.
She has a little monkey on her arm and wants to sell him.
But the monkey clings to the little Inca girl, scared to death.
We board old, dented paratrooper transport planes; their
propellers rage in my temples like a jackhammer. Shim­
mering heat; choking, stuffy air; gasoline stench; hunger,
thirst, headaches, and stomach cramps. We are crammed
together, squatting on the hot steel floor of the plane with
no windows. Hour passes after hour. During the flight, each
of us, one by one, is allowed to crawl out of the cabin into
the cockpit and look outside through a tiny window far
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below: the green ocean, three thousand miles of jungle, yel­
low snakes winding through it, the largest network of rivers
in the world.
After that we take a single-engine amphibian plane that
lands after a nosedive. Then trucks and buses again, and
finally rafts. We are tied to the cargo, standing upright,
speeding down the rapids, crashing now and then against
the rocky cliffs. The raft is loaded down too heavily; the
Indians had warned us. But bigmouth Herzog, arrogant and
ignorant as he is, jeered at the Indians' warnings, dismiss­
ing them as foolish. We're all in costume and completely
set up, because we want to film the trip. But Herzog misses
what is most beautiful and incomprehensible because he
doesn't even notice it. Every time I yell at the cameraman
through the thundering of the rapids that he should at least
film how we're risking our lives, he answers that Hezog
ordered him not to touch the camera without being directed
by him.
My costume of heavy leather, my long hip boots, my hel­
met, vest of armor, sword, and dagger weigh about fifty
pounds. If the raft capsizes because of Herzog's megalo­
mania, there's no rescue for me— I'm a dead man. As if
none of this were enough, scattered throughout the rapids
are jagged reefs, whose razor-sharp points lie in wait
beneath the foam like piranhas, sometimes even looming
up out of the whirling water.
We shoot along the current like a bullet fired from a gun,
the steep waves attacking our raft like raging bulls, crashing
together behind us, high above our heads. The air is filled
with foam.
Suddenly, as if the crashing river has spat us out in anger,
we glide in a calm, powerful current— amidst the jungle,
always deeper into its interior. The wilderness grabs me,
sucks me in, hot and wet like the naked body of a lovesick
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woman with all her secrets and wonders. I gape at her, my
amazement and praise never ends . . . fairytale animals full
of grace . . . plants strangling one another in embrace . . .
orchids spread out on stumps of rotting trees like young
girls on the laps of horny old men . . . butterflies as big as
my head, metallic blue . . . foaming flowers . . . pearly
streams of butterflies landing on my mouth and hands . . .
the eye of the panther camouflaged in flowers . . . green,
yellow, and red clouds of birds . . . silver sun . . . violet-blue
fog . . . I will show this wonder to my child . . . my son! . . .
the kissing lips of the fish . . .
We live almost exclusively on rafts for two months before
entering the Amazon. Minhoi and I have a raft to ourselves.
We either float way ahead of the other rafts or we stay
behind— as far away as possible. When night falls we moor
our raft to lianas. Then I lie awake and stare at the Milky
Way, the archipelagos of stars.
We have a small Indian canoe that we tie to the raft and
pull along with us. When I don't have to shoot, we search
for openings in the jungle. Sometimes we penetrate a nar­
row slit that closes in immediately behind us. The water in
the interior of the flooded forest is still, even as we paddle.
We sit in wonder for many hours, silently awaiting noth­
ing in particular. For the first time in my life I feel as if I
have no past. The present is all-powerful. I know I am
free.
Although I'm constantly trying to escape his eye, Herzog
sticks to me like an outhouse fly. The mere thought of his
existence here in this wilderness makes me sick. When I see
him approaching from afar, I scream at him to stop, that he
stinks, that he disgusts me. That I don't want to hear his
bullshit. That I can't bear him!
I always hope he'll attack me. Then I'd push him into an
eddy full of bloodthirsty piranhas and watch them tear him
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to pieces. But he never makes a move on me. It doesn't even
seem to bother him that I treat him like a worthless piece
of shit. He's a coward. He only attacks when he believes he
has the upper hand— for instance, a native who takes a job
so his family won't starve and puts up with anything for
fear of losing it, or helpless animals. Today he chains a
llama to a canoe and sends the llama and canoe crashing
down the rapids, because it's in the plot— which he wrote
himself! I find this out when it's too late. The llama is head­
ing for a whirlpool, and no one can save it. I can still see
how it rears up in fear of death, ripping at the chains, trying
to escape its horrible execution. It disappears around a bend
in the river, smashing against sharp reefs, drowning an ago­
nizing death.
Now I absolutely despise this murderer Herzog. I tell him
to his face that I want to see him perish like the llama he
executed. He should be thrown to the crocodiles alive! An
anaconda should throttle him slowly! The sting of a deadly
spider should paralyze him! His brain should burst from the
bite of the most poisonous of all snakes! Panthers shouldn't
slit his throat open with their claws, that would be too good
for him! No. Big red ants should piss in his eyes, eat his
balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts! He should get
the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yellow fever! Leprosy! In
vain. The more I wish the most horrible of deaths on him
and treat him like the scum of the earth that he is, the less
I can get rid of him.
We float down the river all day long and film nonstop.
Night falls. On land, we're supposed to shoot a night scene.
The place is full of poisonous snakes crawling in search of
prey. We're completely exhausted and haven't had any­
thing to eat or drink, again for three days.
I fall into a sumphole in full costume and try to free my
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body from the sludge, sinking deeper all the time. I scream
out in blind rage, "I'm getting out of here! Even if I have to
paddle to the Atlantic Ocean!"
"You're a dead man," says limpdick Herzog, terrified of
the risk he's taking.
"And how do you plan to achieve that, you asshole?" I
ask, hoping to rid myself of him forever.
"I'll shoot you!" he sputters like a paralytic with brain
damage. "Eight bullets for you and the ninth bullet is for
me."
"Who has ever heard of a gun or a pistol with nine bul­
lets, you bumbling idiot? No such thing exists. Besides, you
don't have a gun. I know it. You have no gun. You have
nothing, not even a can opener. I'm the only one who has
a gun. A Winchester. I have a special permit from the Peru­
vian military. I had to bust my ass walking from one police
station to he next for signatures, stamps, and all kinds of
shit just to get bullets. I'm going back to my raft now and
I'll wait for you, you vermin."
I am ecstatic that it's finally gone this far.
On my raft, Minhoi has fallen asleep in her hammock. I
load my Winchester and wait. At four in the morning, Her­
zog comes paddling over and apologizes.
Herzog is a miserable, spiteful, envious, stingy, stinking,
money-hungry, malicious, sadistic, insidious, backstabbing,
blackmailing, cowardly person, and a liar through and
through. His so-called talent is nothing more than torturing
helpless creatures and, if necessary, putting them to death
or simply murdering them. No one and nothing interests
him but his lousy career as a so-called filmmaker. Driven
by a pathological addiction to cause a sensation, he himself
provokes the most senseless difficulties and dangers and
puts the safety and even the lives of others on the line—
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only so he can later say that he, Herzog, has mastered the
seemingly impossible.
He gets the mentally retarded and dilettantes for his
films, whom he can order around (and allegedly hypno­
tize!), and whom he either pays a pittance or nothing at all.
The rest are cripples and freaks of all sorts. He wants to
appear interesting. He doesn't possess a spark of talent and
has no idea what filmmaking is. He doesn't dare to ask me
if I am willing to carry out his boring nonsense. He gave
that up a long time ago, because I forbade his claptrap. If
he wants to repeat a shot again, because he, like most direc­
tors, is inconfident, I tell him he should fuck off. If I think
the first take is okay, I repeat nothing. Especially when a
faker like him wants me to. I determine every scene, every
adjustment, every shot, and refuse to do anything other
than what I see as right. This way I can at least save the film
from becoming complete trash.
Nearly everyone is still living like pigs after eight weeks,
crammed together on a couple of rafts like cattle to be
butchered. The others eat grub they've cooked with pig fat,
and, most dangerous of all, they guzzle water from the
river, which might induce unimaginable sickness. None of
them has been vaccinated.
Minhoi and I cook alone on our raft. We dump soil on the
wooden foor and build a fire. When one of us jumps into
the water to bathe, the other looks out for piranhas. We
usually have nothing to cook and nourish ourselves on fan­
tastic jungle fruits. But these fruits of paradise are hard
to get because we are floating downstream, stopping
infrequently.
After a while we start to feel the consequences of our pal­
try diet. We get weak; my stomach swells up. I'm skin and
bones. The others are worse off.
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The wilderness isn't interested in arrogant filmmakers.
She has no mercy for those who disregard the laws of life.
Today at three in the morning we're violently awakened
on our rafts. We're told only that there's no time to have
breakfast, not even coffee. We'll be in transit only twenty
minutes, only until we reach the next Indian village on the
river. We'll get everything there. The alleged twenty min­
utes become fifteen hours. Herzog has lied to us again.
Our heavy steel helmets get so hot from the sun that we
burn ourselves. We are at the mercy of the heat all day long,
without the least bit of shade, without eating and drinking.
People are dropping like flies: first the girls, then the men,
one after the other. Most of their legs are covered with pus
and swollen to disfigurement from mosquito bites. When
we finally reach an Indian village around evening, it's in
flames. Herzog had it set on fire and we— hungry and
dehydrated and exhausted to death, tottering from fifteen
hours of hellish heat— must attack the Indian village
straight off the rafts, as stated by his idiotic screenplay.
We spend the night in the Indian village and camp in the
remaining shacks, where huge rats romp about, moving in
closer and closer. They must sense how weak we are, and
are waiting for the right moment to pounce on us.
Someone tells Herzog that the people can't go on if they
aren't fed better, and most of all, if they don't get more to
drink. Herzog answers that they can drink from the river.
Besides, it's perfectly fine that they are collapsing from
exhaustion and hunger and thirst, because that's how the
story goes. Herzog and his gang have their own stash of
fresh fruit, vegetables, French Camembert, olive oil, and
drinks.
The American who is my lieutenant in the movie falls
sick with a dangerous case of hepatitis and is in convulsions
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with a high fever on the raft. Herzog claims the American
is pretending and refuses to have him taken to nearby
Iquitos.
When we are situated directly across from Iquitos and
drive our rafts into the Amazon, we bring the sick man in
to land and take him to the hospital by force. We ourselves
take the day off, also by force, to buy food, water, first aid
supplies, medicines, and salves for mosquito bites.
After about ten weeks have passed, the last scene of the
film is shot: Aguirre, the only survivor, has gone insane and
floats downstream toward the Atlantic Ocean with
hundreds of monkeys. Most of the monkeys that are put
onto the raft jump into the water and swim back to the jun­
gle. They were supposed to be sold by a band of animal
trappers to American laboratories for dissection. Herzog
borrowed them. When only about a hundred monkeys are
left, just waiting to jump into the water to regain their free­
dom, I order Herzog to film immediately. I know this
opportunity won't repeat itself.
When the filming is over, the last monkeys jump into the
current and swim back to the jungle, which swallows them
up. There isn't a single person who isn't exhausted to death
or sick or both. But my daughter in the film, a sixteen-yearold blond Peruvian, was fucked by almost everyone, I
think.
Minhoi and I head for the hospital in Iquitos to get vita­
min injections. We are hooked up to hanging bottles with
plastic tubes, thick needles stuck into our veins, for three
days and three nights.
When the jet takes off into the air with a murderous blar­
ing, leaving the jungle far below and behind me, I burst into
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a fit of tears. My body jerks back and forth so violently that
I think my heart is being torn apart. I hide my face from the
other passengers, pressing it against the cabin window, and
try to choke my sobs. An animal or a human being crying
because he's had to leave the wilderness— an animal or a
human being who isn't happy and thankful in the supposed
security of human ghettos, where madness slinks around—
is locked up in a mental institution or put to sleep.
On the way back, we fly around the world one more
time. Minhoi is happy when we finally reach Vietnam. In
Saigon an adolescent Vietnamese boy spits on me in the
ricksha and runs off immediately. Here's another one spit­
ting on me again! First it was the Belgians, because I wasn't
American. Then the American fighters shoot my mother.
And now here in Vietnam, where the dirtiest of all wars
turned Minhoi into an orphan at birth, someone spits on me
because he thinks I'm American. Maybe he takes me for
one of those soldiers who sent Polaroid photos home for
Christmas, showing the corpses of massacred women and
children. Minhoi is crying next to me. I jump from the rick­
sha to catch up with the boy. Just then a Vietnamese points
his pistol at my breast. I have to pull myself together to
keep from bursting into tears of rage. Yet I love these people
like no other.
Everywhere in the street there are sandbag barricades. A
small boy, no more than seven or eight years old, does a
pantomime in front of us with fixed eyes and a gaping
mouth. I don't know what he wants. Minhoi understands:
He wants to tell me through the pantomime that he's seen
me in a film. I was a soldier who perishes in the hatch of a
tank with fixed eyes and a gaping mouth. So we are back
in the human hell.
*
*
*
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We have no money, so I take the first film that comes
along, like a whore on the strip who takes on the first avail­
able customer. We have to go to Holland, where this non­
sense is supposed to take place.
The director (the word itself makes me sick), an Ameri­
can, has left his girlfriend Joan with Maria Schneider. Now
Joan and Maria fuck their brains out. Maria just finished
filming the silly unerotic film Last Tango in Paris and is
proud of being fucked in the ass with butter serving as
lubricant. She brings books with photos of Bedouins and
distributes her cocaine. These fixers always convince them­
selves that drugs have something to do with freedom. Why
does she show me photos of Bedouins in the desert? I have
lived with Bedouins myself. They don't need cocaine. She's
so full of shit, giving Minhoi some of the stuff behind my
back.
In Amsterdam the Dutch have built an entire museum for
van Gogh alone, cramming his paintings together like
inmates in an overcrowded state prison— like in the zoo,
where a polar bear is executed on the cement floor of his
cell in slow-motion. Five steps to the left. Five steps to the
right. Five steps in a circle. Its tears and excrements are
hosed into the gutter. Sometimes the tiger is let into a cage
next door through a trap door just to mock him. The mon­
keys, insanity in their eyes, stick their arms through the
bars of the cage. They have their fingers clenched together
in prayer, begging to be set free— here, van Gogh is flooded
on death row. Secured with an electronic alarm. Like a man
sentenced to death. You can see him only through rein­
forced windows. Each painting is stamped with the state
seal. The visitors stand in lines like it's fast food. Push in
ahead. Next! They're holding brochures in their hands on
why van Gogh cut off one of his ears. Some visitors look
exhausted. Some gape without understanding. Some make
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base jokes, giggle hysterically. One girl trembles. One man
has tears in his eyes. Many look for an exit to get out of the
stuffy museum, where no window is ever opened. The
bleeding suns are piled up on top of each other like a mass
grave. The bursting sunflowers. I run out of the van Gogh
museum. I vomit in the street.
We are back in Rome, this time in a small hotel near
Piazza Navona. I love Minhoi above all else. I love the mag­
ical beauty of her body. I love her mysterious soul full of
wonder. She is my wife and my lover and the future mother
of my son— but our life together gets more and more
painful. Minhoi is innocent. I take all the blame. Every­
thing in me is extreme: my feelings, my imagination. My
reactions are so violent, like a natural catastrophe ripping
everything along with it and leaving only desolation
behind. Conflicting powers in me threaten to tear me
apart.
Sometimes Minhoi is so shocked she can do nothing but
cry. Helplessly she holds her hands out to me, as if she
wants to fend off the rage that's destroying us. After these
outbursts we're both exhausted and depressed for days. But
when she sees me like a caged animal walking back and
forth in the shabby hotel room, back and forth, from left to
right, right to left— then she comes and kisses me and begs
me to stop pacing like that, because she can't bear my
suffering.
"Help me!" we scream at the same time and cling to each
other.
We speak about our son often. Then everything is good
and we're happy. We wonder where is best to bring him
into the world; we make plans and dream about where he
should grow up. Maybe we'll go to the mountainous jun­
gles of Vietnam— which is Minhoi's desire— or to the
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Himalayas from Ama Dablam. Maybe we'll sail across the
seven seas and never come back to land.
Making movies means money. Money is our way out of
drudgery. So I'll keep going a while longer. First, two films
in Turkey. A Greek film on Crete. A film in Paris. A film in
Spain. At least I'll be with my gypsies in Andalusia.
Minhoi comes with me everywhere. I can't take a breath
without her being there. But our life together has become
impossible; it's a merciless war, with no way out but sepa­
ration. I refuse to think the horrible thought. But both Min­
hoi and I know it's inevitable. It's our only hope.
We rent an attic with a terrace across from Luchino Vis­
conti's home and across the street from Villa Ada Park.
When the phone calls from photographers become a pain
in the ass, I make an appointment to meet them in front of
the park entrance. They don't know that I can observe them
from the roof of our house. I need only to climb up the fire
escape of our terrace. When they search high and low for
me because I haven't shown up for the appointment and
they happen to look up in my direction, I duck behind the
chimney. After a while I come out again, cautiously. I keep
this up until they've had enough and disappear. I can't bear
to be photographed anymore. Photography is a kind of
prison where my emotions die an agonizing death.
I wake up on our terrace in a stream of light where I had
fallen asleep. Minhoi is gone. I refuse to believe it; I can't
grasp it. I need a long time to come to my senses from the
numbness. I get up slowly, as if I had been given a shatter­
ing blow to the head. Then suddenly knowledge of her
absence shoots through my brain like a bullet: Everything
inside me is aflame, torn to shreds, bloody. Everything is
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screaming: a shrill alarm. Everything is screaming for Minhoi. I dart to the apartment door. It is ajar, probably not to
make a noise. I call out "Minhoi!" again and again. I start
to laugh. It could be a joke. Maybe she's playing hide-andseek. But my laughter is only a sign of fear. I rush to the
bathroom and rip the shower curtain to the side, as if I were
sure to find her there. I look in the bathtub. Go to the toilet,
to the bidet. I crawl under the bed. In the courtyard I'm star­
tled, thinking I hear her as she changes her hiding place. I
throw open all the closets. I jerk around, hoping to surprise
her if she's trying to slip away. I run back onto the terrace.
Rush up to the roof. Back into the apartment: to the shower,
bathtub, toilet, bidet, under the bed, closets again. I rifle
through the drawers, disarrange the bookshelves, look
behind the books, in the kitchen, cupboards, refrigerator,
oven. I am dizzy. I rip the receiver from the telephone. I'm
incapable of dialing a single number. What for? People
would laugh at me. No one will know where she is. I rush
down the five floors, the elevator is too slow. Look in the
garage. She isn't there. I run back up, then down, the five
floors. It's almost dark. Where shall I go? Where shall I look
for her? I run in any direction for miles. Then in the oppo­
site direction. I must have stepped on broken glass; I'm
bleeding like a slaughtered pig. I didn't notice it. Not even
that I was barefoot. I run back home; not through the main
entrance: I can't bear to meet the doorman. I use the
entrance from the street, which leads directly to the stairs.
Besides, who knows, maybe Minhoi is back! I am so weak
I can't stand up anymore. I fall to my knees crying and curs­
ing; I want Minhoi back! I don't know who I'm praying to.
My prayer is directed to the universe. To life. To love. I say,
"Come on, torture me! Just give Minhoi back to me!" I pray
to our future son: "You are the light that shines in my dark­
ness. I shall never lose my belief in you!"
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The doorbell rings. It hurts as if I'd been abused by a cat­
tle prod. When I open the door, Minhoi is standing there, a
small bouquet of flowers in her childlike hands. She holds
it out to me. My God! Does a person have to go through
death first to be as happy as I am at this moment?
From now on I am traumatized by the idea that Minhoi
could leave me any moment. What shall I do? How shall I
behave? (As if my nature could be altered!) Maybe she
doesn't like how I dress? Should I throw everything away?
What should I wear? Maybe she doesn't like my face any­
more. Maybe she wants me to wear my hair differently.
Shorter, maybe? Or longer? Maybe she doesn't like my
being blond? Or that I have blue eyes? Maybe I don't tell
her often enough how beautiful she is? That's not possible,
no one in the world could tell a woman how beautiful she
is more than I do. That I love her? I say it so often that I
think she doesn't want to hear it so much. Why shouldn't I
say it again and again, a thousand times, a million times!
Have I never told her how intelligent and talented she is,
or not often enough? My God, what have I done wrong and
said wrong? Am I just incapable? Haven't I said often
enough that I'm enchanted with the way she wears her
dresses? How she wears her hair? Haven't I said enough
how much I like what she cooks for me? Don't I say it every
day, many times, every time I eat something? Maybe I've
forgotten without knowing it? Don't I thank her enough for
everything she does for me? When she washes or mends
something for me? Should I buy her more clothes? Maybe
different clothes? Or rings and necklaces? Does she dislike
me for not earning much money right now? Because I've
postponed everything? Doesn't she know that it's only a
matter of time till I'm shooting as many films as I want
again and that no one can stop me? Is it taking too long for
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her? Should I take on some film far away, so that we can
get away, now, immediately? I can attain everything I want,
I am able to execute everything I'm asked to, I know how
to prostitute myself.
All day and night, I don't dare walk from one room to the
next without leaving the doors wide open, even the toilet
door. I even tell Minhoi not to shut the door when she goes
to the toilet. I'm afraid she might climb out through the
bathroom window and from there up a fire escape to the
roof and flee across the other terraces. Sometimes I jump
out of the shower and rush out of the bathroom to see if
Minhoi is still there. Now I don't dare take a shower any­
more or wash my hair, because I wouldn't hear the apart­
ment door. At night I am startled from my sleep time and
again and grope to see if she's still in bed. One time I scream
out because I can't find her. The bed is empty. I turn on the
light and look for her everywhere. She's sitting sleepily on
the toilet. I don't let her go shopping alone. I don't leave
the house anymore, only with Minhoi. And even then, I am
afraid that she'll run away once she's on the street. I don't
make appointments with anyone anymore. Not without
Minhoi. We would starve like this, because we never have
money if I don't work. I've never saved any. So I have to
do film after film. Minhoi doesn't want to come to the
shootings anymore, because they're dull and taxing. I
wouldn't have a single moment of concentration while
standing before the camera anyway, unable to see her all
the time. During filming or when I just have to speak to
someone, I think of nothing but what Minhoi is doing. As
soon as I'm finished with work, I scream for my car and
every second that passes by is an ache in my heart and I
think I'm losing my senses. I can't wait for the elevator and
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run up the five flights of stairs. When I get to the apartment
door, I listen first. If everything is quiet, I am afraid Minhoi
isn't there anymore. If I hear a sound, I know she is and I
jump for joy.
Whenever we walk in Villa Ada Park we feel far apart—
in our future, especially when there are no other people
around. We meet one of Minhoi's girlfriends, whom she
knows from school in Paris. She is taking her newborn baby
out for a ride in the buggy and gives it to Minhoi to hold,
so Minhoi can feel what it's like to hold a newborn baby in
her arms. But Minhoi looks troubled and wants to give the
baby back quickly, like a mother who has taken another
child for her own by mistake. When her girlfriend can't take
the baby because she's getting a fresh diaper ready, Minhoi
gives the baby to me. But I don't want to hold the baby,
either. When I feel the weight of the tiny, heavy body, I
cannot bear that it's not our son.
We have only a Cooper Mini, but it runs. And since I'm
not making a movie for a few weeks, we throw our tent and
a duffel bag in the back seat and take off. Normandy, Brit­
tany, England. From London we drive through the night to
Portsmouth, Plymouth, Land's End. It is from here that
Chichester sailed by himself to Australia and Cape Horn. A
few years later he took off from here for his last Atlantic
race. He died of lung cancer during the race at the age of
seventy-two. And Chay Blyth sailed from here alone, non­
stop around the world against all currents and all winds.
This is where the Single Hand Race across the Atlantic
starts every four years. We run around for days to see all
the sailboats and their skippers, who are completing their
final preparations. The day the boats leave the harbor, I feel
as I did when the jet took off from the runway in Peru after
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the filming of Aguirre, leaving the jungle far below and
behind.
We move on down to the jagged coast where the Atlantic
roars, whipped by an icy wind. There are no other people
in sight, only bushes driven by the wind and clouds racing
over the cliffs. I feel as though we've broken away from the
deadly tomb of civilization. For a moment I forget the traps
that human society has set for anyone who has the crazy
idea of crossing its fucking yellow line. A ranger drives us
away. We must pull our tent up. It's only allowed in camp­
ground ghettos. We wait till it's dark. Then we sneak into
the bushes.
Very early in the morning, we go back to the cliffs and
build a fire.
We have trouble finding food in this country. We always
get to the restaurant too late, sometimes by only five min­
utes or less. The waitresses always look at us angrily and
suspiciously, as if we had insulted the entire nation, simply
because we didn't show up for grub punctually. It's sick­
ening that you can't order a beer between (I think) twothirty and six in the afternoon only because some drunken
slut of a queen had the sadistic idea that she alone was
allowed to get drunk! That's why the beer is piss warm and
has no foam! And this fish and chips! And bed and break­
fast! Give me a break.
On our way back through Brittany, I fight with Minhoi in
the car, probably because we're getting closer to the ghet­
tos. I'm beside myself in desperation and rage. I feel as if
I'm not even the one who is raging and screaming, as if I
hear and see myself raging and screaming, spitting out hor­
rible words and insults, dream images. I realize the terror of
what's happening and I feel as if I'm going to implode. I
sense the pain, but I sense it as the pain of another. Minhoi
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wants me to stop the car. She gets out and runs across a
field. When I get out of the car to run after her, I cry out,
rolling in convulsions on the ground. It's as if someone
were knifing me over and over again, in my heart.
Minhoi can't wait any longer. She wants our son! Now!
Today! Immediately! I long for our son as much as she does.
First I have to find a place.
In Spain, Granada, I do a film; I'm always with my gyp­
sies. One reads in my palm that a drastic change will take
place in my life. I will lose what I love most. I hate the
gypsy for this, although I know she speaks the truth. I
shouldn't have let her read my palm. I don't need this. I
only wanted to fuck the gypsy, anyway. She has a sweet
cunt and floods like a river.
We give up our apartment in Rome and fly to Paris
because Zulawski has asked me to do his movie It's Impor­
tant to Love. A Polish guy for a change, I say to myself. I
love the Italians as if I were one of them, but we've been in
the same place too long.
As soon as we get to Paris, Minhoi gets pregnant. Early
in the morning she runs out of breath into the bathroom
where I'm shaving and shows me a tiny round framed piece
of paper that has changed color from her urine. It looks like
a slide you view under a microscope. After she's showed
me the paper, she carefully and lovingly places it on the
glass shelf above the sink.
From this moment on everything inside me is bright.
Everything is bright around me. Light is everywhere. I see
fields of flowers everywhere I look, though it's gray and
cold and mean in Paris. All people seem friendly and happy
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to me. I feel like I myself am being born anew. Everything
is fresh to me^and everything seems good. Nanhoi is grow­
ing in me just as he grows in Minhoi's womb.
I hate making movies now as never before. The only
thing I want to do is prepare everything for the arrival of
my son, whom I love more than anything else in the uni­
verse. But I can't get around having to work, because we
always need money. More now than ever.
They all want me to do Kean, after Jean-Paul Sartre's
adaptation of Dumas. The show is supposed to take place
in the Paris City theater. I can never agree with this fid­
gety theater director on the pay. What provincial ideas of
theater wages they have here! Finally he agrees to a price.
He claims that it's double the amount Ingrid Bergman got
in Paris and that Ingrid Bergman was paid the highest sal­
ary in Paris. None of that is of interest to me. What does
interest me is that I want more money.
At our first encounter, Sartre is okay and happy that I will
incarnate Kean. He eats and drinks like a pig and smokes
like a chimney. No wonder he's sick and nearly blind,
despite his thick glasses. I only skimmed through his adap­
tation once and don't worry too much about the nonsense
in the ridiculously bad play. There's still a year's time
before the opening.
Having barely recovered from Zulawski's intellectual shit
(I don't want to talk about Golden Night), I plow through
Kean again. There is no way I can do the play as it is. As I
read it, I cut nearly every line, I try more and more to work
in excerpts from Shakespeare— cinematic cuts, but in vain.
In the end there are practically only monologues of Shake­
speare left: Hamlet, Romeo, Richard III, Othello, Macbeth,
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Mark Antony, King Lear. I go to the hysterical theater direc­
tor and tell him my objections should be relayed to Sartre.
Maybe he can rewrite the bullshit. Sartre answers that he
doesn't want anyone changing even one comma of the
work. He's kidding! Did he actually forget that he stole the
whole thing from Dumas and mixed it up with some frus­
trated fraudulent socialist crap?
Not long ago I was asked if I wanted to do a film incar­
nating Louis-Ferdinand Celine. I don't know who Celine
was. I've never read anything by him. I only know what he
wrote about Sartre: "This myopic little tapeworm, this
Sartre . . . Where was he when the blood was flowing? . . .
Crawling around in the intestines of the damned like the
shitball that he is! This false little worm of turds, this tad­
pole of shit!"
Minhoi and I find a studio apartment in the Marais, the
old Jewish quarter of Paris. The apartment is one huge
bright Japanese lacquered room with windows all around.
It has a balcony and an open kitchen. A staircase leads up
to a loft, which in turn leads to a large terrace. You can't
hear the traffic from the street. On one side, the windows
look out on the playground of a school. Whenever there is
recess, we hear the happy and free laughter and screams of
the children, who come running out of the buildings to play
ball and romp.
Minhoi's belly is getting bigger and bigger and she gets
more and more beautiful. Every day, every hour, every
breath we take toward the birth is a festival. Sometimes
Minhoi takes my hand and puts it on her belly, so I can feel
Nanhoi move. I can even see him kicking inside her. I no
longer have the words to say how I love Minhoi. Minhoi
and Nanhoi are one. And I grow in Nanhoi. I will be born
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through Nanhoi, as Nanhoi is born through me and
Minhoi.
December 23: Minhoi's birthday. I have to shoot until six.
Then I rush to the production office, have the rest of my
salary paid to me, and rush to Cartier, where I have selected
a diamond for Minhoi.
When I take her the diamond for her birthday, she isn't
happy. She smiles thankfully, but I know the diamond
means nothing to her. I've done it all wrong again. I know
I can't make things better with diamonds. What worse
could I have done to her than not love her? I love Minhoi
so much that I would give my life for her at any moment.
But I am sentenced to this endless struggle with myself, and
it becomes more horrible with the deadly hate I have for
the opposing forces in me.
My head is burning as though someone has beaten it
with an iron bar, and my soul is a bleeding wound. I am
distressed to the core, I feel crippled; though my body is
young and my will for freedom cannot be tamed.
Minhoi did everything she was capable of doing in her
love for me. She can't go on. She simply can't bear it any­
more. It's not her decision. It's not within her power. I know
that. But I don't want to understand it, or, better yet, I can't
understand that I am not able to make her happy. And I
can't carry this guilt around with me like a disgusting cross.
What have I done?
Minhoi is threatening more and more often that I will
lose her completely if I don't change. But how can I change?
Should I cripple my nature altogether? It's the devil's circle
again.
Can a person learn to be different? I don't mean to learn
different behavior, that's no great art. I mean, can a person
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learn to transform himself entirely? If so, he would be capa­
ble of hacking off a hand or poking out an eye. Van Gogh
didn't cut off his ear to change himself. He did it in desper­
ate passion. But that is only a physical example. Yet how is
it possible to change spiritually without doing damage to
oneself? I have racked my brain so many times imagining
myself as another.
I count the days, the hours, the minutes, the seconds until
the birth of my son. My son will be my salvation. He will
free me with his love from the torturous chains of my
life.
Minhoi's belly is getting bigger and sweeter. We can lit­
erally see it growing, hear the music of birth. Minhoi always
calls to me when Nanhoi moves in her. I caress him.
Aguirre is showing in Paris. Herzog, inept as a director,
inept as a producer, inept at selling his film, has hocked the
disgustingly dubbed movie (dubbed in Rome by a Swede
into English!) to a French pee-pee distributor for shit. He
has sold an even worse version (German with subtitles)
which, like the English one, isn't dubbed with my own
voice, because I have refused to speak to Herzog for years.
I am allergic to hearing his name mentioned or seeing it
written. The so-called press kit consists of blown-up con­
ceits and lies praising Herzog. A certain public relations
upstart nincompoop named Mizrahi is responsible for it. He
has decided to kiss Herzog's miserable ass for the rest of his
life. Now for the first time appears the lie that Herzog
forced me to act before the camera at gunpoint. Newspa­
pers, radio, and television eat the bullshit up. In every inter­
view I call Herzog a cretin.
None of these film freak interviewers wants to believe
that I have refused Ken Russell, Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini,
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Cavani, Penn, Lelouch and all the other so-called world
famous directors, and that I only make films for money.
Nanhoi is kicking strongly all the time. I kiss Minhoi's
belly and Nanhoi kicks my lips. I'm sure he knows it and is
laughing in his mother's womb.
Minhoi is starting to sew baby shirts and sheets and is
quilting a blanket for Nanhoi's little bed. We bought sweet
Tiffany fabrics in spring colors with flowers. I buy the same
material for myself and have shirts made so I can dress the
same as my son. We speak to mothers with babies every­
where in the parks and ask them where they bought their
baby buggies. I wish that Nanhoi could ride in a big English
baby buggy. Then he'll think he's riding in a coach. But
Minhoi doesn't want a big baby buggy, because we can't
load it into the car if we want to take our child to the park
or the country. We ask the mothers we meet about baby
cribs, walkers, and baby baskets, about milk bottles, nurs­
ing, diapers, baby lotion, and baby powder and where to
find a changing table and a dresser for baby things for Nan­
hoi's baby room. In time we know all the baby stores there
are. I know where to find all the toys I'll buy for Nanhoi.
We always fight on these shopping excursions. We're
always jealous of each other whenever one of us selects
something for Nanhoi. I force myself to shut up as best I
can so I don't irritate Minhoi, but I'm overflowing with
excitement to make everything as beautiful as possible for
my son.
Miklos Jangso calls me up from the Paris airport. He
wants to do a film with me and Claudia Cardinale in Hun­
gary. Are there even hotels there? The film is supposed to
be shot when Nanhoi is due. Where in Hungary, I want to
know. Is there a clinic there? A doctor? A midwife or people
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who can help with Nanhoi's birth? Miklos can't say exactly
yet where we'll be shooting, but he assures me I don't need
to worry. Maybe my son will be born in Budapest?
Our plans change from week to week because I'm offered
new films from week to week. Each week I am proposed a
different place on earth where Nanhoi might enter the
world. I am undecided about which film to take because
maybe the next will offer more money.
I decide on the Swiss film Jack the Ripper in Zurich. I
shoot the trash in eight days. The rest of the time I play
tennis, even in the pouring rain, until my hands and feet
ache and I can neither walk nor stand.
Back in Paris, the tension in unbearable. I feel as though
my own body were awaiting Nanhoi's birth, as though
Minhoi, Nanhoi, and I were a single organism.
Minhoi is now having powerful contractions; I drive her
to the clinic immediately. All evening and nearly all night
her contractions intensify and diminish. I don't leave her
side, and I kiss and caress her and my son. I can feel the
depth of my being shaken by the natural violence of the
imminent birth. I see and feel nothing but my son, who is
approaching. I have loaded a Polaroid camera with which I
will capture Nanhoi's birth. Minhoi wants me to. What
mother wouldn't be happy to see herself giving birth to her
child?
Four a . m . Minhoi is lying on her back, her legs spread
wide apart. She holds tightly onto the handles of the bed,
her lower body is raised, taut, ready to give birth. Minhoi,
who must be suffering severe pain, is laughing! The crown
of Nanhoi's head appears. The midwife puts a tiny thing
that is connected to a stethoscope on his little head. She
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holds the stethoscope out to me so I can hear the heartbeat
of my son, the sweetest sound in the world. Nanhoi's head
emerges into the light, his little face lifted up to the heav­
ens. Minhoi's breaths are deep and regular as she forces and
pushes Nanhoi out of her womb. His little right arm comes
out next, then his little left arm, both of them hanging down
exhausted from the strain of being born. Minhoi opens her
body like a flower, its petals fully open to the light, without
the slightest strain. Now she doesn't seem to be exerting
herself anymore. Nanhoi's body glides out of Minhoi's. The
first thing Minhoi kisses when the midwife holds him up to
her are Nanhoi's little feet. The doctor wants to take Nan­
hoi into the next room to wash him. I am right on his heels.
He sprays the rest of the placenta from Nanhoi's head and
face with a shower of water, and as he holds him upsidedown by the feet, Nanhoi screams for the first time and I
kiss his sweet little scrunched-up face.
All the pain I have felt my whole life has no meaning in
light of Nanhoi's birth.
The day of celebration arrives: I can take Minhoi and
Nanhoi home. At night we take turns giving Nanhoi his
bottle. I set the alarm every three hours so as not to nod off
and sleep through the appointed time. But my love screams
when it's time to drink. I can feel his tight little body getting
heavier with every gulp. I rest his head on my shoulder so
he can burp. He falls asleep again on my shoulder, and I
don't make a move. I don't dare breathe heavily and disrupt
my baby's sleep.
When Nanhoi is sleeping, I check to see if he's lying com­
fortably; if he's properly covered; if he's getting enough air;
if there is a draft; if the room is too warm or too cold. The
baby breath that he exhales in his sleep is entrancing. And
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I watch to see if he's having a bad dream and being tor­
mented in his sleep. But mostly he smiles in his sleep, and
sometimes he laughs out loud.
Eight-week-old Nanhoi stands up for the first time; that
is, he leans against Minhoi, who is lying on the bed, but he
stands on his own legs. I realize for the first time what
strength he has.
Minhoi wants me to move out. She wants to take an
apartment on the lie St.-Louis, the island in the middle of
old Paris. I don't fully grasp what she is saying. Does she
want me to move out and look for a place away from her
and Nanhoi? Does she expect me not to share in the joy of
our son? I don't understand anything. I can't get her request
through my head. I can't think at all. Perhaps it's better not
to argue with her and simply find an apartment. She says
we agreed to this. She says I promised to leave her alone
with her son once she had him. It's true: Years ago we had
talked about separating once Nanhoi was born. But I hadn't
known then what my son would mean to me. I've known
for a long time that Minhoi can't live with me. I know that
no one could. My head is spinning. Maybe it's all a bad
dream? Maybe I'm just imagining this calamity because I'm
so fatigued.
I feel paralyzed, withering like a branch torn from a tree.
As if in a trance, I rent an apartment advertised in the news­
papers, near the Bois de Boulogne. I wander around Paris
in a daze, day and night. I can't bear people looking at me
and seeing the torment in my face, though I can't hide it
from anyone. I feel like a leper who covers himself up. I
break into loud sobbing in the middle of the street. I don't
know where to turn. I run. I make believe I'm in a hurry, as
if I had no time at all. I smile at the whores as I run by them
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and look at my watch, shrugging my shoulders as if to say,
"Sorry, maybe some other day, I really don't have the time
right now." I can't do anything. I can't sleep, I can't eat. I
think only of my Nanhoi, whom I am allowed to see every
other three to ten days and then only for one or two days
or one night. The worst is that I never know exactly when.
If the telephone doesn't ring the whole day, I am terrified.
And when the telephone does ring, I get terrified, too. I
walk back and forth in my luxury prison cell for hours, day
and night, back and forth like a locked-up polar bear, a
wolf, a lion, a tiger in the zoo. I bore my fists into my ears
until it hurts to keep from hearing the noise of Avenue
Foch— but the deadly vibrations move through me,
through my body, through my brain, through my soul. I am
cursed by my consciousness of existing without my light,
my son. What could hurt more than living without him,
breathing without him? The deadly traffic along Avenue
Foch doesn't cease at night, either. I lie awake with the slid­
ing window open, so that I can get some air. There's no
oxygen in the room, only the stench of paint, a poisonous
stink emanating from the walls, the closets, the kitchen cab­
inets, and the doors, and the choking stench of dust and
chemicals from the carpeting and the floors. I call Minhoi
on the phone every day and ask her if I can have Nanhoi.
I beg her. I curse her. Sometimes she says matter-of-factly
that I can't see him. Sometimes she hangs up on me! What
have I done?
As I wander through an absurd street with its absurd
advertisements for absurd needs— a bomb explodes. Some
terrorist pig planted it. There are shattered windowpanes
everywhere and piles of glass splinters on the street. A foot
is lying in the middle of the street, still inside its shoe. The
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meat is gray and bloodless. It looks like flesh pulled from a
heap of rubble after a bomb raid. I am sick to my stomach.
Minhoi explains to me time and again where I must go to
buy food and other necessities. Sometimes she comes with
Nanhoi to my apartment at 33 Avenue Foch— to help me.
I live only to be with Nanhoi. The moment I see him, I
caress his sweet little body; sniff him; stare at his beautiful
face, his little hands— the most beautiful, graceful, and at
the same time strongest little hands I've ever seen; hold him
tight; throw him in the air so high that he almost touches
the ceiling and breaks out in a peal of laughter like a song­
bird chirping, and his diapers come undone and fly into a
corner, and we roll on the floor and I tickle him and both
of us laugh and laugh.
I have to shoot the film Madame Claude here in Paris. The
pay is a disgrace. The producer wants to trick me, but I
always need money. And the girls who are Madame
Claude's whores, the extras and mannequins, very young
and in their twenties, are excellent fuckers. I can fuck the
married ones only when their men are out of town for a
short while or haven't yet come home in the afternoon. One
very young extra has a tiny, almost naked pussy like a little
girl's mouth, very tiny butt cheeks and very tiny titties. I
always have to fuck her mother first before I'm allowed to
fuck her.
Menahem Golan calls me from Israel and talks me into
doing the film Entebbe. He has a nerve offering me such low
pay; he could use a good one right in the face. Besides, I
don't know what he's talking about because I don't read
newspapers, listen to the radio, or turn on the news on tele­
vision. I turn the television off when the news comes on.
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But I want to go to Israel, and when I'm told the story, I am
so impressed that I decide to do it for the pitiful pay Golan
offers me. But first I must finish shooting Madame Claude.
I persuade Minhoi to bring Nanhoi to Israel. I am happy
as a lark and call Menahem immediately to tell him to rent
the penthouse suite of the Hilton in Tel Aviv, because Min­
hoi wants to bring a friend along as a baby-sitter.
I think of beautiful young Jewesses that I have fucked; of
the smell of musk at the bazaars in Jaffa and Jerusalem.
The filming in Tel Aviv is slavery. We shoot sixteen, eigh­
teen, twenty hours a day, sometimes in the cockpit of a
plane With no air-conditioning. There is not even time to
piss.
Minhoi and I have terrible fights. I can't stand it when she
walks down to the beach alone or anywhere, for that mat­
ter. Whenever I get back from work or I have a day off, I
ask her to play tennis with me, to walk with me on the
beach, or just try to be together with her and Nanhoi. I am
desperate to reunite the three of us.
Minhoi is bored in Tel Aviv and goes with Nanhoi to the
Red Sea, where Golan owns a hotel. I have three days off.
But I can't go to the Red Sea, I must go back to Paris to work
on Madame Claude.
At two in the morning I'm walking on the ChampsElysees because I can't sleep. The Champs-Elysees is
crowded with cars and people. What are all these people
looking for on the street at two in the morning? They run
this way and that like ants. But I have the impression that
most of them don't know where they want to go or what
they're looking for. Whatever it is, they won't find it here
in Paris. An interview I saw on television with Bernhard
Moitessier comes to mind. A reporter asked Moitessier after
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he had sailed the world alone for twenty years if he hadn't
felt terribly alone. Moitessier was aghast and answered the
reporter, not understanding him at all, "Alone? Why alone?
You're not alone at sea. Here, in Paris, in the middle of mil­
lions of people, Ϊ am alone. So alone I think I shall die of
loneliness." A couple years ago Moitessier sailed alone
nonstop around the world one and a half times. It was the
first (and I think so far the only) single-handed nonstop race
around the world. Of the nine participants, only two came
in. The others gave up because of shipwreck or exhaustion.
One is still missing. When Moitessier was back on the
Atlantic again, nearly completing his circle around the
globe, he was sent the news that he was probably the win­
ner. There was a prize of five thousand English pounds for
the winner. Moitessier had no money whatsoever. But he
answered over the radio, "I'm not coming back. I want to
save my soul." And he turned around and sailed halfway
around the world again, to Polynesia.
Minhoi, Nanhoi, and I are in Jerusalem at Christmas, at
the ugly, disgusting Hilton. It would be impossible to hold
out here alone without going insane or committing suicide.
We only go inside when we are about to collapse from
fatigue. It's cold in Jerusalem, too, and we aren't prepared
for it.
Outside Jerusalem the sky is magical. In the Church of
Gethsemane, no one is interested in the guide who is read­
ing the deadly psalm. Everyone is under a spell, staring at
Nanhoi. I am carrying him in my arms as he radiates the
icons with his light.
From Jerusalem to Avoriaz in the mountains of Frenchspeaking Switzerland. I pull Nanhoi on a sled through the
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snow for the first time. My angel is sleeping as I pull him
through fields of snow, over hills and slopes. My angel
sleeps in the white snow beneath the cold white sky where
a white sun is shining. And when he wakes up, I build a
snowman for him and show him how to make snowballs.
And we ride in a sleigh and the horses have bells around
their ankles. Every hour, every minute, every second, every
breath that I am with Nanhoi I am happy. These are the
only moments in my life when I am happy.
I leave Avoriaz to film one more asinine scene, the very
last one of Madame Claude, on a millionaire's yacht in
Monte Carlo.
I go with Minhoi to one of those idiotic parties where
men and women in their finery blather and block each oth­
er's way to the toilet, ignore each other entirely while they
gossip, and describe the sloppy food and cheap drink as
"superb." They aren't sure if "high society" is here. They
question whether they themselves truly belong. They are
skeptical and observe each other spitefully, then backbiting
erupts. They can't stand each other. Minhoi and I are here
after the usual senseless search for the street and house
number. I am full of disgust as I enter the snakepit. But I
didn't want to dissuade Minhoi from going somewhere she
had in mind. We're fighting more and more, going at each
other viciously. There are horrible scenes, leading from one
state of depression to the next. Naturally Minhoi doesn't
want to go to parties like this, either, but it happens some­
times that you say, "Let's go, what harm could it do?" just
to break away from a destructive atmosphere.
Roman Polanski is there, too. I counted on him because
he's always at these parties, probably to break out of some­
thing himself. Or he's out for booty; sometimes there are
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rather young girls at such parties. In any case, he is always
the big exception at all the idiot parties that I have ever had
to put up with. We talk just as we have for years about
doing Richard III together. Who knows if we'll ever do it.
We also talk about Paganini. Polanski always shows up
very late, eats, talks a lot, and leaves right away. This time
he's talking about masturbation, saying he doesn't believe
you can go blind from too much jerking off. Then he
switches the subject to people who dunk pieces of bread
into toilet bowls where many other people have pissed and
then eat the soaked pieces of bread. He says what these
people are called, but it has slipped my mind.
Minhoi is angry and blames me for dragging her to this
deathly, insulting, degrading place. She's like a wild bird
caught in a net, its wings flopping madly in the mesh. She
doesn't know anyone, and no one says a word to her. It
doesn't surprise me. No one looks at me either, even
though they all know me. I don't care; in fact, I don't want
to know any of them. But Minhoi is humiliated and hurt
by what she perceives as brutal indifference. She gives
me an angry look and hisses at me with tears in her
eyes.
"Why did you bring me here? Why should I let myself be
insulted and degraded by such trash?"
I want to tell her I'm sorry. That I had no idea it would
be like this, and that I myself . . .
But Minhoi is already running out of the apartment and
I'm not able to calm her down. Not on the stairs, not even
in the car on the way home. She won't let me sleep next to
her, and there is nothing left for me to do but go to my
penitentiary on Avenue Foch.
Now and then Minhoi agrees to give our marriage
another try. I race around looking for a big, bright apart-
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merit, where we both would have enough space and espe­
cially enough light and room for Nanhoi. That's not easy,
because the apartment has to be close to the Bois de
Boulogne or at least near a big park, so that Nanhoi will
have a place to frolic. Now and then we look at apart­
ments together. But then something happens again. I am
obsessed with the childish idea that renting one of these
apartments or houses means the salvation of our little
family.
Ever since he was born, Nanhoi could hardly wait to
stand, to walk, to run, to fly. Yes! He wants to fly right now,
just like baby birds want to when they pull themselves up
to the edge of the nest with their beaks so they can fling
themselves into the air like their parents do. That's why
they fall out of high trees so often. Nanhoi has had enough
of lying around in his bed, his buggy, his basket; he's had
enough of crawling around on the ground.
Now he can stand and take a couple swaying steps like a
ship on the high seas. He must still hold on to something
from time to time, otherwise he would fall over. He grabs
at everything with his little hands. My baby boy loves it
most when I carry him on my shoulders so he can beat my
head like an African drum, which means "Gallop!" and the
faster he beats the faster I must gallop. He fills my world
with his laughter.
I can't see her face from behind. She's standing in front
of a boutique in Montparnasse. I see only her high ass,
which hypnotizes me, pulling me over to the other side of
the street. Only black women have such asses, my balls
remind me. The first one I relished was an American stu­
dent in Paris. Just before Jasmin. Her creamy white lava
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cum tasted strong and sweet like strange wild honey. Since
then I've been crazy about the scent of black women. I walk
so close to her that my hard-on almost brushes her cheeks.
A beautiful animal face is mirrored in the windowpane. She
turns to me. Standing face to face with this black woman, I
stutter unrepeatable nonsense, and she presses two of her
moist fingers to my lips, as if to say, "Save your breath for
fucking honey."
The first few days she comes to Avenue Foch regularly,
but she never stays longer than a couple of hours. She's liv­
ing with a man who pays for her. Besides, she is also terri­
bly busy, running around, making phone calls, meeting
with ambassadors and officials to help her free her father,
a cabinet minister in Ethiopia who has been in prison since
the coup.
An attorney writes me a letter saying that Minhoi has
asked him to handle our divorce. He wants to meet me to
talk about a settlement. But I don't want to meet him. And
I don't want to speak to anyone about a divorce between
Minhoi and me. I don't want to think about it at all, and I
burn the letter.
As I push Nanhoi in his stroller running the mile-long
stretch from 33 Avenue Foch to the Bois de Boulogne, he
looks at me and smiles, as if he knows how sad I am. I take
him out of his stroller and throw him high into the air; he
likes it so much, he yells, "Encore!" Nanhoi laughs from
deep in his heart and flaps his arms like the wings of a hum­
mingbird. God! Keep my baby boy from knowing about the
unbridgeable chasm between Minhoi and me! Nanhoi
means "Be strong." I don't want to think about a divorce
when I'm with Nanhoi. I want to make faces like the ones
that have made him burst out in laughter ever since he was
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a newborn. I don't want to be a sad clown who cries out in
pain as he laughs.
The director of the Cinematheque in Paris asks me to
choose twenty-five movies from all the crap that I've filmed
to be screened at the Cinematheque as a tribute to me. I say
forget it. But I can't stop him from screening whatever he
wants.
As soon as I've fucked a girl or she's sucked me off, I
want her to leave immediately. If one sucks me over for so
long that I let her sleep with me and she wants to cuddle
up to me, I kick her away.
I forget the damnation I live in only when Nanhoi spends
the night with me in my bed in my arms. . . . Then I don't
dare to move the whole night, so as not to wake my baby
boy. . . . Only my lips kiss his little gentle head very
tenderly.
Desolation sets in after Minhoi picks him up. I'm awash
in the horrible consciousness of my loneliness without
Nanhoi. I see no way out. I call Minhoi, at first every day,
then several times a day, then several times an hour. I beg
her to bring him back. We fight, scream, threaten each
other. We hang up on each other and call back. Now Min­
hoi refuses to answer the phone. I run in a daze through
Paris, like a deer dashing from one street to the next. I run
along the quais down below, right on the bank of the Seine,
where no one hangs out at night except the bums, espe­
cially in bad weather. In the dark you can't see the dogshit
from the thousands of dogs that people bring here espe­
cially to shit. But what does it matter? If only I didn't have
to go back to the crowded, aggressive, lit-up streets. After
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I've covered about seven miles, running most of the time, I
disappear into the driveway of 5 Rue St.-Louis-en-l'Ile and
slip up to Minhoi's apartment on the top floor. Though the
ancient house is the only one with an elevator on the lie
St.-Louis, I take the stairs, because the elevator makes a
deafening noise when it stops. Besides, I'm not in the mood
to chat with anyone. The tenants all know me; they prob­
ably mock my situation. I must be stealthy. Minhoi must
never suspect that I come here often without calling or ring­
ing the doorbell.
I feel like someone who has committed a crime and must
hide out. I sneak around silently, holding my breath. I press
my body up against the wall halfway up a flight of stairs,
throw myself to the floor with my face in the dust when
people come out of their apartments on various floors. If
anyone else is using the stairs besides me because the ele­
vator takes too long or it's occupied or isn't working at all,
I have to slip all the way back down in no time and hide
behind the trash cans until the person is out of the house.
Then I sneak back up to the top. And on every floor I must
be ready for an apartment door to open suddenly as I slip
by. I never know if I'm being watched through the
peepholes.
From the top of the stairs it is one step to Minhoi's apart­
ment door. I take it ever so carefully. I'm so close to the
door, my mouth nearly touches it. I listen with my whole
body for Nanhoi's little voice . . . his laugh . . . the patter of
his little feet . . . the wheels of his wooden three-wheeler
on the stone floor of the entryway . . . his ball bouncing
against the door . . . the clapping of a spoon or a baby plate,
if he is sitting at the table . . . his humming top . . . a rubber
animal that squeaks when he steps on it or squeezes it in
his tiny fists . . . any little sound . . . his breathing. . . . But I
don't want to be impertinent. I am already happy and
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thankful when I can hear through the closed kitchen door
that he is standing on the trash can, where Minhoi puts him
so he can watch her cook.
If only I could at least hear Minhoi making noises. Any
kind of noise to know that they are there! A lid on a cooking
pot. A water faucet. The toilet flushing. A window. A
drawer. Washing.
My god! I think Nanhoi is standing directly behind the
door! (He does it often and hangs out there a long time,
observing some teeny weeny part of an object that he's
found, sometimes smaller than a pinhead.) I get down on
my knees carefully. I feel with my fingertips where his
moist, half-open child's mouth must be and press my
mouth to the gray-painted door. The stench of turpentine
irritates my sinuses, but only a half an inch of wood sepa­
rates my lips from my baby boy's. I hear little words rip­
pling in French that I don't understand . . . and then two
syllables that cut into my heart and make me so happy:
"Pa-pa" . . .
The shock of the elevator stopping at the fourth floor is
like the falling blade of a guillotine— as if I were kneeling
down here the whole time awaiting my execution. The
instant I hear the iron fencing open, I dash down the stairs
on tiptoes. Was it just my imagination? I will never find out.
What if it was Minhoi in the elevator coming home with
Nanhoi? Usually I could have heard his little voice chirping
through the entire stairwell. But he is often so exhausted
from playing that he falls asleep in Minhoi's or my arms
and we bring him right to his little bed. I hear a door open­
ing, but where I can't tell.
Before I go back to Avenue Foch, I run over the bridge
that connects the lie St.-Louis with Notre Dame to the small
park behind the cathedral where even the flowerbeds are
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fenced off, and where a cop blows his shrill whistle as soon
as a child kicks a ball. He drives the mothers and children
out of the park the moment the church clock strikes at clos­
ing time and closes the iron park gate at this infamous
cathedral with a chain. In this park surrounded entirely by
bars, there is a little sandbox where Nanhoi likes to dig. But
first are the swings, not like the ones in Luna Park that turn
360 degrees and have a minimum age requirement. The
ones here are for little children, but the swings are rather
high and every child must be tied on. Nanhoi is beside him­
self about this swinging, and it's the first thing he insists on
when we come here.
I often come here secretly, hoping I might see him, even
from afar. I hide behind parked cars or among passersby so
Minhoi won't discover me. Or I sneak through the bushes
that surround the cathedral as close to the sandbox as pos­
sible. Sometimes I catch glimpses of my son.
I know it's foolish to look for Nanhoi in the park at this
hour. The barred gate is already locked shut with the heavy
chain.
Agents in the United States offer me Arthur Miller's latest
play on Broadway. I refuse. The play is a pain in the ass:
yakety-yak about duty, screwed-up sex, socialism, and socalled freedom. Part of the package is the provincial habit
of tryouts in Washington or Boston first; they're not confi­
dent about taking it directly to the stage in New York. I had
heard about this practice before, but I had thought it was a
lame joke. It is insulting to the audiences of Washington
and Boston to be used as guinea pigs. But then again,
maybe the level of sophistication of audiences in Washing­
ton or Boston is an insult to New York. What is it they're
trying to do? Needless to say, the salary they call "maxi­
mum pay" is a mockery. The whole thing makes me sick.
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But if I should ever appear on stage again in my life, I would
do so only in New York. Anyway, even if all of my condi­
tions were met, I can't imagine being separated from my
son for so long.
Nanhoi wants me to throw him into the air as high as I
can. The higher he is thrown, the louder he laughs. Ten
times, twenty times. I play airplane with him, too. I hold
him by one arm and one leg and spin him around faster and
faster. We glide up and down until the entire earth spins
around us and I can't stand up anymore and we fall down
like drunkards. We crawl through the grass and roll down
little hills. We feed the ducks with their ducklings in the
pond in the Bois de Boulogne; the sparrows land on Nanhoi's hand and stroller. We watch the bigger boys sail their
boats on the pool in the Luxembourg Gardens. Nanhoi isn't
afraid of any height. He has limitless trust in my catching
him as he falls.
Some of the girls who come to see me on Avenue Foch
don't care that I am so sad and sometimes never say a single
word to them. They must think they don't interest me.
They're right: I'm not with them in my thoughts. One of
them doesn't go away even when I beat her. She only
wants me to fuck her in the asshole. In her mouth and cunt,
too, of course. But she especially wants to be ass-fucked.
Again and again, several times in a row, ass-fucking, noth­
ing but ass-fucking.
More French movies. I don't know how many, about ten
or twelve altogether, maybe more. I don't want to know
their titles or the directors. I have money again. I buy a fourwheel-drive Range Rover.
* * *
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Every time I see my baby boy now, he tells me he is going
to travel to Egypt with Mama. With great effort and con­
centration, he forms the syllables of the country. I stay at
Minhoi and Nanhoi's the last few days before their depar­
ture, and Minhoi lets me stay there the three weeks they
are in Egypt as well. It's the first time that I'll be separated
from Minhoi and Nanhoi for so long— I can't imagine it—
in any case, I get to see my baby boy all day long until his
departure. The day I take Minhoi and Nanhoi to the airport,
I have no idea what lies ahead. On my way back to Paris, I
imagine Minhoi and Nanhoi thirty thousand feet in the air,
flying farther and farther away from me. My thoughts are
like the wriggling of worms.
FI VE
mptiness overwhelms me. I am void. If some­
thing— anything— would only happen to me.
There is a frizzy-haired girl, maybe seventeen,
who talked to me after the screening of one of my films in
Lelouch's Club 13. Her black curls are contorted like tan­
gled snakes. Her eyes are slits, her eyebrows growing into
each other like thick black wire. Her turned-up nose dis­
plays flared nostrils in uncanny proximity to her upper lip.
I stop at a gas station and call her up at her grandparents',
where she lives. She answers the phone before it has rung
even once. I pick her up at her grandparents'. At the Bois
de Boulogne, I park in the first spot I find, just inside the
entrance, because we both can't wait any longer. As I am
ripping her dress off in the back seat of the car, a man's face
appears at the window. I have scarcely had time to see how
she's built: bony, childlike upper body, no tits to speak of,
hot, rough, tight skin, protruding pelvis . . . firm little butt.
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The man presses his face to the window shamelessly. I
know many men do this. They hang out in places like this
to watch others fucking while they masturbate. All right. I
climb back into the driver's seat with no pants on. The girl
stays in the backseat naked and covers herself with my
pants. I drive around and around in circles, having lost my
orientation, undecided as to where to park the car, nearly
paralyzed by my horniness. I find a place. Her little cunt is
round like a woodmouse's. I get myself a fingerful of it, her
asshole is tight but willing. There! Another face again! In
the rear window . . . I can't hold on much longer. I drill her
hot slit in delirium. Her face is distorted, her eyes are shut.
The girl screams. She doesn't know a man is watching us.
Time and again she comes. Sometime around morning,
when she starts to talk about Communism with unfath­
omable motives, I can't get a hard-on any more.
I have received no news from Minhoi and Nanhoi since
they left for Egypt. I have no way of getting in touch with
them: no address, no telephone. I don't even know what
part of Egypt they are in now. Minhoi wanted to go deep
into the south, and with a fisherman sailing on the Nile on
top of that. Now it seems as if I hear about or see the word
"Egypt" all day long. There are headlines about plane
crashes, train accidents, hijackings. I don't read newspa­
pers. But the headlines maliciously insinuate themselves
into a highly irritable head; already I've been bordering on
paranoia. My nerves are raw. In the apartment, bits of TV
news flash at me. I don't turn the TV on purposefully
because I don't understand the buttons and often push the
wrong ones. I never understand what the newscasters are
saying, anyway. But now I think I've understood the word
"Egypt," or did I see it as a headline on a front page? I can't
tell. I buy all .the newspapers and stare at the disgusting,
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sadomasochistic news about the garbage of humanity until
I can't bear it any more. I beat my skull with my fists and
bore them into my ears so as not to hear these voices
imprint any more. But I was wrong: nowhere is there any
news from or about Egypt.
Minhoi and Nanhoi's postcard of the pyramids takes six­
teen days to reach Paris. But where are they now?! It is late
evening when the telegram messenger rings and delivers a
telegram from Minhoi announcing their imminent arrival in
Paris. I would like to drive to the airport right now, right
away, immediately, three days in advance, spend the nights
there and wait for them.
I go to the airport two hours early. I don't understand a
word of the racket and blaring of the speakers, which
announce the landing of a plane every second, it seems.
And I don't rely on the monitor screens that give the air­
lines, flight numbers, arrival times, and delay times. I run
from exit to exit uninterruptedly and scrutinize every pas­
senger I see, regardless of his point of departure.
In the chaos of faces, I get a glimpse of Minhoi and Nanhoi coming through immigration; Minhoi is pushing the
stroller carrying Nanhoi toward the stairs leading to the
baggage claim. At first I can hardly see his little head. It
seemed much bigger when he left, because his full, long
hair past his shoulders has been cut very short; he has been
sheared like a little lamb. I rush and take him out of the
stroller and we kiss each other; I don't let him out of my
arms until we reach Minhoi's apartment, where I carry him
to his little bed.
Minhoi says the apartment on Avenue Foch is a waste of
money, because I've been spending most of my time at
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hers. But neither of us gives in to the deception. The longer
I stay with her, the more we fight. And the more we fight,
the more often we cut loose on one another. The verbal and
physical violence we inflict on each other becomes more
horrible. We behave not like married couples who live
together out of habit instead of interest and hate each other,
but like lovers struggling with passion, desire, jealousy, sus­
picion. Accusations and acts of vengeance abound, from
despair, love transformed to rage. When Minhoi and I go at
each other in Nanhoi's presence or when he hears us fight­
ing and rushes into the room, he throws himself between
us, ready to kick us if we persist. We are so shaken by our
little child's wisdom, by his goodness and his love that we
become ashamed and stop hurting one another. If Nanhoi
witnesses us kissing or hugging or caressing each other, he
clings to our legs and pulls all three of us together into a
single organism, as it were. But Minhoi cannot bear our
"violent ups and downs," as she calls them, any longer. She
says that I oppress her, that I dictate every aspect of her life.
She accuses me of having made all decisions from the
beginning— about her clothes, makeup, hair, nail polish,
underwear, and so on. I don't see it that way. I never
wanted to limit her freedom. Minhoi says, "Everything
about you is too much!"— words I have heard for years and
can't hear any more. She says I feel too much love, too
much passion, that my desires, my demands, are too great.
I'm too sensitive, too quick to react, too violent, too wild,
too frolicsome, too happy, too silly, too sad, too loud, too
silent, too bad, too good, too softhearted, too merciless, too
gentle, too brutal, ad infinitum . . .
She doesn't realize that creation, rebirth, results from a
collision of opposites.
*
*
*
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An English producer wants me to star in a film about the
life of the greatest dancer of all time, Nijinsky; it is suppos­
edly a coproduction with the Soviet Union and the Bolshoi
Ballet. I'm convinced that only after an eternity would this
project come to fruition.
I follow Minhoi around like a jerk when she shops. I
carry Nanhoi in my arms, push him in his stroller, and now
and then slip him a little something, pieces of chocolate or
a cookie. I bear any humiliation— I let Minhoi order me
around and shut me up— just to be with my baby boy.
Minhoi sends me back to Avenue Foch again; she doesn't
want me to come to see her and Nanhoi in her apartment
any more.
Sometimes I run into them both on the street, because I
.λ.
often hang out on the lie St.-Louis to be close to Nanhoi.
The Song of Roland: a miserable, painful story from the
Middle Ages. The pretentious director, Cassenti, has no tal­
ent; he can win people over only with money. He is too
idiotic to realize that it is they who are giving an asshole
like him the chance to make a movie.
Minhoi has obtained a divorce hearing; I've received a
citation to appear in court. I refuse to go to the courthouse.
But I have no choice, because I have no money at the
moment to pay for my own attorney.
As I enter the courthouse— its darkness is nearly liquid—
I feel as though I'm entering an empty slaughterhouse.
When I arrive at the top floor room where Minhoi and I are
to be divorced, the insanity of the world sticks to me like
cold sweat. First the judge babbles about some movie he
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saw me in. I scream at him and storm out of the room. Minhoi's attorney catches up with me in the hall and says the
judge will lock me up if I yell at him again. Minhoi is
ashamed of what's going on here. Finally the judge says we
should give it another try, especially for the sake of our little
son. The divorce is postponed for a probationary period of
six months.
Students write to say that they have chosen me, Kinski,
to be the subject of their doctoral dissertations. Five or
seven have done so. Hacks want to write books about me.
Others draw comic books or send me poems. I throw the
stuff in the garbage.
The gypsy Manitas de Plata is the greatest guitarist in the
world and my friend. In the convention center in Paris, he
comes down from the stage to the audience, forces his way
into the row Minhoi, Nanhoi, and I are sitting in, stands
before us and plays only for us. He has a very young wife
with big thighs and a wild ass. She gives me her telephone
number in the South of France.
Whenever I see flowers I want to take them to Minhoi.
She doesn't want my flowers; still, I give them to her as
often as I can. Early this morning I brought her flowers
again: a big bouquet of bright happy flowers. Then I had to
go film outside of Paris. Now it's evening and I'm back in
my torture chamber in Avenue Foch. A big bouquet of
bright happy flowers is on the table. My heart warms when
I see the flowers— especially because a letter is lying next
to them and I can tell that the handwriting is Minhoi's. I
assume that Minhoi sent me flowers. Although they look
exactly like the flowers of this morning, I don't realize they
are the ones I picked for Minhoi this morning. Even after
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I've read the letter time and again, I don't understand what
it's all about. . . what Minhoi means by "going away" and
"for a longer time" . . . why the flowers are here and not
with her . . . why she and Nanhoi are no longer here . . .
why she brings me flowers when she wounds me to death
. . . why the flowers are the same ones I gave her this morn­
ing . . . reality works like slow poison. She doesn't tell me
where she has gone or how long she'll be gone. She only
writes "for a longer time" and that she can't bear it here
anymore.
Every person can withstand only a certain amount of suf­
fering and pain. Therefore, a person can care about the suf­
fering and pain of others only to a certain degree. I refuse
to describe what I'm going through; I cannot bear to relive
the torture by writing it down.
After weeks of searching all of Europe, I find Minhoi and
Nanhoi on the Spanish island of Ibiza. They come with me
to southwestern France, where I have to shoot the final
scene of The Song of Roland.
Two more French films: Zoo Zero and The Death of a Rot­
ten Man. Then Herzog calls me up at Avenue Foch at one
in the morning and asks me if I want to incarnate Nosferatu
and Woyzeck. I tell him to fuck off for calling me at one
o'clock in the morning and say "okay." I have completely
forgotten who Herzog is. I have also forgotten that I refused
to incarnate Woyzeck for the theater ten years ago; it's sui­
cide, and I threw the script into the garbage can. I don't
know why I say yes this time. There must be a point to my
choosing to endure someone else's hell when I'm at my
nadir. Will I experience the pain myself after I've incarnated
it? Is it a warning or a repetition? Is it a chain reaction? Does
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one replace the other? Or are both happening at the same
time— my life and that which I must incarnate? Do I trans­
fer the hell of others into my own life, or is it the other way
around? Do I live through everyone, and does everyone live
through me? Who can tell?
Nanhoi is a brilliant juggler. He never practices, it's as
natural to him as day and night. What a joy it is to see his
creativity before my eyes!
The judge pronounces the divorce final. I run out of the
deadly room, down the steps, through the hall where a man
in handcuffs is led past me. An old woman is crying. I run
out of the courthouse onto the street. I feel as though people
are no longer in disguise. I run along the quais, avoiding
pedestrians and vehicles. I think that everyone is staring at
me, as if I were an object of curiosity, too deformed not to
be noticed.
At the sandbox at Notre Dame, I pull Nanhoi into my
arms; my tears drop into the sand behind his back. I tell the
girl who is watching over him while Minhoi and I are being
divorced to go. I want to be alone with my baby boy and
far away. When we go to Minhoi's apartment for Nanhoi's
lunch, he stands in my way in the stairwell, as if he doesn't
want to let me by until I have answered his question:
"Tu aime maman?"
"Bien sur, mon amour," I say, as tears come to my eyes.
Hate: The story of a motorcycle rider who hasn't com­
mitted any crime but is chained to an electrical transformer
by the residents of a small town and executed at high volt­
age. The so-called director passes most of the time in bars.
His wife has a firm ass in a very tight skirt, sufficient reason
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to shoot the movie. Before Hate, we must do a porno movie
for the director to earn the money for my pay. Maria
Schneider is one of the girls I'm supposed to fuck in the
film. She has become a junkie and makes me sick. She
blows every scene; thanks to the director I didn't slap her
face.
Nosferatu for Twentieth Century-Fox: I must go on loca­
tion to Holland and Czechoslovakia, all the way into the
Tatra Mountains on the Russo-Polish border. The point of
departure is Munich, to which I fly weeks before shooting
starts because my costume has to be made. I shave my head
for the first time. I feel exposed, deserted> defenseless, not
only physically— my head is as sensitive as an open
wound— but especially spiritually. It's as if my soul had
been exposed to the sun's piercing light. At first I walk the
streets only in the dark; I always wear a woolen cap even
though it's spring. The metamorphosis has begun: I am
becoming a vampire, neither man nor animal, neither dead
nor alive, an indescribable creature suffering its existence in
full consciousness.
Now I leave the house only to go for costume fittings at
the tailor's.
I fly to Holland, and Minhoi and Nanhoi follow me. Even
though I'm before the camera all the time, through the
night as well, I can at least see my baby boy in his sleep, or
in the early morning.
With Nosferatu completed, work on Woyzeck begins
immediately. Woyzeck is suicide, mayhem. Every day we
shoot, every sequence, every take, every photograph is sui­
cide. At night I beat my head against the walls of my trailer
in a deserted park. I believe I am going insane. But I'm
going to fight it. I cry, scream, run through the pitch-black
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park in a fever, get drunk on piss-warm beer, get some girls
but usually throw them out before I've fucked them. In a
panic I press the filming onward, as if I had to get rid of this
Woyzeck before madness sets in. I don't have to rehearse or
listen to Herzog's rubbish. I tell him, I warn him, to keep
his trap shut and let me do what I must. He complies.
Today, after sixteen days of shooting, there's only one scene
left: when Woyzeck stabs his wife and, with her corpse in
his arms, falls victim to insanity. It's three in the morning.
I announce that the scene will be shot in only one take.
Impossible to request this murder and insanity!
After the take I stumble through the park; I hear discor­
dant sobbing. It is my partner in the final scene, Eva
Matthes. Her whole body is trembling. I take her in my
arms and lead her to her hotel. After we've washed off our
makeup and the blood from the scene, I go to my car, the
one I'll drive across the border to Vienna to catch a plane
to Paris. Everyone has disappeared. The entire troupe has
disappeared, as if they had fled the death and insanity of
Woyzeck.
In the hotel in Vienna I can't put on my socks and shoes
without struggling on the floor in pain. For the duration of
the credits of the film, I had told Herzog to show Woyzeck
being chased around in the barrack yard and tormented by
rifle drills, doing push-ups, kneebends, until he collapses.
Time and again, as he falls, a corporal boots him in the back
of the neck. I wanted it that way. I had told him to kick me
over and over until I couldn't take it any more. After the
sequence was over, I couldn't walk without help for days.
My physical hurt will take a long time to be assuaged. But
the damage to my soul has been worse. In Paris, when a
dog looks at me, I cry. What have I done to the dog? Or
what did he do to me to make me cry? I cry when I see
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certain people, movements, and objects. Everything I see,
hear, think, feel, pains me. I need to be with my baby boy!
But I find a letter from Minhoi saying that she has flown to
Mexico with Nanhoi. I don't know for how long.
Nastassja is filming Tess in northern France with Polan­
ski. I drive there and we spend nearly a week together.
Polanski shows me the first dailies. Nastassja is striking. But
as much as I desire Nastassja, I can't be happy as long as I
don't know where Minhoi and Nanhoi are and how they
are doing. My concern is for them; my desire is for them.
At night I can't fall asleep with Nastassja. I find no peace; I
am exhausted, nervous, irritable. I drive back to Paris to
wait for Minhoi and Nanhoi to call.
I can't say how many weeks have passed since Minhoi
and Nanhoi flew to Mexico. I can't think within conven­
tional time references at all any more; every moment with­
out Nanhoi is an unbearable eternity. Finally, when the
telephone rings in the middle of the night, it is Minhoi call­
ing from Mexico City. She and Nanhoi have arrived there
after a long journey through the country. She tells me to
come, and I drive to the airport to await the first flight to
Mexico. When I join them at their hotel in Mexico City, my
heart is pounding out of control. As I sneak up the stairs to
Minhoi and Nanhoi's room, I'm suddenly afraid of making
a noise; I stop in my tracks. I fear that Minhoi might run
away with Nanhoi when she hears me coming. I continue
walking, tiptoeing to the room number the porter gave me.
My heart overflows with joy when I hear Nanhoi squealing
and splashing in the bathtub. When I enter he pulls me into
the bathtub with my clothes still on, and Minhoi hugs and
kisses me, too.
*
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The very next morning, we fly to Miami and from there
to the Bahamas, where I want to buy an island. From Nas­
sau we fly in a one-engine Cessna to the Exuma Islands
chain and inspect a place. It has a sparkling white sand
beach, a small jungle, and a cliff where seagulls nest. Plus
there's an underwater garden, full of wonder. From a din­
ghy you can see, with the naked eye, strange fish of daz­
zling colors swimming and bizarre, magical plants. I buy
the island and we fly back to Nassau, where we've rented
a house, the same day. But as if we've woken from a deep
dream, Minhoi and I can't stand each other. We can't even
sit together at the same table in a restaurant any more.
In Paris I quit the torture chamber in Avenue Foch and
move into Hotel l'Hotel where Oscar Wilde lived, until I've
found an apartment. The Route Mandarin, the first Viet­
namese restaurant Minhoi took me to, is across the street.
And l'Hotel was the first hotel I stayed at with Minhoi in
Paris. Now it's a nightmare. But I don't know where else to
g°Hungry for pussy, I drag every woman I can grab into my
bed and fuck her: salesgirls, waitresses, maids, married
women, mothers, Negresses— from Haiti, Mozambique,
Jamaica— Frenchwomen, American tourists, students—
from Russia, China, Japan, Sweden, Chile, India, Cuba— a
Bedouin woman, the naked black African woman in Para­
dis Latin, the sweet asses in the Crazy Horse, the seven
black mannequins from Saint Laurent, who gobble me up
with their meaty lips, the wife of the gas station owner and
mother of two children, the girl at the reception desk, the
dishwasher in the Route Mandarin, the married woman
with a big scar on her face, all the girls in the coffeehouses
who smile at me as I pass by, or whom I meet on the way
to the toilet, the young black woman on the other side of
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the Champs-Elysees— our eyes meet and we head for each
other across the street through the traffic. The hotel maids
don't come to my room at night; most of them are married
and have to let their husbands fuck them at night. I fuck
them when they come to straighten up my room, or I call
them under some pretext when they're making beds in
adjoining rooms or when they're vacuuming the stairs. I
fuck them on the bed, the floor, the toilet, the bidet, on their
backs, on their knees, on their stomachs, standing, bent
over, crouching.
The French sailboat race across the Atlantic starts in St.Malo in Normandy. Minhoi, Nanhoi and I drive there to
watch the boats sail off. My friend Olivier de Kerauson is
one of the competitors. A sponsor had an aluminum tri­
maran constructed for him. The hulls form points like
spears. The metal is supposed to be the same alloy used for
spaceships. Nanhoi isn't interested in that as he poops in
the water, squatting off one of the hulls. Olivier and I plan
to sail from the United States back to Europe, if he wins the
race. If he doesn't, the boat will be brought back in the hold
of a freighter— the reason having to do with the insurance,
which would be prohibitive, and the sponsor will pay only
if he wins. Another boat, the Vendredi 13 is also at the start.
We accompany the sailors a long time far out on the sea.
Today, forty-eight hours after the start, the skipper of the
Vendredi 13 calls Paris to ask me if I want to sail across the
Atlantic with him to Guadeloupe. He's given up the race
because his automatic rudder broke. But he has to take the
boat to Guadaloupe, where he earns money making charter
trips. I throw some clothes into a duffel bag, press my baby
boy closely to my heart, and take the next plane to Brest,
where the Vendredi 13 is anchored.
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It's November and icy cold. The sea is raging all the way
to the Azores, and we head for Faial, the island where sail­
boats on their way across the Atlantic have landed for
hundreds of years and where skippers have painted the
names of their ships on stones along the quay.
When I call Paris, I am told that I must return immedi­
ately to dub Nosferatu in French. A rotten joke! I would
never have flown back save for Nanhoi.
In Paris I find an apartment on the Quai Bourbon, on the
He St.-Louis, near the home of Minhoi and Nanhoi. I don't
want to own anything. I even check the few clothes I have
every month and throw whatever I can do without into the
garbage can. I have only a few books by Jack London, some
about single-handed sailing around the world, and one
about storms at sea. I burn scripts, letters, pictures, as I do
with every book I have read. Only Nanhoi's photos and
scribblings are sacred to me, and I carry them with me on
all my trips around the world. I even yearn to burn my own
script for Paganini, which I've been working on for years. It
is so mired in my past. But I desist. And as luck would have
it, a telegram from the most ingenious Italian producer,
Alfredo Bini, arrives. He has known the script for years; he
now says that he is able to produce the film. He comes to
Paris and we work out a contract for my script, direction,
and incarnation of Paganini, the understanding being that,
for now, I have other obligations to fulfill in the United
States, Japan, England, and France.
λ
Nastassja is coming to see me more often, if only for a
few minutes. She is crazy about Nanhoi and hugs and
kisses him all the time and rolls around with him on the
floor, laughing.
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Today, on the way to the Rothschild Bank, where Nas­
tassja has opened an account, too, she bursts into tears in
the car, and I can't calm her down. She clings to me sob­
bing. She loses her breath, stammering, "You don't love
me."
I have no idea what to say, which makes me appear cal­
lous, and she tries to open the car door and jump out. I hold
her back by force, and hug her and kiss her a long time. We
have been separated since she was seven years old. We
have since been together only sporadically and for a short
time. I wasn't by her side when she needed me. Now, when
she sees how boundless my love for Nanhoi is, she thinks
I don't love her as I love my son. I tell her otherwise, and
that her pain has distorted her reality. I insist that I have
never stopped loving her. Though gradually she calms
down, I sense she doesn't believe me. I tell her about Paga­
nini and that I want her to star in my movie. She is to be
the young woman Paganini desires with wild passion, a
woman who is herself obsessed with Paganini.
The German government writes to say it has awarded me
its highest honor for an actor. But really, who empowered
these robots to award me anything? How vulgarly pre­
sumptuous of them to give me, of all people, a prize! What
is this prize supposed to signify? What is it for? For my pain,
desperation, tears? A prize for passion, hate, and love? And
how do they intend to present me with the prize? Fuck
them! What do they want? They must be drunk or out of
their minds! No check is enclosed with their announce­
ment, so there's to be no money, to boot. This is infuriating!
The first screening of Nosferatu is in the Cinematheque in
Paris. When Nosferatu appears on the screen, head shaved,
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white as chalk, with snake's fangs and long claws like spi­
der's legs, Nanhoi calls out from the dark stillness in excite­
ment, "Papa!"
Minhoi takes off to India with Nanhoi. Their first post­
card came today. I will fly immediately to India to look for
them, but I can't make out the name of the village on the
postcard. I buy a magnifying glass, but the letters are so
smeared I still can't make out the name. I buy a big map of
India and search all of it with the magnifying glass for a
village with a similar name. It's hopeless. I feel helpless and
ridiculous. Why is Minhoi doing this to me?
The day I am to fly to the Cannes Film Festival ap­
proaches. I am resolute about canceling Cannes if Minhoi
and Nanhoi aren't back to accompany me.
I had never heard of the Cannes Film Festival before.
Now everyone is talking me into going because of Woyzeck.
I am even supposed to have a tuxedo tailored at Dior for
the gala premiere and for dinners. I'm sick of the shit! But
it's all the same because Minhoi and Nanhoi have come
back.
At Cannes, I slave like a horse and bullshit with hacks
from TV, radio, and newspapers. It's the same old "how?"
and "why?" and "what's next?" I refuse to believe the pub­
lic is interested in their meaningless sterility.
There is hysteria over the so-called prizes, given out by a
dirty dozen who presume to act as judges, their fondest
dream come true. (I myself had been asked to be a judge at
three different festivals. Me! When I refused, they thought
I was joking, for who would refuse their perverse honor?)
Once again, I am supposed to receive a prize, like a bull
prized for his cock. On my way to a piss after an interview,
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I run back into the air-conditioned room and yell into the
microphone that they had better not mock me with their
shit.
Menahem Golan sits down next to me at my table and
asks me if I want to shoot his first film in Hollywood. I ask
him if he's got his checkbook on him. He shows me his
checkbook, stuck onto his fat belly under his sweaty shirt.
It's hot, and he's not wearing a jacket. Menahem rips a
scrap off of the local newspaper and scribbles the terms he
is proposing.
"Can't you wait until morning," I ask, "to discuss the
important points of the contract?"
"Tomorrow you'll receive the Cannes prize," he says,
"and you'll cost twice as much."
They are all like this, these cowherders, as if I would be
transformed by a so-called prize. I postpone his pimping
until early next morning. But I'm itching to get a check for
half the pay, or at least a third of it right now, right here at
the table, without doing a thing for it. A lump of money
right in my hand, after I've signed a scrap of newspaper for
a film that will begin in six months (who knows?). The
street kid in me says, "Grab the money! who cares who it's
from. Don't think about what or when it's for."
Minhoi, Nanhoi, and I drive back to Paris through Arles,
where we want to look at property and a sixteenth-century
house. Minhoi insists on it, and I don't discourage her in
any way, even if I don't know where I'll get the money. But
first we spend a week with the gypsies in Les SaintesMaries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue on the coast of the
South of France, where the largest festival of gypsies from
all the countries in Europe takes place every year.
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He
He
Child Woman: A film by a woman director. It is the story
of a deaf and dumb gardener in love with a twelve-year-old
girl. When the girl is sent away by her parents, the gardener
cuts his throat with a razor. The first thing I think of is fuck­
ing this director. That would be something new! Our dis­
cussions about the shooting take place on a bed, but she
insists on remaining fully dressed. It takes me forever to
grab a piece of her ass, forget about her cunt. She's not only
dumb and has no talent whatsoever, but is also stubborn.
Anyway, I must go to Hollywood first to shoot the film for
Menahem Golan, for which I've already gotten the entire
pay in advance.
I had promised Twentieth Century-Fox that I would do
a promotional tour through the USA and Canada for Nosferatu and that I would take part in the New York Film Fes­
tival. After already slaving in seven European countries for
them, I must now fulfill my promise, and Minhoi, Nanhoi,
and I fly all over America for four weeks: 480 interviews; I
don't know how many TV shoes; six thousand radio sta­
tions, it seems; every day from seven in the morning to
midnight. The only important thing to me is that my baby
boy is near me. Naturally I can only answer the same ques­
tions with the same answers time and again, even though
most of the American reporters I meet are intelligent, fair
and unbiased people. I think the United States of America
is the freest country in the world. I believe that every new
generation makes it stronger.
The Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where I am staying, reminds
me of the hotel in Prague in Czechoslovakia where secret
agents spy around in the foyer and on every floor. I'm end­
lessly running into these snoops everywhere.
I cannot sleep any more without my baby boy. I turn on
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the TV hoping to see a gangster movie or a Western or a
Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers or the Three
Stooges. But every time, even at three in the morning, these
Pacmen who call themselves evangelists appear. At first I
think it's all a joke, but then it's clear that they are simply
miserable actors whom no one would hire. One of them
sweats horribly in his tailored suit, screams, and stomps
about. Another is downright unfriendly and shameless and
orders viewers to send him bigger money, on the double.
Another counts his checks like a pimp as an old, bleachedblond, horrendously made-up whore hands them to him,
squealing "Hallelujah" after each one like a piglet.
In Hollywood I sign an agency agreement with Paul and
Walter Kohner in their office on Sunset Boulevard. They
had called me often in Paris about the contract, and I had
kept putting them off. Paul has been one of the most expe­
rienced and respected agents in Hollywood for over a half
a century. His younger brother, Walter, was the best and
wisest agent I've ever had and my true friend.
I have an accident during a night of shooting in Holly­
wood, and the spot behind my left ear swells up to the size
of my fist. I fall down whenever I try to stand up. An ambu­
lance rushes me to the hospital. There I am abandoned until
nine the next morning. Walter comes to the hospital and
doesn't leave my side. I frantically think: What if I fall into
a coma and never regain consciousness? The idea of a
fatherless Nanhoi is exceedingly horrific to me. If only I
knew where in India he and his mother are now!
Having been released from the hospital, I stay in bed a
couple of days. I'm always tired; just picking up the tele­
phone to say "Hi" is exhausting; the receiver falls from my
hand.
He
He
He
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Herzog— who has been on a prize-collecting tour since
Aguirre (there are a lot of countries where Aguirre, Nosferatu, and Woyzeck won prizes)— suddenly pops up in Los
Angeles and goes around like a door-to-door salesman beg­
ging for money for Fitzcarraldo. But no one here trusts him
with the sum the film supposedly will cost, except for a
trash producer who offers him a pittance for the American
rights.
During the filming of Nosferatu I bought Herzog a pair of
white pants from Saint Laurent because I couldn't bear to
see him in the same fart-infested, unwashed, shit-colored
rags any longer— rags that reminded me of penitentiary or
mental institution clothing. Who knows what he did with
the pants from Saint Laurent; he's dressed in his vile clothes
again.
Golan asks me about Paganini time and again. I don't
trust him. I am convinced he has no idea what I'm talking
about when I recount the screenplay. The first thing he
shows me in his office on Sunset Boulevard is the Oscar
nomination for Entebbe. I wonder why these people don't
hang their nominations above their toilet to masturbate in
front of, undisturbed.
It's back to Paris for Child Woman. I don't think there is a
meaner, more sinister, more suicidal part of France than the
place the bitchy director has found for the film. The place
is brutal, insidious, and now, in December, gray and bare,
with freezing slush, slick ice, and muddy snow. The hotel
where we're filming is an imitation of an ancient castle, and
construction is underway or, rather, a mayhem produced by
drills, hammers, saws, tractors. The air is full of poisonous
dust and the stink of paint, day and night. Parisians use this
so-called luxury castle as a brothel for whores on weekends.
H
<
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This Christmas is the most beautiful ever, because I'm
alone with my baby boy for several days. We'll have the
most beautiful Christmas tree, like the one I wished for as
a little boy. I buy mountains of every kind of candy my little
sweet tooth loves to eat. And bundles of toys: .a train set,
balls, his first bicycle, a teepee, music boxes, little ships and
boats for the bathtub, a rocking horse, marbles, picture
books, crayons, an airplane, a car, a scooter, and many
Matchbox cars, from race cars to Rolls-Royces. We don't
even leave the house, it's mercilessly cold and unfriendly
outside. We lie on the carpeted floor and play until we fall
asleep in the teepee, exhausted.
Carlo Ponti wants to shoot a film with me about trans­
sexual operations. I don't even consider it because Ponti is
stingy. But he's hospitable and Nanhoi drinks a whole carafe
of freshly squeezed orange juice in his apartment in Paris.
Manitas de Plata is in Paris, this time for a TV show. I
rush to the studio to embrace him. I find him in a bare wait­
ing room. The door is open; there's no light on. I nearly trip
over one of the gypsies who perform with Manitas and are
lying on the floor, smoking, as Manitas plucks the strings of
his guitar in the corner. I am reminded of the zoo outside
Paris. In its cages, animals born free waste away: They lie
in their cells as if too weak to turn their heads, too proud to
let themselves be mocked by the sight of people.
Minhoi flies to California to see friends, and Nanhoi and
I go on vacation alone for the first time. We fly to our island
in the Bahamas. We splash around for a whole week in
emerald and turquoise water, the sky turning to a glowing
red, evenings and mornings. We dig in the white sand and
build castles. We cook over open fires and roast lobsters and
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delicious fish. We sleep in the open under galaxies of stars.
Nanhoi asks me if the world is round and if it really spins.
He is three years old.
Steven Spielberg wants me to do Raiders of the Lost Ark,
and someone brings the screenplay from Hollywood to
Paris. But as much as I think that Spielberg is the best direc­
tor America has to offer, the screenplay is the same tired old
shit. Lelouch is also talking at me about The One and the
Others. I like him, too; but not his shabby pay. Venom is an
American horror movie to be made in London. All three
films are being shot at the same time. I choose Venom, even
though I'm sick of London. First I must go to Japan and
China to do Fruits of Passion for a Japanese production
team.
Minhoi and Nanhoi come along to Japan. Before the
shooting begins, we take our baby boy to the circus and the
Luna Park, where we ride the carousel. On July 30, Nanhoi's birthday, I set off fireworks, rockets, firecrackers, and
fiery showers from the windows of our hotel suite.
When I finally must go to work, Minhoi and Nanhoi
decide to travel through all of Japan by train. I take them to
the train station in Tokyo. Nanhoi is wearing his first little
Japanese backpack, with a locomotive printed on it. I take
them into the train compartment and wait, hugging them
tightly, until the train pulls out and I have to jump off. I run
alongside the train as it moves faster and faster; my baby
boy blows kisses at me through the window.
There's a lot of fucking to enact in the Japanese film. It is
the story of a man who places his lover in a brothel in
Shanghai because it excites him. The girl does it out of love
for the man, but she suffers deadly torments. Of course,
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most of the story is set in the brothel. Fifty miles from
Tokyo are the oldest, most primitive silent movie studios in
Japan, where Kurosawa shot his first movie. In the scorch­
ing heat, we work up to twenty hours a day without a
break. The Japanese never complain; they like to work. But
we have to fuck here! Yet, every man's cock is hanging
limp, even though the producer and director Jushi Terajama
has signed for so-and-so many fucking dicks and cunts in
his contract, in coproduction with the French. One of the
Japanese girls, whom I have to fuck in the film and whom
I also hump in my hotel, goes into dark corners with the
men and sucks their cocks until they get hard. Then she
runs to Terajama to give him the good news. It often hap­
pens that a cock will become limp again before the camera
starts rolling. As for myself, I simply reach into the cheesy
panties of one of the French actresses from time to time for
a fingerful. I smear the residue into my nostrils and inhale
the sharp stink, not forgetting to rub some of it over my face
and cock. Or I stick a finger into her asshole. Or into both
her asshole and her cunt. Or I lick the salty sweat from the
long hair of her armpits.
I try to call Nanhoi every day, but it gets more and more
difficult to make a connection because his mother never
stays in one place for very long and because I don't leave
the studio until late, often not until night, and then my baby
boy is already fast asleep. If I finish filming earlier, I make
a mad dash back to Tokyo and stare at the telephone, wait­
ing for it to ring.
Nastassja is in Tokyo for the opening of Tess, and I call
her at her hotel. She reprimands me for not calling her
when I was in Hollywood. I didn't even know she was
there.
2 6 2
K L A U S
*
K I N S K I
*
*
Minhoi and Nanhoi fly directly from Tokyo to California.
They now live in a tiny house, as small as a dollhouse, in
the middle of a forest in Marin County. It's fairy tale-ish.
The woods, hills, valleys, fields; seagulls and falcons fly
overhead; elk, bobcats, and pumas lurk about.
I fly to London to film Venom. The producer fires the
director, the arrogant cameraman, and the fat script girl
after four weeks of shooting and throws the results thus far
into the garbage can. We begin to film the trash anew.
In London, a Hollywood fool calls me every day to blab
about a film in New Zealand and Australia. I don't want to
do a film in New Zealand and Australia. Not now. I don't
want to make any films at all right now, not for all the
money in the world. I am exhausted and disgusted. I'm
going to spend two whole months with my son, just the two
of us. Minhoi is going to Guatemala.
It's Christmas again, and I'm alone with my baby boy in
the dollhouse in the middle of the fairy-tale forest. I bring
in a small tree from the forest and decorate it colorfully. I'm
standing in the tiny kitchen alcove cooking for my baby
boy. I just washed our laundry in the bathtub, and it's
hanging on a line above the stove, where burning wood is
crackling. This is the most wonderful Christmas of my life.
Walter Kohner hooks me up with a Japanese house­
keeper, Nauko.
I make a film with Billy Wilder. The shooting of the junk
is pompous, gross, hysterical, ridiculous, and boring.
"You'll shoot the serious films with Herzog and the funny
ones with me," Billy said when we met for the first time.
A L L
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2 6 3
But Billy Wilder's so-called funny movies haven't been
funny in years, while Werner Herzog's films would be inad­
vertently funny, if I followed his so-called direction.
Journalists, writers, film freaks: These vultures are trying
to feed off me. Mad masturbators, thieves, plunderers: They
want to write books about me. Everything I say to them is
misunderstood. The University of Michigan asks me to give
a speech next Easter on the Crucifixion of Christ! Why me?
The Baltimore Symphony wonders if I would like to
address its audience concerning Beethoven during orches­
tral intermissions. Why me? The French Minister of Culture
sends me, through the French ambassador in Los Angeles,
the honor of "Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres." They're all nuts! I have the nauseating suspicion
that human society wants to accept me into its fold.
I tell Herzog to fuck off and hang up on him when he
blathers about his next film. So he's started Fitzcarraldo
without me, using someone from New York and Mick Jagger as Fitzcarraldo's friend. Now Herzog farts into Los
Angeles and begs me to do the film. After four weeks of
shooting with the guy from New York, even idiot Herzog
realizes that everything has to be dumped and that he
needs to start the film over from the beginning with me.
Nevertheless and tediously, he tries to dupe me contrac­
tually. It doesn't work.
The five months in the jungle during the filming of Fitz­
carraldo are like the time spent doing Aguirre ten years
before. Once again, Herzog's ignorance, ineptness, arro­
gance, and thoughtlessness put our lives at risk and
threaten the completion of the film. Once again he's feeding
2 6 4
K L A U S
K I N S K I
the whole troupe slop cooked with pig fat. Once again there
is a shortage of fresh fruits and drinking water. Whenever
possible I prepare a fish caught from the river or a hen or a
wild duck on an open fire. As soon as Herzog smells the
roast, he sticks to me like an outhouse fly, wanting to pig it
down, no matter how much I curse him, insult him,
threaten him. As soon as he wants something from me, he
hits me like the stench of a pile of shit. Day and night he
carries a notebook around with him in a leather case on his
belt. He enters his lies, reports on the film, on me, like an
attendant at a correctional institution. He's arranged for a
so-called documentary filmmaker to shoot a film about Her­
zog's shooting a film. This man thinks of nothing but garlic
and gorging himself on anything he can get his hands on,
before sleeping through all the goings-on. I go deeper into
the jungle to build fires, because this man wants to stuff
himself with my nourishment.
The pristine jungle springs from the colorful morning
mist. The mist is pink. I slash a path through the jungle with
my machete to a point where I can see the river from above.
A 350-ton ship on the steep incline of the opposite shore is
held fast by a single steel cable. It points to the pink heav­
ens. It is four in the morning. I dart through the jungle back
to camp and kick Herzog and the slobs awake. In twenty
minutes the mist will break up; they risk not filming a nat­
ural wonder.
The film is as good as done. Just a few more weeks and
I'll be rid of this cockroach. We're shooting on a ship mov­
ing along the Amazon. I must smoke a giant cigar. I'm also
standing on deck against the wind, which is blowing black
smoke from the smokestack into my lungs. They're burning
automobile tires in the engine room because the ship,
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265
which is supposed to be a steamship, is in reality run by a
diesel engine. I am sick to the point of fainting. Herzog says
he wants to do another take; he wants me to repeat the
scene. I can't stand this any more. I kick him to the ground.
When the photographer tries to take pictures, I throw a
chair at him. I walk away, disgusted.
"Was that really necessary?" Herzog grovels.
"Maybe you need another kick," I respond.
"Are you ready to continue shooting?"
"Naturally," I say, "that's what I'm here for."
In Iquitos I get a letter from my baby boy. I cry and laugh
every night and every morning when I take it out to read.
His words are:
PLEASE BE CAREFUL OF THE SNAKES.
I LOVE YO U .
N A N H O I.
The shooting must be interrupted. The loudmouths
didn't listen to the Indians again. The water level of the
river has sunk so low that the ship is stuck in the mud. We
have to come back in two and a half months, when the
rainy season begins. Herzog is giving one of those revolting
parties producers put on after the shooting of a film, when
everyone drowns in cheap champagne while feeding on
garbage. I refuse to go. I call Minhoi from Manuas in the
Brazilian jungle. She hangs up on me. Herzog comes to the
airport to embrace me. I feel sick.
A
b o u t
t h e
A
u t h o r
Klaus Kinski (ne Niklaus Nakszynski) was born in Poland in 1926. He
lives in California and Rome.
About the Author
Klaus Kinski (ne Niklaus Nakszynski) was born in Po­
land in 1926. He lives in California and Rome.
Jacket art: Klaus Kinski
Random House, Inc., New York, N.Y. 10022
Printed in U.S.A. 12/88
© 1988 Random House, Inc.
''Hurricane-force autobiography from film actor [Klaus] Kinski, .who here writes of his
astonishing life with the same ferocity that he has brought to his brilliant star turns in
Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Nosferatu. Fitzcarraio'o. and other movies.
■'Born to dreadful poverty in pre-World War II Warsaw, Kinski's life—as he tells it here—
has been one long mad dash for the love and comfort denied him as a child. The white-hot
intensity of his run is well reflected in this memoir, which fairly blisters off the page....
Starving, stealing for a living, sent to a children's welfare home, Kinski in time found two
escapes from his youthful hell—acting and sex. The acting, cultivated in the German
theater and coming to flower in the films of Werner Herzog, has won him fame and
wealth....And the sex—starting at a tender age with his sister and rolling on through a
Casanovian number of liaisons, many with underage girls... has brought him mostly pain
in two shattered marriages and a trail of broken loves. Kinski's demonic energy seems to
have diminished not a whit as he enters his 60s: he tramples those who admire him
(■'Journalists, writers, film freaks: These vultures are trying to feed off me") and curses
those with whom he must work (“ I absolutely despise this murderer Herzog....Big red
ants should piss in his eyes, eat his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts!” ).
"A singular celebrity biography, echoing Celine and Hamsun and throbbing with rage,
pain, and lust. Not a gentle read... but certainly an unforgettable one.”
—Kirkus Reviews
5 1995
9 780394 549163
ISBN 0-3^4-54^113-3