Katri Lipson

Translated by David Hackston

As we were waiting for the rain, we tried to get the director drunk. We couldn’t get anything out of him; all he told us was about his years as a student. He mentioned one night in particular, for nowhere had he learnt so much about film as in a single evening in Berlin before the war. He’d been spending the evening at a dance in one of the more liberal parts of town and ended up getting lost looking for the men’s room that was nowhere to be found in a labyrinthine mass of red-lit corridors. He soon realised this was part of a carefully planned scheme: the sense of urgency building in his groin and the eager, garishly painted lips moving behind each of the doors whispering Was suchen Sie, lieber Herr? Eventually he found what he was looking for, a small cubicle with barely enough room to turn around. After he’d emptied his bladder and tugged the string dangling from the ceiling, he heard a heated discussion from the other side of the wall. Once back in the corridor he pressed his ear against the adjacent door, and in a matter of seconds it was wrenched open.
Sie wollen sehen? Zwanzig Mark, bitte.
     To this day, the director told us, he wasn’t sure which parts of this scene were acted and which were what one might call ‘real life’. It might have been the case that the restaurant’s clientele included people for whom entertainment required an ambivalence between intelligence and instinct, fact and fiction. The intent was to capture on film a considerably detailed scene between a man and a woman on a set made up to look like a shabby old backroom. The atmosphere was as flat and numb as if this had all taken place a hundred times before. Then suddenly the female actor flew into a rage: according to her contract, in all acts of penetration she was to be replaced by a body double. The cameraman didn’t take any notice of the woman’s tantrum but continued filming, his arms taut with exertion. The woman’s announcement was clearly news to the male actor. And regardless of the surprise, he couldn’t help but take it all personally. Because he knew the woman from before? Or perhaps because they were complete strangers? To hide his annoyance, the man began a long argument with the woman about why genuine penetration was such a crucially important element of the overall performance. The woman could do nothing but wonder at this. Her head was tilted confrontationally to the side, something one would only notice if one’s senses were attuned to the gesture.