The Ice Cream Man Read Free

everything’s totally nonsensical: in Moravia, they apparently heat their houses in the middle of summer, and the music played at Tomáš’s birthday party in 1942 wasn’t released until 1945.
    The director’s mother is demented, just sits in her garden chair all day answering letters and writing opinion pieces. Her reputation is in constant danger. The struggle to preserve her reputation dates from the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the present day, and from the present day to a future that will continue mercilessly long after her death. When the newspapers mention the fifty Hussars, her response is published as a letter to the editor: “I have never had anything to do with the Hussars.” When the war ends: “I have never even set foot in Munich.” Readers are hungry for her letters. Occasionally a piece is published in order to quash all possible gossip and suspicion: “I deny everything, regardless of time and place.” Soon afterward, everything starts over again, laden with juicy details. “Not even the Hussar with the red mustache.”
    Can you blame the son of a mother like that for wanting to keep things to himself? And can you blame the actors for threatening to alert the minister of culture unless they are given more information about their roles?
     
    As we were waiting for the rain, we tried to get the director drunk. We couldn’t get anything out of him; all he’d tell us about were his years as a student. He mentioned one night in particular—nowhere had he learned so much about film as in a single evening in Berlin before the war. He’d been at a dance in one of the more liberal parts of town and ended up lost, looking for the men’s room that was nowhere to be found in a labyrinth of red-lit corridors. He soon realized 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 door, whispering, “ Was suchen Sie, lieber Herr ?” Eventually he found it, 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 on the other side of the wall. 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 .” (“You want to watch? Twenty marks, please.”)
    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 ambivalence between intelligence and instinct, fact and fiction. The intent was to capture on film a detailed scene between a man and a woman on a set made up to look like a shabby old back room. The atmosphere was as flat and numb as if this had all taken place a hundred times before. Then suddenly, the actress flew into a rage: according to her contract, she was to be replaced by a body double for all acts of penetration. The cameraman ignored the woman’s tantrum but continued filming, his arms taut with exertion. Her announcement was clearly news to the male actor. And regardless of the surprise, he couldn’t help but take it 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, something one would only notice if one’s senses were attuned to the gesture. Und warum? The man stared at the woman, his mouth drooping open as if words were unable to describe the artistic truth with which he had now been left feeling utterly alone. This truth now required that he speak in metaphors, as elevated knowledge in our