Take No Prisoners (4 page)

There was another factor, which was that I was young, and immature even for my age. Continuing to attend the Rupolo's Monday double-bill matinees was risky and risqué, it was to partake of forbidden fruit – and thus it was infinitely appealing to me. Life as an impoverished postgraduate was generally dull and sometimes duller than that, and the excitement of deliberate illegality added a sparkle to something otherwise sparkle-free.

So the following Monday I was back at the Rupolo with my seventy-five cents.

The old guy looked up at me as he reached out his clawed hand for the money, and as he studied my face I could see something die in those fanatic eyes of his – some element of the fire that normally lit them. And, although there was no alteration at all of his habitually hostile facial expression as he grabbed the coins and grudgingly emitted the usual torn card stub through the hole in his window, I could somehow tell that he was disappointed in me. After a moment of disconcertedness I shrugged his attitude off: why should I give a shit about the opinions of a misanthropic old vulture – who anyway, by the look of his nose, probably had some Semitic blood in his ancestry?

Don't get me wrong here. I am not a prejudiced man, and I believe that the Final Solution, as perpetrated both in Germany under the Fuehrer and here under President MacNaish, was almost certainly an unnecessarily inhumane means of dealing with an acknowledged problem. There seems to me no reason at all why the Jews could not have been dealt with in the same way as MacNaish coped with the nigger problem. But in my youth I was more encumbered by the cultural baggage of my elders and peers. That moment when I recognized that the old ticket-seller might well be partly Semitic and yet
did nothing about it
was a major leap forward in the evolution of my own, independent worldview. From now on I at least recognized that there was the possibility for me to develop attitudes and a morality that were not merely carbon copies of those my parents lived by.

I shuffled into the semi-gloom of the theater and, sure enough, my regular seat was vacant – fifth row from the front, on the right side of the aisle. There were still a few minutes to go before the torn red-plush curtains would draw back and the screen flicker into life, and so as always I craned round to check that all the regulars were arrived or arriving. There was the middle-aged woman with the tightly clutched beadwork handbag and the perpetually watery eyes. There was the young couple who came here to neck in the back row and who I could swear once went the whole way there, right through the central section of a movie called
Casablanca
, in fact; at the end one of the characters said something like "Play it for me again, Tom" and half the small audience burst into sniggers. There was the tall man who carried himself so upright that I always guessed he'd been in the military fifty years ago. And there were the rest. You understand, none of us ever spoke to each other or even acknowledged each other's presence, yet in a strange way we'd each gotten to know our fellows, and there was a certain bonding between us. Quite how we'd have reacted had any of us ever run into one of the other Rupolo Monday-afternoon regulars I do not know: it never happened to me, and it was a prospect that made me quail. Today, as usual, there were a couple of new faces, too – doubtless stragglers who'd wandered in off the street less to watch the movie than to make three and a half hours of their lives disappear.

I turned back toward the screen just as the curtains drew apart.

The first movie to be shown today was called
Private Kohl's War
, and it was directed, according to the opening credits, by Thea von Harbou – one of the directors whose biographies I'd noticed on the library shelves. It told the story, in color, of a young soldier who'd taken part in the invasion of England and then fought in the sequence of battles that led to the Fall of London. At the end it showed him celebrating the surrender, contributing to the extermination of the Communists, and making plans to import his beautiful blonde German girlfriend so they could marry and raise kids on the small plot of farmland he'd been permitted to annex. It was a well enough made movie, and some of the camerawork and sets were superb – strongly influenced by Art Deco in places – but overall I found the movie unsatisfying and often tedious. Where were Chips and Ginger? The few Brits who had speaking parts were either villains of the stupidest sort or wise collaborators who might as well have been Germans themselves. And where was all the poignancy of watching stiff-upper-lip heroes who didn't know that, despite all their courage and dedication, they were doomed to be on the losing side, whatever their temporary triumphs? Where was all the antiquated slang I had come to love?

I glanced around me as the lights came up. So far as I could tell, none of the other regulars had found the movie in any way less enjoyable than usual – I seemed to be the only one to have noticed the very different character of this piece from our customary fare. Well, there had been other dreary movies in the Rupolo's seemingly neverending season devoted to World War II, and I supposed it was about time that the owner showed one that presented the other side of the story, as it were.

I settled back to watch the trailer for the movie that was showing in the evenings all this week. It was called
Robotic Cop Two
, and if the trailer was anything to go by it involved a machine taking the place of a cop and shooting everything and everybody in sight for a solid two hours. I decided not to bother watching it even when it came onto tv.

The second feature that afternoon was called
The Rising Sun Shall Never Set
, and at last we seemed to be back in familiar prisoner-of-war territory. I relaxed briefly in my seat, luxuriating in the sensation of having come home, but that happy state did not last long. The prisoners-of-war proved to be not Britishers incarcerated somewhere in Germany but Japanese being held in one of the concentration camps that the traitor Roosevelt established in this country. Aside from that the plot was fairly routine, following the lines I had come to expect from my earlier viewing, although with the additional complication that Japanese escapees had a tougher time of it, because of their distinctively non-American appearance, as they tried to make their way across country to join their comrades or make contact with the Resistance. The gimmick of the movie – which for all I know may have been historically based – was that the intelligent Japs got their imbecilic guards, mainly niggers, so involved in learning samurai skills that they relaxed the actual business of guarding. The close of the movie saw the liberation of the camp and a general rejoicing over the assassination of the hated Roosevelt.

My mind was in something of a ferment as I wandered home, clutching one of Mr. Perkins's roast beef and Swiss sandwiches with "the works." Was it possible that sometime during the past week the cops had quietly warned the Rupolo's owner to alter his ways or be busted for sedition? Or was it not more likely that he'd simply had a change of heart? Or maybe he'd run out of movies of the
other
sort and, rather than start repeating himself, he'd decided to move on to more realistic dramas? Or had he sold the business, and the new owner ...? There were endless possible reasons for the double bill I'd just witnessed, but none of them seemed entirely plausible to me.

I was still nagging away at the problem as I climbed the stairs to my apartment. Just as I put the key in the lock I was startled by a bellow from behind Mrs. Bellis's door.

"Your maw called," she yelled. "You gotta call her back, you fucker."

I paused. For Mrs. Bellis to speak to me at all was unprecedented. For her to give me a phone message was something I'd never considered outside the bounds of fantasy. Normally, if she answered the phone and it was for me she just slammed the receiver back on its hook and swore – I'd heard her do exactly this several times. Mom must have been extremely firm in her instructions that I was to be informed.

The key still in my hand, I retreated down the stairs and dialed the operator. In a few moments my collect call had been put through and I was speaking to my mother.

Who was in near-hysterical tears.

After all those years of complaining about his indigestion, and how it could be related to a serious heart condition, my father had been chasing some Jehovah's Witnesses off the property when he'd inadvertently stepped into the path of a fire-truck racing to an emergency. He'd died not just immediately but emphatically, with bits of him smeared halfway down the street, although apparently the paramedics had had some difficulty extricating his heavy walking stick from his tightly clenched fist. She'd wired some money to me so I could, as my father's only child, his son and heir, come home the following day.

I comforted her as best I could over the phone, standing there in the hallway with the shouts of the playpark kids and the fish-market habitues coming in through the thin door. I think I helped her with just the sound of my voice – a reassurance to her that she still had something left of her family. After I put the phone down I trudged slowly up the stairs to get my bags packed.

~

It was nearly a month later that I returned, and then only briefly – to tell the folk at the university face-to-face that I was abandoning my doctorate, and to clear out my apartment. It was pathetic that I could fit all my remaining possessions there into a single medium-sized case. I yelled a goodbye to Mrs. Bellis as I departed, case in hand, but her only response was to jack up the volume on her tv set a bit higher and to emit one of her thunderous farts as a farewell memento – one of the most effective mementos I've ever been given, in fact, because I can remember it quite clearly to this day.

On my way to the station, I made a detour to bid adieu to the Rupolo, the place where I'd spent so many happy Monday afternoons, the place that had been responsible for changing the course of my life. From a distance the cinema looked very much as tatty usual, but as I approached it along the sidewalk I realized that its doors had been boarded up and that the posters outside still advertised
Robotic Cop Two
. Although I was becoming a little anxious about being in time to catch my train, I went into Mr. Perkins's deli to ask him what had happened; from the fact that he refused to answer me, or even to recognize me, I deduced that the cops had finally stepped in.

On the train, as soon as we'd left the station behind, I pulled out of my bag the copy of
Brunner's Companion to the Cinema
I'd bought with part of my father's surprisingly sizable legacy and began to browse lackadaisically through it. I hardly saw the words, though. Instead I was thinking about how my life had changed so radically over the past few months, and in particular over the past few weeks. Mom had initially not taken kindly to my insistence that I was ditching my veterinary career in favor of becoming a student of the cinema – she had wailed that I was insulting my father's memory, for had he not paid to put me through college so I could establish myself in a worthwhile and respected career? – but eventually she saw such moral-blackmailing arguments were going to get her nowhere, and that I was absolutely resolute about my new future. After a while she actually began quite to like the idea, and started introducing me to her friends as "my son, the film critic."

The funeral had been ghastly, of course. My father had more friends in death than he had ever had in life. The worst moment of all was when, after the service, Glenda Doberman made a bulging attempt to hit on me. Gossip must have exaggerated the size of my inheritance.

Still idly turning the pages of
Brunner's Companion to the Cinema
, I forced such memories out of my head. This was a more recent edition of the book than the one in the university library, and I wondered if the expansion trumpeted in the blurb meant that it now included some of the old World War II movies I'd watched in the Rupolo.

No such luck.

I gazed out the train window at huge cornfields and placid cows speeding by, and another fantasy began to build itself in my mind.

It had been my assumption that Andrew Brunner had omitted the movies I'd watched on Monday afternoons because of their seditious content, their undesirability – he didn't list porn flicks, so it was reasonable to figure that he wouldn't want to list politically reprehensible movies either, censoring himself for reasons of either pragmatism or good taste. Or perhaps his publishers had insisted such items be expunged.

But what if that mundane explanation was totally wrong-headed?

It's very obvious that the future is malleable – or, to put it another way, that at any particular moment in time there are numerous possible futures lying in wait for us. We tend to think of the passage of time, the movement of the moment that is "now" from the present into the future, as being much like the train on which I was currently sitting lost in speculation. A train can travel along just a single track – no way can it go along two tracks simultaneously. But I began to think – and I've believed it more and more as the decades have passed – that the passage of time isn't like that at all: the movement of the "now" is like that of the impossible train which can run on more than one track at once: on many tracks, on an almost infinitely large number of tracks. And I think it's open to us to decide which of those tracks we perceive the train to be running on. Over the past month or so I had opted – wittingly or unwittingly – to shift my perception of the track along which my own personal train was traveling. One of the many railway lines had been leading to a station that was the security of a career as a vet, and for over a decade that had been the only track I could see. But then had come my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo. Nothing in the physical universe had been changed by my experience of them – that would have been a ridiculous notion – but my perception had been altered, so that now the chief railway line I saw was the one leading to a station called Cinema Historian and Critic. I was still conscious that the other railway line was
there
, but I no longer perceived it.