All That I Am Read Online Free PDF Page B

gestured loosely to his bandy legs, ‘if these damn things were straight.’
    I laughed.
    ‘Dora’s told me all about you.’
    ‘Really?’ It seemed unlikely to me. Dora was over at my light-table, looking at some negatives. I could tell by her stillness, though, that she was listening. Just as everything he said to me was intended for her.
    Dora turned around, suppressing a smile. ‘He’s exaggerating,’ she said, her eyes on him. ‘I barely said a thing.’
    ‘She told you I needed a gramophone?’ I looked from one to the other. They laughed. ‘It’s very kind but I can’t—’
    ‘Please,’ the great man said, showing me both palms, ‘I couldn’t resist. I really would like you to have it.’ He started to cough, raising a fist to his mouth.
    I saw then that to make a fuss would be to imply there was something abnormal about buying six gramophones on a whim, at least one of them for someone you’d never met.
    ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
    He looked relieved. The coughing stopped. ‘Sorry.’ He lowered the fist to his chest. ‘An old lung problem.’
    Dora let out a chuckle. ‘That was your generation’s malaise du jour , wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘The problem on the lung.’ She was a straight talker, though utterly without malice. People rarely took offence, but I saw Toller start. My cousin had been working for him for all of two weeks.
    ‘And yours would be?’
    ‘Oh, well…’ She was thinking quickly. ‘Ours would be–a complex of some kind. Father complex, mother complex, insecurity complex, authority complex…’
    ‘Got all those too,’ Toller smiled. ‘They just don’t make me cough. And anyway, I’m not even ten years older than you.’
    Dora nodded as if to say touché , and turned back to my light-table. There was a tension between them I could almost see, like a string across the room, taut and loose and taut again. I realised they were lovers.
    I pointed Toller to a stool. ‘Shall we get started?’
    Dora had arranged for me to take his photograph for a poster promoting Wotan Unchained , his new play. She’d told me how biting it was–a comedy about a megalomaniac barber called Wotan who wants, through a deft combination of demagoguery and butchery, to save post-war Germany from communists and Jews. (To think of that now! Terrible for Toller, really, to be able to see so clearly what was coming.)
    I touched his shoulders lightly, to square him to me. The cyclorama behind him was white as his shirt; it would be beautiful to have that great dark head coming out of brightness.
    ‘Just be yourself,’ I said, moving back to my camera.
    ‘Easy for you to say.’ He eyed the camera on its tripod. ‘You get to hide behind that thing.’
    I stopped winding the film on. He was smiling at me in such a way that I felt suddenly, and absolutely, seen.
    I turned back to my work.
    ‘“Act natural”,’ he continued, ‘is the worst thing you can say to an actor. They simply forget how to be. They get a kind of slow swagger.’ He readjusted himself on the stool. When I looked up again he was posing, fist to chin and frowning, like Rodin’s Thinker .
    ‘Stop impersonating yourself,’ Dora called from the other side of the room.
    ‘Told you it’s too hard,’ he said softly to me, and then he started fooling about, forming pose after pose, thinker to boxer to a gorilla scratching his sides, like an actor warming up, or someone looking for his character. This wasn’t working at all.
    ‘Dee, can you give me a hand here?’ I called.
    She came over. I gave her a light meter to hold, behind me. It was a useless task: I needed her in his line of vision, to steady him.
    The photograph became famous. It was used on all the playbills for his productions from then on, and sometimes by the newspapers too. It’s a close-up, dominated by the eyes. They are large and kind and, somehow, naked. His mouth, full and curved, is closed. His brow is a little furrowed; there’s a