The Kingdom of Shadows

ELEVEN

“I believe Mr. Wise expects me.”

The secretary glanced up at Marte. “I’ll see if he’s free right now.” The look from the woman continued for a moment longer, before she swivelled her chair around toward the intercom box.

She knew what the secretary’s appraisal meant. There were two secretaries here in the lobby of David Wise’s office, both young and good-looking enough; perhaps they could have gone for bit parts out on the production lot rather than sitting here all day behind their typewriters and stacks of mail. But they both had in their eyes that little smoldering spark, a seed of both contempt and envy, that the merely pretty always directed toward the beautiful. The same here in Hollywood as it had been in Berlin – the unspoken accusation that the beauty wasn’t enough, that it had to be what she had done with it, in private, that accounted for the way men, including the estimable Herr Wise, looked at her.

There was nothing she could do about it. She had long ago stopped feeling anything when it happened.

The secretary turned back to her. “It’ll just be a couple of minutes.” Efficient.

Marte sat and waited, flipping through the pages of an American magazine. The printed words were still opaque to her; she had to translate them from English into German inside her heard, to know what they meant. Speaking it was easier, it was just like reciting lines in front of a camera. That was the pay-off from all the coaching she had gotten from Mr. Wise, with dialogue from movies he had produced. Hours of practice, on the long stage-by-stage journey – Berlin to Paris, then to Liverpool and the ocean liner. And the long train ride, cities and then the empty desert spaces, that had looked to her like the place where the world ended. It had made sense that Hollywood lay on the other side of all that, a place where everything could be made from nothing, a blank piece of paper for men like Wise to write upon.

She looked up, through the window next to her. In the distance, at the edge of the Wise Studios lot, stood the Taj Mahal. Not the real thing, a replica, a false front made of wood and plaster, the paint that had imitated the jewel-like tiles flaking from the heat of the California sun. It had been built for some historical epic several years ago, heroic British soldiers in the service of their far-flung empire; taken from a book by Kipling, perhaps, transmuted into perfect romance by Wise’s staff of writers. Just that one set was bigger than anything she had ever seen at the UFA studios in Babelsberg, outside Berlin.

She returned her attention to the magazine. As she deciphered its words, she was aware of someone watching her. From the farther side of the waiting room – a tall, lanky man, with thinning red hair, wearing an unstylish checked jacket. When she looked up, she saw him keeping his gaze on the newspaper he held unfolded in front of himself, as though idly catching up on the baseball scores. Wilson; that was his name. David had even introduced his head of studio security to her, and the man had smiled and shaken her hand, and told her that if there was anything she ever needed, then she only had to call him. She knew that if he was watching her, that was just part of his job, something that David had asked him to do -

“Marte!”

The magazine was pulled from her hands and tossed onto the table on the other side of the chair. She raised her eyes and saw a smiling David Wise standing in front of her.

“God, you’re looking great.” He reached down and took both her hands in his, bringing her to her feet. “Rose took you downtown, got you all fitted out?”

She nodded. The head of the Wise Studios’ costuming department had spent all of yesterday with her on Wilshire Boulevard, taking her through the private fitting rooms of the shops, plush-lined sanctuaries where tea was invariably offered before the tape measures flew and the racks of dresses were wheeled in. The small woman with her bob of jet-black hair and gogglelike horn-rimmed glasses had torn through the offerings, yanking out the ones which she had approved. Those had been boxed, after Marte had tried them on and they had gotten past the other woman’s critical scowl, and sent on, with no exchange of money needed. The studio settled its accounts on a quarterly basis – or so the costuming head had informed her.

“Ladies, I ask you -” Wise took her elbow and turned her toward the secretaries. “Isn’t she looking swell?”

The same dim spark was in the other women’s eyes as they looked over their shoulders at her. “Lovely, Mr. Wise,” said one. They both turned back to their typewriters.

“I’m really glad you came by today.” Wise steered Marte toward the door of his office.

“But you asked me to.”

He shrugged. “People in this town, you ask ’em to breathe, they want to know what’s in it for them. Don’t you worry about that, though.” He had laid his arm around her shoulder; with his other hand, he reached for the door knob. “Trust me, people will always be nice to you.”

The office was dark except for the film screen. Standing in the middle of the room, Marte turned and saw her silhouette at the bottom of a battle scene. Shouts and explosions – a squadron of soldiers, dressed in the uniforms of 1914, charged with their rifles and bayonets through a forest, as the earth around them erupted into great bursts of fire and smoke. Some of the actors crumpled to their knees, the weapons dropping from their hands as they fell shoulder-first to the ground.

Wise pulled the door shut and walked toward Marte. The war scene covered his head and torso, other men’s faces, grimacing in pain and anger, superimposed on his. He squinted into the shifting beam of light, raising his hand to gesture at the projectionist. “Turn it down, Freddy. You’re driving us deaf in here. There, that’s good.” The shouts were murmurs now, the explosions removed to a landscape far away. He turned back to Marte. “What do you think?” He pointed over his shoulder to the screen. “Does that look like the Battle of the Somme to you?”

“I don’t know.” In their near-silence, the images of the falling men seemed like those of sleepwalkers, lost in the nightmares from which they couldn’t awake. “That all happened so long ago… before I was born…” Everything that happened up there, in that world of light and shadow, seemed like a dream to her. When she had first seen her own face transformed into radiance, she had wondered who the girl was, and if she had dreamed the Marte that watched her in the darkness. “I don’t know about those things.”

“Ah, that’s all right. I didn’t really expect you to.” Wise stood beside her for a moment, gazing at the action on the screen. “I don’t even know if we’re gonna go ahead with this one – it’s not really making a lot of sense to me any more. You know what I mean?” He glanced over at her. “There’s a war going on over there right now; why should anybody be interested in what happened in the last one? People are just glad we’re staying out of it this time.” His face grew heavier, brooding. “I should be making more comedies. Right? Get people’s minds off their little problems for an hour or two. Or romances.” He smiled at her. “That’s where you come in.”

“Yes… if you still think I would be…” She couldn’t find the word in English. “ Praktisch? Suitable?”

Wise laughed, tilting his head back. “That’s really sweet. You know, I’m glad you didn’t get our complete Pygmalion number – you still got a little bit of your accent. That’s good, I want you to keep some of that exotic quality about you. It always plays well, at least with blondes. Dark-haired, you want to go the other way, tone it down.”

She hadn’t followed everything he had said. “I could dye my hair -”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “We’re not gonna touch a thing about you. Perfect the way you are.” He smiled, then leaned closer, as if he were about to kiss her. “Believe me. You’re going to be very suitable.” He drew back, gesturing toward a sofa barely visible under the bright beams from the projection booth windows. “Have a seat. Let me get you something – we really haven’t had a chance to celebrate your arrival.”

He came back from the bar with two glasses. In the darkness, she couldn’t discern what was in the one he handed to her; she took a sip and found it to be well-aged brandy. She had learned to drink things like that, expensive things, even to tell one apart from another. She let the thread of its warmth ease down her throat.

“You fixed up okay?” Wise settled down beside her, sinking back into the soft leather. The battle scene continued unreeling across from them. “How’s the little house?”

“ Es ist so schon…” She found the English words. “It’s lovely.” That had been where the boxes from the shopping expedition had been delivered, to a Spanish-styled bungalow on a winding road in the foothills. The glazed tiles set into the walls and floor were real, not just daubs of paint like those on the lot’s fake Taj Mahal.

“You really like it?” He seemed surprised by how quickly she had answered him.

“Oh, yes. It’s so… so much sun. So bright.” After the driver had brought in her luggage, she had stepped out the house’s back door and been dazzled by the tumble of flowers over the garden wall, big exotic-looking ones – exotic to her; she supposed they might be as common as Ganseblumchen in this wonderland. She didn’t even know what the flowers were called, bursting like soft explosions from their creeping tendrilled vine. She had closed her eyes as she had brought her face close to the flowers, drinking in the warm, vanilla-ish scent. Like a piece of some bright heaven, that she could cup in her hands.

Bright…

Maybe here was that heaven, where the sweet flowers came from, their home. Before she had left Berlin, everything had come to seem so dark there. Even when she had stood beneath the glare of the studio lights, their heat drawing a rivulet of sweat through the makeup slathered upon her skin – even then, when she had barely been able to squint past them to where Ernst sat leaning forward, next to the whirring camera, even then she had known it was night outside the Babelsberg walls, or a grey daylight of scudding clouds and rain-shimmered puddles at every street corner.

“Well…” Herr Wise shrugged, looking away from her, as though to hide a blush of embarrassment. “We want you to be happy here.”

“Oh, but I am sure I will be.” She reached out and touched his arm. “You have been so kind to me.”

He stood regarding her from the corners of his eyes, rubbing his black-stubbled chin with the tips of his long, delicate fingers. A musician’s fingers, the hand of a violinist.

“We’ll have to get down to business soon,” he said at last. “But not right now.” She had seen a decision click into place behind his eyes, like a coin falling through the slot of a vending machine. He nodded toward the screen. “Relax, make yourself comfortable. Why don’t we just watch the movies for a while, okay?” He smiled with perfect white teeth, the smile of one of his actors. “Take a look at this.”

He signaled to the projectionist by pushing one of the buttons on the little console near the sofa. She turned and looked up at the screen, and saw her own face. In black and white; a girl stood on a street in Berlin, her empty, hungry gaze reflected in a shop window.

“That was the first time I saw you.” Wise looked at the screen, studying the girl carefully. And then back to the one beside him, the smile rising on his own face again. “I mean, the first time I saw one of your films.”

Marte closed her eyes as she leaned back into the embrace of the sofa; she could still make out the turning and fall of the shadows and faces on the screen across the room. She heard the soft clink as Wise refilled the glasses on the low table before them. She had been holding her breath, as though she were a quiet, invisible thing, not really in this room at all, or anywhere. While she had waited for that coin to fall, for that decision to be made. The one that she already knew, that she had come to expect when men looked at her. That made her real. That made the woman with her face, up on the screen, even more real, as all the men in the darkened theater gazed up at her in silence.

“Here you go…”

She opened her eyes and saw him holding a glass out to her. As she took it, her fingers touched his for a moment. That didn’t end. He raised his gaze to hers; in the darkness at the center of his eyes, she saw the girl’s face, the woman’s face, her face. On the tiny screen of his vision, the shadows and light from the larger one played across that image. Which one was real? She didn’t know. She didn’t know, even as he leaned forward and kissed her, their fingers still touching.

She didn’t see, but heard the glass strike the floor, the brandy spilling across the rug. But she knew where she was now, inside the annihilating embrace of a man’s arms, her head tilting back as he pressed his face into the taut angle of her throat.

All the other worlds, the bright ones and the dark, vanished as she fell.

The radiance from the screen turned her skin to silver, as though she were one of those figures of light and shadow.

Marte drew away from him and sat up at one end of the couch in the little alcove. His skin caught the reflection from the screen as well, brightened by the sheen of sweat across his shoulders, lost in the tangle of dark hair on his chest. David – as he had told her to call him; he didn’t want her to say ‘ Herr Wise’ anymore – hadn’t moved when she had slipped out of his embrace. He was still asleep, or pretending to be.

She looked down at her own arms and breasts, wrists crossed against her knees. The shadows moved across her skin. The projectionist, in his small chamber above her head, had gone on running film, reel after reel, all the time she had been here with David. Perhaps the man behind the flickering beam of light was blind, or deaf, or perhaps it didn’t even matter. They had been as private here as though in a bedroom with the door closed; the soundtracks from the films had swallowed up the things he had whispered to her, his lips brushing her ear.

Perhaps there was no one up there at all. No one changing reels upon the projector – perhaps the films went on and on by themselves because they were true things, the screen a window into another world, brighter vivid than this one. The light from that world had rained gently upon her while she had slept in David’s arms, made her a part of it. For a moment, she thought that she could walk across the room, her bare feet sinking into the thick carpets, and stand against the screen, the beam of light wrapping itself around her body. In the glare of that small sun, streaming through the fingers of her outstretched hand, she might become a true, real thing herself, at home in the world that claimed her.

“Then I would…” She whispered aloud, the words moving inside her head as she gazed at the screen. Dann ich werde. “Then I would know…”

In that other world, a battle still raged. Soldiers swarmed across muddy fields, the terrible long mouths of cannons spat fire and smoke. Marte shrank back, the couch’s leather touching her rounded spine.

Other skin, living, touched her. David’s hand – she looked round at him and saw his half-lidded eyes and dreaming smile. She let him pull her close into the shelter from which she had risen. Falling, as she had let herself fall toward Joseph, and before him, the father of her baby.

She looked up into David’s face and saw that his gaze had strayed from her, even as his arms drew her closer against his bare chest. Reflected in the dark centers of his eyes were the sparks and motions of light.

The light drew her gaze as well. She looked over her shoulder, the side of her face pressed tight against his skin. Across the darkened room, in the dazzling world of the screen, a squadron of planes, cruel and beautiful things, thundered across the skies. In tight formation, wingtips almost touching, their riveted bodies as silver as the reflected light had made her own skin. They flew on, carrying metal and fire to distant parts of that other world.

She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see that anymore. But she knew that he kept his eyes open, went on watching, even as he held her tighter and more fiercely to himself.