The Kingdom of Shadows

SIXTEEN

For a moment, as Ernst von Behren gazed up at the faces before him, he felt that he had just woken up from dreaming. He slouched down in the screening room seat, his thoughts drifting to memory. The sunshine of Hollywood, the palm trees like a child’s drawing of what a tree should look like, the flowers like bright soft wounds, achingly beautiful… and, of course, the money. Even though he had gotten just a taste of that, the little bit that the powerful ones such as Herr David Wise doled out to their faithful underlings, it had still translated to that pretty cottage in the hills, and a car with a driver from the studio, and restaurant meals where the bill never came, just more strangely weak American coffee, poured by a smiling waiter from a silver pot.

He sighed, feeling an ache of longing in his heart. Beyond the walls of the screening room – and a cramped little space it was, a far cry from the airy, cushioned spaces he had gotten used to at the Wise Studios – were all the rest of the buildings of the UFA complex, and beyond that was the suburb of Neubabelsburg, and beyond that, the city of Berlin. Just as though he’d never left.

When he’d been in Hollywood, one of that band of happy exiles, those smart enough to bless their luck rather than curse it, all of this had seemed to be the dream, a bad one. The kind from which you woke with gratitude, bathed in sweat. It still amazed him that he had made this return journey voluntarily.

“So you should always remember, dear Marte -” A moment of silence had come on the film’s soundtrack, just long enough to tempt him into speaking aloud. “You should remember that I do love you, in my own way.”

She didn’t answer him back. On the screen, Marte Helle was dressed in a period ballgown that exposed a good deal of her rounded cleavage – he could appreciate that on a purely aesthetic basis, like spring flowers on a grassy hillside, a meaningless bounty of nature. A costume like that was, of course, the preference of the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda; the Reich’s other noted cinema aficionado, the Fuhrer himself, was stirred more by the sight of long bare legs, a taste that he’d cultivated with showings of dreadful musicals at the Reich Chancellery for himself and his ‘chauffeur gang,’ his lower-ranking aides and their secretaries. That had been before the start of the war, when there had still been time for trifles such as that. Since then, things had become a lot grimmer, a bad dream, for the Fuhrer and everyone else.

Perhaps that was another reason for this show of Marte Helle’s flesh. Her face, and that radiant field from her throat to the center of her breasts, like the sun finally emerging after a night wracked with storms, would be something to counter the sense of dismal foreboding that had settled upon the Reich’s citizens. The Rundfunk, the broadcasts of Goebbels’ speeches, had grown shriller and more impassioned, the newsreels in the theaters even more boastful of every military triumph, as the whispers of the Mundfunk, the radio that went from one person’s mouth to another’s ear, had grown more dismayed and anxious. Dreadful stories had begun to circulate, of the horrors of the Eastern Front, of German soldiers, some hardly more than boys, lying dead, their mouths and eye sockets filled with drifting snow. Smoke rolled over blackened skeletons in the hatches of broken Panzer tanks. Seaweed tangled in the hair of U-boat crews sleeping in each other’s arms, while their mothers wept and ate brown bread thickened with sawdust. A clubfooted death’s-head had asked, Wahlt ihr den totalen Krieg? And all, or enough, had answered that yes, of course they wanted total war, and it had been given to them. How silly it would be now, for them to complain that the splinters in the bread cut their mouths. Better to swallow one’s own blood and listen for the drone of the bombers coming from the west.

Proof of the old adage that you should be careful what you wished for, since you might get it after all. The National Socialists had painted a picture – or perhaps it was the screenplay that Reichsminister Goebbels had written for his leading man to star in – of a Germany encircled by vengeful enemies, a noose tightening around the Herrenvolk ’s neck. Now, that had come true. There was no denying that it made for an epic film, a true spectacle, with a cast of thousands – everything that one of von Behren’s own heroes, the great American director de Mille, might have wished for.

Of course, the ending of the this particular film might be less pleasant than in a de Mille production. It didn’t bode well for Germany that Goebbels had a taste for classical tragedy. His barely readable novel Michael, the product of his student days – the Reichsminister had bestowed a signed copy upon von Behren at a UFA reception – with the misunderstood, beleaguered hero dying a martyr’s death, gave some notion of what the final scenes might be.

Von Behren sighed, watching his protegee waltz with an actor dressed as a nineteenth century Prussian cavalryman. He could hardly remember directing the scene, or writing the stilted dialogue. In the midst of the great tragedy, the film that was not a film but was this world, the Propaganda Ministry dictated the making of such lightweight fluff as this. Costume dramas, the comforting dreams of a glorious past. Or modern trifles such as Die gro?e Liebe, all about the romances of Luftwaffe pilots on leave, torn between a woman and duty. Goebbels’ Ministry had cited that one as a film of particular artistic merit, though when von Behren had finally seen it, he had been bitchily fascinated by how much weight its star, the Swedish actress Zarah Leander, had put on while he had been away in America.

He pulled his attention back to the images on the screen. This raw footage would have to be edited into more of the same, a place to which the German audiences could escape for an hour or two, sitting together in the darkness, dreamers all, while the fires of Europe burned closer. Marte looked so sad as she waltzed with the cavalryman. But not sad, really; more as if she were dreaming, too, dancing in her sleep, her eyes half-closed, her body weightless in the arms of men.

Perhaps it wasn’t too much different from the films he would have been making with Marte if they had stayed in America; Herr Wise’s tastes were close enough to those of the Reichsminister. He could at least comfort himself with that notion.

“The question, Marte, is what comes next.” Von Behren spoke through the lilting Strauss music. As the war went more and more disastrously for Germany – as any fool could tell, despite all the Propaganda Ministry’s trumped-up news of victories and assurances of secret weapons being developed – what kind of films would he be allowed to make? He remembered talking with Herr Wise, the American screenwriter, in the parking lot of the Wise Studios, as the desert winds had drifted through the warm California night. About how the great tradition of the German cinema of the fantastic had died, or rather been put to death, in the new Reich. Perhaps that would change, now that so many could feel their dark collective fate pursuing them, like the relentless Rote Jager of the old stories. The punisher of those guilty of breaking the ancient laws of the hunt, those who had washed their hands in the blood of the innocent… perhaps there were others now who dreamed each night, as von Behren did, of the hooded figure dressed in tattered animal skins, striding through the forest, as close to one’s heels as one’s own shadow…

That image, the woodcut in his childhood book of Marchen, haunted him. The face hidden in darkness, and one hand reaching out for the fleeing huntsman, the other drawing a knife from the scabbard on the leather belt, its point sharpened for skinning prey…

Von Behren felt a familiar chill crawl up his spine. The memory of the woodcut, that piece of his childhood that had always stayed with him, had blotted out for a moment the swirling ballroom on the screen.

The room was suddenly bathed with light as the reel came to an end; he could hear the fluttering noise from the projectionist’s booth behind him. He knew there were more sets of rushes to be gone through, but he wouldn’t watch them now; they would be too much to bear. To see Marte, with her sad, dreaming face, caught in the motions of that other world, the one he had created for her…

He shook his head. Perhaps later, tomorrow or the day after. Right now, he only felt like going back to his flat, the same one he’d had before – before he’d fallen into that brief dream of sunshine and exile – and writing a few more pages of the script that he still hoped to be given permission to film. As dreams and nightmares becoming increasingly real, in both the night and the day, the time to suggest his pet project might be approaching. If the Reichsminister wished to see his mistress clothed in a brocaded medieval gown, imprisoned in a stone castle, then it would come to pass. The Teutonic heaviness, that dreaming deeper than all others, would appeal to Goebbels’ Wagnerian predilections.

Von Behren closed his eyes. He already had it worked out, inside his head, how he would light Marte, the first time that anyone would see her in the film. She would be at an arched window, gazing out across a forest that stretched to the horizon, a dark world where a hooded figure in animal skins waited for the transgressors of his laws. She would turn from the window, slowly, as though she and the audience in the theater were waking for the first time. Turn, and then her downcast eyes would raise, bringing her devastating beauty straight into the vision and hearts of all who saw her.

Another chill ran across his shoulders. He opened his eyes and saw nothing. The projectionist had switched off his machinery, leaving the screening room in darkness.

He sat for a while longer, in silence, waiting for the image he had conjured inside his head to fade.

The little boy lifted the ball up and, grinning, threw it at the camera lens. She leaned toward the flickering black-and-white image, as though she could bring her own hands up and catch the ball.

“You see?” A man’s voice came from somewhere beside her. “He is healthy and happy. Does he not look well fed? You should be proud of such a sturdy lad.”

Marte could barely hear what Joseph said. All her attention was drawn to her son. This bit of him that she was allowed to have.

“His hair is the same color as yours.” Joseph spoke as if the resemblance between mother and child pleased him. “And there – you can see it – just when he turns. His eyes. One brown, one blue.” His voice went softer. “So you know this is your son, don’t you?”

She didn’t need any proof like that. She could feel it inside herself, the drawing short of her breath, the trembling of her pulse. She wanted to cry out to the little boy, and reach through the screen and gather him to her breast.

“Every provision has been made for his care. Both he and his mother – I mean, the woman who looks after him – have been issued supplemental food authorizations. I had my staff make the arrangements; you can be sure that your little boy receives tidbits that a general’s wife would be hard-pressed to find here in Berlin.” Joseph leaned back in his chair, nodding sagely as he placed the tips of his fingers together. “And of course, as you can see, they are billeted far from any city or industrial center, so they are free of any danger from the Allied bombing raids. Where your son is, one could barely tell that we are at war.”

Marte knew that was true as well. There were still places like that. This little film, taken by one of the Reichsminister ’s technicians, without sound – she couldn’t hear her child’s voice or laughter – caught a piece of that other world. Her child had grown older – more than a year and a half, closer to two, had gone by since the consulate official had ensnared her, brought her back here with the only possible enticement. The film showed a little boy growing up, time racing by him as he ran after a bird hopping across the ground.

There had been other photos, images of her child, that had been doled out to her since her return. She had begged for something more, and Joseph had finally relented, and this was what she had been given. Not the child himself, a living form that she could wrap her arms around and hold so tightly that he could never be taken away again, her tears darkening the child’s fine white-blonde hair. But this, a film, a thing of light and shadows. Several minutes of it had gone by already, the projector rattling behind them – Joseph had threaded the machine himself, taking the film from a small metal canister sealed with his security chief’s initials. She wondered how much more of it there was, how much longer it would be before the tail-end passed through and blank light filled the screen.

“I want to see him.” Her own voice, her wish, broke the film’s silence.

“But you are seeing him, Marte.” Beside her, Joseph reached over and squeezed her hand tight in his. “You’re seeing him right now. Look -” He gestured with his other hand, catching a corner of the projector’s beam, throwing a shadow across the bright world. “There he is. Your son. You know he is healthy and happy… and safe. What more do you want?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.

“I want to see him.” She turned her wet-streaked face away from the child’s image on the screen; she couldn’t bear to watch any more of his laughing and playing. “I want to hold him. I want him to be with me.”

“That’s impossible.” Joseph’s voice became stern. They had talked of these things before, many times since she had returned to Berlin and found no child waiting for her. “It cannot be done. I have forbidden it.” His voice softened to pleading. “Don’t you see, Marte? I have made you the queen of the German cinema; every eye gazes upon you. You are one of the most famous women in all the Reich. Do you really think you could have this child with you, a child of… such a background…”

She knew what he meant when he said that. Something that he could never speak aloud: a child, whose very eyes gave away the secret of his Mischling genetics, the scandalous cross between Aryan purity and her alien blood.

“You wouldn’t be able to hide it – we wouldn’t be able to. The scandals would blow up once more. The Fuhrer ’s attention is consumed by the war now, but he wouldn’t be able to ignore what would be told to him by my enemies – and I have many of those, greedy and unscrupulous power-seekers, right up to the top levels of the Reich. Goering and Bormann and all the rest… they would love to see me fall, to no longer have the ear of the Fuhrer, so they could tell their lies to him without hindrance from me. Everyone knows that I brought you back here because I love you, that I can’t exist without you.” Joseph’s voice became even more fervent. “For now, as long as we are discreet, that can be tolerated, they’ll let us have our little bit of happiness. But if the wolves at my heels were to find out your child exists, then they would discover all the rest. The Rassenschande , the crime of racial pollution… and then the wolves would be upon me, they would be at my throat. I would be torn to bits by them.”

She turned from the screen and gazed at him. “You say you love me… that I mean more to you than anything else… and you wouldn’t do that for me?”

“But you don’t understand, Martchen -” Joseph took her by the shoulders, drawing her closer to his face and words. “I am doing it for you. Everything! I must protect you from these people. Himmler… if he were to find out the arrangements, the deals I have made behind his back, with his underlings in the SS… the bribes and favors I continue to bestow in order to keep your child a secret… if he knew, there would be no place you could hide with your little boy. He would find you and destroy you both.” Joseph shook his head, voice turning bitter. “These politics of race, they are just something I have used to achieve power, to make the Fuhrer strong; the people need an enemy, if they are to flock to someone who can protect them. The Jews and the gypsies, and your own people – they are just scapegoats, so that the whip can be placed in the Fuhrer ’s hand for their scourging. You understand, don’t you?” His gaze drew inward for a moment. “My sins may be greater than Himmler’s – at least he believes the things he says. His skin crawls when he speaks of Jews and other creatures. But I… I am just an actor, a traveling player such as yourself; no less so, even if I have written the words I’ve placed in my own mouth and in the mouths of others.” His words had grown softer, his eyes turning away. Suddenly, his gaze snapped back to her; his voice shook with emotion. “You understand, don’t you? – you have to understand. I’m protecting both you and your son. Perhaps later… when the war has been won, and the Fuhrer no longer needs me… then we can be together, all of us. We can go away, you and your little boy… far from here. To the embassy in Tokyo; I asked him before, to make me the ambassador. He’ll do that for me, I know he will… when the war is over…”

She understood. The things that Joseph said, and the things he didn’t; the things inside his heart. A heart that was no different from David Wise’s, or any other man’s. For all his impassioned speech, just like lines from a film – an actor, yes, but a bad one, a scenery-chewer as Herr Wise and the others would have called him in Hollywood; she’d almost expected Joseph to place both his hands over his heart, to swear his undying love – for all the lofty words, she could still hear the silent voice behind them. The one that spoke the truth: that he could never share her with anyone else, not even her own child.

Marte closed her eyes, letting herself fall away from him, into that empty space inside her own heart, where no one else would ever come now. She wondered what Joseph saw on the screen – not this one, with the little boy laughing and running – the screen with her face magnified upon it. Or rather, not what he saw, but who did the seeing. Perhaps there was no one in the theater with him, no human presence, nothing at all. But only him, alone in that dark empty world, where her face was the only light, the moon that he fell toward, as those in dreaming fall from the earth and into the hollow night sky.

“You’ll see, Marte. Everything will be fine…”

The room was completely silent and dark now, the last of the film having run through the projector; Joseph had switched off the machine. Now she felt his arm wrapping around her shoulder, drawing her to him, as the fingertips of his other hand drew gently down the curve of her neck.

His whisper, a breath at her ear. “You saw your little boy. I didn’t lie to you.” His hand moved lower, under the neckline of her dress. “That was real… you know it was. I gave him to you…” He brought his head down to kiss her throat.

She let him go on. Joseph’s words echoed inside her head. That was real… She knew he meant the little film, the images of the child laughing and running and throwing a ball. That was as real for him as if the child had been here in the room, and she could have knelt down and gathered him into her arms.

And when he saw her on the screen, the larger one, with all the faces in the theater audience turned toward it… then that was real as well. Or perhaps that was the only time she was real to him. The woman in his arms, with the face of the luminous being on the screen – the woman whose dress had been unfastened at the back by his careful hand, to expose her skin made even whiter by the black lace of the Parisian finery he’d given her; the woman whose bare shoulder he kissed, murmuring her name – that woman was the creature made of shadows, the ghost, the insubstantial thing. The woman on the screen, that other Marte, would exist long after this one had slipped from his arms and dissipated like smoke in the still air.

She dreamed that sometimes, or let it dream her, an image that came unbidden whenever she kept her eyes closed, while the embrace of Joseph or David or any other man tightened around her. She didn’t know where it came from, but it comforted her. To see a thing of translucent silk with her face, rising above the sweating arched back of the man and the pale form he crushed beneath himself… to see it rise and drift, to slowly become less and then nothing, gone…

Now, in this room, Joseph had laid her down against the sofa’s cushions, his hand brushing the bare skin above her stockings. Another part of her, the smallest, coldest part that stayed locked inside her head, in a little room that no one else could enter, watched her and this man in the slow measure of their coupling. Watched and calculated, and kept its silence. That part knew this was something it endured, or less than that, what he did with her was something that didn’t matter at all. It was how she kept Joseph bringing her photos of her child, news of him, and this time, the gift of the film. Something real, or close to it.

Marte turned her head away from the sofa cushion and kissed him, feeling how avidly he set himself to consume her. His jacket and the shirt beneath dropped onto the rumpled fall of her dress upon the floor.

Later – she didn’t know when; she had retreated into that small, hidden part of herself – she opened her eyes when she heard a distant keening sound, a high-pitched shiver in the air. It took her a moment to realize that it was an air-raid siren, that urgent cry that had become so familiar in the last few months, bringing Berlin from its sleeping dreams to a waking one.

Past the screen on which she had seen her child, and past the drawn curtains of the tall windows of the Joseph’s Ministry office, she saw the beams of the searchlights sweep across the sky. The bass drone of the bombers mounted beneath the wail of the sirens. With the first impacts, that rattled the glass in its frames and sifted a fine plaster dust from the ceiling, Joseph raised his head. His hands still gripped her bare arms as he gazed out toward the city’s luminous night. Above the clouds, the distant, ghostly forms of the bombers passed in and out of darkness.

She watched, looking up at Joseph’s face, as his feverish gaze followed another perfect drama.

He lay on the narrow bunk, his eyes closed, dreaming. Though not yet asleep; awake enough to know that his dream was part memory. Of a time when he had sat in a darkened theater, surrounded by others, all of them gazing up at the screen before them, at the faces that were so much more real than they themselves were.

One of those faces, the most beautiful one of all, was tucked inside the curl of his arm, his hand clutching tight the wrinkled photograph. Pavli held on to the little piece of brightness, the image of her face, the angel of the shop window. He would have to hide it again before the dawn, before anybody in the dormitory of the Lazarene men could see him with it, even his own brother. None of them would understand. They had shut him out, made him an outcast from their faith… it didn’t matter why they had done that, to protect him or not. It didn’t matter because he had a faith of his own to comfort him.

He would hide the photograph of Marte Helle, perhaps back in the lining of his boot, or some other place he would find, that would be as safe. But for now, he wanted it here, close to him, so he could see her face in the faint moonlight that came through the barred window high above his head.

All over the world, in this world and the next, people dreamt and remembered. Even here, among these who were still his brethren somehow, still his blood. In the night’s darkness, in their dreaming, they were all denizens of that other land, moving among the shadows and ghosts that called their names, that bent forward from the bright heavens and bestowed a kiss upon their upraised lips.

And farther… beyond the breathing and murmurs of the Lazarenes… in Berlin and across the fields of night and of the coming day. There were others – he could sense their dreaming as well.

Some dreamt of her. The angel. Awake or in sleep… in the small theaters bound by their skulls, or on the great luminous screens rising before them… they dreamt of her.

As he did.

Pavli squeezed his eyes shut tighter and whispered her name. So softly, that no one would hear.

No one but the angel…