The Kingdom of Shadows

NINETEEN

“Where is she?”

The assistant director looked over his shoulder at von Behren. “I don’t know.” He had his right arm in a sling, a casualty of last night’s bombing raid on the city. With an awkwardly balanced clipboard and the messy pile of the shooting script, he was trying to inventory the damage to the studio, which sets had been damaged and which were still intact enough to be filmed around. “No one’s seen her since we left the shelter.”

Von Behren spine bent beneath the tonnage of his worries. His nerves were still on edge from the hours of darkness, crouched like a rabbit in a hole while the earth shuddered with concussive blows. Concrete dust had sifted down from the cracks spreading through the shelter’s arched ceiling. The smell of human sweat in a closed space, a sputtering paraffin lamp that had been lit when the bare overhead bulbs had dimmed and finally gone out, a woman – not one of his actresses, thank God – who had gone hysterical in the brief interval of darkness, her half-drunken husband ineffectually soothing her, screams turning at last to a muffled sobbing… and all the while, listening to a giant walking the empty streets above them, each bomb impact a footstep that leveled a building. The giant had stridden off to the east, the night bombers completing their pass and wheeling over empty countryside, away from the flak guns, to head back to their home bases. One of the worst raids so far – von Behren, his crew and actors, had emerged from their hole in the ground, half-expecting to see nothing but rubble in all directions.

He was grateful that the studio with his sets had taken only an indirect hit. The banks of skylights had all been shattered, a layer of broken glass sparkling across the floors and props. The carpenters had worked all morning covering the empty frames overhead with thin canvas; it gave the interior of the studio a muted yellowish light that reminded him of the age-browned pages of the book of old folk tales sitting on his desk. Perhaps it would show up well on film, softening the edges of the captured images; he had asked one of the cameramen to set up for a test reel. The most important thing would be how Marte would look. Only when he had sent instructions for her to be made up and laced into the period medieval costume had he found out that she was missing. Again.

“Send someone out to find her.” Von Behren looked across the sound stages and the hum of activity they held, push brooms sweeping up the last of the debris, the set painters mending a backdrop that had fallen and snagged on a brace of floodlights. “I suspect we’ll have a few hours of quiet before the Americans come overhead.” That was the schedule by which everyone in Berlin lived now: the British bombers concealed in darkness, the Americans flying brazenly by daylight. As winter began slowly unlocking into a damp spring, the pounding of the city had become such a regular occurrence that any respite, a day when the sirens didn’t herald the planes’ approach, seemed more agonizing than an actual raid, nerves tightening in anticipation. “Perhaps we can get something on film before we all have to scurry away into that wretched burrow.”

“Of course.” The assistant director raised an eyebrow. “And where should we have someone look for Fraulein Helle?”

The other’s smile annoyed von Behren. “Please. The usual places – all right?” On top of his other burdens, he didn’t need all these arch, knowing comments. “If you’re not aware of them by now, I’m sure we can find someone on the crew who is.” Any of them, as a matter of fact; Marte’s renewed affair with the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was the main topic of the whispered gossip on the set.

That affair, the secret and public love between Reichminister Goebbels and the actress he had made the queen of the German cinema – just as he had promised – was both a curse and a blessing to von Behren. How could a mere film director interfere with the Reichsminister ’s demands upon his leading lady’s time and body? It made the shooting schedule difficult, trying to squeeze moments between the air raids and Goebbels’ lusts – it was no wonder the frustrated crew was given to remarks.

At the same time, they all wouldn’t be here, in the first stages of filming Der Rote Jager, if it weren’t for that affair. The little favor that Marte owed to von Behren, or that he had managed to convince her that she owed, or that she had been willing to pretend that she believed she did, had come in at last. It had taken this long, the four years and more since they had returned here to Berlin, he to his old office at UFA’s Babelsberg complex, she to Goebbels’ feverish embrace -

(And where was the little boy, for whose sake Marte had come back? That lying bastard, von Behren thought whenever he saw a newspaper picture of Goebbels or heard his ranting voice on the radio. But he also noted the still sadness grown even more visible in Marte’s face, that made her even lovelier and more devastating to all men’s hearts.)

– and the dreaming of those who saw her on the screens of the darkened theaters. They bought their tickets and vanished for a few hours into that darkness, into that light, once more into the stillness of Marte Helle’s gaze. She had returned to them, and that was all that mattered; the words that von Behren wrote for her to say were unimportant. The Reichsminister, in his role as de facto head of the German film industry, had more than personal reasons to give her anything for which she might ask. She had given him von Behren’s script for Der Rote Jager, with her part carefully noted in the margins. Goebbels’ antipathy for the fantastic, that deep Teutonic world of witches and demons, Faust and Der Golem and old Murnau’s Nosferatu, had finally been overcome; he had commissioned Munchhausen to commemorate UFA’s twenty-fifth anniversary, a special effects showpiece using Agfa’s newly developed color film, all intended to outshine the Englishman Korda’s Thief of Bagdad and even Gone with the Wind, that the American Jew Selznick had produced so brilliantly. The premiere at the UFA-Palast am Zoo, just before that theater had been lost to the bombs, had been enough of a success to justify more things along those lines. Perhaps Goebbels had decided that if those were the films that the German people wanted to see now, that’s what they should be given. The more time they spent in the dark shelters of the theaters, the less they would see of their own city streets, battered by the fleets of planes overhead, that Goering’s Luftwaffe was powerless to stop.

Or perhaps there was no calculation at all on Goebbels’ part; von Behren wondered if the Reichsminister had lost the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Perhaps it had all become the same to him – the great cynic, the manipulator of men who could have just as easily pulled the puppet strings for the Communists or been a film director himself. Whole divisions of the German army, or what was left of it, had been taken away from fighting real battles and then been costumed like Prussian regiments of the Napoleonic Wars, charging up and down hills for the big scenes of that pandering hack Veit Harlan’s Kolberg epic. Goebbels and the rest of the Nazi bigwigs obviously preferred the heroic past to this present that was falling in rubble around their ears. Of course, that golden past was as much a fantasy as any specter concocted in a film story. Once the door into those other worlds had been opened inside Goebbels’ head, then it had been easy enough for Marte, at von Behren’s off-screen urging – she still did what he asked her to; she was still grateful to him, though he was no longer sure why – to whisper to her lover, across the pillow of whatever bed she and Goebbels shared. About the script von Behren had written for her, the medieval fantasy concerning the red huntsman, the punisher of those who violated the ancient laws that bound men and their prey together. She had even given him a set of photographs from the costume test that von Behren had arranged, showing her in the long period gown, with its belt knotted intricately at her waist, her white-gold hair braided in the fashion of the maidens in the old woodcuts. Von Behren suspected that it was those photos alone that had secured Goebbels’ approval for the project; the Reichsminister wanted to see that vision of beauty come to life on the screen. Not enough to hold her naked in his arms, the woman all men desired; every fantasy had to be made real.

That was the insanity of the National Socialists, their Frevel, and now Goebbels had succumbed to it with the others. Very well; in that sense, the head of the German film industry was no different from Herr David Wise or any other man of power and money whose approval von Behren had to obtain before making a film. The Reich’s film office, upon the instructions of its head, had bestowed a nice fat production budget upon von Behren – this close to the Apocalypse that everyone could sense was coming, what did mere money signify? – with the only condition that the principal shooting was to be done here in Berlin. Of course, the only reason for that was to keep her here, close by Goebbels – it was so obvious that any other explanation wasn’t even bothered with, nothing about her wanting to remain and boost morale among her fellow Berliners or some similar nonsense.

Von Behren had had no objection; there was more than enough money in the budget to have the sets built on the UFA sound stages, elaborate reproductions of a medieval castle’s parapets and banquet halls, massive stones that were really nothing more than wood and canvas daubed with clay. And it kept him and his crew here in Berlin, where there was still a semblance of order and the familiar, despite the bombing raids; the electricity cut out for only a few hours each day, and the food rations were small but still obtainable. God knew what the conditions had become out there in the Reich’s shrinking empire; terrible stories of starvation and grislier deaths were carried into the city by the refugees streaming in from the east. A good number of Berliner Hausfrauen had taken to carrying knives in their handbags, not to defend themselves with, but to slash their own throats before the inevitable rape at the hands of the Russian soldiers. All Goebbels’ propaganda had successfully terrorized the women about what their fate would be; the men merely expected to be killed, and perhaps dismembered and eaten. Von Behren knew that wasn’t likely, but as a practical matter, there wasn’t a real castle where the shooting could have been done that hadn’t already been overrun and turned into a command headquarters by the Allied armies.

“So what shall we do now?” The assistant director, with the script cradled in his plaster armcast, was still standing next to von Behren; one of the assistant’s assistants had gone to snoop after the missing Marte Helle. “While we wait?”

Von Behren sighed as he looked around the studio interior. Most of the cleaning up had been finished, just in the last few minutes. That same sense of urgency – of time running out, life and work that had to be squeezed in between bombing raids – motivated everyone here. It seemed strange, but not really when he thought about it, how much more he himself had accomplished, scripts on paper and films in the can, since he had come back with Marte to Berlin and the war. When he had been in Hollywood, that sunny paradise, it had been easy to believe that time was infinite, stretching out in all directions like the golden light that buttered the hills. Even with no money in the bank and dependent upon the continued indulgence of Herr David Wise, he had taken whole days and weeks off to sit in the backyard of his little bungalow and re-read his childhood book of Marchen. When the thick, warm air had sent him drowsing, the old stories had come into his dreams; the red hunter had stalked him through a sun-dappled forest, not to catch and punish him, but to gather him up, a child again, and lift him to the face concealed inside the hood of stitched animal furs, a kiss in that small darkness…

“Sir?” The assistant’s polite, patient voice broke into von Behren’s drifting thoughts, the memory of a dream that had always ended before the last of its secrets had been revealed. “What is it you would like us to do now?”

He wasn’t blinking into the soft Californian sunshine, just thrown out of his own dreaming; he was in Berlin, always in Berlin, in what everyone knew was the last and hardest winter of the war. A wind sharpened with ice cut through the canvas nailed over the broken skylights.

“Yes…” He nodded slowly, rousing himself. “I’d like to… I’d like to do some exterior shots.” He knew there would be time enough for that, at least; it would be hours yet before Marte returned and any filming could be done with her. “Out in the streets. There were things I saw this morning… they might be something we can use.” A sector of residential blocks near the studio had been transformed by the bombs and fire, from Berlin of 1945 to a blackened, timeless vista, the bones of the city stripped of their modern flesh. He would have to see how they looked on film; the ruins might serve better than any construction from the carpenters and painters, for the final sequences of Der Rote Jager, when the spectral figure’s wrath had laid waste the village and countryside of the sinning lords of the castle. Further proof, if any were needed, that Goebbels had not even read the script that Marte had taken to him; he had merely given his approval as a present to her. If poor Frank Wysbar could get into trouble for the black horsemen in his Fahrmann Maria, those bringers of death too close to the real SS to be allowed, then surely the Reichsminister would have suspected a metaphor in the Rote Jager script, a defeatist prediction of the Reich’s encircling fate.

Or perhaps Goebbels had indeed read it. Von Behren wondered if the dramatist inside Goebbels’ soul had embraced the apocalypse as the fitting conclusion to this great film he had written, the one that had taken all the world for its sets.

It little mattered now. His old friend Wysbar had made his escape to America, where he at least had had the good sense to hunker down and stay. The last von Behren had heard, Wysbar had been having a hard time finding work; there were too many German refugees under the palm trees for all of them to be hired. And here I am, he mused, and I can make all the films I want. For a while, at least; while there’s still time. So who’s the fool now? Von Behren pulled his coat tighter around himself as he watched the studio doors being rolled back, the cameras being readied for the grey, wintry light outside.

He had made love to her in so many different rooms. And outside as well, on the grounds of his Schwanenwerder estate, soft grass still warm from the passage of the summer day, the lights of a reception inside the grand house visible through the overhanging branches of the night-shaded trees. Everywhere it had happened, where she without will had let it happen, on velvet couches or beds that he had once shared and would share again with his wife – they were all the same place, the tiniest room, the darkness behind her eyelids. She closed her eyes and went in there, leaving him in the world outside that held her body.

“It is sad, isn’t it?” Joseph’s voice came to her, close beside where she stood on a carpet littered with rubble. “I can barely stand to look at it myself. They’ve done such damage here…”

Marte opened her eyes and looked across the high-ceilinged room. The intricate cornices and plasterwork above had come crashing down, into dust and white crumbling fragments, revealing the skeletal girders and ragged patches of sky beyond. Snow had fallen through, melting and then freezing into grey mirrors on the floor. Through the frames of the shattered windows that had filled one wall, scraping mechanical noises and faint voices could be heard, the clean-up squadrons filling in the bomb craters on the Wilhelmstra?e below. The corpses had been dug out from the hills of fallen brick and taken away, in the first hours of quiet after the planes had departed, while the fires in the other parts of the city were still being extinguished.

A gloved hand ran across one of the empty shelves; Joseph looked at the dust on his fingertips. He had on his trench coat, belted over his severe National Socialist uniform. “You see?” He turned back toward Marte. “This is why we had to move the ministry’s staff down to the basements. Impossible to do any work here, under these conditions; my own home is now an annex for at the ministry’s senior officials. But this arrangement will not last forever.” His gaze swept across the room, taking in the now-ragged wallpaper, the blank spot where the portrait of the Fuhrer had hung, the empty space where his own ornate desk had stood. She could see him transforming it all in his mind, one set being struck and a new and grander one being erected in its place. “When the war has been concluded, and we can turn our attention once more to the rebuilding of our nation… this will all be different. And better.” Joseph nodded in satisfaction at what he alone could see. The future. A gesture of his hand took in the entire room. “There are great plans… the ministry, this building itself will be gone, replaced by one of such splendor…” He smiled at her. “Those whom you knew in America, those Hollywood Juden such as David Wise… nothing of theirs will compare to what we will achieve here. Soon…”

Strange, to hear David’s name come from Joseph’s mouth. She knew there was still some jealousy there, even though he had been the victor. One thing to share her in the dreams of men who saw her on the screen, another to think of a Jewish film mogul – a real one, a prince of Hollywood, the exact creature Joseph had modeled himself after – running his manicured hands over her skin, drinking in her kiss. Joseph had all that now, but he could still speak his rival’s name with venom.

She thought about him, the other, for a moment. David… she had seen him last in a newsreel, one of the many that Joseph’s propaganda writers and filmmakers churned out for the German theaters. A piece about how the American film industry was controlled by Jews, all part of that great international conspiracy. The wicked lies they used to deceive the American public – or at least that fair-haired, blue-eyed Aryan part of it – so they could go on raking in their bloodstained profits while sending innocent, handsome youths to their senseless deaths in Europe. The narrator had been some anonymous UFA hack, but Marte had heard Joseph’s voice, speaking his strident, battering words. He must have had a hand in it, or even written it personally; her own image had shown up on the screen, old footage of her disembarking at the Templehof airfields, a virtuous German heroine who had fled in disgust from Hollywood and the rich, hook-nosed lechers who ran it. Her face had looked tired as she had come down the steps from the JU-52’s door, from the long flight out of Lisbon, but the voice – Joseph’s voice – had hinted darkly of some lingering sadness at what the judischen Zuhalters had forced her to do while she had been in their thrall. No doubt the blood of the German males who watched the newsreel had quickened at the thought, and they could even feel virtuous while their groins tingled; such was Joseph’s mastery with words. The newsreel had ended with a still photo, taken from an American newspaper, of those rich Jewish film moguls, all in dinner jackets and with thick cigars in their hands, smiling and laughing among themselves at some USO fundraiser. David had been the youngest man in the photo, but even so, she had barely been able to recognize him. He had put on weight, and the dark, curly hair she remembered had thinned and greyed, just in these last few years of the war – as if he were turning into one of the men on either side of him, men old enough to be his father. His eyes hadn’t been laughing; even in the grainy newsprint blown up on the screen, Marte had been able to see the simmering anger under his brow. They seemed hard, mean-spirited eyes now, a rich man’s eyes, as though he had become exactly that which Joseph’s propaganda spoke of, a grasping figure of money and power.

“Yes,” said Marte slowly; she felt Joseph watching her, waiting for her to speak. “I’m sure it will be… magnificent…” She drew the fur wrap closer around her shoulders, against the chill lancing in through the broken windows.

Joseph went on talking; she watched him now as he stood overlooking the street, his raised hand and words sketching in the wonders that would be built in the new Berlin. He had changed as well, but not the way David had; Joseph’s face looked as if the flesh beneath the skin had been cut away with an invisible knife, the edges of bone growing sharper, ready to break through. She had been sitting a few days ago with some of the actors and stagehands at the studio, drinking ersatz coffee and waiting for von Behren to finish blocking out a sequence of camera movements, when Joseph’s voice had replaced the music coming from the radio. “That ranting skull,” a younger actress had sneered, glancing from the corner of her eye at Marte, as though defying the other woman to say anything. But Marte had said nothing; it was true, Joseph did look like a death’s-head. The shrill fury of his voice, when he spoke over the radio or at a mass rally, had burned away all the soft tissue, like a rendering fire. When he kissed her now, his fingertips stroking her cheek and neck, she would close her eyes and be unable to keep from seeing an old woodcut, Durer’s Tod und das Madchen, a skeleton embracing the flesh of its love.

“You’re so quiet.” Joseph stood before her, hands touching her hair on either side, his face lowered to try and look into her eyes. “I’m sorry I brought you here… I didn’t realize it would upset you so.”

“It’s all right… I don’t mind…” She wasn’t upset; it was merely an empty room, filled with broken rubble. There were spaces like this all over Berlin. The streets themselves were graveyards and ruins. “If this is what you want…” The building itself was silent, though she knew there a few of Joseph’s trusted men nearby, standing guard to ensure that no one intruded upon them. “To be here…”

He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, pulling her close to himself. “But of course, this place has such memories for us – does it not?”

His voice had become an actor’s now, a leading man mouthing bad dialogue. What Herr Wise and the others she had worked with in America would have laughed at and called pure corn, even when they had written it themselves. But she knew things like that, old movies, were there inside his head, a sentimental streak that revealed itself when he lapsed into being human for a moment.

“Of course, Joseph…” She closed her eyes at the nearness of him. “Whatever you say…”

“We’ve had many hours together here. That’s why it grieves my heart to see it this way.”

That was true; there had been many times when she had come back with him to this office, late at night when there had been no one about to see them. After one of his speeches or a broadcast or some other moment of triumph, his voice hammering the souls of German men and women into the shapes he wished them to take; she would wait for him in his chauffeured car outside the Sportspalast or the Rundfunk Haus, wait for him until he was finished and ready for her alone, the blood surging in his thin body. While his wife Magda and their brood of blond children slept at home, a bottle and a tray of cold delicacies would have been set out here for him and his personal guest, his aides withdrawing discreetly behind the ministry’s tall doors.

He led her to the couch at the side of the room. It had already been cleared of the debris that had fallen from the ceiling and walls, but the embroidered cushions were still coated with plaster dust. Even as she let herself be drawn down beside him, his hand pushing the wrap away from her neck, part of her was making a mental note, to remember to brush off the back of her dress, to make it easier for Joseph’s driver and anyone else to pretend not to know what had taken place.

“You’re so lovely,” he murmured at her ear. “That hasn’t changed… that never changes…”

She knew that was true; she could see it in the mirror of his gaze. It must be true; she wouldn’t exist otherwise. If her beauty had died, she would only have been the ghost of that woman she had seen in Joseph’s and David’s eyes, and up on the radiant screen in the darkened theaters.

He pressed her down against the cushions, his other hand having drawn up the hem of her dress, his palm and trembling fingers curved against the bare skin above the top of her stocking.

“Always…”

She didn’t know what he meant when he said that. Inside herself, in a little room behind her closed eyelids, she waited until it would be all over. Over for that other woman, the one with Marte Helle’s face.

Afterward, Joseph drew his trench coat, that he had unbelted and discarded on the floor, over them like a blanket. He held her close, the disarray of her dress and his uniform crushed between them. The winter chill in the ruined office had made it impossible for him to have her naked, as was his usual preference.

In that, he was like David, or perhaps like all men – she didn’t know. And in another way, the darkening of his mood when it was over, as though some bright and still-living part of him had died.

“How many more times,” murmured Joseph. “For us… to be like this.” He smiled sadly as he brushed a lock of her hair away from where it had fallen across her eyes. “Perhaps… perhaps this is the last time.”

He had said that before – his taste for the dramatic, the gestures and words of tragedies – but now Marte wondered if it might have become true. There was so little time left; everyone knew that. For the war, for everyone here in Berlin.

There was a question she had to ask him, the same one as before, the one she always asked afterward. She let that happen, she waited in the little room inside herself until it was all over, and she could have what she wanted. An answer.

“Where is my son?” She laid the side of her head against his chest, a pillow of stone. Careful to avoid letting him look into her eyes, to see anything there. Her voice as well; she had learned so much about being an actress from von Behren, about hiding things rather than showing them. “My baby…”

She had received different answers to that question before, some more satisfying than others. Sometimes Joseph had had photographs, rushed-looking blurry ones or those that had been carefully posed, all of them showing the same little boy, her child. There had even been one, a studio shot, with him in miniature Alpine lederhosen, white stockings drawn to below his knees, his face bright and laughing at whatever funny business the photographer had used to catch his attention; Joseph had had it enlarged and mounted in a frame bright with gold leaf, and had urged her to take it as a gift. But she wouldn’t; she had known it would have broken her heart every time she had taken it out of some secret place and looked at it.

Joseph stroked her hair. “I’m sure the child is all right -”

His soft words made her stiffen in his arms. She pushed herself away so she could look into his face. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing; nothing at all, my love.” His voice became even more soothing. “There’s nothing to worry about -”

“Something’s happened to him.” It would have been so easy for Joseph to lie to her, to lie completely, to have spoken the same words he had used so many times before. But there was a reason for every word from his mouth; he must have wanted her to catch the thread of doubt in these. “Where is he?” The winter air from the empty window-frames chilled her skin as she raised herself against the back of the sofa. “Where’s my son?”

Joseph shook his head. “You must remember, Marte, that we are in wartime. The Reich is pressed from all sides by its enemies. The Bolshevik hordes march in from the east…” His voice had risen, as though he had been addressing a rally or the microphone of one of his radio broadcasts. “You must understand; until we have turned the tide, until that victory is ours – and it will be – and we can sweep the interlopers from our soil… until then, there is confusion and disorder. You know how the refugees have come streaming into this city… my city; you’ve seen them. Where did you think they came from?” Shrill now, even a little angry, as though he were chiding her for her foolishness. “They are the lucky ones, those who managed to get away with their few scraps of belongings, their suitcases and their handcarts, all that they could manage to carry away with them – and sometimes not even that, nothing more than their empty hands and bellies. They ran from the animals in their tanks and heavy boots, Asiatic beasts…” Joseph’s lip curled in disgust. “And some were not so fortunate; some waited too long to gather their things and flee. The women make their way here with the blood still running down their legs, their white breasts clawed by black fingernails, their eyes still vacant from the sight of their husbands and brothers killed for attempting to protect them, and what happened to them after their murderers stepped over those corpses.” He nodded, his own eyes grim-set. “So be it; I will take them in and care for them, and soon there will be revenge for such violations. But in the meantime…”

She had heard those stories before, the sexual appetites of the Russian soldiers. That was what women spoke of, in the shelters during the air raids, as if to make welcome a direct hit from a bomb, one that end their lives in quick fury, before the rape-mad armies could enter the city. She had paid little attention; none of it mattered to her. It was all like the recounting of another person’s dream, news from a world barely connected to this one. But now…

“That’s where he is, then.” Her voice sounded hollow, lifeless, even inside herself. “That’s what has happened to my baby. Left behind, forgotten…” Abandoned. Snow drifted across the glass teeth set in the jaws of the window-frames. All this world was in winter, from which it could never awaken.

“No, no; you’re wrong.” Joseph held her by the shoulders, a doll limp in his hands. “She’ll bring him here. The one to whom he was given – she’s strong. Stronger… stronger than you.” He said the last in a whisper. “You’ll see. She’ll take care of your child. She’s devoted to him, she always has been, from the beginning; she loves him as though he were her own child. Your little boy’s safe with her, wherever she is. Tomorrow, or the next day – soon – she’ll be here with him. There are still divisions of the German army in those regions to the east; their duty is to protect the civilian population and see that they reach sanctuary as quickly as possible. They’ll arrive here in Berlin safe and sound, and -” His voice rose, trying to instill his own excitement into her. “You’ll be able to see him! Not just a photograph, but a child you can hold in your arms! She’ll give him back to you… her task will have been completed…”

You liar. She hated him now, knew that she had always hated him. For lying to her, for telling her the truth, for any word that came from his thin-lipped serpent’s mouth. He had wanted her to know that her child was lost, that the war had broken over him like an ocean wave, the tide that now was flooding this little island’s shores; a wave red as blood, that had dragged her child out into the depths to drown. Perhaps it had happened already, weeks or months ago – why would Joseph tell her now? To crack open whatever was left of her heart, to kill her…

To say goodbye to her.

To say goodbye to everything; he knew, he had read the last pages of the filmscript, the one he himself had written, the one for which he had cast the Fuhrer as the leading man. Though that was a star that had flickered and gone out, run to ground in a concrete hole beneath the Chancellery’s rubble-strewn garden, a sick and aging little man pushing imaginary armies across tattered maps; Joseph had told her what had become of him. Now, in the midst of the burnt or crumbling stage-scenery of Berlin, Joseph was himself the star; he was the only one of the Nazi hierarchy to show his face in the battered streets of the city, going from one bomb site to another, the center of the crowds pressing close to him, the ones who had always adored him and the grumblers who now had to confess they admired his strange and persistent courage… or craziness, whatever one wanted to call it. The smoldering ruins suited him; they were sufficiently dramatic. Most of the other bigwigs had fled, looking for safety in the west; when the end came, they would rather fall into the hands of the Americans than the Russians. Only a few had gone underground with the Fuhrer. Joseph’s cast had failed him, abandoned their roles, even the one for whom he written the grandest, most heroic part. To save the production, as Marte had heard von Behren and the others mirthlessly joking at the studio, Joseph now had to play everything himself. He was enough of an egotist to do that. The final scenes could now be shot, with no camera but the human eye, here in the streets of Berlin.

This great film, the warping of reality to the vision unreeling inside Joseph’s head – she knew that was all that mattered to him now. And perhaps now there was no role in it for the Reichsminister ’s romantic infatuation. She would have to be eliminated, this illicit affair clashing with the hero’s public image he attempted to project.

There was only one way Joseph could do that. In this he was weak, that he couldn’t say goodbye to her, he couldn’t turn her away. He had stretched his hands halfway around the world, to gather her back to himself; there would be no way he could give her up with a few curt words. But other words could do it for him. The truth, when he could so easily have lied to her again, told her that her child was safe, here is another photograph of him, doesn’t he look happy? Joseph was a master of words; he had meant to let it slip out – I’m sure the child is all right – those words just enough to tell her, to tell her everything. And to let her hate him, to let that hate free at last. A hate that freed her from him.

Without her child, that small life, in his grasp, he no longer had any hold over her. With just those few words, he had told her as much.

He didn’t try to stop her as she pushed herself out of his arms. With his trench coat draped across his bare chest, he silently watched as she stood up to put her dress and undergarments back in order, then sat down on the edge of the dusty sofa to slip on her shoes.

“Marte… I’m sorry…”

She was at the door, her hand on the brass knob turned cold as ice by the winter that had invaded the empty building. She looked over her fur-wrapped shoulder at him.

That had been weakness, too, for him to have said anything now. To have spoken words that had no meaning.

She was not that weak now. She regarded him for a moment, then pulled the door open, stepped through, and closed it behind herself. Her footsteps echoed through the vacant corridors.