The Kingdom of Shadows

TWENTY

When she lifted her face from the ground, she saw the imprint her jaw and mouth had made in the trampled snow between the wagon tracks. Liesel touched her lips with her fingers; the snow where she knelt was muddied with the tramping of so many boots across it, and now the bright red of her blood released a wisp of steam before it froze into sharp-edged ice. Under the skies crumpling with clouds of dark silver, clouds heavy with more bone-chilling snow and sleet, the crystals looked like black diamond chips. For a moment, she wanted to scoop them up in her hand and hold them tight, as though she had discovered a treasure in this road’s slush-filled ruts.

“ Mutti -” A child’s voice whined close to her ear, like a buzzing summer insect. The heat that pulsed behind her brow and parched her tongue was fever, she knew. The blood that had frozen on the ground might not even have been from splitting her lip against a stone when she had tripped and fallen; she had been coughing for days now, and after every spell she had tasted hot wet salt on her tongue. “ Mutti, they’re leaving us -” Desperation rose in the child’s voice. “We have to catch up with them!”

Dizzy, she managed to get to her feet. The ice and dirty snow sifted from the heavy coat and the layers of clothing that shapelessly swaddled her body. A soldier had given her the coat to keep her warm on the long trek westward; she had gotten that much at least, and a share of the blackened and withered potatoes that he and his squadmates had with them, a few mouthfuls for herself and for the two little boys she had with her. All she’d had to do in return had been to go with each soldier out of reach of their little fire’s wavering light, open her legs or kneel before them, their grimy woolen gloves pressed hard against the sides of her head. The coat had belonged to the last of the soldiers, the one who hadn’t taken her for his few minutes in the darkness, the one who instead had lain down by the fire, knees drawn up and face ghastly pale, the one who’d died with a sudden burst of blood from his mouth and nose, his lungs giving way like rotted burlap sacks. He had come all the way from Russia, he had escaped when the German lines along the Dnieper had collapsed – and he had at least made it this far home. They had stripped the coat from his corpse and given it to Liesel, and had left him curled like a child beside the ashes of the fire.

The coat and the few bits of potato… it had been one of the better transactions she had engaged in recently. At least she had gotten something from it besides a fist across her mouth and a warning not to move.

Again the child’s voice, without words this time, just a keening note of anxiety as he tugged at her sleeve, trying to get her to stumble a few steps forward. She shook him away angrily; that was what had caused her to fall in the first place, the burden of the two children with which she had been saddled, the one little boy who could still walk, and the other, the useless one she had to carry. She’d held that one cradled against herself for mile after weary mile, her back aching with the weight that had seemed so little when she had started out, but had grown heavier and more leaden with each step. Her shoulder was numb from the pressure of the sling she’d improvised from torn strips of cloth, looping it between her son’s legs to take some of the load from her own arms.

Her son… where was he? She had stood up without him; the sling’s knot had broken, the ragged ends of cloth dangling against her stomach. The other little boy, the bastard Mischling she’d raised, scurried ahead a few steps, to the crest of the road; he hesitated there, torn between running after the others, the men and the women and the few other children slogging through the rutted mud with the wagons creaking before them, or staying with the only mother he had ever known. He squatted down on his haunches and chewed the knuckles of one hand, as though that could fill his hollowed belly; his eyes of two colors, china-blue and golden-brown, watched to see what she would do.

“There you are…” Her voice rasped painfully in her throat. Liesel had found her own true son a few feet away, lying on his side as though sleeping. The soldier whose coat she wore had lain just like that, knees toward chest, babyish, before he had died. She bent down, pulling aside the knitted muffler she had wrapped around the child’s face and throat. He was alive, his breath panting fast and shallow, his nostrils and the corners of his eyes crusted with phlegm. His face had turned white and transparent as rice paper, the only color a hectic spot of blood under his cheeks. “Yes, yes; there you are…” She crooned to him as she got her grip beneath his spine, raising him up; he flopped backward for a moment, then the small hands let go their fistfuls of frozen mud and grabbed her arm, clutching with the unconscious reflexes of a panicked animal.

A wave of light-headedness swept over her. Just the effort of picking up her son, who had dwindled down so small, like a fledgling bird that had fallen from its nest, had taxed the limits of her remaining strength. The fever wrapped a heated metal band around her head, blinding her. She could only feel the child slipping out of her fumbling hands.

“ Mutti… come on…” The other little boy, the Mischling , had returned, tugging at the thick fabric of the coat. He had been alarmed, no doubt, by how she swayed as she stood, but his pulling at her only made that worse. She slapped him, sending him sprawling, before he could topple her again. Through the black spots dancing before her eyes, she could see him skitter away on his hands and knees, getting out of reach of another blow or a kick from her. He crouched on his hands and knees, regarding her with the careful wariness that came with the experience filling the few short years of his life.

She wondered what she was going to do now. If she held very still, breathing slowly and carefully so she didn’t start the racking cough again, she could hear the little caravan of wagons and people, the creak of the wheels and the muddy ice cracking beneath the slow boots, fading in the distance. Even at their laborious pace, they would be gone soon, beyond any chance of her catching up with them. In some ways, that was what she wanted, to never have to see any of those beaten-down, hunched-over human figures again. She had felt them all dragging on her arms and shoulders, oppressing her with their sullen weight, their envy and malice; they wanted to make her one of them, another broken and frightened refugee, scrabbling for bits of food, clothes and skin turning the dun color of ingrained dirt. There were a few women in the caravan who had come the same way with Liesel, fleeing from the SS housing estate when the war’s front had suddenly surged closer, the German military units being pulled back almost overnight, with no warning. They had been left on their own, a disorganized band of women and children and a few elderly shopkeepers, to make their escape as best they could. Some of the women had been too paralyzed to move, hunkering down in their flats with the curtains drawn, minds blanked with fear as they waited for the Russians to come pouring over the hills to the east. The ones who had set out on foot, tugging their children with them, the ones who hadn’t dropped by the wayside – those jealous bitches enjoyed seeing her ground down to their level. They had always been envious of her beauty and the privileges it had rightly brought her. Now, to see her transformed into a shapeless, bedraggled lump like themselves – of course, they were all enjoying that. She was sure she had heard, through the daze of the fever, their cruel laughter as she had fallen with her son. They had gone on laughing as they had trudged on, leaving her sprawled across the frozen mud with the two little boys.

Perhaps more soldiers would come along; they were at least still capable, no matter how ragged from their own long marches, of seeing what she was, desiring her, helping her. Even if they did no more than slap her and hike the layers of her skirts up around her hips – that at least proved she was still beautiful to them. For anything more, such as the coat, she had to be quick about it, to catch them while the lust still ebbed in their blood. Afterward, they were useless, thinking only of themselves and saving their own skins. They were all like that; it was why the abandoned women and children were on foot. The army had requisitioned all the trains and motorized vehicles for their own evacuation, even the horses that might have pulled the wooden carts. The peasants from the village near the estate had yoked their thin-flanked cows to the carts and plodded with them over the fields and the narrowest lanes; the main roads were unpassable with broken tanks and heavy equipment left behind. One silly SS wife had kept on crying and sobbing about how her husband should have been there with her, to rescue her and their children, instead of sitting in some warm and cozy headquarters barrack in Berlin. All that useless fussing had gotten on Liesel’s nerves. She had least been spared that illusion, that she had anyone to rely on but herself; she had received the notification of her Heinrich’s death, and a tiny box of his medals from somewhere outside Stalingrad, nearly a year ago.

Thinking of other people’s deaths, Heini’s and the ones yet to come, those stupid laughing women who had been her neighbors, cleared Liesel’s head a bit. She regained enough balance to stand on tiptoe, scanning the direction from which she had come and to either side. There was no sign of any soldiers in the vicinity. The only indications of life in the wintry landscape were the sounds of the refugee caravan, even fainter now from the other side of the hill’s rise. Even at their slow, head-down pace, the others would vanish entirely. Nightfall was only a few hours away; then she would never be able to find them.

“ Mutti…”

She didn’t bother to cuff the child away. “ Sei ruhig,” she ordered. “Your mother has to think.”

Her own child was dying; she could see that, anyone could. That had to figure into her calculations. The frailty of the small body disgusted her. Perhaps he had inherited weak lungs from his father; the SS couldn’t be expected to weed out every genetic flaw. The boy certainly hadn’t gotten it from her; feverish as she was, and even hacking up blood, she knew that would pass, she would survive. So would her child, if there was a doctor with medicines, perhaps even a little clinic bed with clean, warm sheets, in whatever village might lie ahead of the trudging caravan. But what were her chances of getting him there, or the doctor and all the villagers not having already fled themselves? They were all such cowards…

If only there had been any more soldiers in sight, ones with a truck or even a commandeered automobile. She could have played on their sympathies for the little boy; that, and the usual trade in kind, might have accomplished everything. But without them, she knew she couldn’t carry him all that way, however far it was, not in her present weakened condition. It would kill her to try, and what good would that accomplish?

And there was the other child to consider, the one watching her with his rounded, apprehensive eyes of two colors. The Mischling

…

It was painful to admit, but he was more valuable than the product of her own womb. There was his real mother, the scheming little bitch she remembered from the Lebensborn hostel, who had cheated her once and gone on to become such a famous actress – it still amazed Liesel that there were so many men who’d want to sleep with such a drab and skinny thing, men who’d be willing to advance her career. Though it only took one, if it were the right one, and everybody in the Reich knew who that was. So this child had powerful protectors, perhaps even more powerful now than the dark godfathers who had brought about his birth. Reichsminister Goebbels was interested in the child’s welfare; she had found that out from his agents who had come prowling around the SS housing estate, cameras in hand. Liesel had entered into a small conspiracy with those men – it was always so easy to do that – making sure that they got the photographs they needed of a happy, laughing – and healthy – child. One that was being well looked after…

That was a worry. The Mischling had gotten so pale since they had started walking, and had now picked up a cough, not as bad as her own son’s, but placed the same, deep in the chest. His mismatched eyes were rimmed with red, and he constantly wiped his nose across his sleeve. Going hungry hadn’t helped; when Liesel had gotten the bits of spoiled potato from the soldiers, that had been when she had first thought of what a waste it was, to give any to the weakest among them. The least likely to survive…

He had started to suck his thumb, hunkered down in his misery. He stared sightlessly before himself, no longer listening to the faint noises of the other refugees in the distance.

She had come to a decision. The only possible one. She gathered her strength, enough to reach down once more and gather up her own son. She knew the other boy was watching her as she carried the small burden toward the tangled bushes a few yards from the side of the path.

Her son woke up from his feverish dreaming as she laid him down. She had hoped that wouldn’t happen, that he would have gone on sleeping until she gone, and after as well. He clutched her arm, trying to pull her closer, so he could see her face.

“No, no; it’s all right…” She laid her hand against her son’s cheek; it was like touching a red-hot oven. She controlled her reaction to snatch her hand away, stroking his cheek and brow until his eyes closed again. “It’s all right… everything will be good again.” She crooned the words as though they were the last whisper of a lullaby. “ Mutti just needs you to wait here… until she comes back. That’s a good boy…” Her shoulder trembled the branch above him, and a dusting of snow fell across his face; she brushed it away. “You go to sleep now. That’s right…” He was quiet for a few moments, his grip relaxing from her forearm. She stood up and hurried back to the other child.

“Come on.” She jerked him upright and tugged him stumbling behind her. “Now!” He dangled on tiptoe like a puppet. “You wanted to go with the others, didn’t you? What’s wrong?”

He looked behind him at the small form only partially concealed by the bushes. “My brother -”

“Never mind him.” She had looked behind as well, toward the eastern sky. She had seen something there, or thought she had. A trace of fire against the banks of clouds, that might have been lightning but wasn’t. If there was a low rumble – she strained to make it out – it would have been artillery shells rather than thunder. Had the fighting come that much closer? There was no time to waste. “Come along.”

On the other side of the hill, she saw the refugees far ahead. She hurried, pulling the child into a trot behind her. The other one was already gone from sight, hidden by the rise of the rutted path.

She had done what was necessary, Liesel told herself. She had saved this one. The valuable one, the one that would repay her for all the trouble she had taken on his behalf. She squeezed the child’s hand tight, to make sure she didn’t lose him in the gathering dusk.