The Kingdom of Shadows

TWO

Her father had taught her everything she needed to know, all the lines she might have to speak. Who she would be. A part she had been born to play.

Marte waited on the platform alone, the handle of her one small case clasped in both hands. Her father hadn’t come to the Bahnhof Friedrichstra?e with her, to put her on the train. “Because someone might see us together,” her father had explained. He’d taken her face in his hands and kissed her on the brow. “And then they’d wonder how such a golden beauty as you came to have such an old black dog for a father. Or maybe they’d think I was a race polluter, some kike leching after another schone Madel.”

Marte bit her lip, until she could almost taste the salt leak under her tongue. No one must see her crying; no one must see her at all. That wasn’t one of the things her father had told her. It was something she had decided for herself, a vow sealed in that small room of her heart that was still her own.

The tears had been fought back. It helped not to think of these things, of how frightened she was inside. If she could only become what she pretended to be, like pulling on another’s skin, looking through their eyes, being that other girl. That woman.

Marte raised her head and looked about her, at the other people waiting. Two well-dressed women in fur-collared coats, chattering to each other in bright, hard voices. Men reading newspapers, the pages of Der Angriff folded back in their hands. At the end of the platform, two soldiers smoked and talked in low voices, their heads nearly touching each other. Everyone was who they seemed to be; of all the people in this world, she was the only one with a secret.

The memories she had tried to banish, to seal away in the dark where she couldn’t see them, moved inside her again. She could hear her own voice, the bravest she had ever been, asking her father if everything – all his plans and secret dealings – would turn out all right.

“There is nothing to be afraid of.” The papers for which he had paid were laid out on the dining room table; he had been explaining to her what each one meant. “These are perfect,” he’d said, tapping the papers with his fingertip. “The man who made them for us works with Naujocks, Heydrich’s own forger. These people are masters of their craft. If I could tell you of the mischief they’ve caused to Germany’s enemies… but such things are not meant for the ears of an innocent girl.”

The names her father had spoken meant nothing to Marte, but they frightened her nevertheless. As did the forged papers, that she turned over one after another, wondering if the girl they described was the same as herself. The documents attested to Marte’s lineage, pure Aryan stock for three generations back. Marte had been only eight years old when she had figured out that her father’s black hair and his eyes, one blue and one golden-brown, were things of which he was embarrassed. And that her own blondness, and the matched blue of her eyes, was somehow part of all his scheming.

“These make it possible.” Her father had held the papers in his hands. “And every further step – everything that you must do, my child – will make us safer and safer. You’ll see.”

What she had seen, one time when she had come late from school, had been the master forger to whom her father had paid so much money. A little sidling man, with the bright eyes of a scurrying animal, undimmed even though he had reeked of schnapps and cigarette smoke, brushing past her in the narrow hallway with a leather portfolio clutched tight to his chest. The forger’s eyes had glitteringly inspected her, as close as if he had run his ink-stained fingers over her breasts, before he had rushed down the stairs. In the flat, her father had been admiring the newest document, a certificate from the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt attesting that Marte Helle’s Nordic pedigree had been traced back to the Thirty Years War.

Such things weren’t for women to think about, but she wondered what would ever happen if someone were to offer the little man more money, for him to tell all her father’s secrets. Wasn’t it dangerous to have anyone know so much about you, things that were like a dagger pointed at your heart? But she knew she had to trust her father, who was wiser about such matters.

A shouting whistle roused her from those worrisome memories. The train, brakes hissing, slowed around the curve of track. She let herself be jostled forward with the others, an object with no thought other than holding on to her suitcase in the press of the crowd.

She found a seat on board, surrounded by other women, the two well-dressed ones across the aisle, their laughing and talking uninterrupted from before. She could smell the women’s heady perfume, like rare flowers, but wilder and sweeter, too. They wore makeup as well, rouge on their cheeks and red, unnatural lipstick. Marte’s father had debated whether she should wear makeup, but had decided against it. He had studied a leaflet written by Reichsfrauenfuhrerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, that said makeup was un-German and only for faces ‘marked by the eroticism of Asiatic females.’ Was that what those women across the aisle were? “And what does makeup matter, anyway?” Her father had said that to her, as he had cupped her chin in one hand. “You are already so beautiful without it.”

The men – the soldiers and the newspaper readers – had taken over the rear section of the carriage, where they could ease together in their grey smoke and talk of those things that softly whispered the coming of war, like ravens flying over old battlefields. One man had already leaned forward and, with beaming courtesy, offered the contents of his cigarette case to the two soldiers.

Marte pushed her suitcase farther back on the leather webbing of the shelf above the seats. When she sat back down, she saw that the seat across from her had been taken by a girl her age, with blond hair only a little darker than her own, pulled back into a thick braid.

As the train moved away from the platform, the girl turned a level, unblinking gaze over the faces near her. The girl’s eyes caught Marte’s for a few seconds, and she felt a chill touch the base of her throat as one corner of the girl’s mouth lifted in a knowing smile.

The train’s swaying motion rocked Marte’s head against the seat back. In her skirt pocket was the ticket her father had bought her; she reached in and closed her hand around it.

Across from her, the other girl sat up straighter, her nostrils flared. “I am going to the Lebensborn hostel in Steinhoring,” she announced in a loud, clear voice. She smiled in triumph, her hands gripping the edge of the seat. From the corner of her eye, Marte could see the other passengers turning their startled attention toward the girl; at the end of the carriage, the men broke off their talking.

The girl’s voice was now a shout. “There, I will have myself impregnated by an officer of the SS, the flower of German manhood, so that I may present our Fuhrer with the child of my flesh.” She looked across the blank faces with the piercing vision of an eagle suspended in the cold, thin air above mountain peaks.

Silence filled the carriage, broken only by the clattering of the iron wheels on the tracks.

Marte felt the narrow space twisting about her, as if she had gone mad, that there was no girl sitting opposite her. That it had been she who had cried out, so that all could hear.

The newspapers rustled again, and conversations resumed, the well-dressed women speaking in softer voices than before, leaning toward each other and glancing across the aisle. One of the soldiers laughed at something whispered to him.

The girl had turned her steel gaze to the window, as though willing distance to vanish, for the train to have already arrived at its destination.

It could have been me. Marte tried not to think; to vanish instead, to become nothing from inside out. But she couldn’t. I could have shouted that.

Her fingers touched the edges of the ticket. The destination printed on it was Steinhoring.