The Kingdom of Shadows

SEVEN

The little mongrel bitch was leaving – Liesel watched with satisfaction as the car rolled toward the hostel’s gates. She let the curtain fall back into place. Frau Hegemann was sticking the other girl, the mother of the baby in Liesel’s arms, on a train back to Berlin. Where she could just slink back into the darkness where she belonged.

It had all gone to show that breeding – blood and racial purity – was indeed the most important thing. Liesel smiled to herself, thinking of how the bitch must have thought she’d won, taken the prize that so rightfully had belonged to Liesel and no one else. Only to have the invisible stain in her blood reveal that behind her pretty face was… what? Filth and corruption, or whatever the race of men, in their black shining uniforms and strutting boots, decided was there. That was all that mattered.

The baby, another woman’s child, started to fuss. Hungry – it was certainly a pink, healthy thing. Liesel gazed down at it, the crook of her arm already aching from the soft weight. Golden angel strands for hair, lighter than Liesel’s own – but then, weren’t most blond infants as fair as that? Nobody would be able to tell from the coloring that it wasn’t her own. A pity about the eyes – but no one would dare say anything about them, at least to her face; Liesel had already decided that.

She gave the child her breast, and it suckled greedily. A good strong baby, the offspring of a famous SS officer, a favorite of the Fuhrer – she would make sure the child would thrive and grow. In the world around her, there were already people making arrangements on her behalf, seeing to it that her needs were taken care of. That was how it should be.

In the cradle beside her bed, her own baby began to squall. It was a pretty little thing as well, if not quite so big as this one. And hungry, too.

“Be quiet -” She would get around to the other child, her own, all in good time. It could wait. She lowered her head and kissed the one in her arms, as its tiny hands kneaded her full breast.

The handle of the door was broken, the wood around the metal splintered, as though from the impact of heavy boots.

Marte pushed the door open, the topmost hinge wobbling, its screws wrenched partway from the frame. The light from the building’s hallway spilled into her parent’s flat.

Or what had been their flat. Empty now, at least of living things. The furniture was still there, her father’s chair overturned, books tumbled from the shelves, the pages spread like the wings of broken birds.

Behind her, she heard other doors opening, faces peering out through narrow slits. The tenants of the other flats now whispered to each other, watching her.

On the street outside the building, she thought she had seen the little man, her father’s forger, the creature to whom her father had entrusted all his secret planning. From the mouth of a dark alley, the little man had peered out at her, then scuttled away on his ceaseless errands.

He’ll tell them – Marte’s breath tightened in her throat. Part of her, the hollow spaces that began just inside her skin, didn’t care. Not any more. If they came and took her away, to the place her parents had been taken… it didn’t matter. She could step outside, and the silent men would come up to her and take her arms, one on either side, there would be a car they could hustle her into… and then she would be gone. Disappeared, like so many others. At last, even the little part of her that people could still see would be extinguished.

Now she wasn’t afraid. She set her suitcase on the floor, then turned and walked out of the flat, leaving the door open.

The street was empty. No one came up, no one spoke to her. She wondered if perhaps she had already disappeared, become the ghost of that girl who had looked out of the mirror at her, long ago.

“Look at those crows sitting up there.” Ernst von Behren lifted his gaze to the Romanische Cafe’s gallery, where the chess-players sat hunched over their boards. He gestured with a pudgy, well-manicured hand. The gaunt men did look like crows in their black overcoats, some of them still shiny from the rain that continued to drizzle past midnight. “They’ve always been up there. They always will be, I suppose.”

Gunther glanced up with his glittering doll’s eyes, so perfect and untrue, but didn’t say anything. Von Behren watched Gunther’s high-boned face radiating boredom and contempt, feeling his own heart, not breaking, but sighing under the hammer stroke of a familiar pain.

With his fingertips, he stroked the precisely shaped point of the beard on his own face, round and plump as a sad-eyed baby’s. He knew that he probably wouldn’t ever see Gunther again after this night, that Gunther would disappear wherever all the other handsome boys went. Gunther was sulking, not just because they had come here to the great cavernous Romanische instead of some dark cellar hole smelling of roach shit and candle wax, where Gunther could have turned his elegant profile to the trembling admiration of other brokenhearted men. But also because Ernst von Behren’s contacts at the UFA studios had proved ineffectual in getting Gunther cast in a film production, even in a nonspeaking role. Gunther was probably thinking now that there was little point in going to bed with him any longer.

Well, to hell with him then, thought von Behren as he sipped at the cold dregs of coffee left in the heavy porcelain cup. He at least didn’t feel any guilt over the matter; a face as handsome as Gunther’s should be kept off the Reich’s motion picture screens, as a public service. He’d be damned if he’d be responsible for unleashing that beauty upon all the poor silly Hausfrauen of Germany, just so they could weep into their pillows that their husbands weren’t the cruel god incarnate they had seen up on the motion picture screens.

He watched Gunther take a sip of mineral water. Gunther had never lacked for admirers. Back in the rowdy starving days that now seemed, in memory, like newsreels from another planet – Gunther had done his trolling on the Weidendammbrucke and the Tauentzienstra?e with the other women, the real along with the false. Not far from the Romanische in fact, just beyond the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche, that the night rain had darkened to a hulking stone beast. Von Behren could remember Gunther’s feral teenage face, with its slash of red lipstick and kohl-rimmed cat’s-eyes, chin brushing the ratty fur swathed around his neck, a spit-curled bob shining like black Japanese lacquer. The height of the glossy green-leather boots the Tauentzienstra?e girls wore indicated their sexual specializations, and Gunther had tottered around in ones that signaled an absolute willingness to do anything.

That will stand him in good stead now, thought von Behren. They had entered – not just Gunther and himself, or the patrons of the Romanische, but all Germany, and probably the rest of humanity as well – a world where the willingness to do anything would be a valuable commodity indeed.

“Do you remember Conrad?” He whispered the question, knowing that if Gunther heard him against the cafe’s hubbub, the handsome other could pretend he hadn’t. Conrad had been another Tauentzienstra?e prowler in his hungry days, the bones cutting through his narrow face giving him an emaciated, deathly glamour. But Conrad had managed to get into the films, back when they had been silent, and had stalked around as a murderous sleepwalker surrounded by crazy cardboard sets, doing so well at that and all the other parts that came his way, that now he was in Hollywood, putting on the worldly airs that impressed the Americans so much. Von Behren doubted if Conrad talked much of his Tauentzienstra?e nights. But it did serve to demonstrate that it was true, in America – or at least Hollywood – you could reinvent yourself. If you were lucky.

“Perhaps I should go to America,” mused von Behren aloud. He might as well have been sitting at the table alone.

But Gunther had heard that. He turned his profile enough to give von Behren a glance of contempt, the look traitors and cowards receive.

Von Behren found that tiresome. So many others were leaving, or thinking about it – why shouldn’t he? Just yesterday he had gone by Frank Wysbar’s flat, out by the Babelsberg studios, to look at some dreadful drum-beating script Goebbels’ ministry kept shoving into the UFA production queue. He had found Wysbar sitting at the writing table, practicing a new signature. “That is what my American contacts say I would have to change my name to,” Wysbar had said, turning around in his chair and displaying a sheet of paper with the name Frank Wisbar written upon it. “What do you think?”

He had told Wysbar that it didn’t seem that much different, the letter i instead of the original y. What was a name, anyway? You did what you had to do, these days. Wysbar had sighed and said that he didn’t know, maybe he wouldn’t leave for America; at the least, he would try to hold out a while longer.

Of course, von Behren knew, Wysbar had reasons for feeling gloomy. Goebbels and the NSDAP hacks beneath him at the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda – what a joke; was there a word such as endarkenment? – had given Wysbar nothing but grief about the last film he’d directed. All because he’d used a dark-haired actress – Sybille Schmitz, whom von Behren had always found good-looking enough, in a sort of strange, heavy-jawed way – as the romantic interest of a blond Nordic hero. And the actress wasn’t even the least bit Jewish; she wouldn’t have still been working if the party’s racial examiners had been able to find a spot of Hebrew blood in her pedigree. Just her luck to be a brunette, when the official fetishism dictated blue-eyed blondes, hair braided as thick as ships’ ropes.

Funny to think about Wysbar now. When von Behren had brought Gunther to the Romanische tonight, there had been a street musician outside, a blind man with a wheezing button accordion. Just a few notes of the awkward melody had reminded von Behren of something, and now he remembered in full what it had been – the ferryman’s song in Wysbar’s film. He softly hummed what he could recall of the words. The soul, something something… struggling against the kingdom of shadows.

Wysbar had gotten that right, at least. Das Schattenreich. That was what this world had become. All grey and black, with a few bright, spurting wounds of red. He missed the old Berlin, the Twenties that had seemed so golden to everyone, even if the gold had been as false as the money. And even if there had not been a lot to eat, there had been plenty of sex around, a sort of warm ocean of it, and not the hearty, brown bread and baby-making kind the Nazis were promoting these days.

It didn’t seem so long ago that von Behren had tagged along with one of the other scriptwriters – that was how he had started out back then, at the old Nero studio – following him to a shabby flat all the way out past the Landwehr Canal. The hallways had been dark, but they had stepped from them into a tightly pressed little world of light and blaring, syncopated music. And the black woman had been there, the one who had already taken Paris and now was conquering the hearts and loins of Berlin – that was the kind of thing that one could just stumble into back then, a laughing miracle exploding in one’s face. The Negress had worn her trademark skirt of ripe bananas, and she’d danced among the drunken partygoers, snaking her glistening ebony hips past the bellies of financiers giddy with champagne and bankruptcy. Her smile had been a kingdom of avaricious joy. Then she had gone to sleep on a horsehair sofa, a pretty child in a sailor’s suit clasped in her willowy arms.

Back then, it had been possible to believe that Africa itself would blossom in the middle of Germany. And how he had longed to be that pretty boy, or girl – impossible to tell which – resting a rouged face against the black woman’s breast.

All that was gone now. Just about the only things that had survived from that world to this, das Schattenreich, were the chess-players up in the Romanische Cafe’s gallery. Those hunched-over crows would likely still be there, contemplating their slow, tedious strategies, when all was rubble around them.

In this world, there were no dancing Negresses. In this world, someone such as poor Wysbar could get into trouble for having a yellow-haired man fall in love with a fair-skinned brunette.

Then again, there was no point in handing these people the stick with which they could beat you. “What I need,” said von Behren, rubbing his chin and gazing up at the blue clouds of cigar smoke drifting to the Romanische Cafe’s distant ceiling, “is an angel. Of light.” His fingertips pushed through his beard. “To put into a film.” He nodded slowly. “That would keep them happy.”

Gunther shot him another glance. “You mean a blonde. Why don’t you just say so?”

Von Behren shook his head. “No… not just a blonde. There are plenty such, God knows.” They all seemed to hang around the UFA studios like golden vultures. “I need something… sadder than that. And more beautiful.” He had been drinking spirits before they had come to the cafe, and now he was in that stage where the alcohol had started to die and fade from his blood, leaving a clarity of thought that made words difficult to match to the tumble of images in his brain.

People always needed what they themselves were not. What they had forgotten how to be, or left behind, like old clothes in a suitcase tied up with string. When people were dirty and poor, they wanted cleanliness and pretty things, up on the screen where they could lose themselves in one big collective embrace. When they felt weak, they wanted the hard clenched fist, even – or especially – if it was in their own faces.

And now, when people were so full, every corner of their souls crammed with thundering speeches, the Fuhrer ’s words like election posters slathered on the bone walls behind their eyes – what people could no longer be now, was to be merely empty. And how, in a tiny closet behind their hearts, they would long for that – von Behren could see it so plainly, the future of all dreaming written not in fiery letters, but in a blunt pencil scrawl on a torn scrap smeared with ashes.

How could he ever explain that – or anything important – to one such as Gunther? It was hopeless to try.

Gunther shook his head. “Don’t talk to me of that crap.” His hard eyes scanned across the cafe’s tables. “There. How about that one? She should do for you.”

Von Behren turned to look. A girl, perhaps not even twenty yet, sat at one of the tables near the cafe’s doors, close enough that the wet, sloppy wind brushed against the hem of her skirt every time someone went in or out. On a night like this, no matter how crowded the Romanische might get, the drafty tables by the entrance usually went empty. The girl – von Behren had never seen her here before – must have instinctively realized that the waiters would leave her alone, even if all she ordered was one small coffee that she let go cold and clouded over a span of hours.

Gunther’s lip curled. “All you want is some little wren, with its wing broken. Well, there she is. Surely you could put her in a film, and have the whole audience sniffling into their handkerchiefs.”

In the early morning hours, the Romanische’s crowd had thinned a little, and there was no one between this table and the one at which she sat. Unsmiling, her gaze seeing nothing before her, not even the barely touched cup next to her hand. The night’s chill had turned the skin of her throat into translucent ivory. Beautiful… and even beyond that…

“You see?” Contempt sharpened Gunther’s voice, the scorn of one member of the unmoneyed tribe for another. “That is all the cash she has.” Gunther had learned, on the Tauentzienstra?e, the skill of reckoning strangers’ exact financial condition. The girl at the far table had a few folded bills in one hand. “She has counted it over and over, and she has no idea where or when there will come any more.”

Von Behren felt his breath stop in his throat. The girl had lifted her face, and he saw now that she was beautiful. And empty.

He could tell just from looking at her, that she had cried a great deal. But not recently – her eyes were no longer reddened from it. Whatever had happened to her – whatever had been taken from her – that was already sealed in the past. Leaving this shell behind, the parts that could no longer be hurt.

“You’re right.” Von Behren nodded. “She could be an angel.” The angel of sadness and emptiness. The girl was made lovelier by those things. And more desirable – he had enough of the instincts of other, supposedly normal men to recognize that.

“An angel,” scoffed Gunther. He showed an ugly smile as he shook his head.

But Gunther didn’t matter now. For von Behren, Gunther was already dead, vanished. All he could see was the girl at the far table. And beyond her, to that other world of light and shadow, where her face would emerge from the screen’s darkness and into the silent chambers of men’s hearts.

The girl turned her head and looked at him as he threaded his way among the cafe’s tables. There was nothing inside the gaze with which she watched and judged him; beyond hope, beyond despair. “ Fraulein… a moment of your time, bitte…”

“Yes?” She gazed up at him as he stood beside the table. He felt his own heart stumble, then shiver into pieces…