K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

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.”