K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

Pavli put the developing chemicals back onto the darkroom’s shelves, working carefully and taking his time. Until he could delay no longer, and he had to let the single remaining guard take him back to where the other Lazarene men were sleeping.

He heard a key turn in the lock behind him, and the echoes of the guard’s heavy boots retreating down the corridor. His fatigue and the thin cold light of stars and moon sliding through the high, barred windows told him that the time was well past midnight. All he could see were rows of bunk beds, each with a human form beneath thin blankets. Snoring, muttering, the protests and entreaties of those mired in dreaming. Despite those sounds, he knew that some of them were awake; he could feel their unseen gaze turning toward him, heads lifting from pillows to study him, to mark the one who had fallen even farther from their number.

“Pavli…” His brother’s whisper slid through the low noises. He saw a hand silhouetted in moonlight, beckoning to him. Silently, he made his way through the narrow spaces between the beds.

“Here.” Matthi reached out and took hold of his forearm. “You can sleep next to me.”

He sat down on the edge of a thin, hard mattress and rubbed his legs. His muscles ached from standing so long behind the camera and in the darkroom.

Matthi raised himself, wrapping an arm around Pavli’s shoulders. “It’s all right.” He brought his whisper close to his brother’s ear. “Everyone understands. It’s why you weren’t brought into the faith. If this Ritter and all the others should be lying… if the worst should happen… you might at least have a chance.”

Nodding, Pavli slowly began unbuttoning his shirt. He wasn’t so tired that he couldn’t wonder about the things of which Matthi spoke. “But why?” He kept his voice low. “Why would it matter? If all the rest of you were gone, and I was left behind…”

The words were like a kiss, breath against the curve of his ear. “If our blood survived… even just a little bit of it… then perhaps He would still come someday. Even without the marks of His suffering, without the knowledge of the true faith… still, one would be waiting for Him. You would still be waiting, and bearing your people’s blood.”

Perhaps that was true. He didn’t know; he’d like to believe what Matthi told him, but he couldn’t think about it now. The weariness claimed him, dragged him under its slow, dark waves. Half-undressed, he lay down on the hard, narrow bed. With the last of his strength, he bent his knees and pulled his boots from his feet. He rolled to the other side, toward the wall, so that even his brother couldn’t see what he was doing.

His fingers pried apart the leather at the top edge of one boot, and pulled out the treasure hidden within. The papers, a few newspapers clippings, and a glossy photograph. Bent and wrinkled, but in good shape otherwise.

Pavli laid his head on his arm. In the blue light of the moon and stars, the night sky’s thin radiance seeping through the high windows, he gazed at the face of the angel. The angel of the shop window…

For a moment, as Ernst von Behren gazed up at the faces before him, he felt that he had just woken up from dreaming. He slouched down in the screening room seat, his thoughts drifting to memory. The sunshine of Hollywood, the palm trees like a child’s drawing of what a tree should look like, the flowers like bright soft wounds, achingly beautiful… and, of course, the money. Even though he had gotten just a taste of that, the little bit that the powerful ones such as Herr David Wise doled out to their faithful underlings, it had still translated to that pretty cottage in the hills, and a car with a driver from the studio, and restaurant meals where the bill never came, just more strangely weak American coffee, poured by a smiling waiter from a silver pot.

He sighed, feeling an ache of longing in his heart. Beyond the walls of the screening room – and a cramped little space it was, a far cry from the airy, cushioned spaces he had gotten used to at the Wise Studios – were all the rest of the buildings of the UFA complex, and beyond that was the suburb of Neubabelsburg, and beyond that, the city of Berlin. Just as though he’d never left.

When he’d been in Hollywood, one of that band of happy exiles, those smart enough to bless their luck rather than curse it, all of this had seemed to be the dream, a bad one. The kind from which you woke with gratitude, bathed in sweat. It still amazed him that he had made this return journey voluntarily.

“So you should always remember, dear Marte -” A moment of silence had come on the film’s soundtrack, just long enough to tempt him into speaking aloud. “You should remember that I do love you, in my own way.”

She didn’t answer him back. On the screen, Marte Helle was dressed in a period ballgown that exposed a good deal of her rounded cleavage – he could appreciate that on a purely aesthetic basis, like spring flowers on a grassy hillside, a meaningless bounty of nature. A costume like that was, of course, the preference of the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda; the Reich’s other noted cinema aficionado, the Fuhrer himself, was stirred more by the sight of long bare legs, a taste that he’d cultivated with showings of dreadful musicals at the Reich Chancellery for himself and his ‘chauffeur gang,’ his lower-ranking aides and their secretaries. That had been before the start of the war, when there had still been time for trifles such as that. Since then, things had become a lot grimmer, a bad dream, for the Fuhrer and everyone else.

Perhaps that was another reason for this show of Marte Helle’s flesh. Her face, and that radiant field from her throat to the center of her breasts, like the sun finally emerging after a night wracked with storms, would be something to counter the sense of dismal foreboding that had settled upon the Reich’s citizens. The Rundfunk, the broadcasts of Goebbels’ speeches, had grown shriller and more impassioned, the newsreels in the theaters even more boastful of every military triumph, as the whispers of the Mundfunk, the radio that went from one person’s mouth to another’s ear, had grown more dismayed and anxious. Dreadful stories had begun to circulate, of the horrors of the Eastern Front, of German soldiers, some hardly more than boys, lying dead, their mouths and eye sockets filled with drifting snow. Smoke rolled over blackened skeletons in the hatches of broken Panzer tanks. Seaweed tangled in the hair of U-boat crews sleeping in each other’s arms, while their mothers wept and ate brown bread thickened with sawdust. A clubfooted death’s-head had asked, Wahlt ihr den totalen Krieg? And all, or enough, had answered that yes, of course they wanted total war, and it had been given to them. How silly it would be now, for them to complain that the splinters in the bread cut their mouths. Better to swallow one’s own blood and listen for the drone of the bombers coming from the west.

Proof of the old adage that you should be careful what you wished for, since you might get it after all. The National Socialists had painted a picture – or perhaps it was the screenplay that Reichsminister Goebbels had written for his leading man to star in – of a Germany encircled by vengeful enemies, a noose tightening around the Herrenvolk ’s neck. Now, that had come true. There was no denying that it made for an epic film, a true spectacle, with a cast of thousands – everything that one of von Behren’s own heroes, the great American director de Mille, might have wished for.

Of course, the ending of the this particular film might be less pleasant than in a de Mille production. It didn’t bode well for Germany that Goebbels had a taste for classical tragedy. His barely readable novel Michael, the product of his student days – the Reichsminister had bestowed a signed copy upon von Behren at a UFA reception – with the misunderstood, beleaguered hero dying a martyr’s death, gave some notion of what the final scenes might be.