K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

“I want to see him.” Her own voice, her wish, broke the film’s silence.

“But you are seeing him, Marte.” Beside her, Joseph reached over and squeezed her hand tight in his. “You’re seeing him right now. Look -” He gestured with his other hand, catching a corner of the projector’s beam, throwing a shadow across the bright world. “There he is. Your son. You know he is healthy and happy… and safe. What more do you want?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.

“I want to see him.” She turned her wet-streaked face away from the child’s image on the screen; she couldn’t bear to watch any more of his laughing and playing. “I want to hold him. I want him to be with me.”

“That’s impossible.” Joseph’s voice became stern. They had talked of these things before, many times since she had returned to Berlin and found no child waiting for her. “It cannot be done. I have forbidden it.” His voice softened to pleading. “Don’t you see, Marte? I have made you the queen of the German cinema; every eye gazes upon you. You are one of the most famous women in all the Reich. Do you really think you could have this child with you, a child of… such a background…”

She knew what he meant when he said that. Something that he could never speak aloud: a child, whose very eyes gave away the secret of his Mischling genetics, the scandalous cross between Aryan purity and her alien blood.

“You wouldn’t be able to hide it – we wouldn’t be able to. The scandals would blow up once more. The Fuhrer ’s attention is consumed by the war now, but he wouldn’t be able to ignore what would be told to him by my enemies – and I have many of those, greedy and unscrupulous power-seekers, right up to the top levels of the Reich. Goering and Bormann and all the rest… they would love to see me fall, to no longer have the ear of the Fuhrer, so they could tell their lies to him without hindrance from me. Everyone knows that I brought you back here because I love you, that I can’t exist without you.” Joseph’s voice became even more fervent. “For now, as long as we are discreet, that can be tolerated, they’ll let us have our little bit of happiness. But if the wolves at my heels were to find out your child exists, then they would discover all the rest. The Rassenschande , the crime of racial pollution… and then the wolves would be upon me, they would be at my throat. I would be torn to bits by them.”

She turned from the screen and gazed at him. “You say you love me… that I mean more to you than anything else… and you wouldn’t do that for me?”

“But you don’t understand, Martchen -” Joseph took her by the shoulders, drawing her closer to his face and words. “I am doing it for you. Everything! I must protect you from these people. Himmler… if he were to find out the arrangements, the deals I have made behind his back, with his underlings in the SS… the bribes and favors I continue to bestow in order to keep your child a secret… if he knew, there would be no place you could hide with your little boy. He would find you and destroy you both.” Joseph shook his head, voice turning bitter. “These politics of race, they are just something I have used to achieve power, to make the Fuhrer strong; the people need an enemy, if they are to flock to someone who can protect them. The Jews and the gypsies, and your own people – they are just scapegoats, so that the whip can be placed in the Fuhrer ’s hand for their scourging. You understand, don’t you?” His gaze drew inward for a moment. “My sins may be greater than Himmler’s – at least he believes the things he says. His skin crawls when he speaks of Jews and other creatures. But I… I am just an actor, a traveling player such as yourself; no less so, even if I have written the words I’ve placed in my own mouth and in the mouths of others.” His words had grown softer, his eyes turning away. Suddenly, his gaze snapped back to her; his voice shook with emotion. “You understand, don’t you? – you have to understand. I’m protecting both you and your son. Perhaps later… when the war has been won, and the Fuhrer no longer needs me… then we can be together, all of us. We can go away, you and your little boy… far from here. To the embassy in Tokyo; I asked him before, to make me the ambassador. He’ll do that for me, I know he will… when the war is over…”

She understood. The things that Joseph said, and the things he didn’t; the things inside his heart. A heart that was no different from David Wise’s, or any other man’s. For all his impassioned speech, just like lines from a film – an actor, yes, but a bad one, a scenery-chewer as Herr Wise and the others would have called him in Hollywood; she’d almost expected Joseph to place both his hands over his heart, to swear his undying love – for all the lofty words, she could still hear the silent voice behind them. The one that spoke the truth: that he could never share her with anyone else, not even her own child.

Marte closed her eyes, letting herself fall away from him, into that empty space inside her own heart, where no one else would ever come now. She wondered what Joseph saw on the screen – not this one, with the little boy laughing and running – the screen with her face magnified upon it. Or rather, not what he saw, but who did the seeing. Perhaps there was no one in the theater with him, no human presence, nothing at all. But only him, alone in that dark empty world, where her face was the only light, the moon that he fell toward, as those in dreaming fall from the earth and into the hollow night sky.

“You’ll see, Marte. Everything will be fine…”

The room was completely silent and dark now, the last of the film having run through the projector; Joseph had switched off the machine. Now she felt his arm wrapping around her shoulder, drawing her to him, as the fingertips of his other hand drew gently down the curve of her neck.

His whisper, a breath at her ear. “You saw your little boy. I didn’t lie to you.” His hand moved lower, under the neckline of her dress. “That was real… you know it was. I gave him to you…” He brought his head down to kiss her throat.

She let him go on. Joseph’s words echoed inside her head. That was real… She knew he meant the little film, the images of the child laughing and running and throwing a ball. That was as real for him as if the child had been here in the room, and she could have knelt down and gathered him into her arms.

And when he saw her on the screen, the larger one, with all the faces in the theater audience turned toward it… then that was real as well. Or perhaps that was the only time she was real to him. The woman in his arms, with the face of the luminous being on the screen – the woman whose dress had been unfastened at the back by his careful hand, to expose her skin made even whiter by the black lace of the Parisian finery he’d given her; the woman whose bare shoulder he kissed, murmuring her name – that woman was the creature made of shadows, the ghost, the insubstantial thing. The woman on the screen, that other Marte, would exist long after this one had slipped from his arms and dissipated like smoke in the still air.

She dreamed that sometimes, or let it dream her, an image that came unbidden whenever she kept her eyes closed, while the embrace of Joseph or David or any other man tightened around her. She didn’t know where it came from, but it comforted her. To see a thing of translucent silk with her face, rising above the sweating arched back of the man and the pale form he crushed beneath himself… to see it rise and drift, to slowly become less and then nothing, gone…

Now, in this room, Joseph had laid her down against the sofa’s cushions, his hand brushing the bare skin above her stockings. Another part of her, the smallest, coldest part that stayed locked inside her head, in a little room that no one else could enter, watched her and this man in the slow measure of their coupling. Watched and calculated, and kept its silence. That part knew this was something it endured, or less than that, what he did with her was something that didn’t matter at all. It was how she kept Joseph bringing her photos of her child, news of him, and this time, the gift of the film. Something real, or close to it.