K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

He turned a corner and saw the Scharfuhrer waiting for him outside the door to the darkroom. The resolve to be more careful tightened inside him. It would never do for him to keep anyone waiting, anyone who could put a boot on his throat.

The Scharfuhrer was all smiles. “Do you have it ready?” He even gave a pleasant nod of his head as Pavli approached.

“Yes… yes, of course.” Pavli opened the darkroom, switching on the light as the other man followed him inside. “Here it is.” He took a flat square parcel from a hiding place behind the ranks of the dark-brown bottles of developing chemicals and handed it over.

“Ah. Wonderful.” The Scharfuhrer had on his finely tailored dress uniform, the one in which he traveled to the city, to visit both his wife and his mistress. He set his peaked cap, with its skull-and-crossbones emblem above the visor, down on the workbench and unwrapped the parcel. He held up a framed photograph, admiring the image of his own face. “ Ausgezeichnet.”

Pavli had no idea which woman would receive the Scharfuhrer ’s present. That was none of his business, anyway. Enough that he had found this means of ingratiating himself with the guards. Another Lazarene, who had been a carpenter in the larger world beyond the fences, made the frames from bits of scrap, carving a grapevine pattern into the wood with a stolen penknife and staining them with a concoction of boiled leaves and pine needles. For himself, Pavli had made a rough studio, a replica of the one that had been at the rear of his uncle’s camera shop, in the storage area behind the darkroom; he had even been able to nail up a backdrop, a piece of canvas daubed with random splotches of paint. To his own eye, the results were little more than adequate, but the guards who came and posed were pleased enough with them.

“This will do very nicely.” The Scharfuhrer smiled and winked at Pavli. “I’m sure she’ll keep it right by her bedside.”

The mistress then, guessed Pavli. He said nothing, keeping himself from being lulled by the SS man’s confidences and friendly show.

“You do admirable work.” The Scharfuhrer laid a hand on Pavli’s shoulder. “Come with me. I have a small token of my appreciation.”

On the graveled drive in front of the building, the Scharfuhrer reached inside one of the staff cars, turned and bestowed a grease-stained package into Pavli’s hands. The rank smell of the sausage it held made his stomach clench with hunger.

Before he could tell the Scharfuhrer thanks, a commotion sounded from the building’s door. One of the Lazarene women, shouting and with distraught face, jerked her arm away from the female guard who had been trying to pull her back inside. The sweep of the woman’s arm knocked the guard sprawling. In a few seconds, before Pavli could react, the woman had run to him and grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Where are they?” Her greying hair come loose from its knotted kerchief. “My babies -” Her fingers dug into Pavli’s upper arms as she forced him back against the fender of the staff car. “They won’t tell me – they say they don’t know – but you know, don’t you? Because you’re close to him, to Ritter -”

The woman had knocked the breath out of Pavli. Through the spatter of black spots in his vision, he could see the Scharfuhrer trying to break her grasp, to pull her away from him.

“Give them back to me!” The woman’s voice had turned into screaming, her head tilted back as the Scharfuhrer and another female guard dragged her along the side of the car. The first guard had regained her feet; standing in front, she leveled a backhand slap across the woman’s face. The Scharfuhrer let go of her arms, and she dropped to her knees on the gravel, the tangle of her hair falling across the angry mark reddening her cheek and jaw. Her spine bent catlike as sobbing tore from her throat.

The Scharfuhrer grabbed Pavli by the elbow and pushed him toward the asylum’s door. He twisted his neck to look back. “What’s wrong -”

“It’s none of your concern.” The Scharfuhrer ’s face was rigid with anger. “Get back to your work.” He shoved Pavli stumbling against the building’s front step, then turned and strode back to where the two female guards were hoisting the crying woman up between themselves.

The sausage that the Scharfuhrer had given Pavli, as payment for the photograph, had been dropped and trampled in the melee; the paper wrapping had come undone, its greasy contents smeared into the dirt. He didn’t care about that. When the shock had passed, he had recognized the woman, and had even known what she had been questioning him about: she was the mother of a pair of twins, nearly the youngest of all the Lazarene children who had been brought here with their parents. Toddlers, little more than a year old… but what had happened to them? Why had the woman been screaming and carrying on? There was no place in the asylum building where they could have strayed, where they wouldn’t have been found. Had someone taken them from her?

He looked up, aware of others watching him. In the windows above were the faces of the Lazarenes, the men peering out through the bars. He could just see, farther away, a few of the women held in the distant wing of the building.

They had seen what had happened, and now had turned their attention to him. He wondered if they, too, would demand an answer from him.

He stepped back into the doorway, where they could no longer see him. Then turned and ran into the building, toward the shelter of the darkroom.

The mystery of the woman and her vanished children deepened through the afternoon and into the evening. Pavli lay on the cot tucked into a corner of the storage area – that had been a benefit of his success with the photography, to have been moved here by himself. He could be put to work at any hour, without the need for one of the guards to go into the lightless dormitory to fetch him. He didn’t mind that, as it allowed him some privacy and the ability to hide his few small treasures where no one would be likely to find them. The angel’s photo was tucked in a niche behind the highest stack of crates; none of the guards had arms skinny as his, to reach into the narrow space.

From here, he could also hear the comings and goings of the guards and others, and listen in on scraps of their conversations as they passed by the darkroom’s door. Something had happened that had hushed them all to whispers. While Herr Doktor Ritter was away in Berlin… and it had to do with the crying woman’s babies. Pavli lay on his cot, eating a few scraps he had stolen from the kitchen, and wondered what the answer to the riddle might be.

Voices shouting outside woke him up. He could tell from the chill of the air that it was well past midnight. From the darkroom he crept into the hallway, where a window overlooked the graveled drive. He could see Herr Doktor Ritter, still wearing his black gloves and belted trench coat, gesturing angrily at the Scharfuhrer and the other guards behind him; the whole scene was caught in the bright angle of headlights from Ritter’s BMW cabriolet. Pavli listened carefully, keeping well to the side of the window so he wouldn’t be seen, but could make out only that Ritter was chewing out one of the guards, the next in rank behind the Scharfuhrer. The guard tried to give some kind of explanation, some reason as to why he had disobeyed one of Ritter’s orders, but finally fell silent, shrinking beneath the tongue-lashing. Ritter turned on his heel at last and got back into the cabriolet. Its engine growled through the night’s silence as it picked up speed through the gates and out onto the road leading back toward Berlin.

Pavli drew away from the window and returned to the darkroom. The scene in front of the asylum had seemed so strange, like a dream from which one wakes and can only partly remember. The glare from the cabriolet’s headlights had turned Ritter and the guards into ghostly figures, drained of color.