K Jeter: The Kingdom of Shadows

Marte pushed her suitcase farther back on the leather webbing of the shelf above the seats. When she sat back down, she saw that the seat across from her had been taken by a girl her age, with blond hair only a little darker than her own, pulled back into a thick braid.

As the train moved away from the platform, the girl turned a level, unblinking gaze over the faces near her. The girl’s eyes caught Marte’s for a few seconds, and she felt a chill touch the base of her throat as one corner of the girl’s mouth lifted in a knowing smile.

The train’s swaying motion rocked Marte’s head against the seat back. In her skirt pocket was the ticket her father had bought her; she reached in and closed her hand around it.

Across from her, the other girl sat up straighter, her nostrils flared. “I am going to the Lebensborn hostel in Steinhoring,” she announced in a loud, clear voice. She smiled in triumph, her hands gripping the edge of the seat. From the corner of her eye, Marte could see the other passengers turning their startled attention toward the girl; at the end of the carriage, the men broke off their talking.

The girl’s voice was now a shout. “There, I will have myself impregnated by an officer of the SS, the flower of German manhood, so that I may present our Fuhrer with the child of my flesh.” She looked across the blank faces with the piercing vision of an eagle suspended in the cold, thin air above mountain peaks.

Silence filled the carriage, broken only by the clattering of the iron wheels on the tracks.

Marte felt the narrow space twisting about her, as if she had gone mad, that there was no girl sitting opposite her. That it had been she who had cried out, so that all could hear.

The newspapers rustled again, and conversations resumed, the well-dressed women speaking in softer voices than before, leaning toward each other and glancing across the aisle. One of the soldiers laughed at something whispered to him.

The girl had turned her steel gaze to the window, as though willing distance to vanish, for the train to have already arrived at its destination.

It could have been me. Marte tried not to think; to vanish instead, to become nothing from inside out. But she couldn’t. I could have shouted that.

Her fingers touched the edges of the ticket. The destination printed on it was Steinhoring.

“ Ganz verruckt.” Liesel looked over the new arrivals. “That one there is completely crazy.”

The hostel director’s car had returned from the train station. From an upstairs window, Liesel and Trudi watched the driver unloading the few bits of luggage. The shadow of the SS black flag danced over the white, pebbly gravel.

They could see Frau Hegemann giving the two new girls her welcoming speech. The words duty and honor figured in the spiel at least three times. Liesel had thought Frau Hegemann was a bit cracked, too, when she had looked into the woman’s eyes. Some of these old bats’ knees trembled every time they thought about the Fuhrer.

That same crazed spark was in the eyes of one of the girls below. It was a look that swept away the whole world. Even the girl that carried around those burning eyes no longer really existed, except for a womb committed to the greater glory of the Reich.

“You’re right.” Trudi giggled. “When her time’s come, she’ll probably go marching into the delivery room.”

Liesel snorted in disgust. “Who could get it up for somebody like that? Even SS officers are men, just like other men.”

“Are they?” Trudi peered at her. “How do you know? They’re supposed to be different.”

“‘Different.’” She shook her head. “They all get hard and stupid when they see a pretty woman. That’s what they all want to stick their kleinen Manner into, not some silly bitch who’ll be singing the Horst Wessel Lied when she should be bouncing her tail up and down.” What men wanted, she knew, was herself; they wanted her golden hair spilling into their faces as her breasts moved against their sweating torsos. She was the best-looking girl in the Lebensborn hostel; none of the others could really compare to her. Trudi and all the other girls would have to settle for whatever men Liesel had rejected as being unworthy of the gift of her body.

The summer before, when her breasts had grown so much, so that she could cup them in her hands when she stood stripped to the waist in front of her dresser’s tiny mirror, her hands no longer her own but the grasp of a man whose face she had not yet imagined – then she was sure of her beauty and the power that came with it. The cold part inside her head, that never slept in its calculations, knew what it was worth; it could get her all she deserved.

Others saw how beautiful she had become. A Party photographer came out and took her picture, and it appeared on the cover of Das Deutsche Madel, the official journal for all BDM girls. The words inside had described her as the perfect Germanic girl, the model for all others to aspire to. She had been annoyed that they hadn’t given her name, but even so, all the other girls in her Bund chapter had known who it was.

That was when the news about the Lebensborn came, first whispered from one girl to another, then confirmed by the older women who were the BDM leaders. Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler’s marvelous idea, to create a way in which every German girl of good Aryan breeding could present to her Fuhrer the greatest possible gift, a new life, a child that would be part of the future race of heroes. Without worrying about the old world’s outmoded notions of marriage and sexual morality, and with the seed of those whose German blood ran purest, who had proved themselves worthy to father the elite of the world to come.

She had been told that there would be no tie between her and whatever SS officer might choose her to bear his child; the Lebensborn program was not in the business of fostering petty emotional dependencies. Liesel was only eighteen, and she already knew that things did not work that way, or if they did, they could be made to work another way. Her way…

“The other one’s not so bad.” Trudi brought her nose right up against the window glass. “She’s kind of pretty.”

Liesel looked down at the other girl who had gotten out of the car. She stood waiting demurely to take her suitcase from the driver’s hand, only to have him shake his head and tell her that he would carry all the luggage inside.

She’s not used to that, thought Liesel, watching. To having people do things for her. She hadn’t been either, when she’d first arrived at the Lebensborn hostel, but it had only taken her a second to know that it was what was owed to her.

“She’s all right, I suppose.” Liesel drew back from the window. “In a cheap kind of way.”

This latest arrival might be a problem, if she had any idea of how pretty she really was, and if she put on airs about it. Then Liesel would have to smile and be nice to her, until there was the perfect chance to put her in her place.

She would have to be careful. It annoyed her to have to think about these things, but she already had plans made, and there wasn’t room for a competitor in them. No one would spoil that shining future she saw ahead.

“Marte -” The hostel director appeared in the doorway. “I’m very disappointed in you. You must come down now and join the others.”

She lifted her face from the dampened pillow. One hand, in a child’s reflex, smeared the wetness on her cheek. “Yes…” She nodded slowly, pushing herself upright. “I’m sorry.”

Frau Hegemann’s expression softened, as much as the sharp, over-prominent bones of her narrow face would allow. She came into the small room and stood beside the bed. “Don’t worry so, mein Kind.” She reached out and smoothed Marte’s hair. “It won’t be so bad. There is nothing unendurable for a girl of your good stock.”