K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

“You’re so lovely,” he murmured at her ear. “That hasn’t changed… that never changes…”

She knew that was true; she could see it in the mirror of his gaze. It must be true; she wouldn’t exist otherwise. If her beauty had died, she would only have been the ghost of that woman she had seen in Joseph’s and David’s eyes, and up on the radiant screen in the darkened theaters.

He pressed her down against the cushions, his other hand having drawn up the hem of her dress, his palm and trembling fingers curved against the bare skin above the top of her stocking.

“Always…”

She didn’t know what he meant when he said that. Inside herself, in a little room behind her closed eyelids, she waited until it would be all over. Over for that other woman, the one with Marte Helle’s face.

Afterward, Joseph drew his trench coat, that he had unbelted and discarded on the floor, over them like a blanket. He held her close, the disarray of her dress and his uniform crushed between them. The winter chill in the ruined office had made it impossible for him to have her naked, as was his usual preference.

In that, he was like David, or perhaps like all men – she didn’t know. And in another way, the darkening of his mood when it was over, as though some bright and still-living part of him had died.

“How many more times,” murmured Joseph. “For us… to be like this.” He smiled sadly as he brushed a lock of her hair away from where it had fallen across her eyes. “Perhaps… perhaps this is the last time.”

He had said that before – his taste for the dramatic, the gestures and words of tragedies – but now Marte wondered if it might have become true. There was so little time left; everyone knew that. For the war, for everyone here in Berlin.

There was a question she had to ask him, the same one as before, the one she always asked afterward. She let that happen, she waited in the little room inside herself until it was all over, and she could have what she wanted. An answer.

“Where is my son?” She laid the side of her head against his chest, a pillow of stone. Careful to avoid letting him look into her eyes, to see anything there. Her voice as well; she had learned so much about being an actress from von Behren, about hiding things rather than showing them. “My baby…”

She had received different answers to that question before, some more satisfying than others. Sometimes Joseph had had photographs, rushed-looking blurry ones or those that had been carefully posed, all of them showing the same little boy, her child. There had even been one, a studio shot, with him in miniature Alpine lederhosen, white stockings drawn to below his knees, his face bright and laughing at whatever funny business the photographer had used to catch his attention; Joseph had had it enlarged and mounted in a frame bright with gold leaf, and had urged her to take it as a gift. But she wouldn’t; she had known it would have broken her heart every time she had taken it out of some secret place and looked at it.

Joseph stroked her hair. “I’m sure the child is all right -”

His soft words made her stiffen in his arms. She pushed herself away so she could look into his face. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing; nothing at all, my love.” His voice became even more soothing. “There’s nothing to worry about -”

“Something’s happened to him.” It would have been so easy for Joseph to lie to her, to lie completely, to have spoken the same words he had used so many times before. But there was a reason for every word from his mouth; he must have wanted her to catch the thread of doubt in these. “Where is he?” The winter air from the empty window-frames chilled her skin as she raised herself against the back of the sofa. “Where’s my son?”

Joseph shook his head. “You must remember, Marte, that we are in wartime. The Reich is pressed from all sides by its enemies. The Bolshevik hordes march in from the east…” His voice had risen, as though he had been addressing a rally or the microphone of one of his radio broadcasts. “You must understand; until we have turned the tide, until that victory is ours – and it will be – and we can sweep the interlopers from our soil… until then, there is confusion and disorder. You know how the refugees have come streaming into this city… my city; you’ve seen them. Where did you think they came from?” Shrill now, even a little angry, as though he were chiding her for her foolishness. “They are the lucky ones, those who managed to get away with their few scraps of belongings, their suitcases and their handcarts, all that they could manage to carry away with them – and sometimes not even that, nothing more than their empty hands and bellies. They ran from the animals in their tanks and heavy boots, Asiatic beasts…” Joseph’s lip curled in disgust. “And some were not so fortunate; some waited too long to gather their things and flee. The women make their way here with the blood still running down their legs, their white breasts clawed by black fingernails, their eyes still vacant from the sight of their husbands and brothers killed for attempting to protect them, and what happened to them after their murderers stepped over those corpses.” He nodded, his own eyes grim-set. “So be it; I will take them in and care for them, and soon there will be revenge for such violations. But in the meantime…”

She had heard those stories before, the sexual appetites of the Russian soldiers. That was what women spoke of, in the shelters during the air raids, as if to make welcome a direct hit from a bomb, one that end their lives in quick fury, before the rape-mad armies could enter the city. She had paid little attention; none of it mattered to her. It was all like the recounting of another person’s dream, news from a world barely connected to this one. But now…

“That’s where he is, then.” Her voice sounded hollow, lifeless, even inside herself. “That’s what has happened to my baby. Left behind, forgotten…” Abandoned. Snow drifted across the glass teeth set in the jaws of the window-frames. All this world was in winter, from which it could never awaken.

“No, no; you’re wrong.” Joseph held her by the shoulders, a doll limp in his hands. “She’ll bring him here. The one to whom he was given – she’s strong. Stronger… stronger than you.” He said the last in a whisper. “You’ll see. She’ll take care of your child. She’s devoted to him, she always has been, from the beginning; she loves him as though he were her own child. Your little boy’s safe with her, wherever she is. Tomorrow, or the next day – soon – she’ll be here with him. There are still divisions of the German army in those regions to the east; their duty is to protect the civilian population and see that they reach sanctuary as quickly as possible. They’ll arrive here in Berlin safe and sound, and -” His voice rose, trying to instill his own excitement into her. “You’ll be able to see him! Not just a photograph, but a child you can hold in your arms! She’ll give him back to you… her task will have been completed…”

You liar. She hated him now, knew that she had always hated him. For lying to her, for telling her the truth, for any word that came from his thin-lipped serpent’s mouth. He had wanted her to know that her child was lost, that the war had broken over him like an ocean wave, the tide that now was flooding this little island’s shores; a wave red as blood, that had dragged her child out into the depths to drown. Perhaps it had happened already, weeks or months ago – why would Joseph tell her now? To crack open whatever was left of her heart, to kill her…

To say goodbye to her.

To say goodbye to everything; he knew, he had read the last pages of the filmscript, the one he himself had written, the one for which he had cast the Fuhrer as the leading man. Though that was a star that had flickered and gone out, run to ground in a concrete hole beneath the Chancellery’s rubble-strewn garden, a sick and aging little man pushing imaginary armies across tattered maps; Joseph had told her what had become of him. Now, in the midst of the burnt or crumbling stage-scenery of Berlin, Joseph was himself the star; he was the only one of the Nazi hierarchy to show his face in the battered streets of the city, going from one bomb site to another, the center of the crowds pressing close to him, the ones who had always adored him and the grumblers who now had to confess they admired his strange and persistent courage… or craziness, whatever one wanted to call it. The smoldering ruins suited him; they were sufficiently dramatic. Most of the other bigwigs had fled, looking for safety in the west; when the end came, they would rather fall into the hands of the Americans than the Russians. Only a few had gone underground with the Fuhrer. Joseph’s cast had failed him, abandoned their roles, even the one for whom he written the grandest, most heroic part. To save the production, as Marte had heard von Behren and the others mirthlessly joking at the studio, Joseph now had to play everything himself. He was enough of an egotist to do that. The final scenes could now be shot, with no camera but the human eye, here in the streets of Berlin.