K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

This great film, the warping of reality to the vision unreeling inside Joseph’s head – she knew that was all that mattered to him now. And perhaps now there was no role in it for the Reichsminister ’s romantic infatuation. She would have to be eliminated, this illicit affair clashing with the hero’s public image he attempted to project.

There was only one way Joseph could do that. In this he was weak, that he couldn’t say goodbye to her, he couldn’t turn her away. He had stretched his hands halfway around the world, to gather her back to himself; there would be no way he could give her up with a few curt words. But other words could do it for him. The truth, when he could so easily have lied to her again, told her that her child was safe, here is another photograph of him, doesn’t he look happy? Joseph was a master of words; he had meant to let it slip out – I’m sure the child is all right – those words just enough to tell her, to tell her everything. And to let her hate him, to let that hate free at last. A hate that freed her from him.

Without her child, that small life, in his grasp, he no longer had any hold over her. With just those few words, he had told her as much.

He didn’t try to stop her as she pushed herself out of his arms. With his trench coat draped across his bare chest, he silently watched as she stood up to put her dress and undergarments back in order, then sat down on the edge of the dusty sofa to slip on her shoes.

“Marte… I’m sorry…”

She was at the door, her hand on the brass knob turned cold as ice by the winter that had invaded the empty building. She looked over her fur-wrapped shoulder at him.

That had been weakness, too, for him to have said anything now. To have spoken words that had no meaning.

She was not that weak now. She regarded him for a moment, then pulled the door open, stepped through, and closed it behind herself. Her footsteps echoed through the vacant corridors.

When she lifted her face from the ground, she saw the imprint her jaw and mouth had made in the trampled snow between the wagon tracks. Liesel touched her lips with her fingers; the snow where she knelt was muddied with the tramping of so many boots across it, and now the bright red of her blood released a wisp of steam before it froze into sharp-edged ice. Under the skies crumpling with clouds of dark silver, clouds heavy with more bone-chilling snow and sleet, the crystals looked like black diamond chips. For a moment, she wanted to scoop them up in her hand and hold them tight, as though she had discovered a treasure in this road’s slush-filled ruts.

“ Mutti -” A child’s voice whined close to her ear, like a buzzing summer insect. The heat that pulsed behind her brow and parched her tongue was fever, she knew. The blood that had frozen on the ground might not even have been from splitting her lip against a stone when she had tripped and fallen; she had been coughing for days now, and after every spell she had tasted hot wet salt on her tongue. “ Mutti, they’re leaving us -” Desperation rose in the child’s voice. “We have to catch up with them!”

Dizzy, she managed to get to her feet. The ice and dirty snow sifted from the heavy coat and the layers of clothing that shapelessly swaddled her body. A soldier had given her the coat to keep her warm on the long trek westward; she had gotten that much at least, and a share of the blackened and withered potatoes that he and his squadmates had with them, a few mouthfuls for herself and for the two little boys she had with her. All she’d had to do in return had been to go with each soldier out of reach of their little fire’s wavering light, open her legs or kneel before them, their grimy woolen gloves pressed hard against the sides of her head. The coat had belonged to the last of the soldiers, the one who hadn’t taken her for his few minutes in the darkness, the one who instead had lain down by the fire, knees drawn up and face ghastly pale, the one who’d died with a sudden burst of blood from his mouth and nose, his lungs giving way like rotted burlap sacks. He had come all the way from Russia, he had escaped when the German lines along the Dnieper had collapsed – and he had at least made it this far home. They had stripped the coat from his corpse and given it to Liesel, and had left him curled like a child beside the ashes of the fire.

The coat and the few bits of potato… it had been one of the better transactions she had engaged in recently. At least she had gotten something from it besides a fist across her mouth and a warning not to move.

Again the child’s voice, without words this time, just a keening note of anxiety as he tugged at her sleeve, trying to get her to stumble a few steps forward. She shook him away angrily; that was what had caused her to fall in the first place, the burden of the two children with which she had been saddled, the one little boy who could still walk, and the other, the useless one she had to carry. She’d held that one cradled against herself for mile after weary mile, her back aching with the weight that had seemed so little when she had started out, but had grown heavier and more leaden with each step. Her shoulder was numb from the pressure of the sling she’d improvised from torn strips of cloth, looping it between her son’s legs to take some of the load from her own arms.

Her son… where was he? She had stood up without him; the sling’s knot had broken, the ragged ends of cloth dangling against her stomach. The other little boy, the bastard Mischling she’d raised, scurried ahead a few steps, to the crest of the road; he hesitated there, torn between running after the others, the men and the women and the few other children slogging through the rutted mud with the wagons creaking before them, or staying with the only mother he had ever known. He squatted down on his haunches and chewed the knuckles of one hand, as though that could fill his hollowed belly; his eyes of two colors, china-blue and golden-brown, watched to see what she would do.

“There you are…” Her voice rasped painfully in her throat. Liesel had found her own true son a few feet away, lying on his side as though sleeping. The soldier whose coat she wore had lain just like that, knees toward chest, babyish, before he had died. She bent down, pulling aside the knitted muffler she had wrapped around the child’s face and throat. He was alive, his breath panting fast and shallow, his nostrils and the corners of his eyes crusted with phlegm. His face had turned white and transparent as rice paper, the only color a hectic spot of blood under his cheeks. “Yes, yes; there you are…” She crooned to him as she got her grip beneath his spine, raising him up; he flopped backward for a moment, then the small hands let go their fistfuls of frozen mud and grabbed her arm, clutching with the unconscious reflexes of a panicked animal.

A wave of light-headedness swept over her. Just the effort of picking up her son, who had dwindled down so small, like a fledgling bird that had fallen from its nest, had taxed the limits of her remaining strength. The fever wrapped a heated metal band around her head, blinding her. She could only feel the child slipping out of her fumbling hands.

“ Mutti… come on…” The other little boy, the Mischling , had returned, tugging at the thick fabric of the coat. He had been alarmed, no doubt, by how she swayed as she stood, but his pulling at her only made that worse. She slapped him, sending him sprawling, before he could topple her again. Through the black spots dancing before her eyes, she could see him skitter away on his hands and knees, getting out of reach of another blow or a kick from her. He crouched on his hands and knees, regarding her with the careful wariness that came with the experience filling the few short years of his life.