K Jeter: The Kingdom of Shadows

She couldn’t look at the older woman. A sudden panic had gripped her, but it had eased now, leaving a dead feeling inside her. She didn’t even know why she had been afraid. Nothing had happened that her father hadn’t told her about. Even what was to come, the lying with a man – he had described how it would be. That wasn’t what she was scared of.

“I… I’ll be down in just a few minutes.” Her throat felt tight when she swallowed. “I just need… to get ready.” Marte knew her eyes had reddened from crying.

“Very well.” Frau Hegemann drew her hand away and touched the sparse lace at her own throat, the only adornment to the high-collared, monastic grey dress that was the uniform of her Lebensborn service. “Don’t take too long.”

Marte splashed cold water from the wash basin onto her face. She looked up and gazed into the eyes of the girl held in the mirror.

Not the lying with a man… the presence of him, opening and consuming her… that meant nothing. If there had been a part of her afraid of that, the smallest child inside her, then it had disappeared long ago.

She rubbed her face with the coarse towel. Her skin felt raw and hot as she looked again into her own eyes.

His eyes… She knew that was what she feared. When he looks at me… What would he see there? A man whose face she did not even know yet, but whose hard laughter she had already heard through the room’s window, the big voices of him and the others like him, touching her ear as their boots had crunched the gravel of the building’s front drive. She had even opened her door a crack and listened, past the other girls’ excited whispers; she’d heard the SS officers’ voices right here inside the hostel as Frau Hegemann had welcomed them downstairs.

They were real, they existed. Even those ghost parts, voices with words she couldn’t make out, were more real than her. What if a man turned toward her and saw… nothing? She would be the ghost, the pink and white of her skin turned to glass, to air, to nothing at all…

Stop it. A voice spoke inside her head, but she couldn’t tell it was her own. The girl in the mirror stood very still and quiet, as though waiting.

A strand of her white-gold hair had come astray. With the tip of her finger, she tucked it back behind her ear. She felt that touch, her own hand against her skin. At least that much was real.

A radio played in the big reception room, a nice-sounding cabinet model, not a cheap tinny Volksempfanger. Someone had actually been able to tune in a broadcast of American-style jazz; though that music was frowned upon in the Reich beyond the Lebensborn ’s walls, here even Frau Hegemann smiled and admitted that it made for a festive atmosphere. More than festive – everyone knew the scientific facts that Negro music helped one forget inhibitions and stirred the blood in one’s loins. And that was just what was called for.

A bar had been set up at one end of the room. Supposedly, only Apfelsanft and other fruit juices were to have been served, especially to the girls, but several bottles of schnapps had been smuggled in by the hostel’s gardener. Frau Hegemann had turned a blind eye to that. The alcohol helped some of the girls get over their nervousness at talking to men they had never met before. Some of the men had that problem, too; the hostel director always knew which ones they were, because their buddies helped out by getting them half-drunk before they arrived.

Liesel had been glad to see that Obersturmfuhrer Dietrich Stoehr – the evening’s star, the handsome-enough face that she and the other girls had seen in the papers – was not one of those, the nervous type who needed to be well-lubricated before they could approach a girl. Funny to think that some of these hardened warriors, the new elite of the Reich, could be frightened of a soft voice and smile. They did look impressive, though, in their black dress uniforms, the mirrorlike gloss of their polished boots, the detailed insignia across their chests. Even their necks, held tall and straight by the uniforms’ collars, the double lightning strokes bright at their throats – this was what a man was supposed to be, hard and splendid, darkly so.

And a woman? What was she supposed to be? Liesel smiled. There was no doubt about that in her mind, either.

Some of the girls had managed to get dancing partners, laughing and tugging even a couple of the most awkward SS men onto the floor, near the lively blare of the radio. Stronger than the jazz music, filling the room, was the light mingled scent of the perfumes with which the girls had daubed themselves, overlaid with a shivering musk that could not even be smelled, but hung suspended in air between one warm body and another. Even the crazy one who had arrived a few days ago – she had fastened herself onto a grinning Sturmscharfuhrer, her hands clasped around his neck to pull him even closer to her fervent gaze.

Liesel crossed the reception room, laughing when she squeezed past a group or a couple, knowing that for a moment each man’s head would turn, his gaze following her, until the girl standing before him would be able to draw him back.

Obersturmfuhrer Stoehr stood alone, at the door closest to the hostel’s front lobby. With his gloves folded in his hands, he watched the activities of his comrades, their capture by the females appointed to them; he looked slightly bored, but patient, as if awaiting further orders from his commanding officers.

None of the other girls had tried to latch onto him. They had kept in mind Liesel’s right to this prize, and the possibility of her wrath.

She came right up and took his arm. “Is it really so dull here?” Liesel took Obersturmfuhrer Stoehr’s arm with both hands, turning her smile up to his gaze. He seemed even younger than he had in the photographs in the Allgemeiner Zeitung. A broad face, heavy-jawed but not too much so. Handsome, or at least handsome enough. “You look as if you were about to fall asleep.”

He nodded at her. “It is very pleasant here.” His words were clipped and precise. “But it is not a world to which I am accustomed.”

“I’m sure you could get used to it.” His manner was distant and somewhat sad, but Liesel knew she could change that. She tugged him toward the music and the other couples. “If you try.”

That was part of her strategy. To not talk too much – the stern eagle look in his eyes, that she had been able to discern in the grainy pictures, had told her that he was a man who would despise prattle. But that other language, that spoke without words… there was no man who didn’t listen to that.

In the midst of the dancing couples, she pressed herself against him. He had apparently been trained well enough that he raised one of her hands in his, his other arm encircling her waist. She knew that the white length of her throat and the upper part of her bosom looked appealing when she tilted her head back. His cold gaze fell toward hers…

The music stopped, replaced by the braying voice of the radio announcer. Liesel had hardly had time enough to take a few shuffling steps with the Obersturmfuhrer. He stepped back from her, snapping off a slight, formal bow. “That was all too brief, Fraulein.” He straightened up, his spine iron again. “Perhaps later this evening, we’ll try again.”

“Wait -” She reached toward him, but was jostled away by the laughing, talking couples heading for the makeshift bar or the folding doors that led out onto the hostel’s gardens. He was gone before she could even touch his sleeve.

“Forget about him.” A man’s voice spoke right at Liesel’s ear, startling her. She turned and saw a broad face flushed with alcohol, a big grin reeking of the same. “He’s got his thumb up his ass so far, he has to open his mouth to sieg Heil.” The cuffs of the man’s black uniform were damp, slopped over from the two full glasses he was carrying. “Here -” He forced one glass into her hands. “Drink up.”