K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

Her hand darted back when the man beside her opened his eyes. He glanced at his own torso, then smiled gently at her. “It signifies my blood type,” he said. “That’s all. Everyone in the SS is marked that way. So if we fall in battle, the medics might assist us with no time lost.”

She said nothing, but drew back against the headboard and watched as he sat up.

“I should be going.” He swung his legs out of the bed, then walked across the room to the chair on which he’d laid his uniform. He held the black trousers up, brushing a wrinkle from them with the back of his hand.

“You’re very…” The sound of her own voice surprised her. She didn’t know what to say; she had almost said pretty, but she knew that was the wrong word. “Nice. I mean… you look good.”

He glanced over his shoulder, as if he had already forgotten, and now been reminded of her presence. The corner of his mouth lifted in amusement. “There is no such thing as ‘nice’ in the SS, Fraulein. There is only Harte.” Toughness, the unbreakable nature of stone.

“I’m sorry.” Marte pulled the blankets up to her chin.

“No need to be. You are a very sweet child. I shall always remember you.”

He wouldn’t. There was nothing to remember.

“I… I’ve seen you before.” The words came unbidden. “Your face.”

“Oh? Where would that have been?”

“In the newspaper. It had a picture of you.”

“ Ach -” He shook his head in annoyance. “That stupid business. Just grateful that it didn’t happen when I was in training camp at Bad Tolz. The others would have given me a rough time of it, with all that crap about being a hero of the Reich.”

“Are you?” Marte studied him. “A hero, I mean?”

“I killed somebody, in front of the right somebody else.” He didn’t look at her, but watched his own hands buttoning his shirt, from the bottom up. “In the Blood Purge. The Sturmabteilung leaders then were all perverts and conspirators; that’s why it was necessary for the SS to clean them out.” He finished the top button, then smoothed the front of the shirt flat with his hand. “There were others who did as much as I had, or more. But my commanding officer had Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler’s ear and told him all about me.” He shrugged. “That is how one becomes a hero.”

She watched him continue dressing, the uniform assembling upon him like dark armor. In the little mirror over the wash basin, his reflection attended to the last details, the straightening of the bright bits of insignia on his chest, the tight closure of the jacket’s collar. He didn’t see her watching him. There was no one there to see her. The eyes the mirror showed… the girl she’d seen in the mirror had had eyes like that. Not blank or empty – not any more – but sealed shut, to keep inside the things that had been placed by others in that hollow darkness.

Marte had long ago stopped wondering what was in the little dark rooms behind the mirror girl’s eyes. Even lying here, under sheets that smelled faintly of a man’s sweat, a man she had never seen before and would never see again. It was nothing that she – the she that hid and listened through the door of the tiniest dark room left inside her, listened to whispers and the distant arrivals and departures of men – nothing that she had to think about.

She wondered instead about what had been put inside him, this man all dressed in black again, with his tall shining boots. What had filled those dark empty spaces inside him? Until, like her, there was nothing left but that ghostlike skin, the thin mask of one’s face.

The black-uniformed man leaned down to brush a dust speck from his shining boots. He stood up and nodded to her. “I hope you will be happy and in good health, and bear a fine child for your country.”

They told him to say that. The way she had been told, by her father and then Frau Hegemann. To say the things they wanted others to hear. He turned his eyes away, so she could not catch another glimpse of what had been hidden there.

He couldn’t look at her. But he laid his hand softly upon hers. Not to comfort her, she knew, but himself.

For only a moment. Then he was gone, the door closed behind him, and the room was empty again. In the bed, clutching the sheets to herself, she felt it all around her, the silent emptiness of the room, nothing at all inside it.

Liesel awoke, step by dragging step, her head aching and her eyelids stitched with fire.

The dead weight of Heinrich pressed against her, his arm slung possessively across her breasts. He snored gurgling into the damp pillow.

Her tongue moved through a sour taste in her mouth. She looked with deep loathing at the body half on top of her own.

“Get off me -” She managed to get one arm free and slapped him across the side of his head. Then again with her balled fist, hard enough to bring his dazed face into blinking semiconsciousness. “Get off me, goddamn it!”

One of the Lebensborn nurses stuck her head inside the hostel director’s office. “ Frau Hegemann – you had best come to the maternity section.”

The nurse was overexcited; that was not the way her superior should be spoken to. But Frau Hegemann did not take the time to correct the nurse now. Without even hearing them, she had been aware of the whispers that had disturbed the hostel’s tranquil spaces. Whatever had caused such a commotion was more important than scolding an impertinent nurse. Frau Hegemann rose from her desk. “I shall be right there.”

In the newborns’ room, a senior nurse nodded to the hostel director. Surrounded by the rows of cradles, the nurse held one bundled infant in her arms. The squalling of the other small creatures, and their damp, sweetish smell, hung in the air.

“I thought you should see this, Frau Direktor.” The senior nurse pulled back the hood of the infant’s wrappings, exposing its pink, soft face. Its eyes screwed tight, one small hand fussing against its cheek.

Frau Hegemann was aware of a gaggle of the younger nurses at the room’s door, hushing each other and standing on tiptoe to try and see around her back. She knew that if she turned around and stamped her foot, they would all scatter like frightened geese.

Instead, she ignored them and reached out to touch the infant’s forehead. “There seems nothing wrong with this child.” She didn’t know which girl had been its mother; there had been several due about this time.

The nurse, with a thumb and forefinger, gently pulled open the infant’s eyelids. The pink skin reddened, the toothless mouth opening in protest.

Frau Hegemann saw then, what was the matter.

The infant’s left eye was the delicate blue of just-born creatures. And the other eye, as beautiful and perfect, a deep golden-brown.

Liesel already knew why Frau Hegemann wanted to talk to her. The talk had gone all around the Lebensborn hostel. Not just of what had happened, but what was going to be done about it. She knew, both by instinct and her sure awareness of her rightful place among all the girls, that she would be part of the answer.

She sat up in the bed, waiting for Frau Hegemann. The nurses had moved her into a private room. That was a dead giveaway, too: things were going to be spoken that were not meant to be overheard. She’d made sure that her own baby was brought in to her just before Frau Hegemann was to appear. So she could have the tiny boy she’d decided to name Siegfried – that seemed patriotic and martial enough – at her breast, the image of serene motherhood.

The door opened and the hostel director came in. She smiled at Liesel. “Everything is going well for you, I trust?”