K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

The blow had been enough to loosen the girl’s grasp; the nurse snatched the child away. The infant, pulled from its mother’s breast, wrinkled its face like a small clenched fist and emitted a thin, piping wail.

“No -” Marte clawed across Frau Hegemann’s shoulders and face, her outstretched hands trying to reach the nurse. The hostel director struck the girl again, a blow to her neck that sent her sprawling on the bed. She still tried to get past the hostel director, rearing up and struggling toward her child. “Give him back to me -”

A pair of younger nurses, summoned from outside the room, pinned the girl against the headboard. They could barely hold her as she struggled. Her disheveled hair tangled across her tear-streaked face. The scream that broke from her mouth echoed in the cry of the infant being carried down the hallway.

“You are a stupid creature.” Frau Hegemann, her jaw clenching in fury, stood at the side of the bed. “It’s for the best.” She slapped the weeping girl, then again, harder. “Don’t you understand? It’s for the best -”

The little mongrel bitch was leaving – Liesel watched with satisfaction as the car rolled toward the hostel’s gates. She let the curtain fall back into place. Frau Hegemann was sticking the other girl, the mother of the baby in Liesel’s arms, on a train back to Berlin. Where she could just slink back into the darkness where she belonged.

It had all gone to show that breeding – blood and racial purity – was indeed the most important thing. Liesel smiled to herself, thinking of how the bitch must have thought she’d won, taken the prize that so rightfully had belonged to Liesel and no one else. Only to have the invisible stain in her blood reveal that behind her pretty face was… what? Filth and corruption, or whatever the race of men, in their black shining uniforms and strutting boots, decided was there. That was all that mattered.

The baby, another woman’s child, started to fuss. Hungry – it was certainly a pink, healthy thing. Liesel gazed down at it, the crook of her arm already aching from the soft weight. Golden angel strands for hair, lighter than Liesel’s own – but then, weren’t most blond infants as fair as that? Nobody would be able to tell from the coloring that it wasn’t her own. A pity about the eyes – but no one would dare say anything about them, at least to her face; Liesel had already decided that.

She gave the child her breast, and it suckled greedily. A good strong baby, the offspring of a famous SS officer, a favorite of the Fuhrer – she would make sure the child would thrive and grow. In the world around her, there were already people making arrangements on her behalf, seeing to it that her needs were taken care of. That was how it should be.

In the cradle beside her bed, her own baby began to squall. It was a pretty little thing as well, if not quite so big as this one. And hungry, too.

“Be quiet -” She would get around to the other child, her own, all in good time. It could wait. She lowered her head and kissed the one in her arms, as its tiny hands kneaded her full breast.

The handle of the door was broken, the wood around the metal splintered, as though from the impact of heavy boots.

Marte pushed the door open, the topmost hinge wobbling, its screws wrenched partway from the frame. The light from the building’s hallway spilled into her parent’s flat.

Or what had been their flat. Empty now, at least of living things. The furniture was still there, her father’s chair overturned, books tumbled from the shelves, the pages spread like the wings of broken birds.

Behind her, she heard other doors opening, faces peering out through narrow slits. The tenants of the other flats now whispered to each other, watching her.

On the street outside the building, she thought she had seen the little man, her father’s forger, the creature to whom her father had entrusted all his secret planning. From the mouth of a dark alley, the little man had peered out at her, then scuttled away on his ceaseless errands.

He’ll tell them – Marte’s breath tightened in her throat. Part of her, the hollow spaces that began just inside her skin, didn’t care. Not any more. If they came and took her away, to the place her parents had been taken… it didn’t matter. She could step outside, and the silent men would come up to her and take her arms, one on either side, there would be a car they could hustle her into… and then she would be gone. Disappeared, like so many others. At last, even the little part of her that people could still see would be extinguished.

Now she wasn’t afraid. She set her suitcase on the floor, then turned and walked out of the flat, leaving the door open.

The street was empty. No one came up, no one spoke to her. She wondered if perhaps she had already disappeared, become the ghost of that girl who had looked out of the mirror at her, long ago.

“Look at those crows sitting up there.” Ernst von Behren lifted his gaze to the Romanische Cafe’s gallery, where the chess-players sat hunched over their boards. He gestured with a pudgy, well-manicured hand. The gaunt men did look like crows in their black overcoats, some of them still shiny from the rain that continued to drizzle past midnight. “They’ve always been up there. They always will be, I suppose.”

Gunther glanced up with his glittering doll’s eyes, so perfect and untrue, but didn’t say anything. Von Behren watched Gunther’s high-boned face radiating boredom and contempt, feeling his own heart, not breaking, but sighing under the hammer stroke of a familiar pain.

With his fingertips, he stroked the precisely shaped point of the beard on his own face, round and plump as a sad-eyed baby’s. He knew that he probably wouldn’t ever see Gunther again after this night, that Gunther would disappear wherever all the other handsome boys went. Gunther was sulking, not just because they had come here to the great cavernous Romanische instead of some dark cellar hole smelling of roach shit and candle wax, where Gunther could have turned his elegant profile to the trembling admiration of other brokenhearted men. But also because Ernst von Behren’s contacts at the UFA studios had proved ineffectual in getting Gunther cast in a film production, even in a nonspeaking role. Gunther was probably thinking now that there was little point in going to bed with him any longer.

Well, to hell with him then, thought von Behren as he sipped at the cold dregs of coffee left in the heavy porcelain cup. He at least didn’t feel any guilt over the matter; a face as handsome as Gunther’s should be kept off the Reich’s motion picture screens, as a public service. He’d be damned if he’d be responsible for unleashing that beauty upon all the poor silly Hausfrauen of Germany, just so they could weep into their pillows that their husbands weren’t the cruel god incarnate they had seen up on the motion picture screens.

He watched Gunther take a sip of mineral water. Gunther had never lacked for admirers. Back in the rowdy starving days that now seemed, in memory, like newsreels from another planet – Gunther had done his trolling on the Weidendammbrucke and the Tauentzienstra?e with the other women, the real along with the false. Not far from the Romanische in fact, just beyond the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche, that the night rain had darkened to a hulking stone beast. Von Behren could remember Gunther’s feral teenage face, with its slash of red lipstick and kohl-rimmed cat’s-eyes, chin brushing the ratty fur swathed around his neck, a spit-curled bob shining like black Japanese lacquer. The height of the glossy green-leather boots the Tauentzienstra?e girls wore indicated their sexual specializations, and Gunther had tottered around in ones that signaled an absolute willingness to do anything.