The Extra (8 page)

“Ola?
What’s that?”

“Spanish expression. They seem to say it a lot.
Ola
this,
ola
that! Just a good general all-purpose word.”

“Ola,”
Lilo repeated.

The bullhorn man was striding toward them. Was he going to give them brooms and order them to clean up as well? Lilo wondered. He stopped just short of where they were standing and looked the girls and women up and down.

“You! You! And you! And now for the fellows . . . that one over there and that one — can you hold an accordion?” He snapped his fingers at Django.

“Hold one? I can play!” Django said.

“All right, we dub in the music, but you can pretend! Look professional.”

“That’s me. I am the total professional!” Django brushed his shirt.

“Okay, my professional, over here!” Lilo had learned that this man was Hugo Lehner. He was one of the two men who had been at Maxglan with Fräulein Riefenstahl when she selected the prisoners.

“And the mother with baby. There’s one with a baby. Right?”

The woman whom Lilo had learned was named Mina stepped forward with her swaddled infant in a sling. The baby was mewling. Mina was so thin that Lilo couldn’t help but wonder how she could make enough milk for the child. Lehner walked over and pulled back the covers a bit. “Okay, good enough. Now your job is just to stand in the square near the well. That’s where all the women gather — to gossip, get water, you know.”

Mina nodded.

“The rest of you, wait over there until called.
Aufseher!”
He raised his hands and snapped his fingers. Two uniformed guards with pistols seemed to materialize out of nowhere.

“Escort the prisoners to the cage.”

“Just like Hollywood,” Lilo muttered to Rosa, another girl, who was about two years younger than she was.

In spite of not being a real village, it was nonetheless an amazing one. The real village, so to speak, the village of Krün, was next door. The cage that Lilo and the other extras were put into was near the tavern. It was more of a small corral than an actual cage. There was splitrail fencing with wire, not barbed, however, between the rails.

Lilo soon learned that there was a lot of waiting on a movie set. But for now it was exciting. She wished her mother had been brought to the set, but only fifteen had been required for the day’s shooting. An assistant director came up to the corral and swung open the gate. A woman accompanied him and began picking out half a dozen girls.

“Follow me!” She waved to them. Lilo and the five others fell in line behind her. The woman had a tape measure around her neck and led them to an area at the tavern that had been roped off and draped with a cloth. It was called the costume tent and was filled with racks of clothes. She began pulling blouses and skirts from the racks. “My God, they’re all so skinny. Anna, come over here. We have to start taking these in fast.”

“No fat ones, Bella?” a woman asked.

“Nah. These were the healthiest I could find. You know these are the street urchins. So we can’t use the older females.”

Lilo’s eyes widened as the woman called Anna walked up to them. She was virtually a human porcupine. Her mouth bristled with pins, and each of her wrists was encircled with a bracelet pincushion with at least one hundred pins stuck into it. On her head she wore a headband that was spiked with larger pins, mostly safety pins.

Lilo, Unku, and two other girls, Rosa and Blanca, had been given skirts and blouses that were many times too large for their thin frames. Anna and Bella, with two assistants, began to furiously sew the girls into their costumes. The stitching was not fine and tight but just basting reinforced with pins. “Just be careful how you sit,” one of the assistants said. It seemed to Lilo like a strange remark at first. Except for Good Matron, no one in any camp had told them to be careful about anything that had to do with their personal well-being. But then she realized it was not really their personal well-being that was the concern but the creation of the flawless nature of the unreal world of the film.

Lilo watched as Bella and Anna put their heads together and whispered off to the side as one of the assistants worked with Unku’s blouse. She found it slightly unnerving how they were looking at her so closely.

“Harald!” Bella called over to a man who was very finely dressed in riding britches. He was holding what Lilo would soon learn was the script of the film. He was tall and good-looking, and Lilo thought at first that he might be one of the actors. But she had learned that he was the assistant director and also the choreographer for Fräulein Riefenstahl’s dances. He leaned over and listened intently to the two women, then looked up and fixed his gaze on Unku. Lilo felt the sharp edge of fear, like a blade scraping inside her. Why were they looking at Unku that way? Was there some problem? What could Unku have done? The man named Harald turned and walked away with a shrug, then speaking over his shoulder, said, “Well, what can we do? Do we want them all ugly? We’ll see what Leni says.”

“Oh, she’ll say something,” Bella said with a laugh. She had a deep laugh like a man’s. Despite the laugh, there was something portentous in her words.

So far none of the extras had seen Leni since Maxglan. They had seen the door to her dressing room when they had come onto the set of the tavern. There was a sign,
L. RIEFENSTAHL, DIRECTOR
—
NO ADMITTANCE
. However, in the middle of the floor, where L. Riefenstahl was to dance, another woman stood in the multi-ruffled costume of a flamenco dancer.

It was strange because this woman simply stood there, and occasionally one of the cameramen would ask her to turn this way or that. As Lilo was pondering this, Django arrived.

“She’s what they call a stand-in,” he explained, “someone who is about the same height, size, and coloring as the main actor and whose job is to stand in the actor’s place while a shot is planned out and the lights and cameras are set up.”

“How do you know all this?”

But before Django could reply to Lilo’s question, another voice boomed, “Quiet, everybody. Quiet on the set, please. Fräulein Riefenstahl!”

“Hans! Hansy darling! You’re going to have to raise that boom higher just a bit for the dance. You know what I want for the opening shot in this scene.”

At first there was just the voice, and then out of the shadows swept a stunningly beautiful figure. She wore a long skirt with tiers of ruffles in contrasting shades of red. The blouse was a peasant style that laced up the bodice to a square neckline, and on her head she wore a mantilla. Lilo could tell it was not very good lace. Nevertheless, the entire effect was sensational. It was hard for her to believe that this was the same woman who had stepped prettily through the mud in Maxglan in her alligator boots. That woman, too, had been beautiful but not in this marvelously exotic way. No boots, no briefcase, no fine wool slacks now. She was dressed in the costume of a Spanish dancer.

The stand-in quickly receded into the shadows, and Fräulein Riefenstahl struck a pose under a beam of peach-colored light. “Steeper,” she called out. “I want steeper angles for both cameras. Not higher but steeper. Understand? And the lighting from below washes up — low lighting but luminous on the cheekbones.” She framed her cheek with her hands in a self-caressing gesture. “Then you get this! It’s that Gypsy light. That’s what I want — that Gypsy light, I call it. Got it, Alberto?”

“Yes!” a voice emanated from the darkness. Above, in the folds of shadows, a cameraman was riding on the boom.

“Music!” someone called out.

The music was from a recording, but a guitarist sat at the edge of the dance area, pretending to strum.

Lilo observed Django making a face as if to say, “You call that playing?”

Her mother had told her that Leni Riefenstahl began her career as a dancer. But there was something peculiar in the way she moved. Possibly it was the bad music. It seemed exaggerated, every movement a bit overdone, almost drastic, Lilo thought.

She lost track of the number of takes for the scene. Perhaps a dozen until they got it the way Fräulein Riefenstahl wanted it. At the finish, the extras were told to report to another station in the tavern that had been roped off. There were several chairs and some standing mirrors.

“This must be the makeup department,” Lilo whispered to Blanca. “If our mothers could see us now. Sinti girls getting rouged up like Roma tarts!” They both giggled.

Unku was already seated. The makeup technician was a round little woman whose dyed red hair was twisted into an elaborate knot that perched on top of her head like a miniature sultan’s turban. She was exclaiming over Unku’s complexion. “Skin like a Gypsy angel. That rose flush beneath the copper hue!
Mein Gott,
and those lashes. Hardly anything I need to do.”

“Tone her down, Janni!” Anna had just come up to the chair where Unku sat.

Then suddenly the man called Harald came up to Anna and she gave him a peck on the cheek. They put their heads together and whispered for a moment while looking at Lilo and the other girls who had been herded into makeup. Mostly they were younger prisoners, under twenty. The small boy who had stood next to Django in the line at Maxglan when Leni had first selected them as extras was there. He was no more than seven or eight and was dressed with a white apron tucked around his waist. He was to be a waiter in the tavern. Leni asked for a tray and a jug of wine and made her way toward him.

“
Liebling,
what’s your name?”

“Otto,” the boy replied.

“Otto? It doesn’t sound like a Gypsy name.”

“Neither does Martha,” the man named Harald said. “You know what Arnold thinks.”

“I don’t give a goddamn what Arnold thinks. He’s not here. I fired him.”

Django had made his way to Lilo’s side. “Martha is the name of the Spanish dancer in the script,” he whispered.

“How do you know?” Lilo asked, and once again, for perhaps the one hundredth time since she had first met Django, wondered how he acquired such massive amounts of information when the rest of them knew nothing.

“I’ll tell you later.”

“And who’s Arnold?”

“Arnold Fanck — the most famous director in Germany . . . well, almost, after von Sternberg —
Blue Angel,
you know, Marlene Dietrich.”

“Yes, I know about
The Blue Angel,
but this Arnold, why did she fire him?”

Django shrugged. “Who’s to know? But she really hates him. I heard some of the crew talking about it.”

Django moved off to where the boy extras were being assembled. He was barefoot, dressed in rags, and his legs were covered with soot. It wasn’t quite the costume he had envisioned. What Lilo was wearing was clean but had been artistically ripped, and smudges of dirt had been applied to her cheeks.

Now Leni, after giving Otto a lesson on how to carry a tray with a wine bottle, was making her way toward Lilo and the other girls. She smiled. Although she was breathtakingly gorgeous, Lilo found something alarming about her beauty. Then after perhaps a minute of watching her talk, she realized it was those close-set eyes. They suffused the beauty of her face with a feral light. Lilo could imagine her sniffing — sniffing out prey with that sharp nose. It was not hard to visualize the nostrils quivering as she picked up a new scent. There was something brutal about her face. She had heard that some Nazis claimed they could smell the inferior races — Jews or Gypsies or Negroes. Was she one who thought she could do that?

Fräulein Riefenstahl addressed the girls now, the street urchins. “My darlings, you must all call me Tante Leni. We are going to have so much fun.” The words sent a shiver through Lilo.
I don’t want to have fun with this woman,
she thought. Fräulein Riefenstahl dipped her hand into a pocket. “I have brought some chocolate for each of you.” She began distributing candies wrapped in silver and gold foil.

Lilo thought now not of the gingerbread man but of the gingerbread house, deep in the dark woods, and of the old crone who lured Hansel and Gretel inside with palmfuls of candy.

“Chocolate!” Blanca sighed. Chocolate was an ancient, nay, an almost prehistoric, memory for all of them.

Fräulein Riefenstahl moved down the line of street urchins, offering them the foil-wrapped candy.

“Go on. Take it,
Liebling,
” she said when Lilo hesitated, merely staring at the extended palm. It was as if her own hand had frozen by her side.

“Don’t like chocolate?” Lilo said nothing. “Come on!” An impatient rasp edged her voice.
If I take it, I die.
That was all Lilo could think. Was it like the candy house that had lured Hansel and Gretel?

“We gotta stubborn one here?” The elegant woman steeped in ruffles suddenly seemed quite vulgar. Lilo reached out and took the chocolate. The brutal eyes drew a bead on her, and Lilo felt as if she were caught in the thin crosshairs of a rifle’s sights. “That’s a nice girl,” Leni said, and reached out and lightly touched Lilo’s cheek. In that split second, Lilo felt as if she had been branded.
God, never let her touch my skin again.

Lilo stared at the chocolate. It had been so long! Suddenly she could hardly resist tearing the foil right off.
But I must eat only half. Can I eat only half? And save the other for Mama?
But if she ate it, what did it mean? What kind of devil had she and the other children struck a bargain with? How had Lilo and her mother ever even in jest said that this was her father’s girlfriend? If only her father could see this woman up close as she had, he would know . . .
Know what?
Lilo thought. Know that she was a predator and was feared as much as any wolf.

She had moved on, and Lilo felt only relief.

“Who’s this?” It was like a razor strop cutting the air. Lilo jerked her attention from the golden-foil-wrapped nugget. Leni was standing before Unku. Even though Unku was dressed in rags and had streaks of dirt on her face, her beauty shined through.

An assistant with a clipboard rushed over and shuffled through papers. “Uh, this is, let’s see . . . this is Unku Graff.”