The Kingdom of Shadows (28 page)

Matthi had come to him before dawn. As Pavli had lain on the cot in the darkroom, he had heard his name whispered. He had opened his eyes as best he could – the left one was swollen nearly shut from the beating – then winced when Matthi had touched his brow. “I’m sorry,” Matthi had said. “I couldn’t stop them.”

It didn’t matter. Pavli had wondered if he were dreaming – how had his brother gotten out of the Lazarene dormitory? Then he had seen, through the darkroom’s open doorway, one of the guards nervously keeping watch down the corridor. Several of the SS men had begun doing such little services for their captives, currying favor with those who might soon be their accusers.

“You’ll be all right.” Kneeling beside the cot, Matthi had drawn the thin blanket under Pavli’s chin. “Just rest.” He had leaned closer, his voice soft and urgent. “Listen. It won’t be much longer. It can’t be. Things are happening, great things – out there.” He hand nodded toward the corridor’s window. The hard, cold moonlight of winter slipped through the bars. “Then it will be all over.”

Pavli sat close to the edge of Ritter’s desk, his hand upon an empty glass, and remembered what his brother had whispered to him in that night. How strange, that his brother still believed that time could move again. That it had not been killed, taken apart by the doctor’s scalpel, the same as those who had slept in the now-empty beds.

His brother’s voice had touched his ear. “You must hold out just a little while longer. The Americans or the British or the Russians – one of those will reach here soon, and then the war will be over for us. We’ll be free.”

Silly Matthi – Pavli smiled to himself. Matthi believed the things that happened in that world beyond the barbed-wire fence – the armies whose advance was noted on the guards’ hidden radio – all that could somehow come inside this little world. How could they? Those things happened in time, and here there was no time.

“We must survive . . .” His brother’s whisper, even softer in his memory. “Soon . . . any day now . . . it’ll be all over. And we’ll still be alive. Pavli . . .” A hand had prodded the shoulder beneath the blankets. “Do you hear me?”

Yes
 . . . He hunched forward in the chair by Ritter’s desk, listening. “Yes . . .” He had turned his bloodied head upon the cot, his cheek against his brother’s palm.

“You must do whatever it takes,” had said Matthi. “To survive. You understand that, don’t you? The others . . . they’ll understand someday. There’s so few of us left now . . .”

Perhaps there would be only the two of them left, at the end. After all the others, the Lazarene men, the women and the children, after they all had been brought, one by one, up to the surgery. And after what was left of them had been taken away. After the red things in the forest pit had been set alight and the black smoke had spread across the sky. Ritter knew that Pavli and Matthi were brothers, the closest possible blood; he knew all things like that, they were written down in another one of his black-bound notebooks. Perhaps that would be Pavli’s reward for his faithful service to Ritter, for his working with the cameras in the surgery and later with the film in the darkroom. Ritter would spare Pavli’s brother, and the two of them, he and Matthi, would walk out the gate of the fences topped with barbed wire. That would be in the spring that would follow this endless winter. When time stepped across the land again . . .

“There is no time.”

The remembrance of Pavli’s brother whispering to him in the night now slipped away, the same as Matthi stepping back into the darkness and returning to the Lazarene dormitory. Pavli raised his head and gazed at the man on the other side of the desk. The doctor had drunk too much and it hadn’t helped.

“No time,” mumbled Ritter again. His face seemed even older and more leaden. “No time to waste . . . if we are going to find out . . . everything . . .”

You poor fool
, thought Pavli. The doctor still didn’t understand, didn’t realize how mired in non-time he was. Months ago – or had it been years? – Pavli had pried open the last crate that had been delivered to the darkroom and had found, not cartons and reels of blank film, ready to be used, but rubble and bricks wrapped in crumpled newspapers. He’d examined the crate more closely and had seen the marks of where it had been opened and re-nailed, the contents looted somewhere between the Agfa factory and the asylum. The black market in the cities devoured everything. That had presented Pavli with a dilemma: what use would Ritter have for a photographer with an empty camera?

“No time . . .”

For the last two months, long after his stock of film had been exhausted, Pavli had gone on recording the sessions in the surgical laboratory – or pretending to; first with no film for the stills, then none in the chattering cine camera. Pavli had offered up for Ritter’s inspection prints made from old negatives, segments of film that had been made at the beginning of the doctor’s research. The dissection of one corpse looked much like another; Pavli varied the old photographs and reels of film he showed to the doctor, being careful to match the pictures of a previous male subject to the latest one, and female to female, one child to another of roughly the same age. Ritter had suspected nothing – by now his obsessions had locked around him. He gave only a cursory glance to Pavli’s work, late at night in this office, then returned to the collection of skins, each with the Lazarene tattoos at the wrists and along the larger thoracic sections. The empty human forms floated in their basins of preserving chemicals or, the process completed, lay folded like strange, pale banners in the surgery’s neatly labelled cabinets. Only Ritter’s loving touch gave them any life, as he lifted the thin tissues closer to his gaze.

He didn’t know; Pavli felt sorry for him. Time and its ghosts had escaped from the doctor. Leaving him with the dead, that could not be brought to life again. No Christ would reach his hand down into the burning grave. Ritter would cut, the scalpel lifting the skin on its narrow blade, and it would be the same corpse before him, over and over, this world without end . . .

“Yes . . .” Pavli nodded slowly, feeling how old and tired he himself had become. A thread of dawn light had appeared at the window, like an incision. “Yes, you’re right,
Herr Doktor
.” Ritter had fallen asleep at last, the lecture over, except perhaps in his muddled dreaming; he’d lain his head on his arm upon the desk.

“You’re right . . .” Pavli reached down and picked up the empty bottle, setting it where Ritter wouldn’t trip over it when he awoke. “There is no time.”

NINETEEN

“Where is she?”

The assistant director looked over his shoulder at von Behren. “I don’t know.” He had his right arm in a sling, a casualty of last night’s bombing raid on the city. With an awkwardly balanced clipboard and the messy pile of the shooting script, he was trying to inventory the damage to the studio, which sets had been damaged and which were still intact enough to be filmed around. “No one’s seen her since we left the shelter.”

Von Behren spine bent beneath the tonnage of his worries. His nerves were still on edge from the hours of darkness, crouched like a rabbit in a hole while the earth shuddered with concussive blows. Concrete dust had sifted down from the cracks spreading through the shelter’s arched ceiling. The smell of human sweat in a closed space, a sputtering paraffin lamp that had been lit when the bare overhead bulbs had dimmed and finally gone out, a woman – not one of his actresses, thank God – who had gone hysterical in the brief interval of darkness, her half-drunken husband ineffectually soothing her, screams turning at last to a muffled sobbing . . . and all the while, listening to a giant walking the empty streets above them, each bomb impact a footstep that leveled a building. The giant had stridden off to the east, the night bombers completing their pass and wheeling over empty countryside, away from the flak guns, to head back to their home bases. One of the worst raids so far – von Behren, his crew and actors, had emerged from their hole in the ground, half-expecting to see nothing but rubble in all directions.

He was grateful that the studio with his sets had taken only an indirect hit. The banks of skylights had all been shattered, a layer of broken glass sparkling across the floors and props. The carpenters had worked all morning covering the empty frames overhead with thin canvas; it gave the interior of the studio a muted yellowish light that reminded him of the age-browned pages of the book of old folk tales sitting on his desk. Perhaps it would show up well on film, softening the edges of the captured images; he had asked one of the cameramen to set up for a test reel. The most important thing would be how Marte would look. Only when he had sent instructions for her to be made up and laced into the period medieval costume had he found out that she was missing. Again.

“Send someone out to find her.” Von Behren looked across the sound stages and the hum of activity they held, push brooms sweeping up the last of the debris, the set painters mending a backdrop that had fallen and snagged on a brace of floodlights. “I suspect we’ll have a few hours of quiet before the Americans come overhead.” That was the schedule by which everyone in Berlin lived now: the British bombers concealed in darkness, the Americans flying brazenly by daylight. As winter began slowly unlocking into a damp spring, the pounding of the city had become such a regular occurrence that any respite, a day when the sirens didn’t herald the planes’ approach, seemed more agonizing than an actual raid, nerves tightening in anticipation. “Perhaps we can get something on film before we all have to scurry away into that wretched burrow.”

“Of course.” The assistant director raised an eyebrow. “And where should we have someone look for
Fraulein
Helle?”

The other’s smile annoyed von Behren. “Please. The usual places – all right?” On top of his other burdens, he didn’t need all these arch, knowing comments. “If you’re not aware of them by now, I’m sure we can find someone on the crew who is.” Any of them, as a matter of fact; Marte’s renewed affair with the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was the main topic of the whispered gossip on the set.

That affair, the secret and public love between
Reichminister
Goebbels and the actress he had made the queen of the German cinema – just as he had promised – was both a curse and a blessing to von Behren. How could a mere film director interfere with the
Reichsminister
’s demands upon his leading lady’s time and body? It made the shooting schedule difficult, trying to squeeze moments between the air raids and Goebbels’ lusts – it was no wonder the frustrated crew was given to remarks.

At the same time, they all wouldn’t be here, in the first stages of filming
Der Rote Jäger
, if it weren’t for that affair. The little favor that Marte owed to von Behren, or that he had managed to convince her that she owed, or that she had been willing to pretend that she believed she did, had come in at last. It had taken this long, the four years and more since they had returned here to Berlin, he to his old office at UFA’s Babelsberg complex, she to Goebbels’ feverish embrace –

(And where was the little boy, for whose sake Marte had come back?
That lying bastard
, von Behren thought whenever he saw a newspaper picture of Goebbels or heard his ranting voice on the radio. But he also noted the still sadness grown even more visible in Marte’s face, that made her even lovelier and more devastating to all men’s hearts.)

– and the dreaming of those who saw her on the screens of the darkened theaters. They bought their tickets and vanished for a few hours into that darkness, into that light, once more into the stillness of Marte Helle’s gaze. She had returned to them, and that was all that mattered; the words that von Behren wrote for her to say were unimportant. The
Reichsminister
, in his role as
de facto
head of the German film industry, had more than personal reasons to give her anything for which she might ask. She had given him von Behren’s script for
Der Rote Jäger
, with her part carefully noted in the margins. Goebbels’ antipathy for the fantastic, that deep Teutonic world of witches and demons,
Faust
and
Der Golem
and old Murnau’s
Nosferatu
, had finally been overcome; he had commissioned
Münchhausen
to commemorate UFA’s twenty-fifth anniversary, a special effects showpiece using Agfa’s newly developed color film, all intended to outshine the Englishman Korda’s
Thief of Bagdad
and even
Gone with the Wind
, that the American Jew Selznick had produced so brilliantly. The premiere at the
UFA-Palast am Zoo
, just before that theater had been lost to the bombs, had been enough of a success to justify more things along those lines. Perhaps Goebbels had decided that if those were the films that the German people wanted to see now, that’s what they should be given. The more time they spent in the dark shelters of the theaters, the less they would see of their own city streets, battered by the fleets of planes overhead, that Goering’s
Luftwaffe
was powerless to stop.