by K. W. Jeter
The Kingdom of Shadows
K W Jeter
The Kingdom of Shadows
K. W. Jeter
Du Seele bist dem Lichte gleich,
Das himmelwarts die Heimat ahnt
Und, kampfend mit dem Schattenreich,
Sich doch zu Gott die Wege bahnt…
Soul, you are like the Light
That senses its home to be heavenwards
And, battling with the kingdom of shadows,
Yet makes its way to God…
- Frank Wysbar (1899-1967), “The Ferryman’s Song” from the film Fahrmann Maria (1936)
BERLIN
1936
Betwixt the press of shadows and the blood…
- George Chapman (c. 1559 – 1634), trans. (1616), The Odyssey, Book XI
ONE
He had never seen anything else as beautiful. A photograph in a shop window – if he was not yet old enough to be initiated into the faith of his fathers, then she would be his angel of light.
His brother Matthi knew, smiled, but did not mock. “When you are older, Pavli.” Matthi had already entered the world of adults. “Then you shall know a lot of things.”
Matthi had taken pity on him and had shown him a secret, a mystery. Undoing the tight, three-buttoned cuff of his shirt – all the Lazarene men wore shirts with cuffs like that – Matthi had pushed his sleeve up and shown Pavli his wrist. The soft inner skin had still been reddened and sore from the slow, patient needles, but the tattooed wound was starkly visible, a dark blue line a few inches long, thick in the middle, tapering at the ends.
“You see?” Matthi had shown him the tattoo on his other wrist as well. “That’s how you know it’s true. These people who call themselves Christians – they think the nails went into His palms. But that’s not how it was done. It was through the wrists.”
That made sense, the way Matthi had explained it to him. The weight of a man’s body – and God had been a man then, for a little while – would have torn the hands around the nails, rags of blood and small bones, and dropped them free. The stronger wristbones made for a proper crucifixion.
Such were the things of which the Lazarenes alone knew the truth. The dark components of their faith. Matthi knew of those things, or at least some of them. The secrets in which he’d been instructed by the elders. Already, Matthi no longer looked like a boy; he was a man, who knew the things of men. He had grown a head taller than his little brother, and his shoulders had broadened, as though to carry the burden of that invisible knowledge. The gaze in Matthi’s eyes had turned thoughtful and distant, already seeing the light of some world more real than the one held by the net of Berlin’s interwoven streets. And Matthi’s voice was both deeper and quieter now, befitting the words that spoke of the Savior’s true death and life, that those outside the Lazarene faith knew nothing of.
Sometimes, Pavli felt afraid to grow up, afraid of that day when he would be initiated into the faith of the Lazarenes as his brother had been. What if learning those dark mysteries meant that he must lose her, the beauty of the shop window?
The shop was his uncle Turro’s – the sign above the door read JOSEFSOHN, which was what his uncle had made of their family name Iosefni. That was not part of the Lazarene faith, but something they did to survive: they hid among those others who were not as they were. They became inconspicuous, walked in shadows, kept their secret ways to themselves. And were always ready to leave again.
One street off the Franzosische Stra?e, still in sight of the elegantly dressed promenaders, Arthur Josefsohn sold cameras. Rolleis and Leicas, clever machines of silvery metal and black folding bellows, deep polished lenses. It was one of the first camera shops in all Berlin.
“You see, Pavli,” his uncle had told him. “That’s why the Gaje get confused, and think we’re Jews.” He’d used the old word that meant the ones who aren’t the same as us, the word the gypsies in their rolling wagons used for people who lived in cities. “Because we have to make money any way we can. They think it’s cleverness, but it’s really just desperation.”
He knew what Jews were, and that these were not good times for them. A shop down the street from his uncle’s had its windows smashed and Juden Raus splashed across the front in red paint. People had stood around laughing when the owner had cursed and shaken his fist at a pack of brownshirts, then been kicked and pummeled to the ground. The blood had still been wet and sticky on the paving stones, glistening with splinters of glass, when Pavli had knelt down and touched it with his fingertips.
Pavli heard more of such things when he came to work in the shop. The Lazarene elders had talked about what was to be done with the two orphaned boys, Pavli and his brother, and their uncle had stepped forward to take them in.
“Why didn’t they live forever?” He had asked Matthi that as they stood with the hems of their trousers getting wet from the graveyard’s tall damp grass. “Some people do.”
“Don’t be stupid,” his brother had said. This was years ago, when their father had been buried beside their mother. “Nobody lives forever. Not even among the Lazarenes.”
Pavli didn’t know if that was true or not. Some things were mysteries. When you are older – his brother had promised him that. Then you shall know. As before, the thought of receiving such knowledge brought dread into Pavli’s gut.
Dread, and also a longing that couldn’t be quenched. To know, to know everything.
That desire had led him to do a shameful thing. To spy upon his own brother. This had not been a dream; Pavli had done it in the daytime, a few weeks after Matthi had been taken into the secrets of the Lazarene faith and become a man by their beliefs.
Pavli had slipped away from the shop and gone back to the little flat they lived in with their uncle. Where he had known his brother would be. He had been able to open the bedroom door silently, just a crack, and peer in. To where Matthi had stood in front of the dresser mirror, with his shirt stripped off. The ritual tattoos, the blue-black wounds of Christ, had shown fresh and stark on Matthi’s pale body. The wrists and the other, longer mark that went down the ribs, the symbol of the Roman soldier’s lance piercing Christ’s side – Pavli had already known about that, had seen the markings when they had both undressed for bed.
He had watched as his brother had dug his fingertips into the soft flesh of his forearm. Then Matthi had lifted his hand, peeling away his own skin.
But not the body’s skin. No blood, but instead a gossamer substance, fluttering slowly as more of it came loose. Like the sleeve of an angel’s gown, if angels were to be seen naked beneath their bright raiment. In the curtained shadows of the bedroom, the secret thing glowed with its own subtle radiance.
Matthi had loosened his hand from a glove of the silky matter. The empty shape of his arm, freed from the heavy flesh, drifted upward. His other hand had peeled away a swath from his shoulder and his neck, then had started on his jaw, when his eyes had glanced into the mirror and spotted the small face of his brother at the door’s edge.
“You should be ashamed!” Matthi had grabbed him before he could run away. “You’re not to know these things! Not yet!”
Pavli had cried, battered by his own fear. Not of his brother’s sudden rage, but of that empty thing drifting near the bedroom’s ceiling, the transparent form of his brother’s arm and the blind fragment of his face.
Matthi’s anger had ebbed. He stroked his little brother’s hair. “Don’t be afraid.” He’d tried to comfort the weeping Pavli. “It’s all right. I won’t tell anyone.” The words had been awkward, hard to find. “I… I wasn’t supposed to be doing that. Not by myself.”
Sniffling, Pavli had looked up at his brother. “What? What was it?” There had been nothing then,
no angel or ghost floating above them.
Matthi had shaken his head. “Don’t worry. Don’t even think about it. You’ll know everything, when it’s time.” A smile, or part of one. “And this will be our own secret, that nobody else will ever know. That you saw. And we won’t even talk about it to each other. Promise?”
He had nodded, sealing the promise deep onto his heart.
In the meantime, there was the beauty in the window of his uncle’s shop. That was another mystery, that bound him in its service.
His uncle had taken the photograph. Arthur Josefsohn had set up a portrait studio in the back of the shop, with black velvet drapes and a vase of silk flowers on a little table. The front window soon filled with samples of his craft. Men gazing unabashed into the lens, and girls turning just slightly away, in poses that were both demure and coquettish. And one of these was more beautiful than all the rest, her white-blonde hair caught luminous by the camera, one strand curling at her neck. Pavli’s uncle must have known as well that she was the loveliest one, for that photograph had been placed in the center of the shop window, in a silver frame set on an easel draped with velvet.
The first time Pavli saw the picture was when his uncle Turro brought him to the shop. Before that, he had never gone much out of the narrow streets and alleys of the Bayerisches Viertel, where the Lazarenes kept to themselves, Christian heretics among the Jews who largely comprised that district. The sight of the city’s broad thoroughfare, Unter den Linden, anchored at one end by the Imperial Palace and at the other by the smaller but equally impressive bulk of the Hotel Adlon, dazzled Pavli; it was like coming out of a dark cellar into the bright sunlight. His uncle had pointed with his cane to the Adlon’s towering stone facade. “There is more money in there than in the Reichsbank.” He’d smiled and winked at Pavli. “It’s safer there, too. So we can’t get at it.”
He’d stood on the sidewalk as his uncle had turned the key in the lock. That was when he had seen the photograph in the center of the window. “Pavli – come on.” His uncle had pushed the shop’s door open. “There’s much to do.” Then he’d seen what had caught and mesmerized his nephew. “She’ll be there when we leave,” he’d said, smiling and tugging Pavli inside.
Only later did he learn that the girl in the photograph was of the same blood as him, another child of the Lazarenes. But older than him, perhaps the same age as his brother Matthi. Which meant that she had learned secrets as well, or had begun to. Secrets from before even the Lazarenes, secrets that the mother of all men had whispered to the daughters of earth, when they had been no longer children and not yet women.
But those others did not concern him. All that Pavli cared about now was the girl in the photograph, in his uncle’s shop window.
Her father had left the faith. Pavli knew that much. The man would come into the shop and argue with Pavli’s uncle.
“There’ll be blood in the streets.” The man flicked cigar ashes onto the mahogany and brass display cases that Pavli had buffed with a soft rag just a few minutes before. “Plenty of blood. Oceans of it!” The man seemed to relish the prospect.
Pavli’s uncle remained unperturbed. “There’s been blood in the streets before. And often it’s been Lazarene blood.” He shrugged. “Yet the Lazarenes are still here. Just like die Juden. Here, or there, or somewhere.”
“The National Socialists are different.” It was obvious that the man would have joined the NSDAP if he could have. “They possess the intelligence, and the will. It isn’t just random outbursts of violence. Their policies are eugenics in action.”
Pavli’s uncle rolled his eyes. “Tell that to those thugs outside. The ones that go tromping up and down the street, scaring away the trade.” The boarded-up shop a few doors down still had its Jews Out painted across the front.
“They can’t accomplish what they need to, without breaking a few heads.” The man tilted his head back to breathe out a cloud of smoke. “That’s why it’s important to be on their side. Because there won’t be anybody left on the other side, when they’re done.”
Pavli’s uncle had muttered something in reply, but the man didn’t hear – he had pushed himself away from the counter and gone over to the shop’s front window. He came back with the silver-framed photograph.
“You see what I mean?” The girl in the photograph was his daughter Marte. “This is what I’m talking about. What you must do, Turro! To survive!”
Pavli’s uncle had told him the whole story after one of the man’s previous visits. How he had left the Lazarene faith and gone to live among the Gaje, how he’d tried to bleach with skin-burning acids the ritual tattoos on his wrists and along his ribs, to no avail. And how the man had married a Gaje woman, one that he didn’t love – a terrible sin, right there – but that had met certain specifications he’d had in mind.
“Look at her!” The man talked about his daughter in cold terms that made Pavli grit his teeth when he heard them. “She is the perfect image of German womanhood! Who could deny it?”
“Your precious National Socialists could.” Turro breathed on a lens and polished it with a soft white cloth. “They have legions of busybody little Rassenprufers, checking people’s pedigrees as if they were dogs.”
The other man’s voice bulled on. “A true Nordic beauty! Blonde and fair, the nose perfect, the brow just right.” He sounded as if he had taken the calipers of the Nazi racial investigators and measured every part of his daughter’s face. “And her eyes – eh? You saw?”
“Yes,” said Pavli’s uncle wearily. “I have seen your daughter’s eyes.”
“Blue! Both of them! None of this mongrel business, one blue, one brown! That alone should be the proof!”
Pavli’s life had been so enclosed in the little world of the Lazarene community, that only when his uncle Turro had brought him out into the city proper, had he seen that other people’s eyes were always both of the same color. The Gaje men and women and children had either blue eyes or brown, or sometimes grey or green – but not one blue and one brown. As were Pavli’s eyes, and those of his brother Matthi, and their uncle, and their parents sleeping in their graves, and all the other Lazarenes. It was the mark of their pure blood, a sign of their separateness that all were born with, that didn’t need to be tattooed on like the marks of Christ’s wounds. But until he had started working in his uncle’s shop, he had thought all people were that way. The first few days, he’d had to hold himself from peering sharply at everyone who came in, marveling at the simple fact of their eyes being matched in color.
The girl Marte’s eyes were both blue; Pavli had been able to tell this, even from just the black-and-white photograph. Her father gloated over that detail.
“ Two blue eyes!” It was why he had married the Gaje woman. “Like sapphires! Cornflowers!”
“You disgust me.” Pavli saw his uncle’s lip curl. “You’ve become just like them. You think you can breed people like cattle. Your own daughter -”
The argument had become even more heated, only breaking off when a customer had come into the shop.
“You will see, Herr Josefsohn.” The girl’s father bowed stiffly toward Pavli’s uncle behind the counter. “You will see that I am right about this.” He turned and strode out, trailing cigar smoke.
Pavli’s uncle let him put the silver-framed photograph back in the front window. Even just holding that object, the image of beauty, made the thoughts whirl clattering inside his head.
He touched the glass over the girl’s face and thought again – wordlessly – of how lovely she was. If what his uncle had told him was true, then she was of the same blood as him. A Lazarene like him, but something different at the same time.
All this talk of blood and breeding chilled him. The girl’s father had given his uncle some books to read, and Pavli had looked at them in the shop’s back room. They were all about race and blood and genetics, with long charts and graphs describing the size of people’s noses and foreheads, and pictures of black Afri
cans and sly, devilish-looking Mongolians. Pavli saw that the books were all from the same publishing company, G. Lehmann und Sohne. The publisher’s emblem, at the bottom of the title pages, was a lion with the words Ich hab’s gewagt beneath. I Have Dared. In the older books, the ones before the National Socialists’ Machtergreifung, their seizure of state power, the lion stood stiff and somewhat placid, an old lion gazing into some unseen distance. But now, in the newer books, the lion’s teeth were bared and threatening, the muscles coiled in his limbs and shoulders, as though he were about to spring on his prey and rend it to bloody pieces. What did that mean?
He touched the eyes of the girl in the photograph.
All the gypsy tribes – the Sinti here in Germany, or the Kelderari coppersmiths from the East, or the Spanish Gitanos; all the wandering gawitka and weszytka Roma, the village and forest gypsies, the bergitka Roma in the mountains, or the forytka Roma, the town gypsies who lived in houses without wheels, even the Diddakoi, the half-gypsies – they all had eyes that were both the same, dark brown, almost black. Only the Lahzeroi had the mismatched eyes, one blue, one golden-brown.
In his uncle’s shop window, Pavli set the silver-framed photograph on the easel. The girl’s eyes, both the same color, gazed out at him, and through him, piercing his heart. The Lazarene blood had been mixed with that of the Gaje – she had become something different, an angel perhaps. In heaven, the angels were supposed to sing, moving the great works of God through their courses. And she was as beautiful as the angels were said to be.
If she sang to me – Pavli closed his eyes, his breath stopped – if she sang, I would hear her. He knew that, and wished it, and dreamed it.
TWO
Her father had taught her everything she needed to know, all the lines she might have to speak. Who she would be. A part she had been born to play.