by K. W. Jeter
She wondered whether she should go to him, wrap her arms around him, rock him against the cradle of her breast. “But that’s what you’ve said before.”
“This time… this time, it must be. Forever.” Joseph looked over his shoulder at her, his face drawn taut, cheeks hollowed, the outline of his skull visible beneath. “That is the Fuhrer ’s decree.”
Forever… She closed her eyes, drifting away. That was funny as well, the way men said such things. As though forever meant anything at all. Joseph was as sworn to the service of Harte as any SS officer, as the father of her lost child was; they were all soldiers of this new world, cold and perfect. But that was just armor over the soft, sentimental part inside them. Forever… Women lost things forever, never seen again, but they went on. They learned how to.
She felt his hand against the side of her face, the fingers tangling through her hair and brushing the curve of her jaw. She opened her eyes and saw him gazing down at her.
“I made an offer.” This close, Joseph kept his voice a whisper, soft as though they were in bed together. “To him.” She knew he meant the Fuhrer. “I offered to resign from the Ministry… and as Gauleiter of Berlin… all my posts. He could appoint me as Ambassador to Japan. I would leave Germany… we would leave. We could live together, in Tokyo. There would be no scandal then; we’d be far away, and people would forget about us.” Joseph’s hand moved down her neck, across the curve of her shoulder. “Magda and the children – they would be provided for. And even they would forget, eventually. Everyone would forget about us. And we would be together.”
“But he doesn’t want you to leave.” She leaned her head against his arm. “He needs you.” That was the truth, even though he had said it himself. The Fuhrer needed his Propaganda Minister, had always needed him, even before he had become the Fuhrer, when he had been nothing but the head of a tiny political group – brawling war veterans and professional anti-Semites – breaking heads at Bierstube meetings and squabbling in the red mud of the dying Weimar republic. Joseph had created the Fuhrer – even that one word, his title, that had been another of his propaganda genius’s masterstrokes. “He needs you even more than I do.”
He stayed silent, but she felt the tremor in his hand, his fingers curling against her skin.
“You can never leave him…”
“I could.” Joseph’s voice came from far away, though he was standing next to her. “I could leave everything… my family… my home… to be with you. But there is no place that we could go. No place where we would be left alone. Where he would leave us alone.”
Now Joseph was lying to her again. She knew that wasn’t true; people could always disappear, become invisible, become nothing. What he really meant was that there was no place they could go, where he would still be powerful, even feared, and have so much wealth at his command. How long would he have been happy as Ambassador to Japan? Even if that had been possible, if the Fuhrer had said yes… it was too far away, too remote from the machinery that he had put in place, the gears that ground out the rallies and radio broadcasts and films, the precisely cut teeth that meshed with those inside the nation’s hearts. How could he leave that, his other love, the true one, for her?
He had left her side and gone back to stand at the tall window, looking down at the street and the world beyond, folded in night.
“It would be best if you were to leave Berlin.” Joseph had gained control of himself again, his words taut and clipped. But he couldn’t look at her; she knew he wouldn’t be able to, that his voice and self-possession would break, he would rush to her and pull her to her feet, crushing her in his embrace. “It would be best for both of us. The production of your next film, and the ones after that – they can all be moved to the remote UFA facilities. You needn’t worry about what will happen to you; I’ll make sure that you’re taken care of…”
She wanted to laugh, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He didn’t realize, none of them ever did, how things were. Men thought they pushed the gears along, that they were in control, and really – they didn’t know. About the other gears, the other machinery that was already in motion. Joseph didn’t know.
Leave Berlin…
Now she was free to go to America. That would solve all their problems. And Joseph would be free of her, free of this love that interfered with the workings of his glorious destiny.
And he didn’t even know yet. Soon he would, but for now, in this moment, he was ignorant. So in command, but unaware of the other gears, the other machinery that had circled around him, his own deliverance.
She could have laughed, softly and sadly, and it would have been all right.
The laughter would have been drowned out by another sound, the rasping drone of an airplane engine. A light had appeared, a brighter star moving in the night sky, passing above the city.
The noise grew louder. The sky seemed to be full of airplanes, flooded with them, their engines massed into one great roaring. Fiery light surged up and across Joseph’s face, as though the streets below had suddenly been wrapped in flame; he turned toward her, the cords in his neck straining, his eyes wild, as he shouted something she couldn’t hear… *** “Are you all right?”
The words, spoken right at her ear, brought her up from her sleep and the dreaming into which she had fallen. Dreaming of Joseph, and the last time she’d been with him. Now, she turned away from von Behren in the seat beside hers, his hand laid solicitously upon her forearm, and toward the airplane’s small, rounded window. Through it, she could see the flat stretches of the Templehof landing strips, the other airplanes arrayed near the low shapes of the hangars. One had already taken off and was mounting toward the clouds, sunlight flashing off its prop blades.
“Marte -”
She could barely hear him; this airplane, the one in which they sat, shivered with the vibrations from its own engines. Soon enough it would head along the grassy runway, picking up speed, and then it would be in the air itself, making for Paris. A few rows ahead of her and von Behren, the American producer sat, the one who had come all the way from Hollywood to fetch her. Herr Wise was reading an English-language newspaper; she could decipher some of the words in the headlines – von Behren had already begun teaching her the new language. She would hit the ground running, as he had smiled and put it the way the Americans themselves would say. There had been time for one quick celebratory dinner at the Adlon, she and her director and Herr Wise, the two men lifting their champagne glasses toward her. To her new career, her new life. Wise had nodded and smiled, agreeing with von Behren – by the time she got there, to the land of the nodding palm trees and the eternal sunshine, she’d be speaking English as though it were her native language. She was a quick study, and words were all the same to her, lines to be learned. Easy when one had nothing to hold on to, nothing inside that would get in the way.
That had been the celebration, with loud voices and laughter all around them. She had spent the rest of the night packing, to be ready for the morning flight. No wonder she was so tired, drifting into sleep.
The engine noise grew louder, filling the airplane’s interior. The world outside shifted as the airplane began to roll, taxiing toward its appointed runway.
Another motion caught her eye, at the edge of the field. The tassel traced across her hand as she lifted the curtain away from the small square window. A black Mercedes limousine swerved onto the field, coming to a halt parallel to the airplane’s progress. Two small swastika flags trailed from the automobile’s front fenders. She recognized it; she had ridden in it herself, many times, sinking deep into the plush leather upholstery. A pale visage showed behind the rolled-down window, a piercing gaze directed toward the airplane. The dark eyes connected straight to Marte’s own, a line stretching to an invisible thread between the man and the woman.
Von Behren grabbed her hand and squeezed it tight. He had spotted the Mercedes as well, the gleam of its black metal. There was still time, for everything to go wrong –
the Reichsminister could have changed his mind, become just a man again, instead of the Fuhrer ’s loyal servant. He might have listened to the orders from his heart and thrown away everything else, the wealth, the power – all for her. A pack of motorcycles from the Berlin Polizei could come roaring from behind the limousine, swoop across the field, block the airplane from traveling any farther. The pilot might already be cutting the engines, obeying a last-minute command from the airfield’s tower…
It could all happen, in a moment, in the blink of an eye…
Nothing happened.
None of the other passengers had noticed the black Mercedes at the edge of the field. The face at the limousine’s window grew smaller with distance, until it was lost behind them. The American folded his newspaper to another page and went on reading.
When the airplane was safely aloft, banking against the clouds, von Behren let go of her hand.
“Everything will be all right now.” He patted her forearm. “You’ll see. Everything will be fine…”
She turned away, gazing out the small window beside her. The earth fell far below them.
It didn’t matter. If everything would be all right or not. Things would happen, the gears of the world’s machinery, seen and unseen, would turn regardless. What would happen only mattered to the other ones, the ones who existed, who were real.
Not her.
She leaned her brow against the cold window, falling from one dream to another, endlessly…
LOS ANGELES
1940
Perhaps really he was a dead king, from the region of terrors. And he was still cold and remote in the region of death, with perfumes coming from his transparent body as if from some strange flower.
- D. H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died (1928)
ELEVEN
“I believe Mr. Wise expects me.”
The secretary glanced up at Marte. “I’ll see if he’s free right now.” The look from the woman continued for a moment longer, before she swivelled her chair around toward the intercom box.
She knew what the secretary’s appraisal meant. There were two secretaries here in the lobby of David Wise’s office, both young and good-looking enough; perhaps they could have gone for bit parts out on the production lot rather than sitting here all day behind their typewriters and stacks of mail. But they both had in their eyes that little smoldering spark, a seed of both contempt and envy, that the merely pretty always directed toward the beautiful. The same here in Hollywood as it had been in Berlin – the unspoken accusation that the beauty wasn’t enough, that it had to be what she had done with it, in private, that accounted for the way men, including the estimable Herr Wise, looked at her.
There was nothing she could do about it. She had long ago stopped feeling anything when it happened.
The secretary turned back to her. “It’ll just be a couple of minutes.” Efficient.
Marte sat and waited, flipping through the pages of an American magazine. The printed words were still opaque to her; she had to translate them from English into German inside her heard, to know what they meant. Speaking it was easier, it was just like reciting lines in front of a camera. That was the pay-off from all the coaching she had gotten from Mr. Wise, with dialogue from movies he had produced. Hours of practice, on the long stage-by-stage journey – Berlin to Paris, then to Liverpool and the ocean liner. And the long train ride, cities and then the empty desert spaces, that had looked to her like the place where the world ended. It had made sense that Hollywood lay on the other side of all that, a place where everything could be made from nothing, a blank piece of paper for men like Wise to write upon.
She looked up, through the window next to her. In the distance, at the edge of the Wise Studios lot, stood the Taj Mahal. Not the real thing, a replica, a false front made of wood and plaster, the paint that had imitated the jewel-like tiles flaking from the heat of the California sun. It had been built for some historical epic several years ago, heroic British soldiers in the service of their far-flung empire; taken from a book by Kipling, perhaps, transmuted into perfect romance by Wise’s staff of writers. Just that one set was bigger than anything she had ever seen at the UFA studios in Babelsberg, outside Berlin.
She returned her attention to the magazine. As she deciphered its words, she was aware of someone watching her. From the farther side of the waiting room – a tall, lanky man, with thinning red hair, wearing an unstylish checked jacket. When she looked up, she saw him keeping his gaze on the newspaper he held unfolded in front of himself, as though idly catching up on the baseball scores. Wilson; that was his name. David had even introduced his head of studio security to her, and the man had smiled and shaken her hand, and told her that if there was anything she ever needed, then she only had to call him. She knew that if he was watching her, that was just part of his job, something that David had asked him to do -
“Marte!”
The magazine was pulled from her hands and tossed onto the table on the other side of the chair. She raised her eyes and saw a smiling David Wise standing in front of her.
“God, you’re looking great.” He reached down and took both her hands in his, bringing her to her feet. “Rose took you downtown, got you all fitted out?”
She nodded. The head of the Wise Studios’ costuming department had spent all of yesterday with her on Wilshire Boulevard, taking her through the private fitting rooms of the shops, plush-lined sanctuaries where tea was invariably offered before the tape measures flew and the racks of dresses were wheeled in. The small woman with her bob of jet-black hair and gogglelike horn-rimmed glasses had torn through the offerings, yanking out the ones which she had approved. Those had been boxed, after Marte had tried them on and they had gotten past the other woman’s critical scowl, and sent on, with no exchange of money needed. The studio settled its accounts on a quarterly basis – or so the costuming head had informed her.
“Ladies, I ask you -” Wise took her elbow and turned her toward the secretaries. “Isn’t she looking swell?”
The same dim spark was in the other women’s eyes as they looked over their shoulders at her. “Lovely, Mr. Wise,” said one. They both turned back to their typewriters.
“I’m really glad you came by today.” Wise steered Marte toward the door of his office.
“But you asked me to.”
He shrugged. “People in this town, you ask ’em to breathe, they want to know what’s in it for them. Don’t you worry about that, though.” He had laid his arm around her shoulder; with his other hand, he reached for the door knob. “Trust me, people will always be nice to you.”
The office was dark except for the film screen. Standing in the middle of the room, Marte turned and saw her silhouette at the bottom of a battle scene. Shouts and explosions – a squadron of soldiers, dressed in the uniforms of 1914, charged with their rifles and bayonets through a forest, as the earth around them erupted into great bursts of fire and smoke. Some of the actors crumpled to their knees, the weapons dropping from their hands as they fell shoulder-first to the ground.
Wise pulled the door shut and walked toward Marte. The war scene covered his head and torso, other men’s faces, grimacing in pain and anger, superimposed on his. He squinted into the shifting beam of light, raising his hand to gesture at the projectionist. “Turn it down, Freddy. You’re driving us deaf in here. There, that’s good.” The shouts were murmurs now, the explosions removed to a landscape far away. He turned back to Marte. “What do you think?” He pointed over his shoulder to the screen. “Does that look like the Battle of the Somme to you?”
“I don’t know.” In their near-silence, the images of the falling men seemed like those of sleepwalkers, lost in the nightmares from which they couldn’t awake. “That all happened so long ago… before I was born…” Everything that happened up there, in that world of light and shadow, seemed like a dream to her. When she had first seen her own face transformed into radiance, she had wondered who the girl was, and if she had dreamed the M
arte that watched her in the darkness. “I don’t know about those things.”
“Ah, that’s all right. I didn’t really expect you to.” Wise stood beside her for a moment, gazing at the action on the screen. “I don’t even know if we’re gonna go ahead with this one – it’s not really making a lot of sense to me any more. You know what I mean?” He glanced over at her. “There’s a war going on over there right now; why should anybody be interested in what happened in the last one? People are just glad we’re staying out of it this time.” His face grew heavier, brooding. “I should be making more comedies. Right? Get people’s minds off their little problems for an hour or two. Or romances.” He smiled at her. “That’s where you come in.”
“Yes… if you still think I would be…” She couldn’t find the word in English. “ Praktisch? Suitable?”
Wise laughed, tilting his head back. “That’s really sweet. You know, I’m glad you didn’t get our complete Pygmalion number – you still got a little bit of your accent. That’s good, I want you to keep some of that exotic quality about you. It always plays well, at least with blondes. Dark-haired, you want to go the other way, tone it down.”
She hadn’t followed everything he had said. “I could dye my hair -”
“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “We’re not gonna touch a thing about you. Perfect the way you are.” He smiled, then leaned closer, as if he were about to kiss her. “Believe me. You’re going to be very suitable.” He drew back, gesturing toward a sofa barely visible under the bright beams from the projection booth windows. “Have a seat. Let me get you something – we really haven’t had a chance to celebrate your arrival.”
He came back from the bar with two glasses. In the darkness, she couldn’t discern what was in the one he handed to her; she took a sip and found it to be well-aged brandy. She had learned to drink things like that, expensive things, even to tell one apart from another. She let the thread of its warmth ease down her throat.