by K. W. Jeter
The man’s words had pressed her back into her chair, as though he had placed his outspread fingertips against her breast and pinned her there. “I don’t… I don’t know if I want that…”
“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow. “To be seen by all men, to be admired, desired by them? What actress – what woman – doesn’t want that? Perhaps it is something else.” His narrow gaze pierced her. “Perhaps it is that you do not wish to leave your comfortable home, your coddled life here in America. Though I can assure you that the sacrifice of returning to Germany would be in your case a very small one. The Reichsminister would see to that a heroine such as yourself would suffer no… privations, as it were.” The word had twisted in his mouth, as though it were a sour taste on his tongue that he wanted to spit out.
“I don’t want to leave…” There were no secrets that she could conceal from him. “I’m… I’m safe here…”
“Yes, of course you are. To go from this land of peace and return to a homeland that is now at war… a war pressed upon Germany by the conspiracy of its enemies… you find that prospect frightening; I understand that.” The consulate official’s voice turned softer, feigning kindness. “But do you really think, Fraulein Helle, that this refuge you have found here will last forever? This is a war not just between nations, or even between ideologies, but a war between one blood – the pure Aryan blood of heroes – and that of the mongrel races who would destroy it. Do you think America can avoid being drawn into that final conflict?”
“David… Herr Wise told me… he said that America wouldn’t go to war…”
“ Herr Wise is a clever man, isn’t he? A very clever… Jew.” The consulate official’s voice darkened with a withering contempt. “And of course, for Jews there never are wars; they find others to fight them, and to die in them. Herr Wise and his breed stay safe in their counting houses until all is quiet again, and then they go out onto the battlefield to pluck the bits of gold from the dead and dying. Germany and France and England have gone to war, and all the other nations of Europe, and yet it is always der ewige Jude who has won.” The official’s face grew heavy with brooding. “Your clever Herr Wise may have a surprise in store for him this time, however. This time, the war will come to the Jews, and they won’t escape.”
He wasn’t Gestapo, she knew that now. A note of fervor had entered his voice, a shrill pitch like a wire tightened to the breaking point. He was SS, disguised in a well-cut double-breasted suit of nubbly brown wool instead of a black uniform shiny with polished leather and steel death’s-heads, but Schutzstaffel nonetheless. One of the true believers, not a simple follower of orders such as the soldier who’d fathered her child, but a disciple of that new dark faith, his visage honed to a knife’s edge by the rendering heat of all that he carried in his heart.
“ Fraulein Helle.” The consulate official watched and judged her. “Do you not think you owe a duty to your own country, the one in which you were born? If there were even a little true German blood in your veins -” He knew, he had to know; everything, all of her secrets. “If there were even a red drop of that blood, you might find it within you to listen to its wisdom. Let the blood decide what you should do.”
She imagined this was how she would be spoken to by a priest, severe and black-clad, a raven with burning eyes. “I… I can’t…” Marte shook her head slowly. “I don’t know…”
“We are well aware of other factors that might influence your decision. To stay here or to return to Germany.” The consulate official’s voice turned harsher and colder. “It is common knowledge that your relationship with Herr David Wise is more than a professional one. It is a tribute to the influence he wields in the motion picture industry, that mention of your affair with him has been kept out of the gossip columns. It is a tribute to the understanding and forbearance of Reichsminister Goebbels, that he is prepared to forgive your involvement with this man. In an industry so unfortunately dominated by Jews, the pressure would be overwhelming for an attractive Nordic woman to allow herself to be pawed and fondled by such a creature, and then paraded through restaurants and night clubs as an ornament to his swaggering pride.” The venom of the consulate official’s loathing, that he had kept hidden at the premiere when he had shaken David’s hand, now tinged his voice. “It is precisely from such disgusting racial predations that the Reichsminister wishes to protect you. From the Jew’s lust for all that is fair and pure, everything that he and his degenerate race can never be. Though of course -” The consulate official’s mirthless smile returned. “I will not pretend to you that Goebbels’ interest in your affairs is purely ideological in nature. This is a matter of some personal importance between you and him, is it not? A resumption of that role you previously played in his life, before the wiles of the American Jew took you away from him.” The smile widened. “Of course, that is why you may be assured of not only your safety upon your return home, but also the exalted position you will be given – the choice of roles, the lavish production budgets, the luxuries befitting your stature. I doubt that you will miss at all the comforts and splendor of your life here.”
“But… I don’t understand,” said Marte. “He sent me away before. He told me I had to leave…”
“A man may change his mind, yes? Especially when the circumstances change. Germany is at war now; it is besieged by both international Jewry and Bolshevism. The Fuhrer has weightier matters with which to concern himself, Fraulein Helle. The movement of armies, a military strategy that takes in half the globe – these are the things that receive his attention. And if I may say so, the Reichsminister has learned something of the art of discretion. He and his wife Magda, the mother of his children – they both have taken it upon themselves to foster the morale of the nation by preserving the appearance of their marriage. So many good, trusting Germans look up to them; it would be cruel to shatter their illusions. And those who tried to, those envious, whispering voices who carried scandal to not only the ear of the Fuhrer, but to the professional gossip-mongers as well…” The consulate official shrugged. “The Reichsminister has succeeded in dealing with such as those. Silence can be purchased, with coin of one kind or another. If the Reichsminister now finds that he has a personal debt to certain forces, certain people… that doesn’t matter. It’s a small price to pay. And he has paid it on your behalf, Fraulein Helle. That is what you must remember.”
She felt herself growing dizzy as she listened to the man, as though the ground itself were being drawn from beneath her feet. The night filled the windows of the house, the darkness wrapping tightly around the brass lamp’s glow. The things the consulate official spoke of, the ways of the land from which she had come so far… just hearing of them made her feel both nauseous and frightened. She seemed once more to be walking down a hallway of apartment doors, walking slowly as she did in dreams and memory, toward the one door that stood open, with the broken, overturned furniture and papers scattered across the floor on the other side, her mother and father gone…
Silence could be bought. With a small red coin, shiny enough for her to look down and see her face reflected in it, in the string of red coins that trailed into the corridor, the last of them soaking dark into the fibers of the worn carpet runner.
Even speaking of Joseph made her feel strange, insubstantial. To know that was still there in that dark world, waiting, thinking of her… She could feel his hands grasping her arms, drawing her close to him, his thin body against her breast. And the fierceness of his hungry gaze, searching her eyes as though the reflection of his own face there could speak and tell him what he wanted to know.
Marte bit her lip, clenching her fists in her lap until they were two trembling white stones. “No -” She looked up from her hands, into the consulate official’s amused regard. “I won’t go. I won’t leave this place.”
“Your hasty decision is not completely unanticipated.” The cigarette had died in the ashtray, leaving the smell of the cold cinder hanging in the air. The consulate official tilt
ed his head back against the armchair’s leather, his eyes hooded. “An involvement with someone so powerful as Herr David Wise is not easy to abandon. This is how the Jew maintains his control over his victims. Nevertheless -” He reached over the side of the armchair. “I have come prepared with further arguments to be made.” He straightened, laying in his lap the thin leather portfolio he had picked up. His manicured hands undid the clasp. “I’m sure that you will find these of interest. And that you will take them into consideration before giving me your final answer.”
She took the group of large glossy photo prints that he handed to her. The top one showed a woman her own age, smiling and pointing the camera out to the little boy whose hand she held. The child scowled suspiciously into the lens.
“Who are they?” Marte looked up from the photograph.
“Ah. It would have been too much to expect, that you recognize the boy. You have never seen him – at least not like this. But the woman? You don’t remember her?”
Marte bent over the photograph, examining it more closely, trying to read its silent depth. Something about the woman troubled her, a memory barely discernible, a shape gliding beneath the dark surface of a night ocean.
“Look at the next picture, Fraulein Helle.” The consulate official’s voice came from far away. “Perhaps that will help.”
She drew out the one beneath and held it up. The photo had been taken outside – beyond a stand of trees could be seen a flat expanse of water, a river with hills mounting from the far bank. The picture had been taken in the springtime, with the shadows of leaves dappling the woman’s bright hair. And it was home, her old home of Germany – she could recognize the countryside even though it was someplace she’d never been to, far from Berlin.
The woman in the photo held the little boy in her arms, leaning backward to balance him against her breast and shoulder. The shutter had snapped as she had smiled and said something to the boy, his gaze still dubious as he looked into the lens and sucked a fingertip of one chubby hand.
“Do you see, Fraulein Helle?” The consulate official spoke softly. “Look carefully. The eyes – look at the eyes.”
Not the eyes of the woman in the photograph. The little boy; Marte brought the photograph closer to her own face, searching it.
And finding…
“Now you see. Don’t you?” The official whispered to her.
She nodded. “Yes…” The photo held her, so that she could barely speak. But she saw. There in the little boy’s face, gazing silently back at her.
One eye light in shade. That was the blue one, blue as her eyes. And the other, the little boy’s left eye – that was darker, almost black in the photograph. That was the golden-brown one.
How old was the child? He looked to be about three years old, with a serious, unsmiling expression. That would be the right age. Three years – so much had happened in that time, but so little as well. Nothing had happened at all, she was still exactly the same, still the girl in the bed with her swaddled newborn in her arms, listening to the step of the hostel’s director coming down the hallway outside the door, coming toward her and the infant with eyes of mismatched color, one blue, one brown…
Marte turned back to the first photograph, where the woman’s face could be seen more clearly. “I remember her.” Not the girl’s name, but the way she had laughed and spoken. “She was there… she was at the Lebensborn hostel…”
“That’s right.” The consulate official nodded. “She bore a child for the Fuhrer. And she was given another child to raise with hers. Your child, Fraulein Helle.”
The top photographs slid off the stack and dropped to the floor at her feet. A close-up of the child’s face was revealed, showing the bicolored eyes even more clearly. Marte touched the glossy surface of the photo, as though she could reach through and stroke the child’s soft cheek. She could see behind the child’s face, to an even younger one, an infant, its pink cheek pressed against her own skin…
“You’re lying.” She snapped her head erect, trembling as she glared at the man sitting across from her. “This is some kind of a trick. This could be anyone’s child. You retouched the photos, you found another one. You did… you did something…”
“ Fraulein Helle – please calm yourself.” Again, the consulate official touched his fingertips together. “I assure you that the Schutzstaffel keeps excellent track of its own. The ties of blood are important to us.” He had dropped all pretense of being other than SS himself. “This child is the son of an officer in the Leibstandarte SS , now serving at the Eastern Front. A child conceived in further service to Germany, a child to whom you gave birth, with no shame. The shame, the Rassenschande, was in your concealing of your racial background. But that’s of little concern to us now. What is important now is that your child is alive, and in good health, I might add – the foster mother has taken excellent care of him. Though none of us expected that the child’s true mother would become a film star of note one day, and even more importantly, the object of a Reichsminister ’s desire. That made it easy for us to render this valued service to him. To come to him and tell him that here is the way to bring the woman he loves back to Germany. For surely this means more than even being die Konigen des deutschen Filmes, does it not? To be close to your child once again, whom you had thought was lost forever to you – I don’t believe Herr David Wise can offer any enticement to match that.”
The rest of the photos had slipped from her grasp, scattering across the floor. She watched helplessly as the consulate official bent down and picked one photo up, then held it out to her.
“You know it’s true, don’t you?”
She tried to turn her face away from the photo, the face of the little boy, but couldn’t.
The consulate official’s voice whispered at her ear. “You must think with your blood, Marte. Then you’ll know this is your child.”
Her sudden tears blurred the photograph. The child’s somber, unsmiling face turned to nothing but muddled shades of black and white, then vanished as she broke away her gaze. A sob rose in her throat as she turned her own face against the chair, as though she could hide in its depths, falling into the darkness that would welcome and forgive her.
THIRTEEN
The shades had been drawn, sealing out the merciless bright sunshine of the morning. A little piece of night remained inside the room that Ernst von Behren used as his study. He sat deep in brooding thought behind the desk. One of the few books he’d managed to bring with him from Berlin lay on the desktop, a black silk ribbon marking his place halfway though the yellowed pages. The book was a favorite, he’d read it many times through since he’d been a boy. But there’d be no reading of old tales set in thorny black-letter, this day. Perhaps for many days to come.
“It is true -” Marte sat curled up in the chair on the other side of the desk, her legs tucked up beneath her, a wet handkerchief squeezed into a ball in one hand. Her face was still puffy and reddened from her crying, though the tears had stopped hours ago. “I know it is.”
She had said those same words over and over, and each time von Behren had felt a knifeblade touch his heart, the edge dulled to ache rather than cut. He slowly rubbed a fingertip on the only other thing on his desk, a photograph of a child lifted up in a another woman’s arms. The corner of the photo had been crumpled where Marte had clutched it tight; he watched his own hand trying to smooth out the frayed creases.
There was nothing he could do about the things of which she told him. His brooding was a pit that opened wider beneath him. Working on a screenplay with Wise or anyone else, he could slash a red pencil through the bad parts, or crumple into his fist a page that was beyond redemption and hurl it toward an overflowing wastebasket. The SS were considerably more difficult to dispose of.
Von Behren roused himself from his brooding. The man from the German consulate, who’d come to Marte with the photos of the child, had displayed a fine sense of timing. David Wise wasn’t here in Los Angeles at the
moment; he wasn’t even in California, but had just left on a two-week business tour of the movie theaters under the control of the Wise Studios – a separate corporation was about to be set up, to avoid getting hit with the same antitrust pressure that Roosevelt’s Attorney General had brought against MGM and Warner Brothers. He would have been the only one who could keep Marte here; he would have been able to wrap his arms around her and hold her, let her cry against his chest, tell her that he and his money and all his powerful friends would do something, he’d go up against the iron weight of the Reich, against Goebbels and the SS, he’d find a way to get the little boy out and bring him here…
It wouldn’t have even mattered if Herr Wise had lied to her about those things, about what he could or couldn’t do. He would at least have found a way of keeping Marte here. Told her that it would be better if she stayed here, in this safe country, while he pulled strings, all his great net of connections and influence, to find the little boy, Marte’s child, and trade whatever else Goebbels and the SS might want for him.
Which was the problem, of course; von Behren’s heart slowed and grew heavy inside him. He knew there wasn’t anything else that the Reichsminister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment wanted. He had done his job all too well, when he had set out to have Goebbels fall in love with his protegee. Only one love greater, the interlocking of obsessions between the Reichsminister and the Fuhrer, that could have made Goebbels send Marte away. And now things had changed; Goebbels had paid his penance, the Fuhrer ’s gaze had turned elsewhere – and now the Reichsminister would have her back again.