by K. W. Jeter
She understood. The things that Joseph said, and the things he didn’t; the things inside his heart. A heart that was no different from David Wise’s, or any other man’s. For all his impassioned speech, just like lines from a film – an actor, yes, but a bad one, a scenery-chewer as Herr Wise and the others would have called him in Hollywood; she’d almost expected Joseph to place both his hands over his heart, to swear his undying love – for all the lofty words, she could still hear the silent voice behind them. The one that spoke the truth: that he could never share her with anyone else, not even her own child.
Marte closed her eyes, letting herself fall away from him, into that empty space inside her own heart, where no one else would ever come now. She wondered what Joseph saw on the screen – not this one, with the little boy laughing and running – the screen with her face magnified upon it. Or rather, not what he saw, but who did the seeing. Perhaps there was no one in the theater with him, no human presence, nothing at all. But only him, alone in that dark empty world, where her face was the only light, the moon that he fell toward, as those in dreaming fall from the earth and into the hollow night sky.
“You’ll see, Marte. Everything will be fine…”
The room was completely silent and dark now, the last of the film having run through the projector; Joseph had switched off the machine. Now she felt his arm wrapping around her shoulder, drawing her to him, as the fingertips of his other hand drew gently down the curve of her neck.
His whisper, a breath at her ear. “You saw your little boy. I didn’t lie to you.” His hand moved lower, under the neckline of her dress. “That was real… you know it was. I gave him to you…” He brought his head down to kiss her throat.
She let him go on. Joseph’s words echoed inside her head. That was real… She knew he meant the little film, the images of the child laughing and running and throwing a ball. That was as real for him as if the child had been here in the room, and she could have knelt down and gathered him into her arms.
And when he saw her on the screen, the larger one, with all the faces in the theater audience turned toward it… then that was real as well. Or perhaps that was the only time she was real to him. The woman in his arms, with the face of the luminous being on the screen – the woman whose dress had been unfastened at the back by his careful hand, to expose her skin made even whiter by the black lace of the Parisian finery he’d given her; the woman whose bare shoulder he kissed, murmuring her name – that woman was the creature made of shadows, the ghost, the insubstantial thing. The woman on the screen, that other Marte, would exist long after this one had slipped from his arms and dissipated like smoke in the still air.
She dreamed that sometimes, or let it dream her, an image that came unbidden whenever she kept her eyes closed, while the embrace of Joseph or David or any other man tightened around her. She didn’t know where it came from, but it comforted her. To see a thing of translucent silk with her face, rising above the sweating arched back of the man and the pale form he crushed beneath himself… to see it rise and drift, to slowly become less and then nothing, gone…
Now, in this room, Joseph had laid her down against the sofa’s cushions, his hand brushing the bare skin above her stockings. Another part of her, the smallest, coldest part that stayed locked inside her head, in a little room that no one else could enter, watched her and this man in the slow measure of their coupling. Watched and calculated, and kept its silence. That part knew this was something it endured, or less than that, what he did with her was something that didn’t matter at all. It was how she kept Joseph bringing her photos of her child, news of him, and this time, the gift of the film. Something real, or close to it.
Marte turned her head away from the sofa cushion and kissed him, feeling how avidly he set himself to consume her. His jacket and the shirt beneath dropped onto the rumpled fall of her dress upon the floor.
Later – she didn’t know when; she had retreated into that small, hidden part of herself – she opened her eyes when she heard a distant keening sound, a high-pitched shiver in the air. It took her a moment to realize that it was an air-raid siren, that urgent cry that had become so familiar in the last few months, bringing Berlin from its sleeping dreams to a waking one.
Past the screen on which she had seen her child, and past the drawn curtains of the tall windows of the Joseph’s Ministry office, she saw the beams of the searchlights sweep across the sky. The bass drone of the bombers mounted beneath the wail of the sirens. With the first impacts, that rattled the glass in its frames and sifted a fine plaster dust from the ceiling, Joseph raised his head. His hands still gripped her bare arms as he gazed out toward the city’s luminous night. Above the clouds, the distant, ghostly forms of the bombers passed in and out of darkness.
She watched, looking up at Joseph’s face, as his feverish gaze followed another perfect drama.
***
He lay on the narrow bunk, his eyes closed, dreaming. Though not yet asleep; awake enough to know that his dream was part memory. Of a time when he had sat in a darkened theater, surrounded by others, all of them gazing up at the screen before them, at the faces that were so much more real than they themselves were.
One of those faces, the most beautiful one of all, was tucked inside the curl of his arm, his hand clutching tight the wrinkled photograph. Pavli held on to the little piece of brightness, the image of her face, the angel of the shop window. He would have to hide it again before the dawn, before anybody in the dormitory of the Lazarene men could see him with it, even his own brother. None of them would understand. They had shut him out, made him an outcast from their faith… it didn’t matter why they had done that, to protect him or not. It didn’t matter because he had a faith of his own to comfort him.
He would hide the photograph of Marte Helle, perhaps back in the lining of his boot, or some other place he would find, that would be as safe. But for now, he wanted it here, close to him, so he could see her face in the faint moonlight that came through the barred window high above his head.
All over the world, in this world and the next, people dreamt and remembered. Even here, among these who were still his brethren somehow, still his blood. In the night’s darkness, in their dreaming, they were all denizens of that other land, moving among the shadows and ghosts that called their names, that bent forward from the bright heavens and bestowed a kiss upon their upraised lips.
And farther… beyond the breathing and murmurs of the Lazarenes… in Berlin and across the fields of night and of the coming day. There were others – he could sense their dreaming as well.
Some dreamt of her. The angel. Awake or in sleep… in the small theaters bound by their skulls, or on the great luminous screens rising before them… they dreamt of her.
As he did.
Pavli squeezed his eyes shut tighter and whispered her name. So softly, that no one would hear.
No one but the angel…
SEVENTEEN
A bird – tiny, brown, indistinguishable from the others – pecked at the bread crumbs that Pavli had scattered through the bars onto the stone ledge outside. He stood far enough back so that it wouldn’t be frightened away, and watched and listened. The bird hopped from one crumb to the next, but made no other sound.
Matthi had told him that birds could speak – really speak, not just a parrot’s idiot squawk – if they wanted to. He hadn’t been able to tell if his older brother had been joking or not. A little story, something else the Lazarenes knew: that when the Savior had hung upon the cross, blood trickling from his wrists and brow and side, the anguished cry to His Father hadn’t been His last words. The crows and ravens of Golgotha, that stripped the dead flesh from the bones and perched upon the skulls that gave the hill its name, had perched upon His outstretched arms – the thieves on either side of Him were already dead and couldn’t hear – and leaned close to His whispering mouth, so they might be told the last of His secrets.
“And from the ravens,” Matthi had said, �
��all the other birds learned to speak. So when St. Francis had a flock of birds before him, he hadn’t been preaching to them, but listening. And learning…”
A silly story. Perhaps it was true. The brown wren-like bird clicked its beak on the last crumb, glanced back at Pavli with one bright-bead eye, then flew away to the grey-barked trees in the distance.
It was time for Pavli to go as well. He turned and opened the door behind him, just far enough to slip through. He closed it carefully and silently behind himself, then turned and ran down the asylum’s corridors.
He had the freedom of the building. Within its walls at least, he could move about as he wished. The privilege that came with what he had attained, the niche he had clawed out for himself. The false gypsy’s advice had been right – to survive, you had to make yourself useful. To them, the guards and the other SS men, from the officers down to the lowliest rifle-toter. The least of them was more powerful now than even the most exalted Lazarene elder; they could do anything for you, from looking the other way when you walked into some restricted area of the building and its grounds, to increasing your rations. If they wanted to; if you were useful to them.
But most important of all, you had to be useful to him… to Herr Doktor Ritter. No one outranked him here; no one was more powerful, more capable of deciding your fate. Into this sealed little world, he brought the atmosphere of a darker and colder sphere beyond the fences topped with barbed wire, like a wind drifting through mountain crevasses where the sun never penetrated. Especially when Ritter came back from his weekly trips into Berlin, where he met with his colleagues in the Ahnenerbe. Working in the darkroom – or pretending to, when there was no real work to do – Pavli saw through the open doorway whenever Ritter returned, his boots shiny as black mirrors as he strode past to his office and laboratory at the end of the corridor. The next morning, the doctor’s studies would resume, and Pavli would receive his instructions about what photographs to take, what film would be used, every little detail.
Perhaps the angel of the shop window was looking out for him, guarding Pavli from whatever misstep would reveal him to be a fraud, an ignorant youth who was desperately using his few scraps of knowledge to pass himself off as someone useful. He knew it was foolish to think of her that way – he knew it was nothing more than the picture of a film actress, one who was distantly related to him by blood – but it comforted him to do so. It also explained his run of luck, that everything to which he’d turned his hand, everything that Ritter had told him to do, had meet with enough success to make the doctor nod in satisfaction. When something had finally gone wrong, a whole day’s worth of test shots turning out over-exposed and black in the darkroom trays, Ritter had scowled at the wet prints but had said nothing. Pavli’s gut had crawled with apprehension, as he’d expected any moment to be sent back to the dormitory with the others, while Ritter sent for a real photographer to be sent to the asylum. But nothing like that happened; they all had carried on as before, with nothing but a sharp comment from Ritter the next day, for him to avoid wasting the Reich’s precious technical resources.
He turned a corner and saw the Scharfuhrer waiting for him outside the door to the darkroom. The resolve to be more careful tightened inside him. It would never do for him to keep anyone waiting, anyone who could put a boot on his throat.
The Scharfuhrer was all smiles. “Do you have it ready?” He even gave a pleasant nod of his head as Pavli approached.
“Yes… yes, of course.” Pavli opened the darkroom, switching on the light as the other man followed him inside. “Here it is.” He took a flat square parcel from a hiding place behind the ranks of the dark-brown bottles of developing chemicals and handed it over.
“Ah. Wonderful.” The Scharfuhrer had on his finely tailored dress uniform, the one in which he traveled to the city, to visit both his wife and his mistress. He set his peaked cap, with its skull-and-crossbones emblem above the visor, down on the workbench and unwrapped the parcel. He held up a framed photograph, admiring the image of his own face. “ Ausgezeichnet.”
Pavli had no idea which woman would receive the Scharfuhrer ’s present. That was none of his business, anyway. Enough that he had found this means of ingratiating himself with the guards. Another Lazarene, who had been a carpenter in the larger world beyond the fences, made the frames from bits of scrap, carving a grapevine pattern into the wood with a stolen penknife and staining them with a concoction of boiled leaves and pine needles. For himself, Pavli had made a rough studio, a replica of the one that had been at the rear of his uncle’s camera shop, in the storage area behind the darkroom; he had even been able to nail up a backdrop, a piece of canvas daubed with random splotches of paint. To his own eye, the results were little more than adequate, but the guards who came and posed were pleased enough with them.
“This will do very nicely.” The Scharfuhrer smiled and winked at Pavli. “I’m sure she’ll keep it right by her bedside.”
The mistress then, guessed Pavli. He said nothing, keeping himself from being lulled by the SS man’s confidences and friendly show.
“You do admirable work.” The Scharfuhrer laid a hand on Pavli’s shoulder. “Come with me. I have a small token of my appreciation.”
On the graveled drive in front of the building, the Scharfuhrer reached inside one of the staff cars, turned and bestowed a grease-stained package into Pavli’s hands. The rank smell of the sausage it held made his stomach clench with hunger.
Before he could tell the Scharfuhrer thanks, a commotion sounded from the building’s door. One of the Lazarene women, shouting and with distraught face, jerked her arm away from the female guard who had been trying to pull her back inside. The sweep of the woman’s arm knocked the guard sprawling. In a few seconds, before Pavli could react, the woman had run to him and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Where are they?” Her greying hair come loose from its knotted kerchief. “My babies -” Her fingers dug into Pavli’s upper arms as she forced him back against the fender of the staff car. “They won’t tell me – they say they don’t know – but you know, don’t you? Because you’re close to him, to Ritter -”
The woman had knocked the breath out of Pavli. Through the spatter of black spots in his vision, he could see the Scharfuhrer trying to break her grasp, to pull her away from him.
“Give them back to me!” The woman’s voice had turned into screaming, her head tilted back as the Scharfuhrer and another female guard dragged her along the side of the car. The first guard had regained her feet; standing in front, she leveled a backhand slap across the woman’s face. The Scharfuhrer let go of her arms, and she dropped to her knees on the gravel, the tangle of her hair falling across the angry mark reddening her cheek and jaw. Her spine bent catlike as sobbing tore from her throat.
The Scharfuhrer grabbed Pavli by the elbow and pushed him toward the asylum’s door. He twisted his neck to look back. “What’s wrong -”
“It’s none of your concern.” The Scharfuhrer ’s face was rigid with anger. “Get back to your work.” He shoved Pavli stumbling against the building’s front step, then turned and strode back to where the two female guards were hoisting the crying woman up between themselves.
The sausage that the Scharfuhrer had given Pavli, as payment for the photograph, had been dropped and trampled in the melee; the paper wrapping had come undone, its greasy contents smeared into the dirt. He didn’t care about that. When the shock had passed, he had recognized the woman, and had even known what she had been questioning him about: she was the mother of a pair of twins, nearly the youngest of all the Lazarene children who had been brought here with their parents. Toddlers, little more than a year old… but what had happened to them? Why had the woman been screaming and carrying on? There was no place in the asylum building where they could have strayed, where they wouldn’t have been found. Had someone taken them from her?
He looked up, aware of others watching him. In the windows above were the faces of the Lazarenes,
the men peering out through the bars. He could just see, farther away, a few of the women held in the distant wing of the building.
They had seen what had happened, and now had turned their attention to him. He wondered if they, too, would demand an answer from him.
He stepped back into the doorway, where they could no longer see him. Then turned and ran into the building, toward the shelter of the darkroom.
***
The mystery of the woman and her vanished children deepened through the afternoon and into the evening. Pavli lay on the cot tucked into a corner of the storage area – that had been a benefit of his success with the photography, to have been moved here by himself. He could be put to work at any hour, without the need for one of the guards to go into the lightless dormitory to fetch him. He didn’t mind that, as it allowed him some privacy and the ability to hide his few small treasures where no one would be likely to find them. The angel’s photo was tucked in a niche behind the highest stack of crates; none of the guards had arms skinny as his, to reach into the narrow space.