The Kingdom of Shadows

by K. W. Jeter

  And then another memory. Of his own brother Matthi, drawing the same transparent substance away from the freshly tattooed markings on his wrists. And Matthi whirling around when he’d suddenly felt that he was being watched, his face angry, shouting at Pavli that he shouldn’t have seen those things, it wasn’t the time yet for him to know.

  “Don’t lie to me – you’ve seen it -”

  “No!” Pavli turned away from the table, reaching for the handle of the room’s door. “I didn’t! I didn’t see anything!”

  Ritter’s voice called after him as he ran from the office into the corridor beyond. “You will see it, Iosefni – I promise you that. Together we…”

  He couldn’t hear any more. He clapped his hands to his ears, blocking out everything. In the storage area behind the darkroom, he threw himself upon the cot, burying his face in the rough blanket. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the ghosts, the things of silk and smoke and memory, still battered his sight with their soft hands.

  Even when he fell into exhausted sleep. Even then, in his dreaming.

  ***

  Toward noon, one of Herr Doktor Ritter’s assistants gave Pavli his instructions.

  “Set up the photographic equipment in the dissection room.” The assistant wore a white laboratory coat and a cold lack of expression. “You know where that is, I assume.”

  Pavli turned away from the trays on the workbench and nodded. “Why?” The feeling of dread, that had been with him all morning, tightened in his stomach. “What’s happening there?”

  The assistant’s glance turned harsher. “That’s not for you to ask. Just get your things there, and be quick about it.”

  Ritter, also garbed in white, glanced up at Pavli as he came into the room behind the office. “There at the corner of the table should do fine.” His voice revealed no emotion. Whatever had been set loose during the night had once again been brought under leash. He turned his attention back to the object upon the table.

  It wasn’t the dead child lying there – that much Pavli could tell. That was what he had been expecting. He lifted the tripod from his shoulder and set it in position. An adult’s bare feet, so much rawer and bonier than the child’s had been, protruded from beneath the sheet stretched over the body’s face. He took the lens cap off the camera and began adjusting its focus.

  “Raise it as high as you can,” directed Ritter. “I want as much of an overhead angle as possible.” He turned back to conferring with his assistant.

  Pavli watched over the top of the camera as the sheet was pulled back from the naked form. A woman then, or what had been one, now reduced to an object without sex. That was all right; he could control the sick, light-headed feeling he’d brought with him into the room.

  The assistant finished marking the body, the black lines to direct the scalpel cuts. He straightened up and turned toward the chrome tray, from which Ritter was already selecting his tools. Pavli could see the dead woman’s face then.

  “Is there something the matter?” Ritter’s cold voice cut through the nausea that distorted Pavli’s vision. “This is a simple enough task. If you are too squeamish for it, then perhaps I will be forced to find a replacement for you.”

  “No… no, I’m all right.” Pavli tightened his grip on the tripod, to keep his balance. “I’m sorry. I’ll try… I’ll do my best. Please…”

  Ritter and his assistant regarded him. Then both men turned and leaned over the body of the woman. The mother of the twin children, the woman who had accosted Pavli, screaming for him to tell her what had happened to her babies. As Ritter made the first incision between her breasts, his assistant leaned forward, watching with clinical interest.

  The camera’s shutter clicked as Pavli pressed the trigger button. That was the first photograph; he closed his eyes and took another…

  In the evening, when Pavli brought the new prints to Ritter’s office, the doctor spread them out upon his desk. He studied them for a moment, then looked up at Pavli.

  “You needn’t harbor such suspicions.” Ritter smiled, pleased at his ability to tell what Pavli was thinking. “The woman’s death was at her own hands. She hung herself after receiving the news of what happened to her children. Perhaps we should have been more cognizant of the extent of her grief and taken greater precautions, watched her more carefully. But we are limited in our resources here, and such unfortunate incidents are bound to happen.” He straightened the edges of the photographs lying before him. “Though I do not abide such waste as that in which some of my colleagues indulge, nevertheless I must take advantage of any opportunities for my research.” He looked up at Pavli. “Does that disturb you?”

  “No -” Pavli shook his head. “Whatever you wish, sir.”

  Ritter nodded. “Exactly so.” He picked up a magnifying glass and leaned over the desktop, the better to study the details of the eviscerated carcass. In the last of the series of photographs, the images were no longer recognizably human. “You should think, Iosefni, upon those matters we spoke of last night. We have much work ahead of us. And… there is not much time.” His voice sank to a murmur. “There is never enough time…”

  “May I go now?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Ritter irritably. “Leave me.”

  Resting on his cot in the darkroom’s storage area, Pavli wondered why Ritter bothered lying to him at all. The photographs had caught clearly enough the imprint of a man’s hands circling the woman’s neck. Her death had been written in the blood pressed beneath the surface of her skin. Why lie about it, when there was nothing that could be done? Such was the nature of this world. It wasn’t up to him.

  He rolled onto his side, using his forearm for a pillow. Only a little effort was required to set aside the images of the woman and what was finally left of her. Beyond that was darkness and sleep.

  As he fell, he could just hear the echo of Ritter’s words.

  Much work to be done…

  And little time.

  EIGHTEEN

  Pavli looked on as the doctor washed the blood from his hands. At the basin on one side of his office, Ritter carefully scrubbed his palms and his long, delicate-seeming fingers beneath the trickle of water from the tap. He paid great attention to the task, bending his head close to examine his nails.

  The smell of soap drifted to where Pavli sat on the wooden stool near the desk. He turned away, nauseated. The alcohol that Ritter poured out and set before him always made his gut queasy. To begin with. Not much later, a few minutes, the warmth would spread up his throat, a numbness that was not pleasant so much as necessary. Blurring the images caught by the camera inside his skull, so that the things he had seen in the tile-walled surgical laboratory behind the office, were harder to discern. They could even be forgotten, if only for a moment.

  His stomach had already begun to calm. Pavli looked up and saw Herr Doktor Ritter drying his hands. The ritual was coming to an end. Inside this room, and inside all the asylum, there was no time. Time had stopped for the Lazarenes, the dwindling numbers of the men and the women and children in their separate dormitories. Their lives, their little comings and goings in the streets of the distant city – all that had ended. They did not live, but existed, in a world without clocks or calendars, waiting for the moment when the guards would come and fetch one of them, take the man or the woman or the child up to Herr Doktor Ritter’s surgery. Most often, the chosen ones would merely shuffle obediently between the guards, head down in a stunned daze. Other times, there had been unfortunate scenes, commotions, a Lazarene male kicking and shouting, one of the mothers screaming as she clutched her child or tried to drag it back from the grasp of the guards. A spark of hope or desperation, or some other unreasoning emotion, springing into a flame that would have to be beaten out with the guards’ truncheons. One rebellion had taken place, when the Lazarene men had barricaded the entrance to the dormitory. Starving them out had not been as effective as Ritter’s announcement, shouted through the door and the stacked-up beds on the ot
her side, that he would simply work his way through the women and children before returning to deal with the men. That had broken the last trace of their resistance; the beds and other scraps of lumber had been pulled away from the door. Now the men accepted their martyrdom with whatever comforts their faith could provide.

  Ritter tossed the damp towel beside the basin. “Ah, my good photographer -” That had become his oddly affectionate term for Pavli. “We have worked hard this day.” He poured himself a glassful from the bottle before sitting down behind the desk. “As every day.” He drew his research journal to himself and flipped it open to the next blank page.

  The alcohol made Pavli drowsy. It helped to dull the ache along his side, the rib he was sure was cracked, if not broken. A jagged piece of tooth in his lower jaw panged in time to his heartbeat; that, too, had receded a bit, the raw nerve softening.

  “We still have so much to learn…”

  The doctor’s murmur drifted past Pavli’s ear. Ritter said the same things after each session in the surgery; that was time repeating itself. Pavli raised his heavy eyelids and watched Ritter inscribing a date at the top of the journal page. December something – he couldn’t make out that part of the upside-down writing – nineteen-hundred and forty-four. Pavli frowned as he mulled that over. A year had gone by – close to two, perhaps – since he and the rest of the Lazarenes had been brought here. In the world beyond the fence topped with barbed wire, it might be 1944; in this little world, Herr Doktor Ritter washed the blood from his hands and wrote his findings down in the research journal, over and over.

  “So much…” The nib of Ritter’s fountain pen scratched against the page. “So much work…” He wrote and drank. Pavli set his own glass back down.

  In the world outside, where time moved, the war went on. Here, they caught only little glimpses of it, like lightning flashes in storm clouds mounted up on the horizon. More than once, in the middle of the night, the drone of the bombers coming from the west had broken all sleep. Pavli had risen from his cot in the darkroom and stood at one of the corridor’s barred windows, looking up at the dark shapes spreading their arms against the stars. They passed the hospital by, as though the Angels of Death had noted a mark of blood on the great front door. The bombs had fallen upon the distant city’s outlying districts, and the glow of the fires could be seen, an orange-red shimmering above the forest surrounding the building. In the morning, flakes of ash, a black snow, had drifted onto Pavli’s hands as he’d stood in the hospital’s courtyard. The guards had turned their faces up to the sky, silent as they sniffed the air, nostrils flared for the scent of the war.

  The guards were soldiers, and knew. Even here, in this little pocket, that time and the black angels had overlooked. Pavli had come upon the guards in their barracks, huddled near a radio receiver, listening to the forbidden broadcasts of the enemy. They had hardly looked up as Pavli had come into the room and laid another framed photograph upon one of the empty bunks. They ignored him, intent as they were upon the news of the armies that had landed on the shores of Normandy, the Russians who had left the German corpses in the snows around Stalingrad and now marched in the muddy tracks of the tanks heading toward Berlin; a fist of iron squeezing around the Fatherland’s heart, blood leaking between the fingers; the blood of soldiers like them…

  “Let us review the state of our knowledge.” Ritter laid his pen down on the journal and sat back in his chair. He drained his glass, leaned forward and refilled it, nodding slowly, deep in thought, as his rubbed his thumb over the glass’s rim. “Those things we have determined to be true… and those which are still a matter of speculation.”

  More ritual, more repeated non-time. Pavli wanted to lay his head down on the corner of the desk, let the alcohol combine with his own fatigue to blot out the aches left from the beating he had received in the Lazarene dormitory a week ago. The blows from those who had been his brethren once… it didn’t matter. What was important was to not fall asleep in front of Ritter, to make a show of interest in the doctor’s little lecture, the one he had heard so many times before. The broken tooth in Pavli’s jaw had its uses; he prodded it with his tongue and the resulting stab of pain dispersed most of the fog inside his head.

  “The Lazarenes are an ancient breed; that has been established.” Ritter had taken another swallow from his glass, and a flush of blood had risen beneath the greying skin of his face. He looked older now, as though more than two years had settled upon him. “We knew that when we started these most critical investigations.” His gaze looked beyond Pavli, as though he were addressing a lecture hall full of medical students. “Yet at the same time, the general awareness of even their existence is minimal. In this, they show a circumspection, a caution lacking in die Juden.” His voice took on a tone of admiration for his research subjects. “Every effort is made to blend in, to seem no different from the Germans around them. The only distinguishing marks, the ritual tattoos upon the wrists and one side of the ribs, are kept carefully hidden. Undoubtedly, the great majority of Berliners who have come into contact with these people, either socially or on business, were completely unaware that they were talking to members of a distinct genetic and cultural group.”

  Pavli nodded, as if he were hearing all this for the first time. Well, of course, he wanted to murmur aloud. With so much murder in their history, the washing of streets with the blood of their ancestors – why wouldn’t the Lazarenes wish to go unnoticed? Do you think we’re such fools? A corner of Pavli’s mouth raised, a smile loosened by the warmth in his gut. The doctor’s proud knowledge – it was all so obvious.

  “Thus we see…” Ritter took another drink, his gaze glittering brighter, as though the alcohol had begun to seep from beneath his eyelids. “Thus we see how the Lazarenes disappeared into folklore… into myths and old legends…” He spoke slowly, laying a hand upon the already-written pages of the journal; he might have been piecing together for the first time these words from before. “Stories of pale gypsies who lived forever… who shed their skins like snakes and became young again. Some versions maintain that it was the serpent in the garden of Eden who showed the trick to the first Lazarene, the third son of Adam. Others speak of Satan disguising himself as Christ and teaching an unholy, self-inflicted crucifixion, the stigmata of which the Lazarenes still inscribe into their flesh.”

  No… it was the true Christ, whispered Pavli to himself. He still believed the little scraps of faith he had gleaned from his brother. A few coins of the inheritance that had been stolen from him. It was He who taught us.

  Ritter nodded, as though he had heard a respected colleague’s differing opinion. “The Lazarenes, of course, maintain otherwise. They regard themselves as the only bearers of Christ’s actual gospel. The secret of eternal life. The kingdom of God inside the human breast.” He shrugged, taking his hand from the glass to make a dismissive gesture. “But that is all mysticism. Of no…” He looked momentarily confused, words eluding him. “Of no value. For we are men of science. Nicht wahr?”

  Pavli looked up. “If you say so, Herr Doktor.” The man was drunk; he could see it in the sweating face, the tongue that seemed to have swollen up too large for the other’s mouth. That, too, was time repeating itself. “Whatever you say.” He helped himself to more from the bottle on the desk; this was the point at which Ritter no longer noticed things like that.

  “A certain body of knowledge has accrued over the years… the Lazaranology, if you will…” The lecture to the imagined audience continued. Though now Ritter’s voice seemed to be moving through the incantations of a religious service. “I am not the first to investigate these matters… though I have the great fortune of being in a time and place where the truth may be at last determined. The Ahnenerbe has given me its blessing, placed these resources at my disposal. Every resource… including the human one…” His face darkened, brooding. “Himmler and the others… all the leaders of the SS… none of them can tell the difference between what I’m doing and the
ir own pet theories. The fat little chicken farmer thinks vegetarianism and mumbling over old runes is as important as this work.” Contempt curdled in Ritter’s voice. “That charlatan Mengele sends them a Jew’s head pickled in a jar, and they’re happy. They add it to their silly museum of such things and think it’s all very scientific.” He snorted in disgust. “No matter. As long as they leave me alone… as long as I have been given what I require…”

  Pavli knew what the doctor meant. What a strange world this was – the small one behind the fences topped with barbed wire – where all these people, the people of his blood, could be given to someone like Herr Doktor Ritter. As something merely required, like the crates of film that arrived from the Agfa labs or the Zeiss lenses wrapped in tissue paper, so that Pavli could carry on with the work he did with the cameras.

  There had been changes, though. Ritter had asked if he had any experience with cine cameras, the kind with which motion pictures were made, and he had answered yes, a little. The doctor had smiled and told Pavli that he knew he was lying. But that it didn’t matter; Ritter had already arranged for a Wehrmacht technician to come and show Pavli how to work the clever machine. The instruction had taken no more than a week, but that had been enough. Now Herr Doktor Ritter had films of his surgical procedures to study, as well as the shots that Pavli took with the still camera he had used before.

  “No matter…” The bottle on the desk was now only a third full. Ritter set his glass back down. “We shall proceed under these circumstances.” His head wobbled a bit as he looked at Pavli for confirmation.

  “Yes, Herr Doktor.” A ritual. “As you say…” He longed more than ever to lay his head down, or slip from the chair and curl up on the floor, knees close to his chest, forearms hiding his face from the glare of the electric light over Ritter’s desk; burrowing toward the anesthesia of sleep. Though sometimes it seemed like there was no such thing as sleep here – how could there be, when time itself didn’t really exist? Just a wearying round of bad dreams, visions of the things he had seen through the cameras’ viewfinders, sights that woke him trembling and sweating on the narrow cot.