by K. W. Jeter
He didn’t know; Pavli felt sorry for him. Time and its ghosts had escaped from the doctor. Leaving him with the dead, that could not be brought to life again. No Christ would reach his hand down into the burning grave. Ritter would cut, the scalpel lifting the skin on its narrow blade, and it would be the same corpse before him, over and over, this world without end…
“Yes…” Pavli nodded slowly, feeling how old and tired he himself had become. A thread of dawn light had appeared at the window, like an incision. “Yes, you’re right, Herr Doktor.” Ritter had fallen asleep at last, the lecture over, except perhaps in his muddled dreaming; he’d lain his head on his arm upon the desk.
“You’re right…” Pavli reached down and picked up the empty bottle, setting it where Ritter wouldn’t trip over it when he awoke. “There is no time.”
NINETEEN
“Where is she?”
The assistant director looked over his shoulder at von Behren. “I don’t know.” He had his right arm in a sling, a casualty of last night’s bombing raid on the city. With an awkwardly balanced clipboard and the messy pile of the shooting script, he was trying to inventory the damage to the studio, which sets had been damaged and which were still intact enough to be filmed around. “No one’s seen her since we left the shelter.”
Von Behren spine bent beneath the tonnage of his worries. His nerves were still on edge from the hours of darkness, crouched like a rabbit in a hole while the earth shuddered with concussive blows. Concrete dust had sifted down from the cracks spreading through the shelter’s arched ceiling. The smell of human sweat in a closed space, a sputtering paraffin lamp that had been lit when the bare overhead bulbs had dimmed and finally gone out, a woman – not one of his actresses, thank God – who had gone hysterical in the brief interval of darkness, her half-drunken husband ineffectually soothing her, screams turning at last to a muffled sobbing… and all the while, listening to a giant walking the empty streets above them, each bomb impact a footstep that leveled a building. The giant had stridden off to the east, the night bombers completing their pass and wheeling over empty countryside, away from the flak guns, to head back to their home bases. One of the worst raids so far – von Behren, his crew and actors, had emerged from their hole in the ground, half-expecting to see nothing but rubble in all directions.
He was grateful that the studio with his sets had taken only an indirect hit. The banks of skylights had all been shattered, a layer of broken glass sparkling across the floors and props. The carpenters had worked all morning covering the empty frames overhead with thin canvas; it gave the interior of the studio a muted yellowish light that reminded him of the age-browned pages of the book of old folk tales sitting on his desk. Perhaps it would show up well on film, softening the edges of the captured images; he had asked one of the cameramen to set up for a test reel. The most important thing would be how Marte would look. Only when he had sent instructions for her to be made up and laced into the period medieval costume had he found out that she was missing. Again.
“Send someone out to find her.” Von Behren looked across the sound stages and the hum of activity they held, push brooms sweeping up the last of the debris, the set painters mending a backdrop that had fallen and snagged on a brace of floodlights. “I suspect we’ll have a few hours of quiet before the Americans come overhead.” That was the schedule by which everyone in Berlin lived now: the British bombers concealed in darkness, the Americans flying brazenly by daylight. As winter began slowly unlocking into a damp spring, the pounding of the city had become such a regular occurrence that any respite, a day when the sirens didn’t herald the planes’ approach, seemed more agonizing than an actual raid, nerves tightening in anticipation. “Perhaps we can get something on film before we all have to scurry away into that wretched burrow.”
“Of course.” The assistant director raised an eyebrow. “And where should we have someone look for Fraulein Helle?”
The other’s smile annoyed von Behren. “Please. The usual places – all right?” On top of his other burdens, he didn’t need all these arch, knowing comments. “If you’re not aware of them by now, I’m sure we can find someone on the crew who is.” Any of them, as a matter of fact; Marte’s renewed affair with the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was the main topic of the whispered gossip on the set.
That affair, the secret and public love between Reichminister Goebbels and the actress he had made the queen of the German cinema – just as he had promised – was both a curse and a blessing to von Behren. How could a mere film director interfere with the Reichsminister ’s demands upon his leading lady’s time and body? It made the shooting schedule difficult, trying to squeeze moments between the air raids and Goebbels’ lusts – it was no wonder the frustrated crew was given to remarks.
At the same time, they all wouldn’t be here, in the first stages of filming Der Rote Jager, if it weren’t for that affair. The little favor that Marte owed to von Behren, or that he had managed to convince her that she owed, or that she had been willing to pretend that she believed she did, had come in at last. It had taken this long, the four years and more since they had returned here to Berlin, he to his old office at UFA’s Babelsberg complex, she to Goebbels’ feverish embrace -
(And where was the little boy, for whose sake Marte had come back? That lying bastard, von Behren thought whenever he saw a newspaper picture of Goebbels or heard his ranting voice on the radio. But he also noted the still sadness grown even more visible in Marte’s face, that made her even lovelier and more devastating to all men’s hearts.)
– and the dreaming of those who saw her on the screens of the darkened theaters. They bought their tickets and vanished for a few hours into that darkness, into that light, once more into the stillness of Marte Helle’s gaze. She had returned to them, and that was all that mattered; the words that von Behren wrote for her to say were unimportant. The Reichsminister, in his role as de facto head of the German film industry, had more than personal reasons to give her anything for which she might ask. She had given him von Behren’s script for Der Rote Jager, with her part carefully noted in the margins. Goebbels’ antipathy for the fantastic, that deep Teutonic world of witches and demons, Faust and Der Golem and old Murnau’s Nosferatu, had finally been overcome; he had commissioned Munchhausen to commemorate UFA’s twenty-fifth anniversary, a special effects showpiece using Agfa’s newly developed color film, all intended to outshine the Englishman Korda’s Thief of Bagdad and even Gone with the Wind, that the American Jew Selznick had produced so brilliantly. The premiere at the UFA-Palast am Zoo, just before that theater had been lost to the bombs, had been enough of a success to justify more things along those lines. Perhaps Goebbels had decided that if those were the films that the German people wanted to see now, that’s what they should be given. The more time they spent in the dark shelters of the theaters, the less they would see of their own city streets, battered by the fleets of planes overhead, that Goering’s Luftwaffe was powerless to stop.
Or perhaps there was no calculation at all on Goebbels’ part; von Behren wondered if the Reichsminister had lost the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Perhaps it had all become the same to him – the great cynic, the manipulator of men who could have just as easily pulled the puppet strings for the Communists or been a film director himself. Whole divisions of the German army, or what was left of it, had been taken away from fighting real battles and then been costumed like Prussian regiments of the Napoleonic Wars, charging up and down hills for the big scenes of that pandering hack Veit Harlan’s Kolberg epic. Goebbels and the rest of the Nazi bigwigs obviously preferred the heroic past to this present that was falling in rubble around their ears. Of course, that golden past was as much a fantasy as any specter concocted in a film story. Once the door into those other worlds had been opened inside Goebbels’ head, then it had been easy enough for Marte, at von Behren’s off-screen urging – she still did what he asked her to; she was still gratefu
l to him, though he was no longer sure why – to whisper to her lover, across the pillow of whatever bed she and Goebbels shared. About the script von Behren had written for her, the medieval fantasy concerning the red huntsman, the punisher of those who violated the ancient laws that bound men and their prey together. She had even given him a set of photographs from the costume test that von Behren had arranged, showing her in the long period gown, with its belt knotted intricately at her waist, her white-gold hair braided in the fashion of the maidens in the old woodcuts. Von Behren suspected that it was those photos alone that had secured Goebbels’ approval for the project; the Reichsminister wanted to see that vision of beauty come to life on the screen. Not enough to hold her naked in his arms, the woman all men desired; every fantasy had to be made real.
That was the insanity of the National Socialists, their Frevel, and now Goebbels had succumbed to it with the others. Very well; in that sense, the head of the German film industry was no different from Herr David Wise or any other man of power and money whose approval von Behren had to obtain before making a film. The Reich’s film office, upon the instructions of its head, had bestowed a nice fat production budget upon von Behren – this close to the Apocalypse that everyone could sense was coming, what did mere money signify? – with the only condition that the principal shooting was to be done here in Berlin. Of course, the only reason for that was to keep her here, close by Goebbels – it was so obvious that any other explanation wasn’t even bothered with, nothing about her wanting to remain and boost morale among her fellow Berliners or some similar nonsense.
Von Behren had had no objection; there was more than enough money in the budget to have the sets built on the UFA sound stages, elaborate reproductions of a medieval castle’s parapets and banquet halls, massive stones that were really nothing more than wood and canvas daubed with clay. And it kept him and his crew here in Berlin, where there was still a semblance of order and the familiar, despite the bombing raids; the electricity cut out for only a few hours each day, and the food rations were small but still obtainable. God knew what the conditions had become out there in the Reich’s shrinking empire; terrible stories of starvation and grislier deaths were carried into the city by the refugees streaming in from the east. A good number of Berliner Hausfrauen had taken to carrying knives in their handbags, not to defend themselves with, but to slash their own throats before the inevitable rape at the hands of the Russian soldiers. All Goebbels’ propaganda had successfully terrorized the women about what their fate would be; the men merely expected to be killed, and perhaps dismembered and eaten. Von Behren knew that wasn’t likely, but as a practical matter, there wasn’t a real castle where the shooting could have been done that hadn’t already been overrun and turned into a command headquarters by the Allied armies.
“So what shall we do now?” The assistant director, with the script cradled in his plaster armcast, was still standing next to von Behren; one of the assistant’s assistants had gone to snoop after the missing Marte Helle. “While we wait?”
Von Behren sighed as he looked around the studio interior. Most of the cleaning up had been finished, just in the last few minutes. That same sense of urgency – of time running out, life and work that had to be squeezed in between bombing raids – motivated everyone here. It seemed strange, but not really when he thought about it, how much more he himself had accomplished, scripts on paper and films in the can, since he had come back with Marte to Berlin and the war. When he had been in Hollywood, that sunny paradise, it had been easy to believe that time was infinite, stretching out in all directions like the golden light that buttered the hills. Even with no money in the bank and dependent upon the continued indulgence of Herr David Wise, he had taken whole days and weeks off to sit in the backyard of his little bungalow and re-read his childhood book of Marchen. When the thick, warm air had sent him drowsing, the old stories had come into his dreams; the red hunter had stalked him through a sun-dappled forest, not to catch and punish him, but to gather him up, a child again, and lift him to the face concealed inside the hood of stitched animal furs, a kiss in that small darkness…
“Sir?” The assistant’s polite, patient voice broke into von Behren’s drifting thoughts, the memory of a dream that had always ended before the last of its secrets had been revealed. “What is it you would like us to do now?”
He wasn’t blinking into the soft Californian sunshine, just thrown out of his own dreaming; he was in Berlin, always in Berlin, in what everyone knew was the last and hardest winter of the war. A wind sharpened with ice cut through the canvas nailed over the broken skylights.
“Yes…” He nodded slowly, rousing himself. “I’d like to… I’d like to do some exterior shots.” He knew there would be time enough for that, at least; it would be hours yet before Marte returned and any filming could be done with her. “Out in the streets. There were things I saw this morning… they might be something we can use.” A sector of residential blocks near the studio had been transformed by the bombs and fire, from Berlin of 1945 to a blackened, timeless vista, the bones of the city stripped of their modern flesh. He would have to see how they looked on film; the ruins might serve better than any construction from the carpenters and painters, for the final sequences of Der Rote Jager, when the spectral figure’s wrath had laid waste the village and countryside of the sinning lords of the castle. Further proof, if any were needed, that Goebbels had not even read the script that Marte had taken to him; he had merely given his approval as a present to her. If poor Frank Wysbar could get into trouble for the black horsemen in his Fahrmann Maria, those bringers of death too close to the real SS to be allowed, then surely the Reichsminister would have suspected a metaphor in the Rote Jager script, a defeatist prediction of the Reich’s encircling fate.
Or perhaps Goebbels had indeed read it. Von Behren wondered if the dramatist inside Goebbels’ soul had embraced the apocalypse as the fitting conclusion to this great film he had written, the one that had taken all the world for its sets.
It little mattered now. His old friend Wysbar had made his escape to America, where he at least had had the good sense to hunker down and stay. The last von Behren had heard, Wysbar had been having a hard time finding work; there were too many German refugees under the palm trees for all of them to be hired. And here I am, he mused, and I can make all the films I want. For a while, at least; while there’s still time. So who’s the fool now? Von Behren pulled his coat tighter around himself as he watched the studio doors being rolled back, the cameras being readied for the grey, wintry light outside.
***
He had made love to her in so many different rooms. And outside as well, on the grounds of his Schwanenwerder estate, soft grass still warm from the passage of the summer day, the lights of a reception inside the grand house visible through the overhanging branches of the night-shaded trees. Everywhere it had happened, where she without will had let it happen, on velvet couches or beds that he had once shared and would share again with his wife – they were all the same place, the tiniest room, the darkness behind her eyelids. She closed her eyes and went in there, leaving him in the world outside that held her body.
“It is sad, isn’t it?” Joseph’s voice came to her, close beside where she stood on a carpet littered with rubble. “I can barely stand to look at it myself. They’ve done such damage here…”
Marte opened her eyes and looked across the high-ceilinged room. The intricate cornices and plasterwork above had come crashing down, into dust and white crumbling fragments, revealing the skeletal girders and ragged patches of sky beyond. Snow had fallen through, melting and then freezing into grey mirrors on the floor. Through the frames of the shattered windows that had filled one wall, scraping mechanical noises and faint voices could be heard, the clean-up squadrons filling in the bomb craters on the Wilhelmstra?e below. The corpses had been dug out from the hills of fallen brick and taken away, in the first hours of quiet after the planes had departed, while the fires in the ot
her parts of the city were still being extinguished.
A gloved hand ran across one of the empty shelves; Joseph looked at the dust on his fingertips. He had on his trench coat, belted over his severe National Socialist uniform. “You see?” He turned back toward Marte. “This is why we had to move the ministry’s staff down to the basements. Impossible to do any work here, under these conditions; my own home is now an annex for at the ministry’s senior officials. But this arrangement will not last forever.” His gaze swept across the room, taking in the now-ragged wallpaper, the blank spot where the portrait of the Fuhrer had hung, the empty space where his own ornate desk had stood. She could see him transforming it all in his mind, one set being struck and a new and grander one being erected in its place. “When the war has been concluded, and we can turn our attention once more to the rebuilding of our nation… this will all be different. And better.” Joseph nodded in satisfaction at what he alone could see. The future. A gesture of his hand took in the entire room. “There are great plans… the ministry, this building itself will be gone, replaced by one of such splendor…” He smiled at her. “Those whom you knew in America, those Hollywood Juden such as David Wise… nothing of theirs will compare to what we will achieve here. Soon…”
Strange, to hear David’s name come from Joseph’s mouth. She knew there was still some jealousy there, even though he had been the victor. One thing to share her in the dreams of men who saw her on the screen, another to think of a Jewish film mogul – a real one, a prince of Hollywood, the exact creature Joseph had modeled himself after – running his manicured hands over her skin, drinking in her kiss. Joseph had all that now, but he could still speak his rival’s name with venom.