The Extra

by Kathryn Lasky

  Three minutes later, she had woken her mother, and they were peeling back the tough skin.

  “Liesel!” her mother said, and her eyes twinkled. “What a little rascal.”

  “Is this the first time she has brought you things?”

  “First time for food. But she is always bringing me little trinkets.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Lilo felt a prickle of jealousy.

  “She made me promise not to, and I was really worried about her getting into trouble. But I did make a drawing of her kitten.”

  “Mama, that is dangerous. Really dangerous,” Lilo said solemnly.

  “But you don’t understand. Her mama died last spring. The girl is lonely. She worries that her father is going to marry the mean lady.”

  “What mean lady? There are several, I think,” Lilo said, savoring the rich crumbs of the chestnut still on her tongue.

  “Not Leni. Some rather wealthy lady in the next village over. And Liesel’s older sister is in love with the head guard, Gunther.”

  Bluma reached out her hand and stroked her daughter’s arm. Lilo felt foolish. But in truth she wanted her mother all for herself. No more sharing, she thought stubbornly. Sometimes it felt good to simply give in to her most infantile instincts if even for just a moment.

  “Here, you take the last chestnut.” Bluma pushed it toward her.

  “Mama, I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can,” Bluma insisted.

  “No, let’s divide it.” Lilo said.

  “How do you divide a chestnut with no knife?”

  “Peel it and use your teeth,” Lilo replied.

  “I don’t have enough teeth. Remember?” She grinned, the dark hole making her smile ghoulish.

  “Okay, I’ll bite it.” Lilo took the peeled nut, carefully bit it in two, and gave one half to her mother, vowing not to be jealous again.

  From the time she woke up the next morning, she was desperate to figure out a way to get her mother and Django into close-up shots. On this particular morning, the extras had to be taken to the set in a smaller bus in two loads, as the larger bus had broken down yet again. Django was in the first load, and by the time Lilo got to the enclosure, he was almost jumping up and down with excitement.

  “You found a way for you and Mama to get in close-up shots.”

  “Not me, but definitely you and we’ll think of something for your mother.”

  “I don’t need a way. It’s you and Mama who need a way.”

  “Don’t quibble. This could really work out.”

  “But what about you?”

  “I’m working on it. I’ll organize something.”

  “All right. So what have you organized for me?”

  “Tante Leni can’t ride.”

  “Can’t ride what?” Lilo asked blankly.

  “A horse — mein Gott!” He slammed his palm into his head as if to say, how stupid can you be? “She almost fell off this morning.”

  “These old plugs? They hardly move,” Lilo said, glancing over at the corral.

  “But you can ride. They think it’s too dangerous for Leni to try the riding scenes. But you . . . you can be her stand-in — or her ride-in! And they are going to shoot some riding scenes in Babelsberg indoors on the soundstages.” He laughed. “I already told them. Look, that fellow Harald is walking this way. He’s going to ask you.”

  “But what about Mama? How do we get her in on this?”

  Django sighed. “Do I have to think up everything? Make something up. An excuse for why you need her — I don’t know.” He sighed again. “Be inventive!” He looked around at the set. “Nothing’s real here — the village is fake. The Spanish dancer is a Nazi. The shepherd is an Austrian ski instructor. It’s all fiction. What’s a little bit more?”

  Django was right. Had Lilo not vowed to learn from Django so she could figure things out? Well, this was her first real test. The test was walking toward her — Harald Reinl, the assistant director and choreographer. A thought suddenly came to her. Tante Leni’s dancing wasn’t very good. Whether it was because of his choreography or her lack of talent, Lilo wasn’t sure. But she would have to pretend that Harald Reinl was the most fabulous choreographer. What else did she know about him? She certainly could see that Tante Leni kept him on a short leash. She had snapped at him that first day on the set —“I don’t give a goddamn what Arnold thinks. I fired him.” He doesn’t want to get fired, Lilo thought. He had also worried about Unku being too pretty. Lilo’s mind was racing. She had to pull all these bits of information, scraps of things she knew about him, and work them into a piece so she and her mother could both go to Babelsberg.

  “Where’s the girl who can ride?” Harald Reinl asked.

  Lilo raised her hand shyly. He strode up to her and put a hand under her chin to lift it. “What’s your name?”

  “Lilian Friwald.”

  “Well, Lilian, how would you like to ride a lovely horse in the movie? We’ll pretend that you are Fräulein Riefenstahl. I know you were one of the street urchins in the close-up shots, but these will be mostly long shots. So I don’t think it will matter. No one will know it’s the same girl. You see, we need a shot of her riding on a horse through the entrance to the village, and then another when she rides out of the village with Pedro. Then some very distant shots of her riding against a setting sun with the mountains in the background. In those shots, we would like the horse to be cantering, but not a full gallop. What do you say?”

  As if I have a say, Lilo thought.

  She tucked her lips in and pressed them together as if she were thinking hard. “Hmm?” he said. She could tell that he was surprised that she had not answered more quickly. Lilo knew she had to play this right. “Where did you learn to ride?” he asked.

  “My uncle Andreas, my mother’s brother, was a trainer at the Spanish Riding School. We always went to the stud farm in Piber for our holidays.”

  “Ha!” He chuckled softly. “I thought Gypsies were always on holiday.”

  Ignore the insult, Lilo! Ignore it. He doesn’t know any better.

  “So you like this idea?” he pressed.

  “Yes, I do. But my mother, may she always be present?” She looked up at him with a fragile half smile.

  “Well, is she here?”

  “Oh, yes, she plays one of the village peasants. You know, with the water jug on her head.”

  He looked over at the four or five women who were standing near the jugs they were soon to carry, then turned back to Lilo. “I don’t understand. Why must she always be with you?”

  “She knows horses.” Lilo looked up and flashed him a different kind of smile, slightly embarrassed this time. “You know we’re Gypsies. We’re superstitious and . . .” She sighed. “Well, I have never fallen off when my mama was there. A horse has never shied when my mama was there.”

  “How close does she need to be?” His brow crinkled.

  “Oh, just on the set. Near enough to see me and the horse.”

  “Well, I don’t see any problem. We don’t want you falling off the horse. That’s settled. Go off to the costume lady to be fitted for your riding costume.”

  “What have you gotten me into, Lilo? I know nothing about horses.”

  “You’re Uncle Andreas’s sister. You have to know something. All those summers in Piber.”

  “But what am I supposed to say to a horse?”

  “You don’t have to say anything to the horse. Just stand there and look like you know horses. You know, pretend. It’s the only way, Mama. Pretend! I needed you for the horse, not for myself,” She paused. “For yourself, Mama.” Then Lilo explained about Babelsberg. “Just look like you know horses.”

  Bluma touched her daughter’s cheek. Lilo looked up into her face. Her mother was doing that funny thing with her mouth that meant she was trying not to cry, trying to look brave. “You and me, that’s all we’ve got. Right? Miteinander!”

  Miteinander — it was getting a bit more complicated be
cause now . . . now, Lilo thought, there was Django. Where did he fit in? And for a moment, she was swept with guilt.

  “Right?” her mother asked again.

  “Right, Mama.” She looked down and felt a horrible hollowness inside her. What about Papa? Papa, where are you now? She suddenly missed him terribly. Was he dead? If he was and yet she did not know it, he was still alive, in her mind. No one really died until you knew it. If she lost them both, she thought she might break, really break, break in two. For the first time, she wondered about his shop on Kirchestrasse. She pictured all the clocks waiting for him, all the watches, each in its cubby in the lined drawers, waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting. The gears frozen from neglect since no one was there to wind them. What would happen to them all?

  Lilo was dressed for the scene in a riding skirt with a vest, and a kind of lady’s sombrero, smaller than a man’s. She caught a glimpse of herself in the wardrobe room and felt that she actually looked quite stylish. There were two horses waiting as she approached. When Lilo walked up, they were pasting some extra hair on one of the actor’s head because he had a hairline that backed up halfway across his skull.

  “Ach, now you know my beauty secrets.” The man laughed. He turned around and put out his hand to shake Lilo’s. She was stunned. This had never happened to her since she had been arrested. His hand was very soft and smooth, but he pressed her hand warmly in a truly friendly way. “Now, what is your name, dear?” He leaned forward a bit and looked into her eyes as he spoke.

  “Lilian Friwald,” she whispered.

  “Mine’s Bernhard Minetti.”

  Minetti looked no more like a Spaniard than Franz Eichberger did. His eyes were not as blue as Franz’s — no eyes could be that blue — but were a misty gray with just a touch of blue. This was the man who was supposed to play the power-hungry, cruel Don Sebastian, but if anything, he reminded Lilo of one of her father’s favorite clients for antique watches, Herr Haffner. He would never forget to bring a small gift for Lilo and often something for her mother whenever he came. Bluma declared that Herr Haffner was an old-fashioned Viennese gentleman and had the most exquisite manners of any man she had ever met. Lilo had trouble trying to fit the man standing before her with the cruel character he was being made to play. But as Django said, it was all fiction.

  “And I understand that you are an excellent rider?”

  “Yes, my mama’s brother is”— she hesitated —“was a trainer at the Spanish Riding School in Piber.” She detected a fleeting shadow cross the blue-gray mist of his eyes. “That is my mama, over there. She knows horses, too, but does not ride,” she added quickly.

  He looked up and walked over to her mother, who was in her black peasant costume.

  “Frau Friwald.” Frau! No one except Django had called her mother Frau in months. He was holding out his hand. “I am pleased to meet you, the mother of this excellent rider.” Bluma was taken aback as well. But she nodded.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Leni then arrived with the head cameraman. “Albert, darling, show that painterly look of the darker grays of the landscape against the lighter ones of the sky. And then the two figures on horseback melt into the distance.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have to use the long lens. Will the horses be walking, trotting, or what?”

  “I think cantering.”

  Just then another man came running up. He was dressed identically to Bernhard Minetti. He gave Tante Leni a kiss, a bit more than the peck Lilo had seen Harald give her a few days before. Leni looked up at him with a glowing expression. Herr Minetti must have noticed Lilo staring at the two of them. He leaned forward and whispered to her, “Peter Jacob is my double for the cantering. But that’s all.” There was a trace of a smirk on Herr Minetti’s face that gave Lilo a glimpse of the cruel side he would have to play.

  Tante Leni told Lilo immediately that she was to address Peter Jacob as Lieutenant, as he was a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht. Lilo quickly surmised that like Franz, he had escaped going to war in order to be in the movie. As a double, he didn’t quite match Minetti’s height, Lilo observed, but then again, she herself was shorter than Leni.

  Leni explained the scene to both Lilo and Peter. They were to come cantering over the top of a slight mound that was perhaps five hundred meters from where they were now standing. A marker had been placed at this point, and they were instructed to come to a halt. Then Leni and Minetti would climb on two wooden contraptions — they called them the rocking horses, but they were not child’s toys. They were fake horses’ heads with manes that matched the live horses and had been mounted with saddles on frameworks. The close-up would show the actors from their waists up with a bit of the horses’ necks and the horns of the saddles in the frame.

  Lilo and Lieutenant Jacob mounted their respective horses. She saw her mother making her way toward them. Bluma put out her hand, then nuzzled the horse’s face and spoke some nonsense words in Sinti. She’s doing this perfectly, Lilo thought. What an actress my mama is! She turned away and smiled at Tante Leni and Albert, the cameraman, who were staring at her. “It always works,” Bluma said, and flashed a smile. Lilo was stunned. Her mother was playing her part to the hilt.

  After the scene had been shot, Lilo walked back to the “waiting pen,” as the Gypsy extras had started to call it. As she and her mother drew closer, they heard the strains of a guitar. A real guitar playing live music. And it was a real Gypsy playing the music. Django! Lilo closed her eyes. She pictured his hands, long slender, yet callous from the work camps he had been in. Now with those same hands he was coaxing from that guitar wonderful rich, dark tones that colored the very air.

  Django had organized a guitar. “Nothing to it,” he said. “The actor who plays the guitarist wandered by the pen. I said to him, ‘Let me have a look at that guitar.’ He, of course, couldn’t slide it through the wire mesh, but I said — just making this up, of course — I said, ‘I know you don’t really have to play it, but if you’d adjust the action . . .’ He doesn’t know what action is. So I explain that action is controlled by the height of the strings above the frets, and then I tell him to change the tension of the number two and the number three string. You see, I start throwing all these terms out there like crazy. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but he’s impressed. So just then an assistant cameraman comes by and Henrik — that’s the actor’s name — says, ‘This guy knows what he’s talking about. Can we bring him out of the pen?’ Only he calls it the cage, which is sort of shocking, but it’s the truth, ain’t it? ‘Can we bring him out of the cage and let him show me?’ Well, the camera fellow is real interested. So I get out and begin to show them stuff. I am very particular to show them how the fingering can be done to look more realistic, and then I just start playing — not one of those stupid songs they had her dancing to but a real Gypsy song. But now the actor says, ‘If we change the music, we’ll have to change the dance.’ And the cameraman says they are reshooting a lot of the tavern scenes in Babelsberg anyway.”

  Lilo gasped. “Django, you are amazing! If I’m a ‘ride-in,’ you’re a what? A ‘hands-in’?” They both laughed.

  “Actually, I think the real name for what we are is ‘double.’ We’re doubles.”

  The word struck Lilo oddly. If only, she thought, there could be a double for our real lives as prisoners, and then we could leave that life behind and escape forever.

  “That little trailer,” Janna said. She was a woman the same age as Lilo’s mother.

  “You mean the caravan?” Lilo asked.

  “No, no, the fancy metal one that Fräulein Riefenstahl uses for her dressing room. I saw him go in there on my way to makeup. Then I heard thumps — bump, bump — then . . . ‘Aaahh! Aaah!’”

  Everyone broke out laughing.

  “Shush, Janna, shush! They’ll hear you,” warned Ulrike, another water-jug lady.

  “Not through my chattering teeth, they won’t,” Janna answered.

  Lilo and a half dozen o
thers were in the women’s latrine back at the farm. The weather had turned chilly in the last few days, and although they had been provided with extra blankets, it was a challenge to sit long with one’s panties down on a rough board with a hole over a trench. But the latrine was the best place for gossip. There were no walls between the toilets, and after being in so many camps, the lack of privacy did not faze them in the least. Despite the cold, all of them lingered to hear Janna’s tale of Tante Leni and her lover, Peter Jacob, and their trysts in Leni’s dressing room. Django was not the only source for information, especially of this nature. Janna and Ulrike actually had a competition going.

  All the women were wrapped in thick horse blankets that had been left for them, but in addition they now wore thick socks. Liesel had left two pairs for Bluma, but Bluma had told her that she could not stand to wear the socks when others had none. The little girl had nodded solemnly, and then two days later, she left six pairs, the following day another eight, and then finally another ten. More than enough, since now there were only twenty-one prisoners.

  Their teeth chattered as they gossiped away. Had gossip become a new kind of nourishment for them? Lilo looked down the line where they sat on the rough board over the smelly trench. Was this to be their life — the high point of their lives — sitting giggling in a latrine locked behind barbed wire? What did it matter if it was Krün or Babelsberg? And what would happen when the filming was finished? Surely then they would be sent east. Until now Lilo had thought only about surviving, day-to-day. But now she understood that she had to think about something else, beyond day-to-day survival — escaping before it was too late. Would her mother be strong enough? Might there be any chance to escape either on the way to Babelsberg or after they got there? Babelsberg was near Berlin. Berlin was a huge city. Could they disappear among the millions? And what about Django? Would he come? As Lilo thought of escape, the gossip went on.