The Kingdom of Shadows Page 2

  Marte waited on the platform alone, the handle of her one small case clasped in both hands. Her father hadn’t come to the Bahnhof Friedrichstra?e with her, to put her on the train. “Because someone might see us together,” her father had explained. He’d taken her face in his hands and kissed her on the brow. “And then they’d wonder how such a golden beauty as you came to have such an old black dog for a father. Or maybe they’d think I was a race polluter, some kike leching after another schone Madel.”

  Marte bit her lip, until she could almost taste the salt leak under her tongue. No one must see her crying; no one must see her at all. That wasn’t one of the things her father had told her. It was something she had decided for herself, a vow sealed in that small room of her heart that was still her own.

  The tears had been fought back. It helped not to think of these things, of how frightened she was inside. If she could only become what she pretended to be, like pulling on another’s skin, looking through their eyes, being that other girl. That woman.

  Marte raised her head and looked about her, at the other people waiting. Two well-dressed women in fur-collared coats, chattering to each other in bright, hard voices. Men reading newspapers, the pages of Der Angriff folded back in their hands. At the end of the platform, two soldiers smoked and talked in low voices, their heads nearly touching each other. Everyone was who they seemed to be; of all the people in this world, she was the only one with a secret.

  The memories she had tried to banish, to seal away in the dark where she couldn’t see them, moved inside her again. She could hear her own voice, the bravest she had ever been, asking her father if everything – all his plans and secret dealings – would turn out all right.

  “There is nothing to be afraid of.” The papers for which he had paid were laid out on the dining room table; he had been explaining to her what each one meant. “These are perfect,” he’d said, tapping the papers with his fingertip. “The man who made them for us works with Naujocks, Heydrich’s own forger. These people are masters of their craft. If I could tell you of the mischief they’ve caused to Germany’s enemies… but such things are not meant for the ears of an innocent girl.”

  The names her father had spoken meant nothing to Marte, but they frightened her nevertheless. As did the forged papers, that she turned over one after another, wondering if the girl they described was the same as herself. The documents attested to Marte’s lineage, pure Aryan stock for three generations back. Marte had been only eight years old when she had figured out that her father’s black hair and his eyes, one blue and one golden-brown, were things of which he was embarrassed. And that her own blondness, and the matched blue of her eyes, was somehow part of all his scheming.

  “These make it possible.” Her father had held the papers in his hands. “And every further step – everything that you must do, my child – will make us safer and safer. You’ll see.”

  What she had seen, one time when she had come late from school, had been the master forger to whom her father had paid so much money. A little sidling man, with the bright eyes of a scurrying animal, undimmed even though he had reeked of schnapps and cigarette smoke, brushing past her in the narrow hallway with a leather portfolio clutched tight to his chest. The forger’s eyes had glitteringly inspected her, as close as if he had run his ink-stained fingers over her breasts, before he had rushed down the stairs. In the flat, her father had been admiring the newest document, a certificate from the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt attesting that Marte Helle’s Nordic pedigree had been traced back to the Thirty Years War.

  Such things weren’t for women to think about, but she wondered what would ever happen if someone were to offer the little man more money, for him to tell all her father’s secrets. Wasn’t it dangerous to have anyone know so much about you, things that were like a dagger pointed at your heart? But she knew she had to trust her father, who was wiser about such matters.

  A shouting whistle roused her from those worrisome memories. The train, brakes hissing, slowed around the curve of track. She let herself be jostled forward with the others, an object with no thought other than holding on to her suitcase in the press of the crowd.

  She found a seat on board, surrounded by other women, the two well-dressed ones across the aisle, their laughing and talking uninterrupted from before. She could smell the women’s heady perfume, like rare flowers, but wilder and sweeter, too. They wore makeup as well, rouge on their cheeks and red, unnatural lipstick. Marte’s father had debated whether she should wear makeup, but had decided against it. He had studied a leaflet written by Reichsfrauenfuhrerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, that said makeup was un-German and only for faces ‘marked by the eroticism of Asiatic females.’ Was that what those women across the aisle were? “And what does makeup matter, anyway?” Her father had said that to her, as he had cupped her chin in one hand. “You are already so beautiful without it.”

  The men – the soldiers and the newspaper readers – had taken over the rear section of the carriage, where they could ease together in their grey smoke and talk of those things that softly whispered the coming of war, like ravens flying over old battlefields. One man had already leaned forward and, with beaming courtesy, offered the contents of his cigarette case to the two soldiers.

  Marte pushed her suitcase farther back on the leather webbing of the shelf above the seats. When she sat back down, she saw that the seat across from her had been taken by a girl her age, with blond hair only a little darker than her own, pulled back into a thick braid.

  As the train moved away from the platform, the girl turned a level, unblinking gaze over the faces near her. The girl’s eyes caught Marte’s for a few seconds, and she felt a chill touch the base of her throat as one corner of the girl’s mouth lifted in a knowing smile.

  The train’s swaying motion rocked Marte’s head against the seat back. In her skirt pocket was the ticket her father had bought her; she reached in and closed her hand around it.

  Across from her, the other girl sat up straighter, her nostrils flared. “I am going to the Lebensborn hostel in Steinhoring,” she announced in a loud, clear voice. She smiled in triumph, her hands gripping the edge of the seat. From the corner of her eye, Marte could see the other passengers turning their startled attention toward the girl; at the end of the carriage, the men broke off their talking.

  The girl’s voice was now a shout. “There, I will have myself impregnated by an officer of the SS, the flower of German manhood, so that I may present our Fuhrer with the child of my flesh.” She looked across the blank faces with the piercing vision of an eagle suspended in the cold, thin air above mountain peaks.

  Silence filled the carriage, broken only by the clattering of the iron wheels on the tracks.

  Marte felt the narrow space twisting about her, as if she had gone mad, that there was no girl sitting opposite her. That it had been she who had cried out, so that all could hear.

  The newspapers rustled again, and conversations resumed, the well-dressed women speaking in softer voices than before, leaning toward each other and glancing across the aisle. One of the soldiers laughed at something whispered to him.

  The girl had turned her steel gaze to the window, as though willing distance to vanish, for the train to have already arrived at its destination.

  It could have been me. Marte tried not to think; to vanish instead, to become nothing from inside out. But she couldn’t. I could have shouted that.

  Her fingers touched the edges of the ticket. The destination printed on it was Steinhoring.

  THREE

  “ Ganz verruckt.” Liesel looked over the new arrivals. “That one there is completely crazy.”

  The hostel director’s car had returned from the train station. From an upstairs window, Liesel and Trudi watched the driver unloading the few bits of luggage. The shadow of the SS black flag danced over the white, pebbly gravel.

  They could see Frau Hegemann giving the two new girls her welcoming speech. The words duty and ho
nor figured in the spiel at least three times. Liesel had thought Frau Hegemann was a bit cracked, too, when she had looked into the woman’s eyes. Some of these old bats’ knees trembled every time they thought about the Fuhrer.

  That same crazed spark was in the eyes of one of the girls below. It was a look that swept away the whole world. Even the girl that carried around those burning eyes no longer really existed, except for a womb committed to the greater glory of the Reich.

  “You’re right.” Trudi giggled. “When her time’s come, she’ll probably go marching into the delivery room.”

  Liesel snorted in disgust. “Who could get it up for somebody like that? Even SS officers are men, just like other men.”

  “Are they?” Trudi peered at her. “How do you know? They’re supposed to be different.”

  “‘Different.’” She shook her head. “They all get hard and stupid when they see a pretty woman. That’s what they all want to stick their kleinen Manner into, not some silly bitch who’ll be singing the Horst Wessel Lied when she should be bouncing her tail up and down.” What men wanted, she knew, was herself; they wanted her golden hair spilling into their faces as her breasts moved against their sweating torsos. She was the best-looking girl in the Lebensborn hostel; none of the others could really compare to her. Trudi and all the other girls would have to settle for whatever men Liesel had rejected as being unworthy of the gift of her body.

  The summer before, when her breasts had grown so much, so that she could cup them in her hands when she stood stripped to the waist in front of her dresser’s tiny mirror, her hands no longer her own but the grasp of a man whose face she had not yet imagined – then she was sure of her beauty and the power that came with it. The cold part inside her head, that never slept in its calculations, knew what it was worth; it could get her all she deserved.

  Others saw how beautiful she had become. A Party photographer came out and took her picture, and it appeared on the cover of Das Deutsche Madel, the official journal for all BDM girls. The words inside had described her as the perfect Germanic girl, the model for all others to aspire to. She had been annoyed that they hadn’t given her name, but even so, all the other girls in her Bund chapter had known who it was.

  That was when the news about the Lebensborn came, first whispered from one girl to another, then confirmed by the older women who were the BDM leaders. Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler’s marvelous idea, to create a way in which every German girl of good Aryan breeding could present to her Fuhrer the greatest possible gift, a new life, a child that would be part of the future race of heroes. Without worrying about the old world’s outmoded notions of marriage and sexual morality, and with the seed of those whose German blood ran purest, who had proved themselves worthy to father the elite of the world to come.

  She had been told that there would be no tie between her and whatever SS officer might choose her to bear his child; the Lebensborn program was not in the business of fostering petty emotional dependencies. Liesel was only eighteen, and she already knew that things did not work that way, or if they did, they could be made to work another way. Her way…

  “The other one’s not so bad.” Trudi brought her nose right up against the window glass. “She’s kind of pretty.”

  Liesel looked down at the other girl who had gotten out of the car. She stood waiting demurely to take her suitcase from the driver’s hand, only to have him shake his head and tell her that he would carry all the luggage inside.

  She’s not used to that, thought Liesel, watching. To having people do things for her. She hadn’t been either, when she’d first arrived at the Lebensborn hostel, but it had only taken her a second to know that it was what was owed to her.

  “She’s all right, I suppose.” Liesel drew back from the window. “In a cheap kind of way.”

  This latest arrival might be a problem, if she had any idea of how pretty she really was, and if she put on airs about it. Then Liesel would have to smile and be nice to her, until there was the perfect chance to put her in her place.

  She would have to be careful. It annoyed her to have to think about these things, but she already had plans made, and there wasn’t room for a competitor in them. No one would spoil that shining future she saw ahead.

  FOUR

  “Marte -” The hostel director appeared in the doorway. “I’m very disappointed in you. You must come down now and join the others.”

  She lifted her face from the dampened pillow. One hand, in a child’s reflex, smeared the wetness on her cheek. “Yes…” She nodded slowly, pushing herself upright. “I’m sorry.”

  Frau Hegemann’s expression softened, as much as the sharp, over-prominent bones of her narrow face would allow. She came into the small room and stood beside the bed. “Don’t worry so, mein Kind.” She reached out and smoothed Marte’s hair. “It won’t be so bad. There is nothing unendurable for a girl of your good stock.”

  She couldn’t look at the older woman. A sudden panic had gripped her, but it had eased now, leaving a dead feeling inside her. She didn’t even know why she had been afraid. Nothing had happened that her father hadn’t told her about. Even what was to come, the lying with a man – he had described how it would be. That wasn’t what she was scared of.

  “I… I’ll be down in just a few minutes.” Her throat felt tight when she swallowed. “I just need… to get ready.” Marte knew her eyes had reddened from crying.

  “Very well.” Frau Hegemann drew her hand away and touched the sparse lace at her own throat, the only adornment to the high-collared, monastic grey dress that was the uniform of her Lebensborn service. “Don’t take too long.”

  Marte splashed cold water from the wash basin onto her face. She looked up and gazed into the eyes of the girl held in the mirror.

  Not the lying with a man… the presence of him, opening and consuming her… that meant nothing. If there had been a part of her afraid of that, the smallest child inside her, then it had disappeared long ago.

  She rubbed her face with the coarse towel. Her skin felt raw and hot as she looked again into her own eyes.

  His eyes… She knew that was what she feared. When he looks at me… What would he see there? A man whose face she did not even know yet, but whose hard laughter she had already heard through the room’s window, the big voices of him and the others like him, touching her ear as their boots had crunched the gravel of the building’s front drive. She had even opened her door a crack and listened, past the other girls’ excited whispers; she’d heard the SS officers’ voices right here inside the hostel as Frau Hegemann had welcomed them downstairs.

  They were real, they existed. Even those ghost parts, voices with words she couldn’t make out, were more real than her. What if a man turned toward her and saw… nothing? She would be the ghost, the pink and white of her skin turned to glass, to air, to nothing at all…

  Stop it. A voice spoke inside her head, but she couldn’t tell it was her own. The girl in the mirror stood very still and quiet, as though waiting.

  A strand of her white-gold hair had come astray. With the tip of her finger, she tucked it back behind her ear. She felt that touch, her own hand against her skin. At least that much was real.

  ***

  A radio played in the big reception room, a nice-sounding cabinet model, not a cheap tinny Volksempfanger. Someone had actually been able to tune in a broadcast of American-style jazz; though that music was frowned upon in the Reich beyond the Lebensborn ’s walls, here even Frau Hegemann smiled and admitted that it made for a festive atmosphere. More than festive – everyone knew the scientific facts that Negro music helped one forget inhibitions and stirred the blood in one’s loins. And that was just what was called for.

  A bar had been set up at one end of the room. Supposedly, only Apfelsanft and other fruit juices were to have been served, especially to the girls, but several bottles of schnapps had been smuggled in by the hostel’s gardener. Frau Hegemann had turned a blind eye to that. The alcohol helped some o
f the girls get over their nervousness at talking to men they had never met before. Some of the men had that problem, too; the hostel director always knew which ones they were, because their buddies helped out by getting them half-drunk before they arrived.

  Liesel had been glad to see that Obersturmfuhrer Dietrich Stoehr – the evening’s star, the handsome-enough face that she and the other girls had seen in the papers – was not one of those, the nervous type who needed to be well-lubricated before they could approach a girl. Funny to think that some of these hardened warriors, the new elite of the Reich, could be frightened of a soft voice and smile. They did look impressive, though, in their black dress uniforms, the mirrorlike gloss of their polished boots, the detailed insignia across their chests. Even their necks, held tall and straight by the uniforms’ collars, the double lightning strokes bright at their throats – this was what a man was supposed to be, hard and splendid, darkly so.

  And a woman? What was she supposed to be? Liesel smiled. There was no doubt about that in her mind, either.

  Some of the girls had managed to get dancing partners, laughing and tugging even a couple of the most awkward SS men onto the floor, near the lively blare of the radio. Stronger than the jazz music, filling the room, was the light mingled scent of the perfumes with which the girls had daubed themselves, overlaid with a shivering musk that could not even be smelled, but hung suspended in air between one warm body and another. Even the crazy one who had arrived a few days ago – she had fastened herself onto a grinning Sturmscharfuhrer, her hands clasped around his neck to pull him even closer to her fervent gaze.

  Liesel crossed the reception room, laughing when she squeezed past a group or a couple, knowing that for a moment each man’s head would turn, his gaze following her, until the girl standing before him would be able to draw him back.