The Kingdom of Shadows Read online

  Obersturmfuhrer Stoehr stood alone, at the door closest to the hostel’s front lobby. With his gloves folded in his hands, he watched the activities of his comrades, their capture by the females appointed to them; he looked slightly bored, but patient, as if awaiting further orders from his commanding officers.

  None of the other girls had tried to latch onto him. They had kept in mind Liesel’s right to this prize, and the possibility of her wrath.

  She came right up and took his arm. “Is it really so dull here?” Liesel took Obersturmfuhrer Stoehr’s arm with both hands, turning her smile up to his gaze. He seemed even younger than he had in the photographs in the Allgemeiner Zeitung. A broad face, heavy-jawed but not too much so. Handsome, or at least handsome enough. “You look as if you were about to fall asleep.”

  He nodded at her. “It is very pleasant here.” His words were clipped and precise. “But it is not a world to which I am accustomed.”

  “I’m sure you could get used to it.” His manner was distant and somewhat sad, but Liesel knew she could change that. She tugged him toward the music and the other couples. “If you try.”

  That was part of her strategy. To not talk too much – the stern eagle look in his eyes, that she had been able to discern in the grainy pictures, had told her that he was a man who would despise prattle. But that other language, that spoke without words… there was no man who didn’t listen to that.

  In the midst of the dancing couples, she pressed herself against him. He had apparently been trained well enough that he raised one of her hands in his, his other arm encircling her waist. She knew that the white length of her throat and the upper part of her bosom looked appealing when she tilted her head back. His cold gaze fell toward hers…

  The music stopped, replaced by the braying voice of the radio announcer. Liesel had hardly had time enough to take a few shuffling steps with the Obersturmfuhrer. He stepped back from her, snapping off a slight, formal bow. “That was all too brief, Fraulein.” He straightened up, his spine iron again. “Perhaps later this evening, we’ll try again.”

  “Wait -” She reached toward him, but was jostled away by the laughing, talking couples heading for the makeshift bar or the folding doors that led out onto the hostel’s gardens. He was gone before she could even touch his sleeve.

  “Forget about him.” A man’s voice spoke right at Liesel’s ear, startling her. She turned and saw a broad face flushed with alcohol, a big grin reeking of the same. “He’s got his thumb up his ass so far, he has to open his mouth to sieg Heil.” The cuffs of the man’s black uniform were damp, slopped over from the two full glasses he was carrying. “Here -” He forced one glass into her hands. “Drink up.”

  The liquor’s sharp taste ignited her anger. She was about to hurl the glass and what was left of its contents to the floor when the drunken SS man caught her arm. “ Na, na -” He laughed, clasping her against his chest; the dregs of his glass spilled on her dress. “Plenty of others. What’s one more or less, when you’re having a good time?” He bent down to nuzzle her neck, his breath hot and wet.

  She leaned back, hands pushing against his shoulders but unable to break free of his grasp. The alcohol fumes were still inside her head, thick and dizzying above the column of fire in her throat.

  The radio’s music had started again, louder and faster this time. More couples came out on the floor, their laughter louder as well. The drunken SS officer swayed, eyes closed.

  Over the heads of the crowd, she could see the stairs. One figure stood there, her hand timidly holding onto the banister, as though the sight of the dancers had frightened her from taking the last few steps down into the room.

  The drunken man hugged the breath from her, his arms locking behind her back. He swung her around, her feet grazing the floor. Through a swarm of black spots in her vision, Liesel saw Obersturmfuhrer Stoehr, his gaze cutting past all the dancing figures. And she knew where he was looking – toward that conniving little mouse, the shy, pretty girl on the stairs.

  FIVE

  “I don’t know what to do.” Marte sat on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap. The dress was the one Frau Hegemann had loaned her, that being the one thing her father had forgotten, a pretty dress, a special one. This one was pink, with a squared neckline fretted with lace. She closed her eyes and remembered, though it had only been yesterday or a century ago. The mirror, and Frau Hegemann smoothing the dress in place, then stepping back to judge the effect. A pity your hips aren’t broader, the older woman had said. You’ll have trouble when the baby comes.

  Marte opened her eyes. The girl in the mirror had been wearing this dress, that she wore now. So this must be her, sitting on a bed in a small room with a man in it.

  “I don’t know,” she said again. How white her hands and her bare arms looked. She could imagine them floating, drifting in a river, caressed by the green tendrils of water weeds.

  “That’s all right.” The man draped the jacket of his black uniform upon a chair. His shining boots stood against the wall. He stripped off his undershirt. “I do.”

  Then everything would be as it should. She didn’t have to try to be anything. As long as he knew what to do next, she could watch what happened to the girl sitting on the bed, from inside, and it wouldn’t matter where she really was. If she was anywhere at all.

  He stood in front of her. He pushed the dress off her shoulders. She looked up, past his bare chest, to see if there was any reflection of herself in the dark centers of his eyes.

  ***

  “You bruised me.” Liesel lifted her arm and looked under the curve of her breast. There were big darkening marks on both sides of her ribs. She slapped Heinrich, not playfully. “Bastard.”

  He laughed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He took another pull from the bottle he’d filched and brought up to the room. Liesel had had some of it, too, pouring fuel onto the fire that had leapt up inside her when she had seen the prize slipping out of her fingers. It had seemed then that the schnapps had no effect on her, that her anger burned it way as fast as it could be swallowed – but then the room downstairs had tilted and swayed sickeningly, and the faces of the other girls and the men with whom they had paired off had turned to laughing animal masks, laughing at her. Her hands had felt thick and swaddled as she had clutched at Heinrich, trying to keep from falling.

  That was all she knew about him, his first name. Besides the fact that he was ready. He had been ready as soon as they had gotten into the room. He had slammed her against the door – everyone down the hallway must have heard – and started pawing her, his wet mouth at her throat, a hand rucking up her skirt to grip her thigh above the top of her stocking.

  She had been able to push him away, stumbling backward with the bottle in his other hand. There was still enough of that coldly sober part awake in her, that she wanted to make sure this idiot didn’t tear her nice clothes. She had sat down on the bed – harder than she’d intended, her feet slipping out from under her – and had started undressing, while Heinrich goggled and drank.

  “Come here.” She grabbed his belt and pulled him closer. She worked at the buckle, his trousers finally sliding down around his ankles. Men always looked so stupid and trapped like that – she had to keep herself from laughing. They hated that, she knew from experience.

  “ Schei?…” Now he wasn’t ready. He looked as if he were about to topple over. The empty bottle dropped from his hand, his eyes rolling back in his head.

  Liesel tugged him down beside her and kissed him, his jaw slackly open under her mouth. His flesh swelled in her hand. Nothing would interfere – she had been humiliated enough already, downstairs, in front of everybody. The infuriating memory came again to her, of the other girl’s face, shadowed by Obersturmfuhrer Stoehr as he had made a small, courtly bow to her. Liesel’s fingers tightened, the man’s blood encased in their grip.

  Her foot touched something cold and heavy in the tangle of his uniform on the floor. She reached d
own and picked it up, holding it between herself and Heinrich. It took her a moment to even see what it was: his ceremonial dagger, the emblem of his membership in the SS. She tugged on the ornate handle, and the glittering blade emerged from the scabbard.

  “No…” Heinrich’s smile soured. “That’s not… something to play with.” His clumsy tongue could barely get the words out.

  She dropped the empty scabbard. The blade had words engraved on it. Meine Ehre hei?t Treue. “‘My honor is loyalty,’” she said aloud. And laughed – she couldn’t help it. She held the dagger up, close to her face, and looked at him. “Are you loyal, Heini?”

  He watched, eyes half-lidded, as she licked the dagger blade, drawing her tongue slowly along its length. The sharp blade cut her tongue. She didn’t feel anything but the warmth trickling at the corner of her mouth.

  She let him knock the dagger out of her hand; it clattered against the base of the wall. It didn’t matter. He was already on top of her, his hands pinning her wrists above her head, her blood smearing on his greedy face.

  ***

  He lay against Marte’s side, head resting on her bare shoulder. He seemed to be asleep; the hand at her breast hadn’t stirred in a long time.

  Warm under the blankets; she breathed slow and shallow, to not disturb the bedcovers snugged around the two bodies. Everything had happened the way her father had said it would. If the girl, the lace-trimmed dress gone now, looked in the mirror, Marte wouldn’t feel sorry for her. No one could say that the girl hadn’t done what was expected of her.

  And even so… there had been one moment, like a spark of light falling in a sky without stars. When she had been falling beneath him. But she hadn’t been frightened, and then that moment had flared and enfolded her, and she had felt – she herself, no one else – the grasp of her thighs and bent knees against his sweating torso, and her arms had reached up and pulled him down to her.

  That, and everything else, had passed. The man took his rest, his duty performed.

  She was almost afraid to touch him now. He lay with the back of his head against one forearm, a dark-blue mark revealed on the skin above his ribs. A tattooed letter B was visible beneath the sheen of his sweat. Slowly, her outstretched fingertip trembling, she reached toward it. The symbol reminded her of the stigmata etched upon her father’s wrists, that he had tried to remove, and upon the wrists of all his brethren who had remained true to the secrets of their faith.

  Her hand darted back when the man beside her opened his eyes. He glanced at his own torso, then smiled gently at her. “It signifies my blood type,” he said. “That’s all. Everyone in the SS is marked that way. So if we fall in battle, the medics might assist us with no time lost.”

  She said nothing, but drew back against the headboard and watched as he sat up.

  “I should be going.” He swung his legs out of the bed, then walked across the room to the chair on which he’d laid his uniform. He held the black trousers up, brushing a wrinkle from them with the back of his hand.

  “You’re very…” The sound of her own voice surprised her. She didn’t know what to say; she had almost said pretty, but she knew that was the wrong word. “Nice. I mean… you look good.”

  He glanced over his shoulder, as if he had already forgotten, and now been reminded of her presence. The corner of his mouth lifted in amusement. “There is no such thing as ‘nice’ in the SS, Fraulein. There is only Harte.” Toughness, the unbreakable nature of stone.

  “I’m sorry.” Marte pulled the blankets up to her chin.

  “No need to be. You are a very sweet child. I shall always remember you.”

  He wouldn’t. There was nothing to remember.

  “I… I’ve seen you before.” The words came unbidden. “Your face.”

  “Oh? Where would that have been?”

  “In the newspaper. It had a picture of you.”

  “ Ach -” He shook his head in annoyance. “That stupid business. Just grateful that it didn’t happen when I was in training camp at Bad Tolz. The others would have given me a rough time of it, with all that crap about being a hero of the Reich.”

  “Are you?” Marte studied him. “A hero, I mean?”

  “I killed somebody, in front of the right somebody else.” He didn’t look at her, but watched his own hands buttoning his shirt, from the bottom up. “In the Blood Purge. The Sturmabteilung leaders then were all perverts and conspirators; that’s why it was necessary for the SS to clean them out.” He finished the top button, then smoothed the front of the shirt flat with his hand. “There were others who did as much as I had, or more. But my commanding officer had Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler’s ear and told him all about me.” He shrugged. “That is how one becomes a hero.”

  She watched him continue dressing, the uniform assembling upon him like dark armor. In the little mirror over the wash basin, his reflection attended to the last details, the straightening of the bright bits of insignia on his chest, the tight closure of the jacket’s collar. He didn’t see her watching him. There was no one there to see her. The eyes the mirror showed… the girl she’d seen in the mirror had had eyes like that. Not blank or empty – not any more – but sealed shut, to keep inside the things that had been placed by others in that hollow darkness.

  Marte had long ago stopped wondering what was in the little dark rooms behind the mirror girl’s eyes. Even lying here, under sheets that smelled faintly of a man’s sweat, a man she had never seen before and would never see again. It was nothing that she – the she that hid and listened through the door of the tiniest dark room left inside her, listened to whispers and the distant arrivals and departures of men – nothing that she had to think about.

  She wondered instead about what had been put inside him, this man all dressed in black again, with his tall shining boots. What had filled those dark empty spaces inside him? Until, like her, there was nothing left but that ghostlike skin, the thin mask of one’s face.

  The black-uniformed man leaned down to brush a dust speck from his shining boots. He stood up and nodded to her. “I hope you will be happy and in good health, and bear a fine child for your country.”

  They told him to say that. The way she had been told, by her father and then Frau Hegemann. To say the things they wanted others to hear. He turned his eyes away, so she could not catch another glimpse of what had been hidden there.

  He couldn’t look at her. But he laid his hand softly upon hers. Not to comfort her, she knew, but himself.

  For only a moment. Then he was gone, the door closed behind him, and the room was empty again. In the bed, clutching the sheets to herself, she felt it all around her, the silent emptiness of the room, nothing at all inside it.

  ***

  Liesel awoke, step by dragging step, her head aching and her eyelids stitched with fire.

  The dead weight of Heinrich pressed against her, his arm slung possessively across her breasts. He snored gurgling into the damp pillow.

  Her tongue moved through a sour taste in her mouth. She looked with deep loathing at the body half on top of her own.

  “Get off me -” She managed to get one arm free and slapped him across the side of his head. Then again with her balled fist, hard enough to bring his dazed face into blinking semiconsciousness. “Get off me, goddamn it!”

  SIX

  One of the Lebensborn nurses stuck her head inside the hostel director’s office. “ Frau Hegemann – you had best come to the maternity section.”

  The nurse was overexcited; that was not the way her superior should be spoken to. But Frau Hegemann did not take the time to correct the nurse now. Without even hearing them, she had been aware of the whispers that had disturbed the hostel’s tranquil spaces. Whatever had caused such a commotion was more important than scolding an impertinent nurse. Frau Hegemann rose from her desk. “I shall be right there.”

  In the newborns’ room, a senior nurse nodded to the hostel director. Surrounded by the rows of cradles, the nurse held one bundled
infant in her arms. The squalling of the other small creatures, and their damp, sweetish smell, hung in the air.

  “I thought you should see this, Frau Direktor.” The senior nurse pulled back the hood of the infant’s wrappings, exposing its pink, soft face. Its eyes screwed tight, one small hand fussing against its cheek.

  Frau Hegemann was aware of a gaggle of the younger nurses at the room’s door, hushing each other and standing on tiptoe to try and see around her back. She knew that if she turned around and stamped her foot, they would all scatter like frightened geese.

  Instead, she ignored them and reached out to touch the infant’s forehead. “There seems nothing wrong with this child.” She didn’t know which girl had been its mother; there had been several due about this time.

  The nurse, with a thumb and forefinger, gently pulled open the infant’s eyelids. The pink skin reddened, the toothless mouth opening in protest.

  Frau Hegemann saw then, what was the matter.

  The infant’s left eye was the delicate blue of just-born creatures. And the other eye, as beautiful and perfect, a deep golden-brown.

  ***

  Liesel already knew why Frau Hegemann wanted to talk to her. The talk had gone all around the Lebensborn hostel. Not just of what had happened, but what was going to be done about it. She knew, both by instinct and her sure awareness of her rightful place among all the girls, that she would be part of the answer.

  She sat up in the bed, waiting for Frau Hegemann. The nurses had moved her into a private room. That was a dead giveaway, too: things were going to be spoken that were not meant to be overheard. She’d made sure that her own baby was brought in to her just before Frau Hegemann was to appear. So she could have the tiny boy she’d decided to name Siegfried – that seemed patriotic and martial enough – at her breast, the image of serene motherhood.