The Kingdom of Shadows Read online

  The door opened and the hostel director came in. She smiled at Liesel. “Everything is going well for you, I trust?”

  “Quite well, Frau Direktor.” Liesel had opened the front of her bedrobe for the baby to suckle. Its small hands pawed annoyingly at her breast, but she had made her mind up to endure that. “He’s put on seven ounces.”

  “ Sehr ausgezeichnet.” Frau Hegemann tilted her head to look at the infant. “This is how the war of births shall be won. The Lebensborn program was instituted for just this reason, to bring such children into the life of our people. Unfortunately -” The hostel director’s face turned hard. “It has not worked out that way in every instance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You needn’t play stupid. I’m well aware of how all the girls and the nurses gossip, and that everyone here knows what has happened. One of the girls has given birth to a child that doesn’t meet the strict standards of racial hygiene that we practice here. The child shows obvious signs of a mongrelized genetic background.”

  The eyes, thought Liesel smugly. A deep sense of satisfaction had arisen in her when she’d first heard the whispered news. About the bastard that mousey, conniving bitch had thrown, with its two different-colored eyes. Her Siegfried’s were both blue, like little jewels, the way a proper Aryan child’s should be.

  “Investigations have been made.” Frau Hegemann sat rigid in the chair, her spine a rod of iron. “The girl should never have been allowed in here at all. The documents that supposedly substantiated her racial background were discovered to be forgeries; her mother’s Nordic blood was mixed with that of her father’s ethnic group, a degenerate strain in which this heterochromia is common.”

  Liesel hadn’t heard that word before, but could guess what it meant: that other baby’s condition of one blue eye, one brown. She liked the word mongrel better, to describe such creatures. The same word someone would use for those gaunt, garbage-eating dogs in the street.

  “I suppose you could drown the baby.” She tried to keep from smiling. “In a bucket of water. My uncle, on his farm, used to do that with kittens.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Frau Hegemann. “The child in question is healthy and sound, other than its regrettable… features.” The hostel director’s mouth curled in distaste. “There are other considerations to be kept in mind. This child is the offspring of an SS officer of note. As such, it presents us with a dilemma as to its… disposition. Until such time as the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt makes a further determination about what is to be done, we have been instructed to make sure that the child is to be placed in a racially fit household. That is why I wished to speak to you.”

  “I’ll be happy to help,” said Liesel, “in any way I can.”

  Frau Hegemann studied her for a moment. “I’m sure you will be. I’m also sure that you’ll understand the need for discretion in this matter…”

  ***

  The other girl had been placed in a private room as well. A room with a locked door.

  “I’m hoping there will be no emotional display.” The hostel director dropped her jangling key ring into the deep pocket of her dress. “The girl might have the decency to understand what her duty should be.”

  The senior nurse closed the door behind them. The girl, this Marte, was sitting up in bed, the infant cradled in her arms. She bent her face down low to it, as though murmuring secrets into the small pink shell of the child’s ear.

  “Marte -” Frau Hegemann kept her voice soft, as calming as possible. “You do remember, don’t you? That the whole purpose of our being here, the creating of the Lebensborn program… it’s all for a reason, the bringing into existence of healthy new life. Life of pure blood. The babies that are born here are to be considered as gifts to the race, and to the Fuhrer. You understand that, don’t you?”

  The girl held the infant closer to herself. That was a bad sign – the hostel director could see that the girl was going to make this more difficult than it needed to be.

  “I was told,” said Marte, “that I could keep my baby. Before I came here – that’s what I was told. If that was what I wanted.”

  “Yes. Ordinarily, we do give the girls that option. There should be no stigma attached to an unmarried woman whose child was fathered by a hero of the Reich. The outmoded morals of the past are to be extinguished. But…” Frau Hegemann drew in a deep breath. “There are unusual circumstances in your case. Surely you see that.”

  A fierce light glinted in the girl’s eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with my baby.”

  “Your child’s health is not the issue.” Frau Hegemann felt her jaw tensing. The impulse to slap the silly girl, to make her see sense, was almost irresistible. “Its racial background – your racial background – that is the problem. You know you are not the pure Aryan that your forged documents made you out to be. Unfortunately for you, the genetic contamination in your blood has shown up in your child. One of life’s ironies is that degenerate breeding is so powerful; it drags the good, strong blood down to its level. And that is why it is so important for our people – the true Nordic race – to safeguard their precious inheritance from those who would defile it. From such as you.”

  The infant whimpered, caught in the girl’s embrace. “I’m keeping him.”

  “That’s not possible. You must try to understand. This is Rassenschande – you are a racial criminal. And worse, you have engaged an officer of the SS in this crime, the mixing of bloods.” Frau Hegemann’s voice rose, her anger overwhelming her resolution to stay calm. “Do you really think you can be allowed to raise this child? That the Reich can trust one such as you? That when people see this Mischling, this little half-breed, and they ask who is its father, you won’t say your baby’s father wears the black uniform?”

  The girl had shrunk beneath the lash of the hostel director’s spittle-flecked shout, bowing her head and wrapping herself around the infant in her arms. The infant had started to cry. As though no one else existed in the room, the girl opened the front of her robe and put the infant to her breast.

  Frau Hegemann nodded to the senior nurse.

  “Let me take him,” the nurse said softly, reaching down. “Everything will be all right. There’s nothing you have to worry about…”

  The girl drew back, her eyes wide with fear and anger. “No -” She shook her head. “Don’t touch him.”

  “There, now.” The nurse had managed to get her hands around the swaddled form. “No need to make a fuss…”

  “No!” The girl jerked the infant out of the nurse’s grasp. She twisted her shoulder and upper back toward the women, her spine arched as she bent protectively over her child. “Go away! Leave us alone!”

  Frau Hegemann had hoped that it would be easy, that the girl would see it was her duty to give up the child. It should have been easy; this girl Marte had been so quiet and timid since the day she had arrived at the hostel. So little trouble that one could have forgotten her, let her presence fade from one’s mind, if it hadn’t been for the loveliness of her face, the radiance of her white-blonde hair. Of course that was why the Obersturmfuhrer had fallen for her, bestowed his valuable seed upon her; men were all fools in that way.

  But where had this other girl come from? This one who cried out and clung to her baby? There had been nothing like this, nothing at all, behind that beautiful, still mask…

  The infant could be torn in two, if the nurse could even get her hands on it again, before the girl would give it up.

  Frau Hegemann reached down and grabbed a fistful of Marte’s golden hair, pulling the girl’s head around toward her. With her other hand, she slapped the girl’s face, hard enough to shock and stun her, mouth opening wide as a red mark in the shape of a palm and fingers swelled on her white cheek.

  The blow had been enough to loosen the girl’s grasp; the nurse snatched the child away. The infant, pulled from its mother’s breast, wrinkled its face like a small clenched fist and emitted a thin, piping wail.<
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  “No -” Marte clawed across Frau Hegemann’s shoulders and face, her outstretched hands trying to reach the nurse. The hostel director struck the girl again, a blow to her neck that sent her sprawling on the bed. She still tried to get past the hostel director, rearing up and struggling toward her child. “Give him back to me -”

  A pair of younger nurses, summoned from outside the room, pinned the girl against the headboard. They could barely hold her as she struggled. Her disheveled hair tangled across her tear-streaked face. The scream that broke from her mouth echoed in the cry of the infant being carried down the hallway.

  “You are a stupid creature.” Frau Hegemann, her jaw clenching in fury, stood at the side of the bed. “It’s for the best.” She slapped the weeping girl, then again, harder. “Don’t you understand? It’s for the best -”

  SEVEN

  The little mongrel bitch was leaving – Liesel watched with satisfaction as the car rolled toward the hostel’s gates. She let the curtain fall back into place. Frau Hegemann was sticking the other girl, the mother of the baby in Liesel’s arms, on a train back to Berlin. Where she could just slink back into the darkness where she belonged.

  It had all gone to show that breeding – blood and racial purity – was indeed the most important thing. Liesel smiled to herself, thinking of how the bitch must have thought she’d won, taken the prize that so rightfully had belonged to Liesel and no one else. Only to have the invisible stain in her blood reveal that behind her pretty face was… what? Filth and corruption, or whatever the race of men, in their black shining uniforms and strutting boots, decided was there. That was all that mattered.

  The baby, another woman’s child, started to fuss. Hungry – it was certainly a pink, healthy thing. Liesel gazed down at it, the crook of her arm already aching from the soft weight. Golden angel strands for hair, lighter than Liesel’s own – but then, weren’t most blond infants as fair as that? Nobody would be able to tell from the coloring that it wasn’t her own. A pity about the eyes – but no one would dare say anything about them, at least to her face; Liesel had already decided that.

  She gave the child her breast, and it suckled greedily. A good strong baby, the offspring of a famous SS officer, a favorite of the Fuhrer – she would make sure the child would thrive and grow. In the world around her, there were already people making arrangements on her behalf, seeing to it that her needs were taken care of. That was how it should be.

  In the cradle beside her bed, her own baby began to squall. It was a pretty little thing as well, if not quite so big as this one. And hungry, too.

  “Be quiet -” She would get around to the other child, her own, all in good time. It could wait. She lowered her head and kissed the one in her arms, as its tiny hands kneaded her full breast.

  ***

  The handle of the door was broken, the wood around the metal splintered, as though from the impact of heavy boots.

  Marte pushed the door open, the topmost hinge wobbling, its screws wrenched partway from the frame. The light from the building’s hallway spilled into her parent’s flat.

  Or what had been their flat. Empty now, at least of living things. The furniture was still there, her father’s chair overturned, books tumbled from the shelves, the pages spread like the wings of broken birds.

  Behind her, she heard other doors opening, faces peering out through narrow slits. The tenants of the other flats now whispered to each other, watching her.

  On the street outside the building, she thought she had seen the little man, her father’s forger, the creature to whom her father had entrusted all his secret planning. From the mouth of a dark alley, the little man had peered out at her, then scuttled away on his ceaseless errands.

  He’ll tell them – Marte’s breath tightened in her throat. Part of her, the hollow spaces that began just inside her skin, didn’t care. Not any more. If they came and took her away, to the place her parents had been taken… it didn’t matter. She could step outside, and the silent men would come up to her and take her arms, one on either side, there would be a car they could hustle her into… and then she would be gone. Disappeared, like so many others. At last, even the little part of her that people could still see would be extinguished.

  Now she wasn’t afraid. She set her suitcase on the floor, then turned and walked out of the flat, leaving the door open.

  The street was empty. No one came up, no one spoke to her. She wondered if perhaps she had already disappeared, become the ghost of that girl who had looked out of the mirror at her, long ago.

  ***

  “Look at those crows sitting up there.” Ernst von Behren lifted his gaze to the Romanische Cafe’s gallery, where the chess-players sat hunched over their boards. He gestured with a pudgy, well-manicured hand. The gaunt men did look like crows in their black overcoats, some of them still shiny from the rain that continued to drizzle past midnight. “They’ve always been up there. They always will be, I suppose.”

  Gunther glanced up with his glittering doll’s eyes, so perfect and untrue, but didn’t say anything. Von Behren watched Gunther’s high-boned face radiating boredom and contempt, feeling his own heart, not breaking, but sighing under the hammer stroke of a familiar pain.

  With his fingertips, he stroked the precisely shaped point of the beard on his own face, round and plump as a sad-eyed baby’s. He knew that he probably wouldn’t ever see Gunther again after this night, that Gunther would disappear wherever all the other handsome boys went. Gunther was sulking, not just because they had come here to the great cavernous Romanische instead of some dark cellar hole smelling of roach shit and candle wax, where Gunther could have turned his elegant profile to the trembling admiration of other brokenhearted men. But also because Ernst von Behren’s contacts at the UFA studios had proved ineffectual in getting Gunther cast in a film production, even in a nonspeaking role. Gunther was probably thinking now that there was little point in going to bed with him any longer.

  Well, to hell with him then, thought von Behren as he sipped at the cold dregs of coffee left in the heavy porcelain cup. He at least didn’t feel any guilt over the matter; a face as handsome as Gunther’s should be kept off the Reich’s motion picture screens, as a public service. He’d be damned if he’d be responsible for unleashing that beauty upon all the poor silly Hausfrauen of Germany, just so they could weep into their pillows that their husbands weren’t the cruel god incarnate they had seen up on the motion picture screens.

  He watched Gunther take a sip of mineral water. Gunther had never lacked for admirers. Back in the rowdy starving days that now seemed, in memory, like newsreels from another planet – Gunther had done his trolling on the Weidendammbrucke and the Tauentzienstra?e with the other women, the real along with the false. Not far from the Romanische in fact, just beyond the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche, that the night rain had darkened to a hulking stone beast. Von Behren could remember Gunther’s feral teenage face, with its slash of red lipstick and kohl-rimmed cat’s-eyes, chin brushing the ratty fur swathed around his neck, a spit-curled bob shining like black Japanese lacquer. The height of the glossy green-leather boots the Tauentzienstra?e girls wore indicated their sexual specializations, and Gunther had tottered around in ones that signaled an absolute willingness to do anything.

  That will stand him in good stead now, thought von Behren. They had entered – not just Gunther and himself, or the patrons of the Romanische, but all Germany, and probably the rest of humanity as well – a world where the willingness to do anything would be a valuable commodity indeed.

  “Do you remember Conrad?” He whispered the question, knowing that if Gunther heard him against the cafe’s hubbub, the handsome other could pretend he hadn’t. Conrad had been another Tauentzienstra?e prowler in his hungry days, the bones cutting through his narrow face giving him an emaciated, deathly glamour. But Conrad had managed to get into the films, back when they had been silent, and had stalked around as a murderous sleepwalker surrounded by crazy cardboard se
ts, doing so well at that and all the other parts that came his way, that now he was in Hollywood, putting on the worldly airs that impressed the Americans so much. Von Behren doubted if Conrad talked much of his Tauentzienstra?e nights. But it did serve to demonstrate that it was true, in America – or at least Hollywood – you could reinvent yourself. If you were lucky.

  “Perhaps I should go to America,” mused von Behren aloud. He might as well have been sitting at the table alone.

  But Gunther had heard that. He turned his profile enough to give von Behren a glance of contempt, the look traitors and cowards receive.

  Von Behren found that tiresome. So many others were leaving, or thinking about it – why shouldn’t he? Just yesterday he had gone by Frank Wysbar’s flat, out by the Babelsberg studios, to look at some dreadful drum-beating script Goebbels’ ministry kept shoving into the UFA production queue. He had found Wysbar sitting at the writing table, practicing a new signature. “That is what my American contacts say I would have to change my name to,” Wysbar had said, turning around in his chair and displaying a sheet of paper with the name Frank Wisbar written upon it. “What do you think?”

  He had told Wysbar that it didn’t seem that much different, the letter i instead of the original y. What was a name, anyway? You did what you had to do, these days. Wysbar had sighed and said that he didn’t know, maybe he wouldn’t leave for America; at the least, he would try to hold out a while longer.

  Of course, von Behren knew, Wysbar had reasons for feeling gloomy. Goebbels and the NSDAP hacks beneath him at the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda – what a joke; was there a word such as endarkenment? – had given Wysbar nothing but grief about the last film he’d directed. All because he’d used a dark-haired actress – Sybille Schmitz, whom von Behren had always found good-looking enough, in a sort of strange, heavy-jawed way – as the romantic interest of a blond Nordic hero. And the actress wasn’t even the least bit Jewish; she wouldn’t have still been working if the party’s racial examiners had been able to find a spot of Hebrew blood in her pedigree. Just her luck to be a brunette, when the official fetishism dictated blue-eyed blondes, hair braided as thick as ships’ ropes.