Kingdom of Twilight

by Steven Uhly

  The event that followed, which consisted of Ranzner ripping the clothes from her body, dragging her into the next room, throwing her onto the divan and opening the trousers of his S.S. uniform in a frenzy, this event united all the women which were Anna, in a state of great shock, in a shared sensation of something unprecedented, something new. It united them in one single pain in the middle of her body, as Ranzner, with the rapid movements of a man who knew nothing but self-gratification, penetrated her. It united them in a heat, which spread from there throughout her entire body, and finally in sorrow when it was over before it had even properly begun, because Ranzner had shot his seed like a boy before collapsing on top of Anna.

  Now the two of them lay there, a couple after the act. Their eyes were closed, the sweat on their foreheads was still glistening and soon dried, their breathing gradually quieted.

  Anna searched inside herself for her sanctuaries, but it was as if Ranzner’s invasion had swept away everything that she had painstakingly constructed, all the barricades, all the fairy meadows, all the secret chambers. Now she was nothing but a woman without honor, a woman who had become an accessory to the crime committed against her, and in some strange way she felt grateful for this sense of clarity.

  His eyes closed, Josef Ranzner lay on top of Anna, searching for a way out. He felt small and feeble, as if lying on his mother’s breast; it was unbearable. He was utterly paralyzed, he had no idea how to escape. All his life he had anticipated this, he had known that he must not fall into this trap and now it had happened, he had allowed himself to get carried away by childish excitement and suffer this humiliation. He was filled with disgust, disgust at what he had done, disgust at himself and at the body he lay upon.

  Ranzner leaped up abruptly, so quickly that Anna flinched. He leaped up and turned around, he did not even wish to look at her. He pulled his underpants over his wet penis, he fastened his trousers, he smoothed down his shirt and coat. Until, at least to the outside world, he was once more Obersturmbannführer Ranzner, the leader of a wild pack, to whom no one must dare come too close.

  Anna was still lying naked on the divan. She watched Ranzner, in expectation that now he would kill her. She no longer felt any fear, no homesickness for her lost childhood, no hope of getting away unscathed. She had had it all, a whole life, even love had come to her right at the end in the most surprising form possible. Thus Anna lay there, still astonished, for at the same time she knew that, in a dire emergency, she had offered up her most precious possession to stay alive. The greatest mystery of all was how this emergency had taken possession of her, instigating a transformation by which she now saw this man—who stood with his back to her, motionless, as if he were suddenly on the terrace again—in a very different light. It did not counter or efface any of the thoughts, not a single one of the emotions she previously felt whenever she thought of Ranzner. Nothing about him had changed. Anna was lying naked on the divan as if she were a painting, her arms were behind her head and she was ready to sacrifice herself, take the final step without questioning the point of it. That had changed.

  Ranzner was standing with his back to her, a conflict between paralysis and flight. He wanted to put everything that had happened into perspective. But everything had already been put into perspective, much more than he had expected, and now he was standing there, fleeing internally, but nothing was moving, not the room, not the woman at his back, not the telegram on the desk in the room next door, which had arrived the previous night, with the order for an immediate retreat to Posen. Everything stayed where it was, even the pistol stayed in its holster at his hip. Shoot her? He could no longer find a reason, for anything.

  At some point Ranzner’s body assumed control. Taking a deep breath, it relaxed and left Ranzner’s quarters without turning back or saying a word. Ranzner went down the stairs, aware of having been defeated, and yet heading for the final battle to be victorious, a paradox, a Gordian knot with neither a solution nor a sword in sight. At the bottom of the stairs one of his adjutants held out to him a black overcoat, gloves and a fur hat; he caught himself thanking the man. Ranzner walked through the large vestibule, two S.S. men clicked their heels and opened the broad double doors. He nodded to them—this was something new, too—and went down the broad steps outside to the utility vehicle that had arrived to take the Obersturmbannführer to Posen, to the place where a little more than a year ago the Reichsführer S.S. had spoken of the virtues of the Schutzstaffel, the racial elite of the German people, of the extermination of the Jews in Europe, of bravery and honesty, and of the Russians, time and again of the Russians, who in a last desperate effort would be sending their fifteen-year-olds to the front, only to be repulsed once more by the victorious German army. Ranzner climbed in, the driver saluted and the car set off, taking him away from this town, which now belonged to nobody again, save for the witches and other mythical creatures dwelling behind the windows. Perhaps Poles and Germans and Russians and Jews were just different types of mythical beings in a fairy-tale world of war and annihilation.

  13

  January the 21st began quietly. There had not been any new snow and it had turned even colder. The wind that had been gusting around the house overnight dropped when the sun rose over the fields of white.

  The two women were asleep and between them slept a three-month-old baby by the name of Lisa Kramer. She slept between her mother and grandmother, but of course Lisa did not yet think in such concepts, unlike the authorities with which she would be registered when the snow had melted and the roads were clear again. Lisa did not yet know her mother’s name, or at least was unable to disclose it if she did, which was a good thing, for she might have said Margarita, but Margarita did not exist, there was only Maria Kramer, and thus they were three generations sleeping in one bed because there was no longer a man in the house.

  Privately Frau Kramer had seen it coming, she had hoped that a mistake might cause her husband’s existence to escape the notice of the authorities, even after he had gone to town she had still clung to the hope that Farmer Kramer would play no role in this vast drama which a simple woman like her could not understand. She had reproached herself for having sent him off with the grandfather clock, allowing him to advertise everywhere that here was one more man fit for military service who could be sent to his death.

  But she never could have imagined that God or the Devil would choose Lisa’s birth as the moment she parted from this man she had loved for almost thirty years, and whose absence over the past three months burned in her heart like a wound. She could never have imagined that Margarita’s placenta would be expelled by an intense post-natal contraction at the very moment her husband dashed through the parlor to pack his bags. She could never have imagined that there would be no time for them to say goodbye, to embrace at least and exchange a glance that would say everything, before Herr Kramer left the house to avoid giving the approaching soldiers any cause to enter it, while she ran hither and thither to wash the baby, to dispose of the afterbirth in the cellar, in the same place where Margarita had lain, on the earth beneath the planks, and finally to scrub the pools of blood from the floor, the blood of Margarita who now lay exhausted with her child in the Kramers’ marital bed, trying to prevent any sound from escaping outside.

  It had been no consolation to her that the birth had gone well that night; she had been irate at him for taking scarcely any food, to ensure they had enough in the house, What an idiot, she had shouted before bursting into tears, while Margarita watched her helplessly from the bed.

  But then she had truly become a grandmother, for the woman in confinement could do little, and she had to take care of everything, keep the fire going in the stove, feed and milk the cow, look after the chickens and collect the eggs, knead the dough and bake the bread, skim off the cream and churn some of it into butter—without rennet she could no longer make cheese. Keep the house tidy, prepare meals with what there was. Many tasks her husband used to perform so calmly and taciturnly
that she had never noticed just how much he got done. Now Frau Kramer’s days were filled with chores and she was also busy sewing clothes for Lisa from those her husband had left behind. By the time he gets back I’ll have got him some new things, she thought.

  Margarita had not said a word, the two women had listened to the thunder rumbling in the distance, which was no longer so far away, as if that were the answer.

  In the weeks that followed, the cannon fire came closer still until it was so near that the two women began to get worried. They told themselves that everything would be fine and that they would surely be given a warning if the Red Army made it through to here. They kept their doubts to themselves, clutching onto daily life. In secret, however, they pondered what they ought to take with them.

  One day, when Lisa had been on this earth for a month and Margarita was back on her feet, helping Frau Kramer as best she could, an armored reconnaissance car appeared on the horizon, tiny as an insect, and battled its way closer. It was a beautiful, sunny winter’s day, the sky was clear and the snow reflected the light so brightly that it was impossible to look at for long.

  Judging by the direction from which the vehicle was approaching, it must be coming from town. The two women stood by one of the windows that faced east, screwed up their eyes, wiped their hands on their aprons and did not know what to do.

  “Shall I go into the cellar with the baby?” Margarita said. Frau Kramer weighed up this option, then said, “No. Go and lie down in bed and pretend to sleep. Let me talk to them. They might be perfectly reasonable souls.”

  Margarita withdrew to the bedroom, while Frau Kramer stayed at the window watching the armored car bump across the fields in a straight line toward her. Her own words echoed inside her head. Perfectly reasonable. She sighed. Who was still reasonable in this world?

  It was a while before the scout car, with a rattle like a tractor, came to a stop outside the Kramers’ farmhouse. It no longer looked small and insect-like, but large and menacing. The cannons towering above the turret pointed directly at the house. At the rear a hatch opened and two men appeared, one after the other. They were so wrapped up against the cold that Frau Kramer could not see their faces.

  When she watched them trudge toward the house through the snow, she was seized by a quite insane hope. She fancied that the two men must be father and son, arriving home as if the war had suddenly come to an end because all the soldiers had left the front. Any moment now they would call her name and she would rush out into the cold, throw herself around their necks and feel happy for the first time in a long while.

  But the cannon fire in the distance did not stop. Frau Kramer did not budge. She waited until the two men were knocking at the front door. Opening it a crack, she found herself staring into two unfamiliar pairs of eyes, framed by fur hats, hoods and scarves.

  “Kramer family?” one of the men said through his scarf.

  Frau Kramer nodded. “What’s left of it.”

  The two men exchanged glances, then the other one said, “May we come in for a moment?”

  Without saying a word Frau Kramer opened the door and made way to let them in. The soldiers entered the parlor, bringing with them the snow on their boots, and removed hoods, hats and scarves from their heads to reveal two men roughly as old as Frau Kramer’s husband. They had with them a piece of paper which said that Wilhelm Kramer, born 1898, would have to report to the territorial army as agricultural production in the Wartheland was no longer vital to the war effort. They shrugged when they learned that the S.S. had taken him already a month ago. One of them said, It’s not the first time that’s happened to us. The other said, You can’t stay here, Frau Kramer. The Russians are going to overrun the entire area. They’ve got no respect for anything. They abuse our women and kill our children. They asked whether Frau Kramer was alone, but before she could say “Yes,” Lisa began to cry in the bedroom.

  And so it happened that Margarita Ejzenstain became Maria Kramer, born April 25, 1925, in Ostra, southern Bukovina, the second child of Marta and Wilhelm Kramer, members of the German minority in Romania, resettled to Germanize the Reichsgau Wartheland; mother of Lisa Kramer, born out of wedlock because the father had fallen at the front before her parents could get married. That is precisely what had happened.

  Frau Kramer fetched the identification cards and naturalization documents, she would, of course, hand in Lisa’s documents later, but the snow, the cold and their men, who had left and could no longer help, had stranded the two women here, and the Reich had not shown its face again apart from in the form of soldiers who were after even more men for a war she had never asked for, and for which she had sacrificed everything she loved.

  The two men looked embarrassed, they reiterated their warning before leaving and Frau Kramer lingered at the window, watching them drive off in their armored car to the next farm.

  That evening the new Maria asked her new mother why she had never mentioned her daughter. Dropping her sewing into her lap, Frau Kramer gave her a long stare. She sighed and said, in her sing-song voice, “My dear child, some people take one path in life, others take another.” She paused, looking over at the windows, which dimly reflected the light from the paraffin lamp. She said, “Has a farmer’s wife ever given birth to a queen?” Nodding, she went on, “Yes, my love, I did, and it was never my intention to, not at all.” She shook her head, muttering, “It must have been similar for the Virgin Mary with Jesus. He could talk cleverly about all manner of things, but he never wanted to make furniture.” She smiled sadly, before composing herself and saying, more loudly this time, “It’s not that bad, boys are different—all wives and mothers know that. They expect boys to be wild and to ignore them. They even love them for it!” She almost shouted that final sentence. Gathering up her sewing again, she said softly, “Maria was the only one of us who was happy to come here.” She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, opened them again and raised her eyes to the ceiling, as if something large had appeared there.

  “My God, what a mass migration!” she exclaimed, as if to distract herself from the actual subject. “They carted us and other families across the country in covered wagons.” She paused, then whispered, “And when we finally got here . . .” she broke off. Like a blind woman grabbing a stick to allow her to go on her way, she picked up her sewing again and got back to work. Margarita could see the tears running down Frau Kramer’s cheeks and dropping onto Lisa’s new clothes, one after another. She wanted to kiss every single one of them away, she wanted to hug her new mother. But Frau Kramer’s grief over the real Maria Kramer pushed its way between the two women and, sitting there with heavy arms and stiff hands, Margarita asked nothing and did nothing.

  They spent the rest of the evening in silence. Frau Kramer thought about her children, one dead, the other lost, and about her husband who was gone and might never return.

  Maria thought about Tomasz, her Tomasz who, now his child had been born, seemed like a wonderful dream from another time. A dream that from now on she would renounce just as she would renounce the name Margarita. And Tadeusz, too, her elder brother. The two of them had Germans on their conscience. Now she was a German herself.

  Her gaze fell on Lisa, sleeping beside her in bed, and for a moment it felt as if all these people had died so this child could be born, as if all of them flowed into this new life, even the German officer she had shot dead an eternity ago, or so it seemed.

  Time stood still if you looked out of the window at the frozen expanses of white and into the cold, blue sky. The two women appeared to know that they were the only ones who could still provide movement. They did it slowly and with stoical regularity. They turned away from the icy landscape outside; their new sun was a little baby. Like two planets they orbited around Lisa’s smile, Lisa’s hunger, Lisa’s sleep. They celebrated Christmas with a boiling fowl, New Year’s Eve with roast chicken, and they worried about their supplies.

  Until January 21, when everything was quiet to begin with. T
he two women got up, one fed the child, the other the animals in the stable. Frau Kramer was milking the cow when the artillery burst into life. Startled, she spilled some of the milk, it was so close now. Because there’s no wind, perhaps, she wondered.

  She returned to the house with the fresh milk. A tall figure with a horse was standing by the front door. It was the pastor, a young man whose hair had turned prematurely gray. His narrow face, with its long, straight nose, and his slender build lent him an ascetic air. Unwrapping himself from his winter clothes, he sat down at the Kramer’s table and did not smile when he saw Maria and the child. He said, “I’m going to all the farms around here that haven’t heard the evacuation order. They’re only evacuating the towns.” He looked Maria in the eye. “Do you still have my old revolver?”

  “No, Pastor. I’m sorry, but we . . .”

  The pastor dismissed her apology with a wave of his hand and sighed. “You’d have found it quite useful now.” He looked around the parlor. “You’ve got to leave today. Only take what’s necessary. Head due west. Here,” he said, putting an envelope on the table. “Enough money for a week. In case you get the opportunity to use it.” Then he said goodbye and rode away to the next farm.

  An hour later the two women led the cow, which was hitched up to the cart, to the front door and loaded everything onto it. Most of what they took was food, for themselves, the cow and the four chickens they had put in cages. The rest was clothing and firewood. No furniture, Frau Kramer had said. Maybe if they had still had the grandfather clock. But that was gone now, and in any case it had never looked quite right in this house, You can’t transplant an old tree, she said, thinking of the Polish family who had left their roots in the earth here and in every corner of the house.