by K. W. Jeter
Another remembered image rose inside him, unbidden, evoked by a glimpse down one of the rubble-filled streets, of the burnt and twisted ruins of the Reich Chancellery. That was where he had been, before making his way over here to the remains of the old studio. A group of Russian soldiers, their rifles slung behind their backs, had waved him over. They had known he was German, but it hadn’t seemed to matter to matter to them now. Alcohol made them friendly and expansive; von Behren had handed their schnapps bottle back, nodded and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and let himself be led by the elbow toward something lying on the ground. The other Russians had drawn back so he could have a clear view.
“ Alles kaput,” the Russian soldier beside von Behren had said. He spat at the dark, elongated object at their booted feet.
It had been a corpse, charred by gasoline, but not enough to have done more than blacken and shrivel the flesh upon the skeleton within. The first indication that von Behren had received, of what had happened to the bunker’s occupants. He had looked down at the corpse lying on its back, its slitted eye-sockets staring up at the sky above the shattered city. It’s Goebbels, he had thought suddenly; he could recognize the former Reichsminister, even in this state. Von Behren’s stomach had coiled into a sour knot as he sensed the vestiges of evil and desire still emanating from the dead thing before him. One of its hands, coal-black as the rest of the body, had been raised up into the air, as though trying to claw a hold upon some vision above it…
An angry Soviet political officer had suddenly arrived on the scene, shouting and waving von Behren back from the corpse on the ground. The other soldiers, one of them hastily concealing the bottle inside his heavy woolen greatcoat, had retreated, looking embarrassed. He’d made his own retreat then; a few of the Russian soldiers had waved goodbye to him, receiving sharp glares from the officer as reprimand.
The image of what had been the Reich minister remained sharp in his mind, Goebbels’ face reduced to blackened ash. Von Behren made his way down from the ruins of the studio, back to the street. He kept walking. There were other things that were more pleasing to dwell on. Such as leaving here at last, and going anywhere else.
***
“This is the place.” Pavli looked up at the block of flats. The buildings on either side had been gutted by fire, and the windows of this one had been shattered. A few had been boarded up, but most still gaped empty, or with broken-armed crosses dangling from their centers. He checked again the tattered scrap of paper. “She said to come here.”
Beside him, Marte nodded as she gazed up at the facade blackened by smoke. She had turned up the collar of the soldier’s coat and covered her hair with a rough woolen scarf, so nobody would be likely to recognize her. They had taken back alleys and picked their way across the streets where the mounds of debris were highest, keeping their faces averted from any others wandering the city.
“I remember…” She touched Pavli’s shoulder. “Her name. When we were at the Lebensborn hostel. It was Liesel.”
The note that had been delivered to her bore no signature. Pavli had been with her when a silent Wehrmacht veteran, with a head swathed in dirty bandages and limping along on crutches, had brought it. The words it had contained, about her son, had been enough. Marte had nothing with which to pay the soldier but a stone-hard heel of bread, but that was enough. He had turned with a bare nod of thanks and disappeared back into the shadows of the cratered streets.
“Let me go first.” The aspect of the building, the dark entrance hallway behind the front door, aroused misgivings in Pavli. He stepped through, regretting now that he hadn’t brought any matches or a candle stub to light the way. Marte followed close behind him as he groped for the railing of the stairs.
He heard laughter and the voice of an American, footsteps coming heavy toward them. At the landing, he drew Marte back against the wall; a G.I. with his cap pushed far back on his head, his arm around the shoulders of a German woman, tromped past without seeing the two of them, trailing the smell of alcohol and raw-scented eau de cologne . When their raucous noise had gone out into the street, Marte could no longer be restrained; she pushed Pavli aside and ran up the rest of the steps.
“Ah – and here is our famous actress! How thoughtful of you to pay a visit.”
Pavli caught up with her at the end of the top floor’s corridor. Daylight poked through the charred roof timbers. He leaned into the room with his hands braced against the doorway, catching his breath, and saw Marte standing before another woman lying with her back against the arm of a stained Biedermeyer sofa. The woman’s mocking smile revealed a tooth missing at one corner of her mouth.
“Where is he?” Marte’s hands trembled at her sides. “My son…”
“Such impatience!” The woman turned her smile toward Pavli, trying to draw him in. “All these years that when she couldn’t have cared less about her little boy’s welfare, and now everything has to be done at once.” The smile disappeared as she looked again at Marte. “Years when I took care of him – when he was as much my child as yours.”
Pavli saw the room’s contents now, the cases of canned goods with markings in both English and German, the unopened bottles of liquor, cartons of cigarettes and the flat, dark bars of American chocolate. An untidy heap of women’s clothing lay on the floor, some new looking, other pieces shabby and worn. The woman herself had streaks of grey in her blond hair, though Marte had told him that she was the same age as her; her cheeks bore patches of rouge nearly as bright and unnatural as her reddened lips. He could easily guess that the girl with the American soldier, who had passed them by on the stairs, was in this woman’s employ, in one of the few businesses that could flourish between the victors and the defeated.
“Your note said you have him here with you -” Marte turned her head, her eyes puzzled, as though she were trying to catch a more elusive scent through the room’s cloying perfume. “I don’t…” She brought her gaze back to the woman. “Where is he? I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you anything you want -”
“Yes, of course. You will pay me. You’ll pay me a great deal.” The woman poured from a bottle into a teacup on the low table before her. She held the liquor up toward Pavli, smiling coquettishly, then shrugged and set it back down on the floor when he shook his head. “And that’s as it should be, isn’t it? Because everything you have is stolen from me.” Her voice became tight and harsh, her eyes glaring now at Marte. “Everything – right down to that fool who fathered your bastard. He should have been mine as well, but you stole him from me, with your coy little ways and your pretty face -”
“Please…” The woman’s vehemence seemed to stun Marte. “I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
“Yes, you do – you’ve always known. He should have been the father of my child, so you see, it makes sense, doesn’t it – the boy is my child, isn’t he? And all your money and fame – it should have been me up on the screens, with everybody looking at me and adoring me. You’re nothing, a mongrel bitch, compared to me. So everything you have is stolen, it’s mine, and now it’s time to pay it back to me. Everything .”
“Where is he?” Marte’s expression became even more frantic, the room trapping her. “I don’t… I don’t feel him here.” She turned back to Pavli in the doorway, tears trembling in her eyes. “My child… I don’t feel him anywhere! I knew he was alive… when you first came to me… but now -” Her voice broke into a cry. “I don’t know! I can’t feel him anymore!”
He wanted to wrap her in his arms and take her away from the glutted, shabby room and the cruelly smiling woman. He’d already stepped toward Marte when the woman raised herself from the sofa, pulling a thin silk wrap closer about herself.
“Oh, very well – you want to see your little boy, than you shall.” The woman’s voice twisted with contempt. “I brought him a long way, I carried him here; I’m not about to lose track of such a valuable little item. Come along – I’ll show him to you.”
They fo
llowed her down another corridor, to the back of the flat. The woman’s hand, with its nails painted bright red, gestured over her shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll be able to work out some suitable arrangement. Of course, I can’t let you have the boy, to keep all to yourself. I’m not a fool. You must come and visit him, and take care of him – I’m tired enough of that, God knows.” The woman rattled on, as though talking to herself. “It’ll be in a much nicer place, though; with your money, we’ll see to that…”
Behind the last door, a small room, the only light that which spilled in from the hallway; it revealed a small figure lying on a rumpled bed. Marte rushed past the woman and knelt down, her fingertips reaching for the sleeping child’s face.
“A mother’s love.” The woman leaned against the side of the doorway, her sneer directed at Pavli. “How charming. You would never know from the way she acts – but then she is an actress, isn’t she? – how she abandoned her child all these years.”
Marte suddenly cried out. “No -” The word was muffled by her hand against her mouth as she stepped back from the bed. The blanket that had been pulled to the boy’s chin slid to the bare planks of the floor. Her eyes widened as she gazed down at the small body.
He shoved past the woman. Before he reached Marte’s side, he saw the pillow and the bare mattress dark with dried blood. The child’s face, the cheeks and neck whiter than paper; the blood, thickened with phlegm, dried to reddish dust.
“You see?” The woman reached between Pavli and Marte, and stroked the child’s cold brow. “I took good care of him. Fed him and bathed him and carried him – oh, it was such a long way – and did everything for him. As if he were my very own. So he is my own. Of course he is.” The woman’s voice softened, as if she had become a child herself, her fingers ruffling a doll’s white-gold hair. “They lied about him, about my baby, right from the beginning. This is my little boy, he always was, you stole him from me, the way you stole everything. It was the other one, the ugly little one, that I left behind in the snow -” She shook her head, face clouding with confusion. “But this one is your little boy, too. I don’t understand how that can be. But look – he has those eyes that he got from you, from being a Mischling. See?” The woman pulled back the child’s eyelids with her thumb and forefinger; the pupils had begun to cloud over, but the colors of blue and golden-brown were still visible beneath the milky-grey film. “You see?”
Pavli looked away from the child’s corpse, turning toward the woman. Her prattling voice went on, each syllable a soft tapping against his brow.
“So now you must give back everything you stole from me. Everything. So my child and your child and I can live in a large fine house, where it isn’t cold and there’s plenty to eat, and everyone will see me there and they’ll know it’s mine, it always was mine -”
He could see the woman’s eyes now; he had leaned forward, drawn to look, as if mesmerized by the spiraling words. He saw there, not the blind gaze of death, but something sharper and brighter, glittering like the points of needles. The woman’s madness pierced the world, showing another, where the dead were merely sleeping, ready to wake and reach for only her with their small hands.
“I took such good care of him.” The woman smiled tenderly at the face crusted with blood. “He was running a fever, and he had a nasty cough, but I knew those would pass and he would get better, and he did. You feel fine now, don’t you, sweetheart? Wake up, there’s someone come to see you -”
“No…” Marte touched the woman’s arm. “Let him sleep.”
Pavli wondered if she had gone mad as well; her voice was calm and untroubled.
“Let him sleep…” Crooning, the words falling as a song. Marte’s hand drew away. “You took care of him, you brought him here to me… I owe you so much.”
The room became still and small, the space between the two women vanished, their faces close together, as though Marte had stepped forward to bestow a kiss. Pavli couldn’t breathe, there was no air in the room, not even enough to shout a single word as Marte’s hand drew something bright from the pocket of the soldier’s coat.
“So much…” A whisper.
The other woman’s mouth parted, a smile tracing its corners, her eyes closing to savor her triumph.
A red flower blossomed on the woman’s lips.
She fell backwards, eyes still closed, her body crumpling away from the shining object that Marte had raised between them. Pavli could see it now, he could even read the words inscribed on the metal.
Meine Ehre hei?t Treue.
The knife was a memory that could never be erased. He had gone back to the empty shelter to look for it, days after the fighting had stopped, and been unable to find it on the wet, dirty floor. He had thought then that some Russian soldier had taken it for a souvenir, a trophy of their victory. Now he saw that it had been Marte who had found and kept the thin weapon.
A larger flower, red and wet, leapt through the slashed front of the woman’s wrap as Marte jerked her arm, the dagger moving without resistance toward the center of the white breasts.
The glistening vine of the flower twisted snake-like around Marte’s wrist, the coat’s sleeve darkening with the growing stain.
For a moment longer, the woman hung upon the knifepoint. Flesh gave way and she sank, first against the side of the bed, then sprawling at Pavli’s feet. The dagger dropped from Marte’s hand and clattered across the floor.
Two dead things in the room now. For a second, Pavli’s vision filled with an image of scrubbed white tiles, his nostrils catching the scent of preserving chemicals in a metal basin. The knife wasn’t the ornate SS ceremonial dagger, but a gleaming scalpel raised in Ritter’s gloved hand…
The vision faded, and he saw Marte standing before him, her hand reaching down to stroke her dead child’s brow. At the same time, Pavli heard the sound of a door opening, and laughing voices, in the distance at the building’s street entrance. Another woman, perhaps the same one they had passed before on the stairs, with another customer; likely an American soldier. That would be trouble, whether the man were drunk or sober.
He looked down and saw that the pool of blood from the dead woman had reached the edges of his boots. He stepped backward, grabbing Marte’s arm and pulling her away from the bed. “We must leave here.” He bent down and scooped up the dagger, wiping its blade quickly on the bedcovers before slipping it inside his shirt, where he had carried it before. “Quickly – before anyone finds us.”
Marte’s gaze snapped round at him, like another, even sharper knife. She drew in her breath, controlling her flare of anger, and something more, that he had not seen in her eyes before. “Very well.” She had turned her back on the dead, the child and the woman, as if they no longer existed. “You know the way better than I do.”
Going down, they had already passed the landing when they bumped into the laughing woman and her customer, a new one, a broad-shouldered American sergeant black as coffee. The pair hardly even noticed Pavli and Marte, her hair covered again by the kerchief, as they drew back against the railing to let the couple by.
On the street, Pavli looked up at the building’s broken windows. The faint glow of a candle moved behind the ragged cloth that had been nailed over one empty frame; again he heard the sound of laughter.
The room with the dead woman and child was far at the rear of the building; it might be hours, or even days, before the corpses were found. He and Marte would be well away by then. And what did two more dead matter in this city? Nothing; nothing at all…
He took the angel’s arm and walked with her, guided her, between the mounds of rubble and the shell craters, carefully and slowly, so that anyone who might have been watching them would not have the least suspicion -
And at that moment, he was happy.
At that moment, his life began. Everything before then had been but a dream, that he could hardly remember now. From which most people, he knew, never woke. They never lived at all.
But I’m t
he lucky one, thought Pavli. He had woken, been born, to hunger and cold and a drizzling rain that sluiced tarry black ash through the broken streets, filled the bomb craters with shimmering dark mirrors, like fragments of a starless night turned upside-down. His hair hung in wet traces along his neck.
“Don’t worry,” murmured Pavli. He sheltered the angel’s cold hand in both his own. “I’ll take care of you.”
“Will you?” She turned her gaze toward him. “Yes…” She nodded slowly. “You will…”
His heart swelled beyond the walls of his chest, beyond the walls of the cold, black world through which they made their way. He had been born, and born for this.
She stopped and looked around them, her gaze searching the unlit buildings, the sharp-toothed broken windows glinting as they caught an angle of moonlight.
“You must help me.”
“Yes…” Pavli tried to draw her away from the spot, before anyone might see them. “Of course…”
“The studio… you must take me there…”
“I can’t.” He shook his head. “It’s all in ruins. I saw it -”
“I don’t care!” She snatched her hand away from his grasp. “And the director – you must bring him there, too!”
“Von Behren? But what can he -”
“It must be finished! Everything must be!” Her rain-damp face was painted bright by the sliver of moon above. “You don’t understand… but it must!”
“All right…” He tried to soothe her, stroking a trembling shoulder with his hand. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
Marte collapsed against him, as though the burst of anger had consumed the last of her strength. He held her and kept her from falling, her face pressed against the side of his neck; he felt the brush of her lashes as she closed her eyes.
“Come on, then.” He pulled her with him, bearing her fragile weight with each step across the rubble. “It’s not far…”
