“While we wait?”
Von Behren sighed as he looked around the studio interior. Most of the cleaning up had been finished, just in the last few minutes. That same sense of urgency – of time running out, life and work that had to be squeezed in between bombing raids – motivated everyone here. It seemed strange, but not really when he thought about it, how much more he himself had accomplished, scripts on paper and films in the can, since he had come back with Marte to Berlin and the war. When he had been in Hollywood, that sunny paradise, it had been easy to believe that time was infinite, stretching out in all directions like the golden light that buttered the hills. Even with no money in the bank and dependent upon the continued indulgence of Herr David Wise, he had taken whole days and weeks off to sit in the backyard of his little bungalow and re-read his childhood book of Marchen. When the thick, warm air had sent him drowsing, the old stories had come into his dreams; the red hunter had stalked him through a sun- dappled forest, not to catch and punish him, but to gather him up, a child again, and lift him to the face concealed inside the hood of stitched animal furs, a kiss in that small darkness…
“Sir?” The assistant’s polite, patient voice broke into von Behren’s drifting thoughts, the memory of a dream that had always ended before the last of its secrets had been revealed. “What is it you would like us to do now?”
He wasn’t blinking into the soft Californian sunshine, just thrown out of his own dreaming; he was in Berlin, always in Berlin, in what everyone knew was the last and hardest winter of the war. A wind sharpened with ice cut through the canvas nailed over the broken skylights.
“Yes…” He nodded slowly, rousing himself. “I’d like to… I’d like to do some exterior shots.” He knew there would be time enough for that, at least; it would be hours yet before Marte returned and any filming could be done with her. “Out in the streets. There were things I saw this morning… they might be something we can use.” A sector of residential blocks near the studio had been transformed by the bombs and fire, from Berlin of 1945 to a blackened, timeless vista, the bones of the city stripped of their modern flesh. He would have to see how they looked on film; the ruins might serve better than any construction from the carpenters and painters, for the final sequences of Der Rote Jager, when the spectral figure’s wrath had laid waste the village and countryside of the sinning lords of the castle. Further proof, if any were needed, that Goebbels had not even read the script that Marte had taken to him; he had merely given his approval as a present to her. If poor Frank Wysbar could get into trouble for the black horsemen in his Fahrmann Maria, those bringers of death too close to the real SS to be allowed, then surely the Reichsminister would have suspected a metaphor in the Rote Jager script, a defeatist prediction of the Reich’s encircling fate.
Or perhaps Goebbels had indeed read it. Von Behren wondered if the dramatist inside Goebbels’ soul had embraced the apocalypse as the fitting conclusion to this great film he had written, the one that had taken all the world for its sets.
It little mattered now. His old friend Wysbar had made his escape to America, where he at least had had the good sense to hunker down and stay. The last von Behren had heard, Wysbar had been having a hard time finding work; there were too many German refugees under the palm trees for all of them to be hired. And here I am, he mused, and I can make all the films I want. For a while, at least; while there’s still time. So who’s the fool now? Von Behren pulled his coat tighter around himself as he watched the studio doors being rolled back, the cameras being readied for the grey, wintry light outside.
He had made love to her in so many different rooms. And outside as well, on the grounds of his Schwanenwerder estate, soft grass still warm from the passage of the summer day, the lights of a reception inside the grand house visible through the overhanging branches of the night-shaded trees. Everywhere it had happened, where she without will had let it happen, on velvet couches or beds that he had once shared and would share again with his wife – they were all the same place, the tiniest room, the darkness behind her eyelids. She closed her eyes and went in there, leaving him in the world outside that held her body.
“It is sad, isn’t it?” Joseph’s voice came to her, close beside where she stood on a carpet littered with rubble. “I can barely stand to look at it myself. They’ve done such damage here…”
Marte opened her eyes and looked across the high-ceilinged room. The intricate cornices and plasterwork above had come crashing down, into dust and white crumbling fragments, revealing the skeletal girders and ragged patches of sky beyond. Snow had fallen through, melting and then freezing into grey mirrors on the floor. Through the frames of the shattered windows that had filled one wall, scraping mechanical noises and faint voices could be heard, the clean-up squadrons filling in the bomb craters on the Wilhelmstra?e below. The corpses had been dug out from the hills of fallen brick and taken away, in the first hours of quiet after the planes had departed, while the fires in the other parts of the city were still being extinguished.
A gloved hand ran across one of the empty shelves; Joseph looked at the dust on his fingertips. He had on his trench coat, belted over his severe National Socialist uniform. “You see?” He turned back toward Marte. “This is why we had to move the ministry’s staff down to the basements. Impossible to do any work here, under these conditions; my own home is now an annex for at the ministry’s senior officials. But this arrangement will not last forever.” His gaze swept across the room, taking in the now-ragged wallpaper, the blank spot where the portrait of the Fuhrer had hung, the empty space where his own ornate desk had stood. She could see him transforming it all in his mind, one set being struck and a new and grander one being erected in its place. “When the war has been concluded, and we can turn our attention once more to the rebuilding of our nation… this will all be different. And better.” Joseph nodded in satisfaction at what he alone could see. The future. A gesture of his hand took in the entire room. “There are great plans… the ministry, this building itself will be gone, replaced by one of such splendor…” He smiled at her. “Those whom you knew in America, those Hollywood Juden such as David Wise… nothing of theirs will compare to what we will achieve here. Soon…”
Strange, to hear David’s name come from Joseph’s mouth. She knew there was still some jealousy there, even though he had been the victor. One thing to share her in the dreams of men who saw her on the screen, another to think of a Jewish film mogul – a real one, a prince of Hollywood, the exact creature Joseph had modeled himself after – running his manicured hands over her skin, drinking in her kiss. Joseph had all that now, but he could still speak his rival’s name with venom.
She thought about him, the other, for a moment. David… she had seen him last in a newsreel, one of the many that Joseph’s propaganda writers and filmmakers churned out for the German theaters. A piece about how the American film industry was controlled by Jews, all part of that great international conspiracy. The wicked lies they used to deceive the American public – or at least that fair-haired, blue-eyed Aryan part of it – so they could go on raking in their bloodstained profits while sending innocent, handsome youths to their senseless deaths in Europe. The narrator had been some anonymous UFA hack, but Marte had heard Joseph’s voice, speaking his strident, battering words. He must have had a hand in it, or even written it personally; her own image had shown up on the screen, old footage of her disembarking at the Templehof airfields, a virtuous German heroine who had fled in disgust from Hollywood and the rich, hook-nosed lechers who ran it. Her face had looked tired as she had come down the steps from the JU-52’s door, from the long flight out of Lisbon, but the voice – Joseph’s voice – had hinted darkly of some lingering sadness at what the judischen Zuhalters had forced her to do while she had been in their thrall. No doubt the blood of the German males who watched the newsreel had quickened at the thought, and they could even feel virtuous while their groins tingled; such was Joseph’s mastery with words. The newsreel had ended with a still photo, taken from an American newspaper, of those rich Jewish film moguls, all in dinner jackets and with thick cigars in their hands, smiling and laughing among themselves at some USO fundraiser. David had been the youngest man in the photo, but even so, she had barely been able to recognize him. He had put on weight, and the dark, curly hair she remembered had thinned and greyed, just in these last few years of the war – as if he were turning into one of the men on either side of him, men old enough to be his father. His eyes hadn’t been laughing; even in the grainy newsprint blown up on the screen, Marte had been able to see the simmering anger under his brow. They seemed hard, mean-spirited eyes now, a rich man’s eyes, as though he had become exactly that which Joseph’s propaganda spoke of, a grasping figure of money and power.
“Yes,” said Marte slowly; she felt Joseph watching her, waiting for her to speak. “I’m sure it will be… magnificent…” She drew the fur wrap closer around her shoulders, against the chill lancing in through the broken windows.
Joseph went on talking; she watched him now as he stood overlooking the street, his raised hand and words
