TWENTY-FIVE
Herr Wise found him poking through the ruins of the studio. I must look so shabby to him – von Behren’s coat was grey with dust from crumbling plaster and concrete. As the American picked his way over the slabs of broken walls and fire-twisted window frames, he spotted the director through the open doorway of one of the still-standing buildings, prodding the debris with the point of his cane, then bending down and picking up some small glittering object.
“Ah, Herr Wise -” Von Behren turned and smiled, as if caught in some mildly embarrassing folly. He held up a framing viewfinder, the enameled metal scratched, but the lens still intact. Its glass shone in the sunlight piercing the soundstage’s damaged roof. “You see? Who knows how many more treasures are waiting here to be discovered?”
He had his reasons for being in a good mood. Wise had been with him the day before, when the film salvaged from the studio’s underground storage vault had been screened, for the first time since the end of the fighting in Berlin. Wise had commandeered an editing suite over at the UFA complex in Babelsberg, at the edge of the city, just for that purpose. All the reels that had been shot of Der Rote Jager, his work in progress, had survived in good enough shape to be used. The artillery shells that had hit the studio during the last days of the battle for the city – he had told Wise about getting the actors and crew out to the nearest shelter – had buried the vault in layers of brick and plaster, keeping the fires away from the irreplaceable celluloid. Von Behren’s cameraman had died there, skull and spine broken by the walls collapsing just moments after he had secured the film canisters; that sacrifice had been the somber edge to the director’s relief at finding the film intact.
“You must excuse me.” Von Behren made a formal nod of his head. “I keep forgetting your exalted rank – I see you always as when we were in Hollywood. Is it a colonel you are now? Or general?”
Wise smiled at the joke. “Hardly. Believe me, it’s not going to be much longer for this get-up.” He brushed his hand across the front of his uniform. “My head’s already a civilian. When we get back to the States, I’m planting myself behind my studio desk for good.”
“Oh?” Von Behren raised an eyebrow. “When we get back? What do you mean?”
“That’s why I came out here. Got some more good news for you.” Wise took off his cap and wiped his brow. Summer had made the rubble-filled streets hot and even dustier, the humid air buzzing with midges breeding in the craters filled with stagnant water. Outside, the studio’s wreckage made a mound of broken concrete high enough to climb upon and look down the surrounding streets. A few blocks away, a line of Trummerfrauen, ragged figures with their hair covered in kerchiefs, shuffled bricks from one woman’s hands to another’s, slowly clearing one of the bombsites. “I’ve been pulling some pretty big strings in Washington on your behalf. But then, those people owe me a lot of favors for all the fund-raising I did during the war.”
Only a small lie, thought von Behren. He knew that the American film producer’s favors weren’t being called in for his sake, but for Marte Helle’s.
“Everything’s settled,” continued Wise. “We got the okay to ship you out of here. Final stop on your itinerary will be Los Angeles.”
“Indeed.” Von Behren watched the point of his cane knock aside a few more bits of plaster. “And will I be unaccompanied on this voyage?”
“Of course not. We talked about this already, Ernst. It’ll be you and Marte and this kid you told me about -”
“Pavli.” The director nodded. “Yes, that will be absolutely necessary. I doubt if Marte would consent to go, otherwise. She relies on him a great deal. As distantly related as they are – some type of cousins, I understand – they are the only family each of them has left now. They spend long hours in conversation with each other; things that I suppose are not to be shared with me.” Von Behren voice turned wistful for a moment. “No matter. Young Iosefni has proved himself valuable to me as well. Did I tell you we started shooting again, with him as my new cameraman? Extraordinary – he seems to have had experience with cine equipment, but he won’t tell me from where. His father or his uncle – somebody – ran a photographer’s studio; that’s all I’ve been able to find out.” A shrug. “He picked up quickly the few things I was able to show him, but his eye for angles and lighting – that is a gift. He should do well at your studio in Hollywood.”
“That’s fine. Happy to give him a chance. Since it’ll be a while before there’s any more filming going on around here.”
“I suppose that’s true, Herr Wise.” It would have been easier if his old studio, plus his crew and actors, had all wound up in the American or British zones. Getting anything done through the Russian headquarters was nearly impossible; truckloads and freight cars full of loot, everything from factory machines to a shiny brass mountain of marching band instruments, were already heading eastward, never to be seen again – not to mention any human resources the Russians thought might be of value to them. “But it seems a shame. I realize that is callous of me, but I almost feel as if the destruction we see around us -” He gestured toward the empty windows and fire- blackened buildings nearby. “It is as if I had designed it all myself, the most elaborate set a filmmaker could ever devise. You recall, in the last pages of the script, how the land is cursed for the sins of its noblemen? The red hunter exacts a terrible retribution. What better way to show that than to point our camera toward these photogenic ruins that have been provided for us? Really, Herr Wise, there are sections of the city where one would hardly know they were still part of the twentieth century.”
Such would be easily believed by the American producer; Wise had no doubt seen as much for himself. Since Wise’s arrival in Berlin on the coattails of the U.S. Army, after the Russian artillery had at last gone silent, there would have been plenty of time to tour the devastated areas, the streets that still stank of corpses not yet dug out from the rubble. Long before now, von Behren had grown sick of the war and its aftermath; he could barely wait for the day when he’d step off the the train at Union Station and walk out underneath the palm trees and caressing sunshine. The reports were already circulating through the Military Government offices about how many deaths from cold and starvation were likely when winter rolled across Europe; the sites where the mass graves would be dug had already been marked on the Occupation maps. He was planning on being well away before that grim time came.
“Guess you’ll be glad to get out of here.”
“How soon?” He asked the most important question. “Before we leave?”
Wise shrugged. “Might be a few weeks yet. I tried, but I couldn’t arrange a flight out for us. There’s a limit to what I can do. We’ll have to wait until there’s a ship sailing out of Marseilles, see if we can squeeze onto that.”
“It is perhaps for the best.” Von Behren lifted the viewfinder to his eye and sighted through it. “A shame that my film will remain unfinished. Wouldn’t that have been an excellent item to bring back with us to Hollywood? A print of the rough cut of Der Rote Jager.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Wise scanned across the ruins, then turned his gaze back to him. “There are always other movies to make. As long as you’ve got your talent lined up.” He frowned. “Actually, that’s why I came looking for you. I was thinking Marte might have been here.”
“Ah, yes. Our leading lady.” Von Behren smiled again. “I’m afraid I can’t help you at the moment. She and her cousin, young Iosefni, disappeared this morning on one of their mysterious errands.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Why should they tell me anything?” He shrugged. “But you have no reason to fear. Pawli is quite devoted to her. What harm could come to them now?”
Wise nodded, though his expression remained troubled. Von Behren could tell what the man was thinking. Mysterious was indeed the word for Marte Helle now, even more so than before. Her quiet beauty was even more evident, but in a way that had somehow touched a cold hand to his heart when he had seen her again. Perhaps something had formed inside her, like ice, where there had only been emptiness before. That was to be expected, he supposed; no one could walk through the war and come out unchanged. He hadn’t.
There was one physical change in Marte that von Behren had pointed out to Herr Wise, the director’s hand gesturing toward the image on the screen. Her eyes, that had both been blue before. Something had happened, as in old stories of a person’s hair turning white in one day. Now her eyes were like those of her distant relation, one still blue, the other transformed to golden-brown. As if a mask had been stripped away, revealing the true face, the
