The Kingdom of Shadows (3 page)

Marte bit her lip, until she could almost taste the salt leak under her tongue. No one must see her crying; no one must see her at all. That wasn’t one of the things her father had told her. It was something she had decided for herself, a vow sealed in that small room of her heart that was still her own.

The tears had been fought back. It helped not to think of these things, of how frightened she was inside. If she could only become what she pretended to be, like pulling on another’s skin, looking through their eyes,
being
that other girl. That woman.

Marte raised her head and looked about her, at the other people waiting. Two well-dressed women in fur-collared coats, chattering to each other in bright, hard voices. Men reading newspapers, the pages of
Der Angriff
folded back in their hands. At the end of the platform, two soldiers smoked and talked in low voices, their heads nearly touching each other. Everyone was who they seemed to be; of all the people in this world, she was the only one with a secret.

The memories she had tried to banish, to seal away in the dark where she couldn’t see them, moved inside her again. She could hear her own voice, the bravest she had ever been, asking her father if everything – all his plans and secret dealings – would turn out all right.

“There is nothing to be afraid of.” The papers for which he had paid were laid out on the dining room table; he had been explaining to her what each one meant. “These are perfect,” he’d said, tapping the papers with his fingertip. “The man who made them for us works with Naujocks, Heydrich’s own forger. These people are masters of their craft. If I could tell you of the mischief they’ve caused to Germany’s enemies . . . but such things are not meant for the ears of an innocent girl.”

The names her father had spoken meant nothing to Marte, but they frightened her nevertheless. As did the forged papers, that she turned over one after another, wondering if the girl they described was the same as herself. The documents attested to Marte’s lineage, pure Aryan stock for three generations back. Marte had been only eight years old when she had figured out that her father’s black hair and his eyes, one blue and one golden-brown, were things of which he was embarrassed. And that her own blondness, and the matched blue of her eyes, was somehow part of all his scheming.

“These make it possible.” Her father had held the papers in his hands. “And every further step – everything that
you
must do, my child – will make us safer and safer. You’ll see.”

What she had seen, one time when she had come late from school, had been the master forger to whom her father had paid so much money. A little sidling man, with the bright eyes of a scurrying animal, undimmed even though he had reeked of
schnapps
and cigarette smoke, brushing past her in the narrow hallway with a leather portfolio clutched tight to his chest. The forger’s eyes had glitteringly inspected her, as close as if he had run his ink-stained fingers over her breasts, before he had rushed down the stairs. In the flat, her father had been admiring the newest document, a certificate from the
Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt
attesting that Marte Helle’s Nordic pedigree had been traced back to the Thirty Years War.

Such things weren’t for women to think about, but she wondered what would ever happen if someone were to offer the little man more money, for him to tell all her father’s secrets. Wasn’t it dangerous to have anyone know so much about you, things that were like a dagger pointed at your heart? But she knew she had to trust her father, who was wiser about such matters.

A shouting whistle roused her from those worrisome memories. The train, brakes hissing, slowed around the curve of track. She let herself be jostled forward with the others, an object with no thought other than holding on to her suitcase in the press of the crowd.

She found a seat on board, surrounded by other women, the two well-dressed ones across the aisle, their laughing and talking uninterrupted from before. She could smell the women’s heady perfume, like rare flowers, but wilder and sweeter, too. They wore makeup as well, rouge on their cheeks and red, unnatural lipstick. Marte’s father had debated whether she should wear makeup, but had decided against it. He had studied a leaflet written by
Reichsfrauenführerin
Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, that said makeup was un-German and only for faces ‘marked by the eroticism of Asiatic females.’ Was that what those women across the aisle were? “And what does makeup matter, anyway?” Her father had said that to her, as he had cupped her chin in one hand. “You are already so beautiful without it.”

The men – the soldiers and the newspaper readers – had taken over the rear section of the carriage, where they could ease together in their grey smoke and talk of those things that softly whispered the coming of war, like ravens flying over old battlefields. One man had already leaned forward and, with beaming courtesy, offered the contents of his cigarette case to the two soldiers.

Marte pushed her suitcase farther back on the leather webbing of the shelf above the seats. When she sat back down, she saw that the seat across from her had been taken by a girl her age, with blond hair only a little darker than her own, pulled back into a thick braid.

As the train moved away from the platform, the girl turned a level, unblinking gaze over the faces near her. The girl’s eyes caught Marte’s for a few seconds, and she felt a chill touch the base of her throat as one corner of the girl’s mouth lifted in a knowing smile.

The train’s swaying motion rocked Marte’s head against the seat back. In her skirt pocket was the ticket her father had bought her; she reached in and closed her hand around it.

Across from her, the other girl sat up straighter, her nostrils flared. “I am going to the
Lebensborn
hostel in Steinhöring,” she announced in a loud, clear voice. She smiled in triumph, her hands gripping the edge of the seat. From the corner of her eye, Marte could see the other passengers turning their startled attention toward the girl; at the end of the carriage, the men broke off their talking.

The girl’s voice was now a shout. “There, I will have myself impregnated by an officer of the SS, the flower of German manhood, so that I may present our
Führer
with the child of my flesh.” She looked across the blank faces with the piercing vision of an eagle suspended in the cold, thin air above mountain peaks.

Silence filled the carriage, broken only by the clattering of the iron wheels on the tracks.

Marte felt the narrow space twisting about her, as if she had gone mad, that there was no girl sitting opposite her. That it had been she who had cried out, so that all could hear.

The newspapers rustled again, and conversations resumed, the well-dressed women speaking in softer voices than before, leaning toward each other and glancing across the aisle. One of the soldiers laughed at something whispered to him.

The girl had turned her steel gaze to the window, as though willing distance to vanish, for the train to have already arrived at its destination.

It could have been me.
Marte tried not to think; to vanish instead, to become nothing from inside out. But she couldn’t.
I could have shouted that
.

Her fingers touched the edges of the ticket. The destination printed on it was
Steinhöring
.

THREE

“
Ganz verrückt
.” Liesel looked over the new arrivals. “That one there is completely crazy.”

The hostel director’s car had returned from the train station. From an upstairs window, Liesel and Trudi watched the driver unloading the few bits of luggage. The shadow of the SS black flag danced over the white, pebbly gravel.

They could see
Frau
Hegemann giving the two new girls her welcoming speech. The words
duty
and
honor
figured in the spiel at least three times. Liesel had thought
Frau
Hegemann was a bit cracked, too, when she had looked into the woman’s eyes. Some of these old bats’ knees trembled every time they thought about the
Führer
.

That same crazed spark was in the eyes of one of the girls below. It was a look that swept away the whole world. Even the girl that carried around those burning eyes no longer really existed, except for a womb committed to the greater glory of the Reich.

“You’re right.” Trudi giggled. “When her time’s come, she’ll probably go marching into the delivery room.”

Liesel snorted in disgust. “Who could get it up for somebody like that? Even SS officers are men, just like other men.”

“Are they?” Trudi peered at her. “How do you know? They’re supposed to be different.”

“‘Different.’” She shook her head. “They all get hard and stupid when they see a pretty woman. That’s what they all want to stick their
kleinen Männer
into, not some silly bitch who’ll be singing the
Horst Wessel Lied
when she should be bouncing her tail up and down.” What men wanted, she knew, was herself; they wanted her golden hair spilling into their faces as her breasts moved against their sweating torsos. She was the best-looking girl in the
Lebensborn
hostel; none of the others could really compare to her. Trudi and all the other girls would have to settle for whatever men Liesel had rejected as being unworthy of the gift of her body.

The summer before, when her breasts had grown so much, so that she could cup them in her hands when she stood stripped to the waist in front of her dresser’s tiny mirror, her hands no longer her own but the grasp of a man whose face she had not yet imagined – then she was sure of her beauty and the power that came with it. The cold part inside her head, that never slept in its calculations, knew what it was worth; it could get her all she deserved.

Others saw how beautiful she had become. A Party photographer came out and took her picture, and it appeared on the cover of
Das Deutsche Mädel
, the official journal for all BDM girls. The words inside had described her as the perfect Germanic girl, the model for all others to aspire to. She had been annoyed that they hadn’t given her name, but even so, all the other girls in her Bund chapter had known who it was.

That was when the news about the
Lebensborn
came, first whispered from one girl to another, then confirmed by the older women who were the BDM leaders.
Reichsführer SS
Himmler’s marvelous idea, to create a way in which every German girl of good Aryan breeding could present to her
Führer
the greatest possible gift, a new life, a child that would be part of the future race of heroes. Without worrying about the old world’s outmoded notions of marriage and sexual morality, and with the seed of those whose German blood ran purest, who had proved themselves worthy to father the elite of the world to come.

She had been told that there would be no tie between her and whatever SS officer might choose her to bear his child; the
Lebensborn
program was not in the business of fostering petty emotional dependencies. Liesel was only eighteen, and she already knew that things did not work that way, or if they did, they could be made to work another way. Her way . . .

“The other one’s not so bad.” Trudi brought her nose right up against the window glass. “She’s kind of pretty.”

Liesel looked down at the other girl who had gotten out of the car. She stood waiting demurely to take her suitcase from the driver’s hand, only to have him shake his head and tell her that he would carry all the luggage inside.