She didn’t answer him back. On the screen, Marte Helle was dressed in a period ballgown that exposed a good deal of her rounded cleavage – he could appreciate that on a purely aesthetic basis, like spring flowers on a grassy hillside, a meaningless bounty of nature. A costume like that was, of course, the preference of the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda; the Reich’s other noted cinema aficionado, the Fuhrer himself, was stirred more by the sight of long bare legs, a taste that he’d cultivated with showings of dreadful musicals at the Reich Chancellery for himself and his ‘chauffeur gang,’ his lower-ranking aides and their secretaries. That had been before the start of the war, when there had still been time for trifles such as that. Since then, things had become a lot grimmer, a bad dream, for the Fuhrer and everyone else.
Perhaps that was another reason for this show of Marte Helle’s flesh. Her face, and that radiant field from her throat to the center of her breasts, like the sun finally emerging after a night wracked with storms, would be something to counter the sense of dismal foreboding that had settled upon the Reich’s citizens. The Rundfunk, the broadcasts of Goebbels’ speeches, had grown shriller and more impassioned, the newsreels in the theaters even more boastful of every military triumph, as the whispers of the Mundfunk, the radio that went from one person’s mouth to another’s ear, had grown more dismayed and anxious. Dreadful stories had begun to circulate, of the horrors of the Eastern Front, of German soldiers, some hardly more than boys, lying dead, their mouths and eye sockets filled with drifting snow. Smoke rolled over blackened skeletons in the hatches of broken Panzer tanks. Seaweed tangled in the hair of U-boat crews sleeping in each other’s arms, while their mothers wept and ate brown bread thickened with sawdust. A clubfooted death’s-head had asked, Wahlt ihr den totalen Krieg? And all, or enough, had answered that yes, of course they wanted total war, and it had been given to them. How silly it would be now, for them to complain that the splinters in the bread cut their mouths. Better to swallow one’s own blood and listen for the drone of the bombers coming from the west.
Proof of the old adage that you should be careful what you wished for, since you might get it after all. The National Socialists had painted a picture – or perhaps it was the screenplay that Reichsminister Goebbels had written for his leading man to star in – of a Germany encircled by vengeful enemies, a noose tightening around the Herrenvolk ’s neck. Now, that had come true. There was no denying that it made for an epic film, a true spectacle, with a cast of thousands – everything that one of von Behren’s own heroes, the great American director de Mille, might have wished for.
Of course, the ending of the this particular film might be less pleasant than in a de Mille production. It didn’t bode well for Germany that Goebbels had a taste for classical tragedy. His barely readable novel Michael, the product of his student days – the Reichsminister had bestowed a signed copy upon von Behren at a UFA reception – with the misunderstood, beleaguered hero dying a martyr’s death, gave some notion of what the final scenes might be.
Von Behren sighed, watching his protegee waltz with an actor dressed as a nineteenth century Prussian cavalryman. He could hardly remember directing the scene, or writing the stilted dialogue. In the midst of the great tragedy, the film that was not a film but was this world, the Propaganda Ministry dictated the making of such lightweight fluff as this. Costume dramas, the comforting dreams of a glorious past. Or modern trifles such as Die gro?e Liebe, all about the romances of Luftwaffe pilots on leave, torn between a woman and duty. Goebbels’ Ministry had cited that one as a film of particular artistic merit, though when von Behren had finally seen it, he had been bitchily fascinated by how much weight its star, the Swedish actress Zarah Leander, had put on while he had been away in America.
He pulled his attention back to the images on the screen. This raw footage would have to be edited into more of the same, a place to which the German audiences could escape for an hour or two, sitting together in the darkness, dreamers all, while the fires of Europe burned closer. Marte looked so sad as she waltzed with the cavalryman. But not sad, really; more as if she were dreaming, too, dancing in her sleep, her eyes half-closed, her body weightless in the arms of men.
Perhaps it wasn’t too much different from the films he would have been making with Marte if they had stayed in America; Herr Wise’s tastes were close enough to those of the Reichsminister. He could at least comfort himself with that notion.
“The question, Marte, is what comes next.” Von Behren spoke through the lilting Strauss music. As the war went more and more disastrously for Germany – as any fool could tell, despite all the Propaganda Ministry’s trumped-up news of victories and assurances of secret weapons being developed – what kind of films would he be allowed to make? He remembered talking with Herr Wise, the American screenwriter, in the parking lot of the Wise Studios, as the desert winds had drifted through the warm California night. About how the great tradition of the German cinema of the fantastic had died, or rather been put to death, in the new Reich. Perhaps that would change, now that so many could feel their dark collective fate pursuing them, like the relentless Rote Jager of the old stories. The punisher of those guilty of breaking the ancient laws of the hunt, those who had washed their hands in the blood of the innocent… perhaps there were others now who dreamed each night, as von Behren did, of the hooded figure dressed in tattered animal skins, striding through the forest, as close to one’s heels as one’s own shadow…
That image, the woodcut in his childhood book of Marchen, haunted him. The face hidden in darkness, and one hand reaching out for the fleeing huntsman, the other drawing a knife from the scabbard on the leather belt, its point sharpened for skinning prey…
Von Behren felt a familiar chill crawl up his spine. The memory of the woodcut, that piece of his childhood that had always stayed with him, had blotted out for a moment the swirling ballroom on the screen.
The room was suddenly bathed with light as the reel came to an end; he could hear the fluttering noise from the projectionist’s booth behind him. He knew there were more sets of rushes to be gone through, but he wouldn’t watch them now; they would be too much to bear. To see Marte, with her sad, dreaming face, caught in the motions of that other world, the one he had created for her…
He shook his head. Perhaps later, tomorrow or the day after. Right now, he only felt like going back to his flat, the same one he’d had before – before he’d fallen into that brief dream of sunshine and exile – and writing a few more pages of the script that he still hoped to be given permission to film. As dreams and nightmares becoming increasingly real, in both the night and the day, the time to suggest his pet project might be approaching. If the Reichsminister wished to see his mistress clothed in a brocaded medieval gown, imprisoned in a stone castle, then it would come to pass. The Teutonic heaviness, that dreaming deeper than all others, would appeal to Goebbels’ Wagnerian predilections.
Von Behren closed his eyes. He already had it worked out, inside his head, how he would light Marte, the first time that anyone would see her in the film. She would be at an arched window, gazing out across a forest that stretched to the horizon, a dark world where a hooded figure in animal skins waited for the transgressors of his laws. She would turn from the window, slowly, as though she and the audience in the theater were waking for the first time. Turn, and then her downcast eyes would raise, bringing her devastating beauty straight into the vision and hearts of all who saw her.
Another chill ran across his shoulders. He opened his eyes and saw nothing. The projectionist had switched off his machinery, leaving the screening room in darkness.