“You’ll see, Marte. Everything will be fine…”
The room was completely silent and dark now, the last of the film having run through the projector; Joseph had switched off the machine. Now she felt his arm wrapping around her shoulder, drawing her to him, as the fingertips of his other hand drew gently down the curve of her neck.
His whisper, a breath at her ear. “You saw your little boy. I didn’t lie to you.” His hand moved lower, under the neckline of her dress. “That was real… you know it was. I gave him to you…” He brought his head down to kiss her throat.
She let him go on. Joseph’s words echoed inside her head. That was real… She knew he meant the little film, the images of the child laughing and running and throwing a ball. That was as real for him as if the child had been here in the room, and she could have knelt down and gathered him into her arms.
And when he saw her on the screen, the larger one, with all the faces in the theater audience turned toward it… then that was real as well. Or perhaps that was the only time she was real to him. The woman in his arms, with the face of the luminous being on the screen – the woman whose dress had been unfastened at the back by his careful hand, to expose her skin made even whiter by the black lace of the Parisian finery he’d given her; the woman whose bare shoulder he kissed, murmuring her name – that woman was the creature made of shadows, the ghost, the insubstantial thing. The woman on the screen, that other Marte, would exist long after this one had slipped from his arms and dissipated like smoke in the still air.
She dreamed that sometimes, or let it dream her, an image that came unbidden whenever she kept her eyes closed, while the embrace of Joseph or David or any other man tightened around her. She didn’t know where it came from, but it comforted her. To see a thing of translucent silk with her face, rising above the sweating arched back of the man and the pale form he crushed beneath himself… to see it rise and drift, to slowly become less and then nothing, gone…
Now, in this room, Joseph had laid her down against the sofa’s cushions, his hand brushing the bare skin above her stockings. Another part of her, the smallest, coldest part that stayed locked inside her head, in a little room that no one else could enter, watched her and this man in the slow measure of their coupling. Watched and calculated, and kept its silence. That part knew this was something it endured, or less than that, what he did with her was something that didn’t matter at all. It was how she kept Joseph bringing her photos of her child, news of him, and this time, the gift of the film. Something real, or close to it.
Marte turned her head away from the sofa cushion and kissed him, feeling how avidly he set himself to consume her. His jacket and the shirt beneath dropped onto the rumpled fall of her dress upon the floor.
Later – she didn’t know when; she had retreated into that small, hidden part of herself – she opened her eyes when she heard a distant keening sound, a high-pitched shiver in the air. It took her a moment to realize that it was an air-raid siren, that urgent cry that had become so familiar in the last few months, bringing Berlin from its sleeping dreams to a waking one.
Past the screen on which she had seen her child, and past the drawn curtains of the tall windows of the Joseph’s Ministry office, she saw the beams of the searchlights sweep across the sky. The bass drone of the bombers mounted beneath the wail of the sirens. With the first impacts, that rattled the glass in its frames and sifted a fine plaster dust from the ceiling, Joseph raised his head. His hands still gripped her bare arms as he gazed out toward the city’s luminous night. Above the clouds, the distant, ghostly forms of the bombers passed in and out of darkness.
She watched, looking up at Joseph’s face, as his feverish gaze followed another perfect drama.
He lay on the narrow bunk, his eyes closed, dreaming. Though not yet asleep; awake enough to know that his dream was part memory. Of a time when he had sat in a darkened theater, surrounded by others, all of them gazing up at the screen before them, at the faces that were so much more real than they themselves were.
One of those faces, the most beautiful one of all, was tucked inside the curl of his arm, his hand clutching tight the wrinkled photograph. Pavli held on to the little piece of brightness, the image of her face, the angel of the shop window. He would have to hide it again before the dawn, before anybody in the dormitory of the Lazarene men could see him with it, even his own brother. None of them would understand. They had shut him out, made him an outcast from their faith… it didn’t matter why they had done that, to protect him or not. It didn’t matter because he had a faith of his own to comfort him.
He would hide the photograph of Marte Helle, perhaps back in the lining of his boot, or some other place he would find, that would be as safe. But for now, he wanted it here, close to him, so he could see her face in the faint moonlight that came through the barred window high above his head.
All over the world, in this world and the next, people dreamt and remembered. Even here, among these who were still his brethren somehow, still his blood. In the night’s darkness, in their dreaming, they were all denizens of that other land, moving among the shadows and ghosts that called their names, that bent forward from the bright heavens and bestowed a kiss upon their upraised lips.
And farther… beyond the breathing and murmurs of the Lazarenes… in Berlin and across the fields of night and of the coming day. There were others – he could sense their dreaming as well.
Some dreamt of her. The angel. Awake or in sleep… in the small theaters bound by their skulls, or on the great luminous screens rising before them… they dreamt of her.
As he did.
Pavli squeezed his eyes shut tighter and whispered her name. So softly, that no one would hear.
No one but the angel…
SEVENTEEN
A bird – tiny, brown, indistinguishable from the others – pecked at the bread crumbs that Pavli had scattered through the bars onto the stone ledge outside. He stood far enough back so that it wouldn’t be frightened away, and watched and listened. The bird hopped from one crumb to the next, but made no other sound.
Matthi had told him that birds could speak – really speak, not just a parrot’s idiot squawk – if they wanted to. He hadn’t been able to tell if his older brother had been joking or not. A little story, something else the Lazarenes knew: that when the Savior had hung upon the cross, blood trickling from his wrists and brow and side, the anguished cry to His Father hadn’t been His last words. The crows and ravens of Golgotha, that stripped the dead flesh from the bones and perched upon the skulls that gave the hill its name, had perched upon His outstretched arms – the thieves on either side of Him were already dead and couldn’t hear – and leaned close to His whispering mouth, so they might be told the last of His secrets.
“And from the ravens,” Matthi had said, “all the other birds learned to speak. So when St. Francis had a flock of birds before him, he hadn’t been preaching to them, but listening. And learning…”
A silly story. Perhaps it was true. The brown wren-like bird clicked its beak on the last crumb, glanced back at Pavli with one bright-bead eye, then flew away to the grey-barked trees in the distance.