He didn’t know; Pavli felt sorry for him. Time and its ghosts had escaped from the doctor. Leaving him with the dead, that could not be brought to life again. No Christ would reach his hand down into the burning grave. Ritter would cut, the scalpel lifting the skin on its narrow blade, and it would be the same corpse before him, over and over, this world without end…
“Yes…” Pavli nodded slowly, feeling how old and tired he himself had become. A thread of dawn light had appeared at the window, like an incision. “Yes, you’re right, Herr Doktor.” Ritter had fallen asleep at last, the lecture over, except perhaps in his muddled dreaming; he’d lain his head on his arm upon the desk.
“You’re right…” Pavli reached down and picked up the empty bottle, setting it where Ritter wouldn’t trip over it when he awoke. “There is no time.”
NINETEEN
“Where is she?”
The assistant director looked over his shoulder at von Behren. “I don’t know.” He had his right arm in a sling, a casualty of last night’s bombing raid on the city. With an awkwardly balanced clipboard and the messy pile of the shooting script, he was trying to inventory the damage to the studio, which sets had been damaged and which were still intact enough to be filmed around. “No one’s seen her since we left the shelter.”
Von Behren spine bent beneath the tonnage of his worries. His nerves were still on edge from the hours of darkness, crouched like a rabbit in a hole while the earth shuddered with concussive blows. Concrete dust had sifted down from the cracks spreading through the shelter’s arched ceiling. The smell of human sweat in a closed space, a sputtering paraffin lamp that had been lit when the bare overhead bulbs had dimmed and finally gone out, a woman – not one of his actresses, thank God – who had gone hysterical in the brief interval of darkness, her half-drunken husband ineffectually soothing her, screams turning at last to a muffled sobbing… and all the while, listening to a giant walking the empty streets above them, each bomb impact a footstep that leveled a building. The giant had stridden off to the east, the night bombers completing their pass and wheeling over empty countryside, away from the flak guns, to head back to their home bases. One of the worst raids so far – von Behren, his crew and actors, had emerged from their hole in the ground, half-expecting to see nothing but rubble in all directions.
He was grateful that the studio with his sets had taken only an indirect hit. The banks of skylights had all been shattered, a layer of broken glass sparkling across the floors and props. The carpenters had worked all morning covering the empty frames overhead with thin canvas; it gave the interior of the studio a muted yellowish light that reminded him of the age-browned pages of the book of old folk tales sitting on his desk. Perhaps it would show up well on film, softening the edges of the captured images; he had asked one of the cameramen to set up for a test reel. The most important thing would be how Marte would look. Only when he had sent instructions for her to be made up and laced into the period medieval costume had he found out that she was missing. Again.
“Send someone out to find her.” Von Behren looked across the sound stages and the hum of activity they held, push brooms sweeping up the last of the debris, the set painters mending a backdrop that had fallen and snagged on a brace of floodlights. “I suspect we’ll have a few hours of quiet before the Americans come overhead.” That was the schedule by which everyone in Berlin lived now: the British bombers concealed in darkness, the Americans flying brazenly by daylight. As winter began slowly unlocking into a damp spring, the pounding of the city had become such a regular occurrence that any respite, a day when the sirens didn’t herald the planes’ approach, seemed more agonizing than an actual raid, nerves tightening in anticipation. “Perhaps we can get something on film before we all have to scurry away into that wretched burrow.”
“Of course.” The assistant director raised an eyebrow. “And where should we have someone look for Fraulein Helle?”
The other’s smile annoyed von Behren. “Please. The usual places – all right?” On top of his other burdens, he didn’t need all these arch, knowing comments. “If you’re not aware of them by now, I’m sure we can find someone on the crew who is.” Any of them, as a matter of fact; Marte’s renewed affair with the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was the main topic of the whispered gossip on the set.
That affair, the secret and public love between Reichminister Goebbels and the actress he had made the queen of the German cinema – just as he had promised – was both a curse and a blessing to von Behren. How could a mere film director interfere with the Reichsminister ’s demands upon his leading lady’s time and body? It made the shooting schedule difficult, trying to squeeze moments between the air raids and Goebbels’ lusts – it was no wonder the frustrated crew was given to remarks.
At the same time, they all wouldn’t be here, in the first stages of filming Der Rote Jager, if it weren’t for that affair. The little favor that Marte owed to von Behren, or that he had managed to convince her that she owed, or that she had been willing to pretend that she believed she did, had come in at last. It had taken this long, the four years and more since they had returned here to Berlin, he to his old office at UFA’s Babelsberg complex, she to Goebbels’ feverish embrace -
(And where was the little boy, for whose sake Marte had come back? That lying bastard, von Behren thought whenever he saw a newspaper picture of Goebbels or heard his ranting voice on the radio. But he also noted the still sadness grown even more visible in Marte’s face, that made her even lovelier and more devastating to all men’s hearts.)
– and the dreaming of those who saw her on the screens of the darkened theaters. They bought their tickets and vanished for a few hours into that darkness, into that light, once more into the stillness of Marte Helle’s gaze. She had returned to them, and that was all that mattered; the words that von Behren wrote for her to say were unimportant. The Reichsminister, in his role as de facto head of the German film industry, had more than personal reasons to give her anything for which she might ask. She had given him von Behren’s script for Der Rote Jager, with her part carefully noted in the margins. Goebbels’ antipathy for the fantastic, that deep Teutonic world of witches and demons, Faust and Der Golem and old Murnau’s Nosferatu, had finally been overcome; he had commissioned Munchhausen to commemorate UFA’s twenty-fifth anniversary, a special effects showpiece using Agfa’s newly developed color film, all intended to outshine the Englishman Korda’s Thief of Bagdad and even Gone with the Wind, that the American Jew Selznick had produced so brilliantly. The premiere at the UFA-Palast am Zoo, just before that theater had been lost to the bombs, had been enough of a success to justify more things along those lines. Perhaps Goebbels had decided that if those were the films that the German people wanted to see now, that’s what they should be given. The more time they spent in the dark shelters of the theaters, the less they would see of their own city streets, battered by the fleets of planes overhead, that Goering’s Luftwaffe was powerless to stop.
Or perhaps there was no calculation at all on Goebbels’ part; von Behren wondered if the Reichsminister had lost the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Perhaps it had all become the same to him – the great cynic, the manipulator of men who could have just as easily pulled the puppet strings for the Communists or been a film director himself. Whole divisions of the German army, or what was left of it, had been taken away from fighting real battles and then been costumed like Prussian regiments of the Napoleonic Wars, charging up and down hills for the big scenes of that pandering hack Veit Harlan’s Kolberg epic. Goebbels and the rest of the Nazi bigwigs obviously preferred the heroic past to this present that was falling in rubble around their ears. Of course, that golden past was as much a fantasy as any specter concocted in a film story. Once the door into those other worlds had been opened inside Goebbels’ head, then it had been easy enough for Marte, at von Behren’s off-screen urging – she still did what he asked her to; she was still grateful to him, though he was no longer sure why – to whisper to her lover, across the pillow of whatever bed she and Goebbels shared. About the script von Behren had written for her, the medieval fantasy concerning the red huntsman, the punisher of those who violated the ancient laws that bound men and their prey together. She had even given him a set of photographs from the costume test that von Behren had arranged, showing her in the long period gown, with its belt knotted intricately at her waist, her white-gold hair braided in the fashion of the maidens in the old woodcuts. Von Behren suspected that it was those photos alone that had secured Goebbels’ approval for the project; the Reichsminister wanted to see that vision of beauty come to life on the screen. Not enough to hold her naked in his arms, the woman all men desired; every fantasy had to be made real.