That was the insanity of the National Socialists, their Frevel, and now Goebbels had succumbed to it with the others. Very well; in that sense, the head of the German film industry was no different from Herr David Wise or any other man of power and money whose approval von Behren had to obtain before making a film. The Reich’s film office, upon the instructions of its head, had bestowed a nice fat production budget upon von Behren – this close to the Apocalypse that everyone could sense was coming, what did mere money signify? – with the only condition that the principal shooting was to be done here in Berlin. Of course, the only reason for that was to keep her here, close by Goebbels – it was so obvious that any other explanation wasn’t even bothered with, nothing about her wanting to remain and boost morale among her fellow Berliners or some similar nonsense.
Von Behren had had no objection; there was more than enough money in the budget to have the sets built on the UFA sound stages, elaborate reproductions of a medieval castle’s parapets and banquet halls, massive stones that were really nothing more than wood and canvas daubed with clay. And it kept him and his crew here in Berlin, where there was still a semblance of order and the familiar, despite the bombing raids; the electricity cut out for only a few hours each day, and the food rations were small but still obtainable. God knew what the conditions had become out there in the Reich’s shrinking empire; terrible stories of starvation and grislier deaths were carried into the city by the refugees streaming in from the east. A good number of Berliner Hausfrauen had taken to carrying knives in their handbags, not to defend themselves with, but to slash their own throats before the inevitable rape at the hands of the Russian soldiers. All Goebbels’ propaganda had successfully terrorized the women about what their fate would be; the men merely expected to be killed, and perhaps dismembered and eaten. Von Behren knew that wasn’t likely, but as a practical matter, there wasn’t a real castle where the shooting could have been done that hadn’t already been overrun and turned into a command headquarters by the Allied armies.
“So what shall we do now?” The assistant director, with the script cradled in his plaster armcast, was still standing next to von Behren; one of the assistant’s assistants had gone to snoop after the missing Marte Helle. “While we wait?”
Von Behren sighed as he looked around the studio interior. Most of the cleaning up had been finished, just in the last few minutes. That same sense of urgency – of time running out, life and work that had to be squeezed in between bombing raids – motivated everyone here. It seemed strange, but not really when he thought about it, how much more he himself had accomplished, scripts on paper and films in the can, since he had come back with Marte to Berlin and the war. When he had been in Hollywood, that sunny paradise, it had been easy to believe that time was infinite, stretching out in all directions like the golden light that buttered the hills. Even with no money in the bank and dependent upon the continued indulgence of Herr David Wise, he had taken whole days and weeks off to sit in the backyard of his little bungalow and re-read his childhood book of Marchen. When the thick, warm air had sent him drowsing, the old stories had come into his dreams; the red hunter had stalked him through a sun-dappled forest, not to catch and punish him, but to gather him up, a child again, and lift him to the face concealed inside the hood of stitched animal furs, a kiss in that small darkness…
“Sir?” The assistant’s polite, patient voice broke into von Behren’s drifting thoughts, the memory of a dream that had always ended before the last of its secrets had been revealed. “What is it you would like us to do now?”
He wasn’t blinking into the soft Californian sunshine, just thrown out of his own dreaming; he was in Berlin, always in Berlin, in what everyone knew was the last and hardest winter of the war. A wind sharpened with ice cut through the canvas nailed over the broken skylights.
“Yes…” He nodded slowly, rousing himself. “I’d like to… I’d like to do some exterior shots.” He knew there would be time enough for that, at least; it would be hours yet before Marte returned and any filming could be done with her. “Out in the streets. There were things I saw this morning… they might be something we can use.” A sector of residential blocks near the studio had been transformed by the bombs and fire, from Berlin of 1945 to a blackened, timeless vista, the bones of the city stripped of their modern flesh. He would have to see how they looked on film; the ruins might serve better than any construction from the carpenters and painters, for the final sequences of Der Rote Jager, when the spectral figure’s wrath had laid waste the village and countryside of the sinning lords of the castle. Further proof, if any were needed, that Goebbels had not even read the script that Marte had taken to him; he had merely given his approval as a present to her. If poor Frank Wysbar could get into trouble for the black horsemen in his Fahrmann Maria, those bringers of death too close to the real SS to be allowed, then surely the Reichsminister would have suspected a metaphor in the Rote Jager script, a defeatist prediction of the Reich’s encircling fate.
Or perhaps Goebbels had indeed read it. Von Behren wondered if the dramatist inside Goebbels’ soul had embraced the apocalypse as the fitting conclusion to this great film he had written, the one that had taken all the world for its sets.
It little mattered now. His old friend Wysbar had made his escape to America, where he at least had had the good sense to hunker down and stay. The last von Behren had heard, Wysbar had been having a hard time finding work; there were too many German refugees under the palm trees for all of them to be hired. And here I am, he mused, and I can make all the films I want. For a while, at least; while there’s still time. So who’s the fool now? Von Behren pulled his coat tighter around himself as he watched the studio doors being rolled back, the cameras being readied for the grey, wintry light outside.
He had made love to her in so many different rooms. And outside as well, on the grounds of his Schwanenwerder estate, soft grass still warm from the passage of the summer day, the lights of a reception inside the grand house visible through the overhanging branches of the night-shaded trees. Everywhere it had happened, where she without will had let it happen, on velvet couches or beds that he had once shared and would share again with his wife – they were all the same place, the tiniest room, the darkness behind her eyelids. She closed her eyes and went in there, leaving him in the world outside that held her body.