“It is sad, isn’t it?” Joseph’s voice came to her, close beside where she stood on a carpet littered with rubble. “I can barely stand to look at it myself. They’ve done such damage here…”
Marte opened her eyes and looked across the high-ceilinged room. The intricate cornices and plasterwork above had come crashing down, into dust and white crumbling fragments, revealing the skeletal girders and ragged patches of sky beyond. Snow had fallen through, melting and then freezing into grey mirrors on the floor. Through the frames of the shattered windows that had filled one wall, scraping mechanical noises and faint voices could be heard, the clean-up squadrons filling in the bomb craters on the Wilhelmstra?e below. The corpses had been dug out from the hills of fallen brick and taken away, in the first hours of quiet after the planes had departed, while the fires in the other parts of the city were still being extinguished.
A gloved hand ran across one of the empty shelves; Joseph looked at the dust on his fingertips. He had on his trench coat, belted over his severe National Socialist uniform. “You see?” He turned back toward Marte. “This is why we had to move the ministry’s staff down to the basements. Impossible to do any work here, under these conditions; my own home is now an annex for at the ministry’s senior officials. But this arrangement will not last forever.” His gaze swept across the room, taking in the now-ragged wallpaper, the blank spot where the portrait of the Fuhrer had hung, the empty space where his own ornate desk had stood. She could see him transforming it all in his mind, one set being struck and a new and grander one being erected in its place. “When the war has been concluded, and we can turn our attention once more to the rebuilding of our nation… this will all be different. And better.” Joseph nodded in satisfaction at what he alone could see. The future. A gesture of his hand took in the entire room. “There are great plans… the ministry, this building itself will be gone, replaced by one of such splendor…” He smiled at her. “Those whom you knew in America, those Hollywood Juden such as David Wise… nothing of theirs will compare to what we will achieve here. Soon…”
Strange, to hear David’s name come from Joseph’s mouth. She knew there was still some jealousy there, even though he had been the victor. One thing to share her in the dreams of men who saw her on the screen, another to think of a Jewish film mogul – a real one, a prince of Hollywood, the exact creature Joseph had modeled himself after – running his manicured hands over her skin, drinking in her kiss. Joseph had all that now, but he could still speak his rival’s name with venom.
She thought about him, the other, for a moment. David… she had seen him last in a newsreel, one of the many that Joseph’s propaganda writers and filmmakers churned out for the German theaters. A piece about how the American film industry was controlled by Jews, all part of that great international conspiracy. The wicked lies they used to deceive the American public – or at least that fair-haired, blue-eyed Aryan part of it – so they could go on raking in their bloodstained profits while sending innocent, handsome youths to their senseless deaths in Europe. The narrator had been some anonymous UFA hack, but Marte had heard Joseph’s voice, speaking his strident, battering words. He must have had a hand in it, or even written it personally; her own image had shown up on the screen, old footage of her disembarking at the Templehof airfields, a virtuous German heroine who had fled in disgust from Hollywood and the rich, hook-nosed lechers who ran it. Her face had looked tired as she had come down the steps from the JU-52’s door, from the long flight out of Lisbon, but the voice – Joseph’s voice – had hinted darkly of some lingering sadness at what the judischen Zuhalters had forced her to do while she had been in their thrall. No doubt the blood of the German males who watched the newsreel had quickened at the thought, and they could even feel virtuous while their groins tingled; such was Joseph’s mastery with words. The newsreel had ended with a still photo, taken from an American newspaper, of those rich Jewish film moguls, all in dinner jackets and with thick cigars in their hands, smiling and laughing among themselves at some USO fundraiser. David had been the youngest man in the photo, but even so, she had barely been able to recognize him. He had put on weight, and the dark, curly hair she remembered had thinned and greyed, just in these last few years of the war – as if he were turning into one of the men on either side of him, men old enough to be his father. His eyes hadn’t been laughing; even in the grainy newsprint blown up on the screen, Marte had been able to see the simmering anger under his brow. They seemed hard, mean-spirited eyes now, a rich man’s eyes, as though he had become exactly that which Joseph’s propaganda spoke of, a grasping figure of money and power.
“Yes,” said Marte slowly; she felt Joseph watching her, waiting for her to speak. “I’m sure it will be… magnificent…” She drew the fur wrap closer around her shoulders, against the chill lancing in through the broken windows.
Joseph went on talking; she watched him now as he stood overlooking the street, his raised hand and words sketching in the wonders that would be built in the new Berlin. He had changed as well, but not the way David had; Joseph’s face looked as if the flesh beneath the skin had been cut away with an invisible knife, the edges of bone growing sharper, ready to break through. She had been sitting a few days ago with some of the actors and stagehands at the studio, drinking ersatz coffee and waiting for von Behren to finish blocking out a sequence of camera movements, when Joseph’s voice had replaced the music coming from the radio. “That ranting skull,” a younger actress had sneered, glancing from the corner of her eye at Marte, as though defying the other woman to say anything. But Marte had said nothing; it was true, Joseph did look like a death’s-head. The shrill fury of his voice, when he spoke over the radio or at a mass rally, had burned away all the soft tissue, like a rendering fire. When he kissed her now, his fingertips stroking her cheek and neck, she would close her eyes and be unable to keep from seeing an old woodcut, Durer’s Tod und das Madchen, a skeleton embracing the flesh of its love.
“You’re so quiet.” Joseph stood before her, hands touching her hair on either side, his face lowered to try and look into her eyes. “I’m sorry I brought you here… I didn’t realize it would upset you so.”
“It’s all right… I don’t mind…” She wasn’t upset; it was merely an empty room, filled with broken rubble. There were spaces like this all over Berlin. The streets themselves were graveyards and ruins. “If this is what you want…” The building itself was silent, though she knew there a few of Joseph’s trusted men nearby, standing guard to ensure that no one intruded upon them. “To be here…”
He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, pulling her close to himself. “But of course, this place has such memories for us – does it not?”
His voice had become an actor’s now, a leading man mouthing bad dialogue. What Herr Wise and the others she had worked with in America would have laughed at and called pure corn, even when they had written it themselves. But she knew things like that, old movies, were there inside his head, a sentimental streak that revealed itself when he lapsed into being human for a moment.
“Of course, Joseph…” She closed her eyes at the nearness of him. “Whatever you say…”
“We’ve had many hours together here. That’s why it grieves my heart to see it this way.”
That was true; there had been many times when she had come back with him to this office, late at night when there had been no one about to see them. After one of his speeches or a broadcast or some other moment of triumph, his voice hammering the souls of German men and women into the shapes he wished them to take; she would wait for him in his chauffeured car outside the Sportspalast or the Rundfunk Haus, wait for him until he was finished and ready for her alone, the blood surging in his thin body. While his wife Magda and their brood of blond children slept at home, a bottle and a tray of cold delicacies would have been set out here for him and his personal guest, his aides withdrawing discreetly behind the ministry’s tall doors.