“Uh . . . look, Lilo.” It shocked her that he knew not just her name but her nickname. He looked up. His eyes were very sad. “Yeah, I know your name. Unku told me. She said you were her best friend.” Lilo felt the threat of tears. “Listen to me. I am saying this for your own good.”
“What did you do for Unku’s own good?”
“Nothing. I am a coward. I am ashamed.”
“Well, I know a quick way you can die if the wolf doesn’t get you. You can go to the Russian front. They say the action is starting any day. Won’t need your skis yet.” She could almost taste the acid as these words rolled off her tongue.
“Fine.” He began to speak rapidly. “Listen, if you have to get it out, I understand. I just want to say one thing.”
“And what would that be?”
“Go and apologize to Leni. Make it easy on yourself.” Lilo shook her head. Franz was at least ten years older than she was. But how could he be so . . . so . . . simpleminded?
“Look, she’s very proud. She likes control.”
Lilo rolled her eyes. She had given up all pretense of politeness or respect. “As if I don’t know that!”
“Look at it this way, Lilo.” She didn’t understand why, but she was touched by hearing her name, her nickname.
“What way?” she whispered, sliding her eyes away from him.
“She likes control, but maybe this is a way, through apologizing, that you can get some control.”
“Me? Control?” Maybe Franz was not so simpleminded as she thought. She had had no control over anything in so long that it seemed impossible. Was he actually saying she could gain it? Even if it was a small bit, she had to try. Not for her sake but her mother’s. “All right. I’ll go.”
But Lilo wondered if it was control she craved or hope. She felt starved for hope. She began to walk away and then turned back to look at Franz. “Should I just go up to her trailer and knock on her door?” He nodded.
Lilo knew that Leni must be expecting her. She must have put Franz up to this. But still he seemed sincere. Just before she was about to climb the two steps to the trailer, Franz ran up to her and whispered, “I still love her, and I don’t know where they took her.”
“Who’s there?”
“Me. The Gypsy horse girl.”
“And what might you want?”
“I have come to apologize, Tante Leni.” Lilo was flooded with fear. She had to fight an instinct to flee. Her heart was racing. Her breath grew short. She looked around. She heard the roar of the fog machine warming up. Leni wanted fog blowing over the lake. Fake bushes had been “planted,” and carpets of real grass had been rolled out on the banks of the lake to make it look more realistic. Salt was scattered around the edges so the sheep would graze in the right spot. But the sheep had become so thirsty that they drank the lake nearly dry. So now Lilo saw the last of the bucket brigade of Sarentino villagers along with film slaves from Krün coming up from the river to fill the lake. It is all false. Lilo thought of nesting dolls. The ones they called matroyshka dolls. That was what her world was like. Except it was not dolls. It was worlds of fantasy, one within another. Endless fantasy.
Django had overheard Leni speaking to a reporter who had come to the set the first day to interview her. “Yes, there is a war going on, but this is my escape.” But was it escape or simply denial? Fantasies within fantasies. Leni was completely insulated from everything. Nothing was as it appeared to be.
Just before she knocked on the door of the trailer, Lilo had thought of the gingerbread house again, from Hansel and Gretel. Lilo could now hear Tante Leni’s footsteps, then the squeak of the door opening.
Suddenly something in Lilo’s body commanded her to relax. A deep composure began to seep through her. Then it was as if she had stepped out of her own body and felt herself standing just slightly behind it. Leni opened the door, and Lilo followed her own body into the trailer. The next thing she felt was that she was no longer behind her own body but rather drifting just above it.
She looked down. She seemed to be floating near the ceiling and was actually watching herself below.
Crumpled onto her knees, the figure that she knew to be herself was begging.
“Please, please, Tante Leni. I did not mean what I said. Never. It was wrong. Forgive me.” She hardly recognized her own voice. Did it come from her mouth? Her throat? Yet she was perfectly aware that she was still floating, calmly above this nearly hysterical begging figure. I am kissing Leni’s hands! And yet she did not feel the touch of the skin on her lips. She was numb, but she was conscious of an increasing separation between her two selves.
“I promise. I promise never to say her name again. I know you know what is best for all of us.” She was squeezing Leni’s hands more tightly. She could see this but not feel it. “But please, please, I beg of you, Tante Leni — protect my mother. Keep her safe. Promise me you will never send her east. She is all I have. You have a mother. I know. I saw her that day when she came to the set in Babelsberg. I know how you love her. I saw the light in your eyes.”
“Of course, Liebling, of course. Don’t worry. When you get back to Krün, you will see that your mama is fine. I promise.”
And then in the next moment, Lilo began to sense that she was reuniting with her own body. She felt the floor beneath her knees. She began to stand up, still holding Leni’s hands. Lilo could feel the skin. It was sweaty. Leni sweated menace. She dropped the hands instantly and stared dumbly into the close-set predatory eyes. I begged, but she’s an animal.
By the time she left the trailer, Lilo was completely exhausted. She asked one of the crew what time it was. She was shocked. Only five minutes at the most had passed since she had entered the trailer.
“Where were you?” Django asked.
“I’ll tell you later. What’s happening?”
“They’re getting ready to do something with the wolf. Not sure what.”
Wieman was standing on top of a ladder with a megaphone. “Attention! Attention, please. We are going to shoot this scene as safely as possible. I want the herders to begin driving the sheep over that hillock and down the slope, so that by the time the wolf comes, they will be grazing near the water. Now, herders, crouch low, and as soon as the last of the flock begins the descent — hide. We do not want you in the frame, but we want to get a nice long shot of the sheep coming down to the lake. Is that understood?” He was speaking a strange mixture of German and Italian to half of the dozen or so of the herders who were Italian. The other half were Gypsies from the camp in Krün.
“Look, isn’t that Eduard?” Lilo pointed toward a gray-whiskered man. Eduard was one of the oldest of the Gypsy men brought to Krün, but one of the toughest. Lilo hadn’t noticed him here until now, though they had been in Sarentino for several days.
“He just came this morning,” Django said.
“Well, I’m glad he wasn’t brought in for hauling water. He’s too old for that.”
“Look at him scrambling after that stray.”
“I hope I get a chance to ask him about Mama.”
There were at least six takes for the sheep’s descent. Leni was striding about with her viewfinder lens. “Liebling,” she cried out to Wieman. “You see, what I want is when those sheep come down the slope by the rock face there, it should look like a river . . . a river of wool flowing by the rock. It’s all about the shades of gray. We want to build up the palette — the dark gray of the rock against the white fleece of the wool.” Then she tipped her head back so the viewfinder was pointing toward the sky. “My God, if I could capture those clouds right now. If I could just stop them!”
On the seventh take, Leni managed to capture the clouds for a few seconds, and the sheep beneath them flowed like the rolling river of wool she desired. She was delirious. She kissed everybody, even one of the sheep. The publicity photographer for the film began snapping pictures of her. She played to his lens beautifully as she cavorted about flirtatiously. “You want another picture
, Karl?” Leni kissed another sheep. “Is that not adorable!” Her high voice drilled the air.
The wolf in the meantime had been fitted into some sort of invisible harness and was let out of his cage with two handlers, who were guiding him to the top of the slope. The actors were now waiting for the sun to sink farther down. This was to be the shadow shot. Leni wanted the shadow of the wolf to stretch across the same rock face that the sheep had passed. A quiet descended on the set. Four men with rifles, two with pistols, quietly appeared and stood fifty feet from the rock wall. And now everyone’s eyes were trained on the wolf. The air was thick with tension, and a chill wind began to blow. Suddenly the wolf did not look so pathetic. His bristling fur was gilded by the low angle of the sunlight. His mouth hung open, revealing sharp, pointed tearing fangs. The animal seemed not simply savage but calculating. He reeked danger.
In the very instant Lilo was wondering how they would get that wolf to go where they wanted him to go, she spied Eduard coming down the slope. Someone directed him to Leni. She couldn’t hear what Leni was saying to him, but she pointed toward the wolf and then handed him something. Lilo gasped when she saw the dark drops dripping from the package. Blood! It was fresh meat, and the blood appeared black against the backlight of the sun.
“She can’t be making him do this,” Lilo murmured to Django.
“She is.”
“Eduard is bait. He’s the lure!”
Albert Benitz, the directory of photography, walked quickly over to Leni. They began to argue. The wind, however, carried their words away. And neither Lilo nor Django could quite hear what they were saying. She waved him off angrily and pointed to the camera. It was clear that she was ordering him back to work. He shook his head wearily.
A minute later, someone cried, “Action!” Eduard stood just out of camera range with the dripping raw meat. The wolf, suddenly alert, shoved his ears forward and locked his gaze on Eduard.
“Stay! Stay!” Leni shouted at Eduard. “Do not drop it until I say.” Eduard was trembling, but he appeared rooted to the spot. “Drop it now!”
He dropped it, started to run, then stumbled. The advancing wolf, his mouth pulled back, revealed his sickle-like fangs in the silhouette against the rocks. Then in a macabre dance, the forms of man and wolf spread across the rock like shadow puppets. Yet there was no sound. For an instant, Lilo thought she had gone deaf. Suddenly a sharp noise split the air, followed by a clamorous popping. She clenched her eyes shut. The pistol with the little brain inside it, she thought. And then it ended.
This isn’t real. Nothing here is real. She never heard Eduard scream. Never heard the wolf growl. But now people were running all over the set. The first sound was that shrill voice scratching the air. “He’s dead! He’s dead!” Leni was shrieking. “The wolf is dead. You shot the goddamn wolf. We have to get a new wolf.”
But they would have to get a new lure as well. Eduard was dead, too. The second shot went through the wolf directly into Eduard’s heart. This was real. This is what was at the very center of the last nesting doll. Death.
Lilo began to lose track of time. The night closed around the film slaves. She heard the guards as they patrolled the encampment. The shadows of their carbine rifles sliced across the canvas of her tent’s walls. She wondered what they did with Eduard. Did they bury him somewhere? Maybe with the wolf.
She thought of the strange tricks her body had played when she had gone to Leni’s trailer that afternoon — or was it her mind? It was just hours ago, but it seemed like months. There had been that pleasant feeling of floating out of her own body, of so calmly observing that other self below on her knees pleading with Tante Leni. But the rest of her, her essence — or was it her spirit? or soul? — had remained so detached. So peaceful. Perhaps this was what death was like — drifting weightless with only your consciousness for clothing. If she could float and coax her mother to leave her body as well, her thin, wrecked, empty body that had been scooped out by the doctors at Buchenwald, that body must be so light, so buoyant, that it would just rise and drift.
And Eduard — where was he now? She imagined him floating above the mountaintops, hovering in the clouds that Leni had tried to capture. He might be looking down at his own body and that of the wolf as if their physical remains were nothing more than discarded clothes. She could picture them both — the wolf and the old Gypsy man, side by side, loping above, running easily across the clouds.
Death would hurt only for a second. And then you would just slip from your body as you would from a coat that had become too cumbersome. And if you looked back, you would not care about that coat. It was no longer needed. She felt a strange yearning. And as Lilo fell asleep, she prayed that Leni Riefenstahl would never again capture the clouds, not even for one second.
Lilo was dragged into the daylight by a voice outside her tent. It was one of the guards. “You are to report immediately to makeup, horse girl.”
They were preparing to shoot another riding scene. The new double they had hired in Babelsberg to stand in for Peter Jacob doubled now for Pedro as well. For the mountain idyll, Pedro and Martha were to gallop across the landscape. Of course it made no sense for Pedro to have a horse. He’s a poor shepherd after all. “Shepherds go on foot. They’re not cowboys,” Django pointed out.
But this was yet another fiction upon a fiction. The matroyshka doll was growing fatter and fatter with the fantasies dreamed up by Leni.
Lilo sat in the chair and stared into the mirror. The process to make her a double took longer than the makeup for when she played a street urchin. Although there was never a close-up of her face, they first slathered on the pancake base to lighten her skin to a shade closer to that of Leni’s, whose skin they had to darken to make her look Spanish. But not too dark. Nazis did not like their idols too dark. Beneath there always had to be just a hint of the super-race. The Aryan.
“This wig,” Bella was saying as she fixed it on Lilo’s hair. “I have to make it tighter so it won’t slip off. They want you to gallop today. It would look pretty funny if suddenly your hair went flying!” Bella giggled. Lilo remained silent. Bella cocked her head and looked at Lilo in the mirror. “What’s wrong, Kleine Püppchen?”
Little Poppet, she calls me! It was a common enough term of endearment that an elder might call a young child, and sometimes these terms hung on into adolescence, the way her mother persisted in calling her Little Mouse. But she and Bella had no history as a mother and child had. And yet she had used these terms on more than one occasion. Why? Lilo wondered. Just habit? She was not, after all, an endearing child. She was part of a hated race. She was a Gypsy. A prisoner. A film slave.
Lilo wondered why she was suddenly thinking so much about words. Words had become as meaningless as the movie set, where nothing was real. Maybe language was the first thing Hitler had slaughtered. And then the rest just followed. The Bible said that “in the beginning there was the Word . . . and the Word was God.” But now, in the end, there were no words, at least not real words. And there was no God, just Hitler and his tin-pot goddess Leni Riefenstahl.
“You’ve worked on all her movies, haven’t you, Bella?” Lilo asked.
“All Fräulein Riefenstahl’s?” she asked Lilo’s reflection in the mirror, since that is how they conversed in makeup — it was their reflections that did the talking.
“Yes.” Lilo’s reflection nodded.
“Not all. Most. She likes me. I know her face.”
This of course begged a question that Lilo could not ask. Do you know what is behind that face? Because I do. Instead she simply said. “You like her?”
“I love her. She is, as Hitler has said, the perfect German woman.”
“He said that?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s been quoted many times saying that.” She nodded at Lilo in the mirror.
“Are they having an affair?”
Bella turned down the corners of her mouth and raised her eyebrows, then shrugged as if to say, “Who’s to know?
” but instead said, “Let me tell you something, Schätzchen, I don’t gossip. That’s why I get where I do in this business.” She reached toward a table with an assortment of earrings. “Let’s see which ones for this scene. I think Fräulein said the big hoop ones with the little beads dropping from them. Yes. I’m sure those are the ones.”
She fixed them to Lilo’s ears. She suddenly looked more like a Gypsy than she ever had in her life. Not a prim Sinti girl but a wild Roma tart. Her mother would have fits if she ever went out like this. Bella reapplied the deep red lipstick. Since it was a black-and-white film, her lips wouldn’t look red but black like the drops of blood from the raw meat Eduard had carried. Like the blood that had gushed from his chest.
“There you are, my pet!” Bella exclaimed, and they both stared into the mirror at her reflection. Bella was delighted with her handiwork.
“What did they do with Eduard?” Lilo asked suddenly. The reflection looked stumped.
“Who’s Eduard?”
“The Gypsy who was killed yesterday.”
“Oh, him. I don’t know. But I know what they did with the wolf.”
“What?” The earrings trembled in the mirror.
“Skinned him. He’ll make a nice muff for someone.”
The horse she rode was a sturdy mountain creature from the village of Sarentino. The double for Franz, a fellow named Egon, was a fairly good rider. He and Lilo were supposed to ride across the crest of the hill. They were to begin with a slow trot and then spur the horses on to a gallop. “When you reach the crest, race the clouds!” Leni shouted, throwing back her head. “You are free. The essence of freedom. I want the Gypsy’s hair to stream out behind her, unfurling in the wind. You are the wind. You are the pureness of the mountain air. Free, free, free.”
Lilo closed her eyes. I am a captive in an endless nightmare. Behind me is a maniacal woman screaming about freedom. What would happen, what might really happen, if she did simply ride off? How fast could she get this horse to go? Could she pretend he was running away with her? This could be her chance, her one chance. However, there were the little pistols — the ones with brains, the most balanced pistols in the world that always find their target. But it would hurt only for a second, and then she would slip from her body. Let them skin me. But I would be free.