That night was the first night Lilo had slept in a real bed with a real mattress since her arrest, almost nine months before. It had clean sheets and a fluffy pillow. Marta sat down on the edge. She took Lilo’s hand and began to stroke it gently. “Lilo, you must understand a few things. During the day, when I am gone, you must not ever answer the door or the telephone. And you must always be in your stocking feet, not shoes.”
“I have no shoes except the ones I tried to steal from Dieter and Bruno and Frank.”
“Ah, yes, that’s true. I forgot. But during the day, you had better not run any water for tea or baths or even flush the toilet. You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course, Marta.” She began to cry softly and turned her head into the pillow. No one must hear her. No one!
Marta rubbed her back. “You poor child.” She rubbed her back until Lilo fell asleep.
Their days quickly fell into a routine. Marta would get up close to seven in the morning and make them both breakfast. She always came home for lunch, so they would eat together. Although Marta complained of the shortages, it was the best food Lilo had eaten in months. There was always milk and eggs and heavy cream. Sometimes bacon or sausage and always pastries. Salzburg was nearly as famous as Vienna for its pastries. During the day, Lilo mostly read. She read and she cried, as she could not help thinking about Django. She was careful, however, to not just muffle her tears so the people in the flat below or next door would not hear her but to freshen her face with the water from the pitcher that Marta always left for her to drink. She crept around the flat as quiet as any cat. When Marta returned, they would play some of her records to camouflage their conversation. Still, they kept their voices low.
Marta usually brought a newspaper home with her, and Lilo devoured it for news of the war. One day, however, when Lilo came out from taking a bath in the evening, Marta was stuffing the paper or at least part of it in the trash receptacle. Lilo said nothing. She even pretended not to notice, but she knew there was something Marta did not want her to see in the evening edition of the Salzburger Nachrichten. In the morning, Marta always took out the trash. The rules of the building did not permit setting out of trash before seven o’clock. So Lilo waited until Marta was sound asleep and then crept out to the kitchen. She didn’t have to dig far into the trash to find the sheet. As soon as she smoothed it out, she saw what Marta had tried to hide from her. The headline leaped out at her. “Juden im Dachboden des Apotheker Entdeckt,” “Jews Discovered in Pharmacist’s Attic.” There was a photograph of the Gestapo leading four people down some front steps. She had just started to read the article when she felt a hand touch her shoulder.
“I didn’t want you to see that.”
“Of course not,” Lilo said hoarsely.
“We agreed from the start that it was a risk. It’s a risk I want to take. Don’t argue with me.”
“I’m not arguing.” Lilo felt a sob rising in her throat and reached out and buried her face against Marta’s thin chest. “I’m not arguing,” she whispered. “Let me cry. Even if I can’t cry out loud.”
“No one will find you here. Not if we’re careful, Lilo. I promise you.”
It was a foolish thing to say, as Lilo knew that such promises should not be made, but she did not argue.
The days slipped by slowly. Sometimes Lilo felt as if she were watching sand slide through the most enormous hourglass, one with a ton of sand and a passageway from one end to the other that was perhaps one-thousandth of a millimeter wide. It could be excruciating. And it was those times when she thought of Django. Marta must have noticed Lilo’s frustration, because one day after Lilo had been there nearly four months she whirled into the flat and immediately turned on the record player. Her color was high, but it was not just the nip in the late autumn air. She held up the satchel she was carrying.
“You said your mother was a lace maker. Are you any good with a needle and thread?”
“Pretty good,” Lilo said. “Why?”
“Here’s why!” She dragged a marionette and a bundle of tiny garments from the bag.
“What is it?” Lilo asked.
“A dummy.”
“Aren’t they all dummies?”
Marta giggled. “Absolutely, but this is a costume dummy. We use it when we have to make completely new costumes. We are not allowed to take the actual marionettes home for fittings. They are too valuable. Would you believe that two were stolen last spring? Probably bartered for something on the black market. In any case, we have a lot of work to do, what with the Christmas season nearly upon us. So we start taking work home. You want to help?”
“Sure.”
“Meet the Queen of the Night.” She waved the dummy in the air.
“Queen of the Night?”
“A major character in the opera The Magic Flute. She needs a complete redo of her costume. So here’s the costume.” Marta pulled out a midnight-blue velvet gown that was edged with black beading. “You must remove the beading very carefully. We save that for the new gown, and then you will put it back on. You want to try sewing it? I have the pattern right here.”
“Sure.”
“And I also brought home some decorative materials. We like to sort of spruce up the design a bit. That way the costumes don’t look exactly the same every season. So if you want to get a bit creative, it’s all right.”
By the time Marta returned from work the following day, Lilo had completed the costume.
“Mein Gott!” Marta whispered when she saw the gowned dummy. “It’s beautiful. What have you done?”
“Not much, really. Just made a wide inverted pleat in the front and set this lovely black-on-black fabric in it.”
“But that’s what’s so great — the subtle contrast between the midnight-blue and the black fabric. That’s the fabric used for the queen’s attendants, so now it will all . . . all come together visually so well when they appear onstage.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that was the fabric of her attendants. I just thought it was nice.”
“And then you added that bit of flouncy lace around the neckline. That, too, is sheer genius. The puppeteers love it when the fabric can move a bit and accentuate the motion of the marionettes.”
Marta came over and gave Lilo a hug. “Such a shame that I am going to get all the credit.”
“Don’t worry — it keeps me occupied,” Lilo replied.
And it did occupy her through the Christmas holidays, which she and Marta celebrated quietly together. The day after Christmas, however, Dieter and Bruno and Frank surprised them by bringing a somewhat scrawny goose along with jams, jellies, and an assortment of pickled vegetables from Frank’s grandmother. They had even brought Lilo a present — a pretty scarf.
“We thought the color was right for you,” Dieter said. They were all quiet for a moment. It was a strained silence, for they were thinking the same thing: Where will she wear this?
Bruno suddenly spoke up: “It’s a gift of hope, Lilo. Hope and faith that this war will end and you will be able to walk out into the sunshine, a young lady with this scarf tucked smartly in your collar or perhaps like a movie star on your head.”
“Ja!” Frank boomed. “Like Marlene Dietrich.”
“But then we’ll have to invest in some sunglasses for you. All the movie stars wear them,” Dieter said, and they all laughed, even Lilo.
Thank God they didn’t say Leni Riefenstahl! she thought. And movie stars wear sunglasses so they won’t be recognized — just like me, except I’m not a star but a Gypsy. She said nothing, however. It was so sweet of them. She liked to think of these three young scientists going into a department store, shopping in the ladies’ section for something to bring to her for Christmas.
There possibly could be occasion for hope as the German invasion into the Soviet Union had not gone as well as expected. The Red Army had repelled the Wehrmacht’s fiercest blow. Nevertheless, she blamed the scarf for making her think more and more about being outside.
>
The sewing still occupied her, but as winter turned to spring and the days grew longer until it was summer again, Lilo began to brood. When Marta came back one day toward the end of June, she found her sitting holding a needle but absolutely still.
“Lilo. Lilo, are you all right?”
She felt frozen, as if she had suffered some sort of seizure or stroke.
“What is the date?” Lilo asked.
“The date?”
Lilo nodded.
“June 21, 1942.”
“It was a year ago that I ran away. It is the longest day of the year.” She looked toward the window, which was partway open. There was a pale golden light outside, and the gauzy curtains blew freely.
Marta followed her gaze. “Lilo,” she said softly, “it’s time for you to go out.”
Lilo gasped. “You mean it?”
“I mean it. You’ve read every book I own, and you can’t sit here sewing forever. We’ll hide you now under the cover of daylight.”
Under the cover of daylight? Is this possible? Lilo was skeptical.
“From now on you are . . . are . . . Christa. Yes, Christa. You are my cousin from Vienna. You were orphaned. Your father died on the front. Your mother of cancer. I am taking you in, as you have no other relatives. You’ll work in the shop with me. You see, the Reich has ordered that we send traveling tours to the front of occupied territories. We have one in Norway, two in Poland, and they are preparing a tour to Russia and Romania. We’re down to a skeleton crew here at the home theater. We need people. And I certainly know you can sew. I’m going to take you to the marionette theater. You’ll blend in with everyone, everything. You’ll become part of the landscape — the scenery.”
“But look at me. I’m dark like a Gypsy.”
“You’re not so dark, and your hair — well, I can fix that.”
“How?” Lilo asked.
“We’ll bleach it. I’m going out right now to get the stuff. And I’m going to buy you a dress.”
An hour later, Lilo sat on a stool in the tiny bathroom while Marta applied the bleach to her hair.
“This brush works great, better than the one that came with the bleach. We can get to your roots with this.”
My roots, Lilo thought. The word had a strange resonance that had nothing to do with bleaching her hair. Perhaps a shadow crossed Lilo’s eye, or her expression changed ever so slightly, but Marta’s hand stopped midstroke as if she sensed she had touched a nerve, veered too close. Their eyes met in the mirrored reflection.
“I used to sit like this in the makeup chair for the movie. Bella was her name.” This was not what Marta had expected to hear.
“Bella?”
“Bella was the makeup artist. She was good.”
“Did she make you pretty?” Marta asked in a hesitant voice. In all the time, almost a year, since Lilo had arrived, she had never really spoken much about her experience in the Gypsy camp or her work on the film for Leni Reifenstahl.
Lilo laughed harshly. “Are you kidding? We were dirty street urchins. They smeared dirt on us. Put sticky stuff in our hair and pulled it into tangles.” Then she thought about Unku’s bald spot, and tears began to run down her face. Her body heaved. It was as if a dam had broken. She slumped over in the chair and sobbed.
“Don’t cry, don’t cry! You can’t get the bleach in your eye. It will sting like hell. Please, Lilo — Christa . . . don’t cry.”
Lilo looked up. It was in that moment that she decided to tell Marta about Django.
“I had a friend,” she began tentatively. “His name was . . . is . . . Django.”
Django! It was the first time she had actually said his name out loud in over a year. It hung in the air like a chime in the twilight. It glimmered like the first star of the evening. “Django,” she said again.
The limp figures dangled in the dimness of the workshop from suspended ceiling racks. They turned slowly in the scattered shafts of light as if in a silent dance with the circulating dust motes. It was a mournful dance, for their heads were dropped forward on their narrow chests. Many were not costumed. They appeared skeletal despite the muslin batting on the frames of their jointed stick bodies. Marta snapped on the overhead lights.
Lilo inhaled sharply. If the movie set of Tiefland was strange, this world was even weirder. The “actors,” the puppets, with their faces frozen into expressions of mystifying neutrality, were like specters that rose to haunt the world of the living. Lilo felt the skin prickle on the back of her neck. She had goose bumps despite her long sleeves and the warmth of the workshop. Her urge was to run. But she couldn’t. Marta had been so kind. Bruno, Frank, Dieter — they had all risked their lives for her. And outside, the streets were crawling with Gestapo. But inside did not feel safe, not as safe as the flat. There was something profoundly disturbing about the limp figures that evoked notions of mortality, intimations of death. And death, she knew, could be very patient.
“Why do they all have the same expression?” Lilo asked, staring at the serenely bland face of a female puppet. They seemed to have slightly more character than the blank dummy she had worked on when sewing costumes but not much.
“Oh, they aren’t all the same. Look at this one,” Marta said, unhooking one who had a scowling grimace. “She’s the evil witch in the Rapunzel story. There are basically two expressions that we carve. Good and grimace, we sometimes say. That’s Rapunzel,” she said, pointing at the bland-faced puppet. “And here, the Witch. We basically have one kind of good face but a few more grimaces — since evil can be cruel, or conniving, or scowling. There are slight differences in how the mouth is carved and the eyebrows. We usually have the eyebrows almost meet for a scowl and carve deep lines between the eyes.” Marta continued to speak for another minute or two, indicating the many faces of evil. But does she know, Lilo thought, that the face of evil can be bland as well? Bland and so very beautiful.
“The real expression,” Marta continued, “does not come from the face but from how the strings are worked. You have to get the feeling in your fingers. In truth, you only have movement to work with for the best expressions. You have to coax the movements of living human beings from these wooden figures. But now to work. I wanted to get here early so that by the time Uta and the shop director arrive, you will already be sitting at the sewing machine.”
“But what will they think? I mean, Marta, they don’t know if I’m any good at this.”
“Never mind. They are desperate for help. We are down to so few people now. So many men at the front, including Herr Professor Aicher.”
“Who is that?”
“Hermann Aicher, the founder of the theater. The master carver. Look, Li — I mean Christa. Normally we have twelve puppeteers. We’re down to seven. They have even drafted me to work on the platform. Of course, I do the easiest puppets, which don’t require much activity. But since I made them, I am familiar with how they move.”
She grabbed a puppet from a wire and took Lilo to the tailor’s room, which was just off the room for joinery and metal work. “This is Donna Anna.” She held up the puppet. “She’s from the opera Don Giovanni. Her costume’s a mess. It needs to be completely redone, but you have to start with the petticoats.”
“The lace on the sleeves is terrible,” Lilo said.
Marta’s face brightened. “Usually I would advise to begin with the petticoats. But no one has been skilled enough to repair the lace.” She dropped her voice. “You are! Remember what you did with the Queen of the Night?” She looked cautiously over her shoulder. “Frau Uta will be so pleased. So why don’t you begin with the sleeves? Do you think you can do it?”
“Yes. I’ll have to tat it. I doubt you have a lace maker’s pillow or bobbins.”
“No, we don’t.”
“It’s okay. Tatting will work fine,” Lilo said, squinting at the lace trim.
Lilo began to work, and soon she heard people arriving in other parts of the workshop. She had just removed the sleeve and be
gun the tatting with the smallest embroidery needle she could find when some other women entered the tailor’s room.
“I want you all to meet my cousin Christa,” she heard Marta say. “Come on, Uta, and you, too, Ina.”
Lilo looked up and smiled. She was suddenly very nervous. Would they be able to tell that her hair had been bleached, as well as her eyebrows? She wore the dirndl that Marta had bought for her. But would they think Gypsy as soon as they looked at her?
“Hello,” she said softly.
“Ah, look, she’s repairing the lace sleeve of Donna Anna!” the woman named Uta exclaimed. “How beautiful. Where did you learn how to tat like this?”
She was about to say from her mother, a lace maker, but she realized that she might be giving up too much information. For all she knew, when they were in the camps, they had noted down her mother’s profession. “Oh, I just did. I loved sewing for my dolls.”
“Well, then, you are in the perfect place.” Uta smiled and gave her shoulder a pat. “I hope you will be happy here. We cannot pay you anything, as I explained to Marta. But we do need all the hands and fingers we can get!” She lifted her own hands and waggled her fingers.
It was midday when the puppeteers arrived for the rehearsal of that evening’s performance of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. They were the stars, and it was immediately apparent that the star of stars was Sepp Lang. He was extremely handsome and apparently was older than he appeared — he walked with a slight limp, which Marta had earlier explained was due to an injury he had suffered in 1918, toward the end of the Great War. It was hard for Lilo to believe that he was more than forty years old.
“He must have been very young in that war,” Lilo whispered as she watched the rehearsal later that afternoon.
“A lot of young boys enlisted, especially toward the end, though they were barely old enough. I think he was fifteen or sixteen at the most. He actually lost his leg. And part of the other.”
“He has wooden legs now? But he really hardly limps at all,” Lilo said.