Lilo watched as Bella and Anna put their heads together and whispered off to the side as one of the assistants worked with Unku’s blouse. She found it slightly unnerving how they were looking at her so closely.
“Harald!” Bella called over to a man who was very finely dressed in riding britches. He was holding what Lilo would soon learn was the script of the film. He was tall and good-looking, and Lilo thought at first that he might be one of the actors. But she had learned that he was the assistant director and also the choreographer for Fräulein Riefenstahl’s dances. He leaned over and listened intently to the two women, then looked up and fixed his gaze on Unku. Lilo felt the sharp edge of fear, like a blade scraping inside her. Why were they looking at Unku that way? Was there some problem? What could Unku have done? The man named Harald turned and walked away with a shrug, then speaking over his shoulder, said, “Well, what can we do? Do we want them all ugly? We’ll see what Leni says.”
“Oh, she’ll say something,” Bella said with a laugh. She had a deep laugh like a man’s. Despite the laugh, there was something portentous in her words.
So far none of the extras had seen Leni since Maxglan. They had seen the door to her dressing room when they had come onto the set of the tavern. There was a sign, L. RIEFENSTAHL, DIRECTOR — NO ADMITTANCE. However, in the middle of the floor, where L. Riefenstahl was to dance, another woman stood in the multi-ruffled costume of a flamenco dancer.
It was strange because this woman simply stood there, and occasionally one of the cameramen would ask her to turn this way or that. As Lilo was pondering this, Django arrived.
“She’s what they call a stand-in,” he explained, “someone who is about the same height, size, and coloring as the main actor and whose job is to stand in the actor’s place while a shot is planned out and the lights and cameras are set up.”
“How do you know all this?”
But before Django could reply to Lilo’s question, another voice boomed, “Quiet, everybody. Quiet on the set, please. Fräulein Riefenstahl!”
“Hans! Hansy darling! You’re going to have to raise that boom higher just a bit for the dance. You know what I want for the opening shot in this scene.”
At first there was just the voice, and then out of the shadows swept a stunningly beautiful figure. She wore a long skirt with tiers of ruffles in contrasting shades of red. The blouse was a peasant style that laced up the bodice to a square neckline, and on her head she wore a mantilla. Lilo could tell it was not very good lace. Nevertheless, the entire effect was sensational. It was hard for her to believe that this was the same woman who had stepped prettily through the mud in Maxglan in her alligator boots. That woman, too, had been beautiful but not in this marvelously exotic way. No boots, no briefcase, no fine wool slacks now. She was dressed in the costume of a Spanish dancer.
The stand-in quickly receded into the shadows, and Fräulein Riefenstahl struck a pose under a beam of peach-colored light. “Steeper,” she called out. “I want steeper angles for both cameras. Not higher but steeper. Understand? And the lighting from below washes up — low lighting but luminous on the cheekbones.” She framed her cheek with her hands in a self-caressing gesture. “Then you get this! It’s that Gypsy light. That’s what I want — that Gypsy light, I call it. Got it, Alberto?”
“Yes!” a voice emanated from the darkness. Above, in the folds of shadows, a cameraman was riding on the boom.
“Music!” someone called out.
The music was from a recording, but a guitarist sat at the edge of the dance area, pretending to strum.
Lilo observed Django making a face as if to say, “You call that playing?”
Her mother had told her that Leni Riefenstahl began her career as a dancer. But there was something peculiar in the way she moved. Possibly it was the bad music. It seemed exaggerated, every movement a bit overdone, almost drastic, Lilo thought.
She lost track of the number of takes for the scene. Perhaps a dozen until they got it the way Fräulein Riefenstahl wanted it. At the finish, the extras were told to report to another station in the tavern that had been roped off. There were several chairs and some standing mirrors.
“This must be the makeup department,” Lilo whispered to Blanca. “If our mothers could see us now. Sinti girls getting rouged up like Roma tarts!” They both giggled.
Unku was already seated. The makeup technician was a round little woman whose dyed red hair was twisted into an elaborate knot that perched on top of her head like a miniature sultan’s turban. She was exclaiming over Unku’s complexion. “Skin like a Gypsy angel. That rose flush beneath the copper hue! Mein Gott, and those lashes. Hardly anything I need to do.”
“Tone her down, Janni!” Anna had just come up to the chair where Unku sat.
Then suddenly the man called Harald came up to Anna and she gave him a peck on the cheek. They put their heads together and whispered for a moment while looking at Lilo and the other girls who had been herded into makeup. Mostly they were younger prisoners, under twenty. The small boy who had stood next to Django in the line at Maxglan when Leni had first selected them as extras was there. He was no more than seven or eight and was dressed with a white apron tucked around his waist. He was to be a waiter in the tavern. Leni asked for a tray and a jug of wine and made her way toward him.
“Liebling, what’s your name?”
“Otto,” the boy replied.
“Otto? It doesn’t sound like a Gypsy name.”
“Neither does Martha,” the man named Harald said. “You know what Arnold thinks.”
“I don’t give a goddamn what Arnold thinks. He’s not here. I fired him.”
Django had made his way to Lilo’s side. “Martha is the name of the Spanish dancer in the script,” he whispered.
“How do you know?” Lilo asked, and once again, for perhaps the one hundredth time since she had first met Django, wondered how he acquired such massive amounts of information when the rest of them knew nothing.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“And who’s Arnold?”
“Arnold Fanck — the most famous director in Germany . . . well, almost, after von Sternberg — Blue Angel, you know, Marlene Dietrich.”
“Yes, I know about The Blue Angel, but this Arnold, why did she fire him?”
Django shrugged. “Who’s to know? But she really hates him. I heard some of the crew talking about it.”
Django moved off to where the boy extras were being assembled. He was barefoot, dressed in rags, and his legs were covered with soot. It wasn’t quite the costume he had envisioned. What Lilo was wearing was clean but had been artistically ripped, and smudges of dirt had been applied to her cheeks.
Now Leni, after giving Otto a lesson on how to carry a tray with a wine bottle, was making her way toward Lilo and the other girls. She smiled. Although she was breathtakingly gorgeous, Lilo found something alarming about her beauty. Then after perhaps a minute of watching her talk, she realized it was those close-set eyes. They suffused the beauty of her face with a feral light. Lilo could imagine her sniffing — sniffing out prey with that sharp nose. It was not hard to visualize the nostrils quivering as she picked up a new scent. There was something brutal about her face. She had heard that some Nazis claimed they could smell the inferior races — Jews or Gypsies or Negroes. Was she one who thought she could do that?
Fräulein Riefenstahl addressed the girls now, the street urchins. “My darlings, you must all call me Tante Leni. We are going to have so much fun.” The words sent a shiver through Lilo. I don’t want to have fun with this woman, she thought. Fräulein Riefenstahl dipped her hand into a pocket. “I have brought some chocolate for each of you.” She began distributing candies wrapped in silver and gold foil.
Lilo thought now not of the gingerbread man but of the gingerbread house, deep in the dark woods, and of the old crone who lured Hansel and Gretel inside with palmfuls of candy.
“Chocolate!” Blanca sighed. Chocolate was an ancient, nay, an
almost prehistoric, memory for all of them.
Fräulein Riefenstahl moved down the line of street urchins, offering them the foil-wrapped candy.
“Go on. Take it, Liebling,” she said when Lilo hesitated, merely staring at the extended palm. It was as if her own hand had frozen by her side.
“Don’t like chocolate?” Lilo said nothing. “Come on!” An impatient rasp edged her voice. If I take it, I die. That was all Lilo could think. Was it like the candy house that had lured Hansel and Gretel?
“We gotta stubborn one here?” The elegant woman steeped in ruffles suddenly seemed quite vulgar. Lilo reached out and took the chocolate. The brutal eyes drew a bead on her, and Lilo felt as if she were caught in the thin crosshairs of a rifle’s sights. “That’s a nice girl,” Leni said, and reached out and lightly touched Lilo’s cheek. In that split second, Lilo felt as if she had been branded. God, never let her touch my skin again.
Lilo stared at the chocolate. It had been so long! Suddenly she could hardly resist tearing the foil right off. But I must eat only half. Can I eat only half? And save the other for Mama? But if she ate it, what did it mean? What kind of devil had she and the other children struck a bargain with? How had Lilo and her mother ever even in jest said that this was her father’s girlfriend? If only her father could see this woman up close as she had, he would know . . . Know what? Lilo thought. Know that she was a predator and was feared as much as any wolf.
She had moved on, and Lilo felt only relief.
“Who’s this?” It was like a razor strop cutting the air. Lilo jerked her attention from the golden-foil-wrapped nugget. Leni was standing before Unku. Even though Unku was dressed in rags and had streaks of dirt on her face, her beauty shined through.
An assistant with a clipboard rushed over and shuffled through papers. “Uh, this is, let’s see . . . this is Unku Graff.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” Unku whispered.
Lilo, even standing three feet away, felt Unku’s terror.
“Better a whore, I think, than an urchin,” Leni said softly.
“Leni, we need urchins following you around, not whores. You are the idol of the village children.” Harald had come up to her and put his arm around her shoulders. She shook him off.
“Well, make her look younger. Call the hairdresser. Much too much hair. Cut it. It will make her look younger, and sew up the blouse. We don’t need to see her tits.”
From her pocket, she drew out not a chocolate but a small notebook. It was the same notebook Lilo had seen her write in at Maxglan. She now wrote something down in it. When she had finished writing, she looked around at the street urchins, who were all watching her. She smiled slightly, then looked down and wrote something else, closed the notebook, and tucked it into her pocket. The entire operation took no more than thirty seconds, but it was as choreographed as the dance she had performed for the camera.
“Mama, can you carry a jug on your head?”
“What do you think I am, a peasant?” Bluma was sitting in the barn, playing with one of the barn cat’s kittens.
“Mama!” Lilo rolled her eyes. “It’s only acting.”
“Why would I want to act like a peasant? I am a lace maker.”
Please, please, Lilo prayed silently. Don’t be stubborn, Mama. “Mama, let me explain this carefully.” She crouched down and picked up the kitty, then looked right into her mother’s eyes. “Django says —”
“Django says.” Her mother spoke scornfully. “Django says this. Django says that. You believe everything that boy says.” Lilo felt a mixture of embarrassment and anger.
“No, not really. I can think for myself. So forget what Django says, then. But I do know that if you don’t work here, if they can’t find a part for you as an extra, you go back.” She let the words sink in. They caught Bluma’s attention. “Back to Maxglan, or east, Mama,” she whispered.
Bluma rose slowly. There was an empty bucket nearby. She bent over and picked it up. She put it on her head and walked three steps. “If I can walk with a bucket on my head, I can walk with a jug. Of course, silly girl.”
Lilo clapped her hands. “Oh, Mama!” She squealed happily.
Bluma took the bucket off just as Unku walked by.
“What happened to you?” Bluma asked. But Unku kept walking sullenly and did not answer. “What happened to her, Lilo?” Bluma whispered.
“Fräulein Riefenstahl made the hairdressers chop off most of her hair to make her look younger.”
“Heh!” This was the distinctive snort her mother gave when she was scornful of something.
“Younger? She just didn’t want anyone prettier. The woman is vain. And what’s more, she’s dangerous. I saw it from the first step she took through the mud at Maxglan. I know vain women. Remember, I work in fashion. Unku was too pretty.” She paused. “And you know what else?”
“What else, Mama?”
“This isn’t Hollywood, and we’re not extras. They lock the barn, remember? We bathe in the cow barn and go to latrines. We sit on rough boards to do our business. You think Gary Cooper did this or Marlene Dietrich when they were making Morocco? We’re film slaves.” She paused, and her face became still. “But I’ll carry the jug.”
Lilo knew that her mother was right. She was a quick study. She hadn’t seen Leni Riefenstahl for more than a couple of minutes back at Maxglan, but she had summed her up. Her body might be failing, but Bluma Friwald’s mind was sharp as ever. Lilo found this heartening.
“You be careful of that woman, Lilo. She cut the pretty Roma girl’s hair. She could do a lot worse, I bet.”
Lilo thought of the notebook but decided not to tell her mother.
“Don’t worry, Mama. I’m not pretty enough.”
Bluma looked at her daughter with an inscrutable expression clouding her eyes. She pressed her mouth together, and the corners tipped down. Her mother almost never cried, but she looked like she was about to now. Why was she looking at her in this way? What did she see? Lilo always knew she wasn’t ugly, but she had just missed being pretty. Her nose was too long, her eyes too big for her narrow face. Her chin sharp and her eyebrows so thick they reminded her of woolly caterpillars. Her hair had never been as lustrous and thick as Unku’s, and now an ugly reddish cast had crept into it, which her mother had told her came from hunger and no decent food. Indeed she had noticed it in some other prisoners’ hair.
At that moment, Django came along. Bluma put the bucket back on her head. “Will this do, Django?”
His face lit up. “It certainly will, Frau Friwald!” He held a thick packet in his hand. It was the shooting script for the film. He had “organized” it.
That evening over a bowl of potato soup, which actually had some meat in it, Django and Lilo and Rosa studied the shooting script. Not of course before Django launched into how terrible the music was in the tavern scene.
“It was a record they were playing, not live music. The guitarist just had to fake the fingering,” Lilo said. “I saw it, behind a curtain.”
“His fingering was all wrong, and the music they chose was ridiculous. They should have me holding the guitar and not the accordion. Besides, I wasn’t in one shot with the stupid accordion. I could show them a thing or two about real Spanish music,” Django said. It was one of the few times Lilo had ever heard him really angry.
“Enough of your music review. Tell us about the film. What’s the script like?” Rosa said, tucking a short strand of hair behind her ear. Lilo flinched when she saw some of the hair simply fall out, but Rosa didn’t seem to notice. She had once been a very pretty girl. She had a straight little nose and high cheekbones and blue eyes.
“First off, I discovered that this film is not just one of the most expensive but the most expensive film ever to be made in Germany. I heard them talking. She — Tante Leni —”
“Are we really going to call her that?” Rosa asked.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Lilo replied, an
d fingered her chocolate, which she had somehow resisted eating and planned to share with her mother before bed.
“She was given fifty thousand reichsmarks for just this part here in Krün, and it’s only, as they say, the tip of the iceberg,” Django said.
“Who’s paying for this?” Lilo asked.
He opened the script to the inside cover. “See that stamp?” The girls bent close to look at it.
“The Reich Film Department,” Rosa whispered.
“Yes, Hitler, the Third Reich, is footing the bill here.”
Lilo and Rosa both sat back. It all seemed very confusing.
“Why should the government pay for it?” Lilo asked.
Django sighed. “She’s a charmer, that one. She’s obviously charmed the Führer.”
All Lilo could think of when Django said the word charmer was snake. Tante Leni was both the snake and the charmer. In her mind’s eye, she saw Fräulein Riefenstahl writhing up from a conjurer’s basket with her glittering beady eyes.
“What do you think that notebook is that she always carries?” Lilo asked.
Django shrugged. For once he didn’t have an answer.
“Django, tell us the story of the movie,” Rosa said.
“All right. The scenes with the red marks by them have already been shot, and you can see that they don’t go in order at all. They haven’t even filmed the opening scene. They have to go to the Dolomites for that. The hero, Pedro, kills a wolf.”
“A wolf!” Lilo exclaimed.
“Yeah, a wolf. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing . . . nothing at all,” Lilo said. “Go on.”
“The wolf is threatening the shepherd’s flock of sheep — well, actually they’re the marquis’s sheep. The shepherd works for the nobleman. And there’s a knife scene toward the end where Pedro kills the marquis.”