Rosa laughed. “Oh, thanks for spoiling the ending for us.”
“I’m confused,” Lilo said. “The ending can’t spoil anything if you don’t know the story. Tell us the story. And begin at the beginning. Why are they calling it Tiefland?”
“All right. Here it is: First, Tiefland means lowlands. There are problems in Roccabruna, which is in the lowlands. There’s not enough water. The greedy marquis, Don Sebastian, owns prize bulls. He gets the stream diverted so he can water his bulls. The farmers, therefore, don’t have enough water. No water means no crops. And no crops means no money. Farmers can’t pay the rent to their lord and master, Don Sebastian. Pedro is a shepherd for the Don’s goats or sheep or whatever grazes up there. Now, you have to understand that lowlands doesn’t just mean low in the geographic way. No, it’s a symbol.” He pulled his mouth down in a sarcastic grimace. “This is fancy literature, I guess. It means low-down, bad people. And in case the audience misses the symbolism, someone warns Pedro, “Don’t go to the lowlands, Pedro. The devil lives there.”
“Okay, we get it,” Rosa said. “On with the plot.”
“I know what’s going to happen, Django doesn’t need to tell us,” Lilo said confidently while scraping up the last dregs from the soup bowl with her fingers. “Pedro and Don Sebastian both fall in love with Martha. Pedro wins. The good guy always wins. That’s what happens in the end with the knife fight, right?” Everyone fell silent as soon as Lilo said this. But now she felt foolish, because she knew that it was not that the script was so simple but that life was more complicated.
The good guys didn’t always win. Django, Rosa, Lilo, and Bluma had lost in every battle so far. This was proof enough that the bad guys had already won over and over again. When there were no more people to be killed, maybe that’s when Hitler would lose.
Django broke the silence. “Yeah. You’ve got it, Lilo. Simple.” That one word cut deeply. It was the only time he had ever betrayed any contempt. That she should have provoked it felt horrible.
She sighed. “How’s Unku doing?”
Both Rosa and Django shrugged.
“I think I’ll go see her,” she said suddenly, and jumped up to leave. Django reached out and brushed her hand softly. He was saying he was sorry — she knew it. Her eyes filled, but she was still ashamed.
“Unku?” she called softly when she reached the top rung of the ladder to the hayloft where Unku slept. “Unku?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s me, Lilo.” She scrambled up over to the loft window, where Unku had made her pallet with the blankets.
“Don’t say it doesn’t look so bad, please.”
“It looks terrible.”
Unku laughed. “Good, at least you’re honest.” She raised her hand to her head and rubbed it. “Look — I even have a bald patch.” She tipped her head forward, and indeed, there was a spot the size of a five-reichsmark coin.
“They made that with scissors?”
“Oh, no. Fräulein Riefenstahl herself took the razor and very carefully shaved that.” Unku paused. “She’s very careful about details.” There was something in the way Unku said these last words that made Lilo’s heart almost stop.
“Details,” she whispered.
“Yes, details. Did you see that notebook she took out and wrote in?”
“Yes,” Lilo said.
“Did you wonder what she wrote down?”
“Sort of?” Lilo lied.
“I think she wrote something about me. She took it out again just after she cut my hair, and asked my name again.”
“She did?”
Unku nodded solemnly, tears beginning to run down her cheeks.
Lilo didn’t know what to say. “Unku, your hair will grow back.” As soon as the words were out, she knew it was the stupidest thing in the world to say.
Unku looked at her. Her eyes were seething with anger now and not tears. “It’s not my hair, you fool! It’s everything. My mama, my papa, my older sister, my only brother. I can’t grow them back again. They take everything! Everything, Lilo. Even your mother’s insides.”
Lilo was not sure how long she had been sleeping when she heard a whimpering in the night. She opened her eyes and listened carefully. It wasn’t Unku. It sounded too young, but not a baby. Or rather not the baby — the little girl who had cried most of the night before but had at last gone to sleep this evening. A child? She got up from the hay and went to investigate.
At first she thought it was just a pile of dirty old blankets stuffed in what looked like a feeding trough, but as she approached, she saw something stir under the blankets. Bending over, she lifted a corner of the coverings. It was the small boy, Otto. He was sobbing in his sleep. She put a hand on his heaving shoulder and patted him gently. This seemed to wake him.
“Bad dream?” she asked.
“Oh, no. Good dream about my mother.” He rubbed his eyes, looked at her, and then sat up in the trough. He was so small. Probably not bigger than the calves or lambs that might eat from the trough. He looked around. “This is the bad dream,” he said.
She looked at him. What was it about the youngest boys that they all looked like little old men — wizened before their time?
“Your name is Otto, right?”
He nodded. “Otto Kunz. My mother is Frieda Kunz.”
He paused and then added in a barely audible whisper, “But she’s not here.”
“Do you know where she is?” Lilo asked.
He shook his head mournfully. The gesture was so slight, so slow, it was as if this small movement caused him profound pain.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said finally.
“I’ll have the guards unlock the door and take you.”
“Can you take me to the ladies’? I don’t like to go to the men’s latrine. Sometimes the guards are there late at night.” Again he paused, then added, “They scare me, especially the head guard.”
“He scares me, too.”
The boy looked up at her and smiled, then took her hand and gave it a squeeze as he stepped from the trough.
“There must be some mistake,” Django was saying to the bus driver. “Bluma Friwald is on the list, I am sure. They are shooting scene six, right?”
“Right,” said the bus driver, consulting his clipboard.
“And it calls for twelve older peasant women in the square when Pedro arrives.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Well, one of those women is to be Bluma Friwald. I heard Fräulein Riefenstahl specifically say yesterday to bring a tall one for the shot by the village gates. See if they added her name down here someplace.” Then very politely Django asked. “May I look at your clipboard?” The driver handed it to him. “Ah, right here. Bluma Friwald.” Django pointed with his finger to a place on the paper.
The bus driver nodded. Then he said almost cheerfully, “Well, if Fräulein Riefenstahl wants a tall one — yes, I guess she is in comparison to the others. Bring her along. Can’t hurt.”
“Thank you, old man.” Django gave the bus driver a friendly pat on the shoulder, indeed the kind of pat one old man might give another old man.
Lilo had watched this entire performance hardly daring to breathe. So much depended on it. How had he done it? He was incredible. Could she have done that? Had she missed some opportunity to help her mother? She had a lot to learn from Django, but she felt for the first time stirrings of other feelings, feelings that had very little to do with what she could merely “learn” from him. She shouldn’t let other feelings about him get in the way. She thought she had been smart when she had ascertained that the guard named Johan was sympathetic as opposed to the head guard. But that was nothing compared to the information that Django was able to collect. Compared to this! He had made a study not just of the guards but also of the entire film crew, right down to this bus driver, apparently. He knew who was bribable and who was not. Who was stupid and who was smart. He had told Lilo that in camps, he was quick to learn which K
apos and guards were really vicious.
“You must become invisible for those,” he had told her. “They are worse than animals.” How do you become invisible? Lilo had asked. “It’s a skill. You find shadows to stand in during roll calls. You look like this.” Suddenly the light drained out of his eyes. They became dead, as if he had no more life than a stone. There was nothing there. Then quickly he came back to life. “See? What fun is it killing something that’s already dead?”
Lilo knew that she had to stop being simply in awe of Django and start really learning from him. He had already figured out that the bus driver was less than swift.
When they got on the bus, Lilo sat next to him. “How did you do that? My mother’s name couldn’t be on the list.”
“It’s not. The fellow can’t read.”
“But how did you know that?”
“I had a hunch he was sort of dumb. I sat right behind him yesterday when we were driving to the set. I saw him struggling to read a newspaper headline. He was trying to sound out the first word in the headline. He couldn’t do it and threw the paper down on the floor of the bus. He didn’t want to admit he couldn’t read — to a Gypsy, no less. He saved face by pretending when I pointed to a name.”
“But Django, her name isn’t on the list, and what if they discover this when we get there? We’ll all be in trouble.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. And her name will be on the list by tomorrow. I guarantee it. There’s more to worry about with Unku. Believe me.”
“Yes,” Lilo said softly. Unku sat a few rows ahead. Lilo could see her bald spot quite clearly. Her eyes fastened on it. What an ogre this Leni Riefenstahl is. How low will she stoop?
Twenty minutes later, the bus rolled up and stopped in front of the fake village of Roccabruna.
“Good heavens,” Bluma gasped. “They built a whole village for this movie.”
“Yes. I told you.”
“But I never imagined.”
“Well, some of the buildings are just fronts. You know, flats, like on a stage.”
“If only it were all just a stage.” Bluma sighed and stepped off the bus. She didn’t have to explain. Lilo instantly understood. Yes, how lovely if Buchenwald had been just a stage or Rossauer Lände and wherever they had taken her father.
They hadn’t walked far from the bus when Lilo spotted the most handsome man she had ever seen in her life standing by the tavern. He was tall and lean, deeply tanned with wavy blond hair, and even from where she stood, she could see that his eyes matched the sky. A bit of golden hair curled out from the deep V of his shepherd’s shirt. She felt herself blush. How stupid of her. He could be a Nazi. Could be? Probably is, she thought. And most likely if he sees me, he thinks of vermin. Dirty Gypsy girl.
“Your typical Spaniard, right?” Django whispered in Lilo’s ear.
“Huh?”
“Pedro. Franz Eichberger.”
“Pedro? The shepherd? That’s him? You gotta be crazy.”
“No, not me. Fräulein Riefenstahl. She’s crazy for him.”
Franz Eichberger strode around the set like a golden god who had just descended from the loftiest peaks of Mount Olympus. His teeth sparkled, his eyes twinkled, and his hair shimmered like curly licks of yellow flame. Lilo thought he was so beautiful that it almost hurt to look at him, like looking directly at the sun on the brightest day — one needed dark glasses.
“My God, he’s handsome. Hard to believe he’s mortal. Does he eat? Talk?” Lilo asked Rosa, who was standing next to Django.
“Does he take a crap?” Django laughed and looked at the two awestruck girls.
“Don’t!” Lilo jabbed him with her elbow but couldn’t help laughing. “But look at him. He’s at least twenty years younger than Fräulein Riefenstahl.”
“Almost. She’s forty. He’s twenty-three,” Django said.
“How do you know that?” Rosa asked.
“I picked up the newspaper the bus driver threw away. It was a local paper and had stuff about shooting the movie here.”
“What else did you learn about him?”
“He’s a ski instructor. You know, like so many shepherds, they teach skiing on the side. Very popular profession. She discovered him on the slopes of St. Anton.”
“No! Don’t kid with me.”
“I’m not. He was actually on active military duty. He was a ski instructor for the Wehrmacht in the Alps.”
“The Nazi army?” Lilo sighed.
“That Wehrmacht — what else? The ski division. It’s just being formed really, the Skijäger. They’re being trained to use skis for movement during the winter, especially if action opens up on the eastern front.”
“You mean Russia?” Lilo asked.
“Yes, now, which would you rather do if you were a man — ski to Russia in the dead of winter or be in the sack with Leni Riefenstahl?”
“Ski to Russia! Safer, I think,” she said, and walked away to the area that had been roped off for them. The Gypsy extras were the only ones on the set whose movements were confined. It was the same as when they were shooting in the tavern the day before.
The outside area where they were enclosed now was right next to a corral where the animals for the movie were kept. There were several horses, dogs, five or six burros, and the flock of geese. Lilo didn’t mind it. She liked the smell of the manure, the straw. It reminded her of Piber, Uncle Andreas, and the splendid Lipizzaner Cosmos. But at the same time, it made her sad. As soon as the war broke out the horses from Piber had all been sent to Czechoslovakia to protect the breed. And God knew where Uncle Andreas had been sent.
These horses, of course, could not compare to the ones in Piber. These were very skinny, like the Gypsy extras, with scruffy coats. But it was not just that. Had they been fat with gleaming coats, they would still never have been the equals of a Lipizzaner. The Lipizzaners’ hooves, oddly enough, were tiny and seemed as delicate as a ballerina’s feet. Despite their rather long backs, the Lipizzaners were compact, very muscular, with a deep, wide chest. Uncle Andreas had told Lilo that their chests were where their power came from. It was those chests that held the huge lungs that gave them blasts of oxygen so they could do amazing things like jump straight up high into the air with all four legs off the ground at once. Uncle Andreas’s joke had been that they could do the airs because they had so much air! Her mind went back to those magical summer days.
It seemed unbelievable to Lilo that a scant four months ago she had been in Piber, riding in the instruction ring and just beginning to learn “the airs.” As her uncle had explained, the airs might seem silly in the twentieth century. But there was a practical reason for them in olden days, when battles were fought on horseback. They allowed the rider, when surrounded by the enemy, to almost magically escape with moves like the capriole, in which the horse jumps straight up into the air while kicking out with its hind legs.
Her uncle Andreas in his summer livery, the gray fitted coat and darker gray jodhpurs, stood in the center of the ring with his white training whip. The whip, with its long tail, never touched the horses but was employed more like the baton of a conductor leading an orchestra. Holding the whip high over his head, Uncle Andreas would flick it. The long tail would unfurl, tracing a pattern against the sky. The crack of the whip was a cue for both the horse and the rider as to which movement was expected. Automatically, or almost automatically, Lilo would know to squeeze her knees or dig in her heels to the horse’s flanks, or perhaps shift her weight slightly in the saddle. Very few words were ever spoken. There was instead a profound silence punctuated only by the sound of the whip, the breathing of the horse, and the very light impact of the hooves in the tanbark. Occasionally a breeze would blow across the surrounding meadows, bringing the whinnies of grazing horses and the sweet fragrance of grass.
As Lilo watched these horses on the set, she thought that with their big old cloppers, narrow chests, and withered rumps, they couldn’t have been more op
posite from the beautiful horses of Piber. Indeed they looked as if they might break under the weight of a rider.
“Stop looking at the horses.” Django came up and put a hand gently on her lower back. She closed her eyes for a second as a deep thrill ran through her from Django’s touch. “Look over there.”
“Where?”
“Look at your mother.”
“Mama!” She suddenly panicked. Had they discovered Django’s shenanigans?
“Look, she’s the lead peasant lady.” Lilo jumped up. There was her mother, dressed in black with a head scarf and a clay water jug on her head. She was standing by the stone arch that led into the village. Harald, the assistant director, was waving his arms at the man who was operating the camera on the end of a long boom. There was another camera on a small cart that ran on a track. “That’s for a dolly shot,” Django said.
“What’s a dolly shot? But wait — that’s not Pedro. That man’s . . . ugly!”
“That’s Pedro’s stand-in. They don’t want the star to tire himself out, you know. There’s Leni — see her?” Django pointed.
Leni, dressed in some sort of robe, not a costume, was holding a device up to her eye. “What’s she doing with that thing? Is it a camera?” Lilo asked.
“No. Just a viewfinder lens. Better than fingers for framing the shot. You know, cuts everything out except what she wants in the frame.”
“Just like at Maxglan.”
“Yes, and luckily we didn’t get cut out!”
Luckily. But how long will luck last? She thought of that notebook. The one Unku had said her name was now written in. Lilo had seen Tante Leni draw the notebook out twice already this morning. She seemed to do it when she was standing near the extras. But now she had dropped the viewfinder and was forming the O again with her fingers to look at something else on the set. Lilo caught her breath as she saw Leni swing the O toward her. Once again she had that feeling of being caught in the crosshairs of a rifle’s sights. Would she next pull out the notebook?