The Extra (13 page)

“Ach, now you know my beauty secrets.” The man laughed. He turned around and put out his hand to shake Lilo’s. She was stunned. This had never happened to her since she had been arrested. His hand was very soft and smooth, but he pressed her hand warmly in a truly friendly way. “Now, what is your name, dear?” He leaned forward a bit and looked into her eyes as he spoke.

“Lilian Friwald,” she whispered.

“Mine’s Bernhard Minetti.”

Minetti looked no more like a Spaniard than Franz Eichberger did. His eyes were not as blue as Franz’s — no eyes could be that blue — but were a misty gray with just a touch of blue. This was the man who was supposed to play the power-hungry, cruel Don Sebastian, but if anything, he reminded Lilo of one of her father’s favorite clients for antique watches, Herr Haffner. He would never forget to bring a small gift for Lilo and often something for her mother whenever he came. Bluma declared that Herr Haffner was an old-fashioned Viennese gentleman and had the most exquisite manners of any man she had ever met. Lilo had trouble trying to fit the man standing before her with the cruel character he was being made to play. But as Django said, it was all fiction.

“And I understand that you are an excellent rider?”

“Yes, my mama’s brother is”— she hesitated —“was a trainer at the Spanish Riding School in Piber.” She detected a fleeting shadow cross the blue-gray mist of his eyes. “That is my mama, over there. She knows horses, too, but does not ride,” she added quickly.

He looked up and walked over to her mother, who was in her black peasant costume.

“Frau Friwald.” Frau! No one except Django had called her mother Frau in months. He was holding out his hand. “I am pleased to meet you, the mother of this excellent rider.” Bluma was taken aback as well. But she nodded.

“Thank you, sir.”

Leni then arrived with the head cameraman. “Albert, darling, show that painterly look of the darker grays of the landscape against the lighter ones of the sky. And then the two figures on horseback melt into the distance.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to use the long lens. Will the horses be walking, trotting, or what?”

“I think cantering.”

Just then another man came running up. He was dressed identically to Bernhard Minetti. He gave Tante Leni a kiss, a bit more than the peck Lilo had seen Harald give her a few days before. Leni looked up at him with a glowing expression. Herr Minetti must have noticed Lilo staring at the two of them. He leaned forward and whispered to her, “Peter Jacob is my double for the cantering. But that’s all.” There was a trace of a smirk on Herr Minetti’s face that gave Lilo a glimpse of the cruel side he would have to play.

Tante Leni told Lilo immediately that she was to address Peter Jacob as Lieutenant, as he was a lieutenant in the
Wehrmacht.
Lilo quickly surmised that like Franz, he had escaped going to war in order to be in the movie. As a double, he didn’t quite match Minetti’s height, Lilo observed, but then again, she herself was shorter than Leni.

Leni explained the scene to both Lilo and Peter. They were to come cantering over the top of a slight mound that was perhaps five hundred meters from where they were now standing. A marker had been placed at this point, and they were instructed to come to a halt. Then Leni and Minetti would climb on two wooden contraptions — they called them the rocking horses, but they were not child’s toys. They were fake horses’ heads with manes that matched the live horses and had been mounted with saddles on frameworks. The close-up would show the actors from their waists up with a bit of the horses’ necks and the horns of the saddles in the frame.

Lilo and Lieutenant Jacob mounted their respective horses. She saw her mother making her way toward them. Bluma put out her hand, then nuzzled the horse’s face and spoke some nonsense words in Sinti.
She’s doing this perfectly,
Lilo thought.
What an actress my mama is!
She turned away and smiled at Tante Leni and Albert, the cameraman, who were staring at her. “It always works,” Bluma said, and flashed a smile. Lilo was stunned. Her mother was playing her part to the hilt.

After the scene had been shot, Lilo walked back to the “waiting pen,” as the Gypsy extras had started to call it. As she and her mother drew closer, they heard the strains of a guitar. A real guitar playing live music. And it was a real Gypsy playing the music. Django! Lilo closed her eyes. She pictured his hands, long slender, yet callous from the work camps he had been in. Now with those same hands he was coaxing from that guitar wonderful rich, dark tones that colored the very air.

Django had organized a guitar. “Nothing to it,” he said. “The actor who plays the guitarist wandered by the pen. I said to him, ‘Let me have a look at that guitar.’ He, of course, couldn’t slide it through the wire mesh, but I said — just making this up, of course — I said, ‘I know you don’t really have to play it, but if you’d adjust the action . . .’ He doesn’t know what action is. So I explain that action is controlled by the height of the strings above the frets, and then I tell him to change the tension of the number two and the number three string. You see, I start throwing all these terms out there like crazy. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but he’s impressed. So just then an assistant cameraman comes by and Henrik — that’s the actor’s name — says, ‘This guy knows what he’s talking about. Can we bring him out of the pen?’ Only he calls it the cage, which is sort of shocking, but it’s the truth, ain’t it? ‘Can we bring him out of the cage and let him show me?’ Well, the camera fellow is real interested. So I get out and begin to show them stuff. I am very particular to show them how the fingering can be done to look more realistic, and then I just start playing — not one of those stupid songs they had her dancing to but a real Gypsy song. But now the actor says, ‘If we change the music, we’ll have to change the dance.’ And the cameraman says they are reshooting a lot of the tavern scenes in Babelsberg anyway.”

Lilo gasped. “Django, you are amazing! If I’m a ‘ride-in,’ you’re a what? A ‘hands-in’?” They both laughed.

“Actually, I think the real name for what we are is ‘double.’ We’re doubles.”

The word struck Lilo oddly.
If only,
she thought,
there could be a double for our real lives as prisoners, and then we could leave that life behind and escape forever.

“T
hat little trailer,” Janna said. She was a woman the same age as Lilo’s mother.

“You mean the caravan?” Lilo asked.

“No, no, the fancy metal one that Fräulein Riefenstahl uses for her dressing room. I saw him go in there on my way to makeup. Then I heard thumps — bump, bump — then . . . ‘Aaahh! Aaah!’”

Everyone broke out laughing.

“Shush, Janna, shush! They’ll hear you,” warned Ulrike, another water-jug lady.

“Not through my chattering teeth, they won’t,” Janna answered.

Lilo and a half dozen others were in the women’s latrine back at the farm. The weather had turned chilly in the last few days, and although they had been provided with extra blankets, it was a challenge to sit long with one’s panties down on a rough board with a hole over a trench. But the latrine was the best place for gossip. There were no walls between the toilets, and after being in so many camps, the lack of privacy did not faze them in the least. Despite the cold, all of them lingered to hear Janna’s tale of Tante Leni and her lover, Peter Jacob, and their trysts in Leni’s dressing room. Django was not the only source for information, especially of this nature. Janna and Ulrike actually had a competition going.

All the women were wrapped in thick horse blankets that had been left for them, but in addition they now wore thick socks. Liesel had left two pairs for Bluma, but Bluma had told her that she could not stand to wear the socks when others had none. The little girl had nodded solemnly, and then two days later, she left six pairs, the following day another eight, and then finally another ten. More than enough, since now there were only twenty-one prisoners.

Their teeth chattered as they gossiped away. Had gossip become a new kind of nourishment for them? Lilo looked down the line where they sat on the rough board over the smelly trench. Was this to be their life — the high point of their lives — sitting giggling in a latrine locked behind barbed wire? What did it matter if it was Krün or Babelsberg? And what would happen when the filming was finished? Surely then they would be sent east. Until now Lilo had thought only about surviving, day-to-day. But now she understood that she had to think about something else, beyond day-to-day survival — escaping before it was too late. Would her mother be strong enough? Might there be any chance to escape either on the way to Babelsberg or after they got there? Babelsberg was near Berlin. Berlin was a huge city. Could they disappear among the millions? And what about Django? Would he come? As Lilo thought of escape, the gossip went on.

“Mina’s baby girl has a bad cough,” Griselda, a toothless old woman, said. “She needs chest liniments and good steam.”

“Fat chance of getting that.”

“I bet they have hoof balm for their calves. That might work.”

“What’s the baby’s name?” There was a silence, like a void in the night. No one had thought to inquire as to the baby’s name. Had they never heard the mother call the little girl by name? Lilo could tell that they were all shocked. It was as if they had had to pare down their lives to only the sparsest detail. Anything else was a distraction.

“Well, you know,” someone started to say, “the mother, Mina. She’s very thoughtful. She always tries to sleep far from all of us so the child’s crying won’t disturb us.”

“Yes,” someone else said softly. It was as if they were suddenly aware that their own humanity was slowly slipping away.

Ulrike now spoke up, almost desperately, to change the subject: “What do you think of Fräulein Riefenstahl making eyes at Pedro — I mean Franz?”

Janna farted. Her timing was perfect. The tension was broken. They all roared at this.

“My sentiments exactly,” said Irma, another water-jug lady.

“What’s to stop her from having two?” Ulrike said. “My sources tell me that this woman has been with many men. The famous director Arnold Fanck — he was her lover.”

“The one she fired,” Lilo piped up. All eyes turned toward her. She was occupying the last seat in the row of the latrines.

“How do you know that?” Janna said, leaning forward to look at her at the end of the row. This kind of gossip was supposedly the province of the older women not young girls.

“My sources.” Lilo winked, then got up from the board.

Perhaps it was ten minutes after Bluma and Lilo had returned from the latrines when they heard angry voices through the crack in the barn wall. “I’ll be right back,” Lilo whispered. She climbed to the hayloft to look out the window by Unku’s sleeping pallet. It gave the best view down to where the voices were coming from.

“They’re cold. This isn’t about mollycoddling. The blankets aren’t enough. They need heavier clothing.”

Two long shadows sliced across the spray of moonlight on the ground below. It was Johan who spoke. “Look, just tell Fräulein Riefenstahl that she will not have any extras for her precious film unless she keeps them warm. They’ll all come down with pneumonia. We hardly feed them as it is.”

“I don’t like your tone,” Gunther replied.

“I don’t like how you’re screwing the farmer’s oldest daughter.”

A silence opened up between them as wide as the night. Unku and Lilo looked at each other, their eyes round with shock. “Oh,
sheka
!” Unku whispered the word for “shit.”

Barely a quarter of an hour later, the two guards arrived, pushing wheelbarrows loaded with more blankets, as well as shawls and sweaters. Shortly after that, the large door of the barn slid open. The farmer’s two daughters appeared. Each carried a pail with steam coming from it. Lilo saw the little girl scan the barn and knew immediately that she was looking for Bluma.

“Bring your bowls, please,” Johan said as he stepped out of the shadows. “We want to give you something warm, and more is coming.” The big sister leaned over to her little sister and whispered. She set her pail down and then ran toward the farmhouse. In a few minutes, the little girl returned with two more buckets.

It was a feast! Two pails of warm milk, two buckets of dumplings with boiled chicken. And still more was coming! Lilo ran to wake her mother. It was important for her to come, not just to eat but also to see the little girl and for the little girl to see her.

As soon as Liesel saw Bluma Friwald’s face, she broke into a smile and ran toward her. She dipped her hand into the pocket of her dirndl. “For you,
Frau,
” she said softly, and handed Bluma something. It was a
Pfannkuchen,
a bun stuffed with jam. And still warm! Bluma slipped it into her pocket.

“Liesel!” Her older sister scolded her then jerked her.

Lilo reached forward and grabbed her mother’s hand.

“Mama, you have to be careful. You saw the sister didn’t like when you did that.”

She began to study her mother carefully. She did seem a bit stronger. She might have even put on some weight. Was she strong enough to get out of here? They had chicken and dumplings tonight, but it could all end tomorrow. Was there any chance they could get out? Make it to safety. But what was safe? Where was safety? The tiny cough of the nameless baby scratched the night. Lilo almost resented it. It was a distraction. She had to think, think hard. She was scared, scared of that older sister. She had to think about the possibilities of escape. But then the baby coughed again. Poor thing! She promised herself that tomorrow she would ask Mina her baby’s name.