The Extra (16 page)

E
very day Lilo was hearing people on the set placing bets on when the action would start on the eastern front. Some said by March, but March was coming soon, just a month away. They had been in Babelsberg now for over three months. The filming continued, seemingly impervious to the war.

The set painters had worked all night on the fake sunset that the doubles, Lilo and Peter Jacob, were to be riding against. It looked all too garish to Lilo, but then the film was black-and-white so what did it matter? The lighting for this scene was tricky, however, as the two of them on their horses would be shot in silhouette against the sky. A row of arc lights had been dropped from the ceiling to create the harsh lighting required for the scene.

A thick cushion was put into the saddle for Lilo so she would appear taller, at least three inches taller, to match Leni’s height. The silhouette shot would emphasize any contrasts in stature more than the usual distance shots of them riding. Peter Jacob, aside from being an excellent rider, was the exact same height as Franz and one-half inch taller than Minetti — the ideal double for the horseback-riding scenes. But right now as he strode toward his mount, he had a deep scowl engraved on his face.

“Bitch!” Peter Jacob muttered as he swung his leg over and settled in the saddle. Lilo heard him. He might not have thought so, but she did. He might not care if she heard him or not. But then Lilo realized that actually he would like to engage her in conversation. He gestured with the reins in his left hand toward “the scene” going on beyond camera range.

Leni had plopped herself in Franz’s lap and was stroking his cheek. She was a great actress, Franz less so, but he was trying. Most likely he was afraid of losing his job and being sent back to the front — the eastern front. Skiing to Russia, Django would say. Then it was as if Peter Jacob were reading her mind. He slid his eyes toward her. “Not much of an actor, is he?” He laughed. “Perhaps we should do a bit of a counterattack.” He leaned toward Lilo as if to kiss her.
Holy Mother!
Then in the same moment, there was a sizzling sound, followed by a loud crack of one of the arc lights as it shorted. Sparks flew. Both horses reared up. Lilo saw the ground coming toward her. Horses crashed. Hooves struck the air.
My mother!

“Stop the horses!” someone shouted.

“Get the Gypsy woman.”

Oh, my God,
Lilo was thinking.
They think Mama really does know horses!
But then a worse thought:
I am not supposed to fall off when Mama is here. What will they do?

But Lilo was flat on the ground. Bluma and Django were both on their knees, hanging over her. “Are you all right?” It was Django speaking. She realized then that her head was in his lap. He was stroking her hair with those lovely long fingers. Bluma Friwald appeared absolutely frozen with fear.

“I’m fine,” Lilo said. She bent one leg and brought her foot to rest flatly on the floor, then the other foot. Nothing seemed broken. Her shoulder hurt a bit. The stupid hat she wore as part of the costume had a very stiff crown, and it had somehow slipped back, which had helped protect her head when she hit the ground. The horses appeared to have been caught and were being led back to where the scene began.

Leni meanwhile was trying to cradle Peter Jacob in her arms.

“Get away, you ugly bitch!” He staggered to his feet and began walking away.

“Where are you going?” she cried.

A hush fell on the set. The only sound was that of the horses breathing. Lilo turned her head toward Peter Jacob. Then every head on the set turned. “To see Eva, my darling Eva. Half your age, you crone.” He spat out each word and continued walking.

Leni suddenly seemed to shrink. She looked old and frail, even insignificant, until Lilo saw her eyes. A deep shudder coursed through her. She knew that worse was still to come.
So dangerous . . . so dangerous
— that was all she could think.

When Lilo returned the next day to reshoot the scene, the first thing she saw was Leni getting up from Franz’s lap. She got up and walked toward her. Lilo felt as if she were caught in the beam of those closely set eyes. “We have a wonderful new double, and I have already given him his instructions. But we’ve altered it a bit. Instead of you being on the left side of the double, as you were with Peter, you can ride just a bit in front.”

Lilo nodded. “Yes, yes. I’ll tell my mother to go to stage left, then.”

“Is that really necessary? It didn’t seem she was of much use yesterday. You fell off.” She gave a toss of her head as she said this and laughed lightly. Was that a threat? Lilo wondered. But despite her laugh, despite the coy toss of her head, Lilo felt the heat of Leni’s anger — not at her in particular, just the general devouring anger of a woman who had been scorned. Over her shoulder, Lilo saw Franz get up and shake his head ever so slightly as if in disbelief.
She is a monster,
Lilo was thinking, and people were her playthings as she turned love to rage. But Lilo wondered what Franz would turn his love to, his love for Unku. Indifference?

“Please let my mother stand by.” She raised one finely plucked eyebrow. “Tante Leni,” Lilo added quickly.

Her face broke into a smile. “Oh, silly girl. If you want your mama, sure!”

Why was she not relieved? Lilo wondered. But she was not.

“This woman is crazy,” Bluma murmured to Lilo late that night. Neither of them was asleep. It was not simply worrying about her mother or Unku that kept Lilo awake. Her shoulder still hurt from the fall. She was bruised all the way down one side of her body.

“You just noticed?” Lilo said.

“I don’t understand what she’s doing with Pedro What’s-His-Name.”

“Franz — Franz Eichberger. She was trying to make Peter Jacob jealous.”

“But he isn’t around now. So how can he see them?”

“I don’t know, Mama. Maybe she takes Franz out to nightclubs or something, goes dancing with him and hopes to run into Jacob. I don’t know. Go to sleep.”

Bluma sighed and turned over. But she was not going to sleep. Lilo knew it. Three or four minutes later, her mother whispered, “You think Papa is still alive?”

Lilo wanted to say,
Of course he is.
She wanted to say,
Papa is tough.
But she knew her father had a heart condition. He was not that tough. He could so easily be dead.

“You heard about Mauthausen?” her mother asked.

“What?”

“From that woman you know.”

“You mean one of the water-carrying women?”

“Yeah, she was in the scene yesterday. She’s a nice lady for —” Her mother, Lilo knew, was about to say
for a Roma,
but she caught herself. “Anyhow, she says at that camp Mauthausen, there is this ‘staircase of death,’ they call it. It goes down into a stone quarry, and the prisoners are forced to carry stones up from the bottom of the quarry. She says there is a saying that each rock costs the life of a man. She heard that her husband and son both died there.”

“Don’t listen to her, Mama. She doesn’t know anything.”

But that probably wasn’t true. The Marzahn prisoners seemed to know things that others did not. Perhaps it was because they had been in a camp so close to Berlin. Also a lot of other prisoners had come through Marzahn on their way to other camps. There was a grapevine of information. This was what Lilo had been counting on when she had asked Django to try to find out news of her father. However, with the arrival of the Marzahn prisoners came more rumors of Poland and what was going on in the camps there, especially Auschwitz. There was talk of a giant death machine being readied into which prisoners would be fed. A word began to circulate:
porajmos.
It meant “devouring” in many dialects of the Romani language.

Bluma yawned and said sleepily. “Maybe you’re right.” Lilo knew her mother was lying.
And,
thought Lilo,
Mama knows that I know she is lying. She knows that I am lying when I tell her that the Marzahn woman knows nothing. More fiction. And yet she falls asleep. And so will I.

And yet she did not fall asleep. She began thinking about Django. Her feelings were changing subtly, she could tell. She had known this ever since her first conversation with Unku about Franz, when she had wondered if she might ever want the kind of intimacy Unku had described. The problem was not really dying a virgin at all. The problem was one of space. Did she have enough room in her heart to love someone beyond her parents during this horrible war? She must look after herself and her mother. To love someone else was a luxury she could not afford. It was dangerous.

It was in the small hours of the night when deep in her sleep Lilo heard a tiny crash. A shattering of glass. In her dream, she looked down. All around her on the concrete floor, pieces of a watch were scattered. There was the escapement wheel with its notches. All sorts of little screws — the bridge screw, an anchor screw, ratchet-wheel screw, wheels, winding pinions strewn about. Lilo knew that she had to assemble all these parts or else her father would die.

“I don’t know how. I keep telling you I don’t know how, Tante Leni.”

“What good are you, darling? First you tell me that your mama knows horses, but look what happened, and now you tell me your father is a watch expert, buys and sells antique watches, repairs them. But this is a lie, too? You lie! You lie!” She turns to walk away. Lilo gasps. Leni is naked. There is no back to her dress. Her bare buttocks seem to twitch. Lilo is seized with a fit of giggles — giggles and fear.
I cannot laugh. She will kill me.
She slams her hand to her mouth.

Suddenly she was awake, awake and biting her own hand! And not laughing. Still, in this moment, she was fearful not for her mother, nor for her father, nor herself, but for Unku. She looked over. Unku’s cot was empty.

Lilo inhaled sharply. Never had an empty cot seemed more alarming. She went to the toilets. Unku was not there. How could she dare to sneak out after what had been going on? Had she listened to nothing Lilo had said? It was four in the morning. She must be coming soon, Lilo thought. There was nothing she could do, so she returned to her own cot. But sleep was impossible. She decided to go back to the toilets and wait for Unku to come through that door marked with the high-voltage warning.

She finally fell asleep with her head against the base of the toilet. She slept deeply, and then hearing the door creak, she jerked awake, hitting her head.

Wrong door!
She cursed silently. It was the woman from Mauthausen who had told Bluma about the staircase of death. She looked at Lilo oddly and then shrugged as if to say,
So what else is new? She sleeps with a toilet for a pillow.
But it was in that moment that Lilo knew deep in her gut that Unku was gone. Gone for good.

“She’s gone,” Lilo said in a low voice when she arrived on the set an hour later. Django looked up from the guitar he was tuning. Confusion swept across his face, and then his eyes, already dark, became absolutely black.

“Unku?”

She nodded.

Django did not say “Are you sure?” or “How do you know?” Instead he turned his head toward Franz, who sat in a chair, looking straight down toward the floor. It was a posture of total defeat.

“Do you think he knows where she has gone?” Lilo asked.

“Don’t you dare ask him. Don’t go near him.” Django grabbed her elbow and dug in his fingers. “If she”— he nodded toward Leni’s dressing room, where she was speaking to the wardrobe mistress —“in any way connects you with Unku or him, you’re finished. Don’t say a word — promise me.” He then concluded with an old Romani proverb:
“Makh ci hurjal ande muj phanglo.”
A fly won’t fly into a mouth that is shut. “In other words, keep it shut!”

He almost spat the words out. Lilo rolled her eyes, and Django reached out and touched her shoulder lightly. “Try not to worry too much.
So ci del o bers, del caso.
” It was another old saying: What a year may not bring an hour might. Tears sprang to her eyes. He put his arm around her and crunched her to his chest. “It’s all right,” he said soothingly. “I mean, I know it’s not all right, but I can’t stand to see you so sad. I think it could be all right. It might not be so bad as you think.”

Django was trying to give her hope. Hope! She was so confused at this moment. Her feelings for Django welled up within her. Would he speak of hope to everyone as he did to her in this moment? If he had room in his heart to hope for her . . . She could not complete the thought. But was there really any reason she should hope for anything and last of all love? Should any of these film slaves hope? They were all abandoned, and yet it was virtually impossible to kill hope. Did she not look around twenty times every hour hoping to see Unku?

She waited for Tante Leni to appear. But so far she had not come. They were told that they would be reshooting some scenes from the previous week. While Lilo was in makeup having her feet made to look dirtier, a new extra was brought over. She could see immediately that the girl was tall. Tall like Unku. Tall and quite ugly and wearing the same rags Unku had worn. That put the seal on Unku’s fate. Lilo knew that there was a term for such prisoners who simply vanished.
Nacht und Neblen.
Night and Fog. It was into this night and fog that prisoners simply dissolved — untraceable, never to be seen or heard from again. Their deaths never confirmed, these people were condemned to wander forever through this netherworld, this purgatory of nonexistence that was neither death nor life.

A chair toppled over backward, and out of the corner of her eye, Lilo saw Franz jump up and storm off the set. But people barely took notice. Bella, who was now smearing the sludge in Lilo’s hair to make it look dirty and tangled, made only a tsking sound. “Stupid boy,” she muttered. “He wants to go to the front, I believe. He should think of his poor mama.”

So they all know!
Lilo thought.