The Extra (19 page)

L
ilo was dragged into the daylight by a voice outside her tent. It was one of the guards. “You are to report immediately to makeup, horse girl.”

They were preparing to shoot another riding scene. The new double they had hired in Babelsberg to stand in for Peter Jacob doubled now for Pedro as well. For the mountain idyll, Pedro and Martha were to gallop across the landscape. Of course it made no sense for Pedro to have a horse. He’s a poor shepherd after all. “Shepherds go on foot. They’re not cowboys,” Django pointed out.

But this was yet another fiction upon a fiction. The
matroyshka
doll was growing fatter and fatter with the fantasies dreamed up by Leni.

Lilo sat in the chair and stared into the mirror. The process to make her a double took longer than the makeup for when she played a street urchin. Although there was never a close-up of her face, they first slathered on the pancake base to lighten her skin to a shade closer to that of Leni’s, whose skin they had to darken to make her look Spanish. But not too dark. Nazis did not like their idols too dark. Beneath there always had to be just a hint of the super-race. The Aryan.

“This wig,” Bella was saying as she fixed it on Lilo’s hair. “I have to make it tighter so it won’t slip off. They want you to gallop today. It would look pretty funny if suddenly your hair went flying!” Bella giggled. Lilo remained silent. Bella cocked her head and looked at Lilo in the mirror. “What’s wrong,
Kleine Püppchen
?”

Little Poppet, she calls me!
It was a common enough term of endearment that an elder might call a young child, and sometimes these terms hung on into adolescence, the way her mother persisted in calling her
Little Mouse.
But she and Bella had no history as a mother and child had. And yet she had used these terms on more than one occasion. Why? Lilo wondered. Just habit? She was not, after all, an endearing child. She was part of a hated race. She was a Gypsy. A prisoner. A film slave.

Lilo wondered why she was suddenly thinking so much about words. Words had become as meaningless as the movie set, where nothing was real. Maybe language was the first thing Hitler had slaughtered. And then the rest just followed. The Bible said that “in the beginning there was the Word . . . and the Word was God.” But now, in the end, there were no words, at least not real words. And there was no God, just Hitler and his tin-pot goddess Leni Riefenstahl.

“You’ve worked on all her movies, haven’t you, Bella?” Lilo asked.

“All Fräulein Riefenstahl’s?” she asked Lilo’s reflection in the mirror, since that is how they conversed in makeup — it was their reflections that did the talking.

“Yes.” Lilo’s reflection nodded.

“Not all. Most. She likes me. I know her face.”

This of course begged a question that Lilo could not ask.
Do you know what is behind that face? Because I do.
Instead she simply said. “You like her?”

“I love her. She is, as Hitler has said, the perfect German woman.”

“He said that?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s been quoted many times saying that.” She nodded at Lilo in the mirror.

“Are they having an affair?”

Bella turned down the corners of her mouth and raised her eyebrows, then shrugged as if to say, “Who’s to know?” but instead said, “Let me tell you something,
Schätzchen,
I don’t gossip. That’s why I get where I do in this business.” She reached toward a table with an assortment of earrings. “Let’s see which ones for this scene. I think Fräulein said the big hoop ones with the little beads dropping from them. Yes. I’m sure those are the ones.”

She fixed them to Lilo’s ears. She suddenly looked more like a Gypsy than she ever had in her life. Not a prim Sinti girl but a wild Roma tart. Her mother would have fits if she ever went out like this. Bella reapplied the deep red lipstick. Since it was a black-and-white film, her lips wouldn’t look red but black like the drops of blood from the raw meat Eduard had carried. Like the blood that had gushed from his chest.

“There you are, my pet!” Bella exclaimed, and they both stared into the mirror at her reflection. Bella was delighted with her handiwork.

“What did they do with Eduard?” Lilo asked suddenly. The reflection looked stumped.

“Who’s Eduard?”

“The Gypsy who was killed yesterday.”

“Oh, him. I don’t know. But I know what they did with the wolf.”

“What?” The earrings trembled in the mirror.

“Skinned him. He’ll make a nice muff for someone.”

The horse she rode was a sturdy mountain creature from the village of Sarentino. The double for Franz, a fellow named Egon, was a fairly good rider. He and Lilo were supposed to ride across the crest of the hill. They were to begin with a slow trot and then spur the horses on to a gallop. “When you reach the crest, race the clouds!” Leni shouted, throwing back her head. “You are free. The essence of freedom. I want the Gypsy’s hair to stream out behind her, unfurling in the wind. You are the wind. You are the pureness of the mountain air.
Free, free, free.
”

Lilo closed her eyes.
I am a captive in an endless nightmare. Behind me is a maniacal woman screaming about freedom.
What would happen, what might really happen, if she did simply ride off? How fast could she get this horse to go? Could she pretend he was running away with her? This could be her chance, her one chance. However, there were the little pistols — the ones with brains, the most balanced pistols in the world that always find their target. But it would hurt only for a second, and then she would slip from her body.
Let them skin me. But I would be free.

She and Egon were riding up through the meadow toward the crest of the hill. A breeze ruffled the grass through which they were riding. “So, Gypsy girl,” Egon said. “You ride a lot. Was it a caravan horse you rode?”

“My family didn’t have a caravan. We lived in a flat in Vienna.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. But maybe we shouldn’t talk.”

“Why not? They are getting pan shots. We are supposed to look like we are chatting — not just chatting, in love.” He leaned over toward her as if to kiss her cheek. A wave of something garlicky radiated from him.

“Look, let’s just ride and pretend we’re talking.” She would have loved to tell him he stank, but instead she was trying to concentrate on this amazing possibility of escape. Sarentino, she knew, was down the slope and to the right. It was the closest village. But it would be such an obvious place to go first. She had no idea of the geography of the region and what else was around. In the distance to the south and east, however, she could see a band of trees. A forest. Through the forest and then what? She tried to picture the map of Italy. Maybe she could ride this horse all the way down the boot of Italy to the coast and then across the sea to Greece. The Germans hadn’t gotten to Greece yet. They had tried six months or so before, but the Greeks had pushed them back.

Lilo was suddenly back in the classroom at the Franz Joseph School on Hartigasse in Vienna. Frau Hoffritz was pulling down the map of Europe. She could, in her mind’s eye, see the heel of the boot of Italy sticking down into the Adriatic Sea — just a hop, skip, and a jump to Greece. They had learned about ancient Greece, not just the gods and goddesses, not simply the mythology, but Greece as the cradle of democracy — that is what Frau Hoffritz called it. It seemed impossible that fifteen months ago, Lilo had been sitting in Frau Hoffritz’s class. She taught them about the playwright Aeschylus, the philosophers Aristotle and Socrates, the historian Herodotus, the scientist Archimedes.

Frau Hoffritz said that not only was Greece the cradle of democracy but that the Greeks invented the idea of human freedoms. “‘Be convinced,’” Frau Hoffritz said quoting the Greek historian Thucydides, “‘that to be happy means to be free, and that to be free means to be brave.’”
I am bound for Athens!
Lilo dug her heels into the flanks of the horse.
To be free! What a noble thing!

“Hey, Gypsy girl, you ride too fast!” Lilo had given the horse his head and was streaking across the crest of the hill. In the distance she could see a deep-green valley and the sky pouring into it, offering up a cup of blue. She looked back and saw Egon waving for her to slow down. The camera truck below was honking. She had ridden out of the frame! Yes, out of the frame! She could discard her body like a piece of clothing but not her freedom.
I am happy. I am free. I am brave even if I must die, but . . .

She suddenly reined in the horse. She could not go on. The thought tore into her with all the force of that nine-millimeter bullet from the Luger. And like the Luger, it had aligned itself perfectly with its target. The memory of her mother in Krün. Instantly Lilo knew that she was bound to this place, this earth, for as long as her mother lived. As long as she had a breath in her body, Lilo could not leave. She could not ride to Athens. She could not slip from her body as Eduard had, or the wolf. She had to go back. She slowed to a walk and turned the horse back. He had broken a sweat and was panting. Lilo felt nothing. Nothing at all.

That night in her tent, she tried not to think of Athens, or Pericles, of Frau Hoffritz, who might be in a camp herself. She was Jewish. It was too sad to think of all that. Oddly enough the only comforting thoughts she had were of the dead — Eduard and the wolf. And so Lilo dreamed of the things left behind. It was a confusing dream, for sometimes she felt as if she were really awake. A soft rain began to fall during the night. Her tent leaked, and the rain fell on her face. She felt the water, so she told herself she could not be dreaming — or could she? She saw something beside her. It was a woman’s figure, lying quietly, her chest rising and falling.
I know you,
she thought. Or did she hear her own voice saying it out loud? The figure looked so familiar. “Do I know you?” She laughed softly. “You know me, don’t you?” she asked the woman.

But already the figure was beginning to fade. “Don’t go . . . don’t go.” The glow pulsed a bit. “I’m tired, a bit tired,” Lilo said. And the figure slipped away into the darkness. And yet where she had lain, the bedding was rumpled and warm as if the body were still there.

T
he filming had wound down at Sarentino within a week after Lilo had experienced her strange waking dream, and they had headed back to Krün for some final scenes. All she could think about the entire way back was her mother. With each passing mile, she became more agitated. Django sat quietly beside her with his arm around her. Every once in a while, he would squeeze her shoulder.

However, as soon as the bus turned into the farm and pulled up in front of the barn, Lilo knew. She was gone. Her mother was gone. It was as if there was a hole in the air. She didn’t even need to go into the barn. She knew it before she even reached the door of the barn. And as if to confirm what she knew, Johan’s eyes would not meet hers. She was rooted to the ground, to the mud in the barnyard. Chickens clucked around her. One pecked at her big toe, which stuck out of her falling-apart shoes. She was aware of a small figure shooing the chickens away.

Then Django came up.

“What’s wrong with you?” He stuck his head forward in a movement that bore an uncanny likeness to the chicken that had just been pecking at her toe. But then she saw a soft terror fill his eyes. “Lilo . . . Lilo.” There was a hot desperation as he whispered her name.

“She promised, Django. She promised.”

“What? Who promised?”

“Tante Leni! Promised she would not send Mama away.”

“But . . . but . . . uh . . . she might be here. We only just arrived.” He took her hand as if to lead her to the barn, but he couldn’t hide that he knew she was right. And the queer thing was that she suddenly felt terrible for Django. She didn’t understand why. But she did. She felt almost as bad for Django as she did for herself. She realized in that instant that despite his bravado, his swagger, his bluster, beneath all that, there was a naïveté, or possibly — the thought suddenly struck her — he was not naive at all, but it was his caring for her that made him desperate to believe. She wanted him to believe that they could both walk into that barn and find her mother there, or, if not there, by the fence playing with the kitten that the little girl Liesel would bring over to her.