The Extra (23 page)

There possibly could be occasion for hope as the German invasion into the Soviet Union had not gone as well as expected. The Red Army had repelled the
Wehrmacht
’s fiercest blow. Nevertheless, she blamed the scarf for making her think more and more about being outside.

The sewing still occupied her, but as winter turned to spring and the days grew longer until it was summer again, Lilo began to brood. When Marta came back one day toward the end of June, she found her sitting holding a needle but absolutely still.

“Lilo. Lilo, are you all right?”

She felt frozen, as if she had suffered some sort of seizure or stroke.

“What is the date?” Lilo asked.

“The date?”

Lilo nodded.

“June 21, 1942.”

“It was a year ago that I ran away. It is the longest day of the year.” She looked toward the window, which was partway open. There was a pale golden light outside, and the gauzy curtains blew freely.

Marta followed her gaze. “Lilo,” she said softly, “it’s time for you to go out.”

Lilo gasped. “You mean it?”

“I mean it. You’ve read every book I own, and you can’t sit here sewing forever. We’ll hide you now under the cover of daylight.”

Under the cover of daylight? Is this possible?
Lilo was skeptical.

“From now on you are . . . are . . . Christa. Yes, Christa. You are my cousin from Vienna. You were orphaned. Your father died on the front. Your mother of cancer. I am taking you in, as you have no other relatives. You’ll work in the shop with me. You see, the Reich has ordered that we send traveling tours to the front of occupied territories. We have one in Norway, two in Poland, and they are preparing a tour to Russia and Romania. We’re down to a skeleton crew here at the home theater. We need people. And I certainly know you can sew. I’m going to take you to the marionette theater. You’ll blend in with everyone, everything. You’ll become part of the landscape — the scenery.”

“But look at me. I’m dark like a Gypsy.”

“You’re not so dark, and your hair — well, I can fix that.”

“How?” Lilo asked.

“We’ll bleach it. I’m going out right now to get the stuff. And I’m going to buy you a dress.”

An hour later, Lilo sat on a stool in the tiny bathroom while Marta applied the bleach to her hair.

“This brush works great, better than the one that came with the bleach. We can get to your roots with this.”

My roots,
Lilo thought. The word had a strange resonance that had nothing to do with bleaching her hair. Perhaps a shadow crossed Lilo’s eye, or her expression changed ever so slightly, but Marta’s hand stopped midstroke as if she sensed she had touched a nerve, veered too close. Their eyes met in the mirrored reflection.

“I used to sit like this in the makeup chair for the movie. Bella was her name.” This was not what Marta had expected to hear.

“Bella?”

“Bella was the makeup artist. She was good.”

“Did she make you pretty?” Marta asked in a hesitant voice. In all the time, almost a year, since Lilo had arrived, she had never really spoken much about her experience in the Gypsy camp or her work on the film for Leni Reifenstahl.

Lilo laughed harshly. “Are you kidding? We were dirty street urchins. They smeared dirt on us. Put sticky stuff in our hair and pulled it into tangles.” Then she thought about Unku’s bald spot, and tears began to run down her face. Her body heaved. It was as if a dam had broken. She slumped over in the chair and sobbed.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry! You can’t get the bleach in your eye. It will sting like hell. Please, Lilo — Christa . . . don’t cry.”

Lilo looked up. It was in that moment that she decided to tell Marta about Django.

“I had a friend,” she began tentatively. “His name was . . . is . . . Django.”

Django! It was the first time she had actually said his name out loud in over a year. It hung in the air like a chime in the twilight. It glimmered like the first star of the evening. “Django,” she said again.

T
he limp figures dangled in the dimness of the workshop from suspended ceiling racks. They turned slowly in the scattered shafts of light as if in a silent dance with the circulating dust motes. It was a mournful dance, for their heads were dropped forward on their narrow chests. Many were not costumed. They appeared skeletal despite the muslin batting on the frames of their jointed stick bodies. Marta snapped on the overhead lights.

Lilo inhaled sharply. If the movie set of
Tiefland
was strange, this world was even weirder. The “actors,” the puppets, with their faces frozen into expressions of mystifying neutrality, were like specters that rose to haunt the world of the living. Lilo felt the skin prickle on the back of her neck. She had goose bumps despite her long sleeves and the warmth of the workshop. Her urge was to run. But she couldn’t. Marta had been so kind. Bruno, Frank, Dieter — they had all risked their lives for her. And outside, the streets were crawling with Gestapo. But inside did not feel safe, not as safe as the flat. There was something profoundly disturbing about the limp figures that evoked notions of mortality, intimations of death. And death, she knew, could be very patient.

“Why do they all have the same expression?” Lilo asked, staring at the serenely bland face of a female puppet. They seemed to have slightly more character than the blank dummy she had worked on when sewing costumes but not much.

“Oh, they aren’t all the same. Look at this one,” Marta said, unhooking one who had a scowling grimace. “She’s the evil witch in the Rapunzel story. There are basically two expressions that we carve. Good and grimace, we sometimes say. That’s Rapunzel,” she said, pointing at the bland-faced puppet. “And here, the Witch. We basically have one kind of good face but a few more grimaces — since evil can be cruel, or conniving, or scowling. There are slight differences in how the mouth is carved and the eyebrows. We usually have the eyebrows almost meet for a scowl and carve deep lines between the eyes.” Marta continued to speak for another minute or two, indicating the many faces of evil.
But does she know,
Lilo thought,
that the face of evil can be bland as well? Bland and so very beautiful.

“The real expression,” Marta continued, “does not come from the face but from how the strings are worked. You have to get the feeling in your fingers. In truth, you only have movement to work with for the best expressions. You have to coax the movements of living human beings from these wooden figures. But now to work. I wanted to get here early so that by the time Uta and the shop director arrive, you will already be sitting at the sewing machine.”

“But what will they think? I mean, Marta, they don’t know if I’m any good at this.”

“Never mind. They are desperate for help. We are down to so few people now. So many men at the front, including Herr Professor Aicher.”

“Who is that?”

“Hermann Aicher, the founder of the theater. The master carver. Look, Li — I mean Christa. Normally we have twelve puppeteers. We’re down to seven. They have even drafted me to work on the platform. Of course, I do the easiest puppets, which don’t require much activity. But since I made them, I am familiar with how they move.”

She grabbed a puppet from a wire and took Lilo to the tailor’s room, which was just off the room for joinery and metal work. “This is Donna Anna.” She held up the puppet. “She’s from the opera
Don Giovanni.
Her costume’s a mess. It needs to be completely redone, but you have to start with the petticoats.”

“The lace on the sleeves is terrible,” Lilo said.

Marta’s face brightened. “Usually I would advise to begin with the petticoats. But no one has been skilled enough to repair the lace.” She dropped her voice. “You are! Remember what you did with the Queen of the Night?” She looked cautiously over her shoulder. “Frau Uta will be so pleased. So why don’t you begin with the sleeves? Do you think you can do it?”

“Yes. I’ll have to tat it. I doubt you have a lace maker’s pillow or bobbins.”

“No, we don’t.”

“It’s okay. Tatting will work fine,” Lilo said, squinting at the lace trim.

Lilo began to work, and soon she heard people arriving in other parts of the workshop. She had just removed the sleeve and begun the tatting with the smallest embroidery needle she could find when some other women entered the tailor’s room.

“I want you all to meet my cousin Christa,” she heard Marta say. “Come on, Uta, and you, too, Ina.”

Lilo looked up and smiled. She was suddenly very nervous. Would they be able to tell that her hair had been bleached, as well as her eyebrows? She wore the dirndl that Marta had bought for her. But would they think
Gypsy
as soon as they looked at her?

“Hello,” she said softly.

“Ah, look, she’s repairing the lace sleeve of Donna Anna!” the woman named Uta exclaimed. “How beautiful. Where did you learn how to tat like this?”

She was about to say from her mother, a lace maker, but she realized that she might be giving up too much information. For all she knew, when they were in the camps, they had noted down her mother’s profession. “Oh, I just did. I loved sewing for my dolls.”

“Well, then, you are in the perfect place.” Uta smiled and gave her shoulder a pat. “I hope you will be happy here. We cannot pay you anything, as I explained to Marta. But we do need all the hands and fingers we can get!” She lifted her own hands and waggled her fingers.

It was midday when the puppeteers arrived for the rehearsal of that evening’s performance of Mozart’s opera
The Magic Flute.
They were the stars, and it was immediately apparent that the star of stars was Sepp Lang. He was extremely handsome and apparently was older than he appeared — he walked with a slight limp, which Marta had earlier explained was due to an injury he had suffered in 1918, toward the end of the Great War. It was hard for Lilo to believe that he was more than forty years old.

“He must have been very young in that war,” Lilo whispered as she watched the rehearsal later that afternoon.

“A lot of young boys enlisted, especially toward the end, though they were barely old enough. I think he was fifteen or sixteen at the most. He actually lost his leg. And part of the other.”

“He has wooden legs now? But he really hardly limps at all,” Lilo said.

“Yes, they say that’s why he understands the movements of the marionettes.” She paused. “He is one in a sense. His left leg he lost entirely. His right leg from the knee down. But he’s very musical. You have to be musical to be a master puppeteer.”

Marta and Lilo sat in a middle row of the theater, which was empty for the most part, except for the director, who sat in the front row, and Uta, who had placed herself in the very back to monitor the sound level of the recorded music.

Under the proscenium arch of the theater perched the miniature stage. It was difficult for Lilo to judge its actual dimensions. Was it ten feet wide or fifteen, and perhaps half as tall as it was wide? Then just barely above the arch but invisible from her seat was the balustrade or balcony from which the puppeteers operated the marionettes. Right now the puppeteers were visible as the curtain hiding them had not yet been drawn.

“To stage right, please!” Uta called out to Elbetta, who was operating the puppet of Papageno, the bird catcher in the opera. After a few more adjustments, the house lights were dimmed. The curtain concealing the puppeteers was drawn shut, and the music of the overture rose. Lilo blinked in disbelief. Within seconds the world in the theater had changed. The puppets, which moments before had seemed so tiny, suddenly appeared life-size. The stage seemed immense. Size and dimensions had been turned inside out. Lilo felt almost dizzy as a mystical landscape loomed up and a desperate prince, Tamino, raced through the swirling blue mists.

Then from stage right a gilded serpent slithered from the wings and began its pursuit of Tamino. Lilo was riveted. Next the Queen of the Night arrived. The costume she had sewn months before possessed a shimmering darkness. Lilo felt Marta reach out and squeeze her hand. The queen’s strings were operated by Anna, one of the artists in the sculpture department. The movement was beautiful — free of gravity, or so it seemed. Lilo loved the way the lace that trimmed the neckline seemed to drift around her shoulders when she moved. The marionettes had a fluid grace and appeared to float even when their feet tapped drily on the stage floor in the quieter sections of the music. Lilo quickly forgot about the mouths that never opened or shut with speech, because their movements were so expressive, so exquisitely delicate, that no facial gestures were needed. The face that she had previously thought of as bland acquired a sudden emotional intensity.

How did this happen? It was as if she had entered a place where none of the known laws of the physical world applied.
EAT ME, DRINK ME
— the words from
Alice in Wonderland
came back to her as she recalled the magical liquid that Alice had consumed so she could fit through the small door at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Alice then ate the cake that stretched her to an insane height. All the proportions of the world as Lilo knew them were turned inside out. The puppets loomed immense, and she felt minuscule in her seat.