The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

  Which will light our way to victories or burn us to death.

  The opening bars of the Hitler Youth anthem.

  The tune heralded a detachment of boys with cropped hair and jackboots, no doubt in training for the upcoming Nuremberg rally. All passersby turned and made the right-armed Hitlergruss.

  Irene decided she was far enough away to avoid the need to salute. The young woman alongside caught her eye and shared the unspoken calculation. They exchanged a complicit smile.

  * * *

  —

  THE MARCH, HOWEVER, HAD disturbed Irene’s moment of peace. Making her way back to the Ku’damm, where trams clanged and shrilled and the air screeched with klaxons, she started to cross the road and was startled by a heavy hand on her shoulder.

  “Halt!”

  The policeman had a face as florid and sweaty as a ham. His hair was harshly shaved and his neck folded with fat. Beside him, a lunging Alsatian practically strangled itself on its chain.

  “According to road traffic regulations for pedestrians, it is not permitted to cross on the yellow light.”

  “I’m awfully sorry.” In her surprise Irene defaulted to English. “I’m afraid I wasn’t looking…”

  The English was enough.

  “Apologies, meine Frau, it is for your own safety.”

  The policeman hauled the dog away, yet out of the corner of her eye Irene noticed that the young woman who had sat in the park alongside her had also attempted to cross and was now being hustled to one side by another policeman, who was examining her papers minutely, as though they were written in Greek.

  The woman’s face was ashen; she was breathing rapidly and her eyes were darting around. The fat policeman added his assistance by grabbing hold of her sleeve.

  Something was wrong.

  Panicked, or frightened, she tried to drag her arm away from the officer gripping it. As the dog hurled itself forward with a volley of yelps and snarls, the other policeman seized her by the elbow. The two men half lifted, half dragged her, so that her feet were off the ground, in the direction of a police car. Pedestrians, with their bags and their priorities, flowed past without a glance as the harsh accents of command curdled in the air.

  Let me go! There’s been a mistake!

  She and Irene locked eyes for a second, the young woman’s face blanched with terror. Her hair had come down from its bun. Passersby lowered their gaze and edged around as she was bundled into the car.

  Should she intervene? There must have been a mistake, yet no one was taking the slightest notice. How could a person be dragged screaming into a police car on the streets of a civilized city and not even turn heads?

  * * *

  —

  AS SOON AS ERNST got home, Irene rushed into the hall to tell him, but he proceeded to uncork the decanter and pour his evening schnapps, unsurprised.

  “There’s an order out to clean up the city.”

  “They weren’t exactly picking up litter. This was a respectable woman, Ernst. She was reading a novel.”

  He picked up the silver tongs and clinked a couple of ice cubes into his tumbler. “Apparently there’s a need to purify the streets.”

  “From who?”

  “The work shy. They’re rounding up the indigents and asocials.”

  “You’re not listening! This woman was smartly dressed, Ernst. A professional person probably. There was nothing asocial about her.”

  “We can’t know that, darling. The police need to be left to get on with their job. And they’re working overtime because of the visitors.”

  The visitors. So much revolved around the need to showcase Berlin for the games; the flags, the bunting, and the loudspeakers attached to the lampposts broadcasting regular bulletins of sporting news. The soldiers with swastika armbands on the street corners, ready to offer help and advice. But just as important were those things that were not to be seen: the signs in the park, the asocials on the streets, or anything that suggested Germany was not a model nation at the height of its power.

  Increasingly, Irene wondered what it might be like if another war came. She had been only tiny when the Great War ended, but she remembered her mother talking in hushed tones about friends whose sons had been killed. And people taking their hats off when they passed the Cenotaph, and soldiers with shot-away jaws and ugly scars. She recalled a veteran with one leg who played the barrel organ in the market square, accompanied by a monkey dressed in a bellhop’s scarlet uniform, chained by a collar and touting a leather bucket for coins. Oily eyes of infinite sadness stared out of the animal’s wrinkled face, but while Irene shied away from touching him, Cordelia pleaded to stroke the monkey and give him a penny. Their nurse always dragged them quickly away.

  It was futile to think about the future, though. Whatever happened, Irene would be here. She had no choice. On marriage she had become a German citizen and had exchanged her British passport for a dull brown document featuring a morose-looking eagle clutching a swastika. She remembered again her father’s bluff, childlike face. I am a friend to all nations! Just how just friendly would Dad feel if he knew what it was really like?

  Let alone Dee.

  All their lives Irene had been the sister over whose cradle the gifts of beauty and artistic talent had been showered, and while Dee was clever and funny, she was all too apt to get cross at the state of the world and blurt out exactly the wrong thing. She had once been sent home from a child’s party for arguing too vigorously with the birthday boy about cheating in musical chairs.

  Hugo cheated! Irene remembered the balloon-strewn room and the howling birthday boy, his outrage quite at odds with the cold calculation of his seven-year-old eyes. It’s Hugo’s birthday, darling. You don’t have to react to everything. The puce-faced Cordelia, trembling with indignation. I don’t care if it’s his birthday! It’s unfair. In the end, Irene had resorted to grasping her sister’s shoulders and giving them a shake. Look at me! What you are doing is bullying. There are other ways of setting things straight.

  As she lay in bed that night alongside Ernst’s snoring form, Irene replayed the incident on the Ku’damm endlessly, trying to soothe her churning thoughts. Ernst was almost certainly right about the rationale for the arrest. What good would it have done to intervene? She knew nothing of the woman’s personal circumstances, and who was to say whether trying to impede police work might have got her arrested too?

  Yet when she thought what Dee would have done, a fresh anxiety made her stomach clench. When she did visit, discretion was the first thing Cordelia would need to learn.

  Chapter Six

  “Please, God, I never have to dance with a Bavarian again.”

  Martha Dodd flopped down on the banquette next to Irene and let out a sigh heavy enough to sound any of the saxophones in the pit of the dance floor in front of them.

  The daughter of the American ambassador was a vivacious brunette of twenty-four with a heart-shaped face, bottle green eyes, and a feverish energy. She had a wit as dry as a vodka martini, and a way of establishing instant intimacy, as if one had known her for years, though she and Irene had in fact met only a month previously, at a dinner at the Bristol in honor of the American Olympic contingent. Over the past few weeks there had been a swirl of receptions for the games and endless parties at foreign embassies that often ended up at one of the fashionable nightclubs around town—Ciro’s, or the Alt Bayern, the Olympia, or the Femina. That night’s venue, the Atlantis in Behrenstrasse, was a dim and moody place mocked up like a Bavarian marketplace, complete with twinkling lights on the ceiling so that customers could “dance beneath the stars.”

  Martha surveyed the faux Alpine décor mutinously.

  “Dance beneath the stars? This number’s more likely to lull you into a coma. I’ve heard riskier lyrics on a greeting card.”

  Irene shrugged. “Presumably they ha
ve to stick to Joseph Goebbels’s list.”

  The Reich Chamber of Culture had published a comprehensive list of acceptable music that strictly forbade any songs with African, jazz, or swing influences.

  “Ugh, that list.” Martha grimaced. “The disgusting Goebbels claims jazz makes us sexually excited, but how anyone could be aroused by these waxworks, Lord knows. You should have heard the things that man was whispering in my ear. It was about as erotic as the Nuremberg rally.”

  “You could have pretended not to understand.”

  One of the reasons Irene enjoyed Martha’s company was the opportunity to speak English. At home Ernst had ordained that they should speak only German, and although Irene had grown entirely used to it, everything about the language, from its long words stuck together with the nouns bolted on, to the verbs obediently banished to the back of the sentence, seemed to remove something of herself. The grammar tangled her thoughts, fencing them in, and she never lost the sensation that she was playing a part. She missed her mother tongue, especially as she increasingly had no idea when she would see England again.

  “Unfortunately I understood all too well. Though I suppose it’s no surprise when you look at their wives. I’ve seen happier faces on a fishmonger’s slab.”

  Martha cast a puckish glance at her former dance partner, now shuffling a woman in Bavarian costume around the dance floor with all the finesse of a man trying to shift a filing cabinet.

  “God, I wouldn’t be seen dead in a dirndl!”

  As if to illustrate her point, she gave a little wiggle in her low-cut, black satin sheath. She herself was lean as a whippet, her eyes were shadowed with kohl, her cheeks rouged, and her lips painted vivid scarlet, all in joyous defiance of the Nazi disapproval of feminine cosmetics. Martha Dodd’s looks had, according to Ernst, propelled “a telephone book of top men” into bed with her, including Rudolf Diels, former head of the secret police; Ernst Udet, the Luftwaffe flying ace; not to mention a French diplomat, Armand Berard, and more recently, Louis Ferdinand, the Prince of Prussia. Ernst had run through this eclectic list with tight-lipped disdain, and Irene couldn’t help wondering exactly how he knew, but she supposed it was just another example of her husband’s close attention to detail.

  “The men aren’t much better. Look at the outfits on that pair.” She nodded in the direction of two mustachioed officers at a nearby table. “I’ve seen better tailoring above my appendix. No wonder the SS order their uniforms from Hugo Boss.”

  Emboldened by the attention, the men beckoned a waiter and sent over two cocktails. Accepting one, Martha raised her glass with a grin.

  “Bet they’re Bavarians too. Bavarians never feel comfortable more than five feet away from a pair of lederhosen and a brass band. They’re so unsophisticated. Adolf’s the same. I met him, you know. When we first came out here Putzi Hanfstaengl, the foreign press attaché, told me”—Martha adopted the hysterical, declamatory tone of the foreign press chief and pointed with her cigarette—“Hitler needs a woman. She should be an American woman who could change the whole destiny of Europe! You, Martha Dodd, are that woman!”

  Irene put down her cocktail, in case laughter choked her. “And were you that woman?”

  “Certainly not. The most intimate we got was shaking hands. He was about as distinguished as an Italian waiter on his day off. He spent the entire time staring at me.”

  Irene wasn’t surprised. The Führer of all Germany reacted no differently than most men when confronted with the sinuous form of Martha Dodd.

  “But then I wasn’t interested in other men at that time. Even if it was the Führer. Especially if it was him.” Martha took out a lipstick and compact from her clutch and began retracing the soft bow of her lips, rubbing and primping in a way that was likely to ensnare many more admirers before the evening was through.

  “I was in love. Still am.”

  “Who with?”

  Martha gave her a sideways glance, as if wondering whether Irene could be trusted. Then she shrugged.

  “His name is Boris Vinogradov. He was a press attaché at the Soviet embassy. We met in Paris actually, and I’ve been out to Moscow with him, but now he’s been posted to Warsaw and I’m desolate. I’m hoping we can marry someday, but until then, I just spend time with friends.”

  Her flippancy vanished and her green eyes were suddenly pensive and focused. Despite the proximity of the band, which had lurched into a mournful rendition of Max Mensing’s “Blood Red Roses,” she lowered her voice.

  “What friends I have left, that is. Today I heard another pal of mine has been arrested and accused of being a Communist. He’s been taken to Dachau.”

  “Where’s Dachau?”

  “In Bavaria. And it’s not the kind of Bavarian place you’d go for a night out. It’s a KZ. A work camp.”

  Irene frowned. “Like a prison?”

  “Much worse. It’s full of Jews and Communists and asocials. There are terrible reports. They make them eat on all fours, the way dogs eat. Once, when I was in Munich, I heard some kids singing a rhyme. Lieber Gott, mach mich stumm, Dass ich nicht nach Dachau kumm.”

  Dear God, make me dumb, so I won’t to Dachau come.

  Irene shuddered. She had never known anyone who had been to prison, or was even related to a prisoner. She had no idea what incarceration must be like.

  “I’m sure that’s just kids—”

  “They don’t want people to know what it’s like,” Martha interrupted fiercely. “When foreign officials visit, they dress up the guards to pose as prisoners, so they look well fed. They even give out souvenir beer mugs that the wretched prisoners are forced to make.”

  She chewed at her rosebud lips. Her eyes were fixed, her thoughts far away.

  “Besides, even if they release Tom, I don’t know what he’s going to do.”

  “Could he not leave?”

  “They called in his passport a few months ago, and then they told him to leave the country in two weeks, but he couldn’t get out without a passport. When he asked for it, they claimed they had never received it and if he was going to keep saying they had his passport that would be a lie. So they arrested him. I’m trying my damndest to pull some strings.”

  “Surely your father can help.”

  “I begged, but Daddy doesn’t want to intervene because of the Communist allegations.”

  Thinking of Ambassador Dodd, with his mild stockbroker demeanor and all the vigor of a collapsed balloon, Irene was not surprised. “What else can you try?”

  “Nothing really. It’s unbearable.”

  “Why not call the newspapers to take his case up?”

  Martha looked at Irene as if she had suggested telephoning the Reich Chancellery for a chat about justice policy.

  “Do you know what Joseph Goebbels says about the press? He calls it a vast keyboard on which the government can play. German journalists are summoned to a press conference at the Propaganda Ministry every morning and told what they’re going to write. No one disobeys. Last week the People’s Court sentenced a journalist to life in prison just for showing foreigners the reporting guidelines for the Olympics!”

  “But surely those rules don’t apply to the international press?”

  “Have you ever met Bill Shirer? Or Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune? Sigrid’s constantly being interrogated by the Gestapo over what she writes.”

  “Seems you’ve done everything you can then.”

  A savage frown crumpled Martha’s brow. “Do you have to say that, Irene? That’s what they all say. As if we should just stand by and watch it happening. You can laugh at them, but laughter’s not enough. And I’ve tried other ways, more than anyone knows.”

  Irene remained silent. She had no idea what Martha could mean by “other ways,” but she guessed now was not the time to ask. As the band segued into a rendition of “Mitt
ernacht” lugubrious enough to double as a dirge to press freedom, Martha sighed again.

  “You know, when we arrived I used to think that these Nazis were the best way out of the chaos. I loved Germans—they’re not like the French, who get mortally offended if you so much as order a cup of coffee in their own language. Everyone here seemed so welcoming and friendly. And the country had gone through so much I thought the Nazis might be just what was needed. They might be a little brutal and some people might get carried away, but the country required order. I simply had no idea what form that order would take.”

  A diplomat in Foreign Ministry uniform approached, his hand outstretched requesting a dance. Martha smiled brilliantly and rose, before bending down to whisper in Irene’s ear.

  “Did you hear of the Night of the Long Knives? Two years ago, Hitler murdered every one of the top ranks of the storm troopers, including Ernst Röhm, his best friend. That’s all you need to know about him. He may look like an Italian waiter on his day off, but he’s lethal. He’ll take the entire nation down with him if he can.”

  Chapter Seven

  Hotel Britannia,

  Rue Victor Massé,

  Paris

  August 4, 1936

  Dearest Irene,

  You said something would turn up, and you were right! Thanks to your glorious typeXwriter I am now a fully fledged professional newspaper girl on the staff of The Courier! Can you believe it? Even better, I’m in XXParis. You’ll have to forgive the mistakes because from now on I’m going to TYPE all my letters to you. It’s good practice and besides, you gave me this typewriter, so it’s only right you should see it put to good use.

  You’d adore it here. I set aside Xevery Saturday to explore a different area. So far my favorite is the Marais, very historical, but every time I make my way to a museum or church I get seduced by the markets. Compared to Jennie’s cooking, the food here is ambrosia and I’m already fat as butter. You won’t recognize me.