by Jane Thynne
“I’d say, ‘Dad, what are you doing missing the biggest political story of the century?’ ”
“Seriously?”
“Not really. I’d tell him I miss him, I suppose. The usual platitudes. That’s the problem with words—there are never enough of them to express the important things.”
“So how did you end up here, in Paris?”
He stretched his arms behind his head.
“Three years ago, back in London, there was a rally at Olympia for Mosley’s Blackshirts. It was a huge event—there were twelve thousand men and two thousand stewards, but they weren’t letting the press in, so I got myself attached to the staff of a film projectionist. I put on a white coat and posed as a technician. Which turned out to be a wise move because when heckling broke out, those men they believed to be journalists got beaten up pretty badly with knuckle-dusters and razors. Precisely two weeks later Hitler wiped out the top ranks of the SA. To me, the parallels couldn’t have been plainer. Fascism was going from strength to strength. I went into the office that day, met with the editor, and asked to be sent to the continent.”
“And he said yes? Just like that?”
A gruff laugh. “Unfortunately not. I had to freelance for an eternity, doing anything and everything before they let me run the Paris Bureau.”
Comprehension was dawning uncomfortably. “So when Henry Franklin took me on straightaway and sent me out here, what did you make of me?”
He was staring at her mouth, studying the curve of her lips, before leaning in to savor the imprint of them on his own.
“Do you have to ask so many questions?” he murmured.
“I’m a journalist, remember?”
“All right. I thought you were privileged and ignorant.”
“Just that?”
“I liked the fact that you were spiky. I admired your indignation.”
“Now you tell me.”
“And I could see you were beautiful, of course. And a good writer.”
“Even if I used too many adjectives…”
“There are some adjectives I can never get enough of.”
“Which ones?”
“Clever. Heart-stoppingly lovely. Adorable. Breast.”
He bent to kiss one, in demonstration.
“Breast is a noun.”
“Now who’s nit-picking?” His voice was thick with amusement and desire. “I like your writing. Very much. Though sometimes I think I’d rather know more about you and less about Balenciaga’s silk tea gowns in the spring collection.”
“So you were paying attention.”
“I pay attention to everything you write.”
He reached again to his jacket pocket and brought out a clementine. Unsheathing the skin with one hand and taking a segment between his teeth, he passed it into her mouth. The juice slid over her tongue, sharply sweet.
“I could recite those fashion notes you do from memory. Like poetry. Want to test me? Schiaparelli’s quirky images, like the lobster on her dress, or the buttons shaped like ornamental crickets, are the ultimate Surrealist declaration. Luxury meets oddity, and it’s meant to surprise.”
“All right, I believe you.”
“Not only that. I know that Chanel’s fluid jersey designs express femininity through liberation and her jackets offer ladies a freedom that has, until now, only been seen in menswear. I can also tell you that spring’s keynote is individuality and the most fashionable hat is boat shaped, with its brim rolled tightly on either side of the crown.”
“Stop!”
They were both laughing. Now seemed as good a time as any to broach the matter that had caused a quarrel between them.
“Can I ask you something? The other day, when you met that man…?”
At that moment there was a wailing from the next room and a rap on the door. Cordelia drew the sheet up to cover herself and whispered, “Ignore it.”
The door opened anyhow and a girl entered, entirely unperturbed by the sight of the two of them naked in bed, shrouding themselves with linen. That was, after all, normal for the Hotel Britannia.
“Mademoiselle Cordelia…?”
It was Violette, one of the residents, with a wheedling tone.
“Would you help me…pour cinq minutes?”
“Actually, Violette, I’m…”
But the girl was gone, only to return in an instant, plumping a baby into Cordelia’s arms. He was heavy and dampish, smelling of urine. His hands were clenched in fists, as though already squaring up for the fight that his life would prove, and black hair was feathered on his forehead.
“Just guard him, plees. Merci!”
She vanished, before Cordelia could properly protest.
The baby’s eyes were following her, exploring her face. She had never held a baby before in her life, and her arms stiffened with the unfamiliar weight, but the child himself was unperturbed at being transferred to a stranger. His small limbs stirred in his tattered swaddling and he flexed one plump, starfish hand.
“Poor little thing,” she said, faintly appalled. “What a terrible time to be born.”
“Don’t say that,” said Torin, taking the child from her and cradling him in his arms. “A child is a gift. Any time’s a good time to be born.”
Chapter Nineteen
The Scheunenviertel was not an area that Irene had any occasion to visit. Indeed, compared to the environment of plush villas, hotels, and clubs that the Weissmullers inhabited, it might have been a parallel universe. It lay to the north of Mitte, a working-class district that had grown up in the nineteenth century to house the tides of Jewish refugees flowing into Berlin from Russia, and it had developed into the center of a bustling textile trade. Tailoring shops, purveying the minutiae of buttons and fasteners and buckles and thread, were bisected by passageways allowing glimpses of cupboard-size rooms where women stitched great bolts of fabric and others applied steam irons to finished stretches of cloth. At street level you could peer through the greasy windows of Konditoreien to see greenish visages drinking coffee or smoking. Faces suffused with generations of accumulated suffering disappeared into a labyrinth of tall tenements clustered in honeycomb fashion around dank Hinterhöfe, where the sun rarely penetrated and garbage cans vied for room with bicycles and baby carriages. Centuries of poverty had washed up here, been dumped and discarded, and in their wake left far too many people in a space too small for them.
The S-Bahn was crowded, the passengers’ clothes steaming from earlier rain, exuding a stink of unwashed bodies and nicotine. Although Scheunenviertel was not far from the center of the city, even the people seemed different here—harsher, poorer, their clothes more shabby and their manners rough. When a skinny young man gave his seat up for an older woman, she greeted it with a look of disdain.
“Why would I want to sit where a Jew’s been sitting?”
Irene came out of the station at Hackescher Markt and walked quickly to the address she had been given in Alte Schönhauser Strasse. Some of the houses here had doors with paper seals affixed to them, and she recognized with a shock what she had only previously heard—that police closed up the homes of departed Jews so the furniture and other contents could be sold at auction by the state. As if to confirm it, a scrawl of black paint, announcing that Jews were the misfortune of the people, was daubed along the length of one wall.
She crossed the street. A cat with one ear skittered away.
Another movement caught her eye and she became aware of a man just behind her. He was wearing a suit, a fedora, and a black leather overcoat, and like everyone else on the rain-washed sidewalk, kept his eyes fixed on the treacherous cobbles in front of him. He was carrying a briefcase, and as she slowed, he overtook her and turned in to the doorway of the same block she was heading for. There was no reason on earth to suspect he was anything other than a busines
sman or a resident, or someone paying a visit to a relative or friend. Yet something about the way the man walked—his measured nonchalant stride—made Irene’s heart quicken.
The block itself was shabby; paint the color of dried blood flaked off the plaster, and the arched wooden door was cracked and daubed with graffiti. The hall stank of mildew and bleach. The light in the stairwell was broken, so she groped her way up with a hand on the cast-iron banister, but there was no sign of the man in the fedora. Her jitters were misplaced. He was almost certainly a resident, as eager to get home and out of the cold as she was.
She was on the third floor before she saw him. Lolling against the wall, lighting a cigarette, eyes fixed on the door to apartment three. In that fraction of a second, Irene’s feet continued moving automatically and she brushed past him, crossing his line of sight but avoiding eye contact, rounding the corner and carrying on up to another floor. Her footsteps rang in the stairwell, until she stopped and knocked on a random door loudly, understanding instinctively that a soft knock would be more suspicious.
A clatter of heels sounded on a wooden floor and a curious face peered out.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry….I feel a little faint. Could you spare a glass of water?”
An elderly woman, iron hair restrained in a severe bun, ushered her in and asked, “Are you local here?”
“I have friends. Downstairs. Apartment three.”
The woman nodded. She understood. She went into the kitchen and filled a glass.
“Wait for a while. Until you get your breath back.”
Irene sat down in the overfurnished room, stuffed with frilled furniture and photographs of yellowing relatives with Kaiser-style mustaches. The mandatory picture of Hitler, complexion feverishly rouged by cheap reproduction, glowered above the mantel. A dog barked somewhere, and there was the pervasive odor of cooking fat and carbolic. The older woman picked up her knitting, and carried on as though Irene was not there.
After a few moments, the bang of the street door was followed by the sound of receding footsteps, and the old woman peered round a gap in the curtains.
“I think their caller has gone.”
“Thank you.”
Irene rose to leave. But the old woman caught her elbow and brought her wizened face up close. Her breath issued in a hiss.
“I help because he’s a nice young fellow, but tell him from me it would be better for him to leave. They cause us so many problems. It’s difficult for us, you know?”
Irene descended the steps cautiously, peering down through the iron banisters to the vacant hallway below, before knocking at apartment three. Almost immediately, the door was thrown open with an extravagant gesture and Irene was beckoned inside.
Oskar Blum looked like someone’s idea of what an artist should look like—coarse black hair the texture of horsehair, worn slightly longer than the custom, and a slightly too fleshy nose. Yet he was also instantly recognizable as Lili’s brother, with the same dark eyes beneath heavy brows, though in his case they were not anxious but glinting with suppressed merriment.
“Frau Doktor Weissmuller. My sister told me you would be visiting.”
He gave a brilliant smile and a little mock bow.
“I arrived a while ago actually. There was a man outside.”
The smile scarcely faded. “You didn’t speak to him?”
“I went to your neighbor upstairs.” She moved closer, as if the man outside might still be lingering. “Who was he? A policeman?”
He shut the door behind her. “Almost certainly. They’ve been watching me for months. They don’t even bother to hide it.”
“Since you were arrested?”
“Before that. They already had a file on me. They had found my telephone number on a banknote belonging to a Communist they detained. The chap was recommending me as a carpenter—I turn my hand to anything, shelves, lock repairs, wardrobes, name it—but he’s in a camp now and luckily I’m not, though they did their damndest.”
“Lili didn’t tell me that.”
“Lili didn’t know.”
“So why are you telling me?”
“Because I trust you.”
She shook her head. “Then what your sister says is true. You’re your own worst enemy.”
“Not while Adolf Hitler is alive.”
Irene laughed. She couldn’t help herself. Oskar Blum seemed able to make a joke out of even the most serious matter. It was as though his status as an artist meant that the strictures that had befallen the Jews of Germany simply did not apply to him.
Reaching into her bag, she removed a thick envelope. Inside were 250 Reichsmarks, secured with a rubber band. “I brought the money. So you can pay your fine.”
“Thank you.”
Oskar accepted it quite naturally, as though it was not an absurdly generous amount, and tucked it into his breast pocket. Irene admired his confidence, even though she realized it was foolhardy, and though he plainly had not a pfennig to spare, judging by the room. It must once have been a grand apartment, with ceilings as high as those of a railway station and molded roses on the cornices. But now the sun struggled in through smeared windows, only to die on the drab brown painted walls. It had a bed to one side, covered with clothes, bare floorboards splintered at the edges, and freezing drafts issuing through the gaps. In one corner stood a gas heater with cracked elements, and on the opposite side a sheet was rigged up to provide a compartment of privacy. Though she had never seen a place like it, there was one intensely familiar element. The air was infused with the mingled aroma of lacquer and turpentine and crusted tubes of paint in shades of indigo, ocher, violet, lime, cobalt, and rose lay scattered on the floor. Stacked in a corner were canvases, the uppermost one a tender image of a woman, her face turning away from the artist, curling wisps of hair around the soft nape of her neck.
“It’s a shame. Ever since I saw that painting Lili gave us, the one of the girl on the stairs, I’ve admired your work. My husband wants a portrait of me and you would have been my choice to paint it.”
“Why’s that a shame? I would have thought it was damn good news. You want a portrait. I want work.”
“But…” She was flustered, not wanting to repeat what Robert Ley had told her, yet seeing she had no choice. “I met a man the other day who’s organizing a purge of degenerate artists in the Reich’s museums. He said painters of Jewish origin are forbidden to work. And you’re of Jewish origin, aren’t you?”
Oskar roared with laughter, as though she had made some delightful joke.
“Not merely origin. I’m Jewish through and through. Cut me to the heart and you’ll find the Jew in me, like the bratwurst in a bun.”
“So you can’t work.”
“Not professionally. Strictly, not even for pleasure. I heard that the Gestapo check the homes of artists to see if their paintbrushes are wet.”
“Surely you can’t risk it, then?”
“I’ll risk painting you if you’ll risk being painted.”
“Oh, Ernst would never have it. He’s a Party member. Dealings with Jews are, well, you know, prohibited.”
“I have an idea.”
The young man thought for a while before coming to a conclusion. “Normally, I would never allow a work of mine to go unsigned, but perhaps, just this once, I would leave off my signature.”
Just this once? The bravado of the man astonished her. As though an entire leisurely career of professional painting and awards awaited him. As though he was not imprisoned in a gloomy one-room apartment with a Gestapo watcher outside and the only thing he was likely to be awarded was ten years in a labor camp.
“How long would it take?” she heard herself asking.
“I think”—he folded his arms and narrowed his eyes at her—“I can do it faster if I sketch you first.”
“If you go over there. It won’t take long.”
He gestured to an ancient, moth-eaten armchair, arranged in the window so that it was bathed in a stream of pure morning light. After a second’s hesitation, Irene sat and fixed her gaze straight ahead. Outwardly, at least, she would be the image of serenity. She was used to the way that her beauty, like a sun-dazzled lake, deflected any real scrutiny. Generally people saw no further than the symmetry of her features and the gleam of her corn-colored hair, so there was little risk that this artist would peer past the limpid eyes into the turmoil within.
Yet no sooner had she sat down than Oskar drew her up and arranged her standing, one arm leaning on the chair, chin tilted up, head back, looking directly, almost defiantly, toward him.
“Sitting’s too passive. You’re not a passive person. This suits you better.”
Five minutes later he signaled for her to relax and she crossed the room to see what he had drawn. As soon as she did, she understood the confidence that shone from him, the natural assumption that anything he produced would be of high value.
He had sketched her face, over and over with swift bold pencil strokes that captured the bend of her neck, and the way her breasts swelled beneath her dress, her figure turning in at the waist before flaring out the hip. The lines seemed possessed of a kinetic movement that gave the sketch an energy of its own, yet also somehow suggested what lay beneath, the structure of the bones and the complication of muscle and tendon. Irene thought of all the years she had spent at the Slade School in Gower Street, with the voice of Henry Tonks, the assistant professor of drawing, sounding over her shoulder. Your paper is crooked, your pencil is blunt, you are sitting in your own light. In five minutes Oskar Blum had produced something more alive than anything she had drawn in five years.