Woman in the Shadows

by Jane Thynne

  Erich’s birthday was coming up soon, and he had asked for a Hitler Jugend knife. He had even given Clara a picture of the one he wanted, torn from a magazine, with BLUT UND EHRE! etched on the blade and an enamel swastika on the black checkered grip plates. He was very precise about these things. Clara sighed. She would much rather give Erich a book than a knife. Children were like that, she supposed. Always wanting unsuitable presents.

  She finished her sandwich and cleaned up. How unpredictable life could be! Five years ago, as a jobbing actress living in London with her father and sister in a tall Georgian house close to the Thames, she could never have imagined that at the age of thirty she would have made a life in Berlin, with an apartment and a contract at the Ufa studios, and a teenage boy to look after. The more conventional path for her life, the path her late mother had passionately hoped for, lay in marriage and motherhood. A safe alliance with the son of one of her father’s political friends and a home in one of the creamy stucco terraces that fanned out like chunks of wedding cake into Kensington and Chelsea. Her children would no sooner grow up than they’d be sent away to school. Her life would be a round of cocktail parties, dinners, theater, and Conservative Party fund-raising events. Deference to a husband who had invested in a set of opinions at boarding school and saw no reason to equip himself with new ones. Respectability, convention, tedium.

  Clara gave an involuntary shudder. It bored her just to think of it.

  Nor could she have imagined that she would discover her own maternal grandmother, Hannah Neumann, was Jewish, a fact that had been concealed throughout her childhood. Or that her father had received funding from the Nazi regime to finance his own pro-Nazi group in England, a cause her sister, Angela, had enthusiastically joined.

  Angela’s letter lay on the desk unopened. Whenever they exchanged letters, Clara stuck to sketchy accounts of her time at Ufa, the parties, the nightlife, her apartment.

  Last week there was a premiere for Love Whispers, and afterwards we all went out to Gustav Fröhlich’s house—he’s just about the most famous star in Germany!

  Clara gave no hint to her sister of the horrors she saw every day. The ugliness on the streets, the arrests of colleagues, the terror that laced the air. Angela reciprocated with fulsome details of her social life. She was seemingly unaware that Clara was not transfixed by the doings of the Belgravia cocktail party set and the Kensington Ladies’ Tennis Club. Right now, Clara decided, Angela’s letter could wait.

  It had been a tiring day. She had been called for filming at nine tomorrow morning, which meant she would need to catch the S-Bahn out to the Babelsberg studios by seven. She was longing for a bath. She ran the water, and as the scented steam rose about her, she unbuttoned her blouse and stepped out of her skirt. Slipping off her underclothes, she stood naked at the heavy porcelain basin, smoothing her hands over her hair. She took out a tin of Nivea cream and began removing her makeup with rhythmic, automatic strokes. With its high, arched brows, strong cheekbones, and straight nose, her face had a neat symmetry that made her photogenic. She examined the fine tracery of lines at the sides of her eyes, the bluish tinge beneath them, and the faint brackets of smile lines. She pursed her mouth, with its pronounced cupid’s bow, and ran her hands down her body with a secret regret that no one else did. Her body was still as slender and smooth as it had been at eighteen. Not that being an actress in Berlin meant starving yourself anymore. Marlene Dietrich–style slenderness had disappeared about the time that Dietrich herself left for Hollywood. All the top actresses now boasted voluptuous curves. But every actress worries how long her screen career can last, and Clara was no exception. She tilted her face left and right, lips slightly apart, the way you did for press photographers, staring critically. Then she leaned forward and spoke.

  “I am a thirty-year-old woman who has no lover or husband, and only another woman’s child. I pose as a friend to the National Socialists, while informing on them for British intelligence. My father admires the Nazis, though my own grandmother was Jewish. No wonder I like going to the studio. Being an actress is the only time that I’m not acting.”

  These thoughts she uttered very quietly. All truths in Berlin nowadays were expressed beneath the breath. Only lies were broadcast at maximum volume.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Ilse Henning had known something was wrong. She had been woken before dawn by the shadows of car headlights swooping over the ceiling of the dormitory and the crunch of hard-soled boots on the gravel drive. Then, at five o’clock, when it was still dark and Fräulein Wolff paraded the length of the corridor with an old cowbell, Ilse reached across to prod the familiar hump of Anna beneath the bedclothes, only to discover empty sheets. Normally Anna was the last to get up, and Ilse often had to cover for her when Fräulein Wolff was on the rampage. Anna was never up and about early. Once Ilse had given her face a perfunctory scrub in the freezing basin, squeezed her plump form into the sweaty serge dress the brides had to wear, tied on her white apron, and braided her hair, there were signs that Anna’s disappearance was not the only unusual thing at the Reich Bride School that day.

  In the dining room, where the brides not on kitchen training awaited their bread and muesli, there was a strict rule of silence. Yet today, along the long benches, the women whispered among themselves. Frieda Müller, collecting the eggs from the chicken roost, had seen men at the bottom of the garden, and they weren’t gardeners. What could that mean? Further omens that things weren’t right came directly after breakfast, when the brides were abruptly informed that the fresh air bath had been canceled. They proceeded to lessons unwashed, agog with speculation. During Cookery there was a talk on thrift and the economic situation, and how to pad out sausage meat with bread crumbs, but Ilse was too worried to concentrate. After a quick break for coffee came Child Care, in which they were to learn a prayer for mothers to say with their children each night. It was based on the old-fashioned “Our Father,” only it began “Mein Führer.” Ich kenn dich wohl und habe dich lieb wie Vater und Mutter. “I know you well and I love you like my father and mother.” Ilse sat at the back, hoping to remain inconspicuous, but the gimlet eyes of Frau Messer fell upon her and she was asked to stand and recite it. Ilse opened her mouth obediently, but the words had gone straight out of her head. She sat down again, the admonishments of Frau Messer ringing in her ears, her mind too full of foreboding to care.

  What had Anna done now? Had she been caught smoking and gotten herself suspended? If so, she would never be able to get her marriage certificate, and that meant she wouldn’t be able to marry Johann. She would be devastated. Anna was always talking about the wonderful life she was going to have with Obersturmführer Peters after they were married, in a big house in the west of the city, Zehlendorf she fancied, with a BMW 328 convertible and a wardrobe full of clothes. Ilse had no such grandiose hopes for her own married life with Otto. They’d most likely start off in his parents’ three-room apartment in Kreuzberg. But Anna was a real dreamer. A surreptitious tear of sympathy fattened and rolled down Ilse’s pillowy cheek.

  The worry continued past lunchtime. Ilse was so distracted during her cleaning duties that Fräulein Horder lost her temper and made Ilse scour all the washbasins and bathroom floors a second time. Coming down the back corridor with the buckets, she was certain she caught a glimpse of two unfamiliar men in overalls in the scullery, but when she dawdled past them, a door was closed in her face, firmly.

  By two o’clock, news that the police had been called to the premises spread like wildfire, but there was still no word of what had happened to Anna. At two thirty Household Budgeting, the lesson Ilse detested most because it involved balancing all the Reichsmarks she was going to spend with her husband’s income, was moved from the ballroom, which looked out on the back of the house, to the library, whose windows gave onto the front. As she stared unhappily into space, trying to work out how much sugar and flour a family of four would need to keep them a week and what fraction of
Otto’s monthly income that would cost, Ilse’s eye fell on the dolls’ house. It was a wonderful little thing, which had been made for visiting children to play with, but it had been moved to the library to keep them from playing too much. The man who crafted it had lavished his work with loving detail. The walls were papered with specially made National Socialist toile de Jouy, featuring little Bund Deutscher Mädel girls skipping alongside Hitler Jugend boys, erecting tents and waving banners. The furniture was hand-carved oak, and the dining table was set with plaster ham and bread. In the bedrooms a girl played with miniature dolls and a boy with bomber aircraft. In the sitting room the father smoked his pipe and listened to the wireless, a portrait of the Führer above the fireplace. In the kitchen, amid her pots and pans, a mother in a flowery apron rested from her ironing, with a microscopic cup of Kenco coffee. Why couldn’t real life be like that? Ilse wondered, with a dear little house and a cupboard full of food and children playing tidily in their rooms? That was how it was meant to be, wasn’t it?

  It was as these thoughts were passing through her head that a commotion on the drive made everyone turn around. Ilse looked out to see a fast-moving huddle of men, in the midst of which was Hartmann, the Bride School gardener, his bewildered face mouthing a cloud of words into the icy air. But no one was listening, and as she watched, Hartmann’s head was rammed brutally down and he was bundled by the policemen into a waiting car.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Unter den Linden, like so many things in Germany now—the sludgy coffee that was extended with chicory, the butter that was half whale blubber, and the bratwurst that was full of bread—did not quite live up to its name. The linden trees that had stood for hundreds of years had been cut down on Hitler’s orders so that his troops could march along the main avenue twelve abreast, and the spindly saplings that replaced them were dwarfed by lampposts. The result was that Unter den Linden was now nicknamed Unter den Lanternen, and Berliners grumbled that it would take decades for their glorious greenery to grow up tall again.

  Clara threaded her way through the Mitte district of central Berlin as the last light leaked from the sky. She was happy to walk. She needed the exercise after a day in the studio and, besides, it was a chance to think. Buttoned up in her trench coat, hair bundled beneath a felt hat, she walked all the way up to the Lustgarten, passed the gloomy, soot-stained Dom, and crossed one of the little bridges over the Spree. The Spree was not the prettiest stretch of water, always crowded with barges and towboats carrying coal and bricks, its walls all streaked with ash, but Berliners had great affection for it. That evening the water’s gunmetal gray was lit by sulfurous yellow lights that shimmered on the surface while the wind whipped leaves in jittery circles like Brown Shirts at a brawl. In winter, Clara thought, Berlin was a Braque painting, full of sharp lines and awkward perspectives colored in an entire palette of grays and browns.

  Making her way northwards, past the labyrinthine alleys of Hackescher Markt and up Oranienburgerstrasse, she came to the Jewish quarter, where shops with spiky Hebrew lettering offered window displays jumbled with jewelry, stockings, and electrical devices. There was a hurried bustle in this area, among the pharmacies and the clothing workshops. The people here looked shabbier; scents of frying food hung in the air. Narrow alleys, webbed with washing lines, led into dank courtyards, where children played and old men in the long, black coats of the Ostjuden congregated. She passed a cigarette-stub seller, with his goods laid out on a battered tin tray and a card offering three stubs for a pfennig or a half-smoked cigar for two pfennigs. Through an opened window she glimpsed a piano, on which two girls in matching horn-rimmed glasses were performing a duet, but as she passed, their mother hurriedly drew the shutters, glancing anxiously at Clara as if piano playing was the latest pleasure to be outlawed in this part of Berlin.

  The echo of last month’s Party rally down in Nuremberg still resounded here in a rash of posters decorating the walls, warning that EVERY CRIME BEGINS WITH THE JEW and THE JEWS ARE OUR MISFORTUNE. A billboard attached to a shop front suggested in loud, red letters that all Germans should UNITE AGAINST THE JEWISH BOLSHEVIST WORLD ENEMY. Clara shuddered. The previous year, during the Olympics, there had been a brief hiatus when the streets billowed with green garlands and red ribbons all the way from Brandenburg Gate to the Olympic Stadium, and loudspeakers everywhere dropped their regular propaganda broadcasts for updates on the sporting results. Goebbels had been obliged to choke down his hatred of the Jews for a few months. He’d ordered the removal of the brown cabins, plastered in swastikas, from which the most vicious anti-Semitic paper, Der Stürmer, was sold on street corners. The posters with their crude caricatures of hooked-nosed Jews were torn down, and the works of authors like Marcel Proust and Heinrich Heine, whose books had been burned on the Opernplatz, were allowed on public shelves again. But now, a year later, things were back to normal. Or, rather, the new normal of the Third Reich. There was no longer any ambiguity about the regime’s plans. Already the Nuremberg laws had stripped Jews of citizenship. No Jew might vote, hold office, practice medicine, teach Gentiles, marry or have sex with them. The fact that the Führer had decided to devote his speech at the Party rally to the theme of Jewish Bolshevism was an omen that a fresh round of trouble was in store.

  Clara turned in to Koppenplatz. It was a pleasant, unremarkable square with a patch of grass dotted with benches. She checked her watch—7:30 P.M.—and looked around for Koch’s café.

  She had never been to this place before. All she knew was that a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums had arrived at the studio earlier that day bearing the label of a florist with this address and a Berlin telephone number ending 1930. There was no other message, but she didn’t need one. Flowers were the preferred method of communication of Archie Dyson, attaché at the British embassy and agent of the British intelligence service, and she had received several bouquets from him over the past couple of years. It sounded romantic, but really it wasn’t.

  The fact that her every movement must be accountable was one of the first things that had been impressed on Clara when she began working for British intelligence. She must have a perfectly innocent reason to be where she was, and she must assume she was watched every hour of the day. Wherever she went, there must be a perfectly rational explanation. More rational, of course, than supplying information to the enemies of the Nazi regime. Thus, she walked today with a purposeful pace and carried a newspaper in which she had circled the showtimes of La Habanera with Zarah Leander, which she had absolutely no intention of seeing, at a cinema just north of Rosenthaler Platz.

  She pushed open the door, exchanging the haze of mist outside for a grainy fog of cigarette smoke.

  To most eyes, Koch’s café was a typical Berlin tavern, an ill-lit, low-ceilinged dive where men drank to get drunk, and sometimes accessorized their beer with a plate of sausage, bread, and pickles. But due to the cooperation of Herr Felix Koch, a bull of a man in suspenders and collarless shirt who stood wiping the wooden bar, flicking a bored eye at his customers, the café was also safe. Herr Koch was considered entirely trustworthy, a trust that was cemented by the fact that his daughter had married an Englishman and lived in Brighton. It was entirely understandable, as an agent of British intelligence had assured him, that he should be concerned for her well-being, and Mimi Koch’s happiness would be greatly enhanced if her father were on friendly terms with His Majesty’s government. Despite this, Clara gave a quick instinctive scan of the room as she entered. There were only four other customers, two slumped over a window table, and a pair in factory uniforms, draining foamy steins of beer.

  Archie Dyson, Eton and Cambridge, in loden overcoat and silk scarf, sat at the back of the tavern behind a screen of fretted wood, trying to do The Times crossword, folded into a copy of that day’s B.Z. am Mittag. Clara leaned over and saw him hovering at Break one’s word, 9 letters.

  “Hyphenate.”

  Dyson started visibly and put the newspaper down. “Goo
dness, Clara, I didn’t see you coming. How did you learn to do that?”

  “Someone taught me.”

  “The crossword, I meant.”

  “Oh that. I always enjoyed crosswords.”

  She had discovered that pleasure as a child. The thrill when her brain, against all the odds, began to fizz, plucking words like crepuscular and cruciverbalist from its store of vocabulary with no problem. The way words flickered together in segments, then parted and re-paired, whirring through split-second computations. She thought of Angela, legs thrown over the side of her armchair, frowning at the paper, then tossing it towards her. Oh, you take it, Clara. Puzzles are more your thing, she would say, her tone implying that crosswords ranked somewhere between jigsaws and knitting in the realm of human endeavor. That was the way the Vines operated—compliments and insults were delivered in a sidelong fashion, never outright, because boasting about one’s abilities was not done and showing excessive enthusiasm was seriously bad form. But Clara understood that crosswords, like chess, were the kind of intellectual activity at which she could beat others fair and square.

  “I’m a little rusty, I suppose,” said Dyson, quickly folding the paper away. The attaché to the British ambassador was a patrician figure with a narrow mustache who couldn’t have looked more English if he had been wearing a bowler hat and carrying an umbrella. Everything about him reminded Clara of England, of limp cucumber sandwiches, Twinings tea, and cocker spaniels with damp fur. In another life, Dyson would have been the secretary of a golf club, or a city stockbroker. He seemed entirely unsuited to subterfuge. That was obviously the point, Clara realized. Dyson is not at all what you expect. None of us are.