by Rosie Thomas
‘Only just the other side of the Ku’damm,’ Pilgrim told Grace, who did not look pleased. ‘I feel it’s just the spot for all of us tonight. And “goodnight to you”,’ he crooned to Isolde’s disappointed suitor as they bundled past him.
The Balalaika was, indeed, only around the corner. It was much smaller and more dimly lit than the restaurant, and what was visible of the décor was not noticeably Russian.
All of them except Grace and Clio were clearly Balalaika regulars. When they arrived and settled at a table there was a good deal of greeting and waving to people at the neighbouring tables. The clientele was an exotic mix of young and old, with every variety of dress and appearance. Some people were in evening clothes while others looked as if they had just wandered in off the streets. The visitors had a new sense of Berlin as a rambling village populated by animated and interconnected groups, in odd contrast with the oversized baroque formality of its public exterior.
‘Do you know everyone here?’ Grace asked Julius.
‘Not quite. But I’ve noticed that since the Nazis came to power, people seem to need to hold together. Not that we actually talk to one another very much, you understand. It’s more as if we are all saying, “Here we are, still. What will happen now?” There’s an air of apprehension, but there is also that rather sickened excitement that goes with uncertainty. It leads to a lot of evenings like this. Groups of people determined to enjoy tonight, in case it turns out to be the last.’
‘It reminds me a little of London in the Twenties, when we were young things,’ Grace said. ‘All those desperate parties, because none of us could think what else to do.’
‘There is more desperation here.’
‘I suppose that depends on your political outlook,’ Grace said.
There was a steady stream of visitors to the table.
Clio couldn’t remember ever having met so many people in such a short space of time. There were students and musicians, actors and painters and professors and teachers. The preferred drink in the Balalaika was vodka, presumably in acknowledgement of the Russian theme, taken ice cold in a single gulp. After two shots Clio felt as if all her veins had melted. She gave up trying to remember names. She nodded and smiled, sitting next to Rafael but separated from him by a tiny space that seemed to hum and buzz with a current of its own.
In a little while the floorshow began. There was a lot of laughter and repartee between the performers and the audience. The high point of the show was a beautiful blonde who came on and sang sentimental German songs in a tiny, breathy, little-girl’s voice. The applause was rapturous.
Clio whispered to Rafael, ‘Is she really that good?’
‘He.’
After that the floor was cleared for dancing.
Rafael touched the back of Clio’s hand with his forefinger. ‘Would you like to dance with me?’
‘Yes.’
On the floor, he held her lightly. There was no room to do more than sway a little.
After a moment Rafael said, ‘Julius asked Grete and me to come tonight, you know. But if he hadn’t done, I would have found a way to meet you again.’
‘I know,’ Clio answered. Everything seemed very clear and shiny, but as brittle as spun glass. She was afraid that if she moved too fast or clumsily all this happiness would break. ‘If I hadn’t found you first.’
They moved closer, an infinitely small distance.
‘Does this evening seem very long?’ Rafael asked.
‘Yes. And very short too, much too short because it has to end.’
His mouth was almost touching her hair. ‘Don’t worry about the end,’ Rafael said.
Julius was dancing with Grete now. Under the lights her hair looked metallic, like threads of gold. Grace sat at the table, watching them, with Pilgrim sprawled beside her. Isolde had disappeared again.
As Grace looked on, Julius turned Grete in his arms, whispering something to her, and their eyes met. Grace sat slowly upright, leaning forward to observe more closely. She was surprised by a sudden, ugly twist of jealousy. Pilgrim, as ever, missed nothing that might be of interest to him. It was amusing to see that Lady Grace could be jealous of a Berlin fraülein in a home-sewn blouse. Nor had he failed to see that Clio and Rafael were hemmed in by the press of dancers and yet seemed to move apart, in a circle of their own creation.
‘Ah, my Janus Face,’ he drawled provocatively. ‘For ever staring in opposite directions.’
‘Shut up, Pilgrim,’ Grace almost spat at him.
‘I don’t think I will shut up,’ he mused, pretending to be equable. The spirit of mischief burnt up in him, fuelled by vodka. ‘I think I feel like a good old heart to heart. Here I am, after all, away from London and cut off from all I belong to.’
‘You don’t belong to anywhere or anything. You are an opportunist.’
Pilgrim pretended not to have heard. ‘My daughter, for instance. How is my daughter? She must be quite a beautiful creature by now. Let me see. Thirteen in August, isn’t she?’
Grace had gone white. There was an interval of two or three seconds. Then she drew back her arm. With all the strength she could find she slapped her hand against Pilgrim’s face. He grunted, and sagged back in his chair. Grace leant across to him. Her heavily made-up eyes seemed to sink into black holes in her face. Her voice came out as a hoarse whisper.
‘She is not your daughter. She is my daughter, and Anthony’s. You are never, ever to speak of her again. I don’t want her or him contaminated with your dirt. With your …’ Her politician’s ease with words had deserted her. She gasped and then managed, ‘Filth.’
Pilgrim began to recover himself. He tried to taunt her, ‘I think you do protest too much, my lady.’
Grace would have struck out at him again. But Julius reached the table, with Grete bewildered behind him.
‘What is it? Pilgrim, what in Christ’s name are you doing?’
‘What am I doing? I merely enquired about my daughter’s progress …’
Julius caught his wrist and twisted his arm. Two waiters put down their trays and began to edge towards them.
‘I don’t believe you have a daughter,’ he said softly. ‘And even if you did, how could Grace know anything about it? I think you should go home now, Pilgrim.’
‘I want to go,’ Grace whispered. She was still white. ‘Julius?’
‘I’ll take you,’ he said. ‘We’ll go now.’
Pilgrim was not done yet. ‘See? He’ll always come running. There’s no need for you to be jealous, darling.’
‘Shut your evil mouth,’ Julius hissed.
‘People keep telling me to shut up. But I’m only telling the truth, so why is it, I wonder? Are you all so anxious about your secrets?’
Julius took hold of Grace’s arm. ‘We’ll go. There’s no need to stay here. Rafael will look after Clio. Grete?’
Grete smiled at him. ‘Go. I will stay with Pilgrim here and keep him company until his Isolde comes back.’
Pilgrim shrugged. ‘That sounds a fair exchange. Go on, Grace. Run away. Leave golden Grete to me.’
The waiters folded their napkins over their arms again. When Rafael and Clio came back to the table they found Pilgrim with one arm draped around Isolde and the other holding Grete. There was a fresh supply of icy vodka, but Pilgrim was silent at last. He looked ready to slide into a deep sleep.
‘I’ll get him home,’ Isolde sighed. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve had years of bloody practice. Come on, you stupid arse.’
‘Gold and silver,’ Pilgrim muttered, ‘silver and gold. Goodnight, sweet ladies.’
‘I am going to talk to Madeleine and Georg,’ Grete said, when they had staggered off. ‘I will take a taxi home.’ She kissed her brother quickly on the cheek, and then kissed Clio too. ‘Goodnight to you both,’ she murmured, and then turned away.
They sat down at the emptied table and drank one more shot of vodka each. The pure spirit tasted as cold as a Christmas sky.
‘I will walk y
ou back to the Adlon,’ Rafael said at last.
In the empty street he put his arm in the sheepskin coat around her shoulder. Clio turned her face a little towards the warmth of him and they began to walk. They passed a great illuminated clock-tower, and she saw that it was half past three.
Rafael said, ‘In an hour, the first people will be going to work. The U-bahn will open and the first trams will start up. It will be morning, another day with everything that must be faced in that day. But now it is still the middle of the night. The quietest hour.’
Now that they were alone, in the deserted night streets, they found that they were not sure what to say to one another. Clio felt that there were great jams of words piling up within her, torrents of explanation and description, all her history waiting to be related in exchange for Rafael’s. She felt greedy for his, and impatient, and uncertain about where they would make the beginning.
‘I think once we start to talk we shall never be able to stop,’ she told him.
‘I know that. There is this quiet hour, and then there is tomorrow.’
‘Do you promise?’ Suddenly she felt like a child. She wanted to seize his lapels and twist them, pummel his chest with her fists, extract a promise from him that could never be broken.
Rafael began to laugh. The sound of his laughter was wonderful in the silent city street. They stopped walking and when she looked into his face she read the happiness in it, a reflection of her own, as if in some magical mirror.
‘I promise,’ he said. ‘I promise there will be tomorrow, and all the days after that.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, now like the child who had unwrapped her present and found it was what she had hoped for, and more than she had dared to hope for.
They reached Pariser Platz and stood under the canopy that ran from the street to the great doors of the hotel. Rafael bent forward and kissed her on the mouth. His mouth was warm and she could feel the curve of a smile in it.
‘Until tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Don’t forget.’
Clio walked on under the canopy and up to the shining doors where the Adlon night porter in his buttons and braid was waiting to let her in.
Fifteen
Berlin was a divided city, and the cold split in it ran invisibly beneath the prosperous streets crowded with shoppers and under the cosmopolitan restaurants and cafés and outlandish nightclubs just as surely as the straight line of Unter den Linden ran up to the Brandenburg Gate and on into the Tiergarten.
Within just a few hours of their arrival Clio and Grace found themselves set on either side of the divide. There had been no chance of bridging it, even at the beginning, and soon they felt that there was no possibility even of calling out to one another from a safe distance beyond the icy edge.
Clio went back to the Café Josef with Rafael Wolf, and Grace received an invitation to take tea with Adolf Hitler at the Reichskanzler-Palais in the Wilhelmstrasse.
‘Are you going to meet him?’ Clio asked when the invitation came, delivered to the Adlon Hotel by one of the Führer’s bodyguard. Grace stared at her in utter disbelief.
‘Of course. Did you imagine that I would refuse?’ Her movements were made jerky by excitement. There was unusual colour in her face.
‘I don’t know what I imagined,’ Clio said. She was amazed at Grace’s susceptibility, her willingness to associate herself with the Nazis after what they had seen and half heard. ‘Not this, anyway.’
‘Then you can’t have imagined very much at all,’ Grace answered coldly.
There was no suggestion that Clio might accompany her to the Führer’s palace, any more than there was further mention of her assisting as Grace’s translator. They stood on opposing sides of some conflict that they didn’t even fully understand, without having taken a single step.
As Clio watched her, Grace took a dress on its hanger out of the wardrobe and laid it on the bed. Grace was remembering something that Pilgrim had said in that dismal nightclub, what was it, the Balalaika?
My Janus Face, for ever staring in different directions.
Well then, so be it, she thought with sudden savagery.
There was a milkiness about Clio, a soft and sentimental lack of direction that blurred her judgements. Grace realized that she found it profoundly irritating. She wished that she had come to Germany on her own, because she did not want to have Clio’s dim misgivings clouding her perception of this new regime.
‘I have to get changed now,’ she said.
Clio went, leaving her to her own affairs.
Grace was escorted with due ceremony from her hotel by two SS men. The palace was only a few steps away, beyond the British Embassy.
The building formed three sides of a square. It was restrained by Berlin architectural standards, a double row of windows with decorative detailing above and a third row of simple dormers in the roof. There were only four classical statues on the top of the central pediment, and the Nazi flag flying from the flagpole in the centre. The fourth side of the square was marked by high railings and pillars that separated it from the street. There were Stormtroopers guarding the gates, and they gave the Nazi salute as Grace passed by.
In the middle of the courtyard there was a circle of frostbitten grass and a stone fountain with nymphs supporting a shallow basin. Grace walked around the circumference of the grass and approached the main door. There was a shallow flight of steps and a glass canopy to protect them. A man in uniform was waiting for her on the top step. Through a flurry of salutes and Heil Hitlers Grace recognized Bruckner, Hitler’s adjutant.
He bowed over her hand, murmuring a welcome, and then led her inside.
They walked down marble-floored corridors and through anterooms hung with gloomy portraits and Nazi insignia. Finally they came to a set of double doors guarded by yet more armed and uniformed men. Grace had a momentary impression of swastikas dancing everywhere. And then the doors were opened and she found herself looking into a light, bright room. It was a drawing room, disconcertingly feminine. There was gilt and cream furniture, spindly legged, and small tables decorated with fine porcelain.
A group of people was arranged in the middle of the room taking afternoon tea. The Führer was sitting amongst them with a cup and saucer balanced on his knee.
It would have seemed funny to Grace, this domestic tableau, if she had not suddenly found herself awed to be in his presence at all. All the way across the courtyard of the Reichskanzler-Palais and along the booming corridors she had not quite believed that at the end of the march she would come face to face with him. And now Adolf Hitler stood up, a small man in a neat civilian suit, and came to meet her with his hands outstretched. She saw very clearly his highly polished shoes and manicured fingernails, and the indoor pallor of his skin.
He greeted her in German. ‘Lady Grace, may we welcome you to Berlin?’ He clasped her hand in both of his. His grip was firm and surprisingly warm.
Grace’s poise deserted her. She could think of no word of German, no words at all, not even the conventional murmurs of drawing-room exchanges. She stood with her feet fixed to the carpet, looking at him, with red patches of colour flaring in her cheeks and her right hand still held between Hitler’s.
‘Wilkommen,’ he said again, smiling at her.
Then he let go of her hand and touched her elbow, to guide her forward. She was taller than he was. Grace took a step, beside him, and then another. She heard a tiny sound within her head, click, and movement seemed to start up once again around her. Colour seeped back into the room, bleeding inwards from the edges of her field of vision. She became aware of the Führer’s other guests, also standing up to greet her. She could even recognize some of the faces: Dr Dietrich, the controller of Hitler’s press and publicity, and his architect Albert Speer.
Grace shook hands around the circle. There was a director of Mercedes-Benz and his lively wife; the Führer’s personal physician; one or two senior SS and SA men; a handful of others.
Her m
oment of paralysis was past. She smiled into each pair of eyes and made the appropriate responses. One of the SS men at her shoulder became her interpreter.
Lady Grace Brock, British Member of Parliament visiting Berlin in an unofficial capacity but as a warm friend of the Reich …
‘How do you do?’ Grace murmured. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, very pleased to be here.’
And then she was sitting in the place of honour, beside Hitler, on a straight-backed Empire sofa upholstered in cream- and gold-figured silk. A white and gold teacup was put into her hand, and she gravely declined the offer of chocolate cake layered with cream, then quickly accepted it when she saw the disappointed expression on her host’s face.
The tea-party resumed its mild course.
The conversation was about opera. Hitler was talking about Bayreuth, Grace picked out that much. She sat stiffly beside him, trying to decipher what was being said. After a moment the Führer turned courteously to her and asked her if she was an opera-lover and if she had ever visited Bayreuth herself. The interpreter translated while Hitler watched her. Grace found his stare hypnotic. It became difficult to know where to look, and what to do with her hands, which felt over-large and clumsy in her lap.
‘I have never had the opportunity to hear opera in Germany. But I love Mozart, and Wagner.’
The translator relayed her banal response and Hitler nodded solemnly.
Grace thought of Julius and his Mozart, and of Nathaniel listening to The Ring on the gramophone in the Oxford drawing room.
‘Perhaps you will have the opportunity to hear some music while you are in Berlin, Lady Grace.’
‘I hope so, very much.’
There was the polite and stilted interpretation again. Grace had imagined before she was admitted to the cream and gilt room that there would be some serious talk, but now she understood that she would be disappointed. This tea-party conversation circled and led nowhere, while Hitler and his aides listened intently to her uninteresting answers. They all nodded at one another and cocked their heads to the interpreter, and their solemnity seemed only to underline the meaninglessness of their exchanges.