His Majesty's Hope

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  The Nazis had reason to celebrate. Not only had they already seized Holland, Belgium, and France, but now German troops had invaded Russia, destroying Russia’s 16th and 20th Armies in the “Smolensk pocket” and triumphing at Roslavl, near Smolensk. The German military seemed invincible. Despite the Atlantic Charter with the United States, Britain’s defeat was clearly only a matter of time.

  Elise could hear the steady beating drums of the Hitler Youth and the coarse clamor of the crowd in the distance, singing the Horst Wessel Song. She could see the scarlet banners with their white circles and black hakenkreuz—broken crosses—which the Volk had hung from their windows. Papering the limestone walls were tattered posters of Adolf Hitler in medieval armor, on horseback like a Teutonic knight, captioned Dem Führer die Treue: Be True to the Führer. Trash, cigarette butts, and broken glass from the rally the night before lined the gutters, and the air stank of stale beer and urine.

  The ground was marked with chalk squares for the children’s hopping game Heaven and Hell. Boys and girls were playing, throwing a small stone, then hopping on the chalked squares, trying to make it from one end to the other and back again. The boys were well scrubbed, the girls had intricate braids. All had round, rosy cheeks.

  As one, they spied a small boy with a clubfoot, walking with a crutch, twisted ankle dragging behind him. He hobbled as close to the wall as he could, trying not to be noticed. But like a pack, the group set on him, herding him away from the wall. They formed a circle around him, holding hands, as the boy’s eyes darted, trying to find a way to escape. One of the older boys started singing a familiar nursery rhyme:

  Fox, you’ve stolen the goose

  Give it back!

  Give it back!

  Or the hunter will get you

  With his gun,

  Or the hunter will get you

  With his gun.

  The other children joined in:

  His big, long gun,

  Takes a little shot at you,

  Takes a little shot at you,

  So, you’re tinged with red

  And then you’re dead.

  So, you’re tinged with red

  And then you’re dead.

  In the distance, church bells tolled the hour.

  “Children!” Elise said, clapping her hands together. “Stop! That’s enough!” They looked over at her, angry.

  The boy with the clubfoot took their momentary distraction as an opportunity to burst through the circle and make a hard right into an alley, staggering as fast as he could with his crutch. The children picked up rocks and flung them after him but didn’t bother to give chase. “Are you going to the parade, Fräulein?” one girl called to Elise.

  “Nein,” she replied. “I have to work.”

  “Too bad!” the girl called back, skipping and laughing, as the boys slapped one another’s backs.

  Walking away, Elise shook her head. “Gott im Himmel help us.”

  Elise took one of the many bridges over the Spree and arrived at Charité Mitte Hospital damp with sweat.

  She went to the nurses’ changing room. It was small, with walls of gray lockers and a low wooden bench. There was a poster on the wall, of a handsome doctor and a mentally disabled man in a wheelchair, with the caption This hereditarily sick person costs the Volksgemeinschaft 60,000 R.M. for life. Comrade, it’s your money, too.

  Elise slipped out of her skirt and blouse. She kept on her necklace with the tiny gold cross, a diamond chip in its center. The door opened. It was Frieda Klein, another nurse. “Hallo!” Elise said, smiling. Shifts were always better when Frieda was working.

  “Hallo,” Frieda replied. She put down her things and began to change. “Gott, I wish I had breasts like yours, Elise,” she said, looking down at her own flat chest. “You’re the perfect Rhine maiden.”

  “I’m too fat,” Elise moaned. “As my mother loves to remind me. Often. I wish I had collarbones like yours—so elegant.”

  Whereas Elise was curvaceous, Frieda was thin and all angles. Whereas Elise had dark blue eyes and chestnut-brown curls, Frieda was blond and pale. And whereas Frieda was phlegmatic, Elise had a habit of speaking too quickly and bouncing up and down on her toes when she became excited about a finer point of medicine, swing music, or anything at all to do with American movie stars. The two young women, friends since school, had both wanted to be nurses since they were young girls.

  They put on their gray uniforms, with starched white aprons and linen winged caps. “Do you mind?” Elise asked, indicating the back strings on her apron.

  “Not at all,” Frieda said and tied them into a bow. She turned around. “Now do mine?”

  Elise did, then slapped Frieda on the bottom. They laughed as they walked out together to the nurses’ station to begin their shift.

  In an examination room that smelled of rubbing alcohol and lye soap, a tiny blond girl in a hospital gown asked, “Will there be blood?”

  The only picture on the wall was Heinrich Knirr’s official portrait of Adolf Hitler—the Führer’s figure stiff, his hard eyes gazing impassively over the proceedings.

  Elise smiled and shook her head. “Nein,” she answered. “No blood work today. The doctor just wants to take a look at your ears. To make sure the infection’s gone.”

  The girl, Gretel Paulus, was sitting on a hospital bed. She held a small brown, well-loved teddy bear and spoke with a slight speech impediment. Her thick lower lip protruded and glistened with saliva, her tongue overlarge. She had a round face, pointy chin, and almond-shaped eyes behind thick, distorting eyeglasses.

  Elise smiled. “What goes ninety-nine thump, ninety-nine thump, ninety-nine thump?”

  Gretel shrugged.

  “A centipede with a wooden leg, of course!”

  That won a weak smile out of the young girl. Elise took an otoscope from the cabinet, cleaned the earpiece with alcohol, and then put it to the girl’s right ear. Then the left.

  “Nurse Hess?”

  “When it’s just you and I, you may call me Elise.”

  “Elise—why do my ears always hurt?” Gretel wanted to know.

  Elise knew all too well that ear infections were common with Down syndrome patients. “It’s just something that happens sometimes,” she said, putting the otoscope away and returning to rub the girl’s back. “And you feel better now, yes? The medicine worked?”

  “If I feel better, why do I still have to see the doctor? The new doctor?”

  Gretel didn’t miss a thing, Elise realized. “His name is Doktor Brandt. And he wants to make sure you don’t have any more ear infections.”

  The door to the examination room opened, and in walked Dr. Karl Brandt. He was relatively new to Charité, one of the SS doctors who came in the late winter of 1941, with their red armbands with black swastikas, and their new rules and regulations. Young, handsome, with thick, dark hair and impeccable posture, Brandt radiated authority.

  Elise handed Gretel’s chart to him. Without preamble, he marked the black box in the lower left-hand corner of the medical history chart with a bold red X, the last of three. He looked out the door and beckoned. Two orderlies arrived, strong and broad-shouldered in white coats with swastika armbands.

  “Am I going home?” Gretel asked the doctor.

  “Not yet, Mäuschen,” Brandt replied, smiling. “We’re going to make sure this never happens to you again.”

  Gretel beamed. “Oh, thank you, Herr Doktor!” she lisped as the two orderlies escorted her back to her room to get dressed. She hugged her teddy bear to her small body.

  “Take this to the nurses’ station,” Dr. Brandt said to Elise, handing her the file. He headed toward the door.

  “What should I tell her father and mother?” During the course of Gretel’s multiple ear infections, Elise had come to know the child’s parents.

  He eyed the cross she wore around her neck. “Just deliver the paperwork to the nurses’ station. They will take care of everything.”

  Eli
se was stung by his brusque tone. “Jawohl, Herr Doktor,” she replied, following behind him.

  Dr. Brandt turned and frowned in response but did not discipline her. “Go,” he said. “There are forms to fill out.”

  Elise made her way down the hallways to the nurses’ station. She handed the file to the nurse on duty. “Another one?” the gray-haired woman grumbled, looking at the three red Xs on the chart.

  “What does that mean?” Elise asked.

  “It means a lot of paperwork.”

  “What kind of paperwork?”

  The gray-haired woman, Nurse Flint, gave Elise a sharp look. “The kind that keeps me here, instead of at home with my husband and children, that’s what kind,” she snapped, stacking Gretel’s file on top of similar folders.

  Elise caught sight of Frieda, rounding the corner; her friend pointed up with one finger. Elise caught her meaning and nodded. She held up one hand, palm out—their code for meeting on the roof in five minutes.

  Before she met up with Frieda, Elise wanted to check on someone. She walked down the corridor and into a ward filled with wounded soldiers in narrow white beds. Some moaned in their sleep, some stared listlessly out the windows at the leaden sky, others sat up in their wheelchairs and played cards.

  Elise wanted to check on the temperature of a young man all the nurses called Herr Geheimnis—Herr Mystery. He’d been running an intermittent fever over the past few days. The patient had curly brown hair, an angular face, shoulders full of tension, and eyes wild with fear. Who was he? Where was he from? Did he have a girlfriend? Was he married? Why couldn’t—or wouldn’t—he speak?

  “Is he all right?” Flight Lieutenant Emil Eggers asked, indicating with his chin the bandaged body asleep in the narrow bed next to him. Eggers, a beefy, blond man with the face of a cherub, was a Luftwaffe commander. He’d had a close call in France but survived his crash landing and had been brought back to Berlin to convalesce.

  “Is that any business of yours, Lieutenant Eggers?” Elise admonished as she shook a thermometer and slipped it into Herr Mystery’s mouth. She might be young, but she was strict with the men, who often seemed grateful to be ordered about as they convalesced.

  “Well, there’s not much to do in here …” Eggers said, trying his best to look winsome and failing.

  “True,” Elise agreed in gentler tones, picking up the chart hanging at the end of the bed frame. “He’s one of yours—a pilot. Had quite a bad crash landing. A veterinarian from somewhere outside Berlin found him and patched him up as best he could and brought him in, but he had a lot of internal injuries.”

  “Is he going to make it?” Eggers asked. He didn’t recognize the man, but there was a code of solidarity among pilots.

  Elise may have been young, but she was also a realist. “I hope so.” She removed the thermometer from his mouth and looked. A hundred and one. “His temperature’s still a bit elevated.” She made a note in the pilot’s chart, then walked over to Eggers. “And how’s your leg today, Lieutenant?”

  Eggers pulled back the rough sheet and gray wool blanket to reveal a bandaged stump. “Still gone, I’m afraid.”

  After, Elise met up with Frieda on the hospital’s roof. The tar paper was littered with cigarette butts. A crumpled packet of Milde Sorte was stuck under a drainpipe. The sun was blisteringly hot—1941 was turning into Berlin’s warmest summer on record. Frieda lit a cigarette and took a puff, then handed it to Elise. “I hate this place.”

  Elise accepted the cigarette and took a long inhale. “Charité? Berlin? All of Germany?” she asked, blowing out rings of pale blue smoke.

  “Everything. All of it.”

  They leaned over the railing. The city of Berlin spread out before them: the river Spree glittering in the harsh sunlight, long red Nazi banners snapping in the breeze, the black, burned-out dome of the Reichstag.

  The parade was still marching down Unter den Linden, the sounds of cheering and music and hobnailed black boots goose-stepping on the pavement muted now by height and distance. Directly below them in the hospital’s circular driveway, a bus idled. It was dark gray, with white-painted windows.

  “Especially since Dr. Brandt and his cronies arrived here.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” Frieda’s slim fingers shook as she took another drag on her cigarette.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you noticed how patient charts now have the attending physician mark a red X or a blue minus sign on them?”

  “Yes,” Elise replied. “I had a third red X on a patient’s chart today. I asked Dr. Brandt about it—he said it had something to do with paperwork.”

  “Paperwork, right.” Frieda picked a stray fleck of tobacco from her tongue. From below, the noxious bus fumes drifted upward in the heat. The two young nurses watched as a cluster of children was herded inside a bus by orderlies in white coats.

  “Maybe it has to do with the compulsory sterilization,” Elise suggested. Under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, all Reich doctors were required to report the retarded, mentally ill, epileptic, blind, deaf, physically deformed, and homosexual—and make sure they were unable to procreate. As a Catholic, Elise was adamantly opposed.

  “Something like that.”

  “How’s Ernst?” Elise asked, deliberately changing the subject.

  Frieda’s face, pale as milk, flushed red in anger. “He’s all right—at least as all right as a surgeon who’s not allowed to operate anymore can be.” Ernst Klein, Frieda’s husband, was Jewish, and now prohibited from practicing medicine.

  “I’m sorry. I can only imagine how hard it’s been.”

  Frieda pressed her lips together. “The Codex Judaicum is a nightmare. They’re taking away our pets, now—can you believe? Pets! No Jew is allowed to own a dog, cat, or bird. And they’re not just given to some nice gentile family—no, they might be ‘racially contaminated’ somehow—God forbid! So, they’re all killed instead.” Frieda kicked some of the gravel with her foot. “Four SA officers came to take Widow Kaufman’s cat last night. Can you imagine—four men for one cat? Widow Kaufman was crying, but little Bärli didn’t go without a fight. We didn’t dare open our door, of course. But from the noise, I think she managed a few good scratches.”

  “And Marthe?” Elise asked. Marthe was Frieda and Ernst’s small white dove, named after Marguerite’s guardian in Charles Gounod’s Faust.

  “She’s safe—for now.”

  “Would you like me to take Marthe in? I’d take good care of her until she can return to you.”

  “Of course, you can still have a pet. You can do whatever you want.” Frieda brushed some loose, pale hair out of her eyes and wiped away hot tears. Then her face softened. “Of course, it’s not your fault, Elise.” She added, “Have you heard anything?”

  Berlin’s Jews were slowly but surely being called to ghettos and work camps. Letters told them where to report, what to bring with them, and which train to take.

  “I’ll ask my mother,” Elise said. “I know she can help.”

  Elise’s mother actually had refused to look into it. But Elise, normally cowed by her domineering mother, was determined to bring it up again, and not take no for an answer this time.

  “Thank you,” Frieda said with palpable relief.

  The two young women smoked in silence, passing the cigarette back and forth, as a long-necked heron flew by in the distance.

  Elise ventured, “Do you ever—”

  The words hung in the air for long seconds.

  “Think about divorcing him?” Frieda finished. “Nein. Never. We love each other. I just wish we’d left Germany when we still had the chance. To think I was afraid to move to Hong Kong.” She gave a bitter laugh.

  “Sorry.” Elise crushed the cigarette out under her heel. “I shouldn’t have even asked.” In the glint of the morning sunlight, Elise caught a glimpse of a young girl with blond hair in the line to board the bus below, holding a tattered br
own teddy bear.

  “I think that girl’s my patient,” Elise said, blue eyes darkening. Together they watched as the patients and nurses boarded, then the bus’s engine revved. It pulled away, belching thick, black smoke from the exhaust pipe as it made its way down the drive. “Those buses,” Elise said, “they call them the Ravens. Why?”

  Frieda shrugged. “The color.”

  Elise was confused. Surely the child she’d glimpsed below was Gretel. Had she missed something? Had the girl taken a turn for the worse?

  Chapter Two

  Clara Hess was wearing a mask. It was pure white, like Kabuki makeup. Her eyes were closed.

  She was draped, catlike, over a divan in her office at the Abwehr, the German Military Intelligence agency, wearing only the mask, a scarlet silk robe, and Chanel No. 5. One woman was painting her toenails, while another was rubbing lotion into her hands. Still another was taking curlers out of her hair, leaving glistening platinum ringlets.

  Taller than most women and slim as a ballerina, Clara looked like Jean Harlow crossed with the warrior-goddess Brünnhilde, as seen through the lens of Horst P. Horst. She favored Chanel’s androgynous suits in jersey, which she wore with ropes of pearls and gold chains. It was a look not often seen on women in Berlin. But with her height, excellent posture, and entitled attitude, she was never questioned. Being good friends with Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels, and being photographed with them frequently at the Opera or Philharmonic, didn’t hurt either.

  Although lately, such photographs were less frequent. Clara Hess’s last mission, the assassination of King George VI and the kidnapping of Princess Elizabeth, intending to pave the way for the eventual German invasion of England and the crowning of Edward and Wallis Simpson as Great Britain’s new King and Queen, hadn’t happened. In fact, it had been a complete and total failure. Since her fall from grace, it was whispered about the halls of the Abwehr that Clara was losing her magic touch—as well as the Führer’s favor.