Black Roses

by Jane Thynne

  ‘He hates artificial hair colours and cosmetics. He says they’re all about feigning health and youth.’

  Clara wondered if the Führer’s dislike of adornment stretched to jewellery. A row of chunky pearls nestled on the Frau Doktor’s neck, a diamond and emerald clasp was fixed in her hair and twin diamond teardrops dangled from her ears.

  ‘Then there’s this cult of unnatural slimness. It makes it so much harder for women to . . . procreate. Did you know that?’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  It had to be said, Frau Goebbels was not herself an obvious advertisement for German fashion. She was wearing a black lacquer Chanel bracelet and her jacket was by Vionnet. Her own make-up had been freshly and immaculately applied. But on hair dye at least she was in line. Her wheat-blonde locks clearly owed nothing to the bottle.

  ‘So you see, Fräulein Vine, I have been given the task – well, the honour I suppose – of calling together designers and creating an entire new look for the German woman using German materials, German workers and German designers.’

  ‘That’s quite an undertaking,’ said Clara, thinking how exhausting it sounded.

  ‘It is. And the Führer knows that my health is delicate and that such a task might be too much for me alone. That’s why he has asked me to involve many of the wives of our top people. Together we will plan a showcase for the new German fashion. And that is when I thought of you!’

  ‘Me?’ Clara gave a little choke of surprise and put down her tea.

  ‘Let me explain.’ She came over and sat on the sofa next to Clara. ‘Look at this article. I had it placed in the National Socialist Women’s Yearbook.’

  Clara looked. The article was titled: ‘How Do I Dress Myself as a German, Tastefully and Appropriately?’ Beneath were a section of pictures of tight-laced bodices, full gathered skirts, embroidered blouses and aprons, as well as a photograph of a smiling woman wearing a green checked dirndl dress. None of them, Clara knew for certain, would she ever be seen dead in.

  ‘Frau Goebbels, this is very interesting, but I can’t imagine what it has to do with me.’

  ‘You mentioned that your acting career was on hold for a short while.’

  ‘Just until the producer returns, yes.’

  ‘So I thought, how would you like to model some of our new designs? In my first fashion show? We have a planning meeting next Wednesday. Five o’clock tea at the Adlon.’

  ‘Modelling! I’m afraid I’ve never done any modelling.’

  Magda shook her head as though this objection was incidental. ‘You have the looks, and you are an actress, after all. An international actress. I plan to get many of our leading ladies involved, Kristina Söderbaum, Olga Chekhova, Zarah Leander. It’s quite an honour to be the first.’

  ‘But Frau Goebbels, the problem is . . .’ Clara thought of Angela’s stint as a mannequin at Harvey Nichols. A photograph of her, in a gold lamé evening gown, looking more elegant than Clara could ever hope to be, had even appeared in The Times. ‘I don’t really want to do it.’

  A slight frown creased Magda’s brow. Clara’s refusal seemed to have introduced a note of vulgarity into their encounter. ‘If it’s difficult, I’m sure we could also manage a fee of some sort.’

  ‘Oh it’s not that.’

  ‘No, I insist.’ She snapped the magazine shut. ‘You will be paid a proper rate.’

  ‘What I meant was, modelling is quite a different talent. And if you wanted well-known actresses, I can’t imagine why you would start with me. Nobody here would know me from Adam.’

  ‘To be honest,’ Magda regarded her coolly, ‘I would have to agree. It was my husband who suggested you.’

  With a shock Clara remembered the look Goebbels had given her as she slipped out of the party. She had guessed his thoughts, but the involvement of his wife added a calculating edge to his interest.

  ‘I’m flattered, and thank your husband for me, but I still don’t think I can help.’

  Frau Goebbels’ eyes, which a moment ago had been fixed on her with such intensity, had turned implacable. Clara’s equivocation seemed to go nowhere. ‘Nonsense. You will be wonderful. Remember this is an honour, as much as an invitation. To refuse it might be taken as an insult by Herr Hitler.’

  Clara reflected a second. She had just two hundred marks to her name. She was going to need to make some money somehow if she were to stay in Berlin. And exactly how onerous could modelling actually be? Only until some more acting work came along.

  ‘What would you like me to do?’

  Magda rose and extended her hand. ‘We shall expect you at five o’clock on Wednesday. Now, if you don’t mind, I must get going. The Führer is coming to tea.’

  At the mention of it, a glimmer of girlish boastfulness escaped her controlled exterior. In a softer, more confidential tone, she added, ‘He loves a gossip you see. He doesn’t always want to talk about affairs of state or ideas. He needs somewhere he can feel safe and comfortable, and a woman who knows what he likes. He has a very special diet, and we make a particular little caramel pudding he appreciates so much. And my cook does the finest cream horns you can imagine. The Führer adores them. He has such a sweet tooth.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The glow from the yellow lamps on Unter den Linden had dimmed since the bulbs were changed to a lower wattage, but the wind was still as sharp as a knife. It came from the east, straight from the steppes of Russia across the Prussian plain and right into the marrow of the bones. Like everything Berliners feared from those frozen Soviet wastes, it was harsh and relentless and utterly without mercy.

  Leo was making his way back to the apartment after a draining afternoon’s work. The lines outside the British Consulate had been growing longer by the day. They were well-kempt queues of men in soft hats with brims pulled down, carrying briefcases and newspapers, trying their hardest to appear inconspicuous. Intelligent faces with round glasses and strained expressions. They were professional men mostly, accountants, lawyers and doctors, respectfully waiting to argue their case for a British visa. And they would argue as if their lives depended on it.

  The phone would ring non-stop from nine o’clock in the morning. There were calls from Palestine or Trinidad or Rhodesia from people vouching for visa applicants and calls from Berliners who had got all the way to the aerodrome and booked their seats on the plane, and needed only the visa to leave. There were desperate enquiries from wives and girlfriends whose loved ones had disappeared. The girls on the telephones were brisk, but they never lost their temper and just occasionally you could see the glint of a tear in their eyes.

  Each day Irene brought piles of letters to open and visa requests to file. The applicants varied. The richer, smarter people had often opened foreign bank accounts already and planned ahead. Others had nothing but their desperation to propel them.

  Leo’s boss, Foley, the chief of the Passport Office, was a short, thickset man in a Harris tweed suit, who looked out on this mayhem phlegmatically through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He was a gentle man who spoke little but had immense patience. Under his guidance, staff on the visa desk knew they had an unwritten authority to bend the rules. They would issue holiday visas that could be transferred once the refugee arrived, or organize sponsors, or create visas that helped people out of prison. Foley remained available day and night with rarely a dent in his good nature. ‘Remember,’ he would say, if anyone pressed him to go home, or take a rest, ‘these people are depending on us.’ Very often Leo ended up staying late too.

  Tonight, however, he had left at six. He had been thinking that he might be able to get in an hour’s translation of Ovid. He was working on ‘The Transformation Of Daphne’ and had reached the moment when the infatuated Apollo first sees the nymph and pursues her, before she prays to her father, the river god Peneus, for a disguise to save her. The lines ran through his head. ‘He saw her eyes like stars of sparkling fire, her sweet lips made for kissing, her h
ands and fingers and her arms; her shoulders white as ivory, and he knew, whatever was not seen must be even more beautiful.’ He had been looking forward to it. There was something about translating that appealed to him at a profound level. It was both an act of impersonation and self-effacement. To think himself into the mind of another man and enact his thoughts, leaving only the lightest touch of himself, gave him a particular pleasure. It was also, undeniably, a superior form of escapism to the kind to be found in the Katakombe or any of the other nightclubs he regularly visited in search of oblivion.

  Yet the more Leo thought about it, the more he was thinking that he might prefer to sit in his chair and allow the schnapps to burn in his throat before heading out to eat his regular supper in the shabby café downstairs – sausage in gravy with a paving stone of bread to mop it up and a tankard of blonde beer by the side.

  Turning off Unter den Linden and passing down the street, he sidestepped to avoid a man up a ladder defacing a perfectly innocent office block with a gigantic loudspeaker. Loudspeakers like this were sprouting all over the city, in cafés, bars, factories and offices, mushrooming on walls and lamp posts, at the zoo, in the parks and anywhere you might go to get away from the Führer’s shriek or the sarcastic hectoring of Doktor Goebbels. Radio was the new weapon of the revolution, evidently. Apparently the little doctor believed Hitler could never have crowbarred his way into the Reich Chancellery without it. There were speeches every day now, in amongst the sport and the light music and the cultural discussion programmes. Great rambling diatribes, bloated with all those long words the Germans preferred to simple short ones, calling for swastika flags to be raised at every house “behind which Germans live”. These addresses were interspersed with frequent pauses, too, to remember fallen soldiers in the Nazi struggle, which meant everyone was obliged to stop what they were doing and stand in awkward silence or risk the wrath of a passing Brown Shirt. As to what the Berliners thought about it, that was harder to fathom. The Führer’s voice wasn’t Leo’s idea of background music when you were drinking your beer, but he hadn’t yet seen anyone complain. Last time it happened, a woman in the bar beside him clapped.

  This time, though, the voice that proceeded from the radio was not the hectoring bark of Doktor Goebbels, but a lighter, female voice. It took him a few moments to realize it was Frau Doktor Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister’s wife. He paused and stood for a moment in the doorway of an electrical goods shop, and lit a cigarette.

  “We are on the threshold of an era of strong men. Women must not struggle for the place of men, but fulfil their own important destiny. That is why the professions of the law, government and the military have been closed to women. No one is saying that a German woman may not work, but when it is a case of choosing between marriage and a career, the German woman will always choose marriage.”

  Leo looked at the toasters and electric food mixers in the shop window beside him. It was bad news to be female right now. Alfred Rosenberg, the mad head of the Foreign Affairs Bureau, whom the Nazis held up as some kind of philosopher guru, had even suggested women should go back to the spinning wheel and the loom. Leo thought of the girls you would see in the Tiergarten. Those groups of Bund Deutscher Mädel marching past with their rosy cheeks and shining faces. Drawing admiring glances for all the wrong reasons in their gym vests and navy shorts. The government said these girls were happy to be serving the state, absorbed in one great endeavour. But what did they really think? How would you ever find out? It was not as though women were writing in the newspapers, or performing sketches in cabarets. Only the female élite, the Frau Goebbels of this world, were allowed to broadcast. And perhaps even she held very different views in private, if you could ever get to hear them.

  He thrust his cigarette away and carried on in the sooty darkness. It would be useful to know what those Nazi women thought. It could tell you a lot about the cohesiveness of the top brass. Behind every powerful man was a wife, after all, who heard things he would tell no other living soul. They may be Lady Macbeths, or Caesar’s wives. They may urge caution, or goad their men on. But how would you ever get to the wives? There, Leo had to admit, he was stumped. It was not as though he knew much about women at the best of times.

  Chapter Twelve

  The girls’ faces were painted in livid white, and elaborate silver wigs were piled in looping curls on their heads. Their bosoms swelled like fresh dough from their tightly stitched bodices and they wore pale yellow crinolines frothing with lace. They had tangles of pearl necklaces, dainty eighteenth-century satin slippers on their feet, and cigarettes hanging from their mouths. Either they couldn’t read, Clara thought, which was just about possible given the silliness of their laughs, or they were so far in character they assumed that the notice behind them on the Babelsberg lot which said Rauchen Verboten simply couldn’t apply to them.

  There were numerous historical films being made just then. Light hearted films about Italian heiresses, aristocrats in danger, Bohemian kings who had been denied their crowns or, as in this case, candyfloss comedies about the lives of Louis XIV. Sweet, syrupy confections that rotted your brain instead of your teeth. They were popular, upbeat and instantly forgettable.

  Perhaps people preferred to focus on the past rather than the realities of the present, Clara reflected, as she passed through the lobby and made her way to Albert Lindemann’s office. Perhaps those French costumes were the truest kind of Nazi fashion, because they were expressly designed to take your mind off what was really going on.

  Still, she didn’t need to think about that now. Not after the good news.

  Albert had called the previous evening, as she was sitting in Frau Lehmann’s front room after another dreary dinner with the other lodgers. Her fellow guests were Professor Hahn, who taught at the university and sported a bow tie and a monocle, and Fräulein Viktor, who had wide, rabbity teeth and staring eyes, and spent her evenings knitting. Professor Hahn in particular had welcomed the arrival of another lodger, and used the opportunity to practise the English he had learnt on a visit to Bournemouth in his youth. He had fallen into the habit of bringing home English newspapers from the university, in the mistaken belief that Clara might be homesick. Nonetheless she took one eagerly that evening, because flipping through reports about the financial crisis in America or a review of 42nd Street, was a foolproof way to forestall further conversation.

  She had told no one about Frau Goebbels’ extraordinary suggestion. There was no one to tell, really, except Frau Lehmann, who was already regarding her with more circumspection than before. Modelling! Let alone modelling for the National Socialists. Yet, without any other work, how else was she going to pay the bills? And she was astute enough to see that refusing would be awkward. The invitation was at the behest of Goebbels himself, who was now in control of Babelsberg. Turning down his request might mean giving up any chance to act in the studio’s films. And she couldn’t go back to London. Not yet. She simply couldn’t face it.

  Just then, as she worried away at the problem while the professor tried and failed to engage her in conversation, had come Albert’s call with the promise of a part.

  Clara took the call in the hall, well aware that Frau Lehmann would listen in as much as she could. As soon as she realized that she might have some work, she raced up to her room with a light heart. At last! With the prospect of a part and a salary there would be no need to go slinking back to London. Even better, she would be too busy to model dirndls for Frau Goebbels.

  From Albert’s office, high above the great hall, it was possible to look right down into the set of the eighteenth century French film as it was shot. Cameras slid backwards as they followed a couple strolling through a painstakingly realized interior, complete with lovingly crafted Louis XIV furniture. A director in shirtsleeves kept bounding onto the set and asking them to repeat the scene. Clara couldn’t tear her eyes away. What must it be like to stand before those painted flats, with the clapper board in front of your face, and wal
k convincingly through a make-believe world of cardboard walls and forests with fake branches? To appear entirely unaware of the great glass eye that tracked your every gesture?

  Albert had his feet up on the desk with one thumb hooked into his braces and in the other hand a cigar, like the movie tycoon he obviously hoped to be.

  ‘I think we might just have found a part for you,’ he announced, airily. ‘A new film directed by Gerhard Lamprecht. He recently made Emil and the Detectives, which, as you know, was a fabulous success. He’s very highly regarded.’

  ‘He does know I haven’t been screen-tested yet?’ she asked anxiously.

  Albert waved his hand. ‘He’ll arrange that. He’s editing at the studio on Cicerostrasse right now, but he’s due back at Babelsberg next week. He’ll give you an audition.’

  ‘And he realizes I’ve never been on a film set before?’

  ‘My dear, don’t worry. A lot of people aren’t going to survive with the talkies. It’s no good having the face of an angel if you have the accent of a barmaid. Your voice, I’m sure, will melt hearts.’

  ‘So what’s the film?’

  ‘It’s a spy story. Ein gewisser Herr Gran – A Certain Mr Gran, in the English version. He’s got Hans Albers and Olga Chekhova. It’s set in Venice. Hans plays a special agent who needs to save some military secrets from the enemy.’

  ‘A spy story! So what would my part be?’

  ‘You would play Alicia, the daughter of the hotel owner. In the German version they have Karin Hardt, so you’d double up for her. Herr Lamprecht would like you to come for a read-through. If you come here on Monday I can introduce you. How does that sound?’

  She could have kissed him.

  ‘Albert, it sounds wonderful. I’d love to! How clever of you to arrange it for me.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  He stood up and together they gazed down at the monumental great hall spread out beneath them.