Black Roses

by Jane Thynne

  That Saturday was as loud as ever with the screeches of the rides and the calls of the men behind the stalls. A rime of petrol hung in the air, mingling with the hot oil from the sausage stalls and the yeasty baking scents of the pretzel carts. But up close everything, from the fairy tale palace, with towers and a staircase leading down to the lake, to the stalls and the rides, was going very obviously to seed. There was a sad, down-at-heel feeling to it, not made any better by rumours that the Nazis planned to bulldoze the place shortly, on account of the decadent fun it represented. Their own favourite hobby was building new roads and as it happened there was one planned right through the centre of Luna Park.

  ‘So what do you think of my boy, then?’

  The two of them had met Erich that morning off the train from Havelberg. Short for his age, with a crew cut and carefully pressed clothes, Erich was far more polite than the children Clara knew in England. Compared to her brother Kenneth, who at the age of ten had spoken to adults only under sufferance and had scarred knees and pockets stuck together with melted chocolate, Erich was a model of maturity and decorum. He had shaken hands solemnly with Clara and risen to his feet without prompting on the tram to give a seat to an elderly man. Clara couldn’t help thinking Erich’s grandmother had made a rather better job of raising him than his own mother would have. Yet the affection between the two of them was plain to see.

  Helga was transformed by his presence. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She repeatedly touched his arm and stroked his hair. She fluttered around Erich, insisting that they drop into a café for tea and a roll because he might be tired after the journey, peppering him with questions about his friends. Another boy might have hated it, but Erich himself seemed equally proud of his mother, who, in her tortoiseshell sunglasses and floaty pink and yellow tea-dress did exude an eye-catching glamour.

  ‘Mutti is a film star,’ he informed Clara solemnly. ‘She is almost as famous as Marlene Dietrich but much more beautiful. Soon she will have earned so much money she will bring me to live with her in Berlin. And Oma too?’ he added, anxious eyes on Helga.

  ‘And Oma too,’ said Helga, winking at Clara.

  ‘And Bruno?’

  ‘Who’s Bruno?’ said Clara.

  ‘Hush,’ said Helga. ‘An old friend of mine. An artist. Erich took a liking to him.

  ‘He made a lovely poster of Mutti. I have it on my wall.’

  ‘Do you, sweetheart?’ Helga beamed. ‘Well then. Why don’t you tell Clara everything you’ve been doing? Are you doing well at school?’

  ‘Of course. I always do well. And I’m excited about the Führertag.’

  ‘Hitler’s birthday is coming up,’ explained Helga. ‘They have a special day at school.’

  ‘We all put flowers on his picture and sing songs, then the teachers bring cakes and we play special games. We are going to have a tug of war. Only,’ his face drooped, ‘no one picks me on the team.’

  ‘Of course they’ll pick you!’ said Helga brightly.

  ‘No. Because I’m small.’

  ‘If anyone leaves you out you must tell the leader.’

  ‘That would be stupid, Mutti! The leader says it is good for the bigger boys to bully. It stops us being weak.’

  ‘What nonsense!’

  ‘No. He’s right. It’s better to be strong. We have to learn to fight.’ Erich brightened. ‘But soon we’ll be going hiking, and that will be fun. We’ll cook at a camp fire and sing and sail in canoes down the lake. And when I’m fourteen in the Hitler Jugend I’ll get an HJ knife with “Blood and Honour” written on it. I can buy one, can’t I, Mutti? They’re only four marks.’

  ‘Of course you can, darling. Now take this and go and fetch us some food. I’m ravenous.’

  They watched him run off and join the queue at the frankfurter stall. The stallholder had a little monkey on a chain, which all the children were allowed to pet. Once Erich was out of earshot, Helga frowned.

  ‘You don’t know how I worry about him, Clara. It’s probably why I drink when he’s not here. It helps me not to think about him. He’ll have a dreadful time in the HJ. They do boxing and they have terrible tests like being marched into ice-cold lakes up to their waists. How will Erich cope with that? He’s always been delicate. He has a bad chest.’

  ‘Does Bauer know about Erich?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘What can he say? The Party is all in favour of children. The more little Nazis the better. Bauer says it’s better for a woman to have a child even if she’s single, than to stay barren.’

  ‘Nice of him.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Clara. That doesn’t extend to having his kid. I’m being very careful in that respect, I assure you.’

  Erich returned, balancing three steaming cartons of wurst and fried onions and little wooden spears to eat them with. They sat contently on the bench opposite a newly erected poster of a roadworker with rippling muscles and the slogan, “Hitler is building. Help him. Buy German goods.”

  Clara noticed Erich was screwing up his face in unconscious parody of the heroic worker.

  ‘I would like to meet the Führer one day.’

  ‘I’m sure you will, darling,’ said Helga, running an indulgent hand over his closely cropped skull.

  Through a mouthful of sausage he said, ‘Perhaps if I am accepted to the Napola school.’

  Seeing Clara’s raised eyebrow, Helga clarified. ‘National Political Academy school. It’s a new boarding school being created for special children. They want to raise the boys to be part of the Nazi élite or something. Erich has set his heart on going there. It’s in Potsdam, but they’re only taking the brightest.’

  ‘I will pass the exams, Mutti. You’ll see. My teachers say I can. And the lessons will be so much more interesting than what I get now. They study Germanic heroes and Luther and Frederick the Great and proper German history.’

  Clara wanted to ask what proper German history might be, but she guessed she already knew. It would be like the films, a special take on the past, seen through Joseph Goebbels’ eyes.

  ‘But, aren’t these places all about sport? I’ve heard they’re planning athletics and boxing and shooting morning and evening. They don’t allow boys who wear spectacles, do they?’ Helga sounded fretful.

  ‘Why should I care, Mutti? I don’t need spectacles.’

  ‘What would they say about your chest?’

  ‘They’ll never know about my chest if you don’t tell them,’ said Erich glaring at his mother from dark-lashed eyes that were identical to her own. Then he tugged at her hand. ‘Look, it’s the china stall! I want to go on it! Please?’

  A short way off was a ramshackle stall in which customers paid to throw hard rubber balls at old plates and crockery. A large crowd had gathered, egging on the players, who had six balls a time. If they failed to smash anything, they complained loudly that the crockery was glued to the shelf, but generally they managed to smash at least one item each turn, resulting in cheers and congratulations. Something about the violence of the players, their evident pleasure in seeing the plates and dishes fall to the ground in a shower of multi-coloured fragments, made Clara flinch. Even though the crockery was chipped and shoddy, and came in job lots from second-rate hotels, she couldn’t enjoy seeing people take such pleasure in wanton destruction.

  Erich disappeared and Helga sat back on the bench, face upturned, basking in the sunshine.

  ‘He makes you very happy, doesn’t he? You look quite different today.’

  Helga grinned, without opening her eyes. ‘Perhaps it’s not just Erich. Perhaps it’s someone else too.’

  ‘Bauer?’

  Helga sat up indignantly. ‘Of course not Bauer! That bonehead. It’s Bruno.’

  ‘The artist?’

  ‘He designs posters for Ufa. That’s how we met. He did the poster of a film I was in and said he’d used the picture of me because I was the prettiest.’ She sniffed. ‘Thoug
h he’s a proper artist too.

  Even before she said it, Clara realized. ‘He did that portrait of you, didn’t he? The one in your room.’

  ‘Yes. I know what you’re thinking. It took me a while to see there was anything good about his style. He’s quite famous, actually, but when he first took me back to his studio all he was painting were prostitutes or dreadful violent scenes. Skeletons and men being hanged. His latest one had a dead woman mangled with a river of blood flowing round her. I can’t imagine what it’s like inside Bruno’s head.’

  ‘But you posed all the same.’

  She bit her lip. ‘When he first asked to paint me I said no, straight away. But then he started talking to me about art, about why he paints things the way he does, and it made sense. He said his art was a church where people could scream out their rage and despair. He said you need to look horror in the face if you’re ever going to overcome it.’

  ‘It’s not how I’d imagine having my portrait painted.’

  Helga sniffed. ‘Me neither. But I thought frankly, who’s going to recognize me? Anyway, now it turns out he’s been commissioned to make the poster for that new film I’m doing, Barcarole, and he came into the studio. It was so lovely to see him. I could tell he’d missed me.’

  ‘So he took you home?’

  ‘Why not? It’s such a relief to be with a decent sensitive man. One who doesn’t boast about how drunk he got last night like he deserves the Iron Cross for it.’

  ‘Is he married?’

  ‘He was, but it didn’t work out. His parents made him marry young, but his wife was completely wrong for him. She got the house and everything and he has to live in a squalid little apartment in Pankow. But who cares?’

  ‘Well, you, I’d have thought.’

  ‘I know. But it’s different this time. So he can’t take me to restaurants or plays, but then I’ve got Bauer for that.’

  ‘And what happens when Bauer finds out?’

  ‘He’ll never find out. How could he?’

  Erich kept up an animated chatter all the way back to the station, but when the moment came to get on the train he reverted to the child he was and clung to his mother’s neck so that she had to prise off his fingers one by one.

  ‘I don’t want to go, Mutti. I want to live in Berlin, I don’t care about the Napola school, I just want to live with you.’

  ‘Now don’t be silly. And besides, I only have one bed.’

  ‘I’ll sleep on the floor then. I don’t care. I’ll be good, you’ll hardly notice me. Please.’

  ‘And how would Oma like that? You’ll come again soon, my darling, I promise,’ said Helga, bundling him into the carriage and shutting the door. ‘Don’t cry.’

  He sat obediently in the third-class carriage, and placed his palm briefly against the window, as Helga touched the glass with her own. Then there was a clamour of doors and whistles, and the blur of his small face behind the glass gradually receded as the train disappeared down the track. He didn’t cry. It was Helga who had tears sloping down from behind her sunglasses half the way home.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Clara could tell from the maid’s face that there was a row going on. From behind the drawing-room door there was shouting, accompanied by the thin wail of a baby elsewhere in the house.

  ‘The Frau Doktor asks you to wait up here.’

  The card in an envelope marked with the crest of the Hotel Adlon had asked her to call at ten a.m. the next day. Surprised as Clara was to receive another summons to the Goebbels’ home so soon, she was even more startled to find herself being shown up the stairs into Magda’s dressing room.

  It was a light, sunny room, papered in yellow, with oil paintings of still lives with flowers, and a pair of French armchairs in apricot watered silk. The mirrored dressing table was clustered with bottles of perfume, amber and pale green liquids stoppered, and a cut-glass spritzer with a trailing scarlet cord. The warm, sweet fragrance of the mixed perfumes mingled with the scent of fresh laundry on the bed.

  “Observe everything”.

  On the chest of drawers were two photographs. The first was an autographed picture of the Führer in a silver frame bearing the letters ‘AH’, his standard gift to loyal friends. The other, Clara registered with a jolt, was a wedding photograph of the couple emerging from an honour guard of storm troopers in shirtsleeves and caps. The one she had seen that first day in the bookshop. She picked it up. There were Magda and Goebbels with Hitler trailing diffidently behind, looking like someone’s affable uncle. How happy the bride looked, how proud the groom.

  In the distance there was a shout, which made her jump, then the bang of a door. A few seconds later Magda entered.

  Her face was flushed and her eyes glazed. For a second she stared at Clara as if perplexed to see her there, then put up a hand to her neck. As she did, Clara saw a row of fading fingerprints on the skin, and wondered at the ferocity of the argument. Magda’s necklace was broken. She stood motionless but too late to prevent its unravelling as it rolled and scattered, spilling a pearly diaspora across the carpet. Clara bent down but Magda waved a hand.

  ‘Don’t worry. The maid will collect them.’

  She went across to her dressing table and sat down, bending her head, to apply a dusting of powder to her face. Her shoulders could not have been tighter if she had been wearing a steel brace. Given Magda’s normal rigid self-control, Clara was shocked by her loss of composure.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Fräulein Vine. I asked you here because the first designs we have had made for the Bureau have arrived and I thought perhaps you could try them out. We have been given some splendid headquarters in the Columbushaus, did I mention?’

  ‘No. How lovely.’

  ‘Very appropriate and so kind of Joseph to arrange it. We move in next month . . .’

  She stumbled to a halt. In the mirror Clara could see her mouth working, trying to maintain control.

  ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps you could come back another time.’

  ‘If you like.’ Clara made for the door, but something stopped her. Tentatively she went over and hovered a hand above Magda’s shoulder.

  ‘Frau Goebbels, is something wrong?’

  She had no idea how Magda would take this gesture and for a moment guessed it would be considered an unforgiveable breach. At first Magda shrugged off her hand and summoned her accustomed formality. ‘I must apologize, Fräulein Vine, for this emotion. I was only discharged from the clinic last month and my constitution is delicate . . .’ then she broke off, and buried her face in her hands.

  ‘Do you know, Fräulein Vine, I sometimes ask myself why I ever married again?’ She stared defiantly at Clara in the mirror. ‘I had everything I could want – a car, a seven-room apartment in Reichskanzler Platz, maids, all the clothes I needed, a generous allowance from Gunther, my first husband. I was only eighteen when I married him, and he was twenty years older than me.’ She dabbed at her reddened nose and looked up at Clara meaningfully. ‘Klaus is an older man too, I know.’

  With a shock Clara realized that Magda must assume she was sleeping with Müller. She blushed, but Magda was staring at her own reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Twenty years is a lot.’ She fumbled for her gold-tipped cigarettes with trembling fingers. ‘Yet Gunther Quandt was a decent man. When we divorced he took me to dinner at Horchers. Roast partridge we had, if I remember rightly.’ In a quieter voice, almost as if she was talking to herself, she continued. ‘Four thousand marks monthly allowance, plus fifty thousand marks to purchase a house.’

  Clara couldn’t help thinking of Leo Quinn’s face.

  “Ask them questions. And just tell me what they talk about. That’s all.”

  She sat on the apricot silk chair, and said, ‘So how did you meet the Herr Doktor?’

  ‘I had had an accident. A car smash, and though I was not badly hurt, I spent several weeks in hospital. While I was there, lying in bed day after day, I did some serious thinking. I be
came convinced that I should find a purpose, and that was when I began to get interested in politics. There was a NASDAP meeting one evening, and I went along. At first, I felt so embarrassed, so out of place – the people, and the smell, the sweaty bodies in that hall, all the Brown Shirts, you can’t imagine. But when I heard Joseph talk, something in me answered that. In the midst of all that excitement, the shouting, the roaring, he was so calm. And his suit was shabby. He needed mothering. That’s what I thought.’

  She looked down at the wedding photograph on the dressing table beside her.

  ‘I taught him so much too. Do you know he had no idea how to eat lobster before he met me? And when he tried to use French, he would mispronounce the words. Can you imagine? I taught him table manners. I smoothed his rough edges. That easy charm he has in society, it was all down to me.’

  She blew her nose. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered. We married just over two years ago. Just two years ago, and now he looks at me like he wishes me dead.’

  ‘Everyone has tiffs,’ said Clara, aware how lame her advice sounded. But if Magda considered her reassurance inadequate, she didn’t show it.

  ‘This is not what you would call a tiff.’ She stabbed her cigarette in the cut-glass ashtray. ‘He’s completely irrational.’

  Clara kept silent. It was almost as if Magda thought she didn’t matter. As if she were a servant. Was it because she was half-English, and may not be in the country for long, that she could be confided in without risk? Or was it that way Magda had, of disregarding most of humanity, as if they had no private thoughts or feelings? She realized Magda rarely asked anything about herself, where she lived, for example, or her acting. Magda was simply consumed by the drama of her own existence.