by Therese Down
Karl studied her eyes. “It is better that way,” he said with such seriousness and apparent sorrow that she could think of nothing to say. Then suddenly his eyes ignited with that fervency she found so intriguing. It was the opposite of what happened in Walter’s eyes when he grew animated or angry; then it was as if something viscous and cold slipped a sluice gate and swam beneath the ice blue surface. What she saw in Karl’s eyes was warm, quickening. Her own eyes widened in surprised response even before he spoke. “Do you believe in God, Hedda?”
“I don’t know! I… I have never really… What a question!” She frowned at him and made a face as if to indicate she thought him strange, though she was at once amused. “You are doing it again, Herr Muller.”
“Doing what?”
“You are being mysterious.”
“I am sorry.” He rose to his feet, and as he did so Hedda was surprised to feel regret that he was about to take his leave. Her conversation with Karl had been at times uncomfortable and even a little vexing, but it was stimulating. His eyes were the most sincere she had contemplated. “I must go,” he said. “It has been lovely to see you again, Hedda – and your children. Perhaps we shall meet again?” He and placed his cap upon his head, stood, bowed and smiled briefly into her eyes before turning to leave. She was just thinking how formal and sudden his leave-taking was when Walter reappeared at her side.
“Your friend came back to you, I see.” But his tone was surprisingly light.
“He is married, to a lawyer. She is staying with her parents in… can’t remember.”
“Oh.” Walter was now uninterested, full of his own thoughts following his talk with Reichsmarschall Goering. “Shall we go?”
Hedda got carefully to her feet, adjusting Anselm’s body as she did so, shifting his weight to her left hip.
“Agnette is outside. Naughty girl – she said she would come in often to let me know she was all right.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get her.” Walter’s response was not the irritated rebuke she had expected. “You take Anselm outside, the chauffeur will be waiting.”
As Hedda watched him go, she thought a number of things in quick succession: how Karl must have seen Walter coming into the Jagdhalle and how quickly he had taken his leave; how Walter was in a mercifully good mood and she might not now be punished for her earlier transgressions; and, most keenly, she felt suddenly protective of Karl and determined to keep to herself all he had told her.
CHAPTER THREE
A few weeks after the party at Carinhall, Goering left for France to direct his Luftwaffe offensive in Operation Adler, the long-planned beginning of the bid to neutralize the British RAF and then invade Britain amphibiously. One evening around that time, Walter spoke about Goering’s courage and the assured glorious victory of the Luftwaffe offensive. His colour high, his eyes bright but distant, he chewed his dinner mechanically and sawed voraciously at his meat as though the action were an illustration of the rigour and incisiveness of the invasion. He gulped at his Riesling, draining his glass, then refilled it, drained it, refilled it. He spoke at, rather than to, Hedda, his eyes barely meeting hers across the table, and if he appeared to become truly conscious of her presence, he seemed to check his animation and rein in his approbation of Herr Goering’s genius, as though remembering her unfitness as an audience. She listened because she had little choice and with the resentful attentiveness of a school pupil who only half understands her teacher’s rapid instruction but dare not admit it for fear of reproof.
Hedda did not like Reichsmarschall Goering and she could not help but fear a British reprisal against Berlin. It seemed inevitable and logical. How had her country suddenly become so audacious? A sustained bombing attack on London? Norway, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria – now France and Britain. She could barely keep track, list the countries assaulted and taken by the Führer in his bid to… to what? Hedda was not at all sure what it was that Hitler intended.
She had gleaned from Goering’s comments about Hellenism and cultural superiority that there was a philosophy of sorts behind such aggressive and sudden militarism. She was not sure how it had come about that when she walked to the shops on Bellevuestrasse that she frequently had to negotiate large parties of soldiers supervising the cleaning of the pavement by old Jewish men with toothbrushes; old men who were forced to kneel in the dirt, staring hard at the kerb as if their attentive brushing of small parts of the concrete were restoring a masterpiece. Many of them wept silently, the tears running from beneath their glasses, their hands trembling as they dipped their worn toothbrushes into black soapy water and then lifted them once more to the pavement.
Several times, Hedda had stopped suddenly in shock as a soldier lifted his foot and delivered a vicious kick to an old man’s kidneys or even, once, to the side of his face, apparently incensed that he had asked for water. Her startled face and instinctive, wordless shock as she met the soldiers’ mocking grimaces engendered patronizing and latently threatening remonstrance – she should hurry on; nothing here to concern such a pretty German lady. One had even taken off his helmet and bowed deeply in an act of mock chivalry. She had walked on, flushing in the wake of their derisory laughter, the chilling wolf whistles.
And here was Walter, more aroused and enthused than ever she had seen him, expressing his hatred of all things un-German, especially Jews. He seemed almost febrile in his compulsion to honour his Führer and the intrepid Reichsmarschall Goering. His eyes shone with hot, furious tears, his face clouded with an expression of barely controlled dejection when he contemplated his inability to be part of the glorious struggle in France.
Hedda dared to ask him why old men were being forced to clean Berlin’s streets with toothbrushes. Was it a cost-saving exercise? She knew, of course, it was not, but was genuinely anxious to know why such inhumanity was so openly tolerated in Berlin. Walter contemplated her with barely controlled contempt. “Cost saving?” he had repeated with affected, tired irony that was supposed to imply her stupidity. Then he paused and smiled, looking with amusement into the empty space to the left of and above his eye-line, his knife and fork separating in a mid-air gesture of mock contemplation. Yes, he supposed it could be seen that way – particularly if they died on the job.
Hedda was unable to suppress her loathing of Walter’s viciousness. She flashed back at him that these old men had always contributed to Germany, the country in which they were no doubt born. Should they not now be left to enjoy their retirement?
For answer, Walter banged the table so hard that the silver cruets jumped and rolled in chaotic circles around the table. “Who are you,” he bellowed at her, saliva and sauerkraut finding an exit together from the corners of his mouth, “to question the policies of the Führer?” What, he wished to know, would the likes of Hedda know about “das Judische problem”? Should he pass on his wife’s dissatisfaction with the treatment of Jews to Herr Goebbels, because he could, she knew; he had occasion to meet the propaganda minister on a weekly basis in the course of his new duties and could certainly question, on Hedda’s behalf, the necessity of being unpleasant to filthy Jewish scum.
Hedda eyed her husband with the inscrutable, level gaze behind which she hid when uncertain how to react, and she noted how the vein in his neck throbbed. “What the devil are you staring at? Are you a complete simpleton? Have you lost the power of speech?”
Hedda lowered her eyes and dabbed delicately at the corners of her mouth with her napkin – in disgust at the rivulets of chewed and unswallowed sauerkraut that curved around Walter’s jaw, rather than because she had any need herself. She sighed deeply and pushed her plate away from the edge of the table, making to rise.
“Are you deaf now as well? Answer me, damn you! Why should I tolerate this insolence at my own table? Hmm? Can you tell me that at least, Frau Gunther, if it is not too much trouble?”
“I am neither deaf nor dumb,” began Hedda as calmly as she could, though her head was a little unsteady and t
here was a tremor in her hands as they lay her napkin across her plate. “I simply will not respond to being spoken to as if I am an imbecile. I asked a civil question.”
“As if you are an imbecile? As if? My dear wife, there is no doubt. Your inane questions and your complete lack of understanding of… of anything indicate quite clearly that you are an imbecile of the first order. Do you have any idea at all – at all – what this country is on the brink of achieving? What is possible here?”
“Clearly not.” Hedda turned away from his manic glare. She did not want to challenge him further and felt to do so was to invite a beating. He was more incensed than she could remember. He seemed to have abandoned any attempt to allay his fury. Something, she knew, was disturbing him greatly, and there was no guessing what it could be. His work – his life – was a mystery to her. She knew only that whatever it was must be momentous, and if she did not escape, it was likely that she would become an outlet for her husband’s terrifying anger. “Excuse me, Walter,” she managed with as much gentleness and dignity as she could contrive, “I must attend to the children.”
As she reached the door handle, Walter’s plate smashed against the door, just inches from her face. She watched transfixed as gravy and shreds of sauerkraut, slugs of cold pork fat, clung briefly to the paintwork, then slid from the gloss surface. The plate splintered, and she was conscious of shards of fine porcelain bouncing off her outstretched hand and forearm and landing at her feet. Gravy splashed across her sleeve and she reflected for a split second that it was silk and would be difficult to clean, but the thought was so rapid it was more an understanding than anything grammatical.
“You’re not excused!” Walter hissed menacingly from his chair.
She did not turn to face him, but let her hand fall by her side and waited, her back half turned to him, for whatever would happen next. Her thoughts were as fractured as the plate, and one of them – a briefly glinting slither – was a thin protest at the increasing violence of the language with which he spoke to her. Somehow, this degeneration in itself was indicative of some terrible metamorphosis Walter seemed to be undergoing. Curiously, she recalled Karl’s assurance made at the Carinhall occasion; that she was better off not knowing the truth of her husband’s work.
The blow, when it came, was numbing of all further thought. Walter had suddenly leapt from his chair and, incandescent with an unnameable rage, had hit Hedda hard across the side of her head with the back of his hand. She stumbled and reached for the polished mahogany sideboard that ran along the wall from the dining room door to the grand bay windows, now heavily draped against the rainy August evening. Still she did not turn to him. Her revulsion was such that upon pain of death she could not have brought herself to look into his face. Fully expecting to be hit again, she closed her eyes and braced for the assault. There was no second blow. Bringing his mouth close to her face Walter hissed into her ear only that she disgusted him and he pushed her out of his way, opened the door and left the room, crunching porcelain beneath his polished boots.
He passed the cook as if she did not exist and the poor woman lifted her apron to her face as Hedda emerged from the dining room. The skin across Hedda’s temple had split with the force of the blow, and blood ran down her face and onto the cream silk collar of her dress.
“Madam!” was all the cook could manage when she had let fall her apron and extended a hand uselessly in Hedda’s direction.
“I am quite well, Elise,” Hedda managed. “Please attend to the children. It is time they were made ready for bed and I really should be letting the maid go home now. Please do that for me, would you?”
“Of course, Frau Gunther.” Elise scurried across the highly polished parquet to the foot of the stairs and ran up them as if there were an emergency.
Hedda could think of nothing except finding her favourite chair in the sitting room and pouring herself a large whisky. Walter had gone straight upstairs and he would go out for the evening, she was quite sure. With luck, he would not return before the small hours of the morning. With a great deal of luck, he would find another woman and never return.
The beautifully executed full colour print of Steen’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia duly arrived, courtesy of Goering and addressed to Fraulein Agnette Gunther. Accompanying the rolled print was a note in Goering’s florid handwriting, complimenting Agnette once more on her exquisite artistic taste and hoping her parents would find a fitting frame for the print so that she might hang it on her bedroom wall and contemplate its beauty whenever she wished. Rolled up inside the print was a carefully typed account of the story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia and, with it, a version that a very young child might like and understand, which Goering had had typed by one of his many beautiful secretaries. The letter instructed Agnette’s mummy or daddy to read it to her whenever she wished, and stated with mock sternness that Agnette was to brook no refusal at any time. Agnette was delighted with her gift and begged Hedda to send Marguerite, the maid, to buy a fine frame – at once.
“Well,” responded Hedda, smiling wearily, “we can’t upset you and have you telling tales to Herr Goering now, can we?” And Marguerite was duly dispatched and instructed to order a frame if she could not find one directly, in ornate gold gilt to mimic the Renaissance masters and do justice to the sumptuous golds and softly gleaming lustres of the print. Within two days, the painting was framed and hung and an electrician employed to install a light above it upon the wall facing Agnette’s bed, so that she could contemplate its compelling beauty before she slept each night.
Hedda feared that the imminent tragedy evident in the satyr-like executioner’s raised hand, the angle of the knife and the evident vulnerability of the intended victim would bring her daughter only nightmares. But Agnette was adamant that Herr Goering was right when he had said the poor deer would become the victim and the girl would be magicked away unharmed. Agnette wanted to know where Hedda thought the girl would go. Hedda contemplated the painting for a long moment before answering, “Well, it says in the story that she went to a place called Taurus, wherever that was.”
“Was it like heaven?” Agnette wanted to know.
“Yes. I think it was,” replied Hedda, smiling. “Like heaven, or just… a lovely, magical place far away from harm.” What she did not say was that in one version of the Iphigenia myth, the fatal blow was not withheld from the girl’s throat; that even in versions which delivered Iphigenia from the sacrificial altar and placed her in Taurus, her “sanctuary” was a terrible endurance of lonely enslavement as a priestess to Artemis, condemned to prepare fellow Greeks for sacrifice to the angry goddess who had first demanded Iphigenia’s death.
“Tell me again why they were going to kill her, Mutti?” Little Agnette stared at the painting and seemed tireless in her fascination with its heroine.
“Well, Iphigenia’s daddy, Agamemnon, had done something very naughty – he boasted that he was better at hunting than the goddess Artemis. She was the best of all the goddesses at using a bow and arrow. Artemis was so angry with Agamemnon that she made the sea go very calm and the wind to stop blowing, so that Agamemnon’s army couldn’t sail to Troy –” here Hedda anticipated the next question before Agnette could form it – “that’s a place far from Greece where Agamemnon’s enemies lived. Agamemnon had promised to help his brother rescue a beautiful lady called Helen, because she had left Greece and run away to Troy.”
Agnette nodded, looked from the picture to her mother with wide eyes, then back again at the print. “Why?”
“Well, Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world, and when a man from Troy came to visit the Greek people, he fell in love with her straight away and she fell in love with him, and they ran away together to his home in Troy.”
“So she wanted to go with him?”
“Yes.”
“So why did everyone want her to come back?”
“Well, Helen was married – to the king of Greece – and she shouldn’t have run away with someon
e else.”
Agnette considered this. “She was naughty, then! You tell us – me and Anselm – not to go off too far and to let you know where we are, don’t you, Mutti?”
“Yes – it was just like that.”
“Didn’t she like the king any more?”
“No, Agnette.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She just found him…” Hedda was tiring, and irritation was gathering force in her breast and causing her to tense. She made sudden movements to smooth the bedclothes and push back her hair. “She found him… bossy.”
Agnette sensed her impatience and was anxious to find out the story before her mother got up and left. “It’s all right, Mutti. It’s nearly the end, isn’t it?”
Hedda looked at her daughter, the pleading in her eyes, the anxiety that made her sit up straight and reach out a tiny hand to her mother in solicitation. Her heart softened. She smiled and hugged her daughter close, breathed in her sweet scent and closed her eyes as she lay her cheek against Agnette’s head.
“Nearly, sweetheart. The story ends as we know. Iphigenia is not killed, Artemis feels sorry for her and magics her away to Taurus. And the ships sail from Greece.” Hedda drew away from Agnette and, keeping her hands in hers, looked into her face and repeated as simply as she could to the enrapt child the saga of the Trojan offensive: how the Greeks could not begin it until Agamemnon, King Menelaus’s brother, had appeased Artemis following his boasting offence, by offering Iphigenia, his own daughter, as a sacrifice to the goddess. “Artemis was still so angry with Agamemnon,” explained Hedda, “that she said she would only make the sea move and the wind blow again if Agamemnon killed Iphigenia.”