by Thynne, Jane
Consulting her map, Clara walked rapidly southwards, past baroque, four-storey blocks painted in pastel shades, threading her way through the cobbled streets of the city centre and glancing into gloomy beer cellars, whose lamps in heavy iron sconces might have hung unchanged since medieval times, their ceilings painted with colourful flowers, entwined with the obligatory swastikas. There was one more place she wanted to see, before she delivered the case to Katia Hansen.
Past the Viktualienmarkt, heady with the smells of sausage, pretzels and crispy roast chicken, she found herself in Gärtnerplatz, a pleasant square where five roads converged. The centre boasted a patch of grass and trees, and what might be called a riot of geraniums, had anything so unruly as a riot ever been permitted in the Bavarian capital. On the far side was an elegant grey colonnaded building, surrounded by scaffolding. Between the scaffolding she saw a sign saying Theater am Gärtnerplatz. The place Anna Hansen had performed.
Clara went into a café directly across the square and, contrary to her usual custom, sat in the window looking out. Next to her were a trio of women ordering hot chocolate and cake with whipped cream, talking about the problem of finding servants.
The waitress brought Clara an apfelstrudel with rich, flaky pastry. She was plump and jolly-looking, with a frill of dirndl barely constraining a full bosom.
‘What’s happening to the theatre?’ Clara asked.
‘It’s being remodelled. The Führer has decided it should become the official home of comic opera.’
‘Does he come here a lot?’
‘A lot! He’s always here! But he’s so modest. He doesn’t want anyone making any fuss. He slips into the royal box just before the curtain rises. No one knows anything about it until his special flag is unfurled over the balcony. He was here just the other day for The Merry Widow.’
‘Again. Do they perform that a lot?’
‘All the time. It’s the Führer’s favourite.’
Clara had heard how Hitler adored Franz Lehár’s operetta, with its sentimental tunes, its plot about women, money and love. Even the fact that its authors, Leo Stein and Viktor Léon, were Jewish didn’t seem to perturb him.
‘And afterwards they have the most wonderful parties at the Künstlerhaus.’
‘What’s the Künstlerhaus?’
‘The artists’ club? On Lenbachplatz? It’s an amazing place. All gold paint everywhere and astrological signs painted on the ceiling in the hall. My man helped with the decoration. He’s a builder.’
‘And what are these parties like?’
‘As if I’d know! They’re not going to invite the likes of me, are they? I’m happy enough to see the Führer go in and out. You get a great view from here. If you sit there until this evening you might see him tonight, you never know.’
The drab apartment block where Katia Hansen lived was on the corner of Frauenstrasse and Zwingerstrasse, only a few minutes’ walk from Gärtnerplatz. After several minutes the door was opened by an old woman who Clara assumed was the landlady, in a stained apron, her hair tied in a rough turban. She had apple cheeks, only the apples had grown creased and withered and her little eyes were sharp with suspicion. Everything about her was a direct contradiction of the mat beneath her feet which said ‘Welcome’. When Clara asked for Katia Hansen, her expression hardened from flint to steel.
‘She’s not here.’
‘But she lives here, right?’
‘Not any more. She used to but she’s gone away.’
‘Where has she gone?’
‘A long way away.’
Clara had not been expecting this. It had not even occurred to her that Katia Hansen might have moved. Yet now, with Bruno nowhere to be seen and Katia Hansen gone, it was plain she had travelled all this way for nothing. Suddenly, fatigue and futility combined to dispirit her. She felt moored to the spot.
‘The thing is, I have something to give her. Perhaps I could leave it here.’
The landlady looked askance at the case Clara was carrying.
‘Certainly not.’
‘You see, Fräulein Hansen’s sister has died.’
The old woman blanched slightly, but was not giving an inch.
‘I’m sorry. But that’s not my business.’
‘This case belonged to her sister. It’s of sentimental value. I’ve come all the way from Berlin to deliver it. Perhaps if I left it here then she would be able to come and fetch it.’
If Clara had hoped the mention of Anna’s death might affect the old woman, she was disappointed. Instead the woman leaned forward and hissed, her breath rank through mottled brown teeth.
‘How many times do I need to tell you? She’s gone. You people need to leave us alone. We don’t want anything of hers.’
‘Then I don’t suppose you have a forwarding address? As I have come such a long way.’
From the bowels of the building came the shout of children squabbling. The scent of boiled flesh wafted down the hall. The woman was clearly torn between slamming the door shut and the thought that her visitor might create more fuss by returning. She cast a glance over Clara’s shoulder into the street.
‘Wait a minute.’
When she returned, she thrust a piece of paper gracelessly into
Clara’s hand.
‘It’s the best place for her,’ she commented. ‘If you see her, tell her not to bother coming back.’ With that she shut the door in Clara’s face.
Clara looked at the scrap of paper in her hand.
Katia Hansen
Heim Kurmark
Klosterheide
Lindow in der Mark
Heim Kurmark? she thought. What’s that?
So the Hansen sisters had quarrelled. And nower entire body taut with the strain of heightened alertness, Clara decided to find somewhere to stay the night. It was six o’clock already, and having rejected the idea of taking the night train back to Berlin, she found a room in a Gasthaus near the station. She should have been more discriminating – the place was cold and unfriendly, the front door had a cracked pane of glass, and she noticed only too late a card propped in the hallway saying Juden Sind Nicht Hier Erwünscht. The owner’s cook had managed to pull off the unlikely combination of overboiled cabbage and underboiled potatoes which Clara ate beneath the monocled eye of the only other guest, a parched, whiskery man who stared shamelessly at her figure as though she might later be offering it to him. Coffee was served in the gloom of the parlour, where every quarter hour a piercing clock’s chime shattered the musty air.
By nine o’clock she was sitting on a bed as hard as a new Reich autobahn, reflecting on a wasted journey. No Bruno, no Katia Hansen, and to make matters worse, her back ached because she had lugged the stationery case all around the city in a cumbersome shoulder bag. Pulling the case out she opened it again and spread its contents on the bed, fanning out the sweet, schoolboyish letters from Johann that she had read so many times, she almost knew them by heart. She wondered what Anna had written back. From everything she knew of Anna Hansen, marriage to an SS officer was wildly out of character and as for a stint at Bride School . . . it was hard to imagine anything less likely. Was it simply love that drew Anna and Johann together? Or was Anna seeking something else from the arrangement? A refuge, perhaps, or a fortune? Or an escape?
She rifled idly through the papers. The only thing she hadn’t properly examined was the letter addressed to Katia, and now she opened it, and read the scant couple of lines.
Darling Katia, I know you’re angry with me, but I will explain everything, I promise. When you get this, please write back. Don’t believe what anyone says to you about me. It will be all right, you’ll see. Your loving sister, Anna
So the Hansen sisters had quarrelled. And now Katia had moved to the other end of the country and probably didn’t know that her sister had been murdered and that they would never be reconciled. How long might it be before she found out?
She shook her head and folded Anna’s letter back into its enve
lope, then bundled the papers up and shut the case again. After she had done that she undressed, lay between the chilly sheets and stared up at the ceiling, riddled with damp like a map of Africa, turning the day’s events over in her head. There was one thing that puzzled her. The remark the old woman had made.
You people need to leave us alone.
Evidently Clara wasn’t the first person to come looking for Katia Hansen. Someone else had been to visit Anna’s sister. It might be the authorities, seeking to contact the family over Anna’s death. Though if that was so, surely the visitor would have explained to the landlady that Anna had died? Yet it was clear from the old woman’s reaction that she knew nothing about it. So why had someone tried to locate Katia, and more importantly, who?
The next morning she skipped breakfast in her hurry to leave but then found herself with half an hour to wait for the train. Idling in the street that led to the station, she saw a shop front containing a display of Hitler Youth knives. There, in the forefront, was exactly the one Erich had told her about. The latest model. She sighed to herself as she realized she was going to have to buy it. When she went in and asked to see it, the shopkeeper, a huge man with a barrel chest and a moustache, put it straight in her hand and it fitted her palm perfectly, as if it was made for her. It was a curiously pleasurable sensation. It lay there, heavy and smooth, with its black checkered grip and gleaming silver blade engraved with the HJ motto Blut und Ehre in antiquated Gothic script. Blood and Honour. Two perfectly ordinary words whose meaning the Nazis had managed to pervert. Frankly, she thought as she paid for the knife, it was hard to think of a phrase she hated more.
‘Heil Hitler!’ said the shopkeeper.
Clara nodded.
Except for that one, of course.
Chapter Twenty
The white, eighteenth-century palace that contained the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was far less imposing than Goering’s Air Ministry, just a grenade’s throw away down Wilhelmstrasse, yet it embodied its master’s character just as well. While the Air Ministry intimidated with its sheer size, Goebbels’ ministry was a far more subtle affair. The original building had been extended in clean, modernist style with a mellow stone façade and modish torch lamps to allow more Lebensraum for the Reich’s propaganda empire. Inside, a viewing theatre and pine-panelled conference rooms had been added, giving the general impression of a sleek, state-of-the-art machine, producing an unending stream of rebuttals and manufactured news to feed the ravenous world media.
As she waited for Hauptsturmführer Huber, Mary watched a bustling stream of journalists filing out of the conference room behind her. Every morning a bulletin would be posted in the lobby with details of the daily press conferences, to be delivered either by Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich or Goebbels himself. The subjects were generally attacks on the Church, the Jews, the Czechs, or the Bolsheviks. No one was left in any doubt what to write. In Nazi Germany the production of news was just as serious and precise a business as the manufacture of tanks and guns, and journalists were kept under as strict a control as possible. Officially that was achieved through minutely itemized permits and visas, and unofficially through wiretaps, threats and surveillance. It couldn’t be more different from Spain, Mary thought, where plenty of the soldiers in charge couldn’t read, and any old bit of paper you flourished, even an ancient love letter, would be accepted as official documentation.
Everything about Madrid had been noisy, vibrant chaos. Each day was dominated by the wail of sirens, street speakers denouncing fascism, yellow trams clanging down the street, and loud bars full of soldiers smelling of sweat and tobacco. Nights were punctuated by the distant rumble of artillery and the thunder of trench mortars as they thudded into their targets. There were queues everywhere for beans and bread, and getting anywhere meant negotiating a way around giant craters in the pavements and ad hoc barricades erected in the street to keep what the locals called ‘los facciosos’ out.
The largest hotels, the Ritz and the Palace, had been turned into hospitals, with local prostitutes dragooned into service as nurses, so Mary had installed herself in a smaller place, containing a strange assortment of foreigners, all with their own agenda. There were journalists, entrepreneurs and agents provocateurs, and other men whose roles seemed even less precise. It didn’t matter though, because no one actually discussed their business. Their conversation focused solely on the progress of the Fascist advance and the availability of food. Which shop had potatoes, which had apples, where sausage could be found. Between forays into the city they would congregate in the ground-floor bar. Someone would commandeer the piano, or another guest with a gramophone would play Beethoven at top volume, while someone else opened a suitcase full of chocolate to be traded for coffee or bread or eggs. One day, as Franco’s forces began their regular morning bombardment, Mary was sitting there listening to the waitress grumble about losing her blonde highlights now all the peroxide in the city had been confiscated by the hospitals. As a nearby shell hit its target, Mary looked out to see a telephone pole crash down, its wires draped like a clothes line across the road. The building opposite was pocked with shrapnel holes.
‘Admiring General Franco’s art?’
It was a pair of men eating at the next table. They asked her to join them and poured a stream of bitter coffee for her as more shells crashed around them.
‘You don’t need to look so worried,’ said one. He was an Englishman, wiry and muscular, with high cheekbones and a sculpted face. He wore khaki fatigues and a red scarf round his neck. ‘You can tell how far away a shell is by the sound of the whistle.’
His companion was a fleshy, self-assured Austrian with thick, wavy hair and dark, suspicious eyes. He had a handgun in a leather holster round his waist. To Mary’s astonishment he was introduced as Emilio Kléber, the military advisor to the International Brigades in Madrid and the man popularly held to have saved the city so far from Nationalist forces. He was eating, messily, a portion of stew, but hearing her accent he paused.
‘You’re American. I lived in New York for a while. Down in Greenwich Village. There was a hot-dog cart outside my apartment and every morning I woke up to the smell of those hot dogs. Best sausage in the world.’
‘And who are you?’ she asked the Englishman.
‘You can call me Pericles,’ he said. That didn’t seem so strange to her. Half the men out in the war had taken fighting names, for one reason or another. The men asked her about her journalism, and her career, and then began to talk with penetrating seriousness about Communism and how it was the only solution to injustice and the way to prevent war engulfing the continent. The barbarity of the Fascists knew no bounds, they argued. The fires they lit in Spain would ignite the whole of Europe if they got the chance.
‘You’ve been to Germany, you say?’ said Kléber. ‘Well, that’s how it will end here, if Franco gets his way. He wants a state like Hitler’s.’
‘I’m hoping to get a pass to go out to the Fascist lines. I’d like to interview some of their leaders.’
Kléber’s face darkened. ‘Beware of the Fascists. They are full of propaganda. They will tell you anything. They claim the Republicans are feeding prisoners to the zoo animals.’ He gave a savage, guttural laugh. ‘I say they might want to, but they wouldn’t get the chance. There are no animals left alive in Madrid Zoo.’
When the bombardment finished Kléber departed and Mary went for a walk down the Gran Via with Pericles. He had a slight limp, from a bullet hole in his leg that had not properly healed, yet he walked with rapid purpose, like a man who has discovered his role in life.
‘What will you do next?’ she asked him.
He shrugged. ‘There is so much to do.’
‘If you’re so interested in Communism, why don’t you go out to Russia?’
He looked at her as if she was mad. ‘What would be the point of that, Miss Harker? Russia’s had her revolution already. My work is to create the next one.’
They parted soon afterwards and she didn’t see him in the hotel again, or for that matter anywhere in Madrid.
Hauptsturmführer Huber returned, wrenching Mary’s thoughts back to the present. He was fatter than she remembered and a bulge of white flesh peeped beneath the straining buttons of his tunic, like filling from a burned, overstuffed pie. The iron filings on his scalp had been shaved again, rendering his head a prickly potato. She was relieved to see he bore a sheaf of papers containing her details and stamped with the indigo National Socialist eagle, but before he handed it over, Huber flicked through with his sausage fingers and read aloud the conditions of the permit. No images depicting the Nazi government in a negative manner would be permitted. No degrading pictures of German citizens. No photographs of any prohibited site. Any violation of the conditions of the permit would be punished with immediate expulsion, by order of the Führer Adolf Hitler himself.
‘Sign here.’
As Mary made to sign, he snatched the paper away again and pretended to read a further item.
‘One further condition. Any Fräulein wanting a photography permit will accompany SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Huber for an evening at the Metropol theatre. So what’s it to be?’
Huber gave a hearty laugh, displaying his gold front tooth to full advantage, and waved the permit in his chubby hands. The thought of what those fingers might try, sitting next to her at the Metropol theatre, made Mary shudder.
Chapter Twenty-one
This time when Clara got back to her apartment on Winterfeldstrasse there was no need to examine the powder on the doorknob to see if she had intruders. An entire crater of splintered wood had been punched around the lock, and the door gaped open.