The Pursuit of Pearls

by Jane Thynne

  Not that Anna had much choice when she arrived at the Bride School, a stately villa with pillared gates proudly topped by a pair of swastika flags and screened from the world by a ridge of tall pines. Classes there were compulsory—they had been since 1935, on Himmler’s orders—and you needed to submit the certificate you received to the SS Race and Settlement Office before your marriage could go ahead. In some ways the School was like a military training academy, with a regime that started at five thirty in the morning and didn’t end until the weary brides dropped into their beds at nine o’clock at night. That morning, for example, had begun with the usual outdoor bath, to take advantage of the island’s fresh, pine-scented air, followed by energetic gymnastics in shorts and undershirts. After breakfast came Sewing, and then a visit from the local Mother and Child branch for Child Care instruction, before lunch, which was made on a rota by the brides themselves, wearing head scarves and spotless aprons.

  Today they had been focusing on Cooking Without Butter because of the shortage, and it had been very dull. Though that was no bad thing, Anna thought, because all these regular meals were making her plump. After lunch came Culture, consisting of a talk on fairy tales. All brides needed to learn fairy tales because the German mother was the “culture bearer” to the next generation. Today’s lecturer had explained how in “Cinderella” it was the prince’s Germanic instincts that led him to reject the stepsisters’ alien blood and search for a maiden who was racially pure.

  Culture should have been what Anna enjoyed best. She had been a dancer after all, not so long ago. Chorus line at the Wintergarten. Standing there amid the shadowy shrubs, she ran an absent hand over her rumpled, shoulder-length hair. Her dark roots were showing badly, and the bleached curls were already turning to frizz in the damp air. She sighed. It was hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between her previous life and the one she was living now. Her old friends would die laughing if they could see her. But then Anna’s circumstances had changed. Changed drastically. And by some miracle, just as she had needed to escape from a difficult spot, SS Obersturmführer Johann Peters, six foot two with a jaw like granite and eyes as blue as the Baltic Sea, had walked into her life. From the moment Johann had come up to her in that dank little nightclub, she hadn’t looked back. If it hadn’t been for Johann, she might even have resorted to answering one of those depressing advertisements you saw in the newspapers. 54-year-old lawyer, pure Aryan, desires male offspring through marriage with young virgin, hardworking, low heels, no jewelry. So when Johann had requested a dance, and shortly afterwards her hand in marriage, she had taken him up on it without a second thought, even if it meant spending six weeks at Bride School in preparation.

  The villa that housed the Bride School had been occupied by a single Jewish family until it was transferred to the ownership of the Deutsches Frauenwerk. As Anna walked between lessons, she would look wistfully at the grandeur of the décor, the mahogany paneling of the hall and the line of little bells in the kitchen, which were connected to different rooms in the house. The whole place was full of color: pistachio paint in the hall, almond white on the dado rails, and deep burgundy in the library, which still smelled of leather and cigars. The music room—an entire room devoted to music!—was painted daffodil yellow, and the ballroom, which was lavender blue, had a ceiling like a wedding cake, molded with plaster roses, from where great chandeliers were suspended. Anna liked to imagine the life that had existed there before—all the parties and the fun and the elegance. There were patches on the walls where gold-framed oil paintings had hung, and if you stood quite still you could almost sense the family that had once lived here, evanescent as a waft of perfume down a corridor, or the faint ripple of laughter in the air.

  Now, however, the ballroom had been fitted with desks and its damask curtains taken down in the interest of cleanliness. Cleanliness was all-important at the Bride School. Everything had to be hygienic and disinfected, smelling of soap and polish. Dirt, and all soiled traces of the past, must be scrubbed away. Dirt was disgusting, the instructors said. Dust was almost un-German.

  Anna’s dormitory, where eight girls slept, was a long room on the top floor. It must have been the nursery originally, but it had been redecorated in the same stark, brutal fashion as the rest of the house. Iron bedsteads flanked the walls, and the floors were bare boards. The wallpaper had been whitewashed over, but if you tipped the wardrobe slightly, you could see a remnant of it, pale pink with knotted posies. Anna was observant like that. She had an eye for detail; she always liked to know what lay underneath things.

  It had been hard to leave her bed and slip out of the house unnoticed. Strangely for an organization that believed so fervently in fresh air, the dormitory window was kept locked, and after bedtime the corridors were patrolled by the sewing mistress, Fräulein Wolff. Brides were told not to leave the room except in cases of emergency. Luckily the only person to notice Anna waking that night was Ilse Henning, a good-hearted country girl with a shelf of a bosom and a face as scrubbed as a pine table, who blinked at her in puzzlement, then rolled obediently onto her side. Ilse probably assumed, quite correctly, that her roommate was going into the garden to smoke an illicit cigarette.

  That much was true. Yet it was a deeper restlessness that was troubling Anna Hansen. All day she had had the curious sensation that she was being watched. It was nothing obvious. Just a brooding self-consciousness that crawled across her skin, raising the minute hairs on her neck, making her tense, the way a gazelle tenses when it scents the approach of a predator. Several times during the day, both in the garden and in the house, she’d had the distinct feeling of someone’s eyes upon her, only to wheel around and find nothing there. She had repeatedly attempted to rationalize the sensation. Perhaps it was the sorry shortage of nicotine that had set her nerves jangling. Or maybe the ugly gardener, Hartmann, the one with the limp and the hedgehog haircut, was spying on her. He was always hanging around eyeing the Reich Brides. What was a creep like him even doing in a place like this? Why couldn’t he be sent to the Rhineland or something?

  The feeling came on her again as she lay trying to sleep in the dormitory, listening to the distant crump of fireworks, and to shake it off she had risen and crept out into the chill October air.

  The moon was obscured by a bank of heavy cloud as she progressed through the garden, avoiding the gravel path and staying close to the shrubs at the edge of the lawn. Behind her the house was a shuttered and slumbering hulk, with only a single lamp burning on the ground floor. Ahead lay the leaden expanse of the lake, visible only by the lights that glimmered from the few yachts and pleasure boats moored at its shore.

  She stopped at the trunk of a large pine tree and pulled out her cigarettes. Around her a dim tangle of laurel receded into a pool of deeper shadow. There was dense vegetation underfoot. Flecks of water from the lake blew against her face, and she hugged her arms to her chest, wishing she had worn something warmer than an old silk dressing gown. Because of the rigid dress code at the School, nightwear was the only area where brides had any self-expression. Most of the girls opted for a floral tent of scrubby toweling, but Anna’s was creamy silk with ivory lace inserts, and a matching negligee that smelled of smoke and perfume and acted as a consoling, luxurious reminder of the good old days.

  Suddenly she sensed a frisson of movement in the bushes, a spectral shimmer accompanied by a rustle of leaves. She froze, her senses on alert, straining to filter the night sounds. The fireworks had subsided now, and the night’s silence was penetrated only by the whine of the high trees swaying and the thrum of a car making its way along the lake road. More faintly, the soft rattle and groan of boats, their timbers creaking, and the water slapping on their sides, carried on the breeze.

  There it was again. A distinct crackle of leaves, a few yards to her left. Anna stiffened, her heart lifting into her throat, and whirled to see a white shape and a pair of golden circles trained on her. She almost laughed with relief.

&nbs
p; “God, Minka. You gave me a fright! Hiding from the fireworks?”

  The cat approached and rubbed against her leg. She was a friendly animal and much loved by the Bride School inmates. Anna squatted down to stroke her head, then took out her lighter, an elegant silver lozenge engraved with her initials. God forbid anyone should find her with it. She had had to smuggle it in here, because smoking was strictly forbidden at the Bride School. The Führer called cigarettes “decadent” and said smokers were unfit to be German wives and mothers. All brides had to sit through a lecture on the poison of nicotine and how the Jews had brought tobacco to Germany to corrupt the native stock. She snapped the lighter open, the flame leapt up and lit the cigarette, and she took a deep drag, impatient for the first delicious hit to coil down her throat. Sighing, she rested her back against the bark of the tree. This was a long way to come for a smoke, but it was worth it.

  Beside her the cat froze and lifted her head. She had seen something, but what? A mouse perhaps, or a bird? A fox even? Following her gaze, Anna stared blindly into the murk.

  “Is someone there?”

  A sudden screech heralded the launch of a single rocket that flared and dissipated in an emerald shower, lighting up the sky. The cat’s pupils contracted to slits. As the sound died away, Anna heard something else. The soft crunch of a footstep on the wet earth.

  “Who is it?”

  The words choked in her throat. As she stared desperately around her into the darkness, frantic thoughts raced through her mind. It had been a mistake to come out here. She should never have left the dormitory. Perhaps it was the creepy gardener, spying again.

  “Hartmann? Is that you?”

  Two more steps, and then a face loomed up before her. As Anna peered desperately through the darkness, terror engulfed her. Her knees almost buckled, and it took everything she had to summon a tone of coy flirtatiousness.

  “Well, hello, stranger.”

  The man raised the Walther 6.35-caliber pistol, and Anna’s eyes widened, but the sound of the shot was drowned in another exuberant volley of fireworks. A spume of scarlet sparks arced and spangled the sky. The man with the gun watched Anna languidly as she fell, then he turned away and melted into the shadows. For a moment Anna’s hand clutched frantically, as if she were trying to haul herself up on empty air, then it dropped back and the lighter slid out of her opened palm, down into the damp grass.

  CHAPTER

  1

  Clara Vine swung her car through the wrought-iron gates of the villa and braked violently to avoid a peacock crossing the drive. As the bird strutted onto the lawn, dragging its magnificent lapis lazuli tail, Clara was sure she divined an arrogant glint in its beady eye. Still, she was relieved she hadn’t hit it. It wouldn’t do to damage any property belonging to the Reichsminister of Enlightenment and Propaganda, even if that property did happen to be an unwanted pet. The birds were leftovers from Joseph Goebbels’s magnificent Olympics party the previous year, when Peacock Island in the Wannsee had been turned into a fairy-tale playground for two thousand guests, filled with dancing and fireworks. Film stars, singers, and all kinds of celebrities mingled with diplomats and high-ranking visitors. The papers had been full of it for days. After the balloons and the banners had been packed away, some of the birds had ended up here, even though Frau Doktor Goebbels detested them. Their jeweled crowns and magnificent displays concealed a nasty temper, and the stillness of Schwanenwerder was pierced constantly by their shrill cries.

  Not that the neighbors would have dreamt of complaining. The Goebbelses’ villa, at Inselstrasse 8, was in the most desirable position on this tiny, exclusive enclave. Though it was called an island, it was actually a peninsula, which stretched out from the Grunewald into the lake, connected by a single, narrow road. Surrounded on all sides by water, and wooded with oak, birch, and pine, Schwanenwerder was only a few kilometers from the center of Berlin, yet it might have been another country. It had been colonized a hundred years ago by the very wealthiest of Berlin’s society, the bankers, industrialists, and department store owners, who had competed among themselves to build the most tasteful, luxurious country houses and take advantage of Schwanenwerder’s restorative air. Since then, in the space of four years, a new elite had emerged to replace them. On the day Hitler came to power, Nazi storm troopers flocked onto the island and raised the swastika flag on its water tower. Most of the homes were now occupied by senior Party figures. Number 8 had been bought by Goebbels at a price far beneath its genuine value from the chairman of the Deutsche Bank, who had been all too eager to sell before his enforced departure abroad. It had a panoramic view of the Greater Wannsee, extensive lawns running down to a boathouse, and a garden ringed with oaks, pines, and fruit trees.

  Clara parked the red Opel next to a Mercedes-Benz cabriolet with beige leather seats, checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror, and smoothed her hair beneath her hat. She sat for a second, waiting for her trepidation, like a surge of stage fright, to come under control. Then she stepped out of the car. As she made her way to the front door, a pear, like a tiny, unexploded bomb, dropped beside her into the grass.

  The maid showed her into the drawing room, whose French windows at one end led to a flag terrace circled by a balustrade, beyond which was a magnificent view of the lake, edged by the gloomy, impenetrable Grunewald. Now, at five in the afternoon, the sun was a molten orb in a streaked caramel sky, turning the waters of the Wannsee into a sheet of hammered gold. At the end of the garden, Clara could see a private beach and a jetty, where Goebbels kept his motor yacht, Baldur. Seagulls squawked and wheeled in the sky, and farther out in the lake, a couple of fishermen drifted in their boats, hunched over their tranquil lines waiting for pike, like figures from a nineteenth-century painting.

  Clara crossed her arms and waited, pretending a nonchalance she did not feel, as she tried, yet again, to work out what Magda Goebbels could possibly want with her.

  The message had come that morning out of the blue. A messenger had brought the note to Clara directly onto the set at the Ufa film studios in Babelsberg, where she was filming a romantic comedy called A Girl for Everything. He had shouldered his way through the makeup girls and the script man, right into the dazzle of the arc lights, to deliver it. The boy’s face was a picture of urgency and intense curiosity, as befitted a summons from Magda Goebbels, wife of Hitler’s right-hand man and the woman informally known as the First Lady of the Reich. The other actors had looked on avidly as Clara quickly scanned the message, then folded the note and slipped it in a pocket. Her face, she knew, gave nothing away.

  Now Clara walked around the drawing room, assessing the pictures and furniture on display. Last year Goebbels had claimed he was embarrassed to have moved into such a large villa because he hated luxury, yet for the sake of the Reich he could not be expected to receive distinguished guests in his old apartment. One look at this room, however, revealed that his aversion to luxury did not run very deep. The place was furnished in solid bourgeois taste: rich Persian rugs and fat sofas upholstered in satin and watered silk, side tables in restrained nineteenth-century style on a parquet floor polished to a high shine. A Gobelin tapestry hung on the wall, and a Bechstein piano stood in the front window. The standard portrait of the Führer, de rigueur in any Party home, hung above a mantelpiece crowded with family photographs, most of which Clara had already seen in the newspapers. There was Goebbels in open-necked shirt and sunglasses, at the wheel of his motorboat. The four Goebbels children, Helga, Hilde, Helmut, and Holde, the girls in matching white dresses and ribbons, and Helmut in a sailor suit, sitting in their miniature pony carriage. Goebbels, it was said, insisted on one baby a year. Four children may be enough for a string quartet, he joked, but not enough for a National Socialist. He had publicly promised another five babies for the Reich.

  Catching sight of herself in a gold Rococo mirror, Clara scrutinized the picture she presented with a critical eye. She was wearing a buttoned ivory blouse beneath a fitted serge n
avy suit with a fur collar, her chestnut hair freshly cut in a neat bob. A new, fashionably tilted navy velvet hat. Red Coral lipstick by Max Factor. Lizard-skin clutch bag. Every inch the screen actress whose career was on the rise, though not so successful that she would be recognized on the street. And all of it a façade. Clara was used to a life of deception now. Sometimes deception seemed like an extension of her own being, moving bodily with her as she walked the streets of Berlin or sat with friends in bars or crossed the sets of the Ufa film studios. The Clara Vine she saw in the mirror was both herself and not herself. What the real Clara Vine might look like, she could no longer say.

  Though she couldn’t fault the image, still Clara felt uneasy. The near miss with the peacock had done nothing to improve her nerves. Behind her she heard the creak of the door and the heavy tread of her hostess.

  “You haven’t changed a bit!”

  It sounded like more of an accusation than a welcome. As Magda Goebbels entered the room, permitting a transitory smile to twitch across her crimson lips, Clara tried to conceal her surprise at the change in her hostess. Even if she had wanted to return Magda’s compliment, it was impossible. Four children in five years had done Magda no favors. Clara had seen her often enough in the newspapers, of course, decked out in satin and pearls, hosting grand Party occasions at Hitler’s side, presiding at the Mothers’ Union and the Winter Relief charity, partying with foreign dignitaries at last year’s Olympic games. But, close up, it was a very different picture. Magda was still elegantly turned out in the height of fashion; she wore a Chanel dress in peach silk, and her platinum hair was scalloped tightly against her cheeks. But beneath the rouge, her skin was putty-colored; her mouth was lined, and the dress bulged at the belt. Her body was waging a war between elegance and middle-aged spread, and it seemed the spread was winning.