Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  Her leg was hurting more than she could remember, pulsing like a fiery rod of pain, and she felt slightly feverish. Yet although her body was like lead, her mind was alive with images and impressions, darting like fish through the reefs and crannies of her brain. Around her the flowerbeds were planted with geraniums, aggressively red, their colour throbbing in the dusk. Katerina had seen a municipal gardener once, measuring out the spaces between the bedding plants with a ruler, as if even the flowers were a regiment. The League of German Flowers.

  She sat on the pediment of a statue to rest and wondered what time it was. The day that Papi died, Sonja had given her his pocket watch. It was gold, with fancy filigree on the case, and Sonja said she had better take it quick before one of those thieving relations found it, so despite the strict prohibition on personal possessions at the NSV home, Katerina had managed to conceal it in her spare underwear, and now she took it out of her pocket and pressed it to her ear. It was still ticking, and she imagined she was listening to Papi’s heart, still strong and beating.

  At her feet she noticed a flicker of movement. She put the watch back in her pocket and reaching onto the dusty paving she saw it was a fledgling bird fallen from the tree above, its heart still visible through the transparent membrane of skin. She picked it up and felt a quiver of life pulsate in her hand even as the outsized beak jabbed blindly at her flesh. Where had it fallen from? Looking up at the light coming through the linden leaves, their veins like fingerprints against the sky, she realized that even if she found a nest in those forked branches it would be impossible to return the bird. It had fledged fatally soon.

  She rubbed a tender finger across the spiky feathers and over the stippled skin. Papi used to rub a thumb down her cheek like this. ‘You have skin like silk,’ he would say, ‘skin like the petal of a flower.’ Sonja said love was like hypnotism, just a trick of the mind that could end with a snap of the fingers, but Katerina was sure love was more like this fledgling’s quiver – the stubborn pulse that kept it alive. Love was her old dog Anka trembling at her feet.

  She had written the letter carefully in private, first thing that morning. Crouching in the girls’ lavatories, the seat down, the smell of sanitation fluid rising and the chipped tiles reflecting the glare of the naked bulb above. She wrote painstakingly, in her best handwriting, using her left hand because no one was looking, and it would surely be impossible for Herr Hitler to tell. She filled two pages because she needed to be entirely honest and she knew that Hitler would respect a person’s integrity. Firstly she had explained all about her leg – how it had been deformed since childhood, and even the caliper would not help. It was a congenital condition – the same malformation that Doktor Goebbels suffered – so it would never be cured and going to any kind of special hospital would be useless. There was no point trying to treat her and she begged the Führer to intervene. Besides, the real difficulty about being sent away was that she was trying to find her sister. Sonja Klimpel. Sonja was a famous cabaret singer who had disappeared from Fischerstrasse, and it looked like her life was in danger. The Brown Sisters were talking of sending her away next week, so it was a matter of urgency.

  Ending with the address of the NSV home where she could be reached, Katerina signed the letter and sealed it in an envelope she had stolen from the nurses’ office, and addressed it.

  Adolf Hitler,

  The Reich Chancellery,

  Voss Strasse,

  Berlin-Mitte

  Then, in the top right-hand corner, where a stamp would normally be, she had written in careful capitals URGENT.

  You should never tell anyone what you’re thinking, kid.

  She had managed that perfectly well at the orphanage. She had been quite composed with Fräulein Koppel – Katerina wasn’t the one who was crying. But there was one person you could tell anything. Der Kinderfreund. The Children’s Friend.

  Above her the statue of a Prussian soldier, his copper face blue with tears, stared out at the government buildings all around. Right to the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda and across the square and up the length of Voss Strasse, to the Reich Chancellery, still draped with banners from the recent victory parade. It was even larger than it looked on film. A blank façade punctuated by a hundred windows and in the centre a pillared entrance surmounted by a carved eagle. An implacable cliff with gigantic bronze doors. In the street outside an SS driver was polishing his car, rubbing its sleek flanks as tenderly as if he were a mediaeval knight grooming a horse.

  Before Katerina could help it, the story of the Pied Piper came into her mind. It was a tale that had ever since childhood festered quietly within her like a dreadful secret, a story she had always associated with profound embarrassment. Even thinking about it was enough to induce a hot flush of shame. In the story, all the town’s children were able to dance their way out of Hamlyn to the magic tune of the Piper, except for one, the deformed child, who could not keep up. The child with the limp, who reached the mountain only to see its doors crash closed. That child was her, she knew, her leg always dragging away behind her like some harsh truth. Katerina had always hoped that one day it would be mended and she would dance along with all the others, yet now she knew she had been fooling herself. The leg would never be mended, no matter what any special hospital tried to do. Not all the medicine in the Reich could magic it. For the first time she properly understood what Sonja had told her.

  The best stories have a little piece of glass in them. It might prick you and make you bleed inside, but it also reflects a bit of your own life back at you.

  Inside her pocket, the letter burned. A well-composed letter is the acme of communication. That was what Papi had always said and it was why he was proud to work in the Reichspost. According to her father, the Führer received a thousand letters a month, most of it fan mail – poems and love letters and requests to marry him or bake cakes for him or have his baby – but no matter how trivial, he read them all. Every letter was filed and replied to. Every letter was stamped and numbered by his office and the appropriate action taken. That was why Katerina was so confident. Surely appropriate action would be taken in this case. She looked up confidently towards the great bronze doors.

  In the event it was easier than expected. The sentry gestured towards a small glass cubicle just inside the door, where a uniformed officer accepted her letter with a wink and assured her that it would most certainly reach the Führer. She felt a lightening of her heart as she retreated. Everything now was in Hitler’s hands.

  Only one thing troubled her. On her way out of the home that evening, escaping down the corridor as the others filed into Abendbrot, she had run into Fräulein Koppel.

  ‘Where are you going, Katerina?’

  ‘My BDM meeting of course.’

  Katerina was flustered. It was the first thing she could think of but Fräulein Koppel knew perfectly well which evenings her BDM meetings were on. She would know instinctively that the girl was lying and challenge her to tell the truth.

  Except she didn’t. She stooped down, her face pale as stone and nodded gravely.

  ‘Good. I wanted to tell you. I’ve been trying very hard to contact your sister, but her friends might have a better idea of where she is. Perhaps they would be able to help. Do try to find Sonja, Katerina. Try as hard as you can.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Number 11 Giesebrechtstrasse was a five-storey Wilhelmine edifice in Charlottenburg, painted the colour of faded lace. Its narrow balconies peered over the street like the pursed lips of a dowager, its pediments were decorated with stucco scrolls and everything about the stuffy gentility of its décor was at total odds with the louche nature of its current inhabitants. But that was, after all, the same with pretty much every other building in Berlin.

  At first glance Salon Kitty was an impressively upmarket establishment. It had plenty in common with the exclusive Herrenklub, the fusty gentlemen’s club in Voss Strasse that was patronized by Berlin’s VIPs, and that was n
ot only the clientele. There were clubby leather chairs surrounding low tables, crowded with cut-glass ashtrays, orange-shaded lamps, and brandy balloons. A marble-topped bar ran the length of the room and the walls were done out in burgundy wallpaper and hung with reassuringly dull oil paintings. This décor created a womb-like atmosphere intended to reassure the dignitaries, industrialists, high-ranking military officers, diplomats and foreign officials that this palace of pleasure was cut off from the rest of the world, with all its bourgeois morals, obligations and bureaucratic cares. In the corridors leading off from the reception room, thousands of Reichsmarks had been spent on beds that were ten times as comfortable as anything the clients had at home – not that anyone would be sleeping in them – as well as every conceivable modern convenience, including running hot water, chilled wine in ice buckets and state-of-the-art recording devices to relay every word of pillow talk to Heydrich’s trained eavesdroppers in headphones, established in the basement of 10, Meinekestrasse, just a short distance away.

  Bettina Beyer walked swiftly out of the front door and took a great gulp of fresh air. It was always a relief to leave Salon Kitty and fortunately it had been a quiet afternoon. Generally clients didn’t start arriving until past nine o’clock in the evening, and before anything else could take place there would be a long, dull dalliance with a bottle of cheap Sekt listening to their woes or their triumphs. The girls were encouraged to chat: Why are you finding your time at the embassy so frustrating? How much longer will this war be going on, do you think? The men never wanted to hear Bettina’s woes of course, which was just as well. If anyone asked her she might just be tempted to tell them.

  First up was the fact that she was working at Salon Kitty at all. When she was a little girl growing up in a small town east of Berlin that had never been part of the plan. She had dreamed of being an actress, or in lieu of that a model, but in the event she had to settle for work as a leg model for a hosiery company. It went well to begin with. She still had the posters of herself, or at least her legs, lightly crossed and entwined around a sinuous black cat above the slogan: The female leg enveloped by a fine, delicate stocking is one of the most powerful symbols of sensual desire. But the war put paid to that. No one was advertising stockings any more. You couldn’t get silk pairs for love nor money and the coarse grey woollen versions you found in the shops were not going to be anyone’s powerful symbol of sensual desire. Shortly after the leg modelling dried up, she had run into a woman called Kitty Schmidt, a formidable bottle-blonde of indeterminate years who suggested a little moonlighting to make ends meet, and that was how it had started. Bettina knew immediately it was a dreadful mistake.

  She hated everything about the work, and lived in terror that her modelling friends would find out. She had told her old parents she was engaged to an officer in the Wehrmacht and waiting for her man to return from France so they could marry. Mutti and Vati weren’t to know any better and besides, Bettina wasn’t sure how much longer she would be employed at Salon Kitty anyhow. In the past few weeks a troupe of hand-picked Bavarian girls with very superior airs had appeared – all kitted out in smart day dresses like Lufthansa air hostesses with single-strand pearls round their elegant necks. They spoke all kinds of languages and were assigned to the more important clients. There was the distinct impression that freelancers like Bettina were no longer part of Kitty Schmidt’s plan.

  The tram arrived and Bettina climbed on and elbowed her way gratefully towards a spare seat, from which she was swiftly ejected by a fat hausfrau with a Mother’s Cross prominently pinned to her bosom. Hanging on to the strap, staring out of the bleary windows, her mind returned to the other problem. The visit she had received the previous night.

  It was half past eight in the evening when young Katerina had come knocking, and it being Bettina’s evening off, she had made the mistake of opening the door. God, it was like seeing a little ghost of Sonja – the same steady gaze, the same chin jutting out with determination, only with an unsettling innocence that her elder sister lacked.

  Bettina couldn’t help herself.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  She regretted her tone almost immediately and asked the kid inside – there wasn’t much alternative and besides she showed no signs of budging. She gave the girl a cup of tea and some bread she had been saving for the morning and Katerina ate it all ravenously, in between bites explaining that she was still trying to find Sonja. Her sister would never have disappeared without a reason. Katerina needed to find her and she wasn’t going to give up. That was all fine and Bettina was only listening with half an ear as she did her nails, until Katerina mentioned that she had enlisted an actress in her search.

  ‘Clara Vine!’ Bettina abandoned the nail varnish and sat up with a start. ‘What are you talking about? You didn’t give her this address?’

  Not that it mattered. A few nights ago the police had visited and ransacked Sonja’s room, presumably hoping they might find that Jewish boyfriend of hers hiding under the bed, and although Bettina had looked pretty and played dumb, inside she was fuming. She had no idea what Sonja was up to – God knows she was capable of anything – but one thing was for certain, she was on a suspect list now and if the police came back sniffing round Fischerstrasse, they would be wanting to know Bettina’s business too, which could spell trouble.

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you, Bettina. I know you work hard. Fräulein Vine is on a committee assisting orphans so I asked her to help.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go the whole way and ask the Führer himself?’

  The girl frowned, but Bettina was staring in the mirror, head tilted and lips pursed, posing for an imaginary photographer, so it didn’t seem the right moment to answer.

  Outside the stage door of the Haus des Rundfunks in Masurenallee a small crowd of autograph hunters had gathered. They were always there on the nights when the Werhmacht Request Show was broadcast, desperate to catch a glimpse of a celebrity, or even better to touch them, like mediaeval pilgrims grabbing the magical hem of a saint. A regulation pair of press photographers was usually present, by order of the Propaganda Ministry, lolling against the wall and stabbing out their cigarettes on the brickwork as they awaited any even half-recognizable celebrity who might make the next day’s society pages.

  When Bettina arrived and merged into the crowd, she felt a miserable stab of envy. She had herself done a spot here once in the chorus of a concert – her one and only acting job as it happened, unless you counted what she did now as acting, as Bettina did. It helped to look at it that way and besides, with so many professional actresses now being assigned to factory work, making munitions and tanks, she was probably better off doing what she was. Drinking cocktails with diplomats and sleeping with them afterwards was her version of war work and frankly she deserved an Iron Cross for it.

  A dazzle of flashbulbs, the stage door opened and she pressed forward.

  ‘Fräulein Vine!’

  ‘I always listen to the Request Concert. I never miss it. I liked your slot.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The two women were ensconced in a scratched leatherette booth in a station Kneipe on the corner of Adolf-Hitler-Platz a few hundred yards from the Broadcasting House. Above them the steel Funkturm mast, like a mini Eiffel Tower, thrust into the violet sky, and directly below trains screeched and rattled through the U-Bahn. Clara brought a couple of bottles of Pilsner to the booth that Bettina had selected, in the far back corner of the bar. The air smelled of exhaust fumes and fried onions.

  ‘I worked at the Haus des Rundfunks for a while. In the chorus.’

  Clara squinted in puzzlement at the girl before her, with her pretty, heart-shaped face, bee-stung lips and shameless scarlet lipstick, and tried to place her.

  ‘So you’re a singer. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.’

  ‘Singer, model, actress.’ Bettina shrugged, airily. ‘I’m an all-rounder really.’

  After an hour on the Request Conce
rt, Clara wanted nothing more than to head back to her apartment and try to sleep. Her mind was far away, back in Lisbon with Ned. She was still savouring the day they had spent together, treasuring it like a moment out of time. Something about war changed the natural progression of Time. War gave you grief that was leaden and slow, yet it also contracted the minutes so you had to seize pleasures while you could.

  She forced herself to focus on the woman in front of her.

  ‘You said you had something to tell me. Something I needed to hear.’

  ‘It’s to do with a kid I know. An orphan. You’re interested in orphans, right? Well this one has a bad leg and she told me she’s being sent to a special hospital for it. When she told me I thought, special hospital? What’s that? Anything they call “special” these days usually means the opposite.’

  Close acquaintance with Third Reich officials had developed in Bettina an acute ear for the weasel words of bureaucracy. The lies and evasions and downright monstrosities that cloaked themselves in the thickets of Nazi jargon.

  ‘Anyhow,’ she sipped her beer and coolly examined her nails, ‘I don’t think this kid should go, so I’ve decided she needs to be adopted.’

  ‘And you’re going to adopt her?’

  Bettina realized she was going to have to ditch the actress fantasy and acquaint Clara Vine with her other occupation.

  ‘Not exactly. Have you ever heard of Salon Kitty?’

  A brief nod.

  ‘Fact is, I may have ten generations of spotless ancestors behind me, but I’ve managed to blot my family record pretty well since then. I’ve spent a little time at the salon. Here and there. Which pretty much rules me out.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’