by Eric Dupont
“Alfred, is it the Bolsheviks?”
Papa seemed to find the whole thing quite amusing. On the sidewalk right below our living-room window, three heavyset men with mustaches were unloading a black, upright piano from a wood-paneled truck.
Who on earth, I wondered, still swimming in the fog of sleep, would have a piano delivered at six o’clock in the morning? The serenade had completely slipped my mind.
Then the truck left, and the three men with it. The piano was all alone on Schillerstraße, like it was waiting for a bus or something. People exchanged looks from their windows on either side of the street.
“I assure you we have nothing to do with this,” Papa said, keen to make sure the neighbors understood his mission to entertain the German people only went so far. Birds sang in the linden trees. A crazy woman shouted: “There must be a bomb inside! It’s gonna blow!”
“My goodness, Alfred!”
Mama was quivering with fear. But we were quickly reassured. Footsteps could be heard coming from Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße. Slow, deliberate footsteps. Everyone went quiet. From above, we could see a blond lady making her way toward the piano. She was carrying a folding stool, which she set in front of the instrument. Then, raising her head, she looked up at us.
It was Terese, my singing teacher!
Her smile was sweet and gentle, her skin pale, like Ludwig’s. Even from a distance, we could see she had long hands. With a nod to her audience, she sat down on the stool and took a score out of a bag she was carrying on her shoulder.
“Don’t tell us you’re going to play Schubert!” someone shouted. And that’s exactly what she did.
“Alfred, it’s Schubert’s Ständchen!”
Mama still thought Papa was behind it all. It was the kind of thing he would have done. The woman played Schubert’s serenade for a minute. It was the piano version, so gentle that you fall in love with it the first time you listen to it. You want to hear it a second time, just to relive its thematic repetitions, just to revisit its nuances. Do you know it? Yes? Ach! At last something you know, Kapriel!
The people at the windows began to laugh. A woman sang the song’s first words: “Leise flehen meine Lieder . . .” in a faltering voice. Then Terese suddenly stopped playing. At the corner of Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße, exactly where Terese had appeared, stood Ludwig. Of course, I’d suspected from the very beginning that this was one of his schemes. But until the moment he appeared, I was torn between the hope of seeing him and the pain of having to part with the cross. My thoughts hadn’t yet turned to what my neighbors and parents might think of the whole thing. Unconsciously, I covered the little cross with my hands, as if to protect it. So, he was prepared to go that far . . . He stood beside the piano. Mama recognized him.
“Magda, it’s your singing teacher and her little brother. What’s his name again? Joseph?”
“Ludwig, Mama. His name is Ludwig Bleibtreu.”
And so Ludwig Bleibtreu sang Ständchen, looking up to my window from time to time. His voice echoed off the walls, rose up to the sky, filled the linden trees with fragrance, and charmed the sparrows who, I swear, Kapriel, went quiet the whole time he was singing. He delivered the second “jedes weiche Herz” with a vibrato that I can still hear to this day. They’d clearly been practicing. But who had agreed to deliver the piano to our doorstep so early in the morning and, more importantly, how were they planning on taking it back? He even held a flower in his hand, the silly boy! Every blind on Schillerstraße was open now. The rare drivers on Schillerstraße that morning stopped for a closer look.
Needless to say, fate had it that a journalist lived in the building opposite, a gentleman that Papa knew through KdF. The Arts section of the following day’s newspaper featured a photo of Terese on the piano and Ludwig singing beside her. The writer headlined the article “Bebend harr’ ich dir entgegen,” the words Schubert’s song ends on. “Trembling, I shall await thee here.” Since then, I’ve never been able to imagine love other than to that tune and those words. You know you’re in love the moment you walk up to someone trembling, I’d think to myself. And since I associated trembling with the freezing cold, having grown up in East Prussia, I associated love, that awful feeling, with the sumptuous winters of my native land. You’re the only one in Berlin who could know what I mean, Kapriel. You need to feel all the coldness of that music. I think it’s a song for the cold of heart. For people like us, Kapriel. I wait for you, trembling. Words to be sung in despair, one last cry from the heart, a petition of sorts. Do you follow me? It takes someone familiar with the body’s tremors, the inexplicable bumps and jolts of the nervous system, to understand Schubert. Did you know he died of syphilis? No, not Ludwig. Schubert. You did? At any rate, Mama was prostrate on the sofa, head in hands.
“Alfred, everyone’s watching us. Make him stop!”
“No, no! It’s too funny. We have to let him finish.”
Papa was helpless with laughter. I was trembling with barely contained anger. Not because the whole street was watching us, not because everyone would sing Ständchen as I walked down Schillerstraße for months to come, but because I was going to have to give him back the damned cross. It was out of my hands.
A crowd gathered around the piano below. Germans are morning people, as you know. And since he sang so well, they asked him three times to start over, then he sung a little Mozart until I went down to the sidewalk, after hurriedly getting dressed, my hair still in a state, to accept the stupid red rose with my left hand, slipping the cross into his pocket with my right. That was the rule. The cross had to be handed over as soon as the test was passed. No dithering, no haggling. Just the cross. I was furious. All of Charlottenburg applauded for ten minutes or three centuries, I can’t remember which. No more than three quarters of an hour after the show began, the same truck came by with the same strapping men. They loaded up the piano and left, this time with Terese and Ludwig holding on to the side of the truck with one hand and waving good-bye to their Schillerstraße audience with the other. His father no doubt punished him for requisitioning the truck for nothing more than a serenade. He probably beat him, like he did when he missed his Hitler Youth meetings. But it was too late. I’d grown fond of our little game. And if you think, Kapriel, that I’d seen it all with that piano arriving on Schillerstraße at six o’clock in the morning, you’ve got another think coming. I was about to perform any number of outrageous acts to get my hands on that cross. That was in the summer of 1936 in Berlin.
(At this point, Michel, she got up to go into the kitchen. I heard her turning on the taps to hide the sound of her sobbing. There was no doubt: she was in tears. Until then, I hadn’t quite thought her capable of tears, but she was definitely crying. She came back to the living room with a glass of water, keeping up her pretense right through to the end.)
Things with Mama were never the same after the serenade. On the one hand, Ludwig had charmed her beyond belief, probably more than he had charmed even me. On the other hand, she disapproved of such extravagance.
“Whatever will people think of you, Magda?”
“Let them say what they want, Waldtraut . . .”
Papa, on the other hand, had been moved by the whole incident. For the last few days of school, the girls, who had all heard one version or other of the story, no longer eyed me scornfully. I had become someone. When a boy sings Schubert for you, that makes you someone in other people’s eyes. That’s why you’ll never amount to anything, Kapriel. I’m joking, I’m joking!
August brought with it the Summer Olympics. Papa found a job for me as a hostess because I had a gift for languages. I welcomed foreign visitors and helped them find their way around Berlin, the venues, and Charlottenburg. I spoke French for close to a month with visitors from France and Belgium. If it hadn’t been destroyed in the air raids, I’d show you a photo of me in my Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform, Kapriel. The French had all sorts of questions: “Is the regime mistreating you?” or “Are you allowed to speak t
o Jews?” Questions I had no answer to. No one was mistreating me. I didn’t know any Jews. At least . . . Anyway. Of all the visitors, I think the French had the most questions. And they seemed to always know the answers already. Perhaps that’s just the impression I had because I’d mostly learned French and didn’t speak much English. I don’t know.
I barely saw Papa that summer. KdF had tons of events to organize, entertaining people wherever possible and bringing Germans from across the Reich to the capital and people from the capital to the rest of the Reich. I was all alone with Mama when I wasn’t working for the Olympics. One morning, I found her sitting at her piano in tears. She wanted to talk to me, alone. She asked me to close the window so the maid wouldn’t hear us.
“Listen, Magda. I’m exhausted. And your father has been invited to a huge party at Schwanenwerder.”
“I know. At the Goebbels’. He’s spoken of nothing else for a month. Tomorrow, right?”
“It’s very important to him, darling. I have to go with him.”
“And you don’t know what to wear?”
That was when she broke down. I’d never seen her in such a state. I had to sit down beside her on the little piano stool, like I did when I was learning my scales.
“Your father loves society life, he loves everything that shines, everything that sparkles, Magda. It’s a curse. And he’s going around telling anyone who will listen that the Führer himself will be at this blasted party!”
“But Mama . . .”
“I won’t go. And you’re going to help me. Remember these words: women must help one another. Never count on a man!”
Mama’s plan was simple: she would make herself sick to get out of the party and instead I would go with Papa. It was unthinkable that he would go alone.
“If you’re old enough for someone to sing you Ständchen, you’re old enough for dinner at the Goebbels’. But promise me you’ll behave. And don’t count on them showing you how to. Those people have lots of money but precious few manners. Anyway, there’ll be thousands of guests: no one will even notice you.”
“But Papa will never believe you’re ill. He’ll be angry.”
“That’s where you come in, darling. You’ll go down to the bakery and get me a sugar pie . . .”
“But you’re not allowed sugar! Papa said it could kill you!”
“A little piece will make me just ill enough not to have to go to this stupid party! I’d rather be sick all night than have to clink glasses with proles who think they belong to the bourgeoisie. Now do what I say or you’ll never have another singing lesson again.”
I was furious with her. Not because she was throwing me in at the deep end at the Goebbels’, not because it hurt me that she would poison herself like that, and with my help, too, but because she’d insulted Magda Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda’s wife, a person I worshipped, like many other German girls. Do you know her? Not personally? Poor Kapriel! She’s not one of your Wessi-Tanten! She died in 1945. I’d keep every newspaper cutting, every photograph of her I could find. She was a kind of Nazi saint. She was everything I was supposed to become: a mother. That was it. Women were to have children. The Nazis went on about that a lot, just like your Catholic priests. To set an example, Magda Goebbels had already had three children on top of the one she had from a previous relationship: Harald, Helga, Hilde, and Helmut. The six children she had with Joseph Goebbels all had names beginning with H. H for Hitler. Do you see what they were up to, Kapriel? Onkel Adolf didn’t have a wife, you see, so Magda Goebbels became the Reich’s First Lady by default since she was married to the Minister of Propaganda. Eva Braun? You’re joking, Kapriel. We didn’t know that little Bavarian mouse was even in the picture back then. At least I didn’t. Magda Goebbels was blond and chic, always elegant and impeccably dressed. They say she spoke French like it was her mother tongue. The thing is, she was born in Belgium and brought up by French-speaking nuns.
I didn’t understand why Mama said she had plenty of money but precious few manners. If I’d been older, I would have understood, but at sixteen I didn’t see much beyond Magda Goebbels’s shockingly blond hair. To be honest, I secretly wanted to be her. She was beautiful, admired, and elegant. And no one was ever going to ask her, just to be spiteful, just to make fun of her, if she was actually a boy.
So it wasn’t so much my willingness to help out Mama as my eagerness to meet Magda Goebbels that led to me accompany Papa to Schwanenwerder. The following morning I gave Mama a slice of Streuselkuchen, a sugary cake, her poison of choice. Then I went to meet Ludwig at the zoo. He had been severely punished for the serenade and we were only able to see each other once a week at the zoo, in the hour after my lesson.
“Will you go back to taking singing lessons?”
“If Father lets me.”
And then, I don’t know what came over me. I asked him what I had to do to get the cross back. He said he’d think about it. A half hour later, still on the same park bench, he set out his conditions.
“You want the cross back.”
“Yes.”
“What are you prepared to do?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. Do you want me to sing outside your window?”
“No, I’ve had enough of that type of thing. It’s something else I’m after.”
“I’m listening, Ludwig.”
“I’ll exchange it for another piece of jewelry.”
“I won’t steal from Mama to get my hands on your cross.”
Ludwig took a newspaper out of the trash. There was a photograph of Magda Goebbels in it.
“You want me to bring you back Magda Goebbels, bound hand and foot?”
“No, just this.”
He pointed at the photo of my idol alongside the Führer at an award ceremony.
“You want a medal?”
“No, you idiot! I want her earrings!”
“What do you mean, you want her earrings? What am I supposed to do, just walk up to her and go, ‘Oh look, a bird!’ and swipe them without her noticing? Have you lost your mind?”
“That’s your mission, Magda. Magda Goebbels’s earrings and you can have the cross.”
What a lunatic. He knew how the Reich’s First Lady absolutely fascinated me. Hitler, on the other hand, always left me cold. That ridiculous Austrian accent, Kapriel! But Magda Goebbels, well, I was a little . . . yes, a little in love, perhaps. That settled that, at any rate. I would never see the little cross again. Ludwig would have it forever. I gazed for a long time at the earrings in the photo. Tiny pearls. How much must they have cost? A gift from Joseph Goebbels himself? Who knows? We went back to see the zebras.
By the time I got home, the Streuselkuchen had done its work. Mama was in bed, grey. The maid swore to Papa she hadn’t seen sugar anywhere. She was a plump Potsdam girl. What was her name? Marie? No. I don’t remember.
“I swear, sir. I didn’t bring any with me! No cake, nothing!”
He was livid. There was no way he was going to miss the Schwanenwerder party. No way he was going by himself, at any rate. The invitation was for two.
“Magda, your mother is very ill. Would you come with me to the Goebbels’ this evening? They say the Führer will be there. I can’t promise he’ll speak to you; there will be thousands of us. All you’ll have to do is be on your best behavior. Do you have a dress? A pretty one?”
How could I hide the fact that Mama had prepared the dress I’d be wearing before even biting into the Streuselkuchen? It was a purple gown, the kind of thing a vestal virgin would have worn.
“There. You look like a Greek goddess! Very olympisch!”
Papa was pleased. On the way to the party, he explained what I was to do, what I was not to do, what I mustn’t say.
“Talk about Königsberg. People like that. And don’t sing! Even if you’re asked!”
Then three minutes later:
“Sing if you get the chance. People like that. But don’t mention Königsberg, even if you’re asked.”
I’d never seen him so worked up. At Schwanenwerder, there were so many cars parked we had to walk for at least fifteen minutes. The Goebbels had made a princely home for themselves on Lake Wannsee, on a private island linked to the mainland by a little bridge.
It was no ordinary party, Kapriel! Everybody who was anybody was there—from all over Europe! We were welcomed by young women dressed in white tunics and holding torches, true to the Olympic spirit. Musicians, dancers, and entertainers were everywhere.
The Goebbels had spared no expense. You had to stand in line for a quarter of an hour just to be able to say hello to the hostess. Night fell around the Goebbels’ mansion. All across the lake there were little butterfly-shaped lights. “Italian Night” was the theme.
We were introduced to Frau Goebbels at last. I still tremble at the memory. “Herr Alfred Berg of Kraft durch Freude, and his daughter Magdalena.”
Genuflect, Kapriel! Proffer a little hand. And you’ll never ever guess, Kapriel, what Magda Goebbels said to me! Ja! You guessed it! “You have a very pretty name, Fräulein Berg.”
I thought I was going to faint. Papa clenched his teeth, which I knew meant: “Say something, you little nitwit!” But what could I possibly say to a woman I only knew from the newspapers? The guests behind us were already growing impatient. I barely had time to stammer an awkward thank-you before we were shooed into the garden, where supper was to be served.
It didn’t take long for the party to descend into drunken debauchery.
Sheer decadence. Nothing less. I had no idea, at sixteen, what the word “decadent” meant. All I knew, looking around me at the way people were behaving, was that I wasn’t cut out for a life of decadence, Kapriel! Not like you! Ach! Stop being so sensitive! I’m not the one the police just brought home drunk from a bar in Prenzlauer Berg! The earrings? Yes! The earrings! Magda Goebbels was wearing the very same earrings. At once a stroke of luck and misfortune. Luck, because now I knew exactly where I could get my hands on them. How else would I ever have found them in such a huge villa? Can you imagine me rifling through the drawers of the Reich’s First Lady? And the misfortune being that they were in her ears. It wouldn’t be easy getting up close to the ears of the First Lady of the Reich. It was far from a foregone conclusion.