by Thynne, Jane
Rosa hastened along Lützowstrasse, hugging the inside of the pavement, keeping close to the shade of the buildings. The streetlamps cast jagged shadows, inking in the side streets and glancing off the cobbles. A group of boys overtook her, laughing, a car blared past, and behind her she heard the rapid pacing of a man’s footsteps growing closer. Seized with alarm, she looked around for somewhere to conceal herself and saw, down a side street, the entrance to a cinema.
The musty, velour-carpeted foyer was deserted. Judging by the music emerging from a curtained entrance, the programme had already begun and the ticket clerk had gone off duty. Nor was there anyone waiting behind the coat check counter, so she slipped inside the auditorium and stood at the back of the stalls in the glimmering light. The stalls were sparsely populated. Only a few people were dotted at random among the rows as the imperial blare of the Ufa Tonwoche newsreel announced another military manoeuvre. The footage showed German army cars entering the Sudetenland and the camera panned along the route, filling up the screen with smiling faces, flowers, and right-arm salutes. Children running alongside, town squares decorated with swastikas and smiling faces everywhere. The camera cut to a newsstand and the sight of it made Rosa think, yet again, of Rupert Allingham, in his office the other day, in his ash-flecked suit and tie at half mast, talking about Prague.
After she had read the report of the dead girl from her book of Observations, he had asked her why she wrote. Not presuming to confide her journalistic ambitions, she had said,
‘People always want things to be neat, but I like to look at the underside of things, like . . .’ she had searched for an appropriate image, ‘like turning a carpet over and seeing the pattern beneath.’
Rupert’s eyes had lit up, like a teacher with a good pupil.
‘That’s exactly what journalism is about. Untidying the things that people want tidied, looking at what other people have brushed under the carpet.’
‘That’s journalism?’
‘Sure. A better description of journalism would be hard to find. Look at things as clearly as you can, and then write about them as clearly as you can. That’s journalism. All the rest is entertainment.’
Emboldened by this discovery, she had asked,
‘So what about the lady on the cruise ship? Might you be able to write about what happened to her?’
‘Tell you what, you can help me write the story.’
She had stared at him, mesmerized, clutching the bag on her lap.
‘Do you really mean that?’
‘I do mean it, Fräulein Winter. You seem a most intelligent young woman and a punctilious writer. It’s a shame you’re so happily settled with the Führerin. I could do with an office assistant.’
Now, standing in the dim light of the cinema stalls, she made her decision. She would leave the Führerin’s office straight away. She would call the next morning and pretend that she was needed urgently at home, to help with her parents, and give no forwarding address. Then she would collect Hans-Otto from school with Brummer, and let him walk the dog, which was his favourite job in the world, and later she would visit the office of Herr Allingham and ask to be taken on as his assistant. In a new job, under the protection of an English journalist, she would be safe from any further attentions of Herr August Gerlach.
But before that, there was one last thing she needed to do.
In Derfflingerstrasse the offices of the Frauenschaft were deserted, but as the Führerin’s assistant Rosa was allowed to keep a key on her ring for emergencies. Though she didn’t dare turn on the main lights, it was easy to navigate the darkened corridor to her office and sit down at the desk, where a green-shaded lamp spilled a pool of light onto her new typewriter. Rosa sat for a moment, abstractedly chewing her nail. She had spent years in this office, at this desk, compiling figures, sorting the names and addresses of women into impersonal columns as though they were some vast mathematical exercise. Filing human beings, diligently, methodically, the way a bookkeeper files his figures or a scientist moves formulae around a board. Typing millions of bland, bureaucratic words in letters and directives and reports. And now, she realized, those bureaucratic words, those directives, that unthinking obedience to authority, were the only weapons anyone had.
Decisively she pulled the machine towards her, removed the cover, and from a wire basket beside her desk drew out a sheet of paper with the heavy Gothic letterhead of the Office of the Führerin of the Greater Reich and two sheets of carbon paper. She wound them all into the machine, and began to type.
To whom it may concern,
A medical examination has been carried out on Hans-Otto Kramer at these offices today. I am pleased to tell you that after exhaustive tests, the boy has been found to be normal in all respects and free from congenital disease. After professional consideration of the case of Hans-Otto Kramer it has been decided that no further action will be taken. Educational authorities are ordered to desist from enquiries forthwith.
An illegible squiggle.
She stamped the bottom of the paper with the official stamp of the Reichsmütterdienst Department of Infant Health, and a second, indigo stamp bearing the swastika and the eagle.
Then she typed beneath it, ‘By order of Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Reich Führerin.’
Chapter Thirty-eight
It was past midnight by the time Clara got back to the apartment, but she was not in the least tired. The discovery that she had been shadowed by Himmler’s men, and that Goebbels himself would be forestalling any further surveillance, exhilarated her, but the thoughts that were spinning round her head made it certain that there was no chance she would be able to sleep any time soon.
She sank down in her armchair with a cup of coffee. Rummaging in a pile of books for a packet of cigarettes, she encountered the album which had been left by Ada Freitag on the Wilhelm Gustloff. The events of the past few days had driven all thought of it from her mind.
She sat back and examined it slowly. It was a beautifully decorated album, about nine inches square, its heavy cardboard covers the same plush crimson and gilt as prestige cinema décor. Picked out in embossed, scrolly golden letters on the front was the title Stars of the Ufa Screen and underneath the line Brought to you by Reetsma Cigarettes. Inside was a page devoted to the Reetsma brand ‘loved around the world for their rich sophistication’, followed by tinted photographs presented against a metallic gold background. Each page had a framed space for a single cigarette card, which was secured beneath plastic film, with a name and brief description underneath. Clara turned the pages slowly. All the faces were familiar to her, fixed in the studio’s artificial glare, their smiles pearly and their skin shimmering under the lights. There was Hans Albers, Zarah Leander, Gustav Fröhlich, Emil Jannings and Kristina Söderbaum. It was like looking at a montage of her own life over the past five years, or the public side of it at least. Clara had worked with all of these actors, at some point, in a stream of mostly forgettable romantic comedies, spy capers and historical biopics, and she had enjoyed it too – the actors’ talent was usually in inverse proportion to the quality of the scripts they were obliged to perform. Unconsciously she smiled as she flicked through. Everyone was there, even Ursula Schilling, pouting distantly, and on one of the last pages, a picture of Clara herself. The photograph had been taken to publicize her film the previous year with the air ace Ernst Udet, who was now head of the Luftwaffe’s technical division. She examined it more closely. The picture looked both like and unlike her, dressed in a gingham dirndl, her hair braided, gazing rapt at the sky above. She marvelled at the silky shimmer of her skin. She looked for all the world a confident, happy woman, gazing expectantly into the distance, ‘A flower of German womanhood’, as one of the reviews had called her. Though Der Angriff, more snidely, had reminded readers of her foreign blood by referring to her as an ‘English rose’.
As she looked at the card, something curious occurred to her. A spy, Leo had once told her, uses all their senses. Sight, touch, hea
ring, taste, and even smell. The smell of earth recently disturbed, of cooking on a man’s clothes, of a gun that has been discharged, all were invisible clues that were hard to disguise. The smell she detected now was sweet and powdery, a complex mix of narcissus, violet and hyacinth which struck a chord in her memory. Je Reviens. The legendary perfume from the House of Worth.
Eva Braun’s favourite perfume.
Peeling back the plastic and slipping the card out of its sleeve to examine it more closely, she turned it over and for an instant she was perplexed, then astonished. The back of the card was covered in fine rounded letters, minutely compressed, with a date at the top. She had seen that handwriting somewhere before.
July 5th. A red letter day. Hairdresser and seamstress. Tonight, after three weeks, I will finally see my man!
Even as she looked across to the desk it came to her. The same handwriting was on the perfume bottle that Eva Braun had given her.
She ran her fingers over the card for a while, like braille, as its implications sank in. She had in her hand the ultimate card trick. A diary hidden on cigarette cards.
That was what had distressed Eva Braun. That was what was obsessing her. It was not the fact that her infertility had been discovered, nor her fear of being abandoned by Hitler, which had provoked such suicidal despair, but the realization that the diary she had kept secretly had been stolen. Clara thought of Eva’s words as she lay on the floor of her villa, sleeping pills scattered across the floor. ‘It’s not just that. It’s something else. I can’t tell you. Something awful. When I discovered, I realized I might as well be dead.’
Eva had always kept a diary, until Bormann banned it, but diaries were a habit that was hard to get out of. Perhaps, like Goebbels, Eva’s diary was a psychological necessity, a vital outlet for turbulent emotions that must otherwise be kept under wraps. And a way that everyone would know that she mattered, and that Hitler had promised to marry her.
She must have cast around for a way to keep it without being discovered, and resolved to hide it in plain sight. Everyone knew Eva was a film fan. They made jokes about it. Eva’s cigarette card album went everywhere with her. The album was proof, if proof were needed, of the essential frivolity of her nature. Eva collected cigarette cards like a child, she was as star-struck as a teenager, so where better to keep her confessions until the time came to reveal them to the world? Yet Eva’s diary ended up on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic and the woman who stole it, Ada Freitag, was almost certainly killed for it.
That was Ada Freitag’s ulterior motive. She needed to leave in a hurry not because she had any interest in poisoning the Führer, but because she had discovered Eva Braun’s diary, and understood its implications. She would be planning to sell it, no doubt, only Heydrich’s men had got there first. They had disposed of Ada Freitag without having any idea of the real weapon that she was carrying. It was not poison that was to damage Hitler; it was far more personal than that.
Quickly Clara went through the album, peeling back the plastic and systematically slipping out the cards. On the back of a picture of Hans Albers was an account of a day at the Berghof.
Our perfect day ended with a Western. Those cowboy films bore me stiff but Wolf loves them. He says the American conquest of the Red Indian lands is like the German search for Lebensraum.
She turned over Ursula Schilling’s card.
He says the Poles are more like animals than human beings. Completely stupid and primitive, and their ruling class is degraded by lower races. They deserve extermination, not assimilation.
She skimmed quickly, the letters blurring beneath her eyes as she read through the gossip and heartache and female longing interspersed with fragments of military talk.
Wolf calls his plan the Plan Green. It starts with Czechoslovakia, and then Poland.
How many times have I heard him talk about after the war? It’s always after the war. Now I don’t think there will ever be an after the war. Once Himmler finds out that will be an end of me so I may as well take the initiative and end myself.
Another, on a photograph of Lída Baarová, dated July 1938.
Mimi Reiter came last night. She says she visited Wolf in his apartment and he had told her everything. She was telling me because he was too weak to tell me himself. I’m too young for him. He wants to end it. My God, I want to die.
Then Clara picked out the card with her own picture on it.
Last night Wolf said that after the war he would marry me. When is after the war, I asked? When Poland is subjugated, he explained. Very soon, Poland will cease to exist.
This more than anything was what the British government needed to see. Poland will cease to exist. It put the lie to any idea that Hitler would end with the Sudetenland. The people in London should know, as they cast around for an alternative to war, that the Führer’s true ambition was not a small, disputed portion of southern Czechoslovakia but an entire country, and then another, in his quest for a greater Reich. Eva’s diary, written so artlessly, and hidden so artfully, laid bare the mind of the Führer like nothing else.
Chapter Thirty-nine
In the corner of the Volkspark Friedrichshain, beyond the bunkers lying like open graves in the bleached grass, workers were raking dead leaves into a bonfire, as though burning the last of summer itself. The first heavy drops of rain, foreshadowing a storm, dappled the dusty pavements and the prospect of a Berlin autumn brought a chill to the bones.
As Clara walked she thought of Max and hoped that Steffi Schaeffer had managed to hide him. Berlin had become a city of the hidden. Of refugees, their jewels stitched against their skin in heavy, invisible seams, carrying their secrets close. Of U-boats, concealed in back rooms and attics, with forged papers and desperate plans, and of plotters hidden in safe houses, waiting for the moment to strike. Of food, secreted in bags, taken to those who were hiding, and of secrets concealed on cards, telling the truths that no one dared speak.
Clara, too, had attempted her own form of concealment.
That morning she had taken her copy of Mein Kampf, a smart edition bound in wine-red leather that had been a personal gift from the Führer to all cast members of The Pilot’s Bride – a film he was said to have especially enjoyed. Turning to Chapter Five, The World War, she took a sharp knife and carved a rectangle down through the centre of the book block, then she collected the deck of cigarette cards which comprised Eva Braun’s diary and placed them in the space she had created, before sticking the first page of Chapter Six down to the previous page. Looking around her apartment, wondering where to conceal the book, a moment of inspiration struck her and she slid the volume beneath the wobbly leg of her desk. A copy of Mein Kampf was part of the furniture in most German homes, so when one part of the furniture was being used to prop up another, what intruder would give it a second glance?
In her bag she carried a purse, identity documents and a packet of cigarettes, in one of which the tobacco had been replaced with a rolled cigarette paper bearing the next day’s date. A veneer of tobacco had been reinserted at the tip. She also had her fallback, the ticket Alois Kassner had given her to his cabaret on Friedrichstrasse. As cover stories went, an invitation to the theatre from the great Kassner himself would surely dazzle the most suspicious of policemen.
Missing the meeting at the Siegessäule had been unavoidable, but the plan had always been that she could communicate through a message in the Dead Letter Box, which, Hamilton said, was checked regularly. With the Munich Agreement signed, and so many people believing war had been averted, it was more crucial than ever that the people back in London heard what Eva Braun had to say.
She slid her hand into her coat pocket, where a single card remained: the one with her own photograph on it.
Last night Wolf told me that after the war he would marry me. When is after the war, I asked. When Poland is subjugated, he explained. Very soon, Poland will cease to exist.
The Märchenbrunnen, the fairy-tale fountain, was a pi
ece of baroque whimsy crafted for the children of Berlin in the days when family promenades on Sunday afternoons were routine and children considerably easier to enchant. Situated on the northwestern end of the Volkspark and accessed through a pair of arches, it was flanked by two long stone benches and fenced off from the rest of the park by a parade of pillars. Marble versions of Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel and others, interspersed by rabbits and stags, posed joylessly around the water as though some wintry magician had turned them to stone. The spouting tortoises, designed to issue jets of water into the air, were turned off and the tiered pools lay stagnant. Clara waited as an old lady, bundled up spherically against the chill, with an equally rotund poodle on a leash, made a leisurely progress around the fountain before turning out of the gate towards the Friedenstrasse. There was no one else in sight, apart from a leaf raker about a hundred yards away, focusing on the grass beneath a group of lime trees. Swiftly, Clara approached the bench on the left-hand side, closest to the pillar, and let one hand drop. There was the cavity, exactly as Guy Hamilton had described, a six-inch indentation large enough, she hoped, to conceal a packet of Reetsma cigarettes.
She sat for a moment. In the stillness of the park, the distant traffic was muted like the faint roar of the sea. Taking out her compact, she could see that there was no one behind her and the leaf raker, having completed his pile of leaves, was gradually moving away. She was about to extract the cigarette packet from her bag when she remembered something that Leo had taught her.
If time allows, perform a trial run.