Nobody has even heard of a chest brace these days. It was a garment like this that I wore under my blouse, a structure made of stout cotton and whalebone enclosing my torso, and not just compressing everything budding and swelling there when it threatened to show, but hiding it under a perfectly flat front. Not a bra, more of a breastplate such as perhaps only St. Joan of Arc wore before me, and for the same reason that it had been imposed on me: to keep us from leading men into temptation. There was to be nothing swelling and bouncing about when we faced the fray, St. Joan on the battlefield, I in gymnastics lessons as the only girl among the fourth-year boys at the Jena grammar school I attended at the time.
My father wanted me to wear one of these garments, and my mother had taken me to a shop selling sanitary items and bandages to be fitted with this armored carapace when my breasts began to grow. They grew fast, and seemed to do so all the faster in the constraint of their imprisonment. When I undid all the metal hooks and eyes in the evening, they were sore and marked by deep red weals, and they swelled up like balloons that start out crumpled and unattractive and are then pumped full of air. They hurt whenever I moved, and I didn’t know what I would do if they didn’t stop getting bigger and heavier, if the day came when I couldn’t endure them either with or without the breastplate.
I knew there was no help for me, and when my cousins watched, speechless, as I unbuttoned my blouse and then undid hooks and eyes and exposed the sore, tormented flesh underneath, slowly swelling to its full shameful size, when I saw in their faces first horror, then incredulity, and they shook their heads, it confirmed my suspicion that I had some kind of monstrous growth that would slowly kill me, like a cancerous tumor, and for which there was no cure on earth. Then they began to laugh, and suddenly I realized that I was laughing, too, and Eva helped me undo the last hooks and eyes, peeled the thing off me, and tossed it away. Instead, she wrapped me in her arms. I felt her breasts soft against mine, and realized at that moment how things were supposed to be.
What on earth’s the idea of that, little one? she said.
I told her about the gymnastics lessons.
Then they gave me my first bra, light and soft as silk. It was one of Eva’s. I tried it on, and it fit. It had adjustable straps crossing over the back, and champagne-colored satin cups. I wore it for many years, for the growth of my breasts soon stopped giving me cause for concern.
LATER, WHEN WE HAD NOWHERE TO TURN, when we wandered aimlessly through a country that offered us no home anymore, through devastated cities, ruined stations with trains that had nowhere to go, nowhere to arrive, when we all carried our lives around with us in little cases that we never put down anywhere, always keeping a watchful eye on them, cases full of letters, broken hand mirrors, empty tubes of cosmetics, single stockings whose partners had been lost in another life, I always carried Eva’s bra with me—a little soft, silky thing—in my hand baggage, light as a feather. Yet one day, when I remembered whose it had been, it seemed to me a heavy burden. I didn’t want it anymore. I wanted to be rid of it, as one would wish to be rid of the corpus delicti, leaving no trace behind. I threw it in a waste bin, and then took it out, because you didn’t throw away used articles of clothing in those days, not while there might still be some use for a button, a piece of elastic, a scrap or so of fabric. Finally I threw it on the fire, and tried not to think of the bits that wouldn’t burn, the metal clips for adjusting the straps. The Austrian farmer’s wife with whom I was living at the time must have found them in the ash box of her kitchen stove.
No one asked questions in those days. Uniform buttons lay beneath all the rubble that was being removed; stinging nettles grew and fed on disintegrating cotton drill trousers and black coats, ferns and coltsfoot spread over weapons thrown away into roadside ditches in haste. The black boots under which the roads once echoed were lost somewhere in a swamp, sinking deeper into it year by year, until nothing was left of them. No archaeological dig would ever bring them to light. Only now and then did a warhead still explode, tearing apart children who had been playing on a bomb site. No one could dig among that detritus with impunity.
I didn’t want anyone to ask me where I came from or who I was. You dare not turn around if you are suspect. Everything depends on passing unrecognized. The trains were full of people who wanted to pass unrecognized. Most of them hoped for a future spent incognito, somewhere no one knew about them, a place where the seeds of liking and trust could be sown again, where everything they felt to be good in themselves could be brought to flower. For we all feel that we are good. We feel it too deeply to believe any evidence to the contrary. Some men turned up their coat collars when the train came into their hometown and did not get out, but traveled on somewhere else, anywhere, and their wives went to the social services, registered them as dead and applied for their pensions.
And there were plenty of others who did not go home, and now and then one of these took another man’s place. Is that you? a woman would ask, and he said yes, and slept with her, and she told the children, don’t run away, this is your father, come along, don’t be frightened, and something in the children knew that they would never love him and could not stop waiting for another father to come back; a vague sense of grief lingered on in them, and now and then they would feel a convulsive desire to sob for no apparent reason.
So many of the dead were never buried. People tried desperately to imagine the site of some kind of grave. Crosses set up in nowhere, crosses over which the wind of the steppes blew in its never-ending passage, driving grains of sand and matted tufts of dry grass before it, soon to cover the crosses, until only one last piece of wood stuck up like the hand of a dead man who has failed to rise again. The living need graves in order to believe that the dead are really dead. What else protects us from meeting them once more?
For a long time after the war was over, we lived in a world full of the undead. They came and went. They mingled with us. Somewhere in a busy shopping street, in the gloom of an underpass, outside a railway station, our footsteps would suddenly falter, because we had recognized someone. A passerby had the profile or the shape of someone we had lost. It was his way of walking, his hair . . . it was him. We quickened our pace to tug at his sleeve, and then, no, it wasn’t doubt that held us back, something else made us hesitate to address him: Is that you? Oh, what a surprise! What are you doing here? Rather, it was a sense that it was too late to meet again. We had changed so much, all of us. Only the dead still resembled themselves. They were the same as they had always been. They would not recognize us now. That was what made us hesitate until it was too late. The person we had seen turned a corner and was lost in the crowd. Only then did the doubts set in, and they would never entirely let one go again.
Now and then I met Eva.
She stood above me on an escalator, riding up to the clothing department on the top floor of a big store. She wore the New Look these days. Long, swinging skirts and tailored jackets. Her little hat was jauntily perched over one ear. A peroxide blond lock of hair swung free on the other side of her head. She’d grown no older. How could she? She was trying the Marilyn Monroe style these days, although she was a little too athletic and earthy for it. She was playing hide-and-seek with me, luring me down the alleys between racks of clothes, until she turned into one of the shop dummies standing there with their empty, lascivious smiles. Once again, I was too late to recognize the game she was playing.
Then I met her in a hairdressing salon. She was sitting under the dryer, looking odd, disfigured by the rollers. She glanced at me in the mirror with a familiar, knowing smile, considering me in a rather resigned and weary way. Do you think it’s any fun for me, haunting your life? she seemed to be saying. Then they washed my hair, put it in rollers, and installed me under the dryer, too. When they let me out again, another customer was sitting in her chair, casually looking through a magazine.
On other occasions she was standing on railway platforms as I sat in a train just coming in, or the ot
her way around: I was on the platform and Eva was just closing the window of her compartment as the train drew out, or she walked down the corridor past my own compartment, and when I looked to see where she was going she disappeared into the lavatory and didn’t come out again until I had given up waiting.
I was not the only one to whom she appeared at that time. There were always rumors that she was still alive. Hitler had gone to Argentina with her in a submarine, said these rumors, and they were convalescing in a sanatorium there.
Eva would have liked that. I know for certain she would. That was the picture she had imagined of their survival after the war: a sanatorium where Hitler could recover from all the stress and strain. And she would be with him, a cross between nurse, Wallis Simpson, and dietitian, walking arm in arm with the former dictator along well-tended garden paths, or taking down his memoirs on her shorthand pad. It would have been sheer heaven for her. At heart she saw happiness as a sanatorium, a place set apart where all your decisions and responsibilities could be delegated to people in white coats.
Eva had no grave either. Could it not be true that she had really escaped after all? That her suicide with Hitler had merely been staged, and she had not bitten into the capsule of cyanide found lying on the ground like a lipstick? Could Goebbels, the first to enter the room, not have taken her out immediately and given her the forged passport she would need for a life after Hitler? Couldn’t she have escaped from the bunker while they set up the legend of the double suicide, bringing out two corpses wrapped in blankets and burning them in the Chancellery garden? Anyone could be inside a rolled-up blanket with only a pair of ladies’ black suede shoes sticking out of it. That legend would have made it possible for her to go on living. Eva Hitler would be dead. That way she could have lived on.
I imagined her disappearing into the underground railway tunnels of Berlin, a fugitive, a nonentity among other fugitives. I imagined her slowly realizing that she was nobody now, no one’s daughter, sister, or cousin anymore. Most of all, not a widow. At least, not the widow of the man she had married two days earlier. I imagined her putting on a headscarf, tying it not over the forehead but under the chin like a farmer’s wife, so that no one could see her hair, permed and dyed blond, later to grow back straight and light brown. She would have it cut very short, as women do when luck goes against them—I’ve often observed it. It’s like a cry for help. Self-mutilation, forcing others to feel sympathy. But Eva couldn’t have counted on sympathy from anyone.
She would surely have tried to go south to Bavaria, where else? They all wanted to go to Bavaria, as if Bavaria, where it had begun, still offered them a refuge, a place where they would be inviolable and safe, something like the sanctuary mark in children’s games of catch that bestows immunity if you can only reach and touch it. But there was no such sanctuary now. The Obersalzberg had turned back into the nonplace it had always been. A lunar landscape. A field of rubble. A desert. A place no longer of this world.
Today I meet her only in the past. The longer ago that past is, the more clearly I see her: a very pretty blonde with something not quite right about her eyes. An athletic girl, not as young as she once was, not as invincible as she had been, “smart,” as they put it at the time, a term that also suggested the pitiless cheerfulness she would assume, her mischievous merriment, her positively heroic determination to be amusing at any price. The self-discipline with which she forced herself to keep coming up with new ideas, to be active all the time. Her slender and androgynous figure, although that was endangered now. Some of the fatty tissue that would have made her look matronly later had already accumulated on her upper arms and thighs. Everything about her seemed like a false claim that could be upheld for only a limited amount of time. That was how I found Eva when I arrived in Berchtesgaden on the fifteenth of July 1944.
CHAPTER 2
GREAT TYRANTS HAVE CASTLES IN THE MOUNTAINS from which they come down to strike terror into the world. And they go back there from time to time to consider their work, while the smoking ruins on the plains still bear witness to their pitiless acts. Now and then they bring abducted princesses to their castles and have them guarded by sinister characters released from their duties of killing and looting for this task. All this is yours, they tell the princesses. Make yourself at home. Taste the delicacies so lavishly provided for you. If there’s anything you want don’t hesitate to tell me. All my ministering spirits are here only to satisfy your discriminating mind. Look at this—there’s no jewel that I would think too costly for you, dear child. Tell me what flowers delight you, and I’ll order all the vases in the palace to be filled with them even if they have to be brought from the ends of the earth. You have only to open your mouth. Speak to me, lovely child. End your silence. I don’t want anything from you. Nothing that you will not grant me some day of your own accord. For you will, never doubt it. But now I must leave you for a while. Remember, when I am not here, you are mistress of this place. Give your orders and they will be obeyed. It’s a pretty game, as you will see. For a time, anyway. Until I come back. You will be longing for me. No? Oh, but you will. In the end you will be listening for nothing but the sound of my horse’s hooves, you will have forgotten that only one thing is not permitted to you on pain of death: to leave my castle. And why would you want to? It seems to me there is no better place in the world for a beautiful young princess with no one to protect her. How well your anger suits you! I would like to stay with you, believe me, but a man like me has little leisure to do as his heart desires. We have to fight, conquer, destroy all opposition. There are so many things of which you have no idea, Princess. But if you’re lonely I will happily allow you to choose a girl for your playmate. Do you have sisters, relations, young friends, even cousins? Any of them will be welcome as my guests.
Hitler left the Berghof on July 13, 1944. The motor convoy was ready, the men of his escort stood by the open doors of the cars. He came down the flight of steps, stopped briefly, and then climbed the steep stairway to the entrance again. My cousin stood there. She had already said good-bye. He walked past her, entered the great hall, crossed it, stopped in front of the huge panoramic window, allowing one to suppose that he was taking his leave of the Untersberg spread out before his eyes, the mountain under which, so the story goes, the Emperor Barbarossa sleeps waiting to be recalled to life—a farewell between two men who had guided the destiny of the world, a wordless greeting outside space and time, a farewell made in the void where it is easy to die, to destroy, to perish. Then Hitler turned, ignoring the fact that my cousin had joined him, and went over to Feuerbach’s Nana, who looked into the distance above his head, with a stern and permanently injured expression.
Who knows if one will ever come back, he said.
He liked to use the impersonal pronoun in speaking of himself. My cousin Eva, half fainting with the hope that he had come back to take leave of her once more, as he had done already in the usual mercilessly casual manner that always made her determine to take her own life the moment he had left, so that he would have to come back, burst into lamentations, take her in his arms even if she was already dead, and once, just once, speak those passionate words of farewell that she was never destined to hear—my cousin, so close now to the fulfillment of her dreams, which were not of happiness but of ecstasy in disaster, renunciation, separation, the long good-bye, thought he was addressing her, and was about to fling herself on her lover’s breast in tears when Luftwaffe Adjutant von Below joined them.
Let’s go, said Hitler.
Von Below bowed his head slightly, to show that he understood the Führer’s feelings but at the same time dared not take any notice of them, or not insofar as they might be taken as a sign of weakness. And when Hitler turned and, bestowing not one more glance on his mistress, left the room followed by his adjutant, there was much soldierly concurrence between them in that, too. Much of it is the cruelty that separates men from women, not only determining the form of their farewells but making those leave
-takings acts of exquisite cruelty in themselves. The pain of parting weighs light in the balance compared with the distress of the woman left behind, recollecting the indifference of the man as he left, and now she must endure day after day, month after month, with that memory in mind. The pain of parting may diminish with time but the distress never will. It will renew itself whenever it is remembered. It grows with time. Like revenge, it wants satisfaction.
He didn’t look back at me again, Eva told me later, adding at once: We’re never alone when we say good-bye.
As if that were a mitigating circumstance. Like any woman whose feelings are hurt, she sought exoneration for herself by exonerating the man who had hurt her.
I was too young to understand. The only farewell I could remember was when the young soldiers from my class at school left:
A chilly April morning. We were freezing. We recalled jokes from our schooldays. Do you remember how . . . ? There was a sense of setting off, as if for a class outing. The expectation of something sure to turn out greater than anything we had ever known. An attempt to act as if it meant nothing special to us, as if we’d been through all this a thousand times before.
And in the middle of the crowd Ernst-Günther trying to make his way toward me, the few moments we stand close together, laughing at jokes, not exactly jokes, references that no one but our classmates would understand, silly, scrappy little remarks, all of a sudden unbearably comic, revelations suddenly illuminating our shared experiences in a lightning flash, positive chasms of comedy that now, at the latest, we have fully explored.
We share our knowledge of those comic depths. It links us that morning as only those who have studied in the same class at school can be linked, and I don’t need to look at Ernst-Günther to know that he, too, has tears of laughter in his eyes.
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