Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  There was a lot of his love for his dog in it. Sentimentality. A touch of self-pity. An admission that he was lost from the first, and could not even imagine real happiness.

  Speer, he said, the day will come when I have only two friends, Fräulein Braun and my dog.

  Are those the words of a man confident of victory who will subjugate the rest of the world?

  The doglike pet name he gave her. Embarrassing. Revealing. Just as the pet names a couple give each other are always revealing, the ordinary kind just as much as those with some claim to be unique. A word like a wet, slobbery dog’s tongue suddenly licking your face. I am glad I was never present to hear it spoken. Let’s forget the word. Extinguish it. Let it never have been heard from the first.

  WE HAVE OUR EVENING MEAL SERVED on the great terrace. There can be no lovelier setting. The pink mountain range. The birds of prey circling high above the valley of the Ache, the vague awareness of human settlements down below us, somewhere to the southwest where Berchtesgaden lies. It’s all so far away. The inhabited and uninhabitable world, the war. We know it can never, ever reach us. Not here, not where we are. Not up here on the Berghof, where Eva and I sit under the slowly darkening sky in which the stars of summer are beginning to show. We get them to bring us out a lantern. Soon we can see only our faces in its light.

  Now, tell me about yourself, little one, says Eva.

  I know she’s thinking of something else. I feel very clearly that something else is taking hold of her with ever-increasing power. Something removing her from me. Putting her out of my reach. I understand that the questions she asks me are nothing but a defensive wall behind which she is disappearing. An attempt at concealment, obscuring the path along which she is moving away from me.

  Tell me all about yourself.

  All the same, I try to interest her. The farther away she moves, the harder I try. I tell her about my parents. About my engagement that was not really an engagement. About Ernst-Günther’s death, and my wanderings in the Thuringian Forest, mourning for the boys I knew.

  And what else? says Eva from far away. Your studies? What are you studying?

  I know she is only trying to keep me talking so she can devote herself, undisturbed, to the other subject that entirely occupies her mind. I trip over my own words. I tell her things she can’t understand. I talk about optical polarization, about the nature of all electromagnetic radiation resulting from the transversal character of electromagnetic waves. I know perfectly well how useless this is, but I fear the silence that will fall between us otherwise. I tell her, with increasing enthusiasm, that the polarization in long waves, medium waves, and short waves is vertical, but in the ultra-short waves of radio communication it is horizontal. I draw diagrams on the tablecloth with my thumbnail. I begin explaining how a radio works.

  Suddenly a change comes over Eva. She leaps to her feet.

  Quiet! she shouts at me.

  A telephone is ringing inside the house.

  Put it through to my room, calls Eva as she disappears through the door to the little living room.

  A few minutes later she is back, relaxed, relieved, as if she had just finished taking an exam. I can tell at once that she has attention to spare for me again. She’s been speaking to Hitler on the telephone.

  Hitler sends his regards, she tells me.

  Thank you, I say.

  I am ashamed to have told her so much about myself and my own interests just now. I decide to be more understanding in future. I have yet to find out what conduct is appropriate for me.

  As time passes by, I get used to the evenings when she’s waiting for that phone call. It doesn’t come every day, but with every evening when there is no phone call Eva’s uneasiness grows. I know now that I am there to help her bear it. At the same time I sense that I myself am more than she can bear on such evenings. I talk so we won’t hear the silence of the telephone. I talk too fast, too loud. Everything I say drops into that silence.

  Can’t you keep your voice down a little? asks Eva. I’m not deaf, you know.

  The transformation comes at the moment when she is summoned: Telephone, gnädiges Fräulein. It’s the Führer for you.

  Oh, my God, cries Eva, leaping up. Oh, I don’t know what to say to him! Tell me what to say to him!

  Love over the telephone. The fact that he calls is what matters. They get through the conversation itself as best they can.

  (So what are you doing?

  Getting people killed. How about you?)

  Once, when the door to Eva’s room is left open, I overhear a couple of sentences. They are about her dogs Stasi and Negus, two black miniature schnauzers given to her by Hitler, who are scuffling around her while she talks, trying to climb up on her lap.

  Down, Stasi. Down Negus. Don’t do that!

  A happy yapping and squealing. I close the door quickly. I don’t want to hear any more.

  I am sure she has never asked him what he was really doing. Not on the telephone, not when he was with her.

  I mean, what do you really do?

  The most obvious question to ask. And at the same time the form of words that would have released her. Afterward, she would have been free. Free to leave him and get on with her own life. She went to join him and died with him instead.

  Tell me who you are. Not: Do what you like with me.

  It would have been so easy. When I realized that, later, I tried to tell her who he was. I heard what our enemies were saying on the radio. I told her about it. I spoke of the dead we saw in the Böhmerwaldplatz. I offered to take her into the mountains, to the place where the deep tunnels had been dug. I wanted her to see this shadow world and understand who had made shadows of us, so that we no longer recognized ourselves, and could not ask the simplest questions: Tell me what you are really doing!

  But I couldn’t save her. She didn’t even say good-bye to me when she went to him to die. Not a word from her, not a greeting. To hell with her!

  And that was where she went.

  MEMORY IS A WHORE. It is solicitous, obliging. It’s ready to do everything that has been agreed, but no more. You want it to look real? That’s a little more expensive. You want it to be real? The truth? Which truth, pray?

  Once, a few years ago, I gave an interview. Some radio station or other called me. I’ve no idea how they found my name. They had probably discovered that I was Eva’s last surviving relation.

  You’re Eva Braun’s cousin, said the voice on the telephone, and as I had not expected to hear those words until the Day of Judgment I admitted to everything.

  We’d very much like to talk to you, said the voice, and since that sounded as if a commission of investigators had tracked me down it didn’t even occur to me that I could just say no. This was what I had always feared, and now I would simply have to face up to it.

  Petra, in her early thirties, arrived a few days later. I liked her. We were on friendly terms at once, calling each other du, and we drank cup after cup of coffee. I didn’t even notice her putting her microphone on my living room table. I showed her my only memento of Eva, the little china rouge pot Hitler had brought back from Paris for her. Then came the questions, and all the time I was answering them I was aware that I wasn’t telling the truth.

  Not that I was lying, but there’s a world of misleading answers in between the truth and an outright lie.

  We ordered a pizza when we had finished. Petra didn’t like the cake I had baked specially for her. Finally I took two quarter-bottles of sparkling wine out of the fridge. We told each other how well we had got on. After she had left I began to suspect that they always act like that to get to where they want, extract from you what they want to hear. I was left with a curious sense of depression, like a hangover. I never listened to the broadcast. I shall never give another interview.

  Memory is a whore. She’s ready for everything. And if she ever really tells the truth, who would notice? In the last resort, truthfulness is only another pose. It shows up inciden
tally. By chance. Unnoticed.

  What do I really remember?

  I remember the even tenor of our days on the Berghof.

  Is that all?

  I remember the boredom I felt.

  Is that all?

  I remember the sense that time was standing still. As if every new day was just a repetition of the day before. A kind of curse, a magic spell from which it was impossible to escape in any way.

  And what else?

  Our flights when we escaped to Munich.

  We’ll be coming to that later. What else?

  There wasn’t anything else. There really wasn’t.

  Oh yes, there was.

  Well, yes. There was. But I can’t explain it.

  You don’t have to explain it. Just remember. What do you see?

  I see a girl. I can’t believe it’s me. She looks so young.

  Never mind about that. Just say what you see.

  She’s lying in a deck chair on the great terrace. The sun is blazing down on her skin, and if she opens her eyes a little way she sees a world of glittering white with deep, black shadows at the edges. She’ll have a sunburn that evening.

  Something else will happen that evening. Remember.

  We went down to the lake.

  That’s right.

  We rowed out from the Malerwinkel to the place where we usually bathed. There was a waterfall nearby. We climbed a little way up the rocks to the top of the three basins that had formed there. We plunged down with the water from one basin to the next until we reached the lake. I was scared when I first did that, but Eva laughed at me. It was just the kind of thing she liked. In fact, now that I come to think of it today, she was too old for it at thirty-two. Not too old to do it, just too old to get so much fun from it as she was showing me she did, with her shrieks of delight and screams and her announcement of her firm intention to do it again at once. How could she insist so obstinately on enjoying life?

  Stick to the point. What happened that day?

  Something spoiled it.

  What?

  News. Someone or other came along and spoiled the summer’s day for us.

  News?

  Alarming news. We were suddenly ashamed of having had such fun. We snatched up our things, the picnic basket, our beach robes, and ran barefoot to the place where the boat was tied up. We called to the men to row faster.

  What was that news?

  I don’t remember.

  Don’t try to remember the news, remember yourself. Was it a secret pleasure you felt? A kind of relish of all the excitement? A readiness to meet what was coming, whatever it might be, head on? Wasn’t there something of all that in it?

  Maybe. Possibly. But I was afraid, too. Afraid for myself, afraid for Eva.

  If you remember how you felt, then you can remember the news, too, what it meant, all the rest of it. Stop airbrushing yourself out of the picture! Now, close your eyes and remember!

  I remember. It was the twentieth of July. I can still feel my bathing suit clinging wetly to my skin, the puddles that formed under me in our guards’ official car. We’d had no time to change. And the thought suddenly occurred to me that this might be the last time we ever sat here, the last time we had a chauffeur, the last time we’d be asked: Anything you’d like, gnädiges Fräulein?

  If Hitler was no longer alive then we would be totally superfluous, two young women who would have to disappear as quickly as possible. The whores of dead rulers are always the first to be thrown out of the house. I see myself running barefoot up the great flight of steps after Eva, racing through the door, which as usual has opened as if of its own accord. I hear the housekeeper’s whispered words, yet I can’t make out what she means. The lines are all busy at the moment. What does that signify? The two dogs are barking somewhere in the house. I want to stand by Eva. That’s how I see my part in this drama, however it turns out. I determine not to move from her side.

  Leave me alone, she says, when I have followed her into her room. Please go away!

  My feelings are hurt. She kneels in front of the telephone on her bedside table. She keeps on and on dialing the operator and hanging up again.

  When I close the door behind me I don’t know where to go. If I stay in my room I’ll miss finding out what happens next. I’m still wearing my wet bathing suit under my dress. The lump in my throat is my swelling tonsils. I keep swallowing to find out how the pain is developing.

  Was that the week I spent in bed with a temperature, when the doctor had to be called? Did he come the next day? I think that was it.

  I am so absorbed by my role as comforter, by my duty to be there for Eva, that I still don’t venture to change my clothes. I go down to the great hall. Hitler is receiving Mussolini, listening to his expressions of sympathy and his congratulations on such a piece of luck; he has already given orders for the merciless settlement of accounts with the conspirators, and a nightmare begins in Berlin in which the protagonists of the Resistance recognize one another in growing horror as they watch themselves moving incredibly slowly, dreamers who simply cannot move from the spot in an attempt to save themselves. All this time I am standing by the gigantic window, a very small figure looking out at Hitler’s panorama, the jagged mountain crests like military defenses behind which the sun has disappeared. My skin is glowing, but beneath it I’m trembling with cold. I hope Hitler is dead. I passionately hope so. Not for my father’s reasons, but because I hope that then, at last, Eva will realize that she needs me.

  Let’s go, I shall say when she comes down. Let’s get away from here as fast as we can.

  I am not prepared for what she will tell me soon afterward. Now that she knows what has happened she wants to go to Rastenburg to join Hitler. Tomorrow. She is like a madwoman in her determination. I realize that I can’t stop her.

  You must stay here, she tells me, imperiously.

  The experience of finding that her lover is actually vulnerable has made her strong. She has become another woman in the last few hours. I don’t recognize her.

  Misfortune is Eva’s own domain. It gives her radiance, strength, personality. She is made for misfortune. On its arrival she straightens her back, acquires a firmer outline, shows style and self-assertion, not to avert it but to welcome it. There is no saving her, but I don’t know that yet. She is mistress of the art of self-destruction.

  Eva is an oracle. It will be obvious on the day when she appears in the bunker of the Chancellery, calm, relaxed, beautiful, totally selfconfident. There will be nothing left to remind anyone of the shop-girl she once was. Everything nervous, rapid, blurred about her will have given way to supreme clarity. She will step on stage with the utmost assurance, as if she had been rehearsing all her life for this one entrance. And this time she will not remove herself from the scene by withdrawing to the prescribed distance from Hitler; she will place herself beside him, to the fore of the picture, and all present will see and understand with horror. As the survivors will say later: When Eva Braun arrived we knew it was all over.

  But we haven’t reached that point yet. When she is still there on the Berghof the next day I actually believe she has stayed for my sake. I feel as if I were still wearing my wet bathing suit. I have shivering fits. I can’t get warm even under the two eiderdowns Eva has them fetch for me. The housekeeper makes me compresses as if I were a child.

  But I am wrong: Hitler has forbidden her to do anything so stupid as to come to East Prussia. If there is one person he doesn’t need there it is Eva. Now he has the proof of his own invulnerability. He feels fortified. Confirmed. Authorized to proceed with the work of destruction upon which he has embarked. She will have to wait a little longer before she can join him in his downfall.

  To cheer her up, he sends her his ruined, bloodstained uniform. Kind of him. Here, you can enjoy a little of the feel of the disaster that just missed me. Well? How do you like it?

  Did he know her, then? Did he know what she needed?

  But then shouldn’t I
remember this unappetizing item of clothing, said to have been among Eva’s possessions at the time of her death?

  I don’t.

  Shouldn’t I remember how disgusted I felt?

  I don’t.

  Disgusted by the smell of it? The smell of Hitler? Of the sweat he shed in fear? Of his blood?

  If I remembered any of that, I would go into a nunnery and spend the rest of my days inhaling the scent of incense. Or perhaps I would have killed myself long ago. But I don’t remember it.

  I do remember something else, though.

  I remember what Eva was like. She hated dirty clothes. Stains. Grime. The smell of sweat. She never wore anything of her own more than once before having it laundered or dry-cleaned.

  She could be utterly nauseated. She was not the nurse type who will mop up other people’s body fluids. She was fastidious.

  If there had been such a . . . such a thing, if Hitler had really thought it a good idea to send it to her, whether to create a holy relic of himself or wanting to be close to her in that way—no, my cousin Eva would have wrinkled her nose, held it away from her at arm’s length between the tips of two pointed fingers, her head turned aside, and would have burned it in the hearth. Anyone who ever looked into her wardrobes and saw the meticulous order in which she kept her outer garments and underclothes, from which the delicate, slightly dry scent of lavender rose with uncompromising cleanliness, knows that she would never have kept a . . . a thing like that.

  CHAPTER 3

  AS LONG AS THE UNIVERSE GOES ON EXPANDING nothing is irretrievably lost. What was once so always will be. The past hurtles through space at the speed of light. Fifty-five light-years away is the point where, seen from that viewpoint, I am twenty years old, a pale young woman wrapped in rugs, lying on a mountainside terrace in a deck chair, convalescing from a nasty attack of tonsillitis. Fifty-five years away, Hitler’s Berghof still stands, the chimneys of the concentration camp incinerators are still smoking, the tanks are rolling on, the sky is still fiery red with the light of burning cities, the echo of death-dealing commands still lingers in the air.