What? says the child, rolling her eyes scornfully.
Oh, my dear, then it’s high time you learned, says Mama Fegelein. She demurs, but soon realizes that she has come up against a blank lack of comprehension.
Even Gretl, says Mama Fegelein, even Gretl has made some progress.
She speaks of Gretl in the unmistakable tones of a mother-in-law, not concealing the fact that Gretl fails to come up to her expectations in more than one respect. Just imagine: She can’t even ride, and she invites cousins who can’t ride either!
The next morning the visitor is taken for a riding lesson after one of the chambermaids has brought her a pair of jodhpurs, a pair of boots, and a red jacket. The boots are tight, but she finds the jodhpurs and jacket an exciting costume, allowing her to resemble the uniformed men around her, and she suddenly thinks that it can’t be impossible to talk to one of them. And as she walks down the path through the park to the riding ground a few hundred meters away, with the man who has been detailed to accompany her, she suddenly feels that she wants to stop and look at his face.
It is a blue morning of the kind found only up in the mountains in August. On one side of her and down below, the southern end of the lake shines brightly; the meadows are deep green; and here and there you see the scythes of the mowing farmers flash in the sunlight. The whole scene suddenly strikes her as a kind of Garden of Eden, a new morning, a new world in which the old precepts, the old constraints, the old setbacks no longer apply.
She looks sideways at her companion, and sees how young he is. He can’t be more than two years older than she is herself. And as she notices this she no longer finds him strange and intimidating. Behind the masculinity on display she sees his still childish face. His shyness. His homesickness. His awkwardness because there is a girl walking beside him. We could have been at school together, she thinks suddenly, and wonders why the idea is so surprising, why it has never occurred to her in connection with any of the other men she has met recently.
And she cannot resist the temptation. It is like the desire to do something forbidden, kick over the traces. For a moment she feels it is possible to say: Come on, let’s just leave all this behind us. Let’s go.
Instead she asks: Do you like it here?
That in itself is a bold remark. As far as she can possibly go, even in view of their closeness in age.
(Fifty-five light-years away, on a planet called Earth, the two would now take hands, shouting in high spirits, and run down into the valley, where they would stand by the roadside and wait for a car to stop, a car in which they disappear from our view. The screenplay of life changes at the speed of light, too.)
What do you mean? asks the young man.
I mean, she says, emboldened by the morning, the blue air, the scent of hay, I mean it’s a bit like being on holiday. You feel like going for a swim. A pity one can’t just do what one likes here. Have you ever been up there? she asks, pointing to somewhere up in the mountain peaks, which appear to her suddenly close, as if you could walk on them.
Up there? says the young man. Well . . .
Do you know anything about the history of the castle? she asks, trying again.
History? says the young man. No, no idea.
All the same, he, too, suddenly seems to want to talk. But in everything he now tells her about himself she hears nothing but a litany of military ranks, promotions, and decorations for courage that he was nearly awarded, or nearly was not awarded. His Austrian accent makes it even harder for her to understand what he is talking about. It is as if he were talking not about life but about some kind of sport with which she is unfamiliar, so that she cannot appreciate his triumphs in it either.
Where do you come from? she says, trying to change the subject. The East, he says proudly. Kiev. Vilna. Minsk. Anywhere we were needed.
She had meant his home.
And don’t you ever get frightened? she says.
Frightened? he asks. Frightened, well, yes. When they scream so loud. Especially the women. The women scream so hard when they have to hand over the children. Enough to frighten anyone. But we in the Black Corps have to be particularly brave. Anyone can shoot a man dead. It’s different with the women. . . .
They have come to the big dairy farm located above the valley, with the men’s barracks and the stud farm. It is a proud and ancient building, displaying the centuries-old wealth of the lords of Fischhorn. A little lower down lies the riding ground, from which the sound of hooves and the wonderful warm snorting of the horses are heard. There is a smell of hay and manure and equine sweat in the air. Men’s voices rise, good-humored laughter, commands, scraps of remarks full of pride and appreciation. Agreement. Jokes. A whole symphony of lively activity, healthy and in harmony with itself and everything else, with nature, with animals, with their attitude to one another.
To her surprise, the young woman meets the limping man from the billiard table here, and she realizes that this is Fegelein senior, Gretl’s father-in-law, head of the SS cavalry school that is conducted here. Yet again she marvels at the agility with which he moves.
He lets his glance wander over her from head to toe and back again. He is assessing her, but as a riding master, not as a man. He sums her up and matches her in his mind with one of the horses.
Snow Queen, he says.
This is an order to her young companion. Soon afterward he emerges from the stables leading a horse by its bridle. The young woman cannot imagine getting up on the creature’s back. It is far too high. Anyway, she has not missed seeing the hostile look in the mare’s eye. She knows the two of them are not going to get on. She knows it, and so does the mare. Involuntarily she retreats as the horse approaches her.
Up you get, says the limping man.
He believes in the bareback method of learning to ride. It is his view that a novice must feel the horse under her, feel its warmth, the play of its muscles, its flesh. She must feel it between her thighs. He swears by this method.
She is rigid with fear and distaste. She does not want the insides of her thighs in contact with the animal. She doesn’t even want to go close enough to touch its twitching flank, that convulsively moving mass of muscular flesh from which the acrid smell of horse rises, one of the typical aromas of life here, immediate and powerful, both familiar and strange.
Her companion puts the reins into her hand and holds out his own linked hands to help her mount the horse. There is no way she can get out of it now, so she steps into this living stirrup. Her desperation and fear have turned to anger instead, although she does not know what she is angry about. But something has given her a reason to feel anger and contempt. Something monstrous that shapes the monstrosity of her fury.
She senses the hands raising her with extraordinary ease. For a short moment she really does feel like a horsewoman about to gallop away on the back of her mount, leaving everything behind her, free and wild. Very briefly, she is at one with the impulse of the movement raising her to the horse’s back, experiences the intoxicating novelty and startling intimacy of the situation. Then, with the same willfulness that inspired her to feel like a horsewoman, she lets herself slip off the other side of the horse again.
You have to be patient with the ladies, she hears Fegelein senior saying, everyone knows that.
It’s always different with women, that’s what, says the young man.
She gets up and simply walks away. Only much later does she notice the pain in her knee. No one is going to persuade her to mount a horse ever again in her life.
At dinner she feels what a burden she is to her cousin. Her failure makes Gretl’s position, weak enough anyway at this court, no easier. After all, who is Gretl Braun? Is she Hitler’s sister-in-law? Obviously not. Still, one can’t behave as if she were not, to some slight extent, his sister-in-law. She fulfills that role just enough to have made it impossible for Hermann Fegelein to refuse when she was suggested to him as a wife, although in herself and without Eva she appears even more pall
id. And she does not improve matters by her efforts to please everyone and be constantly obliging. Even Hermann Fegelein sometimes simply fails to notice when she speaks to him, and only when something is repeated does he pull himself together and say:
I’m sorry, darling. You know I’ve not heard well since then. “Since then” is a phrase they frequently use, and they all know what they are talking about.
You know he hasn’t heard well since then, repeats Mama Fegelein, as if it were Gretl who was hard of hearing.
The young couple are seldom to be seen together here at Schloss Fischhorn. Life in the castle, on the riding ground at the dairy farm, at the stud farm, on the bridleways and paths through the park is a man’s life. Women are merely peripheral to it, marginalia scribbled in at the edges, pale, barely perceptible. Imagine them absent, which is easily enough done, and there wouldn’t be much difference here. Cooks, chambermaids, a few wives. The most noticeable female presence is that of Mama Fegelein. She has what it takes to be a chatelaine, the lady of the castle, except there is no such position here. She herself doesn’t seem to know what is really going on, what exactly is the focal point and meaning of all the activities pursued around her.
Cars drive up and drive away again, new arrivals stride with lithe footsteps through the hall, carrying under their arms slim briefcases the contents of which appear to be of incalculable importance, shrill telephones ring, boots creak on the wooden floor, double doors swing open and shut, briefly revealing groups of men in black uniforms bending over tables behind clouds of cigarette smoke, letting out the regular buzz of a constant exchange of views, which immediately seems to be muted when the doors are closed again, a roar rising and then receding again, like the sound of a swarm of insects going about its business somewhere in the building, moving from place to place, settling somewhere or other and rising in the air, without sense, without meaning, without purpose.
Gentlemen, is the word repeated over and over again, the leitmotif. If I may say so, gentlemen. Thank you, gentlemen. Gentlemen?!
It is a world in which the gentlemen mix only with themselves. A world in which they relate, in a curious manner, to one another and nothing else at all.
Young Fegelein moves in this world like a fish in water, smooth, quick, and agile. He is in his element. Only late at night is he to be seen climbing the stairs and approaching the bedroom into which Gretl disappeared hours before. He does not seem to be in any hurry. Not until the last game of billiards or poker is over does he join her. He lights a cigarette as he goes up, putting it out again, half smoked, in a vase of flowers in the corridor. He is straight and smooth in every way, seen like this. His dark hair, combed back, is straight and smooth, not a strand ever out of place except when he is riding. The skin of his face is taut, gleaming, and very pale, so that the idea of touching it produces a chilly sensation. His uniform tunic fits smoothly and faultlessly, molded to his body.
Now, at night, he has unbuttoned its collar, just the top button, which gives his appearance that certain something, that touch of the casual, which is essential to true elegance. There’s the inimitable cut of the riding breeches he wears under it, emphasizing his thighs and buttocks. The promise of power and intransigence expressed in his appearance. All the sex appeal of martial virility. And oh, those boots. They, too, are black and shiny. See how he walks in them. Long, sure, firm footsteps. Even the mighty oak staircase of Schloss Fischhorn groans beneath that tread.
Only Gretl knows who he is when he gets undressed, or perhaps not even Gretl. Perhaps the light is always out when he approaches her. Darkness is appropriate to the lovemaking of two people who know each other so little. They married in Salzburg two months ago. Hitler was there. Bormann and Himmler were witnesses. Such were the men who stood sponsor to their married bliss. A dream wedding for Gretl Braun, thereby socially elevated above her sister. An SS-Gruppenführer to whom one is married trumps a Reich Chancellor and supreme warlord to whom one is not, anyone can see that.
Gretl did not want this triumph for herself, but what Gretl wants is not the point. Not even with respect to what happens after the wedding. The dark nights when she lies alone in the double bed until the boots come creaking upstairs, and shortly afterward, somewhere near her, a belt buckle is undone, while a cloud of horsiness wafts her way, mingled with the odor of leather, cold cigarette ash, and the exhalations of a man who has drunk too much cognac. Signals from a world in which she has no part, a world that alarms her, in which she senses something like contempt, even hostility toward herself.
At the time of their marriage she had only one night with him, the wedding night. Then he left. This is a time of separations, brief moments of happiness, and moments of unhappiness, too. The rest of your life for a single night. Or two. Or three. And the opposite may be true: another three nights. Another two. Another one night. And then it’s over—perhaps forever, but for the time being anyway.
Let it never end!
Or, make it end!
This is the time in which the silent prayers of women are heard. Men come and go, and women pray for both their coming and their going.
In this world of superfluous females the young visitor is even more superfluous than anyone. Nonetheless, people occupy themselves with her, although she cannot see why. Why can’t she simply go for a walk? There’s no need for them to go to a great effort to fill her time.
The fact that they do makes her suspect that she is the one intended to be driven away. Driven away? From where? Driven away from the scene of the crime. What crime? She doesn’t know.
Take care of her, Fegelein junior told his mother, and his mother is taking care of her now.
What about going for a climb in the mountains tomorrow?
The young woman doesn’t want to go for a climb in the mountains. Her knee hurts, and she is afraid of climbs in the manner of a Luis Trenker film, with women falling down crevasses in glaciers to be rescued, half dead, by intrepid mountaineers, children of nature to whom they are then delivered up for better or worse. She likes mountain movies, but only while she is sitting comfortably in the cinema.
Anyway, her shoes would be a problem again. She has only her oxfords from Jena with her, and they are not at all suitable for climbing.
Unfortunately, it turns out that Gretl wears the same size shoe as the young woman, and can lend her a pair of climbing boots.
Doesn’t Gretl want to come climbing in the mountains herself? No, Gretl has been there before. But Mama Fegelein will go, and nothing will induce her to abandon this plan, as if it were the performance of a patriotic duty. The young woman realizes that she must go along with it.
NONETHELESS, HER INTERNAL RESISTANCE is still strong as they set out early in the morning, the two women and their inevitable male companion, wearing climbing boots with his uniform trousers, a combination the young woman thinks looks rather silly, somehow out of place. Without their riding boots these men forfeit much, indeed almost all, of the elegance of which they are so confident; much, indeed almost all, of the intimidating influence they exert and which they themselves feel as a kind of aura surrounding them, keeping their bearing erect, every muscle taut, endowing their bodies with a dimension not their own, but lent to them as members of a collective identity. Like this, the man looks rather overdressed for a climb.
The reluctance dominating the young woman saps her strength, imparts itself to her muscles. She feels none of that inspiring lift of the spirits required for walking and climbing mountains, when you are in pursuit of yourself, part of you always running slightly ahead, making haste to the summit. Instead, she is lagging behind herself, rebellious and unenthusiastic as a naughty child dragged off somewhere against its will.
The Hundstein, says Mama Fegelein, who is walking ahead with remarkable agility, not what one would expect of her sofa-cushion figure, the Hundstein has the best view for miles around. On a clear day you can even see as far as the foothills of the Alps.
The young woman feels no des
ire to see the foothills of the Alps. She fancies dawdling and being tiresome, an obstacle in the way of Mama Fegelein, who is now privately rehearsing her enthusiastic account of the beauties of nature she has seen, to be delivered on their return.
All the same, the climb brings the release of high spirits even to the young woman, that sense of lightness, that feeling of freedom and intoxication induced by any expedition into the mountains. Her own spirit spreads its wings when she sees Schloss Fischhorn, the lake and the villages in the valley, Bruck and Taxenbach and Maria Alm, lying at her feet, the lake like a puddle glittering in the sunlight, the castle like a toy, soon to be entirely lost from view. But her exuberance, her sense of a greater liberty than is permitted down in the valley, is expressed in an urge to behave badly.
I can’t go any farther, she says, and since she says it, it is true.
To her surprise the man accompanying them turns out to be chivalry itself. He takes her rucksack and insists on a rest so that she can recover. Mama Fegelein, on the other hand, agrees to rest only reluctantly. Her bosom is heaving, her face is flushed an alarming shade of red, but her small person will allow no sign of weariness to show. She is possessed by the energy of the uncompromisingly domineering who are used to getting their own way, even in competition with themselves. Only much later will the young woman realize what strength of will animates Mama Fegelein, and what plan she is pursuing at present with such effort that it is driving her to the limits of her strength.
Early in the afternoon they reach a mountain hut, and the young woman says she doesn’t want to go any farther. There is something about her two companions she doesn’t like. It’s the way they are both doing her bidding, serving her, anxious always to give her the best place, to make sure the old herdsman who brings them milk and cheese is aware what glorious radiance she has shed on his poor hut. What is it that unites them? They know something about her that she doesn’t know herself.
At any rate, they know where they are going, and they assure her that it isn’t much farther now.
Eva's Cousin Page 11