Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  He rubbed his eyes, narrowed them again at once, and remembering his mother’s advice never to rub them except from the outside in, he suddenly realized that there was bright if brownish light around him, and with streaming eyes he realized that there was a way out of the upper branch of the passage into which he had moved, a way out overgrown with creepers and ferns, and he could get through it. He hauled himself up on the rocky platform, and saw that it was of the same size and gently rounded shape as the benches around the stoves in Korcziw.

  HE SLEPT ALMOST ALL THE TIME. He had come with the winter, and he stayed the winter through. He hibernated in the cellar of Hitler’s Tea House, wrapped in the blankets I had provided, hidden under the eiderdown I had borrowed from the Berghof on the pretext that the temperature in the Tea House dropped sharply at night. It was two years since he had had enough sleep. The inmates of the huts would have sold their souls just to stay lying where they were when they were woken at four in the morning, particularly in winter. Now he could do just that, with his heartbeat, circulation, and heat regulation lowered to hibernation levels. He slept and slept. He woke only in order to eat, and then soon fell asleep again.

  And something happened to him. When I met him one last time over six months later, with a pistol in his hand and a GI’s cap on his head, I saw that he had grown. Suddenly he looked like a man. All the strength of his hibernation was there in him.

  In time I stopped locking him in. I gave him the key to the cellar door, and when darkness had fallen he could move about the house. He knew himself that he must never put a light on, and he learned to find his way in the dark with the skill of a nocturnal animal.

  On his first explorations of Hitler’s Tea House he discovered the radio. He turned the knobs. He was alarmed to hear a human voice speaking so close to him, but with time it became his only toy. His passion. When I came back from the Berghof late in the evening I knew where I would find him: on his knees by the little table in my bedroom where the radio stood, his ear pressed to the fabric covering the loudspeaker. He learned to turn the sound right down.

  At first he didn’t really understand that the radio was talking about the world in which he, too, lived. Then he heard names. Warsaw. Belgrade. He tried to find out what he was being told about these cities. And Lvov? And Belz? And Hrubieszów? From the fact that no one said anything about those places he concluded that everything was still the same at home.

  He could hear the Germans’ music. It was wonderful. It was terrible. It brought tears to his eyes to hear their music. There was a stormy wind in it, laughter, a festival, victory. It broke through dams, including the dams of his mind, like a great tidal wave. When he heard the music of the Germans, their victory signal, he knew he was subjected to them forever.

  One evening he heard the voice that spoke to him personally. He was greatly alarmed, but there was no doubt about it. It was meant for him, Mikhail, even if his name was not spoken.

  And now, just for you, said the voice, alone and far from home as you are, here is your song. Your song, my song, our song. Next comes . . . “Lili Marleen.”

  Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate Darling, I remember the way you used to wait . . .

  Mikhail knew the song. Everyone knew it. The men in the huts had sometimes hummed it to themselves. But he had not known until now that it was his song, a song that had been dormant in his soul until this moment. Now it awoke in him, and he realized, happily, that he knew it word for word and note for note, and could join in singing it in his mind with the woman’s voice on the radio.

  This was the first time such a thing had happened to him. He was sixteen. He had never heard a woman sing except for the women of Korcziw, who sometimes struck up a kind of chant as they did their washing by the river, a chant cursing unfaithful husbands. Mikhail had never before heard anything as beautiful as the song Lale Andersen was singing for him and him alone:

  Resting in our billets, just behind the lines Even though we’re parted your lips are close to mine. When the night mists swirl and churn, To that lantern I’ll return, My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marleen.

  And he saw it: the mists rising from the ground, the rain slowly turning to thick snowflakes like cotton wool. He saw the woman as he had seen her on the morning when he escaped and found a way to climb out of the mountain. He had seen her as he hid behind tendrils and ferns. Her short gray coat, flapping wet and heavy around her thighs, impeding her as she walked, her little high-heeled shoes, the small hat she was clutching to her head with one hand to keep the wind from blowing it away. And then he saw her face, the face of an angel as she raised it to him. He saw the pain in it as mingled rain, snow, and tears ran down it. And he saw her swiftly give him her present. She threw it down among the gorse beside the path, as if to say: There, did you see that? Pick it up for yourself! He noted the place where it fell.

  He knew she had been sent to him. He put it down to the prayers they were saying for him at home in Korcziw. Suddenly everything was in league to save him: the earthly part he had performed himself by escaping through the mountain, and now came the part played by heaven, which was necessary for success. And when the next minute she disappeared, in those shoes that didn’t allow her heels to touch the ground—he had never seen anything like them before—when she disappeared, floating rather than walking, he immediately climbed down to the path and found what she had brought for him. It was a key. The key to his salvation. He had no doubt of it.

  But he was not insane. He knew he must be cautious, and he hid until darkness fell. He had seen the SS guards. He knew that their route passed his hiding place. He knew that if an angel comes to your aid you must still be clever. He knew he must do the rest for himself, with the greatest caution and if necessary the cunning of a thief.

  He went back to his hiding place. He made himself a bed of autumn leaves, soil, and flakes of stone as best he could. For the moment he was very pleased with the way things were turning out, and he fell asleep at once.

  When he woke it was dark. He did not know how long he had been asleep. It seemed to him that everything was all right, everything already achieved. He felt he had been saved, miraculously brought to the place where he was supposed to be. Then, suddenly, as his mind made an effort, apparently operating on its own and separately from him, he took stock of his position in a crack in the rock, a kind of cave, and realized that he was in the process of freezing. Exerting great strength of will, he opened his eyes and saw that it was still snowing. By now, he could see, the snow was settling, and it occurred to him that he still had some way to go.

  He reached the way out of his cave several times, to find that he was really still lying where he had been, and only his dream self had set out. At some point, with another huge effort, he managed to get his body moving as well. Letting himself down to the ground, he saw with all the horror of which his mind was capable that he would be leaving visible tracks in the newly fallen snow.

  He set off in the direction from which his angel had come. He avoided walking along the path, but knew it was impossible to leave no tracks behind him, and when he saw the house he realized that he would have to take his last few steps to the door along the path itself. He hoped his footprints would soon be snowed over.

  The house was dark. It seemed empty. It must be empty, or would an angel have brought him the key? He put it in the lock and was not surprised when the door opened. Groping his way along a wall in the dark, he reached a narrow passage through a door that had been left ajar, came to another door at the end of the passage, and at once he could smell that there was bread nearby. He was frantic with hunger. His hand passed over a tabletop. He turned to the wall, where he thought there was a cupboard, and a chair fell over. Suddenly pausing, he heard the sound of bare feet in the passage. They moved away, and then came closer again. He had not been wrong. There was someone else here.

  He knew he would be too weak to defend himself. The fear that came over him made him even weaker
. He felt the back of a chair and sat down. He was finished. He wept. The light came on.

  WHERE DID YOU GET THE KEY? Tell me where you got the key.

  I put it on the kitchen table between us. At night, when I came back from the Berghof, he fell on the food I had brought him. The kitchen was on the valley side of the Tea House, above the steep slope, so that its window was invisible. We could put the light on there.

  K-key? he repeated.

  His boyish face twisted into the mendacious grimace I was getting used to. Something between weeping and grinning, between slyness and pitiful vulnerability. Boys reaching puberty tell lies all day long. They can’t help it. They are practicing how to hide what matters. It is the pact they make with their future, which depends on keeping what matters a secret. They seal the pact with the lies they tell.

  I find, he said.

  This was the stupidest and most common of all stupid explanations. It annoyed me that he thought he could try that one on with me.

  Mikhail, I said, if you go on lying to me I won’t bring you any more to eat.

  But he stuck to his story.

  Where did you find it?

  By path, he said.

  It made me really furious. Here I was risking everything for him, and he wasn’t even prepared to tell me the truth.

  So I suppose the key fell from heaven, I said. I would have shouted at him if silence had not been of prime importance here.

  Yes, he said.

  An angel gave it to you, no doubt, I said. I meant it to sound ridiculous.

  Yes! he said. Yes!

  Oh, really? I said. What did the angel look like? It had wings, did it?

  Then, hesitantly, ashamed, he described it to me. The mist. The rain. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her tears. The shoes in which she didn’t walk but instead hovered in the air.

  I JUST WANTED TO SEE who it is now, she had said to me. And then I understood. The traces of someone else in the Tea House that Eva and I had noticed before I moved in here—one of the SS men had been using it as a love-nest after Hitler left. He had given the woman he was meeting there a key so that she could wait for him. That might also, perhaps, explain the presence of a radio in the Tea House. Perhaps it belonged to this couple and they liked making love to soft music. For hadn’t we found it in the bedroom? And could it not be that they had also, very secretly indeed, tuned in to enemy stations now and then?

  Then I had come, and the woman probably thought that I was the reason for the end of her affair. That her lover was now entertaining another woman in the Tea House. And she had let herself be driven to intrude on me. She had been beside herself. Beside herself with hatred and jealousy. I’d seen that she was.

  I saw her walk out in the snowy rain, saw her put her hand in her coat pocket halfway down to the path, and fling the key into the bushes beside the path in a passion of fury. I saw her stop, raise her face to the rain for a moment, and try to face the pain of knowing it was all over. I saw the boy watching her from his hiding place. Saw him looking for something a little later among the bushes beside the path, finding it, quickly picking it up, and returning to his hiding place with it.

  All at once I myself felt I was serving some kind of higher plan, a plan that had been made long ago and without my personal involvement. There was nothing more to be decided. I was involved in it now.

  If the worst comes to the worst, I thought, Eva will help me.

  She wouldn’t have.

  Today, so many years later, I know that she was helping me in her own way, the only way in which she could face the horrors going on around her: She didn’t look. She looked in the other direction. I think Mikhail could have walked past her and she wouldn’t even have asked who he was.

  That is the way in which people like Eva Braun help you. And they help to make evil possible.

  I had nothing to fear from her. At heart, I knew that. But when someone who could be dangerous to me did come on the scene soon afterward, I also knew at heart that I could not hope for anything from her.

  CHAPTER 6

  ON NOVEMBER 20, HITLER HAD LEFT HIS HEADQUARTERS at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia and continued to wage his war from Berlin.

  It did not seem to trouble Eva that this meant a retreat from the approaching Eastern front. Soviet troops had already marched into East Prussian territory in October. I knew that from what Hugh Carleton Greene said. But suddenly Eva seemed full of optimism again.

  I’m just so glad he’s back, she said.

  She sounded as if she were speaking of someone who has come home after a long absence. And gradually I came to understand her purpose. She could not have reached him in Rastenburg, where he was in the field. But she could follow him to Berlin; she had access to him there. He couldn’t turn her away from the Reich Chancellery. I sensed her restlessness, her readiness to set out.

  I could imagine the difficulty Hitler had in persuading her over the telephone not to pack her bags at once and set out to join him. Perhaps he even talked to her, just that once, about the military situation, for she was full of hints to me about an expected turn of the tide in the West.

  Christmas, said Eva, eyes shining like the eyes of a child who can’t wait. You wait and see—at Christmas . . .

  But I could get nothing more precise out of her, while Hugh Carleton Greene was holding out to me and all the people of Germany the prospect of the saddest Christmas we had ever known.

  And it would be Hugh Carleton Greene who was right.

  When the Ardennes offensive began on December 16 there was no holding Eva. She began preparing for Christmas celebrations with the victorious commander in Berlin, and to this end we were all to go to Munich where she employed—she actually still employed—a dressmaker.

  Can one believe it? Were frocks still being made among the ruins? Was someone designing a new pattern? Were people curling their hair? Practicing the cello? Making Christmas decorations? Teaching dance steps? Crocheting borders for handkerchiefs? Embroidering cushions? Writing poems? Building dollhouses? Were they still affectionate? Vain? Scheming? Feeling hurt by a thoughtless remark? Were they still mad with love, ambition, jealousy? Could you still fear making a fool of yourself? Could you be looking forward to a special occasion? Did gossip still flourish, and resentment, and lust?

  Yes, they did. Jealousy, ambition, fearfulness. Great longings and small anxieties. Parties. Walks. Fretting over whether your skirt was too short or your hair too long. The whole A to Z of small needs that spell out great events.

  The simplest lesson is the most difficult. I didn’t realize that until later, when I read the diaries of Goebbels. How injured he felt. How enamored, how enthusiastic. How proud when he scored a particularly great success with one of his acts of arson, one of his lies. How deeply stirred his feelings were! Oh, the pain of love! Heartache. Paternal pride.

  Didn’t he know that he had no right to such great feelings?

  Who says so?

  History.

  Didn’t he notice the Muse of History looking over his shoulder when he wrote of his affair with Lida Baarová, “My heart is sick unto death,” didn’t he see History falling about with mocking laughter?

  No, he didn’t notice. Not even he, who dictated to History the lies she needed as a pretext to make herself come about. If we were ever aware that history is on the point of coming about we would try to prevent it. We would try to stop it with all the force at our command. Not just this particular bit of history, but History in general. It’s so tactless. It makes us look like fools. It lays all our great passions and small needs open to ridicule. It makes little of them, destroys them, leaving nothing but mockery behind. The insipid flavor of a faux pas that has been committed and, seen in the light of day, suddenly appears a crime.

  Looking back, I find it incredible to think of myself walking through Munich with Eva in the pale midday December sun, past mounds of rubble, facades scorched black, former display windows boarded up, notices adjuring people
: “Knock to give a signal! How to act in the event of being buried under the rubble.” Then walking past the church of Our Lady, which has a hole blown in the vault above the choir, while its entire roof is more or less open to the elements. “Danger of Falling Masonry!” says the notice on the temporary hoarding past which we hurry, soon afterward reaching the food market in a basement entrance, where there are a couple of steps down to the fashion showroom. Here Eva tries on a close-fitting pale mauve suit with a mink-trimmed collar, and expresses her annoyance at finding that the skirt is too short.

  Not again! she says, crossly. Not again! Don’t you see? I can’t afford to show so much leg, not in my position. Don’t you understand that?

  To which the dressmaker, on her knees, replies: Oh, yes, of course, gnädige Frau. We only tacked the hem up. It’s easily let down if madam prefers.

  Her mouth is full of pins. I admire the way she can talk through those pins.

  Madam knows that we always go to a lot of trouble to get everything just as madam likes it. If there’s no air raid tonight we can bring it around tomorrow morning. Of course. Heil Hitler, madam!

  When the first air-raid warning goes off at around nine-thirty we’ve already polished off a couple of bottles of Sekt with Eva’s friends, who as usual turned up as soon as we arrived in Wasserburger Strasse. The ground-floor windows are blacked out with the thick roller blinds specially made for the purpose. We are sitting by candle-light. Well, it will soon be Christmas.

  What a shame, says Mitzi. This always happens just as we’re feeling nice and comfortable.