Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  He was like a domestic pet, and indeed he crawled around the house on all fours like an animal so as not to be seen from outside. He did not sit on a chair, but crouched on the floor close to the walls. It seemed second nature to him, and when I saw him later at his full height, after everything was over, I was suddenly afraid of him, as if he were someone else. And so he was.

  At the time, however, he still had a wood-carver’s knife in his hand instead of a gun. He was carving animals for me. A cat. A squirrel such as he saw outside our windows. A dog, a hunting dog. He kept the dog himself. I gave Eva the squirrel for Christmas. How sweet, she said, and never asked where I got it. The cat sat on the mantelpiece. She was asleep, waiting. She had curled up, aware that nothing in life is better than having a warm place. That was the cat’s message. I knew what it meant.

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Eva gave me a dressing table set of hairbrush, comb, and mirror with silver handles. It could have come from a Hollywood diva’s dressing room. All I needed was a lady’s maid to brush my hair for me.

  Oh, we can fix that, said Eva, brushing my hair until it was crackling with electricity and stood out from my head like a wreath. As she brushed I felt her increasingly nervous state, about to veer into aggression. I knew what the matter was. She was waiting for a phone call.

  She had given the staff the evening off, including the film projectionist. Only the two security men were sitting in the room next to the kitchen, playing dice. The cook had left a cold meal for us before she left: Norwegian smoked salmon, chicken salad with mayonnaise, and toast. The greatest independence we were allowed was to make the toast ourselves and carry the trays into the great hall.

  As we ate we listened to a record of the Vienna Boys’ Choir. After that the insistent silence of the telephone surrounded us, interrupted now and then only by the click of the dice shaken in a leather container and falling on an uncovered wooden table, and the suppressed cry of triumph of one or other of the men when he had won a game from the other.

  I could feel the thin ice of Eva’s composure. I guessed at the dark torrent of despair beneath it. I felt the burden of the task of diverting her, noticed from her reaction that she was letting a kind of somnambulistic automatism guide her actions. I was sitting at the same table as a suicide. Far, far away from me she was moving toward the darkness, the all-consuming emptiness that had power over her. It was there. It was always there. Eva’s love for Hitler had been conceived and had grown under the spell of that power. It was founded on it.

  It had been in her from the very first, a fearful void, a vacuum sucking her in, allowing no resistance, no attempt to oppose it. She was that void. She could not remember ever having been anything else.

  Oh, she struggled. She erected bastions against the void within her. She tricked it by playing little pranks, even when she was a schoolgirl. She always went about with a group who liked to have fun. She didn’t need good marks, she needed fun, small triumphs of insubordination. At the Tengstrasse high school she relished the reports of her schoolmistresses, who considered her a “wild, unruly, lazy child.”

  She loved sport, or rather the idea of herself as a sports-woman. Her body would do everything she demanded of it. She did gymnastics. She swam. She went skiing. She had mastered the basic figures of ice skating. She liked to show off in these sports. She was proud of her body, and lived in it as you might live in a magnificent and imposing house, but a house that nonetheless is haunted after dark. The void in her felt at ease there.

  She also had a talent for dressing well. She was amazed by women who were perfectly happy to be badly dressed yet were obviously attractive. The nothingness in her insisted on an elegant wardrobe, and she obeyed it.

  She cultivated appearances. It satisfied her to make photographic copies of appearances and keep them. She was an enthusiastic photographer and cinematographer. She took photographs as mothers do. Everyone in her pictures seemed to have been snapped for a family album, and even when she happened to have history in front of her camera, as she did in the days before the outbreak of the Second World War, she carefully stuck the pictures in her albums and wrote little captions under them, such as:

  “. . . and then Ribbentrop went to Moscow”

  (Hitler, Bormann, Julius Schaub, and Luftwaffe General Bodenschatz talking in front of the hearth in the hall of the Berghof)

  Or:

  “. . . but Poland still refuses to negotiate”

  (Goebbels, with Hitler apparently lunging at him in a blurred movement as if to press him to his heart, and in the background the entire entourage in front of the drawn curtain of the great window of the Berghof.)

  In Eva’s photo albums all this looks like a child’s birthday party. Sport. Photographs. Clothes. She did not give up without a struggle. And Hitler. She had him. She would have chosen him as her lover above any other man. The dictator, the conqueror before whom everyone she knew trembled. Could there be a stronger bastion against the void inside her?

  I lean over the abyss. I want to understand why she chose to go that way.

  I see that the abyss is deep. I can make nothing out there. Confused yearnings. Intertwined dependencies. Emptiness. Confusions, mistakes.

  I don’t understand it.

  But I remember. I remember the Christmas Eve I spent with Eva. I know that her desperation and rebellion were present in the room like an aura. I felt the outrage gathering in her. I guessed that a night can be endless when the phone does not ring, harder to endure than death itself. I understood that this is the logic of depressives. I felt an emptiness from which I myself shrank in horror, a vacuum that I, too, must resist as it tried to suck me in as well. I felt the presence of the Fury of suicide in the room. She spread her wings and brushed us with them as she passed. I, too, was mortally afraid.

  I suspect that this contains the answer to my question: How can Eva have loved this man?

  But I don’t really know the answer. It is hidden in the folds of my memory. The waiting, night, death. The aura of outrage. The Fury rising in the air.

  And I knew that Hitler’s liaison with Eva had begun with an attempted suicide. She had been waiting in vain for days for a telephone call from him—he was then in the final phase of the Reichstag election campaign—when Ilse came home one evening to find her on the bed in their parents’ room, bleeding and unconscious, with a bullet lodged in the side of her neck, its outlines clearly visible.

  This kind of thing mustn’t happen again, Hitler is supposed to have said to Heinrich Hoffmann. I must look after her from now on.

  From the first, death was a partner in their relationship, saying incomprehensible things, expressing itself in riddles as it always does. Let those understand it who will. At any rate, it had the last word.

  Go away now, said Eva. Leave me alone.

  In no circumstances did I want to leave her alone.

  I told her that at this moment her lover was losing the war in the west, and possibly that was why he didn’t get around to calling her.

  She wasn’t interested.

  The ground troops can operate only at night, I say. By day the Allied bombers attack them. And the German supply lines as far as the Rhine and the Luftwaffe airfields are under attack at the same time.

  I’m not interested, she said firmly.

  The Ardennes offensive has failed, that’s what Hugh Carleton Greene says, I told her. The German tanks have stopped at the Meuse. They won’t make it, he says.

  Will you shut up! cries Eva. I don’t want to hear any more of this.

  I tried another tack. I suggested going out. The bar at the Hotel Platterhof would still be open.

  Suppose he calls?

  Then you’re not at home, I said.

  That had the desired effect. Cognac for her woes, and for Hitler the unsettling news that she wasn’t at home. If he happened to call. After all, she still cherished the hope that he would. It would help her to get through the night.

  Not a bad idea, she said.

>   The Fury vanished, like a vampire with a wooden stake thrust through its heart.

  As she walked out into the glittering night, and our two guards closed the door after us, Eva suddenly stopped.

  Did you hear something? she asked me. Was that the telephone?

  Oh, come on! I said.

  There was a band playing in the Hotel Platterhof, with dancing in all the function rooms. I didn’t know where so many women had suddenly come from. Elegant young women in long off-the-shoulder evening dresses, with fur stoles that seemed to be in constant motion against their shimmering skin. They let the stoles slide off their shoulders, made them brush along the floor for a few steps like a pet following its mistress. Then, with an inimitable gesture, they swept them up to their necks again. I was immediately fascinated.

  Perhaps the officers have their wives visiting for Christmas, I suggested.

  Or perhaps not, said Eva.

  We sat down at the bar. No one seemed to be taking any notice of us. The atmosphere was obviously extremely heated. Champagne had been flowing. You could see the silver buckets at all the tables. We decided on champagne ourselves.

  I hadn’t known you could dance Christmas Eve away at a party. As a bourgeois young Catholic girl I was surprised, and said so.

  Well, now you know, said Eva.

  We ought to have changed, I said.

  No, said Eva. We ought not. And you won’t let anyone ask you to dance, is that clear?

  Yes, that’s clear, I said.

  Soon afterward the first hopeful dancing partner began making his way over to us.

  We’re not dancing, said Eva, before he could open his mouth. Kindly but firmly. Once again I was impressed by the sure way in which she dealt with matters of etiquette.

  I saw the barman lean over the counter and whisper something in the man’s ear. It wasn’t difficult to guess what. Careful, he was saying, that’s the Führer’s mistress.

  I saw the man give a start, and with a slight bow in our direction he disappeared as fast as he could.

  This was a crazy idea of yours, coming here, said Eva. Still, we’re here now.

  I liked it. To hell with good upbringing and the rules of etiquette, I thought. All those boring Christmas Eves with my parents. The silence in our living room. The exclusivity of the nuclear family that celebrated Christmas by strictly isolating itself. The thin singing under the Christmas tree accompanied on the piano by my mother, who had been practicing for this occasion for weeks. I didn’t miss any of it.

  Oh, I don’t need any millions, Money doesn’t make my day, All I need is music, music, music all the way!

  announced the singer in the hall. She was wearing a knee-length velvet dress and had her hair pinned up on top of her head in tiny curls that fell forward over her brow. A man in a glittering sky-blue suit had appeared next to her and began to tap dance with her.

  Keep your feet still! Eva hissed.

  I wanted to dance. Oh, how I wanted to dance. Instead I rapidly tipped another glass of champagne down my throat. Beside me, a behind covered with tight-fitting silk brocade settled on a bar stool. A blue fox fur fell head first from the woman’s neck and slid with a slightly sinuous movement to the floor, tracing the curve of her hips. A man bent down, picked it up, and looked at me as he placed the blue fox fur back around its owner’s neck, with a tenderness that seemed to be more for the blue fox than the woman.

  Good evening, he said. I didn’t know you were here.

  We aren’t really, I said. We’re just having a glass of champagne and then we’re going back.

  What a pity, said the Obersturmbannführer. I would have liked to dance with you.

  We’re not dancing, I said bravely.

  Even more of a pity, he said.

  The world won’t come to an end,

  continued the singer in the hall.

  Though the skies may now look gray, Never mind what Fate may send They’ll be blue again some day . . .

  The Obersturmbannführer and the wearer of the blue fox fur made their way to the dance floor. They were all making their way to it, joining to form a mass slowly coming to the boil, separate whirlpools uniting around a swirling center. The waltzing couples pressed close together, bumping into each other. They let the crowd catch and support them, dissolved into it, merged with one another, and the voices of the dancers, taking up the refrain, mingled with the singer’s voice to make a single sound, the loud roar with which the living strike up a song to defy the chorus of the dead, the fearful to defy the fear in them, the guilty to defy the voice of conscience, shipwrecked mariners to defy the roaring of the storm that will soon destroy them.

  I tried to remove my mind from it. I tried to catch something of the silence surrounding us, even here broken more and more often now by air-raid warnings. Allied bomber formations were flying over us in the direction of Munich with increasing frequency. We concealed ourselves under the artificial mist at ever shorter intervals. We still thought it sufficient protection. We still believed in the magic of the mountain, we thought our enemies could not find us there, we believed that the fortress in which we were secluded was impregnable. We still expected retribution to strike others, not ourselves.

  We may go round the bend

  sang the dancers in the Platterhof,

  And our heads be all awhirl But the world won’t come to an end Not for me, not for me and my girl.

  Let’s go, said Eva.

  The Obersturmbannführer caught up with us at the door.

  Wait, he said. I’ll see you home.

  When we reached the Berghof I offered to spend the night with Eva, but she refused.

  Don’t worry about me, little one, she said. It takes a lot to get me down, you know.

  The two guards we had left behind opened the door of the house for her.

  There, you see, said Eva, no harm can come to me.

  Did she have no idea what this was all about? Couldn’t she help me just this once by letting me spend the night at the Berghof?

  I saw the Obersturmbannführer talking to the two men. I knew what it was all about. I saw their glances. They were in it with him. Their secret knowledge. Their satisfaction in seeing the suspicions they had long entertained of me confirmed.

  I’ll take you to the Mooslahner Kopf, he said.

  He mustn’t. I had to think of some way of stopping him. If I got back late at night Mikhail would be there. I’d have no chance of warning him. He would hear the sound of boots outside the house. He wouldn’t understand how one of them could be with me. He would see me letting the man kiss and embrace me. Because I would. By now we had gone so far that it was a certainty. And Mikhail would think I was one of them now and was ready to betray him. I’d never be able to win his trust again.

  I’d like to go back to the Platterhof, I told my companion when we had reached the foot of Hitler’s stairway.

  It was not a solution. Delaying tactics, no more. Just as everything from now on was not a solution, only delaying tactics. From now on my situation was the same as the military situation: desperate, but at no price must I give in. A hopeless tactical gambit; the war of procrastination now beginning could be ended only by the final victory of the Allies. I would have to defend an indefensible position until then. It would take that long.

  Are you sure? said my companion. Haven’t you had enough of the Platterhof?

  I haven’t danced yet, I said.

  Then let’s go, he said, starting out along the path to the Hintereck again. After a few steps he put his arm around my shoulders, drew me close and kissed me. There was nothing for us to lean against. We swayed slightly in the snow, holding each other tight like sparring partners unsure how to emerge from each other’s clutches without falling over. Partners in love. Sparring partners. There’s a moment when it can go either way. A moment when everything trembles in the balance.

  You’re a strange girl, he said.

  We reached the Platterhof too late. The ball had turned into a b
oozing session. Hairstyles had slipped, glasses fallen over, ashtrays filled up faster than they could be emptied. Uniform jackets were slung untidily over the backs of chairs. The bar where Eva and I had sat almost alone was now besieged by a dense cluster of humanity. Men pressed close to women, women to men, gently pushing a knee between their legs. Hands that had been clicking cigarette lighters earlier were now laid on the curves of the women’s buttocks, stroking them. Makeup was smudged. Cigarettes passed from mouth to mouth. No one minded who was drinking from whose glass now. The threefold ban on smoking, drinking, and using makeup did not apply to the German women gathered here.

  The band had stopped playing and was just packing up its instruments.

  Wait a minute, said my companion, going up to the musicians and giving the pianist a note—of how high a denomination I could not see. This young lady hasn’t had a dance yet tonight. One more song, please. Just one.

  And they unpacked their instruments again and switched on the microphone.

  For a young lady who hasn’t had a dance yet tonight, said the man at the piano with his erotically husky entertainer’s voice. Shall we give her a last tune? What do you say?

  Yes, yes, yes, called the men and women from the bar. Yes, give her a tune!

  A lullaby for a good little girl, want to hear it?

  Yes, go on, they cried, let’s hear it!

  Give me your hands once again in farewell,

  sings the man at the piano, accompanied by a fiddle and a double bass, and the men and women standing at the bar join in the refrain with their slurred, intoxicated voices:

  Good-night, good-night, good-night,

  they sing. And my companion and I dance a slow waltz, our bodies entirely in harmony. It is the continuation of our long embrace, except that we now have the music and our dance steps to keep us balanced in equilibrium, an equilibrium somewhere between a duel and an embrace. I realize that this is what dancing was invented for. I give myself up entirely to his guidance . . .

  You’ll think of me again one day, sings the man at the piano,