Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

Lower your eyes and softly say . . . Good-night, good-night, good-night, the men and women at the bar join in. I feel their glances lingering on me. I know that in my pleated skirt and my pullover from Eva’s winter collection I look like an ugly duckling among swans. I look like a girl with whom a man more than fifteen years older is about to fall madly in love. I know I look like that. I’m acquainted with the rules for falling in love in the Cinderella scheme of things. I bring to it the same elementary advance knowledge as the women watching, who, in their expensive evening dresses, their makeup now smudged, are suddenly confronted with this divergent pattern, which they know to be invincible. There is nothing they can do but be moved, nothing they can do but sing along:

  Good-night, good-night, good-night, like a benediction for me and my dancing partner. They are wishing we will spend a good night together, and the wish unfolds its whole insinuating nature as we dance. They watch us, and they see what in their eyes we are: a couple for tonight. They see the desire in my dancing partner’s eyes. The women at the bar feel it themselves. They think of nights long past when a man looked at them like that, fixedly, through half-closed eyes. They move a little closer to their companions. They cannot take their eyes off us. They applaud wildly when the dance is over.

  As we are standing at the bar amid all the crush, I hear someone ask: Who is she?

  A cousin of the Führer’s, comes the reply.

  I am too tired to contradict. Too tired and already too much in the wrong to set anything right. I give in to what will happen. I am twenty years old and about to discover love on the Obersalzberg. It will be a Nazi love. A Nazi affair, inflamed by Nazi desire, and it will come to a Nazi end. Not a clean break but a total collapse. If we survive we shall not recognize each other again.

  I see myself standing in the crush at the bar of the Platterhof. I see myself from decades away like a daughter I have lost, a child gone astray. I cannot warn her or hold her back. I know what is going to happen, and she doesn’t. I see her looking up at the man who has put his arm around her. How small she is. She has that look of being in need of protection, which many men like in women, many men can’t get enough of it. I would like to take the glass away from her. She is drinking too much this evening. I see the man do so now. Carefully, he takes it from her hands and empties it himself. She throws her head back, laughing. He is much taller than she is. Taller. More experienced. Older, and in possession of a degree of masculinity to match his military rank. It is only natural for him to be good-looking, it’s the result of his masculinity. Nothing in her can withstand him. Everyone can see that.

  But there is another game going on between the two of them as well. In this game he is dying of desire for her. He is head over heels in love with her. She can dictate conditions. Let her give the orders. He’ll do anything for her, anything.

  These are the old rules of the game of seduction, and they apply here, too. It could have been anywhere in the world that she first discovered love, but it’s here. It had to be here. On Hitler’s mountain. A Nazi love. It can never be undone now, it’s a part of me.

  I remained virgo intacta that night, which I spent in a room at the Hotel Platterhof. He was being considerate with me, as consideration was understood at the time. Men did not expect a virgin to go all the way on the first night, and since on general principle they were more experienced in love they took their time with us.

  The hymen I defended with almost ludicrous tenacity was, strictly speaking, my only possession, and I still had it after several nights at the Platterhof.

  In fact, diverting our lovers again and again from destroying it schooled our sexual fantasies, increased our sexual ingenuity. It put other ideas into their heads, guided them in other directions. And it was good for their own stocks of ingenuity, too, their ability to empathize. It was all in the cause of tenderness in bed that we begrudged the granting of our favors so long. The men swore the most extravagant oaths. They promised us whatever we wanted. They begged. They showered us with gifts. They could be delightful, tender, in a word irresistible as long as we did not, as one says, give ourselves to them. At some point they, too, realized that what we were withholding from them was of no importance, that this ultimate possession, so highly prized, was really something tiny, something that had long ago been superseded by another ultimate factor, and then— then—the time to give it up had come.

  I remember the morning when I lost it in detail. It happened at a moment of inattention, a moment when I really did have other anxieties, when there were other things on my mind.

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN IN JANUARY. We had celebrated New Year’s Eve at the Platterhof, Eva and I. I had succeeded in dragging her away from the telephone at the Berghof, although in fact Hitler had helped by calling earlier than expected, during the day. She was cheerful and relaxed as we set off down the road to the Platterhof, this time in full evening dress ourselves. I was wearing a pale blue dress from Eva’s wardrobe, and Eva herself was a vision in dark red.

  I’m so happy, she said, now that the tide’s turning.

  Turning which way? I asked.

  How should I know? said Eva. But the Führer sounded so confident on the phone.

  Really? I asked.

  You know, she said, those Englishmen of yours don’t always know everything.

  I’m glad, I said, specially now I hear it from you. Well, are the Americans retreating? Have we crossed the Meuse?

  You don’t think the Führer tells me such details, do you? she asked. I can tell from his voice if we’re winning or not.

  Perhaps your Führer had been drinking a little champagne, I said.

  No, he never does, said Eva. You can be absolutely sure of that. He doesn’t drink a drop, even on New Year’s Eve. No alcohol, no cigarettes, no meat ever.

  Must be awful, I said.

  That depends, said Eva. There are worse things.

  Of course, I said. Far worse.

  The New Year’s Eve ball at the Platterhof would not have been to Hitler’s taste. This was not a party for ascetics. The buffet was for hungry folk: goose liver pâté, larded saddle of venison, eels in aspic, Parma ham, appreciated at the time by only a very select body of connoisseurs . . . it was a party for gourmets. The hungry were elsewhere. Everywhere, in fact: in the camps, in the cities, at the front. Almost everyone went hungry. But here the tables were laid for the rest of us, the lucky few. Here we satisfied a hunger of another kind. A hunger for forgetfulness, amusement, oblivion.

  We danced till morning. Eva danced that night, too. She, too, forgot and amused herself. We danced with the officers, the architects and construction managers of the bunker complexes, with the National Socialist Party district heads from southern Bavaria. I danced with Hitler’s physician Dr. Brandt, with Bredow the head of the air-raid HQ, with Schenk, Bormann’s deputy on the Obersalzberg. I saw sad Frau Bormann, more beautiful and melancholy than ever in the festive crowd, her heavy dark hair parted in the middle, her eyes black and grave, without the slightest expression except for her sadness, which remained always the same, like a woman already drowned who haunts the place like her own ghost, the loveliest depressive I ever saw.

  Unlike Eva, who hid behind her cheerfulness, Frau Bormann let herself be seen in the garment of melancholy that clothed her. It clothed her completely, as it does in the portrait Pitthan painted of her in 1940 and exhibited in Munich: a Nazi Mona Lisa in a brocade dirndl.

  At midnight we welcomed in the year of our downfall rejoicing. The year of countless deaths and unparalleled exhaustion. The year of the mass murder we committed, the year of executions and the end of them. The year of innumerable flights and rapes, the year of captivity, of hunger, of despair. The year of our defeat in more than merely the military sense. The year in which we would be swept away. The year when our disgrace would be made obvious. The year of the beginning of our shame. The year when we did not yet grasp, as in the years that followed, that it would be forever: the shame of our new German sense of nationalit
y, slowly growing in us, making its way very hesitantly, very cautiously toward something new, something never seen in the world before, just as a nation arises from a historical experience: a nation ashamed.

  The year we have only to remember in order to know there was reason enough for that shame: Year Zero, as we were already calling 1945 at the time.

  Heil, heil, heil, we shouted. Heil the Führer! Sieg Heil.

  I can still see Eva standing there, raising her champagne glass to the many who wanted to drink a health with her. Smiling, she takes on the role of our commander in chief’s deputy, receiving New Year wishes on his behalf.

  To the final victory! To the final victory!

  As usual, there was something like an apology for being at the center of attention in her smile, the smile of a woman who was really rather shy. As usual, I see that she would like to steal away.

  To victory! she says with warmth.

  It is her last New Year’s Eve. The year of her death is beginning. The year of her wedding. In a few weeks’ time she will pack her bags for her last journey. She looks charming, in the way shy women look charming when they are slightly tipsy. That is how I would like to remember her. At that moment. Holding her glass aloft in the snapshot taken by my memory.

  To what victory? says the Obersturmbannführer, who has his arm around me.

  The final victory, I say, rather foolishly.

  To our final victory, he says softly, leading me out on the dance floor. I shall spend that night in the Hotel Platterhof again. The man who loves me will tell me next morning that he must go back to Schloss Fischhorn, and he is not sure when he will be able to return to Berchtesgaden. I feel his pain at the parting. It confuses me. I myself feel rather relieved at that moment.

  A period of grace, I think. Maneuvering for position. Delaying tactics. He must never visit me in the Tea House. Final victory?

  Meanwhile, the Allied fronts are advancing.

  The Red Army is moving toward the Oder. On January 17 it takes Warsaw; on January 19, Lodz, Krakow, Tilsit; at the end of the month it is somewhere between Frankfurt and Küstrin. Berlin is threatened. In the west, the U.S. Air Force is now attacking the Rhine bridges at Koblenz, Neuwied, and Remagen. The American pincer attack against the German frontal advance in the Ardennes at Houffalize closes in. Suddenly everything happening there seems quite close to us. A pincer attack on our fears.

  One morning in the middle of January there is a knock at the front door of the Tea House. The cleaning women don’t come until the afternoon. Eva has never been there at this time of day. I’m not expecting anyone.

  I don’t know where Mikhail is. I hope he hears the knock as clearly as I do.

  I rise from my desk. I call on the spirits of cold calm and clever dissimulation. I go through the outer room. I see that the cellar door is closed. I fervently hope Mikhail will stay hidden there. I tell myself he must. He surely heard the sound of boots, I tell myself. Two pairs, I suspect. When they come they always come two by two. I open the door, I open it very slowly, because I am still trying to form a clear view of the situation. Would it have been better to act like a rabbit in its burrow, to pretend not to be here? But they have keys, it occurs to me as I am slowly opening the door, they’d get in anyway. Better if I can shake them off at the doorway.

  There is only one man standing at the door. The man who loves me. The most dangerous of all. None of them can be as dangerous as the man who loves me.

  He says he knows I’d asked him not to come here, and he respects my wishes. But he has only a few hours before he must go back to Schloss Fischhorn again.

  It moves me to realize that he is feeling shy. It moves me in a way not entirely free of the satisfaction of having power over him. Over the dangerous, the powerful man who really has me entirely at his mercy if he wants. I recognize his fear of being rejected by me. If I were to close the door again I would be doing only what he feared on the drive here from Fischhorn. I could do it.

  Will you let me in? he asks.

  And for a moment I feel so strong that I am weak enough to let him in. He kisses me. I am under the spell of his self-consciousness. It is the self-consciousness that affects lovers when they meet again. A self-consciousness that can be overcome only by the consummation of love. Lovers take refuge in its consummation. They recognize it as the only way to escape their self-consciousness.

  He half urges me, I half draw him into the tea salon.

  So this is where you live, he says.

  This is where I work, I say.

  He glances at my notes lying on the table, and at Heisenberg’s Principles.

  You won’t understand that, I say, taking the book from his hand. He shakes his head.

  Clever girl, he says.

  I can think of only one way to distract him.

  Have you ever been here before? I ask.

  Good heavens, what an idea, he says.

  He says it with awe, positively devoutly. I realize that he is well aware where he is. This little shrine, known to be the favorite place of the deity he reveres, and I, the priestess dwelling in it. I feel how the aura surrounding me holds him spellbound. I show him the famous view from the Mooslahner Kopf down to the valley of the Ache from the windows of Hitler’s tea salon. The towering peaks, the blue sky, the sparkling snow. I have that view at my command. I am generously letting him partake of it, as of a divine supply of salvation over which I preside, allotting it to whom I will.

  My God, he says, it’s beautiful here.

  I hear a noise in the background. As I turn I see Mikhail crouching behind the hearth. Motionless, pressed far into the shadows between the hearth and the wall, he looks like a wood sprite, a small and cunning goblin who will leap up any moment and dance around the room like a flibbertigibbet.

  My SS lover misunderstands the movement with which I have turned to look at the room. We are now facing each other. The dramatic conventions of the moment demand that we kiss now, more passionately this time. He presses me back against the window frame. I have to move to one side, since otherwise I shall lose my balance and stumble over the low window seat. I sink into the flowered linen curtain. I am afraid of tearing it down. I guide my lover to one of the deep armchairs. They are wide armchairs with heavy upholstery and low seats. They seem to be made for giants, huge flowered laps into which you can let yourself drop, too large for one person, not large enough for two, so that we are lying partly beside and partly on top of one another. We sink into the chair and try to find a position that, if not comfortable, will at least be tolerable. My lover tries to get us out of it. He sits up. He wants to go somewhere else. He wants to go in search of my bed.

  But he mustn’t do that. I adopt and pursue the course of showing that I am overcome by transports of silent ecstasy. I close my eyes, I sigh, I bend back as far as my position in the armchair will allow, I let him see I am beside myself, I can’t do anything about what is going to happen. And I really can’t do anything about it! I am indeed beside myself. I dare not let him be any less carried away than I am, not for a moment. He must not come to his senses. Not for a second. I know the way from the hearth to the door leads past our armchair. There is no other way. But as the one lying underneath—if there can be said to be any above or underneath in our tangle of limbs—it is from my position that I can check the escape route, and as I watch Mikhail’s movement toward the door through half-closed eyes, looking into his wide eyes for the fraction of a second, I suddenly feel the pain of something in me tearing, and I realize that I have lost my virginity.

  The most sobering moment of a woman’s life when seen in the bright light of day. Nothing could be farther from the transports of love than this moment. A rending, a pain, a thought, clear as glass: so that was it. A fine rent, a razor-sharp dividing line. A moment like a knife. Impersonal, never mind who did it. No man will believe us if we say what it’s like. A pain illuminating the setting like a lightning flash: Hitler’s tea salon. An SS man. A boy in fear for his l
ife. I myself. And no myth will be based on the incident, only the memory will remain.

  I hear myself saying: I don’t want a baby!

  I’ll be careful, whispers my lover.

  Later I shall be worried about the chair, and scrub at it with soap-suds. Luckily the cover has a flower pattern with a good deal of red in it. I work away with the zeal of Lady Macbeth, returning to the task again and again. I want to undo what has been done. After a while I can’t help seeing that I am making matters worse. The colors are bleaching out of the patch of fabric concerned. Hitler will notice at once when he comes home.

  Sometimes I try to imagine him suddenly standing in the doorway, having come to drink tea in his Tea House. The mere idea casts me into a frenzied desire to be of service. Where would I find a tablecloth for the table? Has the silver been cleaned? The sugar bowl filled? Do I have enough biscuits to offer him? Where’s the tray I ought to use? And what would be the right moment to pass on Hugh Carleton Greene’s message? Even in my daydreams I am ashamed of the assiduity with which I am ready to be of service.

  These are daydreams of the Hitler period. In the time after Hitler the same dream looks different. I imagine myself handing Hitler a cup of tea on the Mooslahner Kopf. Why not? I ask myself. After all, it was his house. It could have happened. In this daydream I am far from assiduous, I am perfectly cold, resolved to desperate measures. I have laced his tea with poison. I see him raising the cup to his mouth, drinking. . . . It could have happened, I tell myself.

  The unwritten history of daydreams. The world of lies in which we walk, which we inhabit. The history of our lies may contain much history that is real. One might perhaps be able to deduce that history from them. From the way our lives change, and make changed characters of us. It is not we who create the lies, the lies create us. Fleeting subjects of a history we do not know. Fading illusions blotting each other out. Is that really me bending over an armchair with a flowered cover, trying to scrub away a bloodstain?

  A little over three months later the Tea House will stand in an ashen lunar landscape scattered with ruins and riven by deep craters, one of the few buildings on the Obersalzberg still intact, together with the Kehlstein house, Speer’s studio, and the houses on the Hintereck—too removed from the vicinity of the Berghof on which the bombers concentrated their attack.