by Jane Thynne
“No one’s interested in someone like me.”
“They are especially interested in someone like you. A foreigner. Married to a major industrialist. Keep your thoughts to yourself. Watch what you say. And be careful what you send by post. Confine your Christmas cards to ‘Season’s Greetings.’ ”
“What on earth would I have to say that anyone else might want to hear?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If I was…observed, as you say…how would I tell?”
“You wouldn’t. They would look entirely ordinary. More than ordinary.” He was silent for a second, thinking. “You know the little sparrows that dance around your feet at a café? They come from nowhere and you never give them a second glance? That’s how a watcher will be.”
“Have you been watching me?”
With crawling dread she met Sturmbannführer Hoffman’s eyes.
Just for a moment, his urgency relaxed and he smiled.
“Not for that reason, Frau Doktor.”
* * *
—
DRIVING HOME THROUGH THE darkened streets, Ernst was full of the fact that he had actually been introduced to Hitler. The Führer had shaken his hand. He had referred to the Weissmuller company as “a vital plank of Reich rearmament.” That was Adolf Hitler’s opinion, straight from the horse’s mouth. Whatever you said about the man, he had a sharp brain for industrial strategy.
“I can’t believe you missed your chance.” Ernst glanced across at Irene, who was watching the sodium of the streetlights slide past the car window. “Where on earth were you? I looked around for you, and you’d disappeared.”
“I told you. I felt faint. I needed some air.”
“And I had my photograph taken with Goering. He’s more cultured than I thought, that chap. He was very keen to meet you.”
“Was he?”
“Goering’s a terrific Anglophile, you know. A great friend of your new King.”
She tried to listen to Ernst, but she could barely focus. All she could think was that she now lived in a country where ordinary citizens were suspected for no reason. Where private mail was routinely read by others.
Confine your Christmas cards to “Season’s Greetings.”
Had she written anything compromising to Cordelia?
Her sister’s most recent letter had come a few days ago, and she had kept it to savor privately after Ernst had left for work, but as soon as she saw its contents, tears stung her eyes. So dear old Frau Klein had been harassed, and forced to move to Paris. And Cordelia was worrying about her and wanted her to return home. But in the meantime to keep some kind of journalistic record of what she experienced. Everything else is propaganda.
Easy for Cordelia to say. If she tried that it might not only incriminate her but put Ernst and his family at risk. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t want everyone to hear. Keep your thoughts to yourself. More than ever, Irene realized, she must confine her letters to family business, write-ups of their evenings out, and plentiful details of Ernst’s factory output. She must avoid all talk of anything that might be construed as unpatriotic.
Her parents were in England, her sister in France. Their little family was flung as far apart as the stars in the sky.
Irene felt suddenly, intensely alone.
Chapter Thirteen
How did you even begin to write? To create a world and characters in it? To ensnare your changing emotions in the subtle net of language? Often, in the evening, Cordelia would take the Underwood back to the Hotel Britannia, feed the paper and carbon in, and stare at the page. She would start with word sketches of the characters she had met through the day; that was easy enough, as most of them were larger than life, but it was when she attempted to intertwine their fates and provide them with backstories, motivation, interaction, and destiny; to place them in a world that she could order and control, that she fell short. The storytelling that had always come so easily when she was a child seemed so much more complicated from an adult perspective. Persistently, doggedly, she attempted to write. But she always ended up ripping out the paper in frustration or stabbing away her tentative lines in sequences of angry Xs.
Eventually she told herself that it was perverse even to think about inventing a world when there was so much to say about the real one. Why twist words into fiction, when you could use them to write about the glorious merry-go-round that was Paris?
* * *
—
HER ENTRY TICKET TO that cultural whirl was Janet Flanner. Maybe the veteran journalist saw something of her earlier self in Cordelia’s eagerness, but she took the young writer on like a personal project, escorting her to her favorite restaurant, La Quatrième République in the Rue Jacob, where they would eat pâté and salad with goats’ cheese, and listen to Charles Trenet, whose joie de vivre perfectly captured the French ability to ignore every dark cloud on the horizon.
Boum!
Quand notre coeur fait boum
Tout avec lui dit boum
Et c’est l’amour qui s’éveille
[Boum!
When our heart goes boum
Everything else goes boum
And it is love wakes within us]
After dinner they would progress to the bars of Montparnasse, each only a drunken stagger from the other, where writers chatted or quarreled or crouched over their notebooks. At Le Select, the favored café of Diaghilev, Debussy, Chagall, and Gershwin, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, they sat on a stained velour sofa next to a pair of crop-haired lesbians with ties and monocles, who were engaging in a display of vigorous French kissing. Cordelia pretended not to notice.
At other times there were dances and grand luncheons where they dined on langoustine-stuffed ravioli and truffled potatoes. At a cocktail party at the Ritz, Janet introduced Cordelia to the legendary socialite Elsie de Wolfe, an interior decorator who presided over a paradise of gilt, polished mirrors, and immaculate brass and mahogany fittings.
Together Janet and Cordelia attended first nights at the Comédie-Française and the floor show at the Bal Tabarin music hall, where girls hung from the ceiling in cages and Man Ray photographed seminaked women writhing in fantastical arrangements. They were invited to a Surrealist costume ball where Max Ernst appeared dressed as a beggar with hair dyed blue, and Lee Miller was coolly elegant in a velvet robe.
Above all they covered the collections. One morning, they were invited to the launch of a new fashion house in the Avenue Georges V belonging to a young Spanish designer called Cristóbal Balenciaga. Cordelia and Janet took an elevator lined in red Córdoba leather like a tiny, padded cell up to a light-filled room where a slender man with eggshell skin and glistening, wavy hair awaited them. Unlike the usual stick-thin mannequins, Balenciaga had jolie laide figures with hunched shoulders and swinging arms that he called his “monsters.” And while in the rest of the couture world hats were sporting veils, shoulders were square, and pretty blouses were worn under tightly tailored suits, Balenciaga’s designs were so simple and pure they looked like sculpture, Cordelia decided. The gowns unfolded like flowers, their geometrical cutting and radical silhouettes seeming to say that women did not need to accept traditional ideas of femininity—they could choose their own path and occupy a different space in the world. Cordelia felt the same thrill she had at her first Schiaparelli show, an effervescent fizz surging up like soda water.
Yet she despaired of communicating that excitement to the tweedy readers of her newspaper’s fashion notes.
“How do you ever convey exactly how all this feels?” she sighed, as a model in white taffeta stalked by like an angry swan.
“You don’t need to,” replied Janet. “Just tell it how it is. I’m like a sponge. I soak it all in and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks. If you want to reach your readers, that’s how.”
Cordelia frowned. She would try. But more than her readers, it was Irene she wanted to reach.
Chapter Fourteen
Villa Weissmuller,
Am Grossen Wannsee,
Berlin
December 10, 1936
Dearest Dee,
To think I believed I’d never see any English people in Berlin. Last night we went to yet another party, this one at the Hotel Adlon to celebrate von Ribbentrop’s appointment as British Ambassador, and you couldn’t move for lords. I counted Rothermere, Beaverbrook, and Viscount Camrose—all exclaiming at the elegance of Unter den Linden and marveling at how the Führer has restored Germany’s place on the world stage. I did my best to look fascinated, but I must have looked queasy instead because Ernst assumed I was homesick. In fact it was the combination of endless speeches and high heels. I know you’d be in your element at these receptions, with so many politicians and people of influence, but I pine for a quiet night in. I shall miss you so much at Christmas, darling. It’s the first we’ve ever spent apart! Do you remember that snow globe?…
December in Berlin was a very different month from that in England. Freezing winds, edged with ice, blew direct from Russia, a fierce aching cold that forced people to clutch their fur collars more tightly around them and bury their faces in their necks. The trees in the Tiergarten, so crisp red and gold throughout the autumn, now writhed like twisted metalwork against a bare sky. A thick layer of cloud pressed down on the lake.
Christmas was coming. The bakeries filled with gingerbread and Pfeffernüsse cookies, Weihnachtsplätzchen, sugar cakes, candied almonds, Christmas biscuits, and Zimtsterne, cinnamon stars. There were lanterns in every shop, stalls offered pink marzipan pigs, and storm troopers had taken over the sale of all Christmas trees for the Winter Relief Fund.
Berlin was made for Christmas; the frost softened the city’s granite edges and iced the tips of the pines in the Grunewald. Snow dusted the roofs and bells clanged in the clear air. Yet Irene deeply missed Christmas at Birnham Park, steeped in traditions made from early childhood, when she and Cordelia would dash down on Christmas morning to plunder a tide of colored boxes beneath the tree. The best year was when she had unwrapped the snow globe. She had never seen one before, and she loved it at first sight. She spent the entire day playing God, peering at her miniature world before drowning it in a blizzard.
Adolf Hitler, by contrast, had only one Christmas wish, according to the voice projected from loudspeakers fixed to lampposts on every street.
Germany has a single desire. To contribute to universal freedom in the world.
With the end of the Olympics, the air of civilized normality in Berlin had evaporated, and from autumn onward a bold and belligerent prosperity had prevailed. Unter den Linden was clogged with men in uniform and traffic constantly held up by brass band parades and Hitler Youth marches requiring right-arm salutes. Chants and shouts filled the air, and the peace of the skies was shattered by regular Luftwaffe squadrons roaring overhead.
Much of this change was down to the Weissmullers themselves. As Ernst pointed out, a good proportion of this glinting metalwork, and of the armored cars and tanks and guns, was supplied by their own presses and precision-cut parts. The white-hot molten iron, stoked furnaces, and belching chimneys of the Weissmuller factories were central to the rearming of Germany, and new orders were coming in daily, he reminded his wife. The fact that the Führer had commended Ernst for making a major contribution to the future of the Fatherland had prompted him to throw a party for those contacts who had been most useful in the past year.
It was the most prestigious collection of VIPs Ernst had ever amassed under his roof, probably the apogee of his career thus far, yet if he was feeling stressed, he wasn’t showing it.
He was halfway up a ladder dressing the tree, a fragrant ten-foot pine draped with silver streamers and small wax candles fixed to the end of each branch.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever associate Heinrich Himmler with Christmas,” said Irene, passing a decoration.
Due to its unfortunate resemblance to the Star of David, no one wanted to risk a traditional Christmas star, so Ernst had returned home with a frosted swastika and a box of glass heads of various political leaders—Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, and also Heinrich Himmler, whose festive figurine, outfitted in traditional SS black, Irene was now studying. The glass head was impressively rendered, right down to the harshly shaven skull and the silver skull and crossbones on his cap. Irene wasn’t sure if Ernst thought the baubles were a joke or a serious gesture of political allegiance, but knowing him, it was more likely something in between. Where business was concerned, he was always prepared to blur the boundaries.
“Himmler wouldn’t want you to,” Ernst said with a smile, pegging the swastika to the top of the tree. “He doesn’t like Christmas.”
“Everyone likes Christmas!”
“He thinks it’s an ancient Germanic rite hijacked by the Christian church. He wants to de-Christianize Christmas in favor of the old Germanic traditions. You know, the Volksweihnachten.”
The People’s Christmas. Irene knew a little about this. Her mother-in-law had thoughtfully passed on the National Socialist Guide to the Christmas Season, which spelled out the ways festivities should be properly conducted. Carols, for example, should be replaced by songs about motherhood—a state that Irene had thus far not achieved, though not for want of trying. When she received the guidebook, Irene wondered if her mother-in-law was making a subtle hint, until she remembered that subtlety was not a Weissmuller virtue. It was probably not a Nazi virtue either.
“There’s legislation planned to have all crucifixes removed from churches and the Bible to cease publication,” added Ernst, who was himself a proud atheist. “Don’t forget Jesus was a Jew.”
Ernst regarded the whole paraphernalia of Christmas as a distraction, unless, like now, it had a business advantage.
“Did you know the Communists want to outlaw Christianity too?” teased Irene. “I sometimes think the Nazis and the Communists have a lot in common.”
“Don’t for God’s sake repeat that tonight.”
“Why do we have to invite these people? You don’t even like half of them. And I certainly don’t.”
In reply Ernst nodded at the box containing an ice blue tea gown that had just been delivered from the salon of Hilda Romatzki. The number of parties and receptions they attended demanded an increase in Irene’s wardrobe, and the dressmaker, chosen by Ernst, was a favorite of the VIP ladies. Like all Romatzki’s clothes, it carried a label from the Association of Aryan Manufacturers confirming that it had not been touched by Jewish hands.
“Those people you don’t like keep you in pretty dresses, my darling, and I don’t hear you complaining about that.”
Irene decided to ignore this. In part because she admired her husband’s tough, pragmatic approach, so modern and clear-minded compared to her father’s easy sentimentality, but also because she hated arguing with Ernst. As a former lawyer he loved debating and enjoyed nothing so much as delivering a sententious lecture whenever Irene disagreed with him.
“I just never thought you were that interested in politicians.”
“I’m not. Politics means nothing. It’s business that counts.”
“All the same, I could do without having to talk to Robert Ley.”
The minister in charge of the German Labor Front, the DAF, was Ernst’s most important new contact and that night’s guest of honor. It was a tremendous coup to have him, and Irene was dreading it, even though she was now quite used to mingling in political high society. Barely a week went by without an invitation to a foreign embassy or a trip to the theater with friends from Ernst’s exclusive Herrenklub.
Ernst descended the ladder, brushing the pine needles from his shirt. “You’ll be fine, sweetheart. Talk about your painting. Doktor L
ey likes art. And I like business, so make sure everyone has plenty of Glühwein. Keeps them indiscreet. I like to know what they’ve got planned so I can adjust our output.”
* * *
—
THE EVENING WAS, to outward appearances, a great success. The drawing room filled with a thicket of Nazi dignitaries and their wives, although the guests immediately separated into a dark masculine huddle of evening dress and uniform and knots of chatting wives. Martha Dodd had not been invited–“not the right tone” was Ernst’s terse explanation—but he had briefed Irene, in the precise, lawyerly way he had, on each significant guest. The names, however, blurred in her mind. She tried reciting them to herself as she went. Hans Globke, a lean, ascetic lawyer whom Ernst knew from his legal days; Count von Helldorf, the chief of the Potsdam and Berlin Police, with a face as flat as a tombstone and a smile like the slit of a knife. Sleek, dark Albert Speer, film-star handsome and the Führer’s favorite architect.
The guest of honor, Robert Ley, had a florid complexion boasting of beer and bad blood pressure and a roll of fat at the back of his shaved head. A slight speech impediment caused him to chew his words like wurst, and a war injury had left him with brain damage, resulting in alternating depression and rages that he medicated with alcohol and extravagance. According to Ernst, Ley’s new villa in Mehringdamm had its own cinema, numerous bedrooms, and eight en suite bathrooms, each with enough marble to clad a swimming pool.
Irene had decided to steer clear of alcohol, yet that only had the effect of making the evening seem the more interminable. As she glided through the guests, smiling serenely, her ice blue dress with its scalloped neckline and foam of lace at the hem received plenty of compliments from female guests and admiring glances from the men.
But Ernst was focused on business. He explained that he needed another plant—he was diversifying production as his contracts with the ministry multiplied. Weissmuller Steel was now producing motors for aircraft and tanks, but a new factory was required to cope with demand, and finding the extra labor was another problem.
