Woman in the Shadows

by Jane Thynne

  It was fifteen minutes before Clara’s Opel Olympia passed through the dense Grunewald, reached the leafy avenues of Wilmersdorf, and moved along Königsallee into the clanging bustle of Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s smartest shopping street, known to all as the Ku’damm. The noise was always what one noticed first at the heart of Berlin. The high-decibel blaring of car horns, the screech of brakes, the wheedling calls of the newspaper boys. Then the smell, the fumes of traffic and hot oil, the spicy scent of a pretzel cart or a wurst stall. Normally the pavements outside the fashionable cafés were crowded with customers, sipping coffee and watching life go by. Today, however, the tables were mostly empty. The cold of the past few days had reminded everyone that another bone-chilling Berlin winter was fast approaching, and shoppers passed quickly, huddled into their coats and scarfs.

  At the junction with Wilmersdorfer Strasse, Clara braked as a traffic policeman stepped forward with his hand extended to allow a detachment of soldiers to pass. There was always some kind of military procession these days. Either it was troops or a formation of the Hitler Youth or the BDM, the League of German Girls, with their flaxen braids and navy skirts. The storm troopers, the SS, or the Hitler Jugend, all with their different uniforms and insignia. War was in the air. Even the collecting tins and the banners talked of the “War on Hunger and Cold” as though the most charitable of enterprises must be undertaken with military aggression. There was a stirring of something just over the horizon that people preferred to ignore, and pedestrians, looking forward to the weekend, kept their heads down, their faces as blank as the asphalt underfoot. They hurried on, hoping that no motorcade of Party top brass would be following the soldiers, requiring everyone to halt and raise a respectful right arm. The Führer supposedly trained with an arm expander so he could perform his own salute for two hours without flagging, but most people found even a few minutes a trial. Clara wondered where the soldiers might be heading. These days, that was all anyone was thinking.

  She shivered as she recalled the British newspapers she had flicked through that summer. The dispatch in The Times, informing the world how a special German flying unit, formed to support the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, had bombed the ancient Basque town of Guernica. For more than three hours Junkers and Heinkel bombers unloaded bombs and incendiaries, while fighter aircraft plunged low to machine-gun those of the civilian population who had sought refuge in the fields. The town was razed to the ground. Hundreds of women and children were killed. Three small bomb cases stamped with the German Imperial Eagle had proved to the world that the official German position of neutrality was a sham. Looking up now at the bone-white sky, Clara tried to imagine the bombers screaming out of the stillness of a spring morning, the terror of the people fleeing as they were strafed from the air. Then she pictured the same happening in England, Hitler’s bombers raining their deadly payload on the House of Commons or Westminster Abbey, or Ponsonby Terrace, where her father lived. On Angela’s home in Chelsea, or farther out in the quiet suburbs, in Hackney and Greenwich and Barnes. On the Wren churches and Nelson’s Column and the National Gallery. She imagined the air-raid sirens, the women and children hurrying out of their houses, the fighter planes diving low to finish off those stumbling figures who had escaped the incendiaries. The horizon lit by the red glow of a thousand fires, gas bombs sending coils of poison into family homes. She shook her head. That could never happen.

  As she waited for the traffic policeman to clear the road, she looked across the street, to where a crane was poised like a giant bird, pecking at another excavation. Berlin these days was like a patient under constant operation. Every street was subject to extracting, filling, and fixing. You couldn’t move for heaps of bricks, planks laid over holes in the earth, and skeletal steel structures rising into the sky. Everywhere there was the roar of cement mixers and the rattle of drills, erecting the monumental neoclassical buildings deemed suitable for the new world capital of Germania. There was something grand and futile about these buildings of the Führer, Clara decided. They were like an empty boast, designed to make human beings feel like ants in their long passages and echoing halls. Goering’s Air Ministry had seven kilometers of corridors apparently, and it was said that for his centerpiece Hitler wanted Albert Speer to build a dome that rose a thousand feet into the sky, capable of holding 180,000 people. The Führer had also ordered Speer to equip all government buildings with bulletproof doors and shutters, just in case the people should ever lose their enthusiasm for his grand plans.

  CHAPTER

  2

  It would be hard to find a greater contrast with the Goebbelses’ home in Schwanenwerder than the worn, ocher-painted nineteenth-century apartment building in Winterfeldtstrasse, where Clara lived. A heavy wooden door led from the street into a hall painted institutional brown and lined with pocked tiles. To the left was an arthritic wrought-iron lift and behind it a stairwell for when the lift all too frequently refused to function. To the right, secreted in a cubbyhole furnished with a chair and lamp, Rudi the block warden could be found. Try as she might to enter silently, Rudi would always dart from his cubicle with some piece of information or greeting. He was a Party member with a prestigiously high number—signifying that he had joined in the early days, well before they closed the ranks to new membership—and in his role as National Socialist block warden, every Saturday he donned his brown shirt and attended a Party meeting. That was the only time one could be sure he was not around. Rudi knew everything that went on in the building, and Clara suspected he had seen every film she appeared in. He smelled of unwashed clothes and styled his sparse hair in imitation of the Führer’s. His oyster eyes bulged from a face as pinched and mottled as a crab’s claw, and his breath reeked like old carp, but Clara knew that nothing and no one escaped him.

  “Good evening, Fräulein Vine.”

  He sidled up unctuously and handed her some mail. There was an invitation to a lecture on the Semite in film—probably dispensed to all Ufa employees—and a flyer appealing for contributions to the Winterhilfswerk. The money raised was supposed to provide coal and food for the needy, but everyone knew it went on armaments. Herr Kaufmann, Clara’s neighbor, had put a sticker on his door, testifying that he already contributed to the Winter Relief fund and was exempt from doorstep collections, but that only meant that when the Hitler Jugend came around with their collecting tins, Rudi ensured his was the first door they knocked on. Also in the pile was a letter with a London postmark and the curly female handwriting of her older sister, Angela.

  “May I ask how filming is proceeding?”

  “Well, thank you, Rudi. We’re almost finished. Though we had a late script change, which has meant a delay.”

  The change had come down from Goebbels’s office, just a few days before the wrap. The minister went through the script of every film made at the Ufa studios and issued alterations whenever he felt like it. In this case, he had decided that the actress playing an unfaithful wife should die at the end of the film. It would not be right for us to encourage the propensity to adultery at a time when young men are separated from their families by the call to arms. Infidelity must be publicly punished! the notoriously womanizing minister had scribbled on the director’s script. Deadpan, the director had read out the comments to the assembled actors. That was the greatest test of acting skill at Ufa—managing not to laugh.

  “Just to mention, Fräulein, our official collection point.”

  Rudi gestured at a bin he had installed in the lobby. This was a new idea. Clara had heard about it on the wireless. Citizens were to donate anything they didn’t need that was metallic—cutlery, old toothpaste tubes, soup cans, razors, or tinfoil—for the greater good of the Reich. Clara wondered how many toothpaste tubes it would take to build an airplane, then abandoned the speculation as far too much like the math problems she used to get at school.

  “Of course, Rudi. Thank you.”

  “And to warn you, there are men coming in to repair the lif
t.”

  There were always men coming in to repair the lift.

  There were six apartments in the building, and hers was on the top floor. She climbed the steps and, reaching her door, paused and put out a forefinger to examine a fine coating of powder on the ebony handle. It was a habit of hers, whenever she left the apartment, to give the handle a swift dab with the Max Factor compact in her handbag. Entering, she locked the door behind her and surveyed her private domain.

  If Berlin was being rebuilt according to an architectural fashion for gigantic size, Clara’s apartment was the precise opposite. There were four rooms, all of them small. To the right of the narrow hall was a bedroom, to the left, a minuscule kitchen with a porcelain stove, its surrounding wall tiled in black, and a pine table, on which stood a red geranium. Farther on was a bathroom so cramped you had to close the door before undressing. The bedroom was dominated by a large painting of a jazz trumpeter, which Clara had positioned directly opposite the bed so it was the first thing she saw each morning. It was not a beautiful picture. Its clashes and jagged lines expressed something of the fear that encircled the city and suggested not harmony but screeching, discordant notes, yet she loved the painting because it reminded her of the artist, her old friend Bruno Weiss. Beside it was a tallboy, containing several evening dresses as well as the linen blouses, dark skirts, and bright sweaters that were her working wardrobe.

  The sitting room had views over the rooftops towards Nollendorfplatz, a few blocks away. Clara had covered the wooden floors with rugs, and with her scant wages had assembled a collection of deliberately modern furniture, not the heavy, dark stuff of so many Berlin apartments but low armchairs, a modern glass-topped table, a huge mirror, and bookcases that ran the length of one wall. The entire décor was designed to maximize space and light. Clara loved this apartment. It was her refuge. It was the only space in Berlin that felt entirely secure, and the only place she could really relax.

  She went into the kitchen and boiled water for coffee. For anyone with an addiction to coffee, Berlin was the ideal city, even though it had risen shockingly in price and most places sold ersatz concoctions with the bitter tang of chicory. The watered-down stuff in the cafés had acquired its own contemptuous street name—Negerschweiss—Negro sweat, but Clara liked to buy the best, Melitta Kaffee, which she found in a specialist shop just north of the Tiergarten. She adored visiting the cramped aromatic space, surveying the hundreds of different beans heaped in drawers behind the counter, like gold and amber gems. She lingered happily as the rich roasted scent rose like incense from the coffee machine and the proprietor weighed out her order in a priest-like ritual. A trip to the coffee shop was as good as any pilgrimage, Clara thought.

  Waiting for the coffee to filter, she opened the window and reminded herself, as always, how lucky she was to have gotten a place in this part of town. She had inherited the apartment from an American journalist, Mary Harker, who had needed to make a swift exit from Germany. It was a departure for which Clara was indirectly responsible. When Helga Schmidt plunged to her death from her apartment window, Clara, convinced it was not suicide but murder on the orders of the Nazi high command, had confided her suspicions to Mary. The ensuing article in the New York Evening Post so enraged Joseph Goebbels that he gave Mary forty-eight hours to leave the country. That was the last Clara had seen of her, yet she missed her friend’s warmth and dry wit daily. For a time, she had received the occasional letter, full of Mary’s trademark deprecation about life in suburban New Jersey—Undoubtedly the seventh circle of hell for any woman with a brain—but in the past year there had been nothing.

  When Mary left, the streets around the apartment had bars full of artists, intellectuals, singers, and actresses, but now the Nazis had closed most of the bars down, and if she ever came back, she would be hard put to recognize the area. Nollendorfplatz was still the same, though, the busy square straddled by an elevated track and the great dome of a railway station. It was crisscrossed day and night by trams, and clattering above them the maroon and yellow carriages of the trains, sliding into the station. At the south end of the square was the Neues Schauspielhaus, a theater that had once been home to Expressionist artists like Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller but was now consigned to revue shows and the kind of light operetta that the Nazis adored. Its granite façade was decorated with chunky Teutonic nudes, their taut calves and rippling muscles rising from the gray wall, the frigid opposite of the curvaceous dancers who could be seen performing in increasingly skimpy costumes inside.

  Rising above the tangle of traffic sounds and shouts, from a nearby window issued a familiar shriek. It was Joseph Goebbels on the radio, reprising his talk from the Nuremberg Party rally.

  The Jew is a parasite, the ferment of decomposition.

  All his speeches were the same. You hardly needed to listen to them. Even when you tried to block out the content, the same word emerged again and again, Juden, spat like a curse. Goebbels was on the radio almost every day now. He timed his later broadcast for when people were sitting down to their evening meal, but even if you switched it off, there was no escape. Loudspeakers throughout the city obligingly blared the thoughts of Hitler and his Propaganda Minister. You would hear chunks of speech whenever you passed an open shop, or waited in line at the bank. Their words hammered into your brain like construction workers’ drills, whether you liked it or not. Quickly Clara closed the window.

  She took the coffee to her desk along with a sandwich made with the last of her cheese, and a square of Ritter Sport chocolate. As she ate, her thoughts turned away from Joseph Goebbels and back to his wife.

  Magda Goebbels, aloof and neurotic, was Hitler’s favorite among the wives of his top men. She had indeed caught the Führer’s own eye before he decided that marrying would be a bad career move and encouraged Joseph Goebbels to take his place. Magda liked to invite actresses to her parties for the pleasure of the Führer, and a couple of times a year Clara would be summoned to these events. Yet until today Magda had never addressed a word to her since the time, four years ago, when Clara, newly arrived in Berlin, unwittingly became a go-between in Magda’s clandestine love affair with a Jewish man. Burdened with Magda’s secret, Clara had concealed a deeper secret of her own. She became a spy on the private life of the Third Reich, passing snippets of information and gossip to Leo Quinn, assistant at the British Passport Control office and agent for the British Secret Service. It was Leo’s idea that Clara should feed him details of the Nazi women’s lives, reporting on their feuds and conflicts while masquerading as an actress without a political thought in her head. Leo had impressed on Clara how desperately the British needed information about the top figures in the Nazi regime. He had taught her everything he knew about surveillance and observation, how to keep herself safe and move with ease among those she hoped to deceive. He had taught her the precautions every informer must take to avoid the paranoid suspicions of the Nazi state. He had schooled her and drilled her and inducted her into a dangerous new world. He had also fallen in love with her.

  Leo. The thought of him still sent a shard into her heart.

  Tall, with a penetrating green gaze and upright bearing, Leo Quinn possessed a reserve that Clara assumed she would never penetrate, until she discovered the intense passions that lay beneath. He loved poetry and translating Ovid. Part of him yearned for an academic career in some remote, ivy-clad quad, yet he was driven by the urgent need to help Jews escape from Berlin. He was the man who had turned Clara’s ordinary existence into one fraught with danger and deception, yet he had also helped her escape the confines of her life in a way she could never have imagined. Leo was the only person in Berlin to whom Clara had confided her most dangerous secret—the fact that her own German grandmother was Jewish, and so, by maternal line, was she.

  At first, when Leo left for London, Clara’s first waking thought would be of him. Now it was more like a scratch that had healed and hurt only when certain things came to mind—a view of rooftops
, a snatch of Latin inscription, or whenever she had reason to pass Xantener Strasse, a block off the Ku’damm, and look up at a third-floor window above a bakery to the safe house where they had conducted their affair. She still missed him. Sometimes she strove to hear the ironic lilt of his voice in her head or conjure up the frank intensity of his gaze. On a purely physical level, she craved the touch of a man, the trace of fingers across her skin, and the heat of a body close to hers. The rush of desire would come upon her without warning, when acting in a love scene, or meeting the glance of a handsome stranger on a tram. After they had separated, she and Leo had agreed not to contact each other. In the early days she had needed physically to restrain herself from calling the consulate and asking for his forwarding address. There were times when she had simply stood here, biting her lip and hugging her arms around her chest to avoid lifting the telephone. That didn’t happen anymore. The hurt had ebbed. For all she knew, Leo was married. Indeed, that was how she liked to think of him. Back in London, married with a child. Besides, she had her own child to think of.

  She moved over to the mantelpiece and studied a small photograph. It was of a boy, aged around six, gap-toothed, with an impish grin; Erich, the son of Helga Schmidt. As Helga lay dying on the pavement, Clara had promised she would look after Erich, and she had been true to her word. Every month she sent part of her wages to the grandmother the boy lived with. When he won a place at a top Gymnasium in Berlin, Erich and his grandmother had moved to a cramped apartment next to a brewery in Neukölln. Erich was almost fourteen now, and the broad grin had vanished. Though he had his mother’s dark eyes, he lacked her sunny disposition. He had grown into a serious, intelligent child, who concealed his anxiety with acts of bravado. Clara had seen him a lot over the past summer. They had driven out to the beach to sunbathe, and they had taken boats onto the lake. Clara had surprised herself by learning how to row. She had indulged his passion for aerobatic displays, and he had tolerated her enthusiasm for the theater.