Ernst sat in his armchair, shielding himself from the music with his newspaper as the record squealed its tinny tune:
My gorilla’s villa’s in the zoo
My gorilla lives a happy life, it’s true
If anybody bugs him he gets angry and he spits
He’s joyful he knows nothing about politics
His wife keeps silent if he wants to kiss her
And if he wants it, be sure gorilla will-a.
He peeked over the front page of the newspaper, which reported that Japanese warplanes had bombed Canton.
‘This world is becoming unbearable,’ he said. ‘This is sure to add complications to our expedition. By the way, there’s an article here about the Entarte Kunst, that degenerate art exhibition in Munich you were telling me about. You know they’re getting over 20,000 visitors a day?’
Herta was ignoring him by now, her good cheer restored by the music. ‘Will you put down that Nazi rag and come dance with your bride!’ she trilled, shimmying around his chair, trying to lure him away from the day’s news.
Ernst had never been an enthusiastic dancer. Back in Waltershausen, dance school was where they had both learnt to waltz and glide together, although some of their compatriots never got beyond stepping on toes. It all seemed so simple to Herta, the rules and proceedings laid out for them in advance by the instructors. Even so, she remembered how she felt her insides crumble the first night at dance school as she and her friends had stood huddled together against the wall, waiting for a boy to invite each of them onto the dance floor.
‘Here comes Freddy,’ Gretchen had said, giggling. The others moved aside, leaving Herta directly in the line of fire of a pimply youth.
Herta stood like a statue as Freddy waited before her. The ensuing silence was broken by Gretchen, who whispered instructions to Herta to hold out her hand. She reached out reluctantly, and the boy hesitated as he placed his fingers under her palm, which rested there like a dead fish. In his haste to kiss her, in the way they had been taught to do when asking a girl to dance, he accidentally slobbered over her wrist. She withdrew quickly, as if she had been bitten, wiping her hand on the linen pocket of her pinafore. Her friends, carefully watching Freddy’s every move, drove the poor boy across to the other side of the room with their laughter alone. He was swallowed back into the folds of his fraternity, who rallied around him to hide his mortal suffering.
These lessons of etiquette read like hieroglyphics to young Ernst Schäfer, he had later confessed to her. Feeble versions of Sturm und Drang. Having witnessed Freddy’s melodramatic retreat in a cloud of abject humiliation, Ernst took the opportunity to conquer his nervous unrest and leapt over to where Herta was. She was surprised to see him standing before her, and her girlfriends tittered, covering their mouths to exchange gossipy squeals. He looked as light as air, but Herta’s feet seemed chained to the earth. He bowed slightly. One must be a gentleman, or at least make a show of it, the dance instructor had told the boys. She held out her hand in return and felt the rest of her life unfold with the touch of his fingertips.
‘Would you care to dance, Fräulein Völz?’ he asked, smiling at her.
Without answering, she followed him. As the band struck up, they both performed the steps of the waltz they had learnt as a group only an hour earlier.
He spoke softly. ‘We are one in the other, Herta. Always have been.’
An invisible flame hovered over them. She sensed the urgency in his voice, this boy she had always known.
‘Why are you telling me this now, Ernst?’
‘All shall be clear soon. Birds of prey do not sing.’
She found out the reason for his confession later that week. Her family was invited over to the Schäfer home for an afternoon tea of strudel and lebkuchen, as part of a small farewell for Ernst. He was being sent away to boarding school. After the announcement, Herta was seated on a sofa in the parlour, pretending to read a book so no one would suspect how upset she was that Ernst was leaving, when she overheard Herr Schäfer chatting to her father in the hallway.
‘There’s no taming him.’
‘Albert, have patience,’ Vati said.
‘He’s just turned fourteen and still behaves like a petulant child. Sending him to Heidelberg is the right thing to do, for him, as well as for us. The boy needs strict discipline. I only wish he had a head for numbers; at least that way I could have guided him. I expected Ernst to take over the factory when he was older. I’m so bitterly disappointed. I’ve built that business from scratch, and once I am gone it will all go to ruin.’
‘Your business is nothing to sneeze at, my friend. And Ernst is young, and may still surprise you.’
Herta looked up from her book to find Ernst standing in front of her.
‘Now do you understand?’ he whispered.
‘What’s to understand?’
‘They don’t want me back in Waltershausen, Herta. They say I will only be at the school for a year, but I know what my trajectory is from there. They will force me to stay till I get my Abitur, and then who knows where I’ll end up.’
He sat down beside her and placed his hand on hers. She tried to cover up the book in her lap.
‘What’s this?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, sliding it to the other side of the sofa.
‘Show me!’ He laughed, reaching to snatch it away from her.
‘No! Ernst, it’s private.’
Even all these years later, Herta could still remember her embarrassment as he opened the cover and saw the heading decorated with sketches of flowers and birds: Mädchen tagebuch, her girlhood journal. He turned the page to find a life-size drawing of the feather of a rare skylark they had found together three summers earlier. The next few pages held her sketches of Ernst’s zoology collection: tadpoles, the intricate lacework inside a bird’s bone. The journal was filled with these testaments to the love they shared for nature. Just as he was about to close it, he turned to a picture of himself, drawn so lifelike on the last page. Beside it, she had written, I will always love him. He looked up and placed his lips to hers, a fluttery kiss lighter than angel’s wings.
They heard their fathers entering the room. Herta jumped up quickly, grabbing her book from his hands.
‘Auf wiedersehen, Ernst,’ she said, curtsying. ‘And good luck in Heidelberg.’ She turned and walked away.
Shuffling around on the carpet now, in a quick waltz to please his rosy-cheeked bride, Ernst light-heartedly asked Herta what she had wished for over dinner. Klaus spun around beside them, chasing his own tail.
‘No! Don’t tell me. Let me guess.’ The music was making him feel joyful again. ‘You have a birthday coming up soon and you would like a string of pearls.’
She didn’t answer. Her chest was pounding, filled with a mixture of yearning and dread.
‘Wrong?’ He smiled at her. ‘A fox stole, perhaps?’
Herta stopped dancing and walked over to the gramophone, scratching the record as she lifted the steel needle off it. She turned to face him. ‘I wished that you might help me find Margarete.’
CHAPTER 11
September 1937
It was hard to kill perfectly.
Feathers shone under the morning sun that poured in from the window. Ernst sat in his study surrounded by piles of papers and books, cupping his aching head in his hand, the skins of twenty species of bird spread across his desk. He’d been up all night cataloguing the tiny corpses, unpacking them one by one from wooden crates he’d brought from the laboratory, cradling each specimen like a newborn. The collection was huge, but he needed to get through it quickly in order to finish up his thesis by November, so he could focus entirely on preparations for the trip. They were hoping to leave early in the new year.
Since that first meeting with Himmler more than a year before, Ernst’s willingness to be associated with the Ahnenerbe had abated as he watched his colleagues at Berlin University refuse to take him seriously. The ludicrous conspiracies do
ing the rounds, that he was at the behest of the lunatics running the Ahnenerbe, were slurs on his professional integrity and reputation. He made it clear from the outset that he would not compromise the rigour of his science for anyone. Perhaps the others were simply jealous; scientists were, by necessity as well as nature, competitive.
Leaving the specimens on his desk, Ernst went to get ready for the day ahead. He was dressed and had finished breakfast well before Herta woke up. Ernst had spent most of their two months of married life studying or planning for Tibet. Herta kept herself busy, though, filling her days adding a woman’s touch to the apartment, sewing new lace curtains and trying out recipes from the leather-bound book Mutti had given her, passed down through three generations.
The fiery eroticism of their first month was already waning. Marriage seemed to reverse a woman’s desire so rapidly. He couldn’t understand why she held back, telling him it was too painful or that she was tired or, worst of all, simply grimacing when he rolled on top of her in bed, as if his hairy leg against her thigh belonged to a tarantula. Admittedly, he’d been so preoccupied with his thesis lately that there wasn’t much time left for romance. His heart wasn’t in academia anymore; the qualification was something he needed to get out of the way. He much preferred channelling his energies into preparing detailed maps for the expedition. He knew how to navigate the route through China into Eastern Tibet far better than he could make his way through the streets of Berlin.
Tibet was a land that had always held a strange fascination for Westerners as a mystical utopia, Shambhala, Agartha, as far back as the Rosicrucians in the seventeenth century. Madame Blavatsky, with her strange theosophical ideas of a hidden master race in the mountains, claimed she had lived there for seven years. It was all lies. Most of those who purported to understand Tibetan society, privy to the so-called secrets of its ancient spiritual knowledge, held one thing in common – unlike Ernst, they had never been there.
Seated at his desk, he pushed his pen across the page in a frenzy, filling his notebook with illegible spidery scrawl. When he referred to ‘uncharted territory’, he meant terra nullius in every sense of the word, from the geography and biology of the land to the ethnographic characteristics of the people. His plan was almost ready to present to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the German Research Foundation, for some additional funding. He still didn’t want to rely solely on the Ahnenerbe. He had put together a team of the finest young scientists: Edmund Geer, a botanist and hunter with a keen talent for logistics; Karl Wienert, an expert geophysicist and geologist; and Ernst Krause, an entomologist with a passion for wasps, who could double up as the expedition’s photographer and filmmaker. At thirty-eight, Krause would be the old man of the team. And, of course, there was Bruno.
That evening, Bruno sat on the sofa at Ernst’s apartment, long legs stretched out as he puffed on his pipe; at a height of six feet and two inches, Bruno Beger towered over most people he met. Klaus rubbed against him, purring for attention.
A news bulletin on the radio hummed in the background, reporting that Hermann Göring had just given a speech in Stuttgart. He was calling for Jews in Germany to pay for any damages incurred as a result of a threatened boycott against the Fatherland.
Ernst looked up from his papers and maps of Tibet. Herta brought in a tray laden with cakes and biscuits and started pouring the tea when Bruno lashed out and kicked Klaus, trying to get him out from under his feet. She hurriedly placed the teapot down, knocking over the cup she had just filled, while the terrified cat raced across to the window ledge and clambered up the lace curtains, his bad leg dangling like a second tail.
Herta mopped up the steaming liquid as the men continued their heated discussion.
‘Why do you care what anyone thinks?’ Bruno said. ‘As long as we get some of the funding for the expedition, let them believe whatever nonsense they want.’
Ernst’s colleague was the exemplary son of a well-respected Heidelberg family that staunchly avoided racial mixing. No mongrel blood had ever been sown into the Beger clan. Nordic prowess and strength shone from each of their tall, wiry, golden-haired specimens. At university, Bruno had often gone to listen to the eminent visiting scholar Hans Günther speak about racial ethnology. Even now, when he spoke of Günther’s lectures to Ernst, his eyes lit up. Bruno had decided he wanted to pursue a degree in anthropology and moved to Berlin to further his studies in the field. He set about acquiring the intricate and exacting research skills of anthropological measurement, together with mathematical expertise, to analyse his findings, and aimed to develop a taxonomy of human types and to highlight the perils of miscegenation.
‘It’s our reputation at stake, Bruno. No one will ever take us seriously again if we are seen to throw our lot in with these cranks. And turning a blind eye to the Ahnenerbe’s wishful untruths, or laughing them off as a crazy fringe, means risking that they will eventually become accepted into the mainstream of modern science.’
As he spoke, Herta tidied up the tray and quickly served them.
‘Thank you, darling,’ Ernst said. He took a sip of tea.
Bruno leaned in closer. ‘You’re exaggerating, my friend; you’re just getting cold feet. Don’t get so hysterical. It’s a passing phase. Besides, Hörbiger was a true genius. We should learn some lessons from him on how to curry favour with the public.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
Across the room, Herta stepped up on a stool and reached for Klaus. ‘Here, kitty,’ she called, trying to coax him down before he shredded the curtains.
‘Get that pathetic creature out of here, Herta,’ Bruno growled. ‘We have important matters to discuss.’
Herta swore under her breath and stepped down.
‘Ha!’ Bruno slapped his hand on his thigh. ‘Let me guess. Was that directed at me or your defective cat? Why don’t you put the pathetic creature out of its misery?’
‘Shut up, Bruno. Don’t speak to her like that.’ Ernst felt it his duty to shield Herta from his friend’s ugly taunts. He climbed onto the stool and grabbed Klaus by the scruff of his neck, handing him to Herta like a piece of dirty laundry. Hugging the cat, she retreated into the bedroom.
‘I love it!’ Bruno bellowed. ‘The great hunter can’t control either his animals or his wife.’
Ernst, refusing to rise to the bait, sat down again.
Bruno continued their discussion, unfazed.
‘Listen, Ernst. Hörbiger wasn’t bothered with trying to convince the academic establishment of the veracity of World Ice Theory, Glazial-Kosmogonie, call it whatever you want. He simply targeted the masses. It’s a brilliant model, and true scientists like you and me should use it more to publicise our own theories.’
Ernst listened, appalled. He knew his friend was ambitious; Bruno had joined the SS in 1934 as a promising Rassenkunde, or racial anthropology expert, and being invited to join the Tibet expedition was perhaps the most exciting moment of Bruno’s life – probably even more so than the birth of his daughter. It was a windfall for the twenty-six-year-old; there could be no better way of establishing himself as a pre-eminent racial scientist than cultivating relationships with mentors the likes of Himmler.
‘Hörbiger used scientific terminology to embellish what was essentially a fairytale,’ Bruno said. ‘He wasn’t the first to propagate an entire theory on a vision that came to him. Who wouldn’t be captivated by the notion? “Eureka” is as old as the hills. Look at Archimedes and Galileo.’
‘You’ve gone mad, Bruno. You, a respected man of science. I bent over backwards to get you on board for this trip.’
Ernst hadn’t told Bruno how at first Himmler insisted Edmund Kiss from the Ahnenerbe join the expedition. Ernst refused to have the lunatic novelist and pseudo-archaeologist on his team, and stuck his neck out for his friend. In his book The Sun Gate of Tiwanaku, Kiss wrote about an ancient city in the Andes. He was convinced it was built by Nordic ancestors and collapsed during a cataclysm that wa
s set off by a falling icy moon.
‘What you are telling me, then, is that you are willing to accept the doctrines of a man who has a dream about a cosmic “truth” in which the moon is made of ice?’ Ernst said. ‘And the basic building block of the universe, the atom, has been replaced by the venerated ice crystal? Scheisse! The moon might as well be made of cheese, and we should all bow down to the god of Camembert. Himmler and his cronies from the Ahnenerbe read no books other than those of Blavatsky, or this Hörbiger-themed trash.’
‘Thank you for the fascinating lecture, Ernst, but I’m telling you, Himmler did us all a huge favour.’ Bruno smirked.
‘How so?’
‘He helped get rid of Jewish science. Cleaned the corridors and lecture halls of vermin like Einstein and his stinking Theory of Relativity. For too long they have been held up as remarkable scientists. Jews even jumped on top of brilliant German academics such as Schrödinger and Heisenberg, twisting their creative genius about quantum mechanics into absolute drivel.’
‘It’s one thing to hate Jews, but this is a separate issue. How can we turn a blind eye to the idea that the entire universe is made up of ice?’ Ernst stood up and took a book down from the shelf, handing it to his friend. ‘Have you read this?’
Bruno looked at the cover, flipping through the first few pages. ‘Wirbelstürme, Wetterstürze, Hagelkatastrophen und Marskanal-Verdoppelungen. Hurricanes, weather crashes, hail catastrophes and Mars canals.’
‘He sure couldn’t have found a catchier title, could he?’ Ernst snorted.
‘You can laugh as much as you want, Ernst, but I believe it sold very well. Hörbiger’s public lectures were always packed out. And he wrote a novel that was made into a movie. The man was a master of publicity and self-promotion.’
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