The Winter Garden (2014)

by Thynne, Jane

  Clara fumbled for the light, and gasped as she saw the desecration within. The place had been ransacked. The kitchen shelves had been clumsily rifled and the cupboard doors opened. In the drawing room, books had been pulled and flung from the shelves and her desk was open, papers scattered. In the bedroom the chest had been pulled away from the wall and its drawers hung out drunkenly, trailing clothing. The mattress was askew where someone had searched beneath it, and the painting by Bruno Weiss tilted on the wall. In the bathroom, the tops of the jars were open, and lavender bath salts carelessly spilled. It was as though some giant child had had a tantrum and thrown everything around like toys.

  With a sudden thought, she moved towards the opened desk in the sitting room and gave one of the ornate legs a sharp tap with the side of her hand. It snapped outward, revealing a hollowed space inside. Pushing her fingers down into the narrow space she connected with the cold metal of a gun barrel. Her Beretta. A present from a friend.

  At that moment she heard the heavy tread of Rudi, who had wheezed up the stairs and stood goggling at the door. He had seen no intruders, he protested, pasting a lank strip of hair back across his skull in bewilderment. He had been up the previous evening, just to put some letters through the door, and seen nothing amiss, so this must have happened earlier today. A Sunday!

  ‘I’ll call the police,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here in no time.’

  That was the sole advantage of living in a Nazi state. The police were never far away.

  ‘No. Don’t do that.’

  ‘Why not, Fräulein?’

  ‘I don’t want police tramping around before I’ve checked what’s missing.’

  ‘But we’ll need to get this door mended.’

  ‘It looks worse than it is. The lock still functions. No need to call a workman out on a Sunday.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ he said distrustfully.

  ‘Let’s deal with it later, when I’ve cleared up,’ she said firmly, as he edged reluctantly away.

  Clara’s first thought was of the men who had been mending the lift. Might they have been watching out for residents who had left their apartments empty? Or had someone known already that she would be away? She realized that the intruders had picked the one time of the week when Rudi could be guaranteed not to notice them. Sunday morning was when he slept off the hangover of Saturday night with his storm-trooper friends.

  Moving swiftly from room to room she made a rapid inventory of her possessions. The strange thing was, despite the scale of the devastation, nothing appeared to be missing. Though her pearls were flung across the bedroom floor, her brooches scattered and her diamond clips emptied out on the dressing table, once she had collected them up she found her jewellery was all there. In the top drawer a wallet with fifty marks inside sat undisturbed, alongside a book with a speckled cover of bird’s-egg blue entitled Poems of Rilke. Copies of The Times, which like other foreign newspapers were hard to obtain, lay piled on the floor. A bundle of letters from her family, and one from Leo she had never been able to throw away, had been scattered across her desk, but none was missing. What kind of burglar was this to break into an apartment with such determination, through the front door, and leave empty-handed? To take such a risk and escape with nothing to show for it?

  Her mind was working frantically. She had lived here for four years without being burgled. And now this. If it was the Gestapo, then she had to assume her apartment was no longer the sanctuary it had been. There was every chance that along with reading her mail they would have installed listening devices. At the very least they would have read every single letter in her desk.

  She moved about feverishly, tidying and straightening,

  There wasn’t time for this. It was already lunchtime and she had an appointment to keep. Today was Erich’s fourteenth birthday. His present was nestling at the bottom of her bag, along with a bar of his favourite Trumpf chocolate and a pen inscribed with the logo of the Ufa studios which she knew would gain him plenty of kudos at school.

  Mercifully, the front door still closed and as for locking it, what was the point of that? Grabbing her coat and hat, she headed out to meet Erich.

  Even for a Sunday, the Anhalter Bahnhof was busy, full of little huddles. All railway stations were places of departure, yet there was a particular atmosphere among the Anhalter Bahnhof travellers. You could always tell them, the departing Jews, from the way the nervous mothers silenced their children, clustered around a pitiful collection of luggage, the wives in their best furs, the husbands’ faces taut with anxiety, clutching passports, nervously checking and rechecking documents and tickets. Emigrating, without funds, to an uncertain future. To a land that might not be outrightly hostile to them, as Germany was, but would still be cold and unwelcoming, resentful at the influx of refugees lapping over their borders in an increasingly unstoppable tide.

  Erich was waiting in their usual place, beneath the clock. At the sight of him the anxiety Clara had suppressed over the break-in suddenly rose and she found herself blinking back tears. Briskly she wiped them away. She was determined not to mention the burglary to Erich. She didn’t want to worry him and, besides, it was his birthday.

  ‘Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag, sweetheart!’

  She enveloped him in an unusually heartfelt hug and felt his body stiffen at her public demonstration of affection.

  ‘Thank you.’ He pulled away. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘Sorry, darling. I got caught up.’

  ‘I haven’t got long. There’s a meeting of the HJ.’ He pointed at his knapsack. ‘We’re practising for a big march through Berlin. I’ve brought my uniform to change into, seeing as you don’t seem to like me wearing it.’

  ‘But it’s your birthday! We were going to go for a meal!’

  He looked impatient and annoyed. The little boy who got excited every October was now at odds with the older boy who knew that birthdays were babyish beside the privilege of serving the Fatherland. His hair had been shaved savagely to the scalp and he had polished his Haferl shoes to a high shine.

  ‘Birthdays aren’t important at my age,’ he shrugged.

  ‘Just wait till you get to my age then,’ she joked, but it fell flat, and instead of a special celebration they headed for a dingy café in the corner of the station, where they sat at the busy bar with travellers jostling alongside them, hurrying their drinks. Clara ordered buttered eggs and rolls, and for Erich, Käsewurst sausage with a delicious stuffing of cheese. She watched him closely as he ate. He was poised so exactly between man and boy that in one light she could still see the shy, underconfident lad who had been eager to please her, while in another the swagger of a grown man was already visible.

  She tried a bit harder.

  ‘So who’s this march in favour of?’

  ‘Some foreign dignatory.’ Keen to conceal the fact that he had no idea, he added, ‘We’re not supposed to say. For security reasons.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We march from Kemperplatz all the way up the Siegesallee past the Reichstag, round the Victory Column and up Unter den Linden. And look at this!’ He pulled out of his knapsack a grey collecting box, unmistakeably shaped like a bomb. ‘Some of us have been chosen to march on the outside with the collection boxes. That’s an honour.’

  ‘You’re raising money for bombs?’

  ‘No, Clara. That’s an enemy bomb. Germany needs to raise money to defend herself.’

  ‘But no one is threatening Germany.’

  ‘Of course they are.’ Her obduracy annoyed him. Increasingly now Erich found himself correcting Clara politically. He didn’t like it, but they had been told in the HJ they were quite right to do it. Young people no longer needed to feel subservient to their elders. They were the spirit of the new Germany and should feel confident in their role.

  ‘The Communists want to overrun us. They’ve already overrun Spain. They are anti-Christian. They murdered all the priests.’

  ‘There’s bad on b
oth sides in Spain, Erich.’

  He shrugged. ‘I hate Communists. I hope they all die. Or at least . . .’ he frowned, a concession to Clara whom he knew disapproved of sweeping generalizations, ‘I hope they get sent to camps so they can be educated.’

  The birthday treat had got off on the wrong note, Clara realized. How Erich had changed from the boy last summer who had laughingly learned to row in the Havel, taking the oars alongside her and glowing with pride at how quickly he became skilled. Seeing him only at weekends was like time-lapse photography, where he appeared to grow and develop at an alarming rate. And his political views were changing at an equally rapid pace.

  Normally nothing was more relaxing and absorbing to Clara than being with Erich, but the burglary had distracted her and she found her mind wandering as he talked. He mentioned a speech they had received at the HJ last week. The Germans in the Rhineland were grateful for their liberation and the next people desiring liberation were the Czechs.

  ‘Who do the Czechs want liberation from? Themselves?’

  ‘There are three million Germans in Czechoslovakia.’

  ‘And how many non-Germans?’

  Clara cursed herself for avoiding her own iron rule never to discuss politics with Erich. He gave her a fierce look.

  ‘England should watch out. Germany will take England’s colonies. England is decaying and decadent.’

  ‘Oh Erich, for God’s sake be quiet! You don’t know anything about England.’

  ‘Why should I be quiet? Why shouldn’t I tell everyone what you’re like? You don’t love the Führer. You’d do anything to avoid the salute.’

  ‘That’s not true!’

  ‘You don’t think I notice, but I do. And you’re not even German!’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You’re far too young to understand.’

  ‘I have to go.’ His eyes glinted with tears. ‘If that’s how you feel about our country, perhaps I don’t want to see you again.’

  He slipped off the stool and darted out of the café. Helplessly Clara watched his dark head bobbing in the crowd until it was lost in a sea of grey coats and trudging figures. She remembered another speech Hitler had made: ‘When an opponent says I will not come over to your side, I calmly say, your child belongs to us already.’

  It was a teenage tantrum and he would be regretting it already, she knew, yet arguing was never going to be the way she won Erich’s heart. How was it, when in every other area of her life she managed to remain composed, that she lost her cool with the person she most cared about? The shock of the day and her tiredness came together. She groaned out loud as she stared after him into the crowd.

  Beside her at the bar an old woman eyed her sympathetically and smiled.

  ‘Trouble with men?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Same old story.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Clara realized she had not even given Erich the knife. It lay at the bottom of her handbag, a red ribbon tied incongruously around its leather sheath.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Despite its prestigious address on Unter den Linden, the offices of the New York Evening Post were far from impressive. Even the word ‘office’ was a generous description for the sixth-floor room behind a frosted-glass door, containing a couple of desks ringed with coffee stains, on which stood several black telephones, ashtrays melted with cigarette burns and towers of old newspapers. Mary reached for the brown paper bag containing a carton of bockwurst and some rye bread she had brought for lunch and chewed an absent mouthful. As if there wasn’t enough to report, now it looked like she needed to become a photographer too.

  ‘Get yourself a camera!’ Frank Nussbaum had suggested, when she called him with her proposal for a piece on the Bride School. ‘Get some snaps of these ladies in the kitchen, or taking lessons on Führerworship or whatever it is they do.’

  ‘Whatever happened to the art of telling a story with words?’

  ‘Words aren’t enough now, Mary. It’s pictures with everything now. Have you seen the circulation of Life Magazine? It’s shifting a million copies a week.’

  ‘But I’m a journalist, Frank.’

  ‘If you can take pictures too, it’ll make all the more impact. Pictures put more emotion in it. Tug at the heartstrings. Look at Robert Capa out in Spain.’

  Mary had met Robert Capa once in a bar in Madrid, a sinewy young Hungarian who had changed his name and reinvented himself, reinventing war journalism too, in the process. His pictures were stunning. There was no possibility she could ever produce something like that.

  ‘Photography’s an art, Frank, for God’s sake. It’s not like taking family snaps on Coney Island.’

  ‘So be an artist!’

  ‘You need to be a chemist too! You need to know about, oh I don’t know, fixer and developer and darkrooms. That kind of thing. I’m not good with those.’

  ‘The office can help you with that. Let them do the chemicals. You do the shooting. It’s called photojournalism. I have faith in you, woman. You can do it.’

  ‘And I’d need to register,’ she moaned. ‘Goebbels says all photographers must wear a special armband now, to identify them as press. It was tough enough to get this visa in the first place. I’m not sure they’ll appreciate the idea of me with a camera too. I’m hardly Leni Riefenstahl.’

  ‘Leave it to me.’

  So Mary had gone out and fixed herself up with a Zeiss Ikon Ikoflex, a sturdy black box with a twin lens and a smart little case, and practised focusing with the knob on the left side and loading the film. Sneakily she liked it, though she resented the implication that the truth of her stories wasn’t enough, and you needed the proof in black and white. But Mary had always been one to look on the bright side and the fact was, there were so many illustrated newspapers and magazines in Germany, if she had to turn herself into a photojournalist, Berlin wasn’t a bad place to start. Just so long as she never had to learn the technical details of focal lengths and lenses and how to turn her negatives into front-page splashes.

  And, she had to admit, Frank had a point. Mary wished she had had the camera back in Spain. Sometimes, when she was there, she reckoned her words might be written on the air for all the good they did. If she had had a photograph of what she had seen, of the pitiful victims of that savage conflict, how much more attention might she have grabbed. How much better she could have reached the people back home who liked to dismiss the Spanish war as just another wrangle in Europe’s dismal history. Sometimes it was hard to find the words to describe what she saw but a camera would have done the job.

  So from now on her Zeiss was going everywhere with her. Starting with the Propaganda Ministry where she would apply for a permit and armband with a tin badge marking her out as a registered press photographer. Despite what Frank said, that would not be easy. Her old contact there, Putzi Hanfstaengl, the former head of foreign press who was half American himself, had fled the country in February fearing a plan to assassinate him. He had been summoned to Goebbels’ ministry and issued with orders to fly to Spain, but Hanfstaengl suspected the idea was to push him out of the plane and he had instead taken the first train to Switzerland. Since then Goebbels had said the whole assassination idea was a joke, but that was hardly reassuring. As everyone knew, Goebbels’ sense of humour was not to be trusted.

  All of which meant Mary would need to be extra persuasive. She might even have to approach Hauptsturmführer Huber, the fat official in the Press department who was always leering at her during Doktor Goebbels’ interminable press conferences. She groaned at the thought. The only man to have asked her out since she arrived in Berlin, and it had to be a Nazi oaf with a face like a prize fighter who was no longer winning any prizes.

  Mary banished the image from her mind and licked the oniony grease from her fingers. She had better get around to it straight away. Once she had the permit, she would be able to return to the Bride School and tell that godawful Fräulein Wolff that she was officially per
mitted to take any photographs she liked. At the same time she could see if there had been any developments in the case of the murdered bride.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Residenz-Casino on Blumenstrasse, known as the Resi to its clientele, was the place all of Berlin went to drown its sorrows. It had a dance floor that could hold a thousand people, and the air was alive with music, laughter and the clash of cheap perfume. Shards of light splintered from the mirrored globes fixed to the ceiling’s reflective glass, showering everyone below with dappled brilliance. The special attraction of the Resi, however, was the telephones. The dance floor was surrounded by a series of cubicles fitted with Bakelite receivers which could be called from any other of the cubicles. There was even a system of pneumatic tubes suspended above the tables, along which gifts could be sent.

  Wearing a black satin dress and a slender string of pearls, Clara sat in her cubicle and stared out at the dance floor below. She had spent the entire day clearing the mess of her apartment, folding clothes which had been torn out of the cupboards systematically back into drawers, and rehanging her dresses, putting away the fragments of smashed crockery in the sink, working out what, if anything, had been taken. The answer still, it seemed, was nothing. Once she had established that, the other question was whether anything had been left behind. She had made a thorough inspection of the hidden places in the apartment, behind the radiators and the panels in the bathroom. She had unscrewed the light fittings and the telephone receiver and checked the underside of the bedside table. But there was nothing. In one way the burglary bore the hallmarks of a Gestapo raid. They could be heavy-handed in their operations and were never too concerned with tidying up afterwards because they knew no one was going to file a complaint. Yet if it was the Gestapo, the sheer chaos in her apartment told her that this was no ordinary search. It was sufficiently unsubtle to be a message to her. A warning almost. But a warning of what? Once more, Archie Dyson’s words rang in her ears. Lie low. Do nothing. But it was clear to her now that doing nothing wasn’t working.