The Winter Garden (2014)

by Thynne, Jane

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The plane shuddered like a living thing and the bolts strained in its aluminium sides. Peering out of the window with relief Clara saw the grass shiver and flatten as the wheels hit the ground with a bump and juddered over the muddy ruts. The vibration penetrated her to the core, making her bones rattle and the teeth shake in her head. Finally, Strauss doused the engine and removed his goggles. She looked out at a field clotted with thistles and weeds, and the remains of a concrete hut.

  ‘Is this it then?’

  ‘The place we like to eat is through that wood. This disused airfield is quite convenient for us. We pilots think of it as our little secret. Come on.’

  They climbed out and headed across the airfield to a fringe of trees, through which led a chalk-stoned path. It was a beautiful afternoon, and the trees were at the height of their autumn colours, creating a vivid tapestry of russet, amber, yellow and gold. Inside the wood the sun penetrated the birch leaves to make a mosaic of light and shade, and above them in the boughs the birds were calling to each other. Clara and Strauss walked side by side, the ground beneath them springy with pine needles, the air tinged with woodsmoke. Clara was just thinking how exquisitely lovely the place was when they passed a sign saying Jews are not wanted in these German woods.

  The path petered out into a track that led to the village and, just around the bend, a white-painted, timbered inn with green shutters, leaded glass and heavy wooden doors, the kind of place you might find in the Tyrolean section of the Haus Vaterland. Inside, a row of steins stood above the fireplace and a landlord in traditional red waistcoat and white apron was pouring beers with a frothy head. A couple of locals leaned against the bar, and a few elderly men holding cards gathered in a corner around a game of skat. Clara sat in an oak inglenook while Strauss went to the bar. He returned balancing three glasses.

  ‘Is someone else joining us?’

  ‘No. Two are for me.’

  He downed the first quickly, and she noticed a slight tremble in his hand. He surveyed her wryly.

  ‘So how did you like the flight?’

  ‘It was a different plane this time, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A Heinkel He III, if that means anything to you.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘It’s probably better that way. There’s a security scare in the Air Ministry right now.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Some top secret information leaking out where it shouldn’t. They suspect a Luftwaffe staff officer. It’s tiresome, but we’re having to go through all sorts of new procedures and security checks. The Gestapo tried poking their nose in, but Goering told them the Luftwaffe can handle its own internal affairs. That showed them. I tell you, the affair between Germany and France has nothing on the rivalry between the Gestapo and Goering.’

  Clara placed her cigarette in the ashtray and watched the slight string of smoke blowing in the breeze, its delicate skein tugged each way by divergent currents. This was what she was here for. She recalled what Strauss had said when he took her for the first time in the plane. Officially, you don’t exist. He couldn’t know how accurate that was.

  She paused while the waiter brought them their food: schnitzel for Strauss; for Clara, trout which had been caught in the nearby lake, with creamed potatoes. After she had given the pink-fleshed fish and rich buttery sauce her full attention, she said, ‘Don’t tell me a thing about the plane then. I positively don’t want to hear. But what on earth were you doing with that camera?’

  ‘That’s technical stuff. You don’t want to know about that.’

  ‘But I do. I’m interested. I’m a film actress, remember. I work with cameras myself.’

  He cast her a quizzical glance.

  ‘All right then. I was using the camera to map the terrain beneath us. It uses special thirty-five-millimetre film with a perforated edge, which allows motors to turn the film automatically behind the lens and get a precise exposure. It can also be used for night photography.’

  ‘So you’re taking pictures of the ground beneath you? Why would you do that?’

  ‘To examine the lie of the land.’

  ‘The lie of the land? What’s that?’

  ‘It’s everything.’ He leaned towards her eagerly. His enthusiasm for the subject had overtaken his normal reserve. ‘You see, it’s not just a question of taking pictures of the terrain. It’s a question of working out their meaning. You’ve got to know what you’re looking for. What information a photograph may contain.’

  She cocked her head and frowned. ‘Information?’

  ‘Exactly. There is so much more than meets the eye. You need to be a geologist, a mathematician, an archaeologist and, I don’t know, a botanist, to work out everything a picture means.’

  She laughed. ‘A botanist? As in plants and flowers? Surely not. When did flowers ever reveal anything?’

  ‘Oh, you underestimate flowers. They’re not just pretty little innocents. The type of plants reveal crucial details about the terrain. Is it swampy or marshy? That would mean it would be too soft for landing. Is the ground hard, does the earth shift? Botany can tell you a lot. Have you ever read Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants? It’s a wonderful combination of botany and poetry. You’d like it.’

  ‘So you’re saying, a pilot has to read the land . . .’

  ‘Exactly. And you would be surprised what you can make out once you get the photographs back. Sometimes you see the remains of an ancient settlement, a fort, or a castle, that literally doesn’t exist any more. All that’s left is a grey smudge on the map. And you think, long ago people lived there, and loved and fought, but now they’re nothing. Just shadows on the ground.’

  Clara thought of people, long dead, leaving their ghostly shadows for those who knew where to look.

  ‘Of course we’re more interested in what’s there now,’ Strauss continued. ‘These photographs reveal all kinds of secrets. Some of the most important things are hidden in plain sight.’

  ‘What kind of secrets?’ She glanced at him closely, uncertain of his meaning.

  He laughed warmly and leaned back, signalling to the waiter.

  ‘Now then, they wouldn’t be secrets if I told you, would they?’

  She waited until the waiter had deposited another couple of drinks on the table then said, ‘Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile before? Not properly.’

  ‘Perhaps I don’t have much to smile about.’

  ‘When did you first think about flying?’

  ‘Oh, that’s dull.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t interested.’

  ‘You really want to know all this? My life story?’

  ‘Of course.’

  As she watched him his face softened and the habitual sour demeanour relaxed into something gentler. ‘Well then. Where shall I start? Our parents were wealthy. My mother was descended from a banking family, the von Eckdorffs, who came from just outside Potsdam. My father was a professor of law, who wrote books about the German legal system and so on. They were highly cultivated, sensitive people with great ambitions for their children. Not that we thought much about that. It was a good childhood. In the summer we went to our villa on the Wannsee. It was a lovely house, full of light, with a beautiful view of the lake. Deer would come into the gardens from the wood. We had endless picnics there, and barbeques, and we went boating. I loved that time. Whenever I smell grass crushed beneath my feet it brings it right back to me. I remember lying on the sunlit lawn talking about our plans. Guests coming in and out of the house for our parents’ parties. Playing with my brothers. I had a twin called Harro. We were identical, but he was the older. We were both crazy about flying. A neighbour of ours had a glider and he taught us to fly.’

  It was all too easy to picture the sunlit lawns, the expensive villa, the pre-war elegance, but far harder to imagine the young Strauss, happy and unscarred.

  ‘Anyhow, we turned out to b
e very good at it. We joined a flying club. We had great plans to become professional pilots and make a name for ourselves. We competed against each other all the time, though to tell the truth he was a little better at it than me. Harro was fearless, you see. He was not reckless, but he was lacking in fear, whereas I still had a sliver of fear inside me.’

  ‘You mean you were cautious.’

  ‘No. It was not caution, it was fear. Genuine fear.’

  ‘Perhaps you need fear to be good at your job. Fear makes you careful. It stops you making silly mistakes.’

  That was certainly true for everything Clara did. The razor’s edge of fear sharpened her. It kept her watchful, and wary.

  Strauss considered her point for a moment.

  ‘I think it’s fear that separates the great pilots from the lesser ones. Ernst, for example, has no fear. Not one iota. Fear means you haven’t accepted what might happen. You haven’t looked it in the face and embraced it before you start. It’s only when you acknowledge the worst that could happen and accept it, that you can proceed without fear.’

  ‘Do you still have that fear?’

  ‘It’s fading. But I would be a liar if I said it had left me completely.’

  Pensively, he traced the silver scar that bisected his melted cheek.

  ‘Anyhow, one day it all went wrong. We went up together in a two-seater, Harro at the controls. The conditions were perfect. Nothing should have happened, but the plane came down and we were thrown. We were lucky, of course, to be alive. My face was badly crushed, just a mass of blood and flesh, but Harro had hardly a mark on him. At first I thought he was just knocked out, so I lay down beside him and told him I was going for help. It took hours to get him home. It turned out he had broken his back. He was paralysed.’

  Strauss’s gaze passed hers, trained on the elaborately carved inglenook beside them bulging with wooden fruit and leaves.

  ‘He lived for months. You can’t imagine how it felt to see my twin, this handsome, lively young man, reduced to nothing, just a suffering body, marooned in a bed. He shrivelled up in front of our eyes. It wasn’t just his back broken, he had brain damage, apparently, at least that was what my mother said. She spent all day with him, but my father could hardly bear to look at him. I had to carry on, of course. They patched up my face and I went to school, though I skipped every other engagement outside the house because I only wanted to be at home with Harro. I felt very guilty, you see. Every time I came back there were just his eyes looking up at me, mute with pain, and he was mumbling. The doctor said he would never walk again. We would never achieve all those things we had dreamed of. Eventually, I decided I would stop flying completely. If Harro couldn’t go, then I wouldn’t either. I stayed in and read to him, and brought work home from school for him, though we were fooling ourselves to think he might have a decent life. Pretty soon, he caught pneumonia and died. And the moment our father came and told me, I felt relieved. That was actually my first emotion. I was relieved because it meant I could go out flying again without feeling guilty. That only lasted for a second of course. Then came the grief. It destroyed my mother. She never got over it. Occasionally I wonder how it has affected me, too. Sometimes, in my daily life, I have a feeling that I’ve lost something, and it’s a moment before I realize what it is.’

  He pursed his lips.

  ‘We buried him in the churchyard next to the villa at Wannsee. People find it strange, but we put no headstone to mark his grave. My father said Harro was a free spirit and should have nothing above him but the patter of deers’ hooves.’

  He blinked, and took another gulp of his drink.

  ‘There. Now you have my sad story. Make of it what you will.’

  Clara focused on her drink as a familiar, sick feeling rose in her gullet. It was a conflict that tore at the heart of her, and threatened to overwhelm her with self-loathing. She knew she was a honeytrap. A femme galante, as the French called them. A Mata Hari. However shadowy and double-dealing the life of a male spy, the female spy’s life involved an extra layer of deception. Eking out confidences like this, faking closeness, pretending intimacy, coaxing a man to strip the layers off himself. Somehow it seemed even more deceptive than stripping off his clothes. Whenever this feeling threatened to engulf her she reminded herself what was at stake. The information she could get from Arno Strauss was valuable. Thousands of lives might depend on it. If deceiving him was the price, it was well worth paying.

  ‘Some people might be surprised, Arno, that you never stopped flying.’

  ‘Quite the reverse. You have two choices when it happens. Either your nerve gives out, or you get back in the cockpit. I joined up in the war.’

  ‘And you went to Spain.’

  His head rose sharply, detecting an undercurrent in her voice.

  ‘Yes, I volunteered for Spain. And I’m glad of it. I was motivated by the chance to prevent the spread of Bolshevism. It’s a rot that’s spreading through Europe. A cancer. What’s happening in Spain will soon be happening in Germany if we don’t help stop it. Germany will never recognize a red Spain.’

  ‘Who says Spain would go red?’

  He snorted. ‘You haven’t seen it. The country is packed with agents of Moscow. They’re not just sending arms and aid. They’re sending spies. The Soviets exert huge control over the Republicans. They have secret prisons around Madrid where they torture and kill Nationalists and Catholics. The spies aren’t easy to spot. They’re not always Russian, they’re German and Spanish too. Nearly all Jews of course. There’s a Ukrainian Jew called General Kléber – at least that’s his nom de guerre – who advises the International Brigades. In reality he’s a senior member of the NKVD, hotfoot from Moscow, real name Manfred Stern. Some of them are English too. You should take heed. It’s the declared aim of Bolsheviks to overthrow the leadership of Great Britain too. If the British aren’t careful the hammer and sickle will soon be flying over Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘The way you speak about them, it’s like they’re not human.’

  He shrugged. ‘Bolsheviks, Jews. They’re different from us. It’s not that I think they’re dull-witted animals. Quite the contrary. I think they’re dangerous. They stand for the destruction of everything we believe in. Have you heard what’s going on in Moscow right now? Stalin’s purges?’

  Clara said nothing. It was astonishing to hear Strauss talking about the terror being perpetrated by Stalin when illegal executions, show trials and arbitrary arrests at dawn were a fact of daily life in Hitler’s Germany.

  ‘But what about you, Arno? What did you do in Spain?’

  ‘Are you asking me what goes on in a war?’

  ‘Just generally.’

  ‘I flew with the Legion Condor. My commander was Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen. A relation of the Red Baron, you know? The overall commander was a man called Hugo Sperrle. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?’

  Clara had seen the pictures of Generalmajor Sperrle in the newspapers. A human bulldog, with a monocle and a savage, downturned mouth.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘We flew on missions against the Communists.’

  ‘So all the people you bombed, then, were Communists?’

  Strauss’s voice turned to ice.

  ‘What’s this about Clara?’

  ‘It’s not about anything. I’m interested in the war.’

  ‘You’re interested, are you? That’s why you’re asking all these questions. Are you going to ask me what I’ve seen? What I’ve done? Do you expect me to recount it here, over a pleasant meal, for your entertainment? Are you one of those women who like to hear how many we killed and what they looked like when we bombed them? Do you want to know whether they were burned or buried alive in rubble?’

  There was a silence as he finished his drink, slammed down the glass and rose to pay the bill. Bitterly Clara chided herself. God knows why but she had introduced politics, which was the last subject she should have risked, and ruined the confidential mood
between them. She had probably aroused Strauss’s suspicions about her own motives, but even if she hadn’t, it was almost certainly too late to retrieve the situation. Great work, Clara. Mission unaccomplished.

  They walked in silence back through the village. A slanting, late-afternoon sun burnished the red roofs and lit up orange and gold chrysanthemums leaning over the garden walls. Above them, a flock of migrating geese formed a hooting black arrow across the sky and beneath, on the grass, a scatter of hens pecked. Gradually the beauty of the countryside must have had its effect on Strauss, because he relaxed, the lowering frown left his face and she sensed his previous anger dissipate.

  They entered the cool, verdant light of the wood, where there was no sound but the shift of branches and the rush of a distant stream. After a while Strauss stopped, obliging her to come to a halt beside him, and pressed her against the trunk of a tree that was peeling with lichen like an ancient plaster statue. The light filtered down through the leaves above them, sifting sun and shadow.

  ‘Why did you come here today?’

  ‘I told you. It’s useful for my research. It helps me understand the character I’m playing, Gretchen. I’m supposed to know how she would be without having to think about it. So I can inhabit her.’

  ‘What does this Gretchen do?’

  ‘She flies into enemy territory to rescue her husband.’

  ‘And the husband is Ernst?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s a lucky man.’

  She realized the drink had had its effect. She laughed lightly.

  ‘I’m seeing him this week. We’re doing the publicity shots for the film.’

  ‘Is that so? I would like to have one of those pictures. My walls are pretty bare.’

  ‘I’ll get them to send you one.’

  ‘And what about me? Am I part of your research?’

  His hand reached down to hers and grasped her fingers with his. She tried hard to prevent herself withdrawing her hand.

  ‘You know, Clara, I find you fascinating.’

  He ran his fingers lightly over her face, as though he were a blind man, or a lover. Feeling out her features, his fingers gliding over her skin, as though searching for something her features might say, across the temples, then down the cheekbones, stroking the planes of her face.