The Winter Garden (2014)

by Thynne, Jane

  ‘We have something in common, you and me. I don’t show my feelings because I can’t. This thing on my face prevents me. You conceal your thoughts behind a façade. Which is why I wonder at your interest in me. There are not a lot of pretty actresses who throw themselves at me. What are you hiding?’

  ‘Who says I have anything to hide?’

  ‘Sunlight and cloud. That’s what I see in your eyes.’

  The arch of trees above threw shifting patterns on his face as he smiled down at her. For a moment she thought, if Strauss was not a National Socialist, if he didn’t believe what he believed, could she possibly become involved with him? In some ways he was not so different from Ralph. Ralph’s easy charm was a deterrent just as effective as Strauss’s damaged face. But then she reminded herself: Strauss was a senior officer of the Luftwaffe. He kept company with thugs like Goering and Himmler, ruthless, violent men who regarded anyone who disagreed with them as degenerate or Bolshevik or in some other way undeserving of walking in German woods or breathing the fresh, green German air. Strauss might lack the sadism of his masters and their more vicious beliefs, yet he had chosen, hadn’t he, to serve the regime? Like them, he despised Jews. He had elected to work in Goering’s ministry, and fly his bomber under the Nazi flag.

  Strauss reached his crumpled face down and made to kiss her. Instinctively she ducked away. His mouth hardened into a thin line.

  ‘You find me repulsive. Well, it’s not a surprise. I should be used to it by now.’

  His face was stiff with anger and annoyance. ‘Women always avoid me. They don’t want to get too close to this monstrosity. They give the boys in the Arbeitsdienst a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda every day for that problem. Perhaps I should take their advice.’

  ‘Your face has nothing to do with it.’

  A flash of his bitter, grey eyes. ‘You don’t need to say any more, Fräulein. Thank you for your candour.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘I spent years training in the boxing ring, so that men would hesitate before they said anything they would regret, but it doesn’t work with women. I disgust them. They can’t see beyond this thing, and who can blame them. No girl wants to be seen out with a freak show. When I march in parades and the BDM girls come to give flowers, they always shy away from me.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

  How could Clara make him understand? His face might be scarred but the scars in his mind were so much deeper. Those scars had silvered over and lay flat until someone touched them, and then they rose savage and scarlet, as painful as the day they were made. How could she tell Strauss she didn’t recoil from him because of his face, but because she didn’t want to deceive him any more than strictly necessary? Rapidly she cast around for a credible explanation.

  ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘Is that so?’ His expression was disgusted.

  ‘My response had nothing to do with your face.’

  ‘And what else could it be?’

  ‘You said I had a secret and you’re right. I do. You see, Arno, you have been consorting with a Jew.’

  He stared at her for a moment then she felt the stiffening of his recoil. He took a step backwards, his voice flat with shock. ‘You should visit the anthropologist. I can’t believe there is any Jewish blood in you.’

  She had regretted the words as soon as they had left her mouth. Her heart was hammering against her ribs. What had possessed her to tell a Nazi officer that kind of secret? The secret she hid every day. That had been so carefully covered by Leo’s false documents, made and printed by men who ran enormous personal risks. What right did she have in an unforgivable moment of emotion, to risk all that? Not just to risk herself, but to risk the lives of all those brave men, throughout Berlin, who would undoubtedly be traced and rounded up if her false identity came to light? Just because she wanted to stop Strauss from kissing her. She would have to pretend it was a joke.

  ‘Not that kind of Jew. I meant, because I’m half English. That SS newspaper, Das Schwarz Kopf, says we are white Jews.’

  He gave a bark of laughter. ‘You should have said. There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all.’

  Nonetheless, he did not repeat his attempt to kiss her. As they walked on through the wood he appeared entirely detached, almost as if she was not there at all. When they came to a tangle of ferns and mossy stones he held out an arm momentarily to support her, then removed it again. Clara’s comments about the beauty of their surroundings went unanswered. His face had frozen over again, the currents of emotion beneath it icily suppressed. At one point he reached into a pocket and withdrew a silver hipflask which he tipped, swiftly, to his mouth. It wasn’t until they reached the airfield and made their way to the plane that he looked at her and said, briefly, ‘Perhaps we could meet on Thursday. If you’re free.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Arno. I have to be at the studio that day.’

  He slid open the cockpit door and reached for the jackets.

  ‘Well then. There’s a lunch at Horcher’s in a few days’ time to celebrate the retirement of Sperrle from the Condor Legion. He’s been promoted to General der Flieger. I’ll send you the details. I think you should come. It would be interesting for you to see Sperrle at close quarters. Consider it part of your research.’

  ‘Thank you. I will.’

  The answer seemed to satisfy him.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  It was dark by the time they had landed at Tempelhof and she made her way back to Winterfeldstrasse. A thin rain had polished the tarmac and emptied the street. Albert’s red Opel was still parked where she left it outside the apartment and as she passed she caught a flash of something pale on the windscreen. It was probably a flyer distributed by a National Socialist organization exhorting her to save crusts or mend socks. Picking it up, she saw it was a plain envelope, with no address. That was unusual. Propaganda leaflets were generally brightly and garishly decorated. Opening it, she peered in and saw a photograph. It was a picture of a little boy smiling, in uniform, aged about six. Her hand trembled as she took it out. Erich. The photograph that used to sit on her mantelpiece. She had never even noticed it was gone.

  She glanced rapidly up and down the street but there was no one. The envelope was slightly damp, which suggested that its sender had been caught in the rain. The person who left it could only recently have gone. If they had gone at all.

  Clara felt her breath coming in fast, jagged gasps. The photograph was a threat, a direct threat by whoever it was who was stalking her. Without the need for words, the threat said that Erich would come to harm. Erich, whom she had last seen storming off from his ill-fated birthday outing. Panicky images crowded her mind. Erich’s body lying in the road, his thin chest barely fluttering with life, or falling out of a window, like his mother. The young boy whose life had become intertwined so unexpectedly with her own, was now at risk. Erich, whom she had grown to love, who at times was the only thing keeping her here in Berlin. Instead of keeping him safe she had put him in danger.

  At that moment Clara felt as though she was only a bit player in a story she couldn’t understand. A story devised by someone who was directing the action, pulling the strings, and moving events towards an end only he could see. Who was he, this person behind the scenes? What did he want? And what did he have in store for her?

  Back in the apartment, she forced herself to think calmly about where and when she might have been followed. She had been told, by Archie Dyson, that the Gestapo had its eye on her. For weeks she had sensed there was someone on her tail, even in Munich. She had been burgled; that must have been when the photograph was taken. She cursed herself for having failed to notice that it was missing. Whoever took the picture knew enough about her to understand how much she cared for Erich. And now, that same person must have known she was away from the apartment. They knew where she lived. They knew the car she drove. The message was pretty clear. They had threatened something that Clara held dear because s
he knew about something that they held dear. She just didn’t know what it was.

  The apartment in Neukölln was not on the telephone and she resisted the temptation to jump on the U-Bahn straight away. Instead, she called Erich’s Gymnasium where the gruff headmaster, who was working late, answered the telephone himself and assured her that Erich Schmidt had been in as usual that day. Then she sat in her silent apartment, a cup of black coffee in her hands, and forced herself to think. She had gone to Munich to find the sister of Anna Hansen. Somehow, though she could not see why, Anna Hansen’s life had become linked to her own. The unexplained death of a rackety model turned Reich bride was now casting a shadow over her own life. She needed to discover what happened to Anna Hansen and soon.

  That night she had to will herself to sleep. At last, as her breathing slowed and sleep approached, she saw a figure beckoning to her and in the dark spaces of her thoughts, where images swam before dreams descended, she felt something on the edge of her perception. It was trying to force its way out from the pictures in her mind, to separate itself and come to the fore, but it had no face or voice and it moved like a memory might, shifting in and out of the shadows in her mind.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The Heim Kurmark was in Klosterheide, a small village five kilometres north of Lindow and an hour and a half ’s drive north of Berlin. It was a stately, high-gabled building of rose-coloured stone which sat on the ridge of a hill, its slate roof topped by a cupola with a bell inside, sounding the hour with a gloomy, metallic toll. The austere façade hinted at its origins. It had been a monastery originally and there remained an odour of piety about it, competing with the strong scent of ammonia and cleaning polish. Earlier that year the place had been taken over by the officials of the SS, given a deep clean, and rechristened as a Lebensborn home – part of a string of institutions throughout the Reich funded by the Well of Life Foundation and devoted to the care of unmarried pregnant women who wanted to escape the moralizing of priests and family members. Here, in a programme devised by Heinrich Himmler, they could bear children with the choice of keeping them, or donating them to an SS family keen to meet the officially sanctioned target of four children. Above the heavy oak door a black SS flag twitched in the brisk autumnal breeze.

  Clara climbed out of the car and waited at the door. So Katia Hansen was unmarried and pregnant, then. That might explain the contempt of the landlady back in Munich. But it did not explain why she had chosen to travel halfway across the country, trusting to the tender mercies of the SS when she was at her most vulnerable. Unless that had to do with the fact, as the landlady also mentioned, that other people were looking for her too. Clara had no idea whether her journey here would be any more fruitful than the one to Munich, but this time she was spurred by more urgent considerations. Someone wanted to find Katia Hansen and, it appeared, Katia Hansen didn’t want to be found.

  There was no bell, so after a while Clara pushed the door and ventured inside. It seemed strangely quiet for a place devoted to babies and young children. She saw linoleum faded by repeated scrubbing, drab mustard walls and a scuffed wooden floor. Even the light slanting through the cloudy windows was wan and drained of radiance, as though promising the babies that the world outside would be no less drear than the place in which they were born.

  Before she had taken more than a couple of steps a nurse, dressed in a white headdress, bustled out to meet her.

  ‘Katia Hansen, you say? Was this visit arranged?’

  ‘I’m a friend of the family. I have some sad news for her,’ said Clara, sidestepping the enquiry and summoning a tone of grave solemnity. ‘Her sister has died.’

  The nurse flinched, as though Clara had uttered an obscenity. Perhaps, in a way, death was an obscenity in this place of birth.

  ‘Her sister, you say. She has died?’ Clara watched the nurse analysing this information, pondering whether Katia Hansen had illegally concealed some familial flaw, some health defect which ran in families, a tendency to early death.

  ‘She was murdered,’ Clara clarified. Surely being murdered couldn’t run in families.

  ‘Murdered! Really? How shocking! Then I shall have to go and find her. I think she’s in the lecture room. But I would ask, please, be gentle. A girl in her condition should not have to take a shock.’

  Clara was shown into a waiting room, featuring a battered array of cane furniture and a poster promoting porridge and brown bread as a wholesome diet for pregnant women. A window at the side gave onto the garden where more nurses swathed in white, their caps bearing a red cross, were sitting in a circle with a baby on each lap. There was something peculiar about those babies, Clara thought, and it was not just that they were uniformly blonde and dressed in identically knitted suits and bootees. Then she realized the peculiarity was that they looked so much better fed than the babies one saw in Berlin. They had round, apple cheeks beneath their bonnets and chubby little arms, braceleted with fat. On the terrace immediately below the window stood a line of cribs, done out with lace covers and flowery blankets, and a little further down the lawn was a round table where ten children were eating a meal from steel bowls.

  Katia Hansen was a slight girl of around twenty whose voluminous smock suggested a pregnancy of at least seven months. Her hair was dark brown, probably the same as Anna’s before it was bleached, and her delicate features reminded Clara instantly of Katia’s older sister. She shrugged off the nurse’s arm and looked at Clara in amazement.

  ‘Is it true? What Krankenschwester Flick told me about Anna? What happened?’

  ‘Sit down, dear,’ said the nurse, with a glimmer of kindliness. ‘This lady has come to explain everything.’

  ‘It is true, I’m afraid,’ said Clara. ‘I’m sure the Reich Bride School has been trying to trace you. And the rest of the family.’

  ‘There is no rest of the family,’ said Katia, sitting down. ‘It’s just me. And they can’t have tried very hard. Who are you, anyway?’

  ‘I knew Anna in Berlin.’ Clara took a deep breath and explained. About meeting Anna through Bruno Weiss. About the Bride School and the shooting. She tried to keep the details of the murder vague, but she thought she should add that the police had already released the gardener who had first been arrested.

  ‘So who do they suspect now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Poor Anna.’ A tear fattened on Katia’s cheek and she swiped it away with a forefinger. ‘Whatever else, she didn’t deserve that.’

  Whatever else?

  Out of the corner of her eye, Clara noticed a car draw up in the drive and a group of SS officers slamming the door and stamping on the gravel. One of them carried a bouquet.

  ‘They’ve come for the ceremony,’ explained Katia, matter-of-factly.

  ‘What ceremony?’

  ‘There’s a baby being dedicated to the Fatherland today. The mother doesn’t want to do it, but she can’t see much alternative. She knows it’ll have a good future as a child of the Reich. There are always plenty of takers.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ When times were hard it seemed strange anyone should want more mouths to feed.

  Katia shrugged. ‘SS families need a minimum of four children. Himmler says they have to be “kinderreich”. If you get a child from the Lebensborn it’s guaranteed to be racially pure. Oh, here’s Eva now.’

  A large girl with a frizz of red hair entered the room, and settled nervously in a chair. She was formally dressed in a hat and coat and clutching a baby draped in a white shawl. The child began to grizzle, and the girl hushed it urgently, rocking it back and forth in her arms. The crying only grew louder and eventually, looking quickly around, the mother undid her blouse to breastfeed. Clara watched as the baby’s navy, unfocused eyes swivelled towards the distended, blue-veined breasts and seized the nipple, causing the mother to flinch. Eva sat and stared directly ahead of her as the child suckled, a look of desolation on her face.

  ‘Eva had her little girl a month ago.’
Katia smiled across at her, then lowered her voice. ‘It’s being adopted by a childless couple. We’re all supposed to attend the dedication ceremonies, only I can’t stand them . . .’

  She glanced outside. ‘Is that your car? Do you think we could go for a drive? We’d have to be quick but I’m dying for a cigarette.’

  They walked swiftly down the corridor. As they passed, Clara glanced into the dining room where the SS officers had congregated. It was set with a couple of rows of chairs, and a table made up like an altar at the front, covered with a white linen cloth and dressed with a vase of flowers and a portrait of the Führer. A crimson banner was hung behind on the wall and next to it the black banner of the SS with its jagged lightning strokes. Beside the table, a couple stood, a grizzled Sturmbannführer and a woman in a flowered hat with a grim expression that suggested she would cope with whatever life threw at her. Even if it was a baby.

  Katia walked smartly towards the car and lowered herself effortfully into the front seat. She had the same bold, no-nonsense manner Clara remembered from Anna. Though she had only just heard about her sister’s death, she had barely shed a tear. Catching Clara’s eyes on her, Katia said, ‘In case you’re wondering, it was an accident, so what was I supposed to do? The doctors can’t give contraceptive advice. If they do, it’s off to a camp for them, and the contraceptives you can find are all duds. Deliberately so. More kids for the Fatherland. And as for an abortion, forget it.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Clara. Abortions were banned in the Third Reich. The punishment for assisting an abortion was death. Except for Jews, for whom terminations were actively encouraged.

  ‘Not that I’d have considered that,’ Katia continued as they headed off up the drive. ‘Anyway, it’s supposed to be an honour to be here. You have to apply, and they only accept half the applications. They prefer the father to be SS, and you have to prove you’re hereditarily healthy. Thankfully my boyfriend wasn’t racially inferior. Just inferior in every other way.’