by Jane Thynne
“Happiness is not something I expect, Clara. I never have. I always assumed that one needs to learn happiness early, like a foreign language. If it comes too late, you can never properly be fluent. You’ll never understand its inflections. I don’t think I’ll ever know what it is to be happy.”
He turned round. “Does he make you happy? This unmarried man who is so intriguingly absent from your life?”
“Yes.”
“Is he coming back to you?”
“I choose to believe so.”
“So Love gives you faith, does it? Faith’s a pretty poor substitute for real life, Clara. Look at that picture there.” He pointed to a portrait of Venus being pursued by Adonis, prettily depicted in glinting oils. “They’re imprisoned like that forever. They never fade, but they never kiss. They exist in an eternity of yearning. Is that what you want?”
“Who cares what I want? What does it matter?”
“You’re right, of course. But it matters to me because I have a proposition for you.”
“I already said…”
“Hush.” He put his fingers to her lips, then smoothed the hair from her temples and rubbed a strand of it between his fingers, as though it was silk. The way he was looking at her had changed now. He was no longer the painter, examining his subject, but a man savoring something precious, like a jewel.
“War is coming soon between our two countries. Hitler has already breached the terms of the Munich treaty. I’ve read documents demonstrating the enormous superiority of Germany’s air force over those of Britain and France. I’ve played a small part in the preparations myself, so I can scarcely claim innocence. But you, Clara, will be in a difficult position. A woman who is half English, and hiding her Jewish identity. You’ve just spent the night in a prison cell. What could be safer than marriage to a senior member of the Party?”
“Marriage?”
“You’d have to go through the selection procedure, of course, for marrying into the SS. There’s a questionnaire, with preposterous queries about whether you like cosmetics and perfume. Whether you smoke.”
“As you’ve already noticed, I would hardly pass the Aryanization tests.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged. You have blue eyes, which is good, even if they’re flawed with something darker. And besides, we Nazis are not the only ones who are good at faking our identity. If we can invent a cultural heritage, why shouldn’t you?”
Still, she was staring at him in astonishment.
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s as though no one has ever asked you to marry them before.”
“And you look like no one’s ever refused you. I don’t love you, Conrad. That must be obvious.”
“I’m not asking you to love me. I wouldn’t presume to think that affection was involved. On your side at least. I merely suggest it as a strategy you might find useful. An alliance if you like, between interested parties.”
“You deserve more.”
“I’ll be the judge of what I deserve.”
He turned his attention to a Dutch interior on the wall. It was of a young girl sewing, with a dreamy look on her face and light from a window filtering through the glossy web of her hair.
“Vermeer’s wife was Catholic, did you know? That was illegal in seventeenth-century Holland. So by marrying her Vermeer was making a secretive alliance. I like the idea of that. Making our own alliance. You would be safe under my protection, and I wouldn’t deny you your freedom. You could come and go as you choose, but I would suggest that, at least for a while, we move to my estate at Weimar. It is, my darling, one of the loveliest parts of Germany. Not only the home of Goethe and Schiller, but it also boasts the most beautiful woodland, the lovely forest of Ettersberg.”
The way he was discussing it, it was as though she had already agreed. For a moment, the exhaustion of a night without sleep overcame her and Clara allowed herself to contemplate his proposal. Would it be so bad, this loveless marriage? Reporting for her Rasse Merkmale, her racial characteristics assessment, where she would be examined, weighed, and have her upper lip measured? It would need only be a temporary measure. It would mean she could stay in Germany with a safe cover for her work. More important, she could stay close to Erich.
Adler watched these thoughts travel across her face, and his voice dipped.
“Don’t you ever get lonely, in that house out at Griebnitzsee, eating your solitary dinner? Don’t you ever long for some intellectual companionship as barbarity descends?”
“Are you seriously suggesting that you would marry me just to keep me from arrest?”
“That wouldn’t be my only motivation, but it might be yours.”
“So a short-term marriage of convenience?”
“I think that’s the phrase. That’s one thing I’ve always admired the French for—their approach to affairs of the heart. They have none of the dull Protestant rigidity that afflicts us Germans, and the British too. The French understand that human passions come in many forms.”
She shook her head. “It would be living a lie.”
“Aren’t we all living a lie? You have, I assume, sworn an oath to the Führer as a condition of your employment at Ufa?”
He was right. Whatever Goebbels said about big lies being needed to convince people, life in Nazi Germany was full of little, everyday lies. What would one more matter?
Adler smiled down at her, a rare trace of tenderness softening the perfect lines of his face as if he were a statue momentarily blurred by rain. “Besides, there would be honesty between us. Sometimes the most unlikely partners come together for mutually beneficial reasons. That’s an idea being actively propounded in my old Foreign Office workplace just now.”
She was instantly alert. “You’re talking about the Soviet Union.”
“An alliance between Germany and Russia is coming any day.”
“How do you know?”
“You’d shown such an interest that I took the opportunity to catch up with Frau von Ribbentrop. She loves to confide in me. Perhaps she thinks, because I share her interest in old masters, I must share her other views. I raised the subject with her.”
“And she told you?”
“Something she shouldn’t have. But she couldn’t resist. She knew I would understand why. It’s a personal triumph for her, you see, although the world will never realize it. All those years of hostility, that long-nurtured hatred of the English, has finally born fruit. What is that saying? Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. The way they laughed at her in London. Mocked her pretensions. Ridiculed her husband’s infatuations. It hurts, being laughed at. It leaves a lasting legacy. Now Britain will reap the consequences. Annelies showed me something actually. Perhaps you’d like to take a look.”
He picked out a piece of paper and handed it to her casually. At the top it bore the eagle and swastika, the official stamp of the Foreign Ministry, and beneath it von Ribbentrop’s personal seal, featuring his family coat of arms. Clara scanned it, trying to accustom her eyes to the dense Gothic script.
Reich Ministry for Foreign Affairs: Top Secret
OPERATION WHITE
OPERATIONAL ORDERS FOR THE INVASION OF POLAND
Issued by German Military High Command
“Von Ribbentrop is shortly to fly to Moscow to negotiate a nonaggression pact,” said Adler. “The Soviet Union and Germany will join arms and carve up Poland between them.”
Clara’s eyes raced to the final paragraph of the directive.
PREPARATIONS MUST BE MADE IN SUCH A WAY THAT THE OPERATION CAN BE CARRIED OUT AT ANY TIME FROM 1ST SEPTEMBER 1939 ONWARDS.
BY COMMAND OF THE FÜHRER.
Heil Hitler!
Adler watched as she absorbed it. Musingly he said, “Curious, isn’t it, how important a scrap of paper can be? We Germans place such childish faith in what is written. We surround ourselves with minutes, directives, cultural audits, requisition orders. Invasion plans. We document everything. It’s as though, once something is commi
tted to paper, everything that follows is legitimate.”
“September first? So they’ve set a date.”
“And now you’re wondering when you can alert your sister.” He plucked the paper from her hands. “But you mustn’t. If they find out that I’ve shown you this, they’ll take a very dim view of me. Showing top secret ministry documents to actresses is probably worse than showing them my portraits.”
Clara looked up at him soberly. “If I married you, would you take Angela’s name off your list?”
“Yes.”
“How can I trust you?”
He was entirely unmoving, his face tense and still, his eyes shining with some unexpressed emotion.
“You can’t. None of us can trust each other. That’s the message of this murderous brigade. They show us the true face of humanity. They may try to stamp out reality by destroying paintings, but who needs paintings when we have ourselves to look at? Besides, if you want to understand human nature, we still have the old masters. Brueghel’s a good start. I recommend him.”
He drew her towards him, and she felt the fight go out of her. His body felt hard and solid, like a pillar, and she was so tired.
“I need time to think…”
“Time, I’m afraid, is one thing we don’t have. Let me explain. While I was in Paris, I met an American. That’s not unusual; Paris right now is crammed with Americans trawling for any booty on offer, but this man was different. He offered me a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It would be a dream of a job. I would be an expert by day and a painter by night. You mentioned the idea of running away, and I admit I am coming round to it. I’m forty-four, Clara. I’m the last of my line. I have no parents, no wife, no children. Nothing to lose. In a couple of weeks the doors will slam shut and my chances of leaving will be gone. So I need your answer quite soon.”
He wrenched her face up by the chin and kissed her, a thick, greedy kiss.
“Accept me, Clara. You’d be insane not to.”
Still that arrogance, that patrician confidence, the disbelief that he might be refused.
She almost loved him for it.
CHAPTER
37
“They built this place when we had our first colonies. The plan was to collect exotic plants from German territories all over the world and bring them back to Berlin. Think about that. The entire German empire in a garden.”
They were walking along a gravel path through the lush borders of the Botanical Garden, a short ride on the S-Bahn to the southwestern borough of Steglitz. The garden was the city’s green jewel, an oasis of greenhouses, intersected by streams crossed by small bridges and stepping-stones, with meadow areas and formally laid parterres set behind high, unprepossessing walls. It was a favorite outing for Berliners, and even more for Hedwig and Jochen because it was where they first met.
It was more than a year ago, on a rare Saturday when Hedwig was not in classes at the Faith and Beauty school. She had taken a book with her to the Botanical Garden, but the book was only a prop because what she actually wanted was to sit beside the decorative lake beneath a monkey puzzle tree and imagine that she lived there. She loved the garden, partly because it was situated as far from Moabit as was possible in Berlin, and partly because being there allowed her to indulge her fantasy of being a Hohenzollern princess living in elegant splendor, rather than in a dank tenement with washing hanging in the courtyard.
But that day her fantasy was interrupted by Robert Schultz, an old school friend who, it turned out, was carrying out his Arbeitsdienst year as a gardener. He had a friend with him, a wiry, fierce-eyed young man who showed great interest in the book she wasn’t reading. Shortly afterwards, Robert left, and she and Jochen spent an hour in intense conversation before he leaned over in the shadow of the monkey puzzle tree and—to her astonishment—kissed her.
They had come here often since then, although their approaches to the outing were entirely different. While Jochen was obsessively interested in botanical detail and would frequently squat down and scrutinize the plants and their Latin names, Hedwig was happy simply to gaze around her. She liked Nature to be orderly, and the sorting of plants into their appropriate categories—the Japanese garden, the Italian garden, the rose arbor, and so on—appealed to her sense of tidiness.
Today, however, the garden’s tranquillity was shattered by the racket of drills. A band of workers at the far end of the garden were constructing yet more air-raid tunnels. A digger was biting straight lines into the ground, slicing through the grass and leaving a frill of earth behind.
“Those tunnels are going to house all the SS files and personnel,” commented Jochen quietly. “They’ve decided it’s one of the safest places in the city when the air raids come.”
“How would you know a thing like that?”
He didn’t answer. Apart from his comments about the colonies, he had scarcely said a word since they met at the S-Bahn and made their way here. There was nothing new about that—Jochen never saw the point of small talk and Hedwig was quite used to his moods—but that day his jaw was clenched more rigidly than ever and his tension, like that of some hunted wild animal, alarmed her. The horror of the past few weeks—of Lottie’s murder and Jochen’s revelations—had filled her with a constant, tremulous anxiety. But the task he had asked of her now—to smuggle illegal pamphlets into the following week’s ball—made her feel physically sick. She had barely eaten for days. Even Mutti was casting suspicious glances at her.
They came to the biggest greenhouse, the Great Pavilion, an Art Nouveau triumph of glass and steel that towered at the garden’s center like a glittering crystalline castle. As they passed from the clear air to the sweltering, damp atmosphere inside, the humidity clung to Hedwig’s skin and the lush, dense plants seemed to pulse with their own life. This was another world, an enclosed, mossy universe, surprisingly noisy with the screeches of birds in the rafters and the rushing of artfully constructed waterfalls into koi ponds. Giant vines and bamboos stretched to the highest parts of the roof, and glossy leaves, as big as elephants’ ears, waved all around. Between the delicate fronds, orchids dangled from hairy vines thick as babies’ arms, and at their feet, the ubiquitous Berlin sparrows pecked at a tangle of ferns.
Hedwig and Jochen followed the winding path to the deepest part of the glass house. This area was reserved for the flesh eaters: the flytraps, with their suggestive lobes and stamens thrusting frankly up from reddened petals. Vivid tubes that persuaded insects to crawl into their pendulous prisons. Hedwig had always hated carnivorous plants. The whole idea of plants eating flesh seemed a dreadful inversion of the natural order.
Jochen sat down on a bench that had been painted yellow to indicate that it was for Jews. Since November, Jews were no longer allowed in the Botanical Garden, so the yellow benches had reverted to Aryan use, but they still bore the instruction Nur für Juden, and despite the fact that they were unobserved, Hedwig felt uneasy about disobeying an order. Beside them cacti, cobwebbed with flimsy silk, reared up, their spikes tipped with flowers like hanging drops of blood. She realized Jochen had chosen this spot because the trickle of a stream into a stone grotto behind them drowned out their conversation.
He reached into his bag and brought out a book wrapped in plastic: The Proper Care of Cactuses.
“Good, isn’t it? I made it up at work. Never judge a book by its cover.”
He took off the wrapping and opened it. Between the stiff boards was a wedge of what Hedwig immediately recognized as Flugblätter, a wad of pamphlets tightly packed together. She didn’t want to look at them.
“You remember everything I told you?”
“Yes.” Just the thought of it made her feel even sicker.
“When you have the afternoon rehearsal at the Schloss Bellevue, go to the women’s washrooms. They’re on the ground floor, to one side of the reception hall. You’ll have the book with you. Leave it in the cistern of the cubicle on the far end.”
“And Sofie will pick it
up?”
“That’s all you need do.”
“Why can’t she take them herself?”
“The guards check their instrument cases and everything. The orchestra doesn’t arrive until an hour before the ball begins, but the Faith and Beauty girls will be practicing all afternoon.”
“What if someone sees me?”
“They won’t. Put it away in your bag now.”
“What if the pamphlets drop out of the book?”
“It’s simple enough!” he snapped. “Just do it, Hedy!”
He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring ahead.
After a moment’s silence she said, “Why are you being like this?”
Jochen took out cigarette paper and tobacco, rolled it, and lit up, even though smoking was not permitted in the pavilion.
“Something’s wrong.” His voice was gentler but grim. “I think my number’s up.”
Her insides churned. “Why? What happened?”
“There was a woman, the other day. Part Jewish. I was making an identity document for her. Everything seemed straightforward. I did the cards and we waited a while for them to dry. She left quickly and I waited a few minutes before leaving. But when I came out on the street, I realized she was being followed.”
“That’s her problem, surely.”
“No. Don’t you see? I have no idea how long she had been shadowed. If the man was watching her before we met, he would have tailed her all the way to the house, and then he would have seen me too. The house can’t be used anymore. And they may be onto me too.”
“Oh, Jochen.” Instinctively she looked around her to check for eavesdroppers, but it seemed they had the jungle to themselves. “What did you do?”
“I evaded him at once. Jumped on a tram, doubled back. There was no sign that he was after me.”
“So you’re safe?”
“No. I’m blown, Hedy. I’m sure of it. I’ve already moved out.”
“What did you tell your family?”
