Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  She was far too alert to go to bed. She thought of switching on the radio and trying for the BBC. Like everyone else she had a Volksempfänger VE301 on her mantelpiece, a mottled brown mass-produced Bakelite object with an eagle and a swastika on its case and a dial that offered only German frequencies, yet beneath a floorboard in her kitchen she had a hidden shortwave set. The sentence for listening to foreign radio stations had been upgraded to concentration camp or death, but that did not deter her. It helped that she had total trust in her neighbour, Doktor Franz Engel. Often, when they were both in, the confident blast of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony would vibrate through the wall – a private, neighbourly signal to Clara, as clear as any Morse code, that her transgression would be drowned out.

  Only last week she had crouched down to hear the slurring bass of Winston Churchill, the new British Prime Minister, addressing the House of Commons, his distant voice crackling from the set like the echo soundings of a submarine.

  ‘The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire . . .’

  Yet now she had no appetite for news. Instead she perched on the edge of the velvet armchair, clasping her knees, and tried to make sense of the curious sensation racing through her. It wasn’t trauma – it was more like – excitement. The inertia she had felt for so long had turned into a thrumming impatience. Something about her encounter in the street – the rush of adrenalin she had felt – had taught her something. She need not go on any longer like this, drifting and dreaming, imprisoned by her loss. The thing she most feared had happened, and if her own life was to have any meaning, the least she could do was to fight back, seize every opportunity to assuage her sorrow and make something worthwhile from the loss of Leo. To collect up all her grief and resentment and with it light a fire to revenge him. In the past months her life had dwindled to such a point that acting was her only occupation. She had promised Leo that she would stay away from the work that he himself had introduced into her life and since last summer she had kept her pledge. She had avoided any contact with the British intelligence services, nor had they contacted her. She remained on the guest list for many a Nazi reception, which meant she still saw the wives of the Nazi elite – Emmy Goering, Magda Goebbels, Annelies von Ribbentrop – and still overheard their gossip about the progress of the war and their husbands’ feuds. Yet she had not attempted to relay this information elsewhere. She had abandoned all contact with the British secret services. She had lost all inclination for espionage.

  But now she felt a new resolution surge within her.

  She realized, although her heart was broken, it was still beating.

  Chapter Two

  ‘War’s changed a lot of things,’ said Mary Harker, as she and Clara stood at the back door of sound stage three in the Babelsberg studios, where a line-up of chorus dancers were practising a basic high-kick number, ‘but you’d never have thought it could change basic human anatomy.’

  Clara saw her point. Assembled on the sound stage in front of them the chorus line rehearsing the latest musical, Die grosse Liebe, seemed so much less elegant than usual. The film was a typical Babelsberg extravaganza, with no expense spared to create an uplifting visual spectacle that would simultaneously remind Germans of the sacrifices of war and invite them to dream of the future. The troupe were dressed as angels, in billowing white chiffon with gauzy wings, yet they possessed all the ethereal elegance of a village football team. Their movements were pantomimed and their routine woodenly regimented, with none of the suggestive sexual undercurrent that chorus girls usually imparted. The blusher on their cheeks was far too exaggerated and their wigs had the comical cast of a bad cartoon. It was all the more extraordinary, given that they were performing alongside the nation’s favourite film star, Zarah Leander.

  Like everything in the Third Reich, the studio star system was rigorously controlled and that included telling the nation which actress they loved the most. Once it had been decided that Zarah Leander, a statuesque redhead of Swedish origin, should be the Diva of the Third Reich, nothing was left to chance. The studio had issued her with a rigid set of rules dictating her wardrobe, her social life and her press interviews, and no expense was spared on her productions, including this one. She wasn’t the first Swede to make her way to Babelsberg; Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo had gone before her, but Zarah was the first to stay and make the most of it. She possessed a deep, smoky contralto that got under the skin, an exotic air and an image of unapproachable grandeur. She was also the highest paid artist in the Reich. Which made it all the stranger that the hatchet-faced angelic host surrounding her should be so unappealing. From where Mary and Clara stood, a hundred yards from the dazzle of the arc lights, this chorus line seemed more muscular than usual. Heavier, too. In fact, they seemed almost . . . male.

  ‘You know what it is, don’t you?’

  Another actress, Claudine Hoss, had come up behind them. She pursed her mouth and raised eyebrows that had been darkened in the new method with burnt matchsticks.

  ‘Take a good look.’

  As Clara focused more closely on the dancers – the bulky thighs, the rough hands, the shadow of stubble on their faces – reason slowly dawned.

  ‘They’re men, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not just men. They’re from the Führer’s bodyguard. The cream of the SS.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It’s Zarah. She’s too tall. They need to match her height or she’s going to stick out from the chorus line like a bratwurst from a bun.’

  For the first time in a year Clara burst out laughing.

  ‘Please God tell me they’re not going to sing.’

  ‘They probably only know the Horst Wessel Song,’ said Claudine, ‘and songs about knives spurting Jewish blood don’t sound so good coming from angels, even if they are SS ones.’

  ‘I thought Goebbels had banned drag acts,’ gasped Mary, choking down laughter. ‘I remember him saying it offended National Socialist sensibilities.’

  ‘I expect they volunteered on account of the stockings,’ said Claudine. ‘Perhaps they think they can keep them to bribe girls with.’

  ‘They might be right. There’s a lot I would do for a pair. These are hopeless.’

  They all cast a glance at Mary’s legs, which on close inspection had been painted a streaky brown. Liquid stockings came in a jar, but they were pricey.

  ‘At least you’re not using gravy powder,’ shrugged Claudine, in reference to the cut-price alternative. ‘It looks good but you find dogs following you up the street.’

  Mary grinned happily. ‘Just wait till I write up this story. The SS must be the only people left in Berlin who still get to dress up.’

  It was true. Dressing up, since the beginning of the war, had become the stuff of dreams. Once, Germany’s glossy magazines had carried patterns for every type of occasion – town clothes and country gear, afternoon dresses and evening gowns, for lunch in town and evenings at the opera. Now there were only articles on make do and mend, tips for making knickers out of old sheets and excitable pieces about second-hand fabrics. Even when one found a pattern, the styles were confined to a miserable, drab selection, with strict stipulations over the amount of cloth allowed and a single shade of the season, which according to the latest edition of Vogue was ‘storm-coloured’. That made sense.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, the newspaper fashion pages were cluttered with government regulations on what a woman’s ‘normal’ wardrobe should resemble. Ladies should own just one dress and petticoat, a single pair of knickers, a lone bra, one pair of stockings and three handkerchiefs. No one need possess more than two pairs of shoes, and if they wanted another pair they needed to provide evidence that the old ones were thoroughly worn out before they could get permission. Clara’s wardrobe far exceeded this paltry provision, even if her favourite
pink silk dress by Hilda Romatzki was wearing thin, and the others were feeling a little shabby. Yet if her surplus clothing was going to be discovered it would have happened already. If past experience was anything to go by, the Gestapo probably knew the contents of her drawers better than she did.

  Claudine pursed her lips. ‘What is it they say? In wartime everything must be put to a different use. I suppose that applies to SS men too.’

  The women lingered a while longer, enjoying the comedy of the spectacle, before Clara and Mary wandered out into the sunshine. The grassy lawn at the centre of the Babelsberg studios was a favourite place for actresses to spend their lunchtimes or the break between scenes. It was fringed with willow trees, and that day it was crammed with actors and production staff stretching out in the sun. Yet it was a spot Clara tended to avoid, given that it was overlooked by office windows, and one office in particular: that belonging to Joseph Goebbels. The minister frequently stood at his window feasting his eyes on the suntanned flesh outside, and the idea of his gaze falling on her turned Clara’s blood to ice.

  ‘Mind if we keep walking? That’s Goebbels’ office over there.’

  ‘So you’re avoiding him?’

  ‘I’ve been offered a new film. Jud Süss. It’s a dreadful script but if I turn it down I’m looking for trouble. I could be arrested. It takes almost nothing these days.’

  From her earliest days in Babelsberg, Clara had recognized that acting was a dangerous business. In her second week at the film studio the actor Hans Otto, a Communist, had been arrested in a café by Brown Shirts and beaten to death in Gestapo headquarters when he refused to name his associates. Helga Schmidt, her first friend in the city and Erich’s mother, had been thrown from a window for daring to make jokes about Hitler. To turn down a role in one of Goebbels’ prestige projects would take either crazy courage or an especially convincing excuse. As yet, Clara had not managed to summon either.

  ‘Or is it you don’t want to be seen with a known trouble-maker like me?’

  ‘Don’t joke, Mary. It’s Goebbels I don’t want to see. You, on the other hand . . .’

  Clara left her sentence hanging. Mary had, as usual, perceived the truth. Even though she was American, and her country uninvolved in Europe’s war, she remained a foreign journalist and it was increasingly risky for the pair of them to be seen together. Yet there was practically no one in Berlin whose company Clara preferred. Mary Harker had barely changed in all the time they had known each other, since the days in 1933 when she abandoned her affluent family home in New Jersey and arrived in Germany as a poorly paid stringer for the New York Evening Post. She still had the halo of hair springing untidily from her head, ineffectually tamed by a few Kirby grips, in a shade the Germans called Strassenköterblond, mongrel blonde, because of the range of colours it contained. American teeth as wide and white as a picket fence. The sun had spattered freckles across her face and her clear hazel eyes were masked by the same heavy spectacles. She still had a habit of speaking her mind, in a drawl that had only deepened over the years from a serious addiction to Marlboro cigarettes, and she retained the burning sense of justice that landed her in frequent conflict with the authorities. And she still, after seven years, was no nearer finding a decent man to share her life.

  As far as Clara knew, since Mary’s unrequited love for a British journalist called Rupert Allingham, there had been no one serious. The other foreign correspondents, who, apart from the freelance Stella Fry and the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz, were almost all male, treated her as an equal. She was an experienced, professional, hard-drinking reporter, an acute reader of the power structure in Nazi Germany, and simply one of the guys. That was how they saw her. There had been a few light-hearted affairs – Mary had the ability to make everyone laugh and she was effortlessly relaxed in male company – but no man had yet come between Mary’s Remington typewriter and her roving eye for a story.

  ‘You didn’t tell me. Why exactly are you here?’

  ‘I wanted to take a look at the camp.’

  ‘A camp? At Babelsberg?’

  ‘Apparently. They’ve built it round the back of the lots. Deliberately out of the way.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘To house Polish prisoners.’ Mary grimaced. ‘Forced labourers.’

  Since the invasion of Poland, the country was awash with foreign workers. Zivilarbeiter. You distinguished them by the initial P sewn onto their clothes; that was if you hadn’t already noticed the starved pallor and fugitive eyes averted whenever a German went by. Public transport, churches and restaurants were out of bounds to them and, most of all, German women. Just in case the women forgot, every library, station and government building was littered with pamphlets warning of the risks of disease and the penalties for any form of fraternization.

  ‘Why house prisoners at a film studio?’

  ‘Useful labour. In fact, I’m surprised they needed to call in the SS for Zarah Leander because the word is labourers are going to be used as extras, now that so many actors have been conscripted.’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘Straight from the mouth of Joey Goebbels himself. Doesn’t mean it’s true of course, in fact it usually means the opposite. But seeing as he announced it in the morning press conference at the Ministry of Truth I thought I’d come out here and take a look on the off-chance that for one moment he wasn’t lying. It’s so rare he lets out anything interesting; I tell you, the nightly blackout has nothing on the information blackout from the Propaganda Ministry. We journalists are starved of news. But you know what?’ Mary pointed. ‘He was right. There they are.’

  On the far wooded edge of the studio grounds a number of workers wearing cast-offs from the prison system were initiating the construction of a series of low, brick-built barracks under the instruction of an SS guard. As Clara and Mary approached they detected, alongside the sound of hacking and sawing, a quite different commotion. At the end of the barracks a makeshift boxing ring had been set up, and two prisoners were being picked to fight. The supervising guard strutted down the lines before pulling out a heavy-set worker with a dense, hairy torso and enormous hands and feet. As the prisoner trudged towards the ring, the guard continued squinting through the throng before selecting a pigeon-chested figure in wire-rimmed glasses.

  A jovial throng of Ufa employees had begun to congregate, men with their hands in their pockets, secretaries on their lunch break, and stagehands snatching a moment off work, all relishing an unexpected moment of entertainment. An impromptu boxing match was a welcome interruption to the usual working day.

  Once the boxers were in their corners, it was even clearer how mismatched they were. The larger one was jogging, dancing round the ring, making practice feints with his fists as the crowd shouted their appreciation. His opponent sat stripped to his shorts, the towel round his neck barely concealing the ladder of ribs clearly visible beneath his heaving chest. Even before the fight had begun his face was beaded with sweat in anticipation of the pummelling he was about to endure. Sickened, Clara turned away.

  ‘I’m surprised they’re not trying to keep this place quiet rather than broadcasting it to the international press.’

  ‘They’re proud of it. Goebbels says everything necessary will be done to keep Ufa studios at the peak of its production. Entertainment is more important than ever. Film is the vanguard of the German military. Etcetera, etcetera.’

  ‘I suppose it’s better than most of the work they can hope for.’

  ‘Exactly. But while the Poles come here,’ Mary’s voice dropped, ‘the Jews are being sent to replace them.’

  ‘Moved to Poland?’

  ‘Somewhere in the east. For resettlement.’

  No one in Berlin could be unaware that the Jews were going somewhere. Those who had not already fled the Reich were now a terrified, hunted people, banned from cafés, restaurants, places of worship, hospitals, cinemas and theatres. Yet not content with removing them from dai
ly life, Hitler had publicly announced his intention to deport them. It was hard to remain ignorant of the trucks making arrests in the Scheunenviertel, the Jewish quarter, or calling at dawn at addresses across the capital.

  ‘What does resettlement mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’m determined to find out.’

  They sat for a moment, watching the boxing match progress along predictably uneven lines. After the third time the smaller man was knocked down and hoisted to his feet, Clara turned away.

  ‘All I can say is, I pity you having to see Goebbels so often.’

  ‘As it happens, I’m seeing more of him than ever. There’s a war going on.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘Not that one.’ A small, ironic laugh. ‘I mean the war between Goebbels and von Ribbentrop.’

  The antagonism between the Propaganda Minister and his opposite number at the Foreign Office was longstanding. Feuds were rife in Nazi circles and anyone hoping to understand the senior men needed to be an archaeologist of arguments, digging deep into the origins of the rivalries that gave the regime its malign energy.

  ‘It’s reached absurd levels. First, they established rival foreign press clubs, and now they’ve taken to scheduling their press conferences at the same time so they clash. Both start at eleven o’clock each morning and we journalists have to choose between them.’