Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  She had been born with one leg shorter than the other, its calf muscle puckered as though a giant creature had raked a claw through the flesh, turning the foot slightly inward at the same time. Until recently she had worn an iron caliper until one day Sonja knelt down and removed it.

  ‘If you keep wearing this thing it’ll only make your muscles wither.’

  ‘The doctor says I need it!’

  ‘These doctors don’t know anything. Start walking without it and you’ll be fine. You’ll build up the muscle. Like an acrobat, you know? Or a dancer. You want to be a dancer, don’t you?’

  ‘But it hurts.’

  ‘Don’t be a baby.’

  Sonja had disposed of the caliper, without telling Katerina where it was gone, and while she was delighted to abandon the hated thing that rubbed against her leg and made the skin on her calf red and raw, now her entire limb ached more profoundly and her walk was even more hesitant, with the quick dipping gait of a sparrow. Far from becoming a dancer, she couldn’t even attempt the sprint in BDM games. But she had not dared ask Sonja to put it back.

  Her crippled leg had never mattered to Papi, the man who had raised her single-handedly after her mother died. Herr Otto Klimpel in his immaculate suit with a triangle of white handkerchief peeping over the pocket, a spotted bow tie and a gold watch in his waistcoat. Sometimes Katerina still awoke feeling him swing her up in his strong arms, smelling the pomade on his skin, the musty tobacco from his cigars that was ingrained in the fabric of his suit and the dab of scented wax on his moustache. He had done exactly that the last time she had seen him in December, half an hour before he had arrived at work at the Reichspost building in Leipziger Strasse and fallen to the ground next to his desk, like a great oak crashing to the forest floor.

  When Papi died it had been like walking along a sunny pavement and having a trapdoor open up beneath her feet. She was a small moon flung out of the orbit of a parent planet into deep space. The shock was so great that even now Katerina barely comprehended it. What was more, Papi left barely a pfennig.

  It was decided, by a distant coterie of aunts and uncles Katerina had rarely met, that she should move out of the house in Wilmersdorf and into a home run by the National Socialist Volkswohlfahrt – the Nazi welfare organization. She could not possibly live with Sonja, who shared a tiny apartment with her friend Bettina, though in truth the shortage of space was the least unsuitable part of Sonja’s living arrangements. So Katerina moved instead to an ugly NSV mansion in Lichterfelde where children in need were housed and educated. They weren’t all orphans. Some had parents who had been deemed ‘unsuitable to care’ because they were alcoholics or idiots or incapacitated. Recently there had been others too, who came from far away and had been allocated their own separate quarters and schoolrooms apart from the other children.

  The only escape Katerina had was at evenings and weekends when she was allowed to make the twenty-minute train ride across Berlin to attend the social meetings of her BDM group. It was important that you stayed with the same Mädelschaft – the group of girls you had grown up with – because it reinforced sisterhood and loyalty. So twice a week she would sing songs and write letters to the troops or, like tonight, make packages of wool gloves and ear warmers and socks.

  The only other escape was visiting Sonja.

  The last time she had seen her sister was at the Café Casanova, where Sonja was performing. The communal dressing room, with its pink lights fixed round the mirrors and rubble of rouge and lipstick and Pan-Cake on the dressing table, the smell of perfume and sweat and cigarettes, a tangle of underwear and stockings thrown over the chair, was, to Katerina, the cosiest space on earth. Curled up on the battered armchair in the corner, listening to the chatter of the women, utterly unselfconscious in their hair rollers and underwear, or dressed in feathers and beading and scraps of peach chiffon, was the only place in the world she felt secure and comfortable.

  Mostly the women discussed their love affairs, but Katerina noticed that Sonja never joined in. She was funny like that. When Papi died, Katerina had tried to transfer all her affection onto her sister, like an unwanted pet seeking attachment at all costs, but she met only rebuffs.

  ‘Who do you love most in the world, Sonja?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Well for me, it’s you.’

  ‘Let’s see how long that lasts.’

  ‘I’ll always love you. You’re my sister.’

  ‘Up to you.’ Sonja shrugged, her lovely, creamy face impassive. They might have been talking about their favourite cake, or whether it was going to rain. Then she sprang up and began applying a layer of lipstick, pursing up her lips in a way that Katerina hoped she too would one day be able to perfect.

  ‘Personally I don’t think love exists. It’s just a trick to get people to do what you want. Like being hypnotized. Besides, you should never tell anyone what you’re thinking, kid. That’s a very bad idea.’

  Sonja was full of talk like that. Katerina was sure she didn’t mean it. And as she never actively tried to dissuade her from visiting, or tried to make her leave, Katerina carried on turning up backstage wherever Sonja was performing, or at the matchbox apartment in Fischerstrasse, basking in the glamour of her big sister’s life and absorbing the complex etiquette of womanhood – arranging hair, fixing earrings, tweezing brows. She would drink in snippets of gossip and learn the names of Sonja’s friends and associates like one enormous extended family. She knew better than to try to talk about their own, shrunken family, reduced now to the two of them, or to reminisce about their father, and she found if she kept quiet Sonja tolerated her quite well, gave her tea to drink and the odd bread roll and sometimes even asked when she was coming back.

  That was until two months ago.

  Sonja had gone abroad. Compared to some of her friends who had been drafted into factories or hospitals or department stores, getting a job abroad was paradise. Sonja had explained her trip briefly to Katerina, as if as an afterthought.

  ‘I’ll be back in a fortnight. Be good, kid.’

  But she wasn’t back. Weeks passed without any sign of Sonja, then the other evening, getting off the S-Bahn at Friedrichstrasse on her way to the BDM meeting, Katerina had run into Bettina.

  ‘I’m sorry, Katerina. Has no one told you? Sonja didn’t come back. In fact, we don’t know where she went. She disappeared.’

  Bettina’s heart-shaped face creased, partly in sympathy, partly in irritation at being saddled with delivering this awkward message.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling, Sonja will be all right. The one thing about your sister is, she knows how to look after herself. Let me know if there’s anything you need, hmm?’

  The session was winding up. The girls’ voices rose in a bright tangle of sound. At the door, handfuls of badges for the Winterhilfswerk were being doled out from a bucket for the girls to distribute during the week and Katerina tried surreptitiously to slip some of hers back. The idea was that they should sell them in a public place, like a railway station, where people would always donate in case they were seen and reported, but even with that stipulation the girls were always given more badges than they could possibly offload. That was intentional because everyone knew their parents would make up the difference rather than expose their offspring to embarrassment. But Katerina had no parents, and the chances of Sonja spending any of her wages on a heap of tin charity badges were next to none.

  Especially as she had now vanished without trace.

  Chapter Four

  The Mercedes passed through the city and headed northeast into a heavily wooded landscape. It was raining in earnest now, drumming on the car roof, dripping down through the dense wall of regimented beech, pine and oak that arched across the narrow road through the forest, blurring the windows and the lowering sky. Very few other cars passed, and the occasional picnic spots with their damp cluster of wooden benches were deserted. A tattered billboard of Hitler, proclaiming Ein Volk, Ein Führer,
flapped desolately in the breeze, alongside a poster advertising family hikes with the Strength Through Joy foundation. Clara sat in tense silence, trying to make sense of her situation. If Goebbels wanted to see her, surely he could have called her into the Propaganda Ministry in Wilhelmstrasse, or more simply his office at the studios? Yet instead they were heading in precisely the opposite direction, far out of the city.

  The expensive Mercedes engine purred deep beneath her, and the aroma of polished leather rose around her, but the chauffeur in front remained impassive. Clara wound down the window and breathed in the air, sharp with pine, heavy with earth and vegetation, trying to gauge where they might be, but the rain had lowered the temperature, making her skin prickle over, so she rolled the window up again, and tried to calm herself.

  Then it dawned on her.

  When the city of Berlin was informed that it wanted to make a birthday gift to the Propaganda Minister, it came up with a plot of land several miles to the north of the city, close to the small town of Wandlitz. At its centre was the Haus am Bogensee, whose finishing details were designed by Goebbels himself and only completed the previous year. Buried deep in rustic solitude, on the shores of the Bogensee, the house boasted an underground bunker, a cinema and a banqueting hall. But its most important feature was the fact that it was sufficiently far away from Magda and his children that Goebbels could conduct his casting couch meetings in peace.

  The roads had been narrowing for some time, tunnelling deeper into the forest, and now the car slowed at the end of a lane, rounded a bend and turned. Two minutes later it was crunching onto the gravel of the house to the energetic barking of dogs.

  A guard in a green rain-cape approached, managing to wield an umbrella in one hand and salute with the other.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’

  He opened the car door, giving Clara her first proper glimpse of the house every actress in the Reich had heard of, even if they had not yet had the misfortune to see it.

  The Haus am Bogensee had a low-hanging Nordic roof, brown wooden shutters at the windows and whitewashed walls, yet despite its air of rustic simplicity, it was a distinctly ugly edifice. The huge mediaeval gabled entrance, flanked by wrought-iron lanterns and supported by rough stone pillars, was freakishly out of proportion to the low-built, utilitarian style of the building. Floor-to-ceiling French windows led out onto a terrace, speckled with a coating of damp leaves and fringed by thick clusters of silver birch and fir. An ivy-clad stone balustrade surrounded the garden, where a flaking nude of a young woman was posed awkwardly, one hand across her legs, as if longing to cover up. To one side of the entrance the steel doors of a concrete bunker could be seen and in the distance, half hidden by beech, fir and oaks, stretched the grey mass of the Bogensee. Only the soft dripping of the trees and the sharp call of birds pierced the thick silence.

  At Clara’s approach the heavy wooden front door opened and the smell of wet leaves and overcoats gave way to a mingled aroma of floor polish and cigars. The hall was decorated with a marble bust of the Führer, glowering sightlessly, and a series of heavy-framed photographs of the owner: Goebbels shaking hands with Mussolini at the Olympic Stadium, Goebbels beaming adoringly at Hitler at the Berghof, Goebbels in intimate conversation with the Duke of Windsor, Goebbels with one hand on the arm of Zarah Leander. None, Clara registered, of Goebbels with his wife.

  A young man in his thirties, sleek in field grey, with a bundle of manila files under his arm, approached.

  ‘Fräulein Vine. I trust you had a good journey. The Minister asked to see you as soon as you arrived. If you would follow me.’

  He led the way along a narrow passage with parquet flooring and modernist brass wall-lamps, and down a gloomy series of steps. Opening the double doors at the bottom, Clara found herself looking into an enormous darkened room with an outsized flickering screen dominated by the giant, maddened figure of Robert Wiene’s Expressionist antihero, Dr Caligari. The film of the insane doctor had become famous around the world but had not been shown in Germany since it was banned as a danger to health and safety by the same man who was now viewing it, seated alone in his personal movie theatre.

  Joseph Goebbels swivelled round, whipped off his glasses, and raised a hand in half salute. The ghostly Dr Caligari with his wild stare and chalky skin loomed behind him on the screen, casting Goebbels’ face in shadow. His position was deliberate, Clara realized; with the light of the screen behind him it was difficult to make out his features.

  ‘So glad you could make it. It’s an age since I’ve seen this film. I find it a little long-winded, but overall a classic, don’t you think?’

  If this was a test, Clara was taking no chances.

  ‘I’m not sure I ever saw it.’

  ‘Really? You should. Some say it indicates a subconscious need amongst our populace for a leader who will rule with an iron hand. Firm leadership as the only alternative to social chaos. In many ways it was the most important German film of its time, the high point of Expressionism, not to mention a horror masterpiece.’

  That much was right, though when Clara had watched the film with apprehension and awe she had reached the opposite conclusion. For her, the shadowy distorted perspective of twisted buildings and spiralling streets was a mirror of the angst-ridden German psyche. The crazed psychiatrist Caligari, transforming into a hypnotist and murderer by night, symbolized an authoritarian state gone mad.

  ‘It’s not for everyone of course. Obviously one takes one’s responsibility seriously when it comes to protecting the populace – there’s a documentary coming out about the Eternal Jew that makes for very alarming viewing, and I’ve decided that no women will be allowed to watch the closing sequences. But for professionals, it’s a different matter. And you are, after all, a professional. I hear Veit Harlan has offered you a role in his new vehicle. Jud Süss, isn’t it called?’

  He knew.

  ‘That’s going to be an important movie. Film has a vital place in the vanguard of the German forces. We must fight with words as well as weapons. Have you accepted it?’

  ‘I’ve only just received the script. I’ve not had a chance to do much with it yet.’

  ‘Of course. And in normal times, I would urge you to take the role. However . . .’

  He rose to his feet. ‘These are not normal times and it may be that there are other projects you need to consider.’

  ‘Herr Doktor?’

  The familiar dazzling smile stretched over his cadaverous features.

  ‘I’m going to need to explain.’

  He led the way out of the cinema, limped swiftly up the steps and into a spacious oak-panelled drawing room laid with Turkish rugs. In one corner a sofa stood, piled with cushions and capacious enough to facilitate any amount of casting. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave a panoramic view of the Bogensee beyond the terrace. Despite it being summer, a fire was burning in the open fireplace and two chairs were pulled up before it. Without turning, Goebbels addressed the aide who had followed silently and slid into the room behind them.

  ‘Leave us alone, Farben. And I mean alone.’

  The aide clicked heels and melted from sight.

  ‘Sit down, won’t you.’

  Goebbels settled himself into one of the armchairs with a wince and Clara realized that his right leg was giving him trouble again. A childhood operation had crippled one foot, meaning that Goebbels always walked with a characteristic semi-hobble. The pain it caused him surfaced so reliably with stress that employees at Babelsberg could judge the ferocity of his mood simply by monitoring the extent of his approaching limp.

  ‘Drink?’

  A frosted bottle of 1929 Mosel, wrapped in a white napkin, stood on a table at his elbow, two glasses alongside.

  ‘Thank you, yes.’

  He poured Clara a glass then leaned back, extending an arm along the chair and staring into the dancing flames of the log fire. The silence continued so long that eventually she could bear it no longer.

  ‘How
is the Frau Doktor?’

  The previous year the crisis of Goebbels’ affair with a Czech actress had come to a head. Following his wife’s demand for a divorce – and Hitler’s adamant refusal to countenance such a thing – a pact had been agreed between the couple, witnessed by the Führer himself, pledging that as the First Family of the Reich the couple would endeavour to get along. One result of this, Clara knew from the newspapers, was that Magda was pregnant again. The reconciliation baby would be the sixth in a brood whose neat braids and wholesome, white-smocked innocence were routinely exploited by their father. The Goebbels children were rarely out of the press and their most recent outing on public screens had been in a documentary in which they appeared as a contrast to the misshapen and handicapped children who were such a burden to the Reich.

  ‘My wife is fine. Thank you for asking. If you can call spending all your waking hours playing Solitaire “fine”.’

  Clara remembered Magda Goebbels’ affection for Solitaire, a game she played compulsively, shuffling and sorting the cards, flipping and turning, as if by ordering them she could set her own life to rights again.

  ‘She’s a keen bridge player too, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a whole circle she plays with. They gamble endlessly.’

  That Magda should involve herself in gambling was not a surprise. Bridge, poker, canasta and Skat, games of chance, threat and dare, were now the favourite pastime of high society. Everyone played, from officers in the exclusive Herrenklub to fashionable ladies in the Skagerak Club. When you felt the cards were stacked against you, gambling was a sure way to recapture that fleeting sense of feeling lucky.