Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  ‘So pleased to meet you, Fräulein Vine.’ Irene Schönepauck’s voice was a soft coo, straight out of a perfume commercial. ‘I recognize you from the piece in Neues Volk.’

  Emmy Goering had already placed a piece in the newspaper announcing the members of the committee. Alongside the panoply of top-ranking wives, including Annelies von Ribbentrop, Marga Himmler and Margarete Hess, Clara was an exception, being neither a wife, nor having any expectation of matrimony.

  Irene rested a cool hand in Clara’s and lowered her voice as if in confidence.

  ‘Apart from you I don’t know a soul here.’

  ‘I’m sure Fräulein Vine will fill you in,’ said Emmy Goering tartly, melting away.

  Schellenberg’s fiancée looked around restlessly before hooking an ancient waiter by the elbow and tipping her empty glass towards him. Once it was replenished, she swallowed its contents in one, as if downing cyanide, and shuddered visibly.

  ‘Scheisse. I thought at least here there might be something worth drinking. I’m sorry, you’re probably wondering why I’m here, aren’t you? Everyone else is. Even I am.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘There’s no point pretending. I was only asked because I’m engaged to Walter Schellenberg.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks. Not to say I’m not interested. It’s a good cause and all that, those poor little kids. But I know all the Party wives are talking about me behind my back.’

  There seemed little point in denying the obvious, so Clara said, ‘They talk about everyone. But I’m not anyone’s wife and I don’t even belong to the Party. I’m just an actress.’

  ‘Does that mean you don’t know Walter?’

  ‘I’ve never even met him.’

  Her eyes widened in delight. ‘Wonderful! That means we girls can chat without me having to watch every word I say! I can, can’t I?’

  ‘Of course. I promise nothing you say to me will get back to the Party. And do call me Clara.’

  ‘You must call me Irene.’ The name issued like a sigh through her lips and Clara understood what a man like Schellenberg would see in her.

  ‘Can I ask when the wedding will be?’

  The lips puckered in a sulky grimace. ‘I only wish I knew. I’ve had the physical examination, I’ve got the certificate to say I’m racially perfect and Walter says he wants us to get married as soon as possible, but he keeps putting off the date. Partly because that old baggage, his first wife, dragged out the divorce, and partly because of work. I say it’s not easy for me making all these arrangements and then cancelling them, not at a time like this, but he claims he’s up to his neck in counter-security problems.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she shrugged. ‘It would be better if he could discuss things with me, but when he gets to my apartment he just sits brooding, getting more and more drunk. It’s easy for you actresses. You have your work to take your mind off things. But I’m a dress designer, at least I was until I met Walter, and now I’m not working at all. I just stay in the apartment all day, drinking coffee.’

  ‘Coffee!’ No one in Berlin could find coffee any more. ‘How do you get that?’

  ‘My little secret. My doctor gives it to me. If you can persuade your doctor that coffee is necessary to your health, he’ll put it on prescription and then it’s provided for you. I’ll get you an appointment with him if you like.’

  Clara shrugged. If people were going to keep recommending doctors to her, she may as well take the one handing out free coffee.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Irene hooked a curl from her face with a single fingernail and sighed.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. Lucky girl with all those connections. But Walter being so senior works both ways. You’ve got no idea of the evenings I have to sit through. The other night we had dinner at Horcher’s, which would have been lovely except that it was with Heinrich Himmler and his wife. I can’t tell you how scared I was. I knew Himmler had complained to Walter about me wearing lipstick – he sent Walter some pictures of me covered with critical remarks in green ink and the way he looks at me is so acid it would burn through a Panzer – but frankly God forbid I ever end up in the same boat as his wife. Marga Himmler – what that woman has to put up with! She was on about her husband’s new plans for marriage. He’s decided that all healthy SS men should have two wives. The first one will be called Domina to show that she’s older. I thought, that’s not going to work. Who wants to be known as the older wife?’

  ‘I hope you told him.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t. Walter would have gone crazy if I’d interrupted SS-Reichsführer Himmler, so I just kept shtumm, nodding and pretending to look interested. Unfortunately that only encouraged him. He started telling me about how if a German soldier is prepared to die then he must also have the freedom to love unconditionally, with many different women. The sight of that funny little man with no chin talking about sex, I tell you, I was dying to laugh. I was kicking Walter beneath the table, but he didn’t move a muscle. I don’t think he felt it through his jackboots. Then Himmler got on to the subject of Menschmaterial.’

  ‘Remind me?’

  ‘Oh you know, human material. The birth rate. All that business about Dem Führer ein Kind schenken.’

  The slogan Give the Führer a Child was plastered everywhere.

  ‘That’s a big topic for him, isn’t it?’ reflected Clara. ‘Having babies.’

  Her sole encounter with Heinrich Himmler had involved a lecture on the subject of breeding racially superior children.

  ‘Apparently the attempts to raise the birth rate aren’t going as well as he planned. The idea is that all SS families should have at least four children, but a lot of them aren’t managing more than one. I hope nobody’s expecting me to take up the slack.’

  At this point their conversation was interrupted by a burst of applause and they turned to see a gaggle of children being ushered out of the elevators and herded into a group. The photographer was fiddling with his equipment, assembling the legs of the tripod and the camera with its lens on top like a soldier clicking together his gun. Frau Goering was orchestrating proceedings, positioning VIPs behind the small figures.

  Irene grimaced. ‘I thought they were supposed to be evacuating children, not bringing them to parties.’

  The orphans were outfitted in standard Hitler Youth uniform – white blouse, belted blue skirt and ankle socks for the girls, shorts for the boys – but what marked them out was their unusual attractiveness. All the children had clear skin, shining hair and even teeth. They had almost certainly been selected for their looks. No VIP wanted their picture taken with an ugly child. The children hesitated wide-eyed as the celebrities clustered around, arranging their features into appropriate expressions of concern.

  ‘They like kids, don’t they, your actress friends,’ observed Irene shrewdly.

  Clara looked across at Jenny Jugo, crouching cinematically beside the most photogenic child, her sleek brunette coiffure pressed unnaturally close to the young girl’s head in a pose which seemed guaranteed to appear on the front pages of the following day’s newspapers. The girl had big eyes, blue-green like jade, and tightly braided hair. She stood stiffly, plainly unused to such close contact, one leg slightly bent. There was something wild and shy about her, as though she was only temporarily tamed, like one of the lion cubs Goering kept as pets in his home. When she caught Clara’s eyes on her, she met her gaze and returned it with a penetrating stare.

  ‘I suppose we should join in,’ said Irene, grimly. ‘I’m standing at the back, though. I don’t want any kids getting jammy fingers on this dress.’

  It was late afternoon by the time Clara escaped from the reception. The conversation with Emmy Goering had unsettled her. So her English heritage was once more prompting gossip and rumour. That was to be expected, and yet, it was important that she discovered in what quarters this speculation was rumbling. The routine
chatter of actresses was one thing, but if the unease issued from Frau von Ribbentrop or her friend Lina Heydrich, wife of the SD chief, it was far more disturbing. For months, ever since she had cut her ties with the British secret services, she had told herself she was safe. Since the outbreak of war she had had no communication with any foreign agent. She had gone from home to work to home again with the stupefying regularity of a metronome. S-Bahn to studio to shop to S-Bahn. Sleep, work, eat. And cinema or meals with Erich at weekends. So precise was her routine that no agent shadowing her would have need of a watch, and so immaculate her cover that Joseph Goebbels himself had entrusted her with a mission of his own. Yet still the old worry rose up to haunt her with a rush of dread. Could it really be that her seven years of spying and informing and watching every move of the Nazi elite had gone entirely undetected? She might have the confidence of Goebbels, but he was only one cog in the extensive apparatus of this police state. She thought of the vast databank of Gestapo files that stretched beneath Berlin like the labyrinthine coils of a human brain, the thousands of human informers its neurons and synapses. What was the chance that within it some glint of knowledge existed, waiting to come to the surface? Or that some zealous functionary had decided to increase targeted surveillance against foreign-born citizens? Was it crazy to hope that she could continue undetected in a Germany at war?

  Reflexively she looked around. Following a target on foot was a challenge for anyone; the absence of traffic in the streets made it harder to hide a lone tail and Clara liked to think she could detect a shadow’s sensory fingerprint. They tended to conceal themselves behind clumps of pedestrians, switching from one side of the street to the other, easing into shop doors, making ample use of windows to mirror their target. They might work singly or in pairs, covering their suspect, intensely focused behind bland, professional exteriors. Now, in the early evening, the crowds were lighter and Clara felt sure that if any kind of shadow was around, she could spot them.

  Her eyes passed over a Hausfrau pushing a gas-resistant pram with a curved brown lid, like a turtle on wheels. A man in a café watching her legs. A newspaper seller with a portable paper rack strapped to his body like some strange mediaeval instrument of torture, a burst of headlines running down his front. The BZ am Mittag said the S-Bahn attacker had struck again, stabbing a woman near Rummelsburg S-Bahn. The Völkischer Beobachter declared Britain would be foolish to reject any offers of peace. The Berliner Morgenpost had a photograph of Polish Jews, bewildered old men and children who were being dragged by the hand, still young enough to be fascinated by everything, even the camera that so coldly recorded their fate.

  But nothing out of the ordinary. No tail.

  She quickened her step, feeling her surge of panic subside through the meticulous inspection of her environment.

  A pair of factory girls, hair still up in turbans, jostled past and, looking further along the street, she saw a long queue forming outside the cinema.

  In May an early closing order had been imposed on cafés, and dancing was banned throughout the Reich. Such trivial pursuits were unsuitable in wartime, Joseph Goebbels decreed. In response cinema audiences had spiralled, with droves of citizens making several visits a week. Some establishments extended their screenings to ten shows a day to cope with the demand, yet it was not adventure movies or romantic feature films that the citizens of Berlin were seeking out, but news.

  There was plenty of news on the radio, of course, but listening to Goebbels every evening had the power to drive you mad. Cinema newsreels were another matter. Until recently, the Ufa Tonwoche had been a mild diversion, a dutiful propaganda checklist to sit through before the main feature, a short trot through a week’s worth of international events, taking in the odd visiting dignitary or celebrity promoting their latest venture. But no longer. Now the newsreels had been extended to forty minutes, and when they ended there was an interval inserted before the main feature began to give audiences a chance to calm down. Instead some people simply got up and left, having had their fill of drama for one evening. Who needed an action movie when you could watch the fall of France?

  The climax came on the 14th of June when the Germans entered Paris, marching down the Champs-Élysées, just as Bismarck had done after his victory over the French in 1871. In Berlin, a fanfare of trumpets had come over the public loudspeakers and people everywhere had jumped to their feet. Those in cafés and restaurants had even stood on chairs in most unPrussian fashion, raising their arms and cheering. Bells rang for a week and official flags were flown.

  Clara had watched the newsreels with mounting dread. The reporters breathlessly delivering their bulletins, rockets flaming into the air, machine guns providing a background soundtrack. Then the cameras panning along the troop lines, tilted up into the soldiers’ faces to display their angular battle-hardened features to better effect. Dramatic music playing behind the reportage. ‘We see new German tanks ready for attack, ready for a mighty push forward. They are the new romance of fighting. They are the knights of the Middle Ages.’ Alongside the troops were the faces of conquered civilians – old men at the farm gates staring with terrible calm at the encroaching troops, peasant women straight out of a seventeenth-century Flemish portrait feeding pigs while their children played oblivious in the yard. Then Paris, and the troops in clean lines beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

  This time tomorrow she would be there. Clara felt a throb of alarm at what she was being asked to accomplish. What were the chances that she would be able to get Hans Reuber on his own, and even if she did, how could she possibly discover if he was indeed a foreign agent? If she warned him of Schellenberg’s distrust and Reuber was a loyal German patriot, then suspicion would in turn fall on her.

  In the hallway of the apartment block a dull-eyed Polish girl, a forced labourer recently acquired by her neighbour Frau Ritter, was mopping the hall. She wore a filthy yellow headscarf and a threadbare apron. Not for the first time Clara wondered where she had come from. Everyone employed foreign workers. They moved through the streets and dwellings of Berlin like an invisible army, an undercurrent of misery no one ever thought about. Numerous Polish women had been seized after the invasion and brought to Berlin to live in large camps on the outskirts of the city. They were mostly employed in factories but some, like this one, were made available for work in private residences. Clara realized she didn’t even know her name.

  The girl glanced sourly up at Clara then bent her head back to the task, sending a rank perfume of ammonia up the stairwell to mingle with the old cooking and washing smells that issued from closed doors. Halfway up the stairs the faint wail of a child pierced the clash of raised voices. From Frau Ritter’s apartment came a metallic voice on the radio giving ‘Tips For The Housewife’ and as she passed the door opened a crack and the woman herself, in a dressing gown, peered out, surveying Clara with pursed lips and a wordless glance, before retreating. On the fifth floor the light was broken, and Clara had to fumble for her key in the dark. Her neighbour, Doktor Franz Engel, was listening to a concert from the Berlin Philharmonic at full blast – his private signal that Clara could, if she chose, turn on her shortwave set without detection – yet that evening she had no desire for distraction. She needed to pack a bag and focus on the task ahead.

  She began to sort through her dwindling selection of clothes, picking out a velvet hat and an anonymous grey serge jacket, and choosing her best gown, a plunging halter-neck of Prussian blue silk from the couture house of Madame Grès, for her stage appearances. A single pair of stockings, darned many times. Ferragamo shoes wearing perilously thin in the sole. A crêpe de Chine blouse. A rare tube of Kolynos toothpaste, sent in by a fan. An indigo bottle of Soir de Paris.

  Catching its fragrance, memories of Leo tumbled through Clara’s mind like a heap of glinting shards and this time she didn’t try to distract herself. There was no point resisting it. Leo was forever part of her. He was there physically, ingrained in the memory of her muscles, and his spirit,
too, remained here, in the last place they had loved before his existence had emptied out of the world and vanished like footsteps in the dew. She breathed in and held her breath, as though she was inhaling the last traces of him.

  Increasingly, she realized, it was not just grief she was feeling but guilt. That she had lived and Leo hadn’t. If she had accepted the place he offered in the car leaving Germany that night, it would have been her lying dead in a pool of blood on the border, and not him.

  And then, confusingly, the anger came. That he had entered her life and changed it, then disappeared, with her still standing. That their love should have been so cruelly sundered. That he had robbed her of any hope of finding happiness again.

  How bitterly she wished that she had a photograph of him. Anything to shake the terror of forgetting his face. Abandoning the packing, she went over and pulled a book of Rilke’s poems from the shelf, thumbing through to Leo’s favourite, Exposed on the Cliffs of the Heart, in which the poet talked of the raw landscape of the heart and his sense of isolation.

  Exposed on the cliffs of the heart.

  See, how small down there,

  see: the last hamlet of words, and higher,

  and yet so small, a last

  homestead of feeling.

  Was it some prophetic gift that made Leo love this short poem shot through with a desolate sense of loss? He had read it to her time and again, and whenever her eyes moved across the page, she heard the intonations and inflections of his voice, which was why she read it often, just to bring him back to her. She loved it too, and could not ignore how, even at a time of grief, Rilke managed to see beauty in the stony ground.

  Even here, though,

  something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge

  an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.

  Clara replaced the book, made herself a Leberwurst sandwich and ate it ravenously, then went over to the basin and washed. The only soap available now was uniform soap, thin, with no lather, but abstractedly she washed herself over and over, rubbing the flesh as if she was trying to rub away the whole of Berlin, and the Nazis, her loneliness and everything that had happened in her life.