by Thynne, Jane
‘She’s ten. And she’s different from other children. It’s probably because she’s an only child. Or she lost her Vati. In some ways she’s really advanced for her age, but in other ways she’s . . . I don’t know. Too naïve. Or rebellious.’ Steffi gave a quick, instinctive glance around her.
‘The other day she got in trouble. She defaced a cabinet of Der Stürmer on her way home from school. They put the stands deliberately right outside the schools so the children see them and have to walk past them every day, but Nina decided to kick an entire cabinet down.’
Despite herself, Clara gasped. Der Stürmer was the Jew-hating Nazi newspaper whose pages were dominated with stories of how criminal and defective the Jews were, and editorials on how to resolve the Jewish question. The idea of any child – let alone a Jewish child – defacing one of its Stürmerstands was alarming.
‘Thankfully, one of the kinder teachers saw, and the matter hasn’t gone any further. But when I talk to Nina about it, she just looks at me and I can’t tell what’s going on behind those eyes. She’s unfathomable, even to me. In fact, most of all to me. What I would really like is to send her away, but lone children are not allowed to leave Germany unaccompanied. And that’s not all . . .’
Steffi took Clara’s hands in her own and lifted her face. Her normally calm hands were shaking, and her eyes glistened with unshed tears.
‘I’m nervous, Clara. I think they’re planning something round here. We’ve had bands of stormtroopers walking around the streets for months, painting on the walls and kicking in the windows, but there’s a man – one of the Blockwarts here – who said something bad was coming. He has contacts in the Gestapo and he took me aside the other morning and said, “They have something planned for the Jews. They’re drawing up lists of names and properties. No one will be able to help you.” He was doing me a favour by advising me to go as soon as I could.’
‘Something planned?’
‘That’s what he said. Why does nobody do anything? Sometimes, I think to myself, when all of us Jews have gone, what will the Nazis do? What will they do with their hatred then?’
Steffi turned away to busy herself parcelling up Clara’s new summer dress and Clara realized that she simply couldn’t talk any more.
‘I’d better be off. I’m meeting my godson at the Lehrter Bahnhof.’
There was no way she was going to tell Steffi that her godson had been on a KdF cruise. The idea of some Germans heading off on sunny foreign jaunts while others did everything in their power to leave the country only to be obstructed by bureaucracy at every level was simply too grotesque.
She touched Steffi lightly on the arm. It was hard to show the sympathy she felt, or the gratitude that Steffi had trusted her enough to confide her dangerous secret.
‘I’m sure that Blockwart was scaremongering. About something happening. It’ll be OK.’
But secretly she thought that was about as credible as the horoscopes in the Berliner Tageblatt.
She was late, of course. At the Lehrter Bahnhof the train from Hamburg had already arrived and the clatter of disembarking passengers rose high into the crisscrossed steel arches of the vaulted roof. Clara searched frantically for the two figures in the crowd.
Physically brown as a nut and bursting with health, Erich looked just how Clara expected him to look after two weeks in the sole company of his grandmother. Mutinous, grumpy, bordering on truculent. The interests of a widow in her seventies had little in common with those of a teenage boy and old Frau Schmidt’s desire to see her grandson avoid the kind of tragedy that had befallen his late mother tended to express itself in a perpetual low-level nagging. The nagging was born of love, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier for Erich, and Clara knew that both of them would be longing to escape each other’s company for a while. The pair of them lived in Neukölln, in an apartment at the end of a long corridor stinking of cabbage stew and drying nappies.
‘Here, let me take that, Frau Schmidt.’ Clara heaved a couple of bags from the old lady and looked around for a porter. Frau Schmidt was stout, with swollen ankles and knuckles like walnuts. Whenever she looked at those hands Clara remembered Helga talking of her mother returning from the hospital where she worked as a nurse each night, her apron dark with blood and her hands raw with scrubbing.
‘Why don’t I take Erich off for a meal and let you get back home?’
Her face lit up. ‘That would be kind, Fräulein Vine.’ Though she had known Clara since the death of her daughter five years ago, and accepted a monthly payment to help with Erich’s costs, old Frau Schmidt still found it difficult to address Clara informally. ‘It will give me a chance to unpack and Erich can tell you all about our excitements.’
Clara saw the old lady into a taxi and, turning brightly to Erich, took the smaller of his bags from him and headed for the tram.
‘What would you say to tea at the Konditorei Schilling?’
The Konditorei Schilling on the corner of Koch Strasse and Friedrichstrasse was their new favourite place, largely because of its famous selection of excellent cakes, which were irresistible to Erich’s sweet tooth. A long counter displaying baked goods and pastries led to a series of tables and chairs at the back. Erich would devote several minutes of serious scrutiny to the trays of cinnamon-speckled Apfeltorte, syrupy honey cakes and towering chocolate cake layered with cream before making his choice. They were not as delicious as they used to be – sugar was in short supply and the chocolate cakes were layered with a peculiar artificial cream that tasted like petrol – but they still looked splendid, and it was a pleasure for Clara to have Erich to herself.
They established themselves with a hot chocolate and Butterkuchen for Erich and a glass of tea and Apfelkuchen for Clara, but Erich kept his eyes lowered and fiddled with his spoon, tapping it annoyingly on the side of his cup.
‘So tell me everything,’ said Clara, partly to stop the tapping.
‘Not much to tell,’ he shrugged, continuing to tap his spoon.
Clara tried to contain her irritation and focus on the pleasure of being with her godson. ‘Tell me anyhow. I want to hear everything. You don’t look like someone who’s just had the holiday of a lifetime.’
‘It was all right.’
‘Just all right?’
‘OK. It wasn’t then.’
Erich frowned and squinted up at her. When she had first become involved in Erich’s life, as a promise she made to his dead mother, Clara had seen Helga in him all the time. But now it was just the occasional flash of his sceptical, dark eyes that reminded her of his mother and when that happened Clara felt a pang of sorrow at what Helga had missed and a renewed resolve to look after Erich as well as his mother would have wanted. They talked about Helga less and less now, and Clara found herself hesitating to mention her name, in case Erich should be upset.
Erich paused, as if assessing whether to confide in her, then frowned.
‘There was this woman – lady. She was very friendly. She had the cabin next to mine. We got talking because of you actually.’
‘Me?’
‘She was interested in film. She had this collection of cigarette cards, like the one I have, only much better.’
Cigarette cards were a craze that crossed all age groups. All the tobacco companies did them, with subjects ranging from cars and aeroplanes, to flowers or film actors. The idea was to acquire a complete set, and in the process to smoke a lot of cigarettes. One brand, Reemtsma, had recently produced a series of Ufa actors and Clara’s own photo had been included.
‘She had the one you did for The Pilot’s Wife and I told her you were my godmother.’
Clara smiled.
‘Sounds nice. What was her name?’
‘Ada Freitag. But that’s not the point.’ Erich traced the pattern on the table’s linoleum surface, as if the path of its shiny tessellations might help him comprehend the sequence of events. ‘The thing is . . . she disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?�
�� Clara cocked her head curiously. A lot of people were disappearing right now. But not from cruise ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
‘Where was the ship docked at the time? Do you think she just wandered off and didn’t get back in time?’
Tightly, he said, ‘It wasn’t in port. It was at sea. I think she fell overboard.’
‘Oh, Erich, that’s terrible.’ Clara reached a hand across to him. ‘That can’t be true. Are you sure?’
Erich shifted his arm slightly to detach Clara’s hand.
‘I don’t know. One moment she was there talking to me, the next she said she had something to do and could I look after her things. But she never came back.’
Clara’s mind leapt to the obvious conclusion. The girl had formed a romantic attachment with another passenger and spent the remainder of the voyage in his bunk. It was a holiday, after all, though Erich might be too innocent to understand the concept of a holiday romance.
‘I think,’ she said tentatively, ‘that perhaps Ada might have met a friend, and decided to spend the rest of the cruise with them. Maybe a boyfriend.’
‘I’m not a baby, Clara. I thought that too. Of course I did. But she never came back to her cabin. And all her belongings in her cabin disappeared too.’
‘Perhaps she moved into another cabin.’
‘I wondered that. So I thought I’d go to the captain and ask him.’
‘Goodness.’ Clara quailed at the thought of her godson interrogating the ship’s captain. It was entirely in character. Though small for his age, Erich was assertive, and possessed a stubborn inclination to stand up to authority. He had inherited it from his mother and in her case it had proved fatal.
‘Are you sure you should have bothered the captain?’
‘Of course. He’s in charge of the ship, isn’t he? He ought to be worried if one of his passengers just vanishes. Anyway, he was happy to help. He told me she had disembarked at Funchal. He even showed me this ship’s log, with all the names and dates on it, and I could see that it was written there: Fräulein Ada Freitag. Disembarked Funchal, 23rd August.’
‘So that’s the explanation.’
‘No.’ Erich frowned, impatient for Clara to keep up. ‘Because I know that wasn’t true. I talked to Ada after we left Madeira.’
‘Are you sure?’
He gave her a brief, withering look.
‘I asked Oma about it, but she said the ship’s captain knew best. And after I’d asked a couple of times, she got cross and refused to talk about it any more. So I decided on a plan.’
‘Which is?’
‘It involves you. Do you think, Clara, you could ask someone?’
‘Me! Who could I ask?’
‘I don’t know. Journalists. You meet them. They interview you. There must be someone.’
Clara wanted to ask Erich why the fate of a chance acquaintance, even if it was a pretty young woman, should matter so much to him, but the answer was staring her in the face. Or rather it was sitting before her, a bundle of tempestuous adolescent emotion, his boyish features becoming sharper, and his body growing so swiftly that the HJ uniform she had so recently invested in would all too soon need to be replaced.
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
His face softened in relief. ‘Thank you, Clara. I knew I could count on you. Especially as she was so interested in you. I think she was a fan.’
Clara saw Erich onto the U-Bahn back to his grandmother’s apartment in Neukölln, and then headed down Friedrichstrasse, puzzling over his story. The fact that the woman’s departure was noted in the ship’s log seemed pretty conclusive, but it was not like Erich to make a mistake like that. He had an excellent memory and a sharp mind for figures. Above all, Clara was sorry that the mix-up should have spoiled his first foreign trip. There was no telling when he would get another chance to travel abroad, and God forbid it should be in the cabin of a Luftwaffe plane. Erich never stopped talking about his ambition to begin pilot training the moment he reached seventeen.
Sunk in thought, she received a sharp blow in the ribs as she collided with a man and apologized instinctively, or at least the English half of her did, even though it was she who had been jostled.
‘I’m sorry.’
The man had a handsome face with a thin moustache. His lips twitched upwards in a ghost of a smile.
‘You want to watch yourself, Fräulein.’
Clara frowned.
Why did no one have any manners these days? But then, perhaps it was absurd to mind about Berliners losing their manners when you considered everything else they were losing.
Chapter Six
There was always a small crowd of sightseers outside the Reich Chancellery in Wilhelmstrasse. Mostly they were tourists from out of town, hoping to catch the glimpse of the Führer that would form the highlight of their trip to Berlin. Hitler knew this, and when he was in Berlin he would often make an impromptu appearance on a first-floor balcony that had been added onto the building for precisely this purpose. He would emerge like a god on Mount Olympus, albeit a putty-faced god in brown uniform with a swastika armband, accepting the salutes of the crowd before ducking away again as the disembodied white gloves of SS guards, like stage magicians, closed the curtains behind him. That day, as the sky pressed down like a hard blue lid and a blast of heat rose from the pavement, the crowd was there as usual, but they looked clammy and less excitable. The sentries, rigid in their steel helmets and massive black boots, sweated through the seams of their uniforms as they stood outside the newly refurbished bronze double doors. The Chancellery was in the process of being extensively rebuilt by Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, and this week it had gained another, unexpected decoration. Like all the other public buildings in this city, the roof had been fitted with slender anti-aircraft guns pointing menacingly up at the sky and, as if in response, a squadron of silver Luftwaffe planes flew directly overhead. Along with the bunkers and the bomb shelters now being dug, the belligerently billowing swastika flags and the detachments of soldiers marching along Unter den Linden in their high boots, everything suggested a city preparing for war.
Clara clicked along the road, saw the crowd and crossed to the eastern side of the Wilhelmstrasse, where the buildings cast welcome blocks of shade. The windows of the Propaganda Ministry, known to everyone as the Promi, had been opened and the faint clatter of typewriters could be heard, compiling the daily stream of orders and directives which reminded the nation’s newspapers about the atrocities of the Czechs or reprimanded them for printing unhappy horoscopes. It was an oppressive, airless day. Not a whisper of breeze flickered the leaves on the linden trees. It was the kind of day to be in Berlin’s great park, the Tiergarten, or farther out, walking by the Grunewald lakes or sunbathing on the silver sand of the Strandbad Wannsee, but sunbathing was the last thing on Clara’s mind as she made her way back towards her apartment, a few streets beyond Nollendorfplatz. She had more important things to contemplate.
The more Clara pondered Eva Braun, the more she realized how little she knew about her. No more than a handful of facts. Eva came from Munich, where Hitler had first encountered her working in the shop of Heinrich Hoffmann, his official photographer. She was much younger than him, no more than twenty-six, Clara thought, but still the Führer considered her a pleasant enough companion for the opera and excursions to the Berghof, his retreat in the Obersalzberg mountains. Eva Braun came to Berlin sometimes, but Clara had never even glimpsed her. Magda Goebbels had dismissed her as silly, ill-educated and provincial and Emmy Goering said she liked cheap jewellery and perfume. To Clara, the more astonishing question was what such a young, and apparently ordinary, girl could have in common with a man like Hitler. How she could bear to be brushed from the public record, because Hitler had proclaimed himself married to the nation? And now Clara had been asked to get close to her. She had no idea how she would even meet the girl, let alone get to know her. It was a mission which seemed as fraught and difficult as
scaling the cliffs of the Obersalzberg itself.
Turning into Winterfeldtstrasse, Clara quickly scanned the street. This kind of automatic scrutiny came as second nature to her now, one of a number of little habits like memorizing the numberplates of cars parked outside her apartment or counting the pedestrians she passed. Her impulse was to note anything unfamiliar, but today the long, leafy street of residential blocks, including her own ochre-painted nineteenth-century building with its heavy wooden front door, looked the same as ever. The only changes she detected were an advertisement for Leni Riefenstahl’s latest film Festival of Beauty, featuring three young women in swimming costumes, that had been erected on a hoarding at the end of the road next to a poster in which Berlin’s top illusionist Alois Kassner posed menacingly over a nubile brunette with the slogan Kassner makes a girl vanish! And there was a brand new swastika flag hanging on the pole outside the apartment door.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Entering the dim hallway, and noting as always the single missing tile in the chipped chequerboard floor, Clara heard the familiar greeting from the cubicle of Rudi, the Blockwart.
‘Heil Hitler! Fräulein Vine!’
Rudi, a fanatical old Nazi with a leathery complexion and a clutch of brown teeth, was in charge of the maintenance and care-taking of the apartment. His spine was severely bent from scoliosis, but he was still able to dart swiftly from his cubicle like some barnacled sea creature scuttling from its hole. Despite his inauspicious appearance, Rudi was a perfect example of the way that the Nazis managed to keep Berlin’s four million residents under control while they were behind closed doors. The old man maintained a relentless scrutiny of the residents of the block, and reported the slightest deviation from proper behaviour to the authorities. Even activities not in themselves illegal could still suggest potential criminality to Rudi’s luridly suspicious mind. Excessive typewriting might imply the production of resistance pamphlets, and tantalizing cooking smells could mean the resident had been benefiting from black market food. Recently, Clara suspected that the arrest of Herr Kaufmann, the shy bachelor who worked as a fiction reader at Ullstein publishers and occupied the apartment adjoining hers, had been prompted by a denunciation from Rudi about his visits from young men. The vast majority of arrests for homosexuality came from local informers. Herr Kaufmann might no longer be there, but the suspicion of his homosexuality lingered like a stain and the other residents grew more cautious of Rudi’s all-encompassing gaze.
