by Thynne, Jane
A frown snagged her ivory forehead. ‘It turned out he wanted to refashion my image. I was to represent the woman of the new Reich. I was not to resemble a little American vamp any more. Instead I should say I dreamed of owning a farm in the country and riding horses.’
‘Horses?’
‘Horrible, isn’t it? Filthy great beasts. Don’t you just hate horses?’
Actually Clara loved them. She’d had a horse back in Surrey, a dappled bay called Inkerman, a creature of infinite patience and intelligence, and the smell of him – warm leather and horsehair – came back to her in a rush. All the same, it was hard to think of Ursula cantering through the Tiergarten with a flush on her cheeks.
‘You could probably get to like them.’
‘Never. Just think what riding does to the thighs. Besides, darling, horses were just the half of it. Goebbels wanted Stern to take pictures of me in the kitchen, whipping up a stew. I had to contribute my favourite recipe to a stars’ cookbook. My dear, can you imagine me with a recipe? I couldn’t boil an egg. If I could find an egg to boil, that is.’
She shook her head as though Goebbels had asked her to split the atom rather than perform a perfunctory domestic task.
‘Besides, I had other plans.’
She gave Clara a look, as if assessing whether to trust her, and leaned forward.
‘I’d had an approach from Hollywood. A man called Frits Strengholt, the head of MGM – you must have heard of him.’
Vaguely Clara recalled a dough-faced bureaucrat who had been snapped at Hitler’s right hand during a number of screenings.
‘He’s very close to Goebbels. He sacked all the Jewish staff in the MGM offices at the request of the Promi and he even agreed to divorce his wife because she was Jewish and Goebbels complained. Anyhow, Strengholt said I would be a knockout in the States. I was a second Garbo and had a face to die for. I wasn’t complaining. It felt like it was my turn. Everyone’s been going to Hollywood and back for the past decade – name me a single star who hasn’t been there – Emil Jannings, Lilian Harvey, Olga Chekhova, there’s no end of them, so why not me? Only when I applied the bastards at the Chamber of Culture refused to recommend me for an exit visa.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘Too many actresses are jumping ship. It looks embarrassing. It’s bad enough that Marlene Dietrich, the most famous German actress in the world, won’t come back. So now they’ve slapped a ban on any other actresses crossing the Atlantic. I’m cursing myself. I would have left last year if it wasn’t for . . .’
‘Wasn’t for what?’
Something in her face had wilted, so that her eyes were huge and woeful, and a dab of wetness smudged her mascara. She frowned at Clara, as though she was about to continue, but at that moment the costume girl appeared, hovering behind them, bearing two powdered wigs.
‘Oh, never mind. I’m pinning my hopes on this evening at the Künstlerklub that von Arent’s invited us to. It’s for the benefit of the Americans, to showcase the Ufa stars, and all the big cheeses will be there. I’m going to have another try with my MGM man. See if I can persuade him to sort things out for me.’
Turning to the costume girl she fixed her with a beaming smile and said, ‘Darling, could you fetch me another coffee? As black as sin and as hot as hell. That’s how I like it.’
Then she tossed her head, dried off her eyes, and turned her attention to Clara.
‘Enough of my troubles. You’re doing fine. Kaffeeklatsch with the Führer’s girlfriend, that’s a good start.’
‘Shh.’ Clara looked around her. ‘Your voice carries, you know.’
Ursula laughed. A rich, husky, knowing laugh.
‘You imagine they don’t know already? They know everything, Clara, and anything they don’t already know, they’re going to find out. They know everything you think, even before you’ve thought it. There’s no point having secrets here. Secrets in Germany are like butter; they don’t keep. You’ve heard the saying: the only person with a private life in the Reich is the person who’s asleep, but that’s not enough for them. Goebbels wants to control your dreams.’
She shrugged. ‘What I want to know is how you do it. I’ve seen the way they hang around you, all the men at the studios, and yet you’ve managed to keep out of Goebbels’ clutches. How’ve you pulled it off? Are you in love or something?’
The question brought Clara up short.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘You have that look about you just now. As though you’re thinking about a man.’
‘I am. I’m thinking about my godson Erich. He’s fifteen.’
Ursula sighed, a long, world-weary sigh.
‘Ah well, fifteen or fifty, men are always a worry. Don’t I know it?’
After the fittings had been completed, and they had spent the afternoon in the rehearsal room, the cast drove back to Berlin for dinner at the Hofbräuhaus, the former royal brewery adopted by Hitler in the Twenties for the inaugural meeting of the newly launched National Socialists. By that time in the evening the place was already loud with the drinking songs of boisterous men in leather Bavarian jackets and fur-edged Tyrolean hats. Barmaids balancing great steins of beer blithely ignored the men’s ribald remarks as they placed huge dollops of sauerkraut and sausage on their plates. In the past Mozart had drunk there, and Lenin, but no one remembered that now, when the riotous alpine flowers painted on the ceiling were entwined with ornate blue swastikas, and the buxom waitresses had Nazi symbols embroidered on their dirndls.
As she sat with the cast Clara wondered again if the feeling she had – that a man was on her tail – had been correct, and if so whether someone might be following her even there. It would be hard to spot a watcher in a crowd – the place was packed to the rafters – but after a while she decided to relax. If a shadow was there, then good luck to him. He wouldn’t be up to much surveillance after a couple of steins of the Hofbräuhaus’s finest, strong Bavarian beer.
Back in the pension in Maximiliansplatz Clara sat for some time at the little desk in front of the window, watching a moon of pale bone climbing the sky. It was true that she had been thinking about Erich. She had not seen as much of him recently as she would like and she was dismayed that his first experience of foreign travel had been marred by that incident on the Wilhelm Gustloff. She wondered if Rupert had taken the chance to find anything out about it.
She had meant to write a postcard to Erich, but instead she sat, abstracted, making shapes on the letter pad as a tapestry of thoughts wove through her mind. She picked up Rebecca and tried to read, but the descriptions of the Cornish landscape only reminded her of Joachim von Ribbentrop saying that Cornwall was his favourite part of England, with the unspoken implication that if ever the Nazis were obliged to invade, Cornwall would pretty much be his. It was terrible to think of her beloved Cornwall, her childhood holiday home, in his hands. She thought of sitting on the gritty beaches and cutting her feet on the flinty rocks. Of walking through rhododendron woods, fragrant with moss and damp earth, in the early days of her childhood.
The thoughts stirred memories, and on impulse she went over to her suitcase and picked out a locket. It was a pretty thing, Victorian probably, with a design of entwined flowers and leaves and a filigree silver clasp, and all she possessed of her mother’s apart from a fox fur coat. Inside was a photograph of her mother and herself at the age of six – her mother’s watchful, luminous eyes and high cheekbones repeated with uncanny precision on the child beside her. Clara dimly remembered that she had been trying to copy her mother’s air of reserved self-control, a look that she had eventually perfected. She realized that she must be the same age now as her mother was in the picture, and wondered what her mother would have made of her current situation. Would she urge Clara to return to the safety of London, as Leo Quinn had, or would she acknowledge that her daughter had made a new life in a foreign land, just as she had done herself?
For a long time after she died, the image of her
mother on her deathbed had been the one that dominated Clara’s thoughts – her wasted, bony hand on the eiderdown, her searching, brown eyes with violet smudges beneath them, and her long hair, wired with grey and tied in an incongruously girlish plait. But eventually earlier memories returned, many of them bound up with her mother’s attempt to recreate her German youth. Though Helene Vine was self-effacing in public, hating for people to notice her German accent and always quick to defer to their father, at home she had tried ardently to recreate her Hamburg childhood, teaching the children to sing Stille Nacht at Christmas time while she played the piano, and ordering gingerbread from Harrods. She encouraged the children to leave their shoes out for presents on St Nicholas Day, and told them about Black Peter who beat bad children with his stick. On Christmas Day she baked Stutenkerl, little men made of sweet spiced dough, and they ate goose and red cabbage for lunch. Probably she expected Clara to follow in Angela’s footsteps. To be married in England by now, with children perhaps, her acting career long behind her and a dull, blameless, housewifely life ahead. Would that be so bad?
After Helene Vine died, her daughters might have grown closer, but instead grief seemed to drive a wedge between them. Angela’s politics had veered to the right and she had adopted her father’s pro-Nazi sympathies, while Clara came to Berlin. Despite their differences though, Angela remained an inveterate letter writer, covering pages of notepaper headed Elizabeth Street, SW1, in her round, curly handwriting, spiking her political sympathies with arch humour. She wrote punctiliously once a month, with news of a world that Clara had long since left behind. How Angela’s husband Gerald had been put up for White’s club by their father and the three of them had been invited to Nancy Astor’s place in Cliveden. Frequently she enclosed clippings of herself from The Tatler, grouse shooting or attending a charity ball, but while her face may have worn the myopic, glassy expression which had made her such a successful model before her marriage, the mind behind it was as sharp as a whip. Angela prided herself on her ability to tell what her younger sister was thinking – indeed it was probably having Angela as a sister that had honed Clara’s ability as an actress.
Though Angela had plenty of friends who studied music and flitted between castles in Bavaria and art in Berlin, she maintained a relentless campaign to persuade Clara to return to England. She had tried again when she visited the previous year. ‘I’ve never understood why you felt you had to leave us and spend all this time abroad. I know you have your career and everything, but you must miss England, surely? All those people you used to go round with. Ida McCloud. The Cavendishes. And you didn’t even make it for my wedding! What is it about Germany?’
In that moment Clara had been badly tempted to tell her: of her discovery that their grandmother was Jewish, and that they themselves were a quarter Jewish, a fact which had been kept from them all their lives, as though it was something to be ashamed of. But she could never be truthful with Angela; the intimacy they had once shared was over and instead she said nothing, leading her sister to deduce that Clara’s affection for Berlin must be connected to her love life.
‘It’s a man, isn’t it? Anyone special?’ Angela enquired in her knowing, elder sister voice. Then, more softly, ‘Whoever it is, you want to get a move on, Pidge. Men don’t wait around forever.’
Pidge was a childhood nickname. A reference to the time when an eight-year-old Clara had found a pigeon with a broken wing, a mess of fright and clotted feathers, and insisted on nursing the bird in a cardboard box until, inevitably, it expired. The memory stung Clara into denial.
‘It isn’t a man. There’s no one special.’
It felt like a lie, but perhaps it was true.
It was hard to unwind. Even when she undressed and lay between the cool sheets, Clara couldn’t sleep. Angela’s question, ‘Anyone special?’ ran through her brain, along with her advice, so casually dispensed, ‘Men don’t wait around forever.’ That was true. The splinter of pain left by Leo was a lingering reminder of that. She recalled what Eva Braun had said about perfume, that sometimes the most unlikely things, when the particles paired and collided, could have a dramatic effect. Then the face of Max Brandt came to her, talking of how perfume stirred olfactory memory – the kind which went to the deep seabed of the brain and unlocked the images buried there. Of the hundreds of strange ingredients in perfume, and the exotic names they had. ‘They don’t work so well in German of course; you have to say them in French.’
But Max Brandt was not to be trusted, no matter how attractive he might be. That brown gaze and seductive smile was concealing something, she was sure of it, and every instinct Clara possessed warned her to be wary. All the same when she eventually fell asleep she dreamed of the collision of unlikely particles and of dinner with Max Brandt, speaking softly to her in French.
Chapter Eighteen
Rosa Winter reached for Adolf Hitler and idly flicked his right arm up and down into a salute. He looked faintly risible, standing rigidly in his Mercedes 770, with his moustache reduced to a mere dab, and cheeks as rosy as a case of diphtheria. The Führer figurine was one of several stationed on her desk in preparation for a talk to be given that afternoon to the senior officials of the cultural section of the Reich Mothers Service. Already several of the women had begun to arrive, in their frumpy grey coats and flat black boots, notebooks and pens at the ready for the lecture on the importance of promoting the correct German playthings. Toy production in Germany had been severely curtailed in recent years, but the Elastolin company was still doing a roaring trade with its replica soldiers and action figures. As well as Hitler, you could buy Goering, Hess, Goebbels, Himmler, von Schirach, Mussolini and Franco, though the figurine of SA leader Ernst Röhm had been discreetly discontinued after Hitler had him assassinated in 1934. The figures were made of plastic now because all metal was needed for aeroplanes, but Joseph Goebbels had recently instructed that the heads of the most important figures should in future be crafted out of porcelain, to look more realistic. Rosa wasn’t sure it made much difference. Making Himmler more lifelike was hardly going to make children want to play with him.
Traditional German toys, preferably made of wood, were essential to convey the correct ideological conditioning, the Führerin believed, so along with the action figures Rosa had that morning been sent out to buy puzzle games with pieces of wood that spelt out the words Adolf Hitler, a spelling book – A is for Adolf, B is for Bormann etc – and a mobile with the face of Hitler to hang above a baby’s cot. There were card games too, like the one where players competed to collect the top Nazi leaders, with Hitler, of course, worth the maximum number of points. All these toys would be demonstrated to the women’s leaders in their session on Childhood Indoctrination, and everyone would be allowed to examine them more closely, though not, of course, play with them.
The Führerin had indicated that, as a perk of the job, Rosa might like to take home the Hitler figurine for Susi’s son, Hans-Otto, when they had finished with it. Already Rosa was imagining Hans-Otto’s wide face lighting up as he saw it, the vacant blue eyes sparking with delight when she gave it to him that night.
Thursday evenings were when Rosa looked after her nephew while Susi went to her weekly Mutterdienst meetings and Pauly was off drinking with his friends from work. As soon as she had finished for the day, Rosa took a tram to the dingy, pockmarked block in Moabit where the Kramers had their apartment, and climbed the stone stairs to the fourth floor. But as soon as Susi opened the door, it was clear she would not be leaving the house. Her eyes were pink and blotchy with crying and she was wearing her apron. She held up a handkerchief to her face, ushering Rosa inside with a tired wave.
‘Is it Pauly again?’ During their rows, Pauly was known to resort to physical force to give his argument more emphasis.
‘No. But I’m not going out tonight. I have to stay in with Hans-Otto.’
‘What’s wrong?’ said Rosa with a surge of alarm. ‘Is it another fit?’
‘I
t’s worse.’
As Susi shunted her sister into the kitchen, Rosa suppressed a gag. The claggy moisture of a cabbage stew hung in the air, mingled with the heavy damp of drying clothes stacked on an ironing board and underwear soaking in a bucket. Hans-Otto was sitting on the floor, playing lethargically with a cardboard box, still dressed in his school uniform of a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck and tucked into his trousers. His face had a dazed expression, as though he was listening to music that only he could hear, but as soon as he saw Rosa he held out his arms for a hug.
Susi returned to the sink and resumed savagely scrubbing potatoes.
‘You know how he is at school. You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’
On the occasions when she had collected him from school, Rosa had watched Hans-Otto amongst his classmates, and winced inwardly at how he hung back while the other boys scampered around the schoolyard, faces flushed and yelling their lungs out. He didn’t properly come alive until they reached the pet shop on the way home, where he would smile at the puppies and place his palms flat on the window as their wet noses nuzzled the glass.
‘Well, now we’ve had this.’ Susi fumbled in her apron pocket and thrust a letter towards her. It was a thin blue envelope, marked with the official stamp of Hans-Otto’s school office, and contained a terse note, outlined in the finest National Socialist officialese.
Dear Herr and Frau Kramer,
I am writing with regard to the episode suffered this week by your son. This episode, as well as difficulties observed by your son’s teachers, has alerted us to the possibility of congenital weakness. Under the law for prevention of Genetic Diseases, 1933, I am required to report any signs of weakness or potential disability to the requisite authorities. Please be advised that unless you can provide medical evidence that your son is free from any disease of heredity the school will report his case for examination by a Heredity Health Court which will evaluate his condition. The school awaits your response.
