Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  (Suppose I had a woman meddling with my work, Herr Speer! I need peace and quiet in my leisure hours. . . .)

  Well, there you are then, Mr. Greene.

  AT THIS SEASON THE MOUNTAIN was surrounded by thick autumnal mists. It was the time of year that makes you think of staying where you are for the winter. Autumn tempts you to linger, at least until the coming of spring.

  The winter semester had begun in Jena. I was still determined to go back soon. But whenever I mentioned it to Eva, she begged me to stay, as if she felt God knows what depended on it. Her fear of being alone, without the excuse I offered her for little diversions, must have been boundless. And some of it had rubbed off on me, too. The life we lived here, like two princesses, its curious mixture of tedium and amusement, the luxury surrounding us, there was something seductive about all that, something that sapped my will and drew me along with it, repeating daily what was always the same, like those afternoons playing cards in Eva’s house in Munich years ago. Once you begin you can’t stop.

  Sometimes I phoned my mother. My father always puts the receiver down without a word, and I could talk to my mother only when he was not at home. If he was she confined herself to short answers.

  We’re all right.

  Well, there’s a war on.

  She dared not ask how I was when my father was around. But when she was alone she urged me to come home.

  And bring Eva with you, she said. You girls can’t stay where you are when the war ends!

  I asked her to send me some warm winter clothes. She promised, but I waited for the parcel in vain. My father must have forbidden it, and she was no heroine who could hide things from him.

  I could just hear him saying, if she’s feeling cold she’d better come home. I knew it broke his heart to know where I was.

  In the end Eva lent me all I needed from her own wardrobe. She had plenty of clothes, and I was never in my life as elegantly dressed as in that last winter of the war.

  Now that I had moved into the house on the Mooslahner Kopf I spent the morning studying the physics textbooks I had brought with me. The bathing season was over. Eva respected my going back to the Tea House after breakfast. She never asked what I was doing there, but she let me off the task of keeping her company. I didn’t know what she herself did during these hours. We met again at the Berghof for lunch and spent the rest of the day together.

  I used the round tower with the view of the valley as my study, and I have never again had such a beautiful study. Mist dripped from the larches outside my windows. The yellow of their needles shone through the grayness, and just before the mist rose and dispersed entirely the Watzmann came into view behind its veils, while the solution to one of the exercises in my textbook revealed itself with majestic clarity, and I was rewarded with a correct answer that could be verified.

  I loved these hours that I had all to myself. I loved the indestructible happiness they brought me, a happiness raised above all suspicions, uncertainties, and doubts. I was sure I would go far in my scientific career. I saw a future as a researcher before me. Experiments, laboratories, scientific conferences at which I would be much admired for the delivery of my findings . . . I had no idea that these proud hours alone in Hitler’s tea salon were my last excursions into the pure, clear world of the natural sciences, my last experience of a happiness bought at the cost of nothing but enjoyable intellectual effort.

  I was sorry for Eva, who was unable to experience such happiness. I tried again and again to share it with her, at the same time training my ability as a teacher by guiding her interest to the miracle of the polarization of light, or explaining the way in which electrophoresis functions—only metaphorically and as a general principle, of course.

  She reminded me slightly of my mother in her reaction to my attempts to lead her, with missionary zeal, to the marvels of the world and of life, hoping at least to elicit from her something like amazement at the scientific approach to these subjects.

  I’m really pleased it gives you so much fun, dear, my mother used to say.

  It was hopeless.

  Eva reacted similarly, if not in such a calm maternal way, at least with just the same friendly indifference. She thought it “very sensible” of me to be studying, because getting hold of a husband could be very difficult, look at her, the living proof of it. But she didn’t understand that the field I had chosen genuinely interested me, and once, when I talked about the pleasure of my mornings, when I tried explaining what I felt—pride, independence, a certain sense of invulnerability, as if I were made immune to all humiliations, as if my study of physics was a kind of dragon’s blood in which I could bathe as often as I liked—when I tried explaining this Eva looked at me as if I were out of my mind. She did not understand the slightest part of what I was trying to tell her.

  The only person who did understand me was Albert Speer.

  He turned up one day, walked into the hall of the Berghof, where I was sitting with Eva by the Nibelungen-like hearth—it was a rainy autumn afternoon, and we had got them to light a fire—he kissed Eva’s hand, paid her compliments, asked if he could be of service to her, she knew, he said, that if there was anything he could do for her she only had to say so, and then he came over to me and kissed my hand, too. I think he was the first man who ever did.

  What’s that you’re reading? he asked, and I saw that he was asking only out of politeness. He obviously thought nothing of the intellectual activities of women. Then his eye fell on the book’s author and title: Werner Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of Quantum Theory. He looked at me in surprise, and decided, I suppose out of a kind of embarrassment, to address himself to Eva, saying something like: Well, imagine your cousin reading that! Only then did he turn to me, asked me what course of studies I was taking, whose lectures I had attended in Jena.

  Could I perhaps talk to him about Hugh Carleton Greene? I felt sure he knew about him. I felt sure he would know more about the war than Greene did. He was the cleverest man I’d met for a long time. Self-confident. Superior. A little restless, in too much of a hurry, too distrait, as if someone had just summoned him and he was already on his way. Did Hugh Carleton Greene know that Hitler had men like Speer around him?

  I hoped suddenly that he had news of some kind for us. A message, just for us, secret news of an imminent change for the better. Something along the lines of: Ladies, not a word to anyone else, but the war will soon be over. I’d have believed him. I’d have believed him more readily than anyone else. His praise, his lively interest in my work had led me to overestimate myself. His interest was always lively, and always moved on quickly to something else, but I wasn’t to know that.

  Herr Speer, I said, Eva and I would very much like to see the new bunkers.

  Your cousin, he said, rising, knows where to go for that kind of thing.

  He suddenly seemed irritated.

  I’m afraid I’m too short of time to put myself at your disposal any further.

  Are you crazy? Eva snapped at me when he had left. Acting the blue-stocking! Speer hates it. All men hate it. Physical Principles, she said in an affected tone of voice, and that quantum thingummy. Didn’t you see him roll his eyes? Now he’ll think that kind of thing runs in the family. And what did you mean by saying: Herr Speer, we’d like to see the new bunkers? I suppose you thought that would make him regard you as an expert on air-raid shelters!

  Did Eva herself actually know what was going on underground? Like me, she had heard the rumbling inside the mountain, felt the ground tremble under our feet. Did she really not want to know what it meant? Didn’t she, like me, see the trucks driving along the access road to the Obersalzberg day and night? Did she really not know who lived in the huts on the Antenberg, five hundred meters away from us as the crow flies? Didn’t she sometimes see the lines of gray-clad men from a distance, marching in step as they were taken out to work and then back to the huts?

  From a distance. We saw them from a distance. From where we were�
�at the very center of events—we saw everything that happened only from a great distance.

  If you really want to know, said Eva, I’ve seen the plans and that’s enough for me. Schenk came here and asked how I wanted the bathrooms tiled, and if the wooden paneling in my bedroom should be natural or white. I told him I didn’t mind. I shall never go down there anyway, I told him.

  Schenk?

  Bormann’s head administrator. If you ask me, the whole idea of the bunkers is a whim of his. You don’t know Bormann. He’s a real slave-driver. He likes to have other people working themselves to death for him. When those catacombs he’s having driven into the mountain are finally ready he’ll think of something new to plague his workmen with, something that’ll let him tyrannize over the engineers and craftsmen. Did you know that almost the whole mountain belongs to him personally? Not to the Führer. To Bormann.

  Once, she said thoughtfully, before the war, when everything was still different, the Freidinglehen stood down there on the way to the valley—an old farmhouse, but it was empty.

  Who used to live there? I interrupted. Where had they gone?

  No idea, she said. There wasn’t anyone living up here anymore when we arrived. That’s to say, well, there was, but they . . . sort of moved out. The Freidinglehen people were the last of them. And the house got in the way of our view. It was annoying, you see. The windows were all broken. They’d been broken at some point when the house was being cleared—I mean when the people who lived there moved out. Well, you see, they weren’t moving out of their own accord, not really. Many of the families had lived up here for several hundred years. Anyway, the house was in the way. So the Führer asks Bormann how long he would need to demolish it. Three days, Führer, says Bormann, or more precisely three days and three nights. Good, says the Führer. The Aga Khan is coming in three days’ time. And when the Aga Khan arrived there was nothing but green turf where the house had stood. That’s Bormann for you. There’s nothing he can’t do. He could have the whole mountain removed in a day and built again next day if he wanted. I don’t like Bormann. Have you ever seen Gerda?

  Who?

  Gerda Bormann. She lives here on the Berg, too. Her garden goes almost all the way down to the Tea House.

  I’ve sometimes heard children’s voices, I said.

  She has ten of them, said Eva. I feel sorry for her. Imagine being married to a man like that. It must be terrible.

  And is she unhappy? I asked.

  Children’s voices. Suddenly I remember hearing shouting one day at the end of summer. It wasn’t children shouting. I had heard the voice of an adolescent boy—it had either broken or was just breaking—and a woman shouting “Martin! Martin!” I went out of the Tea House. I heard something like the sounds of the hunt, the noise of something crashing through branches, the branches breaking, the running and hard breathing of a hunted animal trying to escape through the undergrowth. Then the hunter caught up. I heard the whistling sound of a whip cutting through the air, the precise noise of the whip hitting a body, the scream that followed every lash. And I saw them. It was all going on not far away. I saw the boy clutching a tree trunk, his arms around it, I saw the man, no taller than he was, chastising him. I saw that the boy could have defended himself, that he was quite strong enough to wrench the whip from his father’s hands. I saw that he didn’t know that, hadn’t realized yet, was letting himself be beaten the way he had always been. I heard his screams of “Stop it! Stop it!” And I saw the woman who came running down the hill calling out “Martin! Martin!” For a moment she saw me, too. She stopped and we stared at each other before I turned and went back into the house.

  She’s the saddest woman I’ve ever seen, said Eva. And the most beautiful.

  I wanted to say, You’re the saddest woman I’ve ever seen. But instead I said, Well, what about it? Shall we go and look at the bunkers?

  If Bormann is building them, she said, I’m not setting foot inside.

  Yet there was everything there she needed. She’d have had a big wardrobe. A wardrobe with mirrors inside the doors and indirect lighting. She could have changed her clothes seven times a day in Hell. But there is no day in Hell. It’s always night. I should know. I’ve been there.

  IN THE EVENING, after the showing of a film, I set off on my way to the Mooslahner Kopf. I heard the voices of my companions somewhere behind me. They were always there. I saw their cigarettes glow in the dark. Nothing could happen to me. When I closed the door behind me I heard their footsteps as they patrolled around the house.

  I knew they had a key to the Tea House. I was the best-guarded virgin in the whole German Reich. Early in the morning, when I was still half asleep, I heard them again.

  So I was not greatly alarmed when, one morning, I suddenly heard someone enter the house. I thought of Eva—perhaps she had sent me a message. But I had never before seen the woman standing just inside the door.

  How did you get in? I asked.

  The first thing I felt was her furious dislike of me.

  The same way as you, she said. I still have a key.

  Who are you? I asked.

  The woman had been walking through the rain. Her small hat was dripping. Her coat, slightly too short, was clinging to her. She was shivering. She wore very high heeled shoes that were much too thin. I wondered how she had ever made her way to the Tea House in those shoes in such weather. She was no longer in her first youth, it struck me at the time, perhaps twice my own age.

  Instead of answering she just stared at me.

  What do you want? I asked.

  Nothing, she said. I just wanted to see who it is now.

  Her voice dropped to an indistinct murmur. Was she ill-wishing me? Was she telling me a secret I couldn’t understand?

  Then she turned and hurried away. I heard the click of her heels on the wooden flooring and the catch of the front door as it closed. I followed her.

  What did you say? I called after her.

  But she had already disappeared around a curve in the path.

  It was freezing cold. By now the rain was pouring down. It would turn to large snowflakes as the day went on. The woman was much too lightly dressed. Her silk stockings. Her shoes. Everything about her was chosen for the wrong occasion. And I was the wrong person to be the object of her anger and disappointment. Her . . . her jealousy, was it? But why be jealous of me? And why had she come to the Tea House? Where did she get the key?

  Was I really as safe here as I had thought? Or were there loopholes for the unexpected after all in the faultlessly guarded, hierarchically ordered world of the Obersalzberg? Was there a parallel world of uncontrollable passions whose existence I had not previously suspected? The scene between the Bormann family. The sly recalcitrance of the staff. A strange woman in the Tea House. I decided not to tell Eva about the incident, but to be more watchful.

  The first snow fell that day. It was around this time that the German troops stationed in Albania surrendered Tirana. American units took Metz and Strasbourg. Hitler issued a special order stating that if the commanders of sections of troops that had been cut off wanted to stop fighting, they must hand over command to any subordinate determined to hold out. I could imagine what Hugh Carleton Greene would make of that: Hitler was now staking everything on the last madmen in his army. He had given the command to them. To those like himself, the deranged and merciless.

  When I was a child I saw the first snow with a child’s eyes. The world was putting on fancy dress for my delectation. I was enchanted. But since the war, and to this day, when the first snow falls I see a shroud. The endless snowy steppes out in the East. The weary men for whom there is no shelter, no safety. Their slow steps. Their isolation. The white storm against which they will defend themselves a little longer, and which will finally bring them to their knees. No rescue. Nothing.

  Since the war, and to this day, I have known nothing sadder than the first snow. The wet, black, treacherous tracks in it. Hungry, wandering animals, some hu
nted, others hunting. Black patterns in the snow, the traces suddenly made visible of an otherwise hidden world bent on getting a little food, on domination, on warmth. The world of stray cats, foxes, pine martens, and homeless human beings.

  I wake up from terrible dreams in the night. I have been dreaming that I was in Hitler’s Tea House.

  I am in Hitler’s Tea House. If this isn’t a dream, how will I escape the terrors of my nightmare? In that dream there was someone else in the Tea House with me. Someone watching me like a secret camera. A strange consciousness observing me. It was there.

  It is there. I can hear its footsteps. It is moving along the passage outside my bedroom door. It is not wearing shoes, and is trying to keep as quiet as possible. All the same, I can hear it stealing into the kitchen. The door creaks softly.

  I want to wake up, but how can I when I know I’m already awake? In my dream, I cautiously get out of bed, taking care not to make any noise either. Then I hear a clatter as something drops to the kitchen floor. Suddenly I am wide awake. At the same time I think of the woman that morning. The woman who hates me. She’s come back, I think. She wants to kill me. I have no idea why. But I dredge up from my dream the assumption that she must want to kill me.

  I have nothing to use as a weapon. I must get to the tea salon somehow before she finds me. I am planning to defend myself with the fire poker that’s in there. I am still acting on the logic of my dream. But what is going on outside me follows the same logic, too. I make my way along the wall to the tea salon. Only when I have the poker in my hand do I realize it is a murder weapon. I stand there in the dark, listening. All is quiet in the kitchen, but then I clearly hear a chair being moved. If she wants to kill me, what is she doing in the kitchen?

  I can see in the dark now. My fear ensures that my pupils are wide open. From the passage I see that the kitchen door is open. And I see the figure sitting at the table.

  What are you doing here? I ask.