Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  On that morning I shall not be sitting at my desk as usual, but standing at the window and staring out, turning my back on two men from the security service whose orders are not to let me out of their sight for a moment. I shall be under suspicion of having committed a political crime. I shall be waiting for the arrival of our enemies, and nothing else. Where are they? I shall keep thinking as I look down into the valley of the Ache.

  And then they come without warning. Suddenly there they are. They come over the Hoher Göll, and with them comes the urgent air-raid warning signal that ought really to be preceded by an ordinary air-raid warning. Suddenly I shall be aware of the distance to the bunker entrance of the Berghof, and think that they may be locking the doors there.

  At this moment the difference between me, the prisoner, and my guards is no longer of any importance. The three of us simply run for it. And no sooner are we out of the house then my guards will leave me behind without more ado, overtaking me as they run, in fact they will even push me slightly to one side on the narrow path in order to get past me on the way to their own safety. They are two young men. What else are they to do? This isn’t a matter of courage in the face of the enemy. I am not their adversary, only a woman, and a treacherous woman at that.

  And suddenly, when I am already a few hundred meters from the Tea House, it will occur to me that I must have my Heisenberg. Without thinking, I shall run back, and as I come out of the house with the book the first bomb will fall somewhere nearby.

  The blast will throw me back into the house, where I shall stand listening in the roaring noise of the four-engined planes overhead. I shall stand as if spellbound behind the door of the house, not knowing what to do next. I can’t go out there, I shall think, and I can’t stay here either. I shall feel like the only target of this attack. It will seem to me somehow pointless to hide. They’ll get me anyway.

  Then the noise of the aircraft will die away. I shall wait for the all-clear, but it will not sound. I shall stand listening for a long time, but at the heart of that silence there will be something growing louder, coming closer, a deeply malevolent note like the sound of a murderous swarm of insects in flight toward me, and I shall suddenly realize that the first wave was only the beginning, the next wave is coming, and then I shall run, knowing that I am running for my life, while they come down on us over the mountain peaks to the south, making straight for us. Then the first shock wave will throw me to the ground, and suddenly Mikhail will be there. He will grab me and haul me up the slope. From there, we shall see that the right wing of the Berghof is in flames. Before our eyes, huge fountains of earth will shoot up, rising to the sky and darkening it. The day of devastation is dark night.

  We shall crawl far into the passageway, into the womb of the roaring mountain as it rears up, and as I press myself to the quivering rock beneath me I shall feel the book on my breast like armor, for I have put it under my jacket, and I shall think: If we are buried in the rubble it will be buried, too. No one will recognize us. No one will know who we were.

  1.20

  M. won’t speak to me. He isn’t touching his food either. I think that’s going too far.

  1.23

  I’ve tried to tell him how it came about. But he’s too young to understand. On the other hand, unfortunately, he’s no longer too young to feel like a man. I think he despises me. He said a single word. I guessed what it meant, and looked it up in the dictionary. At least he’s eating again, but only if I leave him alone in the kitchen. I’m sorry. I’d got used to our nocturnal conversations. The word means whore.

  1.29

  Eva says she’s worried about H.’s health. She thinks his physician Dr. Morell is prescribing him too many drugs. I wonder if Hugh Carleton Greene knows that? I’m anxious about her.

  2.1

  Yesterday evening, on the radio, heard H.’s speech on the twelfth anniversary of his taking power. He says he will shrink from nothing to spare us the most terrible fate of all time. What is the most terrible fate of all time? And how can a sick man who swallows over 20 tablets every day spare us that fate?

  2.3

  Hans was here again. He’s getting suspicious. He can’t understand why I won’t let him into the Tea House again. He says he suspected from the first that there was another man with me there. He has ways of finding out, he says. What am I going to do? I’m afraid of him.

  2.4

  Now that H. is back in Berlin I can sense Eva’s restlessness. She may well go to join him even if H. doesn’t want her to. Although we are probably losing the war she always seems certain of victory, is always radiant. Does she know more than the rest of us? There’s something the matter with her. She wants to spend her birthday in Munich. We leave tomorrow.

  2.7

  I think Eva’s overdoing it. Celebrating her birthday as if it were the final victory. Singing and dancing late into night. Down to the cellar a couple of times in between. The usual crowd: Schorsch, Mitzi, Kathi, and the others. And Aunt Fanny and Uncle Fritz. At some point I went upstairs. Why are you so quiet? Aunt Fanny asked me. Her, too. I can’t understand it. Nobody talks to me. There’s nobody I can talk to.

  My God, how young I was. How desperate to get it off my chest. I needed to so much. I wanted my cousin’s help, her ear, her advice, her support. Her willingness to listen to me, that’s all I wanted. Her readiness to know what I knew, understand what I understood. At twenty you are desperate to confide in someone. I almost did.

  It must have been in Munich, the day before Eva’s birthday, when she is going to be thirty-three. It will be a farewell party. These days every party is a farewell party.

  The city is a ghost town now. You count the buildings still standing, not the ruined ones. There is no glass left in the windows anywhere. The window openings have rough boards nailed over them, where they aren’t gaping open like dead eyes. There seems to be nothing behind them. Blackness. The city is blind, dark. It looks uninhabitable, although there are still people there. But apparently half a million of the inhabitants have left.

  Men and women no longer look different from each other. A race of gray people in woolen caps, old wool coats, long trousers. The children are very well behaved. They have learned that shouting does no good. They are terribly quiet, and very small. The older children were evacuated to children’s homes in the country long ago, where it’s supposed to be safer, and where they cry themselves to sleep night after night with homesickness.

  In 1945 this Munich is the only city we know. We see the destruction and believe it is final. This is Munich, we say. This is what it has become. This is how it will be. We shall live in this city, we say. And we know other cities are the same.

  We do not know the word reconstruction. We could think up such an expression but we don’t, because we can’t imagine the possibility of such a thing. We would be unable to think who could have the strength for it. The money. The materials. And above all the work, who would do the work? When this is over we shall be simply too tired for such an effort. We shall be rats living in cellars, emerging now and then to go raiding. We are the race left over when the human world has died out. We are those who will have to live in the former cities, in the rubble, in the dark ruins, like thieving vermin. Nobody else survives in such cities. We do not see them as cities not yet reconstructed. We see them as they are.

  We see ourselves in them.

  On the evening of the fifth of February we have to go down to the air-raid shelter in the cellar. There are air-raid warnings every night now, although often they portend only nuisance attacks. No one can get any rest in Munich these days.

  This time the two of us are alone. We sit side by side on the folding seats against the wall. If it were not so dreadful it could be quite cozy. It gives me the illusion that only the two of us exist, just Eva and me in our fortified shelter from which a corridor leads out into the garden and the open air. Twin children in the womb of the world.

  Eva shows me a gold bracelet set with pearls and
diamonds. I don’t need to ask who gave it to her. She takes it out of a box hidden under the folding seat opposite. It contains many more things of the same kind.

  She says that if she dies this is to be mine. She shows me a matching ring and brooch. She tells me she made her will in October, and left this to me in it.

  But make sure you get it, she says. They’ll try to trick you out of it if I’m not here.

  I don’t ask who she means. I say: Goodness, what’s all this about? You’re not going to die. You don’t need to make a will.

  She says nothing.

  Eva, I say, what are you planning?

  You know what, she says.

  You could go to my parents in Jena, I say.

  What would I do there? says Eva.

  Nobody there would know who you are, I say.

  You haven’t the faintest idea, have you? says Eva. Everyone knows who I am.

  I realize I have made a mistake. Eva’s sensitive spot; her pride in being Hitler’s mistress.

  But Eva, I say, you’re not married to the Führer.

  I know, she says curtly.

  I only meant, I say, that you can break it off with him anytime you like. You’re not his wife. And then you can start a new life.

  I know just how hollow my words are. I know I have to tell her she is dying for the wrong man. But whom does a woman see as the wrong man? A criminal? Is that any kind of argument? A criminal on the grand scale? The perpetrator of murder and atrocities in unimaginable numbers? A man who devastates a continent? Causes immeasurable suffering? Is he the wrong man—and is that any kind of argument?

  If I had asked Eva the question she would not have held it against me. I’m not even sure if she would have contradicted me. It would not, so to speak, have touched her sense of feminine honor. It would have achieved nothing.

  But if I’d told her: I don’t like him. I really think he’s unattractive. Even stronger: I think he’s repulsive. He’s old. He’s ridiculous. He’s worn out. He looks like a loser. I can’t bear to think of him touching you—then she might well have hated me, and shouted at me angrily and thrown me out of the house, but perhaps she might have lost the desire for her own grand finale. A little pinprick and all the hot air of heroic sacrifice would have leaked out, leaving only an obscure affair in the life story of my cousin Eva Braun, an affair better not discussed any further. She would have broken with Hitler before it was too late. She would have been able to slip away unnoticed. The rest of the whole sad tale would have been silence.

  But I didn’t do it. I could not bring myself to say that to her. Anything else, not that.

  Since then I have experienced, over and over again, the affirmative power inherent in one’s choice of partner. Once that choice is made, and made public, it is inevitably confirmed by outsiders. No sooner is a couple’s engagement announced than congratulations hail down. The lover is touched to discover what a wonderful person his or her chosen partner is.

  There’s no one who will say: Take a good look at this person you’ve fallen in love with. What strikes you? Yes, quite right: he or she is unappealing.

  Does love need the nourishment of other people’s hypocrisy in order to grow and thrive? A kind of unspoken, collective conspiracy, interested not in happiness and success but simply in the sealing of a pair-bond? I was part of it myself. I, too, could not bring myself to use the only argument that can dislodge love.

  And so, a few weeks later, Eva will receive congratulations on her wedding. She will raise her glass, will smile, look dreamily at the man beside her. He will not raise a glass. Even if he drank alcohol he couldn’t because his hand would shake too much. Thank you, Eva will say. Thank you. Many, many thanks. And with that slight touch of awkwardness and timidity that makes her so charming, she will offer her hand to the guests congratulating them. Good luck. Good luck. Good luck, they will say, wishes echoing through the room that lies sixteen meters underground in the midst of death and destruction.

  And none of those present in the great conference room of the bunker under the Reich Chancellery, not Hitler’s secretaries Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian, not Generals Burgdorf and Krebs, not Axmann, not Goebbels and his wife, and certainly not Bormann, will tell my cousin that she has married the wrong man. Not just any wrong man, but the worst choice of man a woman ever married. They will not say he was wrong for all those who threw in their lot with him, wrong from first to last, wrong, wrong, wrong. And although they have known it for a long time now, although hardly any of them will come away unscathed, they congratulated her sincerely. They congratulated her on her choice. Thirty-eight hours later she will be dead.

  I, too, bow to the affirmative power of her choice of partner. I myself will not say to her face what I think about him. (I find him old. I find him repulsive. I find it intolerable to think of him even touching her, and I can guess the rest.)

  Get yourself somewhere safe—that is all I beg Eva. Of course she has no intention of doing any such thing.

  But you ought to go, she tells me. Don’t stay here at the Berghof. If they find you, you’ll be one of us.

  One of what? I ask, stupidly.

  Us, she says.

  And that phrase echoes on in my mind. For the first time I have some presentiment of a world that will exist after us. A world where we shall no longer be the same. Carefully, I try out categories. We. I. They.

  I’m not one of you, I say.

  And hearing myself say that, I am suddenly carried away on a wave of confidence, courage, a deceptive sense of my own abilities. Something brushes against me, and I shall recognize it again later: a state of mind that no longer distinguishes between boldness and carelessness. You just want to say everything once, express it that one time. You want to be as free as you feel.

  I can’t leave, I say.

  Are you in love? she asks.

  I don’t know, I say.

  What is it, little one? she asks. If I can help you I will.

  I suddenly hear myself talking about responsibility, a responsibility too heavy for me to go on bearing alone.

  Are you pregnant? Eva asks.

  No, I say. No.

  Just then we hear the all-clear, and I realize I was about to give Mikhail away. At the same time I suddenly know how Eva can help me, me and the boy who has taken refuge with me and is endangered by my lover.

  I tell her I’m confused about my feelings for Hans. I need time to think. He’s pressing me, and it would all be easier for me if we could be apart for a while.

  This is the kind of language she understands.

  Fischhorn is too near, says Eva thoughtfully. Now, if he were in Berlin . . .

  Then you could meet at the Adlon, she adds, suddenly back in familiar waters.

  Eva, I say, there’s not going to be much left of the Adlon.

  I don’t want to see her retreating into such stupid ideas.

  But Berlin would be just the thing, I say.

  It depends on Hermann Fegelein, says Eva. He’s his superior officer. They were in the same brigade in the Russian campaign.

  Oh yes, I tell Eva. If you do go to Berlin, maybe you could ask Fegelein to fix it as a favor to you. I mean, he’s your brother-in-law.

  I don’t know, she says. I don’t like doing that kind of thing.

  Do it for me, I say.

  I’ll try, says Eva.

  Later, long after the Nazi period, I shall discover that the SS cavalry brigade commanded by Hermann Fegelein shot six thousand civilians in Pinsk in August 1941.

  I’m not one of you, I hear myself saying.

  But I was.

  CHAPTER 7

  THERE WAS A SPELL OF PREMATURE SPRING weather in February that year. When I look at the notes I made in my Heisenberg, it suddenly comes back to me. The smell of melting snow. The warm southwest wind, sometimes rising to storm force. The colors on the horizon: turquoise blue, yellow. The mountains, ultramarine and white.

  ENTRY IN HEISENBERG, p. 103 (quantum theory of wa
ve fields): The first blackbird. Eva has gone.

  I didn’t enter any date.

  FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS I act like a husband whose wife has walked out on him. I am indignant. I’m baffled. I don’t believe it. I say: It’s not so much the fact that she’s gone. It’s the fact that she didn’t say good-bye to me. Imagine just leaving like that!

  I wait for her to call me. But she doesn’t call. As there is no telephone in the Tea House I go to the Berghof several times in the evening to ask if she has rung.

  No, she hasn’t, says the housekeeper. But madam will be sure to come back. Everyone will come here in the end, she says.

  I think so, too. What else? When Berlin can hold out no longer, at the very end, there will be only this Alpine fortress left. This is our refuge. We shall defend ourselves against the rest of the world here.

  Then you’ll be one of us, Eva said.

  We. I. They. Against the rest of the world.

  But I know from Hugh Carleton Greene that the Allies have reached the Rhine. They are in Kalkar on February 27. The “West Wall” falls. They will get here some time. It won’t be long now.

  I don’t know which I ought to fear most: the arrival here of the Allies or of our own people. Since I don’t know I just hope it will be quick. Whatever happens, let it happen fast.

  This is the attitude of the trapped, those besieged by the enemy. Our fortress cannot be held indefinitely. We don’t know what will happen to us, we only know that things can’t stay as they are. No one will get away. We are ducking our heads, closing our eyes. We are acting perfectly calmly, listening for sounds from the world outside. Are they here yet? We fall victim to the apathy of the already defeated. Perhaps it would be a good idea to play dead? Anything that gets us out of this intolerable state will be welcome.