by Jane Thynne
He was enjoying himself.
‘In a minute. You see, it’s interesting to mark how they’ve made the forgery. This stamp here . . .’
‘Give it to me. Now!’
Clara reached to snatch the documents from his hand but as she did, he jerked them up out of her reach and she stumbled and collided with his chest. Adler put out an arm to steady her, clasping her to him, and in the process lost hold of the cards, which spiralled upwards, into the air, then pirouetted lazily down behind them into the shifting, sliding waters twenty metres below. Instantly, they both reached over the balustrade and stared as the pale flash of Clara’s cards flickered a second on the surface before being engulfed in the vast, swirling water of the Seine.
‘Forgive me . . .’
At that moment the rumble of a well-tuned engine caused them to turn. A black Mercedes, shiny as a jackboot, pulled up on the bridge alongside them and a man climbed out of the back. He was in his forties, balding and thuggish, dressed in a clearly expensive evening suit, and he leant against the car, lazily snapping a pair of calfskin gloves as he regarded them. In a second Adler’s deportment changed.
‘Herr Adler. I’ve been looking for you. But as so often you’ve found yourself a more appealing diversion.’
Adler stiffened. His eyes lost their flash and became flinty and unreadable. His face was formal again, sculpted into official disinterest. He was transformed into the sober Obersturmbannführer.
‘I’m afraid I must leave you.’
Clara was still too dumbstruck by the loss of her documents to make a proper reply. She gazed at him in desperation.
‘Please don’t let me hurry you, Herr Obersturmbannführer.’ The man had a lascivious gleam in his eye. ‘I wouldn’t want to interfere with private . . . affairs. But if you have finished with this young lady I would remind you that we do have some pressing business.’
Adler bowed and gave Clara a swift hand-kiss, leaving her only with the rough brush of his cheek against her skin and a sense of utter desolation as he turned abruptly and climbed into the car.
Chapter Twenty-one
Hedwig loved the library at the Ahnenerbe. It was her secret domain. Other people assumed she enjoyed her workplace because it was in an upmarket part of the city, amid leafy, pine-scented streets where expensive cars stood in the driveways, but it wasn’t anything to do with that. When she was in here the outside world dissolved away, and she was alone in an exotic space, smelling of floor wax and the concentrated must of ancient wisdom. She loved the idea of History; that things had been going on for thousands of years and would continue long after they were all gone. Everyone kept telling her they were living in historic times, by which they meant the Führer’s birthday and the expansion of the Reich, but that wasn’t the kind of history Hedwig liked. For her, History was about an ancient world and most of all it was about books. At home they hardly had any books – only a couple of children’s fairy stories and Goebbels’ autobiography From the Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery. And a big picture book called The Growth, Struggle and Victory of the NSDAP, which her parents had collected from coupons in their cigarette packets and exchanged for real snapshots of the Führer, to be stuck in like an actual family album. But the books here were different.
The books at the Ahnenerbe were fragile manuscripts with strange scents of spice and leather. Some were so old their leaves furled up like tobacco and their ink was clotted and dark as if they had been written in blood. She imagined them preserved on their shelves like fossils, their wisdom gradually hardening and solidifying, compressed between the pages like dirt turning into diamonds. Some books had photographs in them of natives, looking into the camera with alien, thousand-yard stares. When Lotti used to come and visit the Ahnenerbe – no one ever minded Lotti visiting – Hedwig would guide her proudly around the library and Herr Doktor Kraus would join in, explaining to Lotti how the Tibetans and Mongolians, with their exotic faces like crinkled autumn leaves, were really part of the Aryan tribe. ‘Why do they want to be Aryans?’ Lotti demanded. ‘Why couldn’t they stay being themselves?’ Secretly, Hedwig agreed. It was hard to believe that all those flat-faced tribesmen could possibly come from the same Aryan family as her. Then again, it was often hard to believe that her own parents came from the same family as her.
Her mother had started again last night.
‘I hope you haven’t been seeing that boy.’
They were in the kitchen, preparing dinner on the scarred oak table. The kitchen, with its dark brown papered walls, was the warmest room in the apartment, courtesy of the coke stove from which clouds of steam were unfurling. The damp, urinous smell of boiling laundry mingled with a bone broth on the stove. Kurt was perched in a high chair for Hedwig to feed him, looking around with a bright excitement as if everything they did was a game.
Trussed in an apron, chopping potatoes, Mutti looked hot and fat. Six babies may have earned her a silver Mother’s Cross, made of blue enamel with the motto Der Deutschen Mutter and displayed in a proud frame on the parlour wall, but six pregnancies had left layers of flesh around her middle like the rings around a tree.
‘Jochen’s not a boy. He’s twenty-one,’ Hedwig protested, not actually denying their meeting. She offered a spoonful of porridge to Kurt and he turned his head just before it reached his mouth, so the spoon collided with his cheek and he laughed.
Mutti tossed the potatoes into her stew and gave it a savage poke, then began decapitating the green fronds from the carrots.
‘He looks like a Bolshevik.’
Hedwig knew for a fact that Mutti didn’t know what a Bolshevik looked like. Reiner and Wolfgang came in and began wrestling on the floor, tumbling like puppies until their mother smacked them on the back of their heads. Kurt observed proceedings with a lordly air.
‘How could he possibly be a Bolshevik when he spends all day painting the Führer? You liked that painting he gave you.’
Mutti allowed the truth of this with a grudging tilt of her head. She began peeling carrots and Kurt reached out for the bright festive ribbons that curled onto the tabletop.
‘He wasn’t in the HJ though.’
‘So what? He’ll still be called up if there’s a war.’
‘There’s something about him I don’t trust.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with him!’
Mutti turned round and nodded savagely towards Kurt.
‘So if he’s going to be called up, why throw yourself away, Hedwig? You want to be a widow before the age of twenty-two stuck with some screaming brat in an apartment the rough end of Pankow?’
Oblivious to the bad press he was getting, Kurt slapped his hands into the bowl, spattering porridge everywhere, then wiped them on his hair. Hedwig often wondered if Kurt owed his existence to the enticing prospect of the silver Mother’s Cross, which qualified her mother for all sorts of privileges and better treatment on public transport. No one with a silver Mother’s Cross would ever find herself standing on a tram or at the back of the bread queue. Then she chided herself. Mutti loved children, even if it didn’t seem like it most of the time and perhaps Kurt’s difficult birth, or his playfulness, accounted for the fact that she never seemed to show him much affection. Secretly Hedwig had vowed to make up for that. As she took a cloth to his chubby face, Kurt chuckled and reached his sticky fingers out to catch her braids.
‘You met Vati when you were eighteen.’
Mentioning that was a mistake. It was no doubt her own experience that led Frau Holz to warn her daughter off any hasty decisions. That was why Hedwig was at the Faith and Beauty Society, trying to be something she was not.
‘Vati’s not a Communist.’
‘Nor is Jochen.’
‘What is he then?’
‘He’s an artist.’
Mutti started on a turnip, slicing off its sprout with surgical precision and reducing it to dice.
‘You’ll waste everything, Hedwig. Everything your parents have given you. All y
our heritage.’
Heritage. That word again. The word that seemed to obsess everyone. The word that she heard every day at the Ahnenerbe. Your Aryan Heritage. As though everything in life was about pretending you were a certain kind of person – pure and uncomplicated – when in fact everyone, not just Hedwig, was a glorious mixture of contradictions. Who cared who her grandparents were, that Jochen’s mother was Polish or that Jochen’s grandfather had been a farm labourer?
‘Did you meet him through Lotti?’
Hedwig glared at her mother. Lotti might be responsible for many things, but Jochen was not one of them.
‘No.’
Hedwig wished Mutti could see Jochen for what he really was. She knew at heart that her mother’s true disappointment was in her own life and her chief hope was that her only daughter would do better for herself. Valiantly, Hedwig tried a rapprochement.
‘It’s Irna Wolter’s wedding this Saturday.’
This sparked an interest.
‘It’s going to be a classy affair,’ Hedwig added, presenting the details up like a peace offering, to allay the focus on her own, unsatisfactory romance. ‘It’s at a castle that belongs to the SS.’
‘That sounds lovely.’
The glow in her mother’s eyes was almost enough to make up for her previous disappointment. But not quite.
‘So where were you, then, yesterday evening? If not seeing that boy?’
‘I was visiting Frau Franke.’
It was true. Udo Franke was still drowning his sorrows at the bar down the street, so Marlene was all alone in the stuffy apartment. Hedwig had forced herself to stay an hour, trying to breathe through her mouth so as not to inhale the stink of fried onions and enduring repeated, sweaty hugs from Marlene, who clutched Hedwig to her pillowy bosom as though for a few moments she was able to retrieve her own child. Marlene was so different from her elegant daughter. Lotti had been cool as ice cream but Marlene was blowsy and bulging out of her apron, her face a blotchy mess. She wanted to talk endlessly about the girls’ childhood, their first day at school, their holidays in the little cottage by the lake, and Hedwig didn’t mind that – she wanted to talk about Lotti too – but it was hard when there was so much that Frau Franke must not know.
‘Poor soul,’ said Mutti, wiping her hands on her apron and coming over to scoop Hedwig into her arms. ‘You were good to go.’
Her eyes were bright with tears. Her only daughter might be involved with a Bolshevik, but at least she wasn’t dead.
Hedwig’s visit had not, however, been one of sheer compassion. She might have made a promise to Lotti, but Lotti was dead now and past caring, so after enduring Marlene’s odorous hugs, she had asked to visit Lotti’s bedroom. Just to be alone with her.
The bedroom had been preserved exactly as Lotti left it. Utterly tidy, unlike the rest of the apartment, and decorated with the kind of quirky personal touches that gave it style. Her collection of antique perfume bottles on the mantelpiece. A gemstone necklace hanging from the mirror. Five peacock feathers they had found on Pfaueninsel in a jar. In some ways, the room was like a shrine to Lotti, with her notebook laid out on the desk at the page of her last completed sketch. Hedwig ran her hand along the bookshelf, rummaged in a stack of fashion magazines then felt beneath the mattress and behind the bedhead. She leafed through Lotti’s notebook and investigated the drawers of the desk. But it was useless. She found nothing.
Now, standing in the Ahnenerbe library, she came to a decision.
If you remember anything that might be useful, just call me.
She didn’t need to remember anything because there was not a second when the matter was not running through her mind like some dreadful newsreel devoted to a single subject. Several times she had taken out the page from Clara Vine’s leather notebook and looked at the autograph – a tendril of black ink with loops like the petals of a flower – before folding it carefully up again.
Hedwig had made Lotti a solemn promise, but Lotti was dead now so what did it matter? Clara Vine was the only person who had ever shown the slightest interest in her feelings about Lotti’s death, so perhaps she deserved to know. Hedwig decided to call her.
Chapter Twenty-two
For a second, as Clara awoke and stretched out luxuriously on Ursula’s white linen sheets, the day ahead lay sunlit and full of possibilities. Outside, it was an exquisite morning. Wild birds were calling, pale columns of birch trees shimmered around the languorous expanse of the Griebnitzsee and clumps of reeds rose like slender green blades from its depths. The air was studded with pollen and glinting insects were coasting on the warm currents. Then she remembered. She was a Jew, in Nazi Germany, without an ID.
The train journey back from the Gare du Nord had been fraught with anxiety. The possibility of being caught without her documents, not to mention the gun in her suitcase, played constantly on Clara’s mind and she had needed to maintain a careful synchronicity of movement between carriages to avoid the scrutiny of the guards. Shortly after the train left Paris she informed the other passengers that she had a bad headache, necessitating several trips to the corridor for ‘fresh air’. It worked well until they crossed the border into Germany, when she had been obliged to lock herself in the lavatory as a pair of guards came through. But she had underestimated their Nazi thoroughness, and emerged only to run slap into the second of the guards, who was systematically checking the passengers in the final compartment. He was a young lad, not much more than nineteen she reckoned, with a complexion that didn’t need shaving and fair hair cut savagely short. Yet his youth was an advantage, Clara realized at once. He was flustered by their unintended physical contact and he flushed.
‘Documents,’ he snapped, automatically, then looked up with a flash of awed recognition in his eyes. Perhaps he had sat through romantic comedies under pressure from a girlfriend, or maybe he had seen Clara’s war film, The Pilot’s Wife, in which she had been married to a lost Luftwaffe pilot, played by the real-life air ace Ernst Udet. Whichever it was, finding himself face to face with an actress from the big screen was overwhelming. For the first time in her career, Clara was relieved to be recognized.
‘My apologies, F-F-Fräulein.’ He had a very slight stammer. ‘Is it . . .?’
‘Clara Vine, yes.’
‘So sorry. Your identity documents please?’
She smiled sweetly, glad that she had just reapplied her lipstick in the train’s narrow mirror and was wearing Steffi’s pearls.
‘I’m afraid I’ve left them in my compartment. And it’s all the way back down the corridor.’
‘I’ll need to see them,’ he insisted, in a starstruck mumble.
She tilted her head, coquettishly.
‘Do you? Really? Even if I promise I am who I say I am?’
The guard gave a nervous laugh, which turned into a cough. Far ahead in the corridor his colleague shouted at him to hurry up.
‘You could come back with me to my compartment. It’s quite a way.’
The young man cast an anxious glance up the corridor at his companion, who was making impatient gestures in the distance. God forbid the older man should return to help his colleague out. Clara moved fractionally closer and lowered her voice to a seductive whisper.
‘Perhaps you want to search me instead? Is that what you’d prefer?’
He leapt away as if electrified, a puce blush suffusing his entire complexion.
‘Fräulein, forgive me! Not at all. It’s just we have to . . .’
‘How about I give you an autograph instead? That should prove my identity. Do you have a pen?’
Hastily the guard reached for his top pocket and brought out a pen and notebook.
‘I’ve seen your movies,’ he stammered, confirming her suspicions.
‘Do you have a favourite?’
‘The Pilot’s Wife.’
‘I guessed you’d say that!’
‘With Ernst Udet.’
Everyone loved Ernst Udet. The fact that Clar
a had starred alongside him was as good as a golden Party badge in most people’s eyes.
‘Well it’s lovely to meet you, Herr . . .’
‘Herr Wolmann. Ludwig Wolmann.’
‘To Ludwig . . .’
Clara scrawled her name, hoping that he would not notice the tremble in her hand, gave him her most dazzling smile and tucked the book back in his top pocket. Then she strolled back down the corridor as slowly as her legs could manage it.
It had taken hours for the shock of the encounter to wear off and she sat staring out of the window, barely able to focus on the countryside as it passed. Rooks sat like musical notes on the electricity lines, and in between the fields gun emplacements had sprung up on city borders. But once the train arrived at the Anhalter Bahnhof and the passengers flowed onto the platform there were no more requests for documents and she felt the tension that had been holding her body rigid suddenly ease, her shoulders slumping like a puppet whose strings have been released.
While she may have escaped inspection of her papers, however, Clara’s inspection of herself was merciless. How could she have been so careless with Conrad Adler in Paris? Why had she relaxed her guard? What impulse made her snatch the documents from his hand, with the result that they ended up in the Seine? The answer, she knew, was that she had allowed Paris to get under her skin. The atmosphere, the food, the alcohol and the sheer foreign beauty of the place had intoxicated her. And perhaps the jousting conversation and bitter, ironic humour of Conrad Adler, too.
Yet the questions about Conrad Adler, the ones she needed to answer, remained. Why was he watching her at the Dingo Bar? And what did he want with her? Above all, how had he known she was not all she seemed?
Climbing out of bed, she pulled a wrap around her, entered the bathroom, looked into the lightbulb-fringed mirror, and switched on the wireless to drown out the thoughts crowding her head.
The smooth voice of the continuity announcer came on.
‘And now, it is with great pleasure that we bring you the Hamburg City Orchestra with Franz Schubert’s Winter Journey song cycle.’
