by Jane Thynne
Clara felt it too; the zoo was special to her. It was the place that Leo had first taken her to teach her the art of espionage; when she was a nervous ingénue and he a brusque passport control officer. And anxious, as he later confided, to be inducting a naïve young actress into a peril she could barely comprehend. Since then she had visited numerous times with Erich, who would always head for the Grosses Raubtierhaus, eager to see the elegantly pacing lions and tigers, to marvel at the sleek jaguars and panthers. That was until he announced that he couldn’t bear to see such magnificent animals caged and would never go again.
She bought a ticket and made her way along the meticulously planted beds of begonias and roses towards the animal enclosures. The zoo was a haven of peace in the city’s heart and now, in early summer, it was at its most beautiful. The traffic fumes were replaced by a sweet mingled aroma of straw and dung. Two boys in lederhosen flashed past on scooters, threatening to scrape the shins of anyone foolish enough to get too close. A dog in a little overcoat waddled along importantly. A pair of excitable matrons were being hoisted onto an elephant idly flicking his trunk as he waited to give his hourly ride. Clara threaded through the crowds, wondering what would happen to these animals if bombing came. Were shelters being built for them too?
He will find you.
Clara hadn’t questioned Steffi’s suggestion at the time, but now it seemed absurdly ambitious. Even on a weekday lunchtime, the zoo was busy, and the visitor numbers were further swelled by the arrival of a gargantuan sea lion called Roland, whose appearance on the Ufa Tonwoche newsreel had granted him celebrity status. How could she begin to find a complete stranger here, especially if he was purposefully anonymous? Could she be sure he would recognize her?
Her first thought was to head for one of the more distant animal houses. Surely the elephant house on the furthest edges, or the elegant ostrich enclosure, styled like an Egyptian temple, would be better suited to an assignation. And yet, if he had been seeking privacy, why had the man she was to meet chosen such a public place? Was it, perhaps, precisely because of the crowds? After a moment’s deliberation she gravitated towards the milling throng that had gathered to watch the sea lion being fed.
It was a spectacle of high entertainment. Every time the keeper, armed with a bucket of sprats, dangled a tiny, silvery flicker above the water, the sleek grey mass would rise abruptly, water sheeting from his sides, to a volley of delighted shrieks. The sea lion would then heave his three-ton bulk onto a rock and open his mouth. Predictably he had already been nicknamed Goering.
As Clara focused on the feeding ritual, wondering what to do, a flicker of movement wrenched her eyes upward. A man leaning with his elbows on the far side of the rail, dressed in wide-legged trousers and a nondescript checked jacket, had glanced in her direction and adjusted his hat. He had a sharp-edged face, but the trilby’s deep brim shaded his eyes as he stared, apparently absorbed, into the enclosure below.
At the back of her mind a memory stirred. There was something about that half-shaded profile she had seen before, but where? The image remained frustratingly unknown, floating free, without context, evoking only an uncomfortable frisson of unease.
Then she looked again and recognition electrified her.
When she was a child she had adored puzzle books. Each Christmas her parents would give her a story album that was interspersed with games, crosswords and picture puzzles. As she grew, she progressed to entire books of them and one of her favourites was called Spot The Difference. It featured two scenes with minute changes that forced the eye to focus on fine detail. A Sunny Day, On The Beach, At The Fair. Two versions of Trafalgar Square but in one a man was carrying an umbrella and in the other he was empty handed. Two identical jungles with a missing monkey in the second. You knew if you looked closely, really closely, you would uncover aspects that had not at first revealed themselves. Comparing the man at the railing over and over with the image in her mind, she realized, with a jolt of horror, what was bothering her. That lean face, the eyes which deliberately avoided hers. It was the man she had found standing in the lobby of her apartment block in Winterfeldtstrasse. The man who, she was convinced, was not sheltering from the rain.
Hovering at the back of the crowd, she fought the urge to walk away as fast as possible. Was this the man she was supposed to meet? If so, either the Gestapo had somehow discovered their plans, and replaced Steffi’s accomplice with their own person, or the figure before her was genuine, and her assumption about him was wrong.
Even as she hesitated the man threw his cigarette stub down on the ground and peeled languidly away, as if motivated by nothing more than a casual desire for lunch. As he moved slowly towards the gate, Clara made up her mind to follow him.
Immediately outside, he made for a dark green bicycle leant against the railings, mounted it, and proceeded slowly eastwards, along Budapester Strasse and across the Landwehrkanal, turning right towards Lützowplatz. Almost immediately he turned right again into Keithstrasse. Although the bicycle was proceeding slowly, Clara was forced to walk as fast as she could to keep up and by the time he stopped outside a tall, brick-faced residential block, she was gasping for breath.
She lingered in a porch on the opposite side of the road, assessing the situation. The building was the type of multi-use block that could be found all over Berlin. An office on the ground floor, apartments above. A floating population that afforded a certain amount of privacy from prying eyes, and where unfamiliar visitors would raise no eyebrows. The man dismounted and disappeared inside.
Clara glanced around her. The street was empty and there were no parked cars close by. A burst of laughter spattered out of an upper window, and a radio buzzed further off. Eventually, she knocked twice, preparing to ask for Herr Vogel if any other face answered the door. But it was the same man.
‘You took your time. I was beginning to give up on you.’
He was young, now she saw him close up, and spoke with a rough accent, but his demeanour was shrewd and intelligent.
‘It’s hard following a cyclist.’
‘It’s safer than buses or trams. No one looking you up and down. You’d better come in.’
He led her down a dim, tiled corridor through a door to a back room containing only a couple of cheap wooden chairs and a table.
Clara looked around her.
‘You know what I’m here for?’ she asked.
‘A Kennkarte and an Ariernachweis.’
‘My documents fell into the Seine in Paris.’
He gave a dry laugh. ‘Use that as an excuse and it might get you points for originality.’
‘It’s true, as it happens.’
‘It’s of no concern to me, Fräulein, where you lost them. I’m here to replace them. I’ve got the cards ready. All I need are photographs of you.’
She fished in her bag for the contact sheet shots that had been taken for the publicity for Love Strictly Forbidden. He surveyed them critically.
‘Ideally we’d want one with no smile.’
‘It’s the best I can do.’
‘They’re not too bad.’
She recalled Leni’s words. Your face has a useful quality. It’s a blank canvas. It’s like I can project anything I want.
The young man switched on the desk lamp and bent over a piece of card. An Ariernachweis, on which Clara’s details had already been filled in. He took the photograph and placed it in the corner of the card then fixed it to the pass with brass eyelets.
‘It took ages to get these looking right. Eventually I found a cobbler who supplied me with the tool he uses to fix eyelets for bootlaces. It was perfect.’
He reached for a fine brush and a jar of purple dye and began painting on a separate piece of card.
‘There are twelve long and twenty-four short feathers on the German imperial eagle, did you know? The hardest thing is to get the correct colour and shape.’
He continued working intently, his movements as tender and delicate as if
he were creating a Renaissance Madonna and Child, rather than an eagle and swastika. His face was closed, intent, inscrutable in the dim light. When he had copied the eagle he took a piece of newspaper, dampened it with spittle and pressed it down on the newly painted symbol, creating a mirror image on the newspaper. He then took the paper and pressed it onto the photograph of Clara.
‘The stamp needs to project across the photograph. Now we’ll need to give it a few minutes to dry.’
He sat motionless, as if expecting that she too would sit in silence beside him. But Clara had too many questions.
‘Where do you get the passes to copy?’
‘One of our supporters is a church pastor. Some of his congregation drop their expired ID passes into the collection box instead of money. They know how valuable they’ll be. I’ve had all kinds, even Wehrmacht passes. The equipment I get from work. There’s no shortage of brushes or paint there.’
‘You make it sound simple.’
‘That’s only the beginning. Once we’ve given someone a new identity, we advise them to join a lending library and get a card with their new name on it. As many extra pieces of ID as possible.’
‘So you can make anyone into anything?’
‘Not at all. You need to match the face with the occupation. If I have a card which gives the occupation as kitchen cleaner, I can’t hand that out to some smart lady whose husband owned a department store.’
‘Are you busy?’
‘It’s constant. But time’s running out. People are going to need more than ID documents. Jews here are trapped in a net. They need places to hide.’
‘Or they need to leave Berlin.’
‘No. Berlin’s the best place to hide. Did you know almost half of the city is underground? There are a thousand bunkers in Berlin. Speer has built a tunnel running all the way from Mitte to Tempelhof so Goering can ride the whole four miles in his car. The customers of the Adlon Hotel have their own shelter under Pariser Platz. Not so grand for the rest, of course. They’ll mostly be using the U-Bahns. They’ve just finished a new shelter at Alexanderplatz.’
‘I was there just the other day. I didn’t see anything.’
‘You wouldn’t. It’s entirely inconspicuous. You walk along the tunnel to the U5 line and you pass a green steel door. You’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there.’
So that was where they would huddle. Waiting for the explosions. Listening to the muffled boom and the lick of flames as above them the dark blast of bombs flowered into the night sky.
The young man put out his half-smoked cigarette and tucked the stump in his pocket.
‘The Nazis may be driving people underground now, but one day soon they’ll be driven underground themselves.’
He jumped up and checked the card.
‘There. You’re no longer a Jew. But don’t go dropping it into any French rivers again. Don’t allow it to get wet at all. Even a drop of rain might dissolve the watercolour.’
She placed it in her bag and looked at him soberly.
‘Thank you. I’m sorry. I don’t know your name.’
‘I’d be a fool to tell you. If anyone thought this was a forgery, they’d ask where it came from and who forged it. There aren’t many people who can resist answering when they’re having a chat with the Gestapo.’
She made her way to the door.
‘ID forgery is punishable by death, isn’t it?’
‘You ask a lot of questions, Fräulein. Most of my clients are too frightened to do anything but sit in silence.’
‘Just because I ask questions, doesn’t mean I’m not frightened too . . . I do have another question, though. When I first saw you, I knew I’d seen you before. In the lobby of my apartment building in Winterfeldtstrasse. You remember, don’t you?’
‘You’re an observant lady.’
‘What were you doing there?’
He smiled; a quick smile that utterly transformed his features.
‘As a matter of fact I had just posted a flyer on the wall opposite. I had my leaflets and the paste bottle in a suitcase. But a policeman appeared and I needed to leave in a hurry.’
Clara left the apartment as swiftly as she could and got on the first bus she found. As she travelled, the bus rocking under her, she thought how her whole life was like the young man’s painstaking work. The least inconsistency, the tiniest slip, and her entire, carefully constructed identity would unravel, like the silk spooling from a beautiful gown. Yet in a few days’ time the existence that she had crafted for herself over the past six years was facing its greatest test. And whatever happened, she would not be the same person afterwards.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Their meeting place was the bridge over the Spree just before Museum Island. It was, according to their Heritage Studies teacher, the place where the first settlers in Berlin, who were fishermen, had erected their wooden huts. Hedwig leaned for a moment, watching the canal as it glittered in bright rings beneath the setting sun, stirred into lazy arrows by the coal-heaped barges making their slow progress westwards. Above, the sky was as luminous and mottled as an oyster shell and faint traces of Linden blossom were carried on the breeze. It was a lovely summer evening, but Hedwig was sick with nerves.
She had barely slept since the evening of Jochen’s revelations. Tonight was their regular meeting but she had no idea what they might do or where they would go. Everything had changed now. She had hurried home after work and pulled on a flowered dress that Lotti had made up from one of her own designs. It clung to her curves a little too obviously for her taste, and Hedwig was only wearing it because Jochen had once said casually that he liked girls in flowered dresses. And because the memory of the beautiful Sofie, whom Jochen admired, burned in her mind.
A hand on her shoulder made her jump, but the sight of him brought the reflex rush of excitement.
‘So where are we going?’
‘Somewhere interesting. Up west.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘I’ll tell you when we get there.’
‘Is it . . . to do with what you told me? The other night?’
He grinned.
‘Patience, Hedy! It’s a secret.’
On the tram Jochen seemed lost in contemplation so she stared out of the window at the glimmering shop windows and the commuters in their office outfits hurrying home from work and thought how foolish she had been to assume that Jochen was planning to propose. Perhaps it was for the best. Hedwig thought of her mother savagely scrubbing, her father looking her up and down in that way he had. They already thought badly enough of Jochen; God knows what they would think if they knew what he was really doing. Since Lotti’s death her life seemed to be spinning out of control, with one terrible shock following on another. She desperately hoped the next surprise was not about to arrive.
She waited until the tram had reached the smart boulevards of Wilmersdorf, and they had disembarked, before she spoke again. Jochen walked fast, hands jammed in his pockets, as if propelled by some urgent inner force.
‘I still don’t know where we’re going.’
‘Actually, we’re going to see a fortune teller.’
She so wanted to believe him. It was such a wonderful, imaginative idea and it might have been planned expressly to delight her. Numerous friends had visited fortune tellers to investigate their romantic futures. Hand reading and Tarot cards were all the rage. Irna Wolter had visited a psychic with her fiancé before they married and had learned they would enjoy a long, happy marriage, blessed with five children. Hedwig had not consulted a psychic herself, but she never missed her horoscope and she kept a Winterhilfswerk donation pin in the shape of her star sign – Pisces – in her lapel. She had bought one for Jochen, too – Aries – but she had never seen him wear it.
‘I thought you didn’t believe in fortune tellers.’
She couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. Her stars in that month’s edition of Der Zenit promised dramatic developments in her love
life.
‘I believe in this one. Her forecasts are impressively accurate.’
After a few minutes they reached a building in Pariser Strasse, the kind that Hedwig sometimes fantasized about inhabiting but had never set foot in. It was a five-storey stucco block with fancy scrollwork round a doorframe. A lot of smart houses were having swastikas set into their lintels, but here the plaster was moulded into an elaborate confection of leaves and squirrels. Next to it a buffed brass plaque read ‘Psychic consultations. First floor.’
The door was opened by a maid who ushered them into a front room with a vaguely eastern air bestowed by drawn tasselled curtains, fringed red lamps and rich Turkish carpets. Around the room low tables were clustered with the accessories of the trade – crystal balls, Tarot cards and a porcelain phrenological head segmented into areas with labels like Caution, Secrecy, Eloquence and Artistry. A pungent odour hung in the air. Hedwig was quite used to homes that smelt strongly, but unlike the cabbage intercut with rancid fat that perfumed her family’s apartment, this scent was exotic and mysterious. Nutmeg, cinnamon and frankincense, perhaps. Like the incense in a Catholic church or the ancient smells that emanated from the library at the Ahnenerbe.
The door opened and a short, commanding figure swept in, wearing a cerise kimono-style silk jacket and a beaded cap. She must have been in her late sixties, with a crooked nose and kinked hair, her dark caramel eyes heavily lined in kohl, and her makeup thickly applied. Exactly like a fortune teller was supposed to look, thought Hedwig, enthralled.
‘This is Hedwig,’ said Jochen shortly. ‘Hedwig, this is Frau Annie Krauss.’
The Annie Krauss! Everyone had heard of her. All the top people, film actors and singers and sports people, were said to consult her. There had been a feature on her work in Der Zenit, Madame Krauss Prognosticates, with a picture of her craning over a crystal ball wearing a fringed headband, and reports of some of her predictions, mostly picking winners at the Hoppegarten race course. This was so thoughtful of Jochen. It was impossible to get an appointment with her unless you booked months in advance.
