“Eddie hasn’t sent word that anyone wants to see me,” I said, as Tamara emptied my ashtray and gave me a look. She was on medication to deal with her nerves; whatever she was taking had caused her to stop smoking, not that she’d ever smoked as much as me or Rudi. Besides, my jaw surgeon had advised me to quit, saying it had contributed to the infection and damage. “I don’t see why I should humiliate myself by going somewhere I’m not welcome.”
Rudi sighed. “You can’t sit here for the rest of your life. I know you’re afraid, but—”
“I’m not afraid,” I interrupted sharply. “I’m just not ready to keep every eyelash straight. Hollywood never knew what to do with me. Every risk I’ve taken, I took on my own. And don’t forget, I’m still German. No one wants to see movies with a German femme fatale.”
“Are you telling that to them or to yourself?” asked Rudi, making me scowl. I despised the fact that he could still see through me. “You’ve done more for morale with your USO tour than any other performer. You’re a war hero. That must count for something. You could stay with Orson Welles. He sent you a personal invitation, offering his home for as long as you like. He’s directing his own films; his wife, Rita Hayworth, is one of Columbia Pictures’ biggest commodities. They’ll introduce you to everyone. It could be the start of a brand-new career—one you’re finally in control of.”
I laughed and lit another cigarette, ignoring Tamara’s disapproving snort. “When has anyone who signed a contract been in control of their career?”
Yet his words stayed with me. He was right. I couldn’t hide away and hope they came to me. They wouldn’t. I’d made them a lot of money once, but as Eddie said, things changed. Or not, as the case might be. In Hollywood, we were only as important as we made ourselves appear. I’d been out of the limelight for too long to hope an amazing part would drop into my lap. I’d have to go to them. I’d have to go and look irresistible. I would have to smile and pose and genuflect, demonstrate I had value, that my name could still attract an audience.
But I seemed to have lost the will. All I could think of was Paris, where people I knew, like Gabin, now worked to revive the stagnant film industry, offering up their talents in partnership with destitute European studios to make films that depicted the realities of today—gritty stories without sequins, about how we lived now. I could find work there; Paris was where I belonged. Without ever having acknowledged it, Paris felt like home.
I’d already decided to book a ticket back to Europe when unexpected word came from an attaché of General Bradley, who’d not forgotten his promise to me.
My mother had been found in Berlin. Alive.
X
I traveled to Paris to apply for the necessary permits to enter Germany. While I waited, I reunited with Gabin, who’d returned to his beloved Paris after having endured his own harrowing battles during the advance to liberate the city. His hair had gone silver; he was weatherbeaten and careworn, aged beyond his years, but still magnetic. He took me to bed, chided me about his beloved paintings, which remained in my storage, before he talked about us working together. He had a script he felt I’d be perfect for; he would play the lead opposite me. France needed to restore her culture, and he’d always thought I should act there. Why not now?
I wanted to do it, but asked for time while the army processed my application to travel to Germany. The Allied tug-of-war over the country, with the Soviets staking their claim to the east, meant every applicant was scrutinized, run through multiple security checks to ensure they had a valid reason for entering enemy territory. Contraband, racketeering, and the occasional Nazi stowaway were rife. Nothing and no one was safe. I had to be patient to get into Berlin.
I’d charmed my way into more perilous engagements. A telegram to Bradley himself, reminding him that I was a major, finally secured my authorization, albeit with the caveat that I was under duty to report when summoned. They even provided me with an official plane, which I accessorized by wearing my military uniform—khaki jacket, gored skirt, tie, and cap.
When I landed at the Tempelhof airfield, international news photographers blinded me with their flashbulbs. Word had leaked out, but this was an event I wanted them to record. It suited me to be seen reuniting with the woman who’d given birth to me and outlived two wars.
She was on the airfield with the army-assigned chauffeur. As I dodged past the airplane propellers, their wind shearing at my cap, I took one look at her spare, brittle form—so small now, so aged, when once she’d seemed immutable, like the Brandenburg Gate—and threw my arms around her. She stiffened; and then, as we went to the waiting car, she cast a censorious glance at the cameras and said, “You’re too thin. You’ll look like a bean stalk on the front page.”
I wanted to clutch her veined hand when we settled in the car. But she tucked her fingers into her lap and, as we drove into the city, she remarked, “You’ll find everything changed.”
She had a way of making it seem as though the streets had been repaved, her expression detached as I melted in disbelief at the window, staring out at the wasteland my city had become. I didn’t recognize a thing. There was nothing to recognize. Berlin was a husk, a burnt-out shell. It was already a ghost, a lost memory.
“Wait,” I started to tell the driver. “This can’t be the way to Kaiserallee . . .”
Mutti sniffed. “My flat was bombed. The area is a shambles. Good thing I wasn’t there. Those endless ration lines people complained about? Standing in one saved my life.”
“I thought you were dead.” I was doing everything I could to contain myself, knowing she’d not approve of histrionics. It did not fail to strike me that within minutes of our reunion, I’d reverted to the daughter she’d raised, wanting to please, to make her proud and avoid censure.
“Then we both thought the same.” She met my eyes. “I heard you singing over the wireless. And your speeches.” Her voice tightened, though I couldn’t tell if she approved of my defiance or considered it an intolerable breach of etiquette. “Later, they declared that London had been destroyed and came to my door—I was still at the flat—to inform me that you had died in the Blitz. An enemy of the Reich, they said, who has paid the price. Heil Hitler.”
“But I was with the Americans,” I exclaimed. “I had everyone searching for you.”
“Is that so? They didn’t search very well. I’ve been here the entire time.”
I almost laughed. She wasn’t saying it to disparage the soldiers who had located her. She simply stated a fact. No one disliked incompetence more than Josephine Felsing.
By the time we arrived at her new home in the Fregestrasse, a neutral suburb between the Soviet- and American-occupied areas, I could see she was weary. She had trouble climbing the flight of stairs, and once we entered her dimly lit flat, which consisted of a sparsely furnished living room, adjoining kitchenette, and closetlike bedroom, she sighed.
“If you need to use the WC, it’s down the hall. The entire floor shares it.”
I made her a cup of tea, noting she had army rations and whispering a word of gratitude to General Bradley. Then, as she sat on the lumpy sofa, I rolled up my sleeves and went to work, tidying up whatever I could until she said irritably, “You needn’t prove you can still keep house. I cleaned the apartment myself when they told me you were coming. Sit with me.”
Perching beside her, I didn’t know what to say. I could now clearly see how much the war had wrought on her. She wasn’t only underweight; her entire being seemed diminished, that unquenchable force within her ebbing like water from a ruptured pipe.
“Mutti, are you sick? You don’t look well.”
She set her cup on the table. “It’s Berlin. No one looks well. We’ve lost another war. Only this time, we’ll pay for it more harshly. Between your Americans and the Reds, they’ll see us penned up like beasts in a stockade.” She paused, glancing askance at the apartment, which contained none of her prized possessions, all lost in the bombing. “I’m a stranger in
my own city. I don’t understand how any of this could have happened.”
It was the first allusion she’d made to the catastrophe, the first time I could recall her revealing a vulnerability that made her question her unswerving belief in the proper order.
“It happened,” I said softly, “because we let it happen.”
She sighed again. “I suppose that’s as reasonable an explanation as any.” She twined her fingers together; she still wore her wedding band, though it now hung loose on her knuckle, like someone else’s memento. “Your uncle Willi is dead.”
I gasped. “No. How? When?”
“Must be over a year now. A heart attack, poor man. Like your father. One minute he was at the store, doing whatever he could to keep it afloat—business was hopeless, like everything else, and his insistence on retaining that imperial patent on the wall didn’t help—and the next, he dropped dead. A mercy. He never liked the situation. Toward the end, he was selling engagement rings at a discount to Wehrmacht officers who wanted to marry their girlfriends before they went to die at the front. I had him buried in the Wilmersdorf chapel. He would have liked the service, I think, though no one we knew was there. You were gone, and Liesel—”
She caught herself, looking sidelong at me before she went on: “He bequeathed everything to me in his will. It isn’t much. The store was heavily damaged by the bombings. But whatever is left will be yours and your sister’s when I’m gone. If the Russians don’t take it first.”
“Mutti, let’s not talk about this now.” I started to reach for her hand, overcome by sorrow that my beloved uncle, with his fancy mustache and elegance, was no more. “It’s not necessary. You are tired and—”
“No.” She grasped my fingers. “Listen to me. I am an old woman who has seen too much. I don’t want to live in a world where I don’t exist, where the country I love, that I’ve called my home, no longer exists. It’s not a tragedy. Not like what has happened. It is God’s will. We live as best we can, and if we’re lucky, we die in our own bed. So many have not had that privilege. But you mustn’t let our name disappear. You must fight for what remains. You are our heir. You alone can save what we fought for so long to build.”
“Mutti.” My voice quavered. “I’m an actress. I’m not anyone.”
“You’re more than that. You are my daughter. My child. You are not Liesel; you have proved that much. I want you to promise that no matter what, you’ll do everything you can to restore our name. We—we did not do this,” she whispered. “We are not responsible. We are good Germans. Some of us have always been good Germans.”
Her eyes and voice were fervent. It had been eating at her, consuming her strength, this terrible guilt and fear that we’d be held culpable for the actions of a madman. I wanted to tell her what I’d seen in Bergen-Belsen, what the world was now seeing—the evidence that even if we’d not personally drawn up the lists or herded them onto the trains like cattle, we were still to blame because we had done nothing to stop it. We had turned away and refused to look.
But I held back. She was indeed an old woman now. Not the dragon anymore, not the mother I’d fought and rebelled against, her demands too stringent to include in my life. She was a survivor, who had earned the right to dictate her own epitaph.
I nodded. “I promise I will do whatever I can.”
“Good.” Her fingers unraveled from mine. “I must rest awhile. Are you staying long?”
“As long as you need me,” I said. “Or as long as the army will let me.”
She smiled vaguely, motioning to a rickety credenza. “There are some calling cards for you. A few of your fellow students from that academy and friends who didn’t leave or were taken away. They’ve been coming by, wanting to know if you are really alive.”
I started, turning to look at where she pointed before returning my bewildered gaze to her. “But you . . . I thought they told you I was dead.”
“They did.” She harrumphed. “But who could believe anything those criminals said? I suspected you might not be. You always were stubborn. I preferred to think you were dead until you came to me. I wasn’t certain you would. These days, it’s easier not to hope.”
She retreated to the lone bedroom, clicking the warped door shut.
Alone on the sofa, I let tears slip down my cheeks. So much time lost, so much we could have shared, if only we’d found common ground. The war had taken everything from her.
But it had brought us together.
XI
They came on rickety bicycles and on foot, haggard and swathed in an assortment of mismatched clothes—frayed scarves, moth-holed caps, and ill-fitting coats that barely protected against the chill. November had fallen upon Berlin like a fist. It would be another long winter and few in the city had the means to withstand it. There was a shortage of everything: food, fuel for transport, kerosene, coal, and apparel. While the Allies haggled over the nation’s fate, those who had withstood the Nazis and the resultant reprisals now faced rampant hunger and destitution.
I was overjoyed to see them—these people whose faces I did not remember, acquaintances from our champagne-and-opium-infused heyday, when Berlin bloomed with postwar intoxication, the future unclear yet, had we only known it, full of misguided hope. Looking back as I greeted them and they filled Mutti’s apartment—she’d gone next door to stay the night with her widowed neighbor—whisking contraband Russian vodka and British gin from their pockets and settling on the sofa, the chairs, and the floor, I marveled at our lost innocence. We had believed we were invincible. We’d boozed, smoked, and slept with one another like pagans; but to see us now, a threadbare collection of pinched cheeks and bruised eyes, was to realize we’d experienced a time that would never come again—a glorious pageant of protest and perversity, squashed under intolerance and coils of barbed wire.
Then Camilla Horn, my rival-friend from the boardinghouse, walked through the door.
I fell apart.
She engulfed me in her arms. She looked the same in her squirrel-trimmed coat and chic beret, bleached curls peeping out to frame her narrow, still arresting face, an unexpected vision from the past, though as she whispered, kissing my cheek, “Not so young anymore.”
“But more blond,” I said, wiping my tears. “Weren’t you a redhead?”
“You set the trend. I only copy it.” She swept her feline stare over the others, nodding to those she knew. “I need a drink.” One of the men, an actor I vaguely recalled from our Reinhardt days, rushed to pour vodka for her into one of the army-issue tin glasses.
“Danke.” As he flushed and backed away, she said to me, “I heard you were here, so I made a special trip from Vienna. How long has it been?”
“Too long.” Hooking my arm in hers, I drew her into a corner. “How did you . . . ?”
“Survive?” She downed her vodka. “Not easily. Certainly not like Leni.” She grimaced. “You know she made propaganda films for them?”
I nodded. “I saw one. Triumph of the Will, I think it was called.”
“Atrocious, wasn’t it? Like a bad DeMille epic. Leni always did tend to the garish.” She made an irritated sound. “She used inmates from detention centers as extras, then watched them being loaded onto the death trains to Poland. She escaped Berlin, but the Americans captured her as she fled over the Alps. They’re holding her for questioning, using her own propaganda to identify missing officials. I hope they hang her. She was fucking Goebbels, a miserable failed novelist, just as she failed as an actress. A party of losers. Who would have thought?”
I had to agree. Leni Riefenstahl deserved whatever was coming to her. She had not been an innocent caught up in the maelstrom; she had actively participated, helping to whip the maelstrom into murderous frenzy with her overwrought paeans to the Reich.
“Do you know anything about Gerda?” I asked, bracing myself. I’d not heard from her since our falling-out over the kidnapping threat. She’d taken her final paycheck, which I’d left as promised, and disappeared
. I assumed she’d returned to Europe. Where else would she have gone?
“Not lately,” said Camilla. “Last I heard, she was in Austria. She wrote for a Viennese newspaper—Nazi approved of course. Guess she had to make a living. Then, because of her connection to you, she was hired by Goebbels to write a series of articles about your life in Hollywood. They weren’t exactly flattering, but they probably saved her.”
“Is she alive?” I said. “She wasn’t arrested or gone missing?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Word traveled fast when people were taken. Like I said, knowing you must have saved her. The Nazis may have declared you a traitor in public but in private they couldn’t get enough of you. Leni told me after she saw you in London, Goebbels was furious that you’d refused their offer. Hitler was a fan; he’d seen all your pictures, even those they banned, and he wanted to make you his mistress. Just think,” she said wryly. “You might have helped us win the war if only you’d agreed to come here and screw the führer.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, in gratitude that Gerda had survived. Then I looked at Camilla and said, “Will you tell her I asked about her if you see her?”
“Of course. But Gerda never liked our circle much, as you know. It’s unlikely I’ll run into her anytime soon.” She paused. “Do you want to know how I made it through?”
Marlene: A Novel Page 38
