Faith and Beauty (44 page)

It had been more than a year ago, on a rare Saturday when Hedwig was not engaged in classes at the Faith and Beauty Society. She had taken a book with her to the Botanical Gardens, but the book was only a prop because what she actually wanted was to sit beside the decorative lake beneath a monkey puzzle tree and imagine that she lived there. She loved the gardens, partly because they were situated as far from Moabit as was possible in Berlin, and partly because being there allowed her to indulge her fantasy of being a Hohenzollern princess living in elegant splendour, rather than a dank tenement with washing hanging in the courtyard.

But that day her fantasy was interrupted by Robert Schultz, an old school friend who, it turned out, was carrying out his
Arbeitsdienst
year as a gardener. He had a friend with him, a wiry, fierce-eyed young man who showed great interest in the book she wasn’t reading. Shortly afterwards, Robert left, and she and Jochen had spent an hour in intense conversation before he had leaned over in the shadow of the monkey puzzle tree and kissed her.

They had come here often since then, although their approaches to the outing were entirely different. While Jochen was obsessively interested in botanical detail and would frequently squat down and scrutinize the plants and their Latin names, Hedwig was happy simply to gaze around her. She liked Nature to be orderly, and the sorting of plants into their appropriate categories, the Japanese garden, the Italian Garden, the rose arbour and so on, appealed to her sense of tidiness.

Today, however, the gardens’ tranquillity was shattered by the racket of drills. A band of workers at the far end of the garden were constructing yet more air-raid tunnels. A digger was biting straight lines into the ground, slicing through the grass and leaving a frill of earth behind.

‘Those tunnels are going to house all the SS files and personnel,’ commented Jochen quietly. ‘They’ve decided it’s one of the safest places in the city when the air raids come.’

‘How would you know a thing like that?’

He didn’t answer. Apart from his comments about the colonies, he had scarcely said a word since they met at the S-Bahn and made their way here. There was nothing new about that – Jochen never saw the point of small talk and Hedwig was quite used to his moods – but that day his jaw was clenched more rigidly than ever and his air of tension, like some hunted wild animal, alarmed her. The horror of the past few weeks – of Lotti’s death and Jochen’s revelations – had filled her with a constant, tremulous anxiety. But the task he had asked of her now – to smuggle illegal pamphlets into the following week’s ball – made her feel physically sick. She had barely eaten for days. Even Mutti was casting her suspicious glances.

They came to the biggest greenhouse, the Great Tropical Pavilion, an Art Nouveau triumph of glass and steel that towered at the garden’s centre like a glittering, crystalline castle. As they passed from the clear summer air to the sweltering, damp atmosphere inside, the humidity clung to her skin and the lush density of plants seemed to pulse with their own life. This was another world, an enclosed, mossy universe, surprisingly noisy with the screech of birds in the rafters and the rushing of artfully constructed waterfalls into koi carp ponds. Giant vines and bamboos stretched to the highest parts of the roof and glossy leaves, as big as elephants’ ears, waved all around. Between the delicate fronds, orchids dangled from hairy vines thick as babies’ arms, and at their feet the ubiquitous Berlin sparrows pecked at a tangle of ferns.

They followed the winding path to the deepest part of the glasshouse. This area was reserved for the flesh-eaters: the fly traps with their suggestive lobes and stamens thrusting frankly up from reddened petals. Vivid tubes that persuaded insects to crawl into their pendulous prisons. Hedwig had always hated carnivorous plants. The whole idea of plants eating flesh seemed a dreadful inversion of the natural order.

Jochen sat down on a bench that had been painted yellow to indicate that it was for Jews. Since November Jews were no longer allowed in the Botanical Gardens, so the yellow benches had reverted to Aryan use, but they still bore the instruction
Nur für Juden
, and despite the fact that they were unobserved, Hedwig felt uneasy about disobeying an order. Beside them cacti, cobwebbed with flimsy silk, reared up, their spikes tipped with flowers like hanging drops of blood. She realized Jochen had chosen this spot because the trickle of a stream into a stone grotto behind them drowned out their conversation.

He reached in his bag and brought out a book wrapped in plastic.

The Proper Care of Cactuses
.

‘Good, isn’t it? I made it up at work. Never judge a book by its cover.’

He took off the wrapping and opened it. Between the stiff boards was a wedge of what Hedwig immediately recognized as Flugblätter, a wad of pamphlets tightly packed together. She didn’t want to look at them.

‘You remember everything I told you?’

‘Yes.’ Just the thought of it made her feel even sicker.

‘When you have the afternoon rehearsal at the Schloss Bellevue, go to the women’s washrooms. They’re on the ground floor, to one side of the reception hall. You’ll have the book with you. Leave it in the cistern of the cubicle on the far end.’

‘And Sofie will pick it up?’

‘That’s all you need do.’

‘Why can’t she take them herself?’

‘The guards check their instrument cases and everything. The orchestra don’t arrive until an hour before the ball begins, but the Faith and Beauty girls will be practising all afternoon.’

‘What if someone sees me?’

‘They won’t. Put it away in your bag now.’

‘What if the pamphlets drop out of the book?’

‘It’s simple enough!’ he snapped. ‘Just do it, Hedy!’

He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring ahead.

After a moment’s silence she said, ‘Why are you being like this?’

Jochen took out cigarette paper and tobacco, rolled it and lit up, even though smoking was not permitted in the pavilion.

‘Something’s wrong.’ His voice was gentler, but grave. ‘I think my number’s up.’

Her insides churned.

‘What happened?’

‘There was a woman, the other day. Part Jewish. I was making an identity document for her. Everything seemed straightforward. I did the cards and we waited a while for them to dry. She left quickly and I waited a few minutes before leaving. But when I came out on the street, I realized she was being followed.’

‘That’s her problem, surely.’

‘No. Don’t you see? I have no idea how long she had been shadowed. If the man was watching her before we met, he would have tailed her all the way to the building, and then he would have seen me too. That apartment can’t be used any more. And they may be onto me too.’

‘Oh, Jochen.’ Instinctively she looked around her to check for eavesdroppers, but it seemed they had the jungle to themselves. ‘What did you do?’

‘I evaded him at once. Jumped on a tram, doubled back. There was no sign that he was after me.’

‘So you’re safe?’

‘No. I’m blown, Hedy. I’m sure of it. I’ve already moved out of home.’

‘What did you tell your family?’

‘I said I’d been sent away. I’d been specially requested by a manuscript factory in Dresden. They won’t find out for a while.’

‘But if you’re stopped?’

‘I’m changing my identity.’

‘What about your job?’

He flicked his cigarette into the leaves, where it fizzled out in the damp vegetation, then turned to face her.

‘I’ll have to leave it and lie low for a while. There’s no alternative. I need to disappear completely. There are people who can help me. There’s a pastor in the West End who’s offered me a place for a while, so please don’t worry about me.’

‘How do you expect me not to worry about you?’

Her voice was harsh with anxiety.

‘If you need to contact me, leave a message with Robert. You know where he lives, don’t you? You can trust him.’

Panic was starting to overwhelm her and she began looking wildly around her.

‘Of course I’ll need to contact you. I need to see you.’

‘And you will. I promise. We’ll be together after all this is over.’

She had a sinking feeling of desperation, as though they were in trouble with no path back, like a butterfly that has crawled into a fly trap and finds its frail wings stuck to the treacherous nectar. In so far there was no way out.

‘Take me with you.’

‘Do you mean that, Hedy? You’d leave your family and all those little brothers, would you? You’d leave the Faith and Beauty? Because you couldn’t go back, if you went underground with me.’

She thought of everything she had been told her life would be: all the painting and dancing and chess. Then she thought of her real life: Mutti’s tired face, and the boys jousting and squabbling. She heard Kurt’s laugh. Love was supposed to be uplifting. It was a balm that made your life complete, not a knife slicing your heart into ribbons. Not a constant stream of questions about who you wanted to be. Hedwig or Hedy? Ordinary or exceptional?

She forced herself to focus.

‘Yes. Yes I would.’

He smiled. A strange, bitter smile.

‘Perhaps. But first, there’s one more thing you can do for me.’

She clutched his hand tightly, as though he was proposing to vanish right there and then.

‘What? What is it now?’

‘I need you to find me a gun.’

Chapter Thirty-eight

Rule Seven: stick to public places.

The spot in the Alte Nationalgalerie where the Titian had hung bore a small label.

On permanent loan to the collection of Hermann Goering.

The Alte Nationalgalerie was one of the first places Clara had ever visited with Leo and in the six years since then it had become a regular outing for her and Erich. Increasingly, however, the more famous of the artworks were notable by their absence. Goering had led the way, favouring paintings of naked women, the more voluptuous the better. Then Goebbels had taken his pick, under the auspices of creating a home of sufficient grandeur for his ministerial rank, and Hess and von Ribbentrop followed suit. Soon the walls were pockmarked with labels alerting the citizens to the fact that its paintings were serving a more important function in the private homes of the Nazis’ senior men.

That day the gallery was thronged with summer tourists. A crocodile of Bund Deutscher Mädel girls was being shepherded through a gallery of Austro-Bavarian realism – the type of folksy landscapes the Führer adored, replete with jolly monks and tavern scenes. Art came well below sprinting and long jump in the BDM curriculum, yet the occasional tour round the duller parts of the city galleries, avoiding nudes or foreign painters, was on offer for those who showed an interest. And, judging by the giggling, even those with no interest at all. Clara drifted in the girls’ wake, pretending to eavesdrop on the lecture, but all she could hear was a date.

First of September. The date for the invasion. The date for war.

She had stolen back to Winterfeldtstrasse that morning for a change of clothes. She made her way up the familiar stone steps, so worn away by the tread of thousands of feet that they caved in the middle, shut her front door and leant against it, trying to absorb everything that had happened. The suggestion that her own sister was liaising with anti-Nazis in France was astonishing, but whether it was true or not, Angela’s name featured in Heydrich’s Black Book and accepting Conrad Adler’s proposal was the price for her sister’s safety.

Clara longed to barricade herself inside, to sit amid her own belongings, brew coffee, to linger and reflect. Yet what if her apartment was no longer a sanctuary but a place of danger? She had no idea if her release had been agreed, or whether the Gestapo were still trailing her. Whether she would hear the cough of an ignition when she left the block, and the slow growl of a Gestapo car following her down the street. There was no point in waiting to find out. She donned a pair of sunglasses, covered up the mark on her cheek as best she could with foundation and closed the door behind her.

Walking through the ground floor of the gallery – Neoclassical and Romantics – she focused on the people around her, checking for repeating faces, or anything that suggested anomaly. An art gallery was the perfect place to disappear. One could linger, staring not at the pictures, but the reflections in the glass, wandering this way and that as taste dictated. Clara found herself gazing blindly at still lives of dead game, spoiled fruit, and rotten, blown flowers. The bloodied fur of a rabbit, posed beside a dying rose. Until a soft voice came in her ear.

‘Did you know that the Führer originally wanted to be a painter? He was turned down by the Vienna Academy of Fine Art twice. I wonder if they’re regretting that now.’

She turned, astonished. The speaker was a man of middling height with solemn brown eyes and a fedora, which he doffed with an air of old-fashioned gallantry.

‘Forgive me. You are, I think, Fräulein Vine?’

Strangely she felt no alarm. There was something benign in the man’s expression and his vaguely beseeching air. He looked more like a salesman than a policeman. Besides, what choice did she have?

‘That’s right.’

‘I wonder if I could have a word?’

‘Should I know you?’

The man glanced round the gallery, with his grey felt hat clasped in front of him, as if he too was unsure why he was there.

‘Not at all. We’ve never met before. But you might know my brother. My name, you see, is Goering. Albert Goering.’

With his slender frame, thin moustache and sideburns, Albert Goering could not have looked less like his older brother Hermann. His high, arched eyebrows gave him a startled air, and he was dressed with dapper Viennese charm, from the handkerchief sprouting at his jacket pocket, to the fat gold watch suspended by a chain across his waistcoat. He looked more like an assistant in a high-class gentleman’s outfitters than a member of Nazi royalty. Instantly Clara recalled Emmy Goering’s words.

Hermann’s brother is very keen to meet you.