Life After Life (37 page)

There was a lot of marching and singing to a brass band and several speakers who attempted the same declamatory style as the Führer (and failed) and then everyone leapt to their feet and sang ‘
Deutschland über alles
’. As Ursula didn’t know the words she quietly sang ‘Glorious Things Of Thee Are Spoken’ to Haydn’s lovely tune, a hymn they had often sung in school assembly. When the singing finished everyone shouted ‘
Sieg Heil!
’ and saluted and Ursula was almost surprised to find herself joining in. Klara was convulsed with laughter at the sight but nonetheless Ursula noticed she had her arm raised too. ‘I should think so too,’ she said, nonchalantly. ‘I don’t want to be set upon on the way home.’

No, thank you, Ursula didn’t want to stay home with Vati and Mutti Brenner in hot, dusty Munich so Klara rummaged through her wardrobe and found a navy skirt and white blouse that suited requirements and the group leader, Adelheid, provided a spare khaki battledress jacket. A three-cornered scarf drawn through a braided leather Turk’s-head knot completed the outfit. Ursula thought she looked rather dashing. She found herself regretting never having been a Girl Guide, although she supposed it was about more than just the uniform.

The upper age limit for the BDM was eighteen so neither Ursula nor Klara was qualified to join, they were ‘old ladies’,
alte Damen
, according to Hanne. Ursula didn’t think that the troop really needed to be escorted by them as Adelheid was as efficient as a sheepdog with her girls. With her statuesque figure and Nordic blonde plaits she could have passed for a youthful Freyja visiting from Fólkvangr. She was perfect propaganda. At eighteen she would soon be too old for the BDM, what would she do then?

‘Why, I will join the National Socialist Women’s League, of course,’ she said. She already wore a small silver swastika pinned to her shapely bosom, the runic symbol of belonging.

They took a train, their rucksacks stowed on the luggage racks, and by evening they had arrived in a small Alpine village, near to the Austrian border. From the station they marched in formation (singing, naturally) to their
Jugendherberge
. People stopped to watch them and some clapped appreciatively.

The dormitory they were allotted was full of two-tier bunks, most of which were already occupied by other girls and they had to squeeze themselves in, sardine fashion. Klara and Ursula elected to share a mattress on the floor.

They were given supper in the dining room, seated at long trestle tables, served with what turned out to be the standard fare of soup and
Knäckebrot
with cheese. In the morning they breakfasted on dark bread, cheese and jam and tea or coffee. The clean mountain air made them ravenous and they wolfed down everything in sight.

The village and its surroundings were idyllic, there was even a small castle that they were allowed to visit. It was cold and dank, full of suits of armour and flags and heraldic shields. It seemed like a very uncomfortable place to live.

They took long walks around the lake or in the forest and then they hitched lifts back to the youth hostel on farm lorries and hay-carts. One day they hiked all the way along the river to a magnificent waterfall. Klara had brought her sketch-pad with her and her quick, lively little charcoal drawings were much more appealing than her paintings. ‘Ach,’ she said, ‘they’re
gemütlich
. Cosy little sketches. My friends would laugh.’ The village itself was a sleepy little place where the houses had windows full of geraniums. There was an inn on the river where they drank beer and ate veal and noodles until they thought they would burst. Ursula never mentioned the beer to Sylvie in her letters, she wouldn’t have understood how commonplace it was here. And even if she had, she wouldn’t have approved.

They were to move on the next day, they would be living ‘under canvas’ for a few days, a big encampment of girls, and Ursula felt sorry to be leaving the village.

A fair was taking place on their last night there, a combination of an agricultural show and a harvest festival, a lot of it incomprehensible to Ursula. (‘To me too,’ Klara said. ‘I’m a city girl, remember.’) The women all wore local costume and variously garlanded farm animals were paraded around a field and then awarded prizes. Flags, again with swastikas, decorated the field. There was plenty of beer and a brass band played. A big wooden platform had been set up in the middle of the field and, accompanied by an accordion, some boys in
Lederhosen
gave a demonstration of
Schuhplattler
, clapping and stamping and slapping their thighs and heels in time to the music.

Klara scoffed at them but Ursula considered it rather clever. Ursula thought that she would quite like to live in an Alpine village (‘Like Heidi,’ she wrote to Pamela. She wrote less to Pamela as her sister was so aggravated by the new Germany. Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance).

The accordionist took his place in a band and people began to dance. Ursula was led on to the platform by a succession of terrifically shy farm boys who had an odd clodhopping way of moving around the dance floor which she recognized as the rather awkward 3/4 time of the
Schuhplattler
. Between the beer and the dancing she began to feel quite light-headed so that she was confused when Klara appeared, dragging by the hand a very handsome man who was clearly not local, saying, ‘Look who I found!’

‘Who?’ Ursula asked.

‘None other than our cousin’s half-cousin’s cousin once removed,’ Klara said gaily. ‘Or something to that effect. May I present Jürgen Fuchs.’

‘Just a half-cousin,’ he said, smiling.

‘Delighted to meet you I’m sure,’ she said. He clicked his heels and kissed her hand, she was reminded of Prince Charming in
Cinderella
. ‘It’s the Prussian in me,’ he said and laughed, as did the Brenners. ‘We have no Prussian blood at all,’ Klara said.

He had a lovely smile, amused and thoughtful at the same time, and extraordinarily blue eyes. He was undoubtedly handsome, rather like Benjamin Cole, except Benjamin was his dark polar opposite, the negative to Jürgen Fuchs’s positive.

A Todd and a Fuchs – a pair of foxes. Had fate intervened in her life? Dr Kellet might have appreciated the coincidence.

‘He is so handsome,’ she wrote to Millie after that encounter. All those awful words used in trashy romances come to mind –
heart-stopping, breathtaking
. She had read enough of Bridget’s novels on idle wet afternoons to know.

‘Love at first sight,’ she wrote giddily to Millie. But of course such feelings weren’t ‘true’ love (that was what she would feel for a child one day), merely the false grandeur of madness. ‘
Folie à deux
,’ Millie wrote back. ‘How delicious.’

‘Good for you,’ Pamela wrote.

‘Marriage is based on a more enduring kind of love,’ Sylvie cautioned.

‘I am thinking of you, little bear,’ Hugh wrote, ‘so far away from here.’

When darkness fell there was a torchlit procession through the village and then fireworks from the battlements of the small castle. It was rather thrilling.

‘
Wunderschön, nicht wahr?
’ Adelheid said, her face radiant in the light of the torches.

Yes, Ursula agreed, it’s lovely.

August 1939

DER ZAUBERBERG
. THE magic mountain.

‘
Aaw. Sie ist so niedlich
.’
Click
,
click
,
click
. Eva loved her Rolleiflex. Eva loved Frieda. She is so
cute
, she said. They were on the enormous terrace of the Berghof, bright with Alpine sun, waiting for lunch to be brought out. It was much nicer to eat out here,
al fresco
, rather than in the big, gloomy dining room, its massive window full of nothing but mountains. Dictators loved everything to be on a grand scale, even their scenery.
Bitte lächeln!
Big smile. Frieda obliged. She was an obliging child.

Eva had persuaded Frieda out of her serviceable English hand-smocked dress (Bourne and Hollingsworth, purchased by Sylvie and sent for Frieda’s birthday) and had arrayed her instead in Bavarian costume – dirndl, apron, knee-length white socks. To Ursula’s English eyes (more English every day, she felt) the outfit still looked as though it belonged in a dressing-up box, or perhaps a school play. Once, at her own school (how long ago and far away that seemed now), they had put on a performance of
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
and Ursula had played a village girl, clad in much the same get-up that Frieda was now attired in.

Millie had been King Rat, a bravura performance, and Sylvie said, ‘Those Shawcross girls thrive on attention, don’t they?’ There was something of Millie in Eva – a restless, empty gaiety that needed continual feeding. But then Eva was an actress too, playing the greatest part of her life. In fact her life
was
her part, there was no difference.

Frieda, lovely little Frieda, just five years old, with her blue eyes and stubby blonde plaits. Frieda’s complexion, so pale and wan when she had first arrived, now pink and gold from all the Alpine sunshine. When the Führer saw Frieda, Ursula caught the zealot gleam in his own blue eyes, as cold as the Königsee down below, and knew he was seeing the future of the
Tausendjähriges Reich
rolling out in front of him,
Mädchen
after
Mädchen
. (‘She doesn’t take after you, does she?’ Eva said, without malice, she had no malice.)

When she was a child – a period in her life that Ursula seemed to find herself returning to almost compulsively these days – she had read fairy tales of wronged princesses who saved themselves from lustful fathers and jealous stepmothers by smearing their fair faces with walnut juice and rubbing ashes in their hair to disguise themselves – as the gypsy, the outsider, the shunned. Ursula wondered how one obtained walnut juice, it didn’t seem the kind of thing you could just walk into a shop and buy. And it was no longer safe to be the nut-brown outsider, much better if one wanted to survive to be here, on Obersalzberg –
Der Zauberberg
– in the kingdom of make-believe, ‘the Berg’, as they called it with the intimacy of the elect.

What on earth was she doing here, Ursula wondered, and when could she leave? Frieda was well enough now, her convalescence drawing to a close. Ursula determined to say something to Eva today. After all, they weren’t prisoners, they could leave any time they chose.

Eva lit a cigarette. The Führer was away and the mouse was being naughty. He didn’t like her to smoke or drink, or wear make-up. Ursula rather admired Eva’s small acts of defiance. The Führer had come and gone twice since Ursula first arrived at the Berghof with Frieda two weeks ago, his arrivals and departures moments of heightened drama for Eva, for everyone. The Reich, Ursula had concluded a long time ago, was all pantomime and spectacle, ‘
A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
,’ she wrote to Pamela. ‘But unfortunately
not
signifying nothing.’

Frieda, on a prompt from Eva, did a twirl and laughed. She was the molten core at the centre of Ursula’s heart, she was the better part of everything she did or thought. Ursula would be willing to walk on knives for the rest of her life if it would protect Frieda. Burn in the flames of hell to save her. Drown in the deepest of waters if it would buoy her up. (She had explored many extreme scenarios. Best to be prepared.) She had had no idea (Sylvie gave little indication) that maternal love could be so gut-achingly,
painfully
physical.

‘Oh, yes,’ Pamela said, as if it were the most casual thing in the world, ‘it turns you into a regular she-wolf.’ Ursula didn’t think of herself as a she-wolf, she was, after all, a bear.

There were real she-wolves prowling everywhere on the Berg – Magda, Emmy, Margarete, Gerda – the brood-wives of the senior party officials, all jostling for a little power of their own, producing endless babies from their fecund loins, for the Reich, for the Führer. These she-wolves were dangerous, predatory animals and they hated Eva, the ‘silly cow’ –
die blöde Kuh
– who somehow or other had managed to trump them all.

They, surely, would have given anything to be the mate of the glorious leader rather than insignificant Eva. Wasn’t a man of his stature worthy of a Brünnhilde – or at the very least a Magda or a Leni? Or perhaps the Valkyrie herself, ‘the Mitford woman’,
das Fräulein Mitford
, as Eva referred to her. The Führer admired England, especially aristocratic, imperial England, although Ursula doubted that his admiration would stop him from trying to destroy it if the time came.

Eva disliked all the Valkyries who might be a rival for the Führer’s attentions, her strongest emotions conceived in fear. Her greatest antipathy was reserved for Bormann, the
éminence grise
of the Berg. It was he who held the purse strings, he who shopped for Eva’s gifts from the Führer and who doled out the money for all those fur coats and Ferragamo shoes, reminding her in many subtle ways that she was merely a courtesan. Ursula wondered where the fur coats came from, most of the furriers she had seen in Berlin were Jewish.

How it must stick in the collective craw of the she-wolves that the Führer’s consort was a shop girl. When she first met him, Eva told Ursula, when she was working in Hoffmann’s
Photohaus
, she had addressed him as Herr Wolf. ‘Adolf means noble wolf in German,’ she said. How he must like that, Ursula thought. She had never heard anyone call him Adolf. (Did Eva call him
mein Führer
even in bed? It seemed perfectly possible.) ‘And do you know that his favourite song,’ Eva laughed, ‘is “Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?”’

‘From the Disney film
Three Little Pigs
?’ Ursula said, incredulous.

‘Yes!’

Oh, thought Ursula, I cannot wait to tell
that
to Pamela.