Life After Life (38 page)

‘And now one with
Mutti
,’ Eva said. ‘Hold her in your arms.
Sehr schön
. Smile!’ Ursula had watched Eva gleefully stalking the Führer with her camera, hunting down a photograph of him where he hadn’t turned away from the lens or pulled the brim of his hat down comically low, like a spy in poor disguise. He disliked having his photograph taken by her, preferring flattering studio lighting or a more heroic pose than the snaps Eva liked of him. Eva, on the other hand, loved being photographed. She didn’t just want to be in photographs, she wanted to be in a film. ‘
Ein
movie.’ She was going to go to Hollywood (‘one day’) and play herself, ‘the story of my life’, she said. (The camera made everything real somehow for Eva.) The Führer had promised, apparently. Of course, the Führer promised a lot of things. It was what had got him where he was today.

Eva refocused the Rolleiflex. Ursula was glad she hadn’t brought her old Kodak, it would hardly have stood up to comparison. ‘I’ll have copies made for you,’ Eva said. ‘You can send them to England, to your parents. It looks very pretty with the mountains in the background. Now give me a big smile.
Jetzt lach doch mal richtig!
’

The mountain panorama was the backdrop to every photo taken here, the backdrop to everything. At first Ursula had thought it beautiful, now she was beginning to find its magnificence oppressive. The great icy crags and the rushing waterfalls, the endless pine trees – nature and myth fused to form the Germanic sublimated soul. German Romanticism, it seemed to Ursula, was writ large and mystical, the English Lakes seemed tame by comparison. And the English soul, if it resided anywhere, was surely in some unheroic back garden – a patch of lawn, a bed of roses, a row of runner beans.

She should go home. Not to Berlin, to Savignyplatz, but to England. To Fox Corner.

Eva perched Frieda on the parapet and Ursula promptly removed her. ‘She has no head for heights,’ she said. Eva was forever lolling precariously on this same parapet, or parading dogs or small children along it. The drop below was dizzying, all the way down past Berchtesgaden to the Königsee. Ursula felt rather sorry for little Berchtesgaden with its innocent window boxes of cheerful geraniums, its meadows sloping down to the lake. It seemed a long time since she was here in ’33 with Klara. Klara’s professor had divorced his wife and Klara was now married to him and they had two children.

‘The
Nibelungen
live up there,’ Eva told Frieda, pointing at the peaks all around them, ‘and demons and witches and evil dogs.’

‘Evil dogs?’ Frieda echoed uncertainly. She had already been scared by the irksome Negus and Stasi, Eva’s annoying Scotties, without needing to hear about dwarves and demons.

And
I
have heard, Ursula thought, that it was Charlemagne who hid out in the Untersberg, sleeping in a cave, waiting to be woken for the final battle between good and evil. She wondered when that would be. Soon perhaps.

‘And one more,’ Eva said. ‘Big smile!’ The Rolleiflex glinted relentlessly in the sun. Eva owned a cine camera too, an expensive gift from her own Mr Wolf, and Ursula supposed she should be glad that they weren’t being recorded for posterity in moving colour. Ursula imagined in a future time someone leafing through Eva’s (many) albums and wondering who Ursula was, mistaking her perhaps for Eva’s sister Gretl or her friend Herta, footnotes to history.

One day, of course, all this would be consigned to that same history, even the mountains – sand, after all, was the future of rocks. Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance. The Führer was different, he was consciously
making
history for the future. Only a true narcissist could do that. And Speer was designing buildings for Berlin so that they would look good when they were in ruins a thousand years from now, his gift to the Führer. (To think on such a scale! Ursula lived hour by hour, another consequence of motherhood, the future as much a mystery as the past.)

Speer was the only one who was nice to Eva and therefore Ursula afforded him a latitude in her opinion that perhaps he didn’t deserve. He was also the only one of these would-be Teutonic knights who had good looks, who wasn’t gimpy or toad-squat or a corpulent pig, or – worse somehow – resembled a low-level bureaucrat. (‘And they are all in uniform!’ she wrote to Pammy. ‘But it’s all pretend. It’s like living in the pages of
The Prisoner of Zenda
. They’re awfully good at hogwash.’ How she wished Pammy was here by her side, how she would have enjoyed dissecting the characters of the Führer and his henchmen. She would conclude that they were all charlatans, spouting cant.)

In private, Jürgen claimed to find them all ‘tremendously’ flawed and yet in public he behaved like any good servant of the Reich.
Lippenbekenntnis
, he said. Lip service. (Needs must, Sylvie would have said.) This was how you got on in the world, he said. Ursula supposed in this respect he was rather like Maurice, who said you had to work with fools and donkeys to advance your career. Maurice was also a lawyer, of course. He was quite senior in the Home Office these days. If they went to war would this be a problem? Would the armour of German citizenship – donned so reluctantly – be enough to protect her? (If they went to war! Could she really countenance being on this side of the Channel?)

Jürgen was a lawyer. If he wanted to practise law he had to join the Party, he had no choice.
Lippenbekenntnis
. He worked for the Ministry of Justice in Berlin. At the time he proposed to her (‘a bit of a whirlwind courtship’, she wrote to Sylvie) he had barely ceased being a communist.

Now Jürgen had abandoned his Leftist politics and was staunch in his defence of what had been achieved – the country was working again – full employment, food, health, self-respect. New jobs, new roads, new factories, new hope – how else could they achieve this, he said? But it came with an ecstatic faux-religion and a wrathful false messiah. ‘Everything comes with a price,’ Jürgen said. Perhaps not as high as this one. (How
had
they done it, Ursula often wondered. Fear and stagecraft mostly. But where
had
all the money and jobs come from? Perhaps just from manufacturing flags and uniforms, enough of those around to rescue most economies. ‘The economy is recovering anyway,’ Pamela wrote, ‘it’s a happy coincidence for the Nazis that they can claim this recovery.’) Yes, he said, there was violence to begin with, but it was a spasm, a wave, the Sturmabteilung letting off steam. Everything, everybody, was more rational now.

In April they had attended the parade for the Führer’s fiftieth birthday in Berlin. Jürgen had been allotted seats, in the guests’ grandstand. ‘An honour, I suppose,’ he said. What had he done, she wondered, to deserve the ‘honour’? (Did he seem happy about it? It was hard to tell sometimes.) He hadn’t been able to get them tickets for the Olympics in ’36 yet here they were now, rubbing shoulders with the VIPs of the Reich. He was always busy these days. ‘Lawyers never sleep,’ he said. (Yet as far as Ursula could see they were prepared to sleep throughout the Thousand Years.)

The parade had gone on for ever, the greatest expression yet of Goebbels’s showmanship. A great deal of martial music and then the overture provided by the Luftwaffe – an impressive, noisy fly-past along the East–West Axis and over the Brandenburg Gate by squadrons of aircraft in formation, wave after wave. More sound and fury. ‘Heinkels and Messerschmitts,’ Jürgen said. How did he know? All boys know their planes, he said.

There followed the march-past of the regiments, a seemingly in-exhaustible supply of soldiers goose-stepping along the road. They reminded Ursula of high-kicking Tiller girls. ‘
Stechschritt
,’ Ursula said, ‘who on earth invented that?’

‘The Prussians,’ Jürgen laughed, ‘of course.’

She took out a bar of chocolate and broke off a piece and offered it to Jürgen. He frowned and shook his head as though she had showed a lack of respect to the assembled military might. She ate another piece. Small acts of defiance.

He leaned in close so she could hear him – the crowd were making an abominable racket – ‘You really have to admire their precision, if nothing else,’ he said. She did, she did admire it. It
was
extraordinary. Robotic in its perfection as if each member of each regiment was identical to the next, as if they had been produced on a factory line. It wasn’t quite
human
, but then it wasn’t the job of armies to look human, was it? (‘It was all so very
masculine
,’ she reported to Pamela.) Would the British army be capable of achieving such mechanical drilling on this scale? The Soviets perhaps, but the British were less
committed
somehow.

Frieda, on her knee, was already asleep and it had hardly begun yet. All the while Hitler took the salute, his arm stiff in front of him the whole time (she could catch a glimpse of him from where they were sitting, just the arm, like a poker). Power obviously provided a peculiar kind of stamina. If it was my fiftieth birthday, Ursula thought, I would like to spend it on the banks of the Thames, Bray or Henley or thereabouts, with a picnic, a very English picnic – a Thermos of tea, sausage rolls, egg and cress sandwiches, cake and scones. Her family was all there in this picture, but was Jürgen part of the idyll? He would fit in well enough, lounging on the grass in boating flannels, talking cricket with Hugh. They had met and got on well. They had gone to England, to Fox Corner, in ’35 for a visit. ‘He seems like a nice chap,’ Hugh said, although when he learned that she had taken German citizenship he wasn’t so keen. It had been an awful mistake, she knew that now. ‘Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,’ Klara said. ‘If we all had it there would be no history to write about.’

She should have stayed in England. She should have stayed at Fox Corner, with the meadow and the copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood.

The machinery of war started to roll past. ‘Here come the tanks,’ Jürgen said in English, as the first of the
Panzer
appeared, carried on the back of lorries. His English was good, he had spent a year at Oxford (hence his knowledge of cricket). Then came the
Panzer
under their own steam, motorbikes with sidecars, armoured cars, the cavalry trotting smartly along (a particular crowd pleaser – Ursula woke Frieda up for the horses), and then the artillery, from light field guns to massive anti-aircraft guns and huge cannons.

‘K-3s,’ Jürgen said appreciatively, as if that would mean something to her.

The parade showed a love of order and geometry that was incomprehensible to Ursula. In this, it was no different from all the other parades and rallies – all that theatre – but this one seemed so bellicose. So much weaponry was staggering – the country was armed to the teeth! Ursula had had no idea. No wonder there were jobs for everyone. ‘If you want to rescue the economy you need a war, Maurice says,’ Pamela wrote. And what did you need weaponry for if not war?

‘Refitting the military has helped to rescue our psyche,’ Jürgen said, ‘given us back our pride in our country. When in 1918 the generals surrendered …’ Ursula stopped listening, it was an argument she had heard too many times. ‘They started the last war,’ she wrote crossly to Pamela. ‘And honestly, you would think they were the only ones who struggled afterwards, and that no other people were poor or hungry or bereaved.’ Frieda woke up again and was cranky. She fed her chocolate. Ursula was cranky too. Between them they finished the bar.

The finale was actually rather moving. The massed colours of the regiments formed a long file several ranks deep in front of Hitler’s podium – a formation so precise its edges might have been cut with a razor – and then they dipped their colours to the ground in honour of him. The crowd went wild.

‘What did you think?’ Jürgen asked as they shuffled out of the grandstand. He carried Frieda on his shoulders.

‘Magnificent,’ Ursula said. ‘It was magnificent.’ She could feel the beginnings of a headache worming its way into her temple.

Frieda’s illness had begun one morning several weeks ago with a raised temperature. ‘I feel sick,’ Frieda said. When Ursula felt her forehead it was clammy and she said, ‘You don’t have to go to kindergarten, you can stay home with me today.’

‘A summer cold,’ Jürgen said, when he came home. She was always a chesty child (‘Takes after my mother,’ Sylvie said gloomily) and they were accustomed to sniffling colds and sore throats but the cold got worse very quickly and Frieda turned feverish and listless. Her skin felt as though it were ready to catch fire. ‘Keep her cool,’ the doctor said and Ursula laid cold wet cloths on her forehead and read her stories but Frieda, try as she did, could summon no interest in them. Then she grew delirious and the doctor listened to her rattling lungs and said, ‘Bronchitis, you have to wait for it to pass.’

Late that night Frieda grew suddenly, horribly worse and they wrapped the almost inanimate little body in a blanket and rushed in a taxi to the nearest hospital, a Catholic one. Pneumonia was diagnosed. ‘She’s a very sick little girl,’ the doctor said, as if somehow they were to blame.

Ursula didn’t leave Frieda’s bedside for two days and nights, holding on to the little hand to keep her in this world. ‘If only I could have it for her,’ Jürgen whispered across the starchy white sheets that were also helping to pin Frieda to this world. Nuns floated around the ward like galleons in their enormous, complicated wimples. How long, Ursula wondered in an absent moment when all her attention wasn’t focused on Frieda, did it take them to put these contraptions on in the morning? Ursula was sure she would never have managed without making a mess of it. The headdress alone seemed a good enough reason not to be a nun.

They willed Frieda to live and she did.
Triumph des Willens
. The crisis passed and she started the long road to recovery. Pale and weak, she was going to need to convalesce and one evening when Ursula returned home from the hospital she found an envelope, hand-delivered to their door.