A War of Flowers (2014) (25 page)

For a long time after she died, the image of her mother on her deathbed had been the one that dominated Clara’s thoughts – her wasted, bony hand on the eiderdown, her searching,
brown eyes with violet smudges beneath them, and her long hair, wired with grey and tied in an incongruously girlish plait. But eventually earlier memories returned, many of them bound up with her
mother’s attempt to recreate her German youth. Though Helene Vine was self-effacing in public, hating for people to notice her German accent and always quick to defer to their father, at home
she had tried ardently to recreate her Hamburg childhood, teaching the children to sing
Stille Nacht
at Christmas time while she played the piano, and ordering gingerbread from Harrods. She
encouraged the children to leave their shoes out for presents on St Nicholas Day, and told them about Black Peter who beat bad children with his stick. On Christmas Day she baked Stutenkerl, little
men made of sweet spiced dough, and they ate goose and red cabbage for lunch. Probably she expected Clara to follow in Angela’s footsteps. To be married in England by now, with children
perhaps, her acting career long behind her and a dull, blameless, housewifely life ahead. Would that be so bad?

After Helene Vine died, her daughters might have grown closer, but instead grief seemed to drive a wedge between them. Angela’s politics had veered to the right and she had adopted her
father’s pro-Nazi sympathies, while Clara came to Berlin. Despite their differences though, Angela remained an inveterate letter writer, covering pages of notepaper headed Elizabeth Street,
SW1, in her round, curly handwriting, spiking her political sympathies with arch humour. She wrote punctiliously once a month, with news of a world that Clara had long since left behind. How
Angela’s husband Gerald had been put up for White’s club by their father and the three of them had been invited to Nancy Astor’s place in Cliveden. Frequently she enclosed
clippings of herself from
The Tatler
, grouse shooting or attending a charity ball, but while her face may have worn the myopic, glassy expression which had made her such a successful model
before her marriage, the mind behind it was as sharp as a whip. Angela prided herself on her ability to tell what her younger sister was thinking – indeed it was probably having Angela as a
sister that had honed Clara’s ability as an actress.

Though Angela had plenty of friends who studied music and flitted between castles in Bavaria and art in Berlin, she maintained a relentless campaign to persuade Clara to return to England. She
had tried again when she visited the previous year. ‘
I’ve never understood why you felt you had to leave us and spend all this time abroad. I know you have your career and
everything, but you must miss England, surely? All those people you used to go round with. Ida McCloud. The Cavendishes. And you didn’t even make it for my wedding! What is it about
Germany?
’

In that moment Clara had been badly tempted to tell her: of her discovery that their grandmother was Jewish, and that they themselves were a quarter Jewish, a fact which had been kept from them
all their lives, as though it was something to be ashamed of. But she could never be truthful with Angela; the intimacy they had once shared was over and instead she said nothing, leading her
sister to deduce that Clara’s affection for Berlin must be connected to her love life.

‘It’s a man, isn’t it? Anyone special?’ Angela enquired in her knowing, elder sister voice. Then, more softly, ‘Whoever it is, you want to get a move on, Pidge. Men
don’t wait around forever.’

Pidge was a childhood nickname. A reference to the time when an eight-year-old Clara had found a pigeon with a broken wing, a mess of fright and clotted feathers, and insisted on nursing the
bird in a cardboard box until, inevitably, it expired. The memory stung Clara into denial.

‘It isn’t a man. There’s no one special.’

It felt like a lie, but perhaps it was true.

It was hard to unwind. Even when she undressed and lay between the cool sheets, Clara couldn’t sleep. Angela’s question, ‘
Anyone special?
’ ran through her brain,
along with her advice, so casually dispensed, ‘
Men don’t wait around forever.
’ That was true. The splinter of pain left by Leo was a lingering reminder of that. She
recalled what Eva Braun had said about perfume, that sometimes the most unlikely things, when the particles paired and collided, could have a dramatic effect. Then the face of Max Brandt came to
her, talking of how perfume stirred olfactory memory – the kind which went to the deep seabed of the brain and unlocked the images buried there. Of the hundreds of strange ingredients in
perfume, and the exotic names they had. ‘
They don’t work so well in German of course
;
you have to say them in French.
’

But Max Brandt was not to be trusted, no matter how attractive he might be. That brown gaze and seductive smile was concealing something, she was sure of it, and every instinct Clara possessed
warned her to be wary. All the same when she eventually fell asleep she dreamed of the collision of unlikely particles and of dinner with Max Brandt, speaking softly to her in French.

Rosa Winter reached for Adolf Hitler and idly flicked his right arm up and down into a salute. He looked faintly risible, standing rigidly in his Mercedes 770, with his
moustache reduced to a mere dab, and cheeks as rosy as a case of diphtheria. The Führer figurine was one of several stationed on her desk in preparation for a talk to be given that afternoon
to the senior officials of the cultural section of the Reich Mothers Service. Already several of the women had begun to arrive, in their frumpy grey coats and flat black boots, notebooks and pens
at the ready for the lecture on the importance of promoting the correct German playthings. Toy production in Germany had been severely curtailed in recent years, but the Elastolin company was still
doing a roaring trade with its replica soldiers and action figures. As well as Hitler, you could buy Goering, Hess, Goebbels, Himmler, von Schirach, Mussolini and Franco, though the figurine of SA
leader Ernst Röhm had been discreetly discontinued after Hitler had him assassinated in 1934. The figures were made of plastic now because all metal was needed for aeroplanes, but Joseph
Goebbels had recently instructed that the heads of the most important figures should in future be crafted out of porcelain, to look more realistic. Rosa wasn’t sure it made much difference.
Making Himmler more lifelike was hardly going to make children want to play with him.

Traditional German toys, preferably made of wood, were essential to convey the correct ideological conditioning, the Führerin believed, so along with the action figures Rosa had that
morning been sent out to buy puzzle games with pieces of wood that spelt out the words Adolf Hitler, a spelling book – A is for Adolf, B is for Bormann etc – and a mobile with the face
of Hitler to hang above a baby’s cot. There were card games too, like the one where players competed to collect the top Nazi leaders, with Hitler, of course, worth the maximum number of
points. All these toys would be demonstrated to the women’s leaders in their session on Childhood Indoctrination, and everyone would be allowed to examine them more closely, though not, of
course, play with them.

The Führerin had indicated that, as a perk of the job, Rosa might like to take home the Hitler figurine for Susi’s son, Hans-Otto, when they had finished with it. Already Rosa was
imagining Hans-Otto’s wide face lighting up as he saw it, the vacant blue eyes sparking with delight when she gave it to him that night.

Thursday evenings were when Rosa looked after her nephew while Susi went to her weekly Mutterdienst meetings and Pauly was off drinking with his friends from work. As soon as she had finished
for the day, Rosa took a tram to the dingy, pockmarked block in Moabit where the Kramers had their apartment, and climbed the stone stairs to the fourth floor. But as soon as Susi opened the door,
it was clear she would not be leaving the house. Her eyes were pink and blotchy with crying and she was wearing her apron. She held up a handkerchief to her face, ushering Rosa inside with a tired
wave.

‘Is it Pauly again?’ During their rows, Pauly was known to resort to physical force to give his argument more emphasis.

‘No. But I’m not going out tonight. I have to stay in with Hans-Otto.’

‘What’s wrong?’ said Rosa with a surge of alarm. ‘Is it another fit?’

‘It’s worse.’

As Susi shunted her sister into the kitchen, Rosa suppressed a gag. The claggy moisture of a cabbage stew hung in the air, mingled with the heavy damp of drying clothes stacked on an ironing
board and underwear soaking in a bucket. Hans-Otto was sitting on the floor, playing lethargically with a cardboard box, still dressed in his school uniform of a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the
neck and tucked into his trousers. His face had a dazed expression, as though he was listening to music that only he could hear, but as soon as he saw Rosa he held out his arms for a hug.

Susi returned to the sink and resumed savagely scrubbing potatoes.

‘You know how he is at school. You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’

On the occasions when she had collected him from school, Rosa had watched Hans-Otto amongst his classmates, and winced inwardly at how he hung back while the other boys scampered around the
schoolyard, faces flushed and yelling their lungs out. He didn’t properly come alive until they reached the pet shop on the way home, where he would smile at the puppies and place his palms
flat on the window as their wet noses nuzzled the glass.

‘Well, now we’ve had this.’ Susi fumbled in her apron pocket and thrust a letter towards her. It was a thin blue envelope, marked with the official stamp of Hans-Otto’s
school office, and contained a terse note, outlined in the finest National Socialist officialese.

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Susi, half despondent, half angry. ‘All that jargon.’

‘What are these difficulties they’re talking about?’

‘You know. It’s just Hans-Otto. He’s not like other boys. He’s slow.’

‘He’s a dreamer. That’s what Vati says. Hans-Otto is dreaming up great things. Vati says Einstein didn’t talk until he was four.’

This remark only seemed to upset Susi more.

‘Einstein! He’s not Einstein! Look at him!’

Hans-Otto was holding up the figurine of the Führer and gazing at it with a seraphic air, as though observing the transit of invisible angels.

‘You don’t know what he’s capable of,’ said Rosa stoutly.

‘I know what he’s not capable of. The teachers are supposed to report any child who seems abnormal and according to Fräulein Blitzer that includes not being able to button a
coat, doing badly in sports, or failing an exam. Hans-Otto hasn’t taken any exam yet, but he certainly can’t button his coat and that fit he had the other day has made everything so
much worse. He sits there in a trance. I’m desperate, Rosa.’

‘What’s this Heredity Health Court they’re talking about?’

‘A type of health board.’

‘But what does health have to do with a court? It’s nothing to do with the law, is it?’

‘I don’t really understand it either. Apparently it’s a place where they investigate an inherited disease.’

‘But having a fit isn’t inherited.’

Susi’s face seemed to contort with suppressed rage and fear.

‘Pauly’s father had fits. Pauly’s brother has had them too. It’s something called epilepsy. But Pauly absolutely refuses to accept that Hans-Otto is suffering from it.
And he insists that his brother’s fits were just a consequence of too much beer.’

‘What about Doktor Eberhardt?’ The family doctor was a kindly man with a practice in Keithstrasse, who had tended the entire Winter family since Rosa and Susi were children.

‘I’ve seen him, of course. He said he would prefer not to examine Hans-Otto.’

‘But why?’

‘He would be obliged to pass any information about Hans-Otto to a central archive and he doesn’t want to do that.’

‘Not even to see him, though?’

‘I’m glad. I don’t want Doktor Eberhardt to write anything about Hans-Otto down. I don’t want anything about my son on some file in someone’s archive.’

‘So what can you do?’

Susi folded her arms defiantly.

‘It’s you who need to do something, Rosa. You understand the way these things work. You talk to these people. You work for the Führerin after all – the most powerful woman
in the land – you must be able to ask her for help.’

‘But . . .’ It was impossible to explain to her elder sister just how adamantly the Führerin was opposed to any form of nepotistic advantage. Giving Rosa the toy that day was
the nearest to official corruption that the Führerin had ever come, and Rosa knew she would probably have reimbursed the office later from her own pocket.

‘I will. Of course I will. I’ll see what I can do.’

She cast a glance at Hans-Otto, who was now bashing the Hitler toy with a gentle rhythm, up and down, up and down, on its head.

‘Susi, why don’t you go tonight anyway – you need the break. Let me stay with him for a couple of hours.’

Once Susi had left, Rosa opened her bag and drew out the book she had plucked from the library before leaving work. The very few children’s stories available were all on the recommended
list for National Socialist teaching and followed correct ideology. By far the most borrowed was Holst’s
The Dragon Slayer,
in which Hitler was pictured as a prince battling to free
the princess who was Germany, but Rosa had chosen a book with a deep burgundy cover and a line drawing of a wizened, old dwarf on it, decorated by a title in black Gothic script:
The Household
Tales of the Brothers Grimm
. Women on the Mother Service course were encouraged to read fairy tales to children on the grounds that they embodied the correct folkish values and the characters
in them bravely struggled to find racially pure marriage partners, but Rosa didn’t care about any of that and, obviously, Hans-Otto didn’t either. She just loved the stories.