A War of Flowers (2014) (27 page)

‘I suppose it gives her something to do,’ reasoned Frau von Ribbentrop. ‘Now that she’s given up the shop work.’

Clara was not surprised to hear Eva Braun subjected to this barrage of scorn. No one would dare disparage Eva in Hitler’s presence so they made up for it when he was not around and
evidently they reasoned that there was no problem in revealing their feelings in front of Clara. Yet despite the triviality of their conversations, and the torrent of bile they unleashed on the
mistress of their beloved Führer, it was important to listen to what they had to say. If the people back in England had identified Eva Braun as a potential clue to Hitler’s thinking,
there might be a nugget of gold in this river of mudslinging.

‘So, Fräulein Vine,’ Annelies von Ribbentrop folded a canapé into her large jaw like a boa constrictor ingesting a mouse, ‘how interesting to see you
here.’

What could that mean? Had an order already been put out for her arrest? The Foreign Minister’s wife gave the flicker of a smile.

‘I suppose you know your Prime Minister has visited the Berghof?’

It was not the first time Annelies von Ribbentrop had referred to Chamberlain as ‘your’ Prime Minister as though Clara were not half German, but she knew better than to rise to
it.

‘I saw his car go past yesterday.’

‘He only stayed a few hours,’ said the Foreign Minister’s wife, leaning closer. ‘From what I hear, the Führer was not too impressed with his arguments. He says
it’s time England stopped playing governess to Europe.’

Though Frau von Ribbentrop liked to imply she was confiding a state secret, Clara had managed to gather this much from the copy of
The Times
she found at the studios. Chamberlain’s
mission had changed nothing. It was widely reported that Hitler had blackmailed Chamberlain with the threat of immediate war and that the Czechs had been betrayed. One commentator compared
Chamberlain to a curate visiting a pub for the first time, imagining all the customers were as decent and honourable as himself.

‘I feel sorry for Chamberlain actually,’ Frau von Ribbentrop continued. ‘Poor old man. He’s very weak and troubled by his health. Did you know that until this week he had
never flown in an aeroplane before? Extraordinary, don’t you think?’

This was an enjoyable fact. It fitted with the notion of Britain as hopelessly backward-looking in comparison to Germany, with her gleaming Dorniers and Junkers and her ranks of gleaming Panzers
preparing to roll east. But Emmy Goering was glazing over. Politics bored her. She had once confided to Clara that she wished Goering had made his career on the stage, rather than the grubby and
frankly dangerous world of politics.

‘Fräulein Vine was just telling me she’s acting with Ursula Schilling,’ she interrupted.

Annelies von Ribbentrop gave a fastidious little sniff.

‘That foolish woman. She’s probably regretting all that time she spent cultivating Joseph Goebbels now.’

Clara’s alarm was confirmed. Had something happened to Ursula since they had been together the previous day? She was desperate to ask more but forced herself not to.

‘How about you, Clara?’ Emmy turned to Clara with an air of innocence. ‘Have you seen Herr Doktor Goebbels recently? In the course of your work, I mean.’

Clara knew there was nothing these two wives would like better than to bracket her with the actresses who were said to have slept their way to the top. The best response was an entirely neutral
one.

‘I saw him and his wife in Berlin the other day.’

Frau von Ribbentrop suppressed a snigger.

‘Not in the same room, surely?’

Emmy Goering cast her a disapproving glance. Goebbels was ridiculous and the public state of the couple’s marriage was pitiful, but there were limits. She pursed her lips primly.

‘Was it about a new film?’ she asked.

‘Yes. The Herr Doktor wants me to voice a documentary about Frau Scholtz-Klink and the place of the German mother.’

The prim expression turned to disgust.

‘That harridan. I can think of one place this German mother would like to put
her
.’

Half an hour later Eva Braun still had not appeared and the gossip about Ursula Schilling, plus the strength of the Mai Tai cocktails, combined to give Clara a raging headache.
With a swimming head and unsteady feet she was no longer able to resist the desire to escape so she forced herself to dally another five minutes, before slipping out of the bar.

Outside on the hotel’s red carpet other women who had enjoyed one cocktail too many were wobbling on their high heels into taxis on the arms of SS officers. The doorkeeper attempted to
hail a cab for Clara but she demurred and turned left, heading not to her pension, but to Ursula’s hotel. Though she wanted nothing more than to collapse in bed, first she needed to see if
Ursula was all right.

Moonlight lent a silvery glamour to the streets, which thanks to the presence of high-ranking international visitors, had been swept until they gleamed. Munich looked as perfect as a film set
– one of the old Expressionist films made by Fritz Lang or Robert Wiene, with shafts of brilliant street light puncturing the blackness of the night and inky alleyways leading off the main
streets to small squares glittering with cobbles. As she threaded her way through the side streets, unfamiliar buildings loomed up and faded again like movie scenes and Clara could not help
thinking of what Fritz Gutmann had said about Goebbels.
He sees the whole of the Third Reich as a cinematic event.

At Ursula’s hotel the night receptionist had only just come on duty, so he couldn’t vouch for Fräulein Schilling, but he was only too pleased to direct Clara to her room on the
second floor. Clara picked her way through the honour guard of jackboots that lined the corridor, waiting outside every room for their nightly polish like a phantom squad of stormtroopers on
permanent watch, and hoped she would not run into their owners.

But there was no answer to her knock on Ursula’s door.

In the corner of the Friedrichshain Volkspark, a group of Arbeitsdienst lads armed with spades were attacking a roped-off area, hacking deep into the turf. They were
constructing a bunker in case enemy bombers should fly over Berlin and demolish the houses. If that happened, a siren would sound and everyone would have to go to their nearest shelter or risk
certain death as the bombs rained down and fires started. At the same time, anti-aircraft guns on all the buildings would shoot into the sky, hitting the bombers and bringing them crashing down.
The whole city would be lit up by livid flames and the sound of machine guns. It sounded pretty exciting. Like most boys at school, Erich was looking forward to it. He hoped it would happen before
he was due to start his own Labour Service. It would be far more exciting to enrol directly into the airforce than spend six months digging trenches and latrines and draining marshes for the
Arbeitsdienst.

Even though his godmother Clara was half-English, it was plain that Britain needed to be taught a lesson. They had studied it in Geography.

‘Schmidt, name the chief enemy of the Fatherland!’

‘Great Britain, sir.’

‘Who are the villains of the Versailles Treaty?’

‘Britain, France and America, Herr Kinkel.’

‘What is the greatest enemy of the civilized world?’

That one was easy. Bolshevism.

Herr Kinkel had got his pupils to draw a large swastika in pencil on the cover of their exercise books and write the list of Germany’s enemies on the first page. When he discovered that
Erich had met Ernst Udet, the air ace, he had been visibly impressed. He was mad keen on fighting and Erich’s class often got him talking about the forthcoming war to distract him from the
work they were supposed to do.

Erich rolled over in the warm grass and inhaled the deep green scent. No matter how exciting war was going to be, he didn’t mind waiting a bit longer. He loved this park. He used to come
here a long time ago with his mother when she was alive; on fine days they had sunbathed and there was a pond with swans and a skating rink and a café. It was a popular place for parents to
take children, partly on account of its famous fountain, the Märchenbrunnen, surrounded by stone sculptures representing characters from traditional German fairy tales – Cinderella, Tom
Thumb and the rest. They didn’t mean much to Erich; as a kid he had preferred the life-sized ones they had in the KaDeWe windows at Christmas and he preferred stories about crime like
Emil
and the Detectives
– indeed he’d rather fancied becoming a detective for a while until he decided to join the Luftwaffe. The best stories, though, were the ones his mother told him
about her film career. Mutti knew all the movie stars and she’d met a lot of important Party people too. If she’d lived she would most likely have been as famous as Marlene Dietrich.
She used to tell him all about the parties and the stars she met – Emil Jannings, Hans Albers, Gustav Fröhlich – with gossipy details of who was in love with who, though most of
them seemed to be in love with her. Sometimes, if Mutti had been to a party, she would keep a few of the chocolates they served with the coffee for him, and smuggle them back in her handbag. He
swiped away a tear. Now all he had was Oma. His grandmother was devoted to him of course, but she was just a plain old nurse who went off every day to the red-brick Gothic Charité hospital
and returned at night smelling of sick and disinfectant and nagging him about school. Oma hated Erich talking about war. There was his godmother Clara, who had been friends with his mother, only
they talked about his mother less and less now. Often he wished they could talk more about her, and that Clara would add to his little stock of memories, which were in danger of dwindling, but he
didn’t like to bring the subject up in case it upset her.

Normally he saw Clara on a Saturday afternoon but she was away now, and the day’s HJ session had finished, so he had jumped on a tram and come to the park just to get out of the
apartment.

A soldier passed, walking arm in arm with his girlfriend, and Erich tracked them, watching the girl flick her long, creamy plaits flirtatiously across her shoulder as the man’s hand
caressed her waist. With a painful stab he was reminded yet again of the woman on the ship, Ada. He kept wondering what had really happened to her. He knew she hadn’t disembarked at Funchal,
whatever the captain said. They had talked after the ship left Madeira. Oma said he had got muddled, but young people didn’t forget things like adults did – their minds were still fresh
and sharp. It might be that Ada had gone off with a man – that was obviously what Clara thought – but Erich knew something worse had happened. He knew she was dead, and he guessed that
he was the only person in the world who cared.

What would she look like if she had fallen into the sea? Would they even be able to identify her body? He had heard of bodies being pulled out of water – he had even seen one once, a woman
being dragged from the Landwehr Canal, shockingly white, with her dress ballooning on the surface of the water. Someone joked that it was the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg, the communist, who had been
shot and dumped in the canal alongside her revolutionary comrade. Erich knew that drowning would disfigure a person – you were bloated beyond recognition and your flesh was eaten away by
fishes – and he hated to think of that happening to Ada. He almost felt like praying for her, only he knew praying was wrong.

He wondered if Clara had discovered anything, as she promised, but he guessed she was just fobbing him off. She was always too busy acting now to focus on him. Erich was proud, of course, of her
acting – it meant he got to meet celebrities like Ernst Udet, which boosted his status at school, but he didn’t talk about Clara’s acting work too much because actresses were not
entirely respectable. He had watched Clara act once, at the studio in a scene with Gustav Fröhlich. It was a love scene, in which Clara had to tell Fröhlich that she was leaving him, and
it made Erich feel awkwardly uncomfortable. He hadn’t realized that film actors had to repeat the same scene over and over again, while the cameras stood just inches from their faces, until
the director decided they had got it right. As Erich peered from the shadows of the set, the great hall seemed to shrink so that only Clara and Gustav Fröhlich existed, facing each other in
their little pool of light. After each take Clara wiped the emotion from her face and faced him again with a fresh smile. But when she told Fröhlich the sad news, her face crumpled in the same
way, and real tears came to her eyes. Erich wondered how Clara knew what it felt like to tell a man you were leaving him. She didn’t have a boyfriend, as far as he knew, so did that mean she
was making it up? And if she was, how was it possible to look like you meant it each time? How could you summon the emotions and control them, so that your face only said what you wanted it to
say?

Sitting up, he felt for the satchel by his side and took out the cigarette album. Everyone collected cigarette cards now, all the boys at school. It was the number one craze, and at break time
the playground was full of kids trading their cards to get a complete set. The albums came in different colours – golden, red and blue – and there was a text underneath the space where
the card would be pasted, or secured beneath plastic sheets. Erich had completed several albums already, despite the fact that, unlike most of his friends, he didn’t even smoke. There were
always adults willing to hand out the coupons for the cards, which were high-quality reproductions on a variety of themes from Old Masters, to sports cars to castles, and you had to pay extra for
an album to collect them in. So far Erich had collected
The Portraiture of Northern Europe
, sports stars, flags,
Germany Awakes
, and most recently,
The Life of Adolf Hitler
.
Even though the company which issued these cards was not her usual brand, Oma had bought several packets of cigarettes until they got the full set.