A War of Flowers (2014) (35 page)

Herr Engel gave a bureaucratic smile and although instinct told Clara she should engage him in conversation and enquire after his job, perhaps, where he had last lived, or at the very least
comment on the weather, for once her Englishness failed her and she remained silent. Her lack of response seemed to forestall any further pleasantries, so in his clipped voice Engel said,

‘Anyhow, I just wanted to let you know I had moved in.’

He vanished quickly into his apartment and shut the door.

Perhaps it was fatigue, or the alarming events of the past twenty-four hours, but the encounter shook Clara. Who was Franz Engel? To judge by appearances alone, he might have been a teacher or a
civil servant or a clerk, some kind of professional anyway, yet he could be any of those and still be a Gestapo spy. That was the genius of the Gestapo – its strength lay almost entirely in
its network of informers. They fanned out through Berlin like a giant spider’s web, connecting every strand of society, no matter how far from the centre. If, as Sabine said, the orders had
gone out that Clara should be watched, what better method than to take the empty lease on the adjacent apartment and install a man within? Listening out for whether Clara tuned to foreign radio
stations, watching who visited, how long they stayed, observing her daily routine and eavesdropping on her conversations through the wall. It couldn’t be easier if you were stationed right
next door.

She went over to her window and looked out across the rooftops to the arched dome of Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn. She had always loved this place, ever since her friend Mary Harker was ordered to
leave Germany and allowed her to take over the lease on the apartment. Nollendorfplatz had been the vibrant hub of the old Weimar Berlin, packed with nightclubs and cabarets at the time that the
Nazis came to power, and even though they had closed down the clubs and replaced the Expressionist repertoire of the famous Metropol Theatre with operetta and light revues, it was still possible to
feel the old racy pulse of the city running through these streets. The buildings with their scrollwork and plaster ornamentation bore witness to a lingering Weimar charm and the crash of bottles
being collected from bars in the small hours suggested that some traditions hadn’t changed.

Winterfeldtstrasse was her home, but now, for the first time since she moved in, she realized she might have to leave.

The second most important woman in Germany, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, was in a more than usually filthy mood. She was engaged in a battle over territory – not quite as
frenetic as that over the Sudetenland – but just as heartfelt. The Führer, she had told Bormann, despite his fulsome tributes at the Nuremberg rally, was simply not sparing time to meet
her. There had now been three hundred thousand applications from women in the Sudetenland to join the organization, and that was on top of four hundred and seventy thousand from Austria. Yet she
was still not getting the official recognition or encouragement that she deserved.

As the Führerin paused for breath, Rosa looked around her office – a place of utilitarian drabness that was a perfect outward expression of her boss’s personality. There was no
mirror, there being no need for cosmetic adjustments, and the sole touch of luxury Gertrud Scholtz-Klink allowed herself was a row of leather-bound speeches of Adolf Hitler with lettering picked
out in gilt. On the wall, by way of decoration, was a tapestry bearing a pronouncement from the Führer, stitched in elaborate Gothic letters in black thread:

Woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.

When eventually Gertrud Scholtz-Klink finished dictating the letter to Reichsführer Himmler and flounced out for a meeting with the Faith and Beauty League, Rosa moved swiftly. Her boss
would not be back for a good hour, giving Rosa the chance to attend to the matter that was preoccupying her.

The light in the windowless library was dim and the air smelt musty and unused, reflecting how few visitors it received. This was not a place many people came to browse. The couple of shelves of
books were outnumbered by rows of tall steel racks containing thousands of files, organized under sections including Family Policy, Marriage and Race Hygiene. Rosa gave a quick smile to the
librarian, a mountainous woman whose job afforded very little exercise, and received a sour nod in return. Rosa’s position as secretary to the Führerin lent her a certain status, but the
librarian was under-employed, and liked to flex what little authority she possessed to the full.

‘Can I help you, Fräulein Winter?’

‘I’m just looking in the files for something on racial science.’

The librarian inclined her head towards the shelves beside the chart explaining differences between the Nordic, Alpine and Baltic races and the inheritance of tainted blood through the
generations. The chart was a baleful thing, illustrating the progress of the bad blood with red arrows pointing in various directions, like a diagram on a detective’s wall to follow the
movements of a crime.

‘Anything particular you need?’

The woman was more like a guard than a librarian, as though, if not vigilantly protected, her files might be accessed by any passer-by in search of light reading.

‘It’s fine. I’ll just have a quick browse.’

Rosa needed to find what happened when children were reported to something called a Reich Health Board, but she had no idea where to start. She thumbed through the files at random, her fingers
trembling, the contents blurring before her eyes. Tiny puffs of dust rose up as she browsed, suggesting that no one had felt the need to access any of this information since the day it was
stored.

She withdrew a pamphlet entitled
Mate Selection Guidelines
with chapter headings like ‘You and the Question of Blood’ and ‘What is Race?’ She skimmed a little:

‘
Since normal and sick hereditary factors are passed on equally to the offspring, the knowledge of hereditary factors and the duty to intervene – to restrict and to promote them
for the formation of coming generations – are of enormous importance. At conception, the essence and worth of a person for his folk and his race are already determined. Hence the
responsibility for the next generation lies with us.’

It concluded with the triumphant announcement,

‘Everything weak or inferior is annihilated.’

It read like gibberish. Rosa couldn’t see how any of this rhetoric could possibly apply to Hans-Otto, but she sensed the librarian peering suspiciously in her direction and guessed she
would have to offer more information.

‘We just needed to clarify an item of law. About Reich Health Boards.’

‘Why didn’t you say then? It will be Hereditary Health you need.’

The librarian heaved herself to her feet and progressed along the length of another shelf, her fat fingers flicking expertly through the files.

‘Better let me help you. I don’t want anything getting out of alphabetical order.’

She pulled out a drawer and plucked a pamphlet entitled
Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, 1933.

‘You’ll need to start with this.’

Rosa read it through. The law concerned anyone who suffered from any of nine conditions assumed to be hereditary: feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, Huntington’s
chorea, genetic blindness, genetic deafness, severe physical deformity, chronic alcoholism and epilepsy.

Epilepsy.

The pamphlet was illustrated. Rosa gazed appalled at the grisly portraits of the mentally weak, easily identified by their slack, empty expressions and lolling tongues. They reminded her of a
newsreel she had seen once, in the cinema – a documentary screened before the main feature which argued that some people led ‘a life unworthy of life’, and were doomed to rot in
institutions. The Fatherland should be rid of such ‘burdens on the German worker’.

None of this, though, surely, had any connection to the note from Hans-Otto’s school. She felt sweat prickling under her blouse and sensed the librarian’s eyes boring into her, as
though this was the most interesting thing that had happened all day. She was compelled to explain.

‘I’m just trying to remind myself of the details of the Hereditary Health Boards for children.’

‘Oh those. They’re new. You want to look under Proposals for Registration of Diseased Offspring.’

‘If you could show me.’

‘They’ve just come through. A letter’s been sent out to all the schools so I filed it under Education.’

The woman heaved her way across the room and extracted a piece of paper, stamped with the crest of the Reich Interior Ministry.

‘
A decree has been enacted compelling all physicians, nurses and midwives and other professionals involved in the care of children to report infants and children who show signs of
mental and physical disability. The prescribed registration form is designed with the intention of giving increased medical care. District doctors will send the completed form to a National
Committee for observation.

The aim is to prevent the neglect of healthy children in a family through excessive care of the sick. Details of any child who might warrant registration under the scheme will be forwarded to
the Health Board unless sufficient authority is given for such registration to be suspended
.’

The letter finished with the touch that was the hallmark of all Nazi bureaucracy, a combination of promise and threat.

‘
A reward of two Reichmarks will be given to the teacher or health administrator who furthers a name to the register. Failure to register any such infant will be subject to
investigation.
’

The final salutation, however, was unambiguous.

‘Heil Hitler!’

Rosa thanked the librarian and made her way back to her desk. She had a stack of typing to complete, but although her fingers flitted across the keys mechanically, her mind was full of the
letter, with its ominous circumlocution and evasive terminology.
Disability. Registration. Increased medical care. Excessive care of the sick
.

Each one was a dagger of ice to the heart.

Rosa had a special reverence for words. She had always thought that words were instruments of enlightenment and that if you chose the correct words in the right order they would help you to see
the world in a more beautiful and perfect light. That was why she had wanted to be a writer in the first place. It was why she worked away at her Observations in the privacy of her bedroom every
night, trying to recapture the things she had seen that day in precisely the right language. Finding words that would make her experiences leap out from the page. But now she understood that words
could be used to obscure, as much as elucidate. Abstract words and ugly official phrases grew up like a thicket of thorns around an idea. Walls of bland bureaucratic jargon could hide horror. Rosa
saw that words were dangerous, and powerful. If you used the right words, you could do anything.

For days now the city had been alive with politicians. Hurrying down the Wilhelmstrasse, burning the midnight oil in the embassies. Making so many foreign calls it was almost
impossible for the wiretappers to keep up. At street level the bars and cafés buzzed with rumours and all night the dull rumble of convoys, lorries, tractors and tanks kept people awake in
their beds. Police car sirens wailed through the streets. Chamberlain had met Hitler twice now, yet there was stalemate. Berlin felt like a city poised on the edge of something, uncertain whether
the speeches of politicians represented the wind of change or mere bluster. History hung in the balance like a charge of cordite in the air.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German Military Intelligence, five foot three with white hair, a ruddy complexion and bushy eyebrows, liked to project an air of professional inscrutability. In
his Abwehr office he had statues of the iconic three monkeys fashioned to exemplify Canaris’ personal motto: see all, hear all, say nothing. He was a workaholic, perhaps on account of an
unhappy home life, so he spent most of his time in his office on the Tirpitzufer, where he could be seen arriving at the crack of dawn and leaving late at night. Although the wily Canaris managed
to camouflage his precise feelings about the Führer, his discontent with the direction of the Reich’s foreign policy was suspected and the gap between himself and Hitler was apparent to
everyone in the know. Probably the only thing that Canaris did share with Hitler was his devotion to dogs. He could not be friends with anyone who disliked animals and took his two wire-haired
dachshunds everywhere. He would book twin-bedded hotel rooms on his travels so that they could sleep beside him and when he was in Berlin he arrived at Army High Command carrying them tenderly
under each arm in the black government Mercedes.

Sitting in the Casino Club opposite Canaris’ granite-faced headquarters, sipping a vodka and tonic, Rupert wondered yet again if the whispers he had heard were true. That a section of
German generals, calling themselves the Black Orchestra, had launched a desperate mission to the heart of the English government and Canaris himself was aiding and abetting those who wanted to
bring Hitler down.

This astonishing information had come to him the previous day, at the Stadtbad Mitte on Gartenstrasse, where he swam regularly with Dieter Adler, an army officer who had become a friend. The
swimming pool was a handsome Bauhaus place, and its great glass windows which echoed the lively splash of swimmers made it the perfect place to talk. No one could possibly eavesdrop on two men
engaged in a leisurely length of breaststroke even if they wanted to, which was why Adler had selected it for their regular meetings. All the same, Adler was a slow swimmer – he had suffered
an injury to his leg in the war – so Rupert kept having to decelerate to catch his words.

‘There’s something up, Rupert. A stirring of something. A lot of the army are made up of Prussian aristocracy. They regard Himmler and Heydrich as despicable thugs and they’re
extremely exercised about the idea that Hitler will take the Sudetenland by force.’