A War of Flowers (2014) (38 page)

Out of the satchel he drew a silk scarf, patterned with green and blue rhombuses which contained within them the interlocking double C of Chanel – and a large book.

‘She left this scarf.’

‘It’s lovely.’

Clara examined it closely, looking at the hand-stitching and the rolled edges, wondering what kind of young woman came by an expensive silk Chanel scarf.

‘And this. I tried to give them back, but when I went back to her cabin all her stuff was gone and the place had been cleaned. So I thought I’d look after them for her. I mean, I
don’t want anyone to think I was stealing. I would have given them back.’

‘Of course you would.’

‘But if you’re going to be finding out about it, perhaps you should have them. They could help the police investigation. Here.’

He tucked the scarf into Clara’s bag and opened the gilt and scarlet album. Clara turned the pages dutifully.

‘You’re Number 37.’

She smiled briefly. That made sense. Everyone in Germany had a number.

Erich reached over and pointed Clara out to herself. It was a wistful shot of herself gazing skywards as Gretchen, the part she had played the previous year in
The Pilot’s Wife
. She
recalled so clearly the day it had been taken. It had been easy to look sad, because she had just heard of the death of a Luftwaffe pilot, Arno Strauss, who had become a friend. Indeed it was a
miracle she wasn’t crying.

‘I remember that day.’

‘Ada said she was a fan of yours. I’m sure she’d be glad that you have it. Will it help the investigation, do you think?’

‘It might. You never know.’

A bank of cloud passed over the sun and the bathers on the beach gave a collective shiver. Faces turned as one to the sky and bodies tensed, assessing whether it was a passing chill or if the
darkened sky meant this long spell of fine weather was finally breaking.

‘Fancy a Wurstsemmel?’

Erich nodded and Clara headed back up the beach towards the concrete parade where a line of booths sold beer and snacks and ice creams. Queuing for a couple of sausage rolls she glanced around
her and as she did, the feeling came, the one she knew so well, that said someone was watching her. She had no idea how she knew it, yet she recognized pursuit the way a wild animal recognizes the
presence of a predator. It was as if some current in the air – not sound or smell but something infinitely lighter, driven along the same particles, like a pheromone, alerted her to danger.
She looked about carefully, studying the faces of the people around her, and that was when she noticed it. The man whom she had seen buying the
Völkischer Beobachter
at a newspaper
kiosk earlier – the one who had glanced at her legs. He was there again, standing with his back to her as he chatted to the girl behind the counter. There was something wrong about him, but
what could it be? He was in his thirties, with a sharp-planed face, steel-rimmed spectacles and wiry hair, wearing shirt sleeves and braces, and a jacket dangling over his arm. He had a deep tan
but there was no sign of sand on his trousers or his lace-up shoes. What kind of man came to the beach in office clothes? As he handed over his change, tucked the paper beneath his arm and
sauntered off down the parade, Clara realized what it was that disturbed her. It was the newspaper. No matter how exciting the news from the continent, what man bought two copies of the
Völkischer Beobachter
on the same day?

Alarm washed over her. Everything she had feared since that day in Sabine’s salon was confirmed. Max Brandt was right. There was a shadow after her and she had finally set eyes on him. As
the metallic taste of anxiety rose within her, she walked slowly back to Erich on the beach, gave him his sausage roll and said, ‘It’s getting cold now. I think it’s time to
leave.’

They took the S-Bahn back to Friedrichstrasse. Clara chose the seat in the corner with a view of the entire carriage and Erich, buoyed by his swim, sprawled across the seat,
chatting constantly. Clara stared out of the window, trying to filter out his conversation while she worked out what the newspaper man might signify. The glimmering reflection of the window
afforded her a good view of the other inhabitants of the carriage, most of them fellow day-trippers, with swimming costumes bundled into baskets and canvas bags, but a few minutes into the ride the
connecting door of the carriage clanged and a man entered, taking up a seat as far as possible from her own. The wire-rimmed glasses were unmistakable. Like Clara, he gazed studiously out of the
window. She glanced across at him a couple of times but his gaze didn’t flicker. It was almost a relief to have set eyes on him at last, but was he one of Heydrich’s men? Were they
planning to arrest her?

At Friedrichstrasse Station she parted from Erich, made her way down to Leipziger Strasse and crossed the green slug of the canal, heading for Nollendorfplatz. Then she paused. There was no
point leading the tail straight to her apartment. From there she would have no idea who was watching her, or why. And she needed to know. She turned on her heel and headed north.

Potsdamer Platz was its usual tumult of traffic and Clara paused on the pavement, as though waiting to cross, while she took stock. Bicycles wove in and out of the tram tracks and pedestrians
milled around the green clock tower stationed on a patch of grass at the centre of the square. Neon advertising slogans shouted at each other above people’s heads and late Saturday shoppers
poured into the Wertheim department store. On impulse Clara dipped into one of the cast-iron octagonal lavatories, known as Café Achteck in Berlin vernacular, slipped from her bag the Chanel
scarf that Erich had given her, and tied it round her hair. When she emerged she jumped on the first tram.

The tram took her to the far east of the city, to areas she rarely visited, past tenements with dank courtyards where hawkers and vegetable sellers parked their carts. She glimpsed the insides
of blocks with dingy whitewash and peeling plaster, occupied by the type of family where the men would spend their wages drinking and fighting, before coming home for a repeat performance.
Disembarking, she walked along and saw little notices everywhere pasted onto gates and doors.
To be sold. Carpets in good condition, furniture, other items. Utensils.
Jews who fled, or
‘evacuated’ in the official terminology, were obliged to leave all their possessions behind, and these belongings, everything from china to sheets and armchairs, were itemized and
listed and passed to the state, so it made sense to sell as much as possible before you left. How dispensable people were, Clara thought, and how trifling the possessions they had spent a lifetime
acquiring.

She continued at a purposeful pace, neither too fast nor too slow. She had developed a way of making herself intensely aware of the sounds and sights around her, stilling her own thoughts to
register every sensation that occurred – the high screech of a train running above the buildings out to the suburbs, blue electricity flashing in the dusk. A man pouring a zinc bucket of
water into a drain, a child hauling her toy pram up some steps. At one point a cat approached, rubbing against her legs, and she stooped to caress it, feeling the push of its silky head in her
hand. As she stroked it, she glanced around, but there was nothing behind her, no one out of the ordinary, no figure slipping from the edges of her vision like a shadow.

On the corner of Knaackstrasse she stopped in a café, choosing a table in the way that Leo had taught her – halfway along the room with her back to the wall and clear sight of the
exits – and ordered a pot of coffee. The window afforded a view across a wide intersection, and as she watched the people and the traffic going past, another phrase of Leo’s came into
her head.

Examine the territory.

It was a lesson he had drawn from birdwatching. Most people see only a fraction of what they look at – a few outstanding features of a street or a room. They see what they think they will
see, but the spy must look for what she is not expected to see. Like the dappled feathers of a bird that have been designed through eons of evolution to blend precisely into a tree trunk, or the
speckles on its breast which match the flinty texture of a ploughed field, the spy must focus on whatever blends into the environment. Because it will be there that the anomaly lurks.

Once she started looking it was easy to see him. He was directly opposite her on the other side of the street, lost in a crowd of people at a stand-up noodle bar, with a carton of food in hand
and a clear line of sight to her. She had no idea if he realized she had caught sight of him, but a truck momentarily obscured her view and when it had passed he had disappeared.

She forced herself to concentrate, staring at the menu while her mind ordered its version of events. Everything that Sabine had warned of had come true. She was being followed – almost
certainly by a man sent from Heydrich – but if Heydrich suspected her of spying, why did he not simply arrest her? It must be that they were still waiting and watching, checking who she met,
where she went, what she did.

She half-turned her back on the window, took out her compact and applied a layer of Velvet Red, watching the street behind her in the mirror. She repeated the action regularly over the next half
hour, revealing nothing, but a man on the table next to her who, perhaps assuming her regular cosmetic checks were for his benefit, began to grin over the top of his newspaper. He was reading about
the failure of the talks at Bad Godesberg and seeing her glance flicker over the headlines, he commented softly,

‘We have bad luck in our leaders.’

Clara didn’t answer. If the man was genuine, he would soon find himself arrested for remarks like that and if he was a plant and she responded, she would be the one to be arrested for
treasonous comments. It was safer to say nothing, so she gathered together her things and left the café.

By the time she made her way back up Leipziger Strasse she was shattered. She had walked miles. Her feet hurt and she was shivering in the flimsy dress and cardigan she had worn for the beach.
Approaching Potsdamer Strasse she became aware of something strange – a distant rumble in the air – and tilting her head she detected a murmuring din from the direction of Unter den
Linden. The sound rose and people began to turn in its direction. It must be a motorcade of some kind, or a rally. There was nothing unusual about a rally in Berlin – they were almost a daily
occurrence – yet it was odd that one should take place so late in the evening. Generally motorcades were staged in the daytime for full public display. As the shoal of people moved forward,
she allowed herself to drift in their wake.

The sight that greeted her, as she rounded the corner of Wilhelmstrasse, was astonishing, even by the standards of war-ready Berlin. Rank upon rank of soldiers were marching in a seemingly
endless line down the street, field guns mounted on motor trucks, followed by motorcycle outliers and heavy motor-drawn cannons. Rows of Panzers, engines roaring and tracks clattering on the
asphalt, made their way up past the British Embassy to the spot where a couple of hundred people were gathered in the square outside the Reich Chancellery, its boxy frontage lit up with spotlights,
swastika banners fluttering like standards at a mediaeval tournament. Burying herself in the crowd, Clara watched as the seemingly unending parade rolled by, a frank, propagandist statement of a
regime readying itself for war, brashly illuminated by arc lights from an Ufa Tonwoche crew. As she tried to fix on individual soldiers’ faces, white blurs against their black and field-grey
tunics, the sky darkened and in deafening counterpoint squadrons of Luftwaffe planes were roaring above them, causing heads to crane upwards at the sky and a shudder to pass through the crowd like
wind through the leaves of a tree. Staring at the tanks, imagining the contrast between their steel and iron and the fragility of the human lives inside them, Clara pictured the troops in their
helmets and the planes overhead spreading through Germany in a vast wall of men and metal, rolling and gravitating inexorably towards war.

Generally crowds in Berlin were pumped up and feverishly excited, but this one was dejected, mutinous even, like a football crowd whose team is losing, and whose supporters begin to slink away
early. If this display was designed to intimidate the populace, or prepare them for an imminent war, then it was failing miserably.

Once the troops had passed, leaving only a ghost of exhaust fumes and clatter in their wake, the crowd began to break up, but Clara remained, watching the last vestiges of the motorcade
disappear down the street. Beside her, two drunks who had stumbled out of a bar to see what all the commotion was about stared openmouthed at the vanishing parade, then shook their heads. Behind
them, a man with a pot of glue was posting up an advertisement for the Winterhilfswerk, the winter relief charity. It was the usual kind of picture, little children at their mother’s knee and
a slogan reading,

No one will feel hunger or cold.

‘So even that’s verboten now,’ quipped one drunk.

The poster-painter ignored him.

‘Call it relief?’ added his friend. ‘The only people relieved are us and we only get relieved of our money.’

A few people around them exchanged glances, as if daring each other to say something, but no one had the inclination and within minutes everyone had drifted away.

A rattle at Clara’s door revealed a small girl with a red bucket and a tray of Nazi Party lapel pins. Every Sunday householders could expect callers asking for a
‘voluntary’ contribution to Party funds. They would have the names of every occupant of an apartment block, and beside each name, the sums that they had given on previous occasions.
Often the sheet of paper would be proffered so that you could compare how much you gave in comparison with your neighbours. The youth leaders chose Sunday for these collections because it meant the
children would be too busy to attend church. Christianity was not approved of – Erich had earnestly advised Clara in the past that Christ was a Jew – and now only a trickle of elderly
people attended services while children were sent on marches, or collecting missions. Yet the strange thing was, Clara thought, that their earnest, shining-eyed insistence on the HJ gospel, and
their unrelenting commitment to proselytizing it, was exactly the same as those missionaries who once used to knock on apartment doors, Bible in hand, in an effort to save your eternal soul.