Woman in the Shadows (8 page)

Clara felt a guilty twinge of relief. She said, “Of course. Stay as long as you need. Whatever you want.”

“What I really want is a drink. Where shall we go?”

“Now?”

“Why not? Unless Berlin nightlife has changed out of all recognition, things are only just getting started at eleven o'clock.”

At the prospect of an evening out with Mary Harker, Clara's fatigue evaporated. Mary's enthusiasm was like a transfusion of something life-giving. The kind of substance you couldn't get in one of Magda Goebbels's clinics.

“Where would you like to go?”

“Do you know anywhere a couple of women on their own could drink a martini without being bothered?”

“I think so. Why?”

“That's exactly the kind of place I want to
avoid
.”

GIVEN THEY'D SPENT SUCH
a raucous evening, it was strange that Clara should wake so early. The pearly morning light was beginning to penetrate the curtains' edges like a negative developing in its chemical bath, seeping into the room and transforming the solid black shapes of furniture to watery textures of gray. Clara woke in a state of exhausted clarity. Even though, for the first time in ages, there was another person sleeping in the apartment, she had never felt so alone. Her solitude seemed to envelop her in an invisible cocoon as she lay listening to Berlin waking up, car horns, the rumbling of trams on Nollendorfplatz, and the metallic screech of the S-Bahn trains on the high stilts of their elevated tracks.

Mary had been full of questions last night.
How long can you stay here? Are you happy? Is there a man on the horizon?
Clara had smiled and shaken her head at that. The truth was that, despite the occasional flings of the past few years, she had never met anyone she was deeply attracted to. There had been love in her life once, but since Leo's departure, no man had managed to penetrate her defenses. She could laugh with them and sleep with them, but she could also leave in the morning without a backward glance. Perhaps it was testimony to the strength of the carapace she had erected around herself, but no one had ever had the effect on Clara that Leo had. The frisson she had felt from the very moment she met him. No one, until perhaps Captain Ralph Sommers.

What about your private life?
Mary wanted to know
.
Clara couldn't tell her that there was no such thing as a private life for someone in her position. Her private life was where her professional life—her unofficial professional life—took place. At parties and premieres she was always on the alert, always attentive for useful pieces of information. Any snippets of gossip that the women let drop about the Führer's thoughts, or the feuds between their husbands, or the grumbles about the Reich's intensifying military preparations, would be memorized until she could feed them back to Archie Dyson. Yet although Clara batted away Mary's questions, it was increasingly difficult to silence the clamor of questions in her own head. Which, thanks to a succession of gin martinis in a Westend bar, was feeling distinctly muzzy.

Her eyes fell, as they always did, on the Bruno Weiss painting on the opposite wall.
What happened to you, Bruno?
When she had gotten to know him, after Helga died, she had grown to love his mordant Berliner humor, and his brave decision, as a Jew, to turn down a visa for England. That kind of decision was absolutely typical of Bruno. It was simultaneously bold and foolhardy, because life for a German Jew, let alone a former Communist agitator who had already been arrested for pamphleteering and whose paintings were everything the National Socialists considered degenerate, was perilous in the Third Reich. Other artists, like Bruno's friend Georg Grosz, had already emigrated. Otto Dix had been forced to join Goebbels's Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, but as a Jew, Bruno couldn't follow his example and retire to the country to paint inoffensive landscapes. Under Reich law, Bruno couldn't even paint, so how was he earning a living? Was he living a life in the shadows somewhere, trying to get by? Sleeping on the street and in shop doorways, risking a beating from any passing Nazi? Or had he been captured, imprisoned, and sent to a camp? Bruno was the only German Clara had ever trusted to know what she did and what she was. It was impossible not to conclude that it must have been Bruno, under interrogation in some police cellar, who had aroused the suspicions of the men in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.

Clara's head pounded like a marching band. She needed coffee, then aspirin, then more coffee. She should never have drunk so many martinis. She stood up unsteadily, as though on the deck of a yacht. She would make breakfast for Mary. That was the plan. Get up, find herself an aspirin or six, and make Mary some breakfast. Then she remembered there was no breakfast.

THEY COULD HAVE FOUND
coffee anywhere. Berlin was a city of cafés. Cafés were where the citizens met, disputed, wrangled, and, more recently, since it had become so hard to heat a home, huddled in the warmth that the price of a cup of coffee could bring them. Coffee flowed through the veins of Berlin and kept the city on its feet, even now, when the stuff was more likely to be chicory or acorns. And Clara was longing for coffee. But Mary insisted they walk all the way to Olivaer Platz, a good twenty minutes away, to see if a bar owned by a friend of hers was still going strong.

“There's no hurry, Clara. You're not on set today, and a foreign correspondent's day doesn't begin until lunchtime. New York is hours behind us, remember. I don't even start sending wires until late afternoon.”

As they walked through the streets, Clara tried to see Berlin through her friend's eyes. It was true, the changes wrought by the new regime were not always immediately apparent. The flower women were still selling their little bunches of violets and roses. Berlin shop owners were still not inclined to give the Nazi salute and usually contented themselves with a straight
Guten Morgen.
Even when they did salute, Clara, like many other Berliners, had discovered that you could avoid returning the salute with the simple precaution of carrying a briefcase in one hand and a bag in the other.

Yet there were truckloads of soldiers in the streets, pennants and banners hanging from every building. The somber edifices of Berlin blazed with scarlet, as though someone had spilt a jar of red ink across the city. And everywhere there was Hitler's face, in shops and on placards, and piled in postcard form on racks by the U-Bahn entrances. The licorice loop of hair across his forehead, the pasty cheeks, the studied frown. Mary squinted at them and grimaced.

“He's like a sunset, isn't he? People never get bored by looking at him. That same view, in a thousand slightly different versions. Arm up, arm down, full face, half profile.”

“Shh.” Foreigners' voices, Clara had noticed, always seemed unnaturally loud. “Haven't you heard that phrase everyone uses?
Speak through a flower?
”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You hear it all the time now. It means say only positive things about the Nazis in public.”

“You won't catch me mumbling through my bouquet. I couldn't care less if people hear what I have to say. And I think it's strange they like Hitler so much here, considering he doesn't much care for Berlin. Doesn't he call it a Trümmerfeld—a field of rubble?”

“Well, he's the one we have to thank for that. You must have noticed the construction going on everywhere.”

Even as she spoke they walked past a building site, where clouds of dust rose like incense in the morning air, and a couple of workers, their mustaches matted with dirt, hacked at rocks. One of them, with suspenders and shirtsleeves and a glint in his eye, paused to call out a greeting in a thick country accent.

“Why do Hitler's buildings have to be so big?” Mary asked.

“He needs size. He thinks it enhances his own stature. Apparently he asked Speer to copy Mussolini's idea of having a gargantuan office so that visitors have to walk a long way across the floor to reach him. He thinks it makes him more intimidating.”

“God, and that's a man who needs to work on his softer side.”

“Speer is only allowing stone, marble, and bricks to be used,” said Clara. “He has a theory. Because the Reich is going to last a thousand years, one day all these buildings will resemble the ruins of ancient Greece.”

“What does it say if your architect is talking about ruins before the thing is even built?” said Mary, pushing open a café door. “Fortunately, Stefan's still here, at least.”

Stefan Hirsch, a lean man in his early sixties, welcomed Mary as effusively as was possible for a habitually gruff Berliner. His smile was like a crack in gnarled oak, and his voice was as gritty as the Berlin earth itself.

“So you came back. What happened? Some other café forgot your order?”

“Oh, you know. I felt like a change. How are you doing?”

“Lucky for you I'm still in business. You want your usual?” asked Stefan, turning to the shining coffee machine and clattering the cups.

“With whipped cream on top!”

“Shows how long you've been away. You won't find whipped cream in any café in Berlin now, Fräulein.”

“I'm so pleased he remembered me!” murmured Mary, as the two women ensconced themselves at a window table over steaming cups of coffee.

“To be honest, it would be hard to forget you.”

“What's that supposed to mean? No, don't tell me.”

On the railings outside Stefan's café, swastika flags fluttered, alternating with banners with the bear of Berlin, the city's heraldic animal, raised on its rear legs.

“Don't think I put them there,” Stefan growled, delivering thick slices of freshly baked
Streuselkuchen
to the table. “It's the city's seven-hundredth anniversary. A lot of fuss about nothing, I'd say. All these flags and marches and live bears.”

“Live bears?”

“The city of Bern donated them. They're building a pit for the wretched beasts in Köllnischer Park.”

“A bear pit? In the middle of the city? Erich would like that.” Clara bit into the rich, cinnamon-spiced dough. “Perhaps you should write about it, Mary.”

But Mary was absorbed in a copy of the
Berliner Illustrirte.
Its front page bore a photograph of a large Mercedes, with two SS guards in the front seat, others on the running boards, and behind them a small man with a dark-haired woman by his side.

“Look at this! Seems your duke finally arrived.”

Clara thought back to December, the high, surprisingly reedy voice on the wireless:
I, Edward the Eighth of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the sea, King, Emperor of India, do hereby declare my irrevocable decision to renounce the throne.

The abdication had transfixed Britain and sharpened the already deepening social divisions. There were people in pubs and working men's clubs across England who hoped it would mean the end of the monarchy and others, in smarter circles, who feared the same thing. Angela wrote that the whole household had sat in the Ponsonby Terrace drawing room, servants, too, listening to the broadcast in silence, and the cook had wept.

“What's wrong with Wally anyhow?” objected Mary.

“She's divorced.”

“I don't think it has anything to do with that. I think it's just that you Brits can't stand the thought of an American on your throne.”

The
Berliner Illustrirte
had gone to town. There was a six-page spread with a series of photographs. The duchess in evening gown, on a yacht, at her wedding. Then two impeccably trim figures making their way along a red carpet at Friedrichstrasse station, dwarfed by a posse of Nazis. The duchess, in a black coat and fur tippet, gripping a bouquet of white roses, and the duke with a sour expression on his monkey face. They did not look a picture of nuptial bliss. For a moment Clara almost felt sorry for the duke. What must it be like to give up the throne for a woman? To sacrifice your entire life's work for love? Clara had only sacrificed love for her work, so how would she know?

“It says here that Dr. Goebbels personally composed a song to be performed on the royal couple's arrival at the Kaiserhof. That's across the road from his ministry. No doubt he booked them in there to keep a close eye on them.”

“Very romantic.”

“What's the betting the Gestapo has installed a microphone in the royal bedroom?”

“Let's hope they have. Then Goebbels will get to hear what they really think of his song.”

The two women finished their coffee and made their way slowly back in the direction of Nollendorfplatz. At the center of Olivaer Platz they passed through a little park where, between stone colonnades garlanded with late-flowering honeysuckle, sparrows hopped and bobbed. A man played his accordion for pfennigs. It was a tranquil morning, with only a couple of clouds scudding in the bright blue sky. Mary and Clara continued arm in arm until Clara noticed, with a twist of disquiet, that a knot of people had gathered ahead of them.

Instinctively, she avoided crowds now. There were benign crowds certainly, queuing patiently at shops where a consignment of butter had arrived, or outside the theater to see the stars arriving, but more often crowds presaged something far less pleasant. The chance was you would find yourself witnessing some violence being perpetrated, or at the very least be asked for your papers. That suspicion was now confirmed as they approached. At the center of the throng were the distinctive gray service uniforms of a pair of SS men. Even from a distance Clara could sense the cruelty coming off them. Before them were a young couple engaged in the apparently futile task of rubbing down one of the park benches with their handkerchiefs.

“What the hell…?” said Mary.

To Clara, the situation was all too clear. The jeers of the guards explained precisely the situation.