Faith and Beauty (21 page)

And yet, thought Clara, as she boarded the last S-Bahn and sat in the warm, rumbling darkness, was she not herself in thrall to a kind of superstition? Wasn’t she also longing to believe her own personal faith? That unexplained sixth sense, like a quiet flame in her heart, that told her that while Leo Quinn was missing, while he had disappeared without trace, he might yet not be dead?

Chapter Seventeen

Hedwig was sitting in the cramped front room of the apartment with her five brothers, quizzing Reiner on Air Raids. It was Reiner’s homework, but all the boys were listening – all except one-year-old Kurt, who was drifting off to sleep on her lap. Kurt was too young to understand about bombs or fire or death, and when he had been given a picture book about air raids, he had torn it up and cheerfully stuffed the pieces into his mouth. Hedwig wished she could do the same with Reiner’s quiz.

As she ran through the list of questions, she was trying to keep order as the three others attempted to compete. Wolfgang, who at eleven was younger than Reiner, but brighter, kept butting in. The oldest, Peter, bent over his schoolwork, contributing answers in a tone of bored superiority that infuriated his younger brother. Even little Ludi, who at five was too small even for the Pimpf, the junior section of the Hitler Youth, but had regular air-raid lessons at kindergarten, kept jumping up and trying to interrupt.

‘Stop it, Ludi. It’s my homework!’ shouted Reiner, with a mounting flush on his cheeks. ‘I need to get it right because there’s a big drill coming up!’

Reiner always found himself left behind by his cleverer brothers. He was hopeless at school. Perhaps that was why the HJ meant so much to him. It played to his strengths, which were running, fighting and swimming. Placing a soothing hand on Ludi’s head, Hedwig continued.

‘What do you do if you see a fire, Reiner? Who would be the right person to tell? What do you do if someone’s injured? How would you deal with poison gas?’

War was by far the boys’ favourite subject. It occupied their every thought. Even when they weren’t studying it, they were playing it in a variety of military board games:
Tanks Forward
,
Without a Propeller
,
We Sail Against England
– a new one involving U-Boats – and
Bombs Over England
, a game where Heinkel bombers attacked London Bridge. That was Wolfgang’s favourite and when Hedwig told him she had seen London Bridge and hoped it wouldn’t be bombed, he stared at her in disbelief.

But who needed board games now that the whole of the city had turned into one big practice site? Mock air raids and blackouts went on all the time in Berlin. In a recent drill, soldiers trussed up in decontamination suits had hosed down the streets as if clearing poison gas. The Luftwaffe had been co-opted to drop smoke bombs for a more realistic effect and fire engines raised their ladders up the side of buildings to stage rescues. The Hitler Youth dedicated a couple of evenings every week to air-raid drill and Reiner’s battalion had a large-scale exercise coming up. When war came, it would be the HJ that the city relied on to coordinate the air-raid precautions, check the blackouts and sirens and cope with the casualties. That was why Reiner’s homework mattered so much, and why Hedwig needed to drum the answers into his head.

She was devoted to her brood of brothers. Sometimes she felt she was never happier than when ensconced in this drab and cramped apartment, parrying their backchat and adjudicating over their arguments. There was Peter, at seventeen serious and ambitious, Reiner and Wolfgang always fighting, Ludi, a burly miniature of their father, and tiny, boisterous Kurt, who called for Hedwig before his mother and whose care Mutti seemed quite happy to delegate.

Perhaps that was why she loved Kurt with a special passion. With his little jutting chin and his air of absolute confidence, it was clear that he would not stay a baby for long. The way he slammed his palms on the table of his high chair, demanding attention, he might have been commanding a battalion of soldiers, rather than a single harried sister. Yet although he was fast leaving infancy behind, his nails were still tiny pink shells and his hair soft as feathers. He watched his brothers constantly, observing their playing and their fights, clamouring to be included. He rarely cried and Hedwig’s possessive pride manifested itself in small acts of preferential treatment. She saved the lumps of sugar that were provided with tea for staff at the Ahnenerbe and crumbled them up for Kurt when his brothers were not looking.

In the evenings when she was not taking Faith and Beauty classes, Hedwig cooked and washed the plates, and after her father departed for the nearest Kneipe, divided her time between homework, storytelling and keeping order. Not to mention patching Kurt’s clothes, which had been shed by four brothers before him like the skins of a snake. This humdrum existence could not be less like the gracious, elegant life that the Faith and Beauty Society was preparing her for. Here in Moabit there was no art, or dancing, or conversation to speak of, unless you counted their father bellowing at the children or Mutti moaning about the amount of washing she had to do. There was no music, apart from the light dance music on the radio that Mutti used to drown out the squabbling of the boys. And yet it could not suit Hedwig better.

Ploughing through the pages of questions on Reiner’s list Hedwig felt a pang of sympathy for him. It had been the same for her in the BDM – endless lists of questions that she could still reel off like some leaden poetry imprinted forever in her mind.
What is the date and place of the birth of the Führer? What are the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles? What is the date of the Beer Hall Putsch? What is the significance of 10th November?
– the answer to that was Martin Luther’s birthday, rather than Kristallnacht, which had raged through the city last year.

At times it seemed that citizens of the Reich spent their entire time answering questionnaires. The girls at the Faith and Beauty Society marvelled at the form issued by the office responsible for maintaining the racial purity of the SS for women hoping to marry. It was seven pages long and spelt out cumbersome requirements for the hopeful girl, including the precise date that she learned to walk, and photographs of herself in a bathing suit taken from three angles. Some of the queries seemed as daunting as a university examination.

‘
Is the woman positively addicted to housework?
’ was one. How did you answer that?

‘
Does she hold fast to the values of German womanhood?
’

And the one that had particularly floored Hedwig: ‘
Does she cherish the high ideals of German philosophy?
’

God knows how she would ever answer them, yet with any luck there would be no need. The only question she was interested in just then was the one that Jochen had mentioned the other evening in the restaurant.
I’m going to ask you something.
If Jochen’s request was what she suspected, it would be both thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.

Chapter Eighteen

Paris in late Springtime had a reputation to live up to. The air was soft as a peach. The sunshine had obliged, and the smart ladies at the Auteuil races showed off that season’s striped silk suits. Hats were worn with flowers. Eau de Nil, sorbet, champagne and sky blue were the colours of the moment. The bateaux mouches slid beneath the bridges of the Seine, the used book sellers set up their stalls on the parapets, and artists in broad-brimmed hats propped their easels as ever beneath the façade of Notre Dame. The chestnuts were blooming in the broad boulevards and in the exquisite Spring light the elegantly peeling façades of soft mushroom stone and the bleached shutters with their window boxes of tumbling scarlet geraniums seemed almost impossibly beautiful.

Paris, above all cities, was good at putting on a show.

If the French were preparing for war, it was with all the elegance and nonchalance that only Parisians could muster. Young men at café tables still whistled and tried to catch the glances of passing girls in imitation silk dresses, who stalked the pavements as haughtily as fashion models, and policemen still wore brass-buttoned jackets, flat-topped caps and white cotton gloves to conduct the traffic round the Place de l’Opéra. Even the air-raid precautions were undertaken with a view to appearances, and the statues and monuments were fringed with a spotless line of sandbags. Perhaps the French thought the great Maginot Line would protect them from anything the Germans could attempt, or perhaps they trusted that no one, not even Hitler, would dare sully the splendour of their most elegant city.

Clara was wearing a silk day dress – white zigzags on a dark pink background – and a second-hand Chanel scarf which her godson Erich had given her the previous year knotted casually round her throat. She rarely risked bright colours in Berlin. The ideal demeanour for a spy was nondescript, which translated as workday, inconspicuous clothing or at the very least muted shades, but here in Paris she felt more relaxed and besides, it made sense to look as glamorous as possible when you were expecting, or at least hoping, to feature in the pages of French
Vogue
.

At the Gare du Nord she had parted with seven francs for the latest edition of the magazine.
Vogue
was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower and featured a startling photograph of a model called Lisa Fonssagrives wearing a Lucien Lelong dress, balancing on the very summit, the city spread beneath her like a glorious map. Flicking through, it was clear that the shadow of war had not been permitted to darken the magazine’s pages. The chief international crisis of the day was the fact that Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford were now being dressed by American designers. And a forthcoming movie called
Gone with the Wind
was to bring back the fashions of the American South. Was New York about to inherit Paris’s crown? France was fighting back with a Tyrolean style from Mainbocher and blue tulle veils from Jeanne Lanvin. The only inkling that anything more serious might be on the horizon was the news that Schiaparelli was calling her latest vivid shade ‘Maginot Line blue’.

Clara stuffed the magazine into her bag and made her way across town. It had been a long train journey, and the narrow bunk in the sleeping car had allowed only minimal rest, but she wanted to walk. She was longing for the brief respite from Berlin and the chance to savour a different city. She wanted to drink in the sight of ladies taking coffee at marble tables and peer through shutters the colour of verdigris into courtyards with ivy-covered fountains. To hear the church bells, with their charming lack of synchronicity, sound out across the rooftops and wander into the shadowy mediaeval spaces glimmering with candles and thick with incense. She wanted to absorb everything from the roosting birds to the sun piercing the wrought-iron balustrade of the Pont Alexander III, lacing the pavement with a dark tracery of shadow.

The Rue Léopold-Robert lay in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, between the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The list of artists who frequented this district might have been specially composed to enrage the Führer. Picasso, Cocteau, Duchamp, Ferdinand Léger, Modigliani and Dali were locals, arguing all day in Le Dôme, La Rotonde or La Coupole and carousing in the bars all night. Above the streets, rickety apartments were packed with artists’ studios, and beneath them lay the bone-stacked catacombs. It was as though Death stretched beneath the feet while Life danced above it.

Clara was early, so she stopped at a café called La Closerie des Lilas and sat inside, beside a dark wood and button-leather bar beneath a picture of Lenin. She ordered an apple tart, revelling in the rich, flaky pastry that melted in her mouth while observing the tiny vignettes of Left Bank life all around. An elderly woman was passing with a baby carriage containing a minuscule dog with a ribbon in its hair. A flock of nuns, wimples lifting in the wind like solemn grey wings, prayer books in hand, were on their way to mass. A toddler with bright eyes stretched out her hands at a falling leaf. Clara’s eye was caught by a girl a few seats away who casually took out her compact and applied lip rouge from a pot with her little finger. It was a startling sight – no woman in Berlin would dare apply cosmetics in public.

She tried and failed to read a report in
Paris-Soir
about the imminent trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the young Jewish boy who had shot Ernst vom Rath, a German cultural attaché in Paris the previous year, but it was hard to focus. Despite the reason for her visit, being away from Berlin and its daily fears and dangers was intensely soothing. The French language, with its slick warp and weft and softly undulating vowels, flowed like silk around her and bit by bit tension fell away as she relaxed into the sensations of Paris.

She finished her coffee, paid and walked the short distance to the Rue Léopold-Robert.

Number Eleven Rue Léopold-Robert was a dingy stucco, wooden-shuttered building with ornate balconies of latticed iron and a set of bells beside a peeling green door. Pushing the outer door open she walked up three flights of a stone staircase with a twisted iron banister. The hall stank of urine and fish and somewhere behind several doors a couple were carrying on a heated, uninhibited argument. When she reached apartment four she found the door wide open, revealing a man half a head shorter than her wearing a stained white blouse, horn-rimmed glasses and red spotted cravat. He had a mass of gleaming dark hair, a beaky nose and alert, intelligent eyes. His face was a composition of lines and angular smiles, like a Braque portrait. He removed the Gitane from his mouth long enough to say, ‘Mademoiselle Vine. I felt sure you would come. And so prompt. Would that all my models were so punctual.’

Clara stepped into an atelier filled with a pure northern light that poured through the long windows and glanced off the parquet floor. A few pieces of furniture were assembled randomly like some avant-garde art show – a chaise longue, a table, various lamp stands and a bed, beside which stood a glass ashtray overflowing with stubs. A white screen lit by four spotlights covered one wall and the others were filled with giant blow-ups of Epstein’s work – bodies striped with light and bisected by operatic shadows. A lifesize torso draped in wet silk. Through a doorway she glimpsed a bidet and a basin with nickel taps, on the side of which a single woman’s stocking hung. A Siamese cat on the windowsill stared at her with indifferent grandeur.