The Winter Garden (2014) (42 page)

Clara recalled
The Devil’s Bacchanal
, the contorted bodies and their naked writhings.

‘What did Anna tell you about the parties?’

‘Hitler and his gang used to attend. Anna claimed she got to sit on his lap and he told her she was a special favourite. But that was as far as the decadence went, she said. She was
already sleeping with the darkroom assistant at Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic shop. He was a nasty piece of work, Anna said. It made sense that he worked with chemicals because his face
was as bitter as a bottle of acid.’

‘What was his name?’

‘She never said. But she reckoned he was her ticket to a better life. The thing was, Hoffmann used to take pictures at these parties. At that time, Hoffmann went everywhere Hitler went and
he took photographs of just about everything. He would snap Hitler in the mirror, making gestures and funny faces. Practising for his speeches. Whatever Hitler did, wherever he went, Heinrich
Hoffmann would be in the background, snapping away. The deal was, Hitler would let Hoffmann have exclusive access to his private life and make him his official photographer, provided that Hitler
would get to see every single picture he took. That way, he could keep absolute control over his image.

‘Did it work?’

‘Like a charm. Hoffmann and Hitler used to spend hours poring over every frame, and any picture Hitler didn’t like, the negative would be smashed. They were working with the old
glass negatives then, so they were easy to destroy. They smashed thousands and thousands of them. It was important, you see, that the right image should be portrayed. Hitler was clever. He was
always aware of that. You don’t want a picture of your Führer looking absurd, though some of us would say he can’t help it. Anything unflattering, wearing the wrong clothes, or
with his mouth open, or his eyes half shut, or with undesirable characters – which to me would be everyone he knows – those negatives all got destroyed. The trouble was, there were so
many that Hoffmann couldn’t manage to destroy them all. So he would give this guy, Anna’s boyfriend, the job of smashing up some of the negatives, and Anna came too. Well, you can
imagine what she did. She took a couple for herself, without his knowledge. Just for a rainy day.’

‘What were these pictures of?’

‘Anna didn’t say. Years later, long after they’d split up, she was in a fix and needed the money, so she went looking for him. By this time she had moved to Berlin and was
doing a bit of dancing at the Wintergarten and this guy had also left Munich and got himself a job up here. It was a good job, lots of money, so Anna reckoned it was payback time. She told him what
she had and asked him how much he was going to give her for the negatives. If he didn’t pay up she was going to sell them to an American newspaper. That was a big mistake.’

Bruno looked around and lowered his voice to a whisper.

‘The guy went crazy when she told him. Threatened her and everything. She said she realized he might even kill her, only she didn’t have the negatives with her right then, and he
badly wanted them back. Not so much because they might cause a problem for his beloved Führer, though they would, but because it would point the finger at him. He’d been the one
entrusted with disposing of those things. It would be his fault if they came to light emblazoned across the front page of some foreign newspaper.’

‘So Anna didn’t give him the negatives?’

‘Precisely. The guy changed tack, went all sensitive and told her to meet him and bring the negatives with her, but Anna was scared. She was a tough girl and it was hard to fool her. She
realized she might be signing her own death warrant if she actually turned up like he said. She knew she needed to escape. She had to disappear, and the best way she could think of doing that was
to get married. Where could be safer than an SS Bride School?’

‘You usually need an SS officer for that.’

‘Anna did say meeting Johann was a stroke of luck. And to her credit, she seemed genuinely fond of the poor boy, but still she was scared. She felt certain the old boyfriend was going to
track her down. The day I saw her she was terrified because there had been a photograph that morning in the women’s pages of
Der Angriff
. It showed the Bride School girls doing
gymnastics right there in the garden and Fräulein Anna Hansen was standing in the front row. She was certain he’d see it, and work out where she was.’

‘So he did?’

Bruno shrugged. ‘I guess so.’

‘What will you do now?’

‘I can’t go back to Schwanenwerder. Not now that girl has told the police about her suspicions. The place is crawling with secret policemen. I would be arrested in an instant. I
shall need to find some more papers. And another place to live, of course.’ He gestured towards the suitcases in the corner.

‘I was packing when you arrived. I should have gone already but after I saw your friend Fräulein Harker and gave her this address, I thought I would hang on. Just in case.’

Clara leaned over and placed her hand on his arm. ‘You must come and stay with me, Bruno.’

‘You know that’s not possible.’ He smiled wistfully. ‘I have often thought of the time when Herr Quinn offered me a visa for England, and I have wondered if I should have
accepted it. That will have to remain in the realm of conjecture. I have friends. You mustn’t worry.’

‘What will you do now?’

‘What I always do. Daytimes I spend waiting, planning paintings in my head. Drawing with pencil on the back of paper bags, and pages torn from books. I plan to study the frieze at the
Pergamon Museum. I thought I might make a sculpture myself, something about a struggling people oppressed, when all this is over.’

As he showed her to the door a brilliant smile lit up his gaunt face and he spread his arms expansively. ‘Don’t worry, dear girl. This barbarity won’t last. A nation that has
produced Goethe and Rilke and Caspar David Friedrich couldn’t endure this state of affairs for long.’

It was raining again when Clara left, sharp little razor blades of rain. She pulled her collar up and made her way back to Winterfeldstrasse, oblivious to the traffic and the people around her,
so lost in thought that she was almost at her front door before she noticed the hulking black Mercedes with its engine running, waiting outside.

Dressed in her long-serving duffel coat because of the penetrating cold, Mary was perched in her habitual pose – nose six inches from her Remington typewriter and eyes
squinting in concentration. She was trying to write about the Bride School murder, but it was no good relying on the local press for details. Unlike the journalists at home, who would have pounced
on a murder with delight and spent days eviscerating the case in ghoulish detail, newspapers here preferred to focus on the miraculous achievements of the Reich. Mary had flipped through them in
vain and found nothing but the record harvest and the triumph of Mussolini’s visit. The premiere of a new film to be attended by Goebbels. Good news from abroad. In Spain the Fascists had
encircled Madrid and a Republican destroyer,
Ciscar
, had been sunk by Nationalist aircraft.

Spain
. For a moment, Mary took off her glasses and rubbed her tired eyes. The thought of Spain brought troubling memories. Something had happened there which she could still not
properly work out.

When spring came she had moved up from Madrid to the north of the country and a small village in the Basque stronghold of Bilbao. At that point this area of the country,
including Santander, was still in Republican control but the Nationalists were launching new offensives all the time. That evening the International Brigade fighters were playing guitars and
singing revolutionary songs out in the dusty square and Mary was in a bar, watching the bartender flicking dead flies off the counter and moping over the collapse of another love affair. Alfonso
had been dark-eyed and charming and utterly useless. His hands smelled of guns and he spent every evening sodden with drink. He told Mary she was too independent for a man. Men were scared of her,
Alfonso explained. At least he had tried to explain, in a very unromantic drunken monologue, until the sheer intellectual effort exceeded him and he collapsed in a puddle of Rioja and self-pity.
Eventually Mary decided she might as well join him in alcoholic oblivion. She was on her second carafe of rough local wine, mopping the occasional tear, when a young man walked through the
door.

‘Pericles!’

It was the Englishman from the hotel in Madrid. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see her.

‘Hello, Mary. Why are you crying into your glass when you should be filing reports?’

He slid onto a chair next to her. His curly hair had been bleached in the sun and he had the beginnings of a beard. He wore a beret and an old blue jacket on top of a collarless shirt.

‘There was another successful counter-attack today . . .’

Mary lifted a hand to forestall him. ‘Stop right there. I don’t want to talk about the war. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of all politics,’ she slurred.

‘Fine.’ He offered her a Gauloise and she accepted it quickly. Tobacco was in short supply at that time and packets were ten pesetas apiece. ‘Let’s talk about you then.
But before that, let’s find you something to eat.’

He took her off to another bar and magicked up a hot meal of salami, rice and olives which she ate as though famished. Pericles watched her intensely as sobriety descended and eventually he had
coaxed the whole sorry tale out of her.

‘I never meet a suitable man. The interesting ones are either married or mad. The uninteresting ones want me to live in New Jersey and wash socks. I’m no good with men. I don’t
think I’ll ever get married!’ she had wailed.

‘Why would you want to?’ he asked, in all seriousness. ‘Who wants to be hobbled in some eternal three-legged race? You’re better as you are, Mary. You’re
free.’

She looked at him wet-eyed with gratitude. It seemed, in the lingering haze of drunkenness, as if he had just shown her an entirely new way to live.

‘You’re right. Marriage would ruin everything, wouldn’t it?’

She sniffed and tilted her glass at him.

‘How would I continue my magnificent career?’

She was half joking but he chose to take her seriously. ‘Exactly. And on that subject I have a tip for you. There’s something happening later today, not far from here. It’s
something you’ll want to cover. A scoop. The Germans have been holding a military conference in Burgos under Wolfram von Richthofen, the commander of the Condor Legion. You know who I
mean?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good. The thing is, they’re planning to target Republican troops at Guernica.’

‘I’ve not heard of it.’

‘No reason you should have. It’s a market town about thirty-five kilometres away. Why not head out and take a look? I guarantee it will be worth your while.’

The flames were still burning when she arrived on the outskirts of Guernica at dawn the next morning with a couple of local fighters in a ramshackle van. The glow lit up the
sky from miles away and as they approached they met civilians struggling along in ox-drawn carts and tractors, all their possessions piled high. Out in the parched fields bodies were splayed and
blackened corpses leaned out of burned cars, half incinerated. Once they reached the town itself the scenes were worse than she could imagine.

Until Mary had arrived in Spain she had never seen a dead body apart from her father’s, turning slowly yellow in his mahogany bed back home. She might have said she knew what death looked
like, but she knew it wasn’t true. Guernica was a different dimension of death altogether. These bodies had been wrenched out of life in the middle of it, eyes open and mouths agape. Some
were buried in ash and others burned alive. Then there were the living, who moved as though the soul had been sucked out of them, scrabbling through the smoking ruins with their bare hands,
searching for their loved ones. Basque soldiers were lining up the bodies outside the church of Santa Maria, which was the only building still standing. And everywhere the rank smell of burned
flesh caught in the throat. Standing in the marketplace where bombs had rained from the sky, Mary was aware of an eerie stillness, a kind of outraged silence, broken only by cries and shouts as
another charred corpse emerged from the decimated buildings and the frantic barking of dogs.

She wandered around the market square stunned, robotically clutching her notebook like a doctor with a stethoscope. Houses were still collapsing around her into heaps of glowing debris, sending
out showers of sparks and bricks bouncing like tennis balls. She knelt down beside a farmer who was cradling a boy of about fourteen and moaning repetitively. ‘My son needs some air! Just let
him have some air and sun on his face.’ The man snatched at the feathers that were whirling like snow out of a split pillow and grabbed handfuls to prop up the boy’s head. His cries
were harsh and jagged, like an animal’s. Mary took one look at the boy and saw he had plainly been dead for hours.

She met a priest coming out of the church who told her a third of the inhabitants had been killed. All the men and women he had ushered into bomb shelters at the beginning of the raid had been
burned alive. He told her he had trained his binoculars on the sky and seen a squadron of planes coming in close, circling high, and by the drone of their engines he knew they were German planes
– the Legion Condor.

It turned out that Mary was one of the first journalists on the scene. She filed yards of copy, which Nussbaum ran on the front page.

It was clear at once that Guernica marked a change in warfare. Something grave and terrible was written on the faces of those people in the market square. Though there were Republican forces in
the area, the village had never been involved in any fighting. A place like Guernica had no air defences. What Mary had seen was sheer terror bombing, the strafing of people with no defences, to
intimidate and terrify. Children weren’t a military target. They weren’t an industry or a vital infrastructure. The true target of Guernica was the people’s morale. What sort of
men would do this kind of thing?