Woman in the Shadows (13 page)

T
he cold had settled on Berlin. The frost feathered the railings and softened the trees with a fur of brilliant white. The sweet smell of roasting chestnuts eddied from trolleys parked on the pavement. A chill wind whipped around the gray flanks of buildings and iced the walls of the canal. All the iron that made up the city's bones, the cables that glittered in the sharp air, the girders that screeched and shivered, the tramlines, lamps, bridges, and railway elevations, was freezing to the touch.

And still Clara could not shake off the sense that she was being followed.

The feeling had been there from the moment that Archie Dyson issued his warning. Dyson's advice had been to lie low, uttered as mildly as a bank manager cautioning against extending an overdraft. But lying low had changed nothing. In the following days the feeling had only intensified. Someone was on her tail, she was sure of it. The next afternoon, after a costume fitting for the new film—all girlish gingham dresses, dirndls, and aprons—Clara decided to find out.

Babelsberg station, a short walk from the studio, was a pretty, red-brick construction of gables and fretted wood. Looking down the tracks beneath her, feeling them grating and humming with the approaching train, Clara forced herself to consider the possibility that this feeling she had arose not from the streets of Berlin but from the depths of her own mind. She had always been self-conscious. Was this merely a sense of heightened alert that had become impossible to switch off?

Twenty minutes later the train pulled into Bahnhof Zoo, and she descended the platform, making her way eastwards along Hardenbergstrasse. She walked fast, the chill slicing into her as she went. She passed peeling posters for Strength Through Joy vacations, with their blue skies, Norwegian fjords, and night sun on Baltic beaches.
NOW YOU CAN TRAVEL TOO!
The pictures would have been a mockery to passersby, were it not for the fact that scarcely anyone lifted their eyes above street level, keeping their necks huddled tortoise fashion into coats and scarves.

She turned left up Budapester Strasse, stepping purposefully as she approached the Tiergarten. There was a shiver of wind in the trees, and the broad pathways were deserted, save for the dull bronze heroes who punctuated the paths. After a few minutes in the park, once she had assured herself no one was following, she executed a swift U-turn and walked steadily south, dipping into the U-Bahn at Wittenbergplatz and surfacing a few stops later at Potsdamer Platz.

The buildings of Wilhelmstrasse turned their drab, bank manager backs on her as the wind whipped down the streets of the government sector. She passed the Air Ministry and tightened her coat in an unconscious defensive reflex. Ahead of her, rounding the corner of Voss Strasse, where a forest of scaffolding surrounded the new Reich Chancellery, two men in leather coats approached. That was hardly surprising. The Gestapo were everywhere, and this was the very crucible of the Nazi regime. Clara passed them, eyes downcast, like any other citizen, observing them minutely all the same.

The Gestapo had been in existence for only four years, yet it had spread like a cancer through German society. Its aim was to know everything about people, from what they wore, to how they slept, to where they went in their dreams. Its surveillance was legendary. The techniques were equally impressive, but some of them, at least, Clara knew.

They had signals. A man bending to tie a shoelace might be signaling to his partner that he was eager to terminate the observation. A man raising his hat, a woman stroking her hair, a boy leaning against a wall turning the pages of his newspaper—all these apparently random gestures could be code for instructions or communication between one observer and another. Leo Quinn had taught her some of them, but these signals and their meanings changed constantly. What you needed, Leo had warned, was to note more instinctive signals, like the tilt of a head or the direction of a gaze, and above all to develop a sixth sense that you were being watched.

In her mind Clara ran through a constant register of the people around her and studied not just their clothes but their faces, separating them into their distinctive parts—easy elements, like spectacles or a glass eye, and, more subtly, the jut of a jaw, the curve of a nose, the eyes slightly too close together. At that moment, for example, there was a man sweeping the pavement with a large broom. He glanced at her, revealing a mouthful of brown teeth. There was a boy of around sixteen who seemed to be taking an inordinate length of time lighting a cigarette. Parallel to the Propaganda Ministry a fat old woman in a floral head scarf stood complacently while her fat old dog relieved itself against a lamppost. Ahead of her a man in a pale fedora with a dark band and a slight hunch to his shoulders turned a corner to his left. Nothing she could see to raise any suspicion.

At the top of the street Clara jumped on a tram and took a quick glance around. Weary office workers were strap-hanging in the crowded carriage, exuding the stink of unwashed clothes. A boy in a cap and earmuffs stared at her dispassionately. Opposite, a man with a plush black hat and a silver-topped cane caught her eye with a flicker of puzzlement. That didn't worry her. She was quite used to being half recognized. She knew to counter it with stony impassivity. What she was looking out for was something more covert. Yet no one in the carriage deliberately looked away, or masked their observation behind a newspaper.

By the time she jumped off the tram halfway up Friedrichstrasse, the light was fading. The wide thoroughfare was the theatrical heart of the city. Here the neon of the theater lights reflected off the sides of gleaming Mercedes and BMWs. The street was busy with people beginning their evening out to the theater. An operetta titled
Maske in Blau
was playing at the Metropol. Past the steel arches of the station, the red neon lights of the Wintergarten announced that Das führende Varieté, the leading variety company, was staging a magician's act.

As Clara passed she glanced in the shop fronts, looking through the displays of stockings and shoes and handbags to the reflected images of other pedestrians, noting the colors of their ties, or hair, or shoes. Anyone following would look utterly anonymous, so it was crucial to observe the details, the ones they could not easily change.

She wove around a crowd of people laughing and chatting as they waited to enter a cinema. With a jolt of surprise she noted that the film was
Madame Bovary. S
he glanced up to see the dark eyes of Pola Negri looking across at Werner Scharf, the dashing actor who played Léon Dupuis. For once Clara was glad that her role had been so small. There was no chance of anyone connecting the actress of a nineteenth-century French village girl with the slight figure in trench coat and cloche hat now lingering at the glass display cases that showcased coming attractions.

Past the cinema she stopped at a café and ordered a plate of
Bockwurst
with potato salad and fried onions, which she ate while observing the people outside, watching for anyone who dallied, or lingered without obvious purpose. For a while she kept her eye on a man waiting in a doorway across the street. He seemed restless and on edge, glancing over the top of his newspaper covertly, suggesting he was watching without wanting to be watched. Then suddenly a girl ran up and joined him and they went off laughing, arm in arm.

At Oranienburgerstrasse, she caught the S-Bahn back down towards Nollendorfplatz and headed for her apartment. She had run a great ring around the city, with no sign of anyone in pursuit. Her aim had not been to shake off a potential tail, only to determine if one was there. But everything about her journey had convinced her; the only shadows were the ones in her mind.

Ahead of her, streetlamps hung like a string of pearls in the deepening dusk, casting precise circles of light on the pavement beneath. A man emerged in front of her. As he passed each lamppost his shadow loomed and wavered ahead. He was not a tail. A tail would have melted into the darkness on the other side of the street.

By the time she rounded the corner of Winterfeldtstrasse, she was looking forward to a quiet night in and soaking in a hot bath with a good novel. Her feet were aching from all that walking. She should have worn more comfortable shoes.

The street was very quiet. It always was at night, even so close to Nollendorfplatz. A blind winked at a window, and she became aware of footsteps behind her. Something—perhaps that sixth sense Leo had talked about—told her to stop, and she ducked swiftly into the porch of the building to her right. A cat perched on the roof of a parked car watched her with bored yellow eyes as she shrank into the shadow, waiting for the footsteps to pass.

There were twenty paces between the corner of Nollendorfstrasse and her door. She knew. She had counted them. The approaching footsteps were confident and deliberate. They took ten paces. Fifteen. Then she recognized something. Something she had heard before. A click of steel in the heels of the shoes. That was not unusual in Berlin; no one threw a pair of worn shoes away when the holes could still be patched; indeed, not just patched but mended a dozen times, stitched and heeled and soled with cardboard. But there was something about this tread. Something languid, decisive, metallic. The paces came to a stop. He must be right outside her door.

She stepped away from the porch. Ralph Sommers was standing beneath the streetlight right outside her door, lighting a cigarette. He looked up at her approach.

“I must say you're awfully difficult to track down.”

“You seem to be awfully intent on finding me.”

He shook his match, tossed it away, and smiled charmingly. “That's because, Clara—may I call you Clara?—I would very much like to invite you for a drink.”

Clara was dumbfounded. She felt like she was playing a game whose rules she didn't know. Had Sommers followed her all the way from Bahnhof Zoo? Had he tailed her all the way around the city? Or had he come to Winterfeldtstrasse by chance?

“You want to invite me for a drink?” she repeated.

“That's right. I'd be delighted if you could. Do you know the Café Einstein on Kurfürstenstrasse? Why don't we meet there? Are you free Thursday night? Say seven o'clock?”

N
eukölln lay to the south of the city, a poor area of tenements, factories, and cemeteries, crowded with east European immigrants. In the past it had been a Communist stronghold, and even now underground printing presses existed, tucked away on the top floors of shops, concealed in cellars, or hidden in apartments, where the activists who once had written for Communist newspapers now issued crude pamphlets with hand-lettered text containing news of people who had been imprisoned. They would post them at night, wearing gloves so they didn't leave fingerprints, with brushes and paste concealed in orange boxes. The penalty for distributing these
Flugblätter,
dissident political posters, was death, and the Gestapo went to great lengths to analyze everything, from the paper's origin to the brand of paint and the kind of typewriter used. Despite that, everywhere you looked scraps of flyers could be seen plastered on walls and across tram timetables, slapped onto billboards. Their messages were partially legible, where they had not been fully torn off.
GERMAN SOLDIERS! FIGHT WITH US FOR THE OVERTHROW OF THE NAZI REGIME! JOIN THE ANTI-FASCIST STRUGGLE
! There were stencils, too,
DOWN
WITH
HITLER
! and more simply
FREEDOM
! If you wanted to know the truth about a country, better not to read the newspapers: read the walls.

Clara wondered if her own allegiance was also evident to anyone who looked hard enough. Last night's encounter with Ralph Sommers had made her more determined than ever to be careful. Had he followed her around the city? And if he had, was it purely to ask her for a drink? Was a drink, indeed, all that he wanted? His calm, faintly mocking demeanor, mingled with his undeniable attractiveness, had unsettled her profoundly and caused a night of restless, troubled sleep. She was looking forward to seeing him again and, at the same time, dreading it.

Erich was ready and waiting when she rang at the apartment. He ducked quickly out the door, anxious to be away from his grandmother's nagging. Clara was touched by how pleased Erich was to see her. She had feared, once he became a teenager, that his dogged, boyish affection would mutate into something more gruff and withdrawn. That a certain embarrassment and reserve would appear, along with the muscles and the broadening shoulders. And that might have been the case, if it hadn't been for his accident.

Aged twelve, away at summer camp with the Pimpf, the junior section of the Hitler Youth, Erich, who was short for his age, had attempted to make up for his lack of stature with an excess of ambition by scaling an almost vertical rock face. The fall badly fractured a femur. When he was brought back to Berlin to endure three months with his leg in a cast, Clara had spent many hours at the apartment reading aloud passages from some of her favorite books. They started with German novels like
Emil and the Detectives
and progressed to English works. This was partly to help Erich learn English but also because Clara had discovered there was no better way of bonding with him than over an absorbing passage of literature. He loved Sherlock Holmes and
The Thirty-Nine Steps
.
Kidnapped
was possible, but slow. Dickens and P. G. Wodehouse left him baffled. Clara's experiments with English literature also had another point. She didn't want to talk to Erich about politics or risk him absorbing any anti-Nazi views from her, in case he should repeat them at school and be punished. So she contented herself with talking about books and history. And of course, above all, film.

That day, as usual, they were going to see a movie after a meal at his favorite restaurant. They made their way to the U-Bahn, past the towering Karstadt department store, whose roof garden restaurant was a regular haunt of theirs. She loved taking Erich to places he would never normally go, treating him like an adult. Ordering anything he wanted from the menu. Besides, though he might be small for his age, he was the same height as she was now, so it was all too easy to forget that he was still so young. That day, however, Clara was on edge and mildly irked. She decided it was because Erich was wearing his new Hitler Youth uniform. He had a freshly ironed brown shirt, gleaming belt, and swastika armband—an outfit for which Clara had paid a breathtaking 135 marks.

“Why have you got that on?”

“I've been collecting this morning.”

“Winter relief?”

“Nope. You'll never guess what.” He wrinkled his nose. “
Bones.
We have to go to households and collect bones from their kitchens. You can't imagine the stink of them.”

“Poor you. What on earth do they need bones for?”

“They grind them down for industrial use. Our leader says they turn bones into lipstick. Do you reckon that's true, Clara?”

She shuddered. “If it is, that's the last time I wear it.”

“I have my formal induction ceremony next week. As soon as I turn fourteen.”

“Fourteen, eh? Quite grown up.”

He gave her a wry smile. He knew she was teasing. He had a watchful look, which she sympathized with because she recognized it in herself. She knew Erich had been bullied at school, yet he took it as his due. An orphan was a dangerous thing to be. The only thing worse than having no mother or father was having a parent who turned out to be the wrong kind.

“So you'll come?”

“I'm sorry, Erich. I don't think I can make it.”

“Doesn't matter.” He shrugged.

The truth was, she didn't want to make it. Beside the Hitler Youth boys, with their ardent Aryan faces and their wide blue stares, Erich just didn't fit in. He had Helga's own dark eyes. The eyes that Clara had last seen begging her wordlessly to care for her son, as Helga lay broken and dying on Rykerstrasse, a halo of blood lacquering around her head.

Clara's first meetings with the boy after his mother's death had been awkward. Erich had stared at his knees, gnawed his lip, and barely spoke. He sat through whatever outing Clara devised—a walk, the movies, or a café—with the same immutable expression. The only other boy Clara had ever known well was her brother, Ken, who was the sunniest, least troubled person imaginable. Ken had come through the trauma of their mother's death entirely unscathed, and the worst he would do in a mutinous mood was go and kick a ball, or walk his dog, Flashman. Erich was different from Ken, quicker and more intelligent, but more troubled, too. Clara had originally seen herself in a godmotherly role to Erich, but any thoughts she had of occasional trips to the theater and the bestowing of improving gifts had gradually vanished. Now Erich was more like a son to her. At least what she imagined a son would be.

They came up out of the U-Bahn at Potsdamer Platz and made their way across the square to the Haus Vaterland. Kempinski's Haus Vaterland was a fantasy destination, a gigantic pavilion full of theme restaurants furnished with astonishing detail. There was the Bavarian beer garden, which seated a thousand people, the Viennese Grinzing café, a Spanish bodega, a Hungarian eatery, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese. Erich's favorite was the Wild West bar on the fourth floor. They passed through the saloon doors to find straw bales hung from the ceiling, rams' horns adorning the walls, and wooden tables lit by tin lanterns. Erich gazed around him, reveling in the familiar surroundings as a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat showed them to a table beneath a poster proclaiming that
LAW AND ORDER'S ROUGH AND READY IN A LAWLESS LAND
. Clearly the restaurant owner had a well-developed sense of humor.

They ordered lemonade and Erich's favorite: braised pork knuckle with noodles. Clara loved indulging him. And he ate so much more now. She noticed the muscles bunching on his arms as he ate, the thickening neck, the stockiness that was gradually filling out his slender frame. Her eyes dwelled on him fondly as he tackled his plate, then she remembered an important piece of guardianship.

“I've been meaning to say, Erich. Your grandmother tells me the HJ leaders are rude to her. They undermine her authority.”

“That's not true. Oma's too sensitive. She's always interfering. She's got to understand I'm grown up now. I'm not a child anymore.”

Clara sympathized with Erich's grandmother. Everyone complained that the Hitler Jugend encouraged children to be contemptuous of their parents. For Erich, with his desperation to fit in, that tendency was likely to be worse. “Anyway,” he continued. “She won't see so much of me. I'm going to be away much more now. I'll be busy with the HJ.”

Clara knew how the Hitler Youth operated. Meetings every week and two hours of political instruction and sport every Saturday afternoon. Fifty-mile hikes on the weekends. Camping over the holidays. The idea was that the boys should never have any peace and quiet. No time to escape the propaganda and reflect. It wasn't just the HJ, of course. The National Socialists had a group for every stage of life. The joke went that with a husband in the SA, a wife in the National Socialist Women's League, a son in the HJ, and a daughter in the BDM, the only place a family could actually meet would be at the Nuremberg rally.

“Well, try to be more respectful to your grandmother, would you? She's an old lady now. She loves you.”

The English boys Clara knew of Erich's age had respect drummed into them, along with please and thank you and standing up when an adult came into the room. But in Hitler's Germany, things were different. The power lay with the youth, and they knew it.

“Yeah. I will.” He ate hungrily. “I can't wait for next summer camp. We're going out to an island on the lake. I'm glad you taught me to swim, because if you say you can't swim, they throw you in the water so you learn quickly.”

Sometimes, Clara thought, the less she knew about what went on in the Hitler Youth, the better.

“And how is school?”

“Okay. Apart from Herr Klug. I hate him. He has a
Backpfeifengesicht
.” It was a German word that didn't exist in English. It meant a face badly in need of a fist.

“Is he a teacher? Why do you hate him?”

Erich's face was a hostile muddle of emotion as he struggled to define the precise reason he disliked the man.

“He asks the boys what they had for Sunday lunch.”

“Why on earth would he ask that?”

“He's waiting to see who never says pork. You know, if they're
Jews
.”

Clara flinched. She had seen the race charts in Erich's books, full of photographs of children showing the difference between the Jew and the Aryan. The theme emerged not just in
Rassenkunde,
race science, but in every subject. Even math.
Compare the percentage of Jews in different positions with their share of the total population.

“He's always trying to catch Karl Meyer. Karl does fine at school. He gets top marks in math and science. They don't let him join in the songs and all that, but everyone likes him. Anyway, Herr Klug makes Karl stand up for the whole lesson. And when Karl won the hundred meters, Herr Klug said he wasn't allowed a medal.”

How was it that Erich could not see the connection between the odious teacher and the methods of the HJ? The anti-Semitism that made him bristle at school was openly taught in the Hitler Youth. How was it possible that he did not connect the two?

“I'm sure Herr Klug already knows who's Jewish. The Jewish boys don't Heil Hitler, after all. So what subject do you like best?”

“Still history. He's good, Herr Schnaubel, though we can't figure him out. There are all kinds of questions about German history, or our future, that he just won't answer. He simply says, ‘We do not discuss what the Führer tells us.' ”

“He's right.” Herr Schnaubel was playing a dangerous game. Most probably he hated giving the Nazi view of German history. Yet if a master was suspected of being anti-Nazi, he would be pursued by the bigger boys. Avoiding discussion was the safest tactic.

Erich finished his noodles and glanced at the menu again, selecting, as always, Black Forest cake, sandwiched with whipped cream, topped with cherries and grated chocolate.

“I don't mind you missing my induction ceremony, Clara, but next year, if I'm lucky, I'll get to march at the Party rally. Then you'll have to come and watch me.”

“I will. I promise. Now…I know what you want for your birthday, and I'll give it to you next time I see you. Meanwhile, I got you this.”

Across the table she slid an envelope, containing the signed postcard of Ernst Udet. Erich's eyes lit up, as she knew they would. He whistled.

“You've actually met Ernst Udet?”

“I'm married to him. In the film, at least. And yes, I've been to a party at his house.”

Erich's eyes swiveled from the card to Clara. He had quite forgotten his dessert.

“Do you think…? Is there any chance that I could meet him?”

“I'll see what I can do.”

He studied the picture, eyes shining.

“Perhaps they'll make a card of you soon. Like they did with Mutti.”

The promotional card of Helga Schmidt, which showed her flimsily clad and leaning coquettishly towards the camera blowing a kiss, might not have been the most appropriate image for a son to treasure, yet it was the most precious of Erich's paltry possessions. There had been a dreadful day when his school friends discovered the picture, snuggled between the pages of
Mein Kampf,
and waved it in the air with hoots of glee, taking it first for a girlfriend and then, when they discovered the truth, with howls of cruel laughter and taunts of “whore” and “Mutti's boy.” It was a miracle he had managed to recapture it.

“I suppose they will,” answered Clara. “I'll be on the poster, certainly.”

“I'm going to be a glider. Goering says Germany is to be a nation of aviators. I've signed up for training this summer. I can join when I'm seventeen.”