Black Roses (17 page)

There was another, more agonizing, concern. He had placed the girl herself at risk. If she talked to anyone about his proposal, there was no telling what dangers she was getting herself into. Would she understand how vital it was to say nothing?

He cursed himself and lit another cigarette. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t enough work to get on with at the consulate.

He had reached the end of Orianenburger Strasse when he heard the shouts and a sparkling shower of glass spilled across the pavement in front of him. It was Zimmerman’s, the place he bought his morning paper and tobacco. He liked going into that shop. It was stacked like a tightly packed suitcase, with every surface filled, shelves piled high with tins and the whole place smelling of sugar and newsprint and a deep musty scent of polished wood. Its owner, Herr Zimmerman, was a dapper little man in his sixties with a moustache and a pipe, who liked to ask Leo about English football. He had relatives in north London and he claimed to support Arsenal.

As Leo approached, a pair of Brown Shirts crashed out. They had been drinking – he could smell the beer on their breath from where he stood – and they were cursing the shopkeeper for being a filthy Jew. Herr Zimmerman, though he was half the size of the men, had taken one by the arm and hustled him to the door. His friend had picked a stone from the gutter and broken his window for his pains. Now jagged teeth of glass surrounded a gaping hole.

‘Count yourself lucky that’s all we broke!’

They sprinted off up the street, and Leo fought a powerful urge to give chase. The second man was fat and ran slowly with splayed feet. His lumbering backside reminded Leo of a boy at school who was routinely and universally bullied, and in turn bullied those smaller than himself. Leo could easily overtake him, probably call the cops on him, yet he resisted the idea. For one, he had already caused enough problems for himself tonight. A punch-up with a Brown Shirt and a night in the cells at the Alex were more than he needed. And the sense of inertia that was seeping through the entire population of Berlin was starting to have a paralysing effect on him.

In normal times, when people witnessed a crime, they called the police. Now people knew better. They would avoid the huddled body in the gutter. They slept through shrieks in the night, and the sounds of car engines and door slamming that meant their neighbour was being arrested. It was as though the Nazis were conducting an experiment on the entire populace, hoping with small and regular acts of violence to inoculate them, and as a result, they were all becoming immune.

Herr Zimmerman had already armed himself with a broom and was sweeping the scattered glass. The window was not so bad. He could patch it with cardboard, no trouble. Leo noticed spots of blood on his white shirt, but there was no sign that he was hurt. Herr Zimmerman looked up from the pavement and gave Leo a quiet, despairing smile with a hint of a shrug. As though he was aware of the catastrophe that was coming towards them all in slow motion.

As it turned out, there was a whole week to kill before the read-through for the new film. Lamprecht needed to edit rushes of his last movie, so Clara passed the time like a tourist, walking through the Englischer Garten in the Tiergarten, gazing at the Brandenburger Tor with the Goddess of Victory lashing her stone horses to war, visiting churches and galleries and roaming round the city, going to cafes and eating sugary cakes swathed in cream.

Sitting in Kranzler’s in the early morning sunlight, sipping her coffee, she took out a postcard for Angela, and wrote in the blandest possible tone, saying she was having a glorious time at Babelsberg and would be in contact soon. What she had told Rupert about her family’s independence was true. Without their mother, she, Kenneth and Angela led quite separate lives and their father, who had never been very communicative at the best of times, found it almost impossible to stray beyond formalities.

Poor Daddy. At a distance his intemperate curtness became possible to explain. He was a widower, robbed far too early of the wife he had loved and he was cursed with more than the usual allocation of an Englishman’s emotional reserve. Thinking about it like that, Clara was almost able to feel sorry for him.

She also forced herself to write to Dennis, telling him she had been offered work in Germany and was not expecting to be back for some time. It had been cowardly of her to leave without explaining, she knew, but she also knew the biggest blow would have been to his pride, rather than his heart. How could she tell him that he was the reason she came to Berlin or that she had wanted to feel closer to her mother, who had died almost a decade ago? Dennis wouldn’t understand and it wouldn’t be kind.

Thinking about Dennis brought into her mind again the question she generally tried to suppress. Why had she never met a man she wanted to marry? At twenty-six most of her school friends were married or engaged. Only Dennis, who had not so much proposed as announced his intentions to a general audience, had ever seriously suggested marriage to Clara. Normally she didn’t let it bother her. She had no shortage of male admirers after all. But yet again she wondered if it was something in herself, some deep inhibition, that deterred true intimacy. Was she too choosy, or was it simply that she had never yet met a man she could imagine spending years talking to?

She left no address and dropped both cards in a postbox before she could change her mind.

Strolling round the city, she found it impossible not to notice how Berlin was changing, even in the short time she had been here. Leaflets and pamphlets fluttered from every railing. Political posters framed harsh warnings in the dense German Gothic script that looked like a thicket of thorns. It was not just Nazi propaganda either. On the sun-warmed seat beside her at the Café Kranzler Clara had noticed the fluttering pages of a pamphlet and, picking it up curiously, found inside a cartoon of a goose-stepping Nazi and the legend
“
Fight Hitler for our Future”
.
Underneath was the strapline of the KPD, the German Communist Party. She looked at it for a moment, before quickly putting it down again and pushing the seat under the table.

She remembered what Rupert Allingham had said about war, and how Hitler wanted to carve up Europe. She thought of the map they had at home, the countries beautifully marked out, the shape of England like Britannia, the upright old dame, France, vast and sprawling, Italy poking into the sea like a lady’s boot, Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia. Other places in Middle Europe you hadn’t even heard of, towns jagged with consonants, villages with names like anagrams. Then she imagined a great pair of scissors cutting the whole thing up and reassembling it like a giant jigsaw. Except war wasn’t neat like that. War was about deaths, hundreds and thousands of deaths.

Her encounter with Leo Quinn troubled her. What he had asked, though it had surprised her, was not such a great request. It wouldn’t be hard for her to comply. She knew she had acted rudely, rushing off into the night like that. She regretted it almost immediately. It was his mention of Müller, and the implication that she might be having an affair with him, that had caused her to react so angrily. If it hadn’t been for that, she might very well have agreed with his proposal. But then she wouldn’t be seeing much of Frau Goebbels any more, so there wouldn’t be any need for it, would there?

That morning she was planning to visit the Kaufhaus des Westens. When she had first passed the KaDeWe store a few weeks ago, she had pushed through the brass doors and marvelled at the racks of hats and gloves and handbags on display, the gleaming escalators that rose to the upper floors. Exotic perfumes hung and mingled in the air and beautiful assistants stood behind the counters, their countenances as creamy and impassive as Japanese geishas while grim-faced housewives with fur-collared coats and cloche hats rammed on their heads fingered the lingerie and picked over the fashions. Clara had been longing to return for a leisurely morning’s shopping. But when she approached that day, a quite unexpected sight awaited her.

A clatter of trucks and shouting from further along the street heralded a series of lorries containing a detachment of Brown Shirts who jumped out brandishing paint pots, intent on despoiling the windows and doors of the store. A large caricature of a Jew with a gigantic nose had been painted on one window and thick streaks of paint were dripping down others as the men laboriously spelt out slogans saying “Drop Dead Jew”, “Danger to Life”, “Jews to Palestine”. Mostly it was spelled correctly. Some passers-by stopped and smiled, others gawped, but most continued with their heads down, mentally abandoning any plans for Saturday morning shopping. They seemed to melt into each other, a vista of turned backs and cold shoulders, undulating away from the trouble.

The storm troop commander, a tall, blond man with a leather crop that he kept swatting on his own calves, was supervising the hanging of a banner between two lampposts reading “The Jew Is Our Enemy”. Clara stopped to watch as he strutted along, the whip switching impatiently against his polished boots, with a smile as thin and vicious as barbed wire. He must be in his twenties, no older than her own brother, with rosy cheeks and flaxen hair that conformed precisely to the Aryan archetype and eyes as narrow as shards of ice. Until recently he might have been a country boy, with only farm animals on which to exercise his whip, but now, in his smart uniform with the silver shoulder cord glinting in the sun, he looked like a man who had found his vocation. A poster boy for the Sturmabteilung.

At that moment a shop manager emerged from the department store and began to remonstrate with him. He was a fat little man in a three-piece suit and a scarlet spotted handkerchief blooming flamboyantly from his breast pocket. He spread his small hands in a pleading, conciliatory gesture and cocked his head to one side, like the maître d’ of a restaurant explaining why the fish would not after all be available that evening, but perhaps sir would enjoy the chicken instead. He kept gesturing to the storm troopers who were desecrating his shop, as if suggesting they be directed to paint their messages a little more tidily, or perhaps confine their efforts to a single door, rather than slapping the paint all over his windows which would be such an effort to remove once their perfectly justified demonstration was finished. The commander towered over him, head cocked and smile still fluttering on his lips as though politely considering his petition, until in a sudden movement he lifted his crop and lashed it down the side of the manager’s head.

‘I do not take lessons from Jewish vermin!’

The man staggered to one side. Blood was already beginning to seep from a savage stripe on his cheek. His eyes widened, as if more in astonishment than pain at the commander’s swiftly executed stroke. Clara, rooted to the spot, felt an involuntary gasp of shock escape her, at which the commander looked round.

His pale blue eyes passed over her Jaeger coat, the chestnut hair tucked beneath her navy felt hat and the shopping bag hanging from her arm, as if he was assessing whether she, too, should be subjected to his whip. She returned his stare and a shudder of something she had never felt before, sheer hatred, went through her like a knife. The emotion rose up in her so that her head was pounding, and the blood rushed in her ears. It took all her effort not to reach forward and snatch the whip from him and bring it down on his own head. What must it feel like to depend on this man’s tender mercies? To be beaten like a dog? She really couldn’t imagine.

Without taking her eyes off him, she stepped forward past the manager, who had propped himself up against the window and was holding his handkerchief against the side of his face in a stupor, and made for the great brass door.

By now the entrance was obstructed by five storm troopers with huge placards hung round their necks. The one nearest her, a bear of a man with a dull, angry look in his eye, had a sign saying, “Germans defend yourselves, don’t buy from Jews”. As she tried to pass him he moved to block her way. He was so close she could smell the stink of sweat on his shirt and the buckle of his belt dug into her side. She dodged and he moved again, leaning against her so that she was pressed against the shop door.

‘
Ausländerin
!’

She had not used the “foreigner” explanation before, but it worked. He did a double take and shifted slightly, just enough for her to slip past and enter the shop.

The store was thinly populated, and the assistants seemed more formal, and distant than usual, as if embarrassed. Clara’s heart was pounding against her ribs and she had lost any appetite for shopping, but almost at random she chose a beret in cherry red and smiled at the salesman who stood behind the till. He served her with the barest of courtesies, without meeting her eye. His face was rigid with a kind of extreme self-restraint, as though every fibre of his being was straining to step outside and order the hooligans away. She noticed that he was wearing a row of medals, and when she looked around she saw that several other staff had medals pinned to their clothes.

‘Can I ask what medal that is?’

‘This is the Iron Cross.’ Her question seemed to have animated him and he met her eye. ‘First Class. Herr Hitler holds the second class, I think. And Frau Mann here,’ he gestured to a stout woman behind the till with terror in her eyes, ‘wears the Emperor’s Service Cross and the Cross of Honour for being a soldier’s widow. She received it from Hindenburg himself.’

Clara was still shaking when she left the shop and boarded a tram. As it proceeded onto the Ku’damm she stared out at the smart stores and the Saturday morning shoppers without seeing them. She felt a sudden sharp longing for Swan & Edgar in Piccadilly, where she would be taken by her mother as a child to buy school uniform, followed by tea and Fuller’s walnut cake in Lyons on the Strand. It was the first time since she had been in Berlin that she felt any kind of nostalgia for London. She thought of the Thames moving slowly beneath the morning light, wet leaves gleaming beneath the lampposts on the embankment, and the comforting smell of oil and damp clothing on a red bus. And how unthinkable it would be to find a banner saying “The Jew Is Our Enemy” draped across Oxford Street.