Hitler's Niece (11 page)

She found out that the one who stayed inside longest had a hurt wing hanging so low that its right feather tips dragged on the floor. She couldn’t heal him, but she named him Schatzi, Little Treasure, and trained him to hop and spin for crumbs as she whistled Strauss so it looked like the jackdaw was waltzing.

It was just the kind of slightly cruel trick to make Hitler laugh until his sides ached, and he wanted his niece to show it off to Helene Bechstein when she visited them for afternoon tea on August 12th, his dead mother’s birthday; but an hour beforehand her housekeeper telephoned Angela to say Frau Bechstein preferred that they visit her.

And so in his finest navy blue suit a frustrated Hitler hiked and skidded three hundred meters down the hillside with Angela and Geli until they got to the fabulous Villa Bechstein, which would later be taken over and turned into a guest house for Joseph Goebbels, other high party leaders, and Benito Mussolini. “They also own Weissenlehen,” Hitler said with enthusiasm, and hunched to point through the forest to a fine house across the road.

Angela rolled her eyes at Geli.
Such a child
.

Ilse Meirer, the housekeeper, was a friend of Angela’s now. She greeted all of them at the front door, and then she and Angela stayed behind to have caraway seed tea in the huge white kitchen while, as if this were a fairy tale and their future precarious, Hitler firmly took Geli’s hand to guide her upstairs to Frau Bechstein’s huge, all-white sitting room.

She was a handsome, square-bodied, matronly woman in her late forties and was lying on a fainting couch
en grande toilette
, wearing only a yellow silk nightgown beneath a yellow silk robe and perhaps four hundred carats in diamonds. She offered a falsely thrilled hello to Adolf and held out both hands to him, which he kissed on the knuckles. And then with stiff formality, he introduced his niece.

“Oh, I’m so glad to finally meet you,” Frau Bechstein said, but she did not hide the rivalry in her tone.

And so, in rivalry, Geli curtsied.

“Aren’t you a sweet girl,” Frau Bechstein said.

“At times.”

Frau Bechstein hugged Hitler around the thighs and brought him forcibly against her face. “And this is my sweet boy.” She let go and glided her hand along the fainting couch. “Won’t you sit, Adolf?”

Obediently, he did so, his hands primly on his knees and his knees tightly together. Geli sat, too, in an Empire chair, but felt the urge to ask a history question just to see the sweet boy raise his hand. Worried and sheepish, Hitler explained to his niece, “We have known each other for seven years now.”

“Oh, how he thrilled us in those first days,” Frau Bechstein said. She angled her head against his chest and inhaled his smell. “Our shy young messiah,” she told Geli. “We put him up in a deluxe hotel, and my husband wore tails for dinner, all the servants were in livery, and Adolf was there in his shabby blue suit, talking away half the evening about the faucet handles in his bathroom that could regulate the heat of the water. And then—it was so funny, really—when Adolf spoke to us about National Socialism, he stood up and shouted intemperately for an hour, his face contorting, his hands flying this way and that, as if our salon were a giant beer hall. And when he finished, he sat down again, thoroughly spent.”

With just a hint of his threatening tone, Hitler said, “You are embarrassing me in front of my niece, Frau Bechstein.”

She prettily slapped his forearm. “Oh, Wolf. Don’t call me that. Call me Mommy.”

Worming his eyes toward Geli, he said, “Don’t humiliate me.”

“We tried to adopt him as our child,” she told Geli, “but were afraid there’d be a stink. Instead we showered him with money, jewels, objets d’art. And for a while I had such hopes that Adolf would fall in love with our daughter Lotte.”

“I shall not marry. You know that.”

She smiled. “Whenever I see him, I melt in his presence.” A hand crawled through his forelock as she admired his sullen face. “You know I would do anything for you, don’t you, Wolf?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, Mommy,” she prompted.

She saw his head hanging in silence and seemed to remember that Geli was there. “And do you play piano, Fräulein?”

She shook her head. “I sing.”

She looked at Hitler. “Would it be impertinent of me to offer her a Bechstein pianoforte?”

Waggling pianist’s fingers in front of her waist, Geli said, “I’m afraid I lack a Bechstein talent.”

“She hates me,” Helene Bechstein said.

“Who could do that?” Hitler asked.

“Will you lie with me like we do?”

“My niece is here.”

Geli stood. “I’ll just be going downstairs. My mother’s there.”

“And so, you see?” Helene Bechstein said. She then fell back on the fainting couch and Hitler scooted forward and cuddled until his head was on the flattened pillow of her bosom. And she was gently petting his hair and humming a Brahms lullaby as Geli fled, quietly shutting the door behind her.

She hurried down to the first floor of the villa, then to the kitchen where the women were, and said, “I feel sick.”

Angela looked up and understood. “Aren’t they a pair?”

Geli shrugged in a gruesome shiver. “Mommy! Wolf!”

Ilse Meirer got up. “Shall I get you some cake?”

“I’m too busy trying not to imagine what they’re doing up there.”

“Or not doing,” Angela said.

“Yes, that’s worse, isn’t it?” Ilse asked. And the older women chuckled as Ilse got Geli some tea.

Wearing
a sleeveless and belted white linen dress in the late August heat, Geli was on the northern terrace and trying to humor her uncle by finally reading Karl May’s
Winnetou
when she shaded her eyes from a shock of sunshine, and saw a green Daimler flow down the pebbled drive to the underground garage. Heinrich Hoffmann got out in white tennis shirt, white flannel trousers, and white shoes, and shouted up to the terrace, “We’re here!”

“Welcome!”

“Wake up your uncle!” he said, and hauled from the floor of the car a high stack of dark photographic plates, a carpenter’s hammer, and a handled leather portfolio as Henrietta got out in a pleated white tennis skirt, a frilly white blouse, and a fine white cashmere sweater tied at her neck. Hurrying up the garden path with two bottles of Kupferberg Sekt, she called, “It’s me!”

“Just as I thought!” Geli called back. She then turned and saw her uncle on the upstairs balcony in his brown woolen suit and purple tie, a foam of Chlorodont toothpaste on his mouth and a hint of blood on his toothbrush. She couldn’t tell if he’d been staring at his houseguests or at her. He ambled back inside.

Geli went through the Winter Garden and dining room and into the kitchen where Angela was helping the girl jam the champagne bottles into the icebox. Henny had styled her chestnut-brown hair in a fashionable bob just below her ears, and she was a full inch taller and far more developed since she and Geli had first met. Even Hitler noticed, for he walked in and watched Henny fitting Angela’s ham sandwiches next to a package of flank steaks and said, “Why, you’re fully grown, Fräulein Hoffmann!”

She fetchingly turned in such a way that the fabric of her blouse was strained. “You missed me, Herr Hitler?”

“Oh, my Sunshine. Each day is night without you.”

She grinned and held out her right hand for his kiss. She childishly scolded, “You have stayed away from München too long.”

“But why not?” he asked. “Look at all I have here!”

Widening his hands to solicit praise for his property, he seemed to include his niece, and Henny’s pretty face fell into a pout. Whether from jealousy or wild speculation, Geli wasn’t sure.

Wanting some sentence to tidy up the awkwardness, Geli tried, “I have been here only two months.”

Henny flatly stated, “We met your mother up here in May.”

Angela said, “So they know absolutely everything about you.”

And then Heinrich Hoffmann sidled in with his hammer, plates, and portfolio. “Where shall we?” he asked.

“The dining room,” Hitler said. “Would you girls like to see?”

Angela brought in a tin waste can as the photographer filled the table with public relations shots of Hitler in his famous trench coat, on a field of snow, hectoring an audience; dining at the Café Heck; shaking the hands of children; striding down Thierschstrasse with Prinz; holding opera glasses as he chatted with an older woman in a fox stole; worrying over an item in the
Münchener Zeitung
.

Hitler bent low over the photographs, leaning on his hands. Without looking up, he said, “You have a picture of me in spectacles here.”

“Where?”

Hitler jabbed at it. “There! Didn’t I tell you?”

Hoffmann flipped through his plates, found the offending negative, and smashed it with his carpenter’s hammer over the waste can.

“And here. My face is puffy,” Hitler said, and ticked a photograph off the dining room table.

Hoffmann got the negative and destroyed it, the glass clanging against the tin as it fell.

Hitler then held up to all of them a stark close-up of himself in a dark brown shirt and a black tie, furrows between his shark-cold eyes, his mouth held in the opposite of a smile, his facial expression that of a hate-filled man whose fierce vengeance is even now being silkily enjoyed. “This is good,” he said.

Winking with irony, Hoffmann told Geli, “We’re never too old to learn.”

And then Hitler put together four different shots of himself as he posed in the brown hat and uniform of the Sturmabteilung.

Geli thought he looked foolish, like a child playing dress up.

“They go or they stay?” Hoffmann asked. Hitler’s glare swung toward him like a farmer’s scythe in wheat, and the photographer hunted for the negatives.

“Let me do it,” Henny said. Her father handed her the hammer and she took joy in crashing the hammer into Hitler’s face in the darkened glass, the shards raining loudly from her hand as she told them, “I’m having fun.”

Angela called from the kitchen, “Ouch, such a racket!” while Geli winced at the noise and held her ears. But her uncle watched with fascination and zeal as the girl shattered the plates, urging her on by handing Henny even good negatives and seemingly growing ever more excited by the wreckage until at last the photographer angrily took the hammer from his daughter. “We seem to be hungry,” he said.

Angela
stayed behind at Haus Wachenfeld to have tea with friends as Hoffmann conveyed the four of them in his Daimler seven kilometers west of Berchtesgaden to the village of Ramsau and the green lake called Hintersee. Henny and Geli shook out red tartan blankets beneath linden trees and they all had a picnic of champagne and caviar, then lemonade and ham sandwiches as they watched fly fishermen in green hip waders hook trout and saibling, wrap them in seaweed, and stuff them inside their creels.

With his slouch hat cocked on his head and his purple tie flipped over his right shoulder for fear of staining it, Hitler ate salted radishes as he lazed in the shade, his brown trousers twisted high enough that Geli could glimpse the stocking garters pinking the hairless white skin of his calves. Tilting up on his elbows to watch Henny toy with a child’s kitten, he told his niece the folklore that Emperor Frederick, the Antichrist of the Middle Ages, was thought to be sleeping beneath the holy mountain of Untersberg, patiently awaiting a flight of ravens that would herald the hour of victory over all of Germany’s enemies and the final, long-sought unification of the Aryan nations. And there was some truth to it, of that he was sure. The first time he’d visited Obersalzberg he’d felt a magnetic force urging him to stay, and he knew that he, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, was meant to live in these mountains for ten years, to become hard here, hard and cold as ice, rejoicing in his loneliness, forging a spirit of steel. “I will have reached my peak,” he said, “when I can observe my former self with loathing and pity, and spit on the fate my stars had determined I should have.”

Such pomposity
, Geli thought, but she said, “You have it all worked out, then.”

“I do,” he agreed, and held himself up on his right elbow as he faced her, locking his hands together with the plum satisfaction of a fortunate banker. “Are you aware of the origins of the name Adolf?” he asked.

“Adolfus, I thought.”

“Athalwolfa,” he corrected. “
Athal
means ‘noble,’
Wolfa
, ‘wolf.’ And now a noble wolf has been born who shall shred into bloody pieces the herd of seducers and deceivers of the people.” And then he grinned with his fanged, ugly, and generally hidden smile, and she was alarmed to find that with such strange talk her famous uncle was trying to woo her.

She was confused by his flirtation and she flicked her dress farther toward her knees as she felt him float his stare from her sun-bleached hair to her suntanned neck and full breasts and waist and then to the fine blond hairs on her forearm. “Oh, listen, Uncle Alf,” she said. “Singing.” And she got up from the blanket to pretend she needed to find out who it was.

Wholly unaware of their führer, ten meters away on the other side of the linden trees were five roaring and sunburnt Brownshirts hoisting steins and hollering
Trinklieder
at a picnic table with two tipsy prostitutes who seemed already to have been much used. Geli was stunned as a brassy, singing woman whose hair was the color of
Weissbier
allowed the hankering man beside her to furtively hunt under her skirt as she linked the fingers of both her hands with those of the man she was facing.

“Are we invisible here?” Geli asked, but no one answered.

When the song was just about finished, a drunken practical joker farther down the table quickly hoisted up the sweater of a heavier, bleached-blond woman whose breasts seemed as huge as world globes. She hurriedly hid herself again, but Heinrich Hoffmann ostentatiously gaped and then grinned at Hitler over his filled glass of champagne. “Where are we?” he asked. “In Berlin?”

Hitler flushed as with a disclosed secret, and looked far out to a racing scull on the Hintersee. He tore up blades of grass and chewed them. Henny was still staring at the five men and the prostitutes, as if this were an important moment whose details she’d want to recall.