Hitler's Niece (17 page)

When Hitler laughed hugely, hitting his thigh with the flat of his hand, Putzi felt he could sit back. The Alsatian was standing high on his hind legs, his forelegs on the fold-down seat, and avidly sniffing the air for florid tales of wildflowers, Benzine, macadam road, finches, fences, wet meadows, and milk cows. Geli and Henny were singing American tunes they’d memorized. Putzi smilingly listened through two songs and then challenged their English pronunciation. “Some-vun to votch o-fer me?” he asked. “Yas! Vee haff no bahn-nahn-az?”

“Close enough,” Henny said.

They sang “Ain’t We Got Fun?” and “Ain’t She Sweet?” and then they couldn’t fully recall other lyrics, so Putzi filled the ride by teaching them strange American slang. A “sap” was a fool. Schaub was a “rube,” Himmler a “Milquetoast,” Goebbels a “wolf.” Göring considered himself a “he-man.” Money was “scratch” or “jack.” Coffee was “joe.” Whiskey was called “panther sweat.” “Ish kabibble” was what you answered when you couldn’t care less. In America they would both be considered “live wires,” “peaches,” “Janes,” “skirts,” “thrills,” “panics,” “tootsies,” and “hot little numbers.” Emil was Geli’s “sheik”—from the Rudolph Valentino movie—and she was Emil’s “Sheba.”

“And what would Uncle Adolf be?” Geli asked.

“Your ‘sugar daddy,’” he snidely said. But when she asked him what sugar daddy meant, the Herr Doktor told her, “It’s too hard to define.”

And then they were at the Chiemsee where Geli thought the far-off mountains seemed to settle into the lake like white-haired women in green bathing dresses. They parked the Mercedes and the old Daimler under oak trees and Schaub flung out woolen rugs and linen tablecloths from the trunks as Emil carried the crate of Spaten to the shoreline and sloshed out among floundering reeds to submerge the beer underwater for chilling. Leo Raubal filled coffee cups from a vacuum flask as Hoffmann handed out
Der Völkische Kurier
, the
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten
, the
Münchener Zeitung
, and the
Wiener Sonn-und-Montag
from the stack he’d collected at a Schwabing kiosk that morning, and the six men stood in the shade with tilted heads, silently absorbed in their reading, their filled coffee cups steaming at their shoes or on handkerchiefs on the fenders, their serious newspapers held as wide as the maps of continents.

The craze of nudism, or
Freikörperkultur
, excited all of Germany in the twenties, and in public parks and on lakes there were generally areas where, as a fitness author put it, “for the benefit of the race, those with high aspirations can steel and train their bodies in the sacredness of their natural condition.” One such beach was on the Chiemsee. Hiding behind a scrim of sloe and scrub bushes, Geli and Henny took off all their clothes and scurried into the lake, screaming as they hit the shallows and fell forward into water that was still so cold it seemed to have teeth. They swam out to a floating dock and hung on to it to find their breath, feeling an aching chill in their feet, and then went farther out toward Men’s Island and the unfinished Sun Palace of Ludwig II, sidestroking back only when Henny’s face was pale with heat loss and her lips were the color of a four-day-old bruise.

And then they lay flat on their backs and naked on the fine, white sand, holding their faces into the flare of the sun, feeling water beads contract on their skin as air flowed over their bodies like cool silk. They heard the men on the other side of the sloe bushes fifty meters away, vying at skimming flat stones on the lake. Geli’s brother seemed to have won with five skips, but then Geli’s uncle, who hated sport, threw a stone that struck the water six times and, with him the victor, the game was determined over.

Henny said, “I was nine years old when I first met him. 1922. I was practicing the piano and hating it and I heard the front doorbell so I went to see who it was. Herr Hitler was on the front step in his slouch hat and shabby white trench coat, a frightening dog whip folded in his hand. I told him my father was taking his afternoon nap upstairs, and he kindly said he’d wait for him. And then he was so charming. We got to talking about the piano, and he stopped my grumbling by sitting down on the bench and playing a Strauss polka. You know how delightful he can be with children.”

Geli shook her head. “I don’t; not really. We hardly knew him then.”

“Well, he is. In fact, I was so flattered by his attention that I polkaed around the room for him, but in a harsher voice he told me to quit and just listen. Then he told me old Teutonic stories about Rhine maidens and an evil dwarf named Alberich, tinkling the piano keys when he talked about fairies and pounding hard on the low notes to indicate trouble and menace. My father woke up before he’d finished his tale and I fell into a sulk. But Herr Hitler promised me he’d stop by on other afternoons when I practiced, and he did, reading his stack of newspapers for an hour or so, then playing a few songs as my reward. That’s when he first called me Sunshine.” With both hands she smoothed her bobbed hair back from her face and crushed water out of it. She asked, “Have you been to the Bayreuth Festival with him yet?”

“No.”

She told Geli he’d taken her there when she was twelve. She’d stayed in the home of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, and seen
Parsifal
and
Der Ring des Nibelungen
.

“Are you trying to make me jealous?”

She smiled. “Well, you get to do everything with him now.”

“I’m his niece.”

“Hah,” Henny said.

“And ‘Hah’ means what?”

“Nothing; never mind.”

A fallen branch was thrown into the Chiemsee, and Geli watched Prinz in full tilt after it, crazily vaulting into the water and crashing through reeds—
Phragmites
, she thought—before floundering out with the stick in his mouth and shaking furiously. Whoever the thrower was strolled behind them and the Alsatian trotted farther away.

She found she’d hidden her sex with a hand and a forearm. She relaxed. Henny was trying to sleep. Her pinking breasts were the size of sherbet dishes, her fifteen-year-old legs were as hard and lean as a boy’s, a hand was idly brushing sand from her dark pubic hair. Closing her eyes Geli saw redness. She felt a faint trickle of sweat find its way down her side.

Anything was still possible. She fantasized about a future with Emil and four children and a forest cottage in the Wienerwald, south of Wien. Shaded in summer. Safe. In Austria. Or a fine, furnished flat off Grillparzerstrasse in Wien, or between the Stadtpark and the Konzerthaus, with medical offices inside the Ring. With dinners at the Korso or the Three Hussars. She’d be a pediatrician. A veterinarian. Well-off, but not rich. Or she’d offer physical therapy in a fashionable health resort like Semmering. She’d find Aunt Paula a job there. And her mother could cook. In Austria. Maybe her husband would not be Emil but a handsome doctor. Civilized, educated, and kind. With no interest in politics. With friends she admired. She’d have four children and gay dinner parties and season tickets to the opera and a weekend house in the Wienerwald. She’d have friends who were civilized, educated, and kind. She’d sing. She’d be safe. She’d…

She felt Prinz urgently sniffing her face and realized she’d been dozing. The Alsatian was worried about her, but Hitler called, “Prinz! Heel!” and the hound hurried back to him. Henny frankly displayed herself, as she’d seen her father’s models do, but Hitler averted his head. Geli hunkered forward to hide what she could. She shaded her eyes but couldn’t find her uncle’s face because of the fierce sun behind him. Ambling toward them on the white sand, he was still in his gray flannel suit and yellow tie, but his shoes and socks were off and his trousers were rolled up to his hairless white calves.

With a menacing tone, he said, “Without a stitch on, two pretty girls lie naked in the sun. And whom do they talk about? Me.” And then he grinned. “I should die immediately. Anything else I achieve from now on will only be a disappointment.”

Geli smiled. “You heard us?”

“And watched you,” he said. Tucked under his arm was a sketchbook that he nervously handed to his niece. Geli paged past some older architectural drawings of a future motorway that he’d fantasized being built between München and Salzburg, some sketches of a fantastic university complex on the Chiemsee, as well as an Art Deco restaurant that he’d slashed with an X. And then there she was in fresh pencil, her feet without the difficult detail of toes and her hands without fingers, her face canted to the side and her wild, tawny hair in cascade so that he didn’t have to fail at her features. But her torso was fairly accurate, with the bowls of her breasts flattened slightly over her rib cage, shadows and roundness deftly smudged in with his thumb, her haunches wider than she’d like, and her vulva shockingly correct but then—with embarrassment?—crosshatched to imply pubic hair. She glanced up at her uncle and recognized his fretfulness and diffidence, his fetching vulnerability, his childish need to be rewarded.
And now you’re at my mercy
, she thought. She flattered him by exclaiming, “But it’s excellent, Uncle Alf!”

He beamed. “Do you think?”

“Oh, indeed.”

Hitler faced the Chiemsee as she tilted the sketchbook toward her friend.

“Sexy,” Henny said.

Geli glared
Are you crazy?

“Well drawn,” Henny said.

Hitler’s face was flushed, and his back was as shut to them as a wall. “Don’t humor me,” he said. “It’s like pity. I have far too much talent for that.”

Geli lightly stroked his shaking trouser leg. “We
do
think it’s good.”

“My thanks,” he archly said. “And now why don’t you girls put clothing on and fix lunch?”

Geli’s
brother found her rinsing dishes. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you,” he said, and so they strolled far from the group to an impermanent dune of sand where they could feel erosion underneath their stomachs as they lay there and watched a hot wind harry the hurrying green waves. “Are we far enough away?” Leo asked.

“Why?”

Leo found two handmade cigarettes of Turkish tobacco in his wrinkled shirt pocket, offered one to his sister, and lit hers with a friction match. With fraudulent elegance she poised the cigarette in her right hand just as her older brother did. She smiled at him as she considered his friendly but not handsome face. His hairline had receded in just a few years, with a hand’s-width stripe of dark hair combed straight back and two fresh areas of forehead beside it, shaped like the heels of shoes. And his mustache she found unfortunate, only a little wider than Hitler’s; but when she questioned him about it he said it was the fashion for teachers in
Realschule
.

“And that’s what you want to be?”

“I have already been offered a position in Linz after graduation next year.”

“Good for you.”

“Thanks. Are you still studying medicine?”

“I haven’t totally given it up.”

“You aren’t, then?”

“I have other concerns.”

He smiled with cunning and told her his own “other concern” was a Frenchwoman named Anne whom he hoped to make his fiancée even though Uncle Adolf considered it a misalliance. “Are you seeing someone?” Leo asked.

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“You guess.”

“He’s here?”

“Aren’t you observant.”

Geli’s brother frowned and rested his chin on one fist, squinting as he inhaled smoke and flicked away ash. “Emil Maurice?” he finally asked.

“Awfully difficult for you.”

“Well, it’s not very obvious.”

“Haven’t you talked?”

“You weren’t mentioned.”

She hit her brother on the shoulder.

“Really,” he said.

“Don’t say it just because it’s true.”

“Are you in love?” Leo asked.

“I’m not sure now.”

“Don’t fume.”

“You’d think he’d have a hundred things to ask an older brother.”

“
Adolf
talked about you. ‘Such a darling girl. So delightful.’”

Geli sighed. “Always the adulation.”

“Uncle was my second guess.”

“You don’t find that odd?”

“Well, he’s only your
half
-uncle. It’s just that Schicklgruber bloodline, that one-quarter contribution.”

“And he’s nineteen years older.”

“Age,” Leo said. “What’s
that?
”

White sunlight splintered through a palace of clouds. The far off Women’s Island and its fishing boats were painted with their shadow. Geli said, “I have the distinct impression that you don’t like Emil.”

Geli’s brother ground out the stub of his cigarette in the sand dune. “
Like
him? Actually I do,” Leo said. “And I have the feeling you
like
him, too.”

Evening
came. Putzi Hanfstaengl fell asleep in a Bombay hammock he’d strung between trees while Henny and her father and Emil, Schaub, and Geli’s brother stood in a wide star pattern in a forest clearing, kicking a scuffed white soccer ball to each other, the men with their shirts and socks and shoes off, drinking Spaten they held by the necks, smoking Herr Hoffmann’s Palo cigars, scolding faulty shots and imperfect form. Hitler shouted his own corrections as he sleepily reclined on a striped folding lawn chair, a china cup of Apollinaris mineral water cradled against his chest. A wild kick rolled to him and he skidded the soccer ball slowly back with a feint of his foot. Schaub congratulated him.

Geli wedged a rug and the picnic hamper into the trunk of the Mercedes, found a still cool Spaten for herself, and strolled over to her uncle, sitting beside him on soft ferns.

“Company,” he said and smiled.

“Are you happy?”

“Quite.” In the European way, his familiarity with her nakedness was balanced by a formality that would have seemed stiff in a first-class hotel. Hitler frowned. “Your skin is burnt.”

“All the girls get as brown as they can now. It’s the fashion.”

“
Really?
I had no idea.”

She nodded as she drank beer. She asked, “You didn’t want to swim?”