The Winter Garden (2014) (13 page)

‘So which artists are appearing in this Degenerate Exhibition then?’ enquired Clara.

‘As Horst says, mostly Jews. Paul Klee, Picasso, Miró, Emil Nolde, Kurt Schwitters, Kandinsky, Bruno Weiss. I saw him actually, Weiss. Standing there bold as brass, looking at his
own filthy artwork.’

Bruno Weiss!
The shock went through Clara like a knife. This man had seen her friend Bruno. Alive, in Munich, and recently too. The surprise caused the glass to tremble in her hand and
in an effort not to betray her amazement, Clara kept her eyes fixed rigidly on Fleischer’s bony face.

‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘he was lucky I didn’t have him arrested straight away.’

‘On what grounds?’ enquired Schwarzkopf. He was by far the handsomest of the group, with a high aristocratic brow and eyes of hard, Aryan blue.

Fleischer shrugged. ‘Endangering public morality, encouraging disrespect of the National Socialist state. Any fucking grounds you like. The police have a list of those offences as long as
your arm, so they’re bound to be able to find a few to suit a piece of Jewish garbage like Bruno Weiss. As it was, I reported him to the local authorities, so he’s likely to find
himself answering some questions very soon.’

‘And they won’t be questions on the meaning of art,’ added Schilling.

Schwarzkopf laughed. ‘More like the kind of questions where if he gets them right, he’ll be in a camp and if he gets them wrong, he’ll be wearing a wooden overcoat.’

‘What were you doing there, Fleischer?’ teased Udet. ‘Do you have a taste for that kind of thing yourself? Decadent art?’

‘I was visiting family,’ said the Oberst Leutnant stiffly.

‘Well I come from Munich too. Perhaps I should drop in on my next visit.’

Udet grinned at Clara, but she barely registered. She was still trying to control her astonishment. So Bruno was in Munich. He wasn’t in a camp, or dead, because this man had seen him
standing right in front of his own artwork. Such a notion was incredible. It would be rash, bold, and recklessly ill-advised. And exactly the kind of thing Bruno would do.

In her torrent of emotion it was hard to focus on the fact that Udet was attempting to introduce another officer, standing to her side.

‘And this, Clara dear, is my right-hand man. Oberst Arno Strauss. Arno, you must meet my new wife. She has eyes you could drown in, don’t you think?’

While Udet’s face bore an alcoholic flush and there could only be room for a few more cocktails inside him, Oberst Arno Strauss was manifestly sober. He was ramrod straight with an
athletic frame and tightly cropped dark hair. In profile, his hawkish nose and lean cheek suggested a chiselled perfection, but when he turned his head it was a different matter. The whole of one
side of his face was crumpled, as though it had once melted, with a long scar that ripped and puckered the flesh from the side of his eye along the cheekbone to the corner of his mouth, drawing
down the eye and raising the skin of his cheek in a silvery welt. As a result of this disfigurement, it was hard to tell whether the curl of his lip was expressive or accidental. Perhaps it was
both.

He clicked his heels gallantly, bowed and kissed hands.

‘So this is the Pilot’s Bride.’

‘Arno Strauss is the only man in Germany who can outperform me in the sky,’ slurred Udet.

‘Only in the sky?’ queried Strauss.

‘And who can drink me under the table, of course.’ Udet leaned confidentially towards Clara, exuding alcohol like the fumes of a Mercedes exhaust. ‘Arno makes excellent brandy
cocktails. His Angel’s Wing has to be tasted to be believed. Brandy, cream and crème de cacao, served without mixing. Superb. He would make the best bartender in Berlin, but the work
he’s engaged in at the moment is a little more useful to the Fatherland.’

‘So what’s this film about then?’ asked Strauss.

Udet rolled his eyes, then lowered his head like a naughty schoolboy. ‘To be absolutely honest . . .’

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t read the script?’

‘I read as far as the part where I did the first stunt and I told them I’d take it. I don’t need to know the story.’

In a strange way, Udet was right. The Ufa films now followed such a predictable template one could pretty much guess after the first few minutes how it would turn out. In this case an audience
could tell that a heroic Luftwaffe pilot would almost certainly have survived the downing of his plane, and that Gretchen’s bravery in going in search of her dead husband would be rewarded,
allowing her to return to housewifely duties. The conflict in which Udet was supposedly fighting was not specified, but anyone looking at the flat, sandy plains which had been painted on sets in
the studio could not mistake the landscape of Spain.

At that moment, a couple of girls came and dragged Udet away, pleading with him to perform a juggling trick. Finding herself standing next to Strauss, Clara felt obliged to continue the
conversation.

‘And . . . where do you work?’

His cool grey eyes flickered over her as though he could barely be bothered to reply. Clara noticed a navy-blue cuffband on his arm which read
Legion Condor
.

‘I suppose you know the Reichsluftfahrtministerium?’

It would be hard to miss it. Goering’s new Air Ministry on Wilhelmstrasse at the intersection with Leipzigerstrasse was simply as gargantuan as its chief, though rather more sober in its
décor. Indeed the building was starkly austere. It was popularly called Haus der Tausend Fenster but in reality the granite slab had not one, but four thousand windows, extending seemingly
endlessly across the cliff face of its façade. Inside there was a lift without doors which never stopped, so that staff had to step out as it passed their floor.

‘Ernst has room 231 and I have room 232.’

‘Do all these officers work with you?’

‘Somewhere.’ He cast a dismissive glance at them. ‘On a lower floor.’

‘Do you fly much?’

He gave a bored smile. ‘I get out as much as I can. Like Ernst I’m not made for desk work.’

Clara willed herself to keep the conversation going. ‘So what’s this work for the Fatherland you’re engaged in?’

His laugh was as desiccated as leaves blowing down a blind alley. ‘Ernst exaggerates. It’s technical stuff. It may as well be me as anyone.’

He was plainly unwilling to talk, but Clara ploughed on, trying to look at him without staring at the scar. His face was like a sculpture on some old Roman temple, half perfect and half
decayed.

‘Have you known Ernst for long?’

‘We met in 1916. We were assigned to the same unit flying single-seater Fokkers. We were out one day, making a routine patrol, when we came under heavy fire from a group of British and
French aircraft. We were hugely outnumbered but Ernst managed to down a French plane and I downed another. These fellows made forced landings and Ernst decided to land beside them and take the men
prisoner. They were terrified, as you can imagine, but Ernst strode over and shook hands with them, like a proper gentleman. When they were later imprisoned, he brought them cigarettes. I thought,
that’s the kind of man I would like for a friend. After the war I continued flying commercially and when Goering got the Luftwaffe going again, I rejoined.’

All the time he told her this, he had kept his head averted, as though conscious that she might not like to look at him, his gaze fixed on the middle distance. Eventually, he seemed to remember
where he was. ‘But enough of my work, Fräulein Vine,’ he said stiffly. ‘Yours is far more exciting.’

‘It’s quiet at the moment. We have a short break before we start rehearsals.’

‘You’re going to enjoy working with Ernst. He has a taste for fun. Look at him over there.’

Udet was juggling with a couple of empty wine bottles. A space had cleared around him, but his ability was hampered by a drunken girl who was getting too close, trying to hang on his neck.

‘Everyone’s looking forward to working with him. I hear he makes paper aeroplanes that fly as well as the real thing.’

‘Just one of his many accomplishments,’ commented Strauss dryly. ‘He also spins plates and does cartoons as well as a street artist. Women find him irresistible. And he usually
sees little reason to resist them.’

Clara wondered if this was meant to include herself.

‘He’s promised to organize a flight for me,’ she volunteered. ‘I need to fly to understand my character properly. And to tell the truth, I’ve always wanted to go up
in a plane.’

‘Why?’

‘It sounds interesting.’

‘Does it? I’ll take you then.’

The offer took her aback. ‘Do you mean it?’

‘I have a test flight to make from Tempelhof on Thursday. A Henschel 126. You can come up with me if you like. As long as you sit tight and wear something warm. No female hysterics in the
cockpit. Can you manage that?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Good then. It’ll have to be early, mind. Be there at nine.’

From across the room, Udet could be heard mocking the grand new art gallery the Führer had opened in Munich. In contrast to the Degenerate exhibition, the Haus der Deutschen Kunst was a
long-held ambition of Hitler’s to showcase the best of German art. Udet, his face glowing with drink and wreathed in smiles, was telling an indiscreet joke about his boss. ‘So Goering
is visiting the House of German Art and he’s enraged to find a portrait of himself as a pig. He starts to complain but the museum director says, “Oh no, Herr Reich Minister, can’t
you see that’s a mirror?”’

There was a gale of laughter, but Strauss turned away and stared out of the window towards the dim confines of the park. From there, the ugliness of his disfigurement was hidden, yet the shade
of stubble on his face seemed to echo a deeper shadow in his eyes. Clara tried to read his emotions but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking until he said quietly, ‘I fear my friend
Ernst has a dangerous condition.’

‘What’s that?’

‘He damaged his hearing in the war. It means he speaks too loudly for his own good.’

There was a crash from across the room. Udet, with a tablecloth tied round his waist, was dancing the can-can on a tabletop.

‘Why must we study healthy eating?’ enquired the teacher, a woman with hair wound in tight braids around a face that could split wood.

‘Because our bodies belong to the Reich and we have a responsibility to nurture them?’

‘Good. Anything else?’

A forest of hands. ‘Because we are the bearers of children and children are the building blocks of the German Reich.’

In a sun-dappled room, with a stunning view overlooking the lake, twenty young women sat in rows, dressed identically in grey dirndls over white blouses and blue checked headscarves. Ahead of
them, her feet planted wide and a rod in her hand, the teacher pointed at the board.

Mary always felt a little ripple of nausea when she set foot in a school – a souvenir of her days in a New Jersey boarding establishment battling with algebra and the American Civil War.
But the Bride School brought on a lurch of full-scale sickness in the pit of her stomach. There was no smoking inside – God, how did they cope? – and the corridors were infused with an
institutional cocktail of cabbage and carbolic. Indeed, it would be hard to find a more spotless institution than the Bride School. The garden looked like it had been tidied with tweezers. The
gravel drive was combed and the path ran down the lawn like perfectly parted hair. Even the birds on the lawn were like tiny mechanical toys, hopping like clockwork on the shaven grass.

‘This really is an inconvenient time for a journalist’s visit,’ complained the woman alongside her, who was called Fräulein Wolff.

‘Why inconvenient?’ asked Mary disingenuously, but if she had hoped to eke some information out of the woman, she was to be disappointed.

‘We have an administrative examination,’ she said blandly. ‘There is to be a visit from the Ministry. We are planning demonstrations of the various classes. Childcare, Sewing,
Obedience in Marriage and so on. Also there is to be a talk on “How to be a Good German Woman”.’

‘That all sounds fascinating,’ said Mary encouragingly. ‘Perhaps I could sit in.’

‘I doubt it.’

She tried again. ‘Do all SS brides come to a school like this?’

‘All SS marriages must be authorized to prevent SS men marrying unsuitable women.’

‘In what way unsuitable?’

Fräulein Wolff gave a sniff of exasperation at being required to answer unsolicited questions.

‘Health, for a start. The brides must complete forms giving all family history of tuberculosis, psychopathy and gynaecology. If an SS man is found to have contracted an unauthorized
marriage, he will be expelled from the SS.’

‘Expelled? Just because he doesn’t have a certificate?’

The woman looked as if she would dearly like to expel Mary there and then.

‘Follow me.’

She led Mary through a pair of high double doors into the marble hallway. Above the mantelpiece, facing the Führer’s picture like a pair of grisly betrothal portraits, was a painting
of Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, the leader of the Women’s Bureau, in grey worsted jacket, shirt and tie.

‘It’s Frau Scholtz-Klink you really need to see. She’s away just now. I shouldn’t really be the one to talk. Can I see your journalist permit again please?’

Mary flourished the pass which had been issued to her with punctilious efficiency on the day of her arrival. The Germans were still, thankfully, keen to assist American journalists in every
particular in the hope of cementing an international alliance. The woman’s face creased with dismay.

‘As I tried to explain, this is not a convenient day for you to visit, Fräulein. Perhaps you could return tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow I will be attending a speech by the Führer,’ lied Mary. ‘But I don’t need much. I wonder if I could interview one of the brides? Perhaps there’s
somewhere I could talk with one of the women in private?’

The idea of brides enjoying private conversations was plainly unheard of here. Fräulein Wolff seemed about to refuse, then the demands of the day overtook her.