The Winter Garden (2014) (25 page)

Clara had no trouble finding the Haus der Kunst. It was unmistakeable. A spectacular neoclassical temple whose pale stone columns rippled with the blood and black of Nazi banners. It looked like
a railway station might look, if it had been built by ancient Greeks. Designed by Hitler’s architect, Paul Ludwig Troost, it had taken four years to construct and had been opened in a grand
ceremony that July. A sweep of steps promised gleaming halls and immense vistas of blood-red marble. Clara had no interest in seeing it at all.

Instead she turned to another building a short walk away, where a banner above the door read
Degenerate Art, Entry Free
.

A long queue snaked up a narrow, wooden staircase, skirted round the first sculpture, a menacing evocation of Christ on the cross, and funnelled into a series of gloomy, low-ceilinged rooms
crammed with exhibits, chaotically assembled. Everything was deliberately jumbled together, pictures hung askew and unframed on the walls, suspended by string or rope. Cubists, Fauvists,
Impressionists and Expressionists were side by side. Beside each work was the price that a museum had paid for it, and some of the paintings were daubed with Nazi epitaphs. The walls, too, had
slogans scrawled all over them.
A Threat to the German Nation! Purification and Extermination! We Despise the Optical Illusions of the Jews!
A couple of SS guards presided like the
opposite of museum guides, contemptuous backs to the exhibits, casting bored glances over the throng. Clara scanned the crowd rapidly. Could Bruno possibly be here?

The place was crammed. Clara fell in step with a tour guide shepherding a goggle-eyed group of Munich matrons around the room. They passed a series of Kandinsky watercolours, hung in chaotic
series beneath a slogan reading
Crazy At Any Price
. Despite the dim lighting the colours burst like fireworks from their frames. The guide pointed a disdainful baton and explained:
‘The Führer tells us that degenerate artists cannot see colours or forms as they are in Nature. That is a sign of racial inferiority.’

It was at that moment that Clara sensed again the feeling she had had in Berlin. The distinct yet irrational impression that someone was following her. The invisible brush of eyes on the back of
her neck. She waited until the group was moving on and turned suddenly to see, at the far corner of her vision, the whisk of something rounding a corner. Then a large-bosomed woman in a flowery hat
sailed into view and when she looked again, it was gone.

Could that be a tail? Or was Clara merely being stalked by her own overheated imagination? Was it a person, or some figment knitted from the interplay of light and shadow? The room was so
ill-lit it was hard to tell. Shaken, she tried to focus again on the paintings themselves. How shocking and energizing they were. Bodies which looked less like people than the raw carcass of some
animal’s kill, yet were still electrifying in their impact. She stared up at them, marvelling at the alchemy by which base pigment was transformed into the very living substance of flesh.

The next room was entirely devoted to the depravity of women and the first painting she saw gave her a jolt of recognition.
The Devil’s Bacchanal
by Bruno Weiss. She had last seen
it propped in the corner of his room in Pankow and now it was here, a vast six by six-foot canvas, cheek by jowl with Van Gogh and Emil Nolde. The scene was surreal, the composition had the garish
texture of a nightmare. In the foreground the earth seemed convulsed and malign, as if it had engendered the evils perpetrated on its surface. Above it a naked woman was surrounded by licentious
scenes of men cavorting with each other, including, in the background, one who closely resembled Ernst Röhm. The woman herself, who had been modelled by Anna, her white flesh gleaming like a
piece of meat on a butcher’s block, appeared both beautiful and inhuman. Above the painting a Nazi curator had scrawled,
An insult to German womanhood.

So this was where Bruno had stood, admiring his own work. Clara had to smile. He was right to be proud, and no wonder he was gratified to be exhibited in the company of artists he admired so
much, even if the presentation left a little to be desired.

She stayed in front of the picture for several minutes, allowing the tour group to move on and hoping against hope that Bruno would materialize. Yet as the minutes passed, the sheer futility of
her search became apparent. Even if Bruno had been here, even if the Luftwaffe officer Fleischer had seen him, what on earth would persuade him to return? No Jew in his right mind could feel
comfortable in this place, or anywhere in Munich for that matter. Bruno must have been aware he was a living target. As a Jewish Communist agitator, who had already been arrested in 1933 on
suspicion of pamphleteering, he would surely feel as relaxed in Munich as a deer in a forest full of wolves.

Suddenly some sixth sense, prickling on the surface of her skin, caused her to look round. It was a flicker at the far edge of her vision, as slight as a tree’s leaves frisked by a passing
wind, and as she wheeled around she glimpsed something. A man with his back towards her, his face obscured by the tilt of a hat’s brim. About five foot eight with a suitcase in one hand. He
was on the far side of the room, observing Otto Dix’s
War Cripples
, a vista of hideous, skeletal veterans selling matches in the street. There was something familiar about the man.
But even as Clara tried to scrutinize him, he stepped briskly round the corner and was gone.

Quickly she followed, turning left into a vaulted corridor lined with glass cases and then into the next room, a cramped, low-ceilinged space, where people stood three deep to view the exhibits.
As she pushed through the crowds, she received several angry reprimands but the man had disappeared. Threading as fast as she could through the rest of the rooms she clattered down the wooden
stairway and looked right and left along the street. A bus crawled into view, blocking her line of sight to the other side of the street. She dashed across the road, narrowly missing a truck whose
driver craned his head, mouthing invisible imprecations behind the window. There was no sign of him. Either he had vanished into thin air, or he could perform optical illusions as well as any
degenerate artist.

Retracing her steps along the broad thoroughfare of Prinzregentenstrasse, she tried to analyse her suspicions. She had learned to trust her instincts over the years and her instincts told her
that something about the man in the gallery was familiar. Yet she could not for the sake of her think why. Added to which, nobody, except for Mary and Ralph Sommers, knew she was here. And even if
the Gestapo were observing her in Berlin, what was the chance they would have tailed her all the way to Munich? On the other hand, if the man had been a genuine visitor, why would he simply
vanish?

She crossed town, wandering up Leopoldstrasse, flanked by stately baroque buildings of cream and soft ochre. Lost in thought, she barely noticed that a crowd had formed ahead of her, until a
forest of right arms rose around her and a supercharged twelve-cylinder Mercedes, followed by a three-car escort full of armed guards, sped past. The cavalcade stopped at the corner of
Schellingstrasse and Schraudolphstrasse, in front of a dark, low-timbered restaurant, with a sign above the door reading Osteria Bavaria. A posse of black-uniformed guards ran out of the escort
cars like beetles from under a stone.

An Alsatian bounded onto the pavement, tail wagging. The Führer was in town. And lunching at his favourite restaurant.

Turning sharply away Clara was almost knocked over by a gaggle of girls on bicycles, eager, unlike her, to catch a glimpse of the Führer as he headed towards his favourite table, tucked
safely away at the back. She half wondered if she might see Unity Mitford, in her black shirt, among them.
Mitfahrt
, as Emmy Goering said she was called, because she followed Hitler
everywhere. Then she remembered that the Mitford sisters were in Berlin, preparing to attend the Goerings’ reception.

Despite Clara’s avoidance tactics, it was impossible to escape the Führer. A little way down Schellingstrasse she passed a glass-fronted shop, adorned with photographs of him. Hitler
speaking, Hitler gazing into the distance, Hitler reading. He stared at the audience without breaking his gaze, in a way that speakers usually avoided – a tactic, Clara had heard, that was
designed to arouse fear and awe. The Hitler gallery seemed excessive, even by the enthusiastic standards of Third Reich shop displays, until she looked up and saw the name – Heinrich
Hoffmann.

Of course. This must be the shop where Hitler’s court photographer first introduced the Führer to the seventeen-year-old Eva Braun, then working as his assistant. Their first date,
apparently, came when Hitler had spare tickets to the opera. Eva didn’t hesitate. Even then she had a sense of her own worth. She had been to a fortune-teller once who told her she would one
day be ‘world famous’. Clara wondered how she squared that with her current total invisibility. Hardly anyone knew that the Führer’s girlfriend even existed.

Consulting her map, Clara walked rapidly southwards, past baroque, four-storey blocks painted in pastel shades, threading her way through the cobbled streets of the city centre and glancing into
gloomy beer cellars, whose lamps in heavy iron sconces might have hung unchanged since medieval times, their ceilings painted with colourful flowers, entwined with the obligatory swastikas. There
was one more place she wanted to see, before she delivered the case to Katia Hansen.

Past the Viktualienmarkt, heady with the smells of sausage, pretzels and crispy roast chicken, she found herself in Gärtnerplatz, a pleasant square where five roads converged. The centre
boasted a patch of grass and trees, and what might be called a riot of geraniums, had anything so unruly as a riot ever been permitted in the Bavarian capital. On the far side was an elegant grey
colonnaded building, surrounded by scaffolding. Between the scaffolding she saw a sign saying Theater am Gärtnerplatz. The place Anna Hansen had performed.

Clara went into a café directly across the square and, contrary to her usual custom, sat in the window looking out. Next to her were a trio of women ordering hot chocolate and cake with
whipped cream, talking about the problem of finding servants.

The waitress brought Clara an apfelstrudel with rich, flaky pastry. She was plump and jolly-looking, with a frill of dirndl barely constraining a full bosom.

‘What’s happening to the theatre?’ Clara asked.

‘It’s being remodelled. The Führer has decided it should become the official home of comic opera.’

‘Does he come here a lot?’

‘A lot! He’s always here! But he’s so modest. He doesn’t want anyone making any fuss. He slips into the royal box just before the curtain rises. No one knows anything
about it until his special flag is unfurled over the balcony. He was here just the other day for
The Merry Widow.
’

‘Again. Do they perform that a lot?’

‘All the time. It’s the Führer’s favourite.’

Clara had heard how Hitler adored Franz Lehár’s operetta, with its sentimental tunes, its plot about women, money and love. Even the fact that its authors, Leo Stein and Viktor
Léon, were Jewish didn’t seem to perturb him.

‘And afterwards they have the most wonderful parties at the Künstlerhaus.’

‘What’s the Künstlerhaus?’

‘The artists’ club? On Lenbachplatz? It’s an amazing place. All gold paint everywhere and astrological signs painted on the ceiling in the hall. My man helped with the
decoration. He’s a builder.’

‘And what are these parties like?’

‘As if I’d know! They’re not going to invite the likes of me, are they? I’m happy enough to see the Führer go in and out. You get a great view from here. If you sit
there until this evening you might see him tonight, you never know.’

The drab apartment block where Katia Hansen lived was on the corner of Frauenstrasse and Zwingerstrasse, only a few minutes’ walk from Gärtnerplatz. After several
minutes the door was opened by an old woman who Clara assumed was the landlady, in a stained apron, her hair tied in a rough turban. She had apple cheeks, only the apples had grown creased and
withered and her little eyes were sharp with suspicion. Everything about her was a direct contradiction of the mat beneath her feet which said ‘Welcome’. When Clara asked for Katia
Hansen, her expression hardened from flint to steel.

‘She’s not here.’

‘But she lives here, right?’

‘Not any more. She used to but she’s gone away.’

‘Where has she gone?’

‘A long way away.’

Clara had not been expecting this. It had not even occurred to her that Katia Hansen might have moved. Yet now, with Bruno nowhere to be seen and Katia Hansen gone, it was plain she had
travelled all this way for nothing. Suddenly, fatigue and futility combined to dispirit her. She felt moored to the spot.

‘The thing is, I have something to give her. Perhaps I could leave it here.’

The landlady looked askance at the case Clara was carrying.

‘Certainly not.’

‘You see, Fräulein Hansen’s sister has died.’

The old woman blanched slightly, but was not giving an inch.

‘I’m sorry. But that’s not my business.’

‘This case belonged to her sister. It’s of sentimental value. I’ve come all the way from Berlin to deliver it. Perhaps if I left it here then she would be able to come and
fetch it.’

If Clara had hoped the mention of Anna’s death might affect the old woman, she was disappointed. Instead the woman leaned forward and hissed, her breath rank through mottled brown
teeth.

‘How many times do I need to tell you? She’s gone. You people need to leave us alone. We don’t want anything of hers.’

‘Then I don’t suppose you have a forwarding address? As I have come such a long way.’

From the bowels of the building came the shout of children squabbling. The scent of boiled flesh wafted down the hall. The woman was clearly torn between slamming the door shut and the thought
that her visitor might create more fuss by returning. She cast a glance over Clara’s shoulder into the street.