The Winter Garden (2014) (4 page)

As she waited for the traffic policeman to clear the road she looked across the street, to where a crane was poised like a giant bird, pecking at another excavation. Berlin these days was like a
patient under constant operation. Every street was subject to extracting, filling and fixing. You couldn’t move for heaps of bricks, plank ribbing laid over holes in the earth and skeletal
steel structures rising into the sky. Everywhere there was the roar of cement mixers and the rattle of drills, erecting the monumental, neoclassical buildings deemed suitable for the new world
capital of Germania. There was something grand and futile about these buildings of the Führer, Clara thought. They were like an empty boast, designed to make human beings feel like ants in
their long passages and echoing halls. Goering’s Air Ministry had seven kilometres of corridors apparently, and it was said that for his centrepiece Hitler wanted Albert Speer to build a dome
that rose a thousand feet into the sky, capable of holding a hundred and eighty thousand people. Nonetheless, the Führer had also ordered Speer to equip all Government buildings with
bulletproof doors and shutters, just in case the people should ever lose their enthusiasm for his grand plans.

It would be hard to find a greater contrast between the Goebbels’ home in Schwanenwerder than the worn, ochre-painted nineteenth-century block in Winterfeldstrasse, where
Clara lived on the top floor. A heavy wooden door led from the street into a hall painted institutional brown and lined with pocked tiles. To the left was an arthritic wrought-iron lift and behind
it a stairwell for when the lift all too frequently refused to function. To the right, secreted in a cubby-hole furnished with a chair and lamp, Rudi the caretaker could be found. Try as she might
to enter silently, Rudi would always dart from his cubicle with some piece of information or greeting. He was a Party member with a prestigiously high number – signifying that he had joined
the Party in the early days, well before they closed the ranks to new membership – and in his role as National Socialist block warden, every Saturday he donned his brown shirt and attended a
Party meeting. That was the only time one could be sure he was not around. Rudi knew everything that went on in the building, and Clara suspected he had seen every film she appeared in. He smelled
of unwashed clothes and styled his sparse hair in imitation of the Führer. His oyster eyes bulged from a face as pinched and mottled as a crab’s claw and his breath reeked like old carp,
but Clara knew that nothing and no one escaped him.

‘Good evening, Fräulein Vine.’

He sidled up unctuously and handed her some mail. There was an invitation to a lecture on the Semite in film – probably dispensed to all Ufa employees – and a routine flyer appealing
for contributions to the Winterhilfswerk. The money raised was supposed to provide coal and food for the needy, but everyone knew it went on armaments. Herr Kaufmann, her neighbour, had put a
sticker on his door, testifying that he already contributed to the Winter Relief Fund and was exempt from doorstep collections, but that only meant that when the Hitler Jugend came round with their
collecting tins, Rudi ensured his was the first door they knocked on. Also in the pile was a letter with a London postmark and the curly female handwriting that belonged to her older sister
Angela.

‘May I ask how filming is proceeding?’

‘Well, thank you, Rudi. We’re almost finished. Though we had a late script change, which has meant a delay.’

The change had come down at the last moment from Goebbels’ office, just a few days before the wrap. The Minister went through the script of every film made at the Ufa studios and issued
alterations whenever he felt like it. In this case, he had decided that the actress playing an unfaithful wife should die at the end of the film.
‘It would not be right for us to
encourage the propensity to adultery at a time when young men are separated from their families by the call to arms. Infidelity must be publicly punished!’
the notoriously womanizing
Minister had scribbled on the director’s script. The director had read out the comments to the assembled actors deadpan. That was the greatest test of acting skill at Ufa – managing not
to laugh.

‘Just to mention, Fräulein, our official collection point.’

Rudi gestured at a bin he had installed in the lobby. This was a new idea. Clara had heard about it on the wireless. Citizens were to donate anything they didn’t need that was metallic:
cutlery, old toothpaste tubes, soup cans, razors or tinfoil, for the greater good of the Reich. Clara wondered how many toothpaste tubes it would take to build an aeroplane, then abandoned the
speculation as far too much like the maths problems she used to face at school.

‘Of course, Rudi. Thank you.’

‘And to warn you, there are men coming in to mend the lift.’

There were always men coming in to mend the lift.

There were six apartments in the block, and hers was on the top floor. She climbed the steps and, reaching her door, she paused and put out a forefinger to examine a fine, dusty coating of
powder on the ebony handle. It was a habit of hers, whenever she left the apartment, to give the handle a swift dab with the Max Factor compact in her handbag. Entering, she locked the door behind
her, and surveyed her private domain.

If Berlin was being rebuilt according to an architectural fashion for gigantic size, Clara’s apartment was the precise opposite. There were four rooms, all of them small. To the right of
the dingy hall was a bedroom, to the left, a minuscule kitchen with a porcelain stove, its surrounds tiled in black, and a pine table, on which stood a red geranium. Further on was a bathroom so
cramped you had to close the door before undressing. The bedroom was dominated by a large painting of a jazz trumpeter which Clara had positioned directly opposite the bed so it was the first thing
she saw in the morning. It was not a beautiful picture. Its clashes and jagged lines expressed something of the fear that encircled the city and suggested not harmony, but screeching, discordant
notes, yet she loved the painting because it reminded her of the artist, her old friend Bruno Weiss. Beside it was a tallboy, containing several evening dresses as well as the linen blouses, dark
skirts and bright jumpers that were her working wardrobe.

The sitting room had views over the rooftops towards Nollendorfplatz a few blocks away. Clara had covered the wooden floors with rugs and with her scant wages had assembled a collection of
deliberately modern furniture, not the heavy, dark stuff of so many Berlin apartments but low armchairs, a modern glass-topped table, a huge mirror and bookcases that ran the length of one wall.
The entire décor was designed to maximize space and light. Clara loved this apartment. It was her refuge. It was the only space in Berlin that felt entirely secure, and the only place she
could really relax.

She went into the kitchen and boiled water for coffee. For anyone with an addiction to coffee, Berlin was the ideal place to nurse it, even though it had risen shockingly in price and most
places sold ersatz concoctions with the bitter tang of chicory. The watered-down stuff in the cafés had acquired its own contemptuous street name –
Negerschweiss
– Negro
Sweat, but Clara liked to buy the best, Melitta Kaffee, which she found in a specialist shop just north of the Tiergarten. She adored visiting the cramped aromatic space, surveying the hundreds of
different beans heaped in drawers behind the counter, like gold and amber gems. She lingered happily as the rich roasted scent rose like incense from the coffee machine and the proprietor weighed
out her order in a priest-like ritual. A trip to the coffee shop was as good as any pilgrimage, Clara thought.

Waiting for the coffee to filter she opened the window and reminded herself, as always, how lucky she was to get a place in this part of town. She had inherited the apartment from an American
journalist, Mary Harker, who had needed to make a quick exit from Germany. It was a departure for which Clara was indirectly responsible. When Helga Schmidt plunged to her death from her apartment
window, Clara, convinced it was not suicide, but murder on the orders of the Nazi high command, had confided her suspicions to Mary. The ensuing article in the
New York Evening Post
so
enraged Joseph Goebbels that he gave Mary forty-eight hours to leave. That was the last Clara saw of her, yet she still missed her friend’s warmth and dry wit. She had received the occasional
letter, full of Mary’s trademark deprecation about life in suburban New Jersey –
undoubtedly the seventh circle of hell for any woman with a brain
– but in the past year
there had been nothing.

When Mary left, the surrounding streets had been home to bars full of artists, intellectuals, singers and actresses, but now the Nazis had closed most of the bars down and if she ever came back,
she would be hard put to recognize the area. Nollendorfplatz was still the same though, the busy square straddled by an elevated track and the great dome of a railway station. It was criss-crossed
day and night by trams, and clattering above them the maroon and yellow carriages of the trains, sliding into the station. At the south end of the square was the Neues Schauspielhaus, a theatre
which had once been home to Expressionist artists like Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller, but was now consigned to revue shows and the kind of light operetta that the Nazis adored. Its granite
façade was decorated with chunky Teutonic nudes, their taut calves and rippling muscles rising from the grey wall, the frigid opposite of the curvaceous dancers who could be seen performing
in increasingly skimpy costumes inside.

Rising above the tangle of traffic sound and shouts, from a nearby window issued a familiar shriek. It was Joseph Goebbels on the radio, reprising his talk from the Nuremberg Party rally.

The Jew is a parasite, the ferment of decomposition
.

All his speeches were the same. You hardly needed to listen to them. Even when you tried to block out the content, the same word emerged again and again,
Juden
, spat out like a curse.
Goebbels was on the radio almost every day now. He timed his later broadcast for when people were sitting down to their evening meal, but even if you switched it off, there was no escape.
Loudspeakers throughout the city obligingly blared the thoughts of Hitler and his Propaganda Minister. You would hear chunks of speech whenever you passed an open shop, or waited in line at the
bank. Their words hammered into your brain like construction workers’ drills, whether you liked it or not.

Quickly Clara closed the window and took the coffee to her desk along with a sandwich made with the last of her cheese, and a square of Ritter Sport chocolate. As she ate, her thoughts turned
away from Joseph Goebbels and back to his wife.

Magda Goebbels, aloof and neurotic, was Hitler’s favourite among the wives of his top men. She had indeed caught the Führer’s own eye before he decided that marrying would be a
bad career move and encouraged Joseph Goebbels to take his place. Magda liked to invite actresses to her parties for the pleasure of the Führer and a couple of times a year Clara would
routinely be summoned to these events. Yet until today Magda had never addressed a word to her since the time, four years ago, when Clara, newly arrived in Berlin, unwittingly became a go-between
in Magda’s clandestine love affair with a Jewish man. Burdened with Magda’s secret, Clara had concealed a deeper secret of her own. She became a spy on the private life of the Third
Reich, passing snippets of information and gossip to Leo Quinn, assistant at the British Passport Control office and agent for the British Secret Service. It was Leo’s idea that Clara should
feed him details of the Nazi women’s lives, reporting on their feuds and conflicts while masquerading as an actress without a political thought in her head. Leo had impressed on Clara how
crucially the British needed information about the top figures in the Nazi regime. He had taught her everything he knew about surveillance and observation, how to keep herself safe and move with
ease amid those she hoped to deceive. He had taught her the precautions every informer must take to avoid the paranoid suspicions of the Nazi state. He had schooled her and drilled her and inducted
her into a dangerous new world. He had also fallen in love with her.

Leo. The thought of him still sent a shard into her heart.

Tall, with a penetrating green gaze and upright bearing, Leo Quinn possessed a reserve that Clara assumed she would never overcome, until she discovered the intense passions that lay beneath. He
loved poetry and translating Ovid. Part of him hankered for an academic career in some remote, ivy-clad quad, yet he was driven by the urgent need to help Jews escape from Berlin. He was the man
who had turned Clara’s ordinary existence into one fraught with danger and deception, yet he had also helped her escape the confines of her life in a way she could never have imagined. Leo
was the only person in Berlin to whom Clara had confided her most dangerous secret – the fact that her own German grandmother was Jewish, and so, by maternal line, was she.

To begin with, when Leo left for London, Clara’s first waking thought would be of him. Now it was more like a scratch that had healed and only hurt when certain things came to mind –
a view of rooftops, a snatch of Latin inscription, or whenever she had reason to pass Xantener Strasse, a block off the Ku’damm, and look up at a third-floor window above a bakery to the safe
house where they conducted their affair. She still missed him though. Sometimes she strove to hear the ironic lilt of his voice in her head or conjure up the frank intensity of his gaze. On a
purely physical level, her skin craved the touch of a man, the trace of fingers across her skin and the heat of a body close to hers. The rush of desire would come upon her quite suddenly, when
acting in a love scene, or meeting the glance of a handsome stranger on a tram. After they had separated, she and Leo had agreed not to contact each other. In the early days she had needed
physically to restrain herself from calling the consulate and asking for his forwarding address. There were times when she had stood here, biting her lip and hugging her arms round her chest to
avoid lifting the telephone. That didn’t happen any more. The hurt had ebbed. For all she knew Leo was married. Indeed, that was how she liked to think of him. Back in London, married with a
child. Besides, she had her own child to think of.