The Winter Garden (2014) (41 page)

The problem was, Clara seemed to have disappeared. There was no reply from her telephone, though that in itself didn’t mean much. All foreigners were cautious about using the telephone now
and Clara was always careful in that regard. The day before, Mary had walked over to the apartment and engaged in a friendly chat with her old pal Rudi the Blockwart, who readily yielded up the
information that Clara had not returned home for the past couple of nights. Though Rudi attempted to place a salacious spin on this fact, it probably meant nothing. Clara was no doubt away filming.
Yet Mary felt a nagging anxiety. She needed to try again.

Slipping a few sandwiches and a cake into her handbag for later, Mary left the Propaganda Ministry and made her way to Winterfeldstrasse. Clara was home, Rudi gestured, but when she had laboured
her way up the stairs and knocked on the door, Mary’s smile faded.

‘My God, Clara! What happened.’

‘This?’ Clara fingered the bruise on her temple, now going yellow at the edges. ‘Oh, I fell over in the street. I was going to cover it, but I wasn’t expecting
visitors.’

Mary was worried. She stared at her friend, her eyes brimming with concern, then bustled into the apartment, put the kettle on for tea and laid out the Ministry’s sandwiches on a plate,
beside the battered cream cake. She had been intending to tell Clara about the visit to Schwanenwerder and the startling discovery she had made there, but the sight of her bruised forehead banished
it momentarily from her mind.

She went over and placed a hand on her arm.

‘There’s something wrong, Clara. What is it?’

Clara wrapped her arms tightly round her chest and looked away. She had no make-up and was wearing a plain white blouse which emphasized her pallor.

‘It’s nothing, I told you. I just fell over as I was crossing the road. You don’t need to worry.’

Mary brought over the tea and sat herself down opposite Clara.

‘You’ve been away. I came to find you yesterday and Rudi said he hadn’t seen you for days. Something’s happened, hasn’t it? I’m your friend. You can tell
me.’

Clara sipped her tea gratefully. ‘You’re sweet to worry. I do appreciate it, but there’s nothing to tell.’

‘Give me credit for having eyes in my head.’

‘Honestly, Mary, it’s nothing.’

There was something, Mary knew, but it was going to take some time to find it out. When Clara decided to keep something private, that was how it tended to remain. She bit down the implied
rejection and carried on.

‘OK. You don’t want to tell me, so let’s start with my news. Because this you do want to hear.’

She was gratified to have Clara’s immediate attention. ‘I went back to the Reich Bride School to take some photographs and I talked to that girl Ilse Henning again. She told me the
Gestapo has been put onto the case. They’ve taken the investigation away from the Kripo, which seems awfully strange. The Kripo men had been kind to her – she’d found Anna’s
silver lighter and handed it in.’

‘A lighter?’

‘Yes. Quite a valuable thing with Anna’s initials on it. But the Gestapo men seemed to think Ilse was hiding something. They treated her like she was working for the Red Front
Fighters’ League. She was scared out of her wits.’

Clara was alert, her mind whirring. ‘Poor girl. How cruel they are.’

‘Exactly. I can’t work out why the Gestapo should have got involved, but I’ve found out something else, Clara. It’s something you need to know. That artist friend of
yours, Bruno Weiss? He’s been working as a builder at the Schwanenwerder Bride School. Ilse pointed him out, so I took him aside and got him to tell me everything that’s happened. But
he was holding something back, Clara, I could tell. The guy was in quite a state. And he was desperate to see you.’

The Moabit area of north Berlin was a grim district of rented flats and tenements crouching under a sullen sky. Clara passed the granite walls of Moabit prison and turned into
Turmstrasse, heading for a high grey block in a courtyard of peeling plane trees. She climbed a dank stone staircase to the third floor and knocked, hoping that Mary had taken the address down
correctly. Her heart was in her throat.

She barely recognized the figure who peered through the crack of the door. Bruno Weiss’s hair had receded further from his brow, leaving only thin wisps across the skull, and his face was
bled of colour. The skin was taut over his cheekbones, and his slender frame looked not so much undernourished as starved. For a man still in his thirties, he could have passed for two decades
older. Yet at the sight of Clara a grin of delight spread across his face and he grabbed her inside swiftly and held out his arms.

‘Clara Vine!’ He hugged her to him, then kissed her formally on both cheeks, the way he always did. There was a pungent surge of sweat and unwashed clothes as his ribs jutted against
her body like sticks.

‘My God, I never thought I would see you again. Except on the screen. You’re looking well.’

He peered outside nervously to see if they had been observed, then ushered her along the hall. ‘Forgive my precautions. I feared it was other visitors entirely.’

Bruno’s room looked as though it had been abandoned by its previous occupant. The floorboards were bare and a shiver of wind blew in through the cracked window. To one side there was a
stained mattress and pair of cracked suitcases stood by the door.

‘I’ve seen all your films, you know.’

‘And I’ve been down to Munich to see your paintings, too.’

‘You went there? Magnificent exhibition, wasn’t it? And free entry too. Such enlightened politicians we have.’

The old, mocking humour came into his eyes. The defiance that told her Bruno’s spirit had survived. He held onto her arms and gave her a searching look, as if assessing her motives, and as
he did Clara felt a rush of shame at believing Bruno would ever have denounced her under police questioning. The lines scored in his face suggested he had been interrogated, but there was nothing
but honest affection in his eyes.

‘It’s so good to see you, Clara. Are you still keeping an eye on that lad Erich? How is he?’

She shrugged. ‘Moody. Passionate. Temperamental. The last time I saw him he accused me of not loving Hitler.’

Bruno gave a wry smile.

‘Perceptive boy.’

Clara winced. Since their argument and the threat against him she felt a desperate urge to see Erich, but she didn’t dare. She dreaded the possibility that she might have drawn him into
danger.

‘He’s a good boy, Bruno. He adores the HJ right now, but he’ll see through them in time. He’s very intelligent.’

‘Like his mother then.’ He shrugged. ‘I think I know why you’re here.’

‘Don’t worry. You can trust me.’

‘How could I ever doubt that?’ He gestured towards a table where an ashtray overflowed, as elegantly as if it were a dinner table at the Adlon, and bowed stiffly. ‘Please, sit.
Forgive my less than perfect housekeeping.’

He made her a glass of tea, and as he placed it on the table she noticed his hands were shaking. Bruno had an artist’s hands, large and capable, with fingers which had always been stained
with paint and even now were weathered and workmanlike. Except for the tremor. She wondered if he would ever be able to paint again.

Brightly, she said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you when you didn’t smell of turpentine.’

He scooped away a lank wisp of hair from his face. ‘A treacherous fragrance, turpentine. I keep well away from it. It’s the kind of perfume that could get me locked up.’

‘You think turpentine could get you noticed?’

‘They notice everything. Sights, sounds, smells. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, Clara, it’s not to underestimate them. Once I was excluded from the Reich Chamber of
Art, it meant I couldn’t paint. I might have thought I could keep it up behind my own four walls, but I reckoned without the ways of the Gestapo. They make lightning raids to check if your
brush is wet. They check up at art supply shops to see if banned artists are ordering paint. Eventually I realized I would have to abandon painting completely. Down in Munich I had no way to earn a
living, and the chances of getting work as a Jew are, as you know, much harder in beautiful Bavaria.’

‘So you came back to Berlin.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s safer here. It’s easier to disappear.’ He reached for a scrap of tobacco and began rolling out a cigarette, shaping it elegantly, smoothly, like a
piece of origami. Hastily Clara drew from her bag the cobalt-blue tin of cigarettes with a picture of Ernst Udet on the lid.

‘Take them, please.’

Bruno picked up the tin, scrutinized it and smiled. ‘As a matter of fact, a cigarette was how I got back into it. One day, an old friend I had been talking to left a packet of cigarettes
on the table and when I looked at them I found an address written on the inside. It was a place in Rudow, on the outskirts of Neukölln. When I went there I found a couple of guys operating a
construction company. A chap called Max Grabowski, and his brother Otto. They had a shed with paint, wallpaper, supplies and equipment, that sort of thing, and hidden inside there was a printing
machine. They had been producing some flyers denouncing German involvement in the Spanish war and they wanted my help.’

Clara remembered the first time she had ever seen one of Bruno’s pamphlets. She had been sitting outside Kranzler’s café when she found a leaflet on the seat beside her,
extolling the German Communist Party, the KPD.

‘That’s dangerous, Bruno.’

He raised his eyebrows and gave her a frank look. ‘And you think what you do isn’t? But you’re right, Clara. It’s getting harder. The Gestapo watch everything. They even
count the number of office supplies and stamps that people buy in bulk. That way they can work out if anything covert is going on. Our people have to be extremely careful. One guy gets his brother
to play the violin to disguise the sound of his typewriter keys. The only problem is, his brother plays so badly he fears the neighbours will have him arrested on account of the noise.’

He laughed delightedly, and Clara wondered how he managed to retain a sense of humour in such perilous circumstances.

‘So how long have you been pamphleteering?’

‘A couple of months now. We’ve been dropping them everywhere you can think of: mailboxes, telephone booths, luggage racks on trains. One of our people is a doctor and he posts our
little flyers on the pretext of making house calls.’

‘And you?’

‘I only go a couple of times a week. It’s something to do at night when I can’t sleep. I keep waking up thinking I hear the crunch of boots on concrete outside or banging on
the door.’

‘Bad dreams.’

‘Usually, thank God. Except when it’s real. When I first came to this apartment I was sharing with another man but one morning there was a knock at the door and two policemen
arrived. They told me to stay in bed, while they took him. They barely gave him time to dress. When I looked, the policeman shook his pistol in my face. I asked where they were taking him, but they
ignored me. I was lucky not to be taken myself. Max Grabowski found out what happened. He was guillotined at Plötzensee Prison.’

Bruno blinked and looked away. Clara focused on her tea. Silence hung heavily between them. People here were getting used to these silences in conversation. They observed them, the same way they
might observe a commemoration for the dead. They were eloquently emotional, dense with memory. Yet within a few seconds, Bruno assumed a lighter tone.

‘Enough of me. It’s another sad story you’re after today, isn’t it? I take it you want to know about Anna Hansen?’

‘I remember she used to model for you, didn’t she? Way back?’

‘Yes. You met her once, I think. Anna was quite a character. She liked to live on the wild side. I can’t say I’m wholly surprised she ended up dead. Not half so surprised as I
was when she turned up a Reich Bride.’

‘How did you come to see her again?’

‘That’s the funny thing, if anything can be called funny in this story. It was pure chance. I had to eat, and there’s so much construction work going on in the city that
they’ll hire anyone, even Jews. I was called up to a job on Schwanenwerder, building a little model cottage in the garden of the Reich Bride School. It was a pleasant job and I was enjoying
myself. Out in the sunshine and fresh air, plenty of pretty girls to look at. Then one day I got the shock of my life because I saw a girl who looked the spitting image of Anna Hansen. She was
attending a lesson on being an obedient bride and because it was a sunny morning they were taking the lesson in the garden. I nearly choked. It was definitely Anna. I couldn’t fathom what she
was doing there, but you don’t spend a month painting a woman and not recognize her, even if she is disguised in an apron and a dirndl.’

‘Was she pleased to see you?’

‘Put it this way. I’ve had some luck with women in my time, but I’ve never seen a girl so keen to see me. She could hardly control herself. She passed me a note, asking me to
come back that night and we met up at the back of the garden, behind the trees. I thought she had something else in mind until she told me her story.’

‘And what was her story?’

Bruno moved over to the window and looked down at the street below, before dragging the tablecloths that were serving as curtains across the window and switching on the lamp. Unconsciously, he
lowered his voice.

‘Anna was a pretty girl but she had an eye on the main chance. She made sure she’d collected a whole lot of secrets that their owners would rather not have publicized. That was just
how she operated. She didn’t have a lot of morals. Back in Munich she’d been surviving by withdrawing money from the account of an elderly Jew who had been obliged to emigrate. She said
he owed her money as his housekeeper. When that money ran out and she needed a new source of funds so she decided she would have to rely on her artistic talents. She’d been a
dancer.’

‘At the Theater am Gärtnerplatz?’

‘You know it? Back in the day that place was famous for the after-parties they’d throw. Decadent parties, to borrow the Nazis’ favourite phrase. Girls dancing naked, men and
girls together, men and men, girls and girls. Anything went. I did some paintings based on what Anna told me. You might have seen them if you went to Joey Goebbels’ art exhibition.’