Hitler's Niece (13 page)

“And
why
are you telling me this?”

Emil blushed. “I’m not betraying him, if that’s what you’re thinking.” The horns of a band began blaring so loudly in the festival hall that Emil was forced to hunker forward to be heard. “We used to go watch bare-breasted girls in boxing matches. Hitler was thrilled. And that’s when I put it together. He likes to look, but won’t touch. Women and sex, they frighten him, I think, and so he’s standoffish, he seems a prude, a perpetual bachelor. At that judge’s house, with those naked girls, at first I was thinking how high-minded and moral he was, but then I saw that he was just squeamish.”

“And if he hadn’t been there, what would
you
have done?”

Emil smiled. “Oh, well; who knows?”

She fixed a cool stare on him. “That’s why I asked.”

“Watch? Yes. Offer money for more? Unlikely.”

“Do you always do what he says?”

“Sure. Naturally.”

“Why?”

Emil seemed honestly puzzled, then he grinned at her for a minute as if waiting for some telltale hint that she was joking. “Are you trying to tell me you
don’t
do what he says?”

She felt a guilty twinge saying it, as though it were a lie, but she insisted, “No. I do as I please.”

Emil considered her as if she were rebellion and will-of-its-own and whatever else it was he’d subtracted from his life. And finally he said, “Well, maybe that’s what he wants, then.”

They
were in the parlor of the Pension Klein. The house lightly snored in the silence, and the flakes from the first snowfall of winter softly ticked against the windows. Chewing gum was the latest fad from America, and Emil gave her a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint. Quoting the billboard ads, she said, “Pleasant and refreshing.”

Emil thought hard and remembered the other line, “The aroma lingers.”

She patted his knee to praise him.

Emil inched closer on the sofa and asked, “May I kiss you?”

And Geli said, “Yes, please.”

At
first they didn’t tell Hitler they were seeing each other, but for a selfish, cold, and insensitive man he was fairly intuitive, and within a few days he seemed to have noticed a new significance in their glances, the way she would stay in the car just a little longer than necessary, as if Emil were her air, how she seemed to find her harbor not far from him when they were in a room. And so he started talking about the Nazi hierarchy and all the bachelors in it. “We need wives,” he told Emil, “families.” And as Emil drove and Hitler wore his leather flying cap in the front seat, he’d embarrass his niece by mentioning unmarried women whom Emil ought to consider. Fräulein Christa Schröder? A beauty. Or who was that contralto at the Cuvilliés Theater? Fräulein Marika Kleist? And what about that girl at the Carlton Tea Room? Fräulein Meiser, wasn’t it? Leni Meissner? Which?

“Leni Meiser, I think,” Emil said.

“And?”

Emil found them all wanting.

Hitler sighed in frustration. He turned to his niece, in the backseat. “Any ideas, Geli?” he asked.

“Well, it’s hard with him so ugly.”

“We’ll just keep looking,” Hitler said. “Surely there’s somebody you’d like, Herr Maurice. Somebody to have little Aryans with? We’ll go to city hall for the wedding. We’ll get Franz Gürtner to officiate. And we’ll all get to be such good friends. We’ll have spaghetti together at your house every night.”

Emil smiled. “She can’t cook, my leader. Women I like can’t cook.”

“But my Angelika, for instance! She cooks, she cleans, she sews her own clothes! And beautiful, too! Why not find a wife just like her?”

Emil found Geli in the rearview mirror. Geli gazed out the window.

Hitler folded up his itinerary and held his hands in his lap as he said, “I myself have overcome any need for women. But I find nothing more sacred than the flame of life awakened by holy love. We must remember, though, that the flame only burns when lit by a man and a woman who have kept themselves pure in body and soul. And when their love is magnified by the presence of children, the sins of iniquity that have destroyed our nation fairly scream out in their doom.”

“And the sins of iniquity would be?” Geli asked.

“Oh, that you would never learn,” Hitler said.

With
nothing being mentioned, Emil and Geli began holding hands around Hitler’s friends, and one night took the risk of hugging as they strolled to his
Stammtisch
in the Café Heck after the cinema. Rudolf and Ilse Hess were there with Putzi and Helene Hanfstaengl and Heinrich Hoffmann and a photographer’s model named Kristina. She was wearing a swastika pin. The gentlemen were all in white ties and tails, and the ladies in sheath dresses and opera tiaras. And the party turned and beamed at Emil and Geli as if they were children shocked awake by hearty toasts from the dining room.

Winter was finally there in earnest. Geli’s cheeks were as wind-chilled as if she’d been skiing, and she’d gone without gloves so she could feel Emil’s hands in hers. Hitler formally stood up, kissed her knuckles, and was startled. “But your fingers are cold as silverware, Geli!”

“I feel warm,” she said.

“I’ll bet you do,” said Ilse Hess, and she watched with fascination as Emil went to the
Herrens
.

“What film did you see, Fräulein Raubal?” Putzi Hanfstaengl asked.

“Metropolis.”

Rudolf Hess tilted toward the führer to inform him. “About the alliance between labor and capital,” he said.

“And what Jew directed that?” Hitler asked.

Heinrich Hoffmann said, “Not a Jew. Fritz Lang. A first-rate director.”

“You liked it?” Hitler asked his niece.

“Oh yes. It was stunning.”

“Whose metropolis was it?”

She shrugged. “It’s imaginary, I think.”

With certainty, Heinrich Hoffmann said, “It’s Philadelphia.”

White-jacketed waiters brought over two highly ornamented dining chairs, and Hitler ordered Emil’s to be situated near his own, and his niece’s inserted farther away, between Ilse Hess and Helene Hanfstaengl so “the women can talk about hairdressers and clothes and romantic novels.”

“Oh do sit,” Putzi’s American wife said as she held out the chair to Geli. And then she added in English, “And fill us in on your love life.”

Geli knew just enough English to shyly grin.

Hearing a foreign language, Hitler frowned, but then he turned in his chair to his private secretary and told Rudi what a marvel his niece was because she could follow the fiction serials in twelve magazines and newspapers simultaneously. “And she always knows how the stories fit together. She even notices when an installment is missing.”

Geli turned and found Ilse Hess interestedly staring. “What’s your sign?” Ilse asked.

“My
sign
?”

“Astrologically.”

“I’m Catholic. We don’t believe in astrology.”

Ilse smiled indulgently. “What’s your birthday?”

“June fourth.”

She sat back. “You’re a Gemini then. I’ll have to do your chart.”

Waiters put china and glassware in front of Geli and filled a flute with champagne. She heard Hitler holding forth to his followers about the joy of having such glamorous female company as he dined. “Women have always been such a comfort to me,” he said. “I have always found that feminine beauty lifts me from my doldrums and helps me put aside the cares that the world so often hands me. Whether she is intelligent or original is quite unnecessary. I have enough ideas for both of us.”

Helene Hanfstaengl sighed at his gracelessness, and softly asked Geli in German, “Are you in love?”

Geli thought for a few seconds, furiously nodded, and then she and the women laughed.

Kristina, the photographer’s model, asked, “Are you talking about the man you walked in with?”

“Hitler’s chauffeur,” Helene Hanfstaengl said.

Kristina fascinatedly looked over her shoulder as Emil walked from the
Herrens
to his chair near Hitler. “He’s very handsome. Is he French?”

“Corsican,” Geli said. She saw that Herr Hoffmann was now telling a joke, but Hitler was divided in his listening, flicking his worried attention between Emil and her, trying to be a jocular man among men yet wanting even more to hold his niece’s voice next to his ear, like a seashell with an ocean’s roar. She heard Helene ask in English, “Are you kissing yet?”

Geli answered in first-semester English, “Yes. But many time kissing not. Uncle watches.” She pinched her thumb and first finger a few millimeters apart. “Little only.”

Hearing them, Putzi Hanfstaengl widened his knees and hunched into their group, his white tie falling loose. In English he whispered, “Who’s kissing whom?”

“Emil and Geli.”

Clownishly dropping his jaw, Putzi tilted his ugly head to his wife. “And how will our smitten corporal take that?”

“Why should he care? Women don’t matter to him. He’s a neuter.”

Ilse asked Geli in German, “What are they saying?”

“I have no idea,” she said, but she did.

Waiters put down hot plates of food in front of Kristina and Ilse and Helene. Heinrich Hoffmann was full of satisfaction as he sat back to be served and continued his story, telling it now only to Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess, whose hand failed to hide his buckteeth as he smiled. Geli’s uncle was glaring at her across the dinner table as if she’d betrayed him, his white face seeming about to fracture with hurt. Hoffmann finished his joke by shouting, “Hold the lion!” and the men howled with hilarity, and Hitler joined in, too, repeating Hoffmann’s final words and folding over with laughter, laughing so hard that he took out his handkerchief and wiped the wetness from his eyes.

She
was scheduled to take the afternoon train to Berchtesgaden and share Christmas with Angela at Haus Wachenfeld, and so at noon on December 21st Hitler visited her white room at the Pension Klein, staying in his coffee-brown leather trench coat and slouch hat as he scanned her science textbooks and turned the handwheel on the Köhler sewing machine on her desk. A chart of the periodic table of the elements caught his attention, and he seemed at once to hate it. Swatting his right trousers leg with his dog whip, he asked, “Are you enjoying your studies, Geli?”

She said she was, but heard the heartlessness in it, as did he.

“We call it the Talmud high school,” he said, “there are so many Jews there.”

She shrugged. “They’re smart.”

“Are your studies difficult?” he asked.

“I have so much reading to do. And memorization.”

Hitler flinched a smile. “And you don’t have much time for either.”

Emil, he meant; the friend he envied, the rival he revered. She put a pfennig in the heater and watched the coils warm into radiance as she buttoned up a pink cardigan and hugged the chill in her torso.

“Are you thinking of Emil now?”

“Always,” she said.

She felt a soft nudge against her forearm and saw that her uncle had taken off his hat and was jutting out a present that was the size of a fountain pen in a box.

“I have something for you,” he said.

She took it from him and smiled. “Well, it’s too small to be a photo of you.”

Saying nothing, her uncle sucked his right little finger as he often did when he was nervous.

She tore off the silver foil wrapping and opened a jeweler’s box to find a fourteen-karat-gold chain and swastika pendant. “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”

“And now you can take off that other thing.”

She was still wearing the crucifix, on a fine steel chain, that she’d gotten at her confirmation. She took it off to please him, and he fastened his gift around her throat. She felt his hands hover just above her shoulders, his face tilt close enough to inhale the fragrance of her freshly washed hair.

“Love has made you even more lovely, Geli.”

She touched the swastika and said, “Won’t the girls at school be envious.” She felt him withdraw from her and sink down on the white-enameled bed, his leather trench coat talking with each move. She turned and he was lying back as he so often did, as if in a faint, one forearm flung over his forehead, one hand hanging to the floor.

“I hate the Christmas holidays,” he said. “Have you any idea why?”

“No.”

“Of course you don’t. You weren’t even born.”

“Oh,” she said. “Your mother.”

“Today is December twenty-first. She died precisely twenty years ago today.”

She sat forward on her desk chair. “Uncle Adolf, I’m so sorry.”

“Cancer of the breast,” he said. And he told her that Klara had been just forty-seven. She’d gone through a mastectomy, but they’d still found cancer in the tissue. A Jewish doctor had told them their only chance of a cure was to continually saturate the wound with iodoform, which burned into her skin like acid. Even now he could smell its foul, hospital odor. Klara had clenched her teeth on a towel so she wouldn’t scream. When it entered her bloodstream, she couldn’t swallow. When he’d offered her water, it had tasted like poison. They’d installed her in the kitchen, Aunt Johanna and he; there was no heat in the rest of the house. They’d torn down a closet and hauled in a sofa so he would be in perpetual attendance, and would hear her moan in her sleep. “I was in hell.”

“But wasn’t it good for her, having you there?” Geli asked. “Wasn’t she happy for the company?”

Rolling to his side, he crushed a pillow under his head and squeezed his forearm between his knees. “I was eighteen, and she changed me. She was so brave, Geli. So tender and considerate. Unflinching. Without complaint. We put up a Christmas tree and filled it with candles, and she fell asleep in their flickering glow. I was sketching her face just after midnight when she died. Angela found us at sunrise.”

Geli got up and gently knelt by him, a handmaiden to his grief. “And you still feel the loss?”

He childishly turned his face into the pillow, childishly nodded his head.

“Are you crying?” She heard nothing but a false kind of wailing, a boo-hoo-hoo. “Don’t, Uncle Adolf.” She put a hand into his hair and trained it back. She kissed his shoulder. “You’ll make me cry, too. You don’t want that.”