The Pursuit of Pearls Page 8

  Above them, Hitler hung, brooding eyes inclined downwards to the tanned legs and heaving breasts, and a slogan beneath him blaring, “Future German mothers! Your body belongs to the Führer!” Three passing policemen, part of the investigation into Lottie’s death, pointed to the picture, and one made a ribald remark. Although Hedwig couldn’t hear what he said, she could guess.

  The Faith and Beauty girls had been practicing for a “special event.” No one yet knew what it was, only that it was on the Führer’s command, and that the eyes of the world would be on them. Hedwig assumed it would be something complicated involving hoops. Hoops always made her nervous, because of having to throw them in the air and catch them and the terrifying possibility that one’s hoop would escape and roll away to the eternal shame of herself, her family, the community, and ultimately the Fatherland itself.

  Gym was compulsory here. On their first day the leader of National Socialist Youth, Baldur von Schirach, had turned up in person to address them and told them gymnastics focused “the harmonic cultivation of body, mind, and spirit.” Privately, Hedwig wondered what the point was of learning social graces that expressed their individuality when gymnastic displays made everyone look the same.

  Everyone, that is, except Lottie. She had been the star gymnast of them all, lithe and acrobatic, her lissome body curling obligingly into extreme poses with no apparent effort. She claimed gymnasts had better sex because they were more in tune with their bodies. That was the kind of thing Lottie said, and Hedwig had long since gotten used to it.

  She rubbed the places beneath her armpits where her outfit chafed and left angry marks on her skin. Being tall meant that from the moment she joined the Jungmädel at ten, followed by the Bund Deutscher Mädel at fourteen, the regulation uniforms had never quite fit. Lottie, even though she was five foot ten with big feet, was as graceful as a cat and could make the frumpiest outfit look like something from Elegante Welt. Hedwig’s body was always awkward. She sprawled on a chair like a disjointed puppet and stooped to make herself less tall. Watching her one day, wrestling with a blouse, Lottie had joked it was not the clothes but Hedwig herself who didn’t fit. It was a light remark, but secretly it terrified Hedwig. It was something she had always feared about herself—that she was different from the others. That everything the Fatherland demanded from a woman—obedience, enthusiasm, and utter loyalty to the Führer—was somehow missing in her. And one day it would be found out.

  In a way, it had been found out already.

  Jochen was the only son of Eastern immigrants who came over in the years after the war and settled among the grim tenements of Prenzlauer Berg. He was as tough as any Hitler Youth, but his strength came from digging vegetables rather than paramilitary exercises. Often his pockets were filled with dried seeds in mysterious, leathery pods that he was planning to plant in his allotment. Despite the fact that he spent all day painting Hitler, he had never joined the Party or talked excitedly about army service or the chances of war. On the Führer’s birthday he had taken the train out to the borders of the city and spent all day harvesting asparagus, while everyone else traveled in the opposite direction.

  It was inevitable that when Hedwig’s parents met Jochen the encounter would be a disaster. In their cramped parlor, with its dark brown walls and sooty stove, Jochen had sat dumbly, making monosyllabic comments, eyes fixed stubbornly on the tabletop. Hedwig felt her mother wince when he fetched out a rag of a handkerchief to wipe his face and saw her father frown every time he heard Jochen’s rough Berliner accent. Herr Holz had fired off questions to Jochen as though conducting one of the questionnaires that every German now completed in the workplace. What were his interests? Botany. What was his ancestry? Polish. What was his Party membership? Nonexistent. The answers could not have been more disappointing, and as Jochen wolfed down the sausage stew as though it might be taken away from him, and wiped his plate round with a piece of bread, Hedwig could read the verdict in her parents’ eyes. He had failed the test. This boy was not what their daughter had joined the Faith and Beauty for. Precisely the opposite, in fact. What was she thinking of?

  Afterwards, there had been an argument. Frau Holz claimed Jochen would never amount to anything, and if Hedwig stuck with him, the only house she could hope for was a greenhouse. Herr Holz went further, demanding she end the relationship there and then. Hedwig knew that from that moment on her assignations with Jochen would have to remain secret. Which was why, perversely, her staying in the Faith and Beauty Society suited everyone. Her parents wanted her there so she would not see Jochen; she wanted to be there so that she could.

  After lunch that day there was Dinner Etiquette, focusing on how to lay the correct knives and forks, fold napkins into swastikas, and use sugar icing in clever ways. The entire topic was fiendishly complex. There were guidelines for which flowers went with different dishes. Roses with beef. Orchids with fish. The Führer’s favorite, edelweiss, if you could find it, with anything.

  Everything was about rules now. The girls had been given a Rule Book to mark down everything they learned. How to talk, how to look, how to conduct yourself correctly. Girls should always, for example, wait for the men to pick up cutlery and start eating first. Hedwig studiously noted everything she learned, but in truth, it was like taking life lessons from a fairy tale. No one in Berlin would be holding five-course dinners in the near future. You couldn’t get sugar icing, and finding a side of beef was about as likely as the Führer himself dropping by to eat it.

  Gloomily she selected a hunk of rye bread to accompany the thin gravy. Today’s lunch was sauerkraut, bread soup, and fake meat. Everything was fake now; not just the coffee but the rice cooked in mutton fat molded to make artificial chops, rice mixed with onions and oil, which was called fake fish, the nettles in soup, and the horse chestnuts in bread. It reminded her of a joke Lottie had told. What’s the difference between India and Germany? In India one man, Gandhi, starves on behalf of millions. In Germany, millions starve on behalf of one man.

  Lottie was the only woman who dared tell jokes in public, with a rich, full-throated, gurgling laugh. That was also against the rules, of course. Laughing was inelegant for women, according to the principal, Frau Mann. It implied criticism and did not befit a German woman. Smiling was a different matter—indeed, Faith and Beauty girls should always smile when a man addressed them—but laughing, well, the way Frau Mann talked, it was as though a healthy dose of female laughter could bring the whole edifice of the National Socialist Party crashing down.

  “Are you eating that?”

  Hilde Ziegler was eyeing Hedwig’s slice of rye bread, and Hedwig shrugged. She used to be hungry all the time. A hunger that filled her dreams with fat pork chops, chocolate, and cake with real cream and pastries made with butter, but since Lottie’s death, her appetite had disappeared.

  She glanced out of the window to the woods at the far end of the garden. At the place Lottie was found, the police had erected arc lights, the kind you saw in film studios, bathing the area in a dazzling phosphorescent glow. But there was one secret that no amount of police spotlights were going to uncover.

  Everyone in Germany kept a place in their mind, like a cellar in a house or an attic concealed by a study door, that nobody knew about. A place where they thought their own thoughts and examined their true feelings. And when Hedwig retreated to this place and shut the door behind her, what she mainly felt was guilt.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Even though he was standing in the shadows, Clara could feel his eyes on her. Calculating, malign, dangerous. Attempting, with the precision of an interrogator, to dissect her performance and separate pretense from reality. Analyzing every minute facial movement, every glance and gesture, to pounce on falsity and drag the truth from where she had concealed it.

  Despite the heat of the stage lights, she shivered.

  She was wearing a flimsy pink silk dress and spectacles and standing next to Heinz Rühmann on stage five of the U
fa studio—the very same soundstage on which Marlene Dietrich had only a decade earlier filmed The Blue Angel and Fritz Lang made Metropolis. Now, in contrast to those cinematic masterpieces, stage five was playing host to the final scene of Liebe Streng Verboten. Love Strictly Forbidden was pure, high-octane candyfloss for the eyes. The plot revolved around an ambitious mother who wanted to marry her daughter to the lord of the manor, while the daughter was in love with a lowly hotelier. It was a farcical procession of mistakes and confusions with a satisfyingly happy ending and just the kind of escapism Herr Doktor Goebbels prescribed to soothe a nation’s frazzled nerves.

  In truth, Clara was glad that the film required a minimum of effort. Her visit to London and the news of Leo occupied all her thinking space. She felt stunned, as though she had left part of herself in England, and Love Strictly Forbidden, whose script had as much depth and sophistication as the back of a cornflakes packet, was the ideal vehicle to occupy her. The lovelorn secretary was a popular role in German cinema, and she had played it a number of times over the last few years, so it was easy to go through the motions. It helped that Heinz Rühmann, one of the biggest blond heartthrobs of German screen, was an old friend, so kissing him was no great hardship.

  Yet even the most intimate of love scenes required an army of people in the studio: director, assistant director, crew, clapper board loader, piano player. Continuity girl, props manager, cameraman, and gaffer, and a makeup artist with brushes and palette primed for a last-minute touch-up. Boys with belts of tools hung from the cranes, and in distant glass cubicles sound engineers fiddled with knobs and microphones. All morning everyone’s attention had been focused on the small pool of light occupied by Clara and Rühmann, but when the minister for propaganda entered, suddenly no one was watching the actors anymore.

  As soon as Clara saw Goebbels take shape in the shadows, assistants fluttering around him and the violet haze of his cigarette smoke coiling up into the studio roof, she knew there was no point going on. The man in charge of all filmmaking in the Third Reich was not the type to linger respectfully in the shadows. Once he registered that she had seen him, he gave an infinitesimal nod, and Clara, with a quick, apologetic smile to the director, threaded her way through the camera cables and followed Goebbels as he hobbled in his built-up patent leather boots along the corridor to his office.

  The propaganda minister’s limp was the first thing everyone noticed about him and the last thing they dared mention. In the early days of the regime, the Society for the Aid of Cripples had brought out a pamphlet celebrating Goebbels as the supreme example of mental powers triumphing over physical disabilities. The charity got a taste of those mental powers shortly afterwards, when their pamphlet was burned and the society closed down.

  Reaching his office, Goebbels flung open the door.

  The office was a symphony of gleaming light, polished oak, and pale leather furniture. Chrome lamps graced a desk of immaculate walnut. Stills from Ufa’s greatest hits were displayed in tasteful black frames on the walls. Pride of place was devoted to an enormous close-up picture of Goebbels’s own face, cadaverous, hollow-eyed, and exuding all the gravitas of a wanted poster. The office also came fitted with the standard accoutrements of any minister of the Third Reich—microphones concealed in the walls, lamps, and picture frames—invalidating the need to close the door quite so firmly as he gestured her to a seat.

  Goebbels stalked across to his desk and threw himself down. Generally, his charm was as polished as his own furniture, but that day his bony visage was grimly set and his pomaded hair visibly graying. Despite the immaculate Hugo Boss herringbone suit and shimmering silk tie, he looked more wretched than Clara had ever seen him. A twitch flickered in the corner of his left eye. Something serious was plainly troubling him, and though there was no shortage of troubles that might concern a senior member of the Nazi government in the spring of 1939, Clara guessed Goebbels’s misery had nothing to do with the prospect of European war.

  She wondered if it was the stomach complaint that had forced him into hospital recently, or the fact that Lida Baarová, the Czech actress he had been besotted with, had been banished from Germany on Hitler’s orders. Yet instinct told her it was the same old story—the ongoing marital war with his wife, Magda, who according to studio gossip had taken revenge for her long humiliation by initiating an affair with Karl Hanke, her husband’s aide, and was now disporting herself in an unseemly manner around the city’s nightclubs. On Goebbels’s desk Magda stared out from a silver picture frame with a look that could freeze blood. Clara wondered how he managed to stop himself turning it to the wall.

  He eyed her coldly.

  “I must say you look totally unrecognizable with those spectacles. You don’t need them, do you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. They’re hideous. Take them off. Spectacles on women are worse than trousers. They lend a dreadfully academic air, and I loathe academic women. Besides, it makes it harder to tell what you’re thinking.”

  Unbidden, Conrad Adler’s phrase again floated into Clara’s head. Like fire behind ice.

  “Actresses are supposed to project their feelings, not suppress them. It doesn’t do to look sly. Especially—”

  He broke off to reach for the silver cigarette box, a gift from Hitler himself, and extracted one cigarette, tossing it carelessly in Clara’s direction and offering a light. Having savored this hesitation, he resumed.

  “Especially when you’re about to appear in the most ambitious film that Germany has ever seen.”

  “Love Strictly Forbidden?”

  Goebbels cast his eyes to the ceiling, as though beseeching divine help, and tapped a finger on his patent leather boot.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, woman. Love Strictly Forbidden is a piece of nonsense designed for brainless secretaries on a night out whose highest ambition is to seduce their employer and entrap the poor sap into marriage. I’m talking about something of immense artistic importance.” He exhaled a weary stream of smoke, as though the woes of the world had settled on his narrow shoulders.

  “You, Fräulein Vine, have been plucked from—well, perhaps not obscurity”—he gave a sardonic wince—“but very far from stardom, to feature in a documentary film about the making of Germania.”

  “But I…”

  “Don’t interrupt. It’s the inspiration of the Führer himself. He feels the time is right for a full-length film about the triumphs of our nation and a celebration of our cultural conquests abroad.”

  What exactly could Goebbels be referring to? The remilitarization of the Rhineland? The annexation of Austria? The seizure of Czechoslovakia?

  “Which cultural conquests did you have in mind?”

  Goebbels’s eyes narrowed to check for subordination, then he said, “I take it you’ve heard of the Ahnenerbe?”

  “I’m not sure I…”

  “Herr Reichsführer Himmler’s hobby.”

  The mention of the sinister, moonfaced SS chief was like an ice cube down the spine. Himmler had that effect on most people. Generally his hobbies involved building new concentration camps and expanding the Gestapo’s state-of-the-art surveillance system, but no one, as yet, had suggested making a film about them.

  Goebbels crossed his skinny legs and sighed. “I can see I’m going to have to explain. You must have seen newsreels about the trip to Tibet?”

  “Oh yes,” she said quickly. “That.”

  The weekly newsreel was shown before every feature film. Clara had dozed through one just the other evening when she visited the Ufa Palast with Erich. Vaguely she recalled footage of scientists disembarking from a plane at Tempelhof airport. From what she could recall, the expedition had been dedicated to proving one of Himmler’s most cherished notions—that the Aryan race was preeminent on earth. They had been examining Tibetan natives for evidence.

  “Himmler’s full of these obsessions,” grunted Goebbels. “If it’s not the Ahnenerbe, it’s that place down in Wewelsburg.”<
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  Sensing that he had imparted a little too much information, he drew himself together, rose, and clasped his hands behind his back.

  “Anyway. The Ahnenerbe is a scientific institute established to research the cultural history of the German race, and whatever our private thoughts about the SS Reichführer’s—enthusiasms—its work will be the centerpiece of this film. It’s got foreign locations, history, adventure.” A little, dismissive wave. “Everything people love.”

  “It sounds very ambitious.” Clara made a mental note to grill Erich about the Ahnenerbe as soon as possible. As an ardent member of the Hitler Youth, he always knew about these things.

  “It is. As the Führer sees it, the Ahnenerbe is at the very heart of our work as National Socialists. It seeks to propagate the eternal values of the Germanic races. Et cetera, et cetera.” Goebbels waved his hand to signify the kind of officialese beloved of his own newsreels and newspapers. “I’m giving you the broad-brush picture here, but you’re going to need to familiarize yourself fairly swiftly, because from what I hear Himmler is taking a close interest in this film and he’s perfectly likely to turn up on the set without warning.”

  Goebbels’s face twisted with distaste at the thought. The prospect of another senior Nazi intruding on his own department was plainly a serious irritant. He strode over to the window to look out on a small square of lawn in the style of a medieval cloister, where actresses and secretaries liked to relax between takes, gossiping and catching the sun and, all too often, the minister’s eye. Although his gaze traveled automatically over the tanned legs and golden figures on display, his mind was plainly elsewhere.

  “I would have thought, Fräulein Vine, you would be flattered to be involved.”

  “I am. Very. Who’s the director?”

  He swung round, his expression, if possible, even more dyspeptic. “I was coming to that. Germania is to be directed by Fräulein Leni Riefenstahl.”