Winter, page 46
‘What a mouthful. It sounds very important.’
He was being mocked, but he didn’t mind that. He found her attractive, this little woman with her large eyes that challenged him and tried to see inside him. Until now he’d not realized that his father needed a woman like this, a strong, challenging personality who let you know she would fight back. And yet her assumed fearlessness was curiously disconcerting. ‘I might be useful, Frau Somló.’
‘I call myself Frau Winter.’
‘Frau Winter. Good. Yes, that is clear. It might be possible to find completely new papers for you.’
‘You are going to convert me from being a Jew?’
‘I will try. Do you see any difficulty?’
‘Difficulty?’
‘Yes,’ said Pauli. My God, but people could be stupid when it came to the important things in life. ‘Are you registered or listed anywhere as a Jew? Do you go to the synagogue? Jewish societies? Do your neighbours know you as a Jew?’
‘Synagogue: no. Societies: never. Neighbours …The Bergers upstairs know. We talked about it one evening. Years ago.’
Pauli brought out his notebook and crossed his legs to balance it on his knee. ‘Bergers? One floor up? Number eight? What is the first name of the father?’
For a moment Martha Somló stared at him with her big eyes. Calmly and softly she said, ‘No, no, no, Herr Regierungadirektor-working-in-the-Gestapo Pauli Winter. I don’t want anything unpleasant to happen to my friends upstairs.’
‘They will simply be moved,’ said Pauli. ‘No one will be harmed.’
She was fishing the lemon from her empty teacup, apparently giving it all her attention. ‘I said no.’
He laid his thin gold pencil upon the open notebook. ‘Frau Somló – Frau Winter, that is – I came here to help.’
She looked up at him again, and, in a small theatrical gesture, she touched the wedge of lemon to her mouth to taste its sourness. She smiled and said, ‘You came here because your father asked you to come.’
‘That is correct.’
‘So don’t make yourself into an altruistic benefactor.’
Pedantically he said, ‘I came here to help because my father asked me.’
‘Not at the price of my neighbours, Pauli Winter. Do you think I could sit here waiting for footsteps on the stairs? Knowing I sent them?’
‘Not to hurt them.’
‘No, I said. You just get out of here and leave me alone.’
Pauli felt humiliated. His face went pale and he stood up to take his leave. ‘You misunderstand me,’ he said.
‘Perhaps I do.’ She looked at him. So this was the one who had come back so changed by the war. From where in the family did he get that wonderful blond hair. It made him look perpetually young. Still he was Harry’s boy. She could see Harry Winter in him – in the way he moved, the way he spoke and he had Harry’s touchiness – but it was a Harry Winter without that ruthless determination.
‘I’ll give you my office card…’ He got one from his waistcoat pocket. It had his rank and his Gestapo office on it. On the back of it, in his minute handwriting, he put ‘Frau Winter/Somló is under my protection. Contact with this office mandatory before action.’ Then he signed it and passed it to her.
She took the card without thanking him and put it into her handbag. ‘Is your mother well?’ She didn’t ring for the man, she went and got his hat and overcoat from the hall.
He took the coat and put it on. All the time he was waiting for her to change her mind. People often did.
‘She is. Thank you.’ He took the dark roll-brim hat that Inge had bought for him because it made him ‘look important’. When she’d opened the door he took Martha Somló’s hand gently, ‘Goodbye, Frau Winter.’ From upstairs came the same vocalist singing ‘Thanks for the Memory’. It was a gramophone record.
‘Goodbye, young Pauli. Don’t work too hard,’ she said.
It was another of her jokes, of course. She knew what he’d been sent to Vienna to do.
Once he’d gone her face fell. She went back into the drawing room and poured herself another cup of tea. Boris came from the kitchen and held up his cup. She poured tea for him too. ‘It’s cold. I’ll boil up more water,’ he offered.
‘This will do,’ she said.
‘So he came?’
‘Yes, he came.’ She sighed and sank down onto the chair. She wrapped the silk dressing gown across her knees, the tigers smiled contemptuously.
‘You shouldn’t have got angry, Mother. It never does any good.’
‘I know.’
‘He wanted to help.’
‘How can I be sure?’
‘Father asked him to come.’ He sat down beside her, wanting to comfort her but not being sure how to go about it.
‘I should have told him who you were,’ she said.
‘Perhaps it’s better he doesn’t know.’
She put an arm round him and kissed him on the ear. ‘Wonderful Boris. You never complain about your stupid old mother.’
He smiled and drank his tea.
‘Harry should have told him, and told Peter, too. Sometimes I wonder how Harry has kept you a secret for so long.’
1939
‘Moscow?’ said Pauli
‘Well, I said we’d do it and we have,’ said Fritz Esser rubbing his big hands together in glee. Today he was wearing another of his seemingly endless supply of new, beautifully tailored suits, but his hair was thinning so that he was almost bald at the front.
Pauli Winter faced him across the huge desk in the Ministry of the Interior, and poured out two glasses of schnapps. He seldom drank nowadays, but this was a celebration. ‘To the next Minister of the Interior,’ toasted Pauli.
Fritz Esser held his drink high. The August sunshine caught the cut glass and made it sparkle. ‘To the next Minister of the Interior,’ he said, ‘as long as it’s me.’
Both men laughed and drank. It was a good big room in the Interior Ministry. A corner room in one of the best positions in the city. From one of these two big windows there was a view of the traffic along Unter den Linden, and through the other they could see Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. Since Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in April, when the remarkable ‘East-West boulevard’ had been opened by a military parade that took four hours to pass through that gate, this had been the centre of a new, vigorous Imperial Germany. But inside the Ministry it all looked as it must have looked for many generations, with panelled walls, rich carpets and comfortable chairs. Only the formal sepia photograph of Adolf Hitler on the wall looked new.
‘The minister won’t last long,’ said Pauli, ‘and the Führer wants you in the job.’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Then the job is yours,’ said Pauli.
Esser looked round the room. ‘The Führer can’t always be relied on to say exactly what he means,’ said Esser cautiously. ‘He likes to play off one against the other. I can’t be sure he hasn’t promised the job to someone else … to Heini or Reini, for instance.’
‘They have enough on their plates,’ said Pauli. He’d got used to Fritz Esser’s calling people by their first names and knew that he meant SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich respectively. Sometimes Fritz Esser wanted everything formal: everyone addressed by rank and title. Some days, when visitors were present, Pauli was addressed as Dr Winter or just as Winter. On other days it was exactly the reverse, and Fritz would even refer to the Führer as Dolfo. ‘And now that we’re working together at last, we’ll show what we can do around here,’ said Pauli.
‘You’ll be back and forth to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, I’m afraid,’ said Esser. ‘They wanted you officially reassigned to Heydrich’s SD and given an office there in Wilhelmstrasse, but I said you’d prefer to remain as you were.’
‘I’ve been through all that with them,’ said Pauli. ‘The SD is still a party organization. Heydrich still depends on party funds. I wouldn’t like to have my future so unsure. I’ll stay with the Gestapo and get my state pension and medical insurance.’
‘Yes,’ said Esser.
‘I’m nearly forty, I have to be practical,’ said Pauli. And then, to change the subject, he said, ‘How did the meeting go?’
‘Shall I tell you something that always amazes me?’ said Esser, pouring another drink, and continuing without waiting for a reaction. ‘It’s the way everyone I meet has some secret desire to be a member of the army’s General Staff.’
‘Do they?’ said Pauli. Who, in his secret dreams, had that very notion.
‘Everyone bows and scrapes to the generals: it makes me sick.’
‘Not the SS-Reichsführer?’ said Pauli. Esser had just come from a meeting with Himmler.
‘He’s just as bad. They all treat the soldiers like little tin gods. And Heini’s latest obsession is to have his own soldier boys.’
‘He’s got them already.’
‘He wants a whole bloody army corps of his own. Then he says they’ll have to make him a member of the General Staff. “Why the hell do you want to be a member of the bloody General Staff?” I asked him.’ Esser pulled a mournful face and imitated Himmler’s high voice: ‘“You wouldn’t understand, Esser: you’re not an army man.”’ Esser laughed. ‘Silly old goat! I felt like saying he’d never been an army man, either, except for a few weeks of cadet school at the end of the war.’
‘He’s given them field-grey uniforms; the army is furious,’ said Pauli.
‘“Waffen SS”, he says he’ll call them. But that’s as far as it will get: a name. The army have already made sure that that stupid idea will come to nothing.’
‘Have they?’
‘Well, Heini can’t draft men, can he? Conscription has completely stifled any idea of an SS army. As Heini himself says, just as he gets his kids indoctrinated and trained, the army grabs them, and they’re lost to him.’
‘They can join the SS when they come out of the army,’ said Pauli.
Fritz Esser pulled a face at him. ‘When they get out of the army. If they get out of the army. Heini doesn’t want the army’s leftovers; he wants a proper army of his own. He’s quite crazy. You know how he gets these crackpot ideas, and then he can’t think of anything else.’
‘It shouldn’t be difficult to get round the problem,’ said Pauli.
‘How?’ Fritz Esser sniffed. ‘The army’s legal department keep screaming that they have the sole right to conscript men. And Heini’s been all through it with his best lawyers looking for loopholes.’
‘Best lawyers?’ said Pauli. ‘Those shysters in the SS legal department?’
‘But the army have the sole right to draft men,’ said Esser in that dogged way in which people say things they desperately hope will be contradicted.
‘Yes,’ said Pauli. ‘The army have the right to call fit men of military age into the army, but some men are exempt.’
‘Only the unfit,’ said Esser. ‘He’s been all through that.’
‘No, not only the unfit,’ insisted Pauli. ‘Policemen are exempt.’
‘You can’t run a country without a police force,’ said Esser.
Pauli smiled. ‘You’re right, but Himmler is the head of all German police forces. He could draft his policemen into this army he wants to set up, and then recruit more policemen to replace them.’
Fritz looked at him with a set expression on his face. ‘Would that be legal?’
‘More or less,’ said Pauli, his mind working on the possibilities. ‘And he could do the same thing with his concentration-camp guards. They sign up for twelve years, don’t they. He could make his five SS-Totenkopf regiments into the cadre, and form a division round that. Then he could recruit more guards for the camps.’
‘That would give him a large Totenkopf battalion plus a Polizeidivision?’ said Esser. ‘He’d almost have the SS corps he’s talking about.’ He was still doubtful. ‘You say it’s legal to do that?’
‘Yes,’ said Pauli.
‘Heini will kiss you if you’re right,’ said Esser.
‘Then tell him it’s your idea,’ said Pauli.
‘It would give him almost two divisions.’
‘Now that Czechoslovakia is no more, he could recruit in the new Reichsprotektorat and perhaps in the Slovak Republic, too. With the Volksdeutsche living there as well, he’d certainly get enough for two divisions.’
‘Volksdeutsche. That would be legal, wouldn’t it?’ Esser touched the top of his head, where his few remaining strands of hair were carefully arranged.
‘Yes, the army could hardly complain about that. The army is only permitted to recruit within the borders of Germany – they have no right to draft Germans who live in other countries.’
A sly smile had come over Fritz’s large moonlike face as he envisaged telling all this to the ambitious Himmler. ‘That’s wonderful, Pauli.’
‘Is it? I’m not sure we should be encouraging the SS-Reichsführer to encroach upon the army’s preserves.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Esser happily. ‘Let’s give him an army to organize; he needs something to do. Could you get these ideas of yours typed out into a short report, and have an appendix giving the necessary legal references. And seal it up and put it into my private safe? I don’t want some snooper reading it.’
‘If that’s what you want, Fritz, I’ll dictate it this afternoon.’
‘The end of the week will do. I’m going to the Obersalzberg for a meeting with the Führer and then, as soon as I return, I’m flying to Moscow with Ribbentrop and his gang.’
‘Moscow?’ said Pauli.
Fritz Esser winked.
Pauli smiled and decided that it was one of Fritz’s jokes, the sort of thing he said when he was going to disappear for a few days with a new girlfriend.
‘If I’m not back for Inge’s birthday, give her a big kiss and tell her that I won’t forget.’ It had always been something of a mystery to Pauli that Inge and Fritz always got along well together. She really seemed to like him, despite his rough accent, coarse manners and ribald jokes. I wish I’d seen you before Pauli here, he’d often say with a saucy wink, and give her a slap on the behind. ‘Tell her happy birthday.’
Pauli sometimes forgot the date of his wife’s birthday, so nowadays he arranged that the florist sent lots of flowers and a card every year on that date. Sometimes it proved inappropriate – for instance, the time when they went away to Italy and came back to a house filled with dead blooms. And there was another time when the flowers arrived while they were having a row.
But usually it worked well. This time he had arrived home to find carefully arranged flowers around the house and Inge in a particularly happy mood. They went to change to go out to dinner. Inge was sitting in front of the mirror in her petticoat applying make-up. She’d let her hair grow out so it was loosely curled over her ears and the nape of her neck, a more feminine style. It did need more visits to the hairdresser but they could afford such little luxuries.
Around the dressing-table mirror, birthday cards were arranged; birthday greetings from both sides of the family. The Winters always sent jewellery: this year a watch. Professor Wisliceny had sent a valuable antique vase filled with flowers. Pauli had paid the bill for her new dress, and Fritz had sent a kilo tin of Russian caviar. There were cards from everyone: even the Horners had remembered, and Peter and Lisl and Erich, too.
On the bed Inge had laid out her husband’s formal evening dress, complete with starched dress shirt and black silk socks. Pauli was searching through the chest of drawers to find all the necessary accessories: tie, pearl shirt studs, gold cuff links and the pocket watch that he’d bought after Inge told him that only waiters wore wristwatches with their evening clothes.
Inge was in her underwear – silk, black, lacy and expensive – sitting at her dressing table pencilling her eyebrows. She moved like a cat, sometimes Pauli wondered if she contrived these feline manners. On a hanger by the door was Inge’s new dress. Instead of the clinging bias-cut dresses she usually wore she had this latest fashion: double-tier full skirt with ruched bodice, low straight neckline and halter strap. Inge had spent two hours this afternoon trying on various jackets with it to see which she preferred. She was very happy. Pauli took advantage of her good will to ask a favour, ‘I’d like to invite my brother to dinner at the weekend, darling.’
‘Of course, Pauli, if that’s what you want.’
‘It might be the last time we’ll get the opportunity for some while. He’s got his cabin booked: he’s going to America.’
‘When?’
‘Next week. Grandfather sent the tickets. First class: promenade deck. The Bremen, I think it is.’
‘Is it something about Lottie?’ said Inge. It would have to be about Lottie. Peter had never adjusted to Lottie’s going to prison. Inge stood up and smoothed the petticoat over her hips while looking at her reflection. She was forty-two and regretted that her prayers about having a baby had not been answered, but at least she had a good figure, better than her younger sister Lisl, who was getting plump. ‘America. Yes, well, he’s pestered everyone in Germany about her.’ It was a cruel little jest, and she felt self-conscious as soon as she’d said it. But Inge had never really forgiven Peter for choosing Lottie in preference to her. Even though she’d got over her love for him, that feeling of injured pride and resentment remained.
Pauli said, ‘I talked with him about it last week. Grandfather will be eighty-nine this year. He still has all his faculties. He was a personal friend of Herbert Hoover. Peter is hoping that he can get the State Department to petition for Lottie’s release, on condition that she returns to live in America.’ He struggled into his stiffly starched dress shirt and started pushing the buttons through the buttonholes. It wasn’t easy.
‘Would Peter live there?’ Inge had never been able to cope with foreign languages, and the idea of living anywhere other than Germany was appalling to her.
‘If Lottie was there, yes. I encouraged him. He stands a better chance of doing things at diplomatic-corps level. Getting someone out of prison through regular channels is impossible. The Ministry of Justice will never cooperate with us. I told Peter even the SS-Reichsführer can’t get prisoners out of prison. I know, I’ve seen him try.’
