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“Well, there are those who find that—”
“Mesmerizing?” she asked.
Schirach laughed. “Are we on the subject of your uncle again?”
She shook her head, then tilted it farther toward his chest as she sang Marlene Dietrich’s famous song, “‘Men cluster to me like moths around a flame. And if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame. Falling in love again. Never wanted to. What am I to do? I can’t help it.’”
And finally the song ended, and the singer was generously applauded, and Geli felt a funneling stare from off the floor, and she knew who it was but failed to turn. She forced him to embarrass himself by walking out to her like a fuming emissary, a lane widening as the many dancers fell back, his shoes as loud as wood in the hush. And then she did turn, and his face was as white as a faint, canceling any hint of his wrath for the sake of all his children there. “We are going now,” Hitler said.
Schirach was still young enough to be surprised. “My leader,” he implored, “it’s just ten o’clock. I have access to a car. Won’t you let me get her back to your flat in an hour or so?”
Clenching his jaw, Hitler held the large twenty-two-year-old in his scalding eyes until Schirach’s fortitude, his friendliness, the flush in his feminine cheeks were all gone. “She is with me,” Hitler said, and she followed him as he went to where Rudolf Hess was holding the coats.
They were driven to Prinzregentenplatz in a silence as great as that of a closed museum, his anger trying to disfigure everything he glared at, he in the front seat, she in the back. She ran up the stairs ahead of him and when she got inside the flat heard Maria Reichert call from her quarters, “Fräulein Raubal?”
“Yes.”
“I have four messages for Herr Hitler.”
Hitler was just then walking inside. He frowned at his niece, then went to Frau Reichert, and Geli hung up her overcoat, got a beer in the kitchen, and went to her room, firmly locking the door. She put Verdi’s Requiem on the gramophone and took her canaries out of their cage, lying flat on the bed as she watched Honzi and Hansi fly wildly from wall to wall and then find the fingers she held out just above her face. She kissed their beaks. She cheeked their feathers. She finished the beer.
She heard Hitler in his office next door, railing over the telephone at Himmler, then Göring, then Doktor Goebbels. “Won’t any of you ever think for yourselves?” he shouted, and slammed down the receiver just for her. She heard him stewing in the hallway outside her door, and then she heard him in the library at the white Bechstein, childishly pounding out the overture to Wagner’s Rienzi until she finally lifted the needle from “The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” in Verdi’s opera Nabucco and there was peace.
She got into her pink flannel nightgown, glanced down the hallway, and hurried into the bathroom. She urinated, washed her hands, cold-creamed her face, worked up a froth with her toothbrush and her uncle’s Clorodont powder, then opened the mirrored vanity cabinet above the sink and carefully put her things on the second shelf, his on the first. She found an old towel in the straw hamper and polished the chrome faucet and handles, wiped spots of water from the mirror and the porcelain. She stowed the towel away again and flicked the lock on the bathroom door.
Hitler was there, frail and woeful and still in his tuxedo. “This is not enough,” he said, and fell to his knees. His face flattened against the flannel just below her heart, thudding now like his shoes on the staircase, and he said, “Oh, Geli, this is not enough. This is not enough.”
“What isn’t?”
“This!”
“The way we are?”
“We aren’t.”
She felt his petulant breathing like moisture, and she found herself softly petting his chestnut-brown hair, though her palms, she knew, would glisten with oil. “What would be enough, Uncle Alf?”
Like a little boy begging for a pfennig, he said in a weak, measly way, “Affection.” And he tilted down to forcefully kiss the pink flannel over her pubic bone, his mustache prickling her.
She felt a thrill flow up her spine, but she held his head and gently lifted it. “We can’t have you kneeling here like this. The ladies.”
Worriedly, Hitler glanced down the hallway toward the quarters of Maria Reichert and her mother. There was a faint hint of a Christmas concert on Maria’s wireless; otherwise all was dark. Squatting back on his heels, he groomed his forelock, then gripped the doorjamb and Geli’s offered forearm to find his way up to his feet. And then he focused on her and she felt pinioned, his stunning irises as silver as mercury, his face wolfish and stern and full of control. Wordlessly overmastering her. Others in the party talked about his Svengali eyes, and now she knew what they meant. Within a few seconds she felt so enfeebled she feared she’d slide to the floor.
“We have both been depriving ourselves,” he said. “We haven’t given our love an outlet.”
Was she in love? She knew she was confused and sad and yearning. Was that love? She wanted to be inward and alone with her emotions for a while, but he took her hand and tightly held it behind his back as he forthrightly walked them to his red-walled room.
She stood there in the coldness as he shut the door and tore loose his black bow tie. She felt adrift in the geography of dreams, somewhere between fright and fascination, where she seemed to have no volition, where she seemed to watch herself as she watched him.
He sat in his fire-red wingback chair to take off his shoes and stockings and stocking garters, and he focused on her with great seriousness as he twisted the studs and cuff links from his formal shirt. “Are you just going to stare?” he asked.
“I have no idea what else to do.”
“Aren’t you a child of nature?”
She’d never heard the words “child” and “nature” voiced with such snide criticism. She said, “I don’t know what you have in mind.”
With flat, tan teeth, he smiled. “Oh yes you do.” He stood and strode to his closet and found a wooden hanger for his tuxedo jacket. Without turning, he said, “Lift off the nightgown, Geli.”
