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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.”
Wildly thrashing, like a fish in a net, Hitler tore away from her and hiked up his dark trench coat to hide his face. “Don’t look at me like this!” he shouted.
