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When Hitler laughed hugely, hitting his thigh with the flat of his hand, Putzi felt he could sit back. The Alsatian was standing high on his hind legs, his forelegs on the fold-down seat, and avidly sniffing the air for florid tales of wildflowers, Benzine, macadam road, finches, fences, wet meadows, and milk cows. Geli and Henny were singing American tunes they’d memorized. Putzi smilingly listened through two songs and then challenged their English pronunciation. “Some-vun to votch o-fer me?” he asked. “Yas! Vee haff no bahn-nahn-az?”
“Close enough,” Henny said.
They sang “Ain’t We Got Fun?” and “Ain’t She Sweet?” and then they couldn’t fully recall other lyrics, so Putzi filled the ride by teaching them strange American slang. A “sap” was a fool. Schaub was a “rube,” Himmler a “Milquetoast,” Goebbels a “wolf.” Göring considered himself a “he-man.” Money was “scratch” or “jack.” Coffee was “joe.” Whiskey was called “panther sweat.” “Ish kabibble” was what you answered when you couldn’t care less. In America they would both be considered “live wires,” “peaches,” “Janes,” “skirts,” “thrills,” “panics,” “tootsies,” and “hot little numbers.” Emil was Geli’s “sheik”—from the Rudolph Valentino movie—and she was Emil’s “Sheba.”
“And what would Uncle Adolf be?” Geli asked.
“Your ‘sugar daddy,’” he snidely said. But when she asked him what sugar daddy meant, the Herr Doktor told her, “It’s too hard to define.”
And then they were at the Chiemsee where Geli thought the far-off mountains seemed to settle into the lake like white-haired women in green bathing dresses. They parked the Mercedes and the old Daimler under oak trees and Schaub flung out woolen rugs and linen tablecloths from the trunks as Emil carried the crate of Spaten to the shoreline and sloshed out among floundering reeds to submerge the beer underwater for chilling. Leo Raubal filled coffee cups from a vacuum flask as Hoffmann handed out Der Völkische Kurier, the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, the Münchener Zeitung, and the Wiener Sonn-und-Montag from the stack he’d collected at a Schwabing kiosk that morning, and the six men stood in the shade with tilted heads, silently absorbed in their reading, their filled coffee cups steaming at their shoes or on handkerchiefs on the fenders, their serious newspapers held as wide as the maps of continents.
The craze of nudism, or Freikörperkultur, excited all of Germany in the twenties, and in public parks and on lakes there were generally areas where, as a fitness author put it, “for the benefit of the race, those with high aspirations can steel and train their bodies in the sacredness of their natural condition.” One such beach was on the Chiemsee. Hiding behind a scrim of sloe and scrub bushes, Geli and Henny took off all their clothes and scurried into the lake, screaming as they hit the shallows and fell forward into water that was still so cold it seemed to have teeth. They swam out to a floating dock and hung on to it to find their breath, feeling an aching chill in their feet, and then went farther out toward Men’s Island and the unfinished Sun Palace of Ludwig II, sidestroking back only when Henny’s face was pale with heat loss and her lips were the color of a four-day-old bruise.
And then they lay flat on their backs and naked on the fine, white sand, holding their faces into the flare of the sun, feeling water beads contract on their skin as air flowed over their bodies like cool silk. They heard the men on the other side of the sloe bushes fifty meters away, vying at skimming flat stones on the lake. Geli’s brother seemed to have won with five skips, but then Geli’s uncle, who hated sport, threw a stone that struck the water six times and, with him the victor, the game was determined over.
Henny said, “I was nine years old when I first met him. 1922. I was practicing the piano and hating it and I heard the front doorbell so I went to see who it was. Herr Hitler was on the front step in his slouch hat and shabby white trench coat, a frightening dog whip folded in his hand. I told him my father was taking his afternoon nap upstairs, and he kindly said he’d wait for him. And then he was so charming. We got to talking about the piano, and he stopped my grumbling by sitting down on the bench and playing a Strauss polka. You know how delightful he can be with children.”
Geli shook her head. “I don’t; not really. We hardly knew him then.”
“Well, he is. In fact, I was so flattered by his attention that I polkaed around the room for him, but in a harsher voice he told me to quit and just listen. Then he told me old Teutonic stories about Rhine maidens and an evil dwarf named Alberich, tinkling the piano keys when he talked about fairies and pounding hard on the low notes to indicate trouble and menace. My father woke up before he’d finished his tale and I fell into a sulk. But Herr Hitler promised me he’d stop by on other afternoons when I practiced, and he did, reading his stack of newspapers for an hour or so, then playing a few songs as my reward. That’s when he first called me Sunshine.” With both hands she smoothed her bobbed hair back from her face and crushed water out of it. She asked, “Have you been to the Bayreuth Festival with him yet?”
“No.”
She told Geli he’d taken her there when she was twelve. She’d stayed in the home of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, and seen Parsifal and Der Ring des Nibelungen.
“Are you trying to make me jealous?”
She smiled. “Well, you get to do everything with him now.”
“I’m his niece.”
“Hah,” Henny said.
“And ‘Hah’ means what?”
“Nothing; never mind.”
A fallen branch was thrown into the Chiemsee, and Geli watched Prinz in full tilt after it, crazily vaulting into the water and crashing through reeds—Phragmites, she thought—before floundering out with the stick in his mouth and shaking furiously. Whoever the thrower was strolled behind them and the Alsatian trotted farther away.
She found she’d hidden her sex with a hand and a forearm. She relaxed. Henny was trying to sleep. Her pinking breasts were the size of sherbet dishes, her fifteen-year-old legs were as hard and lean as a boy’s, a hand was idly brushing sand from her dark pubic hair. Closing her eyes Geli saw redness. She felt a faint trickle of sweat find its way down her side.
Anything was still possible. She fantasized about a future with Emil and four children and a forest cottage in the Wienerwald, south of Wien. Shaded in summer. Safe. In Austria. Or a fine, furnished flat off Grillparzerstrasse in Wien, or between the Stadtpark and the Konzerthaus, with medical offices inside the Ring. With dinners at the Korso or the Three Hussars. She’d be a pediatrician. A veterinarian. Well-off, but not rich. Or she’d offer physical therapy in a fashionable health resort like Semmering. She’d find Aunt Paula a job there. And her mother could cook. In Austria. Maybe her husband would not be Emil but a handsome doctor. Civilized, educated, and kind. With no interest in politics. With friends she admired. She’d have four children and gay dinner parties and season tickets to the opera and a weekend house in the Wienerwald. She’d have friends who were civilized, educated, and kind. She’d sing. She’d be safe. She’d…
She felt Prinz urgently
sniffing her face and realized she’d been dozing. The Alsatian was worried about her, but Hitler called, “Prinz! Heel!” and the hound hurried back to him. Henny frankly displayed herself, as she’d seen her father’s models do, but Hitler averted his head. Geli hunkered forward to hide what she could. She shaded her eyes but couldn’t find her uncle’s face because of the fierce sun behind him. Ambling toward them on the white sand, he was still in his gray flannel suit and yellow tie, but his shoes and socks were off and his trousers were rolled up to his hairless white calves.
With a menacing tone, he said, “Without a stitch on, two pretty girls lie naked in the sun. And whom do they talk about? Me.” And then he grinned. “I should die immediately. Anything else I achieve from now on will only be a disappointment.”
Geli smiled. “You heard us?”
“And watched you,” he said. Tucked under his arm was a sketchbook that he nervously handed to his niece. Geli paged past some older architectural drawings of a future motorway that he’d fantasized being built between München and Salzburg, some sketches of a fantastic university complex on the Chiemsee, as well as an Art Deco restaurant that he’d slashed with an X. And then there she was in fresh pencil, her feet without the difficult detail of toes and her hands without fingers, her face canted to the side and her wild, tawny hair in cascade so that he didn’t have to fail at her features. But her torso was fairly accurate, with the bowls of her breasts flattened slightly over her rib cage, shadows and roundness deftly smudged in with his thumb, her haunches wider than she’d like, and her vulva shockingly correct but then—with embarrassment?—crosshatched to imply pubic hair. She glanced up at her uncle and recognized his fretfulness and diffidence, his fetching vulnerability, his childish need to be rewarded. And now you’re at my mercy, she thought. She flattered him by exclaiming, “But it’s excellent, Uncle Alf!”
He beamed. “Do you think?”
“Oh, indeed.”
Hitler faced the Chiemsee as she tilted the sketchbook toward her friend.
