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“Are you in love?” Leo asked.
“I’m not sure now.”
“Don’t fume.”
“You’d think he’d have a hundred things to ask an older brother.”
“Adolf talked about you. ‘Such a darling girl. So delightful.’”
Geli sighed. “Always the adulation.”
“Uncle was my second guess.”
“You don’t find that odd?”
“Well, he’s only your half-uncle. It’s just that Schicklgruber bloodline, that one-quarter contribution.”
“And he’s nineteen years older.”
“Age,” Leo said. “What’s that?”
White sunlight splintered through a palace of clouds. The far off Women’s Island and its fishing boats were painted with their shadow. Geli said, “I have the distinct impression that you don’t like Emil.”
Geli’s brother ground out the stub of his cigarette in the sand dune. “Like him? Actually I do,” Leo said. “And I have the feeling you like him, too.”
Evening came. Putzi Hanfstaengl fell asleep in a Bombay hammock he’d strung between trees while Henny and her father and Emil, Schaub, and Geli’s brother stood in a wide star pattern in a forest clearing, kicking a scuffed white soccer ball to each other, the men with their shirts and socks and shoes off, drinking Spaten they held by the necks, smoking Herr Hoffmann’s Palo cigars, scolding faulty shots and imperfect form. Hitler shouted his own corrections as he sleepily reclined on a striped folding lawn chair, a china cup of Apollinaris mineral water cradled against his chest. A wild kick rolled to him and he skidded the soccer ball slowly back with a feint of his foot. Schaub congratulated him.
Geli wedged a rug and the picnic hamper into the trunk of the Mercedes, found a still cool Spaten for herself, and strolled over to her uncle, sitting beside him on soft ferns.
“Company,” he said and smiled.
“Are you happy?”
“Quite.” In the European way, his familiarity with her nakedness was balanced by a formality that would have seemed stiff in a first-class hotel. Hitler frowned. “Your skin is burnt.”
“All the girls get as brown as they can now. It’s the fashion.”
“Really? I had no idea.”
She nodded as she drank beer. She asked, “You didn’t want to swim?”
“Oh no. I might be photographed. There are few things as discouraging as the sight of a politician in a bathing suit.”
“But Uncle Adolf, you’d be dashing.”
“I find your innocence quite endearing.”
Emil flipped the soccer ball high and Leo smacked it with his forehead flush into Schaub’s face. Wide-eyed, Schaub considered a crushed cigar that seemed to have exploded, as in a cartoon, and the others fell over with laughter.
Watching them, Hitler said, “Even in groups one can be so alone. Whether because of force of mind or character or other unusual traits, one becomes aloof, different, an outsider. It’s the principal hazard of leadership.”
“Are you lonely?”
Hitler forcibly took in breath and sighed it out. “Often,” he said. “In childhood. On the front. With my followers now. I have given up so much for the party, for Germany. And I wonder if it’s worth it. Self-sufficiency is a fiction whose father is false pride. We in fact need someone of our own; someone with whom we can be wholly ourselves, foolish and intimate and off guard. I have such a longing for that.”
“You have me,” Geli said.
With wet eyes, Hitler focused on his niece, his normally stern mouth twitching as he said, “Yes. With you I can fully relax. You’re so natural and free spirited. And tactile. Affectionate.”
