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“Enter, Princess,” he finally said.
Her uncle’s swank bedroom was fashioned after his favorite suite in the first-class Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, with furniture of mahogany, fixtures of gold, red suede walls, and a plush golden quilt on a high and wide feather bed. Hanging below one brass wall sconce to the bed’s right was a fuzzy photograph of his mother, and twinning it on the left was a haunting painting by Franz von Stuck called Die Sünde (Sin). Hitler was hunched as if ill in a fire-red wingback chair, just under Adolf Ziegler’s frank nude, his hands folded at his crotch, facing the bed in a white, collared nightshirt.
“What do I do?” Geli asked.
Whining it, he said, “Won’t you fill my water glass for me?”
She saw a full pitcher and water glass on one nightstand and went to it.
“Say what you’re doing,” he said.
Would Eva do this? Would his actresses? She said, “Here’s your water, Uncle Alf.”
“Yes,” he said, “in case I get thirsty.”
She was about to turn until he said, “Don’t turn.”
“And now what?”
“Window,” he said, as if she were slow.
“Shall I open a window for you?”
“Yes,” he said, from his own storybook. “The air gets so stale.”
She quelled a host of misgivings as she felt him watching the cinema of her motherly movements. She raised the sash of a far window just an inch, then another inch, and another.
“Quit.”
She found half his face in a mirror—so sincere and guileless and fascinated, like a high school boy’s first reverent glimpse of the swellings beneath a girl’s blouse—and she felt only affection for him. She shifted to the next step by saying, “Oh, you’re so tired, aren’t you, Uncle Alf.”
“Yes,” he said in a child’s voice. “I’m sleepy.”
She waited.
Quietly, he said, “And you turn down the covers.”
Was this what Klara did for him? She tried, “Shall I turn down the covers for you, Adi?”
“Yes, please,” he said in the child’s voice. “I’m so sleepy.”
She walked to the head of the bed, took hold of the golden quilt, blanket, and sheet, and folded a triangle back from his fat white pillow.
Whining again, he said, “Don’t do it so quickly.”
“Again?”
“Again.”
Geli stood tall, stooped over, held the bedding in her hands, and folded a bigger triangle back.
“Stay that way,” he said.
Would a wife do this? Would a girlfriend? Would nurses, maids, secretaries do this for men they were fond of? And yes, she decided, they would, they did, hundreds and hundreds of times. She felt the travel of his interest as she held there, as she posed with her rump high, the yellow satin pajama trousers filmy against her buttocks, her elbows planted on the mattress to ease the strain of her spine.
“Aren’t you lovely,” he said. “Aren’t you lovely.” And then Hitler sighed and said, “You can go now.”
She kept her eyes on the floor as she walked out, and at the door she said, “Sleep well.”
