That was then explained to them by Bormann. The problem was, he said, that all German women wanted a child by the Führer. They called their sons Adolf anyway. If he were now to marry Miss Braun, and if it were subsequently to emerge that he had become the father of a child, supposedly born two months premature, they would feel that he had betrayed them, and that was undesirable for political reasons—after all, it was mainly women who had brought him to power. Brückner burst out laughing and said that the head of Chancellery certainly always knew how to present things succinctly. Miss Braun was obviously irritated, but even the Chief had to laugh briefly, and his eyes rolled completely backward for a moment as if they were looking inside, into the darkness of his skull.
“And what did your responsibility consist of?” asked Herter, still not recovered from his astonishment.
“That it must appear to be our child,” said Falk.
Herter sighed. He could forget his own story now, including his literary son Otto, but he no longer cared. All he wanted to do was listen to theirs.
That morning the Chief took no further interest in the matter. Apathetic, as if it did not concern him, he tucked in to the biscuits with drooping shoulders and looked out the window at the wild, awesome rocky massif of the Untersberg, gray as cigarette ash above the tree line, with occasional patches of snow. According to a South German legend, the Hohenstaufen emperor, Friederich I, otherwise known as Barbarossa, was asleep inside the Untersberg; one day he would open his eyes and, after crushing the Jewish Antichrist, would found the Thousand-Year Empire, leaving the plain of Salzburg ankle deep in blood. Probably Hitler had already thought up the code name for his invasion of the Soviet Union three years later: Operation Barbarossa.
The scenario that Hitler and his intimates turned out to have devised was acted out step-by-step in the following months and years. First of all, that very week, Ullrich and Julia had to move to the Berghof itself. Two guest rooms on the same corridor onto which the rooms of the Chief and the Lady Chief also gave, up to then reserved exclusively for personal guests such as the family of the Lady Chief, were cleared and fitted out for them. One could give as a reason that the Führer and Miss Braun wished to have their personal servants closer to them. For the rest of the war, Falk was given exemption from military service. They must also quickly write home and say that they were expecting a child, then submit the letters to Bormann, just as he would check all their outgoing mail from then on. Moreover, Bormann gave them to understand that they must put out of their heads the idea of having children of their own—that would be considered as insubordination. The obvious thing would have been to charge Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Morell, formerly a fashionable doctor on the Kurfürstendamm specializing in high-society venereal diseases, with the care of Miss Braun, but that would have aroused suspicion; the other members of the staff relied on the SS garrison doctor, but he was too close to things. Therefore it was decided to involve the GP of Berchtesgaden, Dr. Krüger, an elderly, distinguished gentleman with a well-groomed white mustache and bow tie, who thus acquired a certain Mrs. Falk as a patient. He was sworn in and intimidated in covert terms by Bormann personally. Miss Braun was happy with that course of events, as she did not like a doctor in uniform, and maintained that Morell had an unpleasant body odor.
After that, time was left to do its work. Four months later, when Miss Braun’s bulge could no longer be unobtrusively concealed with clothing, the second phase began. One afternoon, when the Chief was in Berlin, a car drew up with an unknown driver, who loaded her empty cases while she said good-bye to the secretaries and Julia, ostensibly bound for Italy on an extended art tour. Not even the secretaries believed that ruse—it was obviously over between her and the Führer, but no one dared mention it. There were tears, but Miss Braun kept her composure. For the driver, a Gestapo man who had learned not to ask any questions, she was a certain Miss Wolf; he drove to Linz, where they had a meal in the Rathskeller, and in the middle of the night they returned to the Berghof, without being stopped at any of the countless sentry posts. Julia had heard all this from Miss Braun herself.
Herter had to force himself not to listen openmouthed; he had not been so under the spell of a story since his childhood. But it wasn’t a story—that is, it was not made up, as children say; it had “really happened,” since it was inconceivable that those two ancient people here in Eben Haëzer could make up something like this.
Until her confinement in November, Miss Braun could now no longer leave the Führer’s wing. She must not show herself at the windows, and at night no light must be seen in her room. Only the conspirators still had access to her, and from then Julia’s role was to play the part of a pregnant woman. Every morning she went to the mirror with Miss Braun and stuffed all kinds of cloths, towels, and later cushions under her clothes so as to represent faithfully the growth of the Führer’s child. That was accompanied by a lot of fun, and Miss Braun always wanted to know exactly how they had reacted downstairs to Julia’s pregnancy. Hitler particularly enjoyed inquiring in company how she was feeling. He was also in the habit of sending her to bed early in the evenings, because of her condition.
“Of course I had to be careful,” said Falk, “that my wife did not really become pregnant. That would have sabotaged the whole plan, and Bormann would have destroyed us. It used to be more difficult than it is now—not destruction, I mean, but not getting pregnant.”
“I know all about it,” sighed Herter. “I went through it all myself. And how did Miss Braun pass her days during those months in her room?”
Since she must of course have something to talk about in November and should preferably not say that she had drunk coffee on the Piazza San Marco in Florence and visited the Uffizi in Rome, she was provided by the father-to-be with Baedekers, art books, and the standard works of Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and Cicerone. With Blondi at her feet, she studied daily—usually at Hitler’s massive oak desk when he was not there. In order to give her support, he was there often during those months; that was why, during his preparations for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he had had Chamberlain come not to Berlin but to the Berghof. Next to her bed lay Goethe’s Italian Journey. She spent all day in her nightie; Julia washed her underwear in the bath. Because Julia, pregnant as she was, preferred to eat quietly in her room but seemed to have a huge appetite, Falk always took a triple portion upstairs. Mittlstrasser now also had one of the Falks’ rooms fitted out as a nursery, including a traditional German cradle with Bavarian carving.
“Finally,” said Julia, after lighting up yet another cigarette, “I had the feeling that I was expecting any day. Eventually I had to take things easier, as Dr. Krüger had said to ‘Mrs. Falk,’ since I was supposedly getting tired more easily, and I remember even feeling involuntarily rather offended when he came for a checkup and of course did not see me.”
Whenever Krüger pulled up at the Berghof in his puttering, two-stroke DKW that seemed to be made of papier-mâché, he brought with him an atmosphere of civilization. Then, in the afternoon of November 9, labor began. All day long there was a restless feeling in the house; there were obviously some political goings-on. Downstairs in the large reception room, where a number of functionaries were gathered, all in uniform, Hitler sat telephoning nonstop, to Göring and Himmler in Berlin. Falk knew that because he called them by their surnames; the only one he had ever been on first-name terms with seemed to have been Röhm, the leader of the SA, but Hitler had had him executed a few years earlier. Bormann was also there, of course. Meanwhile Miss Braun was taken to the Falks’ quarters, where she was to give birth, since the cries of mother and child must come from the right direction. In addition an SS ambulance had been stationed next to the Berghof, in case there should be a problem and Mrs. Falk had to be brought to a hospital in Salzburg. Julia had taken off the cloths and cushions and helped with the birth, which took place at about midnight.
“And?” asked Herter.
“A boy,” said Julia. She glanced at the photo on the television, and there were tears in her eyes.
Herter looked questioningly at Falk, who nodded.
“That was already during the war. Miss Braun took that photo.”
“Do you mind?”
Herter got up and studied the photo more closely. The little boy was standing feet apart and confident on a terrace in a white blouse, white shorts, and white knee-length stockings, taking a bite from a sandwich. The look in his eyes did indeed seem to have something of the piercing quality that characterized his father. His father? Was this really Hitler’s son? The thought still struck Herter as totally absurd, but why, actually?
“There was sugar on that sandwich,” said Julia. “I made it myself. That’s me, next to him.”
Now he knew, he could see. The slim young woman in her late twenties still shimmered through Julia, like a figure behind frosted glass, though conversely there was no hint of the fat, ancient lady that she would become. Herter turned around.
“What was his name?”
“Siegfried,” said Falk with a sigh, which at the same time seemed a sigh of relief at having finally unburdened himself of his lifelong secret.
“Of course,” said Herter, raising his hand briefly before sitting down again. “Siegfried. I might have known. The great Germanic hero who knew no fear. That’s what Wagner called his son, too. And how did the Chief react to the birth of his son?”
Majordomo Brückner had given him the news downstairs, Falk told him, and when he came pale-faced into the room, with Bormann hard on his heels, and saw his Patscherl lying there with his child at her breast, it was as if what was happening scarcely sank in. Hitler’s thoughts were somewhere completely different—namely, on his first pogrom, which he had ordered that same night. As they heard the following day, the synagogues burned everywhere in Germany and Austria, and the windows of Jewish shops were smashed. “The Night of Broken Glass,” it was later called—and it was the same November 9 on which the German emperor had been deposed in 1918, on which Hitler’s coup had failed in Munich in 1923, and on which in 1989 the Berlin Wall had fallen.
“So the final end of his action and its consequences,” said Herter, “came sixty-six years after the beginning. Almost the Number of the Beast. Exactly a hundred years after his birth.” In a sinister way, everything always added up with Hitler.
But the Chief soon recovered and looked as if he had suddenly forgotten his pogrom. Miss Braun was overjoyed that she had not borne him a daughter, and after he had given the mother a stiff kiss on the hand, Julia laid the baby carefully in his arms. He looked terribly awkward, pressed Siegfried against the Iron Cross on his chest, gazed around in a kind of clumsy ecstasy, and said solemnly, “A child is born.”
Mittlstrasser whispered respectfully that this was a quotation from an opera by Wagner. Only Bormann seemed somehow none too happy at the arrival of the child; he looked as if he would prefer to ask it for its papers.
Then a precarious period began. Ullrich drove with Mittlstrasser to the Registry Office in Berchtesgaden to register the child: Siegfried Falk instead of Siegfried Braun. In the next few days, Julia received visits from the secretaries and other members of the staff in the bed in which she had given birth, while her room turned into a florist’s shop. Her parents were allowed to come to the Berghof. That, said Julia, had been the most difficult moment of the whole comedy for her: when her mother took her supposed grandchild in her arms with tears of happiness. Her father, on the other hand, who was in SS uniform, seemed more fascinated by the Holy of Holies in which he found himself than by his grandson.
After a week the supposed Mrs. Falk was allowed by Dr. Krüger to start work again carefully. Miss Braun, who was secretly breast-feeding her child, also returned around that time. Weak and exhausted from her extensive journey—in the dead of night, as she said, and in a certain sense that was not a lie. After each feed she had Julia bind the large breasts she had suddenly developed with a silk shawl; in addition she wore wide woolen sweaters, as it was cold at the Berghof after Sicily, where she had recently climbed Vesuvius. Falk told him that, during the welcome-home lunch, Speer had repeated in amazement, “Vesuvius? In Sicily? Of course you mean Etna?” Of course, Miss Braun had said, blushing—Vesuvius, Etna . . . she always got them mixed up. Whereupon the Chief said, between two mouthfuls of his pseudosteak made of vegetables, that in a certain sense those two volcanoes were manifestations of one and the same primeval volcano, like himself and Napoleon.
TWELVE
There was another knock, but this time the visitor waited until Julia had called “Come in.” A thickset woman in her forties, with calves like upturned champagne bottles, appeared in the room.
“Mr. Herter,” said Falk, introducing him, “Mrs. Brandstätter. Mrs. Brandstätter is our director.”
Herter got up and put out his hand, whereupon she stared at him in astonishment for a few seconds, as if he were the last person she expected.
“Didn’t I see you on television last night?”
It was immediately clear to Herter that he must think up an explanation on the spot for his presence. What was a famous foreign writer, who actually appeared on television, doing in the apartment of this poor old couple in her old-people’s home in an out-of-the-way corner of Vienna? She suspected something; probably she knew whom she had in her home—although she did not know what he now knew—and wanted to protect them.
“Just like Mr. and Mrs. Falk. We’re going over old memories. Mr. and Mrs. Falk went to my reading to see if I were the same person as the young writer they once met by chance forty years ago.”
“And?” asked the director, looking from one to the other.
“I never change,” said Herter, with something resembling a smile.
She said that she did not wish to interrupt them any further, and, without saying why she had actually come, took her leave.
“Should Mrs. Brandstätter ask any more about our meeting,” said Herter after her departure, “you must think up something for yourself. I don’t know what your circumstances were forty years ago.”
“They were very reasonable again by then,” said Falk, “after having been less reasonable for a while. After the war we spent two years in an American internment camp.”
Julia got up, stubbed out her cigarette and asked, “Would you like a sandwich perhaps? I’m ashamed that we’ve kept you so long.”
Herter looked at his watch: a quarter to one. Perhaps he should give Maria a ring, but it did not seem sensible to shatter the intimacy.
“I’d love a sandwich, and it would be odd if I were to say I must be getting along, when I hear that Hitler had a son. Do the two of you actually realize how sensational what you’ve told me is? If you had offered it to Der Spiegel and ten other such magazines worldwide, you would have earned millions. You wouldn’t have lived in this flat in Eben Haëzer, but in a villa as big as the Berghof, with your own staff.”
Falk’s eyes suddenly took on a cool look.
“For the time being that also applies to you. You swore an oath just now.”
With a feeling of shame that was not entirely feigned, Herter bowed his head for a moment. Falk had put him in his place. Anyway, who would believe him? And after the death of the Falks, without witnesses, he would be even less credible. He would be praised for his imagination, and perhaps be awarded a literary prize for it, but no one would believe him.
“Apart from which,” said Falk, “you haven’t yet heard the half of it.”
In the kitchen Julia pressed a large, round, dark brown loaf to her chest and with a long knife cut off thin slices in a way that made him shiver. Nowhere in the world did bread have its throat cut like this. He was also given a glass of beer, and as he sank his teeth into the slice, spread with goose fat and horseradish and liberally sprinkled with salt, he was again overcome by the feeling of roots that he had only in Austria. It tasted better than a priceless lunch in a three-star restaurant in Riq
uewihr.
“And then?” he asked: the central question of all narrative.
Then the happiest time of their lives began.
Of course they were watched more closely than before, and family visits from Vienna were no longer possible. Every six months the deceived grandparents were allowed to appear at the Berghof for an afternoon, when Julia’s father was always disappointed at not seeing the Führer. What it came down to was that they were prisoners, but their little Siggi, who wasn’t their Siggi, made up for everything. For the first three years, when he conquered ten countries, the Chief was more at the Berghof than in Berlin. He received kings and presidents there, whom he threatened and swore at, so loudly that it could be heard even in the kitchen, after which they were offered a meal by a suddenly utterly charming Führer and went to their cars still trembling with fear past the SS guard of honor, in the awareness that their country was doomed. To the sorrow of Miss Braun, her fiancé was not very interested in his little son to begin with. He might be the all-powerful Führer, who had his eye on world domination, but he was obviously not cut out to be a father: for that he was too much of a mommy’s boy himself. Besides, the child was probably as yet too small and interchangeable with other babies and toddlers.
He once said to Falk that the boy would very probably never amount to anything, since great men always had insignificant sons: you could see that from August, Goethe’s son. But in this case his insignificance would be laid at Falk’s door. The fact that Siegfried existed at all he owed to the entreaties of Miss Braun, whom he had to leave alone so often because of his busy activities in the service of the German people. He forbade Falk to pass on his remark to Miss Braun, but Julia was just as shocked by it as Miss Braun would have been. As the years went by, in fact, she had a stronger and stronger feeling that the child was really hers, since it was treated as such by everyone, in public even by the seven initiates. When he was allowed to attend the nursery school run by Mrs. Podlech, which Bormann had set up at the Berghof for his own children, those of Speer, and those of a few other highly placed officials, such as Göring’s little daughter, she was certainly prouder than the real mother. It was never mentioned, but perhaps Miss Braun struggled with the same feeling of jealousy. If Siggi was in pain or unhappy, he cried not on her shoulder but on Julia’s; if he had had a nightmare, he crawled into Julia’s bed, not his mother’s.