The girls spilled and tumbled into the apartment, all wet from the rain, laughing and carrying parcels. ‘Look who’s arrived,’ Herr Brenner said, inducing much excitement in the youngest two girls. (Hilde and Hanne would prove to be the most excitable girls Ursula had ever encountered.)
‘You’re here!’ Klara said, clasping both her hands in her own cold, damp ones, ‘Herzlich willkommen in Deutschland.’
While the younger girls chattered nineteen to the dozen Klara moved quickly round the apartment turning on lamps and the place was suddenly transformed – the rugs were worn but they were figured richly, the old furniture gleamed with polish, the cold jungle of plants turned into a pretty, ferny bower. Herr Brenner lit a big porcelain Kachelofen in the living room (‘like having a big warm animal in the room’, she wrote to Pamela) and assured her that tomorrow the weather would be back to normal, warm and sunny.
A table was quickly laid with an embroidered cloth and supper produced – a platter of cheese, salami, sliced sausage, salad and a dark bread that smelt of Mrs Glover’s seed cake as well as a delicious kind of fruit soup that confirmed that she was in a foreign country. (‘Cold fruit soup!’ she wrote to Pamela. ‘What would Mrs Glover have to say about that!’)
Even Herr Brenner’s dead mother’s room was more accommodating now. The bed was soft and inviting, the sheets edged with hand-worked crochet and the bedside lamp had a pretty pink glass shade that cast a warm glow. Someone – Klara, Ursula suspected – had placed a posy of marguerites in a little vase on the dressing table. Ursula was dropping with fatigue by the time she clambered into the bed (it was so high it required a small footstool) and fell gratefully into a deep, dreamless sleep, untroubled by the ghost of the previous occupant.
‘But of course you’re going to have some holiday time,’ Frau Brenner said next morning at breakfast (a meal that was oddly similar to supper the night before). Klara was ‘at a bit of a loose end’. She had finished her art course and didn’t know what to do next. She was chafing at the bit to leave home and ‘be an artist’ but ‘not much money in Germany to spare for art’, she grumbled. Klara kept some of her work in her room, big, harsh abstract canvases that seemed at odds with her kind and temperate nature. Ursula couldn’t imagine she would make a living from them. ‘Perhaps I shall have to teach,’ she said miserably.
‘Fate worse than death,’ Ursula agreed.
Klara occasionally did some framing for a photography studio in Schellingstrasse. The daughter of one of Frau Brenner’s acquaintances worked there and had put in a word for her. Klara and the daughter – Eva – had been in kindergarten together. ‘But framing, it’s hardly art, is it?’ Klara said. The photographer – Hoffmann – was the ‘personal photographer’ of the new Chancellor, ‘so I am intimately acquainted with his features’, she said.
The Brenners didn’t have much money either (Ursula supposed that was why they were renting her a room) and everyone Klara knew was poor, but then in 1933 everyone everywhere was poor.
Despite the lack of funds Klara was determined that they should make the most of the remainder of the summer. They went to the Carlton Teehaus or Café Heck by the Hofgarten and ate Pfannkuchen and drank Schokolade until they felt sick. They walked for hours in the Englischer Garten and then ate ice-cream or drank beer, their faces pink with the sun. They also spent time boating or swimming with friends of Helmut, Klara’s brother – a revolving carousel of Walters, Werners, Kurts, Heinzes and Gerhards. Helmut himself was in Potsdam, a cadet, a Jungmann at a new kind of military school that the Führer had founded. ‘He’s very keen on the Party,’ Klara said, in English. Her English was quite good and she was enjoying practising with Ursula.
‘On parties,’ Ursula corrected her. ‘We would say “he’s very keen on parties”.’ Klara laughed and shook her head, ‘No, no, the Party, the Nazis. Don’t you know that since last month it’s the only one that we’re allowed?’
‘When Hitler came to power,’ Pamela wrote didactically to her, ‘he passed the Enabling Act, in Germany it’s called Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich which translates as something like the “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich”. That’s a fancy title for the overthrow of democracy.’
Ursula wrote blithely back, ‘But democracy will right itself as it always does. This too shall pass.’
‘Not without help,’ Pamela replied.
Pamela was a grouch about Germany and was easy to ignore when you could spend long hot afternoons sunbathing with Walters, Werners, Kurts, Heinzes and Gerhards, lolling lazily by the municipal swimming pool or the river. Ursula was taken aback at how these boys were near enough naked with their short shorts and disconcertingly small swimming trunks. Germans generally, she discovered, were not averse to stripping off in front of others.
Klara also knew a different, more cerebral set – her friends from art school. They tended to prefer the dark, the smoky interiors of cafés or their own scruffy apartments. They drank and smoked a great deal and spoke a lot about art and politics. (‘So by and large,’ she wrote to Millie, ‘between these two groups of people I am getting an all-round education!’) Klara’s art-school friends were a ragged, dissident bunch who all seemed to dislike Munich, which was a seat of ‘petit-bourgeois provincialism’ apparently, and talked all the time about moving to Berlin. They talked a lot about doing things, she noticed, but actually did very little.
Klara was in the grip of a different kind of inertia. Her life had ‘stalled’, she was secretly in love with one of her professors from art school, a sculptor, but he was away in the Black Forest on a family holiday. (Reluctantly, she admitted that the ‘family’ was actually his wife and two children.) She was waiting for her life to resolve itself, she said. More prevarication, Ursula thought. Although she was hardly one to talk.
Ursula was still a virgin, of course, ‘intact’ as Sylvie would have it. Not for any moral reason, simply because she hadn’t yet met anyone that she liked enough. ‘You don’t have to like them,’ Klara laughed.
‘Yes, but I want to.’ She seemed instead to be a magnet for unsavoury types – the man on the train, the man in the lane – and worried that they could read something in her that she couldn’t read herself. She felt rather stiff and English compared to Klara and her artist friends or the absent Helmut’s confrères (who were actually terrifically well behaved).
Hanne and Hilde had persuaded Klara and Ursula to accompany them to an event in the local sports stadium. Ursula was under the misapprehension that it was a concert but it turned out to be a rally of Hitler-Jugend. Despite Frau Brenner’s optimism, the BDM had done nothing to counter Hilde and Hanne’s interest in boys.
To Ursula, these ranks of hearty, healthy boys all looked the same but Hilde and Hanne spent a lot of time animatedly pointing out Helmut’s friends, those same Walters, Werners, Kurts, Heinzes and Gerhards who loafed by the swimming pool in next to nothing. Now, squeezed into their immaculate uniforms (more short shorts), they looked like very fierce and upstanding Boy Scouts.
There was a lot of marching and singing to a brass band and several speakers who attempted the same declamatory style as the Führer (and failed) and then everyone leapt to their feet and sang ‘Deutschland über alles’. As Ursula didn’t know the words she quietly sang ‘Glorious Things Of Thee Are Spoken’ to Haydn’s lovely tune, a hymn they had often sung in school assembly. When the singing finished everyone shouted ‘Sieg Heil!’ and saluted and Ursula was almost surprised to find herself joining in. Klara was convulsed with laughter at the sight but nonetheless Ursula noticed she had her arm raised too. ‘I should think so too,’ she said, nonchalantly. ‘I don’t want to be set upon on the way home.’