Hitler's Niece

“The child’s a miracle at music,” the old priest told Raubal. “You play, what, violin, viola, piano…. What else?”

“Also trumpet and trombone.”

“Amadeus Mozart,” the old priest said.

Angela got a braising pan out of the oven and put it on an iron trivet on the kitchen table. “We have potatoes in jackets here. And herring rolls in the icebox.”

Raubal handed Kubizek a stein of beer and a cold skillet of sliced kielbasa in ale, then focused intently on his high forehead and his soft, feminine face. “And what does our Adolf do in Wien while you study your music?”

“Oh, he works; very hard. Even to two or three in the morning.”

Raubal was astonished. “At what?”

“Watercolors of churches, parliament, the Belvedere Palace. Reading in Nordic and Teutonic mythology. Writing of all kinds. And city planning. Adolf strolls around the Ringstrasse in the afternoons, carefully observing, then redesigns sections of it at night. Amazing things, really. Architectural drawings for a new opera house. And plans for a high-level bridge over the Danube here in Linz.”

Raubal smirked. “Dare I presume no one pays him for this?”

“We have made friends with poverty, so there is no urgency.”

Raubal told him, “You know what Hitler’s poverty is? An orphan’s pension of twenty-five kronen per month plus a loan from his Aunt Johanna of another thousand.”

Angela asked, “Are you going to want anything else to eat?”

She was ignored. “And what is my salary,” Raubal continued, “the hardworking husband and father of two children and the guardian of his crazy sister? Ninety kronen per month. Don’t talk to me about your friendship with pove

rty.” Raubal turned to the priest. “Nineteen years old! And a thousand kronen to play with!”

“A fortune,” the monsignor said.

Kubizek fixed his stare on the beer inside his stein. “Wien is expensive,” he said.

“You get germs from money,” Paula said. The twelve-year-old walked as softly as a kitten to a kitchen chair and sat. “Torrents of them all over your skin.”

Raubal stared at his sister-in-law for a moment, then turned to the monsignor. “And this is what I have to put up with.”

“Well, it’s never easy, is it,” the old priest said.

Angela went back into the front room and took the baby from Aunt Johanna. Hitler watched as Geli squirmed and widened her mouth and finally cried in a worn, soft, cranky way, like a hinge that needed oiling. “She’s hungry,” Angela said, and eased down onto the sofa where she mindlessly unbuttoned her blue dress and offered the infant a full and aching right breast. And then she realized that her offended half-brother had fled into the dining room where he looked out a window with his hands locked firmly behind his back. She remembered him hiding in his bedroom as he dressed, or holding his mouth in malaise when she talked about childbirth, that he was squeamish about anything having to do with the body.

She called to him, “You have to give me your new address before you go. Where are you staying?”

“A few minutes from the Westbahnhof, in the Sixth District. In a flat at Stumpergasse 29.”

While the baby nursed, Angela wrote down his address. “And your landlady?”

“Frau Maria Zakreys. A Polish woman. Hungarians are shouting all day next door. Upstairs are Slavs and Turks. The Habsburgs have made Wien an Oriental city.”

Wearily Aunt Johanna slumped to the right in a wing chair, her forearm on her forehead. “Are you not liking this apartment, Adi?”

Angela watched Geli feeding and heard Adolf holding forth about the city. Almost every night he went to the Burgtheater or the opera—Tristan und Isolde just yesterday, and Der fliegende Hol-länder on Thursday—but he could afford it only because August got free tickets through the conservatory. Otherwise things were so expensive he’d had to hock his winter coat. And others were worse off than he was. Small wonder that the city was thought to be filled with Raunzer, grumblers. It was a hard and dangerous place to live.

Aunt Johanna tut-tutted while Angela forced Geli to try her left breast. And now Hitler was pacing around the dining room table. Did Aunt Johanna know he’d walked the streets of Wien for a full afternoon and not found one true Austrian? Really. Yesterday he’d gone into a café to read a newspaper and found many hanging on canes, but in Czech, Italian, Polish, and Croatian, not one in German! Equality of the races, pah! It was shameful. Hitler half-turned, but saw Geli was still feeding, so he faced the hanging portrait of Alois, his strict, pompous, irritable, authoritarian father, who’d died in 1903.

“Evil is rife there!” Hitler said. “One night August and I saw a hair-raising play called Spring’s Awakening and I felt it necessary to take him to Spittelberggasse and the sink of iniquity—”

“The sink of iniquity?” Aunt Johanna asked.

“Houses of prostitution,” he explained.