She was trying to think of a tactful reply when Hitler fretfully waved a hand and said, “My niece is not interested in politics.”
She’d never felt so fortunate, so reprieved. When their talk finally turned to foreign affairs, Geli promptly got up from the terrace table and gleefully hurried back to the house.
She began calling him Uncle Alf, and at his fondest he called her Princess. She would look up from reading and find him just glancing away, or she’d turn when she was walking and find him intently watching the sway of her dress. At times she felt unclothed by him. At ot
her times she felt protected, cherished, and adored. She was his quiet den, his twilight stroll, his hobby. She knew Hitler was carrying her in his humming mind like a tune that would not be lost. Like a beautiful sentence from an ancient book that he’d turned into his motto.
In fair weather, Angela would shift their late-morning breakfasts outside to the terrace, and, when Hitler did not shoo them, big black jackdaws would fly down from their high mountain aeries and wait for gifts of pastry. Within a few days, to fight boredom, Geli was making a game of it, first testing how close the jackdaws would come, then flicking out a winding trail of pine kernels to see how far the jackdaws would strut through Haus Wachenfeld for more food.
She found out that the one who stayed inside longest had a hurt wing hanging so low that its right feather tips dragged on the floor. She couldn’t heal him, but she named him Schatzi, Little Treasure, and trained him to hop and spin for crumbs as she whistled Strauss so it looked like the jackdaw was waltzing.
It was just the kind of slightly cruel trick to make Hitler laugh until his sides ached, and he wanted his niece to show it off to Helene Bechstein when she visited them for afternoon tea on August 12th, his dead mother’s birthday; but an hour beforehand her housekeeper telephoned Angela to say Frau Bechstein preferred that they visit her.
And so in his finest navy blue suit a frustrated Hitler hiked and skidded three hundred meters down the hillside with Angela and Geli until they got to the fabulous Villa Bechstein, which would later be taken over and turned into a guest house for Joseph Goebbels, other high party leaders, and Benito Mussolini. “They also own Weissenlehen,” Hitler said with enthusiasm, and hunched to point through the forest to a fine house across the road.
Angela rolled her eyes at Geli. Such a child.
Ilse Meirer, the housekeeper, was a friend of Angela’s now. She greeted all of them at the front door, and then she and Angela stayed behind to have caraway seed tea in the huge white kitchen while, as if this were a fairy tale and their future precarious, Hitler firmly took Geli’s hand to guide her upstairs to Frau Bechstein’s huge, all-white sitting room.
She was a handsome, square-bodied, matronly woman in her late forties and was lying on a fainting couch en grande toilette, wearing only a yellow silk nightgown beneath a yellow silk robe and perhaps four hundred carats in diamonds. She offered a falsely thrilled hello to Adolf and held out both hands to him, which he kissed on the knuckles. And then with stiff formality, he introduced his niece.
“Oh, I’m so glad to finally meet you,” Frau Bechstein said, but she did not hide the rivalry in her tone.
And so, in rivalry, Geli curtsied.
“Aren’t you a sweet girl,” Frau Bechstein said.
“At times.”
Frau Bechstein hugged Hitler around the thighs and brought him forcibly against her face. “And this is my sweet boy.” She let go and glided her hand along the fainting couch. “Won’t you sit, Adolf?”
Obediently, he did so, his hands primly on his knees and his knees tightly together. Geli sat, too, in an Empire chair, but felt the urge to ask a history question just to see the sweet boy raise his hand. Worried and sheepish, Hitler explained to his niece, “We have known each other for seven years now.”
“Oh, how he thrilled us in those first days,” Frau Bechstein said. She angled her head against his chest and inhaled his smell. “Our shy young messiah,” she told Geli. “We put him up in a deluxe hotel, and my husband wore tails for dinner, all the servants were in livery, and Adolf was there in his shabby blue suit, talking away half the evening about the faucet handles in his bathroom that could regulate the heat of the water. And then—it was so funny, really—when Adolf spoke to us about National Socialism, he stood up and shouted intemperately for an hour, his face contorting, his hands flying this way and that, as if our salon were a giant beer hall. And when he finished, he sat down again, thoroughly spent.”
With just a hint of his threatening tone, Hitler said, “You are embarrassing me in front of my niece, Frau Bechstein.”
She prettily slapped his forearm. “Oh, Wolf. Don’t call me that. Call me Mommy.”
Worming his eyes toward Geli, he said, “Don’t humiliate me.”
“We tried to adopt him as our child,” she told Geli, “but were afraid there’d be a stink. Instead we showered him with money, jewels, objets d’art. And for a while I had such hopes that Adolf would fall in love with our daughter Lotte.”
“I shall not marry. You know that.”
She smiled. “Whenever I see him, I melt in his presence.” A hand crawled through his forelock as she admired his sullen face. “You know I would do anything for you, don’t you, Wolf?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, Mommy,” she prompted.
She saw his head hanging in silence and seemed to remember that Geli was there. “And do you play piano, Fräulein?”
She shook her head. “I sing.”
She looked at Hitler. “Would it be impertinent of me to offer her a Bechstein pianoforte?”
Waggling pianist’s fingers in front of her waist, Geli said, “I’m afraid I lack a Bechstein talent.”