Hitler's Niece

“Yes. Enough. I’m dizzy.”

Emil’s stare fell to her chest, and he smiled. “But there’s so much more to describe!”

She blushed and crossed her forearms over her sweater. “And now we really can stop with the compliments, Herr Maurice.”

Emil was quiet for a minute. “Would he mind it if we saw each other?”

She tried not to seem as thrilled and breathless as she was. “Uncle Adolf? Why?”

“Haven’t you seen how he looks at you?”

“But he’s my uncle. And nineteen years older.” Ask, she thought.

“Would you like to go out with me tonight?”

She hesitated, then sighed, “Oh, I suppose so.”

Emil took her to the cinema and a government-financed Kulturfilm called Ways to Health and Beauty, a feature-length documentary urging the “regeneration of the human race” through calisthenics, dancing, “hygienic gymnastics,” and wrestling—a subject that might not have filled the theater had it not been for the fact that for much of the film the oiled actors and actresses were stark naked. Emil smirked at Geli’s shock, and she hit his shoulder. “You knew, didn’t you,” she said, but Emil just smiled and watched, pressing his forearm and knee against hers.

Walking to the Hofbräuhaus afterward, Emil said, “Don’t tell Uncle Adolf.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Has he talked to you about the flame of life and the sin of iniquity yet?”

“No.”

Emil smiled. “He will.”

At the Hofbräuhaus a waitress in a Tyrolean dirndl put gray porcelain steins of foaming Hofbräu in front of them, and Emil told Geli what it had been like chasing around Berlin in the old days. “We were all poor, but Hitler found party financing in Switzerland; just a few hundred francs, but a fortune with the exchange rate then, and we took it with us. We were in a cabaret and I was scouting for girls to join us at our table—that was my job as his driver—when a fellow introduced himself as a judge and told me he knew of a far more interesting nightspot. We took the underground with him and found ourselves in his home: fine furniture, family photographs of officers on the walls, and his wife serving us a champagne she’d made with spirits and lemonade. And then the judge brings out his two daughters, maybe fifteen and sixteen years old, and Hitler about faints because they’re naked. No clothes on at all, and they’re squirming around in front of us in some kind of Egyptian dance, and the judge is waiting for us to make him an offer. Well, Hitler jumps up and starts shouting that this was what he was going to change, this was how Germany was being destroyed by the Communists and the Weimar Republic and so on, a twenty-minute version of his speech. And pretty soon the whole family is weeping and wanting to join the party, and when we go out the judge insists we take his gift of Havana cigars. But this was Berlin in 1922 and the cigars turned out to be cabbage leaves soaked in nicotine.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

Emil blushed. “I’m not betraying him, if that’s what you’re thinking.” The horns of a band began blaring so loudly in the festival hall that Emil was forced to hunker forward to be heard. “We used to go watch bare-breasted girls in boxing matches. Hitler was thrilled. And that’s when I put it together. He likes to look, but won’t touch. Women and sex, they frighten him, I think, and so he’s standoffish, he seems a prude, a perpetual bachelor. At that judge’s house, with those naked girls, at first I was thinking how high-minded and moral he was, but then I saw that he was just squeamish.”

“And if he hadn’t been there, what would you have done?”

Emil smiled. “Oh, well; who knows?”

She fixed a cool stare on him. “That’s why I asked.”

“Watch? Yes. Offer money for more? Unlikely.”

“Do you always do what he says?”

“Sure. Naturally.”

“Why?”

Emil seemed honestly puzzled, then he grinned at her for a minute as if waiting for some telltale hint that she was joking. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t do what he says?”

She felt a guilty twinge saying it, as though it were a lie, but she insisted, “No. I do as I please.”

Emil considered her as if she were rebellion and will-of-its-own and whatever else it was he’d subtracted from his life. And finally he said, “Well, maybe that’s what he wants, then.”

They were in the parlor of the Pension Klein. The house lightly snored in the silence, and the flakes from the first snowfall of winter softly ticked against the windows. Chewing gum was the latest fad from America, and Emil gave her a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint. Quoting the billboard ads, she said, “Pleasant and refreshing.”

Emil thought hard and remembered the other line, “The aroma lingers.”