“Are you seeking my approval?” she asked.
“She wants to be on her own,” Hitler said.
“A furnished room, a private bath. She can dine with us or with the servants.” She joked for the fräulein, “I’ll warn Hugo to keep his hands in his pockets and his hungry eyes on the floor.”
Still Adolf demurred, but Elsa insisted, and Geli watched in silence and fascination until the play was over. They ate lightly due to the August heat, and then they took the Bruckmann’s car to the Thierschstrasse town home. And while Hitler went next door to find fresh shirts in his shabby flat, Geli was introduced to her fourth-floor quarters and to Italian furnishings that would have suited a regal hotel. Elsa told her they used to offer their first-floor rooms as a völkisch salon after the war, inviting philosophers from a group known as the Cosmic Circle to educate their friends on the secret meaning of the swastika and the need for a pagan revival. “We once had a Dionysian evening,” she said, “in which an ancient Coryban-tine dance was performed by gorgeous young men who wore nothing but copper bracelets.”
Geli smiled and lamented, “And there I was in Wien, doing homework.”
“We first met Adolf on one of our salon nights, and he became our homework. Hugo taught him how to kiss a lady’s hand, and I instructed him on how to eat an artichoke or a lobster. To give him a more masculine air, we bought him his first dog whip. I suppose we’ll have you as our project now.”
Geli icily said, “Oh, you’re so kind to offer, but I don’t think that’s necessary.”
Elsa judged her for a second and said, “We’ll see.”
“Are you sure you want me here?”
“Quite sure.”
“I have canaries,” she informed Elsa.
“We have cats,” the former princess said.
Their stares warred. Elsa won. Geli shifted her gaze to an Etruscan helmet on a scrolled white desk. She felt the wealth of pink silk on a quattrocento chair. “What are you getting out of this?” she asked.
“Access to him,” Elsa frankly said.
“And Uncle Adolf? He gets what?”
Elsa smiled. “Control.”
She often saw Emil Maurice from her fourth-floor window as he waited for Hitler in front of his flat, shining chrome with his handkerchief or just standing in Thierschstrasse with folded arms and a cigarette, avoiding even a wayward and sudden glance at the Bruckmann’s cream-colored town house. Ever cagey, and in vague ways frightened, Emil seemed to Geli all forethought and geometry, figuring the angles, the odds, the tricky, male arithmetic of what would be gained versus what would be forfeited. If he drove Geli somewhere without her uncle, she would sit in the front seat and his hand would gingerly find her inner thigh, squeeze her breast, huddle her nearer for kisses when street traffic stalled, and Emil would say flattering, loving, thrilling things that gave beauty to their future. With Hitler in the car, he was cold and silent, his face forward, his manner correct, his hand even tilting the rearview mirror so he wouldn’t find Geli in it.
In Emil’s mind she was always subordinate to her uncle. Schaub drove them all to a picnic once and Emil sat in the back of the Mercedes with her, strumming the same three chords on his mandolin as he sang verse after verse of an Irish ballad in a falsetto voice that wanted to be a tenor. With irritation Hitler finally turned in his front seat and asked, “Does it ever end?” And Emil finished the song at once.
And they were all in a farmer’s field near Dachau, sharing a goatskin of cider with six other young people around a fire, watching a scarecrow fall in on its own ash, the night above it wrinkling with heat, and fireflies of red sparks spiraling up. Emil kissed her hard on the mouth, for the first time in days. And then she heard a honking noise and saw her uncle tilting into his car and holding his hand angrily down on the horn. Emil immediately ran.
She was losing interest in Emil, and once told him so. She was alone in the
back of Hitler’s car waiting for Henny in front of the Hoffmann Photography Studio. Emil’s face fell forward onto his forearms atop the steering wheel, and he professed how much he loved her, that this was killing him, he ached to have her with him, but she had no idea how difficult and dire and overpowering her uncle could be, how he could dominate any man he met and defeat the firmest intentions with the merest flinch of dismay.
Geli sighed. She said she’d perhaps only felt a Schwärmerei, an infatuation, for Emil after all. And then she told him, “Here’s Henny. Smile.”
She also heard of Hitler’s tyranny from Adolf Vogl when she began taking singing lessons from him in September. Geli stood in his front parlor, idly scrutinizing framed opera programs and captioned photos of Vogl in chromatic makeup and costume, a fierce, full-bellied man with a wild effluence of gray hair, performing into his fifties in Fauré’s Requiem, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. And then Vogl swaggered in from his dining room, food still in his mouth, and found that Geli was alone. With relief he said, “Oh good. Your uncle’s not with you.” She thought that strange enough that she frowned, and he hurried to say, “Don’t misunderstand, Fräulein Raubal. I consider myself Hitler’s friend, his foremost disciple, and yet after only a few minutes with him, I feel exhausted and wholly depleted.”
“I have heard that said.”
“You aren’t…disquieted?”
“We relate differently.”
Vogl considered Geli for a few seconds. “You wish to be a Wagnerian soprano, he says.”
“My uncle wishes it.”
“And you?”
She shrugged. “I just like to sing.”