Then he took them to see the Pinakothek’s great collection of Peter Paul Rubens, standing still for a long time in front of the hurl and tangle of anatomies in The Fall of the Rebel Angels, and again in front of the great wheel of two frothing horses, two seething men, two Cupids, and two fleshy and pliant Venetian nudes in Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus.
Off to the side, Geli watched her uncle’s hand float just above the canvas, following the flow of beige highlight and bister shadow on the flanks of the virgins. “I have so much to learn,” he said, and he turned. “Will you let me draw you?”
Wearing, as he’d requested, a red ski sweater, a plaid wool skirt, and green knee-high stockings, she went to his Thierschstrasse flat the next afternoon at four. A failure of nerve that he sought her that way, she thought, for she knew he wanted a Lucretia, or a nude on a sofa, and she wasn’t confident she’d reject him.
Widow Reichert was making tea for him, and he went to get it after he formally greeted Geli in his pin-striped, three-piece suit. The furniture, she saw, had been moved so that his folding table and chair were centered in the flat, the headboard and bed were against the curtained front window, and a stool stood in the rear in a rhomboid of sunlight just to the right of the photograph of Hitler’s crazily staring mother. She heard Der Rosenkavalier being introduced in English by an announcer from the BBC and she saw that her uncle had acquired an American Crosley radio. She wondered if he’d gotten it from Doktor Goebbels.
Wanting attention on the folding table was an old Skizzenbuch, sketchbook, with occasional architectural drawings in pencil and maybe twenty skillful, patient, and surprisingly poetic watercolors of the meadows, mountains, and lake lands of Bavaria. In one, orange skies hinted at a fabulous sunset that couldn’t be seen because of the forbidding fortress wall of a forest in winter. Another seemed to be of the Chiemsee, with a gray wash for the sky and Delft-blue waters, and only far away on the scumbled sand of the beach were there a few hasty strokes of his brush to suggest children playing on the shore. She carefully turned to another page and found a pleasant, sunlit village, but again viewed from a great distance and from behind a black fence and skeletal trees that seemed almost to be the bars of a jail. There were fences in many pictures, screens of trees, yawning chasms that functioned like moats, a general sense of exile and awayness, and she felt sorry for him—for his melancholy, his loneliness, his isolation, his consciousness of separation from the community and the happiness of others.
And then Hitler walked in with his tea, silently took away his old sketchbook, got a fresh one from his bookcase, and sat at the folding table. Geli was given no instructions, so she positioned
herself on the stool.
“Like this?”
“That’s fine.”
At first he sketched too small, stroking in millimeters like an amateur, as he did when he doodled on paper place mats whenever others were talking. She saw him try her face four times before he sat back. “Look at my hands,” he said as he lifted them. “They’re shaking.”
She rotated away from him, her hands on her thighs, her heels on a rung of the stool. “Why not just try roughing in the whole form first. Loosely. Don’t be so careful.”
“Oh, I see; you are instructed in art?”
“We took drawing in high school.”
“Soon you’ll be sketching me,” he said in an unfriendly way. “Were you any good?”
“Tight,” she said. “Tentative. That’s how I know.”
She was facing a framed 1896 poster for Simplicissimus, the illustrated satirical weekly, with an issue price of ten pfennigs. The price was now sixty. A frolicking lady in fancy Victorian dress was haphazardly holding an artist’s palette and completing the final s in Simplicissimus with the paintbrush tail of a naked, pitch-black devil who was fiercely hauling her elsewhere by the waist even while he was reading.
She asked, “Are you friends with Simplicissimus now?”
“I just liked the poster,” he said. “Hold still.” She heard him finish a sketch, jostle the folding table either left or right, and with a flourish draw a few bold lines. “It’s going better,” he said.
“I’m glad.”
“Shall we be silent? I find the talk distracting.”
“The choice is yours,” she said.
Thirty minutes later Hitler asked, “Are you comfortable?”
“Stiff.”
“We’ll stop.”
She got off the stool. “Will you let me see them?”
Quickly, Hitler shut the sketchbook. “Maybe eventually. I’m embarrassed now.”
“Don’t be.”
“They’re not as beautiful as you are. I haven’t the hand yet. Won’t you come tomorrow?”
She did. And a week later, too. She liked it. She was flattered by his attention, pleased to so easily have the access to him that others schemed for; and she felt that for the first time he was selfless and sincere and concentrating solely on her, and that she was being seen by him just as she was.
In their fourth session Hitler seemed to find sentences on the floor as he said, “We’ll be doing different poses today.”