Hitler's Niece

“Which?”

He still wore a full three-piece suit, as if he would be called to a finance meeting in a wink, and his hands were sorting charcoals and pencils needlessly here and there on the folding table, but he seemed far more confident of his talent and his notions of art, and there was that hint of mastery that he found after his first introverted minutes with a crowd. “Without clothing,” he said. The tone was imperative. “You can take everything off in the bathroom there.”

She hesitated, and Hitler sat at his sketchbook as at a fine meal, his fast finally ended. The Crosley radio was playing the American jazz he hated, and she knew it was for her. Without looking up, he asked impatiently, “Have you understood me?”

She told him, “Yes,” and the yes seemed to preclude any other options. With a thrilling fear she went into his bathroom and took off her clothes, wanting to be neither fast nor slow about it. She fleetingly thought about first hiding herself in a yellow bath towel there, but that would imply indecency, she’d seem a present to be unwrapped. And so she checked herself in the mirror and with a flutter in her stomach walked out, forcing her hands to shield nothing as she faced him frontally.

There was no lift of his eyebrows, no blush, no intimation that this was salacious. “We’ll be doing life studies,” her uncle said from his chair. She saw that he held The History of Erotic Art open on his knees like an instruction manual. “We’ll start with you on the stool.”

She got on it. She felt a faint crack in the cold, lacquered wood.

“Still facing me. Yes. And with your hands flat on the seat.”

She glanced down. “There’s no room.”

“Widen your legs.”

She joked, “Are your eyes good at this distance?”

“They are.”

She sighed and did as she was told, watching his flash of interest as he glanced between her shaved thighs for just an instant before her hands and wrists hid her sex. She was surprised that she took pleasure in that.

“Aren’t you beautiful,” he said.

“I’m not really. I have flaws.”

“Where?”

“Well, it’s not like you can see them with just your eyes, Uncle Alf. You need a microscope.”

“Your flaws shall stay a mystery then.”

As he frenetically sketched in silence, she listened to the jazz that he called “hellish noise” and to the slash and silty shadings of his charcoals on paper. Then he flipped to a favorite page in his history of women in such positions, and ordered her into a change. After he finished sketching her fourth pose, Hitler got up and folded and flattened a freshly washed bedsheet on the cold, green linoleum, and Geli lay on it in whichever pose he wanted, gifting her uncle with the globes of her breasts, the intricate petals of her vagina, the secret between her buttocks, giving up any shame or worry as she got used to his greed and seriousness and wonder. She felt breathless. She felt sexy. She felt self-conscious and vain and insolent, free and reckless and criminal; and when he’d finished his drawing she felt so confused she wanted to be kissed.

With yearning she stood naked in front of him as he smiled with satisfaction and shut his sketchbook. “I did good work today,” he told her.

“Will you let me look?”

Hitler shook his head. “I found out that models never do. It’s a tradition.”

“Who will see them?”

“They’re only for me.”

A shrinking in him made her cautious. “You won’t tell Emil about them?”

“Certainly not.”

“You won’t show them to your friends?”

“Shall I give you my word of honor?”

“I think that would give me solace, yes.”

Hitler held up his right palm and swore, “You have my word of honor that no one shall see these drawings but me.”

“Thank you,” she said. She held his cheeks as she kissed his forehead, and she felt him stir as if he wanted to touch her. She withdrew to the bathroom for her clothes feeling victorious.