She was his escape, his torpor, his surrender to the vacillation and passivity that were increasingly part of his nature. With a Rolleiflex he’d given her, she took snapshots of him in his Tyrolean costume sitting on a snowbank in Obersalzberg, of him throwing sticks in the woods to his Alsatians Prinz and Muck, of him on a wood-runnered sled in a sweatered suit, his trouser cuffs tucked inside woolen stockings. And in each one he was smiling.
After their hikes they listened to the radio programs from München in the Winter Garden while Angela heated saltwater for his footbath. When she walked out to them from the kitchen, she’d often see Geli kneeling on the floor, taking off his stockings and folding his woolen trouser cuffs to his white, hairless calves. Angela put down the steaming basin and her half-brother whimpered with counterfeit pain as he immersed his feet, saying, “Oh, why do the women in my family torment me so?”
“Because you crave it,” Geli said and got up.
Hitler luxuriated, oozing contentment and shutting his eyes. “It’s true, it’s true. I like it so much. I’m so happy. So, so happy.”
In March, at twilight, Hitler stood at parade rest in the cold winds of the north terrace, filling his chest with ion-rich air and staring out at the majestic Alps and a fleet of clouds trundling in. Geli went out to him in a cardigan, her flying skirt as tight as paint against her legs. She put her arm around his waist, and he held out a gloved finger to the villages below, giving each its name, as if he were Adam. “Bischofswiesen is farthest west. Then Berchtesgaden. Maria Gern. Obersalzberg. Marktschellenberg. And far behind it Salzburg. East is Oberau. Hallein. Klaushöhe. Buchenhöhe.”
“I love it here,” she said, and she shamefully realized she was urging him to say he loved her here.
Instead he tried out a line of just imagined poetry. “And high above the world,” he quoted, “on the cold fastness of the Kehlstein, I feed the needy flames of my hate.”
Hurt and discouraged, Geli said, “I have to go in now.”
There were midnights in Obersalzberg when she would hear his shoes in the hallway and see him hesitantly tip his head just inside her bedroom door to see if she was still awake. She’d invite him in, and often he would simply plant a swift kiss on her forehead and wish her a Schlaf gut, “Sleep well,” but there were also other times when he’d sit against her blanketed calves and in a fatherly and official way consult with her about what she’d done that day, what she wished to do in the morning, whether she had all she needed. Then he’d softly pat her knee and get up, perfectly comfortable with just that.
She heard him arguing for an hour on the telephone in the Winter Garden one night, and then he walked into her room with a glass of Riesling. And he stood over her as he said, “There are those in the party who dislike my involvement with you. Who wish you’d just go back to Austria.”
“And?”
Holding a hand over his eyes, he confessed, “I feel such love for you, Princess! I feel I could marry you!”
“Why is that so painful to say?”
Hitler turned to the frosted window and found his own face in a high, night-shaded pane. “I have to stay single,” he grimly said, “so I can give myself fully to Germany. Without diminution. And yet I feel I have to watch over you, and exert a fatherly influence on your circle of friends until such time as you find the right man.”
“Wherever I go, there’s you there.”
He smiled. “I shall choose to take that as a compliment.”
She wasn’t sure if it was or wasn’t. She got up against the pillows and hugged her knees.
“What others see as compulsion on my part is simply prudence,” he said. “I have such fears that you’ll fall into the hands of someone unsuitable.”
“Emil, for instance.”
“An Old Combatant, but a misalliance,” he said, and finished his wine. “Are you growing impatient?”
She nodded.
“Oh, how I wish,” he said, and his hand found her hair, flowed down her face, and fell flat and heavily onto her right breast. She inhaled as if she’d jumped into shockingly cold water, and his hand lifted off. “Sleep well,” he said, and walked out.
She was going alone to Wien in April in order to renew her visa, so her mother and her uncle took her to the railway station in Berchtesgaden. Geli would handle the government paperwork that afternoon, stay the night with old high school friends, and get back the next day, but Hitler seemed to fantasize that she was going to the Congo, and he was uncertain if he was angry or worried or full of grief in his affliction. Hitler had forfeited his own Austrian citizenship and was not yet a German national, so he was stateless and could not join her, and yet that was all he wanted then, and as Geli got ready to board her first-class railway car, he seemed to want to hug her good-bye just as Angela did. But he held back and instead stropped his hand hard and loud with his riding whip, shaking out the sting as he stalked away.
Angela asked, “Won’t you consider becoming Adolf’s fiancée?”
She flushed red and lied, “I haven’t thought about it.”
“Well, he has, you can tell. He’s lovesick. Men just don’t know it as soon as we do.”
Often Geli felt she was in love with him, too. Adolf Vogl’s wife had had a baby boy, and Geli was the first to visit them in the hospital. She took along a Schwatzei, or gossip egg, and touched it to the newborn’s mouth so he’d learn to talk early. “My uncle says unless a girl has a child, she’ll get hysterical or ill. Are you finally sane now, Frau Vogl?”
She smiled. “I haven’t screamed for hours.”
“May I hold him?”
“Of course.”