Willie translated, “And the teeth.”
She shifted to German to say that for hours at a time their uncle would do nothing but chew on his fingernails and stare out a window and whistle. And then there’d be shocking activity until he took his rest again. She said he was stunningly consistent. Others stewed and worried and hemmed and hawed, but their uncle had decided things once and for all, and he would think on Thursday of next week just what he’d thought four years before, and he’d die without changing his mind. She allowed that Hitler was quite winning at a first encounter, but that was because he found all people fascinating the first time he met them. Joining his company, they’d be offered courtesies and pleasantness while being questioned about their fields of expertise, and she’d see his internal machinery collecting what he needed from them while figuring out their affections and secret longings and ways of thinking and feeling. And then he would talk to them, a flood of words, using all he’d learned, dominating their minds, and they’d be amazed by his force of will and intellect, his well of sympathy. If he wanted to charm you, you were charmed. If he wanted to persuade you, you were persuaded.
“And if he wanted to love you?”
Saying nothing, Geli jerked forward and got out another lozenge.
Willie asked in English, “Are you the only one Uncle Adolf’s affectionate with?”
“So this you notice?”
“Oh my word, yes. Will you marry, do you think?”
She flushed. “We are just uncle and niece! Was this anyone saying?”
“My father.”
To avoid Hitler’s glare in the formidable portrait, she got up from the sofa and sat on the floor underneath the painting, hugging her knees. She shifted again to German to tell her cousin, “I owe Uncle Adolf a lot for acting as my father and for taking care of the family. I can never repay him. We’d have no home or money without him. We’re all grateful. And I’m sure he’s fond of me in his way. But I don’t like it that he’s so jealous and possessive. Often I feel enslaved by him. Are you aware of that feeling?”
Willie said in English, “I can’t say so, no.”
She said in German, “There are times when he can’t bear to have me show interest in anything or anyone other than himself. Any moment I have to be ready to go where he wants, or halt whatever I’m doing to obey his latest whim. Even my weekly singing lessons get cancelled because he so hates to be alone. We sit in the movies all day sometimes, and then he wants to go back again in the evening. I get so bored. Or it’s the opera. Night after night. I’m twenty-two. I want to have fun. With people my age. And all I ever seem to do is have dinner with older men.”
“And they can be so tedious,” her cousin said.
She was surprised to find herself in tears, and to find in Willie’s face a flabbergasted terror that she’d go on gushing. And still she continued, “It’s because wherever he goes he needs company. An adoring audience. Words fly up all around him, like a fortress of sentences. Who can get inside it? And does he listen to others?”
Willie admitted that Uncle Adolf seemed to find listening a distraction.
“Yes! And so I am a mystery to him. We all are. Undiscovered. Uncomplicated. He only wants me to be a good housewife, a pet. Even my singing annoys him. It’s a wonder I give him any pleasure at all.”
Willie said in English, “Well, I’m sure he’d be pleased to see he’s made you so upset.”
She laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m just frustrated. I have a fever, maybe. We have good times, too. And Uncle’s very generous.” She wiped tears from her cheeks with her palms. She breathed in. “Won’t you try to forget the horrible things I said when you go back to England?”
Willie gallantly said, “I shall remember only you.”
“Even when I hate Uncle Adolf, he wins. I fret over him; I’m obsessed by him; I can’t get him out of my mind.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DAS BRAUNE HAUS, 1931
On January 1, 1931, at Briennerstrasse 45, just east of the white stone prairie of the Königsplatz, Adolf Hitler officially dedicated the Brown House as the headquarters of the National Socialist German Workers Party. When the formalities of the grand opening were finished late that afternoon, Hitler, in jackboots and jodhpurs and Sturmabteilung uniform, took Geli on a private architectural tour, first walking her around the four sides of the four-story building and tilting her head in his soft and feminine hands so she could see how the walls had been sandblasted and painted, the window balconies added, and the huge scarlet-and-black flag of the Nazis hung over its front entrance.
“You did a good job,” she said.
“Would you like to know the technical details? How many hours of labor went into it, for example? How many wooden scaffolds were used, how many tons of cement?”
She smiled wanly. “Not really.”
“I have all the facts memorized.”
“Seeing is enough.”
With a furrowed brow, Hitler viewed the Brown House from afar and said, “In the Weimar Republic, it is a foreign embassy. We’ll soon be changing that.” And he took her hand as he walked her through the giant bronze door past four hard-faced and black-uniformed Schutzstaffeln sentries who offered the Nazi version of the Fascist salute while shouting, “Heil Hitler!”
The floors were highly polished marble, handsome inlaid oak paneled the walls, and swastikas had been imprinted into the stucco ceiling or etched into the fine window glass. The forty regional Gaue were represented in the hall by their blood-red revolutionary standards, all tilted in reverence toward two bronze memorials containing the names of those sixteen Nazis killed in front of the Feldherrnhalle in the 1923 putsch.