On the Sunday after the bomb, Bormann returned briefly with the Führer to Berlin for a special party in the Chancellery gardens to celebrate his escape from death and to greet and walk among the Party faithful.
Bormann surveyed the gathering and thought: These are my days of greatness.
Most were so caught up in their own self-regard that they couldn’t see what was under their noses. Bormann delighted in their contempt and dwindling influence.
The Führer was on his best behaviour, telling everyone it would take more than a bomb to get rid of him.
A kowtowing Goebbels declared the Führer a picture to melt the sternest heart. Silly ass, thought Bormann, watching Goebbels say how important it was the Führer did not become distracted from their deliverance.
Goebbels was resplendent in a white sharkskin jacket, his skull-like grin a lot more fixed than Bormann remembered it being ten years before. On that occasion – Sunday, 1 July 1934 – when Bormann and the Führer had landed at Berlin Tempelhof, the welcoming party had fumed at the sight of Bormann’s unexpected presence by his master’s side. Complaints were already flying about the underling’s apparent indispensability. These the Führer ignored, telling Bormann that in the political equivalent of rock, paper and scissors, paper wins every time.
Himmler and Göring were waiting on the runway that blistering afternoon, as excited as two schoolboys. Himmler had a lo ng and tattered list in his hand, which the Führer went through while Himmler and Göring poured honeyed poison in his ear.
*
When, ten years later, Bormann suggested a similar party in the Chancellery to celebrate the Führer’s safe passage, the Führer jumped at the idea as it would allow him to reassert himself. The weather was just as kind on the second occasion; not a cloud in the sky.
Whereas the mood in 1934 had been euphoric, it was now marked by the eclipse of many of those present, allowing Bormann the satisfaction of assessing his decade’s advance at the expense of faltering rivals.
Göring was conspicuous by his absence, ‘retired sick’, doped on morphine, the reputation of his airforce in tatters. Goebbels was sucking up to Bormann because there were only so many ways to paper over bad news, which reduced him to even more towering displays of sycophancy. Bormann watched him perform his usual seamless volte face after the Führer dismissed his suggestion of the soft pedal and insisted on a clean sweep. Goebbels was out of the traps in no time. Show trials! Everything to be recorded! Hang them with piano wire! Film that, too!
‘Trouserless!’ The crowing doctor was unstoppable. ‘See how their pathetic cocks like that!’
How dearly Bormann would like to see the wire bite into the blubber of Göring’s neck, watch scrawny Goebbels flap like a chicken, and hear Himmler squeak and squeal as he hung suspended.
Heini Himmler was swanning around, forever pleased with himself. Touch and go, but he had done well out of the failed coup. His pathetic military ambitions were being encouraged by Bormann because they were out of all proportion to his expertise, which was about up to running a scout troop. Bormann knew Heini was feeling out the future, which might yet see him drop through the same traitor’s trapdoor as the rest.
Himmler was hard to like, despite making a point of appearing amenable and terrifyingly normal – good father, kind to animals, gentle, hesitant, soft-spoken, absorbed . . . a total crackpot. For all his modern bureaucratic know-how and worship at the altar of technology, the man was crippled by superstition. Bormann suspected he was a secret God lover. Himmler had modelled his elite on the Jesuits. In the first instance, given his preoccupation with racial purity, Bormann had watched him fill the SS with a remarkable collection of fair-haired morons who would have fared better as ships’ cabin stewards. For Himmler the world was occulted and magical. He could bore for the nation on the subject of the hidden secrets of Nordic runes, which, if they could be deciphered, would reveal a close affinity with the characters of the Japanese alphabet, and that the Japanese, despite their alien appearance, were in fact Aryans. Thus did Heini make sense of the world. When relaying this, Bormann always got a laugh at Heini’s expense, making slitty eyes with his fingers when it came to the bit about the Japanese.
Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer to the Chancellery, was snaking around, being a charmer to the women. Fegelein fancied himself as a political player, which he wasn’t; not really. He was putting it about that he and Himmler had been on to the conspiracy and their agents had penetrated a group of disaffected officers. Bormann was certain that this feint was a shoddy attempt to disguise the fact that Heini and Fegelein had been playing both sides.
Even as they celebrated in the garden and spoke in witty asides while their women trilled, people were being shot. Himmler reckoned it might be as high as six thousand in the end.
Bormann at the appropriate moment respectfully took the Führer aside and asked if he was tired. The effect of his booster shot would soon wear off, which could lead to sulks and petulance, but the Führer announced he was in tip-top form and said they should do it more often as it was good to get out. He gripped Bormann’s sleeve and said, ‘Do you really think none of them noticed?’
‘Even if they did, no one dare say.’
To which the Führer added, ‘To question the image of the Führer is treason.’
Plan B, Bormann thought, as he watched the Führer mingle again with his guests; always a plan B.
*
Even during a reign of terror there are days off. Go to the lakes on a hot sunny weekend and you still see women sunbathing, soft water lapping against the jetty, bottled fizzy drinks for sale from carts and something calling itself an ice cream cone that never was. Scorched grass, dog turd and litter, just like in summer peacetime. Warm tanned flesh. The white disc of the sun high in the lazy blue sky.
Gerda sunbathed in her underwear, with the strap of her brassiere undone. Schlegel wore an unprepossessing pair of woollen swimming trunks from before the war.
The day passed as ordinary for the first time in as long as Schlegel could remember. He recited to himself: We got up late and spent our Sunday by the lake, lying in the sun and dozing.
They rubbed suncream on each other and still got burned. Gerda could look stern in repose but a beguiling smile lit up her face, enough for Schlegel to wonder if what she had been raised to believe really mattered. He lay on his front, comfortably tumescent, resting his hand on the small of her hot back. All around lay loving couples made more poignant for the majority of men being home on brief leave. Gerda’s gestures and movement suggested certainty about everything; yet, Schlegel sometimes thought he saw a shadow pass over her before deciding he was reading too much into her. He longed to be unimaginative and accepting, with a woman to come home to. He liked the idea of sex becoming more mysterious and elusive as they started to discover each other.
Impossible, he thought; lusting after this Nazi girl.
They did their share of laughing. They stuck to safe questions. Favourite colour. Film. Actors liked. Popular songs. Favourite leader after the Führer; her question. What could he say? She settled on Speer as he was good looking and seemed competent and sensible.
They were behaving like normal people, Schlegel told himself, and it was quite nice, realising he was qualifying a lot with the word ‘quite’.
He pictured them sitting next to each other on the train home. He would put his arm around her waist and kiss her ear, making her shiver and squirm. They would look back at a moment of helpless laughter and wonder at themselves. It was a pleasant fantasy, going through the motions of falling in love. In a gallant gesture, down on one knee, Schlegel tied her shoelaces before they left, and on the way back, hanging around in the shadows of the railway station, they passed the blind and limbless, begging where they weren’t supposed to.
On impulse they went to the cinema and arrived in the middle of some rubbish about love lost and found, full of overstated emotions. They held hands and laughed at the nonsense on the screen – it really was terrible – and kissed in the dark.
The film was followed by a newsreel reporting the Führer’s miraculous escape. They were shown footage of the bomb-blasted room. From this devastation the Führer had walked out of alive, the commentator trumpeted, before reporting the resumption of business as usual with the steadfast Führer well enough to carry on with that afternoon’s duties. Film was shown of him keeping an appointment with the Il Duce, meeting the Italian leader’s train.
Schlegel found it strange seeing the Führer, who had become less and less of a recorded presence over the years. He looked much older. After the ordinariness of the day the newsreel appeared a bit unreal and Schlegel even found himself wondering if the bomb had ever in fact taken place. They were only being told on the newsreel’s authority that Il Duce’s visit came after the explosion when it could have been filmed on quite another occasion. The Führer was not shown inspecting the damage, either alone or with Il Duce, and those shots could have been dropped-in ones of any old blown-up room. By contrast, the torched clinic, the falling man and the dead staff appeared a far more comprehensive plot than what they were being shown, and nobody was broadcasting that. Schlegel thought: What if the newsreel was to distract from the awful state of everything else, and was as made up as the melodramatic nonsense they had just sat through?
Gerda was outraged that anyone could even think of killing the Führer.