Levitation. Werner Nehmann told her he’d first seen it in a circus ring erected in a meadow outside Svengati. He’d been a kid, immune from disbelief, and later he swore he’d experienced it himself, a kind of magic, his soul leaving his body, everything you took for granted viewed from a different angle. He also said that Hitler understood it, practised it, had fallen half in love with it. Obvious, really.
She’d spent the night with Nehmann, here in this apartment in the Wilhelmstrasse. The apartment belonged to Guramishvili, a fellow Georgian who’d made a fortune importing wine. Nehmann said Guram, as he called him, was out of town just now and had left him the keys. Hedvika had never met Guram but knew that, unlike Nehmann, he’d never bothered to disguise himself behind an adopted German name. Too proud, he said. Too Georgian. And very rich.
The apartment was on the first floor. The tall window in the bedroom offered a fine view of the Wilhelmstrasse, the broad boulevard pointing at the heart of the Reich. The Chancellor’s train was due at the Anhalter station at three o’clock. According to Goebbels, whom Nehmann had seen last night, every allotment in Berlin had been ordered to supply a tribute of flowers to brighten the route from the station to the Chancellery. As a result, the boulevard was ablaze with colour.
After waking late, Hedvika had got up and stationed herself at the window, offering Nehmann a running commentary on the hundreds of busy hands unloading the carts and barrows below. Trays of crimson begonias and delicate gladioli. Handsome stands of lilies, nodding in the breeze. Even the Führer’s name, prefaced with the obligatory Heil, picked out in yellow roses on a first-floor balcony across the street. Minutes later, with the city’s trains cancelled and swimming pools closed, long queues of workers began to appear, marching from their workplaces to swell the crowds along the Wilhelmstrasse.
Senzacni, Hedvika had murmured in her native Czech. Wonderful.
Nehmann agreed. In a handful of weeks, Hitler had crushed every Western European country that mattered except Italy and Great Britain. In the case of the Italians, Nehmann told her there’d be no need because Mussolini was simply Hitler with a bigger chin and a fancier wardrobe. And as far as the British were concerned, he added, it was simply a matter of time. In a month or two, once Goering had dealt with the RAF, there’d doubtless be an even noisier homecoming. Maybe they’d lock Churchill in a cage and parade him through Berlin. Assuming, of course, they hadn’t already put a gun to his head.
Now Nehmann emerged from the kitchen, fully dressed, with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Ever since they’d first met on set in the Ufa studios, he’d called Hedvika Coquette. The scene she was shooting had required her presence on a tiger-skin rug in the palatial setting of a rich man’s weekend retreat. She’d been naked under a mink coat the colour of virgin snow and Nehmann, assigned to do an interview, had afterwards spent an hour or so in her dressing room. The woman who attended to her make-up, a Czech cousin, called her Koketa. Nehmann liked the sensation of the word on his tongue but thought it sounded even better in French. And so Coquette she became. It meant ‘temptress’, with undertones of ‘tease’.
‘What time is it?’ Naked but for a silk blouse, Hedvika was still at the window, her back to the bedroom, her elbows on the windowsill, looking down at the street.
Nehmann put the two glasses on the windowsill, moved his precious pots of chilli plants into the sunshine, and then knelt on the carpet and nuzzled the soft cleft between her buttocks. He was a small man, slight, nimble. After a while, gazing out at the street, she began to move under his tongue. Over the past few months, whenever he was in Berlin, Nehmann had become more than familiar with the repertoire of tiny grunts and sighs that signalled pleasure. The Georgian had a gipsy talent for lovemaking. It went with his origins, and his rumpled face, and the mischief in his eyes, and his reputation for a certain reckless charm that had opened countless doors across this wonderful city, but as far as women were concerned he’d never met anyone so responsive, so eager and so candid in her many demands. Remarkably for an actress, in bed or otherwise, she never faked it.
‘Time?’ she asked again.
Nehmann was on his feet by now, unbuttoned, moving sweetly inside her.
‘Two minutes,’ he said. ‘The man is never late.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I am. It’s what I do.’
‘Ja… ich kenne… so why am I not surprised?’ She looked to the right, towards the station, and reached for one of the glasses. ‘Any ideas?’
She glanced backwards, over her shoulder. Nehmann smiled at her and then shrugged. She knows I lie. Everyone lies. That’s the currency you use in this place. Spend your lies wisely and you might end up as rich as Guram. In Prague that might count as a sin. Here, it keeps a head on your shoulders and buys you champagne.
Outside the window, the gigantic crowd was beginning to stir. Over Hedvika’s shoulder, across the street, Nehmann could see balcony after balcony crowded with faces and flags, children fighting their way through a forest of legs to get a better view, heads turning towards the oncoming growl of the motorcade.
Nehmann paused for a moment, reaching for the other glass, then began to quicken. A moment like this, he’d decided, deserved every kind of tribute.
‘Don’t,’ she murmured. ‘Not yet.’
The crowd was cheering now, thousands of voices, Berlin at full volume. Nehmann began to move again, deep, slow, taking his time, then he murmured an apology and withdrew for a second or two. Hedvika, he suspected, had barely registered his absence. At a moment like this, like every other spectator, she was in the hands of a quite different experience, no less overwhelming.
Nehmann was right. The blouse she’d thrown on earlier had become unbuttoned, but she didn’t care. She leaned forward over the windowsill, her slender arms outstretched in welcome. Hitler’s open Mercedes was barely metres away, at the head of the huge motorcade. He was standing at the front, beside the driver, both hands gripping the top of the windscreen, looking neither to left nor to right, grim, implacable, victorious.
Other women might have wanted him to smile for once, to risk one of those natural moments of warmth the newsreel cameras sometimes caught at the Berghof when he was playing with somebody’s children, but not Hedvika. Berlin had been a good swap for Prague. Her heart was bursting for this man-God who’d shown the rest of Europe just who was in charge. Berlin, indeed the whole of Germany, was getting no less than it deserved. Thanks to the unbending figure below her window.
‘Heil!’ she screamed. ‘Mein Führer!’
The Mercedes moved on towards the Chancellery and the Brandenburger Tor and in its wake came the long procession of equally sleek limousines, each one laden with more of the faces that Hedvika had come to know from their lingering visits to the studios. But these men she regarded as mere walk-ons, riffraff, nobodies, bit-part players in the unfolding triumphs of the Reich. Hitler, to his great credit, never stooped to studio visits.
She peered to the left and offered a last wave to her departing Führer, and then – as the crowd began to thin – she looked down towards the pavement. Hitler gone, there was an emptiness deep inside her and she knew exactly how to fill it.
‘Faster,’ she murmured.
Nehmann obliged as he always did. She pushed back against him, finding the rhythm, then a single face among the crowds below caught her attention. Everyone was still on tiptoe, looking at the last of the cars, but this single face had no interest in the motorcade. Instead, it was looking up. At her.
For a moment, she couldn’t believe it. The curly hair he deliberately wore long. The suntan he worked so effortlessly to maintain. The simplicity of the open white shirt. The lumpy peasant contours of his face. The broadness of his grin. Even the champagne glass, nearly empty, lifted in salute. Werner Nehmann.
But wasn’t he behind her? Making love to her? Perfectly à deux?
Still moving sweetly, she looked over her shoulder. It was Guram, Nehmann’s friend, his fellow countryman. She’d met him twice before, once here in Berlin, and once in Munich, both times when she was with the little Georgian. He was a large man, with a belly to match, and he had Nehmann’s talent for making her laugh. In Munich, an evening in one of the city’s bierkellers had ended with all three of them in bed, a night she remembered with great affection. Generous people, she thought. In all kinds of ways.
Now, Guram’s perfectly manicured hands had settled on the tops of her hips. Two rings, one featuring a showy bloodstone.
‘Guten Tag.’ Georgian accent. Pleasant smile. ‘Wie geht es dir?’
‘I’m fine. Why aren’t you in Paris? Making lots of money?’
‘Business called me back.’ He smiled. ‘Faster?’
She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded.
‘Ja,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you when.’
She turned back to the street, trying to work out how a thing like this could ever happen, trying to catch the rhythm again. Nehmann, she knew, loved practical jokes, pranks, any kind of mischief, but this had to be in a league of its own. Nehmann’s friend owns the flat, she thought. He has every right to be here. The two men grew up together. Brothers-in-arms. He may have been expecting something like this. Nehmann may even have planned it. Who knows?
She shook her head, enjoying the ride, knowing she was seconds away. She closed her eyes for a moment, letting it happen, exulting in the long spasm of orgasm and then she arched her back and gasped one final time before her gaze fell on Nehmann again and she held her limp hands wide in a gesture than needed no translation. You fooled me. I give up. But thank you all the same.
Nehmann was laughing now. He handed his glass to a man beside him and then cupped his own hands.
‘Levitation,’ he shouted, before asking the stranger for his glass back.