Elsa Neuländer-Simon’s photography studio was in a tall stucco building in Schlüterstrasse, just off the Ku’damm in the west end of the city. For years, Studio Yva had been the most successful studio in Germany until the Nazi regime blacklisted the photographer and obliged her to carry out all work under the auspices of an Aryan studio manager. It would take more than that to stop Yva working, however, and every part of the house, from its pillared entrance, to its grand balconies and winding staircases, continued to be used as backdrop to her legendary shoots. The door was opened by a fey young man in a sleeveless sweater and bow tie who ushered Hedwig into a parquet hall and yelled, ‘Yva! Ein Fräulein to see you.’
A reply floated down from several floors above.
‘If it’s another one of those girls collecting for the Winterhilfswerk, tell them we don’t want to buy any more tanks.’
The young man gave a camp little shrug and said, ‘Follow me.’
The studio, a sparsely furnished, open space running the length of the house, had a vacant, abandoned air. It was furnished only by a couple of chairs, a cabinet and a pile of dustsheets. In the midst a slight woman was kneeling on the floor dismantling a cumbersome tripod.
‘You’ll have to wait.’
Awestruck, Hedwig looked around. The girls whose portraits hung on these walls were entirely different from the images of womanhood she had seen anywhere else in Germany. Here were no hearty, fresh-faced mothers, none of the wholesome members of the Faith and Beauty Society or the League of German Girls, but glacial blonde goddesses who emitted a cool artifice that seemed to say although they may be advertising cosmetics, shoes or jewellery, their bodies remained their own. Their limbs were hard as marble, their eyes heavy-lidded, and they had a smouldering erotic charge.
One picture in particular caught Hedwig’s attention. It was a young woman, platinum hair rippling in tight waves, fur coat flicked aside to reveal a slash of ivory flesh from the top of her stockinged leg to the snow of her exposed breast. The composition was all geometric lines and oblique perspectives like an old silent movie, its dramatic lighting and edgy glamour breathing a sense of violence and danger. The expression on the girl’s face, the poise of her body, and the cigarette dangling from one hand, was at once decadent and rigidly controlled. It was as though all the sex that had been suppressed in Germany was distilled in a single photograph.
The subject was Lotti Franke.
‘Everyone loves that one. It was taken by my apprentice, Helmut Newton. He loved big blonde girls in high heels,’ said Yva, getting to her feet. ‘Especially naked ones. He’s left me now, unfortunately. He could have been quite a talent, but he would insist on emigrating. Perhaps he was right. I had an offer from Life magazine to go to New York but I turned it down.’
‘Why didn’t you go?’
‘My husband wasn’t keen. Only now he has lost his job and been given a new occupation as a street sweeper, he’s regretting his decision. But there we are.’
Yva finished folding away the tripod and began meticulously dismantling the camera. Her angular, intelligent face, framed by dark brows, looked in no mood to expend any niceties on Hedwig.
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this studio is officially closed. They’ve given me a new job too, as it happens. A technician in the Jewish hospital, working with X-ray cameras. Is that a joke, do you think?’
‘I think they have no sense of humour.’
‘You’re probably right. Anyhow, if it’s photography you’re after, I’m unavailable.’
‘That’s not what I came for.’
‘Then . . .’ The eyebrows lifted slightly.
Hedwig nodded towards the photograph on the wall.
‘Did you know her well? Lotti Franke?’
Yva’s voiced hardened with suspicion.
‘Who are you exactly?’
‘My name is Hedwig Holz. I was her best friend.’
‘Ah.’ Yva abandoned her business with the camera and rose. She made her way to the solitary cabinet.
‘In that case, perhaps you’ll share a drink with me.’
She poured two large whiskies into cloudy tumblers and handed one to Hedwig, who gulped it like lemonade, the unfamiliar burn causing her to choke. Yva perched on one of the chairs, extended one long, fishnet-stockinged leg and stroked it thoughtfully.
‘I first met your friend Lotti a year ago. Perhaps she mentioned it.’
Hedwig nodded silently.
‘She came to me with some sketches for clothes and wondered if I would photograph the finished products. Perhaps I would speed her progress as a designer. But though they were good, it wasn’t only the clothes I was interested in. I could see your friend had quite another talent. I said I would only photograph the clothes if she modelled them and she agreed straight away. She had drive, that girl, and a hard ambition. I recognized something of myself in her. I was one of nine children – my mother was a milliner – so I knew what it was to work hard and graft. To use everything God gives you to succeed. Lotti was not ashamed of using her body if it helped her. Helmut Newton loved her. He said Lotti was his ideal woman. But then, with a body like that, I daresay she was a lot of men’s ideal woman. Even the Führer’s.’
Her needle-sharp glance grazed Hedwig’s own legs, causing her to blush fiercely. But she persisted.
‘The last time you saw Lotti, did she seem distracted by anything?’
‘If she was, I wouldn’t have known it. She was far too professional.’
‘The fact is . . . the day before she died she told me about something she had. And I wondered if perhaps she left it here.’
For a long moment Yva continued to scrutinize Hedwig, as if trying to decide whether she was worth trusting, then she nodded.
‘She asked me to look after it. Just for a few days. She wouldn’t say what it was, or why she wanted me to take it, and my first instinct was to refuse. You don’t hide other people’s possessions without a very good reason nowadays. But your friend had the face of an angel, and I was not about to lose a model that good. Unfortunately the next time I saw that face it was on the front page of the Berliner Tageblatt.’
Quietly, so quietly that her voice barely travelled across the narrow distance between them, Hedwig said, ‘Where is it now?’
Yva remained motionless for a moment, then she stubbed her cigarette on the floor, ground out its embers with the toe of her shoe and rose decisively. She crossed to the cupboard where she had found the whisky bottle and rummaged behind rows of satin dresses until she retrieved it.
It was a light tan leather briefcase, expensive-looking but slightly scratched and worn at the corner, with brass fittings and the gilt initials H S L indented on the front. A smaller monogram on the clasp said Asprey of London. Hedwig’s fingers trembled as she unlatched it. The air that escaped smelt of burning, the mustiness of an old fireplace, the ancient molecules of another era. And vacancy.
‘There’s nothing here.’
‘What were you looking for?’
‘A book. A manuscript.’
‘Oh that. I disposed of it.’
To one accustomed to handling the manuscripts in the Ahnenerbe with white cotton gloves, Yva’s casual comment was devastating.
‘You can’t have any idea what it was.’
‘On the contrary, my dear. I knew exactly what it was. No good German can fail to be aware of the importance of the Germania. To me, it is the world’s most dangerous book.’
‘But where is it?’
‘As I think I mentioned before, I’m a Jew, Fräulein. I reasoned that the book belonged somewhere far away from the hands of those who would use it for their own purposes. Last Saturday I was taking a picnic out by Krumme Lanke. We go there to sunbathe and swim, though it’s still not quite warm enough yet for my tastes. Anyhow, at one point I made my excuses and went into the woods. Your manuscript is there, somewhere. Don’t ask me where. I forget.’
In that moment, her shock evaporated and Hedwig laughed out loud at the little woman’s ingenuity. She was right; it couldn’t be more appropriate. The Germania. The work that meant so much to Doktor Kraus and SS-Reichsführer Himmler and everyone at the Faith and Beauty Society. The key to the German people’s past. How fitting that old Roman, Tacitus, would have thought it; that his work on the ancient forest tribe should remain where it started, deep beneath the must and mouldering leaves of the Grunewald.
An hour later she found Jochen in the place they had arranged, beside the Löwenbrücke in the south-west corner of the Tiergarten. The bridge was suspended by four cast-iron lions with ropes in their mouths, and above it the sun cascaded through the lush summer foliage and flint-necked crows squabbled in the boughs of the sweet chestnuts. Jochen was concealed in shadow at the foot of the bridge, smoking a ragged cigarette with deliberation, savouring each inhalation like a connoisseur enjoying a fine wine.
She had so much to tell, yet the sight of him silenced her. Already, only a few days since he had left home, he looked dramatically different. Feral almost. His entire frame seemed to have shrunk; his cheekbones stuck out cadaverously and he was wearing an ill-fitting, dingy jacket and unfamiliar cap. Hedwig might not even have recognized him were it not for the way that he was surveying the vegetation intently, his eyes fixed on the variety of weeds and the bees that were blundering between the flowers, pollen spinning like jewels in the sunlight.
‘Where are you living?’
‘Schmidstrasse.’
It was a slum area, north of Kreuzberg.
‘Are you sleeping all right?’
‘I’ll sleep better if you’ve brought me what I asked for.’
She felt in her bag and brought out one of Kurt’s muslin cloths in which she had wrapped the pistol. He took it from her swiftly, almost imperceptibly, and slipped it into his pocket.
‘Also, I brought you some food.’
She passed him a lovingly prepared roll of ham and cheese, a piece of white sausage, a packet of tea and a bag of sugar she had purloined from work. These too he transferred wordlessly into his jacket.
‘What about your clothes? Do you need me to wash them?’
Still, Jochen didn’t move, but his eyes flicked towards her and he gave a sharp smile.
‘You think of everything.’
‘I’ll have to if I’m going to come with you . . .’
‘You’re not coming with me.’
‘You said I could.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
Looking into his face, dappled with green shadow reflected from the water under the bridge, she felt he had already receded from her, like an animal into deep camouflage.
‘But why?’
He remained slouched against the bridge, staring straight ahead, taking swift, savage drags of his cigarette.
‘It won’t work. I have no idea how long this will go on. Where I might go. What will happen when war comes.’
‘All the more reason for us to be together.’
‘I don’t need you.’
‘You don’t need me?’
The words almost choked her. Jochen’s tone was offhand, as if he was declining a cup of coffee, rather than her life.
‘Not exactly. I do need you. But if I’m going to survive underground, I need you on the surface. Someone who would never arouse a moment of suspicion. Somebody ordinary.’
‘Is that what you think I am, then? Ordinary?’
‘No.’ He ground out the cigarette impatiently beneath his foot, swivelling his heel in the damp gravel. ‘I thought you realized that. You’re brave. Just as brave as Sofie. You took a big risk at the ball the other day. And you were willing to leave those brothers you love so much and come with me.’
‘Then why . . .?’
At last Jochen’s gaze lost its hardness and he turned to look at her full on.
‘Don’t you see, Hedy? Surely you understand? It’s not only food or clothes or guns you can give me. It’s the thought of you. The thought that there’s someone good waiting for me. Someone worth caring about.’
He was staring at her now, as if trying to stamp the impression of her face indelibly in his mind. He lifted a grimy finger to her cheek and touched it briefly.
‘Everyone needs something to keep them going. For me, it’s you.’
She knew then, as she looked at him, that this gruff, prickly man was her fate – a fate that no fortune teller would ever have predicted. Who at the Faith and Beauty Society, training her up for the black-liveried arm of an SS man, would have paired Hedwig with an angry, independent anti-Nazi instead? Plain Hedwig Holz, who except on the dance floor had never put a foot out of line. What could she possibly have in common with this unpolished character, so indifferent to the social graces and averse to pleasantries or compliments? Yet Jochen had divined something in Hedwig, a potential she had never recognized herself and nor, she was sure, had anyone else.
He noticed her eyes were glinting and burrowed in his pocket. ‘Here. I got this a while ago from work and I forgot to give it to you. Dry your eyes. If I’m going to think of you, I don’t want to think of you crying.’
He passed her a square of synthetic silk, emblazoned with the words Our Führer is Fifty and pictures of Germany’s achievements: a People’s Car, a Luftwaffe plane, a factory in the Ruhr, and at the centre an image of the Führer. Hedwig blew her nose on it and they stood in silence, shoulders touching, as the wafts of cigarette smoke curled into the brightening air.