Love by the Morning Star (2 page)

“Honestly, do you think I can pass as a kitchen skivvy?” she asked in her most cultivated voice.

“Perhaps we can get you in a slightly better post—a housemaid, maybe—but the important thing is that you are there at Starkers.”

“Why me?” she fished.
Because you're so clever
, she willed him to say.
Because we trust you
.

“Because a servant, particularly a female servant, is anonymous and inconsequential. Especially in an upper-crust British estate, servants are so taken for granted that for all practical purposes they don't exist. They are conveniently invisible. You come from the lower class—no, don't scowl—but you know how to emulate the upper class. You can pass for one of the maids, but understand the masters. That may be necessary. Now, will you do it?”

Below her, through the naked boughs of the few remaining linden trees lining the boulevard, she could see a vague commotion. The window was propped open a crack, and through the gap came a cry, a wail that rose in frantic desperation until it was cut off abruptly to strangled silence. Then the sound of shattering glass, so loud that she was certain her own window had been smashed, and she flinched back. But no, it was in the street. The sound seemed to echo . . . or was it more glass breaking, farther away?

“What's that?” she gasped.

The Von snaked an arm behind her and snapped the heavy curtains closed.

“Nothing that need concern you. Internal affairs.”

When he had gone, Anna said petulantly to her father, “I'm happy to help in any way, of course, but really, a kitchen maid!”

Her father slapped her, hard, and that was that.

H
ANNAH
M
ORGENSTERN WAS SINGING ABOUT SHEEP
. Why her audience loved songs about sheep, she was not sure. They were soldiers, businessmen, wealthy gentlemen about town, who had probably never known a sheep intimately. (What a joke her father would make out of that!) Still, when Hannah sang sheep songs they bought champagne and oysters like they were going out of style, and left tips so large that goodhearted Benno the busboy often ran after them, asking if they'd made a mistake.

This was a song about black sheep on the grassy banks of the Danube looking like the freckles on her true love's nose. Since the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria, she was a bit leery of singing songs about that country, but her repertoire of sheep songs was limited. It was either that, a tune about a British shepherdess, which was too politically risky, or one about frolicking Sudeten lambs, which was too fresh, though no doubt popular with her customers.
What the show needs
, Hannah decided as she crooned the final bars to wild applause and tossed flowers,
is a song about a nationless, nondenominational sheep
. A sheep that cannot stir up resentment from any side.

Of course, by now there was only one side, really, and everyone else kept silent if they knew what was good for them.

The next number was the Double Transvestite Tango, so Hannah made her bows, scooped up as many flowers as she could carry (Benno's grandmother would sell the sturdiest of them the next morning, and one might end up the boutonniere of the very man who'd tossed it the night before), and made her way to the wings. Already a couple of admirers were homing in on her. She was used to becoming another person onstage, someone who attracted and compelled. It was good for business but annoying when business was done, when all she wanted was a breath of fresh air and a glimpse of the stars over Berlin.

Her father, Aaron Morgenstern, was the master of ceremonies and the comedian, dressed, as always, in some variation of a devilish costume. Her mother sang torch songs, sad and sultry. Rounding out the troupe were assorted dancers, actors, and singers, lewd or clownish or satiric as the situation demanded. But there was a market for innocence, too, for eyelet lace and braids and shepherdesses in dirndl skirts, for gentler tastes than most of the clientele possessed. Hannah filled that niche. Old men and young soldiers adored her.

Two of the latter, young lieutenants in the Heer, the German army, tried to catch her eye, so she ducked into her mother's dressing room and peeled off her false eyelashes. She slipped out of her dirndl and into a dark wool dress, then pulled off her wig of coiled blond braids to reveal a slicked-back chocolate-colored bob. When she walked by the two eager officers they didn't recognize her.

“Have you seen that luscious bonbon with the golden braids?” one asked her as she passed.

She grinned up at them with such impish mischief that they almost forgot their quest for the singer. “She is with her lover,” Hannah said. “But she can always handle one or two more.” She winked at them. “Go there, through that door.”

She made her escape while the uniformed hobbledehoys gawked and gaped and finally burst into the dressing room where Franz, the three-hundred-pound juggling strongman, was adjusting his loincloth.

“I ought not to do it,” Hannah said aloud to herself as chaos erupted behind her. “I just can't seem to help myself. It is a shame, really.”

But she did not look at all sorry.

Outside, Hannah leaned against the cabaret's stone wall and tilted her head, taking in the hazy night sky, the lounging neon devil winking insouciantly out at Berlin from the garish sign for Die Höhle des Teufels. She was so lost in thought, she didn't see the middle-aged man approaching, and started at his voice.

“Staring at things that used to be, my pet?” he said. “Where is your imagination tonight? Nineteen twenty-eight? 'Twenty-nine? Come now, you're too young for nostalgia.”

Hannah, like a good many other Germans, was trapped in the past. No matter that the twenties had been times of desperation and poverty and rampant inflation, when a loaf of bread might cost ten marks one day and a million marks the next. It had also been an era of wild creativity and beauty, when no one cared about the price of bread because there was art to create, jazz to dance to, satires to perform, debaucheries such as the world has never known to invent. Hannah was a child of that world, born, literally, in her parents' cabaret, learning to walk by hanging on to its gold velvet stage curtains. Her first solid food had been a banana from Josephine Baker's famous skirt, and a visiting Ziegfeld had dandled her on his knee.

Now, in November 1938, that free, inventive, tolerant spirit was gone, surviving in a few relics such as Der Teufel, or more likely, had fled, to Paris, to Russia, to the United States. Bread was cheap, but the golden age was over. Hitler was in charge, and there were plenty of people who liked it that way.

“Good evening, Herr Alder,” Hannah said, her small, sweet face scrunching in irrepressible mirth. “Even babies feel nostalgic for the womb, I think. How nice to be toted around and never have to worry about a thing! Now there are battles and revolutions and invasions and horrible discrimination—and that's just among the kitchen staff. Do you know, Chef actually dumped a flambé on top of the waiter Dieter's head because he told a customer the cream therein would make her fat and so she sent it back? Luckily his hair pomade prevented him from catching alight, but still.”

Alder took a hopeful breath, but he stood no chance against Hannah's torrent of words. Unless she got the hiccups, she could go on for hours. “Perhaps in other places the wait staff does not make so free, but I like the way we do things, don't you? One happy, outspoken family. Ah, but you asked where I was, you sly man. I was in 1929 for a moment. Do you remember that spring when all the ladies wore violets on their bosoms? They wilted so fast, and Benno and I made all our candy money scouring the parks for new blooms.” She sighed. For just a second, the strain of her life showed through the merriment of her face.

“It was a good year, 1929,” Herr Alder slurred. “Much like the bottle of cognac I just consumed.”

“You're tipsy,” Hannah said with mock disapproval. Caspar Alder was almost an uncle to her, a friend of the family who had patronized Der Teufel since it opened. He did something in the government, she knew, though he talked with increasing sincerity of retiring soon.

“I am
not
tipsy,” Herr Alder said, pounding the wall with his fist. His vague avuncular air slipped, revealing something hard beneath. “I am drunk. It is necessary to be drunk when you are about to burn the business of your dear friend, and then perhaps beat him in the streets.”

“What do you mean?” Hannah asked, her eyes wide and luminous in the devilish neon gleam.

His voice dropped. “It has started already, across town. There's not much time. They were only waiting for an excuse.” He growled the words like a caged dog, and Hannah cringed, catching fear as if it were a fever, though she had no idea what he was talking about.

“They
planned
it,” he went on. “They want it to look like a spontaneous uprising, but they planned it, weeks, months ago. I should have warned you sooner, but I lived in hope that mankind isn't quite so foul as it seems to be.” He took a long swig from a pocket flask. “Get your parents, my little kitten. Go to a friend's house—don't tell me where—and hide until it passes. If it ever passes. Damn it, I should have made you leave! Damn your stubborn father and his art, his calling . . .”

He dragged her, almost violently, back inside, and, bewildered, she followed him through the backstage corridors. He knew them well. He'd paid court to many nubile performers over the last seventeen years.

Onstage, Waltraud dipped Otto . . . or was it the other way around? She was so nobly built, he so sveltely beautiful, that in the sensuous, sinuous stalking of the tango it was hard to tell who was who. Each was dressed in bifurcated drag, male on one side, female on the other, and as they danced their hips pressed close, their legs intertwined in a glorious pansexual blur. The Nazi Party inspectors had come to observe the pair but declined to censor them. A man who dressed as a woman because he enjoyed it was decadent and obscene. A man dressed as half a woman, they decided, was worth watching.

Waltraud and Otto bowed and curtsied, then curtsied and bowed, and Benno, who doubled on the fog machine, made a great sulfurous swirl rise through the suddenly dimmed red lights. A violin off scene played a diabolical air, and Aaron Morgenstern appeared as if from the abyss.

He was always the Devil, sometimes a caricature in crimson, though more often Lucifer in his less obvious guises as a sophisticated roué, handsome and irresistible, which closely resembled Aaron's real self, or a jaded old man with a patriarchal beard, bent and weary with the sins of the world. He was the ancient tonight.

“I've seen it all before,”
he sang, waggling his eyebrows like a dirty old man at the park when young girls in pinafores arrive.
“If there is nothing new under the sun, do you think you will find a novel sin in this, the Devil's cave?”
He stroked his beard and leered at the audience. Then he seemed to fix them with eyes as deep and black as chasms.
“When you come into the Devil's hole and enjoy yourself, aren't you doing to him what he would like to do to you?”
He broke character and laughed, a young rich baritone.
“Bend over, Devil! We will give you a surprise, in the end!”
he sang, and made a rude gesture that set everyone laughing—the closet Communist and the Jew on forged papers, the local head of the SS, who had sent someone to his death that morning (though his hands were so clean now) and his subordinate, who would soon commit suicide when he finally realized what he'd signed up for.

All political reference had been banned from the German stage a year before, which had killed most cabaret. Aaron Morgenstern survived, in part because he cultivated many influential friends, but mostly because he could couch his bitter opinions in comedy so perfectly balanced that every side thought he was praising them and condemning their opponents. The SS man nodded and thought,
Here is one Jew who knows his place
, seeing in this Devil every enemy of the German state. The man with the forged Aryan papers knew the Devil was the Nazi Party, and delighted in seeing him bend over. Coming into Der Teufel, catching the coded secrets of Aaron's diatribes, was the only way that he could fight. It helped him keep a seed of rebellion in his heart, one that might never sprout so long as he and his were safe, however tenuously, but all his life he could say that seed was there—that inside himself he fought, by listening to the Morgenstern Devil.

“Get your father,” Herr Alder whispered as Aaron hobbled offstage in his old-man disguise. He was replaced by a plump Bavarian who played a molting bird, her strategically placed feathers falling off here and there, to the delight of the men in the audience.

In the dressing room, Hannah saw her glorious mother in triptych in the hinged dressing mirror. “Am I late for my cue?” she asked her daughter in English as she smoothed the edge of her dark peekaboo waves. Born Caroline Curzon, she had come from England after the Great War and married Aaron when she was barely out of her teens, then adopted the stage name Cora Pearl Morgenstern.

When Herr Alder came in she made a little moue, thinking only that her performance preparations were being disrupted, not her entire life. Hannah took her mother's hand and they listened while Herr Alder drunkenly, incoherently explained.

A Jewish boy in Paris had shot a German diplomat. Why, no one was sure. Was it a lovers' quarrel? Was he angry that his family—Polish Jews living in Germany—had been deported? No one knew, but it was called a Jewish conspiracy and there had been orders . . . no, not orders, but official collusion, Nazi Party encouragement, to seek retaliation on all the Jews in Germany.

“They are coming now,” Herr Alder said. “The SS and their minions, in plainclothes, and I have been ordered to . . . to not interfere. To not interfere in such a way that I might render all assistance necessary. Every Jewish business is to be vandalized, burned. The synagogues destroyed. Men arrested for the labor camps.” He went to take another gulp but, finding the flask empty, flung it across the room, where it crashed into Cora's dressing table, smashing a crystal vial of scent. Though harsher smells would permeate the coming tragedy, Hannah would always recall that whiff of Sous Le Vent's tarragon and iris, disturbingly tropical on that chill, cut-glass night.