The Winter Garden (2014) Read Online Free Page B

a few minutes a trial. Clara wondered where the soldiers might be heading. These days, that was all anyone was thinking.
    She recalled the British newspapers she had flicked through that summer. The dispatch in
The Times
, informing the world how a special German flying unit, formed to support the
Nationalists in the Spanish civil war, had bombed the ancient Basque town of Guernica. For more than three hours Junkers and Heinkel bombers unloaded bombs and incendiaries, while fighter aircraft
plunged low to machine-gun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields. The town was razed to the ground and hundreds of women and children were killed. The evidence of
three small bomb cases stamped with the German Imperial Eagle had proved to the world that the official German position of neutrality was a sham. Looking up now at the bone-white sky, Clara tried
to imagine the bombers screaming out of the stillness of a spring morning and the terror of the people fleeing as they were strafed from the air. Then she pictured the same happening in England,
Hitler’s bombers raining their payload on the House of Commons or Westminster Abbey, or Ponsonby Terrace where her father lived. On Angela’s home in Chelsea, or further out in the quiet
suburbs, in Hackney and Greenwich and Barnes. On the Wren churches and Nelson’s Column and the National Gallery. She imagined the raid sirens, the women and children hurrying out of their
houses, the fighter planes diving low to finish off those stumbling figures who had escaped the incendiaries. The horizon lit by the red glow of a thousand fires, gas bombs sending coils of poison
into family homes. She shook her head. That could never happen.
    As she waited for the traffic policeman to clear the road she looked across the street, to where a crane was poised like a giant bird, pecking at another excavation. Berlin these days was like a
patient under constant operation. Every street was subject to extracting, filling and fixing. You couldn’t move for heaps of bricks, plank ribbing laid over holes in the earth and skeletal
steel structures rising into the sky. Everywhere there was the roar of cement mixers and the rattle of drills, erecting the monumental, neoclassical buildings deemed suitable for the new world
capital of Germania. There was something grand and futile about these buildings of the Führer, Clara thought. They were like an empty boast, designed to make human beings feel like ants in
their long passages and echoing halls. Goering’s Air Ministry had seven kilometres of corridors apparently, and it was said that for his centrepiece Hitler wanted Albert Speer to build a dome
that rose a thousand feet into the sky, capable of holding a hundred and eighty thousand people. Nonetheless, the Führer had also ordered Speer to equip all Government buildings with
bulletproof doors and shutters, just in case the people should ever lose their enthusiasm for his grand plans.

Chapter Two
    It would be hard to find a greater contrast between the Goebbels’ home in Schwanenwerder than the worn, ochre-painted nineteenth-century block in Winterfeldstrasse, where
Clara lived on the top floor. A heavy wooden door led from the street into a hall painted institutional brown and lined with pocked tiles. To the left was an arthritic wrought-iron lift and behind
it a stairwell for when the lift all too frequently refused to function. To the right, secreted in a cubby-hole furnished with a chair and lamp, Rudi the caretaker could be found. Try as she might
to enter silently, Rudi would always dart from his cubicle with some piece of information or greeting. He was a Party member with a prestigiously high number – signifying that he had joined
the Party in the early days, well before they closed the ranks to new membership – and in his role as National Socialist block warden, every Saturday he donned his brown shirt and attended a
Party meeting. That was the only