“Perhaps their wives would have wished it,” I say.
He hesitates for a brief moment, then goes on to talk as if he had not heard me. “Now El Greco should have painted houses. His faces are dumb and who wants to talk to them.”
“I’ve never seen any Greco. But I admire poor Monet who went blind and had to memorize where he put the colors on his palette.” I’m grateful to Sister Angelus in my convent school who had cataracts and spoke frequently about the painter.
He suddenly closes his eyes, in respect and sadness, remembering that time in the Great War when he temporarily lost his sight. Patting my hand, he thanks me for my sensitivity.
But I’m happy that our Führer tells painters in Germany not to use any tint that can’t be seen in nature by the naked eye and not to paint or draw repellent or revolting images. He ordered the Gestapo to conduct raids on artists to examine their brushes for forbidden colors.
But getting back to our first outing… we walked up the steps to this new hospital on Ludendorffstrasse. He stopped and squinted when he saw a lone biscuit wrapper on the stairs, picking it up and placing it firmly in a nearby trash container. Soon we stood in front of ugly steel doors with a thick red ribbon stretched across them. Funny little stick figures (that I later knew as swastikas) were stitched on a banner quivering in the breeze. People were packed together waiting, I didn’t know for what. We were ushered to a row of wooden chairs. Looking around, I didn’t see any cinema stars but just some shabbily dressed politicians and a few doctors and nurses in ugly unstarched uniforms. I was annoyed that I had come and ruined a good evening. More and more people arrived, and large six-wheeled black Mercedes with red leather upholstery screeched up, but there were no film stars that I could see, and I was getting more and more bored when suddenly… he just left me—all alone, sitting there! Left my side without a word! Had he run out on me? The next thing I knew, he was up front receiving a bouquet from a little girl, cupping the child’s face in his hands, smiling, then cutting the thick strip of red satin ribbon to officially open the new hospital. Doves were released in the air, and an orchestra that came out of nowhere played Wagner’s “March of homage.”
Little did I know that on the very street of this hospital, he had once shoveled snow for a few pfennigs when he was poor and a struggling artist. More amazing, one day those swastikas I didn’t even know the name of would fly over the Ritz in Paris.
After the opening of the hospital, he didn’t come by the shop or call me in over two weeks. I wondered if I had only been a last minute replacement as he had invited me just hours before the event and didn’t even so much as pat my cheek when the evening was over. Then… he suddenly appeared carrying a box of film for Herr Hoffmann to arrange in an elaborate political montage. Hoffmann gave him a warm “sieg heil,” something new to me. (I didn’t know that Hoffmann joined his party early with the number 59.)
“Think of it,” Hoffmann told me, “he’s an Austrian, a born politician who only recently became a German citizen. And he’s going to make Germany great. We need a genius of action—Taterperson, this shaker. Tater.”
As he used the store phone, I overheard Herr Wolf’s conversations in which he made arrangements for speaking engagements at various cities. Afterward, he casually asked me to lunch. I accepted eagerly remembering all the doves and music of our first extravagant encounter. But this time, we only walked across the black asphalt street, dodging the traffic as he told me that most of his friends dreamed of owning their own Leica, but his dream was to be the camera itself. We sat on the steps of an office building. He carried a bottle of tepid tomato soup in a brown paper bag, and we took turns drinking from it. Eating too much at lunch was bad for one’s productivity, he explained. Most of his party members wanted heaping plates of meat, something hard for him to witness. I took numerous sips, and he drank the last of it and finished by running his tongue slowly around the upturned rim so that I saw the jar’s murky bottom. He used to drink soup from the same bowl with his mother, he said.
Soon we were sharing a jar of soup two or three times a week with Hoffmann warning me pleasantly that Herr Wolf carried a “single bed” in his heart.
Herr Wolf instructed me to poke him from time to time as we sipped the broth so that even this liquid nourishment would not be automatic and escape his concentration. This made me realize that a man can communicate something before it’s understood. And I enjoyed tickling him from time to time, watching him laugh softly against his will. As the jars of soup became larger, I realized he wanted the lunches to last longer. We would sit on the same office step for two hours. Of interest to him was what it was like for me being a young working girl, and I told him how dandelions make a good salad for lunch when you’re short of money and how I toasted bread on an upturned electric iron in back of the shop. Soon he continued on about unemployment, the shame of Germany’s poor standing in the world, his hatred of the Communist Party. He recited the Versailles Treaty by heart, grimacing over certain words, his mustache twitching after sentences. Then he’d snarclass="underline" “Clemenceau… forbidding our soldiers between the French border and a fifty kilometer line east of the Rhine! What infamy at the Hotel Majestic in Paris—that heinous delegation called the Versailles Peace Conference.” He was continually upset about the ignominy of the Fatherland in that awful War Guilt Clause which erased the former wonders of the German army and reduced it to a mere 100,000 men. (Later, I’m glad to say, he introduced compulsory military service and further flouted the Treaty by announcing on the radio that he planned to raise troop strength to 550,000.)
He encouraged me to read The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl, a book that detailed the Zionist ideal, for he was absorbed by the political Jewish problem with its territorial solution. Herzl wanted Uganda as a possible Jewish homeland, but Herr Wolf felt the use of too many German ships to get them there was not a good idea. I admitted that I personally knew only one Jew who was my mother’s cook, and she was rather dull though dutiful.
There were stories of his being a young man and feeling restless and eagerly welcoming Stahlgewitter, the thunder of the Great War. Even Thomas Mann, he said, desired a steely conflict when he wrote: “This world of peace which has now collapsed with such shattering thunder—did we not all of us have enough of it? Was it not foul with all its comfort?”
Herr Wolf said a single fear was that he would reach the front too late. This fear gave him no rest, and he eventually wrote about it in Mein Kampf. I was lucky enough to hear it from his own lips.
Later he showed me his paintings of blood-drenched poppies from the Great War.
I was honored that he used army terms when speaking to me such as “pill boxes” which were not those little pearl cases on my dresser. I would become familiar with such language. Trusting me with personal sentiments wasted on party members with jowls full of beef, he spoke of his mother, the warm home she made for him, how he would cry as a child when they entered their house because then he couldn’t see it from the outside. Before he said his first word, he drew it, a round outline of his mother’s face. The sketch called out “mutti” as loud as any word. Thereafter, he was continually horrified when anyone showed less than reverence for maternal love.
If one of his associates walked by and I was near him, he would stand, clicking his heels, shake hands with the official and then turn and shake mine. I knew I wasn’t to be part of his political life, but I didn’t care because he told me his real name was Herr Hitler. Bending nearly double, his lips would brush my palm in the old Viennese manner that embarrassed me as I didn’t even know if he was spelled with two tees or one. But he wanted me to call him Adi, the name he went by with all his closest friends. Then he pulled out a membership application form that I eagerly signed.