“And have you met the Pope, Fräulein?“ Hans asks. “They say he has a long mouth with a good set of double teeth on top.”
“Who says that?”
“Lieutenant General Baron Van Voorst tot Voorst.”
“What does he know? I’m the one the Führer sent to help prepare the way.”
“You… his… his…”
“Do you want to say mistress? Now you can say fiancée.”
“I’ve always regarded you, Fräulein, as the Führer’s future wife.”
“I appreciate that, Hans.” He’s not telling the truth. No one thought of me as a future wife. It took moving into the Bunker for Adi to know.
“I’ve met many famous persons. General Maximino Comacho, brother of the Mexican president. The Duke and Duchess of Winsor. And I met the Pope in Venice,” I say proudly. “The Führer is grateful for the pontiff’s birthday prayers said for him each year. He’s also pleased that when Coventry and its ancient cathedral were bombed, the Pope didn’t denounce us.”
How impressed my mother was that her little girl met the Pope. It meant a lot to her as she was brought up a strict Catholic. My uncle Werner, her brother, who owns a shoe repair shop, has no use for Catholics who only wear their good pumps to Sunday Mass and seldom have them repaired. Uncle Werner loves Jewish businessmen who stand in their stores all day and wear down the heels of their shoes running back and forth to the bank.
Father works as a teacher and is happy to deal with anybody, even Catholic students and their parents. He never goes to church himself believing that it’s idiotic to trust in someone who is invisible. Perhaps that comes from being around very loud and demanding German housewives.
Adi gave me the temporary title of Assistant to the Administration Office of the German Embassy so I could meet the Pope. I also met a beautiful city called Venice. It’s hard to believe that Musso who is fat and uncouth is from the same country as that lovely, subtle city. I say subtle because of all the footbridges that I ran back and forth on each morning. As the people there are used to tourists, they didn’t even stare at me when I’d press my cheek against sunny old walls.
Venice. All those wispy violet cardinals praying in gondolas. Birds posing like ancient tapestry. Since the city is so rich in past splendor, I was surprised its pieces didn’t seem to fit together. Houses built on bridges, crooked streets running off without apparent form or reason, aimless canals. Even their tea tastes of arrowroot.
As Josef and Magda were reading Goethe’s account of Venice in the book Italian Journey, they wanted me to read it, too, but I preferred to read the city on my feet, following holy processions through the narrow paths beside the canals, buying mounds of green olives that I ate with my fingers from an oily paper cone.
That day we came into Venice on shiny black gondolas—our red and black swastika flags trailing over the water in a fan of triumph—we made Venice wonderfully Germanic. Swaying but standing erect, we sang while floating through canals: “So weit die braune Heide geht… gehort das alles wir…”
Italians gathered in the little squares and alleys smiling and waving at us. I had seen pictures of this city in schoolbooks, but the overripe buildings with narrow windows that smelled of fish were an exotic delight that I would write about in my next letter to Mother. My mutter said she would like to have her fortune told in Venice under the city’s ancient weight of so much richness. Her fortune would prove more prosperous under funny square lamps in wrought-iron brackets.
Josef and Magda bought opium pills coated in gold flakes. The light layered yellow glaze was able to slow down the effects of the pills so the results were dazzlingly timed. While the three of us sat on brocaded cushions in a hotel suite, a hooded young man and a girl in harlequin dress both played lutes and gave us massages using dominoes. Rhythmic dominoes were interchanged so that those prancing in all the orifices of Josef and Magda were also prancing in mine. We three were love gambling right in the middle of a city of old churches, cisterns, and gullibility. Having won over Musso politically, we were now trafficking in his pleasures.
Before we met the Pope, Josef prepared us for this splendor by giving Magda and me each a diamond studded live fish attached to a leash. Strolling along the canals, Magda and I walked our fish like puppies. Later, Josef had them dried, and they became delicate pins with little diamond chips along the fins. Adi hates me in baubles as his mother never could afford so much as a brooch, and he would be horrified that a fish was killed, so I could only wear it when I visited my mother and later I gave it to her as a birthday gift.
Since the Pope was not at the Vatican, we met him in a sumptuous villa along a muddy Venice canal that was the second home of a countess from Bologna. Above the entryway, the villa flew a huge papal white and yellow flag. In all the rooms were roses on the crosses, not the dying body of Jesus. This I found to be more in keeping with Adi’s demand for the removal of conventional crucifixes in Germany. Roses make things less religious. Adi said Bismarck was suspicious of the Catholic religion because of its Jewish foundation.
I wore a navy blue dress with large silver buttons. A Countess Bologna servant gave me a black veil. We were treated quite well by the priests as most of them favored us because we were against the Communists and Freemasons and had “Gott Mit Uns,” God With Us, on our standard infantryman’s belt buckle. When the Pope came in, we genuflected and kissed the ring on his thin and yellow hand as Josef snickered silently observing the satin vestments and enormous retinue of cardinals and prelates hovering around in a manner he claimed was an outrageous show of rubrics. He could smell the inquisition. But I was impressed because before the Pope met us, he only ate a simple lunch of boiled onions in cream sauce that was served to him from a Vatican cook on his knees.
With a flashy poisonous lime skirt and tight white sweater, Magda was dressed inappropriately. White above the waist was her pious concession, a mesh sweater with pointed steeples jutting out. She smelled of DDT powder from dusting her pubic hair to take care of crabs and was often in agony, the itching making her wildly distracted. Maybe that was why she addressed the head of the Catholic Church as Mein Herr Pope and referred to the Virgin Mary reverently as “Mamma Mia.” On her head she wore a simple creamy lace handkerchief over the black veil that was provided by a humpback nun who later sat in sulky silence on the step of a faldstool. In full diplomatic attire, Josef kept his chromium-plated Beretta pistol strapped to his leg, hidden under his trousers. Being ironic, he addressed the Pope as Eure Majestat.
Hoping to confirm the rumor of his double row of teeth, I tried to see the upper mouth of Pius XII. But he had a wart removed from his lip that morning and couldn’t smile and scrunched up his mouth in a menacing twist. Whether it was from pain or from his double row of teeth, I was never able to know.
Josef was grateful to the pontiff for many things—for being pro-Axis, for not being admired in England, for the Concordat, an agreement that ensured the Catholic schools would not teach anything against Nazi authority, and for not protesting Kristallnacht.
As Goebbels would tell us later, “Kristallnacht was a wonderful free shopping orgy. How can anyone possibly fault that?”
“And the Vatican Index forbidding books was an inspiration for us,” I offered.
“Oh, yes,” Goebbels agreed happily.
Still, Adi remained annoyed by His Holiness’ opposition to the mercy killing of the genetically insane, and in 1941 finally ordered the euthanasia program stopped because of pressure from religious leaders. It’s a mystery to me why the Church cares so strongly for people who have no brains. My father worked with a woman whose demented 15-year-old son used to regularly chase the family around the back yard with a hatchet. When the SS came to take the idiot boy away, the family was actually relieved.