“I get many honorary doctorates, my dear.”
“Is that why you insist on people calling you Herr Doktor?”
“Doktor G will do, though pretty girls can continue with Josef, of course.” His look is outright jaunty.
“You know what some of your men call you?”
“Gobbespierre. After Robespierre.” He smiles. “Though I’d never admit it, I find that dashing.”
“They say you spend your time with literary chauffeurs.”
“Who is they?”
“Bormann.”
“What do you expect from an illiterate?” He suddenly looks down at his feet. “Eva, tell me honestly. Have you secretly despised me?” Running his fingers through his thin hair, he touches my arm to show that he now wishes to be more personal.
“Never,” I lie.
“Even a little? For not serving in World War I? For this tedious lament I carry around for the humble Russian soul? The very country that wants to eat us up. Do you hate me for being a cripple?”
“I never think of that.” But I do.
“I like a little bitterness with everything. I’ve been with women in Africa who have tattooed breasts. Some with two toes. Split feet are admired in many tribes.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m the propaganda minister, am I not?”
I know that if Adi has only one man left, Josef will be the one.
“Let me show you.” Before I can demure, he unlaces his shoe, and I see the soft, pink deformed foot so sly and shifty it makes me think of that wobbly soft bunch inside his underwear. “Do you find it ugly?” he asks. He sees that I hesitate. “At what point do we declare something beautiful? Was all that scratching on cave walls deliberately made to be beautiful? You may prefer the normal or the regular, Evie, but Kant tells us that we instinctively look for form in whatever we behold. Even this. My foot is an aesthetic lesson.”
In between her lovers, Magda uses this “aesthetic” appendage often, claiming his deformity as a tool to pry her wider. That opening which issued six babies into the world hardly needs to be stretched.
Adi, who informs me repeatedly about the best and brightest future race, won’t acknowledge Goebbels’ deformed stem. “Look in any alley,” Adi says talking about everyday people who limp and lope through life, “good common Germans.” But must Goebbels be short as well? Is that why the Herr Doktor likes Russian literature so much? He can hide in the wide tall sweep of Russian characters.
“I was once temporarily impotent,” Goebbels confesses. “I went to a Buddhist temple and was told to have my penis bitten by a wasp. An old Buddhist custom. It did take care of the matter.”
“Was it painful?“
“On the contrary, though it did burst a blood vessel. But that’s all over with. Even my tapeworm is gone. Do you remember the party at the Sans Souci Hotel when I gave the Führer all those Donald Duck films?”
“But Josef, you told me yourself that silly Mr. Disney erased all the udders from cows in his cartoons.”
“He was quite right to do so. We must think of our children.”
“I would rather see films with real people. Real people don’t turn on their axis. Real people aren’t jumping mushrooms, spiderwood faces, purple cornflower horses, leaves with bloodless veins.”
“I adore fantasy, Eva. After all, I live in the country of the Brothers Grimm. I prefer the natural literature of the people, the Volkspoesie like the Grimms’ Kinder und Hausmärchen for the children. But remember, all those people in the Grimms’ tales acquired methods of thievery.”
“Only against monsters and witches.”
“Ah, then you do know the Grimms.”
“Adi loves fantasy and cartoons. So I have to be familiar with them. But those things are why he hates to dance, and I’m forced to waltz with doorknobs.”
“Das Lech is why he hates to dance, my dear.”
“I’d hold him so tightly not a drop of his essence would dare leak away.”
“Dancers are considered traitors.”
“Not unless they jitterbug.”
“Dance—and one forgets the war, Eva.”
“I would think it’s helpful to forget the war from time to time.”
“If it’s so helpful, waltz with me. Here. Now.” He gives off a forced Bohemian flair.
“There’s no music.”
“There’s imposed realism.” Goebbels takes my hand and begins to sing softly, “Es wird ein Wunder Geschehen.” It’s the popular inspirational song being sung these days… “A miracle will happen.”
“When will it happen?” I chant back.
“Miracles take time.”
17
SINCE ADI HATES TO DANCE, I see no reason to refuse Josef. We float around his office desk that is really a butcher-block table from the burnt out Rheingold Restaurant that once held dissected chickens and slippery ducks coated in oil. Now instead of hens, it holds cluttered requisitions for supplies that are nowhere to be found. I’m lighter on my feet than Magda, and he can move closer to me as my breasts are small, firm and resilient. He does lean against my orbs that become soft claws. Feeling a sense of modest revenge, I think of Magda and her little double, Helga, and beg him to tell me about his mistresses, all those actresses. He gave them up for a short while at the Führer’s insistence. But he couldn’t stay away from them, and Adi had to announce that a wife should not be annoyed over anyone as silly as an actress. If I were one, Goebbels might forget himself. But I’m Eva Braun.
“My actresses cry out in passion with a chaotic welter of so many voices and with such projection,” he brags. “Each has her own special nostrum.”
Josef wants to kiss me. It’s quite all right, we’re comrades, are we not? We love the same man. What is a simple moment in the eternal? He takes nothing from the Führer who never kisses.
Adi won’t kiss me on the mouth as he’s kissed no one on the mouth except his mother because the tongue can have a yellow coating indicating bacteria or cracks across the width revealing loss of nutrients—teeth marks along the edges mean bad digestion. My Adi can’t know what’s under the tongue, wet and hiding. As a boy, he saw a prostitute in Linz stooped in the shadows and shining a flashlight on her legs. Leering at him, she tried to get the few coins in his pocket that he thoughtlessly rattled as he walked. The prostitute then shined the light on her mouth and lifted her chunky tongue and he saw parasites there—tiny swarming parasites nesting in a cove of glistening pink. Two entire chapters of Mein Kampf are devoted to the evils of such women.
Josef says I’m silly to think he’d desire anything but the mouth beneath my nose. He simply wants me to kiss back and is patient. He uses his two bony fingers to purse my lips, then gives me a quick peck.
Afterward, my lips droop. Positioning his thin lips against mine again, he tries for a longer press. Different rhythms and pressures will sort out the superior ones. It’s scientific selection. When he sticks his thick tongue into my mouth, wiggling it, nearly gagging me, the great selector finds the perfection he’s after. “Schmeckt gut. Tastes so good,” he says. He ends with what he calls a Florentine Kiss. Napoleon invented it: Squeezing a partner’s ear lobes as his lips pucker on the woman. Why this is so Napoleonic, I can’t say. Pushing me against the wall, one hand on his groin, he projects a cry of passion like the actresses he so admires. Pulling away abruptly, and smoothing down his spent cull, he stares at me. I can read his mind. Never has he been so physically close to his Führer. Before he rushes off to the map room, he tells me, “The one thing I really miss, Eva, is my couch at home. A couch as deep as the one in Baudelaire’s poem.” Heading back to the map room, he softly whistles the miracle song.