The Pursuit of Pearls Read Free Page A

what another would do haunted all but the very young. Only the little boys beside her, who now had squeezed between the legs of the storm troopers guarding the route, saw anything thrilling in the inexorable wall of men and tanks rolling past. Everyone else was getting by on an edgy cocktail of hope and denial. Everywhere you went, nerves flashed and shorted, like violet sparks above the tramlines. Tempers frayed. The whole city was as pumped up and jittery as a dog being forced to fight.
    Above their heads, loudspeakers strung along the street barked out radio broadcasts of Joseph Goebbels between bursts of military music. Goebbels was cheerleading the nation as though the Führer’s birthday was synonymous with facing up to the Poles. Enthusiasm for both was compulsory.
    “No German at home or anywhere else in the world can fail to take the deepest and heartiest pleasure in participation.”
    Clara winced. The voice of the short, clubfooted minister for enlightenment and propaganda still got under her skin like shards of glass. Even now, after six years in Germany, hearing it daily on the radio and at the film studios where she worked, Joseph Goebbels’s wheedling tone could make her flinch like chalk screeching on a blackboard.
    Clara was there only because of a solemn promise she had made to her godson, Erich Schmidt, who at sixteen had been chosen to lead his battalion of Hitler Youth in the parade. It was a great honor, he had reminded her numerous times. But from where she was standing there seemed little chance of even glimpsing Erich, let alone of him registering her loyal presence.
    It didn’t have to be that way. As an actress contracted to the Ufa studios, Clara had qualified for a place in the VIP enclosure, alongside prominent personalities in their finery and portly Party dignitaries trussed up in field gray. The viewing stand, garlanded with golden laurels and tented drapes like a marquee at a country wedding, offered a far better view and a gilt chair to sit on. That was why she had risked the Ferragamo shoes, as well as the skirt suit and the tip-tilted hat, which now looked far too smart amid the stolid burghers of the Berlin crowd. Only, when she reached the gates of the VIP enclosure, she realized she couldn’t face it. She spent enough of her life in close confines with Nazi officials without wanting to join them behind a velvet rope with no chance of escape.
    A frisson of excitement ran through the crowd. A posse of steel-helmeted, black-jacketed SS officers had appeared and were elbowing their way through, glancing from left to right. Joseph Goebbels, who was recording this extravaganza for posterity, was clearly controlling every last detail. No one was allowed to take their own photographs, and police were deputed to arrest anyone in the crowd who wielded a camera or failed to perform the Nazi salute. As the SS men barged past, Clara saw an elderly couple at the back of the throng, the man a teacher or a pastor perhaps, and his gray-haired wife beside him, being hustled off to a side street and lined up against a wall to await the police wagon.
    Mirror periscopes swiveled like reeds in the wind, and the yells around her intensified, rising into a wall of sound. The cordon of SA and SS officers linked arms to prevent the surge of sightseers spilling into the road.
    “He’s coming!” The excitement of the moment caused the stolid woman beside Clara to burst into a cry of joy.
    First came a fleet of motorcycle outriders, then Hitler himself, upright at the helm of his seven-liter Mercedes Tourer, with his arm raised in the trademark salute he could apparently hold for two hours straight. His peculiar, impersonal stare traveled like a searchlight across the crowds as his head flicked intermittently right and left, his eyes seemingly seeking out individual faces. Flowers were hurled through the air, hitting the sides of the Mercedes with soft thuds. Surprisingly, only two members of the Adolf