for a full afternoon and not found one true Austrian? Really. Yesterday he’d gone into a café to read a newspaper and found many hanging on canes, but in Czech, Italian, Polish, and Croatian, not one in German! Equality of the races, pah! It was shameful. Hitler half-turned, but saw Geli was still feeding, so he faced the hanging portrait of Alois, his strict, pompous, irritable, authoritarian father, who’d died in 1903.
“Evil is rife there!” Hitler said. “One night August and I saw a hair-raising play called Spring’s Awakening and I felt it necessary to take him to Spittelberggasse and the sink of iniquity—”
“The sink of iniquity?” Aunt Johanna asked.
“Houses of prostitution,” he explained.
“Oh dear.”
Angela thought of him as a misogynist; she wondered if he’d ever even held hands with a girl. She smiled and said, “You shock me, Adolf.”
“I have no interest in contracting syphilis, I assure you. In fact, August and I have solemnly vowed to keep forever pure the holy flame of life. But if it is my goal to form the ideal state, I have an obligation to investigate from afar those festering and illicit monuments to the perversion of our times.”
Aunt Johanna frowned. “Who can fathom what you’re talking about?”
Angela grinned at Geli, who was forgetting to nurse, lost in a fog, her tiny and affectionate hand as delicate as a moth on the huge white urn of Angela’s breast. Was it possible to feel more love than this for a child and not faint with ecstasy? Would there ever be a time when Angelika was not essential to her? She heard the three men howling in the kitchen and she wondered if whatever was said was truly funny, or was it Leo’s Schadenfreude? Leo who clapped when waiters dropped plates, who found all falls hilarious, who often teased children to tears; Leo who first got interested in Angela Hitler because he’d heard she was fine Hausfrau material and a jolly woman who loved to have a good laugh. She was twenty then, and strong and pretty in a square-jawed way, and oh so eager to get out of her stepmother’s house. And now she was twenty-five and, she thought, much had changed.
Aunt Johanna was talking, and then Adolf. Angela heard him say, “We face a gloomy interior courtyard. Even in the afternoon I have to light a stinking kerosene lamp in order to sketch.”
Angela asked her half-brother, “Why aren’t you painting at the academy of fine arts?” And she heard a shifty moment of quiet before she looked up to find that Adolf had turned from the dining room window with his hand inside his jacket. Crossing spitefully to her, he pulled out a folded sheet of paper that he sarcastically ironed out on the sofa arm next to Geli’s head.
“Official judgment,” it read. “Adolf Hitler, born Braunau am Inn, Upper Austria, on 20 April 1889. Religion: Catholic. Father: civil servant (deceased). Education: four forms, Realschule. Sample drawings: Inadequate; few heads.”
“You weren’t accepted?”
“You’re quick, aren’t you, Angela.”
“Oh, Adolf. I’m so sorry. Was there nothing you could do?”
Aunt Johanna offered, “Learn to draw heads?”
Controlling his temper, he said, “I went to the director. Professor Siegmund l’Allemand. A Jew. He thought I had little talent for painting, but ought to consider the school of architecture.”
“And?”
“I admitted I quit taking classes here at sixteen and didn’t have my diploma.” And then, his face flushed as if he were seething, he began ranting first about the intransigence of the officials at the grueling four-hour exam, and then about their being petty bureaucrats, all of them old-fashioned, fossilized civil servants. Without taste, without fairness, without common sense. With no loyalty to their heritage.
Aunt Johanna sighed. “You realize, of course, that if you’d studied at a technical school you’d have matriculated by now? But no, you’re an artist, you won’t listen to anybody. You’re as pigheaded as your father was. You go your own way, thinking of no one else, just as if you had no family. My sister died six months ago, and this is your first visit.”
Hitler fell melodramatically to his knees before her and in a high, whining, sniveling voice, his face rolling against Aunt Johanna’s thigh, confessed his failings, his fecklessness, his fruitless talent; confessed, too, that it was shame and vanity and his wanting so desperately to please her that had frustrated his good intentions. And now he felt doomed to waste his life in the filth of questionable surroundings, frostbitten in winter, feeble in