Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

She looked away. “I love you, Boris. You know it. And you know how hard I try not to.”

Boris turned to watch the water. “Yes, I know it,” he said with sorrow. “It is not easy for me either.”

Boris could never be subdued for long, however. His smile reappeared—that explosive smile. “But,” he said, “your country and mine are now friends, officially, and that makes it better, makes anything possible, doesn’t it?”

Yes, but…

There was another obstacle. Boris had been keeping a secret. Martha knew it but had not yet told him so. Now, facing him, she made her voice very quiet.

“Also,” she said, “you are married.”

Once again Boris stepped away. His complexion, already flushed from the cold, grew perceptibly redder. He moved to the railing and leaned on his elbows. His long frame formed a slender and graceful arc. Neither spoke.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you. I thought you knew. Forgive me.”

She told him that she had not known at first, not until Armand and her parents showed her Boris’s entry in the diplomatic directory published by the German foreign office. Next to Boris’s name was a reference to his wife, who was “abwesend.” Meaning absent.

“She is not ‘absent,’” Boris said. “We are separated. We have not been happy together for a long time. The next diplomatic listing will have nothing in that space.” He revealed as well that he had a daughter, whom he adored. It was only through her, he said, that he continued to have contact with his wife.

Martha noticed tears in his eyes. He had cried in her presence before, and she always found it moving but also discomfiting. A crying man—this was new to her. In America, men did not cry. Not yet. Up until now she had seen her father with tears in his eyes only once, upon the death of Woodrow Wilson, whom he counted as a good friend. There would be one other occasion, but that was to come in a few years’ time.

They went back into the restaurant, to their table. Boris ordered another vodka. He seemed relieved. They held hands across the table.

But now Martha offered a revelation of her own.

“I too am married,” she said.

The intensity of his response startled her. His voice fell and darkened. “Martha, no!” He continued to hold her hands, but his expression changed to one of puzzlement and pain. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She explained that her marriage had been a secret from the start, to all but her family—that her husband was a banker in New York, she had loved him once, and deeply, but now they were legally separated, with only the technicalities of divorce remaining.

Boris dropped his head to his arms. Under his breath he said something in Russian. She stroked his hair.

He stood abruptly and walked back outside. Martha stayed seated. A few moments later, Boris returned.

“ Ach , dear God,” he said. He laughed. He kissed her head. “Oh, what a mess we’re in. A married woman, a banker, a foreign diplomat’s daughter—I don’t think it could be worse. But we’ll figure it out somehow. Communists are used to doing the impossible. But you must help me.”

It was nearly sundown when they left the restaurant and began their drive back toward the city, the top still down. The day had been an important one. Martha recalled small details—the onrushing wind that tore her hair loose from its coil at the back of her head, and how Boris drove with his right arm over her shoulder, his hand cupping her breast, as was often his custom. The dense forests along the roads grew darker in the fading light and exuded a rich autumnal fragrance. Her hair flew behind her in tendrils of gold.

Though neither said so directly, both understood that something fundamental had occurred. She had fallen deeply for this man and could no longer treat him in the same way she treated her other conquests. She had not wanted this to happen, but it had, and with a man whom the rest of the world saw as unsuitable in the extreme.

Every November the Foreign Press Association in Berlin threw a dinner and ball at the Hotel Adlon, a glamorous affair to which many of the city’s most prominent officials, diplomats, and personalities were invited. The event was nicknamed the Little Press Ball because it was smaller and far less constrained than the annual banquet hosted by Germany’s domestic press, which had become even stuffier than usual due to the fact that the country’s newspapers were by now almost wholly under the control of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment. For the foreign correspondents the Little Press Ball had immense practical value. Wrote Sigrid Schultz, “It is always easier to pump a man for a story after he and his wife—if he has one—have been your guests and danced at your ball than if you see him only in business hours.” In 1933 the Little Press Ball was held on the evening of Friday, November 24, six days before the city’s American population would celebrate Thanksgiving.

Shortly before eight o’clock, the Adlon began receiving the first of a long procession of big cars, many with headlights the size of halved melons. Out stepped an array of senior Nazis, ambassadors, artists, filmmakers, actresses, writers, and of course the foreign correspondents themselves, from countries large and small, all bundled in big coats and furs against the damp, near-freezing air. Among the arrivals were the German state secretary Bernhard von Bülow; Foreign Minister Neurath; French ambassador François-Poncet; Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador; and of course the ubiquitous and gigantic Putzi Hanfstaengl. Here too came Bella Fromm, the “Auntie Voss” society columnist, for whom the banquet would prove to be edged with darkest tragedy, albeit of a kind grown increasingly common in the Berlin beyond public view. The Dodds—all four—arrived in their old Chevrolet; Hitler’s vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, came in a significantly larger and fancier car and, like Dodd, also brought his wife, daughter, and son. Louis Adlon, beaming in tux and tails, greeted each splendid arrival, while bellmen took away furs, coats, and top hats.

As Dodd was about to find out, in a milieu as supercharged as Berlin, where every public action of a diplomat accrued exaggerated symbolic weight, even a mere bit of conversational sparring across a banquet table could become the stuff of minor legend.

THE GUESTS MOVED into the hotel, first to the elegant drawing rooms for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, then to the winter-garden hall, beclouded with thousands of hothouse chrysanthemums. The room was always “painfully crowded,” in Schultz’s appraisal, but tradition required that the ball always be held at the Adlon. Custom also called for guests to arrive in formal wear but “without any display of orders or official rank,” as Fromm wrote in her diary, though a few guests anxious to display their enthusiasm for the National Socialist Party wore the drab brown of the Storm Troopers. One guest, a duke named Eduard von Koburg, commander of the SA’s Motorized Forces, walked around wearing a dagger given him by Mussolini.

The guests were shown to their seats at tables of a kind favored by banquet organizers in Berlin, so agonizingly narrow they put guests in arm’s reach of their peers at the opposite side. Such close quarters had the potential to create awkward social and political situations—putting, say, the mistress of an industrialist across from the man’s wife—so the hosts of each table made sure their seating plans were reviewed by various protocol officials. Some juxtapositions simply could not be avoided. The most important German officials had to be seated not only at the head table, which this year was hosted by the American correspondents, but also close to the captains of the table, Schultz and Louis Lochner, chief of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press, and to the table’s most prominent U.S. figure, Ambassador Dodd. Thus Vice-Chancellor Papen wound up sitting directly opposite Schultz, despite the fact that Papen and Schultz were known to dislike each other.