Hitler's niece by Hansen

Author:Hansen [Hansen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Histoire
ISBN: 9780060932206
Published: 2000-08-09T07:00:00+00:00

On July 28th, they celebrated Angela Raubal’s forty-fifth birthday by letting her sleep in while Geli and Henny fabricated a breakfast of flambéed crêpe suzettes, orange sections and grapes, and a full pot of Italian espresso. Leo Raubal took a four a.m. train from Wien to get there in time, and was with them when they sneaked into Angela’s room with the food tray and woke her by singing the first verses of a song from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Angela’s favorite opera.

She was first astonished by the flooding sunshine and hunted for the alarm clock that her daughter had stolen in the night. “What time is it?”

“Half ten,” Geli said. “We let you sleep.”

With shock Angela then noticed her tall, nearly twenty-two-year-old son, and she started fussing with graying hair, that was as forked and twisted as seaweed. She gruffly said, “Aren’t you cruel children to surprise me like this.”

Leo grinned. “We thought about inviting in the others, too. They didn’t know the song.”

Angela heard Heinrich Hoffmann shouting a joke in the dining room, that Göring was the first man to ascend to a higher realm by means of a parachute. Many men heartily laughed. She held a sheet up over the front of her nightgown. “Who’s here?”

“Emil came,” Geli said. “And Putzi Hanfstaengl, all the way from France.”

“Also my father, as you hear,” said Henny. “And what’s-his-name, the man who lost his toes on the front.”

“Julius Schaub,” Geli said.

“To be with their leader,” Angela said. “Otherwise he might forget them. Are they hungry?”

Geli told her mother they’d been fed, and that the Bechstein’s chauffeur would be taking Angela and her friend Ilse Meirer to Salzburg for the day, so she ought to make herself beautiful.

“And what will you do with all those men?”

“We’re going to the Chiemsee for a picnic.”

Aching as she got out of bed, Angela avoided foul language with the slang, “Oh green nine.” And as she hobbled to the bathroom she said, “You ask too much of your old mother on her birthday.”

Geli changed into a fitted navy blue sundress with a white geometric pattern, white ankle-high socks, and brown oxfords. She brushed her hair for the third time that morning and went downstairs to the dining room.

Putzi Hanfstaengl was now a Herr Doktor, having finally gotten his D. Phil. degree in history with a dissertation on the Austrian Netherlands and Bavaria in the eighteenth century; but he was talking with Hoffmann about his family firm’s photography of the art masterpieces of the Louvre, a permission just recently given them by the director, Henri Verne, a nephew of the famous novelist.

“So you’ll be rich!” Hoffmann said.

“If the books sell, possibly.”

“We’ll have to celebrate with champagne.”

Julius Schaub frowned. “Always the drinking.”

Joking with Hoffmann, Putzi referred to Schaub as “Il Penseroso,” but it fell flat because no one else there knew Italian.

“Who’ll want beer?” Geli asked, and four hands flew up.

Emil stood. “I’ll help.”

She shyly smiled and felt Emil watching the feminine tilt of her hips as she went to the kitchen ahead of him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.