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.

Adi can’t tell I’ve been hastily kissed. Nor would he care. He’s immensely happy because he just had a night without dreams. Dreams disturb him. He sleeps so little, two or three hours. He’s afraid some errant thought will enter his subconscious and to avoid any invasion of his mind, he sleeps as little as possible.

Adi begins the day hopefully predicting there will be a rivalry between the Russians and Western Allies. That happens in a coalition. “Do you think the English will permit all Germany to go to Russia? They’ll fight among themselves, and we’ll be triumphant.” This is a device Adi uses, never settling into the moment but living in the days ahead. Projecting the future, he remains calm in the present. He tells me his prediction so I’ll enjoy eating the poppy seed strudel that Fräulein Manzialy baked with ingredients she’s saved over many weeks. He holds out a covered butter dish and instructs me to lift the lid. Underneath is a gift of a new toothbrush so hard to get these days in Berlin as even the big department stores are depleted. “Today, we broadcast on the Volksempfanger to our civilians that thousands of English soldiers in our prison camps will prefer to fight with us rather than fall into the savage hands of the Russians.” And I eat a second piece of strudel.

He holds out an iron that was given to him by Bormann. A Berlin woman was pressing the uniform of her son when she was killed. Her face was blasted off, but her arms remained ever ready, the iron clenched in mangled fingers. The good German housewife, careful to first take out the wrinkles in her son’s clothes before leaving the Reich forever. Now the iron is a monument as Adi puts it on a shelf next to the picture of his mother.

Nothing is without purpose. Adi tells me this over and over. You learn that when you paint. What if there was no oxygen? Oil painting would be impossible. Air is needed to harden the linseed oil. That’s the science of painting. The science of war is about little things like the air a mother breathes and a simple iron or a common domestic object like the bathtub. Napoleon’s crucial decisions were made in a tub where he always soaked his scabby skin.

Generals cause him the most pain, trying to get around his orders and making up maneuvers of their own. With the Russians practically on top of us, they expect Germany to surrender. This makes him furious and irritates his already spastic colon. Adi is fond of recalling the artist John Singer Sergeant who would dart behind a special screen in his studio in the middle of a portrait painting to vent his anger at the sitter—glaring and making faces from this sanctuary. Adi ordered Bormann to find him a “sargeant screen” so he could stick out his tongue and wag his fist at General Krebs, General Weidling and all the others. Bormann wrote up a screen requisition, but so far none has materialized.

It would have helped to have a screen to dash behind when dealing with Wallis Simpson. She and her husband first came to visit us at Berghof in 1937. The duke had told everybody that a war between England and Germany was out of the question, so we all rather liked him for that even though Adi hated skinny Wallis for what he called her “fake-countess insignia.” Ribbentrop, whom Adi let be ambassador to England, adored Wallis and constantly sent her flowers using party money. Adi put a stop to that, and Ribby had to bring her apfelstrudels that the Chancellery cook made for the Reich staff. Ribby didn’t believe in spending his own money on official matters.

What did the duke see in her? I’m amazed at the preference of men, particularly men in high places. They’re the ones most easily won over by simple flirtation. I know that from my own experience observing men in Munich. Goebbels enjoyed telling me that Napoleon was easily won over by the ladies. Apparently, the emperor’s clever way with military things left him more vulnerable in the bedroom. Not that Mein Führer is easily under the spell of women. Never. He’s always in control. Even when he’s out of control. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Adi invited the duke to the Berghof, but beforehand I supervised a planting of rose bushes as there were too many urns of privets that made the entrance look like an old churchyard. I was to contend with Wally and relieve Adi of that odious duty. Before their arrival, there were weeks of negotiations between our housekeeper and the duke’s butler. Protocol was important.

After Wally lit a clove cigarette with little Turkish wax matches, she unpacked her Sivres snuffboxes and scattered them on every available space in the guest bedroom. The poor maid, Jutta, had to dust them each morning for a week. “No German woman would stoop to such possessions,” Adi fumed, adding, “she and that Duke are like two boys.”

I asked Wally how she got the duke interested in her, and she replied matter-of-factly that he was smitten by the rose-coated almonds that she served him at their first dinner party.

“Was it love at first sight?”

“For the duke, perhaps.”

“He was inspired by almonds?”

“He ate them in a wing chair. Even in the back seat of his black Bugatti. They were no ordinary almonds.”

“Rose-coated and rose-scented,” I added.

“Certainly worth the money.” Leaning back on an ebony chair in the dining room, the duchess’ moss crepe blouse pulled tightly against her flat chest. Her stick legs were spread apart. A full skirt—with a knife pleat in the front—bunched up around her knees. Slight bulging appeared at her crotch, a pouch mysteriously prominent. She smiled with thin lips. “Do you wear a support?” she asked.

“For what?”

“For this.” The duchess softly caressed the bulge between her thighs.

“I don’t believe I need one.”

“Surely a German woman today has liberated herself from any so-called ‘Versailles’ apparel.”

“So… when did you know you loved him?” I asked shyly trying to change the subject.

“Is there a precise moment for such things?”

“There was for me.”

“I find it hard to believe a German woman would be so impetuous.”

“The moment was exactly after he had dedicated a hospital and stooped to hold a child’s face in his hands.”

“I would naturally assume there are many hospitals in Germany.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“Are you Germans not scientific people? Catching horse excrement for tomato plants. I think you call that pferdeapfel.” The duchess shook her head in emphasis, and her straight hair with its center part did not move. She lifted a hand heavy with rings to smooth away an invisible stray wisp from her forehead.

“What beautiful rings. I’d love to see your jewelry box someday.”

“My dear Fräulein, I keep my jewels in buckets.”

I began to pour her a cup of tea from a little side table set up with refreshments by some nameless adjutant when Wallis screamed: “Fräulein! One pours the milk in first!” Though she can ignore murderous royals, there is no forgiveness for a bad tea ritual.

In a grand flourish of adding milk first, I gave her a new cup of tea and a plate of yellow frosted cakes. She took a dainty bite, and I asked if I could photograph her. She murmured: “I don’t drink and masticate for film.”

Jumping up from the chair, she began to dance, agile and dainty. Even though the duke was in the study talking to Adi, she pretended to dance with him, singing his favorite tune: “Oh, love, love, loving again, no, never, never, never.” She stopped abruptly, as if reminded of her royal duties. Looking under the long table, she sniffed in rebuke. “A table should be sprayed underneath with Chanel.”

“And why is that?” I asked.

“One has to honor undersides just as a cucumber can never be served with a pip. At dinner tonight, Fräulein, all the candles on the table must be at the duke’s eye level. And I sincerely hope that the gold fruit bowl on the dining table will be removed. Platinum for evenings.”

“We use that bowl all the time.”

“Duties go beyond sentiment, just as I assume you will not be serving the duke something as mountainous and regionally common as roast porcupine, ragout of bear paws, and moose muzzle.”

“We are serving marinated beef as you requested and…”

Interrupting me, the duchess began an aria about the collection of China pugs and other possessions that she longed to display at her home. “I have Aubusson carpets, thousands of them that I would adore to spread on my floors. Hundreds of jersey dresses, many glitter swing jackets, fifty Petersham fan brim hats, twenty-five Chinese shawls after Stiebel, twenty-two lipstick-red topcoats from Nicoll of Regent Street, seven mannish felt hats, two dozen amusing looking clogs with thick wooden soles covered in rubber, a hundred pastel turbans, a half-dozen suits from Bon Marché, Liverpool. There’s simply not enough room in our five houses. One’s home should never be the Ufitsi Museum. Everything is stored in a warehouse in Zurich. One does worry about the safety of warehouses. Stealing is rampant. You wouldn’t believe my twenty-two-carat gold bathtub in Antibes was hacked at by a crook like some demented dentist pounding away on a gold tooth. How many carats the thief got away with is now up to the insurance people to determine.”