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so glad you’re still alive,” she said.
    Leo rushed into the flat with the rolls and flinched when he saw Geli alone with their uncle. “Wait for me, Uncle Adolf,” he said. “Don’t tell her anything more.” But when he took the rolls into the kitchen, Angela told him to get changed for dinner. Walking down the hallway, Leo called, “Two minutes!”
    Confidentially, Hitler leaned forward and told his niece one more story. “October,” he said, “1918.” In Belgium, near Werwick, his infantry regiment, filled to overflowing with defeatists and pessimists and future deserters, had been attacked by British artillery with a poison called mustard gas and his regiment was forced to retreat. Hitler had lost his voice and his face had swelled like a penny balloon until he was blinded. At a hospital in Pasewalk just outside Berlin, he’d heard the news of Germany’s surrender in the forest of Compiègne, and his heart had ached as it had only once before, after his mother had died in the agony of cancer. Would he ever see again? The question was no longer that. The question was: Would his beloved motherland die as his mother had?
    At that point Uncle Adolf placed a surprisingly damp hand on her knee as he said, “But, Angelika, as I was lying on my cot that night—and you must picture it: frightened, confused, full of hatred, in the blackest state of despair—a miracle came to pass! Like Joan of Arc, I heard voices. Each one crying out, ’Save Germany!’”
    Geli giggled, for she thought he was kidding, but his face was serious and his eyes were aflame with fury. She thought for a second that he might strike her.
    But he controlled his emotions and calmly said, “To be sure, it’s peculiar. Quite out of the ordinary. But you see, when I opened my eyes, I was no longer blind! And I vowed then and there that I would become a politician and offer my life in the hope of changing Germany’s fate.”
    “A politician?” she asked. She thought they were all aristocrats. She felt his hand staying on her knee. Would he waggle it as he did when he was teasing?
    “You see what these stories have in common? I am a child of providence, Fräulein Raubal.” He released his hand and smiled. “You will hear much about me. Just wait until my time comes.”

    Adolf failed to offer Angela money for food though his soldier’s pay had accrued to a tidy sum on the front and the Raubals’ poverty was as obvious as the canning jars they used for glassware. And yet she made him such a feast that even Adolf noticed, he who was like an infant in his alertness only to himself. Tucking a napkin at his throat and fanning it over his medals and ribbons, he smiled at a dining table filled with Tyrolean dumplings on sauerkraut, red beets in a horseradish cream, and four squabs on a bed of celery stalks and onions. And he said, “Such prodigality, Angela! Where is the fatted calf?”
    “Well, it’s not like we often see you, Corporal Hitler.”
    A fierce glare was flung at Angela, but then it softened as Hitler chose to pinion a squab with his fork and vulgarly dump it onto his dinner plate. And then he sawed so hard at the fowl with his knife that the flames trembled on their candlewicks. Would he be sucking his fingers next? Angela thought. The Raubals just stared, until with a strictness and confidence worthy of his father, Hitler said without lifting his gaze, “Everybody, begin.”
    Eating did not halt his talking. Only his listening seemed affected. Inquiry about Angela’s or Paula’s jobs, other opinions, or the children’s hobbies and schools never occurred to him as he told the Raubals and his sister that for a while he had served as a fence guard in a prisoners-of-war camp, near Traunstein, on the Austrian border. But higher-ups had become aware of his perspicacity and loyalty to Germany, even if it was now a republic headed by Jews, and he had been sent back to München to confirm the fidelity of Reichswehr soldiers by