Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  To escape him, Bettina turned toward the table, and picked up a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra which lay there. ‘I suppose this is where you get your inspiration,’ she said, with almost retaliatory zest. ‘It’s rubbish. The worst book he ever wrote.’ They argued vociferously, with growing heat on both sides. Until suddenly he kissed her. Kissed her hard on the lips. Too hard.

  She didn’t struggle. Only looked at him incredulously and then turned on her heel and left.

  She did not allow herself to think about it except to say. ‘So that’s that for Herr Johannes Bahr’.

  But contrary to all her expectations he had arrived at the Eberhardt home in Bogenhausen the following evening, had even donned a stiff collar and cravat for the occasion. Bettina was both amazed and singularly nervous. Her laugh pealed too high, she lost the thread of her sentences. Johannes, by contrast, was all complaisance and rectitude. In his evening clothes, even his face had taken on a strangely aristocratic cast. When the time came to leave, he held her hand only a fraction longer than might be necessary. Or so she had chosen to think. And he extended an invitation to her and to Klaus to drop into the studio at their leisure.

  The next day Bettina had sought out Petra. Over a lunchtime cup of coffee between Petra’s hospital rounds, Bettina had probed, albeit casually. Her curiosity about Johannes had reached a new peak. She discovered from Petra that Bruno Adler had indeed been right: Johannes was the son of the famous jurist Karl Gustav Bahr, that relations between them were particularly tense.

  But she learned little more than that. Because she had suffered over the years from scandal mongers, Petra shunned gossip. That day, she was even more than usually reticent. She also evaded any questions about her own involvement with Johannes.

  Then, just before they had parted, Petra sighed a little mournfully and apropos of nothing, suddenly said, ‘I ‘m getting a little too old for Don Juans, don’t you think?’

  Bettina had immediately interpreted this as a reference to Johannes. Alone again, she had been filled with a profound sense of injury and a mounting anger. That kiss. Merely the trifling gesture of a Don Juan. She determined to put all thoughts of the scoundrel out of her mind.

  But it had not proved so easy. That very evening over dinner, Klaus had said, ‘I was browsing in the bookstore and what do you think I found? An article in a 1909 issue of Future by our new friend Johannes Bahr.

  ‘Interesting?’ Bettina had scalded her tongue over too hot a spoonful of soup.

  ‘Quite, I think. More your sort of thing.’ Klaus had shrugged, ‘On the liberation of women, though he doesn’t focus on your particular question of mothers. I suspect he’s more interested in having women independent so they can liberate men,’ he had paused then, an odd smile on his face as he waited for her response, and when it hadn’t come, he had gone on, ‘I may drop round and look at his paintings tomorrow. Would you like to come?’

  ‘Not this week. I’m too busy,’ Bettina had kept her voice resolutely even.

  For the next three days, she managed to drown herself in work. A crisis had helped. One of the mothers of the nursery children had failed to pick up her little one at the requisite time, had seemingly abandoned him. Arrangements had to be made, the mother found. The crisis contained, Bettina’s thoughts had willy nilly reverted to Johannes.

  The importance Johannes and his kiss had taken on in Bettina’s busy life was due to the fact that it was only the second kiss of that kind she had ever received. The first had long since ceased to have any meaning for her, though it had effectively helped to shape the direction of her life and her ideas. Its bestower had been her philosophy tutor, a man whose rooms she had gone to regularly and at her own insistence once a week during her sixteenth and seventeenth years. The philosophy lesson was the most exciting event in Bettina’s calendar. She worshipped the bearded middle-aged man who was her tutor, loved his learned disquisitions which treated her as an equal and inquiring mind. She grew breathless with the mental effort he demanded of her as they read through Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and even, dangerously, a little Nietzsche. Beside that struggle for understanding, everything else in her life seemed pallid, frivolous.

  The eruption of physical passion one early Spring afternoon, in the midst of what was for Bettina fervent intellectual speculation, had shocked and stirred her intensely, before turning to a nausea which rose in her throat and blocked her speech. She was disgusted by the beseeching look in the eyes of the man who had seemed a giant; disgusted by the rapid rise and fall of his breath, by the quiver in the moist hand he had placed on her arm. She had fled, taken to her bed for a week, and another, refused food. She had never returned to the tutor again.

  Her mother had died shortly after. This death somehow became entangled with her own moment of blinding physical passion, with her tutor’s disgrace and disappearance from her life. In determining to go to Zurich to study, Bettina left all this behind her.

  In Zurich she devoted herself ardently to her studies. She had a bottomless hunger for learning and she fed it not only with books but with friends. Men and women alike were drawn to her, to the energy she radiated. Amongst the latter, were a number of older, emancipated women who took her in as one of themselves. They shaped her interests and her understanding. She began to nurture a half-formed and magical notion that virginity was the very stuff of a woman’s independence. The inner armour of a Joan of Arc. To have no unseemly and overwrought ties to a man was to enable one’s soul to soar freely in that higher sphere that great minds inhabited.

  It was not that Bettina did not like men. Indeed, she worshipped them, when their qualities made them worthy of her worship. She could sit for hours at the feet of some aged professor and with her judicious queries, her empathy, transform the merely talented into geniuses. For this characteristic, her attentions were much sought. If any admirer should overstep the bounds of propriety, one freezing look from the lofty Bettina was always enough to cool any unwanted ardour. In the small Zurich world, she developed a reputation for brilliance, a reputation which followed her to Germany and grew with her well-penned articles.

  When she had accepted Klaus’s marriage proposal four years ago, in part to assuage her father’s earnest imprecations and the interference of her Aunt and other well-intentioned friends, it was on a single condition. She would maintain her freedom: she would not sleep with him. Nor would she welcome any advances of that sort until she signalled her readiness. And that day might never come. She couldn’t promise. If necessary, she had intimated with slight distaste, he could satisfy his desires elsewhere. They would be companions, loyal partners in the adventure of life.

  All this she had made amply clear to him and cautioned him to think over.

  Klaus who had been devoted to Bettina for over two years and was as deeply in love with her as he was in awe of her would have agreed to almost any conditions. He was a man with only a modest sense of his own worth. At the university, his innovative work in pathology had assured him a respectable place - but one which over the last ten years he had been too unassertive to capitalize on.

  His passions, apart from Bettina, went into collecting. He was fascinated by plants and particularly flowers. Their intricate detail, their endless innovation, it seemed to him echoed the complex and mysterious changes wrought by disease in the human tissue he examined under the microscope. On their extended honeymoon, when they had travelled to the Far East, he had filled sketchbooks with precise and beautiful drawings of thousands of species new to him. In the country, he had a roomful of books with exquisitely detailed illustrations of the flora of different lands. His garden and conservatory gave physical existence to a smattering of these specimens, all tended as lovingly as his work of cataloguing.

  For the rest, Klaus was happy simply to be part of Bettina’s life. He was proud of her accomplishments, pleased to be able to put his wealth at her disposal either for the benefit of any number of projects or simply to create a home in which the
ir many friends - drawn as he well knew by her flame - could gather.

  As for that other side of life, he had begun by thinking that Bettina would as a matter of course, once they lived side by side, retract her condition. At first, he had set aside one evening a month when in the subtlest way he knew, he played court to her. Gradually, the periods between such evenings lengthened. He began to think that he no longer knew how to make any approach. It saddened him, since he would have liked to have children. But after a time the situation between them began to take on the guise of normality. As if all married couples lived this way and no other was imaginable.

  It was her husband Bettina was thinking of as she sat tensely waiting for Johannes to leave his canvas. She had told Klaus nothing of her six, or was it now seven, visits here, except once to mention casually and rather deprecatingly, that she had been to see Johannes’s paintings.

  ‘Oh? I’m considering buying one,’ Klaus had replied. He had lately begun to purchase the work of young artists, and Bettina, knowing that his eye was far better than hers, rarely interfered. On this occasion, she simply let the remark pass with a half-voiced, ‘That’s nice.’

  But the situation was becoming intolerable. In her own eyes she was above lying. But how to tell Klaus of that first kiss, now repeated severalfold? How to tell him that she had begun to feel that her internal vow of virginity was foundering? For tell him she somehow must. And love Johannes, she had begun to think she must as well.

  Johannes turned to her now at last.

  ‘Thank you for waiting.’ He took her hand, stroked it, let his fingers caress just beyond the point where her starched cotton blouse met her wrist.

  She sat still for a moment meeting the intensity of his gaze and then wrenched her hand abruptly away. ‘I’ve read your article on women.’ She rose from the chair, turned her back on him, played with the assortment of brushes on the table. ‘It’s all wrong. Wrong I tell you. A ministry dedicated to the liquidation of the bourgeois family! Ha! Pleasure as the only source of value! What rubbish!’

  He laughed. ‘So you don’t agree that self-sacrifice and self-denial are simply part of the moral corruption of patriarchy?’

  ‘Self-denial is essential or we would have anarchy.’

  ‘A little anarchy might be a blessing,’ he was rueful. ‘You haven’t questioned enough Bettina. What is this self-denial but a postponed selfishness in the name of a promised greater good which never comes and deadens us in the process? So that we cease to be able to desire.’ He paused for a moment. His voice grew lower, ‘It is feeling, pleasure, passion which will save us.’

  She veered round to face him. ‘Passion is not a salvation.’

  ‘No,’ he half-conceded, looked at her intently. ‘Not if it’s a guilty secret torn from the tyranny of marriage. Though, even then, perhaps…’

  ‘Nonsense. Just look around you. Look at those poor single women, abandoned women, who bring their illegitimate waifs to our nurseries.’

  Johannes’s eyes gleamed. Bettina’s attacks excited him even more than the way her neck curved long, stem-like from her tensed slender shoulders. It was a new form of excitement for him and it had taken him over quickly. The quickness had surprised him: she was not, with her studious seriousness, his type of woman. Yet the fury with which arguments he couldn’t always counter leapt from those delicate lips so roused him, that he had lost interest in all others. As always, he was torn now between taking her into his arms, feeling the oddly animal nervousness of her proud body and prolonging the stimulation of the verbal duel.

  He hesitated. ‘They are victims. Victims of a male order in which women have been coerced into bartering their bodies, their pleasure, in the hope of security. But for us, who breathe a different air, who are stronger…’

  ‘What different air?’ She began to pace away from him. ‘More nonsense. I breathe the same air. I…’

  He put his arms around her, embraced her tightly from behind, his lips in her hair. ‘Sniff, Bettina. Smell it,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘The air of freedom. High. Pure. We shall bask in it. Be reborn out of our tawdry little everydaynesses.’

  ‘Mine are not tawdry,’ she continued to resist him, though she could feel the pressure of his body beginning to confuse her.

  ‘No, perhaps not,’ his voice was husky. ‘That is where you will save me. He turned her within the circle of his arms. She looked into those wintry blue eyes almost on a level with hers, felt the force of his kiss, of his hands, so that her body in its quivering response became a stranger to her. ‘Yes, you’ll save me,’ he murmured. ‘Transform me. Fuel my work.’

  She was lulled by his voice, as much as she was impelled by the sensations he roused in her, stronger each time she saw him. ‘Save him,’ she thought dimly, ‘saved by him’. The words spoke to her, released something in her, as if a residual guilt had been cleansed, as if the animal act could be transfigured into an angelic mission.

  ‘Speak your desire, Bettina. It’s important to me that you speak it. Especially you who live so much in your words.’ He was holding her so tightly now, she could hardly breathe. ‘Tell me. Tell me, not like some chaste little virgin, who’s frightened of her desire, but like a free woman, boldly. Tell me when.’

  With a violent movement, Bettina broke from his arms. Summoning all her dignity, she looked at him coldly. ‘But I am a chaste little virgin as you so blithely put it.’

  Johannes stared at her, comprehension coming only slowly to his face. ‘I see.’ He paced towards the window, looked out on the hot roofs of houses.

  ‘I see. I’m sorry. I didn’t know,’ he muttered after a moment.

  How could he have known? She spoke so openly, so familiarly about things, about sex. He recalled his first impression of her, an intuition of a woman who was more advanced in her ideas than in her body, his inclination to paint her as Athena. It was as if since that first intuition he had been led astray. Damn it, what human misery these bourgeois marriages hid. Not only his parent’s generation, but his own. Yes, under the shelter of all those roofs he could see before him, crippling unnatural distortions of intimacy were being played out. And they were at the source of the general social distemper. He was right. Only a sexual revolution, a revolution in personal relations would alter things. Even for Bettina. He should take her here, now, ground those airy, if bold, notions of hers in some material knowledge.

  He turned back to look at her. No, she was too proud, too fine. She would run. And he wanted her. Yes, he suddenly realized, he wanted her even more now, the challenge, the strange rectitude of her, wanted to see how she would come to terms with her passion, understand it.

  He moved towards her. ‘It doesn’t change anything Bettina,’ he said softly. ‘Nothing in the way I feel. Each time is always the first time. For me too. When you’re ready. Soon.’ He clasped her hand.

  She pulled it away abruptly, feeling humiliated, feeling for the first time that her chosen virginity was a failing, like a revelation of some secret ignorance. ‘I must go,’ she said icily. She lifted the briefcase she always carried, and brandished it to her breast like a shield, as she fled down the stairs.

  He was left with a greater sense of uncertainty than any he had ever experienced about a woman he desired.

  In an effort both to entertain and educate her sister, Bettina decided later that week to take her along on one of her nursery visits. She had an ulterior motive. With Anna and Miss Isabel present, there would be no temptation to drop in on Johannes on her way home: she had decided not to see him until her thoughts had assumed some semblance of order.

  One of the two nurseries whose work she coordinated and helped to sponsor was located in a poor northwestern corner of the Schwabing district. It, like its sister establishments, had a double premise at its base. Bettina firmly believed that if one kindled the taste for education at as early an age as possible, it would blaze later and produce better individuals. She was also convinced that the impoverished mother’s lot had to b
e eased for her own as well as the child’s good.

  Most of the mothers of Bettina’s nursery children were effectively unmarried, either because their husbands seemed to be consistently absent or because they had never existed. In print, Bettina argued the case of unwedded mothers, urging that these women were as moral as their married sisters, that the reproaches society covered them with were hypocritical, part of an entire edifice of double standards which sheltered men while humiliating women. There was something severely askew in the morals of a city where as many as forty percent of children were born to unmarried mothers, who led abject lives as a result.

  With the mothers themselves, as well as their children, Bettina was sympathetic but firm. The children loved her for it; the mothers, though generally grateful, were less certain. With her clear sense of priorities, Bettina had a way of tackling what she saw as the disorder of their lives and introducing a structure they were not certain they could live up to.

  Anna had been markedly tentative about accompanying Bettina to her nurseries. Things were not easy between the sisters. They had already argued once at the dressmaker’s, where Anna, thinking she could at last give vent to her own taste, had pined over the newest oriental fashions, flowing trousers and loose gowns in wondrous tints of lemon yellow and orange crepe de chine; whereas Bettina had insisted on practical needs, a tailored travelling suit which seemed to require a maximum of stays, a heather evening dress with a minimum of ornament, and so it went on, until Anna lost all interest and began to resent the countless visits to the dressmaker all this required.

  She would have been perfectly content to while away the hours until her return to Vienna by losing herself in a maze of streets with Miss Isabel or by watching life go by from the tram car on which Klaus had readily acquiesced to accompany them. Happier still, to sit in Johannes Bahr’s studio and glimpse the magic by which paint became image, had her sister not firmly quashed that notion.