‘Yes, that’s good,’ the older woman murmured. In the mirror Anna could see that her eyes were half-closed, her lips moving towards her ear. She whispered, warm breath, tickling, tickling, ‘This is how we begin to prepare ourselves for our husbands. So easy. So easy to have pleasure.’ She guided Anna’s hand downwards, down to her own mound, the same sure circular motions. Anna’s breath caught. Two hands, her own, Katarina’s, she could no longer tell them apart, touching, teasing, delicious waves lapping at her, lips on her neck, light, light as feathers. And then that hand guiding, allowing her to touch, the silk of a chemise, another fuller breast, the tautness of a stomach, round, firm, the fragrance. Anna leaned against her dizzily.
‘Yes, we’ll lie down a little now.’ Katarina led her to the bed. ‘But just to rest. This is perhaps enough for a first lesson.’
Anna placed her head on Katarina’s lap, soft. Felt those cool fingers gently stroking her hair again, her temples, thought of wide lawns, moist in morning freshness, breathed in green scent. And then suddenly she remembered. Another lap, other hands, but the same, stroking, consoling. A tearful child. Herself. In her mother’s lap. A blonde head, looking down at her, worried, tender. ‘Poor Annerl. A nasty fall. That naughty horse. There there.’ The tears pricked at her eyes again.
‘Will you come for another lesson, Anna?’ Katarina roused her from her reverie. There was a new note of urgency in her voice.
‘If I may.’
‘You may,’ she said with mock imperiousness, then laughed abruptly. ‘The Professor won’t be happy.’
‘Why do you go to him? Anna asked.
Katarina rose, slowly pulled on her gown, pinned up her hair, shrugged. ‘Because he’s interesting. He teaches me things, though I think he thinks he’s trying to cure me,’ her face grew mischievous, animated. ‘It’s like a little chess game, but played out on me.’
‘Cure you of what?’
She laughed again. ‘Why of this.’ She waved her arms dramatically. ‘My pleasure. For my own good of course.’
Anna, not certain she understood, wanted to ask more, but Katarina was in full dramatic flood. ‘Do you know what he said to me the other day? It’s a gem. Perfect. He said, probably thinking of our husbands, “There where men love,” ’ her voice took on a deeper register, ‘“they rarely desire; and where they desire, they do not love.” Now that will give you something to think about until we meet again.’ She hugged her. ‘Next Wednesday?’
‘And women?’ Anna asked, already halfway down the stairs, not wanting to leave her, gripped by this turn in their conversation.’What does he say about women?’
Katarina arched a single dark eyebrow. ‘I shall ask him tomorrow. But the Professor isn’t always quite so good on women.’
Over the next weeks, Anna sought out her new friend whenever it was possible. They went to galleries together, to the theatre and sometimes to that bedroom which had taken on for her the aura of an enchanted cave filled with a treasure trove of delights. She had learned to be bolder in her caresses, to chart the ebb and flow of Katarina’s pleasure as well as her own. The thought of it all when she was outside that magic space made her heart beat secretly faster.
But perhaps more than anything, she liked to rest in Katarina’s arms and listen to that animated voice telling stories, revealing the world. It was while they were lying together in this way one day, that Katarina once again took on the Professor’s voice to relay that women blossomed on secrets.
Anna wondered. She thought sometimes that she would like to tell Bruno what she had learned, to show him. But ever since the Doctor’s visit, he had not come to her room at night, as if he had taken advice, were under orders not to hurry. Sometimes, without thinking, because she was so full of Katarina’s witty voice, she would begin to repeat to him some saying of hers. But the repetition inevitably brought a flush to her face, made her voice thick, so that she would find herself giggling stupidly. Bruno didn’t seem to notice. He was being kind to her, so kind that she sometimes had the impression he was treating her as a convalescent. She didn’t mind. Her life had taken on such an amplitude of late that even her dreams seemed richer. And in the morning she woke to the heady scent of Katarina’s perfume.
Then, on a warm Friday evening in early June, the bubble suddenly burst. Bruno and she were having dinner together on the terrace when he cleared his throat in a way Anna had come to associate with an announcement she might not altogether like.
He folded his napkin carefully. ‘Anna, there’s something we must talk about. Your friend…’
Anna had an intuition of disaster. She dropped her spoon with a clatter. ‘Sorry. Yes?’ she murmured.
‘I want you to stop seeing Frau Hofer.’
Something snapped in her. ‘Whatever for?’ Her voice was strident, unnatural.
‘Because. You must,’ he said firmly.
So they had been discovered, she thought. In herself, in the magic of that room, she had never felt they were doing anything wrong. But imagining Bruno spying on that scene Anna shivered.
‘I know you’ve grown close to her. She’s a fine woman.’
Anna looked up at him, confused now.
‘But her husband,’ Bruno continued, shook his dark head. ‘he’s got himself mixed up in some shady dealings. With some Croatian nationalists.’ He scowled. ‘It’s bound to hit the papers soon. There’s been embezzlement.’
‘But that’s no reason for me to stop seeing Katarina. It’s not her fault. She’ll need her friends.’
Bruno’s large face took on a ferocity she rarely saw in it. He rose to his full height, his eyes glinting. ‘You are my wife, Anna. And as such my representative. Neither I nor you can be seen to be having any dealings with the Hofer’s. That’s final.’
With a scrape of her chair, Anna rushed from the table. For the first time since her marriage, she locked the door to her room.
The next morning, she stole downstairs early, hoping that Bruno might still be asleep and that she could telephone without him seeing. What a nuisance that it was Saturday and that he would be here all day.
On the breakfast table in the morning room, there was a letter lying next to her place. She tore it open. Katarina. The note was all too brief.
‘The news may already have reached you of Hansel’s difficulties. We shall be leaving Vienna tomorrow for I don’t know quite how long. I’ll write when I can. And miss you.’
Anna trembled. She folded the note back into its envelope slowly. But then with a sudden burst of decision, she ran from the room. Karl would drive her. She would go to Katarina now.
At the foot of the stairs, she almost bumped into Bruno. He blocked her way.
‘Good morning, Anna. I hope sleep has restored your reason.’
She avoided his eyes.
‘A letter from someone?’
Anna knew he was asking to see it, but she sheltered the note in the folds of her skirt.
‘From Frau Hofer, is it?’
She nodded, unable to lie in response to a direct question.
‘Fine. You must answer it straight away, on both our behalfs, and say how sorry we are about her situation, but how she must understand it is impossible for us to see her.’
He took her arm, gently enough, and guided her towards the library, the secretaire. ‘I’ll wait, Anna.’
The tears rose in her eyes. ‘There’s no point. They’re leaving Vienna tomorrow.’ She turned to him, stubbornly confronted him. ‘I want to see her.’
‘That’s not possible, my dear, as I’ve explained.’ He scrutinized her as if seeing something in her he had never noticed before. Then, in a softer voice, he said, ‘I shall ask Karl to deliver the letter to her as soon as it’s written. There. Will that make you happier?’
Anna felt that a little piece of her was dying forever.
Chapter Five
The shot that was fired at the Austrian Archduke in the small Balkan town of Sarajevo and which marked the beginning of a war t
he dimensions of which the world had never known also marked the end of Bettina’s love affair with Johannes. She was not unaware, in retrospect, of the irony of this linkage of dates, of the triviality of her little personal moment in comparison with the movement of history. But so it had been. On the very day in which she had read of the Archduke’s assassination, she had woken with the sense of an imminent ending. Indeed, in the very act of reading the papers, the phrases she would use in her letter to Johannes were forming themselves in her mind.
The decision, the determination to make a break had been shaping itself within her for some months. She had begun to hate, not Johannes himself perhaps, but his need of her, this dark, insistent, inexorable need which acted itself out in their meetings in what were now almost ritualized ways. It would always begin with an argument, friendly enough at first, in which they exchanged views about this or that. Then something she said would unleash a vituperative barrage from him, her fairly innocuous words acting as a catalyst to a destructive torrent of nihilist utterances - about a person, an idea, a way of seeing, a movement.
The content was almost irrelevant in the face of that destructive emotion, so that by the end of it she felt flayed, the very fabric of her being rent. And only then would he make love to her, slow, worshipping, mounting in passion, higher ever higher, until she thought she could bear it no more. And then at the apogee, his lips buried in her tangled hair, he would whisper, his voice uncanny in its need, ‘Save me, Bettina, save me.’
No. She could endure it no more. Confronted by that endlessly repeated need, she felt spent, exhausted. She was haunted too by the sense that he was cracking, that she could do nothing for him, that she had to flee before the crack widened to swallow her as well.
It had not always been like that. No. At the beginning, in those first months of discovery, it had been unutterably beautiful. She had understood then what he had meant before their coming together, when he had talked of inhabiting a purer air, the transport out of the ordinary bounds of identity into a different keener self which was at once part of everything. She had felt free, powerful, alive to the movements of her newly awakened body, to the world. And alive to him, the taut energy of him, the beauty of his limbs, his eyes, the layers and depths of them, like the sea, the caress of his voice, his hands. Alive too, to his canvases, seeing them as if for the first time.
And there had been so many canvases those first months, as many she sometimes thought, as the occasions and sites of their couplings. Every time she returned to Seehafen from the city, there were more as if while the world turned icy and white, snowbound around them, he had frenziedly to replenish it with the colour it had lost.
The work on the extension had had to be postponed until warmer weather. Only the foundations were in place when the first snows came. None of them, innocents that they were, had considered this eventuality. Or perhaps Klaus had, but had wanted to seize the moment, had wanted to help Johannes all those months ago. Help her. For she was still convinced that he had intended it all.
She had told him of course. Told him right after that first night. Had walked into the conservatory where he was tending his plants and simply stated it. ‘I have slept with Johannes.’
‘Oh?’ he had looked at her for a moment. She couldn’t read his face, didn’t want to then.
‘I simply wanted you to know,’ she said and then turned and left him. She couldn’t have borne questions, wouldn’t tamper with the sense of magic in which she floated.
She had stayed in Seehafen for that whole first week, and then after that returned every week for a few days. She had a vague sense of Klaus’s approval. He didn’t speak to her about Johannes and she did nothing to disrupt the companionable order of their married life together, except to change the day of their athomes to Wednesday. In fact, in those first months, she had worked with a new energy, written a dozen articles, made plans for a new nursery, addressed women’s meetings. She felt exhilarated and the climax of that exhilaration as well as its fuel was the time she spent with Johannes.
Klaus would sometimes accompany her on the journey to Seehafen. The first time, she had been nervous, but he had been easy with Johannes, had behaved like a benevolent, even indulgent host or father, who turned a blind eye to the personal affairs of his guests, his children. Sometimes indeed, on those weekends, she had felt jealous of the time Johannes spent with him. The two men seemed to have so much to say to each other: Johannes passionately evoking visions of a new art, the vanguard of a new world order, in which the creative spark in each individual would ignite, burn; Klaus listening, occasionally questioning, assenting.
It was on the anniversary of their wedding in February that she had had a sudden insight into Klaus’s deeper thinking about her. They had been to the opera and then to dinner. At home, at the door of her room, he had taken her hand, held it. ‘Now Bettina, now that you are so changed,’ he looked away, too delicate to make any specific reference, ‘would you consider…’ he made a vague gesture, looked at her with eyes full of longing. ‘I would so like a child,’ he murmured.
Out of compassion, out of her new freedom, she had put her arms around him, felt moist lips seeking hers. But her stomach heaved at the touch of this different, this alien male body. She drew away, trying to find words that wouldn’t come. ‘I can’t, Klaus.’
He looked so sad.
‘Not now,’ she added, trying to make it easier. ‘But I’m loyal to you, loyal to the terms of our contract. I shan’t leave you. Unless you want it.’
‘No, no,’ his voice was strangled. ‘I don’t want it.’
Only as she said it, did she first recognize that indeed she had no desire to leave Klaus, to live with Johannes. There was something too wild about him, too unstable. Klaus was her home, her life as she believed in it, with all its projects, all its ideals. He had taken a risk on her and Johannes, gambled, perhaps lost. She respected him for the risk.
It was in March or April that things began to change. After Johannes had been to Berlin for his exhibition. She knew that he had seen his father, though he refused to speak of that, only fumed about the hideousness of life in that city, of the stupid burghers with their functional briefcases, their officiousness, their watches, their blindness to the misery around them, their equal blindness to beauty.
She knew too that the reviews of his work had been scurrilous. She had read only two - one that spoke of the crass indulgences of inebriated youth; another that spoke in soaring generalities about decadence and disruptive elements, the lack of respect for aesthetic order. Johannes would not talk about this directly either. But the change in him was palpable.
As the leaves burst from their buds and the flowers began to scent the earth, he seemed to lose all interest in his work. There were no new canvases to meet her visits. He spent his time with the builders, happy enough in their presence, but scathing as soon as they had gone about the actualization of his own plan, daily changing his mind about details, paring them away, so that the structure which took shape was far simpler than what he had originally conceived.
Then he lost interest in that as well. He began to spend time in Munich, rented a new studio, started to call on her at home, telephone at work, disrupting the order of her life with his exhortations, demanding to see her at impossible times.
And then there was the uncanny frenzy of his lovemaking. It frightened her, left her feeling obliterated, used-up. What had started as liberation had begun to have all the characteristics of destruction.
She would try, Bettina thought, to express some of this in her letter. But not all. No. Some things were better left unexpressed. She would simply tell him that she still believed in him, had faith in him, but felt her own life was at stake. And she had to make use of that.
Of the baby she had just discovered in this last month she was carrying, she would make no mention.
Johannes sat in his studio reading and rereading Bettina’s letter. On the table in front of him one bottle of wine sto
od empty, the second well past the half way mark. He poured himself another glass and downed it as if the thirst of the desert were upon him.
So she was casting him off, without even doing him the honour of telling him so to his face. Sending him a letter instead, like that she might write to a merchant whose goods were no longer required. ‘Thank you dear sir for the fine services you have rendered in the past. Unfortunately of late they have not been quite of the quality one might desire. Therefore I regret to tell you, etc. etc.’
With a savage gesture, Johannes stood and flung his chair across the room. It split one of the canvases lodged against the wall and in fury he walked over to it, kicked it, made the rip larger.
Then he laughed. Yes, it was all there in that neat orderly script of hers, in each turn of phrase which spoke of a duty to herself, to her work, the struggle for existence. The platitudes at each and every turn, positing the general, higher good against the particular, the bright spark of individual life. Not unlike his father, really. Why her husband was better, understood more.
He laughed again uproariously.
Yes, if the truth were known, she had resisted him, almost from the first. Even when she had begun to allow him to take her clothes off, to gaze on that fine slender naked body, to explore its coolness with his lips, she would instantly clothe herself as soon or even before the last amorous caress had reached its destination, arm herself with her petticoats and her ideas. All his words, which she had begun to echo, about the force of the erotic, about the salvation of the sexual body, had done nothing to counter that resistance. It was unnatural. Each week, she returned dutifully to her husband, never later than the pre-appointed moment, never forgetting her books, her papers.
Johannes slumped into his one dusty easy chair. Yet if he were honest, it was that very resistance which had first stimulated him, coupled to a sense of her fineness, that statuesque grace of hers - only sculpture could render it. The delicacy and susceptibility of her body - so unlike her mind - never failed to surprise him and to rouse him to almost violent passion. And at first when she had come to him, he had felt a rare ecstasy in her shy touch, as if together they might relearn the world. And ideas, work had poured out of him, almost as offerings to mark her weekly return.
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