‘Leo it will have to be, for the time being at least. Leo Adler.’
‘Leo Adler,’ Anna repeated and turning her face to the wall, murmured. ‘You have your baby now, Bruno, the boy you always wanted.’
Chapter Eight
1918
On the seventh of November 1918, Bettina Eberhardt stood in the midst of an immense and excited crowd in Munich’s Theresienwiese and felt a surge of rare elation as their mingled cheers swept over her.
She lifted her hands to applaud the crowd, clapped the women, old and young, the throngs of workers from the Krupp plant, the Rapp Motor and Bavarian Airplane Works, the soldiers, the peasants, the children, massed together across the vast stretch of the meadow on this glorious day in this glorious autumn which would see in peace and a glorious new order.
And she cheered along with them. Cheered their unlikely leader, Kurt Eisner, that shy, slight, grey professorial figure with straggling beard and eyes of unflinching integrity. Cheered the blind farmer Gandorfer, who had rallied the peasants, convincing them their best interests would be served by a Bavarian Free State, a republic in which their own Councils saw directly to their needs. Cheered the poets Toller and Muhsam. Cheered her own husband, Klaus, who had come back from the Eastern Front an adamant pacifist and had bravely called for the King’s deposition in articles, meetings.
There had been countless meetings these last weeks, in halls, beer cellars, cafes, houses. Meetings she had addressed, making the case for women’s suffrage. Meetings in which she had listened to speeches on the reorganization of housing, of food distribution; fierce debates on the economy, on justice. But also meetings in which she had listened carefully to the stumbling addresses of ordinary men and women recounting their experience, voicing their needs. The massed resonance of these voices, the innumerable pamphlets and proclamations, had created an unprecedented electricity. One breathed it with the air. High tingling sparks of freedom which made one’s head light after all those wearing, leaden, sepulchral years of war.
And the charge had reached a new pitch now as the crowd surged forward, marching towards Munich, towards a peaceful revolution.
Head high, Bettina marched in their midst. She couldn’t see Klaus anymore, but that didn’t matter. They were all brothers and sisters now, united in purpose.
As if to reinforce that very fact, she felt a hand on her shoulder, turned to see a soldier’s uniform, a worn but handsome face, crystal blue eyes.
‘Johannes, you’re back.’
His words were lost in the roar of the crowd, but he smiled a peculiar smile and then waved as he was propelled forward.
She hadn’t known he was back in Munich. She would have to find out where he was living. Had he seen Anna, she wondered. But only for a moment. There was more urgent business at hand, the business of creating a Bavarian socialist republic, of eradicating the blight of hunger and poverty, of setting up a decentralized society of self-managing communities, a responsible state which would never again lead them blindly into war.
Bettina marched euphorically into the future, and felt, as Eisner donned the mantle of President, that she had entered it.
Like all futures, this one too had a way of stumbling over its own present. In the various forums she attended over the next days, Bettina realized that a host of people had been foisted into positions of power which they had no idea what to do with. In the interminable debates in the councils of the new independent Bavaria, as many cranks as sensible orators took the floor. When she presented her position paper on the organization of childcare to the education committee, the views that were expressed about women were pre-historic.
She complained of this to Klaus when they caught up with each other late in the small hours of the night.
‘Freedom has a way of feeling like chaos to begin with,’ he replied.
She hadn’t seen him for a few days and he looked exhausted, his gangling form thinner than ever. But his eyes shone with a clear light, so different from the hopelessness she had read in them when he had first come back from the front.
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right,’ Bettina concurred.
‘How is Max getting on?’
‘Fine,’ she chuckled. ‘He asked me today whether the President was going to live in the palace, now that the King has gone. And whether he could visit him there.’
‘No palaces for this lot,’ Klaus smiled. ‘Too expensive to run.’
‘Shall we check on Max now?’ Bettina asked, ‘While the tea’s brewing.’ She could see Klaus was itching to.
They climbed the stairs to their son’s room and looked silently at the small sleeping form. Klaus bent to kiss him. For a moment the thick lashes fluttered open, lips puckered into a smile, and then he turned peacefully away from them.
‘He seems to grow by the hour,’ Klaus whispered as they closed Max’s door behind them.
‘His will certainly does.’
‘He takes after his mother,’ Klaus looked at her whimsically. ‘Which reminds me, I bumped into Johannes a few days ago.’
Bettina busied herself with the tea. ‘Oh yes? I saw him at the march. Just in passing. Has he been back long?’
Klaus shrugged. ‘Not very. He’s sharing a studio with Ella Kessler. I co-opted him to work with us. He’s going to make posters.’
Bettina stirred her tea nervously. ‘Has he changed at all? At half-glance he seemed a little the worse for wear.’
Klaus gazed into the middle distance. ‘He has a severe case of nihilism. A common enough disease these days.’ He smiled in that new determined way he had. ‘But one we should soon be able to treat.’
‘With posters?’ Bettina was sceptical.
He was silent for a moment. ‘I told him, Bettina.’
‘Told him?’
He nodded. ‘About Max.’
‘You didn’t!’ she was incredulous. It was so long since any of all that had been mentioned. She had thought Klaus had almost forgotten.
‘We have to be honest these days.’
‘What did Johannes say?’ she murmured, more distraught than she had been throughout these weeks of high excitement.
‘He stared at me for a moment, a little strangely, aghast perhaps. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and said he couldn’t think of a better father for the little chap than me, if that’s what I wanted.’ Klaus grinned a little, ‘He went on to add that he’d never believed in human property, and now less than ever.’
‘Good,’ Bettina murmured, but she was worried. ‘Will he shout it from the roof tops?’
‘I don’t think so. He told me it was between the three of us. He was comradely.’ Klaus lit a cigarette. A pause grew into a silence. In it she felt increasingly uncomfortable. Klaus was gazing at her so oddly. She averted her face. At last he said, ‘Are you sure this is the way you want to continue, Bettina, the best way?’
‘Oh yes,’ she nodded vigorously. Her thoughts flew to her son. ‘Max is so attached to you, so clever,’ she looked unseeingly at her hands, ‘it would upset him, confuse him if we were to say anything different.’
‘And you, Bettina?’ Klaus cut her off. ‘What about you?’ His voice had a slightly threatening, insistent note she didn’t recognize. She met his eyes. There was anger in them and something else, an obliqueness.
A startling thought fluttered into her mind, flew into dark crevices, scattering light. ‘You,’ she stumbled, assembled courage, ‘you don’t want to continue this way.’ As she said it, it was no longer a question, but a flat recognition. She rose from the table. Its once polished surface had lost its sheen. She hadn’t noticed before. ‘Is there someone else?’ she murmured, wishing as soon as they were out that the cheap words hadn’t been uttered. But she plunged on, the voice no longer her own, ‘Because if you want to go, you must. These are revolutionary times, after all.’ She turned away from him.
He gripped her wrist. ‘It’s not like that Bettina. Not altogether.’
‘Not altogether?’ she s
earched his face, saw a stranger emerge from the familiar features. There was something almost soldier-like in his stance, as if his avowed pacifism had given him a new ruggedness. The brown eyes beneath the slightly drooping lids had a startling brightness about them, and the lines which had etched themselves around his full lips emphasized a sensitivity which had once been half-hidden by a beard. ‘Not altogether?’ she repeated her query, this time with a tremor.
Suddenly he kissed her, long, hard. The unexpectedness of the action took her breath away. She found her arms cleaving to his shoulders, her lips warm. ‘Revolutionary times, indeed,’ she murmured, drawing away, just a little.
‘Yes,’ he echoed and firmly led her to her room.
When she rose the next day, Klaus was already gone. But a secret smile played round her lips as she saw the indentation of his head on the pillow. What strange times these were, Bettina thought, allowing herself the luxury of a languorous stretch. To be sleeping with one’s husband. But this was not the moment to muse on her odd sense of having transgressed on the forbidden, nor to ponder the differences between Klaus and Johannes. She had innumerable duties to attend to, the first of which was her unbreachable hour with Max.
Contrary to all appearances and expectations, Bettina was an imaginative mother. While she was with Max, she gave herself up to him fully, playing madcap games, explaining the universe to him, her perennial rectitude only visible in the adult comprehensiveness of these explanations, so that the little boy often spoke things he didn’t yet understand. Her time with him up, however, she would brook no pleas of ‘just one more game’, or ‘another few minutes’, but simply hug him firmly and repeat, ‘more is not better’.
As a result, little Max grew up with a pronounced if mysterious sense of the benefit of limits, which he applied to the world only to be shocked when it answered with unreasonableness the reasonableness which was his own. He was an altogether charming and lively little boy. And Bettina always took a deep and contented breath, when she embraced him for the last time before setting off for work. That day she squeezed him to her with extra force and wondered for a moment what Johannes would think of him, now that he had been told Max was his son.
But in those heady post-war winter days when the difficulties of daily life - of food and fuel and influenza - were as fierce and numerous as the ideas which were espoused to regulate them, Bettina had little time for pondering her personal life. It was two weeks after the armistice was signed - and the right-wing rumblings about Germany having been stabbed in the back by the socialists, the Jews, its own new governments, had already made themselves loudly heard - before she managed to see Johannes at all. And then it was hardly a satisfactory meeting.
Klaus had recommended that she stop in at an artists’ soirée in Schwabing on her way home. He would try to meet her there.
Bettina easily found the designated warehouse. Inside, it was transformed by a cacophony of posters and banners. A carnival atmosphere prevailed. Streamers flew. Music blared. Huge balloon-like puppets, effigies of the old ruling elite, swung from the rafters. The walls shrieked with lettering and graphics, louder than the laughter and the voices. ‘German Culture is Dead, Long Live German Culture!’.
‘Only money does not die’, shouted the caption above an image of a mountain of corpses. A man, his face whitened to look like a death’s head, stood on a chair and chanted savagely to a gathering group,
‘DADADADA.
In the name of DADA, you are all indicted.
Hang up your hopes.
Hang up your paradises. Hang up your idols, your heroes, your artists, your religions. They are all nothing. In the name of DADA, I proclaim the beginning of year one of the reign of Nothing.’
He cackled wildly.
Bettina turned away in distaste, bumped into friends, couldn’t hear their words over the hubbub, moved on, saw someone pouring water over what looked like a painting by a German romantic. And then Petra embraced her, swathing her in furs, laughing, ‘Isn’t it wonderful’ before being swept away by a man in uniform. Bettina edged towards the opposite side of the room, where paintings were hung in more orderly rows and things were quieter.
‘Like them?’ a voice with the soft, precise inflections of Johannes’s asked from behind her.
She swerved round, but all she could see was a tall elegant man in a frock coat and top hat. As he turned his face to her, she leapt back. There, where a face should have been, there was instead a pink snout and little piggy eyes.
The man laughed mischievously and removed his mask.
‘Frightened you, did I?’
‘This is childish nonsense, Johannes,’ Bettina crinkled her face primly.
He bowed formally, ‘You have it in one, Madame. Aggressive childish nonsense to cock-a-snook at authority.’ He leaned back against the wall in a pose of dandyish nonchalance. ‘It’s good to see you Bettina. Almost good to be alive. I hoped you might be here. Shall we take a little quiet stroll. I think you have something to tell me.’ He put the mask to his face again and laughed.
She looked away from him, refused his arm. His manner irritated her. ‘Why have you got yourself up like this, Johannes?’
‘I told you,’ he matched his steps to hers, bowed to people, making sure all and sundry realised they were together. ‘It’s a very simple statement, Bettina. Even you can understand. Men in wonderfully aristocratic frock coats are pigs. Aren’t you amongst the revolutionaries?’
‘But it cheapens everything. Makes a mockery,’ she was talking so loudly to make herself heard above the noise, that people stopped to listen.
‘And that too is the point. Until we cease to respect the empty forms of authority, there will be no change. None.’
They had reached the door and he held it open for her. ‘Anyhow, don’t you think this is an accurate representation of the real me? A swine. The inner man writ large.’ He laughed again.
‘Take it off, Johannes.’ She took a deep breath of the crisp night air and looked into his face, shadowed by moonlight. His eyes were as wintry as the night. She suddenly had a sense that those eyes which she had loved for the way they looked passionately forward to some imaginary future, now only looked coldly down on the mass of humanity.
‘I think you have something to tell me Bettina?’
She shivered and then squared her shoulders. ‘Klaus has already told you. About Max.’
‘Don’t look so frightened, Bettina,’ he dug his fingers into her shoulder. ‘I won’t file a paternity suit, in case that worries you. I won’t breathe a word. I’m just rather surprised that you never felt the need to tell me yourself.’
‘The need?’ Bettina looked at him incredulously. ‘Just remember what you used to say, Johannes. About woman being free. Needing to grasp the nettle of their own strength. About men being merely incidental. Servants to the great matriarch.’ She let out a shrill laugh.
‘Touché. The great Bettina unearths another internal contradiction.’
His face looked bruised now and she said more softly, ‘I didn’t think you’d want to know, Johannes. You weren’t all those years ago interested in being a father, or so it seemed to me.
He smiled more gently now. ‘Right as always, Frau Eberhardt. I’m not. Klaus makes a far better father. And little Max as I remember him is a fine chap.’ He passed a finger down the curve of her face. ‘I won’t breathe another word about it. Ever. Promise. And I respect you for not telling me.’
She met his eyes. ‘How are you, Johannes?’
Before he could answer, a police van swerved noisily into the street and came screeching to a halt in front of them. Johannes winked at her rakishly. From the depths of his pocket, he unearthed a monocle and screwed it into his eye, simultaneously drawing himself up to his full height in front of the warehouse doors. With his top-hat, he towered over the approaching men and presented the quintessential face of aristocratic respectability.
‘A problem, Officers?’ he addressed the two uniforme
d men punctiliously.
The men looked uncertainly at each other. The first cleared his throat. ‘Trouble brewing, we were told,’ he gestured toward the doors.
‘Trouble?’ Johannes raised an eyebrow. His face took on an air of arrogant disdain. ‘Really, gentlemen, I think you’ve come to the wrong place. The Countess Von Leinsdorf and I have just come out of the exhibition and everything was as peaceful as it would be in a palace of culture. But see for yourselves,’ he stood back and gestured them towards the door. The men shuffled uncertainly. ‘My wife was particularly enamoured of a fine little Madonna, exquisitely rendered, the very essence of Bavarian art. Do look at it.’
‘Well, if you’re sure, Sir,’ the first man shuffled his feet and doffed his cap, ‘that there’s no trouble, I mean.’
‘No trouble. But that little Madonna…’
The policemen backed away, ‘We must have come to the wrong address. They climbed hurriedly into the van, anxious to be off.
Johannes looked after them smiling. ‘There it is. The wonderful German respect for authority in action. Do you think if I’d been wearing a workman’s cap, I would have got away with it? I tell you, Bettina, in order to change anything in this country you’ll have to get a signed and sealed statement from our absent Kaiser to sanction revolution.’
His hollow laugh echoed down the narrow street.
‘I want to talk to you about something other than politics, Johannes,’ Bettina was disgruntled. ‘Is there anywhere we can go?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he looked at her questioningly. ‘There’s a place not too far from here. Serves foul beer, but it’s clean.’ He laughed that devilish laugh again. ‘That’s the real reason Bavarian socialism has got this far. The beer the Prussians have foisted on us is execrable. No one can bear it.’
‘Stop it, Johannes. You’ve grown cynical.’
Dreams of Innocence Page 24