‘And you’ve grown even more ravishing. It can’t be the war. So it must be little Max.’
Bettina swallowed hard. They had reached the bar. It was almost empty except for some soldiers who leaned drunkenly against the counter. They found a scrubbed oak table in the dimly lit back room. Bettina sat opposite him on the hard bench and watched the shadows the tallow candle threw over his face.
‘It’s about Anna. Have you heard from her? Seen her?’
Johannes shook his head, avoided her eyes. ‘You guessed then? he asked quietly. Or she told you?’
Bettina nodded at the latter.
He gazed at her quizzically, then threw up his hands, ‘The two von Leinsdorf sisters. The women in my life.’
‘It’s not a joke, Johannes.’
‘No, no, of course not.’ He paused, reached for a cigarette. ‘How is Anna?’ he asked softly. His eyes were suddenly dreamy.
Bettina shrugged.
‘I would go and see her, but… She’s not like you. She doesn’t know how to deal with her husband. I worry about her.’
‘So you don’t know?’
‘Know what?’ He frowned.
For the first time she saw the exhaustion in his face, a weariness that had settled permanently round his lips when he was still.
‘Bruno’s dead.’
‘I see,’ he breathed sharply. ‘You think I should go to her? In Vienna?’ he leaned back against the wall. ‘She may hate me, you know. I never knew even in those few weeks we had together, wonderful weeks, what she was thinking. She never spoke much. She’s all feeling.’
Bettina felt him looking through her, over her shoulder, into another space. She didn’t know whether she wanted to hear any of this.
‘I would look at her. Touch her. She’s so beautiful. And suddenly I’d have the feeling that I was seeing the grass moving, each blade, fine, distinct. At other times, it was like gazing into the lake. I would see myself, but purified, distiled, transparent. And then I’d sink.’ He shook himself. ‘How is she?’
‘There’s been a child, a little boy.’
He sat up stiffly. ‘I see.’
‘No, you don’t see anything.’ Bettina was suddenly angry. ‘He may be yours.’
He looked baffled for a moment. ‘Is that what she told you?’
‘Go and see her for yourself. Bring her back here. There’s work to be done. For both of you.’
Johannes burst out laughing, his old boyish laugh. ‘Some things, Bettina, despite wars, despite millions of dead, despite revolutions, never change. And you are one of them.’ He kissed her lightly on the cheek. ‘You’ll have to give me her address. I only ever wrote to her at Seehafen.’
‘Other things don’t seem to change much either, Johannes,’ Bettina smiled with a wryness she didn’t altogether feel.
The first thing that struck Johannes as he made his way towards the address Bettina had given him was that the old Imperial capital had lost its lustre. The elegant women with their playful eyes and soft, knowing smiles had disappeared. In their stead, there was greyness and pinched noses, a flurrying of old rucksacks and haggling voices. The rucksacks particularly struck him. It was like Berlin, he guessed. No one quite knew where the next meal might be foraged, what item might be bartered, so one set one in readiness. He had stopped for lunch in one of his old haunts and been told there would be nothing on the elaborate menu until perhaps this evening. He had made do with a glass of foul wine and a list of complaints from the man at the next table followed by a plea for cigarettes.
Johannes let the ornate brass knocker fall and waited in front of the substantial house. A black skirted maid opened the door, looked up at him queerly as he asked for Anna and then scurried away before returning quickly and inviting him in. The room he was led to had the musty clutter of a bygone era. He wouldn’t have associated that particular suffocating taste with Bruno Adler, but then one never altogether knew what people were like when they were at home.
No wonder he had died, Johannes thought mischievously to himself. But for Anna to stay in this! For a moment he had a vision of the knoll at Seehafen, of Anna borne out of the waves. So palpable was it in its distinctness that it was as if he could smell the perfumed air, stretch out his hand and touch paradise.
Before the objects around him could take shape again, a commanding voice barked at him.
‘Herr Johannes Bahr?’
A darkly swathed form wheeled its way towards him in a vast mahogany chair. A mottled hand was offered. ‘Hermine von Leinsdorf. You are a friend of Anna’s?’
Johannes nodded.
The woman held gilt spectacles up to her eyes and peered at him, seemed to decide that he would do.
‘I’m glad you’ve come. She has too few visitors, and she won’t come to my evenings. Stubborn girl. To carry on mourning this long is unseemly, don’t you think?.’ She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘And she works too hard. It’s bad for her health. You’d think that Adler would have sorted things out better.’ She sighed dramatically. ‘But then no one could have foreseen this blasted war. Eh? Speak up.’ Two bright little magpie eyes stared at him from layers of cheek.
‘I asked where Anna was,’ Johannes bellowed.
‘She’ll be back soon. Always punctual. Not for me, for that brat of hers. Imagine Adler dropping off like that, just before the child was born. Altogether inconsiderate of him I say. Look at me. I’m far older than him. And it’s not as if he was shot at.’ She shook her head disdainfully.
A grandfather clock boomed the hour from somewhere in the midst of the house.
‘Any minute now.’ From somewhere in the heaped satin of her dress, Hermine brought out a gold watch and studied it. ‘And what do you do, young man?’
‘I was an artist,’ Johannes said flatly. ‘Before the war.’
‘An artist?,’ she raised her spectacles to her eyes again, and paused. ‘You didn’t by any chance do those monstrous pictures Anna has put up in her room? It looks like a mortuary. Quite unpleasant. I refuse to go in there anymore,’ she sniffed at him.
Johannes shrugged, suddenly laughed.
‘Well, it’s best to be honest, young man. At my age there’s no time for lying.’
‘Johannes,’ a faint voice startled him from behind.
He turned and saw a pale girl in a grey workaday suit. She was standing utterly still. Her skin was translucent, her eyes, wide in astonishment, too large for her face.
‘Anna?’ it was a question.
She raced towards him, a smile irradiating her features, and flung her arms round his neck, pressing herself against him as if to test his reality.
‘So you are a good friend,’ he heard Tante Hermine exclaim loudly.
Anna leapt away from him. ‘The very best. I thought… I thought he might be dead.’
‘He looks alive enough to me,’ Tante Hermine grunted dourly.
‘Yes,’ Anna gazed at him, the colour flooding into her cheeks, so that she looked a little more like the woman he remembered. ‘Yes,’ she breathed again, her eyes not leaving his face.
‘I gather you’d like to be alone.’ Tante Hermine put her chair noisily into motion.
‘Please,’ Anna whispered not taking her eyes from him.
Two days later, they were on a train together, bound for Munich. Johannes didn’t quite know how it had happened. It was as if, ever since she had put her arms around him, had taken him to her room, loved him with a silent intensity which had made the space around them disappear so that they were back on the grass under a billowing sky and history had vanished, he was under the spell of her certainty. She had assumed that she was to come with him, that the child would come too. She had asked him nothing and told him nothing, simply put her hand in his as it was now and told him that today she would be ready to go.
He watched her holding the pale drowsy child. It was odd the way she tended to him without looking at him, like some Madonna whose gaze was directed beyond the merely mortal particula
rity of the boy. Yet there was a strange efficiency about her dealings with the child, a note which was unlike any other she struck. So unlike the look which she now rested on him, so deep and golden and lavishly promising, that he was again lost in it, forgot the questions he wanted to pose about Bruno, about the child, about the past and the future. There was only the present, the rhythmic chug of the train, the splatter of raindrops over the misty window and the heat which came from her, warming him, abundant, swallowing him, like the earth itself.
‘He came back to me,’ Anna looked dreamily out the window at the dark wintery waters of the Isar. Bettina placed a cup in her hand. They were breakfasting together in the morning room in the house in Bogenhausen.
‘Good, that means you can get married and Leo can have his father.’
Anna put her cup down with a clatter and started up from her chair. ‘Don’t ever say anything like that again, Bettina. Leo’s father is dead.’ She turned her gaze back to the window. ‘As for marriage, you know Johannes doesn’t believe in it.’
‘What Johannes believes is neither here nor there,’ Bettina was adamant. ‘What do you intend to live on? Has Bruno’s estate been settled yet?’
Anna shrugged. ‘I don’t know if there’s anything there. The war, the government, they seem to have eaten it. But it doesn’t matter. We’ll manage.’ She wouldn’t let her sister spoil her happiness.
‘Manage! Johannes hasn’t got a mark to his name and paintings are rather less in demand at the moment than potatoes. Then there’s the little question of housing. He’s sharing a studio with a woman painter at the moment, you know that.’
Anna didn’t allow herself the gasp she felt. She sat resolutely still and murmured again, ‘We’ll manage. He’ll find another place.’
Bettina looked at her sister’s frail form and stilled her impatience. Anna was too thin. With her aureole of golden hair and vast eyes, she had an almost ethereal quality. Bettina took her hand. ‘You know Klaus and I will share everything with you, Anna. You can stay here, and Leo will be looked after with Max. But times are hard for everyone at the moment. Johannes should find a teaching post at the Academy. Or something. So that he can look after you.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Anna murmured. She suddenly met Bettina’s eyes with a dreamy resoluteness. ‘We’ll manage, Bettina. I’ll find a job. I’ll start looking tomorrow. And then in the Spring, I thought Johannes and I might go down to Seehafen. Like before. The country suits us. Potatoes and painting,’ she smiled a brilliant smile and that old wild carefree laugh boomed out of her, too large now for her frame.
The weeks passed filled with the activity of setting up a new order. Johannes without Anna’s urging found a new studio. It wasn’t a space that would easily accommodate a family, but then neither of them really wanted that. Anna could come there, could stay, whenever she pleased. Leo, she felt, without needing to hear it from Johannes, belonged in a separate space. Nor did Johannes explain about any other women there might have been. And she didn’t ask. There was really no need to.
When she was with him in that little room at the back of the studio which she had filled with bright things - a canary yellow bedspread, a single vast sunflower she had fashioned herself out of some stiff material - they were so immersed in one another that the rest of the world ceased to exist. The play of their limbs, the satin caresses, the deep satisfying kisses, fed them both so generously that Johannes no longer had to perform an act of memory to see her as the golden Venus of their Seehafen idyll; whereas he took on a ruggedness, his eyes a clarity of sea and sky, that made the women turn to look after him as he walked down the Schwabing streets.
He experienced her as a drug that he couldn’t name but could never get quite enough of, whatever the voluptuous excess of their encounters. If she arrived a few minutes after the regular appointed hour, if she were late back from work, a hunger had already begun to course through his veins, that made him restlessly despondent. Or if a message came through the one telephone in the house to say that for some reason, she couldn’t be with him, he felt a gaping emptiness within him which nothing else could fill. It was not rational. He knew with his mind that she would soon be there. There was no one to keep her from him, except the boy and daily duties, but nonetheless, the hunger would fill him, like a child for whom the breast is delayed.
He worked through those winter weeks with a clarity and energy which had rarely been his. A vast triptych took shape, Anna, a glowingly sensuous Madonna at its centre; beneath her and around her, a hell of mutilated bodies and skeletal remains which her radiant presence obviated, began to exorcise. For many years, people were to say it was his best painting.
Apart from the triptych, there was the work he did to order, the posters, and banners, and illustrations which were the graphic loudspeakers of the new regime. Sometimes, in the new emphatic idiom he had uncovered for this propaganda work, he went far beyond the regime itself and amused himself. One of his posters demanded a state ministry dedicated to the liquidation of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois family and bourgeois sexuality: a postscript in compelling but minuscule red called for the destruction of the very ministry demanded above.
Another showed a naked man and woman, luxuriantly entwined, their only covering a floating fig-leaf in which the words ‘Pleasure is the single source of value’ were inscribed. He was particularly proud of this poster, as he was of one other in which a large toddler wearing only a delicious smile strode like a giant above tiny figures of stiff adults in frock coats, uniforms and judge’s hat and gown. ‘The child is a genius’ roared the lettering. ‘Set the child free.’
The child in question bore no physical resemblance to either Max or Leo. With the children closest to him, Johannes played when mood or occasion took him, but the play always had something impersonal about it: it was an engagement with himself, not with the children. Or so Bettina thought she observed, adding to herself that they seemed to like him nonetheless for it.
For Christmas, at Anna’s insistence, they all went to Seehafen. The grounds were covered in snow when they arrived and the children tumbled in it gleefully, while the men drew them on to greater and greater antics. Anna, a rapturous smile on her face, looked on with Bettina for a moment, and then left without a word. A few minutes later, she was galloping past them on her favourite mare. Her hair loosed in the wind, her face beatific, she waved to them and plunged on, scattering snow from the laden branches which arched the path.
Bettina saw Johannes look after her with an expression which was half way between wonder and pain. And then, he too, was off, repeating her gesture as he passed them, waving, urging his dark stallion across the trodden path.
In the evening they all sat in front of a roaring fire and roasted chestnuts. It was Klaus, a boy on each knee, who told the stories. Stories of old St Nicholas, who brought prettily wrapped presents to the good children and dark coals and old onions to the bad. It must have been the dramatic look on Klaus’s face when he pronounced the word ‘bad’, which frightened little Leo, for the usually impassive child suddenly burst into tears and scrambled across the room to his mother’s side. Her eyes abstracted, Anna cradled him to her, made soft cooing noises. Johannes, Bettina noted, averted his eyes, only to let them fall on Anna again, when Klaus had wooed the little boy back to his lap. She didn’t have time to ponder it, for just then Max addressed them in his most serious voice, ‘What’s bad?’
Johannes laughed. ‘Go on, tell him Bettina.’
Bettina thrust back her shoulders, ‘Bad is when you hit another child for no reason.’
Little Max’s eyes grew dark, ‘And if there is a reason?’
Now both Klaus and Johannes were chuckling.
‘You’ll just have to give in, Bettina,’ Johannes urged her on. ‘And tell him ‘bad’ is what his parents say it is.’
Bettina threw him a fierce look.
‘But they haven’t said, Uncle Johannes.’
At this Johannes burst into gales of laughter,
over which Bettina turned to her son and seriously explained, ‘That’s because the word has so many senses, Max. One sense is that we behave badly when we hurt other people, so that if you had hit Leo because you were annoyed at his interrupting Daddy’s story, that would be bad.’
‘Bravo, Bettina,’ Johannes continued to ironize. The little boy looked from one to the other of them in evident perplexity and then sighed. ‘Can we have another story, Daddy?’
‘Yes,’ Klaus smiled, planted a kiss on the dark, curly head. ‘Have I told you about my visit to the Royal Palace?’
The little boy shook his head and looked at him wide-eyed.
‘Well then, it was just last week. I went along with the Finance Minister because we had to decide what to do about the royal winter garden. The place was spooky, almost deserted. There were only roomfuls of Greek statues who stared at us from vacant eyes, hundreds of Chinese dragons billowing out of great vases. When we had climbed to the top, we saw a lush, gigantic garden, huge luxuriant trees whose tropical foliage hid the glass roof, lotuses, orchids, so that we thought we had travelled thousands of miles to some wonderful Amazonian forest and all in the space of a walk. And,’ Klaus fixed the children with his gaze, ‘in the midst of the garden, there was a waterfall, as big as the one I showed you last summer, Max, which sprinkled us with crystalline drops.’
‘And?’ it was Anna’s turn to prod him.
‘Well, we had to decide the garden’s fate. There isn’t enough coal to go around this winter, and the garden consumes a lot of our meagre supply.’
‘So what did you decide?’ Anna looked at him askance.
‘It wasn’t an easy choice, I can tell you. The garden is so beautiful,’ Klaus said reverentially. ‘But then the people need coal.’
‘But you said coal was bad,’ Max piped in.
Johannes and Bettina joined in laughter.
‘You let it die,’ Anna breathed, distraught.
‘Of course they let it die,’ Bettina murmured, ‘people’s lives are more important than plants.’
‘It’s horrible,’ the tears rose in Anna’s eyes.
Dreams of Innocence Page 25