Klaus gazed at her sympathetically. ‘It is.’
Bettina fumed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Anna. Just think for a moment. Plants or people.’
‘I leave the thinking to you Bettina, I always have done. You’ve always thought better than I have,’ Anna erupted.
Bettina rose to her full regal height, gathered Max in her arms. ‘You make thought sound like excrement, Anna.’
The men shared a quick wary glance.
She nodded at them curtly and left the room.
Anna stared after her, indifferent to little Leo’s tugging at her skirt.
It was only when Klaus gently mentioned that perhaps it was time for little Leo to be put to bed as well, that she reluctantly left them. She was back soon after, sat down close to Johannes, took his hand, listened abstractedly to what the men were saying.
‘You know,’ she murmured after some time had passed. ‘I still can’t accept it.’
They looked at her questioningly. There was a remoteness in the tawny eyes.
‘The winter garden, I mean. Killing all those plants. After all, they’re alive too, just as the garden at Seehafen is alive, that hedgehog you once tended to, Klaus, is alive, the horses are alive. We’re all part of the same life, the same living whole. Even the dead.’ She shivered.
‘It was an artificial garden, Anna. Man-made,’ Johannes said gently.
She nestled against him, at a loss for the words which would express what she meant.
‘I know how you feel, Anna, but it had to be done,’ Klaus said quietly.
‘Still talking about gardens, are we?’ Bettina had come back in.
Johannes nodded, ‘Anna is trying to tell us that our revolution is nothing unless it respects nature,’ his tone was ironical, but he looked at Anna obliquely to test the accuracy of his words. She smiled at him gratefully.
Bettina sat down with a flurry of skirts. ‘Soon she’ll be counselling us all to go home and tend our gardens, a twentieth century Candide.’
‘Would that be so awful?’ Anna challenged her.
‘No, but a great many of us haven’t got gardens to tend. And only after we’ve legislated for a little more equality, can we begin even to think of gardens,’ Bettina grew vehement as she spoke. ‘Don’t be so naive, Anna. It begins to look like either stupidity or willful selfishness.’
Anna flushed while Johannes guffawed.
‘You know, Bettina, you remind me of something a corporal I knew during the war once told me. A great fat fellow, with a wart on his nose. He was always fulminating about this and that and one day he said to me, ‘Once this war is over, Bahr, I’m going to move to Brazil, better still the Yukon. You know why? It’s these European women. They’re all a bunch of frustrated soldiers. I want to marry a woman, not a spiritual sergeant.’
Bettina stiffened, ‘And I’m the spiritual sergeant, I trust, not the fat corporal.’
‘The general, Bettina,’ he raised his glass to her.
It was the next day that Bettina told her. She was driven by she didn’t know quite what demons, but convinced herself that now that Johannes knew, it was better that Anna found out from her than otherwise. They were in the kitchen preparing dinner, Bettina putting the finishing touches to the gingerbread house she had promised Max.
‘There, do you think they’ll like that?’ Bettina examined her handiwork.
‘It’s lovely,’ Anna exclaimed, and then added a little grudgingly, ‘Where did you learn to do that?’
‘From one of the women at the Schwabing nursery.’
‘A few more raisins there and there would make the composition better,’ Anna rapidly inserted the fruit in a new arrangement. It was strange how in these last weeks during which she had grown strong and sure in Johannes’s love, she felt increasing resentment at the very skills and certainties she had once so admired in Bettina.
‘Yes, that is better,’ Bettina acknowledged. She sat down at the rough pine table and watched her sister’s fluid motions. Even for someone like herself, who put a low value on things of the surface, it was striking how beautiful Anna had grown of late, almost like that idealised icon Johannes had made of her in his conservatory mural. Even in the shoddy trousers she had decided to don today. No wonder he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Or his hands. It made her uncomfortable to see them both touching each other so openly. There was a palpable heat which came from them.
Bettina cleared the loose flour off the table. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about, Anna, now that you and Johannes are so firmly together.
Anna smiled secretly.
Bettina folded her white apron, paused, met her sister’s radiant eyes. ‘You know, Anna, Johannes is Max’s natural father.’
Anna sat down heavily. An alien creature seemed to be tugging at her entrails, biting, chewing. She reached for the jug of water, shakily poured herself a glass and then looked at it without moving. Her mind recoiled from the images which bounded across it, images of Bettina in Johannes’s arms, of lips not hers. In the distance she could faintly hear Bettina’s voice.
‘Of course he doesn’t know. Must never know. It would confuse him.’
‘Johannes doesn’t know?’ Anna heard her own taut voice.
‘No, no, Max, of course.’ Bettina gave her a strange look.
‘And Klaus?’
‘Klaus knows everything. And in all the ways that matter most, in all real ways, he is Max’s father,’ she added triumphantly. ‘I thought it wasn’t right, since you’re not a child anymore, since we’re so much together, that you should be the only one in the dark,’ She finished a little lamely.
‘Of course. In the dark,’ Anna echoed. ‘Excuse me,’ she rushed from the room.
‘In the dark,’ the words reverberated in her mind. Without thinking she flung on her coat and made for the stables. Astride her mare, she galloped down the path, didn’t return the waves of the men and the children who were sledging down a small slope, made her way instead across the road and into the woods.
The snow was so bright here that it seemed to illuminate even the shadowy crevices of her mind, which she didn’t like to visit. Stupid of her. She should have known about Johannes and Bettina, had known really, now that she looked back in the light of her new wisdom at events all those years ago before she was married to Bruno. She remembered that summer in Seehafen, the days in Munich. Yes, she was a fool. She should have known.
Anna urged the horse to greater speed. What a strange institution marriage was, just as Katarina had told her. Bettina and Klaus, both here with Johannes. She dug her heels into the mare’s side. No, she musn’t dwell on that. It was so long ago.
She and Bruno had been strange, too. Anna reined in her horse, leapt off, threw herself into a mound of untouched snow, felt its coldness permeate her, cool her heat. She didn’t like to think of Bruno now. Not actively. Though with part of her - a secret part of her that she didn’t like to acknowledge - she knew he was always there, a diffuse presence, watching her, watching over her, sometimes through his son’s eyes. In the early days of the little boy’s life, she had had an almost magical sense that Bruno was embodied in the child. Yes, it was still with her. Even though it was now clear Leo had her hair, her eyes, looked people said, exactly like her. When Leo was happy, then she knew Bruno was happy. When he was fractious, then she felt that Bruno was admonishing her, that he still hadn’t forgiven her, would never forgive her. It made her afraid of the boy, as if she had to tiptoe round him in order not to bring down his father’s wrath upon her. Sometimes she hated him.
Anna brushed the snow slowly from her clothes. She hated thinking like this, hated Bettina for forcing her to think. She mounted the mare again, rode more slowly now, wanting to avoid her racing reflections, yet impelling herself to confront them.
Yes, and then Johannes had appeared, like some luminous figure back from the dead. She had thought him dead, convinced herself that he had to be dead as part of Bruno’s retribution. B
ut Johannes was miraculously alive. His return was a sign: in the smell and touch of him, she was filled with the blessed sense that Bruno had at last forgiven her. She was free to live. And how rich and joyous this new life was, as if all these last arid years in the wilderness had been merely a preparation for this bountiful flowering. She had been filled with a boundless energy, a sense of almost excessive health, and all because of the love of Johannes, sanctioned by Bruno.
She wouldn’t allow Bettina’s unearthing of the past to disturb the wonder of it all. It was over between her and Johannes, had to be over. Otherwise Bettina wouldn’t have spoken. Would she? Anna urged her horse on again, faster and faster over the pristine white of the trail. Johannes and she would move away from here, away from all of them, move to a new life together. They wouldn’t come back to this house, despite the fact that she loved it so much. They had probably been here together. And she didn’t trust Bettina anymore, she was too clever, much cleverer than her. And Johannes was her life, had given her life. She couldn’t lose him.
She said it to him that night as they lay coiled in each other’s arms, dreamy with the taste and smell and touch of each other. ‘Johannes, let’s go away together. Somewhere new, fresh, away from everything.’
He buried his lips in her neck beneath the heavy mass of her hair, ‘When I’m with you, I am away,’ he whispered, ‘away in some lush tropical country where the tigers leap,’ he raked his fingers over her arm, smiled lazily.
She curled closer to him, smoothed the warm skin of his loins, felt him stir. ‘No, Johannes, I mean really away.’
He sought out her eyes, trying to read them in the shadowy darkness. ‘Perhaps Anna, when I’ve sold some pictures.’ He stretched languorously against her.
She didn’t mention what Bettina had told her, wouldn’t utter her name between them for fear that it might darken their togetherness.
Over the following weeks, Anna spent less and less nights in the house in Bogenhausen, only dropping in after work, to see little Leo and put him to bed. Sporadically she searched for flats, where she and Johannes and the little boy could live, but there was so little time, less money, and she had convinced herself of the certainty that they would leave the country imminently. Then too, Johannes seemed to have little interest in changing the present arrangement. He liked to live where he worked. So nothing was altered, except that Anna saw her son less and less.
Klaus remarked on it to Bettina one morning, after the nanny had whisked the children away.
Bettina looked at him in that new admiring way she had and said matter-of-factly, ‘Anna and Johannes are much too immersed in one another to have room for another person.’
‘But a child, Bettina?’
‘There’s no more place for children and erotic love in the same room than there is for the sun and the moon in the same sky. They may follow on from each other, but simultaneously…,’ she shook her head whimsically. ‘Love, that kind of love, I’ve come to see is a very selfish emotion.’
‘And us, Bettina?’ he examined her fine-boned profile.
‘Us? We’re just an old, established couple,’ she laughed gaily. But her face grew quickly serious again, ‘I think Leo is quite happy here. He’s such a quiet inexpressive child, it’s not always easy to tell. But I think so. In any event, he’s no problem and Max has rather taken to him, keeps wanting to make him smile.’
‘Still, I think I’ll have a word with Anna.’
‘Don’t, Klaus. Things will change of their own course, soon enough. And she deserves a little happiness after all. The last years have been hard on her.’ Bettina’s tone was strangely rueful.
Things did change, too soon, and not in the way that either Bettina or Klaus could have predicted.
Soon after their talk, on the twenty-first of February 1919, Kurt Eisner, the socialist leader of the Bavarian Republic, the man alongside whom Klaus and Bettina had worked, was assassinated. The country was thrown into frenzy. The Workmen’s, Peasant’s and Soldier’s Councils proclaimed a general strike. A state of siege ensued. Various factions, anarchist, communist, social democrat vied with each other for control of the government.
Meanwhile, right wing militia groups, some in the pay of the Berlin government, some purely for their own sport, in a re-enactment of the excitements of a war so recently put behind them, began to terrorize Munich as they had other cities. Amongst their triumphs, they could already count the murder of the Spartacist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Munich’s public spaces were aflame with pickets and debating voices, amongst them Bettina’s, Klaus’s and even Johannes’s, for his anarchist and artist friends were now in the ascendancy and, for a brief, utopian week mingling visionary proclamations and carnival, they took over the Munich government.
Johannes’s more radical posters draped the walls. Outside his studio building, a vast one, showing a naked man and woman emerging hand in hand from a prison cell, urged ‘Free Love’. A week later, left anarchists gave way to reds of a deeper shade. Against the encroaching force of the whites, as the central government troops were known, a red guard was created. A red flag flew over the Wittellsbach Palace. There were eruptions of violence across the city, between left and right and left and left.
Bettina was frightened. Reform, yes, even radical reform, but not revolution, not violence. Klaus was not sure that the tide they had helped to let loose could now be stopped. They argued and he left without a word. Somehow, in the midst of the growing chaos she managed to find a car which would take her, the children and their nanny off to Seehafen. She ordered Frau Trübl to say that they were her grandchildren, if any one asked.
When she tried to return to Munich the following day, her car was forced into a multitude of detours, and eventually she had to backtrack towards Seehafen. Berlin troops were moving towards Munich and on May the first, the day the workers should have been parading through the streets, Bettina discovered that it was the army which was doing the parading. Two days later, she finally managed to steal back to the city. There was no sign of Klaus, hadn’t been since her departure.
She drowned her anxieties in work. The conditions in the nurseries were growing untenable. Apart from the shortages of every kind, there had been repeated instances in these last weeks of mother’s urgently asking if the children could be kept overnight, or simply not coming to collect them.
Now matters were even worse: the teachers were exhausted, the children fractious. People were afraid to go out on the streets. Bettina rang colleagues, exhorted help, found a cabaret singer to entertain one group, an actress who would stay the night and help out with another; two mothers who would remain with a third. When she finally ventured out to go home, the streets were dark, deserted. There wasn’t a cab in sight.
Bettina began to walk, her heels clicking ominously on the empty street. A military car tore past her forcing her against the wall. In the distance she could hear an alarm bell jangling menacingly from a church tower. She quickened her pace. Turning a corner, she heard a thud, grunts, the hollow sound of fists on flesh. Then she saw them, five of them, two in worker’s caps, three in field grey, fighting, saw the rifle butt raised like a club, the unequal battle.
She screamed, screamed so that her throat ached, ‘Why? Why are you doing this? Stop. Stop at once.’
The sound of her piercing cry echoing down the narrow cobbled street stopped them for a split moment. In that moment, one of the men darted away. Shutters flew open: ‘Go home,’ a voice shouted from the top of a house.
‘Red bitch!’ one of the soldiers spat at her.
‘How dare you!’ Bettina said coldly, unaware that her lips had moved.
The other soldier heaved the limp form he had been holding against the wall. He too spat contemptuously at her feet. Then the three of them turned and loped away.
Bettina stared at them, stared at the motionless body. Tears gathered in her eyes. From somewhere within her, a voice battered at her eardrums, laughing,
laughing, ‘The future is a long way away, lady. A long way away.’
She shuddered, felt she might faint. Images of a battered Klaus, a wailing Max, danced before her eyes.
Then, with a sudden resolute stiffening of the shoulders, she banged at a door and demanded help.
Chapter Nine
1919
Klaus Eberhardt sheltered behind the thick curtain and gazed down on the patrol marching triumphantly up the street. It was all over. They had lost. Six months of hard work and dreams and the Free Bavarian Socialist Republic was at an end. It had begun in November and now it was May, Klaus counted the months on his fingers as if the clumsy childlike act would somehow clarify the lightning movement of events. Only May 1919 and white troops were pouring into the city wreaking havoc with what had begun as innocent dreams.
The faces of the white soldiers, he thought peering down, looked no different from those of the red. And was it his imagination that the same people who hailed them now and showered them with flowers had so few months ago gathered round his friend, Eisner, and hailed the advent of socialism.
Socialism. What was it but a name for a series of self-evident human needs which could not be disputed - a need for social equality, individual liberty, dignity and peace.
Yet it had been disputed. So that the words which encapsulated their dreams, had been flung and bartered with increasing ferocity, and had gradually grown meaningless in the process. Until finally they had become mere sputterings in a battle for power. And then the guns had come.
Klaus sunk into an armchair and buried his face in his hands. Five days ago he had shot a man. A gun had been thrust into his hand and he had been told to defend the revolution. And he had shot a man, had seen him fall, had seen the blood splatter, could almost make out the traumatic pattern in the tissue. An ordinary man, like himself. In all those years of war, he had patched and sewn and tended the wounded, hoped to save where he often saw die, had told himself that never again must this be allowed, this gross savagery, this wholesale murder. And now when it was all presumed to be over, he, an avowed pacifist, had murdered. In the name of his dream of peace.
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