Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Tears moistened his hands. Through them he gazed at his fingers. Long, knobbly, familiar. Fingers which had stroked little Max’s head. Fingers which had killed. He shuddered, felt his mind reel.

  ‘Have a drink, Klaus,’ a voice gently beckoned him.

  He looked up confusedly at the woman. Who was she? Why was he here?

  ‘Drink. It will do you good.’

  He took the cup. Daphne, of course, he had come here not knowing where else to go, though he hadn’t seen her for months, not since the time he had stumblingly told her it was over between them, and she had smiled and said it didn’t matter, they were friends anyhow, weren’t they.

  Klaus gulped down the hot liquid. He hadn’t dared to go back to Bettina. Not only because they would find him there. The word had gone out that the arrests had begun. Arrests of the traitors. He scalded himself thinking of the definition of that word.

  ‘Alright?’

  ‘Thank-you,’ Klaus tried a smile.

  ‘The news isn’t good, Klaus,’ she lowered her slight form into the chair opposite him. ‘I’ve just come back from the Stephanie. It’s almost empty. Karl told me they’re rounding people up and shooting them on the slimmest of circumstances.’

  ‘I’ll go then. When it’s dark. I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  The doorbell rang and they both stiffened. Daphne gestured nervously towards the bedroom. He crept towards it and hid unthinkingly behind a curtain. Through its folds, he heard a woman’s voice.

  ‘Is Herr Eberhardt here? I was told he might be.’

  Bettina. Klaus took a deep breath. ‘It’s all right, Daphne,’ he called softly. He waited to hear the click of the door and then stepped out.

  ‘Thank God,’ Bettina murmured. She stared at him for a moment as if she had seen an apparition, then turned to Daphne. ‘Thank you for looking after him,’ she gave the other woman a curious sidelong glance, before moving towards Klaus. ‘I have a car waiting downstairs. Will you come?’

  ‘Home?’

  She nodded.

  ‘No, it’ll endanger you.’

  He saw the flush at her temples which signalled anger. ‘We’ll see about that. Besides, you look ill.’

  With the quick gestures she had learned from her brief nursing course during the war, she held her hand to his head and took his pulse. ‘Definitely unwell, Klaus’ She gave him a worried glance and then taking his arm, manoeuvred him out of the door, thanking Daphne again all the while.

  The procession of troops had passed now. Only the leaflets the low-flying planes had dropped littered the streets. Klaus pulled the brim of his hat low, didn’t look to see who was their driver.

  ‘We’ll be alright,’ Bettina put more assurance into her words than she felt.

  She had been worried, worried sick since that night when she had seen the beating, and still there was no word or sign from Klaus on her final return home. More worried on the next day when it had become clear that violence erupted each time the city took a breath. She had rung everyone she could think of, gone to see Johannes only to find Anna alone in the studio, as nervous as she was. And then yesterday, she had seen Klaus’s photograph in the paper, alongside a score of others listed as traitors. Rage at this travesty of truth had then momentarily drowned her worry.

  It was while she was pondering a plan of action, making a list of the ministers and professors she could contact to erase this ridiculous slur from her husband’s name, that Johannes had rung suggesting three further places where Klaus might be, counselling her to lie low for a while. White justice consisted of trial by execution.

  Lying low was not Bettina’s forte. She had a crystalline certainty from she knew not where that Klaus would be in far greater danger without her than with her. It was his way, even in these last months, of listening too quietly to what everyone was saying, of seeming to acquiesce even if the speaker implicated him. As if an uncertainty about his own integrity - which she knew to be unimpeachable - always trailed him.

  Klaus was silent in the car. He shrunk back into the seat and refused to meet her eyes. When they reached home, the silence continued. It was as if he didn’t hear her. He simply stared out at the river vacantly, his fingers tremulous as he lit cigarette after cigarette. Bettina put him to bed, and after only a moment’s reflection about the wisdom of the act, called their family doctor. He was loathe to come out. It would be dark soon, the streets perhaps unsafe. She convinced him, said she would send a car for him; it would see him back.

  When the old man emerged from his examination of Klaus, he stroked his beard nervously and looked askance at Bettina. ‘Well, he’s ill, a high temperature, but I’m not absolutely certain if it’s influenza or not. Give him these every few hours,’ he took some powders from his bag. ‘Make sure he drinks as much as possible.’ He paused, looked at her oddly and scratched his head. ‘He told me he was a murderer, should be arrested, a long story, not quite clear…’

  Bettina swallowed hard. ‘His mind’s wandering. It’s the strain of these last months, these last years.’ She smoothed her skirt. ‘You know Klaus, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘Yes,’ the old man murmured reflectively, clicked his bag shut. ‘Perhaps… well, if he’s not better in a few day’s time, I might recommend a sanatorium.’

  Bettina leapt at the word. ‘Yes, yes, doctor. Could you put that in writing.’

  She took comfort from the scratching of his pen, folded the note carefully and placed it in her secretaire.

  After he had gone, she sat by Klaus’s bedside. His eyes were closed, but his lips seemed to be moving ceaselessly. An incomprehensible mutter in which the odd word rang out clearly.

  Bettina watched and reflected. All their hopes for a just democracy had drowned in a sea of violence. She had known in these last months since Eisner’s assassination that they were trying to move things too quickly, these hotheaded men with their total visions, wanting everything turned topsy turvy instantly, when what was really needed was the slow, hard work of education, of reorganization.

  Democratic ideas, new structures, the necessary responsibility of each individual could not be instituted in a month, all at once, forever. Particularly in a Germany where the power of the state - a state which was the mirror image of the Prussian army with its rigourous military hierarchy - had always taken precedence over any notion of individual rights. Not that it was any better in Russia. Look at the chaos Lenin had wrought. No. She had argued with Johannes about it, as Klaus was arguing with himself now, she thought as she watched his murmuring lips.

  And what was to become of them now? Patience and restraint were needed, clear thinking to separate the good from the bad; and instead they were in the midst of a civil war.

  Bettina dozed, until the nervous jangle of a bell made her leap up in alarm. The ringing was accompanied by a banging at the door. She smoothed her hair. Through the shutters, pale slits of light announced dawn. She walked slowly down the stairs.

  ‘What is this racket?’ she pulled the door open abruptly and faced two policemen, a soldier. The latter held a gun at the ready.

  ‘Klaus Eberhardt?’ one of the policemen barked.

  ‘Yes, this is the Professor’s home,’ Bettina drew herself up regally, remembered Johannes in his frock coat. ‘There is no need to shout, or to wave that gun. I am Frau Eberhardt, Bettina von Leinsdorf,’ she spoke slowly enunciating each word. ‘This is a quiet neighbourhood. What is it that you want?’

  The soldier lowered his gun, but one of the policeman growled, ‘His arrest.’

  ‘His arrest?’ Bettina lifted a contemptuous eyebrow.

  The man tried to push past her, but she stood her ground, blocked the doorway.

  ‘Have you a warrant? Professor Eberhardt is an important man and we will stand for no slapdash revolutionary nonsense, here.’

  The men exchanged a questioning glance. One of the policemen dug in his breastpocket and produced a tatty fl
ier showing a series of ranked photographs.

  Bettina flicked her eyes over it. ‘Why gentlemen, this is mere propaganda.’ Her voice oozed scorn. ‘No official seal. Not even a signature anywhere in sight.’ She crumpled the flier and looked at them suspiciously.

  ‘If you are really here as the representatives of the highest judicial authority, if you are really here to arrest my husband, then you must return with the proper documents.’ She made to close the door in their astonished faces, only adding, ‘And be sure to tell your superiors that my husband is seriously ill with influenza and can be moved nowhere except an infirmary without risk to his own life and those around him.’

  Bettina slammed the door forcefully. She waited until she heard their footsteps receding and then slumped into the nearest chair. But there was no time to lose. Quickly she found the note from their family doctor and rang the clinic he had mentioned. It was full. They were taking no more patients. She tried another whose name she dimly knew. But here too, there were no more beds. She suddenly had an image of all-Munich huddled in asylums or prisons. She telephoned Petra, relieved to find her in, explained her need. Petra had some friends in a small experimental clinic for nervous ailments, just on the outskirts of Munich. She would try to take Klaus there that evening.

  ‘Now, Petra, please. This evening may be too late.’

  She heard her hesitate, then the acquiescence, ‘Alright, as soon as I can.’

  Bettina took a moment to think. It might be safer to disguise Klaus in some way, in case the car was stopped. She remembered that somewhere he had a white doctor’s coat. With swift determination, she went to rouse him, to explain only the minimum, since his eyes were still not focussing. Then she found the white coat, insisted that he put it on, told him that at the clinic he would go under the name of Klaus Niemayer from Konigsdorf. He had come to Munich deliberately because he had heard of the work of the clinic. She made him repeat the name several times, packed a small bag for him, for herself.

  Petra arrived just as she was dialling the number of Johannes’s house. No answer. She would have to go there later.

  They managed to arrive at the clinic without being stopped and at Petra’s insistence, a space was found for Klaus. Bettina explained to the doctor, that she might not be able to visit Herr Niemayer for some days but that should she be needed, a message should be sent to Seehafen.

  Yes, Bettina thought to herself. That would be best. She would go to the children and take Anna and Johannes with her.

  But at Johannes’s studio, there was only a tearful Anna.

  ‘He’s vanished,’ her sister said. ‘He wouldn’t tell me where he was going. Said it would be safer.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s right. We’ll go to Seehafen and wait until this has all blown over.’

  ‘I can’t leave,’ Anna was adamant. ‘Johannes may need me. May send a message.’

  ‘And Leo?’

  Anna looked at her stonily. ‘Leo will be fine with you.’ She turned away and began dabbing at the small oil painting on the table.

  ‘I think it would be wiser if you came with me,’ Bettina insisted.

  Anna shook her head. ‘You don’t understand, Bettina. Johannes needs me. Needs me here. Yesterday the police came. I met them at the bottom of the stairs. They were taking away a friend who was camping out in the studio.’ She hid her eyes. ‘I won’t let them take Johannes away.’

  Bettina shrugged. ‘When you find him, both of you make your way to Seehafen. You can stay in the boathouse. No one will think to look there. Don’t go to Bogenhausen for a while.’

  Anna nodded, looked up at her sister again. ‘Is Klaus alright?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bettina murmured. ‘But I think he’s safe.’

  ‘I wish I thought Johannes was safe,’ Anna shivered.

  Suddenly she flung herself at her sister and began to sob, ‘I don’t think I could bear another loss, Bettina.’

  Bettina cradled her in her arms for a moment and then kissed her lightly on the hair. ‘We’ll get through this too, Anna. We’ve been through so much already. Johannes will be alright. He can talk his way out of anything.’

  Where Johannes was, words were not a primary asset. Handcuffed between two detectives, an officer with a revolver at the ready opposite him, he and two other prisoners were being driven through the streets of Munich. Behind them were the soldiers, their machine guns poised as they joked about the rich picking of traitors this day had brought.

  Despite himself, Johannes laughed. ‘So there we are. Heroes of war become criminals of the peace in less than a year. Doesn’t it strike you as odd?’ he addressed the policeman on his left.

  The man shrugged, while the soldiers behind him hooted and jeered. The officer opposite, cocked his gun menacingly, ‘Keep your trap shut, bolshevik scum.’

  ‘Yes sir, Herr Lieutenant’, Johannes made a great show of trying to salute with handcuffed wrists.’

  ‘Why don’t you try and escape?’ a voice from behind baited him.

  Johannes twisted his head to see the man enact his murder by machine gun.

  ‘It’s heartening to see the new authorities have even more respect than I do for the rule of law,’ he muttered under his breath.

  The officer lashed him across the face with his gun. ‘I told you to keep quiet.’

  ‘Yes Sir, Sir,’ Johannes slumped back in his seat.

  Minutes later they were shoved roughly from the vehicle. Dazzling sunlight bounced off heavy stone walls and prison gates. Johannes tried to shield his eyes, read the scrawls chalked on stone: ‘Reds executed free of charge.’ ‘Spartacist sausage factory.’

  In a different spirit, he would have laughed away the crude threat of this right-wing humour. But he was suddenly frightened, more frightened than he had ever been throughout the war, he realised. There was a kind of individualised brutality at play here, a blind raucous hatred which would make killing him a vengeful pleasure to these men. And he didn’t want to die. Not now. Here.

  He walked obediently between the policemen, let himself be searched, pawed like one animal by another, said nothing as his clothes and few possessions were taken away, walked silently between two warders toward his cell. They passed through a bleak yard, a wall pitted with gun holes, at its base bloody shreds of what looked like dried human flesh.

  Johannes shuddered. From somewhere, he heard men’s voices jeering again,

  ‘We’ll have your brains splattered on that wall.’

  Hoots of laughter.

  ‘He’s the artist, yeah.’

  ‘We’ll get him to paint with his own blood.’

  He was relieved when the cell door clanged shut behind him and he heard the screech of the bolt.

  Johannes looked around the tiny room, saw the narrow bed with its musty blanket, the reeking bedpan. He leaned heavily against the door and closed his eyes for a moment.

  No, they wouldn’t kill him, he told himself, not unless it could be classified as an accident. He wasn’t important enough, not like poor gentle old Landauer, and that meticulous commissar Leviné he had taken such a dislike to.

  But rumour had it that they were murdering indiscriminately. He could well believe it from what he had seen of those soldiers today, the blood on the wall. And so many of his friends had disappeared. It was lucky that they hadn’t found him at home. They might have taken Anna then, too, out of sheer malice. Anna.

  Johannes wiped his brow. The heat was overpowering. Anna. That was why he now cared about his life. He stretched out on the narrow plank bed and stared up into the glazed slit which passed for a window. It was Anna who had twice now revivified him, given him a sense of connection with the world.

  Everything had gone dead for him in those last years, meaningless. His own isolated life one of a series of equally isolated and meaningless fragments replete with only an absurd horror. And then through her, in her, he had felt a kind of visceral force; had an apprehension, however unprovable, of a vast pulse which throbbed
through everything, regardless of his petty consciousness, a pulse which linked the colours he put on canvas with living beings, which made the shape of a bosom the curve of a mountain. It was as if she had given his boisterously voiced youthful beliefs in the healing power of the erotic, flesh and life. When he lay in her arms, the years in which so much blood had been senselessly spilt could almost be re-imagined as a sacrifice to a bountiful nature.

  And now, even now in the depths of this prison, if he visualized Anna, he could feel that pulse which made him hope.

  Clothing that hope in words, however, as he had sometimes tried to do, seemed a near impossibility. Was he really trying to say that if only men could accept that they were a single element in a sympathetic universe in which everything was organically linked in an endless fertile cycle, they might still be able to salvage something out of the slaughter which the exploitative machine mentality had wrought?

  Johannes scoffed at himself. To conjure pantheistic fantasies from this cell which spelled the end of the hope of these last months was a crass bit of innocence. Yet when Anna’s hands rippled over his body, he had the energy for a hundred utopias fashioned out of the lavish sensuality she gave him.

  Johannes leapt up as the cell door clattered open. Two warders ushered him out along the narrow corridor with its blind doors, down a flight of stairs past another row of cells, this time barred. Someone shouted his name. He looked up to see an acquaintance from the Stephanie, then a fellow artist, another friend and another. It was as if all Schwabing were suddenly behind bars.

  The guards hurried him along towards a room where his fingerprints were taken. Then, a number was stuck in front of him and a photograph snapped.

  ‘I am an artist,’ Johannes protested, ‘not a common criminal.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ a policeman scoffed at him.

  ‘See about what?’ A man entered the room, an officious spring to his steps. He was small, beady-eyed. The public prosecutor, Johannes realised.

  He was taken to an office where the charges against him were spelled out. Conspiring with traitors to overthrow the Republic. Fomenting public disquiet with revolutionary posters. Sheltering traitors in his home. The list went on endlessly as did the questions.