Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The inadvertent comparison made her gasp. She pushed it away, focussed again on Johannes. What had he said to her on one of those nights when she had melted in his arms, ‘Laugh for me Anna, the way you used to. I can never hear you laugh enough. I always wanted to find a way to paint that laugh.’

  It was true. In these last years, her laughter so often seemed to have an undertow of desperation.

  Leo. This human legacy Bruno had left her. That was part of it. The responsibility haunted her. She tried to imagine Leo in the house in Ascona, the garden, the bright nursery. And then she heard him crying, saw Johannes’s dark look, their mutual stubbornness, felt herself being torn apart, her half presence unwanted by both. It was a terrifying image.

  The days passed. Leo grew a little less sullen. From her corner by the fireplace, she watched the stubborn intentness with which he placed his bricks one on top of the other, higher and higher, until seeing that they were about to totter, he kicked them down first of his own accord and gave a little triumphant grimace before beginning the task again.

  He also liked collecting stones, brought fresh ones home from the park daily and lined them all up in varying orders. If she offered him a stone, he would examine it critically, sometimes throw it away, sometimes keep it. The ones he kept were always arranged in a separate line.

  She wasn’t allowed to share in his play. It was always Max who approached her with queries or asked her to take part in a game. But she knew that Leo was keenly aware of her: it only took an approach from Max to bring him scurrying in her direction, his handsome little face taut with emotion.

  One afternoon when he fell over in the park and began to cry, she ran to take him in her arms. He looked at her mistrustfully, his body stiff. ‘Want Aunt Bettina,’ he cried. ‘Aunt Bettina.’

  Anna tried not to let it hurt. But that night she left the children alone with the Nanny for the first time. She went to Schwabing, sat in the Stephanie, looked round for acquaintances. There was a pall in the atmosphere, as if Schwabing, itself, had grown tired and needed to regather its forces after the excess of the last year. She sipped her sekt, talked to a familiar face or two, was about to leave, when a big burly man approached her and threw his arms round her.

  ‘The radiant Anna, muse of muses. Is that foul painter finally going to allow us to share you?’

  ‘You’re drunk Gert,’ Anna struggled from his arms.

  ‘Nothing has changed there,’ he laughed a big bellow of a laugh. Ordered another glass for her.

  ‘Where is the foul rake? I haven’t seen hide or hair of him in all the days I’ve been here. And no forwarding address. He’s not still in jail is he? Someone would have communicated that bit of news.’

  Anna shook her head, ‘We’ve moved.’

  He looked at her astutely from small bright eyes. ‘Still we, then is it? And just a teeny weeny bit secretive?’

  ‘Just a teeny weeny bit,’ Anna suddenly smiled.

  ‘Don’t smile at me like that or friendship will be for nought, you Viennese heartbreaker,’ he beat his breast with an air of mock frenzy.

  Anna laughed, ‘And how’s Berlin?’

  ‘A little less dull than this place at the moment, which is not to say a great deal. Come and visit.’

  ‘I may just do that.’

  ‘Did I hear that miraculous word, ‘I’?’

  Anna flushed. ‘You did.’

  ‘A good word, a fine word. But tell that old rogue of yours something from me nonetheless. Tell him Seidermann’s looking for some work for a Swiss Gallery,’ he winked at her. ‘A few pennies never come amiss, eh, especially when they’re in hard currency.’

  ‘Thanks Gert.’

  ‘Just remember that you’re eternally in my debt, o muse of muses.’

  On her way home, Anna reflected that she felt distinctly cheered by her little escapade. She must get out and about more, for Johannes sake as well as her own.

  When she arrived at Bogenhausen there was a telegram awaiting her. ‘Come to Berlin as soon as possible. Bring everyone. Telegraph arrival time to Hotel Kempinski. Klaus.’

  Anna stared at the words, uncertain as to what they signified. There had been no prior talk of her bringing the children to Berlin. But Klaus and Bettina must have their reasons.

  Anna busied herself, alerted the nanny, checked train schedules, packed bags. The activity, she realised, did her good. There was a lesson in that, too. With a sudden sense of exhilaration she penned a quick note to Johannes. She hadn’t written to him yet, hadn’t known how to put into words her sense of desolation without him, her dawning recognitions. Now she told him of the changed plans, told him about Seidermann being in Switzerland. Then she added, ‘Miss you terribly, but not certain when I’ll be back’ - nothing more.

  Klaus, his features strained, was waiting for them at the station in Berlin, as they disembarked from the night train. He embraced the children, let them walk ahead with the nanny, while he took Anna aside.

  ‘Bettina’s lost the baby,’ he said, his voice tense. ‘I thought you might go to her straight away. In the hospital. He wrung his hands. ‘I thought she would like everyone with her when we brought her home.’

  Anna felt he might begin to cry, right there in the station. She had an acute sense of his pain, of his need for support. She gripped his arm. ‘I’m so sorry, Klaus. How is she? Of course, I’ll go to her immediately. Where will you be?’

  He was a little vague. ‘The hotel. I don’t know. Perhaps just for tonight. There’s an apartment we could move into temporarily. The one house we saw that Bettina liked is really too unreasonable.’ He stumbled over his words. Anna sensed that he hated making decisions without Bettina.

  ‘An apartment would be a good idea. With the children,’ she offered tentatively. She, too, was unused to decisiveness. But looking at Klaus’s face, she realised it was essential. ‘Yes, the apartment. As soon as possible,’ she said firmly. ‘Bettina will be more comfortable there. And she’ll need to rest, I imagine.’

  He nodded, tried a watery smile.

  ‘Why don’t you take the children to the zoo, so they don’t have too much time to worry,’ she said it as much for him as for them.

  The hospital gave Anna the jitters. She remembered another hospital but with the same echoing corridors where heels clacked eerily and nurses smiled with official good cheer. She had been so frightened then, so certain, it now came back to her, that Bruno had been coming to take her away, whether in love or revenge was unclear.

  She shook herself. She musn’t allow herself to feel haunted, behave like a silly, superstitious, slip of a girl. She could hear Bettina’s voice saying that. She was a woman now, with responsibilities. And her sister needed her. Yes, perhaps for the first time in her life, the tables were turned and Bettina needed her. Anna’s heels rang more firmly as she neared the ward.

  Bettina’s face was almost as white as the pillow it rested on. Anna took her hand, squeezed it.

  ‘How do you feel?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Like an idiot.’ Bettina’s long lips curved into irony and then quivered. ‘I guess Klaus’s child was not meant to be,’ she murmured.

  ‘Now who’s behaving like a superstitious fool?’ Anna followed her own thoughts.

  Bettina met them, ‘Who, indeed?’ A single tear rolled down her cheek.

  Anna kissed her, sat quietly by her side.

  ‘I had this sixth sense it was wrong,’ she said after a moment. She looked into the distance, musing, not meeting Anna’s eyes. ‘It was at Seehafen, you know, this summer, when we were all there together. I had this notion that Klaus was only making love to me to settle scores. With Johannes. Because Max was conceived there, when the three of us were together. A return match, so to speak. But Klaus was in such a state that I didn’t like to refuse him.’ Suddenly, she gasped. ‘I’m sorry Anna. I was thinking aloud. I shouldn’t be saying this to you.’

  ‘What are we sisters for?’ Anna said ruefully.

 
; ‘Yes.’ Bettina held her hand more firmly. ‘It’s the loss of blood, you know. It makes your head light. I feel I’m floating all the time.’

  They were silent for a while, then Bettina began again, ‘You know, sometimes I have this strange notion that Klaus was more in love with Johannes than I was. Seduced by his passion, his rudeness, his genius, even his revolutionary fantasies. And Johannes was not in the least unhappy to have Klaus there. I was just a pawn in a little chess game between the men.’

  ‘You’ve never been a pawn to anyone, Bettina,’ Anna was adamant. ‘It’s just the momentary weakness speaking.’

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any event, I sometimes wonder whether all this sexual business is worth it for women.’

  ‘Bettina!’

  ‘Well perhaps it’s not the same for all of us. But for me…’ she shrugged. ‘The doctor said I shouldn’t have any more children, Anna,’ she blurted out, her face suddenly as fragile as a pale flower. The tears came again now, copious.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You musn’t tire Frau Eberhardt out.’ A nurse suddenly appeared from nowhere, her voice metallic. ‘She should sleep.’

  ‘Stay, Anna.’ Bettina gripped her hand.

  ‘But no more chatter,’ the woman was firm as she handed Bettina a pill, a glass of water.

  Bettina slept. Anna stayed by her side. She had never seen her sister look frail before, never seen her cry. It shook her, as did all those things she had said. Reflecting on them, Anna suddenly had the glimmerings of a plan.

  Over the next days, she spent every afternoon with Bettina. In the course of those afternoons, she learned far more about her sister than she had ever known. And about Johannes. Some shift in the balance of power between them made her unafraid to ask Bettina questions about him, and all those little factual matters of daily experience which she herself was oddly blind to, came clear for her.

  The day before Bettina was due to leave the hospital, Anna said to her, ‘Has Klaus told you? The apartment is ready to receive you.’

  Bettina nodded. ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘I thought I’d stay on with you until Christmas or the New Year. Help out.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that. The doctor says I’m to take things easy for a few weeks,’ Bettina fidgeted.

  ‘And we’ll try to make sure that you do - though I hope that doesn’t take up all our time,’ Anna laughed.

  Then, a little cautiously, she said, ‘Bettina, after you’re altogether well and settled in, I thought I might go back to Ascona and…and leave Leo with you for another while, if you don’t mind, if that’s not asking too much,’ she finished all in a rush.

  Bettina gave her a long scrutinizing look. ‘I was wondering if you’d come round to that.’

  ‘Is it too much to ask? Do you think it’s wrong? It’s just that I can’t live without Johannes, and for the time being, I can’t imagine Johannes living with him,’ she was racing.

  ‘It’s not wrong, no,’ Bettina said slowly. ‘So many people do it. It’s just that I can’t conceive of leaving Max for more than a few days. But then,’ she laughed, ‘when I think of losing little Leo, I don’t feel very happy either. I’ve grown accustomed to having him with us. And so has Max. And Klaus.’ She suddenly laughed with a more bitter tone. ‘And losing two in one throw would be altogether too many. So yes, he can stay with us for as long as you like,’ she suddenly beamed.

  ‘Thank you, Bettina,’ Anna hugged her. ‘And there’s something else. You know that one house that you liked so much in Grunewald, the vast one. Klaus was telling me that he wasn’t sure about it. That it was too expensive.’

  Bettina’s face fell. ‘He didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘No, but listen Bettina, it’s beautiful. We’ve all been to see it together. And,’ she paused, wondering how to phrase it, remembering how in Vienna, when they had been to see Bruno’s executors, Bettina had refused to take all but a tiny fraction of her legacy, and that only after Anna had insisted to the point of hoarseness, ‘And I thought we might buy it together and one of the wings could be mine to use when I’m here. Please, Bettina.’

  ‘Now that, Anna, sounds to me like a fine idea,’ Bettina’s cheeks took on some of their former colour. ‘And if we put our energy together, perhaps we can even move in by Christmas. Yes, a new city, a new house, a new decade. The Twenties. I’ve had enough of all this depression, Anna. All of us. Mired in it. It’s time to get back to work. No heroics, this time. War. Revolution. Men’s antics. What we want is slow, steady improvement. I have this idea…’

  ‘I can tell you’re better, Bettina,’ Anna smiled, cutting her off.

  ‘And I’ll be even better come Christmas,’ Bettina said staunchly.

  Looking at her, Anna felt more certain of that than of anything else in her universe.

  Chapter Eleven

  The bells of St Pietro-Paolo chimed out the notes of the midnight mass, each note as crisp and clear as the twinkling stars in the wintry sky above Ascona. Each, for Johannes, the bearer of an anticipated message. Anna was not coming back. Not coming back.

  He buried his head in his arms to block out the sound. But it was not eluded so easily. Johannes leapt to his feet and ran. Away from the bells, away from the house, away from the village, until the beating of his heart replaced all other sounds. When he stopped to gauge his whereabouts, he realised that his feet had taken him onto the only sure path of escape. Laughing at himself, he slowly began to make his way along a series of narrow uneven trails. Ascona’s proliferation of communes marked his way: clusters of wooden cabins, more imposing establishments, housing groups of any and every idealist variety. He pulled his jacket more closely round him as he neared the windy crest of the hill.

  It was the second time he had been filled with this certainty that Anna would not return. The first had been all those weeks back when her brief note had arrived. Reading it, he had felt that he had lately misjudged her. In the note’s terse wording, its lack of any emotionalisms, he had seen again that Anna he had first loved in the war years, that fresh impulsive creature, who had followed her instincts straight into his arms only to take him over so rapturously that he felt he had stumbled upon the sensual goddess of his youthful dreams. This Anna, he had a sudden conviction, would find another man as certainly as she had found him. Had probably already found him.

  This Anna was not like the second Anna with whom he had begun to feel enslaved. The second Anna he now dated from Bruno’s death and the birth of her child. She was no less a sensual creature, but something in her had been wounded. She was in need. The passion she had elicited from him, had given him, had been if anything greater, but the emotional demand she made of him drained him.

  Or so he had begun to see things in the great expanses of time he had spent alone since her departure. Too much time, in which he had considered and reconsidered their various lives and the ties which bound them. His own, in which all he could see to value were a few paintings, a wordless kindness to a dead friend, a few moments of passion which obliterated all the rest. Anna’s - with its strange innocence, as if that long aristocratic line of decaying Viennese had suddenly, by some accident of nature, branched into a resplendent new tree, lush in its foliage but overly sensitive to wintry weather. Her husband, Bruno, who had appeared to him as almost a comic incarnation of Austro-Hungary, a man who had pompously married capital with culture. But he had done so with energy and he had had the taste to love Anna. Johannes still remembered their last meeting, the lost, slightly dazed quality of Bruno’s eyes, as if he knew that the world he had aspired to, had striven to build on, to extend, was crumbling at its very foundations.

  It never ceased to surprise him, but he had liked Bruno then. As he valued Klaus with his embattled sincerity, his scientist’s love of detail, not so unlike his own, but with a blindness, an inability, an unwillingness to grasp contradictions, to put philosophy in the place of catalogues. And Bettina, that other stray von Leinsdorf, with her pri
ncipled high seriousness and quick wit, so that she put words to things even before he had grasped what he was thinking. Yes, he liked them all, damaged as they all were by a history they themselves had partly made. It was only himself that he hated and the sordid canvases his imagination refused to abandon.

  No, there was no reason for Anna, with her singular gift for life, to return to him.

  Desolation filled him as he trod the remembered path. He had sought solace here before, when her note had first crushed him. But he hadn’t been to visit Mario’s little band of outcasts for a month now. After the initial series of visits, he had gone back to work telling himself that his sense that Anna wouldn’t return was a fabrication, that he didn’t need to replace her either with communes or the artful hothouse flowers which bloomed there. It was true that before going she had been vague, but she had talked of all of them spending Christmas together, the two of them and the child. He would bide his time.

  But now Christmas had come and hadn’t brought her with it. What it had brought instead were incessant dreams of her and an inability to work. Johannes quickened his step, felt an unseen branch whip him across the face, heard the hoot of an owl. He hooted back. The sound freed him a little. He smiled darkly to himself.

  They were probably all hooting at the dacha, drunk on wine and other kinds of drugs, drunk on their anarchist dreams, drunk on the communal freedoms Ascona permitted.

  He could see the glow of the fire through the slightly crooked windows now, hear the bark of the mangy old dog they kept to alert them of intruders. The door opened before he could knock, and a small bearded man, almost a boy, in frayed shirt and trousers confronted him.

  ‘It’s Johannes,’ he called out in his heavily-accented French for everyone to hear, before patting him warmly on the shoulder, ‘Entrez, entrez, come in, comrade, good to see you again.’ He restrained the dog forcibly.