Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  It was thus that Johannes found her.

  ‘You’ll catch a chill, Anna,’ he chided her, but smiled. She cut such a strange picture out there in the misty morning in her nightie and heavy boots, her pale gold hair tumbled from sleep, like a sleepwalking child, but caught in a frothy tantalizing dream not a nightmare.

  She came running towards him. ‘And what, Johannes, if flowers and plants were my paint and the sky and soil my canvas?’ she asked with no preamble.

  He laughed. ‘No larger, no greater.’

  She clutched his shoulder, looked up at the sky as if in the grip of a vision. ‘Do you think it’s too early to start. I need to dig, need some help. Perhaps a boy from the village.’

  He was entranced by her fervour. No sooner had they breakfasted, than she rushed away, came back hours later, her arms laden with horticultural books, a copy of Blake’s Auguries of Innocence somehow amongst them. There was a dreamy set to her face. She took the books up to her studio, leaving him musing at her slightly awkward secretiveness.

  The very next day, their lives took on a new regimen. Instead of clutching at him, as she had done before her departure, holding him back at her side in the mornings, she would rise early and with Rinaldo, the dark-eyed, curly haired youth she had recruited from the village, she would go out into the garden and begin the day’s innumerable tasks.

  He would watch them from his studio window, or from the back of the loggia and often abandon the work he had in hand to sketch them, then to paint them - the golden Anna, and the dark, sinewy boy who followed her like a shadow. Except when it rained, and she retired alone to her studio, emerging tired but buoyant to let him take her mellowly into his arms. Sometimes, after they had made love, she would read to him in her clear musical voice from the volume of Blake which seemed to speak to her.

  ‘To be in a Passion you good may do.

  But no good if a Passion is in you.’

  Days rolled into weeks. The expanse at the back and sides of the house was cleared except for the trees. Then, towards the middle of March, she announced that she was going off for a week, perhaps a little longer, to a place on Lake Como, another in Milan, where she had heard of a botanist, a nursery. He wondered at her. She had not asked once whether she could come into his studio, see his work. It was almost as if she had taken an unspoken decision. He could not even feel a trace of her waiting for an invitation. He was relieved at that, if slightly puzzled, even perturbed, since he didn’t know whether she would approve of what she saw.

  When she returned, carried by a small truck laden with plants and packages, she was ecstatic.

  ‘Just wait, Johannes, wait until you see the beauty of it!’ Her lips trembled.

  ‘Nothing could be more beautiful than you,’ he murmured.

  She met his eyes, ‘Do you mean that, Johannes?’ she whispered.

  He looked at her. A new lime green dress which fell loosely from her shoulders only hinting at the suppleness of the form beneath, leaving her golden arms exposed, setting off that creamy neck and throat, the aureole of hair, the wide tawny eyes, the Grecian nose above the curling lips, slightly open now as she gazed at him. He nodded slowly. ‘When you’ve been away, Anna, and I see you again, I can’t imagine how I’ve ever let you go.’

  Her eyes flickered. She ran into his arms, letting him kiss her, hold her, despite the glances of the man who trudged up and down the steps unloading her purchases.

  That night, after they had made love and he was so suffused with the touch and scent of her that all the rest of the world seemed to have disappeared, he suddenly sensed her looking at him oddly. ‘What is it, Anna?’ The stars peeping through the vast bay window cast shadows on her face.

  ‘I know you won’t marry me, Johannes,’ she said in a small, unfamiliar voice, ‘You don’t believe in marriage. But just once, I would like you to say if you love me. I would like to know.’

  He tried to read her eyes, but they were opaque. ‘We are married, Anna, in all the ways that matter,’ he murmured. Lingeringly, he traced the line of her hip, her thigh, placed his hand on her mound, felt the curl of her body towards his, the inevitable longing stirring in his own. ‘And sometimes I think that, whatever I may do, I love you far more than my own life,’ his voice was hoarse. ‘I didn’t think the words between us mattered.’

  ‘Oh Johannes,’ she was crying, the tears moistening his face as she kissed him, covered him with her newly quivering body, flowed into him with such lavish generosity, that despite his passion he felt almost unequal to her.

  ‘What is it, Anna?’ he asked afterwards. ‘You’re different. Something’s happened.’

  She shrugged, didn’t answer, ran downstairs instead to come back with a bottle of wine she had brought home with her. She was laughing now, teasing, had donned a silk robe he didn’t recognize, lavish white flowers on a red ground, that made her look like some transplanted geisha. He had a sudden inkling that all this time he had been a fool, that there was another man, that she had seen him in Milan, somewhere, that he had asked her to marry him. There was a new scent to the robe, too, one he didn’t recognize. He grew tense, wary, waited for her to speak.

  She curled next to him, proffering wine, sipping quietly. And then it came. ‘I bumped into an old friend in Milan. Quite by accident,’ she laughed, that wild laugh that seemed to come from some other place.

  He hadn’t known that there had been an old friend.

  ‘Oh,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes, in the arcades near the Duomo. I thought I might do some shopping, that you might be growing tired of me in my garden rags.’

  He didn’t take her lead, negate her.

  ‘An old friend,’ her voice grew dreamy.

  ‘Who is he, Anna?’ he blurted out despite himself.

  She looked confused for a moment, then laughed again. ‘Not he, she. Katarina Hofer, an old friend from Vienna.’

  For a moment, he didn’t believe her.

  ‘She gave me this. Do you like it?’ She swirled round in front of him, holding the candle before her. ‘I admired it so much. And she had only just bought it.’

  Johannes relaxed a little. ‘And was it she who asked you if you had remarried?’

  Anna nodded, smiled. ‘I invited her to come and visit us on her way home. I hope she’ll come.’

  ‘And is she ‘married’?’

  ‘Her husband died last year,’ she laughed, then rushed on as if to cover her tracks, ‘he was old. She says she’s a merry widow now.’

  ‘Indeed. And is she? Merry, I mean.’

  ‘Katarina is always merry.’ Anna leaned back on the bedstead and clutched the pillow to her dreamily. She was silent for a moment. Then she said, as if speaking to the stars. ‘You know, Johannes, before you Katarina was the only one who made me feel things.’

  He wasn’t quite sure he had caught her sense. ‘Feel things?’ he echoed.

  ‘Yes, you know.’ She giggled, passed her hand along his chest, down his groin, played with him, kissed.

  He stopped her fingers ‘I see,’ he breathed.

  ‘Do you?’ she teased.

  An Anna he didn’t know. The way in which it roused him was almost painful. He came into her too quickly with a shuddering violence. And still she laughed.

  The image of Anna with another woman struck him with the force of a revelation. It began to obsess him in the course of that long sleepless night. A succession of scenes played before his eyes, each more painful and yet more fascinating than the next. Not another man, but a woman. A woman.

  He was at once taken by the images and wracked by an emotion which was new to him, but which he decided over the next days must be jealousy. Jealousy, that emotion he had always despised, a sign of pettiness, redolent of property values, beneath contempt. Jealousy, all the more insidious because it came to him that while at least with a man he would know the gestures of his competitor, with a woman he was on uncharted ground, unable to replicate or better the pleasure. How to mas
ter this gnawing jealousy became for him an obsession as strong as the jealousy itself.

  He watched Anna, secretly now, from his window as she laid out her flower beds, pressed and prodded and sowed, humming to herself, imagining he didn’t know what. Her presence taunted him and plagued him by turn, but grew more captivating with each new day.

  Soon after her return, he decided one morning to invite her to his studio.

  ‘Would you like to see my new work, Anna?’ he said nonchalantly as they were breakfasting on the terrace.

  ‘May I?’ she murmured. ‘I didn’t like to ask.’

  ‘You may not like what you see,’ he was wry.

  She laughed. She was full of laughter these days. ‘I’ll take my chances.’

  ‘Seidermann was here early in December. He took quite a few of them away with him. Said there was a museum which might be interested. I don’t think I mentioned it. There was a cheque while you were away.’ He was suddenly nervous, babbling, as if he were taking a potential new patron to see his work.

  ‘That’s wonderful, Johannes,’ she squeezed his hand. ‘I can’t wait to see them.’

  Anna, as she entered the studio, had a sudden sense of transgression. The atmosphere in the room was as charged as the wall racks Johannes had built to hold his canvases. It felt dense, dark, secret, despite the fresh spring sunlight which streamed through the window. It was the aura cast by the large paintings he had positioned against the wall opposite her. They ate up the light.

  She didn’t know quite what she had expected, perhaps the cold, clinical distance of his later war work with its maimed bodies and marionette-like figurines, though she had hoped for the warmth he had infused into the last images she had seen of herself, the wonderful triptych with its luminous colour. But this was something different again. A series of dark night works, thick with encrustations of oil and rampant suffocating vegetation. She shuddered involuntarily. It was like stepping into a hell which offered no exit.

  ‘I call these three, Inferno,’ Johannes said, as if reading her thoughts.

  She averted her eyes from his questioning gaze and sat in the chair he had put out for her. Now that she was appropriately positioned and could see the detail more clearly, she realised that they were forest scenes, each lit by some spectral bonfire made up of human remains. In the first, a woman danced, tall, sinuous, more angular than the trees, her face contorted, her eyes rapacious. She was surrounded by other women, dancing figures too, their movements wild, as they clung to each other, like in some medieval dance of death.

  The second painting repeated the theme. This time she could see that all the women were really the same one in different postures. Here the bonfire burnt more brightly and in its midst was the wreckage of the world, cannons, guns, blasted buildings. In the final picture, the woman herself was atop the flames, incandescent, and only the trees looked on, stately, slender. For a moment she thought the woman might be herself. The hair had caught a golden gleam.

  Anna turned away. She wanted to ask, ‘Who is the woman?’ Instead the tears leapt into her eyes, and she murmured, ‘They’re too painful, Johannes, too painful,’ she reached for his hand.

  The look on his face made her feel she had failed some vital test.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll like these better,’ there was a hard irony in his voice. He moved her to the other side of the room, began to draw out mounted canvases from their racks.

  Anna looked and breathed more freely. She felt she had left a dark night of the soul for a glowing pagan daylight, a world overflowing with colour yet serenely classical in its composition, a tree always at its centre, two figures always somewhere in its vicinity. One golden, the other dark. Herself and the youth.

  There was only one dissonant note in the canvases, but perhaps she only imagined it, a face hidden in the vegetation, peering out at the key players.

  ‘Paradiso,’ Johannes said. ‘Though not quite complete. Perhaps uncompletable.’

  He laughed and she joined him, not wanting to confront what she thought she heard in his tone. They had been so happy, of late. Instead, she said lightly, ‘Sometimes I think I’m not quite strong enough for your visions, Johannes.’

  ‘Does it take strength, Anna?’ He looked her intently in the eyes.

  ‘A great deal more than the garden,’ she kissed him playfully, whispered, ‘Thank you for inviting me.’

  Two weeks later, when the crimson pelargonium had already begun to overflow from the urns Anna had positioned on terraces and loggia and garden paths, and pink angel’s trumpet swayed magnificently above more delicate spiraea, Katarina arrived. As Johannes watched the two women embrace, the sleek dark head above the tousled blonde, he felt the acid of jealousy tearing away at his veins. But he hadn’t prepared himself adequately for the vivacious charm Katarina turned on him.

  ‘Johannes Bahr,’ she took his hand, clasped it warmly in both of hers. ‘An honour. Has Anna told you that I have been an admirer of yours since well before the war, that I have one of your paintings, would have many more if life permitted? No, I can see by your face she has forgotten,’ her laugh tinkled enveloping both of them.

  Johannes bowed.

  ‘How silly of me,’ Anna smiled. ‘I had forgotten. Johannes always makes me forget everything.’

  ‘I can see why.’ She gave him a swift, assessing look and then wryly, her dark eyes twinkling, addressed Anna as if he were no longer there. ‘I did warn you about artists, didn’t I, Anna?’

  ‘Katarina’s warnings are always like invitations,’ Anna explained playfully to Johannes, then turned to her friend. ‘But we must show you round, show you your room.’

  ‘I can already see that you’ve decided to live in heaven,’ Katarina gestured around her expansively.

  ‘But you may find us a little dull,’ Johannes lifted her case, took in the fashionable cut of her dress, the swinging loops of pearls, the satin ribbon that hugged her hips, the length of the silk stockinged legs as she climbed the stairs.

  ‘Dull?’ Katarina gazed at him from beneath dark lashes as he opened the door of the guest bedroom to her. ‘Dull, when I’ve rediscovered my darling Anna and am in the company of one of the great artists of his generation?’ She chided him, put an arm around Anna’s waist.

  ‘He doesn’t know you yet,’ Anna laughed happily. ‘Katarina is never dull, Johannes, you’ll see.’

  ‘I think I already do,’ he murmured, then bowing a little stiffly, said, ‘I’ll leave the two of you to catch up on things then.’

  ‘Not for too long Johannes,’ Anna seemed to be teasing him.

  ‘And if I may, I’d love to see your work.’

  ‘Of course.’ Johannes left them, torn between wanting to leave them alone and wanting to stay if only to see what they would do. Jealousy crackled inside him. He had a sudden shimmering vision of taking part in their revels, charting their pleasures. Only by kindling this jealousy, stoking it to explosive dimensions, he sensed, would he rid himself of the hold it had taken on him.

  Anna was only liminally aware of his disquiet. The thrill of having Katarina at her side in her new home wiped away everything else.

  ‘I was afraid you might not come,’ she said to her when they were alone.

  ‘And pass up the opportunity of seeing you again? And of inspecting the famous Johannes Bahr?’ Katarina’s laughter trilled merrily. ‘Despite all the years, you’re still sometimes a silly goose, my Anna.’

  They strolled slowly along the lakeside path, Katarina keeping up a repertory of ooh’s and aah’s as each new vista slid into sight.

  ‘It’s a veritable paradise here, Anna. A place to live out the good life,’ Katarina stretched her arms high and performed a little pirouette.

  ‘And many have tried,’ Anna smiled wryly and pointed to a little break in the shrubbery.

  ‘Ooooh,’ Katarina giggled. ‘A nudist enclave. But we musn’t spy,’ she tucked Anna’s hand through her arm. They walked on, happy in each other’s company.
At the top of the incline, they paused for a moment to catch their breath.

  ‘And what do you think of Johannes?’ Anna now shyly asked what she had been wanting to ask ever since they had set out.

  Her friend examined her from beneath the broad rim of her straw hat. ‘I think what I thought when I first laid eyes on you in Milan. I think that he must love you very well.’

  The way she said it brought a flush to Anna’s cheeks.

  ‘And that you need no more little lessons in love,’ Katarina continued lightly, ‘though the occasional refresher course in common sense might not be amiss.’

  Anna smiled. ‘You may not be wrong there, and I hope you’ll administer it.’ She put her arm through her friend’s again. ‘And you? You told me so little about yourself in Milan. I realized when I got back, that I had babbled unstoppably about myself.’

  Katarina chuckled, patted her hand, ‘You needed to.’ She paused, took a breath, ‘I, Anna, am in the bizarre position of finding myself attracted to a man who wants to marry me. Can you believe it?’

  ‘Never,’ Anna laughed. ‘You’ll have to rewrite your code book for young ladies. ‘Who is he?’ she asked, and then a little shyly added, ‘Will you?’ She gazed at Katarina, thinking again how little she had changed, how beautiful she was.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Katarina winked at her naughtily. ‘But before I embark on long stories let’s go to that little cafe you told me about in the village. I’m not a mountain goat and it would be nice to pretend we’re in Vienna again. My memories of our past splendour grow warmer with the years. And I always omit our disgraceful leave-taking,’ she added, almost to herself.