‘He’s in there somewhere. Almost bit my head off when I asked why he still insisted on painting such depressing pictures when things were obviously on the mend.’
‘Serves you right for asking unartistic questions,’ Bettina put her arm through Klaus’s and laughing, made her way through the doors.
Inside, the rush of a hundred voices mingled with the smoke of countless cigarettes, swirled round turbaned and jewelled and cropped and pomaded heads.
Bettina and Klaus, dropped their coats, responded to a flurry of greetings and embraces. Everyone was here - nattily dressed businessmen and rumpled proletarian artists, cabaret dancers resplendent in scarlet and silver, double-chinned politicians, bespectacled critics, notorious satirists, lauded writers.
Alfred Flechtheim himself came to greet them. The perpetual thin cigar between his lips, he shook Klaus’s hand vigorously and thanked him again for the loan of two of Johannes’s early pictures. ‘The great man is over there,’ he pointed them towards a far corner of the room.
As they pressed through the crowd, Bettina spotted a slim woman in a long shimmering gown standing a little to one side of the throng. The bright aureole of hair now trimly cut to reveal smooth bare shoulders was unmistakeable. Anna. Her sister. Always beautiful. Always herself. She seemed to be the only person in the room whose gaze was focussed on a painting.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ Bettina kissed her warmly on both cheeks.
‘I didn’t expect to be here.’ Her face had a wintry pallor, Bettina noticed, though it only served to emphasize the purity of its lines, the touching vulnerability of her eyes. ‘But Johannes rang, insisted. I arrived this afternoon and checked into a hotel. In case…’ she looked at Bettina beseechingly.
‘No need to explain,’ Bettina hugged her, then watched her sister as Klaus embraced her.
How odd life was. She would never understand it, understand how two people whose love for each other was so blatantly passionate could so flagrantly fail to make a life together. Anna and Johannes seemed neither to be able to live together for long nor to live apart for long.
She had almost stopped keeping track of their comings and goings. Two years ago, she had again suggested to Anna that rather than embroil Leo any longer in the heat of their twosome and continually disrupt his schooling, the boy would be better off in Berlin with her - Berlin, where Johannes hated to be. Though he had grown to hate Ascona, too, it seemed, couldn’t stand the unreality of it. Bettina shrugged.
She knew that last year, somewhere between Ascona, Munich, Seehafen and Berlin, which marked the corners of Anna’s erratic trajectory, there had been an affair with another man. Anna had confided that to her, told her in dismal tones that Johannes had driven her to it, had perhaps even set it up.
Bettina didn’t pry. She didn’t really want to know. Passion, she had begun to think, was not a useful experience as one grew older, unless one could contain it to its proper place - like a secret delight one kept in store for oneself, a special treat at special moments, not a great hairy beast that trampled over everything in sight. Bettina smiled to herself. That was the way it was for her with Thomas, had been for a year now. Thomas Sachs who made her understand for the first time what it meant to be young. And young in the roaring twenties. Bettina smoothed the close crop of her hair.
She should tell Anna about Thomas. Not that it would help. The problem for her was that her lover was also her husband. Johannes was simply not cut out to be a husband.
She hadn’t seen much of Johannes over these last years, though he wrote to her occasionally. At the rare times when he came to Berlin, he met her in some quiet restaurant for what was always engagingly civilized conversation. She read about him of course, heard his praises sung by the critics. His work was all the rage at the moment.
Bettina glanced at the bits of paintings she could see over people’s shoulders. She had schooled herself to appreciate Johannes’s work intellectually, but she still felt a kind of visceral unease as she looked at his images. But she had grown genuinely to like the early pictures now. And she was particularly fond of the sketches he had done of Anna and her in 1919, when they were all together in Seehafen. Sisters, the series was called. She could see one of the paintings based on it. The front room at Seehafen. Herself sitting upright at the small table, reading peacefully, and Anna, curled like a sleepy cat into the cushions of the sofa, her animal eyes unblinking as they gazed dreamily out of the canvas.
Those eyes, darkened with kohl in the current fashion, now followed the line of her own, and rested on the canvas.
‘Things were better then, weren’t they.’ Anna said softly.
‘Nonsense, Anna,’ Bettina was abrupt. ‘Things are far better now. Just look around you. Think of the chaos after the war, the fear, the misery.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Anna murmured, ‘I was only thinking…’
Johannes was suddenly upon them, his hair tousled, but his white collar and tie immaculate against the dark suit. As always Bettina was both taken aback by and drawn to the directness of that sea-blue gaze. He seemed to generate an electric field around himself. He was gazing at Anna. Silence covered them for a moment. And then Johannes folded her in his arms, kissed her intimately, deeply with no heed for the rest of them. Bettina shivered, averted her eyes. It made her feel as if she were spying into a stranger’s bedroom.
‘I’m so glad you’ve come, Anna,’ she heard Johannes murmur.
Bettina glanced at Klaus. There was a strange boyish melancholy on his features. She took his hand. Perhaps it was her imagination, but Anna looked transformed. Her pallor had vanished. Her eyes sparkled and there was a swing in her movements which drew the gaze of everyone she passed. Bettina shook her head. If only all these powers that Johannes so evidently possessed and liberally passed on could be harnessed for some good purpose.
Leo Adler stood in front of the heavy panelled door which led to the front salon of the house in Grunewald. He hesitated. He could hear the women’s voices, one crisp, clear, certain of its words; the other murmuring, fuzzy, too soft. He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. The smooth stone was there in one of them, its hardness soothing. In a trice he could fit it into the slingshot he had in his other pocket, take aim, and launch a missile. Pftoing. Splat. Like the young American brave in the Karl May novel he was reading.
And then the voices would be stilled. Silent.
He liked the silence. When he sat by the window and looked out, it had its own sounds. The laughter of the ducks as they landed on the lake, the rustle of the sooty squirrels racing through the branches of the oak. But not in winter. In winter, there was only the crackle of ice, the snap of twigs. Sometimes a restless bird.
And the women’s voices drowned them out too easily. There were always so many women’s voices in this house. They drowned out his dreams, too, of becoming a blood brother to Hawk-eye and Chingachgook in the virgin forest, or an officer, a soldier in the Prussian Guard, of limitless adventures and boundless courage.
Leo reached for the door knob, fidgeted and then bent instead to look through the keyhole. There they were, Bettina and Anna. Anna and Bettina. Uncle Klaus wouldn’t be happy if he splatted them with his slingshot. He didn’t like hurting things, killing. And Leo liked Uncle Klaus, liked him best of all. Far better than that horrid man his mother had married who wasn’t his father. Though Klaus was too soft and sometimes didn’t understand things. For example he didn’t understand it when Leo got angry. So angry that things got all blurred and red and he had to scream or run away into the woods. He had been angry just a few minutes ago when old Martha had told him he had to stop reading, had ordered him to go downstairs.
Not so angry though that he couldn’t open the door and aim his slingshot, right there into his mother’s breast.
Mothers. Bettina had said to him one day not so long ago, ‘You’re lucky, you know, Leo. It’s as if you had two mothers. Your natural mother and me.’
; ‘Are you my unnatural mother?’ he had asked her then and she had laughed, said ‘No, I’m your natural Aunt,’ and she had gone on to explain at length, as she always did, with too many words, so that he stopped hearing and only wished that he had no mothers. Neither the one who talked too much, nor the one who touched too much.
But then she had mentioned Corinne’s name and he had started to listen again. He was lucky, Bettina told him, because he had two mothers, whereas Corinne had none and no father either. So she was going to stay with them and they would be her family.
Leo didn’t want to be anybody’s family. Especially not Corinne’s who came into his room without knocking, touched all his stones with her dirty fingers, mussed his collection of bullets and the bird’s feathers he had carefully arranged in the shape of an Indian headdress. And she laughed at him, too. She had horrible knobbly knees and sprouting breasts and everyone was so kind to her, especially Max, even when she said stupid things, which was every time she opened her mouth.
When he was bigger, soon, he would run away to America and live in the woods, alone, without a family, like Hiawatha or Winneton. It would be quiet there, so quiet that he could hear the snakes slithering through the tall grass.
‘Leo,’ the door opened suddenly and Leo stumbled over Bettina. ‘There you are. I was just coming to fetch you.’ She looked at him with momentary disapproval and then smiled. ‘You’ve been daydreaming again. Come and give your mother a kiss.’ She shepherded him across the room.
Leo kept his eyes on the floor. Golden wood. Polished. Hard, so that he could hear his heels echoing on it. Then the softer rug with the patterns whose end or beginning he could never find. If he concentrated on the patterns, he could almost bear the sense of that moist hand ruffling his hair, stroking his neck. But she was lifting his chin.
‘My, how you’ve grown again,’ she squashed him against her so that he smelled that rich fetid smell that suffocated him. He struggled away from her and then met those eyes, sad eyes that always seemed to want something from him, like a whimpering puppy. If only he could kick her to make her go away, make her stop wanting something he couldn’t give.
‘I’m only here for a few days Leo, and I thought we might go out together today, have some cakes, ice cream, catch up on things.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Leo said sullenly.
‘Leo,’ Bettina reprimanded him.
‘No, no, that’s alright,’ his mother’s voice was cloying. ‘Perhaps a walk round the lake, then. It’s lovely out.’
‘I wanted to finish my book.’
‘Get your coat, Leo. And don’t let me hear that rudeness again,’ Bettina was firm. He walked quickly from the room.
‘He hates me,’ he could hear Anna whimpering as he closed the door.
‘Nonsense, he’s just shy. They’re all like that at his age. He’s not eight yet, and he hasn’t seen you for a while.’
Leo fingered the stone in his pocket.
It was bright out. The sun made shadows on the thin layer of crisp snow which crunched as they walked. He could see the two of them on the ground, like great skinny giants. If he moved ahead just a little, he was as tall as her, taller. He smiled.
She had her hand on his shoulder, but he could barely feel it through his thick coat. It wasn’t so bad this time. He wasn’t melting into her, disappearing. His coat was thick, his skin hard. It was alright.
‘How is school?’ she asked him.
‘Fine.’
‘Just fine?’
In the distance the lake shimmered coldly. He shrugged off her hand, started to run towards it. She raced after him, stopped him, laughed.
‘You run quickly now. Bettina tells me you’ve joined a youth group. Do you enjoy that?’
He nodded. ‘In the spring we’ll be going off camping,’ he offered.
‘That sounds wonderful.’
‘Look, there’s Uncle Klaus,’ he pointed. ‘He’s got Wolfi with him. You haven’t met Wolfi yet. Max brought him home. He had an injured paw, but he’s better now,’ he bounded off.
Anna watched him. He was so beautiful with his shock of blond hair, those wide hazel eyes flecked with yellow, like her own, it made her heart ache. She trailed after him, saw him bury his face in the dog’s heavy coat. He seemed happy, she thought. As long as she wasn’t there.
‘Anna, nice to see you,’ Klaus smiled at her. ‘Meet Wolfi.’
At a command from Klaus, the dog placed a shaggy golden paw in her hand.
‘I’ve been ordered to wait here, for exactly another minute,’ Klaus looked at his watch, ‘and then Wolfi and I are setting off to track Max and Corinne. Will you join us?’
‘Yes,’ Leo answered for her. ‘Can I hold his lead?’
Klaus nodded, stared at his watch, ‘Five, four, three, two, one. Go.’
‘Find Max,’ Leo commanded. The dog sniffed the ground and then to the little boy’s evident delight, set off deliberately up the slope.
‘It’s our latest game,’ Klaus smiled. ‘One or t’other of them is lost in the woods and Wolfi has to track them, save them from the elements. It was Leo’s idea originally. He’s been reading about the wild west.’
‘Isn’t it a little dangerous?’ Anna worried.
‘I don’t think so. They always go in pairs and they can’t get very far in ten minutes.’ He laughed gaily, ‘It isn’t really the wild west, Anna, not even as wild as Seehafen.’
‘No, I guess not.’ She looked dubious. In the distance, at the top of the slope, the woods were thick, gloomy. She pulled her coat more closely round her.
They followed briskly behind Leo and the dog. At intervals, the boy would let out a loud whoop and perform a strange little dance, before once more giving the dog his head. They caught up with him at the edge of the woods. Wolfi was sniffing the ground dutifully. Suddenly, he barked and raced off at a tangent, dragging the jubilant boy behind him.
‘He’s found them, he’s found them,’ Leo shouted, tripping happily between trees, leaping over fallen branches.
But the dog suddenly stopped. His ears alert, he sniffed the air and then again the ground. He looked confused. He set off more slowly now into denser wood, dark, despite the shafts of light, the occasional bright glossiness of holly. All at once he started to bark again, growl loudly. Leo whooped, ‘We’ve found you, Max. Come out. Ma-a-a-x.’
But there was no answering call. Wolfi barked excitedly, ran towards a cluster of holly trees. He pawed at the ground. Clumps of dried leaves flew into the air, loose earth mixed with snow. Anna saw a startled look on Leo’s face. She raced ahead of Klaus, then stopped in her tracks. There, half-exposed on the ground, lay a woman, her hair mingled with dirt and leaves, her face frozen into a look of pained surprise, her mouth a smudge of scarlet, too bright against the translucent pallor of her skin.
Anna screamed. Buried her face in her hands, heard the rush of footsteps, the clamour of voices.
‘We’re here, we’re here.’
‘You didn’t find us.’
‘What’s wrong, Wolfi?’
‘Just look what he’s found.’
‘Oh.’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Murdered,’ Leo’s voice.
All as if in a dream.
‘Anna, Anna,’ Klaus’s voice was stern. He drew her hands away from her face. ‘Take the children home. Ring the police. I’ll wait here.’
She saw Max and a dark, frail, girl, their eyes wide with awe. And Leo still staring, staring at that woman. A little rapt smile hovered over his lips.
She shook herself. ‘Come on all of you,’ her voice squeaked in her own ears. ‘Come on,’ she said more firmly.
‘I’ll stay with you, Uncle Klaus,’ Leo was still staring.
‘No, you go with Anna, quickly now.’
‘Leo,’ Anna reached for his hand. He resisted her.
‘Come on, Leo. Quick, we have to get the police,’ Max gave it an important sound, tugged at Leo’s arm. ‘They’ll need
to ask you questions. Come on Corinne. Quickly.
Leo cast a last lingering look at the dead woman. She looked so still he thought. Silent and beautiful. Beautiful and silent. He let himself be led away by his cousin.
Bettina handed each of the children a mug of steaming cocoa and biscuits, and then poured out tea for Anna and herself. The police had been rung and they were waiting for Klaus’s return. A fire crackled in the hearth.
‘Wolfi and I found her,’ Leo said self-importantly for the fourth time.
‘I know, dear,’ Bettina murmured. ‘What a shock it must have been.’
Corinne, her thin pointed face almost as pale as the dead woman’s asked, ‘Do you think she was murdered?’
‘Of course she was murdered,’ Leo’s voice had a note of squeaking triumph.
‘You don’t know that, Leo. Not for certain,’ Max said softly. His bright, intelligent face was troubled as he looked at his younger cousin.
‘Max is right,’ Bettina echoed, but she wasn’t censorious.
‘She looked murdered,’ Leo insisted. ‘She looked like a bad woman.’
Anna met his eyes. In her distress it seemed to her that he was passing judgement on her.
‘You don’t know that either, Leo,’ she murmured.
‘You certainly don’t,’ this time Bettina was firm. ‘She could just as easily have fallen, broken her leg, and what with this weather, died of exposure, of cold.’
They heard the door open and Bettina leapt up.
‘Well, I think she was a bad woman who was murdered,’ Leo repeated stubbornly, though more quietly. This time he fixed his eyes on Corinne. ‘Like that woman in the newspapers.’
‘Stop trying to frighten Corinne,’ Max rebuked Leo.
Max, Anna noted, though he was only ten, behaved as if he were older than Bettina’s newest ward, older than all of them.
The girl had started to cry. Anna put her hand round her shoulder and patted her. She remembered Bettina’s telling her that Corinne’s mother had died only some months ago. The tenement in which she lived was one of Bettina’s regular visiting sites, and she had rescued the girl from being sent to an orphanage.
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