Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘It’s all right, Corinne. I’m sure Bettina’s right,’ she murmured to the girl.

  Bettina came back into the room with Klaus.

  ‘What do you think, Uncle Klaus?’ Leo piped up again. ‘You know about dead people. Was she murdered?’

  ‘I didn’t examine her,’ Klaus looked at them all with watery eyes. ‘It wasn’t my job. The police have taken her away now.’

  ‘Will they come here to ask us questions?’ Max asked.

  ‘Perhaps. But I think I told them the little there was to tell.’

  Leo looked disappointed.

  ‘And there’ll be no more walks in the woods for a while.’

  ‘Why?’ Leo asked.

  ‘They’ve cordoned them off to do their investigation.’

  Anna prodded herself. She was going off soon and all Leo would remember of her visit was a dead body.

  ‘I know,’ she smiled a bright and not altogether successful smile. ‘We need to forget all this unpleasantness. So why don’t I take you all to see a film. I’ve got a car. And I think I noticed that there’s a new Charlie Chaplin playing.’

  ‘That would be terrific, Auntie Anna, wouldn’t it Corinne, Leo?’ Max rallied the others. ‘I love Charlie.’

  Leo looked at her sceptically. ‘Will you let me play in the driver’s seat, toot the horn?’

  Anna grinned, ‘Yes Leo, on our way back.’

  ‘And will there be a lot of dead people in the movie?’

  ‘I hope not,’ Anna tried not to shiver as she met his eyes. ‘Death isn’t very nice.’

  ‘Our teacher said, death was beautiful, dying for a cause was beautiful.’

  ‘But he had to be alive to say it.’ With an attempt at a playful grimace, Anna pulled the cap down over Leo’s face.

  ‘Your mother’s absolutely right,’ Bettina was suddenly stern. ‘I’ll have no nonsense of that kind in this house, Leo. I’ve told you before. That’s the trouble with this country,’ she shook her head in irritation. ‘Teachers fill all your minds with romantic waffle. There is absolutely nothing beautiful about dying for a cause. Remember that, Leo. And tell your teacher I said so. Millions died in the last war for some trumped up cause and there was nothing at all beautiful about it. Do you understand? They simply lost their lives.’

  Leo looked at her stubbornly. That wasn’t what Herr Reichler had said and he liked Herr Reichler, believed his stories about the war. After all, he had been there, had been wounded, had a medal. Bettina didn’t.

  ‘Do you understand?’ Bettina repeated.

  ‘Leave him be, Bettina, he’s only a child,’ Anna murmured.

  ‘Children need to learn how to think clearly,’ Bettina was unrepentant. Well, Leo?’ she stared the boy down. Max and Corinne shuffled their feet. ‘If you don’t understand, let me hear what you think and we can argue it through.’

  Leo looked at his shoes. Then, as if he had suddenly seen the light, his golden head shot up and he said politely, ‘I understand, Auntie Bettina.’

  Before Bettina could speak, Anna intervened, ‘We should hurry if we’re to get to the movie in time.’ She shooed the children out of the house, bundled them quickly into the car.

  Sitting next to her, Leo smiled. It was quite easy really, he thought. All he had to do was lie. Never tell them what he really thought. Just lie and smile. And they would keep quiet. He had always known it. He must remember it.

  Later that night, as Anna lay next to Johannes on the large hotel-room bed, she mused again over the day’s events. She had begun to tell Johannes about it all earlier, but lovemaking had overtaken her words. How good it was to be with him again, to be able to touch him and yes, to hear him. That was perhaps what she had forgotten a little, how much she liked talking with him, feeling his particular intelligence play over the matters of everyday life.

  ‘But do you think Bettina was right to be so hard on Leo?’ she asked him now.

  He traced the line of her breast as if rediscovering it and memorizing it all at once. ‘I don’t know,’ he murmured. ‘It’s her way to argue things out. And she’s not wrong. If the boy is being stuffed full of pernicious rubbish, someone has to present a more intelligent view.’

  ‘But he’s so young. And today of all days, after he’d found that woman,’ Anna shivered and Johannes put his arm around her, held her close.

  ‘I don’t think children are as fragile as all that. In any event, they’re preoccupied by the idea of death - where things come from, where they go. His father, after all…’ he changed his tack, ‘Perhaps it’s better to have it out in the open, as a conversation, even an argument, rather than brooding privately, fantastically.’

  He stared towards the window, festooned with dark, heavy curtains. ‘I know I thought about death when I was young,’ he grimaced, turned towards her again, ‘as you must have done, particularly after your mother died.’

  Anna put the thought away for later investigation. She was silent for a moment. ‘You know that woman in the woods, she reminded me of someone. It’s just come to me,’ a shudder went through her. ‘But it couldn’t be her. It was just the mouth, that pale, ravaged face. Yes,’ she looked bleakly towards the window.

  ‘Who?’ Johannes prodded her softly.

  ‘I never told you about her.’ she met his eyes. ‘I didn’t, don’t, really know her, but I first saw her at Bruno’s funeral. She was weeping. Like me.’

  ‘Oh?’ Johannes looked startled. She realised that she had never spoken to him about Bruno’s death, the funeral, any of it. Funny that it now seemed possible, after all this time.

  ‘Yes. She was a stranger and it struck me then as odd that this stranger was weeping so copiously, that she didn’t speak to me. And then - when was it? about two years ago, maybe more? - I had this letter in Seehafen, from a woman who told me that she had been a friend of Bruno’s, that she was now destitute, didn’t know where to turn. Would I help her. I don’t know why, but when I read the letter I instantly had an image of that stranger by Bruno’s grave.’

  ‘I see,’ Johannes murmured. ‘A mistress.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Anna laughed sharply.

  ‘I wasn’t born yesterday, my dear,’ he stroked her arm softly. And?’

  ‘Well she was, though she never said it in so many words. I met her in Vienna. I gave her money, should have given her far more, though she didn’t ask. That woman, today…’ Anna hid her face in her hands, ‘I think there may have been a child,’ she mumbled, wiped a tear from her eye. ‘I liked her. There was a pride about her, even though she was in dire straits. I wish Bruno had told me about her. It might have made things easier between the two of us.’

  ‘So you approve of mistresses now?’ Johannes questioned wryly.

  She gazed at him, apprehension settling on her features. ‘It wasn’t the same with Bruno, Johannes. I can’t explain. I…’ she trembled, started to cry. ‘We didn’t, weren’t…’

  He stroked her hair, ‘I know, Anna. I think I know,’ he covered her with his body and she arched against him needing the confirmation of his flesh.

  ‘I always want you so much Johannes,’ she murmured. ‘So much.’

  ‘Yet you’re quite capable of leaving me?’ he traced the hollows of her face, the pure lines.

  ‘Not for lack of wanting you,’ her lips quivered.

  He kissed her gently, met her eyes.

  ‘Men are beasts, Anna, corrupt beasts, reaching for angelic heights. Sometimes it’s in the reaching that they do most harm.’

  She stroked him, only half aware of his words, but they seemed to have erased his passion.

  ‘I think that’s a little harsh,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he leapt off her, reached for a cigarette, his face shadowed. ‘I’m tired. It’s all these congratulations from people who spat in my face not too long ago. It’s hard work being even as moderately civil as Flechtheim expects me to be.’

  Anna laughed, ‘The rewards of fame.’

/>   ‘You know, I was offered a post in Dresden today. A good one.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I refused it, of course. I’m not cut out for students,’ he glanced at her warily.

  She chose to smile. ‘Judging by how you treated the last one, I should say that’s right.’

  He looked at her wonderingly. ‘So you’ve forgiven me.’

  ‘I’m thinking about it,’ she was wry, took his hand.

  ‘Excuse me a moment, Anna.’

  He sprung from the bed. She watched him, that tall form, still lithe despite the passage of years, saw him search in the wardrobe, take a small packet from his jacket pocket, walk towards the bathroom. A few moments later he was back, burrowing into the bed beside her.

  ‘Are you on some sort of medication?’ she asked him softly.

  ‘You might call it that.’ And then noting her worry, he laughed, ‘Come here, Anna, come closer to me.’ His hands travelled over her body, ‘Let me love you the way you deserve to be loved, my darling.’

  When the first light peeped round the edges of the heavy curtains and he was still loving her, Anna reflected that he seemed to think she deserved a great deal. That in itself made her feel supremely happy.

  At noon the next day, they left Berlin for Munich in Johannes’s new Mercedes.

  As always, and despite all the current excitement of the place, Johannes was pleased to be leaving the city that bore the indelible imprints of his childhood, to see the last suburb disappear behind him.

  He put his foot down on the throttle, felt the car leap like a large cat into powerful motion, saw, from the corner of his eye, an excited smile curl simultaneously on Anna’s face. For a moment, she looked again like the impulsive slip of a girl he had once met. Yes, she shared that too with him. The sheer pleasure of speed.

  How he loved it. The sense of freedom, the exhilaration of perspectives which changed by the second, making the world into a kaleidoscope of planes and angles trailing colour. The sense of being contained in an iron beast which purred and leapt at his slightest touch, and yet in constant danger, instincts on the alert for the slightest bump or veer in the road, for the presence of another.

  It was like an exercise in mortality, pleasure vying with risk, gambling with fate, an excess of sensation always on the edge of its own annihilation. Speed was the sweet serene taste of life itself, only experienced in the proximity of death.

  He hadn’t driven with her like this before, the distance opening up before them into a seeming eternity. How lucky he was. He hadn’t expected her to come back to him. Not after that last time. Yet she had, a little fearfully. But then the fear was in him, too. A sense of defying the odds. Gambling. Like overtaking the car in front of him now, uncertain what lay beyond.

  If only this time he could prevent that sensation of waning that came over him when they had been together for a solid stretch of time, that overarching almost demonic need to reinvent, to feel the new, and in the process, to punish her, to destroy.

  Anna refused his love games, had even defied him over his father. She was always herself, fully, amply, giving the lie to his demands, his manipulations. That was why he had to punish her. But that was also why he always came back, always wanted her back. Her passion was her passion and she gave of it generously. Her hurt, her hurt - she wouldn’t hide it or lie about it. She was integral. Strong. Stronger than him. Freer. And he drank of her thirstily, but in the drinking, drank her up.

  He wasn’t unaware of it. When they were apart, it haunted him: her ghost, her absent presence, nibbled at him in revenge, taking a little, then more, until there was nothing left and he had to drink of her again. Slowly at first, and then more and more, until he was replete. That was when the trouble always began again. When he was replete, he was no longer himself. That self was always hungry, desiring. Like an alley cat prowling dark streets.

  That was why he couldn’t stay with her in that paradise she had created for them in Ascona - her own embodiment of the good natural life. It made him feel trapped, a fat man imprisoned in a green and golden cage, unreal. In Ascona, the world only arrived in distant whispers, and though he no longer felt the zeal with which to change it, he still had to be immersed in its ugliness, its dirt, its teeming corruption. That was the currency of the real. That was what fuelled his work. Together with a hunger for the other, the new, the extreme. Fuelled him. A craving. Sometimes a random craving. Not now. Now he wanted only her.

  He braked to a sudden halt, met the question in her eyes with a long kiss, almost made love to her there, on the dirt track by the side of the road. But no, it would be more tantalizing to wait, the speed whetting their appetites. He started the engine again, felt it leap into life, placed his hand on her leg, beneath the coat, the soft dress. Warm, taut flesh. He pulled her closer, felt her fingers on his thigh.

  Perhaps this time it wouldn’t happen. Perhaps this time they would arrive at the precarious equilibrium of tightrope walkers, always at the point of falling, but never quite. Yes, that would be the ideal. Like this driving, too fast, on the edge of a precipice. If only he had the necessary control.

  Sometimes in this last year when he had taken too much of the drug - at first because the pain had come back and then simply because he preferred the dazzling clarity or swirling fog it induced to the dull throb of the everyday - he was filled with the sense that the whole country was on the edge of a precipice.

  One particular vision pursued him. He had begun to paint it in the hope of exorcising it.

  A heaving multitude had just crawled out of a stinking abyss, crawled out inch by inch, their grimy feet poised on the heads beneath them, their bleeding fingers gritty with dirt. And now they were precariously balanced on a pale ribbon thin strip of road. If there were any clamour, any loss of control, they would hurtle over into a yawning void on its other side. This second canyon was unlike its turbulent neighbour. It beckoned with a hard icy brilliance, echoed for him with the pure high longing of the overture to Parsifal, yet he knew with a certainty that its depths would shatter them all irrevocably.

  ‘May I drive for a while?’ he heard Anna’s soft tones as if from a great distance.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he slowed the car, pulled onto the first possible verge, watched as she settled herself into the seat, confidently pulled away, driving with a swift certainty which brought the colour into her cheeks.

  Yes, Anna would have no trouble manoeuvring the thin ribbon of road. He could trust her. Unless she were propelled by another, the icy yawning canyon would have no attraction for her.

  Johannes half-closed his eyes, stared ahead. He felt safe, the car a cocoon spun from their two bodies, warm, embracing. He had forgotten that easy, stilling, warmth. The climate this last year had had a constant edge of desperation. His nerves were jagged, fraying. That was probably why he felt haunted by the voice of that mad little corporal. With Anna beside him, the voice seemed less threatening, a comedy on a distant stage.

  It had been just after he had returned to Munich in February of 24. A journalist friend who wrote for The Times had asked him if he wanted to go to the trial of the putschists at the old Infantry School in the Blutenburgstrasse. Their great hero, Ludendorff himself, was in the dock. It had all the makings of a promising spectacle. Johannes tagged along, as he might have for a beer.

  And there, amidst the ten prisoners, he had seen his old acquaintance from the military hospital, the little yellow-faced corporal with the hectoring voice. He had missed the putsch itself, had been away, hadn’t taken in that this very same Adolf Hitler was one of its leaders. And now there he was, engaging in unstoppable harangues, wooing court and public and the world’s press alike, manipulating language so that truths became lies and lies truth.

  All attention focussed on him as he proclaimed himself a revolutionary against the revolution, a destroyer of Marxism; denied that there could be any high treason against the traitors of 1918; asserted his destiny, a dictator born. Evoked the eter
nal court of history, not a mere gaggle of judges, to pronounce sentence on these brave men and himself, who wanted only the good of their own people and the fatherland, who wanted only to fight and die.

  Johannes had a vision of almost hallucinatory strength. A new edition of his father stood in the dock, his father reborn, democratized, popularized into an earnest clown who spoke his words with a demagogic fervour. And the judges must have seen it too, for on the putschists they passed the mildest of sentences, whereas his own friends, only a few years back had been treated as rabid criminals.

  ‘Johannes,’ Anna’s soft voice displaced the histrionic rant of the little corporal which had kept pace in his mind with the roar of the car.

  She had pulled up in front of a village inn, all sloping roofs and eaves. ‘I thought we might stop. You look tired.’

  ‘I am tired, Anna,’ he took her hand, looked at her earnestly, as if not quite believing in her reality. ‘Whatever else happens, Anna, please remember that here, now, Johannes Bahr is eternally grateful for your presence.’

  She eyed him strangely for a moment, ruffled his hair teasingly. ‘I wasn’t planning to leave you, Johannes, not just yet. I’m far too hungry.’ She laughed her old raucous laugh.

  It buoyed him up, drowned out that other voice, gave him hope. In them, if in nothing else.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1931

  When Leo Adler was fourteen, his daydreams were filled with glorious images of heroic self-mortification.

  He was in a dense wood traversed by a cold mountain stream. A morning mist curled from the water while the ground beneath their trampling feet was still covered with a thin crust of frost. They had already marched some five miles, crossing the river by way of a rickety bridge now long lost to view. Their packs were heavy on their backs, but their shoulders were straight, their heads high like knights of old marching fearlessly into battle. Directly in front of him was Gerhardt, their leader, Sir Gerhardt, taller than the rest, his shoulders straighter, his white-gold hair glinting in shafts of sunlight, his voice stronger, deeper in the harmony of their song.