Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The body. Suddenly, the room in front of her swam into opacity and in its place Helena saw Max’s waxy face on that slab, the stiff cold sheath of plastic. The smell of chemicals rose to her nostrils, like the high strong whiff of formaldehyde that had emerged from the plastic sac of yellowy rats they had been forced to dissect at school. Billy had once chased her with a dead rat through the old bomb site. Held the rat by the tail and swung it in front of her face while his jeering friends looked on. She must have been small then, because she couldn’t run very fast and she was crying as he cornered her. She could feel the jagged wall against her back, could taste the tears and then her scream as he lifted her skirts and flung the creature at her.

  ‘Helena. Are you all right?’ There was a steadying arm on her shoulder. The room regained its outlines. Adam was gazing at her.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ she shrugged off his hand, saw James emerge from the huddle of people. She stepped towards him.

  ‘James, this is Adam Peters. James Whitaker.’

  The men shook hands, assessed each other.

  ‘We’re to go and collect Max’s things now. Give them instructions about…’ she stopped herself.

  ‘The funeral arrangements,’ Adam finished for her. I’d better come along. I have all the details here,’ he took a small notebook from his breast pocket. ‘It’s this way to the police station.’

  James eyed her curiously and Helena forced herself into composure. This was the moment she had been waiting for. There would be something amongst Max’s effects, something the police had missed. She was certain of it.

  The police station, a short block away, was busier than she remembered it. Her slip of paper was taken unceremoniously and a plastic sack handed over, together with a small old-fashioned brown leather suitcase that she would have known anywhere as Max’s. She reached for the case, let James handle the plastic, saw Adam murmur something into his ear.

  ‘Let’s go and have a bite to eat,’ James ushered her towards the door. ‘Your Adam Peters tells me there’s a restaurant round the corner.’

  Helena hardly heard him. ‘I want to look through these straight away.’ She blinked at the bright noonday light, looked round for a moment to get her bearings and then walked swiftly in the direction of the court house.

  ‘Wait for me,’ James grumbled. ‘Don’t know why we have to do this now.’

  She didn’t answer him, rushed instead towards the car park.

  In the back seat of the car, she sprung open the locks of the case. The clothes were neatly folded: shirts, socks, two sweaters, a jacket, a pair of dark blue trousers, the same soft grey suit Max had worn in Norway. She was almost afraid to touch it, had to force herself to burrow beneath. But there was nothing else, not a notebook, not a slip of paper.

  James took the suit and trousers from the case and rifled through the pockets. Part of her wanted to stop his hands: it felt like a travesty.

  ‘Nothing,’ he murmured.

  Helena folded the clothes carefully back. She felt a sense of desolation she had kept at bay beginning to overwhelm her. There was no notebook, no message. Nothing. Just the unresolved silence of death.

  ‘And the bag?’ she gestured impatiently at James.

  He held it upside down and spilled the already glimpsed contents gently onto the seat. There were the rumpled clothes Max must have been wearing, a watch, water soiled. Helena looked at it. It had stopped at five past twelve.

  ‘High noon,’ James muttered.

  She shivered, picked up Max’s thick black pen, an ink bottle. She forced herself to focus on it. The bottle was almost empty. That could only mean that he had written something. Letters, notes. But where were they? Almost angrily, Helena looked at the single book, a volume of Hölderlin’s poems, shook it to see what might flutter from its pages. Nothing.

  James was checking through pockets again. ‘He must have had this on him,’ he waved a brown wallet in the air. ‘Plastic is intact, but the money’s a little the worst for wear. What’s strange is that I can’t find his passport anywhere.’

  ‘He lost that ages ago. An innkeeper told me.’

  James looked at her in surprise.

  She didn’t explain further, ‘What I can’t understand is why there are no papers, no notes, not even a diary.’

  ‘I kept that for him, remember? Come on let’s get out of here.’ James crumpled everything back into the sack. ‘These things give me the creeps. I think we should chuck them in the nearest bin or drop them off at an Oxfam shop.’

  ‘James!’ Helena was scandalized.

  ‘Alright then. You take care of them. But Max wasn’t interested in things.’ He jumped out of the car.

  ‘Don’t be so sanctimonious,’ Helena murmured after him. She sat there for a moment and fingered the clothes in the case. An image of Max, stalking between the trees outside that remote cabin came to her; another of him rowing out into the centre of the lake, his face set in the lines of his customary austerity. Slowly Helena snapped the case shut. Perhaps she was wrong and James right. Perhaps Max had wanted simply to disappear into the elements and leave no trace of himself, not even the reminder of a few words on paper.

  Or perhaps he had taken a notebook with him and it was lying engorged somewhere at the bottom of the lake. Or someone, someone who had pushed him, had already appropriated his notes.

  Her thoughts began to swirl again with a menacing fury.

  ‘Are you coming?’ James had opened the door on her side of the car and was tapping his foot impatiently on the ground.

  She gazed at him unseeingly and then with a shrug got slowly out. ‘Alright, let’s get rid of everything. Though I’d like to keep his pen. Perhaps the book.’

  They walked in silence. Then, as the police station loomed in front of them again, James said in a new low voice, ‘I’m beginning to realise it’s different for you. I was so used to seeing Max every day that I think I must have done my mourning in those first months after his disappearance. So all this now seems somehow anticlimactic.’

  ‘Whereas he wrote to me and I had counted on seeing him in Berlin,’ her voice cracked and she coughed to hide it. ‘I must ring them. Where are you taking me James?’

  ‘That restaurant’s meant to be somewhere around here.’

  Helena pointed.

  ‘That’s it.’

  The room was dim, heavy with oak tables and the warmth of thick soups. Helena only had time to take in its general size and shape before she saw Adam waving to them from a back table.

  ‘You didn’t tell me we were meeting him here,’ she snapped at James.

  ‘Funeral arrangements, or have you forgotten already?’ he gave her a queer look. ‘You’d think you’d be pleased to have me check out your prime suspect,’ he grumbled.

  Helena stilled her visceral fears. ‘Get him to tell you about Max’s visits to his house.’

  But she found it difficult to meet Adam’s eyes and when he took her coat and brushed against her, she was enraged at the flush which rose to her cheeks.

  She was doubly angry when, after the waiter had placed a large pitcher of wine on the table, Adam said to James, ‘I hope you don’t mind my sorting this funeral business out. Helena was a bit overwhelmed by events and it seemed the least I could do as the bearer of bad news.’

  ‘What do you mean I was overwhelmed by events?’ she lashed out at him.

  His eyes rested on her and she suddenly remembered how she had come crawling into his bed, how he had held her, how… She scraped her chair away from the table, ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it as a criticism, Helena. It would be odd in the circumstances if…’

  Helena, rushing to the ladies room, didn’t hear the rest of his sentence. She stared at herself in the small mirror, unable to recognize the troubled wide-eyed face which looked back at her. With a grimace she splashed cold water on herself, dabbed on bright lipstick.

  Of course, she had been overwhelmed: she had suffered a shoc
k. But she was quite capable of thinking now. She brushed her hair fiercely. And what she thought was that no man, no married man at that, would take the time and trouble Adam had taken over all this simply for the fleeting favours of a woman who was reluctant to return them. And any woman who thought the contrary was pulling the wool over her own eyes and would suffocate in the resulting tangle. Which simply left her with the added certainty that there was something else behind Adam’s actions. But how was she to find out?

  If the police had been handling an inquiry they would have ascertained where Adam had been at noon on the fatal day; they would have checked out his links with something more than Princeton - not that she had done even that. They would also have looked for a motive. But that was where all her instincts came unstuck. She couldn’t begin to construct a reason why Adam would want Max dead - though she could think of several why she wanted Adam dead, Helena smiled grimly at her reflection.

  The men were talking earnestly when she returned. Adam gave her a smile, which turned into something else halfway, when she didn’t return it.

  ‘Better?’ James was looking at her with a superior certainty which he could only have gained from Adam’s presence.

  ‘I didn’t know I was poorly,’ Helena muttered. ‘So, have you gentlemen sorted everything out while the poor little woman was powdering her nose?’

  ‘Everything,’ Adam grinned. ‘Though we thought it would be appropriate to wait for you before confronting the small matter of the funeral service. Wouldn’t want to unbalance the fair division of labour.’

  ‘Yes, leave the emotional work to the women.’

  ‘You have it in one.’

  ‘But we don’t want it too emotional,’ James had missed their ironies. ‘Max was a restrained sort of guy. I thought I might ask Charles if he would say something. He’s meant to be coming. In fact I should ring him in about an hour.’

  ‘We can go back to my place, if you like. And you can make all your calls from there.’

  ‘That would be very convenient.’

  Helena grimaced, then suddenly found herself blurting out the first thought that came to her mind. ‘What’s your interest in Max Bergmann, Adam?’

  The waiter chose this moment to place the bowls of steaming soup in front of them. She couldn’t see Adam’s face, but she heard him mumble, ‘I’ve told you. And I would have thought your vaunted intuition would have made it doubly clear.’

  She glared at him, aware that he was deliberately using the word that had slipped out of her during the court proceedings, but quite unaware of where her intuitions were meant to lead her.

  The funeral took place in an ornate baroque building on the outskirts of Munich. Only Charles Raymond had flown in from the States. She hadn’t met him before and his relative youth and effusiveness surprised Helena who had imagined a different man of Max’s own years. It was he who led the service. He spoke of Max’s life-long dedication to nature, his work in forestry, begun in Sweden, continued in America, his new home; his setting up of Orion farm. He evoked Max’s single-minded dedication to the Green cause, his ascetic life in terms of an almost political zest. His speech was interlarded with smatterings of German aimed at a gathering which surprised her by its size.

  The notices Adam had penned for James and inserted in two daily papers had done their work, together with the phone calls to Green Party headquarters. A network had been put in motion, and its members now sat there, bound by their common interests and their common reverence towards a man who had been a leading light in their movement.

  From her pew on the platform, Helena looked at their upturned faces, indistinguishable to her but for one at the very back. Adam. Even his posture set him out from the others. There was nothing of reverence in it. Despite the distance between them, she could make out that cool, assessing gaze. He cared nothing for Max.

  Why had he bothered to come? James had invited him, of course, that day when they had all gone back to the house together. But a casual invitation was hardly an imperative, and she certainly hadn’t reiterated it.

  She had stayed close to James that afternoon, away from Adam, pretending to herself that he wasn’t there, that these rooms weren’t charged for her with a significance that part of her refused to forget.

  She had looked through the books in the library as James made his phonecalls, not daring to glance either at the spread of papers on the desk in case James reprimanded her or at anything else.

  It was then that she had found the passage that she was now to read. The book had leapt out at her, the same volume that they had found in the bag of Max’s remains. A collection of Hölderlin’s poems in an old edition. She had read them through, had suddenly understood why Max had the volume by his side: that deep longing for a golden nature, eternally lost. Helena read.

  O Nature, in the beauty of your light

  The kingly fruit unfold with love

  effortless, unconstrained

  Like the harvests in Arcadia

  Dead is now what raised and nursed me

  Dead is now the youthful world

  That breast, which once filled a heaven,

  As dead and needy as a stubblefield

  Oh, the Spring still sings my cares

  As it once did, a friendly comforting song,

  But my life’s morrow is already here

  My heart’s Spring ceased flowering.

  As she walked back to her pew, her eyes fell on the coffin. She had been avoiding it. Max lay in there: still, unhearing, dead, only living on in their memories. And so few here had known him, would now never know him, as she would never know, never be able to solve the mystery of his possible paternity. A father found only to be lost. Adam had said that to her.

  Despite herself, the tears started to stream down Helena’s face.

  She wouldn’t see Adam any more after this either. Max had brought him into her life and he would leave it with Max, whatever suspicions she might still harbour. Or guilty desires.

  Through bleary eyes, Helena watched Gerhardtt Stiehler stand now, the single German amidst their number who had known Max, however briefly, and whom they had invited to take part. He extolled Max, as that very special being, a natural leader. Then he read a passage from one of Max’s books. Odd to hear those phrases in translation. Their resonance was somehow different, somehow in keeping with what she herself had read.

  It was James’s turn last. He was low-key, spoke about the farm, Max Bergmann’s greatest concrete achievement, his pioneering work in the preservation of endangered plant species, expressed his hope that his project would be able to continue in America without him, the greatest tribute that could be paid to him. Looking at James, Helena wondered whether he might ever take on Max’s charismatic stature, decided against it, derided herself as ungenerous for doing so, found herself seeking out Adam’s face and then ashamed, looking back at the coffin.

  From somewhere the high clear tones of plain song filled the room. Max’s coffin started to move slowly down the ramp and suddenly the back of the room dissolved and in place of a wall, a garden took shape before her eyes, a softly glimmering vision of ancient trees and mellow light. For a breathless moment, Helena thought she was hallucinating a paradise. Then she realised that the wall was a series of sliding doors, open now onto the outside where Max’s coffin vanished.

  People began to file from their seats, gather at the doors, spill out into the courtyard. Hushed voices rose into chatter.

  Helena, walking with the group from the platform whispered to James, ‘I’m going to disappear. See you back at the hotel.’

  She had managed to make her way invisibly to the wrought-iron gate when a voice stopped her.

  ‘Running away from here, too?’

  She looked up into Adam’s face.

  ‘You could call it that.’

  ‘But I thought this was your group.’ He was blocking her path, preventing her from leaving. ‘I’d have thought that you’d want to extend your homage to th
e great man, your great leader,’ he drawled the words, twisted them into their opposite sense.

  ‘Don’t be so contemptuous,’ she snapped at him. ‘I don’t know why you bothered to come.’

  ‘Anthropological interest, I guess.’ There was a bitter edge to his laugh. ‘I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of leaders and followers. What is it about someone like your Bergmann that allows him to mould people into a group, halve their critical intelligence, turn them into sanctimonious or slogan chanting half-wits…’

  ‘Stop it,’ Helena hissed at him.

  ‘Okay,’ he raised his arms as if she’d held a gun to him and suddenly smiled disarmingly. ‘You’re right, this is hardly the moment for spleen. I liked the poem you read, though I’m not quite so fond of other sides of Hölderlin, that patriotic longing for the Fatherland, for instance. You know he suffered from something that might have been schizophrenia.’

  She wasn’t listening, ‘Let me through, Adam.’

  Dark eyes scrutinized her, searched. ‘May I come with you?’

  Helena shook her head, ‘I need some time to myself.’

  ‘So is this goodbye?’

  ‘I guess so,’ she put out her hand. ‘Good bye Adam.’

  ‘You might add, it’s been nice knowing you.’

  ‘I might,’ she met his gaze and then turned away quickly before he could see the tears which suddenly pricked her eyes.

  The old table lamp with its copper globe base, cast a circle of light over the long pine table in the kitchen of the Kensington house. It was set for two with merry striped place mats, peach yellow plates and plump balloon glasses. But its far end held no food. Instead, it was spread with an assortment of photographs. Helena sat and stared at them.

  The package from the Murnau police station had arrived that morning just as she was setting out for work. She had cut open the string with clumsy fingers and an excitement she could hardly contain. It was here, the missing link: the hidden story which she had known all too well they had overlooked.

  Inside, wrapped in heavy plastic, there was an old-fashioned Leica. Max’s camera. She knew it as soon as she saw it, though it was not what she had expected. A letter accompanied it, from Officer Weiss, telling her that Frau Dieter, the small boy’s mother, had found this in his room on the day after the Inquest. It had been given to him by Herr Bergmann and Frau Dieter had dutifully turned it over to the police who thought that as the recipient of Herr Bergmann’s effects, it should come to Helena.