It has never been clear when Lilo first found out about the affair. There was always something vague about Lilo—also something secret, so that she may have known about it long before they realized she did. But whatever upheaval there may have been in their inner lives became vastly overwhelmed by what was happening in the streets, the cities, the countries around them. They, and everyone they knew, were preparing to leave; life had become a matter of visas and wherever possible secret foreign bank accounts. Even when he went abroad, to conferences where he was honored, Max had only to lean out of his hotel window—Netta was there beside him—to witness marching, slogans, street-fights, trucks packed with soldiers. Everyone emigrated where and when they could; farewells were mostly dispensed with—no one really expected to meet again, or if they did, it would be in countries so strange and foreign that they themselves would be as strangers to each other. Max, accepting asylum in England for himself and his family, left at what was almost the last moment. Only a week later his books were among those that were burned, an event that must have seared him even more than his parting from Netta. He was by nature a fatalist—he never thought he could actually do anything in the face of opposition, and indeed he couldn’t—so he did not let himself hold out any hope of meeting Netta again. But she was the opposite: she knew she had her hand on the tiller of fate. She told him, “I’ll be there soon.” And so she was—she and even some of her furniture; all were installed in a flat in St. John’s Wood, within walking distance of where Max lived with his family in another flat, up a hill, in Hampstead.
I always assumed that the three of them—Max, Lilo, and Netta—all lived in the Hampstead flat, and on the few occasions when Netta took me to St. John’s Wood, I would ask why we were coming to this place and who lived there. It was very different from my grandparents’ home, which was in an ornate Edwardian apartment house buried among old trees, whereas Netta’s block had been built ultra-smart on a Berlin model in the thirties and had porters and central heating. Her flat was light and sparse, with her tubular furniture and her white bear rug and the large expressionist painting she had brought of a café scene featuring herself among friends—chic women and nervously intellectual men, whom I thought of as the inhabitants of this place. For Netta herself really belonged in the other household where she appeared to be in complete charge of all domestic arrangements. Had Lilo ceded this place to her over the years, or had Netta usurped it? Probably it had fallen to her lot by virtue of temperament—especially during the early years of their exile when they were aliens, refugees, with thick accents and no social circle. Only Netta knew how to cope; and when war broke out, it was she who sewed the black-out curtains for their flat as well as her own and stuck tape over the windows so that they would not splinter during an air attack. She always managed to get something extra on their ration cards, and in the winter she unfroze the pipes with hot water bottles and managed to get a fire going with damp lumps of rationed coal. She found domestic help for them—another refugee, Mrs. Lipchik from Aachen, who was still with them by the time I began to visit the household. Even so, Netta’s greatest contribution was not practical but what she did for their morale, or for Max’s morale: he was the pivot of everything that had meaning for them.
These must have been difficult years for Max—exiled not only from his country but also from his language, his readers, his reputation. Netta created the conditions that allowed him to write new books. She had furnished his study at the end of the passage; it was his own furniture that they had brought with them, his desk and glass-fronted bookcases and the little round smoking-table with leather armchair. Even I, when I was no more than three years old, knew that I could only tiptoe down the passage, preferably with my finger laid on my lips (Netta showed me how). No one was allowed to enter the study except herself twice a day, once with his morning coffee and digestive biscuits, and again in the afternoon with coffee and doughnut. When the telephone rang, it had to be answered swiftly and in hushed tones; if he himself stuck his head out to ask who was calling, she quickly assured him that it was nothing that need bother him. Lunch, starting with a good soup, was served exactly at one—only then was Mrs. Lipchik permitted to ply her noisy vacuum cleaner—and if, hungry or frustrated, he appeared before that time, Netta sent him back again. All this would come to fruition in the evenings when they would gather in the sitting room. This too was full of their German furniture, of light-colored wood and, though modern, more solid and conventional than Netta’s, with woodcuts (I particularly remember a medieval danse macabre) and Daumier cartoons on the walls. While Max read his day’s work to them, Netta was totally rapt, though engaged in sewing, or darning his socks; sometimes she would make him repeat a phrase and then repeat it herself and become more rapt. Lilo didn’t sew; she said her eyes weren’t good enough. Sometimes, sated with Netta’s comments, he might look for some response from Lilo, but she either gave none or said something irrelevant like “Maxi, I think your hair’s going.” At once his hand flew to his brow—it was true, it was getting more and more noble, nobly arched—and Netta said quickly, “What nonsense, nothing of the sort.” “All right, don’t believe me,” said Lilo, shrugging, knowing better.
Slowly, over the years, he became if not famous at least known again. This is the period during which I remember him best, when new admirers and literary historians came to call on him. Besides his study and the passage leading up to it, the drawing room (known as the salon) also became a silent zone at certain hours of the evening. Appointments for his visitors were regulated by Netta, and she was also the only person who entered, to bring a tray of refreshments and to listen in and make sure he wasn’t being tired out by his visitors. He never was—he was too appreciative of this new respect and so was Netta, to witness him again taking up his rightful place as a European man of letters. Lilo did not participate in these sessions; she sat in the kitchen enjoying a cup of coffee with Mrs. Lipchik. The two of them spoke together in German—the only time I heard that language in the flat—and it must have been a funny, racy sort of German, for it made them both laugh. I think sometimes they were also laughing at the visitors—I’ve seen Lilo do a comic imitation of some scholar she had seen arrive with his umbrella and wet shoes—and also maybe even at Max himself. Lilo always enjoyed laughing at Max, which didn’t undermine her pride, or her other feelings for him.
Also, at this time, with foreign royalty payments beginning to come in again, their financial position became more stable. During their first years in England, and especially during the war, they had been almost poor, which affected the three of them in different ways. For Max, having no money was something he had been born to fear: he had grown up with a widowed mother who lived on a shrinking pension and had had to pretend they didn’t need the things they couldn’t afford like a summer holiday. These long-buried memories came back to him and often drove him to a despair that he could only share with Netta. For Lilo, who knew nothing about not having money, blithely accepted that now, for the first time in her life, she was without it. Unable to afford new clothes, she was perfectly content to wear her old ones, even if they were sometimes torn. This characteristic remained with her, so that my memories of my grandmother included a Kashmir shawl that was falling apart and holes in the heels of her stockings. When they could no longer afford to pay Mrs. Lipchik, Lilo told her so without embarrassment; and she gladly accepted Mrs. Lipchik’s offer to wait for her money and was grateful when Mrs. Lipchik, to keep herself going, took a part-time job, enabling her sometimes to help them out with her earnings.
Netta too found a job around this time—probably in response to one of the scenes she had with Max, when he buried his head in her lap: “What are we going to do, Netta? Without money, how can we live?” Although Netta too came from a family of modest means—her father had held a lifelong position as accountant to a shoe-manufacturer—she didn’t share Max’s fear of poverty: from her youngest days, she had managed brilliantly with her looks and personality,
finding jobs in boutiques and as a model, and later, living with or marrying, twice, wealthy men. Now, a refugee in London, she took what she could get and became a receptionist to a dentist, another refugee, Dr. Erdmund from Dortmund. It was a full day’s work, but she continued all her previous chores in the Hampstead flat. Sometimes, when there was a difficult case and she was kept longer in the surgery, she would arrive from the rush-hour in the Underground with her coat flying open to get Max ready for an appointment she had scheduled for him. She didn’t even have time to unpin her hat while she brushed him down, lapels and front and back, for, whatever else, he had to be perfect, and he always was. Nevertheless, he would be complaining about the difficult day he had had, the telephone ringing and no one to answer it, both Lilo and Mrs. Lipchik off somewhere or pretending to be deaf. Netta clicked her tongue in sympathy, and having finished with his coat, she got to work on his hair with a soft baby brush for, as Lilo had predicted, he had gone almost bald. She even had time to flick quickly through his mail—he had extracted the fan letters himself, leaving the rest to her. If she found anything disturbing, like an electricity bill or a tax notice, she slipped it into her handbag to take home to her own flat, for Lilo too did not care to deal with such matters.
Lilo spent her days in her own way, devoting herself to her daughter (my mother), and afterward to me, her granddaughter. I was often sent to stay with her and would sit in the kitchen eating plum cake while she and Mrs. Lipchik talked German; or Lilo would make drawings for me, of fruits and flowers, or a whole menagerie of animals out of Plasticine. When Netta was not there, I played at trains up and down the corridor—till the study door opened and Max stood there, in despair: “God in heaven, is there no one to keep the Child quiet!” The sight of him—looming and hostile—made me burst into tears, and Lilo would have to lead me away, while throwing reproachful looks over her shoulder at Max. To comfort me, she would take me out on one of her shopping expeditions; these were never for anything dull like groceries—that was Netta’s province—but to antique stalls, where she would pick out the sweetest objects for me, like a painted Victorian picture frame or a miniature bouquet in enamel in a miniature vase. She liked to play tennis, and when they were both younger, she and Netta had played together; but Netta was too competitive, so that Lilo preferred to potter around with me on a court we booked for half an hour at a time in the public park.
When Max’s reputation, and with it his royalties, had grown more substantial, Netta broached the subject of leaving her job. He said, “Are you sure? Can we afford it?” She proved to him that they could, but he remained dubious: his inborn caution, as well as the experience of the previous years, made him reluctant to give up the assurance of a steady salary. “What’s wrong?” he said. “What’s got into you? You like your job.” Her eyes, still darkly magnificent in spite of lines around them, flashed: “Who told you that?” But he couldn’t go into it—he never could go into practical problems, especially those of a petty nature, it took too much out of him; and usually she was the first person to spare him, removing annoyances by shouldering them herself.
And now too, she did not burden him with facts of which she had never allowed him to be conscious—that it was tiring for her to do a full day’s work and then look after his affairs as well as her own. She never mentioned anything of that, but what she did now decide to mention was something else that she had spared him. It had been all right, nothing to make a fuss about, during the days of Dr. Erdmund of Dortmund—well, yes, he had had a crush on her, but he was after all a gentleman and never let it go beyond a squeeze of the hand or a stolen kiss behind her ear, which it hadn’t cost her anything to permit. But Dr. Erdmund had become old and had had to sell his practice—“You never told me,” Max said, and she shrugged, “Why should I?” The new boss was a younger man, though not very young—another refugee, from Czechoslovakia, with none of the cultured manners of an earlier generation of refugees. She didn’t mind that—she had always been able to get on with all sorts—but unfortunately he had wandering hands and he could not keep them off Netta, which was really a bit thick. Max genuinely didn’t understand, he had never heard of such a thing, and she had to explain to him how unpleasant it was to spend all day with someone and be on your guard constantly—“You know, Max—” “Know what, Netta, what?” “Coming up behind me—he says he’s a thigh man—oh, it’s disgusting—” But Max was not disgusted; he laughed, he protested: “You’re imagining it.” “Imagining it!” “But Nettalein, how could it be? God in heaven, at your age.”
For a long time, no one—not even Lilo, who wasn’t told the details—knew what had happened: why Netta suddenly withdrew from the household and told my parents and everyone else that she had had enough. She started a life of her own in her St. John’s Wood flat and entertained old friends with whom she had reestablished contact. She also had what she called her cavaliers—elderly gentlemen from Vienna or Berlin, who were very gallant and visited her with flowers and chocolates and always had a good joke for her they remembered from the old days. She kept herself trim with sports—her competitive games of tennis, and three times a week she went to an indoor swimming pool where she swam several lengths up and down, her arms pushing the water with the vigor of a much younger woman. In the afternoons she had her coffee in a restaurant in a hotel—the only equivalent of the sort of coffee-houses she had known in Germany, with deep armchairs and carpets and cigarette smoke and foreign waiters and foreign newspapers stuck on wooden poles. If there was no friend to join her, she went alone; she had adventures, for she was still very attractive with her flashing eyes, and her strong teeth intact, and always chic, the large hats of her youth replaced by little saucy ones over one eyebrow. Of course men of a certain age—incorrigible wolves, she called them—were always trying to pick her up and sometimes she let them, though insisting on respect. She knew how to deal with every situation—for years afterward, for the rest of her life, she told the story of the man who had taken, without permission, the empty chair at her table for two and had been bolder than she would permit: and she, without a word, had picked up her coffee cup and flung the contents in his face. “You should have seen him! Dripping! And it was hot too! With hot coffee in your face, you forget all about being fresh with a woman.”
Around this time my parents, who were documentary filmmakers specializing in aboriginal tribes, went away for almost a year, leaving me in the Hampstead flat with my grandparents. So I was witness to what might be called their second honeymoon—the time alone together that they had not had since Netta had become attached to them. Max, remote and selfish as he was, began to woo my grandmother all over again. With Netta gone, it was once more only to Lilo that he read his day’s work in the evenings—even sitting on the floor the way he had done in the past, though now it was no longer so easy for him, with his increased weight and his custom-tailored suit he had to be careful not to crease. As before, Lilo did not listen too attentively; some of her attention was now bestowed on me, but Max didn’t seem to mind when he looked up and saw her busy helping me pick out the right color crayon for an elephant’s ear. They exchanged smiles then—maybe about me, more likely for each other—before Max went on reading; though he looked up again when, staring at his lowered head, she exclaimed, “Oh Maxi, what a pity—it’s really all gone now!” But when he ruefully passed his hand over his scalp—“Really? All?”—she looked closer: “There’s still a little bit; so sweet.”
My grandmother’s own hair was as long as it had been—she never cut it—but it had turned very grey. She continued to wear it the way she had done as a girl—loose and open down her back and around her shoulders. When people in the street turned to stare at her, I assumed that it was for her beauty. I thought she was beautiful, and I was never ashamed of her though she dressed shabbily—there was her frayed shawl and the holes in her stockings, one of which sometimes came loose and wrinkled around her ankle. Walking tall and erect, she was completely unselfconsious; if so
mething interested her, maybe in a shop window or a flower growing in a hedge, she would stop and look at it for a long time. She was very fond of street markets and liked to talk to people selling pottery and costume jewelry and discuss their craft with them. She always bought something from them, but if on her way home, someone admired her purchase, she might simply give it to them and walk on. She remained my grandfather’s muse for the rest of their lives: there were always reflections of her in his work, but not as she was in these later years, nothing of her gypsy quality, but the girl he had wooed in their youth. This girl—several theses have already been written about her influence—was wound into his work like filigree. She was the moonlit statue of a nymph in a deserted allee of poplars; she was the girl shining in white at her first communion and also the cold lilies adorning the altar. She was everything—every image—that was lyrical, nostalgic, breathlessly beautiful in his work, keeping it as fresh as on the day it was written.
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