Whereas Netta’s flat was now comfortable and lively, the Hampstead flat had changed in the opposite direction. It was as if not Lilo and Max were living there but the original Edwardian families for whom this ponderous structure had been built. It had become gloomy and oppressive—although the one person who had had this effect on me was usually absent. I no longer had to fear that Max’s forbidding figure would appear in the door of his study, for he was now mostly with Netta, and not only in the coffee-lounge. Now I feared—not Lilo (I never feared her) but for Lilo: that, however cute I tried to be for her sake, I could hardly make her smile. We still went on our usual outings, no longer because she enjoyed them but because she thought I would: but how could I, when she didn’t? Mrs. Lipchik heaved heavy sighs as she cleaned, and while she and Lilo still had their long coffee sessions in the kitchen, these were no longer full of German jokes but of secrets, problems. It was even worse when Max was there with us: Mrs. Lipchik’s sighs were nothing compared with his, especially those he uttered like groans when he came to Lilo’s bedroom at night. Sitting as before on the side of her bed, with me curled up beside her, he spoke to her in whispers: only to get up and pace around and then return and seize her hands and implore: “What shall I do? What shall I do?” And she withdrew her hands and didn’t answer him.
My dreams ceased to feature pellucid streams in meadows; instead—if they were dreams—they resounded with the echo of his voice, through which the word fate struck repeatedly like hammer blows. Fate! It was the great theme of his later books. Here Fate is the main character and human beings are depicted as struggling helplessly in the grip of its iron claw. But although he witnessed the upheaval of his whole continent and the destruction of his generation, he goes beyond the epoch in which he happened to be living to embrace the entire epoch of Man: Man in the abstract, from birth to death. And this is what astonished him and made him suffer—the suffering of Man, and all he has to endure in the course of a lifetime of inevitable decline; and also the swiftness of that decline, the inexorable swiftness with which a young man becomes an old one. It is no doubt a great theme, but how could I take it seriously when I identified its author with my grandfather whom I saw suffer because I made a noise playing outside his study door, or because his girl friend flirted with her dentist. In his last book there is a sort of dance of death in a landscape of night and barren rock where men and women join hands and revolve in a circle, their faces raised to the moon so that its craters appear to be reflected in the hollow sockets of their eyes. This might for others be a powerful metaphor for the macabre dance of our lives; but for me it is only a reminder of a birthday party we attended.
It was Max’s birthday—his last, as it turned out—and, like all our celebrations during this year, the party was held in Netta’s flat. For by then Max was spending all his days in St. John’s Wood—even his desk had been moved there—though he still showed up in the Hampstead flat for the sort of nocturnal visits I have described. Netta also came quite often, not with him but alone. I witnessed several scenes between her and my grandmother, only now it was always Netta who was pleading while Lilo remained stubborn and silent. This made Netta desperate and she stopped pleading and was angry, or pretended to be: “My God, think of me all these years, in your house, and putting up with it—yes, gladly! Laughing and pretending to be happy, so that everyone could be happy! And you can’t come even once, for one afternoon, for his sake?” For a long time my grandmother remained impervious, so that Netta might as well have been addressing someone blind and deaf. But gradually, over the years—for no particular reason, or perhaps because it didn’t matter any longer, or that other things mattered more—anyway, we did go to Netta’s flat, to her more important parties like when it was her birthday, or Max’s, or even Lilo’s: everything was celebrated there.
It was always the same guests who had been invited, and they were all Netta’s friends, from the social circle she had formed around herself. They included people we vaguely knew, like Dr. Erdmund from Dortmund and some of the other elderly gentlemen whom I remembered from the coffee-lounge. They were mostly German refugees who, like Max and Lilo and Netta, had had their youthful heyday during the time of the Weimar Republic. In fact, they might have been the embodiment of the big painting in Netta’s flat of the German café scene, with geometrically shaped faces crowding each other around a café table. Now those triangles and cones had been realigned into the masks of old age, and the expression of nervous restlessness had frozen into the smile of the tenacious survivor. Their clothes were elegant—Netta insisted on glamorous attire for her parties—and they still held a wine-glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, some with a long silver or ivory holder; and they were still animated by a kind of frenetic energy, a consumptive eagerness. There was dancing too—Netta rolled up her bear-rug and put on some of her old dance-records, and when the music started, she stretched herself up by her clenched arms and said, “Oh my God,” and laughed at whatever it was that she remembered. They were all pretty good dancers—mostly fox-trots, with some very intricate footwork. Netta’s favorite was the tango, and it suited her—inside her tight silk metallic dress she made movements as sinuous as those of a young siren; and the expression on her face no doubt reflected the sensations in her heart, which were those of her siren years. Her partners did their best to keep up with her, pretending they were not out of breath; but she discarded them one by one when they began to fail, and imperiously snatched up a fresh old gentleman.
The only person who refused her was Max: he would not dance, he could not, never had done, which was why Lilo had given it up too, long ago. So the two of them were always onlookers—except on that last birthday party when everyone had drunk a lot of champagne and excitement burned through the air like holes made by a forgotten cigarette. In fact, Netta was scattering dangerous sparks from the cigarette held between her fingers; and her eyes too sent out glints of fire and so did her red hair and her metallic dress. Discarding her last breathless partner, she turned to Max: he shook his head, he smiled, no, he would not. But for once she insisted and she grasped his hand and pulled him up; and at last, to please her, he let himself be dragged on to the dance floor and tried to imitate her steps. But he could not, and to help him, she pressed herself as close to him as possible to lead him and make his hips rotate along with hers. But still he stumbled and could not; at first he laughed at his own ineptitude, but when others too began to laugh, he tried to extricate himself from Netta’s close embrace. She would not let him go, and perhaps to drown his angry words, she called to someone to turn up the record; and then, when it was really loud, she called out, “Come on, everybody, what are you waiting for—New Year?” and soon they were all jigging up and down, with Max and Netta in their center. The more he struggled the tighter she held on to him, so that he appeared to be entangled in the embrace of an octopus or some other creature with long tentacles. His situation made them all laugh—even I did, till I saw how Lilo had hidden her face in her hands, and not because she was laughing. Suddenly she snatched at me in the same way as Netta had done to Max and made me get up with her. Although neither of us knew how, we tried to join the dance—and that made all of them turn from Max and look and laugh at us, at grandmother and granddaughter hopping and slipping on the polished floor. Although Lilo was getting out of breath, we stuck it out till the music stopped, and then she and I thanked Netta for the party and went home.
If it were not for the famous danse macabre in Max’s last book, I might have forgotten all about that birthday party. I prefer to remember our walk home from it, Lilo’s and mine, through empty streets on a cool autumn night. There was the smell of fallen leaves, and layers of clouds shifted and floated across the sky; the moon was dim, so that even when it came sliding out from between these veils, it didn’t light up anything. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that it did illumine my grandmother’s face when she raised it to try and identify some of the stars for me. She pointed at what she sai
d was the Great Bear—or was it the Plough—I think she wasn’t sure, and anyway her eyesight was not good enough to see that far. I don’t know why I expected her to look unhappy—after all, we had just left a party with music and champagne and special birthday cake ordered from Netta’s bakery; but anyway she didn’t, not at all, on the contrary her face appeared as radiant as was possible by the light of that dim moon.
East Into Upper East Page 38