by Laura Furman
“Better than Eton and Oxford, I’ve attended the School of Life,” he retorted—they were always on good teasing terms.
“Yes, in the gutters of Cologne,” Kohl put in—not in a teasing way.
It was only then that Mann became aware of him: “So there you are. Everyone is asking for you: Where is the husband, the famous artist?” Next moment his attention shifted to the packet lying on the table: “Ah, her present that she's been asking for all day. I’ll take it to her—I’ll tell her you’re busy down here, flirting with two ladies.”
Kohl had instantly placed his hand on the packet, and wild-eyed, cornered, he glared up at Mann. Mann—a very big man but a coward— retreated quickly with our cups held against his chest.
“Take care you bring them back washed, you lazy devil!” La Plume shouted after him. But when he had gone, she said, “He's not a bad sort, though he gets on everyone's nerves. They say he was a very great idealist and gave wonderful speeches to the workers at their rallies.”
“We’ve heard about the wonderful speeches—from him. From no one else,” Kohl sneered. “And when the police came, he ran faster than anyone. It's only here he plays the big hero.”
“Ah, well,” sighed La Plume, “everyone lives as best they can.” This was her motto. “Here,” she said, handing him his trousers. “I wouldn’t get very high marks for sewing, but they’ll do.” He got up to step into them—just in time, for while he was still buttoning them, Marta was heard calling from the stairs.
I had noticed that, whenever Marta came into a room, the air shifted somewhat. I don’t know if this was due to other people's reactions to her, or to something emanating from her, of which she herself was unaware. I might mention here that she had a peculiar, very sweet smell—not of perfume, more of a fruit, ripe and juicy, not quite fresh.
“So where's my present? Mann says you have my present!” Her eager eyes were already fixed on it, but Kohl held on to it. “Give,” she wheedled, “it's mine.”
He shook his head in refusal, while secretly smiling a bit. But when she began to tug at it—“Give, give”—he shouted, “Be careful!” and let go, so that she captured it.
She untied it, the tip of her tongue slightly protruding. The paper came off and the drawing was revealed. She held it between her two hands and looked at it: looked at herself looking out of it. He watched her; the expression on his face became anxious, like one waiting for a verdict.
At last she said, “Not bad.”
“Not bad!” he echoed indignantly.
“I mean me, not you.” Her eyes darted to him with the same expression as in the drawing. She held it at another angle for careful study: “Yes,” was her verdict, “no wonder you fell madly in love with me.”
“I with you! Who was it who chased me all over town, from café to café, from studio to studio, like a madwoman, and everyone laughing at us both?”
“Me running after him?” She turned to La Plume: “Me in love with him? Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous in all your life?”
“No, not with me. With my fame.”
He spoke with dignity and pride, and then she too became proud. She said, “Oh yes, he was famous all right, and I wasn’t the only one to run after him. Naturally: a famous artist.” She returned to the drawing, to his gift to her, and now she appeared to be studying not herself, as before, but his work.
“So?” he asked, valuing her opinion and awaiting her compliment.
This compliment seemed to be hovering on her lips—when Mann came storming into our kitchen, followed by some other guests. As with one gesture, Kohl and Marta seized the wrapping paper to conceal the drawing, but Mann had already seen it: “So that's the present he's been hiding!”
“Don’t touch!” Marta ordered, but she held it out, not only for him but high enough for others to see. They crowded forward; there were admiring cries, and Mann whistled. It was a gratifying moment for both Kohl and Marta. La Plume glowed too, and so did I; we were really proud to have an artist in our house.
The lawyer spoiled it. He peered at the drawing through his rimless glasses; he thrust out his white fingers to point out beauties—the same way he had done with my portrait. He may even have said something similar about Youth with a capital Y, but Marta cut him short: “You really are a donkey,” and at once she wrapped up the drawing.
“You know what, children?” said La Plume. “It's long past my bedtime, and if you don’t clear out, I’m going to miss my beauty sleep.”
Everyone clamored for Kohl to join them. Marta too said: “Come and drink champagne with us. He brought it, so he's good for something.” She pointed briefly at the lawyer, who stopped looking crestfallen, but she had already returned to Kohl. She laid her hand on his shoulder in a familiar gesture we had never witnessed between them: “Come on—only don’t give away any secrets. You’re the only one who knows how old I am today.”
“We all know,” Mann said. “It's eighteen.” No one heard him. Marta still had her hand on Kohl's shoulder; she said, “You used to like to drink. Often a bit too much, both of us… ”
“Maybe,” he said; he shook her hand off. “But next morning I was up at five, working, and you lay in bed till noon, sleeping it off.”
“I never had a hangover.”
“No, it's true—when you got up, you were fresh and fit and ready to start making my life a misery again.” Marta may never have had a hangover, but there were days when she suffered a mysterious ailment about which she and La Plume whispered together. My aunt didn’t want me to know about it, but when she wasn’t there, Marta spoke to me as freely as she did to La Plume. It was something very private to do with her womb— I really would have preferred not to know; these were matters I wanted to keep buried in the depths of the unconscious where I could at least pretend they had nothing to do with me. Marta went into unwelcome detail, though she always warned me, “For God's sake, don’t tell Kohl. He can’t stand women being ill.”
She did however confide in Mann and the lawyer and probably everyone else too. She even told all of us that her trouble was due to an abortion brought about by herself when she was married to Kohl. “I was nineteen years old, what did I know? With a knitting needle, can you believe it? As if I’d ever knitted a thing.” When we asked if she had told Kohl—“Are you crazy? He’d have run off very fast on his fat little legs. We were bohemians, for heaven's sake, not parents.”
Although she spoke this last sentence proudly, Mann stroked her hair with his big hand and said, “My poor little one.”
She jerked her head away from him: “Don’t be a sentimental idiot. I wasn’t going to ruin my career. I was on my way—listen, I’d already been an extra three times, the casting director at UFA was taking a tremendous interest in me, his name was Rosenbaum and he’d promised me a real part in the next production. And then of course he was fired.” She made the face—it was one of scorn and disdain—with which she looked back on that part of their past.
She was not the only one deprived of her future. The lawyer had had his own practice in Dresden; Mann, who was a trained engineer, had been a union leader and a delegate at an international labor conference. In England they were earning their livings in humbler ways, but Marta was never able to get anything going. She said it was because her English was not good enough, but Kohl said it was because she was a lazy lump who couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings. It was true that she usually slept late and had her first cup of coffee at noon.
It may have been her waiflike quality that made one want to serve her, but there was also something imperious in her personality that blurred the line between wishes and commands. During the day, I was often the only person available, and as soon as she heard me come home from school, she called down for me. She said she was too sick to get out of bed, she was starving, and though she had called and called, no one had answered. She wasn’t sulky, just pathetic, so that I was apologetic to have been at school and my aunt on a shopping trip a tube ri
de away where prices were cheaper. But there had been Kohl just across the landing—hadn’t he heard her? She laughed at that: “Kohl! I could be screaming in my death agony, he’d stuff up his ears and not hear a thing.” But again she was not reproachful, only amused.
He too was often waiting for me to come home from school: either he needed to finish a drawing of me or had an idea for a new one. Of course he never summoned me the way she did; he requested, suggested, timidly ready to withdraw. It was only when he saw that she had preempted me and was sending me about her business that his manner changed. Once he came into her room while I was washing her stockings in the basin and she was warming her hands before the gas fire. His face swelled red the way it did in anger: “What is she—a queen to be served and waited on?… You should have seen where she came from, before I pulled her out of the mire!”
She admitted it freely—that she came out of the mire—but as for his pulling her out: oh, there were plenty of others, bigger and better, to do that.
“Then why me? Why did I have to be made the fool who married her?”
“Because you wanted it more than anyone else. You said you’d die and kill yourself without me.”
“And now I’m dying with you!”
It began to happen that on the days when I was sitting with him in his room, she would call for me from hers. Then he kicked his door shut with his foot; but I could still hear her voice calling, weak and plaintive, and it made me restless. I wanted to help her; and also, I have to admit, I wanted to be with her more than with him. I was bored with the long hours of sitting for him. And I was embarrassed by him, too young for his shy approaches, too unused to such respectful gallantry. I began to find excuses not to accompany him on his Sunday excursions, though I felt sorry when I saw him leave alone. Perhaps Marta felt sorry too: I heard her offer to go with him, and then his brusque, indignant refusal.
One day Kohl was waiting for me outside my school. He was standing beside someone's boyfriend, a tall youth with straw-colored hair and a big Adam's apple, this paunchy little old man who tucked his arm into mine and walked away with me. Next day I told everyone he was my uncle, and whenever he stood there again, it was announced to me that my uncle was waiting. I couldn’t even tell him not to come—not for fear of hurting his feelings (though there was that too) but for not wanting anything significant to be read into his presence there. What could be significant? He was old, old! I wept into my pillow at night, ashamed and frustrated at some lack that it was ridiculous to think someone like him could fill.
On a Sunday when I had just told Kohl that I had too much homework to go with him, Marta called after me on the stairs to accompany her. I didn’t dare accept there and then, with Kohl listening, but she knew how eager I was, and maybe he knew too: when we set out, I glanced up guiltily and there he was, standing at a window on the landing. It seemed she was as aware of him as I was: she put her arm around my shoulders and talked in the loud and lively way people do when they want to show others that they are having a good time.
After that first Sunday, I waited for her to invite me again, and sometimes she did. Outings with her were very different from those with Kohl. We were never alone, as I was with him, but there were Mann and the lawyer, and later others joined us, and they had conversations about art shows and films, and a lot to say about people they knew and seemed not to like. Although it hardly ever rained when I was with her—it inevitably did on Sundays with Kohl—they spent little time enjoying birds and sunshine. They gathered in cafés for afternoon coffee and cake, never in the sort of depressing eating holes that Kohl frequented but in large, lavish places; these were probably imitations of the luxury cafés they had once known. Their favorite was one called the Old Vienna, which was not too expensive but was smothered in atmosphere. There were chandeliers, carpets, red velvet banquettes, and richly looped creamy lace under the curtains that were also of red velvet. Here many languages were spoken by both clientele and waiters, and there were continental newspapers on poles for anyone who cared to read them. But few did—they were there to talk and laugh and pretend they were where and how they used to be. Some of the women were chic, with little hats and a lot of lipstick and costume jewelry. Yet Marta, not chic but bohemian with her red hair and long trailing skirt, drew more attention than anyone—maybe because she was enjoying herself so recklessly, surrounded by a group of friends, all male and all eager to supply and then light the cigarettes from which she flicked ash in all directions.
I was always excited after these excursions with Marta and her friends, and my aunt enjoyed hearing my descriptions of the café and its clientele, nodding in recognition of something she had once known. But Kohl frowned and told her, “You shouldn’t let her go with them.”
“But it's so nice for her! Poor child, what chance does she have to go anywhere?”
He said, “She's too young.”
“Too young to go to a café?”
“Too young to go with people like that.”
“Oh, people like that,” La Plume repeated dismissively in her everyone-has-to-live intonation.
As so often with this mild little man, he became a red fighting cock: “You don’t know anything! None of you knows—what she was like, how she carried on. Every day was carnival for her—and how old was she? Sixteen, seventeen, and I, who was forty, I, Kohl, became her clown. She made me her carnival clown.”
“Yes, yes, sit down.”
La Plume pressed him into a chair. She made tea for him, and he drank it with his hands wrapped gratefully around the cup. It calmed him, changed the mood of his thoughts though not their subject. “What could I do? For years and years I had been alone, and poor—poor! And now people were coming to my studio. When I went into a café there were whispers, ‘It's Kohl, the artist Kohl.’ So that was meat and drink for her, other people's whispers…. But she was always laughing at me, making a fool of me. Even her cap made a fool of me! This little striped monkey cap she wore riding on top of her hair…. Her hair was red.”
“It's still red.”
“Nothing like it was!” He gulped tea, gulped heat. “I painted her, I wrote poetry for her, I slept with her, I couldn’t get enough of her. I tell you, she was a flame to set people on fire.” He broke off, pleaded with me, “Come and sit for me. Come tomorrow? After school? I’ll wait for you. I’ll have everything ready.”
That time I was glad to go. There was a stillness, a purity in his empty studio that I have never experienced in any other place; nor at any other time have I felt as serene as in the presence of this artist, drawing something out of me that I didn’t know was there. But then Marta came in and stood behind him to comment on his drawing of me. Once he took off one of his slippers, which he always wore in the studio to save his feet, and he threw it in her direction. It hit the door, which she had already shut behind her. But as always with her intrusion, our peace was shattered.
All this was in my last two years at school: 1946, 1947. After that, things began to change, and some of our lodgers left us to resume their former lives or to begin new ones elsewhere. Mann, for instance, went back to Germany—to East Germany, where he was welcomed by the remnants of his party and returned to an active life of rallies and international conferences. The lawyer started a new practice of his own, taking up cases of reparation for his fellow refugees, which made him rich and took him all over Europe. Their rooms remained empty; there were no more émigrés of the kind my aunt was used to, and she did not care for the other applicants who spoke in languages none of us understood. Anyway, the landlord was keen to convert the house into flats and offered her a sum of money to quit. I was by this time living in Cambridge, having won a scholarship to the university, and stayed with her only during my vacations. She took a little flat over some shops in North West London and led a more restful, retired life, made possible by the monthly payments of refugee reparation the lawyer arranged for her.
He also offered to arrange such payments for Marta, but sh
e was too disorganized to locate her birth certificate or any other of the required papers. She also seemed indifferent about it, as though other things mattered more to her. Before leaving, Mann had asked her to go with him, but first she laughed at him and then she said he was getting on her nerves and pushed him out. A few postcards arrived from him, upbeat in tone and with idyllic views of a cathedral and a river, which my aunt found in the wastepaper basket and put up in her kitchen.
The lawyer married a widow who had been at school with him and had survived the war in Holland. He moved into her flat in Amsterdam but was often in London on business. He began to bring people to Kohl's studio, and they brought other people—gallery owners, collectors, dealers— so it was often a busy scene. The visitors walked around the drawings on the walls, and Kohl turned over the large canvases for them to see; since he had only two chairs, Marta carried some in from her room, and then she stood leaning against the doorpost, smoking and watching. No one took any notice of her. They commented among themselves or turned respectfully to Kohl, who as usual had very little to say; but if Marta tried to explain something for him, he became irritated and told her to go away.
We all attended the opening of his first show at a gallery on Jermyn Street. It was packed with fashionable people, ladies with long English legs in the shiny nylons that had begun to arrive from America; the air was rich with an aroma of perfume and face powder, and of the cigars some of the men had been smoking before being asked to put them out. Marta wore an ankle-length, low-cut dress of emerald-green silk; it matched her eyes but had a stain in front that the dry cleaner had not been able to get out. She wandered around in a rather forlorn way, and no one seemed to know that she was the artists wife. Many pictures were sold, discreet little dots appearing beside them. After this show, another was held in Paris, and after a while Kohl decided to move to Zurich. The pictures still left in the house were packed up under his supervision, and again Marta stood leaning in the open door to watch, and again if she tried to say anything, he became irritated.