No, she had no father. No mother either for that matter. She was a free woman, a woman without progenitors. It was an idea of herself she had grown to like, to cling to even, ever since Emily had looked her straight in the eye and pointed out to her the wonderful liberty it gave her. But now, the notion that Max Bergmann could well be her father suddenly played havoc in Helena’s mind: why else had she always been so strongly drawn to him? Why else had she been so distressed, at once angry and desolate when he had vanished without word? Why else was she here speeding through this alien countryside?
Max her father. Max, who had singled her out. She told herself some stories, tales of lost children, people misplaced and displaced.
Suddenly Helena veered into an opening on the road and turned round to retrace her steps. She was letting her imagination run away with her again. The fog which had settled over the hills and was now closing in to obliterate everything but the taillights in front of her didn’t help matters. It induced dream.
What she needed to do was to head back to Munich and go to Green Headquarters, sift through files, perhaps check the names of the factories she had listed in this vicinity, get a sense of what had brought Max to this corner of the world. Then tomorrow, she could come back to the Wolfratshausen area again and try to trace the descriptions in Max’s letter.
The fog and the gathering darkness slowed her return to Munich and it wasn’t until the next morning that she got to Green Headquarters. Once it was clear who she was, they were helpful. Though they knew nothing of Max Bergmann’s presence in the area, Helena did learn that there was a big anti-nuclear demonstration planned. She also learned there was a chemical plant and a timber firm near Wolfratshausen whose environmental policy they had doubts about. It was a long shot, but she rang both, was put through to a PR man with a smooth American accent in the first who agreed to see her two days hence, and an assistant manager in the second who reluctantly agreed to an appointment on the same day.
Impatient with newspaper clippings, she set off again to Wolfratshausen towards midday, stopped to have a late lunch in the guesthouse where the blousy woman had seen the man of Max’s description. She knew it was a stupid hope, but she hoped that Max would suddenly appear, that he would materialize from the doorway and she could run into his arms. At least Orpheus had known where Eurydice was when he had gone in search of her. No sooner had the notion taken shape, then she answered it herself with one short word. ‘Dead’.
Helena got up hastily and glanced around her as if afraid that the desultory customers had been able to read her mind. It was maddening how her thoughts these last weeks seemed always to be out of control. The break up with Andy had occasioned nothing like this, only a flurried sense of insult overridden by relief.
‘Möchten sie heute das Zimmer haben?’ The man who had helped her yesterday was suddenly beside her.
Helena tried a smile, ‘Later, perhaps. I’m not sure. I may have to go back to Munich tonight.’
She sped away, headed off into the countryside.
It was brighter today, the air so crisp that her nostrils tingled with it. The distant mountains were clear, the dark granite visible at points beneath the snowy caps. She tried different routes, narrow curling roads, flanked now by dense woods, now by fields. She came across a bank of reeds. Marshland. She must be near a lake.
She wasn’t concentrating on her map, but on Max’s letter, its words engraved on her mind now, so that she could almost chant them like a prayer against the recurring tides of despair which threatened her. She followed the rise and fall of the road, saw the lake glistening in the distance, the jagged mountains. It was a magical terrain.
Suddenly she jammed on the brakes of the car, almost skidded off the icy road. She had seen something out of the corner of her eye. What was it? A house, a row of chestnuts, the crest of a hill. She started the car up again, drove slowly until she found a point where she could turn, retraced her path. Yes, that grand house with the twin domes just visible through the bare trees, the lay of the land - it was just like the description in Max’s letter. She hadn’t imagined it.
With a surge of excitement Helena turned the car into the drive, stopped a little way from the house to dig out the letter, reread the passage. She wasn’t wrong. It was as he had detailed it, the two wings, the wide double door, the curl of the iron work, and then to one side, the expanse of the lake.
Heart in mouth, Helena lifted the big brass knocker and let it fall, once, twice, a third time. She waited. Eventually the door opened. A dark-eyed face peered out.
‘Ja?’
Helena put on her pleasantest smile.
The door opened a little further and she saw a broad-faced, curly haired young woman, a girl really, in a loose flowered frock, half covered by a smudged apron. She was holding a mop in her hand.
‘Ich süche einen Herrn Max Bergmann,’ Helena carried on smiling.
‘Kenne keinen.’ The woman looked at her obtusely, and mumbled something Helena couldn’t make out. Her vowels and consonants were all in the wrong places.
Helena made a quick decision, stepped over the threshold. ‘Perhaps someone else in the house might know him.’
‘Niemand da heim,’ the girl shrugged.
‘May I wait? I’ve come a long way.’
The girl looked around her uncertainly and finally opened a door on the left of the wide entrance hall.
As she walked towards it Helena noticed a blue leather spectacle case lying on the hall table. She started. It looked so like Max’s case. Could it be? Her pulse quickened tangibly. She picked it up, put assurance into her voice.
‘I believe this belongs to Herr Bergmann.’
The girl gave her that obtuse look again and then burst into excited speech, incoherent to Helena’s ears, something about the glasses being on the floor. Lots of pieces. She grabbed the case from Helena’s hand, opened it, showed her the specs. They were distinctly like Max’s, but the left eye had been shattered. It came to Helena that the girl thought she was being accused.
‘I’ll keep them for him, shall I?’ Helena smiled, took the case back from her. ‘I’ll explain to him.’
The girl gave her a flicker of a smile in return, gestured her through the opened door, then looked up at her curiously.
‘Amerikanerin?’
Helena nodded. If it made the girl happy to have her American, she was all too pleased to play the part.
She was rewarded with a giggle, an offer of coffee.
‘Yes, please,’ she said in English.
The girl trundled away.
Helena took a deep satisfied breath. She was on the right track. If Max himself was not here, the owners of the house would be certain to lead her to him.
She opened the spectacle case again and gazed once more at the fractured glass. Suddenly a shudder went through her. It would take a violent gesture, a punch, a kick to create this web-like splintering. Had someone hurt Max, struck him? Was he lying imprisoned somewhere in this house? Was she being stupidly naive in her open enquiries? Would the young woman now be running to fetch her masters?
Helena stilled herself, looked around her. She was in a spacious high-ceilinged room, every wall of which was covered in thick, leatherbound tomes with a dusty air about them. In one corner, by the window, stood a large desk, heaped with papers, manilla files, a profusion of books, some of them open, others with an abundance of little sticky yellow markers protruding from their pages.
She edged towards the desk, started to read in an open file.
‘The adepts of the Free Spirit were believers in free love. Just as the deer uses grass, the fish water, the bird air, so the holy man uses woman. By such intimacy she becomes chaster than before. There is a transcendental value to the sexual act here: it is a sacrament. For the adherents of the Adam-cult, ritual nakedness was an assertion of the natural, the unashamed innocence of Adam and Eve before the Fall…’
So startled was Helena by what she read that it took her a
moment to realize that the script was in English, another to hear the clatter of dishes. She looked up to see the young woman gazing at her suspiciously.
‘Oh thank-you,’ Helena hid her confusion, followed her to a polished mahogany table at the other side of the room where she deposited her tray.
‘Thank-you,’ Helena said again. She sat down at the table and poured herself a cup of coffee, made a great show of installing herself before those watchful eyes, pulled out a book from her bag to cement the effect.
The girl seemed to relax, babbled something Helena couldn’t make out.
She would have to be wary, Helena thought. She didn’t want to be caught snooping and thrown out before she had at least had the chance to assess the owners of the house. She would have to proceed cautiously. But a trip to the toilet could lead to no suspicion and it would give her a chance to get more of a sense of the place. If Max were being held in any of the rooms along the way, she was sure she could sense it.
The girl led her, not unfortunately up the stairs, but towards the back of the house. Helena paused at an open door and peaked through.
‘Wie schön. How lovely these old German houses are,’ she opened the door wide. But there was nothing there beyond a confirmation of her words.
‘Ja, ja,’ the young woman mumbled, then pointed her towards another door.
She was waiting for her when Helena came out, led her back to the library.
Helena thanked her effusively, watched her leave and close the door behind her.
She sighed, gazed at the table. Mahogany. She didn’t approve of Mahogany. All those ancient trees in the dwindling rainforest hacked down to embellish the houses of the rich. For this was a rich house, despite the slight air of shabbiness, the cold. Run down, no longer in its prime. Why had Max described it in such detail? She didn’t think he was actually here. The young maid didn’t look like a jailer.
There was nothing for it but to sit and wait until the owners came back.
Her eyes fell on a tome propped on a bronze reading stand in the middle of the table. Odd the way it was so prominently there, almost a centrepiece in lieu of fruit or flowers. Perhaps it was a bible, the bible of some Adam cult, she remembered the notes she had read.
Helena glanced towards the door, listened for footsteps. But surely there was no danger in looking at a book so obviously on display.
She lifted the heavy tome, opened it.
On the inside front cover someone had hand-printed a title: Dass Buch von Anna - Die Besessenen. Anna’s Book - The Possessed. After that there was page upon page of light fluid script. Strange to find a hand written volume like this bound in leather. Helena leafed through the pages. Suddenly the name Max leapt out at her.
Perhaps this was it - the key to Max’s disappearance, his whereabouts.
With a shiver of apprehension, Helena turned back to the beginning and began to read. The first page was brief, like an envoi:
‘A story for you, my son. The story of our lives as I understand them now. What I couldn’t have known, I have imagined. But it is true. More true I suspect than you would wish to know. Forgive us.’
Helena read.
PART I
Chapter One
1913
The children in that house were always conceived when a second man was present.
Now that Anna had learned a little more about the by-ways of life, she could wonder whether she had here arrived at the basis of a universal principle. A supplementary male presence, preferably real, perhaps imagined, was essential to the act of creation. For the dreaming woman, of course. But more particularly for the man.
But in those days, before the absurd clash of the world’s armies had robbed them of their innocence and they still had to lift their skirts to run up the curved staircase of the house, she was more prone to talk than thought. They all were. Words had to stand in for so many gestures they weren’t permitted. And such large words they were too: soul and spirit, struggle and transcendence, justice and morality. Words that muddled and confused, but in their ponderous way breathed a hope that some lack they all felt though couldn’t precisely describe might be filled.
Only the house was silent. Yet, with its eccentric mingling of stately austerity and mannered grace, it alone seemed then to have the wisdom to reflect on their actions.
It stood on the edge of a small hamlet resting peaceably in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. From its rear windows one could see across the mirror stillness of a lake onto slopes thick with blue-green pine. Beyond, there was the cold immovable granite of the mountains.
That summer of 1913, when the din of battle only sounded at the outer edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Anna preferred to keep her eyes to the middle-distance. She had no interest in nationalist struggles in the South Balkans, or in the fact that the Austrian parliament had been indefinitely suspended. Nor did she care that the Prussian military was flexing its muscles in affairs of state or even that suffragettes were on the march in Britain. At home in Vienna ladies in silk frocks chattered gaily beneath the graceful baroque arches of a thousand and one salons or listened dreamily to the vaulting sounds of the world’s best orchestras.
And here, in Seehafen, things were even better. Here, she could ride or wander aimlessly through the capacious gardens, pausing to feel the morning moistness on an elm’s bark. She could gaze on the fluttering dance of the daffodils or the slower swaying of the willows reflected in the indigo depths of the lake.
At such times she would hum little snatches of a Viennese waltz to herself and move in rhythm to the trees until her accelerated twirling brought her inevitably to a fence at the edge of the property. Then, with a surreptitious glance over her shoulder, she would hoick her dress above her knees and clamber across, running wildly up, up over the crest of a little hill and when breathless, throw herself face down on the grass amidst clusters of primrose and sweet smelling celandine. Hands clasped under her chin, she would gaze through the grass at the plump brown and white of the cows in the valley or at the red tiered steamer lolling across the lake; or turn herself over to muse at the tufted clouds ambling in acres of blue, until the height of the sun told her it was time to make her way back.
Or so it had been for almost two weeks of this holiday. But today was different, as her sister Bettina had been at pains to point out. Today Bruno would be arriving. Herr Bruno Adler. To be duly inspected by Bettina and the gathering circle of her friends. And soon she, Anna von Leinsdorf, would be Frau Bruno Adler.
Anna tasted the name as she had done almost daily for the last months. It brought a little giggle to her throat and she stilled it with a mouthful of poppy seed roll smothered in butter and a gulp of the coffee which Dora, the little dark-haired maid, had unobtrusively placed in her room just moments ago. For two weeks, when she wasn’t more gainfully employed, Bettina had done little more than point out to her that now, now she must make an effort to put on a more serious demeanour. As if marriage were a corset which constrained; and movement and laughter were soon to be a thing of the past. But Bruno with his warm chocolate eyes and that drooping moustache which tickled her forehead when he kissed her wasn’t like that, Anna thought.
It had been one of her father’s last acts before he died to sanction their engagement. He had called her to his rooms in the Hofburg to relay the news - a certain sign of the event’s significance. She had only been there once before and the Imperial Palace, with its endless plumed and helmeted guards and footmen, its succession of corridors, and near empty rooms dismayed her. A pervasive grey chill hung over everything and the awesome height of the rooms dwarfed even her Aunt Hermine’s magisterial girth - since of course she had accompanied her.
Her father had looked ancient, bowed by the weight of the Palace. Only his voice, as he conveyed to her from behind his vast desk that he had accepted on her behalf the marriage suit of Herr Bruno Adler, still carried that authority and clipped rectitude which in her mind she always associated with him. The car
eful marshalling of words, the listing of Herr Adler’s attributes, largely financial, as if they were a catalogue of provisions for a distant Balkan regiment, had all passed over Anna’s head into the windy distance of the room. All she could think of was that her father looked dreadfully ill. And when he had finished his speech and had at last fixed his monocled eye on her and said, ‘I trust you are pleased,’ she had only nodded unthinkingly and then blurted out, ‘I wish you would come home with us. This place can’t be good for you.’
Her Aunt had glanced at her severely, but her father’s thin lips had after a moment crinkled into a smile. His dry cold hand had squeezed hers, ‘I’ll try. But I’m needed here for the time being.’
They were perhaps the last words he had spoken directly to her. Three months later he was dead. ‘In the service of the Emperor,’ her Aunt pronounced to anyone who would listen, while Anna remained convinced that it was the draughty weight of the Palace itself which had killed him. She developed a visceral distaste for everything that was Imperial and the very sight of the letters K & K, the pervasive emblem of the monarchy, would make her shiver. Indeed, after that visit to the Palace, she had even grown to like her Aunt’s cluttered, somewhat oriental interior, with its Japanese vases, its great sprays of peacock feathers, its Persian carpets burdening the walls. At least there was the semblance of life here and from the windows one could see the sweep of the woods.
Then, too, though she never thought of it as her own, it was the only home she had known for the last seven years. Ever since her mother’s death. Her mother, with her tawny eyes and her curling smile, whose portrait still graced Anna’s room. When she thought of her first, her real home, it was her mother’s laughter she remembered and a sense of space. Nothing else. After their mother’s death, Bettina had insisted on going off to study in Zurich. Since nothing ever stood in the path of Bettina’s insistence, ten-year-old Anna had been moved in with her Aunt. And her father had been free to dedicate himself increasingly to the service of his Emperor. ‘A service which clothed him in honour’, her Aunt was wont to say and then murmur irascibly in the next breath, ‘and not much else’.
Dreams of Innocence Page 3
