Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  It was when her Aunt intimated to Anna that only her father’s knowledge of his imminent and penniless death could have led him to accede so readily to Herr Adler’s suit, given the vast distance between their respective families, that Anna began to pay Bruno Adler any significant attention. Before that he had simply been one of the many men, brightly uniformed or sombrely suited to appear at her Aunt’s gatherings. Even after Bruno had been accepted as a suitor, with the proviso that no marriage was to take place until after Anna’s eighteenth birthday, still over a year and a half away, she had been too shy to meet his many glances or engage in more than cursory conversation.

  But her Aunt’s intimations, coupled with the cheerful prattle of her French governess, Elise, had fired Anna’s imagination. It was not Bruno’s wealth which impressed her: never having known lack, she was not interested in plenty. It was his difference. He was quite ostensibly not ‘in the service of the Emperor’. Nor did he seem to come from anywhere. What a relief not to have to engage in a repeated litany of grands and greats which teetered like a stack of frayed coloured cards through the centuries.

  One day Anna casually asked her Aunt, ‘Is it true that Herr Adler is Jewish?’

  Tante Hermine turned towards her with such a commotion of black satin that one of her Japanese vases teetered dangerously. ‘Who told you that?’ she asked, dark eyes narrowing.

  ‘Oh, I heard it somewhere,’ Anna smiled sweetly, her voice trailing off.

  Within a week, Mademoiselle Elise had been seen tearfully off the premises.

  Not that Bruno wasn’t Jewish. It was simply that in the anti-semitic reaches of Viennese high society, such prattle was not permitted.

  The day after Elise had left, Anna had allowed her engagement to Herr Bruno Adler to be announced.

  She still missed Elise, missed her tinkling voice pouting risqué songs at the piano, missed the bubble of her conversation, her disquisitions on men’s eyes and the fineness of Bruno’s. Now there was only Miss Isabel with her volumes of Mrs Gaskell, her soulful renditions of the Lyrical Ballads and her constant news of the imprisonment or release of one militant suffragette or another. Anna liked her well enough, but hankered after Mademoiselle Elise’s gossiping playfulness. She would particularly have liked to have had her at her side now to hear her impressions of Bettina and her husband, Klaus Eberhardt, and this curious house.

  The wing Anna was in was as graceful as a Mozart sonata, all pale creamy hues and surprising ornament, right down to the airy rose and blue drawing room with its lightly gilded cupola and high windows overlooking the mellowness of lake and gardens. To walk across the hall to the opposite side of the house and its brother wing was to enter a different, darker world of heavy mahogany tables and gothic candelabra, of wainscoting and worn leather. Under the twinned cupola here, bookshelves reached from floor to ceiling broken only by the gleaming wood of fire place and mantelpiece above which hung an old oil depicting a landscape not unlike the rugged peaks visible through the windows.

  Anna would have liked to say to Mademoiselle Elise, ‘I suspect Klaus’s parents who built this as their country house couldn’t agree on decor and split the place in two, one for Monsieur, one for Madame.’ And Mademoiselle would have offered one of her mischievous chuckles and spiky comments before tying the sash on Anna’s white linen dress just so.

  Anna struggled with the bow now and tried to catch a glimpse of the effect in the looking glass above the painted chest. Then she straightened the white stockings once more and looped her long hair up as neatly as she could, fastening it with the two mother of pearl combs. Little tendrils still curled round her face. There was nothing she could do. Bettina would disapprove, as she had disapproved the night before when she had gone through Anna’s wardrobe.

  ‘Doesn’t Tante Hermine realise you’re no longer a child?’ she had groaned. ‘Mean old crow. When we get to Munich, I shall order some clothes for you. What must Herr Adler think - his bride to be still prancing around like a twelve-year-old?’ At last, Bettina had pointed to the white dress and proceeded to lecture Anna on her behaviour for today, as if Anna were indeed still the child she had been on their mother’s death, when the eighteen-year-old Bettina, her head held high in her grey-striped travelling suit, had set off for Zurich.

  ‘Above all, don’t run about and get covered in mud and grass,’ Anna could hear her sister’s resonant tones echoing in her mind as she looked longingly out the window. And she could recreate the unspoken part of her lecture: ‘Frau Trübl and Fritz, let alone Dora, have enough to contend with without caring for your clothes. And you know I don’t believe in working the servants. And I wouldn’t have any at all here if this house weren’t so big. And…and…’

  Anna giggled. It was always the same. Her sister believed in this but didn’t believe in that. For instance, she now didn’t believe in governesses, but she did believe in education, in the value of books, in hard work. Bettina had beliefs and she, Anna, had none. Unless it were the belief that the grass was so green and the sky so blue that they were both beckoning to her. And if she went down the stairs very very quietly and clutched the book Bettina had given her to her bosom like a prayer, she might just escape outdoors without bumping into anyone.

  Anna grabbed the apple from her tray and raced lightly down the stairs. Holding her breath, she made her way through the doors and ran towards a little gravelled lane where the shrubs shaded her from the house’s view. She would be good today. She wouldn’t stray from the paths. Nor would she tarry in the stables and end up smelling like the horses, as Bettina had once told her she did. With a happy crunch, Anna bit into her apple and as the sound resounded through the air, tried to chew more delicately.

  The path led her into Klaus’s rhododendron grove. She called it by his name, because he had told her in his halting way one day that he had planted it himself. His eyes had played lovingly over the thick glossy leaves with their bursts of purple and pink and white blossom and taking encouragement from her questions, he had told her of the origin of the plants, each one slightly different from its neighbour. She had never heard Klaus speak at such length and so passionately before. Her curious glance had brought a distinct flush to his cheeks above the curling bristle of his beard.

  A sudden rustle from a corner of the grove had allowed him to turn away. She had followed his eyes and seen a little humped prickly form struggle unevenly across the ground, freeze into a ball of stillness. Klaus had put a finger to his lips. They gazed at the tiny creature as it began to move again somewhat precariously. Then Klaus bounded silently down the path, a tall, loping, awkward figure. Within minutes he was back, bearing a can of milk, a saucer, a splint, a bandage.

  With deft, gentle movements she had never seen in him before, he poured milk for the hedgehog, waited patiently for the creature to drink, picked him up in his large ungainly hands and quickly tied the splint round its injured leg. Anna marvelled. Perfect communion seemed to exist between the animal and this ordinarily clumsy, nervous man. Since that occasion she had begun to have a new sense of Klaus and even some inkling of what had always seemed his utterly incomprehensible union with her sister.

  Anna crossed the grove, scanning it for signs of the hedgehog and then turning into a lane which led alongside the little orchard towards the lake, she broke into a run. Where the path twisted and sloped, she suddenly tripped, only just catching herself before she stumbled to the ground. Neither twisted roots, nor loose branches had created the obstacle, but a pair of trousered legs stretched across the path.

  ‘You should watch where you’re going,’ their owner muttered, barely glancing up at her. He was leaning against a tree, his attention wholly on the ground, while his pencil skimmed over his sketchpad.

  ‘Sorry.’ Years of ingrained habit spoke in the word. But she was angry. There was a grimy mark on her stocking. ‘You should watch where you put your big feet,’ she said under her breath. The man didn’t look up at her again, didn’t seem to have heard. W
ith a scowl, Anna moved away, her pleasure spoiled. Who was this man? She hadn’t heard any of Bettina’s many expected guests arriving.

  She had reached the rim of the lake when his voice called her back. ‘You must be Bettina’s sister, Anna, the one who’s getting married.’

  The nakedness of the description made her twirl round. He was coming after her with springy athletic steps, a battered straw hat raised in greeting. ‘You shouldn’t. Shouldn’t get married. Turn yourself into a man’s property. Become a slave to a corrupt system.’

  Anna looked at him incredulously. A young tautly handsome, clean-shaven face dominated by deepset clear blue eyes in which the pupils were strangely large, fierce. They fixed on her.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Johannes Bahr,’ he bowed slightly.

  Anna waited. There was nothing more. ‘Johannes Bahr?’ she queried and laughed suddenly. ‘And that alone gives you the right to advise me on the course of my life?’

  ‘This is the twentieth century.’ It was at once an impersonal statement and an injunction heightened by the intimacy of his gaze.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you?’ he shrugged, lifted the battered hat again, to reveal a springy mass of chestnut hair. He seemed about to go, then added, as an afterthought, ‘You have a fine laugh, a free laugh. I wonder if one could paint a laugh.’ He mused, as if he had already forgotten her presence.

  And before Anna could respond, he was off, vanishing into the shrubbery.

  Discomfited, Anna set off again, following the lakeside path past the boathouse. If all of Bettina’s guests were like Johannes Bahr, she thought uncomfortably, this glorious weekend would be ruined. Yes, Bettina’s friends would be just like her, always telling her what to do, what to feel, what to think. At least this Bahr had the advantage of youth.

  In an effort to deflect her mood, Anna shifted direction and ran, ran back towards the house and the spreading copper beach she loved. Hanging from one of its thick branches, there was a swing. It was Anna’s secret delight. Sheltered by the canopy of branches, she would sit or stand on the weather-beaten board and swoop through the air, higher and higher till her hair flowed in the wind and her feet all-but touched the canopy of leaves.

  It was when she had reached this dizzying height that Anna heard the single blare of a car’s horn, heard the crunch of tyres over gravel. Through the greenery, she caught the glow of sunlight on brass. She jumped from the swing and raced towards the drive arriving just in time to see the chauffeur open a gleaming door to a still begoggled Bruno, a bulky giant in the one-piece mechanic’s suit he liked to don over his clothes when he chose to do the driving. Anna watched for a moment as he whipped off goggles and gloves and bent to kiss Bettina’s hand. Watched his lips beneath the thick moustache as he mouthed, ‘Frau Eberhardt, a pleasure. I hope I’m not too early. This new Mercedes model eats up the kilometres.’ He laughed a boy’s excited laugh which sat oddly with the serious cast of his features.

  ‘Not at all, not at all. Some of our number have already arrived.’ Bettina was all hostessly charm. ‘But I’m afraid I have no idea where Anna is. My sister will choose to disappear.’ She threw up her arms in mock despair.

  ‘Here I am.’ Anna walked towards them with her light tread and heard her name emerge simultaneously from both their lips, her sister’s in admonition, Bruno’s in delight. Following the line of Bettina’s exasperated gaze, she lifted one hand to her hair and tried uselessly to tuck fallen strands behind a comb, and the other to Bruno to accept his kiss. She noticed, with sinking heart, that the hand was far from clean and covered it swiftly with her words,

  ‘Will you take me for a drive?’

  ‘Anna! Herr Adler has just arrived and will want to wash and stretch his legs before lunch.’

  Bruno’s eyes smiled. ‘Later, my dear. Frau Eberhardt is right.’

  He looked from one sister to the other, both beauties, but in such disparate ways. Bettina, whom he had only met once before briefly in Vienna, was, in her stiff high necked white blouse and crisp blue skirt, a model of queenly rectitude. Tall, willowy, she confronted you with clear grey eyes, her smooth dark head always poised at a slightly questioning angle. She had, Bruno thought, the slightly irascible smile of an intelligent woman, who knowing her own beauty, has to forgive the poor, superficial male, for always and inevitably thinking of that first.

  Anna, his beloved Anna, was a little smaller than her sister, a little rounder, and as yet wholly unaware of her attractions. The delicate oval of her face lit up with her emotions; her smile puckered and teased deliciously, her nostrils flared with her temper as flagrantly as her pale gold hair fled from whatever its arrangement. And in the midst of it all, there was the watchful stillness of those tawny eyes, golden like some forest creature. Sometimes those eyes frightened him.

  At the age of forty-five, Bruno Adler considered himself a supremely fortunate man. He had travelled a long way from that timid and tearful five-year-old who had watched his grandfather knocked off a Vienna pavement to a flurry of anti-semitic imprecations, a grandfather who had then wordlessly brushed off his hat, taken his grandson’s arm and walked stoically away. It was the one childhood memory imprinted indelibly in his mind.

  The rest was a haze of repetitive habit: the family dinners turned into gruelling examinations under the strict tutelage of his disciplinarian father; the clandestine visits to the tiny synagogue, thick with the smell of huddled male bodies and his mother’s fear as she dragged him and his sister into the realm of what his father deplored as superstition. All a blur until he had fled at the age of eighteen to America, where he had worked and learned and worked some more to emerge by the time he was thirty with his first fortune, reinvested now, increased fiftyfold, in industries which spanned the corners of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only one gross misfortune darkened this trajectory: his wife, Elisabeth, whose fate it had been to die, taking their firstborn with her.

  But all that was in the past now. Now there was Anna. He glanced at her, saw her impatience as he carried on a polite exchange with Bettina about the eccentricities of the house, the marvels of the site. He had not been certain that old von Leinsdorf would accept his proposal. Some of these ancient families held on with their fingernails to the teetering pinnacle of their nobility. But the old man had been amenable enough, given a little wait - long enough for him to die without having to confront the shame of the event itself.

  Bruno had few illusions. He knew he had been accepted not for himself but for his fortune - something the von Leinsdorfs now sadly lacked. But then, he was his fortune. He had made it with his energy, his intelligence, his will, his perspiration, and it had made him. He would not be the Bruno Adler that he was without his wealth, his factories, his gleaming car and now his Anna, his own von Leinsdorf. And just as they had made parts of him, so would she.

  Then, too, he loved her. There were half-a-dozen young women of equally high rank to whose families his fortune would not have come amiss. But he was honest enough with himself to know that he would have been distraught if the old man had refused him Anna. He could put a precise date to the moment when he had begun to love her. It was in her Aunt’s salon which he occasionally frequented since it was useful to have friends amongst those dusty title-holders who made up the top echelons of the vast Austrian bureaucracy.

  Anna had appeared amongst them that night like a ray of golden light. She had stood casually by the side of the grand piano and in her rippling melodic voice had sung one of Schubert’s Lieder. He could hear it now. It was neither a particularly rich nor particularly fine voice: Bruno, whose dedication to music came second only to his work, knew that. But it had a purity, a clarity that spoke to him. And then just when the melody rose to a peak, her voice had cracked, gone slightly off key. Instead of blushing or showing any dismay, Anna had simply smiled mischievously, as if the fault were a quirk of style, and carried on triumphantly to the end. It was from that little moment of dissonance that he date
d his love.

  And he had not been wrong about her. He sensed that whatever the familial pressure, she had, like the free spirit she was, accepted his proposal in herself as well. As he looked back over the progress of their courtship, he realized that what most stirred her were the very points at which he strayed from what she expected. The periodic and repeated glow of her admiration had fanned what had begun for him as a loving curiosity into a veritable idolatry. Now, on those rare occasions when he didn’t fall into an instant and exhausted sleep at night, and he thought of her, he sometimes shivered with a fear he didn’t altogether recognize. The colour of that fear was not unlike the colour of Anna’s eyes.

  Those eyes, over lunch, moved around the table with growing, if secret, excitement. They were gathered in the arbour. The assembled company included two of Klaus’s colleagues from the university, stern bearded men, and their soberly clothed wives; the raven haired actress Camille Rang and her dramatist husband Emil Nussdorfer; Dr. Petra Fluss, whom Anna had already heard Bettina describe as her dearest friend - a tiny woman with quick bright gestures and a surprisingly deep voice. She had brought along with her Johannes Bahr, whose presence, Anna gathered, had been unforeseen. In the midst of the general flurry, she had also learned he was an artist.

  Bettina presided over a linen-covered table heaped with cold fish in creamy dill sauce, an array of smoked meats, crisp red radishes, moist black bread, an assortment of cakes and fruit, chilled wine.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind the picnic,’ she gestured at the spread, smiled with particular warmth at Bruno. ‘It saves labour. And food, after all, is only for us an inducement to conversation.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so,’ there was a general murmur of agreement, during which Anna gazed covertly at Johannes, noting his sullen air, wondering why when he had been introduced to her, he had failed to acknowledge that they had already spoken. But that, she was soon to realise, was only the first oddity.