Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Johannes Bahr?’ Bruno queried, while helping himself to some pike. ‘Aren’t you the son of the jurist Karl Gustav Bahr? Fine man. Brilliant legal mind.’

  There was no answer from Johannes, except for the brazen crunch of white teeth on radish.

  ‘So he is no relation of yours?’ Bruno unaccustomed to rudeness, raised his voice. Attention focussed on them.

  After too lengthy a pause Johannes uttered, ‘I have no relations with the law. It is not possible to have relations with the enemies of life.’

  Bruno guffawed. ‘So he is your father.’

  ‘Have a little more of this sauce, Herr Adler.’ Bettina sensing trouble, tried to deflect it. ‘My husband grows the dill himself.’

  Bruno persisted. ‘Come, come, Herr Bahr. The law is not an enemy. If I were to steal one of your canvasses, would you not have recourse to the law?’

  ‘If you were to steal one of Johannes’s pictures, he would sit back in delight at the knowledge that you wanted it enough to steal,’ Petra intervened tartly.

  ‘I shall have to make the attempt then,’ Bettina laughed.

  ‘Take me with you.’ Camille seconded her.

  Johannes’s features warmed as he looked at Petra, at Bettina, and then slowly one by one at each of the women at the table. ‘The women have it, Herr Adler. They’re the only ones to listen to these days.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Bruno bowed slightly in acknowledgement to the women. ‘But, I insist that we need the law. It…’

  Johannes cut him off, ‘The law is only another name for power. The corrupt power of corrupt old men. The only power I believe in is this.’ He held up his hands in front of him, turned them slowly. They all gazed at those long-fingered, oddly delicate hands, starkly white except where the paint showed its dark traces.

  ‘And the power of women,’ he gestured dramatically towards each of them in turn, stopping at Anna.

  Her breath caught.

  Bruno hid his mounting anger. ‘I see we have a revolutionist in our midst,’ he ironized, hummed a few bars of a satirical ditty that was making the rounds - the sad tale of a radical lamplighter whose revolutionary ardour was great, so long as his beloved lampposts were treated with due propriety. He saw an answering smile tugging at Klaus’s lips.

  ‘You are not in the revolutionary camp, I take it, Herr Eberhardt?’

  ‘Klaus’s only camp is somewhere in the garden, Herr Adler.’ Bettina was quick to retort.

  ‘Ah, but that too is a revolutionary camp these days, my dear.’ Klaus wiped his lips with his napkin. ‘The Wandervogel are showing us just that. A life in nature as an alternative to our increasingly corrupt and moribund social selves.’

  Bettina seemed about to contradict him and then stopped herself just as Johannes burst in, his face suddenly animated. ‘Yes, I approve of your camp, Herr Eberhardt. Come, let me tell you all a story about revolution.’ His voice grew low, intimately seductive, drawing them all in, even Bruno, persuading them into unity.

  ‘It’s a true story, I’m told, insofar as stories can be true. And it took place not so many years ago, nor so very many kilometres from here,’ he pointed towards the distant mountains, ‘in one of the remoter valleys of the Southern Tyrol or perhaps the Dolomites.’

  He looked at them each in turn, making certain of their attention, wooing their interest.

  ‘You know the poverty of those places. The men leave their small-holdings to their wives, strong, resilient women with large hands and wintry eyes which look right through you. Yes, the men go off, off to America, to earn a bit of extra. Well, one summer, one of these peasants who had been gone for years, returned home, asked after his cow, asked after his dog, asked after his child. He didn’t bother to ask after the new children. Years had passed, after all.’

  Camille tittered.

  Bruno cleared his throat, threw a quick glance at Anna. She was utterly still.

  ‘His wife took him into her bed. If little else, she remembered the milky smoothness of the skin on his back. A year passed. His money ran out. He set off. Off into the next valley, where,’ Johannes paused, ‘he came home to another wife. And then another, and another. Each welcomed him into her bed. In each house, he knew the name of a cow, a dog, a woman. Each recognized him and didn’t recognize him. But wanted him nonetheless.’

  The last sentence was uttered almost in a whisper. Johannes’s gaze lingered on Bettina as silence settled around the table.

  ‘You do talk waffle, Johannes,’ Petra said in a husky voice.

  ‘And this is your revolution?’ Bruno broke in. ‘The revolution of a scoundrel who seduces women away from their marriage vows?’ He scraped his chair abruptly back from the table. Anna shouldn’t be listening to this rubbish. ‘Come, my dear. It’s time for that drive I promised you.’

  ‘No, no, you mistake me, Herr Adler,’ Johannes stopped them. ‘It is the women who are the revolutionaries in my little story. Women who are free, unmastered. They accept men as they accept the change of the seasons. With such women, there can be no Law. No tyrannical law of the father, no crushing weight of deadening regulations. No Prussian master state.’

  Anna suddenly laughed. ‘And no property, of course.’ She saw Bettina’s startled look, felt Bruno stiffen. Now why had she said that? She hadn’t understood a fraction of what Johannes was on about. She was merely parrotting him, reminding him of what he had said to her earlier.

  ‘Let’s hurry, Bruno.’ She moved eagerly away from the table, broke into a run.

  Bettina gazed after her sister in astonishment. What had induced Anna’s sudden outburst? Herr Adler would be upset, was probably already upset by Johannes Bahr’s behaviour. And she liked Adler, was impressed by this large dark confident man with lively eyes who would soon be her brother-in-law. She chastized herself for not having stopped Bahr’s story sooner. The arrogance of the man to lead them on in that way. It was after all a totally unsuitable narrative to recount in the presence of a young girl. But she had been captured by his words. By his oddly hypnotic presence. Yes, hypnotic.

  Johannes Bahr was not in the least distressed by the commotion his little story had provoked amongst his listeners. There was nothing quite like a little disruption to allay the tedium of these lunch parties amongst the supposedly refined classes. In any event, he had come to believe that it was precisely for this that they invited artists to their tables. Though he sometimes wondered why he bothered to accept, since he far preferred the charged atsmosphere of his studio.

  He was a man who in his twenty-seven years had developed three distinct passions. The first was a passion for painting which he pursued almost addictively.

  The second was an overweening hatred for his father, who in his pride and pompousity, his disciplinary zeal and overbearing humourlessness, represented for Johannes everything that was wrong with the current state of Germany. In his eyes, his father was a man who perverted natural impulse, who instantly converted all feelings into impersonal edicts of a turgid banality; the standard bearer of a society gone wrong. He was also the man who with his gross insensitivity had beaten Johannes’s mother into the ground, so that she had died when only thirty-three, a poor silent broken shadow of a human creature. Johannes, thirteen at the time, already hailed as an intellectual prodigy by his teachers, had never forgiven his father his mother’s death.

  This, he was astute enough to realise, had in part fed his third passion: his love of women. It was a strangely democratic passion, for Johannes was capable of finding something to love in any and every woman. It could be the slant of a nose, the particular way a glove was stretched over a hand, the lilt in a voice. It could even be something others considered ugly: a voracious movement of the jaw; the crepe of powdered wrinkles.

  When Johannes desired a particular woman, he was utterly possessed by this desire. This communicated itself to the woman as an attention, so total, so powerful, that it was almost impossible to resist. The very force of his attention convinced them that so
mething magnificent was at stake, not merely a louche little encounter of the everyday kind. And indeed, for Johannes, it was never that. For only when he was lost in lovemaking could he replicate the sensation he had when he had been painting for hours: the sensation of being thrust onto a new and vaster plane. Only then did he feel himself transported away from the long tentacles of common cares which seemed to shadow his every move and drag him down to the abyss of the ordinary.

  Johannes’s zest for women found a convenient home in his beliefs: each woman was after all the embodiment of Woman, that principle which would save them all from the death dealing world of the fathers and their soulless machine morality. Women’s hold on that morality was freer, looser than the man’s. They were closer to the hoary wisdom of the body, to their own sexuality, to the counterreason of passion. And that was a force which could disrupt the moribund order - of the family, the military, the state.

  If Johannes sometimes saw himself as the male who helped to unleash this triumphant natural sexuality in women for the good of the world, he preferred to see himself as chosen for the task by the women themselves, a mere Adonis in Aphrodite’s thrall.

  As the guests began to disperse, Bettina Eberhardt found herself staring at Johannes, noting a diffidence which sat oddly with his bursts of intensity. She forced her look away. He had made her forget her sister. Forget everyone. She would have to question Petra about him. Was Johannes Bahr her lover?, she suddenly wondered. An uncustomary flush rose to her face. Uncomfortably, she thought of Adler again, of Anna, and shrugged inwardly. Anna had to be exposed to things some time. To be so attractive and so innocent was a parlous condition for a woman. And their Aunt seemed to have managed to raise her in a supreme ignorance. Adler was, after all, a man of the world. He would expect his wife to have some knowledge.

  Knowledge, for Bettina, was a greater good than almost any other, perhaps with the exception of talent, or what she would have preferred to call genius. She was of that generation of women who had first fought to have access to ideas on equal terms with men. Only education, universal education, would free the world from the shackles of prejudice and superstition. Only when women were educated would that crucible of humanity, the nursery, cease to be a chamber of horrors where the devils of ignorance perverted the child’s impressionable mind. Social justice would dawn with the bright clear light of an educated reason.

  If such was the core of Bettina’s beliefs, it was in part because nothing thrilled her so much as the free and supple play of a fine mind which briskly swept out the Augean stables of convention. One particularly dank and musty corner of those stables, where the cobwebs, she felt, were particularly thick, was that occupied by the body and sexuality. Even she, Bettina recognized, since she was nothing if not honest, was as yet a little afraid to enter there. In her mind, sex was mixed up with enslavement. Why else should some of the more remarkable women she had known in Zurich have dissipated their talents in the service of altogether mediocre men?

  She had chosen to marry because it had become evident to her in the course of things that the life of an unmarried woman was paradoxically far more constrictive than that of one who was coupled. She had chosen Klaus Eberhardt: not the most eminent nor the most attractive amongst the various men who payed court to her in Zurich, he was the only one who gave her a sense of unrestricted freedom. And this she valued above all else. When he settled his loose-limbed, slightly ungainly figure into a chair and fixed his gentle eyes on her, she felt a kind of attentive repose emanating from him, which fuelled her mind, made it soar, gave her an energetic brilliance.

  As a result, though people wondered at the marriage of the witty and resplendent Bettina von Leinsdorf and the shy Klaus Eberhardt, Bettina was fiercely protective of Klaus.

  But now, as she looked at the solid figure of Bruno chasing after her sister as if she were a rare and precious butterfly, saw him stop her, tuck a loose strand of hair gravely behind her ear, heard Anna’s carefree laugh, she suddenly felt nettled, angry at Klaus. Angry, too, at Johannes, at Petra, who were still lounging around the table and making desultory small talk.

  ‘I’m going to do some work.’ Bettina’s voice carried her disapproval.

  ‘You work too hard, Bettina,’ Petra drawled. ‘Isn’t that the case, Klaus? Tell her. What with organizing her nurseries, her women, her writing, she’ll run herself into the ground.’

  ‘Bettina is at her happiest when working. If a report on the nurseries of Munich calls, anything else is out of the question.’

  ‘Even swimming?’ Johannes queried.

  ‘Bettina is not one of your sporting kind, Herr Bahr.’

  Had she heard a note of irony in his voice? Bettina bristled and then was soothed.

  ‘You should read her report. It’s a fine piece of work. An important piece of work.’ Klaus stoked his pipe with a characteristic gesture.

  ‘I’d like to.’

  The direct, assessing look Johannes gave her was one which in less liberal company might have been considered offensive.

  It was that offensiveness which troubled Bruno, as he sat rigidly and at an appropriate distance from Anna, in the back seat of his car. He would have liked to have been behind the steering wheel himself, feeling the machine respond powerfully to his gestures, goading it to greater strength. As it was he could only sit stiffly and fume.

  Anna shouldn’t be allowed to spend time in the company of that young man. Hear such outlandish stories. Why, it was as if he had with one blow cut through all those wonderful ruches and pleats and puffs and lace and draperies which made women and courtship civilized, to expose the shivering white animal beneath. Bruno frowned. If Bettina sanctioned his particular variety of artistic licence, that was fine. But it was not for him. Nor for Anna. And in his own home it would not be allowed. In his youth, it would have been unthinkable to speak that way in front of women. But things had changed. Vienna, Munich, they had both become nervous cities where anything was permissible and whole hosts of crackpot notions held sway.

  It was hardly that Bruno was old fashioned: indeed, he counted himself and was counted amongst the progressives. But there were things…. He looked at Anna. She seemed wholly unmoved by the incident, utterly enveloped in the motion of the car and the splendours of the landscape around them. Perhaps it was only to his experienced ears, that Johannes’s little story played out its full import. Perhaps he should trust a little more to Anna’s innate tact. For she had that. Nonetheless, since Anna was to spend the remainder of the summer months with the Eberhardt’s, he would have a word with Klaus.

  Bettina restlessly scanned the pages of the books piled high on her desk, her thoughts inevitably winging their way back to Johannes’s peculiar narrative, the sway of his voice, the dreaming clarity of his eyes, those quick white hands which seemed to fashion visions. She imagined the swing of his shoulders as he sauntered down an incline, the set of his clean features as he knocked at the door of one of those mountain houses half propped on stilts. Saw a woman with roughened hands opening the door to him, smiling a little at this stranger, unperturbedly welcoming him as her husband.

  She leapt up from her desk and her thoughts. It was no use pretending to work. She might as well seek out the others.

  It was from the midst of a little copse at the crest of the hill that she suddenly heard Johannes’s voice.

  ‘These flowers, so lovely. But remember, they are nature’s sexual parts. Beautiful. Like woman’s. Like man’s.’

  Shocked despite herself, Bettina stopped, waited.

  ‘Yes, one can almost feel it here on this hill, among these old trees, these uncurling ferns. Right here. Nature’s soul. Feel it. Touch. Smell.’

  Swayed by the urgency of that voice, Bettina sniffed.

  ‘Can you feel it? That primeval time before the God of obedience and disobedience covered that ancient couple in shame. A time when women and men walked with heads high, and followed only the rhythm of the earth, their bodies, their passions
, unconstrained by fear. And now look at us, shackled by false gods, deadened by destructive notions of virtue, unless we can reawaken those rhythms in ourselves, be alive to them.’

  Bettina burst upon the group. Klaus was leaning against a tree trunk; the others were sitting, Johannes holding Petra’s hand to the ground. Seeing Bettina, her friend edged away from him.

  ‘A fine little sermon from one of our new sexual theologists, if I’m not mistaken. Do you count yourself amongst the believers then, Herr Bahr? How very advanced of you to replace one theology with another.’ Irony dripped from her.

  There was a moment’s silence before Johannes turned cold eyes on her. ‘And you, my dear Frau Eberhardt, seem to me rather more advanced in your ideas than in other parts…’ he paused.

  Petra laughed, ‘Bettina is nothing if not well read.’

  Bettina looked at her friend askance, saw a curious glance pass between Klaus and Johannes and then before she could resist, felt Johannes’s hand encircle hers.

  ‘May I?’ He pulled her gently to the ground and pressed her hand to the gritty earth. ‘Close your eyes. Rid your mind of its chattering monkeys. Touch. Simply feel.’

  What Bettina felt rather more closely than the earth between her fingers was the pressure of Johannes’s hand. She pulled away from him abruptly, brushed her dress into smoothness. ‘I am not one of your peasant women, Herr Bahr,’ Bettina began imperiously. ‘And as for what we need to revitalize our tired empires, I very much doubt that it is the power of the erotic. A little more social justice would stand us in better stead.’ Her voice had risen a little too high. She turned on her heel with a swish of skirts. ‘Klaus?’

  But it was Petra who leapt to her side. ‘I’ll stroll with you. We haven’t had a chance to chat for a while.’

  ‘Don’t be angry, Bettina,’ her friend cajoled her as they followed the path towards the lake.