Bettina was silent for a moment, stilling her temper. Then she asked, ‘Who is this Johannes Bahr you’ve brought us?’
‘He’s very talented.’
‘He’s very rude.’
‘Only superficially.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘Don’t be ferocious, Bettina.’
They walked without speaking, paused to gaze at the sun’s resplendent dip behind a granite peak.
‘Has he replaced Olaf? Bettina asked softly at last.
Petra shrugged, offered no more.
Bettina stopped herself from prying. Petra would tell her when she was ready.
For a year now her friend had been trying to extricate herself from a long-standing passion for a politician, some fifteen years older than herself. A charming, serious man, he was continually on the brink of leaving his wife for Petra, but had never quite managed to. And Petra, who had for years swung between hope and despair had in these last months finally managed to distance herself from him. Bettina was proud of her. Proud of the strength of will she had shown, no less a strength, she imagined, than that which had led Petra successfully to complete a medical degree when the odds were so severely stacked against women. She smiled as she remembered Petra’s tale about her finals, when one of her examining professors had refused to acknowledge that it was a woman sitting before him and insisted on calling her ‘Herr Fluss’ throughout.
Bettina’s pride swelled to extend to all the members of her circle, the artists and writers and thinkers who frequented her home, men and women who knew that the world must be changed. She loved the sense of adventure which bound them together, the intoxication of risky ideas - so risky that her friend, Frank, had recently been arrested on a charge of lèse majesté for one of his more outspoken ballads.
If such people frequented her salon, it was not only because of her and Klaus’s generosity, of an atmosphere which permitted and fuelled the outspoken exchange of the new. It was also because they found in Bettina both a superb listener and a severe judge, a charming yet critical intelligence who could sift the wheat from the chaff.
This severe Bettina had not yet arrived at a judgement on Johannes Bahr. She would, she thought as she strolled with Petra, bide her time, still her suspicions, at least until she had seen his work.
Where Bettina’s moods swung between critical severity and generous approval, Anna’s, later that evening, fluctuated between curiosity and boredom, finally to rest in the latter. She had long stopped listening to the endless flow of words which drowned the air in the rose and blue drawing room and when she noted that even Bruno’s attention was wholly engaged elsewhere, she stole quietly out of the house.
It was a mellow evening. A fat moon hung lazily in the sky shedding its glow over the gardens. Anna took a deep breath and meandered happily along the path which led through the rhododendron grove to the lake. She had enjoyed the afternoon, had loved racing along the twisting road in Bruno’s car. She had been triumphant when she had elicited from him the promise that he would teach her to drive. Tomorrow. They would begin tomorrow. Her hands clenched an imaginary steering wheel in excitement and she ran to recreate the sense of wind streaming through her hair.
The resonant sound of a splash made her stop short. Without quite knowing why she hid, she edged behind a shrub and peered out at the lake. There was someone swimming. Clean hard strokes cutting the water. Anna watched, saw the swimmer clamber ashore.
Moonlight glistened over a wet naked body. A man’s body, tightly muscled. She closed her eyes, then quickly opened them again. Saw him bend, stretch, bend, stretch in a rapid graceful succession of movements, each of which seemed to etch itself indelibly in her mind.
Only then did she take in that the man was Johannes. And that recognition made her shiver oddly. She felt herself freezing into position, utterly unable to move. And she had the sense, though it was hardly possible, that he was returning her gaze. Why else was there that sudden smile on his face, a smile she felt she could touch if she only stretched out her hand.
He was bending towards the lake now, helping another swimmer, one she hadn’t seen, ashore. A woman, Petra, her white chemise clinging wetly to her. He drew her towards him, into his arms, shielded her with his body. They kissed.
Anna had the distinct sensation that a slow motion spectacle was being acted out for her eyes alone. A laugh broke from her, a cool unearthly laugh which released her limbs into motion. But Anna wasn’t too sure whether the run she burst into took her in his direction or towards the safety of the house.
Chapter Two
‘We shall wait right here.’ Miss Isabel waved her neatly furled umbrella and motioned both Anna and the blue-uniformed porter authoritatively towards a bench in the Munich station.
Clamour covered everything except her gesture. The place was alive with voices, bustle, the din of engines and the more distant jangle of tramcars. Anna, who had spent the last four weeks in the countryside, felt as if she had suddenly been shaken from the dreaming heat of a long August sleep.
In that sleep two refrains had mingled, two goodbye’s. Bruno’s basso profundo, murmuring ‘Only a few more months now’; and Johannes’s mellow baritone, ‘We’ll meet again, I’m sure.’ For the rest, after Bettina had suddenly decided that she needed to be back in Munich and had dragged Klaus with her, there had only been the returned Miss Isabel, whose chatter had become indistinguishable from that of the crickets and jackdaws.
But now, all at once everything was briskness and sharp punctuation, from the hurrying clack of heels to the raucous calls of the conductors. And here were Klaus and Bettina already, guiding them through the station to a waiting carriage, taking them through the busy Marienplatz, pausing to admire the gothic excesses of the Town Hall, and since two o’clock was striking, the enamelled copper figures of the Glockenspiel perform the miniature tournament which struck out the hour. All the while Bettina flung questions at her, interspersing them with comments on the city streets through which they passed - the southern quality of the buildings, their pastel yellow and ochre hues, the charms of the Residenz, of the lofty churches, of the Prinzregentenstrasse, of the English Gardens.
‘Halfway between Berlin and Rome, isn’t that what they say about Munich?’ Miss Isabel intoned, holding her Baedecker to her. ‘A marriage between the disciplined Prussian male and the feminine Italianate,’ she suddenly blushed scarlet.
‘I prefer to think of it as half way between Vienna and Paris,’ Bettina’s tone was dry.
‘In the middle, in any event,’ Klaus reassured.
‘I’ve almost learned to drive,’ Anna said in half whisper for Klaus’s ears.
‘That’s good. You could do with a few more accomplishments,’ Bettina pre-empted his response. Then, realising she was hardly being fair, she smiled at her sister to lessen the impact of her words.
She had, in the time they had spent in the country together, recognized that she was increasingly taking on the tone of a deriding and critical mother with Anna. Anna’s dreamy laziness, her ability to squander time, filled Bettina with a barely containable irritation. It was one of the reasons she had decided to cut short their stay in the country. It wasn’t fair to Anna, she repeatedly told herself. If Anna was the way she was, the blame was as much Tante Hermine’s and her own as it was Anna’s. After all, she had abandoned her sister to Tante Hermine’s care.
She had determined to try to make good her sisterly lacks over the time remaining until Anna’s marriage. But no sooner was she confronted by her sister than she grew impatient again. And at the moment, there were other things which concerned her more nearly.
‘Bruno put a car at my disposal. Every weekend. And a chauffeur to teach me,’ Anna giggled. ‘We had great fun, didn’t we, Miss Isabel.’
The two women shared a conspiratorial smile.
‘Miss Isabel was making fine progress, too, until…’
Isabel gave Anna a stern look and finished her sentence for her, ‘Until I had a little ru
n-in with a haycart. Nothing serious, mind. Do you drive, Frau Eberhardt?’
Bettina shook her head and gazed out the carriage window. They were passing a cafe where she had once spied Johannes. She scanned the tables uncomfortably and then turned back.
‘Tomorrow we go and see my dressmaker first thing. And then I hope you’ll take in the Pinakotek. You’re interested in art, of course, Miss Isabel?’
‘Of course,’ Miss Isabel patted her Baedecker as if the question itself were an offence.
‘And we can visit Herr Bahr’s studio.’ Anna intervened. ‘Perhaps you can take us, Klaus, if Bettina’s too busy.’
‘I don’t know if…’ Bettina murmured, stopped herself at Klaus’s, ‘Certainly, certainly.’
They crossed the Isar and turned into Bogenhausen with its gracious candy colour residences set in ample gardens.
‘Here we are,’ Klaus leapt from the carriage and opened the door to the pale amber house which he and Bettina had settled in some three years before.
‘How lovely it all is,’ Isabel crooned. ‘And one can see the river.’ She all but twirled round the rooms of the parterre. ‘So ample and yet so spare. How perfect. And all these books,’ she looked at the massed volumes lovingly.
‘If Bettina has children before me, perhaps you can come and live here, Miss Isabel.’
‘Anna!’ both women uttered her name simultaneously, Isabel flushing, Bettina in consternation.
‘What have I said now?’ Anna looked at them both in amazement. In the last month, she had grown fond of the thin Englishwoman with the equine features, who away from Tante Hermine’s abrasive eye, had taken on an attractive coltishness; and she knew that Isabel, with Anna’s wedding pending, was worrying about her next place of work. ‘I haven’t said anything wrong, have I, Klaus?’
Klaus patted her shoulder reassuringly, ‘Nothing at all, little one. It’s a fine idea.’ But his gaze was fixed on Bettina, who turned brusquely away.
It was Klaus who two days later accompanied them to Schwabing, the site of Johannes Bahr’s studio.
Schwabing was to Munich what the Latin Quarter was to Paris. In the first decades of the century, its narrow streets teemed with artists, writers, and revolutionaries of a hundred persuasions. It was from here that the Blaue Reiter group sprang its bright frenzied canvases on the world; from here that Simplicissimus aimed its satirical barbs at the hypocrisies of contemporary life. Behind the thick frieze curtain of the Café Stephanie, Schwabing’s unofficial headquarters, a thousand ways of attacking the bourgeois order in paint or print were ardently discussed over chess or billiards or coffee or sekt. Sometimes, paint or print spilled over into life and utopian visions became actual experiments.
Anna, Miss Isabel, and Klaus made their way through the leafy English Gardens, across the Leopoldstrasse and into a maze of little streets. In one of these, Klaus led them through a portico, and up, up an uneven staircase.
On the second landing, a clash of angry voices confronted them, closely followed by the dark-suited figure of a man, pulling a plump woman behind him. She had not had time to don her hat and its feather tickled Anna’s hand as the couple brushed passed them. From the top of a stairwell an amused voice called down, ‘Do come back when you’re in better humour.’
‘A different kind of tournament,’ Anna heard Klaus murmur.
When they reached the attic level, they saw Johannes leaning over the bannister, a large smile on his face. But his eyes were angry.
‘You have just witnessed the retreat of a dissatisfied client.’ He ushered them into an ample, well-lit, untidy space. ‘I apologize for Signor Fanfani. He wasn’t pleased with my rendering of his beloved.’
‘I’m not surprised, if this is it.’ Klaus was looking at the painting on the easel which showed a woman with a garishly bright mouth, her torso bare, but for the shade provided by the single sunflower she held in her hand.
The lines of the painting were strong, simple, almost as a child might do, Anna thought. The colours fierce. ‘I like it,’ she murmured.
‘There you are. A woman of taste.’ Triumph rang in Johannes’s voice. ‘The lady of the laugh approves.’
Anna met his eyes. He remembered. She hadn’t been sure that last time they had met in the country he had known it had been her. Suddenly instead of the crowded studio, all she could see in front of her was his naked figure bending, stretching, on a moonlit night. She averted her gaze, but she said softly, ‘I should like to be painted like that.’
‘Anna, really!’ Miss Isabel reprimanded in English.
‘Perhaps it would be better to wait until you are Frau Adler,’ Klaus suggested. He folded his long body into a rickety wooden chair, lit his pipe.
‘I’m sure Bruno would love a portrait of me.’
‘I’m not,’ Miss Isabel muttered.
Johannes picked a mottled rag from the floor and all at once flung it forcibly onto a paint laden table, so that the assortment of tins on it clattered. ‘I’m tired of commissions. No more for a while. Not until I’m desperate again.’
The outburst seemed to have rid him of his anger, for he now began to turn canvases which had faced the walls round for them, so that the room took on a wild brilliance.
There was silence as they gazed at the images. Mythological figures paraded in rain-dark forests; couples entwined; a strange Pietà in which Mary had all the trappings of a circus performer; portraits, one unmistakably of Johannes himself, his neck elongated, the chin protruding aggressively; other portraits mostly of women with lush hair and eyes that stared directly out at the viewer, sometimes wary, sometimes regal, animal-like - all executed with those brazen colours, those simple lines.
Anna felt she had stepped into a dangerous, unrecognizable world. She made her way slowly twice round the room, noted an assortment of coloured bottles, bric a brac gathered in corners, gourds, dried flowers, a coat rack of motley velvets and chiffons. Then she peered into a dimly-lit second room. Here amidst the clutter, she spotted an unmade bed, a sink piled high with chipped crockery, and pinned to the walls a variety of sketches, half executed. In a few of them, she recognized Petra; in one she was almost certain, Bettina.
‘So you’re painting my sister,’ her voice fell oddly into the silence.
Klaus leapt out of his chair.
Johannes cleared his throat.
‘Show me,’ Klaus lumbered towards the small room.
‘No, no,’ he barred Klaus’s way. ‘Not yet. It’s just a sketch at the moment. An idea. I was thinking of using her for a study of a modern Athena.’ He gestured Anna away from the door. ‘What’s in there is still private,’ he said sternly.
‘Sorry,’ Anna winced.
Their eyes met.
This young Fraulein von Leinsdorf, Johannes thought, had all the trappings of a trouble-maker. No, that wasn’t quite right. It was something else. Something about the way she looked him directly in the eyes, fearlessly, without coyness. Something in that fresh, but uncanny, laugh of hers, which bounced off social proprieties. He watched her cross the room: light steps, an unconscious swing to her body, a natural grace. And that rich hair, refusing order beneath the not all-together balanced hat. Yes, that was it. She was an innocent. It was such a rarity in the circles in which he moved that it had only just come to him. A pagan innocent.
‘Is Bettina sitting for you?’ Klaus interrupted his musings.
‘No, no,’ Johannes demurred. ‘Nothing like that. Though I’d like her to.’
Klaus’s frown evaporated into a sudden chortle. ‘She might not like the result.’
‘No, I imagine not.’
After they had left, Johannes looked after them for only a brief moment. Then, with an almost savage gesture, he lifted an unfinished canvas onto his easel and began to dab at it furiously. The activity wiped all thoughts from his mind and all sense of time. The world had become simply a particularly brilliant hue of red. And that red eluded him.
When Bettina arrived at Johan
nes’s studio towards the end of the afternoon, she noted that slightly out-of-focus cast to his face which she had begun to recognize. It signalled that he still inhabited the world of his canvas.
‘Shall I come back later? Tomorrow?’
‘No, no, stay. I’ll just be a few minutes.’ He glanced at her gratefully as she perched herself on a chair at a respectful distance from him, removed her sensible hat and picked up a stray newspaper.
From the corner of her eye, however, she looked at Johannes, saw the tensed muscles of his shoulders, the leap of that white hand on the canvas, the total concentration, which he might soon turn on her. It was that, above all, which transfixed her, that ability he had of losing himself while in the presence of another. It gave her the sense that she was in the proximity of genius. She held herself very still, only momentarily chastising herself for having abandoned the nursery so early. It was unlike her. But then everything she had done this last month, she readily acknowledged, was unlike her.
A few days after her return from the country, she had written Johannes a note to invite him to one of her Friday evenings. It was the quiet season; few of her friends were in town and it would be interesting to thrust Johannes with his odd fluctuations between uncouthness, impassivity and urgency amongst them. Then, too, Bettina told herself, Petra would be there and she would appreciate it.
Rather than posting the note, she decided to drop it round herself. She was curious to see how Johannes lived; curious, too, about his work. And time was short.
Happily, he was in and urged her to stay for a moment, turned canvases round for her to look at.
Though she was loathe to admit it, Bettina had little sensitivity for the visual. She could see the strength of Johannes’s pictures, but she was rather shocked by what she registered as their crudity. Her face must have betrayed it, for he quickly turned the paintings back to the wall. But then with something like a grunt, he positioned a particularly graphic rendition of intertwined bodies on his easel and proceeded to lecture her on the use of space, on colour, on classical allusion. Lecture her as if she were a stubborn and ignorant child.
Dreams of Innocence Page 6
