Bettina couldn’t believe her ears. ‘You there?’ she snorted, ‘I don’t believe it. You, suddenly transformed into a parochial patriot!’
‘Now, Bettina,’ Klaus chided her. ‘You know very well the Wandervogel are nature lovers, not blatant militaristic patriots.’
‘That’s just it,’ her eyes gleamed. ‘They haven’t a clue as to what they are. One minute their leaders are blathering on about a greater Germany, more nature to ramble in. The next they’re meek pacifists digging up folklore and singing songs to the hills. Woolly rubbish, all of it.’
‘You don’t let yourself understand, Bettina. Feel,’ Johannes murmured. ‘They, these young people, we…’ he turned to Klaus for confirmation, ‘we’re looking for something new, something authentic, an openness to a way of life which isn’t just the arid intellectualism or the endless mechanical production of the city.’
He stared at her as if she had suddenly become its spirit incarnate. ‘Lifeless repetition in the service of an empty progress which only produces more machines. We need a regeneration, to be reborn in body and soul and imagination. The formulas don’t come ready-made. We don’t know what’s on the other side. So the ideas are woolly. But the feeling is real, strong, pure.’ He brought his fist down on the table.
Bettina snorted again. ‘Yes, very real feelings,’ her voice rose in contempt. ‘Very real anti-semitism. Why I just saw one of these Wandervogel magazines and I can tell you it gave me very real feelings,’ she made a violent ripping gesture with her hands.
‘The Jews are charged with exploiting the German people, corrupting German culture, seducing German virgins.’ She gave Johannes a mocking look and hurried on. ‘Organizing white slave traffic, running everything from the press to the department stores and no doubt, the art galleries. The stupidity of it is unbelievable. And then on top of it, all this waffle about the demon drink, about vegetarianism. The only feelings these people have are those of blaming others for their own lacks. It’s no different from the state itself, just clothed in sandals and dirty hats and stupid little songs.’
‘Yes, yes, of course that side of it is all rubbish.’ Johannes waved dismissively, but his eyes blazed at her attack. ‘They don’t know how to express their dissatisfaction with what is, so some of them find these ridiculous arguments.’
‘It’s simply that they haven’t found their Nietzsche yet - a poet to translate them into language.’ Klaus was solemn.
‘Nietzsche had some pretty scathing things to say about the common herd, as I remember it,’ Bettina muttered.
Johannes fixed her with his blue gaze. ‘When they’re out there, Bettina, wandering with the sky above their heads, the earth beneath their feet, pitting their bodies against the elements, what they experience is far truer than words, than anything else. It lifts them, frees them.’ He paused, glanced at Klaus, added more softly, ‘If you had tried it, you would know.’
‘Yes,’ Klaus murmured.
A short sharp laugh emerged from Bettina. ‘Tried it? Did I hear Johannes Bahr, champion of women’s freedom, saying that? Is he suggesting I change my sex? You do know that in Bavaria, women are not allowed into these groups.’
The two men exchanged an uncomfortable look.
‘Catholic Bavaria.’ Klaus raised his arms in despair.
‘It will change. All soon change. It has to,’ Johannes added emphatically.
Bettina lifted a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Wandering in the hills won’t change it. Which is why I need my rest. Goodnight, gentlemen.’
The two men watched her leave.
‘My wife is an altogether remarkable woman,’ Klaus murmured.
‘Yes,’ Johannes echoed him.
‘And when it comes to argument, she is right about almost everything,’ he laughed.
Johannes heard the odd emphasis on ‘almost’. He didn’t respond, let Klaus refill his glass.
‘I sometimes wonder why it was that she acquiesced to my marriage proposal.’
‘I find it hard to imagine Frau Eberhardt acquiescing to anything,’ Johannes found himself saying, then corrected himself hastily. ‘What I mean is that I can only imagine her actively accepting your proposal,’ he met the older man’s eyes, saw an odd light in them. ‘If you’ll permit yet another boldness,’ he chuckled now, ‘I imagine Frau Eberhardt actively approved of the quality of your appreciation, which I have reason to know is as remarkable as her intelligence.’
Klaus bowed slightly, stoked his pipe, ‘But whereas I take great pleasure in purchasing your pictures, Johannes, - pictures I appreciate - I have always,’ he cleared his throat, ‘given my wife the freedom that is her due.’
Johannes looked at him in surprise, but there was a candour in Klaus’s expression, and he seemed to be waiting for him to respond.
‘In that too, I can only say you are as remarkable as she is,’ he offered after a moment.
Silence ensued. Within it, it occurred to Johannes that Klaus was telling him to take Bettina. Odd, he thought. It wasn’t as if he were making him a gift of her, nor granting a permission. He would have despised both, as well as the giver. It was more as if Klaus were uttering a plea. A plea from a brother.
He was a rare being, this Klaus. He had always known it, recognized it in that first moment when Klaus had sat quietly in front of his pictures. And now, it seemed to him, that the bond which had begun to take shape at that time was being wordlessly sealed between them. Yes, a bond between brothers.
It was the next evening, as the three of them sat sipping their after dinner coffee, that they saw in the distance a stream of torches cutting a swathe through the night.
‘Look.’ Johannes pointed. ‘Wandervogel.’
‘There must be some sort of reunion tonight.’
‘Let’s follow them.’ Johannes had already got up. ‘You’ll see Bettina. It’s not what you think. The experience is quite different.’ His eyes skimmed over her, rested defiantly on hers.
She turned toward Klaus, who nodded at her with a strange eagerness.
‘Alright then.’ Her manner was diffident. But as they hurried out into the cold hushed night, that little voice which had begun to claw at her ever since her first meeting with Johannes, took up its refrain. ‘What if he was right? What if Johannes was right and she was blind to something essential?’
A tangy fragrance of pine mingled with wood smoke filled the air. On the winding road they became one with the stream of youths. The shadowy play of the high held torches irradiated the curves of the road, falling here and there on dreamy young faces. Eyes aglow beneath their battered hiking hats, voices raised melodiously, they moved in trance-like unison through the crisp starlit night, until the hill appeared, braziers, a bonfire, illuminating its crest, a setting for the enactment of some ancient ritual.
As if by a sign from above, the songs died out and an expectant hush filled the air. Then a disembodied voice came through the night evoking the enchantment of the nature of which they were part, the running streams, the dense woods, the primeval mountains, this land, this earth, this mother which was theirs, so much purer, grander, more vital than the cities with their bilious smoke-stacks, their soul-destroying industries, their empty artifice. This, this glorious nature each particle of which was in sympathy with them, was their home, their origin and their resting place, was the true Germany, they had only to open their eyes, to see what it offered, to build upon its example for the future.
Without knowing how it had found it’s way there, Bettina felt Johannes’s hand wrapped round hers. The residual doubts that booming voice had left in her vanished in the pressure of that hand. She had a sudden certain sense, so strong, so new, of the utter naturalness of that hand on hers.
She walked home dreamily, in step with the two men, one on either side. They spoke little, as if words could only spoil what each in their different way had felt. Their goodnights were cursory. But as they separated in the garden of the house, Johannes whispered, ‘Perhaps not the common herd, B
ettina, but the exceptional individual, the one who laughs at danger, despises easy comforts, challenges limits. You?’
In bed, she lay awake for a long time, unable to sleep. At last, she got up again, went to the window, pushed aside the heavy curtains and peered out. The night was black now, but she had an eerie sense that at the edge of the lake she could see a lamp burning, Johannes’s lamp. Was he waiting for her?
She shivered, clasped her arms round herself, felt, in doing so, that strange ache rising in her. Was she to remain eternally ignorant of what Johannes valued so highly? With a muffled cry, Bettina tore a coat from her closet and rushed silently down the corridor. She paused at Klaus’s room, half wishing he would come out, stop her, and then hurried again, down the stairs, out, out into the cool night air.
Her nightgown whipping against her bare legs, she ran wildly until she reached the lake. Here, she stopped for a moment to catch her breath, to look round. Panic filled her. There was no light. She had imagined it. He wasn’t waiting for her. She would have to go back. A pounding sounded in her head accompanied by the bitter taste of disappointment. She was a fool.
Johannes, watching her, had a sense that he had willed her existence from the shadowy play of starlight on shrubbery. He hadn’t expected her to come. She had eluded him for so long: it was like a wound which sapped at the very source of his energy.
One day in September, when he had heard nothing from her in weeks, he had wandered in the streets near her nurseries, followed the trajectory she might take across the river, had even rung the bell of her house, in the hope that he might catch hold of her. It was as he retraced his steps, that he had suddenly remembered himself as a small child, evading his nanny’s hand, chasing after a carriage which had taken his mother away, running after her, calling, crying. Later, when his nanny had found him and dragged him home, his father had berated him, told him roundly that boys didn’t cry, sent him to his room for punishment. For weeks, no one would tell him where his mother was. He had surreptitiously searched the house for her everyday, hiding from his father when he was there. And then, when his mother had at last come back, a new regimen was in place. He was only permitted to see her for half an hour in the morning, and then again for half an hour in the afternoon. She was making him soft, his father proclaimed. Soft.
‘Bettina. I was waiting, hoping.’ He touched her cheek. Soft. So soft. So unlike the hardness of her will which resisted him. But as she turned to him now, she gave him her lips, moved against him.
‘At last,’ he murmured into her hair. ‘At last.’
Bettina felt his hands reach beneath her coat, move over her, hold her tightly, more tightly than she had ever been held. In the circle of his assurance, in the blindness of night, her body seemed to develop a life of its own, pressing against him, swaying to the motion of his hands, reaching out, touching, the firm angles of his face, the hard, tensed shoulders. The adventure of it filled her, made her breath come fast.
Suddenly he drew away a little, held her still.
‘You’re brave as an eagle tonight, Bettina,’ his words rustled into her ear. She could feel his surprise, a little like awe. She could only feel. Everything else was mere shadows. She touched his hand, arching her fingers through his, wanting his kiss, again and again, those fingers on her breast. And then his voice was trembling through her, the words of a half-remembered poem.
‘See how everything’s unfolding; so we are,
For we are nothing but such blissfullness.
What was blood and darkness in an animal,
That grew in us to Soul and howled,
Howled again as Soul. And it howled for you.’
‘Rilke,’ she murmured. ‘The song of the women to the poet.’ She felt his nod, the pause.
‘Will you speak now, Bettina. It’s important to me, to you too, I think, that you speak it.’
She knew exactly what he meant. Her throat felt dry, but when she brought the words out, they were firm. ‘I want you, Johannes.’
He clasped her to him, kissing her, kissing her so that her limbs seemed to give way. Then, he lifted her into his arms and carried her to the little copse where he had first pressed her hand to the earth. ‘The temple of our love,’ he whispered. At the foot of the gnarled oak, he took off his coat and spread it like a blanket over the fallen leaves. They crackled as he crouched, crackled as he pulled her down beside him.
When she tried to remember the scene, the next day, it was the crackling of the leaves she remembered best. The rest was only a trace of the strange indescribable sensations he had roused in her, an ineffable mixture of pleasure and pain and then pleasure, so intense that she could not recapture any of it, short of the act of repetition. And she was bent upon that. Any sense of transgression she may have had was now inextricably fused with a sense of the inevitable naturalness of her actions.
There was only one other memory. His voice murmuring. ‘Blood, your blood, in the soil. As it should be.’
The women howling, Bettina mused, howling for you.
Chapter Four
1914
Anna Adler stood on the terrace of the house in Neuwaldeggerstrasse on the outskirts of Vienna and wondered if she was happy. It was April. The trees were apple green in their budding freshness. A lingering morning mist gave a softness to the air. In the grounds, which she might later inspect, she would find the crocuses in full array, the first daffodils opening to the sun.
But now, she returned to her piano.
She had taken to playing for hours at a stretch, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, of late mostly the latter. Bruno said her playing had become magnificent. But then, he seemed to admire everything she did or attempted, even her untutored water colours. Except one thing.
She passed her hand over the gleaming wood of the grand piano. It looked so beautiful here against the long windows which gave out on the woods. Everything about the house was beautiful. They had taken such pains in choosing and arranging, Bruno acquiescing to her taste, allowing her her little experiments in simplicity, allowing the single stark sculpture which drew the eye to the other corner of the room so that from the piano she could rest her eyes on its subtle curves. But now it was all done, from top to bottom, from one end of the grounds to the other, and time rested heavily on her hands.
Anna struck a chord, let her fingers ring out the overture to Tristan and Isolde, lost herself in its waves of longing. Then with a burst of impatience she leapt up from the piano. Bruno wouldn’t be home until the weekend. Increasingly it was the only time she saw him. There were problems, she knew, in various branches of his industrial network, nationalist demands, strikes, and he was always travelling. She had asked once whether she might accompany him, but he had said no. The word so rarely passed his lips in response to her requests that it took on an unquestionable force. But she had asked again and this time he had given reasons, told her he needed to concentrate himself wholly on his work when he was there - and the presence of his lovely little Anna would hardly permit that, would it?
It was the same reason, she knew, which lay behind his insistence that once the new house outside Vienna was ready, that would be their principal residence, rather than the spacious apartment in town they had first inhabited. Though she loved the house, she had liked being in Vienna, closer to people, to concerts, to cafes. Perhaps she would stay in the apartment tonight, take in a concert after the doctor’s visit. Yes. Anna was suddenly filled with energy.
Sometimes, when she stayed here for too long alone, she had the strange sense of being imprisoned in a castle, like some fairy tale princess. Oh everything was wonderful and just as it should be and Miss Isabel was there with her and the singing tutor came regularly as did the guests on the weekend. But nonetheless, she occasionally felt trapped, like a singing bird, its wings clipped, unable to leave its gilded cage.
Silly, she thought, as she walked along the flowerbanked paths. So silly. She bent to look more closely at the little gossamer webs which sparkled thro
ugh the greenery. Bruno was so good to her. There was only one other thing he had said no to. Just after their honeymoon, on Bettina’s urging, she had asked him whether she might work at one of the nurseries her sister had recommended. About that he had been adamant. No wife of his could work, however charitably. He would donate funds, of course, but her labour, no. In any event, his tone had grown softer, there would soon be children of their own.
And there was the rub. Anna lifted her too heavy skirts and broke into a run, stopping only when she was breathless. There were no children yet. That was why Bruno had arranged for the specialist to come and see her this afternoon. She wondered whether she would be able to speak to the man. But what would she tell him? That her husband spoiled her, that he brought her too many presents, that she had wardrobes full of dresses, boxes of rings and pearls and pendants. Yet in that one little corner of her life things, she suspected, were not as they should be. Or perhaps they were. How was she to know?
She remembered their honeymoon, that first night, then the second, when she had put her arms around him, wanting to touch him, asking him to leave the light on, so she could see. It was perhaps the only time she had seen him angry. He had left her only to return later when she was already half asleep and to press himself wordlessly inside her. It had hurt a little less then, but increasingly over the weeks, when the strange rite was repeated, she had felt herself suffocating, drowning. Sometimes to avoid it, she said she felt ill. He didn’t take it amiss. Perhaps he hated it too.
So though she missed him when he was away, loving his glowing eyes on her, enjoying his conversation, she was also sometimes relieved when that nighttime act didn’t have to be undertaken. She wondered whether Bruno too had been to see a doctor. She didn’t dare ask.
It was strange how marriage had made her timid, had turned her into a liar, making her suppress what she would otherwise have spoken, forcing her to pretend. Were all adults like that? Was her sister? She thought of the people she knew and supposed that probably most of them were.
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