Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Then it had all suddenly changed. After Berlin. He had sold every single painting in that show, apart from the ones he had given Klaus in repayment for his generosity. Yet the notices, the slander had disheartened him. Why couldn’t they understand. Why were they so blind? As blind as his father who had appeared the day before the opening.

  Johannes rubbed his eyes, not wanting the memory of it.

  He hadn’t seen him at first. They were busy hanging canvases, talking. Then that cavernous voice had boomed out, so that everyone could hear, ‘So this is how you spend your time. Painting disgusting filth, splattering it on the walls.’

  He had ushered the gallery assistants away, faced his father’s jowly face, hidden by the ever-trim beard, the hard yet watery eyes beneath the shaggy brows.

  ‘I didn’t invite you here. Please go,’ Johannes had begun with steely politeness.

  ‘Didn’t invite me? As if I needed or wanted an invitation. I just came to check what uses my name was now being put to. And it’s as I expected. Utter filth, underwritten by the authority of my name.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll change it,’ Johannes had felt hatred beginning to choke him. ‘I’ll take mother’s name,’ he had spat out. Their eyes had locked. He could see the twitch moving in his father’s cheek, the guilty lowering of the lids which always accompanied any evocation of his mother.

  ‘No, no, that won’t be necessary,’ his father had crumpled and Johannes had felt his spirits soar.

  ‘Go now. Please.’

  Then there had been that note of pleading, that lying whine. ‘You could do better, Johannes. You were so brilliant once. A worthy son. You could have made a fine lawyer, an estimable citizen in this great nation of ours.’

  Johannes had walked away, sickened by the repetition of that old saw. But the voice had followed him.

  ‘I hear you’ve taken up with one of the von Leinsdorf daughters. If she weren’t married, she would make a good match. Even now perhaps. I would welcome some grandchildren.’

  Johannes stopped in his tracks. He felt sick. Bettina’s name on those dry, lying lips. How could his father know about her? They had almost never been in public together. He must be spying on him as he had once done in the past, sending out his minions, shadowing his movements, so that he had begun to feel as if he were incarcerated in some boundless prison. Either that or Bettina had spoken.

  He left the gallery without looking back. If he had, he felt he might at last have pummelled the man, as he had so often wanted to do before - ever since as a small child he had first become aware of that voice, chiding, ordering, delimiting every step of his and his mother’s existence, so that everything from the colour of his suits to the books he read was under his rapacious control. If only that fat, blubbery body had breathed its last. If only it were stretched out on a slab of marble, then he, Johannes, could breathe at last.

  That evening, despite himself, he had described the first part of the encounter with his father to one of his oldest Berlin friends. Gert had laughed. ‘Jealous. The old man is jealous. He knows he’s being displaced, in the eyes of the world as well as his own. So he wants to eradicate you, take away your name. As simple as ABC. Forget about him.’

  But Johannes found it hard to forget. Particularly in relation to Bettina.

  When he had returned to Seehafen and seen her again, he had been haunted by a sense that she had somehow betrayed him, that she now belonged to his father’s camp. As they talked and argued, he began increasingly and irrationally to feel that she shared the general estimation of his work, that she was only just holding back from criticizing him. His lovemaking became frenzied, as if he were looking in her body for a confirmation that couldn’t be found.

  The harder he searched, the more it eluded him, just as his painting had begun to elude him, had begun to seem an activity undertaken in vain. He spent hours walking around in a daze, feeling watched, trapped. And when she came to him, he would lash out at her. She was resisting him, she had so much to give and wouldn’t part with it. He would make love to her savagely, wanting to possess the secret she was hiding, unable to attain the transport which had once so easily been theirs, thinking that what she held back was the very secret of life.

  He began to do what he had rarely done in the past: to seek out women in the streets, to find easy comfort with one of the artists or performers in the Stephanie circle. But what he really sought was not a woman, but oblivion.

  And now Bettina had given him up. He was expendable.

  With the glimmer of irony that comes from the bottom of a bottle, he saw his whole life as a series of futile lies, only the last of which was that it was possible sincerely to hail Woman as a supreme sexual and revolutionary force and to emerge from that personally unscathed.

  Why, Bettina was no better than his mother! Johannes stared dizzily into his empty glass, trying to trap the thought that had swum hazily to the surface of his mind. Yes, in essence just like his mother. His mother, too, had betrayed him, turned him over to his father, remained utterly passive when the man brayed at him, fulminated. Struck him. He could still hear the hiss of that strap, feel it welting his skin, his teeth on his lips holding in the cry, holding it in until he could taste blood.

  After that first remembered punishment, he would never shed tears in front of his father. Had never done so, not even after the severest beating - that time when he was eight - and his father had tied his hands behind his back, sat him at his little desk, and kept him there for a day and a night, watching him, preventing sleep, until he had exhorted a promise from him that he would never draw a naked body again. Ha! It was then that he had learned that there was no reason to tell the truth if it was to one’s advantage to tell a lie. But never to oneself. No.

  And throughout all that his mother had never intervened, only looked on with compassionate eyes. Suddenly, he hated her for her compliance, her passive wretchedness. That was one lie he had told himself, it now came to him. The lie that his mother couldn’t have saved him from his father’s clutches. Like Bettina. A betrayer.

  With a violence he didn’t know he possessed, he grasped his glass and crushed it between his fingers. Blood trickled down from his thumb where a sliver had embedded itself.

  Barely five weeks later, Johannes Bahr was one amidst a horde of young men who volunteered to fight for their various nations. It was not patriotism that drew him. Johannes - and he was not alone in this - wanted nothing more than to see with his own eyes that destruction which would once and for all signal the death of the old world, which would inevitably turn it upside down. Whatever emerged from the fires of that destruction, it could only be an order better than the one that had come before.

  As he donned the rough, ill-fitting uniform which confirmed on him a welcome anonymity a thrill ran through him. To confront death, to risk death heroically was a greater adventure than any he had ever undertaken. And despite the tedium of those weeks of basic training in Munich, the drills, the standing at attention and the standing at ease, the endless goose-stepping, the blaring voices of the NCOs, he felt himself being cleansed, the seeds of a transformation taking root.

  It was in this spirit that just before leaving Munich, he went to bid goodbye to Bettina and Klaus. He had not seen her since the day her fateful letter had arrived. He had not even bothered to respond to it. But now, with the whiff of gunpowder already in his nostrils, he let the large brass knocker clatter on the door of the house in Bogenhausen for what might be the last time.

  Bettina experienced his unexpected arrival as something of a shock. She had willed herself in the intervening weeks not to think of him - there was so much else to think about.

  The world had suddenly been thrust into turmoil, from one day to the next, with no intervening logic, like one of those abrupt jumps in the moving picture she had been taken to see. Her body too, seemed to be subject to those same radical shifts. So that it was quite easy to pretend to herself that in the midst of all this she hadn’t even notice
d Johannes’s silence.

  But now confronted by his physical presence, she had a sudden desire to fling herself into his arms. He looked so spare, strong, utterly self-contained and in his eyes, there was that faraway gaze which she always associated with his genius. She wanted that gaze focussed on her, wanted his body pressed against hers, his hands sensitive to the life growing within her. She shivered, forced herself to keep still, let the men talk, only half listening to their words. Male words, about postings and units and guns. Klaus looked sad. He had been declared not fit enough, too old. She had been relieved, but she worried about his despondency. She would tell him about the baby now, soon, when Johannes was gone. Perhaps it would cheer him.

  Suddenly she found herself speaking, her voice odd in her own ears, ‘So the old pacifism is gone now. It’s off into the world of machines and flags held high, Johannes. The shift in you has been rather swift, hasn’t it?’ There was a savagery in her tone she hadn’t altogether intended.

  He focussed on her for the first time, his gaze dark, bitter.

  ‘New strategies for new times, Frau Eberhardt. One cannot stay in the same place too long.’

  He bowed, as if they had never shared a bed together, lain in each others arms. So be it, Bettina thought. She held herself tall.

  And then he added, ‘I was helped towards the light by someone near to me.’

  But his eyes were already elsewhere and she wasn’t certain he meant her, had intended it as a final attack. She refused the guilt.

  ‘Lights are always a little dim these days,’ she murmured, letting him take her hand, noting that he barely touched it with his lips.

  And then he was saying goodbye to Klaus and was gone, leaving her with a sense of loose ends, with a dejection echoed in Klaus’s entire demeanour.

  Without pausing to think, she confronted Klaus. ‘I’m expecting a baby, Klaus,’ she said in as even a tone as she could manage.

  The emotions fluttered in rapid succession across his face. He looked at her, hesitated, began to pace the extent of the room, back and forth, back and forth, like a caged creature.

  Bettina grew increasingly uncomfortable. She hadn’t prepared for this moment, had refused to think about it. She wasn’t ready for the pain, the fear, the confusion she read in Klaus’s face. Why hadn’t she thought about it more? At last, to fill the unbearable silence, she said softly, ‘It will be your child, Klaus, if you want it. And mine. But if you don’t, I’ll go. I’ll manage on my own.’

  Klaus stopped in his tracks. He looked at her in utter astonishment. ‘But Johannes? I thought you would want to be with Johannes,’ he murmured.

  ‘No, that is finished,’ she turned away from him, watched the sluggish movement of the river through the long windows. ‘Quite finished.’

  ‘I see,’ he breathed. A slow smile began to spread over his features. She couldn’t see it, see that it stopped at his eyes. ‘And Johannes?’

  ‘I shall never tell him,’ Bettina spun round to face him. Her fists were clenched. ‘His going makes it easier.’

  ‘Bettina, the poor man. If it’s his child…’

  ‘It’s my child,’ she was adamant. ‘If you don’t want it to bear your name, share in its upbringing, then I’ll go.’

  He put a staying hand firmly on her shoulder, as if her departure were imminent. ‘No Bettina, it’s not that.’

  ‘I thought you wanted a child.’

  There was a plea in her eyes, in her voice, such as he had never experienced before.

  ‘I do. Very much,’ his tone was warm. ‘It’s only that Johannes…’ he shrugged.

  ‘Johannes has no interest in paternity, except to loathe it,’ she said acidly, only realising as she said it that she could not, however hard she tried, imagine Johannes as a father. ‘It will be ours, if you want that,’ she said fiercely. ‘Yours and mine. And I shall never tell. You can trust me.’

  ‘I always trust your word, Bettina. That always.’

  She smiled. With a completely uncharacteristic gesture, she took his hand and placed it just below her waist. She held it there, feeling suddenly safe, but as bewildered as he was by the implications of what had just passed between them.

  Neither Klaus nor Bettina were amidst the throng who gathered at the station the following day to wave and cheer and shout as the latest group of volunteers, Johannes in their midst, made their way to war. Squeezed amongst his fellows, festive garlands brightening their uniforms, he too waved from the train window, blew kisses at women and children, raised his voice in song.

  The display of patriotic fervour induced a state of exhilaration: they were all suddenly heroes, larger than life, pitiless soldiers standing apart from the common fray. And as the train lurched into motion, Johannes, for perhaps the first time in his life, felt at one with his select group of fellow men.

  It was a feeling which stayed with him through the journey, through the stops and starts of the train, through the weeks spent at the rain-drenched training camp in Pfalz. It persisted despite the corrosive smell of the old chemical factory in which they were quartered, despite the increasingly sodden straw and slimy blankets in which they slept, despite the growing, almost sadistic, severity of the drills to which they were subjected.

  Fitter than most because of his long-time interest in the well-tuned body, unafraid of officers or circumstance, always willing to speak out if he saw injustice being done, Johannes soon drew round him a small band of younger men, boys really, who hung on his every word and gesture. He found strength in their admiration and over the weeks felt a growing sense of responsibility towards them.

  Hans, in particular, he was fond of, a stocky blond youth of eighteen, son of Bavarian peasants. There was a sensitivity around his mouth which belied his stolidity, a stubborn resistance in the depths of his blue eyes when the NCOs called for greater and greater exertions. Like Johannes, he always performed as if he had just risen from a soft feathered bed and had eaten a luxuriant breakfast, instead of the stale bread and lumps of fat which formed the basis of their diet.

  When, in the few brief moments of respite they were given, Johannes pulled out the paper and pens and colours he had carefully packed in his sack, and began to sketch, Hans would look on with something akin to awe. A bond, at first largely wordless, grew between the two men. Johannes began to count on Hans’s steadfast presence by his side, to think of him as the younger brother he had never had.

  What fuelled Johannes through the repetitive tedium of those weeks in Pfalz was the certain sense that soon they would see action, would be in the line of fire. But by the middle of November, gloom had begun to cut swathes into his expectation. Men who had arrived after him, had left for the front, while he had to wait and wait: he could bear the waiting no longer. During the Commanding Officer’s next visit to the camp, before he had a chance to make his rounds, Johannes broke regulations, marched up to him, saluted and announced, ‘It must be my turn. Now. Today.’

  The officer looked at him queerly, turned to the sergeant major with a question.

  ‘Private Johannes Bahr, Herr Kommandant.’

  ‘Ah yes.’

  Clever little eyes seemed to examine him intimately, take the gauge of him. The man coughed. ‘A message has made its way to me from your father, Herr Dr. Professor Karl Gustav Bahr.’ He coughed again. ‘It seems you are not an altogether stable element.’

  Johannes barely managed to contain his clenched fists. His eyes bored into the officer’s. With an effort of the will, he kept his voice even, ‘As stable as the next man, I can assure you, Herr Kommandant. Try me.’

  The man turned to the Sergeant Major. They exchanged words Johannes couldn’t hear. Then he looked at him again, a sly smile forming in his swarthy cheeks. ‘The Sergeant Major tells me that the only untoward thing he has been able to distinguish is the fact that you draw.’

  ‘Yes Sir, it is my work.’

  ‘Your only work here is to be a soldier. To fight for the Fatherland,’ the CO bark
ed.

  ‘It has hardly affected my soldiering,’ Johannes murmured. ‘As for fighting, I have yet to see any. Which is why I am standing here.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Sir.’ He paused, met the man’s eyes.

  More murmuring between the two men. Johannes waited. To be followed, pursued, even here. He wanted to shout. To jab his bayonet into a body, watch it squirm. His father’s fat persecuting body.

  ‘Alright Private Bahr, you leave tomorrow morning. Together with four more men from your troupe,’ the CO’s tone was clipped. Sly eyes probed him again. ‘You will bring your drawings to Headquarters straightaway. For my particular attention. Dismissed Private Bahr.’

  ‘Yes Sir, thank-you Sir,’ Johannes saluted.

  ‘Thank me at the war’s end, Private.’

  Johannes had a distinct sense that the man was laughing soundlessly.

  It was only after the train had rumbled through a darkened Metz that Johannes knew for certain that he had arrived at the front. They could see nothing but the shadowy outlines of blasted trees. Yet the din was overwhelming, a thunderous, persistent clamour, which pummelled and anaesthetized the mind, annihilating thought.

  The train stopped in the middle of nowhere. Their packs heavy on their backs, their boots caked with mud, they were marched through the wet night, until they reached what had been a French village. The streets were pitted with shell holes. Around them, stood the skeletons of houses, their walls blackened, their windows shattered.

  They were led into a church, their stumping boots echoing oddly on its stone floor. Here they slept, huddled near the altar. A Madonna, pitted with shrapnel, her nose and arms missing like some antique goddess, watched over them with a smile of unearthly calm. When dawn glimmered through the splintered colours of the windows, Johannes quickly sketched her, Hans and the others at her feet. For the briefest of moments, he thought of Bettina. Then the day took over.