Johannes slept dreamlessly.
He stayed on with the Müllers for over two weeks, acting as a surrogate son, paying a kind of penance. He wore Hans’s trousers and shirt, learned to milk the cows, scythe and bundle the hay, dig potatoes. They talked little, but he helped the old man repair the barn, brought water from the well, busied himself with a hundred small jobs. Between tasks, he took off his shirt and lay in the fields, listening to the sounds of the dry earth, breathing in the sleepy scent of the tall grass.
Flesh crept round his ribs. He grew brown, stronger, felt his scars heal, his feet tread the ground more firmly. The smell of warm creamy milk, hay and wild herbs suffused him, muting the stink of corpses. But at night they rose again in his dreams. Mutilated figures clawed at his body, demanding that he join them, Hans’s voice loud in their number.
He wondered whether it would ever be possible again to dream the dream of a natural life, a symbiosis of earth and sky and love and community, an unhaunted eternity of sowing and harvesting, of animals and people and work and rest, all in one.
On Sunday he went to the lofty white church in the hamlet with the Müllers and watched the solid, slow-moving peasants kneel, bend their heads beneath a baroque ceiling so encrusted with ornament that it seemed the image itself of the distance between them and heaven. Nonetheless, he listened silently to the soothing tones of the mass. Perhaps a kind of comfort could be found here. He spoke to Father Josef, a gaunt giant of a man whose face was a mass of ridges which seemed as ancient as the hills.
But at night the dead returned.
When Frau Müller began to talk as if he would still be there with them in the autumn, Johannes realised it was time to go. On a Tuesday morning, hot in his heavy uniform, his sack laden with the bread and fruit and sausages Frau Müller had insisted he have, he took his leave. He promised he would write, return to see them. When the war was over.
But as he clambered up the hill and waved, he wondered whether the war could ever end. Even if the guns on the Eastern and Western fronts were to grow silent, how would it be possible to still the dead who inhabited all of them?
Chapter Six
1916
‘Like this, Frau Adler,’ Old Trübl, the Seehafen caretaker, crouched between the rows of feathery green leaves, gently loosened the loamy earth with his fork and tugged. ‘You see, perfect.’ He held up the long plump carrot and turned it slowly in his hand. ‘Now you try.’
Anna imitated his actions exactly and pulled.
‘Fine,’ he grumbled, looking not altogether pleased. ‘When you’ve filled the barrow, call me. I’ll be in the orchard.’
Anna worked, as she had worked throughout that summer of 1916. Yesterday it had been the marrows and beetroot, the day before beans, next week the potatoes and turnips, not to mention the apples and cherries and the plump greenhouse tomatoes. She smiled as she pulled up a stubby carrot and flicked the earth from it. The Seehafen grounds had certainly undergone a radical transformation over this last year. Lush lawns were now neat rows of vegetables, flower beds thick with berries. Chickens wandered behind the kitchen doors, pecking incessantly. There were even two goats, tethered to their separate trees at the very back of the estate, far from the stables where the horses she so loved were lodged.
Klaus had instigated it all, seen the food shortages winter had brought and feared the worst for the following year, should the war go on as it seemed to be doing interminably. And now the Seehafen gardens helped to feed the ever-growing numbers of children in Bettina’s nurseries.
Anna stretched and looked with satisfaction at the half-filled barrow. How pleased Klaus would have been to take part in this first harvest. But his turn had come and he was now away on the Eastern Front working at a field hospital. And so it was left to Anna and the Trübls.
Her sister, Anna decided, had a genius for organisation. It had been Bettina’s idea that Anna come here; it was she who had squared it with Bruno; she who had pulled strings and arranged for twice-weekly deliveries from Seehafen to Munich. Anna sometimes thought that if it had been up to Bettina to organize the war effort, the whole miserable business would already have been over.
And she did it all despite little Max or perhaps fuelled by him, Anna wasn’t sure which. When she had come to visit Bettina and Klaus for Christmas, just after the birth, she had been amazed to see the ease with which Bettina handled the wrinkled little bundle of a baby. When she had taken him cautiously into her own arms, unsure how to hold him, Bettina had laughed, ‘Don’t worry, he won’t break. He’s a sturdy little chap, with impressive lungs. You know, I remember you like this. A tiny mewling thing. I minded the squawling rather more then.’
Perhaps that accounted for Bettina’s ease, Anna thought now, wiping her brow, lodging the straw hat more firmly on her head. She already had some experience of babies. Not like her. Max’s helplessness had frightened her, those wise old eyes poised in that helpless body. She had been relieved to return him to his mother’s arms.
Klaus too had looked on Bettina admiringly, though they had argued about how soon she could take up her duties again. For, of course, no sooner was Bettina up and about than she was off to work, sometimes taking Max and the nanny with her.
Anna lifted the wheelbarrow and manoeuvred it carefully back towards the shed. There was no point disturbing old Trübl. She was quite capable of managing and there was still so much to do before the light gave way.
She had been sorry to go back to Vienna after that visit. The city had lost its lustre. Perhaps it was the omnipresence of those tired looking men in uniforms or the depression that had set in when it was clear that the war wouldn’t be over by that first Christmas. Perhaps it was also that she still missed Katarina. There had been cards from her of course, from Prague, then Lyons, Paris, and finally just this spring one from London, written in French, a grim little note bemoaning how much they were hated there. The war infiltrated all relations, distorting them.
Just days after war was proclaimed, Miss Isabel was off. They had both cried. But Miss Isabel was adamant that they would meet again before the year was out. Meanwhile, she had to serve her country. Women would be needed now that the men were at the front. Her eyes had sparkled. Perhaps she could work in a hospital, or even as an ambulance driver. They had both laughed at that: Miss Isabel’s driving was still somewhat erratic. But her determination had fed Anna and she had worked on Bruno, finally convincing him as the fateful month neared its end, that she would be far better off being gainfully employed than pining away in the vast house outside Vienna and far from everything. On top of it all, there were rumours that petrol would soon be rationed, and then how would even he manage the comings and goings.
So Bruno had acceded, promised that he would make enquiries, find something both suitable and useful. In a celebratory mood, Anna had had a special dinner prepared and they had clinked champagne glasses laughingly in a toast to her new life.
And then it had all changed.
Anna didn’t like to think about it anymore.
She busied herself with unloading the carrots into the crates in the shed, noticed a broken one and tucked it under her shirt. The goats would appreciate that.
With a sudden flurry of movement, she raced towards their corner of the grounds. She could really run now, unhampered. Ever since she had taken to wearing the battered trousers she had found in the house. Anna laughed, suddenly feeling her old self again, yet a new self. A photograph in the newspapers had given her the idea: a picture of women munitions workers, so sensibly dressed with their shirts and trousers and boots. Why not her? So she had cut the trousers down and taken them in and could now run and ride and bend and lie in the grass with a wonderful liberty. Even if old Trübl didn’t approve, as his disdainful looks indicated.
The goats gobbled down her offering in a trice, then looked at her with their stark lidless eyes, asking for more. ‘Later,’ she told them. ‘Later.’
Bruno wouldn’t approve of her attir
e either, Anna thought as she returned to her digging. There were moments in these last years when she had been filled with admiration for him. He showed such skill and authority skill in managing people. Yet the war had also made him sullen, depressed. There were problems he would not discuss with her, terrible difficulties. So many of his factories were in territories where nationalist feeling ran high. She knew, too, though he didn’t tell her, that he was worrying over financial losses.
Worrying about her as well, Anna sighed. Ever since the letters had started. First there had been the bombs placed by Polish insurrectionists in the Lemberg plant, and after that the menacing letters had started, among them a series address to her at home. Horrible letters threatening violent action.
They had closed down the big house. She wasn’t safe there, Bruno thought. It was too isolated. Anything could happen. They had moved into the Vienna apartment, found a small flat nearby for their housekeepers, the Grubers.
The Christmas trip to Munich had come as a godsend. On her return, filled with Bettina’s patriotic injunctions, she had convinced Bruno that she too must engage in the voluntary effort. So she had worked, part-time in an orphanage, part time in a women’s charity. Then had come the day when the men had viciously accosted her in the street, harangued and threatened her as Bruno Adler’s wife. Bruno had been beside himself. He had hired a bodyguard to look after her, had watched over her every step when he was in Vienna. And it had gone on like that for over a year - a year which had brought them closer, despite or because of its pressures.
It was the following January, when she told Bettina about Bruno’s necessary and increasing absences, that Bettina had come up with her wonderful plan. She must go to Seehafen in the spring. No one would trace her there and she would be far more useful than in Vienna. Bruno could come and stay whenever he wished.
And so she was here. Anna finished loading another barrowful of carrots. It was almost, she sometimes felt, like the days before her wedding. She was free to do more or less as she pleased. And now that she had done with the garden, what she felt like, more than anything else, was a little session in the boathouse.
When she had first arrived she had discovered the boathouse was full of colours, inks, sheaves of paper. Johannes’s, she knew. Bettina had told her of the time he had spent at Seehafen, the half-finished extension. Johannes, she thought, wouldn’t mind if she made use of his things. And use them liberally, she had.
She had started to dabble in Vienna. Katarina had always encouraged her and the drawing and painting had become for her a form of silent communication with her absent friend. In the boathouse, she gradually felt she was working under the aegis of Johannes as well. When it was raining, she spent hours on end here. Otherwise, she stole away when possible, sketching outdoors in the vicinity of the lake first and then coming in to undertake the more difficult task of colour.
She was never satisfied with anything she produced, but she loved the process, the adventure of it. She had no idea where the images she made sprang from. They were nothing like her, she thought, these heavy, weighted, iconic, forms - grave primitive creatures with soulful eyes who bore the burden of the world, who had not yet learned to dance. But she made them nonetheless, thinking of each as a special friend.
Inspired by the local craft of painting directly onto glass, she had begun of late to try her hand at that too. She was mesmerized by the way the sun refracted through the painted glass. That was what she would do today.
Anna worked, mixed a deep red, applied slow deliberate lines, humming silently to herself all the while. When she had grown hot with the effort, she rose and looked out the door, listened. Not a sound. With a secret smile, she picked up the large towel she kept here and walked towards a little grassy knoll she had discovered which was sheltered from the grounds by scented shrubs of flowering hawthorn. In a few quick gestures she shed her clothes and lowered herself into the cool water. Then she swam out briskly towards the centre of the lake till panting, she turned over to float lazily and gaze at the sky, the jagged expanse of the distant mountains. The cool lap of the water on her bare skin lulled her. It never failing to bring back Katarina. And as she lay there in a state akin to sleep, she remembered her friend, unsure whether what buoyed her up was the lake itself or memory.
When the cold of the mountain water began to chill her, Anna made her way back to shore. She dried herself slowly, relishing the light breeze on her skin, shaking out her hair so that it tumbled wildly about her. Then she started to dress.
‘No, no. Not yet.’
The sound of a voice so startled her that like a forest creature scenting danger, she froze into position.
‘Not yet. Let me look at you.’
There was a rustle of branches and then a man appeared. For an instant she didn’t recognize him - the uniform, the weathered leanness of his features.
Then she murmured, ‘Johannes’. With a swift gesture, she bent for her shirt.
He stopped her hand. ‘No, Anna, please. Let me see you,’ there was a plea in his voice. ‘You’re beautiful. You’ve grown so beautiful.’ He ran a finger gently down her skin. ‘Unbelievably beautiful,’ he whispered almost to himself, his breath catching.
Anna didn’t know whether it was the unblinking fascination of his eyes or the sensation which his touch evoked in her, but for a split second, she was mesmerized, unable to stir. Then with a shiver, she moved into action, forgetting her underclothes, tugging her trousers on, her shirt, edging away from him. He caught her before she had made her way through the break in the shrubs.
‘Let me,’ he crushed her in his arms, found her lips. She struggled against him only for a moment and then met his kiss, felt it leaping through her, felt the heat of his body. In that instant she suddenly remembered how once, so long ago, she had watched him from the shelter of the bushes, had seen that moonlit form. She leapt away from his embrace, gazed up at him with frightened eyes. Then she bounded through the shrubbery, fleeing, her trousers flapping round her, her shoes left behind.
Johannes, looking after her, took a deep breath. How could he have been so blind to her before. Why, coming out of the lake then she had been like some apparition which had sprung from the hidden recesses of his mind, an incarnation of the very form of beauty. A woman of the future, all gold and sun and laughter and newness, free of the gloomy curse of chastity. Those smooth curves, wet, glistening, those pink-tipped breasts, the snaking hair, and that look in her eyes of pure unquenchable longing. Watching her he had felt something like awe, and then that stirring, almost painful, of his body coming back to life, rising from the dead.
Johannes stretched out on the grass. Wet. Wet with her. He fingered the droplets that had touched her body. Again that sensation at his groin, like an ache, a tugging at his unwilling flesh. How long it was since he had loved a woman. When, on his few brief leaves from the front, his mates had vented their lust on haggard, exhausted prostitutes, Johannes had looked on, his flesh cold, only his eye alive and his fingers sketching, sketching. Examining those sketches again, he had seen that his depictions of the carnal coupling had transformed them into dances of death. These were cadavers intertwined on sheets become graves. His own lust had been vented in the perils of battle. It was only there that he had felt that arousal, that pounding of the blood, the surge of blinding ecstasy. And then death had killed him, leaving only a scarecrow with the taste of ashes in his mouth.
And now? He looked up through the dappled leaves and turned to rake his fingers through the grass, to bury his face in it. Now that young woman had walked out of the waters like some pagan Venus to rouse him. He wasn’t certain he wanted to be roused.
He had found his way to Seehafen blindly, unthinkingly. Had simply walked for days on end, sleeping in barns, only to find himself on the twisting road that led to the house. Seeing it, he had thought no one would mind if he camped out in the boathouse for a few nights. The place had seemed deserted until he had heard splashing in the lake.
<
br /> Johannes leapt up. Should he stay now? Go? He walked back to the boathouse. He had met with Bettina here. Where was she now? And Klaus? They seemed so remote, he could hardly remember them. The boathouse bore no traces of them. But his narrow bed was still there and the little stove. The table was strewn with his paints and paper. Johannes looked again. This wasn’t his work, though. He leafed through the stacked images quickly, saw the squares of painted glass. Anna. It could only be her.
He picked up one of his brushes. Suddenly he knew exactly what to do.
Anna stared through the expanse of windows at the back of the new extension. The sun was setting, a flaming ball between the cold craggy peaks. She had told Frau Trübl that she would take her supper here tonight, as she sometimes did, rather than with them. She needed to be alone.
She leaned against the naked tree trunk which formed one of the supporting columns of the room and breathed deeply. He had made this strange space, she reminded herself. It had become her favourite room, not quite finished and bare as it was, except for an assortment of Klaus’s leafy plants and the small wrought iron table in the corner.
‘Frau Adler, Frau Adler.’
The sudden voice made Anna leap.
‘Look who’s here, Frau Adler. Isn’t it splendid. Herr Bahr is on leave from the front.’
The pleasure in Frau Trübl’s voice made Johannes smile. It was wonderful the impact a uniform had on some.
‘Anna,’ he stepped forward, kissed her hand. The look he turned on her had a touch of mischief in it. ‘What a pleasure it is to find you here.’
‘You’ll eat here with Frau Adler, won’t you Herr Bahr? It won’t be long. And then you can come back into the kitchen and give us news.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Johannes smiled. He sat down opposite Anna. She had changed, he thought. Those lowered lids, that movement of shyness.
Dreams of Innocence Page 18
