Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  A dizziness overcame him, blurring his vision. He closed his eyes, rubbed, rubbed. An image of Anna came to him, so real he could almost touch it. Anna punished. Anna stretched on a white bed, flayed, mutilated, a dead baby beside her. Like his first wife, Elisabeth. He leapt up, trying to rid himself of the vision, scattering Johannes pictures on the floor. Stumbling.

  She stood in front of him, ‘You’ve seen the pictures,’ she murmured.

  A strange hollow laugh burst out of him. ‘Yes, a patrimony for the baby.’

  She stared at him, those tawny eyes so direct, ‘Johannes doesn’t know about the baby.’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’ He didn’t want to look at her, but those eyes held him, not a trace of shame or guilt in them only a widening of the pupils in, what was it, fear, yes, like on that night, when he had despoiled her. He turned his back on her, picked up the pictures with clumsy fingers, ‘They’re good. They should bring in something. If it weren’t a little redundant, I would buy them myself.’ Again that hollow laugh coming from he didn’t know where within him. He handed them to her. ‘He’ll make a far better father for the child than I will, Anna,’ he said, his voice breaking.

  He walked away. She stopped him at the door, blocking his exit, throwing her arms around him, her head in his shoulder, crying. ‘Bruno, please.’ He held her, breathed in the perfume of her hair, felt her softness. He could die here, in these arms. His loins quivered. And then the baby kicked against him and he saw the image again, the dead woman on that slab of a bed, the child beside her. Like an image of his own mortality.

  His head throbbed painfully, ‘Goodbye my darling,’ he murmured. ‘Forgive me,’ he looked at her for a moment as if imprinting her living form on his mind and then fled into the wintry night.

  Thick wet flakes had covered the ground, were still falling in abundance. Bruno lifted his hot face to the sky and let the snow settle on it. He watched the play of those pure flurrying shapes. Yes, he would drive out to the hills. The white expanse would eradicate those seething images, those demons which warred within him. He didn’t dare close his eyes, though he wanted above all to sleep, to rest. He drove, fast, too fast, the conflicting emotions tearing at him, his pulse racing as quickly as the car. By the time he reached the hills, his arms had grown numb with the effort of concentration.

  The air here was cold and hard and pure. He breathed in deeply, his nostrils tightening with the effort, and walked. The whiteness of the snow illuminated the night. Ahead of him, at the top of the slope, the high wolf-like pines rose into the sky. He could hear the wind whistling through them. He would go there and rest. He moved slowly. With each heavy step a weight seemed to drop from his soul, so that as he climbed he began to feel light, emptied out. When he reached the first trees, pain forked through his breast. Sharp, clean. His face grew contorted and he laughed that strange, hollow laugh. Then he slumped against a tree, ‘Goodbye Anna. Forgive me,’ he murmured. The wind swallowed his words.

  They brought Anna the news of Bruno’s death two days later. A prim little man came from his office, a black armband round his coat. His moustache moved over his lips like a clown’s as he spoke. Yes, a stroke, they thought. A dog and a boy had found him. A mastiff, he added, as if the difference were impressive.

  Anna stared at him and slumped into a chair. It would take some time to sort out the business side, of course, it was all so complicated, made more complicated by the war, he continued.

  But Anna had stopped listening. She sat there in the chair in the morning room where he had last sat. Sat for she didn’t know how long, gazing into space. She sat there while Frau Gruber placed milk into her hands, forcing her to drink, leading her to bed, and then sat there again while the phone reverberated with Tante Hermine’s voice, other friends, acquaintances.

  The obituaries had appeared, lauding Bruno as a great man, extolling his virtues, his entrepreneurial skills, his gifts to charities. Visitors appeared, uninvited, and still she sat unmoving, listening and not listening, staring into space. Only one thought went round and round in her mind: she had killed him.

  She told Bettina when she arrived, summoned by Tante Hermine to help with the funeral. They were the first words she could remember speaking.

  ‘I killed him.’

  Bettina gazed at her oddly, stopped her compiling of lists. ‘Don’t be ridiculous Anna. You’re just distressed. He died of a stroke. Tante Hermine told me he hadn’t been well for some time, had had dizzy spells.

  ‘I killed him,’ she repeated again.

  ‘Silly girl,’ Bettina breathed, adding a little harshly, ‘We all have to contend with death these days. You’re not alone. And you’ll have his child.’

  ‘I’m not certain it’s his,’ Anna said flatly.

  Bettina’s eyes widened. A hush fell over the room. ‘You mean… Johannes?’ she said softly after a moment.

  Anna looked at her and nodded slowly. Then she turned away, tears filling her eyes for the first time since Bruno’s death. ‘I don’t know. That’s why he’s dead,’ she cried, ‘I killed him.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Bettina was sharp.

  ‘I never should have told him I didn’t know,’ Anna moaned rocking herself backwards and forwards, her hands folded round the baby.

  ‘You never should have slept with Johannes,’ Bettina said tersely.

  ‘You don’t understand, Bettina,’ Anna murmured. ‘I love both of them.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ her sister looked at her a little forbiddingly and then stood to her full height. ‘Might as well make the best of a bad thing, Anna. If Johannes makes it through the war, you’ll be free for him,’ she laughed queerly.

  ‘Don’t be so callous, Bettina. It will never be the same.’

  ‘Nothing is ever the same, my dear,’ Bettina tried a kinder tone, ‘Time doesn’t stand still. And now unless you want to go to bed and cry privately, I suggest you give me a hand. Frau Gruber can’t do everything and we have a lot to prepare for tomorrow.

  Anna helped, an automaton to Bettina’s instructions. But everywhere she moved in the apartment, she bumped into Bruno. The content of their last meeting, previous meetings over these winter months, played themselves over and over in her mind, following her to bed, raging through her dreams, waking with her, so that her first thought was always, ‘I killed him.’

  Bettina’s stern presence kept her upright through the funeral. But when she saw the coffin being lowered into the cold earth, she had a mad desire to throw herself in after it. Poor, poor Bruno, she thought. So alone. She could keep him company now.

  Only her sister’s hand on her shoulder restraining her, gripping hard, kept her from taking that little step over the edge.

  When she looked up from the grave at last, her eyes met those of a woman standing opposite her. Under a hat that was far too elaborate for her thin but dramatic features, her face was stricken, contorted, wet with tears. For a moment Anna felt she was gazing into the mirror of her grief. She stared. Who was this afflicted double who shrunk into the crowd and disappeared never to offer her condolences? Those weeping eyes haunted her.

  But Bettina pulled her away, saw her firmly through the innumerable handshakes, the obligatory drinks. Then when it was all over, she tucked her into bed.

  ‘I have to go back in the morning, you know that.’

  Anna nodded.

  ‘Would you like to come with me?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Perhaps stay with Tante Hermine, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll be alright? You won’t do anything foolish. Promise me.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Good,’ she smiled at her. ‘You can phone me if you need anything, and I’ll come back in time for the baby. Remember Anna, you’re only twenty-one years old, and your life is just beginning.’

  Anna did not feel her life was beginning. She sat through the days, one much like the next, filled with memories she couldn’t eradicate. They were all of B
runo. In these last months he seemed to have outweighed Johannes, and his death had obliterated him altogether.

  Frau Gruber had caught a grippe and Anna was alone with the little cat, refusing all other company. She telephoned to say she wouldn’t be returning to the orphanage. She forgot to eat, only remembering about food, when the cat’s miaowls grew persistent, penetrated through the fog in which she pondered Bruno’s last words to her. ‘Forgive me, Anna.’ What had he meant? The question would persist in her as she walked coatless out into the streets, bought what food she could, thinking only of Bruno and the kitten.

  One day, she was certain she saw Bruno sitting opposite her in what had been his favourite chair.

  ‘Bruno, tell me what you meant?’

  She rushed towards him, saw that he was about to speak, just when he vanished again.

  Anna sobbed, ‘Come back, Bruno, speak to me.’ She sobbed through the night unable to stop, and then in the morning, he was there again, his hand on her shoulder, stroking her hair, stroking. Like her mother. Her mother. Anna’s tears stopped. Tentatively she put out her fingers to cover his. And then nothing, he was gone. Like her mother had gone.

  The pattern repeated itself. She thought if she cried enough, if she were careful enough, then one day he would stay, would speak to her, forgive her.

  When Frau Gruber returned to the apartment after some two weeks of illness, she found Anna in bed shaking, her face a spectral white, murmuring Bruno’s name. She called instantly for the doctor, who could only diagnose a grippe, recommend a tonic, food, rest. Frau Gruber tended to her, tried to cheer her, ‘It will soon pass, my dear. Soon you’ll have the baby.’

  Anna didn’t seem to hear her. She cried the days away. Only when the old woman gently said to her one day that there was no more housekeeping money, that in fact she hadn’t been paid for some months, did Anna’s eyes come into focus. ‘Of course, of course.’

  She moved clumsily to find some clothes, forgot to comb her hair, forgot her coat, her hat. She walked heavily through the streets. A pale sun shone. The buds were plump on the chestnut trees. ‘You should have waited for Spring, Bruno, everything is better in Spring,’ she talked to herself.

  At the bank they looked at her strangely. A man came over to her, ‘Frau Adler?’

  She nodded.

  ‘My condolences.’

  Anna looked away, ‘Thank you,’ she murmured.

  ‘I’m sorry there’s so little money in the account. You see our instructions were only to transfer a certain sum a month, and the first account is now frozen until your late husband’s affairs are cleared. It shouldn’t take too long, I trust, though the war measures slow everything. If you would like us to advance you a sum to tide you over…’

  Anna gazed at him uncomprehendingly, ‘No, no,’ she murmured, then changed her mind, thought of Frau Gruber. ‘Yes, perhaps a little.’ It was all too complicated. She sighed, took the money the teller handed her, said goodbye, didn’t notice their eyes following her.

  She got lost in the streets, didn’t feel the cold, only the heaviness of her limbs. When she finally arrived home, she handed all the money to Frau Gruber and took to her bed. The little cat curled up next to her. ‘You know,’ she looked at him, ‘we never gave you a name. I think we’ll call you Bruno, now that he never comes back.’

  The cat purred.

  Stroking it, whispering ‘yes, Bruno,’ she felt a little calmer.

  The next day the post brought a letter and a packet. She opened the letter first, from Bettina.

  Dear Anna,

  I hope you’re not still being stupid and are eating properly and taking plenty of rest. Remember, first of all, that women on the whole do not kill men and are far more likely to be killed by them. Bruno was a strong successful man, old enough to be your father. You are not responsible for his death, however stupidly you may have behaved. Remember too, that guilt is not a useful emotion. Read some Nietzsche, avoiding what he says about women. About us he is very stupid.

  The child is now the important thing. And your health. Take care of yourself.’

  As ever,

  Bettina

  Anna read the letter twice and laughed for the first time in months. Bettina was incorrigible. She would never understand how she felt. Never understand about emotions.

  But Anna felt better.

  She was more frightened of the second letter. It bore an official army stamp, and like the first packet she had received from Johannes, had made its interminable way to her via Seehafen. Again, this time, as she shakily unravelled the knot, she prayed that nothing had happened to him, that he was well. But she had a sense of foreboding which was entangled with an image of Bruno stumbling amidst Johannes’s scattered pictures.

  Dearest Anna

  Here I am a hero again, though a minor one this time, since the wound is only deep enough to make me hobble on a stick, like some tired old Trojan for whom battle has gone on far too long. If I’m lucky they’ll send me quickly back into the fray. At least there the bombers and the cannon drown out the moans of the ward.

  Still there are compensations here. The morphine provides an ersatz bliss: painted flowers have a more vital scent than the remembered real. So too the painted corpses.

  And then there are one’s companions. There was a particularly entertaining young corporal here until a little while back. An artist, he claimed, like myself, though he was not particularly flattering about the enclosed. An excited little man with the staring eyes of a visionary, who harangued us for hours on end about the imminence of apocalypse. At times, I had the eerie sense that he might be my double, though the content of his lectures was thankfully different. He was obsessed with Jews, evoked multitudes of them - repulsive slackers, scoundrels all, the eternal mushroom of humanity - undermining the war effort, robbing the great proud German nation. He forgot to mention that this great proud nation eats its young at an unprecedented rate.

  We have all gone mad, Anna, all apart from you, who are fresh and pure and alive like the jade green waters of our lake, like the sleepy scent of the opulent earth on a summer afternoon. Only the memory of you gives me hope. If only I could take your life into me, be reborn in its fullness…

  Be well. I hope Bruno has forgiven you.

  And again, should it be necessary or possible, some pictures to sell.

  Johannes

  At a first cursory reading, the letter seemed cheerful enough, but as she read it again and again and tried to hear Johannes’s voice through it, she was filled with apprehension. There was a note of cynical grimness between the lines which she didn’t recognize in him. And the hope he had of her seemed to be addressed to a different creature, not the Anna who sat here listlessly, resting the sheaf of papers on her bulging form. When she looked at the pictures he had enclosed, her despondency grew. Gone was the frenzied line of the earlier drawings, which in its feverish movement, whatever the content of what was portrayed, had a stormy life to it. Here instead there was a clinical detachment, an anatomical exactitude which turned wounded men into ugly dead animals, their bodies so much meat exposed on slabs.

  And then that reference to Bruno. Anna shivered. It was too close to the truth of what she felt. She stared blindly into space. She had a sense that she was being physically tossed between the two men each of whom held up a mirror to her, reflecting a different and vanishing Anna. And in between these two dim forms, she could no longer find herself, as if she had already disappeared.

  In an attempt to shake off the depression she went for a walk. She sat in the Burggarten and watched the thick spring shoots poking their heads through the earth. If she watched closely enough, she suddenly thought, she might see them grow, catch the action of that force which propelled them upwards. A spring storm caught her unawares, soaking through her dress, and still Anna sat until night covered her.

  The next morning she started to cough, a hard wracking cough which shook her whole body uncontrollably. When she took the handkerchief
from her lips, it was flecked with red. She looked at those red patches uncomprehendingly. They reminded her of something. Then it came to her. They were like the patches of red paint which flecked her bosom, after Bruno had flung paint at the mural. Johannes had tried to cover them up, but whatever his efforts the traces of that blood red paint remained visible. Anna smiled and hid the handkerchief. When the little cat jumped up on her lap and poised himself there on top of the baby, she stroked him reflectively, ‘Yes, Bruno,’ she murmured.

  The baby started to come early, after a particularly fierce bout of coughing. Frau Gruber called for the doctor who instantly had Anna sent off to the Clinic in the Wienerwald. Of the birth itself, she remembered nothing except the flurry of activity around her and her shouts, as loud as the pain itself. And then there was that tiny form in her arms, its face wizened, troubled, frowning. Just like Bruno, she told herself. She gazed at it for the length of a day, heard it snuffling by her side at night. Just like Bruno, she repeated over and over in her half sleep, her body sore, stiff, too spent to twist and turn. And when the sun pierced through the shutters in the morning, she woke afraid. The tiny bundle was staring at her, judging her, accusing her. ‘I never meant to harm you, Bruno,’ she whispered into the emptiness.

  The baby wailed. Anna looked at it helplessly, her fear mounting.

  It didn’t lessen over the days she spent at the clinic, mounted when the child was put into her arms and attached to her breast. She felt as if Bruno was tugging at her, pulling at the little remaining strength she had. She looked away in fear.

  The day she went home to the apartment in Alleegasse, Bettina arrived.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let him come so early,’ she chided Anna, ‘I couldn’t get away.’ But she smiled as she kissed her, picked up the bundle. ‘And what’s your name, young man?’

  ‘He doesn’t have one yet,’ Anna looked at her beseechingly.

  ‘Well, then? What shall it be?’ Bettina cradled the child.

  Anna shrugged tired shoulders.

  Bettina looked from her sister to the child, ‘You’ve exhausted your mother’s imagination,’ she made a great pretence of scolding the baby, ‘so now we’ll have to put our minds together and see what we can come up with. What about Leo, after your venerable grandfather?’ She gazed at Anna who didn’t respond.