Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘But Herr Justizrat, please,’ tears leapt into Anna’s eyes. The interview seemed to be at an end. ‘Johannes needs you. You are the only one who is certain to be able to help him.’ She took a deep breath. ‘My father used to say that justice needs to be tempered by mercy, that Emperor Franz-Josef was so loved because he believed in mercy. I come to you as I would come to my own father.’

  He was silent for a moment, contemplated her from his height. She thought she heard the word, ‘Catholics’ issue from his thin lips. Then he scowled, sat down heavily. ‘So what kind of trouble is Johannes in now?’

  She opened her mouth, but he didn’t let her answer, rushed on, his cheek twitching. ‘You would have thought the war would have taught him. Apparently he performed credibly during those years. Oh yes, I have my sources. I know. Medals, the lot. I almost contacted him in November, to congratulate him, but then he got himself mixed up with those scurrilous reds. Unpatriotic idiot. Ingrate. As if authority could rest in the mob!’ A thick tongue passed over dry lips.

  ‘And now I presume he’s in prison, where he belongs.’ The lips formed themselves into a malevolent smile. ‘And you want me to move the earth to get him out. That’s it, isn’t it? I knew it all in advance,’ he sat back smugly in the broad chair and blinked at her from hard eyes.

  ‘Yes Herr Justizrat. And I hope you will. My father would have.’ Anna said quietly.

  ‘Your father would have,’ he echoed her. ‘But then he had a worthwhile daughter. Two worthwhile daughters.’

  ‘If Johannes survives,’ Anna shivered over the words, ‘I would be a daughter to you.’ She looked at the gnarled old man’s hand on the desk and folded hers round it. The hand was cold, lifeless, like a crinkled sheet of paper.

  ‘So he has said he would marry you?’ one shaggy eyebrow rose in scepticism.

  Anna swallowed, ‘We are married, Sir. Were married in January. Quietly. Otherwise how would I dare to come and see you?’ She raised modest eyes to him.

  For a moment he seemed not to believe her. He surveyed her closely, then slowly he brought his hand to rest on hers. ‘A von Leinsdorf for a daughter,’ he mused, almost to himself. Then his eyes grew crafty, ‘And you think if I bail Johannes out this one more time, you can bring him to order? Induce him to lead a respectable life?’

  Anna drew her hand back, squared her shoulders. ‘Johannes is an artist, Herr Justizrat, a fine artist. Even Prussians allow a little special dispensation for the conduct of artists. Frederick the Great…’

  He cut her off, ‘And you will provide me with grandchildren?’ His eyes travelled over her, settling on her hips.

  Anna swept back her instant rage. ‘I will try,’ she said softly. ‘And as I said, I will be a daughter to you,’ she murmured.

  ‘Yes, yes one can only try.’ He smiled perfunctorily, stood to his full height. ‘Good, I, too, will try. Though it will not be easy.’

  The way he said it left her in no doubt of his own certainty of his success.

  As she rose to shake his hand, he stopped her for a moment. She could almost feel his mind racing, plotting.

  ‘You will say nothing of this meeting to my son, of course. He needs to understand that I have done this for him out of sheer paternal duty. After all, in these times of disorder, with power dissipated at the centre, it has been difficult for young men to know how to behave. But now order is being restored. We must get back to the business of making Germany strong again, breathe new life into our nation.’ A cavernous laugh boomed out of him, as he glanced at her hips again.

  ‘Goodbye Fraulein von Leinsdorf, or should I say, Frau Bahr. When we meet again, I shall call you, Anna.’

  ‘Goodbye Herr Justizrat. Thank-you.’

  Leaving the house, Anna shook off the distaste which covered her like a foul odour. The man was despicable, as she now remembered Johannes had intimated all those years ago when they had first met. He hadn’t spoken of him since to her.

  But Karl Gustav Bahr’s character mattered not a jot. Nor did anything that she had said. All that mattered was that he put in motion the forces which would return Johannes to her. And for that she would always be grateful to him.

  By the time Anna had reached her hotel, she had convinced herself that soon Johannes would be with her again. Her spirits soared, matching the speed of the train which brought her back to Munich. Now, in the short term, all she hoped for was that Brucker had arranged for her to see Johannes. She raced from the station to the studio. But when she arrived the only message was one from the housekeeper in Bogenhausen. She was to come straight away.

  Anna felt a shiver of panic. Had something happened to little Leo? She hadn’t thought of him for days. No. She clenched her fist into a tight ball. Not that. Bettina would have contacted her herself. Anna quickly rang the Bogenhausen number and getting no answer, asked the operator to connect her to Seehafen. Frau Trübl answered, told her Bettina was out in the gardens with the children. Yes, yes, everything was fine. Would she like Bettina to ring her back.’

  ‘No thank you, Frau Trübl, just give them all my very best and kiss the children for me.’ Anna rang off and breathed a sigh of relief, before quickly dropping her case off at the studio and hurrying over to Bogenhausen. Perhaps the housekeeper had left her a message there. Perhaps there was something from Johannes who for some reason hadn’t wanted to send anything through to the studio.

  Assuming no one was in, she let herself into the house with her own key.

  ‘Frau Anna, thank goodness you’re here,’ the housekeeper confronted her. She was unpinning her hat, and Anna realised she must just have come in. ‘This came for you yesterday,’ she scurried towards the hall table and picked up a large sealed envelope. ‘A messenger delivered it and said I was to place it directly into your hands.’ She did so now.

  ‘Thank-you,’ Anna mumbled. She examined the bulky package suspiciously, gazed at the official seal without recognizing it. Slowly she walked towards Bettina’s secretaire and sliced the seal carefully with her ivory paperknife. Inside there was a heavy sheaf of papers.

  Anna glanced at the covering letter and sank down into the nearest chair. Bruno’s estate. Bruno. Her heart raced with she didn’t know what emotions.

  ‘Are you all right, Frau Anna. You’ve turned all white,’ the housekeeper gazed at her solicitously.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Anna murmured. ‘Do you think you could get me a glass of water.’

  She drank it down thirstily and then forced herself to focus on the legal jargon.

  Bruno’s complicated estate had at last been cleared. It seemed that far from having left behind him nothing but debts, which the sale of assets would cover, as the lawyers had originally intimated to her, he had before the war converted a substantial portion of his fortune into American dollars, treasury bonds, stocks. She was, it seemed, a relatively rich woman. The attached pages showed a breakdown of holdings once various taxes had been cleared. All Anna had to do was to instruct the executors on how she would like the capital handled, etc. etc.

  Anna covered her face with her hands. She was trembling.

  She felt as if a great weight was bearing down on her shoulders, constricting her chest - an unshakeable burden of gratitude she could never repay.

  ‘It’s too much, Bruno. This and Johannes, too. I can’t.’ She felt her lips moving against her hands, the tears moistening them. Then, a fear spliced through her. It became more actual as she formulated it soundlessly into words. Johannes wouldn’t come back. That was what Bruno was telling her.

  Anna gripped the arms of her chair savagely. No. That was madness. She was fantasizing. It wasn’t Bruno’s voice she was hearing, it was simply the voice of her own fear. Bruno was generous, not vengeful. How astute it had been of him all those years back to convert a part of his wealth into dollars. He had always been a man of forethought and he had acted for the future, for his heirs.

  With a frenzied urgency, Anna shuffled through the papers again. Yes, there it was. The
date on which Bruno had converted part of his estate into American currency. Just a month after their marriage. A thought for his children. The tears leapt into her eyes again. Leo. She must go to Leo.

  Anna glanced at her watch. It was too late to phone Brucker. At best she couldn’t see Johannes until next week. And perhaps by then his father… Anna didn’t dare elaborate the thought. If she hurried now, she might catch a train to Seehafen. Yes. She must see Leo. Perhaps they could all travel to Vienna together.

  Johannes opened his eyes and lifted his head slowly. The nightmare sounds and smells, the mangled bodies of the battlefield, were finally receding. The pain wasn’t too ghastly now. Just a few surface wounds. Those ridiculous gangsters didn’t even know how to shoot straight. And he was far better off in the infirmary here, than in his cell. The little nun who tended to him was of an ethereal kindness, despite her admonishments that he must pray and her doubling of her prayers for him when he insisted that he had no one to pray to.

  Johannes smiled with only a trace of bitterness. He felt like the proverbial cat with nine lives. How many had he used up now. Seven? Eight? How did one count lives? He might be able to count better if they had some morphine here to dull the pain and give him the necessary distance. But like so much else, that too was lacking.

  He looked round the little room. No one to occupy the other two beds. Perhaps those gangster soldiers didn’t always miss. Or have the bad luck to have the warders come running just as they were indulging in their morning sport - for that was what had saved him as far as he could make out. There had been a message that he be taken to the examination room again. Not the cemetery.

  The little nun, Sister Thomasina, told him he had been here for nine days now. But it seemed an eternity. The world had grown opaque, remote, its circumference Sister Thomasina’s soft comings and goings. Everything else was dream in which figures with no substance flitted. Even Anna had been reduced to a shadow, a golden blaze of hair, a scent of warmed peaches.

  Here was Sister Thomasina now, her small face a perfect girlish oval beneath that great white headdress.

  ‘A letter has come for you, Herr Bahr,’ she smiled shyly. ‘I was told to deliver it to you. Shall I read it to you or can you manage on your own.’

  ‘Read it to me, then I can have the pleasure of your voice. Unless its contents embarrass you.’

  ‘Nothing can embarrass me, Herr Bahr,’ she flushed.

  ‘Go on then.’

  She tore the letter open with slim fingers and then read in a clear schoolgirl voice.

  Johannes,

  I have arranged for you to be transferred to Schleierman’s clinic where you will be under the care of the great man himself. The charges against you are being dropped. I have explained to the relevant powers that you have long suffered from bouts of mental disturbance and that your actions are therefore not always of your own responsibility. Given your impeccable war record, not to mention my own standing, the public prosecutor has agreed that a period of confinement will in this instance stand in the stead of the inevitable sentence. Your transfer should occur not much after this letter has reached you. I trust that as soon as your period of confinement - which will be as brief as your actions warrant - is over, you will come to see me. I am an old ailing man now and a visit from my son would not be amiss.

  As ever,

  Karl Gustav Bahr

  Johannes all but tore the letter from Sister Thomasina’s hands and read it through again. Only her presence prevented him from cursing.

  ‘I am overjoyed to be the bearer of such good news,’ she smiled at him with her sweet smile. ‘My prayers have been answered.’ She crossed herself and cast down her eyes. ‘We must thank the good Lord.’

  ‘I would like to be alone for a moment, Sister,’ Johannes said as soon as she looked up at him again.

  ‘Of course. I understand.’

  He watched her graceful receding form and then lay back on the bed, his mind racing.

  Good news, Sister Thomasina had said. Why was it then that he felt that any sentence would be better than this. To be branded a madman by his own father. To be engineered out of any responsibility for his own actions. To be made to feel after all these years like a delinquent five-year-old.

  Johannes pounded his pillow, felt a blast of pain and relapsed into it. Only his father’s death would put an end to this interminable dance. Or his own. Nine lives, he thought. There couldn’t be many left one. He would certainly not spend the last in any period of confinement designated by his father. There had already been far too much of that in his life.

  Anna clasped Leo’s small form to her and wept silent tears. She should never have left him for so long. He seemed not to recognize her, was distant, aloof, the thick-lashed tawny eyes above the smooth golden cheeks utterly self-absorbed, unresponsive. What would Bruno have said? Anna ruffled the smooth tow-haired mop and planted a kiss on it, but the child struggled against her. She let him go. He ran like a wild creature released from a trap, sped across the garden to Max’s side.

  ‘He’ll come round,’ Bettina had stolen softly to her side. ‘Just give him time. They hate being left. And make you pay when you come back,’ she started a laugh, but stopped it awkwardly when she saw Anna’s stricken face. ‘Really, Anna, just give it time.’

  Anna nodded, gazed at the boys playing in the distance. When Leo looked up, she waved at him. He turned away abruptly and threw his ball into the copse, speeding after it.

  ‘Will they be safe? Shall I go after them?’

  This time Bettina allowed herself the fullness of her laugh. ‘Really Anna, first you pay no attention to the child at all, and suddenly you’re worse than a hen with its eggs. What’s come over you? It can’t just be the fact of Johannes’s absence.’

  Anna looked askance at her sister. ‘You have a way of reducing everything to such simplicity, Bettina, that I’m instantly lost. I don’t know what’s come over me. But I do have something to tell you,’ she turned towards her and took both her hands in her own. ‘It was too late to talk about it last night.’

  Bettina examined her sister curiously, ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve heard from Bruno’s solicitors. Suddenly there’s a great deal of money.’ Anna paused. What she was going to say had only come to her last night, but then, and even more so now, it seemed to her the perfect solution.

  ‘I want you to have it. Most of it. You and Klaus. What isn’t put aside for Leo. I’ll just take what I need for Johannes and I to move away from here. If that’s possible,’ her face turned grim.

  Bettina was silent for a moment. Then she burst out, ‘But that’s ridiculous, Anna. I know Klaus and I are a little short at the moment. But then so is everyone,’ she paused. ‘Anna, you’re just feeling guilty. That’s it, isn’t it. About you and Johannes. It’s no state to make decisions in.’

  ‘I’m not feeling guilty,’ Anna was adamant. She shook her head fiercely. ‘It’s not as clear as that. It’s just that all this has brought Bruno back. I can feel him following me. It’s as if, as if…’ Suddenly she shuddered and looked up towards the tree which had been blasted by lightning, ‘One can’t have everything. He’s been too good.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it when Johannes is back,’ Bettina squeezed her hand. ‘You’ve overwrought. It’s all these worries. Tell me about Klaus, now.’

  Over the next days the sisters talked, slowly, cautiously, growing closer. A dreaminess that she always associated with Seehafen began to suffuse Anna, eradicating the anxieties which had pursued her during the last month. She learned that the charges against Johannes were being miraculously dropped, learned for the first time about the ‘accident’, that he was mending quickly and would soon be transferred to Schleierman’s Clinic.

  As she basked lazily in the early summer sunshine, little Leo gradually began to tumble over her, take part in the games she invented for him, or in the hide and seek he adored - pretending not to see her or be seen when she was in full view and then
launching himself at her with a giant hug. ‘Mummy’s not there’ he would call out as she approached him and then scream with delight, ‘There, there.’

  Despite Bettina’s evident disapproval, she took him riding with her, moving slowly over the well known trails with him in her arms. To her even greater disapproval, she also sometimes took him to bed with her at night, ‘to make up for lost time,’ she proclaimed laughingly.

  On the tenth day of her stay, the telephone rang. She happened to be near it and picked it up only to hear Johannes’s voice. ‘At last,’ she murmured. ‘When can I come and see you.’

  ‘I would rather you didn’t come here, Anna,’ his voice was strange.

  ‘Please,’ she begged him.

  ‘It won’t be long now. As soon as I’m able, I’ll come to you.’

  ‘Has it been too awful?’

  He laughed oddly, ‘Let’s say it hasn’t been as wonderful as the period which preceded it.’

  ‘My poor Johannes.’

  ‘You’ll stay in Seehafen?’

  ‘Unless you want me to come to you.’

  ‘No wait for me there. And then be prepared to go somewhere. Anywhere but Germany. I love you, Anna.’

  Before she could echo his words with her own, the line went dead.

  Replaying the conversation, Anna was suddenly filled with a sense of urgency. She sought out Bettina. ‘We must go to Vienna tomorrow,’ she told her with an unusual certainty in her voice. ‘Everything needs to be in order. I think Johannes wants to leave Germany.’

  ‘Given that he’s been complaining about this place for years, I can hardly say I’m surprised,’ Bettina said drily.

  ‘Don’t joke, Bettina.’

  ‘No, of course, you must all go. If it’s necessary.’ She surveyed Anna critically. ‘You will make him work, Anna, won’t you. What’s special about Johannes, important about him, is his work.’