‘This isn’t the time for lectures, Bettina.’
‘No perhaps not. But I worry about him, about you. If he isn’t working, he’s always so desperate, chasing something that isn’t there. And when he finds that it isn’t, he’s devastated. It’s as if he hasn’t realised that the world outside his canvases is about half-measures, little steps forward; as if he hasn’t realised that paradise is always elsewhere.’
‘Not for all of us,’ Anna murmured. ‘Some of us have tasted it right here.’
‘And that undoubtedly is the difference between us.’ Bettina was wry.
‘One of them, certainly.’ Anna smiled.
Chapter Ten
Little tendrils of morning mist curled slowly from the lake leaving its shimmering indigo surface exposed.
In another hour, if the sun were hot enough, it would gradually burn the mist from the hills and the mountains all around them. Then in the crystalline clarity, drooping palms with dancing fronds, lush, spreading magnolia and plump juicy cactuses, tall cedars and ragged firs, would all rub shoulders and reveal themselves in their full splendour. She had never known such richness of colour and texture, as if this little remote corner of the Ticino had been singled out by some unseen presence as an experimental garden where the tropical and the alpine could mingle and flourish. No wonder people referred to it as paradise.
Anna sighed happily. It was in this light that she had first seen the village. It was over two months ago now in August. August 1919. She had thought of it then as the dividing line between the true end of war and the beginning of a new era of peace.
They had spent the night in a pension in Locarno and then early in the morning boarded the little boat which would take them further down Lago di Maggiore. Ascona had gradually emerged from the mist: a cluster of red tiled roofs, atop creamy coloured houses with green shutters, behind them the graceful old campanile of San Pietro-Paolo.
As they had moved closer to the small wharf, she had spied a house perched on a stony precipice at an angle from the village. Its two wings met in an expansive curved and columned bay, glazed on the first floor, but on the top giving onto an open air loggia. Looking at those columns, Anna had the sense that someone was looking back out at her. She glanced away but her gaze was drawn back to the house again. Her skin began to tingle strangely. It was as if the person looking back at her from the terrace were herself.
She had gripped Johannes’s arm fiercely and pointed to the house. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could live there?’
And now they were here. Had been here for some six weeks. And it was she who was looking down on the lake watching the little fishing boats hoisting their nets into the lake, watching the hills emerge from the mist.
Anna took another breath of the cool morning air and then rushed down the two long flights of stairs which brought her to the white tiled kitchen. She would bring Johannes coffee in bed this morning, since it was she who was up first. Perhaps it would lift the ill-humour he had been in these last days.
She hated it when that blackness descended upon him. Over these last months she had grown so attune to him, every nerve and vessel in her so exposed to him, that when he looked at her from those remote wintry eyes, it was as if there was nowhere she could run to shield herself, and she felt herself dying, turning to stone.
It had been like that when he had returned to Seehafen after his confinement at the Clinic. She still shivered when she remembered that initial meeting.
She had been playing with Leo in the lake, trying to teach him to float and had then clambered up the little grassy knoll with him. They were tumbling about in the long grass, Leo hooting with laughter as she threw him up in the air and caught him in her arms. It was then that she had heard Johannes’s voice. She rushed up to embrace him, throwing her arms round his neck. But he had only stood there stiffly in their circle, his face impassive, and kissed her perfunctorily on the cheek. Leo had started to whimper and she had picked him up gaily, pretending that there was nothing amiss in the way Johannes had greeted her.
‘Hasn’t he grown?’ she had said proudly.
‘Yes, quite the little man,’ Johannes’s voice was cold, his eyes averted.
And so it had continued for the next days, Johannes grim, refusing to look at her, refusing to sleep with her, refusing to talk about going away, telling her nothing about his incarceration, retiring to the boathouse, offering as his only excuses, ‘I have to get used to the world again,’ or ‘not with Bettina here’.
She had been hurt, distraught, afraid, doubly troubled, because any time Johannes was in their vicinity, Leo would cower and begin to cry. Johannes made no effort to make friends with the little boy, though he played well enough, if a little absent-mindedly, with Max, and on several occasions she caught him in deep conversation with Bettina. She felt frightened, excluded, and yes, jealous, all her certainties about Johannes crumbling, all her new warmth for Bettina evaporating.
At the end of that week, Klaus had come home. The panic was over: the government had at last forbidden the execution of prisoners without trial, and the wholesale arrests had ceased. It had taken the brutal and mistaken massacre of twenty-one youths from a Catholic Working Boy’s Club to bring the government to reason.
Klaus was quiet, tearful. He jumped nervously when anyone entered the room. But he seemed to take sustenance from Max and Leo, and kept the boys busy from daybreak till sunset. Not knowing what to do with herself, Anna tagged along with them. On several occasions the two of them came across Johannes and Bettina engrossed in conversation. It was when she caught the look in Klaus’s eyes, which she felt echoed her own, that Anna decided something had to be done.
Late that night she stole down to the boathouse and curled next to Johannes on the narrow bed. He was asleep, his breathing even, his naked body warm beneath the single sheet. She started to stroke him, a little surprised at the instant sensation the touch of him elicited in her, as if her body had been coiled in waiting for him without her knowledge.
She was surprised, too, at the immediacy of his response, the hardening of him against her, the gasp of his breath, as if it had only been a disciplined effort of the will which had kept him from her. As she kissed him, heard him murmur her name, she felt suddenly powerful. And then he was pulling her down on him, loving her as he had never loved her, as he had always loved her, making her senses sing his name, listening to him with her skin, seeing him with her fingers.
When they lay together afterwards, bathed in each others moisture, he had whispered, ‘I’m not worthy of you, Anna. Not worthy of your generosity.’
‘Don’t be silly, Johannes, it’s the prison speaking,’ she had replied after a moment, but his words had pained her. It was after that that she realized he had planned to leave without her, hadn’t wanted to involve her in the necessity of flight.
‘But I thought you loved me Johannes, thought you wanted me with you.’
‘I do, my darling,’ he had clasped her to him. ‘But I don’t know where I’m going. Where I’ll end up.’
‘I want to be with you, Johannes. It doesn’t matter about that. Tell me why you’re so changed.’
He didn’t answer and after a moment she said,’I had this idea that we might go to Ascona. I heard some people talking about it.’
‘Ascona… Muhsam’s place, where Fanny went,’ he looked at her strangely. ‘A haven for Schwabing’s criminal dreamers; the anarchist’s Eden. That’s not like you, Anna. Or is it?’ he mused. ‘Sun and nature worship, is that it? Would you really like to go there, Anna? Even without me?’
‘I don’t think I want to do anything without you, Johannes. Anything at all.’ The tears had started to stream down her cheeks and he had kissed them away, loving her until the sun rose and she had forgotten there had ever been any question of them parting.
The bond between them had sparkled so brightly over the next days, that it almost obliterated the need for speech. Though she did wa
nt to know why exactly it was that Johannes felt he needed to flee. She sensed that Bettina already knew, but felt it a humiliation to need to ask her. Johannes would explain in due course she decided. And then just to have him near her, loving her, seemed such a precious gift that she didn’t want to risk the possibility of his coldness again.
There was only one cloud on her horizon. Leo did not want to be in Johannes’s presence. Every time Johannes was near her, the little boy would start to whine or cry or simply turn wooden, all expression leaving his face. It pained her, reminded her acutely of her debt to Bruno. He would want his son to be happy; but there seemed to be nothing she could do to cajole the boy in Johannes’s presence. And Johannes, in turn was stiff when the little boy was there, abstracted.
It occurred to her that it would be better to leave the child here until they were settled in Ascona, until Johannes’s spirits had lifted sufficiently. She talked it over with Bettina.
‘It’s true that children hate disruption,’ her sister had reflected, ‘but don’t leave it for too long, Anna, for your sake as well as his.’
The parting had been difficult, but then once they had been on their way, the sheer joy of being with Johannes, of seeing him so free and unencumbered and loving, had made her forget everything else. The days and weeks had fled by in a flurry of exploration. There was so much to see in Ascona, so many people: the colony of naturists on Monte Verita, who lived spare, simple lives; the dancers, artists and poets, the Russian emigres all seeking to build better, richer lives, model communities, in this tiny idyllic corner of Europe which felt as remote as the wilds of South America.
The house Anna had designated from the first as ‘theirs’ belonged to an Italian Count whose circumstances had been straitened by the war. Once contacted, he was only too happy to rent it out to them, in the first instance for a year.
And so they had moved in, had swept up cobwebs and whitewashed vast expanses of wall, ceilings, arches, had laughed at their grimy bespattered faces, and rolled on the large bed with its crinkly straw mattress when the passion took them. They had bought odds and ends of furniture from local peasants and craftsmen to make up lacks, had the old well renovated, begun to dig in the overgrown garden until the sweat poured from them.
The top floor with its central loggia had been designated as studio space. Johannes had insisted that they divide it equally, the right hand room which gave onto hills and lake for him, the left with its view of the village and harbour for her. In his studio, he had installed the habitual narrow bed, the rough table with its array of odds and ends, an assortment of pine cones, dried leaves, a goat’s skull, tins, jars. Apart from the view, the room took on the semblance of all the other studios she had seen him in.
Her own stood empty except for a table and an easel. There was still so much to do, before she felt she could settle and then she wasn’t sure that that was what she wanted to settle to. She was concentrating on assembling a nursery for Leo, gathering wooden toys, intending to ask Johannes whether he would paint some animals on the walls for him.
A little over ten days ago now, he had started to work. He had barred her from his studio, but for the first few days, he was unchanged, cheerful, more passionate than ever, loving her rapturously under the stars. Then the coldness had begun to set in. He locked himself into his studio, wouldn’t emerge if at all until she was asleep. Two days ago, when she had asked him how his work was going, he had lashed out at her, ‘Don’t ever ask me that. Ever.’ She hadn’t seen him for the rest of the day or the night.
Then yesterday, he had been contrite, asked her if she wanted to walk up the mountain with him. Near the top, in a little shady grove, they had come upon the dancers, their thin toga-like garments flowing, their bodies writhing expressively in the afternoon breeze. They looked like wood nymphs moving to the sound of Pan’s horn, figures from some antique frieze. Anna had found herself beginning to sway to their motion, had felt Johannes’s eyes on her, seen them kindle. ‘My child of nature,’ he had called her last night, caressing her, but there had been no fire in his touch. And she was afraid that now, this morning, he would be remote again, coldly aloof, with that wintry light in his eyes which seemed to freeze her very life.
Anna arranged the earthenware cups, the coffee jug, thick slices of buttered bread on the platter, took a flower from the vase on the window-sill and placed it in their midst. Then she pattered up the stone stairs to their bedroom.
He was still asleep, sprawled amidst the bed sheets, his chest bare, one long leg arched. She could see the discolourations where his wounds had been. Too many wounds, she suddenly thought, and yet he looked so lean, so strong, his body so taut even in repose, that she sometimes forgot what he must have been through in these last years. She traced the arch of his bronzed cheeks, saw the thick lashes flutter open to reveal those eyes, almost too blue in the morning light. He looked at her dreamily. Her womb stirred, as it did so often at the sight of him, making her captive to his touch, wanting him inside her with a physical intensity which was like no other need she had ever known or could imagine.
‘Little Anna,’ he murmured, drawing her lips to his, kissing her lightly. ‘As fresh as daybreak.’ His fingers found their way through the loosely tied silk of her robe to her back, smoothing it, caressing, moving towards her buttocks, pressing her to him. She could feel him growing hard against her. She buried her lips in his neck, moaned softly, wanting him, craving.
‘Not yet, Anna,’ he lifted her away from him gently, untied the knot of her robe. ‘Will you dance for me, like those women yesterday. I’ve been dreaming about it.’
She felt recalcitrant, confused, but he was already humming, a mournful little tune which she dimly recognized. She turned her back to him, looked out the tall window which gave out onto the lake. The mist was still curling, but streaks of sunshine now played over the waters. She gazed out for a moment, taking solace from the beauty outside, finding inspiration in it. Then she crumpled down to the floor, buried her head in her lap, arched her arms loosely over it.
She listened for the call of his tune, then slowly she rose, curling, curving like the tendrils of mist, swaying her arms, her body, turning slowly towards him, stretching, sinuous, her arms high, her robe parting to reveal breasts, belly. His voice rose, the rhythm faster, she could feel his eyes burning into her. Shyly, she gathered the folds of the long robe round her, crossing her arms with its ends, so that her legs were bare, her feet skimming the polished floor. The wind is coming now, she thought to herself, blowing me away. She flew to the corner of the room, her arms stretched in front of her, reaching, reaching, for the sky, the sun which would burn her away.
And then he was behind her, his arms round her, his hands folded round her breasts, fondling, caressing, restraining her. And still she stretched away from him, reaching, her body taut, grasping for the sky, almost forgetting him, wrapped in her dance. She felt herself being lifted high, higher and then he was in front of her, holding her, carrying her, his penis rubbing between her legs, so that when he deposited her on the edge of the bed, she was already arched against him, so tight, so close, closer, his penis deep inside her, throbbing, hot, hungry, like his lips, drinking her in, scorching her, so that she disappeared. No more Anna. No more mist, just wave upon wave of sensation and the layered blue sky of his eyes.
Afterwards, they sat and drank cold coffee, their fingers entwined, both wondering at their passion, so unexpected after the aridity of the last days. Dimly she remembered that there was something she had wanted to talk to him about. What was it? Yes, Leo, the nursery. But it wasn’t the time. This moment couldn’t be ruptured. Later. She would do so later.
In fact it was three days later. She hadn’t seen Johannes for a day and a night. He had been locked in his studio. She didn’t know if he waited until she was out to come down and eat. But when she called him announcing lunch or dinner, all she heard was a cold muffled voice, uttering a polite ‘no thank-you’.
The
weather had changed that morning. The wind lashed fiercely against the window pains, thunder rumbled from somewhere in the mountains, and then the sky released an unstoppable torrent of water. Anna sat at the table in her studio and leafed unseeingly through a book she had picked out at the small library in the village. But mostly she watched the rain, the fat pellets falling heavily on the lake until it heaved and shuddered uncontrollably, the commotion of the trees which started at their uttermost tips and then moved down gradually until it startled the vegetation beneath.
She saw a solitary man in a dark bulky suit running along the harbour. A sodden newspaper covered his head. For a moment she thought he was coming towards her. With his heavy, solid steps, his stiff, yet agile gait, he reminded her of someone. ‘Bruno,’ she murmured out loud. She shivered.
With sudden decision, Anna rose from her chair and went to knock on Johannes’s door.
‘Come and watch the storm with me,’ she called to him.
He opened the door to her, then closed it rapidly behind him, as if he were hiding something within. He looked weary, unshaven, his eyes dazed beneath the tousled hair.
‘I can see the storm from my window,’ he murmured.
‘Please, Johannes.’
He shrugged.
They walked through the loggia, the gusts of rain splattering them and then raced downstairs to the large glazed terrace which fronted the room they had made their salon. They watched the storm silently for a few moments and then Anna asked, ‘Shall I bring some lunch up here?’
‘I’ll help,’ he nodded.
They filled a platter with goat’s cheese, tomatoes, slices of salami and bread. Johannes uncorked a bottle of wine and brought it all up on a tray. They sat opposite each other at the table in the bay and gazed out, Anna glancing at him surreptitiously.
‘Don’t look at me like that Anna,’ he ran a hand through his tangled hair. ‘I’m not guilty of anything. You know I have to work.’
Dreams of Innocence Page 30
