Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

‘You never had to work like this, secretly, interminably, before.’ The words came out far more accusingly than she had intended them.

  ‘You haven’t known me very long, Anna,’ he said coldly.

  The tears leapt into her eyes.

  ‘I’m having difficulties. I can’t share them,’ he softened his tone. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I found a studio elsewhere.’

  ‘No, don’t do that,’ a yawning gap opened within her.

  He shrugged. ‘Then try to be a little more patient.’

  She took it silently. Words were always such clumsy tools for her.

  After a moment, she said, ‘Johannes, I want to go and fetch Leo now. Bring him here. Bettina tells me he’s a little sad. It would be far nicer for him with us. Will you come with me?’

  He stared at her uncomprehendingly. ‘I don’t know why you want to inflict fatherhood on me when he’s not even my child,’ he muttered. ‘He isn’t, is he?’ he eyed her with sudden suspicion.

  Anna’s mouth fell open. She looked at him aghast, then over his shoulder, beyond him, onto the street, as if she had seen a ghost. ‘Don’t say things like that, Johannes.’

  He made a gesture of hopelessness, scraped his chair back from the table. ‘Do what you must, Anna.’

  She heard the studio door shutting behind him, the click of the lock.

  Three interminable days later, Johannes was waving her off from the little harbour.

  As he watched her standing on the open deck, her hair billowing in the breeze, her city suit trim around her supple form, he thought he must be mad to let her go like that. Already he could see the captain eyeing her, see the concupiscent bow with which he brought her a chair. For a breathless moment, he was tempted to run after her, go with her. And then the boat moved away and all he could do was blow her a kiss which strayed with the wind.

  As he trudged back to the empty house, he was haunted by the sense that she wouldn’t come back. Why should she? He had behaved abominably. But he had felt trapped, no longer a free agent. The tight fingers of domesticity had begun to close round him, choke him. There was always a time for everything, a time to eat, to sleep, to wake; always someone checking his comings and goings, asking questions even if they were not necessarily voiced. It was like being at home again, locked in the prison of the family, with Anna a more beneficent, a more attractive version of his father, but nonetheless clocking his moods, his actions, trying to penetrate their meaning. Soon habit would replace any intensity except the intensity of resentment.

  Savagely, he kicked a stone from the path. It hadn’t been like that in their months together in Munich. Perhaps because the space had been his, a slapdash studio, not a home.

  Johannes opened the door to the house. It was a beautiful space, well-proportioned, gracious, with little architectural surprises. And it was filled with her traces, the potted lizzies still in full bloom, the lovely old Persian rug she had found and hung half way up the fresh whitewashed walls of the broad staircase, the fragments of brightly coloured tiles, she had arranged on the corner table. And her laugh, not so frequent now, that wild unbridled laugh, he could still hear it echoing. Johannes rubbed his eyes and retraced his steps. He needed to be outdoors for a while.

  He walked up the stony path which led from the back of the house, past the tiny old peasant chapel, to the hills. Soon he could see the lake again, shimmering beneath him and in the distance, the receding boat which carried her away from him.

  No, Munich had been different. Not only because the studio was his, but because they had all been engaged in the heady euphoria of overthrowing the old order and bringing in the new. Or, as he liked to think of it, dethroning the all-powerful father and instituting a world of brothers, a democracy of equals. In his wilder moments, he had suggested that it should really be a matriarchy, a different principle to chart the ways of the horde by. But the brotherhood of equals would have done. Except that the brothers started to squabble amongst each other, and the fathers had come back into play, disciplining them, killing, incarcerating, reinstituting the old order in all but name. Only the figurehead of the king was gone.

  Johannes smiled bitterly into the trees. The proof of it all was that his father still carried his sceptre, could still cut through the thick cords of red tape to bind him in them and manipulate his life. And he had done so to manipulate him out of prison - where had he managed to remain alive, he would at least have had the dignity of the political prisoner - into a punishment park of a more lethal kind.

  Schleierman’s clinic was a psychiatric hospital of the old sort, where once a diagnosis had been made, the fate of most was to spend the rest of their lives under mental arrest. But Schleierman was shrewd. For Johannes, he had diagnosed a case of mild paranoia, and decided to give him the run of the hospital, as long as he reported to him three times a week and to his nurses daily. ‘So that you understand no one is against you and the only constrictions are the necessary ones made to fulfil the court order,’ he had smiled crookedly at Johannes from beneath spectacles which perched precariously on his arched nose.

  Johannes held nothing against Schleierman. It was what he had seen in the clinic that had so profoundly disturbed him. He was both fascinated by the abyss that the human psyche could reach and afraid that somehow he would be infected by this new world of suffering and sink irretrievably into it. So that at times he felt ready to bound madly over those iron gates even if it meant that he was to be impaled on one of their spikes.

  Yet he had stayed out his term; had spent weeks observing the victims of schizophrenia with their vacant eyes, their varying paralyses, their delirious speech which made a kind of arcane sense to him as it poured out of their almost unmoving lips.

  And then he had been freed, with the proviso that he check into the clinic twice a month at specified times over the next years. It was in a sense the final twist in the odyssey of humiliations his father had laid down for him, another cord with which to tie him and strangle him. It was why he had had to flee. But that was only the first of the reasons.

  The second was crystallised for him in a chance meeting he had had in the streets of Munich, just after his release from the clinic. It was near the Marienplatz. He had been strolling, trying to come to grips with the sense that he was free but not free, trying to take a measure of the city’s atmosphere. Seeing a small cluster of men in army uniform, he had stilled his instinct to turn the other way and instead gone towards them. He was not a criminal, after all.

  As he approached, he recognized one of the soldiers - the odd little corporal who had so impressed him with his strangeness when he was in hospital back in 1916. He had greeted him and the man had instantly drawn him into conversation. Though conversation wasn’t quite the right word for the harangue he had then been treated to: a delirium of phrases about the cowardly traitors in Weimar who had betrayed the nation, humiliated the great German people by signing the intolerable Versailles Treaty, disarmed the Fatherland. The Weimar traitors, Jews and Reds to a man, with their contemptible and unGerman ideas of democracy, would have to go. No German could rest in honour until the greatness of the nation had been restored.

  And so it had gone on, to Johannes’s growing disbelief. For a split second, the idea had seized him that this crabbed, pale-faced corporal who proudly sported an Iron Cross, was the comic incarnation of his father’s Prussian narrow-mindedness, his relentless sense of patriotic duty. And then he had been overcome by a sense that he hadn’t really emerged from the gates of the Clinic, that war continued to rage, that its bloated jingoism pursued them everywhere, that its madness polluted the very air they breathed.

  He had fled for his life, run away, come here.

  Johannes neared the crest of the hill and looked back again at the expanse of the lake, its curves and bays and inlets all visible now in the clarity of the mid-morning light. He stretched out on the earth and gazed through the dappled trees. How to explain to dear, sweet, innocent Anna, the tangle of reasons why the
y had had to flee Germany and why fleeing in itself was not enough since some dreams could no longer be dreamt.

  His first instinct had been right. He should have gone alone. He no longer had the kind of hope which made a union possible. And he wasn’t worthy of her. Five years ago, before the war, before this last year of pyrrhic victories and incarcerations, before he had lost so many of his lives, she, this place, would have been everything he dreamed of: the magic of an unspoiled natural site; the eccentric mixture of idealists, mystics, anarchists, artists - practical philosophers all of them, trying to live out the model lives of their dreams; the villagers and peasants with their simple, uncorrupted ways. And Anna, that magnificent animal who gave and gave, gave him so much more than he could ever return to her, that he already felt his life trickling out through the hole she had made by her absence.

  But half of him, he knew, desired that absence. He had realised it as soon as he started to work again. He had looked out his window at the beauty all around him and started to draw a prison wall splattered with human remains, each brick bearing the hidden imprint of a dead man. He had torn up the drawing only to find that all his subsequent sketches were cold clinical depictions of the insane, faces from the madhouse. These, too, he had torn up, afraid that she would see them, despite the locked door. But whatever he tried, the results were always the same. Even his drawings of Anna had the same cold ugliness, as if it had taken on a permanent residence in his soul.

  So that when he emerged from his studio, forced to see her, he sometimes felt he was performing in a masquerade, donning an identity that bore no connection to him. Or it was the other way round. He would come into the studio having left her arms and try to paint what was before him, only to find another Johannes yielding the brush. He was no longer capable of the natural. He would only soil it with the dirt of these last years. And then, when he was in the midst of the intense absorption which always characterized work, she would call him to order with her musical voice, and he would feel himself splitting apart. And trapped, always trapped.

  It was better that she had gone.

  Johannes rose to begin his descent. His eyes were wet. He hadn’t realised he had been crying. Paradise left him restless; just as all those ideals of model worlds he had once had, filled him with black scepticism.

  And yet everyone around him here in Ascona was embued with these self-same ideals. Ascona - European capital of outcast dreamers; outpost of radical progress, where visions of free love, of natural and egalitarian communities, put on the flesh of everyday life.

  So that now he felt doubly cast out - from the world and from his dreams. He scoffed at his own self-pity. There were two tragedies in life, he remembered some English wit having said. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

  And he, Johannes Bahr, at the age of 33, was in the position of having experienced both.

  ‘You’ve arrived just in time,’ Bettina hugged her sister. She had that excited look on her face which Anna always associated with the birth of a new project. And a new project for Bettina inevitably meant a series of tasks for those around her.

  ‘In time for what?’

  ‘In time to help look after the children for a few weeks,’ Bettina laughed. ‘We’re moving. Munich is bad for Klaus. And the news has just come that he’s got a post in Berlin, starting in January.’ She was triumphant.

  ‘But what about the nurseries?’ Anna felt disoriented.

  ‘They’ll have to manage without me. And there’ll be plenty to do in Berlin. Besides, I’m pregnant.’ She patted her stomach.

  ‘Oh Bettina,’ Anna kissed her on both cheeks.

  ‘And this time,’ Bettina looked at her wryly and lowered her voice, ‘it’s Klaus’s. Not that he seems particularly pleased. He’s still in something of a stupor. Imagine that. Women have got the vote. I’m pregnant. And Klaus is still in a stupor,’ she laughed with an undertow of bitterness and then was excited again. ‘He’ll snap out of it once we’re in Berlin. We were hoping to leave on Monday to go house-hunting and now that you’ve arrived, I won’t have to try and find a second Nanny.’

  ‘Is Leo asleep,’ Anna asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so. But go and have a peek at him while I make us some tea. Then you can tell me all about Ascona.’

  Anna climbed the stairs and softly opened the door to Leo’s room. He was sleeping peacefully, his little arms stretched above his head, his face angelic. She bent to stroke his cheek, saw him stir, half-hoped he would wake, but he simply turned over with a little snort. She left him quietly.

  ‘But you’ll keep Seehafen, won’t you?’ Anna asked Bettina when she returned bearing a stacked tray.

  ‘In fact we were thinking of selling it. It’s too far from Berlin to be all that useful.’

  ‘Don’t sell it, Bettina, please,’ Anna cried out. ‘Or sell it to me. I couldn’t bear it going to a stranger.’

  ‘I was about to say that there was no point selling anything now. Money isn’t worth the paper its printed on, except the American kind. Which is how, thanks to you, we’re going to manage to move and not sell.’

  Anna sank back into her chair, took the proffered tea. ‘It’s only that I’m very attached to Seehafen. It’s like home.’

  ‘More so than Ascona?’

  Anna averted her eyes. ‘So far yes, it’s early days.’

  Bettina nodded sagely. ‘How’s Johannes?’

  Anna forced a smile, ‘Fine.’

  ‘Just ‘fine’?’ Bettina imitated her tone and examined her astutely. ‘Is he working?’

  Anna nodded.

  ‘Well that’s the most important thing. It’s when he’s not working that you have to worry about the bouts of temperament.’

  Anna as always felt ruffled at her sister’s show of greater knowledge about Johannes. Yet the comment interested her. ‘Do you think so?’

  Bettina nodded, poured more tea.

  ‘He wouldn’t come with me, you know?’

  She looked up abruptly, eyebrows raised in surprise. ‘He can’t come here, Anna. Don’t you know that?’

  Anna gazed at her in astonishment.’Can’t?’

  ‘He’s broken the court order by leaving the country. He could be arrested. Really, sometimes I wonder what you two talk about.’

  ‘Don’t be horrid, Bettina.’ There were tears in Anna’s eyes.

  Bettina squeezed her hand. ‘Sorry.’ After a moment, she added softly, ‘I don’t know where you’ve learned all these tears, Anna. You never used to cry as a child. Just run and tumble and laugh crazily. I used to be quite envious of your daring. It must be these men. They’ve made you too sensitive, all raw emotion. You’ll have to grow a second skin.’ She shook her head humorously and then looked her in the eyes. ‘I did try to warn you that Johannes wouldn’t be an easy proposition. But then, I guess he is Leo’s father.’

  ‘Bruno was Leo’s father,’ Anna said fiercely.

  ‘You know that now, do you. How?’

  ‘I just know, Bettina, leave it alone.’

  They were both quiet for a moment.

  ‘So you’re asking Johannes to raise another man’s child. There’s a certain irony in that.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Anna said uncomfortably. She moved from her chair, started to pace tensely.

  ‘Yes, an irony,’ Bettina mused. ‘You know, I’ve always had this notion that there are certain men who are eternal boys. Sons. They don’t know how to grow up. Klaus and I talked about it once. He thinks a lot of artists are like that. It fuels them. All that rebellious energy.’

  ‘Like Johannes, you mean.’

  Bettina shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And you don’t approve?’

  ‘It’s hardly for me to approve or disapprove.’

  ‘I’ve never known you to be slow to judge, Bettina.’

  She didn’t take it amiss. ‘I guess I’m improving with age,’ she laughed.

  Anna, as she watched Klaus and Bettina depart the
next day, thought that she probably was. Difficulty made Bettina thrive. It did not seem to be that way for her.

  Little Leo had turned away from her this morning, his body rigid, refusing to be touched, his face a sullen, unspeaking mask. She told herself it would get better, but nonetheless, the tears had leapt into her eyes. Bettina was right: she must grow a second skin.

  The bustling, competent nanny was preparing the boys for their walk now.

  ‘Will you come with us?’ she asked her.

  ‘Do come, Auntie Anna,’ Max piped up. ‘You can watch us sail our new boats. See. They’re just like real ones,’ he came bounding up to her and proudly displayed the carved sailboat. ‘Papa made them for us and they float ever so well in the wind.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Anna smiled at him. He was a friendly, talkative child, full of words and experiments. Perhaps Leo would be like that in a few years.

  But not yet, Anna reflected sadly as she watched him race over and try to grab the boat from Max’s hand, punch it, pull. His battling rage transfixed her.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Leo, you have your own boat,’ the Nanny’s voice was stern. She brought his boat to him, but he thrust it away and pulled again at Max’s. ‘Better boat, better boat,’ he wailed.

  ‘Here, take it.’ Max passed it to him. ‘I don’t mind.’ He looked seriously at Anna. ‘Papa said they were both the same.’

  ‘Thank you Max,’ Anna murmured.

  She accompanied the children, allied her routine to theirs. But the days and particularly the evenings passed with increasing slowness. She missed Johannes with a visceral intensity. It was as if she was only half here, as if she could respond to nothing fully.

  She imagined him in the house alone, pacing with that taut dark energy which had been his in those last weeks, that self-absorption which excluded her as effectively as a locked door. As he became more real to her than the present she now inhabited, she began to think that she had misunderstood everything. The door wasn’t locked to keep her out, but to keep him in. The absorption was that same concentration he had always given his work, only now the subject wasn’t her, so that she was a distraction. How selfish of her to suppose that she could always be at the centre, would always have an equal priority. She would never have dared to ask Bruno to forget his work for her.