Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Leo marched, sang, his voice matching his leader’s.

  Forward, forward, forward,

  Youth knows no danger

  Our flag is greater than death…

  He would do anything for Gerhardt, gladly follow him anywhere, die for him, if he asked, if only to have his eyes rest on him for a moment as they had the night before when they were all sitting round the campfire listening to his story of Teutonic knights guarding the purity of their homeland against the enemy from the east.

  Leo’s voice rose in a triumphal chorus.

  Suddenly Gerhardt turned, ordered a halt. The flag. Where was the troupe’s banner proudly emblazoned with eagle and sword? It had been forgotten at the camp. It would have to be fetched. Who would volunteer to fetch it? Leo stepped forward. But he wouldn’t retrace their steps, through wood, over bridge. No, it would take far too long. He would plunge instead into the icy stream and race the short distance. It would take no time at all.

  Quickly he shed his thick sweater, his shirt and trousers, leaving only his shorts. He could feel the other boys’ eyes on him, Gerhardt’s. How good it was that his muscles had been toughened by the rigorous daily calisthenics, by the cold baths. He plunged into the water. Icy cold bit at him, lashed, took his breath away. But he thrashed his way to the other side, head high, clambered out up the steeper bank, raced, despite the needles and pine cones which lacerated his feet, the branches which flailed his body. The flag. He held it aloft, as he struggled back through the icy swirling water, presented it proudly to their leader. The boys cheered loudly.

  ‘Well done, Adler,’ Gerhardt’s tone was laconic, almost curt. But his eyes shone on him with a warmth which made him forget the glacial cold of his body. And as Gerhardt dabbed at the cuts on Leo’s chest with his white handkerchief, Leo felt as triumphant as if he had returned with the Grail itself. In the background, it was as if he could hear the anguished yearning strains of Parsifal.

  They were rudely interrupted by a noisy rattling.

  ‘Leo, unlock the door. Get on with it, quick.’

  Old Martha. Leo roused himself, leapt off his bed, wiped his brow, moist with the excitement of his dream. What did they want with him now? They were always interrupting him, getting at him, these prattling women with their mundane nonsense. In the small mirror, he caught a glimpse of his face. He stopped and looked at himself. Gerhardt had said he reminded him of that wood-engraving of Parsifal in the book they had passed from hand to hand.

  ‘Leo, Frau Eberhardt is coming in a moment,’ Martha’s voice was stern. ‘Have you got your room ready?’

  He had forgotten. Today was the day a boy was being moved into his room, another of those snivelling brats who had gradually filled up the house in these last months, so that there was no longer any space in which to breathe. Leo unlocked his door and let Martha in.

  She looked round her aghast. ‘You haven’t done anything, Leo. You know you were supposed to clear that space,’ she gestured towards the window where all his trophies were lined up, to the table cluttered with his whittling tools, his animals and heads.

  ‘It’ll only take a moment,’ Leo began to move the figurines half-heartedly.

  ‘Let’s just carry the whole table over. Kurt’s on his way.’

  No sooner had she said it, then Kurt appeared, pulling a folded campbed into the room.

  ‘Give us a hand, Kurt. Leo’s done nothing,’ she looked at the boy scathingly.

  ‘I forgot,’ Leo mumbled.

  ‘Forgot? And the poor little boy’s already downstairs.’

  Poor little boy this, poor little girl that… That’s all he ever heard any more. It had all started with the dreaded Corinne and in this last year it had grown to mammoth, to disgusting proportions.

  ‘We have to help in whatever way we can,’ Aunt Bettina said, always adding portentously, as if the words were magical and explained everything, ‘We’re in the midst of a depression. A crisis.’

  There wasn’t even a room for his mother in the house anymore when she came to visit. Not that he minded that. But these ugly, dirty, snivelling, timid brats, with their watery eyes and coughs would soon overrun them all, swallow them up. He was sure there were Jews and Poles amongst them. He could smell their sweaty glands.

  Aunt Bettina had this silly sentimental idea that everyone had an equal right to happiness. A soft humanist notion about progress, his history teacher had called it. But this was 1931 and if the divine Reich of German culture was to be established one had to have the courage of despair. One had to be hard, strong. Not soft. But what could one expect of women?

  That was the trouble with this house. There were no real men in it.

  There had only been his room left untouched by the whimperers and now that, too, was being invaded, polluted.

  He had found himself complaining to his mother on her last visit. He tolerated her now. At least she didn’t laugh and argue when he told her about what he liked at school, in his youth group, the way Bettina did. But it had been a mistake to complain. She had offered to take him away with her. He didn’t want that. Didn’t want to leave his school, his teachers, his group. Certainly didn’t want to live with her and have to suffer those constant hugs and wet kisses.

  But now even his room was lost.

  Aunt Bettina didn’t mind. She just let all those hectoring, suited women who pawed him with their lacquered fingers into her study and closed the door on the rest of them. All those fine words, all that do-gooding made her blind to what was really going on. He had tried to tell her once, tell her that Corinne was a disgusting beast, that she had left a bloody rag under his bed, that she had come to his room one night and tried to show him her ugly body. But Bettina had merely replied, ‘Poor Corinne, you have to understand…’

  And it was the same when he had tried to point out that the spindly-legged Inge stole from the kitchen, that she had beaten up Irena. All Bettina had said, was ‘Poor Inge, you have to understand…’

  Thomas Sachs had been there that time. Leo wasn’t sure about him, he seemed less loathsome than Bettina’s other friends. He stood straight. Looked like a soldier, had told him his figurines were beautiful. Thomas Sachs had taken him aside and said he could understand how he felt, all that noise, his privacy gone. He had suggested to him, that he might teach some of the children basic forest skills, perhaps how to whittle, be a leader to them. And Bettina had butted in, told him, yes, he should follow Max’s example.

  Max. He hated Max almost as much as he hated the noisy squalling brats. Max, who was always bringing home stray dogs and cats with mangled paws and stinking fur. Max, who preferred them like that. Max, who told the orphan beasts that everything in the house was theirs, who let them run all over him, helped them with their reading, their sums. And argued with him, Leo, laughed at him secretly, destroyed everything he believed in with his endless reasoning.

  The whore reason, Gerhardt called it. Yes. Just like Bettina. Like the time when he had brought home his prize winning essay on Siegfried and the Niebelung Saga and they had both told him to forget all that nonsense and come and help out in the soup kitchens instead. As if life wasn’t about a struggle for something higher and deeper than soup, as if life was simply explained by soup. Even Uncle Klaus didn’t stand up for him anymore. He was too old, too dotty.

  A few weeks ago he had had a terrible nightmare which wouldn’t now leave him. It had started off well enough . He was in the house. All alone. Bettina, Klaus, Max, they had all gone away, left him. Forever. He was happy, quiet, in control, fencing with his shadow. And then a voice had shouted. ‘He’s an orphan now.’

  ‘Like us,’ another had added gleefully. And then suddenly there was a great tumult, cries of ‘Let’s get him,’ and all the brats had appeared, their nails sharpened, dirty, and they had begun to claw at him, tear at his skin. No matter how much he thrashed and flailed his limbs, they kept at it so that he was soon bleeding from every pore. He wanted to shout for help, call for Gerhardt, b
ut he was too ashamed and slowly the room filled with his blood.

  ‘Leo,’ Bettina’s voice brought him back sharply. ‘Leo you haven’t prepared,’ she looked at him disconsolately. And then with that half-smile of hers which meant her mind was already elsewhere, she said, ‘This is little Leo, a namesake for you. He’s six years old and he’s going to be sharing your room. Just for a little while. Until his mother is better, until she’s back from the sanatorium. Now show him where he can put his things.’

  She urged the little boy into the room.

  The boy looked at Leo with wide doleful eyes, clutched a rag dog to his chest.

  Leo took the tattered case Bettina handed him and placed it on the camp bed.

  ‘Good, now we’ll leave the two of you to settle in. Leo, you bring the little one down to lunch in half an hour. And be kind,’ she gave him a stern look, ruffled the small boy’s hair and left.

  Leo stared at the little boy, who hadn’t moved since he had come into the room.

  ‘Sit down,’ he snapped, pointed to the bed, watched the boy obey. ‘Good, that’s the first rule. You do everything I tell you instantly. We have discipline here. Understood?’

  The little boy nodded. His eyes filled with tears.

  ‘And you don’t cry. Boys don’t cry. Understood?’

  He snuffled and then nodded again.

  ‘Right, the next thing is that you can’t be called Leo. It’s too confusing. What’s your family name?’

  The boy stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘You know, your father’s name.’

  ‘I don’t have a father,’ he mumbled, his eyes filling with tears again.

  Leo looked at him. ‘That’s nothing to cry about either. There’s lots of boys without fathers. Fathers die in wars. The fatherland looks after us instead. And we fight for the fatherland. Understand.’

  The boy nodded, gripped his dog tighter.

  ‘So what’s your other name?’

  ‘Walter.’

  ‘Good, here you’ll be Walter. This side of the room is mine, Walter.’ Leo drew an imaginary line close to the campbed. ‘Don’t touch anything here unless you ask my permission.’

  He began a little brusquely but methodically to arrange the things which had been moved to his side of the room, the figurines, his collection of plant specimens. He tried to pretend the boy wasn’t there. But even with his back turned, he couldn’t be rid of his presence. And he could hear him snuffling.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he ordered gruffly, without turning round. ‘Or I’ll be forced to give you something to cry about. Put your things away.’

  He heard the lock on the case snap, a scurry of movement, a repressed sob. It was impossible. He would never be able to do his morning work out with this snivelling idiot in the room. All the disciplines he imposed on himself would come to nought. How would he work, dream? Thank God, he was going away in two week’s time. Away to the camp where he would see Gerhardt again. And he would be rid of the chaos of this house.

  Leo stumbled over the rucksack which Kurt had moved to the centre of the room. He cursed under his breath. Then looked at the bundle. Of course, that was it. That was what he would do.

  ‘Come on, Walter,’ he heaved the rucksack onto his shoulder. ‘You can help me put up this tent. I’ll sleep out tonight. Under the stars. It’s beautiful under the stars. Quiet. Lonely. You’ll like it too, when you’re bigger.’

  The little boy followed him dutifully

  Bettina looked round the table and smiled gratefully at Max. At least he was beside her today and making a spirited attempt to keep some semblance of conversation going. They took turns on Sundays: one or two of what she had taken to calling the core family would sit with the little ones in the kitchen, while the others and the older children ate at the dining room table.

  There were twenty of them now, not counting Martha and Kurt and the changing round of daily help. Plus the stalwarts amongst her women friends, Marie and Tina, who took turns helping with the smallest ones, and coordinating lessons. They were with Klaus today, at the kitchen table.

  Sometimes she felt that her old Munich nurseries had taken over her life and she was living perpetually inside them. And today, the effort it demanded was more than she had. Still, what else could one do but help out best as one could in these desperate times.

  Bettina tried to shrug away the clawing fingers of depression. They were always at her throat these days making breathing difficult, clear-sightedness a luxury to be struggled for. It wasn’t simply the sheer and unabating hardship the economic crisis had brought in these last two years to those already dismal tenements she visited so frequently. It wasn’t even that she no longer had any ready answers to anything - except to muck in and help out with their own dwindled resources.

  The last elections in September 1930 had brought a huge rise in the vote for both the Nazis and the Communists, and as a result a parliament that could barely function. Yesterday morning she had witnessed what had so far for her only been hearsay about the ever-increasing thuggery of those contemptible brownshirts.

  She had just come out of a meeting in Kreuzberg when she saw a man dragged out of a tiny local shop by a gang of five uniformed youths and beaten to a pulp. They had paid no attention to her shouts and imprecations, only one of them turning to spit out, ‘Ein verfluchte Jude’.

  She had let herself be led away by a passerby. ‘They’re making Germany strong,’ he had said. She wasn’t certain whether there had been any irony in his tone.

  Brutality was the horrifying physical counterpoint to the rabble-rousing hatred the Nazi press spewed out with its search for scapegoats and empty patriotic rhetoric. She had met that unctuous little Goebbels at some gathering and scolded him about it. He had merely leered at her and pointed out that such things were not meant for a woman of her calibre.

  Bettina stirred the thin soup in her bowl. Who would have thought their hard-fought struggle for a just democracy would have led to this? She would have welcomed a little censorship to still those braying voices. No, she musn’t think that. Bettina fingered the coolness of her necklace with hot fingers. Still when she read that the women’s rights movement was a symptom of degeneracy, that woman’s rightful place was as a preserver of the biological inheritance, of the unadulterated Aryan blood line. That the woman’s movement was an invention - like democracy, like parliamentarism - of the syphilitic Jewish intellect, she wished that there was something called liberal censorship.

  Normally, she could put some of this nonsense down to the mere yapping of illiterate hotheads, no more significant than the ranting of loonies on the corner soap-box. But today she had a presentiment of disaster of a kind she rarely had.

  Beads of perspiration gathered on her brow.

  ‘Are you all right, Mutti?’ Max, ever sensitive to her moods, was pouring her a glass of water. ‘You look a bit pale.’

  ‘I’m alright, dear, thank-you. It’s just a little warm in here,’ she tried a smile.

  ‘It’s because it’s so crowded. There’s no air,’ Leo piped up.

  She looked at him, that handsome unsmiling face. She tried not to scowl. ‘You could open the window then Leo,’ she said in an even voice. ‘And I’ll excuse you and little Leo from table, as soon as you’ve had enough to eat, if you’re feeling cramped.’

  ‘Walter, not Leo. We’ve decided he’s to be Walter.’

  She barely managed to contain her irritation. Yet she musn’t take out her anger on Leo. She watched him cross the room, watched his long-legged grace, his air of carrying out an important mission and almost smiled. He was behaving better than she had hoped, had even taken their latest arrival out into the garden with him. And she could understand his unwillingness to share his room. It was his general lack of generosity which irked her, his air of superiority towards all these hapless children. Still he did well at school, had glowing reports. Bettina shrugged.

  No, it was what Klaus had told her last night which was at the
core of her current rage. A rage at once so hot and so helpless that it brought a paralysing depression in its train. Klaus was thinking of resigning his post at the Institute, had been brought to the point where he felt he could do nothing else but resign unless he were to turn his research to purposes which were anathema to him.

  It was that which she felt with the force of a physical blow. Intelligent men, men she respected, conniving to pervert science, that pursuit of pure knowledge. Turning science to distorted ends. It was as if the whole fabric of her being, her hopes, were being undermined in that single act. For the universities to contain almost twice as many Nazis as the rest of the population was a statistic which made her bow her head in shame.

  Over the last years Klaus had been carrying out research into brain pathology. Now a new head of department had arrived at the laboratory. He was a political appointee and he was putting pressure on Klaus to focus on the difference between Jewish and Aryan brains, in order to pin-point the biological roots of degeneracy, to localize hereditary psychopathic signs. The perversion of it shook her. The racial hygienists were winning.

  Bettina pushed her chair too noisily back from the table. ‘Corinne will you see to the little ones with Martha. I need a walk.’

  Corinne glanced up at her sullenly. ‘But I wanted to have a talk with you.’

  ‘It can wait an hour, my dear, can’t it? Then my head will be clearer.’

  The girl nodded.

  Bettina looked at her for a moment. She suspected what Corinne wanted to talk to her about. Had thought she had noticed a slight swelling of breasts and waistline. But she had held back from doing anything. That too was unlike her.

  ‘Shall I join you for a bit, Mutti?’ Max was looking at her anxiously.

  Bettina nodded.

  They walked silently away from the house, into the park where the crocuses had begun to show their plump heads. She could feel Max waiting patiently for her to speak.

  ‘Your father is under pressure,’ she said at last and hurried to explain.