As the train pulled out of the station with a great puff of smoke, he closed his eyes. He would wipe that scene from his mind, expunge it, tear it out shred by shred. God, how dirty he felt, defiled. He wanted to jump into a cold mountain stream, whip his body into cleanliness.
How could his mother be married to that monster? Suddenly his stomach heaved. He ran to the toilet, wretched, felt his insides rise up through his mouth. He held on to the wall of the lurching train, clung to it, until he could stand no more. Then, like a wounded animal, he dragged himself back to his seat, huddled into a corner, closed his eyes.
He didn’t know quite how he got back to Berlin. He remembered changing trains twice, sitting on dark empty platforms, having to fight away an old drunk with foul breath. He was so tired now, so utterly weary, that he didn’t care who saw him, didn’t care about anything.
Bettina must have heard his tread for she opened the door of her study as he made his way up the stairs.
‘Leo, whatever are you doing here?’ she stared at him and then quickly came towards him, a look of concern on her face. She felt his forehead. ‘You’re ill, Leo. You’ve got a temperature. They should have called us. Someone would have come to fetch you.’ She put a hand on his shoulder, guided him to his room. ‘Those miserable youth movement leaders. They’ll kill you with their ridiculous love of strength,’ she was mumbling half to herself.
He was too tired to answer back. He let himself be steered, let himself be tucked into his bed, let the doctor fuss over him, accepted the broth that Martha brought, lay there thinking of nothing, staring out at the familiar oak. For five days he lay there, saying nothing, simply gazing into space, dozing. Little Walter came to sit by him sometimes. One night, he even curled next to him. Leo let him. What did it matter? What did anything matter? There was nothing to live for. He didn’t want to show his face at school, confront his friends. He would die like this. Quietly. In his bed. The old oak his only comfort. And little Walter beside him.
He had given him back his stone, tucked it into his hand and whispered, ‘magic’.
On the sixth day, Bettina came up to his room and handed him two letters, before taking his temperature. ‘You’re mending,’ she pronounced. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’
Leo stared out the window, felt her shrug.
‘Well, if you ever want to, I’m here.’
He fingered the envelopes, tore one open randomly. His mother. Almost, he crumpled it up, but the sight of Johannes’s name whet his curiosity.
Johannes tells me that you may have visited the studio. He isn’t sure. But if it was you, he wants you to know that it would have been better to have forewarned him. Then he could have welcomed you more adequately. And if it was you, - this person who looked like a younger version of me with short hair - he’s very sorry if he frightened you away. I told him it was unlikely, both because you would have let me know and because you’re frightened of nothing. Am I right? I’ll be in Berlin soon.
Leo tore the letter into a hundred little pieces and threw them into his waste-bin before opening the second letter. His heart lurched painfully. Gerhardt. He had never written to him before, but there was his signature in bold black ink at the bottom of the page.
Leo,
I have finally managed to extricate the story behind your sudden departure from your mates. You were right to use your fists. Honour must be preserved at all costs. And sometimes force is the only way to strike sense into the lesser representatives of the fatherland. Especially little lying runts.
You left the carving of me behind. I shall bring it back to Berlin. Perhaps you would like to finish it. If so, come and see me at my rooms. I can also then show you the book which tells the pfingstl story.
This was my last Easter camp in the Jugendbund. I am glad to have been able to spend a few of its days with you. I hope we will meet again.
Yours,
Gerhardt
Leo leapt from his bed in jubilation. Stretched, touched his toes ten times in rapid succession. Gerhardt understood. Gerhardt understood. There was no need for fathers. A fatherland was enough. No need for mothers really either. Mother nature would do. The oak, the dense woods, the soil in which he had so carefully embedded those seedlings. Only brothers were necessary. Brothers in spirit, like Gerhardt. He pulled a piece of paper from his desk and began, carefully, to pen a reply.
Chapter Fourteen
1934
Johannes stopped short at the top of the staircase which led to his studio and stared. There was a crimson swastika on the door, freshly painted, dripping like blood.
So it had happened at last. The inevitable.
For a moment, he felt a rush of exhilaration. He had known they would come sooner or later. For almost eighteen months now, he had anticipated the event daily, so that the anticipation itself had taken on a kind of monotony. And in his bones, the period of anticipation had been even longer. It dated back to the time of Leo’s visit, when he had seen the shocked eyes of Anna’s son on him; perhaps even to the period when his father had had him confined to the mad house.
What else was it that he had railed against, warned about these last years but this very thing: the brutal intrusion of the long tentacles of authority into every aspect, even the most private, of one’s life.
He paused at the threshold, listened. Everything was quiet. Perhaps they had already gone. Shame to delay the ultimate moment. He pushed open the door.
Devastation. The long corridor to his studio was littered with debris. Ripped clothes and books rent from their bindings lay in heaps, battled with shards of glass, the innards of mattresses, old photographs, shattered crockery. Walking was like picking his way through the wreckage of his own life. He retrieved a photo of Anna, the remains of a notebook. Everywhere there was a stink - of urine, of the sweaty excitement of male bodies.
The studio itself was even worse. He leaned against the wall, feeling his stomach rise into his throat. Paintings, drawings, had been torn from their wracks, his figures blotched by tins of colour, cut, split, sliced, hacked.
Not just random vandalism but carnage. Murder. And Rape. Particularly rape. It was the women who had suffered most. Women he had loved, held, listened to. Their bare bodies now lay spliced, kicked, defaced, defecated on. He could almost see the vandals at it, smell them in the act, the collective sexual frenzy of it, their tawdry little consciences dissolved in the name of something greater, something pure, something German. Something that was summed up in the name of Hitler.
His signature was everywhere in the epithets they had scrawled on walls and on canvases. Scum, Degenerate, Swine, Polluter, Traitor, Jew-lover. That too. His portrait of his dealer bore the words ‘Entarteter Jude’- Degenerate Jew: he had effectively been disembowelled.
And they would happily have disembowelled him too, had he been here when they arrived. Or marched him off to one of their camps which meant the same thing.
Suddenly a laugh shook him, a loud hollow laugh which reverberated eerily through the room. It was less than two years since the little corporal had ascended to power and already he had happily, easily installed himself inside people’s all too willing minds, their most private of thoughts. What were those giant rallies, after all, but big, really big, political erections? And it was so much nicer to have thought taken care of from the outside, replaced by uplifting slogans, while one energetically went about the business of the State.
The pageantry and the fires helped, of course. Those great cleansing pyres, larger than the bonfires of the Hitler Youth which one stumbled over at every turn in the countryside, but in the same purifying spirit. First the Reichstag - blamed on the Reds, it went without saying - but did one really need a place where all those impure thoughts were spoken and debated?
And then those lovely medieval pyres, in city and town centres across the country, where scores of those vile, impure books written by degenerates and Jews were burned. Soon to be followed by their makers, no doubt, whi
ch would occasion even greater pageantry.
The little corporal, now their Führer, had always shadowed him like a nightmare he couldn’t shed, and now the nightmares had taken over.
All his artist friends had been ousted from their teaching posts, had had their pictures removed from the museums. Many had left the country; others were planning to leave. Still others - writers, political journalists - had disappeared into the hellholes of Columbiahaus or Oranienburg.
He had no post to be ousted from, so they had paid him this little visit instead. And helped themselves to some pictures, he could see, as well as to the joy of destruction in the name of the purification of the race. Some forms of degeneracy, after all, could be sold abroad to swell the coffers of the state. And they would stop at nothing to swell those coffers. Impure publishing houses could be swallowed up for gain, as well as the property of those other degenerates, the Jews.
Oh yes, he was up to the cynical tricks they performed in the name of Aryan purification. He had read the little corporals monumentally odious tract way back in 1925 when it had first appeared. It was all spelled out there. Though not in his wildest imaginings had he thought it could so quickly come to this.
The pure Aryan blood line. The great Nordic race. He laughed again. Well, unless his mother had not been telling his father the whole truth, there was no purer scion of the Aryan line than he. And yet here was his work being proclaimed impure, degenerate, unnatural. With the result that he would soon inevitably be naturally selected out of nature’s natural course by a few of nature’s trusty Aryan superthugs. It was wonderful the uses to which nature could be put, the way it could be called upon to legitimate any old nonsense.
He had been guilty of it himself, of course, all those years ago when he still nurtured a social hope. That was why he was always pursued by this dastardly sense that the little corporal was a perverted echo of himself, almost his father’s better son. Oh yes, he too had called on nature, - wild, rampant, rich, sexual, in his case - to signal his dissatisfaction with the straitjacket of the culture in which he lived, to designate his hope of freedom. Now he knew better, knew that the only naturalness in man was that he was born and died. Between those two poles, everything else was his own creation.
Johannes perched on a stool and looked at the devastation around him, at last registering it, realising that he would never set foot again in this space in which he had worked for the last ten years. Worked as an artist. Rupturing old forms, trying to breath new life into the frame.
And Hitler was an artist who had moved beyond the frame. That was the hideous, tragic, rub of it. Moved beyond even that tired old adage of living one’s life as art, with the controlled intensity of art - something that was dangerous enough, as he, himself, knew too well.
All of Germany was the canvas on which Hitler enacted his vision, execrable as it was, but a vision nonetheless. And like the omnipotent artist, he set out to control every detail in his bloated canvas, every effect, every figure, fashioning vast orchestrated pageants, regalia, inventing a heraldry of muscled heroes and sentimentalized peasants, brutally excising what jarred with his dream - all in order to create a total artwork.
To combine power, the ability to control lives, with the single monomaniacal vision of the artist, was, Johannes shuddered to realise, to create hell.
He kicked a bit of debris from beneath his feet. As for him, he no longer had either any visions or even the power to wield his brush to any effect.
He stopped in front of the cracked mirror over which the word ‘degenerate’ had been scrawled and looked at himself. The scowl, the lines of weariness, the bloodshot eyes. Yes, perhaps the word was right, but not in the way they meant it. In these last years, the only thing that had propelled his unsaleable work was hatred, an attempt to rub their noses in the shit that Germany had become. And the work was bad, empty, against the grain, a sterile recycling of old forms with only venom to give them life. There was no hope left in him. The ribbon of road which had once held at least the glimmer of a horizon had long disappeared.
And now there was the brute fact of the devastation around him. It was the signal he had been waiting for. Everything was finally over. The last of his nine lives had at last trickled to its end.
Strangely, it filled him with relief. He suddenly felt lightheaded, carefree, calm, as if the Cassandra-like burden of the years had been lifted from his shoulders. He was free at last.
Grinning, he unearthed a brush from the rubble, a half-spilled tin of paint. With quick deft strokes, he covered the large glass with a caricature: a vast figure of Hitler, floating in the skies, crouched, defecating; beneath him, a multitude, their arms and eyes raised, their caps lifted to receive his gift of excrement. Above Hitler, he wrote the words, ‘Aryan Purity’. Below the crowd, ‘The New Man.’ Then incorporating the scrawl, ‘Degenerate’ into his signature, he wrote in Latin, ‘the last work of Johannes Bahr, degenerate painter, December 23 1934.’
With a smile on his face, Johannes made his way from the room. Halfway to the door, he turned back. He had altogether forgotten the reason for his coming here. Was there anything he could salvage to bring to Berlin? The sheaves of drawings in the desk had been scattered, torn, bore the imprints of boots. He found one that was relatively unscathed, rolled it under his arm. The last thing either Klaus or Bettina would want in their home was another work by a degenerate, even as a Christmas present. But it was for Anna he had come here and he didn’t want her to ask any questions. He didn’t want her to to know of this yet.
He raced down the stairs. It had stopped snowing. The old keeper was sweeping a path through the courtyard.
‘They came before, Herr Bahr. Six of them. In uniform.’
‘I noticed Hans.’
‘I couldn’t stop them. I’m sorry, Herr Bahr.’
‘I won’t be back, Hans. Take whatever you want. Though they haven’t left much intact.’
‘I told them you had gone. Perhaps to Vienna,’ he grinned toothlessly.
‘Thank you, Hans. And here,’ Johannes pulled some bills from his pocket, ‘Buy yourself some Christmas spirit. We have to drink for the Führer, eh,’ he winked mischievously, ‘since he doesn’t. Take care of yourself and the old woman, Hans.’
He lifted his hat, waved, hurried down the cobbled street, turned a corner hastily as he saw a group of uniformed youths marching towards him.
They were everywhere now, these young men, brazen in the anonymity of their uniforms, bold in a brutality sanctioned from above. There would be a war soon, though it was denied officially. Why else all these uniforms? Policing was only the first part of the reason. His father would have approved of the policing. But it was the young now policing the old. The new men and new women working for a new Germany. Strength through joy. Hard, tough, quick. Iron youths with a steely inwardness. Blood and soil. The slogans paraded through his mind to the sound of their boots with a hollow inanity.
Yes, they were clever these Nazis, taking over the young, promising, promising, filling them with high purpose and blind obedience. What was it Nietzsche had written about young men? With an effort he could almost remember it verbatim.
When one considers how much the energy of young men needs to explode, one is not surprised that they decide for this cause or that without being at all subtle or choosy. What attracts them is the sight of the zeal that surrounds a cause - the sight of the burning fuse and not the cause itself. Subtle seducers therefore know the art of arousing expectations of an explosion while making no effort to furnish reasons for their cause: reasons are not what wins over such powder kegs.
But they had made a travesty of the philosopher as well.
Still, that was no longer his concern. Nothing was any longer his concern, he reminded himself. Except to take a last look at these streets with their graceful pastel houses, the gardens. Streets he had nonetheless loved. And to spend a last few days with Anna.
He glanced at his watch. He must hurry or he would be l
ate. Anna would worry.
The train station was heavy with smoke and steam. But there she was now, pacing the platform, her hair lustrous beneath a new little toque of a hat, her eyes luminous. His heart leapt as if he were already seeing her in memory, a first time which was also a last. He raced towards her.
‘I’m sorry I’m late, darling.’ He took the cases from her, the brightly wrapped packages, helped her up the steps.
‘I thought you weren’t coming.’
‘I’m here, you see. As promised. Despite the fact that we’re going to Berlin,’ he smiled ruefully. He knew she had thought he might not turn up at the last minute. He hardly ever went to Berlin with her. But this time was different. Bettina had summoned them both in no uncertain terms. And in any event, he wanted to make the journey now. Revisit the sites of his blighted youth.
They had their own compartment on the train and as soon as he had closed the door behind them, he turned to kiss her, slowly, luxuriantly.
She searched his face, ‘What is it, Johannes.’
He chuckled, ‘Am I not allowed to kiss you, Anna?’
She looked at him curiously, ‘Have I ever refused you?’
‘Oh, once or twice, as I remember it. But you look so delicious today in that little hat.’ He held her at arms length, examined her, helped her off with her coat, ‘and this new dress,’ he fingered the soft pale green wool which swirled at her hips, the clasp at the bodice. ‘All in honour of your son, I gather. Not for me,’ he teased.
She flushed, ‘Don’t be silly, Johannes.’
‘I don’t mind,’ he sat next to her, close, breathed in the fragrance of that bright hair. ‘Though he might get strange ideas if his mother looks more like a sister.’
‘He’s not like that, Johannes,’ she met his smile this time.
‘The more fool he,’ he ruffled her hair. ‘Do you remember what it was like at that age, all those juices stirring, taking you over?’
Dreams of Innocence Page 42
