Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Anna watched her stride across the room, her steps light, saw her hug Max so hard that the parcels almost dropped from his hands.

  ‘Sorry, I’m late,’ He was wearing a peaked worker’s cap, a thick navy jacket. ‘Shall I change or do you want me as I am?’ he grinned at his mother.

  ‘As you are Max, for the moment at least. Come and say hello to everyone.’

  He took off his cap, embraced Anna, ‘Happy Christmas, Aunt. Good to have you back.’

  ‘Happy Christmas, Max.’

  As always, Anna felt warmed by his direct gaze and open face. She watched him as he hugged Klaus, shook Thomas and Gretl by the hand, then Johannes. Was it her imagination or was Johannes looking at him strangely. Seeing the two of them together, she was suddenly struck by a resemblance. Was it the set of the head? The stance? Did everyone see it?’ She glanced at Bettina, wondering at her thoughts. But she could not see beyond the visible relief which now covered her features.

  ‘Good to have you with us again, Uncle Johannes. It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Too long. You were just a little sprout when we last met. And now…’ Johannes indicated the shared level of their heads, ‘you’re a man.’

  ‘And longing to be a new man, eh Max?’ Thomas embraced him warmly, perched Max’s cap on his own head, ‘a heroic worker in a just and egalitarian society.’

  For a moment Anna didn’t know whether the joking warmth of Thomas’s tone would obviate the irony of his words. But Max seemed to take it in good stead.

  ‘We all have a little way to grow for that, I think, Thomas.’

  ‘Particularly given the wide success of that other form of new man, the super patriot,’ Anna heard Klaus murmur.

  ‘Klaus,’ Bettina said sharply. ‘We made a promise. No politics over Christmas.’

  ‘Whoops,’ Klaus lifted a small boy under his arm, took another by the hand. ‘Time to get a move on, poppets. Collect all your presents.’

  Amidst great cries and squeals, the children received their gifts and then, with only sleepy protests, were pressed upstairs, by Bettina and Klaus, Gretl immediately behind them.

  ‘I’ll come and tell you all a quick story in a moment,’ Max called after them. He took a glass of mulled wine from the tray, drank thirstily, then turned again to Johannes.

  ‘How are things in Munich?’

  ‘Bad for some and I can only assume good for others.’

  Max laughed. ‘Half and half, eh. Like the election. They’re still hope.’

  ‘That was two years ago, Max. I think the figures have changed somewhat now,’ Thomas intervened. ‘The trouble with your lot is that you never think beyond the cities, take account of those vast tracts of land inhabited by the great German peasant to whom our Führer has promised everything.’

  A shadow crossed over Max’s face, but he covered it with a laugh, ‘And if you and your lot see everything so clearly, Thomas, will you please tell me why we’re we in the pickle we’re in?’

  ‘You have me there, Max,’ Thomas grinned. ‘Unless we spend the next two hours in explanation. To which Bettina will heartily object.’

  ‘Object to what?’ a voice asked from the far end of the room.

  They all turned. Leo had come in as softly as a cat. Or a spy, Anna thought inadvertently. They all stared at him in silence for a moment, that handsome gold head, that military bearing, those eyes which gazed at them yet beyond them. A palpable electric field seemed to surround him.

  Anna ran towards him, ‘Leo.’ She raised her arms for an embrace. But he put out his hand before she could touch him.

  ‘Hello, mother.’ He shook her hand stiffly, let it drop, greeted Max, Thomas. Then his eyes locked with Johannes’s. Anna could almost hear the electricity crackle. As if through its haze, she saw Johannes step forward, heard him murmur, ‘I don’t believe we’ve met for some time, Leo.’ Saw Leo turn stiffly away.

  ‘How are you, Leo?’ she said to cover his rudeness.

  ‘Very well, mother. I hope you’ve had a good journey’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ she flushed stupidly, in part at his stiff politeness, in part at the memory of it. ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked to hide her confusion.

  ‘Please, if there’s some juice. I don’t drink alcohol, you know.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she mumbled.

  She poured out some juice clumsily, at a loss for words. Behind her, she heard Max speaking to Johannes.

  ‘I hear they’ve removed your paintings from the Dresden Gallery.’

  ‘Not only from there,’ Johannes laughed too loudly.

  ‘The swine!’

  ‘You’re not German enough for them, Johannes,’ Thomas interjected.

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Johannes raised his glass.

  Suddenly Leo marched towards the canvas of Johannes’s which hung over the mantelpiece. With a slow, deliberate gesture, he spat at it.

  ‘Leo. You will apologize instantly to Johannes,’ Klaus was standing at the door, his eyes blazing, his voice firmer than Anna had ever heard it. ‘Instantly.’

  The boy suddenly looked young, confused.

  ‘That’s alright, Klaus,’ Johannes made a joke of it. ‘I’ve had to deal with severer forms of criticism in my time.’

  ‘Leo!’ Klaus’s eyes didn’t leave the boy.

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered at last, but the word was directed at Klaus, not at Johannes.

  Anna walked over to the chair in which Johannes sat, placed her hand on his shoulder. He covered it with his.

  ‘The children are waiting for their story, Max,’ Klaus gestured to his son.

  ‘I’ll go up too,’ Leo mumbled. ‘I need to have a wash.’

  ‘You do that.’

  Anna gazed after him. He looked humbled, forlorn, despite the proud shoulders. There was a vulnerability in his intractable absolutism. Suddenly, she was reminded of the young Johannes. She swallowed hard. And there it was, that sense of being ripped apart between them, just as strong as when Leo had been a tiny child.

  And he was still a boy. Only seventeen, after all. With a little shrug, she extricated her hand from Johannes’s and followed Leo from the room.

  Bettina presided over the table, bright with the sparkle of silver and crystal and candelabra. With a queenly smile, she heaped goose and spoonfuls of red cabbage and dumplings onto everyone’s plate.

  ‘No goose for me, Aunt Bettina, remember.’

  ‘No, no, of course, not,’ she interrupted her gesture. Leo had suddenly decided to become vegetarian. Like his Führer. Guns before butter. The new Puritanism. She sat back into her chair, unfolded the stiff white napkin with an irritated tug.

  ‘Where have you been today, Leo?’ she asked.

  ‘To a film. With Gerhardt. It was wonderful in fact. Leni Riefenstahl’s Blaue Licht. Have any of you seen it?

  ‘Gretl and I have,’ Thomas eyed the boy keenly.

  ‘Tell us about it, Leo.’ Anna prompted him gently.

  ‘Well, it’s set in this peasant village high up in the Dolomites. Beautiful.’ He gazed past her into the distance, seeing what couldn’t be seen. ‘On the peak of the mountain above the village on nights when the moon is full, a miraculous blue light appears. Ghostly, magical. All the youngsters are drawn to it even though to reach it means to tumble down the precipice to their deaths.’

  ‘More half-baked visionary rubbish,’ Bettina muttered under her breath.

  ‘Let the boy finish, Bettina. He’s trying to describe something,’ Johannes chided her.

  She turned on him, as if all her suppressed annoyance had at last found a suitable target. ‘Yes, you were always good at that Johannes. Visions to blind oneself to the reality of facts.’

  He chuckled good-humouredly, refusing the bait. ‘You have to allow that a little vision, no matter how half-baked, is necessary to my profession. But I want to hear about this film,’ he turned to Leo.

  ‘Yes, tell him about these wonderful peasants, Leo,’ Bettina co
uldn’t stop. ‘I bet their faces were noble, etched with suffering, eh? The women particularly. All those aeons of breeding children and preserving the pure biological inheritance of the tribe. What can you expect?’ her voice rose.

  ‘In fact, the film wasn’t about that,’ Leo wiped his mouth carefully. ‘In fact, since you’re so interested in facts, Aunt, it was about an artist, who destroys everything, the miraculous light, the heroine.’

  Johannes laughed loudly. ‘It sounds a wonderful film.’

  Leo stared at him from those unblinking eyes. Then, as if he hadn’t said anything he turned back to Bettina. ‘And another fact for you Aunt, you do realize that under the new regime, the unemployment figures have fallen drastically.’

  Anna, watching Bettina’s face, held her breath. The growing tension in the air made it almost impossible to swallow. It was an accumulated tension, flashing with the sparks of months.

  ‘You’ve stolen one of the words from my vocabulary, Leo,’ Max raised his glass to him. ‘I didn’t know you were interested in the unemployed.’

  ‘It’s not difficult to create jobs if you turn half the country into policemen,’ Bettina plunged her fork angrily into a piece of goose.

  ‘Soon to be transformed into soldiers, whatever the treaties allow or don’t allow,’ Thomas muttered.

  ‘Not difficult to raise the employment figures if you force your scientists, your university teachers, your publishers, not to mention countless others to emigrate,’ Klaus was looking scathingly at Leo.

  ‘If they refuse German ideas, then it is right that they go,’ Leo stared back at him without flinching.

  Klaus slammed his napkin on the table. ‘German ideas! There we have it again.’ Two red spots had formed on his pale cheeks. The pulse in his forehead throbbed heavily.

  ‘German water boils differently from other water. Aryan blood pumps differently through Aryan veins and brains. The properties of German mass and German energy are unique to Germany. True physics is the creation of the German soul. Goodbye Einstein, goodbye…

  ‘Einstein is a Jew. And like all Jews bent on the destruction of the Aryan spirit, sapping the life force of the great German nation.’

  A hush fell around the table, a silence so total that in it Anna could hear the beating of her own heart. At last, she said, her voice cracking. ‘Your father was Jewish, Leo. You’re half Jewish. You must know that.’

  He stared through her, his face stony.

  ‘Which must be the ultimate disproof of all racial theories, Leo,’ Max tried a laugh. ‘After all, as one of my girlfriends pointed out to me, you’re the very model of the most desirable Aryan type.’

  Leo pushed his chair back from the table with a scrape. For a moment, Anna thought, he might raise his arm in salute. Instead he walked slowly away from them, his head high. Under his breath she thought she heard him mutter, ‘Traitors.’

  No one stirred

  Then with a sudden abruptness, Bettina rose. ‘Anna. We need to talk. You’ll excuse us all of you. Martha will bring in the pudding.’

  ‘I’ll take some to Leo, shall I? He can’t be feeling very happy,’ Max mumbled.

  ‘Do as you like, Max.’ With a sweep of her skirts, Bettina turned away, walked with a trembling stateliness up the stairs to her study. Anna followed slowly, closing the door behind them.

  ‘I can’t take it anymore, Anna.’ Bettina leaned heavily on her desk. Her knuckles were white. ‘I never thought I’d have to say that.’ She picked up a solid bronze paperweight, clutched it. ‘But I’d like to throw this at him, tear out his beautiful golden hair clump by clump.’ Her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I thought he’d grow out of it. Wake up. Thought it was just the usual rebellion against us. Adolescent nonsense, a little ecstatic groping in cosmic expanses, all that idealism about community and leader they instil in them in the Jugendbund. But now,’ she threw her arms up in the air, ‘now it’s the Hitler Youth. And he believes it, believes he’s the superman marching to the tune of the German soul. And all that vile racial rubbish. He’s never come out with it as clearly as tonight. Never dared the anti-semitism. But he believes every word of it. It’s clear. Someone who has been brought up in my house. My nephew!’ She jabbed a cigarette into her holder, broke it in the process. Tried another.

  ‘And I’m afraid of him, Anna,’ she met her eyes. ‘Yes, ever since he came home from the camp this summer, that indoctrination camp, worse than military school. I’m afraid he’ll do something to us. I don’t know what.’

  She paced restlessly across the room.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bettina,’ Anna murmured. ‘I’ll try and take him away with me. I’ll…’

  ‘It’s not that Anna. I know you tried to convince him to come with you last year. But he doesn’t care about any of us. He’s only interested in his group, his friends, his Vaterland.’ She blew her nose loudly into her handkerchief.

  ‘Anyhow, that was only part of the reason I asked both you and Johannes to come this week. I hoped the serious conversation would keep until after Christmas, but I might as well say it now.’

  She paused for a moment, met Anna’s eyes. ‘Klaus and I have decided to leave. To go to America. Take Max away from here before it’s too late. We would have put all the necessary procedures in motion sooner, but Max resisted. And now I’m afraid for him too, afraid he’ll get himself arrested, killed,’ she dabbed at her eyes again. ‘And I still have to convince him. But I’ll manage that, somehow.’

  She sat down, her face suddenly haggard, motioned for Anna to sit, too. ‘I think you and Johannes should come as well. Things can’t be very easy for him. Thomas, too, is making plans.’

  ‘And Leo?’ Anna asked softly.

  Bettina shrugged. ‘You can try and convince him. I haven’t a chance. But Anna,’ she paused, lit another cigarette, ‘I don’t think there’s much hope.’ She rose, opened the top drawer of her desk, took out an envelope, ‘I fear he’s lost to us. This came two weeks ago. It’s the second item on the family agenda,’ she handed Anna the envelope.

  For a moment Anna stared at it, not wanting to know its contents. Then with a sense of dread, she glanced at the official letterhead, perused the typed sheet.

  Leo had been selected to attend a special National Institute, the letter stated. A high honour. Because of the extraordinary nature of his recommendations, he could begin in January.

  Anna looked up at her sister. ‘Is this so very terrible?’ she asked.

  Bettina threw up her arms in despair. ‘Where have you been living for the last two years, Anna? This is one of the Nazi’s elite institutions. An offer of a place is not simply an offer, it’s a command. Let’s say we could even find a way, on trumped up medical grounds or whatever, of refusing the place, do you think Leo would agree? Not in a million years. He’s thrilled by it all, ecstatic.’

  ‘So he goes,’ Anna said softly.

  Bettina looked at her aghast. ‘Anna,’ she shook her by the shoulders. ‘Anna. Open your eyes. Not only will they turn your son into even more of a little militaristic Nazi puppet than he already is, but what happens when their secret police get even better at their rooting out of racial lines? Oh, I know, it’s never meant anything to us that Bruno was Jewish. We’ve never talked about it - to the point I think that Leo really didn’t know - until you said it tonight. But if they find out…’

  ‘Aren’t you exaggerating Bettina. It’s not that bad, is it?’

  A look of utter astonishment covered Bettina’s face. ‘Not that bad? Not that bad? ‘My friend Petra’s hair turned white in two weeks over what they did to her family. Do you want details?’ her voice rose to a near shriek, ‘What do you think Klaus and I have been up to, but helping Jews get out of the country? And those poor little mites,’ she sobbed, then with a visible effort restrained herself, said more quietly, ‘Talk to Johannes about it, see what he says.’

  ‘I will,’ Anna murmured. ‘But what you’re really saying is that there’s no solutio
n but to go. To leave. And somehow drag Leo with us.’

  ‘Yes, Anna.’ She began to pace again. ‘It’s time to go. To say goodbye to all their swastikas and salutes and raving. To make a clean break with their Aryan motherhood, their Aryan science and their Aryan philosophy. It’s enough! Did you know that Heidegger has gone in with them. Heidegger!’ her voice cracked. ‘It’s the triumph of the little rural idyll, the small clean and mean green space inhabited only by the Aryan soul. That dreamed of soul conjured up by blue-eyed dreamers.’

  She pursed her lips as if she were about to spit. ‘They hate the cities. Cities are the creation of an international Jewish and capitalist conspiracy,’ she laughed too loudly. ‘Why? Because cities are international and not small and mean and pure and green and can’t be fitted into their horrible idea of a volkisch German nation.

  ‘And do you know, Anna, the women, I can’t bear it, they love Hitler, even though he’s taking away their voting rights.’ The tears filled her eyes again. ‘I’m going Anna. It can’t be fought anymore. It’s like a disease gone wild.’

  Anna stared at her sister in silence. Then, with an uncontainable sob, she ran and embraced her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Brown fog coiled through the narrow streets behind the Ku’damm, crept round yellow lights, and up to the doors of cheap dives. Pale mottled faces appeared as if from nowhere.

  Like rats crawling out of their sewers by night, Leo thought. He flinched as a cheap whore leered at him, opened her coat to reveal a bare breast.

  He should never have come here, never have accompanied Max into these sordid streets where the vermin of the city lived out their perverted lives. He tried to keep his eyes straight ahead, tried not to see the bloated virago waving her fat cigar, urging them to enter the dank bar; tried not to gaze at the gartered leg the blond-wigged transvestite thrust lasciviously in their path.

  ‘Not tonight Hans,’ he heard Max laugh, greet the creature by name.

  He glanced at his cousin in disgust.

  No, he should never have come with him. But he had felt the house stifling him, felt all their hands at his throat and when Max had said he was going to meet a friend at a cabaret and would he like to join them, it had seemed like a godsend.