‘I’ll meet you down there then,’ she nodded at the men at the table, left Trüb to organize.
Johannes’s pale coffin looked strangely innocent in the midday light. A long unvarnished chest suitable for a peasant’s lodging, a simple bride’s trousseau. Slowly, she lifted the lid, shivered. ‘Goodbye, Johannes,’ her eyes rested on the waxy effigy. With a swift movement, she lifted the gold filigree locket he had once given her, from her neck. It contained a miniature, a playful copy Johannes had executed of herself as Botticelli’s Venus. She placed it under his jacket, next to his heart.
She smiled to herself as she imagined the ironic curl of his lips at her gesture. ‘But you’ll be happy at what I’ve planned, Johannes. Our place,’ she murmured. She closed the coffin abruptly as she heard the tread of steps crunching the snow.
The men were carrying spades and an assortment of pots and kettles. Their solemn looks did nothing to erase the comedy of their procession. Anna felt a giggle rising in her throat. She stilled it. ‘This way, gentlemen. Leave the pots here. I’ll come back and light the fire, if need be.’
She led them along the winding track by the side of the lake, through the break in the shrubs to the knoll. The secret site of their love. No long grass now. No fragrance of summer herbs. But the snow didn’t seem too thick here. The sun warmed the place, loved it.
‘Here, Gentlemen,’ Anna pointed. ‘Just here.’
They looked at her queerly.
‘There’s quite enough space for several bodies, I should think. Do begin,’ she stared at them fiercely, waited until the first clump of snow had been lifted, then went back to Johannes.
They lowered the coffin just at the moment that the sun chose to disappear behind the distant peaks, leaving a pale striation of soft pinks in its wake. The tears started to stream from Anna’s eyes, thick, unwanted. She raised her face to the sunset, began to sing from Schubert’s Winterreise, her voice breaking, then growing stronger,
And when the leaf falls to the ground
Hope falls with it
I too fall to the ground
Cry, cry, on my hope’s grave
The men, gazing at her, lowered their hats. Frau Trübl began to sob. But Anna sang on, her voice rising like a shaft of pure melancholy in the cold air, evoking now Schubert’s poignant hurdy-gurdy man. Yes, she thought as she sang, a fitting portrait of the artist for a Johannes emptied of all hope.
‘There behind the village stands a hurdy-gurdy man,
and with stiff fingers he turns what he can,
barefoot on the ice, he hobbles here and there,
and his little plate remains forever bare.
No one wants to hear, no one looks at him
and the dogs growl round the old man
and he lets everything go as it will,
plays, and his hurdy gurdy is never still.’
As Anna crooned the final lines, almost to herself, the men, a little fearful now, began to pile the frozen clods of earth back onto the coffin.
Wondrous old man, shall I go with you?
Will you play your organ to my songs?
Late that evening Anna picked up her courage and rang Bettina to inform her that Leo wasn’t here. No, no, the telegram simply had to do with a burst pipe. Silly, yes. But Johannes hadn’t been available. Yes, yes he was fine.
She couldn’t bring herself to tell. Bettina would arrive. Would order her away, take over her life.
And Bettina had more pressing business. Anna could tell from the high pitch of her voice how much there was, the strain she was under. But yes, Max was mending, they would soon be off.
‘Has he said any more about Leo?’ Anna asked at last.
There was a crackle on the line which only half explained Bettina’s pause. ‘Only that he assumes he’ll be at that special school. Write to him there, write to the Director.’ She hesitated again, ‘I’ll make some discreet enquiries myself again here.’
Anna could almost see her shrug. ‘But don’t worry too much, Anna. It’s only been a few weeks. And Leo, from the sound of it, has good friends in higher places,’ she raced on. ‘It’s Johannes you should be concerned about. Don’t leave it too long.’
Anna rang off. She had left it too long. Irretrievably long.
The days passed in no particular order. She rode for hours, forcing the mare over snowy paths. Or walked, never sure of her direction, wandering vaguely through the familiar countryside. She seemed unable to focus on anything except the random flitting of memory. And on self-recrimination. No newspapers came to the house. And she shunned the radio, afraid that she might accidently come upon that ranting, hysterical voice which had blighted their lives.
But she was dutiful. She wrote again to Leo at the school. When there was no response within a week, she wrote to the Head, a cagey letter saying she hoped her son was settling well. She also penned a brief note to the one friend of Leo’s she knew of, Gerhardt Braun, addressing the letter to the engineering faculty, since she had no other address. She toyed with going to the police, but decided to wait at least until after Bettina had left. She was fearful too of the news getting out about Johannes. There would be questions, perhaps journalists. No, better simply to wait.
Sometimes, as her mind furrowed in the strata of memory, she would forget why it was that she was here in this house, in these grounds, alone. To remember, she had to grapple her way up from the depths. Then the pain would knife through her, making her dizzy so that she had to clutch at the wall or crumble into a chair, or if she was riding, flatten herself against the horse’s rippling back.
Every morning and at sunset, she went to the knoll where Johannes lay. She wasn’t certain if she spoke aloud to Johannes then, but often she heard his voice, coining sentences which so indelibly bore his inflection that she was certain he at least was speaking aloud.
He was kind, the Johannes, of those last days in Berlin, patient, mellow, without that turbulence which had characterized so much of their life together. A Johannes, she realized, who had moved beyond hope, beyond desire and despair. Beyond life. It was when she mouthed those words, that the pain clutched at her again and she found herself on the ground, pounding his icy grave.
If mourning took her into depths, sometimes dark, sometimes glowing like a rich seam of gold, the waiting was poised at its opposite extreme, a steel grey cloud which hovered above her, just out of her reach. It was always there, shadowing her movements, unseen but present, a dull burden which light couldn’t scatter until her son appeared. Between these two poles, there was no life she could call her own.
One day when an icy drizzle fell from the skies and she had come home from her riding drenched, she found that her vague wandering through the house had brought her to the door of Johannes’s room. She hadn’t gone in here since that moment before his burial when she had bundled herself in his sweater. She was still wearing it. Now, impelled by a reason she couldn’t name, she pushed open the door.
Nothing had been touched in the room. She had forbidden Frau Trübl to enter it. The pile of books heaped on the mahogany desk in the far corner, the gold tipped pen, the paperweight she had given him which burst into a dazzle of autumn foliage when one shook it, were all still there under a thin film of dust. The narrow bed with its midnight blue spread was as smooth as if it had just been made. Only the drawer which she had pulled open and left so, provided a discordant note.
Her visits to this room had always been infrequent. It had been Johannes’s private space, and now as she broached the threshold, she felt a sudden sense of trepidation. What if she should encounter a different Johannes here, one she had never met. For she knew as she crossed the space to the desk that she was about to do something she had never done.
Between two leather book ends fashioned into wolf’s heads stood a row of black bound diaries. She had never, not in her worst moments with Johannes, thought of invading these. Now with a trembling hand, she pulled one out and opened it at random.
An undated page filled
with swift penciled script, difficult to decipher. The war.
Anna read, began to hear the noise, the blast of mines, the din of artillery. She read until the light failed and then read some more, until her sight grew bleary and her head sank onto the desk. The reading merged with her dreams, invading her so that when she woke with a start she no longer knew whether she was Johannes or herself and she crept into his bed with the war still ringing in her ears.
The reading began to fill her days and her nights. It was an activity which kept the waiting for Leo at bay. She began again at the beginning, decided to ration herself, not wanting to reach the end. A Johannes she had only half understood rose out of the dense pages, a Johannes who loathed his father, a Johannes who was filled with rage and social hopes, a Johannes with Bettina, with other women, a Johannes who locked himself in his studio, who despaired, who lived at the perilous edge of existence, who loved, who cared.
These various Johannes’s known and unknown accompanied her on walks, spoke to her as she forced herself to eat, slept beside her. Sometimes she hated him, hated the monstrous excess of him, the remorseless anguish. Then she would come across a passage where he talked in such radiant terms about a difficulty with a particular picture, or described a burst of crocuses in Spring, that she would want to melt into his arms. It was when he wrote about her, that the tears filled her eyes and she began to cry unstoppably. He hailed her as a revolutionary, a supremely confident being, a pagan sensualist who knew nothing of the hypocritical morality of her time. That was early on. Later, he grew tender and irate by terms, invoking her limitless generosity, chastizing her for mothering the man, rather than the child.
She read the diaries through three times from beginning to end and certain passages over and over until she knew them by heart, even the quotations from Nietzsche. It was in the course of the third reading that she was suddenly filled with a sense that Johannes in his death as in his life belonged not only to her but to the world, perhaps no longer a world that was, but one that might be again.
Her link with him had always been so intimate, so passionate; she herself had so little of a public sense, that she had somehow forgotten this, or at least left it to one side. Indeed, somewhere in the diaries, he had noted it about her, written that Anna had the gift of simply being, being so intensely, that she had no need of achieving anything, doing anything. He had ascribed this to her magic, one of the reasons he loved her.
But now Anna felt it as a failing. A blistering stupidity. Had she had more of a public sense, she would have been more attuned to what was happening to Johannes in these last years, been more aware of the implications of the Nazi regime for him. Would perhaps have been able to prevent his suicide.
It was with this in mind that she finally ventured away from the precincts of Seehafen to go to Munich. Johannes had told her not to bother with the studio, but she now knew that she must. The scene he had described in his diary was horrific. Nonetheless something must remain of his work there to be salvaged.
She set out on a murky day when sky and earth merged into one indistinguishable shade of grey. Yet the streets of the city seemed more crowded and prosperous than ever. There were only those terrible signs in the shop windows to remind one: ‘Jews not admitted.’ Like the signs there had once been about dogs, only larger. Anna shuddered, picked her way through traffic, pausing, without quite realising that she was doing so, to scan the faces of the men in uniform, so many of them.
It was because of an idea which had taken hold of her that week, in the wake of the letter she had received telling her that Leo Adler had not appeared at the Institute. The letter had been suspicious, full of what she read as veiled threats as if she, herself, were responsible for Leo’s non-attendance.
She had hastened to reply to say that there had been a misunderstanding and made light of the whole thing. It had then occurred to her that if Leo had not gone to the school, he might have lied about his age and enlisted in one of the numerous branches of Hitler’s police. So now she skimmed those passing youthful faces. They were so bland, so expressionless beneath their caps, and yet so arrogant, as if there were nothing more natural than to kick up one’s heels and march through city streets in brisk bands, like so many segments of a single machine powered from a distant source..
She parked the car around the corner from the studio, and made her way a little tremulously through the courtyard, knocked at the caretaker’s door.
‘Frau Bahr,’ old Hans peered round the edge of the door and glanced over her shoulder surreptitiously, before beckoning her in. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ his expression belied his words. ‘I was beginning to worry…,’ he left the sentence unfinished.
‘Here I am, Hans,’ Anna tried to look reassuring.
The room was stuffy, crowded. The old man shuffled over to a table and unearthed a pile of envelopes which he handed to her. ‘I had the apartment cleaned, best I could,’ he peered at her, then shrugged dolefully. ‘Rotten mess it was.’
‘Thank you, Hans,’ Anna reached into her purse, ‘It must have cost.’
‘You’re very kind, Frau Bahr, very kind,’ he stared at her for a moment, then lowered his voice. ‘Herr Bahr told me to keep whatever could be rescued. I’d really rather you took it away,’ he looked furtively out of the small window as if afraid that someone might be spying in. ‘You see..’
‘Of course, Hans. I’ve brought the car.’
‘Good, good,’ he tweaked his ear cannily, came closer to her. It’s all downstairs,’ he pointed towards the cellar, ‘wrapped in old sheets. I’ll get Gunter from next door to give us a hand. Will you wait here?’
‘I’ll go up for a moment first,’ Anna tried to keep her voice calm.
The old man’s eyes narrowed, ‘I wouldn’t Frau Bahr. Your husband didn’t ask me to repaint and… well, the walls…’
‘I want to see,’ Anna murmured.
He hedged, lowered his voice, ‘I don’t know if Herr Bahr mentioned it to you. There’s a woman staying. Frau Feldman.’
Anna stiffened. Not that. She had been certain Johannes had stopped all that in these last years. But now, there it was. Another woman. Like Bruno, she suddenly thought, like that woman, Lotte at his funeral, materializing only at his death.
Old Hans was rambling on, nervously. ‘She came with a note from Herr Bahr. Only a few days, he said. But she’s still here. I don’t have the heart to ask her to leave,’ he shrugged. ‘Perhaps, if you don’t want her there…’
Anna strode past him and made her way slowly up the stairs.
The swastika on the door gave her pause, even though Johannes’s diary had prepared her for it. Its spokes began to swirl before her eyes, like those of a giant threshing machine obliterating everything in its path.
She knocked at the door. No answer. After a further knock and wait, Anna turned her key in the lock and walked softly through the corridor. The scrawls on the white walls followed her like raucous obscenities. She stopped at the door of the large studio and looked round. Bare of Johannes’s work, it had a kind of ghostly emptiness. On the long table, the vials of powder and empty jars, the brushes, were neatly ranged - as they had never been. She picked up one of the brushes, fingered it, and then thrust it down again. No, she wouldn’t take it. She would leave everything as it was. It was only the work that mattered.
But where was this Frau Feldman? Anna shivered. Perhaps she should steal away now without confronting her. No. She wanted to see her. Wanted to with the same avidity as she had wanted to read Johannes’s diaries. His last woman. Apart from her. Perhaps she knew something more about those final days. It was madness that jealousy could still prick her like this. Jealousy over a dead man, compounded with anger.
Anna knocked firmly at the door of the bedroom and then thrust it open.
A dark figure sat by the table beside the window.
‘Frau Feldman,’ Anna said firmly.
The woman turned. Wispy grey hair round a lined frightened face
.
‘Frau Feldman,’ Anna said more softly, gazing into a creased face that couldn’t belong to a mistress. ‘I’m Anna Bahr.’
Visible relief spread over the woman’s strained features. ‘Frau Bahr,’ she leapt up, shook Anna’s hand. ‘I’m so grateful to you, so grateful to Herr Bahr. ‘I hope I haven’t outstayed my welcome. It’s just that I’ve nowhere to go,’ her eyes filled with tears.
Anna’s expression spoke her query.
‘Herr Bahr hasn’t told you?’ The woman frowned. ‘What a shock for you to find me here then. But of course, he wouldn’t want to bother your pretty head with such things.’
‘Tell me,’ Anna said in a low voice.
The woman scrutinized her, seemed to reach a decision.’The Gestapo have taken my son, my Heinzl, to one of their camps,’ she glanced out the window, her face grim as if she could see what her son was being subjected to. ‘They’ve taken the house, as well,’ she turned back to Anna. ‘Herr Bahr, your husband, was the only Gentile I felt I could turn to. You know Heinzl was his friend, wrote about him, bought several of his paintings.’ She passed her hand nervously through her hair, ‘I don’t know when he’ll come back,’ a little sob escaped her, then restraining herself, she murmured, ‘Please say to Herr Bahr that I hope he won’t mind my staying on a little longer. Until I hear something,’ she sank back into the chair, her face utterly devoid of hope.
‘Of course, you must stay here, as long as you like.’ With an impulsive gesture, Anna suddenly reached for Frau Feldman’s hand and squeezed it. Another woman, like herself, sitting by the window, waiting for her son. ‘Have you enough money? Food?’ Anna murmured, noting how thin the woman looked.
Frau Feldman turned away in confusion, ‘I paid this man, a large sum, to get news for me. To…’ she shrugged. ‘I don’t need much.’
‘No,’ Anna mumbled. ‘But I’ll see that Hans brings you some supplies. To save you shopping,’ she was suddenly embarrassed.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ the woman looked up at her gratefully. ‘And please thank, Herr Bahr. It was so kind of him. I didn’t know where to turn.’
Dreams of Innocence Page 48
