Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Johannes is dead, Frau Feldman.’ Anna didn’t know why she chose to say it now, out loud for the first time. And to a complete stranger. But it was said, and like a secret made public, it brought a flush to her cheeks, and instantly too, a rush of tears.

  ‘Oh my poor dear,’ the woman’s frail arms were round her, ‘my poor, poor dear. But how? It’s so sudden. Why I saw him only…’ she stopped herself, as if she had suddenly understood. ‘Terrible times,’ she murmured. ‘Such terrible times.’

  Anna dabbed at her eyes, nodded. ‘If you need anything, Frau Feldman…’ she scribbled the Seehafen number on a slip of paper. ‘I must go now. The men will be waiting for me downstairs. I wanted to gather together Johannes’s work.’

  The old woman nodded. ‘Take care of yourself, my dear.’ Watery old eyes studied her for a moment, ‘And tell your children what a good man Herr Bahr was, a great man. Don’t let those Nazis get you down,’ she whispered the last.

  Draped in greying sheets, Johannes’s canvases stood like tattered ghosts by the gates of the courtyard. There weren’t many. His letter to her had warned her of that. But it was something. She let the men bundle the canvases into the car, put the sheaves of drawings on the front seat. In the midst of the loading, a uniformed band turned into the street. Anna felt the sweat break out on her brow. For the first time since the Nazi’s had come into power, she tasted the meaning of fear. She held herself rigidly still, saw the look of panic in old Hans’s eyes.

  But the men weren’t interested in them. They marched past the car, halted a little way up the street and pounded on a door. She saw it open an inch, saw them force their way in, heard a burst of voices, a scream. A hot rage rose in her. She wanted to lash out, hit at them, anything to stop the callous brutality of that invasion.

  ‘Go now,’ Frau Bahr, ‘while they’re busy,’ old Hans was tugging at her sleeve. ‘Quickly, quickly.’

  For a moment, Anna felt she couldn’t move. Then, as she took in Hans’s frightened face, she forced herself into action, swiftly thanked him and manoeuvred her way out of the street. She realised as she reached the city gates that she never wanted to return here again.

  It was enough, Johannes had said. Bettina, she remembered, had said it too. Now, as frail old Frau Feldman’s face flitted before her eyes and counterposed itself with the bland unseeing features of the young uniformed men, she shuddered grimly and understood in her bones what they had meant.

  Yet Leo was probably amongst those men. Her son. An executioner. Somehow, she must try to communicate to him the hideous enormity of what he was engaged in, make him see.

  The next day, with a sense that she was undertaking another step in a protracted rite, Anna made it her business to find an assortment of rubber sheeting, the kind the farmers sometimes used to protect their haystacks from storms. These to hand, she spent the next week gathering together Johannes’s paintings, and sometimes with Herr Trübl’s grumbling help, carrying them down to the cellar. The walls glared at her in their new bareness. The conservatory, which had served as his second studio became a barren shell, only the mural he had painted of her so long ago, still there to bear witness to his presence.

  As she covered the huddled canvases with the sheeting in the dark cellar, the figures seemed to leap out at her, moan, refuse her stifling of them. ‘For the future,’ she said out loud, almost as if they could hear her, ‘the future’. The words redounded emptily amongst the columns.

  The task done, there was one more she had set herself. She wanted to erect a stone to mark Johannes’s grave. Something which spoke of him, something of which he might have approved, but when she scoured the local stonemasons, nothing seemed appropriate. The matter preoccupied her, she knew, beyond its real importance, as if it were freighted with emotions she refused to confront.

  Then one day, as she was leading her mare along a precipitous path which bordered a stream, she saw it. There, jutting from the racing waters, stood a dark, jagged stone, not too tall, but its rugged jet surface, like an unhewn obelisk. It was perfect. But how to excavate it from the stream? She would need help, two men with picks, perhaps three, a sledge to drag it home with. She couldn’t rest until it was done.

  But the weather proved inclement. Driving sleet, then snow, hindered her efforts for the next days, alongside Herr Trübl’s insistence that her plan was out of the question. Anna waited, unable to think of anything else, possible inscriptions going round and round in her mind and flurrying through her dreams in a bizarre series of associations about Johannes, about his father, about her son, about Germany. The proverbial ‘ein Volk der Dichter und Denker’ - a people of poets and thinkers - catapulted into ‘Richter und Henker’ - judges and executioners, so that Johannes, the artist, the thinker emerged as both son and father of the judge and executioner.

  It was while she was concentrating intently on the matter of the stone, that the letter arrived. One stiff sheet of paper, bearing an unknown address.

  Dear Frau Bahr,

  I am afraid to say that I have not seen Leo for some weeks. And I, too, have begun to feel concern over this. Should you hear from him before I do, please do ask him to contact me. I have a matter of some urgency to convey to him.

  Yours with best German greetings,

  Heil Hitler

  Gerhardt Braun.

  Anna’s letter had evidently taken some time to reach Gerhardt Braun. And his response gave her pause. It spoke to her of a Leo about whom she knew nothing, of a young man who had urgent matters to attend to beyond her knowledge. Of a young man who could say ‘Heil Hitler’ with no second thoughts.

  She suddenly remembered the passage about Leo in Johannes’s diary. She had avoided thinking about it, had sped over it in her reading. But now it all came back, Johannes’s shock at seeing those judging young eyes directed at him in his studio. Eyes which seemed to him to bear the accusing weight of the entire new Germany, with its search for a eugenic purity, its blind intolerance, its murderous suspicion of anything which deviated from that simple-minded ideal of blue-eyed strength - as if human beings were so many plants to be bred to achieve the most potent strain, the weaker varieties or those bearing exotic flowers, to be trodden underfoot.

  And what, Johannes had reflected, if he had had a son? Would he, too, have judged him with that eugenic executioner’s bluntness? What, indeed, if this young man with the pure deadly gaze were in fact his son, whatever Anna thought? Which meant he had two sons, both of whom had been taken from him with his passive acquiescence. Cain and Abel. No, the passage finished, this was the kind of thinking that led only to madness.

  She was sitting in the conservatory when these thoughts besieged her and suddenly she started to cry again. She had been dry-eyed for days, all her energies concentrated on the business of the stone. And now the tears flowed with an added impetus. She looked up at the mural. Through her tears it had the luminosity it had born the day Johannes had painted it. Eve in her garden a day before the fall.

  And the fall had come so quickly. She shivered as she saw Bruno before her. Bruno in a rage, bounding savagely into her room. Bruno thinking only of Johannes, his mind fixed on her betrayal. The scene of Leo’s conception, she had somehow assumed. A conception in which Johannes had been a full if not physical participant. Or what if it were the other way around and Leo had been conceived in the following days, Bruno the shadowy third presence, Johannes the father. As it must have been for Bettina with Max.

  Anna’s thoughts whirled. Perhaps she had stolen his son from Johannes, betrayed him. And then Leo had tried to convince himself that Johannes was his father, had wanted to excise the Jew, Bruno, at all costs.

  Suddenly Anna started to laugh shrilly. A male madness. What did it matter at all that small physical moment in a history which was compounded of so many days, so many other facts. Yet Leo, she knew, felt his very life depended on it. She remembered his face at that Christmas Eve dinner, when she had said to him quietly, ‘But your father was a Jew.’<
br />
  Yes, he felt his life depended on it. And it was probably because of that that he had never turned up at his school. The lunacy of the times they lived in. The eugenic consciousness, as Johannes called it. Blood purity raised to a religion. She would have to explain to Leo when he came back how mad, how unimportant it all was.

  When he came back. He had to come back. She had been so remiss, so timid in her guilt, but now she would make up for it.

  Anna slept. Lay down on the divan in the conservatory and let sleep overcome her. In it, time moved backwards and she was hurled through years to that summer during the war when Johannes had appeared as if by magic on the grassy knoll.

  When she woke a mellow light streamed through the great glass panes of the conservatory. In the distance, she heard the chirrup of a birds. She opened the wide doors.

  There was a breath of spring in the air. She could almost feel a slight stirring in the earth. It came to her with a superstitious certainty born of the snarl of her dreams that he would come now. Now that the earth was stirring, Leo would make a sign. Would come. Like Johannes had come. Suddenly. To take her by surprise. But to be taken by surprise, she had to give up her waiting.

  There would be the grounds to tend to soon, but it was an activity which left her mind too free to wait and to envisage disaster. She would have to find something else. Anna knelt to touch the earth. It was wet, muddy, but soft. Today, at last today, they could try to dislodge the stone from the stream bed. Then she would inscribe it herself, chisel out each letter with care, a lover’s monument to Johannes, to mark his place, their place. And then? She blotted out her thoughts and raced to find Herr Trübl.

  The stone was duly lifted and brought home, not without difficulty. Anna began to practice her chiselling, hammering out the simple epitaph she had finally decided on - Johannes Bahr. Artist Dreamer 1888-1935 - in a variety of scripts on a variety of stones.

  The task was harder than she had supposed, the rocks chipping differently, depending on their type. When at last she thought she was proficient enough to begin, a letter arrived from Bettina, a long letter, not those short notes she had sent from the many stopping places in their trajectory. She read it avidly, but as she read, she was overwhelmed by the sense of the distance between them. An ocean of unspoken things.

  They had at last stopped their travels, Bettina announced. At the furthest edge of the world from Germany: California. Klaus had gone ahead. He had fallen in love with the landscape, the vegetation, and assured them that it was a better stopping place than New York, though she herself, had a preference for the first. Never mind. They had arrived. And there was a family consensus that they now wanted none of their things. She could sell all that weighty furniture which smelled of Germany. Use the money for her and Johannes and Leo’s journey. And if there was sufficient, for two little Jewish girls - Bettina gave names and addresses. They could do any sums that needed doing when they were all in America together.

  She couldn’t say that things were going to be easy for them in America, but the country was full of marvels. And there were almost no men in uniform. That made up for a great deal. She was certain that Anna and Johannes would love it here, so they must hurry and join them.

  They all trusted that Leo had now been located and that Anna had convinced him of the necessity of a move. She, herself, had left him a letter in the Berlin house to that effect, which she hoped had gone some way towards this. If by any chance, he had still not appeared, she suggested that Anna continue to stay clear of the police, since any interest in their affairs from official quarters might make departure more difficult, particularly for Johannes. He could hardly be in any better odour with the authorities, given their latest shameful attack on the arts.

  There was only one thing Klaus wanted from Germany. His books on plants and flowers. They had been left in Seehafen. If things hadn’t been moved round too much, she would find them on the right wall of the library on the middle shelves. As for the rest, they only awaited a telegram signalling their date of arrival.

  Anna gazed out the window and stifled an involuntary sob.

  There would be no arrival for Johannes in America. There was no Johannes at all except for the phantom who traversed her memories and dreams. As for her, everything depended on Leo. Without him, she too was a phantom with only the past to roam in.

  Bettina’s mention of the police in conjunction with Johannes, reawakened Anna’s sense that there was now really no need to avoid the authorities. Yes, that would be the right thing. To go to Berlin, sort out Bettina’s affairs, take care of the children she had mentioned, and then alert the Berlin police. She could do so in the least heated manner: explain that there had been a family disagreement, make light of it, but nonetheless display her maternal worry over the whereabouts of her son.

  The decision made, Anna forced herself into activity. The library first. Klaus’s books. She would post them from Munich.

  It didn’t take her long to find them. Five untitled folio size volumes bound in thick maroon leather, each creamy page bearing careful drawings. Klaus’s drawings, she suddenly realised. How odd that no one had ever drawn her attention to their existence.

  She lingered over them now, entranced by their beauty, the delicate lines and curls of stamens and pistils, the filigree of petals, flowers she knew and others she had never seen. In a strange way these creamy pages reminded her of Johannes’s diaries. An intensity emanated from them, a sense of private musing.

  She sighed as she lifted the last volume from the shelf and set it down beside the others on the desk. But there were no drawings here. How strange, Anna thought, to open a bound book and find nothing, simply an expanse of untouched pages, their very blankness somehow calling out for markings.

  Then, on the top of what should have been the first page she discerned a few marks, penciled in the lightest hand and then seemingly erased. She switched on the reading lamp. There was a date, 1913, and then some words: ‘Male and female exist in the plant world. But do they ever exhibit a sense of sexual property? Bettina…’ The rest was unclear, no matter how near to the light she lifted the volume.

  Pondering the words, Anna closed the tome. With an indecisive gesture, she first placed it on top of the others, and then moved it to one side. What could Klaus possibly want with an empty book? No, it would be better to leave it here, just here. She moved it to the centre of the desk and glanced at it once more before leaving the library.

  The trip to Munich and then to Berlin passed in a haze. She had lost the aptitude for speaking to people, for negotiating the simplest situations. There had been too much time alone, communing only with her ghosts. Everything felt bizarre and at a distance, so that her voice seemed to resound too loudly when she put a simple question to the conductor, or the storage firm attendant or bank clerk. The house in Grunewald, where she had nurtured an irrepressible hope that she might find a sign of Leo, was empty: a tomb replete only with soundless whispers.

  The police headquarters which she built up enough courage to approach on her third day felt as awesome as a temple to some monstrous deity. An alien horde inhabited it. Here the greetings of ‘Heil Hitler’ had grown into a barrage, accosting her at every turn.

  When she finally found her way to the appropriate officer, it was as if she were performing in a masquerade, her quandary a badly scripted play in which her hearer thought her either deeply suspicious or mad. The few notes he took, she had the despairing sense, would lead to no action and her voiced protest only to macabre comedy. How could one say one had misplaced one’s son. Misplaced him some month’s back and only now thought to report it? What shining example of German motherhood had we here?

  After the ordeal with the police, Anna wandered randomly through the streets and averted her gaze from passers-by. She felt strangely humiliated, utterly alone. If she were to disappear now, no one to whom it mattered would register the fact for months. No, she musn’t think like that.

  If only Katarina were
still alive for her to talk to, to turn to, but she had died in childbirth, all those years back. Anna had only learned of it, weeks after the event. Left a son. A son without a mother. And now here she was, a mother without a son.

  It was when she looked up from the pavement that she saw him. Right there, on the other side of the road, his shoulders tautly square, the neck rising firm into that trim blond nape, that slightly stiff long-legged walk. She dashed across the street, oblivious of the traffic, dimly heard the screech of a car, a man’s angry shout. But it was drowned by her own.

  ‘Leo, Leo,’ she raced after him, put a staying hand on his arm. ‘Leo, at last.’

  She looked in confusion at the stranger’s face that turned to her. A glowering, hostile face with narrowed eyes. The man shook her hand forcibly off his arm.

  ‘I’m sorry. Apologies,’ Anna mumbled. ‘I thought…’

  ‘Keep your thoughts and your hands to yourself,’ the man muttered and strode away.

  She was trembling, her sudden burst of hope shattered as violently as if a hammer had been taken to a fragile crystal goblet.

  She left Berlin that evening. The notion that she couldn’t recognize her son began to obsess her. She didn’t know him, not even enough to distinguish him from a stranger. And the correlative was, that he didn’t know her, knew nothing of her. Yet here she was, her existence propelled only by the hope that he would return, that she had somehow to save him from all that he seemed independently to want.

  When she returned to Seehafen the next day and began at last to chisel away at Johannes’s tombstone, it was these thoughts which continued to preoccupy her. She was kneeling in front of the jagged rock, which had been placed in the boathouse, and she found herself addressing it. ‘Tell me what to do, Johannes, tell me.’ But her words provoked no response. Only the chip and scrape of steel on stone was to be heard, and she laughed at her own anguished plea.

  That night, looking for a world outside the maze of her own thoughts, she crossed the threshold of the library again, this room which she had always thought too severe, too forbidding. She pulled a novel randomly from the shelves and went to sit at the desk. Klaus’s leatherbound volume was still there. She let her fingers run over the grain of the cover and then opened it to examine those erased lines once more. They still wouldn’t come clear. It was the date that was most prominent. 1913.