Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  She didn’t do so until late that evening. It had been a long busy day, too full and now she sat on the sofa, her feet tucked under her, a glass of milk at her side, the package from Adam on her lap. She read the letter once more, pausing on the first sentence. Her throat felt constricted.

  No, love was no longer in question. How could it be after the way she had behaved?

  She opened the folder quickly, was astonished to find a text in German rather than the English she had expected. The entries were sporadically dated.

  Helena read, wonder and horror seizing her by turn. It was, she realized, the elusive link she had been looking for.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Berlin - January 1985.

  I am here. Only half a city, but the half is a half too much. Like that half of myself.

  I have known and not known for so long that the not-knowing merged with the knowing. I am the same man and have become another man who has forgotten the sameness. And not forgotten. For now that I am here in this clime as familiar and as foreign as the dreamscapes of She, the language springs to my lips without my bidding.

  Why am I here? She sent me here. That woman. She-who-must-be-obeyed. We used to call Bettina that secretly. That German woman in Oslo reminded me of her. She had her hectoring, implacable certitude. The-voice-that-must-be-obeyed.

  It began to come back then, random heavings of scenes long buried. The earth churning. As if the plateau of my life were a volcano newly awakened.

  My life. Has it been my life? Or a figment in the dreams of that youth who vanished beyond the gates of the city?

  Berlin - January

  There was a boy in the woods near the house today. A slim blond youth in a brown cap. He had a bow and arrow in his hands. I followed him at a distance. As if I had been following myself.

  The woods have grown smaller. The city has eaten them, tree by tree, a hungry careless beast that knows no predator.

  The boy led me to the spot where we found the body. An ugly woman gashed out of life. I was happy that day: she was frightened. I could see she was frightened, as if her own death confronted her in that whore’s body. My mother was a whore who respected nothing. She only knew how to seduce and how to laugh.

  Berlin - January

  Did I write those words? No. It was him. I could feel him inside me churning with hatred and furious indignation. Yet he was good. When he was with the group he was good.

  Berlin - January

  The school is still there, its bulk solid despite bombs. Perhaps they rebuilt it. I look into its windows and see myself looking out. I am dreaming. I dream of the open air, the whistle of the wind through trees. I am happy. Soon I will be with the group.

  The group is a body composed of all of us. It doesn’t matter if the names change. We melt into one another. We have no boundaries. Our arms are interlinked like the branches of a single tree and we gaze up into the stars. The stars are us. The sky is us. The earth is us. We have no boundaries.

  I lived for the group. My being merged with it. Merged with the leader who was all of us, but better. Like the father I never had. My mother robbed me of my father. She killed him. I heard her say so once. She laughed one of her little laughs when she said it. But perhaps he wasn’t my father. That was why she laughed.

  In the group there are no guilts. No niggling individual fears. It cleanses us, makes us strong, bold, unafraid. The group does not listen to their reasons. Without the group I was at their mercy.

  Berlin - January

  She-who-must-be-obeyed never let me dream. Words and reasons poured out of her. Her mouth was like a beak endlessly pecking, churning up the earth, tearing at any flesh it contained, destroying.

  Berlin - January

  A boy at school sniggered and called the Führer, he-who-must-be-obeyed. We beat him up, left him, his nose-bloodied, in a dark alley. We were cleansed, proud.

  Laughter, Gerhardt once said, is permitted to the few, not the many.

  Berlin - January

  Why am I here in this dusty hotel overlooking a dingy blind alley?

  A tiny scar on a man’s cheek, a second Gerhardt. A crack which opened into a chasm.

  And those sentences: ‘The leader must be able to be alone and must have the courage to go his own way. But if he doesn’t know himself, how is he to lead others? Every movement culminates organically in a leader, who embodies in his whole being the meaning and purpose of the popular movement.’

  Over there I was a leader.

  But do I know myself? I am learning.

  Berlin - January

  A gaggle of schoolgirls were skating in the park today, their giggles cluttering the air, taxing the snow’s quiet.

  That summer our group joined with a girls’ group. We were no longer one, but at odds, each of us distinct in his carapace. One of them was sent to gather firewood with me. She chattered and giggled continuously. When we reached the riverbank, she caught me by the shoulders and brazenly stated, ‘Give us a kiss, then.’ She foisted her fat lips on mine before I could escape. Then she ran. If she hadn’t run I might have hit her as I wanted to hit my mother each time she smothered me in her embrace.

  Women cannot be led. They welter in their secrets, disturb, provoke. And they talk when they have nothing to say.

  That summer, one of the boys quoted the custom of the Amahaggers, of killing off the old women in the tribe as an example to the younger ones. Men without women are free, he said.

  Berlin - January

  I am a hateful old man. And hate still lives inside me. I hadn’t realised it still churned. This city of my childhood brings it back.

  Berlin - January

  I have stumbled on the clearing at the edge of the city. It was waiting for me.

  It is still bounded by its trees, the single lopped oak at its centre. The city has not eaten it. They have put a picnic table at its edge.

  Now I know why I am here.

  The memory took me by surprise. So strong that I could smell the excitement and the fear. It bent me over double. I had to lie flat in the snow to get my breath back. But still it almost failed to come. I had to grab it by the throat and force it.

  I had a brother once. A cousin technically, but a brother in fact. I bear his name. Max. I do not know by what act it has come to me.

  In spirit and body, he was the incarnation of She-who-must-be-obeyed. Her creature. His father was nowhere in him. The father was kind to me. His was the kindness of the weak.

  It was a few nights after Max had taken me to that den, a mire of filthy words, filthy thoughts, a democracy of filthy bodies. He wanted to cover me with that filth, pull me down into the polluted pit in which he lived. I loathed him. Germany would have become that vile pit, but for the strength of a few.

  Can I still think that? History has a way of putting the lie to experience.

  Gerhardt had rounded up the others, the nearest and dearest, four of us in all. We were to avenge my honour. Cleanse the nation of filth.

  He - my cousin, my brother - was already known to them, as were various members of his cancerous cell. A Communist, a traitor against the nation, a swine, a believer in equality and license. A degenerate.

  The words ring hollow now. At the time they were fuelled by passionate vision.

  We waited for him to emerge from the arms of his co-conspirators. The narrow street was empty, dark. We threw a blanket over his head and dragged him into the waiting car. We bludgeoned him when he struggled. He didn’t struggle for long.

  Gerhardt drove, his profile silver in the moonlight. He whistled from Siegfried. We didn’t speak. We knew our parts. We were engaged on a heroic mission.

  After the walk through the dark woods, the clearing emerged white, glistening, the snow untouched. We had our black hooded masks on then. We undressed Max, left him with only his shirt and pants, tied him to the trunk of the tree. The cord was thick around his middle. We lit two torches, placed them erect in the ground. The trial was set to begin.
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  Gerhardt carried out the interrogation, his voice strong amidst the silence of the stars. Did he believe in equality or blood? Was the Führer equal to Jew scum? Was he selling the proud German nation to the Slav hordes?

  Max refused to answer. At each refusal, we jabbed and prodded him, each in turn, with our fists, our boots. The thuds rang through the night air like birds falling to the ground after a pigeon shoot. When my first kick landed in his groin and I felt his flesh give, I was filled with a frenzied excitement. That one was for Bettina, I thought, and with each subsequent punch or kick I vented my daily humiliations in that house where everything was soft and sickly except the shotgun verbiage of their reason.

  Max had begun to cry out, ‘Nazi swine, Nazi swine’ over and over again like a chant. The blood was pouring from him. His hands flailed weakly. The shouts incited us. We ceased to wait for Gerhardt’s questions. We simply hit and kicked randomly, until Gerhardt stopped us.

  In the silence filled only with the harshness of our breath, he took one of the torches and flourished it over Max’s body, brought it to rest inches from his face.

  ‘Admit your crimes. Repent of your sins,’ he said in a low voice.

  Max said nothing.

  Gerhardt seared his shirt, brought the torch closer to his face.

  A single word burst upon the stillness, reverberated through the trees in a dizzying circle. My name. ‘Leeeeeoooo.’ Max was looking straight at me. His eyes dark, accusing. Then his head dropped onto his chest as if it had snapped, his body sagged.

  I don’t know why, but my stomach started to heave. I was retching. I ran, ran to the echo of my name, ran from the clearing, ran and ran until I could run no more and then I continued running. I ran from the knowledge. I had murdered my brother. The woods were aflame. Each tree bore his charred body.

  I ran until there were no more trees and no more bodies. I ran until there was only a numb blankness.

  Berlin - January

  I was seventeen-years-old and I murdered my brother.

  Are murderers permitted language?

  I have not written for days.

  My mind is empty. As empty as it was then.

  I will die here.

  Bavaria - January

  The snow covers the ground. Two lines break its infinite expanse. To their side, the tracery of a bird’s progress. Nothing else.

  The snow has covered the markings. It falls thickly.

  Bavaria - February

  The church steeple is claret red. How does the frail white-capped cross at its peak withstand the wind? I am propelled by its gusts. I move through the landscape like a wraith.

  I walk. I walk without a sense of time over a world of whiteness. I walk like a pilgrim in search of the excess that was my self.

  Bavaria - February

  I have found the farm. It sprang out at me from a turn in the path on the other side of a pine strewn hill. A lowlying clapboard house with a red-tiled roof. Next to it a sloping barn. It is the farm and isn’t the farm, just as I am and am not what I was then.

  The house has freshly-painted green shutters. The facade glows, each plank in place. The rickety structure I remember has been manicured and when I steal a look through the windows, I see a re-upholstered interior. Time has given it a new pampered life. Like me. But the old structure is still there.

  When I knock, no one answers. But someone hails me from the barn, a young woman in jeans and sweater.

  The barn is now a workshop. It has a kiln and rows of pots, russet red and deep blue, sometimes overlain with painted flowers. Shelves rise from where the cows used to lie. The woman thinks I have come to buy. She and her husband, she tells me, have moved here from Berlin and set up as artisans. I mention that I used to know the place many years ago and she offers to show me round, take me on a tour of their transformations. I prefer to be on my own.

  I used to sleep in the barn. I had slept in many before, one indistinguishable from the next. The hay returned warmth to my body. There was only the hay and that prickly warmth. And the rich fetid smell of the cows. Sometimes they lowed.

  Here the woman offered more than a cup of milk, an egg, a slab of bread, in return for coins or a day’s work. Her son was in the army, her daughter had abandoned her for the city, her husband was dead. She needed a hired hand. I came cheap.

  There were cows, a few pigs and chickens. There were fences to be mended and tiles to be repaired. When the snows melted, there was earth to be turned.

  We worked side by side. She rarely spoke, was more mute than her animals, as silent as the earth we dug and as ageless, her face a mass of ruddy crevices. I worked and thought of nothing. I was moved from the barn to a tiny room in the house. It was colder here.

  I cannot remember her name. Perhaps I never knew it.

  On Sundays we went to the church with the slender steeple. I kept my eyes to the ground, slipped out before the rest of the congregation, shunned the village, escaped into the hills. I walked.

  It was on one of those walks that I came across the house. It astonished me. I had had no idea that I was so close to it. The house where I was conceived. She had told me that. My mother.

  I did once have a mother.

  Bavaria - February

  Once found the house drew me like a magnet. I returned there every Sunday, slipped through the grounds unseen. The snows had gone by then and the earth squelched beneath my feet.

  One day I saw her by the water’s edge, a tiny figure, smaller than I remembered her. She was digging, planting flowers in a neat rectangle. For a moment, I had the eerie sense that the rectangle was a grave.

  She turned and seemed to look straight at me. I held my breath. She was close enough for me to see the colour of her eyes: tawny. Deep and still, like an animal’s. Like my own.

  Bavaria - February

  One night, after the silent evening meal of thick soup and bread we now took together, my peasant woman stood when I did and reached for my hand. Her touch was dry, gritty as crumbled earth on a hot summer day. She led me to her room. It was dark, a cave with shadowy outcroppings beneath the eaves. The only light was the tallow candle she carried. She placed it on the window ledge, untied her apron, then let her thick skirt fall to the floor and stepped out of her clogs.

  I wanted to bolt, but it was as if something had nailed me to the spot. She lifted the heavy eiderdown on the bed, then looked at me. For the first time I noticed that her eyes were a watery blue. She gestured me towards her and when I didn’t move, she smiled so that I could see the gaps between her teeth. She came towards me, swiftly unbuttoned my trousers, pulled me towards the bed, down on top of her on that crackling mattress.

  But for her hands she could have been part of that mattress. Her hands did something to my buttocks, to my penis, so that it arched and I found myself inside her, her crinkled, matted hair against the skin of my groin. She smelt of onions. I remember nothing else, except thinking that I was dying and was grateful for the death.

  I had never been with a woman before. But I had seen them at it, seen my mother and that man who was not my father. It came back to me in those weeks as it comes back to me now.

  My mother was on top of him, writhing, her blonde mane covering his chest. He was moaning, crying out. Good, I thought, she’s killing him. His eyes opened and he looked at me with the stony gaze of a statue. I wanted to laugh.

  But the next day, he was still there.

  Coupling is a little murder carried out by women against men. They take you and they spew you out as children.

  I wanted to die to merge finally and fully with the elements of which she was one. I went back to her whenever she signalled, but the final death refused to come.

  The big murders are left to men.

  Bavaria - February

  In America I became a father without recourse to women. I reincarnated myself in my sons, replicated myself in the boys who came to me, clean, strong, their minds avid for the filling. Our only mother was mothe
r earth. I taught them how to husband her, how to respect her riches. I achieved generation. They were part of me, their leader, their teacher, their father, and I part of them, my disciples, my sons. Women were extraneous, unnecessary.

  Is this not a suitable dream for a green Faust?

  The laughter tears at me.

  I had my Helena, too, saved from the waters. Pure as ice. Almost a boy. She knew how to listen, how to be silent for all her beauty. It seemed to me that I could replicate myself in a woman. The ultimate feat.

  Bavaria - February

  I dared to confront the house with the twin domes today. Seehafen. My mother’s house.

  Except in patches, the grounds are overgrown. I wanted to get a scythe, a spade, restore their order. But there is someone living in the house. I could see that through the windows. I could also see the paintings. Those hideous paintings which make a mockery of man and nature, executed by her husband.

  A man caught me looking through the windows. He was friendly enough. I told him I was a devotee of Johannes Bahr’s work. He showed me round.

  Bavaria - February

  I have not been able to write for days. When today, I looked back over my last entries, I couldn’t remember the act of penning them. Pages of detail to keep the presence of death at bay. Minute descriptions of the house, the terrain, in order to avoid the issue. All in English.

  I had a sudden desire to send those pages to Helena. I have done so. It is strange how she seems clearer to me than all those others from my afterlife. Perhaps it is because I have been circling round a woman, so like and yet so unlike her. My mother. Today I must confront her.

  The apples were already beginning to cluster like nuts on the branches when my peasant woman tersely announced that her son was about to return. I was glad. Those trysts under the eiderdown were beginning to disgust me. The small deaths had become harder to achieve. Her smell engulfed me for days, even after I had immersed myself in the stream’s icy water.

  I had no clear idea where I was going. But it didn’t seem to matter. The journeying was all. She gave me a big round loaf and a hunk of cheese wrapped in a cloth. She said ‘Grüss Gott, Max’. I still don’t remember ever telling her that was my name. Perhaps she read it on my lips one night when I was dying.