Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  I found myself at Seehafen. I must have wanted to say goodbye to the house. It was early morning. The sun was just rising over the peaks. Everything was still, but for the chattering of the birds.

  Sheltered by the trees, I walked across the grounds and came to the spot where I had seen my mother digging. A black stone jutted out of the earth. I saw his name there, etched in gold. Johannes Bahr.

  So he was dead. I still remember the glee that knifed through me, as if an act of divine vengeance had taken place. The stone marked the place where degeneracy had met its end.

  It was then that I heard the crackle of a twig, the light padding of feet. I crouched behind the shrubbery.

  She was wearing some kind of white shift. Her hair gleamed in the sunlight like a golden mantle. I couldn’t see her eyes, but her profile was pure as if nothing she had done had ever touched her. She bent towards the stone, embraced it. I could hear her murmur. ‘Goodbye for now, Johannes. I’ll be with you soon.’

  She turned towards the lake and gazed out at it. She was only a few metres away from me and her voice reached me, distinct, without a tremor. ‘Goodbye Leo, my little one. Forgive me.’

  I could have rushed out to her then, taken her hand. Could even have caught her shift as she waded into the water. Could have plunged in after her as she swam, reached her while she was thrashing, or even after she had gone down and the little whirlpool formed with its froth of bubbles. Could have towed her back, my arm under her chin as they had taught us.

  But I did nothing. Simply stood there watching, as if I had grown thick tangled roots. I think I called out once, ‘Mutti’ - at least my lips were arched in the shape of the sound.

  Then I was free. I ran.

  Bavaria - March

  They taught us to be strong, pitiless in the service of the nation. I was strong. I was pitiless. I was no one. Some ragged outcropping of a flinty mountain. I was a man. A hero with a stony stare. My darkness had no heart.

  I was a murderer, twice over.

  Austria - March

  I don’t know where I ran to. I can remember mountain trails and cold nights and a cave. I had never had a father, only ghosts with whom to wrestle. Now I had no mother. Like Parsifal’s, she died when I left. I was free to be reborn. When did the rebirth start? Had it already started? A rebirth from the ashes and water of a double death.

  I must have gotten to Austria. I cannot recall a border or a crossing. But I was there, on a farm again, one farm after another. And then somewhere along the line, I must have acquired papers.

  I recall a youth, my age, perhaps slightly older. We shared a barn. He was on a walking tour. He had come from Sweden. He gave me his name, his address, told me to come and visit him. He had sandy hair which fell over sea-blue eyes. Perhaps that was when the idea took hold of me.

  The lying came easily. It was no longer even a lie. I had lost my papers. I acquired new ones. No one ever questioned anything I said. I always looked straight at them, particularly when I crossed borders. I must have crossed many for the next thing I can see clearly are the long days of the North.

  I never looked up the youth who had given me his address. I worked the farms, gradually acquiring snatches of the language. Its strange music worked its way into me. But it was the silence which healed, the silence of those empty expanses. In it I was simply a pair of hands.

  When the snows came, I found work with a forest ranger, a man with a gaunt face and steely eyes. We understood each other. Words were only used when there was need.

  He taught me everything I know. He became my father. I learned to feel the land in a new way, to hear its murmurs, to shepherd its resources, to commune with its vastness. I began to see the intricate web which bound earth and stars and species.

  One day, he told me he had nothing left to teach me. I must go off to the university, study soil engineering, forestry. I could come back to him in the holidays.

  I listened, as I did to everything he said and gestured.

  When I returned for my fourth summer, he was dying. He refused medicine, hospitals. Everything, he told me, had its term. I was with him when he died. I cried then as I had never cried for the others.

  He left me his bible, his rifle, his skis, his jeep and his name. Bergmann. I took the first and the last with me to America. I lived a life in his image, austere, simple, touched by heroism. I sent my angels of purity out to rescue the planet from the ravages men like me have inflicted.

  This is the only time I have looked back.

  Bavaria - March

  What does it mean to be a man? I have no single answer. I am perhaps too old for answers.

  He was a man. The one who chose me as his son. He knew how to be alone, how to be at home in the world, how to be strong when nature demanded it, how to succumb when the end had come.

  Hitler taught us how to be men too. Men bound in a group which allowed them to transcend the confines of their small selves. Men in pursuit of an ideal, strong, single-minded, capable of cruelty. The meek do not inherit the earth, let alone the nation. Though perhaps they inherit heaven.

  But it was an excessive ideal, obsessed by obliteration. It had no respect for the fine balances which nature demands, even in its violence.

  Yet I understand again the need it filled in us: the need for service, the need for purity, the need for meaning unbounded by the meagre limits of our daily lives.

  As I write them, the words disperse before my eyes. Lies, like the flimsy veils of my life, hiding what I was unable to confront.

  A murderer in the service of nothing but my petty vengeance.

  Bavaria - March

  I am still here. The place draws me in like a vortex, its centre radiating magic. From my tiny window, I can see the sloping roof of the pines, and in the distance the glimmer of the lake where I let her die.

  What does it mean to be a woman? Since the surfeit of my childhood, I have spent so little time in their presence that I really do not know. Then they were clammering beaks, arms which smothered like waxy feathers, hot treacherous smells. My head in clouds of song and story, I escaped them. The stories sang of their ineffable purity or their traitorous sexual magnetism. I was happy to sing along, though the experience was not mine.

  Does the violence some men enact on women find its core in a sense that their own murder, their own death, lies in women’s sexual power? So the proposition becomes: their death or mine. I have only gone to women when I wanted to die. My violence was all in the past, buried with that first life.

  I have always preferred sameness, homogeneity. Difference was what separated me from the plant and animal spheres. Here I worshipped diversity. Is it that which marks me as a creature of the time and place I left behind me like an outworn mask?

  Bavaria - March

  In the village where I go for my few supplies, an old chattering woman mentioned the Eberhardt house to the shopkeeper. It is the second time I have heard the name. I have a faint recollection of writing it down. Did I send a letter to Bettina? The past is clearer to me than the present, except for the tang of the pines.

  Trust Bettina to outlive us all. She was always the strongest. I should have been born woman. Like that girl, Helena. She defended me from that latter day incarnation of the-voice-that-must-be-obeyed.

  Will I see her again? I think not.

  I have sent her some pictures to remember me by.

  Bavaria - March

  I dreamt of an apocalypse. A great flood wiping the earth clean of its parasites, leaving behind only the peaks, the highest pines.

  I walk. I read Hölderlin. I gaze out at the lake. I wait for the end.

  I will visit the house one more time. It beckons to me like a cave replete with hoary secrets.

  Bavaria - April

  I have been to the house again. The visit has rendered me wordless until now.

  All the veils have fallen from my eyes. Her fire has burnt them away. Anna’s fire. My mother’s fire. The fire of love. It has shown
me that it is I who am the chattering monkey, the shivering beast, a mere parody of a man. Nothing more.

  I am not the hero reborn from Max’s ashes, the leader battling for the regeneration of the green world, the murdering saint who engaged on a dark night of the soul and a life of atonement. Yes, yes, even if I may have had the humility not to write them down, those images have all played before me.

  But now I know. I am less than nothing: an arrogant parading youth strutting his hours on a tawdry stage, juggling with outworn images even as he and they crumble into senility.

  I read my mother’s words. Her book. She understood me better than I understood myself. She understood my visceral loathing of women. My panic. My desires. Yet, she loved. She forgave.

  Max was not murdered. Even that act of mine was a charade. Yet he never told them of my act. His silence is a greater accusation than any other.

  Max was not murdered. I am not Max. I am no one.

  To lie one has to know truths. I had none. I have none.

  It is time to make an end.

  The child will be my boatman.

  The waters will enfold me.

  I come. Mother, I come at last.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Crimson azalea clustered by the sides of the road. Beyond, the rhododendrons were a mass of colour, pinks and purples and scarlets resting on glossy greens as if there had never been a winter. The countryside had become a garden. Through the density of the foliage, the lake was invisible, a memory rather than an existing landscape.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have come. Two months had passed since she had last been here. Two long months in which her world had been transformed. She might have left it too late.

  Helena hesitated before turning the car slowly into the drive at Seehafen.

  She had written to Adam, of course. Written to thank him for sending her Max Bergmann’s journal, had added that she would like to discuss it with him one day.

  Everything else had been left unsaid. She hadn’t told him how the horror of the journal’s revelations had made her feel that the foundations on which she had constructed her life over these last years had been undermined. Neither had she told him how the very existence of the journal in Adam’s hands had finally assuaged all her suspicions about his actions. Nor had she said how it saddened her that love’s logic no longer prevailed between them.

  She hadn’t, in fact, been anything more than formally polite. Yet some small part of her had waited for the response that never came.

  The greater part had had more pressing business. How to come to terms with the fact that Max wasn’t Max? That the man she most admired had been a fascist who had set out to murder, a man whose saintly identity was a fabrication? What implications did that have for the crusade he had led and of which she had felt herself part? Did his person tarnish everything she believed in, all the principles she had always assumed they held in common? And what of her vaunted instincts?

  It was almost as if she had been seduced and betrayed. And it was Max who was the seducer, not Adam, whom she had so hastily cast in that role.

  On the pretext of a story, she had gone to spend a few days at Greenham Common. The women’s vigil at the cruise missile base seemed a suitable site for reflection. A suitable site too, for purging herself of her shame - the shame of her association with Max.

  As she marched with her placard up and down in front of the wire mesh fence and stared directly into the guards’ eyes, she wondered whether she had fallen prey to an apocalyptic mind set which turned thought to frenzy and saw disasters in everything: from cigarette smoking to industrial pollution; from the massacring of seals to cruise missiles. Was the desire to control the bad simply the desire to control?

  The state Max had once believed in had championed purity and nature, as she did. Adam had lectured her on that.

  It was one of the things that had prevented her from coming to Seehafen sooner - the thought of the contempt he must feel for her, with her overweening admiration, her near obsession with a man who was a wholesale fraud.

  Helena pulled into the drive. The chestnuts were in bloom covering the lane with a lush shade she didn’t recognize. The house was almost obscured by them and for a moment she was filled with a fear that no one would be there, a ghostly paradise abandoned by its key players, nothing remaining of them but a grave.

  She should have written to announce her arrival. She hadn’t. She had been a little afraid that he wouldn’t want to see her.

  After her sojourn at Greenham Common she had returned to London chastened, but at least still certain of that particular cause. Yet her depression didn’t lift. For the first time in her life, she found it difficult to put sentences together on a page. Her syntax unravelled before her eyes; her words sprang out at her with an opposite meaning. She was tempted to ask for leave, but she didn’t dare: the thought of not having an office to check into filled her with trepidation.

  In the midst of it all, a man whose name she didn’t recognize rang her from New York. He was a publisher. He wanted to launch a new eco-magazine. He had read her work, had heard her at Max’s memorial service. And she had been recommended to him not only by Max, but by his friend Rafael Santucci. He was coming to London and he wanted to talk to her about the magazine.

  After their second meeting, after they had talked for the length of two evenings about markets and format and content, he had offered her not simply a job, but the post of editor, an opportunity, as he put it, to think through an entirely new and radical publication.

  It was as if a window had opened on a stifling room overburdened with heavy furniture to let in a fresh breeze.

  But the room was still in disorder. Helena had asked for a little time to think it over. It was while she was thinking that she realised she had to see Adam, whatever his feelings for her. He was the only one she could talk to about Max. The journal, it now occurred to her for the first time, had as many implications for him as it did for her. After all, it was his family history.

  Then too she wanted to reread Anna’s Book so that she could get Max’s story straight.

  There was no second car in the drive and as she slammed the door of hers, Helena was suddenly filled with dismay. She really should have written or had the courage to pick up the telephone. Then in the distance she heard the distinct sound of a laugh. It was quickly followed by the sight of a little girl in jeans and sweatshirt who came dashing out of the shrubbery. She stopped short when she saw Helena.

  The flaming mass of hair was unmistakeable.

  ‘Hello,’ Helena tried to keep the quiver out of her voice. The child would soon be followed by her mother. But she bent to the girl’s height and put out her hand. ‘I’m Helena. I’m a friend of your father’s.’

  The child touched her hand hesitantly with her own grubby one. ‘I’m Janey,’ she said solemnly. Then she added with a burst of excitement. ‘We just found a hedgehog. Come and see,’ she tugged Helena along and then remembering herself put a finger to her lips and announced in a stage whisper, ‘Have to be quiet. Not to scare it.’

  ‘Okay,’ Helena murmured.

  She followed the child along a path which led to the midst of the rhododendron grove. A man in light trousers and blue shirt was standing half-hidden by glossy leaves. He turned as they approached. She would have recognized that craggy senatorial face anywhere.

  He looked at Helena with evident surprise, then pointed Janey towards the thick of the bushes. The child sprawled down on her stomach and wriggled snakelike along the ground.

  ‘It’s asleep,’ she proclaimed in a loud voice after a moment, then quickly repeated the words in a whisper.

  ‘Not for long,’ Max Peters winked at Helena.

  She peeked through the bushes, saw a small prickly form curled into a ball of non-existence.

  ‘Perhaps if we got it a bowl of milk, a few snails or caterpillars, we might tempt it into action,’ she murmured to Janey.

  ‘Okay,’ the child leapt up. �
�I’ll get the milk. You get the snails,’ she screwed her face up with evident disgust and raced off.

  ‘Afternoon’s work cut out for you,’ Max Peters laughed, then stretched his hand out, ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t said hello.’

  Helena smiled, ‘You probably don’t remember, but we’ve met before, Mr. Peters.’

  ‘I do, now that you mention it. Ms Latimer, isn’t it?’

  ‘Helena, please.’

  ‘I trust you haven’t come all this way to interview me, Helena?’ He gave her a sardonic glance.

  Helena flushed despite herself. ‘No, no. I had hoped to find your son.’

  ‘So the two of you have met now?’

  The flush wouldn’t go away. But she let the question pass. ‘Is he here?’

  ‘No.’ Max Peters was studying her.

  ‘Oh, I’m…’

  ‘But he should be soon.’

  ‘Is it alright to wait?’ Helena murmured.

  ‘I can’t imagine how you’d get away with anything else,’ he gestured down the path towards an encumbered Janey. She was balancing a carton of milk in one hand and a bucket in the other.

  ‘Got everything,’ she said proudly, ‘and a bucket for the crawlies.’

  ‘Let’s get to work then,’ Helena grinned.

  It was while they were foraging in flowerbeds for snails, that Janey suddenly leapt up and dashed away.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, I didn’t hear you. We found a hedgehog.’

  Helena turned and saw Adam lifting the little girl off the ground, throwing her up in the air, holding her close. She stood up, feeling uncomfortably like an intruder on an intimate scene, brushed off her dress.

  ‘Not quite the garment for a snail chase,’ Adam was staring at her.

  ‘Hello, Adam.’

  ‘But we’ve collected lots, Dad,’ Janey wriggled out of her father’s arms, ‘Look,’ she thrust the bucket at him.