The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  The pension was amiably noisy. It was inhabited by very diverse people. There were two very large men with huge heads of hair and tangled sprouting beards, one red, one dark. They sat in shirtsleeves, in a corner of the eating-room, and argued—about the cosmos, Griselda thought, trying to understand the southern German accents and eccentric terminology. There were two very buttoned-up, precise men, with slick black hair and small moustaches, who wore pince-nez with black rims, and with tiny circular handles on the eye-pieces like moons on a planet. They went in and out—to work, presumably—but over dinner joined in the arguments about the cosmos. There were also three young women—art students at one of the independent women’s art schools. The Royal Bavarian School of Art admitted only men. One of the young women was clearly well off—she had many changes of dress, elegant hats and elaborately dressed hair. The other two were patched and darned and serviceably clothed. All three laughed a great deal. There was a perpetual smell of paint and varnish in the pension. Elli and Emmi, when they came home in the evening, turned out to be younger versions of these three. Both had their mother’s bony and somehow rackety good looks, and struck up casual and amusing conversations with the other inhabitants. They had simple dresses under aprons streaked with spilled colour. They hugged Charles, as though he was a family member or old friend, and expressed surprise when he introduced Griselda as his sister. We didn’t know you had a sister, said Emmi and Elli in unison, and laughed. Griselda felt awkward. Dorothy, who understood nothing at all of what was said, felt more awkward. The place was buzzing and humming with chatter and argument, and it is hard, when you are seventeen, in a foreign land for the first time, not to feel that the laughter is mockingly directed against you, and the camaraderie designed to exclude you. She had a moment, standing stiffly amid the clamour, when she wondered why on earth she had disrupted her life so furiously to come here and feel lost. She was rescued by Toby Youlgreave, also a stranger to this world, who could read German as a good folklorist must, but had no speaking vocabulary and also no acquaintance with Bavarians.

  “We shall feel like old inhabitants in two or three days, I imagine,” he said to Dorothy. “All this will come to seem quite normal and ordinary.”

  The pension was, it became clear, open to all sorts of café society—artists, Bohemians, students, wandering mystics and anarchists—at lunch time. In the evening the guests of the pension dined together, round a large table, from charming flower-rimmed plates. There was soup, full of cabbage, and sausages and large pork cutlets, and a heap of potatoes and a delicious pudding of red berries and cream. Much beer was served, in large earthenware mugs. Afterwards, one of the precise men produced a flute, and one of the art students sang, in a husky voice, whilst the guests tapped with feet and fingers, until everyone joined in, beards wagging, throats swelling. Toby drank several jars of beer and joined in, humming the tunes. Dorothy said she had a headache, and went to bed.

  It is hard to get to sleep in an unknown room, with unaccustomed bed coverings. Dorothy shifted and stirred and dozed and jerked awake. She could see a thin, curved penknife of a moon, steel-bright on a blue-black sky. She heard a strange sound, a regular banging and flapping, banging and flapping, thump, thump, thump, speeding up as it continued, which it did for a long time. It was accompanied by a creaking sound of bed-slats, and also by a mixture of moaning and giggling. Then there was a wailing cry, and silence.

  Dorothy knew well enough, in the abstract, what she was hearing. Unlike many of her contemporaries she knew how the sex act was performed, in principle. She had watched dogs and horses. They did not take all this time over it. That was interesting. What could be going on? The scientist in her took notes, and the tired, overwrought girl wished that her neighbours would speed up even more, and come to an end, and allow her to sleep. She could hear a murmur of voices, after the banging stopped. She dozed. And woke again, as the banging enthusiastically recommenced. That, too, was unexpected and odd. It was characteristic of Dorothy that she wondered, not who was banging whom, but how it was done, and why it had that rhythm.

  In the morning the girls had two hours’ lessons, in maths, in German, in literature. They were taught sitting on a little balcony overlooking a kind of farmyard and a vegetable and herb garden. Charles did not come to the lessons—he was a young man, not a schoolboy, even if his education was unfinished. Sometimes he slept in, and sometimes he wandered out into the streets, and sat in the cafés. Then they paid cultural visits to galleries and museums, and returned to the pension for lunch, beer, conversation and a siesta.

  Griselda was aware that Dorothy was tense like an overstrung bow. When they found themselves alone, Dorothy would turn to Griselda and say, we must find him, we must look for him, it is what I came to do. She begged Griselda to ask Tante Lotte about a puppet show run by a man called Anselm Stern, and Griselda demurred. She was shy. She was reserved. She did not know how to set about it. But after a few days, during a particularly lively lunch, full of intense little eddies of argument and expanses of foreign laughter, Tante Lotte brought them apple cakes, and sat down for a moment to talk to Joachim. What have you seen, she asked him. The classical statues? The State Museum? You must take everyone to the new cabaret, the Elf Scharfrichter, it is very clever and shocking. What do the young women like to see?

  Dorothy understood most of this. She pushed her finger into Griselda’s flank, surreptitiously. “Tell her,” she said, “tell Frau Susskind what we want to see—”

  “Once, in England,” said Griselda, “we saw a puppet-show. The—the Puppenmeister—was called Herr Stern. Anselm Stern. He acted a version of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Sandman, and Cinderella. It was—very interesting. Do you know anything about him?”

  “But of course,” said Tante Lotte. “He is a famous artist. Marionettes and puppets are famous in this city. There is Paul Brann, whose work is witty and magical, and there is Anselm Stern, who has made his own theatre in a cellar—it is called Frau Holle’s Spiegelgarten—he is more mystical and poetical—but all the artists admire each other, all exchange ideas, all came together in the Künstlerhaus to make a funeral feast for our great painter Arnold Böcklin. You have seen Böcklin? He had a wild imagination, a fantastic vision … you should visit the Spiegelgarten.”

  (A garden of mirrors, Griselda whispered to Dorothy.)

  “Fräulein Dorothy is particularly interested in puppets?”

  “She wishes to become a doctor. It was I myself who was entranced by the Sandman.”

  “It will be very easy for you to find out everything,” said Tante Lotte, rising. “Those two young men, over there, are Herr Stern’s sons, Wolfgang and Leon. They are often here, Wolfgang studies art—not at the Munich Art School, he’s too revolutionary in his ideas to stay there and paint cows and angels. He also helps with puppets—he is more satirical than his father—he has been working with the Scharfrichter on a puppet play about the European kings and queens—the Fine Family—in three Sensations and a Prologue—dangerously comical—Leon is still at school. He is a more serious boy. I shall introduce you.”

  Griselda put an arm around Dorothy, as Tante Lotte strode away to the other side of the room. In the early days—when they had been cousins—Dorothy had been the strong one, the protector, the unfazed. Now it was she who had to protect. To be introduced to two unknown and foreign brothers, with no warning and no preparation, was a shock. Dorothy had gone white, and was breathing rapidly. She whispered

  “I didn’t know … I didn’t know he had children … I didn’t know he was married…”

  Wolfgang Stern was tall and gangly, with long, thin arms and legs. He wore a loose shirt and a large floppy bow tie. His brother, equally thin, was smaller and neater, in a dark buttoned-up suit that might have been a uniform. Wolfgang had unruly, long, black hair in a cloud round his head: Leon—who must have been younger than Dorothy, but not by much—had a precisely cut hairstyle and a neat tie. Both had large dark eyes, like Dorothy’s. Both were, or so Doro
thy in her wrought-up state immediately felt, recognisable. They were faces she knew. She stared, and then looked down, feeling how odd their intent gaze was.

  Griselda talked, with nervous warmth. She introduced Dorothy, in her schoolgirl German, and spoke a sentence or two about how much, in England, some years ago, they had admired their father’s interpretations of Hoffmann and the Grimms.

  “Really?” said Wolfgang. He bowed over Griselda’s hand. “He would be enchanted to hear that. And your name?”

  “I am Griselda Wellwood. We are—cousins—”

  “And one of you—you I think—must be the mysterious, beautiful sister of Karl whom we see in the Café Stefanie and the Scharfrichter—Karl has been rather quiet about his sister. I think he is rather quiet about many things.”

  “So I am finding out,” said Griselda.

  “We shall be very happy,” said Wolfgang, “to take you to one of our father’s plays. Maybe Karl and Herr Susskind would like to come too? And your other companion—Herr Youlgreave? My father would be honoured.”

  He could not stop looking at Griselda. This was not unusual. Many young men looked with excitement at Griselda’s pale and beautiful face. What was unusual, Dorothy thought, noticing as always, despite her own agitation, was that Griselda was responding. She was looking equally persistently at Wolfgang. She was looking down at the table, and up into his eyes, and her lips were parted. Toby Youlgreave came over from another table, where he had been talking to Joachim and Karl, and also noticed the alert stares of both Wolfgang and Griselda. He knew that Griselda was in love with himself—he had known it for a long time, and never said a word. Recently, however, as Griselda had grown into her beauty, and Olive Wellwood had grown stouter and angrier, he had begun to wonder if… and whether… he was not entirely pleased to see the smiling German so eager to make friends. He agreed, in a reserved way, that they would all enjoy a visit to the Spiegelgarten. He spoke about what he remembered of Anselm Stern’s work. The beautiful automaton in the Sandman was peculiarly fine. She was differently artificial, in a world where all the actors were in fact artificial. He said this in a mishmash of German and English, to which Wolfgang replied in a similar way.

  “I have some pitiful in English,” said Wolfgang to Griselda. “You must teach me more.”

  Leon, like Dorothy, said nothing, only looked on.

  Later, in Dorothy’s bedroom, the two girls discussed the Stern brothers. Griselda was overexcited. She said it was wonderful suddenly to have two such interesting brothers. Dorothy sat stony and tears stood in her eyes.

  “It is not wonderful. I wish I had never come. I wish all this had never happened. I wish I was the same as I used to be.”

  Griselda was immediately sympathetic and said they need not go to the Spiegelgarten if Dorothy didn’t want to. Dorothy said grimly that they must go.

  “I can’t bear mess and muddle,” she said. “I thought if I found out—about him—I should be clear in my head. But I see now, it might all be worse mess and muddle.”

  Dorothy found it hard to sleep. Her feather quilt was heavy and hot. She felt a surge of homesickness for Todefright. Her mind fixed on her Todefright brother, Tom, and his golden, slightly maddening, innocence. Tom was part of an idea she had had of an English family, the children running wild in safe woods, in dappled sunlight, the parents smilingly there, when they came home, scratched and breathless, from the Tree House and its simple secrets. They had all been one thing, the whole graduated string of busy children, all the same, all different, as children are, and they had all been absorbed by daily life and ever so slightly confined and constricted by it—a feeling which she now sensed as a luxurious indulgence. She knew the garden and the staircases, her little bedroom and the Tree House, as she knew her own body, her hair under the brush, her thin feet, her wiry hands. Only nothing was what it seemed. Violet was not an old maid of an aunt. Phyllis was only half her sister, Hedda with her cross and nosy habits of investigation and suspicion turned out to be wiser than Tom and Dorothy, her elders and superiors, who knew nothing. She thought hard about Tom, in order not to have to think about Humphry and Olive, past and present, real and imagined. Long-legged Tom, running and running with purposeful absence of purpose. He had sensed that the Garden of England was a garden through a looking-glass, and had resolutely stepped through the glass and refused to return. He didn’t want to be a grown-up. Dorothy had always known she was going to grow older, and had been slightly impatient to get on with it. Now, she thought Tom might get away with his unknowing, and almost envied him. The Downs were full of young, and not so young, men in breeches and tweed or jackets, carrying rods or guns, with linen hats flopping, striding from pub to pub and talking wisely about trout, and weather, and the diseases of trees.

  Tom, she thought, as she almost wept over him, was no more and no less her brother than these two dark Germans, the flirtatious one, and the quiet one. Well, that wasn’t true. She had shared her life with Tom. They had played at families in the Tree House. They had held out hands to each other as they climbed, rode or strode naked into deep ponds.

  It was hard to admit that she was homesick for those two deceivers, Humphry and Olive, who had turned out to be snakes in the grass as well as Adam and Eve in the Garden. She let her mind get round to Humphry’s “act” as she referred to it in her head. She remembered his hand in her nightdress, her own mixture of excitement and revulsion. “I love you,” he had said, “you know I love you, I have always loved you.” And she had never for a moment doubted that he did—all along the lie of their life together—and what was more, she was just enough to recognise that he did indeed love her—as a father should—and had always done so. They were a modern, liberal, Fabian family. He was no paterfamilial tyrant, no ogre, no invisible person who disappeared to Work and was unknowable—as his brother was, in many ways, to Karl and Griselda. He knew how to play with his children. He had played with all of them, laughing and inventive, and still did. She had ridden on his ankle as a horse, when she was tiny, she had later ridden behind him on a bicycle in the lanes, he had steadied her. And loved her.

  She had always, perhaps naturally, loved her father much more than her mother. She sensed that Olive had attention to spare for only one of her children—and that was Tom, not Dorothy. From quite early, she had refused to play Olive’s game—to live in a fairy story, not on the solid earth with railway trains and difficult exams. Olive wanted to love her as a hedgehog, and she wanted to be human and adult.

  It is just my bad luck, she thought, wryly and tragically, to have a mystery parent who turns out to make fairy stories—and sinister ones—with automata and dolls.

  • • •

  They went to Frau Holle’s Spiegelgarten together, Toby and Joachim, Griselda and Karl, and Dorothy. They had arranged to meet Wolfgang and Leon at the door of the house in the Römerstrasse where the marionette theatre was. Dorothy had thought of confiding in Toby about her reasons for coming, and had decided against it. She had an instinctive knowledge of his relations with her mother—she had not, unlike Hedda, wanted to investigate these—and this made him, in a puzzling way, into yet another father or father-substitute. She wished that Wolfgang and Leon did not have to be present, and yet—since it was impossible, obviously, for her to speak to Anselm Stern in their presence—they allowed her to defer the encounter. She would watch him, and think what to do.

  The house was high and forbidding. It had runes—Toby said they were runes—painted on its doorposts and lintels, and a Jugendstil painting of an apple tree, with gold and silver fruit, in the architrave. The young men met them at the door. They went through a dark inner corridor directly to the back of the house, which was lit through a stained-glass window, with more runes, in ruddy gold on white, and a medallion depicting a figure in a circle of flames.

  Through this door, they went into a high, bright courtyard, with painted inner walls and bushes in flower in tubs and pots. A tiny fountain splashed in the centre: it wa
s carved with efts and lizards, butterflies and snails, which from certain angles could be construed as peering faces or outstretched fingers. Griselda exclaimed with delight: Dorothy stood back. The sunlight poured in, golden and quivering in the heat like liquid. The puppet theatre was in an outbuilding on the other side of the courtyard. Its door was flanked by two carved wooden figures, one winged, hooded and slender, one short, stalwart and bearded. Elf und Zwerg, said Wolfgang to Griselda. Elf and dwarf. He added something which Toby translated as “The guardians of the other world.” How Mother would love this, thought Dorothy, grimly.

  Inside was as dark as the courtyard was light. They were in a small theatre, they saw, as their eyes adjusted to seeing—the sudden change had blinded them, and filled the space with hallucinatory flashings and varied colours, intense, fading. They made out rows of benches, and on the walls mirrors framed with carved heads and foliage, some of them covered with black veils. The easiest thing to see was the high, gilded proscenium of the marionettes’ stage, covered with a blue silky curtain painted with moons and stars. A kind of blackboard to the side of these announced “Heute wird gespielt Die Jungfrau Thora, ihr Lindwurm, seine Goldkiste.”