All That I Am (20 page)

I watched Hans redden and smile weakly. I knew that even if he could think of something to say, he wouldn’t trust himself to get it out without stuttering. His silence deepened.

The tea party took a tour of the garden afterwards, a garden like none I’d ever seen: it was carefully, cleverly designed to look wild, its limits concealed with trees and trellises and extraordinary thistles towering prickly in messy beds. The neighbouring houses barely existed. When we came back inside people lounged on sofas and comfortable chairs; the men smoked cigars. Standing by the fireplace, I was startled by a luxuriant snore from the wing-chair at my elbow. It was our hostess. For a tiny instant the room went silent, as if to register something. Then, as though on reflection it had been nothing at all, talk resumed.

At home Hans and I laughed about the snoring, but he still smarted on his own account. He set a fire in the kitchen range and paced. In Berlin he had made himself over from a stuttering country pastor’s son into a master of language, of nuance; a smooth, seamless charmer. Here in London he was pushed back to feeling like a small-town nobody who needed to be taught euphemisms for bodily functions and how to sit at table.

‘Did she truly think,’ he stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the linoleum, ‘did she truly think I’d got to this age without being able to excuse myself and ask the maid where the toilet is?’ His voice was rising, chipping. ‘They infantilise us.’

I was at the table sorting rolls of film and labelling them. I was getting better at deflecting these outbursts of hurt. ‘I’m collecting English euphemisms for “toilet”,’ I said. ‘Lavatory, ladies’ room, powder room, bathroom, smallest room, loo. Mrs Allworth taught me “crapper” and “spend a penny” but I had to force them out of her. They’re shy about it,’ I said. ‘This is not a culture at ease with the body.’

‘It’s more than that.’ Hans came to the table and started to hack at a soft square loaf with a knife. It was wobbling and crumbling off in unbutterable chunks. ‘It’s a code. Every conversation has a subtext you’re meant to divine. If you do, you’re in; if you fail–
shit
.’ The knife had torn into his thumb. Blood popped out in a bright bead. He put up a hand to stop me getting up for a bandage. ‘I-if you fail,’ he continued, finding his handkerchief, ‘they relish the opportunity to point out to you how
outré
you are. They stutter that false stutter–I think sometimes just to tease me. They say “With the gr-gr-greatest of respect” when they’re about to absolutely demolish you. And they pretend to know nothing about something when they’re in fact an expert, in order to trap you as p-pretentious.’ He was buttering a shard with one hand. ‘Or ridiculous.’

‘It’s British indirection,’ I said. ‘
Understatement
.’ I used the English word. ‘They probably find us crude.’

Hans gave up on the bread and fell onto the green couch. He took his notebook from his pocket. ‘It’s a sneaky culture. All backhanders.’ He was thumbing the pages so they fanned. Between those covers he was pouring all the late-imagined retorts, his dislocation and homesickness. They could not contain them.

I knelt on the linoleum between his legs and steadied his hands. His eyes were swimming and lost. It was one thing to reinvent yourself in your own country and your own language, but quite another in a completely foreign place. It required reserves of strength we might not have. I wanted to be enough for him.

‘They are trying to teach us to fit in,’ I said.

He shook his head. The notebook fell to the ground. ‘Why would they assume,’ his voice was thin with shame and rage, ‘we want to be like them?’ He picked up the notebook and went into our room. I sat on the couch, alone. Then I finished sorting my film. When I went in to him he was asleep.

Not long after we’d arrived, I had taken over our correspondence with Bertie because Hans felt he ‘had nothing to report’. I enjoyed Bertie’s cheery, chatty letters on ‘this so-called life I am leading’. He couldn’t say anything about his political work in case our mail was being intercepted, so he was forced to write about the texture of his days. Bertie seemed surprised to find that, looked at closely, life outside of work could contain so much, although his sole interactions were with the baker, the barman, the postman. But his spirits were high, and loneliness was making him into a better observer.

‘I start to see the little things, like you do,’ he wrote, and I knew he didn’t mean it as an insult. ‘I see corners of beauty and think of your photographs.’ Bertie shared small, silly details–about his teeth, ‘loose from living on soft crêpes’; the dogs in the park, ‘small as birds on leashes’; the beauty of the women, ‘who walk always as if they are being watched’. This, he joked, was something he might have to learn.

I thought of him in his life of poverty and work and exile, his wispy hair and untended teeth, the old home-knitted jumpers from when his mother was still living, his neglect of himself somehow a sign of his keen and terrible commitment to the rest of us. While Dora was off somewhere with Toller, and Hans poured his life into his notebooks, it felt intimate to have a friend who let me inside his skin.

TOLLER

‘Do you think it is possible to love just one person?’

Clara’s eyes flicker away. Her body shrinks into itself and she looks down in her lap.

Idiot! First I dance with her and now I make her afraid I want to love her. The look on her face is one of betrayal: I thought we were friends, the look says, but
this
is what you want; I thought I was a person to you, but see now I am sport. It is these niceties between men and women, especially between older men and younger women, that are such a trap.

‘No, no–I am so sorry.’ I lean towards her and then think better of it and stay back. ‘I am not asking you a personal question. Or any question. Not that I am not interested–please, I just…’ I pinch my eyebrows together.

Clara relaxes a little. She wants her version of me back: grand and faded, maybe, but not a dirty old man.

‘Why did you love as you did?’ She pushes back her hair and sits up straight, a nugget of anger in her voice, the residue of a scare.

‘I think,’ I close my eyes, ‘we were trying to live by the new rules of our “freedom”, which meant loving … widely.’ When I open them she is still looking at me.

‘But why did you love others when you only really loved Dora?’

She is brave, this girl, and she will take it up to me.

‘Because,’ I stub out the embers of a cigar, ‘I did not want her to see me,’ I gesture across my knees, at the whole room, this imploded life, ‘like this. If I could help it.’ I feel hot tears of self-pity rising. I stab them away as I kill that cigar.

Outside sounds filter up: car horns and a paper crier. ‘
Her-ald Tribuu-une!
Yankees lose Gehrig, beat Red Sox!…’ In the corridor the soft silver rattle of a laden trolley grows loud then faint, as it passes the room by. And then, instead of calling it a day or giving herself an errand so as to escape, Clara picks up her pencil and pad.

‘We don’t have so much time,’ she says, and from her tone I know I am forgiven, or if not, that concessions have nevertheless been made. ‘We should get this down.’

I should have told Dora in Ascona. But sometimes conversation leads away from things in spite of you, like an untrained horse. Asking her if she would have my child was as close to proposing marriage as I had ever come. I didn’t think she would accept me. But I needed her to reject the idea, so that when Christiane came to London–she was on holiday with a schoolfriend in St Moritz–we could resume our triangulated life: Christiane as my girlfriend, and Dora as my private love, who had chosen, of her own free will, to stay that way.

In Hampstead I took a flat on Constantine Road, near the heath, in a red-brick terrace with chaste blue stained-glass birds over the front door, and a patch of garden down some steps out the back. It was spring when Dora got there but the garden was still mud, with scrawny things around the edges that might or might not resurrect. An abandoned concrete bird-feeder down the end. So far as I could tell, the street was entirely inhabited by psychoanalysts.

I was looking out the front window as the cab pulled up. I stayed put a moment to watch. It felt like spying, or theft. She was leaning forward, listening to the driver finish a story. They were both laughing as they got out. After he’d helped with her bags she offered her hand to shake, and I saw the man’s back stiffen in surprise, pleasure. When she bent to pick up her luggage her neck stretched, bare and fine and white, out of a red coat.

For me there was no going back from Dora; every other woman was less than real. She gave me access to things my striving nature would not otherwise have let me see; things my vanity would have kept from me. Without her I was only half the man, and half the writer.

I raced down the stairs and gulped my breath and opened the door. She gestured to where the cab had been. ‘He was telling me he once had the Duchess of Kent in his cab,’ she said. ‘“Right-on-that-very-seat-you-yourself-are-seated-on-miss-no-less.”’ Her mimicry was nearly as good in English. She laughed, putting a briefcase and typewriter case down in the blue-lit entry. ‘They treat an encounter with the arse of royalty like it’s some holy benediction.’

Then, ‘Hello you.’ She jumped, arms around my neck and her legs clamping my hips.

I carried her up the stairs and when we stopped kissing I let her down. ‘What a load!’ I said. We smiled at the unspoken charade of carrying someone over the threshold. I went back for her bags.

My three rooms were on the first floor. I’d laid a fire in the grate in the bedroom. As she took her clothes off she said, ‘Home sweet home!’ It was a small joke about our homelessness, but it was also, I believe, how she felt about me. I shrank inside with the foreknowledge of harm.

‘Oh. I nearly forgot.’ She opened her suitcase and took out two expensively wrapped presents. I opened the smaller. It was a heavy silver ashtray from Christofle.

‘It’s magnificent,’ I said, ‘but crazy.’

‘Perfect for you then.’

I smiled. Dora bought little for herself–not from frugality, more from lack of interest. But she had no moderation in gifts.

The other was a large box of Angelina macaroons. Each pastel ball lay in its own compartment on a bed of soft tissue, like the egg of some exotic bird. She rummaged further in her case, retrieving a dozen packets of Gauloises.

‘Stimulants,’ she smiled, as she jumped into bed.

Dora and I didn’t discuss whether she was staying for a few days, or weeks, or till she was established, or whether we might be setting up a household together.

We had never lived together. Even in her brief, friendly marriage to Walter Fabian, Dora had kept her own apartment in Berlin. Her need was visceral–the space of the only child–but it was also a political position. Dora’s view was that working women were trapped by ridiculous domestic expectations which, as she put it, ‘link their moral virtue to the state of their flat’.

I remember vividly a socialist congress in Hildesheim where she gave one of her signature addresses, telling the movement it needed to ‘liberate half of humanity from the endless trivia of the household’. She paced the stage like a small, clever cat. ‘This can be done,’ she pushed up her sleeves, ‘with technical innovations and communal kitchens.’ The women in the audience cheered, the men nodded and shifted their feet. ‘Until we free ourselves from the insane idea that communal households and communal cooking “undermine family life”, we will never achieve a true family life of free and equal people living together–one of them will always be the doubly burdened slave of the other.’

She waited a moment, then opened her arms in the gesture of inclusion she used when making a particularly hard-hitting point. ‘This individualist irrationality,’ she said, ‘is swallowing the best energies of women.’ There were hoots and whistles. Dora laughed a little too, as if they were all in this together. ‘There are higher values than duster and cooker–than the “cosy home”, which, despite appearances, makes a
slave
of the woman who has to keep it that way.’

Towards the end the applause for Dora was joyous, unconstrained, intoxicating. Then she stared out into the audience. It seemed she was looking straight at me. The crowd vanished. ‘To say nothing,’ she cocked her head slightly, ‘of a new way for the sexes to live together. Until we change these material expectations, a new valuing of women will remain only a dream and a hope.’

So, naturally, she had no intention of running a household for anyone else. The question of our living arrangements hung in the air of my room; we trod carefully around the unspoken thing. We were thrown together in a bed in a house like a presbytery, in a city that seemed to contain a hundred foreign towns, and there were enough questions for now.

In the bedroom there was only the bed; the suitcases lay open on the floor. When we got up towards evening I said, ‘I’d say hang up your things, but there’s nowhere to hang them.’

‘When is your next trip?’ she asked. She was rolling a stocking over her knee to meet the fastener.

‘The PEN congress next week,’ I said. ‘Dubrovnik.’ I buckled my belt. ‘You can stay here if you like.’ She looked up–I hadn’t let her assume it. ‘Of course,’ I added.

She finished the second leg. Placed her palms flat on her thighs. ‘Are you angry with me?’

I put my jacket on; the place was always cold, the little grate too small.

‘Why would I be?’

‘For what I said in Ascona. About a baby.’

I can never tell how much of a conversation is engineered by my subconscious trailing its coat for a fight. I didn’t want to have this talk so early. We had work to do together–my speech for the writers’ congress, for one thing–but I couldn’t not tell her.

‘I’m not angry,’ I said. I took a breath and looked to the corner of the room. ‘Christiane is coming.’

Dora stared straight ahead of her. She seemed smaller.

‘Why?’ she said finally, her voice high and stretched. ‘She doesn’t need to…’ She turned to me. My arms were empty and useless; I couldn’t work out where to put my hands.