In the darkroom the pictures swam clearer and clearer towards me through the solution, as if, finally, to open and settle on an answer.
Once, I went with Dora to a Hitler rally, to photograph what went on there. Dora was working for Toller by then, but still for the parliamentarian Mathilde Wurm too. She and Mathilde were investigating the irrational, passionate attraction Hitler held for women. Mathilde was in her fifties, portly and sensible, with the soft black eyes of a Labrador and the faintest of moustaches on her top lip. Widowed and well off, she was an effective politician, particularly on women’s issues, though at the same time she was so mild, so level-headed, that any new idea that issued from her lips–from getting hot dinners into schools, to establishing training colleges for young women, to free contraceptive clinics–felt like something that should already have been done. Mathilde hadn’t been able to have children, Dora said, which sadness she had transmuted into a mothering energy directed at the whole world. Dora was very fond of Mathilde as a political mentor, but also, I believe, as a stalking horse for her own, more radical ideas.
Hitler was appearing at an event solely for women at the Berlin Lustgarten. As he passed us, on a path strewn with flowers, women held up chapped and worn hands, as for a blessing. Some wept in ecstasy, rocking and saluting. The woman in front of us hoisted her baby up in the air towards him; I photographed the little fellow red-faced and wriggling.
Beside me Dora shook her head, half sympathetic and half disgusted. ‘Some kind of chiliastic enchantment,’ she whispered. ‘As if he alone could save them.’
We’d arrived late and were standing at the back. By the time Hitler reached the podium I could still just make him out between the heads in front of me, but Dora was too small to see over anyone’s shoulder. Behind her stood an SS guard. He glanced down. No doubt he saw the Independents badge on Dora’s lapel, but she simply shrugged good-naturedly up at him, as if to say, Who would be so short?
The man looked around, then said, ‘Come on, comrade, you want to see the Leader as much as anyone.’ He bent his knees and put out his hands.
Dora didn’t hesitate. She took them and stepped backwards onto the SS man. He moved his grip to her waist and held her there aloft, like the figurehead on a ship.
I want to see her.
For all the thousands of photographs I took in my life before exile, I have ended up with only two albums. The pictures in them seem more valuable than anything that came after.
I slide open a glass bookcase and take one of the albums down. The pages are black and there is tissue paper between each. The photos are all black-and-white contact prints, small as the negatives they came from. They are tucked into the pages at their corners. There are three here of Dora, none of them from that day at the rally. One is of the two of us, teenagers, our heads through a board at a fair that made us into Romulus and Remus. Another is a family group at my wedding, and the third, my favourite, is a portrait I made of her. Her face is turned at a three-quarter angle, her lips are closed and her gaze is slightly down, away from the camera. The set of her eyes is gentle, questioning. Her hair, bobbed short as a man’s at the back, sits forward on her cheek. She wore no make-up, left her eyebrows alone. She looks as contemporary as now.
I study these pictures as if they might yield something of her up to me, or at least a new memory. The sound of her laughing, the flash of white teeth–left incisor crossed over the others. But if I close my eyes to concentrate, her face blurs. My mind is a skittish thing; it will not open if asked too directly. I must be more cunning, approach sideways at the edge of sleep, to get it to surrender something new. After all, everything in it does belong to me.
TOLLER
Clara has gone to meet her husband at the Museum of Modern Art for lunch. Today is their second wedding anniversary. This city is so full of wonders; it keeps a roving eye out for the treasures of the world, snaffles them up and puts them, democratically, on display. Picasso, at the moment. I’ve ordered room service, as a treat.
After the premiere of Masses and Man, Dora called me. The next time I saw her she was addressing a crowd from a podium. I close my eyes.
I am on the speakers’ platform at an anti-Paragraph 218 rally in Berlin’s Tiergarten. It is 1925. We are the generation back from the war and we are remaking the world–fairer, freer–so it can never happen again. Dora, slight, with her cap of dark hair, mounts the stairs to speak. As she walks she pushes her sleeves up her forearms. A fine gold watch loose on a narrow wrist, but no other jewellery. When she reaches the microphone, her face is partially obscured by its metal halo. She leans forward on her toes. Her black eyes stare over the rim, out at the people. She has no notes.
A ripple of insecurity runs through the crowd, which breathes in and shifts its feet on the gravel. I feel a stab of remorse: how could we have asked any woman to do this, let alone this slip of a thing? Paragraph 218 outlawed abortion, and we had decided to protest against that, and to demand sexual liberation of all kinds–for women, homosexuals, prisoners. I’d been on the organising committee for the rally, along with Einstein and other celebrities, and we had asked for women ‘in secure stations in life’ to speak about their own experiences of abortion. ‘Self-denunciation for the cause’, we called it. Given the criminal penalties and social stigma attached to abortion, no one should have volunteered, and no one did. Until she rang me. ‘Dora,’ she said, ‘from the theatre. In Leipzig.’ As if I might have forgotten.
‘A law…’ Her first words to the crowd don’t come out right. She bows her head, moves a fist to her lips. The audience is very quiet, part politeness, part anxiety. She starts again. ‘A law which turns eight hundred thousand women into criminals every year–’ her voice, surprisingly calm, is gaining–‘is no longer a law.’ She eyes them. ‘You are looking,’ she says, ‘at the face of an outlaw.’
There is a gap in time. And then applause starts.
‘No man,’ the girl continues over them, ‘can understand the agony of a woman who is carrying a child she cannot feed. What’s more, to force any woman to have a child is to stymie her activity in economic and public life.’The people go wild, raising fists and hooting. She clasps the microphone stand in one hand and bends it to her mouth. ‘Your body,’ she continues, ‘belongs to you.’
Then, over the din, she stretches out one arm, acknowledging the crowd. I catch my breath. In that moment I see in Dora something I know in myself–the sense of holding one’s life in one’s palm, to do with as one likes.
On the battlefield I had nearly thrown away my life many times–or had it taken from me. I felt its cheapness and its value like a heavy coin, or a pain. But where did Dora have this from? So much of love is curiosity, a search inside the other for some little piece of self; emerging from the bear cave of them with your birthday candle and a filament of ore: the same as that I’m made of!
Pa-pada-pa, pum pum. The waiter must be feeling friendly.
‘Come in,’ I call, expecting to see the trolley. Instead it’s a hand, followed by a soft-faced young man with a flop of hair on his forehead. Auden!
‘There you are,’ he smiles, coming in sideways. He is in a suit jacket and worsted tie, which look, as always, as if they’ve been slept in. I am purely happy.
In my years in England I watched Wystan’s star rise as a poet–he’s the best this century, they are saying–at the same time as he worked with me. He translated my plays and wrote some glorious, original lyrics for them. We would sit in my garden in Hampstead batting words and sense around (his German is good) to see how much equivalent beauty we could wring from each tongue. It is an intimate relationship, when someone is inside your work. They see you better than you can.
‘I’ve searched every crack and cranny of New York City for you, old fellow.’ He is puffing as if he’s only just stopped turning over the rocks. ‘My wife–’ he smiles; he married the lesbian refugee Erika Mann to give her an English passport, and she is now in New York too–‘told me I??
?d run into you at Epstein’s. When that didn’t happen,’ he opens out his hands, ‘I started a manhunt.’
‘Thank you.’ Wystan is the only one, apart from Dora, I told of my thrice-weekly visits to the psychiatrist in London. Partly because we had to work around them, and partly because he is a firm believer in neurosis (up to a point) as a stimulus for art. I can see from how he looks at me, and then around the room, that he is gauging whether mine is working for me now or eating me alive.
‘Ish–Christopher–has left me,’ he says, jacket off, sitting down heavily in Clara’s chair. ‘Gone to California.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I wonder,’ he lights a cigarette, ‘whether any kind of marriage at all is possible for us queers.’
‘For anyone,’ I say. ‘Christiane has left me too.’
‘My turn to be sorry.’ There’s a gentle sibilance on his ‘s’, as if he can’t quite be bothered sounding it out fully. ‘Must be this place.’ He gestures around. ‘Land of the too bloody free.’
Wystan rubs his forehead, smudging it generously with newsprint ink from his thumb. A cylinder of ash floats from his cigarette down onto the carpet. What I most like about him, I see now, is the ability to deflect emotion with a wave of the hand onto the real world, at the same time as he can nail it, in words, like no one else.
‘Christopher said that all my best feelings go into my work, and he got only the residue. Which may, rather horribly, be true.’ Wystan’s eyes are kind, hooded like a puppy’s. He flicks the pages of one of Clara’s stenography pads.
‘What’s going on here, then?’
‘Trying to get my best feelings into my work.’
He laughs through his nose.
‘Actually, it’s true. I’m trying to write about Dora.’
He looks up. ‘Brave Dora,’ he says. He always liked her, and she him. ‘You haven’t written about her?’
‘I didn’t want to use her.’
This is a conversation we’ve had before–about the temptation of art, like fire, to use people as fuel.
‘Yes. Quite.’
I am so relieved to be understood that the words tumble out. ‘But now I have nothing. Not her,’ there’s a thickness in my throat, ‘and no portrait either.’
The waiter interrupts with a trolley, on which a large silver tureen stands, a basket of white and brown rolls, butter in curls, and two bowls. They must have assumed I was ordering for Clara too. As the young man, a neat blond fellow of about nineteen, busies himself setting the table, Wystan tucks a large napkin into his collar, which I know for a fact will mysteriously fail to prevent stains from blossoming down his front. The waiter starts to ladle the chowder and Wystan smiles, confident that the world–so thoughtful of it, really–has anticipated him. Then he reaches into his pocket for his billfold and tips the man generously.
‘Thank you, sir,’ the waiter says with a small nod, and then he turns. Wystan’s pale eyes follow the boy till he’s gone.
‘This country,’ he raises his eyebrows and cracks open a roll with his fingers, ‘is going to be good for me. I can feel it. And not just that.’ He tosses his head towards the door.
I place both wrists on the table. ‘I’m going back to Europe.’
Wystan puts the bread down.
‘I am useless here. No one is listening. Europe will fall.’
He nods, slowly. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I can’t do the speeches any more. I simply don’t believe that man’s better nature can win. Our liberal scruples make us blind–the fascists are too seductive, and too strong.’
‘What will you do here?’ I don’t know why I ask; I know what he will do. He will write poems that will be read in two hundred years, he will fall in love, he will come out the other side.
‘Write,’ he says, as if it were a small thing. ‘While you go back into the fray. As usual.’
I know that he considers me, despite the underside he is aware of, a brave man. This is more a testament to his kindness than his judgement, but it means I can tell him anything.
‘It’s a strange pathology, don’t you think,’ I say, ‘to want to be something other than what you are?’
Wystan leans forward, places a hand on mine. He has seen my need and he will never shame me for showing it to him. ‘It’s the same old thing, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘All that we are not stares back at all that we are.’
He picks up his spoon and smiles as if to say Guten Appetit. But sees I am stricken by what he has said. ‘Not to look at that too closely, old fellow,’ he adds. ‘Do what you have to. And do not discount it.’ He shakes his head a little, lowering his spoon into the soup. ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’
After he leaves, the happiness of his company persists in the room. I lay my head over the chair back and close my eyes again.
I am slouching, head back on the leather car seat. Dora and I are in a cathedral of trees; from each side of the road poplars arch above us to touch. The dapples of light they admit rush over the bonnet and the windscreen and over our bodies, so we can feel our speed. Dora drives; I never learnt. Her arms are bare but she wears cream kid gloves that fasten across the back of her wrists, and she talks and talks, eyes ahead as the ribbon of road flattens under the car. She is counting votes for something–her politics were much more practical than mine–but I have stopped listening. The wind plays with her hair.
Yesterday afternoon we signed in as man and wife at the Schloss Eckberg in Dresden. As her hand moved across the register I reached into her hair, casually as I could, and removed some grass stalks. Smiling mildly all the while to the concierge. By Dresden on the banks of the Elbe the reeds grow to chest height. Dora had dragged me off the path and deep into them, laughing and pushing me down till the world was a patch of sky in a blurring green frame. In the morning she had three cups of coffee and toyed with her egg before she could smoke, this woman who was all appetite.
I have never felt so wanted. I reach across to hold her neck in my hand.
‘You hungry?’ she interrupts her stream of talk. ‘They packed us some food.’
There’s a basket at my feet under the dash. In it I find a magnificent pear. When she bites, the juice drips down.
‘Damn,’ she laughs. I grab my handkerchief and start dabbing in her lap and she shoots me a look, swiping her chin with the back of one leathered hand. The other hand then slipping on the wheel and the wheel spinning through it, the pear airborne past my nose and the car screeching, failing to match the turn in the road. Her feet pump the pedal but it’s no use and we go, slower than is possible, to the end, which comes in a metal scream against one of the poplars.
Steam hisses from the bonnet. Dora pulls herself back from the steering wheel and sees that I am all right. A man runs towards us who turns out to be the town policeman. After he checks that we are unharmed, he shakes his head, looking up and down the empty road on this blue-sky day and wondering aloud how such a thing could happen.
‘Officer,’ Dora offers, as if in full and final explanation, ‘I was eating a pear.’
I’ve left a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the other side of the room. I move to it and put it to my lips. Clara is back, sitting quietly. She doesn’t swivel her head to look at me, or ask a prompting question; she lets the spell persist. As I exhale, my eyes caress the tousled crown of her dark head and it feels like old times.
She picks up her pencil and pad. I am emptying myself out in pieces here. Then trying to see what shape they make when put back together.
‘Ready?’ I ask.
She nods.
When Dora came to work for me she graduated from secretary to sounding-board to collaborator, and then, during the split from her husband Walter, lover. The two of them had had an amicable, even comradely marriage, the freedoms of which had, on his side, simply involved too many other people. Dora vowed never to marry again, as if somehow it had been the institution of marriage, rather than the infidelity–to which she also had a right–that had c
aused her pain.
Dora had a sense of purpose so profound that when I was with her it was impossible to feel lost. Her presence reduced my demons to pathetic things, impractical and bad company, which would go away if I ignored them and focused instead on the task at hand: the book or play, the speech or cause or trip. She would say, ‘It’s not about you, remember, it’s about the work.’ Dora thought I clung to my self-doubt, my edge-of-despair insights, as if they were the outward signs of deep artistic integrity–confidence and equanimity, after all, not being characteristics of genius. It stung a little, but I was grateful to be saved by her. At least half of what we call hope, I believe, is simply the sense that something can be done.
Once, on the beach at Rügen, we lay on our sides in sand so pure it squeaked. Dora had found a beautiful white stone, large as a dog’s head. She closed her eyes and moved her hands over it, as over a crystal ball, mimicking to perfection the deadpan voice of a medium. ‘Your fears for your sanity, kind sir, are grossly exaggerated…’ I lay back laughing, watching her through my lashes.
Mostly I could tell when an episode was coming. I would find myself alone, reading and rereading a paragraph that no longer made sense, even though I had written it the day before. Each subordinate clause felt too heavy, literally, to move or change. But impossible–wrong!–to leave where it lay. As long as this page was stuck, so too was all other life. Making a phone call was too much effort, the company of others futile. When imagination fails, one is caught in a solecism as big as the world: the universe is reduced to a reflection of ourselves from which we cannot escape, narrow and already known. The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance.
When I sensed an attack coming on I would seek Dora out. In the company of someone so honest, so intelligent and so practical, doubt felt unworthy. She had her own demons to control, like the morphine she’d used since the abortion, but she always seemed stronger than me. If I left it too late and the inertia got me, I would be too ashamed to find her. I would put the word out I was abroad and spend the days–sometimes weeks–of the black time in my flat, mostly in bed. Waiting without hope for hope to come back in its own goddamn time.