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.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘You asked her to, to–’
‘I asked her nothing,’ I said. It was you I asked! I wanted to scream. It was you.
Like most things, that contained its own lie. If I had truly wanted Dora to stay with me I would not have frightened her away by talking about babies. I would have just talked about us. ‘Christiane is coming to be with me.’
Dora’s eyes welled with tears, which made her cross. ‘I didn’t think…’ she said, and stopped. She put her pullover over her head and yanked it down. Stood to do up the hook and eye of her skirt. ‘I’m going out.’ She retrieved her coat from under the pile of clothes on the floor. ‘For a walk.’
‘She does have to leave, actually,’ I said to her red back at the door. ‘Because of the role she refused. They wanted to see whether Toller’s girlfriend would work for them. It’s my fault.’
Dora turned around, her voice quiet. ‘Stop talking about yourself in the third person.’ I couldn’t tell whether her anger was directed at me or at herself. ‘It’s not funny any more. You want to believe in The Great Toller the public figure, so you need a little girlfriend who does too.’
It is true that I enjoyed feeling like the man Christiane thought I was. I didn’t know how long it would last, but if I could keep up the front for a young girl, maybe the black months would stay away.
‘Why is it so wrong to want to be…’ I wanted to say ‘better’ or ‘normal’, but couldn’t get it out.
‘The Great Toller?’ She threw her head back. ‘Because that’s not all you are.’
I followed her to the corridor as she started towards the stairs. Halfway down she turned around, chin up to me, her pale, pointed face floating in the darkness of the stairwell.
‘Does the little one know you need bars?’
I heard the front door slam.
I don’t know how much later it was that I heard steps. I went to the door. It was a woman coming up the stairs, carrying a string bag bulging with brown-paper packages. I watched the top of her head, blond and neatly parted on the side. A nothing. No one.
I went back inside. I couldn’t go near the bed. In the front room was a chair. I pulled it to the window and sat there, still and lost. For over an hour I could not move. I felt the punch of emptiness in my gut, a black hole inside that threatened to open up and swallow me down. Superstitions from my childhood returned: if the third person to come along the street was a woman, the world was in order; if Dora came back by my fifth cigarette, everything would be all right.
If Dora left me, there would be no one to catch me. It is only when your beloved leaves you that you realise the stake is gone, and where they were there is only cold air, with nothing to hold you up.
When she came through the gate the hole in me closed over, a very thin sheath. By way of humbling myself I didn’t bother pretending I’d done anything but sit waiting. Her nose was red, sore-looking. She stared at me, hunched and hopeless in the chair. She could see I’d been in freefall. Her eyes grew soft. Our love was like a carpenter’s spirit level, each of us holding an end up so hard, fighting to keep that trembling bubble in sight.
Dora had sat watching mad fellows, she told me, diving into the dark from a high springboard. The pond was blacker than the sky. She must have decided that she would weather this like we’d each weathered other relationships before, as symbols of our freedom.
‘We have work to do, don’t we?’ she said, taking off her gloves, one finger at a time.
Clara’s hand keeps moving across the paper for a few moments after I’ve finished speaking. It must be sore. She has flipped over a centimetre of pages on the steno pad, which are stacked now on the underside of the spiral binding.
‘Shall we take a break?’ I ask.
‘I’m fine,’ she says, but she has put her pencil down and is gently flexing her right hand open and shut.
‘Just a couple of minutes, I think.’ I get up from the chair, go to the window.
‘I’ll get these cases in order then,’ she says behind me. Clara is someone who cannot sit and do nothing, who will never be pulled down to nothing. I hear her start to rustle gently through my papers and clothes.
A life in two cases. Clara is taking my travel plans seriously, and I need her to. As for me, I am finding them harder to believe in. Although I have arranged to see Spender about a translation, and have agreed to public appearances in Oxford, London, Leeds and Manchester, I have to beat down the black part of me that sneers, Who are you kidding?
I cannot escape it by boat.
The cherry blossom trees across the street are extravagant explosions, pink confetti burst from a can. I scan the park for them now, but it must be over. Their beauty seemed unwarranted, heartbreaking.
‘How long will you be gone?’ Clara asks.
I am already gone. I turn around. Clara has removed everything from the cases, so as to audit my plans and fit out my future. She is counting shirts and dividing time to come by their number. Her blouse snaffles the light into its deep, magenta folds.
‘I’m not sure. Perhaps indefinitely. For the time being.’
She gives me a small nod as if I have made perfect sense, then turns back to her task. ‘We’ll pack as much as we can, then.’
Even pared down, my life might be hard to carry out of here in two cases. I feel a sudden and terrible pity for this girl who has to deal with me, now.
‘I’m a hard case, wouldn’t you say?’
She winces and shakes her head at my weak pun.
‘Sorry.’ I hang my head in mock shame. ‘No, truly, I wouldn’t worry
too much about the packing.’
She looks up sharply.
‘Well, I mean they might hold some of my papers in the safe downstairs,’ I offer. ‘While I’m gone.’ I move to her and make as if to touch her arm, but don’t. ‘How about you finish that later?’ I ease myself back in the chair. ‘I’m ready to go on.’
I had a lot of work to do in London, and Dora and I set about doing it in the weeks before Christiane arrived. My first plan was to finish the autobiography, but events in Germany forced me to speak out about them instead.
On the 1st of April 1933 Goebbels warned Germans of three things that represented the ‘Jewish spirit’ which, he said, was undermining the nation: the magazine Die Weltbühne (they had imprisoned its editor, Carl von Ossietzky, already), the philosopher Theodor Lessing (now safely in Czechoslovakia) and me. ‘Two million German soldiers,’ the little hysteric screamed over the radio, ‘rise from the graves of Flanders and Holland and condemn the Jew Toller for having written: “the ideal of heroism is the stupidest ideal of all”.’
The German chapter of PEN promptly expelled me. And then my books were burned, by eager university students and their craven professors, in towns and cities all over Germany. They made a bonfire party of it, with music from SS and SA marching bands, sausage stands, and ritual incantations as they threw the books into the fire: ‘Against decadence and moral corruption, for discipline and decency in family and state, I consign to the flames the works of Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Erich Kästner, Ernst Toller…’
When I got to London, H. G. Wells, who was outraged by what the Nazis were doing, made a point of inviting me to the PEN conference in Dubrovnik as part of the English delegation. I would be the only non-Nazi German there. I felt the weight of it on my shoulders.
While Dora and I drafted I walked the room, or the garden if the day was bright, and she sat over her writing pad, flipping the pages around their coil of wire. People often have to be alone to think or to write, but being with Dora wasn’t like being with another person. We rarely made eye contact. I orbited her chair, eyed without seeing how her hair was cut soft into her nape, the gloss of it. To be with Dora was to be relieved of the burden of my self. This is the trick to creative work: it requires a slip-state of being, not unlike love. A state in which you are both most yourself and most alive and yet least sure of your own boundaries, and therefore open to everything and everyone outside of you. The two of us threw ideas and words around until we had carved a new way forward for the world–clearer and surer and nobler than had ever been done before. Then, elated, we went to bed, whatever the time of day.