She didn’t really know where she was going. She was just walking aimlessly. She imagined the officer in the tea rooms following her, accosting her and offering her money for sex. What would she have done? Perhaps she would have refused the money and given herself to him just the same in some greasy alleyway. At that moment it would have been of no consequence to her. She felt nothing except the thin film of moisture on her body. In an effort to provoke herself she imagined squatting like an animal on the wet cobblestones in front of him, performing a parody of desire aroused by the squalor of the streets. Could she excite herself by walking with the dead, by giving herself to the low-life of the city? The thought didn’t disgust her. It simply came down to the choices one made, and these struck her as a matter of indifference. Several times she walked through the arcades, or through the Eastern Market, glancing at the men loitering outside the peepshows. She wondered what she was capable of doing in her numbed state amidst the smells of rotting vegetables and the ragged, vagabond characters that gathered about these parts of the city like creatures homing towards the shadows.
And still, when she tried to picture the horror of war all she could grasp was horror in the abstract. She imagined the carnage of modern times reduced to the sordid comedy of stagecraft, histrionics and special effects engineered by her brother. The letters and cuttings Paul sent back to South Melbourne from Zurich described his success in the theatre. Even while the war was still being fought, while men were being slaughtered across Europe in their tens of thousands, Paul wrote plays about a military asylum overrun by its inmates, and a shell-shocked maniac unleashed on the home–front to seek a terrible revenge upon his adulterous wife. The plays struck her as vulgar, turning horror into farce.
Paul also sent her photographs. There was one of him looking contemplative as he smoked a cigarette and edited a script, and another of him and Laura, soon after they were married. Paul wore a dark suit and a tie, Laura a long, striped frock. They both smiled with a self-assurance that Ondine found disingenuous. Behind them were some tenements with shops along the street. The background was tranquil. No people, no traffic, no sign of the war. It was as if they’d found their way into an idyllic place safely beyond its reach, as if they’d managed to escape from history. Ondine didn’t believe it. She threw the picture down on the table with a fit of temper, and once again tried to conjure the nightmare of her husband’s death.
I
n the
chambre séparée
they didn’t say a word to each other, just as she’d insisted. Laura closed her eyes. Paul leant over her. His hands were on her hips. She could tell he was fumbling, trying to be considerate, so she moved her legs apart to help him. She wanted to get it over with, but it all happened more easily than she had imagined. The movement of Paul’s body and the rhythm of his breathing prompted her responses. When he was finished she covered her body and looked at him as he lit a cigarette. He was heavier than she’d imagined. His stomach had a thickness to it and his chest sagged.
“Weib oder Frau?”
Klessmann’s voice followed her now. It was like a tune she couldn’t get out of her head. The next day, when Paul showed her the play he was working on, she knew straightaway that the main character was Klessmann. She was certain of it. The image of the skull pushing through his skin was indelible.
When the play opened she could hardly bring herself to watch it. The man at the door raised his cap to her. The theatre was a run-down firetrap: smoke, hot lights and bodies jamming in, one upon the other. Afterwards, they went to the American Bar to celebrate with Bressler. She found it difficult to be her usual bright self, but she made a good fist of it. She wondered how Paul could write such a horrible play and still be the same person she’d fallen in love with. She suspected him of hiding behind a façade and imagined she had seen beyond it in the dreadful violence of the Hamburg maniac on a killing spree across Europe. When they got back to his apartment he kissed her neck and eyes. He was trying to make her feel comfortable, but it felt false to her.
“Do you love me, Paul?”
“How can you doubt it?” he said.
“Because your play is about Theodore Klessmann, isn’t it?”
“What makes you say that?”
Paul was sure she hadn’t seen the poster of Klessmann in Wedelkind’s “Theatre of Derangement”.
“I just have a sense of it.”
At the mention of Klessmann Paul was overcome with guilt. He wondered, as he’d often done since the night of his death, whether he had said anything to Laura about the book. Paul would have given anything to wipe that bird-face from his mind. It haunted him. It accused him. It gnawed away at his resolve.
“You didn’t like the play, then?” he asked.
“It was frightening. That’s what you wanted though, wasn’t it?” She kissed him. “I think you’re very clever.”
She decided to leave Paul’s play alone. She was happy with him as long as she could keep at arm’s length the disquiet she felt at the thought of it. After all, the press had written the play up and people had paid money to see it. Moreover, she liked Herman Bressler a great deal. He struck her as avuncular, not the sort to go about compromising himself.
It was Bressler’s idea to take them all to Zurich. He was being prudent, she thought, and had an eye for their welfare. Paul married her six months after they arrived there. Her mother had already left Europe and her absence was a huge relief for them both. They were settled together, at last.
Laura liked Zurich. She met unusual people there – artists and eccentrics who’d come to avoid the war. Paul was often with Bressler, writing scripts and building sets, so she had time to wander about on her own. She met a German woman – Hilda Meyerhold – who took her to a cabaret tucked away in a basement under the Spiegelgasse. The two of them went there often. People wore outrageous costumes, read nonsense poetry on stage, played imaginary violins, rambled on about the end of art and generally played the fool. It was bizarre, but beside Paul’s plays she found it all very innocent. She felt civilised now, urbane. It pleased her no end and for a while it gave her a feeling of security that she hadn’t known before.
Still, when she yielded, as she occasionally did, and went to see one of her husband’s plays, she was deeply troubled. They seemed to threaten the stability of their life together, to mock it in a way that she didn’t fully understand. Paul talked about being part of the avant-garde. He took it all very seriously. She didn’t understand how he could keep this seriousness up amid howling lunatics and hacked-up bodies. Next to the horror of his plays everything else looked two-dimensional.
One night she decided to test him. They’d come back from a café and both of them were pleasantly light-headed from the wine. She waited for him to get affectionate. She knew the formula: hands in the hair, kisses on the neck, a deliberate, gentle stroking of her arms and back.
“No, Paul,” she said. “Don’t treat me like a piece of porcelain. I’m not about to break.”
But that night he made love to her with more restraint than ever before. It was as if her demand had tamed whatever she sensed lurking within him, and for a while at least she felt relieved, though it left her still empty and unfulfilled.
It took months before the formalities of their marriage really began to drop away. At first, Paul merely paid less attention to her pleasure and got through with his more quickly. It made little difference to her. Then he began to change. It was around the time he began to translate his father’s book back into English. He was more erratic and impetuous. He made her do things she’d never dreamt of doing, guided her to them in a way she sometimes found thoughtless. At first it shocked her. She couldn’t believe it was her. Sometimes she felt ill. Sometimes she found the theatrics curious, even laughable. The question
Weib
or
Frau
had ceased to matter to her. She was neither. She was something else entirely, in her own
chambre séparée,
the place she went to when she needed to be free of him.
She thought about Hilda Meyerhold, who sometimes wore trousers and a jacket. She thought about the first time she saw Paul on board the
Abendstern
and imagined he was the height of sophistication. At the cabaret she had a cigarette, her first, but when the war was finally over Hilda went back to Berlin and Laura’s world began to contract. One by one people left Zurich and filtered back across Europe. Paul and Bressler hung on for two more years. Laura felt like the last girl at the dance, hanging around after everyone else had left. She knew she’d missed her chance.
There was talk of going to America, but finally Bressler went back to Vienna and Paul decided it was time to return to Melbourne. While the Swiss audiences had been constant, interest had begun to drop off after the fighting had ended and the novelty had run its course. Those last years in Zurich were trying. The theatre lost money and without an audience to fill the place, the plays were pointless. Paul couldn’t put them on only for a handful of devotees; the screams from the floor, the laughter and the sense of mass panic were so integral to the overall effect. When Laura saw how hard Paul was working she did her best to help him and finally got her hands dirty working backstage, filling trick knives with fake blood and making up the actors. By then she found the plays more tedious than shocking. As the crowds diminished, so did Paul’s enthusiasm.
They both knew it was time to move on, but Paul was not completely discouraged. He now dreamt of success in Melbourne that would efface once and for all his failure a decade earlier. He was confident he could do something wonderful. As they boarded a steamer in Bremen he was already feverishly jotting down notes for a new play to be set in the Eastern Arcade –
The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities.
During the six-week voyage, Laura scrutinised Paul with renewed intensity. It was the first time in years, probably since Vienna, that they’d been in each other’s company so constantly. In Zurich, Paul had been absorbed in his plays. For long periods of time he seemed to think of nothing else. But as the ship neared Australia, Paul became more self-conscious, more concerned with the dubious stature of his achievement, and this also began to consume him. Laura noted that he had changed physically as well during the voyage. Somehow his body had become even thicker and his skin a touch greyer. There was the beginning of a liver spot on his temple. Once, when she saw him sitting in the dining room chatting amicably with a steward, she was shocked to find that she almost didn’t recognise him. His stomach was like a round melon, the skin under his chin had doubled and his fingers were like plump chipolatas. How odd, she thought, remembering the thin, rakish young man she’d fallen in love with on their voyage out. She chided herself for her superficiality and sat down beside him. He talked confidently about his plans for Melbourne and boasted about Zurich with all the gaudy aplomb of a practised showman. It had never really occurred to her that he was an entertainer, not an artist, but his brashness now convinced her of it. She had given up her romantic view of things years ago, but as the ship approached Australia she couldn’t help but suspect the disillusioning effects of the country’s pitiless realism.
At night, as the ship swayed with the motion of the sea, her husband’s body rocked away on top of her in a manner that would have been comical if it had not been so oblivious. The cabin was small, and the heat reminded her of country Victoria – the farm, the sheep dung, the swarms of blowflies humming through the long, dry summers. His hands always held her down, pushing into her shoulderblades. She’d just lie there on her stomach and try to relax. Afterwards he was always kind. But in the musty cabin, feeling the undulating ocean beneath them, she found the rankness of their bodies hanging in the hot air humiliating.
By the time Anna and Ondine greeted them on the verandah of the family home, Paul had developed into the epitome of condescension. At another time this might have been amusing, but right now Laura felt he’d shattered the ease of their arrival. After almost a decade away – the most momentous decade in recent memory at that – Paul sauntered into the house on St Vincent Place like a jaunty prodigal son. His flippancy was abrasive. Laura cringed as she watched him greet his family with a throwaway familiarity that jarred with the sombre habits of solitude that so clearly hung over the house.
Mrs Norris roasted a leg of lamb in honour of the occasion and Anna welcomed her new daughter-in-law with as much warmth as she could muster. The conversation at dinner rambled over trivialities, the details of the voyage and European anecdotes which Paul dispensed as if he were scattering rare jewels of culture and erudition over the table.
“You simply must go, Mother. You too, Ondine. Imagine how much easier it is to live in the midst of noble cathedrals, great museums, gigantic libraries, and the accumulated effects of the centuries in such ancient cities.”
“We might have gone, but your return is certain to keep us here a bit longer,” Ondine said.
“In Europe one can breathe freely. One need only open one’s eyes to be inspired.”
“It’s a wonder you came back,”Anna said, smiling.
“Well, I’d imagine that we will go back sooner or later. Wouldn’t you say so, darling?”
“Yes, it’s quite likely,” Laura answered.
“But what about the war?” Ondine asked. “I’d imagine that half of Europe lies in ashes.”
“Three years have made a world of difference. And besides, everything is pretty much as it was. It was the countryside that saw the fighting. The cities are largely untouched.”
Later, in the sitting room, Laura noticed that Paul appeared anxious when he spoke to his sister. He seemed a bit unbecoming, stumbling to express himself, tripping over complicated sentences and catching himself out in the convoluted meandering of his own eccentric ideas about life and art.
“I don’t know about popular entertainment, Paul,” Ondine said as she poured the tea. “It surprised me to hear that you’d embraced the popular mood so thoroughly.”