Now that my grandfather, Max Nord, is so famous – many years after his death, a whole new generation has taken him up – I suppose every bit of information about him is of interest to his readers. But my view of him is so familiar, so familial that it might be taken as unwelcome domestic gossip. Certainly, I grew up hearing him gossiped about – by my parents, and everyone else who knew about him and his household set-up. At that time no one believed that his fame would last; and it is true that it did not revive to its present pitch till much later – in fact, till everyone had gone: he himself and his two widows, Lilo and Netta, and my parents too, so that I’m the only family member left to reap the fruits of what now turns out to be, after all, his genius.
Max, Lilo and Netta had come to England as refugees in the thirties. I was born after the war, so I knew nothing of those earlier years in London when they were struggling with a new language and a new anonymity; for it was not only his work that was in eclipse, they themselves were too – their personalities, which could not be placed or recognized in this alien society. At home, in the Germany of the twenties and early thirties, they had each one of them had a brilliant role: Max of course was the young genius, whose early novels had caused a sensation, and Lilo was his prize – the lovely young daughter of a banking family much grander than his own. Netta was dashing, dramatic, chic in short skirts and huge hats. She loved only artists – painters, opera singers – only geniuses, the more famous the better. She never found one more famous than Max, which was maybe why she loved and stayed with him for the rest of their lives. It always seemed to me that it was Netta, much more than his wife Lilo, who fussed over him, adored him, made excuses for him. Lilo sometimes got impatient with him, and I have heard her say to Netta, ‘Why don’t you take him home with you and make everyone happy, most of all me?’ But the moment she had said this, she covered her face and laughed, and Netta also laughed, as at a big joke.
They always spoke in English to each other; it was a matter of principle with them, although they must have felt much more at home in their native German, its idiom packed with idiosyncratic meaning for them. But they had banished that language, too proud to use it now that they themselves had been banished from its precincts. Lilo had had an English governess as a child so that her accent was more authentic than that of the other two – though not quite: I myself, an English child growing up in England, never thought of my grandmother as anything but foreign. Max’s accent was so impenetrable that it was sometimes impossible to understand what he was saying (always impossible for me, but then I didn’t understand him anyway). Yet, although he did not speak it well, Max’s grasp of the English language must have been profound; he continued to write in German but spent weeks and months with his English translator, wrestling over nuances of meaning.
Since Max’s work is so well known today, I need not say much about it. This is just as well, for his books are not the slender psychological novels I prefer but huge tomes with the characters embodying and expressing abstract thought. Today they are generally accepted as masterpieces, but during his last years – which are those that I remember – this estimate was confined to a small group of admirers. In his own household it was of course accepted without question – even by my grandmother Lilo, although I now suspect that she was not as devoted a reader of his works as she should have been. In fact, I wonder sometimes if she read them at all, especially the later, most difficult ones. But Lilo was not really a reader. She liked to go for long walks, to make odd purchases at antique stalls and to play tennis. Yet as a girl she had read the classics – mostly German, and Russian in translation – and, with all her desirable suitors, she had chosen to marry a young writer of modest means and background. An only child, she lived – an enchanted princess – in her father’s villa in the salubrious outskirts of the city. Max would bicycle from the less salubrious city centre where he was a lodger in the flat of an army widow. He brought his latest manuscript and they sat under the trees in her father’s garden – in their memories, as transmitted to me, it seems to have been always summer – and he read from his work to her till it got too dark to see. He was so engrossed in his own words that he noticed nothing – it was she who cried, ‘Maxi! A bee!’ She saved him from it with vigorous flaps of the napkin that had come out with the coffee tray. This tray also bore, besides the voluminous, rosebudded coffee pot, an apple or other fruit tart, so that Lilo was constantly on the alert with the same napkin; and in other ways too she was distracted – for instance, by a bird pecking away in the plum tree, or by Max himself and the way his hair curled on the nape of his strong round young neck where it was bent over his manuscript. Sometimes she could not refrain from tickling him there a little bit, and then he looked up and found her smiling at him – and how could he not smile back? Perhaps it didn’t even occur to him that she wasn’t listening; or if it did, it wouldn’t have mattered, because wasn’t she herself the embodiment of everything he was trying to get into words?
After they were married, they lived in a house – it was her father’s wedding present to them – not far from the one where she had grown up; it too had a garden, with fruit trees, bees and flowers, where Lilo spent a lot of time while he was in his study, writing (it was taken for granted) masterpieces. As the years went by, Lilo became more and more of a home bird – not that she was particularly domestic, she never was, not at all, but that she loved being there, in her own home where she was happy with her husband and child (my mother). During the summer months, and sometimes at Easter, the three of them went to the same big comfortable old hotel in the mountains where she had vacationed with her parents. During the rest of the year Max travelled by himself, to European conferences or to see his foreign publishers; he also had business in the city at least once a week and would go there no longer by bicycle but in his new Mercedes sports car. And it was here, in their home city, which was also hers, that he encountered Netta – or she encountered him, for there is no doubt that, however their affair developed, it was she who first hunted him down: her last, her biggest lion.
She saw him in a restaurant – one of those big plush bright crowded expensive places she went to frequently with her artistic circle of friends, and he only very occasionally, and usually only with his publisher. He was with his publisher that time too, the two of them dining together. They were both dressed elegantly but also very correctly, so that it would have been difficult to distinguish between publisher and author, if it had not been for Max’s looks, which were noble, handsome. ‘Oh my God! Isn’t that Max Nord? Catch me, quick, I’m fainting—’ and Netta collapsed into the lap of the nearest friend (an art critic). Soon she and Max were introduced and soon they were lovers – that never took long with her, at that time; but for him it may have been his first adulterous affair and he suffered terribly and made her suffer terribly. He would only meet her when he travelled to other cities, preferably foreign ones, so that they were always in hotel rooms – he checked in first, and when his business was concluded, he allowed her to join him. She wrote him frenzied, burning letters, which have since been published, by herself— ‘ . . . Don’t you know that I sit here and wait and die again and again, longing for a sign from you, my most beloved, my most wonderful terrible lover, oh you of the arched eyebrows and the— I kiss you a thousand times there and there and there . . . ’ Years passed and the situation did not change for them: he would still only see her in other cities, stolen luxurious nights in luxurious hotel rooms; and she, who had always lived by love, now felt she was perishing by it. She had divorced her husband (her second), and though she still had many men friends, she no longer took them as her lovers; later there were rumours that she had sometimes turned to women friends, her tears and confession to them melting into acts of love. Her looks, always brilliant, became more so – her hats more enormous, her eyebrows plucked to the finest line; she wore fur stoles and cascades of jewels, she glistened in silk designer gowns slit up one side to show a length of splendid leg.
It has never been clear when Lilo first found out about the affair. There was always something vague about Lilo – also something secret, so that she may have known about it long before they realized she did. But whatever upheaval there may have been in their inner lives became vastly overwhelmed by what was happening in the streets, the cities, the countries around them. They, and everyone they knew, were preparing to leave; life had become a matter of visas and wherever possible secret foreign bank accounts. Even when he went abroad, to conferences where he was honoured, Max had only to lean out of his hotel window – Netta was there beside him – to witness marching, slogans, street fights, trucks packed with soldiers. Everyone emigrated where and when they could; farewells were mostly dispensed with – no one really expected to meet again, or if they did, it would be in countries so strange and foreign that they themselves would be as strangers to each other. Max, accepting asylum in England for himself and his family, left at what was almost the last moment. Only a week later his books were among those that were burned, an event that must have seared him even more than his parting from Netta. He was by nature a fatalist – he never thought he could actually do anything in the face of opposition, and indeed he couldn’t – so he did not let himself hold out any hope of meeting Netta again. But she was the opposite: she knew she had her hand on the tiller of fate. She told him, ‘I’ll be there soon.’ And so she was – she and even some of her furniture; all were installed in a flat in St John’s Wood, within walking distance of where Max lived with his family in another flat, up a hill, in Hampstead.
I always assumed that the three of them – Max, Lilo and Netta – all lived in the Hampstead flat, and on the few occasions when Netta took me to St John’s Wood, I would ask why we were coming to this place and who lived there. It was very different from my grandparents’ home, which was in an ornate Edwardian apartment house buried among old trees, whereas Netta’s block had been built ultra-smart on a Berlin model in the thirties and had porters and central heating. Her flat was light and sparse, with her tubular furniture and her white bear rug and the large expressionist painting she had brought of a café scene featuring herself among friends – chic women and nervously intellectual men, whom I thought of as the inhabitants of this place. For Netta herself really belonged in the other household where she appeared to be in complete charge of all domestic arrangements. Had Lilo ceded this place to her over the years, or had Netta usurped it? Probably it had fallen to her lot by virtue of temperament – especially during the early years of their exile when they were aliens, refugees, with thick accents and no social circle. Only Netta knew how to cope; and when war broke out, it was she who sewed the blackout curtains for their flat as well as her own and stuck tape over the windows so that they would not splinter during an air attack. She always managed to get something extra on their ration cards, and in the winter she unfroze the pipes with hot-water bottles and managed to get a fire going with damp lumps of rationed coal. She found domestic help for them – another refugee, Mrs Lipchik from Aachen, who was still with them by the time I began to visit the household. Even so, Netta’s greatest contribution was not practical but what she did for their morale, or for Max’s morale: he was the pivot of everything that had meaning for them.
These must have been difficult years for Max – exiled not only from his country but also from his language, his readers, his reputation. Netta created the conditions that allowed him to write new books. She had furnished his study at the end of the passage; it was his own furniture that they had brought with them, his desk and glass-fronted bookcases and the little round smoking table with leather armchair. Even I, when I was no more than three years old, knew that I could only tiptoe down the passage, preferably with my finger laid on my lips (Netta showed me how). No one was allowed to enter the study except herself twice a day, once with his morning coffee and digestive biscuits, and again in the afternoon with coffee and doughnut. When the telephone rang, it had to be answered swiftly and in hushed tones; if he himself stuck his head out to ask who was calling, she quickly assured him that it was nothing that need bother him. Lunch, starting with a good soup, was served exactly at one – only then was Mrs Lipchik permitted to ply her noisy vacuum cleaner – and if, hungry or frustrated, he appeared before that time, Netta sent him back again. All this would come to fruition in the evenings when they would gather in the sitting-room. This too was full of their German furniture, of light-coloured wood and, though modern, more solid and conventional than Netta’s, with woodcuts (I particularly remember a medieval danse macabre) and Daumier cartoons on the walls. While Max read his day’s work to them, Netta was totally rapt, though engaged in sewing, or darning his socks; sometimes she would make him repeat a phrase and then repeat it herself and become more rapt. Lilo didn’t sew; she said her eyes weren’t good enough. Sometimes, sated with Netta’s comments, he might look for some response from Lilo, but she either gave none or said something irrelevant like, ‘Maxi, I think your hair’s going.’ At once his hand flew to his brow – it was true, it was getting more and more noble, nobly arched – and Netta said quickly, ‘What nonsense, nothing of the sort.’ ‘All right, don’t believe me,’ said Lilo, shrugging, knowing better.
Slowly, over the years, he became if not famous at least known again. This is the period during which I remember him best, when new admirers and literary historians came to call on him. Besides his study and the passage leading up to it, the drawing-room (known as the salon) also became a silent zone at certain hours of the evening. Appointments for his visitors were regulated by Netta, and she was also the only person who entered, to bring a tray of refreshments and to listen in and make sure he wasn’t being tired out by his visitors. He never was – he was too appreciative of this new respect and so was Netta, to witness him again taking up his rightful place as a European man of letters. Lilo did not participate in these sessions; she sat in the kitchen enjoying a cup of coffee with Mrs Lipchik. The two of them spoke together in German – the only time I heard that language in the flat – and it must have been a funny, racy sort of German, for it made them both laugh. I think sometimes they were also laughing at the visitors – I’ve seen Lilo do a comic imitation of some scholar she had seen arrive with his umbrella and wet shoes – and also maybe even at Max himself. Lilo always enjoyed laughing at Max, which didn’t undermine her pride, or her other feelings for him.
Also, at this time, with foreign royalty payments beginning to come in again, their financial position became more stable. During their first years in England, and especially during the war, they had been almost poor, which affected the three of them in different ways. For Max, having no money was something he had been born to fear: he had grown up with a widowed mother who lived on a shrinking pension and had had to pretend they didn’t need the things they couldn’t afford, like a summer holiday. These long-buried memories came back to him and often drove him to a despair that he could only share with Netta. For Lilo, who knew nothing about not having money, blithely accepted that now, for the first time in her life, she was without it. Unable to afford new clothes, she was perfectly content to wear her old ones, even if they were sometimes torn. This characteristic remained with her, so that my memories of my grandmother included a Kashmir shawl that was falling apart and holes in the heels of her stockings. When they could no longer afford to pay Mrs Lipchik, Lilo told her so without embarrassment; and she gladly accepted Mrs Lipchik’s offer to wait for her money and was grateful when Mrs Lipchik, to keep herself going, took a part-time job, enabling her sometimes to help them out with her earnings.
Netta too found a job around this time – probably in response to one of the scenes she had with Max, when he buried his head in her lap: ‘What are we going to do, Netta? Without money, how can we live?’ Although Netta too came from a family of modest means – her father had held a lifelong position as accountant to a shoe manufacturer – she didn’t share Max’s fear of poverty: from her youngest days, she had managed brilliantly with her looks and personality, finding jobs in boutiques and as a model, and later, living with or marrying, twice, wealthy men. Now, a refugee in London, she took what she could get and became a receptionist to a dentist, another refugee, Dr Erdmund from Dortmund. It was a full day’s work, but she continued all her previous chores in the Hampstead flat. Sometimes, when there was a difficult case and she was kept longer in the surgery, she would arrive from the rush hour in the Underground with her coat flying open to get Max ready for an appointment she had scheduled for him. She didn’t even have time to unpin her hat while she brushed him down, lapels and front and back, for, whatever else, he had to be perfect, and he always was. Nevertheless, he would be complaining about the difficult day he had had, the telephone ringing and no one to answer it, both Lilo and Mrs Lipchik off somewhere or pretending to be deaf. Netta clicked her tongue in sympathy, and having finished with his coat, she got to work on his hair with a soft baby brush for, as Lilo had predicted, he had gone almost bald. She even had time to flick quickly through his mail – he had extracted the fan letters himself, leaving the rest to her. If she found anything disturbing, like an electricity bill or a tax notice, she slipped it into her handbag to take home to her own flat, for Lilo too did not care to deal with such matters.
Lilo spent her days in her own way, devoting herself to her daughter (my mother), and afterwards to me, her granddaughter. I was often sent to stay with her and would sit in the kitchen eating plum cake while she and Mrs Lipchik talked German; or Lilo would make drawings for me, of fruits and flowers, or a whole menagerie of animals out of Plasticine. When Netta was not there, I played at trains up and down the corridor – till the study door opened and Max stood there, in despair: ‘God in heaven, is there no one to keep the child quiet!’ The sight of him – looming and hostile – made me burst into tears, and Lilo would have to lead me away, while throwing reproachful looks over her shoulder at Max. To comfort me, she would take me out on one of her shopping expeditions; these were never for anything dull like groceries – that was Netta’s province – but to antique stalls, where she would pick out the sweetest objects for me, like a painted Victorian picture frame or a miniature bouquet in enamel in a miniature vase. She liked to play tennis, and when they were both younger, she and Netta had played together; but Netta was too competitive, so that Lilo preferred to potter around with me on a court we booked for half an hour at a time in the public park.
When Max’s reputation, and with it his royalties, had grown more substantial, Netta broached the subject of leaving her job. He said, ‘Are you sure? Can we afford it?’ She proved to him that they could, but he remained dubious: his inborn caution, as well as the experience of the previous years, made him reluctant to give up the assurance of a steady salary. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘What’s got into you? You like your job.’ Her eyes, still darkly magnificent in spite of lines around them, flashed: ‘Who told you that?’ But he couldn’t go into it – he never could go into practical problems, especially those of a petty nature, it took too much out of him; and usually she was the first person to spare him, removing annoyances by shouldering them herself.
And now too, she did not burden him with facts of which she had never allowed him to be conscious – that it was tiring for her to do a full day’s work and then look after his affairs as well as her own. She never mentioned anything of that, but what she did now decide to mention was something else that she had spared him. It had been all right, nothing to make a fuss about, during the days of Dr Erdmund of Dortmund – well, yes, he had had a crush on her, but he was after all a gentleman and never let it go beyond a squeeze of the hand or a stolen kiss behind her ear, which it hadn’t cost her anything to permit. But Dr Erdmund had become old and had had to sell his practice – ‘You never told me,’ Max said, and she shrugged, ‘Why should I?’ The new boss was a younger man, though not very young – another refugee, from Czechoslovakia, with none of the cultured manners of an earlier generation of refugees. She didn’t mind that – she had always been able to get on with all sorts – but unfortunately he had wandering hands and he could not keep them off Netta, which was really a bit thick. Max genuinely didn’t understand, he had never heard of such a thing, and she had to explain to him how unpleasant it was to spend all day with someone and be on your guard constantly – ‘You know, Max—’ ‘Know what, Netta, what?’ ‘Coming up behind me – he says he’s a thigh man – oh, it’s disgusting—’ But Max was not disgusted; he laughed, he protested: ‘You’re imagining it.’ ‘Imagining it!’ ‘But Nettalein, how could it be? God in heaven, at your age.’
For a long time, no one – not even Lilo, who wasn’t told the details – knew what had happened: why Netta suddenly withdrew from the household and told my parents and everyone else that she had had enough. She started a life of her own in her St John’s Wood flat and entertained old friends with whom she had re-established contact. She also had what she called her cavaliers – elderly gentlemen from Vienna or Berlin, who were very gallant and visited her with flowers and chocolates and always had a good joke for her they remembered from the old days. She kept herself trim with sports – her competitive games of tennis, and three times a week she went to an indoor swimming pool where she swam several lengths up and down, her arms pushing the water with the vigour of a much younger woman. In the afternoons she had her coffee in a restaurant in a hotel – the only equivalent of the sort of coffee houses she had known in Germany, with deep armchairs and carpets and cigarette smoke and foreign waiters and foreign newspapers stuck on wooden poles. If there was no friend to join her, she went alone; she had adventures, for she was still very attractive with her flashing eyes, and her strong teeth intact, and always chic, the large hats of her youth replaced by little saucy ones over one eyebrow. Of course men of a certain age – incorrigible wolves, she called them – were always trying to pick her up and sometimes she let them, though insisting on respect. She knew how to deal with every situation – for years afterwards, for the rest of her life, she told the story of the man who had taken, without permission, the empty chair at her table for two and had been bolder than she would permit: and she, without a word, had picked up her coffee cup and flung the contents in his face. ‘You should have seen him! Dripping! And it was hot, too! With hot coffee in your face, you forget all about being fresh with a woman.’
Around this time my parents, who were documentary film-makers specializing in aboriginal tribes, went away for almost a year, leaving me in the Hampstead flat with my grandparents. So I was witness to what might be called their second honeymoon – the time alone together that they had not had since Netta had become attached to them. Max, remote and selfish as he was, began to woo my grandmother all over again. With Netta gone, it was once more only to Lilo that he read his day’s work in the evenings – even sitting on the floor the way he had done in the past, though now it was no longer so easy for him, with his increased weight and his custom-tailored suit he had to be careful not to crease. As before, Lilo did not listen too attentively; some of her attention was now bestowed on me, but Max didn’t seem to mind when he looked up and saw her busy helping me pick out the right colour crayon for an elephant’s ear. They exchanged smiles then – maybe about me, more likely for each other – before Max went on reading; though he looked up again when, staring at his lowered head, she exclaimed, ‘Oh Maxi, what a pity – it’s really all gone now!’ But when he ruefully passed his hand over his scalp – ‘Really? All?’ – she looked closer: ‘There’s still a little bit; so sweet.’
My grandmother’s own hair was as long as it had been – she never cut it – but it had turned very grey. She continued to wear it the way she had done as a girl – loose and open down her back and around her shoulders. When people in the street turned to stare at her, I assumed that it was for her beauty. I thought she was beautiful, and I was never ashamed of her, though she dressed shabbily – there was her frayed shawl and the holes in her stockings, one of which sometimes came loose and wrinkled around her ankle. Walking tall and erect, she was completely unselfconscious; if something interested her, maybe in a shop window or a flower growing in a hedge, she would stop and look at it for a long time. She was very fond of street markets and liked to talk to people selling pottery and costume jewellery and discuss their craft with them. She always bought something from them, but if on her way home, someone admired her purchase, she might simply give it to them and walk on. She remained my grandfather’s muse for the rest of their lives: there were always reflections of her in his work, but not as she was in these later years, nothing of her gypsy quality, but the girl he had wooed in their youth. This girl – several theses have already been written about her influence – was wound into his work like filigree. She was the moonlit statue of a nymph in a deserted allée of poplars; she was the girl shining in white at her first communion and also the cold lilies adorning the altar. She was everything – every image – that was lyrical, nostalgic, breathlessly beautiful in his work, keeping it as fresh as on the day it was written.
Although at first they enjoyed their time together without Netta, they encountered difficulties. There was now no one to arrange appointments except Max himself – Lilo had tried, but she had several times given rival scholars identical hours and tended to get not only the days but the weeks mixed up. She also didn’t like the telephone and Mrs Lipchik would answer, but she never understood what anyone was saying and that made her laugh so much that she had to put down the receiver (Lilo laughed with her). So then Max had to attend to phone calls himself, which disturbed him terribly in his work; several times he simply let it ring, but that disturbed him even more and he sat with his head between his hands. Also it was he now who had to deal with practical matters, which was very difficult for him, for though he was meticulous, he was very timid and would panic at anything with an official stamp on it like an income tax notice. In fact, these sorts of communications had such a shattering effect on him that, like Netta had done, Lilo hid them from him, if she happened to see them; but unlike Netta, she did not deal with them and only stuffed them into a drawer and forgot about them till threatening notices arrived. Then they would search for them, and if they found them – occasionally they didn’t – Max would blame Lilo for hiding them, and they would be angry with each other and miserable.
Once Lilo was so hurt and annoyed by Max – this was when my parents were home again – that she left the flat and came to us. She had often told us, as a joke, how she had several times run away from Max during their first years of marriage, packing up a suitcase and going straight back to her father’s house. When she came to us, it was also with a suitcase; she didn’t say anything and my parents didn’t ask her any questions. It must have been the same when she had gone home to her parents – it would probably have been as useless then as it was now to expect any explanations or accusations from her. Unlike Netta, who had gone around complaining about Max to everyone who knew him and even to those who didn’t, Lilo’s pride expressed itself in silence. Stubborn and upright, completely oblivious of us tiptoeing tactfully around her, she sat on a chair in our house; but as the afternoon wore on, she moved her chair nearer to the window and looked out into the street, her elbow propped on the sill, her cheek on her hand. That was the way she must have waited in her parents’ house – waited for the garden gate to open and Max to come up the path to take her home; without giving him time to ring the bell, she had jumped up and opened the door for him herself and said, ‘Let’s go,’ not bothering about her suitcase, which her father’s chauffeur had to bring after her. In the same way, my mother had to take her suitcase back to the Hampstead flat – because the moment Lilo saw Max from the window, she jumped up and went straight out to meet him: leaving us to gaze after the two of them walking down the street together, two elderly people with their arms around each other. They appeared to be an odd couple for romantic attachment – he like a banker in his fur-collared overcoat and Homburg hat, and she with her long loose grey hair, a gypsy or a poetess.
After that, my mother hired a part-time secretary to take care of his business affairs and professional obligations, ignoring his protests that he couldn’t afford to pay a salary. The secretary was efficient and soon everything was as it had been with Netta: but when I say everything, I mean only the practical side because in other ways there was something – even I felt it – amiss, or missing. Of course this was Netta, her absence from their lives she had shared for so long. At that time, it never occurred to me that Max was anything but this disagreeable old man who disturbed my pleasant time with my grandmother; and even if I had been old enough to know him better, how could I have understood his need for Netta any more than did my parents, who thought it would be solved by someone else taking care of his practical problems. Emotionally he seemed – he was – completely fulfilled by Lilo, as was evident not only to his family but also to people who knew him simply through his work. Nevertheless – and this is being written about today – there was another element in that work, a hidden current coursing beneath the cool stream of his lyrical love. However, no one mentioned a second muse until Netta published his letters to her, after his death and Lilo’s, which was less than a year later. In her introduction, Netta spilled every bean there was, giving time and place for all their secret meetings, all the hotel rooms in all the cities where they had met and the scenes they had had there – the tears they spilled, but also how she had always managed to make him laugh. In her account, their time together was fundamentally joyous and beautiful; and in his work too it was beautiful but also full of interior struggle and guilt, painful, often renounced yet inescapable, cut down only to grow again, a cancer of dark passion.
Lilo too must have missed Netta during the years of her absence. I accompanied her several times on visits she made to Netta in the St John’s Wood flat – I went under protest, for it was much more interesting for me in the Hampstead flat, and familiar, with the comfortable furniture and all the amusing objects Lilo picked up at street fairs. At Netta’s, there was always the danger of hurting myself on some sharp edge of her metal furniture; and I did not care for Netta’s only picture – the café scene of herself and friends, who did not look like people at all but like geometrical masks. Worst of all was Netta herself – at home I was fond of her, she was always bringing me presents, and when I said anything that amused her, she shouted: ‘Did you hear that? What a child, my God!’ But here all she did was talk to Lilo, in a torrent of words, all of them complaints. When I plucked at Lilo’s sleeve to ask to go home, Netta pleaded, ‘One moment, darling, only one more little minute, my angel,’ and not wanting to interrupt herself by kissing me, she kissed the air instead, with several absent-minded smacks of her pursed lips, and went right on talking. Although everything she said was directed against Max – how he had availed himself of her youth and strength only to throw her away like an orange he had sucked dry – Lilo did not protest or try to interrupt; the most she said was, ‘No no,’ which made Netta shout louder, ‘Yes, an orange!’ When at last I persuaded Lilo to go home, she got up reluctantly, lingering as if she wanted to say something more than only ‘No no’. But she never managed to say much, and then only as we were leaving and Netta was kissing not the air but really me, kneeling down to do so and making me wet with her lips and with tears too, hot tears – Lilo, looking down at us, would say sadly, ‘It was so nice when you were there.’
These words seemed to enrage Netta – not there and then but later, when she came to see my parents, as she did after each of Lilo’s visits. ‘Oh yes, so nice, so nice,’ she cried, ‘when I was there to do all their dirty work for them!’ My parents tried to soothe her, they spoke eloquently, and after a while Netta sat quiet to listen to them: how much she meant to all of us, and whatever had been difficult in the past was now an indispensable part of the present so that she was missed terribly – ‘Who misses me terribly?’ she asked, eyes dangerously narrowed as though she were ready to leap on the answer and tear it to pieces. They said we all of us missed her, even I, though only a child, and of course most of all – her eyes narrowed more – Lilo and (yes?) Max. At that name, her eyes sprang wide open in all their dark beauty: ‘Well, if he misses me so much, let him come crawling to me on his hands and knees and beg me to come back.’
With all the accusations she made, there was one thing she never mentioned: the money from her salary that she had freely shared with Lilo and Max when they were in difficulties. Nor did she tell anyone that she was now herself running short of money and needed another job to keep going. We none of us knew that she was looking for work – she may even have been searching for some time and finally had to take what she could get: this was as manageress of a continental bakery and café. It wasn’t called a café but a coffee lounge; there were only half a dozen tables, usually occupied by elderly refugees who couldn’t do without their afternoon coffee and cake. Nominally, Netta had an assistant, but none of them was reliable – ‘Bone lazy’, she called them – so that often she had to be both saleslady and waitress. She seemed to like it, moving around the place with verve, and always with a personal word for her clientele. It was only a short walk from the Hampstead flat, so Lilo and I often dropped in and stayed for quite a while, with me eating more chocolate eclairs than I was normally allowed. There was usually at least one – and sometimes more – elderly gentleman who seemed to be there as much to enjoy Netta’s presence as the refreshments she served them. Their eyes followed her as she flew around the coffee lounge, and the moment she approached their table they were ready with some gallant quip. If one of them tried to hold on to her hand longer than necessary while she was handing him his change, she good-naturedly let him, while giving us a wink. Lilo watched her in true admiration – the way she handled the business and the customers – and when we went home, she described the scene to Mrs Lipchik, saying, ‘Netta is so wonderful.’ She also praised her to Max, but he didn’t like to hear about it at all: ‘What’s wonderful about being a waitress? And just around the corner to us. What an embarrassment.’ Lilo reared up as if it were she who had been insulted. ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were so grand,’ she said, and swept out of the room, very grand herself.
One day Max surprised me by inviting me for a walk. ‘Would you like to, little one?’ he said with a smile that was as unnatural as the tone in which he spoke. I looked around at Lilo, but she had to nod several times and even frown at me a bit before I went reluctantly to put on my coat. Max continued to smile in a glassy way, but once out in the street, he forgot about me. He strode along, sunk in thought, with steps too large for me; when he realized I was lagging behind, he stopped to wait for me, but impatiently as though in a hurry to get to where we were going. Netta was at the counter, and when she saw us, she went right on chatting with her customer, her hands busy inserting a dozen pastries into their cardboard box. There was no table vacant, and we had to wait; Max’s face had gone very red, but his head was raised loftily and he held me by the hand in an iron grip. Although I was his excuse for being there, when we were seated and Netta came for our order, he turned to me as if he didn’t see me, asking: ‘What do you want?’ ‘I know what she wants,’ Netta said, ‘but what do you want?’ ‘Netta, Netta,’ he implored, his eyes downcast, in shame and pain.
And that was all he said, the entire time we were there: ‘Netta, Netta’. He didn’t address a word to me, and of course I didn’t expect him to, he never did, and anyway I was there to eat my chocolate eclairs. He was like the other elderly gentlemen who came there and followed Netta with their eyes. Only with this difference, that she approached our table quite often – as often as she could – and lingered there to do something unnecessary, like exchanging the position of sugar bowl and milk jug. And we sat on, though there were others waiting for our table and glaring at us, so that Max felt constrained to order more pastry for me. He also tried to order another coffee for himself, but Netta said, ‘Yes, and the indigestion?’ for no one knew better than she what too much coffee did to him. Although totally engrossed in licking up the cream from my pastry, I was aware of the tension emanating from my grandfather. This became unbearable when Netta approached our table; and when she touched or maybe just accidentally brushed against him, he moaned: ‘Netta, Netta.’ Once she flicked at something on his shoulder – ‘For heaven’s sake, doesn’t anybody ever take a clothes brush to you?’ In stricken silence, he pointed at my plate, which was empty again; I looked up hopefully, but Netta said, ‘I’m not having this child spoil her stomach, just to please you.’ However, she brought each of us a glass of water, and ignoring the waiting customers pointing restively at our table, she still didn’t give us our bill.
Over the following period of time – was it weeks, months, or even years? – I often accompanied Max on visits to the coffee lounge. But although we were now steady companions, he never became anything other for me than the remote, gloomy figure he had always been. Holding me by the hand so that I wouldn’t lag behind, he communed only with himself – shaking his head, uttering a half-stifled exclamation; and when we got to Netta’s place of work, he concentrated entirely on her, vibrating to each movement as she passed, now close to, now far from, our table. And there was another burden on his spirit, of which I heard him complain to Lilo: ‘But don’t you understand! They’re sitting there looking at her as if she were – oh my God in heaven – a—’ ‘The child,’ warned Lilo. Who was there sitting looking at her? Next time in the coffee lounge, I followed his burning eyes and saw what he saw: it was only another elderly gentleman like himself, dressed as he was, very correctly, with spats for the cold weather. One of them I knew – it was Dr Erdmund from Dortmund, retired and in the habit of taking his afternoon coffee there. Sometimes he stopped at our table, to pinch my cheek and address a word to Max, very respectfully as was befitting with a famous author. Max never answered or even looked at him, and it was not only his hands but his whole body that seemed to clench up into a fist. And afterwards he would mutter to Netta, darkly, awesomely – except that she was not awed, she tossed her head and moved around on her duties with even greater verve.
My days in the Hampstead flat were no longer as light-hearted as they had been. This was because of the change in my grandmother – she was no longer light-hearted: as with Max, there was a burden on her spirit, and in her case, he was the burden. When he was in his study, oppressive waves seemed to seep from under the door, so that, wanting to get as far away from him as possible, I gave up playing anywhere except in Lilo’s sitting-room at the other end of the flat. I also refused to accompany him to the coffee lounge: since Netta regularly denied me my third round of pastries and we just sat on and on with nothing but glasses of water in front of us, I preferred to stay home with my grandmother. The first time I refused him he looked in such anguish at Lilo that she persuaded me to change my mind; but after that even she could no longer coax me – he of course never tried: it was not in his nature to coax anyone, he only knew to stand stricken till the other person’s heart would melt of its own accord. But mine never melted towards him, not even when I watched him from the window – Lilo stood behind me, her hand on my shoulder – as he made his way with heavy steps towards the coffee lounge, his proud head sunk low.
Ever since I had known them, my grandparents had slept in separate bedrooms. Max’s was next to his study and Lilo’s, which I shared when I stayed with them, adjoined her sitting-room. But he had always come to say goodnight and stayed so long that I was usually asleep before he left. I had no interest in their conversation, which in any case was interspersed with long silences. These had once been soothing enough for me to fall asleep, with clear streams winding through the meadows of my dreams. But now all that changed, and though he still came to our room in his nightshirt and sat on the edge of the bed, there was a different silence between them; and when she took his hand, she did not tickle it as she used to but grasped it tight, either to comfort or hold on to him. Now I could not fall asleep, though I pretended to, while listening for anything they might say. This was often about Netta and her job – ‘She says she can’t afford to give it up,’ Max told Lilo. ‘She says she has no money.’ ‘But that’s ridiculous,’ Lilo said, to which he replied, ‘Money is never ridiculous to those who don’t have it.’ ‘But we have it,’ Lilo said. ‘Don’t we? Enough for three?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he moaned, in despair. ‘You know I know nothing about money.’
‘Listen,’ Netta said to Lilo. ‘If you offered me a million pounds, I wouldn’t do it.’
Lilo and I had come to visit Netta in the St John’s Wood flat. It was not until I saw her sitting side by side with Netta that I noticed how much my grandmother had changed. She had lately had to have many of her own teeth extracted and the new ones hurt her, so that she was mostly without them; and she continued to wear her beloved Kashmir shawl, though the fabric had split with age in several places. I’m sorry to say that she now looked not so much like a gypsy but like some old beggar woman – especially in comparison with Netta, who was in a silk blouse and tight velvet pants, her nails and hair both red. And it wasn’t only Lilo’s appearance: she seemed really to be begging for something that she wanted very much from Netta; and though Netta kept refusing her, it wasn’t Lilo but Netta herself who burst into tears – loud sobs interspersed with broken sentences that made Lilo say, ‘Careful: the child.’
But I was busy exploring the flat, which had changed. It seemed somehow to have filled out, or rounded its contours, an impression that may have been due to additional items of furniture. Besides the tubular chairs Netta had brought from Germany, there were now low round upholstered little armchairs that people could actually sit in. And apparently people had been sitting in them; and they had stubbed out their cigarettes in the ashtrays that were scattered around on new little tables, and these also held glasses out of which guests had drunk wine. When I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator – which had always been depressingly empty – I found it stuffed with food like potato salad and roast chickens. There was also a tray of delicious little canapés, which I took back into the living room. ‘Can I have one?’ I asked, but just then Netta was shouting, ‘A life! A whole lifetime I’ve given him!’ so I had to say it again. ‘Of course you can, my darling,’ Netta said, ‘you can have anything from me you want—’ ‘Oh thank you, Netta,’ I said, and retreated politely back into the kitchen, so that they could say whatever they wanted without having to warn each other of my presence. Anyway, Netta was shouting loudly enough to be heard throughout the flat – ‘That’s what I’m here for, to give, always to give, but now I tell you it’s my turn to take!’
Lilo’s voice was low, conciliatory, which only made Netta’s rise more: ‘Yes, I have my friends, that’s not a crime I hope, to try and get a little bit of a life going of my own?’ And again Lilo murmured, mild, protesting, and again Netta cried out, ‘So who asked him to come and sit there and disturb me in my work? He’s welcome to come here to my home, I’d be glad to entertain him in my own place for a change, because I’ve had enough, up to here enough, of the dog’s life he’s made me lead in his.’
Whereas Netta’s flat was now comfortable and lively, the Hampstead flat had changed in the opposite direction. It was as if not Lilo and Max were living there but the original Edwardian families for whom this ponderous structure had been built. It had become gloomy and oppressive – although the one person who had had this effect on me was usually absent. I no longer had to fear that Max’s forbidding figure would appear in the door of his study, for he was now mostly with Netta, and not only in the coffee lounge. Now I feared – not Lilo (I never feared her) but for Lilo: that, however cute I tried to be for her sake, I could hardly make her smile. We still went on our usual outings, no longer because she enjoyed them but because she thought I would: but how could I, when she didn’t? Mrs Lipchik heaved heavy sighs as she cleaned, and while she and Lilo still had their long coffee sessions in the kitchen, these were no longer full of German jokes but of secrets, problems. It was even worse when Max was there with us: Mrs Lipchik’s sighs were nothing compared with his, especially those he uttered like groans when he came to Lilo’s bedroom at night. Sitting as before on the side of her bed, with me curled up beside her, he spoke to her in whispers: only to get up and pace around and then return and seize her hands and implore: ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’ And she withdrew her hands and didn’t answer him.
My dreams ceased to feature pellucid streams in meadows; instead – if they were dreams – they resounded with the echo of his voice, through which the word fate struck repeatedly like hammer blows. Fate! It was the great theme of his later books. Here Fate is the main character and human beings are depicted as struggling helplessly in the grip of its iron claw. But although he witnessed the upheaval of his whole continent and the destruction of his generation, he goes beyond the epoch in which he happened to be living to embrace the entire epoch of Man: Man in the abstract, from birth to death. And this is what astonished him and made him suffer – the suffering of Man, and all he has to endure in the course of a lifetime of inevitable decline; and also the swiftness of that decline, the inexorable swiftness with which a young man becomes an old one. It is no doubt a great theme, but how could I take it seriously when I identified its author with my grandfather, whom I saw suffer because I made a noise playing outside his study door, or because his girlfriend flirted with her dentist? In his last book there is a sort of dance of death in a landscape of night and barren rock where men and women join hands and revolve in a circle, their faces raised to the moon so that its craters appear to be reflected in the hollow sockets of their eyes. This might for others be a powerful metaphor for the macabre dance of our lives; but for me it is only a reminder of a birthday party we attended.
It was Max’s birthday – his last, as it turned out – and, like all our celebrations during this year, the party was held in Netta’s flat. For by then Max was spending all his days in St John’s Wood – even his desk had been moved there – though he still showed up in the Hampstead flat for the sort of nocturnal visits I have described. Netta also came quite often, not with him but alone. I witnessed several scenes between her and my grandmother, only now it was always Netta who was pleading while Lilo remained stubborn and silent. This made Netta desperate and she stopped pleading and was angry, or pretended to be: ‘My God, think of me all these years, in your house, and putting up with it – yes, gladly! Laughing and pretending to be happy, so that everyone could be happy! And you can’t come even once, for one afternoon, for his sake?’ For a long time my grandmother remained impervious, so that Netta might as well have been addressing someone blind and deaf. But gradually, over the years – for no particular reason, or perhaps because it didn’t matter any longer, or that other things mattered more – anyway, we did go to Netta’s flat, to her more important parties like when it was her birthday, or Max’s, or even Lilo’s: everything was celebrated there.
It was always the same guests who had been invited, and they were all Netta’s friends, from the social circle she had formed around herself. They included people we vaguely knew, like Dr Erdmund from Dortmund and some of the other elderly gentlemen whom I remembered from the coffee lounge. They were mostly German refugees who, like Max and Lilo and Netta, had had their youthful heyday during the time of the Weimar Republic. In fact, they might have been the embodiment of the big painting in Netta’s flat of the German café scene, with geometrically shaped faces crowding each other around a café table. Now those triangles and cones had been realigned into the masks of old age, and the expression of nervous restlessness had frozen into the smile of the tenacious survivor. Their clothes were elegant – Netta insisted on glamorous attire for her parties – and they still held a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, some with a long silver or ivory holder; and they were still animated by a kind of frenetic energy, a consumptive eagerness. There was dancing too – Netta rolled up her bear rug and put on some of her old dance records, and when the music started, she stretched herself up by her clenched arms and said, ‘Oh my God,’ and laughed at whatever it was that she remembered. They were all pretty good dancers – mostly foxtrots, with some very intricate footwork. Netta’s favourite was the tango, and it suited her – inside her tight silk metallic dress she made movements as sinuous as those of a young siren; and the expression on her face no doubt reflected the sensations in her heart, which were those of her siren years. Her partners did their best to keep up with her, pretending they were not out of breath; but she discarded them one by one when they began to fail, and imperiously snatched up a fresh old gentleman.
The only person who refused her was Max: he would not dance, he could not, never had done, which was why Lilo had given it up too, long ago. So the two of them were always onlookers – except on that last birthday party when everyone had drunk a lot of champagne and excitement burned through the air like holes made by a forgotten cigarette. In fact, Netta was scattering dangerous sparks from the cigarette held between her fingers; and her eyes too sent out glints of fire and so did her red hair and her metallic dress. Discarding her last breathless partner, she turned to Max: he shook his head, he smiled, no, he would not. But for once she insisted and she grasped his hand and pulled him up; and at last, to please her, he let himself be dragged on to the dance floor and tried to imitate her steps. But he could not, and to help him, she pressed herself as close to him as possible to lead him and make his hips rotate along with hers. But still he stumbled and could not; at first he laughed at his own ineptitude, but when others too began to laugh, he tried to extricate himself from Netta’s close embrace. She would not let him go, and perhaps to drown his angry words, she called to someone to turn up the record; and then, when it was really loud, she called out, ‘Come on, everybody, what are you waiting for – New Year?’ and soon they were all jigging up and down, with Max and Netta in their centre. The more he struggled the tighter she held on to him, so that he appeared to be entangled in the embrace of an octopus or some other creature with long tentacles. His situation made them all laugh – even I did, till I saw how Lilo had hidden her face in her hands, and not because she was laughing. Suddenly she snatched at me in the same way as Netta had done to Max and made me get up with her. Although neither of us knew how, we tried to join the dance – and that made all of them turn from Max and look and laugh at us, at grandmother and granddaughter hopping and slipping on the polished floor. Although Lilo was getting out of breath, we stuck it out till the music stopped, and then she and I thanked Netta for the party and went home.
If it were not for the famous danse macabre in Max’s last book, I might have forgotten all about that birthday party. I prefer to remember our walk home from it, Lilo’s and mine, through empty streets on a cool autumn night. There was the smell of fallen leaves, and layers of clouds shifted and floated across the sky; the moon was dim, so that even when it came sliding out from between these veils, it didn’t light up anything. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that it did illumine my grandmother’s face when she raised it to try and identify some of the stars for me. She pointed at what she said was the Great Bear – or was it the Plough – I think she wasn’t sure, and anyway her eyesight was not good enough to see that far. I don’t know why I expected her to look unhappy – after all, we had just left a party with music and champagne and special birthday cake ordered from Netta’s bakery; but anyway she didn’t, not at all, on the contrary her face appeared as radiant as was possible by the light of that dim moon.