The Children's Book

Griselda felt awkward. Dorothy, who understood nothing at all of what was said, felt more awkward. The place was buzzing and humming with chatter and argument, and it is hard, when you are seventeen, in a foreign land for the first time, not to feel that the laughter is mockingly directed against you, and the camaraderie designed to exclude you. She had a moment, standing stiffly amid the clamour, when she wondered why on earth she had disrupted her life so furiously to come here and feel lost. She was rescued by Toby Youlgreave, also a stranger to this world, who could read German as a good folklorist must, but had no speaking vocabulary and also no acquaintance with Bavarians.

“We shall feel like old inhabitants in two or three days, I imagine,” he said to Dorothy. “All this will come to seem quite normal and ordinary.”

The pension was, it became clear, open to all sorts of cafe society—artists, Bohemians, students, wandering mystics and anarchists—at lunch time. In the evening the guests of the pension dined together, round a large table, from charming flower-rimmed plates. There was soup, full of cabbage, and sausages and large pork cutlets, and a heap of potatoes and a delicious pudding of red berries and cream. Much beer was served, in large earthenware mugs. Afterwards, one of the precise men produced a flute, and one of the art students sang, in a husky voice, whilst the guests tapped with feet and fingers, until everyone joined in, beards wagging, throats swelling. Toby drank several jars of beer and joined in, humming the tunes. Dorothy said she had a headache, and went to bed.

It is hard to get to sleep in an unknown room, with unaccustomed bed coverings. Dorothy shifted and stirred and dozed and jerked awake. She could see a thin, curved penknife of a moon, steel-bright on a blue-black sky. She heard a strange sound, a regular banging and flapping, banging and flapping, thump, thump, thump, speeding up as it continued, which it did for a long time. It was accompanied by a creaking sound of bed-slats, and also by a mixture of moaning and giggling. Then there was a wailing cry, and silence.

Dorothy knew well enough, in the abstract, what she was hearing. Unlike many of her contemporaries she knew how the sex act was performed, in principle. She had watched dogs and horses. They did not take all this time over it. That was interesting. What could be going on? The scientist in her took notes, and the tired, overwrought girl wished that her neighbours would speed up even more, and come to an end, and allow her to sleep. She could hear a murmur of voices, after the banging stopped. She dozed. And woke again, as the banging enthusiastically recommenced. That, too, was unexpected and odd. It was characteristic of Dorothy that she wondered, not who was banging whom, but how it was done, and why it had that rhythm.

In the morning the girls had two hours’ lessons, in maths, in German, in literature. They were taught sitting on a little balcony overlooking a kind of farmyard and a vegetable and herb garden. Charles did not come to the lessons—he was a young man, not a schoolboy, even if his education was unfinished. Sometimes he slept in, and sometimes he wandered out into the streets, and sat in the cafes. Then they paid cultural visits to galleries and museums, and returned to the pension for lunch, beer, conversation and a siesta.

Griselda was aware that Dorothy was tense like an overstrung bow. When they found themselves alone, Dorothy would turn to Griselda and say, we must find him, we must look for him, it is what I came to do. She begged Griselda to ask Tante Lotte about a puppet show run by a man called Anselm Stern, and Griselda demurred. She was shy. She was reserved. She did not know how to set about it. But after a few days, during a particularly lively lunch, full of intense little eddies of argument and expanses of foreign laughter, Tante Lotte brought them apple cakes, and sat down for a moment to talk to Joachim. What have you seen, she asked him. The classical statues? The State Museum? You must take everyone to the new cabaret, the Elf Scharfrichter, it is very clever and shocking. What do the young women like to see?

Dorothy understood most of this. She pushed her finger into Griselda’s flank, surreptitiously. “Tell her,” she said, “tell Frau Susskind what we want to see—”

“Once, in England,” said Griselda, “we saw a puppet-show. The—the Puppenmeister—was called Herr Stern. Anselm Stern. He acted a version of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Sandman, and Cinderella. It was—very interesting. Do you know anything about him?”

“But of course,” said Tante Lotte. “He is a famous artist. Marionettes and puppets are famous in this city. There is Paul Brann, whose work is witty and magical, and there is Anselm Stern, who has made his own theatre in a cellar—it is called Frau Holle’s Spiegelgarten—he is more mystical and poetical—but all the artists admire each other, all exchange ideas, all came together in the Kunstlerhaus to make a funeral feast for our great painter Arnold Bocklin. You have seen Bocklin? He had a wild imagination, a fantastic vision … you should visit the Spiegelgarten.”

(A garden of mirrors, Griselda whispered to Dorothy.)

“Fraulein Dorothy is particularly interested in puppets?”

“She wishes to become a doctor. It was I myself who was entranced by the Sandman.”

“It will be very easy for you to find out everything,” said Tante Lotte, rising. “Those two young men, over there, are Herr Stern’s sons, Wolfgang and Leon. They are often here, Wolfgang studies art—not at the Munich Art School, he’s too revolutionary in his ideas to stay there and paint cows and angels. He also helps with puppets—he is more satirical than his father—he has been working with the Scharfrichter on a puppet play about the European kings and queens—the Fine Family—in three Sensations and a Prologue—dangerously comical—Leon is still at school. He is a more serious boy. I shall introduce you.”

Griselda put an arm around Dorothy, as Tante Lotte strode away to the other side of the room. In the early days—when they had been cousins—Dorothy had been the strong one, the protector, the unfazed. Now it was she who had to protect. To be introduced to two unknown and foreign brothers, with no warning and no preparation, was a shock. Dorothy had gone white, and was breathing rapidly. She whispered

“I didn’t know … I didn’t know he had children … I didn’t know he was married…”

Wolfgang Stern was tall and gangly, with long, thin arms and legs. He wore a loose shirt and a large floppy bow tie. His brother, equally thin, was smaller and neater, in a dark buttoned-up suit that might have been a uniform. Wolfgang had unruly, long, black hair in a cloud round his head: Leon—who must have been younger than Dorothy, but not by much—had a precisely cut hairstyle and a neat tie. Both had large dark eyes, like Dorothy’s. Both were, or so Dorothy in her wrought-up state immediately felt, recognisable. They were faces she knew. She stared, and then looked down, feeling how odd their intent gaze was.

Griselda talked, with nervous warmth. She introduced Dorothy, in her schoolgirl German, and spoke a sentence or two about how much, in England, some years ago, they had admired their father’s interpretations of Hoffmann and the Grimms.

“Really?” said Wolfgang. He bowed over Griselda’s hand. “He would be enchanted to hear that. And your name?”