Jigsaw (2 page)

When I wrote that novel –
A Legacy
– some thirty years after, I tried to unravel something about his character and his story. To say that Jules, the Julius von Felden of the novel, was my father would be as misleading as to say that he was not. Jules is like my father and unlike; to what degree of either I do not know. My intention was to draw a character in fiction; I used facts and memories when they served and discarded them when they did not. For instance, I never actually knew my father’s own father and mother – my grandparents – they having 
died a long way back in time, and I knew nothing interpretable about them as my father’s talk was about events and objects seen from outside, not about people, not about what made them tick. So I invented Jules’ father in the novel, the old Baron, out of whole cloth (he who got stuck in the eighteenth century as his son did in the nineteenth); the only fact I know about the actual old Baron, my grandfather, is that he was a High Court judge, which makes me inclined to think that
he
at least could tell a hawk from a handsaw.

Jules in the novel is a man by no means originally devoid of feeling, whose contact with reality is snapped by events at one or two points in his life. He protects himself by limiting his grasp. A man who has lost his nerve. A man also seen in the context of a particular time and the changes in that time. Now my father, too, was a man who had lost his nerve; I can only guess as to when or how. (
He
used to harp on his three concussions – as a young man he used to ride in steeplechases.) Like Jules he was born in the eighteen-fifties; for the purposes of the novel, which I wanted to bring to an end at the verge of the 1914 War, I had to make chronological changes – both Jules and Grandpapa Merz die some five years before they actually died and therefore Francesca, the narrator, had to be born five or six years earlier than I. In the novel Jules’ first turning point comes when at the age of twenty he fails to prevent his younger brother’s being sent back to one of the notorious cadet schools. The brother
is
sent back and consequently becomes insane. Half a century later he is accidentally shot by an army officer, a public scandal ensues which among other things destroys Jules’ self-built world. Was there a victim brother? Was there a Felden scandal? No, and yes. When I wrote that story I thought that I had done with it for ever. Are the facts I am now trying to recall much more reliable than the fiction? My sources are the same –
hearsay
: elders overheard, Voss Strasse gossip, stories my father told me when we were living alone together after the war at Feldkirch, he in his sixties, I a child of eight … of nine …

He had been brought up in a house like Feldkirch, like Feldkirch before we were alone. There had been brothers, country pursuits, they had been happy. One boy was sent to a cadet school, could not bear it 
and made a dramatic escape, walking by night, hiding by day, making immense detours to escape re-capture. He reached home half-starved, half-crazed. They fed him up, then sent him back. He tried to kill himself by swallowing a boxful of matches. They sent him back all the same. He did not go mad, he was not put away. In fact he became a cavalry officer, commander of his regiment and in due course he married. How far was he maimed? Too late to say. Eccentric he must have been. Animals were his interest and he had a great way with them. Wild animals. He kept wolves and used to give them jewelled collars for Christmas, or so my father told me without turning a hair. Sapphires (were they really?) for the wolves,
not
for the wife; my father’s tone indicated that this was a mistake. The wife was a beautiful young woman with a great appeal to men. My father’s brother was stationed in a small garrison town called Allenstein at the confines of East Prussia, and she is supposed to have slept with half the regiment, commissioned and non-commissioned. One Christmas night (1908 or ’09) a captain came to dinner; afterwards he pretended to leave and instead hid in the drive. When the house was in darkness he crept back. He had put thick socks over his shoes and he had a revolver in his pocket. My father’s brother called out, Who’s there? and turned on a light.
He
stood in that light and the captain shot at him and killed him. In prison he wrote a confession saying that he had been madly in love with the colonel’s wife, Antonia was her name, and that she had made him do it. She had given him the woollen socks, her husband’s socks, and a key. The captain hanged himself in his cell before the trial. Antonia was arrested and tried for murder; she was sentenced to death. A psychiatric expert managed to get her certified and she was not executed – which according to German law would have been by the axe – but confined instead in a mental institution. From that she was released, by the psychiatrist’s efforts, within weeks. They went to Italy and got married. The Allenstein murder was a national sensation – the goings-on in one of the Kaiser’s regiments, the murder of the colonel by a brother officer and his own wife, Christmas night, the socks, the wolves, the suicide in prison, the beauty of the woman and her getting off scot-free. Some people got extremely angry. Behind the audible 
sabre-rattling there was a good deal of feeling against the top-heavy military establishment and what it cost; the Allenstein affair provided grist to many mills and was turned into a political scandal by factions of the press, the parliamentary opposition and the public. Maximilian Harden, a hard-hitting radical journalist of the day, wrote a searing leader under the heading of our family name; we – what we were supposed to be and stand for – became a target. (My father was just bewildered and appalled.) The scandal was remarkable for the variety of ill-natured emotions it aroused; it even excited more anti-semitism, my father’s first marriage to a deceased Jewish heiress was dragged in and the poor Merzes with it. At the time of the murder my mother was engaged to my father but beginning to have second thoughts. In outline their engagement came about much like that of Jules and Caroline Trafford – he, being susceptible to beauty and vitality, fell in love with her and was single-minded in pursuit; she, caught up in this pursuit, became affectionately amused by him and his archaisms, was tempted by the offered leap into entire change; through this, she believed, she might survive the heartbreak and stalemate of a previous attachment that had come to an end. (The man was long married and too honourable to abandon a wife older than himself, my mother concurring in that decision.) She was about to doubt the wisdom of her engagement when my father’s brother was shot and she found it no longer permissible to back out. They were married in 1910. Some people found it amusing to ask when being introduced to her, ‘The murderess?’ whose name of course she bore now. Eventually she took my father away and they lived in Spain for a time. My impending birth put an end to that. They went back and bought Feldkirch. I owe my existence to the Allenstein affair.

I am trying to climb over a wall. It is the wall that encloses the garden and park land. It is high but there are a few footholds. I fail the first time, the second. I am seen, it’s the village postman. What am I up to? Oh exercising, training my muscles … Glib lies: it was training all right, training to get over that wall, over that wall and out.

In the long run, the not so long run, my mother had been right – it could not last, it did not last; so now my father and I were living alone at Feldkirch, he was divorcing her. This I was not supposed to know. We did not speak of her. During the early weeks of the new life I was beset by a heavy feeling that seemed to come from inside myself and I could do nothing about. It was there every morning. If a small child can suffer depression, it may well have been this. I could not eat much at table and as this upset my father it did not help the unease between us. I would run round the park three times before meals but found that it made no difference. Now let no one think that I was missing my mother. I was interested – and influenced – by my mother’s general opinions, but dreaded being alone with her. She could be ironical and often impatient; she did not suffer little fools gladly. That I was her own made not a scrap of difference. When I was slow she called me slow, when I was quick she called me a parrot. Compassionate in her principles, she was high-handed even harsh in her daily dealings. Between her and my father there had come much open ill feeling – scenes, verbally violent, and these had shaken me. So in my early years (our rapport came later) I was afraid of my mother, more afraid of her, and in a different way, than I was of my father. He too had taken against her, now that she was gone; it came out not in what he said – he said little – but in what he did not say. He, who had once done everything to get her for himself: this puzzled me, how could people change so? Feelings I thought were for ever.

The one person I loved outright then was my half-sister, my sister. They shook their heads over her because she was fond of dancing and flirting and clothes, and got into debt as a girl (in spite of a large Merz allowance); suddenly she had dropped all her young men and insisted, still under age and all, on marrying a man in his late forties. She was warm, generous, pleasure-loving; oddly enough she had taken to me like a mother when I was born (she must have been all of twelve);
she
made no scenes, though she would see that I behaved – with her I felt no constraint.

When the sadness had gone on for some time, a plan came and I felt the better for it at once. I would escape. (Like my father’s poor 
brother.) I would run away to my sister. She was living in Wiesbaden then, a spa where her new husband was deputy mayor. Money I had, having hung on to a large tip one of my mother’s admirers had given me in Voss Strasse days; I did not know how far it would go, I had been told that it might stretch to a bicycle. The main problem (
I
foresaw) was to get out of our place. The gates were locked, the downstairs windows were barred, all was heavily locked up at night, front door and side doors and windows and back door, no Yales or Chubbs, great grinding Gothic keys and heavy bars and bolts. The kitchen door had the most modern lock and it was oiled: some secret daytime practice and I learnt to turn it noiselessly. The right time to escape would be just before first light. It was spring and first light very early and this proved a new difficulty: I did not wake up in time. I tried not to go to sleep at all, but when I remained sitting up I expected icy hands to touch me through the bars of the brass bedstead (the house, we all believed, was haunted), and when I lay down I dropped off. Dawn after dawn was wasted. Then one morning I did wake up. I put on a cotton frock and, shoes in hand, crept downstairs. The stairs were stone and did not creak. The dogs did not stir, the kitchen lock turned smoothly (I left it
un
locked behind me, one of the things that appalled my father), I climbed over the wall. I then proceeded to walk, not run, at a good pace. I passed a man who knew us on his way to the fields and called out,
Off for an early stroll
(that too was held against me). I carried a purse and a book, a book about Red Indians, and nothing else. I’d taken no food, not even a crust (something seldom repeated in subsequent journeys). When after an hour or so I got to the railway station I went straight in and asked for a single ticket, half-fare, fourth class to Frankfurt. There really was a fourth class in those days. The half-fare, drawing attention to my age, was not the best of moves. I said Frankfurt instead of Wiesbaden partly because I did not know how my money would hold out, partly to cover my tracks. I was given the ticket and some change and no questions asked. I went out on the platform to wait for a train in the right direction. I first took a local to Freiburg then changed to another slow train to Karlsruhe. Only the slow ones had fourth class, and the German name for these trains
which stopped everywhere was
Bummelzug
. At Karlsruhe I changed again. I don’t remember my route after that, only that there were more changes. I read my book; I felt no hunger, and I felt quite calm; this was probably my one and only journey without angst. I was resolved to get there – one step after another, and behaved and
therefore
probably looked as if travelling as an unaccompanied child were the most natural thing in the world. Of course fellow passengers and conductors were trying to ply me with questions and offers of
sandwiches
and sweets. I warded them off by saying that I was on my way to visit relatives (my luggage following) and plunging back into my book. The sandwiches I refused. To the pursuit that might be – that
was
– going on, I gave little intelligent thought.

My absence had in fact been noticed early and by mid-morning the police were after me. I had been reported by the man who had seen me on his way to work and by the ticket clerk at the first station. Why I was not caught I do not understand, perhaps it had something to do with my taking so many
Bummelzugs
and sometimes the wrong one (we later heard that I had avoided detection at Karlsruhe by minutes), in any case I must have been incredibly lucky. When I got to Frankfurt I took a big chance, I remained in the train instead of going out to get another ticket. I was afraid that I didn’t have enough money.
Wiesbaden
then was occupied by the French. This I had heard but not that to enter the French sector you had to have a pass and that there was a control of passengers’ papers on the trains. In fact no one came. We pulled into Wiesbaden; it was mid-afternoon; at the barrier I handed in my ticket face down. No hand was clapped on my shoulder. I asked my way through the town and after a longish walk rang the bell at my brother-in-law’s house. I had not met him before. In my plan I had never gone further than the point of arrival. I found my sister away from home and the house in uproar. There had been telegrams about me. My new brother-in-law, a middle-aged man with a bald head, was at a loss to account for my presence; nor did I, now that the moment had come, find anything to explain. He started to question me. I’d felt lonely, I said, I wanted to see my sister. To this I stuck. It seemed hours again before they got hold of her – she was playing in some tennis 
tournament – and brought her home and I was able to fling myself into her arms.