Between Dusk and Dawn

​

Cambridge, 1992.

     The more I discovered about Hulda, the deeper I slipped into my own history. I had begun looking for Hulda no longer simply as a researcher, but almost as a witness to her voice—and, increasingly, to my own.

     Day after day I tormented myself, digging through the seams of memory, trying to follow Hulda's trail while repeatedly stumbling over my father's footprints, which I could neither ignore nor avoid.

     At night they followed me of their own accord.

     There were so many crossroads on the road into the past where I was forced to stop, although nothing tempted me more than to run straight through them.

     Yet I had to make myself pause.

     To ask.

     Which way did the trail lead?

     Had I only just lost it?

     Or had I wanted to lose it?

     Even more than that, I found myself haunted by another question.

     Why, at this crossroads—at that one—at the thousand others where I found myself compelled to stop—had this story taken no course other than the one I now had to follow?

     Why only this one?

     Were my brothers already reflections of the twisted relationship between my mother and father?

     Or were they simply who they were?

     The eldest, nine years older than I.

     The middle brother, three years younger than him and therefore much closer to me in age.

     He came close to me.

     Again and again.

     Closer and closer, if memory serves me rightly, from the time I was six, perhaps seven, perhaps eight years old. When I managed to free myself from him, he tried again.

     By then I was eighteen.

     The other two encouraged him.

     They made room for his assaults.

     Sometimes they watched.

     Sometimes they laughed.

     Today I know it was more than that. They derived their own pleasure from it, though not in quite the same way as he did.

     Only I had to watch.

     Only I had to play along.

     Or rather, allow them to play with me.

     I was not made of straw or wood.

     Yet for them I was never a victim. For no one in the family was I a victim.

     Although no one truly saw me, neither could I make myself invisible.

     Not for years.

     I suspected even then that my father knew. Whenever he entered the room, he would quietly tell my brother to leave me alone. He sent him away. Sometimes the others as well.

     Then he closed the bedroom door.

     Without a word.

     Softly.

     He was never a man of many words.

     He did not teach at the dinner table.

     I never dared speak to my mother about it.

     She was proud of my brothers. She pointed to them as examples for me.

     They would teach me how adults behaved, she said.

     They would show me what it meant to become a woman.

     She made use of me differently.

     I became her substitute in the lending library of the Protestant hospital. It allowed me to read everything the library possessed on history, together with its small collection of books on philosophy, history, art, and a handful of novels and classics.

     Or on Saturdays, when there was no school, she ordered me to wash the windows.

     Sometimes all morning.

     They were never clean enough.

     There were always streaks.

     Even when I could see none.

     My brothers saw them.

     My mother saw them.

     Only my father was satisfied once one could see clearly through the glass.

     But my mother decided.

     So I had to begin again.

     Every family, she used to say, needs its Cinderella. That cannot be changed.

     The only person in the family by whom I never felt used was my father.

     My Papa.

     On Sunday afternoons he would invite me to explore the city with him, usually just the two of us. Then he became almost talkative. He showed me the statue of Louis Spohr. He lamented that scarcely anyone in Kassel still remembered this honorary citizen of the city.

     A great violinist. Composer. Court Kapellmeister. A faithful Lutheran Protestant.

     It was Spohr, he told me, who had invented the conductor's baton. Without order there could be no music. Least of all in an orchestra, which could function only if someone gave the rhythm. When he himself later delivered the memorial address commemorating the destruction of Kassel's synagogue, he spoke of Spohr because Spohr had admitted Jewish musicians into his orchestra despite criticism from many in the city.

     I listened.

     Without realising that my father was explaining not simply music, but his own understanding of the world.

     Not mine.

     Or rather—as I would discover many years later—mine as well, though at the time I could not yet recognise it.

     When, standing before an information panel in the museum, I asked him why the Spohr Society had been dissolved in 1934, he remained silent for a long time. Eventually he explained that the various musical organisations had been brought together into one national body.

     He believed this had been entirely in keeping with Spohr's own vision, for more than a century earlier Spohr had founded the German National Association for Music and Musical Scholarship.

That, my father said, had been Spohr's conception of musical culture. A public servant of music shaping creativity through obedience. Just as, in a classroom, a teacher could never produce historical understanding from the chaotic clamour of overexcited children, but only from attentive listeners willing to concentrate.

     At the time his explanation seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Perhaps because so much that should have appeared questionable did not yet seem so.

     Only the slightly forward-leaning, severe head of the bust, with its narrow cheeks and even narrower lips, intimidated me. It allowed no music to arise in my imagination. Yet my father's words continued to echo within me years later, when, after his death, I walked alone through the Karlsaue.

     I watched the Fulda flowing quietly beside me.

     Felt Papa walking there as well.

     And with him those brief moments of freedom, in which I could forget the confinement that awaited me at home.

     Even if it was not always like that.

     My brothers were not only the monsters of the night. They also gave me the feeling that they cared for me, that they wanted me to belong to their world.

They painted freckles across my face, dyed my hair red, twisted it into stiff plaits with pieces of wire, piled it high upon my head, set me dancing on the table in my little skirt, made me play Pippi Longstocking, gave me a wooden horse as Little Old Man and a stuffed monkey as Mr Nilsson.

     Or they invented tests of courage.

     They lifted me, still in my dress, into the branches of the cherry tree, urging me to climb still higher. Then they caught hold of my ankles and left me hanging upside down from a branch until I stopped screaming and, as they said, had conquered my fear of heights.

     At other times they wedged my little bicycle between their racing bikes, and from early morning until late afternoon we followed the Fulda as far as Hannoversch Münden. Once, before the final stretch—which climbed steadily uphill—I fell asleep from exhaustion and toppled, bicycle and all, into the roadside ditch, knocking out one of my front teeth.

     When we returned home that evening by train, carrying my broken tooth in my hand, it was not my brothers who were scolded.

     My mother scolded me.

     I should have taken better care of myself.

     Looking back, I ought perhaps to have learned that lesson then: to watch over myself more carefully than I ever did later in life.

 

The pressure to leave home became irresistible.

     After finishing school, I volunteered for a year at a residential institution for what were then called difficult children. Within the first weeks it became obvious to me that most of them deserved no such description.

     Some returned from weekends at home having scarcely been parented at all. Their parents were away at work, divorced, or simply had no time for them. Others came back on Sunday evenings emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed by too much attention, too little affection, or by being passed constantly between father, mother, and siblings.

     I had the unsettling feeling that I recognised something of myself in each of them.

     I escaped that pressure because I became friends with one of the youth workers, Helmut.

     For the first time I did so without guilt. True, I was already hopelessly in love with someone else.

     But he was far away.

     Besides, he was a Catholic priest.

     I had first met Bruno—as he introduced himself to me—on the school playground while I was taking children to Protestant religious instruction and he was accompanying another, a Catholic class.

     We spent no more than a single night together, in the room of a school friend who boarded there.

     Years later our paths would cross again.

     I told Helmut about that brief affair. I could never have hidden it from him. He responded with forgiveness, patience, and extraordinary tenderness.

     We reconciled.

     We understood one another.

     We became very close.

     We spoke for hours about the events of each day, argued about philosophy, and tried together to make sense of the lives unfolding around us. Unlike my brothers, he never made me feel inferior because he was a man.

     He listened while I played the guitar.

     He came with me to a Pink Floyd festival. When the rain began he wrapped his jacket around my shoulders. During the storm he pitched our tiny tent almost single-handedly, and through the night we lay pressed closely together, listening to the rain beating against the canvas.

     Yet towards the end of that voluntary year I realised something I had not wanted to see.

     He was too kind.

     Too devoted.

     Not in the suffocating way my brothers had clung to me at home. But he needed me. Needed me so deeply that my growing distance caused him real pain.

     He wept.

     He begged me not to leave.

     And when he finally threatened to kill himself if I ended our relationship, he severed the last thread that still held me to him.

     At that age I scarcely knew how to distinguish closeness from dependency. But I trusted one thing. The quiet voice within me that insisted separation was the only kindness left—for him, certainly, but above all for myself.

     Once again I found myself standing in the street, uncertain where to go.

     Not because I did not know what lay ahead.

     Rather because, with the last of my strength, I had escaped yet another form of captivity. This time one I had helped create myself.

     I had to leave.

     Leave Kassel.

     Leave home.

     Leave myself.

     I wanted to discover who I might become.

     I applied to study Philosophy, German Literature, and Communication Studies in Munich.

     I was accepted.

     By the second week I already knew that Communication Studies was not for me. But I met an English student from Cambridge named Veronica. She spoke with such infectious enthusiasm about Art History that she persuaded me to attend one of her lectures.

     I was enchanted.

     By her.

     By her identical two twin sisters, particularly Valerie.

     By the subject they all studied.

     There was still time to transfer into Art History as a subsidiary subject.

     Without quite realising it, I had fallen in love twice.

​

The following weeks passed like a kind of intoxication.

     Philosophy taught me to question certainties, even those I had never known I possessed. German Literature immersed me in a marathon of reading through what were said to be the hundred greatest works of the previous two centuries.

     I read them. Almost all of them. But Art History introduced me to an entirely different world. A world in which, perhaps for the first time, I encountered myself. A world of bodies and minds, of form and perception, of colours, spaces, textures, and ideas.

     As a woman I found myself entering it creatively.

     We learned to curate exhibitions.

     We spoke with artists.

     With designers.

     With publishers.

     With photographers.

     Munich itself became our studio.

     Our classroom.

     Our playground.

     Night and day dissolved into one another, more often than not meeting in the pale light of dawn as we wandered from parties or exhibitions straight into the morning lecture. Often the nights proved longer than the days. Relationships shifted as easily as the weather.

     Veronica had a boyfriend.

     Together with him, Veronica, and her sister Valerie, we explored the city, talked endlessly about England, spent evenings in the student bar, shared beds, smoked, drank, and swallowed aspirin on our way to the university the following morning.

     Then, a few weeks later, our group from Art History was studying selected works in the Alte Pinakothek, making notes in front of the paintings.

     A young man stood beside me. He was older than I was.

     Absorbed in my notebook, I turned without thinking and walked straight into him.

     We laughed.

     Apologised.

     Yet neither of us moved on. I stood there, transfixed.

     No encounter had ever reached me so completely, as though a flash of lightning had struck somewhere deep inside me, all the way to my feet. I no longer knew what to say. Whether I wished to move at all.

     I simply looked at him.

     He, too, seemed unable to continue.

     He appeared to be studying the painting behind me.

     Or was he looking at me rather than at the picture?

     What was he searching for?

     And what was I?

     When our eyes met we both began to laugh again, remembering the night we had shared. He asked whether I would like to have coffee with him. I accepted without hesitation. Together we walked towards the museum café.

     My long years with Bruno had begun.

 

They began on a crest of happiness. I knew nothing then of the valleys that lay ahead.

     Perhaps that is why, some time later, while I was already writing my first doctoral dissertation in Munich, I stumbled into another encounter which, as it would prove, altered the course of my life.

     I stumbled upon Feeny.

     She first appeared before me at the opening of an exhibition entitled Nightshadows—Women between Light and Darkness. She was one of the models.

     Seductive.

     Languid.

     Entirely self-possessed.

     She had only just begun studying Fashion and Design at the University of Applied Sciences, yet she was already earning her own living. Partly through designs of her own.

     It was a brief encounter. Intense enough never to leave me.

     Later, when I wanted to invite her to become the model for an exhibition I was curating, she welcomed me into her studio and showed me both earlier and more recent work. The studio also served as her massage practice. She offered me a complimentary treatment. I accepted gratefully. At the time I suffered constantly from pain in my back. Too many hours bent over my desk. Perhaps the stiffness came as much from my increasingly complicated relationship with Bruno as from bad posture.

     Or perhaps it was simply the way she looked at me.

     Something within me opened which I had long believed sealed shut. And just as I thought I was beginning to recognise myself again, I dreamt that Bruno had appeared before me while Feeny was telling me how her own relationship with René had begun.

 

One morning, as I left the student residence, I noticed a collection slip pinned to the white notice board beside the porter.

     I almost walked straight past it.

     Then stopped.

     Turned back.

     It really was my name.

     The postal clerk had evidently misspelled the sender. There was no one called "Reger." I tore off the slip and hurried to the university, wondering who could possibly have sent me a parcel.

     Certainly no one from my family.

     Nor was I expecting any delivery.

     The mystery grew.

     During the lecture on Rebecca Horn and Cindy Sherman, on self-fashioning and the body as artistic performance, I forgot all about it. Only when I climbed the stairs back to the porter that afternoon did the memory return. I turned round at once and made my way to the post office.

     The parcel came in a large banana crate. Well wrapped. Surprisingly heavy. With some effort I carried it to my room. I opened it carefully.

     Books.

     They spread themselves across the floor before me. Almost every title from my German Literature reading list. Many that I had never managed to borrow because everyone else needed the same novels at the same time.

     Suddenly they were mine.

     The beginning of my own library.

     On top lay a small note:

     For the long nights when you think too much again. Let these voices keep you company.

They will disagree with you, but they mean well.

—B.

​

Holding The Man Without Qualities in my left hand and the note in my right, I read the lines once. Then again. The tone felt familiar. The allusions even more so.

     B.

     Bruno?

     I folded the note carefully. Tried to put it aside. It clung to my damp fingers. As though it had already become part of me.

     The books carried his scent. Pipe tobacco. The newer volumes still smelled faintly of fresh printer's ink.

     Madame Bovary.

     The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

     The Civilizing Process.

     An old copy of The Second Sex, annotated throughout in pencil. On several title pages I recognised his handwriting. Here and there, when I opened a volume, a marginal note. A question mark. Between two pages lay another sheet. Apparently blank. Almost. Turning it over, I noticed the faint impression of words that had been erased. With the naked eye I could still decipher only:

     For D.

     Holding the paper against the light, I made out fragments. "...not lose..." Nothing more. Who had he meant?

     You?

     Me?

     Himself?

     Someone before me?

     Was the parcel a gift? Or bait?

     I slipped the page bearing that unknown D. back between the leaves with the writing turned inward. Then I took my little Polaroid camera and photographed the books, carefully leaving that page outside the frame. As soon as the photograph developed, I placed it inside a mourning envelope that had remained from my father's funeral.

     With a gold felt-tip pen I wrote Bruno's address on the front.

     On the reverse:

     Munich by night—you must discover for yourself.

     Then I posted it.

 

For a long while I simply sat there looking at the books. They lay before me like an examination I had not yet passed.

     That evening Veronica wanted to go out. Her sister Valerie had already returned to England. I was still occupied with the note on my desk and had begun arranging the books on my shelf according to the authors' years of birth. Veronica planted herself squarely in front of me.

     "So—are we finally going?"

     Even had I managed to throw away the note, or forget it, the books remained. They already existed inside me. And my card to Bruno was already on its way.

     "You expect me to go like this?" I asked.

     I should have known the answer. She shook her blonde hair vigorously—hair so like my own.

     "Like that? Absolutely not."

     Her clothes represented the typical English economy of fabric for an evening spent moving from one bar to another.

     I realised that I did not simply need to change.

     I needed, if anything, to undress.

     She inspected every garment.

     Approved some.

     Rejected others.

     Until, in her opinion, we matched.

     With our first steps outside I felt exposed. Even more so when the first men looked at us. As though my brothers might suddenly emerge from behind the next hedge or street corner.

     The following morning I was the only one of us who had actually used the room during the night.

     Though not alone. We lay in one another's arms. My companion stroked my hair. Paid me compliments. His Lower Bavarian accent seemed made entirely of warmth. His shoulder-length brown hair tickled my face.

     We had hardly slept. Yet we were already making plans for the day.

     We carried breakfast to the English Garden, spread a blanket beside the Isar, rested together so that we would have strength for another night.

     That evening proved every bit as carefree.

     We danced until dawn.

     Repeated almost exactly the rhythm of the previous day. Once again we greeted the morning beneath the Chinese Tower while people around us were already sitting down to lunch. When we returned that evening to change before another excursion, Veronica was standing in the doorway of our shared room.

     She drew me aside while my companion disappeared into the bathroom.

     "We need to coordinate tonight," she said.

     "I've already found somewhere else to stay."

     "What do you mean?"

     "I very much doubt I'll be back before tomorrow afternoon. He's invited me to his student room."

     "He? You're sure?"

     "Oh yes. But more importantly—the porter rang a little while ago. Your postcard reached Bruno this morning. He sent word that he's on the night train to Munich and will arrive at the Hauptbahnhof at dawn."

     Everything inside me froze. My eyes turned involuntarily towards the bathroom door.

     "And now?"

     Veronica smiled.

     "You'll have to improvise. Tell him I'd made plans without telling you. Tell him you have to come with me."

     I was mortified.

     Utterly mortified.

     No amount of acting could conceal the change in my voice.

     He understood the instant he stepped out of the bathroom.

     He looked at me only once.

     A brief glance.

     Contemptuous.

     Then he left. Like a beaten dog. He did not even slam the door.

 

I awoke drenched in sweat.

     So exhausted that I could scarcely open my eyes.

     Much later, during another visit to Feeny, I told her about the dream.

     Or was it a memory?

     Or something between the two?

     We laughed until tears came.

     Perhaps it had never been a dream at all.

     Perhaps it was only the memory of a dream that someone else had dreamt inside me.