to be obliterated quite soon by the monster wave of inflation up into billions crashing over Germany). At our first meeting point the grandmother had already turned her Berlin flat into a pension de famille, the kind where the inmates are friends and most of the friends are artists and actors out of work. Doris despite her extreme youth had been trying to hold down a job or two, typing for a literary agency, some modelling; she hoped to get into films. That summer she had come out to Italy as secretary to an American script writer; that had gone wrong but as she still had a bit of money left she stayed on, my mother erratically befriending her. Doris’s face was sallow, large-eyed, her figure thin, flat-chested, spidery beyond the modish requirement of the time. Her talk was of parties, of avant-garde films and young men who were going to be poets and painters. To me she was a new species and a buffer between me and my new-found parent.
Telegrams from O intruded. My mother made no move; she did not tell us much, there was nothing, she said, to explain; she laughed at herself, making a game of it, perhaps a waiting game. (We thought.) Doris fell in easily with the suspended future, I fretted; I could not bear the waiting – never did, never will – and there was the disappointment of not being taken into real Italy. Then one evening Artur Schnabel was playing at a soirée in some villa and my mother, who was as unmusical as one can be, was asked to go. She always seemed to know people everywhere. Doris and I amused ourselves with a night walk among the vineyards gorging ourselves with stolen grapes (while we were both older in many ways than our respective ages, we were probably also considerably younger in others). Next afternoon a young man called at our hotel. Goodness, my mother said, Doctor Caligari, I presume! That’s what comes from sitting out a Beethoven sonata. You had better see him, he’s a much more suitable age for you . So we were left to receive the man my mother insisted on calling Doctor Caligari in the hotel salon. In came a young man of great good looks who did not show the slightest interest in Doris let alone me; my mother eventually appeared, we slipped away and he must have succeeded in taking her out to dinner.
Although so very young and handsome there was nothing sleek or facile about that caller; had one encountered him at another period one might have seen him in a cinquecento piazza standing by the scaffold, never at the thé-dansant. Style, an inbred sadness, a light façade of badinage and pliancy – in a few years and for long after, my mother told us, he would have come into a resemblance with Titian’s Man with the Glove.
A week later my mother said that she was going away for a few days. To Florence? Not to Florence. And I would be all right, wouldn’t I, here with Doris? Of course. No more questions; my mother left. Next day Doris had a telegram about a film test. No, we said, she could not miss that . You will be all right here, won’t you? Of course. In a way I was. I had a room of my own, my mother had left books, living in an hotel was a fascinating experience. The food, to my thinking, was delicious (mayonnaise on something or other every day), the staff were exceedingly kind. Adult fellow guests tried to ask questions; these I evaded, just as I declined offers of joining them for meals. I ate at a table for one, attended by sweet waiters who brought the dishes for me to look at and gave me second and third helpings of anything I liked. I went for walks, looked into shop windows. I was all right; and yet … Time did not exactly fly and there was an undercurrent of anxiety, not admitted into articulate thought – Will she come back? Will anyone ever come back for me? At one point I bought myself an Italian grammar; learning by heart and reciting it back, I discovered, was a nice resource.
A telegram came (it was always that: the telephone had not really entered people’s
Telegrams from O intruded. My mother made no move; she did not tell us much, there was nothing, she said, to explain; she laughed at herself, making a game of it, perhaps a waiting game. (We thought.) Doris fell in easily with the suspended future, I fretted; I could not bear the waiting – never did, never will – and there was the disappointment of not being taken into real Italy. Then one evening Artur Schnabel was playing at a soirée in some villa and my mother, who was as unmusical as one can be, was asked to go. She always seemed to know people everywhere. Doris and I amused ourselves with a night walk among the vineyards gorging ourselves with stolen grapes (while we were both older in many ways than our respective ages, we were probably also considerably younger in others). Next afternoon a young man called at our hotel. Goodness, my mother said, Doctor Caligari, I presume! That’s what comes from sitting out a Beethoven sonata. You had better see him, he’s a much more suitable age for you . So we were left to receive the man my mother insisted on calling Doctor Caligari in the hotel salon. In came a young man of great good looks who did not show the slightest interest in Doris let alone me; my mother eventually appeared, we slipped away and he must have succeeded in taking her out to dinner.
Although so very young and handsome there was nothing sleek or facile about that caller; had one encountered him at another period one might have seen him in a cinquecento piazza standing by the scaffold, never at the thé-dansant. Style, an inbred sadness, a light façade of badinage and pliancy – in a few years and for long after, my mother told us, he would have come into a resemblance with Titian’s Man with the Glove.
A week later my mother said that she was going away for a few days. To Florence? Not to Florence. And I would be all right, wouldn’t I, here with Doris? Of course. No more questions; my mother left. Next day Doris had a telegram about a film test. No, we said, she could not miss that . You will be all right here, won’t you? Of course. In a way I was. I had a room of my own, my mother had left books, living in an hotel was a fascinating experience. The food, to my thinking, was delicious (mayonnaise on something or other every day), the staff were exceedingly kind. Adult fellow guests tried to ask questions; these I evaded, just as I declined offers of joining them for meals. I ate at a table for one, attended by sweet waiters who brought the dishes for me to look at and gave me second and third helpings of anything I liked. I went for walks, looked into shop windows. I was all right; and yet … Time did not exactly fly and there was an undercurrent of anxiety, not admitted into articulate thought – Will she come back? Will anyone ever come back for me? At one point I bought myself an Italian grammar; learning by heart and reciting it back, I discovered, was a nice resource.
A telegram came (it was always that: the telephone had not really entered people’s
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