Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Marianne Faithfull

Чтение книги онлайн.

       eva

      My mother had been another person entirely before the war. I always had a hard time imagining what she was like as a cool, urbane, young Weimar girl. It certainly didn’t carry over into her life with us. The war must have changed her drastically. She was only twenty-four when the Anschluss happened and overnight a precious part of her life was simply ripped away.

      As my mother got older, she talked more and more about her parents. It was always a very idealistic portrait, with no unpleasant scenes whatever. Her childhood had been perfect.

      Even though I never saw much of this Weimar side to Eva, I must have imbibed it somehow in my mother’s milk – it’s the only explanation I have for how I was able to do the Kurt Weill material so believably. Doing these songs takes an aptitude for seeing the grotesque as an aspect of love. Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht songs are the counterpoint to the unsettling paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz. The style was called the Neue Sachlichkeit, New Realism, but actually it’s a celebration of the edge between beauty and the bizarre. That’s really what the Brecht/Weill canon is all about. You’ve got to be able to go there. That wonderfully masochistic chorus in ‘Surabaya Johnny’, for example. The sheer erotic perversity of it.

       Surabaya Johnny. Will the hurt ever mend?

       Surabaya Johnny. Oh, I burn at your touch.

       You got no heart, Johnny, but oh, I love you,

      I love you, I love you so much.

      They’re all like that. You can hear it in Pirate Jenny’s song, her all-consuming quest for vengeance in The Threepenny Opera – something my mother understood all too well: the ship, the ominous black ship, sailing into the harbour.

      As a person Eva was much warmer than my father and I’m more like her in that respect. But of course that emotional side of her had a downside. She could erupt in an irrational fury. My father’s detachment was oddly soothing compared to my mother’s rages. He didn’t get so emotionally involved, and his remoteness, which I often lamented, was reassuring amidst the family turmoil.

      My mother was extreme in her passions: her likes, her dislikes, her resentments. She was an almost savage person. Sophisticated and refined on a certain level, but utterly dominated by hatred and love and regret and bitterness. She first became embittered about my father, later on it was me. But long before either of us had failed her, she was a tinderbox. Drinking made it worse. Unlike my father, my mother wasn’t intellectual. And as she got older and her past began to weigh on her, she became very religious. She suffered from melancholia – that was her word for it. Something like depression, but a much more romantic concept: a gloomy state of mind saturated in Middle-European Weltschmerz, the sense that one’s own sorrow is intrinsically linked to the sadness of the world.

      I remember going to church with my mother when I was young and watching her getting incredibly emotional – praying loudly with tears streaming down her face, racked with sobs actually. I was terribly embarrassed. Of course she had just been through the war, but children don’t really understand that. When it finally dawned on me that her involvement with the church brought her peace, I felt glad for her – and then very magnanimously forgave her for embarrassing me.

      At the end of her life, God and Christ, Heaven and Hell, all those emblematic ideas became terrifyingly real to her. I suppose she was concerned about going to Hell. She had shot a man, after all. When the Russians entered Vienna at the end of the war, they were hellbent on rape, destruction, and pillage. They opened all the wine cellars in Vienna. Wine running down the streets; all the Russian soldiers had to do was open their mouths and the wine ran in. They got blind drunk, and then raped every woman in sight. A Russian soldier from the steppes burst into the room where my mother and grandmother were hiding. He raped my mother and was about to rape my grandmother, at which point Eva picked up a gun and shot him. It was justifiable homicide, of course – but murder in the eyes of the church.

      As a result of the rape my mother had to have an abortion. After the Russians came to Vienna, there were long lines of women queuing up to have abortions. I’ve heard that when a woman has had an abortion, she always wants to have a child. Certainly, this explains why Eva wanted to marry my father and have me.

      After my parents divorced, my mother and I moved into 41 Milman Road in Reading. I was about seven at the time and, looking back, I can see that Eva was relatively happy when in Reading. She was teaching and I was going to school and things were okay, but I don’t think she realised it until long after it was over. I’ve found that the ability to realise you’re happy while it’s happening is actually quite elusive.

      Eva got a job teaching maladjusted children, as they were then called: children from broken homes who’d gone through hellish lives. And of course she was very good at it. Filled with empathy, she taught them dance, current affairs and art. Eva taught a type of free dance, very much like Isadora Duncan. The children danced in bare feet, made symbolic gestures, and acted out expressive scenes. Sometimes I would go to her classes, which was quite a strange experience. These kids were very disturbed; they had gone through truly terrible experiences and some had done horrible things. I remember one boy had killed some kittens, and he was obviously going to grow up to be a psychopath. That was my unforgiving, childlike take on it. If I saw them being rude to my mother, I would freak out and yell at them, which did no good whatsoever. Eva, in a very matter-of-fact way, would just give them a smack – not hard, but just a quick clip, like a mother lion.

      Eva also taught dance at my school for a while and I found myself put into one of her productions. At fourteen, I was playing the lead in The Snow Queen and, right in the middle of the performance, I got my first period. There was blood on my white costume, and even worse I had absolutely no idea what it was. My mother took no notice.

      ‘The show must go on,’ she said. ‘Just ignore it.’

      When he was a young man my mother’s father fell in love and married an eighteen-year-old Jewish girl from Hungary. Coming from his aristocratic family this was a highly unusual thing to do – and of course his family opposed the marriage, but her family even more violently. One time Eva’s grandmother asked her to go to the synagogue with her, and Eva refused. She had been brought up a Catholic and Catholics aren’t supposed to attend other people’s churches. Many years later Eva still regretted it, which was probably why she became so ecumenical when she got older.

      When the Nazis came to power in Vienna they insisted Jews wear the Star of David on their arms. My grandfather was outraged that his wife should be subjected to this indignity and said to my mother: ‘Come on, Eva, we’re going to visit the head of the Gestapo, and we’ll see about this!’ He put on his Tyrolean hat and his cloak – he was very tall and imposing – and as he strode along the street in a fury, my mother, quite frightened by the whole business, was trying to keep up with him. Eventually they got to the Gestapo headquarters and my grandfather announced himself.

      ‘Baron Sacher-Masoch,’ he said. ‘I demand to see the officer in charge!’ They were shown in to the office of the head of the Gestapo in Vienna, who turned out to be an ensign in my grandfather’s regiment in the First World War.

      ‘What’s this nonsense about my wife having to wear a Star of David?’ my grandfather asked him. ‘I want you to cancel that order immediately.’ And this officer – my mother always used to call him by some daft German name СКАЧАТЬ