Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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Tuesday

My Annerl!

I really can’t wait to hear from you. I’m annoyed at myself because my will alone isn’t able to bridge the distance between us so I can share this time in London with you. I’d love to know what it smells like in the streets and stairwells there, what you can see from your window, the sounds through which the city speaks to you day and night. I would like so much to be able to wander aimlessly through the fog with you, exploring London together, or to feel the spring sunshine on our backs and the green grass of Hyde Park under our feet. Here the rain is pattering against my dormer window. And I still need to get used to the idea that you’re no longer just across the road in your studio, at number twenty five, surrounded by your flowers, your scent, your unique aura. I wonder why you decided to give me the little pencil in black, white and red when you left. It really is exceptionally dainty. I’ve taken it out of the little Francis and plaited a cord from fine grey thread so I can hang it from my braces or my buttonhole. But the strange thing is, it seems somehow mysterious to me, as though perhaps it were the symbol of something unspoken and yet very intimate. I keep taking it in my hand and looking at it quizzically, as though its mysterious secret might somehow be legible. Will you tell me where you found it? What’s the little ‘story’ behind it?

Last night I attended a lecture at the Sorbonne with a few Americans and Brits from the Camaraderie Française. A young lady, Dr Jus, gave an impassioned speech about the need for medical examinations immediately before marriage she defended her theme with all the grisly statistics she’s compiled from courthouses and medical reports over the last few years. Having painted a garish picture of the moral and legal situation in France she became visibly agitated and cried out: ‘HONOUR AND CONSCIENCE ARE WORDS THAT NO LONGER MEAN ANYTHING TO ANYONE BUT THE NORDIC PEOPLES!’ And the interesting thing was that this elicited almost no objection from the French audience. In fact, they rewarded the speaker with a resounding round of applause. From the reports she read out it seems the morals and laws of SWEDEN are almost IDEAL. Immediately I thought of Sweden as an adoptive homeland for you: a country that likely lies outside the European war zone, a progressive kingdom organised along socialist lines, where far-reaching political upheavals are impossible and where the bright, clean, sunny towns are surrounded by landscapes of the most enchanting beauty (if one can believe everything one hears and reads and sees in the photographs). The last thing I want to do is add this ‘pointer’ to the many other ‘pointers’ you’ve been given, which must be making you as dizzy and disoriented as a spinning top by now. It’s just that I think we should keep it in mind, so that, if we’re ever able to undertake a tour of northern Germany, [struck out: trying to get to Stockholm wouldn’t be such a bad idea.] we could try to get to Stockholm. (Now my grammar is running away with me, or perhaps I should say eloping with me!) You know what, Annerl? I’ve been thinking, and I have the fantastic, romantic and quite impossible idea that I might discover myself in Scandinavia. Who knows? In any case, an unknown country will always be ‘Over there, over there . . . . . ’ !

(But for now I’m going to bed. It’s half past twelve and I’m exhausted from the gymnastics I did earlier today. A sleep-well kiss for you!)


Thursday

Your little letter arrived – written with such directness and kindness! Have you found any good irradiation cathodes since then? And have you worked out a ‘sensible’ daily routine?

I still have this ‘latent’ cold coursing through my head, driving me to distraction. But despite that I’m working really well, albeit at the ponderous pace of an ox pulling a Bavarian manure cart. This afternoon I made a new discovery: a restaurant with a really good prix fixe menu for 3.75! It’s a Polish snack bar, and the patrons are almost exclusively Polish students (who, by the way, along with the émigrés at my hotel, are the ugliest human beings I’ve ever laid eyes upon! They have huge, coarse, downward-turned purple-pink horse lips; they have dirty, scar-marked faces, as though they’ve all had the pox and only wash themselves once every ten years; they have crooked noses and slanty little eyes under puffs of flesh; they speak with thick, hoarse, droning voices and they’re always looking around suspiciously – they immediately make one think of Caliban, or those people from Swift (in Gulliver’s Travels) who are worthy only to be servants to the Houyhnhnms (the thinking horses); and even the most gruesome caricatures by Goya or Daumier would not do justice to these ‘images of God’ from Poland. You find yourself asking to what extent these faces explain why Tsar Alexander I, Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa were able to partition Poland out among themselves; how clear and clean the conscience can possibly be behind such a dreadfully ugly face; whether it was really for people like this that the allied nations created the ‘artificial’ state of Poland and forced the beautiful German peasants back from of the eastern regions where they were settled.) All these thoughts were circling in my head as I devoured my delicious black bread with carraway and my salad with liver pâté, and pampfered myself with a huge bowl of barley and vegetables.

Apropos pampfering (is there such a word, or did we invent it in our family?): I found a handful of almonds in the sugar bag and so I garnished them with raisins and munched them with relish while I was thinking about our little Philip this evening. I still owe you a forfeit for your victory! What will it be? Would you like to set a task for me now, or do you want to keep it in the bank? You have plenty of credit with me! More than all your promissory notes could possibly show, more than you can imagine, infinitely more! Go ahead and redeem it whenever you like!

The streets here are becoming busier by the day. It’s as though everyone has been in hibernation over the winter (the Stavisky demonstrations being a mere incubus) and have only just woken up and are sniffing the spring air in the gleaming sunshine. I took a stroll through the Jardin du Luxembourg today. Everything there is budding, becoming greener and juicier from one hour to the next: the turtle doves are already sitting on their nests, and the shrieks from the little throats of the children playing their ball games were so shrill it was as though they had just hatched and were greeting the blue sky with praise for the first time. They’re beautiful, these children, chasing after their balls with no recollection of the winter. So too the lucky layabouts on the Seine, forgotten by politics and high finance; they seem happy enough, even though the creatures they’re fishing for never take the bait. And when you look into the light that’s playing on the waves, then up into the branches of the chestnuts and elms against the silver sky, it suddenly becomes a mystery why there have to be armies, political parties, trade agreements, bank crashes and grisly suicides – all for the sake of ‘self-affirmation’. But you and I, Annerl, we’ve understood the world, and we must always keep hold of the ‘shared wisdom’ within us, and in this way we’ll be super-humans who can no longer be injured by fate.

I’ll quickly pop this in the postbox before I go to bed. Good night, my dearest Annerl . . . . . .

Etl

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