The Emperor Waltz Page 23

  The daughters were a spectacle in Breitenberg. The elder, by two years, was clever but awkward. Her voice shrieked; her movements were jerky and undecided; her hair flew out from under her hat; her clothes were curious and assorted incoherently. She showed the lack of a mother who would have told her to lower her voice and not say such things, to make sure of her tidy appearance, to make certain to wear this with this. She was clever and would become shocking, in the small town of Breitenberg.

  The second was the younger by two years. She was beautiful. Her hair fell in a smooth fillet across her forehead; she liked to wear a black ribbon with her mother’s portrait in a miniature medallion; her clothes were simple but lovely. She was still, and did not fidget. Her sister had taken up all the energy and restless fury that two sisters may possess. She was not clever, but the depth of her blue eyes, fixed entirely on the person speaking to her without movement or change, had convinced many people that her talk did not reflect her thoughts. People had been saying that she was deep since she was three years old, since it was too banal and obvious to say that she was beautiful. They would go on saying it all her life.

  The elder of the two sisters was called Elsa Winteregger. The younger of the two sisters (by two years) was called Adele Winteregger. In 1914 they were sixteen and fourteen years old.

  3.

  On a Saturday morning in May in the year 1914, the two sisters were returning from the Saturday market. A mist had risen from the river Alster and the pool beneath the town, and had not cleared by nine. There were signs of brightness made tangible in the solid white air. The sisters were of different shapes. Adele, perfect, small, and smooth in all her surfaces, her plaits neatly tied in circles behind her blonde head, her nose a button, her mouth a little kiss for Papa. She wore a striped skirt in black-and-white ticking underneath her blue household apron; she had made it herself, with the help of Rosa the kitchen-maid, and it was perfect in every way. She wore sage-coloured stockings and smelt of thyme soap; the household keys jingled in the pocket of her apron as she walked. Despite being younger than her sister, she was the keeper of the household keys and, to some extent, of the household accounts.

  The elder was talking, making strides of different lengths – scramble, pause, turn, a little step and another scramble. Her arms rose and fell as she talked, like an orator or a priest on an important walk. Her fingers spread and shut with the movements. Elsa’s family had long given up on her hair; its doglike qualities of curl and spring with the texture of terrier, of mattress ticking, could have been tamed, but would never have been tamed by an Elsa. She carried the empty basket, which flung about wildly as she gestured. As they passed underneath the stone gate into the marketplace, Elsa’s voice multiplied and echoed before being lost in the noise of the stall-holders. She was talking quickly, in her harsh adult voice, about the meal she would like to make for their father.

  ‘And one day we could make a dinner all in yellow, in lovely yellow, with a fish covered in saffron mayonnaise, and yellow beans, and potatoes, too, with saffron, and a flower to the side, not to be eaten but to be admired, and perhaps a fresh banana, unpeeled, with a strong custard, and to go with it a glass of the yellowest, yellowest wine we could find, a beautiful, beautiful Italian wine, and all the same yellow, not variations on yellow, but exactly the same, because you could make a mayonnaise and colour potatoes to exactly the right yellow a banana has with saffron, I know you could, and I could serve it on a beautiful, beautiful yellow plate, no, on a colour completely different, on a violet plate, yes, the opposite and different colour! Yes, that would be astounding, a meal that Papa would never forget, a meal of yellow on violet, indigo plates. This week …’

  ‘That would not do,’ Adele said. ‘Because we need to buy food which will make for another dinner tomorrow, and soup on Monday, and perhaps cold meat to serve at breakfast tomorrow after church, and fish will not do for that. Besides, we do not have any violet plates and it would be a waste of money to buy a flower just to place on a plate, and perhaps dangerous, as some flowers are poisonous and none is good to eat.’ She reached out and took the basket from Elsa, who gave it up willingly.

  ‘Unless you are a bee!’ Elsa said, and her arms flung up about her head as her mouth opened wide and spittle flew out. ‘We could be bees for the day, bzz, bzz, bzz, and eat nothing but honey, and snoffle at flowers on our plates, and do a little dance with our bottoms when we are finished, like this.’

  There, by Frau Grawemeyer’s cheese stall, in her stained blue frock with the bow half tied, half untied, Elsa gave a waggle with her bottom and a double movement with her elbows. ‘Bzz, bzz, bzz,’ she said.

  ‘Good morning, the sisters Winteregger,’ Frau Grawemeyer called. ‘A foggy day.’

  ‘I am trying my hardest to buzz it away,’ Elsa almost shrieked.

  ‘Elsa, behave yourself,’ Adele said. ‘Good morning, Frau Grawemeyer.’

  ‘And this week, I made a painting, and it was all it was, it was a half of orange, the boldest, biggest, most angry orange you ever did see, and that was in the upper half, and in the lower half there was nothing but a half, a block, of pure green-blue-turquoise-teal, a colour with no name, a lovely, lovely colour, but how it did hurt your eyes to look at it, the line where the orange and the violet did meet, and the master came to me and he looked over my shoulder at what I had done, and he said, he said, what is all this, and I said …’

  ‘Good morning, Herr van Olst,’ Adele said.

  ‘Good morning, Fräulein,’ Herr van Olst said. He was a tall, saturnine individual, red in hands and at the end of his nose; his meat lay in beautiful neat piles, carved and shaped and put in pink pyramids. ‘I will just be finishing with Frau Steuer, and then I will be with you.’

  ‘A beautiful raw pink dish, a lovely dish of pink food, of cherries and raw pork and a strawberry shape …’

  ‘I think it hurts her to stop talking,’ Adele said confidingly.

  ‘But she must stop talking to sleep and sometimes when she goes to church,’ Frau Steuer said. She was a young widow of thirty-two, trim and smiling, black-haired and blue-eyed. Her cook was by her side with a frank, assessing gaze over her kitchen notebook, a licked stub of pencil in her white, blood-drained hand. Frau Steuer lived in a tall old house in a winding street, half-timbered outside, and inside full of sinuous Belgian and Viennese furniture; she had married an old man when she was seventeen, and had seen him out and his money come in. Her coffee cups were square silver blocks, and her sugar bowl and spoons bore a round amethyst each. ‘Thank you, Herr van Olst.’

  ‘I have heard her stop talking when she lies in bed, sometimes,’ Adele said, confiding in Frau Steuer. ‘But she only starts talking again once she has gone to sleep. The only time she ever stops talking is in front of Papa’s marionette plays, or sometimes when she is making something, one of her strange things that she makes.’

  ‘Ah, your papa’s marionette plays,’ Frau Steuer said. ‘How I loved the Faust play he did last year! The Gretchen, she broke your heart, hardly possible to believe that she was wood and paint and string and those strange screws with the circular head. Tell me, what is he doing this year? What play, I mean?’

  ‘Thank you, Herr van Olst,’ Adele said. ‘How is the pork today? Is it bled and hung and good to eat?’

  ‘As always, Fräulein,’ van Olst said stiffly.

  ‘And the beef? Beef for sauerbraten?’

  ‘Not for today’s dinner, Adele,’ Frau Steuer said, alarmed. ‘If you want to make sauerbraten …’

  ‘Not for today,’ Adele said, shaking her head. ‘For the end of the week. And for today a chicken, Herr van Olst, plucked and ready, if you please.’

  ‘The marionette play!’ Elsa said, actually plucking at Frau Steuer’s sleeve. ‘You asked what marionette play Papa is putting on. There is going to be a new marionette play, and it is about a woman like the devil, with black, black hair, who kills her old husband and settles in a town and tries to befriend her neighbour�
��s children, two girls, and then she plans to marry him, and steal his money, because he is not rich but a toymaker, not just puppets, but he makes puppets as well, and it is so so beautiful, beautiful, you will see, and the wicked widow gets her comeuppance, you will see, and the puppetmaker and his daughters, before the end, they, they, they …’

  ‘Thank you, Adele,’ Frau Steuer said. ‘If you want any help with the sauerbraten, my cook will be very happy to come over and explain things to you.’

  She departed, with no sign of having heard anything that Elsa had said.

  ‘I don’t believe that Papa’s marionette play is anything like the story you told,’ Adele said. ‘I don’t think it is like that at all. And you know it is not, Elsa. You know it is not, because you are painting the scenery, I know you are.’

  ‘That is the play I would write and put on, if I were Papa,’ Elsa said. ‘The story of how to scare away a wicked widow and how a man can live very happily with his two daughters without a new wife, particularly a very, very evil new wife.’

  4.

  In his workshop, Franz Winteregger sat at the bench. The apprentices were working to either side, under the leaded window; light fell on them as they planed and chiselled at the body parts, making a rough shape out of limewood that could be rounded and painted later. They did not speak. In the workshop there was a warm smell of limewood burning and of linseed oil, which neither Franz nor the apprentices noticed any more. In the corner of the workshop was a blue-and-white ceiling-height oven; in front of each of the three of them was an array of tools, held in each case by a canvas roll-up bag, each chisel, hammer and miniature saw in its own pocket. The puppet-master insisted on neatness, and his apprentices supplied it. There were no piles of shavings on the floor in this workshop: every half an hour, one of the apprentices got up and swept the floor with brush and pan, emptying the shavings into the Dutch oven.

  Franz Winteregger was turning a puppet over slowly. It was unfinished; the features were sketched out on roughly planed wood. But the weight was nearly right, and he had taken the opportunity to fix the limbs together, to see how it would move. It was a new departure. Most of Franz’s puppets were variations on well-established types; the size of the limbs, their thickness, the proportion of body to head were the same in any number of puppets. They were distinguished only by the paint, and by the features the puppet-master chose to give them. But this was a new puppet. Franz had woken one morning with the idea of a puppet, a witch, a sinister reaching puppet with too many joints in its arms. The arms would not fold, but would roll up; eight joints would have the effect of a boneless arm, reaching across in a sinister loose way to embrace the witch’s victims. The arms were twice as long as usual; the legs, in a perverse decision, had no joints at all. Franz had an idea for the puppet’s hair and face; the face should be green and orange, the hair black and furious, like a witch, like his clever daughter Elsa with her dog hair. The new puppet needed to have its weight tested, its centre of gravity established. Franz was not sure where that lay. He passed it from hand to hand. He held it from above, by the strings, and with a small straight gesture of the hand let the witch fly freely, tracing an arc. There was something wrong about the way the puppet swung; some delay or overshoot that came from an excess of weight somewhere, perhaps only a couple of shavings of wood, perhaps needing to be corrected with a small weight of dentist’s silver, moulded onto the other side, wherever it was. He swung the puppet again. It moved well, but the weight felt wrong, its centre of gravity too low. He took it up and began methodically passing the limbs from hand to hand. The apprentices, their heads lowered and apparently concentrating on their work, watched him carefully.

  The workshop stood at a right angle to the house, and though it would have been a simple matter to knock a hole in the wall for an internal door, Winteregger had preferred to keep the single door on the outside, so that to walk from the house into the workshop, it was necessary to walk a few steps across the courtyard. He did not want the apprentices to get into the habit of walking through his kitchen in a familiar way, and perhaps exchanging banter with his daughters as they went. He also wanted to know when someone was approaching before they opened the workshop door. Now, at almost exactly noon, the kitchen door gave its usual squeal, and Franz set down the puppet, now trimmed of some weight on one side, given some extra weight on the other. ‘I think that must be the end of the week’s work,’ he said kindly to the apprentices, who started to wipe and put away their tools in their canvas holdalls just as the door opened and Adele, the puppet-maker’s pretty daughter, came in with a blue apron over her black-and-white striped ticking dress.

  ‘Frau Steuer is here,’ Adele said. ‘She said she wanted to have a word with you, Papa.’

  ‘I see,’ Franz said. There was a pause. He raised his hand solidly once, twice, in different directions. It was almost a gesture of benediction, but he was actually saying goodbye to the two apprentices, who could now leave with their tools in the canvas holdalls, go to their lodgings in the Herderstrasse above the stationers’ shop, and spruce up before their evenings with their cronies and friends and barmaid allies at the Blue Elephant beer hall. Sometimes they would sit in the Platz and eat yellow ice-cream outside off white marble tables, with girls or friends, from little cut-glass bowls with crisp wafer fans. They said goodbye with murmured, respectful noises.

  ‘Did you ask her to have dinner with us?’ Adele said, when the door was closed.

  ‘This puppet,’ Franz said, raising it meditatively, swinging it to the left, and swinging it to the right. ‘This puppet. I am not quite sure about it.’

  ‘Frau Steuer,’ Adele said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Franz said. ‘Yes. There must be enough food on the table. I am sure you have made enough food for us, and for Frau Steuer too, if she would like to stay and take her dinner with us.’

  ‘That is not what I meant,’ Adele said. ‘That is not what I meant at all. Don’t forget to wash your hands and to change your shirt before you join us.’

  But she said it with a smile, and left her father still swinging the witch-puppet to and fro, feeling the weight of its movement, following slightly behind the movement of the hands, like a thing flying that was never meant to fly. He ran his fingers along the ordinary white bands that the puppets used. All at once he saw that the thing for the witch-puppet was to hang it from violet ribbons, violet ribbons in shining perfect silk. He saw them moving, taut, through the lit theatre, like promises, with a witch on the end.

  Franz Winteregger was the object of interest in Breitenberg, and his daughters did their best to deal with the interest. He was young to be a widower, only thirty-seven, and his wife was not sharply remembered, her memory paid tribute to rather than cherished. His dark hair curled tight against his skull, the cause of the bulk that gave his elder daughter such problems; his eyes were the vivid blue that was so beautiful in his younger daughter, and so beautiful in him. There was a word for him, and the word was ‘boyish’; he had been a puzzled widower with two small girls in black at twenty-eight, and the puzzlement had frozen him in time. The women of the town had shown an interest within a year, almost before he was out of mourning, and had gone on showing an interest. There was, too, his business, which did well, and which because of its natural curiosity raised Franz from the circles where he might have been expected to find a new wife. People felt that, just as the inanimate pieces of wood were given a grace and an intrinsic propensity to dance through the air by the unseen puppeteer, so Franz, who might have been considered a variety of carpenter, was raised into the spiritual, even the philosophical, by the obscure dignity of his calling. He gave life to what he made; he remained modestly unseen in the execution of his art; his physical beauty could be matched by his unspoken, spiritual exercise. He had married well the first time, as, indeed, his father had, somewhat above the levels that their income might have attained alone. He seemed to possess no awareness of any of this, and not to value his own qualities; he had
said, to anyone who asked, that his elder daughter was clever, and he hoped she would pursue a profession, and become a teacher of some sort. There was no son to take on the workshop, and that would go to a nephew.

  The widows came; the old maids; the daughters, even, of women who were not much older than Franz and had established visiting rights. They came with lowered eyes, or with the propensity to laugh Franz out of his humour and into marriage. They had started coming a year or two after Gertrud’s son had been born dead, and a day or two later, Gertrud herself was dead. The girls had still been in black, at seven and five years old, and Franz too. It was hard to know when the visits had stopped being in respect, and had started to take on a besieging aspect.