The Emperor Waltz Read online

  There was not: the addition of Grausemann had seen to that. Frau Scherbatsky had always impressed on her guests that they might ask their friends to dinner, if they were presentable and if they would amuse her. Dolphus was one extra person already, and Christian wondered whether she had meant the standing principle to apply in the middle of a snowstorm when there had been no deliveries of meat for three days. The venison stew had been presented with an unusual number of dumplings, almost piled up and obscuring the surface; the potatoes had been augmented with a large amount of noodles. Frau Scherbatsky’s kindly smile was as it had always been, or almost, as she passed the water jug or the little silver and blue-glass mustard pot to her guests or her guests’ guests. Herr Wolff, on the other hand, in his weekend pinstriped suit with his little political badge on his lapel, was silent, scowling, hungry and meditative.

  The next day was much the same. At six, two men arrived at the house; this time, they were associates of Herr Wolff. Frau Scherbatsky greeted them with pursed mouth. They were less sociable, and their names hardly registered. Their suits were frayed at cuff and lapel; they wore, each, the same little badge that Wolff wore. Their conversation was much less sparkling even than Grausemann’s. It was mostly about the Jews. When the dinner bell came, they leapt up, but not to leave. Frau Scherbatsky asked with every appearance of practised surprise if Herr Wolff had invited his friends to dinner. But Wolff was inured to this kind of treatment, and replied that it was one of the happiest memories of his time here that Frau Scherbatsky had in the past offered hospitality to friends of both – of all – her lodgers. Of course, if it were now a problem …

  It was not a problem, and, once places had been set, Wolff’s two friends sat down to dinner with them, making the best of the vegetable soup, the two rabbits, and the bowl of nuts that was brought out to supplement the quark and red fruit dessert. It might have been tactful of them to stay off the subject of food shortages, and not to take such pleasure in talking about the impossibility of buying food at any price in Weimar today or yesterday, to talk about the results of the Jews’ machinations bringing about the starvation of good Christian folk. Frau Scherbatsky listened, and did not contribute, other than in muttered asides to Neddermeyer; Dolphus had lost his voice, and raised and lowered his spoon in a tired, mechanical manner, wincing as the soup hit the raw back of his throat. Christian did not believe that any conspiracy was taking place to deprive anyone of food. He believed that it was the snow. The sentences followed one another as if rehearsed many times before in exactly these terms. One of the men had a strong Berlin accent and a spoilt, gaseous odour from his mouth. He made gurgling noises with his lips as he drank his soup; the other looked sharply at Neddermeyer whenever he said anything, and tried to put his arm around Maria’s waist as she was taking the soup plates away.

  Afterwards, when the associates of Wolff had eaten and promptly gone away, saying goodbye with a belch and a damp handshake, Frau Scherbatsky cornered Christian at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘I am going to have to ask you,’ she said, ‘to make a particular point of not asking friends or colleagues of yours to dinner for the next few days. I am so sorry to be inhospitable, you know, but it is so difficult to find food even for us!’

  ‘I’m sorry about my brother,’ Christian said. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t be a burden if he had any choice in the matter.’

  ‘Herr Vogt!’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘No, I beg you – I did not mean that in the slightest. I was really referring to those who see an opportunity to feed themselves up at our expense. Herr Grausemann is a welcome guest. But those gentlemen tonight – I really am not so very sure. I will be speaking to Herr Wolff on the subject, you may be sure.’ She waved her hands in an evocative, imprecise way. ‘Of course, Herr Wolff’s friends may be correct. There may be hoarding going on by people who do not really care about ordinary Germans. But I don’t think knowing that will help any of us to eat better if this house becomes a staging post for all manner of hungry acquaintances.’

  Upstairs, Dolphus was reading a book and smoking, his stockinged feet outstretched on the truckle bed he slept on. But Christian did not think that he was concentrating on or very much absorbed in his book. The book he was reading was a school book, a tattered and much-used edition of The Aeneid.

  ‘What did Frau Scherbatsky want?’ Dolphus said, not raising his eyes from the page. ‘Was she telling you that I’ve got to go? I don’t think there’s much more food in the house. At least there won’t be, if Wolff keeps bringing people of that sort to dinner.’

  ‘She’s become very fond of you,’ Christian said. ‘Heavens knows why or how. I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the bedroom. I never do. And you should not smoke with a sore throat at all.’

  ‘It has an antiseptic effect, but I’ll stop immediately,’ Dolphus said, but rather waving his pipe round than extinguishing it. There was a confidence about Dolphus that Christian had never observed before.

  ‘No, she was saying that you are very welcome, but she’s going to have to call a stop to any of us asking guests for dinner until she can restock the larder, or some such phrase,’ Christian said. ‘There is food enough for the regular guests, apparently, but not for any old wanderers or chance-takers.’

  ‘We can’t invite anyone?’ Dolphus said.

  ‘Why?’ Christian said. ‘Who—’ and for one moment he had completely forgotten about Adele and Elsa; forgotten their existence, their life, the obligation they bore each other. Dolphus had remembered, but Christian had forgotten that he was engaged to anyone at all. ‘Oh, they’re quite all right, don’t worry. They are in the middle of town. They can call across the street to any number of friends, Bauhaus people, innkeepers; they can make their way. It is much easier for them than for us, you know. And we will see them again when the paths are clearer.’

  ‘If you think so,’ Dolphus said, with a sidelong glance, returning to his book.

  18.

  Somewhere in Weimar, before a fire, a man with his feet in slippers and a pleasant warm shawl about his neck was writing on his ninth sheet of paper. He went on fluently, his pen leaping up and down like a seismograph. ‘One can see how wonderfully the stock exchange Jew and the leader of the workers co-operate, how the stock exchange publications and the newspaper of the workers echo each other. They both pursue one common policy and a single aim. Moses Cohen on the one side encourages his association to refuse the workers’ demands, while his brother Isaac in the factory incites the masses and shouts, “Look at them! They only want to oppress you! Shake off your fetters!” And his brother ensures that the fetters are well forged.’

  He stretched out his feet, his toes separating within the slippers; he set down his pen and ran his fingers through a little stretching exercise, as if about to play the piano. He had written a lot this morning, produced a good stretch of his speech to the Association when it met next Saturday in Eisenach – if the weather had improved sufficiently by then. They were good, honest fellows, the fellows in the Association, but he wondered whether he was talking over their heads.

  His wife put her head in at the door; a sweet, smiling face, twenty years younger than his own. ‘Is it going well, my sweet?’ she said, in her childish way.

  ‘Very well, thank you, my love,’ he said, smiling. She placed a finger to her lips and withdrew, theatrically, slowly. She amused him: that was the secret of her appeal. He picked up the pen and began to write about Moses and Isaac again. It was important to persuade people, and he remembered that it could only happen little by little, one person at a time. Every change of thought was a revolution and a turning towards the sun. It was pleasantly warm in his study. It was very agreeable to sit in these comfortable surroundings, with a fire blazing and no need to go outside, and write confident, inspiring paragraphs about the Jews.

  There was no food at all in the room the Winteregger sisters lived in, except two pieces of black bread and three potatoes. That would do for their luncheon, and then they would hav
e to try to find some more food somewhere in the town. But the town was still so heavily under snow, and no shops in the street had opened for many days. If only the boys had not eaten so much of the cake she had made! That had only lasted another day after they came. Adele thought that there might be shops elsewhere open. But she knew that the prices would have doubled or trebled. She had no idea how she might pay for anything. All around her, there were people waiting to take advantage; people who had seen the closure of the railway lines as a way of making a good deal of money. She could feel it in the crisp air.

  ‘I will go out later this morning,’ Adele said. ‘There must be somewhere open where I can find a little something for us to eat. People may have some soup, or something small that they can spare. And if that doesn’t succeed, then I am sure it will not kill us to do without food for an evening, and things will be different tomorrow.’

  ‘I am so cold,’ Elsa said. ‘And hungry. Very, very hungry. There was not nearly enough to eat last night, or yesterday during the day.’

  ‘I know,’ Adele said. ‘But at least I am here for you.’

  ‘Can’t you go out now?’ Elsa said. ‘I can come with you. I don’t mind.’

  ‘There is no point at all in our both getting cold and wet,’ Adele said. ‘I can be much quicker on my own. I am sure I know places that will be open for food and wood, and I can get there and get back before you know it, and this afternoon will be like Christmas. You wait and see.’

  Out in the whitened streets of Weimar, a few people were starting to move. Julius Pringsheim had been sent out by his wife Dora; there was still some food in the house, but it would be good to see what the situation was. In their little house just outside the centre of Weimar, Dora sat with their twin boys, both two, in front of the fire – thank heavens there was a good lot of coal in the cellar. She fed them and entertained them with simple games and songs.

  ‘Seven things are needed

  For a lovely cake,

  Eggs and fat!

  Butter and salt!

  Milk, flour and saffron makes it yellow!’

  She patted the boys’ hands gently; they hit hers back as hard as they could, shrieking with joy. Julius was a teacher and had often observed that there was nothing you could do to stop boys taking on their nature, setting on each other violently. ‘Were you like that?’ Dora would ask, since Julius was a gentle soul with three gentle sisters.

  He would smile and shake his close-cropped head. ‘They must learn it from their sister,’ Julius would say. But that was a joke, because Lotte was a dark-haired angel who had never been a moment’s trouble.

  The angel was well wrapped, her fur-edged coat and muff keeping her warm as she sat on the sledge. Her father pulled her along. She was no weight. The streets were empty, but Julius thought there might be some life around the Hotel Elephant; that was where he was heading. Lotte was singing something into her muff as Julius turned, panting slightly, into the Böttchergasse. ‘What are you singing?’ Julius said, turning, but Lotte was absorbed in her song, which seemed to need hand gestures. ‘You’ll catch a cold!’ Julius said. ‘Put your hands back in your muff!’

  Julius had not been thinking. In the Böttchergasse there was the café he knew not to go to, the Café Harbach; it had been no trouble before the war, but now, in the last year or two, it had been taken over by the wastrels of the town. It was best to walk another way. He saw, too, that the café was actually open, a path cleared to its door and two men sitting in the well-lit window. If the Café Harbach were open, then things would be better than he thought.

  In a room lined with paintings, with a violin resting on a table, with a pianoforte covered with a purple velvet cloth, Klee sat hunched before an easel. On it, there was a painting. He thought it might be of birds at dawn. He had finished it the day before, in the intense cold, thinking hard of a summer morning. There were four birds on a line. He saw now that the line was not a tree branch, as he had thought, it was the mechanical arm of a musical instrument, turned by a handle from below, to make the birds sing. He remembered the title that had come to him at dawn, as he woke, his lips almost moving with the rightness of this title. He would not write it down just yet. If the title remained in his mind tomorrow, he would write it down. He turned to the table by his side and, with paint-stained fingers, picked up a pen. It was his habit to write in notebooks when a thought came to him. He did not write the title of the painting. He wrote, ‘Art does not exist to reproduce the visible. It makes visible.’ He had written this before, in different circumstances. He wrote it now because that was what he had done, and what he was about to do. Every person who heard it might change their mind, and find it a new thought. You could only change the world by changing the way individuals thought, one individual at a time, as if turning towards the sun.

  Fritz Leitner and Gottlob Gebhardt were the two men sitting in the window of the café. They had been pleasantly surprised to discover that it was open. The night before, they had decided that the best thing was to go to their comrade Wolff’s lodgings – he lived in high style, and his landlady fed him well, they believed. The welcome had not been everything you could have hoped for, but they had fed like kings. It was good to talk over the present situation, too. But now it looked as if the town was starting to move again. The Café Harbach was open, though old Harbach was complaining that there was not enough food to run a full menu. And people were starting to move through the streets. There, a man pulling a child on a sort of sledge, there over the street.

  ‘That’s an awful Jew,’ Gebhardt said.

  ‘I know him,’ Leitner said. ‘He teaches at the Gymnasium. He teaches my niece mathematics, I believe. A Jew like that, teaching at the Gymnasium.’

  ‘A disgrace,’ Gebhardt said. ‘Where’s he going now?’

  ‘They’ve seen a chance to make some money,’ Harbach said, coming over in his apron to observe.

  ‘Taking his child out, too,’ Gebhardt said. ‘They want their children to learn early how to make money.’

  ‘My little son,’ Leitner said, hunching up his shoulders. He lisped and whined as he talked, making what he thought of as a Jewish voice. ‘Son of mine, watch how their money flows into our pockets, and stays there. Plot and plan, my son, plot and plan.’

  ‘Most of them know better than to walk down the Böttchergasse,’ Harbach said.

  ‘If Wolff were here, he’d be explaining about the blood and inheritance that makes the Jew stoop like that, makes him clever,’ Gebhardt said. He and Leitner and Harbach were conceded to be very good fellows. But they were not very sophisticated about their understanding of the world. They understood this fact, too, and were often to be heard referring in respectful, jeering tones to the theorists of the movement, like Wolff. He had read deeply in scientists who understood the difference between the races; he understood in detail what Leitner and Gebhardt and Harbach and their kind, very decent fellows who were the life and soul of the movement grasped through instinctive revulsion.

  ‘It’s the blood of centuries, hawked around half of Europe and half of Asia, by the cosmopolites,’ Leitner said. ‘Look at the cosmopolite. He couldn’t punch a soldier in the face. He wouldn’t have gone to war. He’d have found some clever way out of it.’

  ‘There was a Jew in our battalion, a butcher’s son from Berlin,’ Gebhardt said. ‘How he yelled when he found out that his wife was dead! Dead of the influenza. He yelled and screamed and howled when he got the letter. But the comrades in the battalion, many of them met the same fate. Did he yell then? No. Probably working out ways to sell their uniforms back to the army.’

  ‘You’re letting that Jew get away,’ Harbach said.

  ‘It’s so nice and warm in here,’ Gebhardt said. ‘And it is only one Jew. We could let him go on his way. Oh, very well.’

  They hauled themselves to their feet and left the café. Leitner let out a hostile shout into the street, and the Jew and his child, now in their effrontery at the end of the Böttcher
gasse, both looked round. It was as if they were expecting to be greeted by friends who just happened to be sitting in the Café Harbach.

  ‘We carry on walking,’ Julius said to Lotte in a cheerful, ordinary voice. ‘And they will grow bored and go away. On we go! We have to find bread, and milk, and eggs, and all sorts of good things to eat, to make a cake!’

  But then there was a fat man in a hat in front of him. His face was red and moist with the remnants of an overheated room.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Julius said, and tried to pull the sledge around him. But it was not so easy, and there was a second man there now, a man with a gingery moustache in a shabby black overcoat; the man, despite a very recent haircut, was as shabby and worn at the edges as his overcoat. ‘If you will excuse me, gentlemen,’ Julius said. The sledge was hard to pull to one side; it preferred to follow the same direction, and Lotte suddenly felt quite heavy.

  ‘Are you out on business, sir?’ the fat man said. ‘Most people prefer to stay at home in this weather, unless they have a good reason.’

  ‘Yes, that is so,’ Julius said. He tried again to get between the two men, but the ginger man now stepped directly in front of him. He could not move without exposing Lotte on the sledge to these two men.

  ‘Have you had a successful morning, then, Moses?’ the fat man said.

  ‘My name is not Moses,’ Julius said. Behind him, Lotte was being very good. She knew when to interrupt and when to keep absolutely quiet. This was a playground taunt. Julius had seen them in his school, and he remembered them from twenty years ago.

  ‘Oh, I got your name wrong,’ the fat man said. ‘Have you had a successful morning then, Isaac? Have you been out making the blizzard pay for you?’

  ‘My name is not Isaac, either,’ Julius said. ‘If I could pass, gentlemen, my business is my own.’