The Emperor Waltz Read online

  ‘You have been busy,’ Katharina said admiringly. ‘All that grunting and pulling and sticking things together. I don’t know why you can’t do things in a normal way like normal people. Now I want to go and have something to eat.’

  ‘You’re so …’ Fritz said. He wanted to tell her how she was. But language would not stretch to it.

  ‘I know,’ Katharina said, putting an immense weight on the word. She was so pleased to be so … ‘I want sausage, burnt, and cold cabbage, and mustard with it, and a whole basin of cold potato salad, a huge whole basin. I am so hungry I could eat what the wolves brought back. Is the old cow gone out yet?’

  ‘“When China speaks with one voice,”’ Fritz said, in a lust-thickened voice, ‘“then the ear of Europe rings.”’

  ‘You and your Mazdaznan,’ Katharina said.

  10.

  That afternoon, Christian took his portfolio out and his charcoals, newly bought with a single gold piece from Grandfather’s hoard. A true student of art would not wait until the first day of instruction before starting.

  He had rarely drawn in public before, and even more rarely set out on his own like this, and never in a strange town. Three or four times, the art master at the Gymnasium had announced that they would be going out for this purpose. The eight senior pupils would follow the master onto the overground train, behaving in a subdued way. There was nothing Bohemian about the art class.

  Christian thought, too, that their generation was a subdued one. He had been twelve when the war broke out, and at fourteen it sat heavily on their minds. There seemed to be no future, nothing worth studying for, except a short adult life of a few grey days commanding troops on the eastern front, running at the end towards a bank of guns. It was important to put one’s life’s energies into the duties of school and labour, when the eastern front awaited.

  During these trips, Christian would place himself before a masterpiece in the art gallery. He liked a landscape; he admired Philips Wouwerman, and he liked the simple arabesque, the invented backgrounds behind the Italian madonnas. How could you tell that those simple valleys with a river curving through them had been invented, whereas Wouwerman had really sat and really observed? From time to time, he raised his pencil and closed one eye; he measured the distance of each part of the landscape, and set it down on his own sheet of paper, making amends as the master made his round, commenting and correcting. Sometimes a lady or a gentleman, visiting the art gallery on a quiet weekday morning, would pause behind him, and observe what he was doing; sometimes they would know what they were looking at, and pass on without comment; sometimes a bundled and smelly individual, dripping from clothes and nose, would express extravagant admiration, call Christian or one of his classmates ‘a little Raphael’. The art gallery was still quiet and warm, in 1916, in January; every class of person came there, sometimes in the love of art and sometimes in refuge from the first Berlin winter of war.

  After one of these class outings, it came to Christian that artists did not only proceed by copying famous works of art, warmly in the gallery. He had developed a passion for Menzel, whose painting of clouds of steam in a factory had made him stand and stare. His mother had stood with him in front of a beach scene by the Frenchman Monet, and she had shown him that Monet had painted it on the spot. How can you know that, Mamma? Painters may sketch the composition with charcoal and pencil on the spot, but they have studios to produce the finished work. Look, Mamma had said. Look, you can see if you get close – we are going to be reprimanded, so let us be quick – look, some grains of sand, there, in the paint. And there it is, Mamma said. He did it all there on the beach, because there are lots of things that you can’t set down with charcoal and pencil.

  And there it was. They suffered from boredom so terribly then, in the war, in 1916 and 1917; life could not be constructed so entirely of dread and hectoring. Mamma was so thin and pretty, with warm red hair; sometimes, when he was small, and he had been very good, she would let him pull out any white hairs that he could find. He could find only a very few. Perhaps one at a time. He would pull it out, and she would wince, and say thank you, and then she would finish getting dressed.

  He was forgetting now what Mamma looked like. The photographs did not get her quite right. The drawing he had made of her did not get her right, either – she had died when he was still not a good artist, did not get things right. He could summon her, just about, by thinking of Dolphus’s nose, and trying to add some thick dark eyebrows, which were like his own in the mirror, and then some dark blue eyes, almost purple. The labour of keeping his mother’s last-days’ face from his memory was hard, too. But then, after some time of holding it in his thoughts, the real face would leap out, effortlessly, in full health, as she had been any morning at the breakfast table, a white silk hat shading her tender and shy expression, and he would wonder that he struggled to think what she had looked like.

  There had been outings, after the Monet moment, to draw in the open air. Dolphus had come, to be company. But Christian was shy about his art, and he did not want to be seen drawing in public. There were quiet corners of parks, but they had a tendency to yield large and vulgar families from Pankow on a day’s outing. The country was too far. The street was interesting, but you could not set up in the middle of the pavement in Friedrichstrasse. Dolphus was easy and tractable; he came not just because he enjoyed the outing, but because sometimes the artist needs a figure to add to a scene, and the figure needs to be observed at length. Dolphus rarely minded being told to stand by a tree, or to crouch over a stream. Christian’s drawings were often of an unspecific male figure, leaning against a tree, or crouching as if holding a home-made fishing rod over a tree. They looked like bucolic scenes, but that was only because Christian had grown shy, and the details of the scene had been sketchy, since they could be done later. Mamma had been kind, and had even had one framed for her dressing room, where it still hung, dusted and cared for by Egon, like all her possessions. But anyone could have seen that it was, in reality, a corner of the Zoological Garden, yards from where carriages and motors, unrecorded by Christian, stood in steaming queues.

  In Weimar, without Dolphus to wait for him patiently and perform a useful task, there was too much burden of expectation. He had produced only three or four rapid and embarrassed sketches when the time came to return to Frau Scherbatsky’s house. The market was emptying now; the stall-holders were calling to each other, and packing up what remained of their stock in boxes, pallets, packing with straw, berating their boys for getting under the feet. In the window of the coffee house two men sat, one with an amused, superior face, one with a clever, screwed-up expression. Towards Christian, a group came: five soldiers, or former soldiers, in uniform. One was in a bath chair, although it was not possible to see how he was injured. It needed only one comrade to push the bath chair, but all four of the standing soldiers had some kind of hold on it and were walking together. Two held a handle each, one was placing a blanket over the knees of the invalid and fussing, and the last, unable to find a particular task, was demonstratively letting a hand trail at the back of the chair, as if claiming territory. They were all young; perhaps no more than three or four years older than Christian. As they passed, he saw that on their arms was a band, and on the band was some sort of motif. They had the picturesque appearance of veterans, the five of them, crumpled, sincere and careworn.

  11.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Kandinsky said. ‘Klee, did you see that? That group of soldiers, there, with the wheeling chair in the middle?’

  They had just sat down in a coffee house. Kandinsky liked to sit in the window where he could see life. Klee did not object. Sometimes he looked inside the coffee house, sometimes he looked outside. In the back of the coffee house, although it was daylight, the yellow lights were on in the card room, in an acknowledgement of the usual evening time for gambling. That did not interest Klee. His gaze disconcerted people. He gave the impression of recognizing strangers, of knowing
exactly what a friend had been doing before the meeting, of looking levelly at a waiter and sharing a silent joke with him, without the requirement of comment. Kandinsky was used to it, and used, too, to Klee speaking only when he had something to say.

  The group moved away, past a boy with blond, very short hair, holding an artist’s portfolio – probably a student, although neither of them knew him. They dissolved into the late-afternoon sauntering of Weimar.

  ‘The old brigade,’ Kandinsky said. ‘They are everywhere. The war was never lost, those responsible should be shot, the Kaiser should return.’

  ‘They had a line,’ Klee said. ‘You could make a picture out of them, a picture of old, old black crows on a bench in a park in Lucerne. Or of five kittens in a basket. Are they young, or are they old? The last one, in the chair, they were saying goodbye to him. Or they were just born and discovering the way that they could live together. The one in the chair, they were welcoming him to life.’

  The waitress had been standing there, not ignored by Klee, exactly, but nearly included in his comment. At some point, she lowered her notebook and pencil; at some point, she stopped waiting for him to finish speaking so she could take their order, and began to listen with curiosity and interest. Her apron was clean, but much washed and greying; her white pie-crust collar was torn at the side and had been mended in a hurry; there were things about her that were coming apart, and she looked tired and hungry. When Klee finished, she stood there, her pencil and notebook lowered, in pensive silence. The two gentleman were not different in size, but one seemed to be tall and thin, the other short and square – the talkative one and the one who had spoken. The one who seemed to be short and square stopped talking. He had a measured, tuneful Swiss voice, and his silence, too, was measured, tuneful and Swiss. Then he looked at her, with a sympathetic amusement – the half-smile of someone who knows that you will find the same thing funny, and then you will laugh at it together. She came to. All her aches and concerns returned to her face in a moment.

  ‘Two coffees, only,’ Kandinsky said.

  ‘Yes,’ the waitress said. ‘That will be two hundred thousand marks today. Or what else do you have to pay with?’

  ‘With money. Is that two hundred thousand each?’ Kandinsky said. ‘I see. Thank you. Have they gone, those soldiers?’

  He had addressed himself to Klee, but Klee stayed silent, and the waitress had lingered. ‘The colonel?’ she said. ‘You mean the colonel?’

  ‘The colonel?’ Kandinsky said, puzzled. But the waitress had slipped away and was saying something to an upright man of middle age, an elaborate moustache, the red streaming eyes of the alcoholic and a Bavarian coat. He was sitting with a plump woman in a white fur-trimmed coat; her hair was newly marcelled, with a fringe in the centre over her face like the tassels of a shawl. He stood up after the word from the waitress, leaving the woman and the two glasses of schnapps on the table. His right leg was amputated, and his stump rested on a wooden leg – it was the cheap sort, where the leather was padded with horsehair – and a neatly folded handkerchief.

  ‘I was not told there would be two of you,’ the colonel, if that was who it was, said. A little gust of sour smells came from him: of old schnapps on the breath, of ancient clothes, not washed, of some kind of brutal disinfectant liquid, not intended in the first instance for personal application. ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘By all means,’ Kandinsky said. ‘But I think there is some mistake. We were not here to meet anyone.’

  ‘I was waiting,’ the colonel said. He bared his teeth in an attempt at warmth; his teeth were brown and broken. ‘I was waiting for a business associate.’

  ‘Who was to ask for the colonel, I quite understand.’

  ‘It is all the same,’ the colonel said and, without waiting further, pulled out a chair. He nodded, sharply, not quite saluting. He might have brought his heel together with the end of his wooden leg, but the gesture would have lacked assurance. With a swivelling movement, he sat down on the sideways chair. ‘My business associate is late,’ he said. ‘He may not come. Things have been difficult, gentlemen, you understand.’

  ‘Things are difficult for everyone,’ Kandinsky said, sharply, but with a tinge of resignation. This happened in coffee houses. It was their own fault for being apologetic.

  ‘Difficult, yes, difficult,’ the colonel said, emphasizing the roll of the word. ‘I lost my leg in battle. Twenty-five years or more I was in the cavalry of His Majesty. And then there was no His Majesty, and no cavalry, as far as I know. And my leg lies in the mud at Verdun. I gave thanks for the escape then, but now I wish they had made an end of me at Verdun, and I would not have seen what I have seen.’

  ‘Why,’ Klee said. ‘What have you seen.’

  He asked it in a plain way, but the colonel turned on him. ‘What have I seen? I have seen the politicians call back the army before they could win. And they dismissed His Majesty. And they declared that we had lost the war, and would not listen to disagreement. We did not lose. We were not defeated by the enemy. We were stabbed in the back. Gentlemen,’ and his harsh voice turned in on itself, remembering that he was there for a purpose, that his voice should be soft and agreeable, ‘gentlemen, I don’t know if you are interested in a very interesting business proposition, but I have property to sell, a very interesting and well-made volume of clothing. I don’t know if you have any means to sell it among your circle, shirts, beautifully made white cotton shirts, and boots, as solid as anyone could desire, truly excellent, and body-linen, stockings, anything you could require, and very reasonable, I know how the cost of things is going, Lord knows how we all know that …’

  At the other table, the colonel’s companion raised her glass of schnapps to her lips, shaking slightly. She was tranquil, much powdered, patient and bemused. She had spent so many afternoons at this table, sipping a schnapps while the colonel made his appeal to strangers and contacts. The colonel’s patriotism ran down like a half-wound clockwork engine; the colonel’s offer to sell army property took over. Kandinsky and Klee said nothing. The two cups of coffee arrived. The colonel looked at them. He fell silent. His eyes rested on the table; it might have been shame. Abruptly he pushed the chair backwards, and got to his feet with diagonal thrusts and jabs.

  ‘Fifty million marks would be a help to me, in the position in which I find myself,’ he said. His red eyes brimmed. He must have seen that Klee and Kandinsky were looking at him intently, in different ways, but both with nothing more than interest, not sympathy or encouragement.

  ‘Good day to you,’ Kandinsky said.

  ‘I am sorry,’ the man finished, with a touch of parade-ground sarcasm, ‘to have disturbed you, gentlemen, in your important discussions.’

  They watched him go. He sat down heavily in his chair, three tables away. His companion raised her eyes slowly, as if pulling them up with great effort. The movement continued: she raised her eyebrows in question. He gave a brief, decisive shake of the head, only a degree or two, dismissing the possibility. They both took up their glasses, clinked them, and took a sip. And in a moment, as if Klee and Kandinsky had been the bad luck that the colonel needed to expunge, a quite ordinary-looking man, no more than twenty-seven, in an ordinary black overcoat and a bowler hat, slid without invitation into the third chair at the colonel’s table and started to talk.

  ‘“To one of the nation’s heroes,”’ Klee said, repeating the words neutrally. And the man must have been desperate to accept money, to be unable to barter his possessions for anything else. Klee liked to repeat phrases, trying them out. A week or a month or a year later, Kandinsky knew he would enter Klee’s studio to ask what he had been achieving lately, and he would be handed a drawing, led up to a painting on an easel, of a giant figure, smudged with oil transfer lines, and underneath would be written ‘To one of the nation’s heroes’, and a neat, cryptic entry in Klee’s numbering system, 1922/109.

  ‘And two more cups of coffee,’ Klee said to the waitress, arriving w
ith a pen.

  ‘That will be five hundred thousand marks,’ the waitress said.

  ‘No, four hundred thousand,’ Kandinsky said. ‘You said two hundred thousand each, for the cups of coffee.’

  ‘It was four hundred thousand when you ordered the first two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. ‘The new price for two cups of coffee is five hundred thousand.’

  ‘No, no, how can that be,’ Klee said. ‘Two hundred thousand is monstrous already – how can that be the price of a cup of coffee, even here, even in expensive Weimar – but five hundred thousand, half a million for two, how can the price change in an hour, how can that be?’

  ‘The price now, at seventeen minutes past four o’clock, is five hundred thousand marks for two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. Her enchantment with Klee had disappeared. ‘If we continue this discussion for long enough, the price of two cups of coffee will be six hundred thousand marks. It is entirely up to you, gentlemen.’

  Outside the coffee house, the soldiers were assembling. The group they had seen before had reappeared. There seemed to be a protest or march in the making. They laid their hands protectively on the handles as if the touch would make sense of everything. About their arms, each had a cloth armband, not part of their uniform originally. On it was some kind of device or symbol, a red shape of some kind. By the door of the coffee house, the colonel, leaning on his crutch, shook the hand of the businessman, full of smiles. The colonel’s lady stood five paces off, looking at the soldiers, swaying confusedly to and fro.

  12.

  Christian had discovered a short-cut through the park to Frau Scherbatsky’s house, after the baroque sandstone bridge across the stream. He was ridiculously pleased with this insight, and came to the door of the house where he lived with a proud feeling of starting to belong in the town. The doorbell was not immediately responded to; he had to ring again before Maria, the red-haired maid, answered. She looked at him as if his face had not registered; she had a confused and perhaps even an embarrassed expression, but she stood back and let him through, with his portfolio of drawings.