The Emperor Waltz Read online

  ‘I always think the best food in Germany is in Bavaria,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Those knuckles! Those white sausages! The fried veal slices!’

  ‘And the most beautiful towns,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘And the country, of course. There can be no doubt about that. Surely you found time to raise your head and admire the beauty of a town in the course of your travels, Herr Wolff?’

  Maria came in with soup bowls on a small trolley with dragon’s head ornamentation, setting the soup down before the four of them. As she set one down before Frau Scherbatsky, she caught Christian’s eye. He did not lower his: he engaged her gaze as she murmured in her mistress’s ear. She made her way round the table, taking the bowls from the trolley, and he watched her, boldly. She reached him, placed a bowl in front of him, and lowered her face to murmur in his ear as she offered him a basket of bread. There was an attractive smell of sweat and of clean skin under soap, mixing with the soup’s sour odours. He had thought she was going to share a moment’s comment with him, but she said only, ‘Liver dumpling soup’, raised her head, gave the table a single, surveying glance, and removed herself with the empty trolley.

  ‘You get good numbers in Bavaria,’ Wolff said. ‘When we were just beginning, in the months after the war, we were sometimes only ten or a dozen, and greeted with savage violence. You recall, Frau Scherbatsky – ah, no, it was before I was living here, it was when I was at Fräulein Schlink’s, before she took exception to me—’

  ‘How could anyone take exception to our dear Herr Wolff!’ Frau Scherbatsky cried.

  ‘Dear lady,’ Wolff said absently. ‘They broke my finger then – it was in Jena. But in the last year, the numbers have grown so wonderfully! For me, the beauties of Bavaria are tied up with the support and understanding the movement is gaining there.’

  ‘What is your movement, Herr Wolff?’ Christian asked.

  Again, that creaking movement of the head; again, the inspection with quite closed eyes of the art student, the revolutionary, the boy of violence, anarchy and square glass-walled houses. ‘It is a small group of associates who stand for what is right,’ Wolff said, in a voice that seemed to have had its patience tried. ‘That is all.’

  ‘I see,’ Christian said.

  ‘There were secret forces that led us defeated out of the war, defeated and shamed, and sold us to people who have long planned for our downfall. Every week, more and more people understand what it is that lies behind. We work hard to help people to understand. In Erfurt, they lined the streets, cheering. The crowd was two deep in places. You can only rely on Germans, now. More and more people understand that, since the war. That was’ – and Wolff did not lower his voice, continued to shout as he moved into compliment and said – ‘a delicious soup, Frau Scherbatsky.’

  Maria took away the soup, and brought in a white fricassee of what must be the promised rabbit, with rice alongside.

  ‘And did you see your wizards today, Frau Scherbatsky?’ Christian said, with an attempt at lightness.

  ‘My wizards, Herr Vogt?’ She seemed genuinely puzzled.

  He immediately wished he had not started it, but persevered. ‘I think you said that the eccentric people we saw yesterday – the people in purple robes – I think you said that they pass every day.’

  ‘Oh,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘I think I know what you mean. No, I do not think I have seen those people today.’ She made a minute gesture towards Wolff, as if to indicate that such talk was not for his dignity. But it was too late.

  ‘What eccentric people are these?’ Wolff said, mixing his rabbit fricassee with the rice in an uncommitted manner.

  ‘Oh, you know, Herr Wolff,’ Neddermeyer said. He was evidently enjoying his food. ‘You must have seen them – an invented religion, I believe, with disciples in purple robes and shaved heads, and a special diet. They seem to be growing in number, too.’

  ‘I should be most surprised,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Is the stew not to your taste, Herr Wolff?’

  ‘Oh, perfectly,’ Wolff said. ‘It may be a little dry for me, but I am an old soldier. I ask for nothing in the way of luxuries or especially delicious food, you know. And they come from? It seems a strange conception, to conceive of or invent a religion from the beginning.’

  ‘Well, it may be an Oriental religion, brought to Weimar, taking root here,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I believe they are based at the new art school, under the direction of one of the masters – now, his name …’

  But then it was clear to Christian that all three had agreed, in the interests of peace and civility, that the Bauhaus and its madness were not to be mentioned before or raised by Wolff, since the conversation was now abruptly turned to a bridge at Erfurt, one filled with shops, one older and longer and more beautiful than the one in Florence that people talked of so. Christian had been trying, without success, to see what the object in Wolff’s lapel was. It was a silver insignia or motif of some sort. He could not quite make it out.

  14.

  Around Weimar, the Masters of the Bauhaus took their leisure.

  Kandinsky sat in a deep armchair, an ashtray precariously balanced on its arm, and sucked on a cigar. His dinner was finished, and a fug of smoke hung heavily over his head. His wife was opposite him, darning a pair of his socks and listening to him talk.

  ‘I saw Klee this afternoon,’ Kandinsky said. ‘He made such a fuss, oh, such a fuss, about the price of a cup of coffee. You would have thought it was the end of the world.’

  ‘How much was the sum, Vassily Vassilyevich?’ Nina said.

  ‘It was two thousand marks. Or three thousand. Yes, first it was two thousand and then it was three thousand. The price of the coffee went up between us ordering the first cup and us ordering the second cup. What would have happened if we had not had the extra thousand marks on us. But we did, so all was well. People fuss so about small things. No – what am I saying. I said two thousand marks, I meant two hundred thousand. You could not buy a cup of anything for a thousand marks.’

  ‘But a thousand marks is a thousand marks,’ Nina said sensibly. ‘Before the war, you could have bought a sofa, a table, one of my Vassily Vassilyevich’s paintings for a thousand marks. And now it is nothing times a hundredfold, the difference between a cup of coffee one moment and the next.’

  ‘That is so,’ Kandinsky said, ruminating over a puff of smoke. ‘Klee could not restrain himself. On the subject of money, he becomes a Swiss businessman – not a very good Swiss businessman. His one idea is not to spend any of it. He was telling me that his new idea is to paint his pictures on newspaper – he said the day was approaching when he could not afford to paint on paper or canvas. I told him that there was no need to make such savings – he should simply spend what he had on materials now, and in a year’s time he would be glad of it.’

  ‘And what did Klee respond?’ Nina asked.

  ‘Klee?’ Kandinsky said. ‘He cannot bear any outlay. Of course, he paints a painting every day, and none of them can be sold, so the blame lies with him, truly. Nina Nikolayevna, where is the bronze of the horse that used to stand there, on the table?’

  ‘And there I am – finished,’ Nina said, laying the socks and the needle and thread down with relief. ‘What did you say?’

  Kandinsky repeated himself.

  ‘It must be travelling slowly from Russia with the other things,’ Nina said. ‘If it has not been robbed and destroyed. One day they will all arrive, all your things, and we will be at home here.’

  ‘The Constructivists have taken it,’ Kandinsky said. ‘And melted it down for one of their towers. We will never see my little horse again.’

  ‘Soon there will be a revolution in Germany,’ Nina said. ‘And we will all be shot. So nothing will matter very much any more.’

  ‘Yes, that’s so,’ Kandinsky said. He sucked meditatively on his cigar.

  Two streets away, Klee lifted his violin from its case. They had eaten well. On Saturday night, Klee liked to choose the dinner, and to co
ok it himself. He liked the inner organs of beasts, bitter, rubbery, softly textureless, perfumed with bodily waste in a way only the practised would enjoy, and Felix had grown up finding these things ordinary and even pleasant; Lily had got used to them, and now took the Saturday dinner as part of how Paul was. Klee divided food into blond and brunette; he could cook sweetbreads in either way, dark or light. Tonight the food had been the heart of an ox, a monstrous thing. Klee had cleaned and stuffed it with meat, turnip, carrot and potato, and a herb of his own discovery, which had given the whole thing an odd flavour of liquorice. It had been a little heavy. Lily sat at the piano, ready to play, but evidently slightly uncomfortable: she burped gently from time to time. Felix sat on the sofa, the sole member of the audience. Paul took the violin from its case, unhooked the bow and, without hurry, gave the bow a good coating of rosin.

  This evening it was to be the Kreutzer sonata. Klee was feeling ambitious. When he felt bold, incapable of restraint, on the verge of great and exciting things, he cooked the heart of an ox for dinner and he played the Kreutzer sonata afterwards. He often played it as something to live up to, before embarking on great enterprises. Lily often concluded that a great change was in the offing when she heard, from the studio, the sound of the first chords of the Kreutzer sonata being played once, twice, a third time; meditatively, trying it out, softly, then with dramatic force. That first chord, four notes at once on the violin, would be heard again and again, as Klee tried to get the sound exactly right; then a pause on one of the middle notes, a doodle, a trill, a thoughtful and slow attempt at the tune in the slow movement, as if Klee were taking it apart from the inside. This morning, the chord was sounded in some kind of announcement: he took the top note towards quite a different place; a dotted rhythm, a gay and yet monumental tune it took Lily a few moments to place, though she knew it as well as she knew her own face. Klee was enjoying himself by playing the little prelude to the Emperor Waltz. A few notes of it, only. And then silence: he had returned to work. For a week now, the Kreutzer sonata had been sounding from the studio at unexpected times, and Lily had taken the hint, and practised the piano part while her husband had gone out for his daily walks or to meet with Kandinsky. Was the larger endeavour a change in Klee’s art, or was it just to announce the beginning of a new term at the art school? But for days he had been practising in his own systematic way, and tonight they were going to attempt the Kreutzer. The outbreak of gaiety in those few notes of the waltz was a sign of it: he felt liberated today.

  Klee raised the violin to his face. He looked, sober, at Lily, who beamed and raised her hands to the keyboard. Klee’s eyes shone intently, like those of the villain in a melodrama. He hung the bow above the strings; with a single gesture, he brought it down. The chord sang out; a cloud of rosin puffed from the bow, its dust glittering in the light from the lamp. Felix sat forward on the sofa, his loose, comfortable brown plus-fours bunching up and his green stockings falling down to his ankles. He clasped his hands in his lap. The beginning of the Kreutzer sonata was the most inexpressibly exciting thing he ever heard. It was like drawing back the curtains at seven thirty in the morning and seeing the lake on the first day of holiday, like the colour of the middle of the yolk of a fried egg in the country, that exact yellow of A major. It was almost better than those other things, because it would soon turn to fury and thunder and blackness, before it went all the way round and found its way back. It was a joy to hear Papa play it and call up a summer morning here, in this dull curtained room filled with things, smelling a little bit of the ox’s heart from dinner.

  ‘Klee is really too much,’ Kandinsky said in his own room, leaning backwards. ‘I am fond of the dear fellow, but …’

  ‘He is a Swiss businessman, a quite unsuccessful one,’ Nina said. ‘Too concerned with money, just enough to make him frightened about it, not enough to paint to earn it. The Swiss …’

  ‘Is he Swiss?’ Kandinsky said. ‘I am fond of him. But I sometimes wonder – can he be a Jew? He has all that race’s enthusiasm for pelf, for lucre, for the pile of gold. How his eyes light up!’

  Nina laughed heartily, waving the comment away. ‘Vassily Vassilyevich,’ she said affectionately, as she always did when he said something to her that he would not say to everybody.

  In another room, a large, empty one, the disciples of Mazdaznan gathered. The hall was at the back of a church, loaned to political groups, societies, choirs and amateur gatherings of a centrist-to-left disposition. One of the two Weimar Wagner societies, the one with an anti-monarchist bent, met here on Tuesdays, and on Fridays the town’s Communist watercolour society. Itten’s Mazdaznan group met in classrooms at the Bauhaus, but on Saturday nights the building was closed, and it was good to have a weekly meeting to which everyone came.

  There were forty people in the room. Most had had their heads shaved, and some were in their formal purple robes, made by themselves, or by adept clothes designers and makers. Elsa Winteregger was talking. ‘And then there’s new people. Oh, there’s always new people. New ideas, new images, new thinking. Do you know? I saw a man, a boy, a new one today, and I took him up, and he was so full of new life, I don’t know where he came from or what he was doing, but he said he wanted to find the Bauhaus, and I helped him, and then I don’t know what happened to him. It was so exciting. And tomorrow there’s going to be so many of them, not tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and there’s going to be so many wise new young heads, all of them full of new ideas, and they’ll put us to shame, we’ve been trodden over and made conventional in life, but them, not them, it’s for us to learn from them, us and the Masters, too …’

  She went on gabbling. People about her came and went, listening and not interrupting and then going away again. Sometimes they turned to each other and began to talk, and drifted off. Her speech had started somewhere else and it was going to be finished somewhere else. And now she was talking about her sister, who was staying with her.

  ‘… only for a few days, only until Sunday, not tomorrow, a week tomorrow, she came yesterday and was so exhausted, she lay in bed until lunchtime, afterwards, easily, and she said, Elsa, what has happened to your hair, so we laughed about that, and I think she is quite used to it, quite used now, she lives where we grew up, in Breitenberg, so she is used to almost anything now. She is so dear, I could not live without her, I promised her to bring her to the Bauhaus on Monday morning, to see us all, all us oddities, but she says that only I am enough, only I am oddity enough for her …’

  The room fell silent, and Elsa too, last of all. Itten had come in, with his head slightly downwards, as if ducking a hit from a low lintel. He was wearing his purple silk robe with a red ruff about his neck. There was a gathering and a shuffling. Itten stood there. His presence commanded attention. He raised his arms to either side and closed his eyes. His chest swelled as he took a great breath in, and held it. The forty people in the room did the same, moving at an angle, not to get in a confusion of arms; they closed their eyes and breathed in, and held it in. For a second there was silence; outside in the street, the shout of two boys, something about the money one owed the other. It was the racket of two voices with no control over their breathing and no sense of the intimate and huge connection between the lungs and the world. Outside, a can of some sort was kicked against a wall, and a shout of complaint; the Mazdaznan breathed out, humming as they did so, expelling the world and its violence; a warm note filled the room, rose, fell, subsided into a satisfied breath in. Itten opened his huge wise eyes; his arms fell limply to his sides. ‘The word is spreading,’ he said. ‘Today we are three dozen. Next week we are fifty. We spread, like breath.’

  And in the room of their house, Klee slowed, and his face rose a little, and the sad reflective little tune that came just before the end seemed to fill his features. There was an expression on Papa’s face you never saw at other times. The tune went its way; Mamma and Papa seemed separated by the music, diversely thinking their way through. And then they ca
me together again; there was a little rush and a clatter of fury; and the first movement of the sonata was done. Felix sat on his hands. He knew not to applaud until the whole sonata was finished. Papa would set down his violin and smile in a brief way. But before that there was the slow movement and the joy of the tarantella. Felix could hardly bear the prospect of it.

  ‘I am so happy to have you here,’ Frau Scherbatsky said to Christian, as he was going upstairs. Her face was warm and beaming; underneath her blonde helmet of hair, she shone. ‘It is so good to have a young person in the house again. I do hope you will be happy here.’

  ‘I think I shall be, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian said. ‘I am very comfortable in my room – I feel very grateful.’

  ‘Oh, I am so pleased,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. In the drawing room, the men were discussing affairs of state; a conversation that had been an energetic exchange of views was turning into a manly argument. ‘You mustn’t –’ she said, lowering her voice and placing her hand on the forearm of Christian’s Norfolk jacket ‘– you mustn’t mind Herr Wolff too much. I know he seems very serious and angry about things.’

  ‘He seems …’ Christian thought. He prided himself on finding the right word, when it was required. ‘He seems very – decided.’

  ‘Very decided,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Yes, indeed. He is. But, please, I do hope you will find some patience with him. It has been so hard for so many people of our generation. You must have seen it in Berlin, but I know that young people can find it difficult to understand, to be patient. You see, Herr Vogt, it has been so difficult to realize what, all this time, has been working to destroy our lives. We were so naïve, all of us, and we only understood now that it is only other Germans whom we can really trust. You see, Herr Vogt,’ she went on confidingly, ‘we let the Jews go on living among us. We had no idea. They destroyed us, and humiliated us, and are now destroying our money. And Herr Wolff understands this. Does he not have a right to be angry? I would just ask you, please, Herr Vogt, you are an understanding, a kind person, I can see, just to be patient and to listen to Herr Wolff, even when he grows – how can I put it? – loud.’