The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  Christian bowed; he had not expected Frau Scherbatsky to say any of this. The voices in the drawing room were, indeed, growing loud. He flushed, and turned, and with brisk steps went upstairs. There were Jews living underneath his father in Charlottenburg; every day his father greeted Frau Rosenthal with a raise of his hat and a smile; Arnold Rosenthal, the elder of the two boys, had been three years older than Christian, had served bravely in the war, had returned unscathed. He was not working against anyone. He had fought for the Kaiser. Christian bowed at the turn of the stairs again, as Frau Scherbatsky beamed, her eyes following him upstairs sentimentally, as she perhaps thought of one of her dead sons. Tomorrow, Christian thought, he would take steps to find somewhere else to live. The arrangements were that he would live here for three months. However, he would move tomorrow. He said this to himself, but he already knew he would not, not because he disagreed with something his landlady had said. He already despised himself for his own cowardice. He already knew that that was the easiest path for the mind to take.

  15.

  On Monday Christian went to the Bauhaus for the first time. In the evening he came home. He went upstairs in Frau Scherbatsky’s house, leaving his hat on the pale oak hatstand in the hall, greeting Herr Neddermeyer shortly. In his room, he took out the laid writing paper and his pen, sitting at the desk. He filled the pen with ink. He began to write. ‘Dearest Dolphus,’ he wrote. ‘I must write to you. Today, at 9.15, in the city of Weimar, I saw a girl whose name is Adele Winteregger. My life begins.’

  BOOK 2

  1979

  1.

  There was an unusual group of people approaching the lounge from the other side of the glass wall and the door that opened into it. The waiting area by the gate was full, and had been for some time. The largely Sicilian crowd had been fanning themselves – the air-conditioning at the airport in Catania was proving inadequate, even in early June. They had been getting up to remonstrate with the employees of the airline company about the lack of information, the heat, the delay of the aircraft. Voices had been raised; hands had gestured; fury had been apparently entered upon before the Sicilian storm of complaint quickly blew itself out and the complainer went back to his seat with every air of contentment. The men above a certain age were in blue shirts and pale brown trousers; the women, some of whom were even in widows’ black, fanned themselves. The sexes sat apart. Now an unexpected and interesting group of people was approaching from the other side of the glass wall, and the attention of the lounge was drawn to it.

  At the centre there was a tall, blond, distinguished-looking man with a large nose and a large-boned face. There was something donkey-like about his features and their big teeth; he looked Scandinavian, perhaps Danish. He wore a neatly pressed white short-sleeved shirt with a dark blue tie and a pair of crisp blue trousers; and his neat turn-out was a surprise, because he was blind. In one hand he held a white cane, folded up and, for the moment, unused. About him were six men. They were Sicilians, perhaps employees of the airport; dark, serious-looking and short. Two held him by either arm, guiding him briskly; another held a piece of cabin baggage, evidently the passenger’s; another, the youngest, walked behind him, giving him an occasional push, perhaps to show what he could do, given the chance. The two remaining walked in front of the blind man; the more distinguished, who seemed to be in charge of the whole operation, was talking to him as they went, the other occupied himself by walking alongside the chief as if ready to take notes. But that was not this last one’s only occupation. He held, it could be seen, the passenger’s passport and his boarding card.

  The lounge watched, fascinated. The group came to the other side of the glass wall of the lounge. The blind man was handed his cabin luggage and, by the chief’s right-hand man, the passport and boarding card. His hand was shaken by all six men. They looked for guidance to the chief, who briskly shook down his jacket as if he had passed through detritus, and walked away. The lounge watched the blind man as he waved the folded-up white stick, and it went in a moment into its full length. He had been left by the group on the other side of the glass wall, about four metres from the open glass door. The blind Scandinavian waved in the direction of the wall, but it was solid. He waved to one side, then to the other. Like a blond insect, he went to his left, to his right, not finding the opening, patiently feeling, then less patiently, then tapping with rich fury, his head turning round and calling to people who were no longer there. The lounge watched with sincere interest. They had wanted to know what would happen if a blind man were deposited before a glass wall and told to find his way to the one door through it. Perhaps the guiding party had wondered this too – but, no, they had not waited to watch the consequences.

  Duncan watched, too, but with less open amusement. His book, a novel by Andrew Holleran that he had read before, rested in his lap. He thought in a moment he would get up and ask the woman at the desk at the entrance to help the blind passenger through. At the moment she was sitting on her swivel stool, smoking, not paying any attention to that passenger or any other. Duncan was used to Sicilians and their cruelty, the way that dogs would be kicked and chained. In restaurants, he had seen parents pinching the noses of their small children when they refused good food, tipping their heads back forcibly and ladling the milk pudding down their little throats and over their faces. He had watched a carabiniero, a lucky pick-up, sit naked at his kitchen table at the little borrowed flat off the via Merulana, take a breakfast knife to the torso of a wasp that was absorbedly feeding on the edge of a dish of plum jam, and sever the wasp in two. He no longer felt the need to intervene when the savagery or inattention of Sicilians resulted in anyone being hurt. The only time he had intervened, after eight months on the island, was when two Sicilians new to each other started discussing, in his company, the tragedy of Sicily and its national character. That he couldn’t bear: it ruined an evening like a solitary drunkard in company. So he watched the battering of the blind Scandinavian on the other side of the glass wall with mild interest, like everyone else. In time he would discover where the door was.

  2.

  The man next to Duncan asked him if he had a light, but Duncan did not; he asked if he was French, returning home, but Duncan explained that he was English, going back to London. Why not go back directly? The man was handsome, one of those good-looking Sicilians who peak, to the world’s gratitude, at twenty-two, then lose their hair, grow papery and dry; he was in his middle twenties, and his hair was beautifully thinning. There are flights, directly, now, to London from Catania. Was the gentleman not advised properly?

  ‘Duncan,’ Duncan introduced himself. ‘Yes, I know about the direct flights, but I had to return at very short notice. This was the only flight today that could take me. I needed to get back as soon as possible.’

  ‘A holiday?’ the gentleman asked. But Duncan had seen that while he had been speaking the man’s eyes had gone towards the daughter of a large family, a girl in a short skirt and a tight blouse, and had run up and down her appreciatively. He was just passing the time in a neutral way in talking to Duncan – not that Duncan knew what could result from their conversation. Duncan simply said that, no, he had been working here. He had been teaching English as a foreign language to schoolchildren, and had been living in a small flat in the centre of the city. He liked Catania, yes, he did, and the food, and he had seen the fish market and had gone to Taormina to see the beauties of the island, which, yes, was the most beautiful place in the world, and he agreed that Sicilians were really very lucky to have been born in such a place, even given all its terrible troubles, which made you think you would have been better being born in the shit with no arms and no legs, sometimes, but then the sun shone and the sea was beautiful, and the women, the women of Sicily.

  Duncan had been in Sicily for eleven months. He could keep this sort of conversation going with only one ear on its content. He had heard its contradictions, its flow and counterflow, many times. The other, more active, ear was busy
keeping an interested and acute ear attending to the difficulties of Italian as he went. Was that an idiom the man had used – in the shit with no arms and no legs? Or just his own way of talking? He did not know.

  He had come to Sicily for no reason in particular – or no good reason, not one that you could tell anyone of any seriousness. He had been working for the government in London. His job had been in an unemployment office in Kilburn, interviewing the out-of-work and granting them the dole. There were mothers, hard cases, alcoholics, but also students and people who did not really need anything. Duncan did not engage with them, in the shabby office behind the solid stone walls. He knew that, if he thought about it, he would probably take the short step that existed between his state, as a poor employee of the government, and the most desperate of the subjects who came through the door.

  One day he could no longer stand it. It was a hot day in early summer and he had, as it were, fooled himself into coming to work. All the way from his second-floor flat in Brondesbury, he had told himself what a beautiful morning it was, how lucky he was to be walking in the sun, what a joy London could be on these days. He admired the boys in their shorts and vests; they might have been on their way to the Heath or to an open-air swimming pool, and Duncan might have been going with them. He had performed this mental trick before, pushing what he did not want to think about to the back of his mind – his father, Christmas, what Mr Mansfield his supervisor had said to him the day before. He had performed the trick with his job as he did now, putting it quite out of his mind and letting his feet trace a route without thinking what was at the end of it. In his bag was a Tupperware box of lunch, in his pocket a Baldwin novel: he might have been saving the two for a read under a tree with a picnic, not an hour in the staff room at lunchtime. It was only when he was in the street of the unemployment office, almost before the staff door, which was to the side of the locked public door, that he remembered he was not going to the Heath, not going to swim, not going to take his clothes off with the boys of London today. He was going to sit in his neat white short-sleeved shirt and tie with his suit trousers on, and listen to the failures of society asking for more money.

  ‘Did you see that programme on last night?’ Marion was saying, as she puffed up behind him. She was a colleague at the same level as him. She had been there longer – it had been a mysterious amount longer for some time – and had a tendency to explain ordinary things to him, where the coffee money was kept, where the better sandwich shop was at lunchtime, how it was important to stay calm and not raise your voice even when they deserved killing, really. He had in the end discovered that she had started working there three months and two weeks before him. Some still older hands probably regarded the pair of them as having the same sort of newness. He could see it happening when, as time passed, still newer colleagues, processors and analysts and form-fillers, arrived in batches.

  ‘I don’t think I did,’ Duncan said. ‘I was catching up with some ironing I should have done at the weekend. Terrible, really.’ He held the door open for her.

  ‘Oh, it was incredible,’ Marion said, coming in and removing her headscarf. Her hair stuck to her scalp. ‘I couldn’t believe it. It was a programme about nudists, all over the world. All of them, all on holiday, like that, like the day they were born. Hello, Frank.’

  On the stone steps just inside the unemployment office, Duncan made up his mind without intending to. The steps were just the same as they had been at his grammar school. They spoke institution. He was smiling and trying to show an interest in a forty-year-old woman watching a television documentary about nudists and saying hello politely to a man with a scruffy beard who commuted every day from St Albans. The man looked at him in return with painful disapproval, hardly greeting him. The man’s name he had always believed to be Fred and perhaps he really was called Fred, since Marion never listened to anything she was told. Duncan had been the subject of institutions before, and now, as he easily absorbed himself into the flow of the institution before the locked doors opened, he felt himself to be the easy agent of those institutions. And that would not do. It was as if he had become a schoolteacher, but without the power of doing good in the world. He would spend a glorious sunny day inside, looking at high windows through which the light fell, looking down at men who smelt, at women who had slept in their clothes, at people begging for money just to feed their kiddies because they were desperate and they didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. There would be students coming in soon, pretending to be interested in getting a job between their summer and their autumn terms. There would be people who had been sacked and people who could not work through injury not their fault. He would sit in the sad, echoing hall on the other side of his desk. He thought of all those people and he really did not give a shit about any of them.

  Going into his office he realized that there was no reason why he should not resign from his job and go to work in Sicily. Teaching English. It could hardly be any worse than here. And why Sicily? It was cheap, Duncan knew; it spoke Italian, which he had a smattering of. But mostly Duncan thought of Sicily because he had, the week before, picked up an off-duty Sicilian waiter in a gay pub on St Martin’s Lane, and the island, now, for him, was a land full of lemons, oranges and waiters called Salvatore. By half past ten he had told an overweight woman looking for employment in the legal field that she was wasting everyone’s time and should aim much, much lower. By eleven he had gone to see his supervisor, and had told him that he wanted to resign at the end of the month. By six thirty he was in the same gay pub on St Martin’s Lane – he had phoned up everyone he could think of on their office numbers – and he was telling a thrilled group of twenty men with moustaches, almost all with checked shirts on, just what he had done and where he was going to go.

  ‘You’ve got some nerve,’ Paul said, coming back from the bar with a half of lager and lime and a pint of bitter for Duncan. ‘I wish I had your nerve, even a bit of your nerve.’

  ‘If you only had a bit of his nerve,’ Simon said, ‘that’d only get you to the Isle of Wight, not much of a life-change, that, I don’t think.’

  ‘Cheek!’ Paul said.

  Even Andrew had come, though it was his night for his men’s group, and he never liked to miss that. Or was it revolutionary politics? ‘I’ll come to that some time,’ Paul said. ‘Sounds like a right laugh.’ Anyway, it was a fantastic turn-out, and they were still there at closing time, most of them. Why Sicily? Why not.

  3.

  Sicily had spoken to him on the fourth day, exactly as he had known it would. He had gone to see his father in his falling-down old house in Harrow the day before he left, to tell him – after he had left the unemployment job – that he was going to the other side of Europe. He had dreaded it, but it wasn’t, in the end, so bad. His father was not what he had been. His shoulders had narrowed, and surely he had grown shorter. His hair fell in a solid lump away from his forehead, not washed for some days. As always, he had immediately started talking about himself. ‘When I started work in the insurance company,’ he said, ‘there was a man there who was a great friend of mine. He admired me immensely. “I just don’t know how you manage to get through all the work you do,” he used to say. When I managed to get out of going into the army, he was drafted in. And he –’ his father reached for a handkerchief, sitting in a damp crumple on the walnut card table by the side of his habitual mustardy winged armchair ‘– he went into Sicily. The first wave of the liberation. He never spoke about it to me when he came back. By then I had made myself useful in all sorts of ways, and I was his superior by a good distance when he returned to his post, but I always let him call me by my Christian name, if no one was around, and I think he appreciated that a great deal. My father always said to me – your grandfather – he said, “Treat your subordinates with courtesy, and they will treat you with respect.” And I believe I’ve always done precisely that.’

  Duncan waited to hear something about Sicily. There in his fathe
r’s mind, there was an irritating fly, buzzing about, a tiny fly, not visible, but audible, and introduced into the normal furniture and spaces of the mind without warning. The name of the fly – what was it? It was Sicily. But in time it proved to go quite harmoniously with all the furniture that was already in the room, and could really safely be ignored.

  ‘Your mother always wanted to go to Italy,’ his father continued. He stroked the arm of the chair; it was bald from this repeated gesture, carried out all the time, all day long, while his father gave the impression of thought. ‘Not Sicily, I don’t think. She wanted to go to Rome, and Florence, and Venice, I believe. But I looked into it, and I found that Rome was a dangerous sort of place. It would not suit us. The food, too, would not suit. The best food in Europe is the food in southern Germany, where the salads are clean and the vegetables are well prepared. I explained all this to your mother. It was only a whim on her part. In the end I decided to surprise her, and we took a holiday on Lake Como, and she enjoyed it a lot. She said, “Samuel, I thought I wanted to go to Rome, but this was a lovely idea of yours, and I don’t think anything in Italy could improve on this.” All the Italians go for their holidays to Lake Como, you know. You don’t catch Italians going to Rome for their summer holidays. That was really a clever wheeze of mine, I always think.’