The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Elsa would ask of one old maid, ‘that if a lady has received not one offer of marriage by the age of thirty that it would be a good idea to accept that it will not and probably should not happen, not ever?’

  ‘Don’t you think,’ of the seventeen-year-old daughter of a lawyer, ‘that marriage between young and old is unfair?’

  ‘Unfair on whom?’ the lawyer’s wife would say.

  ‘On all concerned,’ Elsa would reply.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ she would ask a widow, ‘that this is really a very good painting for a child of twelve to have produced? Don’t you think? Don’t you think?’

  Nothing had come of any of these visits. Some had settled into a regular habit of visiting, some even forgetting over time that they had begun by considering Franz a possible husband for themselves or others. These had become friends. Some, on the other hand, had continued to bring gifts of cake and special, pretty things for the girls, saying that they knew what girls liked, and that they were sure Herr Winteregger never gave such things a moment’s consideration. Adele had put these gifts, whether of cake or of trinkets, away in a special place and, according to the visitor, had either eaten the cake and used the trinket, or, in one case, had disposed of it uneaten and unused, as if it were cursed.

  It was Adele whom the greater number of the visitors found more offputting in the end. Elsa’s questions and behaviour could be safely ignored, as her family ignored them: she lived in a narrow field of perceptions of the world about her, of colour and form and shape, of seeing how the world could be made into an object or a painting. Her perceptions of the world’s behaviour and manners, on the other hand, did not exist. That had its advantages: nobody would much care what Elsa thought of an eventual marriage, and she would carry on in much the same way as before. Adele, on the other hand, made so efficient a housekeeper, with her keys and her apron, her sharp ways with market stall-holders and grocers, her prompt paying of bills and her constant querying of accounts, that more than one of the Breitenberg widows had decided that she would not be at all likely to relinquish her tasks. More than one widow had fallen at the first hurdle of Adele remarking calmly that she was not at all likely to marry; that Papa was her entire concern, and she loved living in Breitenberg and seeing that everything ran so smoothly; innocently, she seemed to mean exactly what she said, and was happy that things were ordered so. There were two daughters of the puppet-maker Winteregger, one beautiful, one clever, and they lived together in the town of Breitenberg.

  5.

  ‘But why do you want to marry me?’ Adele Winteregger said, much later, in Weimar, to the strange man who had accosted her in the street, and had later turned up outside the house where she was staying with Elsa. ‘Why would you stand outside the house for four hours, from five in the morning to nine in the morning, until I left the house, and then insist on walking with me like this through the streets, and telling me that I should come with you into the park and along the river and into the trees to listen to the songs of birds? And you only met me once, and only spoke to me once, not thirty words. I cannot understand why you now say that you want to marry me. I have never heard of anyone saying to a stranger, I want to marry you, then being accepted and any good coming of it.’

  ‘Listen to that bird,’ Christian Vogt said. He laid his hand on Adele Winteregger’s sleeve where her arm carried the basket. His hand, lying on the coarse texture of the clean brown cloth with cuff and neat blue buttonhole, thrilled and tensed at being nearly in contact with Adele. ‘It is a nightingale, singing for you.’

  ‘That is not a nightingale,’ Adele said. ‘I do not know very much about birds, but I can see that it is a blackbird. There is not a lot of point in talking to me about nightingales and expecting me to marry you because it is a romantic thing to say. Nothing is romantic if it is untrue. Perhaps truthful things are not very romantic either, but it is important not to say that things are nightingales if they are not nightingales.’

  ‘It is a beautiful song, and the bird is sitting in a beautiful tree, and I am walking here with you,’ Christian Vogt said. ‘I don’t know what else I can say to you to convince you of my sincerity.’

  ‘I do not disbelieve you,’ Adele Winteregger said. ‘I only think that your feelings at this moment cannot strongly influence my actions, and should not influence yours. There was a lady called Frau Steuer who was very much convinced that she should persuade my father to marry her. She came round to our house every month, sometimes twice a month, and always issued an invitation to her house to have dinner and afterwards a cup of coffee and perhaps a piece of coffee cake, but my father said that it would mean dressing up in his most uncomfortable clothes and polishing his boots, so we did not go to her house more than once a year. When she came to our house, she always brought something she had noticed that we did not own, or something to replace an old object. That showed she loved our papa without her having to say so.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very romantic,’ Christian Vogt said. ‘If I brought you a gift, it would be something that had no necessary meaning or use, just a beautiful object that you could live with, so beautifully, you and it.’

  ‘That is what many people think,’ Adele said. ‘And many people would be wrong. Anybody can buy a useless piece of floral arrangement, or chocolates, or a painting, or something of that sort. But if you notice that the person you visited last week and are visiting this week as well has only a nutcracker with a loose screw and tarnish at the joint, and you buy a good replacement, that is a good gift, which shows love and attention.’

  ‘Did that ever happen?’ Christian Vogt said.

  ‘Yes, that happened,’ Adele said. ‘We had for many years a nutcracker that had a loose screw, and every time we cracked a nut, Papa would comment on it, and afterwards take it to the workshop and tighten it. But it was always the same the next time. I think the screw had gone. We did not eat nuts every day. But then one day Frau Steuer arrived with a new nutcracker, beautifully made, which opened and closed so smoothly, and never creaked. Papa still uses it whenever he wants to crack a nut, which is not every day, as I said. It still works perfectly. Look!’

  Adele was indicating through a window; they had reached the borders of the park, and in the lower rooms at the back of an office building, there was a telephonist at work; at the brown telephone switchboard she moved steadily and surely, before the tangle of jacks and the web of wires, green, red or blue-striped. ‘Look!’ Adele said. ‘How busy and interesting!’

  ‘I want to know everything about you,’ Christian Vogt said, turning away impatiently. He had seen telephonists before; he knew, from his father’s office, how they efficiently plugged in lines and let the tiny shutters fall down, like eyelids. ‘I want to know even about the nutcrackers you owned and the names of the girls in your class at the Gymnasium and—’

  ‘The nutcracker is not a romantic gift,’ Adele said. ‘But it is very much to the point. That is my idea of a very good gift, not a box of chocolates, which you could not eat at once and which would have to be shared with people you did not even like very much. That is not a very considerate gift.’

  ‘But did your father marry Frau Steuer in the end?’ Christian Vogt said. They were crossing the ornamental bridge over the river that wound through the ducal park – crossing it for the second time. He ran his fingers through his hair; he felt wild and sprawling next to this patient, neat, tidy woman, explaining about her family with no need, apparently, to wave her hands as she talked.

  ‘No, he did not,’ Adele said. ‘But he was very glad of the nutcracker.’ She stopped dead in the middle of the path; she looked up at the autumn sun, squinting and screwing up her little nose. ‘Now I must be about my business. You should be getting back to your art classes. My sister would never skip a class. She is going to become a teacher, she knows she must not. I do not know what someone like you will become. I have to go now. Thank you for the walk in the sunshine. I enjoyed it.’


  ‘But you didn’t answer me!’ Christian Vogt said. ‘You didn’t give me an answer!’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Adele Winteregger said, and he was exultant that she had, after all, been thinking about it, that she had borne the question in mind at least. ‘No, Herr Vogt, I am not going to marry you. I have my father to look after, and perhaps, afterwards, my sister too. Goodbye. Thank you for the walk in the sunshine. I enjoyed it.’

  Adele’s father Franz had been lucky: he had been buried in rubble on the battlefield only six months after the start of the war, and had been returned to his daughters, like unsatisfactory goods, smelling of hospitals, iron, iodine, the Red Cross and railways. His eardrum had burst: he carried a strange serpent of an instrument, an ear trumpet, in the upper pocket of his old jacket. Adele would look after him. Later, she might marry her cousin, the Friedrich. If this man persisted, she would be obliged to tell him why her life would run in such a way.

  6.

  The days of Adele Winteregger in Weimar followed a routine. She looked at her sister’s existence, and did not know how she could be happy and productive without knowing what she should be doing today, and what she would be doing at this time tomorrow. Elsa had the timetable for her studies, which Adele strongly suspected her of not following to the letter. But apart from that, she did things on whim and for spectacle. She did not even go to bed at the same time each night.

  Adele had been in Weimar for six days, settling Elsa in, and was to be there for another week. She did not propose to take advantage of the full three weeks that her employer, the Jew, had offered her. Already she had established herself a routine. She woke before Elsa, and washed herself quickly in the washbowl with a damp sponge. She dressed, making plenty of noise to wake Elsa, and made coffee in the little metal pot with the coffee-and-acorn mix that worked out more cheaply, and with it, a bread roll each, bought at the end of the day from the baker in the street below. Then she would walk with Elsa to the school, and make sure that she was there for her first lesson, at least; she would return to the market, and see what was good for dinner. This took most of the morning. The prices were so sharply rising that you could find a difference between one stall and another very easily. The least perishable items, like potatoes and cheese, Adele had bought a good quantity of when they had arrived from Breitenberg. It had seemed like a large outlay of their money, but when she looked at what a sack of potatoes had cost five days before, and what it cost today, she was glad of what had seemed extravagance. She knew the faces of the stall-holders and some of their names; some of them now knew hers. She would return to the little room above the bookshop that Elsa was living in, and where they shared a bed for the time being. She would prepare the food, paring the potatoes and roots and, if it were a meat day, putting the pig’s trotter into the pot after trimming it. When it was done, Adele took the pot down to the baker below, and he would put it into the oven for her, where it took up no space. Elsa came home at twelve thirty, usually, and they ate their dinner together, Elsa sitting on the bed and talking in the way she had about what she had done and what she had made that morning, bouncing up and down; Adele sat on the one wicker chair and listened, encouragingly. In the afternoon, Adele mended clothes, and cleaned the room, and was happy to make and mend clothes belonging to the baker’s wife, or the kitchenware-shop owner’s wife opposite, or the clothes belonging to the wife of the man who kept the accounts in the bookshop three doors down. She was kept busy, and one of them had returned and asked her if she could make her a dress, so the work must have been satisfactory. At five o’clock, she gave in and put her hat on, and walked out of the house to tell the boy Christian Vogt that she would take a walk with him for an hour, when Elsa would return from her studies. In the evening Adele and Elsa ate soup and Adele read ten pages of her book. She would tell Elsa of the latest absurd things that the boy Christian Vogt had said to her, and Elsa would act them out, striding about the little room and laughing. They went to bed at nine thirty, and she slept easily. If you held Elsa, she did not turn in the narrow bed as often and as violently as she otherwise would. Adele was not clever like Elsa, she knew, but she made herself a useful day and she lived in it.

  She lived an orderly and reliable life, and it made her happy. What made it impossible was the lack of order and sense shown by money. Before the war, in Breitenberg, she had gone to the market each day with the money her father had given her, and had bought what they needed. They had even eaten veal or chicken every day. It had cost the same on Friday as it had on Monday. Adele thought of that with astonishment, so used was she now to discovering that a potato bought for a million, a thousand million marks at ten in the morning would cost ten thousand million by noon, and nobody could say what Monday’s potato would cost on Tuesday. Adele stuck obstinately with her routine, but it seemed to her that money was behaving like a Bauhaus student, like Elsa; it had wild hair or a shaved head, it leapt up, it shrieked madly and ran through the streets, rending its garments, it arrived or it did not arrive, it disappeared altogether when it was most expected and most relied upon. It spoke words in the marketplace that nobody had heard before the war, and that nobody should have to listen to now; words that shocked and appalled, words that only men in their most private circumstances should be allowed to speak. Words for panelled rooms and the shut door were now bandied around for children to overhear, to learn, to repeat. Words like ‘billion’. She had bartered in Breitenberg, swapped Dresden figures for a necessary sack of flour; she had given the labour of a week not for money but for a hand of pork. She suspected that her father was doing the same. There was nothing to do in response to the behaviour of money but to establish a routine, and discover what, in the end, was of worth. If Elsa made anything worth selling, she could live on that. But the market in Weimar for tapestry and carpet and ornamental textiles was limited, and dealt with a glut. Adele hoped that Elsa would manage on the twice-weekly supply of money they sent through the post. It had once been, not so very long ago, a million-mark note. It was hard to imagine now the day when that had seemed a large sum of money. But Adele was not clever, she knew, and she had long ago stopped trying to understand what could not be understood.

  Against the harmonious working of Adele’s Weimar routine, too, there was the routine of the boy Christian Vogt. Adele could not understand it. At some point during Adele and Elsa’s morning walk to the school, Christian Vogt would pop out from a side-street. He would pretend to be preoccupied, and only when he was upon them would he give a start of surprise and say, ‘Good morning.’ You would have to be a child of five to think that this happened every day by chance. Then he would walk them to the school and go in with Elsa. He would cast a sorrowing look as he entered the building. Adele did not think he appreciated the opportunity he was being given. Between one and two in the afternoon, he would appear at the wall opposite, like a loafer, or a pickpocket waiting his chance. He would make a pretence of reading the newspapers that had been pasted to the wall. But in reality he was just waiting for Adele to come out. She watched him from the upper window. He was always there by two, but she could never leave the house before five. He waited in his best clothes, a limp patterned suit, an American hat in his hand, his shoes polished to a shine. Adele did not give up before five; then she gave up. She left the house and told Christian Vogt that her work was done for the moment, and she would be grateful for some fresh air. If she insisted on a solitary walk, she knew that she would have Christian Vogt dogging her footsteps, his eyes on her back, trying to see through, to see her heart. She could have told him that a heart was just a fat organ with tubes, probably best when trimmed and stuffed, but very nutritious and, because it was not very widely esteemed, very cheap and easy to obtain by anyone who made a small effort.

  ‘Do you not have a timetable?’ she asked him. ‘Did they not hand you a piece of paper, marked out into squares, that you are to fill in with the names of your classes and their times? Do you not stick to it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Chris
tian said, gazing at her as she pulled the white muslin scarf around her neck and fastened it with a little cameo brooch. He had been standing outside the house for three hours, his figure a recognizable one in the neighbourhood by now. The baker downstairs had rudely called across, some hours ago, that if he was going to be as long as yesterday, why not buy a cake to keep him going, as it would be more expensive by the time Adele came out. His thin shape, his upward cock’s crest of hair, his modest and fearful eyes made an impression on all the neighbours. Adele ignored him until she was ready to leave.

  ‘Yes, what?’ Adele said. She could feel that a garter was already coming loose. The elastic was frayed and would have to be replaced somehow. She hoped it would not fall down altogether. She would prefer not to have to adjust it underneath her skirt; it looked so like an indelicate itching to other people.

  ‘Yes, I do have a school timetable,’ Christian said. ‘I have nothing to do this afternoon.’

  ‘You should be working,’ Adele said, as they set off. ‘I know that not everything that is done in an art school is done during the lesson hours. My sister is hard at work in the textile studio. She is making a large tapestry of her own design. Now, why are you not in the studio, developing your own work? This is no good, waiting for someone you do not know.’

  ‘I only want to be in Weimar because you are here,’ Christian said. ‘There is no other reason.’

  ‘Well, I am going back to Breitenberg in a few days,’ Adele said. ‘So you will have to find another reason to stay in Weimar. Elsa knows why she is in Weimar. She is learning to make beautiful objects, taught by the best masters. And when she has a diploma, she will be able to take it and teach in the best schools in the country. It is absurd, a shame to say that the only reason you have to stay in Weimar is because a little dressmaker is here on holiday.’