The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘If the teachers are talking to me, I just hear Adele, Adele, Adele. I do not think I have learnt anything since I arrived here. Nothing but your face, and your walk. And now you want to scare away people who want to marry you. It is not very good, the way you have made a profession of scaring people away.’

  ‘That’s so,’ said Adele, considering. She had scared away a good number of women who had come bearing gifts, their arms open. She could not see how it was that anyone should change their mind, and tell a man that his offer was acceptable. But sometimes a man must be told that his offer was acceptable, or the human race could hardly continue.

  ‘A man,’ Christian Vogt said, ‘must sometimes be told that his offer is acceptable. If that never happened, then the human race would die out altogether. And that does not seem to be happening.’

  ‘That’s so,’ Adele said, her heart pumping. She had not seen that her thoughts were going to be captured and expressed by this man she hardly knew. ‘I was very good at discouraging the widows, laying siege. But no one has laid siege to me, until now. It has all been to Papa.’

  ‘So tell me the story of how you got rid of all those suitors, suitoresses – is that a word?’

  ‘I have never heard of such a word,’ Adele said. ‘We used to call them the Weed Bed. There was nothing you could do about them. They came up in bundles. They were attractive, sometimes, on their own, just as a flowerbed with weeds can be shown to have even some pretty flowers, like bindweed. But to leave them be – Papa would not have been happy.’

  ‘How can you just – get rid of a tiresome person?’

  ‘Well, once – this would have been during the war …’

  7.

  The faces in the room were in a circle, each holding a deal board with paper pinned to it; the paper was not good paper, as they were going to get through a lot of it. They were turned to the man at the apex of the circle. The circle does not have an apex, but this circle did have an apex. The man at the apex had been talking for some time, and the faces around the circle, thirteen of them, were puzzled, serene, scared or excited. The man’s face was broad and mask-like, the skin stretched tight over the bones. Klee had seen this class earlier in the week for the first time. He liked the beginning classes, and the sound of ingrained thoughts being erased; sometimes easily, sometimes with painful, incomplete grindings, like a motor running on empty. He had been talking about the line; all the things a line could do, once conceived of. It could make a fish; it could make the water a fish swam in; it could make a man or a point, or a pattern of lines and other lines. He looked at the class and saw that he had not made himself clear.

  ‘I want you to do an exercise,’ he said finally. ‘You have your pencil, not too soft, not too hard. Take your pencil, and draw a single straight line, one that goes from one edge of the paper to another.’

  The students all did this, some looking from one side to another in case they had done something wrong. Klee saw with interest that the boy who never said anything, the one who appeared to be dreaming about something entirely different, bored and openly drifting – that boy had drawn a line from the top edge of the paper to the bottom edge. All the rest had drawn a horizontal line, somewhere between halfway and three-quarters down the paper. Klee examined his own instructions. It was right: he had not indicated the direction of the line. The boy had seen the line in his own way, top to bottom of the paper. Klee pondered this, and why he had thought of a horizontal line, and why a vertical line seemed already so original. He came to no conclusions.

  The class looked at him expectantly. Klee’s mind returned to the room. Outside the window of the room on the first floor, there was a tree, just turned yellow, and in the tree, there were three, perhaps four, birds singing loudly. It was like a machine with three, perhaps four, parts moving in different ways, apparently independently, but in fact connected remotely, like a piano and a violin playing together, separated by space. The students were looking at him.

  ‘You have drawn a straight line,’ Klee said. ‘Now, I want you to think hard, and then draw a second line; one that negates the first line. You should think about the line that has nothing of the first line in it, which wants to be completely indifferent to the first line and have nothing whatsoever in common with the first line. Can you draw that line?’

  The students looked at him still. Klee loved the first-year students. They had had no chance to be influenced by the students who had arrived in the year before, or the students in the year before that, having only just arrived. And yet they were very much the same as those students. They wore simple clothes, some of them, almost like the clothes of agricultural workers; or they wore the clothes their mamma had thought appropriate for them, a soft suit with a pattern on it and a red rag of a tie; others wore clothes that were neat, practical and efficient; one had paint stains already on his old jacket, which was torn – looking at this last one, Klee felt the torn lining in the inside of his jacket, the trouser pocket he must remember not to put anything in, as there was a hole in it after he had absent-mindedly thrust a paintbrush in, sharp end first. And there were three advanced students who had already found each other through dress and appearance, and were now sitting together. There was a girl who had an abrupt, angular bob to her hair and a slash of red lipstick; there was a girl who was wearing men’s trousers, a cap and a pair of workmen’s braces; and there was a boy who had found his way to Itten, and to Mazdaznan, and had already shaved his head. The mamma’s boy, the one in the neat soft suit and the red rag of a tie who never said anything, he was the one who had surprisingly drawn the vertical line. He was now sitting gazing forward, thinking, his pencil at an angle between third and fourth finger. The advanced figures, on the other hand, had set to work straight away, their mouths pursed. The boy with the shaved head, the early Mazdaznan recruit, had closed his eyes and was humming as he moved his hand across the paper. Klee looked, unamused. He could see what the result would be; a movement of scribble and a cloud. He wanted a line, as usual. Today he would fulfil the task in his own way, in a different way from yesterday. What seemed interesting to him today was the quality of thinness in a straight line. His second line, should he make one, would fight against that quality. It would struggle to be as fat as possible. He considered this possibility.

  One student after another set their pencil to paper. They drew swiftly, or scrupulously; they raised their pencils, and looked up. Only the mamma’s boy, whose name, Klee saw, was Christian Vogt, did not start work. Only after four or five minutes did he start; he made one mark on the paper, then another; he set his pencil down, and smiled, in a tender, satisfied, confident way. The others had smiled, too, but had smiled at each other, shown each other what they had done. Christian Vogt had smiled at the paper and at the line he had made. Klee recognized that smile.

  ‘Let us see,’ Klee said, and they had all done what he had thought they might do. The Mazdaznan boy had made a line that meandered so much it turned into a cloud. Others had made an arabesque with no straight line. Some of the neat-dressed girls had made another straight line, which crossed the first at an unpredictable angle. Klee nodded, and made encouraging noises. But then he came to Christian Vogt, and there was no second line on his paper, but just two little crosses, five inches apart. Klee looked at the page, and looked at Christian Vogt, an enquiry in his eyes.

  ‘I thought,’ Christian Vogt said, in his careful voice, which few in the class had heard much, ‘that the first line was so solid and substantial. It looked so fat after I had been looking at it. Like a road or a vein or a pipe, full of something. It looked as if it would be so hard to change, once it was made. The second line should not be hard to move. It should be something you could imagine, and then imagine somewhere else, moving in a different way. So there is just a line between these two places that you can make if you think hard about it. That is my line.’

  ‘I see,’ Klee said.

  ‘But it is the artist’s job to decide what sort of line shoul
d go on the paper,’ one of the clever, advanced women students said, the one in men’s braces. ‘It is not the artist’s job to say to the observer, you should make up your mind.’

  ‘No,’ Christian Vogt said. ‘But the observer will make up his mind, whether the artist instructs him to or not.’

  Then it was as if he had said enough. Klee looked at the piece of paper again. It was true. He had envisaged a line that went directly between the two points marked by little crosses. It was a line that existed only in his mind, and not on the paper. And yet the artist had drawn that line and made him think of it. He could not remember a student making an invisible line before.

  ‘Today,’ he said, ‘your task is to make a drawing with a single line, and the line is not permitted to leave the paper, or to cross itself, or to touch itself at an earlier point in its journey. Bring that to class on Thursday.’

  8.

  ‘We have designed a new banknote today,’ Kandinsky said to Klee, as they walked away from the Bauhaus building.

  ‘Yes?’ Klee said. ‘I am not asked to design banknotes. I drew an invitation to the student ball in the summer. But I think I would like to draw a banknote. Perhaps a very large one, and then be allowed to keep it, and perhaps even spend it, afterwards. It would be good to draw something that could be exchanged for the sum of money you said it was worth.’

  ‘We are not allowed to do exactly that,’ Kandinsky said. ‘And all banknotes are very large ones, nowadays. I have banknotes for ten million marks in my wallet that are now worth nothing. I overlooked them for a few hours and then they would not buy a box of matches. We are making designs for the one thousand billion banknote for the Thuringian State Bank. Young Bayer designed it, and we came along to discuss it.’

  ‘What does such a thing look like?’ Klee said, bringing his leather case up to his chest and shivering slightly. They paused at the edge of the road; a farm-cart, nearly empty of all but a few husks of corn and straw, went past, pulled by a heavy white horse. They watched it go with different creative impressions: a sagging line, a large sad eye, a series of green slashes against the white-painted floor of the cart. ‘How would you decide on the colour of a thousand billion marks? The mind would shrink from the responsibility.’

  ‘It is like the colour of money always,’ Kandinsky said, as they continued walking. ‘It is not something one person can decide on. It is never you who decides what the colour of the money you hold will be.’

  ‘But somebody must decide on what colour money must be,’ Klee said, and he reached into his pocket and extracted a ten-thousand-mark note from some time ago. He dropped it into the upturned hat of a begging veteran sitting on the street. The hat was positioned just where his right knee would have been. ‘It does not grow. Someone must decide, other than God.’

  ‘Today I think it was Gropius who decided,’ Kandinsky said. ‘He said he was very proud that the Bauhaus was making the designs for banknotes, though I think he meant only himself. He has told Bayer that the ten thousand billion marks should bear a thick red stripe at the bottom, and otherwise be black printing on white. Bayer has made it sans serif. It shouts.’

  ‘A red stripe at the bottom,’ Klee said, and turned his expressionless broad face away. He made with his hands a small gesture, as if trying out a new piano; Kandinsky had got to know this movement as a warding-off gesture. He could not imagine what was bad luck, or impossible, or evil, about a thick stripe of red on a banknote. ‘That is what the Bauhaus is doing, is it? Making banknotes with a thick stripe of red at the bottom, for thousands and millions and billions?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kandinsky said simply. ‘We are up in our studios, making beautiful objects for the bourgeoisie, founding religions, talking mysticism, and Gropius cannot believe that there will be a place for us in the new Bauhaus, in the new Germany. He wants to make chairs and tables and banknotes and cutlery that works better than any cutlery before.’

  ‘Did he ask you about the design of the banknote?’ Klee asked. ‘Was he concerned about what young Bayer’s banknote looked like, and did he want you to make it more beautiful?’

  ‘No,’ Kandinsky said. ‘He was speaking to me because he wanted to discover my experience using red ink for printing purposes. But the red ink in the prints lasts very well because it is looked after, and it is not screwed up like a banknote.’

  ‘But could you help him? It is a shame that you could not help him,’ Klee said. ‘Shall we walk through the park today? It is still so nice. The trees are so beautiful, all in that red and yellow, just for the moment. Trees are red, as well as money.’

  ‘But why?’ Kandinsky said, as they stepped through the elaborate ducal gate that led into the ducal park, closing its ironwork behind him. Klee was right to want to come this way. Here, it was impossible to believe that anyone was poor. A nanny was wending her way home with her two charges, one in pale blue with a swansdown hood, the other, still smaller, tottering along with a toy dog on wheels, wearing a tiny sailor suit. ‘I really could not have answered his questions. He would not listen. He is the man who decides on the colour of money, you know.’

  ‘I want him to give me twenty banknotes of ten thousand billion marks, out of gratitude,’ Klee said simply. ‘I want to make his money so beautiful that he returns a lot of it to me.’

  9.

  Christian Vogt entered the hallway of the Weimar villa. It still reminded him of the inside of a jewellery box, all velvet and panel; its smell was still as it had been; but the strangeness had gone. He hardly saw it, and he was aware that his response to it was all verbal; it was ‘the place I live in’, ‘This hall’s like a jewellery box’ and ‘Frau Scherbatsky’s house, or Frau Scherbatsky’s husband’s house, as she always says’. Expressed in conversation or in his own thoughts, these seemed to be enough. He had no urge now, as he had had two or three weeks ago, to sit down and draw the interior of the hall. That urge had gone, leaving only a faint tinge of duty and the belief that he might have said something along those lines to Frau Scherbatsky, and really ought to get it over with to please her.

  As if to strengthen this guilt, Christian found himself closing the front door of the house behind him at the exact moment that Frau Scherbatsky came out of the sitting room to the right. She appeared to have been waiting for him. Her expression, normally one of warm delight, had withdrawn into one of tightly smiling forbearance. Christian had seen this expression on the faces of schoolmasters. Before she said anything, he knew he had once been admitted to the company of the grown-ups; now, he was going to be ticked off, like a child.

  ‘Herr Vogt,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘How very nice to see you.’

  Then Christian knew exactly what it was about. She gestured, and he followed her, in a hangdog style, into the sitting room, depositing his portfolio by the hall table where the vase of white tulips sat. He shut the door behind him.

  ‘I was concerned, I must admit,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, ‘not to see you at supper last night. Herr Wolff thought you might be ill, and I sent Maria up after supper with a bowl of beef broth. But she said you were not at home, and had not been at home all day. I was woken up, in fact, when you did finally come home – it must have been nearly midnight.’

  ‘I think that must be true,’ Christian said. He knew it was true. He had walked and walked with Adele Winteregger, from the afternoon into the evening. And then, when she had said, ‘This is too bad – I must go back inside. Elsa hates to come home and not find me there – I must, I really must,’ he had leant down and had kissed her, and she had not moved. There was some resistance in the lips, he could feel, but it was melting as his mouth touched hers, and she had not moved back; she had stood there simply and let him kiss her. Her lips; her skin against his; the smell of her clean hair. She had let him walk her the short distance to the house where she and Elsa lodged, and had darted inside without saying goodbye or looking back. He had stood there outside her windows for a long time, watching the light of the oil lamp come on at her h
and; watching, or imagining the warmth inside as she moved about, lifting and tidying, then seeing her shape against the oil-lamp’s glow, beginning to peel the vegetables. He had gone on standing there in the street even after Adele had come to the window and closed the shutters. And after some time, when her own glow had finally left the street where he stood, he could not go to Frau Scherbatsky’s place and talk about the cost of living and the future of Germany with her and Wolff and Neddermeyer. He had walked and walked, first through the city, then out through new suburbs, and finally when he walked between fields and heard the movement of animals and their night calls in the dark, he knew he had walked enough, and turned homewards.

  ‘I had hoped to mention it to you this morning,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘But you were not at breakfast either. I don’t think you have been at breakfast very often this week.’

  ‘No, I think that must be true,’ Christian said.

  ‘I am very sorry to say that I am going to have to go on charging you for meals, even if you miss them, you know,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘But it is only considerate to inform me whether you will be there. This is not exactly a boarding house, you know, Herr Vogt – I would naturally prefer to have a guest and friend who favours us with his company in general. I understand that Herr Wolff cannot always be here because of his political commitments. But he always tells me well in advance, so I do not delay the serving of dinner, as happened last night on your account.’

  ‘I am so sorry, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian said. ‘The fact of the matter is—’

  Frau Scherbatsky held up the palm of her hand as if halting traffic. ‘You do not need to explain,’ she said. ‘I know that art students get up to all sorts of tricks that it is better not to know about in detail. But in future, Herr Vogt, if you could make your plans known to me? And you are dining with us tonight, I hope?’