The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  The gingery man now placed a hand on Julius’s shoulder. Close, he smelt of old beer and the remains of some cheap cigarettes. His hand was ungloved, and was red with cold or drink.

  ‘Please, remove that,’ Julius said firmly. ‘My business is no business of yours.’

  The gingery man did not remove his hand. ‘There are people in this town who have had nothing to eat for days,’ he said. ‘There are people in this town who cannot afford to buy anything to eat even when the shops are open. Why is that, Isaac? Have you done well this morning, Isaac? Have you been making a profit out of Germans, Isaac?’ At the last, the man hissed, lisping the s in ‘Isaac’ as if imitating a snake.

  Julius was aware that this assault was not happening unobserved. A girl – a young woman, neatly dressed and small, with sage-coloured stockings underneath her brown coat – had paused fifteen paces away, at the turn into the Böttchergasse, and was watching them.

  ‘None of that is true,’ Julius said, maintaining a light, pleasant tone. ‘My daughter and I –’ he indicated, thinking that perhaps a reminder that he was with a small child might turn away assault at least ‘– we were merely coming into Weimar to buy a few essentials.’

  ‘Let’s see what is in your pocket,’ the fat man said, and the gingery man reached intimately towards Julius’s neck and lapel. Julius stood back, amazed and now angry, but the man pushed him against the wall, and quickly reached into his inside pocket. In there was a bundle of notes – it could not be otherwise. The billion-mark notes were now worth so little. They had to be fastened with a pin, run through them, and it was this bundle that the gingery man now brought out.

  ‘That’s a lot of money you’ve made this morning,’ the gingery man said.

  Julius began to protest, but the gingery man was shouting now. Lotte behind – he could hear her crying.

  ‘Look at all of this!’ the man shouted. ‘All this money. Making it out of our suffering, out of German surrender and humiliation. Look!’ He tore the pin out, and sent a billion-mark note into the air. It fell to the snow. ‘You bought goods cheap, before the snow, and now you come into Weimar, and you have sold them to the Germans, who have no alternative. Everything gone, Isaac? A good morning’s work, Isaac? Have you sold everything, Isaac? Everything except one child? You’re waiting for a few years for her to fetch a good price, Isaac? Or are you going to buy a little Christian girl to be her servant, a little German blond girl, Isaac?’ With every five words, the man was throwing a note into the air. Julius did nothing. He knew that to scramble after money would persuade them to put their boot on the back of his neck. It was so little, the money, so little.

  ‘You love money,’ the fat man said. ‘And we love our country. That is the difference. That is why we are going to win in the end. You can’t live on the money that you love so much, can you? Here—’ and he took the money from his comrade. He took seven or eight notes from the top, screwed them up, and now pushed them into Julius’s face. He would have forced them into his mouth, but Julius would not open it. His teeth were clamped shut. That noise was the noise of Lotte crying, and calling for her mummy. But Mummy could not hear. ‘There, thief,’ the fat man said. He cast the money down to the ground. ‘You earned it. Enjoy it while you can.’

  For the moment, that seemed to be all. The two men turned away. One made a gesture at his neck, a tightening gesture, as one who goes into an important argument or as one who has won it. They walked away. They took some of the money with them, but most of it now lay about Julius and Lotte on the snow. She was crying, and he stroked her as he bent down and started to pick up the money. It was all so little. At the end of the Böttchergasse, the young woman who had stopped watched the two men going, and looked for a moment at the sight of a Jew scrabbling around in the snow for money. She had seen everything. She did not come to help. In a moment, she turned away, too, walking in the opposite direction to the men. For the moment, it had not been too bad, not too bad at all. They had not found the little gold chain in his pocket with which he was really hoping to pay for food. There was not much hope that anyone would take the billion-mark notes, but they were worth offering, just in case.

  In Weimar, a few shops were open, though not the market stalls as yet. Adele went her rounds, pleasantly surprised that there was anything open. She could buy some food. It was not much, but it was better than two slices of black bread and three potatoes. They would be able to eat today. Elsa would be so proud of her! The only matter was how very expensive everything was. The prices seemed to have doubled or trebled with the coming of the snow. Her boots creaked like old wood in the snow as she walked around. She had a pair of sausages, a pair of turnips, a very little flour, some more potatoes, a very little sugar, a twist of coffee-and-acorn-and chicory, and that would be plenty for them. Tomorrow it would be better still. If only everything were not so expensive! She would love to be able to ask the Vogt boys to a proper dinner, to show how she could cook. But that would have to wait. She looked forward to being married to Christian, now that she had properly considered it. She had thought at first only to teach him a lesson. But now she thought that it would be a good thing to do. Father would be so surprised. Perhaps he would marry Frau Steuer after all!

  She reached home, and climbed the stairs to their little apartment. The bookshop was still closed. People would not be in such a hurry to buy a book as they would be to buy food. Elsa sprang up with a cry of joy when she saw that Adele’s wicker basket had things in it, good things to eat. Adele began at once to cook. They were so hungry! They had tried not to admit it to themselves, even though they could not stop themselves from feeling hungry. But now there were sausages and potatoes cooking before them, and smelling so very good, they could admit to their hunger. It was unbearable to have to wait even for a few minutes until the sausages, so good, were ready. And in the meantime, Adele told Elsa about how things were; about how expensive everything in the shop had become, and about how some people, the Jews, were taking advantage of the storm, and were making money out of people’s suffering by raising prices and selling dear what they had bought cheap and hoarded. The Jew had had his pockets stuffed full of money. She had seen people taking revenge on him. It was sad, but she had seen the Jew’s money scattered all about, and him wanting to do nothing but count it up, make sure none was missing from the money he had made. ‘I wonder …’ Adele said, then stopped herself. She had been about to wonder what her employer in Breitenberg, the Jew, had been doing to fill the time and to make himself some money while she was away. But that was unfair. He had been good to her and not all of them had contributed to the way things were. But there it was. And now the sausages were ready.

  ‘If only there were some mustard!’ Elsa said. ‘Then our happiness would be truly complete!’

  From the pocket of her apron, Adele brought, as a lovely surprise, a tiny clay pot. It must be the smallest clay pot of mustard anyone had ever made. It would do for a dollop for her, a dollop for her sister. Adele smiled. It had not been truly necessary – nobody would starve without mustard. But what were sausages without mustard? And she had found she had a tiny sum left at the end of her shopping, a hundred million marks or so, no more than that, and had retraced her steps to the shop where she had seen that there was mustard.

  ‘You are the best sister anyone ever had,’ Elsa said. Together they sat in front of the fire, and they ate their sausages and potatoes with the mustard, and the world began to look as if it had a future. ‘I wish that, even when the trains start running, you would stay with me in Weimar.’

  ‘Oh, Elsa,’ Adele said. But she was happy now that Elsa would be quite all right. And her fiancé Christian would look out for her. She would tell him what Elsa needed, in person, or perhaps in a letter.

  BOOK 6

  AD 203

  1.

  The town had been built in an ambitious moment. The hot wastes came up to the half-finished walls and gates of the place, and were not kept out. There was a marble mee
ting hall, and a marketplace, a bath-house and a temple.

  There was also an amphitheatre, of some splendour. Some had thought and some still said that there might have been better uses for Rome’s money. But there was no amphitheatre for far around, in any of the similar towns of the colony. Sport was not the most important thing in life. But it was clear that their desert town rose above its rivals because of the amphitheatre.

  Of these buildings, a local dignitary had said two years before that he had found the town brick and had left it marble. The thought was not original. The amphitheatre, temple, meeting hall and marketplace, however, were the only marble buildings in the town. Much of the rest was not even brick, but smeared, hardened mud that the inhabitants had brought into the town from their native settlements, or it was a means of living that Rome had never known, of branches and cloth, of suspended blankets.

  Sand blew constantly into the town, and sometimes rose up in a furious storm, running towards the town in a sky-high wall, making it impossible to see more than a handspan in front of the face. Sand was piled up against the walls of the few marble buildings in great drifts. The walls did not have the polish and gleam of great Rome’s marble. They were starting to become pitted and rough with the constant buffeting. There had once been talk of a great project, a viaduct across the desert. But there did not seem to be as much money emerging from Rome as there once had been. The town still had a poet, but that was a poor thing to show as proof of Rome’s trust.

  There were few reliable amusements in town. One was to sit at the window of a house, and observe the street going by. There might be a camel-drover, a group of dirty street-urchins, the slave of a neighbour carrying a basket, the water-carrier with his cart and donkey, a beggar with a terrible facial ailment, such as the one who sat always opposite with a dark hole where his nose should be. For the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of the merchants of the town, with three elder sisters and four elder brothers, that was the limit of the permitted. Sometimes she and her slave would, semi-permitted, venture out veiled to the marketplace. Her sisters had warned her about the traders who had snatched a child and taken it off to be sold in a neighbouring town, never to be heard of again. But that had been fifty years ago. The great fat men, glistening with sweat, their heads shaved, calling out their wares to the bidding public, whether soap, fruit, meat, household goods or any other matter, were not threatening.

  Sometimes, too, there was a rare and splendid entertainment. If her brothers and sisters consented, she could go with them to the amphitheatre, and watch the games. But her sisters did not always want her company, though she was old enough to marry.

  There were other entertainments, and on this day, the daughter of the merchant and her slave were sitting quietly, faces veiled, to one side of the public room in the building that served as the town hall. The sand was blowing in at the window with a hot, abrasive, dry blast. Outside, there was the moan and deep grumble of a desert wind mounting in strength. The nomads of the desert would be out there, settling down, wrapping themselves in their dark blue cloths, walling their camels about them and waiting for the storm to pass over them. Here, a magistrate was getting very irritated.

  ‘I just can’t understand,’ he was saying. ‘I’m really trying my very best to help you. It doesn’t seem a great deal to ask. All we ask is that you go to the temple and make a sacrifice – a very small sacrifice – to the Emperor. Do you understand? We are not even requiring you to abandon your rites, whatever they may be. All that we ask – all that Rome asks – is that, from time to time, you come along with the rest of us and make a very small sacrifice to the Emperor. As well as all the performance about your dead God you enjoy so much. Not instead of. As well as.’

  There were five prisoners, an older man with a white beard and a woman who could have been his wife, then two young men who must be brothers, and a strong-jawed man. The merchant’s daughter recognized this last man as a market trader. He sold oil for lamps. The younger of the two brothers was definitely very scared, and the merchant’s daughter thought that the woman was, as well. But the older man with the white beard, who seemed to have some kind of authority over the others, did not even look about him to gather opinion before he spoke.

  ‘That is not possible,’ he said. ‘Our Lord forbids it. We can make no sacrifice and we will not.’

  ‘Well, bring your Lord here, and I’ll persuade him,’ the magistrate said, smiling somewhat. The court officials laughed at this pleasantry. They knew by now that the man they spoke of as their Lord was a dead man, the founder of their cult, but the magistrate had amused them all by pretending to forget this.

  The elder man made no response.

  ‘Now, look,’ the magistrate said. He was quite a young man; he had been sent out, already balding, from Rome. His accent was of the very best, people said. Some wiser and older people wondered what he had done in Rome before Rome had decided to send him here indefinitely. He ingratiated, humoured, broke out in petulant rage, reached for recherché punishments, argued with the prisoners and the forces of the law, or joked with them. ‘Now look. I am a reasonable man. I don’t care to put people to death for no reason. You don’t seem to perceive that I am searching for a compromise, under which the laws of the empire can be respected, and your practices can go on out of sight. I am trying to help you. Is that so hard to understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘We want no such help. Such help would pitch us into the eternal flames. We want no such agreement with people like you.’

  ‘Such help would keep you alive,’ the magistrate said. ‘Honestly, I start to lose my patience here. Do you want to stay alive, or do you want to die? It’s not a hard question.’

  ‘No,’ the man said. He made no effort to consult the others. ‘It is not a hard question. We want to die, rather than accept what you call a compromise.’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ the magistrate said. ‘Take them from this place and put them to death in the amphitheatre, if they absolutely insist. I just want to say that none of that was at all necessary. It really is simply maddening. And you –’ he pointed at the leader ‘– you must make sure that your son is going to carry your business on. The whole town relies on that.’

  ‘One day,’ the older man said. ‘my son will light other lamps that may not be sold in the marketplace.’

  ‘Well, of course he will,’ the magistrate said. ‘You know, sometimes you Christians drive me absolutely up the wall. That will do. Take them away and have them put to death some time very soon, please.’

  A shrieking broke out at the back of the hall, a noise in which there was a joyous note as well as the wailing that might have been more to the front. In it was mingled the beat of a drum, the hiss of some cymbals. The five prisoners were led away. As they left the room, roped together, the last of them turned and tried to raise his hand in greeting or farewell. It was one of the young men, the one who had not appeared scared during the proceedings.

  ‘I would be scared, if I were them,’ the merchant’s daughter said to her slave, in her bright, clear voice, after commenting on this. ‘I would be so scared. But then I think I wouldn’t turn down that offer. Why would someone not agree to come sometimes to the temple and sacrifice some measly goat to the Emperor? No one was asking them to give anything up. They had only to do something a little bit extra.’

  ‘The Christians are strange, madam,’ the slave said. They were struggling to reach the exits; if they did not leave before the mass of people, then it would be best to stay until the end. But if they had to wait for long, then people at home would start to wonder where they had gone, and there was a sandstorm coming, too. They pushed on, the merchant’s daughter holding tight to the slave’s clothes, just as she had when she was a little girl.

  ‘I would not choose death,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘I would wait very patiently until it came to me.’

  ‘You might not have to wait patiently,’ the slave said, turning her head. ‘None of us knows
the hour of his death.’

  There was a deep thrill in the slave’s voice. The merchant’s daughter had known her all her life. She knew when she was saying something important. She looked at the slave’s eyes. It was a band of face, of wet eyes, of a dark slash of eyebrow, and a tear on the dark cheek. She was crying silently and not very conspicuously.

  ‘If we hurry, we can reach home before the sandstorm strikes,’ the merchant’s daughter said sensibly. The slave agreed, and in a moment they were out of the door.

  2.

  That night, the merchant’s daughter had a dream. In it, she was standing outside a garden, a beautiful garden, with a fountain playing and an orchard of silvery, fruit-bearing trees. The wind from the garden through the gates was exquisitely cool, and bore on it the odours of fruit and flower. (Even after she woke up, she could still smell those lovely odours amid the buffeting roar of the sandstorm. She could not remember dreaming in odours and perfumes before.) Inside the garden was a group of people, of all ages. They called to her, in a language she could not speak but which now she could understand without any effort. But how am I to come into the garden? she asked, because that had been their invitation. She did not speak with words, with her tongue, but they understood her just the same. You should come in, of course, one of them said, and another said, from the other side of the gate, But how do you ever come into a garden? You should think of pushing against the gate. She pushed; it opened, and then she was inside the garden. How had that happened? Why had she thought it was impossible? And now the group of people was running away, gracefully, in fits and starts, some turning their heads and laughing to encourage her to follow them. In the middle of the garden, there was a golden ladder. It was narrow, the ladder; it would take only one person at a time. You have to climb a ladder yourself, she said, feeling at the time that this was an enormous statement of colossal weight. It has to be done on your own. But it is not so hard. There was a joyous burst of feeling as she said to herself, But it is not so hard, a shrugging off of the weight of the world, and with that, the first of the people ran up the ladder – scrambled up it, poured himself up it, like a lizard up a wall. The merchant’s daughter approached the narrow golden ladder. She placed her hand on its side, and it was cool and refreshing to the touch, just for a second before she woke up.