The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  They had reached a pause in the rehearsal. They sat down as best they could. The pyramidal pink dancer balanced awkwardly on the base of her shape; the cuboid dancer simply rested squarely on the ground and withdrew her head into the yellow shape. Others were condemned to roll like barrels, rising from their rest periods dizzier than when they had sat down. The ones who had it easiest were those whose arms and legs, only, were encased in a series of small cubes or spheres. They could sit on their bottoms, like honest men and women. The principal dancers, who embodied single large shapes, whether pink pyramid, yellow cube, green sphere or blue egg, attempted to find a position where their stomachs were not rendered sore and the blistered side was given an easier position.

  They were not proper dancers. Previous productions had relied on professional dancers, but nobody had been able to demonstrate that a professional dancer alone was capable of rising above the demands of his costume. They had the tendency, too, of complaining loudly about the impossibility of the ballet’s requirements. All that was needed, even in the central unfulfilled love duet between the pyramid and the egg shape, was a slow and rhythmic walking about the stage without any falling over. The students who had been selected, and who were now pausing between actions, ought to have been at least as reliable as the professionals who had made such a hash of it in Berlin, two years before.

  The director and the dramaturge had been talking at the back of the room while the dancers held their positions or sat down as best they could. Now the director came to the front of the room, and told them to get into positions for the final trio. Those not involved could remove their costumes, as this would take some time. The dancer who embodied the octagon, whose name was Klaus, got up and began to put on his heavy white costume over his black tights and tunic. There was no need for music as yet – that would come with the dress rehearsal. The principle of the ballet was that there should be no relationship between what was happening on stage and what music was being played, and the dancers had been instructed to remain quite indifferent to any sounds, musical or otherwise, that they should hear from the pit. How should they end at the same time, a little dancer had asked. The musicians in the pit would watch the dancers’ moves, which were formalized and correct, and when the last dancer had reached his last position, the music would finish, even if there was theoretically more to play. It was not more important that music reach a final cadence than that the dancers should. Why, then, have even a dress rehearsal? Well, the director explained, it had been known for dancers to fail in that task of indifference, and begin to place their steps to the rhythm and tempo of what was being played. The dress rehearsal was to make sure that the lack of coincidence was absolute.

  ‘At least the scenery is finished,’ the egg shape murmured, taking the leather straps from his shoulder and delicately lowering the bright-covered frame. ‘That’s something at least.’

  His friend the sphere ran her hands through her red hair; a strand stuck to her forehead with sweat. ‘There was not much to it in the first place,’ she said, stepping gracefully out and pulling her frame to the wings. The backdrop was a red square on a shade of just-grey white; at least, it seemed like a square at first glance, but as you looked at it more, it was clear that two of the sides of the square were slightly different in length, and the shape actually converged. It filled the backdrop; it was curiously disturbing.

  The last exchange of the ballet began. ‘Seventy-nine,’ a deep, masculine voice began from the orchestra pit. ‘Eighty. Eighty-one.’ The pink pyramid was advancing from the back left quadrant of the stage towards the front right, revolving slowly as it moved.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ the director said. ‘Is that three hundred and seventy-nine?’

  They agreed. The pink pyramid walked gracefully forward, one step slowly after another. When it reached the front right of the stage, it revolved one and a half times, and began to walk back across the same diagonal. At the same time as the pyramid’s pause and turn, the yellow cube began to walk from the same starting point at the same speed. They met at the centre of the stage, and both moved to the other’s left, walking around each other in a circle. After circling each other twice, a new shape emerged from the wings – a white octagon, as it was described. The white octagon moved to the centre of the stage, and after the pyramid and yellow cube had circled it twice more, they walked in tandem to the wings and exited, leaving the white octagon at the centre as the apotheosis of geometry. ‘It’s really very much like The Nutcracker,’ the director had said, going on to add that in ballet and in art, rigour was a topic like any other, on which art could discourse but by which it was not necessarily limited. In this ballet, he said, the three of the pyramid and the four of the cube add up to the eight of the octagon. Or the four-sided and the six-sided add up to the – he would not count the number of sides on the octagon-based shape. Klaus, the dancer who embodied the octagon, was a strong fellow, but there was no possibility of his moving in anything resembling a dance. He would just walk to the centre of the stage and wait there until the ballet was finished, the object of all admiring or disgusted gazes from the audience.

  But today the octagon had only just begun its journey to the centre of the stage when the doors to the auditorium were hurled open. It was the designer, Fritz, and his student assistants. The director recognized that one of them, the quietest, was Klee’s son Felix. Fritz, the designer, was shouting for them to stop.

  ‘We can’t stop,’ the director said reasonably. But it was too late. The three dancers on stage had interrupted themselves – they would never remember the point they had reached, and they would need to start again. The dancer who had been the sphere was sitting on a stool by the side of the stage, dabbing her flank where there was a little blood. She raised her head with interest.

  ‘It’s not right,’ Fritz was saying. His associates were behind him, in enthusiastic and menacing postures. ‘It’s not right – it’s –’ he gestured to the stage, its red almost-square and its predominant off-white ‘– it’s sculpture. Now, I’ve seen it in time to change it for the better. I saw yesterday at the theatre, the auditorium is one cube and the stage space another, harmonious and echoing. But not if there is clutter! There must be only a white space on the other side of the lights. We will start painting immediately to obliterate that –’ he gestured contemptuously towards, it must be presumed, the red near-square ‘– clutter.’

  ‘Impossible,’ the director said. ‘Not possible at all. Look – this is the apotheosis, where the octagon appears. We see the white octagon because of the red square!’

  ‘Yes, yes, exactly,’ a girl behind Fritz put in. ‘The apotheosis disappears – it cannot be seen. That is perfect.’

  ‘No,’ the director said. ‘Impossible.’

  ‘We can redesign the costume,’ Fritz said. He thrummed his fingers impatiently on the back of a chair in the stalls. ‘Or make it a different colour.’

  ‘No,’ the dramaturge said. ‘There is no time and the dancer needs his costume now.’

  ‘Do we have a dancer in a black costume?’ a boy with some sort of foreign accent said – perhaps Moravian or Bohemian. ‘We could paint the space black.’

  They thought. Perhaps it was not such a bad idea. ‘The space on the stage is a representation of the darkened space in the auditorium, but not the same space,’ Fritz said, in his oracular way.

  ‘Their legs and arms are in black already,’ the director said cautiously. He spread his hands, helplessly, in a kind of shrug. ‘They would be invisible, or less conspicuous.’

  ‘It will be done,’ Fritz said. ‘Stasia – Egon – you are to go to acquire some black scenery paint, plenty. We will do it immediately and it will be dry by morning.’

  ‘When my dancers are finished,’ the director said. ‘And it must be finished in time for the dress rehearsal. Nothing must be delayed and the performance must start on time. The mayor of Dessau is coming, and almost every one of the Masters. The deputy mayor, I mean, of
course.’

  1.5

  The deputy mayor of Dessau had, these days, a small official car when the mayor could spare it, and it was waiting outside the home of the deputy mayor and his wife. It was an ordinary villa, substantial in size and very comfortable, with solid wood gates and an English rock garden in the front. He had a statue of the Venus de Milo in the middle of the lawn to the back, and a range of interesting ericas in the rock garden. Some people, including his children and indeed his superior the mayor, thought the house old-fashioned, but it did not do to replace perfectly good furniture every five minutes. The children had laughed at the mahogany-framed sofa, and the goddesses holding up cabbages and pineapples that ornamented the structure of the sideboard, and even the well-made dining table with the pedestals representing the West Wind that they had bought in Dresden nearly forty years before. The mayor had said that it would benefit the deputy mayor to understand the future of civilization, by which he meant replace all his furniture.

  The deputy mayor’s wife plucked a fading peony out of the dragon-thick vase on the console table in the lobby – they were white and pink, and it was a pink one she disposed of. Her children would come to like all this, and nobody could say that the thickets of chairlegs and low flimsy tables among which they seemed to want to live were well made, or restful to look on. She thought of the evening ahead of her with dismay.

  The deputy mayor of Dessau was coming down the stairs, in his dinner jacket with his silver-topped cane. As long as they had been married, she had been prompter than him to be ready to leave. She believed that was the secret of a happy marriage, never to keep your man waiting. Her evening wear did not take long to assemble. She wore a simple black silk shift dress with her hair neatly brushed back into a bun, and the gold and enamel brooch that the mayor had bought her after he had been recognized by the Emperor, the aquamarine and diamond pendant that his parents had given her on her wedding day, even though that was perhaps no longer the fashion. She wore a corset underneath, but it was not pulled tightly. After five children, all now grown-up with homes and families of their own, there was not much that could be done to give herself the physical shape of her youth.

  ‘Ready?’ the deputy mayor said, as he always had. He was a good man. ‘You look beautiful. Is Adi waiting with the car? Good, good.’

  ‘It is good of you to agree to come to see these people,’ the deputy mayor’s wife said as they left the house and got into the car. ‘I don’t understand why we have to have them in Dessau.’

  ‘Well, they are here now,’ the deputy mayor said. ‘We voted for it, and the mayor says that it does us a great deal of virtue, to be shaken up like that. And it is true. People from all over the world come to our town now simply to look at it.’

  ‘That building! It is beyond anything. Adi told me that normally he drives in a completely different direction so as not to see it. How can anyone think that buildings should look like that? It has a flat roof! That is not – that is simply Oriental. It will do for Jews, but not for Germans.’

  ‘My dear, we are their guests tonight.’

  ‘The building is bad enough, but it is what goes on inside that so horrifies everyone. You know they were forced to leave Weimar. Free love. Anarchism. Communism. No one was safe in the streets. I do not know why they are in Germany, even.’

  ‘My dear, we need only to go there once a year, and then you and Adi can forget all about it.’

  ‘I had a low enough opinion of them based on their teapots. I can only imagine what their ballet is going to consist of. If we escape without open insult, that will be enough to be grateful for.’

  ‘The Prince is coming tonight,’ the deputy mayor said. ‘Informally, very informally – he likes them. They will behave well enough, I am sure.’

  ‘The Prince is coming? You know the sort of people who control what work they do, behind the scenes?’

  ‘Put your normal, kind, happy face on. Remember that there is nothing in what they may or may not be doing that the wife of the deputy mayor of Dessau needs to notice. The Prince is coming, but you and I, we are the principal guests. Democracy, my dear, democracy.’

  ‘There is a great deal in what Hannes was saying last week,’ the wife of the deputy mayor of Dessau said. Her elder son had paid them a visit, and had stayed for dinner and overnight with his wife and their new baby. ‘What happens in Berlin today will happen in Dessau tomorrow. When Hannes says the time has come to take the threat seriously, how can we endure such people in our midst?’

  ‘It is only a fruit bowl,’ the deputy mayor said, coming back to a previous topic of disagreement between the two of them. ‘They meant well. Silver, too.’

  ‘It was an insult. How could I possibly produce such a thing? That fruit bowl, silver or not, stays in the cupboard in the scullery. A silver bucket. I thought I would produce it when someone who knew about it and valued it came to dinner, afterwards, for dessert. But no. Never, never, never.’

  ‘You must have whoever you want to dinner, in your own house. And here we are,’ the deputy mayor of Dessau said peaceably, as the great white building came into view, curved like an ocean liner and flat on top, its square simple windows and curved railings, its single upper-case vertical stripe of a label saying BAUHAUS, the lawn in front, and a greeting committee of Masters, bold-haired, bow-tied, tweed-suited, came forward with the students behind. From inside, there came the noise of hammers striking, regularly and resonantly, metal and wooden, and a muted cheer. It was as if they were arriving at the monkey house at the zoo, and being greeted by the elder chimpanzees in tails. ‘This is an evening of ballet, something everyone loves. Put on your best face, my dear, and hear nothing offensive. Adi, we are waiting.’

  ‘That man is dressed as a pierrot!’ the deputy mayor’s wife said.

  ‘He must be part of the entertainment,’ the deputy mayor said. ‘Do not worry. We will be home again before you know it.’

  2.1

  In a classroom in Dessau, on the ground floor, overlooking a dark stone square, an art class was beginning. The architects and the school administrators had not considered the matter very deeply when they had placed the art room here. It was dark inside – the birch trees grew thickly outside. There was no interesting view from the window to aid contemplation. It had been chosen because art was given very little importance at the Dessau Gymnasium, and the room had been considered to offer sufficient space for the students, and had the largest cupboard attached. It was understood that the teaching of art required a good deal of storage space, to put both artistic efforts and the means of producing them away at the end of the school day.

  A new master was taking a class of fifteen-year-olds. He was not a permanent member of staff; the pupils understood that he was not a permanent member of staff. He had been hired for six months at most. He was a fresh-faced man, prone to blushing when he had to speak to all of them. They faced the front, blank-faced, their expressions fixed on his in a way that was meant to disconcert.

  ‘Do you have a sheet of paper in front of you? Everyone? Ah – does anyone have a piece of paper that they could lend Rottluff? Pencil? You all have a pencil, a good soft drawing pencil. Yes? Good. Now, I would like you to draw a line on your piece of paper. Yes?’

  A boy had no pencil, and another wanted to know if his hard pencil would do. The junior master went into the stock cupboard, and extracted five soft pencils – he was just about experienced enough to understand that these two requests would be followed by others.

  ‘Now. As I was saying, I would like you to draw a line on your piece of paper.’

  There were now some genuinely puzzled expressions on the faces of the boys. One of them, the dreaded Rottluff, had raised his hand.

  ‘Sir,’ Rottluff said. ‘If I may speak, sir. We do not understand. What sort of line are we to draw?’

  ‘You may draw any kind of line you would like,’ the master said. His name was Herr Vogt.

  ‘A straight line, sir?’


  ‘Any kind of line that you would like to draw,’ Herr Vogt said.

  ‘Please, sir, like this?’ another boy said, holding up his sheet of paper on which a line had been drawn, no more than half the width of his fingernail. His name was Walliser.

  ‘If that is the sort of line you feel like drawing, then that will do,’ Herr Vogt said. ‘Stop! Boys! No – not all of you. Don’t draw a line exactly like the one that Walliser drew. Draw your own line. It doesn’t matter whether it is like anyone else’s line. But it should be a line that you have thought about. Walliser, think about the line, and then draw it.’

  ‘How, sir?’ a boy called Schmidt said. ‘How can we think about a line? A line is just a line.’

  ‘Ah, but is it?’ Herr Vogt said. ‘When does a line begin? If I place a pencil tip on a piece of paper but do not move it, is that a line?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Rottluff said. ‘That would be a point, sir, which occupies no volume.’

  ‘But if the point moves, Rottluff, then what does it become?’

  ‘Sir,’ Walliser said. ‘May I ask a question? Are we to be tested and evaluated on this information and theory at the end of the year, or is this just your own …’ He trailed off. He had not necessarily meant it impertinently, but there was a smothered noise of laughter from the back of the classroom.

  ‘Just draw a line,’ Herr Vogt said. He made an expansive, generous gesture with his arms, a weighing of two imaginary weights at the arms’ end, and gave a tentative smile. He was still blushing; his confidence was not very apparent. ‘Draw a line of any sort in the next ten seconds. Let your pencil move, and demonstrate what it is thinking. Clear? Two, three, four, five …’

  He walked about the classroom, peering over the backs of the boys. They were drawing, most of them, but with an air of faint disgust. Almost all of them had drawn a straight line, a horizontal line in the middle of the paper, going from left to right. Three boys were doing something different: two, a diagonal line from one corner of the paper to another, the third a complicated, winding, sinuous line, which, as Christian watched, made a disappointing sort of doubling back to form a looping letter P – no doubt the initial of the boy, or of the boy’s sweetheart, or something of that sort.