The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Very good,’ Christian said disconsolately. ‘Now, I want you to draw a second line – no, stop, don’t draw the second line immediately, listen to what I have to say – I want you to draw a second line that is completely and utterly unlike the first line. Do you understand? Spend a few moments thinking about it, and then draw it. What are the properties of your first line? That’s quite a good place to start.’

  ‘Sir,’ a boy said, not troubling to put his hand in the air, ‘are we supposed to do this on two sheets of paper or on one?’

  ‘Sir,’ another boy said, this one raising his hand and propping it up with the other, the elbow resting on the left-hand palm, the left elbow resting on the desk. ‘Sir. Can I ask a question? It’s a proper question. What my question is, is this. I’d like to ask – what is it for, what use is it for, this art? Last year it wasn’t like this. We learnt about Michelangelo, and how to do cross-hatching and how to put shadows in. Sir, what are your classes for? If there’s a line then it should look like something. What are these lines going to look like? Sir, I just don’t understand it at all. What do you mean, a line that’s the opposite of the first one? I used to think I was good at art, but now I don’t think I understand at all. It’s not fair, sir.’

  ‘Just do it, please,’ Christian said, sitting down in the naval wooden-backed chair behind the desk at the front of the room. There was an easel there with a board placed on it, and a piece of paper pinned to the board. On the board were the beginnings of a seascape, performed for the benefit of the senior class, before, by one of the other masters. It stood as a reproach. ‘Just think about drawing a second line that is the complete opposite in some way of the first line you drew. Can you do that, please?’

  ‘Sir,’ Rottluff said, not raising his hand. ‘Can I ask a question, please? It’s what Walliser asked. Are we going to be tested on any of this? It’s an important question, sir.’

  ‘No,’ Christian Vogt said, defeated. ‘You are not going to be tested on any of this, at any point in your school careers.’

  Almost as one, the boys in the class drew their own single, simple, derisory line across the paper, and flung their pencils down. The boy at the front, with a military haircut and a blue ink stain on his white collar, turned to his neighbour and gave a contemptuous grin and a shake of the head. He was destined for greatness, in Christian Vogt’s opinion, and this job was only to last for six months.

  2.2

  The boys left in a precise, silent way at the end of the lesson. They did not run off happily, making noise, but in a way intended to impress the masters with their diligence, discipline and silence. They must have known that a six-months art master would not expect or be impressed by military discipline. Christian took off his painting-room smock and, in the little mirror hanging on the wall, put on his soft red tie and his soft blue jacket. The jacket had been sponged and pressed a good many times, he saw; the ghost of a stain was on the right shoulder. The other jacket was in a worse state, and though Adele, when he had shown it to her, had clicked her teeth and said she would sponge and press it today, he felt that they had reached the point where both would have to be taken to the laundress. He left the art room, buttoning his jacket and brushing down the sleeves. For one moment he thought of an existence where you could consider that your jacket was old and tattered, make a joke about it and go and order another from your tailor. He thought of his childhood.

  Outside, the weather was beautiful; a late spring just turning into summer. It filled Christian with dread. The baby was to be born in the middle of August, three months away. It would be born, if the doctors were right, two weeks after his contract with the Gymnasium came to an end. He did not know what he and Adele and the baby were to live on. Adele was clever with money, and could make her sister’s income as a young master feed all three of them. Elsa did not seem to care about money and, indeed, quite happily handed over her wages to Adele, with, almost, an air of relief that that was one responsibility gone. Still, Christian knew himself that it was not his money, and not Adele’s; it was not much, and it was Elsa’s. He did not like the idea of living on the small sum the Bauhaus paid his sister-in-law in the metal workshop.

  In the square, a mother in a neat blue coat and dress held a white-clad toddler by a set of leather reins; together, they were feeding stale bread to the ducks in the pond in the middle of the square, with cries of wonder and delight. Above, in the lime trees shading the pond, a blackbird sang, as if sharing in the cries of wonder and delight. Christian went past the mother and child with a feeling of failure in his own child’s life, even before it had begun. He went on in the direction of the town hall’s spire, poking above the layers of solid, weary housing. The streets were full of houses, people living somehow in comfort and happiness, like his landlady in Weimar and her architect lover Neddermeyer. Was it just a question of being born at the right time, and muddling through somehow, that you ended up happily feeding waste bread to ducks in the afternoon with your happy son on reins in a knitted white cardigan?

  The butcher’s shop he used, the least good of the three in Dessau, was in a side-street. It was the only shop of its type in the street, which otherwise was taken up by junk shops, principally handlers of stolen goods. The street had an abandoned, desperate air, crowded with redundant furniture and gewgaws once thought to hold their value; the cast-aside atmosphere extended to the blood-soaked and dusty butcher’s shop. It was very different from Haffener in the main street, with its gleaming brass rails and its gleaming purple livers and pink shining cuts of veal in the window; the butchers there wore striped blue-and-white aprons which, if not immaculate, were clean on each morning and whose bloodstains were somehow fresh and even wholesome-looking. The butcher in the stolen-goods side-street – you felt that he acquired carcasses through other people’s desperation, taking advantage of need. He had a villainous boy for an assistant, hacking away in the backroom at a purple carcass with an axe. Christian entered. Behind the counter, there was a small amount of inner organs in a pile, amid skin and detritus and old blood. Usually, the shop was empty, but today there was a middle-aged woman dealing with the butcher.

  ‘Those ox hearts were delicious, Herr Lachenmann,’ she said. ‘My husband particularly commended them.’

  ‘Only the very best from my shop for you, madam,’ the butcher said. He was unshaven and red-eyed, a heavy drinker; his hands and fingers were fat, and scarred with blunders. ‘And what can I do for you today?’

  ‘Some nice kidneys,’ the woman said thoughtfully, ‘a brain, and I think another ox heart. We eat what other people’s dogs eat, you see. We will end by eating lungs, I know.’

  ‘Not the worst thing, lungs. And it’s the healthiest food in the world, a brain,’ the butcher said, with a gruesome smile. ‘All that thinking, it stands to reason.’

  There had been something familiar about the woman, and Christian realized, as she shook her head in tight, specific denial, that it was Frau Klee, the painter Klee’s wife. What was there to object to in the idea that brains were healthy? She was eating them, after all – perhaps she wanted to impress the butcher with the idea that they ate brains and hearts for pleasure, not out of virtue. She loaded the weight of meat into her shopping basket, said goodbye to the butcher and smiled at Christian – was it a smile of recognition, or did she greet all strangers in Dessau shops like that? Christian was left with the butcher, whose smile had disappeared. There was a thwack and a cry of pain from the back room. The butcher paid no attention. ‘What can I do for you,’ he said. It was as if having Christian as a customer, with his stained jacket and need of a haircut, was a sign of his having come down in the world.

  ‘Liver,’ Christian said. ‘Enough for two.’ He had never mastered weights, and feared being cheated by butchers wanting to offload stock if he said how many people there really were to eat.

  ‘Got some lovely pigs’ liver,’ the butcher said flatly.

  ‘Very well,’ Christian said in his best Berlin-la
wyer’s-son manner. ‘Pigs’ liver for two it is.’

  ‘Nice romantic meal, is it? Nice romantic meal for two?’ the butcher said, jeering somewhat. But Christian was now wondering how he was going to carry the bloodsoaked parcel home.

  2.3

  ‘It would be more useful in steel,’ the Master said. He was turning Elsa’s teapot over and over in his hands. The light in the metal workshop was beautiful at this time of day: indirect, though the windows were large, and dappled with the shadow of a large elm tree it had not been thought necessary to remove. Inside, the atmosphere could be oppressive and hot, and lit with sparks. But the students had left, and there were only the Master himself and Elsa, looking at Elsa’s silver teapot. ‘There is no need to use ebony for the handle, either, I believe.’

  Elsa flushed with pride. If he were talking about whether you were allowed to use expensive materials like silver and ebony, then he had no objection to Elsa’s teapot as a teapot. The silly old goat – he should have known it would work best with silver and ebony. What was she supposed to make it out of – tin and pinewood? The old Elsa rose up in indignation at the thought of it. She thought of tearing the teapot from the Master’s hands and bashing him over the head with it! That would be what he deserved! Tin and pinewood! But then she breathed ten times, as Father always said she should, and she remembered that he had said nothing against the teapot itself.

  ‘The silver is perfect,’ she said. ‘The shape is so pure that it needs a deeper metal, a softer one, to set it off.’

  ‘Softer, how?’ the Master said. ‘If you wanted a softer metal, perhaps you should have used gold.’

  But that was a sarcastic comment and Elsa paid no attention to it. ‘No, softer on the eye,’ she said. ‘Not softer in the scale of hardness. It is softer to look at. Stainless steel is good, but it would hurt the eye here. Look!’

  She took the teapot from the Master’s hands and tugged him over towards the light. In the direct sunlight, it was so beautiful, so very beautiful. The surface of it shone, but there was something deep about its shine, like the shine of water on a deep lake. The shine of stainless steel was the shine of a wet pavement, not even a puddle. Elsa could not say any of this. The Master had a long-standing contempt for any talk of that kind. ‘Look!’ she said in the end, turning it over and over in the light.

  ‘I know what silver looks like,’ the Master said, taking the teapot back with a short smile. She knew that he liked her really. There had been some difficulty when he had refused her permission to use a sheet of silver for her teapot, the teapot she had woken up one morning seeing in her mind. She had sulked and thought about things, and tried to imagine her teapot in other metals. But it was no good. The teapot that was in her mind was a silver teapot with the curve of an ebony handle, and that was that. There was no discussing with it. It would be like asking a good friend if they would mind having hair of a different colour, and not dyeing it, but growing it out differently. Elsa remembered this thought, and sniggered.

  ‘What is it, Fräulein Winteregger?’ the Master said.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Elsa said. ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing. Look! Look at it, just there!’

  ‘Well,’ the Master said eventually, setting the teapot down on the dark blue velvet cloth he used to inspect all finished pieces, ‘well, I think it is a very good piece of work. The shape is good. It is fresh and pleasant to look at. You may be right – this teapot had to be made in silver. But I am very sorry that you felt you had to go over my head to the director of the Bauhaus to ask for permission to use silver, and very sorry that foolish students are now requesting permission to use silver in their turn. Which, naturally, I am refusing.’

  The silly old goat, Elsa thought indignantly, but then made herself remember how he had managed not to be rude about the teapot. That meant he liked it. He was always rude about everything. And the teapot was wonderful, the best, the very best thing Elsa had ever made and the very best thing she had ever seen. Sometimes she had heard somebody at the Bauhaus say, ‘One day, all plates,’ or jugs or chairs or houses, ‘will look like this one’, ‘this one’ meaning the one they had just made. It was the highest thing you could say at the Bauhaus. But Elsa’s teapot was not like that. One day someone would look at the teapot and say, ‘No teapot ever, ever, ever, in the history of the whole world, has ever looked like that one, and there never, ever, ever will be one that looks like it. This is the only one, ever, ever, ever …’ She hugged herself in joy. The Master, when she opened her eyes, was looking at her strangely. Subdued, she lowered her head and picked up her beautiful teapot to go and place it in her work cupboard.

  It was only ten steps from where they stood in the workshop to Elsa’s work cupboard, but she felt full of electricity, holding the teapot. The shape was half a globe, flat-topped. The handle, inset with ebony, was the curve of a new moon, a slash in the air. It had taken such a long time to get that handle right, with its quality of being a shade too big. Elsa felt surreptitiously underneath the teapot, like the affectionate owner of an animal tickling their pet to see if there was anything wrong with its belly. Underneath, the teapot rested on two crossed sheets of silver, only a thumb’s joint thick, and there she had allowed herself to solder it roughly, not polishing it into smoothness. Everything about it was so nice! Before today, the favourite thing ever that she had made had been the fruit bowl out of hammered copper that she had done last November. That fruit bowl? She was glad she had given it away. This teapot – she put it back in its reverential, cleared-away space on the second shelf – this teapot, she would never let it go.

  ‘And what are you thinking of making next, Fräulein Winteregger?’ the Master said.

  ‘A gold cup, a goblet,’ Elsa said, unable to restrain herself. ‘With chasing and dolphins and perhaps a jewelled inset.’

  ‘Hm,’ the Master said, looking at her with an assessing gaze. Outside, in the sunlit five and six o’clock, the sound of students at play with a bat and ball rose up, and a cry as one of them perhaps fell and lost a point. Elsa was so happy, and all at once the absurd idea for a gold goblet with jewels and a dolphin rose up in her mind. Oh, that would be so nice. A dolphin-like shape. But in gold like the light in the late afternoon, outside.

  2.4

  Christian turned the key in the lock. Adele would be home by now. The apartment was on the fourth floor of the back house, beyond the shabby courtyard in which nothing grew, which the concierge never swept. They had been lucky to find it; its door was not high and heavy and carved, like the doors in the flats below, but merely a solid varnished piece of wood. It was a flat for a widow, or the mother-in-law of a family living in a larger flat in the same building. In this flat lived Christian and Adele, Elsa, too, in the tiny second bedroom that was really a study or a sewing room. In this flat would live the baby when it was born. There was just room for a cradle by the side of the bed, if the wardrobe were moved. When the baby was a little older, they could move to somewhere larger. Christian did not know how.

  There was a noise of women’s laughter from the little salon. Christian went across the hall and opened the door. Adele was sitting in the armchair, and on the sofa by the dining table, a wedding gift from Christian’s father that cramped and shrank the already small room, sat a well-dressed woman and Adele’s father. He, too, was well dressed, with a pair of lemon gloves in his lap and a yellow carnation in his buttonhole; his hair was en brosse and his lugubrious face was shaven, glowing with health.

  Adele looked up as he entered. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Look, Christian! It is my father and Frau Steuer! What a lovely surprise! I was taking a small rest after luncheon, and thinking if I had the energy to walk down all those stairs to carry out some tasks, and then there was a knock at the door. I felt – oh, it is only Christian, home early, forgotten something as usual, and forgotten his keys as he so often does. But I levered myself up, and there were Father and Frau Steuer! And they brought such beautiful cakes, such lovely cakes, I am really ashame
d of myself.’

  ‘Good evening, Herr Vogt,’ Frau Steuer said. They had paid a visit to her after their wedding; she was an old friend of the family and had attended, but it was not to be expected that Christian recalled her in the little crowd of old friends. She lived in a tall, sinuous house in Breitenberg full of gorgeous bibelots. She had hummed with pleasure as she turned the pages of the wedding album they had brought with them. She could barely be forty; today she was very elegantly dressed in a white wool coat with an explosion of white fur at the collar – one of what Adele called her Paris clothes. Christian remembered an old story about her giving Franz Winteregger a nutcracker in an attempt to woo him. She had succeeded in her aim at any rate, once Elsa and Adele were both out of the way. She and Franz were to marry before Christmas, when Adele and the baby were able to travel.

  ‘What a pleasant surprise,’ Christian said. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Well, Franz and I, we thought we would be migratory birds for once,’ Frau Steuer said. ‘We were planning a short trip for after the wedding, and I merely said one evening that it was a shame we could not take advantage of the weather. And before I knew it, the workshop was closed, the hotels reserved, and Gunther informed us that he would be driving us about for ten days. My fiancé is so thoughtful and impetuous! And it would be a good opportunity to see Adele before Baby arrives. And Christian and Elsa too,’ Frau Steuer continued, in an afterthought.