The Emperor Waltz

Katharina was not an artist. She was a waitress in a restaurant, a good one, in the centre of Weimar. Fritz had met her a year or more ago; his people had taken him there to feed him, to make sure he had at least one hot meal inside him. Katharina had served their table. She had lowered her eyes respectfully, handing about the roast potatoes and pouring the gravy, one hand held in the small of her back. For the next days Fritz had hung about at the back, by the kitchen, waiting for her to emerge, like a stage-door johnny behind a theatre. She did not pretend, she said, to understand the sort of things they got up to at her Fritz’s Bauhaus. But she liked to listen to Mazdaznan proverbs. Sometimes he made one up, too impossible to be true.

‘No,’ Fritz said. ‘It was the one about the tortoise and the artist and his scientific principles.’

‘I wondered why you were mentioning a tortoise. I’ve never heard that one.’

Fritz repeated it, raising his arm solemnly. He finished. He lowered his hand. He scratched his bare chest thoughtfully. ‘That’s only what Itten says of his own initiative.’

‘Is she still there?’

Fritz moved to the window. Elsa Winteregger was in the middle of the square, but alone now; she seemed to be hugging herself and chanting. Fritz reached into his trouser pocket for his cigarettes, but they were in the cigarette case on the table, with the four other objects; he reached into his shirt pocket for his matches, but he had no shirt on, as well as being barefoot. He did not know where the matches could be at all. A small snore escaped Katharina; she loved to sleep, and her question now went unanswered.

At present Frau Mauthner was moving about downstairs. Her normal departure from the house was no later than nine o’clock. It was now nearly ten to ten, and the sound of her movements had a stealthy, suspicious air. It was not at all unlikely that Frau Mauthner knew perfectly well that Katharina was in Fritz’s room, as she had been for four of the last ten nights. She could have found this out in many ways, although the most likely was that her maid Sophie had told her. Fritz had been obliged to take Sophie into his confidence after an encounter on the stairs in the morning. Frau Mauthner was moving about directly below, in the dining room she barely used; she seemed to be changing the position of some furniture, but so slowly. Fritz was sure she was moving about and listening, establishing her evidence for some future confrontation. He shifted his attention from Frau Mauthner’s stealthy tread to the five objects on the table. They had been there for weeks now.

These objects were for Fritz’s non-representative found-object sculpture. It was a task in class. He had found five objects, with the intention of using four, but he could not decide which to leave out. There was the long, thin blade of a saw, slightly rusting along its flat edge, like the hackles of a cornered fox. This was a fierce object. There was a square of steel wool, pocketed from Frau Mauthner’s kitchen when no one was looking. This was a Protestant object. There was a very old piece of black bread, now curling up at the edges slightly. This object, Fritz could not decide what it represented. Some days it was a nursery object, some days it was funereal, like the feast at a crow’s wake. There was a block of cedarwood, the size of two clenched fists together, and that was a virtuous object, but virtuous in an admirable way, not virtuous in a way you felt lectured at by it. And there was a piece of beautiful red glass, lovely vivid red glass, changing the world as you looked through it, making it warm and strange. The piece of red glass was the fall of Austria-Hungary. He had found it on the street. Where it had come from, and what its original purpose was, Fritz did not know and could not guess. Why it was the fall of Austria-Hungary Fritz did not understand. But it had presented itself to him in the way that a woman might introduce herself and say, ‘I am an only child’, and you thought, Yes, you are, indeed you are. The piece of red glass looked like a pane from a piece of church stained glass, but that was impossible. It had once occurred to Fritz that it might be a discarded fragment of another student’s non-representative found-object sculpture. He did not like to think of that.

They would not go together, no matter which of the five he omitted. Now he moved over to the table and picked up the piece of red glass. The other four things – the bread, the cedarwood block, the saw, the steel wool – he moved about in an undecided way. Now the bread sat upon the cedarwood, which was coiled about by the flexible saw – but the bread looked stupid, and what to do with the steel wool? It had an undecided, irrelevant air. He started again, resting the saw on the bread and the steel wool at either end. They could be made to stand upright. But what to do with the cedarwood? The same as the other things, and that was no good. It had been growing in Fritz for some time that he had made a terrible mistake when he first chose the objects of his sculpture. He had concentrated entirely on contrasts in texture – the luminous smoothness of the glass, the rusty saw, the fibrous wood, the knitted piece of steel wool, and the miniature honeycomb of the bread – and forgotten altogether about the shapes. He had thought that some kind of arabesque could be made out of the saw to counteract the prevailing squareness of the other three, or four. But the squareness seemed to dominate and to bring everything down, even the lovely piece of red glass. He could change all his objects and start again. But he had been contemplating these objects for weeks now. As Itten had instructed, he had penetrated the essence of these five objects by long observation. But he had come to understand through observation that they did not like each other and did not live in the same world.

In a dejected way, Fritz raised the piece of square red glass to his eye, closed the other, and prepared to see the world through Austria-Hungary and its fall.

At first it was merely red. There was nothing distinct about the entities in the room. But then the forms began to emerge. There were square forms, and lines, darker and blacker than the air. The air had a flexible form that would take up the space allotted to it by the solid forms. When the world was seen, red, through the eyes of Austria-Hungary, the eye was drawn to the naked body of Katharina, lying face down on the bed.

But the eye was not drawn to a naked body when it looked through a red filter. It did not look at her bottom and rounded shoulders, the tress of hair falling across her face-down head. What it looked at were pleasing curves and lines: a convex and a concave arch, and then another, longer, deeper, arch. There was no lechery, or love, or any sentimentalizing psychological structure.

‘Stop staring at me,’ Katharina said. ‘Stop it. It makes me shiver.’

He took no notice of what It had said. The lines and volumes had weight, and movement, and an innate direction and energy, but they did not have sound or speech. It was a fascinating phenomenon to find in the room he had rented from Frau Mauthner. He looked for a second above the form at the line drawings, if that is what they are when viewed through a red square. They had retreated into the insignificant, along with the smells, the sounds of the room, and the bad metallic taste in his mouth that came from a broken tooth he could not afford to have removed. He lowered the red square from his eye. The hierarchies disappeared. Without the help of Austria-Hungary, Katharina was Katharina again. Her hair was blonde and her body was rumpled and warm and delicious, a bread smell in the morning, and she was sleepy and open and a little disgruntled. He made an effort, without the red filter. The lines started to re-emerge; the arc; the concave form; you did not have to see the animal confusion that filled them.

Fritz stood up. He dropped the square of red glass onto the floor; it fell harmlessly on his white shirt, where he had left it when he had undressed the night before. He went to the oil lamp, and quickly removed the glass form that protected the lit flame from wind and draught. It was straight, circular from above, and towards the bottom bulged out like a brandy glass. It contained air in a form. With steady concentrated fury, he took the glass; inside it he fastened the thin saw, with a dab of glue, which would be good enough for the moment; he made a spiral. Working quickly, he tore apart the square of steel wool until it looked like wild morning hair, and attached it to the end of the saw. The piece of black bread remained where it was, at the end of the piece. The cedarwood would stand behind, supporting it. Anyone could see what a sentry it was. In fifteen minutes the piece was done. Fritz walked back, critically. He picked up the piece of red glass from the shirt where he had dropped it. He raised it to his eye. It was no longer Austria-Hungary. It was just a red filter. On the other side of the filter, the room had changed. It now had two important sets of curves, lines and volumes in it. There was the Form on the bed. There was a new Form. It filled the room.

‘You have been busy,’ Katharina said admiringly. ‘All that grunting and pulling and sticking things together. I don’t know why you can’t do things in a normal way like normal people. Now I want to go and have something to eat.’

‘You’re so …’ Fritz said. He wanted to tell her how she was. But language would not stretch to it.

‘I know,’ Katharina said, putting an immense weight on the word. She was so pleased to be so … ‘I want sausage, burnt, and cold cabbage, and mustard with it, and a whole basin of cold potato salad, a huge whole basin. I am so hungry I could eat what the wolves brought back. Is the old cow gone out yet?’

‘“When China speaks with one voice,”’ Fritz said, in a lust-thickened voice, ‘“then the ear of Europe rings.”’

‘You and your Mazdaznan,’ Katharina said.

10.

That afternoon, Christian took his portfolio out and his charcoals, newly bought with a single gold piece from Grandfather’s hoard. A true student of art would not wait until the first day of instruction before starting.

He had rarely drawn in public before, and even more rarely set out on his own like this, and never in a strange town. Three or four times, the art master at the Gymnasium had announced that they would be going out for this purpose. The eight senior pupils would follow the master onto the overground train, behaving in a subdued way. There was nothing Bohemian about the art class.

Christian thought, too, that their generation was a subdued one. He had been twelve when the war broke out, and at fourteen it sat heavily on their minds. There seemed to be no future, nothing worth studying for, except a short adult life of a few grey days commanding troops on the eastern front, running at the end towards a bank of guns. It was important to put one’s life’s energies into the duties of school and labour, when the eastern front awaited.

During these trips, Christian would place himself before a masterpiece in the art gallery. He liked a landscape; he admired Philips Wouwerman, and he liked the simple arabesque, the invented backgrounds behind the Italian madonnas. How could you tell that those simple valleys with a river curving through them had been invented, whereas Wouwerman had really sat and really observed? From time to time, he raised his pencil and closed one eye; he measured the distance of each part of the landscape, and set it down on his own sheet of paper, making amends as the master made his round, commenting and correcting. Sometimes a lady or a gentleman, visiting the art gallery on a quiet weekday morning, would pause behind him, and observe what he was doing; sometimes they would know what they were looking at, and pass on without comment; sometimes a bundled and smelly individual, dripping from clothes and nose, would express extravagant admiration, call Christian or one of his classmates ‘a little Raphael’. The art gallery was still quiet and warm, in 1916, in January; every class of person came there, sometimes in the love of art and sometimes in refuge from the first Berlin winter of war.

After one of these class outings, it came to Christian that artists did not only proceed by copying famous works of art, warmly in the gallery. He had developed a passion for Menzel, whose painting of clouds of steam in a factory had made him stand and stare. His mother had stood with him in front of a beach scene by the Frenchman Monet, and she had shown him that Monet had painted it on the spot. How can you know that, Mamma? Painters may sketch the composition with charcoal and pencil on the spot, but they have studios to produce the finished work. Look, Mamma had said. Look, you can see if you get close – we are going to be reprimanded, so let us be quick – look, some grains of sand, there, in the paint. And there it is, Mamma said. He did it all there on the beach, because there are lots of things that you can’t set down with charcoal and pencil.

And there it was. They suffered from boredom so terribly then, in the war, in 1916 and 1917; life could not be constructed so entirely of dread and hectoring. Mamma was so thin and pretty, with warm red hair; sometimes, when he was small, and he had been very good, she would let him pull out any white hairs that he could find. He could find only a very few. Perhaps one at a time. He would pull it out, and she would wince, and say thank you, and then she would finish getting dressed.

He was forgetting now what Mamma looked like. The photographs did not get her quite right. The drawing he had made of her did not get her right, either – she had died when he was still not a good artist, did not get things right. He could summon her, just about, by thinking of Dolphus’s nose, and trying to add some thick dark eyebrows, which were like his own in the mirror, and then some dark blue eyes, almost purple. The labour of keeping his mother’s last-days’ face from his memory was hard, too. But then, after some time of holding it in his thoughts, the real face would leap out, effortlessly, in full health, as she had been any morning at the breakfast table, a white silk hat shading her tender and shy expression, and he would wonder that he struggled to think what she had looked like.

There had been outings, after the Monet moment, to draw in the open air. Dolphus had come, to be company. But Christian was shy about his art, and he did not want to be seen drawing in public. There were quiet corners of parks, but they had a tendency to yield large and vulgar families from Pankow on a day’s outing. The country was too far. The street was interesting, but you could not set up in the middle of the pavement in Friedrichstrasse. Dolphus was easy and tractable; he came not just because he enjoyed the outing, but because sometimes the artist needs a figure to add to a scene, and the figure needs to be observed at length. Dolphus rarely minded being told to stand by a tree, or to crouch over a stream. Christian’s drawings were often of an unspecific male figure, leaning against a tree, or crouching as if holding a home-made fishing rod over a tree. They looked like bucolic scenes, but that was only because Christian had grown shy, and the details of the scene had been sketchy, since they could be done later. Mamma had been kind, and had even had one framed for her dressing room, where it still hung, dusted and cared for by Egon, like all her possessions. But anyone could have seen that it was, in reality, a corner of the Zoological Garden, yards from where carriages and motors, unrecorded by Christian, stood in steaming queues.

In Weimar, without Dolphus to wait for him patiently and perform a useful task, there was too much burden of expectation. He had produced only three or four rapid and embarrassed sketches when the time came to return to Frau Scherbatsky’s house. The market was emptying now; the stall-holders were calling to each other, and packing up what remained of their stock in boxes, pallets, packing with straw, berating their boys for getting under the feet. In the window of the coffee house two men sat, one with an amused, superior face, one with a clever, screwed-up expression. Towards Christian, a group came: five soldiers, or former soldiers, in uniform. One was in a bath chair, although it was not possible to see how he was injured. It needed only one comrade to push the bath chair, but all four of the standing soldiers had some kind of hold on it and were walking together. Two held a handle each, one was placing a blanket over the knees of the invalid and fussing, and the last, unable to find a particular task, was demonstratively letting a hand trail at the back of the chair, as if claiming territory. They were all young; perhaps no more than three or four years older than Christian. As they passed, he saw that on their arms was a band, and on the band was some sort of motif. They had the picturesque appearance of veterans, the five of them, crumpled, sincere and careworn.

11.

‘Did you see that?’ Kandinsky said. ‘Klee, did you see that? That group of soldiers, there, with the wheeling chair in the middle?’

They had just sat down in a coffee house. Kandinsky liked to sit in the window where he could see life. Klee did not object. Sometimes he looked inside the coffee house, sometimes he looked outside. In the back of the coffee house, although it was daylight, the yellow lights were on in the card room, in an acknowledgement of the usual evening time for gambling. That did not interest Klee. His gaze disconcerted people. He gave the impression of recognizing strangers, of knowing exactly what a friend had been doing before the meeting, of looking levelly at a waiter and sharing a silent joke with him, without the requirement of comment. Kandinsky was used to it, and used, too, to Klee speaking only when he had something to say.

The group moved away, past a boy with blond, very short hair, holding an artist’s portfolio – probably a student, although neither of them knew him. They dissolved into the late-afternoon sauntering of Weimar.

‘The old brigade,’ Kandinsky said. ‘They are everywhere. The war was never lost, those responsible should be shot, the Kaiser should return.’

‘They had a line,’ Klee said. ‘You could make a picture out of them, a picture of old, old black crows on a bench in a park in Lucerne. Or of five kittens in a basket. Are they young, or are they old? The last one, in the chair, they were saying goodbye to him. Or they were just born and discovering the way that they could live together. The one in the chair, they were welcoming him to life.’

The waitress had been standing there, not ignored by Klee, exactly, but nearly included in his comment. At some point, she lowered her notebook and pencil; at some point, she stopped waiting for him to finish speaking so she could take their order, and began to listen with curiosity and interest. Her apron was clean, but much washed and greying; her white pie-crust collar was torn at the side and had been mended in a hurry; there were things about her that were coming apart, and she looked tired and hungry. When Klee finished, she stood there, her pencil and notebook lowered, in pensive silence. The two gentleman were not different in size, but one seemed to be tall and thin, the other short and square – the talkative one and the one who had spoken. The one who seemed to be short and square stopped talking. He had a measured, tuneful Swiss voice, and his silence, too, was measured, tuneful and Swiss. Then he looked at her, with a sympathetic amusement – the half-smile of someone who knows that you will find the same thing funny, and then you will laugh at it together. She came to. All her aches and concerns returned to her face in a moment.

‘Two coffees, only,’ Kandinsky said.

‘Yes,’ the waitress said. ‘That will be two hundred thousand marks today. Or what else do you have to pay with?’

‘With money. Is that two hundred thousand each?’ Kandinsky said. ‘I see. Thank you. Have they gone, those soldiers?’

He had addressed himself to Klee, but Klee stayed silent, and the waitress had lingered. ‘The colonel?’ she said. ‘You mean the colonel?’

‘The colonel?’ Kandinsky said, puzzled. But the waitress had slipped away and was saying something to an upright man of middle age, an elaborate moustache, the red streaming eyes of the alcoholic and a Bavarian coat. He was sitting with a plump woman in a white fur-trimmed coat; her hair was newly marcelled, with a fringe in the centre over her face like the tassels of a shawl. He stood up after the word from the waitress, leaving the woman and the two glasses of schnapps on the table. His right leg was amputated, and his stump rested on a wooden leg – it was the cheap sort, where the leather was padded with horsehair – and a neatly folded handkerchief.

‘I was not told there would be two of you,’ the colonel, if that was who it was, said. A little gust of sour smells came from him: of old schnapps on the breath, of ancient clothes, not washed, of some kind of brutal disinfectant liquid, not intended in the first instance for personal application. ‘May I sit down?’

‘By all means,’ Kandinsky said. ‘But I think there is some mistake. We were not here to meet anyone.’

‘I was waiting,’ the colonel said. He bared his teeth in an attempt at warmth; his teeth were brown and broken. ‘I was waiting for a business associate.’

‘Who was to ask for the colonel, I quite understand.’

‘It is all the same,’ the colonel said and, without waiting further, pulled out a chair. He nodded, sharply, not quite saluting. He might have brought his heel together with the end of his wooden leg, but the gesture would have lacked assurance. With a swivelling movement, he sat down on the sideways chair. ‘My business associate is late,’ he said. ‘He may not come. Things have been difficult, gentlemen, you understand.’

‘Things are difficult for everyone,’ Kandinsky said, sharply, but with a tinge of resignation. This happened in coffee houses. It was their own fault for being apologetic.

‘Difficult, yes, difficult,’ the colonel said, emphasizing the roll of the word. ‘I lost my leg in battle. Twenty-five years or more I was in the cavalry of His Majesty. And then there was no His Majesty, and no cavalry, as far as I know. And my leg lies in the mud at Verdun. I gave thanks for the escape then, but now I wish they had made an end of me at Verdun, and I would not have seen what I have seen.’

‘Why,’ Klee said. ‘What have you seen.’

He asked it in a plain way, but the colonel turned on him. ‘What have I seen? I have seen the politicians call back the army before they could win. And they dismissed His Majesty. And they declared that we had lost the war, and would not listen to disagreement. We did not lose. We were not defeated by the enemy. We were stabbed in the back. Gentlemen,’ and his harsh voice turned in on itself, remembering that he was there for a purpose, that his voice should be soft and agreeable, ‘gentlemen, I don’t know if you are interested in a very interesting business proposition, but I have property to sell, a very interesting and well-made volume of clothing. I don’t know if you have any means to sell it among your circle, shirts, beautifully made white cotton shirts, and boots, as solid as anyone could desire, truly excellent, and body-linen, stockings, anything you could require, and very reasonable, I know how the cost of things is going, Lord knows how we all know that …’

At the other table, the colonel’s companion raised her glass of schnapps to her lips, shaking slightly. She was tranquil, much powdered, patient and bemused. She had spent so many afternoons at this table, sipping a schnapps while the colonel made his appeal to strangers and contacts. The colonel’s patriotism ran down like a half-wound clockwork engine; the colonel’s offer to sell army property took over. Kandinsky and Klee said nothing. The two cups of coffee arrived. The colonel looked at them. He fell silent. His eyes rested on the table; it might have been shame. Abruptly he pushed the chair backwards, and got to his feet with diagonal thrusts and jabs.