The Emperor Waltz

‘Fifty million marks would be a help to me, in the position in which I find myself,’ he said. His red eyes brimmed. He must have seen that Klee and Kandinsky were looking at him intently, in different ways, but both with nothing more than interest, not sympathy or encouragement.

‘Good day to you,’ Kandinsky said.

‘I am sorry,’ the man finished, with a touch of parade-ground sarcasm, ‘to have disturbed you, gentlemen, in your important discussions.’

They watched him go. He sat down heavily in his chair, three tables away. His companion raised her eyes slowly, as if pulling them up with great effort. The movement continued: she raised her eyebrows in question. He gave a brief, decisive shake of the head, only a degree or two, dismissing the possibility. They both took up their glasses, clinked them, and took a sip. And in a moment, as if Klee and Kandinsky had been the bad luck that the colonel needed to expunge, a quite ordinary-looking man, no more than twenty-seven, in an ordinary black overcoat and a bowler hat, slid without invitation into the third chair at the colonel’s table and started to talk.

‘“To one of the nation’s heroes,”’ Klee said, repeating the words neutrally. And the man must have been desperate to accept money, to be unable to barter his possessions for anything else. Klee liked to repeat phrases, trying them out. A week or a month or a year later, Kandinsky knew he would enter Klee’s studio to ask what he had been achieving lately, and he would be handed a drawing, led up to a painting on an easel, of a giant figure, smudged with oil transfer lines, and underneath would be written ‘To one of the nation’s heroes’, and a neat, cryptic entry in Klee’s numbering system, 1922/109.

‘And two more cups of coffee,’ Klee said to the waitress, arriving with a pen.

‘That will be five hundred thousand marks,’ the waitress said.

‘No, four hundred thousand,’ Kandinsky said. ‘You said two hundred thousand each, for the cups of coffee.’

‘It was four hundred thousand when you ordered the first two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. ‘The new price for two cups of coffee is five hundred thousand.’

‘No, no, how can that be,’ Klee said. ‘Two hundred thousand is monstrous already – how can that be the price of a cup of coffee, even here, even in expensive Weimar – but five hundred thousand, half a million for two, how can the price change in an hour, how can that be?’

‘The price now, at seventeen minutes past four o’clock, is five hundred thousand marks for two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. Her enchantment with Klee had disappeared. ‘If we continue this discussion for long enough, the price of two cups of coffee will be six hundred thousand marks. It is entirely up to you, gentlemen.’

Outside the coffee house, the soldiers were assembling. The group they had seen before had reappeared. There seemed to be a protest or march in the making. They laid their hands protectively on the handles as if the touch would make sense of everything. About their arms, each had a cloth armband, not part of their uniform originally. On it was some kind of device or symbol, a red shape of some kind. By the door of the coffee house, the colonel, leaning on his crutch, shook the hand of the businessman, full of smiles. The colonel’s lady stood five paces off, looking at the soldiers, swaying confusedly to and fro.

12.

Christian had discovered a short-cut through the park to Frau Scherbatsky’s house, after the baroque sandstone bridge across the stream. He was ridiculously pleased with this insight, and came to the door of the house where he lived with a proud feeling of starting to belong in the town. The doorbell was not immediately responded to; he had to ring again before Maria, the red-haired maid, answered. She looked at him as if his face had not registered; she had a confused and perhaps even an embarrassed expression, but she stood back and let him through, with his portfolio of drawings.

There was no one else to be seen, but when he was in his room, and taking the drawings of marketplace, ducal palace, standing figures and park out of the portfolio, Christian was startled by some noise in the quiet house. It was a muffled shriek; then the sound of a woman giggling; then a shriek again, and soon, from only two or three rooms away in the house, transmitted by pipe and panelling, Christian realized that he was listening to the sounds of Frau Scherbatsky in bed with someone, in the afternoon. He did not want to listen, but there seemed no way of not listening. Her shrieks and downward glissandos of joy grew, and then they were joined by a man’s noises: a grunt and a few murmured words of encouragement, though it was not possible to understand what was said. Christian went to the window, and opened it, trying to concentrate on the sounds of the park. But the noises grew and were joined by the sound of wooden furniture banging against the wall. Christian felt himself beginning to blush. He had never heard such a thing in his family circle. He was a virgin himself, if that shameful and dishonourable visit to the brothel with two schoolfriends in the last Easter at the Gymnasium were not counted. Now a phrase was heard more clearly, spoken by a man. The window of the other room must be open, too, and by opening his window, he had allowed himself to hear more clearly. The student lodger had gone out, and Frau Scherbatsky and Herr Neddermeyer had taken advantage. The phrase he had heard, whatever it was, had been spoken in a strong Leipzig accent. The maid must have known that he would hear the noises she was used to, and understood that he had breached the unspoken conditions of lodging.

Christian became worldly and calm. ‘I say!’ he remarked, in an undertone to the empty room. ‘What beasts! Good for Neddermeyer – I hope I still have it in me when I am as old as that! And the Scherbatsky! Fine woman – and a woman has needs that an architect-lodger can fulfil. A well-known fact.’ He was practising for an anecdote. But who he would tell the anecdote to, he did not know. With a large sigh and a bestial sound, the encounter seemed to come to an end. Christian realized that they were in what must be Neddermeyer’s room, not Frau Scherbatsky’s, which was on the other side, next door to his room. And in the meantime, an awkwardness was arising: he would need to visit the lavatory quite soon, to cross the landing to the shared bathroom. To leave the room now would risk meeting Frau Scherbatsky in dressing gown, négligé or similar intimate apparel, making her dishevelled way back to her room to prepare her appearance for supper. He looked under the bed, but this was a modern house and there was no pot. He waited.

There was the sound of a door being opened, of footsteps, the unsynchronized clatter of footsole against slipper. The sound went past Christian’s door; the door of Frau Scherbatsky’s door was opened and closed. He breathed out. He must keep quiet in his movements. Frau Scherbatsky and Herr Neddermeyer had only permitted themselves this licence because they believed that Christian – and, presumably, still, the tantalizing Herr Wolff – were not in the house.

He opened the door silently and, shoeless, walked across to the bathroom. The modern flush of the lavatory made a noise, and when Christian stepped out of the bathroom, he saw, to his horror, that Herr Neddermeyer’s door was now standing open – it had been opened in the previous minute. ‘Herr Vogt?’ Neddermeyer’s voice called. ‘Is that you? Do come in.’

Christian stood in the door of Neddermeyer’s room, twisting his hands about, one in the other. The room was attractive and immaculate. The bed was made, under a white counterpane. On the walls were views of Roman and other classical ruins; in the bow window stood a substantial octagonal table in mahogany with a central supporting pillar. The table bore a thick pile of papers, weighed down at four corners by a bronze Japanese fisherman, a millefiori paperweight, a grotesquely shaped stone, mounted in silver, and a bust of Brahms in alabaster. On the table, too, were an architect’s drawing tools of pencil and compasses, squares and protractors, in an open walnut case lined with worn black leather. Neddermeyer gestured towards one of the two armchairs in yellow velvet. Unexpectedly, his appearance gave no indication of the rumpus he had just been through: he was groomed and of normal colour, his clothes not suggesting that they had been flung to the floor and picked up some time afterwards. There was nothing of the debauch about him, or about his room.

‘Welcome to my home – my lair, one could say,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I can offer you some coffee – nothing elaborate, nothing extensive, but I do insist on having coffee-making as a possibility in my room.’

‘That is very kind,’ Christian said.

‘I cannot always be calling on Maria to bring me cups from the kitchen,’ Neddermeyer said, going over and opening a small cupboard and beginning to fiddle with its contents. ‘My one remaining vice. So, Herr Vogt, I saw you venturing out this afternoon with your sketchbook. You found some subjects worthy of your pencil? Good, good. I am sure that the Bauhaus will chase the love of beauty out of you very quickly, and replace it with a love of steel and sharp corners. I saw a soup plate that one of them had made. It was square. The absurdity!’

‘Why so, Herr Neddermeyer?’

‘They had not considered,’ Neddermeyer said, ‘that a square has angles and a circle has none. A maidservant, presenting a soup plate, presents it at the eye level of her master. The master’s attention is drawn to something on his right; he turns sharply. The plate is a square one, however, as designed by the bright fellows at the Bauhaus, and the eye is thrust against a sharp corner of a hard material. The master, who has bought a daring novelty and flatters himself that he has an original eye, has, from now on, exactly that: an original eye. Only one.’ Neddermeyer tittered in a genteel, practised, taut way.

Neddermeyer was talking amiably, swivelling and smiling from his post at the coffee cupboard, and now he turned and brought over the cups of coffee. They were tiny, gold and green, with a small medallion of flowers painted on the side. Despite the smile, Neddermeyer’s voice had been growing tense, and he was not looking, exactly, at Christian as he handed it over. He placed his own on the small table by the other armchair, and removed a spotted red handkerchief from the inside pocket of his Bavarian jacket. He wiped his hands clean.

‘I think Frau Scherbatsky said you are an architect?’ Christian said. The coffee, despite coming from a small cupboard, was delicious, with no taint of chicory or acorn.

‘I was an architect,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I do not think I will ever build again.’

‘Do you have drawings of your work?’ Christian said. ‘I would so like to see them.’

Neddermeyer did not exactly brighten, but he grew businesslike, as if he had been expecting Christian to say exactly that. Perhaps he had called Christian in for this exact purpose, to show his drawings. Christian reflected that after the pleasures which Neddermeyer and Frau Scherbatsky had indulged in, the ego was never satisfied; it was at that point, the day after his schoolfriends had visited a brothel, that they were most apt to show classmates their best marks, the most flattering comments made on their work by masters, or, at the very least, to treat the fellows at a coffee shop, pulling out their marks with a profligate air. Neddermeyer wanted someone to see what a marvellous fellow he was.

‘I do indeed,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Perhaps you noticed my drawings over there, on the table. There are some photographs, too, of some projects that came to life. A very civil young man, before the war, came to see me and spent six months visiting what I had designed and built, and wrote a very flattering article about my work in an architectural review. After that article, I had letters from architects in America, even. Of course, that was in 1905. People are not interested now.’

‘Did you always build in Weimar?’

‘Weimar and surroundings,’ Neddermeyer said carelessly, waving his hand at the window as if to suggest that he might have built all of it. ‘I could have gone to America. Interest in my work was very high there, as I said. But as I told my apprentices, my thinking, such as it is, was formed in an age where people climbed to the top floor if that was where they wanted to go. I was too old to change, to think how a tower of thirty floors could be ornamented. A mistake, no doubt. Now. Where were we.’

Neddermeyer stood, and walked over in a vague, uncommitted way to the table, as if hardly engaged.

‘Well, here they are!’ he said. ‘There is no purpose, really, in continuing to work, but the imagination continues to thrive. Sometimes I am playing at the pianoforte and I will be seized with an idea, quite a new idea, for a suspended balcony at the front of a royal palace, or for some rolling bookshelves to simplify storage and display in a library. Now, this is an idea I had for a triumphal arch …’

Neddermeyer’s fantasy work was neatly drawn, exquisitely finished, ornamented and made human with decorative touches of trees and figures. They were a credit to the tools in the open walnut case. He began to turn over the sheets, lovingly, murmuring words of explanation, like an ambassador introducing great dignitaries. Here was an idea he had for a state library; for a permanent circus on the classical model; for an English cottage; for a nobleman’s country house, refined and yet rustic; an idea for the Emperor’s military barracks; a new cathedral for Berlin (‘I was so disappointed, Herr Vogt, with the one His Majesty built, until I did not see why I should not put my own thoughts on paper’); a monument to the dead of the war; a bridge over a country stream and the same bridge, on a larger scale, bearing the traffic of the town; and a royal palace, eighty windows long on its front façade. Christian turned the sheets one after another. The plans were rich in ornament and fantasy; they specialized in pendentives and arches, in caryatids and classical columns, in portes-cochères heavy with mythological figures, in windows leaning out far over the street like orchards, in stucco ornament in their interiors and stone ornament on their exteriors. They specialized in the heavy imagination of the old Emperor, and Christian turned the pages with fascinated absorption. The moment for gargoyles, he thought, looking at the design for the Berlin cathedral, was gone.

‘You see, Herr Vogt,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘What architecture needs is imagination, and variety. The eye craves richness, and finds ornament restful. Now, for one of your teachers at the Bauhaus, a new cathedral in Weimar would be a simple matter.’ Neddermeyer was pulling a sketchbook towards him, a spiral-bound orange book, and now leant over the table to pluck a pencil from its place. ‘It would look just like –’ he began to draw ‘– you see, just like – ah, yes, that is that problem solved. You see?’

He turned the sketchbook around for Christian to see. On the page, he had drawn nothing more than a rectangle, then filled it in roughly with a grid. He took it back, and drew a line underneath it and, with a couple of scribbles, placed some stick figures on the ground. ‘You see, Herr Vogt, I remember there was a great scandal in Vienna when the leader of the school built something opposite the Emperor’s house. The Emperor had not been consulted, and when he saw the building, he said, “Who has built that house with no eyebrows, just there?” A very ugly building, still, and a gross insult to the Emperor. That is the sort of place you are going to, Herr Vogt. I am sorry for you.’

‘Your buildings are very interesting, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘I look forward to talking with you a great deal more. But I am hoping to become an artist, not an architect.’

Neddermeyer was now as flushed and excited as Christian had expected to find him. ‘You see, I lost everything,’ he said. ‘It all went – family and business and home and everything.’

‘I am sorry,’ Christian said formally. He wondered whether now was the time to offer to show Neddermeyer the drawings he had done that morning. He decided that now was not the time. ‘Thank you so much for the coffee, Herr Neddermeyer.’

‘I believe that Herr Wolff will be joining us for dinner,’ Neddermeyer said wretchedly. ‘So the topic for tonight will be politics.’

‘I look forward to that, too,’ Christian said, letting himself out with what he felt was an expert smile, like a doctor leaving a patient in pain, a patient midway through a fit of raving.

13.

Before supper, Christian wrote a letter to his brother Dolphus.

It is not very much like being a student of art in the opera, living at Frau Scherbatsky’s house. I do not think I could bring mistresses with tuberculosis to die in the attic – like in La Bohème. (No attic, too.) It is a large, dull, ugly villa, built not ten years ago by a local architect. He also lives here, the architect, so it is important to compliment the beauty of the house, the convenience of the rooms, and so on, very regularly. I thought at first he was living here as a lodger, because he had fallen on hard times after the war. Actually, he has formed a connection with Frau Scherbatsky. They keep up appearances, but their connection is an intimate one. There is another lodger, a man named Wolff, who has been away, but who I have seen since starting this letter, walking in the garden smoking a cigar. I can only describe him from what I have seen – a small, well-built man, with very short grey hair, carrying a cane and wearing plus-fours. He appears alert and fit – he was whacking the side of his legs with his cane as he walked, quite vigorously. He may be younger than my landlady and her architect friend. He was accosted by Neddermeyer, as the architect of the house is called, who came out to exchange some friendly words with him, but he responded briefly and continued walking briskly from one side of the lawn to the other. Neddermeyer tried to keep up with him, but after a while he gave up and sat down on the bench under the oak tree, limiting himself to saying something when Wolff happened to pass him directly. He seemed to be taking exercise, or perhaps pacing because he had something to think through – you know how Papa does. What do they think of me? They deplore all students of the Bauhaus, I believe, but have not come out into the open on the subject. Luckily, because I can hardly defend it as yet. I have met only one student, a woman who introduced herself to me in the street, who I cannot believe is typical, and I have seen another, a man, through an open window. But I have already been shouted at by a stranger, an inhabitant of Weimar, who disapproved of art students indiscriminately, even of a polite fellow like your brother. (That is why I was spoken to by the woman student who introduced herself in the street – she was defending me. I think I may need a good deal of defending.)

Give my love to Papa and my best to the fellows. If there is anything in this letter which you would like to share with them, then you have my permission. I do hope you will come very soon to visit your brother – I have a good-sized room, and you would be very welcome to rough it for three or four days, and I can show you what an art student’s life is like. Do steer clear of wild company – do not drink or play cards or stay out late, now that you have no guide in life. And take care that Papa makes conversation at dinner. He is growing silent as he grows older. That is not good. The weather here is excellent and set to continue fine.

Your loving brother

C. S. T. Vogt.

And then Christian ornamented the remaining blank half-page of his writing paper by drawing a picture with his fountain pen, which he knew Dolphus would enjoy: an Alpine landscape with a path in the foreground, and two gentlemanly snails with Alpine hats on, one smoking a pipe, rising up and greeting each other with a little bow. When he got to the second one, the idea of getting it to remove its hat politely with one of the stalks it had on its head occurred to him. It was hard to draw, but satisfying. He finished it off with a few Alpine bouquets at the foot, put the letter into an envelope, sealed it and addressed it. The gong for supper was sounding softly downstairs.

‘There were Communist protesters, however,’ the man who must be Wolff was saying, as Christian came into the dining room and took his seat with a brief apology. ‘Or Spartacists. I do not know the exact colour of the beast. They were a small but violent group, throwing bottles. We did not respond – a brother in the movement had his head split open, blood running down his face, but still we did not respond, Frau Scherbatsky. We made our point, and we were very much applauded by the ordinary people of Erfurt. Do you know Erfurt, Herr Neddermeyer? A fine town, I believe.’

‘Herr Wolff, I do not think,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, ‘that you have met our new guest, Herr Vogt.’

‘How do you do?’ Wolff said, unsmiling and closing his eyes as he turned to Christian and nodded. ‘You are most welcome.’

‘Herr Vogt is the son of one of my husband’s oldest friends – no, not his son, but the son of a business associate of that most old friend,’ Frau Scherbatsky said.

Wolff nodded in acknowledgement, again turning to Christian but closing his eyes as he did so. He had something shining in his lapel, something attached. It seemed to Christian that all the discussions about his being a student at the Bauhaus had been gone over and expurgated before he had arrived. There had been something wary, alert and savage about Wolff’s demeanour when he had entered the room, like one dog when introduced to another. Christian resolved to be polite and warm.

‘I was passing the time in the train with the fellows,’ Wolff said, ‘counting the number of places we have assembled at this year. Do you know, we have already had twenty meetings and demonstrations, and this only September? Last year, we mounted only twelve, the whole length of the year. We have really already been the length and breadth of the kingdom.’

‘Which town has the best food in Germany, would you say, Herr Wolff, from your exhaustive travels?’ Frau Scherbatsky said.

‘My dear lady,’ Wolff said, beaming, ‘I can hardly say – you know, we are so busy from the moment we arrive to the moment we depart, sometimes running from missiles. We were not always so very popular in the first days. Meeting, arranging, discussing, making speeches. We often have to settle for something simple to eat. Only very occasionally do the local group leaders arrange for the principal speakers to dine. I cannot say that the food was uppermost in my mind.’

‘I always think the best food in Germany is in Bavaria,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Those knuckles! Those white sausages! The fried veal slices!’

‘And the most beautiful towns,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘And the country, of course. There can be no doubt about that. Surely you found time to raise your head and admire the beauty of a town in the course of your travels, Herr Wolff?’

Maria came in with soup bowls on a small trolley with dragon’s head ornamentation, setting the soup down before the four of them. As she set one down before Frau Scherbatsky, she caught Christian’s eye. He did not lower his: he engaged her gaze as she murmured in her mistress’s ear. She made her way round the table, taking the bowls from the trolley, and he watched her, boldly. She reached him, placed a bowl in front of him, and lowered her face to murmur in his ear as she offered him a basket of bread. There was an attractive smell of sweat and of clean skin under soap, mixing with the soup’s sour odours. He had thought she was going to share a moment’s comment with him, but she said only, ‘Liver dumpling soup’, raised her head, gave the table a single, surveying glance, and removed herself with the empty trolley.

‘You get good numbers in Bavaria,’ Wolff said. ‘When we were just beginning, in the months after the war, we were sometimes only ten or a dozen, and greeted with savage violence. You recall, Frau Scherbatsky – ah, no, it was before I was living here, it was when I was at Fräulein Schlink’s, before she took exception to me—’