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COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Philip Hensher 2014
Philip Hensher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007459575
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007459582
Version: 2016-08-19
PRAISE
From the reviews for The Emperor Waltz:
‘A cause for celebration . . . The five more or less discrete narratives conduct a mutual running commentary, multiplying dynamics, bridging millennia and resulting in a novel that’s almost fizzy to the touch . . . There is a remarkable fullness to the book’s invention. The effect is above all immersive . . . A performance of extraordinary fair and majesty from a writer who seems capable of anything’
Leo Robson, Guardian
‘A glittering performance. Adventurously, it interweaves a series of unrelated stories into a gorgeous amalgam of literary, musical and philosophical ideas . . . Strands converge to form an immensely satisfying whole . . . The author’s exuberant humour and affection for language resonate throughout . . . The Emperor Waltz has the depth and pleasurable density of a 19th-century fiction; I loved it’
Ian Thomson, Evening Standard
‘Complicated and important . . . masterful handling of character and narrative . . . Beautiful because Hensher has an incredible eye for the things that make moments special . . . he might have the iconoclastic temperament of a Kandinsky, but he is an old master when he glimpses the cat asleep under the table or the curve of a woman’s neck . . . Hensher’s multidimensional picture of Europe [is] an insistent reminder of a past that, however picturesque, can only be turned away from’
Melissa Katsoulis, The Times
‘As joyful as its musical source . . . The Emperor Waltz is a beautiful book, both profound and funny. It is a powerful invocation to live a life of joy, surrounded by true friends’
Elena Seymenlinska, Daily Telegraph
‘Ambitious and extraordinary . . . A generous, courageous fire-work of a novel – a Roman candle, alive and fizzing in the hand’
Olivia Laing, New Statesman
‘Funny, ingeniously observed and humming with revolutionary ideas . . . [The novel] probe[s] what it means to be committed to a cause that at once binds and isolates, testing love and faith. Along the way there are incidental characters whose vivacity rivals those conjured up by Dickens, and vignettes in which to delight’
Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail
‘The Emperor Waltz is historical fiction stripped of its more blatant identifers, and is the better for it. The Bauhaus sections in particular are astonishing . . . Hensher writes about his characters with real affection . . . His writing is as wonderful as ever’
Jon Day, Financial Times
‘Hensher in full, uninhibited fight . . . managing to emerge with the punter whole-heartedly on his side . . . Every so often there is a descriptive passage to take your breath away . . . sentence by bejewelled sentence’
D. J. Taylor, Literary Review
‘Hensher’s writing reads like a Vermeer painting: his attention to detail is transfxing’
Vogue
‘Splendidly thought out and extraordinarily readable’
A. S. Byatt
‘Hensher’s most ambitious novel to date . . . his sense of fun bounces off the pages of a novel that is always a joy to read . . . As an entertaining and absorbing exploration of what binds us together as human beings, The Emperor Waltz is just that kind of book. Read it and allow yourself to become a better person’
Matt Cain, Independent
‘The Emperor Waltz is rich and captivating, dizzy with memorable characters’
Ben Hamilton, Spectator
‘Hensher is an ambitious novelist who always bravely sets himself new challenges . . . He has a wonderful sense of place and an eye for the memorable and unexpected detail. He handles big scenes very well . . . He is a novelist who makes many demands on the reader, but the chief and most rewarding of these demands is that you should share in his own evident delight in what he has created’
Allan Massie, Scotsman
‘Hensher is particularly well suited to his book’s roving ensemble form – he has the ability to stage-manage dozens of characters across many years, he’s fluent with dialogue, and he can jump into a scene at full stride’
Sam Sacks, Prospect
‘His self-assurance and brio invests The Emperor Waltz with quasi-Victorian breadth and length, and with stylish authority. I was seduced into complete trust and abandoned myself to it completely . . . The Emperor Waltz again displays his sharp and original sensitivity, and, with remarkable boldness and ambition, evokes heroism, joy and martyrdom’
Caroline Jackson, The Tablet
DEDICATION
For Thomas Adès
An E-flat sonata movement
standing at an augmented fourth to the universe.
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
PRAISE
DEDICATION
BOOK 1
1922
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
BOOK 2
1979
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
BOOK 3
NEXT YEAR
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
BOOK 4
1979
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
BOOK 5
1922 (AND A LITTLE BEFORE)
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
BOOK 6
AD 203
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
BOOK 7
LAST MONTH
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
BOOK 8
1983–1998
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
BOOK 9
1927
CHAPTER 1.1
CHAPTER 1.2
CHAPTER 1.3
CHAPTER 1.4
CHAPTER 1.5
CHAPTER 2.1
CHAPTER 2.2
CHAPTER 2.3
CHAPTER 2.4
CHAPTER 2.5
CHAPTER 3.1
CHAPTER 3.2
CHAPTER 3.3
CHAPTER 3.4
CHAPTER 3.5
CHAPTER 4.1
CHAPTER 5.1
CHAPTER 5.2
CHAPTER 5.3
CHAPTER 5.4
EPILOGUE
2014/1933
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
FINAL NOTE
KEEP READING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY PHILIP HENSHER
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
BOOK 1
1.
‘You will have brought your own towels and bedlinen,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, in her lowered, attractive, half-humming voice, ‘as I instructed, as I suggested, Herr Vogt, in my telegram. Other things I can supply, should you not have them for the moment. Soap, should you wish to wash yourself before tea, of which we shall partake in the drawing room in half an hour. Should you wish for hot water, Maria will supply you with some, if you ask her, on this occasion, since you have just arrived and had a tiring journey. I know all about trains, their effects on the traveller.’
She turned, smiling graciously, making a generous but unspecific wave of the hand.
‘Shaving soap,’ she carried on, continuing across the hall, ‘I can stretch to. My husband and boys, my two boys, were killed in the war, and I have their things, their possessions and bathroom necessities, which I have no undue sentimental attachment to, if you do not feel ghoulish at the prospect of shaving with the soap of a dead man, or three dead men, rather. It is better in these days that things should be used, and not preserved. We have all lost too much to retain the conventions of our fathers. Don’t you agree, Herr Vogt?’
‘That is very kind of you,’ the young man said. ‘But I only need soap to wash after my journey, thank you so much.’ He had the appearance of someone who needed to shave once weekly, and perhaps had not started to shave at all. Too young to have known the war at first hand, blond and fresh-faced, his eyes wide open, eager to please, slight and alert. He walked behind Frau Scherbatsky, across the hallway to the heavy wooden stairs of her Weimar villa, dark-panelled and velvet-trimmed, like the interior of a ransacked jewel-box. His stance was lopsided and ungainly; his suitcase, a borrowed old paternal one, leather and scarred with journey-labels torn off, was full and heavy. He was here for three months at least.
‘It was my husband’s house,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, proceeding in her mole-coloured tea-gown with a neat black apron over the top. ‘He thought of it for many years, considering how many coat hooks should be placed in the downstairs cloakroom. “Your house is perfect, Frau Scherbatsky,” Herr Architect Neddermeyer said. Everything so well considered – and reconsidered – you know. Do you know Goethe’s house in the marketplace? No? You must go. Goethe’s study, surrounded by a corridor and an anteroom, so that he could hear the servants coming and not be unduly disturbed. And we have just the same arrangement here. Herr Neddermeyer’s bedroom, now. Necessity called, on both of us, let us say. The house –’ she continued up the stairs, stately, walking, turning at the half-landing, but not looking at Vogt exactly, giving a general smile in the direction of the English stained glass of an angel with a lily, illuminating the stairwell with sanctity ‘– the house was finished and built by my husband to his exact specifications in 1912, and we had three most happy years here. Two years and seven months. This is your room. I hope you like it. It has a view over the park, as you see. You cannot quite see the Gartenhaus of Goethe – that is only from the corner bedroom. In current circumstances, I cannot specify the exact rent from month to month, but I will not take advantage of you, Herr Vogt, I can promise you that. And I think you said you were a student of art?’
‘I am just about to start my studies,’ Christian Vogt said, setting his case down. ‘I begin on Monday, in three days’ time.’
‘And you allowed yourself three days to settle in, most wise,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Those long train journeys are immeasurably exhausting. You would wish to do yourself justice. If I could only ask that, should you decide to paint in your room, you place on the floor, and especially over this rug, some newspaper. You are a painter, I hope – I do hope those are a painter’s sensitive fingers. Just remember, Herr Vogt, the newspaper over floor and rug. That would be so kind. And no models, please, no models, that I must ask you. And …’
Frau Scherbatsky looked at him with one eyebrow cocked. Christian did not at once know what she meant. But then he recalled the agreement that his father and she had reached about the payment for the accommodation, and took the old gold watch of Great-grandfather from his waistcoat pocket. He handed it over. Frau Scherbatsky, almost unnoticeably, ran her thumb and forefinger along the gold chain and bar. She placed it safely, and with due carefulness, in her apron. That would cover the costs for the three months (at least) and then they could enter into more negotiations, his father and Frau Scherbatsky. ‘But does the room suit you?’ she said.
‘It’s charming, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian Vogt said, not wanting to commit himself in speech to being a painter, or anything in particular, just yet. Something of her stately, half-generous manner had got into his way of talking. The room was plain, but well lit, through the diamond-leaded windows the light from the north, illuminated warmly by the last of the summer greenery in garden and park. On the bed was a practical counterpane of woollen stars in primary colours, knitted together; two stained oak wardrobes built into the wall; a dark green English pattern of wallpaper and, over the bed, a small oil copy of The Isle of the Dead, almost expertly done.
‘And here is Maria, with some hot water,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. The maid came in; she poured her pewter pitcher of hot water into the washbowl with minute attention, her hand trembling slightly in the steam with the weight. Her face was freckled; her uncovered hair was gingery, smoothed back in a practical bun. Maria, watched benevolently by Frau Scherbatsky, finished pouring. She transferred the pitcher from one hand to the other and, with a curious gesture, drew the back of her right hand across her smooth hair. The maid caught Christian Vogt’s eye; she gave a cryptic, inward smile with the movement of her hand across the gloss of her ginger hair. ‘We will see you downstairs in half an hour, Herr Vogt,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Welcome to Weimar.’ And they withdrew, Maria closing the door behind her, not turning as she went.
As the door shut, Christian Vogt was made aware of the sound of birdsong, close at hand, in either parkland or garden, in Frau Scherbatsky’s bereaved garden or Weimar’s long, quiet landscapes. It was a blackbird, and if he closed his eyes, he could see the bird’s open yellow bill and shining black eye, the angle of its neck as it sat in a tree and sang to the empty air in pleasure.
‘I am an artist,’ Christian said, experimentally, to the empty room.
2.
He had been an artist since the eleventh of May that year. Christian Vogt lived with his father and brother in a second-floor apartment in Charlottenburg, in Berlin. White plaster dragons and Atlases held up the entrance to their block, a polished dark oak door in between, and Frau Miller, the concierge, behind her door with a series of notes explaining her absence or place, to be put up with drawing pins according to need. The apartment was serviced and kept going by their cook, Martha, and Alfred, the manservant. Since their mother had died, the spring before, Herr Vogt had decided that it was not necessary to keep a maid as well, that Alfred was quite capable – Christian could remember Alfred’s departure for the war, years before. He had been a big boy, limber and grinning. When he returned from the army, he still had a sort of smile on his face, but a skinny, bony, pulled-apart one. His father had offered him his old job back. ‘I could do nothing else,’ he said, and let the maid go a few weeks later without complaining. There was no way of doing without the cook, however. When Christian’s mother had still been alive, there had been a succession of varied dishes, and complaints if the food, even in the depths of war, had sunk into monotony and repetition. His mother had made things so much nicer. Now there was more food to be had in the markets, but the cook had settled into a routine, and plain grilled lamb chops alternated with veal – sometimes flounder, and sometimes even horse, done plainly. Nobody seemed to notice.
Egon would drive the motor, if it were needed, but it was rarely needed. There were large changes in the household since his mother’s death in the epidemic, the year before. One of the smaller changes, which had also gone unattended, was that Christian’s future was no longer a matter of concern. Among the large and heavy furniture, Christian and his brother Dolphus went, wearing the clothes they had had for two years, filling the time as best they could between meals. His father went to the office, or he stayed at home, working in his study. Dolphus went to school under his own steam. Christian, who had finished at the Gymnasium in the springtime, spent his days quietly and without much sense that anything was expected of him.
His days were matters of outings and explorations, running outwards from U-Bahn stop or tram-route. It was in the course of one of these explorations that, under a railway arch in Friedrichstrasse, far from home, he saw a poster advertising a new school for the arts in Weimar. It had opened the year before. Students were sought. The look of the poster appealed to him: the letters without eyebrows, shouting in a new sort of way. They might have been speaking to him.
Christian had always liked to paint and to draw. When he was younger, he had been able to lie on his bed and imagine the paintings he would produce: of a girl stretched at full length in a bare tree, a greyhound looking up into the branches, forlorn and spiky with his nude mistress. A sun rising over an alp, but a matter of geometry, not sublimity, the mountains rendered as a series of overlapping triangles. A face in a forest, no more than that, the dim chiaroscuro of the rippling foliage absorbing the cloak of the man, the woman, the ambiguous figure. You could paint a picture that was nothing much but a line and a square and another line and a rainbow – people in Russia had done that: he had seen it in the magazines an art master had shown them. A portrait of his family, the four faces, then the three, floating in the darkness of the apartment. Sometimes he thought them through as far as conceiving of a medium. It could change abruptly: sometimes an oil four-part portrait could suddenly decide to become a polished wooden relief with the word ‘UNTERGANG’ carved in tendril-like letters – no, in modern brash American newspaper-headline letters, much better. He would lie like that, conceiving his works of art. Sometimes he would get up and, with charcoal on the rough paper he had saved up for and kept in a stack under his bed, he would attempt to draw what he had thought of. He had learnt some things in art classes at the Gymnasium, but art there did not matter, was only brought to their attention because gentlemen needed to be acquainted with the collectible, needed to be warned of what artists in Russia were laying waste to. He learnt most at home, on his own. Nobody except Dolphus had ever seen anything he had done, except the drawings he had produced, stiffly and awkwardly and without merit, in the drawing classes at school. Those had been praised by the master and by his classmates. Christian did not know how you would show anyone you knew the drawings of an imagined nude woman in a tree, or explain what you had meant by it. Christian had been intended to be a lawyer. Nothing had been mentioned about any of that since his mother had died. Sometimes Christian wondered whether all arrangements had been made by his father without consulting him.
The poster in Friedrichstrasse, under the dank, sopping railway bridge, struck Christian like a recruiting poster. Around him, the dry-rot smell of Berlin crowds rose, as the short, dark, cross Berliners pushed their way about him, banging him with their bags and possessions. An older woman, like one of his father’s elder sisters, raised a lorgnon and inspected him: a thin, blond boy, his head almost shaven as if after an illness, wearing a soft, loose-fitting suit of an indeterminate brown, like the suits of English cloth the young had worn before the war. The poster said that makers of the new were invited to Weimar, where everything would alter, there, for the better. It was the eleventh of May. In the boulevards, the lime trees that gave them their names were opening, showing their fresh leaves, perfuming the wide way. The weather in Berlin was, at last, beginning to improve, to soften, to give out some warmth to the cold ornament of the city.
3.
That evening, his father’s sister from the town of Brandenburg came to dinner. She was a twice-yearly visitor who turned up in the city to make sure of her affairs, which her brother handled, and in the last year, to ensure that her brother and nephews were continuing to live in a respectable way at home, despite her sister-in-law’s death from influenza. She was a small, beady woman, full of news of Brandenburg life. Her brother had moved away from Brandenburg thirty-five years before, to the opportunities offered by a university education, a long apprenticeship, a marriage in middle age, children and a solid apartment in Charlottenburg.
‘And Herr Dietmahler sold his house in the Kleiststrasse to his cousin Horst Dietmahler, the younger brother of his father the corn-merchant, his son, whose wife had twins last year. His business is suffering and he no longer needed a house on that scale,’ Aunt Luise continued. The ivory-handled spoon, from the set that came out for guests, rose and fell from the grey potato soup. Occasionally her small hand, beaded with black rings and a triple jet bracelet, reached out and tore at the bread rolls. Between mouthfuls, she spoke in a tired, mechanical way of her town. ‘There was a Frenchman who came to visit last week, who stayed with the Enzelmanns in Magdeburgerstrasse, you remember the beautiful house, the big beautiful house that the Enzelmanns always had, the Frenchman came after writing, he wanted to look at some furniture that Grandfather Enzelmann had brought back from Paris in the 1870 war, you remember, Cousin Ludwig, the beautiful chair and the commode and the looking-glass with the stork and the swan in gold in the drawing room, and the Frenchman came to inspect it, and pretended to admire it before he said it had been stolen from his family. And Minna von Tunzel …’
Kind-hearted Dolphus in his sailor suit stared and listened, wide-eyed. He felt sorry for her, he had told Christian on her last visit: two sons killed in the war, both on the same day, or perhaps one day after the other, thousands of miles apart, and the telegrams making their separate way to Brandenburg, and Uncle Joachim dead of an apoplexy six months later. But Christian could remember how Aunt Luise had been before the war, and her two big, cruel sons too, and perspiring fat Uncle Joachim. His father was nodding decorously as Aunt Luise reached Minna von Tunzel’s parlourmaid’s baby, giving a signal to Alfred to bring in the whiting, in a circle with their tails in their mouths in a grey sauce, as they always were when a guest came. Christian was thinking about the decision he had made that morning, in Friedrichstrasse.
‘Father,’ he said, when the fish had been taken away and Aunt Luise was fumbling in her reticule for a handkerchief. ‘We must talk about what I am to do.’
‘What you are to do, dear boy?’ his father said. He had had a long afternoon with Luise, trying to explain what had happened to her investments and her bonds. He never looked forward to her visits, and this had been a very trying one. ‘Is this an important conversation?’
‘Father, I’ve decided what I want to do after school,’ Christian said, summoning his courage.
‘I thought all that was decided,’ Aunt Luise said nastily, placing her knife and fork on the plate, inspecting, pulling the fork back a tenth of a point so that they would be exactly next to each other. ‘I thought the elder was to be a lawyer and the younger an engineer. The elder boy to study in Nuremberg; the younger to take himself off to London, where the best engineering schools are.’
‘I don’t want to be a lawyer, Father,’ Christian said, not addressing Aunt Luise. To his surprise, there was something like a grey smile in his father’s eyes, something between the two of them. His father did not often engage him with a look: he found it easier to look somewhere else, as if not paying attention. He wondered whether his father had been waiting for him to start this conversation for the last year. ‘I want to go to an art school in Weimar. I would be a very good artist, I know it. It’s all I want to do.’
‘Want to do?’ his father said. ‘I never wanted to be a lawyer, either, but I did, and I was very glad of it in the end.’
‘Karin Burgerlicher’s second-youngest boy—’ Aunt Luise began.
‘You can always paint in your spare time, on Sundays and on holidays, in the Alps,’ his father said. ‘Lawyers often do. But I never heard of an artist who drew up wills and contracts on Sundays and holidays. You could never be any sort of lawyer, you know, if you went to an art school. Wittenberg, you said?’
‘Weimar,’ Christian muttered.
‘Ah, Weimar, a beautiful town also,’ his father said, in a full, satisfied tone. The fish had been taken away, and now, the sour beef was brought in. They sat in silence. Aunt Luise was pretending to be occupied with something in her lap, with handkerchief and pill box. Dolphus gazed at his brother in undisguised wonder. It was not clear to Christian whether his father had reached some conclusion, or whether he now thought that everyone agreed that Christian’s future was as it had always been, had never needed discussion, that the discussion was now over.
‘Father,’ Christian said, when the beef was served and Alfred had left the room.
‘Well, I don’t see why not,’ his father said. ‘The world is changing so much. And if it all fails, you can at least become a town clerk or something of that kind. Or start again. Nothing much would be lost, by your year at an art school. I suppose that your brother Dolphus can still go to London, to become an engineer.’
‘Brother,’ Aunt Luise said in wonderment, dropping her fork in the beef. It was the first time Christian had ever heard his father say anything worth wondering at, the first time he had surprised anyone other than by remaining silent when he might speak. His choice of wife had been the daughter of a judge; his choice of dwelling had been between two other lawyers; his choice of children might have remained as it had been – the elder a lawyer, the younger an engineer. Christian was not surprised that his sister, even though she had known him from the nursery, stared and gasped, and in protest dropped her fork in her sour beef.
‘Thank you, Father,’ Christian said. ‘I would be a very bad lawyer, I know it. And I can be a very good artist.’ He wanted to say that he could be a great artist. But at his father’s dinner table, with greyish well-ironed and patched linen, the greying velvet drapes, the Moritz von Schwind Alpine landscape, the encrusted silver candlesticks on the table and the hissing curlicue of the gas jets on the wall, the words did not come out.
‘One thing I must insist on,’ his father said. ‘There are to be no models lounging about the place of any sort. Now, Luise. Let me help you to what passes for spinach these days.’
Aunt Luise began to tell them about what had happened to Karin Burgerlicher’s younger brother in Rome in the 1890s.
4.
In Weimar, Christian came downstairs from his room, not changed from the Norfolk jacket he had travelled in, but washed and refreshed. He stood for a moment in the hallway with the illuminated light falling through the stairway, then entered the room with the door slightly ajar. In there was a man standing at the window, looking out at the parkland. His head was severe in expression, with large, round glasses, and his hair cut in an abrupt round manner that had nothing to do with the shape of his cranium, as if a bowl had been placed on his head before the scissors had been run about. The room was light and comfortable, with a pair of sofas and an upholstered window-seat where the man stood, and some chairs about the table where tea sat. A number of wasps were buzzing about the room.
‘Good afternoon,’ the man said, in a strong Leipzig accent. ‘You must be our new arrival.’
‘How do you do?’ Christian said, and introduced himself.
‘I am Franz Neddermeyer,’ the man said. ‘Also a guest of Frau Scherbatsky. How do you find your room?’
‘Very nice,’ Christian said. ‘I am from Berlin.’
‘I did not ask you that, although I am pleased to know it,’ Herr Neddermeyer said. ‘This is my house, and also Frau Scherbatsky’s house, although we are not connected through marriage or otherwise and only one of us owns it. How do you make that out?’
‘I think Frau Scherbatsky told me that you are the architect of the house,’ Christian said. ‘Although both the owner and the tenant of a house could talk about it being their house, so that is also a possibility.’
‘Ah,’ Neddermeyer said. He seemed disappointed at the failure of his conundrum. He walked away from the window, where he had left a book lying face down on the window-seat, and about the room, running his finger over the piano keyboard, covered with a crocheted shawl, the top of a bookcase, the wooden back of one of the sofas. As he came up to the chairs at the tea table, he minutely but decisively shifted one a couple of degrees; stepped back; inspected the change; shifted it back again. Christian thought of Aunt Luise as he looked at the middle-aged man – no, the old man: his skin was crêpy and drawn in a diagonal underneath his chin.
‘I had always lived in the house my father built,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘He, too, was an architect, here in Weimar. How do you come to know Frau Scherbatsky?’
‘I do not know her,’ Christian said. ‘My father is a lawyer, and he made enquiries about lodgings in Weimar from a professional associate here, and the professional associate came back with Frau Scherbatsky as a suggestion. His name was Anhalt.’
‘Ah, Lawyer Anhalt,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘His recommendation – well, he is a friend of old of our “landlady”.’ The word was rendered in a comic tone, as if he was amused by the idea that anyone would offer Frau Scherbatsky money to sleep in a part of her property. ‘Would you care for some tea? I don’t know what has happened to Frau Scherbatsky. Herr Wolff, the other guest here, is on business of some sort in Erfurt today, I know.’
This seemed to put an end to Neddermeyer’s curiosity about Christian’s life, and while he was busying himself with the tea, Christian went about the room. On the bookshelf was a small porcelain or perhaps enamel model of an exotic vegetable, an aubergine. Christian picked it up, and just as he did so, a wasp came buzzing at him. He raised one hand to flap it away, and somehow tipped the aubergine to one side. The stalk and cap of the aubergine actually formed the lid of what it was, a jar, and as Christian tipped it sideways, it fell to the polished wooden flooring and broke. Neddermeyer looked up from the teapot.
‘Oh dear,’ he said.
Christian was crimson – he looked at Neddermeyer with horror. ‘I didn’t realize—’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize it had a lid. I just turned it to one side.’
‘Well, that is unfortunate,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Let me see.’ He put the teapot down and came over. Without its stalk and cap, the aubergine hardly looked like an aubergine any longer, just a bulbous purple vase. It, clearly, would not do. ‘That really is unfortunate.’
Neddermeyer was, in fact, rather enjoying this humiliation. ‘Please help me, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘It can’t be the first thing I do when I arrive in poor Frau Scherbatsky’s house, start smashing her things about.’
‘No,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Although, you must admit, it is the thing which you have started by doing.’ He picked up the lid from the floor. ‘It is really not as bad as all that. A very clean break. And here is our hostess.’
Frau Scherbatsky came in, smiling. ‘I hope you have not been waiting – the tea must be quite cold. I had to finish a letter to my daughter in Dresden. Now—’
‘Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian began.
‘A terrible thing has happened,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I was brushing past the bookcase when my sleeve unfortunately caught your very ugly jar here; it fell; the lid has smashed. But there is good news! It is not so badly broken. It can be mended and riveted very easily.’
‘Oh dear,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Is it so very ugly? I never really thought of it. I don’t suppose it is even any use in the marketplace – no one would barter anything for it, I am certain. By all means, take it and mend it if it salves your conscience, Herr Neddermeyer.’
Christian, full of silent gratitude for the saving of the situation, tried to engage Neddermeyer’s eye, but he quizzically raised an eyebrow without looking in more than Christian’s general direction. ‘Here is some orange cake,’ he said, sitting down. ‘My favourite.’
The orange cake was dry, perhaps a day or two past its best, and flavoured artificially rather than with peel and juice. Christian took a bite just as Frau Scherbatsky said, ‘You are here to study, Herr Vogt, you were saying?’ He could not for the moment speak: his mouth was full of dry cake and his eyes, at once, began to fill with tears of shame at his vandalism. Instead of going on talking – she had asked only for the benefit of Neddermeyer – Frau Scherbatsky waited with a courteous half-smile as Christian took a great gulp of tea to wash it down. He felt like a brutal animal invited to tea with two clever, immaculate dolls, and to finish off the toy-like impression of beauty of Frau Scherbatsky’s house, he now saw, as he prepared to speak, that the teapot from which she had poured was ingeniously shaped in the form of a cauliflower, and the teacup from which he was about to drink was a circle of cauliflower leaves. He swallowed, shook his head.
‘You are a student of what, Herr Vogt?’ Neddermeyer said.
‘I am about to begin the study of art,’ Christian said.
‘Ah, excellent,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘An art historian. That is excellent. At the university here?’
‘No, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘I am studying to become an artist.’
‘At my old school, then,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Is it still in existence? I came here myself to study there, here in Weimar, when I was no more than nineteen, and I have never left. Thirty-eight years ago this autumn. We architecture students had little to do with the fellows on the painting and drawing side. I expect things are just the same now – one half thinks the other flibbertigibbets, and the other thinks them dull, money-grubbing fellows. Artists never change.’
‘You put it so well, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘But is the art school that you are thinking of still in existence, Herr Neddermeyer, even?’
‘I am enrolled at the Bauhaus,’ Christian said. ‘It is only just opening now.’
‘The Bauhaus,’ Neddermeyer said. There was a perceptible chilling; he set down his tea and tipped his head back slightly, inspecting Christian over the top of his glasses. ‘The Bauhaus.’
Christian had the distinct impression that Neddermeyer was now about to change his mind about his previous brotherliness and to tell their landlady that, after all, it had been Christian who had smashed the aubergine pot.
‘I know the Bauhaus,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘There is wild talk in the town, both about them and, I must say, by them. When you are as old as I am, you have seen plenty of young men who hope to change the world by shocking their elders. And as time goes on, the shock fades away – the shock and the desire to shock. You hope only to make things as well as your ancestors made them. That may prove difficult enough. The Bauhaus. Well. They wish to make things new, I believe, and turn our lives upside down; to ask us to sit on tetrahedrons, and to live in houses made of glass, like tomatoes. I have seen plenty of wild young men, wanting to change the world by shocking their elders. I may have been one of them myself, once upon a time.’
Christian inspected the cauliflower teapot; the inglenook fireplace; the padded window-seat. He did not object.
‘Young people will not like the same things as old people,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, smiling. ‘You must admit that if no new opinions ever came along we should be living in the houses of Augustus the Strong.’
‘I don’t think anyone wants to shock,’ Christian said. ‘I think we only want to start by making new things. But I haven’t been there yet. I am sure you know more about it than I do.’
Neddermeyer had got up and, holding his leaf-shaped teacup, had gone over to the window, perhaps to hide his emotions. It seemed as if the mention of the Bauhaus struck some chord with him. ‘They seem very little interested in Weimar, where they are,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe they recruited any teaching staff from the town, though, Heaven knows, there are enough talents and experience to power a—’
‘Herr Neddermeyer feels strongly,’ Frau Scherbatsky said confidentially but audibly, leaning her whole body towards Christian from her chair. ‘He was very unfortunately—’
‘And here they come,’ Neddermeyer said, his voice raising gleefully as he looked out of the window. ‘I don’t know whether you have seen your colleagues and masters yet? They come this way every day, around this time, for their exercise. I promise you, I did not ask them to appear to prove any kind of a point.’
5.
In the park, three hundred metres away, a small group of people was approaching. They had shaven heads that shone in the sun like wet pebbles by the lakeside. There were eight or nine of them; their smiles, too, shone in the light. It was their clothing that seemed most extraordinary. An elderly woman in a fur-collared overcoat was just now pausing, thirty metres from them, and watching them with open fascination. They wore floor-length robes in purple, flapping as they moved; home-made and evidently not well fitting. The robes looked very much like the garb of a wizard Christian had seen in a childhood pantomime. The tallest of the group, a man in his late twenties or early thirties, wore also a metal collar, like a pewter platter with the middle excised. The group surged around him; their combined movement was uniform, rippling, wavelike and unnervingly joyous. Christian felt that if he left the house and went towards this group he would be brought in; he would experience their joy, cut off from the delights and sorrows of the world about him. And yet he did not want to go towards them. The single, jogging, up-and-down rhythm of their heads, like a string ensemble approaching a climax, was unnatural and fruitless. What were they doing? They seemed to be going for a walk, but they were pressed together too tightly for that; they might have been a single body. Their smiles and joyous movements suggested that someone in there was talking, but you could not see that they were anything but silent as they walked. They moved to some music, audible only to themselves. With a shock, Christian saw that they were men and women mixed, brought into a uniformity of appearance by their heads being shaved.
As they passed, their attention seemed forward-facing. But one of them – a woman, it looked like – must have felt the gaze of Frau Scherbatsky, Herr Neddermeyer and Christian upon her from the leaded window of the house. She turned, alone, as if rebelling against the will of the group and, with a habitual but pointless gesture, made a movement over her shaved head. Her wide and empty smile – her mouth was, he could see, too large for her little face – did not alter; he could not see whether she had, in fact, engaged with his look or seen the three of them through the window at all. He felt ashamed. In a moment the girl in her loose Biblical robe of purple turned away again, and the tightly knit procession, like a performance, moved on away from them.
‘They come every day, around this time,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘I couldn’t tell you what it is all about. My neighbours are fascinated by it.’
‘I think it is some kind of newly invented religion,’ Neddermeyer said.
‘Oh, surely not,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘At first we believed that it was some sort of advertisement for a children’s play, something of that sort – the seven noble wizards, you know, Herr Vogt.’
‘Do you know where they come from?’ Christian said. They resumed their seats; Neddermeyer continued to stand at the window, entranced.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘They come from the Bauhaus.’
‘The one at the front,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Did you see? The one at the front, taller and older than the rest, he is actually a member of the teaching staff. I have heard that he has, indeed, invented a new religion, which he requires his students to follow. We were quite safe up here, but if you come close to them, seeing them by chance in the street, they emit an overpowering scent of garlic. I have heard that one of the tenets of the religion is that nothing else may be eaten. A sort of purge.’
‘Very inconsiderate to the rest of us,’ Frau Scherbatsky said.
‘If, when I was a student of architecture all those years ago, I had been told that my professor wished me to wear violet robes in public, to shave my head, to eat nothing but garlic, and to follow a new religion of his devising …’ Neddermeyer started to say.
Frau Scherbatsky nodded, perhaps embarrassed on behalf of Christian. ‘Where is Herr Wolff, Herr Neddermeyer? Did he tell you?’
‘I believe he is in Erfurt this afternoon, on business,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘His usual business. He said he was unsure whether he would return this evening.’
‘Really,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘That, too, is inconsiderate. He might have told me before he went away.’
6.
In a room not so very far away, with a similar view of the park, a man and a twelve-year-old boy sat. The room was hung with paintings; in each of them, an animal, a form, an arrangement of lines, an exclamation mark, the heads of people as drawn by children could be seen. On the easel, a square canvas with blotches and stains in ochre, violet and umber. The boy and the man sat at the tea table, set with a cloth and an old, dented silver tea service. The man fixed the boy with his gaze; the boy’s eyes were huge. The man took a small cardboard box from his pocket, opened it and took out a sugar cube, delicately, with his thin fingers on which paint had dried and dirt been allowed to accumulate beneath his nails. With the tips of his fingers, his eyes never leaving the boy’s face, he lifted the silver lid of the sugar bowl, and dropped the sugar cube among other, nearly indistinguishable sugar cubes. He lowered the lid, and replaced the cardboard box in his pocket. His hands were paint-stained, but his clothes were immaculately clean; Klee liked to take off his painting smock before he had his tea in the afternoon. The boy’s eyes filled with premonitory laughter. Underneath the table on a Turkish leather cushion, a cat slept in its favourite place, curled with its face into its belly, its feet about its face, and paid no attention to anything that was happening.
There seemed nothing more to say. Klee sat back and took out the cigarette he liked to smoke before tea. In one of their shared rituals, Felix got up and went about the studio until he found the place where his father had last left his matches. This time it was by the window-seat, where he often liked to prowl and stand before the view while thinking about his next move on a painting. Not exactly looking at the view, more a matter of letting the world flood in without seeing it, his father had once said. For a second, as he picked up the matches, Felix tried the trick. But it was no good. He could not help actually looking at the world; at the pack of shaved-head wizards moving off into the distance following Johannes Itten, the trees in the park, a blackbird sitting on the branch nearest to the house, and his mother almost at the gate of the house, returning from her walk and already unbuttoning her coat in her eagerness for her tea. He took the matches over to his father and, as he was allowed to, struck one, holding it up to his father’s cigarette.
‘Mother is here,’ Felix said. ‘I saw her just coming up the road.’
His voice trembled with his terrible amusement, thinking of the sugar cube. His father sucked at the end of the cigarette and said nothing. His face was mask-like in its skin; Gropius’s wife had once asked his father whether it didn’t hurt, having a face like that, so tight like a drum, and his father’s face had grown still more mask-like, pulling back into a world of squareness. Felix had twelve tasks in the house, and they were added to every year, at an unspecified date; they included lighting his father’s cigarettes, turning the pages at the piano, announcing dinner when guests came and, most recently, cleaning his own boots. Today his task was to remain normal until the sugar cube turned into what it would turn into.
For weeks now, his father had been constructing a false sugar cube with a shock inside it. First, he had carved a dreadful-looking beetle with goggling eyes and cruel buck teeth out of balsa wood – not even a centimetre long, but you could see its cruelty and ugliness. Then he had stained it black, leaving it to dry under a piece of newspaper, in case Felix’s mother should stumble in. Then he had dipped it in sugar solution, again and again, and finally coated it with table sugar until it closely resembled a sugar cube. Felix had watched all the procedure. His father had not explained what he had been doing. He had merely let Felix watch the preparations and manufacture of the beetle and its encasement in sugar, as if it were a natural part of existence, which Felix would understand if he watched the process. What the purpose of the beetle in the cube was, Klee would not need to explain. It was a practical joke, and therefore not in need of any explanation.
They were sitting side by side, Klee taking occasional puffs and Felix trying not to fix his attention too much on the sugar cube, when Lily wheezed up the stairs. The cat, hearing her, roused itself; stretched and yawned, arched its back, and went to the door of the studio just as Lily opened it. It curled itself about her boots as she walked in; it largely ignored or put up with Klee and Felix’s embraces and gestures of love, but Lily, who only ever gave it a gruff, impatient shake about the head and neck, the cat adored Lily. ‘Am I late?’ she said, dropping her coat on the sofa and coming over to the tea table. ‘It was so lovely a day I felt I had to go a little further than usual. Not cold?’ She felt the tea urn. ‘Good, good. I saw Itten and his children in the park. Gracious heavens, they look so very extraordinary, and their painting, I know, must be simply awful. And I thought I saw Feininger at a distance, queuing with a lot of other Feininger-like beings, but it turned out to be a grove of trees. When is Frau Gropius coming, Paul – do you remember? Ah, tea! “In this world there’s nothing finer/than the tea that comes from China.”’
‘This tea comes from India, however,’ Klee said. As long as Felix could remember, his mother had always poured her cup of tea with the words of what he thought might be an advertising slogan from her childhood; just as long, his father had responded, drily, with the information that this tea, however, came from India. He did not trust himself to speak; he was not looking, with agonizing force of will, at the sugar bowl.
‘Itten saw me, but made no attempt to greet me,’ Lily said. ‘Gracious heavens, he should be ashamed of himself, dressing in such a way, like …’ She paused, contemplating what Itten and his disciples might resemble, and as she thought, she lifted the lid of the sugar bowl and took what must be the false sugar cube, dropping it into her tea from between her fat thumb and forefinger. Felix had thought, with agony, that she might take the wrong one, and delay the catastrophe until tomorrow or even the day after that. But she had taken the sugar cube today. ‘. . . like Mazdaznan, is all you can say,’ she went on. ‘If a child of mine were in Itten’s care, all I can say is—’ And then she shrieked, gratifyingly. The black beetle had floated to the top of her tea and was rotating gently in the English cup. ‘Ah, Paul, you will be the death of me.’
Klee said nothing, but his eyes were full of amusement. Felix was gulping back his laughter. His father was devoted to practical jokes, but exercised them with rigour: he never, as far as Felix knew, played a trick on anyone outside the family, and he only ever played tricks that he could make and invent himself. Only once, in Felix’s memory, had he resorted to a purchased trick; it had been a small rubber bubble that was placed beneath a tablecloth before inflating itself and moving like a mysterious animal about the dinner things. Felix and his mother had adored it, but Klee had shaken his head, half smiling, as if deprecating his own enjoyment in something that anyone could purchase. Since then, there had been carved wooden fruit in the fruit bowl and small amounts of gunpowder buried halfway down one of his mother’s cigarettes, but no more purchased tricks.
‘The beetle!’ Lily said. ‘The beetle!’
Klee slightly smiled. Felix could see his hand under the table had yielded to one of its habits: it was running up and down a musical scale. He knew what this meant: his father wanted to return to work. When music came into appearance – some sound of humming, the gestures of a hand running up and down a piano keyboard or a violin – it did not mean that Klee was about to start practising on the violin, which sat in the corner of the studio on a shelf. It more usually meant that he was thinking of his painting, and wanting to return to it. Presently Klee finished his tea, poured another cup and finished that, quickly, too; Lily finished her story about seeing a woman who looked really very much like Frau Gropius outside the Elephant Hotel, but who had turned out to be someone quite different; Felix slid off the chair, with its uncomfortable oil-slippery seating; and they left Klee to his work.
‘Do you have the black beetle, Mamma?’ Felix said, as they went down the stairs together.
Lily felt in the pocket of her skirt. ‘No – how awful. Now the thing will only turn up somewhere else and make me scream all over again. Do you have mathematics homework? Do you want to work in the kitchen, or in your bedroom?’
But Felix had the black beetle; he had asked knowing where it was; it was for him, now, to decide where it should turn up, and whom it should make scream. Outside, in the quiet street, the lamplighter was beginning to make his patient rounds, still wearing his white summer overall.
7.
The next day, Christian had decided to go out soon after breakfast, and to find the school building at least. He had always had a desire to place himself within cities; not to spend more time than necessary wandering without a notion, and not to put up with living in a city in a state of ignorance about its quarters. He slept well – once, in the night, he woke up and was unsure where he was until he heard an owl calling in the park, and what must be the creak of a roof adjusting as the night cooled. He had never slept anywhere other than with a family above, and a family below; he had never slept in a room with a sloping wall, like this one, underneath a long roof of tiles, and he looked forward to being woken in the night by the rattle of rain or hail. The pillow was warm, and he raised his head and turned it to the cool side. There was a faint smell of fresh laundry about the sheets, the smell that linen had after being dried in the open air. He felt, as he drowsily moved his hands from one side of the tight-wrapped bed to the other, that there was something restless about being in the same house and sharing the same sleep as people he had never met before yesterday, whose Christian names he did not know, who were not related to him or to each other in any way. They were brought together by force and by money, he sleepily said to himself, force and money, Neddermeyer and Scherbatsky, Scherbatsky and Neddermeyer, and the third one, whose name was … whose name was … But Herr Wolff’s name did not come to him in the night; it came to him only with a satisfying abruptness when he was washing his face and torso at the washbasin in the morning. Wolff. He wondered if he had returned from Erfurt last night after they had all gone to bed.
‘I shall not be in for lunch, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian said, when he had finished breakfast.
‘If only,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘If only all my guests were so considerate!’
Neddermeyer, reading the Morgenblatt, lowered it and shook his head sympathetically.
‘I’m sure he has important business in Erfurt,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Still, Maria grows very testy at the uncertainty.’
‘Cook a nice rabbit stew,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘And keep everyone happy, however many you find yourself entertaining.’
Frau Scherbatsky clapped her hands. ‘What an excellent idea! My mother – you know, Herr Vogt, I am quite a country lass – my mother always said that she would prefer a well-made rabbit stew to any fricassee or ragout. My father was always very pleased at shooting a brace because rabbits are a dreadful pest in the wrong place, which of course rabbits always are, in the wrong place, I mean. Yes, a rabbit stew it shall be, tonight, with some very nice little turnips from the garden.’
Christian left the house after breakfast, and walked along the road, still a rough lane, that led along the side of the park. He felt, in his loose jacket and short tie, like a man who belonged in this famous town. The houses here, like Frau Scherbatsky’s, were substantial and artistically made. Outside one, with a steep-pitched red roof and a yellow door, a pair of green-painted benches were placed in the lane for the rest of the weary traveller, or so the painted motto from Goethe stated on the wall. Another had a flat roof, of southern inspiration, and others had friezes of angels and devils painted along the walls, under the roofs. There was a pleasant smell of coffee being made from one of the houses, and the sound of eggs being fried; the clatter of knives came out of the open window of one kitchen. ‘“Alfred, Alfred, you’ll be the death of me,”’ the song of last year, burst out; a scullery-maid came out of one kitchen door singing; she threw her bowlful of eggshells, peelings and muddy vegetable water over the compost heap, scattering the half-dozen white chickens who were picking over it with squawks and flappings. Dashingly, Christian reached up and plucked a pear from a tree overhanging the lane; he put it into his pocket for later. At the end of the lane, the main road out of Weimar into the country, he waited as a lumbering famer’s cart went by, as heavy and groaning as if made of lead, and after it, the watering cart of the district, pulled by two huge and shaggy horses. The farmer raised his fat fingertips lightly to the brim of his broad and grubby straw hat; Christian, smiling, nodded.
It was still early when Christian reached the central square of the town, and the Saturday market was still presenting an orderly and fresh appearance. Although he had just finished Frau Scherbatsky’s breakfast, he took the pear from his pocket and ate it as he went round the market. He had thought that the art school was on the other side of the square, but quickly found himself in a quiet residential street. He turned back and tried another side of the square; this time he found himself facing a statue that proved to be of Goethe and Schiller and, behind that, a grand pillared theatre. A gaggle of white geese, intelligent and imperious, was making its way through the square in the direction of the market, driven by a freckled boy of fifteen or so; a man at the wheel of a black car, his vehicle shiny and bright in the sun, waited for them to pass. Christian sat down on the steps of the Goethe statue to feel in his pocket for the small map he had cut out of the guide to the city; it was not there. He remembered now taking it out of his bag, and placing it on the dressing-table ready to take out, but not taking it out.
A shabby figure was in front of him. ‘Do you know what you are sitting upon?’ he said, in a brusque, military manner.
‘I think so,’ Christian said. He observed the man: he was wearing a cheap blue suit made out of some dyed military material. It fitted him so badly that, when the man made a strong chopping gesture with his arm, a lecturer’s decisive gesture, it appeared to move a second or so behind the man, as if it had its own stiff ideas of movement to follow. ‘Goethe and Schiller.’
The man made an impatient movement, flinging his arm to one side and tipping his head back to look down his nose at Christian, sitting on the stone steps of the monument. ‘Great poets and thinkers,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Christian said. ‘Can you help me? Could you tell me where the Bauhaus is?’
‘The –’ the man said ‘– the— What did you call it?’
‘The Bauhaus,’ Christian said. He had an irrational feeling that this stranger was, in fact, Frau Scherbatsky’s other lodger, the unreliable Herr Wolff. The man stood in front of him with his legs apart, building up to some sort of rage. He was wearing what seemed to be military medals, although he did not seem dressed in other ways for a funeral or other ceremony.
‘He means the art school,’ a woman who had been taking an interest now butted in to say.
‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘It used to be a respectable art school, but now it calls itself the Bauhaus. So you’re one of those, are you? No wonder you sit on the steps of Germany’s monuments, insulting its greatness. Communists and garlic-eaters and free-love practitioners! Go off to Moscow or Paris, why don’t you?’
Among the small crowd that was now gathering to enjoy the abuse, there was a girl who was grinning broadly. She was at the front of the gathering. Her clothes were simple and rustic, perhaps home-made; they were dark green, straight up and straight down, with a gathering at the neck of blue ribbon, simply tied. Her hat, impatiently shoved on her head, was a coal scuttle made out of brown felt. Her grin was empty and her mouth was too large for her small head. With some shock, Christian saw that her head under the hat must be shaved; he saw the stubble above her ear. The smile and the cock of the head towards him was of indefinable familiarity; it was the smile of a friend not yet recognized. It’s me, the smile said. Come on, it’s only me.
‘Yes, we know what they get up to over there,’ the man went on. ‘Four bare legs in a bed. Klimt. Anarchy. We don’t want that in the city of Goethe and Schiller. “This tree’s leaf, that from the east—”’
‘Oh, do shut up,’ the girl said, calling loudly as soon as the man started to throw his arm out and quote Goethe at them. Her voice was hoarse but educated, with some Bavarian musicality to it.
‘Don’t tell me to shut up,’ the man said. ‘Who told me to shut up?’
‘I did,’ the girl said, still grinning, and raising her hand like a schoolchild. ‘Don’t talk rubbish about what you don’t know. Do you want to know where the Bauhaus is?’
Christian did not realize for a moment that she was speaking to him.
‘Hello! You wanted to know where the Bauhaus was. Come with me.’
‘In this city …’ the man began, unconvincingly, but he had missed his moment, and as the girl took Christian by the wrist and led him roughly off, the little group of onlookers dispersed. On the ground, a drunk man lay on one side, clawing at the air with his left hand and cycling at nothing with his legs, like an upturned cow waiting to be righted.
8.
‘Why are you looking for the Bauhaus?’ the girl said fiercely, as they walked away from the Goethe-statue square.
‘I’m starting there on Monday,’ Christian said. ‘They sent me directions but I left them behind, at my lodgings.’
‘But what I can’t understand, what I can’t understand at all, not one bit,’ the girl said, as if they had been having a conversation for days, for weeks, which had not reached a conclusion, ‘is why someone who doesn’t look like a complete idiot and buffoon and twit, not really, anyway, why someone quite normal should want to go and find the Bauhaus on a Saturday when he doesn’t have to go there until the Monday. That I don’t know if I can understand.’
‘You only have to push me in the right direction,’ Christian said.
‘Because when you get to the Bauhaus for the first time,’ the girl said, ‘oho, oho, that is when it all goes wrong. You hear about lines and essences and energy in a point and the hidden cross-weave and the drain a colour can make in the middle of a form. And how yellow can be yellow or it can be a completely different thing. Look at that yellow.’
The girl grabbed Christian’s arm with both hands, and forcibly made him point at the yellow wall of a palace. He felt they must be conspicuous, but the people of Weimar were apparently used to gestures of this sort. ‘That is what you call yellow,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘It is a yellow,’ Christian said, being specific in the way he had heard an art master once attempt.
‘And there,’ the girl said, pulling him round and making him point again, at a different palace, this time in a deep rustic red, ‘that, too, that is what you would call A YELLOW, is it not.’
‘No, that’s red!’ Christian said, forgetting to be specific.
‘Ah,’ the girl said. ‘You see, that is just a matter of context. That yellow only looks red because it lies between two contrasting greens, and the greens have their counter energy, which they project onto the underlying yellow, and there it is, red but only perceived as red. Not real red. You see?’
The wall was still, undeniably, red. The girl, a head shorter than him, came up close to his face. She smelt, curiously, not unattractively, of fresh sweat and of garlic. He remembered what his landlady had said about the diet of the Bauhaus students.
‘And that is the sort of thing which the Bauhaus will draw you into, and make you believe, and make you accost strangers and explain, and turn you into a raving madman before it turns you into an artist. But let us go on. Look, beauties to the right, beauties to the left. An important library built by a duchess for her thirty-four children straight ahead of us, and directly behind – don’t turn – an elephant house in the Gothic Revival style, 1674, three stars in your guidebook. What is your name?’
‘Christian Vogt. I come from Berlin.’
‘I did not ask all that. I come from Breitenberg. My name is Elsa Winteregger. What sort of maker are you?’
‘What sort of—’
‘What do you make? If you are coming to the Bauhaus, then what is it that you make?’
And now they were standing in a shady square, irregular in shape, with a poster pillar at its centre. The weathervane on top of the poster pillar swung indecisively from left to directly away from them and back again. Christian remembered his decisive belief.
‘I am a painter,’ he said. It was the first time he had said it in front of anyone at all. Elsa Winteregger was the person he had chosen to hear his decision.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. She thought for a moment; looked him up and looked him down; she placed her hands on her hips. ‘And when did you arrive in Weimar?’
‘Yesterday afternoon,’ he said.
‘And you come out without your book, your paper, your charcoal and your pencils to draw the beautiful city of Weimar?’
Christian crimsoned. Of course that was the first thing he should have done. It had not occurred to him. Of course a real artist would have loved to take the opportunity to go outside with pencil and paper to sketch a new, a beautiful and interesting city. Christian’s sketchbook was still in his suitcase. He had done nothing, and it had not occurred to him among the most urgent possibilities, last night or this morning. The question of whether he was an artist at all, whether he was deluding himself, presented itself painfully.
‘Or you might be the sort of painter who never goes outside with his easel,’ the word pronounced sarcastically, ‘and his paintbrushes, and his oil paints to paint. You might stay inside the studio painting canvases of something that is almost-but-not-quite a black square superimposed on a red triangle. Don’t you think red is the most important journey you can take as a painter? Who is the greatest painter?’
‘I think the Spaniard Picasso,’ Christian said, priding himself on producing so up-to-date a name.
‘No, it is El Greco,’ Elsa said, ‘or if we are talking about the living, there is no one more wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, than Malevich. Have you discovered what he has to say about black?’
Christian shook his head. He felt defeated before he had even started. Elsa flung her face to the sky, and shouted, in the quiet Weimar square, ‘“As the tortoise draws its limbs into its shell at need, so the artist reserves his scientific principles when working intuitively.”’
A window was flung open, and a voice responded. ‘“But would it be better for the tortoise to have no legs?”’
‘Who is that?’ Elsa shouted angrily. ‘Who is that?’
‘It’s me,’ the voice came. A head poked out of the window; neat-groomed, en brosse, a nice snub nose. His shoulders were bare. ‘I heard someone quoting Itten, I thought I would finish it off.’
‘I wasn’t quoting Itten,’ Elsa said. ‘I was quoting Malevich.’
‘You were quoting Itten, you idiot, you just don’t know it,’ the man at the window said. ‘Who is your friend?’
Christian said, ‘My name is Christian Vogt.’
‘This is not my friend,’ Elsa said again. ‘It is a boy I found in the street. He was being harangued by a local mob. I discovered that he was trying to find the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus, the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus …’ Elsa’s voice trailed off into song; she lowered her shoulders and, apelike, swung her arms to and fro in an enchanted manner. Her eyes slid back into her skull.
‘I see,’ the man said. ‘Goodbye, Elsa. Goodbye, whatever your name might be, I didn’t hear.’
‘Christian Vogt,’ Christian said, but the window was already closed. ‘Goodbye, then,’ he said to the girl in the brown cloche hat, her eyes shut as she crooned. He felt quite put out, as if a friend who had been walking with him had turned aside for someone more interesting. But Elsa was only standing, alone in the square, singing ‘The Bauhaus, the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus,’ to herself in half-tones, with a wide open smile of pure uninterruptible joy. Christian was a hundred paces away before he knew he should have said, ‘Kandinsky,’ to Elsa’s question.
9.
Fritz Lohse withdrew his head from the outside and back into the room. It was a pleasant room, painted pale green, with a dressing-table, an upright old leather armchair, a Turkey rug on the floor and an awkward-shaped, almost square old rustic bed painted yellow. There were twenty sheets of paper, drawn-on, pinned to the walls above the bed and to the ceiling, so that Fritz could see his best ideas immediately on waking. On the dressing-table, by the oil lamp, there sat the remains of last night’s supper: some black bread and two soup pots, alongside the bones of two small game birds. There was an octagonal table, in size between a card table and a dining table; its undecidable size had perhaps led Frau Mauthner, the owner of the building and Fritz’s landlady, to expel it upstairs to her lodger’s room with all the other furniture. On the table there were five objects, just as there had been for the past three weeks.
Fritz observed, with admiration, the ripe curves of his girl Katharina. She was all pink and white above the rumpled bedding; she lay face down. Her back was a deep hollow, rising to her magnificent wide bottom, her thighs slightly marked with the quiver and dimple that fat under skin makes. He imagined striding across the room and taking a deep bite, a spoonful of a bite, out of her thighs. How she would shriek! Katharina was a shrieker, as well as a snorer at night, and, in times of unoccupation, a singer; it was a real trial to her to keep silent during their nights for the sake of Frau Mauthner She was still lying in the bed, hugging a bolster to her as she liked to. She was face down upon it; it ran from her chin between her breasts, under her belly and between her legs; it pushed her rump upwards and emerged between her knees. Fritz often wondered why she did not hug him at nights, but she said she preferred something long, cold, hairless and squashy. She was not asleep; she was just enjoying the bed, and the pleasure of lying there naked in the morning, far too late.
‘What was all that rumpus?’ Katharina said softly, into the mattress. But Fritz was used to the sort of things that Katharina said.
‘It was only Elsa Winteregger,’ Fritz said. ‘She was making a spectacle of herself, as usual. She was giving out Mazdaznan proverbs.’
‘Which one? The one you told me about breathing steadily and praising the Lord?’
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.
‘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.
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