The Emperor Waltz (31 page)

Against the harmonious working of Adele’s Weimar routine, too, there was the routine of the boy Christian Vogt. Adele could not understand it. At some point during Adele and Elsa’s morning walk to the school, Christian Vogt would pop out from a side-street. He would pretend to be preoccupied, and only when he was upon them would he give a start of surprise and say, ‘Good morning.’ You would have to be a child of five to think that this happened every day by chance. Then he would walk them to the school and go in with Elsa. He would cast a sorrowing look as he entered the building. Adele did not think he appreciated the opportunity he was being given. Between one and two in the afternoon, he would appear at the wall opposite, like a loafer, or a pickpocket waiting his chance. He would make a pretence of reading the newspapers that had been pasted to the wall. But in reality he was just waiting for Adele to come out. She watched him from the upper window. He was always there by two, but she could never leave the house before five. He waited in his best clothes, a limp patterned suit, an American hat in his hand, his shoes polished to a shine. Adele did not give up before five; then she gave up. She left the house and told Christian Vogt that her work was done for the moment, and she would be grateful for some fresh air. If she insisted on a solitary walk, she knew that she would have Christian Vogt dogging her footsteps, his eyes on her back, trying to see through, to see her heart. She could have told him that a heart was just a fat organ with tubes, probably best when trimmed and stuffed, but very nutritious and, because it was not very widely esteemed, very cheap and easy to obtain by anyone who made a small effort.

‘Do you not have a timetable?’ she asked him. ‘Did they not hand you a piece of paper, marked out into squares, that you are to fill in with the names of your classes and their times? Do you not stick to it?’

‘Yes,’ Christian said, gazing at her as she pulled the white muslin scarf around her neck and fastened it with a little cameo brooch. He had been standing outside the house for three hours, his figure a recognizable one in the neighbourhood by now. The baker downstairs had rudely called across, some hours ago, that if he was going to be as long as yesterday, why not buy a cake to keep him going, as it would be more expensive by the time Adele came out. His thin shape, his upward cock’s crest of hair, his modest and fearful eyes made an impression on all the neighbours. Adele ignored him until she was ready to leave.

‘Yes, what?’ Adele said. She could feel that a garter was already coming loose. The elastic was frayed and would have to be replaced somehow. She hoped it would not fall down altogether. She would prefer not to have to adjust it underneath her skirt; it looked so like an indelicate itching to other people.

‘Yes, I do have a school timetable,’ Christian said. ‘I have nothing to do this afternoon.’

‘You should be working,’ Adele said, as they set off. ‘I know that not everything that is done in an art school is done during the lesson hours. My sister is hard at work in the textile studio. She is making a large tapestry of her own design. Now, why are you not in the studio, developing your own work? This is no good, waiting for someone you do not know.’

‘I only want to be in Weimar because you are here,’ Christian said. ‘There is no other reason.’

‘Well, I am going back to Breitenberg in a few days,’ Adele said. ‘So you will have to find another reason to stay in Weimar. Elsa knows why she is in Weimar. She is learning to make beautiful objects, taught by the best masters. And when she has a diploma, she will be able to take it and teach in the best schools in the country. It is absurd, a shame to say that the only reason you have to stay in Weimar is because a little dressmaker is here on holiday.’

‘If the teachers are talking to me, I just hear Adele, Adele, Adele. I do not think I have learnt anything since I arrived here. Nothing but your face, and your walk. And now you want to scare away people who want to marry you. It is not very good, the way you have made a profession of scaring people away.’

‘That’s so,’ said Adele, considering. She had scared away a good number of women who had come bearing gifts, their arms open. She could not see how it was that anyone should change their mind, and tell a man that his offer was acceptable. But sometimes a man must be told that his offer was acceptable, or the human race could hardly continue.

‘A man,’ Christian Vogt said, ‘must sometimes be told that his offer is acceptable. If that never happened, then the human race would die out altogether. And that does not seem to be happening.’

‘That’s so,’ Adele said, her heart pumping. She had not seen that her thoughts were going to be captured and expressed by this man she hardly knew. ‘I was very good at discouraging the widows, laying siege. But no one has laid siege to me, until now. It has all been to Papa.’

‘So tell me the story of how you got rid of all those suitors, suitoresses – is that a word?’

‘I have never heard of such a word,’ Adele said. ‘We used to call them the Weed Bed. There was nothing you could do about them. They came up in bundles. They were attractive, sometimes, on their own, just as a flowerbed with weeds can be shown to have even some pretty flowers, like bindweed. But to leave them be – Papa would not have been happy.’

‘How can you just – get rid of a tiresome person?’

‘Well, once – this would have been during the war …’

7.

The faces in the room were in a circle, each holding a deal board with paper pinned to it; the paper was not good paper, as they were going to get through a lot of it. They were turned to the man at the apex of the circle. The circle does not have an apex, but this circle did have an apex. The man at the apex had been talking for some time, and the faces around the circle, thirteen of them, were puzzled, serene, scared or excited. The man’s face was broad and mask-like, the skin stretched tight over the bones. Klee had seen this class earlier in the week for the first time. He liked the beginning classes, and the sound of ingrained thoughts being erased; sometimes easily, sometimes with painful, incomplete grindings, like a motor running on empty. He had been talking about the line; all the things a line could do, once conceived of. It could make a fish; it could make the water a fish swam in; it could make a man or a point, or a pattern of lines and other lines. He looked at the class and saw that he had not made himself clear.

‘I want you to do an exercise,’ he said finally. ‘You have your pencil, not too soft, not too hard. Take your pencil, and draw a single straight line, one that goes from one edge of the paper to another.’

The students all did this, some looking from one side to another in case they had done something wrong. Klee saw with interest that the boy who never said anything, the one who appeared to be dreaming about something entirely different, bored and openly drifting – that boy had drawn a line from the top edge of the paper to the bottom edge. All the rest had drawn a horizontal line, somewhere between halfway and three-quarters down the paper. Klee examined his own instructions. It was right: he had not indicated the direction of the line. The boy had seen the line in his own way, top to bottom of the paper. Klee pondered this, and why he had thought of a horizontal line, and why a vertical line seemed already so original. He came to no conclusions.

The class looked at him expectantly. Klee’s mind returned to the room. Outside the window of the room on the first floor, there was a tree, just turned yellow, and in the tree, there were three, perhaps four, birds singing loudly. It was like a machine with three, perhaps four, parts moving in different ways, apparently independently, but in fact connected remotely, like a piano and a violin playing together, separated by space. The students were looking at him.

‘You have drawn a straight line,’ Klee said. ‘Now, I want you to think hard, and then draw a second line; one that negates the first line. You should think about the line that has nothing of the first line in it, which wants to be completely indifferent to the first line and have nothing whatsoever in common with the first line. Can you draw that line?’

The students looked at him still. Klee loved the first-year students. They had had no chance to be influenced by the students who had arrived in the year before, or the students in the year before that, having only just arrived. And yet they were very much the same as those students. They wore simple clothes, some of them, almost like the clothes of agricultural workers; or they wore the clothes their mamma had thought appropriate for them, a soft suit with a pattern on it and a red rag of a tie; others wore clothes that were neat, practical and efficient; one had paint stains already on his old jacket, which was torn – looking at this last one, Klee felt the torn lining in the inside of his jacket, the trouser pocket he must remember not to put anything in, as there was a hole in it after he had absent-mindedly thrust a paintbrush in, sharp end first. And there were three advanced students who had already found each other through dress and appearance, and were now sitting together. There was a girl who had an abrupt, angular bob to her hair and a slash of red lipstick; there was a girl who was wearing men’s trousers, a cap and a pair of workmen’s braces; and there was a boy who had found his way to Itten, and to Mazdaznan, and had already shaved his head. The mamma’s boy, the one in the neat soft suit and the red rag of a tie who never said anything, he was the one who had surprisingly drawn the vertical line. He was now sitting gazing forward, thinking, his pencil at an angle between third and fourth finger. The advanced figures, on the other hand, had set to work straight away, their mouths pursed. The boy with the shaved head, the early Mazdaznan recruit, had closed his eyes and was humming as he moved his hand across the paper. Klee looked, unamused. He could see what the result would be; a movement of scribble and a cloud. He wanted a line, as usual. Today he would fulfil the task in his own way, in a different way from yesterday. What seemed interesting to him today was the quality of thinness in a straight line. His second line, should he make one, would fight against that quality. It would struggle to be as fat as possible. He considered this possibility.

One student after another set their pencil to paper. They drew swiftly, or scrupulously; they raised their pencils, and looked up. Only the mamma’s boy, whose name, Klee saw, was Christian Vogt, did not start work. Only after four or five minutes did he start; he made one mark on the paper, then another; he set his pencil down, and smiled, in a tender, satisfied, confident way. The others had smiled, too, but had smiled at each other, shown each other what they had done. Christian Vogt had smiled at the paper and at the line he had made. Klee recognized that smile.

‘Let us see,’ Klee said, and they had all done what he had thought they might do. The Mazdaznan boy had made a line that meandered so much it turned into a cloud. Others had made an arabesque with no straight line. Some of the neat-dressed girls had made another straight line, which crossed the first at an unpredictable angle. Klee nodded, and made encouraging noises. But then he came to Christian Vogt, and there was no second line on his paper, but just two little crosses, five inches apart. Klee looked at the page, and looked at Christian Vogt, an enquiry in his eyes.

‘I thought,’ Christian Vogt said, in his careful voice, which few in the class had heard much, ‘that the first line was so solid and substantial. It looked so fat after I had been looking at it. Like a road or a vein or a pipe, full of something. It looked as if it would be so hard to change, once it was made. The second line should not be hard to move. It should be something you could imagine, and then imagine somewhere else, moving in a different way. So there is just a line between these two places that you can make if you think hard about it. That is my line.’

‘I see,’ Klee said.

‘But it is the artist’s job to decide what sort of line should go on the paper,’ one of the clever, advanced women students said, the one in men’s braces. ‘It is not the artist’s job to say to the observer, you should make up your mind.’

‘No,’ Christian Vogt said. ‘But the observer will make up his mind, whether the artist instructs him to or not.’

Then it was as if he had said enough. Klee looked at the piece of paper again. It was true. He had envisaged a line that went directly between the two points marked by little crosses. It was a line that existed only in his mind, and not on the paper. And yet the artist had drawn that line and made him think of it. He could not remember a student making an invisible line before.

‘Today,’ he said, ‘your task is to make a drawing with a single line, and the line is not permitted to leave the paper, or to cross itself, or to touch itself at an earlier point in its journey. Bring that to class on Thursday.’

8.

‘We have designed a new banknote today,’ Kandinsky said to Klee, as they walked away from the Bauhaus building.

‘Yes?’ Klee said. ‘I am not asked to design banknotes. I drew an invitation to the student ball in the summer. But I think I would like to draw a banknote. Perhaps a very large one, and then be allowed to keep it, and perhaps even spend it, afterwards. It would be good to draw something that could be exchanged for the sum of money you said it was worth.’

‘We are not allowed to do exactly that,’ Kandinsky said. ‘And all banknotes are very large ones, nowadays. I have banknotes for ten million marks in my wallet that are now worth nothing. I overlooked them for a few hours and then they would not buy a box of matches. We are making designs for the one thousand billion banknote for the Thuringian State Bank. Young Bayer designed it, and we came along to discuss it.’

‘What does such a thing look like?’ Klee said, bringing his leather case up to his chest and shivering slightly. They paused at the edge of the road; a farm-cart, nearly empty of all but a few husks of corn and straw, went past, pulled by a heavy white horse. They watched it go with different creative impressions: a sagging line, a large sad eye, a series of green slashes against the white-painted floor of the cart. ‘How would you decide on the colour of a thousand billion marks? The mind would shrink from the responsibility.’