The Emperor Waltz (36 page)

‘No, they aren’t,’ Elsa said. ‘They aren’t! How can you say that? They always complain, every single time, they always say it’s hard enough to find space for people they’ve known for years, let alone people like us, a crazy art student and her little sister! They aren’t kind! And the bookshop woman, too, the one just now, she hates us! She was laughing at me when I went out last week to Mazdaznan, she said, you, you lunatic, before the war, people like you, they were locked up. How can you say these things?’

‘I suppose,’ Adele said, as if Elsa’s shriek had been a soft demurral, ‘I suppose that they can be a little resentful. But they have a lot of requests, it is true, down there in the baker’s. And they do put things into the oven for us, sometimes straight away. I think they only once refused to put something in altogether, which was really a shame. People are so good, generally, and times are so hard – I would love to be able to buy one of their beautiful cakes, but I am really afraid to ask the price, even. How does your family cope, Christian? Do they have a good baker nearby?’

‘I think so,’ Christian said. ‘I don’t think I quite know the baker that Martha uses. Martha? Oh, she’s the cook. No, I know, it is that place in Friedrichstrasse, the good one further from the railway station, where everybody goes. I remember seeing their bills with the beautiful writing and the picture of the miller when I was little. I thought it was so kind of them to send in a letter with a jolly picture on it. But you said your father had a workshop that Elsa used to draw. What is your father’s workshop, please?’

‘My father makes puppets,’ Adele said, but she had hardly begun when Elsa flung herself forward.

‘You! You’re going to marry my sister! You asked her to marry her, and then you start wondering – who is her family? What does her—’

‘Elsa, please,’ Adele said.

‘No, I will say it,’ Elsa said. ‘How can you say, “I love this woman and I want to marry her and I want to be a member of her family,” when you don’t know anything about her, you don’t know anything about her family, you don’t know anything because you don’t care anything, you only want to be in love with someone because it will all be so wonderful?’

‘Elsa, this is not helpful,’ Adele said. ‘You should not be so rude to Christian and Dolphus. It is not their fault that they haven’t found out about Father yet.’

‘Yes, he is a puppet-maker,’ Elsa said. ‘His puppets are beautiful, beautiful. They are hanging there, look, in the corner by the fireplace, one of them. Do you know where he comes from? We come from Breitenberg. He is famous all through Germany, our father. How could you not know? How could you not want to find out? You think we are nothing, that you are going to do everything for Adele, make her your wife and then she is never going to see her crazy sister again or her father, who is a puppet-maker, and you are going to find out some time what happened to her mother, what she died of, and then that will all be quite all right. Adele, you must not marry this man, you must not.’

‘I am sorry, Fräulein Winteregger,’ Christian said. He was flushed and quiet; his hands were placed firmly on his knees, gripping tightly. Dolphus had taken a large bite out of the parsnip cake; as Elsa shouted, he lowered the remains to the plate, chewing in a discreet, ruminative, secretive way, as if it might soon be wrong to eat it at all. ‘I didn’t mean to offend. We have so much to find out about each other.’

He spoke in a formal, slow manner, as if suppressing some other comment. He did not look at Adele or at Elsa as he spoke, but at some point between their heads, as if at the far wall. ‘And it is true that I did not know what your father’s profession was, and I am sure that there are many other things I did not have time to discover about your family. I am sure that Adele will say the same thing, that there are things she does not know about our family, that she wants to discover a lot of insignificant small things about us. I am sure she does not know what the profession of our father is, either.’

‘Of course I know what the profession of your father is,’ Adele said, astonished and, it appeared, even a little offended. ‘Your father is a lawyer. Of course I knew that.’

Dolphus turned from one to another, to Adele, to Christian, to Elsa, munching and taking everything in. He turned back to Adele in wide-eyed entrancement. It was, it seemed, as good as a play to him.

15.

The effects of the snowfall, making rounded shapes of the trees in the ducal park, obscuring the town’s buildings, making old men out of gabled houses, marking them with white eyebrows, was all known to the poets of the town. But the best of the poets of the town would have known what it came of. The atmospheric pressure falls, and remains low; the temperature falls to a certain point, as the sun withdraws and the earth tilts away from it; the masses of cloud are moved upwards by wind as they hit the Thuringian hills, and the conditions, very specific in their requirements, are met. The water in the clouds freezes, coagulates, forms a snow crystal, and another, and another, and their own weight, like small furry beasts come to existence in mid-air, sinks them to the ground. The low pressure remains; the temperature stays constant; the snow continues to fall. The ground freezes; the snow packs hard; the surface snow hardens, freezes, solidifies.

What can be done? Nothing. The animal life in the town and thereabouts withdraws inside, for warmth: those animals who can sit before a fire, the windows and the curtains shut tight, and eat small, toasty, pleasant things brought to them by maids. The coal stores are reckoned, and thought to be good for a few days yet. Others of the animal life in the town light smaller fires, and sit inside, swathed in blankets and mufflers, or they encourage their confused dogs to sit on their laps for once, to do the forbidden thing of leaping onto an armchair. It is astonishing how much heat a dog gives out, more than one Weimar wife will remark to her husband, sitting in small rooms with their gloves on. Other animal life retires to the stables, and makes a serious start on the winter hay; the last of the horse-drawn cabbies gives way, and there is no work to be had, and they might as well surrender until the snow finishes falling. There are people who are now out of food, and out of what little fuel they had. There is an old couple in a tiny shack, meant only as a garden shed but which was sold to them in the aftermath of the war by someone who needed a couple of hundred marks when a couple of hundred marks meant anything at all. They sit, swathed in every piece of clothing they can muster, and are still cold. They are thinking about burning the third chair, because there are only two of them and the snow must stop before long, and when it stops falling, the temperature will rise a little. They are thinking about it independently. Tomorrow one of them will raise the subject with the other, and they will argue about it a little longer before burning the last thing they can burn. They have no food to eat, hot or cold, apart from some hard black bread. There are animals in the park, huddled together in the hollows of logs, performing the lot of animals everywhere, which is waiting in terror. Somewhere outside the city boundaries – it is so hard to draw the boundaries, and the lands of snow are a mapless nation – somewhere outside the boundaries, a horse wanders blind and stumbling, lame and panicked and in pain. Its owner is somewhere about; he lies on his side in a mound of snow, his face rimed with frost, his staring eyes open, his lips drawn back in a snarl. The salt tears from his eyes are frozen to his cheeks; the saliva in his open mouth is hard-frozen ice. His animal terror is over. He will be found when the snow melts, but that will not be for many weeks. He is the water-carter of the town, and the water in his great barrel is frozen, spilt out across the country road in a small frozen lake. In her house, the water-carter’s wife sits in her overstuffed parlour, a fire going, the curtains drawn, an English toasting fork bearing a slice of bread. She is well provided for by this handler of a town monopoly; he must have found himself safe quarters as the storm broke, and is probably now being looked after in great comfort by some chit of a farmer’s daughter, as she observes to the maid when she comes in. There is plenty of food around. It is just getting to it that is the problem, or getting it to us, rather. She will give him what-for, when she sees him, she says. But in fact she would exchange the prospect of a future punishment for the sure knowledge that he is safe somewhere, and not lying dead, frozen, by the side of a deep-covered country road.

At home, Klee wears woollen gloves with the ends of the fingers cut off: with a pencil, he draws. He notices that his fingers are white with the cold, and shuddering when his hand holds still, in the air. Is his violin safe? Could it crack with the chill? He sees the indeterminate but purposeful movement of his breath in the cold air of the studio, like a brushstroke of much-diluted ink on paper. It is too cold to paint. Today he is drawing. Tomorrow or the day after or the day after that, the Bauhaus will reopen. There, he will paint the wizard who brings the chill to the earth, flying through the air. He brings his thoughts back, purposefully, to the drawing in front of him. It is a drawing of a fish, an old, old fish, one that knows everything, in the bottom of the deepest lake, beyond the fall of light. It looks upwards, towards what, it does not know.

In the kitchen, Lily talks to the cook. What will they eat for dinner? Heart; there is heart still. And tomorrow? The cook does not know. They may have to eat beans. Is there anything else? Nothing; they may have to brave the snow, if the butcher’s shop is open, and if the butcher’s shop contains anything in the way of meat. So perhaps beans. Like the ancient Greeks, Lily remarks, with a despairing laugh. But the cook doesn’t know about that.

Itten walks in the park. He is cold, and he rises above sensations of cold. Cold is a delusion and a snare, like the effects of all the senses. Last week he walked with twelve; today he walks with only one. He says these things as they walk. They cannot see far. Their eyes must be turned inwards. The world is a gift and an illusion, Itten says. He does not raise his voice above conversational level, and the words of his speech do not survive the short journey to his single disciple’s shuddering head. One disciple is enough, Itten says, in kindly consolation. The disciple hears that, and tries to hold on to it against the thought that one disciple is too much, and that one disciple is hungry and colder than he has ever been in his life. Some disciples decided to stay inside by the fire and come back when the weather is better, Itten observes. Those disciples have failed, as Mazdaznan’s disciple always fails, through the call and tug of animal spirits, which we try to rise above. But Mazdaznan does not fail, even if every one of us fails. Mazdaznan, without any proponents or disciples, goes on in the cosmos.

In a hall, sixty men in uniform stand and sing their song. Almost everyone came. They are red-faced and chilblained, but they came. Their animal spirits are strong; they feel like beasts and they look like doughnuts. Their song is about a hero of their movement; the speech that is to come is about the Jews. They look forward to it.

The door of the garden shack opens. It is an old man. In one hand, he holds an ancient wooden chair. In the other, he holds an axe. The time has come to burn the chair for heat. He has taken it out to slaughter it, like a well-loved animal. He places the chair on the ground; he raises his trembling arms.

16.

In the room above the bookshop, Christian observed the tiny fire with a kind of longing. It was sinking and sinking, and now was surely beyond rescue. Christian’s longing was for the fire of the future, the high-banked and roaring fire that he would insist on once they were married. He observed that, in the coal scuttle, there remained only three pieces of coal. Adele gave the impression of being a good and practical housewife, but her cake was not very good, and her coffee was awful, and surely a good and practical housewife would have made a better estimate of the amount of coal she needed to bring up from the coal cellar. Adele would have to go down again once he and Dolphus had left, and bring up another load of coal to see them through the day.

They had been talking about Breitenberg, and Adele had been answering his detailed questions with detailed answers. Elsa was watching him narrowly, sometimes puffing with despair when he asked something stupid, when he felt he had been told the answer at some point earlier. He could have asked Dolphus to contribute, but his brother was just sitting, staring at the two of them who were talking in a shy, embarrassed, blank way. The English nanny had drummed it into them: you must speak in company, not sit in silence as Germans do. But Dolphus had forgotten the lesson. Christian went on asking polite, amused questions. His mind was on the fire. It had been a great mistake to take off their coats and scarves when they had arrived: the room was growing colder, and nobody seemed to be taking any steps to feed the fire.

‘We must be thinking about going,’ Christian said eventually. ‘I expect that the train you were planning to return home on will not be running in this weather.’

‘Almost certainly not,’ Adele said. ‘I must try to send a telegram to Father. We will just have to sit and wait, and hope for the best.’

‘We will come and see you tomorrow,’ Christian said. ‘If there is anything we can do …’

‘That would be very pleasant,’ Adele said. ‘If you happen to see any eggs for sale, one can go on living on eggs for days, and somebody always has a chicken.’

Dolphus said his goodbyes, in a remote and withdrawn way, to Elsa and to Adele; Christian kissed his fiancée on the cheek. They dressed, in coats, scarves and gloves; they pulled on their galoshes. It seemed to go on for ever, with Adele standing there patiently waiting for their departure. The service he had offered, and had had in mind, was more like holding an umbrella over the pair of sisters as they walked to the railway station.

They let themselves out. The snow had slowed, and the sky was almost beginning to clear. There was a patch of intense, lucid blue between snowclouds. The cold was fierce, and they walked with their faces wrapped in scarves, in silence. The sound of their galoshes in the snow was solitary in the noiseless town. Dolphus followed his brother through the winding streets, softened and rounded with the snowfall. The shops they passed were closed, their windows covered with planks of wood; they passed through a square where the central statue – had it been of Goethe and Schiller? Christian could not remember – had been swathed in sheets of green-painted planking against the cold. What was it to guard against? Would a bronze statue really shatter in the cold, and if it were cold enough, would the green-painted planking do to protect it?