The Emperor Waltz (37 page)

They reached the park. A path across it had been cleared. A wind was parting the clouds, and an allegro suggestion of sunlight on the brilliant white – white with a suggestion of purple in its shadows, of blue, of pink, even – was transforming the landscape, as the snow had transformed it in the last days. They began to wade through the deep snow; it was laborious work. Something hit Christian on the side of his head; a block of snow. He turned, and Dolphus, whose eyes alone could be seen, alive with merriment, threw another fistful of snow. Christian bent and packed the snow into a ball, and threw it back. They ran as best they could through the deep snow, and fell, and threw snowballs, and fell again, and were covered with snow, and pulled themselves out of drifts and waded through still deeper snow, as fast as they could. The snow, apart from where they had been, was a perfect smooth surface. Nobody had been in the park for days, and if they had, their tracks had been covered.

When they arrived at Frau Scherbatsky’s house, the maid Maria was watching out for them, and she must have called her mistress. Frau Scherbatsky opened the door to them as soon as they knocked.

‘My dear Herr Vogt,’ she cried. ‘My dear Herr Dolphus. It was most unwise to go out at all – I would have insisted that you stay at home today. Look at you! Quite covered with snow. Maria will make you some bowls of hot water which you must soak your feet and hands in, immediately. You young people, you have no idea of the pains of chilblains! And then change into dry clothes and come downstairs to sit with Herr Neddermeyer and me by the fire. He has stayed at home with me all day. Very sensible. Herr Wolff has gone out, in his medals and his uniform and his heavy coat, to one of his meetings. Herr Dolphus, please, leave your coat and hat and scarves down here – they will dry much better in the cloakroom downstairs. How did they get so covered? Herr Wolff will come back in the same state, I know. Maria, is the hot water ready for Herr Vogt and his brother? Maria! Maria!’

When they were upstairs, their trousers rolled up and their reddened feet sitting in bowls of hot water, Christian allowed himself to return to Adele, with the beginnings of an apology. He did not see how he was going to be able to remove himself from the situation. He had had an opportunity to say, ‘Perhaps it would be for the best,’ when Elsa had pointed out in her noisy way that they knew nothing of each other, and should not marry. But he had not taken that opportunity when it came. And now the opportunity would not arise again. Adele was the daughter of a puppet-maker who had seen her chance to marry the son of a rich Berlin lawyer. He could not tell her he had changed his mind: not only honour but the law would not permit him to. He knew enough of Adele to understand that she would not permit him to, either. Her tidy mind would not leave the matter unresolved.

‘I know that Adele is—’ Christian began, not turning to Dolphus, but looking down into his bowl and his sore, reddened feet in it. But Dolphus interrupted him.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know exactly. I can’t say how much—’

‘Adele?’ Christian said.

‘She is …’ Dolphus said. He raised his head like an animal at the first light of dawn, stretching and feeling the first rush of blood. ‘… she is wonderful. The most wonderful woman I ever met. I can see exactly why everything made such sense to you. I would marry her, too, tomorrow. If she were not spoken for, I would fall in love with her like a flash.’

‘I know,’ said Christian. He was sunk in perfect misery. Adele had come between him and his brother, and had made a barrier of misunderstanding. Dolphus had not noticed how cold the room had been, how the coffee had sunk to a layer of gritty, sandy acorn grindings, how pert and irritating Adele had been, how the cake had had a strange aftertaste of parsnip. Such a misunderstanding had never happened before.

‘We should go down and sit by the fire with your landlady and her lover,’ Dolphus said. ‘I want to tell them all about Adele, too. Look!’

He held up a piece of paper, rounded and slightly crumpled. It was one of Elsa’s drawings of her sister; this one of Adele making the bed. It was done in large, confident pencil strokes, thick and expressive. It was unmistakably Adele, and in the pencil strokes, there was affection. ‘I stole it,’ Dolphus said, with simple pride. ‘I hid it in the back of my jacket, when no one was looking.’

17.

That night it did not snow again: the temperature dropped stolidly, and the ground froze. The next day began brilliantly, but towards noon the clouds moved back, and after lunch it did begin to snow again. Herr Neddermeyer observed that he had never seen such weather this early in the year, and Frau Scherbatsky agreed with him. The Vogt brothers played cards quietly in a corner of the sitting room; they would have gone out, but Dolphus had unwisely asked Frau Scherbatsky for some honey and lemon juice in a cup of hot water, and she had promptly observed that he had the beginnings of a sore throat. They sat and they played whist, a game from their English-nanny childhood: Herr Neddermeyer called out from time to time that skat was a much better game, that he would school them in that later. It was a dull afternoon. Christian would have liked to remove his boots and stretch out in his stockinged feet on the chartreuse sofa, and to sleep the dull afternoon away. But he behaved himself.

At four, Maria brought the tea in and, with it, a note that she gave to Herr Neddermeyer. How had it been delivered, across these drifts and banks of impassable snow? It was a mystery. At six, Neddermeyer’s friend and colleague Grausemann would come to call. ‘I have known old Grausemann for many years,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘His time hangs heavy on his hands now that his practice is wound up and his wife is dead. I would be very glad to see him. It is not far for him to come.’ Frau Scherbatsky followed Maria out of the room.

At six precisely, an old man with an elaborately shaped, expressively styled moustache and beard was shown into the sitting room. He seemed somehow familiar; it was the gestures, which were the same as Neddermeyer’s: the same experimental baring of the teeth, the same side-to-side smoothing gesture in the air. They had indeed known each other for decades.

‘It may surprise you to know,’ Grausemann said, ‘that we have not always been in such good odour with each other. There was the case of a pupil architect, in the summer of 1892, was there not?’ His eyes shone; he reached across the table for the dish of potatoes, and helped himself extensively. Wolff, who had been upstairs silently all day and had come down only for dinner, let his eyes count the potatoes as the old fool doled them out to himself.

‘Young Fragewort,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Indeed, young Fragewort.’

He shook his head, and Grausemann made a theatrical shrug, his shoulders half rising about his ears. They looked at each other, Neddermeyer narrowly questioning, Grausemann with eyes innocently open; and then, without any suggestion of cause or meaning, they both burst out laughing.

‘That must be thirty years ago,’ Grausemann said.

‘Surely not,’ Neddermeyer said. Wolff leant forward and rudely took the dish of potatoes from where it stood, before Grausemann.

‘Thirty years!’ Grausemann said. ‘The summer of 1892. That is thirty years ago and several months. Count them.’

‘Thirty years!’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Thirty years!’

‘Young Fragewort,’ Grausemann said. ‘And now he is …’

‘Young Fragewort,’ Neddermeyer said, wonderingly.

‘Hardly that,’ Grausemann said. ‘But when you think about it?’

‘Yes, astounding would be the word,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘He ought to be in gaol, young Fragewort.’

‘And some people would say, so should you,’ Grausemann said. ‘So – should – you. I don’t know that young Fragewort isn’t in gaol. He may very well be.’

‘And richly deserved,’ Neddermeyer said, nodding. ‘Is there more of that excellent venison stew, my dear Frau Scherbatsky?’

There was not: the addition of Grausemann had seen to that. Frau Scherbatsky had always impressed on her guests that they might ask their friends to dinner, if they were presentable and if they would amuse her. Dolphus was one extra person already, and Christian wondered whether she had meant the standing principle to apply in the middle of a snowstorm when there had been no deliveries of meat for three days. The venison stew had been presented with an unusual number of dumplings, almost piled up and obscuring the surface; the potatoes had been augmented with a large amount of noodles. Frau Scherbatsky’s kindly smile was as it had always been, or almost, as she passed the water jug or the little silver and blue-glass mustard pot to her guests or her guests’ guests. Herr Wolff, on the other hand, in his weekend pinstriped suit with his little political badge on his lapel, was silent, scowling, hungry and meditative.

The next day was much the same. At six, two men arrived at the house; this time, they were associates of Herr Wolff. Frau Scherbatsky greeted them with pursed mouth. They were less sociable, and their names hardly registered. Their suits were frayed at cuff and lapel; they wore, each, the same little badge that Wolff wore. Their conversation was much less sparkling even than Grausemann’s. It was mostly about the Jews. When the dinner bell came, they leapt up, but not to leave. Frau Scherbatsky asked with every appearance of practised surprise if Herr Wolff had invited his friends to dinner. But Wolff was inured to this kind of treatment, and replied that it was one of the happiest memories of his time here that Frau Scherbatsky had in the past offered hospitality to friends of both – of all – her lodgers. Of course, if it were now a problem …

It was not a problem, and, once places had been set, Wolff’s two friends sat down to dinner with them, making the best of the vegetable soup, the two rabbits, and the bowl of nuts that was brought out to supplement the quark and red fruit dessert. It might have been tactful of them to stay off the subject of food shortages, and not to take such pleasure in talking about the impossibility of buying food at any price in Weimar today or yesterday, to talk about the results of the Jews’ machinations bringing about the starvation of good Christian folk. Frau Scherbatsky listened, and did not contribute, other than in muttered asides to Neddermeyer; Dolphus had lost his voice, and raised and lowered his spoon in a tired, mechanical manner, wincing as the soup hit the raw back of his throat. Christian did not believe that any conspiracy was taking place to deprive anyone of food. He believed that it was the snow. The sentences followed one another as if rehearsed many times before in exactly these terms. One of the men had a strong Berlin accent and a spoilt, gaseous odour from his mouth. He made gurgling noises with his lips as he drank his soup; the other looked sharply at Neddermeyer whenever he said anything, and tried to put his arm around Maria’s waist as she was taking the soup plates away.

Afterwards, when the associates of Wolff had eaten and promptly gone away, saying goodbye with a belch and a damp handshake, Frau Scherbatsky cornered Christian at the foot of the stairs.

‘I am going to have to ask you,’ she said, ‘to make a particular point of not asking friends or colleagues of yours to dinner for the next few days. I am so sorry to be inhospitable, you know, but it is so difficult to find food even for us!’

‘I’m sorry about my brother,’ Christian said. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t be a burden if he had any choice in the matter.’

‘Herr Vogt!’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘No, I beg you – I did not mean that in the slightest. I was really referring to those who see an opportunity to feed themselves up at our expense. Herr Grausemann is a welcome guest. But those gentlemen tonight – I really am not so very sure. I will be speaking to Herr Wolff on the subject, you may be sure.’ She waved her hands in an evocative, imprecise way. ‘Of course, Herr Wolff’s friends may be correct. There may be hoarding going on by people who do not really care about ordinary Germans. But I don’t think knowing that will help any of us to eat better if this house becomes a staging post for all manner of hungry acquaintances.’

Upstairs, Dolphus was reading a book and smoking, his stockinged feet outstretched on the truckle bed he slept on. But Christian did not think that he was concentrating on or very much absorbed in his book. The book he was reading was a school book, a tattered and much-used edition of
The Aeneid
.

‘What did Frau Scherbatsky want?’ Dolphus said, not raising his eyes from the page. ‘Was she telling you that I’ve got to go? I don’t think there’s much more food in the house. At least there won’t be, if Wolff keeps bringing people of that sort to dinner.’

‘She’s become very fond of you,’ Christian said. ‘Heavens knows why or how. I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the bedroom. I never do. And you should not smoke with a sore throat at all.’

‘It has an antiseptic effect, but I’ll stop immediately,’ Dolphus said, but rather waving his pipe round than extinguishing it. There was a confidence about Dolphus that Christian had never observed before.

‘No, she was saying that you are very welcome, but she’s going to have to call a stop to any of us asking guests for dinner until she can restock the larder, or some such phrase,’ Christian said. ‘There is food enough for the regular guests, apparently, but not for any old wanderers or chance-takers.’

‘We can’t invite anyone?’ Dolphus said.

‘Why?’ Christian said. ‘Who—’ and for one moment he had completely forgotten about Adele and Elsa; forgotten their existence, their life, the obligation they bore each other. Dolphus had remembered, but Christian had forgotten that he was engaged to anyone at all. ‘Oh, they’re quite all right, don’t worry. They are in the middle of town. They can call across the street to any number of friends, Bauhaus people, innkeepers; they can make their way. It is much easier for them than for us, you know. And we will see them again when the paths are clearer.’

‘If you think so,’ Dolphus said, with a sidelong glance, returning to his book.

18.

Somewhere in Weimar, before a fire, a man with his feet in slippers and a pleasant warm shawl about his neck was writing on his ninth sheet of paper. He went on fluently, his pen leaping up and down like a seismograph. ‘One can see how wonderfully the stock exchange Jew and the leader of the workers co-operate, how the stock exchange publications and the newspaper of the workers echo each other. They both pursue one common policy and a single aim. Moses Cohen on the one side encourages his association to refuse the workers’ demands, while his brother Isaac in the factory incites the masses and shouts, “Look at them! They only want to oppress you! Shake off your fetters!” And his brother ensures that the fetters are well forged.’