The Emperor Waltz (38 page)

He stretched out his feet, his toes separating within the slippers; he set down his pen and ran his fingers through a little stretching exercise, as if about to play the piano. He had written a lot this morning, produced a good stretch of his speech to the Association when it met next Saturday in Eisenach – if the weather had improved sufficiently by then. They were good, honest fellows, the fellows in the Association, but he wondered whether he was talking over their heads.

His wife put her head in at the door; a sweet, smiling face, twenty years younger than his own. ‘Is it going well, my sweet?’ she said, in her childish way.

‘Very well, thank you, my love,’ he said, smiling. She placed a finger to her lips and withdrew, theatrically, slowly. She amused him: that was the secret of her appeal. He picked up the pen and began to write about Moses and Isaac again. It was important to persuade people, and he remembered that it could only happen little by little, one person at a time. Every change of thought was a revolution and a turning towards the sun. It was pleasantly warm in his study. It was very agreeable to sit in these comfortable surroundings, with a fire blazing and no need to go outside, and write confident, inspiring paragraphs about the Jews.

There was no food at all in the room the Winteregger sisters lived in, except two pieces of black bread and three potatoes. That would do for their luncheon, and then they would have to try to find some more food somewhere in the town. But the town was still so heavily under snow, and no shops in the street had opened for many days. If only the boys had not eaten so much of the cake she had made! That had only lasted another day after they came. Adele thought that there might be shops elsewhere open. But she knew that the prices would have doubled or trebled. She had no idea how she might pay for anything. All around her, there were people waiting to take advantage; people who had seen the closure of the railway lines as a way of making a good deal of money. She could feel it in the crisp air.

‘I will go out later this morning,’ Adele said. ‘There must be somewhere open where I can find a little something for us to eat. People may have some soup, or something small that they can spare. And if that doesn’t succeed, then I am sure it will not kill us to do without food for an evening, and things will be different tomorrow.’

‘I am so cold,’ Elsa said. ‘And hungry. Very, very hungry. There was not nearly enough to eat last night, or yesterday during the day.’

‘I know,’ Adele said. ‘But at least I am here for you.’

‘Can’t you go out now?’ Elsa said. ‘I can come with you. I don’t mind.’

‘There is no point at all in our both getting cold and wet,’ Adele said. ‘I can be much quicker on my own. I am sure I know places that will be open for food and wood, and I can get there and get back before you know it, and this afternoon will be like Christmas. You wait and see.’

Out in the whitened streets of Weimar, a few people were starting to move. Julius Pringsheim had been sent out by his wife Dora; there was still some food in the house, but it would be good to see what the situation was. In their little house just outside the centre of Weimar, Dora sat with their twin boys, both two, in front of the fire – thank heavens there was a good lot of coal in the cellar. She fed them and entertained them with simple games and songs.

‘Seven things are needed

For a lovely cake,

Eggs and fat!

Butter and salt!

Milk, flour and saffron makes it yellow!’

She patted the boys’ hands gently; they hit hers back as hard as they could, shrieking with joy. Julius was a teacher and had often observed that there was nothing you could do to stop boys taking on their nature, setting on each other violently. ‘Were you like that?’ Dora would ask, since Julius was a gentle soul with three gentle sisters.

He would smile and shake his close-cropped head. ‘They must learn it from their sister,’ Julius would say. But that was a joke, because Lotte was a dark-haired angel who had never been a moment’s trouble.

The angel was well wrapped, her fur-edged coat and muff keeping her warm as she sat on the sledge. Her father pulled her along. She was no weight. The streets were empty, but Julius thought there might be some life around the Hotel Elephant; that was where he was heading. Lotte was singing something into her muff as Julius turned, panting slightly, into the Böttchergasse. ‘What are you singing?’ Julius said, turning, but Lotte was absorbed in her song, which seemed to need hand gestures. ‘You’ll catch a cold!’ Julius said. ‘Put your hands back in your muff!’

Julius had not been thinking. In the Böttchergasse there was the café he knew not to go to, the Café Harbach; it had been no trouble before the war, but now, in the last year or two, it had been taken over by the wastrels of the town. It was best to walk another way. He saw, too, that the café was actually open, a path cleared to its door and two men sitting in the well-lit window. If the Café Harbach were open, then things would be better than he thought.

In a room lined with paintings, with a violin resting on a table, with a pianoforte covered with a purple velvet cloth, Klee sat hunched before an easel. On it, there was a painting. He thought it might be of birds at dawn. He had finished it the day before, in the intense cold, thinking hard of a summer morning. There were four birds on a line. He saw now that the line was not a tree branch, as he had thought, it was the mechanical arm of a musical instrument, turned by a handle from below, to make the birds sing. He remembered the title that had come to him at dawn, as he woke, his lips almost moving with the rightness of this title. He would not write it down just yet. If the title remained in his mind tomorrow, he would write it down. He turned to the table by his side and, with paint-stained fingers, picked up a pen. It was his habit to write in notebooks when a thought came to him. He did not write the title of the painting. He wrote, ‘Art does not exist to reproduce the visible. It makes visible.’ He had written this before, in different circumstances. He wrote it now because that was what he had done, and what he was about to do. Every person who heard it might change their mind, and find it a new thought. You could only change the world by changing the way individuals thought, one individual at a time, as if turning towards the sun.

Fritz Leitner and Gottlob Gebhardt were the two men sitting in the window of the café. They had been pleasantly surprised to discover that it was open. The night before, they had decided that the best thing was to go to their comrade Wolff’s lodgings – he lived in high style, and his landlady fed him well, they believed. The welcome had not been everything you could have hoped for, but they had fed like kings. It was good to talk over the present situation, too. But now it looked as if the town was starting to move again. The Café Harbach was open, though old Harbach was complaining that there was not enough food to run a full menu. And people were starting to move through the streets. There, a man pulling a child on a sort of sledge, there over the street.

‘That’s an awful Jew,’ Gebhardt said.

‘I know him,’ Leitner said. ‘He teaches at the Gymnasium. He teaches my niece mathematics, I believe. A Jew like that, teaching at the Gymnasium.’

‘A disgrace,’ Gebhardt said. ‘Where’s he going now?’

‘They’ve seen a chance to make some money,’ Harbach said, coming over in his apron to observe.

‘Taking his child out, too,’ Gebhardt said. ‘They want their children to learn early how to make money.’

‘My little son,’ Leitner said, hunching up his shoulders. He lisped and whined as he talked, making what he thought of as a Jewish voice. ‘Son of mine, watch how their money flows into our pockets, and stays there. Plot and plan, my son, plot and plan.’

‘Most of them know better than to walk down the Böttchergasse,’ Harbach said.

‘If Wolff were here, he’d be explaining about the blood and inheritance that makes the Jew stoop like that, makes him clever,’ Gebhardt said. He and Leitner and Harbach were conceded to be very good fellows. But they were not very sophisticated about their understanding of the world. They understood this fact, too, and were often to be heard referring in respectful, jeering tones to the theorists of the movement, like Wolff. He had read deeply in scientists who understood the difference between the races; he understood in detail what Leitner and Gebhardt and Harbach and their kind, very decent fellows who were the life and soul of the movement grasped through instinctive revulsion.

‘It’s the blood of centuries, hawked around half of Europe and half of Asia, by the cosmopolites,’ Leitner said. ‘Look at the cosmopolite. He couldn’t punch a soldier in the face. He wouldn’t have gone to war. He’d have found some clever way out of it.’

‘There was a Jew in our battalion, a butcher’s son from Berlin,’ Gebhardt said. ‘How he yelled when he found out that his wife was dead! Dead of the influenza. He yelled and screamed and howled when he got the letter. But the comrades in the battalion, many of them met the same fate. Did he yell then? No. Probably working out ways to sell their uniforms back to the army.’

‘You’re letting that Jew get away,’ Harbach said.

‘It’s so nice and warm in here,’ Gebhardt said. ‘And it is only one Jew. We could let him go on his way. Oh, very well.’

They hauled themselves to their feet and left the café. Leitner let out a hostile shout into the street, and the Jew and his child, now in their effrontery at the end of the Böttchergasse, both looked round. It was as if they were expecting to be greeted by friends who just happened to be sitting in the Café Harbach.

‘We carry on walking,’ Julius said to Lotte in a cheerful, ordinary voice. ‘And they will grow bored and go away. On we go! We have to find bread, and milk, and eggs, and all sorts of good things to eat, to make a cake!’

But then there was a fat man in a hat in front of him. His face was red and moist with the remnants of an overheated room.

‘Excuse me,’ Julius said, and tried to pull the sledge around him. But it was not so easy, and there was a second man there now, a man with a gingery moustache in a shabby black overcoat; the man, despite a very recent haircut, was as shabby and worn at the edges as his overcoat. ‘If you will excuse me, gentlemen,’ Julius said. The sledge was hard to pull to one side; it preferred to follow the same direction, and Lotte suddenly felt quite heavy.

‘Are you out on business, sir?’ the fat man said. ‘Most people prefer to stay at home in this weather, unless they have a good reason.’

‘Yes, that is so,’ Julius said. He tried again to get between the two men, but the ginger man now stepped directly in front of him. He could not move without exposing Lotte on the sledge to these two men.

‘Have you had a successful morning, then, Moses?’ the fat man said.

‘My name is not Moses,’ Julius said. Behind him, Lotte was being very good. She knew when to interrupt and when to keep absolutely quiet. This was a playground taunt. Julius had seen them in his school, and he remembered them from twenty years ago.

‘Oh, I got your name wrong,’ the fat man said. ‘Have you had a successful morning then, Isaac? Have you been out making the blizzard pay for you?’

‘My name is not Isaac, either,’ Julius said. ‘If I could pass, gentlemen, my business is my own.’

The gingery man now placed a hand on Julius’s shoulder. Close, he smelt of old beer and the remains of some cheap cigarettes. His hand was ungloved, and was red with cold or drink.

‘Please, remove that,’ Julius said firmly. ‘My business is no business of yours.’

The gingery man did not remove his hand. ‘There are people in this town who have had nothing to eat for days,’ he said. ‘There are people in this town who cannot afford to buy anything to eat even when the shops are open. Why is that, Isaac? Have you done well this morning, Isaac? Have you been making a profit out of Germans, Isaac?’ At the last, the man hissed, lisping the
s
in ‘Isaac’ as if imitating a snake.

Julius was aware that this assault was not happening unobserved. A girl – a young woman, neatly dressed and small, with sage-coloured stockings underneath her brown coat – had paused fifteen paces away, at the turn into the Böttchergasse, and was watching them.

‘None of that is true,’ Julius said, maintaining a light, pleasant tone. ‘My daughter and I –’ he indicated, thinking that perhaps a reminder that he was with a small child might turn away assault at least ‘– we were merely coming into Weimar to buy a few essentials.’

‘Let’s see what is in your pocket,’ the fat man said, and the gingery man reached intimately towards Julius’s neck and lapel. Julius stood back, amazed and now angry, but the man pushed him against the wall, and quickly reached into his inside pocket. In there was a bundle of notes – it could not be otherwise. The billion-mark notes were now worth so little. They had to be fastened with a pin, run through them, and it was this bundle that the gingery man now brought out.

‘That’s a lot of money you’ve made this morning,’ the gingery man said.

Julius began to protest, but the gingery man was shouting now. Lotte behind – he could hear her crying.

‘Look at all of this!’ the man shouted. ‘All this money. Making it out of our suffering, out of German surrender and humiliation. Look!’ He tore the pin out, and sent a billion-mark note into the air. It fell to the snow. ‘You bought goods cheap, before the snow, and now you come into Weimar, and you have sold them to the Germans, who have no alternative. Everything gone, Isaac? A good morning’s work, Isaac? Have you sold everything, Isaac? Everything except one child? You’re waiting for a few years for her to fetch a good price, Isaac? Or are you going to buy a little Christian girl to be her servant, a little German blond girl, Isaac?’ With every five words, the man was throwing a note into the air. Julius did nothing. He knew that to scramble after money would persuade them to put their boot on the back of his neck. It was so little, the money, so little.

‘You love money,’ the fat man said. ‘And we love our country. That is the difference. That is why we are going to win in the end. You can’t live on the money that you love so much, can you? Here—’ and he took the money from his comrade. He took seven or eight notes from the top, screwed them up, and now pushed them into Julius’s face. He would have forced them into his mouth, but Julius would not open it. His teeth were clamped shut. That noise was the noise of Lotte crying, and calling for her mummy. But Mummy could not hear. ‘There, thief,’ the fat man said. He cast the money down to the ground. ‘You earned it. Enjoy it while you can.’