The Emperor Waltz (68 page)

The deputy mayor’s wife plucked a fading peony out of the dragon-thick vase on the console table in the lobby – they were white and pink, and it was a pink one she disposed of. Her children would come to like all this, and nobody could say that the thickets of chairlegs and low flimsy tables among which they seemed to want to live were well made, or restful to look on. She thought of the evening ahead of her with dismay.

The deputy mayor of Dessau was coming down the stairs, in his dinner jacket with his silver-topped cane. As long as they had been married, she had been prompter than him to be ready to leave. She believed that was the secret of a happy marriage, never to keep your man waiting. Her evening wear did not take long to assemble. She wore a simple black silk shift dress with her hair neatly brushed back into a bun, and the gold and enamel brooch that the mayor had bought her after he had been recognized by the Emperor, the aquamarine and diamond pendant that his parents had given her on her wedding day, even though that was perhaps no longer the fashion. She wore a corset underneath, but it was not pulled tightly. After five children, all now grown-up with homes and families of their own, there was not much that could be done to give herself the physical shape of her youth.

‘Ready?’ the deputy mayor said, as he always had. He was a good man. ‘You look beautiful. Is Adi waiting with the car? Good, good.’

‘It is good of you to agree to come to see these people,’ the deputy mayor’s wife said as they left the house and got into the car. ‘I don’t understand why we have to have them in Dessau.’

‘Well, they are here now,’ the deputy mayor said. ‘We voted for it, and the mayor says that it does us a great deal of virtue, to be shaken up like that. And it is true. People from all over the world come to our town now simply to look at it.’

‘That building! It is beyond anything. Adi told me that normally he drives in a completely different direction so as not to see it. How can anyone think that buildings should look like that? It has a flat roof! That is not – that is simply Oriental. It will do for Jews, but not for Germans.’

‘My dear, we are their guests tonight.’

‘The building is bad enough, but it is what goes on inside that so horrifies everyone. You know they were forced to leave Weimar. Free love. Anarchism. Communism. No one was safe in the streets. I do not know why they are in Germany, even.’

‘My dear, we need only to go there once a year, and then you and Adi can forget all about it.’

‘I had a low enough opinion of them based on their teapots. I can only imagine what their ballet is going to consist of. If we escape without open insult, that will be enough to be grateful for.’

‘The Prince is coming tonight,’ the deputy mayor said. ‘Informally, very informally – he likes them. They will behave well enough, I am sure.’

‘The Prince is coming? You know the sort of people who control what work they do, behind the scenes?’

‘Put your normal, kind, happy face on. Remember that there is nothing in what they may or may not be doing that the wife of the deputy mayor of Dessau needs to notice. The Prince is coming, but you and I, we are the principal guests. Democracy, my dear, democracy.’

‘There is a great deal in what Hannes was saying last week,’ the wife of the deputy mayor of Dessau said. Her elder son had paid them a visit, and had stayed for dinner and overnight with his wife and their new baby. ‘What happens in Berlin today will happen in Dessau tomorrow. When Hannes says the time has come to take the threat seriously, how can we endure such people in our midst?’

‘It is only a fruit bowl,’ the deputy mayor said, coming back to a previous topic of disagreement between the two of them. ‘They meant well. Silver, too.’

‘It was an insult. How could I possibly produce such a thing? That fruit bowl, silver or not, stays in the cupboard in the scullery. A silver bucket. I thought I would produce it when someone who knew about it and valued it came to dinner, afterwards, for dessert. But no. Never, never, never.’

‘You must have whoever you want to dinner, in your own house. And here we are,’ the deputy mayor of Dessau said peaceably, as the great white building came into view, curved like an ocean liner and flat on top, its square simple windows and curved railings, its single upper-case vertical stripe of a label saying BAUHAUS, the lawn in front, and a greeting committee of Masters, bold-haired, bow-tied, tweed-suited, came forward with the students behind. From inside, there came the noise of hammers striking, regularly and resonantly, metal and wooden, and a muted cheer. It was as if they were arriving at the monkey house at the zoo, and being greeted by the elder chimpanzees in tails. ‘This is an evening of ballet, something everyone loves. Put on your best face, my dear, and hear nothing offensive. Adi, we are waiting.’

‘That man is dressed as a pierrot!’ the deputy mayor’s wife said.

‘He must be part of the entertainment,’ the deputy mayor said. ‘Do not worry. We will be home again before you know it.’

2.1

In a classroom in Dessau, on the ground floor, overlooking a dark stone square, an art class was beginning. The architects and the school administrators had not considered the matter very deeply when they had placed the art room here. It was dark inside – the birch trees grew thickly outside. There was no interesting view from the window to aid contemplation. It had been chosen because art was given very little importance at the Dessau Gymnasium, and the room had been considered to offer sufficient space for the students, and had the largest cupboard attached. It was understood that the teaching of art required a good deal of storage space, to put both artistic efforts and the means of producing them away at the end of the school day.

A new master was taking a class of fifteen-year-olds. He was not a permanent member of staff; the pupils understood that he was not a permanent member of staff. He had been hired for six months at most. He was a fresh-faced man, prone to blushing when he had to speak to all of them. They faced the front, blank-faced, their expressions fixed on his in a way that was meant to disconcert.

‘Do you have a sheet of paper in front of you? Everyone? Ah – does anyone have a piece of paper that they could lend Rottluff? Pencil? You all have a pencil, a good soft drawing pencil. Yes? Good. Now, I would like you to draw a line on your piece of paper. Yes?’

A boy had no pencil, and another wanted to know if his hard pencil would do. The junior master went into the stock cupboard, and extracted five soft pencils – he was just about experienced enough to understand that these two requests would be followed by others.

‘Now. As I was saying, I would like you to draw a line on your piece of paper.’

There were now some genuinely puzzled expressions on the faces of the boys. One of them, the dreaded Rottluff, had raised his hand.

‘Sir,’ Rottluff said. ‘If I may speak, sir. We do not understand. What sort of line are we to draw?’

‘You may draw any kind of line you would like,’ the master said. His name was Herr Vogt.

‘A straight line, sir?’

‘Any kind of line that you would like to draw,’ Herr Vogt said.

‘Please, sir, like this?’ another boy said, holding up his sheet of paper on which a line had been drawn, no more than half the width of his fingernail. His name was Walliser.

‘If that is the sort of line you feel like drawing, then that will do,’ Herr Vogt said. ‘Stop! Boys! No – not all of you. Don’t draw a line exactly like the one that Walliser drew. Draw your own line. It doesn’t matter whether it is like anyone else’s line. But it should be a line that you have thought about. Walliser, think about the line, and then draw it.’

‘How, sir?’ a boy called Schmidt said. ‘How can we think about a line? A line is just a line.’

‘Ah, but is it?’ Herr Vogt said. ‘When does a line begin? If I place a pencil tip on a piece of paper but do not move it, is that a line?’

‘No, sir,’ Rottluff said. ‘That would be a point, sir, which occupies no volume.’

‘But if the point moves, Rottluff, then what does it become?’

‘Sir,’ Walliser said. ‘May I ask a question? Are we to be tested and evaluated on this information and theory at the end of the year, or is this just your own …’ He trailed off. He had not necessarily meant it impertinently, but there was a smothered noise of laughter from the back of the classroom.

‘Just draw a line,’ Herr Vogt said. He made an expansive, generous gesture with his arms, a weighing of two imaginary weights at the arms’ end, and gave a tentative smile. He was still blushing; his confidence was not very apparent. ‘Draw a line of any sort in the next ten seconds. Let your pencil move, and demonstrate what it is thinking. Clear? Two, three, four, five …’

He walked about the classroom, peering over the backs of the boys. They were drawing, most of them, but with an air of faint disgust. Almost all of them had drawn a straight line, a horizontal line in the middle of the paper, going from left to right. Three boys were doing something different: two, a diagonal line from one corner of the paper to another, the third a complicated, winding, sinuous line, which, as Christian watched, made a disappointing sort of doubling back to form a looping letter P – no doubt the initial of the boy, or of the boy’s sweetheart, or something of that sort.

‘Very good,’ Christian said disconsolately. ‘Now, I want you to draw a second line – no, stop, don’t draw the second line immediately, listen to what I have to say – I want you to draw a second line that is completely and utterly unlike the first line. Do you understand? Spend a few moments thinking about it, and then draw it. What are the properties of your first line? That’s quite a good place to start.’

‘Sir,’ a boy said, not troubling to put his hand in the air, ‘are we supposed to do this on two sheets of paper or on one?’

‘Sir,’ another boy said, this one raising his hand and propping it up with the other, the elbow resting on the left-hand palm, the left elbow resting on the desk. ‘Sir. Can I ask a question? It’s a proper question. What my question is, is this. I’d like to ask – what is it for, what use is it for, this art? Last year it wasn’t like this. We learnt about Michelangelo, and how to do cross-hatching and how to put shadows in. Sir, what are your classes for? If there’s a line then it should look like something. What are these lines going to look like? Sir, I just don’t understand it at all. What do you mean, a line that’s the opposite of the first one? I used to think I was good at art, but now I don’t think I understand at all. It’s not fair, sir.’

‘Just do it, please,’ Christian said, sitting down in the naval wooden-backed chair behind the desk at the front of the room. There was an easel there with a board placed on it, and a piece of paper pinned to the board. On the board were the beginnings of a seascape, performed for the benefit of the senior class, before, by one of the other masters. It stood as a reproach. ‘Just think about drawing a second line that is the complete opposite in some way of the first line you drew. Can you do that, please?’

‘Sir,’ Rottluff said, not raising his hand. ‘Can I ask a question, please? It’s what Walliser asked. Are we going to be tested on any of this? It’s an important question, sir.’

‘No,’ Christian Vogt said, defeated. ‘You are not going to be tested on any of this, at any point in your school careers.’

Almost as one, the boys in the class drew their own single, simple, derisory line across the paper, and flung their pencils down. The boy at the front, with a military haircut and a blue ink stain on his white collar, turned to his neighbour and gave a contemptuous grin and a shake of the head. He was destined for greatness, in Christian Vogt’s opinion, and this job was only to last for six months.

2.2

The boys left in a precise, silent way at the end of the lesson. They did not run off happily, making noise, but in a way intended to impress the masters with their diligence, discipline and silence. They must have known that a six-months art master would not expect or be impressed by military discipline. Christian took off his painting-room smock and, in the little mirror hanging on the wall, put on his soft red tie and his soft blue jacket. The jacket had been sponged and pressed a good many times, he saw; the ghost of a stain was on the right shoulder. The other jacket was in a worse state, and though Adele, when he had shown it to her, had clicked her teeth and said she would sponge and press it today, he felt that they had reached the point where both would have to be taken to the laundress. He left the art room, buttoning his jacket and brushing down the sleeves. For one moment he thought of an existence where you could consider that your jacket was old and tattered, make a joke about it and go and order another from your tailor. He thought of his childhood.

Outside, the weather was beautiful; a late spring just turning into summer. It filled Christian with dread. The baby was to be born in the middle of August, three months away. It would be born, if the doctors were right, two weeks after his contract with the Gymnasium came to an end. He did not know what he and Adele and the baby were to live on. Adele was clever with money, and could make her sister’s income as a young master feed all three of them. Elsa did not seem to care about money and, indeed, quite happily handed over her wages to Adele, with, almost, an air of relief that that was one responsibility gone. Still, Christian knew himself that it was not his money, and not Adele’s; it was not much, and it was Elsa’s. He did not like the idea of living on the small sum the Bauhaus paid his sister-in-law in the metal workshop.

In the square, a mother in a neat blue coat and dress held a white-clad toddler by a set of leather reins; together, they were feeding stale bread to the ducks in the pond in the middle of the square, with cries of wonder and delight. Above, in the lime trees shading the pond, a blackbird sang, as if sharing in the cries of wonder and delight. Christian went past the mother and child with a feeling of failure in his own child’s life, even before it had begun. He went on in the direction of the town hall’s spire, poking above the layers of solid, weary housing. The streets were full of houses, people living somehow in comfort and happiness, like his landlady in Weimar and her architect lover Neddermeyer. Was it just a question of being born at the right time, and muddling through somehow, that you ended up happily feeding waste bread to ducks in the afternoon with your happy son on reins in a knitted white cardigan?