The Emperor Waltz (7 page)

‘I was not told there would be two of you,’ the colonel, if that was who it was, said. A little gust of sour smells came from him: of old schnapps on the breath, of ancient clothes, not washed, of some kind of brutal disinfectant liquid, not intended in the first instance for personal application. ‘May I sit down?’

‘By all means,’ Kandinsky said. ‘But I think there is some mistake. We were not here to meet anyone.’

‘I was waiting,’ the colonel said. He bared his teeth in an attempt at warmth; his teeth were brown and broken. ‘I was waiting for a business associate.’

‘Who was to ask for the colonel, I quite understand.’

‘It is all the same,’ the colonel said and, without waiting further, pulled out a chair. He nodded, sharply, not quite saluting. He might have brought his heel together with the end of his wooden leg, but the gesture would have lacked assurance. With a swivelling movement, he sat down on the sideways chair. ‘My business associate is late,’ he said. ‘He may not come. Things have been difficult, gentlemen, you understand.’

‘Things are difficult for everyone,’ Kandinsky said, sharply, but with a tinge of resignation. This happened in coffee houses. It was their own fault for being apologetic.

‘Difficult, yes, difficult,’ the colonel said, emphasizing the roll of the word. ‘I lost my leg in battle. Twenty-five years or more I was in the cavalry of His Majesty. And then there was no His Majesty, and no cavalry, as far as I know. And my leg lies in the mud at Verdun. I gave thanks for the escape then, but now I wish they had made an end of me at Verdun, and I would not have seen what I have seen.’

‘Why,’ Klee said. ‘What have you seen.’

He asked it in a plain way, but the colonel turned on him. ‘What have I seen? I have seen the politicians call back the army before they could win. And they dismissed His Majesty. And they declared that we had lost the war, and would not listen to disagreement. We did not lose. We were not defeated by the enemy. We were stabbed in the back. Gentlemen,’ and his harsh voice turned in on itself, remembering that he was there for a purpose, that his voice should be soft and agreeable, ‘gentlemen, I don’t know if you are interested in a very interesting business proposition, but I have property to sell, a very interesting and well-made volume of clothing. I don’t know if you have any means to sell it among your circle, shirts, beautifully made white cotton shirts, and boots, as solid as anyone could desire, truly excellent, and body-linen, stockings, anything you could require, and very reasonable, I know how the cost of things is going, Lord knows how we all know that …’

At the other table, the colonel’s companion raised her glass of schnapps to her lips, shaking slightly. She was tranquil, much powdered, patient and bemused. She had spent so many afternoons at this table, sipping a schnapps while the colonel made his appeal to strangers and contacts. The colonel’s patriotism ran down like a half-wound clockwork engine; the colonel’s offer to sell army property took over. Kandinsky and Klee said nothing. The two cups of coffee arrived. The colonel looked at them. He fell silent. His eyes rested on the table; it might have been shame. Abruptly he pushed the chair backwards, and got to his feet with diagonal thrusts and jabs.

‘Fifty million marks would be a help to me, in the position in which I find myself,’ he said. His red eyes brimmed. He must have seen that Klee and Kandinsky were looking at him intently, in different ways, but both with nothing more than interest, not sympathy or encouragement.

‘Good day to you,’ Kandinsky said.

‘I am sorry,’ the man finished, with a touch of parade-ground sarcasm, ‘to have disturbed you, gentlemen, in your important discussions.’

They watched him go. He sat down heavily in his chair, three tables away. His companion raised her eyes slowly, as if pulling them up with great effort. The movement continued: she raised her eyebrows in question. He gave a brief, decisive shake of the head, only a degree or two, dismissing the possibility. They both took up their glasses, clinked them, and took a sip. And in a moment, as if Klee and Kandinsky had been the bad luck that the colonel needed to expunge, a quite ordinary-looking man, no more than twenty-seven, in an ordinary black overcoat and a bowler hat, slid without invitation into the third chair at the colonel’s table and started to talk.

‘“To one of the nation’s heroes,”’ Klee said, repeating the words neutrally. And the man must have been desperate to accept money, to be unable to barter his possessions for anything else. Klee liked to repeat phrases, trying them out. A week or a month or a year later, Kandinsky knew he would enter Klee’s studio to ask what he had been achieving lately, and he would be handed a drawing, led up to a painting on an easel, of a giant figure, smudged with oil transfer lines, and underneath would be written ‘To one of the nation’s heroes’, and a neat, cryptic entry in Klee’s numbering system, 1922/109.

‘And two more cups of coffee,’ Klee said to the waitress, arriving with a pen.

‘That will be five hundred thousand marks,’ the waitress said.

‘No, four hundred thousand,’ Kandinsky said. ‘You said two hundred thousand each, for the cups of coffee.’

‘It was four hundred thousand when you ordered the first two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. ‘The new price for two cups of coffee is five hundred thousand.’

‘No, no, how can that be,’ Klee said. ‘Two hundred thousand is monstrous already – how can that be the price of a cup of coffee, even here, even in expensive Weimar – but five hundred thousand, half a million for two, how can the price change in an hour, how can that be?’

‘The price now, at seventeen minutes past four o’clock, is five hundred thousand marks for two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. Her enchantment with Klee had disappeared. ‘If we continue this discussion for long enough, the price of two cups of coffee will be six hundred thousand marks. It is entirely up to you, gentlemen.’

Outside the coffee house, the soldiers were assembling. The group they had seen before had reappeared. There seemed to be a protest or march in the making. They laid their hands protectively on the handles as if the touch would make sense of everything. About their arms, each had a cloth armband, not part of their uniform originally. On it was some kind of device or symbol, a red shape of some kind. By the door of the coffee house, the colonel, leaning on his crutch, shook the hand of the businessman, full of smiles. The colonel’s lady stood five paces off, looking at the soldiers, swaying confusedly to and fro.

12.

Christian had discovered a short-cut through the park to Frau Scherbatsky’s house, after the baroque sandstone bridge across the stream. He was ridiculously pleased with this insight, and came to the door of the house where he lived with a proud feeling of starting to belong in the town. The doorbell was not immediately responded to; he had to ring again before Maria, the red-haired maid, answered. She looked at him as if his face had not registered; she had a confused and perhaps even an embarrassed expression, but she stood back and let him through, with his portfolio of drawings.

There was no one else to be seen, but when he was in his room, and taking the drawings of marketplace, ducal palace, standing figures and park out of the portfolio, Christian was startled by some noise in the quiet house. It was a muffled shriek; then the sound of a woman giggling; then a shriek again, and soon, from only two or three rooms away in the house, transmitted by pipe and panelling, Christian realized that he was listening to the sounds of Frau Scherbatsky in bed with someone, in the afternoon. He did not want to listen, but there seemed no way of not listening. Her shrieks and downward glissandos of joy grew, and then they were joined by a man’s noises: a grunt and a few murmured words of encouragement, though it was not possible to understand what was said. Christian went to the window, and opened it, trying to concentrate on the sounds of the park. But the noises grew and were joined by the sound of wooden furniture banging against the wall. Christian felt himself beginning to blush. He had never heard such a thing in his family circle. He was a virgin himself, if that shameful and dishonourable visit to the brothel with two schoolfriends in the last Easter at the Gymnasium were not counted. Now a phrase was heard more clearly, spoken by a man. The window of the other room must be open, too, and by opening his window, he had allowed himself to hear more clearly. The student lodger had gone out, and Frau Scherbatsky and Herr Neddermeyer had taken advantage. The phrase he had heard, whatever it was, had been spoken in a strong Leipzig accent. The maid must have known that he would hear the noises she was used to, and understood that he had breached the unspoken conditions of lodging.

Christian became worldly and calm. ‘I say!’ he remarked, in an undertone to the empty room. ‘What beasts! Good for Neddermeyer – I hope I still have it in me when I am as old as that! And the Scherbatsky! Fine woman – and a woman has needs that an architect-lodger can fulfil. A well-known fact.’ He was practising for an anecdote. But who he would tell the anecdote to, he did not know. With a large sigh and a bestial sound, the encounter seemed to come to an end. Christian realized that they were in what must be Neddermeyer’s room, not Frau Scherbatsky’s, which was on the other side, next door to his room. And in the meantime, an awkwardness was arising: he would need to visit the lavatory quite soon, to cross the landing to the shared bathroom. To leave the room now would risk meeting Frau Scherbatsky in dressing gown, négligé or similar intimate apparel, making her dishevelled way back to her room to prepare her appearance for supper. He looked under the bed, but this was a modern house and there was no pot. He waited.

There was the sound of a door being opened, of footsteps, the unsynchronized clatter of footsole against slipper. The sound went past Christian’s door; the door of Frau Scherbatsky’s door was opened and closed. He breathed out. He must keep quiet in his movements. Frau Scherbatsky and Herr Neddermeyer had only permitted themselves this licence because they believed that Christian – and, presumably, still, the tantalizing Herr Wolff – were not in the house.

He opened the door silently and, shoeless, walked across to the bathroom. The modern flush of the lavatory made a noise, and when Christian stepped out of the bathroom, he saw, to his horror, that Herr Neddermeyer’s door was now standing open – it had been opened in the previous minute. ‘Herr Vogt?’ Neddermeyer’s voice called. ‘Is that you? Do come in.’

Christian stood in the door of Neddermeyer’s room, twisting his hands about, one in the other. The room was attractive and immaculate. The bed was made, under a white counterpane. On the walls were views of Roman and other classical ruins; in the bow window stood a substantial octagonal table in mahogany with a central supporting pillar. The table bore a thick pile of papers, weighed down at four corners by a bronze Japanese fisherman, a millefiori paperweight, a grotesquely shaped stone, mounted in silver, and a bust of Brahms in alabaster. On the table, too, were an architect’s drawing tools of pencil and compasses, squares and protractors, in an open walnut case lined with worn black leather. Neddermeyer gestured towards one of the two armchairs in yellow velvet. Unexpectedly, his appearance gave no indication of the rumpus he had just been through: he was groomed and of normal colour, his clothes not suggesting that they had been flung to the floor and picked up some time afterwards. There was nothing of the debauch about him, or about his room.

‘Welcome to my home – my lair, one could say,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I can offer you some coffee – nothing elaborate, nothing extensive, but I do insist on having coffee-making as a possibility in my room.’

‘That is very kind,’ Christian said.

‘I cannot always be calling on Maria to bring me cups from the kitchen,’ Neddermeyer said, going over and opening a small cupboard and beginning to fiddle with its contents. ‘My one remaining vice. So, Herr Vogt, I saw you venturing out this afternoon with your sketchbook. You found some subjects worthy of your pencil? Good, good. I am sure that the Bauhaus will chase the love of beauty out of you very quickly, and replace it with a love of steel and sharp corners. I saw a soup plate that one of them had made. It was square. The absurdity!’

‘Why so, Herr Neddermeyer?’

‘They had not considered,’ Neddermeyer said, ‘that a square has angles and a circle has none. A maidservant, presenting a soup plate, presents it at the eye level of her master. The master’s attention is drawn to something on his right; he turns sharply. The plate is a square one, however, as designed by the bright fellows at the Bauhaus, and the eye is thrust against a sharp corner of a hard material. The master, who has bought a daring novelty and flatters himself that he has an original eye, has, from now on, exactly that: an original eye. Only one.’ Neddermeyer tittered in a genteel, practised, taut way.

Neddermeyer was talking amiably, swivelling and smiling from his post at the coffee cupboard, and now he turned and brought over the cups of coffee. They were tiny, gold and green, with a small medallion of flowers painted on the side. Despite the smile, Neddermeyer’s voice had been growing tense, and he was not looking, exactly, at Christian as he handed it over. He placed his own on the small table by the other armchair, and removed a spotted red handkerchief from the inside pocket of his Bavarian jacket. He wiped his hands clean.

‘I think Frau Scherbatsky said you are an architect?’ Christian said. The coffee, despite coming from a small cupboard, was delicious, with no taint of chicory or acorn.

‘I was an architect,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I do not think I will ever build again.’

‘Do you have drawings of your work?’ Christian said. ‘I would so like to see them.’

Neddermeyer did not exactly brighten, but he grew businesslike, as if he had been expecting Christian to say exactly that. Perhaps he had called Christian in for this exact purpose, to show his drawings. Christian reflected that after the pleasures which Neddermeyer and Frau Scherbatsky had indulged in, the ego was never satisfied; it was at that point, the day after his schoolfriends had visited a brothel, that they were most apt to show classmates their best marks, the most flattering comments made on their work by masters, or, at the very least, to treat the fellows at a coffee shop, pulling out their marks with a profligate air. Neddermeyer wanted someone to see what a marvellous fellow he was.