The Emperor Waltz (78 page)

‘She could send her royalties to me, if she felt that guilty,’ Arthur said.

‘Well, feel free to sell them,’ Celia said. ‘It’ll pay for a very good holiday, I would have thought.’

‘I’ll keep two,’ Arthur said. ‘One for reading, and one just to keep and look at and preserve.
The Garden King
. I knew people would come to it. Did Alan read it?’

‘It was Alan’s favourite book, at the end,’ Celia said, with a crispness that indicated the subject could not be entered on; and Alan had been her favourite homosexual, Arthur remembered.

‘I wondered why you’d come to see me,’ Arthur said. ‘To come all this way, just to bring a few books. That was so nice.’

Celia drank her tea. She looked in an assessing way at Arthur. ‘There was something else,’ she said.

3.

Not everyone had come in after the party last night. It had been in the basement of the former telephone factory in Birkbuschstrasse. They had been getting the building into teaching order, but there was no doubt that the Bauhaus had been in better condition in Dessau. The students who had come in were expecting the worst today, and sat about on the borrowed and stolen tables, talking about what it had been like in Dessau. What had happened to that building? The NSDAP had seized it, as it had seized all of Dessau, and it had become, what, a school, a medical institution? But the buildings would not do as they were, one architecture student told another. It had flat roofs. That was what Oriental, Jewish buildings looked like. Work was at hand to amend and improve the main building, and also what had been the Masters’ Houses.

There was a little Master, a new one, who had been taken on only when all the old Masters moved to Switzerland, or America, or India, or England. He said he had been connected with the Bauhaus for such years – oh, such years, since he was a student and it had been in Weimar. And now they had taken him on in Berlin. He heard the architecture student talking amusingly about the flat roofs of Dessau.

‘The surprising thing,’ the little Master said, ‘the very surprising thing is that I myself grew up in Berlin in a house with dragons, plaster dragons ornamenting the portico. Dragons seem much more Oriental to me than flat roofs, but I don’t know that the Party is thinking of tearing those down. I must ask my wife,’ he finished, in a sort of mutter.

They were not quite sure what he was doing there. There did not seem to be any prospect of teaching happening today. It was a bright clear day in April; the light outside the shabby factory was making the eyes of some of the students hurt. It was always a surprise when one of the Masters remained, even a very little one. It was a pleasant game among the more ambitious students to name the people who had taught or studied at the Bauhaus, and then say, laughing, where they were now. Joseph Albers was somewhere else in America. Hannes Meyer was in the Soviet Union. Gunta Stölzl in Switzerland. Klee was back in safety in Switzerland. Someone else – Tel Aviv, was it called? Moholy-Nagy – England. Egon Rosenblatt was in Kentucky. Kandinsky – France. Elsa Winteregger – New York. Where had they gone? The place of the Bauhaus was here! The spirit still existed, but was it here, in the old telephone factory on the Birkbuschstrasse in Steglitz? All those people, sitting in their lonely rooms, starving amid the obscene riches of America, the cold, silent, urban fogs of England, they did not know what they were doing. The place of the Bauhaus was here, whatever the politicians decided.

The students sat in the dim room, perched on tables, their feet on the chairs, and presently one started passing a bottle to another. Another student remarked that the time was getting on, and they might have to go downstairs and start clearing up from the party. They might start by taking down the streamers in this classroom. But a girl laughed and laughed, holding the bottle. She said there was not much to be said for being closed down by stormtroopers. But one of the things in its advantage was that the school’s last and best party would have to be cleared up by the stormtroopers. Look, she said. They are already outside, preparing for their task of cleaning. They all went to the windows. It didn’t matter, a student remarked. He had himself rammed a broomhandle through the door handles, inside. Outside, there were hundreds of military officers, in black. Each had a truncheon, either in his fist or hanging from the waistband. At the front stood a major in, inexplicably, an American uniform. His men were waiting patiently, feet apart, for the order to begin the operation.

In the centre of the city, in a room high up in a heavy palazzo, the director of the Bauhaus stood and talked to a party official. He had said to others that he was not afraid before arriving. But now he was afraid.

‘The Bauhaus is nothing to do with politics,’ the director said. ‘You have to understand – we are about craft and technology. It has a certain idea.’

‘I, too, am an architect,’ the party official said smoothly. ‘I am from Riga.’

‘We understand each other, then,’ the director said.

‘I think that will never happen,’ the party official said. ‘Whatever you expect me to do – that is not possible. Your Bauhaus is driven by forces that are enemies to our forces. This is one army against another, two spiritual armies.’

‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ the director said, helplessly.

‘If you wanted to help yourself,’ the party official said, ‘you should have changed the name when you moved from Dessau to Berlin.’

‘It is a wonderful name,’ the director said. ‘The Bauhaus. There is no better name.’

And then the party official seemed to speak in parables. He said, ‘You can suspend something: you can cantilever something; but my feelings demand a support.’

‘The support, too, can be cantilevered,’ the director said.

‘Yes, that is so,’ the party official said. ‘Tell me. What is it that you want to do at the Bauhaus?’

The director walked around the desk, with his heart in his mouth. He felt he could be shot at any moment. He pulled out the drawers of the official’s desk and pushed them in again. He banged on the back of the official’s chair. ‘You are important. You are sitting here in an important position. And look at your writing table! Look at your shabby writing table! Seriously, do you like it? I would throw it out of the window. That is all we want to achieve. We want to have good objects that do not beg to be thrown out of the window.’

The official seemed cowed. He took his pen from the desk tidy and began to write something on a sheet of official paper. But it was not the letter that the director had hoped for. It was concerning something else entirely. The official cast a look upwards, and the director walked back to the other side of the desk.

‘We will see what can be done for you,’ the official said.

‘Well, don’t wait too long,’ the director said. He left.

But now the factory was echoing with noise; the thunderous bang of shoulders being thrust against the door. The irruption could not be long delayed. There were only thirty or forty of them inside, and at the beginning of the noise, they instinctively slid off the tables and stood. At least one was regretting coming to the Bauhaus today. There was no point. It would be closed today, and everyone here would be severely beaten. But others were thinking that there was something glorious about being here at the very end. They were thinking this before the infliction of physical pain.

The noise continued, and a girl clambered awkwardly onto the scarred work table at the centre of the room. She was a girl with vivid red hair, tied back with a rubber band. Before she spoke, she gave a calm gesture of her hand over her hair, smoothing it down. ‘Comrades!’ she said, and a mild, half-suppressed jeer came from the room. ‘Comrades, I say! This has been our story! And from now on, for us, the story continues outside the institution. It continues in the prisons, and in the schools, but it does not continue in the institution that made it. It continues in our hearts, and in our hands, and wherever a sheet of paper can be found! Think of that!’

There was some scattered applause from the group, but also a rude noise and a murmuring of dissent. The regular hammer of bodies against door continued. ‘Comrades! Listen to me! What do we have? We have no guns and we have no clubs. We have no stones to throw. But we are stronger, in the end we are stronger, because we have a teapot! We have a tapestry! We have a carpet that we made ourselves! Comrades, I am serious! We have this above all. We have in our hands this wonderful thing. Look!’

She held it up, a heroic pose, and her face tilted upwards to hail the small thing. Some people actually laughed, a derisive, sharp laugh. Christian Vogt thought that this gesture was all very well, in its way, to fill the short minutes remaining to them, and to the Bauhaus. But he wondered if he would ever see his wife and daughter, his brother, again, or if he was about to die under the blows of a truncheon in a police cell. ‘Look what we have!’ she said. ‘This is ours, and we know how to use it. Remember that they can smash our bodies, but they cannot smash our minds. They can smash one pencil, but they cannot destroy every pencil. Remember, too, that …’

But the doors to the Bauhaus were now splintering and smashing, and there was the sound of heavy boots crashing towards them down the central corridor. The derisive laughter in the room died away, and the students faced the door. The red-haired girl on the table held her position for a moment. She felt like a statue of resistance, but nobody there was observing her. Still, as the thugs in uniform crashed into the room, their truncheons raised, she held her arm up; the small soft drawing pencil in her hand indicating the ceiling. With a nervous gesture, she smoothed her hair again, pulling it away from her neck. She was alone, indomitable, angry and, for a few last moments, free. Just before the end came, she caught a glimpse outside the room. In the corridor, as the thugs ran in, there stood, quite coolly, the major in the American uniform.

4.

‘Say if you need to get back to work,’ Celia said, clutching her second cup of tea in her gloved hands. ‘You’ve been so kind. It’s been wonderful seeing you.’

‘There was something you wanted to ask me, you said,’ Arthur said. ‘Best just to come out with it.’

‘Arthur,’ Celia said. ‘I can still call you Arthur, can’t I? I was so much your friend as a little girl. It seems odd to call you anything else.’

‘Arthur is fine,’ Arthur said.

‘When was it that you first knew me? I can remember being in the bookshop, very young, three or four. But you must have seen me before that.’

‘I remember you later much better,’ Arthur said. ‘I remember you being there from start, though. Your mother coming in to say hello, and there was a big bulge, her tummy, you know, and I said to your uncle when she’d gone, she’s surely not having a baby, your sister? He said, Oh, yes, didn’t I mention it? There was a sort of pact between them not to tell anyone anything, much. You had to ask, or guess. And then when you were born, I remember your mother bringing you in when you were only three weeks old, a tiny thing, like a deflated balloon. A deflated balloon wi’ hair on. I’m sorry if that sounds rude. And then I remember you coming in when you could walk, and going straight to a bookshelf. You were fascinated by books. Children are. They go to a bookshelf and pull one out and shake it as if they could shake all them words loose. So there was that stage. And then you remember rest, I dare say.’

‘I wondered,’ Celia said. ‘You must have known Mummy quite well, I suppose.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Arthur said. ‘Very well. I saw her every week, at least.’

‘I wanted to ask …’ Celia began. ‘Arthur, I wanted to ask. When you found that Mummy was going to have a baby, was going to have me, do you remember who it was that she said the father was? Do you know at all?’

‘Is that it?’ Arthur said, after a moment.

‘Is that what?’

‘Is that why you’ve come to find me?’ Arthur said.

‘I wanted to see you,’ Celia said unconvincingly. ‘But I wanted to know the answer, too. Is that really so surprising? Why did you think I would come?’

‘I don’t know,’ Arthur said. ‘I couldn’t have guessed. You’d best ask your mother.’

‘Mummy says she can’t remember. But I don’t believe it. How can that be true?’

‘It’s not for me to say anything,’ Arthur said primly. He had never given the question a moment’s thought.

‘So you do know. Or you know something. I asked Uncle Duncan and he won’t say, and Mummy won’t. It’s so terribly important to me. No one else is around. Mummy’s friends – there were a pair called Katy and Bella, Uncle Duncan said, but they’d long disappeared by the time Mummy had me. And there were people she worked with, but she’d never have said anything to them. I never thought of Mummy as someone without friends, but there just doesn’t seem to be anyone who would have known. It’s so terribly important.’

‘You haven’t considered possibility that she’s not hiding it from you. She maybe just can’t remember. I never met your father. He wasn’t important. I certainly never met him.’

‘But you do know something, you do. Please. It’s so terribly important to me. Wouldn’t it be important to you?’

Arthur paused. ‘Why is it important?’

‘To know where you came from. To know what caused me. You can understand that.’

‘I can understand people wanting to know what they’ve caused. But do you ever know what caused you? How would you know?’

‘I would just know,’ Celia said. They looked at each other, both curiously tranquil. Celia’s face was firm with the determination not to express desperation; Arthur looked at the woman with interest. For the first time in years, he wondered what it must be like to feel like this. Where had he come from? What had caused him? The mother and father – dead now. His sisters; the books he had read. He looked at Celia, and for a fleeting moment saw not her dark father, but her mother, Dommie. He wanted, just for a second, to see Dommie again.

‘He was Syrian,’ Arthur said. ‘He was a student. That’s all I know. I don’t think there is anything else to know. I don’t suppose he even knows that you exist, or ever did know. Dommie wanted it that way. She’s not keeping anything from you.’