The Emperor Waltz (28 page)
Authors: Philip Hensher
‘That’s quite all right,’ Duncan said wretchedly. He handed over a pound note. He took the sandwich, feeling that everyone – Andy, Chris, even Reggie, even the workman called Dave – was watching him go with silent suppression of laughter, their shoulders going like Edward Heath, and the whole street, and the whole of London, all laughing hatefully and wanting them all to fail, and die, and eat a lot of sputum without knowing it, and pay the full whack. He opened the door of his shop. By the side of the cherrywood desk there was a bin, and Duncan dropped the sandwich into it. Tomorrow he would bring his own lunch from home. He had known all this was going to happen. He had been prepared. It was ready to begin. In his wallet, he remembered, he had written down the number of a neighbourhood glazier, for the first time the shop window would be smashed with a thrown brick. He must remember to give the number to Arthur.
The gardener’s boy was already hard at work, weeding the English flowerbeds, when Christian Vogt left the house, that first morning. He was tugging, twisting, laying aside in a wicker basket; he was kneeling on a small wooden footstool. From his perspiration, he must have been at work in the front part of the garden for some time. Christian nodded to him and, in his carefully chosen limp crêpe suit, with its pattern of dogstooth, turned right into the lane. It was five to nine in the morning. He had learnt that the Bauhaus, unlike schools, did not start until mid-morning, and even on the first day of registration, there was no need to be there before half past nine. Unlike a school, too, when he approached the Bauhaus, the noise of conversation from the waiting students was mellifluous, continuous, like a crowded room of intelligent people. The street wound about, opening into a half-square with a lime tree at its centre; a window was opened, and a bolster case flapped three or four times in the clean air; the sound of people talking grew stronger, and then, with a turn and a lump in his throat, there he was. Behind the lawn and the line of trees, the Bauhaus rose with its huge windows, its sliding pitched roof. The fifty or so people were sitting or standing at the double door to the building, smoking and, one or two, eating. Their clothes were smart and undecided; some had done the same as Christian, and put on a fashionable suit; others were wearing what looked like country farmers’ clothes, with thick boots and heavy trousers. The women had short and square haircuts, and many were wearing trousers with weighty, probably self-knitted, sweaters. Perhaps Christian hesitated somewhat; a woman glanced over and saw him pause. She had a basket at her feet; her head craned out, searching for something in the crowd. She looked away again.
Afterwards, he could only know that this moment had happened. He had no memory of first seeing Adele Winteregger, or of beginning a conversation with her. How could he begin a conversation with someone his life had always been waiting for? They were in mid-conversation before his convulsive senses registered and recorded the moment.
‘Are you beginning this year?’
‘No,’ the girl said. ‘I am not a student here. I am only here to visit my sister.’
‘Where do you come from?’
There was a pause. From a thousand miles away, Christian heard voices exchanging remarks, the squeal of a tram somewhere near by, the melody of a violin from the upper floors of a house.
‘My name is Adele Winteregger. But why do you ask these questions?’ the girl said. When she spoke it was as if a consoling hiss of silence fell around her, as if a seashell had been placed to his ear.
‘I want to know everything about you.’
He looked at her. It was with a shock and a delight. Her face was smooth and neat, a little button nose, trim eyebrows and neatly pulled-back hair. Something extraordinary about her eyes, only; a tiny-pupilled deep blue, a kind of blankness in the expression. When he looked at her, it was like the moment before the shutters in a room opposite were drawn. Years ago, when he was young and did not even understand, the newly married couple in the apartment facing theirs across the street came home; they were in their bedroom; behind them was an oil lamp that lit up their shapes and their bold embrace as a coat, a dress was undone, and, without the embrace being interrupted, placed by the side of them. A wolf whistle from the street, years ago; a sudden start, a jumping apart, and the man came to the window and closed the shutters. Here, too, the thrill he felt in his neck, his arms, that too foreshadowed a closing of the shutters. No point was to be served by delay or dissemblance, and he said what he had to say, not knowing what he was going to say before he said it.
‘One day I am going to paint you.’
‘My father said that the art students would be like this. But my sister has to come here, to be qualified. She is so good at art! After this, I think she is going to become a teacher of art, in a school. That would make my father so happy. What is your name?’
‘My name is Christian Vogt.’
Around them, the people were moving slowly into the Bauhaus; the clock had chimed the half-hour, and the doors had been found to be open the whole time.
‘I must go,’ Adele Winteregger said. ‘I came to make sure my sister arrived safely and on time, and now I must go to buy some food for our dinner.’
‘But how long are you here for? What are you doing here? Not just cooking your sister’s dinner?’
‘Our father asked me to come and make sure that Elsa was quite settled in, and then travel back home again, as cheaply as possible. I do not know. I have a job as a dressmaker and seamstress. I make sure that the work of the others is good enough. I am lucky to have the job, and would not like to lose it through being away. They are so kind! They offered me three weeks’ holiday, unpaid, in order to settle my sister in. And my sister is here for her second year. She does not truly need me.’
‘One day I am going to paint you,’ Christian said. The girl looked at him; she wrinkled her nose, she turned away slightly.
‘Here is my sister,’ she said. Christian heard, as if for the first time, her saying that she had come to make sure Elsa was quite settled in. He saw the girl from Saturday, her shaved head, her waving manner. She came directly up to them, and dropped her broad canvas portfolio at his feet.
‘You!’ she said. ‘Are you talking to my sister? She went on ahead, I don’t know why. She wanted to be at the Bauhaus door before me, to make sure that I was coming. Why shouldn’t I come? What are you doing here? I don’t need you, and this boy doesn’t want to meet you.’
‘I only made sure that you were here, that you were going to your class on time,’ Adele Winteregger said. ‘And now I’ve seen you in, and I can go and do what needs to be done.’
‘Yes, go away, go away, we are quite all right now,’ Elsa said.
Adele Winteregger picked up her basket and, with a neat, satisfied walk, walked away from them. Just at the point where the path between trees turned into the road, she turned, and gave a smile in their direction. She was used to being spoken to like that by her sister, it was clear. And some of that smile might have been intended for Christian. He watched her go, her little shape passing between trees, and across the road where a blind soldier in a bath chair waited, an oil can on the floor in front of him, waiting for contributions. Adele Winteregger reached into her basket and dropped a folded-up banknote into the man’s receptacle.
‘That is your sister,’ Christian said, to make sure.
‘Your first day at the Bauhaus!’ Elsa said. ‘You must be terrified. I was terrified. Everyone I know in my year was terrified. I’m still terrified.’
‘That is your sister,’ Christian said. ‘I would like to meet her again.’
‘You could go to Breitenberg,’ Elsa said. ‘That is where she comes from, where we come from. She is going back there, very soon. Martin!’ she said, calling out to a man with a shaved head and a hunting jacket on. ‘Martin! Martin!’
‘But where is Breitenberg?’ Christian said, now speaking alone, to himself.
In the north of Bavaria, where a town called Breitenberg sits perched, black-and-white, stone, plaster and wood, over a gushing river, there lived a puppet-maker and his two daughters, one lovely, one clever.
The town had known patches of prosperity, and these had left their mark in the shape of energetic building. Half a millennium ago, the merchants of the city had knocked down everything they could, and replaced it all with broad, winding streets and handsome, tall-faced buildings of black wood and plaster, black-and-white and top-heavy. Some time later, another burst of prosperity had led the town to put up grand stone palaces, heavy and laden with cornucopia and fruit flourishes in the local yellowish stone. One of these spanned the river, with a strange back-house of wood and plaster, like a compromise between old and new; another formed a tall gate-house, and a third was a three-spired cathedral whose roots and cellars, beneath the extravagance, were said to date back to the three-digit centuries. Since then, not much had been built. The town remained as it had been. From time to time, a visitor appeared to admire or register its backwater charm. Once, recently, a photographer from Berlin had arrived, and had set up his equipment in the street, promising to document the whole of this interesting and picturesque town. It had once been considered as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, before being passed over; it had been considered for a railway in the 1840s, before being passed over in favour of Bamberg; it had been considered again in the 1870s, before being passed over; and finally had been connected to the rest of the world in the 1880s, the largest German town at that date not to possess a railway station. The town’s accent was considered amusing (by Bavarians), baffling (by most Germans) and interesting by philologists, who noted some archaic vowel structures and some unique habits of elision. Breitenberg had its own beer and its own cake; the Breitenbergerkuche was a friable confection of up to ten thin meringue circles held together with whipped cream and raspberries. It was made by three patissiers in the town, who said that they guarded the recipe closely, although it was a recipe that a child of ten could have worked out. The Breitenberg beer was a more specialized taste, which demanded the smoking of the hops at the earliest stage of the brewing process; some people described the beer that resulted as ‘ham-like’ or, sometimes, reminiscent of a liquid cigar. It was famous throughout Germany, a thousand years old, and not much liked even by the hardened drinkers of Breitenberg. The brewery, which emitted a strong smell of tarry sweetness several days a month, was owned by the dukes of Breitenberg, as it always had been, and was situated two miles away, in a forest-lined valley, by the side of the river running down from the mountains that circled the town. Only when the wind came from the south-west did the brewery’s smell bother the town.
As well as the beer and the cake, Breitenberg was known for a puppet maker called Winteregger. His father had made puppets, and his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father. The puppets were beautifully made, hanging from strings, and were taken about the country by Franz Winteregger himself. Winteregger went to Christmas fairs throughout the German-speaking world, and was known even to historians of folk art and to the great makers of toys. His puppets were sold in the best toyshops in Berlin, Prague, Cologne and Vienna, and hung in the best nurseries in Budapest, Sarajevo, Trieste and Lübeck. Winteregger’s puppets were uncanny, both in stillness, on a hook, and in movement, in the little marionette theatre his father had built at the back of the family house. In stillness, their faces were expressive and human, often persuading buyers that they depicted someone that they knew – someone whose features were just out of memory’s reach. In movement, they were transformed. Winteregger often made four or five separate heads with different expressions for his performing marionettes, so that the sad-faced puppet of the first act would be able to marry the heroine in the last with a face of joy. It was their movement, however, that transfigured them. A simple arc of the puppeteer’s arm, a straight line, uncannily transformed itself into the fluid sweep of the puppet’s body. The awkward and conscious gesture of the puppeteer’s arm, re-enacted by inanimate matter, became a lovely arabesque of grace and flirtation. The puppet knew things that the puppeteer could never grasp. That was the statement Franz Winteregger lived by: you can never know what you put in motion. They had no need of the ground; they grazed it only lightly, for appearance’s sake. At the end of the string, they had shed the self-consciousness that prevented the puppeteers, at the other end, from moving as if in a dance. Winteregger’s studio worked as it had in his father’s day, and his grandfather’s, and his grandfather’s father. He had four craftsmen working there, one of whom was his nephew – his sister’s boy Joseph. In the puppet theatre, there were two puppeteers, a married couple called Schwind. Joseph would inherit the business. Franz Winteregger had only two daughters, one clever, one beautiful, and since his wife had died in 1905, he would have no more children, unless he remarried, as Breitenberg hoped he would.
The daughters were a spectacle in Breitenberg. The elder, by two years, was clever but awkward. Her voice shrieked; her movements were jerky and undecided; her hair flew out from under her hat; her clothes were curious and assorted incoherently. She showed the lack of a mother who would have told her to lower her voice and not say such things, to make sure of her tidy appearance, to make certain to wear
this
with
this
. She was clever and would become shocking, in the small town of Breitenberg.
The second was the younger by two years. She was beautiful. Her hair fell in a smooth fillet across her forehead; she liked to wear a black ribbon with her mother’s portrait in a miniature medallion; her clothes were simple but lovely. She was still, and did not fidget. Her sister had taken up all the energy and restless fury that two sisters may possess. She was not clever, but the depth of her blue eyes, fixed entirely on the person speaking to her without movement or change, had convinced many people that her talk did not reflect her thoughts. People had been saying that she was deep since she was three years old, since it was too banal and obvious to say that she was beautiful. They would go on saying it all her life.