The Emperor Waltz (3 page)

Neddermeyer was, in fact, rather enjoying this humiliation. ‘Please help me, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘It can’t be the first thing I do when I arrive in poor Frau Scherbatsky’s house, start smashing her things about.’

‘No,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Although, you must admit, it is the thing which you have started by doing.’ He picked up the lid from the floor. ‘It is really not as bad as all that. A very clean break. And here is our hostess.’

Frau Scherbatsky came in, smiling. ‘I hope you have not been waiting – the tea must be quite cold. I had to finish a letter to my daughter in Dresden. Now—’

‘Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian began.

‘A terrible thing has happened,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I was brushing past the bookcase when my sleeve unfortunately caught your very ugly jar here; it fell; the lid has smashed. But there is good news! It is not so badly broken. It can be mended and riveted very easily.’

‘Oh dear,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Is it so very ugly? I never really thought of it. I don’t suppose it is even any use in the marketplace – no one would barter anything for it, I am certain. By all means, take it and mend it if it salves your conscience, Herr Neddermeyer.’

Christian, full of silent gratitude for the saving of the situation, tried to engage Neddermeyer’s eye, but he quizzically raised an eyebrow without looking in more than Christian’s general direction. ‘Here is some orange cake,’ he said, sitting down. ‘My favourite.’

The orange cake was dry, perhaps a day or two past its best, and flavoured artificially rather than with peel and juice. Christian took a bite just as Frau Scherbatsky said, ‘You are here to study, Herr Vogt, you were saying?’ He could not for the moment speak: his mouth was full of dry cake and his eyes, at once, began to fill with tears of shame at his vandalism. Instead of going on talking – she had asked only for the benefit of Neddermeyer – Frau Scherbatsky waited with a courteous half-smile as Christian took a great gulp of tea to wash it down. He felt like a brutal animal invited to tea with two clever, immaculate dolls, and to finish off the toy-like impression of beauty of Frau Scherbatsky’s house, he now saw, as he prepared to speak, that the teapot from which she had poured was ingeniously shaped in the form of a cauliflower, and the teacup from which he was about to drink was a circle of cauliflower leaves. He swallowed, shook his head.

‘You are a student of what, Herr Vogt?’ Neddermeyer said.

‘I am about to begin the study of art,’ Christian said.

‘Ah, excellent,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘An art historian. That is excellent. At the university here?’

‘No, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘I am studying to become an artist.’

‘At my old school, then,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Is it still in existence? I came here myself to study there, here in Weimar, when I was no more than nineteen, and I have never left. Thirty-eight years ago this autumn. We architecture students had little to do with the fellows on the painting and drawing side. I expect things are just the same now – one half thinks the other flibbertigibbets, and the other thinks them dull, money-grubbing fellows. Artists never change.’

‘You put it so well, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘But is the art school that you are thinking of still in existence, Herr Neddermeyer, even?’

‘I am enrolled at the Bauhaus,’ Christian said. ‘It is only just opening now.’

‘The Bauhaus,’ Neddermeyer said. There was a perceptible chilling; he set down his tea and tipped his head back slightly, inspecting Christian over the top of his glasses. ‘The Bauhaus.’

Christian had the distinct impression that Neddermeyer was now about to change his mind about his previous brotherliness and to tell their landlady that, after all, it had been Christian who had smashed the aubergine pot.

‘I know the Bauhaus,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘There is wild talk in the town, both about them and, I must say, by them. When you are as old as I am, you have seen plenty of young men who hope to change the world by shocking their elders. And as time goes on, the shock fades away – the shock and the desire to shock. You hope only to make things as well as your ancestors made them. That may prove difficult enough. The Bauhaus. Well. They wish to make things new, I believe, and turn our lives upside down; to ask us to sit on tetrahedrons, and to live in houses made of glass, like tomatoes. I have seen plenty of wild young men, wanting to change the world by shocking their elders. I may have been one of them myself, once upon a time.’

Christian inspected the cauliflower teapot; the inglenook fireplace; the padded window-seat. He did not object.

‘Young people will not like the same things as old people,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, smiling. ‘You must admit that if no new opinions ever came along we should be living in the houses of Augustus the Strong.’

‘I don’t think anyone wants to shock,’ Christian said. ‘I think we only want to start by making new things. But I haven’t been there yet. I am sure you know more about it than I do.’

Neddermeyer had got up and, holding his leaf-shaped teacup, had gone over to the window, perhaps to hide his emotions. It seemed as if the mention of the Bauhaus struck some chord with him. ‘They seem very little interested in Weimar, where they are,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe they recruited any teaching staff from the town, though, Heaven knows, there are enough talents and experience to power a—’

‘Herr Neddermeyer feels strongly,’ Frau Scherbatsky said confidentially but audibly, leaning her whole body towards Christian from her chair. ‘He was very unfortunately—’

‘And here they come,’ Neddermeyer said, his voice raising gleefully as he looked out of the window. ‘I don’t know whether you have seen your colleagues and masters yet? They come this way every day, around this time, for their exercise. I promise you, I did not ask them to appear to prove any kind of a point.’

5.

In the park, three hundred metres away, a small group of people was approaching. They had shaven heads that shone in the sun like wet pebbles by the lakeside. There were eight or nine of them; their smiles, too, shone in the light. It was their clothing that seemed most extraordinary. An elderly woman in a fur-collared overcoat was just now pausing, thirty metres from them, and watching them with open fascination. They wore floor-length robes in purple, flapping as they moved; home-made and evidently not well fitting. The robes looked very much like the garb of a wizard Christian had seen in a childhood pantomime. The tallest of the group, a man in his late twenties or early thirties, wore also a metal collar, like a pewter platter with the middle excised. The group surged around him; their combined movement was uniform, rippling, wavelike and unnervingly joyous. Christian felt that if he left the house and went towards this group he would be brought in; he would experience their joy, cut off from the delights and sorrows of the world about him. And yet he did not want to go towards them. The single, jogging, up-and-down rhythm of their heads, like a string ensemble approaching a climax, was unnatural and fruitless. What were they doing? They seemed to be going for a walk, but they were pressed together too tightly for that; they might have been a single body. Their smiles and joyous movements suggested that someone in there was talking, but you could not see that they were anything but silent as they walked. They moved to some music, audible only to themselves. With a shock, Christian saw that they were men and women mixed, brought into a uniformity of appearance by their heads being shaved.

As they passed, their attention seemed forward-facing. But one of them – a woman, it looked like – must have felt the gaze of Frau Scherbatsky, Herr Neddermeyer and Christian upon her from the leaded window of the house. She turned, alone, as if rebelling against the will of the group and, with a habitual but pointless gesture, made a movement over her shaved head. Her wide and empty smile – her mouth was, he could see, too large for her little face – did not alter; he could not see whether she had, in fact, engaged with his look or seen the three of them through the window at all. He felt ashamed. In a moment the girl in her loose Biblical robe of purple turned away again, and the tightly knit procession, like a performance, moved on away from them.

‘They come every day, around this time,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘I couldn’t tell you what it is all about. My neighbours are fascinated by it.’

‘I think it is some kind of newly invented religion,’ Neddermeyer said.

‘Oh, surely not,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘At first we believed that it was some sort of advertisement for a children’s play, something of that sort – the seven noble wizards, you know, Herr Vogt.’

‘Do you know where they come from?’ Christian said. They resumed their seats; Neddermeyer continued to stand at the window, entranced.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘They come from the Bauhaus.’

‘The one at the front,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Did you see? The one at the front, taller and older than the rest, he is actually a member of the teaching staff. I have heard that he has, indeed, invented a new religion, which he requires his students to follow. We were quite safe up here, but if you come close to them, seeing them by chance in the street, they emit an overpowering scent of garlic. I have heard that one of the tenets of the religion is that nothing else may be eaten. A sort of purge.’

‘Very inconsiderate to the rest of us,’ Frau Scherbatsky said.

‘If, when I was a student of architecture all those years ago, I had been told that my professor wished me to wear violet robes in public, to shave my head, to eat nothing but garlic, and to follow a new religion of his devising …’ Neddermeyer started to say.

Frau Scherbatsky nodded, perhaps embarrassed on behalf of Christian. ‘Where is Herr Wolff, Herr Neddermeyer? Did he tell you?’

‘I believe he is in Erfurt this afternoon, on business,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘His usual business. He said he was unsure whether he would return this evening.’

‘Really,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘That, too, is inconsiderate. He might have told me before he went away.’

6.

In a room not so very far away, with a similar view of the park, a man and a twelve-year-old boy sat. The room was hung with paintings; in each of them, an animal, a form, an arrangement of lines, an exclamation mark, the heads of people as drawn by children could be seen. On the easel, a square canvas with blotches and stains in ochre, violet and umber. The boy and the man sat at the tea table, set with a cloth and an old, dented silver tea service. The man fixed the boy with his gaze; the boy’s eyes were huge. The man took a small cardboard box from his pocket, opened it and took out a sugar cube, delicately, with his thin fingers on which paint had dried and dirt been allowed to accumulate beneath his nails. With the tips of his fingers, his eyes never leaving the boy’s face, he lifted the silver lid of the sugar bowl, and dropped the sugar cube among other, nearly indistinguishable sugar cubes. He lowered the lid, and replaced the cardboard box in his pocket. His hands were paint-stained, but his clothes were immaculately clean; Klee liked to take off his painting smock before he had his tea in the afternoon. The boy’s eyes filled with premonitory laughter. Underneath the table on a Turkish leather cushion, a cat slept in its favourite place, curled with its face into its belly, its feet about its face, and paid no attention to anything that was happening.

There seemed nothing more to say. Klee sat back and took out the cigarette he liked to smoke before tea. In one of their shared rituals, Felix got up and went about the studio until he found the place where his father had last left his matches. This time it was by the window-seat, where he often liked to prowl and stand before the view while thinking about his next move on a painting. Not exactly looking at the view, more a matter of letting the world flood in without seeing it, his father had once said. For a second, as he picked up the matches, Felix tried the trick. But it was no good. He could not help actually looking at the world; at the pack of shaved-head wizards moving off into the distance following Johannes Itten, the trees in the park, a blackbird sitting on the branch nearest to the house, and his mother almost at the gate of the house, returning from her walk and already unbuttoning her coat in her eagerness for her tea. He took the matches over to his father and, as he was allowed to, struck one, holding it up to his father’s cigarette.

‘Mother is here,’ Felix said. ‘I saw her just coming up the road.’

His voice trembled with his terrible amusement, thinking of the sugar cube. His father sucked at the end of the cigarette and said nothing. His face was mask-like in its skin; Gropius’s wife had once asked his father whether it didn’t hurt, having a face like that, so tight like a drum, and his father’s face had grown still more mask-like, pulling back into a world of squareness. Felix had twelve tasks in the house, and they were added to every year, at an unspecified date; they included lighting his father’s cigarettes, turning the pages at the piano, announcing dinner when guests came and, most recently, cleaning his own boots. Today his task was to remain normal until the sugar cube turned into what it would turn into.

For weeks now, his father had been constructing a false sugar cube with a shock inside it. First, he had carved a dreadful-looking beetle with goggling eyes and cruel buck teeth out of balsa wood – not even a centimetre long, but you could see its cruelty and ugliness. Then he had stained it black, leaving it to dry under a piece of newspaper, in case Felix’s mother should stumble in. Then he had dipped it in sugar solution, again and again, and finally coated it with table sugar until it closely resembled a sugar cube. Felix had watched all the procedure. His father had not explained what he had been doing. He had merely let Felix watch the preparations and manufacture of the beetle and its encasement in sugar, as if it were a natural part of existence, which Felix would understand if he watched the process. What the purpose of the beetle in the cube was, Klee would not need to explain. It was a practical joke, and therefore not in need of any explanation.