The Emperor Waltz (32 page)

‘It is like the colour of money always,’ Kandinsky said, as they continued walking. ‘It is not something one person can decide on. It is never you who decides what the colour of the money you hold will be.’

‘But somebody must decide on what colour money must be,’ Klee said, and he reached into his pocket and extracted a ten-thousand-mark note from some time ago. He dropped it into the upturned hat of a begging veteran sitting on the street. The hat was positioned just where his right knee would have been. ‘It does not grow. Someone must decide, other than God.’

‘Today I think it was Gropius who decided,’ Kandinsky said. ‘He said he was very proud that the Bauhaus was making the designs for banknotes, though I think he meant only himself. He has told Bayer that the ten thousand billion marks should bear a thick red stripe at the bottom, and otherwise be black printing on white. Bayer has made it sans serif. It shouts.’

‘A red stripe at the bottom,’ Klee said, and turned his expressionless broad face away. He made with his hands a small gesture, as if trying out a new piano; Kandinsky had got to know this movement as a warding-off gesture. He could not imagine what was bad luck, or impossible, or evil, about a thick stripe of red on a banknote. ‘That is what the Bauhaus is doing, is it? Making banknotes with a thick stripe of red at the bottom, for thousands and millions and billions?’

‘Yes,’ Kandinsky said simply. ‘We are up in our studios, making beautiful objects for the bourgeoisie, founding religions, talking mysticism, and Gropius cannot believe that there will be a place for us in the new Bauhaus, in the new Germany. He wants to make chairs and tables and banknotes and cutlery that works better than any cutlery before.’

‘Did he ask you about the design of the banknote?’ Klee asked. ‘Was he concerned about what young Bayer’s banknote looked like, and did he want you to make it more beautiful?’

‘No,’ Kandinsky said. ‘He was speaking to me because he wanted to discover my experience using red ink for printing purposes. But the red ink in the prints lasts very well because it is looked after, and it is not screwed up like a banknote.’

‘But could you help him? It is a shame that you could not help him,’ Klee said. ‘Shall we walk through the park today? It is still so nice. The trees are so beautiful, all in that red and yellow, just for the moment. Trees are red, as well as money.’

‘But why?’ Kandinsky said, as they stepped through the elaborate ducal gate that led into the ducal park, closing its ironwork behind him. Klee was right to want to come this way. Here, it was impossible to believe that anyone was poor. A nanny was wending her way home with her two charges, one in pale blue with a swansdown hood, the other, still smaller, tottering along with a toy dog on wheels, wearing a tiny sailor suit. ‘I really could not have answered his questions. He would not listen. He is the man who decides on the colour of money, you know.’

‘I want him to give me twenty banknotes of ten thousand billion marks, out of gratitude,’ Klee said simply. ‘I want to make his money so beautiful that he returns a lot of it to me.’

9.

Christian Vogt entered the hallway of the Weimar villa. It still reminded him of the inside of a jewellery box, all velvet and panel; its smell was still as it had been; but the strangeness had gone. He hardly saw it, and he was aware that his response to it was all verbal; it was ‘the place I live in’, ‘This hall’s like a jewellery box’ and ‘Frau Scherbatsky’s house, or Frau Scherbatsky’s husband’s house, as she always says’. Expressed in conversation or in his own thoughts, these seemed to be enough. He had no urge now, as he had had two or three weeks ago, to sit down and draw the interior of the hall. That urge had gone, leaving only a faint tinge of duty and the belief that he might have said something along those lines to Frau Scherbatsky, and really ought to get it over with to please her.

As if to strengthen this guilt, Christian found himself closing the front door of the house behind him at the exact moment that Frau Scherbatsky came out of the sitting room to the right. She appeared to have been waiting for him. Her expression, normally one of warm delight, had withdrawn into one of tightly smiling forbearance. Christian had seen this expression on the faces of schoolmasters. Before she said anything, he knew he had once been admitted to the company of the grown-ups; now, he was going to be ticked off, like a child.

‘Herr Vogt,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘How very nice to see you.’

Then Christian knew exactly what it was about. She gestured, and he followed her, in a hangdog style, into the sitting room, depositing his portfolio by the hall table where the vase of white tulips sat. He shut the door behind him.

‘I was concerned, I must admit,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, ‘not to see you at supper last night. Herr Wolff thought you might be ill, and I sent Maria up after supper with a bowl of beef broth. But she said you were not at home, and had not been at home all day. I was woken up, in fact, when you did finally come home – it must have been nearly midnight.’

‘I think that must be true,’ Christian said. He knew it was true. He had walked and walked with Adele Winteregger, from the afternoon into the evening. And then, when she had said, ‘This is too bad – I must go back inside. Elsa hates to come home and not find me there – I must, I really must,’ he had leant down and had kissed her, and she had not moved. There was some resistance in the lips, he could feel, but it was melting as his mouth touched hers, and she had not moved back; she had stood there simply and let him kiss her. Her lips; her skin against his; the smell of her clean hair. She had let him walk her the short distance to the house where she and Elsa lodged, and had darted inside without saying goodbye or looking back. He had stood there outside her windows for a long time, watching the light of the oil lamp come on at her hand; watching, or imagining the warmth inside as she moved about, lifting and tidying, then seeing her shape against the oil-lamp’s glow, beginning to peel the vegetables. He had gone on standing there in the street even after Adele had come to the window and closed the shutters. And after some time, when her own glow had finally left the street where he stood, he could not go to Frau Scherbatsky’s place and talk about the cost of living and the future of Germany with her and Wolff and Neddermeyer. He had walked and walked, first through the city, then out through new suburbs, and finally when he walked between fields and heard the movement of animals and their night calls in the dark, he knew he had walked enough, and turned homewards.

‘I had hoped to mention it to you this morning,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘But you were not at breakfast either. I don’t think you have been at breakfast very often this week.’

‘No, I think that must be true,’ Christian said.

‘I am very sorry to say that I am going to have to go on charging you for meals, even if you miss them, you know,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘But it is only considerate to inform me whether you will be there. This is not exactly a boarding house, you know, Herr Vogt – I would naturally prefer to have a guest and friend who favours us with his company in general. I understand that Herr Wolff cannot always be here because of his political commitments. But he always tells me well in advance, so I do not delay the serving of dinner, as happened last night on your account.’

‘I am so sorry, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian said. ‘The fact of the matter is—’

Frau Scherbatsky held up the palm of her hand as if halting traffic. ‘You do not need to explain,’ she said. ‘I know that art students get up to all sorts of tricks that it is better not to know about in detail. But in future, Herr Vogt, if you could make your plans known to me? And you are dining with us tonight, I hope?’

Later, in his room, Christian wrote a letter to his brother Dolphus. He wrote on the heavy cream paper of Frau Scherbatsky, in the same brown ink that compositors and printers used. It was his habit to keep his brother’s letters before him on the desk, addressing point after point in response, and adding a few independent observations and anecdotes as he went. Today he did not trouble to look at what his brother had written last time: he had too much to tell him.

Dear Dolphus [he wrote],

Today an important thing happened between me and Adele. I will tell you about it later. But first there was something that happened in class. I do not know quite what it meant, but it seemed important to me. We were told to draw a line, and then a different line – a line as different as could be from the first one.

I drew a line that was only in my head, and that was only to be seen when you closed your eyes. You see, I saw the first line, the solid one with a single direction, as like Adele – she is reliable, and always there, and you could always trust her. But the other line, that was like me. It was like the line that was completely different whenever anyone else looked at it. Now that I have met Adele, I see that I made no sense in the world until she looked at me and saw what I was. When she is impatient with me, that is because I am not worth anything. When she endures my presence and listens to what I have to say, that is because I have become a good and valuable person.

I felt that I was like a line that could go in any direction, according to who placed their gaze upon me.

I am so happy, Dolphus. Yesterday I kissed my Adele, and today I saw her again. She would not kiss me, but I had drawn my two lines in class, and I know when I give her the drawing of the two lines, the straight line that you can see, and the invisible line that could go in any direction, she will understand what we mean to each other. The gaze of love, altering what it falls upon.

This is the most wonderful thing that has happened to me, and perhaps to anyone who has ever lived. I truly feel that. I send you my fraternal greetings. I am so changed you would not know me.

Your brother, C. S. T. Vogt

Christian’s handwriting was so large and swooping, with the modern loops and French shapes he had acquired in the art room at school, that he had used up four of Frau Scherbatsky’s writing sheets. He had the sense that he had written absurdly, with some suggestion of madness, perhaps making his brother think that he had been drunk when he wrote it. He and Dolphus had never spoken like this when they were together, but Christian believed that there was nobody else in the world who would understand what had happened to him. He placed the sheets in an envelope; addressed it in a neater, more compact hand than before; sealed it, and placed it on his bedside table to post in the morning.

10.

At that moment there was a soft knock at Christian’s bedroom door. He threw an automatic glance at the letter, as if, even sealed, it could betray him. ‘Come in,’ he said.

The door opened; it was Neddermeyer. ‘I am sorry to disturb you,’ he said. ‘But there is a young woman here who wants to see you.’

‘Here?’ Christian said.

‘She is waiting in the hall. A young woman,’ Neddermeyer said, in his precise way, placing the visitor. ‘She said she knows you.’

Christian got up and followed Neddermeyer out, taking the letter with him. Downstairs, sitting in one of the large hallway chairs, her feet not quite touching the floor, her little white hands resting on the wooden arms too far apart for comfort, was Adele. She had come dressed for a call, although it was nearly nine o’clock; her dark green skirt was in a sort of slippery oilcloth, its folds sticking out stiffly at her knees; her tidy umbrella was at her feet. She looked up as Christian came downstairs, watched from the top of the stairs by Neddermeyer. ‘Good evening,’ she said.

‘Hello, Adele,’ Christian said, placing the letter on the table for posting. She seemed in this house a quite different part of his life. Her expression was defiant, her mouth firm; he wondered if it was difficult for her to come to a house like this, and demand admission at nine at night. Then he recalled the widows of Breitenberg. ‘I thought you had to stay at home with Elsa, always.’

‘Elsa went to her Maza– her Mazadazana – I can never get the name right. Her spiritual group. She wanted me to go, too, but I don’t think it would suit me.’ There was the noise from upstairs of Neddermeyer softly closing his door.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ Christian said. ‘I know that a lot of people belong to it, and they sometimes shave their heads and wear odd clothes and eat nothing but garlic. Does Elsa not eat garlic?’

Adele waved her hand in dismissal. Christian observed that the door to the sitting room was somewhat open. He could hear the voice of Frau Scherbatsky and, after a moment, the harsher, more grating one of Herr Wolff. Their voices had an artificial tone, though he could not hear what they were saying. They were talking in order to disguise the fact that they were listening to Christian and Adele. Christian sat down in the other chair; it was identical to the one Adele was perched on, and placed on the other side of the fire, facing in the same direction.

‘It’s nice to see you here,’ Christian said.

‘I can’t talk like this,’ Adele said. It was true. Seated on the chairs, it was impossible to carry on a conversation with the other person, facing rigidly in the same direction, ten feet to the left. Christian attempted to move his chair round, but it was too heavy to move, or perhaps even fixed to the floor. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘I could sit on the floor.’

‘Is there nowhere else we can go?’ Adele said. ‘In a big house like this.’

There was the dining room, but that was now set for breakfast, the next morning; the study, which was full of Frau Scherbatsky’s private papers, and into which he had never gone alone, and which was very much her territory; and then there was the conservatory at the back, which would need special measures to light up, mastered only by Maria with a taper. There were other rooms, but they had not been shown to Christian, and he did not care to wander. Christian stood up and walked awkwardly over to the door to the offices and kitchen, where a small three-legged stool sat, more for ornament than use. He put that down and sat on it, his legs crossed, almost seated on the floor. At least he was facing Adele now.