The Emperor Waltz (35 page)

‘Aren’t you going to read the letter from your sweetheart?’ Dolphus said. He proffered his candle in an absurd way.

Christian took it, placing it on the table. He looked at the letter’s outside.‘Yes, it is from Adele,’ he said. Then he took a kind of decision and tore it open. He held it next to the candle flame, and read it with some attention. ‘You can read it if you like,’ he said, handing it over. ‘There is nothing private in it.’

Dolphus took it. It was written in an old-fashioned hand, a Gothic script that few people he knew in Berlin still used, and those all middle-aged or older. He saw that the letter had been written first in pencil, painfully, then traced over in ink, with much use of abbreviations and lines over the script to indicate longer words. The paper was thick and flocculent, a piece of paper for drawing on, and Dolphus remembered that Adele’s sister was an artist with Christian at the Bauhaus. The letter was an invitation, formally phrased and directed at both Christian and Dolphus, to come to an address in Weimar to take a cup of coffee the next day at a specified time in the morning. ‘My sister and I’ had sent the invitation. Dolphus thought of handing it back and saying, ‘She seems awfully nice,’ but there was nothing to cause the comment. He wondered if Adele was sixty years old; then he remembered that she came from the country, or from the south, or from something else that explained her formality. On the other side, in thick pencil, scribbled rather than written in the careful old-fashioned hand of the rest of the letter, someone had added, ‘I add my name to my sister’s invitation. E. W.’ Some pressure had been brought here on the writer; its unwillingness was clear in the almost legal precision of the wording. It could be brought up as evidence much later, as proof that she had not always fought against her sister’s young man.

‘Well, that is polite of her,’ Dolphus said. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting her.’

‘You won’t meet her for long,’ Christian said. ‘She’s going back to Breitenberg on Sunday morning. Now – are you dry? Old Scherbatsky was right – we ought to have worn galoshes in the snow. Change your knickerbockers and socks, you’ll be quite all right. The food here is good, hearty stuff, solid great piles of meat, just the thing for a night like tonight. I don’t know how she manages it – no sausage meat and sawdust for her.’

‘I’ll meet her for longer in the future,’ Dolphus said. ‘Adele. When you make your life together, I mean.’

‘Oh, yes, that’s so,’ Christian said. ‘When we make our life together. It sounds so odd. I thought you were talking about old Scherbatsky for a moment there.’

Outside the warm and fire-lit room, the snow was falling without cease, an obscure and complex movement in the dark beyond the candle’s light. Dolphus wiped the condensation from the glass, but nothing could be seen. The night, despite the fury of the snowfall, had a quality of silence about it. There seemed no sign of the snow diminishing or slowing. He wondered if the trains would continue to run.

14.

It was possible to make a cake out of parsnips and brown flour, if you sieved the flour carefully. Sometimes, too, honey was cheaper than sugar of any sort, not just the refined white sort. Eggs were a problem, but Adele knew the baker’s wife, and she had told her of the women in Weimar who kept chickens, and with some persuasion, Adele had extracted four eggs from four separate housewives over the previous days. The cake was made, and glazed with a sort of fruit jam. There was still the question of coffee, however; Adele could only hope that the Vogt boys had grown as accustomed as anyone else to the opaque and sour mixtures of chicory, acorn and root vegetables that usually made do for coffee in these days. She was not convinced, however. The house in which Christian Vogt lived, which had taken her an hour to find, smelt to her of real coffee and good cuts of meat, of comfort and warmth and hot water on demand; it smelt to her like profit and black marketeering.

‘I have never seen such snow so early in the year,’ Adele said, peering through the window in their room. The beds were made, and covered with a crochet counterpane; cushions were placed neatly to left, right and in the centre, and the table at which they ate had been cleared of the breakfast things and laid with plates, napkins and the parsnip cake. Outside, the snow was falling, as it had fallen most of the day before, and all of the night; it heaped up against the walls of the house opposite, and down this street, only three or four brave people had forced their way. ‘I don’t know if they will be able to come. But I am sure they will do their best.’

‘I don’t want them to come,’ Elsa said. She was hunched in an armchair, her overcoat on. It was true that it was cold in the room. Adele would light the fire shortly before the Vogt boys were due to arrive. As Elsa spoke, a little cloud of vapour emerged from her mouth. ‘I don’t want to know them, and I don’t know why they have to come. I don’t know why you are doing this. I hate him, I hate him. I think it’s all so stupid.’

‘You promised you would be polite to him, and to his brother,’ Adele said.

‘I promise,’ Elsa said. She paused, pensively. ‘You don’t have to do this. There will be someone else, or there will be just us.’

‘I know there will be,’ Adele said. ‘But, all the same, I am doing this. It will be for the best all round.’

‘I can’t even draw anything,’ Elsa said. ‘I tried to draw something this morning, but I couldn’t see anything. There was nothing my pencil wanted to draw. Everything was just …’ She made a sideways gesture, an erasing gesture. ‘When are they coming? Can’t you stop them coming?’

‘No, Elsa,’ Adele said. ‘They will be here in an hour. You liked Christian when you met him, remember? Before you knew he was going to marry me? And he is still the same person. They come from a very good family, from Berlin, and I should be proud that one of them wanted to marry me. I can’t go on explaining.’

‘I don’t want you to go,’ Elsa said. She lowered her hands; her voice had a quality of inspiration about it. ‘I don’t want you to go back to Breitenberg, I want you to stay and get to know this boy Vogt, and you’ll realize how awful he is, how he’s just come to take you away from us, how he doesn’t like anyone, he’s not even human, he’s just a Berlin lawyer who’s playing at painting for a year and then he’ll go back and make money, like all his family, and you won’t marry him.’

Adele made no response. And since the boys were to arrive in an hour or a little more, she now went over to the fireplace with the newspaper of two days ago. She took the sheets, one by one, and rolled them before tying them into a knot and placing them in the hearth; they burnt longer that way. Then there was some wood, donated by the baker from his backyard stores; she piled the logs up carefully, not too tightly, allowing air between them; and twelve precious lumps of coal, resting in a doleful, well-spaced way in the brass coal scuttle. Those had had to be bought – she did not like to think about it. She placed four on the top of the pile with the coal tongs, wiped her hands on her apron, and took a match from the box on the mantelpiece. The fire caught first time, and the first rush of flame started to consume the knotted paper.

‘I think you should stay,’ Elsa said again. ‘You can find out all about him, and he can find out about you.’

‘Well, I may have to stay,’ Adele said. She took the apron off and folded it tidily, in two, four, eight, sixteen, a small square of green cloth; looking out of the window, and not at Elsa, she hugged it to her chest, perhaps in cold. ‘I don’t believe that the trains will be running today in this snowstorm, and there doesn’t seem to be any prospect of it slowing down. They may not come, of course, and we will have to eat the cake on our own.’

‘Oh, they will come,’ Elsa said, wailing. Her fists pumped up and down. ‘I can hear them, they are coming in now.’

‘No, I would have seen them,’ Adele said, but she was wrong: downstairs there was the noise of the door being opened and rapidly closed, of feet stamping and male voices. The wife of the bookshop owner, who kept an eye over the coming and going in the room over her husband’s shop, had been warned and was now letting the guests in. The substance of what she was saying was not possible to catch, but the tone of reprimand and complaint was clear, as an F sharp in a crowded square would be to a musician. Clear, too, was the tone of apology and humorous deprecation from the boys. There was an unfamiliar rumble of men’s boots on the wooden stair outside.

The room they lived in was bare – as they came in, Adele saw it clearly. The things they had used to make it their own were ordinary: a five-coloured crochet counterpane, and two small hard cushions in green; three books on the bedside table, and a clean but darned turquoise tablecloth; against the whitewashed wall, propped up with their backs to the room, were two piles of paintings and drawings by Elsa. The air in the room was luminous, greenish, subdued with the heavy falling snow outside. It was not yet warm, but it soon would be; the little fire, now making noises of collapse and crackle, had started work on the logs, and soon on the coals. Perhaps the first edge of cold had been taken off the room, and naturally the boys, coming in out of the falling snow, would not feel the room as cold in the first minutes. Only after that, of seeing how her room looked to them, did she see them; the elder, hawkish, one, with his eyes wide-spaced and half alert, and the younger, who, she saw now, was a child, perhaps only fifteen or so, with hair that was blond and heavy, a big thin family nose he would grow into and pale skin with flushes of red at the cheekbones; he looked about him in an almost fearful way, shyly, not quite greeting his brother’s fiancée with his eyes. Elsa mutinously stood up, holding the cushion to her.

‘It is snowing so hard out there!’ Christian said, shedding his outer garments and dropping them carelessly by the door. ‘It hasn’t stopped for nearly a day. The drifts in the park are simply colossal, a man’s height – we had to turn back and go by the roads.’

‘Don’t leave your coat there,’ Adele said, submitting to being kissed. ‘We have hooks like Christians, there, behind the door. You should hang it up to dry.’

‘And this is my brother Dolphus,’ Christian said. He took a special moment to separate out this introduction from everything else; he gave the words a particular emphasis, and the shy boy put his surprisingly large flat hand out to greet Adele. She shook it. ‘And Elsa, Adele’s sister.’

‘You should not have come!’ Elsa said. ‘The weather would have been its own excuse.’

‘I wanted to come, very much,’ Dolphus said, in his boy’s grating voice as they all sat down around the table, Elsa on the bed covered with counterpane and cushions. He looked at Adele as he spoke, his eyes large and weeping a little in his frost-flushed face. ‘What a lovely fire! I thought that Fräulein Winteregger was returning home tomorrow, so this would have been my only chance.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Adele said. ‘I was supposed to be returning home, but there is really no likelihood of anyone going anywhere while this snow continues to fall. I suppose I should go up to the station to find out what the situation is. Please, call me Adele, I don’t mind at all.’

‘Yes, we are all going to be stuck,’ Elsa said. ‘You two – you could get here in one piece, without any trouble. But we are going to have to entertain you for the rest of the day, the week, the month.’

‘We will manage very well,’ Christian said. He looked at her, as if waiting for something – perhaps for her to invite his brother to call her, too, by her Christian name. ‘How are you filling the time? It is so dull to be inside when you have to be inside.’

Adele looked at Elsa, who made a big-eyed, hands-open, incredulous gesture of denial and ignorance. The brothers both smiled, somewhat nervously. ‘My sister,’ Adele said. ‘My sister has been keeping busy since the school closed.’ She took the coffee pot while she talked, and poured the black acorny mixture into the four little cups; she hoped that it was not too bad. ‘Cake, Dolphus – I may call you Dolphus, may I – it is my own cake. Elsa came home, and had nothing to do, and was disappointed. So I suggested to her that she should spend the afternoon drawing. Of course she does that very often, in any case, finding things to draw in odd moments.’

‘Yes, I do that, too,’ Christian said. He seemed slightly affronted.

‘Of course,’ Adele said. ‘But yesterday, and again this morning, we made quite a game of it, pretending that Elsa had to draw a proper picture in fifteen minutes, as quickly as she could, and then she remembered a game that she had to play in class last year, a game – what was it, Elsa? No, she can’t remember. But it was something to do with a single line, or not lifting the pencil from the paper. I don’t understand these things, or why that might be important. My sister is the clever one, you know.’

Dolphus took a plate of cake and a small steel fork from Adele; she handed him a limp cotton napkin, very pale pink. All the time, and as he started to eat, he inspected her. She brushed her hands down her striped skirt, not quite certain what he was looking for.

‘But what did you draw?’ Christian said to Elsa. ‘I never know what to draw. Either I see only things which have been drawn a million times before, like a sunset, or a pot of flowers. Or everything seems worth drawing. Sometimes I could draw just the corner of that table, there, with that edge of a chair and perhaps the line at the bottom of the window.’

Christian and Adele both looked at Elsa; she gave a mountainously rude shrug, and reached out herself for a piece of the parsnip cake. She began to gnaw at it without benefit of plate, napkin or fork.

‘Elsa,’ Adele said, but made no further attempt to discipline her. She turned back to Christian and Dolphus. ‘I love it when Elsa makes a picture of something that you hardly notice yourself. When she was younger, she used to draw corners of my father’s workshop, just two or three tools, or perhaps one of the apprentices. I liked that so much. Yesterday, she was drawing me at the washing-up or making the beds.’

But it was Dolphus who now leant forward and said, ‘May I see? I would love to see.’

Elsa gave another shrug. Adele looked at her in a warning manner. She got up and went to the wall, where a tattered brown portfolio stood. ‘These are just the drawings from yesterday and this morning,’ Adele said, bringing it over. ‘This is me sitting darning socks; and then again, looking out of the window; and then again, coming in from the market, covered with snow, you can see – how well she has caught that! I feel completely cold all over again, looking at it. And here, mixing a cake to take down to the baker to cook. They are so kind downstairs!’