The Emperor Waltz (71 page)
Authors: Philip Hensher
‘Good morning, Klee,’ he said. ‘I thought it was you.’
‘Oh, good morning,’ Klee said. He seemed not quite irritable, but disappointed. It occurred to Itten that he might have made a request of his own, to the universe.
‘It is I, Itten,’ Itten explained.
‘Oh, yes,’ Klee said, as if reminded. But it was only three or four years before that they had been colleagues.
‘Would you mind if I took this place?’ Itten said, placing his coat on the hook and his bag in the net above the seats. ‘It is a long journey, and it is pleasant to have a companion to talk to.’
Klee inclined his head. He had recognized Itten when he had entered, but had not quite known where he was from. He saw only a tall, innocent face with an expression not quite its own. In a moment, he remembered that the man used to go about with a shaved head. He remembered nothing about his art at all. What had his art been like? Was it – but, no, some kind of insubstantial quality presented itself to the memory, like a cloud made out of sugar, dissolving with its own attempts to rain. He used to go about with a shaved head, and had come to meetings in Weimar, and his name was Itten. Klee felt quite pleased with himself at remembering that.
‘You are Itten,’ Klee said. ‘You were in Weimar, I recall.’
‘But of course!’ Itten said. ‘Klee, we were colleagues – I so much admired what you were doing with the students, as well as your art, of course. There was a beautiful painting of yours, a painting of coloured squares …’
Klee inclined his head. He detested specific praise. There was nothing to be done with it except enrol a disciple. And what was there to be done with a disciple of your own work, except introduce them to the principles of art?
Itten finished praising the painting of Klee, and waited with an eager, expectant face. He looked like a hungry puppy. But Klee had no memory of any work of art that Itten had produced, and he could not reciprocate, even if he had wanted to.
‘You are in Dessau now, I believe,’ Itten said, defeated.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Klee said. ‘The school moved from Weimar two years ago.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Itten said. ‘I think I recall reading about it at the time. It is a great success, I hear. Did you hear about my school?’
‘No, I did not,’ Klee said.
‘You are so tucked away, there in Dessau! It must be so good for the spiritual development, not like Weimar, with its princes and its palaces. I truly found Weimar a struggle. Of course, someone like me can find spiritual solace in any place. I have ended in Berlin, at the Nollendorfplatz; it is no Himalayan summit, it is a busy place devoted to traffic and to commerce. But it is possible for me to close off the Nollendorfplatz and emerge into a realm of pure colour. You were interested in colour, I remember.’
‘Yes,’ Klee said.
‘I left the Bauhaus, you remember,’ Itten said. ‘It was some years ago. I could not understand what the Masters were doing, and what the school was doing, and what the students were doing. I did my best. I brought light and colour into the lives of the students, and I asked them to study breathing. They thought me very odd, I dare say! And then there was the Mazdaznan, too. The students of mine who took up Mazdaznan, their spiritual growth and their artistic growth, it went hand in hand. They were achieving great things when I left. I planted a seed that had no need of me, and I needed to go somewhere else, to plant more seeds. Tell me, Klee – is there Mazdaznan thriving in Dessau?’
‘I don’t know,’ Klee said. ‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Itten said, laughing lightly. ‘It passes into bodies and it lives there, no one knowing what it is, or how it changes things. No one understands it. Not even I understand it. It is like the working of the breath, or the movement of the blood as far as a primitive man, a tribesman, a caveman, a Neanderthal is concerned. He would see some of its effects, but he would not understand its workings. And so it is with the spiritual exercises of Mazdaznan.’
‘I don’t know,’ Klee said. ‘I think I remember now. It was the business with garlic. But it stopped a long time ago. I don’t know whether anyone still does it.’
Itten paused, looked out of the window; smoothed his hands on his thighs. ‘I have a school now,’ he said. ‘It was in Nollendorfplatz, and now it is in the Potsdamerstrasse. It teaches art with spirituality. I am travelling about the country to raise funds for it. There is a great friend of the movement here in Leipzig, Dr Immelmann. He is most interested in everything we are attempting, though he himself is too frail to visit our school. We are so fortunate in our friends! Dr Immelmann is an American, who returned here to the land of his ancestors five years ago, and is as blessed with worldly benefits as he is lacking in health. But his spirituality is strong, and he contemplates a sheet of colour, breathing deeply, for an hour each day. And after him I am travelling to Munich to meet with another friend and his wife. He has been of great help, and has introduced many of my students to Indian strands of thought. It is so difficult to keep a school of art going when the main purpose of it is to connect spirituality with artistic understanding! So few people can see the point of that in the world where we live.’
‘Excuse me,’ Klee said, and got up. He went outside, along to the train’s lavatory. A large pile of leather luggage was almost blocking the corridor, with a violin case on top. With professional interest, he looked into the compartment. In it was a very stout father, with the ruddy face of a baker, and the fat hands of a murderer resting on his knee. With him were four – no, five boys. He might be a schoolmaster or a widower, taking his five sons to stay with his mother. It was hard to know. The eldest son must be the violinist, Klee decided, the one with the broad and blank face that so often concealed pain in humans. He hoped he had not inherited his father’s fat fingers, and thought about what it must be like to play the violin with fingers squeezing together so painfully. He would try to see on his way back what sort of hands the eldest boy had.
In the lavatory, he enjoyed pissing directly into the open hole, through which the swift movement of the tracks could be seen like the movement of a cinematograph, and almost regretted the brevity of the act. He made his way back to the compartment. He could not see whether the eldest boy in the widower’s compartment had fat hands or not. The five boys reminded him of five sleeping puppies, or cats, or nameless creatures fitting their shapes to each other. He entered the compartment where the man he had been talking to was sitting. The man’s name was Itten, he remembered.
‘Is the first stop Jena, Itten?’ Klee asked politely.
‘I’m sorry?’ Itten said.
‘The next station,’ Klee said. ‘I think it must be Jena.’
‘I don’t know,’ Itten said. ‘I am not familiar with this route. I do not travel by train between Leipzig and Munich. I prefer to stay where I am, and not to move. That is the true route to understanding. It is a great sorrow to me to have to uproot myself and hurtle about the country, rewarding though it is to me to meet such wonderful people as Dr Immelmann and my friends in Munich.’
‘I think it’s Jena,’ Klee said. ‘I am almost sure it is Jena. Yes, it is.’
‘Tell me, Klee,’ Itten said. ‘How do you begin with your students in Dessau?’
‘That is an interesting question,’ Klee said distractedly. The train was out in the open country now, and under a tree in a field near by, cows were crowding in the shade. Their squeezing together was like the five boys in the neighbouring compartment. Would it not be sensible for the cows to lessen their heat by standing apart from each other? It seemed to Klee to diminish the point of standing in the shade, to increase the heat by standing between the two hot bodies of different cattle. They were unlike the cows in Bavaria, the cows in Sachsen-Anhalt. He would ask somebody who knew about such things.
‘Well,’ Klee said in the end, ‘I like to ask them to draw a line on a sheet of paper. That sometimes stumps them, you know.’
‘I know!’ Itten said excitedly. ‘I ask them, too, to draw a line. I tell them that the idea of a line is one that I am putting into their heads, and that they should empty their heads and draw the line that I am thinking of. It stumps them to try to think of the line that I might be thinking of. But it proves the joining of minds, how it exists beyond a worldly plane. Sometimes, once or twice in a class, I see on the sheet of paper a line that is exactly the line I have thought of. I have reached that person. They have made a connection with me. It is so frail, that connection. The next time I ask them to do something, there will be no connection, it is just a light in the universe, being lit, once, and then extinguished, passing on into the darkness. But the connection is there.
‘How to keep that connection! How to make the connection solid! How to give your message to the class and allow them to take it out into the world!
‘Klee,’ Itten said, with great solemnity. ‘Sometimes I believe that I am nothing but a great failure.’
‘Oh, surely,’ Klee said. Out of the window, he could see hills approaching. Soon, the train would pass into a landscape of steep-sided hills; he saw in his mind’s eye a woodcutter’s cottage, smoke rising from the chimney, amid the forested slopes. He looked forward to that part of the journey.
‘I do not know what to do,’ Itten said. ‘It is too obvious to me. I hate everything and everyone. I tell them what to do, I set them an example. And they do it while they are in the room and I am in the room. They are impressed. And then they leave the room.
‘Nothing I do leaves the room. Nothing I do is carried away with them. And I look at my work. I do something and it seems wonderful, perfect, the best thing I ever did. And then I grow older and I change my mind, I start to do something different. What happens if you make a painting out of squares of colour? I say to myself, and I make a painting out of squares of colour. But I am so bored with filling in the spaces, long, long before it is finished. And then it is finished. I look at it and it seems that there is no reason why this should not be as wonderful and perfect and famous as the greatest works of art in the past. But I look at what I was doing three years before, and it seems pathetic, hateful, idiotic to me.
‘There seems nothing of me in any of it. I have a truly original mind. I am not one for following trends. I start beliefs, and I spread a religion, and I explain to people a whole new way of thinking about colour, and about art. Sometimes I believe I am a saint, a modern saint, and the way that I cannot spread my word – it is my own martyrdom. People have told me this. Truly.’
‘I wouldn’t go about saying that, if I were you,’ Klee said.
‘But it is. For a saint, not to be listened to, it must be the worst torture. To feel that you are saying the truth, a truth that will change the lives of everyone who hears it – and for your truth to be listened to and forgotten. That is torture. That is martyrdom. I look at my work, and I look at myself, and everything seems empty and false. I pretend to be driven by love, and I am driven by contempt. I look at the world about me, and the faces rising up eagerly, the so few faces in my class at school, the faces of cranks and madmen and those ready for belief, and I put on my loving face, like a hat from the hatstand, and inside, I feel nothing of loving. And my art is just dead. It changes and changes, and then there is nothing of me inside it, nothing that anyone could want to have about them. How is it done? I can do anything with a pencil and a brush, anything. But I cannot do that. How is it done?’
‘How is what done?’ Klee said.
‘What I am saying,’ Itten said. He sank back, defeated.
Klee looked away, embarrassed. He was thinking about the G major violin sonata by Brahms. The first movement, so clean, like a good storyteller. But had Brahms been right to finish with the last movement? Klee often wondered about that.
‘I want to achieve greatness,’ Itten said, his voice lowered in a saintly way. ‘I know I am not worthy, and I know I could never produce anything genuinely great, nothing compared to the great works of the past. But I want to paint a great painting, just one great painting, before I die. What I want to know is this. What does the first great brushstroke of a great painting look like? What is the great stroke of the pencil on canvas? Where does the greatness begin? You see, I do not know how to do it, how to make that great mark. I do not know how you begin with greatness. But you, Klee—’
‘Yes?’ Klee said.
‘I am humble before you,’ Itten said. ‘I can see your work going out into the world. I know it will. I saw a painting of yours in a magazine that a student of mine was reading at the back of the classroom. It was not like any painting of yours I had seen before, and it was a poor photograph, in black-and-white, blurred, small, nothing in particular when I came to look at it. But I saw it from the front of the classroom, far away, and it was as if I had seen your face through a small square window, unmistakable. How is it done? How is greatness started? Tell me, Klee, tell me how you go out into the world.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Klee said.
‘Everyone goes out into the world,’ Itten said. ‘The brownshirts, and the Communists, and the ideas and the designs and the paintings, they all go out into the world. But I stand and preach and I stand and make marks on canvas, and it all goes to the door, and turns, and will not go out. What is the first mark that you make on a canvas, Klee? Tell me! What is it?’
‘I like to start with a line,’ Klee said simply. ‘This is Jena, I’m sure of it. Yes, it is. I very much like Jena, I must say.’
The train was slowing. Itten sank back in his seat. He closed his eyes. He seemed to be practising his breathing.
Itten waited until the rhythms of his breath were calm again, and opened his eyes. Klee was gone from the compartment, with his tranquil broad face and his restless, interested manner. When had he gone? It was not quite clear to Itten. He must have got up at some point as if to excuse himself, but now Itten paid attention, there was no sign of Klee left anywhere. He seemed to have departed. There had been no station; there had been no farewell. It could be that Klee was somewhere on the train and would return. Itten did not think so. His presence had been removed from the train; he could feel it. Or had there been a station? He was not sure. Outside, the flat sheets of field and agriculture were speeding up, rattling past, green, like the sea in a student drawing. One of Itten’s favourite sights, the great monastery library, like the prow of a ship, was rising up remotely at the far horizon. He felt disquieted and not elevated by the sight. And now he looked there was a small boy in his compartment. When had he arrived? Had he been there all the time he had been talking to Klee? The small boy was fumbling with some wooden puzzle, some device or other. He was absorbed in his task to fit shapes together smoothly, and hardly seemed any more aware of Itten than Itten was of him. Was it strange that so small a boy was travelling on his own? He seemed perfectly tranquil. Itten looked at him benevolently. Or he tried to look at him benevolently; after speaking to Klee, it seemed to Itten that he was impersonating benevolence and putting on a kind general face. It seemed to Itten that next to Klee he hated the human race.