The Emperor Waltz (73 page)

And then there was the Cairo, and then another bar, and there was the Rosebud, and then there was a healthy garden in which to drink, where they drank, though it was so cold and the weather was so brisk, in November, and then …

In the Karlsbad beerhall, the party had been going on for some time. The air was heavy with smoke. A waitress in bulging white blouse and Bavarian embroidered skirt indicated entry with a gesture of her head and neck; it was not much of a welcome from the best beerhall in Dessau, but her hands were full with six enormous
masskrug
s of beer. She looked too delicate to be carrying them all. Her cheerfulness was limited to the floral embroidery on bib and skirt; her face was weary, dismissive, had seen it all.

‘One Gibson, two dry martinis, an Alexander and a gin fizz,’ Egon said to her, when she had dumped the beers she was carrying and returned to them. Her fists were placed firmly on her sides.

‘Don’t know about that then,’ she said, in a harsh Leipzig accent. ‘Don’t know about that. We’re a beerhall, we are.’

‘My God!’ Egon said. ‘My God! I thought this was a cocktail bar. What do we do? Do we order something called
beer
, then?’

‘Order whatever you like,’ the waitress said. She was flushing with the weight of the beer; she probably didn’t care for Ingrid laughing behind her hand, or perhaps for Ingrid’s green fingernails, green eyeshadow and green lipstick underneath her severely geometric black bob.

‘Oh, well, if we can order whatever we like, we’ll have a Gibson, a gin fizz, two dry martinis—’

‘Ignore him, miss,’ Klaus said. ‘We’ll all have beer. The wheat beer.’

‘Dark or light?’ she said, was answered and went off wearily.

‘Oh, she’s heard it all before,’ Egon said. ‘She didn’t care. No – I know what you’re going to say but we can tease each other, I believe. The thing is that the revolution will not be without humour!’

‘Yes, and the working-class woman shall be the butt of your humour, unless she forms part of the detachment detailed to shoot fools like you,’ Klaus said. ‘Now – where did that come from?’

At the other end of the beerhall, somewhere behind a wall of smoke being put up by a line of middle-aged men with elaborate moustaches and immense yellow-ivory carved pipes, a noisy party of men was chanting something. Were they singing? Or was it just chanting, the sort of thing a group of men did to encourage one of their number to finish the last beer in as short a time as possible? There were words in it and a great thumping, as the
masskrug
s were brought down in unison on the table. There was something, behind the braying, about pulling the concubine out of the Prince’s bed, about greasing the guillotine – no, it was gone behind a lot of cheering as a glass was shattered and one of the men wailed in disgust. One of the respectable drinkers was wearing a hat with a pheasant’s feather in the brim. He picked at something, a stain or crusted food deposit, on his lapel, and said something contemptuous to his neighbour. Then they all fell silent again.

‘My goodness, those fellows are drunk,’ Willi said. ‘Paul, can you hear? What an awful din they’re making! Thomas, listen – they’re singing some sort of song. It’s not even ten o’clock! You’re musical. Why are they making such an awful din?’

Thomas agreed to go and have a look on his way to take a piss. The waitress arrived with the many mugs of beer, dark and light.

‘I think they must be part of your revolution,’ Willi said to Klaus, in an amicable way. ‘The thing I never understood, though –I never know about these things. I know we’re not supposed to be for the princes, that goes without saying, but there aren’t any princes any more. I’m a Communist, I know, and I want everyone to have the same things, and all that, but I always forget – what am I supposed to think about the Jews? You hear so many people saying things about them, and they all sound very convincing at the time, like people saying they’re human beings, just like us, and you think, Oh, yes, that must be right, but then, a day or so later, you hear somebody in the street making a speech, and you think, Hmm, well, I don’t know, that seems to make a lot of sense, really. So what I don’t remember is—’

‘They’re all in some kind of uniform,’ Thomas said, sitting down and taking a big slug of blond beer from his mug. ‘They look as if they’re pretending to be soldiers, but I don’t think they are. A lot of them don’t look at all fit, and some of the uniforms look as if they made them themselves. They look like insurance clerks pretending to be soldiers. Have you seen this great fat beast coming!’

And from the back a fat man, no more than twenty, reeled towards them. His uniform, crossed with a leather strap, was stained with most of a litre of beer. It had once been brown. He was holding up his hand, which somehow had been cut. Blood was running down the inside of his wrist. A cheering came from the back of the room, a hideous grunting:
Storm storm storm storm storm storm
.

‘Students,’ the man said. ‘Students! Students!’ A group of elderly beer drinkers, sitting in silence and observing his progress in a disapproving way, drew back and concentrated on their drinks. A waitress was standing back. Her arms were full of beer
krug
s, and she was waiting for him to pass. But he paused, wavering like a tree in a gale, back and forth, back and forth. ‘More beer for us all,’ he said, ‘more beer, dark beer …’ and a flourish of inspiration hit him, and as he fell on the waitress, he managed to say, ‘And Thuringian sausages, many Thuringian sausages,’ before he brought her, too, to the floor, her beer glasses falling and smashing and pouring in a great flood over him, over her, over everything. Indignantly, she pushed him up, springing to her feet and leaving him where he lay. A man was quickly on the scene, a well-dressed and smooth man, with dark hair and glinting American glasses, just running to fat in his early forties, and explaining to the man that this could not continue, that he would have to leave if he and his friends could not contain themselves. ‘It was the beer,’ the man in the brown uniform was saying. ‘It was the beer slipped on the floor – the beer spilt on the floor that made me slip and lose my stance and fall against your good waitress here. Let me pay for the beer lost and the lost and broken mugs. Let me at any rate pay for that. Here are the marks to pay for that, my good sir, my good beerhall sir, and you and your lady wife, we would like to say to you, and to this wonderful lady, too …’

Storm storm storm storm storm storm
, the chanting went, from the back of the hall, a great tumult of banging, and then with a single voice, something was suddenly clear –
Judas seems to be winning the Empire
– and then cheering. The man in brown tried to reach out to shake the manager by the hand; the manager stared contemptuously at the hand, dripping with beer and blood.

‘They’d be so shocked,’ Willi said, ‘if those people knew we were Communists, wouldn’t they? I really think I’m going to come to one of Klaus’s meetings and hear all about it.’

‘Let’s have some more beers,’ Egon said. ‘This is all very exciting.’ Then, with a smooth, confident gesture, he stood up and walked over to where the man was still trying to detain the waitress. He took the man by the shoulders, turned him round forcibly and then, with a single blow, hit the drunk man hard in the face. The man fell heavily on the floor. Egon dusted his fists in a theatrical way, grinned like the hero of a movie, and came back to his seat. Was he expecting cheering?

‘But what is all that achieving?’ Karoline said to Paul, with the fervour of the just-arrived. She waved her arms about above her head as she spoke. ‘Really, what is it achieving? Elsa Winteregger, she teaches in the metal workshops, she is trying to make a teapot. A teapot! What use is a teapot? And she is trying to make a teapot that is half a perfect sphere, sliced off with a flat surface, out of silver. Silver is no longer a good material for anyone to use. What we should be doing is making good, cheap, industrial products that anyone can own and anyone can make. Beauty! Who cares about beauty?’

‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’ Klaus said. ‘She is a reactionary, that old Winteregger, and crazy. Did you hear what she said to Ludo? He was telling her—’

Another man in a brown uniform was standing over them. ‘Which of you did it?’ he said. ‘On this holy day? Which of you struck a German hero when he was in no condition to defend himself?’

‘The truth is,’ Paul said, ‘that beauty was invented by nineteenth-century industrialists and linked from its beginning to the profit motive. What is beauty? There will be nothing of beauty –’ he drew out the word in an ugly way ‘– in the new society. There will just be use. A silver teapot! What a dead, stupid, ugly object!’

‘But if there is ugly there is beauty,’ Egon just had time to say.

‘Which of you was it?’ the man said. ‘This holy day of tragedy and betrayal? This day that Germany mourns, and you thought you would strike a German hero in the face?’

‘Oh, do go away,’ Ingrid said. ‘You’re boring us. You stupid, stupid bore. Sing another song. This one’s too boring and dull and you don’t know the tune, half of you. It will never, never catch on in the dance halls. Go. Away.’

‘German womanhood!’ the man said. ‘A woman who should be bearing children, who should be caring for her husband, who should be modest and quiet and virtuous! Look at her! Thinking of nothing but green paint on her face, of shocking the decent, of whoring herself out, of bestial acts with black men, with jazz, making love to the Jews, of betraying your fathers. Listen to what Germany says, woman, and change your ways. It was him, wasn’t it?’

‘This is awfully exciting,’ Willi said to Ludo. ‘There’s something in what they say, after all. I don’t know, Ingrid, she should probably marry one fellow and have children. Women don’t have for ever to settle down, after all.’

‘You can’t seriously think that, Willi,’ Ludo said.

‘Oh, well, perhaps not,’ Willi said. ‘Has he gone away? I hope he’s not going to come back with lots of his awful friends.’

But before they could return and start a fight, Max had gathered their attention, and they left very quickly.

How had Max risen to be their leader, even when he appeared to be skulking at the back, joining in with an evening planned and executed by others? Why was it Max whose approval they sought and whose interest they tried to pique? When he was in the company, it was all a matter of asking Max to look at this, to tell them what he thought, to judge between them on matters of taste and opinion and politics. When he was not there, it was all deadly dull and posturing. One of them would say that he thought he would dress all in white for a year, and the others would nod; or that he believed the clergy were at the root of all evil and corruption, and should be lined up and shot, and whoever was listening would say, ‘Very likely,’ and go on to something else with a yawn. When no one could decisively judge, anyone could say anything, with a jut of the jaw and a widening of the eyes. It was all so impossible. But when Max was there – everything was decisive, and everything was a good idea, an exciting idea, or dull and flat, and everything could move forward under the beam of his judgement. Max was an architect’s son from Düsseldorf, and had known all sorts of artists, politicians, writers from his cradle: his mother had been artistic, he said, giving the word a curious and perhaps ironic intonation of his own. She had liked to have famous people around. An actress had taken Max to bed during the long run of
Wibbel the Tailor
in Düsseldorf, some time in 1917 when Max was only thirteen; in 1919, when things looked bleak, the actor who had played the French general in
Wibbel the Tailor
had been brought round to their house and he, too, had seduced Max. Max had enjoyed both experiences. It was not always necessary to make a choice.

‘Do you know the play,’ Max had said, ‘
Wibbel the Tailor
?’ But people did not – it was a Düsseldorf hit, and Max had been taken to see it many times, and afterwards had watched it from the wings of the theatre, courtesy of the French general or the heroine of the piece, or of a third encounter that neither of the first two knew about, the
soubrette
role. Well, during the Napoleonic wars, the French met their match – Max’s eyes madly rolling – in a tailor of Düsseldorf, whose name was Wibbel. The merry scrapes that Wibbel got up to! For instance, one day there was a giant cheese in the market …

Max’s fantasy, drolly told, was enough to reduce the most sober of people to uncontrolled laughter.

They thought he would be in an artistic profession, and even encouraged him, Max’s parents. But they thought he would grow up to be an architect, a builder of great houses and offices, as his father had been, and live like his father in a house that looked like the Ministry of the Suppression of Magic. ‘First I photographed,’ Max said. ‘Then I drew. Then I drew naked people. They were always about the house! Those naughty naked people, sometimes five and six of them at a time, always forgetting something and having to pop down to the kitchen to ask the cook for coffee and cakes to keep going, pink and white and twinkling on the stairs. Cook was so shocked the first time it happened! Then the naked people were banned, and I made a tea bowl! Then I painted scenery for a drama, and the naked people came back and staged
Hedda Gabler
in the old folks’ drawing room, for the old folks and their friends, like ministers and authors and painters and architects. I painted a great pink dragon on the backdrop! It was a symbol of everything that was wrong for Hedda. And nobody was naked during the production of
Hedda
. No – I tell a lie – that was not quite accurate. The actor who played George Tesman, he was naked all the way through. It was symbolic! Everything the play does is to strip him naked. So we thought we would have George Tesman walking naked through the play, and everyone else in crinolines and morning coats and everything, and a great pink dragon that I had painted behind everything.

‘How the old folks did howl! And after that I was sent to the Bauhaus, as a punishment. Poor me.’