The Emperor Waltz (74 page)

‘Poor you,’ Max’s partner in conversation would say, entranced.

Tonight Karoline was the one under a sad delusion. She had been seduced by Max a very short time ago. She had not yet discovered that Max had taken more than one of them to his bed, efficiently and, usually, as a unique occasion – Ingrid, and Willi, and Paul, and Klaus, but not yet Ludo. She offered her approval as a support to Max. This was the spirit in which she now listened to Egon saying, as they walked beneath the tree-shaded stretch of the boulevard, that he knew an illegal bar, an anarchist bar, which took place in what had once been a piano showroom, and that perhaps the time had come to go there; in that spirit she heard Max saying, ‘That sounds like an awfully good idea,’ and piped up, ‘I couldn’t agree more.’ The others were patient. Who among them could not say that the moment had come for them, too, when they realized that they were not at all special to Max, that he had only done what he had done in a moment of enthusiasm and speculation? She was the naked actor among them this evening, despite the care with which she had dressed.

Egon was saying some of this to Ludo as the door to the piano showroom, the nameless anarchist bar, was opened before them and they entered an unusual scene. The room was filled with the stock of the previous owner, who must have despaired of ever using the prices of his pianos to keep up with the cost of living. Abandoned, thirty pianos filled the room – upright cottage pianos at the side, but ten grand pianos intricately forming a kind of maze in the middle. The room was lit by candles, rudely stuck in saucers or just left to drip on the pianos, one Erard, another announcing itself as made by the Brothers Zimmermann of Leipzig. The crowd were recognizably Bauhaus and ruder folk. Against the far wall, there was a trestle table of drink, a beer barrel or two and twenty bottles of wine. The prices were chalked up on a board behind the scowling barman.

‘Oh, I want to dance!’ Ludo said impulsively. ‘Look at all these pianos – and nobody playing them, and nobody dancing. Klaus – Klaus – dance with me. On top of a piano. Wouldn’t that be marvellous?’

Klaus was talking about the revolution. His attention had to be brought. When he heard what Ludo was asking, he said, ‘There is no music,’ and turned back to Willi, who needed a good deal of education in this matter.

‘Well, that is no problem,’ Ludo said. ‘Look – here is Thomas. You played the piano for
The
Euclidean Ballet
, so I know you can play the piano. Play us a dance, and Klaus and I will dance on top of a piano for everyone. Klaus! Klaus! I want to dance!’

‘There is no music,’ Klaus said again, but just then the music started, almost before Thomas had sat down. It was something that Thomas had played during the ballet in the summer – some old-fashioned piece of music. But it was quite nice. Thomas was a surprisingly expert pianist, and a shock of amused quiet ran through the bar before chatter started again. ‘No, Ludo,’ Klaus said. ‘I am not going to dance with you, even if there is music. We have decided that the practice of animal passions must now cease with each other. And the dance is also an animal passion. I have no objection if you want to dance alone, but it is against the spirit of our agreement for you to seek to dance with me.’

‘But it is so nice!’ Ludo said. There was some drink in his hand now – he was not quite sure who had put it there. ‘Listen – Max – Karoline – listen, it is just so nice when Thomas plays it. Karoline, will you dance with me?’

‘Not I,’ Karoline said, almost indignant in her
moujik
red, shaking her head furiously. ‘I cannot make a spectacle of myself.’

‘Ludo,’ Max said. The others had all quickly dispersed, to their separate friends, here and there in the anarchist bar. It had been open only six days, but this was the day, clearly, when the whole of the Bauhaus had decided to pay it a visit. ‘Ludo! I’ll dance with you, if you like. It would be my pleasure. Is this a Viennese waltz?’

‘Well, you know, I rather think it is,’ Ludo said, and as he and Max kicked off their shoes and clambered onto the top of the grand piano they were leaning against and took each other in their arms, he began to sing along with Thomas’s fluid, trickling playing. The piano, despite being abandoned with all its fellows and sitting for a week in a drunken anarchist bar, was not too badly out of tune. It made, in fact, a lovely noise. ‘Da-daaa-dit-daaa, da-da-da-daaa,’ Thomas sang. ‘I do adore this. It is just like my grandmother’s favourite piece of music. I did love it when I was tiny. I don’t know why – very well, let’s concentrate. Look, Max, they’re all looking. You start and I’ll follow.’

‘I do like you, Ludo,’ Max said in his most purring voice, and Ludo looked very much as if he were going to laugh. Below, at the level of their knees, the crowd could not hear what Max was saying, murmuring bold suggestions into Ludo’s ear, but they could see his pink, plump, pleased amusement as the pair of them waltzed. One of the people below was called Egon Rosenblatt, and in a few years he would pack his bags and go to America. He would live the rest of his life in America, teaching form and structure to blond and glowing children at a liberal arts college in Kentucky, and then at sixty-five, he would retire with his wife to Miami. All that lay before Egon that night. But for the rest of his life, in Dessau, in Kentucky, in Miami, at his deathbed, he would sometimes think of and sometimes talk about that wonderful sight.

They stood open-mouthed beneath Ludo and Max, or making a play of their uninterest, and in a moment, as the music continued beneath them, Max drew Ludo towards him and whispered in his ear. ‘You are so nice, Ludo,’ Max said. ‘I so like you, Ludo. I like your little ears and I like your darling tiny neck and I like the lovely way you smell when you are a little bit sweaty.’

‘I like you so much, Max,’ Ludo said simply. ‘I want to be with you tonight.’

‘I don’t know why that never happened before,’ Max said. ‘I want to be with you tonight and always.’

‘Oh, Max,’ Ludo said. ‘Will you do sodomy with me tonight?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Max said. ‘Yes, I will.’

‘But, Max,’ Ludo said. ‘You won’t stop doing it after ten times, will you? I hate it when that happens, when it stops after ten times.’

‘Oh, no,’ Max said. ‘I won’t stop after ten times. I won’t. I will go on doing it with you for ever.’

‘That is so nice,’ Ludo said. He thought with great happiness that Max must truly like him. Always, with everyone else, Max had done it just once or twice and then moved on. But when he had the chance of being with Ludo, he was definitely going to go on being with Ludo, and doing it with Ludo, for ever. That would be so nice, whatever Ludo had done to deserve it. ‘Now dance with me some more,’ Ludo said.

Beneath them, a drunk and bearded anarchist was plucking cigarette butts from a saucer that read
Hotel Gansevoort
in blue writing, and flicking them at Ludo and Max, now just swaying in each other’s arms rather than trying to dance in a proper way. They paid no attention. They seemed hardly to notice. In a moment the drunk anarchist turned to Thomas, playing the piano; he flicked a cigarette butt into his face. Thomas blinked and shook his head as if the cigarette butt might have stuck in his hair; the drunk anarchist laughed, a coarse self-amused laugh, and flicked another. This one hit Thomas on his forehead, and a third hit his eyes. Efficiently, Thomas stopped playing, stood up, walked three paces to his left and tried to hit the drunk anarchist very hard in the face. The anarchist was prepared for this, and pushed the blow aside, hitting Thomas in return. A bottle broke, thrown against the wall of the piano showroom by some anarchist with a poor aim. Max jumped down from the piano onto the back of the anarchist, pulling him to the floor, and for a moment they rolled underneath the pianos. Ludo, more carefully, sat down and slid off.

‘My goodness,’ he said to Ingrid. ‘What a very exciting night.’

‘Oh, it’s Armistice night,’ Ingrid said. ‘It’s always going to be like this. Have you seen Karoline?’

‘No,’ Ludo said. ‘What are we celebrating? Oh, yes, the November Criminals. We were undefeated in the field! That’s what they say, isn’t it? Which one is Karoline? Oh, the other girl, the other one apart from you. Is it you who is in love with Max or is it she?’

‘It is she,’ Ingrid said calmly. ‘It is like a very bad play, with one person loving another and a third thinking that they are loved more and – shall they compete? What will happen? Where will the choice fall? I think Karoline was crying when she went off because of you embracing Max on top of a piano.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Ludo said, thrilled. ‘Look, I think Max is winning.’

And here came Max, standing up, dusty about his jacket but smiling, and taking a beer from a boy they thought was called Siggi, a boy from the Bauhaus. ‘Yes, I am winning for the moment,’ Max said. ‘But perhaps we should think about moving on. Where is a worse bar than this one? This seems like a very bad bar to me. Does Dessau present a worse drinking place than this one? Or does the game come to an end here? I could drink some more, I believe. Where is a worse drinking place?’

‘Oh, Max,’ Willi said. ‘There are some drinking places worse than this. We have only been to the best beerhall in Dessau. There is another.’

‘That is the second best beerhall in Dessau,’ Paul said. ‘Or, if you prefer, it is the worst. There are only two.’

‘That is very bad,’ Ingrid said. ‘I am not sure if I would even be welcome there.’

‘Oh, we make our own welcome,’ Ludo said. He felt exhilarated with happiness. ‘We make our own welcome with the gentlemen in brown shirts, and with anarchists who want to start fights, and we play the piano and we dance and we make love on the tables. Let us go to the worst beerhall in Dessau! And then –’ he took an immense, celebratory swig of beer from a mug not his own ‘– and then perhaps somewhere else, a place in a cellar where they hardly ever wash the mugs up, and then finally I know a place that calls itself the Hundred Red Roses, where you can drink whatever you want. Only you must not fall asleep. Because once somebody, a soldier in a wheelchair, he fell asleep in the Hundred Red Roses and everyone thought he was quite all right, and then after two days of him sleeping in a corner, they thought to wake him up, and he was dead … It was so sad for the poor soldier … Oh, Max. Let’s go to the Hundred Red Roses. We can dance there, and we won’t fall asleep, not at all, we won’t sleep. Max?’

But only some of what Ludo was saying made sense, he suddenly understood; the words were so difficult to make in his mouth, and the room was so hot and people coming towards him of different sizes and making threatening movements, and through the door now were coming, surely, a lot of men in brown and they were howling for something; there was the noise of something smashing, a window and glass falling; but it was all so much, and without meaning to, Ludo’s stomach rose in protest. It was lucky that there was an open receptacle just there that he could be sick into, a good big receptacle. He raised his head, wiping his mouth. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ He had been sick into an open grand piano. But no one was listening to him: they were all scrambling out of the way of the men with clubs, out of the way of the man with something glittering in his fist. Ludo thought he would just get underneath a piano and stay there until it was all over. Now that he had been sick, he would be quite all right.

5.1

Adele was still asleep when Christian left the flat, and Elsa, too. He had made a knack of dressing as quietly and as quickly as possible, in the dark, since Adele disliked being woken unnecessarily. He was aware that this inconvenience meant that sometimes he only discovered a stain on his jacket once he was outside in the courtyard. He was also used by now to doing without breakfast beyond a piece of bread and cold milk, since the noise of anything else disturbed Adele. It also saved money, and if he were known to be the first master always to arrive at the school, Christian believed that it would stand him in good stead for the offer of a further contract. He did not believe this strongly. He slung his large satchel over his shoulders and left the flat.

There was a figure in the courtyard of the house, examining the leaves of the solitary dusty lime tree that grew there. Surprisingly, it was Franz, Adele and Elsa’s father. It was only a quarter to seven, though at this time of year the day was already well advanced.

‘Good morning,’ Christian said.

‘Oh,’ Franz said. ‘Good morning, Christian.’

Christian waited, thinking that Franz might as well explain why he was there so early.

‘It’s a beautiful day,’ Franz said. ‘I’m always a very early riser.’

‘I, too,’ Christian said.

‘In fact,’ Franz said, ‘I am too early and should have known it. Adele asked me to come today, before we left, but I don’t think she meant as early as this. I have been waiting for twenty minutes or so. I thought you would have gone by now.’

‘No,’ Christian said. ‘I normally leave about now. For work.’

‘You are like me,’ Franz said. ‘I am in the workshop at six thirty, rain or shine, whether I have anything to do or not. And I always do have something to do, I must say. Would you mind so terribly if I walked with you a little? It would occupy the time before my daughter wakes up.’

‘Not at all,’ Christian said. ‘I think Adele is usually awake and presentable by eight, or a little after. Please.’

They walked across the courtyard and into the street. As always when with his father-in-law, Christian felt very young. It was not that Franz was so very ancient, but he was small, neat and weather-beaten; he looked as if he had spent his life fending off disappointment in a forest workshop, and the life had been long and expert. His jacket was beautiful, traditional in cut and ornament, and his hat carried a sprightly badger’s brush.

‘I like a walk in the morning,’ Franz said. ‘Are you walking directly to your school?’

‘The birds start up so early,’ Christian said. He had a sinking feeling: Franz’s company was going to prevent him from going on his true errand this morning. ‘It is almost like being in the countryside here.’