The Emperor Waltz (75 page)

‘Tell me,’ Franz said. ‘How did you manage during the most difficult periods?’

‘The most difficult periods?’

‘The periods – the billions and trillions period. Before the Rentenmark.’

‘Oh.’ Christian was not surprised. Whenever he met Franz, there was some fairly direct probing into his capacity as an earning and managing individual. ‘I don’t know how I came through it. My brother Dolphus came to visit me in Weimar, and he could only come at the very beginning of the month, in the hour or two after my father had his monthly salary. If he had waited another day or two, the ticket would have cost more than a lawyer’s monthly salary. If he’d waited three weeks—’

‘It would have cost more than life itself,’ Franz said, chuckling. ‘It was so strange and interesting. Frau Steuer did very well out of it, you know. She had two thousand Swiss francs and even three hundred American dollars. I have no idea how she came by them – probably her late husband, somehow – and I have no idea how she had the luck not to think of changing them and spending them when the mark was good. But in the end she had five thousand Swiss francs and three hundred American dollars, and in the summer of 1923 she bought three large houses with all their contents, in the centre of Breitenberg.’

‘That was useful,’ Christian said, aghast.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Franz said. He paused under a boxwood tree with its black trunk, looking up into its leaves and listening to a blackbird, somewhere up there, singing. ‘Some people might say she was not the best person to talk about people profiteering from the misery of others. However. We don’t know what happened to the three families who lived in the houses, so perhaps we should not condemn Frau Steuer and her five thousand Swiss francs. How did you manage?’

Christian saw that there was no point in being evasive. ‘I was living in lodgings,’ he said. ‘My landlady supplied all the meals. Once there was crow and sometimes a lot of cheese with potato. We managed, I think.’

‘But how did you pay your landlady?’ Franz said. ‘It is so interesting, how people managed.’

‘Well,’ Christian said, suppressing his impatience, ‘my grandfather had a very good gold watch, and I think my father agreed with Frau Scherbatsky that the gold watch would cover a certain amount of time in her house. I know Adele and Elsa had difficulties when Adele was there. There was just no money.’

‘Frau Steuer was really a genius in the way that she handled all of that,’ Franz said peaceably. ‘Do you know what she did with her stores of foreign currency? When the mark started to dwindle, shrink, dwindle, getting tinier and tinier and yet bigger and bigger at the same time … Frau Steuer had some Dutch money, some guilders, I think. There were only five hundred. But she saw that they could be useful, and she took them to the bank and offered some of them to the bank as security. She asked them for a short-term loan, only three months, and they took a hundred guilders as security and charged Frau Steuer a very large amount of interest on the loan, or so they thought. But at the end of the three months she could pay off the loan and the interest with the other loan she had taken out shortly afterwards using another hundred guilders, which of course was for an immensely larger number, and so on and so on. There was never any trouble about securing a loan and there was never any difficulty about using one loan to pay off another. And at the end of everything, when they introduced the Rentenmarks and a loaf of bread cost fifteen trillion old marks, Frau Steuer went from bank to bank, paying off the loans they had given her, and collecting, one after another, the hundred guilders she had left there as security. She still has the five hundred guilders, I expect. I cannot imagine why I am going to marry her.’

Christian wondered if he had heard quite correctly. ‘Oh, surely,’ he said.

‘No,’ Franz said. ‘We depended on her so much during that time. It was dreadful. Has Adele never told you? No – I suppose she saw nothing so very wrong about it. Going round to Frau Steuer’s house, eating Frau Steuer’s food, closing up the workshop – I suppose you know she told me that she sees no reason for me to continue with the business after we marry. She wants me to be a gentleman of leisure, playing skat in the afternoons with her late husband’s lawyer and her late husband’s doctor. It was a terrible time. And what she demanded of me! Well, it is the way of women. And then to listen to her and her late husband’s lawyer, explaining to each other how easy the Jews found it to destroy Germany, every night after dinner, and to listen to your daughter joining in with that – Christian, that was a terrible time. It still is a terrible time.’

‘We live in terrible times,’ Christian said blandly. ‘But they are not so terrible as they were.’

‘There was an apprentice called Rosenberg,’ Franz said. ‘Elias Rosenberg. His family had lived in Breitenberg for generations. He was an apprentice of mine. I got rid of him. I could not stand being questioned about him every day and what I had known about him when I had taken him on. He was the best carver – no, not the best carver, that was the boy Wilhelm who went off to the war with me and never came back, he was the best carver. But he was a very good carver, Elias Rosenberg. And he would not speak to me or say goodbye. I do not blame him. That was shameful, shameful, and I would have to do it again in exactly the same way. I have to marry Frau Steuer. There is no escape for me. But you! Christian! You!’

‘Sir?’

‘Christian, listen to me. You think you have obligations and duties. But you are in a town where nobody knows you. Your family have never been here except maybe on holiday. The Berlin lawyer! What is known about him? Nothing. I have seen him at your wedding with Adele and never again. Nothing is known about you in Dessau. You have no professional commitments. You have only a wife who is pregnant with your child and a sister-in-law whom we all love dearly, the poor sow. Leave them. Walk away and never look back. How many women have been left like that? Thousands. Let Adele come home to me and Frau Steuer with her child, and tell Breitenberg you died of the influenza. Let her tell her child that the Jews are to blame for everything, and let the women bring up Germany as they choose. You – you can walk away from it all and never see me, or Adele or Elsa, alas, bless her, or, please God, Frau Steuer ever again. Christian –’ Franz turned and took Christian by the shoulders. His face was mad and blazing with belief, a natty prophet of the blazing future. ‘Christian, just leave. Go to your brother in England. It has all failed for us here, in Dessau, in Breitenberg, in Berlin. It will only get worse for you, living with my daughter and her daughter, listening to that all day long, the rest of your life.’

‘It may be a son,’ Christian said, now suspecting for the first time that his father-in-law might be clinically insane.

‘It is a daughter,’ Franz said, shaking Christian’s shoulders again.

‘You don’t like women,’ Christian said.

‘I once liked them,’ Franz said. ‘But I am clear of them now. If I could walk away from them for ever, I would. I feel about the women as Adele and Frau Steuer feel about the Jews. And I feel that the happiest time in my life was the time in the trenches when there were no women apart from the ones who wrote you letters and the ones in the nearby towns on leave whom you could— Ah, what is the use?’

‘Thank you for the suggestion,’ Christian said. ‘However, I love my wife and I am greatly looking forward to the exciting event of our baby together.’

‘And here we are at the Hotel Gansevoort,’ Franz said, striding forward and taking the hand of Frau Steuer, waiting impatiently at the front gate. ‘Am I late, my angel?’

‘I had no idea where you had disappeared to,’ Frau Steuer said in her melodious, whistling Bavarian speech. ‘I had no idea at all. I was so hoping to have a leisurely breakfast with my fiancé. Good morning to you, Herr Vogt! You would not care to join us for breakfast?’

‘Alas, we busy working men,’ Christian said. She was wearing a pretty floral dress, pink and blue and green, a touch of lace at the bodice, and was holding a white lace parasol. She seemed perfectly charming with, perhaps, a forgivable touch of lipstick at her mouth, but quite discreet. The madman went up the steps, leaving Christian behind, and kissed his fiancée on the cheek.

‘What a delightful prospect,’ Franz could be heard saying as they went back inside. ‘A long, leisurely, hotel breakfast.’ He seemed to have quite forgotten that he was to call on Adele once she had woken up. Christian looked up at the clock at the corner of the street. It was all right: he had, after all, plenty of time to go to the Bauhaus and commit his crime before the start of the school day. Christian walked on, wondering whether Franz had really been intending to intercept him all the time, the madman.

5.2

These were some of the things that Christian had prepared to say, if he were interrupted or discovered by staff or students at the Bauhaus in the middle of his crime.

‘Oh, my sister-in-law asked me to come early, and lent me her key.’

‘Oh, it’s a surprise for my sister-in-law – a dealer from Berlin is coming, and I thought …’

‘It’s of no concern – I myself was a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar days, and we were forever …’

‘It was only the little teapot I wanted to take – it is of no importance, only for the morning.’

‘Well, I myself am a teacher of art, and I thought my boys would benefit from seeing an example of first-class work, of new and advanced first-class work …’

‘But I am Christian Vogt. Surely you know me.’

‘I took the key and will be returning it tonight. I am sure Elsa, my sister-in-law, will not regard it as the slightest bit important, so I cannot imagine why …’

‘I am very poor and my wife is pregnant and I want to sell my sister-in-law’s silver teapot and have a little, a very little, money of my own. Surely you can understand that.’

‘This was all going to be an immense practical joke, and Elsa would be the first one to laugh when she discovers how she has been tricked.’

His mouth was moving silently as he took the five keys on a large brass ring from his pocket and, trying to prevent them from jangling, inserted the first in the lock of the metal workshop, and turned. There was nobody about. He had walked through the grove of trees, and avoided the bold fronts of the building. He had come into the teaching school by the back entrance. The door opened, and Christian walked into the room, with its strange smell of sour fire, its unfamiliar and practical surfaces. He closed the door behind him. He knew, he thought, which the cupboard was where the Masters stored their work and the best of their student work: it was at the back of the long room. A line of metal lamps guarded the way, like soldiers at a wedding, each of them with an angled stem, poised in salute. He walked noiselessly to the cupboard at the back of the room. He tried the key, but it would not turn. He had a flush of panic before realizing, and almost laughed to realize, that somebody had actually forgotten to lock the cupboard the night before. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, not quite clean, and turned the doorknob while holding it. Inside, there were no more than a dozen pieces. Without turning the light on, he could not be sure, but none of them seemed to be gold. The teapot was unmistakable. Once, Christian would have described it as beautiful. But now he was not a member of the Bauhaus and it seemed ugly, absurd and, most of all, made out of solid silver. He picked it up, again with the handkerchief, and placed it in his large satchel. He locked the cupboard.

The whole sequence of events had taken only five minutes, from the moment Christian had entered the Bauhaus building, and he had had to use only one of the keys he had stolen. He was aware that he should feel remorse or shame. But he did not. He felt liberated, joyous, cock-a-hoop. He walked briskly across the grass and into the grove of trees behind the Bauhaus. He had seen nobody and nobody, he was sure, had seen him. In the afternoon, he would go directly to the street where the butcher nestled between the receivers of stolen goods, and ask them to receive and pay for some stolen goods.

In the event, he arrived at school at the same time as usual. ‘Line up quietly, boys,’ he said, to the small group already hard at work, scuffing the paintwork outside the art room. The weight of the silver teapot banged against his hip as he went in.

5.3

‘It was quite dramatic,’ Adele said, knitting quietly on the hard little sofa. In the other room, Elsa’s room, the wailing and screaming had subsided, and the noise of fists being pounded into mattress, against walls, onto flesh. There was now merely a sobbing, rising and falling. ‘First, Elsa came out of her room and said she was late. Then she looked about her for her keys, and could not find them. She said that she had had them, but I had not seen them, and I told her that she must have left them at the Bauhaus as she so often does.

‘I am so annoyed. I had so hoped to go to that interesting-sounding meeting at the town hall about the political future tonight, the one that Frau Steuer somehow knew about. And now I must not go out because Elsa is so upset. And for what? For a teapot, and I am sure she could make another teapot, it is not the end of the world, after all. No, it is for me to stay inside and comfort my sister because she has lost something, and it is so unfair, since I have so little pleasure and am able to take so little interest after all in anything.’

‘I would stay and make sure of Elsa,’ Christian said uncomfortably. He was sitting at the little dining table, which was set for supper.

‘And after all that,’ Adele said, ‘I told her that I had not seen the keys, that she should go to the Bauhaus and they would be there. Elsa, after all of that, was not sure at all that the keys had been where she thought she had left them, in the empty fruit bowl there on the shelf. So she went to the Bauhaus. But then only two hours later there was screaming at the door outside, the door to the flat, and I had been taking a rest but I levered myself up and there was Elsa, ringing to be let in, and I said to her, tired though I was, I said, “Elsa. Whatever is the matter? Whatever are you making such a din about?” And Elsa said – well, she told me the whole story, and she was truly almost hysterical. She was not herself, truly she was not. She told me that now she will not stay in this horrible country one day longer. That is what she called it, this horrible country. I am sorry. But it is not the end of the world, neither the theft of the teapot nor what my sister is saying. It does not signify, neither of them.