The Emperor Waltz (76 page)

‘Of course, now that the keys have gone missing, I suppose we will have to have a new set cut, and perhaps, since they seem to have fallen into the hands of a petty thief, to change the locks on the door to the flat. It really seems an awful waste of money, and just when we could do without spending anything much at all. I really do object to it, even though it does seem to be necessary. It really is too bad.’

Adele was jabbing at the air with a knitting needle, red in the face and hissing so that Elsa would not hear what she had to say. She was a little red face over a great belly, her legs and feet sticking out; she was in her going-out dress of black with red frills at the neck, the one she had made herself last month. When she gabbled like that, she grew breathless, her face sometimes pouring with sweat. Christian looked at his wife without letting an expression pass over his features.

‘I don’t know,’ Christian said eventually, when the gabbling had died down. ‘I am sure she has just misplaced the keys. They are probably behind the dining table or on the floor somewhere.’

‘No, Christian, that is not possible,’ Adele said. ‘Because a strange person took the keys, and opened the cupboard in the art room, and stole Elsa’s project. She cannot have misplaced them to be found again somewhere in the flat.’

‘Oh, don’t you believe it,’ Christian said breezily. ‘Everyone at the Bauhaus is always forgetting to lock things. I’m sure somebody forgot to lock the cupboard and forgot to lock up the workshop, and a hungry student waltzed in and took whatever he could find. Believe you me.’

The keys were, in fact, tucked safely away underneath the cushions of the sofa where Adele was sitting at the moment. Christian knew this because he had placed them there two hours earlier. Adele went on complaining about the obligations now being placed on her, knitting with a furious c
lack-clack-clack-clack
in four-four time. In a moment Christian’s mind wandered, and he was able to shut out both the noise of his wife’s complaint, and the more measured and more disturbing sound of Elsa’s distress, only a room away. He picked up the little metal fork from the table setting in front of him, and turned it over, as if checking to see that it was clean. The forks had a ceramic handle with the picture of an edelweiss on them; they had come from a cousin of Adele’s as a wedding present, and she claimed to like them. Christian believed that, for their supper, there would probably be the same pigs’ liver he had bought the day before from the bad butcher. They had not eaten it, having been taken out to dinner yesterday by Adele’s father, who had left on his motoring holiday with Frau Steuer. His mind wandered on, and presently it came to the pleasant thought of the hundreds of Rentenmarks tied together tightly in the inside pocket of his jacket. What the money would go towards, he did not quite know. He expected it would go to defray many small expenses that he would rather Adele did not know about and her budgeting would have no control over. That was an agreeable thought, as she went on talking, her needles clicking.

‘Oh, Adele,’ he said, setting the fork down, and looking at her with his hands spread wide. ‘I will never, ever leave you and the baby. I love you so much.’

Adele looked at him with amusement and surprise. ‘Well, that is good to know,’ she said. ‘But I do not think I was in any doubt on the subject. When Elsa has calmed down a little, I shall go and start to cook some supper. It is only noodles and liver with onions, but I think I would like some supper. It is so bad! I was so looking forward to my evening out, hearing about what might be done to improve matters in Germany. I have so few pleasures now, with my belly the way it is. Baby was restless again today, Christian. Baby was so hot,’ she said, caressing her stomach and smiling down at it as if the thing she was growing inside could hear and see and understand her. ‘Baby was so hot and restless and tiresome today, I did not know what to do with Baby to give Mamma some nice rest. And now this.’ Adele gestured towards the noise coming from the other room, the wailing.

Somewhere in the street where the stolen goods were received and the worst meats were despatched, in a back room sat Elsa’s silver teapot, wrapped in newspaper as if it were nothing so very much. It waited for its purchaser, a gentleman of special interests and few scruples, to take it away and see what could be made of it. Christian expected that in the end it would be melted down and become something else entirely.

5.4

It was a good day. As sometimes happened, a letter from Dolphus arrived a day after a delayed one, the postal services, whether in England or in Germany, making up for their confusion by a prompt delivery of the next. It was propped up on their bed, like the one before, unannounced by Adele. Dolphus wrote weekly, and did not know about the irregular deliveries; he brought his brother up to date with what had been happening in his life. Christian skipped through the first page and a half, the better to have the pleasure of reading them properly later, on his second or third read.

A man called Norway, an engineer with Vickers, came to give a talk to a small supper club that a few of the fellows have here – an engineers’ supper club. We are such jolly fellows, and build such bridges in the sky when we talk! Norway was a pugnacious fellow, who came straight to the point. He is working on a project of airships; he has been the calculator of stresses. But he says he is not excited by the project. There are too many problems with airships, too many things that the commercial requirements have asked him to overlook and neglect. He said that the future lies with the aeroplane, which will take such forms that we know not what they will become in our lifetimes, capable of hundreds of kilometres an hour, capable of flying at thousands of feet in the air. That is the issue, Norway said: how to pressurize the cabin, how to make it secure against the low air pressure outside, which will enable a plane to fly at many times the speed it is now capable of. The airship? It will be quite forgotten.

We were so excited to hear the views of the future expounded by one who truly understands. But after this exciting evening, I found myself disconsolate. In Germany, there is so much belief in the airship. And it seems to me that the future is here. Here is where the great ideas will spring from, and where change will happen. Nothing will happen in Germany, just an attempt to sit on the future and not allow it to happen. There will be nothing left in Germany from which to make anything new, just vast wobbling airships in the air, and in five years the Kaiser, or somebody like him, passing decrees in Berlin. Here is where the future is, Christian. I wish that you and Adele would see that, and come here. But I do not expect that Adele’s mind can be changed in any respect. That makes me so sad. I have decided that after my degree I will go to work in aeronautics. It is where the future will be decided.

You will be interested to hear that I have finally met a woman of the opposite sex! However, you must not be excessively interested. The woman in question is merely a neighbour of my landlady’s, here in Tregunter Road. She lives in a tall, thin house painted white, like all the other houses in Tregunter Road, and a house, like all the houses in Tregunter Road, that could benefit from being painted white again. I saw her standing outside the house remonstrating with a delivery man, a handsome old mahogany commode on the pavement. It was starting to rain. There was a small child by her side, holding her hand. The problem seemed to be that the delivery man and his mate would not carry the commode upstairs into the first-floor drawing room. Stairs, he said, would have been extra. The poor woman was beside herself. I think it did not occur to her that the men were merely asking for some extra payment, unofficially. I intervened and suggested that if she could manage to carry one side of the commode, I would very happily carry the other. She accepted with great alacrity and pleasure. ‘You see,’ she said, dismissing the delivery men, ‘even a passing foreigner has more thought and consideration than you. I shall certainly be speaking to Mr Carrington about this. I have done a good deal of business with him over the years, but no longer. Come along, young man.’

She meant by ‘young man’ her little boy, not me, but I followed her in any case. It was no real effort, and she gave me a cup of tea. I could not understand where her husband was – whether he was absent, at work or perhaps even dead. She seemed very independent, but her most passionate interest was in her son, a small boy of four or five. At first I thought his name was de Sallen, or something of that sort, exotic though it appears. Later, I understood that he was called Alan, a much more ordinary name. She had introduced him by saying, ‘Oh, he knows his antiques, he knows his stuff there,
does Alan
.’ As they say in English, he was her
pride and joy
, and she entertained me with talk, quite improbable, of his gifts and abilities. ‘Do you know,’ she said, her eyes shining, ‘even at his age, he can distinguish Wedgwood and Sheraton, at a glance? He has a real eye, he does. He knows the difference between Doric and Ionic in an old building. Oh, he knows his stuff, does Alan.’ The little boy sat, beautifully dressed, looking at me as if trying to establish what my maker or hallmark might be. The child has an extraordinary sage, learned, knowing air, and is dressed in his best clothes by his doting mother. As he looked at me, I feared that he might want to turn me over and examine the marks on my bottom. Now I think about the encounter, I realize that I know what his name was, but not hers. So if she fulfils her promise to invite me to tea, when it will be properly carried out, she will have to remind me who she is when she drops the card in. She was very amused to hear where I live, and full of tales of the misbehaviour of previous inhabitants of the boarding house. I had thought that the street was an irregular one, but evidently those who live there cling to a belief in their own gentility. It was a small adventure but, as I indicated, it is almost the first occasion I have met a woman of any sort, so I thought it worth recording. I dare say that in several months, not to mention the years to come, you will be boasting about your own little Alan and his gifts in precisely the same way as my new friend. Take heed!

Christian went on reading, absorbedly. Outside, the smell of onions frying had begun, and the clatter of knives came from the kitchen. The sound of Elsa crying had begun to diminish. In his pocket were several hundred Rentenmarks. He was happy to think of it. He would stay with Adele for ever, and do his duty, and that would be his future, not Dolphus’s in London. From somewhere in the building, the same and usual sounds of the neighbours were rising upwards: the first shouts of a row, laughter over something, the noise of a china plate being dropped on a hard floor, the front door being heavily slammed, the sound of a piano being practised, the same two or three difficult bars. It was agreeable to sit on the bed before dinner and read your brother’s letter from London with its news of the future, and what the world might become. Through the window, the lights were coming on in the flat on the other side of the courtyard, and someone was washing the dishes from their dinner; the plump woman he often saw, her waist now being encircled by her plumper husband with the heavy moustache as she plunged the dishes into the sink. There was a faint delicate spatter of noise from the courtyard. He could not think what it was. It continued. Out there, it was beginning to rain, the drops falling singly on stone and roof.

EPILOGUE
2014/1933

1.

The young woman with the beautiful coat had walked over to the other side of the road several times to ring the bell at the apartment block opposite. She was Yusuf’s only customer. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the snow was starting to be quite heavy, but the café was not a success, and Yusuf doubted he would have had any other customers in any case. He was starting to believe that Steglitz was not ready for an elegant Turkish tearoom, with perfect tiny Turkish cakes. He had come here with Florian, away from all the Anatolians in Kreuzberg, and had been convinced that the ladies of the area would find the idea irresistible. They had made a lovely website, with beautiful photographs of the terracotta interior, the singing birds in the gilt cages, the elegant golden chairs and the antique photographs of Ottomans in golden frames. There were details of what cakes you could order, and smiling photographs of both blond Florian, who looked after the business, and dark Yusuf, who made the cakes. It had been a year now, and sometimes whole days passed with only one customer, or sometimes with none at all.

He did not think the woman today was Turkish, but there was something foreign about her. Her coat was expensive, a white waisted coat with a huge fur collar, and when she took off her white fur hat, like a Cossack’s, her black bobbed hair was glossy and sharply cut. She had arrived out of the snow carrying a heavy parcel, saying,
guten Tag
, but that was the limit of her German. She must have arrived in a taxi, Yusuf thought, and rung the doorbell opposite before coming across the road to the café. She had coffee with a small cake; she ate it in tiny bites, her eyes fixed on the snowstorm. In ten minutes, she paid and left. She must have thought she had seen somebody entering the apartment block, but it was either a mistake or not the person she was looking for, because in a moment or two she came back, and asked for a glass of water. In a few minutes, she did exactly the same thing, sinking down with graceful tiredness.

Yusuf’s English was not as good as Florian’s, but he could make an effort and, after thinking for a moment, said, ‘If you wish, I can keep your parcel when you want to go over the road.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ the woman said. ‘I am waiting for a friend. He is not expecting me, however.’

‘He is not— Ah, I see,’ Yusuf said. ‘I perhaps know him.’

‘You know him?’