The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  15.

  The effects of the snowfall, making rounded shapes of the trees in the ducal park, obscuring the town’s buildings, making old men out of gabled houses, marking them with white eyebrows, was all known to the poets of the town. But the best of the poets of the town would have known what it came of. The atmospheric pressure falls, and remains low; the temperature falls to a certain point, as the sun withdraws and the earth tilts away from it; the masses of cloud are moved upwards by wind as they hit the Thuringian hills, and the conditions, very specific in their requirements, are met. The water in the clouds freezes, coagulates, forms a snow crystal, and another, and another, and their own weight, like small furry beasts come to existence in mid-air, sinks them to the ground. The low pressure remains; the temperature stays constant; the snow continues to fall. The ground freezes; the snow packs hard; the surface snow hardens, freezes, solidifies.

  What can be done? Nothing. The animal life in the town and thereabouts withdraws inside, for warmth: those animals who can sit before a fire, the windows and the curtains shut tight, and eat small, toasty, pleasant things brought to them by maids. The coal stores are reckoned, and thought to be good for a few days yet. Others of the animal life in the town light smaller fires, and sit inside, swathed in blankets and mufflers, or they encourage their confused dogs to sit on their laps for once, to do the forbidden thing of leaping onto an armchair. It is astonishing how much heat a dog gives out, more than one Weimar wife will remark to her husband, sitting in small rooms with their gloves on. Other animal life retires to the stables, and makes a serious start on the winter hay; the last of the horse-drawn cabbies gives way, and there is no work to be had, and they might as well surrender until the snow finishes falling. There are people who are now out of food, and out of what little fuel they had. There is an old couple in a tiny shack, meant only as a garden shed but which was sold to them in the aftermath of the war by someone who needed a couple of hundred marks when a couple of hundred marks meant anything at all. They sit, swathed in every piece of clothing they can muster, and are still cold. They are thinking about burning the third chair, because there are only two of them and the snow must stop before long, and when it stops falling, the temperature will rise a little. They are thinking about it independently. Tomorrow one of them will raise the subject with the other, and they will argue about it a little longer before burning the last thing they can burn. They have no food to eat, hot or cold, apart from some hard black bread. There are animals in the park, huddled together in the hollows of logs, performing the lot of animals everywhere, which is waiting in terror. Somewhere outside the city boundaries – it is so hard to draw the boundaries, and the lands of snow are a mapless nation – somewhere outside the boundaries, a horse wanders blind and stumbling, lame and panicked and in pain. Its owner is somewhere about; he lies on his side in a mound of snow, his face rimed with frost, his staring eyes open, his lips drawn back in a snarl. The salt tears from his eyes are frozen to his cheeks; the saliva in his open mouth is hard-frozen ice. His animal terror is over. He will be found when the snow melts, but that will not be for many weeks. He is the water-carter of the town, and the water in his great barrel is frozen, spilt out across the country road in a small frozen lake. In her house, the water-carter’s wife sits in her overstuffed parlour, a fire going, the curtains drawn, an English toasting fork bearing a slice of bread. She is well provided for by this handler of a town monopoly; he must have found himself safe quarters as the storm broke, and is probably now being looked after in great comfort by some chit of a farmer’s daughter, as she observes to the maid when she comes in. There is plenty of food around. It is just getting to it that is the problem, or getting it to us, rather. She will give him what-for, when she sees him, she says. But in fact she would exchange the prospect of a future punishment for the sure knowledge that he is safe somewhere, and not lying dead, frozen, by the side of a deep-covered country road.

  At home, Klee wears woollen gloves with the ends of the fingers cut off: with a pencil, he draws. He notices that his fingers are white with the cold, and shuddering when his hand holds still, in the air. Is his violin safe? Could it crack with the chill? He sees the indeterminate but purposeful movement of his breath in the cold air of the studio, like a brushstroke of much-diluted ink on paper. It is too cold to paint. Today he is drawing. Tomorrow or the day after or the day after that, the Bauhaus will reopen. There, he will paint the wizard who brings the chill to the earth, flying through the air. He brings his thoughts back, purposefully, to the drawing in front of him. It is a drawing of a fish, an old, old fish, one that knows everything, in the bottom of the deepest lake, beyond the fall of light. It looks upwards, towards what, it does not know.

  In the kitchen, Lily talks to the cook. What will they eat for dinner? Heart; there is heart still. And tomorrow? The cook does not know. They may have to eat beans. Is there anything else? Nothing; they may have to brave the snow, if the butcher’s shop is open, and if the butcher’s shop contains anything in the way of meat. So perhaps beans. Like the ancient Greeks, Lily remarks, with a despairing laugh. But the cook doesn’t know about that.

  Itten walks in the park. He is cold, and he rises above sensations of cold. Cold is a delusion and a snare, like the effects of all the senses. Last week he walked with twelve; today he walks with only one. He says these things as they walk. They cannot see far. Their eyes must be turned inwards. The world is a gift and an illusion, Itten says. He does not raise his voice above conversational level, and the words of his speech do not survive the short journey to his single disciple’s shuddering head. One disciple is enough, Itten says, in kindly consolation. The disciple hears that, and tries to hold on to it against the thought that one disciple is too much, and that one disciple is hungry and colder than he has ever been in his life. Some disciples decided to stay inside by the fire and come back when the weather is better, Itten observes. Those disciples have failed, as Mazdaznan’s disciple always fails, through the call and tug of animal spirits, which we try to rise above. But Mazdaznan does not fail, even if every one of us fails. Mazdaznan, without any proponents or disciples, goes on in the cosmos.

  In a hall, sixty men in uniform stand and sing their song. Almost everyone came. They are red-faced and chilblained, but they came. Their animal spirits are strong; they feel like beasts and they look like doughnuts. Their song is about a hero of their movement; the speech that is to come is about the Jews. They look forward to it.

  The door of the garden shack opens. It is an old man. In one hand, he holds an ancient wooden chair. In the other, he holds an axe. The time has come to burn the chair for heat. He has taken it out to slaughter it, like a well-loved animal. He places the chair on the ground; he raises his trembling arms.

  16.

  In the room above the bookshop, Christian observed the tiny fire with a kind of longing. It was sinking and sinking, and now was surely beyond rescue. Christian’s longing was for the fire of the future, the high-banked and roaring fire that he would insist on once they were married. He observed that, in the coal scuttle, there remained only three pieces of coal. Adele gave the impression of being a good and practical housewife, but her cake was not very good, and her coffee was awful, and surely a good and practical housewife would have made a better estimate of the amount of coal she needed to bring up from the coal cellar. Adele would have to go down again once he and Dolphus had left, and bring up another load of coal to see them through the day.

  They had been talking about Breitenberg, and Adele had been answering his detailed questions with detailed answers. Elsa was watching him narrowly, sometimes puffing with despair when he asked something stupid, when he felt he had been told the answer at some point earlier. He could have asked Dolphus to contribute, but his brother was just sitting, staring at the two of them who were talking in a shy, embarrassed, blank way. The English nanny had drummed it into them: you must speak in company, not sit in silence as Germans do. But Dolphus had forgot
ten the lesson. Christian went on asking polite, amused questions. His mind was on the fire. It had been a great mistake to take off their coats and scarves when they had arrived: the room was growing colder, and nobody seemed to be taking any steps to feed the fire.

  ‘We must be thinking about going,’ Christian said eventually. ‘I expect that the train you were planning to return home on will not be running in this weather.’

  ‘Almost certainly not,’ Adele said. ‘I must try to send a telegram to Father. We will just have to sit and wait, and hope for the best.’

  ‘We will come and see you tomorrow,’ Christian said. ‘If there is anything we can do …’

  ‘That would be very pleasant,’ Adele said. ‘If you happen to see any eggs for sale, one can go on living on eggs for days, and somebody always has a chicken.’

  Dolphus said his goodbyes, in a remote and withdrawn way, to Elsa and to Adele; Christian kissed his fiancée on the cheek. They dressed, in coats, scarves and gloves; they pulled on their galoshes. It seemed to go on for ever, with Adele standing there patiently waiting for their departure. The service he had offered, and had had in mind, was more like holding an umbrella over the pair of sisters as they walked to the railway station.

  They let themselves out. The snow had slowed, and the sky was almost beginning to clear. There was a patch of intense, lucid blue between snowclouds. The cold was fierce, and they walked with their faces wrapped in scarves, in silence. The sound of their galoshes in the snow was solitary in the noiseless town. Dolphus followed his brother through the winding streets, softened and rounded with the snowfall. The shops they passed were closed, their windows covered with planks of wood; they passed through a square where the central statue – had it been of Goethe and Schiller? Christian could not remember – had been swathed in sheets of green-painted planking against the cold. What was it to guard against? Would a bronze statue really shatter in the cold, and if it were cold enough, would the green-painted planking do to protect it?

  They reached the park. A path across it had been cleared. A wind was parting the clouds, and an allegro suggestion of sunlight on the brilliant white – white with a suggestion of purple in its shadows, of blue, of pink, even – was transforming the landscape, as the snow had transformed it in the last days. They began to wade through the deep snow; it was laborious work. Something hit Christian on the side of his head; a block of snow. He turned, and Dolphus, whose eyes alone could be seen, alive with merriment, threw another fistful of snow. Christian bent and packed the snow into a ball, and threw it back. They ran as best they could through the deep snow, and fell, and threw snowballs, and fell again, and were covered with snow, and pulled themselves out of drifts and waded through still deeper snow, as fast as they could. The snow, apart from where they had been, was a perfect smooth surface. Nobody had been in the park for days, and if they had, their tracks had been covered.

  When they arrived at Frau Scherbatsky’s house, the maid Maria was watching out for them, and she must have called her mistress. Frau Scherbatsky opened the door to them as soon as they knocked.

  ‘My dear Herr Vogt,’ she cried. ‘My dear Herr Dolphus. It was most unwise to go out at all – I would have insisted that you stay at home today. Look at you! Quite covered with snow. Maria will make you some bowls of hot water which you must soak your feet and hands in, immediately. You young people, you have no idea of the pains of chilblains! And then change into dry clothes and come downstairs to sit with Herr Neddermeyer and me by the fire. He has stayed at home with me all day. Very sensible. Herr Wolff has gone out, in his medals and his uniform and his heavy coat, to one of his meetings. Herr Dolphus, please, leave your coat and hat and scarves down here – they will dry much better in the cloakroom downstairs. How did they get so covered? Herr Wolff will come back in the same state, I know. Maria, is the hot water ready for Herr Vogt and his brother? Maria! Maria!’

  When they were upstairs, their trousers rolled up and their reddened feet sitting in bowls of hot water, Christian allowed himself to return to Adele, with the beginnings of an apology. He did not see how he was going to be able to remove himself from the situation. He had had an opportunity to say, ‘Perhaps it would be for the best,’ when Elsa had pointed out in her noisy way that they knew nothing of each other, and should not marry. But he had not taken that opportunity when it came. And now the opportunity would not arise again. Adele was the daughter of a puppet-maker who had seen her chance to marry the son of a rich Berlin lawyer. He could not tell her he had changed his mind: not only honour but the law would not permit him to. He knew enough of Adele to understand that she would not permit him to, either. Her tidy mind would not leave the matter unresolved.

  ‘I know that Adele is—’ Christian began, not turning to Dolphus, but looking down into his bowl and his sore, reddened feet in it. But Dolphus interrupted him.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know exactly. I can’t say how much—’

  ‘Adele?’ Christian said.

  ‘She is …’ Dolphus said. He raised his head like an animal at the first light of dawn, stretching and feeling the first rush of blood. ‘… she is wonderful. The most wonderful woman I ever met. I can see exactly why everything made such sense to you. I would marry her, too, tomorrow. If she were not spoken for, I would fall in love with her like a flash.’

  ‘I know,’ said Christian. He was sunk in perfect misery. Adele had come between him and his brother, and had made a barrier of misunderstanding. Dolphus had not noticed how cold the room had been, how the coffee had sunk to a layer of gritty, sandy acorn grindings, how pert and irritating Adele had been, how the cake had had a strange aftertaste of parsnip. Such a misunderstanding had never happened before.

  ‘We should go down and sit by the fire with your landlady and her lover,’ Dolphus said. ‘I want to tell them all about Adele, too. Look!’

  He held up a piece of paper, rounded and slightly crumpled. It was one of Elsa’s drawings of her sister; this one of Adele making the bed. It was done in large, confident pencil strokes, thick and expressive. It was unmistakably Adele, and in the pencil strokes, there was affection. ‘I stole it,’ Dolphus said, with simple pride. ‘I hid it in the back of my jacket, when no one was looking.’

  17.

  That night it did not snow again: the temperature dropped stolidly, and the ground froze. The next day began brilliantly, but towards noon the clouds moved back, and after lunch it did begin to snow again. Herr Neddermeyer observed that he had never seen such weather this early in the year, and Frau Scherbatsky agreed with him. The Vogt brothers played cards quietly in a corner of the sitting room; they would have gone out, but Dolphus had unwisely asked Frau Scherbatsky for some honey and lemon juice in a cup of hot water, and she had promptly observed that he had the beginnings of a sore throat. They sat and they played whist, a game from their English-nanny childhood: Herr Neddermeyer called out from time to time that skat was a much better game, that he would school them in that later. It was a dull afternoon. Christian would have liked to remove his boots and stretch out in his stockinged feet on the chartreuse sofa, and to sleep the dull afternoon away. But he behaved himself.

  At four, Maria brought the tea in and, with it, a note that she gave to Herr Neddermeyer. How had it been delivered, across these drifts and banks of impassable snow? It was a mystery. At six, Neddermeyer’s friend and colleague Grausemann would come to call. ‘I have known old Grausemann for many years,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘His time hangs heavy on his hands now that his practice is wound up and his wife is dead. I would be very glad to see him. It is not far for him to come.’ Frau Scherbatsky followed Maria out of the room.

  At six precisely, an old man with an elaborately shaped, expressively styled moustache and beard was shown into the sitting room. He seemed somehow familiar; it was the gestures, which were the same as Neddermeyer’s: the same experimental baring of the teeth, the same side-to-side smoothing gesture in the air. They had indeed known each other for decad
es.

  ‘It may surprise you to know,’ Grausemann said, ‘that we have not always been in such good odour with each other. There was the case of a pupil architect, in the summer of 1892, was there not?’ His eyes shone; he reached across the table for the dish of potatoes, and helped himself extensively. Wolff, who had been upstairs silently all day and had come down only for dinner, let his eyes count the potatoes as the old fool doled them out to himself.

  ‘Young Fragewort,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Indeed, young Fragewort.’

  He shook his head, and Grausemann made a theatrical shrug, his shoulders half rising about his ears. They looked at each other, Neddermeyer narrowly questioning, Grausemann with eyes innocently open; and then, without any suggestion of cause or meaning, they both burst out laughing.

  ‘That must be thirty years ago,’ Grausemann said.

  ‘Surely not,’ Neddermeyer said. Wolff leant forward and rudely took the dish of potatoes from where it stood, before Grausemann.

  ‘Thirty years!’ Grausemann said. ‘The summer of 1892. That is thirty years ago and several months. Count them.’

  ‘Thirty years!’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Thirty years!’

  ‘Young Fragewort,’ Grausemann said. ‘And now he is …’

  ‘Young Fragewort,’ Neddermeyer said, wonderingly.

  ‘Hardly that,’ Grausemann said. ‘But when you think about it?’

  ‘Yes, astounding would be the word,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘He ought to be in gaol, young Fragewort.’

  ‘And some people would say, so should you,’ Grausemann said. ‘So – should – you. I don’t know that young Fragewort isn’t in gaol. He may very well be.’

  ‘And richly deserved,’ Neddermeyer said, nodding. ‘Is there more of that excellent venison stew, my dear Frau Scherbatsky?’