It was an excellent idea, but the American Bar of the Hotel Gansevoort would, it was felt, happily refuse entry to thirty drunk and violent Bauhäuslers after midnight. It had to be conducted as Paul decreed, from good to bad, and his second thought was not put to Max at all. Paul led them into the American Bar of the Hotel Gansevoort. It was seven thirty on Thursday, the eleventh of November. He wore his hair long on top, with a cursory parting in the middle; like many of the other boys, he shook his head and tossed it from his forehead regularly. The barman and the three other parties in the bar looked at the Bauhaus contingent, ten of them in the end, with distrust. One of the other men was wearing a white blouse crossed with a leather strap, like a moujik; another made a habit of blackening the lower rim of his eyelids. They entered the bar, with the wainscoting in soft wood, the beaten brass fixtures and its warm chocolate glow.
‘They are going to be more concerned about prostitutes than about us,’ Thomas said to Klaus.
‘What did you have for your dinner?’ Klaus said.
‘There were croquettes made out of turnip-tops,’ Thomas said, and shuddered. ‘And then a sort of shape that had been broached yesterday and turned up again today, tasting of almond soap. I am hoping for peanuts here at the American Bar.’
The drinks had been ordered by Max, the most respectable-looking of the men, who had come out in a brilliant white shirt with a scribble of a black string tie falling down the front. There was only one barman, a middle-aged and highly groomed individual in a white shirt that looked drab by the side of Max’s, his black hair beautifully neat around a sharp white line of a parting. Max and Ingrid stood at the bar, Ingrid in a pair of enormous ear-rings like the ear-rings of savages. They discussed, at some length, the possibilities of American drinks with the barman, and finished by ordering brandy Alexanders for the women and dry martinis for the men.
‘The bourgeoisie must be shot,’ Klaus was saying to Karoline, a very young girl whose eyes were wide open with interest. She had arrived in Dessau only one month before; her parents were quite set against it, but it was all so rewarding and valuable. She was wearing a brilliant red skirt and yellow stockings, and a white blouse rather like the moujik one that Klaus wore; they looked like a peasant couple at the Russian Ballet. Karoline had been brought by Max. He had seduced her efficiently and hygienically after two weeks.
‘There is no alternative,’ Klaus said. ‘They must all be shot.’
‘Oh, but surely,’ Karoline said, ‘when you explain things as clearly and logically as you explain them – surely everyone would understand afterwards how things must be.’
Klaus gave a brief, harsh laugh, and plucked at the arm of the man who was wearing black makeup on his lower lids. ‘Ludo, you must meet this comrade,’ he said to the man. ‘Here is a comrade who believes still in education.’
‘I think I believe in education, Klaus,’ Ludo said. ‘There is always the possibility of education.’
‘No, often there is no possibility of education,’ Klaus said. ‘There is no alternative but to take them outside and shoot them in the head. I am talking about the urban bourgeoisie.’
‘What about the rural bourgeoisie?’ Ingrid said, coming back from the bar. She had a charming inability to pronounce her rs, a plump girl with bloodthirsty views. ‘What about them? Those of us who spring from the rural bourgeoisie – we would like to know their fate.’
‘They,’ Klaus said, accepting a dry martini from Ingrid and handing another to Ludo, a brandy Alexander to Karoline, ‘they will be sealed up inside their vast palaces, and burnt alive, and the people’s tribunes will line up and watch them burn. It will be a glorious spectacle.’
‘Oh, good,’ Ingrid said. ‘I do hope I’m there when it happens to Mamma. Come on, Karoline – let’s go and look at the mosaics in the bathroom.’
She had finished her drink so quickly, and Karoline, following instructions, too; they went out. Once in the lobby, Ingrid turned and called back into the bar, ‘I say – do look at this,’ and then the men, most of them, strolled out, their martini glasses in hand. The barman looked sceptical, but one boy remained at the bar. It was Ludo. They must have seemed pleasant and clean, though oddly dressed. But in a moment there was a blood-curdling scream from the lobby; the boy who had remained in the bar made a concerned face, and, leaving his glass on the bar, rushed out. The barman followed, more slowly, to find the last of the students piling out of the hotel and running for dear life, hurling their cocktail glasses behind them as they went.
The whole thing had been decided upon before they entered the American Bar at the Hotel Gansevoort. It was the best bar in Dessau, and by a long way the most expensive. The ten of them ran furiously, never having had any intention to pay for the drinks at the hall of the bourgeois predators.
At length they slowed down. Egon had led them through a complex series of side-streets, doubling back and crossing their route twice. Only when they turned into the Radegasterstrasse did they fall back into a walk, rather red-faced. Instantly Klaus began to talk about the revolution.
‘Oh, I know,’ Ludo said happily, at an inquisitive look from Egon. ‘He looks forward so much to the future. I admire him so much.’
‘What is your future?’ Paul said. ‘Your individual one, not the one that contains us all.’
‘Did you not see Ludo’s glass and felt piece?’ Karoline said. ‘It was all in shades of red, transparent and opaque, and the shades were identical but modified by whether it was glass or felt. There were polished aspects and raw aspects. It was—’
‘But red is only red!’ Max said. ‘All that talk of associations – it is just like listening to my father talk about – about – about anything. We have grown out of all of that, surely.’
And then they turned into the second bar of the evening. It was another cocktail bar, but not quite so assured and elegant as the American Bar. The interior had been done in a hurry by someone recognizing a craze, and although its little wooden lights and its marble bar, the large golden mirrors behind the bar looked impressive through the window, there were already signs that it would settle down into a comfortably shabby existence. The striped wallpaper, purple and cream with a thin line of gold between them, had been picked off at table level here and there; the glass ashtray at the table where they sat bore the name of the bar, but was chipped. Nevertheless, the drinks were said to be good, and gin fizzes, a curious mixture containing Curaçao and Chartreuse and a glass of sekt with a cube of brandy-soaked sugar were ordered. Here, it had been concluded, they would pay. The bar was called Bill’s Bar, with a fashionable American apostrophe. A pianist played ragtime cheerfully on a small grand, perhaps too obtrusively for the middling-sized room; a single middle-aged man wearing an American suit, his crumpled hat on the table by his side, read the sporting newspaper with a glass of clear heavy liquid in front of him.
‘Red is everything!’ Ingrid came in. ‘Nothing is only anything! You have not seen his piece. It was so much admired. Red is everything.’
‘Oh, you mean it is blood, and passion, and Spain, and the Party, and more blood, and – associations, my dear Ingrid, associations,’ Max said. ‘The point is—’
‘Those are such important associations,’ Karoline said. ‘We would not know what to do with red, or anything, without bringing our associations into it. When we see blue, there is the sea!’
‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake,’ Max said. ‘The sea is not blue! I have never seen the sea blue. The sea is grey, and sometimes a little greenish, and sometimes brown, and—’
‘It is only blue in the pictures,’ Egon said. ‘The pictures that your grandfather painted and liked so much.’
They all burst out laughing. Karoline had perhaps thought that Max liked her for herself, that she had been brought along because Max thought her so special. But the others knew that Max brought many girls along, and would bring many more girls along, in the course of the year.
‘The truth of the matter is …’ Klaus said, but he found he
was talking to no one. ‘What are they talking about?’
‘Red is only red,’ Max said, ‘as I say. It is for us to make our own associations, or to choose none. It is merely a vibration along a certain spectral line, an illusion, a range of shades that may remind you of blood and revolution and Spain, but which reminds me of a virgin’s First Communion dress. There! And a wedding dress! And snow! That is what it reminds me of.’
‘Oh, but that is absurd,’ Willi said. ‘No one gets married in a red dress. You always marry in white.’
It was tacitly agreed not to take any notice of this contribution. Willi’s foolish contributions to any debate were familiar. He was a stocky boy with close-shaved head; his hair had been blond and glinted like the very beginnings of a mental insight, emerging. Whether he did not listen, or whether he listened and did not understand, his contributions more often led to an embarrassed changing of the subject than a continuation of it. He only made sense when he had a chisel in front of him and a block of cedarwood.
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 masskrugs 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 masskrugs 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 krugs, 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 t
he 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.’
The Emperor Waltz Page 58
