The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher
still quiet and warm, in 1916, in January; every class of person came there, sometimes in the love of art and sometimes in refuge from the first Berlin winter of war.
After one of these class outings, it came to Christian that artists did not only proceed by copying famous works of art, warmly in the gallery. He had developed a passion for Menzel, whose painting of clouds of steam in a factory had made him stand and stare. His mother had stood with him in front of a beach scene by the Frenchman Monet, and she had shown him that Monet had painted it on the spot. How can you know that, Mamma? Painters may sketch the composition with charcoal and pencil on the spot, but they have studios to produce the finished work. Look, Mamma had said. Look, you can see if you get close – we are going to be reprimanded, so let us be quick – look, some grains of sand, there, in the paint. And there it is, Mamma said. He did it all there on the beach, because there are lots of things that you can’t set down with charcoal and pencil.
And there it was. They suffered from boredom so terribly then, in the war, in 1916 and 1917; life could not be constructed so entirely of dread and hectoring. Mamma was so thin and pretty, with warm red hair; sometimes, when he was small, and he had been very good, she would let him pull out any white hairs that he could find. He could find only a very few. Perhaps one at a time. He would pull it out, and she would wince, and say thank you, and then she would finish getting dressed.
He was forgetting now what Mamma looked like. The photographs did not get her quite right. The drawing he had made of her did not get her right, either – she had died when he was still not a good artist, did not get things right. He could summon her, just about, by thinking of Dolphus’s nose, and trying to add some thick dark eyebrows, which were like his own in the mirror, and then some dark blue eyes, almost purple. The labour of keeping his mother’s last-days’ face from his memory was hard, too. But then, after some time of holding it in his thoughts, the real face would leap out, effortlessly, in full health, as she had been any morning at the breakfast table, a white silk hat shading her tender and shy expression, and he would wonder that he struggled to think what she had looked like.
There had been outings, after the Monet moment, to draw in the open air. Dolphus had come, to be company. But Christian was shy about his art, and he did not want to be seen drawing in public. There were quiet corners of parks, but they had a tendency to yield large and vulgar families from Pankow on a day’s outing. The country was too far. The street was interesting, but you could not set up in the middle of the pavement in Friedrichstrasse. Dolphus was easy and tractable; he came not just because he enjoyed the outing, but because sometimes the artist needs a figure to add to a scene, and the figure needs to be observed at length. Dolphus rarely minded being told to stand by a tree, or to crouch over a stream. Christian’s drawings were often of an unspecific male figure, leaning against a tree, or crouching as if holding a home-made fishing rod over a tree. They looked like bucolic scenes, but that was only because Christian had grown shy, and the details of the scene had been sketchy, since they could be done later. Mamma had been kind, and had even had one framed for her dressing room, where it still hung, dusted and cared for by Egon, like all her possessions. But anyone could have seen that it was, in reality, a corner of the Zoological Garden, yards from where carriages and motors, unrecorded by Christian, stood in steaming queues.
In Weimar, without Dolphus to wait for him patiently and perform a useful task, there was too much burden of expectation. He had produced only three or four rapid and embarrassed sketches when the time came to return to Frau Scherbatsky’s house. The market was emptying now; the stall-holders were calling to each other, and packing up what remained of their stock in boxes, pallets, packing with straw, berating their boys for getting under the feet. In the window of the coffee house two men sat, one with an amused, superior face, one with a clever, screwed-up expression. Towards Christian, a group came: five soldiers, or former soldiers, in uniform. One was in a bath chair, although it was not possible to see how he was injured. It needed only one comrade to push the bath chair, but all four of the standing soldiers had some kind of hold on it and were walking together. Two held a handle each, one was placing a blanket over the knees of the invalid and fussing, and the last, unable to find a particular task, was demonstratively letting a hand trail at the back of the chair, as if claiming territory. They were all young; perhaps no more than three or four years older than Christian. As they passed, he saw that on their arms was a band, and on the band was some sort of motif. They had the picturesque appearance of veterans, the five of them, crumpled, sincere and careworn.
‘Did you see that?’ Kandinsky said. ‘Klee, did you see that? That group of soldiers, there, with the wheeling chair in the middle?’
They had just sat down in a coffee house. Kandinsky liked to sit in the window where he could see life. Klee did not object. Sometimes he looked inside the coffee house, sometimes he looked outside. In the back of the coffee house, although it was daylight, the yellow lights were on in the card room, in an acknowledgement of the usual evening time for gambling. That did not interest Klee. His gaze disconcerted people. He gave the impression of recognizing strangers, of knowing exactly what a friend had been doing before the meeting, of looking levelly at a waiter and sharing a silent joke with him, without the requirement of comment. Kandinsky was used to it, and used, too, to Klee speaking only when he had something to say.
The group moved away, past a boy with blond, very short hair, holding an artist’s portfolio – probably a student, although neither of them knew him. They dissolved into the late-afternoon sauntering of Weimar.
‘The old brigade,’ Kandinsky said. ‘They are everywhere. The war was never lost, those responsible should be shot, the Kaiser should return.’
‘They had a line,’ Klee said. ‘You could make a picture out of them, a picture of old, old black crows on a bench in a park in Lucerne. Or of five kittens in a basket. Are they young, or are they old? The last one, in the chair, they were saying goodbye to him. Or they were just born and discovering the way that they could live together. The one in the chair, they were welcoming him to life.’
The waitress had been standing there, not ignored by Klee, exactly, but nearly included in his comment. At some point, she lowered her notebook and pencil; at some point, she stopped waiting for him to finish speaking so she could take their order, and began to listen with curiosity and interest. Her apron was clean, but much washed and greying; her white pie-crust collar was torn at the side and had been mended in a hurry; there were things about her that were coming apart, and she looked tired and hungry. When Klee finished, she stood there, her pencil and notebook lowered, in pensive silence. The two gentleman were not different in size, but one seemed to be tall and thin, the other short and square – the talkative one and the one who had spoken. The one who seemed to be short and square stopped talking. He had a measured, tuneful Swiss voice, and his silence, too, was measured, tuneful and Swiss. Then he looked at her, with a sympathetic amusement – the half-smile of someone who knows that you will find the same thing funny, and then you will laugh at it together. She came to. All her aches and concerns returned to her face in a moment.
‘Two coffees, only,’ Kandinsky said.
‘Yes,’ the waitress said. ‘That will be two hundred thousand marks today. Or what else do you have to pay with?’
‘With money. Is that two hundred thousand each?’ Kandinsky said. ‘I see. Thank you. Have they gone, those soldiers?’
He had addressed himself to Klee, but Klee stayed silent, and the waitress had lingered. ‘The colonel?’ she said. ‘You mean the colonel?’
‘The colonel?’ Kandinsky said, puzzled. But the waitress had slipped away and was saying something to an upright man of middle age, an elaborate moustache, the red streaming eyes of the alcoholic and a Bavarian coat. He was sitting with a plump woman in a white fur-trimmed coat; her hair was newly marcelled, with a fringe in the centre over her face like the tassels of a shawl. He stood up after the word from the waitress, leaving the woman and the two glasses of schnapps on the table. His right leg was amputated, and his stump rested on a wooden leg – it was the cheap sort, where the leather was padded