Philip Hensher - The Emperor Waltz

‘And two more cups of coffee,’ Klee said to the waitress, arriving with a pen.

‘That will be five hundred thousand marks,’ the waitress said.

‘No, four hundred thousand,’ Kandinsky said. ‘You said two hundred thousand each, for the cups of coffee.’

‘It was four hundred thousand when you ordered the first two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. ‘The new price for two cups of coffee is five hundred thousand.’

‘No, no, how can that be,’ Klee said. ‘Two hundred thousand is monstrous already – how can that be the price of a cup of coffee, even here, even in expensive Weimar – but five hundred thousand, half a million for two, how can the price change in an hour, how can that be?’

‘The price now, at seventeen minutes past four o’clock, is five hundred thousand marks for two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. Her enchantment with Klee had disappeared. ‘If we continue this discussion for long enough, the price of two cups of coffee will be six hundred thousand marks. It is entirely up to you, gentlemen.’

Outside the coffee house, the soldiers were assembling. The group they had seen before had reappeared. There seemed to be a protest or march in the making. They laid their hands protectively on the handles as if the touch would make sense of everything. About their arms, each had a cloth armband, not part of their uniform originally. On it was some kind of device or symbol, a red shape of some kind. By the door of the coffee house, the colonel, leaning on his crutch, shook the hand of the businessman, full of smiles. The colonel’s lady stood five paces off, looking at the soldiers, swaying confusedly to and fro.

Christian had discovered a short-cut through the park to Frau Scherbatsky’s house, after the baroque sandstone bridge across the stream. He was ridiculously pleased with this insight, and came to the door of the house where he lived with a proud feeling of starting to belong in the town. The doorbell was not immediately responded to; he had to ring again before Maria, the red-haired maid, answered. She looked at him as if his face had not registered; she had a confused and perhaps even an embarrassed expression, but she stood back and let him through, with his portfolio of drawings.

There was no one else to be seen, but when he was in his room, and taking the drawings of marketplace, ducal palace, standing figures and park out of the portfolio, Christian was startled by some noise in the quiet house. It was a muffled shriek; then the sound of a woman giggling; then a shriek again, and soon, from only two or three rooms away in the house, transmitted by pipe and panelling, Christian realized that he was listening to the sounds of Frau Scherbatsky in bed with someone, in the afternoon. He did not want to listen, but there seemed no way of not listening. Her shrieks and downward glissandos of joy grew, and then they were joined by a man’s noises: a grunt and a few murmured words of encouragement, though it was not possible to understand what was said. Christian went to the window, and opened it, trying to concentrate on the sounds of the park. But the noises grew and were joined by the sound of wooden furniture banging against the wall. Christian felt himself beginning to blush. He had never heard such a thing in his family circle. He was a virgin himself, if that shameful and dishonourable visit to the brothel with two schoolfriends in the last Easter at the Gymnasium were not counted. Now a phrase was heard more clearly, spoken by a man. The window of the other room must be open, too, and by opening his window, he had allowed himself to hear more clearly. The student lodger had gone out, and Frau Scherbatsky and Herr Neddermeyer had taken advantage. The phrase he had heard, whatever it was, had been spoken in a strong Leipzig accent. The maid must have known that he would hear the noises she was used to, and understood that he had breached the unspoken conditions of lodging.

Christian became worldly and calm. ‘I say!’ he remarked, in an undertone to the empty room. ‘What beasts! Good for Neddermeyer – I hope I still have it in me when I am as old as that! And the Scherbatsky! Fine woman – and a woman has needs that an architect-lodger can fulfil. A well-known fact.’ He was practising for an anecdote. But who he would tell the anecdote to, he did not know. With a large sigh and a bestial sound, the encounter seemed to come to an end. Christian realized that they were in what must be Neddermeyer’s room, not Frau Scherbatsky’s, which was on the other side, next door to his room. And in the meantime, an awkwardness was arising: he would need to visit the lavatory quite soon, to cross the landing to the shared bathroom. To leave the room now would risk meeting Frau Scherbatsky in dressing gown, négligé or similar intimate apparel, making her dishevelled way back to her room to prepare her appearance for supper. He looked under the bed, but this was a modern house and there was no pot. He waited.

There was the sound of a door being opened, of footsteps, the unsynchronized clatter of footsole against slipper. The sound went past Christian’s door; the door of Frau Scherbatsky’s door was opened and closed. He breathed out. He must keep quiet in his movements. Frau Scherbatsky and Herr Neddermeyer had only permitted themselves this licence because they believed that Christian – and, presumably, still, the tantalizing Herr Wolff – were not in the house.

He opened the door silently and, shoeless, walked across to the bathroom. The modern flush of the lavatory made a noise, and when Christian stepped out of the bathroom, he saw, to his horror, that Herr Neddermeyer’s door was now standing open – it had been opened in the previous minute. ‘Herr Vogt?’ Neddermeyer’s voice called. ‘Is that you? Do come in.’

Christian stood in the door of Neddermeyer’s room, twisting his hands about, one in the other. The room was attractive and immaculate. The bed was made, under a white counterpane. On the walls were views of Roman and other classical ruins; in the bow window stood a substantial octagonal table in mahogany with a central supporting pillar. The table bore a thick pile of papers, weighed down at four corners by a bronze Japanese fisherman, a millefiori paperweight, a grotesquely shaped stone, mounted in silver, and a bust of Brahms in alabaster. On the table, too, were an architect’s drawing tools of pencil and compasses, squares and protractors, in an open walnut case lined with worn black leather. Neddermeyer gestured towards one of the two armchairs in yellow velvet. Unexpectedly, his appearance gave no indication of the rumpus he had just been through: he was groomed and of normal colour, his clothes not suggesting that they had been flung to the floor and picked up some time afterwards. There was nothing of the debauch about him, or about his room.

‘Welcome to my home – my lair, one could say,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I can offer you some coffee – nothing elaborate, nothing extensive, but I do insist on having coffee-making as a possibility in my room.’

‘That is very kind,’ Christian said.

‘I cannot always be calling on Maria to bring me cups from the kitchen,’ Neddermeyer said, going over and opening a small cupboard and beginning to fiddle with its contents. ‘My one remaining vice. So, Herr Vogt, I saw you venturing out this afternoon with your sketchbook. You found some subjects worthy of your pencil? Good, good. I am sure that the Bauhaus will chase the love of beauty out of you very quickly, and replace it with a love of steel and sharp corners. I saw a soup plate that one of them had made. It was square. The absurdity!’

‘Why so, Herr Neddermeyer?’

‘They had not considered,’ Neddermeyer said, ‘that a square has angles and a circle has none. A maidservant, presenting a soup plate, presents it at the eye level of her master. The master’s attention is drawn to something on his right; he turns sharply. The plate is a square one, however, as designed by the bright fellows at the Bauhaus, and the eye is thrust against a sharp corner of a hard material. The master, who has bought a daring novelty and flatters himself that he has an original eye, has, from now on, exactly that: an original eye. Only one.’ Neddermeyer tittered in a genteel, practised, taut way.