Philip Hensher - The Emperor Waltz

Neddermeyer was talking amiably, swivelling and smiling from his post at the coffee cupboard, and now he turned and brought over the cups of coffee. They were tiny, gold and green, with a small medallion of flowers painted on the side. Despite the smile, Neddermeyer’s voice had been growing tense, and he was not looking, exactly, at Christian as he handed it over. He placed his own on the small table by the other armchair, and removed a spotted red handkerchief from the inside pocket of his Bavarian jacket. He wiped his hands clean.

‘I think Frau Scherbatsky said you are an architect?’ Christian said. The coffee, despite coming from a small cupboard, was delicious, with no taint of chicory or acorn.

‘I was an architect,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I do not think I will ever build again.’

‘Do you have drawings of your work?’ Christian said. ‘I would so like to see them.’

Neddermeyer did not exactly brighten, but he grew businesslike, as if he had been expecting Christian to say exactly that. Perhaps he had called Christian in for this exact purpose, to show his drawings. Christian reflected that after the pleasures which Neddermeyer and Frau Scherbatsky had indulged in, the ego was never satisfied; it was at that point, the day after his schoolfriends had visited a brothel, that they were most apt to show classmates their best marks, the most flattering comments made on their work by masters, or, at the very least, to treat the fellows at a coffee shop, pulling out their marks with a profligate air. Neddermeyer wanted someone to see what a marvellous fellow he was.

‘I do indeed,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Perhaps you noticed my drawings over there, on the table. There are some photographs, too, of some projects that came to life. A very civil young man, before the war, came to see me and spent six months visiting what I had designed and built, and wrote a very flattering article about my work in an architectural review. After that article, I had letters from architects in America, even. Of course, that was in 1905. People are not interested now.’

‘Did you always build in Weimar?’

‘Weimar and surroundings,’ Neddermeyer said carelessly, waving his hand at the window as if to suggest that he might have built all of it. ‘I could have gone to America. Interest in my work was very high there, as I said. But as I told my apprentices, my thinking, such as it is, was formed in an age where people climbed to the top floor if that was where they wanted to go. I was too old to change, to think how a tower of thirty floors could be ornamented. A mistake, no doubt. Now. Where were we.’

Neddermeyer stood, and walked over in a vague, uncommitted way to the table, as if hardly engaged.

‘Well, here they are!’ he said. ‘There is no purpose, really, in continuing to work, but the imagination continues to thrive. Sometimes I am playing at the pianoforte and I will be seized with an idea, quite a new idea, for a suspended balcony at the front of a royal palace, or for some rolling bookshelves to simplify storage and display in a library. Now, this is an idea I had for a triumphal arch …’

Neddermeyer’s fantasy work was neatly drawn, exquisitely finished, ornamented and made human with decorative touches of trees and figures. They were a credit to the tools in the open walnut case. He began to turn over the sheets, lovingly, murmuring words of explanation, like an ambassador introducing great dignitaries. Here was an idea he had for a state library; for a permanent circus on the classical model; for an English cottage; for a nobleman’s country house, refined and yet rustic; an idea for the Emperor’s military barracks; a new cathedral for Berlin (‘I was so disappointed, Herr Vogt, with the one His Majesty built, until I did not see why I should not put my own thoughts on paper’); a monument to the dead of the war; a bridge over a country stream and the same bridge, on a larger scale, bearing the traffic of the town; and a royal palace, eighty windows long on its front façade. Christian turned the sheets one after another. The plans were rich in ornament and fantasy; they specialized in pendentives and arches, in caryatids and classical columns, in portes-cochères heavy with mythological figures, in windows leaning out far over the street like orchards, in stucco ornament in their interiors and stone ornament on their exteriors. They specialized in the heavy imagination of the old Emperor, and Christian turned the pages with fascinated absorption. The moment for gargoyles, he thought, looking at the design for the Berlin cathedral, was gone.

‘You see, Herr Vogt,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘What architecture needs is imagination, and variety. The eye craves richness, and finds ornament restful. Now, for one of your teachers at the Bauhaus, a new cathedral in Weimar would be a simple matter.’ Neddermeyer was pulling a sketchbook towards him, a spiral-bound orange book, and now leant over the table to pluck a pencil from its place. ‘It would look just like –’ he began to draw ‘– you see, just like – ah, yes, that is that problem solved. You see?’

He turned the sketchbook around for Christian to see. On the page, he had drawn nothing more than a rectangle, then filled it in roughly with a grid. He took it back, and drew a line underneath it and, with a couple of scribbles, placed some stick figures on the ground. ‘You see, Herr Vogt, I remember there was a great scandal in Vienna when the leader of the school built something opposite the Emperor’s house. The Emperor had not been consulted, and when he saw the building, he said, “Who has built that house with no eyebrows, just there?” A very ugly building, still, and a gross insult to the Emperor. That is the sort of place you are going to, Herr Vogt. I am sorry for you.’

‘Your buildings are very interesting, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘I look forward to talking with you a great deal more. But I am hoping to become an artist, not an architect.’

Neddermeyer was now as flushed and excited as Christian had expected to find him. ‘You see, I lost everything,’ he said. ‘It all went – family and business and home and everything.’

‘I am sorry,’ Christian said formally. He wondered whether now was the time to offer to show Neddermeyer the drawings he had done that morning. He decided that now was not the time. ‘Thank you so much for the coffee, Herr Neddermeyer.’

‘I believe that Herr Wolff will be joining us for dinner,’ Neddermeyer said wretchedly. ‘So the topic for tonight will be politics.’

‘I look forward to that, too,’ Christian said, letting himself out with what he felt was an expert smile, like a doctor leaving a patient in pain, a patient midway through a fit of raving.

Before supper, Christian wrote a letter to his brother Dolphus.

It is not very much like being a student of art in the opera, living at Frau Scherbatsky’s house. I do not think I could bring mistresses with tuberculosis to die in the attic – like in La Bohème . (No attic, too.) It is a large, dull, ugly villa, built not ten years ago by a local architect. He also lives here, the architect, so it is important to compliment the beauty of the house, the convenience of the rooms, and so on, very regularly. I thought at first he was living here as a lodger, because he had fallen on hard times after the war. Actually, he has formed a connection with Frau Scherbatsky. They keep up appearances, but their connection is an intimate one. There is another lodger, a man named Wolff, who has been away, but who I have seen since starting this letter, walking in the garden smoking a cigar. I can only describe him from what I have seen – a small, well-built man, with very short grey hair, carrying a cane and wearing plus-fours. He appears alert and fit – he was whacking the side of his legs with his cane as he walked, quite vigorously. He may be younger than my landlady and her architect friend. He was accosted by Neddermeyer, as the architect of the house is called, who came out to exchange some friendly words with him, but he responded briefly and continued walking briskly from one side of the lawn to the other. Neddermeyer tried to keep up with him, but after a while he gave up and sat down on the bench under the oak tree, limiting himself to saying something when Wolff happened to pass him directly. He seemed to be taking exercise, or perhaps pacing because he had something to think through – you know how Papa does. What do they think of me? They deplore all students of the Bauhaus, I believe, but have not come out into the open on the subject. Luckily, because I can hardly defend it as yet. I have met only one student, a woman who introduced herself to me in the street, who I cannot believe is typical, and I have seen another, a man, through an open window. But I have already been shouted at by a stranger, an inhabitant of Weimar, who disapproved of art students indiscriminately, even of a polite fellow like your brother. (That is why I was spoken to by the woman student who introduced herself in the street – she was defending me. I think I may need a good deal of defending.)