Philip Hensher - The Emperor Waltz

‘Klee is really too much,’ Kandinsky said in his own room, leaning backwards. ‘I am fond of the dear fellow, but …’

‘He is a Swiss businessman, a quite unsuccessful one,’ Nina said. ‘Too concerned with money, just enough to make him frightened about it, not enough to paint to earn it. The Swiss …’

‘Is he Swiss?’ Kandinsky said. ‘I am fond of him. But I sometimes wonder – can he be a Jew? He has all that race’s enthusiasm for pelf, for lucre, for the pile of gold. How his eyes light up!’

Nina laughed heartily, waving the comment away. ‘Vassily Vassilyevich,’ she said affectionately, as she always did when he said something to her that he would not say to everybody.

In another room, a large, empty one, the disciples of Mazdaznan gathered. The hall was at the back of a church, loaned to political groups, societies, choirs and amateur gatherings of a centrist-to-left disposition. One of the two Weimar Wagner societies, the one with an anti-monarchist bent, met here on Tuesdays, and on Fridays the town’s Communist watercolour society. Itten’s Mazdaznan group met in classrooms at the Bauhaus, but on Saturday nights the building was closed, and it was good to have a weekly meeting to which everyone came.

There were forty people in the room. Most had had their heads shaved, and some were in their formal purple robes, made by themselves, or by adept clothes designers and makers. Elsa Winteregger was talking. ‘And then there’s new people. Oh, there’s always new people. New ideas, new images, new thinking. Do you know? I saw a man, a boy, a new one today, and I took him up, and he was so full of new life, I don’t know where he came from or what he was doing, but he said he wanted to find the Bauhaus, and I helped him, and then I don’t know what happened to him. It was so exciting. And tomorrow there’s going to be so many of them, not tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and there’s going to be so many wise new young heads, all of them full of new ideas, and they’ll put us to shame, we’ve been trodden over and made conventional in life, but them, not them, it’s for us to learn from them, us and the Masters, too …’

She went on gabbling. People about her came and went, listening and not interrupting and then going away again. Sometimes they turned to each other and began to talk, and drifted off. Her speech had started somewhere else and it was going to be finished somewhere else. And now she was talking about her sister, who was staying with her.

‘. . . only for a few days, only until Sunday, not tomorrow, a week tomorrow, she came yesterday and was so exhausted, she lay in bed until lunchtime, afterwards, easily, and she said, Elsa, what has happened to your hair, so we laughed about that, and I think she is quite used to it, quite used now, she lives where we grew up, in Breitenberg, so she is used to almost anything now. She is so dear, I could not live without her, I promised her to bring her to the Bauhaus on Monday morning, to see us all, all us oddities, but she says that only I am enough, only I am oddity enough for her …’

The room fell silent, and Elsa too, last of all. Itten had come in, with his head slightly downwards, as if ducking a hit from a low lintel. He was wearing his purple silk robe with a red ruff about his neck. There was a gathering and a shuffling. Itten stood there. His presence commanded attention. He raised his arms to either side and closed his eyes. His chest swelled as he took a great breath in, and held it. The forty people in the room did the same, moving at an angle, not to get in a confusion of arms; they closed their eyes and breathed in, and held it in. For a second there was silence; outside in the street, the shout of two boys, something about the money one owed the other. It was the racket of two voices with no control over their breathing and no sense of the intimate and huge connection between the lungs and the world. Outside, a can of some sort was kicked against a wall, and a shout of complaint; the Mazdaznan breathed out, humming as they did so, expelling the world and its violence; a warm note filled the room, rose, fell, subsided into a satisfied breath in. Itten opened his huge wise eyes; his arms fell limply to his sides. ‘The word is spreading,’ he said. ‘Today we are three dozen. Next week we are fifty. We spread, like breath.’

And in the room of their house, Klee slowed, and his face rose a little, and the sad reflective little tune that came just before the end seemed to fill his features. There was an expression on Papa’s face you never saw at other times. The tune went its way; Mamma and Papa seemed separated by the music, diversely thinking their way through. And then they came together again; there was a little rush and a clatter of fury; and the first movement of the sonata was done. Felix sat on his hands. He knew not to applaud until the whole sonata was finished. Papa would set down his violin and smile in a brief way. But before that there was the slow movement and the joy of the tarantella. Felix could hardly bear the prospect of it.

‘I am so happy to have you here,’ Frau Scherbatsky said to Christian, as he was going upstairs. Her face was warm and beaming; underneath her blonde helmet of hair, she shone. ‘It is so good to have a young person in the house again. I do hope you will be happy here.’

‘I think I shall be, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian said. ‘I am very comfortable in my room – I feel very grateful.’

‘Oh, I am so pleased,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. In the drawing room, the men were discussing affairs of state; a conversation that had been an energetic exchange of views was turning into a manly argument. ‘You mustn’t –’ she said, lowering her voice and placing her hand on the forearm of Christian’s Norfolk jacket ‘– you mustn’t mind Herr Wolff too much. I know he seems very serious and angry about things.’

‘He seems …’ Christian thought. He prided himself on finding the right word, when it was required. ‘He seems very – decided.’

‘Very decided,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Yes, indeed. He is. But, please, I do hope you will find some patience with him. It has been so hard for so many people of our generation. You must have seen it in Berlin, but I know that young people can find it difficult to understand, to be patient. You see, Herr Vogt, it has been so difficult to realize what, all this time, has been working to destroy our lives. We were so naïve, all of us, and we only understood now that it is only other Germans whom we can really trust. You see, Herr Vogt,’ she went on confidingly, ‘we let the Jews go on living among us. We had no idea. They destroyed us, and humiliated us, and are now destroying our money. And Herr Wolff understands this. Does he not have a right to be angry? I would just ask you, please, Herr Vogt, you are an understanding, a kind person, I can see, just to be patient and to listen to Herr Wolff, even when he grows – how can I put it? – loud.’

Christian bowed; he had not expected Frau Scherbatsky to say any of this. The voices in the drawing room were, indeed, growing loud. He flushed, and turned, and with brisk steps went upstairs. There were Jews living underneath his father in Charlottenburg; every day his father greeted Frau Rosenthal with a raise of his hat and a smile; Arnold Rosenthal, the elder of the two boys, had been three years older than Christian, had served bravely in the war, had returned unscathed. He was not working against anyone. He had fought for the Kaiser. Christian bowed at the turn of the stairs again, as Frau Scherbatsky beamed, her eyes following him upstairs sentimentally, as she perhaps thought of one of her dead sons. Tomorrow, Christian thought, he would take steps to find somewhere else to live. The arrangements were that he would live here for three months. However, he would move tomorrow. He said this to himself, but he already knew he would not, not because he disagreed with something his landlady had said. He already despised himself for his own cowardice. He already knew that that was the easiest path for the mind to take.