Philip Hensher - The Emperor Waltz

It was still early when Christian reached the central square of the town, and the Saturday market was still presenting an orderly and fresh appearance. Although he had just finished Frau Scherbatsky’s breakfast, he took the pear from his pocket and ate it as he went round the market. He had thought that the art school was on the other side of the square, but quickly found himself in a quiet residential street. He turned back and tried another side of the square; this time he found himself facing a statue that proved to be of Goethe and Schiller and, behind that, a grand pillared theatre. A gaggle of white geese, intelligent and imperious, was making its way through the square in the direction of the market, driven by a freckled boy of fifteen or so; a man at the wheel of a black car, his vehicle shiny and bright in the sun, waited for them to pass. Christian sat down on the steps of the Goethe statue to feel in his pocket for the small map he had cut out of the guide to the city; it was not there. He remembered now taking it out of his bag, and placing it on the dressing-table ready to take out, but not taking it out.

A shabby figure was in front of him. ‘Do you know what you are sitting upon?’ he said, in a brusque, military manner.

‘I think so,’ Christian said. He observed the man: he was wearing a cheap blue suit made out of some dyed military material. It fitted him so badly that, when the man made a strong chopping gesture with his arm, a lecturer’s decisive gesture, it appeared to move a second or so behind the man, as if it had its own stiff ideas of movement to follow. ‘Goethe and Schiller.’

The man made an impatient movement, flinging his arm to one side and tipping his head back to look down his nose at Christian, sitting on the stone steps of the monument. ‘Great poets and thinkers,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Christian said. ‘Can you help me? Could you tell me where the Bauhaus is?’

‘The –’ the man said ‘– the— What did you call it?’

‘The Bauhaus,’ Christian said. He had an irrational feeling that this stranger was, in fact, Frau Scherbatsky’s other lodger, the unreliable Herr Wolff. The man stood in front of him with his legs apart, building up to some sort of rage. He was wearing what seemed to be military medals, although he did not seem dressed in other ways for a funeral or other ceremony.

‘He means the art school,’ a woman who had been taking an interest now butted in to say.

‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘It used to be a respectable art school, but now it calls itself the Bauhaus. So you’re one of those, are you? No wonder you sit on the steps of Germany’s monuments, insulting its greatness. Communists and garlic-eaters and free-love practitioners! Go off to Moscow or Paris, why don’t you?’

Among the small crowd that was now gathering to enjoy the abuse, there was a girl who was grinning broadly. She was at the front of the gathering. Her clothes were simple and rustic, perhaps home-made; they were dark green, straight up and straight down, with a gathering at the neck of blue ribbon, simply tied. Her hat, impatiently shoved on her head, was a coal scuttle made out of brown felt. Her grin was empty and her mouth was too large for her small head. With some shock, Christian saw that her head under the hat must be shaved; he saw the stubble above her ear. The smile and the cock of the head towards him was of indefinable familiarity; it was the smile of a friend not yet recognized. It’s me, the smile said. Come on, it’s only me.

‘Yes, we know what they get up to over there,’ the man went on. ‘Four bare legs in a bed. Klimt. Anarchy. We don’t want that in the city of Goethe and Schiller. “This tree’s leaf, that from the east—”’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ the girl said, calling loudly as soon as the man started to throw his arm out and quote Goethe at them. Her voice was hoarse but educated, with some Bavarian musicality to it.

‘Don’t tell me to shut up,’ the man said. ‘Who told me to shut up?’

‘I did,’ the girl said, still grinning, and raising her hand like a schoolchild. ‘Don’t talk rubbish about what you don’t know. Do you want to know where the Bauhaus is?’

Christian did not realize for a moment that she was speaking to him.

‘Hello! You wanted to know where the Bauhaus was. Come with me.’

‘In this city …’ the man began, unconvincingly, but he had missed his moment, and as the girl took Christian by the wrist and led him roughly off, the little group of onlookers dispersed. On the ground, a drunk man lay on one side, clawing at the air with his left hand and cycling at nothing with his legs, like an upturned cow waiting to be righted.

‘Why are you looking for the Bauhaus?’ the girl said fiercely, as they walked away from the Goethe-statue square.

‘I’m starting there on Monday,’ Christian said. ‘They sent me directions but I left them behind, at my lodgings.’

‘But what I can’t understand, what I can’t understand at all, not one bit,’ the girl said, as if they had been having a conversation for days, for weeks, which had not reached a conclusion, ‘is why someone who doesn’t look like a complete idiot and buffoon and twit, not really, anyway, why someone quite normal should want to go and find the Bauhaus on a Saturday when he doesn’t have to go there until the Monday. That I don’t know if I can understand.’

‘You only have to push me in the right direction,’ Christian said.

‘Because when you get to the Bauhaus for the first time,’ the girl said, ‘oho, oho, that is when it all goes wrong. You hear about lines and essences and energy in a point and the hidden cross-weave and the drain a colour can make in the middle of a form. And how yellow can be yellow or it can be a completely different thing. Look at that yellow.’

The girl grabbed Christian’s arm with both hands, and forcibly made him point at the yellow wall of a palace. He felt they must be conspicuous, but the people of Weimar were apparently used to gestures of this sort. ‘That is what you call yellow,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘It is a yellow,’ Christian said, being specific in the way he had heard an art master once attempt.

‘And there,’ the girl said, pulling him round and making him point again, at a different palace, this time in a deep rustic red, ‘that, too, that is what you would call A YELLOW, is it not.’

‘No, that’s red!’ Christian said, forgetting to be specific.

‘Ah,’ the girl said. ‘You see, that is just a matter of context. That yellow only looks red because it lies between two contrasting greens, and the greens have their counter energy, which they project onto the underlying yellow, and there it is, red but only perceived as red. Not real red. You see?’

The wall was still, undeniably, red. The girl, a head shorter than him, came up close to his face. She smelt, curiously, not unattractively, of fresh sweat and of garlic. He remembered what his landlady had said about the diet of the Bauhaus students.

‘And that is the sort of thing which the Bauhaus will draw you into, and make you believe, and make you accost strangers and explain, and turn you into a raving madman before it turns you into an artist. But let us go on. Look, beauties to the right, beauties to the left. An important library built by a duchess for her thirty-four children straight ahead of us, and directly behind – don’t turn – an elephant house in the Gothic Revival style, 1674, three stars in your guidebook. What is your name?’

‘Christian Vogt. I come from Berlin.’

‘I did not ask all that. I come from Breitenberg. My name is Elsa Winteregger. What sort of maker are you?’

‘What sort of—’