Philip Hensher - The Emperor Waltz

‘What do you make? If you are coming to the Bauhaus, then what is it that you make?’

And now they were standing in a shady square, irregular in shape, with a poster pillar at its centre. The weathervane on top of the poster pillar swung indecisively from left to directly away from them and back again. Christian remembered his decisive belief.

‘I am a painter,’ he said. It was the first time he had said it in front of anyone at all. Elsa Winteregger was the person he had chosen to hear his decision.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. She thought for a moment; looked him up and looked him down; she placed her hands on her hips. ‘And when did you arrive in Weimar?’

‘Yesterday afternoon,’ he said.

‘And you come out without your book, your paper, your charcoal and your pencils to draw the beautiful city of Weimar?’

Christian crimsoned. Of course that was the first thing he should have done. It had not occurred to him. Of course a real artist would have loved to take the opportunity to go outside with pencil and paper to sketch a new, a beautiful and interesting city. Christian’s sketchbook was still in his suitcase. He had done nothing, and it had not occurred to him among the most urgent possibilities, last night or this morning. The question of whether he was an artist at all, whether he was deluding himself, presented itself painfully.

‘Or you might be the sort of painter who never goes outside with his easel ,’ the word pronounced sarcastically, ‘and his paintbrushes , and his oil paints to paint. You might stay inside the studio painting canvases of something that is almost-but-not-quite a black square superimposed on a red triangle. Don’t you think red is the most important journey you can take as a painter? Who is the greatest painter?’

‘I think the Spaniard Picasso,’ Christian said, priding himself on producing so up-to-date a name.

‘No, it is El Greco,’ Elsa said, ‘or if we are talking about the living, there is no one more wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, than Malevich. Have you discovered what he has to say about black?’

Christian shook his head. He felt defeated before he had even started. Elsa flung her face to the sky, and shouted, in the quiet Weimar square, ‘“As the tortoise draws its limbs into its shell at need, so the artist reserves his scientific principles when working intuitively.”’

A window was flung open, and a voice responded. ‘“But would it be better for the tortoise to have no legs?”’

‘Who is that?’ Elsa shouted angrily. ‘Who is that?’

‘It’s me,’ the voice came. A head poked out of the window; neat-groomed, en brosse , a nice snub nose. His shoulders were bare. ‘I heard someone quoting Itten, I thought I would finish it off.’

‘I wasn’t quoting Itten,’ Elsa said. ‘I was quoting Malevich.’

‘You were quoting Itten, you idiot, you just don’t know it,’ the man at the window said. ‘Who is your friend?’

Christian said, ‘My name is Christian Vogt.’

‘This is not my friend,’ Elsa said again. ‘It is a boy I found in the street. He was being harangued by a local mob. I discovered that he was trying to find the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus, the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus …’ Elsa’s voice trailed off into song; she lowered her shoulders and, apelike, swung her arms to and fro in an enchanted manner. Her eyes slid back into her skull.

‘I see,’ the man said. ‘Goodbye, Elsa. Goodbye, whatever your name might be, I didn’t hear.’

‘Christian Vogt,’ Christian said, but the window was already closed. ‘Goodbye, then,’ he said to the girl in the brown cloche hat, her eyes shut as she crooned. He felt quite put out, as if a friend who had been walking with him had turned aside for someone more interesting. But Elsa was only standing, alone in the square, singing ‘The Bauhaus, the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus,’ to herself in half-tones, with a wide open smile of pure uninterruptible joy. Christian was a hundred paces away before he knew he should have said, ‘Kandinsky,’ to Elsa’s question.

Fritz Lohse withdrew his head from the outside and back into the room. It was a pleasant room, painted pale green, with a dressing-table, an upright old leather armchair, a Turkey rug on the floor and an awkward-shaped, almost square old rustic bed painted yellow. There were twenty sheets of paper, drawn-on, pinned to the walls above the bed and to the ceiling, so that Fritz could see his best ideas immediately on waking. On the dressing-table, by the oil lamp, there sat the remains of last night’s supper: some black bread and two soup pots, alongside the bones of two small game birds. There was an octagonal table, in size between a card table and a dining table; its undecidable size had perhaps led Frau Mauthner, the owner of the building and Fritz’s landlady, to expel it upstairs to her lodger’s room with all the other furniture. On the table there were five objects, just as there had been for the past three weeks.

Fritz observed, with admiration, the ripe curves of his girl Katharina. She was all pink and white above the rumpled bedding; she lay face down. Her back was a deep hollow, rising to her magnificent wide bottom, her thighs slightly marked with the quiver and dimple that fat under skin makes. He imagined striding across the room and taking a deep bite, a spoonful of a bite, out of her thighs. How she would shriek! Katharina was a shrieker, as well as a snorer at night, and, in times of unoccupation, a singer; it was a real trial to her to keep silent during their nights for the sake of Frau Mauthner She was still lying in the bed, hugging a bolster to her as she liked to. She was face down upon it; it ran from her chin between her breasts, under her belly and between her legs; it pushed her rump upwards and emerged between her knees. Fritz often wondered why she did not hug him at nights, but she said she preferred something long, cold, hairless and squashy. She was not asleep; she was just enjoying the bed, and the pleasure of lying there naked in the morning, far too late.

‘What was all that rumpus?’ Katharina said softly, into the mattress. But Fritz was used to the sort of things that Katharina said.

‘It was only Elsa Winteregger,’ Fritz said. ‘She was making a spectacle of herself, as usual. She was giving out Mazdaznan proverbs.’

‘Which one? The one you told me about breathing steadily and praising the Lord?’

Katharina was not an artist. She was a waitress in a restaurant, a good one, in the centre of Weimar. Fritz had met her a year or more ago; his people had taken him there to feed him, to make sure he had at least one hot meal inside him. Katharina had served their table. She had lowered her eyes respectfully, handing about the roast potatoes and pouring the gravy, one hand held in the small of her back. For the next days Fritz had hung about at the back, by the kitchen, waiting for her to emerge, like a stage-door johnny behind a theatre. She did not pretend, she said, to understand the sort of things they got up to at her Fritz’s Bauhaus. But she liked to listen to Mazdaznan proverbs. Sometimes he made one up, too impossible to be true.

‘No,’ Fritz said. ‘It was the one about the tortoise and the artist and his scientific principles.’

‘I wondered why you were mentioning a tortoise. I’ve never heard that one.’

Fritz repeated it, raising his arm solemnly. He finished. He lowered his hand. He scratched his bare chest thoughtfully. ‘That’s only what Itten says of his own initiative.’

‘Is she still there?’

Fritz moved to the window. Elsa Winteregger was in the middle of the square, but alone now; she seemed to be hugging herself and chanting. Fritz reached into his trouser pocket for his cigarettes, but they were in the cigarette case on the table, with the four other objects; he reached into his shirt pocket for his matches, but he had no shirt on, as well as being barefoot. He did not know where the matches could be at all. A small snore escaped Katharina; she loved to sleep, and her question now went unanswered.