The Emperor Waltz (67 page)

These sounds would alternate with the performance of music from the four proper musicians. An associate of one of the Masters, someone who taught art in a local school, turned out to be a good cellist, and he knew a clarinettist. The director of the ballet had insisted on there being a violinist of theatrical, tired appearance, and he had found one, a seventy-five-year-old veteran of the tea dances. They had worried about this musician, but nothing surprised Hans; he had, too, a foul mouth and a steady supply of obscene stories about his time in Paris in the seventies. Thomas was the pianist. He alone was supposed to know how everything would work.

‘What now?’ Hans said.

Thomas, from behind the piano, explained. At this point they would play the first four bars of Beethoven’s
Pastoral
symphony sixteen times, while the aeroplane propeller was cranked up and Elsa Winteregger beat time by smashing the plates. When they were done with that, Thomas would signal –

‘Oh, we can count to sixteen,’ Hans said genially.

– and they would move on to the foxtrot written on sheet – on sheet – on sheet—

‘I know it’s here somewhere,’ he said, rifling through his folder. ‘The slow fox.’

‘There are two foxtrots,’ Christian the cellist said. ‘There is one which is on a page I’ve labelled seven B and another on page nineteen. I don’t know which one you mean. The one on page seven B is in D, the other one – let’s see – no, that’s in a strange key of your own invention, I believe. Two sharps, but F sharp and G sharp, yes?’

‘It’s the other one,’ Thomas said. ‘It should be labelled nineteen. Is that right? Everyone together? Yes? And then a small pause, while Fräulein Winteregger and Siggi break some eggs and pour water from a great height into the bathtub, and then the Strauss waltz, the first one hundred and twenty-seven bars exactly. It just breaks off. And then—’

‘It is wonderful to me that we are still playing these shitty old tunes,’ Hans said. ‘At the tea dance, I understand. I remember playing that Strauss waltz, the
Emperor
, thirty years ago with a great orchestra, an orchestra of eighty. We still play it at the tea dance. There are just three of us: I, the pianist Frau Schmidt and her sister who plays the cello. The old people who come, they like the
Emperor Waltz
, they like to stand still in the introduction and catch their breath and perhaps to talk a little to their friends. And then they like to waltz, quite slowly, but as in the old days, some of the ladies with each other. I do not know how people who are so advanced as you came to know of the
Emperor Waltz
at all.’

‘Times change,’ Thomas said briefly, not really listening.

‘Oh, I know that times change,’ Hans said, smiling. ‘I am not a shitty old fool like my brother Clemens, who says everything is gone wrong, that everything is falling to pieces, that people are worse than they used to be and that there are people, the Jews you know, who want to destroy Germany for ever. What is astonishing to me is that things sometimes stay the same, and it is astonishing to me that you want to play the
Pastoral
symphony and the
Emperor Waltz
at all. For myself, as I say, it is always nice to play the Strauss waltz, even the first hundred and twenty-seven bars ending in the middle of a phrase, even with Fräulein Winteregger imitating the pissing of a cow behind me.’

‘What am I meant to be doing?’ Elsa Winteregger said, bursting in. She was wearing an old and loose green man’s shirt, frayed about the cuffs, and her short hair was wild about her head. ‘I am so late for everything. I must be gone by half past ten. Tell me when it is half past ten. My sister was sick this morning, and her husband nowhere to be seen. You! Where were you? My sister said you left at dawn, leaving her alone with her sickness. I had to comfort her.’

They always forgot that Elsa Winteregger’s sister was married to the suave cellist with the haunted look. The three of them, it was believed, actually lived together. It was hard to imagine Elsa Winteregger living on her own. The two of them mostly made a habit of not speaking to each other in rehearsals. The cellist muttered an apology to his sister-in-law, and Thomas brought them back to the rehearsal.

1.4

The dancers in
The
Euclidean Ballet
were assembled and dressed. The costumes were an essential part of their movements, which were at root simple and straightforward. The dancers complained to each other about the chafing, sometimes to a state of being rubbed raw, that the costumes had brought about. They were brightly coloured and bulky, the costumes, and very heavy, being made out of frames of wood with dyed silk stretched over the top. There had been some talk about constructing the frames out of something light, like balsa wood, but at the first attempt, the balsa-wood frames were crushed and broken. Something stronger and more resistant was needed, and unfortunately those strong and resistant woods were painfully heavy to lug about the stage.

They had reached a pause in the rehearsal. They sat down as best they could. The pyramidal pink dancer balanced awkwardly on the base of her shape; the cuboid dancer simply rested squarely on the ground and withdrew her head into the yellow shape. Others were condemned to roll like barrels, rising from their rest periods dizzier than when they had sat down. The ones who had it easiest were those whose arms and legs, only, were encased in a series of small cubes or spheres. They could sit on their bottoms, like honest men and women. The principal dancers, who embodied single large shapes, whether pink pyramid, yellow cube, green sphere or blue egg, attempted to find a position where their stomachs were not rendered sore and the blistered side was given an easier position.

They were not proper dancers. Previous productions had relied on professional dancers, but nobody had been able to demonstrate that a professional dancer alone was capable of rising above the demands of his costume. They had the tendency, too, of complaining loudly about the impossibility of the ballet’s requirements. All that was needed, even in the central unfulfilled love duet between the pyramid and the egg shape, was a slow and rhythmic walking about the stage without any falling over. The students who had been selected, and who were now pausing between actions, ought to have been at least as reliable as the professionals who had made such a hash of it in Berlin, two years before.

The director and the dramaturge had been talking at the back of the room while the dancers held their positions or sat down as best they could. Now the director came to the front of the room, and told them to get into positions for the final trio. Those not involved could remove their costumes, as this would take some time. The dancer who embodied the octagon, whose name was Klaus, got up and began to put on his heavy white costume over his black tights and tunic. There was no need for music as yet – that would come with the dress rehearsal. The principle of the ballet was that there should be no relationship between what was happening on stage and what music was being played, and the dancers had been instructed to remain quite indifferent to any sounds, musical or otherwise, that they should hear from the pit. How should they end at the same time, a little dancer had asked. The musicians in the pit would watch the dancers’ moves, which were formalized and correct, and when the last dancer had reached his last position, the music would finish, even if there was theoretically more to play. It was not more important that music reach a final cadence than that the dancers should. Why, then, have even a dress rehearsal? Well, the director explained, it had been known for dancers to fail in that task of indifference, and begin to place their steps to the rhythm and tempo of what was being played. The dress rehearsal was to make sure that the lack of coincidence was absolute.

‘At least the scenery is finished,’ the egg shape murmured, taking the leather straps from his shoulder and delicately lowering the bright-covered frame. ‘That’s something at least.’

His friend the sphere ran her hands through her red hair; a strand stuck to her forehead with sweat. ‘There was not much to it in the first place,’ she said, stepping gracefully out and pulling her frame to the wings. The backdrop was a red square on a shade of just-grey white; at least, it seemed like a square at first glance, but as you looked at it more, it was clear that two of the sides of the square were slightly different in length, and the shape actually converged. It filled the backdrop; it was curiously disturbing.

The last exchange of the ballet began. ‘Seventy-nine,’ a deep, masculine voice began from the orchestra pit. ‘Eighty. Eighty-one.’ The pink pyramid was advancing from the back left quadrant of the stage towards the front right, revolving slowly as it moved.

‘Stop, stop, stop,’ the director said. ‘Is that
three hundred
and seventy-nine?’

They agreed. The pink pyramid walked gracefully forward, one step slowly after another. When it reached the front right of the stage, it revolved one and a half times, and began to walk back across the same diagonal. At the same time as the pyramid’s pause and turn, the yellow cube began to walk from the same starting point at the same speed. They met at the centre of the stage, and both moved to the other’s left, walking around each other in a circle. After circling each other twice, a new shape emerged from the wings – a white octagon, as it was described. The white octagon moved to the centre of the stage, and after the pyramid and yellow cube had circled it twice more, they walked in tandem to the wings and exited, leaving the white octagon at the centre as the apotheosis of geometry. ‘It’s really very much like
The Nutcracker
,’ the director had said, going on to add that in ballet and in art, rigour was a topic like any other, on which art could discourse but by which it was not necessarily limited. In this ballet, he said, the three of the pyramid and the four of the cube add up to the eight of the octagon. Or the four-sided and the six-sided add up to the – he would not count the number of sides on the octagon-based shape. Klaus, the dancer who embodied the octagon, was a strong fellow, but there was no possibility of his moving in anything resembling a dance. He would just walk to the centre of the stage and wait there until the ballet was finished, the object of all admiring or disgusted gazes from the audience.

But today the octagon had only just begun its journey to the centre of the stage when the doors to the auditorium were hurled open. It was the designer, Fritz, and his student assistants. The director recognized that one of them, the quietest, was Klee’s son Felix. Fritz, the designer, was shouting for them to stop.

‘We can’t stop,’ the director said reasonably. But it was too late. The three dancers on stage had interrupted themselves – they would never remember the point they had reached, and they would need to start again. The dancer who had been the sphere was sitting on a stool by the side of the stage, dabbing her flank where there was a little blood. She raised her head with interest.

‘It’s not right,’ Fritz was saying. His associates were behind him, in enthusiastic and menacing postures. ‘It’s not right – it’s –’ he gestured to the stage, its red almost-square and its predominant off-white ‘– it’s
sculpture.
Now, I’ve seen it in time to change it for the better. I saw yesterday at the theatre, the auditorium is one cube and the stage space another, harmonious and echoing. But not if there is clutter! There must be only a white space on the other side of the lights. We will start painting immediately to obliterate that –’ he gestured contemptuously towards, it must be presumed, the red near-square ‘–
clutter.
’

‘Impossible,’ the director said. ‘Not possible at all. Look – this is the apotheosis, where the octagon appears. We see the white octagon because of the red square!’

‘Yes, yes, exactly,’ a girl behind Fritz put in. ‘The apotheosis disappears – it cannot be seen. That is perfect.’

‘No,’ the director said. ‘Impossible.’

‘We can redesign the costume,’ Fritz said. He thrummed his fingers impatiently on the back of a chair in the stalls. ‘Or make it a different colour.’

‘No,’ the dramaturge said. ‘There is no time and the dancer needs his costume now.’

‘Do we have a dancer in a black costume?’ a boy with some sort of foreign accent said – perhaps Moravian or Bohemian. ‘We could paint the space black.’

They thought. Perhaps it was not such a bad idea. ‘The space on the stage is a representation of the darkened space in the auditorium, but not the same space,’ Fritz said, in his oracular way.

‘Their legs and arms are in black already,’ the director said cautiously. He spread his hands, helplessly, in a kind of shrug. ‘They would be invisible, or less conspicuous.’

‘It will be done,’ Fritz said. ‘Stasia – Egon – you are to go to acquire some black scenery paint, plenty. We will do it immediately and it will be dry by morning.’

‘When my dancers are finished,’ the director said. ‘And it must be finished in time for the dress rehearsal. Nothing must be delayed and the performance must start on time. The mayor of Dessau is coming, and almost every one of the Masters. The deputy mayor, I mean, of course.’

1.5

The deputy mayor of Dessau had, these days, a small official car when the mayor could spare it, and it was waiting outside the home of the deputy mayor and his wife. It was an ordinary villa, substantial in size and very comfortable, with solid wood gates and an English rock garden in the front. He had a statue of the Venus de Milo in the middle of the lawn to the back, and a range of interesting ericas in the rock garden. Some people, including his children and indeed his superior the mayor, thought the house old-fashioned, but it did not do to replace perfectly good furniture every five minutes. The children had laughed at the mahogany-framed sofa, and the goddesses holding up cabbages and pineapples that ornamented the structure of the sideboard, and even the well-made dining table with the pedestals representing the West Wind that they had bought in Dresden nearly forty years before. The mayor had said that it would benefit the deputy mayor to understand the future of civilization, by which he meant replace all his furniture.