The Emperor Waltz (72 page)

‘Sir,’ the train steward said, putting his head round the door of the compartment. ‘Sir. You ordered a cup of coffee. It is here.’

‘I don’t think …’ Itten said, but then for no particular reason he said, ‘Thank you,’ and took the cup of coffee. He placed the small white china jug of milk and the bowl of sugar cubes on the tiny wooden platform by the side of the seat. It had been paid for, apparently. The small boy seemed to have ignored the world around him until now, but as Itten held the cup of coffee firm, he looked up, with keen interest. With his fingers, Itten took the uppermost of the white sugar cubes. It was his one small vice; to drink coffee with the addition of a sugar cube. He had tried to rid himself of the addiction, and now he concluded that he need not stop it. It was only one cube of sugar, once a day, if that. Where had Klee gone?

Itten raised the cup of coffee to his mouth. But there was something rising to the surface as the cup met his lips. It was black and floating and spiked; it was – he saw, picking it out of the coffee – it was the black carved model of a spider. How had it got in there? It was bobbing and floating in the brown liquid. It must have been encased somehow in the cube of sugar. Itten plucked it out with distaste; he put it to one side. The small boy was entranced. His puzzle sat in his left hand as he waited to see what Itten would do.

‘I see,’ Itten said benevolently. ‘It is some sort of humorous joke, I believe. I am an artist, young man. I do not know where this object comes from, but I have plenty of time, and now I have decided that I will draw this object. It seems most interesting to me.’

But the boy had raised his puzzle to his face. Itten could have examined the spider more closely. It seemed irreconcilable with the dignity of the universe, however. Shortly, Itten got up and opened the window. He threw the wooden spider out with a single, dignified flick of the wrist. It could not be hurled: it was made of too light a wood, and spun and bobbed as he threw it into the wake of the train. It would not do to make oneself ridiculous by complaining about an absurd attempt to make oneself ridiculous. Outside, the landscape of the country, of green fields and shining water, of dark woods and bright sky, continued to unfold under the regular rhythm of the train’s wheels.

4.1

It was decided to hold an odyssey through the seas of alcohol; a long night’s journey through the bars of Dessau. It had been decided in the introductory class that a Thursday night in November was perfect for this, and then somebody noticed that the date they had settled on was the eighth anniversary of the Armistice. The eleventh of November. It was so hard to pick on a meaningless date to go from one bar to another, and for a moment they considered altering it. But then someone said that Thursdays were perfect, as nobody expected anything much from students on a Friday, and in any case many people went away on Fridays, or found it a bourgeois sort of day to get drunk on. The eighteenth was impossible, and the twenty-fifth was too far away. So, in the end, there was found to be something rather splendid about the decision to go out and get drunk in twenty bars in Dessau on the day of the surrender, the Armistice, the stab in the back.

What a thrill! What a jaunt! What an outing! What a thing to dress up for!

Paul was a Marxist and despised the Bauhaus. ‘The cube!’ he said. ‘The cube! One side blue, another red, a third yellow – a lovely toy for the Bauhaus collectors, the snobs! And the triangle must be yellow, and the circle must be blue, and the square must be red! Put a price on it and hand it to the collectors! The cube is trumps, and wins the game. And on the floor of the Masters’ houses, what do you see? Woven. The interesting psychological complexes of young girls. Woven into interesting expensive carpets. No, we must strive to create art that everyone can own, that has no difference, that is made by factories in their millions, and the director of an art school drinks his tea from the same cup that an honest labourer works. And for that reason we are going to go out and drink in every drinking establishment in Dessau, and take a glimpse at society.’

Paul and Ludo together had a splendid idea, put into detailed execution by Egon, who had a solid knowledge of the structure of the town’s drinking. The rule of the evening would be this: that every bar or pub or beerhall or
Kneipe
entered should be undeniably and objectively worse than the one before. The descent should be gently stepped and appalling in its final result. You see, Paul had said, it should be a demonstration of the suffering of the urban proletariat and the complacency, the emptiness, of the pleasures of the urban bourgeoisie, the rentiers with their little glasses and their little cherries in their drinks and their little diamonds about their wives’ necks. ‘Let’s ask Max,’ someone said daringly, and Max was asked (without offering Paul’s detailed justification), and Max said it was a splendid idea and he would never forgive them if they didn’t include him.

Would it not be better, Paul observed after this, if the bars grew better and better, as the voyagers grew more and more drunk and incapable? And if the last drinking establishment were unspeakably refined and ostentatious, and if it found itself hosting thirty drunk and violent Bauhäuslers on the verge of starting a fight?

It was an excellent idea, but the American Bar of the Hotel Gansevoort would, it was felt, happily refuse entry to thirty drunk and violent Bauhäuslers after midnight. It had to be conducted as Paul decreed, from good to bad, and his second thought was not put to Max at all. Paul led them into the American Bar of the Hotel Gansevoort. It was seven thirty on Thursday, the eleventh of November. He wore his hair long on top, with a cursory parting in the middle; like many of the other boys, he shook his head and tossed it from his forehead regularly. The barman and the three other parties in the bar looked at the Bauhaus contingent, ten of them in the end, with distrust. One of the other men was wearing a white blouse crossed with a leather strap, like a
moujik
; another made a habit of blackening the lower rim of his eyelids. They entered the bar, with the wainscoting in soft wood, the beaten brass fixtures and its warm chocolate glow.

‘They are going to be more concerned about prostitutes than about us,’ Thomas said to Klaus.

‘What did you have for your dinner?’ Klaus said.

‘There were croquettes made out of turnip-tops,’ Thomas said, and shuddered. ‘And then a sort of shape that had been broached yesterday and turned up again today, tasting of almond soap. I am hoping for peanuts here at the American Bar.’

The drinks had been ordered by Max, the most respectable-looking of the men, who had come out in a brilliant white shirt with a scribble of a black string tie falling down the front. There was only one barman, a middle-aged and highly groomed individual in a white shirt that looked drab by the side of Max’s, his black hair beautifully neat around a sharp white line of a parting. Max and Ingrid stood at the bar, Ingrid in a pair of enormous ear-rings like the ear-rings of savages. They discussed, at some length, the possibilities of American drinks with the barman, and finished by ordering brandy Alexanders for the women and dry martinis for the men.

‘The bourgeoisie must be shot,’ Klaus was saying to Karoline, a very young girl whose eyes were wide open with interest. She had arrived in Dessau only one month before; her parents were quite set against it, but it was all so rewarding and valuable. She was wearing a brilliant red skirt and yellow stockings, and a white blouse rather like the
moujik
one that Klaus wore; they looked like a peasant couple at the Russian Ballet. Karoline had been brought by Max. He had seduced her efficiently and hygienically after two weeks.

‘There is no alternative,’ Klaus said. ‘They must all be shot.’

‘Oh, but surely,’ Karoline said, ‘when you explain things as clearly and logically as you explain them – surely everyone would understand afterwards how things must be.’

Klaus gave a brief, harsh laugh, and plucked at the arm of the man who was wearing black makeup on his lower lids. ‘Ludo, you must meet this comrade,’ he said to the man. ‘Here is a comrade who believes still in education.’

‘I think I believe in education, Klaus,’ Ludo said. ‘There is always the possibility of education.’

‘No, often there is no possibility of education,’ Klaus said. ‘There is no alternative but to take them outside and shoot them in the head. I am talking about the urban bourgeoisie.’

‘What about the rural bourgeoisie?’ Ingrid said, coming back from the bar. She had a charming inability to pronounce her
r
s, a plump girl with bloodthirsty views. ‘What about them? Those of us who spring from the rural bourgeoisie – we would like to know their fate.’

‘They,’ Klaus said, accepting a dry martini from Ingrid and handing another to Ludo, a brandy Alexander to Karoline, ‘they will be sealed up inside their vast palaces, and burnt alive, and the people’s tribunes will line up and watch them burn. It will be a glorious spectacle.’

‘Oh, good,’ Ingrid said. ‘I do hope I’m there when it happens to Mamma. Come on, Karoline – let’s go and look at the mosaics in the bathroom.’

She had finished her drink so quickly, and Karoline, following instructions, too; they went out. Once in the lobby, Ingrid turned and called back into the bar, ‘I say –
do
look at this,’ and then the men, most of them, strolled out, their martini glasses in hand. The barman looked sceptical, but one boy remained at the bar. It was Ludo. They must have seemed pleasant and clean, though oddly dressed. But in a moment there was a blood-curdling scream from the lobby; the boy who had remained in the bar made a concerned face, and, leaving his glass on the bar, rushed out. The barman followed, more slowly, to find the last of the students piling out of the hotel and running for dear life, hurling their cocktail glasses behind them as they went.

The whole thing had been decided upon before they entered the American Bar at the Hotel Gansevoort. It was the best bar in Dessau, and by a long way the most expensive. The ten of them ran furiously, never having had any intention to pay for the drinks at the hall of the bourgeois predators.

At length they slowed down. Egon had led them through a complex series of side-streets, doubling back and crossing their route twice. Only when they turned into the Radegasterstrasse did they fall back into a walk, rather red-faced. Instantly Klaus began to talk about the revolution.

‘Oh, I know,’ Ludo said happily, at an inquisitive look from Egon. ‘He looks forward so much to the future. I admire him so much.’

‘What is your future?’ Paul said. ‘Your individual one, not the one that contains us all.’

‘Did you not see Ludo’s glass and felt piece?’ Karoline said. ‘It was all in shades of red, transparent and opaque, and the shades were identical but modified by whether it was glass or felt. There were polished aspects and raw aspects. It was—’

‘But red is only red!’ Max said. ‘All that talk of associations – it is just like listening to my father talk about – about – about
anything.
We have grown out of all of that, surely.’

And then they turned into the second bar of the evening. It was another cocktail bar, but not quite so assured and elegant as the American Bar. The interior had been done in a hurry by someone recognizing a craze, and although its little wooden lights and its marble bar, the large golden mirrors behind the bar looked impressive through the window, there were already signs that it would settle down into a comfortably shabby existence. The striped wallpaper, purple and cream with a thin line of gold between them, had been picked off at table level here and there; the glass ashtray at the table where they sat bore the name of the bar, but was chipped. Nevertheless, the drinks were said to be good, and gin fizzes, a curious mixture containing Curaçao and Chartreuse and a glass of sekt with a cube of brandy-soaked sugar were ordered. Here, it had been concluded, they would pay. The bar was called Bill’s Bar, with a fashionable American apostrophe. A pianist played ragtime cheerfully on a small grand, perhaps too obtrusively for the middling-sized room; a single middle-aged man wearing an American suit, his crumpled hat on the table by his side, read the sporting newspaper with a glass of clear heavy liquid in front of him.

‘Red is everything!’ Ingrid came in. ‘Nothing is only anything! You have not seen his piece. It was so much admired. Red is everything.’

‘Oh, you mean it is blood, and passion, and Spain, and the Party, and more blood, and – associations, my dear Ingrid, associations,’ Max said. ‘The point is—’

‘Those are such important associations,’ Karoline said. ‘We would not know what to do with red, or anything, without bringing our associations into it. When we see blue, there is the sea!’

‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake,’ Max said. ‘The sea is not blue! I have never seen the sea blue. The sea is grey, and sometimes a little greenish, and sometimes brown, and—’

‘It is only blue in the pictures,’ Egon said. ‘The pictures that your grandfather painted and liked so much.’

They all burst out laughing. Karoline had perhaps thought that Max liked her for herself, that she had been brought along because Max thought her so special. But the others knew that Max brought many girls along, and would bring many more girls along, in the course of the year.

‘The truth of the matter is …’ Klaus said, but he found he was talking to no one. ‘What are they talking about?’

‘Red is only red,’ Max said, ‘as I say. It is for us to make our own associations, or to choose none. It is merely a vibration along a certain spectral line, an illusion, a range of shades that may remind you of blood and revolution and Spain, but which reminds me of a virgin’s First Communion dress. There! And a wedding dress! And snow! That is what it reminds me of.’

‘Oh, but that is absurd,’ Willi said. ‘No one gets married in a red dress. You always marry in white.’

It was tacitly agreed not to take any notice of this contribution. Willi’s foolish contributions to any debate were familiar. He was a stocky boy with close-shaved head; his hair had been blond and glinted like the very beginnings of a mental insight, emerging. Whether he did not listen, or whether he listened and did not understand, his contributions more often led to an embarrassed changing of the subject than a continuation of it. He only made sense when he had a chisel in front of him and a block of cedarwood.