The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

9.

      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.

      At present Frau Mauthner was moving about downstairs. Her normal departure from the house was no later than nine o’clock. It was now nearly ten to ten, and the sound of her movements had a stealthy, suspicious air. It was not at all unlikely that Frau Mauthner knew perfectly well that Katharina was in Fritz’s room, as she had been for four of the last ten nights. She could have found this out in many ways, although the most likely was that her maid Sophie had told her. Fritz had been obliged to take Sophie into his confidence after an encounter on the stairs in the morning. Frau Mauthner was moving about directly below, in the dining room she barely used; she seemed to be changing the position of some furniture, but so slowly. Fritz was sure she was moving about and listening, establishing her evidence for some future confrontation. He shifted his attention from Frau Mauthner’s stealthy tread to the five objects on the table. They had been there for weeks now.

      These objects were for Fritz’s non-representative found-object sculpture. It was a task in class. He had found five objects, with the intention of using four, but he could not decide which to leave out. There was the long, thin blade of a saw, slightly rusting along its flat edge, like the hackles of a cornered fox. This was a fierce object. There was a square of steel wool, pocketed from Frau Mauthner’s kitchen when no one was looking. This was a Protestant object. There was a very old piece of black bread, now curling up at the edges slightly. This object, Fritz could not decide what it represented. Some days it was a nursery object, some days it was funereal, like the feast at a crow’s wake. There was a block of cedarwood, the size of two clenched fists together, and that was a virtuous object, but virtuous in an admirable way, not virtuous in a way you felt lectured at by it. And there was a piece of beautiful red glass, lovely vivid red glass, changing the world as you looked through it, making it warm and strange. The piece of red glass was the fall of Austria-Hungary. He had found it on the street. Where it had come from, and what its original purpose was, Fritz did not know and could not guess. Why it was the fall of Austria-Hungary Fritz did not understand. But it had presented itself to him in the way that a woman might introduce herself and say, ‘I am an only child’, and you thought, Yes, you are, indeed you are. The piece of red glass looked like a pane from a piece of church stained glass, but that was impossible. It had once occurred to Fritz that it might be a discarded fragment of another student’s non-representative found-object sculpture. He did not like to think of that.

      They would not go together, no matter which of the five he omitted. Now he moved over to the table and picked up the piece of red glass. The other four things – the bread, the cedarwood block, the saw, the СКАЧАТЬ