The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher

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      ‘And what did Klee respond?’ Nina asked.

      ‘Klee?’ Kandinsky said. ‘He cannot bear any outlay. Of course, he paints a painting every day, and none of them can be sold, so the blame lies with him, truly. Nina Nikolayevna, where is the bronze of the horse that used to stand there, on the table?’

      ‘And there I am – finished,’ Nina said, laying the socks and the needle and thread down with relief. ‘What did you say?’

      Kandinsky repeated himself.

      ‘It must be travelling slowly from Russia with the other things,’ Nina said. ‘If it has not been robbed and destroyed. One day they will all arrive, all your things, and we will be at home here.’

      ‘The Constructivists have taken it,’ Kandinsky said. ‘And melted it down for one of their towers. We will never see my little horse again.’

      ‘Soon there will be a revolution in Germany,’ Nina said. ‘And we will all be shot. So nothing will matter very much any more.’

      ‘Yes, that’s so,’ Kandinsky said. He sucked meditatively on his cigar.

      Two streets away, Klee lifted his violin from its case. They had eaten well. On Saturday night, Klee liked to choose the dinner, and to cook it himself. He liked the inner organs of beasts, bitter, rubbery, softly textureless, perfumed with bodily waste in a way only the practised would enjoy, and Felix had grown up finding these things ordinary and even pleasant; Lily had got used to them, and now took the Saturday dinner as part of how Paul was. Klee divided food into blond and brunette; he could cook sweetbreads in either way, dark or light. Tonight the food had been the heart of an ox, a monstrous thing. Klee had cleaned and stuffed it with meat, turnip, carrot and potato, and a herb of his own discovery, which had given the whole thing an odd flavour of liquorice. It had been a little heavy. Lily sat at the piano, ready to play, but evidently slightly uncomfortable: she burped gently from time to time. Felix sat on the sofa, the sole member of the audience. Paul took the violin from its case, unhooked the bow and, without hurry, gave the bow a good coating of rosin.

      This evening it was to be the Kreutzer sonata. Klee was feeling ambitious. When he felt bold, incapable of restraint, on the verge of great and exciting things, he cooked the heart of an ox for dinner and he played the Kreutzer sonata afterwards. He often played it as something to live up to, before embarking on great enterprises. Lily often concluded that a great change was in the offing when she heard, from the studio, the sound of the first chords of the Kreutzer sonata being played once, twice, a third time; meditatively, trying it out, softly, then with dramatic force. That first chord, four notes at once on the violin, would be heard again and again, as Klee tried to get the sound exactly right; then a pause on one of the middle notes, a doodle, a trill, a thoughtful and slow attempt at the tune in the slow movement, as if Klee were taking it apart from the inside. This morning, the chord was sounded in some kind of announcement: he took the top note towards quite a different place; a dotted rhythm, a gay and yet monumental tune it took Lily a few moments to place, though she knew it as well as she knew her own face. Klee was enjoying himself by playing the little prelude to the Emperor Waltz. A few notes of it, only. And then silence: he had returned to work. For a week now, the Kreutzer sonata had been sounding from the studio at unexpected times, and Lily had taken the hint, and practised the piano part while her husband had gone out for his daily walks or to meet with Kandinsky. Was the larger endeavour a change in Klee’s art, or was it just to announce the beginning of a new term at the art school? But for days he had been practising in his own systematic way, and tonight they were going to attempt the Kreutzer. The outbreak of gaiety in those few notes of the waltz was a sign of it: he felt liberated today.

      Klee raised the violin to his face. He looked, sober, at Lily, who beamed and raised her hands to the keyboard. Klee’s eyes shone intently, like those of the villain in a melodrama. He hung the bow above the strings; with a single gesture, he brought it down. The chord sang out; a cloud of rosin puffed from the bow, its dust glittering in the light from the lamp. Felix sat forward on the sofa, his loose, comfortable brown plus-fours bunching up and his green stockings falling down to his ankles. He clasped his hands in his lap. The beginning of the Kreutzer sonata was the most inexpressibly exciting thing he ever heard. It was like drawing back the curtains at seven thirty in the morning and seeing the lake on the first day of holiday, like the colour of the middle of the yolk of a fried egg in the country, that exact yellow of A major. It was almost better than those other things, because it would soon turn to fury and thunder and blackness, before it went all the way round and found its way back. It was a joy to hear Papa play it and call up a summer morning here, in this dull curtained room filled with things, smelling a little bit of the ox’s heart from dinner.

      ‘Klee is really too much,’ Kandinsky said in his own room, leaning backwards. ‘I am fond of the dear fellow, but …’

      ‘He is a Swiss businessman, a quite unsuccessful one,’ Nina said. ‘Too concerned with money, just enough to make him frightened about it, not enough to paint to earn it. The Swiss …’

      ‘Is he Swiss?’ Kandinsky said. ‘I am fond of him. But I sometimes wonder – can he be a Jew? He has all that race’s enthusiasm for pelf, for lucre, for the pile of gold. How his eyes light up!’

      Nina laughed heartily, waving the comment away. ‘Vassily Vassilyevich,’ she said affectionately, as she always did when he said something to her that he would not say to everybody.

      In another room, a large, empty one, the disciples of Mazdaznan gathered. The hall was at the back of a church, loaned to political groups, societies, choirs and amateur gatherings of a centrist-to-left disposition. One of the two Weimar Wagner societies, the one with an anti-monarchist bent, met here on Tuesdays, and on Fridays the town’s Communist watercolour society. Itten’s Mazdaznan group met in classrooms at the Bauhaus, but on Saturday nights the building was closed, and it was good to have a weekly meeting to which everyone came.

      There were forty people in the room. Most had had their heads shaved, and some were in their formal purple robes, made by themselves, or by adept clothes designers and makers. Elsa Winteregger was talking. ‘And then there’s new people. Oh, there’s always new people. New ideas, new images, new thinking. Do you know? I saw a man, a boy, a new one today, and I took him up, and he was so full of new life, I don’t know where he came from or what he was doing, but he said he wanted to find the Bauhaus, and I helped him, and then I don’t know what happened to him. It was so exciting. And tomorrow there’s going to be so many of them, not tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and there’s going to be so many wise new young heads, all of them full of new ideas, and they’ll put us to shame, we’ve been trodden over and made conventional in life, but them, not them, it’s for us to learn from them, us and the Masters, too …’

      She went on gabbling. People about her came and went, listening and not interrupting and then going away again. Sometimes they turned to each other and began to talk, and drifted off. Her speech had started somewhere else and it was going to be finished somewhere else. And now she was talking about her sister, who was staying with her.

      ‘. . . only for a few days, only until Sunday, not tomorrow, a week tomorrow, she came yesterday and was so exhausted, she lay in bed until lunchtime, afterwards, easily, and she said, Elsa, what has happened to your hair, so we laughed about that, and I think she is quite used to it, quite used now, she lives where we grew up, in Breitenberg, so she is used to almost anything now. She is so dear, I could not live without her, I promised her to bring her to the Bauhaus on Monday morning, to see us all, all us oddities, but she says that only I am enough, only I am oddity enough for her …’

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