Читать книгу The Emperor Waltz - Philip Hensher - Страница 10

That evening, his father’s sister from the town of Brandenburg came to dinner. She was a twice-yearly visitor who turned up in the city to make sure of her affairs, which her brother handled, and in the last year, to ensure that her brother and nephews were continuing to live in a respectable way at home, despite her sister-in-law’s death from influenza. She was a small, beady woman, full of news of Brandenburg life. Her brother had moved away from Brandenburg thirty-five years before, to the opportunities offered by a university education, a long apprenticeship, a marriage in middle age, children and a solid apartment in Charlottenburg.

‘And Herr Dietmahler sold his house in the Kleiststrasse to his cousin Horst Dietmahler, the younger brother of his father the corn-merchant, his son, whose wife had twins last year. His business is suffering and he no longer needed a house on that scale,’ Aunt Luise continued. The ivory-handled spoon, from the set that came out for guests, rose and fell from the grey potato soup. Occasionally her small hand, beaded with black rings and a triple jet bracelet, reached out and tore at the bread rolls. Between mouthfuls, she spoke in a tired, mechanical way of her town. ‘There was a Frenchman who came to visit last week, who stayed with the Enzelmanns in Magdeburgerstrasse, you remember the beautiful house, the big beautiful house that the Enzelmanns always had, the Frenchman came after writing, he wanted to look at some furniture that Grandfather Enzelmann had brought back from Paris in the 1870 war, you remember, Cousin Ludwig, the beautiful chair and the commode and the looking-glass with the stork and the swan in gold in the drawing room, and the Frenchman came to inspect it, and pretended to admire it before he said it had been stolen from his family. And Minna von Tunzel …’

Kind-hearted Dolphus in his sailor suit stared and listened, wide-eyed. He felt sorry for her, he had told Christian on her last visit: two sons killed in the war, both on the same day, or perhaps one day after the other, thousands of miles apart, and the telegrams making their separate way to Brandenburg, and Uncle Joachim dead of an apoplexy six months later. But Christian could remember how Aunt Luise had been before the war, and her two big, cruel sons too, and perspiring fat Uncle Joachim. His father was nodding decorously as Aunt Luise reached Minna von Tunzel’s parlourmaid’s baby, giving a signal to Alfred to bring in the whiting, in a circle with their tails in their mouths in a grey sauce, as they always were when a guest came. Christian was thinking about the decision he had made that morning, in Friedrichstrasse.

‘Father,’ he said, when the fish had been taken away and Aunt Luise was fumbling in her reticule for a handkerchief. ‘We must talk about what I am to do.’

‘What you are to do, dear boy?’ his father said. He had had a long afternoon with Luise, trying to explain what had happened to her investments and her bonds. He never looked forward to her visits, and this had been a very trying one. ‘Is this an important conversation?’

‘Father, I’ve decided what I want to do after school,’ Christian said, summoning his courage.

‘I thought all that was decided,’ Aunt Luise said nastily, placing her knife and fork on the plate, inspecting, pulling the fork back a tenth of a point so that they would be exactly next to each other. ‘I thought the elder was to be a lawyer and the younger an engineer. The elder boy to study in Nuremberg; the younger to take himself off to London, where the best engineering schools are.’

‘I don’t want to be a lawyer, Father,’ Christian said, not addressing Aunt Luise. To his surprise, there was something like a grey smile in his father’s eyes, something between the two of them. His father did not often engage him with a look: he found it easier to look somewhere else, as if not paying attention. He wondered whether his father had been waiting for him to start this conversation for the last year. ‘I want to go to an art school in Weimar. I would be a very good artist, I know it. It’s all I want to do.’

‘Want to do?’ his father said. ‘I never wanted to be a lawyer, either, but I did, and I was very glad of it in the end.’

‘Karin Burgerlicher’s second-youngest boy—’ Aunt Luise began.

‘You can always paint in your spare time, on Sundays and on holidays, in the Alps,’ his father said. ‘Lawyers often do. But I never heard of an artist who drew up wills and contracts on Sundays and holidays. You could never be any sort of lawyer, you know, if you went to an art school. Wittenberg, you said?’

‘Weimar,’ Christian muttered.

‘Ah, Weimar, a beautiful town also,’ his father said, in a full, satisfied tone. The fish had been taken away, and now, the sour beef was brought in. They sat in silence. Aunt Luise was pretending to be occupied with something in her lap, with handkerchief and pill box. Dolphus gazed at his brother in undisguised wonder. It was not clear to Christian whether his father had reached some conclusion, or whether he now thought that everyone agreed that Christian’s future was as it had always been, had never needed discussion, that the discussion was now over.

‘Father,’ Christian said, when the beef was served and Alfred had left the room.

‘Well, I don’t see why not,’ his father said. ‘The world is changing so much. And if it all fails, you can at least become a town clerk or something of that kind. Or start again. Nothing much would be lost, by your year at an art school. I suppose that your brother Dolphus can still go to London, to become an engineer.’

‘Brother,’ Aunt Luise said in wonderment, dropping her fork in the beef. It was the first time Christian had ever heard his father say anything worth wondering at, the first time he had surprised anyone other than by remaining silent when he might speak. His choice of wife had been the daughter of a judge; his choice of dwelling had been between two other lawyers; his choice of children might have remained as it had been – the elder a lawyer, the younger an engineer. Christian was not surprised that his sister, even though she had known him from the nursery, stared and gasped, and in protest dropped her fork in her sour beef.

‘Thank you, Father,’ Christian said. ‘I would be a very bad lawyer, I know it. And I can be a very good artist.’ He wanted to say that he could be a great artist. But at his father’s dinner table, with greyish well-ironed and patched linen, the greying velvet drapes, the Moritz von Schwind Alpine landscape, the encrusted silver candlesticks on the table and the hissing curlicue of the gas jets on the wall, the words did not come out.

‘One thing I must insist on,’ his father said. ‘There are to be no models lounging about the place of any sort. Now, Luise. Let me help you to what passes for spinach these days.’

Aunt Luise began to tell them about what had happened to Karin Burgerlicher’s younger brother in Rome in the 1890s.