Читать книгу The Emperor Waltz - Philip Hensher - Страница 9

He had been an artist since the eleventh of May that year. Christian Vogt lived with his father and brother in a second-floor apartment in Charlottenburg, in Berlin. White plaster dragons and Atlases held up the entrance to their block, a polished dark oak door in between, and Frau Miller, the concierge, behind her door with a series of notes explaining her absence or place, to be put up with drawing pins according to need. The apartment was serviced and kept going by their cook, Martha, and Alfred, the manservant. Since their mother had died, the spring before, Herr Vogt had decided that it was not necessary to keep a maid as well, that Alfred was quite capable – Christian could remember Alfred’s departure for the war, years before. He had been a big boy, limber and grinning. When he returned from the army, he still had a sort of smile on his face, but a skinny, bony, pulled-apart one. His father had offered him his old job back. ‘I could do nothing else,’ he said, and let the maid go a few weeks later without complaining. There was no way of doing without the cook, however. When Christian’s mother had still been alive, there had been a succession of varied dishes, and complaints if the food, even in the depths of war, had sunk into monotony and repetition. His mother had made things so much nicer. Now there was more food to be had in the markets, but the cook had settled into a routine, and plain grilled lamb chops alternated with veal – sometimes flounder, and sometimes even horse, done plainly. Nobody seemed to notice.

Egon would drive the motor, if it were needed, but it was rarely needed. There were large changes in the household since his mother’s death in the epidemic, the year before. One of the smaller changes, which had also gone unattended, was that Christian’s future was no longer a matter of concern. Among the large and heavy furniture, Christian and his brother Dolphus went, wearing the clothes they had had for two years, filling the time as best they could between meals. His father went to the office, or he stayed at home, working in his study. Dolphus went to school under his own steam. Christian, who had finished at the Gymnasium in the springtime, spent his days quietly and without much sense that anything was expected of him.

His days were matters of outings and explorations, running outwards from U-Bahn stop or tram-route. It was in the course of one of these explorations that, under a railway arch in Friedrichstrasse, far from home, he saw a poster advertising a new school for the arts in Weimar. It had opened the year before. Students were sought. The look of the poster appealed to him: the letters without eyebrows, shouting in a new sort of way. They might have been speaking to him.

Christian had always liked to paint and to draw. When he was younger, he had been able to lie on his bed and imagine the paintings he would produce: of a girl stretched at full length in a bare tree, a greyhound looking up into the branches, forlorn and spiky with his nude mistress. A sun rising over an alp, but a matter of geometry, not sublimity, the mountains rendered as a series of overlapping triangles. A face in a forest, no more than that, the dim chiaroscuro of the rippling foliage absorbing the cloak of the man, the woman, the ambiguous figure. You could paint a picture that was nothing much but a line and a square and another line and a rainbow – people in Russia had done that: he had seen it in the magazines an art master had shown them. A portrait of his family, the four faces, then the three, floating in the darkness of the apartment. Sometimes he thought them through as far as conceiving of a medium. It could change abruptly: sometimes an oil four-part portrait could suddenly decide to become a polished wooden relief with the word ‘UNTERGANG’ carved in tendril-like letters – no, in modern brash American newspaper-headline letters, much better. He would lie like that, conceiving his works of art. Sometimes he would get up and, with charcoal on the rough paper he had saved up for and kept in a stack under his bed, he would attempt to draw what he had thought of. He had learnt some things in art classes at the Gymnasium, but art there did not matter, was only brought to their attention because gentlemen needed to be acquainted with the collectible, needed to be warned of what artists in Russia were laying waste to. He learnt most at home, on his own. Nobody except Dolphus had ever seen anything he had done, except the drawings he had produced, stiffly and awkwardly and without merit, in the drawing classes at school. Those had been praised by the master and by his classmates. Christian did not know how you would show anyone you knew the drawings of an imagined nude woman in a tree, or explain what you had meant by it. Christian had been intended to be a lawyer. Nothing had been mentioned about any of that since his mother had died. Sometimes Christian wondered whether all arrangements had been made by his father without consulting him.

The poster in Friedrichstrasse, under the dank, sopping railway bridge, struck Christian like a recruiting poster. Around him, the dry-rot smell of Berlin crowds rose, as the short, dark, cross Berliners pushed their way about him, banging him with their bags and possessions. An older woman, like one of his father’s elder sisters, raised a lorgnon and inspected him: a thin, blond boy, his head almost shaven as if after an illness, wearing a soft, loose-fitting suit of an indeterminate brown, like the suits of English cloth the young had worn before the war. The poster said that makers of the new were invited to Weimar, where everything would alter, there, for the better. It was the eleventh of May. In the boulevards, the lime trees that gave them their names were opening, showing their fresh leaves, perfuming the wide way. The weather in Berlin was, at last, beginning to improve, to soften, to give out some warmth to the cold ornament of the city.