The Emperor Waltz
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This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Philip Hensher 2014
Philip Hensher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007459575
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007459582
Version: 2016-08-19
PRAISE
From the reviews for The Emperor Waltz:
‘A cause for celebration . . . The five more or less discrete narratives conduct a mutual running commentary, multiplying dynamics, bridging millennia and resulting in a novel that’s almost fizzy to the touch . . . There is a remarkable fullness to the book’s invention. The effect is above all immersive . . . A performance of extraordinary fair and majesty from a writer who seems capable of anything’
Leo Robson, Guardian
‘A glittering performance. Adventurously, it interweaves a series of unrelated stories into a gorgeous amalgam of literary, musical and philosophical ideas . . . Strands converge to form an immensely satisfying whole . . . The author’s exuberant humour and affection for language resonate throughout . . . The Emperor Waltz has the depth and pleasurable density of a 19th-century fiction; I loved it’
Ian Thomson, Evening Standard
‘Complicated and important . . . masterful handling of character and narrative . . . Beautiful because Hensher has an incredible eye for the things that make moments special . . . he might have the iconoclastic temperament of a Kandinsky, but he is an old master when he glimpses the cat asleep under the table or the curve of a woman’s neck . . . Hensher’s multidimensional picture of Europe [is] an insistent reminder of a past that, however picturesque, can only be turned away from’
Melissa Katsoulis, The Times
‘As joyful as its musical source . . . The Emperor Waltz is a beautiful book, both profound and funny. It is a powerful invocation to live a life of joy, surrounded by true friends’
Elena Seymenlinska, Daily Telegraph
‘Ambitious and extraordinary . . . A generous, courageous fire-work of a novel – a Roman candle, alive and fizzing in the hand’
Olivia Laing, New Statesman
‘Funny, ingeniously observed and humming with revolutionary ideas . . . [The novel] probe[s] what it means to be committed to a cause that at once binds and isolates, testing love and faith. Along the way there are incidental characters whose vivacity rivals those conjured up by Dickens, and vignettes in which to delight’
Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail
‘The Emperor Waltz is historical fiction stripped of its more blatant identifers, and is the better for it. The Bauhaus sections in particular are astonishing . . . Hensher writes about his characters with real affection . . . His writing is as wonderful as ever’
Jon Day, Financial Times
‘Hensher in full, uninhibited fight . . . managing to emerge with the punter whole-heartedly on his side . . . Every so often there is a descriptive passage to take your breath away . . . sentence by bejewelled sentence’
D. J. Taylor, Literary Review
‘Hensher’s writing reads like a Vermeer painting: his attention to detail is transfxing’
Vogue
‘Splendidly thought out and extraordinarily readable’
A. S. Byatt
‘Hensher’s most ambitious novel to date . . . his sense of fun bounces off the pages of a novel that is always a joy to read . . . As an entertaining and absorbing exploration of what binds us together as human beings, The Emperor Waltz is just that kind of book. Read it and allow yourself to become a better person’
Matt Cain, Independent
‘The Emperor Waltz is rich and captivating, dizzy with memorable characters’
Ben Hamilton, Spectator
‘Hensher is an ambitious novelist who always bravely sets himself new challenges . . . He has a wonderful sense of place and an eye for the memorable and unexpected detail. He handles big scenes very well . . . He is a novelist who makes many demands on the reader, but the chief and most rewarding of these demands is that you should share in his own evident delight in what he has created’
Allan Massie, Scotsman
‘Hensher is particularly well suited to his book’s roving ensemble form – he has the ability to stage-manage dozens of characters across many years, he’s fluent with dialogue, and he can jump into a scene at full stride’
Sam Sacks, Prospect
‘His self-assurance and brio invests The Emperor Waltz with quasi-Victorian breadth and length, and with stylish authority. I was seduced into complete trust and abandoned myself to it completely . . . The Emperor Waltz again displays his sharp and original sensitivity, and, with remarkable boldness and ambition, evokes heroism, joy and martyrdom’
Caroline Jackson, The Tablet
DEDICATION
For Thomas Adès
An E-flat sonata movement
standing at an augmented fourth to the universe.
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
PRAISE
DEDICATION
BOOK 1
1922
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
BOOK 2
1979
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
BOOK 3
NEXT YEAR
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
BOOK 4
1979
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
BOOK 5
1922 (AND A LITTLE BEFORE)
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
BOOK 6
AD 203
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
BOOK 7
LAST MONTH
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
BOOK 8
1983–1998
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
BOOK 9
1927
CHAPTER 1.1
CHAPTER 1.2
CHAPTER 1.3
CHAPTER 1.4
CHAPTER 1.5
CHAPTER 2.1
CHAPTER 2.2
CHAPTER 2.3
CHAPTER 2.4
CHAPTER 2.5
CHAPTER 3.1
CHAPTER 3.2
CHAPTER 3.3
CHAPTER 3.4
CHAPTER 3.5
CHAPTER 4.1
CHAPTER 5.1
CHAPTER 5.2
CHAPTER 5.3
CHAPTER 5.4
EPILOGUE
2014/1933
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
FINAL NOTE
KEEP READING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY PHILIP HENSHER
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
1.
‘You will have brought your own towels and bedlinen,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, in her lowered, attractive, half-humming voice, ‘as I instructed, as I suggested, Herr Vogt, in my telegram. Other things I can supply, should you not have them for the moment. Soap, should you wish to wash yourself before tea, of which we shall partake in the drawing room in half an hour. Should you wish for hot water, Maria will supply you with some, if you ask her, on this occasion, since you have just arrived and had a tiring journey. I know all about trains, their effects on the traveller.’
She turned, smiling graciously, making a generous but unspecific wave of the hand.
‘Shaving soap,’ she carried on, continuing across the hall, ‘I can stretch to. My husband and boys, my two boys, were killed in the war, and I have their things, their possessions and bathroom necessities, which I have no undue sentimental attachment to, if you do not feel ghoulish at the prospect of shaving with the soap of a dead man, or three dead men, rather. It is better in these days that things should be used, and not preserved. We have all lost too much to retain the conventions of our fathers. Don’t you agree, Herr Vogt?’
‘That is very kind of you,’ the young man said. ‘But I only need soap to wash after my journey, thank you so much.’ He had the appearance of someone who needed to shave once weekly, and perhaps had not started to shave at all. Too young to have known the war at first hand, blond and fresh-faced, his eyes wide open, eager to please, slight and alert. He walked behind Frau Scherbatsky, across the hallway to the heavy wooden stairs of her Weimar villa, dark-panelled and velvet-trimmed, like the interior of a ransacked jewel-box. His stance was lopsided and ungainly; his suitcase, a borrowed old paternal one, leather and scarred with journey-labels torn off, was full and heavy. He was here for three months at least.
‘It was my husband’s house,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, proceeding in her mole-coloured tea-gown with a neat black apron over the top. ‘He thought of it for many years, considering how many coat hooks should be placed in the downstairs cloakroom. “Your house is perfect, Frau Scherbatsky,” Herr Architect Neddermeyer said. Everything so well considered – and reconsidered – you know. Do you know Goethe’s house in the marketplace? No? You must go. Goethe’s study, surrounded by a corridor and an anteroom, so that he could hear the servants coming and not be unduly disturbed. And we have just the same arrangement here. Herr Neddermeyer’s bedroom, now. Necessity called, on both of us, let us say. The house –’ she continued up the stairs, stately, walking, turning at the half-landing, but not looking at Vogt exactly, giving a general smile in the direction of the English stained glass of an angel with a lily, illuminating the stairwell with sanctity ‘– the house was finished and built by my husband to his exact specifications in 1912, and we had three most happy years here. Two years and seven months. This is your room. I hope you like it. It has a view over the park, as you see. You cannot quite see the Gartenhaus of Goethe – that is only from the corner bedroom. In current circumstances, I cannot specify the exact rent from month to month, but I will not take advantage of you, Herr Vogt, I can promise you that. And I think you said you were a student of art?’
‘I am just about to start my studies,’ Christian Vogt said, setting his case down. ‘I begin on Monday, in three days’ time.’
‘And you allowed yourself three days to settle in, most wise,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Those long train journeys are immeasurably exhausting. You would wish to do yourself justice. If I could only ask that, should you decide to paint in your room, you place on the floor, and especially over this rug, some newspaper. You are a painter, I hope – I do hope those are a painter’s sensitive fingers. Just remember, Herr Vogt, the newspaper over floor and rug. That would be so kind. And no models, please, no models, that I must ask you. And …’
Frau Scherbatsky looked at him with one eyebrow cocked. Christian did not at once know what she meant. But then he recalled the agreement that his father and she had reached about the payment for the accommodation, and took the old gold watch of Great-grandfather from his waistcoat pocket. He handed it over. Frau Scherbatsky, almost unnoticeably, ran her thumb and forefinger along the gold chain and bar. She placed it safely, and with due carefulness, in her apron. That would cover the costs for the three months (at least) and then they could enter into more negotiations, his father and Frau Scherbatsky. ‘But does the room suit you?’ she said.
‘It’s charming, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian Vogt said, not wanting to commit himself in speech to being a painter, or anything in particular, just yet. Something of her stately, half-generous manner had got into his way of talking. The room was plain, but well lit, through the diamond-leaded windows the light from the north, illuminated warmly by the last of the summer greenery in garden and park. On the bed was a practical counterpane of woollen stars in primary colours, knitted together; two stained oak wardrobes built into the wall; a dark green English pattern of wallpaper and, over the bed, a small oil copy of The Isle of the Dead, almost expertly done.
‘And here is Maria, with some hot water,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. The maid came in; she poured her pewter pitcher of hot water into the washbowl with minute attention, her hand trembling slightly in the steam with the weight. Her face was freckled; her uncovered hair was gingery, smoothed back in a practical bun. Maria, watched benevolently by Frau Scherbatsky, finished pouring. She transferred the pitcher from one hand to the other and, with a curious gesture, drew the back of her right hand across her smooth hair. The maid caught Christian Vogt’s eye; she gave a cryptic, inward smile with the movement of her hand across the gloss of her ginger hair. ‘We will see you downstairs in half an hour, Herr Vogt,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Welcome to Weimar.’ And they withdrew, Maria closing the door behind her, not turning as she went.
As the door shut, Christian Vogt was made aware of the sound of birdsong, close at hand, in either parkland or garden, in Frau Scherbatsky’s bereaved garden or Weimar’s long, quiet landscapes. It was a blackbird, and if he closed his eyes, he could see the bird’s open yellow bill and shining black eye, the angle of its neck as it sat in a tree and sang to the empty air in pleasure.
‘I am an artist,’ Christian said, experimentally, to the empty room.
2.
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.