The Emperor Waltz Read Online Free PDF Page B

and flappings. Dashingly, Christian reached up and plucked a pear from a tree overhanging the lane; he put it into his pocket for later. At the end of the lane, the main road out of Weimar into the country, he waited as a lumbering famer’s cart went by, as heavy and groaning as if made of lead, and after it, the watering cart of the district, pulled by two huge and shaggy horses. The farmer raised his fat fingertips lightly to the brim of his broad and grubby straw hat; Christian, smiling, nodded.
    It was still early when Christian reached the central square of the town, and the Saturday market was still presenting an orderly and fresh appearance. Although he had just finished Frau Scherbatsky’s breakfast, he took the pear from his pocket and ate it as he went round the market. He had thought that the art school was on the other side of the square, but quickly found himself in a quiet residential street. He turned back and tried another side of the square; this time he found himself facing a statue that proved to be of Goethe and Schiller and, behind that, a grand pillared theatre. A gaggle of white geese, intelligent and imperious, was making its way through the square in the direction of the market, driven by a freckled boy of fifteen or so; a man at the wheel of a black car, his vehicle shiny and bright in the sun, waited for them to pass. Christian sat down on the steps of the Goethe statue to feel in his pocket for the small map he had cut out of the guide to the city; it was not there. He remembered now taking it out of his bag, and placing it on the dressing-table ready to take out, but not taking it out.
    A shabby figure was in front of him. ‘Do you know what you are sitting upon?’ he said, in a brusque, military manner.
    ‘I think so,’ Christian said. He observed the man: he was wearing a cheap blue suit made out of some dyed military material. It fitted him so badly that, when the man made a strong chopping gesture with his arm, a lecturer’s decisive gesture, it appeared to move a second or so behind the man, as if it had its own stiff ideas of movement to follow. ‘Goethe and Schiller.’
    The man made an impatient movement, flinging his arm to one side and tipping his head back to look down his nose at Christian, sitting on the stone steps of the monument. ‘Great poets and thinkers,’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ Christian said. ‘Can you help me? Could you tell me where the Bauhaus is?’
    ‘The –’ the man said ‘– the— What did you call it?’
    ‘The Bauhaus,’ Christian said. He had an irrational feeling that this stranger was, in fact, Frau Scherbatsky’s other lodger, the unreliable Herr Wolff. The man stood in front of him with his legs apart, building up to some sort of rage. He was wearing what seemed to be military medals, although he did not seem dressed in other ways for a funeral or other ceremony.
    ‘He means the art school,’ a woman who had been taking an interest now butted in to say.
    ‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘It used to be a respectable art school, but now it calls itself the Bauhaus. So you’re one of those, are you? No wonder you sit on the steps of Germany’s monuments, insulting its greatness. Communists and garlic-eaters and free-love practitioners! Go off to Moscow or Paris, why don’t you?’
    Among the small crowd that was now gathering to enjoy the abuse, there was a girl who was grinning broadly. She was at the front of the gathering. Her clothes were simple and rustic, perhaps home-made; they were dark green, straight up and straight down, with a gathering at the neck of blue ribbon, simply tied. Her hat, impatiently shoved on her head, was a coal scuttle made out of brown felt. Her grin was empty and her mouth was too large for her small head. With some shock, Christian saw that her head under the hat must be shaved; he saw the stubble above her ear. The smile and the cock of the head towards him was of indefinable familiarity; it was the smile of a friend