[17] Social idealism, and its affects

Six weeks is a long time away. I’ve used up six lives in one week. In the afternoon crowds, nothing looks normal to me yet, and it’s good to see everything fresh, looking brighter despite itself, than its nature. If I passed the cathedral, I know I’d enter. I crave that space, though I don’t attend there. I do that when we’re on our hill, at the Crazy Church. If I did that in the city, it would be somewhere quieter, not under this roof, which means something else to me, with the pillars holding up the shadows like a forest at dusk. There are carvings up there, and I think about the centuries of human work that went to make what no one down below is meant to see. That is what art was before people found ways to reproduce it. It was invisible to almost everyone, a thing you had to make a pilgrimage to, a magic you had to journey towards. Sometimes I want to hang my own paintings where people would have to struggle to look at them. It would change what people saw. But suffering is a sin these days, a mark of worthlessness, even though people suffer more now than they’ve ever had to, inwardly.

So instead I walk past the Mozart Cellar, where the actors gather, and along the iron fence of the Schubertiad until the boulevard veers towards the minarets. No one I see looks like they’re working – this is the orbit for spenders and hoarders – but the crowds are just as dense. Instead of watching, I fall in, and my demon wakes up, which always happens when I’m in a crowd without a purpose. Which one is mine today? I want to find the guy who frightened Emma. Emma won’t want me to, so I’m not going to tell her. I’ll know when I find him whether I need to do anything about him. There’s been this problem for me for years … to get violent, I have to have a reason first. It’s a point of honour nowadays. Violence of any kind can be useful, but to inflict it for fun – I can’t any more. I can’t allow myself the crutch of generalizing the world like that. But people can tell I remember how I once did. If you pound on enough of your enemies when you’re young, it changes your walk, and that changes the way the world looks at you. I hope I don’t have a good reason this time, but he’ll have to see that I’m capable so that he won’t treat with me as if I’m not. You can’t let the world find you that way.

I turn towards the River Market, then pass in front of the SilverDome where I’ll make something good happen in three months. This is my city. Not that I chose it, but basically, this is where I have to be. There isn’t a market anywhere else in the empire, and I need to sell more work every year if I want to spend my time making more. Berlin, Dresden, Munich, I’ve been to them, I’ve done those. The empire angers me, but those cities bore me now, or they did soon enough – everyone trying so hard to be of the same mind, even the anarchists working from eight until six. I’m better off here, where everyone detests somebody else. For all the social torment and lies, something new comes of it. The Germans here don’t know how bored they would be if they ever got their way with the Czechs and Jews and Hungarians. I’m safe from what this city can do to people, but I don’t want to become this city. Twelve years and it hasn’t happened. I know now how to live here, but I still compare it to L.––– every day.

I’ve walked up Hail Mary. Rosemeyr isn’t surprised I’m back. The canvases his shop has undercoated for me are waiting against his office wall in one large roll – you’d think I was planning a voyage. He urges me to sit for a while. Olive skin, bushy black hair, long beak, well-fed paunch and proud of it. I want his hands, and you can tell by how he carries them like two soup plates that he likes to look at them himself. How he used to work with them long ago and enjoys remembering how. He’ll pose them for me one day, blushing with pride when I ask.

‘Paul, Paul, Paul, how is she? And the baby.’

‘Frightened, but not as frightened as yesterday.’

‘Who wasn’t? My wife too, more than anyone but Emma. But Doctor Loewe’s a good man. She was still weak from her confinement – tell me it must have been. Stay until you’re warm, will you? Martha brings me tea in another few minutes. You don’t have a telephone.’

‘They’re too loud, and it would almost never be someone I want to speak to.’

‘So you used to have one. And how’s Johnny the lad?’

‘He breathes thunder and rain. He strikes fear at the heavens. He strides the earth and makes it spin. In the night he keeps no secrets, in the day the truth is his sword.’

‘He’ll grow out of that. Our oldest one frightened us half to death until he learned to talk. Nowadays he isn’t so bad, he’s got one of his own. I wish you well getting those canvases home without a cart. The first puff of wind will sail you off. What happened to your head?’

‘I banged it.’

‘Ouch. I could have sent you the canvases, but then I would have worried another day about Emma.’

‘That man,’ I tell him. ‘The one she saw here.’

‘Yes, Wolfie. Him, oh yes. His father was a tax inspector in Passau. He’s a nutter.’

‘Something about him frightened Emma. She’ll tell me one day. Until she does, what do you know about him?’

He blinks with his eyebrows. ‘He knows Emma, he says. He told me that much. He came back this morning, clicking the heels, to ask how she was. And he says he’s seen you before. If you don’t remember him, you haven’t forgotten much. Strange that all three of you should be together, meeting like that, after how many years.’

‘He’s mistaken,’ I say. ‘I’ve never seen him in my life. And he scared half the life out of Emma for a whole night. She hates being frightened.’

‘Who does like that? He comes in two or three times a month to sell a watercolour. He gets a good price from me, too, for what they are. Four kroner each. Well, here, you know better …’ He opens his desk drawer and draws out a sheet of watercolour paper. ‘That’s his. A decent enough draughtsman if you give him something to copy – no good with people, though. He should be working for an architect somewhere, on a blueprinting board, I could help him there, but he always says, “No, no, I haven’t the time, not me.” He’s a real artist, he says. Well …’

I glance at an ink drawing of the Council House, filled in with watercolour, milkbottle people, two fluffy clouds. You can tell he’s taken pains. I wonder what kind of person would have sweated over something like this. A gram of talent for taking pains, none for anything else.

‘You know how my business works,’ he says. ‘Frames sell better when something is in them. When I put a four-kroner picture in, I can add five to the price.’

‘He says he knows Emma? Where does he know her from? Did he tell you that? He’s the reason she fainted. I want to know why.’

‘Of course you do.’

His wife comes in with his tea, asks long and carefully about Emma’s condition, and goes for another cup and a lemon slice. I’ve always taken my time here.

‘How is the show working, Paul?’ he asks. ‘You must be getting to the crunch. 30 April, isn’t it? Awkward timing, I would have thought, with so many people with money heading for the hills the next day. It’s too bad you priced me out. I’m glad I bought a couple of your drawings when I could. Not that you do very many that we could hang in our parlour.’

‘I never try to make them pretty. Anyone can do that.’

‘I don’t know anything about art, but I think I know something about skill. Martha, he’s asking about Wolfie.’

She places a cup in front of me. ‘Mr Creamcake. His father was a tax inspector in Passau, right Manny?’ They laugh together. ‘He reminds us every time we see him. What happened to your head?’

‘I banged it.’

‘Ouch. Those are good sutures. Oh yes. The first time Wolfie came into the shop … two years ago? three, Manny? I’d just served you a plate of my creamcakes with your lunch. You should have seen his face, Paul. Like a puppie wimpering for scraps. Wasn’t it funny, Manny?’

‘You know his kind, Paul. The city is full of young ones like him – shiny suit, frayed collar, cardboard shoes. They’re here from the provinces for chances that don’t come to them. A little education but not enough, hands too soft for labour. So … he keeps coming back here around the same time of day, hoping she’ll bring me more creamcakes. He’s a nutter, Paul. Look at how he dresses. He wore that greasy old coat all last summer, the same one he was wearing yesterday and today, because he didn’t have any linen to wear under it. He could get one for almost nothing from the government warehouse, but he doesn’t care. And an anti-Semite, but this is the imperial capital. You know the local definition of an anti-Semite? That’s someone who despises us more than we deserve. This city elected a mayor on a Jew-beating platform, and people lapped it up. Even plenty of Jews voted for him, if they were shopkeepers, petty clerks. You know the politics in this city: Jew hating is vicious, widespread, and virulent – it just isn’t serious. Not yet, anyway. The emperor likes us, so it won’t get much worse while he’s alive. By then, we can hope that things will have changed again. So what can you do but sigh? During the day.’

‘I’ve never seen him in my life.’

‘Emma has, that’s obvious. Miss Aaronson, he called her, if that was her maiden name. Her father is Aaronson Furniture Mills, isn’t he? Biedermeyer for the masses? She lived in a penthouse behind the Church of the Lucky Soul, he says. You tell me, I wouldn’t know. And her mother had these music parties he used to attend. Oh, he had a lovely time. And he’s pretty certain he remembers you, from the Imperial Art College.’

‘I never attended there.’

‘Neither did he, I’m sure. He’s a fabulist, is my point. He says they gave him the boot after a year because of his politics – he was a socialist then. Now he’s a German patriot, he says. The point is you’d better not take him seriously. Life’s too short. Oh yes, and don’t start him talking about music, if you see him. That’s his other specialty – Wagner as the keeper of the Germanic soul. That’s the second thing he’ll tell you, after he works it in that his daddy was a tax inspector in Passau. Well, it’s a big city, room enough for fools and crazies, so it seems.’

‘The creamcakes, Manny.’ They’re both starting to giggle.

‘He likes selling his little postcards to me because there’s a coffeehouse up the street across from the Western Station that sells yesterday’s cheap. He goes there twice a month, and then comes here with his nose covered in schlag and sells me a new sketch to pay for more creamcakes. That’s his notion of a holiday, and that’s when we see him. Or if I don’t need a postcard that day, he goes to Schlegel’s on the Outer Orbit. But he prefers to sell to me. He says Liberals are more honest – and when he says Liberals, I hope you hear … guess, why not. Schlegel’s a CD like most other Catholic tradesmen here. Shall I tell him you’re looking for him?’

‘If he says he knows Emma, I want to know exactly how.’

‘A sad little fool,’ Mrs Rosemeyr says. ‘Most of the time, he’s so shy that when he stops by, if there’s anyone but Manny and me, he can’t lift his eyes from the floor.’

‘What your wife saw, how she reacted,’ her husband says, ‘we see why you’re wondering. She was this morning’s sermon to me, I’ll put it: the effects of Jewish migration on German culture. To this face he preached it. Mine.’ He throws a profile at the ceiling. ‘Does it make you swoon, Paul? What can we do but laugh, when it’s someone like him who’s going on about it? But there was a grain of truth to him, you know? It was a welcoming city for us for years, after ’68, finally. Then the Old Man built the boulevard, and people came here from everywhere in the empire, and the new Jews didn’t look or act at all like the old ones who’d just spent a century Germanizing themselves. Easterners, most of the new ones – caftans, side locks, fur hats, all of that – and they bobbed their heads when they prayed half the day. That’s when the trouble started – the new ones started poisoning the well for the Westernized ones. They made us cringe with embarrassment – so, no love lost there. These days? Never mind the Germans – even the Ninth Quarter Jews treat the Easties like African savages. That’s all by the way. If you want to find him, try the men’s hostel across the canal, the new one on Meldemann north of the Pleasure Park. He’s been there almost since it opened. The place is full of shirt lifters, they say. Not that I think he’s one. Not from the way he talked about Emma this morning. He made it sound like they’d had a fling back then, which I would never mention if I believed it, knowing you two. I’m telling you that’s how much of a phantasist he is. He actually believes what he says while he’s saying it, and not many people in the Dream City do that. You almost believe him yourself, until you remember to think through what he’s telling you. Or you could go to the Fliegende Hollander at the opera house next Wednesday night. He’s always in standing room, upper balcony, when they’re singing Wagner. So he says. Something tells me that sane people are all about the same, but every crazy is crazy in his own way.’

[[ chapter 18 on 4 April ]]