The Emperor Waltz Read Free

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