Free The Emperor Waltz by Philip Hensher

carelessly, waving his hand at the window as if to suggest that he might have built all of it. ‘I could have gone to America. Interest in my work was very high there, as I said. But as I told my apprentices, my thinking, such as it is, was formed in an age where people climbed to the top floor if that was where they wanted to go. I was too old to change, to think how a tower of thirty floors could be ornamented. A mistake, no doubt. Now. Where were we.’
    Neddermeyer stood, and walked over in a vague, uncommitted way to the table, as if hardly engaged.
    ‘Well, here they are!’ he said. ‘There is no purpose, really, in continuing to work, but the imagination continues to thrive. Sometimes I am playing at the pianoforte and I will be seized with an idea, quite a new idea, for a suspended balcony at the front of a royal palace, or for some rolling bookshelves to simplify storage and display in a library. Now, this is an idea I had for a triumphal arch …’
    Neddermeyer’s fantasy work was neatly drawn, exquisitely finished, ornamented and made human with decorative touches of trees and figures. They were a credit to the tools in the open walnut case. He began to turn over the sheets, lovingly, murmuring words of explanation, like an ambassador introducing great dignitaries. Here was an idea he had for a state library; for a permanent circus on the classical model; for an English cottage; for a nobleman’s country house, refined and yet rustic; an idea for the Emperor’s military barracks; a new cathedral for Berlin (‘I was so disappointed, Herr Vogt, with the one His Majesty built, until I did not see why I should not put my own thoughts on paper’); a monument to the dead of the war; a bridge over a country stream and the same bridge, on a larger scale, bearing the traffic of the town; and a royal palace, eighty windows long on its front façade. Christian turned the sheets one after another. The plans were rich in ornament and fantasy; they specialized in pendentives and arches, in caryatids and classical columns, in portes-cochères heavy with mythological figures, in windows leaning out far over the street like orchards, in stucco ornament in their interiors and stone ornament on their exteriors. They specialized in the heavy imagination of the old Emperor, and Christian turned the pages with fascinated absorption. The moment for gargoyles, he thought, looking at the design for the Berlin cathedral, was gone.
    ‘You see, Herr Vogt,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘What architecture needs is imagination, and variety. The eye craves richness, and finds ornament restful. Now, for one of your teachers at the Bauhaus, a new cathedral in Weimar would be a simple matter.’ Neddermeyer was pulling a sketchbook towards him, a spiral-bound orange book, and now leant over the table to pluck a pencil from its place. ‘It would look just like –’ he began to draw ‘– you see, just like – ah, yes, that is that problem solved. You see?’
    He turned the sketchbook around for Christian to see. On the page, he had drawn nothing more than a rectangle, then filled it in roughly with a grid. He took it back, and drew a line underneath it and, with a couple of scribbles, placed some stick figures on the ground. ‘You see, Herr Vogt, I remember there was a great scandal in Vienna when the leader of the school built something opposite the Emperor’s house. The Emperor had not been consulted, and when he saw the building, he said, “Who has built that house with no eyebrows, just there?” A very ugly building, still, and a gross insult to the Emperor. That is the sort of place you are going to, Herr Vogt. I am sorry for you.’
    ‘Your buildings are very interesting, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘I look forward to talking with you a great deal more. But I am hoping to become an artist, not an architect.’
    Neddermeyer was now as flushed and excited as Christian had expected to find him. ‘You see, I lost