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.
That evening, his father’s sister from the town of Brandenburg came to dinner. She was a twice-yearly visitor who turned up in the city to make sure of her affairs, which her brother handled, and in the last year, to ensure that her brother and nephews were continuing to live in a respectable way at home, despite her sister-in-law’s death from influenza. She was a small, beady woman, full of news of Brandenburg life. Her brother had moved away from Brandenburg thirty-five years before, to the opportunities offered by a university education, a long apprenticeship, a marriage in middle age, children and a solid apartment in Charlottenburg.
‘And Herr Dietmahler sold his house in the Kleiststrasse to his cousin Horst Dietmahler, the younger brother of his father the corn-merchant, his son, whose wife had twins last year. His business is suffering and he no longer needed a house on that scale,’ Aunt Luise continued. The ivory-handled spoon, from the set that came out for guests, rose and fell from the grey potato soup. Occasionally her small hand, beaded with black rings and a triple jet bracelet, reached out and tore at the bread rolls. Between mouthfuls, she spoke in a tired, mechanical way of her town. ‘There was a Frenchman who came to visit last week, who stayed with the Enzelmanns in Magdeburgerstrasse, you remember the beautiful house, the big beautiful house that the Enzelmanns always had, the Frenchman came after writing, he wanted to look at some furniture that Grandfather Enzelmann had brought back from Paris in the 1870 war, you remember, Cousin Ludwig, the beautiful chair and the commode and the looking-glass with the stork and the swan in gold in the drawing room, and the Frenchman came to inspect it, and pretended to admire it before he said it had been stolen from his family. And Minna von Tunzel …’
Kind-hearted Dolphus in his sailor suit stared and listened, wide-eyed. He felt sorry for her, he had told Christian on her last visit: two sons killed in the war, both on the same day, or perhaps one day after the other, thousands of miles apart, and the telegrams making their separate way to Brandenburg, and Uncle Joachim dead of an apoplexy six months later. But Christian could remember how Aunt Luise had been before the war, and her two big, cruel sons too, and perspiring fat Uncle Joachim. His father was nodding decorously as Aunt Luise reached Minna von Tunzel’s parlourmaid’s baby, giving a signal to Alfred to bring in the whiting, in a circle with their tails in their mouths in a grey sauce, as they always were when a guest came. Christian was thinking about the decision he had made that morning, in Friedrichstrasse.
‘Father,’ he said, when the fish had been taken away and Aunt Luise was fumbling in her reticule for a handkerchief. ‘We must talk about what I am to do.’
‘What you are to do, dear boy?’ his father said. He had had a long afternoon with Luise, trying to explain what had happened to her investments and her bonds. He never looked forward to her visits, and this had been a very trying one. ‘Is this an important 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
