by Naomi Wood
Naomi Wood
The Hiding Game
Contents
1. England
WEIMAR, 1922
2. Weimar
3. Weimar
4. Weimar
5. Weimar
6. Weimar
7. Weimar
8. England
9. Weimar
10. Weimar
11. Weimar
12. Weimar
13. Weimar
14. Weimar
15. Weimar
16. Weimar
17. England
18. Weimar
19. Weimar
20. Weimar
21
22. Weimar
23. Weimar
DESSAU, 1929
24. Dessau
25. Dessau
26. Dessau
27. Dessau
28. Dessau
29. Dessau
30. England
31. Dessau
32. Dessau
33. Dessau
34. Dessau
35. Dessau
36. England
37. Dessau
BERLIN, 1932
38. Berlin
39. Berlin
40. Berlin
41. Berlin
42. England
43. Berlin
44. Berlin
45. England
46. Berlin
47. Berlin
48. Berlin
49. Berlin
50. Berlin
51. Berlin
52. Berlin
53. England
Acknowledgments
for Joan, Ari and Ed
‘Again it is astonishing how defencelessly everything collapses.’
Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries, 1933–41
1
England
So: Walter König is dead. Irmi called with the news in the middle of the night: she sounded upset, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t. ‘He was your friend, Paul,’ she said. ‘How can you feel nothing?’
I said I didn’t know.
Tricksy Walter, unlovely Walter: he was no more a friend to me than Jenö, really, who had disappeared decades ago in London. What should I care that Walter was dead? His life was no more than easy treacheries and lazy spite, and I’d washed my hands of him when I’d left Berlin for good.
I felt nothing; it was hardly a surprise.
Half of our group are gone now: Walter, from stroke; Kaspar, his plane shot down over Alexandria, and then there is Charlotte, dead in the beech forest, not five miles north of Weimar, where this story begins.
I think of Charlotte every day. Memories of her are all electricity. I can be sitting at a canvas, brush poised, ready to paint, when I am strung with a pain I do not know what to do with, even after all this time: nearly thirty years have passed since her death; forty, since we lived together in Berlin. Now she comes to me in dreams, over lunch, when I’m in the bath; I see her at the loom, strolling the Tiergarten in her men’s clothes, and finally, before the Bauhaus raid, saying she would not leave Germany.
I would rather Walter dead three times over than to have lost her, but there; that’s a dreamt-up notion. The truth is, I hold Walter accountable for her death. He could have asked Ernst Steiner to spring her from the camp; he could have talked to the right people. It was within his power. Perhaps it was even the last move in his stratagem: to let her die, in the clearing before the forest began again, where we had camped during so many summers, before we’d cycle down to the city, watching the blinking negative of the rushing forest take us back to Weimar, when all six of us were together in our first golden years at the Bauhaus.
My friends would all have different accounts of what happened to us, and I can’t deny my subjectivity. I know the story is lit now by later sorrow: my happiness glows stronger, and grief has perhaps given more depth to the harder times. Sometimes, I envy my younger self, at others, the past is a dereliction.
This is my account of what happened to us in the 1920s: a decade of resplendence and tragedy. But if I am to tell this story, then I can’t tell it slant. Now that Walter is dead, I will give an account of him; but I must also give an account of myself. This is my confession. A confession I haven’t yet made to anyone, and one I haven’t even really admitted to myself. For all those years I blamed Walter, there have been as many – more – when I have put aside my knowledge of what I did, and didn’t do, to save Charlotte.
A friend of mine once said that a secret is truly abject when it can never be voiced; its shame buys its silence. All this time, I have kept my silence, but here it is. There was a moment when Charlotte and I were living together in Berlin, when I, too, could have saved her. It was Walter who gave me the choice, and I looked at all the evidence, and then – methodically, carefully – I chose not to act. It was not a fleeting decision over the course of minutes or even hours. I came to my decision over two weeks.
If Walter killed her, then I killed Charlotte too.
WEIMAR, 1922
2
Weimar
Sparkling year! Our first year at the Bauhaus was one to envy. Back then, there were six of us: Walter and Jenö; Kaspar and Irmi; me and Charlotte. Right from the beginning, those were always the pairings. We were eighteen, and Jenö (a Hungarian diminutive of ‘Eugene’ he had won from a favourite uncle) was twenty when we began our preliminary studies, and it was at the Bauhaus that we learnt everything we were later to rely on: about colour and form, texture and materiality. It was here we learnt about an object’s very nature: the paper-essence of paper; the timbery-ness of wood; the strength of rope and string. But most importantly, perhaps, it was here that we learnt to fast, and where we learnt how our fasts might trick from our hungry selves a world of shimmer; havoc; pleasure.
From the first day of the new semester Charlotte was fascinating to me. I met her in the school canteen over lunch. September light tumbled the shadows of the trees onto the long tables and so her skin too was a canvas where the day leapt and swayed. I thought it was a trick of the day’s turbulence that made her gaze so impossible to read; it was reserved but also flamboyant.
I sat at one end of the table with Walter and Jenö: I’d met them in the Director’s introductory class, and immediately liked both of their unabashed desires to be my friend. Charlotte was at the other end with Irmi and Kaspar. Here we were: stalled in light; friendship on the brink of things.
Walter and Jenö were talking about where their siblings had been during the war. I didn’t really want to talk about my brother Peter – it was too painful and too complicated – and anyway Charlotte was distracting enough. Her bright blonde bob was cut severely along her jaw. Her blink was languorous and slow. She had lovely green eyes that made her look both serene and empty. More boy than woman, she was thin, her bones razorish at wrist and collar. She didn’t smile much.
When Walter and Jenö left to visit the city – Walter wanted to see Goethe’s house – I stayed at the table where Charlotte sat alone, finishing a green apple, which was all the more vividly coloured in proximity to her eyes.
‘You’re in Master Itten’s class,’ I said.
She blushed, but then said, ‘Aren’t we all?’
I asked if I could sit down; she gestured to the chair.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Charlotte,’ she said.
There was a trace of an accent to her German. ‘Where are you from, Charlotte?’
‘Prague. What’s yours?’ she asked. ‘Your name, I mean.’
‘Paul. Paul Beckermann.’
You can sometimes feel such an intensity of happiness that it threatens to shut you down. I wondered if my head was about to smack the table in sleep: if that was the only way
to endure this blonde girl’s teeth. There is a word in German: Herzenslust. Heart’s content. I had met mine. ‘I’m going for a walk. Do you want to come?’
She smiled. Such loveliness! As I walked with her, I thought: don’t tell her you love her. Not within minutes of meeting her.
We walked to the Ilm Park and Charlotte told me of home: she had already been to Charles University in Prague, an institution approved of by her mother. Here, they copied marble busts and made drawings of the musculature of life models – as if, Charlotte said, with throwaway disdain, they were surgeons preparing to cut people open. Her parents were furious when she had transferred to the Bauhaus. They wanted her to paint family portraits; better yet, find someone good to marry. ‘My father’s still not talking to me,’ she said, as we came to the river. ‘He’s quite angry. He thought he’d already secured my future. He’s bitter really; not just angry.’
Grave girl, walking alongside me in the parkland; perhaps I should have left just then: got shot of her, and gulped down the air while I was still, that day, Lotti-less.
‘But the Bauhaus!’ she said, a touch of panic in her voice. ‘And what on earth shall we do here!’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, because in a funny way the question hadn’t really occurred to me. All I knew was that ever since I’d seen Kirchner’s Bathers at Moritzburg, I wanted to be nowhere else but here.
‘I live over there.’ She pointed to a pink building. ‘Up in the rafters. Next to the library. You can just see the Rococo Hall.’
‘And the palace.’
‘And the palace. It smells of shit from the stables.’
We walked past Goethe’s garden house, pale blue, with its roof pitched in an inverted V, and further on some students worked at an allotment. They waved. Somehow they already knew we were part of them. Walter and Jenö came into view at the iron bridge and we followed the river back to them. The Ilm moved slowly; on its top were circling eddies, as if many things had been dropped in there. Up on the bridge Jenö smiled at us; maybe he was already working things out.
‘Do you think you could fish in this river?’ he said.
‘Probably.’
The tops of the trees were cut off in the water’s reflection. It was still warm and we bathed our feet in the shallows where the whips grew. Walter didn’t join us; he couldn’t swim, he said, as he watched the eddies with mistrust. We talked mostly of home; where we had come from, and the small lives we had escaped. None of us had known the war. We knew our good fortune, and in the ripening day our lives felt golden.
We tramped back to school for more introductory classes that afternoon, all of us eager to spot Masters Klee and Kandinsky, the stars of the department. Many of us had come because of them, but it turned out neither had much to do with first years, or, as we were known, the Bauhaus babies.
Instead, it was Master Itten, a Swiss painter, who took us for our first lesson. He was dressed in a ruby robe and had a shaved head; he wore round spectacles that in certain lights obscured his eyes. When my parents had come to visit the school they had nodded genially along with the Director, dressed in his architect’s collar and tie, because they knew this type of man. I wished they could now see Master Itten, who had the look of a monk in whose eyes burned a devout fire. Through the workshop window we could see the beech forest a few miles off: a shimmer of pleasant green.
Master Itten said little by way of introduction. He explained that there wasn’t enough money for chairs, and that we were to sit on the floor. He arranged us in groups, and then set up some books and a lemon in each group, and told us to make our first impressions of the still life. Then he left.
At school I had always been adept at verisimilitude, and I was so engrossed in the task that I hadn’t realised how much time had gone when Master Itten returned. I showed my sketchbook to Charlotte and she nodded, though she was coy about showing me hers. Itten took a look at everyone’s sketches, and he moved so quietly that I wondered whether he was even wearing shoes. Everyone was tense. My books were straight, the lemons plump; but we were at the Bauhaus, we couldn’t have got it right.
‘No,’ he finally said, confirming all our suspicions. He took one of the lemons to the front and opened the fruit with a penknife so that the scent reached us immediately. When he bit into it the room cringed. ‘How can you draw a lemon without first tasting its flesh? Your whole body is involved in drawing. Your mouth, your gut, your lungs. If you think it’s only about the hand and the eyes and the brain, you’re dead, and the picture’s dead too. A lemon is not just a lemon: it is its acidity, its astringency, its pith, its seed chambers and pyramid interior. It’s not yellow skin wrapped around air, or pencil strokes on paper. The lemon is an odalisque. You must seduce it. You must be seduced by it.’
He threw the fruit and Walter caught it.
Itten began to pace, working up his theme. ‘The sketch is not preparatory work. The sketch is the end. Vasari knew this: what we do when we sketch is an act of furor; a passion. Only when Leonardo had paper, not papyrus, was he able to not just sketch, but freely invent. Renaissance thinkers asked the artist to seek balance between decorum and licenza. The sketch is all licence, because the sketch allows for all possibilities: that the lemon is a breast, a mouth, a tumour, or that the lemon’ – he opened out his hands, palm up – ‘that the lemon is not even really there. Begin again. But with licenza,’ he said, smacking his hand against the table: ‘Licenza! Licenza! Licenza!’
The Master watched as we began feeling up the lemon: smelling it, peeling it, tasting it. Later, he put his hands on Charlotte’s shoulders. ‘You still have sleep in your neck,’ he said. ‘You must release it.’
It was dark by the time we arrived for our welcome party. Since lunchtime the cafeteria’s windows had been covered with old newsprint. Townspeople tried to see what was going on inside but there wasn’t much light from the edges. As Walter and I drew closer, we heard strange music inside. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is it,’ though I had no idea what ‘it’ might mean. I remembered Charlotte’s tremulous voice when she had said ‘And what on earth shall we do here!’ and I wondered if this evening might provide her with an answer.
To get into the cafeteria we had to crawl through a tunnel made from a beer barrel. Inside, the other students had painted motifs on the wallpaper: red squares, blue circles, and yellow triangles; I already knew these as the colours and shapes of the Bauhaus. Scraps of cloth and threads hung from the ceiling. A trumpeter was playing some tuneless beeps and bops.
We were a few drinks in when Master Itten reappeared. Now he was dressed in what looked like mayoral robes, with a Napoleonic hat and turned-up Turkish shoes. He tapped his glass, and the shuffling of others moved Charlotte over to me.
‘The graduates of this year have dressed me in these ridiculous vestments.’ There was laughter from the crowd, who were mostly dressed in black slacks and shirts, for the men and women both. ‘But there is a point. This morning the Director talked to you about the practicalities of your first year. You will learn about texture, light, colour, temperature, and form. This applies to all things, not just paint and charcoal but wire, stone, paper. From here on in you will only draw and paint when you understand the material. Production is the apex, but we will take a long time to get there.
‘Now the reason I am standing here, like this’ – there was a whooping from one side of the room, and some uncomfortable shifting from the suited Director – ‘and the reason you had to enter crawling, like toddlers, is that you – we – are here to play. There are those outside this room who cannot stand the notion of adults playing, but this is the operative approach. Play. Risk. Experimentation. Draughtsmanship. Study. Observation. Licenza. Putting your tongue in the lemon; call it what you will. Every day I want you to spend a part of it doing nothing but daydreaming. To many people that is a maddening thought. Do it. It is a radical act to do nothing.
‘What we will do here – and I urge you to learn this early on – is disposable
. Indeed, in many of my classes, I will urge you to jettison what you have made. Our animating principle is not originality, it is methodology. Thinking is making; and making is thinking. If you abide by this principle, you cannot fail to enjoy yourself. Creativity is, in its babiest incarnation, freely associative, lawless, and chaotic. That is all. My voice sounds like a drum at the best of times. May God save the Bauhaus babies!’
A cheer in the room, and the sentiment was echoed all round, even by the Director, who looked more like an accountant than an architect. Then a student called for all the preliminary students to line up.
‘Brilliant, wasn’t he?’ Charlotte said beside me.
‘Yes,’ I said, though I knew I hadn’t really understood his point, ‘quite brilliant.’
We queued and crawled outside. Then we marched in single file toward the Frauenplan, where there was a fountain piping water from a creature – half fish, half man – and cafes lining the perimeter. Each new student was then brought forward, turned around, and had to fall backward into the outstretched arms of two others. With a squeak from the trumpet, another student would then baptise them as a Bauhaus baby with the fountain’s ‘holy water’. The townspeople watched us as if we were deranged, and the waiters stamped toward us, as they would have to scatter stray dogs.
The organisers took no notice. The Director had long ago disappeared, but then so had Master Itten.
I felt Charlotte shifting as we watched the baptisms of our new friends: Jenö and Walter, then Irmi and Kaspar. When it was nearly her turn she seemed unexpectedly tense, and I watched as she walked to the fountain with some misgiving. Indeed, when she fell her arms shot upward, and she stumbled and stayed upright. In that moment she seemed terribly exposed and I knew the other students noticed too. Then she had to fall again. The priest-student anointed her forehead, the trumpeter played a toot, and Charlotte went back to standing. When she was done she walked toward one of the waiters who had stopped at the edge of his cafe, and she got so close to him that eventually, at the last moment, he was forced to step away.
