by Naomi Wood
3
Weimar
Weimar froze that winter. Iced over, the city enchanted. When it was dark, you could roam around the cobbled streets looking in at the ancient rooms lit orange, and it was easy to dream up secrets and potions, witches and hobgoblins. The mullioned windows split the warm light like a wedding diamond. The frost made everything glimmer.
Weimar will always be a burnished city to me. North of the Bauhaus, south of the beech forest, it was the prettiest place I’d ever seen. There was hardly a plain building around; hardly a residence which hadn’t housed a poet or philosopher. Women, angels and lions adorned the houses so that Weimar (especially when the Christmas lights illuminated the upper tiers) always had an extra set of eyes upon us.
Though its people did not like us, were suspicious of us, sometimes even hated us, I loved the city: the classical houses enamelled in pinks, lemons, limes; the smell of the chestnuts cooking on the coals; the Ginkgo which stank in summer; the greening statues of Goethe and Schiller by the theatre where the republic’s constitution had been signed three years before. (Though even in rich Weimar there were men hunched in thin coats, pockets stuffed with meaningless money; soup kitchens, dole queues, begging women, children scavenging. It was just hard to see; I was so spellbound by all the other beauty.)
I don’t know how the Bauhaus had ended up here; it didn’t really make sense that it would choose as its home such a conservative place. Still, we were far enough from its centre to be mostly ignorable. The school was in a yellow Jugendstil building with neither a ribbon nor cherub about it. Mostly the Bauhaus was made up of gridded windows just above eye level, so that you could only see the top of everyone’s head, and you had to divine who it was from their haircut alone.
That winter, we were all Master Itten’s. We had nothing to do with any other staff: we were his to be confected. Our lessons took place in the big ateliers, and it was where we investigated the nature of our materials. The Master was always challenging us to see more intensively: he was obsessed with the purification of vision. ‘The world is only replica until it is truly seen,’ he’d say, as he padded around the workshop barefoot. ‘Pain will only make you see more beauty.’
I was still waiting to understand what this meant; Charlotte and the others had a quicker grasp of all this. At home in Dresden I had been lauded by all my teachers for my painterly skill, and it was confusing not to be picked out as especially talented. But that, I suppose, was why I had come. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.
As a teacher, Itten’s composure was occasionally interrupted by strong emotions. One time, for example, we were asked to paint our impression of the Somme. Max, who had been there, drew exhausted men with bayonets. But Willem, who had been nowhere near France, punctured his paper with his pencil six times. The Master had preferred Willem’s, and hadn’t even really looked at poor Max’s figurative display.
Lessons from the lemon continued. We tasted glass with our tongues; arranged textures of leather, furs and cans; scratched each other with steel wool; smelt the difference between lumber shavings and polished driftwood. Only in the last part of the day would we get to drawing. And when we did, we drew standing up, holding our breath, to music, after meditation, with the left hand, with the right, and, our breath puffing in the freezing school, after gymnastics. Just to see what might come out of it.
In the new semester I felt a constant pleasure of preoccupation. How should I please Charlotte? How could I make her smile? How could I help her in her work? And then too I had to be attentive to my own presentation: how could I please her without being servile? I didn’t want her yet to know the intensity of my feelings: it might put her off, and there were promising signs that she might think of me as more than a friend. Wrapping a twist of hair behind my ear; leaving notes in my lunchbox scrawled with doodles – sketches of naked women, messages with all the Ps written in red; a possible portrait of a man with kiss curls, which could have been no one else but me. Goodness, the smallest gesture made me happy for weeks.
Our actions around one another were gentle arcs of flirtation: our kisses closing in on the other’s lips, hands knocking each other’s in the park; it was always, really, a slow chase to the other’s skin. When together, it was all loveliness; when apart, the situation was an emergency. It felt as if I were about to flood.
It sounds small, but one morning before Christmas she put my shoes on for me, and it was probably the most erotic moment of my young life. Down on her knees, she lifted each of my feet and stowed them into my brogues. She looked up at me, her green eyes flashing – what was it? Knowledge of what we were? Of what we would become? – and then tied the laces in bows. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Much better.’ In class that day she kept on looking over; she too must have known of the morning’s grace. I’d smile; she’d half-smile back.
All day the shoes bit. I did nothing to adjust them.
Like this the days passed.
Over the winter I’d had every kind of fantasy about how we’d end up together. We’d go to the forest and roll in the mulch; at the Ilm she’d kiss me and we’d roll in the blond grass; we’d be reading in my room, then we’d roll by the open fire. Always, this rolling. This was all I could conjure, since I knew her boyish body would not be like other women’s, which made her nakedness more improbable and exciting. Also: I was a virgin. I wasn’t even sure what would happen next.
Discreetly I studied her. I began to predict her expressions, when we were in class, or at the cafeteria – where we always ate, our laughter high in the room, feeling bigger than everyone else. (It was well known that our six could not be separated. I don’t think we were resented for being such a tight-knit group, but I do think we were envied. People joined us sometimes for lunch or breakfast, but they didn’t come back. Perhaps we were more forbidding than we knew.)
The best was when Charlotte was studying an object very seriously, one of the materials the Master had given us, say, then would catch me looking, and her smile would turn enormous as she blinked the fringe from her eyes. ‘Oh, Pauli,’ she’d say. ‘I didn’t know you were there.’ Or the opposite: when someone – Walter, probably – had said something off (he was always able to put his foot in it with her) and she’d scowl, her lips almost disappearing.
When she dozed on my bed in the wintry, high attic light, I kept on wondering if our daughter would look like her, and then I couldn’t help adding more children to our growing family – mutti a sculptor, papa a painter; all of us hungry, poor and very happy.
To be in love is to be stricken; distraught, most of the time, but when things are going well there is the gentle rising of the soul to the top of the room. Ours was a slow game. All the best love affairs are. In the new semester, several students referred to her as my girlfriend. I could have purred.
I think Walter fell in love with Jenö about as quickly as I fell for Charlotte. But Walter was a different man to me. At some point, I don’t know when, or even whether it was conscious, I thought I’d woo Charlotte with nuance. This was the approach she took with me, and so I mirrored it. Whereas Walter! You couldn’t have found a more different man: Walter was all show. When Jenö wasn’t paying him enough attention, he would sulk and make his displeasure known, so that Irmi (with her rolling rs) would say, ‘Oh, do stop frrrrowning, Walter!’ But when Jenö was fully attentive, it was as if a thousand lamps had lit the room. And yet Jenö most often looked lost as to how he’d found himself the beloved of this tall Westphalian. I didn’t even know whether Jenö liked men or women (but how much I wanted to show my parents the audacity of a queer love affair at the Bauhaus! How much that would tremble their Dresden foundations!).
I suppose Walter couldn’t be called classically attractive, but there was something about him. He had a baronial look: you could see him in one of those oil paintings of hounds and Prussian huntsmen, mouths crisped with wealth and displeasure. Indeed, he was some sort of aristocrat – though an impoverished one – and could trace
his lineage to Frederick the Great. He had round spectacles, his nostrils kicked, and his lips were plump. His hair was wondrously thick; his skin olive, like an Italian’s. In his face there was a handed-down imperialism; he looked at the world in judgement of it, as if on a horse. You could see in his face both the poverty of his childhood and the grandeur of his bloodline. I enjoyed his company enormously, and if I wasn’t with Charlotte, then I would inevitably, that winter, be with Walter.
I always did find him alluring, and especially next to Jenö, who, I must admit, was as bland as a bean. Jenö was all breadth. There wasn’t a slender part of him, which made it even more surprising that he fashioned kites thin as moth wings, or made delicate sculptures from rubbish; pan lids, washers, a child’s shoe. He had a symmetrical face, which gave him a peaceful if bovine aspect. I found a dullness to his gaze that others thought mysterious. I said he was bland, but that’s envy talking. Jenö’s mind, I admit, was a labyrinth.
No, I’d never seen Jenö’s allure, though lots of the Bauhaus Frauen liked him very much, but then again lots of Bauhaus Frauen liked me very much; a fact which had me baffled. This had never happened to me as a young man. Now I was in the unusual position of having to break off coffee dates when it became evident that our meetings were romantic. Irmi teased me, saying I was the Bauhaus heart-breaker (Herrrrrrzensbrrrrecher), but then said this wasn’t such a bad reputation to have.
Charlotte and me; Walter and Jenö; Irmi and Kaspar. Only between Kaspar and Irmi could I detect nothing but friendship; though even a friendship in the Bauhaus was made of kisses and caresses. But utopias are frisky places. All of us loved all of us. Had you given me any one of them, man, woman, Czechoslovak, German, blonde or brunette, I would have been a happy sultan. I frequently had to rub myself against the bedroom furniture; a chair or the bedstead, anything to find a place for the erotic clouds that so often streaked against the sky of my soul.
Goodness, I was happy.
4
Weimar
She was a master craftsman, my Charlotte, an almost perfect Bauhäusler. She could make skyscrapers from paper, concertina the floors, dramatise their depths. She could work any scavenged material: wiring hairnets and pipes into extravagant sculptures. More often than not she tossed them away. Sometimes I’d retrieve them from the rubbish and hang them in my room. She’d always give them a wry look, when she saw them later, hanging above my bed like a witchy totem.
But it was in anything Charlotte produced from the loom that I thought I could detect frustration (it was a relief, to know she wasn’t perfect). Charlotte’s weaves appeared made not from wool but horsehair and twine. Wool lists from warm fingers; is split by warm hands. In her weaves there were knots and humps; shocked fibres and knolls. ‘Women’s work,’ she had said, tossing aside the weave, ‘nothing ever came of stitches in fabric.’ It was obviously unreasonable that she’d be so bad at something.
Jenö was a wonderful sculptor; Kaspar and Walter made fine things in the Metal Workshop, and Irmi, like Charlotte, was good at almost everything. It was frustrating that I couldn’t paint at the Bauhaus, since this was my talent, but it was deemed old-fashioned and uninteresting, and in any case something that had to be earned rather than done.
Charlotte told me it didn’t matter, after a workshop when she was so productive that even Master Itten had had to tell her to slow down (though he’d looked at her multiplying sculptures with quiet astonishment). The big paper edifices were cathedrals, the miniatures were lanterns with internal chambers and windows. I marvelled at her work; I put mine in the fire.
After school that day we went to the Swan. ‘You’ve got the skill that’ll sell,’ Charlotte said, as we sat at the bar. She had paper-cuts on her fingers. ‘No one actually needs stonemasons and quilters. Painting won’t go out of fashion.’
‘Don’t I need to make an impression now?’
‘We all want to be further on than we are.’
There were always a few locals in the Swan, but the students and the citizens manoeuvred around each other tolerably enough. The bar-hall was a dark cave: its tables were engraved with students’ initials, the light was dusty from the sinking upholstery, and it always smelled of malt and fruit. It was one of our favourite places.
‘But how am I going to show my worth if I’m never allowed to paint? You’re fine. Look at you today! I came up with one lantern and you made Manhattan.’
‘Maybe the Master doesn’t care about being impressed. Have you thought about that? Maybe that’s not his priority.’
‘He was impressed with Willem.’
‘Puncturing holes in the paper? That was just a stunt.’ Charlotte turned her glass round in circles then drank her beer. The thing about Charlotte was that she could match you pint for pint. It was always fun to drink with her. ‘You want everything to be beautiful. It means you can’t fail.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ve heard that before.’
‘Doesn’t mean you actually listen,’ she said, tugging at one of my earlobes. ‘How is it,’ she said, trying to read my gaze, ‘you’re eighteen and yet such a tired old dog?’
Outside the trees were thrashing about in the February wind that whistled against the door. A flag of newspaper flew against the mullioned window, then flew off again. Weeks ago, the fountain had iced over, and the wishing coins had been frozen in disorder.
‘Can I blame the war?’
‘You certainly cannot,’ she said.
‘Excuse me.’ The man’s voice made me turn. ‘Sorry. I don’t want to interrupt.’ Sitting behind me at the bar was a bald man, quite fat. The fingers around his glass were so blunt they looked sawn off at the knuckle. He wore a long jacket which came over the seat of his chair, just like the one my father wore at work.
‘Yes?’
When he stood his height came as something of a surprise; his frame made me think he’d be a squat man. ‘I’m interested in your dilemma. Though I didn’t mean to overhear. I run a studio of painters. Up at the beech forest, in an old cabinet studio.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
‘We make big oil paintings on commission. Rural landscapes. Allegorical scenes, and mythological, too. The theme is chosen by the client, then we put them together. Meadows, farmhouses, sheep, girls, that kind of thing.’
‘Ah yes. Blut und Boden, and all that?’ said Charlotte.
‘No,’ he said, and he gave her a look that said he did not need to solicit the opinion of women. ‘It’s whatever the client wants. The sacking of Troy, for example, but also the Prussian plains at sunset.’ He gave me his card. ‘You said there’s no chance to paint at the Bauhaus. Well, if you want to paint, and want to be paid to paint, come to the studio. You’d be welcome.’ The man assessed me from head to toe, as if sizing me up for a uniform. ‘I pay a good wage to a decent painter.’
‘What’s a good wage?’
‘Thousands. Tens of thousands. Whatever the day decides to do with money, I keep up. You could try a night shift; fit it in around school.’
The address on the card showed his studio was in the part of the beech forest nearest the city, on the road west.
‘Try it out? If you’re interested, that is.’ He touched his forehead, as if a cap were there, then he drifted over to a table where other men sat in navy overalls.
‘Don’t,’ said Charlotte, as soon as he had gone. There was warning in her voice. ‘It will only be a distraction.’
‘Tens of thousands, though. Can you imagine?’
‘The sacking of Troy, sunset on the Prussian plains? It would undo everything the Master teaches us at the Bauhaus.’
‘It’d be a weekend job.’
‘Are you desperate for the money?’
‘I would like not to rely on my parents.’
Charlotte twisted her hand into my skull, as if she were trying to screw something into my brain. ‘All this begging for clarity, then you go and paint Völkisch oils!’
&nbs
p; She tutted at me; I grinned.
‘It’s a bad idea,’ she said, ‘and you know it.’
While Charlotte bought another round, I knew the man’s eyes were on me. I wondered if he was waiting for me to tell him I’d do it. When I finally looked back, I wasn’t surprised that I found him staring straight at me. How doglike he looked, with his bald head and big eyes. There was a tattoo of an anchor on his neck. Maybe he’d been away at sea during the war: I could imagine him as a sailor, or a captain of a big ship. I turned the card over. On its reverse was his name written in a heavy Gothic script. His name was Ernst Steiner.
5
Weimar
For a while I forgot about Mr Steiner’s invitation. My father had paid March’s fees upfront, and the pressing need for money had gone. A few weeks later, though, as I was sorting through old papers and collapsed lanterns at my desk, Ernst Steiner’s card turned up again. I held it for some moments: wondering what it meant, and thinking back to what Charlotte had said about Völkisch oils. The card was cream, heavy, expensive; and the lettering, though old-fashioned, was embossed. His clientele must be wealthy indeed.
I hadn’t much liked the man on first meeting, but I also knew that his money might prove helpful in the long run. If there was a way I could avoid asking my parents for my fees then I had to take it.
If I’m being honest, though, there was also a part of me which craved something else as well as the cash. Wouldn’t it be lovely, I thought, to hear someone marvel at my talent, my specialness? (How schoolboyish; this desire to have a man like Ernst Steiner tell me I was good enough!)
The woods were starting to green when we went on our camping trip that first warm day of March. Our six had a favoured spot in the forest: a clearing where the trees were held back. At night it had a spooky feel, but in the days it was our small kingdom: not far from Goethe’s Oak, a tree with a crown so big that in the summers it could shade the whole student body of the Bauhaus.
