by Naomi Wood
We went to the woods after class. Though it may be a cliché, the sensation, of wheeling our bikes through the city streets and then up to the woods, was of flight. Vistas opened out between the rows of beech just as I’d seen in photographs of Manhattan: roads narrowing from the foreground between skyscrapers. And for a while I could pretend I was a New York taxicab, wheeling my way through the grid, and that the woodland was a cityscape filled with smells of the subway: ventilated air, and frying onion.
It wouldn’t be much of a detour, I thought, to turn my bike westward and enquire about the possibility of a shift or two.
On the cycle I caught Walter grinning at me, and Charlotte too. Jenö was already ahead. I loved my friends in that moment, their faces caught in the flickering wood, stained by the shadows, hair lit by sunshine. There were stories of pilgrims going into the woods for spring rites that ended in romping bacchanalia, emotions far outrunning reason. There were six of us in our saintish tribe. A man might hope, of course.
In the beech forest the density of the wood was like a bonfire. All the trees were so tall; cherry, green, and rust, their bark so sensitive you could carve your name with just a coin. In the autumn the forest would be aflame with colour, and in the evenings, with a good sunset, the beech could turn violet or blue or pink. In the winter the wind made the branches moan; but in the summer, with the leaves, there was an electrical sound, as if the woods had charge.
It was a gift. These woods, that place, back then.
When the road split I told them I’d catch them up. Charlotte narrowed her eyes but said nothing.
Steiner’s studio was at the edge of the beech forest: not quite town, not quite forest. As I wheeled my bicycle on the gravel path I was surprised to find Mr Steiner on the front porch of the large cabin, cleaning something with an old rag. Again, he wore the foreman’s coat. He took a moment to recognise me, but when he did, his look was one of pleasure. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it’s you!’
It struck me again how blunt his head was, and how hairless he was, like a baby. ‘I came about the job.’ I felt awkward. I wondered if he wanted to see my sketchpad; I’d made studies of yolky sunsets and fattened sheep. Surely he wouldn’t just let me loose without first seeing my work.
‘I thought your girlfriend had persuaded you not to come.’
‘No. I’d be glad of the money.’ I stumbled. I didn’t want to seem too mercenary. ‘And I’d like to paint.’
Mr Steiner tossed the rag and beckoned me over. The door was unlocked, and we walked up a flight. In the main studio there were men in overalls working on several different canvases: flashy oil paintings which, Mr Steiner explained, sold by the square foot to American collectors and Prussian Junkers. Sawdust was everywhere, gumming the light coming in at the windows. As we walked to his office, a couple of men – there were no women – were busy at a particularly lurid scene: slabs of childish light, crazy dappling; women baptising fat babies in the river’s golden waters.
‘Good, aren’t they?’ Mr Steiner said with a broad grin.
I didn’t know what to say. It was all broadly awful, but it did have a kitsch appeal. Inside his office there were no signs of any real art either: only files and accountancy ledgers. We might as well have been in my father’s shoe factory.
Mr Steiner opened a big notebook: inside was a sketch of a watering hole with a host of robed women getting ready to bathe. It was as tacky as anything in my parents’ house.
‘Can you come tomorrow? The courier’s coming then.’
‘But it’s not much more than a sketch!’
‘Three men overnight, then you can finish it off tomorrow. It’ll be done in no time.’
I told him I could come when he wanted, though I doubted his grounds for optimism.
‘What’s your specialism?’ he said, his eyes passing my mouth.
I wasn’t sure what to say but then opted for something a teacher had told me. ‘I’m good at light.’
‘There we are. Remind me of your last name? In fact, I’m not sure I know your Christian name, either.’
‘Paul Beckermann.’
In a long, loose hand, he wrote my name across what I already knew would be the golden sky at break of day. ‘Then all of this,’ he said, expansively, ‘is yours.’
It didn’t take long to cycle from there to the clearing. Up here I could see for miles the velvet fields of Thuringia, and the city of Weimar was laid out at my feet; the Bauhaus the last building before the city turned back to green.
It was always cooler in the forest than in town, but the trees were filling out and the whips growing. Finally I found my friends around a fire. Walter was picking leaves out of Jenö’s soles, and Charlotte was talking to Irmi, who had just moved into rooms opposite hers in the Fürstenplatz square.
The steep cycle had made me feel rather high. The trees were blurred, but the separated flames of the fire were crisp. I steadied my gaze on the fire but saw inside it a swarm of crows, billowing out, and then being sucked in. I could smell my own scent, and it was sharp and animal.
‘Where’s Kaspar?’ I asked.
‘He tailed back,’ said Walter, patting his stomach. ‘Poor Kas couldn’t make the climb. Where’d you go?’
‘I had an errand to run.’
Three tents had already been pitched around the fire. I wondered with whom I was going to bunk. Probably Walter; Jenö in a tent by himself; the two women, together.
‘Very mysterious,’ said Irmi.
‘Not really,’ said Charlotte, unable to help herself.
I took out Mr Steiner’s card and threw it in the fire. Charlotte smiled, but we both knew the gesture meant nothing.
‘Did you enjoy the river glades?’ asked Walter, and the rest of the group laughed.
So everyone had already been well informed. ‘All right, all right. You all already know I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Romantic.’
‘Charlotte says you might be overcome by the “imitation impulse”.’
‘It sounds contagious,’ said Jenö. ‘Like the flu.’
‘It’s just oil paints, and tons of money. You’ll be envious when I start driving my own automobile about town.’
‘I don’t think it’s a bad thing,’ said Irmi. ‘Why not? Especially doing something as easy as painting.’
‘He’ll be able to paint our portraits soon,’ said Charlotte. ‘I can just imagine it. Set up like a Caspar Friedrich in an ancient castle.’
‘First one to be nice to me gets the first gift.’
‘Which is?’ said Jenö.
‘I’ll be nice to you,’ said Irmi.
‘Then you, Irmi, shall have the best of what Steiner will pay for. Champagne. Italian truffles. New dresses and shoes.’
Irmi laughed. As we talked she scooted closer. Twisted around one side her hair was pulled into a complicated plait. Irmi had a wide smile with small teeth, slightly dirty on their edges. Her grey eyes showed all the weather, their changeability nothing like Charlotte’s flat stare. ‘Granite and crystal,’ Walter had once uncharitably described them together; though I’d never learnt which one he’d thought which.
As the dark came, Jenö told a ghost story. It was a child’s tale, and hardly frightening at all, about a kid who lived on his own in the forest, and who let in any man who knocked and called him son, even the man with the axe in his bag. I watched Charlotte as he told it: her face blank as she listened. I imagined her concentrating like this, at the State Opera in Prague, or studying the life models at Charles University. Had anyone else ever loved her as I loved her? Surely that was an impossibility.
‘Did you know,’ Walter said, taking over from where Jenö had left off, ‘that Charlotte von Stein haunts these woods?’
‘Nonsense,’ said Irmi.
‘It’s true,’ Walter said, ‘she and Goethe used to walk this forest. She was married, but her husband was so often away that she saw as much of Goethe as she liked. They met in the Ilm Park. He fell in love with her on the spot.’
‘Charlotte used to read his poetry, and offer him suggestions. He prized her as the best editor he’d ever had. They were great friends. Lovers, maybe. She certainly loved him far more than she loved her husband. None of her four daughters had survived, and she said walking these woods with him was a balm. Goethe couldn’t have been a more sincere, more faithful friend, and he said she was his soul. To read their letters . . . Well, they are so full of affection that you can’t help but feel the force of it.’
Walter cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief, squinting before putting them back on. He caught my eye, and smiled, but went on in a solemn tone: ‘Then, one day, Goethe simply left. He didn’t tell Charlotte where he was going. He wrote to her from Venice. He said he’d be gone a year or two. Charlotte was bereft. How could he have left her here? Without even saying goodbye? His heartlessness was incomprehensible; unthinkable. All that time she roamed these woods, waiting for him to return. That year she wrote an opera about Dido, who cursed Aeneas for leaving her in Carthage, and vowed revenge.
‘Goethe thought of his Italian journey as the happiest of his life, in the land where the lemon trees blossom. And yet Charlotte was here, miserable among the beech trees, while he was in Italy, sighing about lemons. When he returned they became friends again, but it was nothing like how it had been. How can a man be so sensitive to the human condition, and yet be so cruel as to leave her behind, without even saying goodbye?’
Our group was quiet, not used to Walter’s mood, which was usually sardonic and powerful. But then he flipped the solemnity to something else. ‘If you listen carefully to the trees, it sounds just like a woman’s voice – Charlotte’s, some might say – moaning, von Goethe, von Goethe, von Goethe!’
And at this he pulled himself up to a tree in a passionate embrace, and started rubbing his crotch against it.
Jenö shook his head. ‘You’re mad!’
‘Sounds like an oil painting for you, Paul,’ said Charlotte. ‘Dido and Aeneas. Or Goethe and Charlotte, under his Oak.’
I ignored her. Walter, anyway, wasn’t happy that the attention had been diverted. ‘“Beware,” Charlotte continues to moan, even to this day,’ – and his voice was high-pitched and witchy, as he humped the tree, ‘“Beware ye men of fickle hearts! The woods will have their revenge!”’
He unclasped himself and lay on the forest floor, showering mulch on his face in a strange kind of burial. Was it my tiredness that pricked the thought I could see his excitement tenting his trousers? Or it could have been nothing; in memory I seem to catch them all in the erotic net of a dream – and Walter, surely, wouldn’t have been titillated by a beech tree.
In any case he scrambled to his feet when we heard the distant spray of gunfire. Clubs often used the woods for target practice and we heard the pop, pop, pop of a rifle. The fire lit Walter demonically. ‘You see! Blood comes to the woods again!’
Charlotte threw a conker at him. ‘Oh, do shut up, Walter.’
And the rest of us laughed.
6
Weimar
Ernst Steiner was right. After the oasis scene (women bathing their breasts in the aquamarine waters) what followed on my first shift at the studio was a scene of rural German life. Meadows; mountains; sheep; peasants; et cetera. Swans flew with heavy throats and alarming wingspans. Children frolicked in the river’s spray. It was for a rich lady in Zurich with big tits, Ernst said, and she’d be paying in Swiss francs. Valuta: hard currency.
The paintings were all hectic and overlit, and, I must say, I loved the work almost immediately. ‘Good job,’ Ernst said to me at four in the morning, once I’d lit the kindergarten of kids. ‘They don’t look like they do anything but eat.’ I didn’t have the opportunity to worry before it was taken away; in truth I didn’t even know whether the paint was dry.
As I worked more shifts – I ended up doing one or two a week – I soon realised the turnover at the Steiner Studio was exceptional. There were new commissions every few days, and Ernst had a group of workers (they were never called artists) operating day and night so that the paintings could be wrapped and boxed for the courier at four in the morning. The courier often appeared in the middle of the night, and no one knew how long he’d been there, nor why Mr Steiner’s paintings had to be shipped at the crack of dawn. His name was Leo, and his face was as smooth as a boxing glove.
I have no idea when Ernst Steiner slept, since he was the one constant in the studio between the day and night shifts. He organised everything from his office, barking instructions to the floor, with the telephone rattling the new orders. The mark was inflating like crazy, but there were always more and more Americans who wanted idylls and riverbanks, farmyards and sunsets; girls with their unending plaits and nursing mothers, all bosoms.
The exchange rate, anyway, made our work cheap.
Surprisingly, the other workers took little notice of me, and, give or take a few stares, I had been accepted into the fold as any other worker would be. Soon they became comfortable enough to gently deride my practice at the Bauhaus. In fact, they thought us spectacularly stupid: I had been laughed away when I told them how we privileged process over output. ‘That,’ said a big man called Daniel, ‘is what people say when they have no talent.’
The money began to flow in. Mr Steiner paid me at the close of each shift by filling my bicycle basket with cash. I wrote to my father and told him I could afford my fees on my own: a part-time job had come up, and I was determined to pay my way at the art school he so hated. He neither replied nor sent me more money. I’m sure he thought I’d soon be back, begging for more, and it did cross my mind that I shouldn’t be too hasty in rejecting his money outright. But the letter was sent by the time I’d thought of this.
It was nice to have my talent appreciated again. Ernst Steiner thought I was brilliant, and it gave me a glow to think of how highly he held me in his esteem. He said, as my teacher had said, that I had a gift for light. This was about as far from Master Itten’s praise as was possible. If I had painted the sky when asked to paint the sky, well, he would have laughed in my face. But here in the woods there was no singularity, no instress. Here was only blowzy representation, and I was surprised, and a little ashamed, by how much I loved not just the old-fashioned paintings we made, but how it made me feel. Master Itten didn’t favour me, but that didn’t matter. I had a different master now.
Besides, the Master so obviously favoured Charlotte it was useless to court his attention. Perhaps it was because they were both foreigners, and they had their outsiders’ affinity. He always spent longer with her in class than the rest of us, and sometimes they had private meetings where he’d advise her on what she ate, how much she slept, and how she held her body in space.
It was from one of these meetings that Charlotte emerged one morning preoccupied but also excited. As we went down the school staircase, painted with bright Constructivist murals, she said the Master had proposed a fast. He said being full of rich food only dulled the senses, and a fast would sharpen our perception of colour. The forms of things would emerge. Hunger would open a Jerusalem in our hearts. And besides, he’d said, a fast might do our souls some good.
I watched as Charlotte went into the cafeteria: bent, I knew, on persuading everyone else to follow her plans. As I picked up my meal (vegetarian; heavily infused with garlic) I remembered seeing her at the bandsaw earlier that morning. How rapt she had been by the hot seam between the blade and metal. Maybe this is what she imagined was inside her: a clarified eye; a burning stitch.
‘I don’t know,’ said Irmi, who had listened attentively to the same speech about hunger and Jerusalems. ‘It sounds dreadful.’
‘We’ll get to a new transparency. Master Itten says only then will we know ourselves, and the true form of our desires will emerge. After the fast we’ll be better artists.’ Charlotte tailed off, slightly losing her mettle. ‘Th
at’s what he said, anyway.’
‘All this with lemon water and bread?’ said Kaspar. ‘How about absinthe? That’d get us to transparency quicker.’ Kaspar loved Charlotte, but he was also doubtful of some parts of Bauhaus life. He didn’t buy into the festivals, didn’t join in with Itten’s vegetarianism, and often smirked during the kinaesthetics.
‘He said it was the most important thing he’d done as an artist.’
‘Good for him. Doesn’t mean I want to do it.’
‘What’s infuriating about you,’ she said to Kaspar, with a poke, ‘is your laziness. I wish you’d try something new.’
‘Master Itten’s mad!’
‘Master Itten’s world famous!’
‘I think we should do it,’ said Jenö, out of the blue.
Charlotte looked at him, surprised, as did Irmi. I don’t think Charlotte saw Jenö as an ally as much as me, and I hadn’t yet raised a word of support. Actually I thought her plan was a terrible idea, and embarrassing, given people were going hungry across Germany.
‘Why?’ said Walter. ‘Do you need your desires clarifying?’
‘I suppose it wouldn’t hurt.’
Now that Jenö had consented, Walter would have to as well. ‘Well, why not? I suppose it might get us somewhere. Certainly, I’ve got to find some way of livening up my output. Who knows? A fortnight fasting might help.’
Like me, Walter was struggling in Itten’s workshops; I think we both found it hard to relinquish the rules learnt at school. And, like me, his devotions were channelled elsewhere.
‘Paul?’ Charlotte said, looking at me with her frank eyes.
I was the last one to speak, and I didn’t want to be a voice of dissent. Charlotte was excited about her plan, and I was sure I could play along, if only for the sake of her pride. ‘Sure,’ I said, wondering how to play up my enthusiasm. ‘Let’s start tonight.’
