by Naomi Wood
‘Good. Irmi, you’re in too?’
Irmi nodded.
‘Black bread and lemon water for breakfast and dinner,’ she said. ‘Nothing else.’
Kaspar pouted.
‘Agreed?’
He gave a shrug.
‘Bon appétit,’ she said, with a spoonful of stew; ‘this might be our last meal for some time.’
Days later we were in Irmi’s rooms. We were sitting in a circle doing one of the Master’s breathing exercises. We had to take a breath in for ten seconds, then a breath out for five. I felt light-headed. Long ago the air had begun to shimmer.
In the first few days of the fast my limbs had begun to ache. My skin had dulled; the whites of my eyes were grey; my tongue, spongy. Though I had had nothing much to eat there was always the whiff of the eating-house about me. I’d thought of abandoning the fast several times so far: it didn’t feel right, and I was exhausted.
But Charlotte was so full of energy, and so obviously excited, that I stuck with it. Maybe she’d be proved right: I really might start seeing things anew – although I hardly needed to clarify my desires. And besides, Master Itten kept on giving us approving looks, which were of course a pleasure, given that he so rarely commended my work. Now, we were all – not just Charlotte – part of his elect.
Though I was meant to close my eyes during the meditation, Kaspar and I kept on locking our sights on each other, and it was hard not to laugh. Kaspar couldn’t really stay still: there was always a restless leg, or a finger twirling his curls. Though he liked to quote Nietzsche and wear all black, he was hardly a nihilist; instead he was a sensuous man, full of appetite, and I knew during the past few days he’d taken secret meals to tide him over until the evenings. Fair enough. He was only doing it to go along with the group – and, had I not been Charlotte’s devotee, I’m sure I would have cheated too.
When we were finished Jenö opened a window to let some air in. ‘Look,’ he said to Charlotte. ‘You can see your room from here.’
She wandered over. ‘Ah, so you can! You’ll soon know all my secrets, Irmi. I’ll have to keep the shutters closed.’
Walter lay back on the divan: from there he had the best view of Jenö. That pose, one knee hitched, his head in his hand, invited you to think of him naked, and done in oils. ‘For how long are we to eat four slices of black bread a day?’
‘Master Itten said two weeks would be good; three, ideal.’
‘It’s useless!’ said Kaspar. ‘By two o’clock I’m out of my wits.’
‘Tell that to the men at the dole office,’ said Walter.
‘Oh, don’t get righteous.’
These two had a funny sort of relationship; they often chipped away at each other, but there was fondness there too. The thing about Kaspar was that he was open to everyone. Me, Walter, Jenö: we were warier men.
‘Just wait,’ said Irmi, who’d told me she had found the fast more exciting than she’d predicted. ‘The world has changed colour a little. Things are clarifying.’
‘Are your desires taking on a new shape, Irmi Schüpfer?’
Irmi looked at me and then blushed. ‘No.’
Jenö sat down by Walter. He began to sketch in his notebook.
‘It says here,’ Kaspar read from a dating manual, ‘that I should leave a week in between dates.’ Kaspar was always taking women out; he always had someone on the go. He could be moody, but he was also very charming when he wanted to be, and it was a combination deemed irresistible by many in the Weaving Workshop. ‘I only ever leave a few days.’
Charlotte flipped the book. ‘Oh, tie them up like dogs and they’ll still let you take them out for ice cream.’
Walter’s head was resting on the top of the sofa; how nicely it could have dropped, pat, onto Jenö’s shoulder. He watched with interest the development of Jenö’s drawing.
‘“Be firm in your enthusiasm but not overly passionate,”’ Kaspar continued. ‘“Do not be threatening in your affection. Women can feel menaced by what you may perceive as light flirtation.” Good grief. When was this written?’ He flipped the book and looked for a date. ‘Am I a menace? I always thought they wanted me to carry on. At least I thought they did.’
‘You’re more a mouse than a menace,’ said Irmi. ‘Ask Paul what to say.’
‘How would I know?’
‘I can’t remember when you were with the same woman twice on your little coffee trips.’
‘They keep on offering to pay,’ I said, though I knew the excuse was laughable. ‘That’s the only reason I accept.’
‘Even with your studio fortune?’ Charlotte asked.
I blushed. Charlotte often made jibes about my job. Sometimes it was comic; at other times she was earnest, saying as long as I was there, I’d never be here. In some part, I knew she was right, but the fee was too good, and the rebuttal to my father’s financing too satisfying.
‘God, I’m hungry,’ Kaspar said, shoving the book away.
‘Don’t you feel better? More alive?’ Charlotte asked.
‘No,’ he said, ‘my stomach hurts.’
‘I had a moment yesterday when I saw a blackbird with a yellow beak,’ she said. ‘In the cemetery by the Russian church. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. All day I’d been wobbling around, wondering what was the point, just like you, but then for ten minutes the bird held my attention and nothing else. It was transfixing: I was watching an opera. It felt like hours, and all that time there were so many images inside my head: what if I had the bird’s wings? Or what would happen if I crushed its small bones in my hand?’ She cast her eye at Kaspar. ‘Really, it was a joy. Such visions wouldn’t have happened on a stomach full of food.’
‘You sound,’ said Kaspar, ‘as mad as the Master.’
Jenö dropped the sketchbook and went to the kitchen. Walter looked at the drawing then shot me an alarmed look. ‘Handsome Pauli,’ Walter said. ‘You’d have looked wonderful in uniform.’
I turned the sketch the right way up. Jenö had made my expression look sour. How strange that he should portray me like that. I bore no ill will to any of them; certainly not to Charlotte, who had been speaking the longest, and whom I had been looking at – I would have guessed – for the duration of her speech about the blackbird.
7
Weimar
For the first few days I had wondered where the fast might take her. I knew Charlotte would want to escalate things; that it was not in her nature to keep things still. Privately, I hoped that our empty stomachs might draw us together. We might do our breathing exercises, light candles, and in the magic-lantern of a fasted afternoon, we’d finally, lazily, instinctively, end up in bed, too weak to resist temptation a moment longer. Hours of hunger would tip us together. We’d apex. We’d roll around.
For this fantasy I found auguries everywhere, and perhaps this too was a product of the starved mind. The blackbirds were the first thing I noticed, chirruping so sweetly it was as if Charlotte herself were serenading me. Then there were the things she began to leave in my room: bags and notebooks, and even some clothing: signs of her moving in with me. More notes written with red Ps. Perhaps Master Itten was right: if Jerusalem might spring up in this medieval town, perhaps it might even appear in a corner of my bedroom.
That week I began to vibrate. Even when the fire was lit in my room, there was a tremor in my hands, and my body was shivery and cool. The fast was adrenal. There was a hard ledge in my stomach off which I hung, and I brought that ledge around with me, leaning on it when I was weak. After the meditation I wondered whether there might indeed be a sharpening of my perceptions as promised. All morning I had watched how Charlotte’s lantern moved in the room’s draughts. It was deliciously warm beneath the blankets on the badly sprung mattress, and I went in and out of dozy sleep, moving from one pleasant dream to the next as the lantern circled above me, lightweight, planetary, perfect. If this dreaminess was an effect of the fast, then it was a sweetness to dream on.
Life,
like this; it was no bad thing. Sure, all morning I dreamed of what Kaspar was privately devouring (beignets, blood pudding and dumplings), but I had more focus. It was as if the fast had shut down all the unnecessary parts of my brain. I spent hours preparing for Master Itten’s class, and I thought how good I was getting at what it was he wanted us to do: understand the true nature of the material at hand. It seemed plausible that I could be an old master in the beech forest, and a modernist at the Bauhaus.
What I hadn’t expected was Charlotte’s first escalation to happen elsewhere, and without me.
Though I lived three floors up, I could always hear Mrs Kramer screaming at me with ease. ‘Beckermann! You have a visitor!’ I heard Charlotte’s voice from the vestibule; famously, my landlady liked her and no one else. As she walked up the flights I thought how today we’d inexorably come together. My skin tingled. How pleasant it is: anticipation.
Nothing, however, could have prepared me for her appearance as I opened the door. Charlotte’s hair had been shaved off. Her head was nothing but scalp, and her flat eyes looked stranger still. ‘I’ve just been at Jenö’s,’ she said, her breath quick from the climb up. ‘Now’s the time to take the fast further.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All this hair,’ she said, pulling at one of my curls. ‘It’s just confection!’ She came into my room, looking around, as if expecting to see someone else here. ‘Oh,’ she said, looking at the hanging lantern with a frown. ‘I hadn’t realised you’d kept that.’
I touched her bald head. ‘Is this because of Master Itten?’
‘Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him?’
She registered my confusion.
‘Corinthians. You should read your Bible.’
‘I didn’t know you were such a zealot.’
‘My childhood,’ she said, ‘was full of wonders. What you don’t know, Paul, is that I am one of life’s obsessives.’
‘I did know that, actually. Who did yours?’
‘Jenö.’
‘This morning?’
‘Yes. I told you already. Keep up, Pauli!’ She looked excited. Charlotte carried all that in her mouth.
I checked my watch: it was almost noon. I could have sworn it was only nine or so. I lit a fire to take away the smell of mouse; at the mirror she brought out scissors and a razor. Charlotte laid out newspaper by the sink. She snapped the towel like a matador. ‘Ready for your appointment, Mr Beckermann?’
I realised I hadn’t quite consented before she began cutting at my hair. The curls – which my mother had always adored and called ‘my glory’ – fell to the newspaper below. Charlotte worked methodically, snapping away with the scissors. ‘Did you know that nuns were able to stop menstruating just by controlling their breathing? They were the true masters of the fast. Much better than the monks, who anyway drank stout to offset their hunger. No, it was the nuns who ate nothing during Lent, and it was then there appeared the most visitations of Jesus and the Virgin. The two,’ she said, ‘cannot be separate phenomena, can they?’
‘Has either visited you yet?’
‘No. But Jesus once appeared to me in a dream.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He didn’t say anything. He just put his hand on my forehead and when I woke I felt a great heat there, a burn.’ She placed my hand on her forehead. ‘I walked around that day feeling empty but pleasant, like a vessel for religious feeling.’ She smiled. ‘Afterward I became obsessed with Margaret of Cortona. I decided to enter a convent; become a nun. My father wasn’t too happy about that either. But that’s the trick. Master Itten says it’s not about depriving yourself – of food, of hair, of luxuries. It’s simply about making more space to see.’
I didn’t tell her that my mother, a few years ago, had had an epiphany too. She’d been fasting for Lent when she’d had a vision of a British shell hitting my brother’s trench. For days she kept a vigil, believing that if she ate nothing she would keep him alive. And Peter had survived – but at a different kind of price.
Charlotte picked up the razor, which must have been Jenö’s. All the curls were gone so quickly it was as if they had never really been there. ‘Do you think Walter’s in love with Jenö?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘of course.’
‘Do you think Jenö knows it?’
‘I think he’s pretending it’s not there,’ I said. ‘So that they can be friends.’
I saw her expression modify as she pulled the razor around my ear. ‘What about Irmi and Kaspar?’ I said.
She smiled, concealing something. ‘She’s too serious for him.’
In the mirror I looked like a half-skinned apple. ‘Kaspar’s the most serious man I know!’
‘Ah, that’s what he wants you to think. Really, he’s a buffoon.’
Just then the razor nicked, and I felt a drop of blood on my face, then drop down my neck. ‘Charlotte, can you—’
‘Paul?’
I imagined my chin hitting the sink and my tongue bursting; my mouth filling with blood. I felt a wave of nausea, and I saw a brownish film. I tried to blink it away but it was no good. ‘Can you clean that away?’
Charlotte swabbed at it with tissue. ‘I forgot. I’m sorry, Paul. Here, look,’ she switched on the tap. ‘All gone.’
The dizziness felt worse on an empty stomach and I waited for the fur on my sight to go. Again there was the scraping sound of the razor. As she worked I held onto the sink, trying to concentrate on the cold ceramic. I had always been phobic of blood, ever since I’d seen a friend in the playground pull a nail from his foot and a jet of blood spurt everywhere.
Eventually my vision returned, and I saw myself in the mirror, as bald as Master Itten. I touched her scalp, and then mine. ‘How strange we look,’ I said. ‘Like wizards.’
Later, we wandered to the park. I felt the air on my scalp as she must have done on hers. We made a tour of the Ilm then headed back on ourselves. By the cafe there were mothers and children eating sandwiches as pigeons waited for scraps. The breeze moved the toy sailboats on the pond. We watched the kids play then headed to the bridge. ‘Are you warm enough?’ I asked.
She poked her bald head out from an orange scarf. ‘Just about. I hadn’t banked on all that hair keeping me warm.’
‘You look like a monk.’
‘So do you.’
We lay down by the river and watched the clouds pass. I wondered what everyone else was doing. I guessed Jenö would be shaving Walter’s head just as Charlotte had done mine. She hadn’t mentioned Kaspar and Irmi – maybe they had both exempted themselves. I wouldn’t have put it past either of them to be more sensible than us.
‘Let’s play the hiding game,’ she said. ‘You’re the sleeper.’
This was a ritual we kept. One person closed their eyes and counted to twenty. The other found an object and held it in their palm, describing to the ‘sleeper’ what they held in three words. I opened my eyes. Her hand was a fist.
‘Refractive. Colourless. Very wet,’ she said.
‘That’s four words, so you’re cheating.’
‘Wet,’ she said, ‘if I can’t have “very wet”.’
‘It wouldn’t be water?’
She opened her palm, some drops fell. ‘How did you guess?’
‘All right, you be the sleeper.’
She counted with her eyes closed.
I held out my hand to her. ‘Encased. Minced. Piggy.’
‘Sausages?’ she said, her head cocked, confused.
‘Wrong.’ I opened my fist. ‘Imaginary sausages.’
‘Doesn’t count. It has to be here. Materially here.’
‘How do you know it isn’t? The whole river might be atremble with sausages if only you could see its singularity.’
‘Even Master Itten would suggest the river is only water.’
‘Master Itten can’t always see what’s in front of him. Just look at his attitude to my p
ainting.’
I regretted this as soon as I said it. I didn’t want us to argue about Mr Steiner’s studio, not when we had been given a day as divine as this one. And, like a gesture from the gods, without warning the clouds split and the sun poured jewels so that the river heaved and brimmed.
‘Charlotte! Look!’
The trees were struck yellow in the hectic blaze, and the grass beyond was as vivid as a painted field, and the Ilm was so bright that I wondered if Jerusalem hadn’t indeed discovered itself.
Charlotte herself was spectral; transparent. She beamed!
Just then there was a curl of pleasure in my stomach and an odd sensation that I wanted to turn myself outward to reveal more of my nerves to the world. In that quickening moment I had the feeling that I knew everything quite vigorously. I stood at an apex. I knew, then, that I would continue with the fast as long as I could, to see what it would give me. If it was anything like this, a feeling of omniscience, then I wanted more.
Even when the cloud returned, the sun gone in, it didn’t matter, because Charlotte’s hand was still in mine for as long as we lay there. Yes, here it was; not Jerusalem, but paradise itself, discovered, in the scrubland, by the River Ilm.
8
England
In the summer the optics here are almost useless. It’s as if all the day’s light has come through gauze rather than glass. It curves lines meant to be straight, makes pastels of colours intended to chill. The sea air has this softening effect. No more the rinsed light of our apartment in Kreuzberg, where the foundry powdered at the windows. Charlotte always said I was deeply susceptible to the weather, and it’s true: a bright day can open a palace in my heart. It’s just not so good to paint in.
I’ve been in England for so long that I should be used to it by now. Some years I simply leave work to a winter’s pursuit, and in the summers instead I watch the sea and the fishing boats: men reeling in nets sequinned with water, their catches glimmering, and though I am alone, tramping around in my wellingtons, pretending I am nothing more than Paul Brickman, anonymous as any other Englishman, I imagine myself as happy with all this before me: this seafarer’s bounty. It is almost enough.
