by Naomi Wood
The next day we were to explore the properties of newspaper, identify where it was strongest and would bear the most weight, and how this might be applied to a three-dimensional structure. I spent the morning trying to make preparatory forms, working out how I could roll it, cut it, and bend it at different angles. But my mind couldn’t keep itself on the task. Instead I kept on thinking about Walter’s story. The incident had happened at midnight, and I’d seen Jenö at the bakery at four thirty. What had they done in between? And how had Walter been able to see what had happened in so much detail at the Bath-house, without his spectacles?
Later, in the afternoon, I went to find my friends, but they weren’t in the Bauhaus, nor were they at the Ilm, and I didn’t think that on a day such as today, when we were all meant to be doing our best impressions of altar boys, they’d be up at the woods cavorting. (What had I dreamt of in the woodland? Bacchanalian rites and witchcraft?) Besides, if they were, they would have invited me.
I called round to Walter’s, and then Charlotte’s, but neither was there. Kaspar was at Irmi’s. She said she hadn’t seen them all day; she’d been to church that morning ‘on a whim’, and Kaspar said he would leave shortly before our curfew began. I looked at Charlotte’s rooms, but the windows were shuttered.
I went home, wondering why I had been the last to know the story last night. What had Walter said? Forgive me for repeating myself? Maybe it was just bad luck that I was the last to be fetched. After all, somebody had to be the last.
Inevitably, the whores came to the hairpin turn – no Sunday Sabbath off for them – and I heard Mrs Kramer’s music, a Viennese waltz, sounding like it belonged to a different century, which put me in a melancholy mood. Things felt out of joint.
Without anything else to do I was a little lonely. I longed to eat but reminded myself of the promise of new vision: a state of fluorescence. I thought it’d be a struggle to get myself to sleep, but perhaps I was still tired from Friday night’s shift at the studio, because after a shot of hot lemon water, I drifted off to sleep with surprising ease.
The next morning I felt clearer and brighter than I had done in a while. I ate some bread and drank some of Mrs Kramer’s sticky morning coffee. I knew the Bauhaus would be rife with gossip from the Bath-house, and I didn’t much want to get involved. That morning, I left it as late as I could.
When I arrived at school almost everyone from the first year was already in the atelier. What was odd was the way our group had split. There was Jenö, Walter and Charlotte on one side, with Kaspar and Irmi on the other. I don’t know why I didn’t go over to speak to Charlotte, but I wanted to ask Irmi about her trip to church, whether she’d been moved to religious feeling by the fast. Perhaps she’d felt the same thing as I had done by the river: that curious sense of omniscience and power. But Irmi was deep in conversation with Kaspar. ‘Bloody Jenö,’ Irmi was saying as I sat with them. ‘Turns out Sommer is a friend of a local judge. They’re goners.’
Kaspar, who was in all black as usual, nursed a coffee. ‘Surely not for a few thrown punches.’
‘Apparently Mr Sommer is black and blue.’
‘According to who?’
‘He came in this morning for a talk with the Director. Max saw him.’
‘Jenö’s dad,’ said Kaspar, ‘will have him working on his farm in no time. I’d rather be dead than go back to my old life.’ This struck me as odd, because Kaspar, a Berliner, sounded like he’d had quite an exciting life before the Bauhaus. It wouldn’t be like me going back to tea and butter balls in Dresden; or Walter to some province of Westphalia.
‘Will Sommer go to the police?’ I asked. I knew I sounded naive, but I really hadn’t thought it would escalate that far.
‘Irmi has a theory,’ said Kaspar.
Irmi looked at Kaspar.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’ She seemed peeved with Kaspar. ‘Don’t tell me you believe their story?’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve never seen Jenö faint. You, yes’ – she jabbed a finger in my ribs – ‘but not Jenö.’
‘Oh, Irmi,’ Kaspar said, putting his hand on hers, ‘do stop with the theories.’
She took his hand away. ‘Paul doesn’t think it’s true either.’
‘Don’t you, Pauli?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said, with absolute certainty, since I didn’t.
‘Has Walter mentioned anything else?’
‘No. I mean, I haven’t seen anyone all weekend.’
‘Jenö fainting. It’s all hokum, I reckon.’ She sawed the blunt part of a carving knife into her palm and the sound made me feel a bit sick. ‘I think Walter did all the fighting himself and Jenö’s covering for him.’ And then she let out a throaty laugh and dropped the knife.
‘Walter’s a weed,’ Kaspar said drily. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
For a while I watched the others before Master Itten joined us. Walter was being particularly attentive to Jenö, but Jenö looked like he was keeping to himself. His bruises were yellower. Charlotte kept her head down, scrawling on a piece of paper.
Master Itten ignored our groupings when he walked in later. He asked us to close our eyes, and we began our meditation as usual. I expected someone to join me in my ritual espionage, but no one did; not even Kaspar. He probably didn’t want to get caught; not right now.
Time passed slowly. I watched the room but everyone stayed still. I had the odd feeling that we were made from very fine powder, and with only a breeze we might be blown apart. If the police were to come for Jenö, then they would come for Walter too. How easy it would be to take us from our specialness here: some thrown punches and Jenö would be back to farm work. How quickly all this beauty could come unstrung!
Just before the Master’s bell I closed my eyes so that people might think I’d been deep elsewhere. I came to in a faked dreaminess, but Itten was not watching me; he was looking at Jenö. ‘Did you fall over, Mr Fiedler?’
This was for show: surely Itten had heard about the Bath-house. I’d be surprised if the Director himself hadn’t cautioned Itten with what he was allowed to do with the students now. No more private conferences; no more fasts.
‘Yes,’ Jenö said.
Over the class I kept on trying to catch Charlotte’s eye, but she was deep in the exercise. We had an hour to make a new form from several sheets of newspaper. After yesterday’s preparations I had decided on a boat: it was a shape that best exploited the material’s properties. Everyone worked noiselessly. Even Elena, Hannah and Eve – whom we called the Three Graces – were quieter than usual, fashioning, in turn, an African-style hat, a blazer, and a big chunky necklace.
The Master roamed the classroom, commenting on the newspaper’s materiality and its uncommon strength. ‘Fold it six times and it’s impossible to rip. Roll it up and bend it in two’ – he flashed a look at Jenö – ‘and it could kill a man.’
Afterward, he dismissed all of our creations – boats, hats, and aeroplanes – in favour of Gerhard’s simple construction: he’d simply stood the paper on its edges. ‘There it is!’ Itten shouted in delight, which made the whole class simultaneously stop and also give up. ‘Look! A material stiff and yet pliable enough it can stand where it’s narrowest. The rest of it’ – his look took in our vehicles and jewels – ‘is just junk.’
My boat belonged in the bin.
‘Better luck next time,’ Irmi said. ‘Mine’s useless too.’
I felt a pang for whatever compliment Ernst might throw me for an oiled moon.
‘Attention please,’ Itten was saying. ‘For next week’s figuration class, I want everyone to have drawn someone else, full length. The body does not stop at the torso, oh no, and you may paint them in as many – or as few! – clothes as you choose, in any medium you choose. We’ll be looking at the human form. The Bauhaus is not always about the will to abstraction. We must also give in to the caprices of the organic.’
There were smi
les all round. This would be something at which I could excel. Steiner’s studio had proved this, and in turn I could prove to Charlotte that the two disciplines might yet be complementary. ‘Disassemble, please.’
There was never any wastage at the Bauhaus; everyone unfolded their newspapers and packed the sheets away. I smiled as Elena hid her necklace in her bag. Sometimes, there were little rebellions like this; sometimes, we did not do as we were told.
As I filed the newspapers in the storeroom I overheard Kaspar talking to Irmi. ‘Jenö was caught doing this before, you know. In Munich. It’s why his parents pay for his art school. To keep him out of trouble.’
I took a few steps back into the workshop so that I could hear them better. Irmi’s expression was hard to work out, but then expressive people are often hard to read. ‘Charlotte gave him quite a lecture in the cafeteria after Paul went. All about temperament and self-possession. Sometimes I think Charlotte has so much self-possession she might be dead.’
I’d always thought the two women were good friends; but maybe there was some cruelty in Irmi of which I wasn’t aware. Both she and Kaspar were watching Charlotte now, who was looking at the beech forest framed in the window. When Jenö joined her they quickly became deep in conversation.
‘I wish I could be like that.’ Irmi wore a strange expression; not envy, not quite, but as if she, too, yearned to have some of Charlotte’s coolness. ‘Yesterday I saw her sneaking off in the middle of the night.’
‘She broke the curfew?’
‘She didn’t head to the Bauhaus, either.’
‘Peeping at her from behind the Fürstenplatz, Spy Irmi Schüpfer?’
‘I happened to be at the window, that’s all. She had a big bag with her and a hat with a brim,’ Irmi said. ‘Now where was she going?’
‘You and Paul! Why can’t you just accept what Walter told us?’
‘You, my dear,’ she chucked him on the cheek, ‘need to be less of an ingénue and more interested in the truth.’
‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.’
‘Oh, go back to bed, Mr Nietzsche.’ Irmi gave Kaspar an elbow in the ribs but also a kiss. How easily I could watch them from my hidey-hole; how real and lovely was their affection for each other!
Walter walked into the storeroom just then. ‘Stupid Walter,’ he said. ‘Not listening.’
Strips of paper hung from his forearm: he’d been reprimanded by Itten, since changing the material had not been part of the brief. ‘Don’t believe what they’re saying about Jenö. He didn’t mean to beat Sommer. It was a mistake.’
‘They said he was arrested for something similar at home.’
‘Even if that’s true, he was defending me this time.’
‘Against who?’
‘Why, whoever he dreamed up in the faint.’
We went back into the workshop; Master Itten had already gone.
‘Do you think Sommer will press charges?’
‘Oh,’ said Walter. ‘I wouldn’t be able to bear it if he did.’
I knew how he felt. If it had been Charlotte I would have been beside myself.
‘Say they won’t, Pauli.’
‘They won’t. Not for a skirmish in the Bath-house.’
When I turned back to the window, Charlotte had gone. And when I looked to the classroom – damn fool spy that I was – I saw that Jenö, too, had followed her out. I wanted to ask Walter – unbruised, unseeing Walter – to have a coffee with me, so that I could mine him for what had really happened at the Baths – but by the time I’d packed my things, he too had disappeared.
11
Weimar
Those first nights spent under curfew were dull; life can be when you’re not eating, and not allowed to go out. Rumours were circulating that city thugs were looking to avenge Mr Sommer’s beating, and so, every evening, we all dutifully sloped to our lodgings alone. None of us wanted to get ourselves, or Master Itten for that matter, in any more trouble. Jenö especially was keen to observe the curfew, and often left before the last class had finished.
It felt strange to be alone, given that in our time here we had never been out of each other’s pockets. Not knowing what else to do, I did my breathing exercises, put a few acupuncture needles in my legs (to draw out the poisons; this is what the Master had advised), and I imagined Charlotte doing the same in her candle-lit bedroom alone.
Hunger was everywhere. Though my appetite split my sides, I was surprised that my abstinence didn’t so much exhaust as energise me. In many moments I teetered on a prolific transparency: the city felt mine for the taking.
I was sure, too, that soon my fasted vision would let me see through Walter’s story. Like Irmi, I didn’t believe all this hokum about Jenö fainting in the Baths. I wondered what it was that didn’t add up. There were the unmentioned, and absent, spectacles. There was the lapse between the midnight fight and Jenö’s appearance at the bakery. Then there was Charlotte’s odd sortie on Sunday night, with her big bag and a hat, like a caricature of a grave-robber. I suppose she had a capacity for guilt that I didn’t, and the fast had been no one’s idea but her own. And what had she said to me? That she was a zealot; an obsessive – hadn’t she compared herself with Margaret of Cortona, who was herself a penitent? I’d leave her to it. When she was on some private mission it was best not to distract her. This was, for her, just another form of escalation.
On Wednesday I heard the happy news that Sommer would not press charges. Walter and Jenö had been summoned to the Director’s office that morning and told to expect instead a school tribunal. Everyone would be heard: Mr Sommer, Mr König, Mr Fiedler. And the Director would chair the meeting: no town representative or magistrate.
No one could believe the threat of police action had been removed so quickly. It was a triumph. All around the room the message travelled quickly: Jenö and Walter would avoid jail! Merely questioned by the Director, and didn’t the Director think Jenö, especially, a fine and fee-paying student, who ought to stay? There was general consensus in the ateliers, in the Craft Building and the Prellerhaus, that Walter and Jenö would be all right, and that the Bauhaus in general would emerge unscathed.
They were not yet scot-free, but to see Walter’s face over breakfast that morning, well, it was as if the future had been wiped clean. In fact, he seemed more positive and less melancholic than he’d been all week. ‘It’s all working out!’ he said.
Over breakfast, which I ignored, we discussed Jenö and Walter’s approach to the tribunal. There was the question of whether to mention that Master Itten had initiated the fast, and therefore whether it had been ‘sponsored’ by the faculty; whether Jenö should deny the previous brawls in Munich, should the Director have got wind of them; how Mr Sommer should be treated with the utmost courtesy and even deference – and that the fullest apology should be made within the Director’s earshot: Jenö ultimately would own all responsibility for the brawl. Then it would come down to what was out of our control: the Director’s mercy. Jenö was a good student, but he was also one of Itten’s acolytes, and there was an awareness that perhaps the Director might take the opportunity to purge the school of its more eccentric, or at least expressionistic, elements.
Charlotte asked me if I wasn’t thrilled. Of course I was: I said they’d sail through the tribunal, since that’s what I’d overheard Hannah saying to Eve. I couldn’t admit to her that the prospect of losing Jenö had looked increasingly attractive, that in the past week I had wondered whether it might not be a good thing if he were on his way. If he had done this before, might not he do this again? And if it were done again, wouldn’t it plunge our group into even more serious peril? But these were impermissible feelings, and impermissible questions, and I pushed them away. Jenö was my friend. I should do right by him. Charlotte gave me a watchful look, then left to go to class.
‘Not hungry?’ asked Irmi, when the conversation between the others was tailing off.
‘Lost my appetite.
’
‘You should eat. It’ll keep your energy up.’
‘What are you doing with your curfew?’
‘Me? I’m cross-stitching chapels.’ This was a joke. Irmi’s work at the loom was modern and geometric. Her woven work was as fabulous as skyscrapers. ‘Women’s work. Nothing ever came of stitches in fabric.’ Irmi raised her brows. ‘What about you?’
‘Oh, nothing much. Sketching lots.’
‘And you’re not fasting?’
‘I’m on three square meals a day.’
‘And I’m embroidering chapels.’
‘Exactly.’
Irmi looked about to say something: but then decided not to.
‘Irmi?’
‘I shouldn’t,’ she said, biting her lip, watching Charlotte disappear into the Prellerhaus. ‘I feel like I’m reporting on her. You know I can see her rooms from mine?’
‘Yes?’
‘She’s been breaking the curfew. Heading off somewhere: wearing a hat, holding a bag. Where’s she going?’
‘No idea. You think it’s the same place she went on Sunday night too?’
‘Did you see her as well?’ Irmi asked.
‘I overheard you telling Kaspar. Didn’t you follow her?’ I had meant it to sound off-hand, but the words came out seriously.
‘I’m not spying on her, Paul.’
‘I didn’t say you were.’
Jenö and Kaspar left for the Prellerhaus, and Walter finished the last of his porridge.
Irmi lowered her voice: ‘I didn’t want to break the curfew. She might break her neck, but I’m not going out for the sake of Jenö Fiedler and Walter König. Will you ask her?’
‘What?’
‘Where she’s going. But make it look as if it wasn’t me who told you, will you?’
‘How should I do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something.’
‘Paul,’ said Walter, interrupting us, his eyes shifting from me to Irmi. ‘Any chance I might do a shift at the studio soon?’
