by Naomi Wood
‘Is everything okay?’
Irmi was packing her things, readying to go.
His voice was all breeze: ‘Just a few extra expenses. Because of the Sommer affair.’
‘You won’t be able to paint without your glasses, will you?’
Walter looked caught out. Irmi, too, paused. I’d been storing this gem since the weekend.
‘It’s only distance I can’t see. I’ll be fine.’
I told him to meet me outside the statue of the soldier at eleven thirty tomorrow night.
‘What about the curfew?’ asked Irmi.
‘No one will catch us at that time.’
‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Won’t you? We don’t want more trouble.’
Walter got to the cafeteria door when he turned back. ‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I have a little job to do, first.’
He shrugged, and both Irmi and Walter left me to it. The fast had indeed delivered: I’d woken this morning with a plan. I don’t know whether it was the patchy sleep or the hunger, but as I had gazed up at Charlotte’s paper lantern swaying idly above me, its chambered rooms visible, I knew what it was I should do. If Walter hadn’t recovered his spectacles, that meant they might still be in the Bath-house, and that he was probably too afraid to retrieve them for himself. If he came to do a shift in the studio tomorrow night – well, so much the better. In the woods, I’d give him back his glasses in exchange for the truth. And then I’d be able to get the story down to zero.
During the fast my sense of smell had heightened. In my rooms the scent of mouse was stronger; the cafeteria I found by turns revolting and exquisite; the pigments in Kandinsky’s class smelled of the reeded lake where my family holidayed in Moritzburg; and now, inside the Bath-house, the chemicals in the building’s pipes were an unpleasant odour. All this time I had been banking on clearer sight, not a more accurate nose.
I was wary. This was the scene of the crime, and I knew if I should be caught in the Bath-house I’d be in trouble. Maybe I’d be found by Mr Sommer himself, who wouldn’t mind throwing a few punches at a man much slighter than Jenö Fiedler.
In the locker room I put on a cap to disguise my bald head, and changed into my swimming costume. Some men gave me suspicious looks but didn’t say anything, and I made my way to the poolside. The day’s light hit the water hard, and it made me think of that rip of sunshine against the River Ilm that had moved Charlotte’s hand to mine, and which had opened a boulevard in my heart. I had missed her these past few days. I’d call for her later: see if she wanted to start on the Master’s figurative portrait together.
I went down some grubby backstairs, my footsteps alone on the staircase. I hoped it would bring me out directly to the sauna; I was relieved when it did, and I had not been followed.
The sauna door was fitted with glass, and for a moment I stood outside, imagining I was Mr Sommer looking in at the two men in the room. Jenö would have been unconscious on the floor; Walter, who wasn’t always helpful in an emergency, would’ve been flapping around his friend. Sommer would then open the door to help Jenö, only to be knocked around as soon as the man came to, and Walter would have been screaming at Jenö to stop. In fact, maybe Walter had been on the bench, keeping away from their fists, since he had emerged without a scratch. But if he hadn’t been caught in the fight – as the question came to me I simultaneously cheered myself for the genius of having come here – how had he lost his spectacles?
The door gave with a shove. I sat down in case someone should find me here doing nothing, and pulled off my cap. I wondered how vulnerable I was. If someone was to come in here, would they hesitate in teaching me a lesson? It was quiet; only the benches creaked, and the air was dry and clear. It must have been a real scrap in a room this hot. On the floor there was a halo of ash or charcoal; perhaps still left over from Jenö.
How large his body would have been in this space; how much Walter would have loved to stake his claim. Surely it had been a tease for Jenö to come here with Walter alone. Walter couldn’t swim, so the sauna must have been their only destination. Jenö knew they’d be naked, and light-headed, and hungry. Four hours later he’d be ghosting outside the baker’s: a man half mad with hunger – or something else.
The door swung open; a man – not one of those from the changing rooms – waddled in and sat down. He looked at my shaved head but gave me a nod, and the swinging door flashed light under the other bench. I smiled, and though he didn’t return the gesture, he also didn’t appear too aggressive, and I thought I could just about get away with it.
I already knew what was under the bench. The fast had given me this vision, and it had been correct. Crossing the room, I bent over to collect what I knew was there: the flashing object was Walter’s tortoise-shell glasses, cracked on one lens. The man stared at me, obviously wondering what I was up to. And without really knowing what I was doing, I put on Walter’s glasses, as if they were my own.
12
Weimar
Before the war, my family holidayed in Obersee. Every summer we trained down from Dresden, stopping at Nuremberg, then Munich, then taking the tourist train out to the lake: my father fussing about whether we would make our onward connection; my mother, who could be an absent woman, vaguely enduring my devotion – I wanted to sit nowhere except for her lap, and stroke her hair, and lay my cheek against hers. Something about my mother has always made me sentimental, and to commune with her for endless hours was usually enough to keep me occupied; this, Peter found revolting. The day after our arrival (we weren’t allowed down to the lake immediately, for a specific reason never explained to either me or my brother) we went out in the boat my father had chartered.
The lake at Obersee has an unsettling effect. The chemistry of the water traps the world’s image in uncanny perfection: the mountains duplicate, the houses flipped, and the horizon such a thin seam as to be almost imperceptible. This liquefaction of the world induced in me a kind of vertigo: horizons and skylines wobbled perilously. It was why, I was sure, my mother wouldn’t come on the boat. She said it turned her head: the glass lake, the ghost reflection, the beauty’s queasy perfection.
Obersee’s literal beauty is rather kitsch: its strident colours would appeal to a man like Ernst Steiner. It’s a sentimental place, too, since when my brother went to the Front, my family stopped going, and it always now makes me think of a place that is innocent, and unwounded, and untouched by tragedy.
As I cycled from the Bath-house, Weimar metamorphosed into another kind of Obersee. The buildings receded; rocked; and the eagles and cherubs unpeeled from the brickwork. I could still with some acuteness smell the Baths, as if the city too were chlorinated and drenched. I could no longer be sure – it was the same feeling that I had on the boat in Obersee – that if I put my foot down it would hit hard ground.
In the market the reddening apples flared.
Worrying I was about to fall off my bike, I dismounted at the Frauenplan. My vision began to prick and dot. Maybe this was what had happened to Jenö. An energetic cycle, the heat of the sauna, the forfeiture of the fast: it was enough, yes, to make a man faint. I put my hand to my pocket; Walter’s spectacles were still there. I held on to them. Soon, I would find their bigger meaning.
I heard my name called; I turned, there was my friend, Kaspar Lemke, wheeling his bicycle over. I tried to steady my vision on him. Closer to, I saw he had a coil of rope, and he was without a jacket, oblivious to the cold. ‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘You’re white as a sheet.’
‘I might have overdone it at the pool.’
‘Not breaking the Director’s orders, are you?’
‘I lost my breath, that’s all.’ Indeed, I already felt better, just for talking to someone else.
Kaspar’s gaze wasn’t without tenderness, but it wasn’t without its sense of challenge, too. There were sweeps of masonry dust on his suit. I envied him his hair, its luxury. ‘I don’t think it would be a good
idea to carry on with the fast. After all this stuff with Jenö. We don’t need more trouble. Can’t have you fainting as well.’
‘I told you, I’m fine.’
He evidently didn’t believe me, but decided to drop it. ‘Did you skip class this afternoon?’
‘I had to run an errand. Who told you that Jenö had been done for brawling in Munich?’
‘Elena or Eve or Hannah. Can’t remember which. One of the troika. What were you doing at the Baths?’
‘I wanted to see where it happened.’ I wondered whether I should mention Walter’s spectacles: ask Kaspar how Walter had been able to narrate the story so well without being able to see clearly, but I remembered his admonishments on Monday.
‘What’s there to check on?’
‘Walter’s story just felt off. Didn’t you think so?’
‘No,’ he said, but then Kaspar hadn’t seen Jenö outside the bakery. ‘You and Irmi might do better supporting them this Saturday rather than doing your own little investigations.’
‘Of course,’ I said, blushing, because he doubted my alliances. ‘What’s on Saturday?’
‘The tribunal, of course.’
‘Right.’ And then I added, too heavily, ‘It’s brilliant the police aren’t going to pursue this.’
He looked as if he didn’t believe me, but then our attention moved to a shutter which banged in the old Goethe house. The house was so big there must have been twenty or so windows across its front. I remembered what Walter had said about Charlotte von Stein, roaming the woods, moaning Goethe’s name. Such a big grand house had surely been his wife’s house, not his mistress’s.
Another student showed up, but Kaspar didn’t introduce me. Instead he said he was going to the dump. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked.
‘Charlotte’s.’
‘Oh. I think she’s back at school,’ Kaspar said, swinging a leg over his bike. ‘Masterminding their defence. Everyone’s ecstatic they’re not going to prison. But it’s rather worth remembering,’ he said, in a solemn tone, ‘that they’re not out of the woods yet.’ Then he said goodbye in Italian, as if we were in Rome.
Our conversation had settled the world; the city was flat and unperturbed once more. Outside the Fürstenplatz there was a union leader preaching, and other men warming their hands at a burning can. Charlotte’s rooms were in the damson-pink house in one corner of the square. At the doorway I looked to see if Irmi was at her window, watching me as she had watched Charlotte, but it was the middle of the day, and there was no one there.
The landlady shrugged when I asked if Charlotte was in, which I took as a good sign that she might be by now. There wasn’t a response, however, to my knocking. I put my ear to the door but there was no sound aside from a faint percussive noise. Charlotte and I went freely into each other’s rooms, but walking in alone always felt a touch transgressive.
The room had an unvisited feel. The tables were stacked with cloths and paints. Everything was piled on Biedermeier furniture. An easel was set up and an upholstered chair was positioned in front of it. All around there were touching examples of her failed weaves. Even three or four were enough to surprise me; I thought she had quitted the loom altogether. I found a tobacco tin of acupuncture needles, and candles, and I wondered if she, like me, were continuing to fast. I imagined her putting the needles in her skin. The room would be warm and the light tinselled from so many candles burning down to nearly nothing.
It was the shutter that was bumping against the frame: that had been the noise I’d heard. Funny that I’d seen the same image at Goethe’s house. I fastened it and sat facing the easel in the high-winged chair. I turned over Walter’s horn-rim spectacles, tempted to pull one of the arms straight. My prints were on the other lens. I wondered what I should say when I presented them to him. I wondered whether they would be a gift, or a sting.
After a while I found some paper to leave a note. Charlotte’s haphazard writing was on the back: a scrawl of sums: big numbers, into the hundreds of thousands. Master Itten had once teased her about her handwriting, asking how students were taught to write in Prague. You would never guess it was her, from her writing; or at least her loose style suggested a person she wasn’t. I wrote her a quick message, asking if she’d like to get Itten’s portrait done soon, then left it on the mat.
But just as I was about to go I heard footsteps ascending, and didn’t have time to snatch it before Charlotte walked in. She was startled. Her cheeks crept with crimson. ‘Oh, Paul!’ she said, and she held her throat.
Jenö followed. ‘Hullo,’ he said. He had walked in whistling, as if a packet of good news had fallen on his lap. I suppose it had; the police weren’t going to arrest him: that was reason enough to make a man whistle. There was a certain wizardry in Charlotte’s eyes too: perhaps she was still fasting.
‘We’ve been at school—’
‘Masterminding a defence,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ She looked at me oddly. ‘Exactly.’
I wanted to know what was going on, but I also didn’t want to have to ask. Her heeled boot was on my note. Jenö went to the fire, which was dead, and fanned the coals. A flame began to flare. The magic touch.
‘How do you feel about the tribunal?’ I asked him.
It was almost comic, how grave both of them became.
‘Jenö feels really bad about it,’ she said (as if Jenö were unable to ever speak of the matter directly). There was that stitch in her forehead again. ‘He lost all sense of himself. You must know that feeling. After a faint.’
‘Sure,’ I said, though I didn’t. After a faint, I hardly had enough energy to stand, never mind box someone’s lights out.
‘Do you think you could lend something for Walter to wear? He can’t afford a new suit. And you’re the same size.’
‘All right.’
Jenö sat bonelessly on the chair. He didn’t look like he felt bad at all; instead, he looked dreamily to the parkland’s river and sheep. Charlotte went to the easel and flipped a few sheets over, rubbing out some green chalked marks, which came off on her hand. Then she scrunched the paper into a ball. Jenö frowned.
I held Walter’s spectacles in my pocket: feeling their sleek curves. ‘I was at the baker’s on Saturday morning, Jenö. The one near the station.’
I watched in her expression how she suppressed her interest.
‘You came past. I’d just finished at the studio.’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ Jenö said at last. ‘Too keyed up.’
‘It’s near Reinhardt’s cobbler’s.’
‘Yes. I went to talk to Sommer.’
‘Did you?’ Charlotte said. ‘You didn’t tell me that.’
‘At four in the morning?’
I wanted to coax from him all the words he was stopping himself from saying but I didn’t know how. When they had come in both of them had seemed almost high; now Jenö was alert and quick-witted. I noticed his throat work. ‘I went to apologise.’
‘You have to tell me these things,’ she said. ‘There can’t be any secrets.’
‘And what did Sommer say?’
‘Obviously he didn’t want to talk to me for long. I just told him how sorry I was.’ He offered up his hands, a mea culpa. ‘I admitted it was my fault. That the faint had made me confused. That I’d lost my wits.’
‘Good, that’s good,’ said Charlotte. ‘It was a bad idea: the fast, and all that. Master Itten’s in trouble now too. The Director wants things to be straightforward. He can’t stand a scandal.’
She disappeared into the kitchen, and Jenö and I didn’t really look at each other, and we certainly didn’t talk to each other. In fact, he closed his eyes, and I was left standing at the door, doing nothing. When Charlotte came back her skin looked rinsed and her eyes more fierce. She massaged her scalp; I could see the skin move under the stubble. ‘Your job at the studio. Do they need help?’
‘I don’t think Mr Steiner accepts women.’
‘Not for me. For
Walter. He’s going to need the money.’
‘Oh, he already asked me. We’re going tomorrow night.’
‘Oh, good,’ she said.
‘What happened to your objections?’
‘Needs must,’ she said, smiling.
I looked at Jenö, who still had his eyes closed. I realised then he’d dropped off to sleep.
Charlotte laughed. ‘Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous?’
Wake him up? Tow him out? I couldn’t think what else to do; I would have to leave him here. ‘I miss you,’ I ventured. ‘I haven’t seen you all week. It’s not your fault Jenö lost his temper.’
‘I just don’t want either of them to go. And I feel responsible. If I hadn’t suggested the fast—’
‘He wouldn’t have fainted. I know. You’re not still fasting, are you? With all this going on,’ I said, thinking if I used Kaspar’s words she might believe me, ‘it might not be a good idea.’
‘Oh no. I ate the most enormous sandwich for lunch.’ She gave a cheery laugh, which convinced me she was being sincere.
‘You’re thinking Sommer might want compensation? That’s why Walter needs a shift at the studio?’
‘That’s the best-case scenario.’
‘The other?’
‘That they might go, Paul. It’s serious,’ she said, her tone changing again. She looked at sleeping Jenö. ‘Don’t you see? All week it’s as if you haven’t really cared.’
‘I do, Charlotte, how can you say that? I’m taking Walter to the studio tomorrow. I’ll lend him a suit. I’ll help how I can.’
‘That’s not it. You’ve been disengaged.’
I wanted to say to her: I’m not disengaged, I’m wary; that everything felt embroidered; that everything felt like a fiction. And I suppose I too had my part to play. ‘The last thing in the world I want is for Jenö to go.’
‘Well, act like it, then. Pretend you care.’
‘You’ve hardly been around to know I do care.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, puffing her cheeks. ‘I just want it over.’
