by Naomi Wood
‘The curfew’s lonely.’
‘Oh, Paul, it’s only been a few nights.’
I held her hand. ‘What am I meant to do on my own?’
‘Oh, I’m sure you can keep yourself occupied.’
‘Where do you go? In the curfew? With your bag and hat?’
‘Are you spying on me? That must mean you’ve broken the curfew too.’
I shrugged. ‘I got bored,’ I said, hoping the lie would cover Irmi’s tracks.
‘Nowhere. I haven’t been going anywhere. Tell Irmi to mind her own business.’
Evidently not. ‘Can you come around tonight? Keep me company?’
At which point Jenö let out a deep, rumbling snore.
She laughed. ‘I will if I can wake him up. If not, tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow I’m at Steiner’s.’ I added: ‘With Walter.’
‘Well. We’ll work something out.’
I kissed her goodbye, and it was then that I could smell the bar-room off her. And I was so busy in my realisation that the chemical smell wasn’t the chlorine from the Baths, but alcohol, that I forgot to pick up my note. As I walked down the spiral staircase, my mind was alive with this new knowledge: they weren’t fasting: they were, in fact, both drunk.
I don’t know which one nettled me more that evening as I spent another night alone: that my message would expose me even more as completely uncaring of Jenö’s situation, or that I had left him alone, and sleeping, in her rooms.
As if in confirmation of my feelings, overnight the fast’s expansiveness disappeared. I slept badly. I kept on obsessing about the note and how much I wished I hadn’t written it. If there was one thing she believed in – in this she was so like Kaspar, always wanting us to stick together – it was our sacred six. We should not be put asunder. She would not want dissent. The note exposed that I didn’t care.
Her lantern swayed above the bed. I don’t know why it bothered me, but it was keeping me awake. Unwiring it made it collapse: all the rooms folded in. I laid it on my desk.
It was very cold when I opened the window. Even with the first brushstrokes of light there was a guilty air to the streets: there might be thugs lurking, or a band of Kozis looking for a fight. Maybe I’d see Charlotte, with her bag or cap, or see Jenö skulking as I had done outside the baker’s. But no one was around. Even the whores had gone to bed.
Just then I had the rushing sensation that things were happening over which I had no control. One can speak of disquiet, but what does it mean? A feeling in the bones; in your eyes; the pit of your stomach. I didn’t know its source. Things did not feel right, but I didn’t know where this feeling came from – or whether it was simply the paranoiac vapours of the fast. In the mirror my gaze reminded me of a painting of a turbaned Coleridge stumbling from an opium den into the outside light. I put Walter’s spectacles on the sill. They were the answer, I thought. They would reveal the truth.
Thankfully, by the morning, my unease had lifted. The nightmarish thoughts were gone. There was a vibration in my left eye but I put this down to the fact that over the past few days I’d eaten nearly nothing and had very little sleep. Perception, now, if it came at all, would come in extremis.
13
Weimar
Though Paul Klee painted Bird Garden a year after everything that happened at the Bath-house, I find that painting strangely congruent with how I view those weeks which disarranged us for the next decade, so that, even in Berlin, we were forever changed by those events. Because it was during this week that Walter learnt to hate; and perhaps all that hate began when lies were told, and secrets kept, and allegiances slipped.
Klee’s Bird Garden is a procession of waterfowl. The paint is applied so thinly that the leaves and even the newspaper it’s painted on – Klee was no richer than the rest of us – are visible behind the negligible birds. We don’t realise at first how flyaway, how transparent, is each form. There’s a delicacy to the birds’ footing, and the sense that with only a breath each shape would roll away as easily as cigarette paper. Whenever I look at this painting, there seems more depth than there really is: we are not looking into a garden but a pool – and yet, peer closer, and that depth is an illusion. There’s really nothing there.
I still believe that my version of that week could be blown away as easily as those birds; that my story is simply a layer upon someone else’s, and that theirs is a layer on mine. Even now Irmi could tell me that my understanding of what happened in Weimar is false; the pool is depthless, the stories were real.
Klee of course wouldn’t have known what happened at the Bath-house, and neither would the Director, nor Master Itten, who was let go, anyway, months after the incident. It wouldn’t have really mattered to the staff; these details. To them, two fasting men went to the Bath-house. A student fainted. A townsperson tried to revive him. The student was confused and threw some punches. And then, much later, the Bauhaus closed.
This is my whole story perhaps. Recollection scratched against recollection.
The next day we had tours of the ateliers (Metal, Stone, Weaving, Wall-painting) that we would choose for our second-year specialism. No one else had opted for Wall-painting, despite the fact Master Kandinsky would teach it; more fool them, I thought. Like Jenö, Charlotte had chosen Metal, though she must have known the Director would never admit a woman into that workshop.
That afternoon Master Kandinsky gave the Wall-painters a long speech. He was a tall man who gesticulated wildly with his Russian-inflected German. He talked for a long time about the aesthetics of colour and their natural forms, about metamorphosis, and seeing and not seeing, but it must have been impenetrable (his teaching often was), because I can hardly remember a sentence of what he said.
Walter and I kept our curfew separately that evening. I had figured the worst time to break the curfew would be in the evening, but no one would be spoiling for a fight as late as midnight. And so, perhaps because of Master Kandinsky’s class, when we cycled to the woods together that night I imagined myself like Kandinsky’s magnificent Blue Rider on his horse, going at such a gallop as to render the autumn in which he rides nothing but speeding trees.
In the studio, Walter was timid at first. Like me, he wore a cloth cap to disguise his baldness, and he kept to the corner of the room until I beckoned him over to the pearly skin of an already ravished Leda. Her retinue were still only outlines, and the courier was coming tomorrow. It boded well for Walter’s chances.
When he saw the painting, Walter’s expression changed completely. ‘Why don’t we make things like this at the Bauhaus?’
‘Because it’s useless?’
‘But still,’ he said, ‘magnificent.’
I took him to Mr Steiner’s office and Walter took off his cap. I shut the office door so that the other men couldn’t see his bald head.
‘Yes?’ Steiner said, his face still buried in the ledger. I saw the anchor tattoo on his neck. The thing about Mr Steiner was that despite his ability to work the market, or put the money in the right dealer or politician’s hand, he still had quite poor taste.
‘My friend needs some work, Mr Steiner. You said you needed all hands on deck. For Leda and the Swan?’
He hadn’t quite said this, and he knew it. As he looked Walter over I wondered if this was a good idea or insanity. If the other workers found out that Walter was part of the Bath-house brawl, would he be beaten up? And what would I do? See blood and faint? There was something else to Mr Steiner’s gaze. Maybe he recognised Walter from the Swan. ‘He’s a painter?’
‘Yes.’
‘At the Bauhaus too?’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s a bit early to be introducing apprentices, isn’t it, Mr Beckermann? He might do you out of a job.’
I shrugged: I had no answer for this.
‘Half pay. If everyone else rates him, he can stay.’ He looked at Walter. ‘When you paint the women, think of your sister.’
‘I don’t have a si
ster.’
‘Your mum then. Don’t mess them up.’
‘Thank you, Mr Steiner,’ said Walter.
‘Call me Ernst.’ This was odd. He had never given me such permission. ‘Aren’t you meant to be under curfew?’ he asked, as Walter returned to the canvas.
‘Yes. But I need the money. You know how it is. Spend a hundred, lose a thousand.’
This softened him, and he let me go.
I painted the big sky for a few hours while Walter worked on Leda’s crowd. He worked close to the canvas, to make up for his lack of spectacles. Other men on other canvases worked elsewhere. Leo the courier came to take a commission even while the paint was still wet. All the padlocks took the same combination: 1919 – the year Ernst had founded the studio; the year, too, of the founding of the Bauhaus.
‘Are you all right, Pauli?’ asked Walter.
‘Fine,’ I said, giving Walter a thin smile, and gesturing at the skittering clouds. ‘Just working out the direction of the wind.’
‘Does Mr Steiner make lots of money from this?’
‘Tons,’ I said. ‘But we’ll see only a fraction.’
‘Who does he sell to?’
‘Foreigners. Anyone with valuta.’
A few steps back I saw that the sky’s light was too approximate: Ernst liked it literal and disambiguated. I’d have to go over it.
‘Do you ever think about why you paint?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, taken off guard. ‘I guess it’s always been a way to make sense of things.’
Walter nodded, brush held aloft. Without his glasses he stood close to the canvas. ‘It’s a form of truth-telling?’
‘Not exactly’ – though it had started out as that – ‘more a way of understanding what’s already there.’
‘Does this picture hold any truth to you?’
‘This?’ I analysed the commission. The women were not so different from Kirchner’s Bathers at Moritzburg. ‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s my father’s taste, but I can see why someone might like it,’ said Walter. ‘There’s beauty in it. Do you see beauty in it?’
‘Isn’t it a little deceptive? Look at the way the brushwork disappears; it’s all surface.’
Ernst told us to get back to work. Were we a couple of old wives, come for a chat? Walter stared at him for longer than I did, but then returned to Leda’s army, staying with the nymphs all night. His brushwork was lovely: his paint dazzled their hair.
During the shift break we went outside. I loved the woods like this. The air in the forest was so cold and the trees creaked in the dark. Ernst passed around beers and someone else shared a flask of coffee. My one meal of the day – black bread and butter – tasted deliciously of turpentine and paint.
‘Have you ever brought Charlotte here?’
‘To the studio? I don’t think she’d be allowed.’
He looked at my mouth and my eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but I think she’d like it.’ There was something about Walter tonight: he had swung into happiness again. Really all week he had been either marching to the gallows or walking down the aisle. I beckoned him over to where we couldn’t be heard or seen. To let him continue with his nose a quarter of an inch from the canvas would be embarrassing. I brought out his spectacles from my overalls.
‘You never found them! Where were they?’
‘In the sauna. At the Bath-house. They were on the floor. Why didn’t you get them yourself?’
‘No chance I was going back there. Thank you.’
‘What happened?’
‘I told you. They were knocked off. During the fight.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense. You said you weren’t hit.’ The trees squeaked in the wind. ‘And you didn’t have a mark on you.’
‘It was just my glasses that went for a sail, then.’
‘Of their own volition?’
Then the smile, full, unbridled; and a display of his palms.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t Jenö tell his side of the story?’
‘I think his jaw hurt.’
‘And Charlotte keeps on breaking the curfew with big bags. What’s going on?’
‘Did Irmi see that? Yes. She sees things, doesn’t she?’
‘No one believes the story you’ve told.’
‘Don’t they? I thought Kaspar had bought it. All that Nietzsche and yet he’ll swallow any story.’
The bell was rung for time, and the painters began to head into the studio. ‘Look, I’ll tell you everything after the shift.’
‘What if we’re seen? It’s still the curfew, and people might be around.’
‘In the cemetery, then. No one will be there at five in the morning. Oh, Paul, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so happy!’ He put his glasses on. The wonky spectacles made him look rather mad. ‘Lucky my left eye is the stronger one.’ He winked either eye, trying to find his sight, then finished his beer in one. He strolled into the studio like a man who couldn’t throw his happiness off him. ‘Lucky, lucky!’ he shouted.
Walter König, half blind, unrequited, accused of attacking a citizen he had not laid a hand on, on the brink of expulsion from the school he loved: as he disappeared into the studio, it struck me that he wasn’t a lucky man in the slightest.
A while into my brother’s military training, we started going on holiday to the Moritzburg Lakes. Without Peter, my father said the trip to Obersee wasn’t really worth it, and Moritzburg was closer to home. But Moritzburg was no mirror lake. The reeds were thick and the water silted. The woodland around it was dark even at midday, and there were several places I was not allowed to go. I missed my brother terribly.
In lighter moods I heard my mother laughing to my father, asking if they shouldn’t take a trip on the lake and leave me behind. Behind? And be left with whom? The nanny had gone on her own holiday and there was no Peter to keep an eye out against these secluded groves; these needs for privacy. Travelling at speed in my father’s motorcar I’d often spot a rushing between the branches: bird-flight, probably, and then my mother would make some incongruous comment about the weather, though I kept on questioning what was between the flickering elms.
Seeing Kirchner’s Bathers at Moritzburg – a group of naked swimmers kissing and carousing by the water – convinced me that I wanted to be an artist. I was sixteen when I saw the painting. Not only did the veil drop from my eyes, as if Kirchner himself had parted the trees and revealed the naked bodies to the young boy’s stare, but it was the painting itself which seemed to awaken me from all stupor – the primitive forms, the block colours, the thickness of the impasto: all this had combined into an astonishing seduction of my gaze.
From that moment on, I wanted to make work like that. After seeing the Kirchner painting I would forever see art (and it was an unfashionable notion, even then) as a means to the truth. The painting had lanced the woodland and revealed the truth. Though Obersee might astonish, it was the silted Dresden lakes that really changed how I viewed the world.
And the Bauhaus was the culmination of all this. I had heard of the new art school as soon as it had opened. I had read its manifesto, its ideas of putting men and women, and the arts and crafts, on equal footing. Utopia in Weimar: which it was, at least for a little while.
Besides, it was the only place a modern artist would dream of studying. Despite all of my father’s reservations (he wanted me to attend Dresden Art Academy), I persuaded him to pay my fees: I appealed to his nature that genuinely believed, as I did, that there was a truth in beauty that could be captured by the brush on the page.
When Walter asked me whether the Steiner painting told a truth, I had lied, to seem worldly and impervious to what I knew were old-fashioned values. Of course, truth meant something to me, even in the butchered form we gave it in the Steiner Studio. After all, that had been the whole point of the fast: that with enough work, the world’s transparency would eventually reveal itself.
14
Weimar
&n
bsp; In the cool of the morning Walter and I walked the cemetery path in silence, our bikes held by their necks. We weren’t meant to go in there after sunset, and the dark as well as the curfew intensified our sense of trespass. Under the trees were bright mushrooms and spring flowers. Everywhere there were dead Walters on the gravestones: Walter Schwarz, Walter Richter, Walter Beck. I only hoped Walter König didn’t notice them as well.
We stopped by a ruin, moss creeping its walls. Walter ditched his bike outside, Steiner’s cash still inside the basket. It was lighter inside, as if the stone threw off the dark. He leant against the wall; and I saw that smile again, like a man three leagues in love. ‘Thanks for sharing your work with me,’ he said. ‘I know there’s not much around.’
‘It’s nothing. Mr Steiner liked you.’
‘You can tell that already?’
‘I’m sure you’ll be invited back. If that’s what you want.’
‘I think it would take care of expenses, yes.’ He slid down the wall. ‘You know I’m in love with Jenö?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, but Paul! Something magical has happened!’
‘What’s that?’
‘I think he’s falling in love with me too.’
‘Really?’ I thought of seeing Jenö in Charlotte’s room, with that dreamy gaze as he looked at the parkland. Yes, it clicked into place: I’d been looking at a man in love. ‘Jenö didn’t faint, did he?’
Walter shook his head. ‘He told me not to tell anyone. He told me that I must keep absolutely quiet.’ He waited for something inside him to give him a cue, then he said, ‘Mr Sommer walked in on us. Kissing.’
‘Ah. I see. No faint?’
‘No: no faint.’
That’s why his specs were off: he had taken them off to kiss Jenö. They hadn’t been swatted away during a fight.
‘Do you think this is it? Do you think he has feelings for me?’
‘I don’t know. Have you asked him?’
‘I can’t,’ he said, choked. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth?’
