by Naomi Wood
‘Jenö made me promise. Oh God, you won’t tell him, will you? It would ruin everything.’
‘I won’t. Don’t worry. I promise.’
Walter’s laughter was a little bark. ‘All this time I haven’t known what to do with myself. I swing from hysteria to misery within an hour. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I’m on the edge of getting it, and the uncertainty is killing me.’
‘What has Jenö said?’
‘Not much. I think he’s trying to work out what it all means.’
He stood. We reclaimed our bikes and wheeled them through the cemetery’s paths: passing grave after grave – even Goethe’s crypt, which Walter nodded at respectfully – until we neared the Russian Church. The building was striped in ochre and gold, its domes teal. ‘Shall we go in?’ Walter asked, his voice a dare, his shoulder already pushing the heavy door.
Inside, the church was smaller than it looked from the outside. There was a portrait of the Virgin and the baby against the altar. The emptiness of her gaze reminded me of Charlotte’s neon stare.
‘Oh, Paul. It’s all so much!’
‘But Walter,’ I said, unable to resist smiling, ‘isn’t this what you’ve been hoping for? Why are you sad?’
‘Somehow,’ his voice gave a squeak, ‘it was – it is! But I’ve no idea if there’s a future in it.’
‘Give it time. Jenö doesn’t know if he has a future at the Bauhaus. Let alone with you. He’s still got Saturday’s tribunal. If the Director decides he’s not fit to study—’
Something passed over his expression, as if there were reserves of information I still didn’t know. ‘The trial’s a dud. Sommer’s been paid off.’
I thought about Charlotte breaking the curfew; how Irmi had seen her leave at night with a sack. It must have been filled with cash. I wondered how much the bribe was. Thousands? Or hundreds of thousands? ‘Did Charlotte do that?’
He nodded. ‘She feels ever so guilty about the faint.’
‘But there was no faint! That’s not fair, Walter. Is it her money?’
‘I’m paying her back, don’t worry. A few shifts at the studio and I should see the deal right.’
‘What’s everyone worrying about then?’ I thought about Kaspar’s words at the square, that she had been ‘masterminding their defence’. ‘If the trial’s a dud?’
‘A whole lot of nothings. Do you think Jenö might feel something for me?’
‘Well, did he stop you, when you kissed him?’
‘Pauli, no, you don’t understand,’ he said, searching my face, looking for how to say this: ‘He kissed me,’ he said, ‘he kissed me.’
And, just as I had thought that perhaps, for Walter, this was the great pinnacle of his time here, the ghost of Jenö walked past the glass front of the baker’s, and I saw again his expression of profound regret; his visible pain.
My heart sank. I don’t know why I needed to lie to my friend just then: why I couldn’t simply accommodate his worry rather than give him false hope. ‘Well, there you are,’ I said, feeling Walter’s body relax against the church bench: ‘Take heart. He made the first move. Now you just have to wait.’
15
Weimar
We worked quietly the day before the trial. Our class was in Kandinsky’s atelier with its view of the city’s buildings, and the sea of trees over at the beech forest. Master Itten was talking to the Director in his workshop; we’d been left without a teacher, and given junk from the scrapheap to demonstrate varying textures. It was a task designed to keep us occupied.
All day people gathered around Walter and Jenö. I guess everybody had their cautious words of counsel: what to do in the tribunal, and what should be said to the Director. Charlotte acted as a gatekeeper: letting in certain people; rebuffing others. A rumour was going around that as well as Jenö and Walter, Master Itten too might be expelled. Itten, however, had no one to pay off. He had avoided us all week since news of the fight had broken. Understandable: he had no wish to jeopardise his job. Walter, unsurprisingly, looked completely relaxed. The trial was a dud; that’s what he’d said just hours ago.
I felt curiously deflated. I tried to read Jenö’s behaviour, to see in him the habit of returned love that Walter had hoped for. Jenö looked dazed, but that could be down to anything; the trial tomorrow, as well as all of this unwanted attention.
Though I kept on looking over at him – imagining their kiss in the sauna, the press of their bodies in the heat, an image so visceral it stirred in me a desire to be the third in that closed chamber – Jenö avoided returning my gaze. Maybe he was in love with Walter, and when I’d seen him outside the bakery his regret had been for the violence he’d inflicted on Mr Sommer, and not for the kiss.
Indeed, as Walter talked to his well-wishers, Jenö was looking at him with frank astonishment, and, yes, almost love. At one point, Walter clocked me watching, and he nodded, as if to say: here we are; this is what I told you; here’s all the evidence in droves.
It wasn’t melancholy in the room that day: more like quiet solidarity, and I felt bad for not going over to them, to give a specious word or two for a junk trial. Charlotte kept on looking at me: probably wondering when I would talk to them. But in my head there was a high sort of pressure. When I’d woken this morning, with only a few hours of sleep after the trip to the cemetery, my peripheral vision had all but gone. In the past this had been a warning of a headache, or, even worse, a migraine. But I thought perhaps it was the last augury of the fast: that I was on the verge of seeing anew.
At one point I caught Charlotte with her hand outstretched. Jenö said something, she shook her head, and from her fist out sprang a tiny man made from newspaper. He laughed.
The fast made me wobble the grommets and hairpins I was forcing into a sculpture, but I couldn’t hold everything as I wanted to. Over a meagre breakfast – I had dreamed, after the graveyard, of buttered toast and croissants big as hammers – I had wondered if everything Walter had told me was, at worst, a lie; or, at best, a complete invention: not only that they’d kissed, but that Jenö had kissed him. Neither had he left me with anyone to corroborate the story. Only we three knew. And I had promised not to breathe a word of it.
Irmi came in later; I wondered where she had been; she wasn’t one for skipping class. She looked at Charlotte rather mutinously. She set up next to me, unloading what she’d found at the dump; metal washers and bicycle handlebars.
I wanted to tell her what I knew, but I could not imperil the secret; not when everything was so finely balanced.
‘I saw Mr Sommer leave the Director’s office,’ she said immediately after sitting down.
‘How’d you know it was him?’
‘The bruises gave him away.’
‘And?’
‘He’s ancient, Paul, he’s ancient. Why would Jenö ever believe a man that old would be a threat?’
Walter hadn’t mentioned Mr Sommer’s age: not in the cafeteria, not in the cemetery. But then why would he have? This new fact cast Jenö in a terrible light.
Most of the student body came to the Swan on Saturday when word got out that neither Walter nor Jenö would be expelled. The school tribunal had – unsurprisingly, at least for the four of us – been a brilliant success. In the pub Walter regaled us with his version of the trial (doing the voices of both Sommer and the Director and even an exaggerated form of Jenö’s Bavarian twang) while we waited for Charlotte and also Jenö, who had been detained the longest, and who was the star of this show.
‘A hundred thousand marks a week, every week for eight weeks,’ Walter said, holding court at the bar – although Mr Sommer, too poor or too stupid, had not demanded the payments go up with inflation. ‘In a month or so,’ Walter said, ‘he’ll be wishing he’d asked for a bag of marbles instead.’
Everyone laughed, and I looked at Irmi. She was inspecting the shabby carpet. I knew we were both thinking of Mr Sommer’s age. He’s ancient, Paul, ancient. I don’t know why Walter had to crow so c
ruelly, especially given they’d won.
‘It’s Germany’s new Bath-house Plan!’ he announced, and he said it in English as if he were David Lloyd George himself.
Even in Jenö’s rolling walk you could tell the manner of his mood. ‘Everything’s fine!’ he announced as he came into the Swan and Irmi let out a noise which was like a celebration. Jenö shook our hands, Walter’s and mine, and then took Charlotte into his arms and I heard him whisper, ‘Thank you,’ in her ear.
I was pleased that Walter and even Jenö could stay, but it was in Charlotte that the happiness was truly expansive. ‘Isn’t it a relief! It’s such good news! Jenö can stay!’
‘You never needed to feel so bad about the fast,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
Jenö’s features were animated. ‘Like that,’ he made a big gesture: ‘swept under the rug.’
We clinked our glasses, and I watched Walter finish his drink as if he hadn’t had three beers earlier.
‘Everything’s back to how it’s always been,’ Jenö said, and his expression, I thought, was the opposite to what I’d seen at the baker’s last weekend: today he was a soul sprung free.
The six of us stood awkwardly. We hadn’t been together since the cafeteria. I felt quite gone, drinking as I had been on an empty stomach, and had to remind myself to keep step with their cheer, but the headache was massing, and I longed for home. Anyway, Charlotte’s manner told me I couldn’t leave. Not yet. I had to be here.
‘No more punch-ups,’ said Kaspar.
Jenö did a little jab: a one-two, then he dusted off his knuckles and put them away. ‘I shall be as good as gold for the rest of my artistic career.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Irmi.
‘Is the curfew over?’ said Kaspar.
‘Yes,’ said Walter, ‘we’re free to roam. Just be careful of the Bath-house. I think there’s still a price on our heads there.’
Sunlight flooded into the room. I’m sure it made everyone feel doubly drunk because we were carrying on as if it were three in the morning rather than the afternoon. Jenö stood on a table and shook at a stuck window. ‘Fuck, it’s hot in here,’ he said, pulling at his shirt.
One of the locals told him to get down.
But then a cloud moved over the sun and the room’s temperature dropped. Jenö’s face turned exuberant. ‘Ha ha!’ he shouted, then beat his chest. ‘I am Jenö! The all-powerful!’
Everyone laughed. Irmi tried to pull him down by a trouser leg, but Jenö (he must have been very drunk, this was so unlike him) swung her up to dance. There wasn’t much space on the table-top, and he took up the bulk of it.
‘All right, Jenö, enough!’ Irmi said. ‘We’re going to fall!’
‘Come down!’ shouted Charlotte, but she was laughing too. ‘No more funny business!’
Jenö ambled down but Irmi was still there, looking like a figurine on top of a cake. Irmi looked ready to make an announcement. I hoped she wouldn’t. Even if the student body knew Mr Sommer’s age, I doubted she’d have the room’s support. Everyone was in the mood to celebrate; this had been a victory. ‘Won’t you come down?’ I asked.
‘Am I the only one who doesn’t think this is right?’ she said, jumping to the floor. ‘It’s all just disgusting. He’s old enough to be your grandfather.’
For the next hour Jenö burped between his retelling of the Director’s homilies and drinking beer like it was water. That afternoon he behaved so strangely that even Walter kept him at bay. My head hurt, but it still felt too early to leave.
At the bar I bought my last drink, and it was here I found Ernst Steiner. I had assumed that he slept between shifts. But perhaps he came to the Swan, to sink a beer with old friends; perhaps that’s what he had been doing when he’d picked me up the first time. ‘Mr Steiner,’ I said. My headache also waved a greeting. It was becoming painful to talk.
‘What’s everyone celebrating?’
Before I had a chance to make something up, he said, ‘Was Walter in trouble?’
‘A small scrape with the law.’
‘Didn’t have anything to do with the Bath-house, did he?’ Mr Steiner kept his voice low enough that no one overheard him.
I didn’t know what to say, and I certainly didn’t want to jeopardise Walter’s work. Inflation or no inflation, he still had to find the money for Sommer’s payments. ‘No, that wasn’t them.’
‘Your school hasn’t treated him well.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Chicken feed. That’s what they’ve thrown at him. And Sommer’s too dim to have demanded more. It’s not a good day. Not a good day at all for the Bauhaus.’
My friends would have all begged to differ.
‘But your lot are celebrating. So I suppose I should be congratulating you.’ He pushed two glasses together and held them in his fists. ‘There’s Walter,’ he said. ‘He did a good job with Leda. I’ll go say hello.’
When he went over to Walter I wondered if he would fire him. But Walter merely adjusted his taped-up spectacles and laughed with whatever Ernst was saying. I caught Charlotte talking to Kaspar, explaining who Steiner was. The last image I had was of Jenö and an attractive woman conferring closely in a dark corner, and Charlotte and Walter arguing about something they both knew little about. Kaspar had disappeared a long time before, probably to see some girl somewhere, and at some point, with my poor head roaring, I decided to call it a night.
16
Weimar
In the middle of the night I woke to a sensation of sawing from my left ear to my eye. I drank a glass of water, threw it up, then tried to stay as still as possible on the bed. By morning I was pinned to the bed. Even the smallest of movements made the headache worse, and it was all I could do to lie very still under the blankets, waiting for time to pass. So much for transparencies and new Jerusalems. After weeks of fasting, this was my deliverance: a migraine had come.
Vaguely the church bell scraped its hours, and I knew the weekend was disappearing, and I wanted desperately to be elsewhere. I heard the wind scratch the trees. Remembered lights flashed in my vision: the retinal cafeteria, the Virgin’s glare, the forest’s strobing trees, flickering fast. The air in my bedroom had the chlorinated stink of the Baths.
All weekend, my friends visited. Sometimes they were ghostly; at other times it was only their voices I heard. There was old Mr Sommer, creaking about the bedroom; Irmi alone on the pub table, not wanting to take my hand. Jenö, too, ghosting past the baker’s window, then summiting the table, declaring, ‘Everything’s forgotten!’ (Poor Walter: ‘Do you think this is it? Do you think he has feelings for me?’ and my phoney reply: ‘You’ll just have to wait.’) Charlotte pressed her cool hands to my face, and combed my hair; then she too turned to shimmer and I was once again alone. In a moment of clear thinking I wondered why no one had checked on me. It was the weekend, wasn’t it? Surely Charlotte would come soon. Surely Irmi. But then the waking dreams of the migraine would push on me once more, and I was lost, like this, for days.
Joan Miró painted The Birth of the World while he too was hallucinatory with hunger. The canvas is unevenly primed: the colours saturate some parts and fall away at others. The dark painting is all storm. When I look at The Birth of the World I see a visual reminder of the migraine after my inconclusive fast. The promised vision – that I would clasp an as yet uncomprehended truth – was gone. The fast had got me nowhere. Instead, this is what I had won from my fortnight’s labours: hallucinated friends; polluted smells, flashing lights. I was much too gone for thought. I was too gone for anything aside from the sickness which came at me in waves. All weekend I spent in bed.
All pain must end, and eventually the migraine lifted. No more flashes in my vision, and each limb again was free. I was surprisingly euphoric; I hadn’t died.
By the time I arrived at the cafeteria (it was somehow Monday) I’d put together a theory about my friends’ absences: they’d been working at the studio all weeke
nd to pay for Jenö and Walter’s fines. Even Irmi and Kaspar would have been there, joshing with Ernst Steiner and painting in the nymphs’ breasts. Love would set them hard to work. The question would not be: why did no one visit me? But: Paul, where have you been!
That morning I feasted on a delicious breakfast of porridge and coffee. My heart was gladdened to be here, waiting for the friends I loved. And then I saw her! Tricked from the air, Charlotte in trousers and blouse, walking over. She looked so carefree and happy. There was a black case swinging from her hand and I remembered: today we were to present our life drawings. I hadn’t done mine, but Itten would forgive me: the Master was good; the world beneficent; Jenö and Walter were free from trouble, and they’d make a happy couple.
And after this week, Charlotte could come back to me.
She waved as she picked up her breakfast, and Jenö came in minutes later, and Irmi and Kaspar too. Everyone was in high spirits as food was fetched and coffee poured. Charlotte told me about the celebrations on Saturday – after the Swan they’d ended up at Kaspar’s girlfriend’s (I didn’t even know he had a girlfriend) until she’d chucked them out the following morning. Then they’d spent the whole day mopping the school floors (the Director’s punishment) but they’d shared a bottle of schnapps and it hadn’t been – all agreed – too bad.
Charlotte’s laughter, naked and rich, was lovely to hear. I savoured what would be. Spring was here; summer soon. We would celebrate the new warmth at the Ilm, and up in the woods, and we’d forget all about the fasted havoc of these weeks.
But breakfast too soon was finished and I saw that Charlotte and Jenö were getting ready for class. I wanted to say – hold on! Wait! All morning I’d been thinking of the best phrases to describe the sensations of the migraine – the ghosts of them in my bedroom, the blooming visions and odd smells – but now I felt like Irmi, standing on the table in the Swan, not knowing how to stop people; not knowing what it was I should say.
