by Naomi Wood
Instead I watched them from a distance as they made their way from the cafeteria, as if the distance between us was yards, a road, a city: Jenö and Charlotte, two golden creatures edged in April light. And then I saw it. (So this was my vision at last; the fast’s broken epiphany.) My goodness. It felt as if my heart was breaking. All weekend, she hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone.
17
England
An old feeling this afternoon: that if I don’t work, I’ll only brood. There’s a feeling I should do something with my hands but I don’t know what. My seaside wanderings do nothing to keep my mind from things. Since Walter died I can’t think of anything but the Bauhaus. I have had a life elsewhere – other friendships, other love affairs, several decades in my adopted country – and yet after the news of his stroke I can’t think of anything but what happened to us.
Work is the antidote; it always has been. But I also know I can’t make any more of what Irmi calls my ‘breezeblock abstractions’, and so I have decided on a self-portrait. I’ve never done one before. It will be my confession in paint: I will show myself how I really am.
For a while all I do is look in the mirror. Master Itten would be proud of me: how long I delay marking the page. Instead I use my fingers to learn the form of my face: the unshaven cheeks, the sunken eyes, the proud nose. My neck is soft, an old man’s, and I’m as bald as I ever was in Weimar. I spend a long time like this, trying to find what Master Itten called the instress; my singularity.
It is an age since I’ve worked figuratively, and it’s not unwelcome. Usually, my paintings are blocks of colours, bright as ice creams. Usually, I play with the colours’ saturations, which give, like Klee’s Bird Garden, a sense of moving transparencies. I can’t remember when my work showed this orientation toward flatness; it was after the war, in any case. (Worringer would explain my urge to abstraction as ‘an immense spiritual dread of space’, which doesn’t sound entirely wrong.) I’d even paint with a spatula. I got bored of objects and representations; even fairly unguessable ones. I guess I had finally outgrown my imitative impulse.
Over the decades, critics have noted the heat of the paintings’ colours; but to me it is the unprimed corridors that are of interest: unlit and chilly, no bleed between. They’re meant as edges you could drop off. These paintings reference Charlotte’s woven black squares, with their lightning strikes of panic, but no one knows who she is, and so they can’t read into the painting how much her absence and her influence has been left.
Sometimes these zips – I’m borrowing Barnett Newman’s phrase – are at the perimeter, at other times the white caption goes right through the mass, dry as a gone riverbed. Whatever these late works are, their spaces are all Charlotte. Beware the oncoming colour, they say; watch out where it isn’t happening.
18
Weimar
Looking back, I still fail to see when it was that Charlotte and Jenö came together during my hapless fast. Was it when I had left him in her rooms, drunk and sound asleep? Maybe he had spent the night there, and they had ended up in bed together. Was it as she chalked his green portrait, and he had reached out a hand to hers behind the canvas, and I’d caught them later, him looking dreamily to the parkland? Or maybe it had been when I’d been staring out from the luckless window at five in the morning, and I’d had that prophetic rush that things were ending; the lantern collapsed; that something odd stirred abroad; that our group, as we knew it, was over. At that point I had pushed the feeling aside, but maybe some part of me knew.
But all this is conjecture. Really, it could have been any curfewed night I’d spent alone; it could have been the weekend of the migraine. I will not know. I won’t ever know.
I had thought the fast would give me clearer sight: instead I’d only been getting blinder. Hour by hour, day by day, I failed to see what was in front of me. Charlotte and Jenö, two perfect creatures. Of course. Why wouldn’t they be together? They made sense; they made sense.
Jenö’s dalliance with Walter in the Bath-house had been nothing. In the church at dawn I had given Walter a future with Jenö that had seemed viable. And over the week, as I’d been snooping around, fancying myself a hungry detective, I had been watching Walter, when really I should have been watching them.
Walter too must have gone over these weeks, trying to work out when they had come together; or the moment, more precisely, when we had failed. We knew we had. As soon as we saw her take Jenö’s portrait from the portfolio case in Master Itten’s class that Monday morning, we both knew. Here was a man beloved.
The worst thing was that now both the future was dead and the past had to be reassessed. What promises had she given me all year? None! What love tokens? A few doodled messages, some scrawled portraits, a hand held on the banks of the Ilm. I hadn’t been kissed in the Bath-house. I didn’t even have that to resent. I didn’t even know whether I had the right to be angry. Heartbreak. Herzschmerz. What a common wretched thing it is. Most of April I spent bewildered.
Pain gathers. It hardens.
We were witness to their growing closeness in the classroom and in the cafeteria; their in-jokes and soft smiles; their conversations in the windowed light; their collaborations on new projects; their picnics in the woods. It’s not hard to see a relationship forming: their new love came off them in beams.
If I had felt left out of the secret weeks ago, it was nothing compared to this. I had a mania to find them out: I wanted to know what they were doing. I wanted to know where they were doing it. More than ever before, I wanted to be around her.
Charlotte came to see me often enough but the visits were empty; as if she had discussed with Jenö that I should be let down gradually. In any case my behaviour clipped her visits short. I hated her going but I hated her company more. My meanness that April shocked my September self, who had fallen in love with this golden girl and thought she could inspire me only to good. Charlotte tried desperately for normality, but it was a dream of how we were, and it made things worse. I could tell she checked her mood when her happiness unsettled me.
When I had arrived at the Bauhaus last September I had fashioned a future life – narrow-minded magistrate that I was – of my little Dresden wedding to my little Dresden wife. By May it all looked impossible; laughable; silly. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t, and I said nothing to her.
I had thought the future unshakeable; I was wrong.
Weimar soon lost its memory of winter. Blossom was rich in the air or else browning in the streets. In the cemetery, full of dead Walters, the tulips opened; hydrangea offered their heads. It was very dry that spring, almost no rain, and the bees in the air were fat as beans, and the birds unendingly cheerful.
Walter and I spent most of May at the studio: him, working out Sommer’s reparations; me, keeping away from the Bauhaus. As we painted nymphs at the reeds, or Alpine mountains, Walter’s pain so mirrored my own that coming to the woods after a long day at the Bauhaus was hardly the distraction I longed for. Still, sorrow made committed painters of us both.
Every morning, after our shifts, we’d go to the baker’s to exchange our gargantuan salaries for bread. We’d wait for the bakery to open (the ghost of Jenö’s regret materialising in the gas lamp) and buy a black loaf. And then, with the remoteness that was now part of Walter’s heartache, he said he’d see me later, and I wondered what he did with his mornings, when it was early and the moon was still in the sky. After a shift we used to go for a walk in the cemetery, or go for a cycle around town, but now he went off by himself. And I wondered whether he’d return to the Bath-house, to think of the promise of Jenö’s body, or whether he’d go to Charlotte’s, to see of them what he might.
That May, money turned; it ripened. It was in the butcher’s and the baker’s and the beer-hall. Money was under beds, in bicycle baskets, in wheelbarrows, in pockets, stuffed into pillowcases. It was on the roads, in cars, in fires; it made wallpaper, wrapping paper; the homeless lined their jacket
s with it when the nights for a time were cooler than usual. To push a limb into a day’s wages would see an arm or leg gone. Useless, it gathered in the gutter, in bins, in the sewers, off the river. At school we used it as material for papier-mâché towers. Soup kitchens appeared, women volunteers ladling out food to kids; men hung around the Frauenplan, waiting for something to happen outside Schiller’s house, Goethe’s house, Liszt’s house, Cranach’s house; famous men who could do nothing for them. Soon our lives were measured in the billions. That spring, Charlotte and Jenö too felt like a soaring kind of money – they could not stop their ascension even if they wanted to; even if they had tried.
19
Weimar
I found out what Walter was up to on the night we finished Mr Steiner’s last Hamburg commission. How he had been spending his melancholic mornings had been bothering me all month: I had become intensely wary of people keeping secrets.
Mr Steiner’s painting was smaller than usual and we finished it quickly: bowers and light and some comic ducks. At the end of the shift, Ernst gave Walter a funny look and told us Daniel would finish it off. They had a few private words, and I waited for Walter outside.
We cycled down from the studio as usual, stopping off at the baker’s. I expected Walter to go off, as was his normal fashion, but this morning he invited me up to his rooms for coffee.
There was a fusty smell as soon as the door was opened, and the light was dim. It was the opening of the curtains that exposed the secret of what Walter had been up to. There were bags of salt, broken chairs, vegetables and meat; a salami, even a phonograph. Here was his heartbreak, his Herzschmerz: Walter had been stockpiling.
He grinned. ‘My empire!’
‘What is all of this?’
‘I have turned into a merchant.’
My gaze went immediately to the pencil drawings propped on one shelf: both recognizable as Kandinsky’s. There were a couple of others too: boggy abstractions, which I didn’t much like. I picked up the smaller of the Kandinskys. ‘How did you get this?’
Every morning, Walter explained, after a shift at Mr Steiner’s, he’d go straight to the baker’s. From there, he’d trade the loaf for a book of matches, matches for carrots, carrots for pencils, pencils for a tin of luncheon meat, and finally he’d find one of the Masters’ wives and trade in the tin for a sketch. ‘My uncle,’ he said, ‘the art dealer in London. He’s going to get me valuta for one of these! British sterling. Can you imagine! Corned beef into a Kandinsky, then maybe into a house!’
‘You’ll never give them away,’ I said, my eye following the loveliness of Kandinsky’s line. ‘You’d rather die.’
‘Last week I read about a man in Berlin. He withdrew all his life savings – a hundred thousand marks – to buy a subway ticket. He saw the sights, went to the zoo, the palace, the Tiergarten, then locked himself in his rooms and starved himself to death. It’s a dangerous time to be alive.’
‘Not if you’re Walter König.’
On the side table there was a photograph of Walter with his mother and father, looking how he had when he’d arrived in September: bony and aristocratic. It made me realise how plump he’d grown. Maybe he was eating the stock as he went. Walter hardly ever talked about his parents, but then maybe none of us did. They were the ones we were running from.
He brought out some coffee. He’d changed out of his painter’s smock into a collarless shirt. I saw how he carried this new weight awkwardly; he still moved like a thinner man. Seated on the sofa he was framed by tins and cured meats.
‘Won’t it go off?’
‘Even rotting food is better than money.’
‘When did you do all this?’
‘The past month. I had to keep my mind on something else.’
There it was, the tacit mention of the happy couple. I let it go, not knowing what to do with it. We hadn’t yet talked about them. ‘You’ve paid off Mr Sommer then?’
‘Oh. Ernst’s money took care of that in two shifts. I owe Ernst a great deal.’ He made a dismissive gesture, and it sent irritation down me. What had happened to Sommer was grubby, and it had split the group. Irmi had distanced herself from us, preferring the company of the Three Graces, and Kaspar more and more took himself home on the weekends.
Walter waved a nearly empty bottle of vodka. Before I could answer he topped up the coffee with what was left. Unsleeping Walter, trading all day, painting all night, when did he rest? I had cycled past his curtained rooms many times, and had always assumed he’d been asleep. I had retreated into myself, while Walter had become a tsar of all things.
‘Chin, chin,’ he said, our cups clinking together.
The coffee and booze warmed me up. I looked again at the marshy paintings. ‘Whose are those?’
‘They’re Charlotte’s.’
‘Oh. Really?’ I felt bad that I didn’t like them. I stood to get a closer look: the brushwork on both was thick, as if she’d used a palette knife. Walter would have chosen this specifically, since everything, now, was measured in how much of the thing it was. I looked for her initials but couldn’t find them.
‘What did you trade them for?’
‘A bag of salt.’
‘You could have just given it to her.’
‘Do you think she deserves that? After what she did to us?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘whatever she did to us, Jenö did too.’
‘She worked on him. Between the Bath-house and the tribunal, she worked on him.’
‘Rubbish. If there’s anyone you should be angry at, it’s Jenö. He went with you, and then with her, of his own free will.’
‘No. She lured him away. Persuading him he wasn’t in love with me. Making him believe he was in love with her. It’s a treachery.’
‘No, Walter, it’s a disaster. That’s what makes it sad.’
Walter dusted the divan cushions. ‘I must have put him off quite violently.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that it’s not just her to blame. Jenö acted badly. He shouldn’t have kissed you—’
‘Kissed me! He didn’t just kiss me, Paul, we went home together.’
‘What?’
‘When you saw Jenö outside the baker’s, he was walking home from my rooms.’
I thought back to what Jenö had said in Charlotte’s room. ‘I thought he was apologising to Sommer?’
‘Old Sommer didn’t get an apology. He got money, not an apology.’
‘Fine. You slept together. You didn’t get engaged.’
‘He made me a promise! With his body.’
I didn’t know whether I believed what I had said. Charlotte had never made any such promise. We hadn’t even ever talked about our relationship, and yet still I was full of indignation.
Walter opened the window and leant out. There was a florist on the ground floor of his building, and the new air brought in a smell of lilies. When he turned his face was twisted. ‘Oh, Paul! My heart is breaking.’
‘Well,’ I said, shocked that I was being so cold, but I didn’t know why it was Walter who got to feel everything, ‘that’s the one thing you shouldn’t be surprised about.’
My tone led him back to anger. ‘Has she even apologised? For leading you one way and offering nothing the next?’
‘She didn’t lead me one way: I did it all on my own.’
‘Come on! Decency might permit her an apology. She took what she wanted without regard for anyone else. People have been hurt.’
‘Look, I don’t know what happened. They’ve fallen in love, and that may have been a mistake. I don’t think it’s as simple as just blaming Charlotte.’
‘She worked on him!’
‘Nonsense. She was helping.’
‘Think, Paul. It was her idea to pay Sommer off. There was nothing to help with; the trial was sorted from the Sunday when she first gave Sommer the money. It was just an opportunity to spend all that time with Jenö.’
‘Look, I don’t know about all th
is.’
‘You do! I’m telling you. Ask Irmi. She feels very bad for you. And she knows Charlotte hasn’t treated you right either. Ernst says the same thing.’
‘You told Ernst about all of this?’
‘Ernst knows a thing or two about heartbreak. Let me tell you that.’
‘Walter, don’t listen to Ernst.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? He has experience. He has lived.’
‘Ernst is not to be trusted. He hates the Bauhaus. Always has.’
‘Jenö’s a child,’ he said, and I wondered if these were Ernst’s words. ‘His attitudes haven’t quite left the nursery.’
Tears threatened. Poor Walter; an emperor of all things and nothing. Jenö had no need for him; Jenö was done. I remembered, then, Jenö’s expression as he had stepped over the threshold of the Swan: when he had looked to all the world like a free man with no past.
‘I can get anything; anything. But I can’t get what I want.’ Walter wiped a tear away but another came just as quickly.
‘There’s nothing we can do.’
‘Don’t you get bored,’ he spat, ‘with your own inertia?’
It was too late to get into all of this and so I said nothing.
‘Sometimes you’re so passive I think you might just implode.’
I stood and Walter leapt up too and held me by the shoulders. ‘How can you go around as if nothing has happened?’
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What would you have me do?’
‘Fight for something!’
‘There’s nothing left! We’re done. They have fallen in love!’
He let go of me. ‘I cannot accept things with your God-awful equanimity.’
‘It’s not equanimity, Walter, it’s forbearance!’
He looked at me, down to my lips. For a moment I thought he might kiss me too. ‘I would rather be me than you, Paul Beckermann, a hundred times over.’
‘What is that meant to mean?’
‘Nothing. That’s your favourite word, isn’t it?’ He fanned out his hands as if he were playing cards. ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’
