by Naomi Wood
20
Weimar
Of course, there were times when nothing much happened. If my memory serves me well, I can’t enrich the next few weeks with much of relevance. I put in my choice for next year’s specialism, and went less and less to the studio. My argument with Walter and his cosiness with Ernst Steiner made me not want to go any more, and I left my skies to someone else.
I saw Ernst occasionally in the Swan, but he didn’t talk to me, and I was glad we didn’t have to make conversation. The end of the school year came into view. Some would stay for the Summer Exhibition; others would go. I had decided to head back to Dresden for the holidays; I couldn’t be around Charlotte and Jenö any more. I didn’t want to put on my public face every time I caught Irmi watching me, watching them, with something like – it was – pity.
Waiting for term to end, I roamed the warm city. Weimar was maddening in its prettiness: the palace, the castle, and the statues of its philosophers. But in the Bauhaus, with its aprons of cut glass, I couldn’t get any rest either.
Walter, too, became a ghost that May. Oh, one could find him easily enough: everyone in the Bauhaus knew that he was the man who could get you what you needed now that money meant nothing. But he sat elsewhere with a different crowd at the cafeteria and in class; Elena especially became his new friend. He gave her cigarettes, asking for nothing in return. I wondered if he hoped Charlotte would hear of his largesse.
At the cafeteria I would catch him looking at us. Charlotte, too, would watch him in return. She probably knew nothing of his claim to Jenö; I was sure Jenö hadn’t told her the truth. A man fainted. A man was beaten. This was still the Bath-house story.
Before term finished our choices for next year’s ateliers were pinned up at the school office. This was clever: many of the staff had already left on holiday, so there was nobody to complain to, aside from an administrator who wielded no power. Minus Walter, we all went to the Craft Building and climbed the staircase. Painted on the walls was Oskar Schlemmer’s mural of red, yellow, and blue dancing figures, making me think of a happier time when we too had been braced in all that freedom.
There were already foundation students there, running their fingers down the board to find their names under the workshops – Metal, Carpentry, Wall-painting, Weaving, Stone. It felt the same as when they had put up posters of our grades at school, and it seemed curiously retrogressive for the Bauhaus to operate like this. We looked around the boards, ducking under other people to find our names. Irmi had been admitted into her first choice of Weaving, Jenö into Metal, Kaspar into Stone, and I found Beckermann, Paul, under Wall-painting, just as I had chosen. My atelier was, unfortunately, entirely male.
Charlotte hung back. Above her a gridded window threw its shadow on the wall like a gate. I tried to find her name. She hadn’t told me her specialism, but I couldn’t find Feldekova among the German surnames. But then Irmi pointed to Charlotte’s name in the Weaving list. And when Jenö saw it, he too blanched. In the corner of my eye I saw him comfort her. Then, for the first time, I saw him kiss her. It stung, and I turned away.
‘Perhaps it’s a mistake?’ Irmi asked me, very quietly, to draw my attention from them. But it wasn’t a mistake. I knew that. What the Director was saying was clear: this was where the female students belonged.
I looked for König. Walter was in Metal: very close, of course, to Jenö Fiedler.
‘You know,’ said Irmi, as we went down the central staircase, leaving the lovers to it, ‘Walter’s staying here all summer?’
‘With them?’ Charlotte and Jenö were showing their work at the Summer Exhibition.
‘I think it is a bad idea. Don’t you? Very bad indeed. What will you do?’
‘I’m going to my parents’.’
‘You shouldn’t do that. You should come to Berlin with me and Kaspar.’
‘I’ve got a job in Dresden.’
‘I’ll find you one in Berlin.’
But I said I needed the money, and Irmi let it go.
That night Charlotte and Jenö came to my room, two pale saints knocking gravely at my door. I lied about having been asleep and poured them big drinks. I felt blurry but also generous. It was as if we were having a party, though I knew they’d come to apologise. The alcohol from the schnapps made me sit there dumbly. My suitcase was packed for Dresden: all summer I was destined for my father’s shoe factory. Better than being here – with them, in Weimar; or with Walter, at the studio.
I smiled as Charlotte explained how it had all happened out of nowhere, that this business of falling in love hadn’t been done in the week of the Bath-house, but some time after. They had come . . . Here, she stumbled. What had she come to do? I’d never admitted my love to her – it was another secret in our web – so she could not walk in here and presume I needed an apology.
Jenö took up her case: they wanted to make sure I was all right with everything that was happening, he said.
Flushed with alcohol, I put on a fine performance: smoothing away their worries with murmuring rebuttals – no, no, no, it’s fine, I am happy – kissing her cheek, shaking the square of his hand, pouring more schnapps, and there we all were: the party had begun, their love affair anointed. I heard Walter’s words – Fight for something! – even as I sat there, beneficent as a priest, with Jenö’s head nodding along to the rhythm of mine. I detested more and more his honeyed features and blond-tipped lashes; in the summer he was a creature dipped in gold. But I smiled, I drank, I watched their pretty heads. All the while I thought – go, you must go, you must leave, I cannot bear this. What if I vomit? Or take a knife to Jenö’s throat? Or what if I simply blurt out the secret of what Jenö had done to Walter? Inside I felt propelled toward a violence I’d never enact but which possessed me anyway: I wanted the cage of him to shake.
21
In the decade after the Berlin Wall went up, I received the handful of Walter’s letters which I still have to this day. They reveal very few personal details. He taught art to school kids, which had been a challenge to secure, given Charlotte had got him expelled in Dessau, and the expulsion had left him without a diploma.
He didn’t mention what had happened to Ernst Steiner; whether he still lived with him, or if he was dead, or exiled. He talked instead of his life in the East and some memories of the Bauhaus that I couldn’t recall. Then the final plea: for a ‘cultural invitation’ to England.
These letters were phrased in a stiff register that worked hard at concealing our mutual embarrassment. Apart from a drunken letter about Franz, where I could hear his old lively voice, not once did he mention what had happened to Charlotte in the camp.
I heard that the people of Weimar were marched five miles north when Buchenwald was liberated. It took days for the residents, dressed in their Sunday best, to file through the camp. It must have been the barmaid from the Swan, the attendants from the Bath-house, the guides from Goethe’s house, the new teachers at the art school with Schlemmer’s painted-over murals, traipsing along the rail track to see what had happened in Goethe’s golden forest. ‘We didn’t know,’ they said, which must have been true and also not true, in the way that horror can be acknowledged but also ignored. (Disavowal; Verleugnung.) Then there is the fact that even what is known we do not admit; that in our minds we disperse the unthinkable. It is possible to know of horror vaguely.
But Irmi’s right: I cannot judge. I was in England from 1934, and later I’d also be ignoring Walter’s letters, because I too didn’t know what to do, and ignoring him was the easiest option. Though I knew he must be suffering, that East Berlin was a prison, I simply didn’t reply.
I too looked away. It was easy.
Weimar
In tone the letters I received from Walter that summer of 1923 were the same as those he sent me after the war: polite, and very formal. I had expected Walter’s normal spleen – Charlotte was a whore, a tease, a seductress – but instead these summer letters were all restraint. He wrote that he’d bee
n seeing lots of them, and having an excellent time; that all three picnicked together in the woods; that a pool had formed in one of the clearings near Goethe’s Oak, where they could take dips to keep themselves cool.
But a liar can sniff out another liar, and my performance of goodwill toward them was mostly a sham. I wondered what was really going on: whether I’d return from Dresden to Jenö and Charlotte bludgeoned in bed (a tabloid picture of Lustmord) or whether (and perhaps it was not unthinkable for a utopia like the Bauhaus) all three of them might have simply hopped into bed together.
When I returned to Weimar in September it took me a while to track Walter down. I couldn’t find him in his rooms. He wasn’t at the second-year registration, nor was he at the party for the Bauhaus babies (the civilians of Weimar looking gravely on) and neither Irmi nor Kaspar had seen him since they had (joyously, triumphantly) returned from Berlin. Though I didn’t want to go there, I decided Walter must be hiding at the studio. It seemed like a test; that he would know the last place I’d want to look, and the first place he’d hide out, would be the woods.
I headed to the forest. The woods were so still they could have been a photograph were it not for the beating of birds’ wings as I cycled past. All that could be heard was my wheels on the forest floor, and my own thin whistle I’d nervously begun. I don’t know why but I felt panicked on going back to the studio. I thought about Walter mooning about as Charlotte von Stein (back in that magicked spring when all six of us had been together, unexploded) – but I hadn’t been there in months, and I had a feeling that Mr Steiner was angry with me for leaving without telling him why.
At the top of the hill I rested, and looked down at the city. I had forgotten the new term would start with a lantern festival to welcome the new students. The city roads were rivers of light.
When I reached the studio the door was locked. Even when there was no one there the big door normally slid open without a key; no one, after all, was going to steal a six-by-four painting of Persephone in the underworld. I still had the key and I unlocked the door. There were voices on the upper level, though I couldn’t hear Walter’s. Bizarrely a picture flashed in my mind of Walter modelling naked for the painters before him.
It was this image I had to clear as Ernst greeted me on the studio floor. ‘Pauli!’ he said, his mouth big, his small teeth numerous.
‘Hello, Mr Steiner.’
There were some men gathered around a canvas. On its reverse there’d be, I knew, patrols of doves and women. Walter wasn’t amongst the workers. If he wasn’t here, then I had run out of options, and it struck me for the first time that he might have left the Bauhaus altogether.
‘Where’ve you been hiding?’ said Mr Steiner.
‘Dresden. I went home for the summer.’
‘What’s Dresden got that Weimar hasn’t?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You missed the Great Exhibition.’
‘I know.’
‘Albert Einstein came. And Shostakovich.’
‘I heard.’
‘It was fun. Though of course it persuaded nobody that the school’s fit for purpose.’
I followed Ernst into his office. On the desk there were commissions, ledgers and newspapers, and on the walls a few paintings of an Expressionist tilt. There was also a new painting hanging above his desk: a yellow triangle, a red square, a blue circle – just like the one Kandinsky used in his seminars. ‘Didn’t know you were a fan.’
‘I bought it at the exhibition.’
‘It’s a Kandinsky?’
He nodded. ‘Collectors have rotten taste.’
‘Was it expensive?’
He tapped his nose. Though it was cool in the studio I noticed he was sweaty. I was about to ask him about Walter, but Ernst brought him up instead: ‘He’s so funny, your friend,’ he said, snapping the ledger shut.
I waited for him to elaborate but he didn’t. ‘How do you mean?’
‘He’s quite an emotional person, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
‘This Jenö fellow’s a waste of time. Still, he insists on seeing him, and that awful woman Charlotte. The Czechoslovak.’
‘He saw them a lot?’ I doubted Walter’s version of the summer, but there was no reason for Ernst to lie.
‘Oh, he was never out of their pockets! I did try to tell him it wasn’t any good.’ He snapped his jaws. ‘That’s why I swapped his shifts. I thought it would be advantageous, to keep him busy during the day. You know, not to have to see them all the time.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, alarm growing in me. ‘I mean, for looking out for him. Is he here?’
‘He’s really such a terrific painter, Pauli, you should see him go. He has this . . . this thing he does with light. He’s a genius. I owe you for bringing him to us.’
Walter appeared just then, visible through the office glass, rubbing his hands on a rag and sporting a beard.
‘And, ho! Here he is!’ Ernst shouted, walking over to him. ‘Our very own Caspar Friedrich David. What have you been doing out there? Disposing of bodies?’
Walter hadn’t seen me yet. Instead I could see he was watching whether his handsome features were having their effect on Mr Steiner. But when he clocked me his expression froze and his eyes darted over Ernst’s desk.
Mr Steiner picked up the Christmas scene which was evidently the new commission: baby Jesus sweetly sleeping, and Mary and Joseph kneeling by the crib. ‘It’s for a bank in New York.’ Names were written inside the outlines: Daniel in the faces, Hans for the fabrics, and Walter’s name, written across the sky, in the hay-bales of light. ‘Do you want me to add you, Pauli?’ He gestured to the straw manger. ‘Maybe this?’
‘No,’ I said, surprising myself.
‘No?’
He gave me some moments to reconsider.
‘I’m fine for money,’ I said, though it was untrue: the trillions I’d made in August had lost all value, and soon I’d have to beg my father for the fees again. ‘I’m concentrating on my studies.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Ernst said, and something like relief passed over Walter’s expression.
‘How long’s your shift?’ I said to him.
‘Still got a few more hours.’
‘Everything all right?’
‘Fine. Good.’
‘Do you want me to wait for you?’ I asked.
‘No, no. You go on. It’s the lantern festival.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow at school, then?’
Walter nodded. It was unlike him to be so taciturn.
‘All right. See you later.’
On my way out I went over to the painting, knowing I would find Walter’s paintwork on my skies. I don’t know why I felt upset: I knew someone would have to do my job if I didn’t show up, but I also didn’t really want it to be him.
There was, however, an altogether different surprise. The commission was a strange painting, quite beautiful. It was a field scene with a couple of heavy horses in the background. In the foreground there was a farmhouse and a trio of girls, all blazing petticoats and rosebud lips, playing with chickens. The birds’ wings were open in alarm. The field was nearly all ploughed, ready for the drop of seeds. The clouds were tissuey, and well done.
I scanned the painting, trying to find the trick of it: in the seeds thrown, the terror of the flightless birds, the horse’s moronic tread. I couldn’t work out why the painting was so unsettling. Walter had done something funny with the light. I couldn’t name its technique; couldn’t work out the painting’s code.
When I looked over Walter was still in the office. Ernst was talking to him, gesturing at the sky and the holy figures supplicant, waiting for the gift of kings. But Walter kept his eyes on me, as if he were willing me not to see what, this summer, he had buried inside the painting.
22
Weimar
The festival torches were stacked in the school foyer the following morning. There was something of the gang to them, their
blackened heads waiting for the firing squad. Several of the lanterns had been discarded overnight: a ship, a tree, an aeroplane, a car, a lipstick. In patches the lanterns had been burned brown or the heat had opened holes in the paper. I wondered which one was Charlotte’s, which Jenö’s, whether Irmi and Kaspar had been there too, while I was puzzling over that painting and the strangely anaesthetised Walter.
I breakfasted with Irmi in the cafeteria. No longer was she the bony girl last seen in Weimar. She had filled out, and had new freckles on her nose, and a bob cut at her jaw. ‘Kaspar,’ she said, ‘has led me astray. You should see him! He’s as dark as a gypsy.’
‘Did you have fun?’
‘In Berlin? It was wild. And Dresden?’
‘Not so wild.’ I laughed. ‘But it was fine. I’m now a dab hand at gluing plimsolls.’
Irmi said she’d found a summer job waiting tables at a ritzy hotel called the Kaiserhof, which served famous singers and writers and actors. Though I knew she didn’t want to talk about it, I also couldn’t resist asking her opinion. ‘I saw Walter last night at the studio. You know they spent the summer here? Together? All three of them?’
‘I heard.’
I couldn’t help myself. ‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘What do you think of that?’
She let out the air from her cheeks. ‘Well. He spent all summer with one person he hates, and one person he loves and can’t have, and pretends to be best friends with them both. It’s bizarre, but for someone like Walter, it also makes sense.’
‘Do you know what really happened at the Baths?’
‘Walter wrote to me. It was a bit of a shock, reading the details over my lunch break.’
‘Does Kaspar know?’
‘I assume so. We haven’t discussed it.’
