by Naomi Wood
‘Everyone knows,’ I said. ‘Even Mr Steiner. Is it not wrong to keep Charlotte in the dark?’
‘She’s happy, Paul,’ Irmi said quietly, ‘I know that’s hard for you. But I’d leave her alone. It would only make things difficult.’
I let this one go. ‘I just don’t see why Walter didn’t go somewhere. He would have had a remarkable time in Berlin.’
Irmi smiled mournfully and finished her breakfast. ‘Well, yes. People are strange.’
I wondered why Irmi was frustrated with me. I didn’t dare mention Walter’s painting, since I thought this might actually end her patience altogether. I was starting to think there might be an alternative drawing under its surface. Fresco painters had often made sketches of cherubs and saints on the intonaco. Maybe there was a ghosted image underneath: a naked Jenö; a grotesque Charlotte; some clue as to what might have happened while they were all playing nice in the woods. Perhaps, as Irmi would have me believe, the performance of goodwill was real, and Walter had been trying to make amends. But I didn’t believe it. Walter was too much in love with Jenö for a hot summer to have baked that dry.
At our second-year introduction meeting I shook hands with Jenö, and gave Charlotte a kiss. Kaspar squeezed me into a cuddle. Irmi was right: his tan had depth.
Walter offered me a thin smile. ‘Sorry again, Paul. About doing your skies. It doesn’t feel very sporting. After all you did for—’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, and I was being honest; it wasn’t that that was bothering me. ‘Really.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Don’t think about it.’
Masters Kandinsky and Klee began by explaining how we would take our elective options and how we’d be working toward our diploma in a few years’ time. While Klee was speaking I noticed Charlotte had a black mark where she had held her torch last night.
The school secretary came in some way through, asking for Stefan: the Director wanted to see him. Kandinsky and Klee continued. Then she came back, asking for Masha. I heard Charlotte asking Jenö what was going on but couldn’t catch his reply. Neither Stefan nor Masha had yet returned when the secretary came back for the third time. Before she could speak Master Klee told her to take everyone she needed at once.
The secretary was dressed like one of the war widows in the square. Her mouth tightened.
‘Well?’ said Klee.
She looked around the room: the whole of the second year was squeezed in there. ‘I am to take all foreign nationals. And,’ she paused here, perhaps from discomfort, ‘people of Jewish descent or Communist membership.’
The students rose when she read out their names. I saw in the secretary’s face some pleasure as Charlotte stood; she would be glad to have netted one of Itten’s followers.
‘And us too?’ said Master Kandinsky very quietly. ‘Madam, you are looking at a Russian and a Swiss.’
‘No,’ said the secretary. ‘The Director did not say anything about staff.’
During the First World War the German military had conducted a count of the Jews in the army: it was called the Judenzählung. Now we had our own census; a Bauhauszählung. After the Director’s meetings with Stefan, and Masha, and Charlotte, it filtered down to the rest of us that the Republik, a right-wing newspaper none of us read, was threatening the school with the publication of a report: a Citizens’ Survey. It would detail the names and numbers of the school’s foreigners, Jews and Communists.
The Director had got wind of the article early. It was an awful way to start the academic year, and there was a mood of siege in the school once more. It had been silly to assume the city had forgotten the incident at the Baths, just because time had passed, Mr Sommer had gone off meekly, and all the trifling payments had been made. Last night the students had advanced with their rocking lanterns burning; once again, we were now in retreat.
Charlotte said the Director didn’t know whether he could retain the same number of foreign students. The report might force him to revoke foreigners’ places, because it was German money funding places for French, Russian, American, and indeed Czechoslovak students at the Bauhaus. ‘I might be told to go,’ she said. ‘If they take away my place, I’ll have no papers.’
I couldn’t imagine the Bauhaus without Charlotte. Jenö, yes; even Walter I was prepared to see go last April. But Charlotte, in Prague? And us, continuing here, as if nothing had changed?
‘German money?’ said Kaspar. ‘There’s no such thing as German money. Who cares what it funds? It can’t fund a thing.’
‘The point is the principle, I guess.’
‘The point is,’ said Masha, ‘they don’t want to subsidise anyone who is not their own.’
‘They’re going to get rid of me,’ Charlotte said, in her rooms later, ‘they’re going to kick me out. I’m not only a foreigner, I’m linked to the Sommer case. I could be sacrificed to save the school. I don’t know what to do. I can’t live in Prague, Paul: what would I do in Prague?’
‘That won’t happen.’
She picked up a weave, the yarn falling from the warp. ‘Why would they keep me on?’
‘You have as much right to be here as anyone else.’
‘I’m not sure that’s true.’
On one wall was the green chalked portrait of Jenö, his feet prominent, his torso foreshortened. Master Itten had praised it for its mastery of perspective: Jenö sleeping, the vanishing point receding beyond the plane; as if a dove might hover there.
Now Charlotte fell onto the bed. ‘I’m a woman. A foreigner. And a weaver, of whom there are already too many, and I’m probably the worst in my class. I wouldn’t be missed.’
I remembered the false confidence I had given to Walter in the Orthodox Church, and I said nothing.
‘It’s hopeless,’ she said, and I saw the tears in her eyes leak, and neither of us said anything for a good long while. Then she sat bolt upright, and offered me her fist outstretched.
‘Close your eyes,’ she said. ‘And count.’
I remembered the hiding game, how we had played it at the river, when the world was all mine. How much I had shrunk in the months since then! I counted, and opened my eyes.
‘Sheep,’ she said. ‘Braided. Future.’
‘A weave?’
‘Smaller than that.’ Charlotte opened her hand: inside her fist was a yellow thread. ‘Yarn. If they let me stay, I’m going to have to get better at this.’
That week we kept our heads down. Walter was mostly up at the studio while the rest of us attended school meetings. There was talk that the Director was not doing enough: there were fears he would pogrom his own students; get rid of the alien within. It was no secret that he neither wanted too many women nor too many Jews, and that this might be an opportune moment to recast the school. There were petitions and letter-writing campaigns.
I spent my time making murals for the fundraising nights. We were experimenting with different shapes and colours in tension, so that they appeared like a child’s mobile gathering upon a flat plane. We painted in the hall, since none of the ateliers were big enough. Though the Director said the Survey didn’t apply to staff, I knew Kandinsky was worried he was about to be exiled to St Petersburg. Before he’d arrived at the Bauhaus I’d heard he’d not bought a new pair of shoes in eight years. Indeed, I knew Walter could still entice Mrs Kandinsky into a sale of a sketch with merely a tin of corned beef.
‘Why’s Walter not here?’ Kaspar asked, over lunch.
I wanted to tell him about the strange painting, but I didn’t know how to explain my apprehension about a horse, some chickens and a trio of girls. I wondered anyway whether Kaspar hadn’t had enough of my suspicions. Since the Bath-house he too had been distant with me, although that might have been because he had a new girl on the go. ‘There’s a commission at the studio,’ I said. ‘He’s busy with that.’
‘He’s not in trouble? With the Survey? I heard the Director wanted to speak to him.’
‘I think he�
�s just preoccupied with other things.’
Kaspar frowned. ‘I really don’t know what’s more important than this. Is something funny going on? I haven’t seen him for weeks. He’s not a Communist. His family go back centuries in Detmold. What’s he got to worry about?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, being honest. ‘I really don’t.’
‘Well, if you see him around, tell him we miss him, won’t you?’
‘I will,’ I said, but I doubted I would see him anywhere but the studio, and I had so firmly cut my ties with Mr Steiner that it was unlikely I was going to bump into him any time soon.
23
Weimar
None of us, the Director included, thought the Citizens’ Survey would bring us down altogether. Looking back, I might even be tempted to say the Survey was a brilliant move, because in the end, Weimar didn’t serve just the foreigners with their exit papers, but all of us. Though the Director had persuaded them not to print the names of the Jews and the French and the Americans and the Czechoslovaks, the numbers had been printed – and the numbers had done enough.
Shortly after the article, and in a stroke of good luck for the city, the new mark was brought in, and the Republik revised how much money – in suddenly sober terms – these Jews, foreigners and Communists were costing the country. There had been a wildness to the inflation that had let the Bauhaus flourish: if nothing had value then anything was possible. But when the new money came in, Reichswehr officers raided the school, looking, ostensibly, for Communist activity. When they didn’t find any Communists, well: the school was shut down anyway.
The day after they cancelled the old money there were people everywhere wheeling their rubbish to the dump. Up at Walter’s apartment there were trillion-mark notes snowing onto the pavement below, and Walter himself was seated on his lodging’s window as on a horse: a leg over the sill and another in the apartment, as he watched the wind carry off the cash. His silk gown revealed his stomach and the bulge of his genitals against the sill. There was a foul heaviness in the air from the florist, and the day was cool and muggy. I was surprised I’d found him. As Kaspar had said, he’d been something of a ghost since the semester began.
‘Walter! What are you doing? Stop!’
The light hitting his taped-up spectacles meant I couldn’t quite see his eyes. ‘Why?’
‘At least keep it for kindling.’
‘Ah, Pauli, ever the pragmatist.’
His landlady let me in, and the doorway to his flat was open when I’d made it up the stairs. Inside, there was mess everywhere. ‘It’s all garbage,’ he said, looking around the room. Overnight, he’d become a pauper. In his gown he looked like a figure from the Hochadel: an aristocrat’s ruination to him. ‘I can at least make you a coffee. I have,’ he said, ‘tons of the stuff.’ He came in with two small cups. ‘No milk. Sorry.’
We hadn’t really spoken since I’d seen him in the woods. I’d finished my coffee by the time I could think of something to say. ‘I haven’t seen you for a while.’
‘I’ve been busy,’ he said, packing up the stuff. ‘Baby Jesus. The Magi, et cetera.’
‘Walter,’ I said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking. I mean, us not seeing you all this time, since the Survey . . .’ I was messing this up, because I didn’t really know how it was I should say it. ‘I know that article came as a surprise.’
He tensed. I knew I was on to something, then. He stopped packing, waiting to hear what I had to say. I thought of the painting in the woods: the thrown light, the disquiet, its curious mood of intimacy and confession. I kept my focus on anything but him in the room. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘If you’re Jewish. We won’t let anything happen to you. Or Charlotte.’
He laughed, then. ‘Why would you think I’m Jewish?’
‘I thought maybe you were keeping a low profile . . . On account of being Jewish.’
‘No,’ he said, almost sadly, as if he wished he were. ‘I’m not.’
‘Kaspar said you’d been avoiding the Director—’
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m not Jewish. You don’t need to worry.’ He took the cups to the kitchen.
Poor, inscrutable friend. It had been in this room that we’d argued, and from here that he’d written those lonely letters. We picnic in the park. The light is lovely against the lake. When will you be home? Ernst is asking if he might tempt you back. I resolved not to let things ever get so bad again. We were friends, good friends, and, most importantly, we were torch-bearers together.
When Walter returned he seemed more energised. He pulled a hand through his hair. ‘Can you spare an hour? There’s so much stuff to get through.’
We packed the junk into three big suitcases and cleared most of it quickly. Just before we were about to tow it to the dump, I noticed the absent sketches. ‘Where are the Kandinskys?’
A look of guilt swept his features. ‘I traded them in.’
All the air went from me. ‘No! Walter! For what?’
‘Trillions. I couldn’t say no.’
‘What’s a trillion worth? I thought you were waiting for valuta.’
‘Uncle König didn’t come through.’
‘Who did?’
He shrugged, but I knew it had to have been Ernst Steiner. Walter would never have made this error of judgement if he’d been in his right mind. No way would he ever have sold one of those paintings for anything less than they were worth.
We walked from Walter’s apartment to the dump, and there was something funereal about our slow procession. In the city, money once again meant something, and the grey light hardened around the buildings, and the Reichswehr officers, unbeknownst to us, were readying to raid the Bauhaus a few hundred yards away. New money changed hands in the shops. Whatever we had kept in abeyance – responsibility, perhaps – was hard on our heels as we transported Walter’s scrap toward the accountable future.
Everyone else was doing the same. How smelly it all was: what people had once cherished, and would have fought over, for the chance of an egg. Walter had not, I noticed, brought Charlotte’s boggy paintings.
At the dump he rid himself of everything that had made him rich. It was then that I noticed the whistling sound as he bent to his work. I tried to work out what it was, then I realised he was sobbing. He howled, as if some lesson had pierced him, or the whole dead summer had finally broken him. I didn’t know what to do, and so I stood by, letting him weep, in the fields and fields of Weimar’s old junk.
DESSAU, 1929
24
Dessau
A hundred miles north of Weimar, our new school in Dessau was an enclosure of wall and glass. Glacial in winter’s dark fields, everything about the building was essential: white walls, windows gridded in iron; no timber to speak of. It threw off light in great profusion; to stand beside it even on a summer’s day could take tones from your skin. The building aroused in us our devotion; to enter into it was to ascend skywards: it was held only skimmingly to the world. From the outside you could see many floors at the same time, and the way people disappeared and then materialised made them appear like actors in a jump cut. Outsized on the black plains, the building was a spaceship. Within a day of its finishing it was hailed as the Director’s finest monument.
I like to think the Director had imagined his building not when he had seen the plot in Dessau, not when he had designed it at his studio desk, but when those Reichswehr officers had turned up at the school, and he had thought: enough. If the Bauhaus were to survive, it would have to get out of Weimar.
When the Director opened the school to us in 1926 – his students, his Journeymen, his Masters, and a thousand others come to celebrate – he kissed his wife’s hand so that people would not see his tears. He had not lost a single person: not Stefan, not Masha, not Charlotte; not Paul Klee nor Wassily Kandinsky. And walking into its cool laboratories of art and design, the building did seem to exempt us from all the hardness of this world.
It was before
the first snow that winter that I caught Walter heading to the Georgium Park. I watched him from my balcony, wondering if I should follow. The looseness of his stride gave him a sorrowful air. Our improbable twinness made me sensitive to his moods: Walter, after his weekend trips to Weimar to work for Ernst Steiner, could be tender and snappish, and I often questioned whether I wanted to be dragged into the remembrance of what we had lost. Weimar was a long time ago, and I had worked hard to forget it. Below the balconies his thick chestnut hair was blown about by the wind. After a while I put out my cigarette and went after him; I knew he wouldn’t begrudge the company, even if he did protest.
The Georgium Park, just next to the Bauhaus, was full of neo-classical follies, dreamt up by whoever had committed the park so irreversibly to the nineteenth century. There was a garden house that went unused, and a ducal summerhouse, flanked by two mossy maids. Presumably the statuary was to give the park an air of wealth; instead it amplified its menace. Blank-eyed sphinxes guarded the mausoleum; a one-armed goddess stared forlorn from her plinth. As you walked through the whips tangled with snowberry, these open-mouthed statues sprang from nowhere. Empty nests darkened the light-fall to the path. The snow always took longer to melt here, and when it did the River Elbe turned rich and smoky and dark. The Georgium was not at all like the Ilm.
An inlet of reeds and grasses was where the river had broken its banks, and this was where I found Walter: his shoulders slack, his mouth a line, his eyes on the water, reading into its surface some manner of trouble. Maybe he would wade into the river with rocks in his pockets and put a stop to things. Over the years he had once or twice mentioned suicide. But really I knew Walter’s life-force to be resilient: it was just sometimes he got caught in these big nets of mood and found it difficult to go on. Whereas my love for Charlotte had become an acceptable fact of everyday life, as natural but as ignorable as breathing, one felt there hadn’t been much in the way of love’s diminishment – not for Walter.
