by Naomi Wood
I felt myself observed as I too did my watching, and a man dematerialised in the dark then formed again in the gas lamp’s reach. I thought it might be the green-eyed Nazi; I don’t know why. It was just the way he had looked at me with intent, though it hadn’t been all menace, either. He turned into the Metropol, and I walked on, somehow a little disappointed that he had not talked to me, or even approached me.
Beyond the rail tracks the Bauhaus was luminous. Outside its walls the world was in rapture. I could hear the noise from the other side of the building: the students and Journeymen would be out on their balconies until the small hours.
My bedroom was simple. A Brandt lamp lit the room, and one of Charlotte’s weaves hung above the bed. Long gone were her knotted plots of displeasure. Instead, her most recent work had a hovering beauty. Now that she had mastered the loom she was intent on extracting from it increasingly granular levels of blackness. They were very dark, her weaves, so dark that one had to search hard for bolts of lighter aluminium or graded cellophane. She called them ‘Beinahe Nichts’ – Almost Nothings. When you looked inside them it was like falling down a hole.
I began one of Itten’s breathing exercises. I still did this every so often. I thought of the couple outside the Metropol. I moved away the image of the green-eyed Nazi looking at me, but it kept on returning unbidden.
Later I changed into my pyjamas and went out on the balcony. The tip of the cigarette was the only point of colour in the wintry grounds, and though all around me was greys and whites, my brain felt newly filamented with an electricity I had assumed was all but dead. Something about the Metropol couple, or maybe even the Nazi in his uniform, had awakened in me a desire for another human being. I thought of how Jenö, very gently, had placed his brow against Charlotte’s at dinner. Such a simple thing to do. Such a small gesture of love.
I hadn’t felt desire for a long time. Over the years I had gone through nearly every woman in the Weaving Workshop: Grete; Trudi; Margaret, the American. There had been something promising with Magdalena – even talk of an engagement – but she’d said I was too distractible. In any case she broke things off when I didn’t take the next step. She had probably been right.
A voice shouted my name from a balcony above mine. ‘Paul!’
When I twisted my neck to see who it was I was surprised to find that the movement unloosed tears from my eyes.
‘Come up!’ It was Franz, waving from Walter’s balcony. He threw down a knotted sheet, as if I were a prince about to climb Rapunzel’s hair. There was more schoolboy giggling. ‘Climb up! Climb up!’ I thought about it: taking the sheet, leaping off the balcony, quitting this Arcadia altogether, but laughed instead, and told him I would take the stairs.
When the door to Walter’s room opened, it was Franz who greeted me. He had black hair, a soft jawline and a stomach at full sail. He raked the hair from his eyes. ‘Pyjamas!’ he said. ‘Wonderful!’
‘I was going to bed.’
‘Come in! Come in!’
Walter was smoking on the balcony. He tapped the ash over the railing. ‘Paul,’ he said, ‘hallo. You didn’t fancy our other method of transport?’
The knotted bed sheet still hung from the railings. I heard raised voices from the direction of Charlotte’s room. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Oh, they get like this occasionally. Ever since Rügen.’
‘Really?’
He dropped the cigarette off the balcony. ‘Did you hear the noises earlier?’
‘What noises?’
‘The wolves of Anhalt county!’ said Franz, ambling outside, his cocktail spilling. I wondered how drunk they were.
‘There aren’t any wolves in Germany. Never mind Anhalt. Are there?’ I said, suddenly doubting myself.
Franz gave a howl to the half moon. Walter laughed, then someone else on another balcony joined in, as another howl began, and another.
‘Lunacy,’ I said.
And Walter gnashed his teeth. ‘You’re not wrong.’
We went inside. There was a ruler and a compass resting on Walter’s desk; beside it, paper, ink, a fountain pen. ‘Look at this,’ said Franz, assessing the drawing. ‘All this Expressionist shit.’
Walter frowned. ‘Please, I have to hand that in tomorrow. Franz is the only person who you can rely on for a good time and yet when it comes to work he’s a beast. A wolf.’
Franz picked up Walter’s work. ‘Everything’s in disorder. The letters hook into one another. The bowls are too big, the tails have too much flourish. Where’s the baseline, Walter?’
‘I think it’s lovely,’ I said. ‘It’s more a picture than a word.’
‘It’s not even finished,’ Walter defended himself. ‘It’s not so much a type as—’
‘It’s capricious. The stress is variable. It creates confusion.’ Franz took three paces away from me. ‘Look, it’s not even legible. It’s worse than any of that old Blackletter stuff . . .’
‘What’s Blackletter?’ I asked, feeling lost.
‘A Gothic type,’ Walter said.
Franz seemed harder and more talkative than normal, but I put this down to his dismissal of Walter’s lawless homework. ‘At least Fraktur doesn’t have this terrible whiff of modernity.’
Walter addressed me. ‘Franz wants everything straight and clean. As if the type had to burn through something. Not everything needs to have such a will to purity, Mr Erlich.’
But Franz wasn’t really listening. ‘It’s not even legible. What does it even say?’
But this, Walter chose to ignore. I tried to stop the letters swimming, but couldn’t work them out. I felt like they would have meaning if only I could decipher them. Franz was fairly obsessive about work, and he wouldn’t let anyone denigrate his much beloved Print Workshop.
‘Where’ve you been all night?’ asked Walter.
‘The Lamb.’
‘On your own? The Lamb customers scare me.’
I thought about the young man in uniform and the intensity of his stare. ‘They’re not so bad. You know, if you’re discreet.’
‘I’ve never not been discreet in my life.’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘Were you going to bed so early?’
Behind him I saw Franz drop the paper.
I shrugged. ‘It’s nearly midnight.’
‘Oh,’ he flashed a look at Franz, ‘we must have lost track of time.’
‘Too busy having fun,’ said Franz, and they both burst out laughing.
I stayed for a while longer but these two, when they got going, could be their own private universe, and I lost track of what they were talking about – types, Frakturs, Blackletters – as I fell in and out of sleep on Walter’s bed, listening to the sounds of the school’s consolatory plumbing, which had the deep resonance of Dresden’s cathedral bells.
At the time, Franz didn’t seem a bad guy; just young. His place in history of course is much more ambiguous. Personally, I have never known what to make of him, nor how we should judge him. Blameless, I suppose. And yet; and yet. Had he not found himself in the same camp as Charlotte, I believe I would have forgotten him entirely, or at least remembered him only from photos, since his significance only comes after the fact: he was freed from Buchenwald, and Charlotte wasn’t.
I was surprised when Walter wrote to me, boasting he had sprung Franz from the camp and into a desk job as one of the camp’s architects. The looseness of the handwriting suggested Walter was drunk; the warmer tone, too. He had addressed the letter to Pauli, just as he used to call me. As I’ve said, the rest of his letters were stiff and circumspect.
After Walter had worked his magic, Franz designed the type for the Buchenwald gate: JEDEM DAS SEINE – to each what they are due. Three words thieved from a Bach cantata. Carmine on zinc, and to be read from the inside looking out. After that, I suppose Franz gave them what they wanted: new bunkers, new dorms. I don’t judge him on any of these counts. As Irmi reminds me: I wasn’t there. I wasn’t tested. Or
at least my test was never quite so public; my own failings (and they are numerous) are not in the historic record, not like Franz’s thirteen letters.
I often wonder whether Charlotte noticed Franz’s alphabet as she walked under its signage in 1944. The type’s Bauhaus character would have been abundantly clear. I wonder, too, if she would net the six of us in her memory and traverse those woods with us at liberty. That forest; it could give such days – skies of fluffed clouds; days dipped in gold. How we would fly on our bicycles, chasing each other down to Weimar, a city infinite in its prettiness and voluptuous in its charms, dreaming of violence elsewhere.
Now the camp is rubble, and the pain is in its stone. Goethe’s Oak is burnt; a stump. The wind whistles through Franz’s lettering on the gate.
And the trees; they stand witness.
27
Dessau
Snow came. The whole building soon turned freezing, its high ceilings doing nothing to warm us. Klee, Kandinsky and the Director all had their necks scarved and their hands gloved, even while teaching. I sat out on my balcony smoking in the mornings as long as I could take the temperature, and looking across to the other balconies, inevitably finding someone to talk to, most often Anni Albers or Otti Berger, from the Weaving Workshop. Otti was a Yugoslav weaver with soulful eyes and a crowded mouth, who was able to trick from the loom rainbows of colour. She spoke German with an accent that reminded me of Charlotte’s eastern inflections. Anni, Josef’s wife, was also a weaver. When my brother had come here he had got on very well with her, but then everybody did get on marvellously with Anni. ‘He’s such a gentle soul,’ she had said, when Peter had gone inside for a lie down. She had noticed his tremors. ‘What happened to him?’
‘Shell shock.’
‘How does he show it?’ she asked. ‘What are the signs?’
‘He’s sensitive to noise. Panics easily. He gets headaches for days, and awful nightmares. Long depressions, too.’
‘Your parents must be distraught.’
‘My parents don’t know what to do. My mother thinks it’s all her fault. My father on the other hand blames everyone he can: the Bolsheviks, the Jews, the artists; God and Bismarck too if they were contenders. The worst thing is they drive Peter crazy, but he can’t keep a job, so he’s stuck with only my mother for company.’
‘What about friends?’
‘His friends are dead. Or they’re worse than him.’
That week Anni made a beautiful weave, textures of sand and pebble, and sent it to Peter as a gift. She hung it on a branch she’d found at the Georgium: it looked as if it had been washed up from the sea. I thought of my brother often and it grieved me to see his wretchedness. I wished I could do something to help, but every time he came to the Bauhaus I saw his deep sensitivity to its loveliness, which only made him worse. Better to live with the idea that life was no good than see your fellow man find in it so many pleasures. What we could talk about were only distant memories; what he could not talk of was his life as a medical student, how he had passed the Physicum exam with top marks, his meticulously imagined Berlin doctor’s clinic. That life was gone. And the truth was, very little remained.
There were terrible storms that week and our balconies were the best places to watch the strange weather in Anhalt. The lightning strikes were prolific, and lit the snowflakes blue, and the wind so fierce that the snow appeared like tiny birds thrown this way and that. It was a wonder not much settled, but in the mornings the snow wasn’t much more than sugar, and it was gone by noon, and the day could be placid, even bright, until the weather changed again and the sky resembled a nineteenth-century painting of ships lost to the boiling sea.
I was on my balcony with my coffee and cigarette watching one of these electrical shows when there was a knocking I didn’t recognise. My first thought was that it would be Franz – he’d taken an interest in me since our night in Walter’s room and I suppose his attentions were quite flattering. But when I opened the door I saw instead a courier in uniform, and the embroidered logo on his overalls stirred my memory. There were wet patches on his shoulders where the snow had melted. His face was smooth. Without meeting my eye he said he had a delivery for Mr König.
‘His room’s upstairs.’
‘He’s not in. No one’s in. Can’t you take it?’
‘What is it?’
He gestured at the box, about a yard by a yard, and I realised the logo was from the same courier company Ernst had used. ‘All right. Leave it here.’
He asked for a signature, which for some reason I was reluctant to give. I would have preferred it if Mr Steiner had forgotten me completely, and I put down a scrawl. The courier scowled, looked at my nameplate, and printed BECKERMANN and my Christian name too, so all of my efforts anyway were for nothing.
‘Leo?’ I said, suddenly remembering.
‘No,’ he said, scowling. ‘That’s not me.’ Without a further word he pushed the box into my room and left.
Before Walter’s package was even in the room I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist peeking inside. I slipped the padlock to ‘1919’ – thinking that Mr Steiner would surely have changed the code by now – but it worked first time.
There was a burst of excitement: what could be inside? At the top was one of Charlotte’s bog paintings that neither Walter nor I had liked. I wondered why he had kept it, and why Mr Steiner had sent it. Underneath were navy ledgers, the kind that had been everywhere around the studio. Inside them were compositions, measurements and portraits of some of the painters, a few of whom I recognised.
As I went through the ledgers I began to understand how involved Walter had become in the planning of Steiner’s commissions. He’d obviously become more important than just a hired hand. No wonder the job kept on pulling him back. I hoped Ernst was paying him properly – but then Walter was one of the few Bauhaus students who was never out of pocket.
At the bottom of the box was a painting wrapped in paper and string. I undid the bows, wondering what bucolic landscape it would reveal, but what I hadn’t expected was this painting in particular. I propped it against the wardrobe to take a better look at the September image which had stayed with me so vividly over the years: perhaps because of the image, perhaps because of the shiftiness that Walter had exhibited around it. It was from the week that Walter had disappeared.
And now here it was in all its glory, lit even better by the flashes of winter storm: the gabled cottage; the blur of orange chickens; the draught horse; and the three girls playing, looking apprehensively sideways.
The years gone had given me fresh eyes and it took me only a moment now to see its trick. There’s a painting by an old Dutch master – a big Netherlandish landscape, which looks on first viewing like a normal scene of canals, narrow boats, Dutch houses, until you realise the light is pouring in from two directions. Everything is light; nothing is unlit, and it’s not the high midday sun either, but a blast from east and west. It’s an impossibility, and somehow Walter had managed to achieve this same doubleness.
It was a lovely piece. It didn’t make sense that Ernst hadn’t sold it. The paintings that didn’t sell he simply used for firewood. Maybe Walter had convinced him of its sentimental value, but I couldn’t see why: it was only the technique that made it special, not its subject, and Ernst was only ever interested in subject.
‘What’s this?’
I hadn’t noticed Charlotte in the doorway. ‘A delivery for Walter,’ I said.
‘What is it all?’
I looked at the notebooks and old paintings on my bedspread. ‘Don’t know,’ I said. The dust made me want to sneeze. We hadn’t ordinarily been allowed to leave our things at the studio. But Walter, as he was proving, had always been a different case to the rest of us. ‘Remember this?’ I said, pulling out the bog painting she’d sold for salt.
‘Oh, God!’ she said, but she was laughing. ‘Don’t remind me! It’s awful! What’s it doing here?’
‘I’ve always thought it�
��s more interesting than you ever gave it credit for.’
‘For a frog, maybe. Is there another one? Didn’t I sell him two?’
‘Maybe Walter sold it.’ I looked into the box. ‘Its twin is gone.’
Charlotte studied the marshy brushstrokes. ‘Maybe it was used as firewood. Probably the best use for it, at the time.’ There was another lightning flash that blued the room. ‘It’s odd, this weather, isn’t it?’ she said, putting down the frame.
We both wandered over to the glass, from where we had an uninterrupted view of the sky. ‘Otti said it’s something to do with weather fronts and jet streams. Warm air and cold air. She actually said the words extratropical instability.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is not a surprise.’
The thing about Otti was that despite her charm she also liked to fake her expertise on matters of which she had no idea. And, because she was a little hard of hearing, I think people were ready to listen to her for longer. I’d heard her talk at length about the Republic’s constitution, about reform in Bavaria, and wine production in Zmajevac – once, on a winter’s night, how to slaughter a pig. I asked her if she really knew how to do that, and she said, ‘We’re Jews. Of course not.’ (I wondered why I adored the sight of her crooked teeth, looking so infantile and sweet; why her smile, almost always extended a quarter-inch with a rolled-up cigarette, provoked my own.) ‘I suppose Otti knows what she’s talking about.’
‘Otti knows what she’s talking about thirty per cent of the time.’
‘As low as that!’
‘I’ll give her forty, but that’s generous.’ Another leap of lightning. ‘All the snow will be gone by tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I wish it would settle so we could do something with it.’
Behind us the bedspread was hardly visible what with all of Walter’s things. ‘Here, help me get everything into the box,’ I said. ‘I don’t want Walter to know we’ve been through it.’
