by Naomi Wood
‘Naughty Paul,’ she said. ‘How’d you get in?’
‘I remembered the combination. All this time and Ernst hasn’t thought to change it.’
While I piled the notebooks into the box, Charlotte rewrapped the large painting: she frowned, summarising it as awful. The light was all wrong, she said, but then, of course, she wasn’t able to see its doubleness; its lit deception. Now, I saw, this was not so much the painting’s technical fault as it was the animating reason why the landscape – with its throwaway tropes and images – was so haunting.
‘Is there something going on between Walter and his boss?’ she asked, retying the string around the painting.
‘He’s always liked Walter.’
She frowned. ‘I thought you didn’t like him very much.’
‘Ernst Steiner? I don’t. But if Walter’s happy . . .’
‘I thought something was going on between him and Franz.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It changes every week.’
Charlotte watched with interest as I fastened the buckles and slipped the numbers on the padlock. ‘Nineteen-sixteen?’
‘Nineteen. The year Mr Steiner went into business.’
‘And the Bauhaus.’
‘That’s right. Though I don’t think Ernst Steiner cares a fig for the Bauhaus. Don’t tell Walter we’ve been in here, will you? He doesn’t like people interfering with his stuff.’
‘I won’t.’ Together we pulled the box from the bed, and I checked it over, to see whether there were any tell-tale signs of our meddling; there weren’t. We looked at each other and smiled.
28
Dessau
Like Dresden, Dessau was built on floodplains. There were years in high summer when you couldn’t see the streetcar lines, when there were sandbags lining the shops, and people used makeshift boats to row down the central street. The Mulde could climb twenty feet, the Elbe several more, but it had always been an opportunity for carnival, with the factories in danger of flooding, and everyone taking it as a moment to slack off.
The Elbe today was full of moving shadows though the day was bright on the leftover snow. At the river’s banks the water was starting to ice. Walter and I were on the iron bridge, in our heavy coats and scarves. ‘Dare me to jump?’ Walter said, his eyes shining.
‘You’ll smash your ankles,’ I said. ‘Besides, you can’t swim.’
He leant on the rail. Wrinkles fanned his eyes as he looked into the sun. For some reason I fancied putting my nose into his scarf to see what he might smell like. It struck me as strange that I didn’t know this about my friend; what odour he went around with, day to day.
From the bridge we watched Charlotte and Jenö walk hand in hand towards the mausoleum, which towered over the Georgium pond. This was where men and women spent their leisured hours in the spring and summer, and where the willows trailed their branches on the water’s top. Behind them were the Masters’ houses: white cuboid structures built by the Director for his staff. I had always wondered what it might be like to be inside them: whether it might be cosy, or stark, and whether, for a joke, they might have pastoral scenes on their walls like the ones Walter would touch up tonight in Weimar.
‘You’ve lost some weight,’ I said. Maybe Franz had put him on a diet, although I couldn’t imagine fattish Franz would ever exert limits on Walter.
‘How can you tell under all these clothes?’
‘I can see your cheekbones again.’
He smiled. ‘I’ve found something in the pharmacy which suppresses my appetite.’ He bagged out the sides of his coat. ‘I don’t actually like being this heavy.’
‘What is it? A magic pill?’
‘Just a little thing Ernst picks up for me.’
‘You’ll have to tell Franz. He carries a little extra, doesn’t he?’
‘I think he always has.’
‘He seems a serious man.’
‘He’s a buffoon really. He has the most enormous appetite.’
‘That will explain it then,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The extra weight.’
‘Hmmm. Why do you think he’s so serious?’
‘I suppose I mean about work,’ I said. ‘That whole lecture about type and the will to purity. Is he always like that?’
‘The thing about Franz is that he’s an obsessive, and if you’re not, you’re a dilettante. He’s a purist. He thinks Otti’s a fake for using too much chenille. If you’re a weaver, use wool. If you’re a sculptor, use stone. If you’re a typographer, then for God’s sake make it legible.’
‘I’d like to see Otti and Franz in an argument.’
Walter rolled his eyes. ‘It would never end.’ We watched what the river’s current could drag with it. ‘I think Otti likes you.’
‘Otti Berger? Why?’
‘Because she goes into hyperinflation when she’s around you. All her facts and figures. You make her nervous.’
This was a nice thing to hear, though I wasn’t sure I believed him. Otti was the same with everyone: there was no difference between her behaviour to me or Charlotte or Anni. ‘Are you excited about seeing Ernst tonight?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his smile warm and real. ‘I think I am.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘It’s your turn. For a little sweetness.’
‘Do you think that?’
I hesitated. I was wary that I had perhaps over-promised him things in the past. ‘I want you to be happy, that’s all.’
‘Well, that means you deserve something too. I was sad nothing happened with Magdalena.’
‘What was in that box he sent you?’
‘Oh, stuff from the studio. It was too heavy for the train.’
‘What’ll you do tonight?’
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Walter blush as scarlet as he did on the snowy bridge.
‘I meant in your painting!’
‘Oh,’ he said, laughing. ‘Glades and girls. The usual. Come on, let’s catch them up.’
In the puddles the ice broke under our boots. We walked toward a trapped bar of light and reached the mausoleum: Christ in the stucco, stone bears below. We heard their footsteps first, then Charlotte and Jenö emerged around the corner.
‘I’ve never been in,’ said Charlotte, looking up at its dome.
I’d been inside in summer, and it had felt wintry even in the height of the hot weather. It would be an icebox in February.
‘Who’s in there?’
‘Goethe once came here with Charlotte von Stein,’ said Walter, who said it seriously but laughed straight afterward.
‘You and your Goethe!’
‘It was built years after he died,’ Jenö said. ‘Look.’ He found the Roman numerals. ‘Eighteen hundred—’
‘And eighty-eight,’ said Walter.
‘Ninety-eight,’ Charlotte said. ‘Mad to think the Director built the Bauhaus thirty or so years after this monstrosity.’
Jenö grinned. He warmed his hands with his breath. Putting the weight on one foot, he ran and then scaled the gate to the top. You could see in his speed how strong he was.
‘Bravo!’ Walter called. ‘But what will you do now?’
The chained door yielded a gap that was small but not impossible. Jenö put his shoulder into it and, inch by inch, he flattened himself inside. ‘Who’s going to join me?’ he said, inside.
We told our students to avoid these kinds of hi-jinks: this was exactly the kind of thing that would trick any conservative into thinking us Bauhäuslers were grave-robbing Bolsheviks. Still. I didn’t want to be the last one to volunteer, so I followed Jenö’s lead. But I was halfway in when, with some dismay, I saw that neither Charlotte nor Walter was following. ‘Aren’t you coming?’
They looked at each other. Perhaps they were both wondering what the best of the two bad options was: spend some time together or trespass into the dark. ‘You go ahead,’ said Walter, ‘I’ll keep Charlotte company.’
‘Suit yourselves.�
��
Inside, the mausoleum was freezing. There was a golden mosaic high above us in the cupola which gave the only light. ‘Echo,’ Jenö said, into the atrium, to hear his voice thrown back to him. I marvelled again that Charlotte had opted for him; this boy-child.
‘Jenö?’
There were sounds of things falling. ‘Looks like this is where the Prince keeps his garden furniture.’
I found him rifling through trowels and rakes. The smell of cut grass came off the box. I felt a strike of irrational terror: that Jenö might take one of these rakes and swing it to my skull. ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s not ours.’
In the gloom I saw him looking for the next thing to do. ‘Down here,’ he said.
We took the steps to the crypt. I followed the brightness of his hair. In the wet basement there were several tombs. In the dark I touched their lettering, trying to make out the names of those who had died, but the type was too decayed to work out who the dead had been. As I did this I realised it was the first time I’d been alone with Jenö in years. I had him, in the darkness, all to myself. I wondered what Walter would be talking about with Charlotte outside. I remembered what he had said down at the reeds – Am I the only one who has ever felt anything? And I wondered what it would be like – how it might feel – to be honest. I hadn’t been honest, not with anyone, let alone myself, for so long. ‘It’s not been easy, these past few years,’ I said. ‘With Charlotte and you and me.’
After some time, Jenö spoke, and I was surprised his voice was a little scalding. ‘It’s not always easy on the other side either.’ I hadn’t thought about this. I hadn’t thought that what they had given us, as well as what we had given them, had been a performance.
‘I know about you and Walter at the Bath-house.’
I heard his tongue on his lips. ‘It was a mistake. I still feel terrible about that night.’
‘Does Charlotte know?’
‘I told her in Rügen.’
‘Ah, I see.’ Walter had said their arguments were more frequent after our holiday there.
Jenö struck a match and the flame guttered in the wet air. He stood holding it until he couldn’t any more. ‘I saw the spa in Binz, and then felt like the time to confess. Now I think I shouldn’t have. It’s caused problems, naturally. About what she did and didn’t know. About what’s happened as a result.’
The match went out and I didn’t get to see his expression. I lit another, but by then he’d already started speaking. ‘I should have been more careful. Foolish; to have treated Walter’s feelings with so little care. I simply wanted to see what it was like. To be with another man like that – well, it was nothing more than curiosity. I apologised, but he didn’t really hear it. And by the summer it had blown over. He’d forgiven us.’
I thought of the strange September oil painting and wondered if that were true. ‘Walter said you’d told him you loved him. The autumn before. When we’d all just started.’
‘That’s not true. I never said that. I promised him nothing.’
I wondered why I would so quickly believe Jenö over my friend. ‘There’s enough promise in a body.’
‘I agree. But people make mistakes. People make mistakes with their bodies too. I have apologised, over and over. There was nothing else for me to say. Nothing else for me to do.’
The dark was so black it amplified all sound in here. I heard him lick his lips again, I heard the shifting of his body. I vaguely wondered if he might kiss me too, down here in the dark, where no one could see us, and no one would know.
‘And then Charlotte came along.’
‘Yes. And then Charlotte came along.’
Suddenly I felt revolted: that I had thought Jenö would kiss me with those lips that had kissed Walter and Charlotte; that we were such a foul merry-go-round of desires and bodies. I wondered whether Walter and Charlotte would be enjoying the same kind of heart-to-heart. Outside, the world would be rolling: the unknown trees soughing; the placid swans; perfect roads of smashed-up stones; the city waiting for its summer floods in the windblasted plains, Brownshirts crawling the city like lice; and Walter and Charlotte looking at the sky, his hatred of her like an arrow prone; not far away, the Bauhaus signifying something of worship to all of us and yet sometimes not so much a school as a cage wherein our madnesses multiplied. To think that a friend might take a club and wing it to my head! Being pent up like this: no wonder we thought such fevered things.
Irmi was right – as always. I should get out of here.
There was a crashing sound in the atrium. ‘Time to go?’
Upstairs Jenö gestured for me to go ahead of him through the narrow gap. But before I did he evidently changed his mind, and, without warning, embraced me where I stood. The moment’s intimacy – inexplicable – flushed my heart; then, just as soon, it left.
Outside, the world was bright, and Jenö and I both stood blinking off the darkness, waiting for Walter and Charlotte to materialise, but they did not. They had left without saying goodbye.
29
Dessau
Last summer, when the mark was high, we’d been able to have something of a reunion in Rügen. Our four met Kaspar and Irmi at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse Station, then we trained to the Baltic Coast and ferried to the island. Visiting Pomerania had been Walter’s idea; he wanted to see the cliffs as Caspar David Friedrich had done. Though Charlotte sniffed at the Romantic idea, we were all happy enough to spend a week on the beaches of Rügen.
At night the dead drop of the white cliffs gave an eerie feel to the place, but in the days the place took your breath away: the Baltic as clear as anything you’d find at Obersee. It was a hot summer and we all turned dark. We drank a lot and ate a lot that holiday: Riesling, bread and salty butter; baked fish and greens. In the days Charlotte and Jenö would bob about in the chalky sea, her blonde hair scraped and shaved on either side, so that she resembled a Fitzgerald hero, and the cast of the cliffs made her paler than she was. In Dessau, they were circumspect, but in Rügen they couldn’t stop touching each other.
One afternoon, and though we were in nothing but our swimsuits, Walter wanted to pose me and him and Irmi like the characters in Friedrich’s painting Chalk Cliffs on Rügen. Walter had borrowed Josef Albers’ camera, and put it on a timer, and then threw himself into the picture. He was playing Friedrich, who, in the painting, is on his knees, as if scrambling around for loose change. We held our pose – I was looking out to the waves while Irmi made a sorrowful half-gesture to the painter – as we waited for the flash. Finally it caught us when Walter was just about to see if it was working – hence he is so blurred – and then we disbanded once we’d heard the pop. (In the Dessau dark room we watched the picture’s development: Irmi cocking a hip, offering a fading smile; Walter, slightly blurred; while I looked like I simply wanted to put on more clothes. In the distance there was a deathly sailboat, which fitted the original completely. It was only then did I realise that the framing of the tree had caught Irmi and me in a love heart.)
After the shot, Walter fiddled with the camera while Irmi and I stood watching the view, with the warm pine needles under our feet, and the sailboat already gone, as if it had never been there. I was conscious that she had spent a good deal of the holiday in observation of us both. ‘You should come to Berlin,’ she said. ‘It’d do you good.’
‘My life’s at the Bauhaus.’
‘Is it?’ she asked.
On the train home the weather turned. Irmi and Kaspar said goodbye to us at Friedrichstrasse Station. Jenö and Charlotte weren’t speaking to each other after an argument outside the spa in Binz. Once we reached the Bauhaus, they went to their separate rooms without a word.
While Walter was in Weimar that weekend I thought about Irmi’s Berlin idea. Maybe she was right, and a change of scene might do me good. I thought about how I had felt yesterday in the mausoleum: that our home wasn’t a school but an asylum. Since collecting her diploma, Irmi often said the Bauhaus was a hotel.
All I did here anyway was shadow Josef, whose abilities were so wide-ranging – in stained glass, wood, metal, stone, anything he put his hand to – that he didn’t really need a Journeyman to assist him.
And so I wrote to Irmi, saying I had thought about her advice in Rügen, and Berlin appealed. I asked her if she knew of any rooms or boarding houses close by, or whether she had one of those permissive Berliner landladies who might let me stay on her floor. I looked at my letter, not really sure whether I should send it. I signed it off: Pauli, and decided there was no harm in at least telling her how I felt.
I found Charlotte on the walk from the post office, hunched in her man’s coat in the snow-spooked city. I wondered where she’d been; I so rarely saw her without her twin that at first I had assumed it was someone else altogether. Then I felt guilty about writing to Irmi. Ridiculous; I know I owed her nothing.
‘Where did you go yesterday? You left us in the mausoleum without a goodbye.’
‘Walter needed to catch his train.’
But then, I thought, it didn’t make sense that they would both leave; it was only Walter who needed to rush off. And in any case, why leave both me and Jenö quite literally in the dark? I bought her a coffee at the station cafe and myself a newspaper, and let it go. We talked about other things instead: the Metal Ball was soon, and we’d have to plan our costumes. She’d given up on trying to make an openwork weave and told me about a wall hanging she was planning, inspired by the movies, and made from real film. The Director was pushing us all toward utilitarian products that could be mass-produced, and available in every department store in Berlin, and Bonn, and Britain. Charlotte had won her diploma with a weave made with cellophane and chenille, which was hung now in a theatre at Jena, where it stopped dead the room’s acoustic reverberation. She had invented a type of soundproofing. This was how she had made weaving interesting; she had made it functional.
I told her about Kaspar’s latest exploits in Berlin; he was in love, apparently, with a Roma woman a foot taller than him.
