The Hiding Game

by Naomi Wood

  ‘Do you ever wish Kaspar and Irmi were here?’ she asked as she finished her coffee.

  ‘A lot of the time, yes.’

  ‘I miss them. Kaspar the most. I always think those two kept us from the worst versions of ourselves. Irmi doesn’t work any more? Not at all? Not even in paint?’

  I shrugged. ‘She says she’s happy at the Kaiserhof.’ Irmi couldn’t afford a loom, but she said that not making art didn’t bother her. Kaspar, meanwhile, lived like a sultan in his mother’s grand apartment on Wilhelmstrasse, though he didn’t actually have two pfennigs to rub together.

  ‘She’s lucky,’ said Charlotte. ‘You know what Irmi said to me once? She said you’ll never give up on all of this, because as long as you have the Bauhaus, you’ll always love the drama. I’ve always thought that Irmi thinks she’s better than us.’

  I stood to go. ‘That might be true.’

  ‘Do you really think that?’ Charlotte said; shocked, maybe, that I disagreed.

  ‘Yes. Irmi might be better than all of us put together.’

  ‘Then what does that make us?’

  ‘Idiots. No. Worse. Idiots in alignment.’

  As she gathered her things for the walk back, I watched as a train left its platform. Destination: Berlin.

  When Walter returned a few days later, Charlotte was reading a romantic novel lying on the casement bed, while Jenö studied a Picasso monograph at my desk. We had been like this all evening, in silent companionship, getting slowly drunk on a bottle of brandy.

  When I opened the door to Walter the first thing I noticed was the shimmer in his eyes. I had assumed he would return as he always did with wet boots and misery, but this time he was feverish and excitable. He kissed me and said hello to the others. ‘Is there anything good to drink?’

  Jenö looked up. Like me, he did not much like Walter in the aftermath of Weimar. ‘Brandy.’

  I poured Walter a drink. I had no idea where we’d found such an expensive bottle, but sometimes things showed up like this.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  Charlotte turned the book over. ‘I’ve nearly finished it and I don’t even remember the title. I found it in the market.’

  ‘Schund und Schmutz?’ Walter said – which translates roughly to ‘trash and filth’. ‘Franz is a fan too, you know.’ He picked up the mail on my desk: a scantily clad woman framed by the illuminated advertisement of a cabaret. ‘Is everyone at it?’ Walter said. ‘Who’s this from?’

  ‘Take a guess.’

  Kaspar found it hilarious to send anonymous postcards to the communal postbox. ‘Paul Beckermann’ was always spelt very legibly, but he then signed it with an ‘X’, as if he was still worried about getting in trouble with the Director. There was also, in the pile, Irmi’s reply from Berlin a few days ago. Paul, Thrilled about your move to Berlin. When can I expect you? Of course you must stay with me! Walter looked at that one too, but didn’t comment. I hadn’t yet had the chance to reply.

  I took our drinks outside. The balconies were cantilevered downward, so that sometimes it felt a touch perilous to be out there. Walter launched himself against the rail, as if trying to gather momentum for a leap off it. He took a wildly big drink then tugged at his nose.

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Haven’t slept a wink. Ernst worked me hard.’ He smiled. His still-present handsomeness made me remember how alluring he’d once been. Listening to him now, however, I could hear his breath after his climb up the stairs. ‘Did you hear,’ said Walter, ‘a student once climbed the facade of the building? Swinging like an ape from balcony to balcony?’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘We would have seen it.’

  ‘It was Christmas. Everyone was gone. He found the first bit so easy he went all the way up.’

  ‘To the roof? But that’s fifteen metres! He couldn’t have done it without ropes.’

  ‘I don’t know. I look at the school and think I could do that. Scale it to the top.’

  A slow number came on the gramophone and Jenö pulled Charlotte up to dance. Though they were both garbed like stable boys, they had that shine that people of talent give off. There was always this sense that they were two people on the ascendant, but since the mausoleum I wondered whether there wasn’t something shallow about the show.

  There were other parties going on other balconies. We spent most of our nights here, getting drunk in my room (I don’t know how my bedroom had become the centre for our socialising, but it had). Sometimes we’d invite others: Josef and Anni, Otti, my students, but most often it was just us four – Jenö and Walter, me and Charlotte – dancing, drinking, dressing up in crazy costumes, painting our bodies in signs and totems. Often Charlotte would think up some weird game (even now she still wanted things to escalate) and one night we used a Ouija board, calling up the spirits of the dead, until someone spelled out all of Kaspar’s ex-girlfriends, and we’d given up.

  ‘Where’s Franz?’

  ‘Ah, Franz.’ Walter’s tongue swept his lip. ‘Honestly,’ he said, smiling at his own joke – since Ehrlich, Franz’s surname, translates to that very word – ‘the man’s flighty. Jumping from party to party without a care in the world. Plus his appetite is worse than mine. I can’t afford to keep him.’

  ‘He’s young. We were like that too.’

  ‘But one might expect more loyalty. I don’t know. He took offence. He’s gone off me.’

  Walter tugged again at his nose. ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘What did you do, Walter?’

  But Walter wouldn’t answer.

  ‘What did you and Charlotte talk about?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When Jenö and I were in the mausoleum.’

  ‘Sniffing around dead bodies.’

  ‘Sniffing around dead bodies,’ I repeated.

  ‘Oh, nothing much.’ Walter picked up a torch and swung it across the settled snow. ‘What did you two talk about?’

  ‘Me and Jenö? It was rather a frank conversation, actually. He said he’d told her about the Bath-house in Rügen. I hadn’t realised that’s what their argument had been about.’

  ‘You hadn’t? Oh, Paul, Paul: all roads lead back to Rügen.’

  ‘Yes. I see that now.’ I changed tack again. ‘What shall I wear to the Metal Ball?’

  ‘Any thoughts?’

  ‘A skyscraper? An automaton? I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I can’t think of anything original.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said, ‘I’ll think of something.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘For us. We’ll go together. We’ll be a pair. As always.’ He turned the torch beam on the swaying couple. ‘Ah, but aren’t they majestic!’

  As the song closed I saw black light begin to pool around his nose. ‘Walter!’

  ‘Oh.’ He pinched his bridge but this only made the nosebleed worse. It started dripping onto the balcony until he collected it in his glass and the brandy turned scarlet. Though I tried not to look, a warmth spread over me. I heard someone say Paul, Paul! but the world had furred. I grasped at the rail and tried to stay upright. Through a keyhole of sight I saw the glass drop from the balcony down to the snow.

  Walter’s eyes slowly met mine. The look I saw was gone so quickly there was a chance I might have mistaken it, especially with my impaired sight, but what I saw there was pleasure. ‘Whoops,’ he said, ‘hand must have slipped.’

  Quickly, the vertigo stopped, the fur receded, and the world went back to normal. ‘Walter! You could have killed someone!’

  ‘It was an accident. I haven’t slept.’

  Jenö came out to the balcony and looked down to the snow.

  ‘The blood made my hands slippery. Stupid of me.’

  ‘There could have been someone down there,’ Jenö said.

  ‘Get a tissue for your nose. It’s made my head wonky.’

  ‘I’ll get the glass,’ said Jenö. ‘Paul, you direct the beam.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Walt
er.

  ‘No,’ said Jenö, more definitively. ‘We don’t want you in more trouble.’

  Walter went inside as I waited for Jenö then I directed the torch below.

  A voice sailed out of the dark. ‘Hey! What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s fine!’ Jenö shouted to the building. ‘A mistake. Walter dropped something.’ Very carefully, using his shirt as a basket, Jenö picked up what he could of the shattered glass.

  I had done well not to faint, but I felt a fluttering in my ears, faintly suggestive of a migraine. Maybe seeing Walter’s blood like that had set something off inside me. I wouldn’t drink any more; I hardly needed a migraine.

  ‘Done!’ shouted Jenö, and I flicked off the torch. ‘Tell Charlotte,’ he said to the dark, ‘I’m going to bed.’

  Behind me I heard the scratch of the gramophone needle. I went back inside and the atmosphere had hardened. Walter was on the bed reading through Charlotte’s trashy book, his legs girlishly flicked to the ceiling, and Charlotte leapt up to greet me. ‘Pauli!’

  On my desk there were two lines of powder under the anglepoise light. Instantly I realised that this was where Walter’s nosebleed had come from: he must have spent the journey shoving coke up his nose. There was a wrap of newspaper next to the lines, springing open like a pastry.

  ‘It’s good,’ said Charlotte. ‘Really strong. Where’s Jenö?’

  ‘Gone to bed.’

  ‘That’s where Jenö Fiedler will meet his maker, you know: in bed! Do you want some?’

  ‘No,’ I said, but it was as if she hadn’t even asked. Instead she tipped more out on the table. I heard the razor blade’s secretive hammering, and then she took a thin line up her nose. Weeks ago, in Walter’s room in my pyjamas, I had wondered how much Franz and Walter had had to drink; but they hadn’t been drunk: they’d been high. That’s why they had been so bright and ready; so opinionated and combative.

  That evening Charlotte was very talkative, as they had been. It was also out of character because she rarely talked about Czechoslovakia. ‘Our nanny was such a walkover,’ Charlotte was saying. ‘Poor girl, a Slovak, I forget her name: Lara, or Larna, or Laura, or Leila, something like that. One day we tied her to the dining-room table and threw burrs into her hair and she cried when my mother brushed them out. We’d collected them all day to do this. She died of the Spanish flu when I was eight. I cried for days. My brother wailed for weeks. My parents didn’t talk about it: she was the nanny. Odd, that I can’t even remember her name.’ Charlotte lay on the floor, her eyes tranquillised and inert. ‘Where’s Jenö?’

  ‘Gone to bed.’

  ‘Oh yes. You told me that already.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  Walter was grinning as he watched us, the dried black blood flaking on his nose.

  ‘I’m perfect,’ she said, stretching into a long line, ‘just perfect.’

  30

  England

  That I could have become a painter, in fact become the most famous of my group, makes no sense to me. Even now I feel I am the one making trickster pieces, as if I operate with a gang of painters out in the woods. Still, I am only relatively famous, and even in the art world I’m not always known.

  I am of course known enough for Walter to have found me. His letters – I call them his Berlin Wall letters – are in my studio. I don’t know why I have kept them. After the news of his stroke, I reread them. Part of me thinks I should have dignified them with a response; that I was wrong to answer his disregard for Charlotte with my own for him. And, anyway, the fact that Walter is dead should mean my hatred is moot. Not getting him out of East Berlin and he not getting her out of Buchenwald; well, they are hardly comparable. A few whispered words to Ernst Steiner and he could have got her out. In those woods, he betrayed her twice.

  Irmi has not called again. She knew not to bother. After the funeral, she would have gone back to Teddy and to her side of the Wall. Jenö would have flown home to England. Walter, now, is in the ground. That gives me a pang of something. Remorse; regret; I don’t know.

  I have set up my self-portrait by Charlotte’s damaged weave, the last one she worked on before the raid. For a while I’ve painted nothing but the threads she wove, and it has helped me understand her work better: its ribbons of infinite sunlight. In the foreground my face is at a three-quarters profile. The stubble is there, the creased brow, the bald scalp that puts me in mind of Itten. (And Itten. Is he dead now, too?) The nose is smart. I’ve always thought I had a good nose.

  I wonder, though, if figurative work is the right thing to be doing, given what I’m asking it to express. Maybe that’s why I’ve lost myself in abstraction all these years. My gallerist won’t like it: it interrupts the narrative of the exile: the abstractionist Bauhäusler. That’s the story that sells: not this portraiture with the heavy oil and tight brushwork.

  But the exercise at least occupies me, and every day it gives me a little respite from my story. As I peep around the canvas corner, trying to find the right way to see myself, I think this too is the hiding game – what to show of myself, what not to show; what three words might describe the man in the mirror.

  The eyes, most importantly, are waiting to be done.

  31

  Dessau

  For Paul Klee’s fiftieth birthday, Charlotte, Anni and Otti made a life-sized papier-mâché angel. Marianne Brandt made a metal bowl; Kandinsky, a painting; and the three women made a weave. They packed all of this inside the angel’s abdomen. Jenö made brass shavings for the angel’s hair, and Walter painted her delicate features. To work all together again was wonderful: a reunion. This was before the holiday in Rügen.

  Otti, Anni and Charlotte then convinced a Junkers pilot to take them up in his plane. They must have paid him from Anni’s private fortune; her family owned several Berlin newspapers. Charlotte had never been on a plane before and neither had Otti. The pilot’s twists and turns made the women laugh and scream, but Charlotte said she hadn’t been frightened. After the floodplains of Anhalt county, she said it was as if someone had dipped all that time and space into coloured dye.

  The women asked the pilot to fly low over Klee’s lawn, then they tipped the angel from the plane, watching it break on the grass. Gift upon gift had been delivered from the air, because, as Otti had said, Paul Klee was not of the earth, but of the cosmos. Klee stood, astonished, tears streaming. ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ After the flight Charlotte’s eyes had been so bright: as if she too were one of the firmament; one of the sky.

  After Walter brought his cocaine to Dessau, this was how she looked almost all of the time. Her eyes always gave her away; their moving glitter, their liquid brightness. It didn’t matter whether it was night or day: Charlotte wasn’t awake, that February, without something in her system.

  Had I not been high myself I might have intervened, but when Walter brought back an even bigger stash from the post office I decided to help myself, just as she did, to Mr Steiner’s pavilions of cocaine. It was done before I had much time to think about it – and it would happen again and again as the nights grew colder – that I’d snort several lines up my nose. I had learnt my lesson from Weimar: one had to be part of the trouble or else be left out. There was no other way.

  In the time before the Metal Ball the cocaine was never-ending. Mr Steiner, it turned out, had a connection to a Weimar dealer who supplied the entire corps of the National Theatre, the staff at Schiller and Goethe’s houses, and the classical art school that was now housed in the old Bauhaus building. Walter said that around the studio cocaine could be had in abundance; it was the way Ernst got his men to work later and more efficiently. I wondered how long Walter had had access to it: whether, when I’d seen him at the river in January, it hadn’t been rocks in his pockets to sink himself, but all these parcels to lift him into ascendancy. Maybe that’s why he and Franz had become friends in the first place.

  Because there was no new snow Walter’s bloody-brandy bowl sta
yed like that for a while. After a heavy night I’d regard the rubied snow, and I knew it meant something more than I could construe, but what, I didn’t know, and soon enough the early light would send me clasping my roaring head, a hangover dawning. It was the memory of Walter’s eyes before the thrown glass. What was it? A sense of pleasure, maybe, or prophecy? But that look was gone just as soon as it had appeared; and in any case it had been moments away from my vision shutting down, and I couldn’t safely say what I had seen; at least, not with any certainty.

  Now we had enough cocaine to feed a battalion. Those parties in my bedroom were always me, Charlotte and Walter; Jenö wanted nothing to do with the coke. Out on my balcony I’d often catch Jenö walking into Dessau in the evenings. He came back late; late enough that he would have had to have been in the Metropol. He never joined us in my room, though he must have heard the party from the field below, or his room above.

  Anni and Otti didn’t want to get involved either, and Franz was still squabbling with Walter. Walter and I talked well into the nights, while Charlotte coasted around the room: a medieval maiden in a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

  The best thing about Walter’s parcels was that joy had returned to the Bauhaus; or at least real fun. Those nights, we committed ourselves to our pleasures. It was like we were fasting again, as if we were all part of a new communal purpose that our group – or at least our trio – shared once more. There was a sense of striving for something, or at least living through something bigger than ourselves.

  Around this time I spied Jenö in the Metal Workshop, working on one of Marianne’s designs. Some time ago she had delivered a brilliant lecture about how she was getting rid of the frosted lampshade in an electric light: she would let the bulb, in all its nakedness, shine without a shade. ‘I am investigating,’ she had declared, ‘the ontology of the lamp.’

  The Metal Workshop was a different place to the rest of the school. The air was full of metal filings. The stink from the room was like blood – raw and staunchly mineral – and its sounds – the moulding, boring, pressing, grinding – were foreign. I had no idea how to work its machines. That day I caught Jenö standing there, lost in thought, doing nothing, the stick of the lamp in front of him. When he saw me I knew he wanted me to talk to him, to tell him what to do about Charlotte, and the cocaine, and the private interment to which, in her narcotic fugue, she was becoming devoted. Tu was, I might have said to him. Do something. But I didn’t take a step more. He tried to talk to me but I didn’t give much ground. Somehow, this felt like punishment from an old hurt. I was blocking him out, as he had blocked me out.