by Naomi Wood
‘Right response,’ she said, as we took the stairs.
My father’s letters were steeped in memories of the past. Amongst the politics, he reminisced about the summerhouse in Obersee; our shirtless lunches there; and how my mother would adjudicate when Peter and I raced with cherries in our mouths, our lips stained black. But for my father there was nothing in between the glass lake and his new fascism: there was no bridge between.
Upstairs there were no students draped across the balconies; no laughter serrating the air; the school was nearly empty. I brought out glasses of water and we sat outside. In the winter a fringe of icicles might hang from the rooftop, flying down at terrifying speeds when the thaw came. It was a wonder no one yet had been killed. Now Charlotte shielded her eyes against the summer light. ‘I don’t know if Jenö’s coming back.’
‘Why?’
‘Just the tone of his letters. He’s done. He calls the Bauhaus “the nest”. And not in a good way.’
‘I thought about that a while ago too. Leaving.’
She looked at me quickly. ‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, with a pang: I’d never replied to Irmi’s letter. ‘I think I forgot,’ I added, laughing it off.
‘Sometimes I think Jenö might be right. Walter slept with Jenö. I stole him away. Walter told my name to the authorities. I gave his name to the Director. He did this. I did that. It’s both trivial and endless.’
‘Feelings were running high.’
‘Feelings were always running high. There’s a point at which you have to call it normal, and stop making excuses.’
‘True.’ I had said the same thing to Franz.
‘Why did we both have to love him?’
‘Bad luck?’
‘Yes. Bad luck. Let’s chalk it down to that. Do you miss him? Walter, I mean?’
I didn’t think she’d mind me telling the truth. ‘A little.’
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s all quite so painful. I thought we’d patched things up. I thought we were friends again.’
‘Everyone has bad luck, you know. You. Me. Irmi. Even Kaspar.’
‘Not Kaspar,’ she said. ‘Maybe if I read more Nietzsche I’d feel less confused.’
‘Kaspar doesn’t actually read Nietzsche. He just finds the good quotes. And he still lives with his mother. Which is another kind of luck. Do you want to go find Josef and Anni?’
‘Not really. Do you?’
‘No,’ I said.
We idled on the balcony, talking about work, and about our plans for next year; whether either of us would make it as a junior Master. Charlotte dismissed the idea for herself. ‘You will be, though,’ she said, ‘I’m sure of it.’
As we talked, I had the feeling that I was dipped in an old September day, back in Weimar, years ago, when I had tried, in the shadow-tossed cafeteria, to make sense of the inscrutable challenge of her gaze, and the privacy of her smile, and the intrigue of her self-possession, and I’d made not head nor tail of any of them, but felt on the brink of falling in love with someone I had only just met – and the way that sensation had already in that moment felt dreamlike and treasured – and how I had wanted to lead her away so that we could sleep it off, this feeling of inescapable lightness, of flight, and how I hadn’t let myself feel that in a long time.
My heart was a scrap of cloth; still, she held it in her hand.
Soon we went inside. After a while we lay on the bed. The breeze coming in was fresh, and the light was like that which fell from the cliffs at Rügen. Moths were going berserk in the open burn of the lightbulb. I could hear the click of her eyelids as she watched them. There are a few nights in my life that stand out: some, for their abjection, others, for their beauty. All night it was enough to rest my mouth behind her ear, my hand on her hip. We did nothing; which, as Walter had said, is my favourite word; but I can safely say it was one of the best nights of my life; the very best.
BERLIN, 1932
38
Berlin
After the Bauhaus, we lived in a small apartment in Kreuzberg, on the eastern side of Berlin. Minus rent, we only had about fifty marks between us, and our life was simple. When we stayed at home and economised, fifty marks was ample; most of the time we scraped through the month with very little. But for all the frigid winters with hardly a lump of coal to see us through the days, I remember these years as ones of joy. To wake in a warm bed with Charlotte Feldekova, happy and naked in my arms, our breath parachutes in the cold air, this was enough to make me think I was one of the uncommon few tipped for happiness.
Our flat was cold in the winters, and the wind came in through the floorboards, and in the mornings the leaves of the spider plant would be frozen stiff. In the summers noise bled from one apartment to the next, so you could hear the flap of Mrs Müller’s washing hanging from the windows, or her yelling at her kids, or the mass stampede of shoes down the staircase as the working day began. The noise of others’ lives always made me think of the stacked balconies of the Bauhaus, but our old school was a palace compared to this. I counted twelve families at least over the four floors of our tenement, and that wasn’t including the lodgers brought in for extra rent.
Next to our building there was a dubious hotel where twig-legged women brought men back from Kurfürstendamm. We could hear the taxis dropping them off, and the lamplighters, cupping the flame, would call out to the girls they knew in a friendly sort of way, and from behind the headboards, if I was still awake, I could hear the whirr of the lift as it dropped off the couple on the floor next to ours, and the laughter from the street transferred to the corridor; and I wondered what had been done in the mirrored space of the accelerating box. Then the lock clicked, the couple were gone, and I’d hold on to Charlotte in the deep feathered bed, warm, drowsy, her loveliness plain on the pillow, thinking: how lucky I am; how lucky, lucky, lucky.
Berlin was so grown-up. It was a hatched city of swaying telegraph wires and buildings, newspaper kiosks and rattling trams, omnibuses creeping along the Invalidenstrasse, neon signs for the cabaret, and everyone dressed very fashionably. We went to the Romanisches Cafe with the Russian intellectuals who’d fled the revolution. When we could afford it, we went to the Scala Casino, where tall men in garish make-up and sequinned ball-gowns provoked the audience, and we’d finish the night with beer and hot rolls at Aschinger’s. Aside from money, we were rich in everything.
We had converted the small nursery room into a studio, and it was where Charlotte and I painted: she took the mornings; I, the afternoons. We were careful not to intrude on each other’s time; when one was working, the other kept away. Since leaving the Bauhaus, Charlotte hadn’t touched a thread; we couldn’t afford a loom, nor did we have space for one. Now Charlotte painted her weaves on paper. They were just as beautiful painted as woven: these ash-coloured seas with a movement through them like a ripple in silk. I had asked her once if she hadn’t thought some time about using colour. She had shrugged and said no. This summer she had quit the fabric factory where she had worked for the past few years in Neukölln. Though I knew she missed the loom, and that painting onto paper was nothing like handling thread, I thought her to be happy, working away in our studio, with its modest easels and paints and the light that came in slightly greyer from the foundry.
Happily, my days were no longer formed around the waiting catastrophe of Charlotte changing her mind. Now love lived in the habits of the day, in the things we cherished: the blanket she had quilted for us, the studio easels we painted on, our simple meals and evening rituals of books, music, wine; a sausage, if we were lucky. This wasn’t the September love which had lit the month in its terrible blaze, but a love that was because of its daily repetitions, not despite them. As the days passed in churchlike slowness, our pleasures were not complex nor were they painful. Gone was Charlotte’s need to empty herself: there was no fasting, no cocaine. I shouldn’t have, but I put this down to me. Her peacefulness had been hard won. Jen
ö was a forgotten fact.
Like everyone else that winter, we had nothing. Ministers on the radio told us to live within our means, but it didn’t do much good. Men like ants were everywhere doing nothing: in patched coats, the ants did nothing in the squares, nothing in the Tiergarten, nothing in the boulevards or by the Spree, with the wind that came from all corners which made it a fine kind of misery to be out all day. Other men cried ‘Tssigars! Tssigarettes!’ as you walked from the cafes or came out of the cinema at the Tauentzienstrasse, but that was useless too, since no one had any money and the cocaine was only ever cooking salt and aspirin – this is, at least, what Kaspar told me. I made sure we never had any in the house.
Kaspar, who didn’t have a job but always did have nice things, was always producing expensive bottles of alcohol found at various girlfriends’ apartments. Irmi, too, salvaged treats from her job at the Kaiserhof. Living like this felt familiar to us: we who had lived through the antic strangeness of the Weimar years when we’d all been useless millionaires. Now that money meant something, nobody had any.
Ever since we’d left the Bauhaus I had ceased thinking much about Jenö. Indeed, I would not have thought of him at all were it not for his letter that arrived during November’s transport strike. Usually from our apartment we could hear the horns or the grinding of the streetcars rounding the corners hazardously fast. But not a bus or a tram had left the depot these last few days, and the city’s quietness made the sky bigger; the tram wires idle in the windless days. As Irmi and I had walked to the Kaiserhof we’d seen buses abandoned in the streets, and the sleepers ripped up. No gusts of warm air from the U-Bahn vents, either; only footfall and bicycles on the Möckernstrasse.
Irmi was cheerful this morning. This was a ritual we kept. I’d pick up a new tube of paint, and we’d stop for coffee or even go to a museum, if Irmi’s shift allowed it, and while Charlotte had the studio.
‘I’ve met someone,’ Irmi said, as we walked past stalled buses.
‘That’s great,’ I said, though my words had an odd emphasis.
‘You’ll never guess what he does,’ and before I had a chance to offer a suggestion, ‘He’s an insurance clerk!’
‘But that’s so glamorous!’
‘That’s what I said. Money’s so attractive these days.’ She smiled ironically. Her hair was pulled into a low pony-tail.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Teddy. His mother was American. It’s from Edward. Somehow.’
A light rain came. As we strolled down Wilhelmstrasse under a shared umbrella, Irmi explained how they’d met at Aschinger’s, through a mutual friend who had introduced her, rather embarrassingly, with her full name: Irmgard Annabel Schüpfer, and he’d said ‘Teddy’, and that despite a number of dates, she’d still yet to learn his last name, whereas he went around using her full name as much as he could. ‘He thinks I’ll stick around until I know his surname. He might be right.’
Soon we reached the Kaiserhof. Very near the Reich Chancellery, the hotel was a newish building designed to look old. (A hotel shouldn’t be the Alhambra! A train station shouldn’t be a Scottish castle!) Irmi said she had met almost every politician under the sun drinking there at the end of a long day (bar the Communists, who would only come in to make deals). With the dirt she had, she’d make a good source for any journalist.
Uniformed officials were filing in through the revolving door, and Irmi looked inside with some apprehension. ‘I thought it would be a quiet day. How did they all get here?’
‘I’m not sure these people rely on public transportation,’ I said. ‘Will I get to meet him? Teddy?’
‘We’ll see,’ she said, snapping the umbrella shut, and smiling at me like a woman in love.
Quitting the Bauhaus had been one of the best things for my work; all the time I’d spent teaching I now put into my own labours. That afternoon I came home to a blue square and pot of yellow flowers. I had spent days priming the canvas so that the paint on its surface was flat and uniform. Over the afternoon I took a palette knife and began scraping away at the different layers, so that the painting – which seemed at first concerned with the outward blossom of the petals and the stout vase – declared its surface not as decoration, but as paint. The illusion was all gone. I wasn’t completely satisfied with it, but it had kept me occupied these past weeks. Surfaces and depths; I already knew my obsessions well.
Because of the strike our flat was quieter than usual. Maybe Mrs Müller and family were sleeping away the afternoon, and there were no new customers in the brothel either, since business had to be drummed up closer to home, and no one in Kreuzberg had any money. In any case I could hear with exceptional clarity Charlotte’s footsteps later as she returned home, pausing on the landing to read whatever had come in the post.
I waited for her but she delayed, and I wondered what had held her up: maybe the letter was from her parents, whom no one had ever met, and who had never visited her; not in Weimar, not Dessau, not Berlin. They wrote so irregularly that I sometimes wondered if they even existed.
When Charlotte came in she handed over the letter directly. As soon as I saw the writing I understood it to be Jenö’s. I dropped the palette knife and wiped my hands. I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think they had corresponded at all since we’d left Dessau, when the Director had said there was no more money to pay our salaries. I skipped to the signature: there was his name. I worked backward.
Jenö’s tone was not overly personal; in fact, it was quite plain. Last month, he explained, the Bauhaus had been shut down. The Nazis had come in the middle of the day, smashing in windows, kicking in the looms, rounding up ‘Communist’ students and arranging for them several nights in jail. She might remember Franz Ehrlich, Walter’s friend? He’d been one of those in jail. A young officer had orchestrated the whole thing. (Could it have been, I wondered, Oskar?) The Director had handled it all rather wearily, and had started looking for premises elsewhere. In passing, Jenö mentioned that he’d been made a Master. I felt pleased for him and not in the slightest envious. He deserved it. He signed off with love, but also with his surname – Jenö Fiedler – so things could have been worse.
‘The Director’s brave,’ she said. ‘I wonder that he has the energy to begin again.’
It was the second time the Bauhaus had been closed down; the second time uniformed men had stormed the workshops. I felt glad that we were out of it. ‘Brave or foolish,’ I said, picking up my palette once more.
Soon the city’s noise returned again: the buses were released from the depot and the U-Bahn could be heard from the subway vents. Despite the strike a thousand men were laid off, but in better news the Nazis were down a few hundred thousand votes at the last elections. In any case I forgot about Jenö’s letter, and thought no more about him, until I was suddenly faced with him once more at Irmi’s Christmas party.
39
Berlin
Irmi’s flat was a short walk from ours, and Charlotte and I argued before setting off. She had cut her hair very short again, and continued to wear only men’s clothing. I was terrified that every time she left the apartment something terrible would happen. Our street had once teemed with children, but now it was mostly men in different shades of uniform. Invulnerable to the Prussian winds they lurked on the brownstone steps and the ironwork balconies. Mannish Charlotte would be as good a target as any Jew or Red or gypsy.
A man might be beaten in daylight on a street where there were lawyers’ offices and a police station, where snow dusted women’s expensive hair and lavish furs. Razor blades, chair legs, glass bottles: all might be used with no provocation. There were bullet holes chipped into the local cinema and hoardings splashed with blood. Men spent workless days idling for the distraction of violence: better, anyway, than selling laces or dishrags or singing for pennies at the Alexanderplatz. Sundays, really, were the worst: since church finished at eleven, and the cinema did not start till eight, and it was a good fight that filled the l
ong gap in between, and the newspapers sold whatever deathbed photographs they could get.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Charlotte said on our doorstep. ‘Wear a hooped skirt and girdle? I won’t, Paul. That’s not me.’
‘Fine. Let’s just go.’
We walked quickly. The lit Advent wreaths did nothing to lift our mood. With the streetlamps giving not much more than a fizz, at least people might think she was a man, with the ironed-in creases of her trousers and her hat hiding her face. The air that night was wet and freezing. Around us people left the cinemas, blinking at the tumbling colours. People did not look us in the eye. Nobody wanted trouble. I put out my hand to Charlotte’s and though she took it there was little promise of her speaking to me. She didn’t like being told what to do – fine – but I just wanted her to be safe. It was not a crazy thing to want.
We arrived at the party almost silent. If Irmi noticed the chill between us, she didn’t let on. Her flat was stuffed with people. Candles lit the condensation on the windows so that the world outside was nothing more than diffused light. There were bottles of colourful alcohols – ambers, emeralds, rubies, all cold and beaded (Irmi had stolen them from the Kaiserhof) – and people were drinking from jars or glasses stamped with the hotel’s logo.
Charlotte went to find a drink. Irmi kissed me on either cheek, gave me a consoling smile, and handed me someone else’s glass. ‘Let me find Teddy. I want to introduce you.’ And then Irmi disappeared too.
She had been stiff with me when Charlotte and I had first arrived in Berlin; not surprisingly. I’d forgotten to reply to her letter; I’d only just got together with Charlotte and was at the height of my obsession; in short, I’d behaved badly. But Irmi, saint that she was, forgave me.
I looked around for someone I knew, but it was Kaspar who found me. Since Weimar he had failed to age, but he had got heavier. He looked sunburned. ‘However did you get that tan?’
