by Naomi Wood
I followed her through to the living room. I knew it wasn’t a good time, but I didn’t know when I could see Irmi next without Teddy, who always stopped me talking about either Jenö or Charlotte. ‘Have you seen Jenö since the party?’
‘Oh.’ She considered what I was saying for a good while, and then said, ‘Oh,’ again. ‘Is that where you’re going with this?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You think Charlotte sees Jenö at the Bauhaus?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Have you asked her?’
I shrugged. ‘She says she walks.’
Irmi splashed the tea into the cups. ‘Maybe it’s good for her. They say it clears the mind. Don’t for God’s sake follow her.’
‘That’s not what I was intending.’
‘I know you, Paul.’
‘I just can’t help thinking—’
She raised a hand. ‘Charlotte is with you. You have a home together. You are both very much in love. Leave her to it.’
‘What if she’s seeing him? Jenö?’
‘No,’ Irmi said with some finality. ‘I won’t be your Walter in all of this. I won’t confirm your conspiracies. Jenö’s in Berlin but Charlotte’s with you. Don’t sabotage what you have. Oh, don’t look at me like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘You’ve got everything you’ve wanted. Now you have to live with it.’
‘Thanks, Irmi.’ I stood to get my coat and scarf.
‘Oh, Paul, don’t be so sensitive.’
‘No, you’re right, I shouldn’t have said anything.’
We stood watching each other, wondering if either of us would stand down. Neither of us did. Something passed between us – I don’t know whether it was hatred, or kindness. I took my hat, and once again I left Irmi’s apartment without saying goodbye.
Even without a strike, Berlin could be quiet. You saw that in the fishermen waiting for a catch by the Spree. You could hear the wind rattling the cages of postcards for the tourists on Unter den Linden. Only in rumblings could you hear the trains come and go from Friedrichstrasse. People said, Oh, Berlin! Full of noise and traffic and so dirty. We didn’t find it like that. The arcades and boulevards could lend the city an airy openness so that it had the feel of a stockyard at night. It wasn’t all Kurfürstendamm; there was also restraint, a city that knew an old Field Marshal was still president of the Republic.
It wasn’t like this in Kreuzberg, of course. Kreuzberg was shitty compared to the main quarter and rarely quiet. It had rats and mice and a smell coming off the canal. If you tipped Kreuzberg upside down there’d be tram wires and telegraph cables and washing lines to catch it all in a dirty great net.
I hopscotched through Kreuzberg alleys – places dear to my heart – and when I arrived at our apartment (the suspicious porter giving me his daily once-over) I went straight to our studio. Work would take my mind off things; it always did.
But Charlotte had left the typewriter on the desk. On the paper she’d typed a blueprint for a weave out of the letter P and various spaces – one, two, three spaces at a time – so that it made chevrons in the intended fabric. I smiled, remembering the notes she used to give me for lunch, all the Ps coloured red. She often made blueprints for weaves. This in itself didn’t mean she was necessarily at the Bauhaus.
One of the legs was still prone, the P depressed. Perhaps this was the moment she’d left, or maybe someone had come to collect her; perhaps even Jenö. I hated the idea of him in the apartment. I held the paper so as not to disturb the leg. These black letters; what were they but little hobnails of love? (But who for? Who for?)
Next to the typewriter there was an open book where she had stickered a Paul Klee painting called Castle and Sun. Even though it was a black-and-white reproduction I could conjure easily the North African oranges and yellows that had so obsessed Klee in Dessau.
Ah; perhaps the P stood for Paul Klee, not Paul Beckermann.
I sacked off work. Instead I went in and out of the Klee book on the sofa, occasionally closing my eyes to imagine the saffron warmth of the Tunis scenes, finding I had dropped off, then coming back to the grey picture of Kreuzberg at the window. Through the foundry’s grime I watched men working on the scaffolding opposite, a boy-messenger come and go from an office’s reception, a woman working at some books. At some point there was the machine noise of a low-flying aeroplane. I thought of Charlotte, Anni and Otti flying over Klee’s house. Where was Klee now? France? Switzerland? And who lived in the Masters’ houses: how many Nazis occupied those white cubes? And here was Berlin, going to the dogs, and Charlotte was somewhere in it, and I didn’t know where. No matter how much Irmi might reassure me, that fact was going to drive me crazy.
Charlotte had always walked the city. When we had first arrived we walked it together, top to tail. After Weimar and Dessau, the metropolis was a gift. In the night-times we’d go to a club, and I’d be so worn out that, listening to the music, drinking wine, often I’d be overcome by a profound awareness of my own happiness. Under the table Charlotte would pull my hand into her trousers then push it away, smiling with her lovely dull teeth, and I’d go crazy with her smell on my fingers; telling her we had to go home now. She would say, all right, after this song, knowing the wait would twist my longing even tighter.
Surprising: how hungry she was.
We wouldn’t wait for home. Instead I’d push myself into her against the brickwork of the club’s alley where so many other couples had been before, or else she’d take me in her mouth, shielded from the road by hanging laundry. The colour would rise on her cheeks, and I’d feel for her breasts, and her eyelids fluttered as the sounds of the city surrounded us: people laughing, footsteps close, an omnibus brake released.
As we rode home the tenements outside the window were proofs that all this was real and undreamt.
Our passion was a little rank. We were always a hair’s breadth from being caught down alleys, behind a fairground ride, in the cinema. That first winter we were always fucking and never changing the bedsheets. At home everything had our rime on it: our hands, the kitchen counters, the bath-tub. Kaspar would call round to the apartment and even he – the man with multiple girlfriends – would scrunch his nose with faint disgust. I did wonder if she had been like that with Jenö. I liked to think, frail man that I was, that he couldn’t fulfil her like I could. That, I know, is ego speaking, but there we are.
That first winter after Dessau, when our rent was in arrears, both of us knew we couldn’t survive from my paintings alone. I took in some students to tutor – the Bauhaus name got us this far – and Charlotte started some shifts at a fabric factory in Neukölln. We saw much less of each other; and, because work made us tired, in the nights we fell asleep rather than made love.
Life turned a little more normal; things do. But it was those later Berlin years that I learnt who Charlotte really was, and who she was to me. She sang in the bath. It was the only time I heard her speak Czech; they were lullabies her nanny had sung to her (her old nanny – burrs in her blonde hair; dead of the Spanish flu). I learnt she had a curious habit of becoming obsessed with clubs or cafes she rated as excellent, then, just as suddenly, dismissing them as absurd. She was lively and enthusiastic, then she could be taciturn and, as Jenö had said, maddeningly private when she wanted to be. Sometimes she suffered depressions, which made her quiet for weeks, when it was all she could do to force herself to her shifts at the factory. During those times she was far away and impossible to find. We rowed, of course we did; we had arguments when sometimes we both doubted whether things would work. Then she’d pull a chestnut curl; kiss me; tell me she loved me. I was, she said, her Serious Painter.
I was dozing when Charlotte came home, shaking the sleet from her umbrella. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I lost track of time.’ She put her hat on the stand, untucked her shirt. She brought in a smell of the wood glue we’d used in the carpentry workshops. Outside the trams sliced the tracks; there were car h
orns too; in front of me, she yawned. ‘Good book?’
I put the Paul Klee back on the coffee table. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Walking.’
‘Until now?’
‘I’ve got a new idea.’
‘Go on.’
She took a large drink of her wine. ‘It’s a secret. I don’t want to jinx it.’
I put my nose to her neck. ‘What do you smell of?’ I said. ‘Marzipan, is that it?’
She batted me away. ‘Soap!’
‘Charlotte. Do you ever think of having a baby?’
‘A baby! Aren’t I too old for that?’
‘Of course not. My mother was forty when she had me.’
‘Well, I’m hardly forty!’
‘Exactly; we could try.’
She smiled. ‘A girl or boy?’
‘Both.’
‘Shouldn’t we be married first?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Let’s get married.’
‘We can’t get married in Berlin.’
‘Why not?’
‘Such a bloody stage for a wedding!’
‘Maybe in the summer, when things have quietened down?’
‘Yes. Maybe in the summer.’ And she smiled at me, and we both wondered, perhaps, how serious we were.
Attached to her shoe I noticed a woollen thread. I wondered what colour it had been; whether it had been discoloured by the dirty streets, or whether it was from her dark coat, or her black scarf; or a Bauhaus loom, where she might be making, again, her Almost Nothings.
‘A baby,’ she said, crossing her legs, so that the thread was lost. ‘What a thought.’
42
England
The beach today is packed: it’s that moment in the English calendar when holidaymakers arrive here. I suspect they are Londoners; there’s something about their delight that is metropolitan; made fresher by their remembered lives in the complex city. There’s a sunny haze to the scene: with a few brushstrokes the families could just as well water down into the misrule of the sea. (The Beach at Trouville, is that what it reminds me of? That absurd but genteel scene of Parisians come to Normandy to bathe; a painting as far away as possible from the Bathers at Moritzburg that sent me into such a frenzy aged fifteen.)
I lay on my towel. There’s heat on my skin, a warm breeze. Waves crash and retreat. Not far away there’s a couple cuddling by a windbreak. They are scandalizing the families. The woman has auburn hair which curls to her shoulders. She is all curve; hip; breast. Her boyfriend or her husband – but I suspect her boyfriend – can’t stop touching her, and it is this that is earning them the tourists’ censure. One or two caresses would be fine, but it’s the fact he won’t stop, and the woman: she luxuriates. There’s something of the Turk to her, an odalisque; you can tell her body gives her pleasure; with the breeze which she must feel playing on her pale skin.
I am happy for them. Long may they delight in each other; love each other. That’s the thing about the English: sometimes they don’t know how to spend their pleasures.
We too were like this when we were first together in Dessau. It’s hard to recall how we passed the days, since they were spent mostly making love and drowsing. But on other days we found the pickings of late summer: blackberries, sweet and sharp in our mouths; swimming the turquoise water of the Elbe; we caught silver trout, and packed them into ferns, and kept the wine cool against the stones. In the Georgium Park the green trees doubled the green of her eyes. It was impossible to think snow should ever again freeze the ground or strip the trees to branch. And it felt strange that my heart was expanding just as it felt that it should break.
To have in your possession the person who has been the object of both your desire and your misery is an unsettling thing. I had always measured my love by the intensity of my envy. Now that envy was no longer there, it was different. It felt unusual. Here was Charlotte, here was I, and here, in between us, there was nothing in our way.
That I should never have such happiness as I had that month was a certainty I did not resist: in fact, I surrendered. I was sure what we had would only last days, and when it lasted weeks I was sure it would end in months, and when it turned into months I begged that I might get a year – which is what, to my surprise, in the end, I had. Three of them. Three whole years.
Perhaps I might even have had more.
It’s my fault that I lost her in Berlin. Not Walter’s. I underestimated the dangers. No one – not me, not Kaspar, not even Charlotte, I suppose – thought things would get so bad. And yet. And yet. The black wing of memory brushes against me.
I look over to the couple. They have gone, and I know where: home to bed. Good for them. There’s a space where their bodies were, a dip in the sand, and two neat holes where their windbreak stood.
The day is no cooler. The waves tip and rock. Squawks of children; pinkened bodies. I wonder whether we would have stayed together: whether we would have set up that family. I act like it would have been a straight trajectory. It might not have been.
I swim. It takes some time for me to be clear of the families but when I do the water is so cold it’s a brace. I kick out further then dive to where it’s darker. I stay there for as long as possible until I must shoot for breath.
Later in the day I walk the cliffs. I have never thought about jumping, but today I do; I wonder what it would be like to hit the sea at such a speed. I know it’s just this story, making me miserable. All this remembering. At least I’ll be done soon and I’ll lay all these people to rest. Winter will come; I’ll burn the self-portrait and return to my painted breezeblocks. I didn’t realise the force of my confession, and I want it to be over.
I stop where the view from the cliff is the best. I search for a patch of sea where there are no swimmers, setting it up in my mind for me to dive into. When I look at my square of pure blue sea I forget the Bauhaus: my love for Charlotte; Walter’s poison; my own sins. For moments I forget everything, until the blue rises up and I am tumbled back into the past by a wave so violent that it moves toward this solitary diver and overwhelms him where he stands.
43
Berlin
In the last weekend of January everyone stayed off the streets. Rumours of an army putsch surrounded Berlin: reports said that von Schleicher had kidnapped Hindenburg, that martial law had been proclaimed; that most of Prussia would secede. We stayed at home. The world outside was as quiet as it had been in November’s strike, and a frost each morning made the streets smoke in the first sun.
We stayed in bed, our bodies warm. Such a sweetness to have Charlotte all to myself. We listened to the radio, drank tea, ate soup with rolls, held hands while we slept. We talked about who our kids would grow up to be. To have this weekend with her – well, the putsch was a blessing. I could have shaken the hand of every general staked out on the city’s perimeter.
‘Do you know when I fell in love with you?’ she said, over lunch and a cheap bottle of red wine.
‘The night after the cinema.’
She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t then.’ Her neck was long with her haircut. ‘It was when you presented me with these sausages.’
I kissed the salt off her mouth. ‘Yesterday?’
‘No. It was when I saw you on Walter’s balcony.’ (She never mentioned Walter; never.) ‘The night he spent with the Nazi. You thought I hadn’t been watching you for long, but I’d been on Jenö’s balcony for a while. You looked so free there; free of worry, of doubt. You looked so sure of yourself. And I thought: I can’t remember feeling like that, not for a long while.’ She took a drink. Her lips were a little dirty with the wine. ‘And I thought: when did I lose Paul Beckermann? I knew it was no one’s fault but my own; that I’d thrown away what we’d had. The truth was that in Weimar I’d been in love with the both of you. But when I watched you that night—’
‘High,’ I interrupted her. ‘Knocked out of your brains.’
‘A little high, yes, but don’t spoil the story. Anyway, I had
this feeling we’d be together. That we had been apart for a long time, but we hadn’t been able to stay away from each other. We hadn’t been able to stop being friends; we couldn’t stop being in each other’s rooms, or at the Workshops. Jenö put up with it, but I think he knew. I think he just saw it as a condition of us, back then. Some part of me wonders whether he didn’t tell me what he did in Rügen because he wanted out of it. The triangle; the troika.’ She reached out and touched my hand. She almost never spoke like this, so openly, and I wondered what had brought it on; maybe it was the violence outside. ‘And I knew, as I watched you that night, that everything would be all right. That it was going to be hard, but you would always be there. That you weren’t going away.’
I remembered how she had come to my room later that night. We had lain on the bed, and I had touched her neck, and she had moved away, knowing perhaps that it was not yet the right moment.
Now she rubbed at her eyes. ‘The wine’s made me mushy. This is why we can’t drink in the day.’
As we finished our lunch I told her that as she had watched me I had watched Oskar and Walter, two men nearly fucking; and then how I’d had to creep past them, out of Walter’s room. It must have excited her – because we quickly made love again that afternoon.
After, in the January dark, as she dozed in my arms, I thought about running to Irmi’s flat to tell her I’d been wrong. She was right. She was right! Charlotte was here, she was fine, nothing was happening between her and Jenö. I wanted to tell her I was sorry we had argued. I imagined Irmi, curled up against Teddy just as Charlotte was curled up against me, watching and dreaming next to the fogged-up window, where I had days ago imagined the snapping road, the snaking river, the coming flood.
The army did not come that weekend.
Instead, on Tuesday, the unthinkable happened instead: Hitler became Chancellor. Perhaps to others, who had paid more attention, it was not as much of a surprise, but to me and Charlotte, who had spent all weekend cloistered away, it was nothing less than astonishing. We heard it first from Mrs Müller’s radio before we switched on ours. By the time the bulletin ended, Charlotte had gone very pale. ‘What’s going on?’
