The chill off the fast-flowing river burned the men’s cheeks. The crisp breeze swayed the grass and rustled the linden trees. The sound of the river, the wind, the earthy, wet green smell of the grass kindled childhood memories that made the men feel very far from home. All of this was in the air, a foreboding, of winter approaching, of hardship down the line.

‘When do we run?’ Johannes said. Wolfie had promised him they would.

‘Soon,’ Wolfie said. He could see the fear in the boy’s eyes. He reached out and squeezed his shoulder. ‘We’ll be all right for now.’

LOVE IS REJECTION

Earlier in the year, a young Polish artist had come to paint Aunt Margaretha’s portrait. His name was Kasimir Wieczorkowski and he’d recently been making a name for himself in Berlin. He was a serious young man, temperamental, and barely spoke to anybody in the house (he’d stayed in the room where the général was now lodged). Elisabeth von Hoffmann never saw him smile the whole time. Each day he woke late and waited for a platter of bread and cheese to be brought to his room, together with a bottle of warm beer (conditions of his accepting the commission), and then he spent a lot of time over his breakfast, almost until noon. Aunt Margaretha sat waiting for him in the study, where the light was deemed best, and looked at herself in the large mirror opposite her chair, at first practising and admiring her different poses, then slumped a little in the shoulders as she grew tired of waiting for Wieczorkowski to appear. Eventually, he would come out to work, though this didn’t involve any actual painting. Mostly, at the start, he’d just sit there, staring at Aunt Margaretha, silent and brooding.

In fact, the artist didn’t pick up a brush for a whole week. ‘You don’t know how to sit!’ he’d say, tearing up the brief pencil sketch he’d made into the smallest pieces he could manage.

Rather than paint, he fussed for hours over the way Margaretha von Hoffmann sat. He adjusted her head, her arms, her shoulders, the folding of her hands in her lap, the folds of her skirts. He snapped at her in Polish if she moved. Elisabeth was shocked by how her aunt bore his insolence, and expected any day for the artist to be thrown out into the street by Günther. But vanity has terrific qualities of endurance.

And then, at last, during the second week of his residence, he began to paint.