‘I see,’ said Lena. ‘So in your last life you must have been better than I was. Because now you’re handsome and going to be rich and I’m just …’ Heaven knows what sort of life her mother must have lived last time around.

‘No, no! It’s not that simple. Anyway, you have beauty of spirit, Lena.’

‘I think I’d rather have beauty of face.’

‘It’s your soul that matters.’

Lena became quiet as dinner went on, but Rudolf’s voice was beautiful and so were the things he said. They sounded just and uplifting.

‘I wish I hadn’t left school so young,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll never really understand all the things you talk about.’

‘That’s not true. Your education begins the day you leave that dusty building. I’ve learned ten times more since I left the Gymnasium than I ever learned while I was there. All you need is a book. Then you read another book. And the ideas that once seemed so strange begin to sound familiar.’

Lena was won back a little by what Rudolf said. Then she remembered what Sophia had told her. Was his real intention something else? Perhaps he wasn’t really thinking about the rights of workers at all.

In the course of their Friday dinners Lena learned to drink wine without the world spinning when she lay down later on her bed. She understood that the continent around them was in danger and that Germany could not be trusted. That the ordinary rules of ‘democracy’ might not apply for a time, as the ruined countries of Europe looked for ways to rebuild. That there was apparently a ‘cult’ of strong leadership, something real democracy shouldn’t need, because the people, the demos, should be strong, cratos, enough in themselves …

At the art classes, her life drawings always seemed to have awkward bits, as if the model were deformed. A woman sat for two weeks, but she was harder to draw than the market porter. Tomas told her it was difficult for Lena because she had had no teaching until then; but she was doing well, considering. Then they moved on to oil paints and Lena found the brush allowed her to suggest things the charcoal and the pencil had denied. She worked in a narrow range, not much concerned by how close her colours were to those of the real world. Figures and, in particular, faces were what she liked to do: girls with a haunted look, old men with knowledge in their eyes. She could make the clothes any colour she wanted – anything that heightened the feeling she was trying to find.

Rudolf returned to Vienna, but wrote to Lena often. He was dismissive of the existing political groups. ‘The patriotic parties are not democratic and the democratic parties are not patriotic,’ he wrote.

Lena read the sentence again and again, delighted by its clever turn. ‘None of them has any spiritual life,’ Rudolf went on. ‘We recently killed 10 million European men for reasons of survival and national power. The result has been the opposite: impoverishment. Now these politicians propose new alignments to the same ends: of empire and wealth. Have they learned nothing?’