Discreetly I studied her. I began to predict her expressions, when we were in class, or at the cafeteria – where we always ate, our laughter high in the room, feeling bigger than everyone else. (It was well known that our six could not be separated. I don’t think we were resented for being such a tight-knit group, but I do think we were envied. People joined us sometimes for lunch or breakfast, but they didn’t come back. Perhaps we were more forbidding than we knew.)

The best was when Charlotte was studying an object very seriously, one of the materials the Master had given us, say, then would catch me looking, and her smile would turn enormous as she blinked the fringe from her eyes. ‘Oh, Pauli,’ she’d say. ‘I didn’t know you were there.’ Or the opposite: when someone – Walter, probably – had said something off (he was always able to put his foot in it with her) and she’d scowl, her lips almost disappearing.

When she dozed on my bed in the wintry, high attic light, I kept on wondering if our daughter would look like her, and then I couldn’t help adding more children to our growing family – mutti a sculptor, papa a painter; all of us hungry, poor and very happy.

To be in love is to be stricken; distraught, most of the time, but when things are going well there is the gentle rising of the soul to the top of the room. Ours was a slow game. All the best love affairs are. In the new semester, several students referred to her as my girlfriend. I could have purred.

I think Walter fell in love with Jenö about as quickly as I fell for Charlotte. But Walter was a different man to me. At some point, I don’t know when, or even whether it was conscious, I thought I’d woo Charlotte with nuance. This was the approach she took with me, and so I mirrored it. Whereas Walter! You couldn’t have found a more different man: Walter was all show. When Jenö wasn’t paying him enough attention, he would sulk and make his displeasure known, so that Irmi (with her rolling rs) would say, ‘Oh, do stop frrrrowning, Walter!’ But when Jenö was fully attentive, it was as if a thousand lamps had lit the room. And yet Jenö most often looked lost as to how he’d found himself the beloved of this tall Westphalian. I didn’t even know whether Jenö liked men or women (but how much I wanted to show my parents the audacity of a queer love affair at the Bauhaus! How much that would tremble their Dresden foundations!).