One afternoon, and though we were in nothing but our swimsuits, Walter wanted to pose me and him and Irmi like the characters in Friedrich’s painting Chalk Cliffs on Rügen. Walter had borrowed Josef Albers’ camera, and put it on a timer, and then threw himself into the picture. He was playing Friedrich, who, in the painting, is on his knees, as if scrambling around for loose change. We held our pose – I was looking out to the waves while Irmi made a sorrowful half-gesture to the painter – as we waited for the flash. Finally it caught us when Walter was just about to see if it was working – hence he is so blurred – and then we disbanded once we’d heard the pop. (In the Dessau dark room we watched the picture’s development: Irmi cocking a hip, offering a fading smile; Walter, slightly blurred; while I looked like I simply wanted to put on more clothes. In the distance there was a deathly sailboat, which fitted the original completely. It was only then did I realise that the framing of the tree had caught Irmi and me in a love heart.)

After the shot, Walter fiddled with the camera while Irmi and I stood watching the view, with the warm pine needles under our feet, and the sailboat already gone, as if it had never been there. I was conscious that she had spent a good deal of the holiday in observation of us both. ‘You should come to Berlin,’ she said. ‘It’d do you good.’

‘My life’s at the Bauhaus.’

‘Is it?’ she asked.

On the train home the weather turned. Irmi and Kaspar said goodbye to us at Friedrichstrasse Station. Jenö and Charlotte weren’t speaking to each other after an argument outside the spa in Binz. Once we reached the Bauhaus, they went to their separate rooms without a word.

While Walter was in Weimar that weekend I thought about Irmi’s Berlin idea. Maybe she was right, and a change of scene might do me good. I thought about how I had felt yesterday in the mausoleum: that our home wasn’t a school but an asylum. Since collecting her diploma, Irmi often said the Bauhaus was a hotel. All I did here anyway was shadow Josef, whose abilities were so wide-ranging – in stained glass, wood, metal, stone, anything he put his hand to – that he didn’t really need a Journeyman to assist him.

And so I wrote to Irmi, saying I had thought about her advice in Rügen, and Berlin appealed. I asked her if she knew of any rooms or boarding houses close by, or whether she had one of those permissive Berliner landladies who might let me stay on her floor. I looked at my letter, not really sure whether I should send it. I signed it off: Pauli, and decided there was no harm in at least telling her how I felt.