I found Charlotte on the walk from the post office, hunched in her man’s coat in the snow-spooked city. I wondered where she’d been; I so rarely saw her without her twin that at first I had assumed it was someone else altogether. Then I felt guilty about writing to Irmi. Ridiculous; I know I owed her nothing.

‘Where did you go yesterday? You left us in the mausoleum without a goodbye.’

‘Walter needed to catch his train.’

But then, I thought, it didn’t make sense that they would both leave; it was only Walter who needed to rush off. And in any case, why leave both me and Jenö quite literally in the dark? I bought her a coffee at the station cafe and myself a newspaper, and let it go. We talked about other things instead: the Metal Ball was soon, and we’d have to plan our costumes. She’d given up on trying to make an openwork weave and told me about a wall hanging she was planning, inspired by the movies, and made from real film. The Director was pushing us all toward utilitarian products that could be mass-produced, and available in every department store in Berlin, and Bonn, and Britain. Charlotte had won her diploma with a weave made with cellophane and chenille, which was hung now in a theatre at Jena, where it stopped dead the room’s acoustic reverberation. She had invented a type of soundproofing. This was how she had made weaving interesting; she had made it functional.

I told her about Kaspar’s latest exploits in Berlin; he was in love, apparently, with a Roma woman a foot taller than him.

‘Do you ever wish Kaspar and Irmi were here?’ she asked as she finished her coffee.

‘A lot of the time, yes.’

‘I miss them. Kaspar the most. I always think those two kept us from the worst versions of ourselves. Irmi doesn’t work any more? Not at all? Not even in paint?’

I shrugged. ‘She says she’s happy at the Kaiserhof.’ Irmi couldn’t afford a loom, but she said that not making art didn’t bother her. Kaspar, meanwhile, lived like a sultan in his mother’s grand apartment on Wilhelmstrasse, though he didn’t actually have two pfennigs to rub together.

‘She’s lucky,’ said Charlotte. ‘You know what Irmi said to me once? She said you’ll never give up on all of this, because as long as you have the Bauhaus, you’ll always love the drama. I’ve always thought that Irmi thinks she’s better than us.’

I stood to go. ‘That might be true.’

‘Do you really think that?’ Charlotte said; shocked, maybe, that I disagreed.

‘Yes. Irmi might be better than all of us put together.’

‘Then what does that make us?’

‘Idiots. No. Worse. Idiots in alignment.’