Now we had enough cocaine to feed a battalion. Those parties in my bedroom were always me, Charlotte and Walter; Jenö wanted nothing to do with the coke. Out on my balcony I’d often catch Jenö walking into Dessau in the evenings. He came back late; late enough that he would have had to have been in the Metropol. He never joined us in my room, though he must have heard the party from the field below, or his room above.

Anni and Otti didn’t want to get involved either, and Franz was still squabbling with Walter. Walter and I talked well into the nights, while Charlotte coasted around the room: a medieval maiden in a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

The best thing about Walter’s parcels was that joy had returned to the Bauhaus; or at least real fun. Those nights, we committed ourselves to our pleasures. It was like we were fasting again, as if we were all part of a new communal purpose that our group – or at least our trio – shared once more. There was a sense of striving for something, or at least living through something bigger than ourselves.

Around this time I spied Jenö in the Metal Workshop, working on one of Marianne’s designs. Some time ago she had delivered a brilliant lecture about how she was getting rid of the frosted lampshade in an electric light: she would let the bulb, in all its nakedness, shine without a shade. ‘I am investigating,’ she had declared, ‘the ontology of the lamp.’

The Metal Workshop was a different place to the rest of the school. The air was full of metal filings. The stink from the room was like blood – raw and staunchly mineral – and its sounds – the moulding, boring, pressing, grinding – were foreign. I had no idea how to work its machines. That day I caught Jenö standing there, lost in thought, doing nothing, the stick of the lamp in front of him. When he saw me I knew he wanted me to talk to him, to tell him what to do about Charlotte, and the cocaine, and the private interment to which, in her narcotic fugue, she was becoming devoted. Tu was, I might have said to him. Do something. But I didn’t take a step more. He tried to talk to me but I didn’t give much ground. Somehow, this felt like punishment from an old hurt. I was blocking him out, as he had blocked me out.