Every time someone new arrived the trumpeter from the Bauhaus band played a toot! and everyone laughed to see the Director, Klee and Kandinsky land on their rear ends. The staff were dressed in tin hats and steel glasses; their wives’ hair arranged with picture-rail wire, and iron wool around their shoulders like wings. But it was the students who’d really gone to town. Automata, tin men, automobiles, and most of New York City shot down the slides and then began to dance.

By the time Charlotte arrived at the party, I’d already had several goes at Ernst’s coke. She overshot the slide and landed sharply. In that moment I caught her expression unguarded: she looked around the room jealously. Jenö, big child, slid down with both legs thrust forward looking like a tin soldier in a spooned jacket. But she did not wait for him. He had to amble after her, and his boxy costume slowed him down. As the Statue of Liberty she had wrapped a green sheet around her and pinned it with a brooch. She had a torch in one hand, in the other her statute book. Her eyes were terribly unblinking, and her pupils were big. I wondered how much coke she’d already had. I don’t know why she was in such a vicious mood, but, admittedly, she could get like that sometimes.

Walter, dreamy bird, was also quite gone. He was everywhere that night, dancing with me, big Franz (who had evidently been forgiven), even Jenö, and when Walter wasn’t dancing, he was stroking his chicken feathers as if he were his own gentle pet, and the blue letters – the Lotti-line – marked his arms.

That night, I resolved not to have much to do with Charlotte. I danced instead, yanking people around the dance floor: darling Viktoria, shy Michiko. I didn’t really care. I was that kind of drunk that convinces you of your own inalienable goodwill toward others, and an astonishment that you have ever in your life bothered being unhappy. I even played on someone’s trumpet, though many people tried to make me stop. I insisted, thinking I was really good, until Walter drew me away for another line on the steps with the school sign looming over us and we shouted the word as loudly as we could: ‘bauhaus bauhaus Bauhaus!’

Otti danced with me for a time and I wondered at how beautiful she was: with her perfectly round face and dark eyes and that Slavic complexion the other girls were jealous of. Yes, I thought, as we danced: I was in love with Otti Berger – a beautiful weaver whose work streamed with colour.