Hardly anything happened that term. For a while Walter’s expulsion was a great mystery and all anyone ever talked about. I decided to say I didn’t know what had happened to him. After all the years of involuted participations in each other’s lives, this was all I wanted to say, when anyone asked me why Walter König had disappeared without saying goodbye to a soul. I don’t know, I’d say: I’ve no idea why he left. He was popular enough that people missed him, and they didn’t stop questioning me for a long time after he’d gone.

Franz, anyway, did a good job at filling in the gossip: the Director had found out about the cocaine (how he had done so was not mentioned, which was a generous gesture to Charlotte) and Walter had been expelled with no notice. Walter had left with a haversack, home to Weimar. He had been the scapegoat for the Ball. Many were thankful he’d taken all the blame.

No one had been around to see Walter go, not me, not Franz, not Jenö. Later we saw removal men (paid for by Ernst, surely) come for the rest of his things: clothes; the painting; his wheeled hat, bloody feathers still stuck to the spokes, and the crate of navy notebooks which had long kept Walter’s secret.

It wasn’t a cruelty to think that it was better he was gone. He’d always done well with his blowzy pastorals and, really, he had failed to thrive in the Print Workshop – or at least his typography, as Franz had said, was too outdated for the school’s mandate. He had always been a little too Expressionist for the school’s rationalism.

I found Franz in Walter’s bedroom some time after his expulsion. The room, which had been a mess at the best of times, had been clarified back to the Bauhaus box. ‘Walter’s career is over,’ Franz said, dressed all in black. There was a book on his lap as he sat by the desk.

‘He’s got all the work he wants at the studio.’

‘That’s not what I mean. I mean the career he actually wants. I don’t think Charlotte should have reported him for the cocaine. It wasn’t fair.’

I’d lost sight of what was and wasn’t fair, and I said nothing. I sat down on the coverlet. There was a slight discoloration where the painting had been. I thought of Oskar and Walter lying on this bed, and myself on the balcony as I had watched them. ‘Did he tell you what he did? In Weimar?’

Franz nodded. He put the penny novel on the table. It looked like one that Charlotte would have liked.

‘She could’ve been deported. It was very grave, what he did.’

‘He was in love. He was mad.’