Hard dreams, this week. Charlotte is imperilled somewhere and if I could do something then I might save her, but I cannot get up, out of bed, out of the studio. Granted, I can feel the wetness of my tears but it’s not enough to force me to act. Instead: bogs and trees; and Walter looms somewhere, a victim, an aggressor, in the pale dreamed forest.

When I wake I’m exhausted, and roam the house trying to make my dead friends quit talking to me. In the early mornings I go down to the beach to shake them off, so that the wind might blast them away. I wait for the sea to give me some answers. It doesn’t.

I watch the fishermen bring in the lobster traps. I am intrigued about their catch; I never see them pull the lobster from the pot. I wonder where they do it, and what the bright trapped thing does in the pot overnight, hitting its claws against the tin, wondering what it has come to symbolise.

37

Dessau

News from Berlin that summer was not good. Gangs were mobilising in the suburbs, a group of Communists were beaten outside a theatre. There were rumours of abductions near the Potsdam Gate. There were more Brownshirts in the Dessau beer-halls, and I saw Oskar often in town, but after Walter’s departure, he no longer talked to me. Oskar wore a different uniform now, the same as Hitler’s men. But otherwise, beyond the tracks, the school was still a separate zone of swarming light.

It was a hot summer. Naturally, the students who’d stayed behind sunned themselves on the roof, or wandered the Georgium Park, or swam in the Elbe. We caught Paul Klee walking in the gardens, ‘communing with the snakes,’ or showcasing his new Tunisian paintings, or drawing on the bridge where Charlotte had almost drowned hapless Walter. Since the Metal Ball, there was renewed moderation. No cocaine, modest drinking, niceness encouraged, nothing off; we were all well behaved. I never fell asleep in one of my classes again.

School had closed for the holidays and I decided not to make the same mistake again: Dresden did not need me. Jenö had gone home to the Munich farm. Our six was down to two.

That summer, the talkies came to town. Dessau had a cinema not far from school. This was the first time we’d ever heard a voice synchronised with the actor’s moving lips and Charlotte soon became a fixture there. She was a strange sight marching into town in her trouser suit and short-cropped hair, while other women wore dresses and showed off their tanned shoulders. She had new dark hairs on her arms and had lost almost all of her visible femininity. Most people, most of the time, thought on first meeting her that she was a man.