We had converted the small nursery room into a studio, and it was where Charlotte and I painted: she took the mornings; I, the afternoons. We were careful not to intrude on each other’s time; when one was working, the other kept away. Since leaving the Bauhaus, Charlotte hadn’t touched a thread; we couldn’t afford a loom, nor did we have space for one. Now Charlotte painted her weaves on paper. They were just as beautiful painted as woven: these ash-coloured seas with a movement through them like a ripple in silk. I had asked her once if she hadn’t thought some time about using colour. She had shrugged and said no. This summer she had quit the fabric factory where she had worked for the past few years in Neukölln. Though I knew she missed the loom, and that painting onto paper was nothing like handling thread, I thought her to be happy, working away in our studio, with its modest easels and paints and the light that came in slightly greyer from the foundry.

Happily, my days were no longer formed around the waiting catastrophe of Charlotte changing her mind. Now love lived in the habits of the day, in the things we cherished: the blanket she had quilted for us, the studio easels we painted on, our simple meals and evening rituals of books, music, wine; a sausage, if we were lucky. This wasn’t the September love which had lit the month in its terrible blaze, but a love that was because of its daily repetitions, not despite them. As the days passed in churchlike slowness, our pleasures were not complex nor were they painful. Gone was Charlotte’s need to empty herself: there was no fasting, no cocaine. I shouldn’t have, but I put this down to me. Her peacefulness had been hard won. Jenö was a forgotten fact.

Like everyone else that winter, we had nothing. Ministers on the radio told us to live within our means, but it didn’t do much good. Men like ants were everywhere doing nothing: in patched coats, the ants did nothing in the squares, nothing in the Tiergarten, nothing in the boulevards or by the Spree, with the wind that came from all corners which made it a fine kind of misery to be out all day. Other men cried ‘Tssigars! Tssigarettes!’ as you walked from the cafes or came out of the cinema at the Tauentzienstrasse, but that was useless too, since no one had any money and the cocaine was only ever cooking salt and aspirin – this is, at least, what Kaspar told me. I made sure we never had any in the house.