Uniformed officials were filing in through the revolving door, and Irmi looked inside with some apprehension. ‘I thought it would be a quiet day. How did they all get here?’

‘I’m not sure these people rely on public transportation,’ I said. ‘Will I get to meet him? Teddy?’

‘We’ll see,’ she said, snapping the umbrella shut, and smiling at me like a woman in love.

Quitting the Bauhaus had been one of the best things for my work; all the time I’d spent teaching I now put into my own labours. That afternoon I came home to a blue square and pot of yellow flowers. I had spent days priming the canvas so that the paint on its surface was flat and uniform. Over the afternoon I took a palette knife and began scraping away at the different layers, so that the painting – which seemed at first concerned with the outward blossom of the petals and the stout vase – declared its surface not as decoration, but as paint. The illusion was all gone. I wasn’t completely satisfied with it, but it had kept me occupied these past weeks. Surfaces and depths; I already knew my obsessions well.

Because of the strike our flat was quieter than usual. Maybe Mrs Müller and family were sleeping away the afternoon, and there were no new customers in the brothel either, since business had to be drummed up closer to home, and no one in Kreuzberg had any money. In any case I could hear with exceptional clarity Charlotte’s footsteps later as she returned home, pausing on the landing to read whatever had come in the post.

I waited for her but she delayed, and I wondered what had held her up: maybe the letter was from her parents, whom no one had ever met, and who had never visited her; not in Weimar, not Dessau, not Berlin. They wrote so irregularly that I sometimes wondered if they even existed.

When Charlotte came in she handed over the letter directly. As soon as I saw the writing I understood it to be Jenö’s. I dropped the palette knife and wiped my hands. I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think they had corresponded at all since we’d left Dessau, when the Director had said there was no more money to pay our salaries. I skipped to the signature: there was his name. I worked backward.