It struck me again how blunt his head was, and how hairless he was, like a baby. ‘I came about the job.’ I felt awkward. I wondered if he wanted to see my sketchpad; I’d made studies of yolky sunsets and fattened sheep. Surely he wouldn’t just let me loose without first seeing my work.

‘I thought your girlfriend had persuaded you not to come.’

‘No. I’d be glad of the money.’ I stumbled. I didn’t want to seem too mercenary. ‘And I’d like to paint.’

Mr Steiner tossed the rag and beckoned me over. The door was unlocked, and we walked up a flight. In the main studio there were men in overalls working on several different canvases: flashy oil paintings which, Mr Steiner explained, sold by the square foot to American collectors and Prussian Junkers. Sawdust was everywhere, gumming the light coming in at the windows. As we walked to his office, a couple of men – there were no women – were busy at a particularly lurid scene: slabs of childish light, crazy dappling; women baptising fat babies in the river’s golden waters.

‘Good, aren’t they?’ Mr Steiner said with a broad grin.

I didn’t know what to say. It was all broadly awful, but it did have a kitsch appeal. Inside his office there were no signs of any real art either: only files and accountancy ledgers. We might as well have been in my father’s shoe factory.

Mr Steiner opened a big notebook: inside was a sketch of a watering hole with a host of robed women getting ready to bathe. It was as tacky as anything in my parents’ house.

‘Can you come tomorrow? The courier’s coming then.’

‘But it’s not much more than a sketch!’

‘Three men overnight, then you can finish it off tomorrow. It’ll be done in no time.’

I told him I could come when he wanted, though I doubted his grounds for optimism.

‘What’s your specialism?’ he said, his eyes passing my mouth.

I wasn’t sure what to say but then opted for something a teacher had told me. ‘I’m good at light.’

‘There we are. Remind me of your last name? In fact, I’m not sure I know your Christian name, either.’

‘Paul Beckermann.’

In a long, loose hand, he wrote my name across what I already knew would be the golden sky at break of day. ‘Then all of this,’ he said, expansively, ‘is yours.’

It didn’t take long to cycle from there to the clearing. Up here I could see for miles the velvet fields of Thuringia, and the city of Weimar was laid out at my feet; the Bauhaus the last building before the city turned back to green.