Our history, our secrets; all gone.

I imagine Charlotte on the morning of the April raid, an apron over her suit. She is working at the loom. Her expression is calm, the colours she’d finally found streaming from her; a new life ablaze. Otti is near; that’s important, I want her close to hand, so that she might give Charlotte some comfort when they are both taken away. Anni and Josef are teaching in the other workshops; Franz is studying his strident type. Maybe it is only the Director who watches the uniformed men approach: he’s the only one looking outward.

I wonder if their eyes met: Ernst and Charlotte, as he went his way around the Bauhaus workshop, pulling out the Jews, the foreigners, the Communists; just as he had done once before in words. I imagine she was looking instead at Jenö’s desk, empty since February. She must have thought of the disappeared promise of London.

Steglitz. I had seen the word on the blueprint. I had.

53

England

On Wednesday, as promised, I find Jenö outside my house. His hair is silver and his heft has gone. My gaze goes straight to his hands; I wonder if they’re still made for brawling. A lift of anger that he’s here, then I remember we are comrades again; we are both her widowers.

‘Paul,’ he says, ‘I hope it’s not a bad time.’

Odd that we are speaking English. I suppose our ruse is important; even to each other. That he should be here in person stupefies me. Charlotte’s case is against the wall. Its blackness absorbs the afternoon’s light. I wonder what’s inside. I think of Jenö’s green-chalked portrait revealed once more. I wonder how much of the past I will be able to rethink.

‘Jenö,’ I say. ‘Hello.’

Inside, I take him up to my studio. Jenö looks around, appraising. He puts the case on the floor. He wraps his army coat around him, rocks the chair with his weight. I wonder if he fought for the British. I’ll have to ask Irmi.

The case is a black heart between us.

‘Where have you been, Jenö? I looked for you when I first arrived. Mr König, the uncle’ – I cannot say Walter’s name in the undefended air between us – ‘he said he hadn’t heard from you either.’

‘I was in Newcastle for a while.’ With a little devotion he touches the bulb on the lamp. ‘Then I came back to London.’

Jenö Fiedler, loquacious as always.

I wonder whether he has seen Charlotte’s damaged yellow weave above my desk. Instead he finds a photograph from Dessau: we are on the balcony, very happy. Charlotte is trying to smile but the light makes her frown. Franz – the typographer of the gates she will walk through – is there, as is Walter. Jenö’s not in the picture; perhaps he was the one taking it.