Walter and Jenö were talking about where their siblings had been during the war. I didn’t really want to talk about my brother Peter – it was too painful and too complicated – and anyway Charlotte was distracting enough. Her bright blonde bob was cut severely along her jaw. Her blink was languorous and slow. She had lovely green eyes that made her look both serene and empty. More boy than woman, she was thin, her bones razorish at wrist and collar. She didn’t smile much.

When Walter and Jenö left to visit the city – Walter wanted to see Goethe’s house – I stayed at the table where Charlotte sat alone, finishing a green apple, which was all the more vividly coloured in proximity to her eyes.

‘You’re in Master Itten’s class,’ I said.

She blushed, but then said, ‘Aren’t we all?’

I asked if I could sit down; she gestured to the chair.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Charlotte,’ she said.

There was a trace of an accent to her German. ‘Where are you from, Charlotte?’

‘Prague. What’s yours?’ she asked. ‘Your name, I mean.’

‘Paul. Paul Beckermann.’

You can sometimes feel such an intensity of happiness that it threatens to shut you down. I wondered if my head was about to smack the table in sleep: if that was the only way to endure this blonde girl’s teeth. There is a word in German: Herzenslust. Heart’s content. I had met mine. ‘I’m going for a walk. Do you want to come?’

She smiled. Such loveliness! As I walked with her, I thought: don’t tell her you love her. Not within minutes of meeting her.

We walked to the Ilm Park and Charlotte told me of home: she had already been to Charles University in Prague, an institution approved of by her mother. Here, they copied marble busts and made drawings of the musculature of life models – as if, Charlotte said, with throwaway disdain, they were surgeons preparing to cut people open. Her parents were furious when she had transferred to the Bauhaus. They wanted her to paint family portraits; better yet, find someone good to marry. ‘My father’s still not talking to me,’ she said, as we came to the river. ‘He’s quite angry. He thought he’d already secured my future. He’s bitter really; not just angry.’

Grave girl, walking alongside me in the parkland; perhaps I should have left just then: got shot of her, and gulped down the air while I was still, that day, Lotti-less.

‘But the Bauhaus!’ she said, a touch of panic in her voice. ‘And what on earth shall we do here!’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, because in a funny way the question hadn’t really occurred to me. All I knew was that ever since I’d seen Kirchner’s Bathers at Moritzburg, I wanted to be nowhere else but here.