All afternoon I spent sketching, something I hadn’t done in a while. My boarding house was on a hairpin turn, where the town’s prostitutes often solicited business. Opposite was where the Communists met on a Thursday, and a bigger band of the NSDAP met on a Tuesday, although that wasn’t hard, given the Kozis in Weimar might be counted on two hands. Below my rooms was the city’s cemetery packed with famous dead men, and the striped Russian church, and the statue of a helmeted warrior with his sword up, whose name I never knew. I always liked him, perhaps because I fancied I saw myself in him: here was a man ready for action.

All afternoon I sketched the women below. Though it denied me a muse, I was always pleased when one of them found a customer. I imagined the meal she’d be able to eat afterward, and I wondered whether, with each man, she thought ‘there’s breakfast’ and, with another, ‘there’s schnitzel’.

Later, when I heard a voice travelling the staircase, shouting my name, I assumed it was Charlotte, coming to explain her delay. But when I opened the door it was Irmi, standing on Mrs Kramer’s welcome mat, her eyes scooting my room. ‘Paul,’ she said, her voice breathless. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Here,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here.’

I invited her in but she didn’t sit down. ‘All day?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘Something’s happened. With Jenö and Walter,’ Irmi said, coming down heavily on the r. ‘They’re in trouble. Maybe we all are.’ Irmi looked at my scalp. ‘I don’t know why you all had to shave your heads. It’s only going to make things worse. Get your shoes and coat. We have to go.’

We took the staircase, but we hadn’t escaped before my landlady shouted at me from her open window. ‘No more noise, Mr Beckermann! I can’t stand all this hollering.’

‘Yes, Mrs Kramer!’

I wondered if Jenö’s melancholic appearance outside the baker’s was linked to whatever trouble he now found himself in. ‘Where are we going?’ I said as I caught up with Irmi.

‘To the Bauhaus, of course.’

In the dark the cafeteria was as lit as a proscenium. Bald Walter and Jenö were hunched over the same table where I had first talked to Charlotte many moons ago. Charlotte and Kaspar were there too: bussing plates of food from the serving station. It wasn’t yet dinner time, and no one else was in there. I felt left out, and wondered what they had all been up to without me, but I told myself not to be silly and put this feeling away. ‘What’s happening? Is the fast done?’