I called round to Walter’s, and then Charlotte’s, but neither was there. Kaspar was at Irmi’s. She said she hadn’t seen them all day; she’d been to church that morning ‘on a whim’, and Kaspar said he would leave shortly before our curfew began. I looked at Charlotte’s rooms, but the windows were shuttered.

I went home, wondering why I had been the last to know the story last night. What had Walter said? Forgive me for repeating myself? Maybe it was just bad luck that I was the last to be fetched. After all, somebody had to be the last.

Inevitably, the whores came to the hairpin turn – no Sunday Sabbath off for them – and I heard Mrs Kramer’s music, a Viennese waltz, sounding like it belonged to a different century, which put me in a melancholy mood. Things felt out of joint.

Without anything else to do I was a little lonely. I longed to eat but reminded myself of the promise of new vision: a state of fluorescence. I thought it’d be a struggle to get myself to sleep, but perhaps I was still tired from Friday night’s shift at the studio, because after a shot of hot lemon water, I drifted off to sleep with surprising ease.

The next morning I felt clearer and brighter than I had done in a while. I ate some bread and drank some of Mrs Kramer’s sticky morning coffee. I knew the Bauhaus would be rife with gossip from the Bath-house, and I didn’t much want to get involved. That morning, I left it as late as I could.

When I arrived at school almost everyone from the first year was already in the atelier. What was odd was the way our group had split. There was Jenö, Walter and Charlotte on one side, with Kaspar and Irmi on the other. I don’t know why I didn’t go over to speak to Charlotte, but I wanted to ask Irmi about her trip to church, whether she’d been moved to religious feeling by the fast. Perhaps she’d felt the same thing as I had done by the river: that curious sense of omniscience and power. But Irmi was deep in conversation with Kaspar. ‘Bloody Jenö,’ Irmi was saying as I sat with them. ‘Turns out Sommer is a friend of a local judge. They’re goners.’

Kaspar, who was in all black as usual, nursed a coffee. ‘Surely not for a few thrown punches.’

‘Apparently Mr Sommer is black and blue.’

‘According to who?’

‘He came in this morning for a talk with the Director. Max saw him.’