When I turned back to the window, Charlotte had gone. And when I looked to the classroom – damn fool spy that I was – I saw that Jenö, too, had followed her out. I wanted to ask Walter – unbruised, unseeing Walter – to have a coffee with me, so that I could mine him for what had really happened at the Baths – but by the time I’d packed my things, he too had disappeared.

11

Weimar

Those first nights spent under curfew were dull; life can be when you’re not eating, and not allowed to go out. Rumours were circulating that city thugs were looking to avenge Mr Sommer’s beating, and so, every evening, we all dutifully sloped to our lodgings alone. None of us wanted to get ourselves, or Master Itten for that matter, in any more trouble. Jenö especially was keen to observe the curfew, and often left before the last class had finished.

It felt strange to be alone, given that in our time here we had never been out of each other’s pockets. Not knowing what else to do, I did my breathing exercises, put a few acupuncture needles in my legs (to draw out the poisons; this is what the Master had advised), and I imagined Charlotte doing the same in her candle-lit bedroom alone.

Hunger was everywhere. Though my appetite split my sides, I was surprised that my abstinence didn’t so much exhaust as energise me. In many moments I teetered on a prolific transparency: the city felt mine for the taking.

I was sure, too, that soon my fasted vision would let me see through Walter’s story. Like Irmi, I didn’t believe all this hokum about Jenö fainting in the Baths. I wondered what it was that didn’t add up. There were the unmentioned, and absent, spectacles. There was the lapse between the midnight fight and Jenö’s appearance at the bakery. Then there was Charlotte’s odd sortie on Sunday night, with her big bag and a hat, like a caricature of a grave-robber. I suppose she had a capacity for guilt that I didn’t, and the fast had been no one’s idea but her own. And what had she said to me? That she was a zealot; an obsessive – hadn’t she compared herself with Margaret of Cortona, who was herself a penitent? I’d leave her to it. When she was on some private mission it was best not to distract her. This was, for her, just another form of escalation.

On Wednesday I heard the happy news that Sommer would not press charges. Walter and Jenö had been summoned to the Director’s office that morning and told to expect instead a school tribunal. Everyone would be heard: Mr Sommer, Mr König, Mr Fiedler. And the Director would chair the meeting: no town representative or magistrate.