Just then I had the rushing sensation that things were happening over which I had no control. One can speak of disquiet, but what does it mean? A feeling in the bones; in your eyes; the pit of your stomach. I didn’t know its source. Things did not feel right, but I didn’t know where this feeling came from – or whether it was simply the paranoiac vapours of the fast. In the mirror my gaze reminded me of a painting of a turbaned Coleridge stumbling from an opium den into the outside light. I put Walter’s spectacles on the sill. They were the answer, I thought. They would reveal the truth.

Thankfully, by the morning, my unease had lifted. The nightmarish thoughts were gone. There was a vibration in my left eye but I put this down to the fact that over the past few days I’d eaten nearly nothing and had very little sleep. Perception, now, if it came at all, would come in extremis.

13

Weimar

Though Paul Klee painted Bird Garden a year after everything that happened at the Bath-house, I find that painting strangely congruent with how I view those weeks which disarranged us for the next decade, so that, even in Berlin, we were forever changed by those events. Because it was during this week that Walter learnt to hate; and perhaps all that hate began when lies were told, and secrets kept, and allegiances slipped.

Klee’s Bird Garden is a procession of waterfowl. The paint is applied so thinly that the leaves and even the newspaper it’s painted on – Klee was no richer than the rest of us – are visible behind the negligible birds. We don’t realise at first how flyaway, how transparent, is each form. There’s a delicacy to the birds’ footing, and the sense that with only a breath each shape would roll away as easily as cigarette paper. Whenever I look at this painting, there seems more depth than there really is: we are not looking into a garden but a pool – and yet, peer closer, and that depth is an illusion. There’s really nothing there.

I still believe that my version of that week could be blown away as easily as those birds; that my story is simply a layer upon someone else’s, and that theirs is a layer on mine. Even now Irmi could tell me that my understanding of what happened in Weimar is false; the pool is depth-less, the stories were real.

Klee of course wouldn’t have known what happened at the Bath-house, and neither would the Director, nor Master Itten, who was let go, anyway, months after the incident. It wouldn’t have really mattered to the staff; these details. To them, two fasting men went to the Bath-house. A student fainted. A townsperson tried to revive him. The student was confused and threw some punches. And then, much later, the Bauhaus closed.