During the shift break we went outside. I loved the woods like this. The air in the forest was so cold and the trees creaked in the dark. Ernst passed around beers and someone else shared a flask of coffee. My one meal of the day – black bread and butter – tasted deliciously of turpentine and paint.

‘Have you ever brought Charlotte here?’

‘To the studio? I don’t think she’d be allowed.’

He looked at my mouth and my eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but I think she’d like it.’ There was something about Walter tonight: he had swung into happiness again. Really all week he had been either marching to the gallows or walking down the aisle. I beckoned him over to where we couldn’t be heard or seen. To let him continue with his nose a quarter of an inch from the canvas would be embarrassing. I brought out his spectacles from my overalls.

‘You never found them! Where were they?’

‘In the sauna. At the Bath-house. They were on the floor. Why didn’t you get them yourself?’

‘No chance I was going back there. Thank you.’

‘What happened?’

‘I told you. They were knocked off. During the fight.’

‘But that doesn’t make sense. You said you weren’t hit.’ The trees squeaked in the wind. ‘And you didn’t have a mark on you.’

‘It was just my glasses that went for a sail, then.’

‘Of their own volition?’

Then the smile, full, unbridled; and a display of his palms.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t Jenö tell his side of the story?’

‘I think his jaw hurt.’

‘And Charlotte keeps on breaking the curfew with big bags. What’s going on?’

‘Did Irmi see that? Yes. She sees things, doesn’t she?’

‘No one believes the story you’ve told.’

‘Don’t they? I thought Kaspar had bought it. All that Nietzsche and yet he’ll swallow any story.’

The bell was rung for time, and the painters began to head into the studio. ‘Look, I’ll tell you everything after the shift.’

‘What if we’re seen? It’s still the curfew, and people might be around.’

‘In the cemetery, then. No one will be there at five in the morning. Oh, Paul, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so happy!’ He put his glasses on. The wonky spectacles made him look rather mad. ‘Lucky my left eye is the stronger one.’ He winked either eye, trying to find his sight, then finished his beer in one. He strolled into the studio like a man who couldn’t throw his happiness off him. ‘Lucky, lucky!’ he shouted.

Walter König, half blind, unrequited, accused of attacking a citizen he had not laid a hand on, on the brink of expulsion from the school he loved: as he disappeared into the studio, it struck me that he wasn’t a lucky man in the slightest.