Walter’s laughter was a little bark. ‘All this time I haven’t known what to do with myself. I swing from hysteria to misery within an hour. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I’m on the edge of getting it, and the uncertainty is killing me.’

‘What has Jenö said?’

‘Not much. I think he’s trying to work out what it all means.’

He stood. We reclaimed our bikes and wheeled them through the cemetery’s paths: passing grave after grave – even Goethe’s crypt, which Walter nodded at respectfully – until we neared the Russian Church. The building was striped in ochre and gold, its domes teal. ‘Shall we go in?’ Walter asked, his voice a dare, his shoulder already pushing the heavy door.

Inside, the church was smaller than it looked from the outside. There was a portrait of the Virgin and the baby against the altar. The emptiness of her gaze reminded me of Charlotte’s neon stare.

‘Oh, Paul. It’s all so much!’

‘But Walter,’ I said, unable to resist smiling, ‘isn’t this what you’ve been hoping for? Why are you sad?’

‘Somehow,’ his voice gave a squeak, ‘it was – it is! But I’ve no idea if there’s a future in it.’

‘Give it time. Jenö doesn’t know if he has a future at the Bauhaus. Let alone with you. He’s still got Saturday’s tribunal. If the Director decides he’s not fit to study—’

Something passed over his expression, as if there were reserves of information I still didn’t know. ‘The trial’s a dud. Sommer’s been paid off.’

I thought about Charlotte breaking the curfew; how Irmi had seen her leave at night with a sack. It must have been filled with cash. I wondered how much the bribe was. Thousands? Or hundreds of thousands? ‘Did Charlotte do that?’

He nodded. ‘She feels ever so guilty about the faint.’

‘But there was no faint! That’s not fair, Walter. Is it her money?’

‘I’m paying her back, don’t worry. A few shifts at the studio and I should see the deal right.’

‘What’s everyone worrying about then?’ I thought about Kaspar’s words at the square, that she had been ‘masterminding their defence’. ‘If the trial’s a dud?’

‘A whole lot of nothings. Do you think Jenö might feel something for me?’

‘Well, did he stop you, when you kissed him?’

‘Pauli, no, you don’t understand,’ he said, searching my face, looking for how to say this: ‘He kissed me,’ he said, ‘he kissed me.’

And, just as I had thought that perhaps, for Walter, this was the great pinnacle of his time here, the ghost of Jenö walked past the glass front of the baker’s, and I saw again his expression of profound regret; his visible pain.