But breakfast too soon was finished and I saw that Charlotte and Jenö were getting ready for class. I wanted to say – hold on! Wait! All morning I’d been thinking of the best phrases to describe the sensations of the migraine – the ghosts of them in my bedroom, the blooming visions and odd smells – but now I felt like Irmi, standing on the table in the Swan, not knowing how to stop people; not knowing what it was I should say.

Instead I watched them from a distance as they made their way from the cafeteria, as if the distance between us was yards, a road, a city: Jenö and Charlotte, two golden creatures edged in April light. And then I saw it. (So this was my vision at last; the fast’s broken epiphany.) My goodness. It felt as if my heart was breaking. All weekend, she hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone.

17

England

An old feeling this afternoon: that if I don’t work, I’ll only brood. There’s a feeling I should do something with my hands but I don’t know what. My seaside wanderings do nothing to keep my mind from things. Since Walter died I can’t think of anything but the Bauhaus. I have had a life elsewhere – other friendships, other love affairs, several decades in my adopted country – and yet after the news of his stroke I can’t think of anything but what happened to us.

Work is the antidote; it always has been. But I also know I can’t make any more of what Irmi calls my ‘breezeblock abstractions’, and so I have decided on a self-portrait. I’ve never done one before. It will be my confession in paint: I will show myself how I really am.

For a while all I do is look in the mirror. Master Itten would be proud of me: how long I delay marking the page. Instead I use my fingers to learn the form of my face: the unshaven cheeks, the sunken eyes, the proud nose. My neck is soft, an old man’s, and I’m as bald as I ever was in Weimar. I spend a long time like this, trying to find what Master Itten called the instress; my singularity.

It is an age since I’ve worked figuratively, and it’s not unwelcome. Usually, my paintings are blocks of colours, bright as ice creams. Usually, I play with the colours’ saturations, which give, like Klee’s Bird Garden, a sense of moving transparencies. I can’t remember when my work showed this orientation toward flatness; it was after the war, in any case. (Worringer would explain my urge to abstraction as ‘an immense spiritual dread of space’, which doesn’t sound entirely wrong.) I’d even paint with a spatula. I got bored of objects and representations; even fairly unguessable ones. I guess I had finally outgrown my imitative impulse.