Every morning, after our shifts, we’d go to the baker’s to exchange our gargantuan salaries for bread. We’d wait for the bakery to open (the ghost of Jenö’s regret materialising in the gas lamp) and buy a black loaf. And then, with the remoteness that was now part of Walter’s heartache, he said he’d see me later, and I wondered what he did with his mornings, when it was early and the moon was still in the sky. After a shift we used to go for a walk in the cemetery, or go for a cycle around town, but now he went off by himself. And I wondered whether he’d return to the Bath-house, to think of the promise of Jenö’s body, or whether he’d go to Charlotte’s, to see of them what he might.

That May, money turned; it ripened. It was in the butcher’s and the baker’s and the beer-hall. Money was under beds, in bicycle baskets, in wheelbarrows, in pockets, stuffed into pillowcases. It was on the roads, in cars, in fires; it made wallpaper, wrapping paper; the homeless lined their jackets with it when the nights for a time were cooler than usual. To push a limb into a day’s wages would see an arm or leg gone. Useless, it gathered in the gutter, in bins, in the sewers, off the river. At school we used it as material for papier-mâché towers. Soup kitchens appeared, women volunteers ladling out food to kids; men hung around the Frauenplan, waiting for something to happen outside Schiller’s house, Goethe’s house, Liszt’s house, Cranach’s house; famous men who could do nothing for them. Soon our lives were measured in the billions. That spring, Charlotte and Jenö too felt like a soaring kind of money – they could not stop their ascension even if they wanted to; even if they had tried.

19

Weimar

I found out what Walter was up to on the night we finished Mr Steiner’s last Hamburg commission. How he had been spending his melancholic mornings had been bothering me all month: I had become intensely wary of people keeping secrets.

Mr Steiner’s painting was smaller than usual and we finished it quickly: bowers and light and some comic ducks. At the end of the shift, Ernst gave Walter a funny look and told us Daniel would finish it off. They had a few private words, and I waited for Walter outside.

We cycled down from the studio as usual, stopping off at the baker’s. I expected Walter to go off, as was his normal fashion, but this morning he invited me up to his rooms for coffee.