We queued and crawled outside. Then we marched in single file toward the Frauenplan, where there was a fountain piping water from a creature – half fish, half man – and cafes lining the perimeter. Each new student was then brought forward, turned around, and had to fall backward into the outstretched arms of two others. With a squeak from the trumpet, another student would then baptise them as a Bauhaus baby with the fountain’s ‘holy water’. The townspeople watched us as if we were deranged, and the waiters stamped toward us, as they would have to scatter stray dogs.

The organisers took no notice. The Director had long ago disappeared, but then so had Master Itten.

I felt Charlotte shifting as we watched the baptisms of our new friends: Jenö and Walter, then Irmi and Kaspar. When it was nearly her turn she seemed unexpectedly tense, and I watched as she walked to the fountain with some misgiving. Indeed, when she fell her arms shot upward, and she stumbled and stayed upright. In that moment she seemed terribly exposed and I knew the other students noticed too. Then she had to fall again. The priest-student anointed her forehead, the trumpeter played a toot, and Charlotte went back to standing. When she was done she walked toward one of the waiters who had stopped at the edge of his cafe, and she got so close to him that eventually, at the last moment, he was forced to step away.

3

Weimar

Weimar froze that winter. Iced over, the city enchanted. When it was dark, you could roam around the cobbled streets looking in at the ancient rooms lit orange, and it was easy to dream up secrets and potions, witches and hobgoblins. The mullioned windows split the warm light like a wedding diamond. The frost made everything glimmer.

Weimar will always be a burnished city to me. North of the Bauhaus, south of the beech forest, it was the prettiest place I’d ever seen. There was hardly a plain building around; hardly a residence which hadn’t housed a poet or philosopher. Women, angels and lions adorned the houses so that Weimar (especially when the Christmas lights illuminated the upper tiers) always had an extra set of eyes upon us.

Though its people did not like us, were suspicious of us, sometimes even hated us, I loved the city: the classical houses enamelled in pinks, lemons, limes; the smell of the chestnuts cooking on the coals; the Ginkgo which stank in summer; the greening statues of Goethe and Schiller by the theatre where the republic’s constitution had been signed three years before. (Though even in rich Weimar there were men hunched in thin coats, pockets stuffed with meaningless money; soup kitchens, dole queues, begging women, children scavenging. It was just hard to see; I was so spellbound by all the other beauty.)