Before term finished our choices for next year’s ateliers were pinned up at the school office. This was clever: many of the staff had already left on holiday, so there was nobody to complain to, aside from an administrator who wielded no power. Minus Walter, we all went to the Craft Building and climbed the staircase. Painted on the walls was Oskar Schlemmer’s mural of red, yellow, and blue dancing figures, making me think of a happier time when we too had been braced in all that freedom.

There were already foundation students there, running their fingers down the board to find their names under the workshops – Metal, Carpentry, Wall-painting, Weaving, Stone. It felt the same as when they had put up posters of our grades at school, and it seemed curiously retrogressive for the Bauhaus to operate like this. We looked around the boards, ducking under other people to find our names. Irmi had been admitted into her first choice of Weaving, Jenö into Metal, Kaspar into Stone, and I found Beckermann, Paul, under Wall-painting, just as I had chosen. My atelier was, unfortunately, entirely male.

Charlotte hung back. Above her a gridded window threw its shadow on the wall like a gate. I tried to find her name. She hadn’t told me her specialism, but I couldn’t find Feldekova among the German surnames. But then Irmi pointed to Charlotte’s name in the Weaving list. And when Jenö saw it, he too blanched. In the corner of my eye I saw him comfort her. Then, for the first time, I saw him kiss her. It stung, and I turned away.

‘Perhaps it’s a mistake?’ Irmi asked me, very quietly, to draw my attention from them. But it wasn’t a mistake. I knew that. What the Director was saying was clear: this was where the female students belonged.

I looked for König. Walter was in Metal: very close, of course, to Jenö Fiedler.

‘You know,’ said Irmi, as we went down the central staircase, leaving the lovers to it, ‘Walter’s staying here all summer?’

‘With them?’ Charlotte and Jenö were showing their work at the Summer Exhibition.

‘I think it is a bad idea. Don’t you? Very bad indeed. What will you do?’

‘I’m going to my parents’.’

‘You shouldn’t do that. You should come to Berlin with me and Kaspar.’

‘I’ve got a job in Dresden.’

‘I’ll find you one in Berlin.’

But I said I needed the money, and Irmi let it go.