That night Charlotte and Jenö came to my room, two pale saints knocking gravely at my door. I lied about having been asleep and poured them big drinks. I felt blurry but also generous. It was as if we were having a party, though I knew they’d come to apologise. The alcohol from the schnapps made me sit there dumbly. My suitcase was packed for Dresden: all summer I was destined for my father’s shoe factory. Better than being here – with them, in Weimar; or with Walter, at the studio.

I smiled as Charlotte explained how it had all happened out of nowhere, that this business of falling in love hadn’t been done in the week of the Bath-house, but some time after. They had come . . . Here, she stumbled. What had she come to do? I’d never admitted my love to her – it was another secret in our web – so she could not walk in here and presume I needed an apology.

Jenö took up her case: they wanted to make sure I was all right with everything that was happening, he said.

Flushed with alcohol, I put on a fine performance: smoothing away their worries with murmuring rebuttals – no, no, no, it’s fine, I am happy – kissing her cheek, shaking the square of his hand, pouring more schnapps, and there we all were: the party had begun, their love affair anointed. I heard Walter’s words – Fight for something! – even as I sat there, beneficent as a priest, with Jenö’s head nodding along to the rhythm of mine. I detested more and more his honeyed features and blond-tipped lashes; in the summer he was a creature dipped in gold. But I smiled, I drank, I watched their pretty heads. All the while I thought – go, you must go, you must leave, I cannot bear this. What if I vomit? Or take a knife to Jenö’s throat? Or what if I simply blurt out the secret of what Jenö had done to Walter? Inside I felt propelled toward a violence I’d never enact but which possessed me anyway: I wanted the cage of him to shake.

21

In the decade after the Berlin Wall went up, I received the handful of Walter’s letters which I still have to this day. They reveal very few personal details. He taught art to school kids, which had been a challenge to secure, given Charlotte had got him expelled in Dessau, and the expulsion had left him without a diploma.

He didn’t mention what had happened to Ernst Steiner; whether he still lived with him, or if he was dead, or exiled. He talked instead of his life in the East and some memories of the Bauhaus that I couldn’t recall. Then the final plea: for a ‘cultural invitation’ to England.