Charlotte said the Director didn’t know whether he could retain the same number of foreign students. The report might force him to revoke foreigners’ places, because it was German money funding places for French, Russian, American, and indeed Czechoslovak students at the Bauhaus. ‘I might be told to go,’ she said. ‘If they take away my place, I’ll have no papers.’

I couldn’t imagine the Bauhaus without Charlotte. Jenö, yes; even Walter I was prepared to see go last April. But Charlotte, in Prague? And us, continuing here, as if nothing had changed?

‘German money?’ said Kaspar. ‘There’s no such thing as German money. Who cares what it funds? It can’t fund a thing.’

‘The point is the principle, I guess.’

‘The point is,’ said Masha, ‘they don’t want to subsidise anyone who is not their own.’

‘They’re going to get rid of me,’ Charlotte said, in her rooms later, ‘they’re going to kick me out. I’m not only a foreigner, I’m linked to the Sommer case. I could be sacrificed to save the school. I don’t know what to do. I can’t live in Prague, Paul: what would I do in Prague?’

‘That won’t happen.’

She picked up a weave, the yarn falling from the warp. ‘Why would they keep me on?’

‘You have as much right to be here as anyone else.’

‘I’m not sure that’s true.’

On one wall was the green chalked portrait of Jenö, his feet prominent, his torso foreshortened. Master Itten had praised it for its mastery of perspective: Jenö sleeping, the vanishing point receding beyond the plane; as if a dove might hover there.

Now Charlotte fell onto the bed. ‘I’m a woman. A foreigner. And a weaver, of whom there are already too many, and I’m probably the worst in my class. I wouldn’t be missed.’

I remembered the false confidence I had given to Walter in the Orthodox Church, and I said nothing.

‘It’s hopeless,’ she said, and I saw the tears in her eyes leak, and neither of us said anything for a good long while. Then she sat bolt upright, and offered me her fist outstretched.

‘Close your eyes,’ she said. ‘And count.’

I remembered the hiding game, how we had played it at the river, when the world was all mine. How much I had shrunk in the months since then! I counted, and opened my eyes.

‘Sheep,’ she said. ‘Braided. Future.’

‘A weave?’

‘Smaller than that.’ Charlotte opened her hand: inside her fist was a yellow thread. ‘Yarn. If they let me stay, I’m going to have to get better at this.’