As well as the Brownshirts on the streets that winter, there were also Communists and Anarchists, and every other idiot that could dress in a uniform who had idle time after shifts at the sugar factory. Most of the Junkers men, who were better paid than the rest, dismissed them as kids. The Brownshirts drank in the beer-halls and sometimes the Metropol, but they were usually shooed away, since they were known as trouble-makers.

After dinner with Jenö and Charlotte that evening I had a few drinks in the Lamb. I often came to the city on my own. I liked getting away: the school, with its multiple balconies, could be a grid of surveillance. There were a few Brownshirts in the Lamb: younger than me, and good-looking. One, with green eyes and an aquiline nose, kept on looking over, knowing that I was a Bauhäusler. I didn’t like his scrutiny, and finishing my drink, I soon left.

As I headed to school the traffic was coming from the factory, and the cars had the sleek edges of the aeroplanes manufactured there; cruising, remote. I walked past the Metropol, the air inside blue with smoke, and the noise of people having a good time. A woman stumbled onto the pavement; she gave me a hobnailed smile. A man ran his hands down her sacklike dress. They kissed as if I weren’t even there.

I felt myself observed as I too did my watching, and a man dematerialised in the dark then formed again in the gas lamp’s reach. I thought it might be the green-eyed Nazi; I don’t know why. It was just the way he had looked at me with intent, though it hadn’t been all menace, either. He turned into the Metropol, and I walked on, somehow a little disappointed that he had not talked to me, or even approached me.

Beyond the rail tracks the Bauhaus was luminous. Outside its walls the world was in rapture. I could hear the noise from the other side of the building: the students and Journeymen would be out on their balconies until the small hours.

My bedroom was simple. A Brandt lamp lit the room, and one of Charlotte’s weaves hung above the bed. Long gone were her knotted plots of displeasure. Instead, her most recent work had a hovering beauty. Now that she had mastered the loom she was intent on extracting from it increasingly granular levels of blackness. They were very dark, her weaves, so dark that one had to search hard for bolts of lighter aluminium or graded cellophane. She called them ‘Beinahe Nichts’ – Almost Nothings. When you looked inside them it was like falling down a hole.

I began one of Itten’s breathing exercises. I still did this every so often. I thought of the couple outside the Metropol. I moved away the image of the green-eyed Nazi looking at me, but it kept on returning unbidden.