Snow came. The whole building soon turned freezing, its high ceilings doing nothing to warm us. Klee, Kandinsky and the Director all had their necks scarved and their hands gloved, even while teaching. I sat out on my balcony smoking in the mornings as long as I could take the temperature, and looking across to the other balconies, inevitably finding someone to talk to, most often Anni Albers or Otti Berger, from the Weaving Workshop. Otti was a Yugoslav weaver with soulful eyes and a crowded mouth, who was able to trick from the loom rainbows of colour. She spoke German with an accent that reminded me of Charlotte’s eastern inflections. Anni, Josef’s wife, was also a weaver. When my brother had come here he had got on very well with her, but then everybody did get on marvellously with Anni. ‘He’s such a gentle soul,’ she had said, when Peter had gone inside for a lie down. She had noticed his tremors. ‘What happened to him?’

‘Shell shock.’

‘How does he show it?’ she asked. ‘What are the signs?’

‘He’s sensitive to noise. Panics easily. He gets headaches for days, and awful nightmares. Long depressions, too.’

‘Your parents must be distraught.’

‘My parents don’t know what to do. My mother thinks it’s all her fault. My father on the other hand blames everyone he can: the Bolsheviks, the Jews, the artists; God and Bismarck too if they were contenders. The worst thing is they drive Peter crazy, but he can’t keep a job, so he’s stuck with only my mother for company.’

‘What about friends?’

‘His friends are dead. Or they’re worse than him.’

That week Anni made a beautiful weave, textures of sand and pebble, and sent it to Peter as a gift. She hung it on a branch she’d found at the Georgium: it looked as if it had been washed up from the sea. I thought of my brother often and it grieved me to see his wretchedness. I wished I could do something to help, but every time he came to the Bauhaus I saw his deep sensitivity to its loveliness, which only made him worse. Better to live with the idea that life was no good than see your fellow man find in it so many pleasures. What we could talk about were only distant memories; what he could not talk of was his life as a medical student, how he had passed the Physicum exam with top marks, his meticulously imagined Berlin doctor’s clinic. That life was gone. And the truth was, very little remained.