The Hiding Game

by Naomi Wood

  ‘Probably the best of my life. Until things went wrong.’

  The man tethered his horse. I wondered if he would spread news of our decadence around town. I heard the voices again and I wondered if one of them wasn’t Jenö’s. Oskar seemed to flinch.

  ‘Let’s go,’ the old man said.

  Just before they went, Oskar turned to face the Bauhaus, and I saw with a shock the bruise spreading from his eye. I didn’t have a chance to ask him what had happened. Some skirmish with the other Nazis, probably. The scrap man moved his horse off at a gentle clip.

  I followed the raised voices. By the big expanse of glass stood Charlotte and Jenö. Her cheeks were wet and red; I couldn’t see Jenö’s face.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘This is ridiculous. I’ll stop.’

  ‘It’s not just the cocaine.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I should have left them to it, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘You have to tell me.’

  ‘It’s just not the same any more,’ Jenö said, eventually.

  ‘What am I meant to do about that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember what it’s like just to be me. What happened with Walter—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear his name.’

  ‘What Walter did to you was unforgivable. But that’s it. It’s bad timing that it’s all happening at once.’

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You never talk to me! Your privacy drives me crazy.’

  ‘I’ll change.’

  ‘You said that a year ago. It’s like dating half a person.’

  ‘I’m not half a person.’

  ‘I can’t love someone turned so inward.’

  ‘You’re the one who keeps things from me,’ she said. ‘You’re the one who kept secrets.’

  ‘I told you. I didn’t want to make things awkward.’

  ‘They made things awkward enough.’ She stood looking at her hands. ‘Jenö, please. I love you. I have always loved you.’

  A moment passed where neither said anything, then Jenö spoke: ‘It’s too late; it’s too late. It’s done.’

  He tried to embrace her but she wouldn’t do it. ‘I suppose this is very ordinary, isn’t it? It happens every day. I’ll ask you one last time if you’ll stay.’

  Jenö delayed, said nothing, then finally: ‘I’m sorry.’

  He walked back to the cafeteria alone. Charlotte brought her hands up and her shoulders shook as she sobbed. I saw her at the bridge again last night, anger streaming from her, seeming much bigger than she was. Now she looked so sad and small.

  I moved to go, but the movement must have caught her eye.

  ‘Paul, for God’s sake, stop spying on me, will you? Will everyone just leave me alone!’

  And she tramped through the snow back into the school. Through the gridded glass I saw her on the staircase. I knew where she would end up. And I was right: there she was, on the long glass bridge that connected the residential quarters with the Director’s office. I already knew what she was about to do to Walter. I already knew the manner of her revenge.

  35

  Dessau

  As the snow around the Bauhaus melted, there was no change to Charlotte and Jenö’s separation. It was good to wear lighter clothes, not to feel the snow’s crust on your boots, but I guess we all felt such a heaviness that spring came without much relief.

  Even I didn’t feel much to see them broken up. Everything was so withered away; our group of six down to three, and we avoided each other as best we could. There was little left to talk about; little left to say. Charlotte stuck to Anni and Otti in the Weaving Workshop. I saw lots of Josef. Jenö spent most of his time with Marianne. I often saw them in the Metal Workshop, pulling at cords; bevelling lampshades.

  Charlotte didn’t talk much to me that term. In fact, she said few words to anybody, and it seemed a kindness to keep away. She had long ago stopped giving me confidences, and beneath the vacant eyes I could never tell what she was thinking. Always now she was concentrated, as if trying hard to understand a pain that was private, unremitting, incomprehensible.

  She existed in the school like a woman kidnapped.

  She grew thinner; so thin, in fact, that I wondered whether I would find in her room signs of a Weimar fast, for Charlotte always needed her mind clear, especially in the escalation of grief. She went for long walks in the Georgium Park, and hardly spoke. And yet I thought that the moment she opened her mouth so much would stream out unbidden that it was no wonder she didn’t risk it.

  Hardly anything happened that term. For a while Walter’s expulsion was a great mystery and all anyone ever talked about. I decided to say I didn’t know what had happened to him. After all the years of involuted participations in each other’s lives, this was all I wanted to say, when anyone asked me why Walter König had disappeared without saying goodbye to a soul. I don’t know, I’d say: I’ve no idea why he left. He was popular enough that people missed him, and they didn’t stop questioning me for a long time after he’d gone.

  Franz, anyway, did a good job at filling in the gossip: the Director had found out about the cocaine (how he had done so was not mentioned, which was a generous gesture to Charlotte) and Walter had been expelled with no notice. Walter had left with a haversack, home to Weimar. He had been the scapegoat for the Ball. Many were thankful he’d taken all the blame.

  No one had been around to see Walter go, not me, not Franz, not Jenö. Later we saw removal men (paid for by Ernst, surely) come for the rest of his things: clothes; the painting; his wheeled hat, bloody feathers still stuck to the spokes, and the crate of navy notebooks which had long kept Walter’s secret.

  It wasn’t a cruelty to think that it was better he was gone. He’d always done well with his blowzy pastorals and, really, he had failed to thrive in the Print Workshop – or at least his typography, as Franz had said, was too outdated for the school’s mandate. He had always been a little too Expressionist for the school’s rationalism.

  I found Franz in Walter’s bedroom some time after his expulsion. The room, which had been a mess at the best of times, had been clarified back to the Bauhaus box. ‘Walter’s career is over,’ Franz said, dressed all in black. There was a book on his lap as he sat by the desk.

  ‘He’s got all the work he wants at the studio.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. I mean the career he actually wants. I don’t think Charlotte should have reported him for the cocaine. It wasn’t fair.’

  I’d lost sight of what was and wasn’t fair, and I said nothing. I sat down on the coverlet. There was a slight discoloration where the painting had been. I thought of Oskar and Walter lying on this bed, and myself on the balcony as I had watched them. ‘Did he tell you what he did? In Weimar?’

  Franz nodded. He put the penny novel on the table. It looked like one that Charlotte would have liked.

  ‘She could’ve been deported. It was very grave, what he did.’

  ‘He was in love. He was mad.’

  ‘We were all in love. I’m afraid it’s no excuse.’

  It occurred to me once more that it might be time to go; that we had overstayed ourselves. There was no air in the school. No ventilation. ‘What did you two argue about? You were the best of friends, then nothing.’

  ‘Walter had started to be stingy with the coke,’ said Franz.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘At one point he even asked me to pay. I was hardly going to pay when I knew he got it for free. It was a minor disagreement, but he seemed to go off me.’

  Walter had never been anything less than generous to me and Charlotte, and I wondered, finally, whether Jenö had been right: maybe the cocaine had been administered to Charlotte in the hope that it would put distance between those two.

  ‘He could take offence,’ I said. ‘But he was quick to forgive.’

  Franz looked at me and smiled. We both knew this was n
ot true. Walter could take an age to forgive. Franz snapped the novel shut.

  ‘How’d you patch things up? I saw you dancing at the Metal Ball.’

  ‘I started doing his homework for him.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Well, there we are. Walter was ever the strategist.’

  It was tricky to know what to do with my feelings. What he’d done to Charlotte, and to all the others who’d been caught in the Survey, was reprehensible, but it didn’t stop me missing him. I had no other confidant. Irmi and Kaspar were in Berlin. I couldn’t talk to Jenö; nor could I talk to Charlotte.

  Often that spring I thought I heard him pottering around in his room, or I’d go out onto my balcony half expecting to see his face upside down, asking me to come up for a drink, or dangling a knotted bed sheet toward me. I missed my friend. I missed having someone to talk to.

  Several letters arrived. The paper was smeared with Walter’s inky hand; maybe he was drunk or high when he’d written them. I wondered if he penned them in Ernst’s studio. Weimar was the same, he wrote; though there were now enough Brownshirts to give Dessau a run for its money. I know Charlotte reported me – he wrote – hardly a surprise, I suppose: she had just cause.

  I wanted to reply but I didn’t know what to say. Slowly, anyway, I was able to put away my feelings for him, and what he had done hardened inside me. And, very soon, the betrayal felt insurmountable, and it became unthinkable that I would even consider replying.

  That spring I often stopped to look inside the old gallery in Dessau. I always dreamed I’d find a Steiner painting there. And then, some time in May, I did. All the Steiner hallmarks were there: frolicking girls, trees flourishing, and then (obvious, now I knew the trick) those double loops of light which I knew now were Walter König’s signature of guilt from a summer spent betraying his friends. I had finally worked out what the painting signified: his confusion, which was total, and his anguish, which was the same. After seeing it, though, I walked quickly away. I forced myself to say the words aloud, as if making a promise to myself: I would not give him back our friendship. Not for anything.

  36

  England

  I realise now how much my self-portrait is similar to Walter’s double painting. How its light streams from everywhere and nowhere. I wear such a strange expression; costive and cowardly. The portrait has hardly said what I thought it would. Though it’s unfinished – I have hardly a neck and the eyes are approximations – I don’t want to carry on. It won’t sell, and I look a clown. I play with blurring my gaze: Elaine de Kooning did this to her friend Fairfield Porter: as if, in the picture, floodwater has reached his eyes. This might be the only way around it. This might be the only way of getting it done.

  I should have known figurative painting just wouldn’t work, which is why I’ve lost myself in abstraction all these years. Figuration can’t get close. Anni knew that in Six Prayers, the Jewish Museum commission she did a few years ago. Six Prayers is a woven wall hanging, but its colours suggest stone. There are six columns in cotton, linen, bast, and silver. The threadwork on the panels is uneven. I won’t say one of Anni’s pillars is for Charlotte in Buchenwald or Otti in Auschwitz, because I don’t know if that’s true. It’s enough that I see them memorialised there.

  I wrote to Anni after seeing it. She was in Connecticut by then, still with Josef. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ I wrote on functional blue airmail paper I thought she’d like, ‘I keep coming back to what you have expressed in the colours. Your prayers are six poems.’

  Anni never replied. Maybe she couldn’t remember who I was. Or I had signed off Brickman rather than Beckermann. Part of me thinks Anni just couldn’t say any more. Who knows who else she’d lost; which family, which friends. The threads had said enough.

  Hard dreams, this week. Charlotte is imperilled somewhere and if I could do something then I might save her, but I cannot get up, out of bed, out of the studio. Granted, I can feel the wetness of my tears but it’s not enough to force me to act. Instead: bogs and trees; and Walter looms somewhere, a victim, an aggressor, in the pale dreamed forest.

  When I wake I’m exhausted, and roam the house trying to make my dead friends quit talking to me. In the early mornings I go down to the beach to shake them off, so that the wind might blast them away. I wait for the sea to give me some answers. It doesn’t.

  I watch the fishermen bring in the lobster traps. I am intrigued about their catch; I never see them pull the lobster from the pot. I wonder where they do it, and what the bright trapped thing does in the pot overnight, hitting its claws against the tin, wondering what it has come to symbolise.

  37

  Dessau

  News from Berlin that summer was not good. Gangs were mobilising in the suburbs, a group of Communists were beaten outside a theatre. There were rumours of abductions near the Potsdam Gate. There were more Brownshirts in the Dessau beer-halls, and I saw Oskar often in town, but after Walter’s departure, he no longer talked to me. Oskar wore a different uniform now, the same as Hitler’s men. But otherwise, beyond the tracks, the school was still a separate zone of swarming light.

  It was a hot summer. Naturally, the students who’d stayed behind sunned themselves on the roof, or wandered the Georgium Park, or swam in the Elbe. We caught Paul Klee walking in the gardens, ‘communing with the snakes,’ or showcasing his new Tunisian paintings, or drawing on the bridge where Charlotte had almost drowned hapless Walter. Since the Metal Ball, there was renewed moderation. No cocaine, modest drinking, niceness encouraged, nothing off; we were all well behaved. I never fell asleep in one of my classes again.

  School had closed for the holidays and I decided not to make the same mistake again: Dresden did not need me. Jenö had gone home to the Munich farm. Our six was down to two.

  That summer, the talkies came to town. Dessau had a cinema not far from school. This was the first time we’d ever heard a voice synchronised with the actor’s moving lips and Charlotte soon became a fixture there. She was a strange sight marching into town in her trouser suit and short-cropped hair, while other women wore dresses and showed off their tanned shoulders. She had new dark hairs on her arms and had lost almost all of her visible femininity. Most people, most of the time, thought on first meeting her that she was a man.

  On the day of the Nazi rally there was general consensus between whoever was left that we’d stay in the quarters of the Bauhaus, which stretched to the Georgium Park and the Masters’ houses, but no further. This land was ours; we didn’t think they’d come here. But when I saw Charlotte heading into Dessau I asked if I could go with her. She didn’t say yes or no, but walked on.

  Dessau was empty; not a jackboot or Stahlhelm in sight. I wondered if we had missed the rally or whether we’d hit it as we came out. Possibly, everyone was already holed up, knowing that home was the safest place to be. The theatre was still open, however, and we had the cinema to ourselves.

  The film was a horror flick: a monster preying on local women, and the hero an unlikely professor type in spectacles. I began to relax. Watching Charlotte was more interesting than watching the picture: whenever anyone spoke, she moved her lips along with the actor’s voice. She had dropped the watchful expression she’d worn since the Metal Ball, and instead her face tracked the actor’s emotion, so that her expression cleared and changed with every cut to a new character. It was as if in the lit rays she was able to feel all the emotion she had decided to put away during the split from Jenö. It was both childish and heartbreaking. As the monster in the lake zoomed into view, the shadows and the light were the only things animating her face. Then the actress, on her knees in a torn dress, screamed, ‘Help me!’ and Charlotte whispered those words too.

  Under Anni’s guidance that spring Charlotte’s weaves – she had returned to the workshop with added zeal – had developed an almost sculptural form. (Anni was an altogether different weaver to Charlotte, although they showed the same preoccupation with restraint and repetition.) Though the colours did
n’t change – they were still immutably dark – Charlotte started braiding in horsehair, and uncut stones, and milk glass and bones, so that her new pieces had a little colour and shape. Anni said they were beautiful, and she was right.

  After the trip to the cinema we found Josef and Anni up at the Weaving Workshop, sharing a cigarette out of the window. ‘Did you see the rally?’ Anni shouted.

  ‘Not a soul! Town’s deserted!’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Josef. ‘We might win yet!’

  Otti emerged as a third head. ‘Come up later?’ She had her curly black hair wrapped up in an Eastern-style scarf. ‘I’ve found some gin!’

  ‘We will!’

  Anni whispered in Otti’s ear, and Otti gave us a thumbs-up. ‘Hurrah for liberty, and all that. Charlotte, I want to show you my new piece when you’re done with him,’ she said, and then Otti, too, disappeared.

  We walked over to the residential quarter. There was a flash of movement in Walter’s room; perhaps it was Franz.

  ‘Jenö got in another fight in a beer-hall in Munich,’ she said. In many ways, this was the first fully formed sentence Charlotte had said to me in months. It felt good to hear her voice again. ‘Silly fool hasn’t learnt his lesson.’

  ‘Is he in trouble?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll have enough money to pay them off. They’re all fascists there anyway. They probably deserved it.’

  ‘My father’s a fascist,’ I said. ‘Munich’s his holiday destination of choice.’

  ‘Poor you.’

  ‘He keeps sending me articles from Paul Schultze-Naumburg. “Have a look at this from PSN,” he says: with his initials, as if they’re pals. And then he always frames it as a question. “Art as racial purity?” My mother says he wears a swastika on his lapel. She can’t abide it.’

  ‘What about your brother?’

  ‘He’s burying his head in the sand.’