Fascination (18 page)

Paul looked in on the weaving workshop often. Small, with dull olive skin and large eyes below a high forehead, eyes seemingly brimming with unshed tears. He quietly moved from loom to loom and the weavers would slip out of their seats to let him have an unobstructed view. Gudrun had started her big knotted rug, she
remembered, and he stood in front of it for some minutes, silently contemplating the first squares and circles. She waited: sometimes he looked, said nothing and moved on. Now, though, he said: ‘I like the shapes but the yellow is wrong, it needs more lemon, especially set beside that peach colour.’ He shrugged, adding, ‘In my opinion.’ That was when she bought his book and started to go to his classes on colour theory – and she had unpicked the work she had done and began again. She told him: ‘I’m weaving my rug based on your chromatic principles.’ He was pleased, she thought. He said politely that in that case he would follow its progress with particular interest.

He was not happy at the Institute, she knew; since Meyer took over, the mood had changed, was turning against Paul and the other painters. Meyer was against them, she had been told, they smacked of Weimar, the bad old days. Jochen was the same: ‘Bogus-advertising-theatricalism,’ he would state, ‘we should’ve left all that behind.’ What the painters did was ‘decorative’, need one say more? So Paul was gratified to find someone who responded to his theories intead of mocking them, and in any case the mood in the weaving workshops was different, what with all the young women. There was a joke in the Institute that the women revered him, called him ‘the dear Lord’. He did enjoy the time he spent there, he told Gudrun later, of all the workshops it was the weavers he would miss most, he said, if the day came for him to leave – all the girls, all the bright young women.

Spencer leans against the pole that holds the powerlines. The sleeve of his check shirt falls back to reveal more of his burned arm. It looks pink and new and oddly, finely ridged, like bark or like the skin you get on cooling hot milk. He taps a rhythm on the creosoted pole with his thumb and the two remaining fingers on his left hand. I know the burn goes the length of his arm and then some more, but the hand has taken the full brunt.

He turns and sees me staring.

‘How’s the arm?’ I say.

‘I’ve got another graft next week. We’re getting there, slow but sure.’

‘What about this heat? Does it make it worse?’

‘It doesn’t help, but… I’d rather be here than Okinawa,’ he says. ‘Damn right.’

‘Of course,’ I say, ‘of course.’

‘Yeah.’ He exhales and seems on the point of saying something – he is talking more about the war, these days – when his eye is caught. He straightens.

‘Uh-oh,’ He says. ‘Looks like Mr Koenig is here.’

Utta Benrath had dark orange hair, strongly hennaed, which, with her green eyes, made her look foreign to Gudrun, but excitingly so. As if she were a half-breed of some impossible sort – Irish and Malay, Swedish and Peruvian. She was small and wiry and used her hands expressively when she spoke, fists unclenching slowly like a flower opening, thrusting, palming movements, her fingers always flexing. Her voice was deep and she had a throaty, man’s chuckle, like a hint of wicked fun. Gudrun met her when she had answered the advertisement Utta had placed on the notice-board in the students’ canteen: ‘Room to rent, share facilities and expenses.’

When Gudrun began her affair with Jochen she realized she had to move out of the hostel she was staying in. The room in Utta’s apartment was cheap and not just because the apartment was small and had no bathroom: it was inconvenient as well. Utta, it turned out, lived a brisk forty-five-minute walk from the Institute. The apartment was on the top floor of a tenement block on Grenz Weg, out in Jonitz with a distant view of a turgid loop of the Mulde from the kitchen window. It was clean and simply furnished. On the walls hung brightly coloured designs for stained glass windows that Utta had drawn in Weimar. Here in Dessau she was an assistant in the mural-painting workshop. She was older than Gudrun, in her early thirties, Gudrun guessed, but her unusual colouring made her age seem almost an irrelevance: she looked so unlike anyone
Gudrun had seen before that age seemed to have little or nothing to do with the impression she made.

There were two bedrooms in the apartment on Grenz Weg, a small kitchen with a stove and a surprisingly generous hall where they would eat their meals around a square, scrubbed pine table. They washed in the kitchen, standing on a towel in front of the sink. They carried their chamber pots down four flights of stairs and emptied them in the night soil cistern at the rear of the small yard behind the apartment building. Gudrun developed a strong affection for their four rooms: her bedroom was the first of her own outside of her parents’ house; the flat was the first proper home of her adult life. Most evenings, she and Utta prepared their meal – sausage, nine times out of ten, with potatoes or turnip – and then, if they were not going out, they would sit on the bed in Utta’s room and listen to music on her phonograph. Utta would read or write – she was studying architecture by correspondence course – and they would talk. Utta’s concentration, Gudrun soon noticed, her need for further qualifications, her ambitions, were motivated by a pessimism about her position in the Institute to which all talk inevitably returned. She was convinced that the mural-painting workshop was to be closed and she would have to leave. She adduced evidence, clues, hints that she was sure proved that this was the authorities’ intention. Look what had happened to stained glass, she said, to the wood- and stone-carving workshops. The struggle it had taken to transfer had almost finished her off. That’s why she wanted to be an architect: everything had to be practical these days, manufactured. Productivity was the new god. But it took so long, and if they closed the mural-painting workshop… Nothing Gudrun said could reassure her. All her energies were devoted to finding a way to stay on.

‘I’ve heard that Marianne Brandt hates Meyer,’ she reported one night, with excitement, almost glee. ‘No, I mean really hates him. She detests him. She’s going to resign, I know it.’

‘Maybe Meyer will go first,’ Gudrun said. ‘He’s so unpopular. It can’t be nice for him.’

Utta laughed. And laughed again. ‘Sweet Gudrun,’ she said and reached out and patted her foot. ‘Never change.’

‘But why should it affect you?’ Gudrun asked. ‘Marianne runs the metal workshop.’

‘Exactly,’ Utta said, with a small smile. ‘Don’t you see? That means there’ll be a vacancy, won’t there?’

Mr Koenig steps out of his car and wrinkles his eyes at the sun. Mrs Koenig waits patiently until he comes round and opens the door for her. Everyone shakes hands.

‘Bet you’re glad you’re not in Okinawa, eh, Spence?’ Mr Koenig says.

‘Fire from heaven, I hear,’ Spencer says with some emotion.

‘Oh, yeah? Sure sounds that way.’ Mr Koenig turns to me.

‘How’re we doing, Miss Velk?’

‘Running a bit late,’ I say. ‘Maybe in one hour, if you come back?’

He looks at his watch, then at his wife. ‘What do you say to some breakfast, Mrs Koenig?’

Jochen liked to be naked. He liked to move around his house doing ordinary things, naked. Once when his wife was away he had cooked Gudrun a meal and asked her to eat it with him, naked. They had thick slices of smoked ham, she remembered, with a pungent radish sauce. They sat in his dining room and ate and chatted as if all was perfectly normal. Gudrun realized that it sexually aroused him, that it was a prelude to love-making, but she began to feel cold and before he served the salad she asked if she could go and put on her sweater.

Jochen Henzi was one of the three Masters of Form who ran the architecture workshop. He was a big burly man who would run seriously to fat in a few years, Gudrun realized. His body was covered with a pelt of fine, dark hair, almost like an animal, it grew thickly on his chest and belly and, curiously, in the small of his back, but his whole body – his buttocks, his shoulders – was covered with this fine, glossy fur. At first she thought she would find it
repugnant, but it was soft, not wiry, and now when they were in bed she often discovered herself absentmindedly stroking him, as if he were a great cat or a bear, as if he were a rug she could pull round her.

They met at the New Year party in 1928, where the theme was ‘white’. Jochen had gone as a grotesque, padded pierrot, a white cone on his head, his face a mask of white pancake. Gudrun had been a colonialist, in a man’s white suit with a white shirt and tie and her hair up under a solar topee. By the party’s end, well into January 1st, she had gone into an upstairs lavatory to untie her tight bun, vaguely hoping that loosening her hair would ease her headache.

Her hair was longer then, falling to her shoulders, and as she came down the stairs to the main hall she saw, sitting on a landing, Jochen – a large, rumpled, clearly drunken pierrot, smoking a dark, knobbled cigar. He watched her descend, a little amazed, it seemed, blinking as if to clear some obstruction to his vision.

She stepped over his leg, she knew who he was.

‘Hey, you,’ he shouted after her. ‘I didn’t know you were a woman.’ His tone was affronted, aggressive, almost as if she had deliberately misled him. She did not look round.

The day the new term began he came to the weaving workshop to find her.

I take my last cigarette from the pack and light it. I sit on the step below the cab of Spencer’s crane, where there’s some shade. I see Spencer coming briskly along the sidewalk from the pay phone. He’s a stocky man, with the stocky man’s vigorous rolling stride, as if the air is crowding him and he’s shouldering it away, forcing his passage through.

‘They say it left an hour ago.’ He shrugged. ‘Must be some problem on the highway.’

‘Wonderful.’ I blow smoke into the sky, loudly, to show my exasperation.

‘Can I bum one of those off of you?’

I show him the empty pack.

‘Lucky Strike.’ He shrugs, ‘I don’t like them, anyway.’

‘I like the name. That’s why I smoke them.’

He looks at me. ‘Yeah, where do they get the names for those packs? Who makes them up? I ask you.’

‘Camel.’

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Why a camel? Do camels smoke? Why not a… a hippo? I ask you.’

I laugh. ‘A pack of Hippos, please.’

He grins and cuffs the headlamp nacelle. He makes a
tsssss
sound, and shakes his head, incredulously. He looks back at me.

‘Goddam factory. Must be something on the highway.’

‘Can I buy you some breakfast, Spencer?’

Paul met Jochen only once in Gudrun’s company. It was during one afternoon at four o’clock when the workshops closed. The weavers worked four hours in the morning, two in the afternoon. The workshop was empty. The big rug was half done, pinned up on an easel in the middle of the room. Paul stood in front of it, the fingers of his right hand slowly stroking his chin, looking, thinking. From time to time he would cover his left eye with his left palm.

‘I like it, Gudrun,’ he said, finally. ‘I like its warmth and clarity. The colour penetration, the orangey-pinks, the lemons… What’s going to happen in the bottom?’

‘I think I am going to shade into green and blue.’

‘What’s that black?’

‘I’m going to have some bars, some vertical, one horizontal, with the cold colours.’

He nodded and stepped back. Gudrun, who had been standing behind him, moved to one side to allow him a longer view. As she turned, she saw Jochen had come into the room and was watching them. Jochen sauntered over and greeted Paul coolly and with formality.

‘I came to admire the rug,’ Paul said. ‘It’s splendid, no?’

Jochen glanced at it. ‘Very decorative,’ he said. ‘You should be
designing wallpaper, Miss Velk, not wasting your time with this.’ He turned to Paul. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘Ah. Popular necessities before elitist luxuries,’ Paul said, wagging a warning finger at her, briefly. The sarcasm sounded most strange coming from him, Gudrun thought.

‘It’s a way of putting it,’ Jochen said. ‘Indeed.’

We sit in a window of a coffee shop in Westwood Village. I’ve ordered a coffee and Danish but Spencer has decided to go for something more substantial: a rib-eye steak with fried egg.

‘I hope the Koenigs don’t come back,’ Spencer says. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have ordered the steak.’

I press my cheek against the warm glass of the window. I can just see the back end of Spencer’s crane.

‘I’ll spot them,’ I say. ‘And I’ll see the truck from the factory. You eat up.’

Spencer runs his finger along the curved aluminium beading that finishes the table edge.

‘I want you to know, Miss Velk, how grateful I am for the work you’ve put my way.’ He looks me in the eye. ‘More than grateful.’

‘No, it is I who am grateful to you.’ I smiled. ‘It’s not easy to find someone more reliable.’

‘Well, I appreciate what you –’

His steak comes and puts an end to what I’m sure would have been long protestations of mutual gratitude. It’s too hot to eat pastry so I push my Danish aside and wonder where I can buy some more cigarettes. Spencer, holding his fork like a dagger in his injured left hand, stabs it into his steak to keep it steady on the plate, and, with the knife in his right, sets about trying to saw the meat into pieces. He is having difficulty: his thumb and two fingers can’t keep a good grip on the fork handle, and he saws awkwardly with the knife.

‘Damn thing is I’m left-handed,’ he says, sensing me watching. He works off a small corner, pops it in his mouth and then sets about the whole pinioning, slicing operation again. The plate slides
across the shiny table top and collides with my coffee mug. A small splash flips out.

‘Sorry,’ he says.

‘Could I do that for you?’ I say. ‘Would it bother you?’

He says nothing and I reach out and gently take the knife and fork from him. I cut the steak into cubes and hand back the knife and fork.

‘Thank you, Miss Velk.’

‘Please call me Gudrun,’ I say.

‘Thank you, Gudrun.’

‘Gudrun! Gudrun, over here.’ Utta was beckoning from the doorway of Jochen’s kitchen. Gudrun moved with difficulty through the crowd, finding a gap here, skirting round an expansive gesture there. Utta drew her into the kitchen, where there was still quite a mob, too, and refilled Gudrun’s glass with punch and then her own. They clinked glasses.