The Destiny of Nathalie X (20 page)

Spencer leans against the pole that holds the power lines. 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 hot milk as it cools. 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, about his injury—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, or 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 Tobias 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 building on Grenz Weg, out in Jonitz, with a distant view of a turgid loop of the Mulde from the kitchen window. The place was clean and simply furnished. On the walls hung brightly colored 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 coloring 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 Utta and Gudrun 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. It 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 turnips—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 credentials, her ambitions, were motivated by a pessimistic obsession about her position at the Institute, to which the conversation inevitably returned. She told Gudrun 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 Meyer’s intention. Look what had happened to stained glass, she said, to the wood- and stone-carving workshops. The struggle it had been 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 Utta’s 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 around 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? Well, whatever.” 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?”

Tobias 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 ate 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 were perfectly normal. Gudrun realized that it aroused him sexually, that it was a prelude to lovemaking, but she began to feel cold and before he served the salad she asked if she could go and put on her sweater.

Tobias Henzi was one of the three Masters of Form who ran the architecture workshop. He was a big burly man who would become seriously fat in a few years, Gudrun realized. His body was covered with a pelt of fine dark hair, almost like an animal’s, 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 around her.

They met at the New Year’s party in 1928, where the theme was “white.” Tobias had gone as a grotesque, padded Pierrot, a white cone on his head, his face a mask of white greasepaint. 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 1, 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, Tobias, 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 around.

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, not small, but with the stocky man’s vigorous rolling stride, as if the air were 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.

“Goddamn factory. Must be something on the highway.”

“Can I buy you some breakfast, Spencer?”

Paul met Tobias only once in Gudrun’s company. It was 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 color penetration, the orangy pinks, the lemons … What’s going to happen at 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 colors.”

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 Tobias had come into the room and was watching them. Tobias sauntered over and greeted Paul coolly and with formality.

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

Tobias 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,” Tobias 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 aluminum 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.”

“No, no, 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 with the knife awkwardly.

“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 starts the whole pinioning, slicing operation again. The plate slides across the shiny tabletop 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 beckoned her from the doorway of Tobias’s kitchen. Gudrun moved with difficulty through the crowd of people, finding a gap here, skirting around an expansive gesture there. Utta drew her into the kitchen, where there was still quite a mob of people, and refilled Gudrun’s glass with punch and then her own. They clinked glasses.

“I give you Marianne Brandt,” Utta said. She smiled.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s resigned.”

“What happened? Who told you?”

Utta inclined her head toward the window. “Irene,” she said. Standing by the sink talking to three young men was Irene Henzi, Tobias’s wife. Gudrun had not seen her there. She had arrived at the party late, uneasy at the thought of being in Tobias’s house, meeting his wife and other guests. Tobias had assured her that Irene knew nothing; Irene was ignorance personified, he said, the quintessence of ignorance. Utta carried on talking, as Gudrun covertly scrutinized her hostess, hearing some business about amalgamation, about metal, joinery and mural painting all being coordinated into a new workshop of interior design. Irene did not look like an ignorant woman, she thought, she looked like a woman brimful of knowledge. “—I told you it would happen. Arndt’s going to run it. But Marianne’s refused to continue,” Utta was saying, but Gudrun did not listen further. Irene Henzi was tall and thin, she had a sharp long face with hooded, sleepy eyes and wore a loose black gown that seemed oddly Eastern in design. To Gudrun she appeared almost ugly, and yet she seemed to have gathered within her a languid, self-confident calm and serenity. The students laughed at something she said, and she left them with a flick of her wrist, making them laugh again, picking up a plate of canapés and beginning to offer them around to the other guests standing and chatting in the kitchen. She drifted toward Utta and Gudrun, closer, a smile and word for everyone.