The Destiny of Nathalie X (21 page)

“I have to go,” Gudrun said, and left.

Utta caught up with her in the hall, where she was putting on her coat.

“What’s happening? Where are you going?”

“Home. I don’t feel well.”

“But I want you to talk to Tobias, find out more. They need a new assistant now. If Tobias could mention my name to Meyer, just a mention …”

Gudrun felt a genuine nausea and simultaneously, inexplicably, infuriatingly, an urge to cry.

Spencer frowns worriedly at me. I look at my watch, Mr. Koenig looks at his watch also and simultaneously the truck from the factory in Oxnard rumbles up Wilshire. Apologies are offered, the delays on the highway blamed—who would have thought there could be so much traffic on a Sunday?—and Spencer maneuvers the crane into position.

Tobias ran his fingertips down her back to the cleft in her buttocks. “So smooth,” he said. He turned her over and nuzzled her breasts, taking her hand and pulling it down to his groin.

“Utta will be home soon,” she said.

Tobias groaned. He heaved himself up on his elbows and looked down at her. “I can’t stand this,” he said. “You have to get a place of your own. And not so damn far away.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Gudrun said. “I’ll get a little apartment on Kavalierstrasse. So convenient and so reasonable.”

“I’m going to miss you,” he said. “What am I going to do? Dear Christ.”

Gudrun had told him she was going to take the dyeing course at Sorau. They met regularly now, almost as a matter of routine, three, sometimes four times a week in the afternoon at the apartment on Grenz Weg. The weaving workshop closed earlier than the other departments in the Institute, and between half past four and half past six in the afternoons they had the flat to themselves. Utta would obligingly stop for a coffee or shop on her way home—dawdling for the sake of love, as she described it—and usually Tobias was gone by the time she returned. On the occasions they met he seemed quite indifferent, quite unperturbed at being seen.

“Now, if Utta was the new head of the metal workshop,” Gudrun said, “I’m sure she’d be much more busy than—”

“Don’t start that again,” Tobias said. “I’ve spoken to Meyer. Arndt has his own candidates. You know she has a fair chance. A more than fair chance.” He put his arms around her and squeezed her strongly to him. “Gudrun, my Gudrun,” he exclaimed, as if mystified by this emotion within him. “Why do I want you so? Why?”

They heard the rattle of Utta’s key in the lock, her steps as she crossed the hall into the kitchen.

When Tobias left, Utta came immediately to Gudrun’s room. She was dressing, but the bed was still a mess of rumpled sheets, which for some reason made Gudrun embarrassed. To her the room seemed to reek of Tobias. She pulled the blanket up to the pillow.

“Did he see you when he left?” Gudrun asked.

“No, I was in my room. Did he say anything?”

“The same as usual. No, ‘a more than fair chance,’ he said. He said Arndt has his own candidates.”

“Of course, but ‘a more than fair chance.’ That’s something. Yes …”

“Utta, I can’t do anything more. I think I should stop asking. Why don’t you see Meyer yourself?”

“No, no. It’s not the way it works here, you don’t understand. It never has. You have to play it differently. And you must never give up.”

Spencer checks that the canvas webbing is properly secured under the base, jumps down from the truck and climbs up to the small control platform beside the crane.

I remind Mr. Koenig: “It’s manufactured in three parts. The whole thing can be assembled quickly. It’s painted, finished. We connect the power supply and you’re in business.”

Mr. Koenig was visibly moved. “It’s incredible,” he said. “Just like that.”

I turn to Spencer and give him a thumbs-up. There’s a thin puff of bluey-gray smoke and the crane’s motor chugs into life.

Tobias sat on the edge of his desk, one leg swinging. He reached out to take Gudrun’s hand and gently pulled her into the V of his thighs. He kissed her neck and inhaled, smelling her skin, her hair, as if he were trying to draw her essence deep into his lungs.

“I want us to go away for a weekend,” he said. “Let’s go to Berlin.”

She kissed him. “I can’t afford it.”

“I’ll pay,” he said. “I’ll think of something, some crucial meeting.”

She felt his hands on her buttocks; his thighs gently clamped hers. Through the wall of his office she could hear male voices from one of the drawing rooms. She pushed herself away from him and strolled over to the tilted drawing table that was set before the window.

“A weekend in Berlin …” she said. “I like the sound of that, I must—”

She turned as the door opened and Irene Henzi walked in.

“Tobias, we’re late,” she said, glancing at Gudrun with a faint smile.

Tobias sat on, one free leg swinging slightly.

“You know Miss Velk, don’t you?”

“I don’t think so. How are you?”

Somehow Gudrun managed to extend her arm; she felt the slight pressure of dry cool fingers. “A pleasure.”

“She was at the party,” Tobias said. “Surely you met.”

“Darling, there were a hundred people at the party.”

“I won’t disturb you further,” Gudrun said, moving to the door. “Very good to meet you.”

“Oh, Miss Velk.” Tobias’s call stopped her; she turned carefully to see Irene bent over the drawing table scrutinizing the blueprint there. “Don’t forget our appointment. Four-thirty as usual.” He smiled at her, glanced over to make sure his wife was not observing and blew her a kiss.

At the edge of a wood of silver birches behind the Institute was a small meadow where, in summer, the students would go and sunbathe. And at the meadow’s edge a stream ran, thick with willows and alders. The pastoral mood was regularly dispelled, however—and Gudrun wondered if this was why it was so popular with students—by the roaring noise of aeroengines. The trimotors that were tested at the Junkers Flugplatz, just beyond the pine trees to the west, would bank around and fly low over the meadow as they made their landing approaches. In the summer the pilots would wave to the sunbathing students below.

Gudrun walked down the path through the birchwood, still trembling, still hot from the memory of Tobias’s audacity, his huge composure. She was surprised to see, coming up from the meadow, Paul. He was carrying a pair of binoculars in his hand. He saw her and waved.

“I like to look at the aeroplanes,” he said. “In the war I used to work at an airfield, you know, painting camouflage. Wonderful machines.”

She had a flask of coffee with her and spontaneously offered to share it with him. She needed some company, she felt, some genial distraction. They found a place by the stream and she poured coffee into the tin cup that doubled as the flask’s top. She had some bread and two hard-boiled eggs, which she ate as Paul drank the coffee. Then he filled his pipe and smoked while she told him about the dyeing course at Sorau. He said he thought she needed a more intense
blue to finish her rug, something hard and metallic, and suggested she might be able to concoct the right color at the dye works.

“With Tobias,” he said suddenly, to her surprise, “when you’re with Tobias, are you happy?”

He waved aside her denials and queries. Everyone knew about it, he told her, such a thing could not be done discreetly in a place like the Institute. She need not answer if she did not want to, but he was curious.

Yes, she said, she was very happy with Tobias. They were both happy. She said boldly that she thought she was in love with him. Paul listened. He told her that Tobias was a powerful figure in the architecture school, that all power in the Institute emanated from the architecture workshop. He would not be surprised, he said, if one day Tobias ended up running the whole place.

He rose to his feet, tapped out his pipe on the trunk of a willow and they wandered back through the birchwood.

“I just wanted you to be aware about this,” he said, “about Tobias.” He smiled at her. “He’s an intriguing man.” His features were small beneath his wide pale brow, as if crushed and squashed slightly by its weight. There were bags under his eyes, she noticed, he looked tired.

“You’re like a meteor,” he said. “Suddenly you’re attracted by the earth and are drawn into its atmosphere. At this moment you become a shooting star, incandescent and beautiful. There are two options available: to be tied to the earth’s atmosphere and plummet, or to escape, moving back out into space—”

She was baffled at first, but then remembered he was quoting from his own courses, something she had heard in his classes.

“—where you slowly cool down and eventually extinguish. The point is you need not plummet,” he said carefully.
“There are different laws in different atmospheres, freer movements, freer dynamics. It need not be rigid.”

“Loose continuity,” she said. “I remember.”

“Precisely,” he said with a smile. “There’s a choice. Rigid or loose continuity.” He tapped her arm lightly. “Do you know, I think I may be interested in buying your rug.”

Spencer tightens the final bolt and crosses the street to join us on the opposite sidewalk. Mr. Koenig, Mrs. Koenig, Spencer and me. It is almost midday, and the sun is almost insupportably bright. I put on my sunglasses and through their green glass I stare at the Koenigs’ mini-diner.

Mr. Koenig turns away and takes a few paces, his finger held under his nose as if he were about to sneeze. He comes back to us.

“I love it, Miss Velk,” he says after apologizing for the few private moments he has needed. “I just … It’s so … The way you’ve done those jutting-out bits. My God, it even looks like a sandwich. The roll, the meat … So clever, so new. How it curves like that, that style—”

“Streamline moderne, we call it.”

“May I?”

He puts his hands on my shoulders and leans forward and up (I am a little taller) and he gives me a swift kiss on the cheek.

“I don’t normally kiss architects—”

“Oh, I’m not an architect,” I say. “I’m just a designer. It was a challenge.”

Gudrun never really knew what happened (but this is what I think, I’m sure it was like this), as the stories changed so often in the telling, and there were lies and half-lies all the time.
The truth made both guilty parties more guilty and they thought to absolve themselves by pleading spontaneity, and helpless instinct, but they had no time to compare notes and the discrepancies hinted at quite another version of reality.

Gudrun climbed the last block from the station and quietly opened the door of the apartment on Grenz Weg. It must have been a little before eight o’clock in the morning. She had gone a few steps into the hall when she heard a sound in the kitchen. She pushed open the door and Tobias stood there, naked, with two cups of steaming coffee in his hands.

His look of awful incomprehension changing to awful comprehension lasted no more than a second. He smiled, set down the cups, said “Gudrun—” and was interrupted by Utta’s call from her bedroom. “Tobias, where’s that coffee, for heaven’s sake?”

Gudrun (to this day) doesn’t know why she did what she did. She picked up a coffee cup and walked into Utta’s room. She wanted Utta to see that there was to be no evasion of responsibility. Utta was sitting up in her bed, pillows plumped behind her, the sheet to her waist. Tobias’s clothes were piled untidily on a wooden chair. She made a kind of sick, choking noise when Gudrun came in. For a moment Gudrun thought of throwing the hot coffee at her, but at that stage she knew there were only seconds before she herself would break, so, after a moment of standing there to make Utta see, to make her know, she dropped the cup on the floor and left the apartment.

Two days later Tobias asked Gudrun to marry him. He said he had gone to the apartment on Saturday night (his wife was away) thinking that was the day she was returning from Sorau. Why would he think that? she asked, they had talked about a Sunday reunion so many times. Once in his stream of protestations he had inadvertently referred to a note—“I mean, what would you think? a note like that”—and then, when
questioned—“What note? Who sent you a note?”—said he was becoming confused—no, there was no note, he had meant to say she
should
have sent him a note from Sorau, not relied on him to remember, how could he remember everything, for God’s sweet sake?

Utta. Utta had written to him, Gudrun surmised, perhaps in her name, the better to lure him: “Darling Tobias, I’m coming home a day early, meet me at the apartment on Saturday night. Your own Gudrun …” It would work easily. Utta there, surprised to see him. Come in, sit down, now you’re here, come all this way. Something to drink, some wine, some schnapps, maybe? And Tobias’s vanity, Tobias’s opportunism and Tobias’s weakness would do the rest. Now, darling, Tobias, this question of Marianne Brandt’s resignation …

In weary moments, though, other possibilities presented themselves to her. Older duplicities, histories and motives she could never have known about and wouldn’t want to contemplate. Her own theory was easier to live with.

Utta wrote her a letter: “…  no idea how it happened … some madness that can infect us all … an act of no meaning, of momentary release.” She was sad to lose Utta as a friend, but not so sad to turn down Tobias’s proposal of marriage.

I say goodbye to Spencer as he sits in the cab of his crane looking down at me. “See you tomorrow, Gudrun,” he says with a smile, to my vague surprise, until I remember I had asked him to call me Gudrun. He drives away and I rejoin Mr. Koenig.

“I got one question,” he says. “I mean, I love the lettering, don’t get me wrong—‘sandwiches, salads, hot dogs’—but why no capital letters?”

“Well,” I say without thinking, “why write with capitals when we don’t speak with capitals?”

Mr. Koenig frowns. “What?… Yeah, it’s a fair point. Never thought of it that way … Yeah.”

My mind begins to wander again, as Mr. Koenig starts to put a proposition to me. Who said that about typography? Was it Albers? Paul?… No, Moholy-Nagy. László in his red overalls with his lumpy boxer’s face and his intellectual’s spectacles. He is in Chicago now. We’re all gone, I think to myself, all scattered.