I turn away, a little exasperated. “As long as it gets here,” I say with futile determination, as if I had the power to threaten. The drape streams out of the window suddenly, like a banner, and catches the sun. Then I remember: like the wall hanging Utta had done. The one that Tobias bought.
Spencer asks me if he should go phone the factory but I say give them an extra half hour. I am remembering another Sunday morning, sunny like this one but not as hot, and half the world away, and I can see myself walking up Grillparzerstrasse, taking the shortcut from the station, my suitcase heavy in my hand, and hoping, wondering, now that I have managed to catch the dawn train from Sorau, if Tobias will be able to find some time to see me alone that afternoon …
Gudrun Velk walked slowly up Grillparzerstrasse, enjoying the sun, her body canted over to counterbalance the weight of her suitcase. She was wearing …(What was I wearing?) She was wearing baggy cotton trousers with the elasticated cuffs at the ankles, a sky blue blouse and an embroidered felt jacket with a motif of jousters and strutting chargers. Her fair hair was down and she wore no makeup; she was thinking about Tobias, and whether they might see each other that day, and whether they might make love. Thinking about Utta, if she would be up by now. Thinking about the two thick skeins of still-damp blue wool in her suitcase, wool that she had dyed herself late the night before at the mill in Sorau and that she felt sure would finish her rug perfectly and, most importantly, in a manner that would please Paul.
Paul came to 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, 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 color.” He shrugged, adding, “In my opinion.” That was when she started to go to his classes on color theory and 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 had taken over the mood had changed, was turning against Paul and the other painters. Meyer was against them, she had been told, he felt they smacked of Weimar, the bad old days. Tobias 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 instead 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 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.”