“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.
“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.”