“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.