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.
Mr. Koenig is telling me that there are fifteen Koenig mini-diners in the Los Angeles area and he would like, he hopes, he wonders if it would be possible for me to redesign them — all of them — in this streamline, modern streamline sort of style.
All scattered. Freer. Freer movements, freer dynamics. I remember, and smile to myself. I had never imagined a future designing hot dog stands in a city on the West Coast of America. It is a kind of continuity, I suppose. We need not plummet. Paul would approve of me and what I have done, I think, as a vindication of his principle.
I hear myself accepting Mr. Koenig’s offer and allow him to kiss me on the cheek once more — but my mind is off once again, a continent and an ocean away in drab and misty Dessau. Gudrun Velk is trudging up the gentle slope of Grillparzerstrasse, her suitcase heavy in her hand, taking the shortcut from the station, heading back to the small apartment on Grenz Weg which she shares with her friend Utta Benrath and hoping, wondering, now that she has managed to catch an early train from Sorau, if Tobias would have some time to see her alone that afternoon.