‘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.’
‘Maybe Meyer will go first,’ Gudrun said. ‘He’s so unpopular. It can’t be nice for him.’
Utta laughed. And laughed again. ‘Sweet Gudrun,’ she said and reached out and patted her foot. ‘Never change.’
‘But why should it affect you?’ Gudrun asked. ‘Marianne runs the metal workshop.’
‘Exactly,’ Utta said, with a small smile. ‘Don’t you see? That means there’ll be a vacancy, won’t there?’
Mr Koenig steps out of his car and wrinkles his eyes at the sun. Mrs Koenig waits patiently until he comes round and opens the door for her. Everyone shakes hands.
‘Bet you’re glad you’re not in Okinawa, eh, Spence?’ Mr Koenig says.
‘Fire from heaven, I hear,’ Spencer says with some emotion.
‘Oh, yeah? Sure sounds that way.’ Mr Koenig turns to me.
‘How’re we doing, Miss Velk?’
‘Running a bit late,’ I say. ‘Maybe in one hour, if you come back?’
He looks at his watch, then at his wife. ‘What do you say to some breakfast, Mrs Koenig?’
Jochen liked to be naked. He liked to move around his house doing ordinary things, naked. Once when his wife was away he had cooked Gudrun a meal and asked her to eat it with him, naked. They had thick slices of smoked ham, she remembered, with a pungent radish sauce. They sat in his dining room and ate and chatted as if all was perfectly normal. Gudrun realized that it sexually aroused him, that it was a prelude to love-making, but she began to feel cold and before he served the salad she asked if she could go and put on her sweater.
Jochen Henzi was one of the three Masters of Form who ran the architecture workshop. He was a big burly man who would run seriously to fat in a few years, Gudrun realized. His body was covered with a pelt of fine, dark hair, almost like an animal, it grew thickly on his chest and belly and, curiously, in the small of his back, but his whole body – his buttocks, his shoulders – was covered with this fine, glossy fur. At first she thought she would find it repugnant, but it was soft, not wiry, and now when they were in bed she often discovered herself absentmindedly stroking him, as if he were a great cat or a bear, as if he were a rug she could pull round her.
They met at the New Year party in 1928, where the theme was ‘white’. Jochen had gone as a grotesque, padded pierrot, a white cone on his head, his face a mask of white pancake. Gudrun had been a colonialist, in a man’s white suit with a white shirt and tie and her hair up under a solar topee. By the party’s end, well into January 1st, she had gone into an upstairs lavatory to untie her tight bun, vaguely hoping that loosening her hair would ease her headache.
Her hair was longer then, falling to her shoulders, and as she came down the stairs to the main hall she saw, sitting on a landing, Jochen – a large, rumpled, clearly drunken pierrot, smoking a dark, knobbled cigar. He watched her descend, a little amazed, it seemed, blinking as if to clear some obstruction to his vision.
She stepped over his leg, she knew who he was.
‘Hey, you,’ he shouted after her. ‘I didn’t know you were a woman.’ His tone was affronted, aggressive, almost as if she had deliberately misled him. She did not look round.
The day the new term began he came to the weaving workshop to find her.
I take my last cigarette from the pack and light it. I sit on the step below the cab of Spencer’s crane, where there’s some shade. I see Spencer coming briskly along the sidewalk from the pay phone. He’s a stocky man, with the stocky man’s vigorous rolling stride, as if the air is crowding him and he’s shouldering it away, forcing his passage through.
‘They say it left an hour ago.’ He shrugged. ‘Must be some problem on the highway.’
‘Wonderful.’ I blow smoke into the sky, loudly, to show my exasperation.
‘Can I bum one of those off of you?’
I show him the empty pack.
‘Lucky Strike.’ He shrugs, ‘I don’t like them, anyway.’
‘I like the name. That’s why I smoke them.’
He looks at me. ‘Yeah, where do they get the names for those packs? Who makes them up? I ask you.’
‘Camel.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Why a camel? Do camels smoke? Why not a… a hippo? I ask you.’
I laugh. ‘A pack of Hippos, please.’
He grins and cuffs the headlamp nacelle. He makes a tsssss sound, and shakes his head, incredulously. He looks back at me.
‘Goddam factory. Must be something on the highway.’
‘Can I buy you some breakfast, Spencer?’
Paul met Jochen only once in Gudrun’s company. It was during one afternoon at four o’clock when the workshops closed. The weavers worked four hours in the morning, two in the afternoon. The workshop was empty. The big rug was half done, pinned up on an easel in the middle of the room. Paul stood in front of it, the fingers of his right hand slowly stroking his chin, looking, thinking. From time to time he would cover his left eye with his left palm.
‘I like it, Gudrun,’ he said, finally. ‘I like its warmth and clarity. The colour penetration, the orangey-pinks, the lemons… What’s going to happen in the bottom?’
‘I think I am going to shade into green and blue.’
‘What’s that black?’
‘I’m going to have some bars, some vertical, one horizontal, with the cold colours.’
He nodded and stepped back. Gudrun, who had been standing behind him, moved to one side to allow him a longer view. As she turned, she saw Jochen had come into the room and was watching them. Jochen sauntered over and greeted Paul coolly and with formality.
‘I came to admire the rug,’ Paul said. ‘It’s splendid, no?’
Jochen glanced at it. ‘Very decorative,’ he said. ‘You should be designing wallpaper, Miss Velk, not wasting your time with this.’ He turned to Paul. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘Ah. Popular necessities before elitist luxuries,’ Paul said, wagging a warning finger at her, briefly. The sarcasm sounded most strange coming from him, Gudrun thought.
‘It’s a way of putting it,’ Jochen said. ‘Indeed.’
We sit in a window of a coffee shop in Westwood Village. I’ve ordered a coffee and Danish but Spencer has decided to go for something more substantial: a rib-eye steak with fried egg.
‘I hope the Koenigs don’t come back,’ Spencer says. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have ordered the steak.’
I press my cheek against the warm glass of the window. I can just see the back end of Spencer’s crane.
‘I’ll spot them,’ I say. ‘And I’ll see the truck from the factory. You eat up.’
Spencer runs his finger along the curved aluminium beading that finishes the table edge.
‘I want you to know, Miss Velk, how grateful I am for the work you’ve put my way.’ He looks me in the eye. ‘More than grateful.’
‘No, it is I who am grateful to you.’ I smiled. ‘It’s not easy to find someone more reliable.’
‘Well, I appreciate what you –’
His steak comes and puts an end to what I’m sure would have been long protestations of mutual gratitude. It’s too hot to eat pastry so I push my Danish aside and wonder where I can buy some more cigarettes. Spencer, holding his fork like a dagger in his injured left hand, stabs it into his steak to keep it steady on the plate, and, with the knife in his right, sets about trying to saw the meat into pieces. He is having difficulty: his thumb and two fingers can’t keep a good grip on the fork handle, and he saws awkwardly with the knife.
‘Damn thing is I’m left-handed,’ he says, sensing me watching. He works off a small corner, pops it in his mouth and then sets about the whole pinioning, slicing operation again. The plate slides across the shiny table top and collides with my coffee mug. A small splash flips out.
‘Sorry,’ he says.<
br />
‘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 was beckoning from the doorway of Jochen’s kitchen. Gudrun moved with difficulty through the crowd, finding a gap here, skirting round an expansive gesture there. Utta drew her into the kitchen, where there was still quite a mob, too, and refilled Gudrun’s glass with punch and then her own. They clinked glasses.
‘I give you Marianne Brandt,’ Utta said, quietly. She smiled.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She did resign.’
‘How do you know? Who told you?’
Utta discreetly inclined her head towards the window. ‘Marlene,’ she said. Standing by the sink talking to three young men was Marlene Henzi, Jochen’s wife. Gudrun had not seen her there. She had arrived at the party late, uneasy at the thought of being in Jochen’s house with his wife and other guests. Jochen had assured her that Marlene knew nothing, Marlene was ignorance personified, he said, the quintessence of ignorance. Utta carried on talking – some business of amalgamation, of metal, joinery and mural-painting all being coordinated into a new workshop of interior design – while Gudrun covertly scrutinized her hostess. Marlene did not look to her like an ignorant woman, she thought, she looked like a woman brimfull 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. Marlene 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 with a flick of her wrist, which made them laugh again, she left them, picking up a plate of canapés and beginning to offer to the other guests standing and chatting in the kitchen. She drifted towards Utta and Gudrun, closer, a smile and a 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 Jochen, find out more. They need a new assistant now. If Jochen could mention my name, Meyer would listen to him…’
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 manoeuvres the crane into position.
Jochen ran his fingertips down her back to the cleft in her buttocks. ‘So smooth,’ he said, wonderingly. 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.
Jochen 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 about the dyeing course she was going to take 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 place 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 Jochen 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.’ Jochen 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 Jochen 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 Jochen. 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. But 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. Never.’
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 explain to Mr Koenig: ‘It’s manufactured in three parts. The whole thing can be assembled amazingly 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-grey smoke and the crane’s motor chugs into life.
Jochen 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 drafting rooms. She pushed herself away from him and strolled over to the angled 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 Marlene Henzi walked in.
‘Jochen, we’relate,’ she said, glancing at Gudrun with a faint smile.
Jochen sat on, one 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,’ Jochen said. ‘Surely you met.’
‘Darling, there were a hundred people at the party.’
‘I won’t disturb you any further,’ Gudrun said, moving to the door. ‘Very good to meet you.’
‘Oh, Miss Velk.’ Jochen’s call stopped her, she turned carefully to see Marlene bent over the drawing table scrutinizing the blueprint there. ‘Don’t forget our appointment. 4.30 again?’ 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 the students – by the roaring noise of aero engines. The tri-motors which were tested at the Junkers Flugplatz, just beyond the pine trees to the west, would bank round 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 birch wood, still trembling, still hot from the memory of Jochen’s audacity, his huge composure. She was surprised to see Paul coming up from the meadow. 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 aerodrome, 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 colour at the dyeworks.
‘With Jochen,’ he said suddenly, to her surprise, ‘when you’re with Jochen, 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 Jochen. They were both happy. She said boldly that she thought she was in love with him. Paul listened. He told her that Jochen was a powerful figure in the architecture school, that all power in the Institute emanated finally from the architecture workshop. He would not be surprised, he said, if one day Jochen ended up running the whole place.