The Destiny of Nathalie X

Loose Continuity

IAM STANDING on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire, just down from the Mobil gas station, waiting. There is a coolish breeze just managing to blow from somewhere, and I am glad of it. Nine o’clock in the morning and it’s going to be another hot one, for sure. For the third or fourth time I needlessly go over and inspect the concrete foundation, noting again that the power lines have been properly installed and that the extra bolts I have requested are duly there. Where is everybody? I look at my watch, light another cigarette and begin to grow vaguely worried: have I picked the wrong day? Has my accent confused Mr. Koenig (he is always asking me to repeat myself)?…

A bright curtain — blues and ochres — boils and billows from an apartment window across the street. It sets a forgotten corner of my mind working — who had drapes like that, once? Who owned a skirt that was similar, or perhaps a tie?

A claxon honks down Wilshire and I look up to see Spencer driving the crane, pulling slowly across two lanes of traffic and coming to a halt at the curb.

He swings down from the cab and takes off his cap. His hair is getting longer, losing that army crop.

“Sorry I’m late, Miss Velk, the depot was, you know, crazy, impossible.”

“Doesn’t matter, it’s not here anyway.”

“Yeah, right.” Spencer moves over and crouches down at the concrete plinth, checking the power-line connection, touching and jiggling the bolts and their brackets. He goes around the back of the crane and sets out the wooden MEN AT WORK signs, then reaches into his pocket and hands me a crumpled sheet of flimsy.

“The permit,” he explains. “We got till noon.”

“Even on a Sunday?”

“Even on a Sunday. Even in Los Angeles.” He shrugs. “Even in 1945. Don’t worry, Miss Velk. We got plenty of time.”

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.”

“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 around 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? Well, whatever.” 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?”

Tobias 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 ate 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 were perfectly normal. Gudrun realized that it aroused him sexually, that it was a prelude to lovemaking, but she began to feel cold and before he served the salad she asked if she could go and put on her sweater.

Tobias Henzi was one of the three Masters of Form who ran the architecture workshop. He was a big burly man who would become seriously fat in a few years, Gudrun realized. His body was covered with a pelt of fine dark hair, almost like an animal’s, 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 around her.

They met at the New Year’s party in 1928, where the theme was “white.” Tobias had gone as a grotesque, padded Pierrot, a white cone on his head, his face a mask of white greasepaint. 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 1, 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, Tobias, 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 around.

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, not small, but with the stocky man’s vigorous rolling stride, as if the air were 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.

“Goddamn factory. Must be something on the highway.”

“Can I buy you some breakfast, Spencer?”

Paul met Tobias only once in Gudrun’s company. It was 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 color penetration, the orangy pinks, the lemons … What’s going to happen at 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 colors.”

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 Tobias had come into the room and was watching them. Tobias sauntered over and greeted Paul coolly and with formality.

“I came to admire the rug,” Paul said. “It’s splendid, no?”

Tobias 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,” Tobias 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 aluminum 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.”

“No, no, 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 with the knife awkwardly.

“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 starts the whole pinioning, slicing operation again. The plate slides across the shiny tabletop and collides with my coffee mug. A small splash flips out.

“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.”

“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.

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.