William Boyd - The Destiny of Nathalie X

“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.”