The Love Knot

By John Slavin

"The Love Knot" tells the story of two English artists, young lovers caught up in the dramatic events of Hitler's attempted revolution in Munich in 1923.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9780646566481

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Munich. Winter 1922

Afterwards the black marketeers wept as they were driven through the streets in their open coupes. Near the Rathaus the police fired tear gas canisters and blank bullets and made spasmodic sorties to clear the centre of agitators, riff raff, beggars and demobilised soldiers but in the studio the uproar passed unheard. A faint sour smell of chemicals seeped through the high windows.

The work space was a chamber of veiled light. Even on the most slate-grey days when the early frost outside ascended in ghost shrouds over the rooftops and took up residence there, in the high-ceilinged room there was always a weak illumination from above and a little residue of warmth below. The building had once been annexed to the baroque Frauenkirche, the Church of the Madonna, next door. It had functioned as a Lady’s Chapel for those who shied from the stare of the hoi polloi crowding to watch the Mass from the tiled floor of the main nave. Now it served as both workplace and residence for a group of local artists.

In the evening Ilse Lohr lit the fires in the pot-bellied stoves installed at either end of the hall, placed a bucket of water on top of each of them and made sure there was a good supply of wood stacked against the wall behind so that she wouldn’t need to go out into the inhospitable yard later in the night. Patched with pats of plaster on its armature the maquette for a large horse stood against a sidewall. She drew a red blanket along a clothesline, not so much to conceal it as to narrow the space where some of the company would dine later that night, to make the living area cosier in spite of the fact that it irritated Herr Loerke who told her not to bother. When it was done the horse’s head appeared above the line of blanket creating the illusion of being stalled in a stable.

As she prepared a meal Ilse drank. This was her moment of meditation for the day that was closing. She favoured a cheap kind of brandy that she bought from a merchant close by. He drew it from one of the immense casks that lined his cellar walls, filling up her two-litre bottle quickly so that he didn’t spill a drop and yet there was just room to push the cork gently in. She liked that. She didn’t like wastage of any kind.

By the time she went to bed at eleven the bottle would be half empty.

She had modelled for a number of artists from the time she was fourteen. She knew all the successful ones, Obrist, Endell and Steiner, and was not shy to return their impersonal stares as they studied her naked body. In those days she had been proud of her physical beauty the way a young filly cavorts across spring pastures with no thought of the coming saddle or the bit. She soon picked up the secret language of their aesthetic tastes and could with a quick glance over a painting or wax maquette, decide whether or not they had caught something of the daring and determination that had spurred her into a life that back on the farm she could have scarcely imagined.

In their spare time they all tried to seduce her believing that such possession would give an illusion of energy to what they had created; but she came from a peasant family which, while not overtly dedicated to morality, taught its daughters an age-old practicality: you did not surrender your treasure until you were offered something of enduring value in return.

Instinctively she knew how to hold the hungry-eyed young men at bay: ‘Why Puschi, liebe kater, if you eat the hot pastry you won’t want to look at it any more. You will be all filled up with it and your mind will grow tired and dead-eyed like a fat old uncle after Sunday dinner.’ She had worked the note of derision into a refinement. The boys soon left her alone. They invented a nickname for her, die Milchkalb, the milk calf, and she knew that she was safe. That is, until she met Loerke.

She was his favourite model. He took her on, just before war broke out, when she was sixteen. For three years their partnership, if you could so describe such a servitude, was uninterrupted. But when she was eighteen and reaching the full bloom of her physical beauty he said to her one day: ‘That’s enough now, Ilse. I can’t use you anymore. You have nothing new to offer. I need someone younger who might with luck stimulate my inner eye. In you I can only see what I have already achieved. Failed attempts. Power and innovation. This is what is needed.’

That was all he said. Word of her fall quickly went around the bohemian set and soon there was no other work for her in Munich any more. But he didn’t, as she feared, throw her out on the streets. An unspoken contract established itself. She could continue in the studio. But she must work to pay her way. When he returned one evening with Artur Hubischer and introduced him as ‘my new inspiration’ she understood that the sculptor was moving on in his restless search for some ideal that eluded him.

As the simple soup made of vegetables she had gathered from the back of the market stalls bubbled away on one of the stoves, the residents began to gather. They came in without acknowledging her. She had become part of the studio’s arrangements. First to arrive was young Hubischer. A pinched foxy face, pink complexion and with flaxen hair like a tussock of grass, he attended drawing classes at the city’s Gymnasium. This was a source of hilarity for the rest of the group who mocked his insistence that he must learn to draw correctly before beginning to paint. Loerke in particular derided his protégé: ‘My God, Artur, what do you think they can teach you at that place? How to make a nice reflection of what you see? No one follows academic lines any more. Kirchner and Ernst and the rest of that crowd in Berlin wouldn’t tolerate it. Do you think you can release your inner drive, your secret and oh so puerile dream of desire as easily as dissecting an apple?’

Expertly he made a green rose on his plate with pieces of the quartered apple he intended to eat. Then he began pelting the poor boy accurately and deliberately with them, scoring a direct hit on some part of his face each time. ‘Ear eye chin dab dab dab,’ he shouted. The company whooped.

But Artur was determined to proceed along his straight lines. There was doggedness in the way he held onto some vision of success at the end of his journey and Loerke sensed it and understood it as a personal provocation to his own indecision. For Loerke believed that inspiration hovered far below the conscious mind like a pod of mysterious whales that he must fish for.

They had briefly been lovers. He had snatched the boy from one of those wretched groups that walked through the mountains each weekend, shouting ‘Berg Heil!’ exhausting whatever sexual energies they possessed in forced marches up cruel gradients and afterwards, sitting dreamily around campfires at night, sang sentimental folk songs. Loerke openly claimed that he had perverted the boy but there was more than just the pride of conquest in his boast. It was a secret astonishment at what he had started on its way.

Artur drew near the stove and threw himself into an armchair. He felt mentally bruised from the exercises in the life class. His head brimmed with the teacher’s banal instructions. ‘Look at the subject not at yourself, Hubischer,’ he yelled close to his ear. The students around them tittered. ‘Follow the muscular structure of the body, not just the outlines. Look for the geometry! Anyone can trace outlines!’

‘I can’t,’ the woeful boy said. ‘At least, not yet.’

He was mollified by his classmates’ ripple of laughter. But snared on Schnitke’s continual sarcasm it proved only a momentary release. At last the male model, growing restive, relaxed his stance and scratched his upper thigh. Artur observed the gesture and let the derisive voice in his ear wash over him. The revelation of beauty injected an anaesthetising effect into his mind.

This sense of numbness continued all the way back to the chapel. He dragged his feet across the cold cobbles and when a beggar in a ragged army coat accosted him with the familiar challenge: ‘Could you spare a coin for a patriot?’ Artur put his hand deep into his pocket and drew out his last ten Pfennig, dropped it into the outstretched hat and moved on without regret, relieved to be rid of the nuisance so easily.

Ilse placed a glass of tea in his hands and knew better than to disturb him. They were of an age but she feared for him, for his sometime stupidity. In his own eyes he was a prince incognito living a fairy story who believed that if he held true to his vocation it would one day sweep him away from the dull ache of blunted ambition.

‘Where is Loerke?’ the boy asked without opening his eyes. Or so she thought. Through a haze of eyelashes Artur was studying the line visible from Ilse’s outstretched arm along her breast down to her hip across her curved buttock with the pleasure of a connoisseur.

‘He went to the stonemason’s to look at some granite. At least that’s what he told me. He is so secretive I cannot keep up with him. But he had better be here when the Eintöpf Suppe is done or I shall be angry with him.’

‘Go on,’ drawled Artur. ‘You love it when he makes you complain. A regular old married couple you two are, always squabbling about trivialities. You like to rub up one against the other, wearing each other down because …’

He didn’t have time to finish for just then the door at the studio’s far end flew open with a whack letting in a flurry of fine snow. Loerke stood on the doormat energetically stamping and rubbing his boots—handsome lace-up Alpine boots purchased in Switzerland, in good condition and unscuffed by his constant coming and going across the city.

‘Verdammte’ he swore entering the room. ‘Only October, and winter is showing her face already. They have lit bonfires in Marienplatz and riffraff and idlers huddle around them to keep out the cold. It’s like walking through a gypsy camp. All they need is a supply of chestnuts and they can go into business.’

Artur pushed himself out of his chair and pretended he was setting the table although the placements were there simple and precise already. Ilse stood smiling with a dreamy withdrawn expression on her face. It was clear to her that Loerke had been drinking. His features were flushed and his voice was louder than usual. She knew from experience not to cross her landlord when he was in such a state. Playing die Milchkalb was her best defence.

Loerke turned to speak to someone behind him, still standing in the little churchyard with its half-dozen tongues of tombstones, the names and details already erased by time and weather. They heard a low voice and Loerke responding: ‘Eh what? You aren’t getting cold feet, are you? You don’t want to accept my hospitality? Don’t be silly, old man. It’s far too cold to stand on the doorstep arguing whether Ilse can stretch the food a little further. Come in and find out. I can at least offer you a good cognac to warm you up.’

A man wrapped in a trench coat stepped through the door. He wore a shapeless fedora hat from beneath which lank black hair escaped across his forehead. His attitude was so formal that he bowed stiffly to the occupants then stood at attention just inside the door, his hands crossed and locked together across his groin.

‘You know I don’t drink,’ he said.

‘What a card you are. Isn’t he an absolute one in a million? I came across him in the street egging on the police to teach those swine a lesson and then slipping around the corner to rally the demonstrators to turn back and fight the swine. What is one to make of such behaviour, eh? Eh?’ Loerke demanded of the others, then suddenly bustled about the table to give the illusion of genial hospitality. He didn’t bother to introduce the stranger who refused to quit his cautious stance on the edge of the room but hung up his own coat, then walked quickly to the nearest stove, muttered something about ‘bloody soup again’, and beckoned his guest to come forward.

‘There, what do you think of it?’ he casually indicated with a nod the plaster maquette behind its curtain as he relieved his guest of hat and coat and pushed him towards the half hidden monument.

The man brushed his hair out of his eyes and stood before the giant horse with a comic concentration that ignored every other thing around him. He stared upwards for so long that the others, hanging on his response, thought that he had forgotten them.

‘It’s very fine!’ he looked over his shoulder at last. His eyes shone. He could scarcely bear to tear himself away from the thing. ‘It has a style that tells me unmistakably whose hand has shaped it but also it expresses the impersonal power, the concrete vital forces of the species scarcely constrained by the form, quite superbly.’

Loerke visibly squirmed and turned away to pour himself a cognac. It was always so. He longed for some intimate gesture of recognition for his labour. But on those brief occasions when it was given to him he felt like a fraud, dissatisfied and somehow thwarted in his vision.

‘Gudrun would not agree with you. She complains that it lacks a rider and therefore there is no dramatic conflict in the work.’

The visitor absorbed this information in silence and then went back to his rapt contemplation.

‘Gudrun is always criticising Ernst’s work,’ Artur intruded. ‘She says it lacks sincerity.’

‘It should stand in Königsplatz in front of the Glyptothek where everyone can see it. Then they would understand that our best German art has nothing to fear from comparison with the achievements of the past, is in fact in its revolutionary phase a continuation of what Phidias …’

Artur gave a theatrical gasp of suppressed mirth and Ilse turned secretly to him and smiled. The stranger at once became still as a statue himself in the centre of the studio floor. He looked at them with dark hatred in his eyes.

‘Don’t pay any attention,’ said Loerke nudging him again to a chair at the table. ‘They are laughing at the idea that one of my works should stand in a public place. A squib to arouse the masses. The young of today have no faith in the popular taste. I had a work destroyed like that. A smaller version of the same composition. That one had a rider. A young girl. The untamed creature carries away the helpless female. Unseen, Ilse blushed.

‘It stood in a corner of the public gardens. Someone commissioned it as a little memorial to the Daimler workers who served the Fatherland and fell in the war. Well, you know what it was like a few years ago. The Reds declaring their Republic, the demobbed troops taking the law into their own hands. A group of strikers came upon that little corner, read the inscription and took umbrage at its message.’

‘Rabble!’ muttered the stranger. ‘Paid by foreign provocateurs to dance on the corpse of the Reich.’

‘It wasn’t the Reich they danced on. It was my sculpture. Somehow they knocked the rider off her seat and reduced her to rubble. Then they painted graffiti on what was left. Woman is not a pawn in the game of Empire Chastity is a German virtue That sort of thing. Politics, politics. How I despise the charade, the self-importance of brutes like that who came back from the front line to our cities expecting everything to be the same, filled with resentment for the fact that it wasn’t. They hate the future, you know in all its manifestations. Barbarians that’s what they are who, if they can’t have the old ways back want to reduce everything dynamic and new to rubble that they might dance upon it.’

The stranger scowled more darkly. His eyes were constantly shifting to take in everything about him, the secret responses between each person to person. He was clearly on his best behaviour and reluctant to speak again in case they mocked him. Loerke was unsettled by his presence. Still he didn’t introduce him to the other two but continued to walk up and down in an agitated fashion about the space pretending to make the place respectable—shifting an unoccupied chair to a corner, picking up a floor cloth forgotten at the end of a bench which he threw with some force into a dark recess.

He glared at Ilse but said nothing. ‘They used to conduct special Masses in here you know,’ he explained to his visitor. ‘The monks across the way. It was a chapel for those who didn’t want to be seen in the main cathedral—certain members of the Bavarian aristocracy, officials from Ludwig’s court who insisted on a demarcation between Church and State, who talked of a possible secular oligarchy among themselves and plotted his incarceration when the king went mad.

‘But here in this little chapel tucked away from public scrutiny they gave orders for the riff raff to be kept out and came to kneel and pray, to beat their breasts as a sign of contrition for what they had done to their lord. They couldn’t be sure that everything was as black and white as their morality told them. So they took sustenance from playing both sides.’

‘He wasn’t mad,’ said the visitor.

Loerke came up short with the distraction of an actor on stage who had missed his cue. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I thought, since the defeat, you were anti-monarchist. You should hear this man talk,’ he turned to the others. ‘He has an opinion on every subject under the sun. Sharp and direct with all the signs of that authority that usually comes with studying history, politics and law for years. I like a man who can up-end conventional beliefs the way you do.’

‘He wasn’t mad,’ the guest repeated. ‘Ludwig lacked an intelligent mentor among his lackeys to steer him towards what destiny had offered him. His great gift was that he understood the historical destiny of art. No titillation for the rich and the bored. No patronage of vulgar bric-a-brac as investment for the Zionist money men. His vision cut clear and deep. Art must throw hot ashes in the face of convention. Not an idle hobby for self appointed dilettantes. Great art must transform reality.’

‘Interesting idea, dear sir,’ drawled Artur. ‘But what about all those ridiculous fantasies—the castles like Neuschwanstein drawn straight from Brothers Grimm; all those grottoes and underground lakes filled with white swans; and the young men dressed as Greek gods who prowled his parks and gardens to form tableaux whenever he appeared. Surely a personal vision so perverse and exaggerated that it doesn’t so much transform reality as lose all contact with it …’

The visitor scowled and Artur blushed. Loerke laughed and threw one of the damp floor cloths at him. ‘It would be nice if instead of debating the need to transform reality you did a little bit towards tidying up the one you live in.’ And he laughed again to see his protégé blush more deeply.

‘What Ludwig lacked was power to carry through his vision,’ the visitor said ignoring their levity. ‘Money he had in large quantity. He managed to rescue Wagner from penury. Built the Festival Theatre. Saw the wonderful works produced there. But gold wasn’t enough. He needed the support of a party, of a police force, a determined military to push it through …’

‘At last I agree with you,’ Loerke spilled over with enthusiasm. ‘There is one subject for the modern artist. The hidden veins of power. What is greater than the puny individual should be revered. Take that horse that you like so much. That’s not a peaceful animal grazing in some upland meadow. That subject has been done to death. What my horse expresses …’

He got no further because there was a loud summons at the chapel door where a previous pious convert had attached a brass knocker in the form of a predatory bird whose beak struck at its own breast. With a quick jerk of his head Loerke indicated that Artur should see who it was.

The small group of diners sat very still. The atmosphere was suddenly tense with the belief they had been caught out plotting something illicit. It was the nature of the times. Not many years before, people had been pulled out of their apartments by ominous knockings such as this, taken down to the marshy, frog-infested banks of the Isar below the Höhenzollernbruke and shot in the back of the head. The violence swept through the city like some kind of miasma. It drove men and women mad so that neighbour turned on neighbour under the slightest pretext and small children were sent across the city with messages that brought the Freikorps in their steel helmets or the Red Guards in their cloth caps and belted pistol holsters into the neighbourhoods to spill blood and exact revenge for blood already spilt.

And now with renewed violence threatening on the streets there was the dangerous presence of Loerke’s guest sitting among them in the middle of the studio, a lure to every ambitious policeman and every left-wing fanatic in the city. His host glanced quickly at the man seated impassively at his table and wished that he would go away.

‘It’s a foreigner,’ called Artur from the porch. ‘He says he’s come to see Gudrun.’

‘Tell him to come back another time,’ Loerke shouted with more force than the situation required. ‘She’s not here.’

A muttered conference continued at the door. Artur raised his voice in mild exasperation and then to Loerke’s dismay he stepped aside and ushered the stranger indoors. The two men looked at each other. In a corner of his memory a notion began to stir that the sculptor had seen this man somewhere before. Was he a fellow artist? The visitor was thin and remarkably pale with a dark beard and when he politely removed his hat his brown hair falling forward to cover the tips of his ears gave off a faint copper sheen under the lamplight. Clearly a bohemian.

‘Herr Loerke isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to intrude on your supper but I am in rather a hurry. I’ve been travelling for two days. I came straight here from the railway station and I am keen to complete my business before I go to find a pensione for the night. This damp cold that fills your streets is not good for my health.’

Now Loerke caught the faint trace of his foot-loose past. Penetrating cold. Snow. High mountains. Somewhere in the north. Höhenhausen über Zermatt. Snow-capped peaks ghostly and impersonal towering over them giving the impression that the holiday makers stood in the belly of a beast with its huge incisors bared and holding them at bay. It was where he had first become acquainted with Gudrun. She of the laughter that seemed an echo off ice sheet and groaning glacier. Now he had it: this man standing in the snow behind the outhouse buildings, stooped over, coughing painfully, as his wife tried to support him, coughing and at the same time irritably waving away her offer of assistance. Birkin, Gudrun’s once upon a time brother-in-law.

The work day was drawing to a close and those who were lucky to have employment were abandoning it with neither eagerness nor ennui. Shopkeepers barricaded windows on their thin displays of produce. Those who could not afford the outrageous prices for chopped beef steak or two or three eggs had long since stopped loitering in front of shops and stalls in the open market beside the Frauenkirche with its gold statue of the Virgin guarded by twin barrelled towers, onion-capped like spliced guns pointed heavenwards. Across the way labourers hurried against the deepening twilight to complete their work: they were replacing cobblestones in the wake of the municipal plumbers who had made one more attempt to unblock the drains. That morning the mob had used the cobbles as missiles. A flag snapped and flaunted its colours from the top of the Rathaus while in front of the cathedral steps a little girl scarcely more than a child sang an old love song in a plaintive voice that though off-key hoped to earn a few Pfennigs: ‘Mein gliche liebe, warum belien Sie sich weg so begeistert?’.

Gudrun Meier observed these scenes of routine and desperation as she passed through the old centre of the town and they stirred her spirit with the distinctiveness of a myth whose details carried impressions of wet cobblestones, boiling coffee and that pungent smell of starch in the air just before it begins to snow that made one feel intoxicated. She was in love with the city, with its foreignness and with the sense of her own unique presence here in Munich. She was perfectly free to be whosoever she chose to be, or could go and do whatever came into her head and constantly saw herself on the threshold of some exceptional experience.

Yet there were anomalies in this image of her situation. For a start the city still exacted the harsh impoverishment that had followed the end of the war. She must provide for herself. When first they met, in Switzerland, Loerke had made her an offer that seemed at the time a heaven-sent avenue of escape from the love mess that held her hostage: to take her work seriously as an artist and come back with him to Germany to work in his studio. But that was all. There was no suggestion of financial support, no hint of the kept mistress in the arrangement.

True, she thought as she walked among the strangely silent crowds, there had been a brief dalliance in the mountains brought on by the first exultant flush of her escape from convention. At Höhenhausen she had behaved, she now admitted smiling ruefully to herself, like a whore. No, more the urgent tourist who wanted to sample all the goodies on display, because she believed this brief interlude in the glamorous mountains was all that she would ever know of living in an exceptional sort of way. She flaunted her sexual conquest of the young Austrian ski instructor at the chalet. And then briefly she had run away with Loerke. The aftermath of that was a window locked tight against the cold.

Now in the half-light, extravagant as always especially when cash was scarce, she stopped at a stall to buy a little posy of autumn crocuses, trumpet-headed blue ones that drooped sleepily in her hand. It was Loerke who had taken her up into the foothills around the glacier and showed her where to find flowers in the cracks and crevices of rocks where no flower should thrive. It was Loerke to whom after a year of wandering she finally came to seek out in Munich, Loerke who had convinced her that what she considered sexual perversity could be a voyage of personal discovery. Almost as a dare against the odds they had taken up the affair again. She had let him have his way with her and laughed at each of his more outrageous sexual demands while her heart palpitated fearfully that he might discover what a provincial she was, how truly afraid she was. That seemed to her now like the worst kind of naïve gush.

He was quick and gifted and inventive. A nocturnal creature, not quite squirrel, not quite rat that she used to see and shy sticks at to clear a path through the woods at Beldover. He was always restless, always on the move, hunting for something original to gratify himself. Threatening constantly to rush upon her and take her by force. He made her cut her hair very short, a boy in female clothing, and then he made her shave off her pubic hair as though he were working on one of his pieces of stone. He persuaded her to get down on all fours so that he could take her from behind. She found his inventiveness thrilling in its provocation of forcing a tacit boundary, so that the hair on her arms and neck stood up as if an electric shock passed quickly through her.

Too soon however she found that she was no longer aroused. The tricks he knew became a too familiar routine. Yet she willed herself to be patient and relaxed in the face of his proclivities while he grunted and thrashed about above her, a stranger in a dark room trying to find an unfamiliar light switch. Soon he was off along another track.

He made her wear a wig until her hair grew again. He made her wear several wigs, each of more flamboyant colour and style, and long operatic gowns which revealed her breasts and hinted at the V of her crotch while the material shimmered across her flesh in waves of silk or crepe de chine. Then he introduced her into nightclubs on the outskirts of the city hidden in derelict Schlosser or cellars that disguised themselves out front as student taverns since some of the vigilante gangs who roamed the quarter were puritanical.

There was a desperation in the city’s search for diversion. Behind discrete doors were gaudy cabarets where witty and obscene performances entertained a surfeited, wealthy clientele. Loerke set her loose among this exclusive club of libertines and sat himself in a corner to observe the stir his newest creation caused. Often it was three, but never more, who returned to the Kreutzberg apartment where he had installed her.

And all of this dissolution charged her introduction into a new life. It was glamorous. It was chic. It was liberating. Loerke was her guide into the underworld, at once her instructor, her severest critic and her body servant. Whenever there appeared the slightest hint that something more than physical gratification was beginning to establish itself between them, whenever the cool detached amusement by which they witnessed the behaviour of others showed signs of cracking or refused, like an aged mirror losing its quicksilver sheen, to emit a sharp glittering image of themselves, they swerved away from the instant, back into the dazzling light-shocked world of nocturnal amusements.

All of this took money and without explanation Loerke quit working not long after she turned up in Munich. He stopped courting his patrons, the old money contacts, the Catholic aristocrats who, in the past had commissioned him to carve a tombstone or a memorial tablet for a son lost in the war. The new money men of the Republic, the black marketeers, taking advantage of the inflation and the reparations agreement to make their fortunes, were willing to pay Loerke miserly amounts of cash for small plaques or lamp stands or classical urns for their gardens to prove to each other that they weren’t barbarians. He could scarcely conceal his contempt.

Gudrun was forced to find a job that would earn enough to feed them. Once he suggested that she might bring in some money by accepting certain arrangements with his former patrons, the displaced ruling class. Politely she dismissed the suggestion. It wasn’t a question of morality, she explained. She was fastidious and would be no good at it because she found the idea that any male of the species might presume, however briefly, to have actually purchased her attentions repugnant to her pride.

But this new game she was forced to play, it soon turned out, was not at all glamorous. She found a job as an usherette at a hall in the Schwabing district. It was a cinema improvised in an abandoned shed to cash in on the flood of two reelers that poured into the European distributors’ lists from America. Her duties included guiding patrons through the dark to the seats they had been given, the numbers scrawled on the palms of their hands, preventing any kind of love-making in the back rows, evicting the offenders if necessary, and reporting to the projectionist in his curtained box the moment the film jammed in its gate. For the rest of the evening she was free to lean against the back wall next to the curtained entrance already smelling of disinfectant and cigarette smoke, half-alert to the flickering shadows up on the screen and the exaggerated entanglements that bound them there.

Her German by this time was fluent and with her new pageboy cut she was often mistaken for a homelander. ‘Where are you from?’ lonely male patrons enquired in the intervals between the Max Sennett slapstick and the Theda Bara melodrama. Her responses were vaguely flirtatious. Sometimes she told them she came from the Sudetenland because the newly formed state of Czechoslovakia was in the news. Sometimes she was an Austrian from Linz but they shook their heads and smiled at her deceit because her accent lacked the soft regional slur. Often they concluded, because of her ironic disparagement, that she was a Berliner.

In her search for a persona that would allow her to move at ease in the hysterical and contradictory town she thought she had found a new teacher. She watched the screen idols go about their work with the same duplicitous allure that she was trying to perfect. But whereas they were depicted as longing for a man who would sweep them off their feet, rescue them from the trap of their own chilly glamour, Gudrun was convinced that that facet of her life was finished. After the experience of her late lover, Gerald and his brutish intimacy, she would never let a man draw so close again. She refused the responsibility.

She leaned against the door curtain and smiled to herself. It was all tosh, this notion of the erotic experience, of dewy-eyed mutual surrender, the swearing of vows, and yet she could see that most people desperately wanted to believe that it was true and from her vantage point in the darkness she was variously amused and empowered in her watchful intellect that she wasn’t seduced by the ideal, not for a moment. And then she became a little melancholic that this conclusion seemed to have brought her to a full stop. She could proceed no further. Her own experiences were in danger of becoming flickering shadows.

Under Loerke’s influence her bewilderment grew more stark. For a time the dangerous games, the dressing up, the chaotic parties and the brief sexual encounters continued. He encouraged her to bring lonely young boys she picked up back to the apartment where, with some light-hearted ribaldry and mockery of their shyness she fucked them while he, in his usual corner, watched with half-closed, relentless eyes. Often he sketched the entangled bodies on the bed, cruel, unsentimental slashes of charcoal, and it induced a tonic to her flagging libido. Now when they made the rounds of the cabarets on her nights off work he often abandoned her as soon as they were past the scrutineers at the door with a muttered excuse that he had some important business to exact.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked with that odd insinuation that passed for intimacy. ‘You know your way around.’

‘Yes,’ she said ruefully. ‘I know my way around.’

A night club photographer called Hanni Elster took a flashlight shot of her one night. The stark black and white study made her appear like an exotic nocturnal bird of prey restrained by an invisible chain.

‘See how busy busy Loerke is these days,’ an acquaintance, an asthmatic poet who continually tried to insinuate himself by gossip into her confidence, said. ‘I can’t imagine when he finds time to work.’

‘In these fragile times artists can’t afford to lock themselves up in ivory towers without showing a profit,’ she hurried to his defence. ‘If they don’t look out for themselves no one else is going to do it.’ Wistfully she glanced across the smoke-filled room to where her mentor was engaged in rapt conversation with a young woman who looked like she had been prised off the frieze on the porch of the Palace of Art. She wore a full-length orange-coloured dress of rough fustian with gold facings around the neck and sleeves. Her yellow hair hung down in thick plaits.

‘He is getting around with very strange company if that’s where commissions are to be found,’ the poet tried a different tack.

‘The little blonde you mean? Oh, I’m not jealous. We two aren’t like that. We have made a pact to be completely independent of each other, to be utterly open about our particular preferences. Attraction and repulsion aren’t something you can have set rules about. Human beings are not homing pigeons, you know. You can’t set up a schedule of habits and expect us to obey. If one does that they finally panic inside their cages and tear each other to pieces.’

‘The little blonde’s name is Katlin Kist. She is rumoured to be a Hungarian heiress doing a bit of slumming around the fleshpots of the Republic before she returns to her newly liberated estates in Walachia. There are many like her, left stranded by the war. Ruined social prospects in her own class, large foreign deposits in Switzerland and no man in sight. The casualty figures took care of that. She is the kind who is destined to marry a banker.

‘What I do know is that at present she is the mistress of Kommandant Lossow, commander of the military garrison. Curious connection, don’t you think? I don’t mean Katlin who’s decent and rather simple and believes that Munich is one continuous party full of kind people. I mean people like Lossow from the political side of things. Your friend Loerke has been seen with some of the more extremist elements lately.’

‘Political side?’ she echoed wondering. ‘He hasn’t a political bone in his body.’ She fell silent, put out that Loerke hadn’t mentioned such matters to her. She had a moment of misgiving that he no longer considered her the fellow spirit he had eagerly embraced.

She said nothing. But she watched him closely. He was spending more time away from the apartment, so that often she returned home tired from the drudgery of work to find the rooms in a mess, a new kind of demand that she must grimly set herself to meet. She seethed with anger but remained silent. This was not why she had taken the leap into the void not knowing where she would land. She felt his cheating on her far more cruel than the question of whether or not he was involved with Katlin Kis. She saw herself slipping back into exactly those constricting conventions she had felt certain she had escaped.

‘I think I might go away for a little while,’ she said one night when he came in late exhaling alcohol. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Why would you want to do that?’ he flared, red in the face with resentment. ‘Aren’t you satisfied? Isn’t this the kind of freedom you were looking for?’

‘I am sure you can manage without me,’ she drawled