Hartmann's office smelled of chalk, old paper and cold coffee. Marked work lay in stacks on the windowsill, red down the margins, and above the desk hung a single photograph: some leaving class of twenty years ago, grey faces, grey jackets. There were no certificates: people with something to prove hang certificates; Hartmann hung photographs of his pupils.
He shut the door, leaned back against the desk and looked at the two of us for a long time, the way you look at a problem whose answer you already dislike.
"I am going to ask one question," he said. "I want neither poetry nor panic. Had either of you received improper help in any previous exam or assessed piece of work?"
Julian looked at me. Everything I had spent years refusing to name rose up in me at once: a formula whispered in a corridor; a card with a template on it; an "accidental" reminder at the classroom door; a thesis statement tidied up at break. Not once had we passed finished answers between us. I had told myself it was support. But support in an exam is a bridge over the rules, and everyone else was wading across.
I opened my mouth. Julian got there first.
"No." His jaw set like stone. "Klara helped me prepare. That's all."
"Prepare," Hartmann repeated, without expression. "For three years. Every day. Free of charge."
"We're friends."
"I did not ask what you are to each other. I asked what happened during the exams and assessed work."
"Nothing," said Julian, more firmly than he should have.
Hartmann moved his eyes to me.
"Mohr?"
If I admitted how many times we had erased the boundaries, we would both burn. Lie and I would be covering for him again. Say nothing and I would stay seventeen for ever.
"I worked with Julian outside exams for years," I said carefully. "And far too often I happened to be next to him in exam weeks. There will be no more of it."
The office went quiet. Outside, someone crossed the yard and the snow creaked. Hartmann looked at me for a long moment, not the way you look at a girl who has broken a rule but the way you look at a form of words you are testing for strength. He understood exactly as much as he needed to and, it seemed, did not infer a single word beyond what I had said.
"That will do," he said. "A talent that cannot stand without secret props falls down in public sooner or later."
Julian flinched. Hartmann turned to him.
"The refusal of the nomination can be appealed: a full scholarship portfolio, two weeks, on your own. On your own means without help from Mohr, without help from the Ahlenbergs and without corridor miracles. Is that clear?"
"Yes," said Julian through his teeth.
"And you, Mohr?"
"Yes."
"Keep writing the way you wrote today. And stop apologising with your posture."
I had no answer to that. His last words caught me in the doorway, and they were not for me but for both of us.
"One more thing. A friendship in which the same person is always the debtor goes by a different name. In my office you are welcome to work out which. In the corridor I would not advise it: sound carries."
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