woman comes home unexpectedly from a trip and the man has to clean the house in a jiffy with some miracle product. Then they both walk through the rooms together, and the woman looks around in admiration and kisses the man with a knowing smile—because all that cleanliness is just due to her Mr. Clean. Looks good, said Sonia, and kissed me.
It took Sophie a few days to adjust to us. To begin with she retreated to her room and didn’t come when we called her down for mealtimes, and complained about all sorts of things. She kept whining about her cat, and when we put it off, she would burst into tears. We explained the situation to her as well as we could, but she didn’t listen, and ran back to her room where she did nothing but brood and sulk. Slowly things got better, we went on little trips, she started to talk about school, where she was very happy. Thus far, we’d always gone to our parents’ for the holidays, but this time we canceled all arrangements and stayed at home.
When Sophie was in bed, we talked about the future of the company. We were still doing sums continually, wondering where we could save more, looking at competition guidelines. It’s not going to be easy, I said. We’ll get there, said Sonia, we’ve got no choice.
The first year was a struggle. We had to bid for every little order, and work for terms we’d have scoffed at a couple of years back, but we managed to stick to the insolvency plan and make the installments. We entered contests, and by and by a few orders came in, little projects to begin with, a restoration job, a vacation home for friends of Sonia’s parents. We were working with a much smaller team, and with part-timers. I felt reminded a little of the early years after our wedding, when we were young and inexperienced, and were doing everything for the very first time. Sonia and I worked more closely together than in the years before the crisis, and our relationship acquired an intimacy it hadn’t had in a long while. We would often talk about architecture, questions of principle, and what we hoped to achieve in our own work. Everything seemed to be going well, only sometimes I had the feeling I wasn’t good enough for Sonia. She had such lofty ideals and goals that I was bound to disappoint her. She treated me with kid gloves, but at odd moments I caught her looking critically in my direction. When I asked her what she was thinking about, she laughed and shook her head.
We set aside more time for Sophie too. We joined the Parent-Teacher Association of the Waldorf school, Sonia worked for the festival committee and helped organize the twice-yearly festivities, and I drew up a plan for a new central heating system.
I stopped drinking, and for the first time in years I designed buildings again. I was much bolder than before, it was as though I had nothing left to lose. When I looked through a volume of Aldo Rossi’s designs again, I saw a sentence of his that seemed appropriate. Seek to change the world, even if only in little pieces, in order to forget what we may not have.
None of my designs was executed, but that didn’t matter, on the contrary, it kept me from having to make compromises, and allowed me to work freely and follow my own tune. I actually felt like an architect again, and that affected my work on building sites.
Sonia’s style changed, she had finally broken free of her mentors and found her own language. It sounds cynical, perhaps, but it seemed that the crisis had opened our eyes to new ways of doing things, whereas in the years of success we had barely evolved at all, and just imitated ourselves.
Sonia wrote articles for architectural journals, and was invited to conferences and finally was given a teaching job at Dessau. Then we won a contest for a social housing project in Linz. We’re back in business, said Sonia, when she broke the good news to me.
That evening we celebrated. We left Sophie with her grandparents and went to a good restaurant. Do you think we can expense this?, asked Sonia. In six months our probationary period is over, I said, then we’ll be clear of debt and we can do whatever we want. I’m amazed we’ve managed this fresh start.