The Teleportation Accident (5 page)

No sane person, that is, except Egon Loeser. To be that nice all the time, thought Loeser, just didn’t make sense. It was inhuman, illogical, saccharine, and cowardly. You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything. What, he wondered, would it actually mean to be ‘friends’ with Heijenhoort, knowing that Heijenhoort, the skimmed milk to Ziesel’s rancid butter, would bestow his insipid affection so indiscriminately? But even Achleitner said he didn’t mind Heijenhoort, so Loeser kept his contempt to himself.

Loeser introduced Rackenham to the two mismatched messiahs and then asked them how the party was. ‘Not very good,’ Ziesel replied. ‘There’s no corkscrew.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Achleitner.

‘No corkscrew,’ said Ziesel. ‘No one can open their wine. And there are no shops for miles.’

‘There must be two hundred people here. How can there not be one corkscrew?’

‘Hildkraut does have a penknife with a corkscrew attachment but he’s hiring it out and no one wants to pay,’ said Heijenhoort.

‘There have already been some casualties.’ Brogmann, apparently, had smashed his bottle on the wall to break off the neck and then tried to drink from what was left and cut his lip, while Tetzner had told Hannah Czenowitz that, given her curriculum vitae, she should have no trouble sucking out a cork, and she’d punched him in the eye.

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Achleitner.

‘Yes, it’s a disappointment, but at least Brecht is supposed to be coming later,’ said Ziesel.

‘If there’s not even any wine, thank God we found some coke,’ said Loeser. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned.

Achleitner had been right. Adele Hitler had changed.

The first thing Loeser noticed was her hair. It was hopelessly unfashionable. Where every single one of his female friends had a bob that looked like a geometric diagram of itself, often snipped so close at the back that in the morning there would be stubble at the nape, pale Adele wore a flock of black starlings, a drop of ink bursting in a glass of water, an avalanche of curls that could hardly be called a cut because if it were ever to come across a pair of scissors it would surely just swallow them up.

And where most 1931 frocks, like the medieval Greek merchant and geodesist Cosmas Indicopleustes, argued for flatness in the face of all available evidence, Adele had on a blue dress that wrote limericks about her bust and hips, no matter that her figure was actually pretty girlish – with a printed pattern of clouds, skyscrapers and biplanes that seemed to be the garment’s lone, almost touchingly clumsy, concession to the zeitgeist.

And then, above all, her eyes. She didn’t wear goggles of eyeshadow like the other girls did, just a little eyeliner and a little mascara, but both were quite redundant, since no artificial pigment could possibly augment what were not only the biggest and brightest and most tender eyes that Loeser had ever seen but also the most astonishingly baroque, with each iris showing a spray of gold around the pupil like the corona around an eclipse, within a dappled band of blue and green, within an outline of grey as distinct as a pencil mark, and then beyond that an expanse of moist white that did not betray even the faintest red vein but sheltered at its inner corner a perfect tear duct like a tiny pink sapphire. They were eyes that should have belonged to the frightened young of some rare Javanese loris.

Loeser could hardly believe that a beauty this intense had ever existed under all those layers of puppy fat – or not so much puppy fat, he recalled, as pony fat. He could hardly believe that lesson after lesson had seemed so tedious, that he had once felt positively unlucky to have been hired to teach this particular schoolgirl and not one of those schoolgirls one sometimes saw on the tram who had so much more . . . well, one shouldn’t dwell on that. He could hardly believe that he had been so ungrateful when right in front of him, hanging tightly on his every word, had been this revelation, his pupil in pupa. And he could hardly believe that his blinkered pursuit of modish girls like Marlene Schibelsky who knew how to dress and paint their face and cut their hair had just been rendered so utterly absurd.

He had never wanted to fuck anything so much in his life.

‘Herr Loeser,’ she said. ‘Do you remember me?’

He composed himself. ‘Adele Hitler! I certainly do. You’re looking . . . very well.’

‘Thank you. And I see you’ve smartened up. Do you know a lot of people here?’

‘Too many.’

‘Is it true Brecht is going to come?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘I’d love to meet him.’

‘You’d be disappointed. You’d see right through the man.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because of that exquisite critical eye that I remember so well from all our hours of Schiller.’ He remembered no such thing. ‘Unless those jealous Swiss matrons have quite gouged it out.’

Adele smiled. ‘Do you still teach, Herr Loeser?’

‘You can call me Egon now. And, no, I don’t teach any more. I’m in the theatre.’

‘Oh, I’m thrilled, I always thought you might become a playwright! I’ve been so desperate to meet some writers. You’re my first. Are you even bolder than Brecht?’

There was almost no component of his self-respect that Loeser wasn’t occasionally willing to leave at the pawnbrokers, but he did have one rule: he wouldn’t falsify himself to please. No one was worth that. The world could take him as he was. So although it would have been very easy to skate along with Adele’s assumption, he had no choice but to correct her. ‘I’m not a writer, actually. I’m a set designer.’

‘You mean a sort of carpenter?’

Loeser was about to explain that his work was fundamental to the conception of
Lavicini
, but then he heard something click behind his head. He looked round. There was Rackenham with his Leica. Another interruption, but this was all right: it would be good if Adele thought he was ringed with cosmopolitan associates.

‘Oh, you didn’t give me a chance to pose,’ said Adele, fussing belatedly at her fringe.

‘I don’t think it would be possible to take an unflattering photo of you, my dear,’ said Rackenham.

‘Certainly not with that particular camera,’ said Loeser evenly.

‘Why don’t you introduce me, Egon?’

‘Fraulein Hitler, this is Herr Rackenham. He’s a very distinguished young novelist.’

‘A real writer! What’s your book called?’

‘My latest is
Steep Air
,’ said Rackenham.

‘Oh, I haven’t heard of that. I’m sorry to say I don’t read much English fiction.’

‘Don’t be sorry. You’re very wise. English fiction is dead. It’s disloyal of me to say, because I went to university with so many of its brightest hopes, but it is dead.’

‘Then who am I to read?’

‘The Americans. A critic friend of mine says that deciding between English fiction and American fiction is like deciding between dinner with a corpse and cocktails with a baby; but at least the baby has a life ahead of it.’

‘I love American books,’ said Adele.

Loeser, at present, was reading
Berlin Alexanderplatz
by Alfred Döblin. Unfortunately, after seventeen months, he was still only on page 189. Achleitner, who had bought it the same day, was about three quarters of the way through page 12. ‘I cannot tolerate this infatuation with the Yanks,’ he said. ‘Rackenham, you’re as bad as Ziesel over there in his new suit.’

‘I think he might have heard you,’ said Rackenham.

‘I hope he did. If you want to understand what American culture really is you should go and look at the new escalators in the Kaufhaus des Westens on Tauentzienstrasse. They’re American-made. Never in your life will you have seen so many apparently healthy adults queueing up for the privilege of standing still.’

‘What about jazz?’ said Adele.

‘Jazz is castration music for factory workers. This band are playing in the right place but they got here too late.’

‘There must be something American you like.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

This was a lie, but it didn’t feel like a lie, because it had only one very specific exception. About a year earlier, he had taken a slow train to Cologne to visit his great aunt, and on the journey he had deliberately brought nothing to read but
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, on the basis that after six hours either he would have finished the book or the book would have finished him. He lasted one stop before turning to the other man in the carriage and saying, ‘I will give you fifty-seven marks, which is everything I have in my wallet, for that novel you’re reading.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,’ said the man in a thick American accent.

Loeser repeated the offer in English. (He had grown up speaking both languages to his parents.)

‘Don’t you care what it is?’

‘Is it by any chance
Berlin Alexanderplatz
?’ said Loeser.

‘No.’

‘Then I don’t care what it is.’

The book turned out to be
Stifled Cry
by Stent Mutton. It was set in Los Angeles and it was about a petty criminal who meets a housemaid on a tram, becomes her lover, and then makes a plan to steal a baby so that the housemaid can sell it to her infertile mistress for enough money to elope. Loeser finished it in less than two hours, which might have represented bad value for money if he hadn’t been delighted to have the chance to read it a second and third time before they arrived in Cologne, and then a fourth time by candlelight in his great aunt’s guest room. The narrator had no name, no history, no morals, and no sense of humour. He had a vocabulary about the size of a budgerigar’s, and yet he had a strangely poetic way with the grease-stained American vernacular. He seemed to find everyone and everything in the world pretty tiresome, and although he rarely bothered to dodge the women who threw themselves at him, the only true passion to which he was ever aroused was his ferocious loathing for the rich and those deferential to the rich. Loeser found all this captivating, but what he found most captivating of all was that Mutton’s protagonist always, always, always knew what to do. No dithering, no procrastination, no self-consciousness: just action. Loeser yearned to be that man. He had soon afterwards sent off to Knopf in New York for all five of Mutton’s remaining books, which were now hidden under his bed beside an expensive photo album of Parisian origin called
Midnight at the Nursing Academy
.

But he didn’t tell Adele and Rackenham any of this. Instead, he started trying to nudge the conversation back to his impressive work in the theatre. Before he had done so, though, Achleitner appeared. Loeser introduced Achleitner to Adele. ‘I shall enjoy watching you make a fool of yourself with this girl,’ is what Achleitner said with the smile he gave Loeser. ‘Apparently Brecht has just got here,’ is what he said out loud.

Back at the entrance to the factory there was indeed a small crowd of what might have been Brecht’s parasites. But Loeser didn’t see Brecht. He did, however, see Marlene, who had evidently also just arrived. He felt dispirited by how chic she looked. She was even wearing a vogueish monocle. Adele, meanwhile, was standing on tiptoes to try and catch sight of the playwright.

A monstrous thought sank its fangs into Loeser’s brain.

He blurted something to Achleitner about how he ought to tell Adele the story of Brogmann and the lifeguards while he had a word with Rackenham. Then he took Rackenham aside.

‘I know we’ve only just met,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to ask a favour. Brecht will leave after twenty minutes. He always does. Could you just sort of distract Adele until then? Dance with her or something. Take some more “photos”.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m sure even a man of your proclivities can tell that Adele is the most beautiful female at this party. And not only that but she’s new blood. If he sees her, Brecht will go after her like Ziesel after a coffin full of ice cream sundae. And she’s hardly going to say no to him. Even though he doesn’t wash or brush his teeth.’

‘Why don’t you distract her yourself?’

‘My ex-girlfriend’s here.’ He looked around. ‘I’m not sure where she’s gone now, but she is. And if she sees me trying to seduce a naive eighteen-year-old ex-pupil then she may get the impression that my new life without her is not quite the model of mature sexual prosperity that you and I know it absolutely is. I can’t have that.’

‘Loeser, the child seems very lovely, but if I don’t sell the rest of this coke I shall have to hide from my landlady all weekend.’

‘Please, Rackenham. If Brecht doesn’t fuck her then I really think I might be able to. And I know it’s silly but I can’t help feeling that if I did fuck her . . .’

‘What?’

‘I can’t helping feeling that if I did fuck her, just once, then everything would be all right,’ said Loeser hesistantly. ‘For me. Even if I didn’t fuck anyone else this year. I know it sounds pathetic, but look at her. Look at her eyes. And I’d probably be her first. Imagine that! You and Achleitner wouldn’t understand because you two can just fuck whomever you want whenever you want. But it doesn’t work like that if you prefer women. Unless you’re Brecht.’ Or a Stent Mutton hero.