by Beauman, Ned
Loeser himself, meanwhile, hadn’t had sex for a very long time. He had worked hard to erase all mental records of the night of the corset factory, but if he assumed, in the interests of supplying his own biography with at least a minimally sympathetic protagonist, that he hadn’t laid a finger on that fifteen-year-old prostitute, then the last time was with Marlene Schibelsky, and that was nearly two years ago. When he’d said to Achleitner that he might never manage it ever again, he hadn’t believed his own words, but now he retrospectively detected in them a vibration of plausibility. So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.
His dispiriting conversation with Adele had turned on this very subject – sexual abundance, that is, not its opposite. The previous night he’d arrived at a party at Zinnemann’s flat in Hochbegraben to discover that Zinnemann, always a domineering host, had invented a new game.
‘We’re at that age now where everyone’s slept with everyone else,’ he had explained to his assembled guests. ‘There might have been royal dynasties of Persia that were more incestuous but I think apart from that our social circle is just about the limit. The phrase “permutational exhaustion” wouldn’t be out of place. Now, some people say it’s tiresome and we should all make new friends. I think it should be celebrated.’ And he started handing out bundles of coloured string. ‘Look around the room. If you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with, then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the ten-foot pieces of string. And if you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with repeatedly on some sort of joyless petit bourgeois pseudo-marital basis – if you see someone you’ve “gone out with”, in other words – then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the five-foot pieces of string. The result will be no more awkward in practice than any other party – just rather more tangible. And after tonight, every other party you ever go to will seem carefree in comparison.’
There was a baffled pause. Then, to Loeser’s disbelief, everyone started to do as they were told. They must have realised it would be a good story the following day. Before long, Zinnemann’s drawing room was a great rainbow spider’s web. The point of the colours was to make it easier to trace a string from its beginning to its end, and indeed several liaisons were revealed that had not previously been public. Every guest was dragged this way and that by their past loves, held in quivering strummable tension by their old conquests, so thoroughly entangled in a universal net of erstwhile romance that they would have to duck under somebody else’s heartbreak just to cross the room for a drink. There was such a thing as symbolism that was too bespoke, thought Loeser – but the real problem was that Marlene wasn’t here, and nor, as it happened, were any of his other four, so he had no string around his wrists and he looked like a eunuch. He couldn’t tolerate that, even if it was virtually true. So he crawled out of the room on his hands and knees and got a cab over to the Fraunhofens’ in Schlingesdorf.
Herr Fraunhofen was a machine-gun manufacturer whose wife Lotte thought she was cultured, so every month she invited writers and actors and artists and their auxiliaries to her house for an evening salon. (It was one of those houses where even the tassels on the tassels had tassels on their tassels, which might have sounded like a trite joke if it hadn’t in several cases been literally true.) Of course, no one of interest bothered to turn up before midnight, by which time the boring bit was over but there was still lots of wine left and often some food. And indeed Loeser was standing in the dining room with a mouth full of cold sausage when he felt a tap at his shoulder. He turned. It was his former pupil, wearing a black dress with a spray of peacock feathers at the hem. These days most of her clothes were borrowed from fashion designers she had befriended.
‘Hello, Egon.’
Loeser swallowed a cumbersome bolus of veal. ‘Hello, Adele.’ They exchanged some gossip about Herr Fraunhofen’s recent gambling losses and then he said, ‘I would have thought this party would be a bit elderly for you. I don’t think I’ve seen a single person giving themselves a subcutaneous injection of panda laxative or whatever the latest thing is.’
‘I was in a cab with John and Helga and we couldn’t think of anywhere else to get a free drink,’ Adele explained. ‘Also, that Sartre fellow is here.’
‘The Frenchman? I met him. He has a face like a four-year-old child’s drawing of its father.’
‘They say he’s very brilliant, darling.’ She called everyone ‘darling’ now. ‘He’s studying under Husserl.’
‘Don’t tell me you want to sleep with him? Imagine waking up in the morning to find that monstrous dead eye staring fixedly at your tits. And anyway, you don’t know who Husserl is.’
‘I do: author of Transcendental Phenomenology. And anyway, why don’t you shut up?’
This was the only way Loeser knew how to socialise with Adele Hitler, the object of the greatest erotic obsession he’d ever had in his life, without bursting into tears: he made bitter jokes about her sexual itinerary. Not very heroic. But at least she seemed to find him funny sometimes, and quite often they behaved almost like old friends. In fact, he probably could have kept it up indefinitely, as one somehow sometimes did in these situations, and there wasn’t any good reason why he should have chosen this conversation, out of all the conversations they’d had since that night in Puppenberg, to be frank with her for the first time – the thumbscrews of his desperation were no tighter than usual – but he was drunk, and there was something about Zinnemann’s game that had exhausted his patience, and he just found himself saying, ‘Why do you do it, Adele?’
‘Do what?’
‘Why do you waste yourself on all these people? Why do you go to bed with Sartre and Brogmann and . . . and . . .’ He tried to think of a sufficiently damning example.
‘And the waiters at the Schwanneke?’ offered Adele.
‘Yes, exactly,’ said Loeser. Then: ‘Sorry, what?’
‘You want to know why I go to bed with the waiters at the Schwanneke.’
‘Actually just at this moment I want you to reassure me that you don’t, in fact, go to bed with the waiters at the Schwanneke.’
‘Well, I don’t go to bed with all of them.’ Loeser just stared at her, nauseated, so she added: ‘Darling, everyone goes to bed with the waiters at the Schwanneke. The proprietor’s queer so they’re the most handsome in Berlin.’
‘God in heaven. My most febrile paranoid fantasies . . . are they all true?’
‘What can I say, Egon? It’s not as if I did it specifically to annoy you. Is this a class neurosis?’
‘You’ll fuck the man who brings your coffee just because he’s handsome, and yet I chase you for nearly two years and—’
She waved her hand as if to swat him away. ‘Oh, please let’s not get into that again. “Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.” ’
‘Who said that?’
‘I saw it on the wall at a party.’
‘Oh, so it must be true! And all my devotion means nothing?’
‘I’m flattered, but there’d be no point in us even trying. You’re the sort of man who couldn’t stand it if I were unfaithful, but you’re also the sort of man I couldn’t help but be unfaithful to. You’re that type. You’re an apprentice cuckold.’
An apprentice cuckold! Was he truly? As Loeser lay clammy in bed he couldn’t remember how the rest of the conversation had gone. What a joke on mankind, he thought, these random deposits of beauty, like random deposits of gold, an arbitrary and purposeless desideratum, the stipulation at the start of a philosopher’s or a mathematician’s tract – ‘Let x be what you want most in the world’; ‘Suppose y is worth killing for’ – that condemns all that follows to the status of ornamented tautology. And then he thought of what she’d look like if she were next to him now, a creature of blinking eyes and tangled hair, regrowing limbs with each yawn but still so slight that the shape of her
body could hide among the rumples in the sheets. He went back to sleep and had a series of dreams in which he was drinking glass after glass of ice water but he never got any less thirsty, and then was woken up again at eleven by the usual shouts of ‘Jump!’ and ‘Stretch!’ and ‘Kick!’ This, at least, was worth getting up for, so he pried open his eyes like two stubborn oysters and then somehow got himself to the window. Diagonally across Kannerobertstrasse there was a big music box factory that had reopened after a period of bankruptcy, and three times a day the girls who worked there were all obliged to assemble on the roof for twenty minutes of productivity-boosting exercise. For Loeser, this cabaret was both a torture and a more wholesome alternative to Midnight at the Nursing Academy, and he rarely missed a performance. One day he planned to go down and wait outside the factory door at the end of a shift, begging for autographs.
Afterwards, moving around his flat as if he’d been beaten by prison guards, he took mercy on his mouth under the kitchen tap and then opened the letter his landlady had delivered, which was indeed from Achleitner. Loeser hadn’t seen his best friend in nearly three months, ever since Achleitner had met a leonine fifty-two-year-old Nazi aristocrat called Buddensieg at an art exhibition and Buddensieg had taken Achleitner off to his castle in the Black Forest, where he apparently played host to a sort of never-ending homosexual jamboree. Achleitner, in his letters, raved about the food, the wine, the rooms, the countryside, and, above all, the boys. The Nazis, he had written in his latest, ‘are wedded to a sort of aesthetico-moral fallacy, which is that if a man has blond hair, blue eyes and strong features, then he will also be brave, loyal, intelligent and so on. They truly believe that goodness has some causal kinship with beauty. Which is idiotic, yes, but no more idiotic than you are, Egon. When you see a girl like Adele Hitler with an innocent, pretty face, can you honestly tell me you don’t assume she must be an angelic person? Even though it makes about as much sense as astrology. Queers do it too, of course, but not so much, because we were all boys once ourselves, so boys aren’t mysterious to us in the same way that girls will always be mysterious to you, and we we can be a bit more sceptical. Or take any fairy tale – Cinderella must always be beautiful, and her sisters must always be ugly, even though the story would surely have a great deal more force if it were the other way round. All the Nazis have really done is make a cult out of this romantic faith in physical loveliness – there’s something almost touching about how childish it is. As aesthetes, they don’t even have the ruthlessness of a Gilbert Osmond. Anyway, the result is that there are more exquisite boys in this castle than there are in all of Berlin put together. I woke up this morning with three in my bed. I am absolutely drunk on it. Although I must remember not to neglect old Buddensieg or he might kick me out.’
What Loeser hadn’t been able to understand was how Achleitner didn’t get bored. With the exception of a few tolerable communists like Hecht who had the good sense not to bring up Marx every five seconds, any fee-paying member of a political party was certain to be petrifyingly dull. Even a castle full of stamp collectors or football supporters would be better because at least they wouldn’t be so self-righteous all the time. But Achleitner insisted that he hadn’t heard one word about politics since he arrived in Spunk Olympus. ‘Lots about diet and exercise and sunbathing and lots about the lost holy city of Agartha and lots of very tired Jewish jokes, but nothing on Versailles or unemployment or electoral reform, thank goodness. We get the papers delivered but nobody reads them.’
Loeser, like most people, had from the age of fourteen regularly concluded that he didn’t have any real friends in the world, and like all fatuous melancholic generalisations this was wonderfully comforting because it so drained the lake of one’s responsibilities. But to realise that it might actually be true was a different matter. For a few weeks, Loeser had tried to persuade Achleitner to come back to Berlin, but he knew it was no use. No one would give up paradise for a Berlin of ketamine and coloured string. And without Achleitner, who was left? Yes, if Loeser went to a party, there were always dozens of basically interchangeable people with whom he could have a drunken good time. But if he woke up the next morning in need of a companion for a rueful breakfast, there was almost nobody he could telephone. These days, the individual he saw most often was probably Klugweil. Not long after the Teleportation Accident, Blumstein had shamed his two collaborators into apologising to each other so that they could get back to work on Lavicini, and in fact they now got on better than they had before their rift. Loeser had even started to confide in Klugweil about his loneliness, going so far as to ask whether Klugweil thought it was a sign of hermitical derangement that one afternoon he had absent-mindedly said ‘Thank you’ out loud to a chewing-gum machine on a U-bahn platform. But the actor, who had finally come to his senses about dull Gretel the previous summer, never seemed to answer the telephone any more, so one could only assume he’d found some new girl he didn’t want to tell anyone about. The result was that Loeser might actually have to resort to – but, no, the thought was too terrible. He’d just have breakfast at home.
Except that, upon further inspection of his kitchen, it appeared that he had eaten all the food in the flat when he got home from the party last night. In fact, a few minutes’ forensic reconstruction seemed to suggest that he had attempted to make jam doughnuts from scratch, using mostly raw cabbage and angostura bitters. Indeed, since the results were gone, there was no reason to suppose he hadn’t succeeded. If only he’d kept some record of the experiment.
So he would have to go out after all. And he would either have to go out on his own, or he would have to call Ziesel. He knew Ziesel would be free. Ziesel was always free. In Berlin there were typhoid bacteria more socially in demand than Ziesel.
He cast around his flat for some means of putting off this horror. On his desk were a dirty wineglass, an unpaid tailor’s bill, a few notes for Lavicini, Berlin Alexanderplatz with its bookmark at page 202 and an attempted letter to his great aunt in Cologne, which so far stood at two sentences in length. All of them looked back at him imploringly.
He called Ziesel.
‘Hello?’ In the background there was some chatter.
‘Dieter. It’s Egon. Have breakfast with me at the Romanisches.’
‘I can’t.’
‘See you in about twenty minutes.’
‘Egon, I can’t.’
‘If you get there before me, order the double ham and eggs.’
‘I’m very sorry, Egon, but I just can’t join you. I’m already in the middle of breakfast. Some of the fellows from the brass band are here.’
‘What?’
‘I’d be free for lunch.’
After a long pause Loeser said, ‘You, Dieter Ziesel, are too busy to have breakfast with me, Egon Loeser.’
‘Yes,’ said Ziesel.
‘I, Egon Loeser, am assumed to be so eager to share a jolly repast with you, Dieter Ziesel, that I will just hang around for two hours until you are free.’
‘If that’s how you want to put it,’ said Ziesel.
‘This – this! – is what my life has come to.’
‘I wouldn’t like to say,’ said Ziesel.
After another long pause Loeser said, ‘Right, I’ll see you at one,’ and put down the telephone.
Since he was still unwilling to pass the time with any of the orphans on his desk, Loeser decided he might as well get dressed and go out to Luni’s, a second-hand bookshop on Ranekstrasse next door to an antique shop with medieval suits of armour standing vigilant in the window like militarised fashion mannequins. This would be his seventh visit in two weeks, and the elegant girl at the counter was treating him ever more warily; she had obviously concluded that he’d developed some sort of forlorn romantic preoccupation with her, since if anyone was really that desperate to read The Sorceror of Venice by Rupert Rackenham they would just pay twelve marks for a new copy. But in fact Loeser would have drunk a pint of toothbrush-mug run-off before contributing o
ne pfennig to the royalties of the man who’d first fucked Adele Hitler, and he couldn’t just borrow the book, even though every passenger on every tram seemed to have it, because he didn’t want anyone else to know that he was so desperate to read the thing. Rackenham’s novel was by all accounts a very thinly disguised sketch of the Berlin experimental theatre scene circa 1931, and since nobody had been willing to answer Loeser’s oblique enquiries about the way he had been portrayed – even Brogmann had been too tactful to take the piss out of him – Loeser could only conclude that his fictional analogue was a golem of spite and libel, the sort of character assassination where they have to have a closed casket at the wake. He felt quite excited to have been the victim of the kind of affair you read about in interesting people’s biographies, and he was already looking forward to confronting Rackenham about it. For two years he’d been trying to persuade everyone that Rackenham was a bastard, but he’d never been willing to explain why he thought so. Now he’d have a proper reason for his hatred that did not involve getting tripped up in pursuit of a kittenish female.
On the way to Luni’s, he made a bet with himself that he would see Drabsfarben, who for some reason seemed always to be passing by the shop; and indeed he did, but as usual Drabsfarben looked so distracted that Loeser didn’t try to say hello for fear of scaring off some rare harmony that was grazing in his compositional rifle sights. Inside, the girl at the counter tensed visibly at the sight of him.
‘Do you have it yet?’ he said, working so hard, as usual, to exclude all emotion from his voice that he slid a long way past casual and in the end sounded more as if he were barely suppressing some grande passion.
‘Yes. Someone came in with a review copy yesterday.’
When he paid for the book she dropped the change into his hand from about eleven inches up to avoid brushing his palm. On his way out he reflected that in spite of it all there was something nice about knowing, for once, precisely where you stood with a girl. Then he sat down on a bench to skim through The Sorceror of Venice, hiding the cover against his knees in case anyone he knew walked past. At first, although no one was watching, the flick of his fingers was ostentatiously unconcerned, but as not one but two outrages arose from the text, it became involuntarily furious.