by Beauman, Ned
‘De Gorge knows no more than a low pimp.’
‘A very astute low pimp.’
‘The point is that the hero has a change of heart. He redeems himself by his rebellion. Without that, the story is meaningless.’
‘And I assume you hope to encourage the same sort of thinking in your audience?’
‘Louis killed my father. I don’t know how else to take my revenge. I’m no Cromwell. I’m a playwright.’
Lavicini shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard, but I can’t design your set. I’m much too ill. Before more than a few more moons have risen, I’m going to die here, inside the Théâtre des Encornets, just as I was supposed to in the first place. You were lucky to find me still warm. I’m grateful for your visit, but I’m afraid you’ll leave empty-handed. Swap masks with Melchiorre before you go. If you were followed, that will cause some confusion.’
‘I certainly will not leave empty-handed.’
‘If you want to keep the clockwork bat you are welcome to it.’
‘No,’ said Sauvage. ‘I’ll leave with your story. You’ve told me a part, but I want the rest, the entirety, from the very beginning. I’ll write it down and then after you’re dead I’ll publish it and it won’t be lost. You know, my father wanted to write the story of his life. But he never had a chance before he died.’
‘I won’t pretend I have no pride left here in my languor, but are you quite certain?’ said Lavicini, amused. ‘There is a lot to tell.’
‘Of course.’
‘Very well. I hope you won’t come to rue the idea as the hours drag on. Melchiorre, would you be kind enough to bring our guest some paper and ink and a quill, and myself a little water?’ The gondolier did so. Lavicini drank and then sat back against his pillow. ‘Ready, Bernard?’
‘Yes.’
‘So then: I was born in Paris in the year of grace 1648 . . .’
9
Washington, DC, 1947
The Chairman: The Committee will come to order. The next witness will be Egon Loeser.
The Chief Investigator: When and in what country were you born, Mr Loeser?
Mr Loeser: I was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1907.
The Chief Investigator: And you are appearing before the Committee in response to a subpoena served on you Tuesday, 23 September – is that correct?
Mr Loeser: Yes.
The Chief Investigator: Are you a citizen of the United States?
Mr Loeser: No, I’m not a citizen. I still have only my first papers.
The Chief Investigator: When did you acquire your first papers?
Mr Loeser: In 1935, when I washed up on the shore of this country.
The Chief Investigator: Where do you live now?
Mr Loeser: In New York City with my wife.
The Chief Investigator: At what address?
Mr Loeser: At 36 West 73rd Street, near Central Park. Shall I expect a Christmas card?
The Chief Investigator: Mr Loeser, are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?
Mr Loeser: No. But I have a short statement I’d like to make.
The Chairman: Mr Loeser, you may read your statement after you testify.
Mr Loeser: I’d like to read it now.
The Chairman: Only after you are finished with the questions and the answers.
Mr Loeser: I’ve already told you I’m not a communist. I have never had any political affiliation. What else is there to say?
The Chief Investigator: Mr Loeser, you have been called before the Committee as a witness because we are investigating the nature of the association in the years 1934 to 1940 between a certain Soviet agent operating in Los Angeles and the novelist and screenwriter Stentor Mutton, who will testify tomorrow. Is it correct to say that you have some special knowledge of that association?
Mr Loeser: Most of the time I had no idea what was going on.
The Chief Investigator: But you were acquainted with both parties?
Mr Loeser: Yes, I knew Drabsfarben and I knew Mutton. Well, I still know Mutton.
The Chairman: Excuse me, Mr Loeser, but what are you doing?
Mr Loeser: What does it look like I’m doing?
The Chairman: It looks like you’ve taken off your tie and you’re whirling it around your head like a gaucho’s bolas.
Mr Loeser: Yes. I wanted to see if it would show up in the transcript.
The Chairman: What do you mean?
Mr Loeser: The strange thing about a transcript like this is that it contains no stage directions. I could beat you to death with your own gavel and the stenographer wouldn’t even be able to hint that it had happened unless somebody got up and said, ‘Let the record show that Mr Loeser has beaten the Chairman to death with his own gavel.’
The Chairman: Are you making a threat against the life of a congressional official, Mr Loeser?
Mr Loeser: I was only making a theoretical point.
The Chairman: Please put down your tie. May I remind you that you are standing before a Congressional Committee appointed by law?
Mr Loeser: But I don’t think I’m standing before any such thing. I don’t think I’m standing at all. I think I’m asleep in bed in the Shoreham Hotel about three miles away from the Capitol.
The Chairman: How can you possibly justify such an assertion, Mr Loeser?
Mr Loeser: Because I don’t remember getting here. All I remember is making love to my wife a little while after the alarm clock woke us.
The Chief Investigator: In what position?
Mr Loeser: I was on top of her, with my right arm hooked under her left knee in order to hold her thigh up against her stomach.
The Chief Investigator: Why not both arms under both knees?
Mr Loeser: That’s a lot of work. I’m forty years old. May I continue?
The Chief Investigator: Please.
Mr Loeser: I ejaculated, withdrew, rolled off on to my side, kissed her on the neck, and closed my eyes. Then before she went into the bathroom to take out her little rubber womb veil, she shook my shoulder and said, ‘Egon, you’d better not doze off again, it’s already nine and you have to be across town in an hour.’ I grunted in full and sincere agreement. Then I dozed off again. I think I may still be dreaming.
The Chairman: Does this feel like a dream to you?
Mr Loeser: Not really. But that doesn’t prove anything. Schopenhauer would say we all have a case of chronic ontological agnosia. ‘Life and dreams are pages of one and the same book.’ Our senses give us a few flickers and hums and tickles, and we mistake those representations for real objects and real experiences, even though every single bleary morning reminds us that we can’t tell dreams apart from life until we wake up. None of us are really any saner than Colonel Gorge. I loathe Brecht—
The Chairman: Mr Brecht is scheduled to appear before this Committee in a few weeks so please keep your language respectful.
Mr Loeser: – but I can’t help admiring the way he makes it impossible for the audience to forget that they’re only watching actors on a stage. In the theatre we develop a special temporary type of ontological agnosia and Brecht injects us with the cure against our will. But who can give us the same injection at double the dose when we’re out of the theatre and walking down Broadway? Nobody reads the philosophers any more.
The Chief Investigator: So what you’re contending, Mr Loeser, is that history is a nightmare from which you are trying to awake?
Mr Loeser: No. History is an alarm clock I want to throw through the window. Can I make my statement now?
The Chief Investigator: Not yet. Why did you come to the United States?
Mr Loeser: For the good of my health. If I’d dropped dead before I left Berlin the doctors would have cut open my spleen and they would have held it up to be photographed and they would have said, ‘Do you see these patches here and here, the colour and texture of rotten dog food? The patient was only just twenty-six, and yet we wouldn’t normally expect to find such a toxic accumulat
ion of bitterness and jealousy in a man younger than sixty years old.’ That, and Adele’s eyes.
The Chief Investigator: What will you say if you are asked that same question again later this morning?
Mr Loeser: I have no idea. By the way, are we speaking in German or English? I can’t tell, which really does suggest this might be a dream. You two already seem to be on the point of admitting it.
The Chairman: No more of that sort of talk, please.
The Chief Investigator: What is your occupation?
Mr Loeser: I have none. I was once a set designer.
The Chief Investigator: Why did you give that up?
Mr Loeser: After I read the Lavicini book, there didn’t seem to be any point any more. He’d already covered it all. The man was perhaps the second ever professional set designer, after Torelli, and yet he anticipated almost every advance in the history of set design. Today, we only remember his conjuring machines, but he wasn’t just a technician. He was an avant-gardist.
The Chief Investigator: Have you really adopted as your ‘role model’ a man who abandoned the city of his birth, and of all his early success, because of a break-up? Not a death, not even a divorce, just a break-up? Is that rational?
Mr Loeser: Thoroughly rational, yes. I am full of admiration for anyone with such strength of character. Sometimes when there’s a dead skunk in your roof you just have to write off the whole house.
The Chief Investigator: If you’re no longer a set designer, how do you support yourself and your wife?
Mr Loeser: For most of the war we were almost penniless. Mildred’s father cut off her inheritance when we eloped. But then a judge declared, with retroactive effect, that he was mentally unfit to make a will.
The Chief Investigator: Why was that?
Mr Loeser: Gorge’s ontological agnosia, which I mentioned before, has developed to its inevitable final stage. Now, he just has to hear a word spoken aloud and he will see before him whatever that word represents. It’s as if his disease got so strange that it circled all the way round to boring again – you can hardly tell him apart from any other delirious old man. Even Woodkin can’t talk to him, except in pure abstractions, like bad transcendental poetry. Mildred goes back to Pasadena sometimes to see him.
The Chief Investigator: They reconciled?
Mr Loeser: Yes. He says he only changed his will because he wanted her to come back, and he’s forgiven her for going away. He still calls me Krauto, though. ‘My son-in-law, Krauto.’
The Chief Investigator: Now, please relate the circumstances in which you received your subpoena.
Mr Loeser: I was eating dinner with my wife and a man came to the door who described himself as a United States deputy marshal. He wanted to give me a document of some sort. I didn’t tip him. My wife and I sat down and I handed her the document and asked her to read it to me.
The Chief Investigator: Couldn’t you have read it yourself?
Mr Loeser: I was enjoying my steak. But then she said something about Congress, something about un-American activities, and something about going to Washington to testify, so straight away I dropped my cutlery and snatched the document out of her hand.
The Chief Investigator: Why so alarmed?
Mr Loeser: For some weeks I’d been in correspondence with a librarian at the Library of Congress about their copy of Midnight at the Nursing Academy. I was posing as a researcher from Columbia University, but my real intention was to travel to Washington, break daringly into the Library after dark, and steal the book. When the subpoena arrived, my first assumption was that my plot had been discovered – by some means I couldn’t even imagine, since obviously I hadn’t said a word to anyone – and I was being called to trial. I didn’t know what to do. I just stared at the subpoena in silence. (I have never met anyone who is more comfortable than Mildred with long and unexplained silences.) At last my wife finished eating and lit a cigarette. ‘We have to go to Washington,’ I blurted with a pubescent glissando.
The Chief Investigator: What was her response?
Mr Loeser: She simultaneously rolled her eyes and blew cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth as if her whole face was being hoisted to the right. This occurs only once every few weeks due to the respective periodicities of the two actions and I find it supremely beautiful.
The Chief Investigator: More beautiful than her smile?
Mr Loeser: Yes. Anyway, she very seldom smiles.
The Chief Investigator: More beautiful than her laugh?
Mr Loeser: Yes. Anyway, she very, very seldom laughs. Except when she’s reading Krazy Kat.
The Chief Investigator: What’s Krazy Kat?
The Chairman: I believe it’s a newspaper comic strip.
Mr Loeser: By George Herriman, yes. Last year, for Christmas, on the recommendation of the bookseller Wallace Blimk, I bought her a 192-page Krazy Kat anthology published in New York by Henry Holt and Company with an introduction by EE Cummings. I’ve never understood what’s funny about it, but quite often I come home to find her slumped in an armchair with the book in her lap, snotty and straggly and red-faced like someone who’s just been informed of the death of a close relative.
The Chief Investigator: Doesn’t that make you jealous of Herriman?
Mr Loeser: A bit, but he died in 1944. And has never, to my knowledge, given my wife an orgasm.
The Chief Investigator: To return to the matter at hand, for how long were you under your misapprehension about the nature of the subpoena?
Mr Loeser: All the way to Washington. As a matter of fact, I was still squashed under it like a cockroach yesterday afternoon, when I left the hotel to buy some stockings for my wife, who had forgotten to bring a spare pair. I was walking down Calvert Street when I caught sight of someone it took me a moment to recognise. I hadn’t seen him for nearly fifteen years. It was Hans Heijenhoort – Ziesel’s sidekick from Berlin. We shook hands and went into a coffee shop to sit down.
‘When did you leave Germany?’ I asked him when my hot chocolate had arrived.
‘At the end of the war,’ Heijenhoort said. He has strong, almost heroic features, but his face is both much too long and, at the base, much too wide, so it’s only when he bows his head and the trapezoid proportions are foreshortened by perspective that he’s contingently quite handsome, like something from a parable about humility.
‘And you live in Washington?’ I said.
‘No, I live in New Mexico. I’m here for some meetings. Are you still in touch with any of the old gang from university?’
We began to go through them one by one, as people do in these situations. ‘Did you hear what happened to Ziesel?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Terrible.’
‘I was right there in the room. What about Klugweil?’
‘Yes, I heard about that too,’ said Heijenhoort.
‘I didn’t! What happened to him?’
‘Oh, quite an exciting story. He got conscripted into the Wehrmacht and ended up working for an army propaganda unit stationed in Paris. No one seems to know all the details, but somehow he got involved in the Resistance over there – something to do with a girl. And he became a very enthusiastic traitor. He used to pass along information, for instance, about where the next security sweeps were supposed to take place. Well, one day he realised that his commanding officer had begun to suspect him, and he fled. The Resistance hid him in a farmhouse just outside Paris, and the following morning they were going to try to smuggle him out of France. But that same night the SS came to the farmhouse – perhaps the Resistance had a traitor of their own. They beat him up, tied him to a chair, and then set the farmhouse on fire with paraffin. They told him he was going to burn alive.’
‘And then?’ This was not a dignified moment, I decided, to bring up the time Klugweil unacceptably started sleeping with my ex-girlfriend.
‘After the farmhouse was reduced mostly to ashes, the SS men went back inside for a look around. They were expecting to find Klugweil’s blackene
d skeleton. But there was nothing there. He’d escaped out of a window. Several months later, he turned up in Switzerland.’
‘What happened?’
‘The SS know how to tie a man up, of course. Even if you could dislocate your own arms, you wouldn’t have been able to wriggle out of those ropes. But Klugweil managed it. I heard he was never willing to explain exactly how.’
‘What about Achleitner?’ I said.
‘He died in the Battle of Berlin.’
‘And Blumstein?’
‘Dora.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘A work camp.’
‘Oh.’ I was silent for a while. Then I said, ‘What were you up to during the war?’
‘Physics. Just the same as ever.’
‘Still at university?’
‘No.’
‘Where, then?’
Heijenhoort picked up his cup of coffee and then put it down again without taking a sip. ‘For a certain period I was attached to the Ordnance Department.’
‘No! You were working for the Wehrmacht?’
‘Just an accident of organisational structure. My work was almost all theoretical physics. I wasn’t building rockets underground with slave labour like von Braun.’
I leaned back in my seat, suffused with gloating warmth. ‘You know, Heijenhoort, I always thought it was unnatural how indiscriminately nice and helpful you always were to everyone, and now I know I was right! I bet you were just as indiscriminately nice and helpful to the Third Reich! Good nature is deviant, like I’ve always said. You should meet my wife, she could teach you a thing or two.’
Heijenhoort got up and started to put on his scarf. ‘I had no choice, Loeser. You wouldn’t understand. You weren’t there.’
‘Oh, Hans, come on, don’t go! I haven’t seen you in fifteen years!’ I knew he wouldn’t be so self-assured as to leave after I’d asked him to stay. And sure enough he sat down again. ‘How did you get out of Germany?’ I said.
‘In that last April of the war, we were evacuated from the laboratory. We ended up hiding in the mountains. We weren’t under guard any more, but we were terrified that the SS would shoot us all just so no one else could have us. The next worst thing would have been the Russians. They might have taken us straight back to Moscow for torture. The British or the French would have been all right. But it was the Americans. They made us some good scrambled eggs. After that they put us in a barracks for a few weeks, and then on a plane to Boston, and then a train to New Mexico.’