by Beauman, Ned
‘I’m making a documentary film for American television,’ said Rackenham. ‘It’s about what Berlin was like in the last few years before the war. Kristallnacht and the rallies and the Gestapo and all that. I came to see if you’d agree to be interviewed. The idea is to mix my own recollections with those of some other prominent acquaintances of mine.’
‘But we both left in 1934. We missed the worst.’
‘The network don’t know that, nor is there any reason why they should find out.’
Loeser blew out a sceptical plosive. ‘How would I even know what to say?’
‘Oh, it’s easy. “I went to a cabaret and I saw an SS officer with an evil face slap his mistress for spilling a glass of champagne and then I knew the good times were over for ever.” You know the sort of thing.’
‘No, Rackenham. Absolutely not.’
‘There’s no formal fee for an interview, but the budget for expenses is almost unlimited. We can make something up. Bill them for an essential unicorn.’ Rackenham could see that this did interest Loeser, so he said, ‘How do you make your living these days?’
‘I’m writing a book.’
‘You’ve got an advance?’
‘No. I don’t have a publisher yet. But I got a grant from the Norb Foundation.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘The role of mass transit in the Endlösung der Judenfrage,’ said Loeser.
‘Are you joking?’
‘No. The Third Reich moved eight million people on sixteen hundred trains with two hundred thousand railway employees. And this is while they were fighting a war on two fronts. It’s an extraordinary feat. When people talk about the cattle wagons, it’s always as if the Nazis used them chiefly as some sort of demeaning symbolic gesture. But those cattle wagons can tell us so much more if we understand them as a logistical necessity. A hundred and fifty people in every wagon, fifty-five wagons on every train, at least four days for every journey. They could only manage it because there was so much redundancy built into the Deutsche Reichsbahn from before the war, and because they had so much coal, and because the French and Dutch and Belgian state railways were so helpful.’ Loeser was silent for a moment. ‘You know, when I went to Washington in forty-seven, there was no metro, but now they’re finally building one. And the truth is that anyone planning a public transport system now is trying to solve a lot of the same problems that the Nazis had to solve. Just for different ends. If you leave an Enlightenment running for long enough, eventually, one way or another, it will become preoccupied with the moving around of large numbers of people. Were you still in Los Angeles in forty-three? For the first big smog? I was back in Pasadena that week. Everyone said it was the Japanese. They didn’t want to believe it was their own cars turning against them. That same year the Nazis started using transportation vans where the driver could flip a switch so that the exhaust from the engine would be pumped into the back and suffocate the passengers. All those people, killed in transit – killed by the weight of their own bodies, in a sense, because the heavier they were, the more fuel the engine would burn, so because they’d been starving for months they’d have a few more minutes to live – an equation about calories and masses, like all the rest of history . . .’
Rackenham decided not to let Loeser go too much further down that hole. ‘They never built that streetcar network in Los Angeles,’ he said.
‘When I left, I thought they would. I took Mildred, so Gorge had nothing to give Clowne, so there was nothing to stop Plumridge.’
‘What happened?’
‘Plumridge got drafted. He established the Army Transportation Corps almost single-handedly in forty-two. And he liked the army so much he never went back to California. Without him there was no one to push for the streetcar network. So nothing I did could ever have made any difference. A few years ago they started dropping the old streetcars into the sea near Redondo Beach to make artificial reefs for fishing. Imagine them, all submerged like that. You know the only place in California that has real public transport? Disneyland. In Disneyland they have trams and steam trains and monorails and it all works perfectly.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve put all this in the book. I’m going to have to take it all out again.’
‘I didn’t expect to find you writing a book about genocide.’ Rackenham wanted to change the subject, but he also wanted to know: ‘When did you start to . . .’
‘Care?’ said Loeser.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know. It happened gradually. Very gradually. Remember in that taxi when I bet Achleitner that Hitler would never make one bit of difference to my life? I was right. I was nearly right. All those years, all that history . . . Everyone was else was packed into a tram and I was riding along in my car with the air-conditioning on and the windows closed and the radio up. Still, I wasn’t the only one. Brecht was always so “political” but he never understood what was happening any better than I did.’
‘How would you know?’
‘I’ve been reading him a bit since he died. The poetry’s not so bad. “We know we’re only temporary and after us will follow/Nothing worth talking about.” ’
‘And that one on how LA is just like hell.’
‘He didn’t leave until forty-seven,’ said Loeser. ‘Much later than me.’
‘You got there earlier.’
‘Yes. I never lived there, though. Not in a sincere way. Did you ever hear about that question Bailey used to ask? “What’s the one thing in the world that can uproot almost anything?” And that’s what he thought he wanted to invent. But what he should have invented was the opposite of that. The opposite of a teleportation device. That’s what we all needed. Something that could actually root a man in his surroundings. Wipe off some of the lubricant.’
‘A bit of in-der-Welt-sein.’
‘No Heidegger in this apartment, please. I feel zum Tode quite enough of the time as it is.’
‘I think a man with a teleportation device could do good business in a city with a wall through the middle.’ Rackenham noticed a book on Loeser’s desk next to a bottle of cologne. ‘You’re rereading that?’
‘Berlin Alexanderplatz? Rereading? No. I’ve been reading it for thirty years. I only have eleven pages to go. I hope to finish by next autumn.’
Rackenham got up. ‘Can I open the window?’
‘If you want.’
So Rackenham opened the window, picked up Berlin Alexanderplatz, and tossed it out. The book slid down through the branches like an exhausted wood pigeon and then lodged itself between trunk and bough.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’
‘I just had a sudden conviction that if you ever finish that book you will immediately drop dead. Like something from Han Chinese medicine.’ Rackenham shut the window and sat down. The truth was, in spite of everything, he liked Loeser. ‘Will you do this film or not?’
But Loeser ignored the question. ‘Just tell me something.’
‘What?’
‘How did you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘How did you fuck all those women? Adele and Gorge’s wife and a million others? What was the secret? I still want to know. It’s too late to be of any use to me now but I still want to know.’
‘Loeser, if there really existed some trick that I could put into words, I’d . . . well, I suppose I’d write a manual or something. And get rich. Anyway, I never actually slept with Adele.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘After that party at the sewing machine factory or whatever it was. I left with her but she changed her mind.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Yes. She said I reminded her too much of her father.’
‘Gott im Himmel, if I’d known that, I might never have become so pathologically obsessed! I might never have gone to Paris. Or Los Angeles. Everything might have been different.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You left Berlin because you hated Berlin. You would have gone either way. What ha
ppened to her in the end?’
‘Adele? She stayed in Los Angeles. Married Goatloft, that director. I hear she’s very happy. Meanwhile Brogmann’s just been appointed Minister of the Interior and Marlene’s just been made film critic for Die Zeit. Seems like everyone from those days did all right for themselves. Everyone that survived. You know, last month I was on Kurfürstendamm and I was almost certain I saw Drabsfarben walking a dog. It can’t have been, of course.’
Rackenham took out a packet of Sobranies and offered one to Loeser, who shook his head. ‘I’ve got some coke,’ he said as he lit a cigarette for himself.
‘What?’
‘I’ve got three grams of really good coke that I bought from my cameraman. If you’ll be in my documentary, you can have as much as you want, on top of the “expenses”. We can do some now if you like.’
‘I haven’t taken coke in thirty years,’ said Loeser.
‘Then it will be a wonderful, sentimental reunion. Come on, just repeat after me: “In 1938 I went to a cabaret and I saw an SS officer with an evil face slap his mistress for spilling a glass of champagne and then I knew the good times were over for ever.” An hour of that tomorrow afternoon. That’s all it will take.’
Loeser didn’t answer straight away, and for a while the two men sat watching each other in silence. Outside, the breeze changed, and Berlin Alexanderplatz slipped from the tree.
11
Los Angeles, 19310
The gondolier wore manatee-bone goggles, with pornographic engravings on the snout bridge, and when he cocked his head to the right in the Troodonian gesture signifying negation, the afternoon sun flashed in the smoked glass of the goggles’ lenses. ‘You don’t want to go to the temples.’
‘Why not?’ thought Mordechai.
‘Electric eels,’ thought the gondolier. ‘The biggest electric eels you’ve ever seen. They can shock you to ashes. May my slit close up if I lie.’ He chirruped the oath aloud for emphasis.
‘I can barter. I have manna.’
‘I don’t care. I’m not taking you into those waters. I value the life God gave me.’
So Mordechai knocked the gondolier unconscious and stole his boat.
As he paddled, he watched the turquoise surface of the lagoon, knowing that electric eels had an amateurish obligation to come up every so often to breathe. He’d licked the face of death more times than he could count as a soldier in the East, so he wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t want to be caught unawares. Every so often, to cool down, he flicked his tail through the water to douse his snout, then fluttered his dewlap feathers so they wouldn’t get too crusted with salt. In the distance, through their caul of heat shimmer, the viny white tops of the temples rose out of the water like a ribcage lying half submerged in a rock pool, and on his left were the rias of the mainland, their slopes fuzzy with groves of lychee trees. Many octaeterids ago, before Dagon-Ryujin’s half-fish came, when the Troodonians had still had the leisure to enquire into their world, archaeologists and playwrights had lived in villages on this coast, diving every day among the drowned conurbations of the apes. But now they were all gone, which was how the electric eels had begun to proliferate so menacingly in the lagoon, untroubled by hunters or trappers.
Like every Troodonian, except for a few thousand sickening heretics who had gone over to Dagon-Ryujin, Mordechai understood that all time was one instant, all space one point – that only God had the privilege of extension, and his creation was only the very tip of a claw – that any appearance to the contrary was just a sort of stereoscopic illusion. And so, like every Troodonian, he struggled with the paradox of how it could be that in the time of the half-fish, God wanted them to fight, and yet in the time of the apes, God had wanted them to humble themselves as shrunken quadrupeds, when the two periods were of course not only equivalent but simultaneous. Nonetheless, he knew that God did now want them to fight, and God did now want them to win. And that was why he, Mordechai, had abandoned his comrades and trudged across a continent to this lagoon. Whatever their clerisy might say, the Troodonians were losing the war, and if they ever hoped to drive the half-fish back into the sea, they would need either a direct intercession from God or some unimaginable new weapon. Since he did not dare rely on the former, Mordechai had come to these temples to look for the latter. The apes hadn’t understood much, but they’d understood fighting. There might be something here, forgotten in the ruins, an accidental legacy from an unmourned and intestate species. The chances were laughably slim. But he had to try, because no one else would. He was lost in these thoughts, and in the rhythm of his rowing, when his boat was flipped over like a dried peapod.
Smashed into the water, limbs flailing, bubbles streaming from his snout because he was too surprised to hold his breath, Mordechai stared for a moment into the eel’s monstrous right eye. Most of its gigantic body was dark grey, but its belly was a mottled orange not unlike the colour of his own intertarsal scales. He began a prayer that he knew he wouldn’t have time to finish.
Except that, somehow, he did finish. He opened his eyes and he wasn’t dead.
And then he realised that perhaps to this beast he was neither a threat nor a meal. The eel wouldn’t go to the trouble to fire its voltage organ just because it had bumped against something on its way up for air. Thank God he’d lost the oar when he went under, or he might have been stupid enough to try to use it as a weapon. He held as still as he could without sinking any further down, and just as the grinding of his empty lungs was becoming unendurable, the eel swam off into the cloudy water, its long anal fin rippling like shadow congealed into a dainty membrane. Mordechai’s knitted skullcap twirled in its wake and then was also lost to sight. Not since the half-fish themselves had he come across a creature that so obviously owed allegiance to Dagon-Ryujin as this long gullet with a face.
He floated, panting and retching, at the surface until he’d regained enough strength to right the stolen boat. The hull had sprung a small leak, he had nothing to row with, and he’d badly grazed his elbow climbing up over the side. But there wasn’t that much further to go until the temples. Cursing himself for coming here in such a puny craft, cursing the gondolier for being so correct, cursing the sun for being so plump, he began to paddle.
And that was when he saw it. The lone figure standing on the roof of the nearest temple on his right like a soliloquist on a raised stage. An animal that hadn’t walked God’s earth for more than eight times eight times eight generations.
An ape.
Mordechai began to paddle as fast as he could, his elbow stinging with every splash of brine. As he drew closer, he could make out the ape in more detail. It had a bald, pink, snoutless face, with sparse grey fur only on the top of its head, and like a Troodonian cantor it wore woven clothing that covered almost its entire body. The fabric of the clothing looked soaked through, but at low tide the lagoon here wasn’t nearly up to the level of the roof, so the ape must have ascended from some lower section of the temple. And instead of a left eye the ape had a meaty tunnel – although Mordechai had no way to be sure if that was a wound or just a characteristic of its species – a collateral sense organ or supplementary orifice.
The ape was barking loudly, and of course the noise itself meant nothing to Mordechai. But by the time the prow of his boat bumped up against the cracked and barnacled wall of the temple, he was close enough to hear the relict mammal in his own head.
‘I don’t know where I am,’ the ape was thinking. ‘I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am.’
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