by Beauman, Ned
Whatever the truth, that was Lavicini’s Teleportation Accident. As for Loeser’s Teleportation Accident, that wasn’t nearly so bad. Nobody died. The Allien Theatre was not rended apart. Klugweil just dislocated a couple of arms.
They didn’t confirm that until later, though. All Loeser and Blumstein could see as they rushed over was that Klugweil was dangling half out of the harness, limbs twisted, face white, eyes abulge. The overall effect reminded Loeser of nothing so much as a set of large pallid male genitalia painfully mispositioned in an athlete’s thong.
‘Why in God’s name did you have to call it the Teleportation Device, you total prick?’ hissed Blumstein to Loeser as they struggled to untangle the actor. ‘I knew this would happen.’
‘Don’t be irrational,’ said Loeser. ‘It would have gone wrong whatever I called it.’ Which, judging by the head-butt he then received from the pendulant Klugweil, was not felt to be a very satisfactory reply.
Two hours later Loeser arrived at the Wild West Bar inside the Haus Vaterland on Potsdamer Platz to find his best friend already waiting for him.
‘What happened to your nose?’ said Achleitner.
‘To answer your question,’ said Loeser indistinctly, ‘I don’t think we’re going to be able to get all that coke from Klugweil tonight as we planned.’ He lit a cigarette and looked around in disgust. The Haus Vaterland, which had been opened the year before last by a shady entrepreneur called Kempinski, was an amusement complex, a kitsch Babel, full of bars, cinemas, stages, arcades, restaurants, and ballrooms, with each nationally themed room (Italian, Spanish, Austrian, Hungarian, and so on, but no British or French, because of Versailles) given its own decor, music, costumes, and food. Up in the Wild West Bar where Loeser and Achleitner now sat, a sullen Negro jazz band wore cowboy hats to perform, which gave a sense of the Haus Vaterland’s dogged commitment to cultural verisimilitude, while downstairs you could take a ‘Cruise along the Rhine’ with artificial lightning, thunder, and rain like in one of Lavicini’s operas. It was as if, in some unfashionable district of hell, the new arrivals had established a random topography of small territorial ghettoes, each decorated to resemble a motherland that after a thousand years in purgatory they only half remembered. The whole place was full of tourists from the provinces, always strolling and stopping and turning and strolling and stopping again for no apparent reason as if practising some decayed military drill, and it was as loud as a hundred children’s playgrounds. But Achleitner insisted on coming here, maintaining that it was good practice for living in the future. Loeser, he said, might think the whole twentieth century was going to look like a George Grosz painting, all fat soldiers with monocles and tarts with no teeth and gloomy cobbled streets, but that vision of darkness and corruption, that Gothic Berlin, was just as artificial and sentimentalised, in its own way, as the work of any amateur countryside watercolourist. When Loeser disputed Kempinski’s prophetism, Achleitner just alluded to Loeser’s ex-girlfriend Marlene.
Loeser had broken up with Marlene Schibelsky three weeks previously after a relationship of seven or eight months. She was a shallow girl, and Loeser knew that he ought not to settle for shallow girls, but she was good in bed, and until the day that either Brain or Penis could win a viable majority in Loeser’s inner Reichstag there had seemed to be no hope of change. What finally broke the deadlock was something that happened at a small cast party in a café in Strandow.
Quite late in the night, Loeser had overheard part of a conversation in a nearby booth about dilettantism in Berlin cultural life, and one of the five or six occupants of that booth was the composer Jascha Drabsfarben. This was surprising for two reasons. Firstly, it was surprising to see Drabsfarben at a party at all, because Drabsfarben didn’t go to parties. And secondly, it was surprising to hear that particular topic arise while Drabsfarben was sitting right there, because in any discussion about dilettantism in Berlin cultural life, Drabsfarben himself was the obvious and unavoidable counter-example, so either at some point someone would have to invoke Drabsfarben’s reputation in the presence of Drabsfarben himself, which would be uncomfortable for everyone because it would sound like flattery and you didn’t flatter a man like Drabsfarben, or else no one would, which would be uncomfortable for everyone too because that elision would throb more and more conspicuously the longer the discussion went on.
Loeser, like most of his friends, was mildly enthusiastic about his own artistic endeavours in the usual sort of way, but Drabsfarben was known to have a devotion so formidable that if he were ever shipwrecked on a rocky coast he would probably build a piano from dried kelp and seagull bones rather than let his work be interrupted even for an afternoon. Sex was nothing to him; politics were nothing to him; fame was nothing to him; and society was nothing to him, except when he thought a particular director or promoter or critic could help him get his work heard, in which case he would appear at precisely as many dinners and receptions as it took to get that individual on his side. His most recent work was an atonal piano concerto derived from an actuary’s table of hot-air balloon accident statistics, and indeed most of his music seemed to demand that the intellectual tenacity of its listeners almost outmatch that of its creator. Drabsfarben, in other words, made Loeser feel like a bit of a fraud. But normally Loeser didn’t resent this. In fact, Loeser sometimes felt that Drabsfarben might be the only man in Berlin he really respected. Which was why it was so upsetting when Hecht said, ‘So many people only seem to have gone into the theatre in the first place because they have some narcissistic social agenda – you know, like . . . like . . .’ And then Drabsfarben, who had been almost silent until this point, said, ‘Like Loeser?’
While sober, Loeser could have brushed this off, but two bottles of bad red wine had transformed him into the emotional equivalent of one of those strange Peruvian frogs with transparent skin exposing their jumpy little hearts. He rushed from the party, and Marlene followed him out into the chilly street, where she found him sitting on the kerb, heels in the gutter, weeping, almost whimpering. ‘Is that what they all think of me? Is that really what they all think of me?’ Although he would probably have forgotten all about this small crisis by the following morning, or even by the end of the party, she did her best to comfort him.
And that was when she said it. ‘Don’t slip into the dark, my darling. Don’t slip into the dark.’
Even while drunk, Loeser immediately recognised these words. They were from an atrocious American melodrama called Scars of Desire that they had seen at the cinema on Ranekstrasse. Loeser had mocked the film all through dinner and all the way back to his flat, finding himself so funny that he thought he might write a satirical piece for some magazine or other, and confident of Marlene’s agreement, until finally he noticed her quietly sobbing, and she confessed that she had loved the film and felt it was ‘meant just for [her]’. He dropped the subject. Marlene went to Scars of Desire four more times, twice with female friends, twice alone. To summarise: late in the film, the male romantic lead has a moral convulsion about marrying the female romantic lead, who was previously engaged to his brother, who was killed in the war. He starts crying and knocking over furniture, and we realise that he is not really angry at his new fiancée, but at the pointless death of his brother. The female romantic lead coaxes him back to his senses by whispering, ‘Don’t slip into the dark, my darling. Don’t slip into the dark.’
The problem wasn’t that Marlene was quoting from the film, although that would have been bad enough. The problem was that she said the line as if it had come not from any film but from deep in her own heart. She had internalised some lazy screenwriter’s lazy offering to the point where she was no longer even vaguely conscious of its commercial origins. Scars of Desire had been screwed into her personality like a plastic prosthesis.
Naturally, he split up with her the next day.
‘So you’re trying to tell me that Marlene is herself a sort of avatar of the twentieth century,’ said Loeser, sipping his
schnapps.
‘Yes,’ said Achleitner. ‘Because she nurses sentiments that have been sold to her as closely as she nurses sentiments of her own. Or perhaps even more closely. Like a magpie with discount cuckoo’s eggs. Did you ever bring her here?’
‘Once, remember. You were with us.’
‘Did she like it? I would have thought she’d be quite at home.’
The jazz band concluded ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and trooped off stage, presumably ready to return to some sort of art deco hog ranch. ‘That is cruel,’ said Loeser. ‘You know she’ll probably be at the party tonight? Which is why I’m absolutely not going if we don’t get some coke.’
‘Egon, why is it that every single time you’re obliged to be in the same room with one of your ex-girlfriends you have to make it into a huge emergency? It’s incredibly boring.’
‘Come on. You know how it is. You catch sight of an old flame and you get this breathless animal prickle like a fox in a room with a hound. And then all night you have to seem carefree and successful and elated, which is a pretence that for some reason you feel no choice but to maintain even though you know they’re better qualified than anyone else in the world to detect immediately that you’re really still the same hapless cunt as ever.’
‘That’s adolescent. The fact that you are so neurotic about your past lovers makes it both fortunate and predictable that you have so few of them. It’s one of those elegant self-regulating systems that one so often finds in nature.’
‘I can’t lose this break-up. We’ve all seen what happens to the defeated.’
‘You didn’t even like her.’
‘I know. But at least she had sex with me. And it was really good. When am I ever going to have sex with anyone again? I mean, without paying. Honestly – when? Sometimes I wish I was queer like you. I’ve never seen you worry about all this. Upon how many lucky pilgrims have you bestowed your blessing this year?’
‘No idea. I gave up keeping count while I was still at school. Remind me what you’re on now?’
‘Five. Still. In my whole life. Not counting hookers. Sometimes when I walk down the street I look around at them all and I feel as if I’m being crucified on a cross made of beautiful women. Sometimes when I get out of the bath I catch sight of myself in the mirror and I feel as if even my own penis is bitterly disappointed in me.’
Throughout the 1920s, Germany had been full of teachers, doctors, psychoanalysts, sociologists, poets, and novelists who were eager to talk to you about sex. They were eager to inform you that sex was natural, that sex ought to be pleasurable, and that everyone had the right to a fulfilling sex life. Loeser broadly agreed with the first two claims, and he even agreed, in principle, with the third, but, given his present situation, the establishment of a global Marxist workers’ paradise seemed a modest and plausible aim in comparison to this ludicrously optimistic vision of a world in which he, Egon Loeser, actually got close to a non-mercenary vulva once in a while. These well-meaning experts honestly seemed to believe that as soon as people were told that they ought to be having sex, they would just start having sex, as if there could not possibly be any obstacle to twenty-four-hour erotic festivities other than moral reluctance. ‘Oh, thank you so much,’ Loeser wanted to say to them. ‘That’s so helpful. I should be enjoying fantastic sex all the time, should I? That had really never occurred to me until you mentioned it. Now that I have been liberated by your inspiring words, I shall go off and enjoy some fantastic sex right away.’
Then again, it was sometimes possible to use this nonsense to one’s advantage. Apparently there had been a short halcyon period in the early 20s when all you had to do to make a girl go to bed with you was to convince her that she was inhibited and politically regressive if she didn’t, rather in the same way that you might nag someone into contributing to a strike fund. You could cite all manner of progressive thinkers, sometimes by chapter and paragraph. But that trick had expired long before Loeser had been old enough to use it.
Loeser felt particularly unlucky because, as a young man rising through Berlin’s experimental theatre scene, he moved in perhaps the most promiscuous social circles of perhaps the most promiscuous city in Europe. If he had lived in, say, a village outside Delft, the contrast probably wouldn’t have been quite so agonising. He half envied Lavicini, who got squashed twenty years before Venice entered its century of utter carnal mayhem. Loeser hated politics, but he knew there were plenty of politicians who wanted to reverse Germany’s descent into libertinism, and he wished them the best. A bit of good old-fashioned sexual repression could only improve his comparative standing. Back in the 1890s, for instance, he wouldn’t have felt nearly so depressed that he never got laid, because no one else would have been getting laid either – the same principle they now used in Russia with potatoes and electricity and so on. Before the Great War, women knew that their dear daddies had spent years saving up to pay for them to be married, so they wanted their wedding night to mean something. But ever since all those dowries had been turned to dead leaves by the Inflation, women had realised that they might as well just have fun. That was Loeser’s theory, anyway.
‘So how long has it been now?’ said Achleitner.
‘Since the day I broke up with Marlene.’
‘Before or after you told her?’
‘Shortly before.’ This final strategic indulgence had been especially enjoyable for Loeser because for once he didn’t feel as if he had to bother about giving Marlene an orgasm. Normally, there was only one damnable way this could be done: Loeser would sit up in the bed with his back against the wall like an invalid receiving his breakfast, Marlene would straddle him, they would begin to rock back and forth, and then Loeser would simultaneously stick his tongue deep in her ear and reach down between their jostling bellies to – well, he sometimes had dreams afterwards where he was a vet in handcuffs who had to deliver a tiny, tiny calf from a tiny, tiny cow. The procedure with Marlene was incredibly awkward, it took so long that his fingertips wrinkled, and by the end his wrist and forearm were so embattled with cramp that he scarcely had the patience to attend to the needs of any other appendage. But for most of their time together he had been quite content to perform this little duty because she was such an exceptional lover in every other category. ‘So that’s three weeks,’ he told Achleitner.
‘Three weeks? You’ve gone longer than three weeks before.’
‘Of course I’ve gone longer than three weeks. I seem to remember I once went nineteen years.’
‘So why are you complaining?’
‘If my platoon is stranded in the mountains and our rations have just run out, I’m not allowed to start worrying until we actually begin to starve?’
‘Won’t be long before you resort to cannibalism, I imagine.’
‘Anton, I resorted to cannibalism one afternoon in 1921 and I have hardly stopped since. The point is, it could be another six months before even the most rudimentary lines of supply can be re-established. It could be a year. Or, who knows? I may never have sex again without paying. Never. It could happen.’
‘You’ll meet someone.’
‘That is a groundless probabilistic calculation, and therefore of no value. I thought you knew better than to try to reassure me. There is nothing more sickening than reassurance.’
‘If you are going to be like this all evening then I really am going to need some coke too. I wish you hadn’t pissed off Klugweil.’
And Littau was in Munich, and they both owed money to Tetzner, and the toilet attendant at Borchardt would sell them crushed aspirin. ‘Or the one at the Mauve Door?’ said Achleitner finally. ‘The one with no ears.’
‘Even worse – I don’t know what he sold us last time but it nearly made me soil myself in the street on the way back to Brogmann’s house. I’m fed up with buying it from strangers. Come on, you must be able to think of someone. You lot’ – by which Loeser meant homosexuals – ‘always seem to know twice as many people for this sort of thing.’<
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‘Thank you for your confidence, but I don’t think I can help in this case. Oh, although that Englishman from last night had excellent stuff with him.’
‘Which Englishman?’
‘Some blond aspiring writer from London. I met him at the Eden Bar. Hung like one of those Norse giants from the Ring Cycle.’
‘Can we find him again?’
‘I think I’ve got a number for his boarding house.’
Loeser sighed. ‘Listen, Anton, as fondly as I remember the many, many evenings of our youth that we’ve squandered running round Berlin searching in vain for adequate drugs, I just don’t think I’m in the mood tonight. And anyway, my septum is still convalescing.’
‘But we have to go to this party. I heard Brecht is going to be there.’
‘Oh, ha ha.’ There was nobody in Berlin that Loeser loathed more than Bertolt Brecht, and there was nothing about Berlin theatre parties that he loathed more than the ubiquitous cry of ‘I heard Brecht is going to be there’.
‘And Adele Hitler.’
‘What?’
‘She’s back from Switzerland, apparently.’
Adele Hitler was a giggly teenage girl from a rich family whom Loeser had tutored in poetry for two lucrative years before she went off to finishing school. ‘So? I’d stop to chat if I saw her in the street but I’m not going to the party just to catch up with the latest on her doll collection.’
‘She’s eighteen now,’ said Achleitner, raising an eyebrow.
‘What are you implying? I’m hardly likely to try to get her into bed.’
