The Teleportation Accident

by Beauman, Ned

  ‘Pedagogical ethics?’

  ‘None whatsoever, but she was a grotesquely fat little thing.’

  ‘They say she looks very different. Ugly duckling and all that.’

  Loeser considered this. ‘I did always think she had a bit of a crush on me.’ He finished his drink. ‘Well, all right, it’s not as if I have any dignity left to lose. Let’s find this Wagnerian gallant of yours.’

  An hour later they met the Englishman in the street outside his boarding house on Konigslandstrasse. The evening was blustery, and nearby a hunchbacked balloon seller with two dozen red balloons stood shifting his weight against the tug of the wind like a Zeppelin breeder out promenading a whole litter of excitable pups.

  ‘I’d love to introduce the two of you,’ said Achleitner, nodding at the Englishman, ‘but I’m afraid on this napkin next to your telephone number I seem just to have written “London, blond, incomparable dong”.’

  ‘Rupert Rackenham. And for accuracy’s sake I’m originally from Devon. Have you been in a fight?’ he asked Loeser.

  ‘Of a kind.’

  ‘We were wondering if you had any more of that coke,’ said Achleitner.

  ‘Quite a cache of it, yes,’ said Rackenham. His German was good.

  ‘Can we buy some?’ said Loeser. ‘We’re going to a party later and it’s the only way we know how to endure the company of our friends.’

  ‘What sort of party?’

  ‘It’s in an old corset factory up in Puppenberg,’ said Achleitner. There had been a craze recently for parties like this: in disused ballrooms, bankrupt coffin warehouses, condemned gymnasia. Loeser’s attitude was that if a place was abandoned it was probably abandoned for a reason and reviving it voluntarily was perverse.

  ‘Well, as we’re all intimates now, why don’t I give you each a few lines as a gift? And then perhaps you’d be kind enough to bring me along to this party and introduce me to a few more of these unendurable friends that you mentioned.’

  ‘How many lines between the two of us?’

  ‘Let’s call it a sonnet.’

  Achleitner shrugged at Loeser and Loeser shrugged back at Achleitner. So Achleitner said, ‘Fine. I should think once you’re there you’ll sell out the rest of your stock in about thirty seconds.’

  ‘Splendid. I’ll just go upstairs and get my camera.’ He had an educated, ironic, very English manner, at once sharply penetrating and affably detached, like someone who would always win the bets he made with strangers at weddings on how long the marriage would last but would never bother to collect the money.

  ‘We’ll find a cab.’

  When he came back down, Rackenham had a Leica on a strap around his neck. He took a photo of Loeser and Achleitner and then the cab set off for Puppenberg. At the corner, a coachman was feeding his nag out of a wide-mouthed coal scuttle, pigeons pecking grudgingly at the spilled oats as if what they really craved was a few scraps of fresh horse brisket.

  ‘I assume you’re an artist of some kind, Herr Loeser,’ said Rackenham.

  ‘Why do you assume?’

  ‘Because since coming to Berlin I never seem to meet anyone who isn’t an artist. At least by their own description.’

  Loeser thought of what he’d overheard at that cast party. ‘Yes, it’s a state of affairs I find pretty sickening, but as you correctly surmise I’m guilty of contributing to it myself. I’m a set designer. I work mostly at the Allien Theatre.’

  ‘What have you got on at the moment?’

  ‘Nothing quite yet. We’re just starting a new project.’ Loeser gave Rackenham a brief sketch of Lavicini as it was currently conceived. He always felt a bit self-conscious talking about his work in the earshot of taxi drivers.

  ‘So it’s a historical drama? I hope you won’t take offence, Herr Loeser, but I’ve never seen the point of historical drama. Or historical fiction for that matter. I once thought about writing a novel of that kind, but then I began to wonder, what possible patience could the public have for a young man arrogant enough to believe he has anything new to say about an epoch with which his only acquaintance is flipping listlessly through history books on train journeys? So I stick to the present day. I really think it’s the present day that needs our attention.’

  ‘By accident, Herr Rackenham, you’ve led me to one of the great themes of the New Expressionist theatre,’ said Loeser. And he explained Equivalence. Yes, whenever one began a play or a novel, there was a choice to be made: whether to plot your Zeppelin’s course for present-day Berlin, or seventeenth- century Paris, or a future London, or some other destination entirely. But the choice meant nothing. Consider Germany under the Weimar Republic in 1931. Thirteen years since its inception, five years since its acknowledged zenith, two years since there was last any good coke: a culture old enough, in other words, that journalists were already beginning to judge it in retrospect, as history. And they were calling it a Golden Age, an unprecedented flourishing. But if you were part of it – and even if you were only part of its decline, like Loeser – you couldn’t help but say to yourself: all these thousands of young people, all in a few nearby neighbourhoods, all calling themselves artists, as Rackenham had said. And all this spare time. And all these openings and all these premières and all these parties. And all this talk and talk and talk and drink and talk. For nearly fifteen years. All of this. And what had it produced for which anyone would really swap a bad bottle of Riesling in eight decades’ time? A few plays, a few paintings, a few piano concertos – most of which, anyway, went quite unnoticed by the boys and girls who made such a fuss about being at the heart of it all. If that was a Golden Age then an astute investor might consider selling off his bullion before the rate fell any further. There had been so many Golden Ages now, and Loeser was confident that they had all been the same, and always would be. Compare the Venice of the late Renaissance, where Lavicini came of age, to the Berlin of Weimar, or compare the Berlin of Weimar to whatever city would turn out to be most fashionable in 2012, and you would find the same empty people going to the same empty parties and making the same empty comments about the same empty efforts, with just a few spasms of worthwhile art going on at the naked extremities. Nothing ever changed. That was Equivalence. Plot a course for another country, another age, and the best you could hope for was that you would circumnavigate the globe by accident, and arrive at the opposite coast of your own homeland, mooring your Zeppelin trepidatiously in this rich mud to find a tribe you did not recognise speaking a language you could not understand. If Loeser could ever get his Teleportation Device working, then in future productions it might sling actors not just through space but through time.

  ‘Equivalence is all very well,’ said Rackenham. ‘But political conditions, at least, must change. And for a revolutionary dramatist that must mean something.’

  ‘Good grief, don’t talk to me about politics,’ said Loeser. ‘In the thirteen years since the war there have been how many governments, Anton?’

  ‘Fifteen?’ guessed Achleitner. ‘Seventeen?’

  ‘Exactly. And we’re supposed to keep biting our nails as we wait for the next arbitrary plot development? Politics is pigshit. Hindenburg and MacDonald and Louis XIV, they’re just men. I will bet you anything you like that . . . Anton, you still read the newspapers: name somebody who’s making a lot of noise at the moment.’

  ‘Hitler.’

  ‘I will bet you anything you like – sorry, Hitler? Do you mean Adele’s father?’

  ‘No relation.’

  ‘Right. As I was saying, I will bet you anything you like that this other Hitler, whoever he is, will never make one bit of difference to my life.’

  ‘Careful, Egon,’ said Achleitner. ‘That’s the sort of remark that people quote in their memoirs later on as a delicious example of historical irony.’

  ‘What about the Inflation?’ said Rackenham. ‘That was politics’ fault. And you can hardly say it didn’t affect you.’

  ‘Actually, he can,’ sai
d Achleitner. ‘He’s a special case. His parents were psychiatrists and most of their clients paid in Swiss francs or American dollars. The Inflation worked out very well for the Loeser family. That’s why he’s such a cosseted little darling. He wasn’t eating cakes made of fungus like the rest of us.’

  ‘Anton is partly correct,’ said Loeser, ‘but he neglects to mention that both my parents then died in a car accident. Thus cancelling out any egalitarian guilt I might otherwise have felt.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Rackenham.

  ‘Yes, I think of them often.’

  ‘No, I mean, I’m sorry to hear that people here have to feel guilty about growing up in comfort. In England even my socialist friends wouldn’t be so tiresome.’

  ‘And this so-called Depression makes no difference to us either,’ said Achleitner. ‘Six million jobless doesn’t seem like so many when none of us ever had any wish for a real job in the first place.’

  ‘Still, what is one supposed to do with six million surplus people?’ said Rackenham.

  ‘Perhaps they can all become full-time set designers,’ said Achleitner.

  ‘We’d better stop and get some wine,’ said Loeser. ‘There won’t be anywhere open near the party.’

  When Loeser came back with four cheap bottles they got the driver to carry on waiting so they could do some of Rackenham’s coke. Rackenham obligingly opened the back of his camera and took out a little paper parcel like a mouse’s packed lunch.

  ‘Is that where you always keep your coke?’ said Loeser.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t that where the film is supposed to go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So how does it take pictures?’

  ‘Don’t be so literal. Photography, as a ceremonial gesture, is a convenient way to make people feel like they’re having a good time, but the technical details are a bore. I picked this machine up for a song because it wouldn’t work even if there were film in it. Meanwhile, I may as well point out that the meter is running.’ There was no flat surface near by so they just sniffed the coke off the sides of their hands and then licked up the residue. One of the great skills of Berlin social life was to make this awkward self-nuzzling into an elegant gesture; Loeser knew that he resembled a schoolboy trying to teach himself cunnilingus. Then, afterwards, always that furtive, startled look, as if somehow you’d only just realised that you weren’t alone in the room.

  The cab drove on. Now that they were further up into Puppenberg, most of the buildings they passed had sooty bricks and squinty windows. ‘Whatever I may just have said about drugs these days, this stuff is not bad,’ said Loeser. And then they pulled up outside the corset factory.

  No one could remember whose party it was. Inside, long black rows of sewing machines still stood ready like cows for milking, but the electricity was disconnected so the whole factory had been lit up with candles, and at the far end a jazz band (Caucasian, hatless) played on a stage made out of upturned wooden crates – all of which Loeser would have found very imaginative and refreshing four or five years ago.

  The first familiar faces they saw were Dieter Ziesel and Hans Heijenhoort, which was not an auspicious start. Both were research physicists who had hung on to the scrubby cliff edge of Loeser’s social circle with the help of some old university friendships that had withered but not quite died. They were both olympically dull, but Loeser had nonetheless felt a special warmth for Dieter Ziesel ever since one drunken evening in the third year of his degree.

  He had been in the college bar and something had just happened – he couldn’t now remember what, but it was most likely some rejection by a girl – to melt him into the same sort of doldrums that would one day prove indirectly fatal to his relationship with Marlene Schibelsky. ‘I know perfectly well that I’m better than everyone else around here, except maybe Drabsfarben,’ he had said to Achleitner. ‘But what if that makes no difference? I mean, girls don’t seem to care, so why should the rest of the world? If I achieve anything really important, I won’t mind about being unhappy, and if I did end up really happy, I suppose I could just about tolerate not achieving anything important. But what if I get neither? My whole life I’ve been so scornful of anyone who could make peace with failure, but what if I have to? Not everyone can get to the top. Someone’s got to be at the bottom. It could happen. Except I think I’d gnaw out my own spleen first.’

  ‘You’re never going to be at the bottom,’ Achleitner had said.

  ‘How can you know?’

  ‘Because of Dieter Ziesel.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Achleitner had pointed, and Loeser had looked over to see a fellow student with all the classical good looks and muscle definition of a shop-window dummy dipped in birthday-cake icing, who sat alone with a glass of beer. Ziesel was in their year at university, Achleitner explained, but almost nobody knew him. He was still a virgin because he had been too nervous ever to undress in front of a prostitute, and in fact he had never even kissed a girl. He vomited down his shirt whenever he had more than two drinks. He was miserably conscious of his flab jiggling up and down whenever he ran for the tram, which he often did because he was always late. Every weekend he took the train back to his parents’ house in Lemberg and all afternoon would cry into his mother’s lap while she cooed to him like a baby. He spent his evenings drawing maps of imaginary planets. ‘And he even plays the tuba! Isn’t that too perfect? So you’d think he’d be a mathematical genius, wouldn’t you? Specimens like him usually are. But he’s not. He does all right in his exams because he spends so many hours in the library without bothering to wash, but all his Professors say he lacks any real feeling for his subject.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘He left his diary somewhere and somebody found it. The point is, however bad you may think your life is, you can be sure that Dieter Ziesel’s is worse. You’re never going to be at the bottom, because Dieter Ziesel is always going to be at the bottom. In mathematical terms, he is the n minus one.’

  ‘That may be the most gladdening thing I have ever heard,’ Loeser had said.

  ‘Yes. Dieter Ziesel is a gift to us all. I often feel that in some respects he is our Jesus.’

  In the years that followed, Loeser took strength thousands of times from the thought of Dieter Ziesel. At one point he considered commissioning a miniature portrait of Ziesel and keeping it in his wallet. When his great redeemer won a prestigious research fellowship it was a bit of a blow, but apparently a particular Professor had championed Ziesel’s cause to the selection committee, and that Professor was no doubt taking pity on the fellow, knowing that he would have no prospects in any other walk of life.

  What Loeser found especially hilarious was that Ziesel still refused to accept his role. When he heard about a party thrown by people he knew, he always turned up, even though it must have been clear that nobody wanted him there. He had recently bought a suit in the gross American style that was now fashionable among the middlebrow public – huge shoulders, slim legs, leather belt – as if everyone would suddenly change their opinion about him as soon as they had a chance to admire this up-to-date garb. And, most absurd of all, he maintained his abusive relationship with Heijenhoort. The two had been good friends at university, but at some point Ziesel must have realised that his skinny classmate was the one person he could bully who was certain not to bully him back. This was because Heijenhoort – also a bit like Jesus, but in a less useful way – was basically the nicest man in the entire world. He wasn’t all that charming or funny, he was just nice. He had incomprehensible reserves of friendliness, optimism, self-effacement, generosity, and tact. A gang of dockers could kick him to mush in the street and even his death rattle would be polite. Ziesel was safe with Heijenhoort. So he made constant little jokes at Heijenhoort’s expense whenever he was in the presence of anyone who he thought might be impressed, hoping that it might at least infinitesimally elevate his social status, like a provincial civil se
rvant writing to a minister about the incompetence of a colleague and expecting a promotion in return. But in fact it only had the effect of making Ziesel look like even more of a failure, since no sane person could possibly dislike Heijenhoort.

  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.