by Beauman, Ned
Marlene answered the door in a fetching green silk kimono that she hadn’t owned when she was going out with Loeser. She smelled of vanilla perfume under a thick baste of sweat.
‘Oh, Egon,’ she said, ‘are you really standing here in front of me or is this just a wonderful dream?’
‘What the fuck is this about you and Klugweil?’
‘You’ve finally heard.’
‘Finally heard?’
‘Everyone else already knew, of course, but we’ve been making half an effort to keep it from you because we knew you’d be such an unwarranted arsehole about it.’
‘Try as I might I just can’t believe the two of you would do this to me.’
‘It’s been two years, Egon. In any case, I could quite justifiably have fucked Adolf the day after you dumped me – but it’s been two years.’
‘You must be thrilled you’ve caught up with him at last.’
‘I am, actually. And I’ll tell you why. Do you remember, after what your idiotic gadget did to his arms, the doctors told him they’d never quite go back to normal?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘The doctors were right. And guess what that means.’ She leaned forward to whisper in his ear. ‘He can do it with both hands at once.’
‘Do what?’ Marlene smiled and raised an eyebrow. Then Loeser realised. ‘No!’
‘Yes.’
‘No one can do that with both hands at once! I tried half a dozen times! There isn’t room! Arms just don’t do that!’
‘Adolf’s do. We ought to thank you, really. But the neighbours might disagree. It’s frightful how it makes me wail.’
‘So you’re trying to tell me you’ve climbed the carnal ranks? All right, good, well, so have I. It so happens that I’m having dinner with Adele Hitler tonight.’ He had not intended to mention that.
Marlene laughed. ‘Really? You’re actually wasting the price of a meal on the biggest slut in Berlin? Good grief. Are you also under the impression that you have to bribe the librarian every time you want to get a book out of the public library? Adolf, did you hear that?’ she called back into the flat. ‘Egon’s having dinner with that filthy Hitler girl tonight. He’s very proud of it.’
‘Klugweil’s here now?’ said Loeser.
‘Indeed he is.’
‘Let me in. I want to talk to him.’
‘Sorry. I want to make the most of the afternoon. Adolf’s on very good form. Goodbye, Egon. And good luck tonight. I do hope she’s worth it.’ She started to shut the door.
‘Wait. Please. Just one more thing.’
‘What?’
‘Have you ever slept with any of the waiters at the Schwanneke?’
‘You’re disgusting.’
‘Oh, Christ, I know that blush! You have!’
Marlene slammed the door in his face.
He trudged back down the dusty staircase for which he’d once had such affection, resenting every familiar creak of every floorboard for its new allegiance to his former friend. Blumstein’s house was half an hour’s walk away, but this time Loeser was too angry to wait for the tram, so he went on foot. The director and his wife lived not far from the Fraunhofens in a sort of giant trophy case that had been designed for him in 1923 by a young architect from the Bauhaus called Gugelhupf. Its glass walls killed something like a thousand birds a year, and ever since its construction the neighbours had complained of an unmistakable quality of mourning to the dawn chorus in Schlingesdorf. That glass of champagne had postponed Loeser’s hangover but he still hadn’t had anything to eat and he began to feel as if the ballast of his rage was the only thing that was stopping him from floating away like a balloon.
‘We can’t work with Klugweil any more,’ he said as soon as Blumstein opened the front door.
Blumstein sighed as if he were estimating how much of his afternoon he was going to lose to this. ‘Good afternoon, Egon,’ he said. ‘Come in. I’ll ask Emma to make us some coffee.’
‘Don’t bother about coffee,’ said Loeser, following him into the expansive sitting room. From a shelf in the corner stared out some of the obscene painted masks from Blumstein’s notorious student production of The Tempest, which everyone always claimed to have seen even though it had run for two nights twenty years ago in a theatre the size of an igloo. ‘I just want to get this over with.’
‘This is hardly the first time you’ve come here to gripe about our mutual friend,’ said Blumstein. ‘If you could forgive each other for the “Teleportation Accident” then you can forgive each other for whatever it is that’s happened now.’ He lowered himself into one of Gugelhupf’s black rectilinear armchairs and gestured to another one for Loeser but Loeser stayed standing.
‘I’m not just here to whine this time. I mean it. He’s stabbed me in the back.’
‘How so?’
‘There’s no use telling you the whole sordid story. The point is, we can no longer be collaborators. But on the way here I realised that it’s for the best, anyway. Have you heard him these last few months? All of a sudden he’s determined that Lavicini should be all about the Nazis. Our play is not about the fucking Nazis. The New Expressionism doesn’t waste its time with politics. We agreed on that.’
‘We agreed on that in 1929,’ said Blumstein.
‘And?’
‘With all due respect to Equivalence, things do change. Do you even realise they shut down the Bauhaus last month? It’s very hard to have a conversation with you about this because you don’t read the newspapers, but at a time like this it seems to me that an artist has certain responsibilities.’
‘I agree. At a time when the atmosphere of Berlin is even more polluted with political talk than usual, we ought to give our audience a few breaths of clean air.’
‘If you had heard what’s being said about the Jews—’
‘Then what would I think? That you’re all going to be rounded up by thugs tomorrow morning?’
‘No, of course not, but . . .’ Blumstein paused and gave his left shoulder four or five unhappy taps with his right hand. ‘I had not planned to tell you this yet, Egon, but Adolf and I have been working on a small project of our own.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just a simple piece about what’s happening in Germany. What’s happening today, not what happened in the late seventeenth century. Something that we can write and rehearse and stage in a few months and that people will actually want to come and see.’
Loeser was so shocked that all he could think to ask was, ‘Who’s going to do the set?’
‘There won’t be a set. Nothing but black drapes. Like we used to do it right after the war.’
Loeser thought of all that he’d learned from the older man, and all that he owed to him. That excused nothing. ‘So after three years of work we’re abandoning Lavicini.’
‘There’s no reason why we can’t return to Lavicini in the future but just now—’
‘Oh, to hell with this.’
Blumstein jumped up and followed Loeser out of the house. ‘Egon, please try to understand. I might be wrong about all this, I hope I am – but at the moment I don’t feel as if I have any choice.’
But Loeser hurried away without looking back, so the only reply Blumstein got was the soft double thump of a young sparrow shattering its skull against the glass wall of his house and then dropping into the bed of petunias behind him.
When Loeser arrived at the Schwanneke that evening, the restaurant was crowded but luckily there was almost no one there he knew. He wondered if Adele would let him feed her ice cream off his spoon. On the way back to his flat, he’d told himself that nothing that had happened today really mattered – not Rackenham, not Marlene, not Blumstein – because he was having dinner with his prize tonight. But then he remembered the party in Puppenberg, and the canyon of his disappointment, and he reached the irrational conclusion that the only way to ensure that she really would turn up was to convince himself that she wouldn’t. So as he bathed and dresse
d and changed his month-old sheets he had told himself again and again that she wouldn’t come, she definitely wouldn’t come, she absolutely definitely wouldn’t come.
And then she didn’t come.
Loeser waited an hour and a half, pulling threads from the hem of the tablecloth, counting the punctuation errors in the menu, watching the staff at their duties in an attempt to work out which ones had fucked Adele and which ones had fucked Marlene. At last, numbly, he gave up hope, and paid for the bottle of wine he’d drunk. As he was putting on his coat he noticed three waiters conferring near the door. All he could think about was how these cunts could apparently have any woman they wanted without even trying. He found himself veering towards them, and on the way he snatched a fork from a vacant table. He didn’t know what he was going to do.
‘Excuse me,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir?’ said one of the waiters.
Any woman they wanted, he thought. These cunts.
There was a long pause.
‘Are there any job openings here?’ Loeser said at last.
‘I’m afraid not, sir.’
‘I see. Fine. Thank you. Goodbye.’
Outside, Loeser hailed a cab to take him to the Hitler residence in Hochbegraben. To arrive uninvited at Adele’s house would represent the final collapse of his dignity, but he didn’t know what else to do. The door was answered by the Hitlers’ maid, who recognised him from when he used to tutor Adele. He realised he missed those boring, luxurious afternoons in the Hitlers’ drawing room, and he was reminded of a business plan that Achleitner had once suggested for the newly established Allien Theatre:
1. Put on plays ferociously satirising the sort of people who live in nice houses in Hochbegraben.
2. Sell a lot of tickets to the sort of people who live in nice houses in Hochbegraben.
3. Make enough money to move into a nice house in Hochbegraben.
‘Herr Loeser!’ said the maid. ‘What a lovely surprise!’
‘I’m sorry to call so late. Is Fräulein Hitler at home, please?’
‘I’m afraid not, Herr Loeser.’
‘Do you know where she is?’ he said. For the first time he wondered where Adele’s parents thought she went when she didn’t come home night after night. Dance lessons?
‘She left for the train station a few hours ago.’
‘The train station?’
‘Yes, Herr Loeser. Fräulein Hitler has gone to Paris.’
‘Paris? For how long?’
‘I don’t know, Herr Loeser, but she did pack quite a lot of suitcases to be sent after her.’
‘Did she leave a note for me? Anything like that?’
The maid looked embarrassed. ‘Not that I know of, Herr Loeser.’
‘I see. Fine. Thank you. Goodbye.’
He reached into his pockets to see if he had enough cash on him for another cab and found only the fork from the Schwanneke. He would have to walk. Above him the moon over Berlin shone bright as a bare bulb in a toilet cubicle. When he got to the swimming pool on Sturzbrunnenstrasse he crossed the road, and off to his left was the library of Goldschmieden University, in front of which about fifty students seemed to be holding a bonfire. They were all cheering. Probably it was some sort of silly art performance, but still, out of curiosity, Loeser decided to see what was going on. As he drew closer, he saw that what they were burning was books, tossed one by one into the middle of a square framework of logs. Several boys and girls held placards that were difficult to read in the flickering light. The smell of the smoke was surprisingly caustic for such a stolid fuel.
‘What are you doing?’ he said to the nearest youthful biblioclast. Every time a heavy book landed it threw off a cheerful spittle of cinders, and shreds of stray paper danced in the wind like fiery autumn leaves.
‘This is degenerate literature. We are destroying it in the name of Germany. Would you like to join in?’
Loeser chuckled. The student was playing his part with an almost Expressionist rigidity. There was, Loeser had to admit, something quite amusing about acting out this medieval folk magic just outside the doors of fashionable, modern Goldschmieden. It was the sort of thing that Loeser himself might have come up with at that age. He was about to ask whether they were affiliated to a particular company or collective when the student pressed a novel into his hand. He looked down. The Sorceror of Venice by Rupert Rackenham. Straight away, all thought of objective theatrical evaluation forgotten, Loeser turned and hurled the book into the bonfire with a delighted yell. Next, the student handed him a script for Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera and a torn copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Loeser happily sent Brecht and Döblin after Rackenham. Then some Kafka and Trotsky and Zola, against none of whom he had anything in particular, but he was too much in the swing of it to stop. At last, the heat started to get a bit uncomfortable, so he gave the student a grateful slap on the back and continued on his way.
But as soon as he left the glow of the bonfire, all his troubles settled back on to him like a swarm of photophobic midges. Adele gone, Achleitner gone. Blumstein betraying him with Klugweil, Klugweil betraying him with Marlene. Ketamine, politics, boredom. No sex for two years. This sticky film of disappointment and frustration over everything. Berlin was hell. He thought of that essay Nietzsche had cobbled together in the last sane year of his life after he fell out with Wagner. Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Loeser Contra Blumstein. Loeser Contra Omnes.
How did Lavicini feel when he left Venice? How long did he think he’d be gone? Did he have the slightest fear that he might die in a foreign land?
All right, Loeser decided. Fuck it.
Paris.
3
Paris, 1934
‘Dear Mother and Father. Good news: I am rich. I have cornered the market in foreskins.’ Scramsfield sat outside a café on the Rue de l’Odéon, trying to convince himself that, really, it was a blessing that the plan had failed, and the first of his consolations was that he could never have told his parents. ‘I have given up literary ambitions for ever now that the tender hatbands of newborn boys have brought me a different sort of fame. I can walk into any bar in Paris and straight away there is a shout of, “Ho, drinks on the house for the snozzle tycoon of the Champs-Élysées!” ’ No. Impossible.
But of course he needn’t have been so explicit: he could just have said he was in the medico-cosmetic supplies business. Which would have been true. According to the Armenian, half the foreskins were going to be mashed up into a skin cream and the other half used as grafts to heal burns and pressure sores and venous ulcers. The reason that old women and private hospitals would pay thousands of francs for an ounce of penis carpaccio was that apparently the cells of a fresh baby were still so vague that they’d melt benignly into any old forehead or thigh. It sounded like voodoo, like medieval popes drinking infants’ blood to put off death, but after some consideration Scramsfield had decided he believed it: he only had to think of himself in 1929, getting his first sight of Le Havre from the deck of the Melchior, to remember that as a new arrival you would shake hands with anyone you met as if they were your best friend. The Armenian had explained that there was no particular reason it had to be the foreskin; it could just as well be the belly fat, except that of course the foreskin was normally the only disposable part of the kid, whereupon Scramsfield had wondered what he meant by ‘normally’; but anyway, that was what distinguished it from the famous monkey gland racket, where the idea was that you couldn’t sew just any part of the monkey into a man’s sac, it had to be the inventory of the monkey’s own sac, so you’d get all the relevant endocrinal juices.
Perhaps ‘racket’ was the wrong word. Scramsfield had a friend called Weitz who was a dentist. (He often left his consonants half formed when he spoke, as if his mouth were wide open; Scramsfield had once asked him about it and he said it was the same as how if you lived in a foreign country for long enough, you started to pick up the accent.) Last year Weitz had published a short but influential article in
the European Journal of Anaesthesiology, and as a result he’d been invited to dinner with the famous Dr Serge Voronoff up at the Château Grimaldi, where an animal trainer from a bankrupt circus was employed to run the monkey-breeding operation that took up most of the grounds. Weitz reported that Voronoff truly believed in what he was doing: he truly believed that he could give a man an extra twenty or thirty years of life – and ruffian sexual prowess – by hiding a monkey testicle like a contraband package between the man’s own pair. ‘You are only as old as your glands,’ he would say. For years, the patients had queued up: he’d grafted presidents and maharajahs and the Duke of Westminster’s dog and even, it was rumoured, Pope Pius XII, which made you wonder just what it was about that particular job that made you so desperate to postpone the big meeting you had scheduled with your boss. And now that everyone else had finally realised the whole thing was nonsense, and its inventor was getting mocked in all the newspapers, Voronoff himself still believed in it as wholeheartedly as he ever had. Well, why not? They couldn’t take away his money. They couldn’t take away his pretty twenty-one-year-old wife.
In any event, the prepuce game wasn’t like the primate game. Scramsfield could never have had a monopoly like Voronoff, or not for long. And that was his second, more practical consolation: within three or four months, either the rabbis or the Armenian would have got bored with splitting their cut, so to speak, and Scramsfield would have been quietly circumvented. Still, for those three or four months, he could have lived like a Guggenheim. He could have put out another issue of apogee, sixty-four pages with half-tone illustrations on coated paper, contributors paid on time at five cents a word; he could have put down a deposit on that old boot shop in the Latin Quarter that he’d told everyone he was going to turn into a gallery; he could have redeemed his long-suffering blue Corona from the pawnbrokers; he could have given back this borrowed suit and bought one for himself that didn’t cut into him under the arms. He wouldn’t have wasted it all at the Sphinx this time. And right now he wouldn’t be sitting here watching the door of Shakespeare and Company, knowing that if nobody who might want to make his acquaintance turned up by the time the shop opened again after lunch, he would have to go in to steal some more books to sell to Picquart. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before and hunger kept barging his thoughts out of the way.
