When you knock a bowl of sugar on to your host’s carpet, it is a parody of the avalanche that killed his mother and father, just as the duck’s beak that your new girlfriend’s lips form when she attempts a seductive pout is a quotation of the quacking noise your last girlfriend made during sex. When the telephone rings in the night because a stranger has given a wrong extension to the operator, it is a homage to the inadvertent substitution of telegrams that terminated your adulterous cousin’s marriage, just as the resonant alcove between the counterpoised struts of your new girlfriend’s clavicle is a rebuttal to the apparent beauty of your last girlfriend’s fleshier décolletage. Or this is how it seemed to Egon Loeser, anyway, because the two subjects most hostile to his sense of a man’s life as an essentially steady, comprehensible and Newtonian-mechanical undertaking were accidents and women. And it sometimes seemed as if the only way to prevent that dread pair from toppling him all the way over into derangement was to treat them not as prodigies but rather as texts to be studied. Hence the principle: accidents, like women, allude. These allusions are no less witty or astute for being unconscious; indeed, they are more so, which is one reason why it’s probably a mistake to construct them deliberately. The other reason is that everyone might conclude you’re a total prick.
And that was the final worry to flutter through Egon Loeser’s mind before he pulled the lever on his Teleportation Device one morning in April 1931. If it went wrong, they would all say: for what possible reason did you name your experimental stagecraft prototype after the most calamitous experimental stagecraft prototype in the history of theatre? Why make that allusion? Why hitch those two horses together? Paint the devil on the wall and the devil will come, as every child knows. Or, to sieve the German idiom down to an English one, don’t tempt fate. But Loeser was so unsuperstitious he was superstitious about it. He’d once got up on the stage of the Allien Theatre half an hour before a performance to shout ‘Macbeth!’ until he was hoarse. And one of his father’s long-standing psychiatric patients had been an American financier who named his yacht Titanic, his daughters Goneril and Regan, and his company Roman Empire Holdings in the same spirit. So he couldn’t credit the English idiom’s characterisation of fate as something like a hack playwright who never missed a chance to work in an ironic pratfall, any more than he could credit the German idiom’s characterisation of the devil as something like a preening actor who checked every gossip column in every newspaper every morning for a mention of himself (although perhaps God was like that). Accidents allude, but they don’t ape. Naming one thing after another cannot, logically, increase the chances of the new thing turning out like the old thing. But if the test today went straight to ruin, people would still say he shouldn’t have called it the Teleportation Device.
What choice did he have, though? This machine was primarily intended for use in a play about the life of Adriano Lavicini, the greatest stage designer of the seventeenth century. And the climax of the play portrayed the ghastly failure of Lavicini’s Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place, better known in modern discourse as the Teleportation Device. Since Egon Loeser was, in his own opinion, Lavicini’s closest modern counterpart, and since this new Teleportation Device was his finest innovation just as the old Teleportation Device had been Lavicini’s, then to stifle the parallel between the two would have been even more perverse than to let it breathe.
Anyway, Lavicini himself had painted the devil on the wall with far bolder strokes than Loeser possibly could. Back in 1679, the Teleportation Device wasn’t allowed a test run. Like a siege weapon, it had been constructed in total secrecy. No stagehand had seen more than a single jigsaw piece of the plans. Even Auguste de Gorge, the dictatorial owner of the Théâtre des Encornets, had not been permitted a peek, and even at the final dress rehearsal of Montand’s new ballet The Lizard Prince the machine had not yet been in operation, so neither the dancers nor their choreographer had any idea what to expect on opening night. But Lavicini insisted that the operations of the Teleportation Device were so precise that it didn’t matter, and the essential thing was that no rumours about the nature of the machine should escape.
The comparison to a siege weapon was especially apt here, Loeser always thought, because in the seventeenth century the struggle for supremacy between the great theatres and opera houses of Christendom resembled nothing so much as an arms race. For the ruling family of any major Italian city it would have been a political catastrophe to fall behind, and even within Paris the competition was fierce, which was why a set designer like Lavicini, who had in fact once held a job at the Venetian Arsenal, could expect to be bound as tightly by his contract of employment as the average twentieth-century germ-warfare scientist. (His salary, naturally, was large enough to make up for it.) This was an age in which the audience expected sphinxes pulling chariots, gods dancing in the air, lions transforming into girls, comets destroying city walls — all the really good stuff, of course, towards the middle of the play, because during the first act you would still be on the way to the theatre and by the fifth act you would already be doffing your hat to a platter of oysters. A typical published libretto might proudly list all nineteen contraptions that were to be set into motion during a performance, but neglect to mention the composer. Impresarios were bankrupted in their dozens, and enlightened critics complained that genuine dramatic values had been surrendered to this obsession with ‘the marvellous’, continuing a debate about the overuse of special effects that had begun with the Reformation and would presumably last until Hollywood fell into the San Andreas fault.
So Lavicini’s employer could forgive him for wanting to keep the Teleportation Device a total secret. Still, even de Gorge, who had once strangled a man while dictating a love letter, must have felt a little nervous as the entire bejewelled elite of Paris, including, last of all, Louis XIV and his queen, arrived at the Théâtre des Encornets for the première of The Lizard Prince, greeting each other with hand-kissings so formalised and ostentatious they were like miniature ballets in themselves. For the thousandth time he must have reminded himself of what his mentor Lunaire had once taught him: as an impresario, you shouldn’t flatter yourself that you were really anything to do with the show. You couldn’t conjure a hit. Your job was just to sell tickets. And if you had done that to the best of your ability, said Lunaire, then the only thing left to pray for was that nobody in the audience arrived with a dog bigger than a child or a pistol bigger than an upholstery hammer. But all this without even rehearsing the new machine — that was painting the devil on the wall.
Loeser’s Teleportation Device, by contrast, was about to be demonstrated at the little Allien Theatre in Berlin in front of only two other people: Adolf Klugweil, the putative star of Lavicini, and Immanuel Blumstein, the putative writer-director. The latter, at forty, was old enough to have been a founding member of the famous November Group, which seemed really pretty old to his two younger collaborators. Behind his back, they mocked him for his baldness, they mocked him for his nostalgia, and they mocked him for his habit, whenever he thought he might have misplaced his wallet or pipe (which was always), of patting himself down with such impatience, such savagery and such complete disregard for the actual location of his pockets that it began to resemble some sort of eroto-religious self-flagellation ritual — and yet they also had enormous respect for their mentor’s refusal to let the convictions of his youth fall out along with his hair. The belief all three men shared was that Expressionism had not been pushed nearly far enough. ‘Expressionism is no more a form of theatre than revolution is a form of state,’ Fritz Kortner had written. Perhaps, but in that case the revolution had been botched. The New Objectivity that had replaced Expressionism in the middle of the 1920s was nothing but the old state with a new cabinet. In reply, the New Expressionism would be the old revolution with new bombs.
Klugweil, meanwhile, was a twenty-four-year-old so languid as to be almost liquid, except when he went on stage and broke open some inner asylum of shrieks and contortions, wild eyes and bared teeth — which made him perfectly suited to Expressionist acting and almost useless for any other type. He’d been at university with Loeser, who had always wondered what he was like during sex but had never quite had the cheek to make an enquiry with his dull girlfriend.
‘Is everyone ready?’ said Loeser, who stood in the wings with his hand on the lever. The Allien Theatre had been an old-fashioned music hall before Blumstein took it over, and renovations were still only half complete, so after a few hours backstage your clothes and hair were so thick with paint flakes, dust clumps, loose threads, cushion stuffing, cobwebs, and splinters that you felt like a veal cutlet rolled in breadcrumbs.
‘Yes, get on with it,’ said Blumstein, who sat in seat 3F of the empty auditorium.
‘This pinches under the armpits,’ said Klugweil, who stood on stage, strapped into a harness like a test pilot missing a plane.
Lavicini’s Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place was, as it turned out, genuinely extraordinary. Once, as many as sixteen stagehands communicating with whistles had been required to change a scene. Giacomo Torelli’s invention of a single rotating axle had since made possible the simultaneous movement of multiple flats, reducing that number from sixteen to one. But that leap forward was rendered instantly trivial by the magnificence of Lavicini’s Teleportation Device. At the end of the first scene, the audience gave a gasp so great you could have marked it on a barometer as the stage suddenly took flight like a flock of birds. A vast hidden assembly of ropes, cranes, cranks, wheels, springs, runners, gantries, pulleys, weights, and counterweights was lifting every part of the set into the air — was rearranging it in a flurry of swoops and swaps and spins — and was setting it down again with barely an audible bump. The Third Temple of the Lizards was replaced by a Dagonite slave-cove before anyone in the room even thought of breathing out. All the violinists missed their cues and one ballerina fainted, but the cheering afterwards was so loud that it didn’t matter. At the back of the theatre, Auguste de Gorge decided that, having gone to bed with eight whores after the last première and five whores after the première before that, he would go to bed tonight with thirteen. (Not long ago someone had told him about the Fibonacci sequence and he had construed it as a challenge.) In the wings, Adriano Lavicini stepped back from the controls with a temperate smile. A stagecraft machine so ambitious that it was indistinguishable from magic: that was painting the devil on the wall.
Loeser’s Teleportation Device, by contrast, was not supposed to be spectacular. It was just a means to an end. The first half of Lavicini, before the protagonist’s emigration to Paris, would take place during the Venetian Carnival, when the entire city strapped on masks — when lawyers would wear masks to plead in court, maids would wear masks to go to market, and mothers would put masks on their newborns — and not just masks, in most cases, but also a long domino-cloak, so that it was impossible to tell a man from a woman until they spoke. Anyone could go anywhere, and anyone could mix with anyone: ‘prince with subject’, as Casanova wrote, ‘the ordinary with the remarkable man, lovely and hideous together. There were no longer valid laws, nor law-makers.’ The inquisition, omniscient and omnipotent for the rest of the year, gave up completely. To Loeser and Blumstein, the glamour and intrigue of the old Carnival were nothing compared to its unacknowledged political radicalism. At what other time in history had there been a social experiment on such a scale? No Bolshevik would have had the guts. The plays on which Loeser and Blumstein collaborated always stressed a notion they called Equivalence: the communist was shown to be no different from the Nazi, the priest from the gangster, the wife in furs from the prostitute in army boots. So the Carnival was perfectly suited to their themes. And so was the Teleportation Device. Like Lavicini’s machine, Loeser’s machine used springs and pulleys and counterweights, but whereas Lavicini’s machine moved the scenery around the cast, Loeser’s machine just moved the cast around the scenery, which was a lot easier. The idea was that a harnessed actor could make a speech as a stockbroker in the little bank at the top right of the stage, step back out of view, and be whipped across to the little casino at the bottom left, from which he would step back into view almost instantly as a compulsive gambler. This would be an effective if unsubtle way of driving home the point about how the two were just the same. And if in this new play there was some business with masks and cloaks coming on and off, the effect could be even more striking.
At the Théâtre des Encornets, by the time the second act drew to a close, the Teleportation Device was a novelty more than twelve minutes old, and yet the Paris upper crust weren’t quite bored to death with it yet. Montand’s lovely Dance of the Half-Fish came to an end, the dancers fluttered off stage to make way for an orchestral interlude, and the scenery began once again to lift into the air. And then there was a rumbling sound like thunder ground up with a pestle.
No two accounts quite agreed on what happened next. The confusion was understandable. Loeser knew only that the Théâtre des Encornets began to crumble — not the entire building, fortunately, but only its south-east corner, which meant one side of the stage and several of the nearby private audience boxes. There was a stampede, and even after all those centuries it was perhaps with a moistness in the eye that one recalled the tragic and senseless sacrifice of some of the most deliriously beautiful couture in the early history of the medium. Most of the inhabitants of that couture, as it happened, were unharmed — as were the musicians, who were shielded from tumbling marble by the position of the orchestra pit, and the dancers, who by great good luck had just exited stage right rather than stage left. The dead, in the end, numbered about twenty-five audience members from the private boxes nearest the collapse, who were recovered from the rubble after the fires had been put out but were in every case too badly mashed to be identified; the swooned ballerina, who had not been in the wings with her sisters but rather languishing on a couch backstage; Monsieur Merde, the Théâtre des Encornets’ cat; and Adriano Lavicini himself.
The Teleportation Device, meanwhile, had deleted itself along with the building. No part of it could be salvaged for an investigation into what might have gone wrong, and no plans or even sketches could be found in Lavicini’s workshop. Auguste de Gorge was, of course, ruined. And Louis XIV never went to the theatre again.
Two hundred and fifty years later, at the Allien Theatre, a spring sprang. A counterweight dropped. An actor shot across the stage. And a scream was heard.
The original Teleportation Accident was not notorious solely because it was the only time that a set designer was known to have inadvertently and suicidally wrecked a theatre and flattened sections of his audience. It was notorious also because of claims that appeared in certain reports of the cataclysm. Several reliable witnesses recalled that just before the end of the second act they had detected a stench somewhere between rotten metal and rusty meat. Others had felt an icy draught lunge through the theatre. And one (not very reliable) marquis insisted to friends that, as he fled, he had seen grey tentacles as thick as Doric columns slithering moistly out from behind the proscenium arch. Rumours began that — well, that an aforementioned German idiom was more literally applicable here than any post-Enlightenment historian would be willing to credit. Before his death, Lavicini had, after all, been nicknamed ‘the Sorceror’.
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.’
‘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.’
‘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,’ said 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 servant 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.
The first thing Loeser noticed was her hair. It was hopelessly unfashionable. Where every single one of his female friends had a bob that looked like a geometric diagram of itself, often snipped so close at the back that in the morning there would be stubble at the nape, pale Adele wore a flock of black starlings, a drop of ink bursting in a glass of water, an avalanche of curls that could hardly be called a cut because if it were ever to come across a pair of scissors it would surely just swallow them up.
And where most 1931 frocks, like the medieval Greek merchant and geodesist Cosmas Indicopleustes, argued for flatness in the face of all available evidence, Adele had on a blue dress that wrote limericks about her bust and hips, no matter that her figure was actually pretty girlish — with a printed pattern of clouds, skyscrapers and biplanes that seemed to be the garment’s lone, almost touchingly clumsy, concession to the zeitgeist.
And then, above all, her eyes. She didn’t wear goggles of eyeshadow like the other girls did, just a little eyeliner and a little mascara, but both were quite redundant, since no artificial pigment could possibly augment what were not only the biggest and brightest and most tender eyes that Loeser had ever seen but also the most astonishingly baroque, with each iris showing a spray of gold around the pupil like the corona around an eclipse, within a dappled band of blue and green, within an outline of grey as distinct as a pencil mark, and then beyond that an expanse of moist white that did not betray even the faintest red vein but sheltered at its inner corner a perfect tear duct like a tiny pink sapphire. They were eyes that should have belonged to the frightened young of some rare Javanese loris.
Loeser could hardly believe that a beauty this intense had ever existed under all those layers of puppy fat — or not so much puppy fat, he recalled, as pony fat. He could hardly believe that lesson after lesson had seemed so tedious, that he had once felt positively unlucky to have been hired to teach this particular schoolgirl and not one of those schoolgirls one sometimes saw on the tram who had so much more … well, one shouldn’t dwell on that. He could hardly believe that he had been so ungrateful when right in front of him, hanging tightly on his every word, had been this revelation, his pupil in pupa. And he could hardly believe that his blinkered pursuit of modish girls like Marlene Schibelsky who knew how to dress and paint their face and cut their hair had just been rendered so utterly absurd.
He had never wanted to fuck anything so much in his life.
‘Herr Loeser,’ she said. ‘Do you remember me?’
He composed himself. ‘Adele Hitler! I certainly do. You’re looking … very well.’
‘Thank you. And I see you’ve smartened up. Do you know a lot of people here?’
‘Too many.’
‘Is it true Brecht is going to come?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘I’d love to meet him.’
‘You’d be disappointed. You’d see right through the man.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because of that exquisite critical eye that I remember so well from all our hours of Schiller.’ He remembered no such thing. ‘Unless those jealous Swiss matrons have quite gouged it out.’
Adele smiled. ‘Do you still teach, Herr Loeser?’
‘You can call me Egon now. And, no, I don’t teach any more. I’m in the theatre.’
‘Oh, I’m thrilled, I always thought you might become a playwright! I’ve been so desperate to meet some writers. You’re my first. Are you even bolder than Brecht?’
There was almost no component of his self-respect that Loeser wasn’t occasionally willing to leave at the pawnbrokers, but he did have one rule: he wouldn’t falsify himself to please. No one was worth that. The world could take him as he was. So although it would have been very easy to skate along with Adele’s assumption, he had no choice but to correct her. ‘I’m not a writer, actually. I’m a set designer.’
‘You mean a sort of carpenter?’
Loeser was about to explain that his work was fundamental to the conception of Lavicini, but then he heard something click behind his head. He looked round. There was Rackenham with his Leica. Another interruption, but this was all right: it would be good if Adele thought he was ringed with cosmopolitan associates.
‘Oh, you didn’t give me a chance to pose,’ said Adele, fussing belatedly at her fringe.
‘I don’t think it would be possible to take an unflattering photo of you, my dear,’ said Rackenham.
‘Certainly not with that particular camera,’ said Loeser evenly.
‘Why don’t you introduce me, Egon?’
‘Fraulein Hitler, this is Herr Rackenham. He’s a very distinguished young novelist.’
‘A real writer! What’s your book called?’
‘My latest is Steep Air,’ said Rackenham.
‘Oh, I haven’t heard of that. I’m sorry to say I don’t read much English fiction.’
‘Don’t be sorry. You’re very wise. English fiction is dead. It’s disloyal of me to say, because I went to university with so many of its brightest hopes, but it is dead.’
‘Then who am I to read?’
‘The Americans. A critic friend of mine says that deciding between English fiction and American fiction is like deciding between dinner with a corpse and cocktails with a baby; but at least the baby has a life ahead of it.’
‘I love American books,’ said Adele.
Loeser, at present, was reading Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin. Unfortunately, after seventeen months, he was still only on page 189. Achleitner, who had bought it the same day, was about three quarters of the way through page 12. ‘I cannot tolerate this infatuation with the Yanks,’ he said. ‘Rackenham, you’re as bad as Ziesel over there in his new suit.’
‘I think he might have heard you,’ said Rackenham.
‘I hope he did. If you want to understand what American culture really is you should go and look at the new escalators in the Kaufhaus des Westens on Tauentzienstrasse. They’re American-made. Never in your life will you have seen so many apparently healthy adults queueing up for the privilege of standing still.’
‘What about jazz?’ said Adele.
‘Jazz is castration music for factory workers. This band are playing in the right place but they got here too late.’
‘There must be something American you like.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing.’
This was a lie, but it didn’t feel like a lie, because it had only one very specific exception. About a year earlier, he had taken a slow train to Cologne to visit his great aunt, and on the journey he had deliberately brought nothing to read but Berlin Alexanderplatz, on the basis that after six hours either he would have finished the book or the book would have finished him. He lasted one stop before turning to the other man in the carriage and saying, ‘I will give you fifty-seven marks, which is everything I have in my wallet, for that novel you’re reading.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,’ said the man in a thick American accent.
Loeser repeated the offer in English. (He had grown up speaking both languages to his parents.)
‘Don’t you care what it is?’
‘Is it by any chance Berlin Alexanderplatz?’ said Loeser.
‘No.’
‘Then I don’t care what it is.’
The book turned out to be Stifled Cry by Stent Mutton. It was set in Los Angeles and it was about a petty criminal who meets a housemaid on a tram, becomes her lover, and then makes a plan to steal a baby so that the housemaid can sell it to her infertile mistress for enough money to elope. Loeser finished it in less than two hours, which might have represented bad value for money if he hadn’t been delighted to have the chance to read it a second and third time before they arrived in Cologne, and then a fourth time by candlelight in his great aunt’s guest room. The narrator had no name, no history, no morals, and no sense of humour. He had a vocabulary about the size of a budgerigar’s, and yet he had a strangely poetic way with the grease-stained American vernacular. He seemed to find everyone and everything in the world pretty tiresome, and although he rarely bothered to dodge the women who threw themselves at him, the only true passion to which he was ever aroused was his ferocious loathing for the rich and those deferential to the rich. Loeser found all this captivating, but what he found most captivating of all was that Mutton’s protagonist always, always, always knew what to do. No dithering, no procrastination, no self-consciousness: just action. Loeser yearned to be that man. He had soon afterwards sent off to Knopf in New York for all five of Mutton’s remaining books, which were now hidden under his bed beside an expensive photo album of Parisian origin called Midnight at the Nursing Academy.
But he didn’t tell Adele and Rackenham any of this. Instead, he started trying to nudge the conversation back to his impressive work in the theatre. Before he had done so, though, Achleitner appeared. Loeser introduced Achleitner to Adele. ‘I shall enjoy watching you make a fool of yourself with this girl,’ is what Achleitner said with the smile he gave Loeser. ‘Apparently Brecht has just got here,’ is what he said out loud.
Back at the entrance to the factory there was indeed a small crowd of what might have been Brecht’s parasites. But Loeser didn’t see Brecht. He did, however, see Marlene, who had evidently also just arrived. He felt dispirited by how chic she looked. She was even wearing a vogueish monocle. Adele, meanwhile, was standing on tiptoes to try and catch sight of the playwright.
A monstrous thought sank its fangs into Loeser’s brain.
He blurted something to Achleitner about how he ought to tell Adele the story of Brogmann and the lifeguards while he had a word with Rackenham. Then he took Rackenham aside.
‘I know we’ve only just met,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to ask a favour. Brecht will leave after twenty minutes. He always does. Could you just sort of distract Adele until then? Dance with her or something. Take some more “photos”.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m sure even a man of your proclivities can tell that Adele is the most beautiful female at this party. And not only that but she’s new blood. If he sees her, Brecht will go after her like Ziesel after a coffin full of ice cream sundae. And she’s hardly going to say no to him. Even though he doesn’t wash or brush his teeth.’
‘Why don’t you distract her yourself?’
‘My ex-girlfriend’s here.’ He looked around. ‘I’m not sure where she’s gone now, but she is. And if she sees me trying to seduce a naive eighteen-year-old ex-pupil then she may get the impression that my new life without her is not quite the model of mature sexual prosperity that you and I know it absolutely is. I can’t have that.’
‘Loeser, the child seems very lovely, but if I don’t sell the rest of this coke I shall have to hide from my landlady all weekend.’
‘Please, Rackenham. If Brecht doesn’t fuck her then I really think I might be able to. And I know it’s silly but I can’t help feeling that if I did fuck her…’
‘What?’
‘I can’t helping feeling that if I did fuck her, just once, then everything would be all right,’ said Loeser hesistantly. ‘For me. Even if I didn’t fuck anyone else this year. I know it sounds pathetic, but look at her. Look at her eyes. And I’d probably be her first. Imagine that! You and Achleitner wouldn’t understand because you two can just fuck whomever you want whenever you want. But it doesn’t work like that if you prefer women. Unless you’re Brecht.’ Or a Stent Mutton hero.
‘Well, I can hardly say no after you’ve been so frank, can I?’ There was a sardonic edge to Rackenham’s tone but there was also a genuine sympathy, and for just a moment, as Loeser looked into the Englishman’s handsome blue eyes, he felt a befuddling combination of tearful gratitude, unaccustomed optimism, and perhaps even a small homoerotic tremor. Probably something in the coke. Regardless, he thanked Rackenham warmly and they rejoined Adele and Achleitner, then Rackenham went off with the girl. He was about to explain the situation to Achleitner when he saw Tetzner standing near by, and he didn’t want a conversation about his drug debts, so he rushed off in the other direction, and that was when he collided with Klugweil.
The actor had his arms in a double sling that bore a regrettable resemblance to the harness that had injured him the first place. And he was in mid-conversation with, of all people, Marlene, which was unfortunate but wasn’t a total surprise, since he had always been the first man she flirted with at parties, even when she was going out with Loeser. Thankfully, Klugweil was devoted to his boring girlfriend Gretel, and in Loeser’s experience it was always boring girlfriends who lasted the longest — like some Siberian brain parasite, they seemed to shut down their host’s capacity to imagine a more exciting life.
‘Hello, Adolf,’ said Loeser. ‘Hello, Marlene.’
Klugweil just glared at him, and Marlene said, ‘The doctor says that his arms will never quite go back to how they were before. That’s what you accomplished today, and here you are at a party as if nothing had happened.’
‘I did almost get my nose broken.’
‘And worst of all, Adolf says you made some comment afterwards about how the machine was actually designed to injure him, and that’s why you gave it that name.’
‘No, I didn’t say that, I was only making a theoretical point about how the name of the thing couldn’t logically make any difference to whether or not—’
‘Oh God, you’re always making some point, aren’t you? Always some useless fucking point. Well, what about his arms?’
Loeser shrugged. ‘At least they didn’t get ripped off completely.’
Marlene gasped in disgust and led Klugweil away, presumably to counsel him not to slip into the darkness. ‘Hey, calm down,’ Loeser called after them. ‘I was joking. Adolf! You know I’m sorry about it really. I am!’
‘Oh, just fuck off!’ Klugweil shouted back at him, not very languidly.
Loeser thought this might be a good time to do some more coke. So he found Achleitner and they went off into a corner and started drafting lines on top of a sewing machine.
‘That wasn’t actually Brecht, by the way,’ said Achleitner. ‘It was Vanel, but he happened to be wearing one of those long red overcoats like Brecht always wears.’
‘So why was there all that commotion by the door?’
‘It turned out he had a corkscrew on him.’
‘Oh, I might as well get Adele back from Rackenham, then.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I left her with him so that Brecht wouldn’t notice her. He was very helpful about it.’
‘That was brave,’ said Achleitner.
‘Brave?’ said Loeser. Near by he heard one of those startling explosions of communal laughter that are distributed at random intervals through parties like moisture pockets in a fireplace log.
‘He’s very charming.’
‘Yes, but he’s hardly going to make a move himself, is he? He’s queer. Ideal chaperone.’
Achleitner cocked his head. ‘Not exactly.’
Another monstrous thought sank its teeth into Loeser’s brain, which made the previous monstrous thought look like an adorable snuffly pet. ‘What do you mean?’
‘As everyone knows, all those English public-school boys are Gillette blades. They cut both ways.’
‘But you said he was queer.’
‘I didn’t, Egon. I just said I fucked him. Not the same thing.’
‘You’re playing games with me.’
‘No.’
‘You must be.’
‘No.’
‘You must be because otherwise I will kill you and then kill myself.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not.’
Loeser made a run for the dance floor, but Adele and Rackenham were nowhere to be seen. He collared Hildkraut, who looked as if he were mourning the loss of his corkscrew monopoly. ‘Have you seen that girl with the long black hair and the big eyes?’ he shouted over the music. ‘She’s with an Englishman in a waistcoat.’
‘The short bony girl? Looks about twelve?’ said Hildkraut.
‘I suppose so,’ said Loeser. That others might not find Adele as attractive as he did had not even occurred to him.
‘They were here, but they left.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Well, they were doing some coke, not very discreetly—’
‘He gave her coke?’
‘Yes. And then I think they went out by the back entrance.’
‘Fuck!’
Outside, there was nobody but Klein vomiting methodically into an upturned copper corset mould. Loeser dashed past him and out into the street beyond, but it was deserted, so he hurried back to the party, wondering if Hildkraut might have got it wrong about the other two leaving.
Like a faithful old butler who quietly begins preparations to auction the antique furniture and dismiss the French chef several weeks before his master has even begun to wonder if all that fuss about the stock market might have cut a little bit into his income, there was an inferior part of Loeser’s brain which had long since accepted that it was going to be Rackenham, not him, who fucked Adele tonight, and which was already getting ready for the moment when the superior part had no choice but to accept the same thing. Until then, however, Loeser would just go on running back and forth, looking in cupboards, tripping over dancers, asking incoherent questions of possible witnesses, inventing optimistic excuses (she might have become suddenly and disruptively menstrual!), and generally behaving as if what was now obviously true might still, somehow, be false. In the end, though, after a frantic, undignified and predictable twelve-minute crescendo of desperation, the last hope finally departed Loeser like a last line of credit finally withdrawn. ‘That worthless cunt!’ he howled, stamping on the ground. He realised he didn’t have a drink, and just at that moment he saw Gobulev put down his bottle of black-market vodka to light a cigarette, so he grabbed it and sloshed as much of its contents into him as he could before it started to dribble down his chin. Then he slipped unsteadily back into the crowd, away from the dance floor.
What now? The main thing was not to dwell on it. There were alternatives. He could just go back to his flat, where whatever hour happened to show on the clock it was always, mercifully, Midnight at the Nursing Academy. But for once the book might not quite be enough to satisfy him. He could try and fuck someone else at this party. But he didn’t have the spiritual stamina to fix upon a new target and begin a whole seduction from nothing when he was almost certain to fail as usual. What about Marlene? Could he persuade Marlene to go to bed with him for old times’ sake? That was the sort of thing people did, wasn’t it? But she hated him too much. Which only left the Zinnowitz Tearooms. He wasn’t often drunk enough to want to go to the Zinnowitz Tearooms. But if he forced down the rest of Gobulev’s vodka, he would definitely be drunk enough before long.
If some confidant had learned that the sole reason Loeser didn’t like going to prostitutes was that they made him feel so uncomfortable, he might have deduced that Loeser had no moral sentiments at stake in the matter — or otherwise he might have deduced that this very feeling of awkwardness was itself a sort of moral sentiment — a sickly, selfish, and impotent sort of moral sentiment, but a moral sentiment nonetheless. Whatever the case, Loeser hadn’t gone to a prostitute sober since he was nineteen, and he hadn’t even gone to a prostitute drunk since late last year. That last occasion had been particularly bad. About a minute into the act he had stopped thrusting and cleared his throat nervously.
The girl, who called herself Sabine, turned her head to look back at him. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. Loeser’s forehead felt riverine with sweat but hers, as usual, was somehow still talcum dry.
‘Look, if it’s all the same to you…’
‘What do you want me to do, darling?’
‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort you put in, with all the moans and the lofty commendation of my dick and so forth, but the truth is …’ He’d never had the courage to say this before. ‘I don’t like it when a waiter or a clerk pretends to be a bosom friend, and I don’t like it when you pretend to be enjoying all this, either. No offence meant. I know it’s part of the job. But we both know you’re not really enjoying it. The suspension of disbelief isn’t quite there. And on the whole it just puts me off.’
He’d expected her to get a bit sulky but in fact she just said, ‘Whatever you say.’ Relieved, he went back to work, but straight away she started squirming away from him and gasping, ‘No, no, please, let me go, please, it’s too big!’
He stopped in horror. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She looked back at him again. ‘Why did you stop? Did I get it wrong?’
He hadn’t realised she’d been acting. ‘What were you doing?’
‘You told me to pretend I wasn’t enjoying it.’
‘No, I just told you to stop pretending that you were enjoying it.’
‘So am I supposed to be enjoying it or not?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Well, then.’
‘But not in that way.’
‘If I’m not enjoying it, then I’m going to want you to stop, aren’t I?’
‘But you weren’t enjoying it previously, and you didn’t want me to stop. Well, I mean, I’m sure on some level you did want me to stop, actually, that’s part of my point, but the difference is you didn’t say anything.’
‘You didn’t ask me to say anything.’
The exasperation in her voice was murdering Loeser’s erection. ‘I know, but … Look, can we just agree that I’m not giving you hundreds of orgasms, but I’m also not raping you, I’m just a polite stranger offering you a fair wage in exchange for the efficient completion of a specific service within a capitalist system of alienated labour, all right? That’s my shameful fantasy.’
From then on she was as silent and still as a coma patient. Which was by far the worst of the three scenarios. After another few minutes he had to pretend he’d ejaculated just so that he could leave, which was not something he’d ever anticipated he’d have to do with a paid consort, but he knew it was his own fault.
So it was with a rucksack of apprehension that he stepped out of the taxi outside the Zinnowitz Tearooms on Lieblingstrasse. At two in the morning the streets of Strandow were crowded with screeching drunks from the beer halls near by, many now queuing up like a congealed riot to buy boiled meatballs with caper sauce from stalls to eat on the way home. He nodded to the brothel’s bouncer and went inside, where he was greeted straight away by Frau Diski, the dwarfish proprietor. ‘Herr Loeser! What a pleasure. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Sit down, sit down. What would you like to drink?’
‘I suppose I’ve probably had enough tonight.’ He couldn’t remember what he’d done with the bottle of vodka.
‘Some tea, then.’
‘Fine.’ Around the room sat six or seven other men, alone or in pairs, some of them with girls on their laps. Mercifully there was no one among them he knew. With its floral wallpaper, bentwood chairs, and Blandine Ebinger records playing softly on the gramophone in the corner, the Zinnowitz Tearooms, even after midnight, really did retain the stolid atmosphere of the sort of place your aunt would take you for chocolate cake, which was presumably a calculated psychoanalytic strategy on Frau Diski’s part to stop her customers from getting rowdy: they had all been nice boys once and there were some deep bourgeois instincts that even a barrel of beer couldn’t drown.
‘You seem to be in low spirits, Herr Loeser.’
‘I haven’t had a fantastically good evening.’
Frau Diski sat down beside him. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’
‘There’s no point.’
‘I want to know.’
‘Well … I was after a girl, of course. And I should have got her. But someone else got her instead. And what makes it really intolerable is that it was my fault that he did.’ He meant that he’d handed Adele over to Rackenham, but now he remembered that he’d also been too stubborn to let her believe he was a writer. Would that have made a difference? Did writers really get more sex just because they were writers? Presumably writers hoped and prayed that they might. He’d read somewhere that Balzac only took up writing because he thought it might help him meet women. And it worked, of course: he married one of his fans. But that was after he’d written ninety-two novels, and they were married for just five months before Balzac died of a lung complaint. Even assuming they’d fucked every day since the wedding, that meant Balzac had written about half a book for every wheezy sexual encounter. Not a very efficient rate of return. Still, it was better than nothing, and if Countess Ewelina Hanska was as good in bed as Marlene Schibelsky, it might just about have been worthwhile.
‘Who is she, this object of desire?’ said Frau Diski.
‘Oh, I used to tutor her when she was about fifteen. But naturally she’s older now,’ he added hastily.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Adele.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘Ravishing long black hair like nobody has any more except peasants. Huge innocent eyes. Perfect pale skin. Musical laugh. So slender you just want to reach out and stroke her collarbone and her shoulderblades and her spine and her hips and her spine and all the rest.’ He wondered if it was possible to vomit with lust.
‘You needn’t say any more, Herr Loeser. Come this way.’ Frau Diski got up again and led him down the carpeted corridor towards the bedrooms.
‘But I haven’t chosen a girl yet. Have I?’ He realised he was staggering a bit.
‘There’s no need to bring them all out on parade as usual when your description is so evocative. You should be a writer.’
‘I mean, not that I really mind. Just as long as it’s not Sabine again. Not that there’s anything wrong with Sabine.’
‘Here you are, Herr Loeser.’ They stopped, and Frau Diski opened the door to the bedroom before them. Inside, a girl sat on the bed brushing her hair with her back to the doorway. She wore nothing but lacy white underwear, and in the gaslight her skin looked as soft as water, the vertebrae of her spine a row of pebbles half submerged in a stream. The room smelled of clean linen. For a dilated instant Loeser felt as if he were looking at something unreal behind glass, like a photograph in an old locket, but then Frau Diski said, ‘This is … Anneliese,’ and the girl turned and Loeser felt his heart leap into his mouth.
‘Frau Diski, I think you must have misunderstood me,’ he stammered. ‘Just now, I wasn’t trying to explain the sort of girl I wanted, I was only trying to explain what had happened to me tonight. Like you asked me to. I’m not — I don’t…’
‘I’ll leave the two of you alone,’ said Frau Diski with a smile. She gave Loeser a gentle push into the room and then closed the door, trapping him inside the locket.
‘Anneliese’, who could not have been more than fifteen years old, looked like Adele, but she did not look like Adele at fifteen, nor did she look like Adele at eighteen. Rather, she looked just as Adele would have looked at fifteen if she had already been beautiful, if she hadn’t been pudgy and half finished. She had the hair, the eyes, the skin, the bones, but she also had the youth — she was the old Adele he had once known so well, combined with the new Adele he had met only for a few minutes. The likeness was uncanny, but it was a likeness to somebody who had never existed, a loan from a parallel world.
He knew, though, that this was not a job that anyone should be doing at this girl’s age. Even his own atrophous moral faculties could tell him that. He tried not to look at her body because he knew he’d feel so guilty if he got an erection. Naturally he’d seen very youthful harlots on street corners before, but he wouldn’t have known that there were any to be found here in the cosy Zinnowitz Tearooms.
Loeser stared at the girl, and the girl smiled shyly back at Loeser. Cries of synthetic pleasure seeped very faintly through the wall to his left.
He couldn’t, of course. He couldn’t.
Could he?
When Loeser awoke he realised at once that a mistake had been made: he had been sent the wrong hangover. Somewhere in northern Rhodesia there was a bull elephant who had got drunk on fermented marula fruit, rampaged through a nearby village, and fallen asleep in a ditch, and was now pleasantly surprised to find itself greeting the day with only the mild headache that follows a couple of bottles of good red wine from the Fraunhofens’ cellar. Perhaps if Loeser got in touch with the relevant authorities he could get this unfortunate little mix-up corrected, but he would have to do so without moving his head or opening his eyes. Otherwise he would die from the pain.
After twenty minutes of lying there motionless as he pondered his strategy, he heard his landlady come up the stairs to slip a letter under his door. Probably it was from Achleitner, which wasn’t worth getting up for. But at least it must be quite early. There was still most of the day left to be ruined. Except then he remembered about Adele and the waiters from the Schwanneke, and he decided to go back to sleep, wondering if it was possible to set his alarm clock to wake him up when everyone he knew was dead. He thought of Hecht’s recent play about the legend of Urashima Taro, the Japanese fisherman who rescued a turtle from some children, discovered that the turtle was the daughter of Ryujin the sea dragon god, was rewarded with a trip to Ryujin’s palace, and returned to his village to find that somehow three hundred years had passed. What bliss that would be.
By early 1933, even the most heedless and egotistical Berliner — so, even Loeser — couldn’t help but notice that something nasty was going on. At parties now, optimism had given way to dread, and yells to whispers — the really good times were never coming back, and to think what might come next was just too horrible. Of course, it was mainly young working-class toughs who had propelled this awfulness at the beginning, but now people of every generation and every class had joined the brainless charge. They seemed to think that, just because the civilised solutions of the 1920s had begun to falter, that was a reason to dash headlong in the opposite direction. Most of Loeser’s friends agreed that something urgently needed to be done, but no one had any idea how to fight what was somehow already so dominant. Some had even begun to talk about leaving the country, at least until sanity was restored. German history was at a turning point.
Loeser could still remember the first time he had heard of this new drug ketamine. Everyone had taken the train up to an estate north of Ritterbrücke that belonged to somebody’s absent parents. It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon. At about midnight, bored with playing hide-and-seek, Loeser had wandered out to the back lawn where the jazz band was performing, hoping to find a girl to dance with. Instead, he nearly tripped over a boy who lay flexing and humming in the grass, and looked around to see several others in the same state. So when he spotted Hildkraut he went over to ask him if there had been a mustard gas attack, since they couldn’t all be so drunk already, and Hildkraut explained that they’d taken a black-market horse tranquilliser called ketamine, at which point Loeser began to feel as if he had slipped into some sort of Dada world.
‘Why on earth would anyone voluntarily take horse tranquilliser?’
‘Because they can’t get good coke any more.’
‘They can’t get good coke any more, so this is the logical alternative?’
‘Yeah. Started with scummy kids from the suburbs, then it got to the art schools, and now everyone takes it.’
Vanel wandered past looking for a cigarette lighter and they both ignored him. ‘What does it do?’ said Loeser.
‘You feel as if you’re being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it’s as if all the different weights and cares of the world have been lifted from your shoulders to be replaced by a single, much larger sort of consolidated weight. Your limbs stop working and you can’t really talk. If you take enough then it can last for hours and hours, but it seems like even longer because time slows down.’ Hildkraut smiled wistfully. ‘It’s fantastic.’ At their feet, somebody groaned softly as if in enthusiastic assent. ‘And it makes Wagner sound really good.’
‘I’m sorry to be obtuse,’ said Loeser, ‘but has everyone gone insane? I take coke because it’s fun. I take coke because it makes me feel confident and talkative and full of energy, or at least it used to, when it wasn’t mostly brick dust. If I want to feel as if I’m being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.’
‘Well, anyway, the story is that Brogmann once took so much that he blacked out and then woke up in a stables surrounded by actual horses. Explain that.’
After interrogating several other people at the party, Loeser concluded that he was the last person in Germany to have heard of ketamine. But nobody offered him any. And after that episode, as the months passed, fashionable Berlin nightlife distorted into an unrecognisable parody. Nobody seemed to laugh or dance or kiss any more, they just lay around slurring and drooling, vanquished until morning. Certainly, most of his worthwhile friends didn’t bother with ketamine — why would they, when they still remembered what proper drugs were like? But they were twenty-five or twenty-six now. And it was the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who had all the clout. For the first time in his life Loeser had a sense of what the early days of Expressionism must have felt like to the prior generation of Realists. Not only did he almost begin to miss the exhausting and obnoxious conversations he used to have with people who were inconsiderate enough to have done more coke than him, he also almost began to envy Achleitner, off in the mountains with his new Nazi friends, far away from all this tranquilliser nonsense that had a real chance of ruining what was otherwise quite a promising decade.
The triumph of ketamine had coincided with the triumph of another dark horse, to use an unfortunate phrase — a certain pretty girl called Adele Hitler, who was now among the first rank of those all-too-influential foals and fillies. At that first party in Puppenberg, she’d been a novelty item, but by the end of 1931 she was getting more invitations than Brecht, and it wasn’t hard to see why: she could be relied upon to look stunning, she could be relied upon to get entertainingly drunk, and above all she could be relied upon to fuck someone worth gossiping about. Rackenham was just the beginning. When you heard about who Adele Hitler had gone to bed with after a particular party, it was like reading the solution to a really elegant murder mystery: you’d never for a moment suspected that it might be x, but now that you’d found out it really was x, you realised that it could never have been anybody other than x. She fucked Brecht because everybody did, she fucked Brogmann because nobody did; she fucked Littau because he was queer, she fucked Hannah Czenowitz because she was straight; she fucked Hecht because he had a girlfriend, she fucked Klein because he was known to be impotent; she fucked clarinet-playing Negroes and one-legged war veterans, drug dealers and ambassadors’ sons. And this was Adele Hitler’s legend: that in two years of astonishing promiscuity, she hadn’t ever fucked anyone more than once, and she hadn’t ever fucked anyone who could not, in one way or another, be considered a little bit of a coup.
There was something about beautiful, sexually prolific women that made Loeser feel as if his soul were being pelted with sharp flints. If they were being sexually prolific with him, then of course it was fine. But with anyone else it was agony. He couldn’t stop thinking about that occult moment of surrender, that critical turn when all their softnesses were redispersed, when their limbic electorate voted in some new and unfamiliar tyrant. How did it happen? Did those girls really enjoy these fleeting encounters with men they barely knew? There was no satisfactory answer, because if they didn’t, then their beauty was being exploited and despoiled, which was a tragedy, and if they did — well, they couldn’t. They just couldn’t. For eyes as dizzying as Adele’s to exist in the same body as a banal urge to get stoked over a desk by an unwashed playwright was a paradox as imponderable as the indivisibility of the Trinity.
Loeser himself, meanwhile, hadn’t had sex for a very long time. He had worked hard to erase all mental records of the night of the corset factory, but if he assumed, in the interests of supplying his own biography with at least a minimally sympathetic protagonist, that he hadn’t laid a finger on that fifteen-year-old prostitute, then the last time was with Marlene Schibelsky, and that was nearly two years ago. When he’d said to Achleitner that he might never manage it ever again, he hadn’t believed his own words, but now he retrospectively detected in them a vibration of plausibility. So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.
His dispiriting conversation with Adele had turned on this very subject — sexual abundance, that is, not its opposite. The previous night he’d arrived at a party at Zinnemann’s flat in Hochbegraben to discover that Zinnemann, always a domineering host, had invented a new game.
‘We’re at that age now where everyone’s slept with everyone else,’ he had explained to his assembled guests. ‘There might have been royal dynasties of Persia that were more incestuous but I think apart from that our social circle is just about the limit. The phrase “permutational exhaustion” wouldn’t be out of place. Now, some people say it’s tiresome and we should all make new friends. I think it should be celebrated.’ And he started handing out bundles of coloured string. ‘Look around the room. If you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with, then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the ten-foot pieces of string. And if you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with repeatedly on some sort of joyless petit bourgeois pseudo-marital basis — if you see someone you’ve “gone out with”, in other words — then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the five-foot pieces of string. The result will be no more awkward in practice than any other party — just rather more tangible. And after tonight, every other party you ever go to will seem carefree in comparison.’
There was a baffled pause. Then, to Loeser’s disbelief, everyone started to do as they were told. They must have realised it would be a good story the following day. Before long, Zinnemann’s drawing room was a great rainbow spider’s web. The point of the colours was to make it easier to trace a string from its beginning to its end, and indeed several liaisons were revealed that had not previously been public. Every guest was dragged this way and that by their past loves, held in quivering strummable tension by their old conquests, so thoroughly entangled in a universal net of erstwhile romance that they would have to duck under somebody else’s heartbreak just to cross the room for a drink. There was such a thing as symbolism that was too bespoke, thought Loeser — but the real problem was that Marlene wasn’t here, and nor, as it happened, were any of his other four, so he had no string around his wrists and he looked like a eunuch. He couldn’t tolerate that, even if it was virtually true. So he crawled out of the room on his hands and knees and got a cab over to the Fraunhofens’ in Schlingesdorf.
Herr Fraunhofen was a machine-gun manufacturer whose wife Lotte thought she was cultured, so every month she invited writers and actors and artists and their auxiliaries to her house for an evening salon. (It was one of those houses where even the tassels on the tassels had tassels on their tassels, which might have sounded like a trite joke if it hadn’t in several cases been literally true.) Of course, no one of interest bothered to turn up before midnight, by which time the boring bit was over but there was still lots of wine left and often some food. And indeed Loeser was standing in the dining room with a mouth full of cold sausage when he felt a tap at his shoulder. He turned. It was his former pupil, wearing a black dress with a spray of peacock feathers at the hem. These days most of her clothes were borrowed from fashion designers she had befriended.
‘Hello, Egon.’
Loeser swallowed a cumbersome bolus of veal. ‘Hello, Adele.’ They exchanged some gossip about Herr Fraunhofen’s recent gambling losses and then he said, ‘I would have thought this party would be a bit elderly for you. I don’t think I’ve seen a single person giving themselves a subcutaneous injection of panda laxative or whatever the latest thing is.’
‘I was in a cab with John and Helga and we couldn’t think of anywhere else to get a free drink,’ Adele explained. ‘Also, that Sartre fellow is here.’
‘The Frenchman? I met him. He has a face like a four-year-old child’s drawing of its father.’
‘They say he’s very brilliant, darling.’ She called everyone ‘darling’ now. ‘He’s studying under Husserl.’
‘Don’t tell me you want to sleep with him? Imagine waking up in the morning to find that monstrous dead eye staring fixedly at your tits. And anyway, you don’t know who Husserl is.’
‘I do: author of Transcendental Phenomenology. And anyway, why don’t you shut up?’
This was the only way Loeser knew how to socialise with Adele Hitler, the object of the greatest erotic obsession he’d ever had in his life, without bursting into tears: he made bitter jokes about her sexual itinerary. Not very heroic. But at least she seemed to find him funny sometimes, and quite often they behaved almost like old friends. In fact, he probably could have kept it up indefinitely, as one somehow sometimes did in these situations, and there wasn’t any good reason why he should have chosen this conversation, out of all the conversations they’d had since that night in Puppenberg, to be frank with her for the first time — the thumbscrews of his desperation were no tighter than usual — but he was drunk, and there was something about Zinnemann’s game that had exhausted his patience, and he just found himself saying, ‘Why do you do it, Adele?’
‘Do what?’
‘Why do you waste yourself on all these people? Why do you go to bed with Sartre and Brogmann and … and …’ He tried to think of a sufficiently damning example.
‘And the waiters at the Schwanneke?’ offered Adele.
‘Yes, exactly,’ said Loeser. Then: ‘Sorry, what?’
‘You want to know why I go to bed with the waiters at the Schwanneke.’
‘Actually just at this moment I want you to reassure me that you don’t, in fact, go to bed with the waiters at the Schwanneke.’
‘Well, I don’t go to bed with all of them.’ Loeser just stared at her, nauseated, so she added: ‘Darling, everyone goes to bed with the waiters at the Schwanneke. The proprietor’s queer so they’re the most handsome in Berlin.’
‘God in heaven. My most febrile paranoid fantasies … are they all true?’
‘What can I say, Egon? It’s not as if I did it specifically to annoy you. Is this a class neurosis?’
‘You’ll fuck the man who brings your coffee just because he’s handsome, and yet I chase you for nearly two years and—’
She waved her hand as if to swat him away. ‘Oh, please let’s not get into that again. “Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.” ’
‘Who said that?’
‘I saw it on the wall at a party.’
‘Oh, so it must be true! And all my devotion means nothing?’
‘I’m flattered, but there’d be no point in us even trying. You’re the sort of man who couldn’t stand it if I were unfaithful, but you’re also the sort of man I couldn’t help but be unfaithful to. You’re that type. You’re an apprentice cuckold.’
An apprentice cuckold! Was he truly? As Loeser lay clammy in bed he couldn’t remember how the rest of the conversation had gone. What a joke on mankind, he thought, these random deposits of beauty, like random deposits of gold, an arbitrary and purposeless desideratum, the stipulation at the start of a philosopher’s or a mathematician’s tract — ‘Let x be what you want most in the world’; ‘Suppose y is worth killing for’ — that condemns all that follows to the status of ornamented tautology. And then he thought of what she’d look like if she were next to him now, a creature of blinking eyes and tangled hair, regrowing limbs with each yawn but still so slight that the shape of her body could hide among the rumples in the sheets. He went back to sleep and had a series of dreams in which he was drinking glass after glass of ice water but he never got any less thirsty, and then was woken up again at eleven by the usual shouts of ‘Jump!’ and ‘Stretch!’ and ‘Kick!’ This, at least, was worth getting up for, so he pried open his eyes like two stubborn oysters and then somehow got himself to the window. Diagonally across Kannerobertstrasse there was a big music box factory that had reopened after a period of bankruptcy, and three times a day the girls who worked there were all obliged to assemble on the roof for twenty minutes of productivity-boosting exercise. For Loeser, this cabaret was both a torture and a more wholesome alternative to Midnight at the Nursing Academy, and he rarely missed a performance. One day he planned to go down and wait outside the factory door at the end of a shift, begging for autographs.
Afterwards, moving around his flat as if he’d been beaten by prison guards, he took mercy on his mouth under the kitchen tap and then opened the letter his landlady had delivered, which was indeed from Achleitner. Loeser hadn’t seen his best friend in nearly three months, ever since Achleitner had met a leonine fifty-two-year-old Nazi aristocrat called Buddensieg at an art exhibition and Buddensieg had taken Achleitner off to his castle in the Black Forest, where he apparently played host to a sort of never-ending homosexual jamboree. Achleitner, in his letters, raved about the food, the wine, the rooms, the countryside, and, above all, the boys. The Nazis, he had written in his latest, ‘are wedded to a sort of aesthetico-moral fallacy, which is that if a man has blond hair, blue eyes and strong features, then he will also be brave, loyal, intelligent and so on. They truly believe that goodness has some causal kinship with beauty. Which is idiotic, yes, but no more idiotic than you are, Egon. When you see a girl like Adele Hitler with an innocent, pretty face, can you honestly tell me you don’t assume she must be an angelic person? Even though it makes about as much sense as astrology. Queers do it too, of course, but not so much, because we were all boys once ourselves, so boys aren’t mysterious to us in the same way that girls will always be mysterious to you, and we we can be a bit more sceptical. Or take any fairy tale — Cinderella must always be beautiful, and her sisters must always be ugly, even though the story would surely have a great deal more force if it were the other way round. All the Nazis have really done is make a cult out of this romantic faith in physical loveliness — there’s something almost touching about how childish it is. As aesthetes, they don’t even have the ruthlessness of a Gilbert Osmond. Anyway, the result is that there are more exquisite boys in this castle than there are in all of Berlin put together. I woke up this morning with three in my bed. I am absolutely drunk on it. Although I must remember not to neglect old Buddensieg or he might kick me out.’
What Loeser hadn’t been able to understand was how Achleitner didn’t get bored. With the exception of a few tolerable communists like Hecht who had the good sense not to bring up Marx every five seconds, any fee-paying member of a political party was certain to be petrifyingly dull. Even a castle full of stamp collectors or football supporters would be better because at least they wouldn’t be so self-righteous all the time. But Achleitner insisted that he hadn’t heard one word about politics since he arrived in Spunk Olympus. ‘Lots about diet and exercise and sunbathing and lots about the lost holy city of Agartha and lots of very tired Jewish jokes, but nothing on Versailles or unemployment or electoral reform, thank goodness. We get the papers delivered but nobody reads them.’
Loeser, like most people, had from the age of fourteen regularly concluded that he didn’t have any real friends in the world, and like all fatuous melancholic generalisations this was wonderfully comforting because it so drained the lake of one’s responsibilities. But to realise that it might actually be true was a different matter. For a few weeks, Loeser had tried to persuade Achleitner to come back to Berlin, but he knew it was no use. No one would give up paradise for a Berlin of ketamine and coloured string. And without Achleitner, who was left? Yes, if Loeser went to a party, there were always dozens of basically interchangeable people with whom he could have a drunken good time. But if he woke up the next morning in need of a companion for a rueful breakfast, there was almost nobody he could telephone. These days, the individual he saw most often was probably Klugweil. Not long after the Teleportation Accident, Blumstein had shamed his two collaborators into apologising to each other so that they could get back to work on Lavicini, and in fact they now got on better than they had before their rift. Loeser had even started to confide in Klugweil about his loneliness, going so far as to ask whether Klugweil thought it was a sign of hermitical derangement that one afternoon he had absent-mindedly said ‘Thank you’ out loud to a chewing-gum machine on a U-bahn platform. But the actor, who had finally come to his senses about dull Gretel the previous summer, never seemed to answer the telephone any more, so one could only assume he’d found some new girl he didn’t want to tell anyone about. The result was that Loeser might actually have to resort to — but, no, the thought was too terrible. He’d just have breakfast at home.
Except that, upon further inspection of his kitchen, it appeared that he had eaten all the food in the flat when he got home from the party last night. In fact, a few minutes’ forensic reconstruction seemed to suggest that he had attempted to make jam doughnuts from scratch, using mostly raw cabbage and angostura bitters. Indeed, since the results were gone, there was no reason to suppose he hadn’t succeeded. If only he’d kept some record of the experiment.
So he would have to go out after all. And he would either have to go out on his own, or he would have to call Ziesel. He knew Ziesel would be free. Ziesel was always free. In Berlin there were typhoid bacteria more socially in demand than Ziesel.
He cast around his flat for some means of putting off this horror. On his desk were a dirty wineglass, an unpaid tailor’s bill, a few notes for Lavicini, Berlin Alexanderplatz with its bookmark at page 202 and an attempted letter to his great aunt in Cologne, which so far stood at two sentences in length. All of them looked back at him imploringly.
He called Ziesel.
‘Hello?’ In the background there was some chatter.
‘Dieter. It’s Egon. Have breakfast with me at the Romanisches.’
‘I can’t.’
‘See you in about twenty minutes.’
‘Egon, I can’t.’
‘If you get there before me, order the double ham and eggs.’
‘I’m very sorry, Egon, but I just can’t join you. I’m already in the middle of breakfast. Some of the fellows from the brass band are here.’
‘What?’
‘I’d be free for lunch.’
After a long pause Loeser said, ‘You, Dieter Ziesel, are too busy to have breakfast with me, Egon Loeser.’
‘Yes,’ said Ziesel.
‘I, Egon Loeser, am assumed to be so eager to share a jolly repast with you, Dieter Ziesel, that I will just hang around for two hours until you are free.’
‘If that’s how you want to put it,’ said Ziesel.
‘This — this! — is what my life has come to.’
‘I wouldn’t like to say,’ said Ziesel.
After another long pause Loeser said, ‘Right, I’ll see you at one,’ and put down the telephone.
Since he was still unwilling to pass the time with any of the orphans on his desk, Loeser decided he might as well get dressed and go out to Luni’s, a second-hand bookshop on Ranekstrasse next door to an antique shop with medieval suits of armour standing vigilant in the window like militarised fashion mannequins. This would be his seventh visit in two weeks, and the elegant girl at the counter was treating him ever more warily; she had obviously concluded that he’d developed some sort of forlorn romantic preoccupation with her, since if anyone was really that desperate to read The Sorceror of Venice by Rupert Rackenham they would just pay twelve marks for a new copy. But in fact Loeser would have drunk a pint of toothbrush-mug run-off before contributing one pfennig to the royalties of the man who’d first fucked Adele Hitler, and he couldn’t just borrow the book, even though every passenger on every tram seemed to have it, because he didn’t want anyone else to know that he was so desperate to read the thing. Rackenham’s novel was by all accounts a very thinly disguised sketch of the Berlin experimental theatre scene circa 1931, and since nobody had been willing to answer Loeser’s oblique enquiries about the way he had been portrayed — even Brogmann had been too tactful to take the piss out of him — Loeser could only conclude that his fictional analogue was a golem of spite and libel, the sort of character assassination where they have to have a closed casket at the wake. He felt quite excited to have been the victim of the kind of affair you read about in interesting people’s biographies, and he was already looking forward to confronting Rackenham about it. For two years he’d been trying to persuade everyone that Rackenham was a bastard, but he’d never been willing to explain why he thought so. Now he’d have a proper reason for his hatred that did not involve getting tripped up in pursuit of a kittenish female.
On the way to Luni’s, he made a bet with himself that he would see Drabsfarben, who for some reason seemed always to be passing by the shop; and indeed he did, but as usual Drabsfarben looked so distracted that Loeser didn’t try to say hello for fear of scaring off some rare harmony that was grazing in his compositional rifle sights. Inside, the girl at the counter tensed visibly at the sight of him.
‘Do you have it yet?’ he said, working so hard, as usual, to exclude all emotion from his voice that he slid a long way past casual and in the end sounded more as if he were barely suppressing some grande passion.
‘Yes. Someone came in with a review copy yesterday.’
When he paid for the book she dropped the change into his hand from about eleven inches up to avoid brushing his palm. On his way out he reflected that in spite of it all there was something nice about knowing, for once, precisely where you stood with a girl. Then he sat down on a bench to skim through The Sorceror of Venice, hiding the cover against his knees in case anyone he knew walked past. At first, although no one was watching, the flick of his fingers was ostentatiously unconcerned, but as not one but two outrages arose from the text, it became involuntarily furious.
First outrage: theft. The novel began in 1677 with the arrival in Paris of the great Venetian set designer Adriano Lavicini. Loeser should have guessed as soon as he heard the title, but after all Rackenham’s talk in that taxi to Puppenberg about the pointlessness of historical fiction, it never would have occurred to him that the Englishman might help himself to the very same shank of the seventeenth century that Loeser, Blumstein, and Klugweil had been trying to turn into a play for nearly three years. (Three years! Einstein’s equations said that time slowed down on a merry-go-round or ferris wheel because of the relativistic effect of the angular momentum. Was that why, in Berlin, which never stopped whirling, you could work for season after season on just one play and still feel as if it was all right that you’d barely got anything done?)
In Rackenham’s travesty, Lavicini fell in love with a young ballet dancer he met at the Théâtre des Encornets, who was actually Louis XIV’s rebellious daughter Princess Anne Elisabeth in disguise. She spurned his advances because she was worried he might uncover her identity, so he built the Teleportation Device as an expression of his love, loading the scene changes in The Lizard Prince with little winks and curlicues that only she would understand. In the final chapter, when she saw it all for the first time during the première, she was won over at last, and feigned a fainting fit so she could hurry backstage into his arms. As the performance continued, they made love on a couch, giving a jealous stagehand the opportunity to smash the Teleportation Device’s controls, sending the (otherwise reliable) machine haywire and consequently killing all three of them. Rackenham seemed to be making some point about how some of the greatest art in the world is created to impress girls, and that’s rather sweet in its way, but the artist musn’t lose sight of his moral responsibilities or chaos might ensue.
In the Loeser–Blumstein–Klugweil production, by contrast, there would have been nothing so glib, and no romance: instead, Lavicini became so maniacal about his Teleportation Device that he lost all humanity, refused to acknowledge the machine’s many defects, and in the end was literally consumed by it. What that might have symbolised would be left up to the audience. To Loeser, it was about how politics, business, and all other such bourgeois social contraptions had a tendency to turn anyone who got involved in them into an insufferable prick.
Second outrage: insult. And this one was much worse. The Sorceror of Venice did not contain, as predicted, a brutal parody of himself. Nor did it contain some unexpectedly warm tribute. Nor did it contain even the most innocuous incidental likeness.
There was no character based on Loeser at all.
There were characters recognisably based on Achleitner, Blumstein, Brecht, Drabsfarben, Grosz, Heijenhoort, Klugweil, Ziesel, and Zuckmayer. There was even a character based on Brogmann. Charming Lavicini, needless to say, was based on the author, and Princess Anne Elisabeth seemed to be Adele. But Loeser was nowhere. In a book that was being read all over Europe as the most scandalously detailed document of the young Berlin artistic classes that had ever been produced — a book that specifically centred on a fucking set designer — he was nowhere. To appear in The Sorceror of Venice was to go to bed with posterity, and everyone was allowed to go to bed with posterity but Loeser: Adele all over again, except that this wasn’t posterity’s fault, because posterity was getting pimped out by Rupert Rackenham, of all people. And of course it wasn’t even possible to complain about his negation, because that was the one response that would make him look even more pitiable than he already did — except perhaps to sink his life savings into the staging of a baroque opera called Rupert Rackenham is a Worthless Cunt, music by J. Drabsfarben, libretto by E. Loeser, which was what he urgently wanted to do by the time he finished skimming the book. Instead, he set off for the Romanisches, and upon arriving twenty-five minutes late to meet Ziesel, the first person he saw was Rupert Rackenham himself, drinking coffee with Klein.
The Romanisches still had its separate sections for artists, actors, writers, directors, film producers, art dealers, fashion designers, Marxists, philosophers, right-wing journalists, left-wing journalists, doctors, psychiatrists, and all the rest, but by the end of the 1920s the territorial negotiations had become even more complex because of the defeat of movements like Dadaism and Expressionism and the consequent power vacuum. One might have expected a sort of Versailles, with one faction taking their western Prussia, another their northern Schleswig, another their Alsace and Lorraine, and so on, but in fact there was always an initial reluctance to sit down where the tablecloths were still stained with obsolescence. So those seats were occupied in their first weeks of availability by the sort of insignificant newcomers who could otherwise only get a place near the entrance and were happy to penetrate further into the café, until the real customers decided that, well, if anyone was going to sit there, it shouldn’t be these packs of stray dogs, and briskly moved in, sometimes pausing to inform the head bouncer, with his greying beard and pierced lip, that these latest arrivals shouldn’t be let in at all. For the last year or so, Loeser, Klugweil, and their fellow New Expressionists had been waging a campaign to recover the section of the terrace that had once belonged to the original Expressionists and was now given over to theatre critics. But none of them had had much luck — what they needed, Loeser often thought, was a strong leader.
Rackenham and Klein were in the middle of a conversation about boxing when a copy of The Sorceror of Venice was slapped down on their table with such force it made the coffee cups flinch in their saucers. They looked up. ‘What the fuck made you think you could do this?’ said Loeser. He hadn’t seen Rackenham in person since the première of Urashima the Fisherman.
‘I’d already spent the advance so I didn’t really have any choice,’ said Rackenham.
‘No, I mean, what the fuck made you think it was all right to steal our plot?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean. Lavicini was a real individual. Nobody can own him. I did all the research myself.’
‘But you know perfectly well you never would have thought of writing a novel about him if I hadn’t told you about our play.’
‘Yes, like most of us I like to continue my education through conversation.’
Loeser was trying to keep in mind that he couldn’t admit to being offended over the lack of a Loeser character. ‘It wouldn’t be quite so bad if you didn’t get everything wrong!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know where to start. Among the twenty or thirty historical celebrities with whom Lavicini just happens to cross paths in your ridiculous plot is his old friend Leonardo da Vinci.’
‘Yes, he helps with the Teleportation Device.’
‘Leonardo died a hundred and twenty-nine years before Lavicini was born.’
‘Bad timing on his part.’
‘You also have somebody referring to Leonardo as Signor da Vinci. Da Vinci means “of Vinci”. That’s like referring to Joan of Arc as “Mademoiselle of Arc”. “Telegram for Mademoiselle of Arc!” ’
‘All right, I feel a bit sheepish about that one.’
‘And da Vinci carries a pocket watch and calls people “rotters”.’
‘You’re such a pedant, Loeser. It’s a novel, and I wrote it in a hurry. If my public want historical rigour they can refer to the Domesday Book or Wisden.’
‘But for God’s sake, why even bother to write a historical novel if you’re not interested in history as it actually was? Your Venice is worse than Kempinski’s New York.’
‘You must understand, I don’t have much imagination,’ said Rackenham. ‘Every one of my novels is a roman à clef. It’s just a question of whether I bother to hide the clef under a flowerpot. And I was getting bored with doing nothing but changing the names each time. I had a nasty experience with my last one. In Steep Air, when it’s implied that the judge’s daughter goes to bed with three rugby players at once after a party — that story is true in almost every detail. It happened to a university girlfriend of mine. She confided it to me in a tender moment, not long before our untender disunion. When I wish to enact a private sexual humiliation, I’d much rather the girl’s face was buried in a pillow at the time than buried in a book, but since this one wasn’t quite stupid enough ever to let me fuck her again, I had no choice but to use my publisher as an intermediary. And I assumed it would remain private, because obviously rugby players can’t read and obviously my old flame couldn’t complain about what I’d done, even to her dearest friends. When she read it she would have felt so angry, and so powerless, and it would have guaranteed me the upper hand every time I saw her for the rest of our lives. Ideal in every way.’
‘What happened?’
‘One of the rugby players had a chum who knew about the episode and was literate. He told all three of them about the book. They came down to London in search of me. Luckily I was in someone else’s flat that night. It’s one of the chief reasons I ended up in Berlin.’
‘So what difference does it make if you settle your scores in seventeenth-century Venice? It’s still quite obvious who everyone is supposed to be.’
‘Yes, but my theory is that people will feel so absurd about coming to me and saying, “This syphilitic gondolier in a carnival mask is transparently my good self” that they won’t want to do it. History is a sort of fantasy, and fantasy softens the blow. So far it seems to have worked. But of course, whatever precautions one takes, excuses can always be found for fury, as you’ve just demonstrated.’ Rackenham drained his coffee. ‘Anyway, Loeser, I should have thought you’d still be in a cheerful mood after what happened with Adele last night.’
‘Are you taking the piss? It was awful. She called me an apprentice cuckold.’
‘But you kissed her.’
‘What?’
‘You kissed her,’ said Rackenham. ‘I didn’t see it myself, but you came up to me afterwards and told me about it. I’ve never seen you so happy.’
‘I don’t remember anything of the kind.’
‘I’m not surprised. You were as glazed as a sash window. You were trying to hang on to your own wineglass for balance.’
‘You’re sincerely telling me I kissed her.’
‘Yes.’
‘Rackenham, if this is a joke, I will stuff this book so far down your throat that your duodenum will autograph it in bile.’
‘It is not a joke. You said you had just kissed her.’
And then Loeser remembered. He really had.
‘You’re an apprentice cuckold,’ Adele had said in the Fraunhofens’ dining room.
‘And you’re an aspiring joke,’ Loeser had replied.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I estimate you have about three more weeks until this conquering trollop routine loses its novelty and people start talking about something else. After that you will pass out of gossip and into mere signification. The only time anyone will mention your name is when they need a simple way of referring to a specific pattern of social behaviour. You will be living shorthand for something out of date. A ghost. A statue. A joke.’
‘And how exactly can I avoid that fate?’
‘Stop being so predictable. For instance, you might try being old-fashioned just for a night.’
‘That sounds tiresome. What does it involve?’
‘I’ll take you to dinner and there’ll be no absinthe and no ketamine and you can decide whether to sleep with me on the basis of my intelligence and my charm instead of my notoriety and my jawline.’
‘How boring. Where would you take me?’
‘Borchardt’s.’
Adele smiled and raised an eyebrow. ‘What about the Schwanneke?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘If it’s the Schwanneke, and you’re nice to the waiter and give him a big tip, then I will condescend to eat with you.’
‘Honestly?’
‘Yes. I won’t go home with you afterwards, though. That wouldn’t be very old-fashioned.’
‘But you might kiss me, at least?’
‘I suppose.’ She frowned. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Now you will just spend the whole evening calculating how you can coax me that far.’
‘Probably.’
‘Well, if we get it over with now you shan’t be distracted.’ Adele stood up on tiptoe and kissed him in a way that was both utterly passionless and staggeringly potent. ‘Eight o’clock tomorrow, then?’ she said afterwards.
Loeser wanted to respond but he felt as if both his tongue and his penis were likely to end their days among the shell-shocked in a rural mental institution.
‘Well, anyway, I’m going to find Sartre,’ said Adele. ‘Just because I’m seeing you tomorrow it doesn’t stop me making his acquaintance tonight. Have a nice evening.’ And she was gone.
When all this came back to Loeser in the Romanisches Café, he nearly bent down to give Rackenham a hug, but then he reminded himself that the Englishman hadn’t actually had any part in this victory. Instead, he just picked his book, apologised for the interruption, and went over to sit down with Ziesel.
‘Dieter! How have you been?’ he said, and generously permitted almost an entire phoneme to venture out of Ziesel’s mouth before cutting him off: ‘I’ve been pretty fucking well myself, since you ask. I’m having dinner with Adele Hitler tonight. Adele Hitler. And she kissed me last night.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘She said she won’t sleep with me but, come on, we all know her. And after that I feel fairly sure she’ll be my girlfriend. I’ll be the first to tame the beast. You wouldn’t know about this, of course, but there’s normally something a bit distasteful about going out with someone who’s fucked a lot of other men. “If a woman is good at sucking cock, it can only be because she’s sucked a lot of cocks. That is man’s eternal tragedy.” Somebody said that … Goethe, no doubt … And sometimes I think it’s only the replacement of the cells of the body that makes sex even conceivable: there’s no way I could kiss a girl’s clitoris if on a molecular level it was the same clitoris that other men had kissed instead of on a mere Ship of Theseus level. But this time I won’t care about any of that. If she’s mine, I’ll be operating on a new plane. Oh my God, Dieter, this is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to anyone. To think — for two years the highlight of my romantic life is flirting with an elderly dental nurse, and now this. Oh, yes, a ham sandwich, some gherkins, and a glass of champagne please — thanks. And I’ve even beaten Marlene! It had never occurred to me that she might take even longer to find a new squeeze than I would, but look at me now. I’ve got Adele Hitler and she’s still got no one. No one!’
Ziesel took the pause for breath that followed as a cue for corroboration and said, ‘Well, no, quite, I mean, Klugweil hardly counts, does he?’
Here it was: the equal and opposite reaction.
‘What on earth has Klugweil got to do with this?’ said Loeser.
Some sort of rapid mental computation clicked across Ziesel’s face. ‘Nothing. He doesn’t have a girlfriend either. That’s what I meant.’
‘You said he “hardly counts”. He hardly counts as what?’
‘Whatever we were talking about. I wasn’t really following.’
‘You were following perfectly well. It sounded almost as if you were trying to express some sort of connection between Klugweil and Marlene.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Don’t try to lie to me, Ziesel.’
Ziesel cringed. ‘I thought you must already know.’
‘That my best remaining friend in Berlin is fucking my ex-girlfriend? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
‘Well—’
‘No, I did not already know that.’
‘But you dumped her. Two years ago. It’s not as if he stole her from you.’
‘Are you now dictating what I am or am not allowed to be angry about? I will be as angry as I fucking like. I don’t need to be issued a licence. Jesus, I am generous enough to let you have lunch with me and this is what I get in return.’ The waiter arrived with his glass of champagne. Loeser knocked it back and then rushed out of the Romanisches to catch a tram.
Sometimes psychology could be very straightforward: Loeser’s parents had died in a car crash, and ever since he had hated cars. He had never learned to drive, and he refused even to be a passenger in a private vehicle. Taxis were all right because a taxi was essentially a very specific bus. And trains were relaxing. But trams were best. Loeser, as an expert judge of character might have noticed after a lot of close observation, was not a man who shed tolerance and camaraderie in every flake of skin. But somehow, as soon as he stepped on a tram, his usual sensibilities would vanish and he would look around at the other passengers with their mysterious lives and find himself powerfully grateful that he had been born in a big twentieth-century city. He delighted in the tram network’s indifferent generosity: who else would ever work so hard to help you achieve your desires without pausing even for a moment to enquire what those desires might be? Wasn’t that an attitude about one stop short of love? Even a doctor would only do what you asked if he thought it would keep you healthy, while a tram would unhesitatingly take your fare even if you were on your way to jump off a bridge. Loeser couldn’t stand it when his friends complained that the trams were too expensive or too crowded or too erratic. That was so spoiled. Hecht had told him that if he extended this sentiment to the entire brotherhood of man, he would realise he was a communist at heart, but Loeser wasn’t interested. No Party was ever going to get him to a party. To Hecht, he liked to quote from Politics. ‘There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves,’ Aristotle had said, ‘and this condition would be that each instrument could do its own work,’ like the golden robotic handmaidens in the Iliad that Hephaestus had built to help out in his workshop. (Or like a tram with no conductor.)
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 dressed 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.
‘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.
But Scramsfield’s third and supreme consolation was Phoebe. She had sent him to Paris to be a writer. And with the Armenian in jail because of those cheques, he was free to be a writer again. No money and no distractions was better than money and distractions. His father had money and distractions. Anyone could have money and distractions. That was the important thing.
Just after one o’clock on this clement April day, two women walked up to the door of Shakespeare and Company, stood for a minute looking at the books in the window, and then tried the door. It was locked, but they kept trying it, as if they thought it might realise its rudeness and change its mind. After wiping his front teeth with a napkin, Scramsfield got up, hurried towards the women, slowed to a saunter before he got near enough to be noticed, and then carried on past. A few steps further on, as a considerate afterthought, he paused, turned, and said, ‘Looking for Sylvia? She’s closed until two.’
And there it was on their faces, as always, the moment of relief so deep it seemed almost carnal: the tourist’s hopeless gratitude for a friendly American voice, an honest American face, an ally against this conspiracy of waiters and concierges and policemen and taxi drivers and beggars and shopkeepers and train conductors. One of the women was young, blonde, pretty enough, but all her features a little askew somehow, like paintings haphazardly hung; the other was older, greying, not similar enough in the face to be the mother, perhaps the aunt but more likely the governess. ‘Oh,’ said the older woman. ‘Thank you. Who is Sylvia?’
‘Don’t you know Miss Beach? She runs the store. She’s an American, but the French close for lunch, so she does too.’
‘That’s awfully irritating. We’d hoped to buy a copy of Ulysses.’ She had an upper-class Boston accent not unlike Scramsfield’s own.
‘You picked a good week. The fifth edition’s just out. Jimmy’s over the moon about it. He says they’ve finally chased out most of the typographical errors. He’s punctilious about those typographical errors.’
‘Jimmy?’
‘Jimmy Joyce,’ said Scramsfield, as if it were obvious.
The older woman exchanged a glance with the younger one. ‘You know Mr Joyce?’
Scramsfield shrugged. ‘Sure. Everybody in Paris knows Jimmy. I had dinner with him and Sylvia just last night. He still hasn’t found a single restaurant in France he can tolerate.’ Then, in an accent that was Irish or at least Scottish: ‘ “I’ve eaten headache pills with more blood in them than this steak!” ’ Both women laughed delightedly, which was when Scramsfield saw the younger woman stroking the head of a poodle she had in her handbag, except that the poodle was tiny and green and hairless and wore a white lace bonnet and, in conclusion, just wasn’t a poodle, even though he knew he wasn’t nearly hungry enough yet to be hallucinating. ‘Well, say hello to Sylvia for me when you see her,’ he said, doffing his hat as two curly-haired boys in sailor suits ran past rolling bicycle wheels with sticks.
‘We will,’ said the older woman. Then, as Scramsfield turned to walk on, she called after him, ‘Oh, but I don’t believe you told us your name.’
Scramsfield turned back for the second time, smiley and mechanical as a chorus girl. ‘You’re right. How blockheaded of me. Herbert Wolf Scramsfield.’
‘How do you do, Mr Scramsfield? I’m Margaret Norb and this is my niece Elisalexa Norb.’
‘And this is Mordechai,’ said Elisalexa, grabbing her iguana by the throat, pulling it out of her handbag, and holding it out in front of him. ‘He’d like to shake your hand.’
The reptile was sprinting in the air, and in its eyes was a plea for rescue, but Scramsfield still reached out and took one of its clawed feet between finger and thumb. A long yellow dewlap hung from its lower jaw like a monkey’s vacant pouch. ‘How do you do, Mr Mordechai?’ he said solemnly.
A short while later they were all sitting down for lunch at Le Beau Manchot on Rue des Saules, and Scramsfield was telling the Norbs about his time as an ambulance driver in the Italian army, where he first met Hemingway. ‘You can’t believe anything Hem tells you about those days. He says he saved my life at Schio. I know it was the other way around. But the only reliable witness was Sidney Howard and he’s dead now.’ When the undercooked trout arrived Scramsfield made sure it wasn’t obvious how famished he was from the way he ate, recalling one particularly desperate occasion here when in his haste he had swallowed half a baked lemon and surprised the whole restaurant with a high wail of shock like an operatic lamento. They soon got on to the subject of their common home town, and Scramsfield was relieved when it became clear that the Norbs did not know his parents. ‘And you don’t know Phoebe, either? That’s a shame. She’s my wife. She’s coming out here to join me in a few weeks.’
Elisalexa’s father made industrial chemicals: sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid and so on. He’d got through the first years of the Depression by cutting his workforce right down, Margaret explained, and although a few poor souls did make for the vats after the first round of firings, Mr Norb had made sure to install safety nets by the time of the second. That sort of logical leadership, and his preference for government bonds over corporate stocks, had left the family’s fortune almost intact after the crash, which was how the Norb women were able to afford their educational trip to Europe.
Over dessert, Scramsfield told the Norbs about apogee, his literary magazine, which had been the first to publish T.S. Eliot, and The Sorrowful Noble Ones, his debut novel in progress, which Jimmy Joyce simply wouldn’t be allowed to look at until it was finished. Elisalexa had not spoken at all during the meal, except to Mordechai, and she now occupied herself stuffing morsels of cake into the lizard’s mouth with the back of a spoon before holding his jaws shut to make sure he swallowed. He had chocolate all over his bonnet and some in his eyes. Everyone was getting on very well. Afterwards, Margaret wouldn’t let Scramsfield pay any share of the bill, despite all his protests. She spent a short while trying to calculate the tip before Scramsfield told her it ought to be at least a hundred francs.
‘That sounds like quite a lot.’
‘That’s just how it works here, I’m afraid. The only reason they can sell the food so cheap is because they know we’ll pay the waiter’s salary ourselves.’
‘Well, the food was awfully cheap.’
In fact, twenty francs of that would go to the waiter, thirty francs would go to the manager, and fifty francs would go towards paying off Scramsfield’s tab here. The only reason he’d brought the Norbs to Le Beau Manchot was this arrangement, which was replicated in half a dozen establishments around Paris.
As they were leaving, Scramsfield happened to mention that if they should want to meet Hemingway, he was almost certain to be found at the Dingo. Margaret said they’d planned to go shopping at Lanvin and Molyneux this afternoon but she would much rather meet Hemingway and she was sure Elisalexa would too. So they went to the Dingo, but Hemingway wasn’t there. Scramsfield said they should wait, so while they were waiting they made a list of the other notables that the Norbs would like to meet: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Picasso, Chanel, and above all Diaghilev, because Margaret was a great lover of ballet. Scramsfield assured the Norbs that these introductions could hardly be easier for him to arrange. After a few rounds of drinks — whisky for Scramsfield and citron pressé for the Norbs, who paid the bill again — Scramsfield decided that perhaps they ought to try the Dôme. Hemingway wasn’t at the Dôme either, so next they tried the Rotonde, then the Closerie des Lilas, the Coupole, Lipp’s, the Strix, and finally the Falstaff Bar, by which time they were all hungry again, so they went to dinner at Le Maison d’Or. After a few glasses of pinot noir it became clear that Margaret Norb had something to confide.
‘As it happens there is one other gentleman I’d like to meet, Mr Scramsfield.’
‘Yes, Miss Norb?’
She leaned in closer. Her face had soaked up the red wine like blotting paper, and there was a large dark mole on her forehead that seemed to Scramsfield to be staring directly at him. ‘I’d be awfully eager to meet this Dr Voronoff. I’ve heard he can take thirty years off your age, you know. I don’t understand quite what it involves but it’s something to do with glands. Monkeys’ glands. Very scientific.’
Scramsfield was somewhat taken aback until he remembered something Margaret had said about how Mr Norb didn’t care to have newspapers in the house because even the Wall Street Journal was full of socialism. He’d drunk a lot of whisky and at this stage he had to be especially careful not to say anything which might give the mistaken impression that he wasn’t absolutely on the level. ‘I know Dr Voronoff quite well, Miss Norb. I’m sure a free consultation for a friend of mine would be no burden at all.’
‘Good heavens, Mr Scramsfield, is there anyone in Paris you don’t know?’
‘There is one man in Paris I don’t know, Miss Norb, and that’s the man who can give me a decent American haircut!’
Laughter.
After he’d coaxed Margaret into leaving another two hundred and fifty per cent tip, he tried to get the Norbs to the Flore for just one more drink, but the aunt was already visibly stewed, and kept burbling about how they needed to get back to their hotel so that Elisalexa could be put straight to bed. They agreed to reconvene for lunch at Le Beau Manchot the following day, where Scramsfield intended to make a proposal to the Norbs: merely to shake hands with Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Joyce or Picasso or Chanel or Diaghilev might be enough for the average gabbling sightseer, but what about if they could tell their friends and relations back in Boston that they’d hosted a stylish and historic dinner for all six at once? They need simply advance a little cash — say five thousand francs — for the food, the wine, the staff, and the hire of the dining room, and Scramsfield could get it all ready for the day after tomorrow. And he would do his honest best. He always did his honest best. He wasn’t some sort of con man. But if by any chance it turned out that the guests weren’t all available, so the dinner couldn’t go ahead, and he’d lost the ticket stub on which he’d written down the name of the Norbs’ hotel, so he couldn’t return the money, then he would have more than enough in his pocket to bail out both the Armenian and his typewriter.
On his way out of Le Maison d’Or, Scramsfield felt a hand on his shoulder and flinched. ‘Excuse me?’ With some reluctance, he turned — but was pleased to see that the author of this intervention was nobody he knew. Before him was the sort of man who could, when necessary, adopt an easy posture and receptive face, but the moment he was given permission to relax would fall back gratefully into his natural configuration of hunched shoulders, cocked head, folded arms, locked knees, knotted brow, narrowed eyes, pursed mouth, gritted teeth, clenched fists, and curled toes; the sort of man with blood pressure so high you could send him to the bottom of the ocean without a diving bell. A few years younger than Scramsfield, he was quite thin and quite pale, with black hair parted at the side and a dark grey suit that fitted him well but was beginning to emancipate its threads. He spoke with a German accent and had a distracted, impatient intelligence that seemed to hover a few inches to his left.
‘Yes?’ said Scramsfield.
‘I know I shouldn’t have eavesdropped, but I was eating alone at the table next to yours and I heard that woman saying something about how you know everyone in Paris. Is that true?’
This fellow had presumably also heard Scramsfield’s barber joke and he couldn’t immediately think of a substitute, so he just shrugged.
‘I’m looking for a girl called Adele Hitler. Do you know her?’
Scramsfield tried to remember if he’d ever heard the name. Nothing came to him. ‘Sure, I know Adele. She usually drinks at the Flore. I can take you there if you like.’
‘I don’t want to trouble you.’
‘I was going anyway. Maybe you can buy me a drink when we get there.’
‘I’d be pleased to. My name is Egon Loeser.’
‘Herbert Wolf Scramsfield.’ They shook hands.
Adele Hitler wasn’t at the Flore but, as he had with the Norbs, Scramsfield said they ought to wait, so they each had a brandy. Lucienne Boyer sang from a gramophone. The bar was still packed with the early crowd — so different from the late crowd — still so full of optimism, exuberance and youthful good looks — still so unburdened by nostalgia for their distant and irrecoverable salad days of four hours earlier.
‘Did you really come all the way to Paris just to find this girl?’
‘Yes,’ said Loeser.
‘She must be a knock-out.’
‘Yes.’ He’d hoped to arrive several months earlier, he elaborated, but he’d had difficulty extracting from a family trust some money without which he couldn’t afford to travel.
‘What do you do in Berlin?’ said Scramsfield.
‘I’m a set designer for the theatre.’
‘Terrific. A man devoted to his muse. I’ll drink to that.’ Scramsfield told Loeser about apogee and The Sorrowful Noble Ones. Loeser didn’t look very interested, so he changed the subject to local restaurants, but Loeser didn’t look very interested in that either, so he asked Loeser what was in the brown-paper parcel that he carried under his arm. The German unwrapped the parcel to show him. Inside was a very old edition of Dante’s Inferno, bound in dark red leather, so saggy and crinkled that it looked almost viscous, like cured strawberry jam.
Scramsfield allowed his attention to wander during the explanation that followed, since any story that began with a dead man’s book collection was unlikely to end with a dirty punchline, but the basics were as follows. Because Loeser didn’t think he had much chance of bumping into Adele Hitler before the bars filled up at night, he’d been spending his afternoons finding out what he could about a hero of his called Adriano Lavicini who’d once lived in Paris. And by good luck he’d discovered that there was a rare-book dealer in the Marais who had acquired in an auction several books that had once belonged to this fellow. By now, though, only one of those books was left in the shop, and it was the least desirable of the whole lot, not just because at some stage in its long life it had spent several months drinking from a leaky roof but also because there was no reason to think that Lavicini had ever even parted the covers: it had originally belonged to a friend of Lavicini’s called Nicolas Sauvage, and when Sauvage died, he left Lavicini some of his books, but then Lavicini himself died only a few months after this inheritance. Loeser bought it anyway, and when he examined it over dinner at Le Maison d’Or, he was thrilled that he had. Evidently neither Lavicini nor, centuries later, the book dealer had noticed that about halfway through the Eighth Circle, Sauvage had stashed a letter that Lavicini had sent him in January 1679.
‘What’s in the letter?’ said Scramsfield.
Loeser took a blank envelope from his pocket and slid out the old folded letter. ‘ “Dear Nicolas” ,’ he read, going slowly so that he could translate as he went, ‘ “I could not sleep at all the night after we parted because I was so concerned that you had not taken my warnings with … due seriousness. I do not know what good it will do to repeat them but I cannot think of any other recourse. So allow me once again to be plain: if you proceed with your plans, you ought to fear for your life, and the lives of your family. You know what happened to Villayer when he tried to match himself against forces he could not help but underestimate: he met his death in the Cours des Miracles” — Court of Miracles. “I do not pretend I am a wiser man than Villayer. But the choices I have made have brought me closer to the heart of this malevolence than any man should ever have to come. Therefore, I know its power, and its reach. I hesitate to say any more in a letter, but please, Nicolas, my dear friend, mark this: if you persist in your intention to conquer those … dark lower depths, then you will soon find yourself entombed in them. I know it is your proud belief that man should be free to make these” — I haven’t been able to work out quite what this next phrase means — “unprecedented travels”? Anyway: “to make these unprecedented travels, just as Villayer believed that he should be free to make his unprecedented communications,” or whatever that is, “but until our own strength can match that of those who oppose us — and until the current order of things is utterly upset, we both know it never will — it is a … doomed and desolate aim. Blaise is sensible enough to comprehend this — why can you not?” I think that must be Blaise Pascal — he and Lavicini knew each other. “For the hundredth time, I beg you to desist. Pray write back as soon as you receive this letter. Adieu.” Then a postscript at the bottom: “I neglected to enquire at dinner: de Gorge is looking for a good barber for his dog — do you know of one?” ’
They ordered some more brandy. ‘Who was Sauvage?’ said Scramsfield.
‘He was a carpenter. But a very good one. He helped Lavicini with some of his mechanical stage designs. Villayer was a politician. And you know Pascal, of course.’
Scramsfield nodded. He didn’t. ‘What was the Court of Miracles?’
‘Gringoire the playwright goes there in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.’ The broad, unpaved cul-de-sac next to the Filles-Dieu convent, Loeser explained, had become a sort of criminal sovereign state, a Vatican City of misrule, full of burglars, pickpockets, highwaymen, and prostitutes, who had their own laws, their own king, and even their dialect. The Court of Miracles got its name partly because as soon as the beggars went home there at the night, the crippled would ‘miraculously’ walk again, the blind would ‘miraculously’ see, the pustulent would ‘miraculously’ wash off their sores, and so on; but also partly because it was supposed to be full of fortune-tellers and witches and devil worshippers. ‘There was one cult that would eat parts of an animal while the animal was still alive in order to become like that animal.’ Scramsfield thought of Voronoff. ‘Later on Louis XIV got the police to clear it out and then ran a boulevard straight through it.’
‘So what do you think the letter means?’
‘I don’t have a clue. Apparently I would not have gone far in grand-siècle Paris because when I write a letter I actually like to specify whatever it is that I’m talking about. Regardless, what’s strange is that Lavicini, Villayer, Sauvage … they all died these odd accidental deaths in 1678 or 1679. At the time, lots of people thought that Lavicini had got involved in … well, it’s almost too ridiculous to say. And I wasn’t aware that anyone suspected the same of Villayer or Sauvage. But here’s Villayer meeting his death in the Court of Miracles, where the fish cults were, apparently. And here’s Sauvage trying to make “unprecedented travels” in “dark lower depths”. I’ve no idea what to make of it all. Tomorrow I want to go and see where the old Théâtre des Encornets was, where Lavicini died. And I want to find out more about Villayer and Sauvage.’ Loeser replaced the letter in its protective envelope and wrapped up the book. ‘Well, there’s no sign of her here. Don’t you think we should go somewhere else?’
So they went to the Strix and then to Zelli’s. But they still didn’t find Adele. By now it was after midnight. ‘Isn’t there someone we could ask?’ said Loeser. ‘You must know someone who knows.’
‘That’s a fine idea.’ They got up and made a tour of the bar. These days, Scramsfield’s pals didn’t greet him with quite the warmth that they once had, but he knew there was less money than ever coming from America now, and even bonhomie did have overheads.
After they’d made five or six enquiries Loeser said, ‘So far we’ve only been talking to Americans.’
‘So?’
‘I still don’t know exactly what made Adele decide to come to Paris. But I have a theory, because I remember the last thing she did before she left: she had a dalliance with some strabismic philosophy student from Paris. I think she must have enjoyed it so much that she came straight here in search of more French kisses.’
‘I don’t see your meaning.’
‘What I mean is, she’ll probably be hanging around the French, not the Americans. I don’t want to be gratuitously difficult about this, Scramsfield, but do you actually know any Gauls?’
‘Of course I do.’ But Scramsfield had hesitated just for a moment, and he could see that Loeser had intercepted the hesitation.
‘How long have you been here?’ said Loeser, now giving him a harder look.
‘Five years.’
‘And you don’t have a single French friend?’
‘I do. An old man called Picquart. But apart from that … Americans here don’t really have French friends. They might have French mistresses, but they don’t have French friends.’
‘That’s contemptible. In Berlin all the foreigners were desperate to make friends with us. I think they knew we were better than them.’
‘It’s different here.’
‘Do you even really know Adele?’
Scramsfield felt a squirt of panic. ‘Yes! You wouldn’t take me for a liar? Good old Adele! You know what she’s like! Always flitting around. Always disappearing.’ He shook his fist in mock fury. ‘Isn’t she? Ha ha! But we’ll find her in no time. Let’s get another drink and then we’ll work out a plan.’
‘I think I’d better go back to my hotel.’
Scramsfield grabbed Loeser’s arm. ‘Don’t be a fool. I was just joking about not knowing any of the French. I was being satirical … Like Mencken … Look, that’s Dufrène over there. He’s a dear friend of mine and he’ll know where Adele is. He’s certain to.’ Scramsfield didn’t like Dufrène, and he didn’t want to talk to him, but it didn’t seem that he had any choice. They went over to the back bar where Dufrène was standing with a Pernod. The milliner had moist white skin, he smelled of peppermint, and his head, neck, shoulders, and waist were all of more or less the same diameter, which in sum could not help but produce the impression that he had been squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste. They’d been introduced at a poker game by the Armenian. Scramsfield wondered if Dufrène had heard anything from the Armenian since the Armenian went to jail. He hoped not. There was some chance the Armenian might blame Scramsfield for the trouble over the cheques. That was absurd, of course, and they would sort it out when Scramsfield got together the money for the Armenian’s bail.
‘Fabrice, my old pal! How are you?’
‘What you want?’
‘I’d like to introduce you to a marvellous new friend of mine. Fabrice, this is Egon Loeser.’
Dufrène regarded Loeser but didn’t shake his hand. ‘What does he offer you?’ he said to the German. ‘Is Ernest Hemingway reading your novel? Or is Coco Chanel sucking your cock? Whoever they is, he does not know them.’
Scramsfield laughed loudly. ‘Very funny, Fabrice,’ he said. ‘But nothing like that. Loeser is looking for a lady acquaintance of his called Adele Hitler. We can’t find her. I saw you and I thought, if anyone knows where she is, Dufrène knows. I thought, Dufrène knows every beautiful girl in Paris. Yes? If anyone knows, good old Dufrène knows.’ He was afraid to stop talking because of what Dufrène might say next.
Rightly, as it turned out. ‘What I cannot understand about you, Scramsfield, is why don’t you go home? Why don’t you go back to America? Why don’t you go home since five years with the rest of them? Paris is not wanting you. Paris is maybe wanting him for a week so we can take his money but is not wanting you.’
Scramsfield had known Dufrène was a risk but he hadn’t expected this. ‘I can see you’re a little bit under the influence, Fabrice, so perhaps we’d better just leave you in peace.’
‘No, you are the one who is “under the influence”. I am sober compared. How many drinks does this gullible imbecile buy you tonight already? You are pathetic.’
‘Listen here, Dufrène, a joke’s all right between pals but you must still be polite to my friend. He’s new in town and I bet you don’t want him to think that Frenchmen are as rude as everyone says, ha ha! Do you?’
‘Do not have any more to do with this man,’ said Dufrène to Loeser. ‘If you are determine yourself to give your money to a fraud I have a friend who sells you an excellent forge Monet. Then at least you have something to show for your trip.’
‘Let’s be going, Loeser. Fabrice is obviously embarrassed that he can’t tell us anything about Adele. I’ll see you another time, Fabrice.’
Dufrène smiled. ‘Do you know what I hear the other day, Scramsfield? I hear a small rumour about your “fiancée”.’
That was when Scramsfield hoisted a right hook at Dufrène’s jaw. The milliner pulled off a languid dodge before punching Scramsfield in the stomach with the disinterested efficiency of a clerk stamping a passport. Scramsfield dropped immediately to his knees and his dinner dropped immediately out of his mouth, splattering his shirt and the floorboards and Dufrène’s polished black shoes with half-digested steak frites in a casserole of red wine and whisky. He tried to get to his feet but his knees took no notice and then he felt Loeser grab him under the armpits. A few people sarcastically applauded, and as he was dragged out of Zelli’s, his heels drawing a translucent railway line of bile, he found himself howling, ‘I’ve boxed with Hemingway! I’ll tear that son of a bitch apart! I’ve boxed with Hemingway!’
Outside, Loeser propped him up against a lamp-post and then turned to leave. ‘Where are you going?’ Scramsfield moaned. ‘Are you going to find a cab?’
‘I’m going back to my hotel.’
‘How am I going to get home? I don’t think I can walk.’ His vomitous white shirt was steaming in the cold night air as if freshly laundered.
‘You just need to sober up for a few minutes. Get your breath back. Maybe someone will bring you a glass of water.’
‘But Loeser, you’re my best pal.’
‘I only met you three hours ago.’
‘You’re my best pal and you can’t leave me here like this.’ Then Scramsfield started to cry. Loeser made an angry remark in German and then walked as far as the street corner. After what seemed like hours, he could be heard in negotations with a gruff cab driver, who wanted an extra twenty francs to help lift Scramsfield into the back seat and an extra thirty francs for puke insurance. Scramsfield managed to communicate his address between seaweed breaths, and then they were rattling unbearably over the cobbles, and then Loeser was helping him up five flights of stairs to his apartment, and then he was in bed.
‘Undress me,’ Scramsfield said. ‘I think I’ve shit my pants.’ He felt as if someone were stirring the room with a wooden spoon.
‘Definitely not,’ said Loeser. Then he seemed to remember something, looked around for a moment, and stamped his foot. ‘I left the verdammte book at the bar!’
‘Yeah, it was under your chair.’
‘Why didn’t you remind me? I’m going back for it.’
‘No. Don’t leave. You can’t leave. I’ll die if you leave. You’re my best pal.’ He wanted to take his shoes off but they were too far away.
‘I want that book. It’ll be gone by the morning.’
‘There’s a bottle of champagne under my desk. Real good stuff. Real expensive. I was saving it for when I finished my novel but you can drink it if you stay.’
Loeser found the champagne and popped the cork. No grey vapour spooled out. He took a swig and then crumpled his face. ‘That is infernal,’ he said when he could talk again. ‘It’s as if they’ve decided to incorporate the eventual hangover directly into the flavour as a sort of omen.’ He examined the label. ‘And they’ve spelled “champagne” wrong on here.’
‘You can’t leave now you’ve opened it,’ said Scramsfield in undisguised triumph. ‘That was my special bottle. You’ve opened it now and you can’t leave.’
Loeser sighed, sat down in the chair by the desk, and forced down another mouthful of champaggne. On the desk was nothing but a framed photo of Phoebe, a pair of underpants, an empty bottle of grenadine, and a lumpy knoll of cigarette ash that presumably still concealed a stolen hotel ashtray somewhere at its base, but between the desk and the wall were three stacked parcels, each containing two hundred copies of the first issue of apogee, minus the four he’d posted back to Boston and the two he’d folded into a flotilla of paper boats when he was bored last weekend. Loeser picked up one of the remaining five hundred and ninety-four and started to leaf through it.
‘Is this your literary magazine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are all these copies still in your apartment?’
‘A wop poet called Vaccaro says he’ll shoot me dead if I circulate it in Paris. He doesn’t realise I never really planned to in the first place, which is funny, I guess.’ Scramsfield explained that he had a homosexual school friend from Boston called Rex Phenscot whose highest ambition had been to publish a story in some influential avant-garde journal printed in Paris because that was how so many of his heroes had got their start in the 1920s. So Scramsfield had written Phenscot a letter suggesting he ask his lawyer father to invest some money in the first issue of apogee. The money duly arrived, and he’d used half to pay the ‘editorial board’ and the other half to print the magazine (he could have forged the printers’ receipt and kept the entire payment for himself, but he wasn’t some sort of con man). Phenscot’s story about an incident in a rural diner only took up a few pages, so Scramsfield had manufactured enough Dada poetry to fill up the rest of the magazine by copying out random sections of a boiler repair manual into irregular stanzas, knowing that this should be sufficiently confusing to satisfy his patron; but then Vaccaro had got hold of a galley proof and angrily accused Scramsfield of ripping off his best idea. So apart from the two copies he’d sent to the Phenscots and the two copies he’d sent to his parents, apogee had to cower in his apartment. All those popinjays like Vaccaro thought they were so brave and exciting. Well, Scramsfield knew a girl called Penny who’d gone to bed with a succession of prominent Dadaists and Surrealists the previous winter, and she’d now quit that gang to become the mistress of a psoriatic Lutheran mortgage accountant from Grindelwald; not for the money, she said, but because she wanted a more imaginative sex life.
‘So was this really the first magazine to publish T.S. Eliot?’ asked Loeser.
‘I never even read T.S. Eliot. You?’
‘No.’
‘You read Joyce?’
‘I look forward to starting Ulysses as soon as I finish Berlin Alexanderplatz. Did you really box with Hemingway?’
‘No. I only met him once. I didn’t even have time to tell him my name.’
‘Why is everyone here so obsessed with this Hemingway anyway? In Berlin nobody reads him.’
‘Who do they read?’
‘Of the Americans? I don’t know. I read Stent Mutton.’
‘I love Stent Mutton!’ said Scramsfield, delighted. Then his face fell: ‘Oh Christ, none of this would ever happen to Stent Mutton. Stent Mutton would never get beaten up by a designer of expensive hats for rich French ladies. Stent Mutton would never get beaten up by the fucking toothpaste man.’
‘No. I’ve always imagined him as a sort of grizzled ex-drifter. Still carries a rusty blade even when he goes into the Knopf offices to sign a contract for a radio adaptation. Just in case.’
‘Yeah, me too. He probably couldn’t ever tell his criminal buddies he’d become a writer because they wouldn’t understand. I’m in the opposite fix.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been writing The Sorrowful Noble Ones for six years. I’ve never got past the first paragraph. I don’t even know what it’s going to be about, apart from, I guess, some rich gadabout fellows who are noble but also — well, you know.’
‘Sorrowful.’
‘Yeah. I did write a book once, a real one, about facts, under a different name, but it was just for the money. It only took three days and I never even saw a copy. And I can’t tell anyone I don’t really have a novel. Any more than I could tell those ladies that I don’t know Hemingway or Joyce or Fitzgerald or Eliot or anyone.’
‘You’re as bad as Rackenham.’
‘Who?’
‘A writer I used to know in Berlin. He wrote a book about Lavicini and it was meant to give you the feeling that you were being taken around Venice and Paris and introduced to all these exciting luminaries. But the truth is, he can’t introduce you to anyone. He doesn’t know anyone either. It’s all nonsense.’ Loeser paused to peer down the neck of his bottle as if it were the barrel of a microscope. ‘This is starting to taste not so bad. And I can’t really smell you any more.’
‘So who’s this girl?’ said Scramsfield. ‘Is she young? Oh, why even ask? Of course she’s young. What else?’
‘I’ve been aspiring to fuck her for — Gott im Himmel, it’s been three years now. But I still feel the same way now as I always have — that if I did fuck her, just once, then, somehow, everything would be all right. Even everything in the past. Everything — everyone — I ever missed out on. Can you understand that?’
Scramsfield understood. ‘You fucked any French girls since you been here?’
‘No. I haven’t slept with anyone since I started chasing Adele. It’s not that I’m trying to be faithful to her, that would be cretinous, it’s just that — I don’t know. It hasn’t happened.’
‘You haven’t got laid in three years?’
‘No.’
‘Boo hoo,’ said Scramsfield. ‘That’s nothing. I haven’t got laid in five.’
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t get it up. I go to whores sometimes, to try, and I just end up sucking on their tits.’
‘Didn’t you say you had a fiancée? What are you going to do when she comes here and you get married?’
There was a time when Scramsfield could get drunk and it was like excusing himself from a party and he would go into the next room and his guests would have the politeness not to follow him and he would be alone in the quiet. Now when he went into the next room they all just crowded in there with him. ‘She isn’t coming,’ he said. ‘Phoebe isn’t coming to Paris.’ There was a long pause in which all they could hear was the distant grind and clatter of the horse-drawn pump wagon that came past every night like a coprophagic ogre to empty the district’s septic tanks. Then Scramsfield told Loeser about Phoebe.
They’d met in the summer of 1927, just after Scramsfield was expelled from Yale. He’d been accused of cheating in three different exams, and the Dean had made it clear that if he simply wrote a letter of apology he would be allowed to come back for his sophomore year, but despite all the urgings of his mother and father, who had evidently decided to take the Dean’s word over their own son’s, Scramsfield would not surrender to an accusation he still maintained to be false. One hot Saturday afternoon in August, when a frost of ill feeling still lay thick on the family’s tongues, his mother suggested a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Scramsfield didn’t want to go, but he also didn’t want to look as if he were sulking, so he accompanied his parents.
In the Titian Room, with its raspberry wallpaper, they happened to see the Kuttles, another rich Back Bay family. Scramsfield had never before set eyes on the Kuttles’ blonde daughter, and standing with her in front of The Rape of Europa he felt so panicked by her beauty that after she made an enthusiastic comment about the painting he just stared at her, silently, like some sort of sweating inbred elevator attendant. Only later did he find out that she’d assumed he felt such scorn for her unsophisticated commentary on the Titian that he hadn’t even bothered to reply.
And that was how their courtship glided on for several months afterwards. Phoebe would say something about art or poetry or music or philosophy, and either Scramsfield wouldn’t listen because he was lost in the orchards of her face, or he would listen without understanding what she meant, but either way he would put on his stern thoughtful expression, and Phoebe would conclude that she still wasn’t quite clever or knowledgeable enough to impress him. Sometimes he liked to imply that he’d deliberately engineered his departure from Yale because he’d decided he had nothing left to learn from such a stuffy institution. Phoebe began to worship Scramsfield, just as Scramsfield began to worship Phoebe, but the difference was that he had to keep his worship a secret, a heresy inside their love, an impermissible inversion. She couldn’t know how far beneath her he felt. He was soon bored with all the exhibitions and readings and recitals and salons, but he would go anywhere with her. And it was inevitable, really, that they should soon start to talk about going together to Paris.
(‘Are we still in the prologue?’ asked Loeser. Scramsfield ignored him.)
All their heroes were in Paris. Art was there, and love, and truth. They could go there and get married and be poor and happy and free. Scramsfield could write a novel and Phoebe could paint and anything they did there would be so much better and more real than anything they could do in America, which was nothing now but a dry goods company pretending to be a nation. They were so certain.
He couldn’t remember when he’d first suggested that if they couldn’t go to Paris they ought to kill themselves. He must have been drunk. He might even have meant it as a joke. But then almost without debate it became a basic doctrinal premise between them: that it would be better to evaporate over the flame of their own love than to be trapped for ever in awful Boston with their awful families, doing awful jobs and having awful children.
When they’d sworn all that to each other, however, it had felt abstract, because they were still confident that they could get to Paris. No one else seemed to have any trouble. But as 1928 went by they worried more and more about the money. They knew that if they eloped their parents would cut them off straight away. Once they were out there, they were sure they would find the rent somehow — for a good bohemian, money was something that just came into your house at odd intervals like a one-eared tabby until you scared it off by fussing over it too much, so that in their elastic fantasy they were to go hungry sometimes, in a romantic and inspirational way, and they were also to employ a cook — but as it was they didn’t even have enough for two tickets on a steamship. Scramsfield thought of stealing some antiques from his parents’ house and selling them (to whom?), but Phoebe wouldn’t let him take the risk, because if he were caught and went to prison they’d be separated for years. If he were in Boston now and he needed two hundred and seventy dollars, Scramsfield often thought, he could be wearing blackface, leg irons, and a sandwich board that read do not under any circumstances give money to this man, and he could probably still find it a dozen ways. But back then he knew how money worked in the same way he knew how electric lighting worked.
Phoebe and Scramsfield had both agreed that they couldn’t tell anyone what they planned to do, not even their friends. But in the end, when they’d thrown away every other possibility, they decided that Scramsfield had better talk to his Uncle Roger. Scramsfield had heard rumours from his cousins that twenty years ago there had been some epochal scandal about Uncle Roger and a Cushing daughter and a week’s disappearance and a cheap hotel in New York. Uncle Roger was now a bachelor who spent about a hundred hours a week playing golf, but that story was still enough to suggest that he might, once, have had at least a smear of passion in his soul, and might understand why it was so important that Phoebe and Scramsfield should be able to run away together to the city where their future was impatiently waiting.
It was in Uncle Roger’s drawing room with an unaccustomed tumbler of bourbon in his hand that Scramsfield realised for the first time that he didn’t actually want to go to Paris very much. He hated foreigners, he loved American plumbing, and he was pretty certain that writing a novel didn’t pay, even if you had a good idea for one, which he didn’t. And out there he would presumably have to buy a lot of drinks for all these people he kept pretending to have heard of, and be grateful for the chance to buy drinks for them. He wanted to be with Phoebe for ever, sure, but he’d forgotten what was supposed to be so gruesome about being with her for ever in a nice big Boston townhouse full of servants. The great revelation took place at precisely the instant he opened his mouth to make his case, and he was never sure, later on, whether it had been this that had guaranteed his failure. While Uncle Roger sat frowning in his armchair, Scramsfield paced the room, mumbling about art and love and truth like a salesman who had never sampled his own product. Then he asked for a loan.
After a slow, regretful shake of the head, Uncle Roger said it was insulting even to have speculated that he might sanction such a damned childish escapade, let alone fund it. He said he was going to have to think very seriously about telling Scramsfield’s parents, and Phoebe’s too. Scramsfield’s plan, if this happened, had been to bring up Uncle Roger’s infamous youthful transgression, and appeal to him to remember what those torrid years had felt like — but he didn’t have the courage. Instead, he apologised incoherently, begged his uncle not to say anything to anyone else, departed the house, and had walked a mile before he found a drugstore from which to call Phoebe. They were going to have to kill themselves. It was urgent now, because if Uncle Roger did tell their parents, then they would probably be forbidden from seeing each other ever again. Something inside Scramsfield was banging with split knuckles on the inner walls of his head and screaming at him to end this folly; but something else was telling him that if he backed out now, it would prove that he didn’t love Phoebe as much as he had always told himself he did, and she would know it, too.
The two sweethearts had cut out several newspaper articles about suicide pacts and saved the clippings in a secret scrapbook, so they knew that the usual procedure was for one party to kill the other and then turn the weapon on themselves. But given that each of them found it painful even to wake the other up from a nap, neither of them could possibly imagine murdering the other, by consent or not — their love was too strong. So they would have to do it separately but synchronously, which meant taking not one but two pistols from Phoebe’s father’s gun collection.
They did this the following Sunday afternoon, when all four of their parents were at a charity picnic in the Kelleher Rose Gardens. Phoebe had pretended to feel faint and Scramsfield had pretended he was going birdwatching with Rex Phenscot. He had to wait for nearly half an hour on the sidewalk opposite the Kuttle house before Phoebe signalled from her bedroom window that the servants were all playing cards in the kitchen and it was safe for him to come in; and in that time several automobiles came down the quiet street but only two individuals on foot. The first was a girl in a blue dress walking a dog, around the same age as Phoebe and blonde like her too, but with a plate-like face rinsed clean of any crumb of intelligence. Scramsfield thought wistfully about how this girl would never want to go to Paris, except perhaps for shopping. The second was a bearded man in a filthy overcoat and bare feet, shuffling along with his head down, holding a dog leash in his hand like the girl but with only an obedient invisible animal attached. Scramsfield wondered what harm it could possibly do the world if he simply sent this man into the house to die as his proxy.
Phoebe let him in. They went quietly into her father’s study, took a key from his desk drawer, opened the cabinet in which he kept his guns, and took out two pistols — a little derringer with a pearl handle and a Colt revolver that must have been nearly as old as the house — along with a box of bullets. Then they went upstairs to Phoebe’s bedroom, where Scramsfield loaded the guns according to instructions he’d memorised from an old book in the library.
He couldn’t get the safety catch on the derringer to work. And after a minute of fiddling he began to wonder if he could turn this into an excuse to call the whole thing off. But then Phoebe took the gun from him and unlocked it straight away. Her father had given her a lesson about safety catches when she was younger in case she ever came across a gun that someone had forgotten to put back in the cabinet. Still, now that escape had brushed his ankle, Scramsfield wouldn’t let it slip away again. He decided he would say something forceful about what a waste this would be, and how Baudelaire (or somebody like that) wouldn’t want them to do it. Phoebe worshipped him and she would listen. He started to speak but just then she started to speak too, and they both halted like two polite strangers.
‘What were you going to say?’ Phoebe said.
‘No, you first,’ he said. Phoebe looked nervous. Maybe she didn’t want to go through with it either. And if she tried to renege first, he thought, then he could just keep silent, as usual, and look as if his resolve had never failed him, and not make a mistake about Baudelaire, because now that he thought about it, maybe Baudelaire actually had shot himself, unless that was Rimbaud?
Phoebe swallowed. ‘Shouldn’t we … I mean, I always thought we’d wait until we were married but now that we won’t ever be married I don’t see why we should wait.’
Scramsfield’s heart stumbled against his lungs. He’d kissed Phoebe a lot, of course, and felt her breasts through her clothes and seen her once in her underwear, but never anything more. Losing his virginity felt real and gigantic in a way that dying did not, even now.
‘What were you going to say, before, darling?’ Phoebe said.
‘Nothing,’ said Scramsfield. ‘I think you’re right. I think — I think we should.’
They undressed without looking at each other, then Phoebe lay down on her bed and Scramsfield climbed on top of her. What followed did not last more than a minute and a half, and afterwards he was disappointed to realise that somehow the act had contributed not even one iota of detail to his inadequate understanding of the structure and mechanics of the human vagina, despite his having made such a diligent investigation with the most sensitive part of his own body — there was nowhere on the outside of a man that was ever soft in quite that way, he thought, except perhaps the gum still healing after the dentist took out a molar — but it was all still fantastic enough to make him wonder: if you could do this right here in Boston whenever you wanted, at no expense, what the hell was the point of going to Paris? Or anywhere else at all?
Afterwards, without speaking, they both got dressed and sat down cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, knees touching. Scramsfield knew that this was his last chance to rescue himself, but he also knew that if he spoke up now, it would look as if the whole thing had just been a plot to filch Phoebe’s virtue. She would despise him. He couldn’t stand that.
Phoebe picked up the revolver and held it to her right temple. Scramsfield did the same with the derringer. If they both collapsed backwards, he thought, their corpses, observed from above, would present the neat rotational symmetry of royalty on a playing card. The room was fluffy with sunlight.
‘I love you,’ Phoebe said. Her knuckles were white on the grip of the revolver. ‘I don’t regret anything.’
‘Same to you,’ said Scramsfield.
Did something in Phoebe’s eyes flinch in bafflement at the banality of his words and the casualness of his tone? He wasn’t sure. But she still leaned forward to kiss him. Then she nodded ready and he nodded back. ‘Three,’ she said, and Scramsfield’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘Two,’ she said, and a tear rolled down her cheek. ‘One,’ she said, and Scramsfield felt a firework of panic soar inside him as he realised for the first time that this was actually going to happen.
Then Phoebe shot herself.
His ears ringing, Scramsfield took the derringer from his temple, slid the safety catch back on, and put it on his pocket. Then he got up, left the bedroom, hurried down the stairs to the front door, and got out of the house before any of the servants had interrupted their card game to investigate the noise. When he got home, he looked in the mirror and found that he didn’t have a speck of blood on him. That night, after receiving a telephone call, his mother poured him a gin and tonic and then told him that Phoebe Kuttle had been killed by accident when handling one of her father’s guns. Scramsfield burst into tears.
He never worried about getting in trouble. Nobody remembered to enquire about his fictional birdwatching expedition with Rex Phenscot (although someone mentioned that twenty years ago the Phenscot family had lost a beautiful daughter of their own) and as far as he knew nobody noticed the disappearance of the derringer, which he threw into the Charles one night. A coroner did investigate Phoebe’s death, as a formality, but he correctly concluded that the gunshot could not have been anything other than self-inflicted. Still, because Phoebe hadn’t left a note — they had decided suicide notes were pretentious and egotistical — a police officer was sent to speak to a few of her friends. In the drawing room of his house, the grandfather clock ticking like a bone chisel, Scramsfield was asked how long he’d been one of Miss Kuttle’s suitors. Then the police officer said: ‘The coroner tells me that Miss Kuttle appears to have been party to some sort of … improper transaction shortly before her death.’ That was how he put it. He had an Irish accent. ‘Would you know anything about this?’
Scramsfield shook his head. ‘That’s a very disturbing thing to hear,’ he said solemnly, leaving it deliberately ambiguous whether he even knew what the police officer meant or was just bluffing along. ‘I guess it could be a clue, though. You know, to what Phoebe was doing with that gun. Maybe you should ask Mr and Mrs Kuttle about it?’ The police officer nodded, although they both knew no such discussion would ever take place.
At the wake, Uncle Roger took Scramsfield aside. ‘Look here, Herbert. I am beginning to see now that I may have been a little harsh when we talked the other day. I think after a shock like this, a good long trip is just what a young man needs. I’ve talked to your parents and they agree. The money’s yours if you still want it. A return ticket and plenty more for hotels and so forth.’ Scramsfield didn’t think Uncle Roger had any idea that his earlier refusal had led indirectly to Phoebe’s death — rather, he just felt guilty for having been uncharitable to a relative who was now bereaved. That night, Scramsfield dreamed that while he was kissing Phoebe in a hat shop he stole a coin out of her mouth with his tongue. Someone had put it there to pay for her steamship ticket but he needed it to pay for his own.
The Melchior was full of young men and young couples, and to Scramsfield every single one of them seemed to be auditioning for the roles of Phoebe and himself in some inept small-town musical-comedy production of their intended life together. Insincere and ugly, they gabbled enough about all the things that Phoebe had loved to make Scramsfield hate those things; they used words like ‘art’ and ‘love’ and ‘truth’ and ‘poor’ and ‘glad’ and ‘free’ and ‘real’ and ‘good’ — words in which he had come to believe even though he didn’t know what they meant — in ways that made Scramsfield realise that what they meant was nothing at all, that earnest monosyllables had nothing to do with life. The older couples were the worst, because they were the ones who could easily have gone to Paris in 1922 or 1923 if they’d wanted, when it was still new, but had not had the imagination to go until everyone else had already been. They all read The Sun Also Rises like an instruction manual, and of course they were all rearing novels of their own. Scramsfield kept to himself until he met a girl from New York who was thrilled when he told her how his fiancée had shot herself because she couldn’t be with him. One night they were both drunk in her cabin and she asked him to make love to her. But as soon as she lay down on the bed he thought of Phoebe on the floor and his erection fell down. It only took her two days to find another man who said he had a dead girlfriend. After that he didn’t see the point of admitting that Phoebe wasn’t still alive.
Paris was a trial. He didn’t want to be friends with any of the new arrivals, he wanted to be friends with the genuine exiles, but they were hard to find, and when he did find them, he didn’t know how to talk to them. He knew it would have been a lot easier if he’d been half of an attractive couple. He spent all of Uncle Roger’s money too fast out of boredom. Then in the autumn came Black Tuesday. Later on, people who wanted to be dramatic would say it had been like a bomb going off at the American Express on the Rue Scribe, but in truth the result was not immediate: lots of companies raised their dividends to ‘restore confidence’, and there were more Americans in Paris in the summer of 1930 than at any time in the 1920s. Soon, though, the dividends fainted away again, and everyone went home — first the poor, then the rich, and then all those in the middle who had depended on the rich: bank clerks and portrait painters and reporters for English-language newspapers. Scramsfield’s parents wrote asking him to come home too. But he’d been there less than a year, and he hadn’t conquered the city like he was supposed to.
‘So I stayed,’ Scramsfield said. ‘That was five years ago. I don’t like it here, but I’m not leaving until I finish this novel and publish it. That’s what Phoebe would want. You don’t think I should go home, do you?’
But there was no response from Loeser. Scramsfield looked up. The German had passed out in his chair, his fingers still curled around the neck of the champaggne bottle. Out in the street, a woman was singing.
Some time later, Scramsfield fell asleep too.
The next morning they were both awoken by the determined slamming against the apartment’s front door of what sounded like a gravestone, jewellery safe, bust of Napoleon, or similar object of medium size and considerable mass, but what turned out — upon Scramsfield’s displacing himself from his bed by a sort of gastropodous undulatory motion, rising to his feet, and reluctantly unbolting the portal — to be nothing but the dainty gloved fist of Miss Margaret Norb. Just behind her stood Elisalexa Norb, and in the crook of Elisalexa’s elbow squirmed little Mordechai. The aunt looked angry, the niece looked angry, and even the iguana had a kind of resentful squint.
‘Good morning, Miss Norb, and to you too, Miss Norb,’ said Scramsfield. Because he’d comprehensively vomited, his hangover wasn’t as ruthless as it might have been, but his mouth still tasted as though he’d been tonguing Mordechai all night, and yesterday’s clothes were now stuck to him in various places by muck’s cruel tailor. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this—’
‘Mr Scramsfield!’ said Margaret Norb, interrupting him with a stinging emphasis on the initial syllable of the honorific. ‘I must ask you to explain yourself.’
‘Uh, yes?’
‘This morning we made sure to get to Shakespeare and Company before it closed for lunch. While we were there we found ourselves in conversation with a very agreeable clergyman from Philadelphia, and we confessed to him our excitement about the prospect of being introduced to so many of your celebrated “friends”. But this clergyman was a cultured fellow, and he was able to tell us that Joyce sees no one, Hemingway isn’t even in Paris any longer, and Diaghilev …’ She swallowed. ‘Diaghilev is dead! Thank goodness he wasn’t more tactful otherwise we still mightn’t know.’
‘Miss Norb, I assure you—’
‘Let me finish, please. As luck would have it, our conversation was overheard by a third party. This other man, from Chicago, told us that he had a cousin who came to Paris and had a very similar experience with a scoundrel who drank a lot of whisky on his tab. The cousin actually went as far as to put up money for a dinner party that never took place. He also bought a signed first edition of Ulysses, which a book dealer later informed him was a very poor fake — for one thing it was only fifty-eight pages long, including woodcuts and glossary. The man from Chicago gave various other details that led us to believe that you were the souse involved. The shop had your address in its lending library records and the proprietress was happy to give it to us after we explained that you had told lies about her for personal profit. Unless you can satisfy us that an improbable mistake has been made, we are going to report you to the gendarmerie as a confidence trickster.’
As if to throw her support in with all this, Elisalexa Norb stuck her tongue out at him.
Scramsfield smiled. ‘I’m so glad you’re giving me the chance to clear all this up, Miss Norb. To start with, I can tell you that I’ve never had anything to do with anyone’s cousin from Chicago, and I’ve certainly never tried to sell anyone a sham Ulysses. As for the introductions I promised: sure, Joyce normally sees no one, but he will make an exception for my dear friends. If Hem has left Paris then I’m a little offended he didn’t tell me but we’ll have it out as soon as he gets back. And Diaghilev—’
‘Yes?’
‘Oh boy, you can’t have thought I meant Sergei Diaghilev, Miss Norb? Your clergyman pal from Philadelphia was right, of course, we lost him to tuberculosis a few years ago. I still remember the funeral — Cocteau gave such a moving elegy. No, I was going to introduce you to his brother Fyodor. Every bit as talented.’
‘And I suppose you have similar alibis for Fitzgerald and Picasso and Chanel?’
‘I think you’re being a tad unfair, Miss Norb, but let me say that if I have wandered away from the scientific truth once or twice …’ He shrugged and spread his hands, contrite and self-effacing. ‘Well, I’m a writer, Miss Norb. My imagination is my forge. If you stay in Paris much longer you will find many others like me.’
‘Not good enough, Mr Scramsfield. We are going to the police. Goodbye.’
‘No,’ said Scramsfield. ‘Wait. Please! Don’t be rash.’
‘Nothing you say can persuade me,’ said Margaret Norb, turning away.
‘I can get you an appointment with Voronoff.’
She stopped. ‘The real Dr Voronoff?’
‘Yes.’
‘In a week, I suppose? And we’ll be buying you dinner until then.’
‘No. Not in a week. This afternoon. I can hardly lie about that, can I? If you haven’t had the operation by six o’clock today then you can tell the flics anything you like.’
He had her. He could tell. He did not have the remotest idea what he was going to do next, but he had put off calamity.
Then she sniffed.
‘What in heaven’s name is that smell?’
The effluvium from his bed and his clothes had reached her. Even knowing that most American tourists learned to shutter their olfactory epithelia as soon as they left their hotels, Scramsfield was surprised it had taken so long. ‘I don’t smell anything,’ he said.
‘It’s revolting.’
‘Might be the people downstairs. I believe they’re French.’
‘Mr Scramsfield, you can hardly expect me to believe that you are a close associate of an important man like Dr Voronoff when your own apartment smells like a sewer.’
‘It must be the monkeys,’ said Scramsfield, and involuntarily squeezed his eyes shut for a second, as if he was thirteen again and had just thrown a baseball that would either win the afternoon’s game or break a neighbour’s window.
‘The monkeys?’
‘Yes. Until the day before yesterday, Dr Voronoff was keeping some stud monkeys here that he had just imported from Morocco. Now they’re at the Château Grimaldi. But the stink does linger, ha ha!’
‘You mean to tell me that Dr Voronoff sometimes uses this very apartment as a base of operations?’
‘Quite often,’ said Scramsfield, on a roll now. He pushed the door open wider, so that the Norbs could see into the apartment, and pointed at Loeser, who was still sprawled in Scramsfield’s wooden chair. ‘In fact this is Dr Voronoff himself.’
Loeser went white.
‘This is Dr Voronoff?’ said Margaret Norb.
‘Yes. I’m afraid he was up very late last night operating. And he speaks very little English.’ He gave Loeser a significant look that meant ‘Get up and introduce yourself in a Russian accent’. But Loeser must have misunderstood this because instead he just performed something resembling a palsied military salute and then looked down at his feet. ‘The operation won’t take place here,’ Scramsfield hurried to add. ‘We will come to your hotel with all the equipment. Shall we say four o’clock?’
‘He’ll carry out the operation? For no charge? On both of us?’
‘Both of you?’
‘Elisalexa is young, Mr Scramsfield, yes, but I believe there’s no such thing as being young for too long.’
‘Of course not. Both of you, then. Absolutely. For no charge.’
‘In that case we shall await you this afternoon at the Concorde Sainte Lazare. If you do not appear as promised, you know what will happen. Good day, Mr Scramsfield. Good day, Dr Voronoff.’
The Norbs made their exit and Scramsfield shut the door. He turned to Loeser. ‘That went damned well, I thought.’
‘Do not ever do that to me again,’ said the German.
‘Sorry, pal, but I knew you’d pull it off.’
‘You can’t sincerely expect me to go through with what you have just set in motion.’
‘I can’t have them go to the cops.’
‘It’s not my problem you’re on the run because you murdered your fiancée.’
‘What? I did not murder my fiancée and I am not on the run!’
‘You told me last night you pushed her off a steamship and she drowned,’ said Loeser. ‘That’s why you can’t go home to New York. Something like that.’
‘Were you listening at all?’
‘You rambled on for so long that I may have passed out a short while before the end. But I got the fundamentals.’
‘Phoebe tragically took her own life and it wasn’t my fault. I can go back to Boston whenever I like.’
‘Yes, all right, you’re welcome to type up the footnotes and I’ll give them my careful attention.’ Loeser levered himself out of the chair. ‘You know, when I woke up, I looked around at these squalid and unfamiliar surroundings and for a moment I really thought I might have met some wonderful floozie last night.’ He went to the sink and began to splash his face with water.
‘Come on, old pal. You’ll do this for me, won’t you? Look here: if you do, I’ll take you to see Picquart.’
‘Your French friend? Why should I want to meet him?’
‘He’s a historian,’ said Scramsfield. ‘A scholar. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about Paris. He’ll be able to tell you the truth about Lavicini and … all those other fellows. The dog barber. The Castle of Mystery.’
‘Court of Miracles,’ said Loeser. He looked around for a towel to dry his face, but there was none, so he made the most of his arm hair.
‘Yes. He hates Germans, there’s no way he’d see you otherwise, but if I call in my very last favour with him, he will.’
‘If I believed you, wouldn’t that make me as gullible as the Norbs?’
‘He’s not Hemingway. He’s not Picasso. He’s just an old man I happen to know. Why would I bounce you about that?’
‘I don’t see how you expect this to work, anyway. We don’t have a monkey.’
‘We could use a little black boy,’ said Scramsfield. ‘One of those Algerians.’
‘I think there is some chance the ladies will penetrate that ruse.’
‘Well, if we bring a cage with a sheet over it, it doesn’t matter what’s inside. They’ll never see. They’ll be under anaesthetic.’
‘How are we going to manage that?’
‘I know some Cambodian medical students who will sell us barbiturates.’
‘Barbiturates?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think they’d have any good cocaine?’
‘I don’t know. Probably.’
Loeser went to the window and looked out. ‘This is going to take up the whole afternoon, isn’t it? I was going to visit the site of the Théâtre des Encornets today.’
‘You still can. I won’t need you for the preparations. Just be back here by three o’clock.’
‘You’d better have bathed. Get at least a gallon of carbolic acid from the Cambodians.’
So a few hours later, Herbert Wolf Scramsfield and Sergei Voronoff arrived at the Hôtel Concorde Sainte Lazare wearing white doctor’s coats, carrying brown doctor’s bags, and wheeling a trolley on which rested an enshrouded birdcage, like the agents of some sinister and incomprehensible room service delivery. After they told the concierge their cargo was primatal he tried to throw them out, but they insisted he telephone up to the room and enough of a fuss was made that he had no choice but to let them into the service lift.
The Norbs were staying in two bedrooms connected by a small drawing room. ‘Mordechai wants to see the monkey,’ said Elisalexa Norb as soon as they were through the door.
‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question.’
‘Why?’
Scramsfield thought for a moment. ‘Patient confidentiality,’ he ventured. This seemed to satisfy the Norbs. You could pump this suite full of coal tar until there was only an inch of air beneath the corniced ceiling, he thought, and it would still, on balance, be nicer than his own apartment.
‘Will you require us to undress before surgery?’ said Margaret Norb.
‘No,’ said Dr Voronoff before Scramsfield could reply.
‘But where will you put the glands?’
‘Zyroid,’ said Dr Voronoff, gesturing at his neck.
‘You will at least need to roll up your sleeves for the anaesthetic, however,’ said Scramsfield.
He took two needles out of his doctor’s bag and carried out the injections. Then he guided Margaret Norb to an armchair and Elisalexa Norb to a chaise longue. Within a few minutes they were both asleep, the latter with her tongue poking out of her mouth. Behind them, a folding Japanese screen of painted cedar wood showed a bearded man lifting a turtle into a fishing boat.
‘Why did you tell them not to undress?’ Scramsfield asked Loeser.
‘I’ve sunk pretty low in my time, but I am not yet at the stage where I will pose as a doctor to molest unconscious women. Not quite yet.’
‘Who said anything about molesting them?’
‘You would definitely have molested them.’
‘I wouldn’t, but in any case we’d better get a move on. I didn’t give them much of this nembutal stuff so I don’t know when they’ll wake up.’ If only Weitz were here, thought Scramsfield. He took a small brown paper parcel out of his doctor’s bag and emptied its contents on to the shiny top of the Boulle writing desk.
‘What are those?’ said Loeser.
‘What do they look like?’
‘Armoured raspberries.’
‘Haven’t you ever seen a lychee before?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Let’s hope the Norbs haven’t either. They’re delicious, by the way. The Cambodians go crazy for them. Surprisingly good in a martini, too.’ Scramsfield tossed one to Loeser. ‘Peel that.’
With some difficulty, Loeser did so. Scramsfield peeled a second.
‘Perfect,’ said Scramsfield. ‘One hundred per cent convincing raw monkey balls.’
He returned to his doctor’s bag and took out a small tube of glue.
‘That’s your plan?’ said Loeser incredulously. ‘Glue these things to their necks?’
‘What else are we going to do? We’re not surgeons. We could have glued them somewhere more discreet if you hadn’t interfered.’
He was about to get to work when out of the corner of his eye he saw Mordechai sitting on the mantelpiece next to the clock.
‘Loeser,’ he hissed.
‘What?’
‘The lizard.’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s watching.’
‘So?’
‘What if it tells the girl what we did?’
‘How would it do that? It doesn’t talk.’
‘I think they have some sort of … some sort of connection. Catch it and put it in your bag.’
Loeser made a grab for the iguana, but it leaped from the mantelpiece and fled through the doorway into Elisalexa Norb’s bedroom. That was enough to put it out of sight, so Scramsfield began the operation. ‘Das ist ein Tiefpunkt,’ muttered Loeser several times to himself after that. ‘Das ist ein echter Tiefpunkt.’
Within an hour, the Norbs had begun to stir. Margaret was lagging behind so Elisalexa kept pinching her aunt’s calf until she woke up properly. Both then tottered over to the mirror to examine their ripe gemmeous xeno-transplants.
‘They do rather stick out,’ said Margaret Norb. ‘The glands.’
‘Yes,’ said Scramsfield, ‘but they’ll soon be absorbed into your body.’
‘Can I touch it?’
‘If you like.’
She hesitantly brought an index finger up to the little moist bulb, then stiffened in shock. ‘It’s so sensitive.’
Elisalexa Norb did the same, then licked her finger. ‘It tastes sweet,’ she said.
‘Please don’t do that, dear, it’s disgusting,’ said Margaret Norb. She turned to Voronoff. ‘This is wonderful, Doctor. Mr Scramsfield, perhaps you’d be so good as to telephone down for a bottle of champagne.’
A few minutes later an olive-skinned boy arrived with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and four glasses. He looked at Margaret Norb, then he looked at Elisalexa Norb, then he squinted in puzzlement and raised his hand to his own neck as if he were about to point out a minor oversight in the guests’ toilette — but of course he thought better of it. On his way out, Margaret Norb gave him fifty francs, which he nodded at philosophically as if somehow it explained everything.
Margaret Norb led a toast to Dr Voronoff. ‘How is the health of our donor?’ she said after her first sip of champagne. Scramsfield couldn’t work out what she meant until she nodded at the birdcage on the trolley under its black sheet.
‘Still under sedation,’ he said. ‘But stable.’
‘They lead comfortable lives, do they? After their … sacrifice?’
‘Luxurious, yes,’ said Scramsfield.
Elisalexa Norb gave a small burp. Scramsfield looked over and saw that she had already drained her glass.
‘Purhayps zay lady should not bay dvinkink so soon aftur hur anayzaytic,’ said Dr Voronoff with genuine concern. But his warning was too late, because Elisalexa Norb almost immediately staggered backwards and bumped against the writing desk.
‘Oh dear,’ said her aunt. ‘Elisalexa, you must be put straight to bed to recuperate.’ She stepped forward with the intention of carrying this out, but was almost as unsteady herself. Dr Voronoff caught her arm as several ounces of champagne hopped from her glass to the carpet. ‘Or — goodness — well — Mr Scramsfield, might you be kind enough to…’
‘Certainly, Miss Norb,’ said Scramsfield. He guided a giggly Elisalexa into her bedroom. She was quite pliant, but as they went through the doorway she grabbed for the brass knob so that the door swung most of the way shut. This didn’t worry Scramsfield until he was helping her down on to her bed and he realised she was pulling him down with her by the lapels of his doctor’s coat. He lost his balance.
‘Miss Norb!’ was all he had a chance to say before her mouth was on his. Somehow she got his tongue between her lips and began to suck it down like a steamed mussel that wouldn’t slip out of its shell. With one hand she was unbuttoning her dress and with the other she was bullying his crotch. Her whole body was quivering like a nervous poodle. At last she gave up the kiss and he got his tongue back. He felt as if he’d been punched in the mouth. ‘For Christ’s sake stop this,’ he whispered. ‘Your aunt is in the next room.’ But by then her girdle was half unlaced, and he got a glimpse of a cranberry nipple.
Elisalexa Norb flung her head back against the pillow. With his mouth on her breast, the lychee glued to her neck was only inches from his eyes, and there was something soothing, almost spiritual, about its smooth pale surface, so that by meditating on it he could almost forget that at any moment they might be caught. He switched to the girl’s other nipple. He would not have thought that anything could possibly improve on the first breast, but the second breast was, somehow, even more sensational, and he was enjoying this so much that he was beginning to think he might be able to support an erection for long enough to make love to her.
Then there was a daub of green in his peripheral vision.
Scramsfield couldn’t believe how fast the reptile could move. Already it was crouched beside its mistress’s neck, sniffing the lychee, flicking its tail. He tried to shoo it away with his hand, but Mordechai just gave him a contemptuous glance and then went back to the fruit. He wondered if he ought to say something, but he decided it was better not to. And he was still fiddling with his belt buckle when the iguana opened up its jaws, fit them somehow around the counterfeit genital, ripped it away with one jerk of its head, and leaped from the bed with its prize.
Elisalexa Norb screamed. Her hand shot to her neck. ‘My gland!’ Looking to the door, she was just in time to see Mordechai escaping into the drawing room, so she pushed Scramsfield off her with surprising force and made after the pet. He lunged to catch her wrist. ‘Miss Norb, you’re not dressed! What will the others think? Please just—’ But she broke free and rushed out of the door, bare breasts bouncing. Scramsfield, not knowing what else to do, followed. Beyond, he was expecting to find his doom. What he found instead was Margaret Norb bent forward over the writing desk with an expression of anticipatory ecstasy and Dr Voronoff manoeuvring himself into position behind her.
‘Elisalexa!’ shrieked Margaret Norb. She hurriedly and ineffectually rearranged her petticoats, then turned and slapped Dr Voronoff so hard in the face that he nearly fell over sideways.
‘Where is he?’ said Elisalexa Norb, totally uninterested in what her aunt was doing. Scramsfield had just caught sight of the lizard in the opposite corner of the room, so, like an idiot, he pointed. The girl hurled herself towards the iguana, but her legs were still muddled, and she tripped, bounced off an armchair, and collided finally with Dr Voronoff’s trolley, knocking it to the ground with a crash and sending the birdcage flying through the air. It slipped its black sheet, landed by the Japanese screen, and rolled to a stop.
The silence afterwards was so total that you could hear the little brass creak of the empty cage’s door as it fell slowly open.
‘Perhaps we’d better be going,’ said Scramsfield to Dr Voronoff. And, with some haste, they were going.
The two men were out of the Concorde Sainte Lazare and around the corner before Loeser said, ‘What the hell were you doing with her in there?’
‘I could ask you the same question,’ Scramsfield panted, making a dance step to avoiding getting tangled in somebody’s dog leash.
‘I said no but she insisted.’
‘Yes. Mine too. Champagne and nembutal. Must remember that. “Scramsfield’s Patent Aphrodisiac Serum”.’
‘Oh God, don’t talk like that, we sound like rapists.’
‘Rapists? We’re not rapists. They’re the rapists.’
‘I’m not going to debate free agency with you, Scramsfield.’
They passed a pharmacist with an unsettling window in which nine plastic pelves each demonstrated a different herniary bandage. ‘Come on, buddy, I’ve heard how you all do things in Berlin. Are you telling me you never used dope and booze to get a girl to go to bed with you?’
‘I’ve never done that.’
‘And you never tried?’
Loeser coughed. His right cheek was still pink. ‘When are we going to see Picquart?’
‘We can go now if you want. He’s always at home.’
Picquart lived on the fifth floor of a dirty building in the Latin Quarter with a staircase so hellishly steep and narrow that halfway up you began to wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier to try your luck with a drainpipe. Scramsfield knocked on the door.
‘Quoi?’
‘It’s Scramsfield.’
‘Bien.’
They went inside.
Heraclitus taught that all is change. Scramsfield knew this from his first semester at Yale, and he was sure Picquart’s three cats would agree with the Greek. The entire apartment was crammed with piles of old books, often with only the narrowest of pedestrian corridors between them, and these piles were continually being rearranged, relocated, or removed, so that after every nap the cats woke up to an entirely unfamiliar topology, like a tribe dwelling in some impossible mountain range that rumbled every hour with random, hyper-accelerated geological convulsions. Yesterday, they might have found a nice ledge, hidden between two volumes of a dictionary, which caught the morning sunlight through the window; today, it would be gone, or it would be too high to reach, or it would topple as soon as they set paw on it. The cats didn’t seem to leave the apartment very often, and Scramsfield imagined it was because they found the great city outside to be eerily, almost unbearably static. However, Picquart said they did sometimes go outside to mate. Heraclitus taught, also, that all things come into being through strife, and Scramsfield hadn’t believed this in Boston, but he believed it in Paris, because the sound the local cats made when they fucked on the roofs in the middle of the night was really enough to persuade anyone.
Picquart himself was a wiry and warty old man with a nose like an eroded cathedral gargoyle. They’d met in a prison cell when Scramsfield had been arrested for running away from a restaurant without paying the bill and Picquart for swearing at a policeman. The next morning they both got out and Picquart now sometimes bought stolen books from Scramsfield. They didn’t particularly like each other.
‘What do you have for me? Who is this?’
‘I don’t have any books today, Marcel. This is Egon Loeser. He’s an old pal of mine.’
‘Un Allemand?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does he want?’
Loeser took out the letter from Lavicini to Sauvage, along with a box of cigars they’d bought on the way, and gave both to Picquart. ‘Scramsfield said you might know what this character Sauvage is talking about there,’ he said.
Picquart read the letter, then looked up. ‘What do you think he’s talking about?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. But I wondered if it might be…’
‘Oui?’
‘Some sort of black magic.’
Picquart laughed. ‘Black magic? Non. You’re an imbecile.’
‘What, then?’
‘This isn’t about the devil. This is about Louis XIV. Do you know what Villayer was doing in the Cours des Miracles?’
‘No.’
‘He was trying to build a post office.’ Villayer, Picquart explained, was a politician, a shrewd and particularly disloyal member of Louis XIV’s Council of State. Every day, as a consequence of his position, he sent his servants out to deliver hundreds of messages and pick up hundreds of replies: political, commercial, philosophical, social, and sexual. But the bigger Paris grew, the more expensive and complex this network became, and the more obsessed Villayer became with its failures, drawing diagrams and annotating maps late into the night — many of his friends grew used to receiving notes that just read ‘This is a test’ — until at last he realised that the only constituency with which he now spent any real time was the pulsatile village of his own couriers. He decided that the capital needed a universal postal service, if only so that he could go back to being a real politician. Around that time, the journalist Henri Sauval was working on the Sun King’s behalf to make every respectable citizen of Paris believe that the Court of Miracles was full of criminals and cultists. Really, it was just an impoverished square like any other, but Louis was in the process of reshaping the city by finding excuses to evacuate and demolish every section, no matter how small, that wasn’t under his power. And Villayer saw that if he put Paris’s main post office in the middle of the Court of Miracles, he could expose Sauval’s manipulations, and perhaps save the Court’s inhabitants from losing their homes. He not only signed his own death warrant, therefore, but countersigned it too: Louis didn’t want a postal service in Paris, because he didn’t know if he could control it, and he especially didn’t want a post office in the Court of Miracles. So he had Villayer snatched on his way home from a banquet and beaten to death.
Lavicini learned all this because through de Gorge he’d met several of the King’s closest advisors. And when Lavicini warned Sauvage in the letter, it was because Sauvage was about to make a very similar mistake. The first public transport in Paris was a fleet of carriages that Sauvage himself had installed. Half a dozen strangers could ride together and they only had to pay five sous each. He’d paid Blaise Pascal to design the routes, working from some of Villayer’s old maps, so that they would be optimal down to the yard, an endeavour that Pascal later spent an unsuccessful week trying to adapt into a strategic board game. But the carriages were still slow. The streets of Paris were too crowded. So Sauvage had the idea of using the abandoned quarries under the city for the world’s first underground public carriage system. Once again, Louis didn’t want that because he didn’t know if he could control it. ‘Lavicini was warning Sauvage that if he carried on with the plan, Louis would have him killed just like he had Villayer killed,’ concluded Picquart. ‘ “If you persist in your intention to conquer those dark lower depths, then you will soon find yourself entombed in them.” Comprends? And that is just what happened. A hundred years later, de Crosne started burying our dead in the Catacombs, but Louis and his assassins were avant-garde in that respect.’
There was something about the eyes of Picquart’s biggest cat had always made Scramsfield feel sick, and at that moment he realised for the first time that they were the same pale yellow-green as a medicine he’d been given for an ear infection as a child.
‘Erstaunlich,’ said Loeser. ‘May I ask one more question?’
‘If you wish.’
‘What happened to Lavicini? What was the Teleportation Accident, really?’
‘You suspect that was “black magic”, too?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No. It was an assassination attempt. Gunpowder. When the Théâtre des Encornets collapsed, it was nothing to do with Lavicini’s machine. It was because Louis was in the audience that night. After he moved the court to Versailles, he hardly ever came to Paris. So if you wanted to kill him, you had to take every chance you could get. Even if you killed a lot of others in the process.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Aucune idée. Could have been the English. Could have been the Spanish. Could have been anyone. Louis had a lot of enemies, even more than the average tyrant. Sauvage had a son who disappeared around that time. Sons are vengeful. Does that answer all your questions?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Loeser, Picquart and I have a bit of business to do,’ said Scramsfield. ‘You may as well go.’
‘All right. See you at Zelli’s, Scramsfield.’
After Loeser had left, Scramsfield said, ‘Was all that true? What you told him?’
Picquart shrugged. ‘Bof. All theories. Villayer, Sauvage, Lavicini — it was all three hundred years ago. Personne n’en saitrien. But he didn’t want theories, he wanted facts. So I gave him facts.’
A few days later, just before one o’clock, on one of those cruel April mornings that are spread out across the sky like a Norb etherised upon a hotel chaise longue, Scramsfield sat outside the café on the Rue de l’Odéon writing a letter to his parents. A blond man walked up to the door of Shakespeare and Company, but instead of trying the handle, he just took out his watch. After wiping his front teeth with a napkin, Scramsfield got up, hurried towards the man, slowed to a saunter before he got near enough to be noticed, and then carried on past. A few steps further on, as a considerate afterthought, he paused, turned, and said, ‘Looking for Sylvia? She’s closed until two.’
Scramsfield watched for the gratitude in the man’s face, but there was none. ‘I’m not, actually,’ the man said. ‘I’m meeting someone here.’ That explained it: he was English. ‘Who are you?’ he added.
‘Just a friend of Miss Beach’s.’
‘And you make it your business to loiter outside the shop, informing every potential customer of its opening hours? Does she pay you for that? Odd sort of friendship.’
‘I just happened to be walking past—’
‘No, you weren’t. I saw you in that café. Are you about to sell me something? You have that air.’
Scramsfield was taken aback. ‘I’m not some sort of confidence man, if that’s what you’re implying.’
‘I wasn’t implying anything so glamorous. But perhaps that is how you regard yourself. I suppose you were hoping I was a rich American?’
‘Look here, I’m very well respected in Paris—’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes.’ Scramsfield drew himself up to his full height. ‘In fact, the one man in Paris I don’t know is the man who can give me a decent American haircut.’ But this time he didn’t get the tone of the joke right, so that it sounded as if he were affirming the existence of a specific individual of that description whose acquaintance he believed it morally unsound to make.
‘I see. In that case, did you ever meet Adele Hitler?’
Scramsfield did remember the name, but for once he was afraid to exaggerate. ‘I don’t think so. Who is she?’
‘A rich girl I know from Berlin. Pretty little beast. She ran off to Paris, so I arranged to be introduced to her parents, and then I talked them into paying for me to come out here and hunt her down and bring her home like Urashima Taro.’
‘Have you found her?’
‘After about three minutes of asking around, I found out she’s not in Paris any more. Apparently she decided to go on to Los Angeles. But I haven’t told the parents yet because they’re paying my expenses. I think I can string it out here for about another week. Then I might see if they’ll send me to America. You see, I’m a parasite of sorts too. It’s not so shameful, if one plays the game with some conviction. Which I’m afraid you don’t.’
‘If you know where she is, why are you still asking about this girl?’
‘I’m told she didn’t have enough money to have her luggage sent on after her,’ said the Englishman. ‘So it’s still in Paris. But no one seems to know where.’
‘Why do you need her luggage? To send back to the parents?’
‘No. At the Strix the night before last I met a certain scion of the House of Grimaldi who became friendly with Miss Hitler while she was in Paris but couldn’t persuade her to stay here with him. He’s offering several thousand francs for a parcel of her unlaundered underwear.’
Scramsfield scratched his ear. ‘Is that right? Well, nice to meet you. I’d better get back to … uh, I’d better get back.’
Relieved that the encounter was over, Scramsfield returned to his table at the café. After a few minutes he saw a second fellow walk up to Shakespeare and Company and greet the Englishman he’d just spoken to. They embraced and then ambled off together, just as Scramsfield remembered where he’d first heard the name Adele Hitler.
After they’d parted at Picquart’s apartment, Scramsfield hadn’t particularly expected ever to see Egon Loeser again. He didn’t like to stay friends with people who had seen him at his worst. But if he found Loeser and told him about Adele Hitler going to Los Angeles, then surely the German would have to buy Scramsfield a steak. Or at least a few brandies. And for once Scramsfield wouldn’t even have to lie.
The first place he looked for Loeser was the Flore. But the bar was nearly empty, and he was about to make for Zelli’s when he felt a tap on the shoulder. The scent of peppermint was so strong that even before he turned he knew it would be Dufrène.
‘Hello, Fabrice.’
‘Scramsfield, pauvre con, what is this the Armenian says about you and the cheques?’
‘The Armenian?’
‘Someone bails him. He comes looking for you. He says it’s your fault he goes to jail in the first place.’
‘That’s ridiculous. It was just rotten luck. I did everything I could.’
‘You should tell him, then. Because he’s angry. He says he’s killing you. He says he’s ripping your balls off.’
How apt, thought Scramsfield. ‘Just a misunderstanding. Thanks for letting me know, buddy. I’m going to go and find him right now and tell him what really happened and then we’ll both be laughing about it. Simple as that.’
‘I hope so. For your sakes.’
Outside the Flore, Scramsfield looked around, but to his relief there was no sign of the Armenian, just two curly-haired boys in sailor suits poking a dead tabby cat with sticks. He decided it might be best if he got out of Paris for a while. A nice impromptu countryside vacation, just a month or two, working on the novel, until the Armenian calmed down. (Or got taken back to jail.) In principle, there was nothing to stop him leaving a message for Loeser about the girl before he got on the train. But then there would be no way for Loeser to buy him that steak. No, he’d give him the news when he got back. Paris was a joy this time of year. It wouldn’t do Loeser any harm to wait a little while.