The Teleportation Accident Read online

  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 thea
tre. 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 anti
que 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.