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
‘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.’
