‘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
‘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 premieres 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
