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
‘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.
