Rackenham looked up from his newspaper. A woman of about his own age stood there in the posture of someone who has just dropped a fragile antique.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Don’t you recognise me?’
Rackenham smiled in apology.
‘You promised you’d keep me in your heart until the end of time.’
‘Oh. Did I really?’
The woman burst into tears. Rackenham searched his pockets for a clean handkerchief and his memory for a name or at least a context. He couldn’t help but feel she was behaving with extraordinary rudeness. Thankfully, after a few minutes, she seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to ask her to sit down with him, but before she’d leave him alone he still had to take down her address and promise to write her a long letter. Even her full name didn’t so much as gesture at a bell, and so, in the usual manner of these things, it wasn’t until she was on her way out of the cafe that Rackenham got any inkling. At the door, she looked back at his table, Orphean, and as she did so you could see in her face that she was already rebuking herself for her weakness, and then she turned away again and forced herself on, but too hastily, so that she bumped into a fat man on his way in and had to apologise in her bad German. The whole sad procedure took him straight back to 1932 or 1934 or whenever it was and he remembered her at last. One night she’d asked him to tie her naked to a clothes horse with shoelaces but it had collapsed and he’d had to pay his landlady for a replacement.
He was still a few minutes early for his appointment, but he decided that now his peace had been disturbed he might as well pay the bill. Outside, on Kurfurstendamm, the sky was a grey paving stone with a few dirty bootprints of darker cloud and the sparrows conducted their usual patrol among the tourists for unattended pretzels. Turning right at the Kino Astor, he went down a passage into a potentially pleasant courtyard that was rendered rather gloomy by a huge plane tree with the apparent ambition to expand like a gas to fill every cubic inch of available space. He found the doorway, buzzed for entry, and went upstairs.
‘You never seem to age, Rackenham,’ said Loeser when he invited the other man inside. ‘And I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s sinister.’
‘Do you live on your own here?’ Rackenham didn’t really need to ask — in its resonant frequencies this flat was so much like his own in London that he could tell at once no woman shared it. The place was not untidy so much as rationalised in a precise and stable way to the habits of its occupant: a bottle of vodka on the floor by the armchair, an electric razor keeping a place in an etymological dictionary, a corduroy jacket on a hanger that was hooked over the door of the fusebox cupboard, and then by the window some chrysanthemums in a vase, alive but wilted, like a small delegation from a more feminine land who knew that their presence at these negotiations was a pointless diplomatic formality.
‘Mildred and I divorced in fifty-four,’ said Loeser. ‘That’s why I came back to Berlin. I have a “girlfriend”, though,’ he added, nodding at the flowers. ‘The word sounds ridiculous, of course.’
Last year, Rackenham’s cousin Etty had come to his flat in Paddington for tea, and she’d adopted such a tone of condolence as she looked around it that he was provoked to ask for an explanation. ‘It’s obvious you can’t be happy here, Rupert,’ she’d said. ‘Living like this. All alone.’ He’d assured her that, as reluctant as she might be to believe it, he was happy — much happier, in fact, than she was, with a husband and two children who were all visibly sick of the sound of her voice. But whether Loeser was happy here, he couldn’t yet tell. How strange, he thought, that Loeser should ever have been married to the Gorge girl, so that with respect to sexual genealogy Rackenham was to the German a sort of father-in-law. Did mother and daughter fuck the same way? He remembered all those afternoons with Amelia Gorge on Loeser’s sofa in Pasadena, cold dimes kissing his knuckles as he groped between the leather cushions for purchase, when he’d been obliged to accept that nothing he did to her body would ever match the ecstasy she milled from that nasty rumour he’d helped her to spread about the contents of her husband’s wine cellar. ‘Do you like being back here?’ he said.
‘I can’t find the old neighbourhoods any more. I tried to steal Ryujin’s daughter from his palace and when I came home without her it was all in ruins as if three hundred years had gone by. Puppenberg, Schlingesdorf, Strandow, Hochbegraben. What happened to them?’
‘Bombed. Demolished. Walled off.’
‘But they can’t all have been. Not every single street. It doesn’t make sense. I must say, though, yesterday I was in Kreuzberg and the wind made one of those hurricanes of blossom and it made me very happy to be here. I’d forgotten quite how fecund this city is.’ He sat down and gestured for Rackenham to do the same. ‘I spent quite a while trying to work out why you wanted to see me. But I can’t guess.’
‘I’m making a documentary film for American television,’ said Rackenham. ‘It’s about what Berlin was like in the last few years before the war. Kristallnacht and the rallies and the Gestapo and all that. I came to see if you’d agree to be interviewed. The idea is to mix my own recollections with those of some other prominent acquaintances of mine.’
‘But we both left in 1934. We missed the worst.’
‘The network don’t know that, nor is there any reason why they should find out.’
Loeser blew out a sceptical plosive. ‘How would I even know what to say?’
‘Oh, it’s easy. “I went to a cabaret and I saw an SS officer with an evil face slap his mistress for spilling a glass of champagne and then I knew the good times were over for ever.” You know the sort of thing.’
‘No, Rackenham. Absolutely not.’
‘There’s no formal fee for an interview, but the budget for expenses is almost unlimited. We can make something up. Bill them for an essential unicorn.’ Rackenham could see that this did interest Loeser, so he said, ‘How do you make your living these days?’
‘I’m writing a book.’
‘You’ve got an advance?’
‘No. I don’t have a publisher yet. But I got a grant from the Norb Foundation.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘The role of mass transit in the
‘Are you joking?’
‘No. The Third Reich moved eight million people on sixteen hundred trains with two hundred thousand railway employees. And this is while they were fighting a war on two fronts. It’s an extraordinary feat. When people talk about the cattle wagons, it’s always as if the Nazis used them chiefly as some sort of demeaning symbolic gesture. But those cattle wagons can tell us so much more if we understand them as a logistical necessity. A hundred and fifty people in every wagon, fifty-five wagons on every train, at least four days for every journey. They could only manage it because there was so much redundancy built into the Deutsche Reichsbahn from before the war, and because they had so much coal, and because the French and Dutch and Belgian state railways were so helpful.’ Loeser was silent for a moment. ‘You know, when I went to Washington in forty-seven, there was no metro, but now they’re finally building one. And the truth is that anyone planning a public transport system now is trying to solve a lot of the same problems that the Nazis had to solve. Just for different ends. If you leave an Enlightenment running for long enough, eventually, one way or another, it will become preoccupied with the moving around of large numbers of people. Were you still in Los Angeles in forty-three? For the first big smog? I was back in Pasadena that week. Everyone said it was the Japanese. They didn’t want to believe it was their own cars turning against them. That same year the Nazis started using transportation vans where the driver could flip a switch so that the exhaust from the engine would be pumped into the back and suffocate the passengers. All those people, killed in transit — killed by the weight of their own bodies, in a sense, because the heavier they were, the more fuel the engine would burn, so because they’d been starving for months they’d have a few more minutes to live — an equation about calories and masses, like all the rest of history…’
Rackenham decided not to let Loeser go too much further down that hole. ‘They never built that streetcar network in Los Angeles,’ he said.
‘When I left, I thought they would. I took Mildred, so Gorge had nothing to give Clowne, so there was nothing to stop Plumridge.’
‘What happened?’
‘Plumridge got drafted. He established the Army Transportation Corps almost single-handedly in forty-two. And he liked the army so much he never went back to California. Without him there was no one to push for the streetcar network. So nothing I did could ever have made any difference. A few years ago they started dropping the
