The Teleportation Accident

have with people who were inconsiderate enough to have done more coke than him, he also almost began to envy Achleitner, off in the mountains with his new Nazi friends, far away from all this tranquilliser nonsense that had a real chance of ruining what was otherwise quite a promising decade.

The triumph of ketamine had coincided with the triumph of another dark horse, to use an unfortunate phrase — a certain pretty girl called Adele Hitler, who was now among the first rank of those all-too-influential foals and fillies. At that first party in Puppenberg, she’d been a novelty item, but by the end of 1931 she was getting more invitations than Brecht, and it wasn’t hard to see why: she could be relied upon to look stunning, she could be relied upon to get entertainingly drunk, and above all she could be relied upon to fuck someone worth gossiping about. Rackenham was just the beginning. When you heard about who Adele Hitler had gone to bed with after a particular party, it was like reading the solution to a really elegant murder mystery: you’d never for a moment suspected that it might be x, but now that you’d found out it really was x, you realised that it could never have been anybody other than x. She fucked Brecht because everybody did, she fucked Brogmann because nobody did; she fucked Littau because he was queer, she fucked Hannah Czenowitz because she was straight; she fucked Hecht because he had a girlfriend, she fucked Klein because he was known to be impotent; she fucked clarinet-playing Negroes and one-legged war veterans, drug dealers and ambassadors’ sons. And this was Adele Hitler’s legend: that in two years of astonishing promiscuity, she hadn’t ever fucked anyone more than once, and she hadn’t ever fucked anyone who could not, in one way or another, be considered a little bit of a coup.

There was something about beautiful, sexually prolific women that made Loeser feel as if his soul were being pelted with sharp flints. If they were being sexually prolific with him, then of course it was fine. But with anyone else it was agony. He couldn’t stop thinking about that occult moment of surrender, that critical turn when all their softnesses were redispersed, when their limbic electorate voted in some new and unfamiliar tyrant. How did it happen? Did those girls really enjoy these fleeting encounters with men they barely knew? There was no satisfactory answer, because if they didn’t, then their beauty was being exploited and despoiled, which was a tragedy, and if they did — well, they couldn’t. They just couldn’t. For eyes as dizzying as Adele’s to exist in the same body as a banal urge to get stoked over a desk by an unwashed playwright was a paradox as imponderable as the indivisibility of the Trinity.

Loeser himself, meanwhile, hadn’t had sex for a very long time. He had worked hard to erase all mental records of the night of the corset factory, but if he assumed, in the interests of supplying his own biography with at least a minimally sympathetic protagonist, that he hadn’t laid a finger on that fifteen-year-old prostitute, then the last time was with Marlene Schibelsky, and that was nearly two years ago. When he’d said to Achleitner that he might never manage it ever again, he hadn’t believed his own words, but now he retrospectively detected in them a vibration of plausibility. So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

His dispiriting conversation with Adele had turned on this very subject — sexual abundance, that is, not its opposite. The previous night he’d arrived at a party at Zinnemann’s flat in Hochbegraben to discover that Zinnemann, always a domineering host, had invented a new game.

‘We’re at that age now where everyone’s slept with everyone else,’ he had explained to his assembled guests. ‘There might have been royal dynasties of Persia that were more incestuous but I think apart from that our social circle is just about the limit. The phrase “permutational exhaustion” wouldn’t be out of place. Now, some people say it’s tiresome and we should all make new friends. I think it should be celebrated.’ And he started handing out bundles of coloured string. ‘Look around the room. If you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with, then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the ten-foot pieces of string. And if you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with repeatedly on some sort of joyless petit bourgeois pseudo-marital basis — if you see someone you’ve “gone out with”, in other words — then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the five-foot pieces of string. The result will be no more awkward in practice than any other party — just rather more tangible. And after tonight, every other party you ever go to will seem carefree in comparison.’

There was a baffled pause. Then, to Loeser’s disbelief, everyone started to do as they were told. They must have realised it would be a good story the following day. Before long, Zinnemann’s drawing room was a great rainbow spider’s web. The point of the colours was to make it easier to trace a string from its beginning to its end, and indeed several liaisons were revealed that had not previously been public. Every guest was dragged this way and that by their past loves, held in quivering strummable tension by their old conquests, so thoroughly entangled in a universal net of erstwhile romance that they would have to duck under somebody else’s heartbreak just to cross the room for a drink. There was such a thing as symbolism that was too bespoke, thought Loeser — but the real problem was that Marlene wasn’t here, and nor, as it happened, were any of his other four, so he had no string around his wrists and he looked like a eunuch. He couldn’t tolerate that, even if it was virtually true. So he crawled out of the room on his hands and knees and got a cab over to the Fraunhofens’ in Schlingesdorf.

Herr Fraunhofen was a machine-gun manufacturer whose wife Lotte thought she was cultured, so every month she invited writers and actors and artists and their auxiliaries to her house for an evening salon. (It was one of those houses where even the tassels on the tassels had tassels on their tassels, which might have sounded like a trite joke if it hadn’t in several cases been literally true.) Of course, no one of interest bothered to turn up before midnight, by which time the boring bit was over but there was still lots of wine left and often some food. And indeed Loeser was standing in the dining room with a mouth full of cold sausage when he felt a tap at his shoulder. He turned. It was his former pupil, wearing a black dress with a spray of peacock feathers at the hem. These days most of her clothes were borrowed from fashion designers she had befriended.

‘Hello, Egon.’

Loeser swallowed a cumbersome bolus of veal. ‘Hello, Adele.’ They exchanged some gossip about Herr Fraunhofen’s recent gambling losses and then he said, ‘I would have thought this party would be a bit elderly for you. I don’t think I’ve seen a single person giving themselves a subcutaneous injection of panda laxative or whatever the latest thing is.’

‘I was in a cab with John and Helga and we couldn’t think of anywhere else to get a free drink,’ Adele explained. ‘Also, that Sartre fellow is here.’

‘The Frenchman? I met him. He has a face like a four-year-old child’s drawing of its father.’

‘They say he’s very brilliant, darling.’ She called everyone ‘darling’ now. ‘He’s studying under Husserl.’

‘Don’t tell me you want to sleep with him? Imagine waking up in the morning to find that monstrous dead eye staring fixedly at your tits. And anyway, you don’t know who Husserl is.’

‘I do: author of Transcendental Phenomenology. And anyway, why don’t you shut up?’

This was the only way Loeser knew how to socialise with Adele Hitler, the object of the greatest erotic obsession he’d ever had in his life, without bursting into tears: he made bitter jokes about her sexual itinerary. Not very heroic. But at least she seemed to find him funny sometimes, and quite often they behaved almost like old friends. In fact, he probably could have kept it up indefinitely, as one somehow sometimes did in these situations, and there wasn’t any good reason why he should have chosen this conversation, out of all the conversations they’d had since that night in Puppenberg, to be frank with her for the first time — the thumbscrews of his desperation were no tighter than usual — but he was drunk, and there was something about Zinnemann’s game that had exhausted his patience, and he just found himself saying, ‘Why do you do it, Adele?’

‘Do what?’

‘Why do you waste yourself on all these people? Why do you go to bed with Sartre and Brogmann and … and …’ He tried to think of a sufficiently damning example.

‘And the waiters at the Schwanneke?’ offered Adele.

‘Yes, exactly,’ said Loeser. Then: ‘Sorry, what?’

‘You want to know why I go to bed with the waiters at the Schwanneke.’

‘Actually just at this moment I want you to reassure me that you don’t, in fact, go to bed with the waiters at the Schwanneke.’

‘Well, I don’t go to bed with all of them.’ Loeser just stared at her, nauseated, so she added: ‘Darling, everyone goes to bed with the waiters at the Schwanneke. The proprietor’s queer so they’re the most handsome in Berlin.’

‘God in heaven. My most febrile paranoid fantasies … are they all true?’