‘Don’t bother about coffee,’ said Loeser, following him into the expansive sitting room. From a shelf in the corner stared out some of the obscene painted masks from Blumstein’s notorious student production of
‘This is hardly the first time you’ve come here to gripe about our mutual friend,’ said Blumstein. ‘If you could forgive each other for the “Teleportation Accident” then you can forgive each other for whatever it is that’s happened now.’ He lowered himself into one of Gugelhupf’s black rectilinear armchairs and gestured to another one for Loeser but Loeser stayed standing.
‘I’m not just here to whine this time. I mean it. He’s stabbed me in the back.’
‘How so?’
‘There’s no use telling you the whole sordid story. The point is, we can no longer be collaborators. But on the way here I realised that it’s for the best, anyway. Have you heard him these last few months? All of a sudden he’s determined that
‘We agreed on that in 1929,’ said Blumstein.
‘And?’
‘With all due respect to Equivalence, things do change. Do you even realise they shut down the Bauhaus last month? It’s very hard to have a conversation with you about this because you don’t read the newspapers, but at a time like this it seems to me that an artist has certain responsibilities.’
‘I agree. At a time when the atmosphere of Berlin is even more polluted with political talk than usual, we ought to give our audience a few breaths of clean air.’
‘If you had heard what’s being said about the Jews—’
‘Then what would I think? That you’re all going to be rounded up by thugs tomorrow morning?’
‘No, of course not, but …’ Blumstein paused and gave his left shoulder four or five unhappy taps with his right hand. ‘I had not planned to tell you this yet, Egon, but Adolf and I have been working on a small project of our own.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just a simple piece about what’s happening in Germany. What’s happening today, not what happened in the late seventeenth century. Something that we can write and rehearse and stage in a few months and that people will actually want to come and see.’
Loeser was so shocked that all he could think to ask was, ‘Who’s going to do the set?’
‘There won’t be a set. Nothing but black drapes. Like we used to do it right after the war.’
Loeser thought of all that he’d learned from the older man, and all that he owed to him. That excused nothing. ‘So after three years of work we’re abandoning
‘There’s no reason why we can’t return to
‘Oh, to hell with this.’
Blumstein jumped up and followed Loeser out of the house. ‘Egon, please try to understand. I might be wrong about all this, I hope I am — but at the moment I don’t feel as if I have any choice.’
But Loeser hurried away without looking back, so the only reply Blumstein got was the soft double thump of a young sparrow shattering its skull against the glass wall of his house and then dropping into the bed of petunias behind him.
When Loeser arrived at the Schwanneke that evening, the restaurant was crowded but luckily there was almost no one there he knew. He wondered if Adele would let him feed her ice cream off his spoon. On the way back to his flat, he’d told himself that nothing that had happened today really mattered — not Rackenham, not Marlene, not Blumstein — because he was having dinner with his prize tonight. But then he remembered the party in Puppenberg, and the canyon of his disappointment, and he reached the irrational conclusion that the only way to ensure that she really would turn up was to convince himself that she wouldn’t. So as he bathed and dressed and changed his month-old sheets he had told himself again and again that she wouldn’t come, she definitely wouldn’t come, she absolutely definitely wouldn’t come.
And then she didn’t come.
Loeser waited an hour and a half, pulling threads from the hem of the tablecloth, counting the punctuation errors in the menu, watching the staff at their duties in an attempt to work out which ones had fucked Adele and which ones had fucked Marlene. At last, numbly, he gave up hope, and paid for the bottle of wine he’d drunk. As he was putting on his coat he noticed three waiters conferring near the door. All he could think about was how these cunts could apparently have any woman they wanted without even trying. He found himself veering towards them, and on the way he snatched a fork from a vacant table. He didn’t know what he was going to do.
‘Excuse me,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir?’ said one of the waiters.
Any woman they wanted, he thought. These cunts.
There was a long pause.
‘Are there any job openings here?’ Loeser said at last.
‘I’m afraid not, sir.’
‘I see. Fine. Thank you. Goodbye.’
Outside, Loeser hailed a cab to take him to the Hitler residence in Hochbegraben. To arrive uninvited at Adele’s house would represent the final collapse of his dignity, but he didn’t know what else to do. The door was answered by the Hitlers’ maid, who recognised him from when he used to tutor Adele. He realised he missed those boring, luxurious afternoons in the Hitlers’ drawing room, and he was reminded of a business plan that Achleitner had once suggested for the newly established Allien Theatre:
1. Put on plays ferociously satirising the sort of people who live in nice houses in Hochbegraben.
2. Sell a lot of tickets to the sort of people who live in nice houses in Hochbegraben.
3. Make enough money to move into a nice house in Hochbegraben.
‘Herr Loeser!’ said the maid. ‘What a lovely surprise!’
‘I’m sorry to call so late. Is Fraulein Hitler at home, please?’
‘I’m afraid not, Herr Loeser.’
‘Do you know where she is?’ he said. For the first time he wondered where Adele’s parents thought she went when she didn’t come home night after night. Dance lessons?
‘She left for the train station a few hours ago.’
‘The train station?’
‘Yes, Herr Loeser. Fraulein Hitler has gone to Paris.’
‘Paris? For how long?’
‘I don’t know, Herr Loeser, but she did pack quite a lot of suitcases to be sent after her.’
‘Did she leave a note for me? Anything like that?’
The maid looked embarrassed. ‘Not that I know of, Herr Loeser.’
‘I see. Fine. Thank you. Goodbye.’
He reached into his pockets to see if he had enough cash on him for another cab and found only the fork from the Schwanneke. He would have to walk. Above him the moon over Berlin shone bright as a bare bulb in a toilet cubicle. When he got to the swimming pool on Sturzbrunnenstrasse he crossed the road, and off to his left was the library of Goldschmieden University, in front of which about fifty students seemed to be holding a bonfire. They were all cheering. Probably it was some sort of silly art performance, but still, out of curiosity, Loeser decided to see what was going on. As he drew closer, he saw that what they were burning was books, tossed one by one into the middle of a square framework of logs. Several boys and girls held placards that were difficult to read in the flickering light. The smell of the smoke was surprisingly caustic for such a stolid fuel.
‘What are you doing?’ he said to the nearest youthful biblioclast. Every time a heavy book landed it threw off a cheerful spittle of cinders, and shreds of stray paper danced in the wind like fiery autumn leaves.
‘This is degenerate literature. We are destroying it in the name of Germany. Would you like to join in?’
Loeser chuckled. The student was playing his part with an almost Expressionist rigidity. There was, Loeser had to admit, something quite amusing about acting out this medieval folk magic just outside the doors of fashionable, modern Goldschmieden. It was the sort of thing that Loeser himself might have come up with at that
