The Teleportation Accident

age. He was about to ask whether they were affiliated to a particular company or collective when the student pressed a novel into his hand. He looked down. The Sorceror of Venice by Rupert Rackenham. Straight away, all thought of objective theatrical evaluation forgotten, Loeser turned and hurled the book into the bonfire with a delighted yell. Next, the student handed him a script for Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera and a torn copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Loeser happily sent Brecht and Doblin after Rackenham. Then some Kafka and Trotsky and Zola, against none of whom he had anything in particular, but he was too much in the swing of it to stop. At last, the heat started to get a bit uncomfortable, so he gave the student a grateful slap on the back and continued on his way.

But as soon as he left the glow of the bonfire, all his troubles settled back on to him like a swarm of photophobic midges. Adele gone, Achleitner gone. Blumstein betraying him with Klugweil, Klugweil betraying him with Marlene. Ketamine, politics, boredom. No sex for two years. This sticky film of disappointment and frustration over everything. Berlin was hell. He thought of that essay Nietzsche had cobbled together in the last sane year of his life after he fell out with Wagner. Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Loeser Contra Blumstein. Loeser Contra Omnes.

How did Lavicini feel when he left Venice? How long did he think he’d be gone? Did he have the slightest fear that he might die in a foreign land?

All right, Loeser decided. Fuck it.

Paris.

3. PARIS, 1934

‘Dear Mother and Father. Good news: I am rich. I have cornered the market in foreskins.’ Scramsfield sat outside a cafe on the Rue de l’Odeon, trying to convince himself that, really, it was a blessing that the plan had failed, and the first of his consolations was that he could never have told his parents. ‘I have given up literary ambitions for ever now that the tender hatbands of newborn boys have brought me a different sort of fame. I can walk into any bar in Paris and straight away there is a shout of, “Ho, drinks on the house for the snozzle tycoon of the Champs-Elysees!” ’ No. Impossible.

But of course he needn’t have been so explicit: he could just have said he was in the medico-cosmetic supplies business. Which would have been true. According to the Armenian, half the foreskins were going to be mashed up into a skin cream and the other half used as grafts to heal burns and pressure sores and venous ulcers. The reason that old women and private hospitals would pay thousands of francs for an ounce of penis carpaccio was that apparently the cells of a fresh baby were still so vague that they’d melt benignly into any old forehead or thigh. It sounded like voodoo, like medieval popes drinking infants’ blood to put off death, but after some consideration Scramsfield had decided he believed it: he only had to think of himself in 1929, getting his first sight of Le Havre from the deck of the Melchior, to remember that as a new arrival you would shake hands with anyone you met as if they were your best friend. The Armenian had explained that there was no particular reason it had to be the foreskin; it could just as well be the belly fat, except that of course the foreskin was normally the only disposable part of the kid, whereupon Scramsfield had wondered what he meant by ‘normally’; but anyway, that was what distinguished it from the famous monkey gland racket, where the idea was that you couldn’t sew just any part of the monkey into a man’s sac, it had to be the inventory of the monkey’s own sac, so you’d get all the relevant endocrinal juices.

Perhaps ‘racket’ was the wrong word. Scramsfield had a friend called Weitz who was a dentist. (He often left his consonants half formed when he spoke, as if his mouth were wide open; Scramsfield had once asked him about it and he said it was the same as how if you lived in a foreign country for long enough, you started to pick up the accent.) Last year Weitz had published a short but influential article in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology, and as a result he’d been invited to dinner with the famous Dr Serge Voronoff up at the Chateau Grimaldi, where an animal trainer from a bankrupt circus was employed to run the monkey-breeding operation that took up most of the grounds. Weitz reported that Voronoff truly believed in what he was doing: he truly believed that he could give a man an extra twenty or thirty years of life — and ruffian sexual prowess — by hiding a monkey testicle like a contraband package between the man’s own pair. ‘You are only as old as your glands,’ he would say. For years, the patients had queued up: he’d grafted presidents and maharajahs and the Duke of Westminster’s dog and even, it was rumoured, Pope Pius XII, which made you wonder just what it was about that particular job that made you so desperate to postpone the big meeting you had scheduled with your boss. And now that everyone else had finally realised the whole thing was nonsense, and its inventor was getting mocked in all the newspapers, Voronoff himself still believed in it as wholeheartedly as he ever had. Well, why not? They couldn’t take away his money. They couldn’t take away his pretty twenty-one-year-old wife.

In any event, the prepuce game wasn’t like the primate game. Scramsfield could never have had a monopoly like Voronoff, or not for long. And that was his second, more practical consolation: within three or four months, either the rabbis or the Armenian would have got bored with splitting their cut, so to speak, and Scramsfield would have been quietly circumvented. Still, for those three or four months, he could have lived like a Guggenheim. He could have put out another issue of apogee, sixty-four pages with half-tone illustrations on coated paper, contributors paid on time at five cents a word; he could have put down a deposit on that old boot shop in the Latin Quarter that he’d told everyone he was going to turn into a gallery; he could have redeemed his long-suffering blue Corona from the pawnbrokers; he could have given back this borrowed suit and bought one for himself that didn’t cut into him under the arms. He wouldn’t have wasted it all at the Sphinx this time. And right now he wouldn’t be sitting here watching the door of Shakespeare and Company, knowing that if nobody who might want to make his acquaintance turned up by the time the shop opened again after lunch, he would have to go in to steal some more books to sell to Picquart. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before and hunger kept barging his thoughts out of the way.

But Scramsfield’s third and supreme consolation was Phoebe. She had sent him to Paris to be a writer. And with the Armenian in jail because of those cheques, he was free to be a writer again. No money and no distractions was better than money and distractions. His father had money and distractions. Anyone could have money and distractions. That was the important thing.

Just after one o’clock on this clement April day, two women walked up to the door of Shakespeare and Company, stood for a minute looking at the books in the window, and then tried the door. It was locked, but they kept trying it, as if they thought it might realise its rudeness and change its mind. After wiping his front teeth with a napkin, Scramsfield got up, hurried towards the women, slowed to a saunter before he got near enough to be noticed, and then carried on past. A few steps further on, as a considerate afterthought, he paused, turned, and said, ‘Looking for Sylvia? She’s closed until two.’

And there it was on their faces, as always, the moment of relief so deep it seemed almost carnal: the tourist’s hopeless gratitude for a friendly American voice, an honest American face, an ally against this conspiracy of waiters and concierges and policemen and taxi drivers and beggars and shopkeepers and train conductors. One of the women was young, blonde, pretty enough, but all her features a little askew somehow, like paintings haphazardly hung; the other was older, greying, not similar enough in the face to be the mother, perhaps the aunt but more likely the governess. ‘Oh,’ said the older woman. ‘Thank you. Who is Sylvia?’

‘Don’t you know Miss Beach? She runs the store. She’s an American, but the French close for lunch, so she does too.’

‘That’s awfully irritating. We’d hoped to buy a copy of Ulysses.’ She had an upper- class Boston accent not unlike Scramsfield’s own.

‘You picked a good week. The fifth edition’s just out. Jimmy’s over the moon about it. He says they’ve finally chased out most of the typographical errors. He’s punctilious about those typographical errors.’

‘Jimmy?’

‘Jimmy Joyce,’ said Scramsfield, as if it were obvious.

The older woman exchanged a glance with the younger one. ‘You know Mr Joyce?’

Scramsfield shrugged. ‘Sure. Everybody in Paris knows Jimmy. I had dinner with him and Sylvia just last night. He still hasn’t found a single restaurant in France he can tolerate.’ Then, in an accent that was Irish or at least Scottish: ‘ “I’ve eaten headache pills with more blood in them than this steak!” ’ Both women laughed