The Teleportation Accident

And then, above all, her eyes. She didn’t wear goggles of eyeshadow like the other girls did, just a little eyeliner and a little mascara, but both were quite redundant, since no artificial pigment could possibly augment what were not only the biggest and brightest and most tender eyes that Loeser had ever seen but also the most astonishingly baroque, with each iris showing a spray of gold around the pupil like the corona around an eclipse, within a dappled band of blue and green, within an outline of grey as distinct as a pencil mark, and then beyond that an expanse of moist white that did not betray even the faintest red vein but sheltered at its inner corner a perfect tear duct like a tiny pink sapphire. They were eyes that should have belonged to the frightened young of some rare Javanese loris.

Loeser could hardly believe that a beauty this intense had ever existed under all those layers of puppy fat — or not so much puppy fat, he recalled, as pony fat. He could hardly believe that lesson after lesson had seemed so tedious, that he had once felt positively unlucky to have been hired to teach this particular schoolgirl and not one of those schoolgirls one sometimes saw on the tram who had so much more … well, one shouldn’t dwell on that. He could hardly believe that he had been so ungrateful when right in front of him, hanging tightly on his every word, had been this revelation, his pupil in pupa. And he could hardly believe that his blinkered pursuit of modish girls like Marlene Schibelsky who knew how to dress and paint their face and cut their hair had just been rendered so utterly absurd.

He had never wanted to fuck anything so much in his life.

‘Herr Loeser,’ she said. ‘Do you remember me?’

He composed himself. ‘Adele Hitler! I certainly do. You’re looking … very well.’

‘Thank you. And I see you’ve smartened up. Do you know a lot of people here?’

‘Too many.’

‘Is it true Brecht is going to come?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘I’d love to meet him.’

‘You’d be disappointed. You’d see right through the man.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because of that exquisite critical eye that I remember so well from all our hours of Schiller.’ He remembered no such thing. ‘Unless those jealous Swiss matrons have quite gouged it out.’

Adele smiled. ‘Do you still teach, Herr Loeser?’

‘You can call me Egon now. And, no, I don’t teach any more. I’m in the theatre.’

‘Oh, I’m thrilled, I always thought you might become a playwright! I’ve been so desperate to meet some writers. You’re my first. Are you even bolder than Brecht?’

There was almost no component of his self-respect that Loeser wasn’t occasionally willing to leave at the pawnbrokers, but he did have one rule: he wouldn’t falsify himself to please. No one was worth that. The world could take him as he was. So although it would have been very easy to skate along with Adele’s assumption, he had no choice but to correct her. ‘I’m not a writer, actually. I’m a set designer.’

‘You mean a sort of carpenter?’

Loeser was about to explain that his work was fundamental to the conception of Lavicini, but then he heard something click behind his head. He looked round. There was Rackenham with his Leica. Another interruption, but this was all right: it would be good if Adele thought he was ringed with cosmopolitan associates.

‘Oh, you didn’t give me a chance to pose,’ said Adele, fussing belatedly at her fringe.

‘I don’t think it would be possible to take an unflattering photo of you, my dear,’ said Rackenham.

‘Certainly not with that particular camera,’ said Loeser evenly.

‘Why don’t you introduce me, Egon?’

‘Fraulein Hitler, this is Herr Rackenham. He’s a very distinguished young novelist.’

‘A real writer! What’s your book called?’

‘My latest is Steep Air,’ said Rackenham.

‘Oh, I haven’t heard of that. I’m sorry to say I don’t read much English fiction.’

‘Don’t be sorry. You’re very wise. English fiction is dead. It’s disloyal of me to say, because I went to university with so many of its brightest hopes, but it is dead.’

‘Then who am I to read?’

‘The Americans. A critic friend of mine says that deciding between English fiction and American fiction is like deciding between dinner with a corpse and cocktails with a baby; but at least the baby has a life ahead of it.’

‘I love American books,’ said Adele.

Loeser, at present, was reading Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin. Unfortunately, after seventeen months, he was still only on page 189. Achleitner, who had bought it the same day, was about three quarters of the way through page 12. ‘I cannot tolerate this infatuation with the Yanks,’ he said. ‘Rackenham, you’re as bad as Ziesel over there in his new suit.’

‘I think he might have heard you,’ said Rackenham.

‘I hope he did. If you want to understand what American culture really is you should go and look at the new escalators in the Kaufhaus des Westens on Tauentzienstrasse. They’re American-made. Never in your life will you have seen so many apparently healthy adults queueing up for the privilege of standing still.’

‘What about jazz?’ said Adele.

‘Jazz is castration music for factory workers. This band are playing in the right place but they got here too late.’

‘There must be something American you like.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

This was a lie, but it didn’t feel like a lie, because it had only one very specific exception. About a year earlier, he had taken a slow train to Cologne to visit his great aunt, and on the journey he had deliberately brought nothing to read but Berlin Alexanderplatz, on the basis that after six hours either he would have finished the book or the book would have finished him. He lasted one stop before turning to the other man in the carriage and saying, ‘I will give you fifty-seven marks, which is everything I have in my wallet, for that novel you’re reading.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,’ said the man in a thick American accent.

Loeser repeated the offer in English. (He had grown up speaking both languages to his parents.)

‘Don’t you care what it is?’

‘Is it by any chance Berlin Alexanderplatz?’ said Loeser.

‘No.’

‘Then I don’t care what it is.’

The book turned out to be Stifled Cry by Stent Mutton. It was set in Los Angeles and it was about a petty criminal who meets a housemaid on a tram, becomes her lover, and then makes a plan to steal a baby so that the housemaid can sell it to her infertile mistress for enough money to elope. Loeser finished it in less than two hours, which might have represented bad value for money if he hadn’t been delighted to have the chance to read it a second and third time before they arrived in Cologne, and then a fourth time by candlelight in his great aunt’s guest room. The narrator had no name, no history, no morals, and no sense of humour. He had a vocabulary about the size of a budgerigar’s, and yet he had a strangely poetic way with the grease-stained American vernacular. He seemed to find everyone and everything in the world pretty tiresome, and although he rarely bothered to dodge the women who threw themselves at him, the only true passion to which he was ever aroused was his ferocious loathing for the rich and those deferential to the rich. Loeser found all this captivating, but what he found most captivating of all was that Mutton’s protagonist always, always, always knew what to do. No dithering, no procrastination, no self-consciousness: just action. Loeser yearned to be that man. He had soon afterwards sent off to Knopf in New York for all five of Mutton’s remaining books, which were now hidden under his bed beside an expensive photo album of Parisian origin called Midnight at the Nursing Academy.

But he didn’t tell Adele and Rackenham any of this. Instead, he started trying to nudge the conversation back to his impressive work in the theatre. Before he had done so, though, Achleitner appeared. Loeser introduced