Read Online The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman - Free Book Online Page B

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?’
    ‘What can I say, Egon? It’s not as if I did it specifically to annoy you. Is this a class neurosis?’
    ‘You’ll fuck the man who brings your coffee just because he’s handsome, and yet I chase you for nearly two years and—’
    She waved her hand as if to swat him away. ‘Oh, please let’s not get into that again. “Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.” ’
    ‘Who said that?’
    ‘I saw it on the wall at a party.’
    ‘Oh, so it must be true! And all my devotion means nothing?’
    ‘I’m flattered, but there’d be no point in us even trying. You’re the sort of man who couldn’t