Read The Teleportation Accident for Free Online

entire world. He wasn’t all that charming or funny, he was just nice. He had incomprehensible reserves of friendliness, optimism, self-effacement, generosity, and tact. A gang of dockers could kick him to mush in the street and even his death rattle would be polite. Ziesel was safe with Heijenhoort. So he made constant little jokes at Heijenhoort’s expense whenever he was in the presence of anyone who he thought might be impressed, hoping that it might at least infinitesimally elevate his social status, like a provincial civil servant writing to a minister about the incompetence of a colleague and expecting a promotion in return. But in fact it only had the effect of making Ziesel look like even more of a failure, since no sane person could possibly dislike Heijenhoort.
    No sane person, that is, except Egon Loeser. To be that nice all the time, thought Loeser, just didn’t make sense. It was inhuman, illogical, saccharine, and cowardly. You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything. What, he wondered, would it actually mean to be ‘friends’ with Heijenhoort, knowing that Heijenhoort, the skimmed milk to Ziesel’s rancid butter, would bestow his insipid affection so indiscriminately? But even Achleitner said he didn’t mind Heijenhoort, so Loeser kept his contempt to himself.
    Loeser introduced Rackenham to the two mismatched messiahs and then asked them how the party was. ‘Not very good,’ Ziesel replied. ‘There’s no corkscrew.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ said Achleitner.
    ‘No corkscrew,’ said Ziesel. ‘No one can open their wine. And there are no shops for miles.’
    ‘There must be two hundred people here. How can there not be one corkscrew?’
    ‘Hildkraut does have a penknife with a corkscrew attachment but he’s hiring it out and no one wants to pay,’ said Heijenhoort.
    ‘There have already been some casualties.’ Brogmann, apparently, had smashed his bottle on the wall to break off the neck and then tried to drink from what was left and cut his lip, while Tetzner had told Hannah Czenowitz that, given her curriculum vitae, she should have no trouble sucking out a cork, and she’d punched him in the eye.
    ‘This is ridiculous,’ said Achleitner.
    ‘Yes, it’s a disappointment, but at least Brecht is supposed to be coming later,’ said Ziesel.
    ‘If there’s not even any wine, thank God we found some coke,’ said Loeser. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned.
    Achleitner had been right. Adele Hitler had changed.
    The first thing Loeser noticed was her hair. It was hopelessly unfashionable. Where every single one of his female friends had a bob that looked like a geometric diagram of itself, often snipped so close at the back that in the morning there would be stubble at the nape, pale Adele wore a flock of black starlings, a drop of ink bursting in a glass of water, an avalanche of curls that could hardly be called a cut because if it were ever to come across a pair of scissors it would surely just swallow them up.
    And where most 1931 frocks, like the medieval Greek merchant and geodesist Cosmas Indicopleustes, argued for flatness in the face of all available evidence, Adele had on a blue dress that wrote limericks about her bust and hips, no matter that her figure was actually pretty girlish – with a printed pattern of clouds, skyscrapers and biplanes that seemed to be the garment’s lone, almost touchingly clumsy, concession to the zeitgeist.
    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