Ned Beauman - The Teleportation Accident

The Chief Investigator:They reconciled?

Mr Loeser:Yes. He says he only changed his will because he wanted her to come back, and he’s forgiven her for going away. He still calls me Krauto, though. ‘My son-in-law, Krauto.’

The Chief Investigator:Now, please relate the circumstances in which you received your subpoena.

Mr Loeser:I was eating dinner with my wife and a man came to the door who described himself as a United States deputy marshal. He wanted to give me a document of some sort. I didn’t tip him. My wife and I sat down and I handed her the document and asked her to read it to me.

The Chief Investigator:Couldn’t you have read it yourself?

Mr Loeser:I was enjoying my steak. But then she said something about Congress, something about un-American activities, and something about going to Washington to testify, so straight away I dropped my cutlery and snatched the document out of her hand.

The Chief Investigator:Why so alarmed?

Mr Loeser:For some weeks I’d been in correspondence with a librarian at the Library of Congress about their copy of Midnight at the Nursing Academy . I was posing as a researcher from Columbia University, but my real intention was to travel to Washington, break daringly into the Library after dark, and steal the book. When the subpoena arrived, my first assumption was that my plot had been discovered — by some means I couldn’t even imagine, since obviously I hadn’t said a word to anyone — and I was being called to trial. I didn’t know what to do. I just stared at the subpoena in silence. (I have never met anyone who is more comfortable than Mildred with long and unexplained silences.) At last my wife finished eating and lit a cigarette. ‘We have to go to Washington,’ I blurted with a pubescent glissando.

The Chief Investigator:What was her response?

Mr Loeser:She simultaneously rolled her eyes and blew cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth as if her whole face was being hoisted to the right. This occurs only once every few weeks due to the respective periodicities of the two actions and I find it supremely beautiful.

The Chief Investigator:More beautiful than her smile?

Mr Loeser:Yes. Anyway, she very seldom smiles.

The Chief Investigator:More beautiful than her laugh?

Mr Loeser:Yes. Anyway, she very, very seldom laughs. Except when she’s reading Krazy Kat .

The Chief Investigator:What’s Krazy Kat ?

The Chairman:I believe it’s a newspaper comic strip.

Mr Loeser:By George Herriman, yes. Last year, for Christmas, on the recommendation of the bookseller Wallace Blimk, I bought her a 192-page Krazy Kat anthology published in New York by Henry Holt and Company with an introduction by EE Cummings. I’ve never understood what’s funny about it, but quite often I come home to find her slumped in an armchair with the book in her lap, snotty and straggly and red-faced like someone who’s just been informed of the death of a close relative.

The Chief Investigator:Doesn’t that make you jealous of Herriman?

Mr Loeser:A bit, but he died in 1944. And has never, to my knowledge, given my wife an orgasm.

The Chief Investigator:To return to the matter at hand, for how long were you under your misapprehension about the nature of the subpoena?

Mr Loeser:All the way to Washington. As a matter of fact, I was still squashed under it like a cockroach yesterday afternoon, when I left the hotel to buy some stockings for my wife, who had forgotten to bring a spare pair. I was walking down Calvert Street when I caught sight of someone it took me a moment to recognise. I hadn’t seen him for nearly fifteen years. It was Hans Heijenhoort — Ziesel’s sidekick from Berlin. We shook hands and went into a coffee shop to sit down.

‘When did you leave Germany?’ I asked him when my hot chocolate had arrived.

‘At the end of the war,’ Heijenhoort said. He has strong, almost heroic features, but his face is both much too long and, at the base, much too wide, so it’s only when he bows his head and the trapezoid proportions are foreshortened by perspective that he’s contingently quite handsome, like something from a parable about humility.

‘And you live in Washington?’ I said.

‘No, I live in New Mexico. I’m here for some meetings. Are you still in touch with any of the old gang from university?’

We began to go through them one by one, as people do in these situations. ‘Did you hear what happened to Ziesel?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Terrible.’

‘I was right there in the room. What about Klugweil?’

‘Yes, I heard about that too,’ said Heijenhoort.

‘I didn’t! What happened to him?’

‘Oh, quite an exciting story. He got conscripted into the Wehrmacht and ended up working for an army propaganda unit stationed in Paris. No one seems to know all the details, but somehow he got involved in the Resistance over there — something to do with a girl. And he became a very enthusiastic traitor. He used to pass along information, for instance, about where the next security sweeps were supposed to take place. Well, one day he realised that his commanding officer had begun to suspect him, and he fled. The Resistance hid him in a farmhouse just outside Paris, and the following morning they were going to try to smuggle him out of France. But that same night the SS came to the farmhouse — perhaps the Resistance had a traitor of their own. They beat him up, tied him to a chair, and then set the farmhouse on fire with paraffin. They told him he was going to burn alive.’

‘And then?’ This was not a dignified moment, I decided, to bring up the time Klugweil unacceptably started sleeping with my ex-girlfriend.

‘After the farmhouse was reduced mostly to ashes, the SS men went back inside for a look around. They were expecting to find Klugweil’s blackened skeleton. But there was nothing there. He’d escaped out of a window. Several months later, he turned up in Switzerland.’

‘What happened?’

‘The SS know how to tie a man up, of course. Even if you could dislocate your own arms, you wouldn’t have been able to wriggle out of those ropes. But Klugweil managed it. I heard he was never willing to explain exactly how.’

‘What about Achleitner?’ I said.

‘He died in the Battle of Berlin.’

‘And Blumstein?’

‘Dora.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘A work camp.’

‘Oh.’ I was silent for a while. Then I said, ‘What were you up to during the war?’

‘Physics. Just the same as ever.’

‘Still at university?’

‘No.’

‘Where, then?’

Heijenhoort picked up his cup of coffee and then put it down again without taking a sip. ‘For a certain period I was attached to the Ordnance Department.’

‘No! You were working for the Wehrmacht?’

‘Just an accident of organisational structure. My work was almost all theoretical physics. I wasn’t building rockets underground with slave labour like von Braun.’

I leaned back in my seat, suffused with gloating warmth. ‘You know, Heijenhoort, I always thought it was unnatural how indiscriminately nice and helpful you always were to everyone, and now I know I was right! I bet you were just as indiscriminately nice and helpful to the Third Reich! Good nature is deviant, like I’ve always said. You should meet my wife, she could teach you a thing or two.’

Heijenhoort got up and started to put on his scarf. ‘I had no choice, Loeser. You wouldn’t understand. You weren’t there.’