Adam Thirlwell - Politics

This is not an essay on revolutionary architecture. Architecture can often be revolutionary, and I like that. I like the Bauhaus. But I am not interested in the Bauhaus here. I am interested in Nana.

As a historian, Nana believed in accuracy. Now I know that if you asked her to remember certain details of

Moshe’s and her history, she would not have been able to. But it is difficult being accurate all the time. The point is that she tried.

Nana’s MA thesis was on the critical reception of Mies van der Rohe in America. She disliked those who idealised him. Nana loved the man, no question, but she was also a girl who cared for precision.

First, she did not see a natural progression, based on democratic theory, from Mies’s revolutionary housing in Berlin to his American skyscrapers. The connection was aesthetic. It was not political. And her second disagreement was with Mies himself when he was political. For example, following the theory of the Bauhaus, Mies was determined to use flat roofs. Pointed roofs, claimed the Bauhaus, were bourgeois. They symbolised kaiserly crowns. Whereas, thought Nana, pointed roofs were just necessary. They were practical. They kept the rain off. Germany is rainy.

She remembered her visit to the New National Gallery in Berlin, Mies van der Rohe’s crowning achievement, where little pails and engorged mops, positioned at strategic intervals, cluttered the clean lines in every room.

I know Nana sounds geeky, but I like her. I approve of this care for particulars. Sometimes I do not think it gets enough recognition — this care for the facts. There is nothing wrong with being an accurate historian.

You see, when a party person thinks about architecture they can tell someone, immediately. When a party person stumbles on a new theory concerning the nature of public design in Weimar Germany, he or she has a receptive audience. Whereas the people who just sit and read and think — they can only be charming on their own. And Nana was this kind of person. She was a quiet person.

What a fucking waste of time, she thought, considering Mies’s attempts to politicise, in 1962, the design of an art gallery. It was so fucking anachronistic. Maintaining a theory for thirty years was just so lazy, thought Nana. It was just a form of nostalgia.

You see? She was geeky, but she was charming.

6

But the sex, the sex took time. It took practice.

This, for example, was how they first had sex. It was a week after they had first kissed. It was three weeks after 28 April.

At midnight, in a Covent Garden hotel, Moshe and Nana were naked. They were naked in full view of a buzzing minibar.

They were in a hotel?

The hotel was Moshe’s treat. His idea was that people respond to treats. But unfortunately, it was not an idea he could test. This was because he was very drunk. He was now perhaps too drunk to eat. He was certainly too drunk to appreciate the joy of sex.

An empty miniature Stolichnaya bottle dropped, a miniature thud, off the bed.

This was not a sex scene, not yet. I do not want anyone to get the wrong impression.

Moshe swayed above Nana’s long and slender body. He lovingly stroked her stomach with the back of his hand. Now, the back of the hand may seem like an unorthodox sexual surface. And it was an unorthodox surface. But Moshe had given it thought. The back of the hand was inventively tender. That was one reason. There was also a sadder reason. He stroked her with the back of his hand so that Nana couldn’t feel the roughage of the eczema on Moshe’s pink tough fingers.

Nana held his penis hard in her hand. It was not an erect penis. And they looked at each other in the way they imagined they should — an earnest look, a determined look. It was a very serious look. Moshe glanced down. He was trying to see what his penis was up to. But instead he just saw the freckles on the back of Nana’s right hand. He studied them, propped on his arms, his back curved, propped on his arms, he studied them. Then he noticed the hanging dip of his belly. While they both observed his inelegant penis, Moshe tried to hold his belly in.

Nana and Moshe’s first sex scene was not a sex scene. It looked a bit like a sex scene but it was not. It was slapstick.

Moshe got off the bed — to get a drink or stand mysterious by the window or just do anything but look at his floppy belly and floppy penis — and tragically stepped on a mini can of slimline Schweppes. He staggered. His knees gave way. His mouth was open. Then finally, wobbling and steadying, he spoke, not at the beginning, but at the end of a breath, with a trembling voice. ‘Fuchristfuckme,’ he said.

Giggling, they tucked each other up. They snuggled in their single bed.

I know the single bed looks odd. The single bed surprised Nana. But there was an explanation. This explanation was financial. The double rooms, Moshe had explained to her sadly, were astronomical .

At four in the morning, Nana woke up. She was hung over. She yawned, she yawned, stood up. She picked up a glass of water and it slipped and spilled on the bed.

She was in love. I know it sounds girly but it was true. She thought it was wonderful that she was here, feeling nauseous, in a single room paid for by Moshe. She thought it was too gorgeous, that Moshe was sleeping and Nana was awake.

Let me describe this moment. Let me describe this nighttime idyll.

If you looked from up above you’d see the bed and Nana standing while Moshe slept. Above the bed there was a copy of a Raoul Dufy print, in a clipframe, of a sunny landscape and a cascading pot of red geraniums on a window sill. Next to the print, there was rain framed in a window. But Nana did not see this glamorous arrangement, nor the fish tank behind her in the corner where one fish brushed another. So she could not see the goldfish moving flatly past or through her head. Interior decoration was not her priority.

Having drunk two bottles of wine and then four miniature Stolichnayas, three miniature Jim Beams and one miniature Gordon’s gin, Nana needed desperately to piss.

8

The next event in this story is a blow job.

I suppose this could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. Personally, I think it was a good thing. This is not because I think blow jobs are intrinsically a good thing. Well no, I do think blow jobs are a good thing, I am rarely averse to a blow job, but that is not why I think that a blow job was the right thing here. I have another explanation. A lot of love is dependent on sex. It is difficult for love to survive without sex. So in the end, if they are going to truly love each other, Nana and Moshe need to get to sex. That is my theory.

It was also Nana’s theory.

And there was another, sneaky motive behind Nana’s behaviour that morning. She was imagining the endless procession of Moshe’s previous, highly trained lovers. No doubt about it, they were more highly trained than Nana. Nana was no competition to the sleek girls of Moshe’s past. Unlike Nana, these perfect girls could walk in five-inch heels. Their breasts were braless yet buoyant. To their yoga- schooled limbs, no sexual position was alien.

This should be a lesson to us all. The sleek girls of Moshe’s past. I don’t know. That is the conclusion of a girl who did not believe in her attractiveness. That is the natural conclusion of a girl who did not pride herself on her sex appeal.

If only people never came to conclusions.

Nana gulped down some water. Then her sleepy head began its determined route down past the black mushroom cloud of Moshe’s soft chest hair, and along the fainter vertical line of hair from his tummy button to his pubic hair, until she reached his penis. At this point, she opened her unsure lipbalmed lips and was very gentle around Moshe. Moshe grew, then grew. He sleepily woke up. He could feel some spit leaking warm then cold around his testicles. This made him feel very satisfied.