little mix-up corrected, but he would have to do so without moving his head or opening his eyes. Otherwise he would die from the pain.
After twenty minutes of lying there motionless as he pondered his strategy, he heard his landlady come up the stairs to slip a letter under his door. Probably it was from Achleitner, which wasn’t worth getting up for. But at least it must be quite early. There was still most of the day left to be ruined. Except then he remembered about Adele and the waiters from the Schwanneke, and he decided to go back to sleep, wondering if it was possible to set his alarm clock to wake him up when everyone he knew was dead. He thought of Hecht’s recent play about the legend of Urashima Taro, the Japanese fisherman who rescued a turtle from some children, discovered that the turtle was the daughter of Ryujin the sea dragon god, was rewarded with a trip to Ryujin’s palace, and returned to his village to find that somehow three hundred years had passed. What bliss that would be.
By early 1933, even the most heedless and egotistical Berliner – so, even Loeser – couldn’t help but notice that something nasty was going on. At parties now, optimism had given way to dread, and yells to whispers – the really good times were never coming back, and to think what might come next was just too horrible. Of course, it was mainly young working-class toughs who had propelled this awfulness at the beginning, but now people of every generation and every class had joined the brainless charge. They seemed to think that, just because the civilised solutions of the 1920s had begun to falter, that was a reason to dash headlong in the opposite direction. Most of Loeser’s friends agreed that something urgently needed to be done, but no one had any idea how to fight what was somehow already so dominant. Some had even begun to talk about leaving the country, at least until sanity was restored. German history was at a turning point.
Loeser could still remember the first time he had heard of this new drug ketamine. Everyone had taken the train up to an estate north of Ritterbrücke that belonged to somebody’s absent parents. It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon. At about midnight, bored with playing hide-and-seek, Loeser had wandered out to the back lawn where the jazz band was performing, hoping to find a girl to dance with. Instead, he nearly tripped over a boy who lay flexing and humming in the grass, and looked around to see several others in the same state. So when he spotted Hildkraut he went over to ask him if there had been a mustard gas attack, since they couldn’t all be so drunk already, and Hildkraut explained that they’d taken a black-market horse tranquilliser called ketamine, at which point Loeser began to feel as if he had slipped into some sort of Dada world.
‘Why on earth would anyone voluntarily take horse tranquilliser?’
‘Because they can’t get good coke any more.’
‘They can’t get good coke any more, so this is the logical alternative?’
‘Yeah. Started with scummy kids from the suburbs, then it got to the art schools, and now everyone takes it.’
Vanel wandered past looking for a cigarette lighter and they both ignored him. ‘What does it do?’ said Loeser.
‘You feel as if you’re being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it’s as if all the different weights and cares of the world have been lifted from your shoulders to be replaced by a single, much larger sort of consolidated weight. Your limbs stop working and you can’t really talk. If you take enough then it can last for hours and hours, but it seems like even longer because time slows down.’ Hildkraut smiled wistfully. ‘It’s
After twenty minutes of lying there motionless as he pondered his strategy, he heard his landlady come up the stairs to slip a letter under his door. Probably it was from Achleitner, which wasn’t worth getting up for. But at least it must be quite early. There was still most of the day left to be ruined. Except then he remembered about Adele and the waiters from the Schwanneke, and he decided to go back to sleep, wondering if it was possible to set his alarm clock to wake him up when everyone he knew was dead. He thought of Hecht’s recent play about the legend of Urashima Taro, the Japanese fisherman who rescued a turtle from some children, discovered that the turtle was the daughter of Ryujin the sea dragon god, was rewarded with a trip to Ryujin’s palace, and returned to his village to find that somehow three hundred years had passed. What bliss that would be.
By early 1933, even the most heedless and egotistical Berliner – so, even Loeser – couldn’t help but notice that something nasty was going on. At parties now, optimism had given way to dread, and yells to whispers – the really good times were never coming back, and to think what might come next was just too horrible. Of course, it was mainly young working-class toughs who had propelled this awfulness at the beginning, but now people of every generation and every class had joined the brainless charge. They seemed to think that, just because the civilised solutions of the 1920s had begun to falter, that was a reason to dash headlong in the opposite direction. Most of Loeser’s friends agreed that something urgently needed to be done, but no one had any idea how to fight what was somehow already so dominant. Some had even begun to talk about leaving the country, at least until sanity was restored. German history was at a turning point.
Loeser could still remember the first time he had heard of this new drug ketamine. Everyone had taken the train up to an estate north of Ritterbrücke that belonged to somebody’s absent parents. It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon. At about midnight, bored with playing hide-and-seek, Loeser had wandered out to the back lawn where the jazz band was performing, hoping to find a girl to dance with. Instead, he nearly tripped over a boy who lay flexing and humming in the grass, and looked around to see several others in the same state. So when he spotted Hildkraut he went over to ask him if there had been a mustard gas attack, since they couldn’t all be so drunk already, and Hildkraut explained that they’d taken a black-market horse tranquilliser called ketamine, at which point Loeser began to feel as if he had slipped into some sort of Dada world.
‘Why on earth would anyone voluntarily take horse tranquilliser?’
‘Because they can’t get good coke any more.’
‘They can’t get good coke any more, so this is the logical alternative?’
‘Yeah. Started with scummy kids from the suburbs, then it got to the art schools, and now everyone takes it.’
Vanel wandered past looking for a cigarette lighter and they both ignored him. ‘What does it do?’ said Loeser.
‘You feel as if you’re being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it’s as if all the different weights and cares of the world have been lifted from your shoulders to be replaced by a single, much larger sort of consolidated weight. Your limbs stop working and you can’t really talk. If you take enough then it can last for hours and hours, but it seems like even longer because time slows down.’ Hildkraut smiled wistfully. ‘It’s
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