The Dead by Christian Kracht

Author:Christian Kracht
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

25.

And Kracauer and Eisner (who, Nägeli notices in his inebriation, has a wonderfully pretty pursed mouth)—having finally given the slip to Hugenberg and his blond little monkey Heinz and Putzi the Golem at the Hotel Adlon around three thirty in the morning—now embark on a breakneck taxi ride with Nägeli, during the course of which he must request the vehicle be stopped at once, there, at the edge of the Tiergarten. Exeunt. The sky, it plunges upward, dark and starless.

Nägeli kneels down on one leg, retching and retching, while bracing himself on the black automobile’s rear fender, his face contorted theatrically and illuminated in profile by the taxi’s yellow taillights (as though he himself were suddenly starring in one of those garishly overblown, now slightly antiquated German films with overly mannered acting), then relief; he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, Kracauer putting his arm around his shoulders warmly and amicably; they climb back into the car, and Lotte Eisner holds a vial of Hoffmann’s anodyne under the nostrils of this slender Swiss soul.

And now it continues, this nocturnal swoon through Berlin, under the light of streetlamps blurred by intoxication, past soaring steel colossi, past dozens of clownishly made-up whores frozen in salacious poses on the curb, past shoeblacks, rat catchers, disabled bodies. Trucks, loaded with jeering youths racing from one political melee to the next, speed through red traffic lights.

And above them, yet again, as if they were driving in circles, shimmers the noxiously green neon-light ad of the Philips company, extolling the virtues of pentode tubes.

What nerve you had with this Hugenberg fellow, Nägeli says to Eisner. The truth is, she replies, we’ve got maybe another six months to live in Germany. At most. That’s why it is essential not to engage in self-denial anymore, not for another minute.

Yes, that goes for him, too, Nägeli, Kracauer adds, a director should believe in the absoluteness of his subject, yes, yes, he must believe in vampires and in ghosts and in miracles. Only then would emerge, presto: Truth. Nägeli nods, swallowing down the acrid taste of what he has just vomited up; yes, they are right, his new friends.

Up front, the taxi driver then says something very ugly in cowardly grousing Berlin dialect: The Jews are to blame for the whole mess, for all of this. All the better if they are chased off, to Timbuktu, deep into the most distant jungle where those vermin belong. Whoever doesn’t want to live like a respectable German here can simply get going, or get got, and he draws the edge of his hand across his gullet.

Nägeli wants to give him a smack from behind; Lotte holds on to his arm, it’s better to just ignore these sorts of things, but then Kracauer, who is sitting up front next to the driver, pokes him in the eyes with two outstretched fingers, the chauffeur cries out, jerking his hands from the steering wheel to his face, and the now driverless Mercedes

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