by Heinz Helle
One by one we crawl through the hole that he has helpfully vacated, and Gruber, who is directly behind him, crouches down and lifts up his head and pulls the loud, twitching thing, which is what his upper body has become, into his lap. From the deep gash in his lower back downwards there appears to be no life left in Golde.
Drygalski and I come closer, slowly, uncertainly, filled with a sense of curiosity that I find a little unsettling. Golde’s roars are growing louder and more high-pitched, until finally he is squealing, he is squealing so much that I look at him in disgust, lying there in Gruber’s lap. I can feel my mouth contracting into the kind of expression you normally have just before you throw up. Luckily Golde can’t see it, his face is buried in Gruber’s crossed calves. He is trying to raise his head. He gives up and tries again and gives up again, and he tries it one last time and he gives up. And then he gives up. And he is screaming all the while, unbearably loudly, and I am startled, but then also relieved, when Gruber whispers to me, Give me the hammer. And just to make sure, I say, What?, even though I heard him perfectly well the first time. Golde is screaming. Gruber says, Give me the hammer. Golde is screaming, and the others are standing around, and their body language says, We don’t have all day, and Gruber yells, Give me the hammer, and then Golde yells as well, For fuck’s sake give him the hammer, and then I pull the hammer out of my belt and give it to Gruber, and then the hammer comes down from a great height into Gruber’s lap, and hair and blood spatter my face, and then it is quiet. I lick my lips. They are salty.
40
That night we can’t fall asleep. And so we get up and keep going. It’s slow going in the dark. We walk in single file. The one in front gingerly holds his arms out and follows the path, the others each place their hands on the shoulders of the one in front of them. After a while this strikes us as weird so we let go again. We let our arms swing by our sides and listen for the steps of the one in front of us. They sound soft, careful, uneven, they have no end and no beginning. Our feet drag across the soft forest floor. We don’t even bother lifting them any more. We are stroking the surface of the planet. It’s like we are trying to make up.
41
I imagine Golde, a few weeks ago, sipping a cup of coffee. The coffee tastes awful. Golde says: Good coffee.
The afternoon sun is shining through the blinds. The clients’ clock strikes four.
I imagine Golde saying something to break the ice – Bang on time, for example – and I imagine the female client, let’s call her Frau Huber, nodding and then looking at her husband, who gives Golde an expectant but not unfriendly look, wondering whether he means them or himself.
Do you still believe in retirement?
Ah, well, goes Frau Huber. Her husband goes, Hmm.
Golde laughs.
Father Christmas, God – sure, why not? But retirement? I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you there. But of course you want to plan ahead. You’re smart. That’s why you’re here today. That’s why you called me.
You called us.
Right. But you told me: Herr Golde, please come on Thursday at four, and it is Thursday at four and here we are, having coffee, and we’re going to see what we can do to provide some security for your retirement.
I imagine Golde leaning back in the armchair by the coffee table as if to show them what a secure retirement looks like. He takes another sip of coffee, and then his movements suddenly become very quick. He smooths his golden yellow tie, his hand pausing for a brief moment on his golden tie pin. He doesn’t touch the matching cufflinks for now. Not until they sign, he says to himself. Then he bends down over the briefcase at his feet and pulls out two contracts.
Please take a moment to fill these in.
All right, says Frau Huber. Herr Huber looks sceptically over the top of his glasses. He begins to read. Then he says:
But.
Yes?
You haven’t told us a thing yet.
That’s true. That’s because everything is clear. But I’ll be happy to tell you about it. I’ll tell you everything you want to know. What would you like to know? That the population pyramid for Germany is currently more unstable than it would have been if the First and Second World Wars had occurred simultaneously? That the state pension funds have lost billions on their investments in emerging markets? That China has overtaken Germany as the world’s largest exporter? That we will be facing deflation soon?
No, says Frau Huber. We know all that. We’re not complete idiots, are we, Gerald?
I imagine her as speaking more loudly and confidently than before.
I was thinking of something more along the lines of a consultation, says Herr Huber. Different options. Just to know what they all are. That’s also what the young lady who called us said: a non-binding personal consultation. That’s what I would like. What is this thing that my wife has already half-filled in, anyway?
Herr Huber, Golde leans back, I appreciate your scepticism.
I’m not sceptical.
Yes, you are, and I thank you for it. I prefer working with people who know exactly what they are doing. Who don’t let anyone take them for a ride. People who won’t just let you tell them how the world works. And they’re the sort of people you want to make an effort for. I’m the same way. That’s why I immediately felt at ease here.
A confiding glance at Frau Huber. She shifts her weight from one buttock to the other, smiles, or something to that effect.
Herr Huber. What your wife is filling in there is nothing other than what is going to preserve your standard of living in old age. It is the guarantee that you won’t suddenly find yourselves empty-handed if and when the German state fails again. Wouldn’t be the first time.
I imagine Golde laughing, and Huber not, and Golde thinking to himself, Tough nut to crack, but maybe he doesn’t like references to the Third Reich, a Jew perhaps, or his grandma was killed in the bombing, or his grandpa killed in action. We’ll see.
And of course I will explain the principle behind the investment type with the highest security and the highest yield for your retirement: Europe Central, the Rolls-Royce of central European property funds. Safe as houses. And I’ll tell you about all the other things that are out there. But first I’d like to tell you what there won’t be any longer, in five years: the euro.
Frau Huber laughs, Golde laughs with her. He’s got her, but what about him?
So how does this fund work, exactly?
First of all, it’s exclusively first-rate countries, first-rate locations, first-rate interiors. Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland. None of that Mediterranean or Slavic rubbish.
Aha.
Guaranteed monthly returns from a predetermined age, in a predetermined amount, depending on the premiums. Alternatively, you can also receive a one-time lump sum. Who knows, perhaps you’re dreaming of finally getting that Porsche for your retirement? Or a yacht? If you’ve worked hard all your life, you should be able to reward yourself later.
I’m on disability.
But you would work if you could!
And where exactly does my money go?
Your contributions will be invested in a fund. It’s like a big cake that everyone bakes together, and then in the end everyone gets a piece.
And what are the ingredients?
As I said, it’s nothing but first-class properties in exclusive locations: Hamburg-Ottensen, Berlin-Mitte, Zürich Goldcoast. The crème de la crème, you know what I mean? You won’t see any of those urban waste-lands like Neuperlach or Hasenbergl.
I grew up in Hasenbergl.
And of course it used to be beautiful there. Until all those, well, how should I put it, in any case when they brought in all those foreign workers they didn’t always think ahead, you know, Herr Huber. I mean, let’s be honest, is that really still your Hasenbergl?
No, you’re right about that.
Is this still your Germany?
No.
You see?
But you want me to inve
st in this Germany?
In the good parts.
Aha.
The risk is spread out across the most reliable and most sought-after real estate companies in the entire region of central Europe. Diversified, we call it. Nothing can go wrong. If they all go belly-up we’ll have much bigger problems to worry about.
You mean if the next world war comes we won’t even get a pension?
Oh, Gerald.
Herr Huber. If the Third World War comes, nobody anywhere will be getting anything. I assume that’s clear. But I also think that we can expect our politicians to be more, well, maybe not sensible, but at least not entirely idiotic.
From your mouth to God’s ear.
Gerald, I want to do this.
I don’t.
Fine, then don’t. I’m doing it.
Do what you want.
I imagine Herr Huber getting up and making for the door.
So you’ll be sitting pretty if I die, but I’ll be left with nothing.
I imagine Herr Huber stopping in his tracks, and Golde thinking: Oh bless you, Frau Huber. Suddenly she even seems vaguely attractive.
Give it here.
I imagine Herr Huber taking Golde’s fountain pen, and Golde touching his golden cufflinks.
Please excuse him, he can be so stubborn sometimes.
That’s men for you, says Golde.
I imagine them sharing a laugh then, Frau Huber and Golde. All except Herr Huber. He just wants it to be over.
Would you like some more coffee?
Thanks, I’d love some.
42
The meadow is wet. We’re walking. The meadow is soft and elastic. We are walking slowly. The meadow is endless and on a mild slope, disappearing into the thick greyish white. Withered, sodden grass, burnt perhaps. No, just singed. A broad hill comes into view, the same colour as the background, not high, five or six feet perhaps, running diagonally from left to right, too even, too straight, too wide, somehow artificial, and as we get closer we see that it really is made of the same material as the ground. A railway embankment. We walk up it. Smooth, wetly glinting tracks, running in perfect parallel to the horizon in both directions. The contact line poles have been felled and are lying on the grass. Decommissioned timber machines. We stand around on the embankment, unsure how to proceed, but then we decide that when these tracks were still in use they must have led somewhere. We decide to follow the embankment. At first we walk unnaturally fast, taking two sleepers at a time. Unnaturally long strides. We make good progress, but we also tire quickly. Little by little we adjust our stride, taking just one sleeper per step. These are unnaturally short steps, we are moving unnaturally slowly, and the concentration it requires to ensure that each step hits a sleeper is tiring, even if we are moving slowly. I wonder briefly where all the little stones in the track bed come from. I wonder who brought them here and who mined them somewhere else, and how many there are per square foot, on this stretch of track, on all the tracks in the world, and I begin to marvel at how many stones there are in the world and how many track beds and tracks and how many places they used to lead to, and then Gruber suddenly leaves the embankment, and the rest of us follow him, relieved. We don’t need a destination. There wouldn’t be anything there any more if we ever got there anyway. It’s more important to be able to walk the way we want to walk, and so we keep walking across the thick, wet grass. We walk slowly and steadily.
43
We hear the rumble from a long way off. It is coming from a group of clean, new buildings surrounding an old Tyrolean farmyard. White walls, metal roofs. Stables, possibly. Of course we are afraid. We haven’t heard any noise in so long that didn’t come from us, or the weather, and this noise isn’t particularly reassuring. A metallic rumble, steady but somehow off kilter. I can’t say exactly what I think sounds wrong about it. It just seems to me that the noise isn’t in harmony with itself, it doesn’t sound the way it should, the way it was intended. It sounds forced, excessive perhaps, like a car engine in neutral doing three thousand revs at a stop light.
We approach with caution. The steel sliding doors on the first building are locked and we can’t get them open. The windows are narrow barred slits ten feet off the ground. When we get to the second building we can hear that this is the source of the noise. We circle it once. The rumble stays equally loud and hyped up. In the rear we discover an unlocked wooden door. We enter. Suddenly it’s very loud. The little side room in which we find ourselves smells powerfully of diesel. The rumble is different in here, deeper and richer, this sounds like an engine just doing its job, no more and no less, and when I see the diesel generator I think to myself, that’s a bog-standard diesel generator, the type you see on farms throughout Europe being used for all sorts of perfectly ordinary tasks.
What’s it running, Drygalski shouts over the noise.
A particle accelerator, Gruber shouts back.
What? Drygalski shouts.
A top-secret facility for producing black holes. A kind of unofficial emergency exit in case of a global catastrophe.
The only way out of this shit. Finally, we’ve found it.
What? Drygalski shouts.
How the fuck would I know? Gruber shouts back.
The next door leads into the main space, and we are relieved because we’ve identified the rumble as the perfectly ordinary sound of a perfectly ordinary generator, doing its thing in a perfectly ordinary way, and in the central space we see a perfectly ordinary mammoth steel tank connected to perfectly ordinary tubes, each leading to one of the milking stations arranged in a large circle around the tank, at each of which there would ordinarily be a perfectly ordinary cow, but now they are all lying there, the cows, and they do not look ordinary, but it is still a perfectly ordinary milking machine that they simply forgot to switch off when the world ended, and it is still sucking and sucking, the way milking machines ordinarily do, despite the fact that there is nothing coming out of the cows, hasn’t been for quite some time. Underneath their hides they are all empty except for their bones. Old, wrinkled cow costumes with slightly overlarge heads, long after Halloween. Orange slime is oozing out of the tank’s overflow valve. It stinks.
44
On a narrow stone bridge we see a coach, wedged in between waist-high walls. Far below, a brook babbles romantically. We laugh. The vehicle’s gigantic front end, the potholed road before it, on either side the old stone walls.
What an idiot, says Gruber.
We don’t dare to try and squeeze past the coach across the twenty-centimetre-wide wall above the twenty-metre drop. So we smash the windscreen with a piece of the rock jutting out of the slope at the side of the road, between the tarmac and the trees, where year after year the soil is loosened and washed away by the snowmelt.
We wrench the blanket of splintered safety glass out of its frame. We step on the bumper. Tentatively, we reach into the empty rectangle above the radiator grille. Our hands grip the dashboard. Carefully, we pull ourselves up and into the coach. On the floor there are chocolate wrappers and empty bags of crisps and a couple of empty water bottles. In row three we find a light brown scarf. Drygalski stuffs it into his bag. Gruber finds a suede glove in the luggage rack. Just for fun I turn the key in the ignition. With a start, I duck for cover from the loud music – heeeeeeeeey hey baby (uhh, ahh). I quickly turn it back off.
If we hadn’t smashed the windscreen, this would have made a good shelter for the night. Now the wind is whistling in through the open front and out through the open side door in the back. The coach happened to come to a standstill at a point where you could just about open the door and get out one by one. The luggage compartments, by contrast, are inaccessible, wedged in between the dented metal of the chassis and the stone wall of the bridge. We get out. We stop at the rear for a moment. The engine cover is open. We stand for a while and examine the engine. It looks exactly how I would have imagined the engine of a tourist coach to look. We close the cover. There is something reassuring
about the sound.
The narrow road winds its way down the mountain in steep serpentine coils. Farther down it widens out. The valley opens up before us. We can see the first passenger. He is lying in the middle of the road as if placed there for our benefit. His head resting on his rucksack, his arms crossed over his chest. His clothes and face are covered in a thin layer of snow.
The valley gets wider. We are nearing a village. We see more and more people. It seems to me that there are too many to have all fitted into a single coach. But I may be wrong. I don’t count them, and I also have no idea how many people you can fit on a coach.
They are lying on the road, all in a row, as if the one in front had stopped and the rest had lacked the courage to go past him, or the strength, and so they stayed there, in the lee he provided, until he was too cold to stay standing and then they huddled behind the second, the third, the fourth, until at some point the fifth also lay down, on the four others in front of him, slowly, as if on a well-made bed.
They are sitting in the ditch by the side of the road, leaning against the slope. From the road all you see are brightly coloured hats, but from the curvature you can tell that there are still heads underneath them, frozen solid in their dreams. Two are lying on the tarmac, one on top of the other at a right angle, as if at the last moment they had wanted to pray, and for want of a cross had decided to make one out of their own bodies. They are sitting by the side of the road, leaning against the walls of the houses, one resting his head on the other’s shoulder, as if they were simply asleep, peaceful and soft, and white. They are lying in front of closed doors, in open doorways, on doormats and thresholds, on the narrow pavements once filled with passers-by. Under the empty, smashed window of the butcher’s shop. They are leaning against the wall of the village cemetery, they are lying behind it, in rotting wooden coffins beneath heavy tombstones etched with numbers that soon no one will know the significance of. They are lying in the fields around the village, down in the valley, in the wooded slopes, on the cliffs above. Since time immemorial they have grown, withered and decomposed here in this region, blown by the wind all over the country, and the neighbouring countries, the whole planet. They are in the trees. In the grass. In the snow. In the rain that is beginning to fall on the snow.
