by James Hawes
Let freedom ring from every molehill of Holland, and from every mountainside of Austria, let freedom ring.
Because we had a deal. And when this deal is honoured all of Europe’s children will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old song, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’
67: Tutus for Party Bosses
I stepped blindly from the stage on wings of applause, plucking and draining another glass of beer from another delighted Heidi without so much as pausing, strode manfully up to the double doors and walked straight through them and into the corridor, where I knew Panke was waiting.
Well, I tried to. But God had other plans. He had made the doors open the other way.
—Agh! God …
I came to my senses on the floor, my specless eyes struggling to focus, and found myself looking up at many unknown, worried faces and one well-known one. I watched the decision form in his eyes.
—Doktor, come to my arms, cried Panke. In a second I was indeed in them, and, for the first time ever, as an equal. —What a team we make, is it not true, my friends? How shall I follow him? he laughed. —I think I shall come to help you give your paper in Oxford after all, my little Doktor. It will be fun, no?
—God, yes, Heiner, I mean …
Panke suddenly leaned back slighty from his hug and his nostrils twitched.
—What is that perfume you are wearing, little Doktor?
For a second I was about to tell him, but I held the floodgates shut. Perhaps later, when we were alone, we would drink and I would talk.
—Oh, it’s just, it’s called Gunsmoke, I think. Um, Hugo Boss Gunsmoke.
—Not bad, he nodded, then clapped me powerfully and publicly on the back before proceeding into the wall of cheers beyond the door to the big hall.
The fat man beamed at me and bowed his head slightly. The tall young man was obviously having great difficulty not springing to attention at my every glance. The women smiled their lip-glossed smiles. And in my head, that noise of applause simply continued as I was passed now from smile to smile, handed from womanly clasp to manly shake to comradely clap on the shoulder, as if on a production line of respect and admiration.
Beer appeared on demand. After so many years spent steadfastly but hopelessly defending the encircled trenches of my self-regard against the ceaseless attacks of age, failure and social decline, it felt wonderful. Better than wonderful. It felt like life itself.
It felt like love.
Christ, I was living in the wrong country! Being a university lecturer still meant something here! And in Germany you were judged by what you did and stood for, not by the accent you said it all in and whether or not you had sash bloody windows.
I mean, why not just up sticks and come here and make Sarah and the boys come too? For the price of our foul little terrace in SE11 we could come here to Dresden, where I would see Heiner all the time and have this amazing status and all these smiling friends, and buy a vast flat with …
My God, Panke was coming to Oxford in person! I swung on my heel fairly successfully and, freshly glowing as I was with the hieratic nimbus of my bodyhug from Panke, addressed the tall young man with a certain curtness.
—Heiner is coming to my meeting at Oxford. I need to announce this great event to the English media. Your BlackBerry please? He obeyed with the speed of a man who had a simple, innocent love for orders, whether giving or taking them. I had so often emailed the European editor of The Paper in vain that the hallowed address was by now imprinted on my mind. It was one of the few possible conduits of my salvation and I would know it by heart even on my deathbed. Within two minutes, no more, I had blipped off my tidings in appropriate fashion:
Heiner Panke, founder and leader of Germany’s anti-capitalist pro-European DEBB (17 per cent last time in Dresden + tipped to beat 25 per cent regionally in upcoming emergency elections) has just confirmed that he will be in person @ my plenary address on his work @ the major Oxford peergroup conference (8–9 Dec, St John’s Coll). You are heartily invited to interview him (and indeed me). (Dr) John Goode.
I then copied the body of the message (no cc-ing for such vital stuff!) and inserted it into a fresh email to Newsnight. Well, one hardly forgets the address of a national news programme to which one did, after all, contribute substantially not that long ago! To this version I simply added, after my name, the words Major Contributor, ‘Checkpoint Charlie Checks Out’, broadcast 5 May 1990, just in case the editorial team had changed over the past few years and were no longer quite sure who I was.
—A most useful device, I nodded, as I handed back the BlackBerry to the grateful young man and plunged into another beer. My mind was spinning with a new world of real possibilities. My name might get into The Paper at last. Maybe on to Newsnight again. Would having been twice on Newsnight allow me to describe myself as a regular contributor to it on my CV? My God, if I played my cards right, according to Eamon’s instructions …
—Herr Doktor, you were magnificent!
I refocused my eyes to make them look outwards at the world, rather than inwards at my sunlit future, and found myself in front of a particularly attractive woman of about forty who was looking at me in a particularly attracted way.
—Merciful lady. I bowed ever so slightly.
—You spoke for us all. You know what we all thought when the Wall came down? We thought it would be the same, only better. The things that were bad about this place were so simple and so obvious: the Stasi, the border guards, the Party. And they were finished! For years we had heard nice people from the West saying that there were good things about the East: education, culture, no unemployment. We thought it was so easy, so clear. We would get your freedom to travel where we wanted to go and say what we wanted to say, but we would obviously keep the good things we had. My friends in the theatre and I would be able to do all the amazing and experimental work the DDR hadn’t let us do. No more dancing ballet in tutus for Party bosses!
—Ah, you are a ballet artiste? I smiled, as if culturally impressed. Visions of leg warmers and physiologically unlikely sexual positions zipped for a second behind my eyes. Well, for God’s sake, what do you expect? Also, I tried not to giggle, because I found myself thinking treacherously: I know, Frau glorified dancing girl, you thought they’d keep up all your grants and maintain five huge state-funded theatres in Berlin with a hundred full-time technicians in each of them, except that now you’d be subsidised for doing Romeo and Juliet naked and walking about on stilts in nappies for no apparent reason with people playing the saxophone badly.
—I am indeed a ballet artiste, she intoned graciously.
—But now I stage shows to celebrate the launch of a new Mercedes or the opening of a new conference centre. And I think I am lucky to get the work, and everyone I used to know is desperate for me to take them on – dancers, musicians, actors, designers. And I always tell the pretty young ones to make sure they smile at the board members.
—Terrible, I nodded, looking secretly at her high-heeled shoes and fabulous ankles. I could see us now, clinging together, her legs wrapped right around me, like two survivors in the rubble of some vast war. She would understand.
—Sorry? I said, rematerialising from this happy vision to discover that I had completely failed to hear her last question. I smilingly signalled that it was simply the noise in the foyer that had made me miss her words of wisdom, and leaned a little closer still. From here, once again using my lecturer‘s skills, I could look right down the front of her dress while maintaining eye contact.
—You did not bring your wife with you? Heiner said he has seen her photograph. He says she is very pretty. Now, fluency in a foreign language can easily get you into trouble. So it really wasn’t my fault. I intended to tell my ballet dancer simply: This time (i.e. for once) I’ve left (i.e. not brought) the (i.e. my) wife in England. However, perhaps through excessive long-term and short-term tiredness, or rather too much drink, or a slight nat
ural rustiness in my German due to having not been able to get away for ages because of my beloved kids, or maybe all of the above plus the facts, for example, that I had just experienced a moment of triumph and that it was a very long time since an alpha woman looked at me like that, I somehow made a tiny little slip of grammar and intonation so that it actually came out as: This time (i.e. at last) I’ve left (i.e. dumped) that woman in England.
I would have immediately corrected myself, no doubt, except that a small and intense man of my own age now plucked daringly at my sleeve. I turned and frowned, but he spoke before I could object to his intrusion, and he obviously knew that his words would do the trick.
—Grundmann. Herr Panke’s press secretary. Responsible also for his tour diary.
—Of course, I said graciously. This little creep might well be the one planning Panke’s trip to Oxford next week, so I had better keep in with him. —You will excuse me a moment, merciful lady?
—Naturally. Until later.
—Until later. So, Herr Grundmann?
68: The Global Locusts
While I let this pathetic but perhaps important functionary have his ration of face time, I grabbed yet another beer from yet another Heidi and kept a careful side-eye on the dancer, to make sure she did not escape or give up on me.
—Herr Doktor?
—Mmm? Oh, yes, sorry?
—Or rather, Herr Colleague. I may call you that, for I too am doctor of German history.
—Splendid, splendid.
—Herr Panke tells me that you are speaking on his works to the Conference of British and Irish University Teachers of German next week.
—Yes, actually. And Heiner has just told me that he’ll be there too.
—I am currently finalising arrangements.
—Of course. The English press will all be there.
—I did not know. That is good. Now, Herr Colleague, I ask you to use your influence, substantial as it must be, to get my own paper a hearing at the conference.
—Your paper? Well, you’d have to write to Professor Bill Adams at Midlands University to see if he can slot you in at the last minute. Slot, as in get you in, I mean, not as in shoot you, ha ha!
—Sorry, Herr Colleague?
—Nothing, nothing.
—As you wish. But you would support my application, Herr Colleague?
—In principle, of course, as a friend of Heiner‘s, I mean, not that I have much influence.
—My paper is important.
—I’m sure it is. This beer is excellent, isn’t it?
—As you know, Herr Colleague, so-called historical truth is always just myth, the story written by the victors.
—Of course, of course.
I was looking at the dancer and hardly listening to him. I felt that very soon I was just going to be drawn across the floor without any intention on my part, as if on sexually magnetic roller skates, towards her. I looked down openly at her strong, tanned legs. She saw me looking, and did not mind that she had done so. I plucked another foaming beer from the tray of a passing, pigtailed cowgirl and raised it privately to her. Christ, I could almost feel my hand stroking up her stocking already. And slowly the knickers slide aside and …
—I particularly admired the way you brought up the global locusts of financial capital.
—Mmm? Ah yes, yes, them.
Yes. There was no doubt. She wanted me to go over to her. From inside the hall I heard a roar of outraged agreement at something Panke had said. God, this was more like it! Excitement, drink, political radicalism and knowing that at the end of the evening you were, as Heiner‘s sidekick, odds-on for a fast, uncomplicated and indeed quite romantic …
—Why do we allow our lives to be run by these faceless players of the markets, who dwell amongst us, yet with no loyalty to any country or community?
—Why indeed? Well, I’m glad you liked my speech, do please send me your paper right away, I’m looking forward very much to taking out our enemies, ha ha, with Heiner next week, perhaps you’ll be there too? Now, if you’d just excuse me a moment, I promised to join the lady in order to discuss the lamentable situation regarding state support for serious art and culture in our brave new free-market world, and …
—And of course we know who the global locusts really are, is it not so, Herr Colleague?
—Sorry?
As he said global locusts again, he raised his forefinger to form a hook which he stroked, as subtly and secretly and unmistakably as a mason’s handshake, over the entire length of his nose.
I could not move. I could no longer see the dancer. All I could fix on were the bubbles slowly rising to the surface of my beer.
For a greasy second I was back in the working men’s club, during the Strike, with Hubby Huck the Racist Bastard on the television and roars of laughter all around me, drinking up and not objecting; or in a crowded bar in working-class Madrid on the night a gang of terrorists almost killed the elected British Prime Minister, raising a glass and cheering along; or in the Irish pub on the night some twisted fantasist suggested, whilst tuning his guitar for another ballad to which I planned to harmonise, that the IRA’s Remembrance Day massacre was probably the work of British Intelligence, nodding away and ordering another Guinness.
Once again, I felt the icy certainty that if I had any guts I would just walk out right now, away from my comrades and the beer and the music and warmth and the life and the ever-present chance of unthinking sex. That I must change my life and be alone.
Probably, I had been mistaken.
Surely?
Look, the man might well just have had an itchy nose.
People can have itchy noses, for God’s sake.
Or it was some complex and ironic joke which I had imperfectly understood due to my German being good but not perfect.
Yes, that would be it.
Ridiculous to even think of leaving.
What? Offend Heiner? Desert my beer and my triumph and my new friend with the great legs? For what? For the cold lonely night?
And all just because I thought, thought mind you, that I might have detected some little unpleasantness in one of Heiner‘s many supporters? Absurd.
I was tired and I hadn’t really been paying him my full attention, and he had an itchy nose or had been making a joke and I’d had a few drinks and perhaps I was a bit guilty about having lied to Sarah about where I was, not that anything was going to happen, and anyway, yes, I had almost certainly just imagined the whole thing.
Fine.
I smiled vaguely at the little man, raised my glass to him and turned to go back to my dancer. But he held openly on to my arm. I looked down at his hand.
—Herr Colleague, you will understand why I need your help. We must stand for the truth!
—Of course. Now, I really must …
—Our opponents will stoop to any lie, just as Bush and Blair invented the lie, which we now all know to have been a lie, of their so-called weapons of mass destruction in order to justify their imperialist war.
—Certainly, I said impatiently, and tried to free my arm. But his little hand was strong.
—, Roosevelt and Stalin, iJust as their forefathers, Churchillnvented a far greater lie to justify the perverted, the impossible, the insane alliance of British imperialism, Stalinist Bolshevism and American free-market capitalism. What possible common interest could these forces have? Only one, Herr Colleague! Then, as now, it was this: the prevention of a strong and united Europe under the natural and inevitable leadership of Germany! Then, as now, they needed a story, a grand lie, to justify to the world their criminal and genocidal actions, to ensure that Europe would stay helpless and that Russia’s millions of Jews could at last, as they had planned for years, pour forth from Russia under the disguise of discrimination, with the sympathy of the whole world.
—Sorry?
—Exactly! The whole world was made to feel sorry for the poor Jews. So that they could occupy the Arab lands, as required by the plan of
the Jewish oil millionaires of Jew York! The final masterstroke of that most cunning and tenacious of races! Oh yes, one cannot refuse them admiration, Herr Colleague. To have tricked the entire world! For, of course, only one lie was great enough to do their work, the greatest lie in world history, the only lie which could enable them to destroy Germany and hence enslave Europe whilst at the same time providing the excuse for the founding of the criminal state of Israel! The grand lie of the Holocaust! Herr Colleague? Where are you going? Herr Colleague?
—You must excuse me, Herr Grundmann, I’ve just remembered, I’ve got to, um, call my wife, I’ll just, I’m afraid we Englishmen aren’t used to such good German beer. Please tell Heiner that I am very tired from my journey and, and, that I’ll of course see him next week, but that I’m, ah, yes, merciful lady, my apologies, I …
69: Straight Down the Line
I stumbled on watery knees from the sports complex and into the grey tower blocks of outer Dresden. Out of the rain and the dark, there was a glow in the black sky that could only be the halo of floodlights from the restored glories of the city centre. I headed for this beacon of hope, but no sooner had I set out towards it than the glow seemed to darken, to grow red, and for a terrifying moment I thought I was heading not into light but into the firestorm.
There was no doubt.
I was going to have to withdraw from the Oxford conference.
No more VIP.
Which meant no more late and unexpected career break.
Which meant forget ever, repeat ever, reviewing for The Paper, or being on the box, or any of the other dreams that even now, at forty-five, allowed me to kid myself that this life, this salary, this house was not actually the life yet, my only life, the rest of it.
I had no choice. My brain might be steaming with beer, but on this point there was only a merciless clarity. As I staggered through the night, scarcely seeing cars, trams, pedestrians, I was already mentally composing the email that I intended to send from my hotel (assuming I could find my hotel):
