Jacko

by Keneally, Thomas

  —I am a traveller. I go back to Bitterfeld so I have the joy of shoulder-colding my asshole brother.

  Durkin noticed Al Bunker dolorously watching Gunter.

  —Sorry, Bunker, said Durkin.

  —Make them reunite anyhow, Jacko suggested. Gunter, if we’re going to fly you across the Atlantic, in a you-beaut airplane, the least you can bloody do for us is to put your arm around your miserable, Stalinist brother for thirty seconds.

  —All relationships soured by Marxist dialectics, said Bunker, more vigorously than I would have expected. Brother torn from brother. I think that’ll fly …

  —We don’t have a bloody choice, Durkin told him. It’s the small hours in Berlin now. The networks are drinking their first coffee and getting ready to start poncing up and down in front of the Wall. As dawn breaks over the-no-man’s land around the Brandenburg Gate, etcetera. God bloody help us.

  —Take him some luxuries from the good old West, Jacko suggested. Corrupt the bastard eh!

  Durkin thought this a good idea and asked Gunter what Gunter’s brother was partial to.

  —Tangerines. And Calvados. That sonnerbitch, Gunter told him.

  —Are you serious?

  For Durkin feared Gunter might be stating his own preferences. Indeed, did this brother exist to have preferences in the first place?

  —I tell you, tangerines. And verdammt Calvados. Communism has rot his brain. But his belly and his liver are all stinking capitalists.

  And so I saw bright girls from the best communication schools in America sent to the Korean stores on nearby corners to buy up tangerines by the crate, or else to liquor stores up on Lexington or Third who might stock Calvados by the crate. Bird-boned Jewish and Italian girls of the finest Westchester families lugged wooden boxes of fruit and liquor into the Perugia, to be told by Durkin that they should deposit them in the limos outside. Vixen Six would export tangerines across the Atlantic! For one could not be sure that they could be procured in Berlin.

  Jacko and I helped in this loading process.

  —Hereya love, Jacko would boom, taking the crates out of delicate, stretched hands. Your parents didn’t send you to Vassar so you could be a wharfie.

  At last Denise arrived back with Gunter’s passport, but was treated coldly by Durkin, as by Dannie and the other producers. She came to Jacko for an explanation.

  —Well love, you picked the wrong bloody Kraut, didn’t you? Don’t let it worry you. You weren’t to know.

  His mood had grown more elevated still now that it was clear that Dannie was certainly coming to Berlin with us.

  A few minutes later we pulled away from the curb, leaving Denise in the doorway of the Perugia with a scowling Durkin. The poor child carried on her forehead that smudge of failure, the peculiar and damaging failure of one whose best is not thought good enough.

  In our fleet of limousines, which swung down beneath the river, taking the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey, we carried the latest printouts. Honecker, spiritual son of Joseph the fearsome Georgian, was still under detention by his own police.

  —The muncher has been munched, Gunter told us.

  I think he meant the biter had been bitten, the oppressor oppressed.

  On visits to Africa – Poland first for the New York Times Color Magazine, then starving East Africa – I had seen Honecker’s security forces running the intelligence systems of tyrants like the Ethiopian Mengistu. I also knew the East Germans had given plenty of free advice to the Polish secret police too – they had written the manual on how to interrogate. So I was as gratified as Gunter that the muncher had been munched.

  Before we were out of the Tunnel, and in what passed for the open air again, Gunter had fallen asleep on Jacko’s shoulder. His breathing was the busy, industrial breathing of the deep drinker.

  —Thank Christ I’m the Wall and not the sodding reunion, Jacko told me.

  We emerged out into the cold swamplands of trans-Hudson: Jersey as despised by Manhattanites. Rendered piquant by our destination, the moist, migrainously yellow and red lights of the commuting traffic seemed less dismal tonight, more jubilant. The headlights behind, the taillights in front, softened by mist, glowered with abnormal promise, lights from the remade world, a sweeter realm. We rolled at last through a gate where a customs officer waved us through and straight out onto the airfield! No immigration officials, no security search, no squinting at departure information. The jet waited for us all with its stairs laid down for our ascent! A telex machine was fitted aboard with – we were sure – further news that distant tyrants had been locked away, had been hoisted on their own weapons of state. Was the century declaring itself at last a fable, a tale for hopeful children, the casting out of dark knights?

  A steward in black tie welcomed us at the top of the stairs, relieving us of the boxes of tangerines and Calvados, promising to stow them. He ushered us all into a cabin designed as a saloon – a bar, banquettes, sofas. Dannie was already collecting more telexes, and I could see Jacko and Gunter prowling amongst the upholstery.

  The American Al Bunker told the steward, I’m charged with getting this damn thing off the ground immediately.

  The steward reassured him. We had clearance. But he wondered would Jacko and Gunter kindly strap themselves into one of the banquettes for take-off, instead of sitting on stools at the bar.

  Dannie briskly distributed more sheets of paper, and everyone but Gunter hungrily read them. Krenz, the new leader of East Germany, was nervously saying that the stability of Europe depended upon the existence of two Germanies. But the drift and the comradely symbolism of events was already against him. Early morning crowds were parading the Ku’damm, embracing Easterners who were coming over through the opened checkpoints. Krenz was calling for an equitable Marxism, a new human-faced socialism. Until tonight, Krenz’s plan had been a sentimental dream even to Westerners. I myself had always imagined it as the only possible happy result: Marxism turning kinder, more like the societies that old Jewish Yahweh buried in Highgate Cemetery had had in mind when he took the trouble to craft Das Kapital. But the Berliners had lost all confidence in dialectics. They wanted to go shopping. Communism had waited too long to turn humane. Its credit had at least been postponed, and perhaps utterly cancelled.

  During take-off, I sat soberly in my banquette, relishing the hour’s joy. I had a sense that the work of East Germany’s interrogators in the dungeons of Africa may have somehow spurred the dawn now breaking in Berlin; may have fed first the great weariness, the Eastern accidie, and now this day’s primal humanity, this great European corroboree.

  A new telex Dannie gave me said that every East Berliner who danced across the border was given a hundred marks for shopping.

  Although the Wall had been opened, it seemed it was meant to stand. One printout said that when a panel of the wall was attacked by enthusiastic Berliners at dawn, the border guards of the East had driven them off with fire hoses. Again, this appeared to me a realistic limit to what could be permitted in a flawed world. After all the Cold War’s occasional flying lead, after the misery and inimical air of that cleft city of Berlin, water seemed almost a kindly riposte to the over-enthusiasm of the Berliners. We were so glibly used to the Wall, so accustomed to looking on it as a perpetual device, that we could almost feel brotherhood with the East Germans with the hoses.

  Dannie approached me now with a sort of frown. It showed that maybe Jacko’s idea of interviewing his favourite and – according to him – clever mate in front of the Brandenburg Gate didn’t generate much zeal in her.

  —You’ve really written for the New York Times Color Magazine?

  I said I had. I told her of Poland. And the Horn of Africa.

  —Well, that’s the sort of thing we want. Maybe a bit more specific. A sense of the human event. Nothing highly political. Observations. Humorous if you can manage it. A bit of history. You worn makeup before?

  She seemed to imply I might need it if I were to come near exciting any of Vi
xen Six’s thirty million viewers.

  Al Bunker was trying to get a not quite coherent Gunter away from the bar and to shoot an interview with him in midair. Bunker hoped people might think Gunter’s mumblings arose from the despair of exile, and from the disabling hope which had now been released upon the earth, in particular upon Germans who lived in Queens.

  Three enormous sofas lined the walls at the rear of the plane, and people were going there to sleep now, leaving Bunker with a silent plane in which he could try to make something out of shifty, unfocused Gunter. Dannie had sprawled herself in the corner where two sofas met: her feet still on the floor, her shoes kicked off. Along the rear bulkhead lay Jacko, his head on her lap. She patted the sofa on her left, against the side wall.

  —There’s room for you here if you want, she told me.

  I felt somehow sundered in two by exhaustion. It seemed to me that my brain was bouncing against the ceiling and my feet were ten yards away, the two connected by one thin wire. I took to the sofa gratefully. There was no room to lie full length, but plenty of room to recline, as Dannie had. Only kings like Jacko, entitled to six and a half feet of upholstery, lay full length.

  I saw that Dannie stroked his head, and was talking softly, though loudly enough so that I could make out what she said. In this context, history’s most joyful and clamorous night, the words didn’t quite make sense. Gradually it became apparent she was talking about something our wild preparation and departure had already wiped from my mind: Sunny Sondquist’s case.

  Slavery, was the word which recurred in Dannie’s mouth. She was listing a sub-bibliography of slave magazines I never knew about.

  —Basically they tell you how to capture, secure and then wreck the mind of your slave. They’re extraordinary publications. This is our glorious system of freedoms we’re about to bring to the East Germans!

  —Who put you onto this stuff? Jacko groaned on the edge of sleep.

  —This psychologist, that new one I found. Young, Jewish, sexy. A damned good talker.

  —Ah, murmured Jacko. Fancy him, do we? It’d make your mother very happy.

  While the rest of us grew somnolent, Dannie still brimmed with information.

  —Jesus, Jacko, he told me stuff that would make even Durkin take a long pull on his beer. Great material as a matter of fact. Did you know, for instance, there exists something called NAMBLA? North American Man Boy Love Association. Its members share information in their published magazine and through their computer network. These apparently respectable men punch up the program, direct some computer mail to someone they’ve met, or someone they’ve talked to before by computer mail, and say, Let’s go out and take some adolescent boy prisoner.

  —Holy Christ, murmured Jacko. Suddenly it’s great to be out of America eh.

  By now we were over the Atlantic, and America’s perverse computer mail lay behind us.

  —There are cases, Dannie continued, where they call up each other and propose enslavement followed by murder. An FBI man punched himself into the network and caught two of them. They asked him to join them in a kidnapping.

  —But what about Sunny? Jacko urged her, anxious to get to that and then sleep. What about women?

  Dannie continued in that soft, forthright way.

  —This psychiatrist agrees with the other guy we had: this is a case of enslavement too. Sunny’s so circumspect at work. She goes obediently home. She runs home in fact, spelling all the way. The only time she turns up to speak to her father, he can’t speak back and she’s with a man, a minder.

  Dannie’s hand on Jacko’s head at last became languid.

  —He lets her go jogging here and there, but then he reclaims her. Classic slave-master stuff. The magazines publish a slave-master contract! How’s that for the land of the free?

  —Bloody appalling, said Jacko drowsily.

  There was something so conjugal about the way they sat trading horrors on the edge of sleep. Was she still offering to wait for him, functionally, and for an exact slice of the night? With a view to improving him, was she still writing her memoir of their friendship? A missionary woman murmuring of slave magazines, she was proving Jacko’s theories of her nation. The pressure of evil, remitting at the Brandenburg Gate, was still building in America’s computer traffic.

  On one of those determined grey mornings characteristic of England, we landed at Stansted near London. Every one of us who rose to disembark carried a refugee greyness in the face. Dannie gathered up our passports and went off to a shed to do business with British immigration and customs about our transit.

  No official intruded on our activities as we heaved equipment and supplies across the tarmac to two smaller chartered aircraft. I remember a crate of Gunter’s brother’s tangerines cutting into my shoulder. Jacko carried a silver case of camera gear in each hand, and had more cylinders and cases clamped in his armpits.

  Halfway across the concrete, on our passage between the newly provided aircraft and the one in which we had flown across the Atlantic, I saw the American journalist Al Bunker arguing with Gunter. Gunter seemed a much better, ruder colour than the American. He gestured with a well-rested man’s vigour. Bunker appealed to us.

  —Says he’s not coming to Berlin.

  —Makes sense, yelled Gunter. Bring my sonnerbitch brother out here to the West. Regent Street, Piccadilly, Soho …

  Al Bunker said, Durkin’s already got the promos running for tonight: The Great German reunion. You’ll just damn-well have to come, Gunter.

  A dark-eyed little fury, Dannie had just returned with our passports. She tore her way into our group with her elbows, and temporarily put the wad of our documents into her purse.

  —Listen, Gunter, we’ve had enough of this fucking nonsense. Are you wanted by the East German police or something? House-breaking? Black market? Drug-pushing? What? What is it?

  Gunter turned his eyes to her.

  —This is sickness with Americans. First thing you think of is guilt, guilt, guilt!

  —Listen to me. Listen. Don’t talk to these men. Don’t talk to Bunker or Jacko. They’re too goddam kindly. Talk to me, fuck you, Gunter!

  —This is not the way I speak to women, said Gunter, making a pious tuck in his mouth. American poor sonner-bitches put up with woman Hitler. Not me. I don’t speak to women like this.

  —You’re talking to this fucking woman that way, you bloody Kraut prevaricator!

  Of course she had picked that bloody up from Jacko. The Australian version of goddam. Bloody. Said to be ancient English By-Our-Lady. The imprecation to the Virgin found now on the lips of another, dangerous woman.

  —You can put me in a hotel in West End, said Gunter. You bring my brother. Sweetness and light is all guaranteed! I take him to Harrod’s and buy him beer.

  It was touching that he believed Dannie might, by this sort of speech, be quietened and forced into retreat. She reached up and grabbed him by the collar of the shirt and shook him with a virulent little fist.

  —Gunter, try to understand this. The fucking Berlin Wall is coming down in Berlin. It’s not coming down in the West End of London. Do you catch the difference? You’ll come to Berlin or I’ll murder you here, right on this runway!

  Then, smoothly, she had produced a little black revolver from her shoulder bag. Her protection against New York assaulters and intruders, brought without hindrance across the Atlantic.

  I was transfixed by the sight of this weapon, and so I think was Al Bunker. But Gunter was not easily terrorized. Jacko could be heard chuckling, of course.

  Gunter asked, Do I have a contract with you? Am I being paid? Does the land of freedom and home of the brave not allow liberty of movement to men named Gunter? Shit in your pistol, lady!

  Jacko put down a camera tripod he was carrying. Hanging from it was one of those rolls of thick silver gaffer-tape which cameramen seemed to use for everything – marking clapper boards, sealing cartridges, providing a point on pavements or floors to show commentators
where they were to walk to and stick each foot. Jacko unhooked this tape with one hand and with the other gave one of those deft, economic punches of the type he probably learned to deliver in his boyhood on Burren Waters. A perfect punch, say, to deliver to troublemakers at the Brahma Breeders Ball. Despite the breadth of my writing, I had led a fairly protected life. I’d rarely seen a pistol produced or a punch like this one thrown. I had very little experience of the way the legs gave way under a blow of this kind or how the interruption of the brain current produced so instant a collapse in so massive a frame.

  Gunter fell sideways, a fall so dead that I feared he would crack his skull against the runway.

  Jacko himself was now a man utterly undelayed by doubt. He bent and ran strands of the silver gaffer-tape around Gunter’s legs. If Al Bunker and I seemed a little abashed at this fast action, Dannie didn’t at all. She attended Jacko, a helpmeet.

  —Get him upright, get him up, get him upright, she exhorted us.

  Mumbling and stupefied, Gunter was hoisted and dragged towards one of the Berlin charters. I wondered about the British officials in the hut across the tarmac. But they must have been reading their Daily Mails. We all helped in the process of toting Gunter. His legs pinioned together and scraping monopedally on the tarmac, he must have looked, if there was anyone to see him, like television talent who had celebrated the historical rarity of this night too well. No one, not even Bunker and Dannie, both of whom came from such a litigious nation, seemed worried about legal action. But just in case, Jacko reassured them.

  —Who’s going to worry about him? He looks so bloody unreliable.

  14

  When, very soon after, our charter was rolling down Stansted’s runway, Jacko ignored the Fasten Seatbelt sign and knelt at Gunter’s feet, unwrapping the silver tape from around them. Gunter’s head jerked backwards against his seat, and he looked down his sallow cheeks, trying to achieve a clear image of Jacko’s moonface gazing up at him. He gagged, and Jacko held a sickbag for him.

  —Feeling better, mate? asked Jacko, folding up the bag functionally when the spasm had passed. I think you had a little cerebral episode there. Bit of a blackout. Ought to watch your consumption of brandy!