Jacko: The Great Intruder

by Thomas Keneally

—Bugger it, said Jacko, and heaved the thing savagely back into its bracket. He was angry now and turned on the house detective.

  —Don’t think I’m paying for the fucking glass eh. You bastards are totally lacking in imagination. There would have been someone just like you counting the bloody eggcups in the Chancellery the day Hitler suicided!

  Raoul stretched his arm up around Jacko’s shoulder.

  —Never mind, I know a fire station … We’ll get you an axe there, my friend.

  Jacko turned away and the rest of us followed him. We collected our overcoats, and found Fartfeatures and Dannie ready to go. The detective and the man in uniform were still waiting for us in the corridor as we emerged. They followed us apologetically to the lift.

  —Who says Stalinism is bloody dead eh? Jacko asked me loudly.

  The security man, perhaps on orders, attempted to follow us into the grillework contraption when it arrived. Jacko could be heard growling, and Dannie told the detective that we wanted to travel down alone. The detective ordered his uniformed man away, and we descended towards the bonfire of freedom and the quest for an axe for Jacko.

  Raoul drove us only a few blocks and stopped by a corner fire station. It was an old building, either a restored one or one which had survived the bombing hecatomb of World War II – the Imperial Eagles of Kaiser Wilhelm were still on the stone facade. Raoul said he should talk to them himself, and was about to wander in amongst the red engines, when Jacko, growing reflective, grabbed me by the upper arm.

  —A jackhammer eh, he told me. A bloody jackhammer and a compressor.

  Dannie had begun snorting and looking at her watch.

  —We’ve got to get out there, Jacko.

  Jacko turned to Raoul.

  —Ask the firemen where we can hire a compressor? A frigging compressor and a jackhammer. You know, a compressor. You know, jackhammer. Dur-dur-dur-dur!

  And Jacko did a mime to illustrate these new instruments he sought. Raoul went in, and a few firemen appeared in half-uniform and old-fashioned voluminous boots. There was a discussion and Raoul came running out and threw himself into the car.

  —Right, he said.

  We surged away, Raoul driving frantically. Jacko comforted Dannie.

  —Give us half an hour eh love.

  We drove south through residential streets – old pre-war houses in their own gardens, Bauhaus apartment blocks, a platz with a statue of Goethe and another with a statue of Bach. Beyond the metal fence of a new building site we found at last a yard devoted to excavation equipment hire. Yellow compressors stood around in muddy ground in the moist afternoon. Lights already shone in a prefabricated office.

  Again Raoul made the approaches, the heavy man behind the counter speaking leadenly, in a way that gave us little hope.

  —He wants to know what you need it for, said Raoul.

  —Tell him we’re renovating a house, Jacko suggested. In Tiergarten or somewhere flash. We want to knock a wall out.

  There were problems about our not having an account with the hire company, and pages of documentation to be filled out.

  —Time’s wasting, guys! Dannie kept crying out. Seventy minutes to air time.

  —It’s going to be worth it, Jacko reassured her.

  The man laughed and shook his head when Jacko gave his address as the Kempinski Hotel. Neither were any of Dannie’s credit cards acceptable. But Jacko was, of course, in a position to make large deposits of cash.

  In the end, the paperwork was done and the hire company man telephoned for one of the staff truck-drivers to drive the thing to the site Jacko proposed. As we all stood in the cold yard, Raoul had to make the truck-driver more accurately aware of the location. And at last, in this man, he found someone who would take a few rolls of Basil Sutherland’s deutschmarks, pocket them and haul a compressor off behind us towards the Brandenburg Gate.

  I remember the divine berserkness growing in Raoul’s limousine. Dannie, Jacko and Raoul were hooting at the stratagem by which they would subvert not simply the Wall but the harbinger-of-history gravity of the chief commentators. Even Fartfeatures was caught up, animated, ready to shoot. He and Jacko and Dannie discussed camera angles and I was surprised to hear him agree to mount the Wall with Jacko. The truck and compressor rumbled behind.

  Jacko said, I used a jackhammer when I had a road job as a student.

  I didn’t know whether that was the truth, since he seemed to have worked in radio and television since his childhood. Perhaps he was just trying to reassure Fartfeatures.

  —I won’t knock off such a big chunk, Jacko promised, that you’ll go with it …

  But Fartfeatures, suddenly a risk-taker for his craft, seemed willing to countenance even that.

  Police still formed a loose cordon at the rear of the great Brandenburg Gate enthusiasm, keeping vehicles – except for the media – away from the mêlée.

  —Tell them, said Jacko, the compressor’s needed for power generation.

  Raoul got out, attended by a very serious Jacko with a straightened tie and a wallet full of currency in his breast pocket in case that was needed. The professional-looking, authoritative Dannie also strung along, and only Fartfeatures and myself were left in the vehicle. I saw Raoul explaining and persuading as a policeman frowned, and Jacko remained sombre while Dannie displayed the press cards she had collected for us at the airport.

  At one stage, the policeman obviously asked who was in the car, because I heard Dannie trill, Our commentator and our cameraman.

  And to my amazement, the policeman nodded and let them return to the car. We were allowed to roll through with the truck and compressor in our wake. The reasons that machine itself was let in are still a mystery for me. I know what Raoul told the cop, but I couldn’t see why the cop would accept it. I’d always believed the World War II propaganda which said that the Germans were creatures of manic efficiency and a sense of good order. How did Raoul persuade them to admit a lord of chaos with a compressor in tow into the heart of the great Germanic ferment, the magic acreage by the Gate?

  The crowd likewise stepped aside in what looked like wilful agreement with Jacko’s intent. Snug in under the Wall, we found our satellite truck.

  Dannie had me rigged up, the earphone in place, the mike on my tie, and she and I discussed what I could say.

  —Latest news is, she briefed me, they’re saying Krenz will resign during the night.

  Jacko had no time for me. He was talking to the compressor man through Raoul and muttering to Fartfeatures and pointing up to the Wall.

  Dannie said, Tell them to expect something amazing.

  Durkin asked in my ear, You fine to run, mate?

  —Yes.

  —You first, minute and a half. Then a commercial break, and Jacko on the Wall. Okay?

  —Okay.

  I wondered how I could say anything coherent even for a modest ninety seconds. The energy of this chaotic event weighed on all our senses, obviously even on the cops’ senses, and had somehow to be defused.

  —Sixty seconds to go, Dannie told me.

  In front of me, Fartfeatures raised his camera, and I saw the cable handler lassoing coils of cable at his feet ready for the assault on the Wall itself.

  I don’t know exactly what I told the viewers, but I could hear Durkin and Dannie applauding me in my ear. I did tell them to expect amazing gestures from people at the Wall, perhaps even from Jacko, who having trespassed over every American barrier was now about to take on the ultimate one. My segment now ended, I was briskly thanked and reduced to what I most wished to be: a spectator.

  By the compressor, the truckdriver stood smiling, ready to press all its rowdy buttons once Jacko and Fartfeatures were positioned. Like all the Berliners, I yowled rabidly as Jacko, wired for sound and having got the signal from Durkin and Dannie, walked up to the wall, the inert jackhammer cradled in his arms, the slash of a larrikin grin beneath his porkpie hat, his tie awry from the violence of events.

  As Jacko
handed the implement to Raoul and myself to hold, it seemed that these waves of enthusiasm lifted him onto the Wall, hands reaching down from where a number of other young Germans were standing, other hands pushing his great arse and thighs from below.

  Soon he was seated on top, and then stood tentative but massive, arms out for balance, and found with a smile that there was enough room up there to support him in an upright position. He embraced a red-haired German youth, and their mutual breath went up in the one cold cloud.

  Raoul and I and the truck driver hoisted the jackhammer, which seemed coated with an amalgam of oil and mud, to others up there, who delivered it into Jacko’s hands. Receiving its weight, Jacko seemed to over-balance, and I wondered whether we should be concerned about how he would keep his footing up there. But he steadied himself, and then, with legs carefully spread, raised the jackhammer in both arms towards the crowd, whose frenzy was thereby, if possible, increased. Like the Berliners, Dannie and I too screamed our applause as, theatrically, he tested the point of the drill with a thumb, and seemed to conclude that he had brought the right tool. Then he lowered it point-first and ceremonially to the top of the Wall. In the posture of a road worker, he yelled, Boys and girls, we’re going to improve your view to the East!

  Dannie and I could hear these words. God knows how many of the crowd heard or needed to hear them.

  With both thumbs on the buttons, he called to the compressor man.

  —Start her up, Fred!

  The compressor’s mechanical rage began. Yet the cheering seemed in no way suppressed by the racket of the machine. Somehow, despite the vibrations, he remained in place and in command.

  Fartfeatures first filmed Jacko from below, hammering away, and then was himself hoisted onto the wall, and his camera lifted behind him, still running as in the tradition of Morning Manhattan, the lock on its shooting button. I remember my hand upon its metal. Topside, Fartfeatures accepted it in one movement and aimed it at Jacko.

  Young Germans atop the Wall, who did not want to fall along with the masonry Jacko hoped to bring down, were keeping their distance from him, clapping and whistling. Fartfeatures, however, edged bravely close, and I revised my view of him.

  It is a truism to say there is no narcotic like the ecstasy of a crowd, and of all crowds, the political crowd, the crowd that thinks it is on the edge of the answer, is the most exhilarated. Though the very word exhilarated is a pale term for the primal joy, for the frantic sense of liberation of a crowd which has the same true north, whose brains from the lizardy cortex to the angelic reaches of the cerebrum are all magnetized in the one direction.

  And then the happiness with which the crowd greets the man or woman who owns the right gesture, the gesture which is the model or niftiest metaphor for their frenzy! The man tonight was Jacko and the metaphor was the jackhammer.

  Below, Dannie and Raoul and I and all the witnesses made a semicircle leaving a space into which debris was free to fall. A slab of brick and cement soon did so. Jacko himself, a giant holding his suddenly quietened jackhammer one-handed, picked up, with the other hand, a section of the wall which had come loose but had been small enough to stay up there. Jacko raised this, an executioner raising the head of the devourer.

  —Look, he yelled, the bloody Wall’s hollow.

  I could see him collect himself, remember that he was on television and that he must foreswear the normal profanities. But it was unnecessary for him to restrain himself. He was such a figure now, such a focus of all our ecstasy, that he had transcended the proprieties others practised in this po-faced medium.

  —This symbol of tyranny and division, he said for the camera’s sake, is hollow at the core. Its contents nothing but air.

  Just to demonstrate, he dropped the jackhammer into the hollow of the wall to its handles. The agility of this in particular was a delight and derived more from Stammer Jack’s province than from the normal endowments of Vixen Six employees. And of course the crowd bayed. Jacko had come all the way from Burren Waters to be, for half an hour, the nub of the new Germany. I yelled for him, too, beside a howling Dannie. His primal imagination had made votaries of us. I had my arm around tough Dannie. I must admit that Lucy was forgotten. But then, so was everything else.

  Jacko went on applying himself. More masonry fell. Fartfeatures backed up the Wall, not once seeming to look behind him. You could tell he was saying to himself, I’ve found something worth the trouble. He was no longer the freelance cameraman on casual rates. He was taking the footage all the others would have most wanted to take; the footage the networks would at first avoid showing because they hadn’t shot it themselves; the footage which, paying Basil Sutherland, they would have at last to buy rights to use in every current affairs program ever likely to be made on this exultant night.

  The gap hectic Jacko made was first three feet, then five, then seven across. It had not achieved a depth of more than a few feet however. Until now. Jacko, in his porkpie hat and overcoat and cradling the jackhammer in his arms, descended into the gap itself and, with one foot on the eastern casing, another just about beside it on the western, began further subversion there. God, how we cheered now, more like a howl of acclaim. Dannie was weeping in my arms, and Raoul was bleary with delight at these passengers he had been fortunate enough to pick up in his limo.

  In the end a young German, hoisted up there by colleagues, approached Jacko from behind. He nudged Jacko’s shoulder. He was claiming the jackhammer. The justice of the boy’s demand was apparent to all of us. Jacko took his thumbs off the buttons and spaciously, without hesitation, reached the thing behind him to the young man. As he did, I could see the gloss of a huge sweat on Jacko’s face.

  The young German took the jackhammer and applied his thumbs to its rubber buttons, laughing as his shoulders jolted. Jacko sat, jumped off the Wall and landed heavily amongst our upraised hands.

  There had been some press photographers in the crowd who had shot Jacko at work, but now everyone there recognized this German boy with the jackhammer as the sublimest image of the late century, and the night crackled with the spiky intensity of their flashlights.

  The media would not give any credit to one of their own for the best and most anarchic picture of the end of the Wall. The New York Times would say that young Germans had brought the compressor up there. The same mistake was gratefully repeated by the television networks.

  That night was Jacko’s apotheosis, his transfiguration. No one of us would forget it, and of course everyone who saw it would forever after use it as an adjustment to anything snide that might be said of him.

  We made other television later that night and at mid-morning the next day, but nothing touched what Jacko had done with the jackhammer.

  If he wasn’t already, I suppose that night he was Dannie’s lover. For going home to the Kempinski, we all clapped his shoulders and caressed him, and in our hysteric condition it might have just about seemed the right thing. Fartfeatures bought him cognac at his own expense, I ordered for him a ninety-eight-dollar Riesling from room service. God knows what actually went on in his room, in that prevailing air of nothing being too good for him.

  I noticed as we all sat drinking on a commercial jet on the way home, and as new editions of magazines with the picture of the young German with the jackhammer accumulated around us, that Jacko never seemed to find any inequity in all this.

  —We make up the news, he told me one afternoon. So we can’t be part of it, can we eh?

  It seemed that to him the doing of it, being seen by citizens and peers to do it, was more important than to be credited with it. He took a paternal pride in the quickly enough famous picture of the young man on the Wall.

  —What I don’t understand, he told me, is how I stayed up there so long. I mean, there was room, but just enough eh. Add in the jackhammer and I should have fallen. Except I knew I bloody wouldn’t. I bloody knew it.

  There was a kind of bush gallantry in this. It was a better story, more styl
ish in his own terms, if, at the end of everything, his place in it went unrecorded and frankly declared as being beyond his normal powers or pretensions.

  Full of wine, I rose in my seat on the plane and recited in Jacko’s honour the words which generally were found on Jacko’s lips.

  —And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise

  Their torn and rugged battlements on high,

  Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze

  At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,

  And where around The Overflow the reed beds sweep and sway.

  To the breezes, and the rolling plains are wide,

  The man from Snowy River is a household word today,

  And the stockmen tell the story of his ride.

  A steward interrupted me.

  —Excuse me, sir. The fasten seatbelt sign is illuminated.

  15

  From the transcendence of Jacko on the wall, I returned to New York and my Wednesday night graduate writing class. Fourteen writers, nearly all of them capable of publishing fiction if they could stand the ignominy and disappointment of it all. They were two-thirds women, and they wrote about the intimate and the domestic: post-AIDS love in New York; the business of finding a good man in a poisoned city; the raising of children; marital ennui. Their heroes were Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, and someone had got hold of them at a young age and told them that they must all write like a New Yorker short story. Considering the difference in our taste, we got on well. I liked to tell them that if I had one virtue as a fiction teacher it was that I gave all genres equal credit. I urged them to do the same. You never knew when a genre would come ravening out of the bush and claim you for its own.

  They didn’t believe it though. Their range was very nearly the awful things mother and father had done, and then the perfidy of lovers. Of Dickens’s trilogy of terrors, hunger and want had been largely taken care of, and love remained, unappeasable under any political regime.

  In one of the students’ stories, a woman betrayed by men of average fallibility meets a Persian-American in a Soho bar. He is a gentle soul, but he wants to suspend her in an apparatus designed for men who like to see women swinging powerless from the ceiling. He is embarrassed to ask, but would she consider it? More conventional males have adequately traduced her; she consents. In mid-suspension though, as she gyrates in her captive state, he’s overwhelmed by the shame of his perversion and goes off and reads American Track and Field. Suspended between his desire and self-loathing, she swings in an empty room. It’s a poisonously accurate image, a wonderful New York tale.