A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  the prisoner to his cell, I want to see

  the British consul, I am ending

  this interview now and

  returning the prisoner

  to his

  cell.

  I was in the police station for three days. I was questioned a number of times. Once I answered every question with the sentence ‘I want to see the British consul.’ If they did not think I was a little boy, they should have stopped playing childish games with me. The interview was no shorter than any of the others. My questioners betrayed no impatience. All that time I had the sense that I was walking on a very thin piece of ice. These few holding cells were the thin surface above a vast and unknowable darkness. There was nothing in my cell that could not be found in a similar cell in the West, even in England. But I knew that if I were to be moved from this holding cell to another part of the system I would be in something that did not exist in the West. I had, previously, dismissed the existence and extent of that punitive system as lies, propaganda, invention by capitalists. I had laughed when people had used the phrase The Gulag Archipelago – the first time I heard it, or saw it on the front of a paperback, I didn’t know what either substantive word meant. Now I knew. It was strange that I knew, because I had no evidence at all for it. The only evidence I had was that the British consul did not arrive.

  I grew very calm.

  I thought things through.

  I hardly thought at all about Percy Ogden. He might be in the same building, or he might be somewhere else.

  I thought about justice, and about Joaquin.

  I thought, too, about Joaquin’s father, and the cell he must have died in.

  I thought about them a lot. I had an immediate explanation when, on the fourth morning, I seemed to hear something that the guards could not possibly know or recognize or imitate. It had certainly come from my own thoughts, a hallucination. Such things happened to prisoners held in solitude. I should grow used to them.

  The door of the cell was opened, with much clanking and the confident banging of bolts. A guard stood there. I did not recognize him.

  ‘Follow me, please,’ he said. I was aware as I moved that I smelt bad. I had not changed my clothes for some days, though I had been given the opportunity to shower twice. I followed him. Instead of turning towards the interview room, we continued into the corridor that ran by the office space. None of those working there looked up. They saw this regularly. The officer opened a door with a large iron key. I was at something like a reception area. On the other side of the desk stood a man. He was exactly the same size as me, exactly the same physical shape. He was examining a form laid out on the desk top in front of him, frowning.

  ‘Herr Joaquin Anibal Goriategy,’ the guard said.

  Joaquin looked up. His gaze met mine. He shook his head, tightening his lips.

  ‘I can’t understand this form at all,’ he said. ‘I am what you call your deus ex machina. I am the cavalry, you know what I mean? One thing, though. I can’t remember any of my German and I tell you, Spike, this is what I cannot understand. You have to look and explain before you sign. This is all your stuff, yes, okay?’

  As it happens, it was not all my stuff. There was a ring missing. I expect now the son of an ex-police officer of the German Democratic Republic wears my father’s gold ring on nights out in newly renovated Weimar. (Perhaps I am being unfair: perhaps my father’s ring sits in an envelope in a filing cabinet in some archive somewhere, detached from any explanation.) But I did not notice that the ring was missing. If I had noticed, I would not have cared. Idiotically, I started to shake Joaquin’s hand. Something about his name, offered days ago in a Reisebüro, had triggered an official response from the structures of power, and not a hostile one, either. The invitation to his father as an honoured guest of the state had not been forgotten. The name Joaquin Anibal Goriategy had been recorded years ago, though then it had referred to a small boy. It had summoned a friend of the state with some swiftness. He had come to get me. I was safe. I had no idea what I thought any more. What I believed. Ogden could wait until the interrogators got round to calling the British consul. My hand-shaking went on and on. In a moment Joaquin put his second hand on mine, to calm it.

  ‘What is this?’ he said.

  ‘Herr Goriategy,’ the officer behind the desk said impatiently.

  ‘I don’t want to join the Labour Party,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to join the Labour Party. I just don’t want to. Joaquin, I want to join. I want to join Labour. I don’t want to do this any more. I don’t want to.’

  ‘What’s this? My man, the democratic parliamentary socialist? You want to, or you don’t want to?’

  ‘I’ve got to say—’

  ‘Not now. We go home. Is that all right with you? You got everything? This thing all right to sign, okay?’

  When we were outside the police station, it was raining. There were clouds and sun. I had forgotten that was possible. I had had no sense of the weather, or anything outside, for days. I was dazzled by light and by the idea that water could flow from the heavens, falling wherever it chose. Nobody had ordered it or arranged it. The police station was in a central part of the historic town. It looked beautiful. All around it beautiful just was. The lime trees shone with rain in the sunlight. There was a heavenly smell, as perfume on a woman is meant to smell. I would love Weimar for ever, for the sake of this moment, and I would never come here again. The most beautiful thing of all was that it was over. Joaquin had come to fetch me home. Everything would be all right from now on. I clutched my passport. I hardly listened as Joaquin explained what we were going to do, the route we were going to take to get home again. As he went on talking, he began to smile.

  Part three

  I have lived a quiet life. My name is unknown, and I have not tried to achieve any public status. The quietness, and the overlooked corner I have lived my life in, was in part of my choosing. When I look back at the last thirty years, its avoidance of the limelight strikes me as having a moral quality. I would not sum up my existence in the priggish sentence at the end of Middlemarch. I am not somebody whose life was made up of ‘unhistoric acts’, as George Eliot calls them, because there are no such lives. All acts are historic, in the sense of belonging to history, contributing to history. My contributions, however, were anonymous. I did not publish what I wrote; I did not make speeches in Parliament, argue in Cabinet; I did not hunger after fame. I had been at school with those who did. I was that familiar figure in a group, the forgotten friend. Nobody knows the teacher in a provincial university with a pile of marking on his conscience; nobody knows who writes the slogans on the wall of the Territorial Army headquarters, unless they get caught.

  My life has, in part, been quiet because of necessity. My doctoral thesis was interrupted for a year and a half, some of which I spent undergoing treatment in seclusion. I returned to my studies only when I was quite well, and I finished my thesis. My examiners were as kind and sympathetic as my nurses had been, most of them. My work was excellent, they said. I was turned down for every academic job I applied for. That gap of eighteen months always had to be accounted for, and always proved decisive. The faculty I had studied in gave me some teaching work. After some years, they appointed me to a permanent job. Five years ago, I was promoted to senior lecturer, where I expect to remain until I retire. I have published almost nothing. Nevertheless people like me have their uses. I return my marking on time. The individual assessments I make have never been queried by any external examiner. I am appreciated, as far as my existence merits appreciation. As the writer I love best in the world has said, the rule is that some people eat figs, and others sit and watch.

  And perhaps we have eaten some figs, in any case. We are not old farts. We keep up with stuff. We like an argument. We were both expelled from the local LGBT group, as it now calls itself, for shouting at a man in a dress who called himself a lesbian. When th
e chair told us we had to leave, Joaquin, thinking he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, punched the man in a dress who called himself a lesbian. (He came with his wife; he had told two real lesbians to sit down and shut up. We are now rather the heroes of the real lesbians. Not that they have heroes.) We like Childish Gambino this year and we liked Lomepal last year. When a branch of Foxton’s estate agents opened up near us, trying to sell cheaply renovated flats to property speculators, we went down on a Friday night and threw a brick through their big plate-glass window. We wore balaclavas. There are CCTV cameras everywhere.

  We keep up hope. Nothing ever has a permanent triumph in this world. Things can improve. In recent years, the students I teach have grown more like the student I was. They read less, and the wall they write on is Twitter, but they want to change things, as we did. The two of us keep up hope for ourselves, too. One development of our middle age is an enjoyment of walking. Every week, we drive our ancient van out into the countryside. We walk for five hours, whatever the weather. Sometimes we vary things and walk through the oldest bits of this early industrial city. Neglected by the side of canals, the monuments of the first years of industrial capitalism crumble. Over the years, we have become well versed in the history of this place. It is astonishing, what you find out by walking, and standing, and staring, and wondering what it is exactly that you are looking at. That picturesque ruined wall by the canal now sprouts buddleia. It once contained the daylight lives of labouring nine-year-olds, some of whom died on the floor, here, gasping for air. That noble wild stretch of land, purple with heather, is not a blank wilderness, but bought and carefully controlled by a ducal corporation to shoot grouse on. We tramp on, understanding how the world is through disillusion and enlightenment. At the end of the day we are the better for it. Probably once a week somebody is startled to discover that I am fifty-three, and Joaquin nearly sixty. We don’t look it. We are big, leathery, outdoorsy; our eyes are clear; we have the same teeth, and the same trousers, that we had thirty years ago. We have the same springy walk as each other, the same gleam. The word springs to the mouths of strangers – boyish. We glow with health, as the departmental secretary once said to me. We like that in each other, too.

  Once a year we go away for a fortnight, walking somewhere in Europe. We tried a number of destinations. Switzerland was ruinously expensive; Portugal’s walking paths were so badly signposted that your head was never out of the map; the Peloponnese one year was just too hot.

  For the last ten years our annual walking holiday has been in Germany. The culture of walking is well established there. It is quite rare that you need a map, so well signposted are the paths. Even the cheapest hotels are clean and often pleasant. When we went in 2008, it was the first time either of us had gone to Germany in twenty years. The country had changed an enormous amount. Of course we both felt some disquiet, getting off the plane in Berlin. The last time we had passed through that airport, in 1987, Joaquin had walked me through, gripping me tight, both of us pale and silent as ghosts. I had cried on the plane home. But at this distance in time I hardly know why I cried. As it turned out, when we returned in 2008, my feelings were not stirred up by the sight of landscapes which, in any case, I had hardly taken in before. It was a great success, that first walking holiday in rural Brandenburg. We have gone on to explore different parts of Germany every year since.

  We have often gone to the lands in the former German Democratic Republic. Saxon Switzerland, where the party leaders once had their villas. Thuringia. The Wartburg, that faked-up palace on top of Eisenach’s hill, where Luther threw an inkpot at the devil; the ink stain on the wall is carefully renewed every so often by discreet guards, paid by the hour. We have even been back to Weimar. It is a beautiful city, after all. Some people might think it strange that we go so lightly to the former German Democratic Republic, given my history with the place. But history is what most people succeed in ignoring.

  This year, the island on which we were born or made our home tried to extricate itself from the continent. Went sailing westwards, to borrow a metaphor, like a raft of stone. We went to Germany, to the Harz mountains. We based ourselves in Quedlinburg. It is picturesque; beautifully preserved; a half-timbered medieval city of imperial extent. People have admired its picturesque quality for years. There is, for instance, a photograph of Heinrich Himmler with his storm troopers entering the cathedral for a picturesque pageant in 1936, celebrating a thousand years of German purity.

  ‘Mountains’ is an ambitious word for the Harz lands. They amount to substantial hills, no more than that. They are ideal walking country for us. They possess the right level of historical and cultural interest. One day we took a steam train up to the top of the Brocken, the largest of the hills, and walked all the way down. The Brocken was closed to citizens of the German Democratic Republic for decades. It was a large hill situated very near the border with the West. For this reason, the government sited a listening station at the top. On the day the Wall was opened up, tens of thousands of people walked up the Brocken, perhaps to see where Goethe set an act of his Faust. Over the years, I have come to think that the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the unification of Germany was not altogether a bad thing. In any case, that long walk down the hill in the heat of the day was the sort of day we always dream of. When we got back to the hotel room, Joaquin started to take his shirt off. I wrestled him to the floor. We fucked. He licked my neck, my shoulders, with a sort of fury. I was burnt, as he was, and the salt of me was like a necessary mineral to a wild beast. Only then did we have a shower. The smell of Joaquin after a hot day walking – the taste of him on my tongue – is something I never want to be without.

  On the Saturday morning, we decided that we would go to visit the former border. There was no particular reason for this, unless wanting to do the unusual thing is a reason. Everyone has seen the old border in Berlin. Bits of it are preserved, and tourists of every sort flock to it. I can’t say I had ever heard of anyone visiting the long land border that contained the whole country. Our motivation was not very strong – this was a border that was needed for some time. Then it stopped being needed. Now it is not there any more. But when you decide to go on a walk, it is often a good idea to have some aim in mind – a listening station, Goethe’s birthplace, tracing the line of a national border. Otherwise you end up trailing around after some other person’s idea of the picturesque, and admiring what you are told to admire.

  We took a bus from Quedlinburg to Wernigerode. After three stops, a whole class of schoolchildren got on with their two teachers – maybe for some weekend nature observation. To my eyes, the thirty ten-year-olds were disconcertingly uniform, all white and almost all blond. They were very well behaved. They chatted to each other in a decent, engaged way. None had a mobile phone. At Wernigerode there was a wait of an hour. We filled our water bottles from the public fountain in the main square.

  ‘This is a long trip,’ Joaquin said, once we were on the bus, not complaining but with the beginnings of disgruntlement. ‘Another hour before we get there?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘Just enjoy the ride.’

  The bus was empty. We were sitting directly behind the driver. It was a pleasant ride, through forests and along rivers, stopping peaceably at crumbling and isolated concrete shelters every so often. At one point a very old lady got on. The bus driver, a cheerful soul, got out of his seat, helped her on and dusted her down before setting off again. Three stops later, she got off again with the same ceremony. That was her daughter, she confided to us, waiting for her, and her granddaughter, too, look! She wasn’t expecting that! Her joy was touching. The granddaughter, slab-bosomed in a Slipknot T-shirt, had been cajoled and threatened into coming out.

  ‘Going all the way to Sorge?’ the driver said, over his shoulder. ‘You’ll know when you get there for two reasons. One is that this bus stops there and doesn’t go any further. The other one is the Eng
lish dog that’ll be waiting to say hello to the bus. Lying in the middle of the road, he’ll be.’

  ‘It’s a strange name for a village,’ I said.

  ‘There’s a town called Kotzen and another one called Fickmühlen too. No one knows why.’

  I thought it was probably something to do with a mishearing, way back. An eighteenth-century mapmaker asked some passing agricultural labourers for the name of their settlement. They had difficulty understanding what had been asked. The mapmaker had difficulty understanding what they said in return. He wrote down a word that was similar. In the end, the village was called Vomit, which is what Kotzen means, or Sorrow, which is the town called Sorge that we were going to. Fickmühlen, or Fuck Mill, can really only have been some delinquents seeing what they could get away with.

  ‘Strange town, Sorge,’ the driver said. ‘I think it’s only the English dog that likes it.’

  ‘Why do you call him an English dog?’

  ‘Well,’ the driver said, thinking the question over, ‘he’s a gentleman, that dog. He’s got an English passport and he’s got English manners. If you ask me, that dog voted for Brexit and he’s quite happy about it. You don’t hear so much about that any more. When are you leaving our family of nations? Is it this year or next year?’

  Some time passed in silence. Nobody had taken any offence.

  ‘History in the making,’ the driver said.

  ‘We’re better off as we are now. Not everyone round here would agree with me,’ the driver said.

  ‘The town’s perfectly all right,’ the driver said. ‘Sorge. It’s the people who are a little bit unusual.’

  ‘What are they, tribal?’ Joaquin said to me, when I had explained. ‘Are we going to visit some people in caves to find out their ancient inner wisdom?’