While Putin waits for Angela Merkel to let her cat in, he reads through the lines one more time. He knows what he has to do. But he also knows he has to tell Angela first. He needs her tacit approval even if she cannot give it publicly.
‘Vlad, I’m back. What was it you were going to read to me?’
‘Angela, just listen,’ and Putin reads the only words in Russian in Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs. And if you need to be reminded what those words were, they are:
Mankind needs War
Without War civilisation would not have evolved
It is your duty to further the evolution of Mankind
Make War Now
There is silence down the other end of the line. Putin knows Merkel is still there, he can hear her breathing. He knows she will understand these words even if she cannot tell him she agrees with them.
Until the age of thirty-eight Angela Merkel lived under the gaze and influence of Soviet Russia. I will not use the clichéd word ‘yoke’ here, because Angela Merkel also understood and respected what lay at the heart of the Soviet dream. She understood what made a Russian ‘man’ tick, be that man from the Soviet era or from somewhere far back in history, or from today. For them, what we know as ‘democracy’ was never going to work. And what the world has now under the ‘yoke’ of the Five is anathema to everything Putin holds to be true and right.
‘The thing is, Vlad, I also got a book in the post this morning. And my guess is it was the same book. And in my copy the only words in German are …’, and Merkel reads these words:
When the new day dawns
And the seas begin to toss
The world will need a woman
To provide a steady hand on the tiller
You are that woman
‘Vlad, we have to ask ourselves, is someone playing us? Are we just the mice being tossed from paw to paw by the unseen cat? Anyway, I have to get going, we are playing away this evening. Talk to you in the morning.’
11:22
Thirty-odd minutes later, Angela Merkel is already on the coach on her way to Dortmund to watch an away match with her beloved FC Energie Cottbus, and Putin is still on the phone.
But this time Putin is on the phone to his ‘retired’ Marshal of the Russian Federation, one Igor Dmitriyevich Sergeyev Junior. The ‘Junior’ is there so as not to confuse him with his father, who had held the same office a couple of decades earlier.
The thing is, when Russia went bankrupt because no one needed to buy their oil or gas any more, and their army, the largest in the world at the time, was dissolved, Putin had to put other secret plans into action. He had quietly mothballed forty divisions of his army.
Somewhere out in the vastness of Siberia, even beyond the reach of GoogleEarth, hidden in several thousand bunkers, each the size of a football pitch, were forty thousand tanks and a hundred thousand young and disciplined wo/men. Their only job was to wait for the call, and whenever that call came they would be ready. That call was about to come.
‘Igor, today is the day. Are you and your legions ready to honour our Mother Russia and save the world? By December I need to know we have regained all of the land we had mastery over in the Soviet era. Everything as far as the Rhine is ours.’
‘President Putin, give me twenty-four hours and our tanks will be rolling. We will be in Poland by this time next week.’
And the lip-print on a half-filled cup of coffee
That you poured and didn’t drink
But at least you thought you wanted it
And that’s so much more than I can say for me
11:36
Not that Divine would have any idea what the time was – she is still drifting down the mighty Congo. And just so you have some idea of how ‘mighty’ the Congo is, it is the deepest river in the world, at 220 metres, and discharges into the ocean over forty thousand cubic metres of water every second. And at this moment in time Divine is the only woman on its 4,371 kilometre length in a pirogue on her own. She is the Queen of all its waters.
Now, I don’t really know what magical realism is, but I do know it was the name given to some sort of genre fiction that was all the rage in Latin America some years ago. But right now I am going to borrow something from what I imagine magical realism might be.
Here goes.
The white Egret that was flying above Divine’s stolen pirogue in the last chapter has landed on its bow.
If you do not know what an Egret is, it is like a pure white heron, all very elegant and beautiful. And from this Egret’s beak hangs not a baby in a basket, but a string bag, like your mother might have once used. In this string bag is a copy of Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs.
The reason for using this form of delivery to get the book to Divine – and not the Royal Mail, or some other regular parcel-delivery system like UPS or FedEx – is that the only connection Divine’s village has to the outside world is via the Congo River itself. There are no roads leading in or out of her village, so no form of motorised transport. Maybe the odd pushbike, but that is it.
Once every couple of weeks or so, a half-dozen rusting barges, tied together with fraying steel cables, are pushed upriver by a tugboat. This is the only internal form of public transport between Kinshasa, the capital city, and Kisangani, the inner station. The journey takes about three weeks.
This ragbag of watercraft may have up to three thousand passengers on board, along with their livestock and all their worldly goods. And this ragbag of watercraft does not stop at any of the passing villages.
The only way to either get on the barges or trade with them is to wait in your pirogue for hour after hour in the middle of the Congo on the days you judge the ferry might be passing. And when the ferry comes up around the bend, you have to paddle like hell to get up alongside it. Then, with one end of a rope tied to your pirogue and the other around your waist, you have to make a leap for the side of the ferry and hope you can catch the hand of one of the many passengers who are leaning over the side.
You then tie the pirogue up to the railing of the barge and do whatever trading and transactions you need to do with those on board.
The above description is an aside, but I thought you should know that although your world might be the most connected it is ever possible to be, some parts of the world still have next to no contact with the outside world. High-speed broadband will never arrive at places like this. Why should it?
So, in the string bag hanging from the beak of the Egret is the book. And Divine takes the string bag from the Egret’s beak, removes the book from the bag and flicks through its pages. I’m in danger of sounding very patronising here, but Divine lives in a world where all sorts of things intervene with the mundanity of real life. If an Egret wants to deliver her a book while she drifts down the mighty Congo, so be it.
The words in the book are in many languages and, as it happens, Divine is fluent in over a dozen of them. But the fact that on one page there are some lines in her language of Lingala surprises her way beyond the book being delivered by an Egret. In English you will not be surprised to discover these words read as follows:
You are a Shepherdess
Your sheep follow only you
But now it is time for you to find
Your Sisters
Then all Three of you
Find and pay homage to the One
Who is to be the Shepherdess of all Womankind
There are pastures green
Where the worm has not turned the Apple
In the string bag is also a loaf of bread and a plastic bottle of mineral water.
The Egret’s job done, it lifts itself slowly back into the air and heads for the North bank of the river.
Divine feels good. Better than she has ever felt in her life before. She will make it to Brussels or even Paris on her own. She is a woman, she can do these sorts of things.
After three full years of marriage
It’s the first time that you haven’t made the bed
> I guess the reason we’re not talkin’
There’s so little left to say we haven’t said
11:37
The forty thousand tanks are being filled with petrol.
Their engines are being turned over.
Shells are being loaded.
Young women sharpen their bayonets.
Young men write letters home to mothers.
A distant cousin of Mister Fox takes a shortcut through Vladimir Putin’s dacha. Putin likes to watch this fox. He likes to think that if he were an animal, he would be a fox.
11:38
The transgender artist from London staying in the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince wakes up and wonders if he really wants to go through with the operation and have his cock removed. I mean, if he had his cock removed, he would never again get to fuck little whores like he did last night.
He then thinks about the art he has been producing while over here as part of the Ghetto Biennale. He wonders if it is driven by post-colonial guilt, or if the post-colonial guilt is all part of it and makes the art even stronger.
He then uses his left hand to stroke his enlarged breasts while using his right hand to gently pull back the foreskin on his as-yet-to-be-removed cock.
He wonders what happened to the girl who came back with him last night. He wouldn’t mind fucking her again tonight.
He wonders if he should be worrying about HIV.
11:40
Putin decides to prune his roses before making any more phone calls. While doing this he whistles the tune to George Jones’s hit ‘A Good Year for the Roses’. Putin loves George Jones. It was one of the reasons why he first fell for Lyudmila. She was totally into Tammy Wynette, George Jones’s then wife. How could Lyudmila and him not make a perfect match?
But Lyudmila and Putin divorced many years ago. Putin wonders if he has left it too late to ever fall in love again.
He keeps whistling the tune to himself while he prunes the roses.
While a million thoughts go racin’ through my mind
I find I haven’t spoke a word
And from the bedroom the familiar sound
of our one baby’s cryin’ goes unheard
11:41
Angela Merkel is on the coach with the other FC Energie Cottbus fans heading for Dortmund. It’s a Cup match. Energie have never won anything, not even in the days when they were in the old East German league. Since unification they have only ever made it to the Bundesliga for a couple of seasons.
Angela is at the back of the coach, her red and white scarf around her neck, and is singing the songs she has been singing since she was only ten years old. It just so happens Angela Merkel is also a George Jones fan. She too, when alone and not singing football songs, can be heard singing ‘A Good Year for the Roses’.
Angela’s mind keeps drifting from the prospect of the evening’s match to the conversation she had with Putin this morning. She knows Putin has a tendency to get carried away with different ideas about things, but she is usually able to get him to see sense. I mean, it took him a couple of years to accept it was all over for his Russia once no one was interested in buying his oil or gas. And all that posturing of his in the Ukraine. It was only her influence that stood between him and another major European war.
She pulls Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs from her handbag and starts to flick through it, reading each of the pages in turn. Where has this come from? If she has got a copy and so has Putin, who else?
She reads again the words that were so obviously meant for Putin. They make sense. Something in her knows these words to be true. Where wo/mankind had once arrived was now stagnation. Wars were always needed to jolt things to the next level. Yes, a generation of young men had to be sent to the slaughter, but that was what was required for culture to keep on evolving.
Without the bombing of Dresden there could have been no Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Without the bombing of Coventry there could have been no Krautrock. Anyone with the thinnest understanding of cultural history over the past century knows this.
Oh yeah, and without the Atlantic slave trade, no Jazz, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley or even Jay Zee. Or something like that. Or is that a different argument?
Then she reads the lines again that are so obviously meant for her:
When the new day dawns
And the seas begin to toss
The world will need a woman
To provide a steady hand on the tiller
You are that woman
11:43
In a village hall somewhere in rural Northamptonshire, Extreme Noise Terror play through all the songs that are on their Black Room album without a break. They get to the end and look at each other. It was either the greatest moment in the history of rock ’n’ roll reunions since the original line-up of Black Sabbath got back together in 2017, or it was a heap of shite. We will let history be the judge of this. At least they remembered all the chord changes, even if Alan Moore seemed to have improvised some of the lyrics.
Then he suggests they try a slowed-down grunge version of ‘A Good Year for the Roses’. ‘It might make a good encore.’
11:44
Elvis Costello is considering recording another album of Country & Western covers in Nashville. He has just been listening to a Best of George Jones on his way to pick up his grandchildren from their grandmother, his first wife. He reckons his voice is now far better suited to the tragedy of ‘A Good Year for the Roses’ than it ever was when he was in his twenties. Maybe he should re-record it.
11:45
In Stoke Newington Police Station the lab report has just come back. There is DNA on the piece of paper ripped from a book that had been tied around the brick that had been thrown through the pet-shop window.
Barney Muldoon and Saul Goodman are the names of the two officers on the case. If you think you recognise their names, it is because they have been borrowed from the two police officers in the Illuminatus books. I have done this so the identities of the two real officers on this case are not exposed.
The DNA matches up with a Paul Harrison they have on their files. He was charged last year with graffiti-ing abusive statements on walls around Dalston. It seems although he pleaded guilty, he tried to turn his court appearance into some sort of performance-art piece. The last known address they have for him is a warehouse down in Hackney Wake.
Muldoon and Goodman make plans to go and give the place a visit that afternoon, maybe pull this Harrison in for questioning.
‘Kids have everything these days, so why the fuck do they still feel the need to throw bricks through windows?’ asks Muldoon.
‘Because he is an artist, so what he is doing is art,’ retorts Goodman.
‘And that is what our job has been reduced to in this day and age: trying to stop spoilt kids from doing what they call art. What happened to proper crime? I remember when we had to sort out drug turf wars. Kids stabbing each other with knives.’
‘Yeah, remember the Tottenham Riots? Now that was fun. We spent months on that, nailing all the ringleaders. Sorting them out. Getting them back on the straight and narrow.’
‘What are you saying? You reckon we could do with another riot?’
‘Why not? It would be better than some kid with delusions of being an artist lobbing a brick through a pet-shop window.’
11:54
Angela Merkel is looking out of the window of the coach at the autobahn and the passing cars. She tries to ignore her ageing reflection looking back at her. She is also trying not to think because, if she starts thinking, she will start thinking about Putin and how he is right. She might also start thinking that for some time she has suspected Putin is hiding something from her, that although all the deals were done and hands were shook, and we all looked forward to a world no longer blighted by war, that Putin had some other agenda. Maybe ‘agenda’ is too strong a word, but even way back when the deal was done over Greece between the two of them, and Greece was sold off to AmaZ
aba, she felt that he was hiding some of his thoughts and plans.
Angela Merkel knew in her heart of hearts Putin had a secret army somewhere out there in the vastness of his former empire, and at some point before he got too old he would want to use it. Boys always did. Especially when the boys were Russian men.
11:57
Vladimir Putin makes himself a fresh pot of tea, takes a seat on the veranda of his dacha, and stares out at the roses in his garden. He can tell it is going to be a good year. At last things are going his way.
12:00
‘This is the news at noon on iJaz Europe. It has just been announced that the winners of this year’s Hockney Award are a formerly unknown collective of artists who go by the name of K-SEC.
‘As yet it is not known if K-SEC were aware they were in the running for the world’s premier contemporary art prize. Our reporters are trying to track K-SEC down in the Hackney area of London, where it is suspected they are based.
‘Their prize-winning work is a triptych of posters that were fly-posted in the early hours of this morning onto a wall on Kingsland Road, London.
‘These works are being exhibited in Lord Saatchi’s new contemporary art museum in the recently reopened, refurbished Battersea Power Station.
‘I will now hand over to our arts editor, Will Gompertz, who is on-site in Battersea Power Station. Will, what can you tell us about—?’
12:01
Vladimir Putin lifts the arm of his record player and drops the needle into the groove of his favourite track by the late great George Jones. He sits back, takes another sip of his black Russian tea and, as he loses himself in the tragedy of it all, the tanks begin to roll.
It’s been a good year for the roses
Many blooms still linger there
The lawn could stand another mowin’
Funny I don’t even care
When you turn to walk away
2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) Page 14
