by Timur Vermes
The car has leather seats, which take an unbelievably long time to warm up. Good for the connective tissue, at least, Astrid consoles herself. With a sleek movement Nadeche slips her mobile into her Louis Vuitton bag. In the past there were women who looked the height of elegance with a cigarette holder – the smartphone is Nadeche Hackenbusch’s cigarette holder.
“What have you brought along for the filming?” she asks, leaning towards Astrid.
“Quite a lot of H&M. They’re doing loads of adverts at the moment. Some Hallhuber, and then a couple of suitcases of Doris zu Wagenbach.”
“Oh my God!”
“You know how it works with us.”
“Doris zu Wagenbach!” She emphasises her contempt to perfection. “Chuck a quilt and a clown into a shredder and there’s your evening dress. I have no idea why you’re so obsessed with her.”
“The editorial office sees her as the up-and-coming fashion—”
“—the up-and-coming fashion talent? Wagenbach? I like your editorial office, but you know how they traipse about. Has your deputy editor worked out how to do up his shirt yet? Every time I see him he’s got a button open. And we’re lucky it’s only the shirt we’re talking about. For God’s sake, the man works for Evangeline! Can’t someone tell him?”
Astrid von Roëll tries to stop her teeth from chattering. “We only have to take a couple of pieces from the collection, the rest can go back to where they came from. And we’ve got plenty of Hallhuber too.”
“Hallhuber. Jesus. Oh well, better than nothing.” Nadeche slumps back in her seat and breathes out audibly. She stares out of the window. Beyond the tinted glass, a local vanishes into the blue-yellow-grey dust. They can’t see much. Their car is the third in the convoy, and the two in front have stirred up clouds of dust. “But I’m relying on you. I don’t want it to sound like I’d wear this crap myself.”
“Sure,” Astrid assures her. “It’s just for the filming.”
“Yes, but it’s awful, isn’t it? I mean, like, these are poor people, really poor. They don’t have a roof over their heads, they don’t have anything to eat. And we come along from one of the richest countries on this earth and what do we bring them? H&M and Doris zu Wagenbach! These people must feel like the lowest of the low.”
“It’s not as if they usually wear Dior,” Astrid tries to appease her.
“Precisely. They usually wear shite and now they can wear crap too.”
“But H&M isn’t—”
“That’s exactly why this planet will, like, never be at peace. There’s just no sensitivity for the poorest of the poor!”
“We’ve got Hallhuber too . . .” Astrid reiterates helplessly. She feels a slight retching in her throat. It’s bloody cold in this fucking car, she’s been on her feet for twenty-seven hours and she’s really tried her damndest. She knows that Nadeche Hackenbusch hates Doris zu Wagenbach, because of the shop@Home thing. Because Wagenbach got Nadeche’s slot after sales of HackenPush-ups fell. It was nobody’s fault, large breasts were simply no longer in such demand, but Nadeche thinks that a Wagenbach plot lay behind it. And because she, Astrid, knew this, she made an extra effort to get something nice from Hallhuber. It wasn’t easy at all. She had to ring the brainless intern on the fashion desk three or four times until she had it wrapped up – and now this angry outburst. She’s not normally like this, but for a moment she thinks she might cry. Then Nadeche says, “It’s just like this fucking car.”
Oh, right.
So she’s not to blame for the bad mood, but the car.
At moments like this it really pays off that Astrid has been up close to Nadeche Hackenbusch throughout her career. She would even go as far as to say that Nadeche is her discovery. Ever since she was given her first show on Kabel Eins or Vox or R.T.L.2: “Balderdeche”, which became a fiasco. Today Astrid knows everything there is to know about Nadeche. In interviews and features she’s documented this wonderful Cinderella story so often, this incomparable rise to stardom, that she feels as if she’s gone through all that muck together with Nadeche, the entire length of that stony path, the difficult years after school, the tiny shared flat in Hamburg, the worries about not being able to pay the rent. For may it never be forgotten: Nadeche Hackenbusch, star and role model to hundreds of thousands of girls and young women, comes from a very modest background. And all this time she, Astrid von Roëll, has been at her side. Even during the rape case, a really vile affair with an extremely difficult burden of proof, as with all rape cases. Once again it was very evident how quickly the victim can become the perpetrator. The poor status a woman has in court and in public. Just because in the middle of the trial it transpired that she had been away filming at the time the crime allegedly took place, which led to many in the media doubting her story.
As if you’re able to check the date in the middle of being raped.
“Judges in Germany are still living in the 1950s,” Astrid von Roëll wrote in a piece at the time. Also: “In a year that has 365 days, the law cannot possibly depend on the coincidence of a correct date.” Her piece elicited many readers’ letters and comments on the website, and a very large number of women offered their thanks.
“What’s wrong with the car?”
Astrid is toying with the idea of winding down a window to let in some African heat, but there’s just too much dust. And she doesn’t want to give the game away, even if her lips have turned blue. How does Nadeche manage it? “I think it might be new. I’m not so sure about the others, but this one . . . it even smells brand new.”
“There’s a spray what makes it like that. They always try to pull a fast one on you. But I was expecting that.”
“So what’s wrong with it?”
“Er, hell-o? The colour?”
“The colour?”
“They were like, you’re going to be the new Schreinemakers. So I was like, I want a car with a zebra pattern. Like on ‘Daktari’.”
“It’s a great idea, I thought so the moment I saw it.”
“It’s great when it’s in black and white. But black and pink?”
“I thought it had to be like that because it’s your show and pink is—”
“Would Schreinemakers drive around in a pink zebra car?”
“I—”
“I may be a bimbo, but I’ve got eyes in my head. And I can see what non-bimbos drive around in. Daktari saves animals. He spends the whole day thinking of nothing but animals and people, and that’s why he drives around in a black-and-white zebra car like everyone else in Africa. Meanwhile I’m like, stuck in a pink box, as if the colour is the most important bit.”
These are the moments that really thrill Astrid von Roëll. It’s at moments like this that she’s a true Nadeche Hackenbusch fan. The fact that Nadeche spots those little details which she’d never have spotted herself. At moments like this she feels that a star isn’t a star purely by chance, but because they notice things that pass others by.
“So what are you going to do?”
“They’ve got to change it. And fast. The production manager’s going to have to get hold of a different car, right away.”
“Is that even possible?”
“There’s no such thing as impossible. And I want to see the final cut. I swear, if that Cindy von Marzahn slut is on the screen for even a second the shit’s really going to hit the fan. ProSieben has already been talking to my agent. They’re desperate to have me. But don’t write that.”
Astrid gives a professional nod. This is the kind of stuff Evangeline readers love. Women who are striking-looking and yet not stupid, but assertive. Hard as nails, yet sensitive, as men ought to be more often, whereas in real life only women ever are. A few are, at least. And that’s why she’s perfect for “Angel in Adversity”. Because she gets stuck in, because she’s experienced life from the very bottom, because she’s a role model for the weakest, because she fights for the little people, for women, for children and, at the end of the first series, for that little dog
too. Because she sees what it’s like inside the hostel and says straightaway, “There’s no such thing as impossible.”
They should say that in editorial meetings now and then.
She herself can say it in editorial meetings soon, since they’re discussing her promotion to the chief editorial team. At the moment her business card says “Editor at Large”, like in the big U.S. publishing houses, but soon that could be “Chief Editorial Member”, very soon, in fact. Or, even better, “Chief Editorial Member at Large”. It’s high time too: she’s good at leadership, she’s an excellent decision maker. She even styled her corner office herself and everyone thinks it’s great.
And of course it’s no coincidence that Astrid is responsible for Nadeche Hackenbusch. For she and Nadeche are kindred spirits, of sorts. Astrid can be as hard as nails too, and journalists are capable of virtually anything because they see and hear so much. With that kind of experience you can become a Politician at Large, or a Manager at Large. She might not be quite as stunning as Nadeche Hackenbusch, but she’s superb at expressing things in words and that’s why Nadeche respects her. She doesn’t articulate this all the time, but Astrid is aware of it all the same. And that’s why she, exclusively she, is sitting here in the car with the star presenter. After all, Nadeche reads what’s written about her and she remembers who is fair and who is mean, like the people at Gloria, or that spiteful lot from G-Style with their sneaky snaps of celebs without make-up. If you provide a refreshing contrast to that rabble, a good rapport develops naturally. And yet you have to watch out.
For her colleagues are also keen to piggyback on someone like Nadeche Hackenbusch. Every few weeks someone comes to the editorial meeting proposing a Hackenbusch story, most likely a load of rubbish. And Astrid immediately says so: “That can’t be true, Nadeche would have told me.” She says the name as casually as that, “Nadeche”, so everybody knows how close the two of them are and how impossible it would be for a Hackenbusch story to happen without her getting wind of it. The editor-in-chief then tasks her, of course, with checking the story, and she discovers it’s utter garbage. Or at least completely different. Like the one about the second pregnancy which her colleague Grant was desperate to hog for himself: “Nadeche Hackenbusch at nine weeks”. Bullshit.
It was ten weeks.
“Lou” Grant permanently whining, “But she is pregnant, she is pregnant,” because of course he wants to be in the byline. “You can’t just leave me out! That’s not possible!”
“There’s no such thing as impossible.” She’d say it just like that. And let him talk it through with a Chief Editorial Member at Large. “Lou” Grant with information worth the square root of nothing.
The square root of minus nothing!
Astrid’s anger has almost warmed her up, but it’s more that she can no longer feel her frozen toes. She’d love to slip off her shoes and put her feet up on the seat, but she’s had these shoes on for twenty-eight hours now, and who knows . . .
“Look!” Nadeche exclaims. “Greenhouses!”
This is why it’s a good thing they’re not doing a live programme with her. What at first glance look like greenhouses are in fact white tents in the shape of half barrels. U.N.H.C.R. is marked on them clearly, in large blue letters. In fact it’s hard to miss.
“Bingo!” she says. “U.N.I.C.E.F. We should be there soon.”
But soon doesn’t come. Tents stand in endless rows in this nothingness. They never stop, even though the convoy of vehicles is by no means dawdling. You wouldn’t be allowed to drive this fast in a built-up area in Germany and yet the tents refuse to come to an end. They don’t get any wider or taller. In a place like this you expect to find something like a centre, a church, a castle, a bridge over a river. But here there’s nothing. There wasn’t anything here before either, and that’s why everything’s the same, just a dense layer of tents on the dusty, dried-up, scorched land. The view extends across the tent roofs and into the endless distance, a ruffled sea of white canvas with dark figures moving between the waves, hundreds and hundreds of them, with groups of small children breaking away from them, running to accompany the convoy for a while, as schools of dolphins might a ship.
Astrid looks at Nadeche, who is glued to the tinted window in astonishment, transfixed by the immense, overwhelming size of the camp, its limitless expanse making immediately clear that this isn’t just a bigger version of the refugee hostel; it’s something else altogether, a tent city for a population the size of Berlin or Paris. The most dreadful thing, Astrid thinks, is that despite the enormity it’s going to be hard to find seven or eight passable locations for fashion shoots with refugee women. Or even one, for that matter.
Eventually the car comes to a stop. The sliding door opens. Astrid closes her eyes. Her mouth opens as if redeemed and she abandons herself to the wonderfully warm air that floods into the car. She wants to launch herself into it, frozen stiff as she is, she wants to sink into it, into this divine, sunny warmth. Swiftly she packs her bag, ready to get out as soon as Nadeche has left this ice palace on wheels. A hand floats inside the car, a white hand, and from the watch on its wrist Astrid recognises the location production manager trying to help Nadeche out, and Nadeche takes it for granted that there is a hand to grab. She wouldn’t be surprised if someone laid their coat on the dusty ground before her. She stands up lithely, like a polar bear she must be immune to the cold. You come across them sometimes, people with a particular metabolism or whatever, not often but it does happen, like that Icelandic fisherman in the film who survived for hours in the sea. And Nadeche Hackenbusch must be one of those rare, adaptable human beings, Astrid thinks, just as Nadeche vents her complaint:
“Why didn’t you warn me it was going to be such a long drive? Your silly heated seat almost like, melted my arse.”
6
It was pure luck. Or natural destiny, but who can distinguish between the two apart from Allah? For anybody who’d been in the camp long enough could have got this job. And pretty much everyone did try to get it.
It took two hours at most for every last soul in the camp to know that an angel was coming from Germany: Malaika, as they say in Swahili. An angel from the television. They all swapped links for Malaika videos on YouTube, and they said that Malaika helped the poor, even though all you saw in the videos was Malaika and an elegantly dressed man talking into a microphone, or Malaika dressed as a village trollop having a bucket of iced water poured over her, probably as a warning to other village trollops. But the narrow selection of videos was because the angel came from Germany. The angel was unknown in countries where English or French was spoken; you needed to know the German words to find more clips. People searching for a German angel who helped poor people only ever got the ex-Merkel, who was a woman.
“Malaika is beautiful,” Mahmoud says, trying to sound like an expert. “She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“She’s not as beautiful as Scarlett Johansson.”
“That’s because you only know Scarlett Johansson from photos. Where they make her up to be beautiful. Scarlett Johansson in Africa looks like a gnu.”
They’re drinking beer at Miki’s and the refugee is paying. For he’s landed the job that everyone was desperate to get. All of them were aware that the television Germans would bring work and money. Rumours were even circulating that there would be work for women too. But that was nonsense because no women had applied to the Germans. Not even the Germans can alter the fact that women are just as loathe to get a slap in the face as anyone else. But it was also clear that the good Germans would pay their helpers more than any people smuggler or small-time gangster. The refugee’s main reason for applying is that he’s hoping he might be able to afford a smuggler to take him to Europe.
Much of what they say about the Germans is true. For example, they really are well organised. To begin with he saw as little of the angel as the others did, for the angel had helper angels facilitating her search for experienced assi
stants. They had arrived at the camp a week before the angel did herself. Of course Ali and his boys paid a visit to the Germans too, and they pretended not to know each other so as to improve their chances. Mojo the Blue had dressed Salif in something he took to be a suit, as if the angel was on the lookout for a president. Shaquan the Liar, loopy Pakka, old Gbil who tries to make out he’s some sort of sage – everyone who had their own pair of legs was there, and even some who didn’t. The angel had three assistants who took the men’s names and photographed them in an old-fashioned German way: with instant cameras rather than smartphones. But this is something you see all the time: the Germans prefer driving around in old V.W. buses or on old motorbikes or old bicycles.
Apparently Mojo was convinced that the Germans wouldn’t look any further once they’d seen his man. Salif can speak French, he said, they’re going to love Salif. But the Germans weren’t interested in Salif ’s amazing French. They were far more interested in the refugee when he told them he could speak English. It had already crossed his mind that the Germans had always won their wars against the French, but lost the ones against the U.S. and the British. You respect the language of the victors, never that of the losers.
Then they took some video footage, which went well too. Many of the men were uncertain, but he was far too curious to lack confidence. He laughed a lot, in part because he’d taken a shine to the young assistant and because she laughed back. But very soon he wasn’t laughing half as much; something had caught his attention.
There was another woman present who few had noticed because she was unremarkable looking, already very wrinkled. He noticed her because she was saying nothing, yet keeping a watchful eye on all that was happening. The Germans may be rich, but they think everything through carefully, and if they’re spending money on a wrinkly old lady then she must be important.
