The Hungry and the Fat

by Timur Vermes

  But they won’t let him.

  She won’t let him.

  Because she’s an angel, and angels understand nothing of life.

  First she pestered him to protect the little whores. It had nothing to do with protection, of course; she wanted him to see to it that they didn’t have to sell their bodies anymore. As if he – or anyone else in the world, for that matter – could put a stop to that. Besides, they have to earn money to pay for food and water and protection.

  “No! I pay for they.”

  A true angel. If a little unworldly. He told her what he predicted would happen then, when word got around that the angel was paying for the little whores. Very soon everyone would stop paying in the hope that the angel would come to their help. He calculated the revenues for her. In fact the angel’s arithmetic isn’t that bad. She realised that she’d never be able to stem the tide. Then he told her that after she ran out of money, she’d have to get people used to paying again. Which wouldn’t work. She wouldn’t be helping the whores, she’d be leading everyone to their deaths.

  “But we must something do!”

  “No. We must bring them to Germany.”

  Then came the first sick people. He aimed for young people and didn’t have any difficulty finding candidates; he could take his pick. He also made it clear to his guys that they should only take young people who could nurse their own minor ailments. Children weren’t a problem, nor young families. He wanted to regulate the uptake via the circulation of the app. But because it could be copied, of course, some elderly people did come along at first. They soon realised that they weren’t up to it, so they turned and headed back to the camp. Does he care if they made it? Probably not. He isn’t the tour guide, for God’s sake.

  He’s just the guy with the idea, nothing more. Just the guy with the idea.

  Then she came with all the sick people.

  When you’ve got one hundred and fifty thousand people, some will get ill, it’s obvious. So what? He didn’t guarantee to anyone that they’d stay healthy. Somebody catches something and can’t keep going. Which means they’ve got to find someone to carry them or drag them or whatever. And if they can’t find anyone, they have to drop out. Which doesn’t mean they’re going to be driven in a pink zebra car. Because if that happened, all of a sudden there’d be lots of very sick people. So they have to drop out. Some are lucky: being at the front they can rest for a day before rejoining at another point. But when the column of migrants has passed, that’s that. They can hope that someone will come by and help, but that might take time because the group has been avoiding the main routes. They have the water they’ve got with them and perhaps a few morsels of food, but perhaps not. Maybe they’ll die, maybe not – he’ll never know because he’s not going to drive back to check. Lots of people die in Africa.

  So far, apart from the elderly, they’ve all kept up, but it’s only a matter of time before someone just can’t keep going. A broken bone. An appendix. These things happen. Then there really will be dead bodies on television. There haven’t been any so far only because it’s so difficult to film at sea.

  “No! We need a doctor.”

  And so they agreed on a doctor.

  Or someone doctor-ish: Pakka once helped out as a hospital orderly. Malaika has made one of her zebra cars available to him. Now Pakka drives up and down the column and treats people. He gets medicines through Malaika’s connections. Painkillers, plasters, bandages. He doesn’t give anyone a ride; he tries to ensure that people can keep going on their own. When there’s nothing more he can do he says, “Sorry.” That’s it.

  “That is it? But that is impossible!”

  He tried a joke, “Nothing’s impossible”, like she always says when she won’t take no for an answer. But this is all about the mechanism of the column, which mustn’t be broken. Everyone must be aware of the risks, everyone must keep paying, everyone must keep walking. The procession cannot stop, because the moment it stops the locals will worry it’s here to stay. The supreme advantage of this procession is that it passes. A column that stops is a camp, and nobody wants a camp. When people stop, you can’t be sure they’ll ever get moving again.

  Malaika wants a doctor. The money in her foundation, she says, will pay for a proper doctor. Alright, a doctor, another car and more equipment, her foundation will surely be able to cover all that. But no transport.

  Then there were the pregnant woman.

  It doesn’t stop. He specifically said at the beginning, no pregnant women. But some didn’t look pregnant. And others have become pregnant en route. So many young people, a few prostitutes. With some it’s pretty obvious now. He’s been told that walking is fine, even late in the pregnancy, but it gets difficult close to the birth. And then there are the newborns.

  “You know that not! You have no childs! I have!”

  She sits up on the flatbed of their pick-up. It’s the only luxury they have: a flatbed for two, with half-metre metal sides for privacy. He sits up too and puts his arms around her.

  He read on the Internet that one hundred and fifty thousand young people would produce between one hundred and fifty to two hundred children a year. There’s no way they’ll be able to support them all. The tougher mothers may manage, but what else can he do? Wave a magic wand?

  “Another truck. I pay. Another truck. And a sister for babies!”

  She kisses him.

  He’s getting used to her idiosyncratic English. She wants another lorry for newborns. And when it’s full, the oldest baby will be returned to its mother, and so on. For newborns only. No patient transport.

  It doesn’t sound that bad. Better than dead children. A small bus full of babies. The pictures would be good. Babies aren’t threatening. But it won’t prevent hardship. People might still die. Children might die.

  She nods.

  He agrees to it, and it feels as if a heavy weight has fallen from his shoulders. There are enough heavy weights, but now there’s one fewer, and Malaika has this tireless confidence. She embraces him and gives him the sense that he doesn’t have to do everything, everything on his own.

  It’s because she’s an angel, he keeps telling himself.

  29

  “Hey, that’s not shit on the ground there, is it?”

  “What?”

  Sensenbrink leaps up. He’s in editing suite 3, currently the editing suite of the entire firm. Up till now he’s been sitting there fairly quietly, sending messages via his smartphone, while Karstleiter and a technician check the new material. But now he’s on his feet pointing at a small, curly shape on the screen.

  “Can’t you see that? Freeze the picture, I’ll show you. Back ten seconds . . . that’s it! There and there! And there!”

  “Hmm,” the technician says. “I don’t know. I mean, they could be stones.”

  “Stones? What sort of stones do they have down there?”

  “Lava’s often dark—”

  “We’re not on fucking Lanzarote! There! Again. Rewind again. Stop! There! Those things!”

  “Sleeping animals, perhaps,” Karstleiter says.

  “O.K., Charles Darwin, what kind of animal sleeps in the shape of a sausage? Have you lost it? That’s shit! Period. Zoom in.”

  The sleeping sausage gets bigger, but not sharper. Nevertheless, it’s now almost impossible to construe it as anything else. Since there’s another sleeping animal not far away, and this one’s trodden flat in the middle.

  “There we go!” Sensenbrink says. “There are no animals that soft. Who commissioned this?”

  Beate looks at the list. “Korbinian, from Anke’s team.”

  “I want Anke here. Now!”

  Karstleiter makes a call. Sensenbrink tells the technician to start the film again. The refugees have been on the march for ten weeks; the stories are getting pretty thin. They can’t keep constructing everything around the unconventional lovebirds with their outlandish mission. As with any successful format, they’re facing the challenge of fr
agmentation. He put more writers onto the story, ten to begin with, then another ten, and anybody who was a writer at the start is now a chief writer.

  “It’s the same every time,” Sensenbrink sighs to Karstleiter. “None of these creatives are leaders. Anke is good, but only with words. People like her shouldn’t be promoted. Take away their keyboard and replace it with people, and they just want to be nice, and all of a sudden . . . Yes?”

  “What’s up?” says Anke, who’s actually reliable otherwise.

  “Come in, take a pew. We’re just viewing the material. Did your department script this? What’s it called, again?”

  “The working title is ‘The Rearguard’,” Karstleiter butts in.

  “‘The Stragglers’, actually,” Anke says. “Yes, that’s ours.”

  “You see, Anke, we’re dialoguing here about what we’re seeing on that screen. He says he sees animals. I say shit.”

  “You’re right.”

  Karstleiter and Sensenbrink exchange glances, then their heads turn to the young woman as if to order.

  “What do you mean, ‘You’re right’?”

  “You’re right. Those are heaps of shit.”

  “Human shit?”

  “Well, we haven’t analysed them individually, but—”

  “Hey, don’t get all sarky on me!”

  “—but if my eyes don’t deceive me, then yes.”

  “What were you stir-frying in your think-wok when you put this together?”

  “Don’t you like the topic anymore?”

  “Did I ask for heaps of shit? Why would I do that?”

  “Herr Sensenbrink, we were all in that meeting. We discussed the possible topics we could focus on. There were the standard ones, like oldest refugee, the youngest, the most beautiful, those furthest at the front, those furthest at the back. Someone even said, ‘Awesome, right at the back, it must be really grim there’—”

  “That’s fine,” Karstleiter says, “but I don’t understand these pictures! How can they have gone unnoticed? I’d go fifteen metres further on and film there. Don’t any of you have eyes in your head?”

  “Yes, and I said exactly the same as you! But everywhere looks the same. When I rang the civil defence people they just laughed. ‘What did you imagine?’ they said.”

  “But up till now we haven’t—”

  “Because we’ve been filming almost everything up near the front. In fact it’s just a simple arithmetical problem. I’d happily talk you through it, but it’s a little . . . unappetising.”

  Sensenbrink groans and slumps in his chair. A meek wave of the hand gives Anke the floor.

  “It’s like this,” Reliable Anke says. “Those right at the front look for a secluded spot to do their business. Anybody who’s been on a hiking trip knows the procedure. But being a hiker doesn’t make you any more imaginative than anyone else. So you’ve chosen your spot, and when you get there—”

  “—there’s already tissue paper lying around,” Karstleiter says.

  “Exactly. The spot you thought was suitable has been earmarked as suitable by someone else before you. And the more people that pass, the fuller these suitable spots become. So then people start looking for less suitable spots, which are a little further away. Or they go for more obvious places. Children, for example, will just do it by the side of the road, though they’ll aim for somewhere that hasn’t been used before. But take a section where fifty thousand people are walking, and by the evening you’ll be hard pushed to find an unused spot.”

  “Yuck!” Karstleiter says.

  “What then?” Sensenbrink says.

  “Then people camp there. To begin with the most popular sleeping area was the road itself, where there weren’t any little heaps. But when night fell people kept getting run into. They soon learned to keep the middle of the road empty. But then this free space became the first choice for people to do their business—”

  “But why?”

  “Well, I’d be the same. The first place you go at night is somewhere you’re guaranteed not to bump into someone. Anyway, it’s dark at night so people can barely see you in the middle of the road.”

  “And it’s close,” Reliable Anke says. “Your alternative is to head off somewhere far away. But you don’t want to do that: it’s dark, it’s not safe, you want to stay with your herd, you’re afraid you might not find your way back—”

  “Fine,” Sensenbrink says, “But does it have to look like that?”

  “Yes,” Anke says soberly. “It does. What we’ve just been talking about is only the first day. And this column is fifty or so kilometres long. Which means that the second tranche of people, those who are fifteen kilometres behind the front, are walking through a section that fifty thousand people have already used. And the following day, the third lot of fifty thousand—”

  “Spare me the rest!” Sensenbrink closes his eyes and turns away.

  “Each person produces 300 grams of shit per day,” Karstleiter reads from her smartphone.

  “You can work it out yourself,” Anke says. “This means that, every day, those at the very back have to walk through an area in which around forty-five tonnes of shit have been deposited over the previous three days. That’s a quarter of a million heaps, depending on the size—”

  “Enough!”

  “Drone images even show patterns.”

  “What?”

  “O.K., you’ve got a column in which a constant number of people always group themselves in a similar way, that’s to say around the water tanker.” Reliable Anke takes a sheet of paper and starts to sketch circles and lines. “The following morning it always looks the same. Here’s the water tanker, there’s the road and the shit is dispersed roughly like this.” She makes lots of dots on the paper.

  “Enough, enough!” Sensenbrink pleads.

  “The further back you go, the more you see people with plastic tarpaulins. So they can sleep on a halfway clean surface. Now there are even specialists, earning a bit on the side by folding the tarps in such a way that the outer and inner sides don’t come into contact.”

  “Mary, mother of Jesus! We can’t show any of this.”

  “Even though it’s almost another good story.”

  “No, it’s not! We can’t use it. We’re broadcasting the greatest live drama in the history of German television. Of any television. This is bigger than 9/11. We’ve got exclusive access to the lead figure. The two lead figures in the drama. It’s the most important show we’re putting out there right now. We stand here, aware of our responsibility towards history. Everyone on the board agrees that we bear a responsibility towards humanity. Towards journalism. Towards democracy! But not by showing pictures of shitheaps.”

  “It may sound cynical,” Anke says, “but when the provisioning wasn’t so great, the problem wasn’t quite so . . . spectacular.”

  “The cement mixers?”

  Anke nods.

  It was some viewer. One of these globetrotters. But also a truck manufacturer or engineer. He’d seen the episode about the dreadful quality of the food, endless howling and tears. The N.H.F.H. pulled in donations amounting to tens of millions. And then this globetrotting engineer rang up and said you could run the whole thing much more efficiently, especially in Africa where people mainly eat porridge. Of course they couldn’t all stir their porridge while on the march, but it could be done centrally. And the porridge could be delivered in cement mixers. It would be stirred en route, and with a few modifications it might even come out in a better state than it had been when it was poured in. This was a huge initiative: two lorries were donated and more were purchased. And because this was a humanitarian crisis, normal construction firms dropped down the distribution list, which made no sense, because dubious local gangsters latched onto the idea enthusiastically and organised some old cement mixers from China, which worked just as well. Ever since, serving each refugee a portion of porridge on a bit of cardboard has been a doddle.

  Karstleiter pushes he
r mouse around. The screen is bright again, and the problem is clearly visible. “Everything is interconnected,” she says.

  “But it’s got to stop, it’s mission critical.” Sensenbrink says. “To be blunt: this is no longer advertiser-friendly space.”

  “But it’s the authenticity that marks us out,” Reliable Anke says, confused. “The journalistic quality. The fact that we don’t prettify anything.”

  “Try telling that to the folks at Salomon or Adidas,” Sensenbrink says.

  “Tsk, tsk,” Karstleiter says. “Or Meindl, for that matter. Viewers aren’t going to buy 300-euro hiking boots when they’re watching people standing up to their ankles in shit.”

  “I get that you don’t like it, but I can’t work magic. All I can suggest is that we start filming from the front again.”

  “That’s not going to help. Someone else will film it. It’s amazing that nobody else has picked up on it. The turds have to go.”

  “But what do you think’s going to happen? Are you going to ban people from pooing?”

  “Maybe we don’t have to,” Karstleiter suggests. “Maybe nobody will notice.”

  “The longer it goes on, the more likely someone else is going to pick up on it. We can’t risk it any longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not ‘any longer’?”

  “Because,” Sensenbrink sighs, “because we’ve just started sales talks.”

  “Is the company being sold?”

  “No – the show.”

  “We can sell a licence?”

  “Licences.”

  The two women and the technician exchange glances. Three approving faces: raised eyebrows, an understanding nod and pursed lips. The pursed lips belong to Reliable Anke, who asks, “Do we have to licence it? I mean, it’s news. An event. It’s not something we’ve organised.”

  “We’ve argued about this already,” Karstleiter reminds them. “It’s quite clear that, without us, none of this would be happening.”