by Timur Vermes
“Now every night before I go to sleep I can think of my two boys”
Two L.E.D. lanterns stand tall in the cargo area, one on either side, with drinks holders humorously attached. They (LightUp, various, inc. www.handwerk.de) also match the colour of the car. This is nothing like camping in the 1970s. Which is no coincidence as Nadeche Hackenbusch has experienced these grim aspects of the past too: “Sweaty times in polyester, I really don’t need that anymore,” she grins. “But with modern, functional clothing, who does? These days we don’t do that Adidas tracksuit look.” We have to agree with her. Even though Nadeche Hackenbusch doesn’t look quite smart enough for the Salzburg Festival, her plain merino shirt from Mufflon would be fine for any day in the office.
But the question must be asked: can they, in the midst of such persistent suffering and struggle, allow themselves such an oasis of peace? “Lionel always tells me we can sleep when we’re in Germany,” Nadeche says. “But my response is that if you don’t get enough rest, you’ll arrive there dead.” And there’s another reason the dream couple need to spend time alone: Nadeche Hackenbusch reveals exclusively to Evangeline that she’s teaching Lionel German. For the German media, but also for the future he dreams of in the Federal Republic. “I don’t want to be lazy,” he says with astounding fluency. “I’m thinking of working as a chief executive.”
This sounds amazingly ambitious, but every day he shows astonishing management capabilities. “Lionel thinks of things I’d never come up with,” Nadeche marvels. “While I prefer to take each day as it comes, half the time it’s like he’s already got as far as Uruguay or whatever.” Nadeches serves up the customary porridge plus a few nuts. “In Germany I’d start by drinking a prosecco,” she says. “So cold it makes your teeth fall out. Lionel doesn’t know prosecco yet, but I’ll teach him about that too.” Then she laughs out loud and says, “I’ll sort that out before you become a chief executive.” She harbours no doubts: “I spent enough time with a man who called himself a producer without producing anything worthwhile. Lionel produces more here every day and he risks his life for the hundreds of thousands who need help.”
“The first altercation in this young, blissful love affair?”
The sun sinks over the endless horizon of Africa. We take our leave as the two of them retire to their tiny nest (maximum load: 1,225kg). As we walk away, we can see the little lamps light up inside the ISUZU D-MAX. It’s a light of hope in a land that can turn darker than any other place on earth.
34
“Performance reviews,” Mojo says with a sigh. “Know what they are?”
The sun is going down and the temperature is becoming bearable, even here where there’s nothing. Or less than nothing, to be precise. The column has already moved on and behind it the entire stretch of desert doesn’t just look desolate and empty, but desolate, empty and bulldozed.
Echler nods. He looks around and considers fetching binoculars from the Humvee.
“There’s nobody here,” Mojo assures him. “Anyone wantin’ to use a directional mic here would need a range of 50K, Mr Jones.”
Echler is giving him a searching look, probably. You can’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but the corners of his mouth are extended slightly outwards. Mojo points at Echler’s broad-brimmed hat. Echler’s head nods, the corners of his mouth turn upwards. He looks at the sky.
“Drones? You’re drivin’ without a licence plate, so even if they are watchin’ us, nobody’s gonna be able to prove it’s you. At most they know that somebody’s meetin’ me.” Mojo throws out his arms and smiles broadly. “And I meet a whole lotta people.”
“Well, then . . .” Echler gives his driver a signal. The Humvee’s engine starts up and it drives off. Echler peers over his shoulder at Mojo. Mojo smiles, then nods at his car. The car comes to life and drives away too.
“What about him?”
“Bandele? Bandele ain’t here. Don’t look at him. Bandele is air. Ain’t you, Bandele?”
No reaction from Bandele.
“How dumb of me.” Mojo shakes his head. “I’ve just been speakin’ to thin air. Come on, let’s take a little walk.”
The vehicles have left tyre tracks in the reddish-brown dust. Echler can see other tracks beneath these, probably from the lorries. Larger tyres have been here too, from a tractor perhaps. Echler walks beside Mojo and he can feel the heat of the ground through his boots. Mojo smells faintly of eau de cologne. Taking a sniff, Echler asks, “Calvin Klein?”
“Hey, not bad,” Mojo laughs approvingly. “Calvin Klein! You hear that, Air-Bandele? This guy’s a real sniffer dog! Calvin Klein. A present from my kids. D’you have kids?”
“No,” says Echler.
“Kids,” Mojo continues. “A blessing and a curse. So young, so clueless. D’you know what my kids like most of all? Barney, the dinosaur.”
Echler looks at him, eyebrows raised.
“It’s a terrible show. A fluffy pink dinosaur who’s always singin’ goddam awful songs.” In a squawking voice Mojo starts warbling something that sounds very like Yankee Doodle. “Yadda yadda yadda, And so it goes on. They’d already binned the show, but then they bought it back to life. It’s horrible. Any sane guy watching it feels an immediate, uncontrollable urge to throttle that dinosaur.”
“In a children’s programme?”
Mojo shakes his head. “Not in the show – in his head. I wanna kill Barney. You’d wanna kill Barney too. But of course we don’t. Of course I don’t. My kids love Barney. But . . .” he says, raising his hand in warning, “. . . they gotta watch it on their small T.V. Barney ain’t comin’ nowhere near my big screen. If I catch even a glimpse of Barney on my big screen then it’s contaminated and I gotta destroy it.”
Echler looks quizzically at Mojo. Mojo winks and slaps him on the shoulder.
“Just kiddin’,” he laughs. “My kids’ T.V. ain’t small.”
“Well . . .”
“But that show is dire. And not just dire. It’s dangerous too.”
“Is it?”
“Yup. That’s what the experts are sayin’.”
“Because men are starting to kill dinosaurs.”
“Don’t joke. I’m bein’ serious. Really dangerous. For the kids!”
“I see.”
Echler would quite like to get down to business now. It may have turned cooler, but here cooler basically means less hot. Besides, he’s got a stone in his shoe. But friendliness and small talk are part of the way of life here. It would be impolite to launch straight into the matter at hand.
“Barney tells the kids a whole pack of lies,” Mojo insists.
“Well, at least people don’t generally sing in daily life.”
“It’s not just the singin’. He tells them that everythin’ in this world is beautiful an’ good an’ nice.”
“That’s not so bad,” Echler says. “They learn the rest soon enough.”
“No, they don’t,” Mojo groans. “They grow up with their heads full of Barney. And then I have to do performance reviews.”
Echler shrugs. “What can you do?”
“I could do with guys like you,” Mojo says ruefully. “You ain’t seen Barney. You know what life is like. But too many of my guys are just dumb niggers.”
Echler doesn’t respond.
“They come to me and complain. Always complainin’. Now they’re complainin’ because of the cabanas.”
“The cabanas?”
“You know: the plastic cabanas. They come from Germany, don’t they? Cabanas for shitting in.”
“You’re doing that too?”
“I’m a businessman. If someone needs little shithouses drivin’ around then I get someone to drive little shithouses around. Of course I could say, I don’t drive shithouses around, but then what? Then some other dude comes along. And if some other dude drives shithouses around for a while, who knows, he might get silly ideas.”
“Like he could drive water around too?”
Mojo la
nds a very gentle punch on Echler’s upper arm.
“You’re a smart guy. Did you hear that, Bandele? He ain’t just got a good instinct, he’s got a good head too.” He taps his nose with the tip of his index finger; Echler’s sure he’s seen this gesture somewhere before.
“But the dumb niggers come to me and say, I ain’t gonna drive no shithouse. I say, you’ll get a stack of cash. A stack. Ain’t that fair enough. An’ they say, sure, but you never said I’d have to drive shithouses. I say, it don’t matter what you drive. Porridge, water. It don’t matter. And they say, but no shithouses. I say, sometimes in life you just gotta drive shithouses around. They say, not me, no way.”
“Because of Barney?” Echler suggests, glad to have something to say.
“Because of Barney,” Mojo confirms. “Because in Barney-world there ain’t no cabanas for shittin’ in. An’ so they believe there ain’t no shithouses for them either.” He stops, his shoe has got stuck. Something is sticking out of the ground. Mojo bends down and pulls on it. It’s some kind of cord, or a hose. Mojo gives an almighty tug. The hose is evidently long, two or three metres of it come out of the ground. Mojo rolls it up, just as Echler’s grandmother used to do with packing string. Then he tosses the bundle to Bandele who stuffs it in the pocket of his cargo trousers.
“So I say, what’s wrong with shithouses? They say, shithouses stink. They say it like kids do. And I say, they’re German shithouses. They don’t leak. They don’t stink. They say, sure they do. And I say, No way, José.” Mojo rolls his eyes, then spies another hose on the ground. He seizes it and begins to pull. Echler thinks about his grandmother again; this time she’s weeding. Two or three metres. Mojo rolls it up.
Echler looks at his watch. He’s got time, but not so much.
“What then?”
“What am I to do? I get new guys to drive around an’ try to convince the old ones. It’s a process,” he says, circling his hands around each other. “I think we’re headin’ the right way.”
“Marvellous,” Echler says. “That brings us to another process. We had a deal.”
“I figured you’d ask about that.”
“Did you think we’d pay you and that would be that?”
“I see the whole thing more as an exercise in trust-buildin’.”
“As what?”
“I know now that you’re an honourable guy. If you say you’ll pay, then you pay.”
Echler stares at him. His sunglasses prevent him from looking as angry as he’d like to.
“That’s good,” Mojo says. “I don’t trust many folk. But I trust you now. I don’t know who you work for, but you can go to them and say, ‘Mojo trusts me.’” He bends down again and pulls a hose from the ground. “Help me, would you?” he says, pointing at another.
“What is that?” Echler asks.
“Bad for the environment. Plastic. Plasticiser.”
Echler cautiously pulls on a hose.
“Sure,” Mojo says, “there ain’t no fields here, no agriculture, but . . . somehow it all ends up with the dolphins. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Echler pulls. “We paid you a seven-figure sum. Why haven’t you delivered?”
“I have delivered,” Mojo says. He rolls up another hose and tosses it to Bandele.
“You know what I mean. Why have you kept on delivering? The deal was, no more water after that dump of a place.”
“Harder than you think, ain’t it?” Mojo jiggles his head at the hose Echler is tugging on. “This goddam plastic shit!” Echler nods. You’d think the thing had roots.
“Your dough – let me be frank about this. I thought it was just a deposit.” Mojo checks the ground to see if he’s missed a hose. “You buy into a business by acquirin’ stocks.”
“Stocks?”
“Speakin’ figuratively, of course,” Mojo adds jovially. “You don’t actually have no real stocks.”
“We paid you a seven-figure sum—”
“Yeah, yeah, I got you. You thought you could buy me out with that? Another one.” Mojo bends and pulls up a hose. “And one by your foot too.”
“Seven-figure!”
Mojo vigorously plucks the hose from the ground, then stands up straight. “Hey, I know you’re disappointed. That happens in business. But be honest: did you really think those few bucks would be enough? You’re a nice guy, and smart too. I like you. But what do you imagine I earn? I’m responsible for a shitload of jobs here. An’ this model can run an’ run, for a very long time. To put it plainly: if we’re goin’ to do business, you’re goin’ to have to replace these costs. Give it a hard tug, then it’ll come.”
Echler pulls harder, then straightens up too.
“O.K. How much?”
“I can’t disclose my calculations to you right now, understand? But I’ve got one thousand drivers workin’ for me. An’ the way things are lookin’, I can keep’ em busy for ten years minimum. So your seven-figure sum would have to come rollin’ in every week.”
“Are you saying you want to be on our payroll?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
“For doing nothing at all?”
“It’s a paradox, ain’t it? But how else is it gonna work? The business partners I’ve had up till now have ample financial resources.”
“But we can’t do that! There’s no way I can pay you millions on a weekly basis!”
“You can pay it in one lump sum too, but that’ll be more expensive. To adjust for inflation. And those are amounts that I don’t imagine your government can send over unnoticed.”
Echler puts his hands on his hips. He wonders whether to demand back the money they’ve paid Mojo, but this doesn’t seem a particularly good idea. “I can ask again,” he says, pulling his hose from the ground. Something really stinks. He checks the soles of his shoes.
“Smell anythin’?”
“Actually, no,” Echler says. “I just thought I did.”
“If so, it’s the hose.”
Echler checks the end of the hose. Indeed. It is pretty pongy.
“But apart from that you don’t smell nothin’ do you?” Mojo says, sniffing. “That’s the standard procedure. Every day we dig a pit behind the last people. The cabanas are emptied into the pit an’ then driven to the front. The excavator then fills in the pit. Six feet of sand, you don’t smell nothin’ no more. The excavator is great. German firm: Lieber? Liebare?”
“Liebherr.”
“That’s the one. This entire procession is cleaner than any refugee camp.”
“What about the hoses? Are they for the anaerobic digestion?”
“What’s that?”
“No idea, I’m no sewage expert. In Germany we collect sludge in septic tanks. I imagine it’s the same principle.”
“I don’t understand nothin’ ’bout that. But the people gotta breathe.”
“Which people?”
“People who’ve seen too much Barney. Dumbass niggers. I’m goin’ to ask you again, an’ please give me an honest reply. Be as rude as you like. D’you smell anythin’? D’you smell shit?”
Echler takes a big sniff, then shakes his head.
Mojo bends down. He’s found another hose. He squats and pulls the hose to his mouth. “Like I say,” he bellows into the narrow opening, “we can smell nothin’ at all. I hope you guys understand that now.”
He stands up. “I think we’re done talkin’ here. Get in touch again if you wanna get involved properly. And thanks for your help. Bandele, call the cars back.” Mojo pulls hard on the last hose, which tautens and then keeps stretching, as if someone were holding onto the other end.
Finally, it jerks out.
“We’re sticking
with the programme!”
SPIEGEL interview MyTV head of entertainment, Joachim Sensenbrink, on the success of An Angel in Adversity, social responsibility and making money out of refugees
SPIEGEL: Congratulations, Herr Sensenbrink!
Sensenbrink: What for, exactly.
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SPIEGEL: Well, what would you like to be congratulated for? You can take your pick. MyTV’s turnover is skyrocketing, as is Angel in Adversity’s advertising revenue. And we hear you’re going on the board of directors.
Sensenbrink: I can confirm the first two here, but not the last. It’s a matter for the supervisory committee and nobody else.
SPIEGEL: Can the supervisory committee overlook the man behind this upturn?
Sensenbrink: You tell me. As far as I know the supervisory committee can do anything.
SPIEGEL: Now, we’ve heard a funny story that says Angel in Adversity in its current format wasn’t developed by you, it was a spontaneous decision by your star presenter.
Sensenbrink: Yes, I’ve heard that too. But I can assure you that at MyTV it’s still the broadcaster who decides what’s going to be shown. Of course we discuss it with our stars, but the final decision is ours.
SPIEGEL: Which means we must be talking to the right person. What’s it like making money out of refugees?
Sensenbrink: It’s always nice to earn money, but you’re implying that we’re doing it unjustly. I see it differently. I’m very happy to thrash this out with SPIEGEL if you tell us what we’re doing wrong.
SPIEGEL: Let’s put it this way: each episode of Angel in Adversity carries more than 60 minutes of advertising.
Sensenbrink: How much advertising do you consider permissible?
SPIEGEL: That’s not the question.
Sensenbrink: If I follow you, you’re saying that every cent we take from advertising is somehow immoral.
SPIEGEL: Isn’t that the case?
Sensenbrink: It can’t be. We’re a private T.V. channel. The alternative would be to make programmes about refugees for nothing. Which means we wouldn’t make them at all.
“The refugees aren’t as naïve as you would have them be”
SPIEGEL: Or, like other broadcasters, you’d report on it in your news bulletins. They could certainly do with improvement.
