by Timur Vermes
He just came out with it, but the moment the words passed his lips he was thinking exactly the same thoughts as the Turk. That the Bulgarians – and anyone else for that matter – would be far happier to let someone into and through their country if they were going at forty or fifty kilometres per hour rather than just fifteen per day. That the Bulgarians would feel more comfortable if they were given refugees neatly packaged in buses rather than in an endless, confusing procession. And if, rather than having to rearrange everything, they were able to pass on what they’d been delivered.
“Or the Greeks,” the Turk said.
“Or the Greeks,” Lionel said.
And that was that. Until they got to Turkey, Lionel had not known what to expect. He planned their march to the border as if those calls had never taken place, but then, on the other side, the buses were actually waiting. As the first buses drove off he called the Turk to express his thanks. The telephone number no longer existed.
Mahmoud slows down. The bus in front is braking as it has to let a man and a cow across the road. The bus is the same model and just as ugly. Sticking out from its rear is an engine block, looking like an extra-long arse, but an arse of such rare hideousness and cropped vertically. Whoever designed this vehicle must have completely lost interest at this stage and decided “the bus ends here”. Then he stuck the name of the bus onto it and went home.
Mahmoud brings the bus to a halt behind the other one. “Let me out here,” Lionel says. He’s going to get onto the bus behind. He thinks it’s better if people don’t always know which bus he’s in. Mahmoud opens the door and gives him a wave as he gets out.
When Mahmoud pulls away Lionel looks at the writing on the cropped arse: ICARUS.
Of course, he thinks. The name of a boy who can fly.
47
The minister of the interior can’t sleep. He’s tired, he’s incredibly tired, but the moment he closes his eyes he thinks of a problem he hasn’t yet solved. He hasn’t had a wink of sleep for three days now. He got the hell out of Turkey as fast as he could, informing the chancellor’s office on his way to the helicopter that they had to get the E.U. to club together and back Germany, securing in particular the commitment of Bulgaria and Greece. Romania’s unlikely to come into the equation – the refugees want to take the land route rather than go up via the Black Sea – which leaves only Bulgaria and Greece as adjoining countries. If they keep their borders closed the problem can be overcome – the Turks will just have to be paid for the refugees. And the sum would have to be higher than what they’d save by adding tens of thousands of their own refugees to the procession.
You can always find money, but you can’t find a population that will accept refugees.
The minister turns over. He’s lying on the sofa he had brought over from his old office with the chairs. The furniture he sat on with Leubl just before Christmas.
Leubl.
How do you bring the Bulgarian and Greek borders under control? Because one thing is certain: if the refugees are allowed to behave as they did at the Turkey–Iraq border, the whole thing will collapse in exactly the same way. The Turks didn’t do the job for us, he thinks, so nor will the Greeks and Bulgarians. Somebody else has to. Somebody representing our interests. The army? The border protection squad? Neither Bulgaria nor Greece will allow this; borders are domestic matters, and countries are mightily fussy about them. The chancellor’s office is going to have to pile on some pressure. And then they can send Frontex. Protecting the E.U.’s external borders is Frontex’s job. They can send German soldiers in Frontex uniforms. A sort of uniform scam, like Putin in the Crimea. Who could he call? The minister sits up and switches on the light.
The clock shows half past two. He rubs his dry eyes. He ought to have left the light off. Sometimes when you’re dozing you have flashes of inspiration that turn out to be twaddle when the lights are on. He already has a pretty good idea of how the chancellor’s office and the foreign office would react to his suggestion. German soldiers under the Frontex flag. By the time they warmed to the idea, the refugees would have passed Nuremberg. He has three text messages. The first two are from the domestic intelligence service. They’ve smashed another vigilante group, this time in Bavaria. Thirty members, an astonishingly high proportion of women. Heavy weapons, hand grenades, flame throwers. Less than six months old but already radicalised. And there’s no doubting they’re prepared to use these weapons – five security agents were shot dead during the arrest, and eight more injured. The third message says that they’ve found a database with information on a nationwide network, but it’s encrypted. There is evidence pointing to dozens more groups; paramilitaries may even be heading southwards.
The minister feels as if a huge wave were washing over him. He takes a deep breath, he imagines making himself flat, as in quicksand, as with an avalanche airbag, you mustn’t let yourself get buried, you have to lie flat, distribute your weight, always stay on the surface.
You have to ride the wave.
No, that’s nonsense. That would mean having to deploy those paramilitaries at the border. The state has to keep control, not relinquish it. He makes a note: “Major crackdown. Raabe!” No stinting with the arrests. Let them take legal action, it’s all about adopting a firm approach. The minister of justice will be on his side, he can slow down the working speed of his judges – the minister of the interior needs peace and quiet until the refugee crisis has been averted. Afterwards they can quash as many of his decisions as they like.
He scribbles “Crackdown!” He has to keep the far right off his back, even if this means locking up every last one of them. Once he’s solved the refugee problem they’ll calm down again. They may even make him their hero; the far right is seriously loopy, after all. If you give them a good kicking they honestly regard this as something akin to a reasoned argument.
First job, then, is to speak to Raabe. He sends a text straightaway: “We need to speak, urgently! I’ll call you at 7!”
He switches off the light and lies down. He feels a twinge in his stomach: tension, he’s lying there completely tense, breathing tensely, trying to get to sleep tensely. Evangeline said he’d become a “states-man” over the past few days. Written with a hyphen, such utter rubbish. They published “before and after” photographs of him: taking office as under-secretary, then two days after his return from Turkey. They like his three-day beard, they say he looks as determined as Gerard Butler in “300”. What a comparison! Three hundred men against one hundred thousand heavily armed invaders – he doesn’t know whether this distorted picture is intentional, or whether it’s cheap propaganda, or whether the editors at Evangeline just like bare-chested men with beards.
The minister turns over. Half past three. So, with the Nazis now ticked off it’s back to the refugees.
What would Leubl have done?
Actually, that’s pretty obvious. So what would Helmut Schmidt have done? After all this is a kind of flood disaster too, isn’t it? The Bulgarians. The Greeks. How do you keep your flank watertight? They must all realise that they’ll be left with the refugees. They must realise this. They simply must.
Echler phoned to say that there are quite a few individuals in both Greek and Bulgarian government circles in favour of simply waving the buses through. Unofficial talks are underway with all countries en route to Germany. He asked Echler about the likelihood of the Bulgarians sticking to E.U. rules. According to the Dublin Regulation all the refugees would be theirs – surely that must worry them?
Echler said nothing.
“Fifty-fifty? Forty-sixty? Come on, give me a rough estimate!”
“Based on the current situation, if our chances are 10 per cent, I’d say that’s generous.”
The minister’s neck is aching. He’s lying with his head on the armrest. Einsteiger kindly fetched him a pillow from a nearby hotel, but like so many hotel pillows it’s a floppy sack into which one’s head sinks like a stone. It allows him to cushion the armrest at least
, but the angle for his neck is far too steep. The minister tries lying on his back.
The German border is the key. If it’s credibly watertight, then the others will be too. In fact he’s thought about spring-guns as well. If you’re not using them to keep your own people in, but to protect the border, they’re certainly worth consideration. And nobody’s being forced to cross the border; if you tell them not to come closer but they do anyway, then really they only have themselves to blame, don’t they? He even started googling all this, but then scrapped the idea. There are no spring-guns that could keep hundreds of thousands of people at bay for hours on end. In the G.D.R. they were booby traps, more or less, which went off when someone touched a wire or whatever. Bang! – and after that they were empty. No, you’d have to link motion sensors up to machine guns, but since that’s never been done, it would be as reliable as screwing together parts from your local electronics outlet. The advantage? It’s so beyond the realms of possibility that you don’t have to bother poring over the legal parameters.
There’s not a noise to be heard in the building. No clunking in the heating pipes, no flushing anywhere. He can’t hear if anyone’s running a tap. No birds hopping on the roof. But no cars either. When he was small he’d always watch the headlights sweep across his bedroom ceiling at night. You were never completely alone; even in the desperate depths of night the city was alive. In his office in the newly built ministry of the interior, he can’t see any headlights. Nobody’s hooting, no trams rattle past.
A wall. A ditch to protect against vehicles – this is what they had in the “death strip” to stop trucks ploughing through. An open field of fire. Floodlights. Fences that can’t be climbed because of the overhang at the top – like protecting flower beds from snails. Metal barriers in front of the wall. Or behind. A sort of outer courtyard, like the ones castles have. His head obsessively rearranges the components, more come to mind, towers, it’s getting confusing, but the solution will come by arranging these correctly, for only with the perfect combination of all the pieces will it work. The barbed wire edges its way in again, he’s doing it wrong – the barbed wire always comes last. First the ditch, then the wall, the gates, he holds them in his head like enormous puzzle pieces, but whenever he inserts one piece it’s too big or it gets stuck to other bits, and he knocks the wall down, he’s got to start all over again. The barbed wire gets entangled, he begins yet again, resolving to concentrate really hard this time, really slowly. First he puts up the wall, but now the wire gets caught in his jumper, his sleeve snags on the barbs, he no longer has any time, he’s got to rearrange all the pieces to stop them getting mixed up, the rolls of barbed wire, the blocks of wall, the towers, the floodlights, but everything is always full of wire, the wall slips out of his hands, the rolls of wire are obstinate and keep springing apart . . .
The minister wakes with a start.
He can hear a hoover somewhere in the building.
He sits up. His eyes feel swollen, dry and sticky. He gets up and goes over to the kettle. He’s going to make himself some tea.
Legally he’s got more leeway now. Not in theory, but certainly in practice. Anyone trying to adhere strictly to the rules has already lost this game. Everyone acts in accordance with the principle that whoever first gets the refugees can try to get rid of them too. Of course the Dublin Regulation – whoever finds the refugees has to keep them – was nonsense. Those countries with external borders are fools. That was never going to be a solution, from the very beginning it only worked if no or very few refugees came. Once the numbers rise the injustice of the Regulation is so obvious that states with external borders will simply send the refugees on.
But then that means Germany can simply refuse to let them in. The minister rubs his neck and unwraps a teabag.
In theory the law is binding, but in practice everything here is being renegotiated from scratch. This is how it needs to be seen: an unheralded renegotiation in particularly bizarre circumstances. Like the chickie run in that James Dean film, where they both drive towards the edge of the cliff and the winner’s the one who jumps out of his car last. Here the contest is: who can watch the refugees suffer the longest? Given the nature of the German population, he’s stuck with bad cards.
The water boils and the minister pours some into his cup. You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t scald the tea.
The simplest thing would be to stop the broadcasting. If nobody can see the suffering, it gives you far greater freedom. But there’s no way of stopping it, so they need a strategy that causes the least possible harm. A wall. But every wall needs a gate, which means they need gates like those on the U.S. government atomic bunker – steel gates. Or at least the most solid gates they can rustle up in a few weeks. And if things continue as they have in Turkey, Germany will simply have to be the country that won’t open its door. That won’t be blackmailed. Shooting people shouldn’t be a necessity; simply refusing to open up will have to suffice.
And a fence along the border with Austria at least, if not along the Czech border too.
Unaffordable. And totally impossible in the time remaining.
They’ll need simpler fences, then, and they’ll have to be defended. Everything’s going around in circles. Literally: the minister feels giddy, he needs to hold on to something. Apparently some of his colleagues reach for the cocaine in situations like this. But he doesn’t even smoke. His pulse is racing. He tries to make himself light, and flat, like when you’re in quicksand. He’s sweating. Outside the birds are beginning to twitter. The minister is so tired, so dreadfully tired. His mobile flashes. A text. “Saw u in Evangeline. U look awful. Look after yourself!”
Tommy.
Knowing that Tommy’s thinking about him makes him feel a little better. He goes back to the sofa with his cup. He picks up the woollen blanket and lays it around his shoulders like a poncho, before sitting down and leaning back into the cushions. He closes his eyes and tries to think of nice things. Comforting things. His childhood bedroom. The sounds. The birds chirruping. The clatter of trams as they take a bend. He’s always liked trams, much more than buses. The driver raising the pantograph which then glides along the overhead cables virtually in silence. The loudest thing about the trams was always the wheels in the tracks.
The overhead cables.
The sparks in the overhead cables.
He opens his eyes wide.
48
He’s not even allowed to express his delight.
Even though there are plenty of reasons to do so. Sensenbrink closes the office door behind him and says, very quietly, “Yesss!” It’s undeniably down to him. O.K., you could say Olav was the one who gave him the information. But he was the one who made use of it.
Sensenbrink drops onto the sofa and reaches into the bottom tray on the shelf above him. He feels a bit uneasy about keeping it, but it looks so fantastic: the viewing figures from that day at the Turkish border. He yanks out the sheet of paper, but that’s fine, because he laminated it. That same evening when his secretary had gone home. That in itself is quite embarrassing, but fuck it. When do you ever get ratings like these?
To begin with it was slightly disappointing – just below average, typical afternoon figures. Still extraordinary compared with the umpteenth “Big Bang Theory” repeat, but not by “A2” standards. When you’re Bayern Munich you’re not satisfied with winning the league; you want the cup too. Then – and how beautifully this is shown on the timeline – a noticeable increase at the time the border is crossed. On the other channels too. They were all there: n-tv, N24, with A.R.D and Z.D.F. showing it in duplicate – you’ve got to spend the licence fee somehow when the other channels have poached all the football matches.
But then, on the other side of the border, everything looked very different.
Sensenbrink reaches behind him for the other graphic, the one analysing the time of the border crossing minute by minute, second by second. Ahhh. To begin with some viewers switch back to the c
hannel they were watching before. But then word gets around that the trek is continuing. It’s not over the border then STOP – now it starts motoring, literally: it’s over the border then BUS. And the other broadcasters have no pictures. They don’t have anything. They’ve finished their work, they thought that would be it. They didn’t even notice what was afoot with the buses, those news experts. In town two days earlier he’d met that bonehead Klüpfel. He wanted to show off his insider knowledge about MyTV’s scheduling.
“Fourteen drones? Eight camera teams? I get that the show’s your big thing. Hats off and all that, but what on earth are you going to film?”
Typical Klüpfel. He’s always been one of those people you don’t bother trying to talk to after 5.00 p.m. And now he’s deputy drip or whatever at W.D.R. But your oh-so-wonderful network of correspondents and Middle East experts are fuck-all help if they’re just getting a bunch of vox pops at the border, while the real action is happening two kilometres down the road. Sensenbrink grins. They had two hours’ exclusive footage of the refugees boarding buses. Two camera teams even went with them. And they’re still with them, changing buses every day.
Exclusively on MyTV.
No po-faced current affairs programme is going to change that.
Well, they’d sewn it up. Once you’ve hooked the viewers, you’ve got an advantage. Of course they’ll switch to A.R.D. from time to time, just to make sure that what you’re broadcasting really is happening. But if A.R.D. doesn’t have any pictures, what do the viewers do then?
