The Hungry and the Fat

by Timur Vermes

  He’s been at the exclusion zone, where all hell has been let loose. It’s not the farmers, that much is clear – it wouldn’t ever occur to the farmers. It’s the furious television viewers, people who moved to the country to give their children a better or greener life, or to have a lawn to accommodate their five-thousand-euro barbecue and a playground without anyone else’s children. And it’s people who’ve driven out from the cities to demand the border be opened.

  The exclusion zone was properly secured, he’d satisfied himself of this earlier. It was no surprise that these human rights activists and aid organisations would mobilise. But nobody could have anticipated the force of the images. You can talk to Greenpeace and the others, those people are professionals. But these protesters are amateur. Worst are the outraged women. The agitation, the nagging, always in such shrill tones: “You don’t have children, you wouldn’t understand!”

  It was particularly unfortunate that so many came. “Twenty thousand,” the young police sergeant told him earlier as he was being driven there. “Twenty thousand?” he said. “Are we talking police estimates here or for real?”

  The sergeant turned to him and said, “If you ask me, there are twice as many. Easily.”

  The twice as many saw at once that there were only a handful of officers on standby. The access roads should have been blocked, but there’s a big difference between stopping demo veterans at a G20 summit and people claiming they urgently have to save lives. At a certain point they just went around the roadblocks. And then the vigilantes thought their time had come. He saw it with his own eyes, having stopped with the sergeant at one of the redundant roadblocks to get a view of the situation. Idiots in ridiculous uniforms and with extraordinary stocks of weapons emerged from the bushes and tried to fraternise with the police officers. There were at least four reports of this, all from different places. It’s unbelievable how many of these loonies there are now. Some officers were even delighted – it’s beyond comprehension. Via radio he ordered this chumminess to stop at once, and then he heard the shots. They weren’t warning shots; those self-appointed auxiliary police officers were firing at the crowd, shouting, “Fuck off! This is our country!”

  The minister shakes his head as if to banish an unpleasant thought. He watched the young police sergeant use the 4×4’s radio to call in help. It was a podgy man, tattooed, with a homemade S.S. armband and a Kalashnikov, who shot the man standing beside an extremely irritating woman twice in the stomach, then knocked her to the ground with the butt of his rifle – one quick, professional, brutal blow to the side of the head, which flipped to the side as if her neck were made of paper. She toppled over like a dummy in a shop window.

  The young sergeant leaped out of the car, yanked his pistol from its holster and bellowed at the minister, “Get in and drive straight to the situation centre! Get reinforcements. Go, go!” He fired a warning shot, and because the man with the Kalashnikov didn’t react, he shot at him a couple of times. The Kalashnikov man fell to his knees, at which four of his fellow idiots turned around, took aim and put two bullets in the sergeant’s head. No hesitation, one fluid movement – turn, raise rifle, bang – as if they did this every day. Then the minister made the engine of the 4×4 roar. Two of the vigilantes turn their attention to the screaming demonstrators, the other two fire at his departing vehicle. Several bullets tear into the metal. Something hot fizzes past his head. Soon after that he is behind a knoll and out of range.

  The minister gets everything out of this 4×4 that he learned on that rally driving course. What has the domestic intelligence service actually been doing these past few months? How can these types suddenly appear out of the woodwork in packs? This is fast approaching a state of emergency; he’s going to need the army. He swerves to avoid a tree growing at an angle across the road, almost ramming a police van that must have overturned attempting a similar manoeuvre. He sees officers tending to other officers and squeezes his car into the field beside the road. Hoping that this 4×4 is worth its salt, he puts his foot down and the engine roars, catapulting the car back onto the road. The minister throws himself to the side to avoid smashing his head on the ceiling. He takes out his phone and taps on it with one hand.

  He should have called in the army straightaway, but then there was no state of emergency, all they could have done was to offer humanitarian aid and he didn’t want to send out any false signals. The refugees mustn’t get the idea that tents are being set up for them. By now he’d have had companies, brigades, everything there, hundreds of men who would just need to be given rifles. The way they do it is all wrong, and the mobile network isn’t working either.

  Another police van is coming towards him and the minister slams on the brakes. His weight is thrown against the wheel, he changes gear and accelerates again. Now he can see the situation centre. He drives practically to the door, a low concrete wall doing the lion’s share of the braking. The minister flings his arms against the dashboard and roof, his head dashes against the steering wheel and he doesn’t feel his incisors bore into his lower lip. Something light falls on his head and slides past his bloodied temple. He leans back in the seat. The sun visor is down, something has fallen out. He looks woozily on the ground, finds a piece of paper and picks it up: a photograph of the young police sergeant and a girl in a bikini. The sergeant is bare-chested, he’s wearing his cap at an angle. The girl is snuggling up to him, grabbing at his cap, but one of his arms is around the girl and the other holds tightly onto the cap. She’s laughing. Written on it in touch-up pen is: “My warrior for law and order”.

  “My” is underlined.

  And on top of the “i” there’s a heart.

  *

  Nadeche comes to, partly because she’s lying so uncomfortably. In fact she’s hardly lying. Her arms and legs are wedged between other legs, twisted at strange angles, and she can barely pull them towards her. Her face is on its side, a foot knocks into her skull and her cheek scrapes across the tarmac.

  The loudspeakers have gone quiet. In their place she can hear groaning, cries for help and men’s voices shouting something perhaps intended to be reassuring. She can make out a few words like “further on” and “border”.

  She needs to stand up.

  “Olav?” she says into the headset. “Olav?”

  Olav doesn’t reply.

  “Olav,” Nadeche says much louder, because there must be a glitch on the line, “send the chopper! Now!”

  She remembers that the transmitter must be under her left hip. But when she feels for it, the transmitter isn’t there.

  Get up. Get onto your knees and then your feet. She tries to turn over, but someone else’s legs are where she wants to go. She tries to hit the legs to attract attention, but she can’t even take a swing. Presumably the other person’s legs don’t notice any difference between her hands and all the other legs.

  “Lionel!” she shouts hoarsely and then, louder, “Saba!”

  *

  I’ve failed, Admiral Mahmoud thinks.

  He’s where an admiral ought to be, right at the front. He always wanted to be a proper admiral who stays with his troops, not one who hides at the back.

  He tried to organise his people, but there’s nothing more to organise here.

  He tried to form protective rings for the women and children, but the protective rings were flattened and became useless.

  He shouted at them, he appealed to their sense of honour, but now he hasn’t got the puff to shout anymore. He’s standing by the fence, trying desperately to prevent one of his arms or legs slipping through.

  He’s seen what happens to those people when the crowd shifts. Arms and legs suddenly at impossible angles, until you realise that they’re no longer connected to the bones, only the skin. But the spooky thing is the silence. Because no-one has enough air in their lungs to scream.

  *

  “Where are your Germans . . . huh?”

  Lionel can’t place the voice. It’s soft but clear
, and it’s coming from somewhere he can’t see.

  “Where are your Germans?”

  “They . . . they’re going to open up,” Lionel wheezes.

  “Bullshit. They’re . . . going to . . . let us . . . die . . .”

  Lionel wants to give a longer answer. Something along the lines of: “This is now the key phase, we have to tough it out, we all knew it would happen like this.” But he can’t get enough air, so instead he says, “They . . . can’t.”

  People are already dying. Even if the Germans pull off a miracle now, people are going to die here. And Lionel has no intention of being one of those fatalities. He can’t feel his hands anymore, his legs are numb.

  It’s so easy to say, “We’re going to risk our lives one way or another.”

  But in the end you only risk your life because you assume you’re not going to lose it.

  “Where . . . are your Germans?”

  “Where is Malaika?”

  Lionel can’t answer these questions. And it strikes him that he doesn’t care, either, so long as he survives the day.

  *

  From outside the situation centre the minister hears Gödeke bark, “How can they stand by and do nothing? I mean, it is their fucking country.”

  An official hurriedly opens the door for him. Gödeke is standing in the centre of the room, ranting in the middle of a group of police officers who are all staring at the screens in disbelief. Two are showing MyTV, and from the corner of his eye the minister can see the news ticker: “ckenbusch MISSING +++ SEVERAL DEAD +++ E.U. OFFERS TO TAKE 15,000 REFUGEES +++ NADECHE HACKENBUSCH MISSING”. But the most horrific news isn’t coming via the television. It’s the surveillance cameras on the German side of the fence – the really exclusive images. Exhausted, emotionless faces pressed by the mass of people against the wire fence as if it were a gigantic egg slicer. There’s no sound, but the minister has never seen so much fear without any screaming. Arms reach through the fence in supplication, some are just hanging from it. He sees a child’s head in an extremely unnatural position.

  “What they’re doing there constitutes failure to render assistance,” Gödeke screams. “If only we could get away with that.”

  We already are, the minister thinks.

  He looks at the police officers staring at the screens. He sees them shake their heads – this is all too much. The older ones among them can’t watch anymore; they keep turning away. Sergeants, a chief inspector: experienced officers, all despondent. And whenever they avert their gaze, that gaze tends to fall on him. Slowly, one by one, they turn to face him, the last being the commander. This isn’t insubordination. They’re asking for help.

  The minister tries to keep his composure. There must be a solution, no matter how horrendous the pictures are. What has priority? What is his most urgent task? He has to represent the interests of a country, his country, he has to act in the interests of its citizens. But is all this in the interest of its citizens?

  “Minister,” Gödeke says, “what are we going to do?”

  Leubl claimed that this would change the Germans, that what is happening here would turn them into murderers, into accomplices to murder. He doesn’t know whether this is true, but what’s certain is that if he continues to let these people die, soon the Germans will be citizens of a different country entirely.

  He wasn’t elected so that he could change the country before the very eyes of its people.

  But the country will change with more refugees too.

  If the country is going to change anyway, which country should it become? He thrusts his hands into his trouser pockets and feels something, thick paper. The photograph.

  The young woman. The young police sergeant.

  The minister takes a deep breath. He’s finding this difficult, his voice is a combination of anger, admission and resolve. His fist closes around the photo.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the objective of our operation has changed. What we see here may be the law,” he says. “But it’s no longer acceptable.”

  *

  Nobody seems to react to Nadeche’s cries. She can hear muffled yelling from elsewhere. The crowd seems to surge in one direction, presumably towards the border installations, and with this movement comes a communal groan.

  “Saba!”

  On the ground she’s useless; she’s got to get up, first on one arm, then up. She tugs a trouser leg and a foot steps on her forearm. Nadeche screams. The foot twists until only the toes are on her. Her other hand feels wet suddenly, body-temperature warm, and only now does she notice that the ground is damp in several places, beneath her face too, but that’s probably blood.

  “I’m down here!” she cries. “Hey! Down here! Saba! Where are you?”

  Painstakingly she gets to one knee, but that alone doesn’t help. She’s in danger of falling flat on her back, and here that instinctively feels like the most dangerous option.

  “Nadeche,” she hears a very faint voice say.

  “Saba? Where are you?”

  “. . . eche!” It’s impossible to work out where the voice is coming from. “. . . deeeche!”

  “I’m coming . . . I’ll come and get you!” Nadeche cries, and another wave surges through the crowd, people move over her like an immense swell and the mass becomes even more tightly packed. “Oof,” the men say and the women scream as the air is pressed out of their lungs. Nadeche Hackenbusch yells because something heavy is burying her foot beneath her. With one jerk she tries to free her leg from the weight, now the wave moves and a sharper pain shoots through her ankle. She feels her leg give way beneath the weight, but the pain remains, it roars and drones in her ears, she gasps for air, her legs twist themselves around her, she tries to remain conscious – it hurts like hell. She feels the weight shift, only squashing her calf, but a foot is now bracing itself against her shoulder, pushing her back.

  “Lionel!” Nadeche yells with all the breath her lungs will allow. More and more feet come. They feel their way forwards, they realise they’re stepping on something far too soft to be the ground, then they lift again, quickly but clumsily, as if they’re struggling through a viscous liquid. They try to set down elsewhere, but there is no elsewhere, the feet feel her as blind aliens might an unfamiliar life form, and at some point they have to come down. All Nadeche can do is try to roll to the side and let the feet slide past her.

  “Lionel! I’m here!”

  She’s not sure whether her voice can penetrate through all these bodies. In desperation she pinches every leg she can reach and tries biting into the leg attached to the foot on her shoulder. The leg shifts to her chest, it presses her shoulder blades against another leg that yields a couple of centimetres so that Nadeche slides further back.

  “Lionel!” she cries out in panic. “Down here!”

  Somewhere above a voice is barking orders. The legs on top of her try to coordinate.

  “Hemp!” the muffled voice shouts, and then more clearly: “Hand!”

  She thrusts her other hand upwards, twists it behind her and manages to push it up as far as knee-height, she can feel calloused fingertips but can’t get a grip. The tips of her fingers keep groping and she manages to get them into the calloused hand, then the crowd surges again, the hand is pushed away and her arm is clamped beneath a stranger’s knee and pressed to the tarmac. She feels the knee try to straighten, slowly at first, then desperately, and then it goes limp.

  “N . . . deche,” she hears a feeble voice. “. . . scared!”

  Nadeche suppresses her panic. She’s often discussed with Lionel what would happen if the border wasn’t opened, and he says that there’s no fence on earth that could withstand that pressure indefinitely. The way things are going here it can only be a matter of minutes before the entire fence crashes to the ground and this madness stops. Somebody small kicks her in the stomach.

  “Saba, hang on in there!” Nadeche calls out. “It’ll be over soon.”

  Her neck is painful; it’s so strenuous t
o hold it up like this the whole time.

  “Saba, can you hear me?”

  It happens in a split second. As Nadeche tries to reassess the situation it strikes her as clear as day that there’s no room for any doubt: if she doesn’t get up in the next few minutes she will never hear Saba’s voice again. She feels herself beginning to scream, no more words, she screams as loudly and shrilly as she can, louder than she’s ever screamed in her life, everyone’s got to understand that this is the end, this isn’t about a few scratches and scrapes, this is about Saba’s life. Nadeche notices she has released energies she never knew she possessed. The unbearable pain in her leg is just risible now. Nadeche pulls and tugs and fights her way up.

  But she only gets as far as knee height.

  A hard kneecap rams her nose, she feels it bleeding, but she can’t even get her hand up to wipe the blood away. She screams, she tries to scream even louder, but her voice cracks, it’s not as penetrating as before, and now she hears another woman somewhere else screaming in exactly the same way, but louder.

  “Saba!” Nadeche screeches. Perhaps she only thinks she’s screaming, it’s hard to tell the difference because the pain in her foot has returned, and it’s worse than before. A leg knocks off her wiry headset and sharp metal bores into her auricle, a foot steps on her head and slips off, across her face and past her painful nose. She senses a form of tiredness, a sort of preparatory tiredness because she realises that now she’s going to need huge amounts of strength, it will be arduous, even more arduous than before, she needs to summon all her reserves. Another short rest would be good. Trying to push away these legs is so irritating and futile: the moment you’ve shoved one away, another takes its place. Now someone else is standing on her thigh, she rolls to the side but keeps her foot where it is, it’s bearable, right now it’s more important to rest, she has to protect her chest, make herself small, another surge goes through the crowd, as a result of which two feet press her to the ground, the back of her head smacks hard against the tarmac, she lifts it, more as an impulse, and suddenly the ground seems cosy and inviting, if only her leg . . .