by Timur Vermes
*
A flashing blue hope. These are the vehicles belonging to the fire service, every fire service they could muster at the border. They’re working on the fence, they’re working feverishly and they’re cursing because this fucking fence is made out of some kind of fucking metal that even the most powerful hydraulic cutters barely make a fucking impression on. To start with they tried to cut too far up the blades, but the pressure wasn’t great enough. You need to position the cutters as close as possible to where the blades meet, but then the blades jut out and into the people pressed against the fence. They hesitated. Referred back to operational command. Until the minister came running out of the situation centre and seized the unwieldly tool from the nearest firefighter.
Now the minister looks as if he’d been bathed in blood. He took turns with a firefighter and they cut through three struts, during which he sliced into a dead foot and a living one. Around him, firefighters are directing two diggers, trying to prevent the fence from toppling over and burying the rescue crew beneath it. But there aren’t enough people, there aren’t enough diggers – there aren’t enough of anything. Most of the police constables are needed back in the border area. They have to ensure the fire service and other services can get through, if they’re not already caught up in battles with right-wing extremists. Real skirmishes, not just Molotov cocktails, no. These are attacks by trained paramilitaries trying to get to the border to take the law into their own hands. Helicopters have been brought into operation; the Austrians authorised that, at least. Their job is to pick up refugees from the back of the crush and fly them to Germany. But the refugees don’t trust the pilots. They want to walk across the border because only then can they be sure that they’ll get there.
It’s incredible how much the fence is sagging. Everything sags eventually, of course, every piece of metal can buckle, but anyone who saw the fence before wouldn’t believe their eyes now. They switched off the current and then hastily discussed whether to invite the refugees to climb the fence, but that would have resulted in the stronger ones clambering over the weaker. The worst-case scenario would be to have the fence hanging with people like love locks on bridges; it might collapse in the wrong direction. They need to release the pressure in a controlled fashion, and the only way to achieve this is by opening the fence.
He can’t hear the cries for help anymore; they don’t seem to be as insistent. Since help is now suddenly being offered, some refugees deduce that the fence is no longer electrified, but those at the very front are too weak to climb it, or they’re wedged in and can’t move. The minister thinks they should remove the razor wire. He bellows this to the firefighters, who then argue about how best to do it. When building a fence nobody thinks about the simplest way of getting rid of it again.
Someone brings an angle grinder, which looks like a machine for cutting gigantic loaves of bread. The minister hears someone say, “Fuck it” and “Or the whole lot of them are going to die on us!” When the machine starts up it makes an ugly sound.
A small boy is lying on the ground beside the fence, looking directly at the minister. He’d feel more relaxed if this boy weren’t staring at him the whole time. He’s already tried to position the cutters so he’s no longer in the boy’s field of vision, but there’s only one practicable angle. When he first saw the boy he tried to offer some words of comfort. The boy didn’t respond. Now the minister has discarded his jacket. It was as he was varying the angle of the cutter that he first noticed the boy’s critical gaze, as if in surprise at the minister’s ineptitude. Then suddenly his expression changed.
The minister hears a muffled bang, something misfiring perhaps. He looks up to see if everything is alright with the tools, but nobody else seems to have reacted. Clenching his jaws he presses the cutters against the metal with all his strength. The fence creaks reluctantly. They’ve obviously removed a substantial section at the other point, he can see the digger juddering. The driver revs the engine to push harder against the fence. The minister has one more go, then falls back and a firefighter takes over.
The boy could be eight or nine years old, it’s hard to tell because only his head is visible and this head has become quite shapeless by now. Someone is standing on it, someone who has someone else standing on them. The boy doesn’t care. The minister wants to look away, but that feels like a betrayal. It’s as if the boy were saying, I can’t look away.
With a groan he stretches his back, and then he hears it again. A muffled bang, and then another.
It’s coming from the other side.
58
Astrid von Roëll has switched off the screen. She can’t watch things like that, she’s prone to claustrophobia. It’s not as if she can do anything anyway. Kay is out somewhere with the drone and the agency is supplying the updates. This is how it used to be with her colleagues in sports – you just had to wait for the results. It can’t be that exciting. Why should this be any different from the previous borders? Germany is one of the richest countries in the world; they’ll open up at some point.
Over the past few days she’s been thinking about whether she should prepare an obituary for Nadeche, just in case. It’s what all the major newspapers do, the big agencies. Once a famous person gets to a certain age they have an obituary on file so they can be the first to publish when the time comes. Because these things can’t always be planned. One day an actor might be treading the boards, and the very next – phut!
She’s been obliged to think about it – that’s a better way of putting it – because the deputy blockhead suggested something along those lines: “Of course this is a very delicate topic, Frau von Roëll, but we do have to be professional here . . .”
First, she’s not a news agency, second, she’s got enough to do as it is, third, she’s a human being rather than a machine, and fourth, Nadeche might not die after all, and then the effort would have been in vain. She doesn’t mean this cynically; in fact it’s unimaginable that Nadeche might die, whatever the news ticker said.
And that’s precisely what she told the deputy blockhead: “How can you think like that? We’re talking about Nadeche Hackenbusch here! If she dies they’ll have scripted it beforehand!” And this of course is doubly true for her going “missing”.
In the end he understood her point. In any case they could get the intern to cobble together an obituary. If Astrid were to have any involvement at all, it would be to give the piece a personal touch: “Nadeche Hackenbusch’s final hours – my own impressions.”
She goes to the front, sits in the passenger seat and puts her feet up. Three young men are peering out of the back window of the bus ahead. They’re laughing and making flirtatious gestures. She shakes her head reproachfully, but secretly she feels flattered. She may even miss the camper van. At least a little. How many more nights will she spend here? One? Two?
She wonders whether the Museum of Contemporary History will be interested in it. After all, one of the longest reportages in German history was completed inside this camper. Probably the longest reportage. As well as one of the best, as ought to be noted when they award her the Nannen Prize. Or that other one, the Theodor Thingummy Prize. The Pulitzer might also be in the frame, but she doesn’t know anyone in New York.
She feels a muffled explosion from beneath. As if the motorway had farted.
The boys in the bus in front obviously felt it too. Astrid puts on a dumbfounded, amused and innocent expression, and holds up her hands as if to tell the boys, “It wasn’t me.” But the boys aren’t paying attention, they’re looking over the roof of her camper and pointing at something. Then the ground lets rip once more. Astrid frowns. She slides her feet off the dashboard and hops out.
Her eyes follow the line of buses. There’s hardly anyone to be seen, they’re all inside because the sunshine makes it difficult to read off their phones. What is crucial for them is what’s happening at the border. Far, far in the distance Astrid sees two columns of smoke. She turns around.
/> A police car is driving at high speed on the country lane that runs parallel to the motorway. She sees the man in the passenger seat gesticulating wildly. The car reverses and leaves the lane. It backs into a field and its wheels start spinning. The engine howls, the gesticulating policeman wrenches open the passenger door and runs away across the field. He takes big, awkward leaps, each time sinking up to his ankles. Astrid can’t help but laugh.
The motorway shudders and roars, up ahead this time. Turning around, Astrid sees a fireball in the queue of vehicles. Another fireball, then another, another, like a ball chain, like an enormous fuse cord. She looks at the bus in front, it becomes incredibly loud, the noise swallows her like a huge dragon’s mouth and then there’s just a ringing in her ears.
The bus no longer has a rear window, nor any at the sides, in fact the bus has no windows at all, which is a good thing because the burning boys can climb out. They’re screaming, but they must be quite hoarse already. Astrid can’t hear anything anymore, or maybe only one is screaming. The other two are lying half out of the window, like duvets hanging out to air. Burning beds, they’ll definitely reek of smoke.
Beds are burning, Astrid thinks, remembering the song.
She watches a woman struggle to open the rear door of the bus, but it doesn’t budge; there must be something blocking it inside. She turns to scream at someone else on the bus, she bends in tears to pick up whatever is blocking the door. Then her face reappears, her mouth is wide open, she’s given up on the door and is trying to crawl through the narrow opening where the window shattered. She puts her head through, then a shoulder and an arm, her mouth is open wide all the while, Astrid has never seen anyone open their mouth so wide, then her hair catches fire and a large flame rolls down the length of the bus.
The time has come.
Hot air hits Astrid in the face, but the air is much harder than air, as if Astrid had run head-first into a blistering wall. She can smell burned hair, sweat runs into her eyes, she wipes her face with her sleeve, it’s painful, the sweat is dark red, she feels along her forehead and removes a shard of glass, half of which is beneath her skin as if it had been slipped into a neat little extra pocket.
Astrid decides to follow the lolloping policeman, then she collapses. Her right trouser leg is missing; it doesn’t matter, she was going to throw out these trousers anyway. But there’s a piece of bus sticking out of her knee and her leg isn’t working quite how it was before. There’s skin missing too, and she can see the parts of her knee connected to each other. It looks like chicken. Maybe it’s not just her knee, maybe there’s another piece of bus in her thigh. Her trousers are dripping wet, which must be a good thing with all this fire about. She’s glad it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt at all, that’s another stroke of luck she’s had.
She turns to the bus behind the camper, which is still intact. The door opens, a man stumbles out, pushed by a dozen hands, he looks at Astrid, but this time Astrid doesn’t feel flattered. His expression is one of horror, and she shakes her head and rolls her eyes. She thinks she can see a cigar hovering in the sky. Something comes away from the cigar, two smaller cigars, one of which is coming towards her, then her eyes are covered in blood again. When she wipes her eyes she sees the man burning, and the bus he was on is in flames too. Something burning crawls across the ground, then turns feebly onto its back and goes on burning but no longer moves.
Astrid’s camper explodes without a sound.
Once, when she was a child, Astrid cycled home through a hailstorm with her best friend. It was high summer and the experience was both painful and lots of fun. The hailstones bounced around all over the place, they pelted her skin, her face, she squealed and Biggi, slightly podgy Biggi, squealed too. Now Astrid is lying on the ground, she’s trying to squeal in the hailstorm, but it’s a laborious gurgling, she needs to rest, she’s out of breath. She allows herself to sink back, she feels giddy, lying down is much better, then the blood can run out of the sides of her eyes, carefully she raises her head, her heavy, heavy head, she sees part of the cutlery tray sticking out of her chest, two knives, some forks too, at least they won’t have to look for them later, there’s something stuck to her shoulder, another sliver of wood from the cutlery tray. Astrid chokes, she needs to cough, there’s something in her throat, in her lungs, not that too, she’s choking, she tries to clear her throat, her mouth tastes like it smells in the garage sometimes, not where they work with oil, but where the metal shavings fly around, she once had a thing with a mechanic, he couldn’t stand blood, he wouldn’t like her T-shirt now, even though it’s wet.
Now she feels terribly cold. How weird, Astrid thinks, seeing as the camper van is blazing away. The museum isn’t going to want it now.
59
The minister of the interior could swear it happened just when the firefighters hauled him back. A groan swept through the kettled-in crowd, the section of fence came springing towards him and the firefighter he was taking it in turns to cut with grabbed him by the collar and dragged him away from the danger zone. They watched a ten-or fifteen-metre length of fence come down as if it were as soft as wax. Then they saw the refugees burst from their confinement, a seething mass of people screaming in horror, in their panic running over and into each other. He saw that even saving them would cost lives, and he prayed that it wouldn’t be many. Please let it be fewer than fifty, he prayed, or at least fewer than a hundred, oh Lord, let it be few, for it is my fault they are dying, punish me but spare them. They wanted to enter the Promised Land, just as Your people once did, and what I did to the merest among them I did a thousand times.
He prayed that the rest of the structure would give way as soon as possible, so that they didn’t all have to squeeze through this ridiculous gap, and he remembers seeing the fence sway and tip over at the other end too. This completely irrational feeling of happiness, this unbelievable relief, as if there were the prospect of a happy ending after all, even though of course it won’t be a happy ending because he can already predict that what they will find on this side of the fence is going to be dreadful, and not just because of the boy with the dead eyes.
Then he remembers a series of fireballs rising from the valley, glowing, yellowy-red pearls on a chain, targeted with great accuracy one after the other, as if by a particularly pedantic god. He saw them heading his way and then the kettle of people exploded in ten or twenty of these fireballs. The minister remembers a body flying towards him, circling like a dancer with arms outstretched, but with no legs or head, although in his hand was a strange, burning hat, a sort of captain’s cap. Here, part of the minister’s memory is missing, it seems. It must be missing, for what is happening right now doesn’t fit with the flying man.
The minister is walking along the motorway. He walks past the buses, there are hundreds, probably thousands of buses, there’s no end in sight, and each of these buses is in flames. Thick clouds of black smoke billow from the glassless windows, fat as gigantic, grub larvae. The seats and interior of the buses burn like torches doused in filthy oil. Some of the black bars bend in the heat, these are huge, burning cages. In the seats he can see people, their black heads sometimes tipped forwards, but mostly backwards, dark silhouettes against a flaming background. Mouths gape in skulls like vast notches in tree trunks. Sometimes he can see the teeth. From the way they’re sitting, some appear resentful, but many look as if they’d just been thinking about all their efforts and privations, and then about the outcome, and as if they’re laughing, loudly and bitterly.
Next to these heads he can make out smaller heads and black arms around black necks, and everywhere those open eyes, open more widely even than the mouths, those horrifically open eyes that will never close again.
People are standing beside some of the buses, watching the inferno. Some scorched figures keep trying to get back onto one of the buses, they raise their arms helplessly, they try to walk until they realise the futility of their undertaking, only to try again. The minister se
es a man filming with his mobile, and a sobbing woman, perhaps his wife, place her hand on his forearm. He drops his phone and embraces her.
The air is thick with the acrid stench of diesel, burning plastic, rubber and charred flesh. Now and then the shifting wind envelops the minister in thin swathes of narcotic smoke, and people emerge from the plumes as if from an underworld. Many are missing skin, with others it’s impossible to tell where the clothes end and the body begins. He doesn’t know what he can do for them, without any equipment, without medicines, without water, and with only one arm he’s still able to move. He ought to turn back, but he feels it’s his duty to plough on; he wants to know if that terrifying god really has, with all thoroughness, turned every bus into a burning coffin.
Then the minister sees the woman and the child.
They’re moving slowly, like the walking dead, but they are moving. The girl can’t be older than seven or eight, but it’s the girl who’s leading the woman by the hand. The girl has a sooty face, as does the woman who could be her mother. She looks straight ahead with a serious expression and walks tentatively, as if here, on this motorway, she has to decide with each step whether it’s worth the effort. The fuel tank of a bus behind the girl goes up in flames, she barely reacts. For a brief moment she stays where she is, a dark shape in front of the whitish-yellow inferno, then continues on her way.
The minister stops. The girl is walking with small steps, dragging the woman behind her, determinedly but with little strength, as if she were a toy. The girl stops beside the minister. She turns to look up at him. There is nothing in her eyes, no supplication, no anger, no reproach, no complaint.
