by Hari Kunzru
I suspect I am not the only person who sometimes imagines kneeling before an executioner in a jihadi propaganda video. I think of what it would be like to be on display, at the mercy of people who hate me, utterly without hope of rescue. I ask myself what it is I would fear most at that moment. Death or pain? Pain is my answer, every time. The sawing motion of the knife, the other exotic ways the bastards might think up to torture me. By contrast, non-existence doesn’t seem so terrifying. It also doesn’t seem much like an orgasm.
That day I left the grave and walked on for about half an hour, before I emerged out of the forest, back onto suburban streets. A church, an old inn with a heraldic sign. To warm up, I bought coffee at a bakery, where the man behind the counter gave me dirty looks and pretended not to understand my German. I couldn’t tell if the problem was me or him. As I drank my coffee, I wandered back towards the Center, passing a couple of dog walkers who nodded and said hello. No one else was around.
As I walked back out onto the main road, a little vintage MG drove past, braked and then reversed back towards me. I bent down to see who was driving and was almost assaulted by the beaming smile of Ulrich or Uwe, the porter from the Deuter Center. He leaned out of the window. He was wearing a tweed cap and string-back driving gloves.
“Hello professor,” he said, in his clipped English. “Can I offer you a ride?”
“It’s OK. I’m enjoying my walk.”
“Where are you going, the Conference House?”
“No. No I’m not. It’s OK, thank you. Thank you anyway.”
“Get in, I show you something.”
I hesitated, not sure how best to get rid of him. I tried making a sort of jaunty farewell gesture and turning to walk away, but he called after me.
“Professor?”
It wasn’t possible to pretend that I hadn’t heard.
“Yes?”
“Get in.”
“No thanks.”
“Why not? You’re not doing anything else!”
“How do you know?”
“Come on, everyone knows you are having problems with writing. Get in the car, the Conference House will wait.”
I was stunned. “What do you mean, everyone knows?”
“Get in.”
Something about his bluntness drained me of opposition. I walked around to the other side of the car, opened the door and dropped down into the passenger seat. He turned to me, grinning like a fairytale wolf. “There’s nothing in there, you know. A lot of blah blah. Pictures hanging on boards with writing. The Russians took everything, all the furniture. They burned the floorboards for fuel.”
“What do you mean, everyone knows?”
He shrugged. “You are never in the Workspace. You are always in your room or walking by the Wannsee. Here you are today, going to the Conference House. This would not be so when your writing was making progress.”
“I wasn’t going to the Conference House.”
He started the engine.
“I save you the trouble. It’s very boring. We do something much better.”
“What?”
“You will see. Don’t worry. It’s very close.”
We turned onto a side road that led away from the lake into an area of woodland. After a few minutes he turned down a short driveway and parked outside a single-story concrete building, a windowless bunker with a low flat roof. Several other cars were parked outside. There was nothing to identify its function.
We got out, and he retrieved a metal briefcase from the back seat, motioning me to follow him. By the door was a discreet plaque declaring that this was the Schiessgemeinschaft Wannsee. The building must have been soundproofed in some way, because as soon as we got through the door, the sound of gunfire was deafening.
Otto greeted the man at the front desk, who looked—with his tightly curled hair, his tracksuit, the cigarette dangling from his lip—as if he’d been frozen at some point during the early nineteen-eighties. He signed us in and we went downstairs to a pistol shooting range, a sunken gallery with baffles on the walls and a big mound of earth at the far end. The whole building smelled of smoke. Two or three positions were occupied by men shooting at cardboard targets.
I was in a trance of suspicion. Ulrich handed me a set of ear protectors and a pair of goggles. His case turned out to contain two black semiautomatic pistols. He laid out a box of ammunition, filled a clip and loaded the guns. He handed one to me. For a moment, I expected him to announce that we would both walk ten paces, turn, and fire.
“Please.”
I faced the target, a black-and-white silhouette. I lined up the white dots and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.
“The safety,” he said. He took the gun from me and flipped a lever on the side. “Try now.”
I fired, wide. A casing jumped out of the slide. My second shot was better. I tried to work out if he was surprised. I’m not someone you’d necessarily expect to be familiar with firearms. My mind was full of questions. How do you know I’m not writing? Do you see the computer logs? And above all, Why guns? Why are you introducing guns into this situation? I started to speak. He tapped his ear protectors, shrugged, and indicated the target.
I shot off a ten-round clip. He took the gun and reloaded it. He took position next to me and emptied his own clip into the target next to mine. In this way, without talking, we each shot off fifty rounds. Finally, he took off his ear protectors.
“So you feel more relaxed now?”
“Sure.”
This was a lie. My brain was almost melting from my attempt to work out the angles. I did not for one moment think this encounter was the product of an impulse to be sociable. And a shooting range? A pair of pistols? Every writer knows about Chekhov’s gun. It is one of the rules of writing, insofar as there are rules. One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It is wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep. I was not an actor in a play, so this should have had no bearing on my situation. All the same, it felt as if Ulrich were dropping a hint, nudging a narrative towards a particular resolution.
He drove me back to the Center, swinging the little MG through the front gate and scattering gravel into the flowerbeds. We shook hands and he told me that anytime I wanted to borrow the guns, I had only to ask. I was, he said, a surprisingly good shot.
I went to the library and pretended to flick through an oversize album of pictures of the house and grounds. My eyes skated over a portrait of the man who built it, a Wilhelmine manufacturer of fancy leather goods, gloves and belts and purses. During the Second World War it had been some kind of research institute, and afterwards a club for American officers. Pictures of tennis parties, sailing on the lake. Civilian clothes giving way to uniform. One kind of uniform giving way to another—Deuter, pictured reading in a chair roughly where I was sitting, reading about him—was able to purchase the house from the American occupying forces. I retained little of what I saw. All I could think about was a sound, a single tiny click, the clasp snapping shut on Ulrich’s gun case.
Plot is the artificial reduction of life’s complexity and randomness. It is a way to give aesthetic form to reality. I went upstairs, lay down on my bed with my laptop open on my chest and carried on with Blue Lives. I’d been watching a lot of television drama in Berlin, often several hours a day, retreating from formlessness into soothingly tight plotting. In most ways Blue Lives was an entirely unremarkable product. After a lifetime of American police shows I probably wouldn’t have devoted yet more hours to watching plainclothes cops brutalize people, let alone spent time on the internet, hate-reading profiles of the “mind behind” the show, had its tone not been so weird, so off. On the surface, Blue Lives seemed very conventional, but something else was at work, a subtext smuggled into the familiar procedural narrative.
The show’s cops were all memb
ers of a special unit and they’d lost their moral compass. They were now as bad as the criminals they were pursuing. Everyone—criminals and police—was in high-stakes competition with everyone else, committing acts of appalling violence. When I started watching, the horror of this world had felt safely abstract, so removed from my own life that I could take pleasure in the melodramatic story line. I’d become very involved with the characters, or if not exactly with the characters, who were quite thinly drawn, then how they dealt with the extreme situations in which they found themselves, their strange combination of recklessness and calculation. They were forced to improvise and make instant decisions, yet had to accept that even the tiniest mistake could be fatal.
That evening, after I’d watched a couple of episodes, my encounter with the porter at the gun range started to seem like just another lurid scene, something happening to a character on-screen. I reheated some takeout leftovers, and ate them as a third episode began to autoplay. I was bored, sick of the car chases and the shouting and the bad blues-rock soundtrack and was beginning to wonder about switching to something else. The protagonist, Carson, was working a case with his partner, Penske, knocking on doors in a project, when they heard a violent domestic dispute. Bursting into an apartment they found a black man and a white woman, both in their underwear, the woman with a visible wound above her eye. Carson, full of chivalrous outrage, pistol-whipped the abuser, a spontaneous outburst that turned into a bloody and protracted scene. As the man screamed and begged for Carson’s mercy, Penske took a look around. In a cupboard he found a suitcase with a lot of money, banded up drug-dealer style in thousand-dollar rolls. The two cops looked at the suitcase, then at each other. They made a judgment. This is your lucky day, they told the beaten, disfigured man. They took the money and left.
Their victory soon turned sour. Two days later, the woman who’d been at the apartment was found strangled to death in an empty shipping container. It seemed likely that the drug dealer boyfriend was responsible. Feeling angry and guilty, Carson and Penske searched obsessively, kicking down the doors of shooting galleries and crack houses. When they found the boyfriend, they took him to an abandoned factory and tied him to a chair. As Carson tortured the man with an electric drill, his face was framed tightly by the camera, a haunted grimace soundtracked by appalling screaming. Usually I could watch dramatized violence, even convincingly shot and acted, without feeling much beyond a sort of defensive boredom and a mild interest in the plot, but something about this was different. I felt—there is no other way to put it—at risk, as if I were present in the room and there would be consequences for watching. It seemed to me that unless I did something to prevent the torture, I would be mentally and spiritually violated by it, by its imprint, its presence in my memory. Carson forced open the boyfriend’s bloodied mouth and pushed the drill between his teeth. Although nothing was shown beyond a few impressionistic frames, it was terrible to watch, and somehow I had forgotten that these were not real events and I had only to press the space bar on my laptop to pause them. Carson, whose face was now spattered with blood, looked directly into the camera and spoke. “The whole earth,” he said, “perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar on which all living things must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without pause, until the consummation of things.” Then he went back to his grisly work.
The effect was strange and upsetting, doubly so because the line was entirely out of keeping with the rest of the show. Usually the actors never acknowledged the audience and Carson’s dialogue consisted of grunts and threats. Sacrificed without end, he said, and his eyes filled with sorrow. It was a different sorrow to mine, the sorrow of the accomplice who fears that watching will carry an unforeseen moral cost. Nor was it the sorrow of the victim whose screams formed the soundtrack to the image of Carson’s face. It was the executioner’s sorrow, the disappointment of a man who has been initiated into the great mystery of human suffering, only to find that it is just a puerile joke.
Finally the episode ended and as the credits rolled, I slapped the laptop shut before another could start. My breathing was ragged, my heart racing. I kept asking myself what I had just seen. The sense of transgression, of having done something wrong, was very powerful.
People never talk about the insanity of the decision to start a family with everything an adult knows about the world, or about the terrible sensation of risk that descends on a man, I mean a man in particular, a creature used to relative speed and strength and power, when he has children. All at once, you are vulnerable in ways you may never have been before. Before I was a father I’d felt safe. Now I had a child, everything had changed, and it seemed to me that safety in the past was no predictor of safety in the future. I was getting older, weaker. Eventually I would fall behind, find myself separated from the pack.
* * *
—
REI WAS IN BED. I had woken her up. She listened to me talking, her head still on the pillow, her eyes intermittently closing.
“I mean, what security do we have? The only real security is money. Hello?”
“I’m listening. We’re fine for money. Honestly, we’re OK.”
“Are we? Not really. What if one of us got sick? What if things change, if we have to move?”
“Why would we have to move?”
“Have you been online lately? I think this is what Weimar Germany must have felt like. The sense that something was coming. We have to expect the unexpected. A Black Swan event. We don’t want to be the ones who hesitated. I mean, Walter Benjamin—”
“It’s six in the morning and you want to talk about Walter Benjamin.”
“I’m bringing him up because he’s relevant. He wasn’t a fit man, an athletic man. When he fled he dragged a heavy case of books over the Pyrenees. He took an overdose when he was denied entry at the Spanish border. He wasn’t mentally equipped to survive. Why? Because he was a collector, tied to his collection. He was hoping, irrationally, that something would work out and the Nazis would let him stay in his study. By the time he realized how ludicrous a wish that was, it was too late.”
“You’re talking about the Nazis. I’m going to put the phone down.”
“Don’t, honey. Just a minute. People extrapolate from what they know. They find it hard to imagine radical change. It’s a cognitive bias. Ask yourself honestly, what will happen to people like us if they come to power? They hate us.”
“Who hates us?”
“The bastards. It’s always people like us who go first.”
“Look, I’m as worried as you are. There’s actually a fundraiser tomorrow night. A lot of legal people. We’re going to back our slate of candidates and make sure the Democrats have the best possible chance on the night. Besides no one seriously thinks it’s going to happen. Have you seen the polls? I’m not minimizing whatever anxiety you’re feeling, but we’ll handle it, OK? We’re smart people. If it comes, we’ll see it coming.”
This was a problem between us, Rei’s faith in the democratic process, in the Democratic Party, in the essential reasonableness of the world. To me, the presidential election later that year was only a small part of what I feared. The shift was bigger than one candidate, one country. The rising tide of gangsterism felt global. I saw nothing reasonable about what was coming. Nothing reasonable at all.
Rei yawned. I tried to put it as straightforwardly as I could. “I just—I don’t want to spend my last years scavenging for canned goods in the ruins of some large city.”
“Would you listen to yourself?”
“Honey.”
“I’m going to have to be up with Nina in a few hours. I have to get more sleep.”
“Sorry. Of course. I’ll let you go.”
“Go to bed.”
The screen went blank.
I said the rest of it silently, the things I badly wanted to tell her but couldn’t: that I was afrai
d and needed her help, that every day we were alive was precious and ought to be filled with love and honesty, that I was feeling very far away and the distance scared me and I was worried that if something happened I wouldn’t be able to protect her and Nina, not just because I was in Berlin and they were in New York, but because I lacked power and money, the only true protection in the world. I lacked so many other things, necessary personal qualities, courage and stamina and strength of will. I wanted to tell her that the future I foresaw was unimaginably bleak and terrible and I was beginning to realize that I’d been complacent, or perhaps just selfish, absorbed in my little projects, my lofty thoughts and scribblings. I had not taken the most vital thing seriously, which was safety. The safety of my family. Without safety, we had nothing at all.
IN 1801, at the age of twenty-three, Kleist had a crisis, brought about by reading Kant, who taught that the human senses are unreliable, and so we are unable to apprehend the truth that lies beneath the surface of things, the famous Ding an sich, the “Thing in Itself.” This was a huge blow to Kleist, who was planning to gather as much truth as he could while on earth, then transmit his accumulated wisdom to future versions of himself, living “on other stars,” eventually producing a perfect and complete man. The discovery that he was probably not even seeing the world correctly, let alone collecting points towards cosmic gnosis, led him into a deep depression. He tried to distract himself by getting drunk and going to the theater. He wrote to a member of his all-female lecture circle (he lectured, they listened), saying that he had an “indescribable longing” to cry on her breast.
I was sympathetic to the desire for a system. Who wouldn’t want to have an answer for everything? But twenty-three is a reasonable age to accept that the world is more complex than whatever map you’ve made of it, and systems, however metaphysical or abstract, are never innocent. They do the dirty work of knowledge, clearing the ground for action, for taking control. The truth is that the savages should always eat the anthropologist. They should murder the botanist who comes tripping through the jungle looking for the blue flower, because after him will come the geologist and the surveyor and the mining engineer and the soldiers to protect the miners as they work.
