Greybeard Read online

  By the same author

  The Wolves of Joy trilogy:

  1. The Hungry Wolves of Van Diemen’s Land

  2. The Heretic Emperor

  3. Reveries of the Dreamking

  (also available in a single volume edition)

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  wolvesofjoy.wordpress.com

  Greybeard

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  Der Feind ist der Gleiche.

  CONTENTS

  Separation………………………………………..7

  BLACK

  Putrefaction………………………………….23

  Awakening………………………………...…40

  The Field of Mars……………………………59

  WHITE

  Plumbing the Depths………………………...79

  How the Whore of Babylon Became a Virgin Again………………………………………..88

  In the Palace of the Leper King………..........98

  Doubling Up………………………………..112

  RED

  8. Gimme Shelter……………………………....125

  9. Peace Frog………………...…………………141

  Separation

  My memory is of her running in sunlight, tripping merrily on the greensward. Her way of moving, not her face, I had long seen in dreams…

  That was the weird summer of 1974, the last time I ever took acid, and the first I was tortured by secret police. The Summer of Love™ was long gone. Twisters slaughtered hundreds in America, cholera raged in Bangladesh, the West suffered the aftermath of the fuel crisis…it seemed like the end of an era. But for me, setting out on my journey, it was a beginning.

  My Ford Cortina plumed in clouds of dank smoke, its engine making strange clackings as it tried to turn, apparently out of oil. A collective farm was nearby. The girl ran to fetch her father to help, but I had no clue as to her reason, merely held in thrall by the way she ran. It brought back a memory I had perhaps never known, of a time and place that had probably never been. Had she been my lover in a previous incarnation? Or was it a premonition?

  As the old man and I bantered in broken English and still more broken German, and then as he vanished across the field, returning with a large metal can and a funnel, I was still held in thrall. So much that I didn’t notice he was tipping the oil into the petrol tank. It was two-stroke oil, designed for a filthy Trabant! He had never seen a Cortina, product of the decadent West…

  Now the tank would have to be drained.

  I tried explaining to him, but all I could think of was that I couldn’t imagine her ever dying. He shrugged and helped me to push the car off the road, down to the edge of a duck pond, by way of apology.

  ‘You stay here heute Nacht,’ he pointed at the vehicle. ‘Im Morgen…’ He made signs indicating he would arrange for the vehicle to be towed to a garage on the morrow. I barely registered what he was saying, thinking only of how to catch a glimpse of the girl again.

  But I didn’t have to try. For as soon as her father disappeared, she came out bearing food, and seemed to recognise me openly.

  * * *

  In my glove box was a copy of a book I had found on a second-hand stall in London: The Serpent of Paradise, by a South American writer called Serrano. The book concerned India (my destination on this pilgrimage), which was why I had purchased it. In it was a passage that described a palace at the top of the World Tree, where two people met who had been searching for each other for such a long time, and whose tears of joy on finally meeting formed the fruit of the Tree.

  And that was how it was.

  We embraced, openly weeping, and I held her in my muscular arms. Yes, muscular. For I wasn’t one of the culture industry’s Hair hippies. I was a real hippie, and when my pilgrimage was over I would settle down to become a farmer myself, a tiller of soil.

  And I had found, it appeared, my farmwife, my Shakti.

  * * *

  I was then twenty-six, in the prime of youth, the girl nineteen or twenty (ironically the goblinesque Merkel creature would have been the same age, studying physics not far from where I then stood, and possibly working for the Stasi). I, like not a few of my fellow Englishmen, was following the Hippie Trail east to India and beyond. Unlike most, though, I had elected to take a detour behind the Iron Curtain, reaching Istanbul by a more circuitous route. I wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist, you understand, just intrigued by the relative isolation of the lands behind the Curtain.

  We didn’t know it at the time, but those were to be the final years of the Hippie Trail. Khomeini’s revolution, Russia’s Afghan quagmire and other morbid events would soon put an end to it. So far my passage had taken me through France, Belgium, West and East Germany, and if all went well, would continue through Czechoslovakia, Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and on into Kashmir and India.

  Along much of the pilgrimage route, hotels and eateries had by all accounts sprung up like mushrooms to cater to us hippies. I didn’t know that I was fated never to sample them…but I wondered how many of my fellow travellers intended to become settled farmers when their pilgrimages were over. To me it was everything. A rooted, settled existence would be more of a counter-blast to the world of the bourgeois jet-set than the life of a rolling stone…

  And, while I consider the musical Hair to be one of the most appalling, trite and phony pieces of excrescence ever devised by human hand, it is nevertheless true that the age of Aquarius was dawning (although the posturing, money-grubbing charlatans behind Hair never actually understood what this meant). Many thought and still think that, for free-thinkers and individualists, the Aquarian will actually be something of a Dark Age. For when, as Serrano puts it, ‘the Fish enters the Aquarium’, group consciousness comes at the expense of the free-thinking pilgrim, and the fish swims contained, before becoming amphibious.

  Perhaps Aquarians will look back to the Piscean age as a time of golden legend, just as we now look to the myths of Aries: the Argonauts and Troy. But if the New Age is water, how can it be grasped, for it is ever-shifting?

  But soil can be grasped.

  * * *

  It had been easier than I had thought to get a tourist visa to East Germany, for at that time they badly needed money, and were encouraging tourism to some degree. The only problem was, you had to change all your money to East German marks, and were permitted neither to take any out with you, nor to change it back to another currency (I had arranged to have more English money wired to me in Vienna, but was unsure how I would go about obtaining korunas in Czechoslovakia. Also, overstaying your visa was a criminal offence, so I had to be careful there.)

  They inspected my car very thoroughly at the border, and were interested in my 8-track cartridge collection; but confiscating these would have been useless as they had nothing to play them on. They looked briefly in my wallet, but failed to find the LSD tab hidden in the back compartment; they probably wouldn’t have known what it was anyway, and the worst that would have happened would be that they would tell me to throw away the ‘sleeping pill’ (for that is what I would have told them it was, having heard that the medical establishment behind the Curtain looked favourably on sleeping drugs).

  I was directed to stay only at certain hotels (they furnished me with a typewritten list), but disregarded this, and soon managed to give a car I believed was following me the slip, for I wanted to see the East German countryside, not the claustrophobic cities…

  * * *

  That evening I drank wine in my car with the girl (I never learnt her name, no, nor she mine, and have no wish now to know it, rose by any name). The rough Hungarian ferment was the on
ly vintage available in that hair-shirted land.

  The car battery was fine, so we listened to music for a while. She had never seen an 8-track player before, and was fascinated by it. We listened to Changing Horses by the Incredible String Band, and Seven Drunken Nights by the Dubliners.

  ‘But why does the song fade out, then fade in again,’ she asked in a German I could barely understand.

  ‘It’s when it changes track,’ I explained in English, and she shrugged and laughed, not comprehending. I then put on Led Zeppelin III, and she covered her ears in horror at the leaden heaviness of it; now it was my turn to laugh. I wished I had brought along Comus’ First Utterance, which was heavier still, but had only owned it on LP, which I had given away before my journey began.

  But I did put on Tangerine Dream’s newest masterpiece Phaedra, which she loved. Listening to it in her company made it seem somehow consecrated. I experienced the closest thing I have ever felt to true timelessness as we kissed, our souls interlocking.

  The physical communion never went further, and she headed back to the house to sleep – that in itself seemed wonderful to my somewhat jaded mind; indeed, the Indian pilgrimage was embarked on partly to cure this very jadedness…but now I appeared to be done with it before I had even left Europe.

  * * *

  In the morning, when I walked over to the farmhouse, she was the only one present – she gave me to understand that her father had gone to alert the garage to my ‘Zwangslage’.

  ‘Zwangslage?’ I thought. ‘That means something like predicament. I’m not sure what she’s talking about.’ I was sure she had been up since before dawn, milking the cows or something like that, and was now making me breakfast.

  Afterwards she suggested a walk ‘zum Meer’. I wasn’t sure how close we were to the coast, but joyfully acquiesced. It turned out the sea was only some two miles away. We arrived at a fine-sandy Baltic beach…I had expected something rocky, but the sand here was delightful. The sun reflected my inner joy, and the whole scene looked like something Caspar David Friedrich might have painted in a moment of quiet exultation. In honour of this near-perfection I decided to take the LSD in my wallet which I had been saving for a special occasion. I said nothing about it to her, as I feared she wouldn’t understand.

  Then came the worst decision I have ever made, though I could not have known it at the time…but it was nevertheless I who made it. I suggested that we might walk across the rocks at the eastern end of the beach, to see what might be there.

  We rounded the point, scrambling carefully over the rocks, only to find another small beach…

  * * *

  There were no warning signs, no ‘keep out’ notes, just a submarine washed up on the beach. It may have been a Russian one, wrecked there in transit to or from Rostock, I don’t know. What I do know is that the moment after I noticed the acid starting to kick in, I felt a cold gun at the base of my neck. Next moment we were separated and dragged away to different cars.

  I was driven to a building I don’t know how many miles away (my sense of time had already begun to break down), which was to be the scene of my first interrogation. I well remember the arrival – the high walls, topped with barbed wire, the grey watchtowers of concrete; and then we went through a metal gate at the side, entering a subterranean complex, a terrible underworld. It was then that the acid began to take effect in earnest…

  They say acid ‘merges’ you with the universe, but I don’t think that is accurate – for while it makes you aware of an apparently benevolent consciousness that seemingly belongs to the kosmos as a whole, you are still aware of your own ‘personal’ consciousness, albeit in a more objective and critical way.

  And so I refrained from struggling with the grim secret police, and instead hearkened heedfully to what they had to say. And I found they spoke with the very voice of the kosmos.

  But this in itself made me feel protective of my own poor ego – for I wondered what it had done to earn the wrath of that kosmos, that it should be hit so hard across the face it should fall off its hard metal stool. Yes, why did it hate this part of itself so much?

  I began to feel worthless and retreated outside myself again. The mould on the walls began to form patterns: marching bands, strange festivals; entire civilisations rose and fell in front of my eyes on the dank, dripping wall (which appeared so beautiful then, and so terrible next day when the drug had worn off), and at the nucleus of one of the mould-civilisations was a new religion. It was the Aquarian religion I saw taking form before me – neither pagan nor Christian, but something entirely new, a fresh chapter in history’s meandering book.

  At one point I was struck across the face so viciously that I fell to the floor and was unable to get up again. To my surprise, I could see traces of the new religion here, too, although the floor was a vastly different colour, a different world to the walls, and had no mould.

  I could barely understand a word of the questions they were asking (in German, as they appeared to have no interpreter), but soon worked out that making eye contact was a big taboo. Even looking at their faces led to buffeting and blows. So I began to look above them, to the spaces beyond their heads, to find their essential personalities, which to my great amaze turned out to be some kinds of lofty spirits, partaking in a divine drama that manifested even here in this wonderful police cell.

  One of them I called the Upright Man, for none was more upright than he, none more devoted to his duties. Another, more slovenly and sadistic, was the Calm One, who cared no whit for the suffering of others, and thus became beautiful by virtue of his ‘moral objectivity’. Then there was the Crocodile, scary but interesting. What great struggles in the world of the spirit had he engaged in? He fascinated me…

  As they tortured and beat the ‘I’ that was no longer ‘I’, I found myself cheering them on, intrigued. I was hoping they would tear my face off and sever me from the physical world so completely that ‘I’ would be free to float through the walls and find ‘her’, wherever ‘she’ was, and merge with her to form something greater than either of us had been in the days when imprisoned completely in our egos.

  How wonderful things were, imprisoned instead in the castle of a kosmic progress!

  * * *

  But by the end, my ego must have taken hold again, for I became subject to panic attacks and uncontrollable trembling, and a fear that was more than real. For what seemed an aeon I fought with this fear, always in danger of being submerged by it, until finally my interrogators left the room, and I was able to master it to some degree – but afraid of turning my head any more than a few degrees to right or left.

  I watched as the patches on the walls slowly became normal again – nothing more significant than plain old mould – and finally drifted off to sleep just as the sun was rising.

  * * *

  I had probably only been asleep a few minutes when they woke me again.

  All the pain I should have felt during the first interrogation now flooded me for the first time. I was a broken man. I felt I would never be whole again. As they opened the door and the light flowed in, the darkness seemed to grow. Even light here was darkness…

  This time they had brought an interpreter. One of the agents, the one I had thought of the previous night as the ‘Crocodile’, was spitting out words and laughing heavily. The interpreter informed me the Crocodile was telling how he had raped the girl I had been brought in with, and laughed over the memory of things he had done to her ‘soft body’.

  I swung at him, and the next thing I remember is being woken up by means of a bucket of ice-water over the head, with a stabbing pain behind my eyes. They must have really worked me over. I was forced to stand, and did so for the next several hours, while they questioned me again and again as to what I had been doing on that beach. Each time I protested that there had been no sign, no warning of any kind, and each time they hit me in the mouth and face.

  Eventually I worked out they only wanted answers they liked, and so
, when asked if I preferred East Germany to West, I said that I did, and gave actual reasons why: the people here didn’t seem as materialistic, there were no advertising billboards and so forth. But this only increased their suspicions, as apparently the only Westerners who claimed to prefer the East were carelessly overacting spies…

  They left my cell, claiming they now had proof that ‘1203’ (for they referred to us by cell number only, never by name) was a Western agent, and had furnished them with evidence of it by his praise of the very East that had imprisoned him without just cause!

  I was hoisted on my own petard…

  * * *

  They gave me some thin watery soup and mouldy bread to dip in it. I asked where the girl was, and whether she had been charged, not expecting a response, but was told she was charged with espionage, like myself. Then I was beaten again for making eye contact with the guard.

  After being informed that I was allowed to sit but not to lie down during the day, they left me…although randomly-timed eyes through the spy hole put a check to my plans of getting any kip. It would have to wait until night time.

  But at night, when the sounds of the prison seemed to be quieting down, the interpreter and three agents re-entered, and my third interrogation began. This one lasted the whole night through.