Greybeard Page 2

  On a reel-to-reel tape machine they played back ‘evidence’ that I was a spy, recorded during ‘the time of my delirium’ (i.e. during the acid trip). It consisted of me saying the words ‘all around the world’ repeatedly, and this, apparently proved that I had been planning to sell the secrets of the submarine ‘all around the world.’ It was absurd, but I couldn’t even summon up the energy to laugh.

  All night they interrogated me. When the first lot tired, a new team entered…but I myself was allowed no respite.

  Then it was morning, and once again only sitting or standing were permitted.

  So that was their little game, I thought. They counted on sleep deprivation to crack me up. My second bowl of soup and mouldy bread I hurled against the wall, but they merely laughed. By the end of the day I was eating the flung remnants of cabbage and bread off the floor, while a nameless eye watched through the spy hole. I was already losing my dignity. Crackling electrical pulses flickered behind my eyes in unpredictable clusters, as my body began to attempt to sleep while sitting up. This was not allowed, however, and more than once I was hosed with cold water through the spy hole.

  After another day of this, I was ready to tell them whatever they wanted. I confessed I was a spy, a filthy Western imperialist dog, and had come to see the glorious submarines of the East with a view to copying superior Communist technology. They obviously didn’t believe me, but it was nevertheless what they wanted to hear.

  ‘Not the girl, though,’ I croaked. ‘She is innocent…I told her I was a tourist, and asked her to show me around the local area. That’s all. She is guileless.’

  ‘Rubbish. She has already confessed. Why lie about it?’ And they beat me again.

  Then, finally, I was allowed to sleep, and immediately fell into a near-coma; but was soon awakened by pummels from the guards…for I had fallen asleep on my side, with arms inside the blankets, which was strictly forbidden. So they lay me on my back, arms outside the blankets, and at last I was really allowed a good eight hours of solid sleep.

  After that I was put in a lightless solitary cell for an unspecified time (a few weeks I think, but it’s hard to tell), light emerging only once a day when some semi-rotten meat was shoved in. The chamber pot soon overflowed, and I had to live with the stench of excrement in uttermost dark. But at least there were no further beatings.

  Then one day (or night) the door was flung wide open, and I was informed that a trial had been held, that I had been found guilty (naturally), and would be transferred to a proper prison to begin my sentence (but they wouldn’t tell me how long the sentence was), and was driven to an enormous building near Karl-Marx-Stadt, where I was kept in solitary for another week or so, before being transferred to yet another prison on the outskirts of Cottbus, this one smelling of sulphur.

  It was here that I learnt of the girl’s execution, in a women’s prison outside East Berlin.

  I was told of it by a Stasi agent, a cold young woman with a protruding lower lip and a curious birthmark above her left eyebrow. The execution had been carried out by a method that was common at the time – a pistol shot to the back of the neck. But they had botched it, and the Stasi cunt described in loving detail how the girl had twitched while they argued over whether to use a second bullet, or not to waste the money. By the time they decided on a second bullet, she was gone.

  ‘And thus perish all enemies of Marxism…’

  I took care not to show emotion, as I knew punishment would instantly ensue if I did, but stored everything in my heart for later. (What I didn’t then know was exactly how long that later would be.)

  I myself avoided the ultimate penalty only because the DDR was cautious about executing foreigners at that point; and so I was put to work with other prisoners in a factory making typewriter ribbons. After six months of the prison diet, my hair began to fall out; even after my release, it never grew back.

  I spent ten hours a day, seven days a week working in the cramped factory, the remaining time being spent in my cell, which was so narrow that it held a bed and nothing else. Only once a week, for an hour, was I allowed into a caged outdoor exercise yard (no bigger than the cell), where at least I could feel the breeze on my face. Then I was given the required weekly cavity search, and escorted back to my cell.

  I honestly envisioned that the rest of my life would be spent like this…but after only one year, to my amazement, I was suddenly released, apparently due to a prisoner exchange with two East German spies held in Britain (I suspected the DDR simply didn’t want to pay for my upkeep).

  A year, but I was broken in body and (almost) in spirit. Almost.

  On my return, after several days of interrogation by British authorities, I was given an invalid’s pension, and left to my own devices.

  A few years later I sired a child with a slovenly woman whose face I can no longer remember in any great detail. She took the child away and raised it somewhere else…I don’t remember where. And that child grew to be a woman, and had another child, my grandson. I know this, because one day his mother, my daughter, wrote to me.

  So the 70s passed. And the 80s. And the 90s. And then the 2000s. And one day I looked in the mirror at my bald head and long grey beard, wondering where the time had gone. For I remembered 1974 far better than last week…for that was when I fell into the void.

  But the years had passed, and why should I have been surprised to find myself old?

  Fragile, tottering Greybeard…

  BLACK

  1

  Putrefaction

  December

  'Surely it's what it's always been,' I interjected. 'The same icy ball of rock.'

  'It's a bloody dwarf planet' the uncouth English scientist bellowed, causing occupants of the bus to frown, although not to look around.

  'It isn’t,' his Scottish girlfriend rejoined. ‘Anyway, like he said, it's the same ball of rock it always was.'

  'That's beside the point.'

  'It's a planet,' chirped my grandson. 'There are nine planets!'

  'In the middle ages there were seven,' said the girlfriend.

  'Yes, because they hadn't yet been blessed with Galileo’s telescope,' jeered the scientist. My grandson pulled a cheeky face at him, causing him to become flustered.

  I asked if he was involved with the military, as most of the (quite numerous) holders of British passports in the Paderborn area were. But the scientist scowled and said no, he was merely visiting Germany for its traditional Christmas markets…making him an altogether more complex and mysterious character in my eyes. I suspected he was on the spectrum somewhere, but as so many are these days it hardly rates a mention. At this stage in life I was beginning to wonder if I myself wasn’t developing some kind of late-onset autism.

  It was Christmas 2015. I was 67, but felt (and probably looked) older, a lack of physical exercise during the last four decades having taken its toll.

  My grandson Davey, on the other hand, was simply bursting with energy; a sturdy, tousle-headed Anglo-Saxon youth, with an intelligent gleam in his eye. My daughter had married a career soldier, and the family now lived at the British Army garrison near Paderborn, Germany, with Davey attending the William Wordsworth School in the suburb of Sennelager, along with other offspring of British soldiers.

  He was telling me all about Germany, how much he liked it, but couldn't decide if he preferred it to England, and was making some amusing observations on the differences between the two lands.

  I liked the lad immensely – he had the same adventurous spirit I had once had myself, before the stuffing had been knocked out of me in ’74. The way he looked so openly and fearlessly around the bus made me smile, at least internally.

  Before long he started chattering away to yet another passenger, a somewhat flurried-looking woman who also turned out to be English. Gods, there were so many English in this town! Aside from architectural differences, it could pass for a small but prosperous city in the East Midlands.

  I tuned my mind out
for a brief while, and when I came to he was saying she was torn, bifurcated, and even used the word 'schism'. She sneered, saying 'big words, for such a little man', but he wasn't bothered at all, realising full well that her patronising remarks were empty. Perhaps she was also a little afraid of him, and thus of no further interest to him, because after all he was offering her a service with his observation; although what he meant by ‘schism’ I couldn’t determine and didn’t wish to ask. I merely note that she was wearing revealing and somewhat vulgar clothes, yet sounded uptight, maybe ‘educated’ (I mean, that is, had gone to an expensive school).

  The bus then stopped and we alighted at the Paderborn Christmas markets.

  And they were wonderful. Even the gloomy scientist looked happy as his girlfriend led him off, through the whirl of lights like so many-coloured marzipan globes. The next hour passed in a whirl of gift-buying. There were gingerbread hearts, some finger puppets for the boy (characters from Grimms), a music box for my daughter, and a large beer mug for her husband. And, of course, mulled wine from the Glühwein huts, light in the dark leaved-frames around them, so beautiful, like something from a fairy tale. The cathedral’s mighty spire was aflame, towering across a maze of delicate beauty, a swirl of green and red in the darkened ocean of night-time Europe.

  We strolled down the shopping street called Kamp, and I asked my grandson if he wanted to go to the cinema; but he asked me if I would like a beer instead.

  We soon found a pub, although it wasn’t a German one, but an Irish-themed place called the Harp of Erin. I ordered some drinks (Pilsner for myself, a sparkling apple juice for the lad) and we headed to the only empty table in the place, which was packed out with both German and international patrons on this Heiligabend (Christmas Eve).

  A picture of Brendan Behan’s cuboid cranium gazed pugilistically down upon us, and I felt a brief pang of despair, remembering how she had liked the Dubliners, so many years ago, but it still felt like a muffled yesterday. I had the same sense of loss, grasping at the same nothing I always felt when I remembered her. But then I saw my grandson’s open and confident face looking up at me, and felt that perhaps I could finally deal with the fact that she had gone…only not yet, not tonight. But soon, a change was coming; for the first time, I could feel it…

  The table next to us was crammed with Englishmen, loudly discussing world events. It appeared that the Turkish government were jailing people for sharing ‘memes’ (that is, pictures with writing on them) comparing the current Turkish president to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. That had been one of my favourite books in the ‘70s, and I got an actual belly laugh when I heard how a Turkish professor’s trial (and possible prison sentence) hinged on whether Gollum was to be interpreted as a good or a bad character. I pictured the defence lawyer arguing before the judge: ‘good Smeagol, nicccccce Smeagol,’ as the prosecutor hissed ‘bad, bad, wicked Smeagol,’ and almost choked on my beer.

  Davey asked what I was laughing at, but I shook my head, not knowing how to explain.

  We finished our drinks, and went to get the bus back to Sennelager, chatting of this and that. This bright, imaginative lad was the first thing that had brought any measure of joy back into my life in over four decades.

  We passed the closed door of a musty second-hand book dealer, and Davey told me how delighted the seller had been when he bought a book by a German novelist called Hans something-or-other. I asked what the book was about, and Davey said it was about a man who was an assassin trained from birth to kill himself, but had to wait for a moment when he could take himself by surprise enough to successfully do so. The name of the book was Das Unbewachte Moment.

  As we walked back through the markets to the bus stop near the Rathaus, I noticed a strange and discordant note creeping into the German yuletide clamor, which I quickly sourced as emanating from a group of youths who were hollering and whooping at the fringes of the scene…not festive whoops, but warning cries, like angry chimps. They were Strangers, and I noticed (with something resembling anger) that two of them were grabbing German women by the tits as they swaggered along. Some feeble voices were raised (thin and whining) in protest, but other than that there was no manifest opposition to their actions. As the simians disappeared in the direction of the Cathedral, a sour feeling of deflation followed in their train.

  ‘These Strangers,’ sighed my grandson. ‘They are not good like most English strangers. They caused some trouble near the garrison a few days ago.’ He told me that over six thousand of them had arrived in the Greater Paderborn area in the last couple of months. I frowned, but recovered my spirits somewhat on rounding the corner into the Rathausplatz, where the western section of the market remained unbesmirched.

  Nevertheless, waiting for a Sennelager bus, there was a distinct feeling of tension, even in spite of the mellow old drunk who amused everyone by warbling about how the 'the year is winding down…' (at least I think that’s what the song said in German); and then I suddenly remembered an article in an international newspaper on the flight from Stanstead airport, about how Germans were buying guns in record numbers, and perhaps now I understood why. These Strangers were not open-minded travellers (as I would have been on my Indian pilgrimage, had it eventuated); they were not here to learn about the culture of the Germans at all…but rather to spit on it.

  The bus arrived. I suddenly felt protective towards my grandson, wishing my muscles were stronger. If I had farmed these lost years, they would have been…I felt suddenly that I had failed a test, one I had not even been aware of, and it was now too late to re-sit it.

  We passed the grand computer museum, the largest in the world, and a renaissance palace called Schloss Neuhaus, civilised and proud; before alighting in Sennelager, outside of a supermarket not far from the garrison. I entered and bought a bottle of wine to go with supper, as I was saving the Glühwein for the morrow, but as we emerged, the entire atmosphere of the streetscape has changed, and the German, very Westphalian buildings now seemed like cardboard mise-en-scène framing an entirely different spectacle.

  At least a dozen Strangers were walking down both sides of the road, giving their customary whoops and hollers. One grabbed a rubbish bin and with some exertion wrenched it from its pole, hurling it down the street so that I was reminded unavoidably of an ape flinging its own faeces.

  Two local girls, perhaps University of Paderborn students, were walking along with their heads down and arms folded, and I sensed they were about to be attacked; and so, possibly, was I.

  The Strangers did a kind of whirling dance. Not the clean whirling of dervishes – it was more like filthy water vanishing down the plughole. They started running their hands over the students, both of whom squealed in short staccato bursts – as if unable to scream openly for fear of social disapproval.

  I jogged up, huffing, to help them, instructing Davey to stay where he was. I managed to smash one ape over the head with the wine bottle, knocking him out, then cut up another’s face with the broken bottle-stub (I saw my Stasi torturers of years before in front of me, as a sea of red rage took me). But by this time five had surrounded me, the girls having scarpered. Then, to my horror and anguish, Davey ran up with a garden stake he has pulled from someone's front yard and began beating one of the apes with it.

  I screamed at him to get away. I was being held down, and couldn’t get to him. But I saw, I saw…

  I saw it when they gashed his throat raggedly with a great dirty knife.

  * * *

  One ape was laughing dementedly, but the others seemed angry. My grandson’s blood splattered the pavement like some vile work of abstract art, as he sank coughing and congealing to the ground, his youthful life disappearing before my very eyes.

  'It’s happening again,' I thought in despair, slipping into a darkness I had long ago thought would never take me again.

  Then one of the apes clubbed me across the back of the head.

  * * *

  My daughter’s grief was that of a
n animal, wailing and moaning. We sat in the atrium of a typical small city police station waiting to be interviewed. I tried to comfort her but she would have none of it. Was she angry at me – did she think it was my fault for putting Davey in the way of danger? How could I have known? But she also shrugged away the attentions of a female officer who tried to put a comforting arm around her.

  None of the other cops paid us the slightest heed. The boy’s father sat head in hands, unable to speak a word.

  I was called in to be interviewed. The officer spoke fluent English, no interpreter needed. But to my amazement the tone of the interview was that of a criminal investigation – with me as chief suspect. He questioned me from all angles about what had happened, rephrasing his questions so many times that I began to consider demanding a lawyer, starting to become paranoid they were trying to frame me.

  I mentioned the two female witnesses, but the police had been unable to locate them; the description I had given them at the scene had not been enough, and the interviewing officer actually expressed doubt over whether the girls even existed. And then there was the matter of the wine bottle.

  ‘So you admit that you used a weapon with deadly force?’

  ‘I was fending off a group of dangerous attackers. Single-handedly, I might add.’

  ‘Yes, very convenient.’

  ‘What?’ Despite the desperate miasma of grief that enveloped me, I well and truly lost my temper.

  ‘You have these fucking…people…running around in Germany…child killers…who you can’t contain…and so you shift the blame to me?’

  ‘There are many problems in the world. Perhaps we should focus on the ones that matter.’

  I was speechless. It was Stasi without the torture, and so worse because less honest. I would cooperate no more and they sensed it. I demanded lawyers, and so they let it go for now, but not without a final twist of the knife.