Greybeard Read online

  ‘Frankly, I don’t hold out any hope for apprehending your grandson’s killers. It could have been anyone. Possibly even a right-wing agitator, I don’t know.’

  ‘I already told you who it was.’

  ‘Yes, but you had by your own admission been drinking beer and Glühwein at the Weihnachtsmarkt…’

  I stormed out into the atrium, where I stood fuming for around an hour, not making eye contact with a single one of these horrible German police. Filth…pigs…Schweine. No other word for them. And at the end of that hour my daughter emerged, and I demanded: ‘Well?’

  But from their body language I could already tell they had been cowed not to press the matter further. They were content to grieve…and no more. Blood of my blood. They say certain parts of the soul skip a generation.

  * * *

  Next day, one Captain Farrow of the Royal Military Police announced in the British media there would be an 'investigation’ into the incident because it had happened on the doorstep of a British base, to the son of a serving NCO.

  And precisely one day later, the investigation was announced as being over. Nothing to see here, no danger to Her Majesty’s bloody buggering British military.

  That same day I moved out of the house in the garrison, and took up residence in a backpackers’ hostel in a baroque castle at a village called Wewelsburg, a half hour bus ride from Paderborn. My argument with my pathetic excuse for a son-in-law had involved me threatening to break his spine for his lack of interest in the details of his son’s death. And then he had done it, openly – accused me of being responsible for the lad’s death by taking him out at night time, taking him into a shop to buy wine (gasp) and all manner of suchlike things. I struck him in the face, and he tried to throttle me – he was far stronger than me, of course, from push-ups and whatnot in the military, but if my daughter hadn’t separated us I don’t know who would have prevailed, due to my furious anger. The boy, whom I had known for all of two days, had been more my son than his. I had to get out of there or I might have found myself up on a murder charge. Things long suppressed were now bubbling to the surface.

  * * *

  I had a room to myself at the hostel, which I paid extra for. It contained a small television, about the size of a slice of bread. I remember flicking numbly through it my first night there, and coming across the Paderborn Chief of Police giving a press conference. He was only responding at all because the spokesman of a foreign political party (UKIP) had raised the issue.

  ‘For all we know, this boy may have been asking for it,’ were what his words amounted to. Then the picture cut to two talking heads, discussing the events of the day. They were describing ‘far right agitators’ from England who were stirring up trouble by wasting excessive police resources on what was clearly just a routine throat-slashing. There were more serious issues to deal with – domestic violence was up amongst native Germans (they stressed the word einheimisch) according to a government report…

  I got the bus straight back to Paderborn. I stormed into police headquarters and demanded an appointment with the Chief. I was quickly escorted from the premises by two officers. They weren’t burly or intimidating – in fact they looked like old-fashioned postmen, with their wooly green vests. But they threatened to lock me up. And other voices stirred, and so I let myself be led away.

  I staggered down the street, reeling under the weight of history, the weight of a death that had taken place in the wrong circumstances – which in any other circumstances would be regarded with horror and shock. I ran shouting down the street, beard streaming behind me like a vagabond’s. Many heads turned to stare, but they flashed past in a blur. I ran into the Irish pub where I drank with Davey on the fatal evening, heart pounding. Tried to sit at the same table but some matrons were there jabbering away in English…army wives no doubt…and so sat at the bar, head in hands, and tried to cry, but tears wouldn’t come.

  I began telling random strangers about it, but they couldn’t understand my manic English. And then I saw the scientist from the bus at one of the wall tables.

  I staggered across to him, rasping: ‘How do you like Germany’s traditional markets, now that tradition is overthrown?' It was just a question, for I knew instinctively, and assumed others did too, that while tradition could survive an invasion of Strangers who hated it, it couldn’t survive a native population which had lost all interest.

  To my surprise, however, dwarf-planet man started to fidget, then became uppity and defensive of the Strangers. It was to my further surprise that I found myself thrashing him severely.

  As my fists thumped into the side of his squishy, oversized head I could feel the layers of dust and grime peeling from my soul, and the springtime of my youth returning. I felt that she was there, watching and smiling, as I beat deep purple welts across the man’s face with bloodied fists. He wore a look of stunned, mute amazement, and I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t even try to defend himself.

  Others did, however – hands grabbed at me, a mob of the pub’s patrons moving forward to assault me. I wrenched myself out of their clutches and fled the building, needing room to move and think. I was jabbering as I ran, long beard fanning out behind me once more…I must have looked a sight, streak of vicious grey.

  * * *

  Next day I viewed Davey’s corpse at the mortuary near Schloss Neuhaus. He was to be buried in England, but I will never visit that grave, for as far as I am concerned the corpse is the grave.

  My grandson’s dead body seemed to chatter to me – of a better world, a world some of us wanted in the 60s and 70s; a world where things were real, where things mattered. Spreading now in Europe is some ridiculous academic philosophy which holds that ‘the world’ is a myth, but all individual things in it are real. But this is a hollow sham, because the interconnections between things are just as real as the things themselves; even a child can see that.

  My grandson started to talk again; this time sadly. Of the things he will miss out on, things robbed from him. But he will quietly return in another form, he assures me. I ask him, out loud, what I should do, but he doesn’t reply. No, he doesn’t reply, but he seems to wear a crown – a crown of flame; as if, within, the corpse were fire.

  Yes…within the coffin is fire.

  Am I the only one who sees it?

  Yes. I believe I am.

  The only one?

  My daughter and her husband entered as I left, but I refused to speak to them; they likewise.

  * * *

  In a courtyard adjoining Paderborn Cathedral is a window with three hares, which, between them, have only three ears. These spin like a sunwheel, reeking of fertility. Fertility from the depths of the earth.

  And so I visited the crypt.

  Down there were strange structures.

  Also, a girl.

  Around twenty, perhaps twenty-five, it’s hard for me to tell anymore. Dressed in the gothic mode. This was supposed to be the antithesis of hippiedom, yet I can’t say I mind it. Her ears triply pierced, perhaps more (my vision is a blur), yet she seemed sincere. Her wire-rimmed glasses gave the impression, partly, that there was something else beneath. And so I gave a weak nod.

  ‘The roots go deep beneath Paderborn,’ she murmured, in English. ‘I wonder how far they go? All the way to Niflheim, perhaps.’ She had a middle class accent – another English.

  ‘But are there any lower levels? Ones you can get to?’ I murmured.

  ‘Not by stair. So you’re British, too. Everyone here is either British, American or Russian. I hardly ever get to mix with any actual native Germans.’

  ‘Are you…something to do with the army?’

  ‘No. Austauschstudent. Exchange student with the University of Paderborn, doing postgrad work in computer science.’

  ‘Ah, computers. Not my forte, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I want to be a hacker…a really good one. Not sure why I’m telling you this, but there you go.’

  ‘And what do you
hope to hack?’

  ‘Something big. I don’t know what, yet. I’m one of those terribly pretentious people who hate the system but don’t know what they want to replace it with.’

  I sympathised. So many of my own generation had been like that. They sensed instinctively there was something wrong at the bedrock, but didn’t know what to put in its place. So many of them fell for Marxism. And now…

  ‘The rot is pretty deep embedded,’ I said. ‘You may have a big task ahead of you.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s a saying: if you fight in isolation, others will come. Well, so long.’ She gave me a puzzled glance, and walked up the dusty steps that exited the crypt.

  * * *

  The next day, I went to the Paderborn public library and read the papers with the help of a German-English lexicon.

  A local CDU politician by the name of Schuster was giving angry denunciations of the ‘extremists’ who were ‘fanning the flames of hate’ in light of the unfortunate death of an eight-year old boy which had been ‘misunderstood’ and ‘taken out of context’. He didn’t say who these ‘extremists’ were, nor where I could make contact with them if they actually existed…as far as I knew, the only one who had commented on the matter had been the UKIP spokesman, and even he didn’t seem to be pressing the matter too hard.

  So I headed to Herr Schuster’s office.

  I told the receptionist in no uncertain terms that I wished to talk to her boss on a matter of ‘extremism’. She told me in English that his schedule was all booked out, then scurried out back. I could tell, somehow, I don’t know how, that she had guessed who I was, and had been instructed to call police. And I was right, as around a minute later, she still not having emerged, two woolly-vested Polizei entered, and demanded to know what I was doing there. I told them, quite truthfully, that I had seen Herr Schuster quoted in the media as saying he believed there were extremists out there who wanted justice for my dead grandson, and that I wanted to be put in contact with them.

  The policemen looked taken aback.

  ‘In contact with them? Why?’

  ‘So we can work together. To bring his killers to justice.’

  ‘You openly admit…you wish to work with extremists?’

  They ‘escorted’ me to the police car, my old grey muscles not up to the task of resisting.

  * * *

  At the station I was made to wait in an interview room for around two hours. It was a lot more comfortably furnished than the old Stasi rooms, but that in itself made it seem sinister, and I steeled myself for what was to come.

  But no interview took place.

  Instead, in this room that smelt like carpet shampoo, I was told I was being charged with ‘extremist activity’ (that was the exact English phrase used), and served with a summons to appear in court in the nearby city of Bielefeld in three weeks time.

  They warned me not to return to the United Kingdom, or I would merely be extradited back.

  * * *

  After leaving the police station I entered a Kniepe (small pub), and saw on the wall-mounted TV something that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up (unlike the hairs on my head, the Stasi hadn’t destroyed those on the back of my neck). For the figure I saw on the screen, talking about my dead grandson, was a cold grey-haired woman with a protruding lower lip and a curious birthmark above her left eyebrow.

  It was her, no mistake. Her face, distinct in itself, was permanently etched into my memory; forty years made no difference.

  The lies that flew from her sneering mouth were astounding. A text at the bottom of the screen announced her as one Katarina Rosenzweig.

  But why was this civil servant and ex-Stasi agent lying about my grandson?

  What had he done to her? Was it his free-spirited nature?

  ‘And thus perish all enemies of Marxism,’ she had once said. But what was she saying now?

  Only that my grandson had provoked the men who attacked him. That Europeans must learn to adjust, to accommodate the ways of the Strangers. That anyone who disagreed with this should leave Germany. There would be no discussion, no compromise on the matter. It was literally a criminal offence to think otherwise.

  Then the news moved to sport, a football match, so rapidly (to my aged eyes) that I was forced to ask myself if I had really seen her on that screen, or had I fabricated it…was I getting my memories mixed up? I turned to the man sitting next to me at the bar, and asked in halting German if he had seen the Hexe (witch) on the screen. He growled in response, and let fly a chain of invective, which I understood by general intonation only. Then he made it clear he had seen her, and disapproved of her mightily.

  ‘Danke,’ I said, leaving him to his beer, and flew out dazed into the streets of Paderborn. It was as if my life had turned full circle twice – a bizarre loop-the-loop that would have made the Red Baron giddy.

  At the corner I could see a group of Strangers, a whole committee of them, jabbering softly, with the placid eyes of statues, learning with passive-aggressive ‘dignity’ to come to terms with the fact that they were now ‘kings’ of Germany – but there was no wonder or awe in their eyes at the prospect. No reverence or desire to assimilate the mighty weight of history that had preceded them – no, they barely understood it. I walked the other way, trembling, fearful that I might cause a ‘scene’, or even try to kill them, no doubt ending up dead myself in the process. That would be a waste. I had to think of a better way to take revenge. A clever way, one that would have appealed to Davey. And perhaps to her.

  I wandered about the Aldstadt a while, noticing something I had not paid attention to in a long while – the globalist advertising. While not as conspicuous as in Britain, it struck a sour note when juxtaposed with the baroque Westphalian greathouses and the rest of the region’s unique cream-gold and soft-grey architecture. It was a canker in the genius of place, the spiritus locus. This nightmare, this rootlessness. The Irish pub fit somewhat, perhaps…the chain stores not so much. Last night some talking head on TV had seriously said that families who didn’t wear clothing with American logos should be considered suspect, the parents possible ‘right wing extremists’.

  What was going to happen, to Germany and to Greybeard?

  The year was winding down, just as the drunk at the bus stop had promised…but surely Yule is as much of a beginning as an end.

  2

  Awakening

  January

  Love has no boundaries, love has no limits.

  On the TV I had just listened to the bitter little mayor of Cologne, a self-described feminist, telling German girls that they would have to ‘learn to live with’ mass sex attacks (including gang rape).

  ‘It is always possible to keep a certain distance that is longer than an arm’s length,’ she had said. I actually watched the words emerge from her twisted mouth (they all seem to have crooked mouths, these people – what does that mean?). Meanwhile, other feminists were loudly blaming ‘men’ for the attacks…as if Germans had carried them out alongside the Strangers.

  It was around this time that I began to hear the word Lügenpresse muttered around Paderborn. For the press has been caught red-handed, conspiring with the federal government to cover up the sex crimes and physical attacks that had taken place in dozens of German cities. The invaders (for that is what I now thought of them as) were busy planting their seed, attempting to colonise Europe by means of enforced biology. A minister for Nordrhein-Westfalen, the federal state where Paderborn was located, claimed that internet posts criticising the invaders were ‘at least as bad’ as the sex attacks themselves – he actually said that! And a Thuringian minister enthused about his idea that small German villages should be turned into ‘integration laboratories’, receiving huge amounts of invaders to ‘revitalise’ them.

  Lügenpresse, indeed…Lügenpolitik.

  In the meantime I had tried joining a muscle gym, to get some tone into my old arms and legs, as I knew not what trials awaited me in coming days. I paid a mon
th’s membership to a gym at Schloss Neuhaus…but when I entered the weights room, I was amazed to find it full of invaders. It was a fascinating sight – they reminded me somehow of slick, segmented annelids.

  There were eleven of them, and only one of me. No Germans in sight. They looked angry, like spoilt overgrown children, and as one of them turned to stare at me I got the feeling I was looking into the dark marble eyes of an ancient statue, crafted by the leader of a mindless cult…there was nothing behind them that I recognised. Then they all turned to look at me.

  I fled, my membership fee wasted.

  But perhaps muscle power wasn’t the answer. And after all, I didn’t know how much my tendons and ligaments could realistically take after four decades of inertia.

  So I pondered a while, coming up with another approach.

  In the end it came to me. A weapon easy to conceal; one which turned the Lügenpresse itself against its own pet murder gangs. I speak of that favourite amongst rowdy British football fans, the Millwall Brick. At the Hauptbahnhof I bought copies of some of the main German broadsheets – FAZ, Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung – and practiced making them into rock-solid cudgels, rolling them, folding them, making them super-hard. No one was more surprised than me at the calm feeling of elation this thuggish origami bestowed upon my soul.

  At the Hauptbahnhof, a name on the departures screen caught my attention – Hameln, home of the Pied Piper – and this gave me another idea. I went to the Südring shopping centre and bought a small mp3 player with two equally tiny speakers. Though small, they were quite loud when turned all the way up – I made sure of that, using awful canned music that the shop attendant provided. Then went to the library and read up on how to get music from the internet – where, to my surprise, there were sites where you could get it for free, just like the old bootlegged cartridges people used to sell at Camden Market back in the day. From a site called the ‘Pirate Bay’ I got a swag of tracks by Klaus Schulze; Tangerine Dream; Fairport’s mighty Liege & Lief; and numerous others. I even found Comus’ First Utterance. As I had mostly already paid for these on vinyl or 8-track back in the day, I didn’t feel bad about purloining electronic copies of them now.