by Amis, Martin
That was over a year ago, and now, for Christmas 2016, we’re off to our house in the Sunshine State, me, Elena, and our two daughters, Eliza and Inez (to be joined, we hope, by my two sons, Nat and Gus) – before proudly returning, on New Year’s Eve, to all the comfort and security of Strong Place…
‘Oktober’
I
I sat drinking black tea in the foyer of the the Munich hotel. A lady in a lustrous purple trouser suit attended to the keys of the baby grand in the far corner, her rendition of Hungarian Rhapsody (with many graces and curlicues) for now unable to drown out the inarticulate howling and baying from the bar beyond the lifts. For it was the time of the Oktoberfest, and the city was playing host to 6 million visitors, thereby quintupling its population – visitors from all over Bavaria, and from all over Germany, and from all over the world. Other visitors (a far smaller contingent) were also expected, visitors who hoped to stay, and to stay indefinitely; they were coming from what was once known as the Fertile Crescent…
‘Let’s see if we can make a bit of sense of this,’ an itinerant executive was stonily saying, bent over his mobile phone two tables away, with clipboard, legal pad, gaping laptop. He spoke in the only language I could understand – English; and his accent derived from northern regions, northern cities (Leeds, Doncaster, Barnsley). ‘Yes yes, I should’ve rung two weeks ago. Three. All right, a month ago. But that doesn’t affect the matter at hand, now does it. Believe me, the only thing that’s kept me back’s the prospect of having to go through all this with the likes of…Listen. Are you listening to me? We need to resolve the indemnity clause. Clause 4C.’ He sighed. ‘Have you got the paperwork in front of you at least? Quite honestly, it beats me how you get anything done. I’m a businessman, and I’m accustomed to dealing with people who have some idea of what they’re about. Will you listen? Will you listen?’
The photographer arrived and after a minute he and I went out into the street. In great numbers the Oktoberfesters were parading past, the women in cinched dirndls and wenchy blouses, the men in suede or leather shorts laced just below the knee, and tight jackets studded with medals or badges, and jaunty little hats with feathers, rosettes, cockades. On the pavement Bernhardt erected his tripod and his tilted umbrella, and I prepared myself to enter the usual trance of inanition – forgetting that in this part of Eurasia, at least for now, there was only one subject, and that subject was of intense interest – to the entire planet. But first I said,
‘What do they actually do in that park of theirs?’
‘In the funfair?’ Bernhardt smiled with a touch of sceptical fondness. ‘A lot of drinking. A lot of eating. And singing. And dancing – if you can call it that. On tabletops.’
‘Sort of clumping about?’
‘The word is schunkeln. They link arms, and sway while they sing. From side to side. Thousands of them.’
‘…Schunkeln’s the infinitive, right? How d’you spell that?’
‘I’ll write it down for you – yes, the infinitive.’
Our session began. Broad-shouldered and stubbly but also delicately handsome, Bernhardt was an Iranian-German (his family had come over in the 1950s); he was also very quick and courteous and of course seamlessly fluent.
‘Last week I came by train from Salzburg,’ he said, ‘and there were eight hundred refugees on board.’
‘Eight hundred. And how were they?’
‘Very tired. And hungry. And dirty. Some with children, some with old people. They all want to get to this country because they have friends and family here. Germany is trying to be generous, trying to be kind, but…I took many photographs. If you like I’ll drop some off for you.’
‘Please do. I’d be grateful.’
And I remembered that other photograph from the front pages a few days ago: two or three dozen refugees arriving at a German rail station and being greeted by applause. In the photograph some of the arrivals are smiling, some laughing; and some are just breathing deeply and walking that much taller, it seemed, as if a needful thing had at last been restored to them. I said,
‘Trying to be kind. When I was in Berlin the police closed a crossroads in the Tiergarten. Then bikes and a motorcade coming through. The Austrian prime minister. Faymann, for a little summit with Merkel. Hours later they announced they were sealing the border.’
‘The numbers. The scale.’
‘And the day before yesterday – I was in Salzburg and there were no trains to Munich. All cancelled. We came here by car.’
‘Long wait at the border?’
‘Only if you go on the highway. That’s what the driver told us. He took the parallel roads…In Salzburg there were scores of refugees gathered at the roadsides. Girding themselves for the last leg.’
Bernhardt said, ‘You know, they won’t stop coming. They give up all they have – job, family, house, olive trees. They pay large sums of money to risk their lives crossing the sea, and then they walk across Europe. They walk across Europe. A few policemen and a stretch of barbed wire won’t keep them out. And there are millions more where they came from. Unless Merkel yields to domestic pressure – you know, to the people who call them aliens – the flow’s going to go on for years. And they won’t stop coming. Wir schaffen das, she says – we can do this. But can we?’
II
It was two o’clock. I had forty-five minutes (my book tour was winding down, and this was not a busy day). In the bar I waited at the steel counter…When Bernhardt asked me how I was bearing up after three weeks on the road in Europe, I said I was well enough, though chronically underslept. Which was true…And actually, Bernhardt, to be even more frank with you, I feel unaccountably anxious, anxious almost to the point of formication (which the dictionary defines as ‘a sensation like insects crawling over the skin’); it comes and goes…Home was 4,000 miles away, and six hours behind; pretty soon, it would be quite reasonable, surely, to return yet again to my room and see if there were any fresh bulletins from that quarter. For now I looked mistrustfully at my phone; in the email inbox there were over 1,800 unopened messages, but from wife, from children, as far as I could tell, there was nothing new.
The heroically methodical bartender duly set his course in my direction. I asked for a beer.
‘Non-alcoholic. D’you have that?’
‘I have – one per cent alcoholic.’
We were both needing to shout.
‘One per cent.’
‘Alcohol is everywhere. Even an apple is one per cent alcoholic.’
I shrugged. ‘Go on then.’
The beer the Oktobrists were drinking by the quart was 13 per cent, or double strength; this at any rate was the claim of the young Thomas Wolfe who, after a couple of steins of it, acquired a broken nose, four scalp wounds, and a cerebral haemorrhage after a frenzied brawl (which he started) in some festival mud pit – but that was in 1928. These male celebrants in fancy dress at the bar had been drinking since 9 a.m. (I saw and heard them at breakfast) before setting off for the Biergarten, if indeed they ever went there. I saw them and heard them the night before, too; at that point they were either gesticulating and yelling in inhumanly loud voices, or else staring at the floor in rigid penitence, their eyes woeful and clogged. Then as now, the barman served even the drunkest of them with unconcern, going about his tasks with practised neutrality.
I was carrying a book: a bound review proof of the forthcoming Letters to Véra, by Véra’s husband, Vladimir Nabokov. But the voices around me were insurmountably shrill – I could concentrate on what I was reading, just about, but I could extract no pleasure from it. So I took my drink back into the foyer, where the pianist had resumed. The businessman was still on the phone; as before we were sitting two tables from each other, and back to back. Occasionally I heard snatches (‘Have you got any office method where you are? Have you?’). But now I was slowly and appreciatively turning the pages, listeni
ng to that other voice, VN’s: humorous, resilient, boundlessly inquisitive and energetic. The letters to Véra begin in 1923; two years earlier he sent his mother a short poem – as proof ‘that my mood is as radiant as ever. If I live to be a hundred, my spirit will still go around in short trousers’.
As January dawned in 1924, Vladimir (a year older than the century) was in Prague, helping his mother and two younger sisters settle into their cheap and freezing new apartment. (‘Jesus Christ, will you listen? Will you listen?’) These former boyars were now displaced and deracinated – and had ‘no money at all’. (‘5C? No. No, 4C. 4C for Christ’s sake.’) Vladimir himself, like his future wife, the Judin Véra Slonim, had settled in Berlin, along with almost half a million other Russian fugitives from October 1917. And in Berlin they would blithely and stubbornly remain. Their lone child, Dmitri, was born there in 1934; the Nuremberg Laws were passed in September 1935, and were expanded (and strictly enforced) after the Berlin Olympics of 1936; but not until 1937 did the Nabokovs hurriedly decamp to France, after a (never-ending) struggle with visas and exit permits and Nansen passports.
‘No, I bet you don’t. Okay, here’s an idea. Why don’t you pop on a plane and come and tell them that here in Germany? With your approach, so-called? They’d laugh you out of town. Because here they can handle the ABC and the two times two. Unlike some I could mention. Here they happen to understand a thing or two about system. And that’s why they’re the powerhouse of Europe. Go on, pop on a plane. Or is that beyond you too?’
The muted TV screen showed the chancellor in mid-explication, her face patient and reasonable and mildly beseeching…I put the book aside and briefly reminisced about Angela (with the hard g) – Frau Merkel.
I was introduced to her (a handshake and an exchange of hellos) by Tony Blair, in 2007, when she was two years into her first term (and I was spending several weeks on and off in the prime minister’s entourage). We were in the top floor of the titanic new Chancellery: the full bar arrayed on the table, the (as yet spotless) ashtrays, Angela’s humorous and particularising smile. The Chancellery was ten times the size of the White House – where Blair would also squire me a week or two later; but I had no more than a sudden moment of eye contact with President Bush, as he and Tony came up from the subterranean Situation Room (this was the time of the Surge in Iraq). And from Washington we went via London to Kuwait City, and to Basra, and to Baghdad.
Merkel was born in East Germany in the early days of the Cold War…So far, there have been several dozen female heads of state; and I thought then that Angela was perhaps the first who was capable of ruling as a woman. In the summer months of 2015, in the world’s eyes she became the brutal auditress of the Greek Republic; by late September they were calling her Mutti Merkel, as she opened her gates as wide as she could to the multitudes of the dispossessed. Willkomenskultur was the word.
Blair was practically teetotal, but he was visibly charmed and stimulated by Angela Merkel (he was full of praise for her, adding with amused affection that she liked to sit up late and have a lively time), and on the Chancellery roof that evening the British premier could be seen with a beer in his hand, a beer perhaps of festival strength…
This is to some degree true of every human community on earth, but the national poet, here, said long ago of his Germans, with a strain of anguish: how impressive they were singly (how balanced, how reflective, how dry), and how desperately disappointing they were plurally, in groups, in cadres, in leagues, in blocs. And yet here they all were (for now), the Germans, both as a polity and a people, setting a progressive, even a futuristic example to the continent and to the world.
With the refugee crisis of 2015, ‘Europe’, Chancellor Merkel had said, was about to face its ‘historic test’.
III
‘Will you listen to me? Will you listen to me?’
But like a washing machine the businessman had moved on to a quieter cycle. Still tensed, still crouched, but reduced to a sour mutter. The pianist’s shift was apparently at an end, and I was grimacing into a phone myself, trying to hear the questions of a studious young profilist I had talked to in Frankfurt. Eavesdroppers and those active in identity theft might have been tempted to draw near, but the foyer was practically deserted; the businessman and I had the space to ourselves.
‘1949,’ I said, ‘in Oxford. Not Wales – Wales was later. Yes, go ahead. Why did my wife and I move to America? Because…well, it sounds complicated, but it’s an ordinary story. In 2010 my mother Hilary died. She was on the verge of eighty-two. My mother-in-law, Betty, was also eighty-two at the time. So in response to that we moved to New York.’ Yes, and Elena ended a voluntary and much-punctuated exile in London that had lasted twenty-seven years, returning to her childhood home in Greenwich Village. ‘Us now? No. Brooklyn. Since 2011. You get too old for Manhattan.’ We made our way to the final question. ‘This trip? Six countries.’ And ten cities. ‘Oh definitely. And I’m reading all I can find on it, and everyone’s talking about nothing else. Well, I haven’t spent time with any experts – but of course I have impressions.’
Our call wound up. The businessman was going on in his minatory whisper,
‘You know who you remind me of? The hordes of ragamuffins who’re piling into this country even as I speak. You, you just can’t stand on your own two feet, can you? You’re helpless.’
* * *
—————
An angular youth from the reception desk approached and handed me a foolscap Manila envelope. In it were Bernhardt’s photographs. Registering this, I felt the rhythm of my unease slightly accelerate. I moved next door into the restaurant, and I fanned them out on the table.
The Europeans you talked to offered different views and prescriptions, but the underfeeling seemed to centre on an encounter with something, something not quite unknown but known only at a distance. The entity accumulating on the borders, the entity for which they were bracing and even rousing themselves to meet with goodwill and good grace, seemed amorphous, undifferentiated, almost insensate – like an act of God or a force of nature.
And it was as if Bernhardt’s camera had set itself the task of individualisation, because here was a black-and-white galère of immediately and endearingly recognisable shapes and faces, bantering, yawning, frowning, grinning, scowling, weeping, in postures of exhaustion, stoic dynamism, and of course extreme uncertainty and dismay…
When you glimpsed them in the train stations, they were configured in narrow strings or little knots, always moving, moving, their gaze and gait strictly forward-directed (with no waste of attention, with no attention to spare). But in Salzburg two days earlier I saw seventy or eighty of them lined up on the street corner, very predominantly very young men, in international teenage gear, baseball caps, luminous windcheaters, dark glasses. Soon they would be approaching the German border (just a few miles away) – and then what? Theirs was a journey with charts and graphs and updates (those cell phones), but with no certain destination. Dawn had just arrived in Austria, and the buildings shone sheepishly in the dew. And you thought, How will all this look and feel a few weeks from now – after Oktober?
At four o’clock, as scheduled, I was joined by my penultimate interviewer, an academic, who began by reminding me of a salient historical fact. She was middle-aged, so it was not in her living memory; but it was in the living memory of her mother. In the period 1945–7 there were 10 million homeless supplicants on the periphery of what was once the Reich, all of them deported, ejected (in spasms of greater or lesser hatred and violence, with at least half a million deaths en route), from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. And they were all Germans – the ‘ethnic’ Germans that Hitler claimed were so close to his heart.
‘And your mother remembers that?’
‘She was at the station. She was seven or eight. She remembers the iced-up cattle cars. It was Christmas.’
I had been gone for se
venty-five minutes and the businessman was still in mid-conversation. By now his phone had a charger in it; and the short lead, plugged into a ground-level socket, required him to bend even tighter – he was jackknifed forward with his chin an inch from the knee-high tabletop.
‘You carry on like this and you won’t have a roof over your head. You’ll be on the street and you’ll deserve it. The wheels are coming off your whole operation. And I’m not surprised. Bloody hell, people like you. You make me sick, you do. Professionally sick.’
The pianist had gone but other noisemakers were on duty – a factory-size vacuum cleaner, a lorry revving and panting in the forecourt. I went back to my book. August 1924, and Vladimir was in Czechoslovakia again, holidaying with his mother in DobŘichovice. The hotel was expensive and they were sharing a (sizable) room divided in two by a white wardrobe. Soon he would return to Berlin, where Véra…
All ambient sounds suddenly ceased, and the businessman was saying,
‘D’you know who this is? Do you? It’s Geoffrey. Geoffrey Vane. Yeah, Geoffrey. Geoff. You know me. And you know what I’m like…Right, my patience is at an end. Congratulations. Or as you’d say, Super…
‘Now. Get your fucking Mac and turn to your fucking emails. Do you understand me? Do you understand me? Go to the communication from the fucking agent. The on-site agent. You know, that fucking Argy – Feron. Fucking Roddy Feron. Got it? Now bring up the fucking attachment. Got it? Right – fucking 4C.’
The often-used intensifier he pronounced like cooking or booking. At this point I slowly went and slid on to the chair opposite me, so I could have a proper look at him – the clerical halo of grey hair, the head, still direly bowed and intent, the laptop, the legal pad.
‘It’s the fucking liability. Do you understand me? Now say. 4C. Does that, or does that not, square with Tulkinghorn’s F6? It does? Well praise fucking be. Now go back to fucking 4C. And fucking okay it. Okay? Okay.’ And he added with especial menace, ‘And the Lord pity you if we have to go through this again. You fucking got that? Sweet dreams. Yeah, cheers.’