Greybeard

by Paul Christensen

  There was also the matter of the local Lügenpresse reporter, but I would take care of him myself. I donned my Dazzle and paid him a visit (for I had determined that my hands should not be entirely free of tangible blood, for that would make me a hypocrite, and I disliked hypocrisy.)

  When I appeared at the door he got the shock of his life. The armor worked. As I advanced toward him he retreated the wrong way, making him twice as easy to catch. He didn’t even try to defend himself as I bludgeoned him to death with a Millwall Brick made from his own newspaper, merely throwing an expression of astound, as if his sickly face itself were a kind of secret weapon. In any case, with Dazzle and a Millwall, I felt invulnerable.

  I was confident that his death wouldn’t be reported, nor investigated too closely, as it would merely be assumed the invaders were responsible…the same ones who occupied the police chief’s home later that afternoon.

  Mysteriously, a few days later, that particular tribe of invaders were quietly escorted to another part of the country.

  It didn’t feel that the cleansing Spring would be upon us for some time yet, however.

  WHITE

  4

  Plumbing the Depths

  March

  Spring did come to Paderborn, and it brought surprises. The waters of the Pader suddenly became clearer, as they bubbled up from the hidden springs beneath the Altstadt. Something was stirring inside my old bones, and I felt the urge to throw aside the book that Gleb had insisted I read, a lumbering nineteenth-century Russian novel, and to rip it up…to tear the pages out and to trample them. Would this be my last, cryptic spring? If so, I was determined to make every second count in the holy actualisation of duty.

  Something was puzzling me, however. During this visit to Paderborn, my first in several weeks, I couldn’t help but notice that the city was flooded with pretty young blonde women…and none of them saying a word. They were walking along the cobblestoned shopping streets in twos and threes, as silent as the future. Only my desire to avoid attention prevented me from asking them directly if they were part of a group, or was it mere coincidence that the city was turning blonde? A noticeable police presence made me leave the Altstadt in any case, before curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to make my purchases at the Südring shopping centre in the suburbs instead.

  A mistake.

  Two polizei recognised me as I stood deciding between three supermarkets (as in Goldilocks, one was expensive, one shoddy, and the third just right), and yelled at me to stop at once. Of course I ran, into the corridor where the toilets were located, pulling a roller door shut behind me to buy time. Luckily it had a twist-lock mechanism.

  The police started hammering on it, but were hesitant to kick it down, or to shoot out the lock. How softly beautiful this country was…no wonder it had been unable to resist turning into a maleficent matriarchy under mouldy Mama Merkel. I spotted a door that opened onto a ramp that led directly to the underground car park; and spotted something else – a motorised wheelchair emerging from the handicapped loo.

  ‘Entschuldigung,’ I murmured, and hauled its occupant out as gently as I could, blocking his protestations with soothing words. I left him lying on the floor of the corridor, where help would doubtless soon be forthcoming. Then I revved the wheelchair (it was rather powerful) and with another yell of apology, floored it down the ramp into the car park. Top speed was as a run – faster than my old heart would have carried me safe over such distances. But the two blocks to the Uni, where I hoped to blend safely into the crowd, suddenly seemed a long way.

  I reached the crossing and looked back – the cops were emerging from the front entrance of the shopping centre. The pedestrian light was against me, so I had no choice but to steer the wheelchair into traffic on the ring road, ignoring the honking of horns all around. Somehow I managed to maneuver into the left lane and turn the corner, hurtling through the university car park to the bike racks, where I dumped the wheelchair. Students watched wide-eyed in amazement as I sprang out of it and hobbled towards the nearest building.

  I decided to head to the student café for a quick bite to eat. Paderborn University, built in the 70s judging from its architecture, was a bit of a maze, and I doubted the police would comb the entire institution looking for me.

  But I was wrong again.

  I could hear them before I entered the cafeteria. The first two must have phoned for backup – one Greybeard against only two of them, an unfair contest. I began to warm to my outlaw role. I could hear them trying to enlist students to help them catch the ‘politische Verbrecher’. The students didn’t seem too happy or enthusiastic about it, however. One was openly mocking the officers, although others were listening to them in earnest.

  I could see another cop near the entrance, so I headed for the library, thinking to either hide or evade them in its maze of shelves, or perhaps find another way to the bus stop, where a ride to the Altstadt left every ten minutes or so.

  I got past the front desk without attracting a glance, but was starting to think sloppily now, and to panic. I found myself standing with a lavishly illustrated German translation of Edgar Allan Poe across my head like an umbrella, hoping the mental shelter would help me think.

  And then, just as I needed it, Rescue came. Two students in black shirts with indecipherable scripts I assumed were the names of gothic or heavy metal bands, one having runes down the sleeve, approached and offered to help. They knew the cops were hunting me down, and they also knew why. It seems my story was starting to leak out – would I become a shadowy folk hero, a figure of future legend? There was no time to think about it, as the two hurried me to an obscure car park, where the bearer of runes had his silver Volkswagen parked.

  Hunched in the back seat, I asked if they could drop me a block behind the Hauptbahnhof, and they did so, without asking questions. They declined to give their names, but looked admiringly at me as I shook their hands and thanked them sincerely. And that was the last I ever saw of them. Were they acting as unconscious emissaries of a higher force, or was it all just happy coincidence? Again, no time to wonder as I headed for Perdita’s.

  She ushered me in, somewhat distractedly. I thought she looked haggard. Too much caffeine, perhaps. I didn’t feel the need to bore her with my chase story, but was curious to hear her take on the fair-haired young ladies flooding the Altstadt.

  ‘That’s the League of Dumb Blondes,’ she said. ‘They’re in Paderborn because it’s said to be a hotbed of racism.’

  ‘Dumb Blondes?’

  ‘It’s a pun – not low IQ, but mute. They’ve all taken vows of silence. Pretty amazing. For females to be silent, I mean, ha ha.’

  ‘What are their aims?’

  ‘They were originally set up to monitor and combat the Red-Headed League.

  ‘Red-Headed League? As in…Sherlock Holmes?’

  ‘No. Well, possibly named for that story. It’s a self-defence league. Red-heads started banding together against the kick-a-ginger trend. But as most of those kicking the gingers were Strangers, they soon became red-pilled.’

  ‘Red-pilled?’

  ‘I keep forgetting how old you are. I mean, aware of certain facets of reality.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  ‘Then the Red-Headed League is verboten?’

  ‘They haven’t been branded terrorists or anything…yet. But the Dumb Blondes were set up to counter them, as I said. And they soon expanded to become a general counter-protest movement. That’s why they’re currently gathered here in Paderborn rather than, say, Scotland, where there are lots of redheads.’

  ‘I don’t recall reading anything about them in the press.’

  ‘Social media’s abuzz with it. Lot of normies altering their profile pictures to wear blonde wigs in solidarity.’ I wasn’t sure what ‘profile pictures’ were, but I ‘got’ the situation. What a lot of things had changed since the 1970s; and so many of them due to mass immigration, it seemed.r />
  I shut my eyes, tired and overwhelmed. In my mind’s eye danced the faces of blonde girls I had known, back in the mists of time. One was a bitch, several were kindly, but none of them were particularly dumb. Whence came the dumb blonde stereotype, I wondered idly…and a face with birthmark and protruding lower lip flashed before me. More Lügenpresse lies, I thought idly. Had the media ever been straight, or was it crooked from the outset?

  I snapped to attention to hear Perdita say that she was now dating Bartholomew Cleves, and (could I have heard this right?) was going to convert him to the anti-invader cause (‘rape monkeys’, she now called them), and use his wide audience to ‘get the message out’.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I snorted, ‘but I can’t imagine Cleves actually caring about anything besides his own wallet. I’ve met his kind before.’

  ‘Don’t be so cynical. There’s something underneath, you just have to penetrate the slightly chubby surface.’ I imagined Cleves penetrating her, but shut the image out distastefully. Even if it had happened in actuality (and I had no proof it had), it seemed blasphemous to think of it, somehow.

  ‘No doubt you know what you’re doing,’ I grunted, rising shakily to leave.

  ‘Do I? I’m as lost as the next person.’

  ‘I’ll see you in the abyss, then.’

  ‘Look after yourself. And please come round again soon.’

  ‘Greybeard always returns, sooner or later. Like a plumber.’

  ‘Plumber?’

  ‘Plumbing the depths.’

  ‘I see.’

  And she did, perhaps more than I.

  * * *

  Before leaving Paderborn, I paid the ruined commune a visit. The gates had been removed completely, and the place was apparently deserted. Then a lone figure shuffled round a corner, looking around itself, apparently in disbelief. It was the commune’s erstwhile ‘leader’.

  Approaching, I saw tears glittering at the sides of her face. She muttered something about never being able to start again, to pick things up. She was a defeated woman, but I, who had defeated her, felt no joy. I did, however, force upon myself a certain sternness, as befitted one who had lately dispensed a most just and fitting punishment.

  As if on a whim, I asked what she thought of the League of Dumb Blondes. She sniffed suspiciously before turning away and clamming up. I guessed she simply didn’t know what it was socially acceptable to say…such a heavy atmosphere of fear in the ‘open society’.

  Only, of course, it isn’t an open society, for there is no such thing…opening one valve in the complex network we call ‘society’ inevitably means shutting another off. And if one gets the wrong combination of valves, the pressure becomes explosive, shorting the network.

  Now I understood why I had called myself a ‘plumber’ at Perdita’s.

  * * *

  A week later, the League of Dumb Blondes held a silent march through Paderborn, replete with hug-an-invader placards. I watched, hooded and cloaked, from a narrow lane, wondering whether they would march through unopposed. I guessed they would, but it turned out I was wrong. Two gentlemen whose Southern German (or Austrian?) accents revealed them as out-of-towners, heads groomed very much in the ‘skinhead’ mode, were so incensed by the sight that they decided to engage them in reasoned, if heated, debate. But the blondes marched smugly by in single file, without a word. It was unclear whether the two skinheads (if that’s what they were) were aware of their vows of silence, but in any case the lack of response enraged them, and they began to verbally harangue them.

  Fair enough, too – you have to expect that in a protest, a bit of counter-opposition. And they never laid a hand on the dames. So why wasn’t I at all surprised when the police swooped, seemingly out of nowhere, and hauled (or to be more accurate, dragged) the gentlemen away. I shrunk from sight, back into the lanes leading to the Pader Springs behind the Cathedral, having seen more than enough.

  Russian novels were no more use, now, I thought.

  Only direct engagement with these spirits of ‘light and objectivity’ (but is light objective?) would suffice.

  * * *

  Later, walking from Perdita’s back to the Hauptbahnhof, I began to realise I was losing interest in her troubles, having enough of my own. I had listened attentively as she told me of something called the 33rd Khaos Kommunications Kongress (I had already seen stickers for it at the university), a worldwide hacking event (I couldn’t imagine what that even looked like), held this year in Essen (the German board game capital, apparently), not far from Paderborn. It seemed there was a faction she regarded herself as belonging to (and I had thought she was independent!), which had declared some kind of virtual war on the ‘mainstream’ of the ‘hacking community’, and in Essen there was to be a showdown. This new faction, it seemed, recognised the invader threat – a kind of digital heresy. They had adopted the Aquarian frog as their mascot, I noted with interest.

  But her real news, the news that truly animated her, was that she was now dating Nicky Hooden. So, she had been swayed by a Lothario! For so I believed him to be. She herself realised (she said) that he was superficial, and so what were her motives? Mere physical attraction? I had thought her above that.

  So I lost interest, even as she told me about the second fist fight between Hooden and Cleves, which had left them both with bloodied faces.

  At the Hauptbahnhof, stopping to buy a croissant, I noticed the two burger ads had now been replaced with different ones; but for the same two franchises. And this time they were so graphic and extreme I could scarcely believe they were legal, outside of the kind of establishment where I had bought the studded codpiece for my dazzle armour. Shall we say, a mixed flavour was what they portrayed, as had the first, less graphic set. But again, no one batted an eyelid.

  Yet the newsagent beside them had recently been firebombed for selling the nationalist paper Junge Freiheit. It was temporarily boarded up, charred copies of Lucky Luke and Asterix the Gaul visible through a crack in the boards. No one batted an eyelid at that either. These Germans, their conformity, was it irreversible? Surely not, in the people who had once given us such non-conformists as Klaus Schulze and Friedrich Nietzsche?

  But an incident in the countryside gave me a fresh clue into the collective Deutsche psyche.

  I had been strolling in the (overdeveloped and overpopulated) countryside outside Horn. My stroll turned into a kind of epic ramble, as I mulled afresh over the problem of Perdita, and various other problems, and it was late at night before I thought of turning back for my campsite. The road took me past an isolated farmhouse, where a raucous party was in full swing. But the party, so loud and freiwillig, to my intense surprise culminated in a formal song that ended at midnight on the dot (by the watch I had set that day at the Hauptbanhhof), after which the guests dispersed, quietly and politely, to their cars.

  It was going to be hard to get these people to go against the government in any large numbers.

  But I remembered, too, the students who had hindered the cops when they were chasing me at the Uni.

  5

  How the Whore of Babylon

  Became a Virgin Again

  April

  ‘The debbil is in YOU.’ He pointed a bony Stygian digit at the journalist, who nodded, a respectful frown on her trim-urgent visage, her eyes trying hard to appear more intelligent than they apparently were, yet less so than her interviewee.

  ‘Could you elaborate on that?’

  ‘You are the debbil. A part of his old bones. You are classic victim of circumstance.’

  ‘So, I’m a victim?’

  Here the man’s eyes narrowed. He felt the urge to contradict his previous statement.

  ‘No. You are never victim.’

  ‘But…you said…’

  ‘You, woman. Always you said. Just…learn to focus…on the silence. Your mind…clouded.’ The journalist nodded, vigorously.

  ‘Uh, yes. As you say. And now…’

  ‘Yes?’

>   ‘Could you tell me a bit about your plans?’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘And, what? You distort them! Yes, I see your eyes. You plan to distort…’

  ‘No,’ she reassured him, anxiously. ‘No, a thousand times, no.’ His seeming hostility confused her, I could tell. For ‘am I not the only writer to feature him’, her eyes revealed her thoughts, at the margin of mainstream and extremist press, just far out enough to give off an aura of danger without actually having to contend with things like…difficult interviewees. She flipped her blonde locks curtly. Was it racist to give off unseemly body language? His hostility was at bottom a product of the forces who had made him suffer, made him bleed. We all bleed red, spake her angry, docile eyes. She told herself that, with increasingly steely determination.

  ‘I just meant…could you tell me your goals and wishes, and those of your followers?’

  ‘My followers,’ he sneered. ‘You mean…my Sad Lepers?’

  ‘Uh, yeah.’

  ‘You mean the New Chosen People of God?’

  ‘If you…’

  ‘No…if you, sister. If you.’ A little shiver passed through her body as he called her sister, invisible to all but Greybeard. He had her on the ropes, clearly; his charisma as magnificent as his stench.

  ‘We have no goals. We have no wishes. We are simply…the New Chosen of God. We are the new Jews.’

  She frowned, allowing a note of dissent, ever-so-faint, to creep out of her mouth. ‘And what about the old Jews?’

  The Stygian one tilted back his head and laughed. It was a feigned belly laugh, not genuine. I could sense the tension and anger simmering behind it, but she apparently couldn’t. She smiled, conciliatory – a mistake, of course. And now the spittle flew from his mouth.