Greybeard

  ‘I thought I’d catch you here today,’ she said, with a strange far off look in her eyes.

  I listened to her news. It appeared the 33rd Khaos Kommunications Kongress in Essen had been and gone, and Perdita had been attacked in some way, and doxed, meaning she would probably never be able to find gainful employment, at least not under her birth name; and so she had changed the latter, she now announced, to Funda.

  Her experience appeared to have morphed her, like a light-white butterfly emerging from a cocoon of old damp stone. In fact I was surprised I hadn’t run into her near the place of resurrection by the lake. But here, at the top of the ancient stone cathedral, she seemed to burn and blaze with the light of the sun itself, despite her introversion. She was changing – talking more poetic and intense. It was all good. Greybeard basked in the heat of it. Finally, he was going beyond black and white.

  ‘They’re dead, their snark, all of it. Just dead,’ she sang and sighed. ‘Rotten little fucks. Dust of history. Betrayed their openmindedness, the only thing they had going for them. And I must step in…I have to go to the dark places, the crypts and catacombs. But I’ll emerge from the cave into the light, while they, who knew nothing but the light, will never see it.

  ‘I will stare in the face of the sun, along with the best of my generation, emerging brighter and cleaner. Without all the deadweight. But I guess the deadweight is necessary to our quest, as is the dark, for without it how could we shake free of it and emerge into Space?’

  I nodded, understanding instinctually what she meant, though not all the specific details were clear to me, even after her terse account of the Kongress and its conflicts.

  Then she showed me something I hadn’t yet seen – an open letter from the former Dumb Blondes leader to me, Greybeard, which Funda had printed out off the internet. The ex-Blonde had sent it to all daily newspapers in the English-speaking world, but none had printed it, and so she had published it as something called a ‘blog post’ on the internet. I put it in my pocket to peruse later.

  She also told me that the Red-Headed League had now been officially branded as a terrorist group by the European Union; however, the Redheads (many now dyed) had laughed in the face of this, and were intending to come to Paderborn, where they believed some red-headed women may have been raped or stoned as ‘witches’ by the superstitious interim government.

  ‘What will become of Paderborn, I wonder,’ Funda sighed. ‘Such a lovely city, I hope it weathers the storm.’

  ‘It will,’ I said, sure suddenly that it would. ‘Because Dresden weathered worse, and is nearly all rebuilt. So Paderborn can survive Leper Hell. A new colour’s being shuffled into the deck now, anyway, so we’ll see what happens…’

  ‘Yeah, we will. Oh, by the way, something you might find amusing. You made it into Bartholomew’s documentary. In fact, it was the only bit of filming at the Externsteine that came out. I watched the whole film (if you could call it that) online.’

  ‘Here, in this incredible spot. Greybeard the only thing that came out. Ha ha. Now that brightens my day, somehow.’

  ‘It’s going to be a bright summer…’

  * * *

  Later, alone, I read the letter from the ex-Dumb Blondes leader to myself.

  Dear Old Man,

  They say you’re an outlaw, a dangerous criminal. But you appear to have stopped me in the middle of doing something even more dangerous to myself. I now see you as a rough figure of healing, just the dose I needed. You showed me the view from the top of the cliff in order to stop me hurling myself off, and for that I thank you.

  And Germany should thank you, even if she doesn’t know it yet. You have riches to offer, but I must go my own path now, dark, uncharted, and someone else will just have to find the treasures that you strew. Yet you showed me the start of my path.

  And, thanks to you, I learned to see myself not through the lens of those who flatter in order to control, but in the light of true objectivity, which involves a reasonable amount of subjectivity. And I now have the chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth in my head, running continually…such freedom and joy! You made me feel ice, but also that. So much pain and beauty intertwined; I never knew they were so close because I was numbed.

  But now am free.

  That’s why I dyed my hair red, as have so many others of late. Not to conform, but because it’s a symbol of our cause, the cause of true objectivity and truth!

  Hail.

  Yours truly,

  _____

  Upon reading this, I threw away my Dazzle.

  * * *

  Something, a seventh sense, told me I should now re-enter Paderborn. I did so openly, without cloak or hood. I jumped from the train onto a leafy embankment as it slowed on entering the suburbs. The university was only a few blocks away, and I headed there first, entering the commercial precinct of Warburger Straße. The citizens walked with heads bowed, as if bereft, but I saw no Lepers.

  Stalking the corridors of the uni I witnessed a fight between two women over what was happening to Germany. They were older than student age, and may have been staff members. I was in ‘psychological mode’, taking it in, and had no wish to intervene.

  One, the nicer, expressed some rather housewifely sentiments on Germany, how its people had the right to a decent life, free of muggings and stabbings. Whereupon the other began shrieking hysterically at her, that she was a trollop, and, curiously, a ‘Russian agent’. The first one laughed out loud. ‘Me, an agent!’

  ‘Not literally, you sow, but you’re doing their job.’ And she burst into tears. The first looked confused, then turned and stalked away in disgust. The second followed her down the corridor, shrieking incoherently so that I couldn’t understand her, only that the word ‘Rußland’ kept recurring in her diatribe.

  Then someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Funda.

  ‘I followed you here. Jumped the train at the same spot. You’re unobservant, old man. You should learn to be more watchful…you have so many enemies.’

  ‘I’ve little need to be on guard anymore. We’re entering the endgame.’

  ‘Endgame for who?’

  ‘That remains to be seen.’

  ‘Then why did you come back here? Is it anything I can help with? Because I felt compelled to come here too, for some reason. Something was drawing me, the city herself perhaps.’

  ‘I felt that way, too. Do cities have souls?’

  ‘If they do, then this one is crying out in distress.’

  She took my hand and led me towards the Altstadt. There was nothing sexual in this, of course…even if I had been a young man of twenty it would never have crossed my mind, not under these circumstances. No, this was religion. The soul of the city was calling me.

  Like some pockmarked freemason making a distress signal to his fellow lodge members, the city had sent me a sign; and some part of me had picked up on it, like a cat’s whisker.

  And so we arrived at the Hauptbahnhof, as if it were the magnetic point we were drawn to…and lines of tension, also drawn there, crossed it like a magnetic web, drawing all fighting creatures, no matter their allegiance, within a certain radius of Paderborn.

  The Redheads were already beginning to arrive. I spotted one who looked a leader, a true red by the look, holding court to those (many, though not all, dyed) about him. I waited patiently until he had finished, then approached him. It emerged he was from Finland. I looked him long in the eye, hoping he would recognize me, but he was rather self-absorbed. I didn’t hold that against him, for it rather suited him.

  His slender, acerbic face was far more honest than the equally chiseled visages I had seen on the other side, especially those of the well-placed, slimy politicians. It surprised me in a controlled-bleeding mellow kind of shock (for I didn’t have time to ponder it overmuch) that I so glibly thought of certain types as the Enemy now…was I really what they called a ‘right-wing extremist?’ How did that happen? I was still the same mellow hippy I had always been. Live a
nd let live was still one of my guiding tenets. Yet some people just could not let live…the redheaded Finn now mumbled some prepared words on insurrection, reiterating this very truth. And he still didn’t recognize who I was.

  More and more Redheads were arriving, and the wildest, surprisingly, were not the dyed converts but the natural ones, champing at the bit for violence.

  Suddenly, with a flash of booming laughter, a platoon of mad-eyed Lepers entered the Hauptbahnhof, assault weapons hanging slackly at their sides, with an aura of wily trickster seduction, dissembling tension. Many redheads surged forward, unarmed, yet unafraid of bullets. This was how far we had sunk. A tourist snap for Merkel’s Deutschland…

  But then, more surprisingly still, came the police. Apparently they had not yet written the city off completely…or rather, those who issued their orders were in two minds, or factionally opposed.

  In any case they came, and not ordinary police but well-armed tactical troops, interposed between Lepers and Redheads, two lines of tense but vacuous stern-blank faces with automatic weapons (which, unlike the Lepers, they were obviously well trained to use).

  And then, sparkling and superficial, the media shimmied up behind between the two silent rows of cops. Only the peripheral forces moved now, with an organic seething motion, while the centre held in brittle Bristol fashion. How on earth was it, I wondered, that a ‘centre’ still existed?

  * * *

  There was a silence of sorts; not complete silence, but a dip in the wave of ambient noise. Then the wave surged.

  Both sides began to throw things at the journalists. Soft things at first, like croissants, then increasingly harder objects. The journalists put their arms over their heads for cover, but the police, riot-shield protected, never moved a muscle. When the barrage ceased, I actually heard one journalist making excuses for her attackers, but only for those of the Leper side. I could guess what kind of stories would appear in their publications next day.

  Then a leader of police put a microphone to his lips, commanding both sides to disperse. I turned to Funda.

  ‘Are you sure you want to be here?’ She looked nervous, but nodded. Nevertheless, my instinct was now to get her out of there. Also, my preternatural confidence was dissipating, and a sudden fear of being seen by the cops ransacked me.

  Too late, however.

  The Lepers began to break ranks, and, no longer able to endure the sight of anything European, or to contain their festering resentment, they surged towards the cops and began attacking, despite the booming voice of their lieutenant, an enormous Leper I recognized from the camp, yelling at them to hold back (then I saw him shrug and join the fray).

  The police panicked…these were clearly not the ones they had been engaged to counter. They turned and began to flee, as did the journalists, pushing Redheads out of their way in order to do so. But a fresh batch of Redheads had just arrived by train, and seeing their compatriots under pressure, surged forward towards the police in ginger and scarlet rage. The establishment forces were caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

  But I had no time to gloat about that, for Funda and I were hemmed in an alcove, and there was no way out except by plunging into a fitful sea of violently fighting bodies. In addition, bullets were now flying. Some of the cops had pulled their guns and fired shots, but others were beaten to the ground before they could draw. I saw journalists trampled underfoot, and I saw the gigantic Leper lieutenant wave a machine pistol above his head, then fire it in a crazy random way. For some reason, the PA system of the train station began to play, loudly and distortedly, a piano concerto that sounded like it had been written by Mozart or Haydn. A German way of trying to calm everyone down? Ineffective, however, for it seemed to drive the Lepers crazier then before.

  The fighting bodies near us swarmed away, for who knew how long, and I realized this might be my only chance to get Funda safely out of there. I led her out and down the stairs that led to the platforms, the only way available. We jumped the tracks, skirting the fence at the other side until we emerged through a jumble of buildings into a deserted lane. As we followed it back to the main street, however, the crowd began to pour out of the Hauptbahnhof (it appeared that someone had activated a tear gas canister), and I was knocked to the ground. Getting shakily to my feet, I circled round, but could see Funda nowhere. We were separated. And, as a growling Leper was leering right at me, I had no choice but to pull the Millwall Brick from my pocket and fight right then and there. I felt it would be my last fight. My old bones were being superseded…

  I thought the look in my eyes would scare him off, but he closed in, screeching in an accursed high-pitched babble like a man possessed, and I had no choice but to connect brick to flesh. An opiate exuberance floated through my cells, rising to my cheeks, cheeks that had hardened with the passage of dread time. I smacked him again and again, until he was deadibones, deader than Jim Morrison, deader even than poor Sandy Denny. Images of the 1970s began to flood behind my eyes in rapid succession. Many sang about loving our fellow man, but what if he didn’t love us, what if he was an inhuman monstrum? I salute you, dear beloved hippies. Right about so much, wrong about so much. Here I was doing the best I could, muddling through somehow, with no guide other than my double, and I knew not where he was.

  Stepping over the body as one would a muckheap, I wondered where to turn. But there came a roar, long and loud, that froze me in my tracks.

  For there, looming above the crowd, the eye of the storm, was the Leper King.

  Here, at last, my immediate enemy; we would clash in single combat, two opposing kings, I could sense it.

  I hobbled menacingly towards him through the crowd. He saw me and leered.

  ‘Behold, Greybeard loon,’ was what I thought he said. ‘Look upon thy doom, which is now come…I will grab thee by thy reverend head and smite thee…’ I knew not by which grab-bag of never-fading poesy he had come across those words, and in any case my mind was double-saturated with the heavy fog of war, and the lamps were going out, all over Deutschland. Was this the Last Battalion? Or was I alone?

  No. For one was stepping alongside me through the ‘fog’.

  Kamerad.

  Double.

  We moved together, never looking at one another. I knew our eyes could never meet. But I saw the Leper King’s eyes, whites yellowed, filled with overarching fear. He then let out a cry of desperate rage, as if sensing already that his time on earth was over. Our newspapers thwacked from either side, matter and anti-matter colliding in unison with something that was non-matter, if such a thing could be.

  And his head imploded.

  The troops around him seemed to lose heart at such an unexpected happening. The implosion rippled through the crowd, with devastating consequences for the followers of the Leper King.

  It was like watching a mushroom cloud in reverse. The Sad Lepers fled howling towards the suburbs, and the Redheads gave them chase.

  Greybeard and his double separated, disappearing in opposite directions through the crowd.

  The game was afoot.

  * * *

  Things were transmuting fast. I felt cold salamanders crawling down my hot spine. Paderborn was now centre of attention for the West, and much of the Third World as well, a true test pattern for wonderful futures to come.

  The Lügenpresse, of course, blamed the Redheads solely for the Battle of the Hauptbahnhof, but I was nevertheless grateful to them, because they gave me further clues as to my ancient enemy. The former Stasi agent Rosenzweig appeared before the camera, part of a task force charged by Merkel’s Minister of Justice with the task of monitoring social media to discover ‘xenophobic’ posts, whose authors would then be fined or imprisoned.

  And this was not the only reminder of the old East Germany…Paderborn’s Altstadt was now divided into two zones (controlled by Redheads and the federal government respectively, the Sad Lepers having barricaded themselves in the Paderhalle following the battle), and in the government zone s
peakers had been erected for the broadcast of propaganda, just as had once been done in East Berlin. Only, in our more enlightened age, the recorded messages concerned the danger of redheads, and 'right-wing families'; families who liked organic food, and who didn’t wear mass-brand clothing.

  Hold on, that sounded an awful lot like the sort of things my friends and I were into in the early 70s…

  A circle had closed!

  * * *

  The Lepers, as mentioned, had barricaded themselves in the Paderhalle, having entered just as a performance of Tannhäuser by an out-of-town opera company was about to begin, the performance having been allowed by the late Leper King as a temporary propaganda measure, placating the outside world by showing that German Kultur was continuing as normal. There had been murmurings from his own ranks at this, but more mutinous notes were held off temporarily by the arrival of the Redheads.

  The Paderborner burghers, at least the well-to-do, attended the opera with something no doubt resembling giddy relief. But as the well-heeled were mingling in the lobby waiting for the gong to summon them to their seats, it remains doubtful whether they were expecting the entry of a horde of psychotic, blood-drenched Lepers.

  It was to the credit of these burghers that they kept up their impeccable German social decorum, even after two days, when the Lepers began forcing them to draw lots to see whose turn it was to be eaten (singers and orchestra not being exempted from this). We knew this, because a Leper with a loud voice was daily dispatched like a medieval herald to give an account of the goings on inside the concert hall.

  He would taunt those outside by describing what he called the ‘lip-smacking taste’ of the latest music-lover to be cooked up in the lobby. We could smell the smoke rising from the air vents, day and night, except when rain fell and disguised the sickening stench.