Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

“No sir, that won’t be possible. You’ll have to sort out through Heathrow.”

  “Would it be possible for me to have a cigarette?” Fred said, and one of the men from Immigration spoke to the guard. The guard gave Fred a cigarette and a light.

  Best fag he’d ever had. The guard was a Marlboro man.

  “I have been served with form IS-151-A,” the tape says. “I’ve been diagnosed with a gastric ulcer and the situation is very painful. I am incarcerated with a possible violent criminal, and have received no help from the embassy.”

  He gathered himself then, and spoke carefully: “At this point I’d like to be allowed to see my wife. This is my statement.”

  They brought her to the interrogation room from wherever she’d been. The men from Immigration whispered to the guard and left. She looked pale and shaky and Fred, galvanized, reached across the table and spoke.

  She yawned. “I was trying to sleep,” she complained.

  “Are they treating you alright?” Fred said.

  “Two chairs sure ain’t a bed,” his wife said. “People coming in and out. They don’t call it a waiting room for nothing.”

  “Are you using your pens? Have they given you something to eat?”

  She pulled half a sweet roll from her sweater pocket, wrapped in a napkin. “I’m saving this for an emergency.” She put it back. “They gave me some word puzzles but a lot of it’s weird. What’s a lorry?”

  “A truck,” Fred said. “Just hang on a little longer. I think I know who’s behind this and they can’t hold us forever.”

  “Those people,” his wife said.

  “In the waiting room?”

  “The other ones,” she said. Her eyes were closed and she seemed almost to be talking in her sleep, in touch with the unguarded truth. “It’s them. They aren’t right.”

  “They’ve helped us,” he said.

  “God help us from their help.”

  “Listen,” he said. “Sometimes things are complicated.”

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes were still closed and she was nodding. Her skin looked gray.

  The guard stepped forward and put a hand on Fred’s shoulder. “Sir. At this time.”

  “I’d like to speak to the American consul,” Fred said softly.

  “Well bloody hell,” the guard said, and Fred’s wife lifted her head but still didn’t open her eyes.

  “Bloody,” she said, and started snoring.

  The under consul sounded like he was still asleep himself. “This bear be good,” he said. “Who is it?”

  “A taxpayer,” Fred said.

  “What?” the under consul said. “Who is this?”

  “You know damn well who it is,” Fred said. “Just thought I’d return the favor and ruin your night, you fucking lackey.” He did not approve of foul language but under the right circumstances it became his second tongue.

  “Is this the Nazi-lover?” the under consul said, and Fred thought he heard a woman’s voice in the background.

  “I don’t love them any more than I love you, you worthless son of a bitch,” he said. “But I’ll say this: they pulled their weight. And when I get back I’m issuing a formal complaint to the State Department, I promise you.”

  “You want a formal complaint?” the under consul said, and Fred wondered again if he had been sleeping in drink. “Try this.” He heard the woman laughing, then another sound, sharp and terse, which he didn’t fully recognize till the under consul had hung up.

  He’d forgotten to mention his wife. When he got back to the interrogation room she was gone. They let him use the lavatory again, then took him back to his cell.

  He asked for a blanket. Around four thirty they gave him one and he dozed in broken stretches over the next couple of hours, his dreams reiterations of the previous evening. He tried to give his speech, tried to gather up his papers scattered among the big black stones, a sound coming from the cracks in their faces. He rarely dreamed.

  When he opened his eyes there was light coming into the cell through a small window he hadn’t known was there. His cellmate was sitting up on the cot, drinking coffee and staring at him.

  “And who would you be?” Fred’s cellmate said quietly. He seemed to be smiling but you couldn’t tell if this was due to good humor or because he had no teeth.

  “A trespasser,” Fred said. “A tourist.”

  “Political prisoner,” he said. The man looked at him.

  “Fred,” he said then.

  “Right,” his cellmate said. “How do you take your coffee then, Fred?” You could hear the other inmates being woken in the other cells, clang of clubs on bars.

  Fred said he took it black.

  “Well bring fucking Fred a bloody cup!” his cellmate shouted. “Christ sake!”

  By eight o’clock his cellmate and all the other prisoners were gone, taken to court. Fred heard new inmates arriving, but no one else was brought to his cell. He asked about his wife but there was no reply; the day shift personnel didn’t seem to know what to do with him so they pretended he wasn’t there. He asked about his wife once an hour on the hour, when they made their rounds, but the only response he got was a lunch consisting of a breakfast someone hadn’t eaten. Eggs, toast, sausage. He was very hungry but his ulcer wouldn’t let him near it. He left the tray sitting on the floor and the next time he looked at it the mouse had taken an interest in the eggs.

  At one o’clock he demanded to see his wife and twenty minutes later they came back and opened his cell and took him back to the interrogation room. She wasn’t there but another official from the Immigration Department was and he invited Fred to sit down. Fred sat.

  “Where is she?” he said.

  “First let me say it has been determined that you are in the country illegally,” the man from Immigration said, “in violation of a ban by the Home Secretary.”

  “What ban…who?” Fred said.

  “The ban that was in place before you arrived,” the man from Immigration said.

  “Just let us go home,” Fred said.

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that,” the man from Immigration said. “You’ll be held until you can be deported.”

  “Where’s my wife?” Fred said.

  “In due time, sir,” the man from Immigration said.

  “I entered this country in Dover with a valid stamped passport,” Fred said. He said this like he was making another statement, though the tape recorder was gone.

  “Technically you are not in the country illegally,” the man from Immigration said.

  “So I’ve heard,” Fred said.

  “But an official determination has been made that you are, and that is the law,” the man from Immigration said.

  “Who made this dermination?” Fred said. It was getting hard to form words again. “The Immigration Department?”

  “The decision was made very high up in the Home Office,” the man from Immigration said. “Much higher than my ladder will reach, so to speak.”

  “What about my wife?” Fred said, and somebody knocked at the door. Fred turned when it opened but it was another policeman, asking to speak to the man from Immigration. The man from Immigration frowned heavily, excused himself and went out into the hall with the policeman. When he returned he sat down heavily, as if under the weight of his frown.

  “I’m afraid,” he began, and now Fred was afraid too.

  “I’m afraid you won’t be able to see your wife right at this moment, sir,” the man from Immigration said. “It seems there’s been a bit of a complication.”

  “Complication,” Fred said. “Where is she?”

  “In hospital, I’m afraid,” the man from Immigration said. “It appears she was found unconscious in the lavatory.”

  Lava tree.

  Fred looked at him.

  “I assure you, sir,” the man from Immigration said. “I’ve been informed she’s resting comfortably and appears to be in no danger at this time.”

  “I demand to see her this m
inute,” Fred said.

  “You shall see her as soon as it can be arranged, sir,” the man from Immigration said. “But first I must tell you we’ve contacted French immigration about your possible deportation to France.”

  “I don’t want to go to France,” Fred said. “I want to see my wife.”

  “Nevertheless,” the man from Immigration said, holding up a hand. “If France refuses, the next step would be to try Belgium. Do you know where Belgium is, sir?”

  “Goddamn suburb of France,” Fred said. “She went into shock,” he said. “Is that what happened?”

  “If Belgium won’t have you, then Germany,” the man from Immigration said.

  “Too much insulin, or is it too much sugar?” Fred said, and seemed to be talking to himself. Or was it not enough?

  “Germany,” he said to himself.

  “If Belgium won’t have you,” the man from Immigration said.

  He had commitments in Germany. Cologne. He could not think about that now.

  “If Germany will have you,” the man from Immigration said, “the Hamburg Ferry runs twice a week. The next one leaves Tuesday.”

  “Never mind Tuesday,” Fred said. “What about my wife?”

  “Tuesday is three days from now,” the man from Immigration said. “Legally, we can hold you for up to five. Plenty of time for her to recuperate.”

  “She’s a Type 2 diabetic,” Fred said. “What happened?”

  “You have my word she’s receiving the best of care,” the man from Immigration said. “It’s merely a precaution, really.”

  “Your word,” Fred said.

  “If Germany will have you,” the man from Immigration said.

  Fred sat in the green room at SAT-1 with a faith healer and a therapist who specialized in optimizing the sexual pleasure of the overweight and obese. His wife wasn’t there. Assistant producers or whatever they were scurried in and out with headsets and clipboards, and on monitors they could see the hostess chatting up the audience and announcing today’s guests. She seemed nervous. The show was live.

  “Meine Damen und Herren,” she said to seven and a half million people.

  The station manager approached, an irritable, impatient man who treated the guests like incompetent employees. He advised the therapist she was about to go on. The makeup girl cheerfully applied the final shades of pink like the flush of some permanent embarrassment. Another girl with a headset and clipboard escorted the guest from the green room to close but muffled applause. She re-entered the world on the monitor screen and Fred and the faith healer became two of the seven and a-half million.

  He didn’t understand a word. His interpreter, the man from the National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, had not been allowed in the building. The studio would furnish a translator and the interview broadcast via digital delay. Another kind of miracle. The faith healer turned to him. She asked him in German if he spoke it and he understood just enough to shake his head.

  “Your name,” the faith healer said. “I have thought perhaps.”

  “My great grandfather,” Fred said. “Or maybe the one before that. Anyway I don’t speak a word.”

  “Grosse Grossvater,” the faith healer said.

  “Yes,” Fred said. “How long have you been healing the sick?”

  “I am having my gift from zo high,” the faith healer said, and held the palm of her hand about two feet above the floor.

  “My wife has diabetes,” Fred said. “I should have brought her along.”

  “Ach so,” the faith healer said. She pointed to the monitor. “She is not?”

  Fred shook his head. “She’s back in the States right now. The trip was a little much for her.”

  “She has not needed me,” the faith healer said. “I am for the one without medicine. Faith work best…wenn Hottnung nicht in der Weise ist.” She looked at him intently, as if she would make him understand with her eyes.

  As if it were he who in some way could benefit from her powers.

  Fred nodded. On the monitor was a soap commercial in which you could see all of a woman’s breasts.

  “And your work?” the faith healer said.

  “In a way you could say we’re in the same line,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?” But she was looking over his shoulder now. He turned and saw the station manager behind him and behind the station manager three uniformed police officers. One was a woman who spoke some English and told Fred he was under arrest.

  Once again he found himself asking what he was being charged with. The policewoman’s English failed her here and she exchanged words with the station manager. He nodded and looked at Fred.

  “You are under arrest for incitement to hatred and defaming the dead,” the station manager said, with such relish and authority he might have pronounced a verdict and passed sentence as well. Laughter and applause from the studio audience. The faith healer looked at the floor. They rode the Autobahn.

  In Mannheim some of the trustees were Jews. They delivered the meals. They would come into his cell and taunt him, make threatening near-miss gestures, have accidents with his food and just leave it there on the floor. Slices of dark bread, cheese. He began to fear for his safety. He had nothing against them, but he gave what he got. In Mannheim you were allotted a broom and dustpan, and he took his broom and sharpened the handle into a rough point on the edge of his window. Now when they came into his cell he held it with both hands, the bristles tucked under his arm like the stock of a rifle, backing carefully away from the door, telling them how to move and where to put his tray. The trustees affected great amusement at this, but they kept their mouths shut and stopped having accidents with his food till the guards took his weapon away.

  They’d given him his own cell: a bed, a chair, an enamel-covered table on which to eat and write. A sort of metal cabinet that functioned as locker and wardrobe, a sink with mirror, a toilet with curtain. The window had bars but you could turn the light on and off as you pleased. The cells were equipped for cable and there was a built-in radio that played two stations. The trash can had a lid. Some inmates had boom boxes, color TV. Fred bought a coffee pot from the prison store; the man from the National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands had given him the money (and an English Bible), and this was the last visitor Fred had. The only time he turned on the radio station he heard an angry kid rapping in German.

  The walls were three feet thick. Fred didn’t know how old the old prison was, but its dank resounding passages must have turned its corners from out of the last century, maybe the one before that. He would think of chains and lashes and shirtless men with hoods and sometimes he heard things, or thought or dreamed he did, echoes of suffering consigned to stone. But when he asked who’d occupied the cell before him, he was told of a minor tennis star convicted of tax evasion.

  The man from the NPD had translated the Report into German. He taught French and English in high school.

  They called it investigative custody. Untersuchungshott—awaiting trial. He was in his cell twenty-two hours and forty-five minutes a day. Mornings they let him out in the yard, where he heard German and a dozen other languages, fragments of English though never American. In the yard was the red-faced bigamist from Munich. There was the kid of seventeen or eighteen whose nose always ran and who’d gone around taking a crowbar to windshields, finishing the argument he’d started with his girlfriend. He spat every time he finished a sentence, as if to rid himself of words. The African whose father, a U.N. ambassador, had waived immunity to teach his son a lesson, who hung out with the Spaniard who wore Hawaiian shirts and ate the cockroaches with whom they all shared their cells.

  The red-faced bigamist went around with a small dachshund under his arm. It had one blue eye and one brown. Once, during a dispute over soccer, the dog became aggressive as if with its own opinion, escaped its owner’s grasp, and was itself booted like a penalty kick nearly the width of the yard. It survived but afterward dragged a leg and urinated blood, and restri
ctions were placed upon inmates having pets.

  He’d seen the vandal shivering outside one morning and loaned him his jacket. The kid disappeared and later Fred traced him to the infirmary, found out he’d been sent away for detox. He did not see his jacket again till one of the trustees wore it into his cell, a size small.

  Mostly he just chain-smoked with himself.

  The judge had let him keep his watch. They gave you toothpaste and a toothbrush that wasn’t sawed off as in American prisons; a comb, shampoo, soap, razors, two towels and a face cloth. If you didn’t like the razors there was Gillette in the prison store, and you could buy coffee, tea, honey, lemon oil, sardines, and chocolate. You could buy paint and brushes and inmates of an artistic turn sometimes sold or traded for their work in the yard, meticulous carnal depictions, roses and hearts bound in barbed wire—another kind of pornography, and Fred had use for none of it.

  A river ran some two hundred meters away. He never saw it but could hear the gulls, and he heard crows shrieking out on the grounds and sometimes doves.

  Most inmates were allowed one five-minute phone call per month, but Fred was in investigative custody and wasn’t allowed any. He was permitted two thirty-minute visits but the Amstgericht had final approval and would permit neither the Frenchman nor the British historian. (A guard would sit in on visits, an official listener who not only sometimes participated in conversations but suggested changes of topic.) No limit was placed on mail as long as the letters were written in German or English. If you got a letter in German you could ask someone to read it for you in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes; you could ask the bigamist from Munich.

  “She is leaving you for the postman,” the bigamist declaimed loudly in his corner of the yard. “His Packschen is bigger and he makes delivery in the rear.” Fred wrested the letter angrily back and, though he did not approve of violence unless necessary, thought with guilty satisfaction of the little dog, airborne and pissing blood.

  But he never heard from his wife and there was no one who could translate this silence. He wrote to her and she didn’t write back. He wrote to the British historian, the Frenchman, the German national for whom he’d gone to Toronto. His pen dried up. He’d bought it at the prison store for thirty-five cents, and he did not buy another.