Look Who’s Back

by Timur Vermes

  Having spent one of the first nights tossing and turning in my armchair, unable to sleep after those strenuous hours of reading, and ruminating on my plight, all of a sudden I was struck by a flash of understanding. I sat up bolt upright, my eyes wide with enlightenment as they surveyed the large jars of colourful confectionery and everything else inside the kiosk. It was crystal clear: in her own inscrutable way, Fate herself had intervened in the course of events. I slapped my forehead; it was so obvious that I reproached myself for not having realised it earlier. Particularly as this was not the first time that Destiny had taken hold of the rudder. Had it not been exactly the same in 1919, at the nadir of German misery and hardship? Did not an unknown corporal rise from the trenches in that portentous year? Despite being afflicted by poverty, abject poverty, did not a brilliant orator emerge from the desperate multitudes, from where one might have least expected? Did not this orator also reveal a rich hoard of knowledge and experience, amassed during those darkest of days in Vienna and born of an insatiable curiosity which, from early childhood, spurred this young man, keen of mind, to devour everything relating to history and politics? The most valuable information, stored seemingly at random, but in fact carefully accumulated morsel by morsel within one man? And did not this man, this inconspicuous corporal, upon whose lonely shoulders millions placed their hopes, did he not smash the shackles of Versailles and the League of Nations, withstand with God-given ease the conflicts forced on him with Europe’s armies, against France, against England, against Russia? Did not this man, who was said to possess no more than a mediocre mind, lead the Fatherland to the highest peaks of glory in the face of unanimous judgement by self-professed experts?

  This man, of course, was none other than myself.

  My ears were pounding. Each single event, each single occurrence from back then was by itself more improbable than everything which had befallen me over these past two or three days. Now my razor-sharp gaze pierced the darkness between a jar of bulls-eyes and one of sugar drops, where the bright light of the moon soberly illuminated my brainwave like an icy torch. Of course, for a lonely warrior to lead an entire people out of a slough of errors is a wondrous talent, which could appear only every one hundred or two hundred years. But what was Fate to do if she had already played this priceless trump card? If, amongst the human material available, there was not a single soul with sufficient presence of mind?

  Then, for good or evil, he must be snatched from the clutches of the past.

  And although this was unquestionably a miracle of sorts, it was comparatively easier to achieve than the task of fashioning a sharp new sword from the inferior metal at hand. Just as this stream of insight began to calm my erratic thinking, a new concern swelled in my alert mind. For this conclusion brought with it another, like an uninvited guest: if Fate had been forced to play a cheap trick – there was no other way to describe it – the situation, however tranquil it may seem at first glance, must be even more cataclysmic than before.

  And the Volk in even greater danger!

  This was when I understood that now was not the moment to waste time on academic arguments, to agonise pedantically over the “how” and the “whether”, seeing as the “why” and the “that” were by far the more important considerations.

  And yet there was still one question that remained unanswered: Why me? Given that so many heroes of German history were waiting for a second opportunity to lead the Volk to new glories.

  Why not a Bismarck, or a Frederick the Great?

  A Charlemagne?

  An Otto?

  After brief deliberation the answer came so easily that I almost chuckled at how flattered I felt. For the Herculean task that was waiting to be undertaken here truly seemed as if it would put even the bravest men, the great and greatest Germans in their place. All on his own, without party apparatus or executive power, one man in particular was being entrusted with the job, the man who had already demonstrated that he was capable of cleaning out the Augean stables of democracy. But did I want to put myself through all those painful sacrifices a second time? Swallow all the privations and derision again, nay, gulp them down with disdain? Spend my nights in an armchair beside a water urn in which sausages are heated up during the day for human consumption? And all this for the love of a people which, in the struggle for its destiny, had already left its Führer in the lurch once before? Whatever happened to the Steiner offensive? Or Paulus, that ignominious blackguard?

  At this point I needed to keep my rancour in check, to separate reasonable anger from blind rage. Just as the Volk must stand by its Führer, so the Führer must stand by his Volk. Under the right leadership the simple soldier has always done his best – how can he be upbraided if he is unable to march loyally into enemy fire because cowardly, neglectful generals surrender his opportunity to die an honourable soldier’s death?

  “Yes!” I cried, into the darkness of the kiosk. “Yes, I want to! And I will! Yes, yes, and three times, yes!”

  The night answered with black silence. Then, close by, a lonesome voice hollered, “Exactly! They’re all a bunch of arseholes!”

  I should have taken this as a warning. But if, back then, I had known of the ceaseless efforts, the bitter sacrifices that I would ultimately have to make, the sheer torment of the unequal struggle – I would have merely sworn my oath more heartily, at twice the volume.

  v

  The first steps were hard work. There was no question of any physical weakness on my part; the fact was, I felt like an imbecile in the newspaper vendor’s borrowed clothes. Trousers and shirt were just about passable. He had brought me a clean pair of blue cotton trousers, which he called “genes”, and a clean, red-checked cotton shirt. I had rather been expecting a suit and hat, but when I took a closer look at the newspaper seller I had to admit that my reasoning had been deluded. This man did not wear a suit in his kiosk and, from what I had observed so far, there was little of the bourgeois about the dress of his clientele, either. Hats, just to complete the picture, seemed to be uncommon. With the modest means at my disposal, I decided to lend as much dignity as I could to the ensemble by eschewing his bizarre habit of wearing the shirt loose outside the trousers, instead pushing it as far down my waistband as possible. The trousers were slightly too big for me, but with my belt I was able to fasten and hitch them up tightly. Then I fixed my strap over the right shoulder. It was no German soldier’s uniform, but the overall look was at least one of a man who knows how to dress decently. The shoes, on the other hand, were a problem.

  Having assured me that he knew nobody else who took my size, the newspaper vendor had brought along an outlandish pair belonging to his adolescent son. Whether they could rightly be called shoes was a matter open to debate. They were huge, white, with massive soles: I felt like a circus clown. I had to resist the impulse of throwing them straight back into the face of that halfwit.

  “I’m not wearing these,” I said. “Why, they make me look like a buffoon!”

  No doubt insulted, he made a remark to the effect that he disapproved of the way I wore the trousers, but I ignored this. I wrapped the legs of the genes tightly around my calves and pushed them into my boots.

  “You really don’t want to look like other people, do you?” the newspaper vendor said.

  “Where do you think it would have got me if I had always done everything like so-called ‘other people’?” I retorted. “And where would Germany be?”

  “Hmm,” he said, silenced by my comment. He lit another cigarette and said, “You could see it that way, I suppose.”

  He folded up my uniform and put it in an interesting-looking bag. What struck me was not just the material, synthetic and very thin, clearly much more durable and flexible than paper. I was also intrigued by the words that were printed on it: “Media Market”. The bag must have served as packaging for that cretinous newspaper that I had spotted under the park bench. This proved that, deep down, the newspaper seller was a sensible man – he had kept th
e serviceable bag, but thrown away its infantile contents. Handing it to me, he explained the way to the cleaner’s and said perkily, “Hasta la vista, baby!” This modern German would take some time to accustom myself to.

  I set off, albeit not directly to the cleaner’s. First I went back to the patch of ground where I had woken up. In spite of my fortitude, I could not deny I harboured a faint hope that someone from my past had accompanied me into the present day. I found the park bench where I had taken my first rest, then crossed the street – very carefully this time – and made my way between the houses to the waste ground. It was late morning and all was quiet. The Hitler Youths were not playing; they were probably at school. The place was empty. Bag in hand, I gingerly approached the puddle beside which I had awoken. It had practically dried up. Everything was so quiet, or at least as quiet as it can be in a big city. There was the muted drone of automobiles in the distance, and I could also hear the buzzing of a bumblebee.

  “Psst,” I said. “Psst!”

  Nothing happened.

  “Bormann,” I called out softly. “Bormann! Are you there?”

  A gust of wind whooshed across the terrain, an empty can knocked against another. Otherwise nothing stirred.

  “Keitel?” I said. “Goebbels?”

  But there was no answer. Fine. In fact, it was better this way. The strong man is mightiest alone, an axiom as true now as it ever was. Indeed it was truer than ever; I had greater clarity now, after all. It was my task and mine alone to save the Volk. Mine alone to save the earth and humankind. And the first step along this path led to the cleaner’s.

  Full of resolve and bag in hand, I returned to my roots, to the place where I had learned the most valuable lessons of my life: the street. I carefully followed the directions I had been given, comparing terraces of houses and streets, checking, considering, cogitating, chancing. My preliminary survey was rather positive: the country, or the city at least, seemed free of rubble and in good order; overall one might certify it satisfactorily pre-war. The new Volkswagens seemed to be performing reliably; they were quieter these days, albeit an acquired taste aesthetically. What stood out to my keen eye were the mystifying slogans covering every wall. Yes, I was familiar with this technique; in Weimar, especially, the communist accomplices used to daub their Bolshevist claptrap all over the place. And I myself had learned from this. But at least back then you could read the words painted by either side. Now, I noted, a large number of the messages – their authors evidently regarded them as sufficiently important to deface the houses of honest citizens with them – were simply impossible to decipher. I could only hope that this was the brainchild of illiterate leftwing vermin, but as I kept going I observed that the legibility of the slogans did not change from house to house, and therefore had to assume that important messages such as “Germany, awake” or “Sieg Heil” were possibly hiding amongst them too. Confronted with such ubiquitous dilettantism, I felt my blood boil. It was plain for all to see that what was missing here was firm leadership, tight organisation. What made this particularly irksome was the fact that many of these writings had been produced with substantial colour and apparent effort. Or had the world in my absence developed a specific style of writing for political slogans? Determined to get to the bottom of the matter, I approached a lady who was holding a child by the hand.

  “Please excuse me for bothering you, madam,” I said. Pointing to one of the inscriptions, I asked, “Could you tell me what that says?”

  “How should I know?” the lady said, giving me an odd look.

  “So you find this writing rather strange, too?” I enquired further.

  “Not just the writing,” the lady said hesitantly. “Are you alright?”

  “Worry not,” I said. “I’m on my way to the dry cleaner’s.”

  “You’d be better off going to the barber’s!” the woman said.

  I turned my head to the side, bent to the window of a new-fangled automobile and took a good look at myself. Although not impeccable, my parting appeared fine, and although my moustache would need a trim in a few days’ time, for the moment a visit to the barber’s was not essential. I took the opportunity to calculate that the following evening would be the most strategically advantageous for a more thorough body wash. Setting off again, I passed more of the same propaganda slogans, which might as well have been written in Chinese. The other thing that struck me was how many people seemed to be equipped with wireless receivers – an admirable number. Radar dishes were attached to windows everywhere, for receiving radio transmissions, no doubt. Were I to have the opportunity to speak over the radio waves, then winning over a new horde of staunch comrades amongst the Volk would be as easy as marching into Denmark. I had, after all, listened fruitlessly to a broadcast on the wireless, which sounded as if drunken musicians were playing, and announcers were babbling the very words that were smeared so illegibly on these walls. All I had to do was speak comprehensible German, surely that would suffice? – child’s play. Full of confidence and with a spring in my step, I strode on. Then, a short distance away, I saw the sign for YILMAZ BLITZ CLEANER’S.

  This came as something of a surprise.

  Yes, all those newspapers had implied that there must be a large Turkish readership in the city, even if the circumstances of their arrival remained something of a mystery. And during my stroll I had also noticed the occasional passer-by whose Aryan ancestry was questionable, to put it mildly, and not only four or five generations back, but right up to the last quarter of an hour. Even if it was still a mystery what exactly these racial aliens were doing here, at least they did not appear to be playing a leading role. Which made it unlikely that businesses were being annexed by foreign types on a large scale and their names changed accordingly. As far as I was concerned – even for the purposes of economic propaganda – it was hard to comprehend why anyone should want to christen a “Blitz Cleaner’s” with the name “Yilmaz”. Since when did “Yilmaz” represent the guarantee of clean shirts? At most, “Yilmaz” represented the guarantee of a serviceable donkey cart. The only problem was that I had no alternative to this cleaner’s. And given that rapidity of action was of the essence, to allow me to exert pressure on my political opponents, I needed a Blitz cleaner’s. Plagued by doubts, I marched in.

  I was greeted by a distorted glockenspiel. The place reeked of cleaning fluid, and it was sweltering – far too hot for a cotton shirt, but the splendid Afrika Korps uniform was unavailable at present, alas! On the counter was one of those bells one often sees in hotel receptions.

  Nothing happened.

  I could make out some sort of plaintive oriental music; perhaps, in a back room of the shop, an Anatolian washer-woman was lamenting her faraway Heimat – queer behaviour indeed, especially if one had the good fortune to live in the capital of the German Reich. I perused the items of clothing which hung in rank and file behind the counter. They were wrapped in a transparent material, not dissimilar to the substance my bag was made of. In fact, everything seemed to be wrapped in this stuff. I had once seen something similar in a laboratory, but I.G. Farben must have come a long way with it in recent years. According to what I knew, the production of this material was highly dependent on a ready supply of crude oil; correspondingly it came at great expense. But the way in which synthetic materials were used here – indeed, the extent to which automobiles were driven – suggested that crude oil was no longer a problem. Had the Reich somehow kept possession of the Roumanian deposits? Unlikely. Had Göring ultimately discovered new sources on home soil? A bitter chuckle rose within my chest. Göring! That incompetent morphine addict! He would sooner find gold up his own nostrils than oil in Germany. I wonder what had become of him. It was more probable that we had fallen back on other resources, and …

  “Been waiting long?”

  A southern European man with Asiatic cheekbones peered out from a passageway at the back of the shop.

  “Absolutely!” I said impatiently.

  �
�Why not ring?” He pointed to the bell on his counter and tapped it gently with the palm of his hand. The bell rang.

  “I did already ring – here!” I insisted, opening the door to the shop. The strange glockenspiel rang out once more.

  “Must ring here!” the cleaner said dismissively, hitting the bell on the counter again.

  “A German only rings once,” I said, prickly.

  “Then here,” the half-breed of indeterminate lineage said, ringing with his palm a third time. I was seized by the urge to send round the S.A., and have them lacerate this cretin’s eardrum with his cursed bell. Or even better, both eardrums. He could then explain to his customers to wave when they entered his establishment. I sighed. Being deprived of even the most basic auxiliary staff was downright annoying. A number of things would have to be put straight in this country before I could settle this matter to my satisfaction, but I started to compile a list of traitors sabotaging the future of the German Volk, and “Yilmaz Cleaner’s” was at the very top. In the meantime all I could do was scowl and remove the bell from his grasp.

  “Tell me,” I said harshly, “do you clean things, too? Or where you come from is the cleaning industry just about bell-ringing?”

  “What you want?”

  I placed my bag on the counter and took out my uniform. He took a sniff, said, “Aha – you work at petrol station,” and calmly picked up the bundle.

  I ought to have been indifferent to the opinions of a non-voter from an alien race, and yet I could not ignore what he said altogether. Granted, the man did not hail from here, but could I really have fallen into such obscurity? On the other hand, most of the German Volk knew me from press photographs only, and these generally showed my countenance from a favourable angle. Meeting someone in the flesh is often surprisingly different.