The Cusanus Game

  The woman turned to me and asked in a friendly tone, “How far are you going?”

  “Amsterdam,” I said, not particularly eager for a conversation that early in the morning.

  “A beautiful city,” she sighed. “I used to go there often.”

  “Not anymore?” I asked, for the sake of politeness more than anything.

  “What do you think? It’s no longer so simple for us Germans to get a visa.”

  “As a German you need a visa for the Netherlands?”

  “Germans need a visa everywhere. They could be illegal immigrants, after all, or looking for work without permission. Besides, there are health policy concerns—genetic problems. We Germans are regarded as genetic cripples. For marriages with foreigners we need a whole sheaf of medical certificates. In most countries a German can’t get a marriage license at all.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You’re Italian, right?” asked the woman.

  “Yes,” I said. “From Rome.”

  “How I’d love to go to Italy again someday. Rome, Naples…”

  “It’s not without danger,” I said.

  She nodded. “I follow it in the news. It’s terrible. But at least Venice,” she said longingly.

  “I’ve just come from there.”

  “How interesting! Is it true that it will soon shine again in its old splendor?”

  “Oh, I think that’s still going to take a while.”

  “Is it still so difficult to get a visiting permit?”

  “For you as a reporter that can’t be a problem.”

  “Reporter?” she asked, frowning.

  I gestured with a nod to the equipment on her wrist.

  “Oh, I see,” she said with a smile. “In the old days, yes … Everyone finally seems to have gotten on. So we have the compartment all to ourselves,” she said, turning to look outside. “They’ve begun sealing it off.”

  Workers in bright orange clothing, with breathing masks and yellow hard hats on their heads and knapsacks on their backs, filled the cracks around the doors with foam. There was a sharp smell of solvent.

  “They do that because of the radioactive dust raised by the wheels,” said Princess Brambilla.

  Dirty children’s hands slapped against the panes. The children knew it was their last chance to get hold of something before the passengers were cut off.

  “I thought the disaster victims and their surviving kin were being provided for,” I said.

  “They’re provided for. These children have run away. They don’t want to be confined in homes; apparently they prefer to roam around.”

  The small hands left smears on the pane.

  “Many of them aren’t right in the head,” she added after a pause. “Malnutrition, genetic defects. They’re like animals. Speechless. You can’t talk to them. They don’t understand you.”

  A small agile man in white pants, a red uniform jacket, and a red cap inspected our travel chips. RHEINEXPRESS was embroidered in golden letters on his breast pocket.

  “Windows and doors are not to be opened during the journey,” he explained. “Getting on and off at the stations is permitted only via the marked door in the middle of the train and under the supervision of the train personnel. For the duration of the journey you will be provided with drinks and meals. The cafeteria is located in the middle of the train. In first class there is also service in your compartment. You need only instruct your ICom accordingly. I wish you a pleasant journey.”

  A few compartments down a brief dispute seemed to flare up between the conductor and a passenger. He came down the aisle with a scowling man.

  “I’m sorry, but your indicated birthplace seems to be incorrect,” said the conductor. “I have to check that.”

  “But that’s nonsense,” the man said angrily. “I’m not from here.”

  “Because of the birthplace?” I asked the princess, shaking my head. “What’s that about?”

  “People who were born in the death zone do not receive travel permits,” she explained to me. “Probably he tried to obtain one fraudulently. That often happens.”

  “Yeah, and if he did?”

  “There have repeatedly been dangerous incidents in which defiant people pulled the emergency brake and tried to leave the train in order to return to their original home. They endanger all the other passengers, of course, when they smash windows or break open doors.”

  “And why do they do that? I mean, that’s extremely dangerous for them too, isn’t it?”

  “Some underestimate the danger. Believe it has passed by now. They want to see what’s left of their belongings or their parents’ property. Often valuables or cash were left behind. They want to get it before it falls into the hands of plunderers or the cleanup workers pocket it.”

  It was seven o’clock. The train promptly started moving. The children ran alongside the train as if they were still hoping for gifts. Then they remained behind.

  Along the route stretched rusty tracks; barbed-wire fences were overgrown with Clematis vitalba and blackberry vines. Between them garbage, broken-open abandoned pieces of luggage in all stages of dissolution, rotten dolls, children’s toys, household items—probably all this had been weeded out as radioactively contaminated and discarded by the border guards. Battered signs warned urgently with the symbol for radioactivity and the inscription

  ATTENTION!

  END OF THE SAFETY ZONE

  NO ADMITTANCE!

  DANGER OF DEATH

  Behind the barriers I saw more destroyed and burned-down buildings. To the left of the tracks rose a brick tower with a flat copper roof, the facade scarred with gunshot holes. From a man-sized round opening, which had apparently once contained a clock, jutted the remains of a heavy laser weapon.

  Here at the edge of the death zone the bitterest battles had been fought, my fellow passenger told me. Many people from the surrounding regions viewed the demarcation of the border as arbitrary, as official harassment. And those scarcely contaminated areas had, of course, particularly attracted plunderers, and thus very rigorous measures had been necessary to clear them of their residents, because they did not understand why they should leave their houses while others, a few blocks away, were allowed to stay.

  Dilapidated watchtowers, an abandoned, half-overgrown hut camp stretching over several square miles. Here the streams of refugees from the west had been received and filtered. Here a selection had taken place. Those who were heavily exposed to radiation were transferred to the field hospitals in Karlsruhe and Rastatt, “permanent disposal sites” for those who were—how had Birgit put it?—hopelessly poisoned by radiation. The others were permitted to travel onward to the safe south and southeast.

  “Terrible things happened here,” said the princess. “Families had to part from their more severely afflicted members, had to leave them behind. Can you imagine that?”

  I nodded. Could I really imagine it?

  The train rolled through a monotonous flat landscape. To the left I glimpsed a tall building with a pyramidal roof. A peeling facade with the remains of a painting announced: BADEN WINE, PAMPERED BY THE SUN. On the left appeared a high-rise, rammed into the ground like a double-edged blade, then on the right a huge palace of rust-brown sandstone with triangular gables over the windows and a stone balustrade on the roofs of the massive towers on both sides. The white around the windows shone freshly.

  Spray-painted on the concrete walls along the tracks were francophobic slogans:

  MAY GOD PUNISH YOU, YOU GALLIC FROGS!

  YOU TOO WILL SOON GO TO THE DOGS!

  And:

  TO THE VILE FRENCH WE OWE THE FATE

  OF OUR LOST PALATINATE

  It had been a calamitous chain of unfortunate circumstances, everyone knew that. Negligence, perhaps—but never intentional. Hate had nonetheless burrowed deep, especially into the hearts of those expelled from their homes. And the extreme right knew how to instrumentalize it and channel it into their propaganda mi
lls. Again and again on the bare concrete: ASEN—the balled fist; KICOB—the hurtling-down sword.

  “Such nonsense,” said Brambilla. “The fatal batch came from Germany, from Hanau. It had been incorrectly declared, claimed the French. But Berlin denied it. Said that no transport had ever gone from Hanau to Cattenom, but exclusively to La Hague.” Princess Brambilla shrugged.

  “One good thing came out of the catastrophe, though: The belief in cheap nuclear energy was buried once and for all. But do you know what the craziest thing is?” she went on. “People are suddenly clinging to those awful ruins. They protest against demolishing them. Apparently there are in all seriousness efforts to elevate the horrible concrete sarcophagus of Chernobyl into a world heritage site! Can you imagine that?”

  “No,” I replied. Actually, I could imagine it.

  On the left I glimpsed an up and down of elevated roads and underpasses. And frequent signs painted over in red: CLOSED! CLOSED! CLOSED! Then the train rolled onto a bridge: the Rhine.

  A freighter, deep in the water, pushed a large bow wave in front of it. On the opposite bank stretched industrial plants; between them stood apartment blocks and office buildings converted into lodgings. Laden clotheslines protruded from the windows like flagpoles.

  After twenty-five years, the authorities had allowed Mannheim a resurrection. I saw repaired roofs, newly paned windows, curtains, flowers on the balconies, and, in the front gardens, playing children. Cars, buses, people at bus stops, occupied parking spots. Many trees had been freshly planted, particularly plane trees and fast-growing eucalyptus trees. Here and there I saw newly planted groves—particularly Picea omorika, the Serbian spruce, which was more resistant to environmental toxins and coped better with the increasing warming than its sister, the Picea abies.

  Life was returning.

  The train stopped between stations. From outside penetrated the muffled twittering of birds.

  “Do you hear that?” asked my fellow passenger. “That’s always a good omen. For twenty years, they could no longer be heard here. Songbirds are a reliable sign. Where they appear, people can live too. If you see dead songbirds, it’s high time to leave the area. Miners already knew that a long time ago. Birds sense disaster.”

  Canaries have always been a reliable indicator of mine gas. With radioactivity, however, that would hardly work. They don’t have an organ for that any more than people do.

  “With ravens it’s different. The radiation doesn’t seem to bother them. I know that from experience,” she said, and looked out the window, lost in thought.

  The train rolled on—out into the region on the left bank of the Rhine. The border was not marked, but it was unmistakable. It wandered; each day a step, or ten … The land was suddenly deserted.

  Two rows of electricity pylons from which the lines had been removed stood around indecisively, robbed of their task. They spread their arms regretfully like discharged servants. To the right and left of the tracks stretched allotment garden colonies flattened and pushed into piles by bulldozers. Yellow tank trucks with the inscription DÉCONTAMINATION were parked in the bare terrain. Long-legged, spiderlike robots stalked through the landscape as in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds; remote-controlled, they sprayed with their long thin swiveling snouts aerosol carpets, until they returned to the tank truck to suck themselves full like monstrous insects.

  “You won’t believe it,” said Princess Brambilla, “but ever since the French have been decontaminating the area here on a grand scale, the real estate prices in Hessen and the Rhineland-Palatinate have shot up tenfold. I know what I’m talking about. I live off it.”

  “Are you a real estate agent?”

  “No, not that, but thanks to my work, the interested parties no longer have to jeopardize their health and that of their fellow human beings. With my drone I shoot any desired picture for them. I travel the route twice a week. My transmitter has a range of about thirty miles. Between Pirmasens and Kassel I photograph any hovel they wish and send the image data via satellite directly to my computer at home.”

  She handed me a small card: IPMAS – Image Provider and Mapping Service, Margit Bodmer.

  “My name is Domenica Ligrina. I’m a botanist.”

  She nodded gravely. “Then brace yourself for something terrible right up ahead.”

  “That’s the purpose of my journey.”

  “A research expedition, so to speak?”

  “Yes. For my work.”

  “Then take a close look. It’s bad. Really bad.”

  VIII

  The Inner Circle of Hell

  No star, and no vestiges

  Of the sun, even low in the sky,

  To illuminate these marvels,

  Which shone with their own fire!

  And over these moving wonders

  Hovered (terrible novelty!

  All for the eye, nothing for the ears!)

  A silence of eternity.

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  I looked out the window of our compartment. The land was literally stripped bare, its green skin peeled off down to the debris of the Rhine’s gravel tongue. Huge bulldozers pushed the farmland in front of them like brown waves. Belching black diesel smoke vertically into the sky, they lifted the soil onto gigantic trucks, which then dumped it into cube-shaped concrete containers. Sealed, these were transported across France to the coast, where the contaminated earth was used to build the new Europe Dam.

  There was not a human being in sight far and wide. The drivers of the earth-moving machines sat in their fully air-conditioned cockpits as if in space capsules, or they operated them by means of telepresence from the safety of their mobile control centers.

  Occasionally I glimpsed on the side of the tracks or in a hollow a few trees—alders, ash trees, maples, poplars, or willows—but despite the advanced season they bore no green. Their bark was blackened. They were dead. The fruit trees were systematically leveled, shredded, and amassed into piles of wood chips. I saw barriers as high as houses made of heaped-up grapevines; gnarled, bent wood, waiting to be pushed into the gaping maws of the shredders. It had to be buried very deep and turned into peat, for if it were burned, the radioactivity would be in the air again and descend somewhere else.

  Miles-long scrap heaps were lined up along the tracks: cars piled up in stacks of six or eight; trailers, tractors, harvesters, buses, and streetcars; remnants of white, turquoise, and lime green paint. The rust had only partly effaced the advertisements. I still saw the numbers, the names of city districts where no one lived anymore. Complete, state-of-the-art urban transport fleets were discarded there—radioactive scrap. Railroad cars, Eurotrans containers, tank cars, forklifts, machine tools, parts of building cranes, antennas, lawnmowers, cut-up pipes, torn-out heaters, metal frames of roofs and greenhouses, and between them frequent dunes of shattered glass.

  Suddenly my gaze fastened on a dismantled children’s carousel, the colorful coaches with horses, double-decker buses, boats, a swan—the sections of the crown painted with giraffes, camels, hippopotamuses, and dolphins. That broken children’s world made me sadder than the rest of the destruction all around.

  Everything was lined up along the tracks for transport. Probably it would eventually be compressed and, loaded onto trains, roll toward the sea, to be permanently disposed of under the concrete sheath of the Eurodam, where it could exhale its radioactivity over the next several million years. The Eurodam as the sarcophagus of cutting-edge European technology, a memorial for eternity.

  To the left on a hill two churches rose into the sky, one of them gutted by fire. The redbrick tower was half collapsed. Most of the houses in the village had been blasted by cleanup crews. Everywhere were heaps of rubble, on which black weeds had shot up, monstrous coltsfoot, thistles as tall as men. OPPENHEIM I read on a rusty sign.

  The sky was almost cloudless. The sun was shining, but the light was strangely hazy, too dim to cast shadows. Things were without contours, drab and gray. Birgit had t
ried to describe this to us: The contaminated areas had turned into an indistinct shadow realm, over which the powers of darkness seemed to have spread their cloak.

  Suddenly the river reappeared to our right: rank riverside meadows, cut-off bends, silty pits in which boats rotted, fallen trees, caved-in huts. We overtook a military convoy—cleanup equipment in front, behind it a dozen trucks in Euro-white; the drivers and passengers wore goggle-eyed face masks. They looked over. One of them waved. I waved back, even though he probably couldn’t see me through the tinted windows.

  Suddenly Luigi chirped.

  “Yes?”

  “Please use the earpiece,” he said at a minimal volume.

  I detached the receiver from the clasp and pressed it into my ear.

  “Very nearby a strong transmitter has begun operating. I have substantial disturbances in communication.”

  I looked over at Brambilla. While I had been staring out the window, IPMAS had been activated. She had flipped down the monitors in front of her eyes; on her wrist in her lap glowed green and amber lights. Her fingers performed steering motions with an invisible joystick. She looked really grotesque: the delicate figure, the slim stockinged legs, the knees close together, the elegant suit, the medium-length blond hair under the hat brim, the dark squares in front of the glasses, and the mechanically jerky hands.

  “Tutto bene, Luigi,” I whispered.

  “If you say so, Domenica.”

  The train stopped, but I saw no station. Next to the tracks stood an ugly, completely graffiti-covered building with a flat, hole-ridden roof. In the east a railroad bridge made of simple latticework spanned the Rhine. The segment on the opposite bank had collapsed; overgrown with dense bushes it projected partway into the river.

  “The bridge was blown up because plunderers from France were constantly coming over to Mainz,” Brambilla, who had paused in her work, suddenly remarked. “Frankfurt was never successfully evacuated. The residents didn’t even let the military intimidate them. ‘Kiss our ass!’ they wrote on bedsheets, and hung them out the windows.” She laughed.