The Cusanus Game

  “Are you already finished with your work?”

  She had flipped up one of the monitors and was scrutinizing me with one eye.

  “My computer takes care of it. I set the flight path of the drone beforehand so that it heads for the pinpointed objects. Sometimes a bit of precision work is necessary to choose the correct angle, but direct steering by telepresence is impossible—for one thing, because of the many tunnels here.”

  The train slowly rolled on. The ramp onto the bridge was guarded by two round brick towers. The tracks on the railroad embankment, which ran between them to the bridge, were nothing but rust marks on concrete ties, between which tall grass grew. A swarm of mosquitoes hung over them like a smoke cloud.

  “Frankfurt had also taken far less of the brunt than this region here. Do you know how it happened?” Brambilla asked me.

  “Only what I’ve read about it.”

  “Then let me tell you.” She looked out the window and flipped up the other monitor on her glasses. “July 28, 2028, was a hot day. A slight west-southwest wind blew, which later turned southwest and finally south-southwest. Around ten o’clock, when the contamination cloud from Cattenom arrived here, the Rhine Valley had not yet heated up much. So there were downdrafts. The stuff came down, and most of it landed on the eastern bank, here between Oppenheim and St. Goar. Mainz got the worst of it.”

  “Is this here Mainz?” I asked.

  “Yes, we’re just outside of it.”

  “Frankfurt is very close to here, isn’t it?”

  I remembered Birgit’s story about her excursion into the death zone in search of her parents.

  “It’s about twenty miles northeast of here. When the cloud reached the Frankfurt area around noon, there was fortunately already a strong thermal over the city. It drew the fallout up like a chimney. It first came down again more heavily between Fulda and Leipzig, contaminated a roughly one-hundred-and-twenty-five-mile-wide swath between Potsdam and Karlsbad, and thinned out gradually on its way to Posen,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve never forgotten it, after all these years.”

  “Did you live here?”

  She nodded. “In Gießen. Fortunately, many people had gone away on vacation at the time, and we were among them. Lots of children, in particular, for they had school break; otherwise there would have been even more victims.”

  “And those who had stayed home?”

  She gave a wave of her hand. “Don’t ask me about them.”

  “They died.”

  “It was terrible. Many didn’t die right away. Only later in the reception and transit camps on the periphery: Heidelberg, Schweinfurt, Osnabrück, Braunschweig, Magdeburg. There were many dead in particular among those who had followed the evacuation orders too late. They were not even brought into safe areas anymore. The condition of most of them was hopeless. The worst affected, however, were those who had simply stayed home, mostly older people who did not even grasp what was going on. For a while, there was still electricity, gas, and water. ‘We have a right to assistance,’ they told themselves. ‘After all, our whole lives we worked, paid our taxes, our insurance, our contributions. So eventually someone has to come, damn it—from the fire department, from the relief agency, the Red Cross, or some other emergency service.’ So they remained in their armchairs in front of the television, but soon they no longer fully understood the broadcasts because of the headaches, the nausea, and the general weakness in their limbs. ‘Nothing but boring movies about refugees somewhere and medical emergency treatment, one special after another about radioactivity and that plutonium dust from France. Who cares? And that—what awful programming everywhere—on all the channels.’ They didn’t grasp that it was live and affected them too. And so they died, remote control in hand—if they were lucky. For those who weren’t lucky things got completely surreal. First came the flies, attracted by the smell of blood flowing from their orifices and lymph seeping through their brittle skin. Progressive radiogenic fibrosis. And then, at some point, came the rats…”

  I cringed with horror. Suddenly branches and foliage scratched and grazed the car. The train pushed its way through a tunnel in the vegetation. It got darker and darker. A tunnel? The grinding and grating stopped. Again a stretch of half-light—like a clearing in the jungle. I had never before seen the Clematis vitalba nigra from so close. Its dark claws slid hungrily across the window; it was feeling the train, searching for a crack, a way in. Again it got dark. The train rolled at a crawl. The window was soiled with chlorophyll slime, white secretion from spurges, and mashed black leaves. For a moment I thought I saw the scurrying movement of something furry—the face of a lemur.

  Once again the train entered a tunnel; this time it was a longer one. Then came another jungle clearing, which gradually took on the form of a train station. Behind it was a row of half-overgrown flat-roofed buildings. Through the window on the other side I saw a former parking garage full of dark, abundant vegetation. Was that mutant ivy? I had never before seen ivy with such large leaves. On the concrete ribs grew tree fungi like stacked-up dish antennas made of rotten flesh. Above it rose a round, smashed glass tower like the dome of a greenhouse, from which rubber trees gone mad had broken free in a vegetal eruption. Between them Rafflesia had spread its three-foot-wide white-starred dark red cushions. The train stopped.

  MAINZ.

  On the next track were two hitched-together diesel locomotives, in front of them a flatbed equipment carrier with two contra-rotating rotors, higher than a train. A sort of high-performance shredder. The thing had apparently cut a path for us through the vegetation. The locomotives were covered with shredded plant parts and a slimy green foam of chlorophyll. Clusters of branches had gotten caught in the protective bars in front of the viewing windows; in them hung the remains of birds—and the severed arm of a monkey. I observed the vegetation all around and felt as if I had been transported to a strange planet.

  Some of the plants had forgotten the art of photosynthesis—their fundamental vital function for more than three billion years. They incorporated into their protein molecules elements that blocked large areas of the spectrum to them. In their abnormal hunger for light they searched for a way out in gigantism and ever-larger leaves, only to be smothered in a genetic chaos of diversity and formlessness.

  At the main entrance to the train station building, which was sealed off with plastic and foam, an accordion-like object unfolded; it grew straight across the platform toward our train and docked with it. Two bulky figures with knapsacks on their backs trudged through and sprayed the sealant of the door to the car. A few minutes later six distorted dark gray figures strode across through the ribbed plastic corridor. Shortly thereafter, two women and four men walked through our car in search of their compartment. Their light gray papertex coveralls rustled and gave off an aseptically fresh scent. The smell of soap wafted toward my nose. The young people seemed to have scrubbed themselves thoroughly. They were unusually pale and had acne on their necks and cheeks. All of them had dosimeters hanging around their necks.

  “There are still idealists,” said Brambilla, nodding approvingly. “They come from all over the world to help—most of them from France. They wish to make amends. The ‘month in hell,’ they call it. They get a medal for it, which is recognized worldwide as education credit. So there is something to be gotten out of it. But they are certainly well advised to have stem cells and sperm or eggs frozen as a precaution.”

  “Do many come?”

  “Yes. Even though they have to put up with getting spit on by some Germans.”

  “I’ve read those stupid slogans.”

  She shrugged. “They’re not assigned the really hard tasks. For those there are specialists: forensic scientists, military doctors, pathologists. They deal with one house after another, floor by floor, apartment by apartment, photographing the skeletons and the mummies and whatever the rats have left, taking DNA samples, collecting and bagging them. Awful work. The authorities keep the records
under wraps. But I’ve seen a few photos. I can tell you…”

  I shivered.

  “The volunteers are assigned mainly to the decontamination work. A month in a protective suit,” Brambilla went on, gesturing with a nod in the direction the young people had gone. “They’re done with it.”

  “How long will it take before the decontamination is completed?” I asked.

  “Estimates range between thirty and three thousand years,” replied Brambilla. “I’ve often wondered whether they shouldn’t team up with the Asians. I heard they have a plant that removes the radioactive contamination in a harmless fashion. A papyrus or something like that from India. It has those fullerenes in its cells, in which the radioactive material is enclosed as in a cage. When the plant decomposes, it’s washed away. Harmless. They’ve supposedly been using it for years along the Saale. As a botanist, you should actually know more about that than I do.”

  “I’ve never heard anything about it before.”

  I would have to look into that miracle plant. Probably it was a rumor. Wishful thinking. On the other hand, I knew that the Asians conducted their research at the Botanical Institute in Gardelegen with great success.

  A buffet cart was pushed through the car: sandwiches, tofu with rice, and drinks were included in the train fare. And there were drinking nuts with that miserable coffee I had already loathed in Heidelberg. For such spinoffs we truly did not need space travel.

  Suddenly I spotted a fly on the edge of my plate.

  “Take a look at that,” I said to my fellow passenger.

  The princess took her glasses off her nose and leaned forward.

  “A fly.”

  “Yes, but take a closer look.”

  Despite the shielding, the insect had made it onto the train with the young people: a large black blowfly with a green metallic shimmering abdomen. But the front limbs looked strange to me; dark, pearl-shaped outgrowths dangled from them.

  “It has an extra pair of eyes on its front legs,” I observed.

  The insect tried repeatedly to raise the mutant pair of legs over its head in a cleaning movement. To no avail.

  “Oh, there are worse things, young woman.”

  I was aware of that—and involuntarily I thought of CarlAntonio, the Siamese twins, and of the little girl on the platform in Heidelberg, from whose wrist sprouted a small black talon.

  A howl approached from behind. The two diesel locomotives with the shredder rolled by on the next track. The rotors spun threateningly. So a swath would have to be cleared for the continuation of the journey northward as well. Finally the train moved on. To the left of the tracks I saw five-story houses from the beginning of the previous century. Gutted by fire. Black window holes. To the right rose two tower blocks built very close together—twenty-seven or twenty-eight floors high, with panoramic windows like embrasures. Most of the windows had been broken. Ivy and wild vines had already made it to the fifteenth floor and had penetrated inside through the openings. I pictured scenes inside: the residents sitting dead in their television chairs, entwined by Parthenocissus tricuspidata, their bony temples adorned with blooming Hedera helix, and eye cavities in which spiders nested.

  Thousands of ravens flew over the roofs, swarming here and there.

  “Do you see the ravens?” asked Brambilla. “You have to be careful around them. They hunt animals in huge swarms. They’ve grown fiendishly intelligent, perhaps because they’ve battened on human flesh. They originally came from the east, from Poland and the Baltic states, people say. Then they stayed here. No wonder, with the abundant food supply. The woods and fields were littered with animal carcasses. Who wanted to collect them all? It had not been possible to bury and cremate even close to all the dead people. And those birds have multiplied incredibly here, despite the radioactivity.”

  “Like the rats.”

  “Like the rats,” she confirmed, nodding.

  The tracks now ran along the river. A passenger ship lay with its bow half on the embankment—the Princess of Rhine-Hesse. The stern was missing. What jutted into the river had been severed. The ship rested high up on the bank. So the water level had dropped significantly, probably because of the melting of the last glaciers in the Swiss Alps.

  “Those ships were the first to pass through the death zone,” said my fellow passenger. She told me that between Mainz and Koblenz more than thirty sunken passenger ships had blocked the channel. They had been stormed by refugees and had gone under. “It took over a year before the river was navigable again. Now it has been open again for twenty years, but there are still some ship owners who don’t dare to operate on it. Superstitious people; they’re afraid of ghosts—Loreley and such…”

  Brambilla smiled; then, with a jerk, she flipped down both monitors in front of her eyes.

  “Damn beasts!” she hissed. “They’re attacking my drone again.”

  “Who?” I asked, perplexed.

  “The ravens,” she said through clenched teeth. “But feathers are going to fly.” Her fingers twitched back and forth.

  Brambilla seemed to be completely preoccupied with her reconnaissance work. I looked out the window. It was already late afternoon. One abandoned village followed another. Hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, boat docks—run-down, decayed. Rotten fences, caved-in roofs. Fire had raged unopposed, spreading from one house to the next and eating its way through whole lines of old half-timbered houses. The black roof beams rose from the rubble like the ribs of large, half-incinerated monsters.

  Occasionally I saw special ships spewing riverwater in high arcs over buildings and the streets to wash away the fallout. Probably remote-controlled; people were nowhere to be seen.

  The base of the tracks was so bad in places that the train wobbled like a large animal ponderously plodding along.

  Again we stopped. Probably the tunnel cutter made only slow progress. The vegetation of the riverside meadows had begun to storm the railroad embankment and had in places overrun it. Fallen trees lay on both sides of the train, buried under the shroud of the ubiquitous nigra. BINGEN, I read. On the hill of the opposite bank stood a huge dark bronze figure, its fist raised threateningly to the west.

  The valley narrowed. City ruins lined the river, beyond them rank vineyards, collapsed walls, breaches from mudslides. The streets were impassable due to mud and drift sand, in which blackberry thickets welled up. The late-afternoon light, which broke through gaps in the clouds in the west, revealed details on the eastern slope: here a castle ruin, there a hotel, a porous rock face, a house, a hole-ridden slate roof.

  Suddenly I glimpsed in the middle of the shallow riverbed a water castle. It was freshly whitewashed, and the roof had been covered with new wood shingles. The shutters were painted red, light blue pennants hung from the bay windows, and the main tower wore a fresh, red-gold, sparkling copper hood. Was this the first sold real estate?

  “What’s that?” I asked my fellow passenger.

  “That’s the Pfalzgrafenstein toll castle. It belongs to a Chinese shipowner from Singapore. Filthy rich. He had the castle renovated. By Asian guest workers.”

  “Can people live here then?”

  “Some like it hot,” she said with a shrug.

  The island was besieged by driftwood, on which dense bushes grew rampant. It looked like Sorbaria, but I couldn’t identify it with certainty. The pinnate leaves ranged from dark green to black—a landing force that had formed a beachhead.

  OBERWESEL. The view of the river was obscured by dense woods. The valley made a ninety-degree turn to the right. The eastern slope had gotten it worse than the western. The steep terrain was crosshatched by dead vines—contorted as if they had died in pain. The lichens, on the other hand, had experienced an unexpected evolutionary boost. In some places they formed large, continuous, reddish brown splotches, as if a giant had vomited over the slopes.

  HOTEL LORELEY, I read in the dim evening light. A Disneyland of the dead.

  Dinner was served. Poultry s
alad with peas, corn, carrots, and mayonnaise. Turkey? Chicken? Or something in between?

  “Biotech muck,” Brambilla grumbled with disgust, but ate nonetheless.

  I longed for Tafelspitz, for Vanillenbraten and Fiakergulasch, for the Salzburger Nockerln at St. Peter, of which I had had to send back a double peak. In one gulp I emptied a bottle of mineral water before I even got down a bite. I felt as if I had ashes in my mouth, as if I had to wash down the plutonium dust in my throat and the effluvium of an unrestrained vegetation that had settled on my mucous membranes.

  Gloom sank over the landscape. It was the minute after sunset, in which the last light of day seems to suck the colors out of things and smear them across the sky, before everything is melted into darkness. The train now moved faster. Night fell. Outside emptiness, no people, no movement, no cars, no illuminated windows. Only the reflection of the train windows dragged like a pale chain along the railroad embankment; sometimes it jumped up onto a wall, then rushed again along the sides of the tunnel.

  The land on both banks of the Rhine, a settled area for thirty thousand years. Here light had burned from time immemorial; campfires had flickered, around which people sat. Now it had plunged back through time into deep prehistoric darkness. Only occasionally pale red and green lights appeared on the river, ghostly, as if from time-ships seeking their course through the abysses.

  * * *

  A SCRAPING AND pattering, hissing and pounding woke me. Had we gotten stuck in the wild vegetation? Were the locomotives trying with futile thrust to free the train from entanglement? Were the branches and vines already breaking through the windows to seize us? The panes were opaque, covered with a white foamy smear. Rotating brushes wiped it away. Our train was passing through a carwash; the radioactive fallout stuck to it was being cleaned off. Hard jets of water lashed metal and glass, thundered from below against the undercarriage.

  I looked at my watch; three o’clock in the morning. Outside it was pitch black.