A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  ‘I don’t know that we’ve got time, actually,’ I said. ‘The bus back to Wernigerode is due about now.’

  ‘The bus? There’s no bus today,’ the proprietor said, in English for the first time, turning to Joaquin to include him. His English was excellent, hardly accented at all. ‘Did you think there was? The next bus back is on Monday morning.’

  I gaped at him.

  ‘Show him the timetable,’ Joaquin said. His mouth was set. ‘Show me the timetable, too. There’s a bus, definitely, I saw it.’

  I got the timetable out of my rucksack. Together we showed the proprietor the 18.30 bus from Sorge, its many stops carefully marked in minute- or two-minute gradations until it reached its destination in Wernigerode.

  ‘I see,’ the proprietor said. ‘You didn’t notice the little C in the box at the top.’

  He pointed with a grubby fingernail. There was, indeed, something that might have been a C, a superscript to the four-figure bus number that indicated the route. I followed his finger down to the footnotes, in tiny letters. I just about succeeded in reading the words Montag bis Freitag.

  We are normally good at analysing bus timetables, their exceptions and their hidden inconveniences. This was a catastrophe. For some moments my mind refused to accept how bad the situation was.

  ‘It has actually happened once or twice before,’ the proprietor said. His voice – I started to think, with that actually, that I had made another mistake here. Was he, in fact, German at all? ‘There was another group who came on the Saturday bus – went for a walk, just like you – came back, I offered them a beer. In the end they had to call a taxi. I kind of wondered, actually, when you turned up. The trouble is …’

  By now I was sure he was English. Joaquin was frozen, his knife poised over the muddy bottom of his boots, staring at the proprietor.

  ‘The trouble is that there’s no taxi to call. It’s only Markus who sometimes helps out, ten miles away, and he left for Mallorca this morning. I would drive you, but the van’s in the garage. There’s a company in Wernigerode, but I don’t think you’ll get them to come out here on a Saturday night, and it would cost you a good hundred euros, maybe a hundred and twenty. Half as much again if they come out on a Sunday, too. The best thing is probably to stay here. It’s only thirty euros for a room. I tell you what, I’ll do you two nights for fifty euros. I was airing a room when you got here. I’ll throw in an overnight wash of your clothes, tonight and tomorrow too, for five euros. Sybille will do it, no trouble. Give her something to do. Can’t say fairer than that.’

  He had us over a barrel. The dog Nala came out of the hotel. He had not, after all, been sleeping just yet. He came up to us where we sat. He laid his head on the table. He observed the empty beer glasses. He returned to the door of the hotel. He turned his head, waiting for us. He wanted to show us our horrible room.

  It is fair to say that Joaquin was not at his most cheerful that evening. We had had the sausages at lunchtime. I had the goulash that night. Joaquin had the herrings and potatoes. They were brought to us by the fat girl, who had adorned herself in a flouncy green and yellow dress and a black feather boa. She remained barefoot. She had the beginnings of a bunion. A couple of times I thought of commenting on her relationship with the proprietor – was she his daughter or his girlfriend, because no connection of mere employment could possibly be sufficient – before deciding to leave it until tomorrow. Joaquin stirred his herrings with dark disdain. A couple of times he started a comment: ‘Okay, so maybe we could, I don’t know …’ before trailing off. The expense and complexity of arranging a return from Sorge before Monday morning was more than we could overcome. We would just have to accept the waste of paying for two nights in a hotel in Quedlinburg for a room we weren’t sleeping in.

  Perhaps the worst of it was we had nothing to read. We had not thought to bring our novels along on our day trip. The only books on the hotel’s meagre bookshelf were tawdry German thrillers and the equivalent of joke books for children, and the teenage love story someone had left on the reception desk, the book that was everywhere this year. It was lucky that we were in the habit of carrying a change of shirt on walks like this. That would have to do for tomorrow. After dinner, we sat in an old leather sofa. We started to look through the four-day-old copy of the London Daily Express that we had found yesterday at a newsagent in Quedlinburg. Joaquin rang a china bell that was sitting on the side table. It might have been for decoration, but it fetched the fat girl.

  ‘Zwei Bier, bitte,’ Joaquin said. He had folded the newspaper back. Having said this, he started to raise it again. His ordering beers in German was a deliberate attempt at antagonism. I wasn’t the only one who could speak German, it said. My heart went towards my man, but I kept my face dour and cross, just to humour him.

  The girl pointed at the paper. ‘Mei Freind hatt oamoi von ihm gewusst,’ she said. She padded off. I looked at what she had pointed at. It was the photograph at the head of Percy Ogden’s twice-weekly column. Ogden had ‘come out’ in print a year before, saying that the time had come to ‘admit’ that he was homosexual. It was as if he were a criminal in the dock, facing a bundle of new evidence. His standard fare as a columnist was ecological tragedy, predictions of catastrophe when Britain left the European Union, and the urgent need for a new party, occupying the middle ground of UK politics. It seemed utterly footling to us. Even more absurd were his occasional ventures into sexual politics, taking on the new role, at fifty-three, of an undisputed leader of ‘queer politics’ as he called it. We definitely didn’t call it that. This was one of those weeks. It began, ‘It’s time that gay guys like me took the lead, and drove the disease of transphobia from queer politics, where it’s got no place at all, and never did.’ Somewhere deep in the hotel was the noise of television applause and musical outbursts, too muffled to identify, the sound of a glittering Saturday-night extravaganza. Outside, the silence of the woods and the village was broken only by the rustle of night-time wind. We were stuck in a remote village at the far western borders of Saxony-Anhalt until Monday. There was nothing else that would have persuaded anyone to read to the end of Ogden’s nine hundred words. In that sense we were Ogden’s ideal audience. The last time I had laid eyes on him, he was setting a cigarette lighter to a fanned-out fistful of East German banknotes in a market square in Weimar, in the summer of 1987. I had followed his subsequent career, turning away from politics into know-it-all journalism, with patchy and decreasing attention. It must have been disappointing to him. Sometimes I remarked to my colleagues in the university common room, ‘That bugger raped me once.’ They would say, ‘We know, Spike,’ with resignation. Sometimes Ogden would bring up his ten days in East Germany in 1987 as a badge of honour, writing in his awful column that he had seen Communism and had been subjected to interrogation in the cells of the gulag. That made him think admiration of Mr Tony Blair was the principle ‘we must’ adhere to, en masse. I never gave him a moment’s thought. It wasn’t important whether that columnists’ we succeeded in including me and Joaquin, or not.

  The proprietor emerged from the kitchen door. His walk towards the bar at the far end of the lounge was not at all proprietorial, or like a hotel owner, but like that of a man in his own house who has forgotten just what he came over for. ‘Another two beers, then? Good idea,’ he called, by now talking to us in English. He was already pouring himself one.

  He brought the three beers over on a tray. He sat down in the leather armchair across from the sofa. ‘I shouldn’t drink beer,’ he said. ‘It’s against the programme I stick to. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now,’ he went on, ‘but I was immensely fat until a year ago. Then Sybille had a go at me. Said I was making her put on weight with the way I ate. She’s not fat, not at all. It’s just the way women talk about themselves. But I was fat. It’s growing up in a pub that does it. That was my childhood. Self-indulgence was never far away. But I’ve lost fifty kilos sin
ce last August. What do you think about that?’

  ‘Well done,’ Joaquin said.

  ‘The good old Express,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen a copy of that for years. I thought it had probably closed down by now. Leave it when you go, I’d like a look at it when I get a moment.’

  ‘Read it now if you want,’ Joaquin said, laying it down. ‘I’m finished with it.’ He put it on the table just as it was, folded to the opinion page.

  ‘I’ll put it off and enjoy it more,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to have company on a Saturday night. That one – you see that bloke there writing – I used to know him. I was talking to Sybille about him the other day, strangely enough.’

  Mei Freind hatt oamoi von ihm gewusst. The girl Sybille’s comment, left uncomprehending where it lay, slowly resolved itself in retrospect from, what, Swiss, Bavarian, into German and then into a statement I could understand. My friend knew him, once.

  ‘Well …’ he went on. He had an odd air, as if he were about to make a terrible confession. He was assessing our reactions closely. He was looking at me, but not looking at me in a normal way, more going over the surface of my face for possible imperfections. ‘… I say I used to know him. He wasn’t my friend, really. He was actually my brother’s friend. They were in the same year at school together. They used to hang out a lot. He used to come round. I heard he’s a big-shot journalist now.’

  ‘I know him too,’ I said. ‘We both did. He was an arsehole. I would have known your brother. I was at that school too.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ the proprietor said. ‘What’s your name? Maybe I know you.’

  I told him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember your name. There was a black boy and a sexy girl that used to come round with Ogden. The black boy’s a lord now, someone told me. Tracy, the sexy girl was called.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Joaquin said.

  ‘I’m Pete Frinton,’ he said. He was the little brother, the boy in the pub, the one peering at us, scared, and lost, the one taking care of his mother, the one his mother had said we should take out with us, but not bring back at one in the morning, covered with love bites. It came back to me, Eartha Kitt and all. In the depths of the hotel, somewhere beyond the kitchen door, in Pete Frinton’s private quarters, the sound of a star and her Saturday-night spectacular echoed from tiled floor to whitewashed ceiling. We must have gaped at him.

  ‘But then your brother—’ Joaquin said.

  ‘My brother’s the important one,’ Pete said. ‘Sometimes I see him at Christmas if we go over, or just a phone call. The last time I saw him – maybe seven years ago. He hasn’t been here. You couldn’t expect it – it would take three days out of his life. You don’t get three days spare in his position. Home Secretary. I don’t think anyone would have predicted that one. Apart from James himself, of course. The papers call him Jimmy, I’ve heard – Nice One, Jimmy! ‒ when he’s locked some immigrants up or something. It’s as if they’re talking about someone else.’

  ‘He turned into a Tory,’ I said.

  ‘He had to do that before he could be turned into the Home Secretary, I would say. Some people were more shocked by that than others,’ Pete said. ‘Turning Tory, I mean.’

  ‘Spike knew,’ Joaquin said. He was getting interested now. His foul mood with me was dissipating. The idiocy of overlooking that superscript C had condemned us to two whole days in Sorge. He was forgetting it. He leant forward. ‘Spike always said that Frinton, he’s following what he wants to do.’

  Mei Freind kannte ihn oamoi. And that was true.

  ‘They all changed, though,’ Pete said. ‘They all stayed political but I know some of the people my brother knew, and they were quite far-left. But teenagers, they’ll believe in anything. The one I remember was the girl called Tracy. She was always talking about political theory in this very, very sexy way. She almost got me to read it. She died – you know she died? It was a five-days wonder. By the time she died she’d stopped being political. She wasn’t going round saying, “Darling, you have to read Bakuvenitsky, you have to read the Russian anarchists, I love the Russian anarchists,” to the little brothers of her friends. My brother kept on being friends with her right to the end, I know he did.’

  ‘The last time I saw your brother,’ I said, ‘it was when he came to my house to tell me she’d died. I was always grateful for that. Otherwise I’d have first seen it in the papers.’

  ‘Well, that was kind of him,’ Pete said dismissively. ‘She just stopped being one of the political types, all at once. She went to that girl’s wedding – what was she called? The older girl, the student.’

  ‘Kate,’ Joaquin said. ‘She was my flatmate. She married my other flatmate. He was called Euan.’

  ‘Well, you’ll remember it,’ Pete said. We didn’t. We hadn’t been invited and hadn’t gone to it. Kate and Euan had moved out of the flat. I had moved in. ‘My brother wasn’t asked and I don’t think any of the others were asked – it was just Tracy. I suppose that time between school and your first job, it’s a time when people like to turn themselves into somebody different. Growing up. You wouldn’t have said that Kate’s wedding was going to be like it was. It was sort of arty-bohemian, but all that meant was that she walked up the aisle barefoot, a garland of wild flowers round her head instead of a bouquet in her hands. You can imagine what the dress was like. It was very pretty, really. A country church in the village her parents had retired to – her father had made a packet and stepped down before he was fifty-five. The one blunder was that Kate had said everyone should dress exactly as they liked, including the smallest children. She had half a dozen cousins and nephews who would carry flowers behind her. She wouldn’t impose a uniform on them. She had something clearly in mind, however. I don’t think she expected to be followed up the aisle by half a dozen kids in lurid pink Cinderella ballgowns and Spiderman outfits from the toy shop. That’s what happened. But it was a nice event.

  ‘Tracy hardly knew anyone. She wandered round at the reception saying hi to people, getting into conversations that fizzled out. Everyone was at least six or seven years older than her. It was hard to explain how she fitted in here. She’d been sorted out with a lift back, or she would probably have left early. Who were these people? They were all in couples, some already with a baby in a basket, howling, and all so good-looking. The ones who had got their outfits right were in soft, floppy, pale clothes, the men with white silk scarves tied anyhow round their necks, the women bareheaded or with straw hats over loose white dresses. After a while the music started. A folk band dressed in the same way, a lot of Marie Antoinettes with mandolins and squeezeboxes. Half the party kicked off their shoes, like Kate. They started to dance in an improvised, expressive, flailing style. None of them knew or cared about dancing. To Tracy the ugliness and strangeness of their dancing was inexpressibly alluring. She just wanted to dance like that – no, she wanted not to care about how her dancing looked and go on dancing anyway. She tried – they let her in – she drank some more and tried again. She had thought that, whatever she wanted to be, her friendship with Kate and with Euan had prepared her for it. She didn’t know why she had been invited.

  ‘The music stopped. A few speeches followed. Anyone who wanted to could stand up and say something. There was no best man. Kate started. She clasped her hands together, she said that she was just so happy she felt like crying. Then she read a poem she had written that morning. Euan had got a job with the BBC two years before. I think he’s still there, producing documentaries, winning prizes. Or perhaps he’s got some admin job, Head of Outreach. Who knows? Tracy listened as best she could to the dozen or so speeches by friends of Kate and Euan. She felt her inner core clenching painfully. If you stand at the top of a great waterfall, see the river run smoothly to the edge before toppling in a thunder of waters, a temptation seizes you to leap in and be swept over in that huge collapse. A huge collap
se is what the human race always dreams of. It’s so banal, the human imagination. Hearing all those friends bear witness, some beautifully, some awkwardly, some with the appearance of improvisation and some with the sad and embarrassing reality, Tracy felt sure that if it went on much longer she would throw herself at the stage and seize the microphone. She was the most marginal guest there, she knew, the one who might just as well not have been invited. She felt she would not be able, in the end, to resist the temptation to introduce herself and gabble on about everything she’d discovered about love, from Kate and Euan. The desire to speak to a crowd from a platform, to tell them what’s what – that’s as strong as the death-wish above Niagara.

  ‘Of course she didn’t. At some point in the late evening, she found herself dancing with Kate, who was dancing with a dozen of her women friends in a kind of improvised khorovod, a round dance. The women drew her into a kind of stately stomp where a rhythm of claps and simultaneous hand-raisings was starting to emerge – they were all learning the dance and inventing it at the same time. It felt tremendous. It must have looked ludicrous. It fizzled out in a snake-train of women, threading through the rest of the party, and Tracy, who thought she was leading someone, found herself being led by Kate out of the tent into the warm bluish dark of a hot English September. Kate squatted and then toppled over with a little cry, bringing Tracy with her. She brought herself upright again. Out of some fold or pocket in her mud-streaked cream dress she produced a spliff, which she lit. “I’ve been promising myself this,” she said, passing it to Tracy. “I tucked it away, planning for just this moment. No one’s going to miss us for five minutes. I’m knackered, I can tell you. Never get married. Are you having a good time?” Tracy was having the best time ever, she told her.