by Timur Vermes
He turns his back to the fence and gives a determined nod. The plan is women and children first. And everyone behind him knows to go slowly, but to keep moving. Onwards and onwards. There is only one direction.
And if they can’t go any further: push!
55
“Give me sector C,” the commander says. Now the large screen is showing one of the outlying areas. They can see more young men, too many to assume this is just a random grouping.
“I think they’ll be the first to try. Can I get another camera?”
The strategy simulations all showed the same thing: they will send young men up front, who will try to climb the fence and weaken it from the other side. Or claim asylum, that might happen too. They must be stopped. It’s like a balloon. If the rubber bursts you can’t stick it and the whole thing collapses – you have to ensure that first hole doesn’t appear.
“Loudspeaker,” the commander orders, “and move two water cannon over there. Keep those boys well away from the fence!”
Well away is no longer possible, however. Most of the refugees at the front are far too close to the scary electric fence. Nobody’s tried to touch it yet. Some of those at the front are anxiously pushing backwards.
“Should we . . .” Gödeke asks the minister. They’re standing side by side, watching the organised chaos, so that he can authorise decisions at any point.
The minister shakes his head. “Nine thousand volts is enough.”
The power cables have been moved. They’re working, but they’re now at the top of the fence. They mooted the idea of electrifying the entire thing, but it would have been counterproductive. If such a mass of people were to push against the fence it would kill at most a few hundred before the installation became overloaded or damaged. And with such a large number of people unable to retreat, this would be a few hundred deaths to no additional effect. It would be no more than a “we tried” signal, and this signal could be given more effectively with targeted shooting. Shots are generally audible and there are fewer fatalities. And the fear of the electricity remains. It will scare them off for longer.
“We don’t want to sit and wait, open up the fucking gate!” they’re now singing.
“There is no gate,” the minister mutters. There’s only one way to disperse this crowd and that’s from behind, where they can still be kept well away from the fence. Those behind would need to be driven back, dispersed into Austria, after which they could set about removing those at the fence. Then those wankers would have to scoop the refugees up again. They’d have to deal with them rather than just waving them through. But it’s inconceivable that the Germans could use tear-gas grenades or anything similar on Austrian soil.
“O.K.,” the commander says. “Showtime!”
Accompanied by cheers from the refugees one of the boys climbs onto the shoulders of another. “Water cannon the moment he touches the fence,” the commander says into his headset. “And get ready for sector A, that’s where the next attempt is likely to be.”
The first water cannon spouts forth, knocking the first boy clean off the shoulders of the other, but two more have climbed up and are already holding onto the fence. These are smooth metal struts, now wet too, yet the boys stick to them like geckos, with only one arm. They reach back with the other, trying to get their hands on coats, blankets, whatever they can use to cover the electrical cables and razor wire at the top.
“Give the warning!” the commander orders. “Snipers at the ready!”
The fear of the electricity is greater than the electricity itself. As long as nobody climbs up the fence, nobody knows just how strong the current is. So the key is to keep the refugees on the ground. The commander glances at the minister and Gödeke, and when neither reacts, he says firmly, “Warning shots!”
The gunshots are clearly audible. The cameras show the crowd retreating, if you can call it that. It appears to contract, but there’s barely any room. One metre, perhaps only half. The boy clings to the fence.
“He’s going to get it,” the squad leader warns. “Fingers or legs!”
Two shots are fired, and the boy sails back into the crowd with a scream. More shots are fired, and all the cameras show an empty fence once more. The minister fetches a cup of coffee. He saw Lionel do just that on television earlier: get a coffee. He raises his cup and toasts his absent opponent.
It could be going worse.
56
At some point the cameras withdrew from the crowds. To begin with Nadeche thought this sensible, as they could no longer get sufficiently far away to capture decent footage. Besides, there are enough refugee cams in the crowd. But now she feels slightly abandoned, which may have something to do with the gunfire.
She didn’t see exactly what happened, she just heard the cracks. But word quickly spread that some of the refugees had been shot at. A wave of fear surged through the crowd and Saba howled with pain because someone stepped on her toes. Then the shooting stopped. “It’s all part of the poker game,” Lionel called out to her. “They have to do that. Our boys are only injured.” Which was true, of course.
“Ooooh, it’s all getting a bit like, cosy here,” she says cheerfully into the microphone by her mouth. “I’ve been to a few discos in my time. And I’ve squeezed into Cologne pubs during Carnival. But there isn’t going to be any dancing here!”
“You’re on camera right now,” she hears in her ear. “Would you give a wave? Ten o’clock?”
“Are you already on the booze? It’s well past noon!”
“Our drone is coming from ten o’clock. From where you are it’s quite far to the left, no, not completely to the left . . . the other left! Where you . . . Yes. That’s it. Give us a wave!”
Nadeche thrusts up her hand, which in itself isn’t easy, and waves towards the drone. This isn’t very funny anymore. She’s five or six metres from the fence, and up front it must be even more cramped, because the fence has less give than the people around her. From time to time some of the boys try to climb, but every one of them has paid for it by being shot at. In fact nobody is daring to touch the fence. Down below, Saba is clutching her knee to avoid being dragged away by the crowd. Nadeche bends to her as best she can.
“Do you want to go on Lionel’s shoulders? Or mine?”
Quite a few people are doing this now. Children who are old enough are being lifted onto shoulders. It saves space and it’s safer for the children.
“Yours.”
“O.K.” Nadeche groans. “But you’ve got to help me.”
It’s virtually impossible to bend over, and she can’t just lift Saba up either. People are so tightly packed that she has to manoeuvre her upwards like a corkscrew.
“Press hard against me,” she says. “I’ll pull and you crawl your way up. Put your feet in my trouser pockets.”
“I can’t get my feet up,” Saba pants.
Nadeche feels fingers on her bra straps, then the straps are off. The fingers dig into the sleeves of her T-shirt. The sleeves hold. A quality product.
“Everything alright?” says the earbud. “Should we send the helicopter?”
“No,” Nadeche gasps as Saba’s head pushes up between her breasts. “It’s crunch time now! Just a little longer and they’ll have to open up. I mean, surely they can see what’s happening here!”
The loudspeakers are now instructing people over and over again to clear the border zone. In English, German and something else. You’ll be lucky! Nadeche thinks.
“I’ve lost my shoe,” Saba squeaks.
“Keep going, sweetie. There are plenty of shoes in Germany.”
Saba’s bare toes scrabble around Nadeche’s waistband. Clever girl. She’s realised that she can’t get up at the front, so she’s clasped her thighs around Nadeche like a coconut picker in a palm tree, and she’s pushing herself up. She turns around deftly and gives a laugh of relief from Nadeche’s shoulders.
“Hello Germany!” she squeals, waving with both arms.
; “Wave towards ten o’clock, sweetie.”
“That’s good,” the earbud praises her.
“Have you got the babies on camera?” Nadeche wheezes. “Ouf!”
“What’s that?”
“Whoah, that’s tight . . . I could barely breathe just then . . .” She puffs out again, unintentionally loudly. “Have you got the babies on camera?”
Hardly any of the babies are crying at normal volume now. She can hear widespread howling accompanied by that griping undertone babies put on when they’ve really had enough.
“Yes, we have,” the earbud says. “It looks pretty mega. The viewers are getting worked up already. There are demos in Berlin and everywhere else we’ve put up big screens.”
“H . . . ow! How many . . . vie . . . ooh! View . . . ouch!?”
“Almost a hundred thousand in Berlin, more than fifty-five thousand in Munich. But we weren’t allowed to put a screen in the city centre there. Not a surprise really – where do you think the minister of the interior is from? But it’s all kicked off at the border where you are too. More than ten thousand have made their way there. Your job’s done, you can knock off now.”
“I’m not chickening out now . . .” Nadeche moans. “That’s precisely what they want!”
“You won’t be able to see it, but there are masses of people coming from behind where you are. From where I am it looks pretty overwhelming . . .”
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” Nadeche pants. “I know what I’m talking about, I come from a humble background! Bloody hell!”
“O.K., let’s do a live connection then – it looks great. Right in the thick of things rather than just watching from the sides! In two minutes!”
“O.K.!”
“Maybe you should put Saba down?”
“That’s not going to happen.” Nadeche tries to make some room for herself, but it’s not easy.
“But if we want Saba on camera we’ll only just get your head in. And if we focus on you, then most of Saba will be out of shot.”
“There’s nothing I can do!”
“O.K., we’ll think of something. Wide-angle or whatever.”
Nadeche gives Saba’s knee a squeeze of encouragement. Saba squeaks. Then Nadeche tries waving to Lionel and gestures that she’s about to be on camera again. Lionel gives her the thumbs up. The crowd has dragged him a few metres further away. It’s annoying that the live programme is being presented by that ex-W.A.G. Didn’t they want the show to be like Schreinemakers? Now it’s more like Schweinsteigermakers. Forget it. When she’s home she’s going to take a nice chunk of time off, and together they’ll write the book she signed the contract for last week. And when the book’s really buzzing she’ll make a grand re-entry into television, bang into Thursday evening primetime, knocking Heidi Klum off her perch.
“Ten seconds, Nadeche!” the earbud says. “And at ten o’clock!”
“Roger!” She lifts her head and says, “Here we go, sweetie!”
57
“This is really close to the knuckle now,” Reliable Anke says. She alternates between hands on hips and clenched fists as she paces up and down. Her eyes are fixed on the screen in the middle.
“Oh, I don’t know,” says Olav, in contact with Nadeche Hackenbusch via his headset. “It was more extreme at lunchtime.”
“More extreme?”
“To my knowledge those were the first live gunshots ever on German television.”
“At least the shooting has stopped. Just look at that, it’s like the Love Parade in Duisburg.”
Olav scans the various screens in the control room. He shakes his head and looks at Beate Karstleiter, who’s tapping one of the two technicians on the shoulder. Despite the dimmed lighting in the control room Olav is sure the technician wasn’t that pale this morning. The camera zooms in to the area by the fence. It’s true, people are pressed together like herrings. The women hold their heads at unnatural angles, their chins tilted upwards to snatch some air in between the taller men. It’s a scene you only see on underground trains at rush hour, and it’s been like this for at least an hour. People look exhausted at best.
From time to time there is pushing in the crowd, when another group of arrivals increases the pressure from behind. This pushing, these waves of pressure leave even those watching breathless. It’s as brutal as it is obvious. It’s not some subtle tactic; these people want to get into another country and they’re prepared to die for the privilege. This time, however, they’re doing it on the Salzburg motorway rather than on the Sicilian coast.
“Look at that woman there, up at the front,” Reliable Anke says, and she gasps. “She’s out of it. The only reason she hasn’t fallen over is that there’s no room. Look, her eyes aren’t even open anymore.”
“Are you sure? I don’t know, maybe she’s just having a rest?”
“Look at her! She’s not having a rest. It must be thirty-five, forty degrees down there.”
The door clicks open and Sensenbrink comes in. From the faces in the room he can tell at once that the mood isn’t as great as the viewing figures. “What’s our marvellous minister doing? Can’t he see what’s happening? Doesn’t he have a television?”
“Possibly,” Reliable Anke says. “Maybe he’s on the wrong channel. Bayerische Runkfunk has stopped broadcasting.”
“What’s their excuse?” Sensenbrink says.
Anke points at the screens with both hands. “They’re refusing to broadcast this, instead they’re showing stills with an audio commentary.”
“I’ve been dialoguing with Kärrner until just now. Last time I looked the situation was dicey, but not dire. What’s happened?”
Now Anke taps the pale technician on the shoulder and he gets the shot back on screen. “Do you see that woman there?”
“Shit,” Olav says. “There’s another one. Christ!”
“And there,” Beate says, standing up. “And there! Look!” She points at the screen.
“For God’s sake, they ought to be watching out for their children if they’re going to have them on their shoulders,” the technician exclaims. “They’re practically asleep.”
Lots of children are now slumping with tiredness. Some topple over their parent’s head, others fall to the side, and only some parents still have the energy to look after them.
“Don’t zoom in so close for the broadcast pictures,” Sensenbrink orders, then more emphatically: “I said not so close!” But the technician zooms in ever closer to a sleeping three-year-old, as if he could wake the child this way.
“Hey!” he yells. “Your little one’s slipping!”
Then the toddler vanishes. He collapses to the side, then falls back head first, as if diving into the crush of the crowd.
“Shit, where’s he gone?”
“He can’t have gone anywhere,” Olav says. “There isn’t any room for him to fall to the ground.”
“Rewind,” Anke orders, “and let’s look at the angle from camera 5.”
“But for the live feed I want you to zoom out to a distance shot, do you get me?” Sensenbrink says.
The technician rewinds the film. They see the child fall back, then hit his head on a the head of a young woman behind. The woman drops to the ground, the child follows and the crowd closes above them.
“Shit,” Sensenbrink says. “Fucking shit.”
Anke covers her mouth with her hand.
“They’ve got to pick him up,” the technician says. “Someone’s got to pick him up. The boy and the girl, both of them!”
“Nobody’s doing a thing,” Karstleiter notes in disbelief.
“Nobody can,” Olav says. “They can’t move.”
“That . . . that can’t be . . . It wasn’t like that before . . .” Sensenbrink rubs his face. “It must have escalated in the last few minutes.”
“No, it’s been like that for a while,” Anke says.
“Oh shit! For God’s sake, don’t zoom in so close, none of our advertisers
want to see that!”
“The girl over there!” The technician bends to the left and vomits into the wastepaper basket. Reliable Anke pushes his swivel chair to one side and takes control.
“The question is whether anyone wants to see it – oh Christ, there’s another one. There! She’s gone.” A woman vanishes silently into the crowd like cocoa powder into a glass of milk.
“It wasn’t like this earlier,” Sensenbrink rants. “We can’t broadcast this. Switch our feed to another area, further away. Go to a commercial break. And make the live picture smaller. How come we didn’t get a heads up about this? What’s our wonderful star been doing the whole time?”
“Nadeche?” Olav says. “What’s the scene like with you?”
“What camera’s the silly cow on, anyway?” Sensenbrink says.
“Two,” the technician says, his voice shaky.
“Nadeche?” Olav tries again.
“Rubbish,” Sensenbrink says. “She’s not on two.”
*
The minister of the interior yanks round the steering wheel to avoid hitting a transporter. The wound on his forehead has reopened and he can feel blood running down the side of his head. They’re already sending police vans back from the border – this is madness, utter madness. He needs every man up front. He reaches for a tissue in the glove box, but all he finds are cigarettes, handbooks and replacement magazines for a pistol.
Another police van races past, blue lights flashing; he almost drives the 4×4 into a ditch. He realises that he hasn’t got his seatbelt on. They shouldn’t pull more people out, he thinks, but he doesn’t know how to give the order. He can’t get to grips with these new radio devices and the mobile network is overloaded. He should tell a police officer, but there’s never one to be had when you need one.