Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

  I looked at him sharply. For the first time, I thought I saw some doubt creep across Weber’s face. Anton saw he’d overdone it, and hedged. “Not everyone has that feeling, I suppose.”

  “I am interested to see the bunker,” said Karl.

  Weber brightened up. “Ah yes!” He made a vague hand gesture at a camera high up on the wall. Almost at once, the porter appeared.

  “Can we unlock the bunker, Uwe?”

  “Yes, of course, Herr Doktor.”

  Uwe, I thought. That’s his name. Uwe.

  We followed Uwe downstairs and walked along the corridor past the IT office. He opened a door and stood aside, gesturing us to step into a small storeroom lined with shelves of office supplies. At the back of the storeroom was a second door. He unlocked it and reached inside, switching on a bright light.

  “Please.”

  Weber led the way down a flight of stairs to an extraordinary space, like something from a dream. Our footsteps echoed as we walked across a huge, completely empty room, with concrete walls, floor and ceiling. A featureless box, the air cold and damp. What made it so strange was its brightness. Every surface was painted white. Strip lights lined the ceiling, many more than necessary. Dazzled, we all squinted, shielding our eyes.

  “Deuter white,” explained Dr. Weber. “It was his specific instruction.”

  “Why?”

  Anton scoffed. “Because he was afraid of shadows.”

  Dr. Weber smiled. “Yes, that’s a good way of putting it. He wanted to banish the darkness of those years.”

  “What did they do down here?” I asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

  “Oh, nothing very scandalous. Sheltered during air raids. The Nazis built these bunkers under many of the houses round the lake. When there was bombing the Institute held its meetings and cultural program down here. I can show you a photo.”

  He’d brought a book with him, some sort of local history publication containing old photographs of Wannsee. He flicked past pictures of boating parties on the lake, grainy pictures of interiors. I saw the dining room, recognizable but full of heavy dark furniture. Finally he found what he was looking for, a photo of a man speaking to an audience of uniformed military personnel. The caption: A lecture takes place underground: Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser speaks on “Kleist and the Nordic spirit of honor.”

  We stood and looked at the picture. The speaker was gripping the side of the lectern and gesturing with a closed fist, in the approved rhetorical style.

  “Over here you see more or less the only unusual thing about this room.”

  Weber walked us over to the spot. Set into the concrete floor was a brass arrow, about two feet long. It was plain and unabstracted, with a barbed head and detailed lifelike fletching.

  “It points due North.”

  Karl turned to Anton. “You see? I read that this was here.”

  Anton nodded, and at once, as if at a signal, they both turned smartly to face in the direction indicated by the arrow, and held up their right hands, as if swearing an oath. “I am the Magus of the North,” intoned Anton, as if he were uttering the words of a spell. “I have opened the book of secrets.”

  “I am the spear bearer of the North,” said Karl. “I am the complete man.”

  Weber frowned. “What is this? What are you doing?”

  Anton relaxed his posture. “No amount of light will banish the shadows,” he said, his tone conversational again, laced with irony, though the words themselves were still portentous. “The shadows are your history.”

  Weber was angry now. “I must ask for an explanation.”

  “Don’t take things so seriously, old man.”

  “Why do you speak like this?”

  “Yeah,” I said, suddenly disgusted by the whole stupid business, the deception, whatever occultist idiocy I’d just witnessed. “Tell us, Anton.”

  Weber turned to me, accusingly. “Who are these people? “

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I actually didn’t invite them here.”

  “They are your friends.”

  “They aren’t my friends.”

  Anton did his sad face again. “That’s cold, dude. Seriously.”

  “Oh go to hell.”

  Weber was furious. He turned to Anton. “This is a place that has fully faced up to the past. We acknowledge it, of course, but there has been a decisive break. I don’t know what you’re doing but I find it tasteless. Your flippant tone, your humor about this, is misplaced, more so from an American.”

  Anton shrugged. “I guess that means it’s time for us to leave.”

  Uwe the porter was hovering. He and Karl were making hostile eye contact. We all began to move. I could not wait to get upstairs, out of the dazzling light. As soon as we were out of the storeroom and the door closed behind us, Dr. Weber said a curt goodbye and stalked off down the corridor.

  “Looks like you’re in trouble,” said Anton, cheerfully. “Shame, because your poker face was holding up so well.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “Karl’s into this esoteric stuff. The hollow earth, the spear of destiny, all that. Me, I just wanted to mess with your shit.”

  “Please,” said Uwe. “It is time for you to leave.”

  “Sure, man. Just a minute.” He gestured at our surroundings. “You know this is all bullshit, right? Reason, technocracy and a coat of white paint. It’s just a front, my friend.”

  “Please,” said Uwe. “No more.”

  “Underneath, these enlightened liberals enjoy all the same dark age shit as the people they condemn. All the obscene shit. They call it humanitarian intervention, but it’s just a chance to play Abu Ghraib.”

  Uwe placed himself in front of Anton, who raised his hands in a gesture of pacification. He spoke to me over Uwe’s shoulder.

  “They’re better at hiding it. That’s the only difference.”

  Uwe touched Karl, steering him towards the door. Karl reacted badly, snatching away his arm and squaring up to Uwe, who took a step back and adopted a fighting stance.

  Anton giggled at them and turned to me. “You know what the best part is? I’m going to be living rent free in your head from now on. You’re going to think about me all the fucking time. Come on, Karl. Time to go.”

  And with that, they left. I stood at the front door with Uwe and watched them sauntering insolently down the drive, their hands in their pockets.

  “Personally,” said Uwe, “I am surprised. I didn’t think you were a Fascist.”

  “What? God, no. Of course not. I’m nothing to do with those guys.”

  “I’m different from a lot of people here. I was in the army. I’m not so judgmental.”

  “No, seriously. I met them last night.”

  “But I think others will have problems with it. Dr. Weber, for example.”

  “What do you mean, problems?”

  “I think after today you will not be able to stay.”

  I had a bad night. The only person I wanted to speak to was Rei and I absolutely could not call her. I couldn’t think straight. I barely slept. Sometime in the early morning I went to the station and caught the first train into the city center. I spent the day wandering around, I don’t exactly remember where. I was consumed by the shock of everything that had happened, the ruthless disruption that Anton had visited on my life. His invincible sarcasm, his constant hints of transgression. Everything he said sounded like a dare, an outrage that was taken back as soon as it came out of his mouth. I meant it, I didn’t mean it. Sorry, not sorry. I was conducting a constant dialogue with him, with some version of him I’d conjured for myself, all the while knowing that this was exactly what he’d predicted. Rent free in your head. The stress this induced in me was intolerable. Rage was eating away at the core of my being. As I came back to
Wannsee, the late afternoon sun was already low in the sky. Long shadows. Frost on the ground. I needed a sign, a talisman, something to ward off Anton. What would clear my confusion was a baseline, a piece of firm moral ground. I needed to remember why I believed the things I did, and why I had a right, even a duty, to defend them. At the station I got on a bus that took me over the bridge and past the blue-light Chinese. It dropped me near a set of iron gates, kept open so that people could pass freely in and out. Beyond them a paved driveway led towards an undistinguished Neoclassical villa.

  If you say the name Wannsee, Berliners may think of the lake or the Strandbad, but for everyone else, the immediate association, if any, is with this house, the venue for a conference held in January 1942, where SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich presented his plans for the extermination of the Jews of Europe. I paid an entrance fee and went inside. To my dismay I found an empty shell, completely without character. I knew at once that I would find nothing to help me. There was little or no furniture, and in the absence of any meaningful connection with the past, the freshly painted rooms had been filled with images and wall texts narrating the events that led up to the conference and the terrible consequences of the policy that was agreed on there. I found a photograph of the interior as it had looked when it was still a private house, with tapestries on the walls and Persian rugs on the floor. At the time of Heydrich’s meeting it was a guesthouse for the State Security Police, expropriated from its former owner, who had been generously allowed to donate it to the Nazi government after his arrest for fraud. At the end of the war Soviet marines were billeted there, and in succession it housed American officers, an adult education center and a school hostel, changes that explained why there was nothing left to see.

  That afternoon the house was disconcertingly busy with British teenagers, two or three different school parties being shown around by guides. They walked around solemnly, all behaving in, I suppose, much the same way as me, talking in lowered voices, receiving the terrible information. I had been directed to join a tour, but couldn’t face it. I needed the house to do something immediate, something primal. I wasn’t in any condition to follow the whole grim story, from the medieval blood libel to the Eichmann trial. I felt distracted and claustrophobic.

  I was retracing my steps to the front entrance when my way was blocked by yet another school group, dozens of young people squeezing through a narrow corridor. I had to step back into an alcove that housed a display about the Nuremberg race laws of 1935. As I waited for the group to pass, I read about the consequences of the law criminalizing extramarital sex between Jews and gentiles. In various places, local Nazis had staged carnivalesque public humiliations, dragging mixed couples through the streets. There was a photograph of a man and a woman flanked by policemen, surrounded by a crowd of gawkers, mostly children. The man wore a curling paper sign saying “Ich bin ein Rassenschänder.” The words were underlined as if they’d been written out for a school exercise: “I am a race defiler.” The woman beside him looked crushed. Her head was bowed, her hands clasped contritely in front of her. He gazed directly into the camera, at me.

  A gap opened, and I was able to slip through the crowd and out the front door. Though the sun had set, I walked around the grounds for a while, peering vainly across the dark lake in the direction of the Strandbad and the Deuter Center. I left the house and wandered down a side street that led to the water, where I found a large bronze statue of a lion, apparently captured during a war with the Danes.

  I was staring up at it, feeling the chill sharpening in the air, when a flash of color drew my eye back to the road. I recognized them at once, lit up in the glow of a streetlight, the refugee father and daughter walking down the street. The little girl was wearing the same bright pink parka that had drawn my eye when I first saw her in the play area behind the restaurant. The father was setting a fast pace, perhaps because of the cold. His clothes—a thin jacket and jeans—weren’t warm enough for the weather, though the little girl, trotting to keep up with him, seemed properly dressed. They turned away from the lake, along a road with houses on one side and woodland on the other.

  I followed them, keeping some distance behind. After a few minutes, they crossed the street and seemed to disappear into the woods. When I reached the spot where they’d vanished, I saw a driveway and some lights visible through the trees. I walked down a slight incline and a large concrete block came into view, a sort of bunker, eerily lit by yellow sodium lights. There was nothing to say what the place was, but much later I found out that it dated from the Second World War, part of a Luftwaffe training complex that had been hidden in the woods to deter Allied bombing. People were milling about outside the building. Boys played football on the cracked concrete of a parking lot. A group of old men sat on green plastic chairs, bundled up in heavy jackets, smoking cigarettes and drinking little glasses of tea. A security guard in a fluorescent yellow vest leaned against a wall, engrossed in a tabloid newspaper. The father nodded a greeting to the tea-drinkers and took the little girl inside. I hesitated, expecting to be stopped, but when I followed them into the building, the guard didn’t even look up.

  I passed through a set of swinging double doors like those in a hospital, and found myself in an enormous room, bigger than a gymnasium, with peeling magnolia walls and a high ceiling supported by metal beams. The space had been partitioned with sheets of plywood to form dozens of cubicles, each one with a number spray-painted on the side. There were people everywhere, sitting or lying on camp beds, feeding babies, charging cell phones around long tables festooned with extension cords and power strips, the whole scene taking place under a hard white fluorescent light that made everyone, young and old alike, look haggard and drawn. It was a world of noise and plastic water bottles, pervaded by the smell of chlorine. A man pushed past me, a toothbrush clamped between his teeth like a cigar. Along one wall was a line of portable toilets, and a second line of plastic sinks where women were washing clothes. Beside me, near the main door, two men began some kind of altercation, gesturing and raising their voices. Others gathered round to reason with them. I could see into the nearest cubicles, where bunk beds were curtained with sheets and blankets.

  I looked around for the father and daughter, but I couldn’t see them. Along the wall above the toilets ran a sort of gantry or walkway, reachable by a ladder. A few teenage boys were up there, leaning on the rail, looking down at the spectacle below. I climbed up and joined them, scanning the room until I spotted the father in the doorway of one of the cubicles. As I climbed back down, I was suddenly gripped by intense emotion. It was physical. An inflation, a rush. I was the Prince of Homburg! Immortality was all mine! I knew what I would do. I would make a gesture, not a grand one, nothing showy or egotistical. Something pure and true. A small act of charity in a fallen world.

  As I had these thoughts, I could feel Anton’s adversarial presence, an imp squatting on my shoulder. I don’t believe in possession, though the language of possession is the best I have to describe it. Some part of my own personality had broken away and dressed itself up in Anton’s clothes. I walked down one of the narrow corridors between cubicles and Anton pointed out how absurd I was, like a pop singer in a charity video, passing fashionably through a crowd of the global poor. I ignored him and found where the father and daughter were staying. A stenciled number, a blue plastic refuse sack hanging by the door. The little girl was lying on a camp bed reading a Donald Duck comic, the father sitting next to her, one foot up on the frame, cutting his toenails. Seeing me, he looked startled. He got up and came to the door, the clippers still in his hand. Now watch, I said to Anton. This is an authentic connection between two human beings. And at that moment I did not know what to do. All I could think of was to take out my wallet. I only had a fifty-euro note, which didn’t seem enough. I want to give you this, I said. Anton sniggered. The man waved his hands, shook his head. I felt in my pockets for more money, but couldn
’t find any. I held out the banknote to him, pleaded with him to take it. No, no, he said. No. He looked around nervously.

  All at once I saw that I’d come unmoored. I was embarrassing myself and frightening him. It wasn’t how I meant it to go. Money wasn’t the meaning of what I was doing, just the easiest and most direct way to help, to make my commitment clear. I realized that he thought I wanted something in return for my fifty euros, and at that moment we both looked at his daughter. No, I said. My God, no. I saw you walking on the street. You looked cold. This is for you to buy a coat. Go, he said. No want. Anton pointed out that you couldn’t really get a coat for fifty euros. Look, I said. Take mine. I was wearing a thick goose down parka. I took it off and handed it to him. He didn’t know what to do with it, just held it in front of him at arm’s length, like a man asked to dispose of the corpse of an animal. Why not give him your boots too, Anton suggested. I was unlacing them when the security guards came. Was machen Sie hier?

  It was a confused and difficult scene. The father talked rapidly in Arabic. He pointed to his daughter. No, no, I said. You have the wrong idea. Anton said that for the right price, he’d probably change his mind. Those fucking ragheads didn’t care. I should just offer him more camels. The security guards told me I had to leave. I said I wanted to help the people. All the people. I had the right to help, to reach out to another human being. They could not deny me that. They said they would call the police. I told them I didn’t give a damn about the police. Then I was outside in the cold, holding my winter boots in my hands, my feet growing numb as moisture seeped through my socks. In the scuffle I’d left my coat inside.

  I was limping back down the road towards the lake, shivering in the freezing night air, when a police car pulled up. The policemen asked me what I was doing and I said I was existing, just being in the world. They asked if I need help. I said I didn’t need help, I didn’t want anything from anyone, I wanted to give to people, not take, but they got out and blocked my path, and I thought they’d taser me, gun me down, it’s what would have happened in America, but for some time they just stood there, apparently unwilling to act. I realized how cold I was, already my legs were numb below the knee, and so I got in the back of the car and allowed them to drive me back to the Deuter Center as I coughed and wheezed and laid my cheek against the cold glass window.