A YEAR IN THE SCHEISSE
Copyright by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2006 by Ullstein Taschenbuch Verlag
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.
The right of Roger Boyes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.
Summersdale Publishers Ltd
46 West Street
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1RP
UK
www.summersdale.com
eISBN: 978-0-85765-294-2
This version is for Ruth and the Dartmoor gang
Contents
Chapter One
The Clash of Civilisations
YOU LOOKING PALE
The SMS pinged onto my tired mobile at the very moment that I entered Germany.
'Turn it off, please,' said the customs officer, a young man with iron-rimmed glasses, more poet than policeman in his soft features. My passport was curled at the edges like stale bread and so the officer had to type in my data rather than swipe it through the machine. He bit his tongue with concentration. The queue was growing impatient. He was a very slow poet. Often, these are the best.
Ping!
TELL HIM YOU DOCTOR
'I must ask you to switch off the phone,' said the officer, very firmly.
'I'm a doctor!' I lied, obeying my electronic orders.
'It says here you're a journalist.' Suddenly alert.
'Well. I'm both. Like, like, er, Chekhov.'
'Chekhov wrote for newspapers?'
I nodded hard. Thinking: did he?
'That's why my phone has to stay on. Could be an emergency.'
'And is there one?'
'You could say so.'
My emergency had a name: Harry. He had managed, probably through bribery, to gain access to a gallery overlooking the whole of the customs and luggage area. It was probably reserved for the antiterror squad, entry limited to those with legally registered firearms and bulletproof vests. He waved to me as I passed from the increasingly confused poet-policeman to the luggage carousel which was burping and stop-starting like a drunk.
'Give me five minutes,' I mouthed to him, punching the air with an open, splayed hand.
The trolleys, elegantly designed by an award-winning mobility-artist, proved to be useless. Each demanded a one euro coin before it could be unchained. As the plane had just landed from London, only the most thoroughly prepared passengers were able to load their luggage. An American rock band, three white-vested men with key chains round their necks, boxer shorts on display, cursed as they hoisted their guitars and sound systems off the conveyer belt. An Arab solved the luggage problem by handing his cases to his wife. No doubt he had a bad back. Everywhere, there was a huffing and puffing as non-eurozone passengers struggled to cope with entry to Germany. Carefully, I extracted a 15 Turkish lira coin and inserted it into the slot. Harry had first given me the tip and I used the coin, a perfect fit, every time I passed through Berlin airport. With luck the almost worthless Turkish coin would soon be buying me some preternaturally cheap cigarettes from a slot-machine.
It had been a bumpy early morning flight from London on Breezy Airlines, the airborne equivalent of a cattle truck. Nobody vomited. As the passengers milled round the trolleys, as tightly locked as chastity belts, their faces radiated an aquarium-green. Harry's text message could have been sent to any of them: there was a special bargain-airline pallor. They were for the most part sufferers from the easyJet delusion, people who thought that cheap air fares made it possible to be happy in two cities simultaneously. Or that misery in London could be compensated by personal success in Berlin. Or vice versa. Or that there were two levels of happiness, a British brand and a German one; a 29 flight no meal, no sick bag, no seat number could somehow complete the individual.
It was Laptop Man that chose to believe this silliness, above all German men who were born in the second half of the 1960s. They had been brought up with the very best medical treatment, they were well fed, pumped up with vitamins, most had never had to wear uniform; there was not a single product of an unwanted pregnancy. Their first instinct on arriving at a new place was to search for a power-point; their actual locus, their habitat, was irrelevant. For them, the Fatherland was not Germany, it was some form of flag-less electronic terrain, limbo ber alles. That was not my tribe. Germany had, against all the odds, become my adopted Fatherland. The British, of course, have neither a Fatherland nor a Motherland. They say home. We're going home for Christmas. It is a word that carries a sense of warmth of cracking chestnuts round the wood fire but which has only a limited validity. Home can also be no more than an airless overheated living room. There is nothing grand about it, nothing worth fighting for. Britain as a country is too confused, too busy, too fiddly, too cheapskate, too fraudulent to be considered a Fatherland.
Against all the odds and by default, Berlin had become a place of refuge. It was the place where, after decades of covering revolutions and little, unnoticed wars, I had ended up. Could I perhaps end up liking the country? It seemed improbable. But then, the Germans themselves did not much like it either least of all the Laptop Man, whose main demand of his Fatherland was: where can I plug in my computer?
Sweating a little, I picked up my bags. I had stuffed them full of Marks and Spencer Cornish Pasties, Cheddar cheese, golden syrup and treacle tart. I had just returned from a 'chat' with my editor, traditionally a time to stock up with foodstuffs unavailable in Germany. You entered the office, kissed the rings of the powerful, and counted the minutes before you could flee for Selfridges Food Hall. It was time, the editor told me, for a more modern approach to Germany. I thought about this for a while, nodded sagely as if confronted by a startling new concept. And tried irony. 'So fewer stories about Albrecht Drer?' 'That's it,' he agreed enthusiastically. 'Less culture! Think of our younger readers.' There was a pause while I tried to picture a young reader, sipping a caff latte in Starbucks, listening to his iPod, flicking through the newspaper with its increasingly big photographs and shrinking texts. 'Articles about cannibals and crime then?' My editor glared at me as if I were a particularly slow pupil. 'And Hitler, of course,' he said, looking at his watch. 'Of course,' I said, 'of course.'
