A Chip Shop in Poznań, page 27
I arrive at Frankfurt-Oder and enter the white Volkswagen. We are a quartet. There is Alicia and Valeria, mother and daughter, whose journey this is, and there is Marco, who responded to Andrew’s invitation as I had. Marco wears a bandanna and muddied boots. Like me, he will be put down in Cologne. The Russians will go no farther west than that. It’s convenient for me. Clara S, who owes me a favour, lives in Cologne. I met Clara in Slovenia a few years ago. I offered her and her boyfriend a free ride to Croatia in my campervan. I shouldn’t have. We were stopped at the Slovenian–Croatian border that evening, introduced to a pair of sniffer dogs, then invited to pay a €700 fine or have the campervan confiscated, the dogs having reached the conclusion, accurate as it happened but news to me, that there were drugs in Clara’s bra. There were seven of us in the van. We pooled our resources and just about managed to pay the fine. Hence: Clara S owes me a favour.
Valeria goes to an international school in Brandenburg. She likes it there. ‘Everyone gets on. Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Chinese. But everybody has money and maybe it’s easier to get on when you have money.’ Alicia steers the car with her knees, watches video clips of elephants swimming on her phone. I felt safer with Mother Stefania. We pass under Potsdam, where the big boys met to shift Poland to the left, where Stalin said, ‘Don’t worry about Poland – I’ll sort it out.’
Signs for Berlin: I think of the Wall, and what it stood for. Compared to the one Trump wants to put up, it was a peanut. Just a hundred kilometres long. That’s all that was needed to contain West Berlin, to quarantine its thoughts. The wall’s official name in East Germany was the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart. It’s got a ring to it. Who wouldn’t want one of those in their town? In truth the wall was put up to trap East Berliners, who had shown a bothersome inclination to sneak across the border and get on a train to Amsterdam or Antwerp and never come back. Three-and-a-half million East Germans jumped ship before 1961, representing 20 per cent of the population. Socialism was clearly not everyone’s cup of tea. Something had to be done about the westward traffic: the wall was erected and defection made a crime. The wall proved an effective barrier until a series of events weakened its foundations. In June 1989, Hungary – another member of the Eastern Bloc – took down the electric fence along its border with Austria. Thirteen-thousand East Germans who happened to be on holiday in Budapest made a dash for it there and then. Then East Germans started escaping through Czechoslovakia. The will to leave East Germany grew too significant and conspicuous to be ignored or controlled. The East German government’s stance began to falter. On New Year’s Eve 1989, ex-lifeguard David Hasselhoff climbed onto the wall and sang of liberty to 500,000 on both sides. The song he sang was called ‘Looking for Freedom’, which sounds appropriate enough, but in fact the song tells the story of a boy born into a rich liberal family who flees his home to find freedom working on a farm in the middle of nowhere. The song was number one in the German charts for eight weeks. It was the soundtrack of reunification, of Communism’s demise. It has to count as one of history’s greatest ironies that David Hasselhoff’s neo-liberal anthem, his hymn to the West, could have been written by Chairman Mao or Joseph Stalin. Despite the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1991, Marco says that the East Germans are still apart somehow: in their way of thinking, in the nature of their concerns. Mauer im kopf, they call it. The wall in the head. Of all walls, this might be the hardest to level.86
We push on towards Hannover, where King George I of Great Britain and Ireland was born and raised and lived happily until being forced onto the British throne because he was Protestant and second-cousins with Queen Anne. On the face of it, George didn’t take the job very seriously. He had Robert Walpole run the country and spent most of his time back in Germany, which is fair enough: if a second-cousin of mine died in a distant land and I was invited to assume their manifold responsibilities for the rest of my days, I wouldn’t think much of the proposal either.
Just as history is one thing after another, so is Europe. We enter the Rhineland, a part of the world which made headlines in the 1930s, when an increasingly pugnacious Nazi Party put a load of tanks in the area, and so doing defied the Treaty of Versailles, that disarming slap on the wrists meant to punish-pacify Germany after the First World War. Other than the militarisation of the Rhineland, the other big news story to come out of the area was the Peace of Westphalia. Remember that from school? (Remember school?) The Peace of Westphalia (1648) was a collection of treaties that sought to put an end to the theological disagreement that was then rampant in Western Europe, which had started in earnest when the Catholic monk Martin Luther stopped being monkish and started being a radical big mouth. Luther’s nonconformity caused Christendom to fracture into loads of conflicting bits, or denominations. For the next century or so, these denominations fought among themselves (and with the Catholics) over such things as whether Jesus had a middle name. Eight million people died. By 1648 it was generally agreed that enough was enough and the key people needed to meet in Westphalia and talk peace. The outcome of their chat was, more or less, ‘each to their own’. And thank God it was.
Marco and I are put down in Longerich. We take a train into central Cologne, where we hug and say goodbye and it was nice knowing you. The station is situated next to the cathedral. A couple of years ago, on New Year’s Eve, some men attacked and harassed about a hundred women in separate incidents in the vicinity of this cathedral. Because the men were found to be mostly immigrants or asylum seekers, the story was astonishingly popular. Plenty used the incident to argue that Europe should close its doors, that diversity doesn’t work, that people can’t be trusted to mix well. News is too popular for my liking, if you don’t mind me saying. I find the extent of its influence disagreeable. It steers our instincts and hunches, our sentiments and inclinations, to an undue degree. It stands to reason that if the news we consume is bad and unkind and unnuanced and erroneous and reactionary, our instincts will follow suit. It stands to reason that if we are fed stories of extremism and violence and criminality, and fed them in a hysterical manner, we will emerge from the banquet believing hysterically that the world is thus. As big a problem as bad or hysterical news reporting is misreporting – or fake news. Fake news is an old problem. In 1213 BC, Rameses the Great told his mates he’d had a blinder out on the battlefield, going so far as to commission murals and artworks to illustrate his heroics, when in fact the battle had been a stalemate and Rameses the Great had spent most of it eating grapes. These days Rameses would have taken to social media, which is a propaganda tool par excellence, because it is unpoliced and seemingly has no standards whatsoever. Traditional media at least have to pay some attention to the credibility and potential ramifications of the content they put out. The stuff that turns up on social media can be as fanciful and inflammatory as its authors want it to be. The quality of information entering the public sphere – and thus shaping opinion, arousing emotion, determining the results of elections – is getting monumentally worse. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, said that misinformation is stopping the internet from serving humanity.87 In light of the above – that we are bombarded with bad news, skewed news, bogus news – I try not to listen much these days. I try not to be led to the ‘truth’ but to find my own way to something approximating it. I trust my own data and I ask you to trust yours. How many times in your life have you been wronged or injured or abused or victimised or swindled? Take that figure and compare it to the number of times you weren’t treated this way. The discrepancy is gorgeous, because people are overwhelmingly gentle and cooperative. People that do terrible things – like the men in Cologne – only represent themselves. ‘Sun destroys the interest of what’s happening in the shade,’ wrote Philip Larkin. Bad news gets too much sunlight, I’d say.
When I try to buy a ticket for the tram or bus, it’s clear I’m an alien again. ‘Ein, er, ein klein ticket, bitte.’ I change, as instructed, at Barbarossastraße. A treacherous address. Operation Barbarossa was when the Germans turned on the Soviet Union, broke a pinky-promise and launched an eastward attack on their former ally. Unlike the Germans, I stick to the plan: I board the second tram towards Clara’s flat. We pass Frau Wong’s, Baghdad Shisha, Hollywood Bar and Schmuck. The range is promising: a city that can accommodate such scope is unlikely to work up an appetite for war, if only because its constituents wouldn’t be able to agree on a casus belli. Clara meets me off the tram, takes me up to her flat: a bedside lamp built from old cassettes, tobacco pouches, heaps of clothes. Clara is doing an internship at an advertising agency. She doesn’t like it. I’m not surprised. ‘Ads are pollution,’ I say. ‘Let’s go,’ she says.
We walk to a dinner party. Clara asks what I thought of Poland, all things considered. I decide to start with something trivial, and then go from there: ‘I like the food but then again I like the food everywhere. The people? It’s hard to say. When I travelled Britain, I learnt so much by eavesdropping. Small things, chance remarks, at the bar or on the bus. In Poland I was deaf. Therefore, I can’t say the Poles are this or that because I haven’t heard them, haven’t overheard them. I could see people, of course. I could see how they treated guests, how they came together for national holidays, how they went to church, how they gathered to protest or remember. What of Poland’s artists? Again, I’m hardly in a position to judge. And even if I had dedicated myself to Polish art, reading two books a week, watching a film a night, listening to an album each morning, I still wouldn’t be in a position to. I can say that I like the poems of Zbigniew Herbert. I can say that I like the essays of Miłosz. I can say that I like Kieslowski’s short film about love, but not his short film about killing. I can say I like Chopin’s quiet stuff but wouldn’t get out of bed for his dance music. If, for the hell of it, I was to take all of what I’ve seen and heard and attach an epithet to the sum, a label to the lot, I would call the art painful. I like the old market squares. I like the lakes and the mountains. I like the dogs that look out the window. I like sitting on the balcony, listening to the people, to the trees, to the traffic. But I would like these things anywhere. And maybe that’s the thing. Maybe that’s what’s crucial: that I was as happy in Poland as I might have been anywhere else. Edmund Burke said that for all it’s worth Poland might as well be a country in the moon. Well, not for me. For me, Poland is very much of this world, a chip off the old block. When I’m in Poland, I could be anywhere. If that doesn’t sound much like a compliment, then the fault is mine, not Poland’s. Would I go back? Try and stop me.’
We reach the dinner party. I’m introduced to a pair of DJs who are making a name for themselves. They are playing tonight at a popular bar up the road and Clara means to take me there. Because tomorrow is Good Friday, there can be no music after midnight, which is a small blessing as far as I’m concerned, though the DJs are livid. I attempt a bit of small talk by asking one of the DJs – Lauritz – about Angela Merkel’s position on the migration crisis. He says: ‘Her father was a preacher. She has a strong moral compass. She knows about history, about German history, and maybe this openness to migrants is a kind of atonement? In any case, she might pay for it.’ I want to know why he said that. ‘Because integration has been hard. The benefits aren’t always obvious. And then you have incidents like the attacks on New Year’s Eve and then what happened yesterday.’ What happened yesterday? ‘Islamic terrorists bombed the Dortmund football team bus.’ He shakes his head, exasperated. ‘And you can imagine the shitstorm that has created.’88
I am fed well – pasta with rocket and cherry tomatoes and parmesan and oil and vinegar. I’m not made a fuss of – ‘Oh wow, a stranger!’ – just taken easily in. After the meal, we go to the bar where the boys are DJing. I buy a drink then find a place to sit out of the way. It is avant-garde disco music: abstract yet accessible. I love it. A pair of Israelis sit next to me. The boyfriend says he photographs food for a living, snaps salad for bread, meat for lolly, pudding for salt, and so on. ‘I couldn’t cope with the emotional detachment,’ I say. He shrugs then goes to the bar to photograph the lemon wedges. The girlfriend lives in London and I tell her that Richard will have an exhibition there soon and she really ought to come.
‘I might come,’ she says.
‘You’re invited,’ I say.
She holds my eye, not for the first time, and I don’t mind, she can do what she wants. I go onto the dance floor and dance, after a fashion. Unrelatedly, Clara says it’s time to go. She says she’s going to walk me home and then return to the fray, because there’s going to be a lock-in between midnight and six. In short, I’m being put to bed.
Back at her flat, Clara forces a grapefruit on me. She says she’s on a liver and kidney detox, which involves eating food that helps those organs, not refraining from eating those organs. Her flatmates are pretty square, she says, pretty German. I enjoy hearing a German recycle lazy stereotypes about Germans. They study physics and maths, she says out of the side of her mouth, as if the subjects were wildly taboo. She asks if I like what I write. I say, ‘I like it when I’ve forgotten it.’ She insists that I sleep in her bed, since the collapsible bed is rubbish.
‘Yes, but then you’ll be in the rubbish bed.’
‘No I won’t,’ she says. ‘With any luck, you’ll be gone by the time I’m back.’
86 Margaret Thatcher didn’t want a unified Germany, by the way. She felt a unified Germany posed a threat, especially at World Cups.
87 I just made that up. No I didn’t. He said it in USA Today, 11 March 2017.
88 The Dortmund bus was on its way to the first of two matches against Monaco. When reading up on the incident, I enjoyed the ambiguity in this report: ‘Spanish footballer and Dortmund’s team member Marc Bartra was wounded by shards of glass from the shattered bus window; he was taken to a nearby hospital where he was immediately operated on, and was forced to miss both legs.’ Incidentally, the attack was initially blamed on Islamic terrorism. Police found letters at the crime scene saying the attack was revenge for German intervention in Syria. You can imagine the narrative that dominated the media. It was discovered months later that the letter was a fake, that it was planted by the German-Russian guy who also planted the bombs. His motivation was to attack Borussia Dortmund so the club’s share price would plummet, in the event of which he stood to make lots of money. The bomber believed, accurately as it turned out, that the public would blame the Muslims.
39
I want to see the European Union
16 April. I’m up at seven, or just after. I eat another grapefruit, pinch a German’s coffee, put on the same clothes, borrow a squeeze of toothpaste. My tram is at 7.50am. I should leave the flat at 7.40am. Clara was quite clear about it. I leave the flat at 7.45am. I miss the tram. The service is irregular and infrequent because Jesus was crucified today. If I wait for the next tram I’ll miss my train. I have to walk, and quickly. The streets are quiet: barely breathing, still stirring, putting the kettle on. I’m the only thing moving. My footsteps wake up the birds. How rare to walk through the middle of a city and hear birds singing. I arrive at the station with just a few minutes to spare. People are running for the Brussels train. A tall official says to buy a ticket on board.
The guard wants €70 for the 90-minute journey. It was advertised at half the price online. The guard is Belgian but sounds like someone from Birmingham. His grandfather was English, he says. My grandfather was Irish, I say, but I don’t sound like someone from Galway. Then maybe you didn’t listen to your grandfather as I did, he says. I say: ‘Look, seeing as we’re getting on so well, how about we take a look at that price you quoted. It’s a bit steep, isn’t it?’ He agrees that it is, but insists I cough up.
The landscape is nice as we approach Liege. I’m at an advantage: the railway is raised here, expanding the scene, pushing back the horizon. The city is done in brick around a river, set among low hills. If it had a cricket pitch it could pass for Durham. Continental goods go by in freight containers – croissants, sprouts, bratwurst, vodka, fresh copies of Le Monde. The green and yellow fields bring the trams of Poznań to mind – that wouldn’t have happened a year ago. A young man gets on with a cheeseburger. He doesn’t want to buy a ticket, and I don’t blame him. He tells the guard he hasn’t got money or identification, says in French that he lives in Rome, near the Colosseum. Fair play to him.
Brussels. I have four hours before I need to move on towards the coast. I want to visit the European Union. I want to meet a bureaucrat. I’ve heard so much about them. I’m anticipating somebody broad-shouldered – you’d have to be to get in the way of so much. I want to tell them they’re famous, that their tape is legend. I want to see the infamous law-making machine in action, fat on stolen power, swollen with ill-gotten sovereignty. I want to see where the undemocratic EU Council meets (the Council is the 28 elected Heads of State). I want to see where the undemocratic EU Commission meets (the Commission is the 28 representatives appointed by the elected Heads of State). I want to see where the undemocratic EU Parliament meets (the Parliament is the elected MEPs). I want to see where Tusk and Juncker and all the other members of the EU brass band lounge on beds stolen from NHS hospitals, where they rejoice on thrones made of pure regulation, wiping their ever closer bottoms with sheets of unearned cash, and laughing, laughing that they get away with it, get away with pumping out the thick bureaucratic fog that has settled over the continent of Europe, from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, the better to obscure its institutional evil. If I reach the EU and see a thousand humble souls pretending to toil so Europe might tick over smoothly, fairly, peacefully, boringly, I will call them out. I will tell them what they really are, which is mean, spendthrift, socialist, capitalist, fat-cat, paper-pushing, bone-idle jobsworths bent on ever closer union, when what we all really want is ever more distant disunity, to be a continent of lone rangers, lone strangers, because there is safety in isolation (everyone knows that), and joy in solitude. I want to go up there and have a chat with a low-ranking Europhile so I can put a face – just one – to the headlines. And then I want to stamp on that face, like Big Brother, forever, because I want Britain to be great again, and the only way that will happen is if it trades with New Zealand.
