The motorbikes reach us. Uniformed police. They roar past us and swing round, showing off like they’re cowboys on wild horses. They cut their engines and swing their leather legs off the leather saddles and walk towards us with that crotch-bucking swagger that says, Here come the hard men. Make my day. You feeling lucky? It makes me sick to my stomach to watch and not because I’m afraid of them, but because it’s all so recycled, an act based on an act dreamed up by some sad fantasist in Santa Monica compensating for his undersized dick. So what I’m saying is before I do what I do I’m feeling this violent need for authenticity.
They’re only young, not much older than me, maybe even younger. They walk the walk because they’ve got the big boots and the padded leather jackets and the guns in their holsters smacking against their thighs. Also because their total job experience up to today is unarmed citizens of their country standing in line and shitting themselves when the motorcycle cops roar by.
Eckhard is behaving as per regulations, hands by his sides, eyes on the ground. They reach him first. They say something to him. I don’t know the words but I know the tone, halfway between a command and a jeer. Before Eckhard can answer, one of them reaches out his gloved hand and whacks him across the face, knocking his spectacles to the ground. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. My friend hasn’t spoken a word, and this baboon is smacking him about.
Eckhard makes no protest at all. He picks up his spectacles and fumbles in one pocket for his papers, but his hands are shaking too much. That’s because of me. The baboon whacks him again, making him stagger. I don’t like this. I am seriously not amused. I mean, fuck them, right?
I take out my gun and shoot one shot into the ground. This gains their attention. I yell out in English.
“One FUCKING MOVE and you die!”
“Don’t!” says Eckhard.
“You want to DIE?”
They’ve seen enough movies. I’m screaming like a madman and just in case they don’t get it I’m pointing my gun at their heads and moving towards them and on my face is a look that says, Just give me one chance, please do something stupid, because I really, really want to blow your face off.
I am the executioner.
Don’t ask me where this is coming from. It’s like a wild fury has exploded deep inside me and I’m singing a song that goes, Fuck you! Fuck me! Fuck us all!
Time to take charge.
“If they touch their guns, I SHOOT! Tell them!”
Eckhard tells them. They don’t touch their guns. They’re staring at me like I’m a serial killer with an anger-management problem. But it’s going to get worse, boys. They’re suddenly so young, I see it now, eighteen at the most. They’ve never had anyone fight back before. They’re not just afraid of my gun. The rules of the game have changed. They’re bewildered. The peasants aren’t supposed to shout.
“They do EXACTLY what I say! EXACTLY! Tell them.”
Eckhard tells them. They’re listening.
“Or I put a bullet in their spines. Tell them.”
Eckhard tells them.
“The bullet doesn’t kill them. It paralyses them.”
Eckhard stares at me.
“Tell them.”
He tells them. Now their eyes are jumping out of their heads. The next part doesn’t need words, in my language or theirs. I take out the pliers and I hold them up so they can see. It’s there on their faces. They know what bad guys do with pliers to people who can’t run away. After this I have willing co-operation.
I order them to remove their outer clothing, their gloves and biking leathers and boots. I tell them to lie face down on the ground. Just to help them along I fire two more shots, quite close to them. I strap their ankles to their wrists with their own belts. Eckhard watches me as if I’ve morphed into the Terminator.
“Can you ride a motorbike?”
“What?” he says. “What?”
“Ever ridden one of those?”
I gesture at the cops’ bikes.
“No. No. No.”
“Me neither.”
However the fire is in my belly and the man who has just reduced two evil goons to jelly is not intimidated by a heap of machinery on wheels. I tell Eckhard to put on the leathers, as I now proceed to do myself.
“You’re crazy,” says Eckhard, his teeth chattering. “They’ll kill us.”
“How are they going to do that? Huh?” I get angry, to wake him up. “HUH? Did they see your papers? No! Will they recognise your face? No! You’re all scarfed up. Will they know where we’ve gone? No! So how are they going to kill us, HUH?”
“You,” says Eckhard miserably. “You. They’ll know you.”
“So they kill me. You’re okay. I’m dead, you’re not. Okay? OKAY?”
“Okay,” he says, looking down.
Now I’ve turned into a goon. Time enough to deal with that later. Right now Eckhard has to be woken up so we can get out of here.
I examine the motorbikes. How hard can it be to drive one of these things? I knew a boy once who was so stupid he had to stop walking if you asked him a question. I mean, literally suspend the brain operations required for motion and engage the brain operations for speech. This boy owned and rode a motorbike. In my present full-on mode, in which I’m already rolling so fast that I’m committed to take-off and all out of runway, I believe myself capable of anything. In order not to alarm the natives I tell a very small lie.
“Get on behind me. I can ride this fucker.”
It’s not so much a lie as an advance on the truth. Very soon now I will know how to ride this fucker. Eckhard to give him his due never questions my giant self-assurance, not even when we jump forward and stop dead and the engine cuts and we fall over.
“Cheap garbage Eastern European shit!” I shout, kicking the toppled bike. I’ve become bad. This is new.
Now we’re back in the saddle and we’re on the move, though just in one gear. I have no idea how to change gears but what the hell, I’ve found the throttle and I’ve found the brake. As a show of confidence for Eckhard’s sake I circle the two half-stripped cops lying trussed on the ground and let off a last couple of shots to keep them docile. Then I swing back onto the sheep track and Eckhard holds on like he loves me and I open up the throttle and we rock and roll.
This is without doubt the way to go. If you want to eat countryside and possess a carefree attitude to personal injury, motorbike travel is for you. Also it helps if your skeletal structure is bendy in several places because it is likely to get bent. So I race down the trails with the wind in my face and speed-tears in my eyes and I really get the feel of the machine. Fortunately I’m not called upon to stop because the only way I’ve found how to brake is completely which would not be good at this speed. I can hear Eckhard whimpering behind me, due I imagine to an exaggerated attachment to life, which I do not share. I’m discovering that there’s a big buzz to be got from risk. Mortal danger is the true zingaroo. Why did nobody tell me this before? From now on I spend my life in war zones.
We hammer over winter-hard earth and down into a lost valley and I see a stream ahead. Somewhere buried in my brain are images of pursuit and tyre-marks and tracker dogs so without further analysis I ride us into the water and charge down the stream bed kicking up a wake like a power boat. I think maybe Eckhard is screaming now but what’s the problem? We’re not drowning. The stream is shallow. So long as we keep moving at this speed which I guess to be roughly a thousand miles an hour why should we fall off?
There’s a road ahead which will be a friend to the coccyx so up, up, up, spitting gravel on the stream bank and smack onto the crumbling tarmac. The racing rubber chews the road and off we go, faster still. The sudden absence of crashing and splashing makes speech possible so long as we yell.
“ARE WE ON THE RIGHT ROAD?”
No answer.
“ECKHARD! TALK TO ME! DIRECT ME!”
“YES! RIGHT ROAD!”
All is well. The god of adventurers has guided us on ou
r rampage. Now the god of connubial arrangements sees us to our destination. We thieves, we wild men, we gun-toting terrorists, have a wedding to attend.
The road rolls us into a village. The people who are out on the single street stare at us in fear and hatred, which seems to me to be out of order until I see myself reflected in a dark window. I am of course a cop.
I slow down and swerve into a side lane and execute an imperfect stop. Eckhard falls off. I swing my leather leg from the leather seat and feel like a cop. Enough.
“Is this it?” I say. “Is this the right place?”
He’s climbing to his feet. Not in a good way.
“You don’t understand,” he says. “You don’t understand.”
“They’re not going to find us, Eckhard! We could be anywhere! We got away!”
“You don’t understand.”
This is not the gratitude I deserve. For the first time in my life I have imposed my will on others, set the agenda, broken out of passivity and given the orders. I am the leader. I am the man with the gun. So what exactly is it I don’t understand?
“They will find us.”
I see it in his eyes: he’s lived all his life in a police state, he’s endowed the authorities with god-like powers. He simply can’t imagine that defiance such as ours will go unpunished. Nothing I can say will reassure him because I don’t live here and I don’t understand.
“How close are we?”
“What?”
“How close are we to where we’re going?”
“We’re here. It’s here.”
This is Ilona’s family’s village. Ilona’s family’s house is just a few minutes’ walk away. I suggest we strip off our cop suits and lose the motorbike. This he understands. We have pulled up beside an open-fronted barn, in which several carts and wagons are standing. Every one of them is broken in some way, a missing wheel, a snapped shaft, a buckled bed. The barn is a wagon cemetery. Together we roll the bike into the barn and lay it down right at the back, and cover it and the stolen leathers with a tarpaulin borrowed from a wood-pile.
“Later we move it,” says Eckhard. “If they find it here, they will take the farmer.”
“They won’t find it. They don’t know where to look. We got away.”
“No. You don’t—”
“Yes, okay. I got that bit. Let’s go.”
I’ve become so dominant. I wish my father could see me.
As we reach the village street, which is also the main road, a car is approaching. It cruises on by without stopping, a big old grey Mercedes. He’s sitting in the back, his head leaning on the head-rest, as if he’s been sleeping. As he passes, he glances towards me, and I know he sees me. All I see of him is an impression of a dark furrowed brow and piercing black eyes, but I sense that he’s young, not much older than me. This is scary, because he’s the one in the back of the car, the one in control, the one who is following me. I’m wearing a farm coat, a farm hat, nothing marks me out as a stranger. Why should he notice me or remember me? But I know he does. He has information. He is well trained. He is the hunter. He will follow me for ever, and I will not escape him.
I come to a standstill and shake my head, to throw off the sudden jolt of fear. The grey car is already out of sight. I force myself to think more rationally. If my pursuer is so all-knowing, how come he doesn’t stop the car and come after me? What’s happening here is classic guilt projection. I feel deep down that I should be punished for my badness, and so I project superhuman powers onto the first available authority figure. I’m worse than Eckhard. Analyse the situation objectively: a man in a passing car has looked at me; possibly, but by no means certainly, a man I have seen once before. I have no idea what he actually looks like, so the chances are he has no idea what I look like. This does not add up to a pursuit by avenging furies. And now he’s gone.
“That car,” I say to Eckhard. “Is that a common sort of car in your country?”
“A grey car?”
“A grey car like that one.”
“You mean some grey cars are different from others?”
Right. The man’s a novelist. You don’t find him studying the new models in Auto World Monthly. However, my capacity for world domination is dwindling. If it was the same man in the grey car, then it may be that he will return, looking for me. In which case, in fairness to Eckhard, I should fuck off out of his life. We’re walking down the village street towards his fiancée’s house. The man is about to acquire a wife and child, currently packaged as a single item. He does not need an associate who is an alleged assassin.
“I think I should leave you here.”
We’re in front of a doorway. An ordinary home with a faded timber door.
“Why?”
“I don’t want to get you into any more trouble.”
Now that I’m sounding less sure of myself Eckhard regains some of his former courage. This is how it goes. In any given group of people there’s only so much will power to go round. One very wilful individual can corner the entire supply, and then everyone else goes floppy and does what he tells them. As we stand before the doorway, the certainty is bleeding out of me because of that glimpse of the man in the grey car, and Eckhard is soaking it up.
“I’m in trouble anyway,” he tells me. “My name is on the list. One day they will come for me. But not today.”
He raps on the door.
“I’m a danger to you,” I say. “And to these people.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay.”
The door opens and we go in.
ELEVEN
They’re all teachers. Eckhard is a teacher. Ilona is a teacher. Her father is a teacher. In this country, it seems, it’s a considerable deal to be a teacher. I think of my own schooldays and how my teachers drove sad old Fiestas and pretended that not buying their own cigarettes meant they weren’t smokers and how they stank of staleness and failure. Who’d be a teacher if you could hack it in the world of grown-ups? We all sensed it. They’d come to our school because we were the short people, and that made them tall. But we grew, every day we grew. Now of course when I meet one of my old teachers in our town I’m taller than them and they’re all smiles and deference and I just feel pity.
But here it’s different. For a start the authorities don’t trust teachers. That alone gives teachers status. Then there’s the interesting fact that the authorities are right. These teachers have a mission. They see themselves as the lamp-holders, the one source of light in a shadowy world where their people are close to drowning in darkness. They have no ambition to overthrow the state. They want only to keep the light of knowledge burning, and to spark an answering flame in as many hearts and minds as possible, while the dark clouds roll on by overhead.
Not so long ago I would have laughed like a duck laying an egg at a phrase like “the light of knowledge,” but it doesn’t seem so funny any more. I have fallen into a shadowed land. I am hungry for the light. I think of the dawn of a new day, of the light of the rising sun spilling into the kitchen at home, and the memory moves me almost to tears. Not that I have any actual memory of ever being out of bed early enough to see the dawn, but I must have done it once because the image is lodged within me.
Also I’m beginning to understand the connection between the many little things teachers do, day after day, in all the ungrateful classrooms across the ungrateful world, and the one big thing we all seek, which is the contented life. You can’t enjoy a poem until your belly’s full and the barbarians have stopped raping your sister, but you can still dream of the day. How else are we to go on? In smug sea-hugged England I have been unaware that I am the recipient of a bequest. Teachers are millionaire donors, they pass on the wealth accumulated by past generations. Teachers are warriors, they fight the forces of darkness. And everywhere, always, in the end, they win.
This is not my own insight. As before, I echo Leon Vicino. In his writings I too am finding the articulation of a new faith.
However powe
rful our enemies grow, they can never defeat us. We pursue a goal to which they too must come in the end. When at last their anger and their fear are exhausted, they will ask, how now am I to live? From that day on they will join with us, of their own free will. They will say, as we say: life is short, let us live it well.
Live life well. Not much of a rallying cry when the time comes to man the barricades and start the revolution, but then they have no revolution in mind.
Beware of victory. Beware of all stories that end in the sound of applause. For us, there are no endings. The clapping fades, the company disperses, and life goes on. So I say: beware of glory.
Ilona is, as promised, no beauty. Her hair is a dull brown, cut like a helmet, and her face a little longer than is strictly the fashion. But she loves pop-eyed bespectacled Eckhard, no two ways about that. I watch them sitting side by side at table and I can tell by the way they’re each eating with one hand that the other hands are clasped out of sight. Afterwards, Eckhard strokes Ilona’s bump where the baby is, though if you’d asked me I’d have said there wasn’t a bump. He whispers to the baby, which should be embarrassing, but isn’t at all because his face is so serious. He looks like the characters you see in movies visiting their loved ones in prison: leaning close to the bars and speaking low and wanting terribly to be able to touch.
While he’s doing this Ilona is stroking his hair and looking far away. I can feel how she too is communicating with her baby, from what you might say is the other side. Not saying anything that requires words, just sending her love. This baby is getting it from all directions. It had better be grateful.
Then for a moment I feel it too. It’s only a flash, but it’s unmistakable. I feel what it’s like to be that baby, and to be so loved. In fact this isn’t a transference, it’s a memory. I was there once. My mother and my father adored me beyond reason. I was the baby god, I drank their worship as my due. I lay on my back, defenceless, trusting, omnipotent.