Hand Me Down World (7 page)

Luckily he is the only one to have brought his wallet. He pulls out two hundred euros and hands the money to Leo. Leo remains on the spot, his hand out…until another stab of pain behind the closed eyes causes the food writer to retrieve another fifty, which he thought Leo must not have seen. Leo takes that, then he walks around the fire to the African woman and holds out the money. She can't believe that it is for her. Leo has to encourage her. She looks across to Paolo. Maybe she thinks he will shoot her. He nods and so she takes the fifty off the top. Leo laughs and keeps his hand there. She looks at each of our faces. I nod. So does Paolo. The food writer is staring at the ground. She holds out her hand and Leo transfers the collection to her.

In the morning we leave the shepherd's hut nice and early. Leo and the American start off down the hill. I tell them I will catch up. I stay put and watch Paolo and the African woman climb up to and eventually disappear over the white ridge. It is a beautiful morning. Blue skies. Still. No good for partridge. But there is a lightness in my heart. I set off after Leo and the American.

Back in the village I drop the American off at his rental. Then Leo at his house. Then I drive to Paolo's lovely big home outside of town. His wife is younger, from Granada. I explain everything to her. She seems puzzled, unsure. I give her some reassurances.

Next morning I pick her up and we drive up the mountain road. We climb to the shepherd's hut and wait. Around noon we see Paolo come over the ridge. His young wife starts up the scree. I stay back. The figure on the ridge stops. Then he leaps—amazing to see—a man leaping off the side of a mountain. He bounds the rest of the way down the scree. By the time I catch up, Paolo, unshaven and sweaty, has his big arms around his pretty young wife. He is kissing her, panting over her. Then to my surprise I notice he is crying. Paolo ‘the strong man in defence'. I turn around and walk back to the car.

part two
:
Berlin

eight

The inspector

On this Sunday afternoon, in a park whose hills and winding paths are built on top of war rubble and the dead, new mothers gaze across lawns dotted with young lovers. There is new sap in the air. The sweet powdery smell is almond blossom. The light is green and filtered. At such moments the world trembles at the thought of itself.

In this park the layers of the world coming into being and departing are more obvious. In the copper mulch of last season's leaves the pigeons grub away. They do not care about anything other than what they may find. A job applicant occupies a bench: he leans forward on his spread knees—look at the way he hangs his head. There is a little too much hope and virtue combed into his hair. Winter is the season when separation is felt hardest. In the hard air the lunch crowds huddle in blankets and wait for the duck pond to freeze, and then for it to thaw. The leaves are not out yet, just the hard buds. The new world is coming.

Feral dogs sniff at the ground where the pigeons were, and years ago in this same place a grieving mother in a coat and bare legs delivered her dead son in a wheelbarrow. With his teenager limbs hanging over the sides of the wheelbarrow she scratched out a grave on her hands and knees. And here too at the edge of the bushes, in more or less the same place, a man spreads himself on top of a woman who also faces the ground. His face is buried in her shoulder. Whereas, she looks up with a foolish bloated smile. She looks like she is being squeezed out of her clothes. With the last of the phantom light hanging in the trees, the paths lead into the dusk. Now the lanterns come on and people spill out of the woods.

Across the road from the park fornicators is a large
kirche
with its administrative heartland of corridors indicating responsibilities for Africa, Asia and Eurasia. Here, the nameless, the unofficial, the windblown and the vermin climb the outside steps. Along corridors reeking of disinfectant they creep, cap in hand, past the doors with the unfamiliar names and allocated territories.

The man in charge of Africa is a pastor of the Ibo order, a portly man used to his desk and the space that divides him from his visitor. Hardly a day passes without a reminder that he is a well-fed man with position. He smiles as the language of calamity and death parts his lips. He smiles endlessly and at times his smile stretches to the brink of hilarity.

nine

A pastor of the Ibo order

If I am laughing it is because you have come here to Berlin to ask a pastor, a black man, about ghosts. Presumably you mean white ghosts. Yes. I am being facetious. I apologise, perhaps just a wee bit. I speak four languages. Besides Ibo, I speak Italian, English, Oirish. I was trained by the Holy Ghost Fathers, an order of sunburnt white men from Dublin. Others like me became the Ibo order ‘Sons of the Soil'. I prefer to speak Deutsch since, after all, we are in Berlin. But under the circumstances Italian may be more appropriate.

It is true that I am an expert on some ghosts. For example, there are the ghosts we do not see, the spooky ghosts, the ghosts of the American imagination, creatures appearing in doors dressed in white bed-sheets with the eyes cut out. These are the ones small children worry are lying beneath their beds at night. These ghosts are a puzzle. I like American movies. But what I don't understand about these particular ghosts is that we never see the consequences of the encounter. The ghost remains a spectre, no more than a possibility. Something to be afraid of. A manifestation of fear, such as the opposition parties in each and every undemocratic regime in Africa.

The other ghosts—the real ghosts if I may call them that—are simply those whom we choose not to see.

These people did not start out as ghosts. God put them on Earth as human beings. Here, I will show you on the map. This is where they began life. Around the horn of Africa. Liberia. Sierra Leone. Senegal. Gambia. Ivory Coast. The Western Sahara. Many were fishermen. While they were fishermen they were human beings. But then the multinationals with high-tech trawlers scooped all the fish out of the sea and the fisherman with the net was left in the same state as his brothers gazing across fallow land in the midst of a drought. There is nothing left for the fisherman to do but leave.

This is the way they go. They walk, they catch a bus, a bush bus, hitch a ride. It is slow progress. In some cases I know of, it has taken one of God's souls two years to reach here and here, Tunisia and Libya. And there the human traffickers sit in cafes with their worry beads. By now the process by which a man turns into a ghost is well advanced. A human being is of no more value than a sack of rice. A human being is merchandise. Then, once money passes hands, it is cargo. The cargo sets off in unseaworthy boats. Old fishing boats. Open boats. Over-crowded, poorly resourced. Without sufficient food or water—since when did merchandise have such requirements? And they disappear. They disappear at sea.

A Danish ferry capsizing in the North Sea is a calamity. It is international news. Fifty-one souls lost. A tragedy. Twenty, thirty, fifty thousand black people...Well, it is too big a figure to contemplate. It is apocalyptic. It is a sandstorm blowing across the African continent as fortress Europe nails down its shutters. It pretends. It pretends like the child afraid of the ghost under the bed. And instead it exercises its sympathy and shock and horror for the fifty or so lives lost in the North Sea. I understand. I don't wish to make light of that event. It too is a tragedy. We see on television the grieving families on the shore. We hear them speak of their loved ones who drowned. Before our eyes those fifty souls turn into individuals, faces, trailing lives and families. The blacks continue to spiral down to the seabed of the Mediterranean, where they become food for sharks. The closest Europe will come to them is when Europeans eat the shark.

The biggest human trafficker is Libya. Some blacks make it across to Europe. Lampedusa. If they were to consult a map before setting out they would see that Lampedusa is a tiny place. It is the stone the boot of Italy attempts to kick back across the sea. They step ashore into a detention centre. These ones have the semblance of human beings. They still have names. Soon they will turn into ghosts. There are so many of them that Europe has turned to Gaddafi. The self-proclaimed father of Africa has built a vast detention centre in the middle of the Libyan desert. The Africans who have made it to the shores of Europe now file into the holds of aeroplanes and are flown back to Africa, not whence they came, that would be too expensive, but to the detention centre in the Libyan desert. Here they turn into ghosts, some go mad and wander into the desert to meet their maker.

So, when the authorities come to my office and ask for help to find a particular illegal immigrant I do what Europe does. I pretend these people don't exist. I am not sorry that I cannot be of more help.

There is one more thing. Before I entered the church I studied geology. An oil company made that possible. They hoped I would find oil for them in the future. Instead I became side-tracked by what I found. Did you know there was once a land bridge between Africa and Europe? This was many, many thousands of years ago. Back then, an African could have arrived in Europe simply by following the shoreline.

ten

A man by the name of Millennium Three

I have not eaten since yesterday. That is a fact. Now a declaration. But fear of the inexplicable has not yet impoverished the existence of the individual. No. I don't want any money. Not yet. I believe in the fair exchange of goods. I will accept your money but only as payment. So. What do I have to give? It is all up here in my head. Amazing riches. For example, you may have recognised the words of Rilke a moment ago. Listen again—carefully…
But fear of the inexplicable has not yet impoverished the existence of the individual.
And this—from the third stanza. Listen.
We are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us.
It is not a very good poem in my view, but it contains some lines which I only have to recite and suddenly the spark they produce warms my insides. Rainer Maria Rilke. He is dead so it does not matter. The language belongs to the entire human race. Rilke is dead. Whereas I am very much alive and when in need of a meal I recite a few lines.
How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses: perhaps all of the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only wanting to see us once beautiful and brave
...Yesterday I recited those lines without attributing their source and a woman wanted to take me to dinner. It was kind of her. But she misunderstood. I was not looking for kindness. I was after payment. She paid ten euros for a different poem, also by my friend and sponsor, Rainer Maria Rilke, this one about a dog.

I choose my customers carefully. Rilke is not for everyone. Some of my customers prefer my flea joke. It is slightly risqué. It is not my joke, that is to say, I did not create it. I lifted it from somewhere, someone, I forget where or who. Jokes are like dandelions. They float across the world lifting away from our outstretched hands. No one remembers where the dandelion is from. No one thinks of its origin. But everyone instinctively reaches out to hold one. That is not Rilke by the way. That is me.

Millennium Three? I changed my name by deed poll before coming to Berlin. You see how easy it is to become the other—to bloom with the same flower when grafted onto a shared stem. Rilke is my stem. But there are others too. My flea joke, for example, it has more universality than many of Rilke's poems. Perhaps I will tell you the short version. The long version you will have to pay for. But let me go back to Rilke. The second stanza of the poem ‘Fear of the Inexplicable'. Where he says,
If we think of the existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people only know a corner of the room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down.
These lines changed my life. These lines struck me with the force of a thunderbolt. My strip of floor was so meagre. It was pitiful. This is what it amounted to—a desk before a class of adolescents who resented my presence and who did not want poetry inflicted on their anorexic souls. In their eyes I saw myself as some kind of oppressor. But I continued. I persevered. At night I planned my lessons. I looked for poems that would break open their hearts and minds. But Rilke's lines would not go away. In the end I tore up the floorboards of small existence. I changed my name to Millennium Three. I drew up a manifesto. From now on, no traps or snares. No fear of the inexplicable.

I left my life in Paris and came to Berlin. It was that easy.

I was in search of other free spirits. I found them late at night on the trains. Artists of one kind or another. Not the kind who puts pen to paper, though some did. Not painters or sculptors or filmmakers. I met a new kind of artist whose medium was not language or paint or film…but their lives. Anarchists. Some. Yes, why not? Late at night on the trains we found one another. We agreed on certain principles. One, borders are inherently evil. They create awareness of difference. We talked long into the night about the kind of difference we would tolerate. On the one hand, you see, we embraced indifference. On the other we abhorred the state-inspired delineations and definitions of difference. Borders. Citizenship. Rich. Poor. Entitlement. We forged political liaisons with other underground groups. The more radical were low-profile. By definition they could not be organised. Their spark was spontaneity. Our movements ignited into magnificent explosions of our ideas and values that showered down upon the sleepy roofs across Berlin. The idea was that the city would wake up feeling changed but not know how.