This spectacle greatly cheered the spectators, which was just as well, for it was the last enjoyment they were to have. At the end of the May Day party dozens of yellow coaches — like the one that had met their plane when Jimfish, Soviet and Jagdish arrived at Kiev Airport — drew up and, under the watchful eye of armed soldiers, tens of thousands of people were removed from their city; then farm animals and domestic pets were shot, farmhouses were dynamited, guards were posted on roads and bridges to ensure that no one returned, and the city of Pripyat was closed for ever.

CHAPTER 7

Moscow/Perm, 1987–9

Jimfish knew he might have died in Pripyat; perhaps he should have died, whether by firing squad or of radiation sickness like many bio-robots of Chernobyl. He had seen the good Jagdish cruelly killed by Big Ivan, whose life he had saved; he had watched his mentor Soviet Malala clumsily executed by a drunken firing squad. Yet for reasons he did not understand his life was spared and he had been flown — on the very plane in which he had arrived in Kiev — to Hospital Number 6 in Moscow, the sole establishment capable of dealing with severe cases of radiation sickness.

Thanks to special treatment his symptoms abated. The effects might resurface in years to come, he was told by the doctors, but for now he was fine. When Jimfish thanked the medical staff for their care, they replied that his brave work as a bio-robot on the roof of the ruined reactor at Chernobyl had won their admiration, even if they felt a certain regret that, having helped to save his life, he was to be transported to a distant penal colony as an American spy.

‘But I’m not a spy!’ Jimfish cried. ‘I am not even American. I come from a little town called Port Pallid in South Africa.’

But none of the doctors at Hospital Number 6 had the vaguest idea where South Africa was — and even if this were true, they asked, why was he not black?

The secret camp to which he was sent was known as Perm 35, one of a constellation of jails, mental asylums and penal colonies a thousand miles east of Moscow. It was a ‘special’ prison for ‘special’ prisoners, one of a type which the authorities claimed had been closed down, and so it did not officially exist. Row upon row of desolate wooden barracks where the huts were furnaces in summer and iceboxes in the snow, and the guards were paid extra well to see to it that prisoners never escaped. In any case, it would have been hopeless to have done so, because beyond Perm 35 stretched endless, empty forests.

Jimfish was happy to discover that many of his fellow prisoners were poets and philosophers; gentle people who helped him to learn some Russian and who talked about openness, renewal, liberty and love, much as they had been doing before they were arrested and sent to Perm 35. What he found hard to fathom was why they had been locked up for such talk. What would his old teacher Soviet Malala have said about this?

‘Obviously the Party in Moscow has made a mistake,’ Jimfish decided, ‘and as soon as this is corrected, we will be freed.’

His fellow prisoners were at first amused, then alarmed by a man so secure in his ignorance, so quick to take moral positions, so blind to what was in front of his nose that he must be a holy fool, a lunatic or even an American, as the authorities in Moscow had charged.

Jimfish had spent a couple of years in Perm 35 when one day without warning he was freed from his cell, driven to an airport and placed on a plane, which took off for an undisclosed destination. It was November, snow was falling and, looking down upon the vastness of Russia below him, he wept when he recalled the fate of Jagdish, dead in Reactor Number 4, and Soviet Malala, shot for all the wrong reasons in the ghost city of Pripyat.

Some hours later the plane circled above a city seemingly cut in half by what looked like a long wall, but he had no idea where he might be. Only when he had been securely locked in a new prison cell did an officer from State Security (its motto: ‘The Sword and Shield of the Party’) inform him that he was in Berlin, a guest of the German Democratic Republic. As an important American spy he would be exchanged for an important Soviet agent. A few days later the same man from the Stasi took him to a place called Checkpoint Charlie to rehearse the coming exchange. Curious, as always, about the traditions of foreigners, Jimfish asked him about the long dividing wall he had seen from the air.

‘It is not a wall,’ the Stasi officer told him. ‘We never use that word. What you see is an anti-fascist protection rampart running for a hundred miles, consisting of concrete, wire mesh, trenches, fences, mines, listening devices, dogs and armed guards.’

‘Is it there to keep people in or out?’ Jimfish asked.

‘It’s there to protect us from the subversion and aggression of those on the western side of the rampart, and thus on the wrong side of history,’ came the reply. ‘The guards are ordered to shoot anyone silly enough to try crossing to the other side.’

From which Jimfish concluded that anyone even glancing across the rampart was already on the wrong side of history.’

The Stasi officer agreed. ‘Being wedded to the purest form of socialism, we occupy that point where history ends; we are its culmination and its apotheosis. In other words, the right side of history is us.’

Jimfish was deeply impressed and longed for the day when he would be closer to that point himself.

His cell included a small television set on which he saw, day after day, political speakers addressing large crowds in the streets. None of it did he understand, but he took it that the speakers were assuring the crowds that they were wedded to the purest form of socialism, as well as being the culmination of history. But the crowds seemed to listen less and less and took to climbing the anti-fascist protection rampart and riding on it, as if they were children and it were a nursery rocking horse instead of a concrete barrier many miles long, bristling with guards, dogs and barbed wire. Next, the climbers began chipping away at the antifascist protection rampart, using hammers and chisels, and no one came to stop them. It was all very puzzling.

At night Jimfish lay in his cell listening to chisels chinking on concrete, as if legions of steel-beaked woodpeckers were chipping to bits the anti-fascist protection barrier. Soon there were large holes everywhere and people walked through these gaps, helped by the very guards who, just days earlier, were ready to shoot anyone who did this.

Jimfish’s TV screen began showing pictures of whole families of East Germans clambering though holes in the barrier and heading into western Berlin, stopping to stare for long minutes at cakes and shoes and pickles in the bright windows of the supermarkets, or wandering down Martin-Luther Strasse, awestruck by billboards advertising ‘Big Sexy Land’. If the western side of the barrier was on the wrong side of history, why did these people want to go there?

Jimfish wished he could have talked this over with his mentor Soviet Malala: surely he would have known why the world seemed so suddenly to have been stood on its head; why the barrier had great holes in it and why State Security headquarters, where he had been locked up, had gone so very quiet. It was the strangest feeling: his prison, a hubbub of clanging cell doors and shouted orders, was suddenly as silent as the grave.

CHAPTER 8

East Berlin, 1989

When Jimfish tried his cell door, it was unlocked and he wandered at will in the deserted building, lights left burning, filing cabinets open, office after office knee-deep in ribbons of shredded paper, as if someone had wanted to destroy as many files as possible. When he walked outside he was swept up in crowds chanting ‘Wir sind eine volk!’, which, as he spoke Afrikaans, he understood to mean ‘We are one people!’ But why should they insist on it? he wondered. What else could they be?