Jimfish shouldered his way through the jubilant throngs, left the deserted Stasi Headquarters and walked to the once-imposing Protection Rampart, now torn by gaping holes. A smiling border guard happily helped him to clamber through a gap into the western side of town, where an official greeted him with an envelope stuffed with a hundred German marks. Jimfish understood not a word but his benefactor’s demeanour told him that the cash was ‘welcome money’, a gift to spend in the gigantic street-party that engulfed Berlin. So it was that each day he joined the joyous, tipsy crowds carousing from Karl-Marx-Allee in the East to the Kurfürstendamm in the West, returning in the evening to sleep in his old cell at Stasi Headquarters, barely aware of the days flying by. Before he knew it, November had gone and with it all but the last pfennigs from his stash of welcome money. From what he had seen of the heart of newly unified Berlin, Jimfish felt that the welcome cooled as his money dried up, and he knew he would have to move on.
One evening in the midst of the singing, dancing, ecstatic tumult, Jimfish noticed a small man, well muffled against the winter cold, wearing a black conical astrakhan hat. He seemed alarmed by the fierce joy of the crowds, shaking his head and repeating again and again: ‘It’s time to change, it’s time to change.’
‘What? Do you mean the way this country is run?’ Jimfish asked him.
‘No, no,’ said the little man. ‘This is not change. It’s anarchy. I mean it’s time for me to change my clothes and have them burnt. I have done so every morning all my life. But my staff deserted me to gape at this hysterical rabble and I’ve not put on a clean suit for days.’
‘But why burn your suit after wearing it just once?’ Jimfish asked.
‘To protect myself against radioactive contamination. Even when I went to visit the Queen in Buckingham Palace in London I took a fresh suit for each day, as well as my own sheets. Her Majesty made me a Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, but I’d give my knighthood away right now for a fresh change of clothes. And a shower.’
‘Well, if it’s contamination that worries you, then steer clear of me,’ warned Jimfish. ‘I’ve spent time in Chernobyl putting out the fire and my radioactive reading is probably off the scale.’
‘If you’ve been in the Soviet Union then yours will be socialist radiation from the peaceful atom. And it is to a semblance of socialist order that I must return very soon. Do you happen to know what Lenin said in 1903?’
Jimfish had to confess he did not.
‘He said: “Where one or two socialists are gathered, there the glass must be raised.” From which part of the world are you?’
‘Africa,’ said Jimfish.
‘I have a great friend in Africa. He runs Libya and comes to visit us often. We are brothers under the skin. He is called “The Guide” and I am “The Genius of the Carpathians” or, if you prefer, the “Danube of Thought”. As a socialist you should get out of this country right now before you catch whatever contagion is on the loose and go back to Africa.’
‘That’s not possible. I have nothing. No money and no transport,’ Jimfish confessed.
‘Then come with me,’ said the little man in the black conical hat who burnt his suits each day. ‘I have a helicopter waiting.’
He hurried Jimfish into a huge palace, ablaze with light. ‘This is, or was, the home of my old friend Erich, the ruler of the German Democratic Republic, until he made an unfortunate series of missteps.’
Jimfish gazed at the blazing forests of chandeliers, neon and fairy lights that lit up the vast palace, admiring especially the veritable zoo of stuffed animal heads everywhere on the walls.
‘He owns a lot of lights, your friend.’
The Genius of the Carpathians nodded. ‘This palace is known to locals as “Erich’s Lamp Shop”, because he can afford so many lights and everyone else must make do with a few weak bulbs.’
Jimfish could not help smiling and before he could compose his face, the little man frowned.
‘Allowing jokes was just one of Erich’s missteps. The other mistake was his wall.’
‘You mean putting it up?’ Jimfish asked.
‘Not at all.’ The little man shook his head so vigorously his conical hat almost flew off. ‘His mistake was to let it fall. This is a leader who said, just the other day, that his wall will be standing in fifty or a hundred years. But as you have seen, it is being pulled down before our eyes, without so much as a by your leave! The guards who yesterday were primed to shoot escapees are today helping little old ladies to scrabble through the cracks and claim their one hundred marks welcome money from the West Germans, then head out to shop in the Kurfürstendamm. It’s disgusting! Let’s leave this failed state before we are polluted.’
‘Shall we switch off some of these lights first?’ Jimfish asked. ‘Or Erich will face a very large electricity bill when he gets home.’
‘He’s unlikely to be back this way,’ said the little man. ‘He left a few hours ago for Moscow. Now follow me.’ He led the way down some stairs and into a secret tunnel. ‘This is an emergency route Erich built in case he ever needed to leave quickly and quietly.’
The Genius of the Carpathians and Jimfish hurried along the tunnel beneath Erich’s Lamp Shop, passing under the Schlossplatz, and came out in what had once been the stables of the German emperor on the banks of the Spree river. And here a helicopter was waiting, its rotors whirling.
CHAPTER 9
Bucharest, Romania, 1989
As the helicopter rose, Jimfish could see below him the wall that once divided the city pocked and perforated by the iron beaks of hundreds of human woodpeckers. The Genius of the Carpathians sat beside him, rehearsing a speech he was to make as soon as he arrived home.
‘There has been a little bit of difficulty in my country. Doubtless encouraged by the appalling events of the falling wall in Berlin. Instead of doing the decent thing and sending in the tanks, our Russian friends have been unhelpful. They keep talking about what they call “openness” and “reconstruction”. This is madness. As my old comrade Kim Il-sung likes to say, “The openness we need is found in the barrel of the gun.” And as for “reconstruction”, that’s for reactionaries. We true Communists prefer cementation. Provocation must be crushed.’
The pilot of the helicopter was on the radio and told his chief what he was hearing: ‘It’s more than provocation, sir. It’s wholesale insurrection in Timişoara and Bucharest.’
The little man was having none of it. ‘As soon as we touch down in my capital, I will address the cadres, structures, formations and Party elements and all dissenters will be obliterated.’ And then, looking down from a great height on his capital city, he formally welcomed Jimfish to the Socialist Republic of Romania.
‘I feel I have built the place myself.’
As the chopper dropped lower, Jimfish could make out among the huge buildings tiny, ragged creatures wheeling sticks of firewood along icy boulevards. When he remarked on how lone and lost they looked, the little man in the conical astrakhan hat smiled at his ignorance.
‘Those are individuals and do not count. Only the masses have weight. When we speak, thousands are wheeled out to applaud and then loosed against the provocateurs. Wait and see.’
As they prepared to land he pointed to various landmarks. ‘You can see the Palace of the People, a monument to the Party and the masses, inspired by a similar marvel erected by my friend Kim Il-sung, that pharaoh amongst pygmies. But mine is larger.’
Jimfish said he had never in his life seen anything so big.
The Genius of the Carpathians nodded so happily his conical astrakhan hat wobbled. ‘I wanted it to be seen from outer space. To build it, we first knocked down most of the old historical centre of Bucharest, along with a couple of dozen churches, six synagogues and got rid of no fewer than thirty thousand houses.’