The Republic by joost De Vries

Author:joost De Vries [Vries, joost De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

And yet there I was, me of all people, hurrying along the corridor of my five-star hotel with panic at my heels. To flee: that was the first impulse. A primitive instinct, as old as humanity, to run away from forest fires, from floods, from pterodactyls, from saber-toothed tigers, from bears, from wolves, from invading Mongol hordes. But what was I running away from, exactly? From me-that-was-not-me. From digital cameras. From hacked TV channels, from secret recordings. From someone I’d never met.

Not really running, by the way—that would look conspicuous—but taking great awkward strides, like when you’re trying to step over a puddle. Not that anyone could see me in the corridor, but still. Hadn’t I thought that no one could see me yesterday evening in Nina’s room?

After just managing to get a foot between the closing elevator doors, I ran straight into the mobile bunker of Raimund Pretzel, Panzer Pretzel, and a nurse who was sticking her index and ring fingers up Pretzel’s nose, V for Victory, probably to position the oxygen tubes better. Sic transit gloria mundi. Through his Coke-bottle glasses I could see that the eye that wasn’t covered by a patch was sharp and bright, and taking careful note of my face. The elevator doors closed again. I waited until the nurse had finished, and bent down in front of him, my hands on my knees, grinning inanely in a way that was meant to be disarming, the sort of look you adopt for a toddler or an animal at a petting zoo.

– Mr. Pretzel, may I say how inspired I am by your work?

Of course I was trying to prove something to myself: that I could do this, at such a moment, have a little chat, that all the adrenaline coursing through my body could be controlled by my brain. Mind over matter, intellect over gut instinct.

He looked at me with his bright eye and something like a smile appeared on his crooked mouth.

– Thank you, he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. Are you a historian by profession?

– I work in Hitler studies.

He nodded, he could still do that, and in the forced voice of someone trying to talk through a ball of phlegm, he said: a truly fascinating field of research.

I’d felt a brief pang of embarrassment when I told him my field; this man, whose historical research had shaped current social debate on the reunification of East and West Germany, on European interventions in the Balkan wars, surely he had more important things to occupy his tired head than a bunch of navel-gazing theory-mongers? But I couldn’t help being disappointed by his response. He too. Truly fascinating, yes, absolutely fascinating.

– I understand that in your field no topic is too insignificant. Is that true?

What I wanted to prove to myself couldn’t be proved: not by me, not there in the elevator, not ten minutes after the TV screen had gone black. A trapdoor opened, a hole in the roof.

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