The Prepper Room E-Book

Karen Duve

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The year is 2031 and all the dire predictions of environmentalists are coming true: extreme weather bringing storms, floods and intense heat; and the genetically modified 'killer rape' is rampant everywhere. A rejuvenation pill has been developed but no one is going to enjoy eternal youth for long: the experts forecast that the world's ecosystems will collapse in five years' time. Women have taken over power to try and save the world from the mess men have got it in. But there is opposition in the form of the MASCULO movement that is aiming to reassert male power by violent means if necessary. At the same time apocalyptic sects are proliferating. Sebastian, the central figure in this novel, appears to be one of the good guys, a Greenpeace activist in his youth, he now has an important position in the Democracy Centre. But in his private life he is attempting to restore his male pride: for the last two years he has kept his wife locked up in the cellar. But his attempts to do away with her so he can live with his new love lead to disaster. A hugely entertaining novel about feminism, masculinity and the battle between the sexes for domination which is full of grotesque humour and highly-charged eroticism.

Leseprobe

The Author

Born in Hamburg in 1961, Karen Duve is one of Germany’s leading contemporary writers. She has won eight literary prizes, the latest being the Kassel Literature Prize for Grotesque Humour. While working on her book Anständig essen (Eating Responsibly), in which she tried out a number of ethically based forms of eating, she became a committed vegetarian and a well-known figure on German television arguing, for example, with representatives of the agricultural industry. As well as polemics, short stories and children’s books, she has written five novels, one of which, Taxi, has been made into a film. The Prepper Room is her most recent novel.

The Translator

Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995 and has published over eighty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.

His translations have been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000, The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008 and The Lairds of Cromarty by Jean-Pierre Ohl in 2013.

Step one: ‘Seize the victim and spirit her away.’

Step two: ‘Isolate the victim and make her totally dependent on you for survival.’

Step three: ‘Dominate the victim and encourage her to seek your recognition and approval.’

Step four: ‘Instruct the victim and re-educate her to think and act in terms of your ideology.’

Step five: ‘Seduce the victim and provide her with a new sexual value system.’

“Brainwashing: How to Fold, Spindle and Mutilate the Human Mind in Five Easy Steps,” an article from the June 1976 edition of the men’s magazine Oui, quoted in Perfect Victim by Christine McGuire and Carla Norton, William Morrow, 1988.

“Women and people of low birth are hard to deal with.”

Confucius

Contents

Title

The Author

The Translator

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Dedalus Celebrating Women’s Literature 2018 – 2028

Copyright

1

I’ve just installed the telephone I found up in the loft, a simple, light-grey device with a dial and no technical frippery – no stand-by mode, no screen, no integrated photocopier with ink cartridges that can only be changed following instructions in pictures, and, above all, no answerphone. Just a big, old-fashioned receiver on a sturdy base that can be opened and repaired by any layman with a simple screwdriver.

But when there’s a ring, it’s not this epitome of durability and recyclability, that connected my parents to the world in the ‘60s, but the snazzy, slim, sightly concave egosmart in my pocket, of course, that curse on humanity that forces us to be available anywhere, anytime, if we still want to be involved in things. The fact that it emits the same old-fashioned ringtone as my parents’ phone merely adds insult to injury.

I’m worried it might be someone from the Community Association. I made the mistake of volunteering to join in the local campaign to eradicate the invasive ‘killer rape’ that’s growing rampant everywhere. But I know the face on the display from somewhere – the profile of a bird of prey with receding, greying hair and pouches under his unshaven chin – though I can’t at first remember from where.

“Hi, Basti,” the face shouts, “it’s time again. You coming?”

Hardly anyone gives their name on the telephone any more. The more tedious the person, the more they’re convinced that their ugly mug has made an indelible impression everywhere. I shuggle the image over to the eighty-inch compunicator over the sideboard, hoping that at least the caller’s name will display, but nothing doing.

“It’s me – Norbert! Don’t tell me you didn’t recognise me? Norbert Lanschick. Don’t you remember me?”

“Yes… of course… but you’ve…”

I leave long pauses between the words in the hope that Norbert Lanschick will fill them.

“Ohlstedt School! Graduation 1981. Has the penny dropped now?”

It has. Norbert – Nobby – Lanschick, in those days a spindleshanks so skinny the girls all shouted “Biafra” when he went past; above average marks in physics, below average, if any at all, in sport; a bit childish as well, never a girlfriend. Today: marathon runner, lawyer, husband, father, drives a BMW, still boring, still thin, balding. Every five years he organises a reunion for our year in Gasthof Ehrlich in order to allow the witnesses of his wretched youth to become witnesses of his wonderful transformation. Which doesn’t work, of course. You can’t pull the wool over your classmates’ eyes any more than you can over your brothers’ and sisters’. Even though Biafra Lanschik brings his very presentable wife, no one can forget how he used to wrap those incredibly long, thin legs sticking out of his shorts round the asymmetrical bars and hung there for ages between the upper and lower bars, head down like some bizarre insect, trying to heave himself up with his stick arms, all the while slipping down to the floor inch by inch.

“And there was me thinking you’d given them up…” I said. Five years ago there hadn’t been a reunion. He must have had a setback in his career. What’s he got to show us this time? A new wife, a new car?

“I couldn’t manage last time,” Lanschick says with a quiver in his voice, “my partner died. It really hit me. We’d had the chambers together for thirty years, you understand? I spent more time with him than with my wife. Since then I’ve had to do everything myself.”

The vulture face, blown up to four times life-size on the compunicator screen, tries to hide a self-satisfied grin. A complexion like the skin on porridge. He looks old – old, old, old. How can a man let himself go like that?

“But this time I’m doing it again. If I don’t, nobody will. Do you realise this is the fiftieth anniversary class reunion? Should I book a room for you?”

“No, I don’t need a room,” I say. “I’m back in Wellingstedt.”

“Wellingstedt? Where? Surely not with your parents?” Lanschick makes his braying laugh. “Since when?”

“I’ve been here four years now,” I say. “And my parents are dead. I’m just living here in the house.”

When things around me started to disintegrate, my wife left me and took the children away, when it became clear that global warming had already passed every tipping point and the official state feminism wouldn’t make any difference to that, when my favourite pub burnt down and my vision became so poor I could only read the newspaper holding it at arm’s length – which didn’t really matter because the last quality printed newspaper closed down – when first my mother and then my father died out of pure wilfulness, and my brother and sister kept going on at me to hand over the house in which we’d grown up to an incredibly oily estate agent, I sold everything that was at all saleable, took out a loan, paid off my brother, had laser treatment for my eyes and let my hair grow again, packed my toothbrush and a couple of pairs of underpants in a sports bag and went back to the place where I’d spent the happiest years of my life.

“Actually it’s not a bad location at all,” Lanschick says patronisingly, “I’ve even thought about it myself.”

By now Wellingstedt is regarded as a superior residential area for young families with a high income and poseurs like Lanschick. A low crime rate, only two asylum-seekers’ hostels – and very well integrated ones at that – green woods, a brown river winding its way through the terminal moraine and only twenty kilometres from the centre of Hamburg.

In the late fifties tradesmen and clerks had built their houses on plots which a not very farsighted farmer had let them have for an incredibly low life annuity. Among them were my parents, who mixed concrete and brought in bricks in a wheelbarrow after work. Once all the access roads had been tarmacked, better-off people moved in and built their spacious flat-roofed bungalows right next to the red-brick hipped-roof houses with the coloured glass bricks. And naturally we, the children of electricians and detergent salesmen, went to school together with the children of bank managers and directors of insurance companies, paddled with them in the Alster in the summer and fought battles in which often-repaired inflatable dinghies faced canoes of Canadian cedar. As a matter of course we finished our schooling together under a social-liberal coalition – a brief window of social justice had opened up, an anomaly of history that had never before existed and presumably never will again.

In those days there were toads there, kingfishers and otters, and even today you might, if you’re lucky, catch a glimpse of a sparrow or a rabbit. Wellingstedt has undergone great changes, of course. The conifers planted in the gardens in the sixties have grown so tall that now the gardens look like Böcklin’s Isles of the Dead. Moreover the place is gradually but inevitably being gentrified. Estate agents are prowling up and down outside the last little houses where the remaining indigenous population is quietly muddling along. And whenever one of those houses is free, it’s torn down and replaced with a monstrosity of a Tuscan-style villa on the site that is too small for it, because for some reason or other a Tuscan villa can be built with two stories without contravening the building regulations that only allow one-storied buildings.

“The building itself isn’t worth anything at all,” said the estate agent my brother had engaged to put a value on our parents house that was to his own advantage. “On the contrary, you have to deduct the demolition costs from the value of the land – but that’s still five hundred thousand euros cash down, north euros, of course.”

Property prices have gone through the roof. Which is why the wool shop and the barn I used to pass on my way to school have long since disappeared. The rather grubby riding stables are now a sports hotel and the strawberry fields, where decades ago I used to gather little sandy fruits, warm from the sun, in a wicker basket, have been transformed into a twenty-seven-hole golf course. In the next village a koi-breeder has set up business. And on top of that there’s a Michelin-starred restaurant there and two ‘design for living’ shops. My past is disintegrating like a sugar cube in the rain.

“Did your wife move with you?” Lanschick’s huge face asks. “I mean, she must have to be there in Berlin, she can’t keep commuting back and forth. How are you managing that?”

I don’t reply. I decide to leave him on tenterhooks for a while until the truth dawns on him.

“Oh my God,” Lanschick says. “How stupid can I be! You must excuse me, I’d just forgotten. What a blundering oaf I am. Has there been any news, a clue, I mean? I’m sorry, I really am sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I say, “it’s more than two years ago. Anyway, we’d already separated. The divorce had come through ages ago.”

Lanschick mumbles several times what an idiot he is and doesn’t stop apologising.

“Right then,” I say, to try and cut things short. “Now tell me who’s going to be there at the reunion. Have many confirmed they’re coming? Will Bernie and Rolf be there?”

“Yes, both of them. They always come.”

“And the women? Kiki Vollert and Elisabeth Westphal, are they coming?” I ask in as casual a tone as I can manage. Elisabeth Westphal is the woman I’ve never had. Elisabeth Westphal is the reason why I go to the class reunions. I spent half my young days longing for her. Today I still miss her, even though by now I’ve become so accustomed to her absence, that I mostly don’t notice it. Until the sight of a woman who has a similar laugh or movements as Elli used to have brings it all back to me.

“I’ve not got that far yet. I’m only at ‘L’. But Birgit Lammert’s coming,” Lanschick replies.

“Good,” I say. “Great.”

I give him the number of my landline.

“Ring me on that number in future, not my mobile” – I deliberately say mobile even though it’s only the real oldies who say that now – “I’m going to deregister my mobile in a few weeks.”

“You can’t mean that seriously,” Lanschick says. “How are people going to get in touch with you then? I couldn’t find your email address. Fortunately Holger Hasselbladt had your mobile number.”

“I’ve had my email address deleted,” I say. “In three or four months I’m going to throw my computer out and then I won’t be using any technology that was invented after 1980. If you want to get in touch with me, there’s the landline or you can write me a letter. Or you can come round. The old address: 12 Redderstieg. Same as before.”

“That’s crazy!” Lanschick says. “You can’t do that.”

He sounds outraged, but at the same time he also sounds impressed.

“Of course I can,” I say. “And don’t get the idea of sending me letters with one of those cheap firms that pay their employees four westos an hour – on zero-hours contracts as well. If you want to send me something, then use the post, otherwise I’ll refuse to accept it.”

Lanschick just can’t believe me, he thinks I’m having him on, and when he realises I’m serious about it, he says it’s probably just a phase I’m going through because everything’s a bit too much for me at the moment.

“It happens to all of us,” he says.

But it isn’t a phase, it’s self-defence. And unless I’m very wrong, self-defence is recognised in all the social systems around the world as an exceptional situation justifying actions that are otherwise not condoned. When it’s a matter of them or us everything is permitted. Sometimes you just have to ask other people to put up with a few inconveniences if you don’t want to end up as a slave carrying out the orders of a tyrannical machine dictatorship. And sometimes you have to destroy a woman if you don’t want to be destroyed by her yourself.

And no, none of the neighbours has noticed anything.

2

I’m taking the kids back to their grandmother. About time too. Over the weekend they’ve spread their sticky little fingerprints all over the house. The 1950s lacquered chest of drawers, where I was unthinking enough to keep their hologram games, is so dull and greasy that from a distance it looks furry. Ploughing its way across the box with pot plants is a whole train of bizarre model covered wagons made of rubber. Driving them are green, yellow and red lumps with pug noses, cowboy hats, and holsters round their non-existent hips which, according to the children, are meant to represent some kind of vitamins or other nutrients – Sheriff Fatty, Vitamity Jane, the Mineral Kid and so on.

We’re out on our bikes because it’s such lovely weather. Lovely? It’s as hot as hellfire every day! Never below thirty-five degrees, yesterday it was thirty-seven, once last week even forty-one, and they say it’s going to get even hotter. For the last eight weeks the sky’s been as blue as a picture-postcard – and not a drop of rain. The leaves on the trees have rolled up, the gorse is bowed down under the weight of dust and the grass in the meadows looks the way it does at the end of summer, brown and withered as it rustles away to itself. And it’s only April. What’s the summer going to be like? Even without water the killer rape is flourishing, spreading its heavy, sweet smell everywhere. It’s in the gardens, even on the footpaths, in the meadows, in the woods, in the shade, behind the dustbins, simply everywhere – apart from on the golf course where they’re employing two assistant greenkeepers just to pull up the rape. The whole area’s glowing yellow. If, for a moment, you forget what a noxious, genetically manipulated pest it is – blossoming four times a year and growing faster than it can be pulled up, resistant to every known weed killer and surviving in any kind of soil and almost any kind of climate – it’s incredibly beautiful. As long as you’re not too bothered about the diversity of plant life.

My son Racke is riding along in front of me on his BMX, slewing and swerving wildly. He’s wearing a red-check shirt and a greasy pair of short lederhosen with a white heart made of horn on the strap between the braces – just like the ones I wore when I was his age – and his bronzed, rather chubby legs are going up and down like pistons. When he turns to look at me, the airstream catches the back of his head, making his fine flaxen hair stand up straight. His sunglasses with the drop-shaped pilot’s lenses slip down onto the tip of his nose.

“Look,” he screeches, and his milk-white teeth glint as he makes such a sharp swerve that the sprung frame of his bicycle goes right down and the red pennant on a flexible stick attached to the luggage rack almost touches the road surface.

“Very nice,” I shout back, “and now would you be so good as to look in front.”

The warm airstream caresses my temples, the parakeets twitter in the trees and the rape-bugs clatter into our sunglasses. I feel like one of those endangered great whales ploughing its way through a yellow sea with its young.

My daughter’s a few metres behind us. Binya-Bathsheba’s in a huff. Actually that’s where she is most of the time. She’s not particularly pretty anyway, her face is rather round, and then this permanent sulky pout – she’s sulking for the second time already today. The first time she stopped speaking to me when I took the pROJEKTas away from her and Racke and locked them up, which meant that the pair of them would have to spend a whole afternoon without their 3D friends. I could perhaps have put up with Racke’s Destroyer, it’s the slightly tamer version for kids between seven and ten. That means the projection is only one and a half metres tall, a robot with a crocodile’s head, a loincloth that looks ancient Egyptian and a gigantic hammer, that keeps on rasping, “I want to be your friend,” or suggests, “Let’s make a rumpus.” If Racke, speaking slowly and clearly, says,“Yes, let’s make a rumpus,” which amounts to permission to start, then the tin lizard stomps over to the nearest item in the house and thumps it with the hammer and the pROJEKTa loudspeaker emits remarkably realistic noises, as if it wasn’t a projection but a real sledgehammer causing real damage – a sharp clinking for glass, a softer sound for china, crashing and splintering for the coffee table. For the Destroyer you need nerves as strong as a ship’s rigging but at least it’s cured Racke of his mumbling. The commands have to be given with exaggerated clarity. What really drove me mad was Binya-Bathsheba’s lisping unicorn, that was all the colours of the rainbow. It’s about the size of a pony with twenty-centimetre-long eyelashes and it would lounge around on my couch, fluttering its eyelids and had something to say about everything because the language unit in its pROJEKTa is programmed to respond to particular key words.

“I am Shangri-La, the last living unicorn,” it would coo in its telephone-sex voice. “Come with me to the woods, where the butterflies sing, and become part of the whole.” Or, “Life is a river, build a boat so you don’t get wet.”

It said the stuff about the boat when there was a special programme on TV about the flood wave that swept a coach off the wall of a dam and flattened two villages farther down in the valley, after several million tons of rock and ice had broken off from a melting glacier and slid into the reservoir. When I took their pROJEKTas away, Racke threw himself on the floor and howled until he was starting to go blue in the face. Binya, arms folded and legs crossed, sat on a chair but the wrong way round, her face covered in tears and pressed against the chair back; she hissed ‘fascist’ and then kept her lips pressed tightly together. That’s something that has always bothered me about children – their low frustration threshold, their inability to keep their pain or fury at a level appropriate to the cause. At the least thing they go off at the deep end. How loud are they going to bawl when they have a real reason to? What kind of a rage are they going to work themselves up into when, in the near future, the arctic tundra and seas will have released their millions of tons of methane into the atmosphere and there’ll be nowhere on this bloody planet where it’s not either burning, or flooded or there’s a drought or such a gale-force wind you have to cling on to the nearest lamp post? Half an hour later they were playing with their Lego, as calm as zen monks.

Now B’s in a huff again because Racke and I aren’t wearing helmets, even though, in her self-important and bossy way, she’d trotted out a fifteen-minute lecture on the dangers in traffic that was probably given to them at school a week ago. “It’s the law,” she said, as if that settled the matter and then, when Racke and I just pulled silly faces, she brought out the clincher, “And Mama wants us to wear helmets.”

That’s correct. My wife had even threatened to stop me seeing the children again, if I were to insist on continuing to subvert their education.

“You go ahead, then,” I said to my daughter, “no one’s going to stop you sticking that stupid plastic bowl on your head. But do stop bugging your brother and me about it. And, anyway, you may not have noticed but your mother isn’t around any more, and as long as she’s away, what I say goes.”

That was perhaps a bit harsh, after all she’s only ten, but the obligation to wear a helmet is just about the most stupid law that’s been passed over the last few years. For me it illustrates the ridiculous, fussily overprotective nature of our present government – as if safety can mean anything on such a knackered planet – hey, sorry, we still don’t know how to stop the rising temperatures and the slowing down of the ocean currents, which means that in five or, at most, ten years Homo sapiens will snuff it, so abandon hope, but until it’s all over keep wearing your bicycle helmet or you’ll be paying a hefty fine.

I know, I know, bicycle helmets existed before the women – with the support of willing idiots such as myself – seized power, but they weren’t required by law then. At least for grown-ups. I mean, look at them, all these stylish young and true-young women ministers with at least five piercings in each ear and three in their nose, and their forearms tattooed right up to the elbow, as if they’re still so nonconformist they have to go out after finishing at the office and seize the odd cargo ship. And what are they actually doing? Spoiling the bit of fun that’s left to us – the feeling of the wind and the sun in our hair – and using the road traffic act to compel us adults to abandon our dignity and stick a brightly coloured bit of plastic on our heads.

I’m not saying our parents were perfect, but at least they weren’t tattooed like pirates and, despite everything, were at least a hundred times more relaxed in the way they dealt with children and road traffic. For example, as a joke my father sometimes used to lock us in the car boot – mostly in the summer, when we were coming back from Coppermill Pond and he didn’t want us to mess up his Opel Rekord with our sandy feet and wet bathing trunks. On the way home he would stop now and then, tap on the lid of the boot and get us to guess where we were. Moreover it was a matter of course for our parents that when we were going away on holiday the youngest child at the time would travel on the back shelf of the car, and no customs officer or policeman ever objected. Nowadays our children would be taken into care and the case would make the evening news.

Suddenly I hear a stifled cry behind me. When I turn round I see Binya’s bike lying in the grass and she’s rolling on the ground in a buzzing black cloud. Rape bugs! Unfortunately, as well as her yellow helmet my daughter’s also wearing a white blouse, which attracts the undivided attention of the little black bastards. I jump down, tear off my shirt and scoop most of the bugs off her face with it, then stretch the material tight over her lips so that she can breathe without getting a mouthful of bugs. But Binya doesn’t realise what I’m trying to do, she pulls the shirt away, flailing her arms around and screaming in the midst of the swarm of insects. I have to use one hand to hold her arms so that I can take off her helmet with the other and unbutton her blouse, and I have to do this holding my breath because I’m stuck in the cloud of insects as well. The revolting creatures are already attacking my torso and swarming up and down my arms. It’s good that my hair comes down over my neck, that protects me a bit. Racke stands there with his little child’s bike, keeping his distance from us, howling – with fear or perhaps just because he feels so sorry for us. Finally I’ve got hold of Binya’s helmet and blouse and I stuff both of them, together with a million rape bugs, into my saddle bag and zip it up. And the other bugs gradually leave us in peace and buzz off into a nearby garden. As I said, Binya hasn’t exactly got a pretty face, but now it’s all swollen and bitten by thousands of mini-mouths with micro-jaws.

“Just look at the poor child!” Grandma Gerda cries, succumbing to hysteria the moment we arrive, even though the swelling on B’s face has gone down and it’s not half as red as my bare back, that’s coming out in blisters from second-degree sunburn.

Binja’s got my blue shirt on. She’s wearing it as a skirt over her jeans with a bungee cord from my luggage rack as a belt. And she can’t feel that bad, for she immediately dashes into the living room to check her email on the compunicator. Racke rummages round in his backpack for his pROJEKTa and resurrects the ‘Destroyer’ in the hall. I give Gerda the bicycle helmet with the scrunched-up blouse inside it.

Gerda immediately starts moaning, “You didn’t say you were coming on bicycles,” but then switches off. Our struggle over the children was long and fierce after it had become clear that Christine wasn’t going to turn up again that quickly, but naturally I was granted custody.

The old girl isn’t much older than me but looks a lot older. I wonder why she’s gone in for the grandmother style, happy with the appearance and fitness of a well-preserved fifty-year-old. Nowadays it’s only the ninety-years-olds that look fifty. And Gerda was one of the first to go through the rejuvenation programme when it was really dangerous back then – when the probability of getting cancer within the next five years was still eighty per cent. That’s left her with her watery eyes that are weeping all the time and the swollen lymph glands in her neck. At least she hasn’t got cancer yet. Well, as far as I know. I have a slight suspicion that she’s deliberately adopted the grandmother look in order to remind me of my own advanced years behind the youthful façade. It’s always bothered her that her daughter married a man twenty years older. She’s never become reconciled to it.

“I want to be your friend,” the Destroyer rasps, opens and shuts his crocodile jaws, then waddles down the corridor, stopping next to Gerda.

“You’ve got to reply, Grandma,” Racke shouts.

“Great. Thank you very much. I want to be your friend as well,” says Grandma Gerda. The Destroyer gives a satisfied grunt.

“Let’s make a rumpus,” Racke shouts and for a moment the Destroyer, undecided, surveys Grandma Gerda and me but then, fortunately, it remembers that it’s loaded the tamer version for under-tens and smashes its hammer on the corridor mirror.

“I have to talk to you,” Grandma Gerda says to me. I can see what an effort she has to make to sound friendly.

“Oh,” I say, “don’t start going on about the points again.”

“But I simply can’t manage!” Gerda cries. “Just work it out yourself. I have to drive Binya to her riding lessons twice a week and Racke twice to football and once to his piano lesson. And if the hurricanes start again, I’ll have to drive them to school as well. I need to fill up at least three times. And Racke said he’d love to have Königsberg meatballs again, but the few stamps I still have are not even enough to give them milk every day.”

“I’ve told you often enough that children don’t need milk products at all.”

That I have, and if she wants to throw away her CO2 points on yoghurt produced by cruelty to animals, that’s her own lookout.

Now she can’t restrain herself any more. “But they’re the children’s points and they happen to be living with me, if you remember. It’s not fair that you keep the children’s allocation for yourself. How am I supposed to feed three people with a single person’s allocation?”

“What do you mean by that? That I’m eating the children’s meat myself, driving around on their petrol? They get their share all right when they’re at my place. Ask them what there was for lunch today. Go on, ask them. I can tell you: meat stew, seventy euros a kilo – and five points, I could have filled my tank for that.”

“But the children have only been with you twice this month. I was looking after them the rest of the time. It’s just not fair…”

“Well, if it’s getting too much for you… I’ll be happy to have the kids come and live with me.”

She slumps. “Please,” she says, “we’re getting so terribly short… Racke keeps having to ask the others in the team whether he can get a lift with them, they’re starting to complain that I never…”

From the very beginning I intended to give her an allocation. I am human after all. But I always wait until she’s come down off her high horse. I’ve been manipulated by women and their stupid arguments for long enough. I have the right to spend the last few years before the end of the world in peace. Gerda gets Binya’s CO2 allocation; I’ve hardly siphoned any points off it. I transfer it to her account on my egosmart. I let her watch.

“Thank you,” Gerda says, meek and mild again. “Thank you, that’s a great help, thank you very much.”

So there you are. Things are okay after all.

3

Back home the first thing I do is to go down into the cellar to be with Christine for a while, to have a chat with her and help pass the time. I’m well aware that it can’t be very pleasant to spend forty-eight hours by yourself, locked up in a room with no windows, and she takes every opportunity to make that perfectly clear. So I take the tins – the peas, the carrots, the peaches – off the cellar shelves, push the rack to one side, take the screws out of the plywood panel with my 1970s Black & Decker and pull it away from the wall, then tap in the number combination to open the steel door. Voilà, there I am in my little secret comfort zone, my safe haven: eight by four metres, plus the curtained-off bathroom unit – the classic prepper-room proportions. Enough room for an old-fashioned brass double bed, some yellow IKEA chairs round an occasional table with an IKEA kitchen island in the middle of the room. There’s a smell of biscuits, freshly baked biscuits, a smell I really love. Christine is standing at the stove in a pink-and-white check apron holding the baking tray in her pink-and-white check oven gloves. Four months ago she went through a phase when she really let herself go, but I made a few things clear and now she’s wearing lipstick in a pastel shade that matches her nail varnish and her eyebrows have been plucked to create a curve that gives her eyes a questioning and intelligent look. Under the apron she’s wearing a light-blue floral dress and her blond hair falls down onto her shoulders, where it curls up in a beautifully natural way. She gives me a smile. But I know I can’t trust her, so first of all I close the steel door and, as Christine puts the tray down on the stove – she’s made afghan biscuits, my favourite, little lumps of chocolatey pastry with walnut halves on top – I lean over the keypad, so she can’t see the number combination I put in. Then I get her to go close to the wall, where I’ve fixed three metal rings with snap links into the masonry, one at knee height, one at shoulder height and one above head height, and hook the chain attached to Christine’s collar as tightly as possible in the middle one. It sounds awful, I know, the chain and collar, it makes you think of the Inquisition right away or S&M, but I’m not a pervert, just a man with his perfectly normal needs. I’d be happy to do without the mediaeval rattle of chains, but that just isn’t possible with a woman like Christine. In the two years she’s been living down here she’s tried to inflict a serious injury on me eleven times. She unscrewed a chair leg and hit me over the head with it, she tried to pour boiling water over my face, stick a wooden spoon in my back after she’d gnawed it to a point with her incisors and once she even pulled the power cable out of the stove and lured me over near to it by saying the oven wasn’t working, could I have a look at it. And in between she keeps putting on a convincing act suggesting she’s come round, has finally given up, has reconciled herself to the situation and is prepared to cooperate. She kept it up for weeks, for months even, until I was lulled into a sense of security, almost trusted her and then, at the slightest negligence on my part – pow! – she struck again. Therefore it’s perhaps understandable why, at every visit, I first of all attach her to the wall, frisk her for weapons and then give the room a thorough inspection, checking whether there’s a loose chair-leg somewhere, cable sticking out of the wall or some other change that arouses my suspicions. After she’d been terrorising me for six months, I made another serious investment and installed the security lock with the secret code. Even though I’m not much of a handyman. But if you really want something, you suddenly discover you have unsuspected abilities. I check the room systematically, concentrating and not saying a word. Christine’s not allowed to speak to me while I’m doing that either. Only when I’ve finished do I allow her the full chain length on which she can move freely in two thirds of the space. Only then do I address her.

“Hi Christine.”

And she bows her head and, without looking at me, says, “My Master,” as I’ve taught her and there’s no suppressed rage in her voice, at most a touch of irony.

I introduced this form of address about four months after I’d brought her down here. I remember that when I did so I couldn’t help feeling somewhat ridiculous myself. But every time she addressed me by my name, it brought up umpteen memories of other situations in which she’d called me Sebastian. “Surely you’re not serious about this, Sebastian?” Or when she separated from me – she left me! – and the matter-of-fact way she demanded the flat for herself, “Surely you’re not going to take the flat away from the children, Sebastian? Do you want Binya to have to change schools? Can’t you remember how long it took Racke to get used to the kindergarten? Whatever we’ve done to each other, the children shouldn’t have to suffer for it. Can’t we at least agree on that, Sebastian?”

Ultimately it was only logical that she grabbed the flat. After all, over the years she was the one who’d decided how our flat was furnished and painted – with her fussy woman’s taste that couldn’t bear an empty surface but had to stick some stupid wooden bowl on it, then fill that with polished semi-precious stones or the dried-up pods of some African plants. And when I consented, what did she say? Did she thank me? You must be joking. She said that on my salary I’d have had difficulty keeping up with the rent anyway. It was only with hindsight that I realised how far that woman had undermined my self-respect. Just the way she says Sebastian is enough to drive me into the depths of resignation, threatening to turn back into the man she knows from the old days when manipulating me was the easiest of exercises for her.

When I proposed she should call me ‘My Master’ from then on, Christine bit her lower lip and avoided looking at me.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “It’s no more than a formality. If someone called our son ‘Master Racke’ you wouldn’t think they regarded him as their master, would you? And that being so it can’t be that hard for you to say ‘My Master’ to your real master. Basically all you’ll be doing is to recognise the existing power relations in this room.”

“Sounds a bit like The Arabian Nights, don’t you think?” Christine said.

Oh, that’s why I love her, when she can say things like that even though she has a chain round her neck. She’s a brave little terrier. There’s nothing I can do about the chain but otherwise I do try to make her stay here as pleasant as possible.

Christine takes off her apron and we sit down next to each other on the yellow sofa; I stretch my arm out on the back of the sofa behind her. On the little table in front of us is the bowl with the warm Afghan biscuits, the walnuts on top looking like mouse brains. Beside them is a yellow-striped jug with lemonade, Cathedral Ceramics from Limburg. My mother had the same jug except with pink stripes, but I could only find a yellow one. I used to have it up in my kitchen but at some point I was so put off by the wrong colour that I transferred it to Christine’s quarters. And it goes very well with the set of chairs.

We chat, and I tell Christine what the weather’s like outside – the way it’s been for weeks, she should be glad she’s down here underground in the cool – and that Racke got a ‘sun with cloud’ in Dancing and Gymnastics and Binya a ‘notable’ in Chinese, and I tell her about the glacier that slid down into the reservoir. We both wonder why no one foresaw it and instigated the necessary evacuation measures in the two villages, and that takes us onto the latest developments in politics, geology and climate change and it’s really nice, nicer than it’s been for ages.

It’s almost like when we came across each other on the Democracy Committee and began to fall in love while we spent whole nights with the others making plans to restructure the state without abandoning the basic principles of democracy. I take a biscuit from the bowl, nibble off the walnut and put the biscuit back. And while Christine gets worked up about the fact that the possible technique of cooling the world down by creating artificial clouds is only being pursued half-heartedly – “it ought to be a top priority, have they still not grasped that?” – I let my arm slip down onto her shoulder, take a strand of her hair and twiddle it in my fingers.

“I still think you’re beautiful,” I say and it’s the absolute truth. I give her a third of my daily dose of Ephebo. After all, I can’t just let her rot away down here. She’s forty-eight but with the Ephs she looks as if she’s in her mid-thirties whilst I, with double the dose, can pass for a man in his late thirties. No one would suspect that I’m twenty years older.

It’s odd to think that without the drugs Christine would now look as old as her mother. She gives me a smile and we get up together and go over to the bed. Because of the chain all her clothes have to be done up with buttons at the front, like the dress she’s wearing. I unbutton it down to her hips and run my hands over her warm skin and the fancy red-and-black panties I got for her by mail order. It feels good, and I try to imagine what it would feel like if I were to give Christine the full Ephebo dose for a couple of months. I pull the dress down over her hips and take my own clothes off.

“Why don’t you let the hair on you chest grow again,” Christine says. “No one has it shaved today.”

“Well, you should know,” I say.

We get into bed and I draw her body close to me. She kisses my neck and strokes my chest.

“Nobody’s been going round with their chest shaved for the last ten years. I’d like to see what it looks like on you.”

“Stupid,” I say, “it would look absolutely stupid. An island here and there and a wreath of bristles round each nipple. You wouldn’t want to see that.”

We make love, the smooth, tender sex of an old couple with young bodies. Afterwards Christine lies in my arm and fondles and plucks at the non-existent hair on my chest. It makes me feel quite sentimental.

“Just like the old days,” I say.

But Christine can’t let it be, she has to spoil the mood again. With a jerk she sits up and pushes my hand off her thigh, as if I were an importunate pet.

“Just look at me,” she says. “It’s not like the old days. Nothing is like the old days. I’m tied up with a chain. That’s not normal. You must see that what you’re doing here is sick.”

So off we go again. Christine never manages to pull herself together for more than a few days. We’ve had this discussion a hundred times already and we’re getting better at it all the time. That is, I’m getting better, my arguments more polished every time. Christine basically keeps on saying the same thing, that it’s sick, that I’m sick.

“In a lot of countries the men lock their women up,” I reply patiently, “and it’s a hundred per cent socially acceptable. Indeed, it’s actually expected. Why should I deny my innate male needs, simply because I’m unlucky enough to live in this tiny window of time in which the government here has been handed over to the women. Just a few years sooner and things would have looked quite different. In most countries things still look different even today. Or again today. Men have been ruling over women for thousands of years. And they would continue to do so for the next thousand years if humanity was going to last that long. What’s happening at the moment in Europe and North America, this feminisation of culture and that you can have your say in everything, is a short-term historical abnormality. A slip-up in the history of humanity. Islam will sweep away these pathetic, tolerant, limp-wristed democracies that haven’t got the balls to make decisions. And if the Muslims don’t do it, then the Chinese will. At least they would, if they had the time and the whole planet weren’t going down the drain. Societies that are ruled by women are condemned to collapse.”

She lets me finish, as I’ve taught her, something that would have been unthinkable earlier on. She would constantly be butting in, couldn’t let anything go without contradicting it. But now I can enlarge on the subject as much as I like, she lets me have all the time in the world, waiting for minutes, if necessary, for me to finish before she replies.

“There’s no country in the world where women are put in chains,” Christine says. “Even in Saudi Arabia they’re free to go out in the streets.”

“Yes, but only because there’s nowhere they could run to. They have no option but to go back home. If I could rely on you coming back to me, I’d let you go shopping as well. But as long as that’s not possible, you should just be glad that I’m doing that work for you.”

To which she says, “No one can keep their wife on a chain, that doesn’t exist in any culture, that’s a crime everywhere. That is sick!”

“I doubt that,” I say calmly, “but even if it is regarded as a crime in a few cultures – it’s still far from being sick.”

“Oh yes it is! Sick, sick, sick!”

She squeezes two importunate tears out of her eyes.

“Nonsense,” I say, and despite the act she’s putting on, I keep my calm and reply politely and dispassionately. “Just remember the white-slave ring that was busted after you thought you’d finally got rid of the nasty, nasty business of prostitution. They kept their girls in chains all day, but as far as I can remember none of the guys was seen as psychologically disturbed and committed to a lunatic asylum. They all received prison sentences. And don’t try to tell me the men kept the girls in chains just because of the money – they got all sorts of fun out of it. Why did it never occur to the judges to classify them as mentally ill? Given that in your opinion the idea of putting a woman in chains can only come from a sick mind. I’ll tell you: because every one of the judges could comprehend the fun it gave them. Because they also secretly dream of having that kind of power. You see, for a man it’s something wonderful to utterly dominate a woman. And, above all, it’s something completely normal, a healthy male need.”

“It is not, as you well know, Sebastian. And, anyway, it was a female judge who pronounced sentence. And you’re not seriously going to maintain…”

“Shut your gob,” I say. “You should get out of the habit of always wanting to have the last word. And don’t call me Sebastian!”

I’m not demanding blind obedience. As you can see, I let her get away with quite a lot of bits of impertinence – but my name is absolutely taboo.