‘During the Second World War the Nazis abused patriotic feelings. They created heroes who later turned out to be murderers. Then in the Sixties intellectuals responded by banning certain words and emotions. Since those days, there was a little man inside every German head telling us not to trust our feelings.’
Brussig went on: ‘For Germans this changed during the World Cup. We saw – in a kind of patriotic virginity – that we could show our pride, and still be liked. This in turn helped us to like ourselves again. We felt a healthy new patriotism that celebrated our technology, our generosity with development aid, our protection of the environment, our society that is totally non-unilateral. Strangers put their arms around each other and sang the national anthem. We realised that we were patriots of a new stripe.’
Brussig’s soft, low voice and stern expression often masked his true feelings so his wide smile came as a surprise.
‘I never imagined such changes in my life,’ he said again, echoing the experience of a once-divided generation. ‘It’s another miracle.’
32
Odysseys
The sea was like the desert. Charity’s fingers trailed in the water. An hour earlier the fifteen-year-old had pushed out from the clutch of women and the stink of diesel. She had elbowed herself through the crush of crumpled Nigerians and Ghanaians. She had collapsed against the gunwales. If the boat hit a swell she would be thrown into the water. If that happened she couldn’t save herself. She wouldn’t have the strength. She didn’t know how to swim. No one knew how to swim.
Yesterday the engine had stopped. In the night the boat had begun to take on water. Two corpses had been dragged below deck. The Senegalese boys wrote their parents’ mobile phone numbers on their clothes, so their families would know their fate if their bodies were ever washed ashore. Under the Mediterranean sun, one hundred souls baked in the rolling steel hull. The Libyans had given them only enough fuel to reach the open sea, telling them that the Europeans would rescue them. But no one came to them, apart from the ghosts.
Charity watched them glide towards her across the glassy water. All her life ghosts had hovered at the edge of her vision but never in such numbers, and never walking on water. Now before her eyes they came by the dozen, the white hem of their skirts licking the waves. She lifted her arm to wave to them. She tried to stand and to step towards them. She wanted them to take her in their arms, and to pull her away from the searing silver sea.
One year earlier Charity’s mother had taken her hand and together they had run across the border. There had been no life for them at home, in a country at war with itself. Both Charity’s father and brother had died during their army service. In Eritrea, Christians could be jailed unless they renounced their faith. Their church elder had been executed. In Ethiopia Charity would be able to go to a Christian school, said her mother. She could teach herself Amharic. Yet she still lived in fear. They still went to bed hungry.
On her walk to school Charity met another Eritrean who promised to help her to find work as a maid in Germany. She gave her a printed blouse of white hearts. She said, ‘Europe is where you will not be afraid.’ Six months later Charity stole her mother’s raffia bag and rode a truck into the desert.
No one chooses to be a refugee. Tens of millions of Africans have fled their homes in recent years to escape war, famine and drought. Half of them were under eighteen years old, risking their lives so they, and their families, may live. Charity is one of them, and this is the story that she told me.
She was slender and tall, standing two inches above the other girls in the truck. In Darfur she waited in a mud-walled connection house as other migrants arrived from Sudan, Mali and Chad. Recruiters took some of the boys to the phone shops or cash machines near the bus station. Those with no money were made to call home. If the family did not pay, they would hear the sound of torture. Charity told me that she kept quiet. She did not leave the compound. She had to trust the woman who’d paid for her travel.
Thirty people stood in the back of each Toyota Hilux, clutching phones and bottles of water. At the gates of the desert the Toubou drivers let air out of the tyres for better traction. Charity stood for most of the next week, her feet burning on the bare metal, her head exposed and pounding under the Saharan sun. One pickup lost a wheel and rolled down a dune, crushing its passengers. Another time a dozing Liberian girl fell out, but the convoy did not stop. Days blurred into nights spent around rocky outcrops. In places the dead lay alongside the track, covered and uncovered by the shifting sand.
At the Libyan border a sleek black line of asphalt stretched north towards the sea. But on the outskirts of Tripoli, their pickup was stopped and the refugees taken by one of the fractured militias. Charity was locked in a cell with fifty-three other women, some of whom had been held for almost a year. In the first week two of them gave birth, on the floor, in the filth, passing their babies around to be suckled. Charity slept during the day and prayed through the night that the men would not come. Women who went to the toilet after dark were raped by the guards. Her head still ached from the sun. She had no papers. She was kept in the dark for a month.
The Eritreans were to be traded to another trafficker. The men would be sold on as labourers, the women to serve as prostitutes. But on the day of the trade, an Ethiopian consul happened to come in search of jailed Ethiopians. Charity begged for his help and he, moved by her soft Amharic, asked the militia to free her. Through him she found work as a kind of house slave in Tripoli. Her new owners fed her and beat her. She was too ashamed to call her mother. Instead she telephoned the woman who’d promised to protect her. Two nights later Charity stood outside the house as instructed, terrified and alone on the unlit street. A man in a long woollen jurid cloak approached her and she went with him.
At the water’s edge, the heavy rubber dinghies were lugged through the press of sinewy black bodies. The migrants were divided into ranks of ten and loaded like goats into the craft. The smugglers knelt on the sand to pray then pushed them off, pointing at the sky and ordering, ‘Look at that star. Follow it.’
Charity was climbing onto the ninth or tenth dinghy when it snared on a rock. As it began to lose air the Libyans shouted accusations at each other, waving their guns in the air. She was shoved back, crammed into a larger group then packed into a metal hull that had been beached further along the shore. Libya’s coastline is more than 1,000 miles long. No one knows how many boats are lost en route to Europe, sinking without trace.
None of the passengers were silent now. Those not weeping were calling to God. As soon as their metal boat hit the waves the first of them started to vomit. Ahead the sea seemed endless, without beginning or end. To block out its emptiness, Charity hunkered down with the other women, warmed by their bodies and deafened by the throbbing engine. She took shallow breaths to keep down the sick. Spillings of fuel mixed with seawater burnt her skin.
Five hours later, at dawn, the rising sun drove away the cold as well as the North Star. The tillerman guessed at a heading, out of sight of the dinghies. No phone had a signal. No one had a compass. Around noon the engine ran out of fuel. The metal hull rolled in the swells, baking under the white-hot sky. People sheltered under plastic sheeting and folds of cloth, numbed back into silence. Charity tried to remember the dim coolness of her mother’s thatched hut. She imagined lying on their raffia mat. She was so weary.