Q: Unprovoked?
A: Well something must have provoked him, but it wasn’t me.
Q: You seriously expect us to believe that a distinguished Member of Parliament would behave in this appalling way?
A: The road of expectations is a muddy track with potholes and black ice. I’d never met a politician until I met Mr Lederer but his mad behaviour seems fairly consistent with my impression of the average politician. (General laughter issued from the members of the press.)
Q: What do you know about the petrol bombing of Mr Lederer’s house a few weeks ago?
A: Was it petrol bombed? I didn’t know that. Perhaps that was part of the reason why he was so touchy. A thing like that’s bound to be upsetting.
Q: So why do you think Mr Lederer attacked you?
A: That’s easy. He’s a maniac.
Q: What is the connection between yourself and Mr Lederer’s daughter?
A: Our connection is spiritual, mental and physical. It’s sublime. Love is the greatest thing. It’s all you need. I’d like to tell all the viewers and listeners and readers that love is still alive in the world today. It may not be easy to stumble across but I’ve found it and so can they.
Q: Do you think Mr Lederer can find it?
A: What a very good question. Why shouldn’t he? But it may take a lot of work.
Q: Would you still like to have a ‘chat’ with Mr Lederer?
A: Sure. If he’d listen.
Q: And if he listened, what would you say to him?
♦
Eva Braun — we see a high contrast sepia photograph of a thick-waisted, naked woman caught in a dance pose, on a beach, under a streaked sky. She loves him. She has stood by her man. While Hitler was rising to power she was content not to be married. She didn’t want to stand in the way of his career. Behind every successful dictator…In the Bunker that is no longer a problem. She arrived unexpectedly and announced her decision to stay with him to the end. Love and death thrive in the ruined city. It is pure opera.
♦
A: I would say to him, ‘Sir, politics is all very well in its place, but it’s not the whole answer. We must go further, drive ourselves that bit harder. Let us be rally drivers of the human soul.’
Q: Is it true that you threw down some sort of ‘challenge’ to Mr Lederer and the Crockenfield Blazers?
A: There is one challenge I throw down and it is this: I challenge you to find the light. Look into God’s fog lamps and try not to be dazzled. Pluck out the cat’s eyes of darkness. Replace the flattened battery and the dulled parking lights of evil.
♦
Hitler is fifty-six. He celebrates his birthday in the Bunker. It is a low-key affair. Karl-Otto Saul gives him a finely-detailed scale model of a 350mm mortar. Everyone admires the gesture. Hitler tells how the previous day he was having some blood drawn from his arm in the hope of relieving a venomous headache. The blood blocked the hypodermic needle, spurted, and had to be caught in a beaker. ‘All we needed to do was add some fat and some seasoning and we could have sold it as Führer blood sausage.’
♦
Q: Is it true you used to be a librarian?
A: Yes.
Q: Why did you give it up?
A: Because the repair manual of life is too large a volume to be contained in a single library.
Q: And tell us, what is the significance of the Volkswagen?
A: The Volkswagen is the Chariot of the New Gods.
♦
And now Hitler and Eva Braun are to be married in the Bunker. Depending on your sources you may like to believe that Hitler is riddled with venereal disease, or that he is incapable of sexual intercourse, or, of course, both. Not that it matters now to Eva, not that it matters much to anyone in Berlin any more. Walter Wagner, a municipal councillor wearing a party uniform and a Volkssturm armband, conducts the wedding ceremony. It takes place in the Bunker’s map room. The couple pledge that they are of pure Aryan extraction, though Hitler of course is lying. Eva wears the black silk dress that is Hitler’s favourite. Goebbels and Bormann are the witnesses. Afterwards they retire to drink champagne and talk about the past.
♦
Ishmael was beginning to be the good guy. All right, so he’d lied through his teeth, but there is more than one way to defeat the forces of night, more than one symbolic act that can be performed. And he knew that he’d handled the press with considerable panache and charm, and as he stood there addressing his public, with reporters hanging on his words, recording them and writing them down, he felt very at home.
Night fell. The siege continued. The police trained lights on the house. Marilyn’s father and the Crockenfield Blazers were quiet for most of the night, but they would let off occasional random shots to show they were still in business.
Inside ‘Sorrento’ the siege victims gathered round the television. Recordings of Ishmael’s interview were on every bulletin. He watched himself with pleasure. He was somewhat masked by Marilyn and the sound was poor, but taking all the difficulties into consideration, he thought it was great television.
The media were now telling a simple and appealing story. Ishmael and his followers, whom the television news had dubbed the Children of Enlightenment, or even C of E, were harmless but eccentric zealots who had popped in on Andrew Lederer just at the very moment that he had gone completely off his head and started wanting to shoot everything in sight. If a passing policeman hadn’t raised the alarm there might well have been an orgy of death.
Fat Les sat in a swivel chair, drinking neat gin, and reflected that the part about the orgy of death was all too true, and he knew whose death it was likely to have been.
After a clip of Ishmael speaking there was a studio discussion with a couple of MPs and a psychiatrist and they offered the opinion that with the pressure of modern politics being so extreme it was a wonder that some politician hadn’t snapped before now.
♦
Renata and Max, her current — for want of a better word — lover, sit on Max’s tubular steel settee. They have drinks, joints, and a hand inside each other’s clothing. It is late. The Abbey Road album is on the stereo and they are watching, as they often do, a sample from Max’s extensive collection of blue videos.
♦
Night passed slowly in ‘Sorrento’. Ishmael talked with Fat Les.
‘You know,’ Fat Les said, ‘I think we were all fucking insane to be conned by your glib tongue in the first place.’
‘You weren’t conned,’ Ishmael replied calmly.
‘What could we have hoped to achieve? How could we have hoped to take on this lot? They’re armed for Christ’s sake!’
‘Winning and losing aren’t the only issues. Win or lose it would still have been symbolic.’
‘Symbolic, my arse.’
‘You had your free will, Les. You didn’t have to do what I asked.’
♦
Max adjusts the contrast as the film, which has no titles, shudders into life. There is an external establishing shot of a supermarket. A young, wholesome-looking girl in a fur coat is seen to enter. We enter with her and see her wandering between the rows of merchandise, selecting items and slipping them under her coat. The camera lets us glimpse that she is naked beneath the coat — well, functionally naked, naked but for the high heels, suspender belt and stockings that this genre demands.
She selects items carefully for their phallic nature — a cucumber, bananas, a bottle of ketchup. This goes on for a while until a man (a customer? store detective? supermarket employee? — the film fails to make this clear) begins to follow her up and down the aisles.
The glimpses of nakedness which were previously just for the camera are now directed at the man, and the girl becomes increasingly teasing and explicit. She runs the cucumber up and down her thigh and pokes it around in her pubic region. The man takes the hint and before long he is penetrating her with a handily shaped bottle of olive oil.