The Hurricane Party Read online

  The gifts were always custom-designed for each individual manager. A woman might favour a particular eau de cologne that was, of course, impossible to find anywhere in the city, but Hanck’s father had miraculously found some. Another manager might be especially fond of Highland Cream. And just by chance Hanck Sr happened to have a bottle inside a shiny bag.

  That was why the German city of Cologne and the Scottish Highlands came to have a special meaning for Hanck. As bribes go, these types of Christmas gifts were quite modest. There was really no reason to feel ashamed, even though he did feel a sort of shame every time he tipped his hat and repeated the phrase, ‘Good day, is the manager in?’ But it wasn’t shame over doing something immoral; rather, he was filled with an emotion that he didn’t recognise, an uncomfortable feeling that he couldn’t name and thus associated with something shameful.

  Perhaps there was no name for that emotion, nothing other than ‘Highlands’ or ‘Cologne’. At any rate, it became associated with the smell of whisky and eau de cologne, and the insidious, greedy grins on the faces of the recipients as they stretched out their hands for the gifts – grown-ups who were addressed as ‘manager’ and were regarded with respect and perhaps even fear by their subordinates.

  Along with the onset of this emotion he developed skills that he would have preferred not to have acquired. Skills that upset the fragile balance of things. Hanck liked clarity and order but to keep a semblance of order in his own life, he was forced to develop a double vision that was extremely unsettling. Every time he saw through something, he had to overlook it. Seeing through and overlooking: that was the lesson.

  His father tried to encourage the boy by saying: ‘People are vile . . . and wonderful!’ No matter what his intentions had been with these annual greasings-of-the-palm, they extracted a price that he could never have foreseen. It was as if, in the bottom of every gift bag, there was a small portion of respect that the son had learned to save up for the adults, the authorities, but that he gave away piece by piece. After a number of Christmases it was gone. The stockpile was empty.

  On the way home from these bribery missions, the boy would sit next to his father in the car, feeling empty and exhausted, worn out and disillusioned, at the young age of ten, but he retained a forgiving outlook worthy of a full-grown man.

  His father would say, using one of his constant euphemisms: ‘Look how easy that was. You’re very clever!’

  ‘At what?’ asked Toby. ‘At deceiving people?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hanck told his son. ‘That was no doubt what my father meant.’

  ‘Is that why you felt ashamed?’

  He wanted to avoid discussing the other part, so he said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s important to tell the truth.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hanck. ‘That’s preferable.’

  Toby thought about this for a moment. As usual, Hanck worried that he might have said too much. Surely not everything had to be passed on to the next generation. But at least Toby had inherited some of the lighter side. He said, ‘I’d like to ride in a car sometime too.’

  ‘It’s nothing special,’ said Hanck.

  The boy got up from the kitchen table and went into his room for a while. He rummaged around and then came back. ‘Was it like this one?’ He had an old toy car in his hand. Saussyr had given it to him as a birthday present. He had never really understood how to play with it. Now he rolled the car along the edge of the tablecloth.

  ‘They made a noise too,’ said Hanck. The boy asked how. Hanck tried to remember how the car had sounded and then mimicked the sound with his voice. Toby had no idea what the real sound might be and accepted his father’s version without protest. Soon he could produce an exact imitation.

  Unlike many of his peers, Hanck decided early on to learn to read and write. ‘So typical for an obsolete!’ the shopkeeper had exclaimed with great enthusiasm whenever the subject had come up. As usual, he had drawn a hasty conclusion by linking Hanck to obsoletes. Hanck’s only intention in acquiring such skills was to find a job in the city and avoid ending up ‘out there’.

  With no merits other than his ability to read and write, he had won a position in an insurance company, a firm with a long and venerable past. It had survived numerous disasters.

  But what had once been an entire industry with countless competing companies had withered to a more marginal enterprise, catering to modest families who couldn’t afford to pay for protection for their lives and possessions. The Clan was probably right in realising that it was better to prevent crimes and unfortunate events than to offer compensation to the victims after the fact. It was a simple principle that turned out to be quite difficult to implement.

  Hanck, who was strong and tall for his age, was hired to be an investigator. His job was to find out whether the damage or crime for which an insured individual was claiming compensation had actually taken place. It was a job that in the past had been performed by the police, but it had ended up in the hands of the insurance companies for the simple reason that the power of the police had diminished.

  A new-found calm had reigned, a peace that was still young, an entirely new era, and no one knew how long it would last. There were still people alive who could tell stories in a completely trustworthy fashion about other times, about chaos and lawlessness, even there in the heart of civilisation. All instruments for upholding order – registries, archives and libraries – had been emptied of flammable materials. Everything had to be burned. Not a victory fire or a celebratory fire or a sacrificial fire, but in order to provide heat, to keep the cold at bay, for the sake of the survivors. And with that, all official offices and all regulations had been burned up; the whole Administration with all its paper-shuffling, the whole bureaucracy had vanished in one thick cloud of smoke, never to return, or so some people thought. Like a peat bog of archives.

  One of the few books that Hanck had read dealt with a bureaucratic process that occurred during the entire twentieth century. At that time the bureaucracy was presented as a living organism, with its own soul. The civil servants were interchangeable, and each cell in this organism was constantly reproducing itself.

  The organism might have various purposes, but common to them all was administering decisions for which no one wanted to take personal responsibility. With its all-consuming and all-encompassing power, it was even above the church and the clergymen who were supposed to preach God’s word. It had a soul but no heart. It was the perfect hybrid of the world of plants and the animal kingdom.

  That was why all sorts of brutality could be administered without troubling those in charge. Each person was responsible for his own small, carefully defined area – something which demanded a strong work ethic and strict discipline. Maintaining this discipline could fill a civil servant with a great sense of satisfaction. His conscience was clear.

  In the book that he read Hanck had recognised numerous observations. It was like some unusually complicated and long-winded report on the activities in one of the departments at the insurance company, but he sensed a negative tone in the author’s voice that he didn’t care for. Hanck appreciated law and order. He regarded this type of regulation as the only defence of the weak against raw power.

  Over the years he had witnessed an enormous amount of misery. A large part of his job involved working in the field, among the victims. Although in his view he was acting on their behalf, he hadn’t found it at all difficult to confront people who had fallen prey to misfortune with suspicion and insinuating questions. Fraud was rampant, and he had learned to see right through many intricate scams, some of which he would have actually enjoyed recounting to his son. But as time passed, he preferred to forget those years. He could dismiss them as summarily as his father had dealt with his time ‘out there’.

  It was during that epoch that the Clan had consolidated its position. Up until then its influence had been on a different level, as if in a higher department where its activities had a different substance, a greater dign
ity. For a while people had hoped that the paterfamilias, with his sense of style and integrity, would maintain the strategy. But he grew old and tired and didn’t have the energy to withstand the new trends, the new ideas about an expanded involvement, an influence that was both deeper and more widespread.

  Now it reached into the very heart of every citizen’s life. Hanck had watched this happen during his years at the insurance company; it may have been the only lasting insight he had gained there, a troubling insight that was difficult to convey in amusing stories to his son.

  Time after time he had seen the same pattern repeated – how humble people who lived in straitened circumstances but who, year after year, scraped together the money to pay for the premium that would secure their lives and their modest possessions, would wake up in the middle of the night to see the walls ablaze in the hovel that was their home.

  Sometimes the fires were carelessly set by henchmen who were even more lit up themselves. In those cases the flames could be put out before the whole building burned to the ground. But more often the fires were well set. And in those cases the ancient, desiccated structure would flare up like kindling. When the deliberately delayed fire brigade finally arrived on the scene, only a bare patch of ground remained, and the family was homeless.

  Time after time Hanck had determined that the fires were arson, and the company had agreed. A new house would be erected on the old site, made from even worse materials than before, yet habitable for the distressed but grateful family, who faithfully continued to pay their premiums.

  When the new house later caught fire in a similar fashion, there were only two paths to take: either intimate that the fires were part of a campaign to acquire customers for the Clan’s protection operation, or intimate that the residents of the house were pyromaniacs. Over time the insurance company had been forced to take the latter path. And with that, the family would stop paying the premiums, choosing instead to join the Clan’s circle of customers. No one could survive without protection.

  It was in connection with one such process that Hanck had drifted into a new career. He had gone out to inspect a big charred pile on a windswept piece of land outside the city. An old warehouse which, before it burned down, had been filled with junk. The owner was an old man, a collector, who went round to the estates of the deceased and to rubbish heaps, gathering up whatever had once had or still had or someday might have value. There were plenty of characters like him; most lived an isolated existence as worn-out, filthy loners. This old man was no exception.

  He ate and slept in a cabin that had escaped the flames, and when Hanck, wearing a mask and gloves, sat at a table with a greasy tablecloth in the kitchen, talking to the old fellow, he noticed that the whole place was filled with small cases. There were cases made of plastic and dried-up leather, along with some that tried to resemble plastic or leather, in all sorts of colours and designs, and yet they all had a certain similarity. They had been stored out there in the warehouse, and the old man had laboured all night to rescue the lot from destruction.

  Their contents were unknown. Hanck never got around to asking. The old man wasn’t much of a talker. ‘Berserkers! Berserkers!’ was all he could manage to say.

  Later, when Hanck wrote up the report, he neglected to include those cases among the old man’s total assets. It was one of his last reports. A few months later he was fired. And six months after that, the whole company went bankrupt. It was said that the company could no longer fight against the Clan.

  It was not a nice world to describe to a son. Yet Hanck was forced to touch on the subject, especially when the boy entered his teenage years and started to think about the state of the world. Certain fundamental inferences regarding the city government were obvious to anyone who could think for himself.

  The Clan ruled over everything, both big and small, and had done so for such a long time that it had become an accepted fact that might even be described as ‘natural’. Schools and their teaching materials were precluded from presenting any alternatives to this system, since both the schools and their teaching materials were protected and financed by the Clan itself.

  Sensitive individuals, especially young people, might perceive a claustrophobic lack of alternatives.

  The very word ‘claustrophobic’, designating a specific emotion, had been given an official, authorised definition, which had led to a great spread in usage, turning it into a catchword. It could be found in popular texts distributed by young men on the street; it could be seen scribbled on the walls. The fact that it was now appearing in marketing ads probably meant that it was being co-opted, or at any rate was on its way to losing some of its critical punch, a politically explosive force that had been building for a generation.

  The obstinate and anti-authoritarian streak in Hanck could sometimes cause him to doubt the good of the reigning order, but, as so often was the case, his inherited tendency to gloss over things usually took the upper hand.

  ‘But it was thanks to that poor old man that you’re even here!’ he might say to his son.

  By the time that story came out, the boy was nearly grown. Hanck was prepared; he’d had many years to think through the whole episode. The childish query: ‘Who’s my mamma?’ or the more reproachful: ‘Why don’t I have a mother?’ were easy to dismiss with palliative euphemisms.

  Finally, one day a half-grown young man pressed his father to the wall and said: ‘I have to know!’

  Then Hanck was able to reply: ‘That old man’s misfortune turned out to be my good fortune, because that was where I met your mother.’

  The old man’s cabin stood at the very edge of the city, far beyond the old suburbs. If you continued on in the same direction, you would soon reach no-man’s-land, which stretched all the way to the border. Hanck had never gone that far.

  He stood in the yard between the old man’s cabin and the burnt-down warehouse, looking across a boggy field. It was a day with weak sunlight; the rainy season was over. Out on the field scrawny sticks poked up from the ground. They were coppice shoots that would soon produce scanty leaves which would be almost instantly burnt away by the sunlight. After that the ground would become sun-scorched and the field would be filled with gaping cracks.

  The land was unusable. A couple of centuries in the past it had been fertile soil, and the warehouse had been a barn filled with hay and grain.

  On the other side of the field stood a cluster of ramshackle buildings or hovels. A column of smoke rose up from a chimney.

  ‘Who lives over there?’ asked Hanck.

  ‘Etherists,’ said the old man. He had calmed down and become more talkative after a while. ‘Sneezers.’

  ‘And they didn’t see anything?’

  The old man shook his head. ‘They sleep in the evenings. Or they fornicate.’

  After Hanck had said goodbye to the old man, he walked straight across the field to have a talk with the Sneezers. He had only vague notions about the group; he hadn’t known such people even existed any more. It was one of the sects that had arisen after the Fourth Wave, the largest to date. It had been impossible to count the number of victims; entire communities had been wiped out. It had taken its place in history as a turning point, since that was when the borders were closed and the obligatory quarantine areas were instituted.

  ‘The ones that your father lived in?’ asked Toby.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hanck. ‘When he was forced to stay there.’

  ‘How many people died back then?’

  The boy had a hard time with maths and abstract quantities. Hanck could have told him any number over ten and it wouldn’t have made any difference.

  ‘A billion billion?’

  ‘Probably, yes,’ said Hanck.

  ‘But not you or Mamma?’

  ‘We weren’t even born back then.’ That was another fact that the boy had a hard time comprehending.

  It was even harder to explain who the Sneezers were. The pandemics had reawakened ancient phenomena such as
groups of St Vitus’s dancers, flagellants and others. Some became penitents, others caroused to the bitter end. People threw hurricane parties, even though there wasn’t a breath of wind.

  The last time Hanck was alone with his father, he heard about the Aronites, one of the many sects ‘out there’. One of his father’s workmates had run into them.

  The man in question had got lost. The work team had been busy clearing up after a storm, securing a transport line. The man had gone astray, and after several days on foot, he had run into a group of people on a thoroughfare. Five women carrying some sort of tabernacle. It was just a simple panel made of boards with a handle, but in the middle of the sacred object was a figure that was supposed to represent ‘St Aron of the New World’. The figure had oily black hair and was clad in a white suit with wide trouser legs, a high collar at his neck, stripes and gold buttons. His voice was said to cure the sick.

  The workmate was well-treated by the women. They pitched camp and invited him to spend the night in their company. The figure, that strangely attired doll, was served wine and bread, and in some odd way everything worked out.

  The women worshipped the saint and had dedicated their lives to serving him. They were on their way to a grand meeting where he would appear before the public.

  The workmate was also offered wine to drink, and when his glass was empty, he was given more. The wine emboldened his tongue, and he asked whether the saint did everything that a man does with his wife. He was told that such was the case. The women took out a crude but lovingly polished forked branch and demonstrated.

  He then asked whether the women wouldn’t prefer a more blood-filled saint, one that ate and drank and spoke more clearly. They said that they would.

  Late that night while the women slept, he took apart the stuffed doll, pulled on the outfit, and enjoyed himself all night long.