‘No, I bet you don’t. Okay, here’s an idea. Why don’t you pop on a plane and come and tell them that here in Germany? With your approach, so-called? They’d laugh you out of town. Because here they can handle the ABC and the two times two. Unlike some I could mention. Here they happen to understand a thing or two about system. And that’s why they’re the powerhouse of Europe. Go on, pop on a plane. Or is that beyond you too?’
The muted TV screen showed the chancellor in mid-explication, her face patient and reasonable and mildly beseeching…I put the book aside and briefly reminisced about Angela (with the hard g) – Frau Merkel.
I was introduced to her (a handshake and an exchange of hellos) by Tony Blair, in 2007, when she was two years into her first term (and I was spending several weeks on and off in the prime minister’s entourage). We were in the top floor of the titanic new Chancellery: the full bar arrayed on the table, the (as yet spotless) ashtrays, Angela’s humorous and particularising smile. The Chancellery was ten times the size of the White House – where Blair would also squire me a week or two later; but I had no more than a sudden moment of eye contact with President Bush, as he and Tony came up from the subterranean Situation Room (this was the time of the Surge in Iraq). And from Washington we went via London to Kuwait City, and to Basra, and to Baghdad.
Merkel was born in East Germany in the early days of the Cold War…So far, there have been several dozen female heads of state; and I thought then that Angela was perhaps the first who was capable of ruling as a woman. In the summer months of 2015, in the world’s eyes she became the brutal auditress of the Greek Republic; by late September they were calling her Mutti Merkel, as she opened her gates as wide as she could to the multitudes of the dispossessed. Willkomenskultur was the word.
Blair was practically teetotal, but he was visibly charmed and stimulated by Angela Merkel (he was full of praise for her, adding with amused affection that she liked to sit up late and have a lively time), and on the Chancellery roof that evening the British premier could be seen with a beer in his hand, a beer perhaps of festival strength…
This is to some degree true of every human community on earth, but the national poet, here, said long ago of his Germans, with a strain of anguish: how impressive they were singly (how balanced, how reflective, how dry), and how desperately disappointing they were plurally, in groups, in cadres, in leagues, in blocs. And yet here they all were (for now), the Germans, both as a polity and a people, setting a progressive, even a futuristic example to the continent and to the world.
With the refugee crisis of 2015, ‘Europe’, Chancellor Merkel had said, was about to face its ‘historic test’.
III
‘Will you listen to me? Will you listen to me?’
But like a washing machine the businessman had moved on to a quieter cycle. Still tensed, still crouched, but reduced to a sour mutter. The pianist’s shift was apparently at an end, and I was grimacing into a phone myself, trying to hear the questions of a studious young profilist I had talked to in Frankfurt. Eavesdroppers and those active in identity theft might have been tempted to draw near, but the foyer was practically deserted; the businessman and I had the space to ourselves.
‘1949,’ I said, ‘in Oxford. Not Wales – Wales was later. Yes, go ahead. Why did my wife and I move to America? Because…well, it sounds complicated, but it’s an ordinary story. In 2010 my mother Hilary died. She was on the verge of eighty-two. My mother-in-law, Betty, was also eighty-two at the time. So in response to that we moved to New York.’ Yes, and Elena ended a voluntary and much-punctuated exile in London that had lasted twenty-seven years, returning to her childhood home in Greenwich Village. ‘Us now? No. Brooklyn. Since 2011. You get too old for Manhattan.’ We made our way to the final question. ‘This trip? Six countries.’ And ten cities. ‘Oh definitely. And I’m reading all I can find on it, and everyone’s talking about nothing else. Well, I haven’t spent time with any experts – but of course I have impressions.’
Our call wound up. The businessman was going on in his minatory whisper,
‘You know who you remind me of? The hordes of ragamuffins who’re piling into this country even as I speak. You, you just can’t stand on your own two feet, can you? You’re helpless.’
—————
An angular youth from the reception desk approached and handed me a foolscap Manila envelope. In it were Bernhardt’s photographs. Registering this, I felt the rhythm of my unease slightly accelerate. I moved next door into the restaurant, and I fanned them out on the table.
The Europeans you talked to offered different views and prescriptions, but the underfeeling seemed to centre on an encounter with something, something not quite unknown but known only at a distance. The entity accumulating on the borders, the entity for which they were bracing and even rousing themselves to meet with goodwill and good grace, seemed amorphous, undifferentiated, almost insensate – like an act of God or a force of nature.
And it was as if Bernhardt’s camera had set itself the task of individualisation, because here was a black-and-white galère of immediately and endearingly recognisable shapes and faces, bantering, yawning, frowning, grinning, scowling, weeping, in postures of
