‘Amazing the lengths people’ll go to for a handout, in’t it?’
The in’t it? was rhetorical: his truism anticipated no reply. In Cracow and Warsaw (I recalled, as the businessman immersed himself in his columned figures) everyone was saying that Poland would be exempt: the only homogenous country in Central Europe, the only monoculture, blue-eyed Poland thought it would be exempt because ‘the state gives no benefits’. I heard this from a translator so urbane that he could quote at length not only from Tennyson but also from Robert Browning; and in answer I nodded, and resumed work on my heavy meal. But when I was dropped off at the hotel (and stood on the square facing the antique prosthetic leg of Stalin’s Palace of Culture), I shook my head. Someone who has trekked across the Hindu Kush would not be coming to Europe for a shop sandwich. The businessman said,
‘Where are we. What country’s this?’
He meant the country where dark-skinned travellers were being tumbled and scattered by water cannon (followed up with tear gas and pepper spray). I said,
‘Looks like Hungary.’
‘Eh, that bloke there’s got the right idea.’ He paused as he closed his eyes and the bloodless lips mimed a stretch of mental arithmetic. ‘What’s he called?’
I told him.
‘Yeah. Orbán. We ought to be doing likewise in Calais. No choice. It’s the only language they understand.’
Oh no, sir, the language they understand is much harsher than that. The language they understand consists of barrel bombs and nerve gas and the scimitars of incandescent theists. They’re not in search of a nanny state, Mr Vane. It’s more likely that they seek a state that just leaves them alone…
‘Merkel,’ he said. ‘Frau Merkel should take a leaf out of Orbán’s book. She won’t of course. I know you shouldn’t say this, but I think women are too emotional to be heads of state – too tender-hearted. By rights, Merkel should do an Orbán. Recognise what she’s dealing with, namely illegal aliens. Criminal aliens. See? There you go.’
He meant the footage evidently posted by ISIS – a truck exploding in slow motion, three prisoners in orange jumpsuits kneeling on a sand dune, multipronged fighters tearing by in SUVs.
‘Then there’s that.’ He achieved some climactic grand total on his pad, underlined it three times and circled it before tossing the pen aside. ‘Jihadis.’
‘Might be complicated,’ I said.
‘Complicated…Hang about,’ he said with a frown. ‘Silly me. Forgot to factor in the three point five. Give us a minute.’
Perhaps a better name for them, sir, would be takfiri. The takfir accusation (the lethal accusation of unbelief) is almost as old as Islam, but in current usage takfiris, Mr Vane, is sharply derogatory and it means, Muslims who kill Muslims (and not just infidels). And the logic of it goes on from there. If there are militants in the influx, and they act, Geoffrey, then it’s the Muslims of Europe who will suffer; and the takfiris won’t mind that because their policy, here, is the same as Lenin’s during the Russian Civil War: ‘the worse the better’. Is it fanciful, Geoff, to suggest that this lesson is the evil child of the witches in the Scottish play – ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’?
‘Complicated? That’s the understatement of the year.’
Suddenly he became aware of the phone he had reflexively reached for. He inhaled with resignation and said, ‘You know what gets me? The repetitions. You plod through the same things again and again. And it just doesn’t sink in. Not with that one, oh no. Not with her.’
V
Her? I sat up straight.
‘Tell me something,’ he insisted. ‘Why’re they all coming now? They say despair. Despair, they say. But they can’t all have despaired in the same week. Why’re a million of them coming now? Tell me that.’
I regrouped and said, ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to find out. Apparently a safe route opened up. Through the Balkans. They’re all in touch with each other and then there it was on Facebook.’
He went blank or withdrew for a moment. But then he returned. ‘I’ll give them bleeding Facebook. I’ll give them bleeding Balkans. They…They’ve turned their own countries into, into hellholes quite frankly, and now they’re coming here. And even if they don’t start killing us all they’re going to want their own ways, aren’t they. Halal, mosques. Uh, sharia, in’t it. Arranged marriages – for ten-year-old first cousins…But let’s uh be uh, “enlightened” about it. Okay. They’ll have to adapt, and fucking quick about it and all. They’ll have to bow their heads and toe the line. Socially. On the women question and that.’
He closed his computer, and gazed for a moment at its surface and even stroked his knuckles across it.
‘You know, I’ll have to call her back.’ And there was now a sudden weak diffidence in his smile as he looked up and said, ‘Well it is my mum.’
I had to make an effort to dissimulate the scope of my surprise…Shorn of context (the business hotel, the business suit – the expensive posture-pedic shoes, like velvet Crocs), his bland round white-fringed face looked as though it would be happiest, or at least happier, on a village green on a summer afternoon; that face could have belonged to anybody non-metropolitan, a newsagent, a retired colonel, a vicar. With a nod I reached for my electronic cigarette and drew on it.
‘Eighty-one, she is.’
‘Ah well.’ After a moment I said, ‘My mother-in-law’s eighty-six.’ And you see, sir, it’s a long story, but she was the reason we left England; and we never regretted it. The process felt natural for my wife, naturally, but it also felt natural for me. There must’ve been filial love left over after the death of Hilary Bardwell, and it had
