They are bright, polite, smartly dressed young people, who Victor and Lizzie met when they spent a year in Cambridge. After the eccentric Gruber, who might at any time say something embarrassing, they seem very normal and unthreatening and easy to get along with. Victor shakes their hands and exchanges minor news. They take him out to their little electric car (fossil fuels are verboten in the new Green Berlin) and head off in the direction of their Schoneberg apartment where he is to stay till he has found accommodation of his own.
“But I’ve forgotten if you’ve ever been here before?” says Franz.
“Strangely enough no. Very provincial of me, I know, not to have visited the capital of Europa!”
The two Germans laugh, pleased.
“Come now Victor,” says Renate, “surely even an Englishman knows that the capital of Europa is Brussels!”
“Well you know what they say: the President of the Commission sits in Brussels but when he puts in a claim for expenses it’s Chancellor Kommler who signs the form.”
The Germans smile. These bantering exchanges, with their little hidden barbs of jealousy, are the bread-and-butter of contacts between young Euro-professionals all over the continent, as they shake down into a single, transnational class.
“Well,” says Franz, “how about a little tour of this city of ours before we head for home?”
They drive through bright modern streets: tidy parks, tastefully restored old buildings. They drive past the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. They go down the Kurfurstendamm. Franz points out the Volkskammer and the TV Tower from the gloomy days of the DDR. They drive along the boundary fence of Lichtenberg II, reputedly the largest Underclass estate in Europa, looking across with a small frisson (rather as an earlier generation might have looked across the famous Wall) at the monolithic apartment blocks within, where live the gastarbeiters, the unemployed, the outcasts of Europa’s prosperous new order.
“Of this we are not proud,” says Renate.
Then all three of them, almost simultaneously, sigh and say: “But it seems this is the price of stability.”
“Ja, and we shouldn’t forget that the Lichtenbergers have a guaranteed income, healthcare, roofs over their heads,” says Franz as he turns the car away from the gloomy perimeter, back into the bright prosperity of the real Berlin. “It’s more than you can say for the poor in most of the world.”
He shrugs resignedly, defensively, and changes the subject to more cheerful things. “Now Victor, I seem to recall you have a weakness for VR, I must show you the phantasium. It is the Mecca for all the VR aficionados in the city.”
“Sounds good!” Victor laughs. He loves VR arcades. They make him feel seventeen again. They give him a sense of wildness and dangerousness which is otherwise almost entirely lacking from his tidy and air-conditioned life.
He and Franz plunge into the glowing electronic cave of the Phantasium, with the agreeable, conspiratorial feeling that men have when they get together without their women. (Renate has declined to come in, and headed off on another errand.)
Of course, they have VR in Cambridge too (they also have Underclass estates), but the Phantasium is on a wholly different scale. Victor gives a small, impressed whistle. In an enormous dark chamber, long rows of cages made of plastic tubing stretch into the distance.
And in nearly every cage, a youth squirms and writhes alone inside a suspended control suit that encloses his arms, legs and face, while he battles in imaginary landscapes against cybernetic phantoms that he alone can see and touch…
Other youths wander up and down the rows, sometimes peering into small monitoring screens that give a taste of the electronic dreams and nightmares on offer: “The South Invades,” “Berserkers of Islam,” “Gene-Lab Catastrophe,” “Pump-Action Killer,” “UC Break-out!”…
“Now that last one is good,” says Franz. “The subject matter is in poor taste I admit, but the graphics and tactiles are brilliant.”
Victor smiles, runs his credit card over the reader and straps himself into the control suit. Soon he is cheerfully battling against a murderous gang of immigrants and benefit-claimants who have broken out of their concrete estate and are terrorising the good citizens in the neighbouring suburbs. (All educated Europeans know that the Social Compromise is necessary to contain inflation but how they are haunted by those outcasts behind their concrete walls!)
“Yeah,” he agrees, climbing out. “Pretty sophisticated stuff.”
At the end of this row of games an archway labelled Liebespielen marks the beginning of an inner sanctum where the games are discreetly boxed in with plywood and have names like ‘Oral Heaven’ and ‘Lust Unlimited.’ The two young men, Franz and Victor, glance surreptitiously through the gateway: Franz gives a hearty German laugh.
Later, back in Franz and Renate’s apartment, Vince retires to his room and plugs in his lap-top so it can replenish itself with nourishing streams of information. Presently he calls up Lizzie.
“Oh it’s you, Boo Boo dear,” she says. (How did they start these awful names?) “Did you have a good flight?”
“Not bad at all.”
“What’s their flat like?”
“Oh, like ours really, only bigger.”
“I’ve got nearly got everything sorted for me to come over. Should be with you by the end of next week.”
“Great.”
“You don’t sound very pleased, Boo Boo!”
For a moment, Victor looks at the face of his beloved and sees this is so, sees that the connection between them is an anxious one, one that exists at the surface only. Deep down neither has touched the other at all. Not even once. Terrified, he blots the insight from his mind.
“Of course I’m pleased, Liz-Liz. It’s going to seem really strange just being on my own.”
“Hmmm,” says Lizzie, “I think perhaps I should let you stew on your own for a week on two longer, Boo Boo, and then perhaps you will learn to appreciate me a bit more!”
Afterwards, Victor can’t sleep. He switches on his laptop again and goes to a news channel.
Every playground in Europa, it seems, is to be resurfaced in a new rubberised substance called Childsafe, following a tragic accident in Prague when a child fell from a swing… New standards for food hygiene are to be announced by the Commissioner for Health… The sprawling and impoverished Federation of Central Asia is preparing once again for war with its neighbours. A vast crowd swirls round a giant statue of a soldier in heroic pose. The crowd chants. “Death! Death! Death!” “Death to the blasphemers!” “Death for the Motherland is sweeter than a lover’s kiss!” Thousands of fists are thrust up in unison into the air. And the statue gouts real blood from a dozen gaping wounds…
Victor leans forward closer to the screen. All over Europa, with its safe children’s playgrounds and its pure and hygienic food, healthy and well-fed people are leaning forward like him to watch this reckless energy, this crazy camaraderie with death…
Every day, according to the news report, citizens of Central Asia queue in their thousands to donate blood for the statue. They are poor and underfed, very often, and can ill afford to give away their lifeblood, but they keep on coming anyway: Never mind that Central Asia’s hospitals have no blood for transfusions, never mind that the needles used for the donations are reused again and again and that AIDS is rampant. The statue’s wounds must flow.
Victor switches off and goes to a window: Faint smudges of stars are visible in the city sky. He tries to remember which one of those constellations is Cassiopeia.