Jimfish by Christopher Hope Read Free Book Online

the once-imposing Protection Rampart, now torn by gaping holes. A smiling border guard happily helped him to clamber through a gap into the western side of town, where an official greeted him with an envelope stuffed with a hundred German marks. Jimfish understood not a word but his benefactor’s demeanour told him that the cash was ‘welcome money’, a gift to spend in the giganticstreet-party that engulfed Berlin. So it was that each day he joined the joyous, tipsy crowds carousing from Karl-Marx-Allee in the East to the Kurfürstendamm in the West, returning in the evening to sleep in his old cell at Stasi Headquarters, barely aware of the days flying by. Before he knew it, November had gone and with it all but the last pfennigs from his stash of welcome money. From what he had seen of the heart of newly unified Berlin, Jimfish felt that the welcome cooled as his money dried up, and he knew he would have to move on.
    One evening in the midst of the singing, dancing, ecstatic tumult, Jimfish noticed a small man, well muffled against the winter cold, wearing a black conical astrakhan hat. He seemed alarmed by the fierce joy of the crowds, shaking his head and repeating again and again: ‘It’s time to change, it’s time to change.’
    â€˜What? Do you mean the way this country is run?’ Jimfish asked him.
    â€˜No, no,’ said the little man. ‘This is not change. It’s anarchy. I mean it’s time for me to change my clothes and have them burnt. I have done so every morning all my life. But my staff deserted me to gape at this hysterical rabble and I’ve not put on a clean suit for days.’
    â€˜But why burn your suit after wearing it just once?’ Jimfish asked.
    â€˜To protect myself against radioactive contamination. Even when I went to visit the Queen in Buckingham Palace in London I took a fresh suit for each day, as well as my own sheets. Her Majesty made me a Knight GrandCross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, but I’d give my knighthood away right now for a fresh change of clothes. And a shower.’
    â€˜Well, if it’s contamination that worries you, then steer clear of me,’ warned Jimfish. ‘I’ve spent time in Chernobyl putting out the fire and my radioactive reading is probably off the scale.’
    â€˜If you’ve been in the Soviet Union then yours will be socialist radiation from the peaceful atom. And it is to a semblance of socialist order that I must return very soon. Do you happen to know what Lenin said in 1903?’
    Jimfish had to confess he did not.
    â€˜He said: “Where one or two socialists are gathered, there the glass must be raised.” From which part of the world are you?’
    â€˜Africa,’ said Jimfish.
    â€˜I have a great friend in Africa. He runs Libya and comes to visit us often. We are brothers under the skin. He is called “The Guide” and I am “The Genius of the Carpathians” or, if you prefer, the “Danube of Thought”. As a socialist you should get out of this country right now before you catch whatever contagion is on the loose and go back to Africa.’
    â€˜That’s not possible. I have nothing. No money and no transport,’ Jimfish confessed.
    â€˜Then come with me,’ said the little man in the black conical hat who burnt his suits each day. ‘I have a helicopter waiting.’
    He hurried Jimfish into a huge palace, ablaze with light. ‘This is, or was, the home of my old friend Erich, the rulerof the German Democratic Republic, until he made an unfortunate series of missteps.’
    Jimfish gazed at the blazing forests of chandeliers, neon and fairy lights that lit up the vast palace, admiring especially the veritable zoo of stuffed animal heads everywhere on the walls.
    â€˜He owns a lot of lights, your friend.’
    The Genius of the Carpathians nodded. ‘This palace is known to locals as “Erich’s