The Human Pool by Chris Petit Read Free Book Online

recorders we would get him off-record, foaming at the mouth about dirty foreigners and Jews and all the rest.
    â€˜Sounds fun?’ Carswell had asked at our first meeting. I had nodded. I didn’t say that I was happiest when I wasn’t having to be me. Carswell, by contrast, was one of the super-confident, fluent in all areas of exchange, especially those of the heart, followed closely by a proper dress sense. Carswell was the man other men wanted to be, and he went out of his way to make himself attractive to both sexes, and, above all, to Dora. It wasn’t hard to see why she had fallen.
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    Several coffees after Siegfried’s departure I was not tired and could not face my hotel, which smelt of grime, saturated fat, and industrial-strength cleaner. I decided to go to the airport early and got a taxi to take me back to the paper yard on the way. The driver was young, with a depressing taste for early Pink Floyd. He agreed to wait twenty minutes for an extra twenty marks, not bad for sitting and listening to ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.’
    The gates to the yard were locked, but the perimeter fence was easy to crawl under. (The reason for the dogs, perhaps.) I heard the big diesel engines first, and had time to position myself behind a paper stack. Two big container lorries left, followed by the Merc and the BMW. The Alsatian was sitting in the front passenger seat of the Merc, lit up by the lights of the BMW behind.
    Everyone was gone. The big shed door was unlocked. Everything had been stripped out. It was like no one had ever been there.
    Frankfurt airport was the polar opposite to the paper yard, a regulated and authorised world of arrival and departure, of sponsored consumption, corporate politeness, and, above all, glass. Early morning and the first transatlantic flights were coming in.

Hoover
    FRANKFURT
    FRANKFURT, NEARLY SIX DECADES ON: the airport was a city in itself. Its efficiency and the speed at which we were processed took me by surprise. The flight—apart from the distraction of the chicken-or-beef moment—had remained another metaphor for death, of which, as you grow old, there are too many. Passengers waited under the harsh light of the arrivals hall at the baggage carousel, a ritual that never failed to remind me of one last game at tired children’s parties. Happy landings, time zones totally out of whack. Having had time to think, I decided I was running away from Mary’s reproving silence, which was absolute now, and from the fear of medical diagnosis. Karl-Heinz was just a sideshow, a distraction, like Betty Monroe, once so beautiful and now everything forgotten in senility. The thrill of being old: visiting friends who are sicker than you.
    The new Frankfurt was as big a shock as the bombed-out shell had been. It stood as a testament to the corporate urbanisation and suburbanisation of Europe; and to think, one plan at the end of the war had been to turn the whole of Germany to pasture. Everything looked cosmetic and neatly fenced, as if to say that Germany had given up any designs on lebensraum, and was content with its lot. Plenty of glass said that it had nothing to hide. In the city there was no sign of Speer’s triumphalist vision, though in the swankily designed super-towers that dominated the centre, you could see the aggressive braggadocio of international corporatism. This was the real union forged out of the ruins of war. The universal business logos of peacetime profit were everywhere.
    I have never trusted what they—‘they’ being the several overlapping interests that decided these things—had done to Germany, but I have always admired the smooth switch from expansionist, genocidal policies into something so thoroughly acceptable and apparently house-trained. The irony was obvious. Like the Japanese, the Germans got the hang of peace quicker than their European conquerors.
    It goes without saying that I