The German guys I got to know in Berlin respected me because I was Argentinian. Argentina was a country toward which they felt enormous gratitude. And you know why? According to them, Hitler didn’t die in the bunker of the Chancellery, as the official version has it, but escaped in a submarine via the Baltic, went halfway around the world, and ended up in Argentina. They’re convinced that he landed in Patagonia with Eva Braun, and went to live by a lake near Bariloche, in one of the safe houses built by the Third Reich in case of defeat. He changed his name to Adolf Schütelmayor and died at the age of seventy-one. There’s a documentary—I don’t know if you know it, Consul—in which they show the luxurious mansion you could only reach from the lake, with watchtowers and vast rooms in the imperial style of Speer. Did you know that? Then, when Perón died in Argentina, he moved to Paraguay and changed his name again, to Kurt Bruno Kirchner. He traveled throughout Latin America, he even visited Colombia.
But let me pick up the story where I left off, in Berlin.
As I said, being Argentinian made me popular in political circles. I was still young, still a novice, so I had to bring myself up-to-date on the basics, and in spite of being in Germany I became interested in American groups. The first was a kind of great universal convention called Aryan Nation, but from there I moved on to something much more interesting called The Order, a kind of secret society founded in the United States in 1983 by two amazing guys, David Lane and Robert Jay Mathews.
Lane was a fantastic guy, a genius. He wrote something wonderful called the 88 Precepts. Did you know that double 8 means Heil Hitler? H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, you see. He was a crazy guy. The son of an alcoholic and a drug addict, he was sent to an orphanage that gave him up for adoption by a Lutheran pastor. That’s why he grew up with an extraordinary anger and resentment, but since he was an intelligent kid he wanted to do something with that hate and eventually founded The Order. The guys had balls, and very soon it turned into a well-structured and financed organization. They raised more than four million dollars through robberies and assaults and organized military training camps. I mean, they weren’t playing with water pistols! They had a plan of defense, and then, in the end, they blew it. It always happens. Lane died in 2007 while in prison, in Indiana, from an epileptic fit. He was due for release in 2035. His most famous saying is the fourteen words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
There was another very crazy and very beautiful thing I learned about. It was called Wotanism, an idea that came from Jung, you know Jung, don’t you? It was in an essay entitled Wotan, about the Norse God Odin, the Aryan God, and of course, Lane liked it because Wotanism was an ancestral vision of the world similar to the archetype of racial purity in National Socialism, and in addition it had similarities to his idea of man’s natural savage condition.
He even managed to create something called the Temple of Wotan, with his Sacred Book of the Aryan Tribes. They’re crazy when it comes to the subject of race, I agree, but they have a mysticism that I really like; out of all that, as I’ve said, what mattered to me were the methods. The last thing that Lane did before he died, to show the kind of guy he was, was to write a kind of short novel called KD Rebel, which is set in a mountain refuge where there’s a colony of Wotanists who go down to the cities to persuade blonde white girls to come to the colony, and once there force them to serve as “polygamous procreators,” in order to keep the production line of the Aryan race going permanently.
Anyway, I continued my education in Berlin, noting down what I saw, learning a lot about the groups I saw on the streets. To me they seemed well intentioned but very superficial. That could be seen, for example, in their dependence on something so frivolous and baseless as the craze for soccer. Let me talk a little about this. I have nothing against the game itself, which is entertaining, but how can you sustain a political ideal that depends on whether a group of men manage to put the ball into the opposite net? Do you think that demonstrates anything? Especially when the teams include blacks, Russians, Latin Americans, and even Arabs, where’s your race worship then?
Look, being Argentinian, I like soccer, of course I do. I follow Messi and Di María and especially Tévez, who’s a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, you can see the scars of poverty on him. Him, I do like. The boy’s a gem. He comes from Fort Apache, one of the most run-down suburbs of Buenos Aires. When he was six months old his mother abandoned him, and when he was five his father was murdered, twenty-three bullet wounds. Can you imagine? When he was a baby he spilled boiling water on his face and neck, that’s where he gets those horrible scars from. They are the traces of his life and I think they’re beautiful. The boy is like a god.
Look at me, getting off the subject again.
As I was saying, these German guys channeled their anger badly, did superficial things with it, made violence a mere outlet for hate. You never get anywhere that way! It’s good to feel anger, but you have to use it for something intelligent. How do you think nations were formed? Through anger and hate, of course, but with a plan in mind. All human wars are based on that. From hate and anger heroes are born. They are the people who succeed in leading a collective to victory. You can’t fight against someone you love. Respect, yes. You can respect your enemy and honor him, but if you have him in front of you, you put a bullet in his chest. That’s the law of human history. How do you think revolutions have been made? To invent the guillotine you have to have real anger, don’t you think? The Bolsheviks in Moscow, too, and the English bombing Dresden and the Crusaders in the Holy Land and the Turks in Gallipoli and the Japanese in Manchuria and the Chinese in the Boxer Rebellion and the Spanish in America and the Aztecs cutting up the Toltecs and the Chichimecs with knives. Hate is everywhere, without it wars wouldn’t work. How can you tell someone to go out and kill people he doesn’t know, people he’s never seen in his life and who’ve done nothing to him, if you haven’t instilled hate in him? The really dangerous people are those who kill without feeling hate. That’s the most inhuman thing there is!
But let me carry on with my story.
I don’t even know where I was going.
One day, in Kreuzberg, at a meeting of the National Democratic Party of Germany, listening to a talk by Udo Voigt on the need to review the Nuremberg Laws, I again became aware of strange things happening. The platform on which Udo was speaking started to move, as if driven by powerful waves, everything was moving at a frantic rhythm. The wall of the stage started to fall in drops of acid onto the platform and the panelists, who didn’t seem to move and just kept listening to the talk. I clutched my chair with both hands, afraid of falling to the floor, and what I saw next was even more terrifying: the sky was turning lavender and making whirlpools that swirled around Udo’s words. I started to choke. I wasn’t aware of falling to the floor and the next image I had was a corridor with fluorescent lights following one after another on the ceiling, like that scene from Carlito’s Way.
When I got to the hospital I had a panic attack.
I saw flashes coming in through the windows and tried to take refuge in a surgical unit. Of course they stopped me, but it took six strong men. There was a bit of damage that, luckily, was covered by social security because I was known to be a psychiatric patient. They wired me up and started pumping drugs into my body intravenously, Chlorpromazine and other antipsychotics; I sank into something like a cauliflower heart, but made of jelly: a half-solid world where everything I touched stuck to my hand and tasted sweet.
Then I saw a knife or perhaps a surgical instrument, God knows what it was, and felt a terrible desire to pass it across my abdomen. Not to plunge it in, but to cut the skin from side to side. I rushed at the knife. I wanted to expel the wave of poison I was carrying inside. The people in the hospital thought I was going to hit the other patients or the nurses, which hadn’t even crossed my mind. They grabbed hold of me and tied me to the bed with leather straps on my arms. I started to feel an itch in my nose, in my cheeks. I screamed, begging them to scratch my scalp and behind my ears, but nobody wanted to come near me. I felt a terrible rash, it was horrendous! I don’t know what the hell they put in the drip, but it knocked me out.
The problem is that you can’t just open the body and go in to do repairs. Everything is in its place. And at the same time it isn’t, because it’s as if the candles are dripping inside you. It’s the worst thing there is, believe me.
I slept, as I later found out, for three days on end.
When I woke up I thought I was in the Hadamar psychiatric center on the outskirts of Koblenz, a hospital for mental patients in the Third Reich.
I felt that I was crazy and that I was going around the world covered in a sheet, stopping the lightning and fighting the fires left by the bombing.
I woke up again and realized they had moved me.
Now I was in the psychiatric prison in Beelitz-Heilstätten, in a room with broken windows and a collapsed ceiling. The rain was coming in through a hole in the roof. The wall was starting to be covered over with clinging ivy. The paint was falling to the floor in strange flakes that looked like dirty flour. The tiled floor was covered in a patina of moss that was quite slippery, so that you’d have to move very slowly.
My hallucinations all had to do with abandoned hospitals.
Especially psychiatric hospitals, which were going to be mine all my life. I also dreamed about Cane Hill Hospital, with its sinister bathtubs for washing the mad by force, today full of rotten water, lichen, and frogs. Or about the ashes of the Hellingly Asylum, which at night was home to heroin addicts and other scum who lit fires to warm themselves until someone must have fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.
I once copied out a quotation by the writer J. G. Ballard: “I’m never happier than when I can write about drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels.” Well, if I was a writer, like you, my subject would be ruined hospitals. How about something called Theory of Ruined Hospitals? It has a good ring to it.
My sickness had no cure and I was far from my mother, though I didn’t want to tell her anything either. What for? To make her suffer and feel guilty? After three months I went home, I’d lost nearly thirty pounds, which rather suited me, since in those circles everything revolves around beer and würstel and before you realize it you’ve turned into a pig. It was at this period that I started my unfortunate addiction to junk food, which led me to eat mass-produced sausages and burgers whenever I was anxious, and wash them down with gallons of soft drinks, fruit-flavored yoghurts, and that kind of thing.
I got through three or four large bottles a day.
That period coincided with a slightly crazy episode, too crazy even, which is that, as if there wasn’t already enough going on, I developed an uncomfortable and fortunately passing addiction to sex that led me to the most violent and screwed-up experience of my life. Sorry to talk about something so personal, which has nothing to do with the origin of my project, but it’s important if you want to get an idea of who I am.
My sex life in Argentina wasn’t very interesting. I got hardly anywhere with any of the girls I liked, and only once, at the age of eighteen, did I manage to fuck a local girl. It wasn’t especially memorable. Then I had a girlfriend who was a bit stupid, the cousin of one of my rugby teammates. A quiet girl who came to watch the training and who I invited to eat ice cream, and so I became her boyfriend, rather reluctantly, just to get the sex thing out of the way.
When I got to Germany things spiraled out of control. The women looked like Valkyries, powerful but unattainable. I wasn’t bad-looking, I was strong and quite tall, but I had no money and that’s crucial if you want to take one of those cuties out, isn’t it? I barely had enough to study and attend meetings of the neo-Nazi groups, but paradoxically it was now that I had a kind of great revelation or sexual awakening.
Among the followers in Lichtenberg there was a very beautiful young woman, blonde and with a good body. She had an incredible propensity for raving it up, and one day, after a couple of beers, I made up my mind to talk to her in a noisy and very seedy bar. She already knew me, she had seen me at meetings. She told me something about her life. Her name was Saskia and she was the daughter of Russian immigrants, she was born after the fall of the wall, but her parents were still workers. One day her father let a wheelbarrow filled with bricks slip from his hands and the bricks fell down the stairwell. The problem is that it was on the eleventh floor! It was his bad luck that some workers were seriously injured: one died, another went into a coma, and a third suffered a severe head wound. Of course, Saskia’s father was covered by industrial accident law, only there was a little problem, which is that when he was given a medical test they found that he was drunk. Drunk at work at nine in the morning? He was charged with aggravated negligence and homicide. He lost his job and was reduced to state aid. Saskia’s mother worked in a discount supermarket and her brother was a heroin addict. Not a very stimulating family atmosphere for study, as you can see. In fact, she had tried heroin at the age of fifteen but didn’t get hooked.
That same night we fucked.
She had swastikas tattooed on her buttocks and the face of Stalin under her navel. What a cutie. She had a runic S on each side of her pussy, making the Nazi SS sign, and hangings and piercings in her nipples and nostrils. She looked like a walking tinsmith’s stand! We had a great fuck and she became an obsession with me. All day I wanted to fuck her and when I was with her, even before finishing I already felt I wanted to do it again. An amazing addiction. Saskia realized and since she was a bit crazy and I was Argentinian she was fine with it. All right, she’d say, let’s go fuck, and we’d fuck in the toilet of the bar, on the stairs of the S-Bahn, in subway cars . . . We fucked everywhere! I started falling in love, just imagine, although I knew it was impossible, how was I going to introduce a girl like that to my mother? But when I’d next see Saskia and we’d fuck I’d forget all about that.
I was far from being the love of her life. She soon saw that I had no money and that I wasn’t interested either in rising higher in the party, so one day she said to me, all right, darling, as of today it’s over, thank you, the amusement park is closed, be a gentleman, that’s what she said to me and I said goodbye with a cold, sad kiss and went home, first to drink a beer and then a bottle of cheap whiskey I’d bought. And so, as a kind of replacement I became a temporary alcoholic, while I was missing Saskia, or to be more honest and accurate, while I was dying to fuck Saskia. I thought I’d forget her by fucking other girls and went out looking for them, but it wasn’t the same; and every time I saw a swastika, can you imagine, I got a hard-on.
One day I made a fatal mistake.
Wait while I pour myself a little more gin, because what I’m going to tell you isn’t easy. The only way to take it in is to talk about what happened to me, although as you’ll see, there’s nothing natural about it.
It’s a long, long way from being natural.
One night I’d been drinking on my own at home, and you know, the worst thing for a person who’s lovesick is to have photographs. I grabbed my camera and started going back through them, and saw Saskia, with her white ass and her legs up, with her pussy open, holding up her tits, anyway, I went crazy, half metaphorically and half literally, because I left home like a shot to look for her; I went to Lichtenberg, to a bar called Odessa, a place that was very punk and very Nazi, but couldn’t find her. They told me she was at a party on the other side of the S-Bahn. I went out with the address in my hand, hailed a taxi, and went to the place. It was on the second floor of an old abandoned warehouse.
I found a grille open on one side and went in. Then I went up a fire escape and got to the main room, and you have no idea what it was like: there they were, smoking crack and injecting heroin on a collapsed couch, listening to music at an impossible volume, in a daze, surrounded by empty vodka and schnapps bottles, it was disgusting.
I couldn’t see Saskia anywhere, so I started to search for her.
From the outside gangway I passed through a window into the old offices, and I saw three men lying on a rug with their pants down and syringes in their forearms; a young guy was sucking the cock of another guy of about forty who seemed to be the leader, and a third scumbag, who was about twenty, was fucking the same guy in the ass, which is a pretty horrifying image for someone who isn’t into that kind of thing, don’t you think?
I continued on my way and saw that all kinds of things were happening in those half-ruined offices. It was Sodom and Gomorrah!
In another even darker place I saw some figures dancing, very drunk or very drugged, and a shaven-headed woman of about fifty in a G-string sticking the mouth of a wine bottle into another woman’s ass. And all the while, a kind of emaciated faun with tattoos from head to foot was fucking her in the ass.
The music was really loud in the whole of this area and nobody heard me walking along the corridor, in spite of the amount of broken glass and rusty old iron scattered on the floor. I felt a pang in my heart imagining Saskia fucking someone in one of these offices, and I went from one room to another, scared of what I might see.
But you know how it is, if you search you find.
I saw her and almost fell on the floor. They had her tied up on a table, on her back, with a blindfold over her eyes. A kind of albino orangutan, with a neck wider than his head, had his cock in her mouth while another was dripping melted wax from a candle onto her navel.
Saskia was screaming.
It was too much for me, I went crazy.
I went in and punched the guy with his cock in her mouth, and he fell to one side and hit his head on a desk. The other one, the one with the candle, I kicked in the balls and he fell to the floor, choking. I threw the hot wax in his face and he doubled up in pain. It took Saskia a while to recognize me, but instead of being happy she started screaming hysterically, telling me to get out of there and leave them alone.
“They’re my friends!” she said.
They didn’t look very friendly, I thought, but on seeing what I’d done to them she slapped me across the face. She ran out into the corridor naked and a second later came back with three guys who looked like giants. One had a handkerchief tied around his head, like a Pirate of the Caribbean. The other two could have been miners or railroad workers. When I saw them, I polished up my modest German and said to them: it’s all right, guys, it’s all a misunderstanding, I’m going now, Auf Wiedersehen!, but the guys came forward and however hard I tried to punch them to the ground the only thing I managed to do was dislocate my shoulder and get my nose smashed.
“Did you come here looking for action?” said one of the chimpanzees.
They tied me to a gymnasium horse. A thin toothless guy, with the sour crack breath of onions in vinegar, approached my ear and said:
“If that’s what you were looking for, princess, you’ve come to the right place; get ready for an unforgettable night!”
What followed was disgusting, Consul. They pulled down my pants and put half a jar of cream between my buttocks. Then they all took turns, even those I’d seen fucking each other in the first office. They took turns buggering me, begging your pardon. How many were there? More than a dozen. A chorus of ageing punk women, cadaverous and addicted, laughed and shouted. Then they opened bags of coke and stuck it in in their noses or smoked it in pipes.
They broke my ass, Consul.
Saskia turned into a devil, a kind of female Satan who took the lead in this sinister ritual and urged them to continue: come on, next one! She invited those who hadn’t yet had a turn to take it, and again put cream on me.
Come for this beautiful Argentinian ass!
Today it’s free!
They were all laughing shrilly, revealing gums rotted by heroin and black molars. I thought: if they don’t kill me now, I’ll be dead of AIDS by tomorrow afternoon. Those sons of bitches were like bags of germs.
I didn’t grant them a single complaint, a single tear. Nothing. Just a resentful silence. Every time someone withdrew his cock and cleaned it with a Kleenex, I said to myself: pray for me to die, you son of a bitch, because if I get out alive my revenge will be terrible.
My masters were putting me to the test, showing me the violence of the world. All the things I had to combat. Then an idea started taking shape in my mind: don’t forget them, get a good idea of who they are.
Because there will be revenge.
And so, while the guys continued laughing, I observed them out of the corner of my eye. I managed to find something in each of them that I could recognize: a tattoo, a wristwatch, a small chain, a ring. Most were Russians or Russian speakers from the former East Germany. When they got bored they forced me to take a pill that finished me off, leaving me seeing visions and unable to stand. Two of them dumped me in the back of a beat-up Opel and drove me to a truck stop on the freeway. There they left me, lying in a ditch.
What a big mistake leaving me alive, what a mistake.
I left the hospital two weeks later and didn’t report them to the police. I had already understood the message loud and clear: be violent with the violent and affectionate with the affectionate. In this case, my masters demanded an exemplary revenge and I already had the profiles of seven of the attackers in a notebook. They had shown me a specific area of corruption and it was up to me to cauterize it. It was just a question of hygiene. I decided to turn into a nocturnal avenger, the immunological agent who has to attack and destroy whatever acts in a destructive manner inside the system. That had been the message. I classified it in my brain as “part of a steep learning curve leading to change.”
I’d already made up my mind to leave Germany. I gave up the room I’d been renting, gave away my belongings, and said goodbye to the few friends I had. I announced that I was going back to Argentina, sent my things to Madrid, and stayed in Berlin a few days more. I took a room in a modest boarding house in Charlottensburg with the idea of passing unnoticed among tourists with backpacks. I tried not to stand out. It was very likely I was being watched.
At night, I started my search. I had images of the seven guys, so started to comb the Lichtenberg area. I had changed my appearance as much as I could, of course. I wore black clothes, hoods. I let my beard grow and lost weight. It wasn’t very hard to find them. I just had to keep my eye on Saskia’s brother to get to the others. I drew a series of circles on a map of the area and considered the best way to attack them. They didn’t know what was in store for them! The first thing I did was go into a bar and steal the wallet of one of them when he wasn’t looking. It was child’s play.
The ID said Rudolf Oleg Handke, born in Innsbruck, October 21, 1981. He had a fifty-euro bill and another of ten. Another of a thousand dinars, something like a collector’s item, from the Bank of Serbia. A sachet of a brown substance I assumed was heroin. An old membership card from the Association of Friends of the Tyrol in Aachen. A student card from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, enrolled in educational science. Old papers with telephone numbers, which I noted down.
Once I’d finished the phase of studying my targets, which took me about a month, I went on to the second phase: the attack.
I chose a Thursday, preparing myself physically and mentally for the task. I got up early and exercised. I went out, had some fruit, at noon ate a balanced lunch. Midafternoon, I hired a van from a semi-clandestine Turkish business, using the ID I’d stolen, and started loading and installing the surgical material I needed for my task. Nobody asked any questions, they didn’t even look at the photograph. At about six I took a nap and got ready for the night. At around eleven, I set off and parked the van beside an old school, in the northern area of Lichtenberg. Two of the men often passed that way, although never together.
Here I have to stop my story for a moment, Consul, because you might think that what follows isn’t really mine. A story in the style of Rambo or . . . what’s the other guy’s name? Schwarzenegger. You may think that, but remember, I come from a hard world and was always able to deal with villains.
Anyway, let me continue.
When I saw the first one coming, I felt my blood boiling in my veins. I remembered a sentence I’d heard in a movie: “The silence that comes before disaster.” But only I could hear it, not my victims. When the guy walked past the van, I got out very quickly and in no time at all had loaded him half-conscious in the back, which didn’t have windows. I tied his arms with wire and struck a wedge of newspaper in his mouth, down to his throat. He opened his eyes anxiously when he saw that the floor of the van was covered in plastic, and who could blame him, it must have given him a very bad premonition. Then I put a rag soaked in ether over his face, Gute Nacht . . . He fell asleep like a baby.
I was forty-nine seconds behind schedule.
Soon afterwards the other one arrived and I got out. The son of a bitch must have sensed something because he hesitated, but I grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back until it went crack. With the other hand I put a wad of newspaper down his throat. It’s incredible how useful the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung can be. I stuffed him in the van, bound him and gagged him, and gave him a good dose of ether.
With them on board I drove off, saying to myself, shall I go for more? This is easy. The original plan had been to grab two, at most three of the group of seven candidates. I felt like continuing and looked up, into the German night, but didn’t receive any answer. Believing that you’re strong is bad when you’re going to carry out a mission, because adrenaline is a drug, did you know that?
I felt like an expert and went to another of the places circled on the map. One of them lived on the third floor of a run-down apartment block, but the entrance was on the other side, along an avenue. I knew that he always went in the back way. So that was where I parked the van.
My target was a Serb, the same one who had been fucking Saskia when I went to the warehouse that night, I was going to enjoy this one more than the others, and I thought, with a special dispensation from Odin, who was the master who calmed my muscles that night: he’s going to get special treatment.
I heard a noise and looked in the rearview mirror. The bastard was coming, but he wasn’t alone. He was with someone else who wasn’t on my list. I tried to see if I could recognize him, but there wasn’t much light. What to do? It would be too much of a hassle for everything to go belly up now, so I said to myself, what if I grab the two of them? The Serb was big but the other guy wasn’t. I reckoned I could do it.
I got out of the van with a map in my hand. I played dumb and asked them for help with an address in the area. The guys turned to look at me, I’d caught them off guard and they were a bit annoyed at my intrusion. When I landed the first punch they practically didn’t see it. The Serb fell against the wall, with something broken. I grabbed the thin guy by the neck and just as I was pulling his head up into the light from a streetlamp I saw that he had a wristwatch with a flame on the minute hand. That’s when I recognized him. He was one of them! So I said to him out loud, I wasn’t expecting you, but welcome to the party, willkommen.
I quickly loaded them in the van and left as cautiously as I could, I didn’t want the police to stop me for an inspection or anything like that. I felt pleased with myself: I was a true professional. In less than an hour I had four of these bags of germs tied up and ready to go. My thoughts made me laugh as I took the S-Bahn. I already had a point marked, twenty-eight miles from there, where I could stop and work on them without being disturbed. I turned and looked at them, lying there one on top of the other like sacks of flour.
Now, as I drove through the night, I searched for a little inspiration. Should I give them the full treatment or just strike a blow so decisive as to transform them, through pain, into agents of change? I analyzed the situation from various points of view and came to the conclusion that the second of these options was the more appropriate: the knockout blow. Something told me that letting them go back to their germ-ridden community, but marked by their punishment, was an educational gesture that would prove interesting.
I knew that option would be more demanding physically. But when it came down to it, it was what I wanted to do, what I’d prepared for, and in addition I had all the necessary surgical equipment.
The truth is that I was dying to operate.
When I got to parking lot 49-E, near the exit from the Autobahn, I took a very narrow path through trees that led to a wood, a kind of Schwarzwald, as they say there. There was absolutely nothing for at least half a mile around, so I could work in peace.
I decided to call this session Theory of Mutilated Bodies.
I put on a white coat, latex gloves, and a surgical mask, and got ready, invoking my masters. I again gave them strong anesthetics intravenously and dedicated myself to the hard task of tying arteries and veins, sawing through bones, smoothly cutting muscles and nerves, making knots that would later allow me to assemble the stumps. I did it as best I could, although at the time, tired as I was, I couldn’t be sure of the results. Last but not least, I attached drip bags filled with antibiotics and a little morphine to them, pulled them down off the van, laid them out on the plastic, and covered them with a thick sheet of asbestos. I washed the inside of the van. I put the amputated limbs in a bag for medical waste, and set off back to Berlin.
Before I left, I called emergency services from the cell phone of one of them and gave them directions. Then I sped off, leaving their cell phones on.
I was exhausted.
I drove about twenty-five miles along side roads to avoid the security cameras. My plan involved passing by an artificial lake that was part of a fish farm, because I thought it would be a good fate for the bag of amputated limbs, in which, of course, there were a number of things: four right legs, four complete arms, and sixteen fingers. A penis and a scrotum, too, guess whose? When I saw the news in the press, describing it as a “massacre carried out with macabre coolness,” I felt proud of my surgical knowledge, since all of them, even the Serb whose cock I’d cut off, managed to survive. The event caused a bit of a stir, although not as much as I’d expected. The police favored the hypothesis that it had been a settling of scores between neo-Nazi groups, which wasn’t completely unfounded, and thought that it wasn’t worth alarming the public too much, who during that time were on their vacations.