A clean desk, a clean house. Joseph Leubl likes things to be neat and tidy. Other people might find that boring, but he’s been keeping it this way for fifty-seven years, ever since he’s had his own room. Having grown up with four brothers he knows what a pigsty looks like and he also knows that he doesn’t want one. He never leaves his office until all the jobs on his desk are done. And when he gets home, his house mustn’t look as if there’s more work to be done here.
He gets out of the limousine and says goodbye to the driver, who will be collecting him again tomorrow morning. Then he walks along the claret flagstones in the lawn to the house. He likes these flags, he likes how they’re edged in moss and the way those tiny red beetles, similar to lice, scuttle over them in summer. The flagstones remind him of his parents’ house; he brought them to Berlin specially, after he and his brothers sold the property. Whenever he sees them he thinks of the lawn sprinkler in the sun, the fragrance of damp grass and the feel of hot, wet stone beneath his feet. He had them sunk into the lawn just as he remembered from his childhood. The tufts of grass need to cushion the stone edges; people shouldn’t have to worry about stubbing their toes. Otherwise you can’t run across the lawn. Otherwise children can’t run across the lawn. Both his daughters used to do a lot of running. The memory pleases him; he knows of children who don’t go outside at all anymore, unless you scatter Pokémons around the city as bait.
He goes inside and savours the smell he misses elsewhere, even though he doesn’t notice it at home.
“I’m home!” he shouts from the hallway.
Leubl has had to do this ever since the limousines became quieter and the windows better insulated. He scared the living daylights out of his wife a dozen times until he got used to calling out whenever he arrived home. He hangs his coat on the rack and, in his mind only, hangs up a hat as well. He hasn’t worn one for more than thirty years, but the thought of it is still part of his coming-home-from-work routine. He removes his immaculate shoes and inserts shoe trees, with which he lifts them onto the rack. After putting on a pair of felt slippers he walks across the tiles into the living room and kitchen. Leubl can hear his wife clanking around in the fridge.
He gives her a kiss on the cheek.
“How was your day?”
“The usual. The fountain’s broken. I called the installer, but he can’t come till next week.”
“That’s O.K.”
The kitchen is separate. He doesn’t like this modern fashion of all the living areas flowing into one. He doesn’t want his kitchen overlapping with the sitting room and the sitting room drifting into the garden via a glass conservatory. The children’s room shouldn’t be in the bedroom and the toolshed shouldn’t be in the garage, even if the garage has been empty since they’ve had the official car.
He goes to the fridge to get a beer. Not a pils, not a wheat beer, not a low-alcohol beer. Not a V.I.P. beer. Nor one of those rustic beers that’s carted in from some remote village. And – heaven forbid! – certainly not a craft beer. He hates these new-fangled brews which start off so bitter, as if they’d burned in the copper, then suddenly taste of mango. Or mandarins. Compost beer. He wants a beer of the sort his father used to drink when he came in from the fields.
He drinks lager.
Leubl opens the bottle and pours the beer into his half-litre glass. He’s about to take it into the sitting room to watch the news when his wife says, “Binny’s here, by the way.”
He doesn’t respond. But he’s not thrilled.
He likes an orderly life. He tiptoes into the sitting room. It’s empty. He puts the beer down on the tiled coffee table and slumps onto the sofa. He’s relieved to have a few precious minutes alone in the sitting room. There aren’t many evenings like this, in the quiet summer period, although he takes more liberties than any other minister. He came into politics from the outside; he doesn’t have grassroots party support and never has done. He’s there because they need him, and if you don’t have grassroots support you don’t have to bother cultivating it. In any case he stopped trying years ago. He’s seventy-five years old and doesn’t have that much time to gift away.
Leubl sees two thin legs come down the stairs. Followed by a skinny midriff in shorts and two breasts that weren’t there a couple of months ago.
“Hi, Grandad!”
“Binny!”
“Hmm?”
The minister raps his knuckles firmly on the table and looks at her impatiently.
“Sorry.”
She plucks out her earphones, coils the cord around her smartphone and places it demonstratively on the bookshelf. Leubl nods, appeased.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
She slumps into an armchair just as he did. Strange, this identical movement, but with him you can see that he’s shattered, whereas she’s just in a huff.
“Looking forward to your holiday?”
“Nah!”
“Are you having a spot of bother with Mum?”
“Two weeks in the arse end of the world with no wi-fi? Moist! What am I going to do in Nowheresville?”
“You know that I was born in Nowheresville, don’t you? And that Grandma was born just down the road. I’d live there still if I didn’t have to be in Berlin.”
“Huh!”
She kicks off her slippers and clamps her toes to the edge of the coffee table. Catching the expression on his face, she swiftly takes them off again. Her feet slap on the floor tiles.
“The minister of the interior always get wi-fi if he wants it.”
“Don’t be like that. Your mother just wants to spend as much time with you as possible.”
“That’s the worst part.”
“I’m not sure you understand. It’s because she knows there won’t be so many more holidays with you.”
“Really? Why’s that then? She’s not ill, that’s for sure.”
Leubl frowns.
“Sorry.”
“You shouldn’t joke about things like that. What I meant is that your mother was once your age too. The last time we went away together was when she was fifteen.”
“Thank God!” This is his wife, coming in with the tray.
“Oh yes, Grandma’s all very relaxed about it now. But she cried her eyes out at the time.”
He gets up and sits at the head of the dining table with his beer, Binny sits opposite, Grandma in between. She sets out the plates, butter, bread basket, tomatoes, salami, the vegan spread and the glasses. Binny picks one up critically.
“Nobody’s going to believe me when I tell them the minister of the interior drinks out of old mustard jars.”
“Why shouldn’t we?” Grandma asks as she cuts the tomatoes into quarters and grinds pepper over them.
“They’re so lame, they’ve even got Mickey Mouse on them. You can’t get uncooler than that.”
“That’s fitting, then,” Leubl says, buttering a slice of bread in preparation for some salami. “Of all the cabinet, the minister of the interior is always the least cool.”
“Because he’s in charge of the police.” He bites into his bread. “The minister of the interior is a bit like Germany’s caretaker.”
He watches his granddaughter scrape a sort of greyish-brown mortar from the vegan jar, before cladding a slice of bread with it. Expertly, you might say. He offers her a lettuce leaf with his fork.
“Here, you can use this for wallpaper.”
“Joseph!”
“To be fair, I don’t make any comments about your murderous salami, Grandad.”
He lays the lettuce on his bread.
“The salami murderer issues a formal apology.”
“Fine, but for that you can lowkey tell the stupid minister for transport that he needs to get decent Internet access to Doofhausen, sharpish.”
He laughs. He doesn’t mention how delighted he is that her mother doesn’t go along with all that Internet and mobile nonsense. Nor does he admit how awful the Internet access really is in the area. Or that he regards the transport minister as the only member of the cabinet who is without question 100 per cent inept.
After supper Grandma gets up to clear the table. He takes the rest of his beer back to the sofa. Eight o’clock on the dot. The evening news is his last bastion.
“Can’t we watch something else?”
“Aren’t you at all interested in the news?”
“I know it all already. I’ve got the app.”
“Well, I don’t and nor does Grandma.”
Jens Riewa appears on the screen. Today he’s been dressed in an unflattering shade of blue, which means he sometimes disappears against the graphic overlays.
“Yeah,” Binny says. “Here comes the assassination.”
He gives her a warning look, but at the same time he’s amazed by all the things she picks up on. She can, in fact, correctly predict almost all of the day’s news, even those items he assumes must bore her.
“They’re proposing a new electoral law,” Binny says. “To give sixteen-year-olds the vote. That would mean I could vote next year.”
“And what would you vote?” Grandma Leubl asks.
“A.f.D.”
A moment’s silence. He keeps a stiff upper lip and says, without looking at her, “Because of Mum.”
“Exactly. She hit the roof. Had a screaming fit. Beeeeeneeeeee, how could you?”
“What about my party?”
“Forget it. You’re not shit enough.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment.”
“No. I mean, you’re shit too.”
It occurs to him that at her age he wouldn’t have been allowed to say “shit”, but it hardly bothers him. What does that say about our times?
That his period of grace is over. As soon as the weather finished, Binny grabs the remote control. He doesn’t complain, he knows that Grandma Leubl is on Binny’s side. And he knows too that it’s quite an accolade to have Binny watching television with them. Normally she sees everything on the computer, on demand.
“So what are we watching?”
“Nadeche Hackenbusch,” Binny says. “I’m not gonna lie, this is even something for you two.”
“The one with the . . . ?” he says, intimating breasts.
“The one with the refugees!”
What he sees on the screen is indeed astonishing. He knows this cheap model, of course, pretty much like all the other cheap bimbos. But this time the cheap model has been sent to one of the world’s hotspots: the largest refugee camp on Earth. This, however, isn’t the usual misery television with some listless family living in a mouldy ruin, this is real hardship. Binny and his wife sink inaudibly into the background as he watches, in amazement, the bimbo model, accompanied by a terrifically handsome refugee, talking a lot of nonsense, but also making the occasional comment that verges on the sensible. The bimbo model, he learns, was on this programme yesterday. And will be on again tomorrow, and daily for the next fortnight, broadcasting from this wretched place. What he sees makes him more uneasy by the minute. He crosses the room to the telephone and dials from memory the under-secretary’s number.