The bus has gone quiet. Not just quieter than in Serbia or Hungary, where the atmosphere was still quite jolly, as if they were on their way to a gigantic country wedding. Now everyone’s fallen silent, even the small children, who usually squabble or shriek at every opportunity. It’s hard to say when this began. Maybe when the mountains started looming. Maybe when they saw fewer and fewer cars coming the other way, even though it’s broad daylight. Now there’s nothing on the other side of the road.
The Germans have closed their side of the border and now, at the sight of the empty carriageway, the refugees feel strangely alone. Like in a Western when there’s going to be a shootout and everyone vacates the saloon as fast as possible.
Lionel gazes through the windows at Austria, this astonishingly wet country. The clouds are hanging low. All the rain has made the land fertile, at least where there are no houses or roads. It’s so cluttered. Everywhere you look there’s something; nowhere is there nothing. He noted at once that he was right, there are no goats. It’s obvious, because lush grass is growing all over the place here. Strange how these Europeans fail to come up with the simplest ideas. They’re so modern and rich that they’ve lost sight of all the advantages goats bring. That’s doubly good, because he won’t have any competition. They’re worried about work being taken away from them, but nobody here works with goats. Eighty million Germans and hardly any goats – if only ten Germans share one goat, it’s still a huge market he can take by storm.
“Slow down,” he tells Mahmoud. “Stay just in front of the guys behind.”
He sees the Austrian military vehicle in front of them pull away, before it too slows down after a few hundred metres.
“More to the middle,” he instructs Mahmoud. “Don’t let them overtake.”
“More to the middle,” Mahmoud repeats like a boatswain. Lionel passes the message to those sitting at the back to signal the change in speed to the bus behind. Now they’re driving across a small, astonishingly straight river. At first he thought it must be a canal, but Google Maps calls it the “Salzach”.
“Should I stop?”
Lionel points at the parking signs for the next exit. “Wait till there.”
He holds out his smartphone: Google Maps shows a small stopping place.
“Turn off, drive through the car park, then back onto the motorway and park sideways. I mean right across the motorway. We’ll go on foot again from here.”
“It’s getting serious now, is it?”
Mahmoud pulls into the car park. They could have driven on a bit more, all the way to the border, but Lionel doesn’t want to spoil the image.
“When we stop, and those behind us do too, then grab a few drivers and really block the lanes. I don’t want any clever Dicks sneaking past.”
He’s talked to a few of Malaika’s television people. They say the pictures that work best on television show helpless people holding children by the hand, and they have to be walking. These same people don’t look so helpless if they’re travelling on a bus.
At this point the motorway takes a broad curve to the left. The cameras at the border will be able to see the people with children coming towards them from a long way off. All day long they’ve been swapping places to be at the front. In the fiasco at the Turkish border the young men were clearly the strongest. This upset the order, which is why they’ve rearranged it. Everyone knows there are plenty of young men among the refugees, but it’s not something they need to emphasise. A bride makes herself pretty for her wedding.
Mahmoud steers the bus through the stopping place. He brakes on the slip road leading back onto the motorway and slowly drives it perpendicular to the carriageway. Then he opens the doors and switches off the engine, for the first time in more than a week.
The silence and lack of vibrations from the diesel engine lend a finality to the moment.
Somebody whoops, then cheering erupts, as if they’d already arrived at their destination. Lionel steps off the bus. Bushes line the stopping area. Through the bushes he can see blue lights; the Austrian police are blocking off all other routes, so that nobody gets any last-minute ideas of staying here. Aid organisations have set up taps for water and distribution points for food. The army has also secured the exits from the car park, unnecessarily as it turns out, because these are jammed with vehicles bearing the logos of aid organisations. The car park can only supply a fraction of the refugees. People who’ve been sitting waiting beside their cars stand up. They throw away their cigarettes, drink up from their cardboard cups and return to their vehicles to supply those sections to the rear of the convoy.
Onlookers watch from the wire fences that seal off the car park. Many are holding shapeless objects which, on closer inspection, turn out to be cuddly toys. He heard somewhere that refugees attract cuddly toy tourists like dead fish do cats. Europeans must assume that refugees need cuddly toys more urgently than anything else. Apart from in Hungary where a crowd pelted them with stones. In truth, he surmises after peering inside the bus, most people here would like nothing better than a bar of soap.
On his mobile Lionel checks the G.P.S. signal of the infant transporters. They’re still fifteen to twenty kilometres away, rapidly getting closer. Malaika is on a bus five kilometres behind that. A pink zebra car squeezes past the buses and comes to a halt, and a camera team gets out and hurries over to him. He gives them a reassuring wave. “We’ve still got bags of time,” his hands say. There’s nothing to do now but wait. For the other buses. Not all of them; that would be as pointless as setting off with only one hundred people.
The cogs in his brain are still whirring away, but there really is nothing more he can do because everything has been done. His head is churning out its usual nonsense. Was this really the right place to cross the border? All of a sudden he’s assailed by the thought that he’s made the wrong decision. That the bridge over the Inn would have been the better bet.
But he’s dismissed this idea so many times that it’s easy enough to do it again now. Yes, it would have made the best possible impression in the smallest space. It’s only thirty to forty metres wide, the Germans could have made every effort to seal it off, and likewise they would have made every effort to storm it. Undaunted by death and with no possibility to avoid it, with the water flowing on either side. The Germans would have had to take a decision. A nice showdown. But who would have seen it?
Where would the cameras go? The Germans weren’t going to provide them with prime locations. They’d have to put the crew on boats or pontoons. And from there, below the bridge, you’d be hard put to capture faces, you’d end up with poor-quality, shaky footage. Besides, you couldn’t be sure some refugees wouldn’t leap into the river if things got dangerous. Then everyone would say it’s their own fault they drowned. That won’t happen at the Salzburg border crossing.
On the other hand, there’s far more room to slip off to the side here. He can’t tell how great the desire is to go to Germany and Germany alone. What if half of them were to say that in fact Austria is nice enough, thank you?
And what if the other half reckons they can manage on their own from here?
What if he sets off for the border tomorrow or the day after, and finds himself on his own when he gets there? And at the end of the day everyone has made it to Germany via detours and secret paths. Everyone but him.
Lionel massages his brow with the balls of his hands. This isn’t the first time he’s been tormented by all this nonsense. And on each occasion he comes to the same conclusion: how could they abandon the man walking alongside Malaika and the cameras? They’ll follow him because it’s their best chance of a good future.
The Germans won’t shoot because they’re good people. They won’t switch the electricity on either. They tell these stories because refugees are tiresome – that’s understandable – and they’d be glad if fewer refugees came to their country – that’s O.K. too. That’s why they’re pretending to be angry. That’s politics. But when it comes down to it, the Germans are decent.
The rain has stopped. The cloud cover has broken and the sun is making the car park quite pleasant. One of the television crew hands him a small bottle of water and something to eat. Why not? Lionel thinks.
He sits on the ground, his back against a bus tyre warmed by the sun, and gazes at the mountains. Malaika has told him about them. It’s where milk and chocolate grow, she said. He told her she might be mistaken, because cacao comes from Africa. That’s perfectly possible, she replied, but in Germany the chocolate normally comes from the mountains. Although in winter it comes from an old man with a beard in a red outfit.
Lionel takes a sip of water and bites into a thick slice of bread, on top of which is a bright-yellow slice that has a slight hint of mould. He chews bravely. Let everyone see how well he fits into Germany. That’s all he can do till Sunday.