Carl and Gerlinde (Instalment #46)
It was typical! Whenever Carl really needed some sympathy, nobody was home. Consequently, he gruffly pulled the front door closed after an expectant “Hello”.
The only thing he found on the ledge in the hallway was a note saying:
’Am in the municipal office sorting winter clothes. Why don’t you come, too? It might get late. Kisses, Gerlinde’.
Hmm – Shit! Instead of a friendly face lighting up in welcome, all that drifted through the garden into the living room was the usual November blackness. The last bit of red heaven seemed to be embarrassed as it gracelessly disappeared behind the yellow tamarisk. Well, neither was it necessary for Carl to have any more heaven at the moment. Purgatory or hell would have been more like it…
He was still standing in the hallway when his bag flew out of his hand. His trench-coat and shoes were grumpily thrown in the direction of the clothes-stand. What a shitty day! – he said for the third time, automatically gripping the Brandy bottle! ’Carlos I’! In disgust, he fished for a glass on top of the house bar and threw himself onto the living room sofa with a moan. Listlessly, he stared at his reflection in the patio door pane that was darkened by the night outside. For his first ’Carlos’ he still toasted himself.
As he drank his second one, he was already in the phase of being annoyed with his stupid cerebellum for still circling around the nonsense the concern leaders had offered at today’s meeting. Not to mention all this reassurance drivel of our ’Ruling Fairy-Tale Auntie’, who, through her persistent ’We can do it – We can do it’ tried to preserve the long sleep of her nation that has been going on for ten years without any interruption.
Yes – who knew, perhaps she herself was ’Sleeping Beauty‘!
However, it seems that this was not even known to the overambitious Prince Seehofer in his overflowing-with-asylum-seekers Bavaria: otherwise he would never have been so disappointed about her not being prepared to wake up from that sorry state where she obviously did not know what happened in her realm.
Mind you, he had taken such pains, hadn’t he? Keeping her standing no less than twenty minutes next to him in front of the entire Bavarian Royal Household, just to show that she was well capable of sitting it out when he took command, just continuing to sleep standing up – as always.…
And Carl would probably have gone to sleep after his fourth ’Carlos’ if he had not accidentally activated the remote control of his TV. All of a sudden, he saw a rather excited TV moderator who foulmouthed an absent Schäuble in no uncertain terms, because said minister had totally unbecomingly broken the rules of how to describe the asylum seeker problem by not using the German ’hydraulic collective symbolic language’.
During an event the moderator briefly showed, he actually had – what a scandal! – compared the overwhelming influx of asylum seekers to Germany with an ’avalanche’ a careless skier might have triggered by moving the snow a little thoughtlessly: an avalanche of which at the moment nobody knew if it was already in the valley or still in the upper third of the mountain. This, so the moderator, was really disgusting! Such a totally wrong image is nothing short of inhuman and a catastrophe, said the moderator who had clearly been brainwashed to be mainstream! And this comparison was totally lopsided! After all, as opposed to the one-time alpinist Schäuble, our Federal Chancellor had never ever gone downhill skiing. In fact, she only ever went cross-country skiing, and even then only in the lowlands!
This totally unexpected avalanche-like deviation from the ’hydraulic collective symbolic language’ used by all the parties and media by the Federal Minister of Finances, so the moderator, was really evil!
And he asked what it might mean that Schäuble did such a thing at the very time when the Federal Chancellor was already clearly getting less and less backing both among the citizens and within the party? Is that how someone was massively rattling her guideline competence? Did this not show only the deep rips between CSU and CDU, but even within the CDU? Even in the Great Coalition?
What is the meaning of all this? The moderator apparently was not only asking himself, but also in the direction of Carl who, instead of replying, countered with a question of his own: the question if he, the extra wise Mister Moderator, knew how many glasses of Brandy he, Carl, had already drunk: four, five, six or seven? Because he himself certainly no longer knew After all, for him, so Carl told the moderator on the screen, the answer to that question was far more important than all this avalanche show! Because the answer was basically decisive when it came to the question if he, Carl, could still dare going to the municipal office and appear before the strict eyes of his ’winter-clothes sorting Gerlinde’, thus at long last actually doing something productive for the asylum seekers.
Or else if it was wiser to save face and stay at home, doing nothing practical? To make up for it, as before, he could start trumpeting one smart-assy solution after another into the world tomorrow, as soon as he was again sober. It was all about this difficult hydraulic asylum seeker topic which suddenly was also discussed like an avalanche…
Hm – it was truly a difficult decision, Carl told himself. And as such, it certainly should not be decided before the next ’Carlos ’, or should it?
KH
(Translated by EG)
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