From The Pigs

Author's Note: This is a brief piece of fiction I wrote a while ago for my creative writing group at university, centring around the Baader-Meinhof gang - who, for those unfamiliar with them, were an anti-capitalist group of youths who existed in West Germany during the Cold War and carried out a number of bombings, bank robberies and various other acts of terrorism. Please note that I do not support the Baader-Meinhof gang or their actions, and this is not intended to forward personal politics or intended in any way to glorify the Baader-Meinhof gang; I simply chose to write about them because I'd been studying them quite closely for one of my history courses. Anyway, reviews are enormously appreciated.



It’s very abrupt, of course. One moment I’m in the teller’s line, staring at the broad back of a suit coat, my head full of Cicero, car insurance rates, and heartburn medication brands; the next, the sound of the machine gun fire, a rapid succession of piercing pops, is chiming off the walls. Then there’s the muffled, throaty bellowing, the panicked shrieks, the frantic, haphazard scurrying, and I’m grasped by the forearm and clumsily dragged across the room. A few short seconds later, I find myself with my back against the far wall, where I finally have an unobstructed view of the pack of long-limbed, black-masked figures now frenziedly scuttling back and forth through the bank’s glossy interior, their voices a tangled cacophony of husky bawling.

I glance to my left; more or less everyone in the bank – with striking efficiency, I have to say – has, it seems, been pushed against this wall, and are now standing in a long line, shoulder to shoulder, occasionally broken by the ones doubled up in terror or racked with petrified shrieks. One of the masked figures, a lofty fellow in a gauchely oversized olive raincoat, is standing in front of us, gracelessly flailing his handgun back, howling in a nicotine-scarred rasp at a bronze-haired woman convulsing with panicked, wailing sobs. I distractedly snap my tongue, and watch as one of the other figures flings himself at the counter, where the teller – a makeup-soaked blonde shrivelled well past her prime – is shrinking into her chair, her painted talons gripping the edge of the desk. He flings an empty sack onto the counter and begins barking something at her hysterically; she stares back with bug-eyed incomprehension. The other masked figures, meanwhile, having apparently already burned their way through their initial adrenaline, steadily meander their way across the bank from corner to corner, gingerly and amateurishly fingering their weapons, one hastily tugging down the shades over a far window, all doing their very best not to look aimless.

I glance down at the fellow standing directly to my right, a wizened, decrepit senior with a grey comb-over, his bony, beige-suited frame hunched over a cane, calmly surveying the scene from behind wiry spectacles.

‘Baader-Meinhof again, you think?’ I murmur, recalling the spate of hold-ups all over the headlines not a week ago.

He shrugs absently, not looking at me. Half a minute, perhaps, drifts by, the fellow at the counter still bawling frantically at the teller, the teller still gawking dumbly back.

I shake my head. ‘Lunatics.’ I mumble.

The old man looks up and blinks at me very deliberately. ‘So says our wise generation.’

A pause. I blink at him, lick my lips, clear my throat, my eyes beginning to awkwardly meander. To my left, the bronze-haired woman has stopped her screeching, shrunk to the floor, and collapsed against the wall in a heap, letting out a muffled series of hiccupping whimpers.

‘Now, if these poor young ones had lived through the War, like us...if they’d been down in North Africa with me, with the sand and the tanks and the godless weather...they might not be so keen to be picking up the guns again so soon.’

I gulp dryly, recalling my own wartime experience: the quiet trip to Switzerland a mere few weeks before the War was declared; the dusty broom cupboard of an office I’d settled into at the University of Zurich; the handful of years that had drifted by in blissful dullness as I finished my thesis on translations of Plautus...

‘...but these young fellows, they’re not jaded like that. They see injustice and they take up arms.’

I look down at the old man and raise my eyebrows. ‘Injustice?’

The fellow in the raincoat is slowly ambling his way up and down the line, his handgun held half-aloft in what he clearly hopes is a menacing manner.

The old man gives another shrug. ‘Injustice where it doesn’t exist, maybe. But the thought and the initiative are there, aren’t they?’ He looks up at me again, raises a skeletal finger, and taps his sharp nose. ‘And it’s a sight more initiative than our dear generation ever took, isn’t it?’

I give another dry gulp. Having been raised from birth in an unshakably cosy upper-middle-class environment where my experience of the First World War, and much of the Depression, amounted to little more than whispers exchanged by relatives over Sunday lunches and fragmented headlines bellowed by newspaper vendors, I had always put a very fine point on not understanding politics whenever it could be helped; and, in truth, I had returned to Germany after the War quietly proud of the fact that, though wholly German by birth and blood, I had little more than the most rudimentary understanding of what the Nazis actually were.

The goon at the desk is still yapping hysterically at the teller, sounding desperate by now. Finally, the teller, waking up at last, snatches up the empty sack and scampers around a partition into a back room, with him close on her heels.

I shake my head again. ‘They’re lunatics. How can you defend them?’

A thin smile pushes its way through the sagging flesh of the old man’s cheeks. ‘I’m not. Not entirely. I’ve simply realised that the least we owe them is an effort at understanding.’

Another pause. I drop my eyes to the floor. ‘We’ve given them everything.’

He raises his eyebrows and nods deliberately, still smiling. ‘Including a colourful heritage.’

I snap my tongue again, saying nothing.

‘I think you can spare them a moment.’ he says coolly. ‘Just to reflect, you know. On being born into a legacy like the one we left them.’

A truck’s horn wails from somewhere beyond the bank doors.

‘After all, more or less every bit of their philosophical musing’s been focused on us, hasn’t it?’

I clear my throat again, still say nothing. From the other end of the room, one of the masked figures huskily sneezes.

I let my eyes wander their way across the length of the bank lobby, a rectangular stretch of sterile white tiles and dusty grey carpeting end to end, all of it glossy and shining with the theoretical nightmare of a prospering economy.

Perhaps, if one chose to look at it in such a way, a manifestation of the mindless, mechanised bureaucracy that greases the gears of soulless fascism.

To my left, the bronze-haired woman’s whimpering clambers ever-so-slightly in pitch. I turn, and let my gaze wander its way down the row of customers lined up against the wall, taking in their array of brushed and spruce three-pieces or heavy masks of cherry rouge and dark eyeliner. An identity parade, perhaps, of the indulgent, ruthless elite who consume and destroy...

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of the raincoated goon unhurriedly meandering his way in our direction, his handgun, by now, hanging impotently at his side...

The teller scuttles back around the partition and hastily seats herself back at the counter, her shrivelled face still wearing the stiff, distorted look of baffled distress. The masked figure follows closely behind her, the sack now slung over his shoulder, stuffed and bloated. The plunder, no doubt, of this noble generation of contemporary Robin Hoods seizing back the callous elite’s unearned riches...

The sharp hammering of hurried footsteps begins bouncing off the tiles as, almost in unison, every one of the masked figures, swept up, it seems, in a fresh wave of panicked adrenaline, begins scarpering for the door. Ever one except for the raincoated one, who, still leisurely ambling toward us, stops in front of the old man and stares down at him.

‘Got a smoke?’ he grunts.

‘Stefan!’ one of the other masked figures hisses at him from the door in a warbling squeal that sounds barely pubescent.

The old man, with nary a trace of irony, smiles warmly as he tugs a battered, half-full box of unfiltered cigarettes from his back pocket. The raincoated goon tugs his balaclava halfway up his mossy chin, takes one, and sticks it between his mustard-coloured teeth. ‘Cheers’ he murmurs.

‘Stefan!’ the warbling voice yelps again.

For a few short seconds, the raincoated goon stands stock-still, simply holding the gaze of the old man, whose warm smile does not shift even slightly.

‘Don’t you worry, old timer.’ he finally grunts hoarsely at the old man. ‘We’re men of the people, we are. We’re not after your money here.’ He quite suddenly turns his eyes toward me, and gauchely jerks his head in my direction. ‘We’re taking back the money from the pigs.’

A heavy silence hangs in the air a few seconds more, my head quietly reeling with befuddlement. I glance down at my decade-old black suit, the only three-piece I’ve ever owned. Well, it was dry-cleaned a month ago, I suppose...

‘Stefan!’ comes the piercing squeal, positively whimpering with desperation now.

The raincoated goon turns from me, shoots the old man a heavy wink, turns about, and hastens with surprising light-footedness out the door just as it falls shut. The old man continues to smile as, through the glass of the front door, we watch them clamber into the back of a decrepit white pick-up pulled up onto the curb directly in front of the doors. Even from here, we can hear as the key twists in the ignition, can hear as the engine damply splutters for a moment, then dies away.

The key turns again. The engine gives out little more than a sort of guttural cough. The masked figures begin another session of messy, disjointed bawling.

Over at the counter, the teller has already grabbed the telephone and is hastily dialling the police; and beside me, I hear the old man dryly guffaw as I pull a pen from my breast pocket and hastily copy down the pick-up’s registration onto the back of my hand.

‘Bless them all.’ he murmurs. ‘But you see what I mean, don’t you? Whichever way you look at it, there’s something to be said for that lot – there’s nothing more dogged than a generation that has everything, but has still managed to convince itself that it’s desperate.’