The Black Book

Monday

The first thing I noticed was the silence of the phone, which is a stupid thing to notice, because a phone on a nightstand is silent most of the time. But mine had a habit. Every morning at ten past six it lit up before the alarm with whatever the night had left there: the weather in Lisbon, a newsletter from the chamber of pharmacists, three messages from Jule sent at one in the morning because my daughter had never in her life gone to bed before midnight, and now that she was thirty-four weeks pregnant she said she couldn't sleep anyway, so why try.

That morning the screen was black until I touched it. Then it showed the time, 06:08, and a small grey sentence under the signal bars: No internet connection.

I lay there with the phone on my chest and listened to the house. The heating ticked. A car went by on the Prenzlauer Straße, too fast, the way the bread van always did. Downstairs the router, which lives in the hallway on top of the shoe cabinet because the man from the Telekom said it had to be near the socket, was blinking red. I could see the light on the ceiling of the stairwell from my bed, a slow red pulse, like something breathing in its sleep.

I thought: storm. Then I remembered there hadn't been a storm. It had been a clear, cold night. When I took the bins out at ten there had been stars over the church tower and frost on the lids.

I got up, put on the dressing gown Jule had given me for my fiftieth with the word CHEF embroidered on the pocket, and went downstairs and did what everybody in the world does. I pulled the plug of the router and counted to thirty and put it back in. The lights went through their little parade, green, green, orange, and then settled again on red.

In the kitchen I turned on the radio. It's an old one, a cream-coloured Grundig that belonged to my mother, and it only gets three stations clearly, which has always been enough. The man on Antenne Brandenburg sounded like he was reading from a piece of paper someone had just handed him.

"...widespread disruption of internet and telephone services across Germany. The cause is currently unclear. Providers are working on a solution. We'll bring you more as soon as..."

Then they played a song. That was the part that stayed with me afterwards, when people asked me when I knew. They played a song about a house by a lake, one that had been everywhere the summer Jule moved away, and I made coffee in the filter machine and thought: well, if they're playing music it can't be that bad.

I tried to call Jule at half past six. I knew it was half past five in Lisbon and she would murder me, but I wanted to hear the ring. There was no ring. There was a short burst of noise and then a woman's voice, recorded, saying in German and then in English that the number could not be reached at present. I tried the shop. The shop's line is the same as the house's line now, everything goes through the internet, the Telekom man explained that too, so of course nothing happened there either. I tried Asiye, who works with me, and that went through. It rang four times and she answered with a mouth full of something.

"Chefin? Your WhatsApp is broken."

"Everybody's WhatsApp is broken," I said. "Are you coming in?"

"Of course I'm coming in. Why wouldn't I come in?"

I didn't have an answer to that, and we hung up. It was the last phone call I made that week, though I didn't know it then.

---

I should explain about the shop, because the shop is where the whole week happened, and because on that Monday morning I was nine days away from not owning it anymore.

The Löwen-Apotheke has been on the market square of Altwenden since 1871. There is a lion over the door made of painted cast iron that loses a little more of its gold every winter. Altwenden has two thousand three hundred people, a church, a Netto, a bakery that also sells newspapers, a doctor's practice with one and a half doctors in it, a fire station, a closed school and an open school, and me. The next pharmacy is in Prenzlau, twenty-two kilometres away. I took the shop over from old Dr. Hesse in 2001 when I was thirty-one and full of ideas: I was going to do blood pressure mornings and nutrition talks and a little corner with good tea. The tea corner lasted three years.

What happened since then is what happened to all of us. People started ordering online. The big mail-order companies put adverts on television with smiling grandmothers in them, and the grandmothers of Altwenden, who are not stupid, saw that you could save four euros on your vitamin D and your compression stockings. Then came the e-prescription, which is a good idea, I'm not one of those people who say it isn't, but it meant that a prescription was no longer a piece of pink paper you had to carry to somebody. It was a code on a server. And the code could go anywhere.

I'm not complaining. I'm explaining why, in October, I had said yes to Konstantin Ebeling.

Ebeling was thirty-eight and owned three pharmacies in Prenzlau and Angermünde. He drove a dark-blue electric car with no visible door handles. He wanted to take over the Löwen-Apotheke as a branch for a year, he said, "to see," and we both knew what "to see" meant. It meant he would keep the licence and the customers' files and in a year he would close the door under the lion and send everyone to Prenzlau, where there was parking. In return I got a sum that was not huge but was enough. I got to stop. I had a flight to Lisbon booked for the fourteenth of December, the day before Jule's due date, a one-way ticket that I'd paid for and then sat in front of the screen for twenty minutes with my hand over my mouth.

The notary appointment was on Wednesday at eleven, in Prenzlau.

I told myself the shop didn't need me anymore. That was the sentence I used, at night, when I was lying awake. A pharmacy is a dispensing point now. A machine could do what I do. In some places in the cities a machine already does.

I thought about that sentence a great deal that week.

---

At seven-thirty I drove the four hundred metres to the market square, which I never do, but I wanted to see the petrol station on the way. There were eleven cars at the Total, which was ten more than usual, and a handwritten sign on the door of the shop: NUR BARZAHLUNG. Cash only. A man in a high-visibility jacket was standing beside his van holding his phone up over his head, slowly turning in a circle, as if he were trying to catch something falling out of the sky.

Asiye was already at the side door of the shop, smoking, which she is not supposed to do there and which I have long since stopped mentioning. She is twenty-six and a PTA, a pharmaceutical-technical assistant, which in Germany means she knows nearly everything I know about medicines and is paid about half as much. Her parents came from Mersin to Schwedt in the nineties. She lives with her boyfriend Robert above the bicycle shop and has opinions about everything, including my hair.

"My brother's in Berlin," she said. "I can't reach him. I could reach you. I can't reach him."

"Maybe the networks are separate," I said, which meant nothing.

We went in. The shop smelled the way it always smells in the morning: floor polish, the herbal teas in the wooden drawers behind the counter, and faintly, underneath, that clean dusty smell of cardboard medicine boxes, which I suppose I will smell in my grave. I turned on the lights and the computers.

Our pharmacy software runs on a server in the back room, under the desk, between the vacuum cleaner and the box of Christmas decorations. It came up. It came up fine, it showed me the stock, the prices, the customer files, everything that was in the building. What it couldn't do was talk to anyone. The little green dot in the corner that said TI verbunden, connected to the health network, was grey. The order screen for the wholesaler, which normally sends the trucks that come at ten and at four, said Verbindung fehlgeschlagen. The card terminal on the counter, when Asiye switched it on, thought for a long time and then printed a small receipt that said only Kommunikationsfehler.

"Okay," Asiye said. "Okay. So paper."

"So paper," I said.

The first customer was Frau Lindqvist at 8:02, who is eighty-one and comes in every Monday whether she needs anything or not. She had heard on the radio. She wanted to know whether the bank would be open, whether it was the Russians, and whether she should buy candles. I sold her a packet of throat lozenges, for cash, and told her I didn't know, I didn't know, and that she probably had candles.

The second customer was the problem.

His name was Dennis Ruhland and he was forty-four and he worked at the biogas plant outside the village, and he had high blood pressure and a thyroid that didn't do its job. He had been to Dr. Grabowski's practice on Friday. Dr. Grabowski had issued him an e-prescription. He held out his insurance card to me across the counter the way people do now, as if the card were the prescription, and I put it in the reader, and the reader said it could not reach the server.

"So?" Dennis said.

"So I can't see what she prescribed."

"Ramipril and L-Thyroxin. Same as always. You know what I take."

I did know what he took. I've known what Dennis Ruhland takes since he was a teenager with acne. I looked at his file in our system. Ramipril 5, L-Thyroxin 75. Last dispensed six weeks ago. A hundred tablets of each, which meant he should have had some left, but he said he'd run out on Saturday because he'd left a box at his girlfriend's in Gramzow and she had thrown him out. He said this without embarrassment, as a medical fact.

I stood there with his card in my hand and thought about the law. I'm a careful person. The law says that without a prescription I can't give him prescription-only medicines, unless it's an emergency and a doctor tells me. I couldn't call the doctor. Nobody could call anybody.

"Wait," I said.

I went into the back and took a notebook out of the drawer in my desk. It was a black hardcover notebook from the stationery shop in Prenzlau that I'd bought to write down Portuguese vocabulary in and had used for eleven words. I tore out the page with the eleven words and folded it into my coat pocket. On the first clean page I wrote: Montag, 9.11. And under that: Ruhland, Dennis, 14.3.1982. Ramipril 5 mg N1 (20). L-Thyroxin 75 N1 (50). Kein Rezept abrufbar, TI-Ausfall. Dauermedikation bekannt. Rezept nachreichen. Prescription to follow.

I gave him the smallest packs, enough for twenty days, and told him to go to Grabowski's and ask for a paper prescription, and he looked at me as if I had asked him to go and get it from a monk.

"Paper?"

"Pink paper. Like in the old days. She'll know."

"How much?"

"The co-payment's ten euros."

He had six euros and forty cents in coins. He had his card and his phone and a car with a full tank, but he had six euros and forty cents. I wrote that in the book too. Offen: 3,60 €.

That was the first entry. By evening there were thirty-one.

---

Bodo Kranich came at half past nine with a transistor radio in the pocket of his parka, playing so loudly that he didn't hear what I said to him the first time. Bodo is seventy, a retired physics teacher who taught at the old school until it closed, a widower, and a man who has never in his life forgotten to tell you something he knows. He has a tower on the roof of his house on the Seestraße, a steel lattice with antennas like a fishbone, which the neighbours have been complaining about since 1994. He is, as he says, "on the air." He has a call sign, which he once told me and which I wrote down on the back of a receipt, and he talks with men in Finland and New Zealand about the weather and the propagation, which is a word I learned from him, and which means how far a signal goes.

"It's everywhere," he said. He turned the radio down. "It's not just us. It's everywhere."

"What do you mean, everywhere?"

"I mean everywhere. I was up at four. I couldn't sleep, I never can, so I was on the eighty-metre band. And there was a fellow in Leeds asking if anyone else had lost their internet. And then a fellow in Bavaria. And then a woman in Toronto, Toronto, Henrike, and it was ten at night there." He leaned on the counter. His eyes were bright. I realised, with a kind of distaste, that he was enjoying himself, and then I realised that so would I, if I'd spent fifty years preparing for something that everyone had told me would never happen. "All of it. The whole net. It went at the same moment. Two-twelve Greenwich time. That's not a storm. A storm doesn't do that."

"What does that?"

He shrugged with his whole body. "People," he said.

The radio behind him, as if it had been listening, said that the Federal Ministry of the Interior had convened a crisis staff and that the outage appeared to extend "far beyond Germany." The minister would make a statement at noon. Citizens were asked not to call emergency numbers except in real emergencies, to keep their radios on, and to check on their neighbours.

At 9:40 every phone in the shop screamed at once. Asiye's, mine, Frau Pohl's, who was buying nasal spray. That tearing, rising tone of the emergency alert that the government sends out, which I'd heard once on the national warning day and which made everyone laugh then because it went off in the middle of a meeting. Nobody laughed. The message said: Erhebliche Störung der Telekommunikation. Informieren Sie sich über Radio und Fernsehen. Notrufe nur im Notfall.

And that was the last thing my phone received for five days.

---

Around eleven the mobile network went. Not all at once. It became slower, and then calls would ring once and die, and then there was nothing. Asiye stood in the door to the square holding her phone up over her head like the man at the petrol station and swore in Turkish, softly and continuously, a sound like a kettle.

The truck from the wholesaler didn't come at ten. That wasn't a surprise. It didn't come at four either.

What I did that afternoon was count. I'm good at counting. I went through the fridge and the drawers and made a list in the black book of what we had that people would die without, and how much. Insulin of six kinds, fourteen patients in the village on insulin that I knew of, three of them children. The epilepsy drugs. Heart medications, blood thinners. The two patients on opioid substitution who come in daily, whom I won't name here even now. Salbutamol inhalers for the asthmatics. Antibiotics. Then I went through the people. I wrote down their names from memory, and their medicines, and it took me an hour and a half, and when I checked against the computer I'd got almost all of it right.

I sat in the back office with the list on my knees and felt something I couldn't name. Not pride. Something more like vertigo. As if I'd been walking along a floor for years and had suddenly looked down and seen that it was glass, and under the glass there was a long drop, and the floor had been holding me the whole time.

At six I locked the door and wrote on a piece of cardboard, with the thick marker we use for the prices in the window: Notdienst: Klingeln. Seestraße 4 oder Am Anger 12. For emergencies, ring, or come to Bodo's house or mine. I put it in the window under the lion. It was the first time in twenty-five years I had written my private address on the shop.

At home I ate bread and cheese standing up, and listened to the radio. The minister had said the outage was "global in extent" and "likely the result of a deliberate act," and that restoration "would not be a matter of hours." The newsreader in the evening said it again more slowly. Airspace over Europe was closed. Long-distance trains weren't running. Banks would open tomorrow with limits on cash. People should not hoard. People should check on their neighbours.

I sat on the bottom stair in the dark hall with the red light breathing on the shoe cabinet beside me and thought about Jule. She was thirty-four weeks pregnant in a flat on the fourth floor of a building in Graça, with a Portuguese boyfriend called Tiago whom I had met twice and liked once. She had a midwife and an obstetrician at a hospital whose name I'd written down somewhere, on my phone, in a note, which I could still open because the phone kept its notes. Hospital de São José. She had a bag packed already. She had sent me a photo of the bag.

I tried to call her. The phone didn't even try.

I thought, for the first time that day, and not the last: she doesn't know if I'm all right either. She's lying there in the dark on the fourth floor with her hand on her belly thinking about me.

That was the worst thought, and I had it at eleven at night, and it lasted until morning.

Tuesday

By Tuesday the village had learned the new rules, the way a body learns to walk on a sprained ankle. Not well, but without thinking about it.

The Sparkasse opened at nine instead of half past eight, with a policeman from Prenzlau standing in front of it who looked about nineteen. The queue went round the corner past the bakery and the bakery's own queue joined it, so that for a while nobody knew which line they were in. You could take out two hundred euros, if you had an account there and an identity card and the patience to wait while Frau Möller behind the counter wrote everything into a ledger with a ballpoint pen, because the bank's computers, like mine, could see only what was inside the building. People who banked with the online banks, the young ones and the ones who'd changed for the free credit card, got nothing. They stood on the edge of the queue with their arms folded and watched.

The Netto had taped paper signs over the shelves: Max. 2 Stück pro Kunde. Two per customer of water, of tinned food, of toilet paper, of batteries. The batteries were gone by ten anyway. Someone had bought every candle in the village by Monday evening and nobody would admit to it.

I opened at eight. There were nine people waiting outside, and that was how it stayed all day, nine or ten or twelve, a line that never got shorter because when one person left another arrived, as if the square were feeding them in from somewhere.

Dr. Grabowski had sent her assistant across at half past seven with a stack of pink prescription forms already filled out and signed, an inch thick, held together with a bulldog clip. On top was a note in her terrible handwriting: Frau Voss, these are my chronic patients for the next 4 weeks as far as I can remember them. Paper procedure, the insurance will have to deal with it. Practice open until we drop. G. I nearly cried at that, standing at the counter. It wasn't the prescriptions. It was the as far as I can remember them. She'd been up all night writing out her patients from memory, the same as I had, in a house twenty metres away, and neither of us had known about the other.

Asiye and I made a system. It was a bad system but it was a system. She stood at the counter and took the cash and the paper prescriptions and found the boxes. I stood at the end of the counter with the black book and the pink slips that hadn't come, and for every person whose prescription hadn't come and who needed something, I decided. I asked them questions. When did you last take it. What happens if you don't. Who is your doctor. I knew most of the answers before they gave them. I wrote down every decision. Name, date of birth, drug, strength, quantity, reason. Offen, when they couldn't pay. On Tuesday, most of them couldn't pay.

I've thought since about what it was like for them, standing there. They were used to the pharmacy being a place where you gave a card and got a box. A transaction, like the petrol station. Now they had to stand in front of me and explain their bodies. Tell me about the heart that skipped, the blood sugar at night, the fits that came if they missed a dose. They were ashamed of it, some of them, the men especially, and some of them were grateful in a way that frightened me more than the shame, because it meant they had been carrying something alone for a long time and had never been asked.

Old Herr Pilz, who has a farm out towards Schönermark and atrial fibrillation and a tongue like a rasp, stood in front of me with his cap in his hands and said, "I didn't know you knew all that about me."

"It's my job," I said.

"I thought your job was the boxes."

At about eleven Mandy Behrendt came in with Finn. Finn is nine and has had type 1 diabetes since he was four. He wears an insulin pump on his belt and a sensor on his arm that sends his blood sugar to his mother's phone every five minutes, and he hates both and is very brave about it in the way only small boys who have had to be brave too young can be. The sensor, Mandy told me, still talked to her phone. That was the first good news I'd heard in two days. The app worked with the sensor directly, over Bluetooth, without the internet. The graph was still there on her screen, a wobbling blue line with Finn's life in it.

What she was short of were the cartridges for the pump and the little tubes and needles that go into his skin, the infusion sets. They were delivered by a medical supply company in a box by courier every three months. The box was due Thursday. She had four days of sets left, if nothing went wrong, and something always went wrong with a nine-year-old, a set pulled out at football, a kink in the tube at night.

"And insulin?"

"Two vials. Three weeks, maybe."

I had insulin. I didn't have pump supplies. Nobody in Altwenden had ever bought them from me because nobody needed to. They came in the box.

"If the sets run out," I said, "he goes back to pens. You remember how. I've got the pens and the needles, and I've got his insulin. He won't like it."

"He won't like it," Finn agreed, from somewhere around my knees, where he was looking at the display of children's plasters.

"But he'll be all right," I said, to Mandy, and I watched her decide to believe me, and I wrote it in the book. Behrendt, Finn. Pump supplies short, ~4 days. Pens + needles reserved. Ask Prenzlau.

That Ask Prenzlau sat there all afternoon like a stone in my shoe.

---

At noon the sirens went. The radio had said they would, at twelve exactly, a test of the signal, and still when the siren on the fire station roof began its long rising howl I felt my heart drop into my stomach, and the whole queue went silent, and someone's child started crying. It wound down. The child stopped. The queue began talking again, louder than before.

The radio, all afternoon, was a strange thing to listen to. They had stopped playing songs. It was voices, all day, the presenters sounding hoarse and tired and somehow more human than I'd ever heard them, reading out lists. Which trains were running. Which hospitals were taking emergencies. That the airspace would remain closed. That the federal government had asked the Bundeswehr to carry messages between the ministries and the states, which made me picture young men in uniform running across Berlin with envelopes, and I suppose that is exactly what it was. That all over the world it was the same. That in America the stock exchanges hadn't opened. That in India the trains had stopped. That in Lagos and in Jakarta and in São Paulo people were queuing at banks with nothing in them. They didn't say anything about Portugal. I listened for Portugal all day, and nobody said it once.

At four Ebeling's name came back to me. Wednesday at eleven, the notary in Prenzlau, the papers. I'd forgotten. Twenty-four hours had gone past in which I had forgotten that I was selling the shop. I stood in the back room holding a box of amoxicillin and laughed out loud, and Asiye looked round the doorframe at me as if I'd finally cracked.

---

The power went at twenty to ten that night.

I was in bed, not asleep. The red light on the ceiling of the stairwell stopped breathing. The fridge in the kitchen gave a small shudder and went quiet. Outside, the streetlight in front of the Hoffmanns' went out, and then the next, and I got up and went to the window and the whole of Altwenden was black. Not dark: black. Only the stars, and far off, to the north, an orange glow that must have been Prenzlau, still lit.

I stood there in my CHEF dressing gown and thought: the fridge.

The pharmacy fridge holds about eleven thousand euros of medicine on an ordinary day. Insulin, vaccines, some eye drops, a few biologics for the two rheumatism patients. It is a proper medical fridge with an alarm and a thermometer that records itself. Insulin will keep a month at room temperature, I knew that, and it was November, the shop would cool down. But it's not the temperature that kills it. It's freezing. It's heat. It's not knowing. And a medical fridge that loses power for six hours and comes back has to be checked, and the rules say you document the excursion and in doubt you throw everything away, and there was no wholesaler to bring more.

I got dressed. I took the big torch from under the sink and the car keys and drove to the square with the headlights cutting the black like a knife. I've lived there for twenty-five years and I didn't recognise my own village. Every house a shape. In one window a candle. In another the blue glow of a phone screen held up to a face.

Asiye was already there. She was standing in front of the shop door with Robert, both of them in their coats with their hoods up, and Robert had a head torch strapped to his forehead that made him look like a miner. "I thought you'd come," she said. "I thought, she'll come for the fridge."

We stood around the open fridge in the back room like three people around a fire. The display was dead. Inside it was still cold, four degrees, my little dial thermometer said. It would hold for a while, if we kept the door closed. But for how long? An hour? Six? The radio in the car said nothing about when the power would come back. The radio in the car said the outage was "local" and "being worked on" and that the engineers had to drive to the substations because they couldn't switch them remotely anymore.

"Bodo," Asiye said. "Bodo's got a generator."

He did. Of course he did. Bodo has a generator, a water tank, a cellar full of tins, a wind-up radio, and an opinion of the rest of us that he had been far too polite for twenty years to express. When we drove down the Seestraße his house was the only lit window in the street, a yellow square, and the generator was chugging in the shed behind it, and the fishbone tower on the roof was a black shape against the stars.

He opened the door in a cardigan with a cup of tea in his hand, and looked at us, and at the cool boxes we were carrying, and stood aside.

We put the insulin and the vaccines in his kitchen fridge, which hummed on generator power and which we emptied for it, standing his butter and sausage and pickles in a row on the windowsill, where it was nearly as cold. I wrote down the time and the temperature in the book. 22:31, four degrees. Robert carried the cool boxes back to the car. Asiye made tea. And Bodo, who had been watching me do all this with a kind of patient, pleased expression, said, "Come and see," and took me upstairs.

---

I'd never been in his radio room. In twenty years I'd been in his kitchen perhaps three times, for coffee at Christmas, and once to look at his wife when she was dying, which was a thing I did then for people who couldn't get to the doctor, before the rules changed. The radio room was the small bedroom at the back, under the slope of the roof. It was warm and it smelled of hot dust and electronics, the smell of the back of an old television. There were two radios on the desk, grey and black, with dials and needles and a little screen glowing green, and a microphone on a stand, and a logbook open beside it, a real paper logbook, pages and pages of his small, neat handwriting. On the wall was a map of the world with coloured pins in it and a clock showing a time that was an hour behind ours.

"UTC," he said, when he saw me look. "Radio time. Everybody's time."

He put on headphones and turned a dial, and after a while he took the headphones off and switched to the speaker so I could hear. And out of the speaker, through a wash of hiss and whistle, like wind in a chimney, came voices.

A man speaking English with a Dutch accent, reading out numbers. A woman answering in a flat, careful English with something else underneath it. Then a man in German, a Bavarian voice, asking for "traffic," which Bodo told me meant messages. Then a voice in French, very fast. They were taking turns. They were waiting for each other. Somebody was running it, a calm Scottish voice that said "Go ahead" and "Stand by" and "Thank you, Oscar, next station," and nobody talked over anybody, and it was the most orderly thing I'd heard in two days.

"Emergency net," Bodo said. "It's been going since Monday morning. Hospitals, councils, police in some countries. Mostly relaying for people who've got nothing else. Tomorrow they'll start on health and welfare."

"What's health and welfare?"

"Messages. From people to people. I'm alive, the children are fine, don't worry." He looked at me. "Normally we're not allowed to carry messages for other people across borders. Not between all countries. It's a whole thing. Treaties." He waved the treaties away with his teacup. "In an emergency, it's different."

I didn't say anything. I didn't need to. He'd known since I came in the door.

"Where is she?" he said.

"Lisbon. Graça. Rua..." I had to take out my phone and open the note, and I held it up to him, the screen trembling a little because my hand was trembling.

He wrote it down in his log in capitals. JULE VOSS. The street, the number. The hospital name. Then he looked up and said, "What's the message? Short. Twenty-five words."

I stood there in his warm little room with the voices hissing out of the speaker from Scotland and Holland and Bavaria and couldn't think of a single word. Twenty-five words. I'd been talking to my daughter every day for thirty-four years and couldn't think of twenty-five words.

In the end Bodo wrote it for me, the way you'd fill out a form for an old person at the post office. Mother Henrike Voss Altwenden Germany safe and well. Village safe. Thinking of you every hour. Love. Please confirm Jule and baby well.

"That's twenty-three," he said. "I'll put it in the queue tomorrow. There'll be thousands. Don't expect anything."

"I won't," I said, and expected everything.

The power came back at a quarter past three. I was asleep in Bodo's armchair under a crocheted blanket his wife had made, and I woke up because the streetlight outside came on through the window and shone in my face like a question.

Wednesday

I went to Prenzlau because of the pump sets. That's what I told Asiye, and it was true, and it was also not the whole truth.

The petrol station on the Prenzlauer Straße had a chain across the entrance and a sign: Kein Kraftstoff. My little Polo had a bit under half a tank. Twenty-two kilometres there, twenty-two back. I did the arithmetic three times on the way out of the village, the way I'd been doing arithmetic for three days, the way I suppose everyone was, everywhere: how much of everything, and for how long.

The road was strange. There were hardly any cars and the ones there were drove slowly, as if the asphalt might give way. At the junction at Schönermark a tractor was towing a car with a young woman at the wheel and a baby seat in the back. Outside Dedelow there was a handwritten sign by a farm gate, Eier, Kartoffeln, Tausch möglich, eggs and potatoes, will trade. I'd driven past that farm for twenty-five years and never known anyone lived there.

I'd brought the papers. I want to be honest about that. They were in a folder on the passenger seat, the contract draft with Ebeling's notes in the margin in green ink, and I'd put them there that morning without really deciding to, the way your hand reaches for a cigarette years after you've quit.

The notary's office was on the first floor of a building on the Friedrichstraße, above an optician. The door downstairs was open. On the door upstairs there was a printed notice, printed, they must have had a working printer and no network, which I found oddly touching, and it said that due to the failure of the electronic registers and the communication systems, no notarisations could take place until further notice. Appointments would be rescheduled. Please do not call.

I stood in front of it with the folder in my hand and felt, God help me, relief. A great, warm, shameful flood of it, from my scalp down to my feet.

Then I went to find Ebeling.

---

His main pharmacy is on the Marktberg, in the new shopping arcade, with glass doors that slide open on their own and a fully automatic picking machine in the back, a great humming cabinet with a robot arm that fetches the boxes from thousands of slots and sends them down a chute to the counter. I'd been there once for a tour. He'd been proud of the machine. He'd shown me how it could put away a whole wholesaler delivery in forty minutes while the staff did "the real work, the advice." He'd said "the advice" the way people say "the environment."

The queue went out of the sliding doors and along the arcade, past the closed phone shop, past the closed bank, to the stairs. It was two hundred people, perhaps more. Two security men from the arcade were standing at the doors letting people in four at a time. I went to the side, to the staff entrance, which I knew from the tour, and knocked, and a young woman in a white coat with the badge of an apprentice opened it, looked at my face, and said, "Are you from the health office?"

"I'm the pharmacist from Altwenden," I said. "I need to see Dr. Ebeling."

She let me in because I said it as if it were obvious, and in my experience most doors open if you say things that way.

He was in the back office, which was the size of my whole shop. He was sitting at a desk with his head in his hands. On the desk in front of him there was a computer showing a screen I recognised, the grey dot, Verbindung fehlgeschlagen, and next to the computer there was a pad of paper with three names on it, crossed out.

He looked up. He hadn't shaved. I've seen a lot of exhausted people, I've been one, but I hadn't seen Konstantin Ebeling with a single hair out of place in the four months I'd known him, and now he looked like a man who'd been pulled out of a river.

"Frau Voss," he said. "The appointment's off. The notary..."

"I know. I saw. I didn't come for that."

"What did you come for?"

"Pump supplies," I said. "Infusion sets and reservoirs for an Ypsomed pump. A nine-year-old. He's got three days."

He laughed. It wasn't a nice laugh, but it wasn't directed at me. "Pump supplies," he said. "I've got the robot full of drugs and I can't find anything. Do you know what's happened? The robot works. The robot's fine. It has its own little computer, the whole stock is in there. But the old system that tells the robot who gets what, that sits on a server in a data centre in Frankfurt. We moved it last year. To the cloud. It was cheaper. So the robot has everything and I can't ask it for anything except by typing in the article number by hand, one at a time, at a service terminal, which my staff don't know how to use, and I don't remember the article numbers, because who remembers the article numbers, nobody's remembered an article number in ten years."

He stopped. I waited.

"And the people," he said. "That's the other thing. That's the worse thing." He looked at the pad with the three crossed-out names. "They come in and they say, I take the little white one for my heart, and the pink one, you know. And I don't know. I don't know them. I've got eleven thousand customers in three shops and I don't know any of them. In Angermünde my manager's been there fifteen years, she knows them, she's fine. Here, I've had staff turnover of, I don't know. I just had a man in front of me who couldn't tell me what he takes for his epilepsy. His wife always picks it up. His wife's in Berlin, she went on Sunday for her sister's birthday, she can't get back, there are no trains. He's standing there shaking, and I don't know what he takes, and I can't call anyone, and I can't look it up."

"What did you do?"

"I gave him levetiracetam because it's the most common and asked him if the box looked familiar. He said he thought it was green. I gave him a green box." He rubbed his face. "That was an hour ago. I keep thinking about it."

I sat down on the chair opposite him without being asked. I don't know why I said what I said next. Perhaps because I'd had three days of being the person who knew, and I'd forgotten how it felt to be the person who didn't.

"In Altwenden," I said, "I've got a book."

I took it out of my bag and put it on his desk, the black notebook, already a third full, the spine cracking. He opened it and turned the pages. I watched him read. Ruhland, Dennis. Pilz, Gerhard. Behrendt, Finn. Lindqvist, Margarete. Forty, fifty, sixty names a day, every drug, every dose, every offen. My handwriting getting worse as the day got longer. The note at 22:31, four degrees.

"You know all of these," he said.

"Most of them."

"Without the computer."

"The computer helps. But yes."

He closed the book and put his hand flat on top of it, the way you'd put your hand on a bible in a film.

"I was going to close you," he said. "You know that."

"I know."

"In a year. I'd already worked it out. The rent. The staff. Your PTA I'd have taken to Prenzlau." He shook his head slowly. "Your customers would have come here. They'd have stood in that queue."

We sat there for a moment, the two of us, and I could hear through the door the murmur of the queue, and the chime of the sliding doors opening and closing, four at a time.

Then he stood up and said, "Ypsomed. Come on. You know what the boxes look like."

---

It took us forty minutes at the service terminal. He typed. I described. A white box, I said, blue writing, the orbit soft, this size, and he typed in search terms, and the robot arm swung and clicked behind its glass like a patient animal and brought us the wrong thing, and then the wrong thing again, and then a box of exactly what Finn needed, and Ebeling made a noise like a man scoring a goal. He found me two months of sets and reservoirs. He found me insulin pens for the three children, because I'd asked. He found me salbutamol, which I was low on. He refused money. "Put it in your book," he said. "Write offen. I'll come and collect it."

Before I left I sat with his apprentice for twenty minutes and showed her how I'd set up the book. Name, date of birth, drug, strength, quantity, reason. Who decided. Offen. The time. She wrote it all down in her own notebook, a pink one with a unicorn on it, and asked good questions, and I thought, with a sharp, unexpected pain, that I'd have liked to teach her. That I'd have liked, at some point in the last ten years, to have taught somebody.

On the way out Ebeling walked me to the staff door.

"When this is over," he said, "the contract."

"Yes."

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know anything anymore. Let's just. Let's talk when it's over."

"Let's talk," I said.

It was a quarter to three when I got back to the car. The drive back was slower because the light was going already, the way it does in November, the sky over the fields going the colour of dishwater and then of ash. I drove with the radio on. The newsreader said the government had released fuel from the national reserve and that tankers would be escorted by police. She said that some core networks in Germany were being "brought back up manually, device by device," and that it would take days. She said the attack, which she now called an attack without saying suspected, had used "a vulnerability in the software of network equipment that had been installed worldwide over several years," and that it had been "patient." That was her word. Patient. I thought of the robot arm behind its glass, swinging and clicking, waiting for someone to tell it what to do.

---

When I got back the shop was still open. It was nearly five. Asiye had kept it open on her own all day, which I had never once in four years let her do, and the queue was down to three people, and she was standing behind the counter with her sleeves rolled up and her hair coming out of its knot, and she looked at me coming in with the bag from Prenzlau and said, "Finn?"

"Finn's fine. Two months."

She closed her eyes for a second.

There was a lorry on the square. A real wholesaler's lorry, white with the green logo, its engine running, the driver standing beside it with a clipboard. He'd been driving since six in the morning on a route he'd been given on paper, a standard load, the same crates for every pharmacy, whether we needed them or not: painkillers, antibiotics, insulin, blood pressure tablets, cough syrup, and for some reason four boxes of sunscreen. He had no idea what we'd ordered because nobody could order anything. He had a list of addresses typed on a typewriter. A typewriter, he said, the boss had found it in the basement. He needed a signature. He apologised for the sunscreen.

We unloaded it together, the three of us, in the cold, with the lion looking down at us from over the door and his gold flaking a little more.

That evening, just after seven, Bodo knocked on my door at home with a torch in his hand.

"It's in," he said. "The message. It went out through Hamburg to a station in Spain at four this afternoon. Spain's passing it to Portugal. That's all I know."

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't thank me," he said. "Thank the fellow in Spain. He's been on the air since Monday. His wife brings him soup."

I made him come in and we ate soup ourselves, potato soup from the eggs-and-potatoes farm outside Dedelow, which Asiye's Robert had driven out to that afternoon and paid for with a box of ibuprofen and a promise. We sat at my kitchen table under the light that worked again and didn't talk about Lisbon. We talked about the man with the epilepsy in Prenzlau whose box might be green.

I lay awake again that night. But it was a different kind of awake.

Thursday

On Thursday people began to come back.

Not for medicine. To pay. That was the thing I hadn't expected, and that I didn't know how to do. Dennis Ruhland came at half past eight, before the queue, with his three euros sixty in a twist of paper and, on the step, a sack of potatoes from his mother's garden that he said was "for the inconvenience." Frau Lindqvist came with a jar of plum jam from 2019. A man from the new houses at the edge of the village whom I didn't know at all, who'd come on Tuesday for his wife's asthma inhaler and couldn't pay, came with a wheelbarrow of split beech logs and stacked them by the side door without asking, and when I went out to say he didn't have to, he said, "She slept through the night. First time since Sunday," and went away with the empty barrow before I could answer.

I wrote it all in the book, in a new column. I didn't know what else to do with it. Bezahlt: Kartoffeln. Bezahlt: Holz. Paid in potatoes. Paid in wood. If the tax office ever audits that week, they're going to have to come and look at the woodpile.

Asiye watched me write and said, "You know you're going to have to give the wood to somebody."

"I know."

"Old Frau Kessler on the Anger only has her stove."

"I know."

She was quiet for a bit, putting the sunscreen up on the top shelf, where nobody could reach it, which seemed right. Then she said, without turning round, "Robert says, if you sell, he'll take me to Hamburg. His cousin's got a job for me in a big pharmacy. Near the harbour."

I didn't say anything. I hadn't known that. Of course I hadn't. I hadn't asked her what would happen to her, not once in four months. I'd thought about my flight and my daughter and the money, and I'd thought, Asiye's young, she'll be fine, which is what you think about young people when you don't want to think about them.

"Would you want that?" I said.

She turned round with a bottle of sunscreen in each hand. "I'd want," she said, very precisely, "to be asked."

---

Herr Pilz collapsed at ten past eleven.

He was fourth in the queue. He'd come in to tell me, in his rasping way, that he'd run out of his rhythm tablets on Wednesday and hadn't wanted to bother me about them on Tuesday, when he was here anyway, because I was busy, which is the most Uckermark sentence anyone has ever said, and then in the middle of it he put a hand out to the counter and missed, and went down sideways against the display of reading glasses.

He wasn't unconscious. That's the first thing I checked, on my knees on the floor, with reading glasses all around us like scattered insects. He was grey and sweating and his eyes were open and he said, "Don't make a fuss," and his pulse under my fingers at his wrist was a mad, hopping, galloping thing, a hundred and sixty perhaps, no rhythm in it at all, a heart running down a staircase in the dark.

"Asiye," I said. "Fire station."

She was gone before I'd finished the word.

You couldn't call 112. That was the thing. On a normal day there would have been an ambulance in fifteen or twenty minutes, they come from Prenzlau, they're good. But nobody could call anyone, and the young people in the queue stood there holding their dead phones as if the phones might still do something, out of habit, the way you reach for a light switch in a house where the power's off. The fire station, though, had a radio. Not the internet: their own radio, the one all the emergency services use, which had its own network and its own masts and had kept working, more or less, all week. Bodo had told me that on Monday and I'd only half listened.

I kept Herr Pilz talking. That's most of it, when you can't do anything else. I kept him lying on his side on my floor with my coat under his head, and I held his wrist and counted the mad pulse and asked him about his farm. He told me about his cows. He told me the price of milk, in detail, with bitterness. He told me his wife had wanted to sell the farm in 2009 and he'd said no, and she'd been right, and he'd never told her she was right, and now she was dead. "You should tell people when they're right," he said. "That's my advice." Then he said, "Don't write that in your book."

"I won't," I said.

The queue had gone quiet behind us. Then someone, I think it was the young mother from the new houses, went round the counter and filled a glass of water from the tap in the back without asking, and brought it, and someone else picked up the reading glasses one by one and put them back in the stand, carefully, in the wrong order.

The ambulance came at eleven thirty-eight. Twenty-eight minutes. The fire brigade had raised the control centre by radio and the control centre had found an ambulance on the road near Gramzow. The paramedics came in with their orange bags and their calm voices and put the stickers on his chest and looked at the screen of their machine and said the word I'd been thinking for twenty-eight minutes, atrial fibrillation with rapid ventricular response, and one of them looked at me and said, "You kept him lying down. Good."

When they carried him out on the stretcher Herr Pilz lifted his hand off the blanket and pointed it at me, a single bony finger, like a man in a painting.

"You were right," he said. "About the pills. In 2015. When you told me to take them and I said they were poison."

And then the doors closed.

I sat down on the step behind the counter where nobody could see me. Asiye came back, out of breath, her cheeks red from running, and sat down next to me, and after a while she leaned her shoulder against my shoulder, and we stayed like that, two women sitting on a step behind a counter in a shop full of boxes, until the next customer cleared his throat.

Friday

On Friday the phones began to whisper.

It started in the afternoon. Asiye's phone made a sound in her pocket at 14:20, a small buzz, and she pulled it out so fast she nearly threw it across the shop. It was a text message, an old-fashioned text message, from her brother in Berlin. It had been sent on Monday at 08:51. It said: Alles ok bei dir? Hier Chaos. Everything OK with you? Chaos here. Four days it had been somewhere, in some machine, waiting.

She read it to me four times. She tried to answer and the answer wouldn't send, and then at 15:05 it did, and she screamed, and two customers screamed with her without knowing why.

Mine stayed quiet. I took it out every half hour. I wasn't expecting anything from Portugal, not on a phone, not yet. I knew that. The radio had said international lines were still down except "for official use," whatever that meant. Satellites, I assumed. Ministries. But I took it out every half hour anyway.

The radio also said that some of the big supermarket chains could take cards again, over their own private networks, and that a few flights would leave Frankfurt and Munich over the weekend, mostly for stranded people, and that the government expected "the majority of services" to return within two to four weeks. The presenter said two to four weeks the way you'd tell a child a dentist's appointment would only take a minute.

At eight that evening I was sitting at my kitchen table with the black book, adding up. Not the money, though that too. I was counting names. Over five days, two hundred and eighteen people had come through the Löwen-Apotheke and told me about their bodies. I'd decided something for a hundred and forty-three of them without a prescription. I'd been wrong, as far as I knew, about none of them. Not because I'm clever. Because I'd known them, most of them, for twenty-five years. Because I'd stood behind that counter while they got old and got sick and had children and lost them, and every time, without really noticing, I'd put something away in my head.

A machine could do what I do, I'd told myself, all autumn. And maybe a machine could. Maybe a machine could do it better, on a good day, with the server in Frankfurt humming. But it hadn't been a good day for five days, and on bad days it turned out it was me. It was me and Grabowski and her inch of pink paper and Asiye and Bodo's fishbone tower and a man in Spain whose wife brought him soup. It was a lot of people holding each other's names.

There was a knock at nine.

Bodo stood on the step without a torch, because the streetlights were working, holding a piece of paper torn out of his logbook. He'd run. Bodo, seventy, who hadn't run since the Wende. His face was wet and red and he was breathing in great gasps, and for one terrible second I saw only that his face was wet and thought it was the other thing. I put my hand on the doorframe.

"No," he said, seeing it. "No, no, no. Read it. Read it."

It was in capitals, in his small neat hand, with numbers at the top that meant something to radio people, call signs, a time in UTC, the word RELAY twice.

TO HENRIKE VOSS ALTWENDEN GERMANY. FROM TIAGO LISBON. JULE GAVE BIRTH WEDNESDAY NIGHT HOSPITAL SAO JOSE. GIRL 2140 GRAMS EARLY BUT STRONG. BOTH WELL. NAME MARTA HENRIKE. WE RECEIVED YOUR MESSAGE. JULE SAYS COME.

I read it standing in the door with the cold coming in around my ankles. Then I read it again. Wednesday night. On Wednesday night I had been lying awake in a different kind of awake, and at the same moment, two and a half thousand kilometres away, my daughter had been on the fourth floor of a hospital in Lisbon, six weeks early, with no internet and no phone and no mother, having a child.

Two thousand one hundred and forty grams. I've weighed out a lot of things in my life. I know exactly what that weighs.

"Over thirty words," Bodo said, into the silence. "They went over thirty words. Nobody cut it. All the way from Lisbon, through Madrid and Hamburg. Every station that relayed it, nobody cut a single word."

I couldn't speak. I took his hand, the one that wasn't holding the paper, and held it, and we stood like that in my doorway, the two of us, an old widower and a woman who had been left a long time ago, under a streetlight that had come back on, and I cried the way I hadn't cried since Jule's father left, with my mouth open, ugly, without any shame at all.

Marta Henrike.

Jule says come.

Saturday

On Saturday morning I wrote two letters before the shop opened, on paper, at the kitchen table, with the Grundig on low and the light coming up grey over the Hoffmanns' roof.

The first was to Konstantin Ebeling. It was short. I told him I wasn't going to sell. Not this year, and not to anyone who would close the door under the lion. I told him I owed him for the pump sets and the pens and the salbutamol, and that it was written in my book, offen, and that I had a proposal for paying it. I needed a pharmacist to stand in for me in Altwenden for six weeks from whenever the planes flew again, someone sensible, who wasn't afraid of paper and would listen to the PTA, because the PTA knew everything. He had three pharmacies and a staff turnover he couldn't count. If he lent me one of his people, I'd come to Prenzlau when I got back and teach his apprentices how to keep a book. I didn't say a pink notebook with a unicorn on it. I thought he'd know.

The second letter was to Asiye, and I didn't give it to her, because halfway through writing it I realised it was a coward's way of doing something you ought to say out loud. I tore it up and put it in the stove.

At ten past seven, as I was putting on my coat, my phone made a sound.

Not a buzz. A cascade. It went on and on in my hand like something waking up, shaking off five days, and I stood there in the hall by the shoe cabinet and watched the messages fall onto the screen in the wrong order, all of them, everything the week had held back somewhere in the dark. The chamber of pharmacists, Monday, about a training course. A delivery notification for a parcel. Ebeling, Sunday night, Looking forward to Wednesday! with an exclamation mark that I looked at for a long time. The weather in Lisbon for Monday, sunny, nineteen degrees.

And Jule. Sunday, 23:47. Sunday, 00:58. And then nothing, because nothing could get through, and then, at the bottom, a single message, timestamped Saturday, 05:41 her time, half an hour ago, that had come by some road that had opened in the night.

Mama. We're ok. Bodo's message came Thursday, a man brought it to the hospital on a scooter, I can't believe it, I cried on him. She's perfect. She's so small. Photo below.

Under it, there was a grey rectangle and a little circle, turning.

The photo was loading. The radio had said mobile data was back "in patches," "slowly," "not for all services," and that many websites still couldn't be reached. This was a patch. I could see the circle turning and under it a thin line, a progress bar, crawling from left to right, and nothing else. Two percent. Then, after a long time, four.

I stood in my hall and watched it. Six percent. A strip of colour appeared at the top of the grey rectangle, a band of something pale and blurred, the kind of pink-white that might have been a hospital blanket or might have been a wall. Eight percent. The top of something round and dark. A head, maybe, or the edge of a hand.

Outside, across the square, I heard the bell on the shop door, the old brass bell Dr. Hesse put up in 1971 and that I'd never taken down. Asiye had a key. She'd let herself in. She'd be turning on the lights and the computer and the radio. She'd be looking at the queue, which would already be forming, because on Saturday mornings they always came, and this week they'd come more than ever, with jam and potatoes and empty prescriptions and their long stories about their bodies, and their names.

Eleven percent. Darkness and a softness, a curve that was perhaps a cheek.

I thought about standing there until it finished. I really did. I thought about it for perhaps thirty seconds, with my coat half on and my bag on my shoulder and the black book in it, heavy, nearly full, I'd have to buy another in Prenzlau. Then I put the phone in my pocket with the circle still turning, because it would load or it wouldn't, and either way she was there, and she was well, and she had my name, and I'd be on a plane as soon as there were planes.

I walked across the square. The frost was on the cobbles and the lion over the door had lost another flake of gold in the night; I could see it lying on the step, a bright little scrap like a fingernail. I picked it up and put it in my pocket with the phone. Inside, through the glass, Asiye was standing behind the counter with her sleeves already rolled up, talking to Frau Lindqvist, who had come, of course, because it was a Saturday and she needed nothing at all.

I opened the door and the bell rang.

"Asiye," I said, before I'd even taken my coat off, in front of Frau Lindqvist and the whole queue, because Herr Pilz was right, you should tell people. "I've got something to ask you."