Patuk was for the most part barely present during the initial period in their new home. Like most people he was a creature of habit, and when everything familiar disappeared, people can fall into a sense of paralyzing helplessness. Patuk saw himself from afar as he walked and talked and breathed. The large family with whom they were staying, all the children, the crowded rooms, sleeping in one bed with his parents. Strange shit. Touching his father’s leg while asleep. Sharing the rest of the house with strangers, no place to sit undisturbed and think about the world, about girls—profoundly awkward. Patuk was young, his hormones made him crazy, though he didn’t know that, he just thought he was going nuts. He thought about death, and then about girls again. About god, and his life, and above all about the people he was supposed to live with now, these pale, scowling people, until he died. The town, which you could walk entirely across in half an hour, was unusually clean compared to the place he’d spent the first part of his youth and about which he had never thought: Man, it is filthy here. Back home he had thought his family well-off. After all, his father was an engineer with a firm that broke down old ships. Now his former home suddenly seemed unbelievably shabby. The looks from the white people probably had something to do with the shabbiness that oozed out of all his pores and those of his relatives. The country’s prime minister made it easy for immigrants to come. He wanted to set an example for an aging population, multiculturalism, openness, who the hell knows what he was thinking, but whatever it was, the prime minister hadn’t thought very carefully about what exactly he wanted to enlist all this fresh immigrant blood to do. It would be sorted out and then self-regulate, the market regulated everything after all, it would all work out. As in all European countries, the people in England weren’t reproducing satisfactorily because of feminism. With new, reproduction-friendly people, one hoped to ensure the funding of old age pension payments. That was before they eliminated old age pensions.

For Patuk’s family, the initial situation was optimal. Free doctors, and you got a passport after three years. The fact that contact with the locals was dysfunctional—yes, you could talk of a hostile ignorance with which they confronted the new arrivals—allowed a defiance to form in Patuk. A pride in the lost homeland. A sense of superiority based on his intact family, his intact beliefs, his intact complexion. He would just sweep these white, tired people aside. Patuk put together a gang of sweepers. He wasn’t afraid of the drunks who sat on their chain-link fences and yelled insults at him. He’d fuck them all. He was young. He was strong. And he was many.

Months later