‘Everything good?” I recognized his voice immediately. Hard, cool, a bullying undertone. Only a few weeks ago he refused to speak to me, which I found very suspicious. In periods of silence he forges the most nefarious plans. We now know what he hatched. It is so much that Prime Minister Rutte and Minister De Jonge will soon have to devote another exhaustive press conference to the consequences.
“Everything is pretty good with me,” I said stiffly, “but the country is in turmoil again. If we are not careful, a civil war will break out between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.”
The Virus laughed heartily. “Don’t act like you mind, because then you’ll have dust for your bits.”
“If new restrictions come in, there will be even bigger demonstrations with even more gallows,” I warned.
“You are asking for trouble too,” he said. I heard him rustle a newspaper. „I just got in The Telegraph read an interview with one Hans Teeuwen. Who is that anyway?”
“A kind of Theo Maassen, but on the right.”
“Is he such a stupid man?”
“Not at all. He is just a bit confused, like so many Dutch people.”
“You can say that, my god!” he cried. “He has been vaccinated himself, he has a girlfriend who has been seriously ill thanks to me, but he is against the corona pass that can prevent unvaccinated people in his audience from infecting others as seriously as his girlfriend. Can you tie a rope to it?”
“He is afraid that with the corona pass the government has ‘a means to induce people to behave in a desirable way’.
“Didn’t he allow the government to induce desired behavior with his own vaccination? You can hardly expect the government to induce undesirable behavior – resulting in a large number of victims.”
I had never heard The Virus talk so empathically about its enemy, the government, but this was a sham. “My surprise at the motives of the people is not important. As long as they support me in my fight against the government. Everyone is welcome: the wappies, Baudet, Teeuwen, it doesn’t matter. I, The Virus, am an anarchist pur sang, the government must be destroyed because any authority is a form of oppression.”
I tried to give the conversation a more practical twist. “How do you manage to resurface every time, just when we think the coast is clear?”
He lets out a short laugh. “You ask about the blacksmith’s secret. You won’t get that from me. I just want to say that I always take a good look at people. How do you play them off against each other? How do you compare the interests of one to that of the other? How do you prevent them from agreeing? I have won on two important fronts. In this pandemic, globally speaking, the young are pitted against the elderly and increasingly the unvaccinated are also opposed to the vaccinated. Now if I still get the citizens en masse against the government…”
He interrupted himself. “I have to go, an appointment in a restaurant.”
“Don’t forget your corona pass,” I said, but he was already gone.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of October 27, 2021
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