by Michel Faber
Miss Soedhono’s voice, though still calm and coolly modulated, has been raised somewhat, to compensate for the worsening ‘ar-ar-ar’ of the air conditioners, the rhythmic creaking of metal seats, occasional groans and grunts from the men.
‘Individually,’ she concedes, her eyes half-closing, her head tilting slightly to one side, ‘the male flowers may be sessile and small, but their aggregation on the spikes in large numbers with expanding petals and light-coloured stamens add to the allure of the spadix. The female flowers, when they are in this state of receptivity, offer excellent landing sites. The exposed portion of the ovary near the stigmatic end is covered with bright trichome units which can be irresistibly attractive for insects of all kinds.’
‘Oh God,’ cries a hoarse voice from the audience.
‘Shut up,’ hisses another. The noise of foot-shuffling, chair-creaking and heavy breathing has become obtrusive, and the air conditioner rattles louder, then abruptly dies away, like a lawn-mower whose blades have struck a boulder, fatally injurious to the mechanism. At once the room, which had seemed already as stifling as it could possibly be, is inundated with an invisible wave of additional warmth.
Miss Soedhono glances sidelong at the machete and the coconut, and someone in the audience cries ‘Yes!’ But she makes no move, content merely to verify that the sacraments are in place. Impatience can have no influence on her presentation; enthusiasm, even desperate enthusiasm, cannot alter the inexorable sequence of logic, the orderly progression of argument, the decorous enigma of learning. She parts her lips, licks her upper teeth, leaving the lustrous patina of her lipstick undisturbed, and continues: ‘When a young coconut spadix, still snugly wrapped in the spathe, is trained at the correct stage of its maturity, it can be made to bleed a sweet sap known as toddy or neera. This sap is procured by tapping the palm’s organs. What organ we tap depends on the species. For example, in Cocos nucifera and Caryota urens the flower-bearing portion of the spadix is pared in thin slices for the extraction of the juice. In Arenga pinnata and Nypa frutícans, it is the peduncle beneath the spikebearing region of the spadix that yields the neera. In Corypha elata, the gigantic spadix is severed at the point where the first ramification develops, and the toddy starts flowing. In the case of Phoenix sylvestris, a portion of the tender stem is pared, and the toddy trickles from the surface. Fresh sweet toddy contains twelve point five to seventeen point five sucrose, and sixteen to twenty per cent solids. Thus, apart from serving as a sweet or fermented beverage, toddy yields sucrose, alcohol, vinegar, treacle and sugar candy.’
‘Do it! Just … pick it up!’ exclaims one of the men, unhinged by the agony of anticipation. Hissing and groaning their disapproval, his fellows turn upon him, terrified that his misbehaviour at this crucial juncture may provoke Miss Soedhono to sweep disdainfully out of the room and leave them all unfulfilled. But, to their collective confusion and delight, she walks over to the table and, with a glimmer of a smile, enfolds the hilt of the machete in her hand.
‘The honey in the male flower,’ she purrs, ‘is secreted by three inter-carpellary or septal glands of the pistillode. In the female flower, the corresponding stigma manifests itself outside the perianth lobes just a couple of days before its receptivity. When readiness is reached, the three fleshy lobes secrete a viscous nectar on their inner surface. Profuse quantities of this fluid pour out through three one-millimetre long orifices or slits.’
Without warning, Miss Soedhono swings the machete down onto the coconut, burying the edge of the blade deep in the hard, furry rind. The shock of impact jolts through each of the sixty-six men as if they were a single giant slab of flesh.
Miss Soedhono uncleaves the machete blade from the coconut’s flesh with a deft twist of her wrist, and hacks a second time into the massive fruit. A neat wedge of shell is dislodged into the air and bounces onto the carpet at her feet.
‘The solid sperm of the coconut,’ she declares, each word enunciated with magisterial calm, ‘whether desiccated or creamed, is approximately sixty-nine per cent fat.’ She picks up the wounded fruit, cradling it gently in her palms, lifting it up to her breast. ‘The liquid endosperm, popularly known as coconut milk, is approximately twenty-four per cent. It is rich in lauric acid, which is converted by the human or animal body into monolaurin, an antiviral, antibacterial and antiprotozoal monoglyceride. An invaluable substance, which has been demonstrated to destroy lipid-coated viruses and bacteria such as Listeria monocytogenes, Helicobactor pylon, cytomegalovirus, chlamydia, herpes and H.I.V. All of this, gentlemen, is here for the drinking.’
Solemnly, Miss Soedhono lifts the hairy globe to her mouth, aligns the white gash with her lips, and shuts her eyes. As she tilts the sphere upwards, her facial features are eclipsed, creating, to the delirious gaze of her audience, a grotesque substitute face, a fibrous, bulbous, hairy face with three blind eyes and a fearsome array of pink teeth capped in gleaming orange enamel, a nightmare head made all the more bizarre by the immaculately styled hairdo framing it.
Once, twice, three times Miss Soedhono’s throat, exposed beneath this monstrous visage, pulsates in satisfaction, whereupon the sixty-six men groan and holler and whimper, each according to his nature. This is the moment of communal consummation they have all feared and resisted, and to which they now surrender themselves.
Miss Soedhono lowers the coconut, replaces it on the table. A single drop of milk twinkles on her chin as she surveys her audience.
‘Thus concludes,’ she says, ‘my presentation. I hope that you will honour us with your presence again next year.’
She bows gravely, to raucous applause, and strolls out of the room, past a phalanx of uniformed employees of the Hotel Magdalaya who stand ready with sixty-seven towels.
Sixty-seven? Yes, sixty-seven. One man, despite his best intentions, was unable to be here today. His flight was cancelled at the last minute, leaving him devastated at his misfortune. Vast merciless stretches of ocean have come between him and Indonesia — between him and Miss Soedhono. For longer than he can bear to think about, he’d been looking forward to his exquisite and shameful reward; now he wanders like a lost soul through the gift shops of his home city’s airport. He buys worthless souvenirs for his wife, his wife who is sweet and kind but knows nothing of coconuts. The digital numbers on the overhead clocks change without regard for his yearning, queues of travellers disappear into their appointed slots, the sky discolours from blue to orange, until he knows it is over, Miss Soedhono’s performance is over, it happened in front of other men and he missed it, and now he must wait another eternity to see it again.
FINESSE
Rumours that the dictator was ill were totally without foundation. He’d never been fitter, and anyone suggesting otherwise could expect to be forcibly corrected.
Nevertheless, the dictator considered it wise, from time to time, to confirm the robustness of his health by having X-rays made of his chest. And it was the fear of forcible correction that made his personal physician hesitate to speak when the great man asked if the X-rays showed anything unusual.
‘You have a very big heart,’ said the physician at last.
‘I know that,’ smiled the dictator. ‘But how big?’
They were standing in the dictator’s office; or rather, the dictator was sitting and the physician was standing. The physician hugged the folder of X-rays unhappily to his breast.
‘Bigger than …’ he began, looking to the open window for inspiration. ‘Bigger than is perhaps totally consistent with … with the size of heart that one might expect in a person who was … ah … in a state of health consistent with … with remaining in a state of health consistent with … um … sustained … ‘
The dictator sighed, impatient with this mealy-mouthedness. Sometimes it fell to a leader to rescue people from their own timidity.
‘Bigger than is good for me, you mean?’
The physician’s shoulders sank with relief.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve often thought so,’ the dictator smiled. ‘But seriously, this big heart of mine: how much of a danger is it?’
‘Danger? ‘The physician was nervous again, perspiring in a manner that the dictator found, frankly, irritating.
‘Friend, we have known each other a long time,’ he cautioned. ‘Can we not speak freely?’
The physician gulped, grinning like an idiot. He and the dictator had known each other for twenty-three months, or say two years. Was this a long time? Certainly it was ten times longer than some people lasted before falling out of favour with a thud. On the other hand, knowing the dictator for a very long time didn’t seem such a good idea, as his oldest friends and family members were mostly dead.
‘It appears from the X-rays that you … that your heart … that you have cardiac myxoma.’
There, it was said. The physician waited for consequences, blinking behind his foggy glasses.
‘Is that a cancer?’ said the dictator.
‘Yes, it’s a cancer,’ said the physician.
‘Cancers can go away by themselves, can’t they?’ The dictator sounded doubtful; the notion went against everything he knew about politics.
‘Not this one.’
‘Deadly, is it?’ said the dictator, confirming the strength of his enemy.
‘Well, actually, the myxoma itself is benign. But what it does to the heart is … ah …’
‘Fatal.’
‘Yes.’
The dictator turned and walked to the window. He peered out, hands clasped behind his back.
‘A cancer can be cut out,’ he said.
‘There are cancers of all sorts,’ squirmed the physician. ‘Some can simply be cut out. With others, the job is much more complicated.’
The dictator nodded. This distinction, too, conformed to his experience of politics.
‘How soon can this kill me?’
‘I am a humble all-rounder, no expert,’ pleaded the physician. ‘Books on the subject say that three months is usual. I don’t know how they arrive at such a statistic. If it’s an average, the figure of three months could be derived from one man surviving a week and another surviving … um … almost half a year.’ The physician grimaced: half a year didn’t sound like much. Maybe he should have taken greater liberties with arithmetic; the dictator, for all his honorary university degrees, was famously uneducated.
‘Can you do the job?’ he enquired.
The physician shook his head.
‘I haven’t the skill,’ he said.
‘Not if I gave you a fortnight off to practise and read the books thoroughly?’
The physician hugged the X-rays tightly, to keep from snickering.
‘Not if I had a year,’ he said. ‘The affected blood vessels are very, very tiny. With these big peasant’s hands of mine …’
And he lifted one hand into the air, to show how miraculous it was, that the dictator’s revolutionary regime had managed to fashion a half-decent doctor from such crude materials.
The dictator frowned, rotating his jaw. The physician began to wonder if he’d perhaps overdone the peasant stuff.
At last the dictator said,
‘But I thought the problem was that my heart was too big.’
‘Yes,’ said the physician, ‘but of course in a case like this, the problem can’t be solved by simply yanking the heart out like … like a turnip from the soil. This is a job that requires great delicacy, great … finesse.’
The dictator leaned back in his chair. There was a loud creak. He was a man of seventy-two years old, overweight and moist-eyed, with thin hair the colour of hair-oil. On the wall behind him, a portrait hung in which he was ageless, in which he looked as if he could tear men apart with no help from anyone else.
‘Find the doctor who can do the job,’ he said.
Two days later, the physician was back in the dictator’s office.
‘Have you found the doctor?’ demanded the old man.
‘I believe so,’ said the physician. ‘According to all the surgeons I’ve consulted, there is one person who could possibly do it.’
‘Excellent: what’s his name?’
‘It’s a she, actually. A Mrs Sampras. You will remember, she was one of the fourteen surgeons who shamefully defected in 1992 to America, to perform unnecessary surgery on rich Jewish women.’
‘But this is no use to me!’ exclaimed the dictator. ‘We must get her back!’
The physician bit his lip, nonplussed by the dictator’s apparent lapse of memory regarding the true circumstances of Mrs Sampras’s disappearance.
‘1992,’ he repeated helpfully. ‘You recall the incident, I’m sure, sir. Fourteen surgeons, all critical of you and your government. A cabal of Jewish businessmen organised the getaway plane … ‘
‘Yes, yes: filth and scum …’ hissed the dictator, fists clenched on the desk before him.
The physician had one more try at filling in the gaps.
‘… uh … there was some suggestion, made in a subversive newspaper, that the surgeons never, in fact, left the country. That they were, in fact, being secretly detained in the Milleforte Labour Camp.’
The dictator raised his shoulders in indignation, spring – oaded to refute a vicious untruth. Then abruptly he relaxed, his eyelids drooping.
‘Ah,’ he said.
Having dismissed the physician, the dictator telephoned the chief administrator of the Milleforte Labour Camp.
‘I don’t suppose,’ the dictator said after a few seconds of pleasantries, ‘you know how Mrs Sampras is getting on in America? … Mrs Sampras, the surgeon … You don’t say? That’s good, that’s good You know, I was afraid she might have succumbed to the harsh weather of New York, or that maybe some drug-crazed nigger raped and killed her … Ye-e-es. So she’s in top form, is she? Fighting fit? Ha! Ha! Ha! ‘And his chair creaked again, with the sheer verve of his relief.
The following day, the dictator received a letter which had been dashed off to him by Mrs Sampras herself, delivered by fast car and motorcycle.
Dear Mr President, it said. I understand you have been enquiring after my health. My health is fair: how’s yours?
Well, enough small talk. I seem to be forever making confessions: here is another. I haven’t been at all happy in America. In fact, the experience has taken away all my zest for surgery. I wish I had never left my husband and children for this pampered existence.
But, I suppose we must all suffer the consequences of our bad decisions, and I am resigned to live out my life here, a traitor of no use to man or beast.
Regretfully, Gala Sampras
Pouting thoughtfully, the dictator folded the letter into his fist. A word was eluding him, a word he had heard for the first time only yesterday, although as an honorary doctor of literature he must have known it all along.
This, he thought, is going to require … finesse.
Before the security guards allowed Gala Sampras to see the dictator, they made sure she was not concealing any weapons. Her doctor’s satchel was emptied out, even though it had been hastily supplied by the president’s own physician and contained almost nothing. The slender rubber hose of the stethoscope was tugged experimentally between two strong fists, as if it might be used in an attempt to garrotte the nation’s leader. A small disposable hypodermic was reluctantly left in its sterile wrapper, but a glass ampoule of antibiotic was confiscated, in case it contained poison.
A young man unzipped Gala’s overcoat and frisked her from armpits to ankles, his fingers gentle and thorough, as if he had read in a book that a woman’s erogenous zones could be hidden in the most unlikely places. He even lifted her skirt and passed his middle finger over her underpants, against her vulva. Perhaps he thought that one of his fellow soldiers might have absentmindedly left a sharp object in there somewhere, an electric cattle prod or a Swiss army knife, which she might whip out and attack the president with.
After a minute or two, the young man removed a ballpoint pen from
the breast pocket of Gala’s jacket. He clicked the nib in and out, frowning, as if feeling himself required to make a complicated moral decision. Gala Sampras smiled despite herself, troubling the young man even more. It seemed so absurd that she’d been brought all the way here to slice the dictator’s chest open with a scalpel, but here were his bodyguards trying to make sure she didn’t stab him through the heart with a cheap plastic pen.
‘Mightier than the sword, hm?’ she mocked him as he handed the yellow Bic back.
The dictator welcomed Mrs Sampras graciously, extending his hand over the desk where he had signed the warrant for her arrest years previously. His handshake was firm but gentle. He was smiling, with lips that were ever-so-slightly cyanosed, from the cancer all around his heart. A subtle network of pale purple capillaries were showing on his nose.
‘I’m honoured to have you here,’ he said. It was true, in the sense that he’d investigated every alternative to Gala Sampras and failed to find anyone half as good. In future, more men would have to be encouraged to commit themselves to a career in medicine.
Mrs Sampras said nothing as the dictator continued to pull at her wrist. Face impassive, she extracted her hand from his – extracted it matter-of-factly, as if his hand were a tool or a swab she was finished with.
There being nowhere for visitors to sit, she remained standing, transferring her doctor’s satchel from her left hand back to her right. While he looked her up and down, she avoided his gaze, instead taking stock of his office.
She was surprised to find that it looked exactly as she’d imagined it might, as a child might draw a dictator’s office. There was a massive mahogany desk, strewn with leather-bound folders and the odd sheet of paper. There was an upholstered swivel chair for him to luxuriate in. There was an oil painting, or perhaps a giant colour photograph thinly disguised as an oil painting, of the dictator, installed on one of the walls. There was an uncurtained window looking out over the courtyard. And this was all. No other tables or chairs, no bookcases or display cabinets, no tools of any more complicated work than arbitrary approval and condemnation. Nothing to indicate any undictatorly quirks in the dictator’s personality, nothing out of place. No caddy of golf clubs, no ornaments, no posters of Western film stars, no stag heads mounted on the walls or Virgin Marys dangling from the ceiling. Nothing. In speeches, the president liked to boast that he had no interests, no pastimes, other than overseeing the welfare of his country. Now Gala could see that this was true.