The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

In the drive was a beaten-up Ford Transit with Spanish plates. He assumed it had to be hers.

  Many times he followed her to the edge of the dunes, then stopped and watched her scaling the sandy mounds, the cloth bag slung over her shoulder. He always stopped in the shadow at the edge of the trees and let her merge with the yellows and browns of the blowing sands.

  She never looked back.

  3.

  One day he found himself sitting on the beach just below her house. The cicadas were scraping monotonously. He was stupefied; he’d been there an hour or more when the gate screeched and he saw her coming in a very straight line towards him, stopping at a distance of about ten paces.

  With her hands on her hips, she called out in a flustered voice: “I know you like me, but why do you have to follow me all the time?”

  It was a fair question. He stood up and said, defensively: “I’m only sitting on the beach. I think I’m entitled to sit here. It’s not your beach, is it?”

  “Every morning I wake up, I open the door and I see you sitting right there. Or I go to the village. And what do I see?” She moved a little closer. “I see you, I see your face; your big eyes watching me.”

  Michael felt caught out; he had to come up with something convincing. “I think I’m just bored. I’m not from here; I’m from England. People here don’t like me. They think I’m just a foreigner… and I am a foreigner.”

  She laughed and the sound of her voice carried across the sands, reaching the ears of the other bathers who seemed to accept Michael’s presence more readily now that a lovely owl-faced girl was laughing with him.

  She tilted her head and judged him, which made him feel much better. No one had judged him in a long time, at least no one with warm eyes. “So you’re following me and you admit it. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”

  “Being busy is overrated. People who know what they’re doing don’t do a bloody thing.”

  “Even something nice like having an ice cream?”

  “That’s different.”

  Her name was Ariel; her hand was cool and dry. They went back to the house, where a big Alsatian was sitting very neatly on the porch with its paws together.

  “Give me ten minutes,” she said.

  “Does he bite?”

  “Only if you bite him first.”

  She went inside and closed the door.

  The dog gave him a heartbroken look and sighed deeply. Michael sat down on the step and muttered under his breath: “I know how you feel.”

  From somewhere—maybe inside his head or carried by the wind?—he heard the dog’s reply: “Go home, never speak to her again, she doesn’t belong to herself, she’s property. I’m property, too. Do you understand?” Then, with another sigh, the dog added: “Oh Lord, how could he understand?”

  When he looked at the Alsatian, it was sitting there in what broadly speaking he would describe as a doglike manner, its long pink tongue on its massive teeth.

  Ariel came back wearing a short camouflage-print dress that showed her softly muscular legs and well-formed hips—her skin was like an almond kernel under the husk, polished and smooth.

  They walked down a sun-dappled path under Mediterranean pines and Michael tried to recompose himself.

  Ariel didn’t waste time. “So you’re bored, are you? That’s such a waste; don’t you have family here? A wife? Girlfriend?”

  “No. My folks passed away. I only came here because my grandmother left me her house.”

  “So you decided to live here, in this little shriveled anus. Correct me if I’m wrong, but just because someone leaves you a house doesn’t mean you have to live in it. Right?”

  He laughed, slightly forced. “I don’t really live here…”

  “Sorry, but you do, you know.”

  What about you? What are you doing here, he thought to himself. How did you end up here?

  Ariel glanced at him. “I’m convalescing. That’s what I’m doing here.”

  “You’ve been unwell?”

  She nodded. “I had a breakdown, I lost the will to get up in the mornings. Have you ever had that? One day I just decided to die. I lay there like a lump for a month without moving. I didn’t eat for two whole months. I was on hunger strike. Just the odd mouthful of water.”

  “Hunger strike against what?” He tried to smile: “You’re not being serious, are you?”

  “So I made myself get up,” she said, ignoring his question. “I drove down here and found this house. I thought I’d get some sea air and straighten myself out.”

  “This is the last place I’d come if I wanted to straighten myself out.”

  “Places don’t straighten people out. It’s the other way round,” said Ariel.

  He did not quite understand what she meant. There was a rush of excitement bubbling through him, the mere thought that all this might soon be his. Soon he would touch that overwhelming presence: woman, like a valley with green slopes and a stream flowing through the center. When he looked at her, she seemed less excited about it all: she wore a sort of peeved expression as if life was an inconvenience to her.

  By now they’d reached the hinterland of the village. Walking up the main street towards the square, they seemed to be forcing their way through a tangle of staring eyes. A group of builders outside the wine cooperative elbowed each other and winked knowingly. Ever since Ariel’s arrival they had been sharpening their knives, assessing and weighing up her thighs, buttocks, and breasts as if she were a Christmas sow. The two old madams in the ice cream shop stared at them with their usual bleak disapproval and horror.

  Outside, Michael tried not to look as Ariel licked her ice cream.

  “Michael. I’m nothing special, you know, so don’t start fantasizing about me. I’ve had a hard life. I’ve got nothing to show for it except a rusty old van, a dysfunctional dog, and nowhere to go.”

  “Will you come back? Have lunch with me?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “There.” Michael pointed to a big gray stone house across the square.

  “Oh, God… looks like an old hornet’s nest.”

  “There’s one only hornet left now, and he’s lost his sting,” said Michael.

  They crossed the emptying lunchtime square, bathed in strong, liquid light. Michael led her into his front yard, past the rusty car, through a stand of nettles growing in calcified manure. The house had a kind of infested charm. If you could ignore the years of neglect (but you couldn’t) and if you could forget about the smell of depression (but you couldn’t), it was really a quaint old charming house deep in Provence where nothing—not even time—would ever change anything.

  He called out over his shoulder: “I’ve been here a few years, can’t think where else to go.”

  She strode ahead of him into the house. He directed her into the kitchen and decided not to take her upstairs to show her the sad warren of neglected bedrooms with sunken beds, soggy plaster, and water-stained prints of the Madonna.

  Ariel stopped in front of the painting of the mountain. “This I like,” she said and seemed relieved that she had found one thing that pleased her. She pointed, finding the tiny smudge of the girl in the window, leaning out to fix something to the washing line. “I like the girl. I’d like to know her name.”

  “Why?”

  “Because otherwise she’s just a figment of your imagination. Do you mind if we eat on the porch? In case I need to leave in a hurry.”

  He knocked up some vichyssoise, which they had cold with crisp white wine and fresh bread with a good strong goat’s cheese. They sat on the stone steps and ate in silence. He was uncomfortable: even a monosyllabic exchange seemed beyond him.

  Ariel put down her half-finished plate and stretched. “Delicious. And don’t worry about not speaking. It’s utterly overrated, this constant pitter-patter of words. Drives you nuts. Most of it doesn’t even mean anything. It’s fear.”

  Michael thought about putting on some music, but once ag
ain she seemed to have an eerie ability to preempt him. “Listening to Leonard Cohen in a haunted house can drive a person to suicide. Especially Avalanche.”

  “I always listen to Leonard Cohen. I love that song.”

  “That’s what I mean.” She stood up. “I always find there’s something sinister about other people’s houses. Let’s go to my place?”

  “Your house is far more sinister than mine.”

  “Subjectivity will be the death of us.”

  4.

  They made their way through the narrow streets past the church immodestly covered in threadbare stucco and across the main highway with a sprinkling of traffic in the early afternoon sun. With relief they put civilization behind them and took the sandy track through the pine woods to the dunes and the ever-fresh sea.

  By the time they stopped he had broken into a sweat.

  Ariel was cool as porcelain in his hands but she wriggled out of his grip.

  “You’re fast; that’s good. I mean I’ve known faster, but you’re not bad,” she said, slightly flustered.

  “You’re quite fast yourself.”

  “Waiting is pointless. Pursuit is also pointless.”

  Below her bungalow, intrepid bathers had put up parasols on the blinding white beach. A few of them were standing in the water, partially submerged, mostly looking out to the horizon as if puzzled by this expanse that stood in their way.

  Ariel ran into the sea, diving athletically into a wave. He followed her and caught up with her under the water. Her skin had a lubricated quality a little like a dolphin, he imagined. They kissed fleetingly as they surfaced, but again she pulled away.

  “All right, then,” she said, slightly wearied by foregone conclusions. “Shall we go back to my place?

  Without waiting for his answer, she waded back.

  Inside the beach house it was dark as pitch. Ariel fumbled for a dusty floor-lamp and turned it on.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to pull up a shutter?”

  “They’re nailed down.”

  Michael scanned the place, but there wasn’t much to see. Cheap composite furniture. A bookcase empty but for a dusty Bible, a conch shell inscribed with the name “Santiago” in red ink, and a mangy, stuffed bee-eater with a plastic maggot in its beak.

  Ariel followed his eyes. “I like that bird a lot; he’s got style,” she said.

  She filled the espresso maker and they went outside to sit at the rusty metal table under the fruit trees. Dusk was setting in.

  She disappeared briefly round the corner, returning with a hammock dragging along the ground behind her like a huge dead octopus. After hooking it onto two ready-made fastenings round the trees, she fetched the coffee spluttering angrily from inside the house and lay down in the hammock whilst balancing her cup in her hand. Michael climbed in beside her.

  “I feel bad about this,” said Ariel. “I ought to make you a sandwich and send you home. Not because I don’t like you; I do like you. But it might be better for you if you just stay clear of me.”

  He frowned: “Why, what’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m bad news. At least I’m honest about it. Some people pretend they’re good but they’re just waiting for the opportunity to bury a knife in your spine!”

  They kissed for a while, until they heard the gruff, depressive voice of the Alsatian, still slumped under the metal table: “Ariel, just get this over with, will you? So we can go to Rome and get back to normal.”

  Ariel lifted her head: “You’re such a conformist; I suppose it’s your Austrian nature coming out. Let me ask you something, Günter. You think I’ve got nothing better to do than spend my time sleeping in a box?”

  “Who’s asking for your opinion?” said the dog.

  Michael came close to a nervous attack but he controlled himself.

  Ariel got up abruptly and went inside.

  He lay there for a while after she had gone, staring at the dark entrance, an angular slit cut into the white façade. He had to take a deep breath before crossing the threshold.

  She was in the bedroom by the window where the blind was slightly raised, allowing a smidgeon of light to come through.

  “We don’t have much time,” she said. “I never stay anywhere longer than a month. People are trying to find me and I don’t want them to.”

  He looked at her, uneasy again. “Who?”

  “Oh, a lot of thugs with a horrible attitude.”

  “Criminals?”

  “No, brutes. My life is a nightmare, Michael. Either it’s brutes hunting me down or pedants boring me to death.”

  Struggling with his confusion, he lunged forward. In an instant they’d fallen back into the bed, Ariel with her back to him, and he pushing into her with slow, circling movements. She pressed her strangely cool body against his. He could not have pulled away even if he’d wanted to, so intense was her gravitation. Yet he also had a weird notion that Ariel was releasing her essence into him—a sort of reversion. Where this thought came from he did not know; it disturbed him greatly.

  “Thank you,” he groaned into her ear, flooding with huge relief as he felt himself being released.

  “For what?” she said, lying on her stomach and resting her head on his chest. “You fool; you rabbit fool. Why don’t you put your feet on the ground? Breathe.”

  Again he noted her coolness. He touched her skin, amazed at her prodigious energy.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I have to get out of here. I have to stop playing the fool.”

  “Don’t. I like them,” she said, adding a sleepy afterthought: “I don’t like rabbits much, though.” She paused. “You can come with us if you like. We’re leaving for Switzerland. We know someone up there, she’ll take care of us.”

  Possibly he slept for a while. He was unsure what the time was; his watch had no luminous dials and the room was so dark that only by closing his eyes could he ward off a sense of panic. Even the air was a dusty maelstrom reluctantly drawn into one’s lungs.

  “Oh good, you’re back,” Ariel whispered. “I had a dream: you and me were standing on a mountain looking down on a huge city. It filled the whole valley; there were roads and lights and buildings climbing almost the whole way up to the summit. Then a wave washed in from the sea. At first I thought, oh look, what a big wave. But it kept growing. It picked things up and carried them away. Boats, cars, buildings. People as well; they linked arms in the water and they were singing as the waters carried them along. The water kept rising, one couldn’t see anything except the water rising. It was sliding by at an incredible speed. I remember there were clouds overhead also passing quite swiftly across the sky, but in the opposite direction. It was a frightening illusion; I mean it wasn’t really an illusion, it was actually happening. All the earth and sky were just water and air rushing by while we stood there on a tiny piece of rock. I kept wanting to climb higher, but you kept touching my arm and telling me there was nowhere higher than this, there was nowhere else to climb to. The water was tugging at our ankles. I was terrified. Then it started receding; there was nothing left beneath. As it sank away I only saw black earth, bare wet earth with nothing alive on it, not so much as an earthworm wriggling or a fish left in a hollow; there weren’t even any hollows or rocks. Everything was swept clean.”

  “Then what happened?”

  5.

  When he woke, a limpid sea breeze had cooled the land. A big crustaceous moon was cranking itself up from behind the dunes, appearing momentarily in the gap of the broken blind. He raised himself onto his elbow to look at Ariel, who was sleeping deeply. Her body seemed to be churning from inside, as if having an epileptic seizure. Muscles under her skin were tensing, rippling across her face and body in tight spasms.

  He watched for a while, wondering what he should do.

  Without warning, the seizure stopped and she opened her eyes and said, very brightly: “Oh, what a lovely sleep.”

  “What was that? Are you epileptic or something?”

>   “Don’t worry; it’s normal. It only happens at night.”

  “It looked painful.” He paused, then added: “It never happened to me, that’s for sure.”

  “How can you know?” she said, with a smile. “I mean… if you’re asleep?” She lit a candle and sat there in silence, scrutinizing him again. “Can I tell you something? Your health isn’t as good as you think. You have a small tumor growing on your liver.”

  “Any other defects?”

  “I’m quite serious. You should listen to me.”

  “All women say that.”

  “I’m not really a woman in the proper sense of the word.”

  “I don’t know how you can say that.”

  “No. You don’t.”

  A few big breakers came in; he heard them churning against the sandbar. The sound was ominous—the distant music of a dream where anything could happen.

  “Yesterday,” said Ariel, “when I asked you to take me for an ice cream, I thought I’d give you the chance of deciding what you really thought of me.”

  “I knew that before we even spoke.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded if you didn’t like me. I’m not petty like that. If people don’t like me, that’s up to them.”

  He shrugged, slightly puzzled, then put his arm round her as if to reassure her. She snuggled close and they slept until sunrise. But as soon as he opened his eyes, the conversation continued where it had left off. Ariel was already there, waiting for him.

  “You’re one of us now. You do realize that?” she whispered.

  “One of who?”

  “Last night when I said your world would change, I really meant it. Literally. It’s changed already. As I was saying, there’s a tumor on your liver. You probably wouldn’t have noticed it for another eight or nine months. By then it would have been too late, cancers are very aggressive nowadays. Humans are poisoning their world and they don’t realize they are also poisoning themselves. Anyway. By this time next week the tumor will be gone. In fact, you won’t have a liver at all.”

  Michael felt himself grow heavy as he looked at Ariel, her soft intimate eyes, her tumbling hair spilling over her shoulders.