The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

  “Take care, he’s not a nice man,” said Michael.

  “Don’t you worry, mister, I always did take care of myself. I met a lot of bad men and I was fine until the day I met you.”

  29.

  “I am grateful to you, Michael,” said Giacomo, after Honey, loudly complaining, had been taken off to a nunnery. “I’ve rarely felt so murderous, but you are quite right; it is much prettier to let O’Hara choose his own gin-trap. Messier, too.” He chuckled contentedly.

  They were standing on a palace roof inside the Vatican compound, looking out over the myriad housetops and television aerials of Rome.

  “It all seems so violent,” said Michael.

  “Ah, you think so?” The old man shook his head with wonder. “I’ve seen so much death and violence over the years, I no longer think of humans as anything but deranged, thoroughly objectionable, psychopathic apes. I’d prefer them all dead and buried in mass graves.”

  Michael shuddered. Giacomo’s humanity had withered like a fruit left too long in the sun. He’d been tempered and shriveled, salted and oiled, until finally he lay potted under a screw-top lid and bore no resemblance to his original nature. Yet, in spite of this, some tiny portion of it remained as a super-concentrated essence, and this was the charming part.

  “Are you wondering why I’ve brought you up here? Did you think it was just to admire the view?”

  Michael decided to be truthful. “No. I suspect you have some reason, and I am hoping I won’t be threatened or arm-twisted or in some other way turned against myself.”

  “How unfair you are! How spoiled and self-pitying. I treat you almost like my son. I agonize over your spiritual development.”

  “I’d rather just be left in peace.”

  “Left in peace. Ha! Who wouldn’t?” Giacomo’s hand made a sweeping motion, taking in the entire city. “Flawed,” he said. “All flawed. Give up your hopes, abandon your illusions, they are not serving you.” As he turned to look at his young protégé, Giacomo’s eyes had a strange light in them, a mixture of guilt, eagerness, and affection, emotions that seemed left over in his psyche like driftwood washed up. “I tell you this now because I need you to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Why, yourself. What else is there to understand?”

  “I feel I’ve done everything you could possibly ask. Now I want to have some freedom. And I’d like to understand why Ariel had to be taken from me. Why couldn’t you let us be together? I love her, you know…”

  “Ariel! Good Lord, the fuss you make about her. And as for freedom…” His face softened. “But you are young, I was also young once. The problem with wanting a thing, Michael, is that it almost always takes you away from your true needs. It would be better for humans not to want so much; they’re not equipped for their own ambitions and they won’t pay for their desires. Humans want a free lunch and there’s no such thing; any quantity surveyor could tell you that.”

  From downstairs, in one of the expansive salons, came the voices of a hundred diners, the slamming of their cutlery, loud voices declaiming. While in Rome, Giacomo and Paolo felt it was good politics to have the inner circle over for dinner two or three times per week—for feasting and scheming.

  Michael hung on. “I’m not an opportunist. I do want to survive, though, and I’d like to enjoy surviving.”

  “You’re very fond of making irrelevant distinctions. But I forgive you, I forgive you as a man who once held a gun to my head and chose freely not to shoot. But yes… survival… this bugbear of our race, a remnant from our time in caves.” Giacomo laughed bitterly. “Look at this vast city filled with lost sheep struggling to survive. They think they need money, preferment. They’ll grasp at anything; they’re drowning in ignorance.”

  There was a scrape of a metal door behind them, and when they looked round, they saw Paolo stooping as he emerged. “Thank goodness, you’re still here,” he said. “I thought you might have…”

  “Might have what?” said Giacomo ferociously, as if afraid that Paolo was going to say too much. “I am having a quiet word with Michael, if you please.”

  “Ah…” Paolo stopped indecisively in the doorway. “Should I go?” When Giacomo failed to answer, the monk simply held out his hand and muttered a quiet blessing in Michael’s direction: “‘Amici, ascende superius,’ that is all you need to know for now. Ascend higher, my friend’. For in the bone house none will be able to recognize your bones. You’ll be dead and gone.”

  “Why are you telling me all these things?” said Michael. “Are you going away?”

  Paolo and Giacomo grew shifty. Their thoughts seemed to rise up, whirling about and skimming across the flushed evening sky like starlings hesitant to settle for the night.

  Then Paolo said: “Yes, we are going away.”

  “And you can no longer go through life as a stupid little prick from Provence who wants his girlfriend back,” said Giacomo. “You have to give her up.”

  The two men inched towards the door. “We’ll take our leave, then,” said Giacomo, with a little wave. “God-speed.”

  Paolo came forward and offered his hand for Michael to kiss, which he did, reluctantly: it stank of garlic and vinegar.

  “Don’t let me down,” said Giacomo in the background. “Don’t sadden me.”

  “I don’t think you could be saddened by anyone.”

  Paolo intervened again: “An ambitious man does not have time for sadness, and that is because his time is valuable and he has many things to do before he sleeps.”

  30.

  Cardinal Patrick O’Hara reclined in his favorite chair by the fire, sipping a cup of first-flush Darjeeling while he waited for the Mercedes Pullman to turn up. He was on his way to a private service at St. Stephen’s Chapel of the Abyssinians, far from the unwelcome crowds and their beloved cameras.

  In another age, long ago, congregations had watched services through carved screens—had not even understood the chants and rituals, which were all in a different language from their own. Religion had been a mystery in those days. People had done as they were told and the priesthood held sway over society.

  But democracy had invaded the world and now they were bound by its simplistic rules.

  It had been a heavy night for his soul, one in which he had besmirched himself with a harlot. The narrow lane outside was usually deserted, but today he had seen her several times on the corner, a long-legged stork of a woman in a yellow leotard and tiny latex skirt, tottering unsteadily over the cobblestones in her thigh-length boots. Her availability had made him savage and restless. Ritually he’d repeated one of his favorite maxims, from St. Augustine, ‘God is to be enjoyed, creatures only used as means to that which is to be enjoyed.’ After his long, empty life, why should he not enjoy the delicacies on which others habitually gorged? It was a disturbing and delicious thought. Also a venal sin, yet why so venal? What in the name of God was so venal about reaching out and plucking the sweet cloven fruit of womanhood? Murder, yes, that was certainly an offense to His eyes. Murder had become commonplace—the death squads were constantly liquidating maggots. And most certainly it was justifiable.

  He had kept it brief, up against the wall in the vestibule, then paying the jade what she asked—but he knew repentance would be more long-drawn.

  He reflected on his long life of struggle, wondering, in spite of all, why he cared so much about people’s stuffing—whether of maggot or flesh?—when patently they were all human beings anyway.

  Ah, what a life of melancholy. To be so alone! He thought of his old home in Limerick: the house where he was born, a crumbling unpainted smudge littered with a few sticks of worm-eaten furniture. A smell of dust that could not be got rid of, because the place itself was dust. The larder, stocked with dry beans and unmentionable tins containing nothing that could be eaten, unless his mother applied her utilitarian hand, which she only did at regulated times. The poverty of those days still made him shudder when he thought of it
. Splintered floorboards without linoleum. Rats breeding behind the skirting boards, crawling wood lice drowned in the sink in the mornings. His father in his lumpy chair, fiddling with the wireless and solemnly listening to the King’s speech as if it made any difference to him. Outside, the garden with its tall rustling grass they had no mower to cut.

  Only the church bells, ringing out for evensong, had moved his spirit back then. He had given his life to it. The Church, the behemoth, this human invention, an enormous whirlpool sucking more and more into itself, like a glutton at a table.

  He shook his head to be rid of the memory; but when he peered out of the window at the dreary dark skies, he found it difficult to believe that there’d be some green, bright valley up there, where he’d be welcomed after his death.

  You are a murderer and a wanton, he told himself. Who would welcome you?

  Reeling with disquiet, O’Hara went to the great Venetian mirror in the hall and stood there studying his face in the mirror. Every furrow, every wrinkle and every twitch spoke of deep un-happiness; an unsmiling aspect in all that he had ever attempted.

  You have acted out the iniquities and vices you always secretly longed for. Nonetheless you must take a stand against them.

  I will be their inquisitor; I will fry the very gizzards of their apostasy, until their bones crack with loud splitting sounds and their brains come bubbling out of their miserable skulls, I will spill their churning guts; their pleas for mercy shall be as music to my ears.

  Strength seemed to come churning back as these dark words rose up in him:

  A day will come when people thank me for keeping the human race pure of this filth, this churning, slithering filth that threatens the very backbone of the human project.

  Ah, how fine a phrase that is.

  The human project.

  A shining city on a hill.

  A million willing throats pouring out their hearts in sacred song.

  By the time he had sponged himself down, brushed his thinning hair, put on his pressed woolen cape and walked down the winding staircase, the long black car was already waiting outside, its engine idling. He settled into the soft leather back seat with a contented sigh. “St. Stephen’s,” he muttered to the driver, who did not answer or move. After a long minute, O’Hara leaned forward and repeated in a stern voice: “I said, St. Stephen’s!”

  When the driver turned round, O’Hara’s evening took a decisive turn for the worse. Because the man sitting there in the driver’s seat was not his usual. In fact, he’d been replaced by Brother Paolo—the gluttonous maggot-monk.

  “Good evening, Cardinal. We’re waiting for a few people. If you don’t mind.”

  At that moment, the doors opened on either side. Giacomo climbed in next to O’Hara, and an anonymous non-speaking type in a dark windcheater got in on the opposite side. He didn’t show O’Hara he was armed; he didn’t have to.

  The car accelerated away strongly.

  O’Hara was agape for an instant, then quickly found his stride. “What is this? I have a service to attend to, brother Giacomo. I’m expected.”

  “It’ll have to wait,” said Giacomo. “We’re invited to a dinner party and we thought you’d like to come. You seem so damned miserable all the time. If you were a dog I’d throw a bucket of water over you, give you a good wash, then a pile of marrowbones. And that’s precisely what I’m going to do—even though you’re not a dog.”

  “Although you could be if you want to,” added Paolo from the front.

  O’Hara leaned back, puzzled. “Do you not hear I’m expected somewhere?”

  “Expected, yes. Certainly expected. But unfortunately, owing to unforeseen circumstances…” said Paolo, without taking his eyes off the road.

  “The point is, my brother,” said Giacomo, “You sipped from the sacred well tonight. In ten days or so you’ll be bursting into leaf, if you see what I mean.”

  Paolo slowed down the great car and picked up Honey on a street corner.

  She got in with a guffawing laugh. “You again,” she said, peering at him. “But I’d know you better if you dropped your pants.”

  O’Hara felt his mind spinning and, in the same instant, grew aware of an insistent slithering feeling inside his urethra.

  Oh, fucking maledictions!

  He tried to speak, but his tongue seemed to have recoiled into the back of his throat. The calamity had come. The locusts were swarming over his pastures. His house was burning. There was also an unexpected feeling, which he analyzed many times after. It was relief. Everything was lost. No longer would he have to carry all that luggage, all those boxes and crates and packages.

  No more burdens.

  From now on I shall please myself, he thought, looking at Honey and imagining what else he’d inflict on her, next time.

  These thoughts were intensely private, of course. To the others in the car O’Hara presented the very picture of a man in the grip of remorse and regret—groaning, wailing, oozing with self-castigation.

  Only Honey showed any empathy at all. She turned round and subjected him to a lengthy examination, then said: “If I were you, which thank fuck I’m not, I’d let yourself go a bit. No one minds a guy who likes to get his end away. Most women like it; why don’t you look at it that way? What could be worse than ending up with some bloke who just sits there and reads the frigging newspaper?”

  Giacomo hooted with laughter, but Honey silenced him with a glare.

  “Very well put,” said Giacomo. “I could transpose what you just said into better language and it would be a perfectly well argued piece of…”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not like you. I speak fucking English.”

  “Shut up,” O’Hara cried. “All of you. I can’t listen to this, you’re all foul, revolting people without any sense of…”

  “I must admit I can appreciate your position,” Paolo cut in. “Being a maggot is not for the fainthearted. That’s why we thought we’d give you a choice.”

  Something in Paolo’s voice stopped O’Hara short, made him sink into oblivious silence. The choice to do what? Nothing pleasant, to be sure.

  His question was about to be answered.

  On the outskirts of Rome the car left the autostrada and, after a few winding roads, turned down a bumpy track into a large walled and gated olive grove. In the middle, where the trees thinned, some twenty or thirty people were waiting for them. There were tables, sofas and cushions. Waiters hovered in the background. A log fire had been prepared earlier; the embers lay deep now and were easily hot enough to transform a human body into a skeleton in an hour or two.

  They got out of the car. “If you prefer,” said Paolo, “this will be your cremation fire. As a special favor to you, if you’d like us to, we’ll scatter your ashes over Jerusalem.”

  “Of course you might prefer to spend the evening here, with us?” Giacomo added. “It’s not such a bad night for sitting under the stars. And this is a good fire; really it would be a huge shame to sully it with human fat when we have brought sucking pigs nicely skewered and ready for roasting as well as a barrel of fine Nepente from Sardinia. Why don’t we just roast these piglets, drink this wine? We have fruits of the field, figs, peaches, with cream and vanilla—even a couple of harlots for corrupted appetites.”

  “So the question you’re being asked,” said Paolo, “is whether you want to enjoy your life? There’s no need to follow Giacomo’s gluttonous path. Perhaps you’d rather be a good Dualist—stay clear of meat, partake only of fish and avoid sex altogether?”

  O’Hara thought about it. Without a doubt, he was tired of earthly light constantly bombarding his optical nerve with its babbling irrelevance. But suicide was certainly not an option. He was not about to give up on his great sacrifice now and, in so doing, assure himself of damnation.

  The fierce heat from the fire-pit burned against his skin. He stared down at the churning pool of vermilion, trying to remember if he had any principles left and, if so, what they were.
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  31.

  The following day, Michael seemed to be a prisoner of sorts in a monastery. He had a cell and a hard bed and not much else to occupy him except an abridged copy of Augustine’s City of God.

  Even the food was lackluster. Not so much as a lamb chop or a glass of ale.

  As evening set in he lost his patience and went to the door, repeatedly thumping it with all his might until he heard soft footsteps coming down the corridor.

  “What ails you, brother?” someone said on the other side of the door.

  “What fucking ails me is I don’t know why I’m being kept here. Where’s Giacomo?”

  The answer, when it came, was unexpected.

  Some sort of lever was pulled, he heard a screeching sound of pulleys and wheels turning. A large section of the floor beneath him gave way. For a split second he seemed to hover in the air, looking about him and wishing he was lying on the bunk or standing by the window admiring the view or in fact doing anything but hanging there in temporary suspension, nervously peering down a black shaft right under his feet.

  Then he began to fall.

  At first there was darkness, before he noticed tiny blue lamps sweeping by at dizzying speed.

  Slowly the gradient of the shaft changed and he found himself sliding along a shiny, padded surface at a furious rate of knots. It was difficult to say for how long. It seemed like several minutes, but it must have been much less. Now and then he heard someone roaring just behind him. He looked round, expecting to see a figure in pursuit of him, until he realized that he was actually making the sound himself, and it was somehow echoing back at him.

  An enormous sadness welled up in him. Images of his parents appeared. His mother, her cleanness and modesty. How he missed her. Then his father, his darling father, struggling with his demons and finding no damned peace wherever he went in the world. He even saw their house in Borehamwood, his puzzled grandmother in the top room—like a downy chick in a huge bed filled with ripped feather bolsters—and her constant demands for chicken soup.