The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

  Michael slotted one of his newly bought CDs into the player. Bob Dylan’s wailing harmonica kicked off, filling the whole bus with the first few bars of Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.

  Jesus tapped his foot to the beat.

  Outside, the landscape was changing. The camper was gliding through low-slung hills covered in holm oak and wild olive trees. The days down in the dark had left their mark on Michael’s spirit—and this shadow had given much needed definition to him. Now free again, and with Jesus Christ safely on board, he felt something had been achieved, although it wasn’t quite clear what.

  Ariel was in the galley kitchen knocking up some lunch. “Anyone for an omelet?” she called out gaily. She was also very glad to be back on the road.

  “Give me wine, woman,” said Jesus. “And a soft-boiled egg.”

  And so she did.

  39.

  That night, after the enormity of recent events, Giacomo had great trouble sleeping. First, he lay for a good while thinking about Michael, Ariel, and Jesus, this improbable runaway trinity. Then, as his thoughts turned to other things, he realized why his life had become unbearable and, as a consequence, he had also become unbearable to himself.

  Giacomo had become a weather vane turning in the wind, with no identifiable will or emotion of his own.

  In one of his earlier lives he had spent some years in a lovely brick gatehouse to a mansion belonging to the estate of the Dukes of Bedford in Bloomsbury, London. At that time, Bloomsbury was a mature woodland of elm and oak, a peaceful bird-haunted place where one occasionally glimpsed a woodcutter with his nag or a party of horsemen looking for a fox or an otter to kill.

  Giacomo had a wife who dressed with great care and strolled through the woods in silk slippers and painted lovely water-colors and spent her time talking to the maid or scrutinizing the quality of the Sunday roast. She was a collector of acorns and beechnuts, from which she made collages; also of shadow puppets, which she cut from sheaves of card he bought for her in Piccadilly.

  Mostly they dined with the Duke, whose son Giacomo was tutoring in Latin and French.

  Children they could have none, but there are some who believe that children are nothing but peace-shattering horrors. Giacomo and his wife had convinced themselves that this, without exception, was true.

  Looking back, Giacomo had always felt this was his golden age.

  He and his wife managed their business well. Every month or so a message was brought to their door from Rome, usually by night. Giacomo was not greatly taxed until the Gnostic Church in Rome ordered him to recruit the Dukes of Bedford, first by seducing one of the daughters who, as it happened, was no older than fourteen. Later there was a plot to maggotize the Duke and his oldest son. Giacomo happened to be on good terms with one of the most widely admired women in London, a mistress of a great number of fashionable men and also the finest procurer the maggot church ever had, with skin like milk and an agile, saucy tongue that swiftly brought men to their knees. The Duke was no exception.

  His success with the Bedford family did not go unnoticed. Before long, a bunch of ambitious crackpots in Rome had involved Giacomo in a plot to maggotize the King of England. The Pope got wind of it, of course, and Giacomo was hauled before a hanging judge in the Vatican, who sentenced him to immediate termination. His wife was “spared,” an odd term to use in view of the horrific poverty that she had to endure while he slept. She was permitted to stay on in the Bloomsbury gatehouse, but she earned a pittance as a seamstress and supplemented her diet with milled bark and wood sorrel. By the time Giacomo was reactivated about a hundred years later, he could not find her anywhere. He searched all over London, now entering the industrial revolution. The peasants had been transformed into swarming workers, covered in coal dust and with a raging fondness for gin.

  Bloomsbury had declined. Mud and filth and weaving factories had spread where once there was greenery. In another three hundred years it would be turned into an urban cesspit filled with buses and drug addicts and Chinese tourists. No one would work there anymore; in fact, no one would work anywhere. This was the popular way of defining prosperity: ancient woodlands and farming communities turned into wastelands of boarded-up factories patrolled by drunks and lunatics, while, on a green hill behind electric fences, a small group of petty princes sat in stone houses and pontificated on the science of wealth creation, also known as economics.

  No one should live longer than a thousand years. At a certain point it becomes impossible to remember anything at all. Only the hunger remains, the ravenous need to love and be loved, to eat and fill one’s body or lose one’s mind in chemical distraction.

  The only thing Giacomo was still properly aware of was his unquenchable appetite. As far as he was concerned, nothing could take away the omnipotence of a fried egg.

  Christianity was a ludicrous creed to him now. He was more interested in how to make a perfect hamburger. All the theology, all the doctrinal lisping had become a burden: raving madmen arguing about whose god was the best, like football supporters at a match, shouting abuse at their opponents.

  Once an idea had turned into a burden it was time to let it go.

  Only the other day he’d been walking along with a bottle of mineral water in his hand. When he tired of holding it he drank the water and discarded the bottle. Afterwards, it occurred to him that although he was still carrying the water in his body, its weight had somehow disappeared.

  And like this it was also with ideas: they had to be a part of us.

  In 1988 he had tracked down his wife to Berlin, where she was working as a professor at the Humboldt Institute. By this time she’d also developed a multiple personality. Her ego had grown; she was no longer a budding twig but a many-armed tree trunk floating ponderously down a river. She had learned to be skeptical of him, the man who had thrown away their happiness for the sake of personal ambition. Elegantly she showed him the door. His humiliation was crushing: he threw her a last lingering look as he gripped the doorknob.

  “Why are you giving me that blank, self-pitying look?” she’d said. “You can’t love what you don’t love, Giacomo. I give you nothing as payment for what you have given me—also nothing…”

  “So it meant nothing?”

  “Whatever it meant then, is not what it means now. That is all you need to know.”

  Those words had festered for many years. But, recently, he had felt them raging in his blood with a new keenness. Giaco-mo had understood that his affection for Michael was largely rooted in his identification with him: Michael was doing what Giacomo ought to have done. Michael had given free rein to his personal ambition, in the sense of allowing himself to feel.

  Michael did not want to sleep; Michael wanted to stay in the moment and not lose what he had. In other words he was not behaving as a proper maggot ought to. And this was problematic. Or, as Charles Darwin might have observed, it was an interesting aberration, a mutation that could lead to evolutionary development.

  Giacomo had wanted to keep Michael safe and rolled up in a box until, at some point, many centuries into the future, he had the leisure to question him about it. How had Michael, who had no wisdom or experience, known with such certainty what he must do? Giacomo had never had any such conviction. Only confusion, confusion like mist on a heath.

  The past leaned over him now, like the shadow of an unknown, possibly dangerous, figure in a doorway. Giacomo was a man suffering “the effects of memory,” as he sometimes put it. And memory could not be revisited. Memory was a reunion dinner at which all the guests were strangers to one another.

  To the City

  40.

  Waking from terrible dreams, Giacomo got out of his bed and put on his morning gown, went to the window and parted the curtains. He stared out at the bleak morning, the light drizzling rain.

  For the first time in many, many days, he tried to say a prayer.

  “Oh Lord…” he began, then stopped. Summoning whatever calm he ha
d left, he opened the bedroom door and shuffled down the long, slightly dirty corridor that ended in a swing-door leading into the kitchen, where he found Günter already sitting on a chair with his ears pricked.

  Paolo was at the gas cooker, portioning out a greasy fry-up on large dinner plates.

  Giacomo’s eye fell on three buckets of writhing white maggots, lined up against the wall. “What in the world is that?” he said weakly. “Shouldn’t they be kept covered?” He went to the sink, wet a couple of tea towels and threw them over the buckets.

  “First have your breakfast,” Paolo muttered. “Then we’ll fill you in on all the details.”

  “I had awful dreams,” Giacomo mumbled. “All this trouble is getting the better of me. I think I’m losing my reason. I was back in Bloomsbury all night.”

  “Never mind about that. The maggot liaison officer called first thing this morning,” said Paolo. “He’s given us until midday to leave Rome or we’ll be killed.”

  Giacomo listened as he devoured his crispy bacon rashers. After he’d stilled his worst hunger pangs, he asked Paolo whether he’d been to St. Peter’s that morning.

  “Of course, I went first thing,” said Paolo. “I met Günter on the way. We popped into a favorite bar of mine, had a few artichoke fritters and a couple of espressos, and were slightly delayed as a result. We realized something was wrong as soon as we got there. There were lorries on the west side unloading construction materials. Must have been thirty or forty workers there. They’d screened off the whole area so the tourists couldn’t see what was happening. There was an absolute profusion of security guards everywhere. We went through the cordon and ran into a crowd of maggots who hadn’t been allowed into the crypts. The doors were barred. I demanded to know what was going on. I spoke to the foreman and he took me inside. Paolo stopped. “You won’t believe it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “They’d chalked a line across the main reception. Anyone on the inside of the line wasn’t allowed to leave.”

  Günter gave a little bark of excitement: “There were two men lying dead on the floor. Martyrs. Shot through the head. Very accurately done.”

  “The construction workers were drilling holes in the floor and inserting reinforcement rods across the whole vestibule. They put up a sturdy wood partition. Outside I heard the cement mixers churning and grinding.”

  “The guards moved us out; a few of them had their guns ready to stop anyone on the other side of the line from leaving.” “Before we knew it there was liquid cement being pumped in.”

  “They plugged the entrance, basically. Block by block. Hundreds of tons of cement. We stood there listening to the shouting from the other side of the concrete wall. It grew increasingly faint.”

  Günter took over: “When the shouting stopped we heard…”

  “Singing,” said Paolo. “They started singing.” He blew his nose and looked at Giacomo. “If I hadn’t been slightly late because of the artichoke fritters, I would have been on the other side of that chalked line. I would have been buried alive like the rest of them. I owe my life to some artichoke fritters; isn’t that ridiculous?”

  “Yes,” said Giacomo, who felt curiously unaffected. “It is.”

  Günter picked up the thread. “While the wall was being built, we noticed a few brothers waving at us from the other side of the line. They’d brought up fresh maggot from the vaults.” He nodded at the buckets lined up against the wall. “They passed them across when the guards weren’t looking.”

  “Their courage was exemplary,” said Paolo. “One of them tripped and fell. He went into the cement, just sank into it like quicksand.”

  There was a long silence. Giacomo wondered at his lack of empathy until he reminded himself that empathy was not one of his strengths. “So,” he said. “There must have been a decision from the top to close us down.” He stood up, went to the kitchen cupboard, and started stuffing his specialties—Ligurian pine nuts, Sardinian anchovy fillets, salted capers, dried chilies—into a cotton sack. “We’ve caused too much trouble. They’ll take control and assert proper centralized authority. It’s this whole business of the runaway Christ that’s got the wind up them.”

  Only when he sat down did the enormity of it overwhelm him. “You know what this means, don’t you? It means O’Hara, the shit, actually put an end to us when he planted Michael in our midst.”

  “Oh, that little innocent had nothing to do with it.”

  Paolo nodded. “I have to say I agree. But I’d give my eye-teeth to know how he managed to get out of that cell. And find Jesus…”

  “And rouse him,” said Günter. “Who would have thought it?”

  Giacomo looked at his watch again. “So we have to be out of Rome in just under three hours. Does that give us enough time to pack?”

  “Pack what, in the name of God?” said Paolo. “I shall just bring my Bible and my walking boots.”

  “The only thing I own is my collar,” said Günter.

  “We have to find a suitable container for the maggots,” Giacomo said. “From now on we’ll take one or two every morning.”

  Günter yawned. “I’m ready for a little peregrination. The gardens of Bonus Pastor are starting to look a little dull.”

  Paolo looked at Giacomo: “And where should we go?”

  “I own a nice little monastery in La Spezia,” said Giacomo. “We’ll wait there until Jesus surfaces. His presence won’t go unnoticed. At some point we’ll have to go and see… Him… and persuade… Him… to turn Himself in.”

  “Sounds funny, when you put it like that,” said Günter.

  “It may sound funny,” Giacomo growled. “But it isn’t.”

  He swallowed two maggots as if they were vitamin pills and bid the others do the same. They poured the maggots into large plastic containers, after perforating the lids and placing rotten bananas inside.

  At exactly twelve o’clock they boarded a train. Giacomo and Paolo were carrying hefty rucksacks, loaded with food, maggots, and a change of clothes.

  A group of unsmiling men at the barrier, obviously Vatican agents, spoke into their walkie-talkies as the train pulled away. Giacomo saluted them, as if making light of their presence. But he quickly brought his arm down. When he looked at his wrist it seemed as if there was a leash clipped to it, a leash effortlessly fed out from an infinite, many-geared spool in Rome.

  I’ll never get away from them, he thought.

  41.

  A few weeks after their departure in the camper bus, Michael and Ariel took stock of their experiences so far. While it could not be denied that Jesus had some sort of power, the Master remained deeply enigmatic to them.

  At his bidding, they had driven all over Europe: along valleys, up hills, and through tunnels, across bridges and over plains. No matter how far they drove it was never quite enough for Jesus, who mostly sat at the back of the camper bus drinking goat’s milk (which he was terrifically fond of) and methodically working his way through Michael’s newly acquired CD collection. “Keep going, keep going,” he’d call out, waving his arm. “Farther, farther…”

  At first they had been patient. After all, they didn’t know what Jesus was looking for or where he was intending to go.

  “But where? Where now?” they’d call out and Jesus, closing his eyes as if in deep concentration, would say, quietly, “Vienna,” or “Zurich.” And so the haphazard journey continued.

  It was almost as if Jesus was intent on seeing every motorway in Western Europe. Even ring roads did not escape his rapt interest: Frankfurt, Berlin, London, and Paris were all circumnavigated, and service stations sampled for their cafés and shops.

  “Jesus, do you actually like pizza?” Michael asked once, as they sat at a red Formica table one evening on the outskirts of Hamburg.

  “Liking or not is unimportant. I need to eat a pizza so I know what a pizza is, and once I know what it is I can then decide if it is good or not,” said Jesus. “But for my part it seems little more
than bread and meat. In my day there would have been little call for it, although outside the temple or the market there were usually one or two vendors’ stalls.” He shrugged. “They sold fava beans and chopped herbs or perhaps liver or falafel. People were less prepared to waste money in those days. Every piece had value. But they were fond of tittle-tattle even back in my day; they did not have televisions and not newspapers, either. So they liked to gossip instead.” With an amused smile he held up a celebrity magazine and shook it in the air. “Rihanna,” he said. “She seems a nice little girl; what a pity to give her so much attention.”

  At night, when they retired to their bunks, Jesus would lie in his bunk singing along to whatever music was playing on his portable hi-fi. His favorites were Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, and Janis Joplin, but he also had a sneaking regard for early U2 and knew most of their songs by heart.

  He seemed impervious to boredom. He could spend all day throwing dice or rearranging some peanuts in a bowl.

  There were days when Michael looked at him and thought to himself, “Is this the same Jesus who changed the history of the world?”

  Even Ariel, with her customary good humor, found little to entertain her in the garish sweet shops where they spent hours so that Jesus could stock up on magazines and chocolate.

  His interest in minutiae was enormous. For instance, he was capable of reading food labels almost infinitely, wanting to know what folic acid was, or emulsifier, E331, Omega 3, and B6.

  Tension was building up.

  Ariel started snapping at Michael. “Don’t be so bloody presumptuous,” she told him. “The Master has a plan, and we don’t know what it is. Not yet. We have to be patient.”

  “But what’s the bloody plan? Eating sweets is not going to do much good, is it?” he protested. “I just wish I could understand.”

  Only once did Jesus allay Michael’s doubts. He put his hand on Michael’s shoulder and said, “You think you must do something. But you are a mechanism, my friend. You think work is done by turning the handle. I tell you, this handle you turn with so much energy is not attached to anything; it merely spins in the air, and the machine remains idle in spite of everything you do.”