by Self, Will
He was free to lose himself in the wisps and curls of blue and grey, to aesthetically appreciate these subtle brush strokes on the glowing canvas of the chalet’s interior – a painterly rendition of the very timeless present itself, which, from one second to the next, altered irrevocably. Even Von Sasser had acquired an air of benignity. He was no hawk – but an elegant Audobon heron, his streamlined form garbed in silky, smoky plumage.
Even so, when the anthropologist tapped his pipe stem against his coffee cup, Tom understood that this wasn’t only the command for silence; it was also the toastmaster’s gavel, signalling the beginning of a long speech – an oration, perhaps – and that the orator himself would tolerate no interruptions.
15
I am an anthropologist – not an apologist, right.’ Amusement sparked around the table, but Von Sasser extinguished it with a foaming hiss of pipe smoke. ‘And I view human morality, in the final analysis, yeah, to be a purely instrumental attribute of social systems.’
To illustrate this contention, Von Sasser snapped open the scalpel case that sat beside his place, withdrew one and used it to sever a wispy tumour from the tobacco fug. ‘A man’s or a woman’s very best intentions count for nothing, yeah, when the result of his actions is harm inflicted on another, weaker person.’ He levelled the scalpel’s tang at Prentice, who quailed, then put it back down.
‘ “Goodwill”,’ Von Sasser spat, ‘there’s a bloody oxymoron for you!’ He laughed sardonically, and Prentice, misreading his tone, giggled sycophantically. ‘Mind you’ – the anthropologist looked in turn at the diplomat, the doctor and the charity worker – ‘bad will is equally nonsensical.
‘The pols down south, running scared, bleat about winning hearts and minds – and they call this goodwill. Now, setting aside the truth – which is that they’d like to cut out black hearts and wash out black minds – let’s tell it like it is: their goodwill is really’ – he paused for a beat – ‘God will, because all ideas of human free will amount to the same bloody old bullshit. We know, deep in our animal hearts, every last bloody ape of us, that everything we do, we do instinctively. From painting the Sistine-bloody-Chapel to taking a piss, right.
‘If you ask me who God is,’ Von Sasser declaimed, ‘then this is my answer: you see this moth?’ All eyes fixed on the moth that fluttered by the lamp. ‘Then see its shadow.’ The eyes slid to the wall, where the shadow agitated for a moment, then was engulfed by a larger darkness.
‘God is dead.’ The anthropologist rubbed moth dust on to the tabletop. ‘And all ideas of human free will die with him – or her, or it. I put it to you: cannot a man or woman be programmed to perform, like a robot, any action, no matter how contrary to their intentions? You know they can. We’re lab’ rats, without any Jehova, or Allah, or Yah-bloody-weh sporting the white coat. Only one thing is for deffo: if any given action doesn’t contribute to the good, then it is, by definition, a bad action; and that individual – whatever he believes’ – the anthropologist’s hollow eyes bored into Prentice – ‘is a bad person.’
A curious thing was happening: as Von Sasser’s statements grew more and more adamant, so his tone softened. The raucous vowels were quelled, the harsh consonants churned to Mittel-European slush, the rights and yeahs died a death as the meaningless interrogative swoop flatlined.
‘So,’ Von Sasser soothed, ‘you ask me the next logical question: what is this “good” of which I speak? I’ll tell you. The individual, the family, the group, the tribe, the national power bloc – each seeks its own benefit in the exploitation of another individual, family, etcetera, etcetera . . . Who is to be the arbiter, now that the moth’s so dusty? A fascist dictator? Or, as in the white parts of this country and the homelands of our visitors, an elective dictatorship – albeit, one voted in by apathy?’
He relit his pipe and had a glass of schnapps. Peering into his own glass, Tom saw a rainbow whorl supported on the clear fluid. He tossed it back, and his eyes swirled with the spectrum. The buttery flames of the oil lamps smeared, then righted. Tom felt keenly the massive void of the desert surrounding them, a cloud chamber, thousands miles wide, across which trailed Von Sasser’s vaporous fancies.
‘Well, we – the people, that is’ – he smiled sharkishly – ‘have always desired a more perfect union, justice for ourselves, if not our blacker conspecifics. Domestic harmony, mutual defence, common welfare – the blessing of liberty – for now, and for posterity! These are ringing phrases, deffo, but smokescreens all the same.’ The scalpel came out again, and he operated on the smoky carcinoma that metastasized from moment to moment.
All but one of the waitresses had joined the women slumped against the wall. Apart from Tom and Prentice, the Anglos were drowsing. During the meal Tom had heard his lawyer’s deranged chattering orbiting the room. Swai-Phillips’s voice fell from the rafters, flew in through the windows, was even thrown up from beneath the floor: ‘He tells it like it is, yeah. He says what he knows, right. Time to lissen up, you bloody buggeraters! Time to foooo-cuss!’ But at last he had crept in and huddled together with the tribeswomen.
Von Sasser resumed. ‘The more tenderly ambitious the commonwealth in the domestic sphere, the more rapacious its foreign adventuring: the standard of Rome speared in the barbarian heart, Cromwell’s mailed fist punched through the Irish kidney, the Belgian neutralists who still run amok here. Who decides what shall be ordained “the good”? Why, those who have the power – we’ve always known that.
‘ “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away, even that which he hath.” The colonized have been taught to turn cheek after cheek, while receiving slap after slap.’
Von Sasser stopped, and Tom wondered where all this was going. Could it be aimed at Prentice, who sat across the table, his face, even in the lamplight, as pale and flat as paper? If so, was it the preamble to even rougher justice than Tom himself had contemplated? The waitress poured him yet another shot, and he injected it into the carburettor of his mouth, where it exploded. Tom gagged, spluttered, headlights bore down on him – from inside his eyes.
Ignoring this, Von Sasser continued: ‘Of course, times change, and, rather than admit that he wants to rip off your bauxite, the white man’s burden has become the Coke can he made from it, which you’re too inconsiderately bloody poor to buy off him. And in their own despotisms of dull, the Anglos abuse their wrinklies, their sickies, their dole bludgers, with a conception of “the good” that reeks of formaldehyde and the morgue. Their utilitarianism – how I bloody despise it! The noble Athenian polis rebuilt – on the never-never – in a general medical ward. Socrates is denied his hemlock and put on a morphine pump – as if that were any kind of death!’
The dirndl rustled by Tom’s ear; the shot was poured. Before drinking it Tom had the temerity to interrupt the anthropologist: ‘Excuse me, uh, Herr Doktor, but what exactly is in this stuff? It tastes kinda funny.’
‘A drop of petrol,’ Von Sasser told him. ‘Only a drop, mind. The desert tribes sniff it, and drink it – it’s a bloody scourge. I insist on all my guests having a little themselves. As a medical man I can assure you that it’ll do you no harm.’
A medical man? Tom was preparing to probe Von Sasser on this, when the anthropologist changed tack: ‘When my father arrived here fifty years ago, he found these people’ – he gestured towards the bundled-up tribeswomen – ‘on the brink of extinction. Winthrop . . . Gloria, Vishtar – they’ve heard this tale many times before . . .’ And besides, Tom thought, they’re beyond hearing.
They were: the fastidious Consul had slumped forward on to the table, while both Gloria and Loman were tipped back in their chairs. Gloria’s didgeridoo snores were a droning accompaniment to her cousin’s continuing jibber: ‘He’s the man, yeah, the number-one big bloke. Hear him!’
‘. . . but I think it’s important for newcomers to know the background to what we do here.
‘As I sa
y, my father came here as a young anthropologist. He had studied with Mauss, with Lévi-Strauss – he was eager to get into the field and make a name for himself. In those days, well’ – Von Sasser dismissed a genie of smoke with a wave – ‘the authorities in Capital City had no more shame than they do now. He easily obtained a permit to work among the desert people. Then, when he arrived – in a convoy of bloody Land Rovers! All heavily laden with canvas tents, picks, shovels, all the gear and supplies he needed for six months in the wilderness! Y’know’ – he leaned forward, digging at Tom with his pipe stem – ‘anthropology itself has always been a kind of imperialism: the noble conquest of authenticity . . . Yes, when he arrived, instead of a state-of-bloody-nature, he discovered that the Belgians had long since rounded up all the able-bodied men, women and even children they could find and put ’em to work in Eyre’s Pit. You’ve seen the pit, yeah?’
‘We, uh, swung by on our way here,’ Tom said. ‘It’s . . . I dunno . . . terrifying–’
‘Terrifying, exactly! And that’s now, when there’s mechanization, and Anglo miners are also down there. Then, well, hundreds – thousands – were dying every bloody month. They were being forced, at gunpoint, to dig out the ore with their bare-bloody-hands.
‘The mining company had shot all the game – there was nothing for the people to eat. An entire generation – maybe two – had already been decimated. The guvvie encouraged this genocide, cynically offering so-called “development grants” for every native inducted into the certain death of the mine. There were no human-rights monitors in those days, Mr Brodzinski. None of the voyeuristic gear of an international community, which in our own era sees fit to come and see such atrocity exhibitions.
‘No, this was the heart of darkness, all right. And my father found out that the indigenous people, most of all, had forgotten its anatomy. The tribal groups – if they’d ever existed to begin with – had been broken up. Isolated mobs of old men and women, and young children, roamed the bled searching for water, feeding on each other’s corpses when they fell.
‘These people had bugger-all. Nothing. No language but a debased Anglo pidgin, no identity except as concentration camp inmates or escapees. They had no songs, no dances, no myths, no cosmology – not even the most rudimentary creation myths, such as are found among remote islanders. There were no rituals or holy men and women, no leaders – or taboos. These benighted people had only engwegge – and death.’
Von Sasser lapsed into silence and relit his pipe. The drawing of the match flame into the high ceramic bowl cast crazy highlights on Prentice’s black button eyes – for he sat in a trance. The other Anglos snored, Swai-Phillips muttered, the Tayswengo squelched their nicotine cuds.
At length, Tom ventured: ‘So, uh, if you don’t mind my asking, what did your father do?’
‘A good question, Mr Brodzinski. I’ll tell you what my papa did.’ The anthropologist’s tone softened still more, to a didactic caress: ‘He taught them, that’s what he did. He distilled all of his study of other traditional peoples, all of their myths and songs and dances, into a new and viable belief system for these terminally deracinated souls. He devised an entire new vocabulary for them, then grafted this on to the stump that remained where their own language had been amputated. Then he taught this to them as well. Of course, such instruction would’ve been impossible for a mere rabble, so Papa gave birth to new kinship systems, while inculcating them with the beginnings of a hierarchy.
‘This was true bloody fieldwork: meticulous, slow, painstaking – every step of the way profoundly engaged. My papa was something that was rare enough in the world in those days, and has now totally disappeared: a heroic man – maybe a superman. He had all the skills he needed. He could hunt, he was a crack shot, he could doctor, speak fluent Homeric Greek, and his embroidery was indistinguishable – to an expert – from that of the most refined Viennese seamstresses. He did the dirndls. Even so, this undertaking tested him to his limits – yet he persisted, for year after year.
‘It took him twenty to educate a core group of the natives – the mob that still live here, with me. He called them the Intwennyfortee mob, for he planned ahead, Papa, way ahead. By 2040 he hoped – believed – that this entire land would be under the sway of these new–old traditions. If I’m able to continue the noble work he started for that long, well,’ the anthropologist sighed, ‘perhaps it will.
‘By the time I was finishing school in Bavaria, the process of wider dissemination was under way. From here, emissaries went out to the north and the west. Attracted by these proud pioneers, the tribes now known as the Inssessitti, the Aval and the Entreati coalesced.
‘My mother . . .’ Von Sasser’s voice stretched, then twanged with emotion. ‘Fair Elise.’ His fingers played a few notes on smoky keys. ‘She was a woman of uncommon intelligence – the most refined sensibilities. She supported Papa to the hilt. Not for her the bloody whingeing that women indulge in today, with their drivel about “sexual fulfilment” and “my career”, making of their menfolk handmaidens with penises!
‘I don’t think my parents spent more than three months together in their entire marriage – which lasted over forty years. She understood the enormous significance of her work, she knew her feelings were of no consequence at all, while the knowledge that somewhere, over here, out in the desert, a young girl – or boy – was being infibulated, was fulfilment enough. When Papa sent her instructions, my mother followed them to the letter.
‘He decided that I should go to uni, first to read anthropology, while my brother, Hippolyte, came straight out here to law school in Capital City. If either of us had nurtured any other ambitions – to play at poetry or rebellion, travel the world, perhaps – then we made of them mere arrière-pensées. By our late teens we already knew our destinies: Hippolyte was to become my father’s secret agent, working within the very law itself to undermine the Anglos’ hegemony; while I was to join Papa here, once I’d completed my medical training, then qualified as a surgeon.’
‘A surgeon?’ Tom seized on this inconsistency. ‘I thought you said you’d studied anthropology.’
‘First with the anthropology!’ Von Sasser snapped. ‘Then, next, the medicine. Papa had two vital tasks for me – I was, you no doubt realise, the favoured son. First, I was to infiltrate his bold creative synthesis into the relevant academic journals. Those impoverished dullards!’ he laughed. ‘With their mania for systemization, the ceaseless recycling of mental trash they call knowledge!
‘I agitated these people on my father’s behalf to obtain the necessary peer evaluations. In due course the academic papers appeared that eventually were assembled and published as Songs of the Tayswengo.’
‘But . . . you . . .’ Tom ventured timorously, ‘you, like, made it up?’
‘Mr Brodzinski – Tom – there was no likeness whatsoever. But then, haven’t the sages of the West also, like, made it up? With their World Spirits, their noble savages, their categorical-bloody-imperatives? Isn’t what passes for the epitome of Western knowledge no less creative – and, if I may be forgiven a little pride – far less well written than the tales Papa and I spun?
‘Ours, Tom, was an instrumental morality, not the “will” of a delusory sky god. Papa – he took the long view. In the subsequent years our literary endeavours enabled Hippolyte to campaign for native customary law to be incorporated into the Anglos’ civil and penal codes, thus ensuring us – the desert tribes – with a steady stream of income.’
‘You mean – my $10,000?’
‘Precisely, Tom. It’s an elegant form of justice, you might say. Certainly more elegant than theirs, which is what? The crudest calculus of human existence – an abacus of beady little lives slid hither and thither by spiritual accountants.
‘What do they want, Tom? Why, you of all people should understand by now. Six billion? Nine? A hundred billion human apes soiling this already fouled little ball of a world – that’s their conception of the good. Is that what they �
� what you – want?’
This was not, Tom thought, a question that demanded an answer – least of all from him. His eyes smarted, and he could feel the oily residue of the last shot of schnapps slick in his gullet.
Now Von Sasser tilted his beak towards Prentice and hawked: ‘Then there’s the kiddies, eh, Prentice? We mustn’t forget them, must we?’
Prentice roused himself. The cigarette between his fingers had burned down. His waxy features had melted in the night-time heat. He was transfixed by Von Sasser, a feeble rodent pinioned by relentless talons. ‘Euch, no,’ he coughed, ‘we mustn’t forget them.’ Then he jerked upright and pushed his cigarette butt into the crowded ashtray.
A wild dog howled out in the desert, a cry that was taken up by others on all sides of the Tyrolean chalet. Tom thought: perhaps if I open the shutters there will be icing-sugar snow sparkling in the moon-light, a huddle of happy carollers under a cheery lantern. I fucked up in the dunes – but maybe he’s gonna give me a second chance?
‘The kiddies, yes . . .’ the anthropologist mused enigmatically, and set his long pipe down at last. ‘They bring us back to where we started.’ The hollow eyes sucked in Tom and Prentice’s tacit assent. ‘We are in complete agreement, then: morality is always an instrumental affair. For the Anglo governments those instruments are the survey, the bell curve, and the statistician with no more imagination than this plastic fork.’ He held it up and deftly snapped off a single tine. This then became a diminutive baton, with which he conducted his own final remarks.