He led Helen past a kitchen table where five or six communards were sitting, down a long, dark hallway, at the end of which stood a red upholstered bench. “Plant yourself there.”
For a few minutes Helen stood alone in the half-darkness. Finally she sat down. Low voices could be heard, a water pipe, a pendulum clock. She tried to read the notes that she could decipher from her spot. Next to the bench was: Everything is good, just not everywhere, not always, not for everyone. Above that: Turtles can tell more about roads than hares. And more notes were stuck to the ceiling lamp, only one of which Helen could decipher: If you want to build a ship, don’t try to drum up men to procure wood, prepare tools, allocate duties and divide up the work, teach men to yearn for the vast, open ocean.
Presumably these little notes had been there before the massacre (and certainly the first thing that occurs to one after such an event isn’t redecorating).
Three women with long, straight hair stuck their heads one after the other out of the kitchen and then back again. A man walked crying through the hall. Fluffy beard showed up again and said: “We need to talk.”
Helen didn’t move.
He opened a black lacquered door at the end of the hall and looked over his shoulder. “Now!” he said.
He had a Scottish accent, and as a result of that fact and his bearing Helen concluded that this was Edgar Fowler, Ed Fowler III, the unofficial leader of the little commune. She waited a little while to see whether Michelle would show up, then followed him into the side room.
The room was lined with blankets, scarves and blue-gray mattresses. It smelled. In the middle was a small area that had been cleared; in it stood a child’s playpen. Plastic blocks, colorful balls and rag dolls lay inside it, but instead of a child, an animal with slightly reddish, sand-colored fur crouched motionlessly in the middle of the playpen. One could have mistaken it for a plush toy if its whiskers hadn’t quivered. Two incisors stuck up from its tiny lower jaw, and between its ears it was wearing something like a crown made out of white paper that was strapped to its head by a rubber band. It looked as if it could easily have stripped the rubber band off its head with its back paw if it felt like it. But apparently it didn’t feel like it.
The animal took one sedate stroll around its playpen, sniffed its flank and stared at Helen with little, black button eyes. Although it was much smaller than the spaces between the slats, it didn’t leave its cage.
Fowler sat down cross-legged on a mattress and waited until Helen, too, had sat down facing him. He gave her a look that was perhaps intended to be deep and fiery but which did not fail to make the opposite impression on Helen. Helen looked at the animal. The animal yawned.
“That’s Gurdjieff. He understands everything you say.”
“That thing?”
“That thing. It’s an ouz.”
“And if I speak French?”
“Does God understand you when you pray?”
“I don’t pray.”
“Sophism.”
“What did you want to talk about?”
“We are talking.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You’re a Jew. Michelle says.”
“Actually I’m not.”
“Always looking for confrontation.”
“This constitutes confrontation to you? What did you want to talk about?”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t judge. I state. And what I state is: Negativity. Sophistry. Confrontation.”
Helen sighed and shifted her gaze back to the animal again. It had followed the rapid exchange of words, followed as if watching a tennis match, attentive, serious, focused.
“Look at me,” said Fowler with a menacing edge to his voice.
Helen looked at him and Fowler was silent. He moved his tongue inside his mouth and then slowly, meditatively closed his eyes.
“You didn’t come here for no reason,” he whispered. “But also not for the reason you think. You’ve heard about the murders. You are here to satisfy your curiosity. You are here because—”
“I’m Michelle’s oldest friend.”
“You can answer when I’m finished!” He opened his eyes angrily and waited a long time before he closed them again and continued with his speech. “I said: you didn’t come for no reason. What you have heard triggered something in you. It has affected you more deeply than you know. You want to visit Michelle. So you say. You won’t find her. What? You won’t find her? You just saw her? Stay seated. The desert changes you. The nomads. When somebody has lived here for a long time they see with different eyes. The desert dweller is calm, he is the center. He doesn’t approach things, things approach him. That is the coolness that you feel. It is not coolness. It is warmth. All-encompassing energy. The beginning of freedom.” Fowler reached blindly for Helen’s left breast and kneaded it lethargically. “What does freedom mean? Aha. Freedom doesn’t mean to do and be allowed to do what you want. Freedom means doing the right thing.”
He opened his eyes for a moment and blinked, as if checking on the effect of his words. Helen took this moment to hit him in the face. Fowler pulled his hand back slowly and majestically. He smiled grandly. Not at all offended. A question of knowing human nature. He had foreseen what would happen and he was still the master of the situation. He looked at Helen placidly and full of understanding, and Helen couldn’t shake the feeling that the ouz was looking at her exactly the same way.
“You have your emotions under control. Have always had them under control. But that’s how they get out of control. You are surprised how I know this. You are a nice piece of ass. You’ve heard that a lot. Nice piece of ass, nice piece of ass. From weak men. Men who didn’t interest you. Deep inside you know: there is something else in store for you. You are a typical five, on the border of a six. Though with six I mean the co-operative type. You are not open. Stay seated.”
Fowler stretched his hand out again, and Helen stood up and headed to the door. There she stopped and pointed at the playpen with her chin: “What’s the rat got on its head anyway?”
Fowler ignored the word rat and gestured almost imperceptibly, stoicism and leniency beneath half-closed eyelids. He couldn’t judge anyone, but there were the remains of condescension in his dismissive gesture. He had the strength and the talent to understand people, but not the strength to conceal his position. He still needed to work on that. He was a classic nine, straight out of the book.
Only as Helen took a few steps toward the cage did he jump up.
“Don’t touch!”
“Why?”
“You aren’t yet to that point.”
Michelle was waiting in the hall with asthma spray and a tissue. Judging by her over-zealous disinterest, she had eavesdropped.
“Do you want to show me your room?” asked Helen. “If you have a room. Or the building.”
21
Corn Plants
In any type of attack, it is essential to assail your opponent from behind.
DICTA BOELCKE
THE APPEARANCE of the old school friend on the premises of the commune forced Michelle to see the aphorisms, household altars, flower arrangements and batik images with a fresh set of eyes, and allowed a glut of long-forgotten ideas to well up inside her as she showed Helen around.
She apologized ceaselessly for the dirt and mess, scattered a pile of incense ash on the ground with a quick brush of her hand, and with her foot shoved under the bed a messy stack of notes, the symbols, arrows and zigzagging lines with which someone had decoded the secret messages of the White Album the night before. She called the godheads pretty carvings, the cards an amusement, and the stack of books with pentagrams on them relics of a long since departed member of the commune.
“I’m so happy that you’re here,” she said finally.
Helen looked at Michelle and frowned, and Michelle started to cry.
She had basically not changed. An innate sort of dreaminess, nebulousness, had always been particular to her, friendliness and kindl
iness. But these were traits that didn’t amount to anything. Michelle made no decisions. And her childhood home, a solid education and the years in the commune had not been able to change that. She carelessly and aimlessly adopted strange ideas, mixed them with innocence and kindness of heart, and had the dubious luck to become part of a community where this was viewed more as appealing than as problematic. “Michelle is something else,” was the most common verdict rendered behind her back when she had once again proved too clumsy or apathetic for tangible, worldly interests.
Tensions could thus arise, and Michelle took care of the problem by pursuing with even greater devotion the two things in the commune that didn’t require any assertiveness and for which she had the most talent. First, farming: the fact that the fields of the commune still yielded a substantial crop was entirely thanks to Michelle. And second: that was something more complicated.
Second, namely, had to do with the fact that Jean Bekurtz, a longtime commune resident who had since gone into hiding (or gone missing in the desert), had brought back a set of tarot cards from one of his trips, a reissue of a northern Italian set from the sixteenth century, colorful wooden engravings, twenty-two cards, the Major Arcana. Bekurtz himself didn’t believe in the agency of spiritual forces, or at least no longer did. He had bought two books on the subject along with the cards, but found them tedious reading and quickly lost interest. But the effect the wooden engravings had on the new member Michelle during a demonstration made him think: the way Michelle seemed at first more repelled than excited, how she nevertheless grabbed for the cards, how she contemplated them for a long time and asked questions about the positioning, made it abundantly clear to Bekurtz that he was not the right man for cartomancy. He taught her what he knew and gave her his tools of the trade without any sense of envy.
Michelle didn’t find the books tedious. She devoured them. And after she had devoured them once, she devoured them a second time. Not for a single second did she have the impression that she was ingesting hidden secret lore, mysterious wisdom passed down for centuries from one adept to another. It was the opposite, as if she knew every word, every sentence, as if all of it had long since existed in her head, yes, even as if she had written the books herself.
Other members of the commune also became interested in the tarot cards, but nobody got into their secrets as effortlessly and quickly as Michelle, nobody told fortunes with such a lucky hand, nobody interpreted them so well and from so deep inside herself. When she picked up the deck and carefully shuffled, when she closed for eyes for a moment before she moved the top card slightly forward with her thumb and held the stack of cards above the finely woven carpet like a sensor, when her eyelids began to twitch from concentrating on a higher essence and function, even the most fervent doubter went silent.
Soon the odd person came to ask her for advice. Fowler was the only one who voiced concerns about these goings-on, but his objections were less about contact with the paranormal than about the threat to his hold on power (which was relatively transparent to all).
It didn’t take long before Michelle was attending every important decision made by the commune with her cards in hand. While her own arguments during discussions often went unheard, her oracle came to dictate the outcome. At first it was consulted on only the most important group things, but soon enough there was nothing the cards didn’t offer advice about. Anything that could be decided was at least in part decided by the cards, and nobody, not even Fowler, could say in retrospect that even one of these decisions had turned out to have been a mistake. The cards gave advice on matters great and small, the future, character and development, the weather and crop rotations, as well as the acceptance of new members, what color to paint a room and the location of a lost key.
Michelle’s talent was extraordinary in every respect. But it was more than a talent, it was also a great burden. From the very first time she was shown the cards, some of the images had proved to exert such a power of suggestion over her that suggestion was too small a description.
The Moon was one of those images; but even worse than the Moon was the Hanged Man. Michelle had an allergy to cat hair, and the symptoms triggered by a glimpse of the Hanged Man—a tortured, boyish body hanging upside down by one leg in front of an autumnal landscape featuring mountains and the planet Neptune—were analogous to the allergy. As a result, at first she had liked to remove the Hanged Man and hide it, but after Bekurtz had once publicly expressed surprise that the deck had only twenty-one cards, Michelle developed a technique for shuffling that allowed her to shove the Hanged Man at the bottom of the deck and make sure it stayed there.
The consequence of these practices, which Michelle herself felt dishonest, was a certain imprecision in the interpretation of the cards, tiny cumulative mistakes that led to this or that inconsistency and then one day to catastrophe. Because this shuffling technique was the only way to explain how she failed to really predict the horrible threat looming over her community, Amadou’s criminal intentions, the attack, the robbery, the quadruple murder, and had instead talked vaguely about great cataclysms (that in combination with the rest of the cards became abundantly clear). Since then Michelle had been a nervous wreck. Plagued by secret pangs of guilt, she became thin-skinned and short-tempered.
The only thing that assuaged her psyche was the fact that she hadn’t been close to the four who’d been killed. That damped the pain a little, if only secretly. Because on the other hand it wasn’t without its appeal to be grief-stricken and part of a great tragedy, marked for life. Almost like wearing a medal.
Michelle was happy when she and Helen finally arrived behind the house, where there was a small, lush green cornfield. These solid plants were beyond all ideological objections, respectable plants that one needn’t be ashamed of.
“So what are you doing here—in Targat?” she asked.
“Work.”
“Really? I thought—really? What kind of work?”
“For a company,” said Helen. “Cosmetics. It’s just that when I was disembarking I lost my sample case with all the materials—”
“You work for a cosmetics company? As a traveling saleswoman?”
“No, not a saleswoman. Something similar. I’m supposed to set something up here.”
“For an American cosmetics company? You work for an American cosmetics company?”
“I’m just having a look around.”
“Seriously?” said Michelle loudly.
She could barely keep calm. Her childhood friend, Helen, whom she had admired above all, the formidable Helen Gliese, with her incisive intelligence, cynical Helen, haughty Helen—a tiny cog in the machinery of bourgeois capitalist exploitation.
Her facial expression changed completely from one second to the next. It wasn’t like Michelle to look down on someone, but her amazement was limitless and genuine. The raw power of that great destroyer Time had been confirmed once again: what became of people and their dreams and hopes? What became of that bright star, the intellectual star of Matarazzo Junior High, the blonde, perky-breasted girl surrounded by all the boys?
She involuntarily compared herself. Michelle—and it had never before been so apparent to her—had dared to take the plunge into the unknown. Little Michelle, who had basically only been tolerated, Michelle Vanderbilt, whom Helen had never taken seriously, she had bid farewell to middle-of-the-road thoughts of security and realized her ideals. She had co-founded a commune in Africa, had broken out of her surroundings and transformed her being into a quest. She had stridden across the highest heights and been marked for life by tragic circumstances. Four people had been shot next to her! And in the depths of darkness, her soul had grown. How oddly her childhood friend came across by contrast, the way she stood there in front of a field of glorious, hand-planted corn in her somewhat impractical but stylish clothes—an employee of a cosmetics company! The irony of fate.
Helen ignored the thoroughly triumphant expression on Michelle’s face and looked at
a small, dried corn plant at the edge of the field that seemed to have taken leave of the great cycle of life and the pervasive energy. At the base of the plant was a nest of swarming, whitish maggots that was being attacked by ants. Little white orbs floated on the swarming, black current and were swallowed by a hole in the ground. Michelle, feeling ashamed at her own sense of satisfaction, followed Helen’s gaze.
“Yeah, that’s the way it goes,” she gushed. “Sad, right? The white things crawl all around here. Once in a while I wipe the ants away with my finger, to help, but—it doesn’t do any good. It’s nature. It is how it is. And it’s good that way. The maggots and all the other small animals and we humans, too, in the end we’re just a part of a greater whole, a collective project.”
“I suspect that if you could ask them, your theory would get more votes in the ant camp than the maggot camp.”
“Most people don’t even think about it, they see only a part. But as long as you don’t have it, this yin and yang… everything belongs together, life and death, whether or not we are conscious of it. I don’t fret over it. All is one. All makes sense.”
“Auschwitz,” said Helen.
But one couldn’t trip Michelle up so easily. “Auschwitz,” said Michelle gravely. “I know what you mean, and I understand. I understand it particularly when it comes to you and your family. And obviously it was wrong what the Germans did. There’s no doubt about it: it was wrong!” She looked momentarily pensive. “Just as it is wrong to compare Jews to these maggots, as you—unconsciously, I assume, or unintentionally—just did. Even though you yourself… but what I want to say: Palestine. What you, I mean, what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, that’s no different from Auschwitz—no, wait, let me finish—in essence it is worse, because you haven’t learned from your own history, just as so many others fail to learn from their own history, but in this case it’s particularly tragic because Jews, exactly like Palestinians, both under the influence of Mercury—I mean, in terms of the monstrous crimes being committed there, crimes against Palestinian women and children, against innocent people, against babies, intolerable crimes,” said Michelle, looking with a furrowed brow at the massacre at the foot of the corn plant, “these intolerable crimes,” she said, fighting back tears, “it’s horrible, horrible, horrible.”
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