Nowhere: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  He covered his eyes and wept, the tears running abundantly from beneath his hands to drip on the dirty, caseless pillow, as if he were squeezing water from a concealed sponge. When at last he spoke, he did so through sobs.

  “I have never been addressed so cruelly.” He wept some more. “Oh, how could you?”

  I had enough. “Stop that sniveling, you ninny. You reserve the right to be nasty to others, but you can’t take your own medicine.”

  “But that’s the only way of doing it!” he howled. “You’re punishing me for being human, and it isn’t fair!”

  “If you were brighter,” said I, “you would understand that my punishing you is only human, as well, and it’s really not fair of you to call me unfair.” At least he stopped crying. Now he simply looked baffled. I decided that further traffic with the legislators would not be fruitful, and I left the smelly dormitory, found the stairway again, and climbed until I reached the attic. Judging from the many steps I encountered, the attic was three or four stories above the legislators’ chamber, but I found no indication en route that I was passing other floors and saw no means of access to them if indeed they were in place.

  At the top of the stairway was a door of which the top panel was frosted glass. Scotch-taped to my side was a typewritten notice, which read:

  BEYOND THIS DOOR ARE THE ROYAL MINISTRIES. ALL PERSONS ARE HEREBY WARNED THAT ANY VISITOR MAY BE ASSAULTED AT ANY TIME AT THE WHIM OF THE MINISTERS, WHO ARE NOTHING IF NOT WILLFUL.

  This news was not reassuring, but I had expended too much energy to turn back now. I opened the door and walked down a brightly lighted corridor of which the walls were painted a cheery apple-green. The hallway was carpeted in a slightly darker version of the same color. These premises were the most attractive I had yet found in the building, and but for the sign outside I would have assumed I had succeeded in penetrating not a governmental office but rather one of the business floors I had elsewhere been denied admittance to.

  The first door on my right, made of solid wood and painted in a jolly French blue, was labeled: MINISTRY OF IRONY. I decided to go along the hall to its termination and see what the other ministries were called, before choosing which to enter first. The next, on the left, with a door of bright orange, was the Ministry of Disaffection. Then came, on the right, the Ministry of Clams. On the left again, the Ministry of Allergies. The doors to the foregoing were painted, respectively, blue-green and brick red. Finally, at the end of the hall, neither right nor left, but facing the visitor, was a zebra-striped black-and-white door labeled: MINISTRY OF HOAXES.

  I confess I could not resist applying first at the last-named. I was rewarded by the sight of a very comely redhaired young woman, who sat at a receptionist’s desk in an anteroom furnished with deep chairs and an outsized sofa. These pieces were upholstered in salt-’n’-pepper nubby tweeds. Here and there on the walls were hung trompe-l’oeil still lifes which at any distance at all you could have sworn were real: the dead pheasant, next to the game bag and fowling piece, seemed really to be decaying. “How do you do,” I said to the receptionist. “I’m a visitor to your country. I wonder whether you’d be willing to tell me something about this ministry? Am I correct in assuming that its work is rather like that of what in America we call the police bunco squad? Do you deal with the kind of misrepresentation by which honest citizens are bilked?”

  She smiled at me. “We don’t police hoaxes, we practice them. For example, we spend the money allocated to us for one purpose on something else entirely. We pretend to be a vast bureau with hundreds of employees, but in reality there’s just me and Albert.”

  “Albert’s the minister?”

  “No, he’s the bouncer.” And then, no doubt owing to my puzzled expression, she explained. “Some people—though by no means all—are resentful when they discover they’ve been tricked. If they bring their complaints here, Albert is the man who deals with them.”

  “I see.” More brutality. “Well, thank you for—” I realized that I was beginning to smell a nauseating odor.... Of course, that pheasant in the fool-the-eye painting was real and decaying! What an unpleasant place the Ministry of Hoaxes had proved to be. However, male pride with respect to the redheaded receptionist would not let me leave on a sinking note. I took a conspicuously deep breath and winked at the picture.

  “By George, that’s so clever you’d swear it was phony.”

  “It is,” said the young woman. “Step closer.”

  I obeyed her and found, after all, only a painted bird. “It’s so believable,” I confessed, “that I was sure I could smell it.”

  “You could,” she said in what I was finding an insufferable smugness. “The odor is piped in through a vent.”

  “What’s the purpose of such a thing?”

  She extended a glistening underlip. “Look, duping people is our job. If you have a complaint, talk to Albert.” Before I could discourage her, she pressed a bell push mounted at the edge of her desk, and immediately a door opened behind her and a man came out of the inner office.

  But to my relief I saw he was a small, frail-looking person, a good ten to fifteen years older than I. He wore a genial smile. I recognized that the hoax here was that one would be threatened with “the bouncer,” and then harmless Albert would appear and discuss your problem in a reasonable, even sympathetic way, utterly unlike any governmental employee I had ever met back home, beginning with the mailman, who, since my failure to reward him lavishly enough one Xmas, had habitually left my packages in the entryway corner where winos urinated.

  “How do you do, sir?” Albert greeted me. “Do you have a complaint?”

  “Perhaps I do, at that,” I replied. “Doesn’t government, any government, practice enough hoaxing in the ordinary course of its activity as to make pointless a special ministry for the purpose?”

  His smile became even warmer. “But don’t you see how useful it is to have one government agency which candidly states, boasts, that its function is solely to gull the citizen. We practice pure hoaxing for hoaxing’s sake, with no ulterior motive. We don’t pretend to deal with national highways, for example, or the exchequer, agriculture, or whatnot, and then instead play cards, drink beer, and read thrillers the day long, as they do in Gezieferland. No, we do our job straightforwardly and we’re proud of it. You have any contact with us, and you’ll be bamboozled or know the reason why. Speak to any Sebastianer and you will find that we are that ministry most trusted by the public.”

  As with so many of the phenomena I had encountered in this country, what had seemed utterly preposterous at the outset had a milligram or two of reason in it when more closely examined, but rarely if ever enough to bring it even into the neighborhood of the desirable.

  “Very well,” I said, “you have explained it.”

  His smile grew cooler. “But you’re not yet convinced, are you?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that—” At this point Albert gave me a powerful one-two punch to the midsection. As I bent to favor the pain my legs gave way, and I crumpled to the carpet. I did not genuinely pass out, but, appropriately enough for this office, I simulated unconsciousness so that he would not give me a taste of his heavy shoes, which in close-up looked as though they might be capped with metal.

  After he returned to the inner room, I laboriously regained my footing and limped to the exit door.

  “Thank you for calling at the Ministry,” the redhead said behind me. “We’re always glad to help.”

  I decided to pass up both the ministry that dealt with irony and that whose business was disaffection, for I believed, projecting from my experience at Hoaxes, that I could imagine more or less what they were up to. But I must say I was curious about the ministries of, respectively, Clams and Allergies, if for no other reason than their incongruity with each other and, indeed, everything else.

  The office was like that which I had only just left, but this time the receptionist was a young man with a handlebar mustache.

 
“Good afternoon,” said he. “May I help you?”

  After identifying myself, I asked him what was the precise function of his ministry. “Clam fishing is obviously one of the important pursuits in your country. I wasn’t even aware that you had access to any ocean and was amazed at the variety of offerings at the open-air seafood market.”

  “We have no coastline,” said he. “Our only water is the river, which of course provides no clams. Trout, eels, gudgeon, and some other freshwater fish are caught in the river by individuals for their own private use and are not sold to the public. That display in the market is artificial: the seafood is made of plastic.”

  After a moment I nodded. “Uh-huh, that would explain the absence of any odor.... OK, then: you have no clams in Saint Sebastian.”

  “That’s correct,” said he. “Which is why we have the ministry.”

  “I confess I haven’t the beginning of an understanding.”

  “Aha,” he said, flicking the left tip of his mustache, as if dislodging a fly. “Nothing could be simpler or more effective as an instrument of government than a ministry of clams. It has but one function: it is the bureau of last resort, to which all insoluble problems are sent, to which all unanswerable complaints are forwarded. If nothing can be done about something, for example a plague of locusts at a time when there is an inexplicable absence of the kinds of birds that eat large insects and atmospheric conditions forbid the use of insecticides. If the crops are destroyed the farmers can curse fate, but for their emotional well-being they really need some human agency to blame. The Ministry of Clams serves such a purpose. Accepting denunciations is our job. Look here.”

  He rose from the desk and opened the door to the inner office. I came to the threshold and looked in. The sizable room I saw was filled from wall to wall with metal filing cabinets, with just enough space between their ranks for the drawers to be opened.

  “Those cabinets,” said the mustachioed receptionist, “contain the complaints received for the past thirty days. On the first of next month they will be emptied for the reception of a new consignment.”

  “Your efficiency is breathtaking,” I said. “How do you manage to deal with such a volume of work in only a month?”

  “By doing nothing whatever about it but filing the papers!” he cried. “Is that not beautiful?”

  “And the complainants are satisfied?”

  He frowned. “No, one cannot make such a statement, for human beings, whatever their situation, are never satisfied. Trying to make them so is a waste of effort, perhaps even a mockery of the human condition. Have you ever known any social problem that was truly solved?”

  “Let me think. Of course, the child labor that was the disgrace of the early Industrial Revolution. Humane laws did away with it.”

  “And the result was a child population consisting of illiterate dope addicts supported by government handouts.”

  “Oh, come on. You exaggerate.”

  He nodded soberly. “You’re right. Those who became criminals were very prosperous.”

  “Living in New York has made me a monster of cynicism,” I said, “but surely you go too far.”

  “I’m speaking not of your country,” said the young man, “but rather of mine, as it was back in the Dark Ages, before the Enlightenment, which brought among other things the Ministry of Clams.”

  “Am I right in suspecting that your so-called Enlightenment was not all that far in the past?”

  “Indeed you are,” said he. “For some reason, it is the fashion to call that period the Sixties, though in fact virtually all the important reforms happened rather in the Seventies.”

  “And what role does the prince play in all of this?”

  “None whatever,” said the young man. “I doubt that he even knows of the existence of our ministry.”

  “Remarkable!” I exclaimed. “Do you receive many complaints with reference to him?”

  “Never. It’s impossible to complain of the prince. He’s beyond it all, like the flag.”

  I told him I had never yet seen the flag of Saint Sebastian.

  “No, and you probably never will. I have never seen it though I’m native born and work for the government. I believe it’s kept in some top-secret place along with the Constitution. I’ve never heard who has access to them. Maybe they don’t even exist!”

  “Like the poetry of which your leading critic writes,” I suggested.

  “Isn’t that fun?” he asked, smiling with a set of horsey front teeth.

  “Just two more questions, if you will. Why do you use the word ‘clams’?”

  “To suggest the ministry’s true function in its name would strike a negative note. We could have called it something else, I suppose: the ‘Ministry of Aubergines,’ for example, but that sounds too frivolous. The ‘Ministry of Rust,’ on the other hand, has an ugly sound. No, we think ‘Clams’ strikes the right note. There’s the pleasant connotation ‘happy as a clam.’ And any suggestion that encourages the populace to be discreet and not circulate gossip is welcome: I refer of course to ‘clamming up.’ Fortunately, most Sebastianers are innocent of your World War Two GI term for the female organ, unless like me they have been instructed by Mr. McCoy: the ‘bearded clam.’ ”

  Embarrassed, I said hastily, “Yes, he’s a scholar in the vocabulary of vintage obscenity. In fact, at the moment he’s putting together a comprehensive lexicon of indecent terms for the press of one of our leading universities.... My other question pertains to your artificial fish market. Why do you have such a thing?”

  “Because it is colorful,” said he. “Because fish markets are traditional, and why should we be denied one simply because we are far from any coast and wish to be self-sufficient and eat only those foods we find or grow in our own land? But mostly so that we might have fishwives.”

  “Fishwives?”

  “Who can scream more loudly or demonstrate a more authoritative use of invective? Having such a spectacle available at all times is a healthy thing for a society.”

  I thanked the young man for his eloquent presentation. “Could you give me some idea of the function of the Ministry of Allergies? I’m not sure I have enough time for a visit there.”

  He grimaced. “I’d stay away if I were you. It’s an unpleasant place. I wouldn’t work there on a bet, though I realize it’s necessary, for even in salubrious Saint Sebastian some people fall ill, some even die, though of course everything concerning death is kept under the hat.”

  “Could you explain?”

  “If a certain person doesn’t show up for several days, without having left some message as to his whereabouts, the assumption is he’s dead.”

  “His near and dear, however, surely know?”

  “Certainly not,” said the young man with the mustache, “unless they, or someone else for that matter, has been present at his death, which after all could happen from a bolt of lightning or by falling off a mountain. But you can be sure that, if so, they would keep mum about it, for nothing is more severely punished than to speak of such a matter.”

  “But most deaths result from illness, I’m sure, and not accidents.”

  “Allergies,” said he, “which are, all of them, at bottom but one: an allergy to living.”

  “All matters pertaining to illness are the business of the Ministry of Allergies?”

  “Yes.”

  “And death as well?”

  He shook his head. “No. Death has its own department: the Ministry of Irony.”

  As usual I was taken by surprise. In this case I had too easily assumed that at Irony the bureaucrats sat around exchanging cynical wisecracks.

  My final question was as to the function of the Ministry of Disaffection.

  The young man piously rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “You must not pass it up.”

  “Really? Well, then, I’ll stop by.” I thanked him and left.

  I went along the hallway to the orange door. Just as I was about to touch the knob, it receded
, and a thin, sour-looking woman of about fifty years of age appeared in the narrow opening between the door and frame and said, with a kind of melancholy peevishness, “We don’t want any.”

  “I’m not a salesman, madame. I’m a visitor from abroad.”

  “But we don’t want a visitor,” said she. “What good would you do us?”

  This was a challenge. “I neglected to mention that I’m an American. My country is thinking of giving money to yours.”

  “Money wouldn’t do us any good,” she said, shaking her head of iron-gray hair tightly pinned. “We’d just spend it.”

  “I believe that’s the idea with money.”

  “If we spent it, we wouldn’t have it long, so what would be the point of receiving it in the first place? If it was just one gift, however large, it would soon be gone, and the lack of money, after having had a taste of it, would be degenerating. On the other hand, if you continued to provide money, we’d become your helpless parasites in no time at all.”

  “OK, then,” I said with all the good nature I could summon up. “Forget money. I just want to be your friend.”

  She frowned for a while, as if in thought, and then said, while shutting the door, “I don’t see any profit in that.”

  8

  ON MY WAY DOWNSTAIRS I encountered the ancient judge, who stood catching his breath on the landing at the entrance to the third floor. Apparently he had not yet reached the toilet, for he was facing in, not out. He stared disapprovingly at me, giving no indication that we had met before, and therefore I did not seek to converse with him now.

  As I went along the street I came to a building which was identified, on a polished brass plate alongside its front door, as The Linden Street School. The cable clerk had mentioned this institution. Curiosity took me inside its entrance hall, which proved to be a lobby decorated with colorful posters of coming cinematic attractions.

  “Come along, come along!” said an impatient voice. “The feature is just starting.” This command was directed to me by a woman dressed as a nun, who stood at a curtain-draped doorway. When I approached she held the curtain aside and switched on the small flashlight she carried and preceded me down the aisle. I had never before received this sort of service at a movie house, but could recall seeing the like in vintage films, in which a hero, seeking to hide out till some ill wind blew past, took similar refuge in a cinema, as in real life did our latest successful presidential assassin.