Memoirs Found In a Bathtub (21 page)

“I see. There’s one other thing—how is it you know so much about the Building if everything is supposed to be so secret? After all, you said that—” But the cremator came up and interrupted me with his plates. “I’m not interested in your plates!” I cried, pushed him away, and turned to Dolt. “I mean, how do you know?”

“Know what?”

“You know, what you were just telling me.”

“I know?”

“You know, how both camps infiltrated one another, mutually, to the last man, and how the Building was really the Antibuilding and vice versa, and treason wasn’t treason, but loyalty… How did you find all this out?”

“How?” he said, inspecting his fingernails.

“I’m asking you!”

“Me?” He looked up and gave me an icy stare.

“Yes! How did you—?”

“How did I what?” The room was silent, too silent.

“You know … find all this out?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a sneer, “what you’re talking about.”

I turned pale, the words stuck in my throat—and I realized, suddenly, that the officer in the comer was no longer snoring, but getting up, stretching, removing his pajamas and straightening his uniform, then walking briskly up to us and saying:

“Are you prepared to testify that this employee, known under the name of Dolt
alias
Professor of Nanosemy and Demisemiotics
alias
The False Statistician
alias
Screw
alias
Plauderton, did willfully slander and abuse the Building and did attempt by such slander and abuse to entice you to high treason, lèse maison, asubordination, nonprovocation, unsabotage and null espionage, and that the said Dolt did contrive to ensnare you thereby in his nefarious snares, schemes and coils?”

I looked around. The heavy one stroked his flabby neck. Dolt fixed his white, expressionless eyes on me. The cremator had turned his back to us and was examining his plates, as if refusing to acknowledge what was taking place.

“In the name of the Building I call you forth to bear testimony and witness against this man!” said the officer severely.

Numb, I shook my head. The officer stepped forward, seemed to trip, grabbed me to right himself—and whispered in my ear:

“Idiot! This is your Mission!”

Then he stepped back and said, in the same stem tone: “Speak! We are waiting!”

I looked to the others for help. They looked away. Dolt began to tremble.

“Yes,” I mumbled.

“Yes, what?”

“Well, he said some things…”

“Treasonous things?”

“No!! I swear!” screamed Dolt.

“Silence!” The officer turned to me. “Go on.”

“Well … he did say that treason … was loyalty…”

“Treason loyalty?!”

“In a sense … that is, we were talking in general…”

“Did he say it or not?!”

“He did,” I whispered, and after a moment of silence they burst out laughing; the heavy one held his belly and bounced in his chair, Dolt wheezed, and the officer (young again) danced around the table and yelled:

“He did it! He ratted! He squealed! He sang!”

“Stool pigeon! Tattletale! Stool pigeon! Tattletale!” they crowed, doubled up with laughter.

Only the cremator remained aloof, watching the scene with a sardonic smile.

“Enough!” said Dolt, triumphant. “It’s time for us to go.”

The heavy one buttoned his collar; the young officer, weary but satisfied, rinsed his mouth out with seltzer. They completely ignored me. I was stunned, speechless. Dolt picked up his briefcase and thermos, threw his suit over his shoulder and strode out, arm in arm with the heavy one.

The cremator turned around at the door and pointed eloquently at the plates left on the table. This clearly meant: “I gave you the signs! You have only yourself to blame!”

Only the young man remained, and he was leaving. I stood in his way—he stopped—I clutched his arm.

“It was all a game, wasn’t it? How could you!”

“Please, sir,” he said, trying to free his arm, but evidently too embarrassed to look me in the eye. “That was the Onion.”

“The Onion?”

“That’s what it’s called in the tactical nomenclature. Even our jokes are classified … code names…”

“That was a
joke?”

“Don’t be angry, sir. It was no picnic for me either to lie there and snore all that time. But you know, orders are orders…” And he shrugged.

“Just tell me—what was the point of it all?”

“It isn’t all that simple, sir. I mean … in a way, it was just a joke, really, for you at least… The Professor might have wanted to watch the reactions—”

“My reactions?”

“No, Sempriaq’s. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to be off. And really, there’s nothing for you to worry about—you’re in the clear.”

He skipped out like a schoolboy, giving the cupboard a tap on his way.

I was alone with the remains of the party: overturned

chairs, leftovers, dirty plates, broken plates, crumbs, bottles, wine-stained tablecloth—a dismal scene. There was someone knocking. But the room was empty. The knocking returned, more persistent. I listened closely. One, two, three, four taps. It sounded like wood—the cupboard!

The key was in the lock; I turned it and the door slid open by itself. Inside, hunched over, sat Father Orfini. He wore a cassock over his uniform and held a pile of papers on Ms knee. He didn’t notice me at first, he was writing something. At last he finished, dotted an
i
, put a period, then stretched his legs, got off his little stool and stepped out of the cupboard, pale and serious.

“We need your signature on this,” he said, placing the papers on the table.

“What is it?”

I had my hands up, as if to defend myself against some attack. The papers lay next to the cremator’s plates, between two wine stains.

“For our records.”

“Records? What is it, a confession? Or another joke?”

“It’s merely the minutes of what transpired here, nothing more. Please sign.”

“And if I refuse?” I said, easing myself into a chair. I had a splitting headache.

“It’s only a formality.”

“I won’t sign.”

“Very well.”

He gathered up the papers, folded them, put them in a pocket of his uniform, buttoned up his cassock—and was a simple priest again. He looked at me, apparently waiting for something.

“You were sitting there the whole time, Father?” I asked, my face in my hands. All that liquor left me feeling dirty, befouled.

“I was.”

“It must have been stuffy in there.”

“Not at all,” he replied calmly, “it’s fully air-conditioned.”

“Ah.”

I was too tired even to bother saying what I thought of him. My left leg began to dance. I let it.

“Permit me to explain what happened,” he said, standing above me. He waited for me to acknowledge this intention, but when I didn’t respond (only the leg was shaking like some wound-up mechanism), he went on:

“That ‘joke’ was in reality the showdown between Dolt and Sempriaq. You were to decide the issue. The recruit was in Dolt’s employ, and Deluge served as witness. Actually, the whole thing was staged by Dolt; all he needed was a suitable actor, someone to play it out to his advantage. He must have heard of you from the doctor. That’s all I know.”

“You’re lying,” I whispered through my hands.

“I’m lying,” he echoed. “Dolt engineered this intrigue entirely on his own. But Deluge got wind of it and informed the Section. Thus, unbeknownst to Dolt, the intrigue had become official, that is, it was now a legitimate operation under the auspices of the Section. The Chief sent me to protocol the proceedings. Unfortunately, the situation has turned out to be much more complex than was anticipated. The recruit, you see, tapped the cupboard as he left, indicating that he was aware of my presence. No one else in the room was. Now, the Chief couldn’t have ordered him to tap, since the recruit does not come under his jurisdiction. We must conclude, therefore, that the recruit was acting under orders from higher up. Thus, he was playing a double game, on one hand obedient to Dolt, his superior, and on the other hand in contact with someone superior to Dolt. But why was he told to tap? My orders were to record everything that took place, so I must include the tap in my report. The Chief will read the report and realize that disciplinary action should not be initiated against the recruit for his part in Dolt’s intrigue, since the recruit demonstrated by betraying his awareness of my presence in the cupboard that he was acting under orders from higher up and was therefore not really an accomplice in Dolt’s intrigue. To sum up, the action takes place on three levels: the showdown between Dolt and Sempriaq; the surveillance by the Section, through me, of Dolt, Sempriaq and the others, which was personally ordered by the Chief; and finally, the surveillance of our surveillance, through the recruit, by someone higher up, higher therefore than the Section—that means the Department.

“And that complicates things considerably. Why did the Department, rather than work directly with the Section, choose to operate in such a roundabout fashion, revealing its participation in the affair only by a tap on a cupboard? Here we must go back to Dolt. It is conceivable that what he presented to Sempriaq and Deluge as an independent action had in reality been cleared with the Department, and that the supposed intrigue was not to defeat Sempriaq in the debate over the value of Operation Onion, defeat him, that is, in an academic sense, but actually to destroy him, and destroy any of the other members of that ‘party’ who might break the fundamental rule of loyalty by
not
informing the authorities of his (Dolt’s) intrigue. So the loyalty test presents a new side to the problem, a fourth level. And there is a fifth. You see, there had to be two denunciations: Professor Deluge’s to the Section, and the recruit’s to the Department (obviously, the Department could not have given him the order to tap on the cupboard without having been informed of the intrigue in the first place). Professor Deluge’s denunciation is the more interesting, I think. Both the Department and the recruit acted according to regulations throughout. But Deluge—Deluge knew what he was doing. If he betrayed Dolt to the Section instead of to the Department, it was because he was so ordered. In other words, he was not really betraying Dolt; he was following instructions, earlier instructions—also from the Department. But what was the Department after? It already had two people on the case, Dolt and the recruit. Why a third? To see what the Section would do with an unsolicited denunciation? But the Section would have to forward even a nonregulation denunciation to the Department—which it in fact did, at the same time sending one of its own into the field, namely me. Either way, Deluge is definitely a Department plant. The only one who acted on his own in response to Dolt’s challenge was therefore Sempriaq. Note, however, that he tried to warn you of the intrigue, to tell you that Dolt’s words of advice, that all his confidences were only the lines of a cunning play, of an insidious plot, or—in other words—part of a play-plot, a
plate.
Now any attempt to influence your final decision, any signal or sign in whatever form was expressly forbidden according to the rules set down and agreed to by both parties. (Deluge described them in great detail in his denunciation.) By showing you the plate, therefore, Sempriaq clearly broke the rules. The question is, why? Simply to win? Hardly—that kind of victory would be declared invalid. Anyway, you were obviously blind to the import of his most ingenious signal. Then too, the cremator had nothing to gain in warning you, if by that very act he automatically disqualified himself. Still, he warned you. Why? Obviously to let Dolt know that he knew of Dolt’s real intrigue with the Department and that he was well aware that the ostensible (first) intrigue was indeed ostensible. But such knowledge could only have been gained with the consent of those higher up… It becomes evident, then, that all present (except for myself, hidden in the cupboard) were working for the Department.”

“Not me,” I said.

“Ah, but you were! Your coffee was sweetened!”

“What?”

“The coffee they threw in your face, remember? The sugar in it made you sticky, and that necessitated a shower, which in turn enabled them to remove your clothes and accustom you to moving about in a bathrobe, and from a bathrobe to pajamas the transition is not so great… Besides, the doctor would never have dared to hand you over to Dolt—without orders. So you see, everyone, yourself included, was of the Department. Do you realize what that means?”

“No.”

“If Sempriaq gave up his chance to win by showing you the plate, then there was really no contest. Moreover, if he and the other two, and yourself—if all of you were pawns on the same side, then there was no other side! The joke was not Dolt’s then, but the Department’s! But I see you don’t believe me.”

“I don’t.”

“Of course you don’t, how could you? After all, why would a Department, and a powerful Department at that, waste its valuable time on practical jokes? Impossible! No, there must be some deeper meaning in all this… It was Dolt, remember, who wished to make you the butt of his joke, not the Department. The Department mocked everyone! An odd joke, you say? It all depends on the point of view. Usually, when we find something perfect in every respect but perfectly meaningless, we laugh. Yet if it’s on a sufficiently large scale, we don’t… Take the sun, for example, its prominences like hair in curlers, or a galaxy with all its wandering garbage—a grotesque carrousel, isn’t it? And the metagalaxy with all that dandruff… Really, how can anyone take infinity seriously? Just look at that incredible jumble they call the zodiac! But have you ever seen a lampoon on a sun or a galaxy? Of course you haven’t—we prefer not to make fun of such things. The joke, after all, might very well turn out to be on us… So we pretend not to notice the indiscriminate way the universe goes about its business; we say that it is what it is, namely everything, and surely
everything
can’t be just a joke. Anything enormous, immense beyond belief or reckoning—has to be serious. Size, how we worship size! Believe me, if there were a turd big as a mountain, its summit hidden in the clouds, we would bend the knee and do it reverence. So I musn’t insist that it was all a joke. You don’t want it to be all a joke, do you? The thought that your suffering might be incidental and not intentional, that no one takes an interest in it, not even a sadistic interest, for the simple reason that it concerns not a soul but yourself—surely that’s an unbearable thought. But Mystery offers a way out, a way out of all monstrous absurdities. With Mystery, one can at least hope… That’s all I wanted to say. Except that I oversimplified when speaking of the Department. Many threads lead there, you see, but they do not end there. No, they travel further, they branch and spread throughout the Building. It was the Building’s joke, in the final analysis. Or no one’s—whatever you like… And now you know everything.”