What Lot's Wife Saw (40 page)

He decided to temporarily shelve the Epistleword solution since it was like a pampered paramour, playing hard to get as long as she was sure of his passion and would emerge only when he feigned indifference. So delve into something else and pretend to become absorbed in it. It shouldn’t be long before she dangled some bait to demand his attention. He snapped his notebook shut and leant back in his chair.

“Were you shocked when you received these letters?”

The man turned a page of his paper.

“Much as you might have imagined, Mr Book. Colonists are not allowed to correspond with the Head Office, that privilege belongs solely to the Governor. It was the first time in twenty years that it’d happened. We thought it proper to study them … at least as a singular phenomenon.”

Book prepared his next question but the man interrupted.

“My turn, Mr Book. One for you, one for me. I answered yours, so you must answer mine. Why did I see tears in your eyes, just a while ago? That made three times in the past hour and each time when reading Priest Montenegro’s letter.”

He was looking straight into Book’s eyes. Book felt like a child caught with his fingers in the cookie jar. He assumed his most nonchalant expression.

“Crass stupidity upsets me,” he snorted.

“You are too hard, Mr Book. Usually those that descend from the former South are more tolerant of human weaknesses.”

“These six had plenty of
human
weaknesses before coming to the Colony. Now they have added
inhuman
ones after you have transformed them into … whatever they’ve become. Can you understand what you’ve made them do? And the outrageous thing is, they did it. They did it as if hypnotised! The way they admit it in the last page of their letters should make you cringe with shame! They’ve become so disoriented they can’t understand their own thoughts. They lead each other down blind alleys, they are buried beneath thousands of doubts and questions, when there’s only one question and the answer stares them plainly in the face but they’re continuously looking elsewhere. They stumble over it, they fetch up against it, but they can’t see it. Like mice without a sense of smell, starving in a barrel of cheese.”

“‘Effective management’, I would call that, Mr Book, so I will take that as praise. It isn’t easy to govern so many people from afar, with no communication. We spent years studying our administrative model until we perfected it. Now it’s in a steady state, it regenerates itself without effort on our part. Fear, obedience and discipline come from the governed themselves and are enforced absolutely, something we could never have imposed on them. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon we won’t need a Green Box and perhaps even a Governor.”

Phileas Book was affronted by the bald man’s arrogance and his pride in the crimes of his company, especially as he boasted so openly about them as if Book had been accepted as a member of their nefarious secret society. He thought he should immediately establish his position as an outsider.

“You know very well, sir, that if the contents of these letters were publicised, the Consortium would be in serious trouble with the law.”

The man folded his paper unconcernedly.

“Mr Book, don’t tell me that you’re going to amuse me by trying to threaten me. It is not our fault if the modern world can’t understand the beauty of our methods, and as for you, we don’t for a moment doubt your confidentiality. If we hadn’t known whom we were dealing with, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, is that right? So with whom are you dealing?” Book demanded, his voice rising.

“With Phileas Book, of course, who needs us more than we need him, because when he leaves and goes back to his quaint office, there lying on the table waiting for him will be a letter from
The Times
informing him that, with regret, his employment is being terminated. Phileas Book would then have to find some way of earning a livelihood but would then look at his paltry CV (all two lines of it) with despair. Graduate of 2nd year high school with no work experience apart from a few ridiculous Epistlewords. No professional or non-professional contacts, and communicating with his previous employers via a Post Office Box. Ah! And next week he leaves forty behind and enters his forty-first. Uneducated, unqualified, unsociable and no longer young. Not bursting with prospects, one might say; there will be no elbowing in the queue to employ him. And yet not one of that impressive list of deficiencies condemns him as much as the fact that Phileas Book will always be Phileas Book and will pay for it his whole life.

“Others, less advantaged than he, would quickly find some employment, some remunerating work, but not Phileas Book. And this is because his method of living is choosing
not
to live, to absolutely make sure he wouldn’t live. Phileas Book’s secret is that he ‘departed’ this life at fifteen years of age. His body has spent a quarter of a century under water and has decomposed faster than those of Adam and Genevieve Book; Françoise, Manon and Fabienne Book; Gustave Coty and Mélanie Bouatier. Death might set him free but, alas, Phileas Book feels unworthy of such release and so could never allow himself to die painlessly.

“Who else then but us could maintain him so that he could continue to pay his onerous dues to his dead? We, Mr Book, are prepared to underwrite your survival, to make it more comfortable than your present circumstances, so through living you can continue your self-flagellating penance, since you seem to consider that twenty-five years isn’t enough and you’ll need at least as much again in catharsis.
Then
perhaps your soul will be allowed to depart exhausted … but not cleansed – that would be asking too much! We will see to it that you continue to bear the whole unmitigated weight of your cross because we specialise in helping guilty consciences climb their Golgotha, taking the long path with none of the shortcuts since that’s the only thing they desire and the only thing that gives them relief.”

Book turned scarlet and pretended to sort his papers, feeling as if he was inside a small box, in which there was a smaller one where a tiny Book was sorting his papers and a yet smaller box in which a miniscule Book sat sorting papers and so on
ad infinitum
until the boxes and the Books became so microscopic that they vanished.

“You don’t realise what you’re dealing with,” he said in a barely audible voice.

“Your conscience begs for employers like ourselves. The Overflow filled three continents with prospective colonists who are desperate to go to the Dead Sea – we have so many applications that we will never satisfy them all. The crater’s eruption was tremendously violent, it will be ages before the scars heal and we help the process. You need us, Mr Book, that’s why you agreed to come here and never seriously entertained getting up and leaving.”

Book was having difficulty breaking out of his ever-smaller series of Boxes. The microscopic Books waited for the one that could unlock his minute prison and set them all free, but there was always a smaller one still trapped. He took a deep breath to stop them multiplying further and to break out of this introspection. He mustn’t lose his focus. There was no reason to panic. Nothing the bald man had said had come as a complete surprise. It galled him, however, that the Seventy-Five considered him so weak and cowardly that they could parade their crimes in front of him without compunction. They took his silence for granted and thus transformed him into an accomplice, a full, guilty partner. Book tried to breach the walls of the Box encasing him. Okay, so he had few friends, well … none in fact, he might not have relatives, he might not have anything but his paltry little office, a stack of letters from strangers and his familiar ghosts, but he did have his craft. How powerful it was could be proven by his presence there.

“If it is as bad as you say, sir, then why was I chosen from the whole world as the person you would most like to expose your achievements in the Colony to? You have chosen a very small audience indeed to applaud you. Only extremely romantic artists relish the approbation of a single person and you don’t strike me as such, so why have I been brought here to read the vileness you’ve spawned?”

“Because we love Epistlewords, Mr Book,” the man said sweetly. “I mustn’t take up more of your time, for you will never finish your work,” and he lifted the newspaper in front of his face again.

Book grabbed his pencil and angrily scribbled in his notebook. The grotesque crossword was even more ridiculous than Montenegro’s Bs and Ls that the Priest had jotted in his Bible. He was getting fed up with reading about seas without buoyancy, pirates with earrings, Black Ships and green men from Mars! Since he would never find what he was looking for, why delay, hoping for Divine Inspiration? His pen froze while tracing the Bs and Ls, and his eyes bulged. Time stood still. That simpering, pampered paramour, who had resisted his advances all night, suddenly lay with parted legs, lounging on the diagonal of the meandros. She deliberately winked at him. He arose at once and declared he must visit the lavatory.

“Again, Mr Book?” worried the man. “That’s the sixth time you’ve asked me – are you sure you’re not suffering from some organic problem?”

Book shouted that he was being terrorised and that had loosened his bladder. If it turned out that he’d developed an organic problem then he’d make sure that the kidney specialist sent them his bill. He haughtily asked whether they wanted to search him in case he was hiding a page on his person but the man wearily begged him not to take too long because it was nearly sunrise.

Book left the room and dashed to the Men’s, feeling the emotions well up inside him. How could he have been so blind? It had been staring him in the face but he hadn’t seen it. He chose a cubicle and locked the door behind him. He turned his jacket inside out and teased the half-formed meandros from the lining. He wiped his tears so as to see more clearly and carefully filled in the diagonal with his nail. The completed phrase shone in the fluorescent lighting, like a quavering appeal, like an arm stretched out, pleading to be given a promise. Book slumped against the wall and clutched the meandros to his chest.

“I’ll do it, I swear, but do the same for me. I’ve suffered enough all these years,” he whispered.

A few rooms distant, across from the corridor that hosted the lavatory, it was doubtful if Bianca Bateau had heard him, but he felt sure that they had communicated.

PRIEST MONTENEGRO

… Secretary Siccouane suddenly abandoned his glass, jumped out of his chair and ran out of the bar as if demons were hounding him.

Judge Bateau looked at me in surprise. “Where is he going?”

I shrugged. The speed of his departure made me think that it had been due to the beer. I closed my Bible, returned the pencil to the waitress and stood up. Bateau chose to stay on since he wasn’t dead drunk yet and he was intent on rectifying this. I was upset that we hadn’t left together because I feel insecure in these quarters. I asked him to accompany me to Hesperides but he refused; not before he had emptied the bottle he had ordered.

Outside, the atmosphere was crackling with unrest. The story about the return of the caravan and its extraordinary journey through the desert was being retold using metaphors, euphemisms and allusions as if the colonists were afraid to hear the explicit words pronounced. These quarters were never partial to the Star Bearers but now things were getting out of hand. Wherever I went, colonists would shy away, conversations would stop, only to restart in whispers when I was at a safe distance.

I decided that Hesperides was too far away to walk alone so I changed direction to go amongst the cyclists, who are mercifully blind, deaf and indifferent to things that happen around them. Out of breath, I reached the borough of the angels from where I had no intention of moving before Ali came to fetch me. Lights flickered like candles in a church, hats were pulled down and cheese was melting in the pots. The peaceful scene calmed my pounding heart.

Tonight the lights had been lit in a strange formation. They were normally in a line, but tonight they seemed to form a circle. I stood on tiptoes to see what was in the middle of the circle. There, I made out the beleaguered cyclists from the caravan, lying on sheets with compresses on their foreheads and with limbs shining from some ointment. The healthy ones would rise every once in a while to offer the exhausted ones some water, to rub oil on them, to hold their hands or to touch their foreheads. Both the infirm ones and their carers seemed wounded in some way.

I hesitated to approach them. I felt that tonight I had no place here, the fires had been placed as a barrier to strangers and the cyclists were sealing their borders. I waited anxiously for a sign or gesture that would mean that I wasn’t unwelcome. I pledged my soul to whichever God could arrange it that I would be blessed by the invaluable invitation. If the cyclists rejected me, I wouldn’t have any other haven to turn to – it would mean that no patch of land would suffer my presence.

I heard the shuffling of bodies on the ground and I saw that some cyclists had shifted to make room for me. With gratitude I gathered my robes around me and sat down. I was content to sit amongst them, invisible, to feel their warmth, to listen to their mutterings and their songs, to participate as a stowaway in a gathering of old friends of which I was not a member but was something of a natural element, like the air. They never address themselves to me and I never talk to them, as I wouldn’t know what to say. They have their esoteric conversations, and I listen silently but understand only a portion. It doesn’t help that I can’t see their eyes or make out faces because their wide hats are always jammed down. Like a breath of air that works its unobtrusive way through a forest of friends, I come away like a thief, with the aroma of their warmth.

This time, however, when I sat down, I saw hats raising, faces being revealed and eyes that were looking straight at me. It looked as if they were about to address me – was that possible? This night was like no other. The next moment, a soft voice asked me, “Are we buying peace?”