The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

  Ariel touched her stomach and Michael put his hand there, too.

  Jesus continued. “Soon I must leave. But this is of little consequence to you or anyone else. You will remember me no less than our other friends who have lived with us here, in our home.”

  They were shocked by his words. Why this sudden departure, and what would they do without him, their Master?

  “My work was not so much with you,” said Jesus. “Not with Man. I will judge neither Man nor Woman. Let the truth speak for itself… if it has tongue to speak.” His craggy face stared into the fire, weary. “I came to stop the juggernaut, and now I have. People have stopped moving and the fumes and poisons of their lives and minds are no longer killing their gardens. Now they must work to keep themselves alive.”

  “What about the sick and dying? Without all the medicines and hospitals, how will they be helped?”

  “Have no fear, they will be helped.”

  After that, he would say nothing else. The night passed in a heavy, semi-conscious silence bursting with unanswered questions.

  In the morning there were three distant figures coming up the hill: Giacomo, Paolo, and Günter. Jesus was cutting wood. He didn’t even look up, merely glanced down the valley and wiped his brow.

  Michael took Ariel’s hand and muttered to her: “Here they come, I suppose they were always going to catch up with us.”

  She kissed him. “We’ll keep away from them and mind our own business. We’ve come too far now for them; they can’t touch us.”

  Jesus straightened up and called out to them: “The web is already upon you, if you look.” He turned to Ariel and added succinctly: “There is no way of separating yourself from other men’s business when they make it their business to include you in theirs. Two of these fellows come with good intentions but the third is a darkling thrush. He flatters himself with his struggle; he thinks himself a man of words and learning and he pins honors to his own chest. But he fights for nothing. He fights for the hollowed air where his body stands. He is a mere skin held up by his gaseous existence.”

  Ariel looked up. “Will you heal him?”

  “If he asks to be healed… he will be healed.”

  43.

  Giacomo and Paolo were shown to a vacant hut, where they put their packs down at the foot of the bunks and rested their aching limbs. Only Günter was unaffected by the long hike through the mountains. He sat in the doorway, looking with interest at the bustling settlement all about them: the carts passing by, the donkeys and goats, the digging of drainage ditches and laying of pipes, groups of elderly women on wooden chairs in the thoroughfares carding wool or embroidering cloth. Most of the men and some of the women were down in the valley on the fields, while gangs of carpenters put up more huts farther down the hill.

  Steady streams of people were arriving all the time, carrying their belongings on their backs. Before long, this hilltop would be a town and, within a few years, a walled city.

  Giacomo lay on his back, reading out aloud from Dr. Brun-ton’s The Spiritual Crisis of Man. “Listen to this,” he said: “‘The human entity’s inordinate clinging to its combative animality and selfish personality is being challenged and attacked by world forces and turned into a cause of its own psychic suffering…’ What are these supposed world forces, then?” He yawned.

  Günter turned round in the doorway. “The Devil, you dumb shit. And by this I mean the absence of anything worthwhile, which quickly grows a nose, eyes, and ears. The Devil is just a name we give it.”

  “Günter, do me a favor,” said Giacomo. “Make yourself scarce. Go lay a cable or something.”

  “Some people shouldn’t read books. It goes to their heads.”

  The three friends lay down and rested, each of them seething in his own, private universe.

  Giacomo, because he considered his thoughts to be undervalued by the others.

  Paolo, because his longing for prayer was always disrupted by his clannish need of friendship.

  And Günter, because he viewed most humans as puffed-up idiots concerned with nothing more than the outward forms of things and plagued by hypocrisy.

  A fine mist of unspoken conflict settled over them.

  Finally Giacomo spoke: “In a while we’ll go and introduce ourselves to… well, you know who I mean.”

  “He means Jesus, but he can’t say it,” said Günter.

  Sleep was most welcome. Outside, the birds seemed to be twittering, full of well-being, nothing much concerning them beyond the occasional pecking at seeds or sitting on branches puffing their feathers.

  After a few hours of pleasant repose, the two men and the dog (rolled up on the floor) began to stir and stretch their aching limbs.

  “Two things occur to me,” said Giacomo, the old spark in his eye returning. “First, I want to eat. Then I’ll go and have a look at…”—he glared at Günter—“…Jesus.”

  “In that order, you miserable old glutton,” said Paolo, with guilty delight. “You forget we haven’t any food.”

  “Ah, how wrong he is. I bought a piece of smoked meat in the valley,” said Giacomo proudly, “and a skin of wine.” He rummaged in his pack and placed his treasures on a flat stone, sniffing the meat with deep relish. “Mutton is undervalued, particularly when smoked.”

  “What about oil and bread?” said Paolo.

  “Oil, yes, but no bread, only a small bag of flour. Have no fear, Paolo. Before nightfall you shall have bread and meat and enough wine to stir your mind into repose.”

  “To stir my mind into repose? What a very odd thing to say, my old friend. Repose comes very easily to me,” said Paolo, patting Giacomo’s shoulder. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. A little nervous at the prospect of meeting our Redeemer, I’ll confess. The life of a priest is all preparation, but we don’t expect to come face to face with Him before our time is due.”

  His ruminations were disturbed by Günter shaking his head and flapping his fleshy lips. “Bread is for pot-bellied men, in fact men very much like you. Give me meat to make my muscles hard. And water to settle my mind. Let’s get on with it.”

  They made a campfire. As dusk set in, they squatted on the ground and stared into the dancing flames. Giacomo baked on a flatiron he’d brought expressly for that purpose, lugging it over the sharp peaks of the Pyrenees, all for his faithful love of wheat.

  After they’d luxuriated another hour, digesting, they set up the hill to find Jesus.

  The huts had proliferated in higgledy-piggledy fashion. There was no system to it, no street names. Everywhere sat tired laborers with their families, eating or sleeping in their doorways by glowing embers or clay ovens.

  At the top of the hill they found the camper bus, beside what they assumed to be a chapel. Yet it had no belfry, no crucifixes, no stained-glass windows, and was no more than a simple wattle-and-daub shelter with a thatched roof. A rectangle of hard, tanned calf leather served for a door. Hesitantly they pushed it aside and called out before entering.

  On the floor, wrapped in a sheepskin, lay a woman with a baby at her breast.

  Giacomo drew himself up. “Excuse us, young woman,” he said. “We are looking for Jesus.”

  The woman tore her eyes away from her child, her lips curled with maternal tenderness. Her face was graceful, with the high cheekbones, dusky skin, and aquiline nose of an Ethiopian. “Everyone looks for him,” she said. “He cannot be found.”

  She plucked the child away from her nipple and closed her tunic.

  “Where is he?” Giacomo piped.

  “At night he goes into the mountains.”

  “And in the day?”

  “In the day he’s sometimes here and sometimes in the fields.”

  Giacomo drew nearer, keeping his eyes on her. “And who might you be?”

  Her white, well-shaped teeth glittered in the dark. “I knew him two thousand years ago, and I loved him then as I do now. Who I am is not very important.”
/>   Giacomo stood rocking to and fro, staring fiercely at her as she sat up, wrapping her child in swaddling.

  “We’ll be back tomorrow; tell your husband… if husband he is… that we’d like a word with him,” he said on his way out of the chapel.

  Paolo and Günter followed him outside with loud groans and sighs. As they emerged they found him hyperventilating and swearing.

  “This is exactly what I thought would happen!” he roared as he led them down the hill. “Rank heresy of the first order. The man who led these people here is not Jesus at all. This supposed child of his cannot possibly be his child, can’t you two idiots see that? Jesus is a maggot—any child of his would be a biological impossibility!”

  As they descended the hill they saw a procession moving towards them, lit up by torches. At the front, Giacomo saw a tall, lean man surrounded by plowmen and farmhands.

  The procession stopped directly ahead of them.

  Jesus stood there gazing at them.

  “My Lord.” Paolo kneeled, his knees apparently lubricated.

  Günter was also submissive, but it was harder for a dog to pay its respects. In his general excitement he forgot to stop wagging his tail.

  Jesus immediately walked up to Günter and stroked his head. “Who is this brave man,” he asked, “maltreated by his brothers and sisters?”

  Next, Jesus looked at Paolo and touched his forehead. “Welcome, brother, at our table.”

  But when he turned to face Giacomo, Jesus’s voice changed. It dropped an octave and there was almost something conspiratorial in the way he addressed him: “So, the orator has come, but we shall not listen to his long-winded songs.” He leaned forward and whispered into Giacomo’s ear: “You must die, my friend; die. Only then will I welcome you.”

  44.

  Giacomo spent the next few weeks in shock, sitting in an upholstered chair which he placed in the middle of a verdant patch of ground at the foot of Jesus’s hill, with a lovely view of clumps of flowering hazelnut and willow trees studding the banks of the stream. Come rain or shine, he sat in his chair, not caring that it was ripped, sodden, and crawling with insects, the lining spilling out like a white beard.

  He stopped shaving, stopped combing his hair. He even stopped washing his tubby body, so that by and by the always slightly disheveled, food-stained Abbot turned into a bit of a spectacle whose odor hung disreputably about him.

  When his friends asked what he was doing there, he answered:

  “I am looking at the flowers, the clouds, the hills, the river. I need to take time to give myself time. I am doubly removed from contemplation, first by my humanity and secondly by my maggothood.”

  His words were complex, and people assumed he knew something they did not.

  Paolo had joined Jesus’s entourage. He was usually absent, and whenever he turned up to visit Giacomo, he was bursting with joy like a swelling droplet hanging from a petal.

  Günter, on the other hand, spent most of his time lying in the deep bracken under the trees, or rolling on his back among the wild thyme and sprouting ruccola. He inhaled these fragrances with delight. For Günter this was a time of upheaval, not least physiologically. Since their arrival, a pair of tiny feet had started forming under the skin of his groin. Within a week or two the pink toes were pushing through the skin, itching slightly. As they grew, the shins followed, then the knees and thighs, although two hairy hind legs still hung from his hips like appendages fit for a monster of a traveling circus.

  “You know the body is all we’ve got. We think with our bodies, we exist through our bodies, and right now I’ve got six damned legs, two of them about as useful as spare assholes.”

  Looking at him, one could not be sure what he was: a man wearing a dog’s pelt on his back or some freakish werewolf? And so he kept out of view, ashamed of himself. He still loved to roll on his back like the dog he was, exclaiming as he did so with his great tongue lolling:

  “I’ll miss it, you know, the hairiness and robustness of a dog’s body, its stamina, the strength of these teeth I can crack bones with. Humans are bloody pussy willows, aren’t they? Besides, what human being can lie naked on his back like this, rolling his balls around without a care in the world?”

  Giacomo listened to Günter absentmindedly, his mind at this time steeped in remembrance of his many years on this Earth. The only good thing that had happened to him was that his memory had come back. Childhood was a very distant pocket of light still illuminating his life with a slightly eerie and preternatural intensity—although Giacomo suspected it was mostly invented. He also recalled the early years, a time of weighty illusions, foolishness, and self-aggrandizement. This had been followed by maturity, a smug era of self-approval. Then his middle years, bursting with denial, confusion, and justifications. Now, at last, like an old mushroom in the forest, he had come to the moment when he must drop his spores.

  “I wonder if I’m a toxic mushroom?” he asked himself, suspecting that he probably was a very toxic one.

  Günter, always a great observer, liked to lie at Giacomo’s feet watching the old man’s emotions passing over his face like clouds.

  “And I also wonder,” said Giacomo with some sadness, “whether anyone likes me. I mean anyone at all.” He looked at his friend. “Do you like me, for instance?”

  “I don’t really like people very much; they’re just blobs moving about, getting in your face,” said Günter, who was good at white lies.

  About three months into their self-imposed seclusion, Günt-er was still spending his days with Giacomo, occasionally trying his weight on his brand new human legs or shaking the mangy pelt on his lower back like a diabolical cloak grown into his upper body.

  Once he’d shed his canine skin and was able to look at his reflection in the river without shuddering at his ugliness, he took his farewell of the old man.

  “Why don’t you come, Giacomo? Come to the city with me.”

  Giacomo took a long time to answer, keeping his eyes on the lush river meadows. “I’ve decided I’m going to spend the rest of my life here, on this hill, looking at the trees and the river,” he said. “I’m going to have a house built in the meadow. A group of builders and tradesmen will come very soon from Rome to put up a priory here. Then I’ll make a garden with a good carp pond and a dovecote. I’ll recreate the lives of the ancient monks. I’ll spend my time in prayer.” He sighed. “And when the time is right I’ll have myself emptied and buried here with instructions that I’m not to be woken for at least a thousand years.”

  “Somehow I don’t really think it works like that anymore,” said Günter. “Just look at what’s happened to me. I’m turning into a man again. Soon these old hind legs of mine will fall off like shriveled twigs. I’ll have to look in the mirror and see whether I’m a Günter, a James, a Matthew, or just plain old Fred. What I mean is there aren’t any maggot people anymore. We can’t go swinishly through the centuries like pigs in clover. We have to face the music.”

  Giacomo sat for a long while listening to the tinkle of the stream, the meandering wind in the treetops stirring the leaves, and the crows caw-cawing as they had always done, frustrated at their lack of vocabulary.

  “Do you know this?” he said.

  “Everyone knows it.”

  Giacomo smiled bitterly. From somewhere in the depths of a dream, he seemed to hear the unmistakable sound of masonry collapsing.

  He took a pocket knife and scored a deep cut in his thumb. At first there was nothing apart from a sharp pain. Then a slow trickle of blood, like water rising in a once-dry well.

  Giacomo had not seen his own blood for more than a thousand years.

  45.

  Not many weeks after, Michael and Ariel were sitting by a hearth watching Jesus expertly tossing flatbread onto the embers of the fire. His hands moved swiftly, turning the bread without scorching himself and then passing it to those sitting beside him.

  His wife was breastfeeding their child.

 
; “Now you eat,” she said.

  “I am not hungry,” said Jesus, who had spent all day cutting brushwood. His face looked drawn and preoccupied.

  Ariel drenched the bread in oil and topped it with fresh white cheese, honey and parsley. She was ravenous; she had grown heavy and was accustomed to the sensation of little feet drumming inside her womb.

  A somber feeling hung over their little group. Jesus turned his amber eyes on them:

  “We are leaving. You know this,” he said. “You all have journeys you must make. We also have our journey.”

  “But why? And where will you go?” said Ariel.

  “You shouldn’t be so concerned with where,” said Jesus. “It is a great irrelevance, of interest only to those caught in the comings and goings, the hither and thither of things. We will go where we must go. What more could anyone do?”

  “We will do the same,” said Michael. “But we don’t know where?”

  “Good,” said Jesus. He turned to his wife and for a moment, his eyes filled with something like human warmth. She threw a few sprigs of dried sage on the fire and wafted the fragrant smoke towards them.

  The moment was only slightly marred by the sound of metallic hammering, chisels against stone, from the bottom of the valley. Just about visible over the tree tops below was a substantial roof and a number of tall brick chimneys, growing taller by the day.

  Their thoughts turned to this emanation of stone—Giaco-mo’s house.

  “What can be done about the visitor who comes uninvited and will not leave?” asked Michael.

  “One must share equally with him,” said Jesus. “Soon there will also be soldiers and priests and bishops arriving. They will all say they’re here for our benefit.” He smiled. “But they will find my name much more useful once I’m no longer here. Many witnesses will come forward. They will quote from the book, although there is no book.”