Little Rose smiled.
‘Look! There he goes!’ she exclaimed. ‘That fish has discovered Discontinuous Motion!’
Mr Gladheim smiled non-committally, not having any idea what she was talking about.
‘I had a phone-call from Outside, just now,’ said Little Rose. ‘The first time for ages.’
‘Who was it?’
‘I’ve no idea. Whoever it was got cut off, or rang off. Wrong number I suppose.’
59
I was walking down a barren valley. The streambed was dry. Crickets rattled in abandoned fields. A column of black smoke spiralled into the blue sky from across the other side of the ridge. There was a smell of oil. And from time to time in the distance came a burst of machine-gun fire.
Then I heard a new sound. I had never heard such a sound before. It was a kind of droning, like the buzzing of flies. When I turned a corner it became much louder and I saw a huddle of people in the distance. I kept walking. No one took any notice of my approach. As I drew nearer I saw that all the figures were women and young girls. They were wailing – that was the source of the strange droning sound – and as they wailed, they were pawing at a pile of rags.
I got closer. No one looked up. No one paid any attention to me at all. All their attention was on the pile of rags.
It wasn’t rags. It was a pile of little boys. Their heads were dangling from their bodies. Every one of them had had his throat cut. The severed necks were black with flies.
No one turned to look at me, but they must have been aware of my presence all the same because indirectly they spoke to me, crying out their story in a kind of incantation.
‘The Muslim soldiers came and circumcised the boys.
‘They said if we became Muslims we needn’t die.’
‘We said we’d be Muslims then.
‘They circumcised the boys.
‘They made us say, “There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet”.
‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet!
‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet!
‘And then the Catholic soldiers came.
‘Oh yes, our boys, the good Catholic boys.
‘We told them we were Catholics too.
‘They laughed. They said they’d heard that before.
‘We recited the catechism.
‘We recited the Hail Mary.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!
‘They laughed. They said they’d fallen for that trick before as well.
‘They lined up all the boys and pulled down their pants.
‘They laughed. “Those are Muslim dicks”, they said.
‘They killed them.
‘They killed them all.
‘Every one of them they killed.’
Machine gun fire rattled in the distance. Blood-bloated flies settled on my skin.
‘How can we please everyone?’ a woman cried.
‘We are Catholics,’ wailed another. ‘We told the soldiers that. We are Catholics. But they went on killing. They said that God would recognize his own.’
Sitting apart from everyone else huddled a young girl of twelve or thirteen. She was shivering violently, as if she was freezing even on this sweltering hot day. She was naked from the waist down. Her thighs were covered in blood…
The wailing mothers fell behind me. Their voices merged together once again into a fly-like drone.
It was the time of the Holy Wars, when the religions turned against one another. It was something that was bound to happen after the Reaction because, to true believers, those who believe in other faiths are a much greater threat than mere unbelievers. Unbelievers, after all, are just sinful people who refuse to hear the word of God. But the adherents of other faiths claim they have heard the word of God! They claim they have heard it saying different things, laying down different rules, dictating different holy books…
Bloody wars broke out in America between different Protestant factions. In Western Europe Catholics and Protestants engaged in medieval massacres. But in the Balkans, where different religions lived so much on top of one another, the struggle was the most merciless and intense. Catholics, Orthodox, Shias, Sunnis, Bektashis – and new and imported religions too that had blossomed in the interstices of the old ones during the ferment of the Reaction: Baptists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists… All of them turned on one another without restraint or mercy.
I wandered through it seemingly unnoticed, as if I was a ghost, as if my life was charmed. I saw burning villages. I saw crosses daubed on walls in blood and crescents incised in human flesh. I saw bloated corpses rotting in the sun in the pockmarked ruins of mosques and churches.
By the quiet shores of Lake Shkodër, lying pure and smooth as a mirror under a pure blue sky, I even heard a crazy-eyed monk from Herzegovina preaching the Manichaean heresies of the Bogomili:
‘God created the spiritual world, but Satanal made the material universe and trapped the spirits in it, like a fisherman with a net. Everything you can see and hear and touch is evil and disgusting and vile. Even that blue lake, even those pretty mountains, they are tricks, evil, obscene tricks, made to ensnare you, made to confuse you and hide you from what you really are…’
Then some Illyrian aircraft came overhead, with our own emblem, the black-and-white eye, staring down coldly at the irrationality beneath.
It seemed to me that this was more than a war between different human factions. It was a war which Lucy too had fought, a war about the nature of existence itself, a war between body and spirit, appearance and essence: implacable enemies, yet so utterly entangled with one another that the boundaries could not be clearly distinguished, and everything turned out to be the opposite of what it seemed.
Everyone struggled to get to the bottom of things. Everyone also struggled at all costs to cling to the surface. Dervishes walked on burning coals, statues wept tears of blood, children saw visions of the Mother of God, bleeding penitents wore crowns of thorns. Books were burned, demons were nailed to gibbets, villages were razed to the ground…
Mind and body, body and soul – how could the battle end? How could peace ever be found, when the real combatants were irreconcilable, yet were both present in every faction and every army, chained eternally together?
60
But even amid this mayhem, there were small islands of peace. I came to a remote valley in Macedonia, where people went about their lives as if the outside world did not exist.
And there a peasant named Zhavkov befriended me. He was a widower, living with his daughter Leta. He was getting old and finding it hard to maintain his small farm. He gave me a bed in his loft and a seat at the family table if I would work for him.
He was a slow man and turned out to be an easy master to please. When I was incompetent, he enjoyed the feeling of superiority that it gave him. Yet when my competence exceeded his, that pleased him too. Far from feeling put down, he congratulated himself on his own cunning in acquiring a farmhand from the legendary City where they could make machines talk and destroy their enemies with beams of light.
‘Perhaps we could plant the tomatoes over here?’ I’d say, ‘They’ll get more shelter and catch more rain when it falls.’
He would slowly consider. He knew only one way of doing anything and that was the way his father had done it and his father before that, even if that meant walking round three sides of a field instead of taking the direct line. So new ideas, derived from a fresh analysis of the problem, seemed almost magical to him.
Slowly he would smile.
‘Well, and why not? That’s not a bad idea, not a bad idea at all.’
And he’d beam at me, nodding slowly many, many times.
‘They say old Zhavkov is a fool,’ he’d chuckle, ‘but who else has a real Scientist from the City to help him? You tell me that!’
Leta too was pleased by me. Everything about me intrigued her, and what began w
ith good-natured teasing, soon became knowing looks, accidental touchings, small treats set aside in the kitchen for when I came in.
This wasn’t discouraged by Zhavkov. He would nudge me knowingly when we were out in the fields together.
‘You seem to have made a good impression on my Leta,’ he would say, ‘not such a bad-looking girl is she? She’s turned away more than one young lover in her time I can tell you.’
It was true. She was pretty in a plump, cheerful way. And she was sweet-natured, though slow and unsophisticated like her father. I enjoyed her interest in me at first and didn’t discourage her flirtations.
One day, when we were alone in the house, she engineered a playfight with me over a sweet cake, which ended up with her in my arms. We kissed. We became aroused. Laughter became breathless.
Then Leta took my hand and led me up to her tiny room. She unbuttoned her dress. Out tumbled her big soft breasts. And then she smiled kindly, seeing me hesitate, and gently took my hands and placed them over her thick, dark nipples.
Quite suddenly, and with horrible vividness, the image came into my mind of Lucy tearing away her breasts and revealing the dead plastic shell beneath, with plastic tubes oozing yellowish liquids…
I pulled back abruptly from Leta. Her smile turned to dismay. Mumbling apologies I collected my few things from the loft…
61
Some weeks later, I climbed off a dilapidated bus in a mountainside village in Montenegro, reputed to be another island of peace. The bus came this way only once a week and was soon surrounded by villagers, unloading purchases, greeting returning travellers, climbing on board for the return journey. I was hot and weary and seeing a concrete water tank in the middle of an apple orchard, I made my way down to it, kicked off my broken old shoes, and climbed into the cool green water.
After the initial cold shock, the coolness was enchanting, and I lay back and let it spread through me. I could still hear the villagers talking and shouting on the road by the bus, but the peaceful dreamy sound of a single skylark twittering straight above me seemed more significant than all the talking and shouting in the world.
‘Well, look at me!’ I said to myself, as I finally pulled myself out of the tank and settled myself down in the shady grass under a tree. ‘I’ve found my vocation. I’ve become a hobo.’
I chuckled softly, a grubby, unshaven, smelly figure dressed in ragged clothes. I closed my eyes. Images drifted into my mind from Epiros and Corfu, Albania and Macedonia, Illyria and the Peloponnese, melting and merging together as I began to dream.
But then, splash, an apple fell into the water tank.
I started slightly, then rolled onto my side and prepared to settle down again.
Splash! A second apple hit the water. I sat up, realizing that there wasn’t a tree overhanging the water tank, so someone was throwing the apples in.
A young dark-haired village woman was standing watching me a few metres off, holding another apple ready in her hand. I gaped stupidly at her. She smiled.
‘George Simling!’ she said in perfect Illyrian English, with just a trace of an Antipodean twang. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
It was Marija.
She laughed. ‘Don’t worry George, you haven’t seen a ghost. I live here now, with my Uncle Tomo. Well, he’s my mother’s cousin, but I call him my uncle. I got into some things back in IC which were hard to get out of…’
‘The AHS by any chance? Me too.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. It was me that got you into that, wasn’t it?’
I shrugged: ‘It’s not your fault that I wanted to impress you.’
‘Did you?’ she seemed quite genuinely surprised. ‘I always thought you rather looked down on me. You never seemed to want to stay in my company.’
I covered my face with my hands. I felt that dull ache pressing behind my eyes. This had been the shameful beginning of Lucy’s betrayal. Marija had offered me her friendship. I chose instead – I deliberately chose – a confused, barely awake robot to play the part of my girlfriend. What would Marija think of me if she knew that?
* * *
‘Are you alright?’ Marija asked.
I took my hands away from my face.
‘Yes, just… tired.’
‘Come up to my uncle’s place. You can have a wash and something to eat, a sleep if you want. You look as if you could do with some sleep.’
‘I could.’
‘Come on then, it’s this way. Where were you heading George? Where have you come from?’
I made a gesture of pushing the question away. I had laid down that burden when I climbed into the water tank. I didn’t want to pick it up again so soon.
She laughed. ‘Okay. Tell me later. Now listen, I’d better warn you Uncle Tomo is a priest. Don’t worry, he’s no fanatic. He’s a pragmatist. That’s the way things tend to be in Montenegro. Okay it’s an Orthodox theocracy like Russia or Serbia or the Greek states, but our bishop is no zealot. We keep ourselves out of trouble and get on with life as best we can. I quite like that. I used to be much too keen to change everything, I think, as if I thought no one else had ever tried before.’
62
I had always felt daunted by the Orthodox priests with their long beards and robes, but I liked Marija’s uncle at once. He was a small, sharp, wiry, humorous man with a narrow face and piercing blue eyes that gave him a slightly Irish appearance. His wife Nada (they had no children) was also immediately likeable, almost a female version of her husband, thin and wiry with a sly, ironic smile. Both of them had lived all their adult lives in this small Montenegrin village, but they were open to the wider world and seemed genuinely pleased by my arrival. A bath was run for me, spare clothing was found for me, a bed was prepared for me to take a siesta. While I sat in the cool bath, good wine was being fetched from the cellar by Aunt Nada and a lamb was taken from its mother’s side in my honour and slaughtered by Uncle Tomo himself. I had the pleasant illusion that I had come home.
But it was harder when we were all sitting at table and Marija and her aunt and uncle were all pressing me for the story of my travels.
‘It must be two years now,’ said Marija, who couldn’t conceive of being anything other than purposeful. ‘Where have you been all this time? What have you been doing?’
‘Well,’ I began. ‘First of all I went down into Greece and then…’
It was very hard to make a convincing narrative without Lucy in it, but I didn’t think I would retain this warm welcome if I was honest with them and admitted to them that I had run away from Illyria with an animated sex toy and then engineered its destruction.
‘… I got a job with a farmer named Zhavkhov,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed working there, but unfortunately his daughter started getting a bit too fond of me. She was nice enough but… well, her attentions were getting rather insistent, and…’
‘And so you ran and ran until your clothes were in rags and you stank like a tramp,’ said Marija tartly.
I had hoped to make the story about Zhavkhov and Leta into something amusing and light-hearted, something that would demonstrate my credentials as a real warm-blooded human being. It seemed Marija had not been fooled.
I turned to Uncle Tomo, anxious to change the subject.
‘Can you tell me, because I’ve always wondered, what’s the difference between the Orthodox and the Catholic church?’
Uncle Tomo smiled, ‘Well, there are many differences. For one thing, if I was a Catholic priest, I would not be married to Nada here.’
‘But what is the difference, you know, in actual belief?’
The priest chuckled, ‘Actually a single word, the Latin word filioque, which the Western church inserted into the creed. It means and the son. The West maintained that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and the Son. We in the East hold firmly to the view that the Holy Ghost proceeds only from the Father, albeit through the son. Of course there were other factors too, but that was the doctrinal difference that led to the
schism back in 1054.’
He looked at me, smiling, a hint of a twinkle in his eye. Was he anticipating my incredulity, or did he himself find these things hard to take seriously?
Marija intervened, ‘You see, Uncle, for people like me and George brought up in the City, it’s hard enough to even imagine that such entities as the Holy Ghost or the Son are real, let alone feel so confident of their existence that we could think of discussing their precise relationship. Do you think any of your parishioners understand the doctrinal difference between Catholic and Orthodox?’
Uncle Tomo beamed: ‘No. Not one, I shouldn’t think.’
‘But they all hate Catholics like the plague,’ said Nada, with her sly smile.
‘Oh yes,’ agreed Tomo, laughing, ‘they hate them much worse than Muslims or Bogomili or even atheists!’
Perhaps he wouldn’t have laughed quite so easily if he had seen with his own eyes the full horror of the Holy Wars, but still, the laughter of Uncle Tomo and his wife was infectious – and both Marija and I joined in.
‘But as to the question of belief,’ said Uncle Tomo, ‘you know you City people have a completely different conception of it than we do. You will not believe in anything unless it is proved to you, will you?’
‘Well,’ said Marija, ‘science climbed a long way by only using building blocks that were properly tried and tested.’
‘Of course, unquestionably,’ said her uncle, ‘but our idea of belief is completely different. For us it is a matter of will. Of course it is difficult to believe in the Resurrection, of course it is difficult to believe in the Trinity. What evidence is there? But we see that as a challenge. We struggle to make ourselves believe.’
‘It must be even harder,’ I said, ‘when only a few kilometres away there are villages where they all believe in Mohammed and dismiss the Trinity as polytheism.’
‘Of course. And harder still when not so very far down the coast is that wondrous City of yours which claims to have made religion itself obsolete and can produce amazing miracles to demonstrate the power of its own way of thinking, like machines that can talk and planes that vanish into thin air.’
The Holy Machine Page 18
