Judith

by Nicholas Mosley

  He said ‘I’ll go back tomorrow. I’ll tell them I’ve seen you. The baby is due any day now.’

  Then – ‘I wish I could tell you what I mean about this. There’s a network. It’s aesthetic. Do you know Plato’s myth about the dark horse and the pathway to the gods?’

  I said ‘Yes.’

  He said ‘You do?’

  I said ‘Yes.’

  He said ‘That’s all right then.’

  At the back of the sand-dunes there was, would you not guess, a small temple. Of course I might have said – Oh, and do you know that dream?

  I said ‘What will you do when you get back?’

  He said ‘Perhaps I’ll write a story.’

  I said ‘What story?’

  He said ‘Well – all this fits together: although we don’t quite know what is going on, as they say, around some corner.’

  We were going up, of course, to look at the deserted temple in the sand-dunes.

  Then he said ‘Do you know that story of the hags and the child?’

  I said ‘Yes.’

  We were standing inside the temple in the sand-dunes.

  I wanted to say – You do promise, one day, we can come back here? We can stay in that hotel?

  He said ‘I have the impression that the child is now being born.’

  Those hags that were dismembering the child – they would be eating bits and pieces of it? Do not lovers want to eat bits and pieces of each other? So that they can be alive?

  I began to cry. He held me as if he were trying to get his arms right around me, like gravity.

  I thought – But if we make love, it will not be to do with any of those old images!

  He said ‘Let’s go back to the hotel.’

  I said ‘Yes, let’s.’

  When we were walking back along the beach it was as if I had not quite walked before; where were those strings; you can be on your own, can you, with your centre of gravity. What else is grace?

  He walked along beside me, not smiling, not like one of those statues with their hands by their sides. I thought—You depended on the sun and moon, you mad archaic statues!

  Then – But you mean, some bomb may still have to go off?

  When we got back to the grand hotel there was a page-boy in the lobby with a telegram. The telegram was asking Jason to come home at once: his wife was about to have, or there was some trouble about her having, or she had actually started to have, the baby. Well you know more about this than I do, don’t you? (Not you!) Jason showed me the telegram. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket. Then he said ‘And everyone is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ I said ‘Will you be able to get a flight before morning?’ He said ‘No, I almost certainly won’t.’ I said ‘Is that awful?’ He said ‘Yes, awful.’ I said ‘We can try.’ He said ‘Yes.’ Then he stretched his eyes and raised an arm as if he were letting something fly away like a bird and he said ‘Good heavens, you don’t think, do you, that I really will be able to get a flight before morning?’

  It was shortly after this that the crowds began to increase enormously in and around the Garden: this was mainly in response to articles written by Eccleston and others about Anita Kroll. Such articles were for the most part, of course, aimed at being scathing about the Garden: they accused God of being a charlatan and a confidence-trickster: they exhorted the authorities to make an end of the Garden. Of course, such articles greatly increased the Garden’s notoriety: people heard the story of someone who was supposed to have been dead and come alive; they flocked to have a look. This was, although it was unlikely that Eccleston and others had thought of this, perhaps one way of destroying the Garden. People’s attitudes at this time seemed everywhere to be getting out of control: inmates of the Garden oscillated more and more between hero-worship and rather embarrassed laughter. Outside, there were stories about God himself – that he was indeed going mad: that he was talking gibberish: that he had begun to speak in tongues. And it was true that while he was speaking people had the impression that they understood what he was saying, but afterwards they found it difficult to describe what this was to others or even to themselves. The enormous hall was not large enough for all the people who came to hear him; his voice was relayed by loudspeakers to other parts of the Garden. In the early mornings, too, the hall began to be so jammed that when you jumped up and down there was not enough room for the bits and pieces to fly off: it did seem, yes, that the time might soon come to get out of the Garden.

  God came to an end of his stories (or stories about stories?) about God and Lilith and Adam and Eve: he seemed to want to shock people in a simpler way. He announced that this was what he was trying to do – that people would not change until their patterns of mind were not just preached against (this reinforced pattern) but punctured. He began to tell joke-book vulgar stories about what, he seemed to suggest, were misunderstandings about God and men: the more vulgar and second-hand these became, the more his acolytes closed their eyes and swayed backwards and forwards as if hypnotised. Sometimes, at some of the words, they seemed to flinch; but I thought – This is the ecstasy of St Sebastian, or of Adam in his grotto.

  ‘The Pope was practising golf shots in his study. Every time he did a bad shot he said – Shit! Missed! – Cardinal Virtue, who was standing beside him, said – Holy Father you should not use such language, or a thunderbolt will surely come from heaven and strike you down! – The next time the Pope played a bad shot he said – Shit! Missed! – There was a lightning-flash and Cardinal Virtue disappeared in a puff of smoke. Then there was a voice from the heavens saying – Shit! Missed!’

  This sort of thing was spoken in God’s precise, sibilant near-whisper: the same voice as that in which he spoke of someone being hollowed like a flute so that truth could blow through.

  People flocked to the Garden by air, by train and bus, by taxi: they arrived with bedrolls and rucksacks. A shanty town sprang up between the area of thatched huts and the sea. The grand hotel filled with newspaper men and film men on the trail of the story about Anita Kroll. The scene became like that of a gold-rush: in the shanty town at night tiny oil lamps glittered like the eyes of animals: in the grand hotel, one evening, there was a fight. Or it was like one of those gatherings on a hot and dusty plain where the Virgin Mary has appeared and spoken to children: of course, the children can never explain precisely what the Virgin Mary has said: it has just seemed to them to have had some ultimate meaning.

  People tried to make enquiries about Anita Kroll: God would not answer questions: sometimes it was given as a reason that he was not well. It seemed to be accepted that God was in some sense ill; but also that he was using this as a means of evading questions. When his disciples were questioned about Anita Kroll they continued to treat the matter as some funny metaphysical riddle: what on earth would be an empirical test that would convince anyone that Anita Kroll had in fact been dead and had come alive? So what was the point of going on with such enquiries? People would believe what they wanted to believe; so why not get on with it. Questioners seemed incensed by this sort of argument; and so they made up the hostile stories that, I suppose, they wanted to make up anyway. There were stories that Anita Kroll had been seen driving with God in the town in the back of a large American car: that God was keeping her in his house as his mistress: that some quite different girl was being trained, to be sprung on the world later as a resurrected Anita Kroll. God himself, on the stage of the enormous hall with his huge sea-like eyes roaming about among the audience, seemed to be saying – Do you not see that this is what I am trying to teach you? truth is not a matter of choice between this or that view of facts; it is not with people who are trapped into thinking like this, but with those who are out of the trap altogether.

  God’s discourses continued on their bizarre way for some time; all the time he kept saying that what he was saying was beyond the scope of words. Then one morning he came in and sat there and he did not say anything. It was announced that he was not
ill, but that he just wanted to sit there and not speak.

  We all went on coming to the enormous hall. God was set down on the stage in his litter: he looked at us and we looked at him: he seemed to be saying – Is it you? Is it you?

  The multitudes who had come to the Garden seemed to be waiting for some new miracle – or catastrophe, or farce. I thought – These might be the same thing?

  The hostile feelings that had always existed amongst the local people towards the Garden were exacerbated by the influx: it was true now that the condition of the encampments around the Garden might be a threat to health; the television people and newspaper men treated local customs with little respect. All this coincided with a crisis of antagonism between factions within the local community itself. The territory, or enclave, in which the Garden lay had been settled by Europeans in the sixteenth century: a third of the local population were Christians; these from time to time found themselves under attack from the now more numerous but less influential Hindus. There had recently been riots in the town: shops owned by Christians had been smashed and looted. This in turn had coincided with God’s discourses becoming increasingly contemptuous of both Christians and Hindus – of what he suggested was the Christians’ materialism and the Hindus’ lack of it. Both factions could at least come together from time to time in their hostility to the Garden.

  I once heard Shastri addressing a political meeting at the side of the road. He stood on a handcart that had one wheel missing: his group of boys in white shirts and black trousers were propping it up. He was saying the sort of things that people always say at political meetings – other people have privilege, privilege is wrong, we demand that we have privilege.

  When I talked to Shastri he said – What is your God planning? to say he has died, and to come alive? taking with him everyone’s money?

  One day one of the shanties made of sacking and old driftwood in the sand-dunes caught fire; a child was burned; her mother was said to have been on acid. The next day the police came and walked around the scene. Their helmets were like the shells of crabs. They seemed to be waiting for baby turtles.

  Throughout my time in the Garden I never went (perhaps I went just once in order to see) to any of the encounter groups or what used to be called ‘human potential’ groups in which people were supposed to be helped to get rid of bottled-up feelings of rage – against parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, society. Strangers would face each other on the floor of a large room and shout the abuse that they had not been able to shout at whom it concerned; there was an outpouring of hatred that was meant to disappear down some drain. But the reserves of hatred, from such a well, seemed endless. I thought – Surely there is enough to do in the way of fighting in the world outside?

  Once or twice I went down to the grand hotel to see – what? the bodies stretched out by the swimming-pool? the landscape in which I had for a moment been happy, in which I might be happy again? I thought – If you have to fight anyway, perhaps it is in seeing yourself as an agent in occupied territory that you might feel at home.

  One evening I was lying on my bunk in the hut and Ingrid and Gopi were combing each other’s hair like one person looking in a mirror and Samantha had got into a yoga position like the one in which you are supposed to be able to squirt water in and out of your arse; and there was a sort of pattering, a small screaming, on the pathways outside: it seemed to be to do with rats; we went to the doorway and looked out. It was the police running down to the shanty town by the sand-dunes; they carried long sticks like the wings of seagulls or the claws of crabs. I thought – It is they, and not the baby turtles, who now run towards the sea; and will the baby turtles get them? I followed them and saw them hitting with their sticks at the makeshift huts: the denizens came out and the police kicked and knocked the huts over: there did not seem to be much purpose in what they were doing; people would wait for a time, standing around in the half-dark, and then start putting their huts up again. I thought – It is like that painting in the National Gallery of the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs: people enjoy bashing and being bashed about; it is what they are used to; it is not so easy simply to get out?

  The house in the village in which Shastri lived, and which was owned by his uncle, was a sort of boarding-house on two floors with rooms on four sides facing inwards round a courtyard. Bedrooms were on the upper floor with doors on to an inner veranda; on the ground floor there was an eating-room and a kitchen and a laundry and rooms where people could hold meetings. Men in striped pyjamas used to stand on the veranda and lean on the balustrade and look down as if they were political prisoners.

  I did go to one of Shastri’s meetings: I sat at the back of a room of men and girls in white shirts and black trousers while Shastri faced us from behind a table. He spoke mostly in their local language: when he spoke in English, he seemed to be speaking to me.

  ‘My father was once a schoolteacher and had high hopes of this man who is now called God. He thought he might lead the country to a new beginning! Then there was a strike of schoolteachers and my father lost his job – Who was this man who would do nothing to support him?

  ‘My father went to jail. These people in the Garden, who will support them in the day of retribution?

  ‘When last there was violence it was not ourselves who suffered: it was the rich! the privileged! Let no one imagine it is a privilege now to say you will come alive when you have been dead!’

  I thought – A political meeting is like some box, perhaps, which you listen to through a keyhole and the bits and pieces of sound that come out seem to make sense; then you lift the lid off and it is all nonsense, there are no connections.

  Afterwards I went up with Shastri to his room. I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head while noises came in like flies from the road outside. I said –

  ‘My father had the idea that human beings became different from apes when they walked upright; then they could have bigger brains, there were thus no limits to their interest in sexuality. This resulted in language: they couldn’t have sex all the time, so they had to think, to talk about it – to plan, to attack, to cajole, to defend. They did not need to spend so much time hunting for food. Of course, when we know this, we can just stop talking: but we carry this enormous brain round in our heads. We don’t use it yet wholly; we can cut off bits and pieces of it. But we don’t use our ability to take the lid offand look inside. This would be the whole – to talk, and talk about what you are talking about at the same time.’

  Shastri, with his hands at the buckle of his belt like a gunfighter in a western film, said ‘What are you saying? I don’t understand what you are talking about.’

  There was a day when I was told I had been chosen to be one of the disciples to whom God was to give his special blessing that evening in his inner garden. I did not know why I had been chosen; it might have been arranged by one of the people in my hut, or by my friend who was like Lilith. I did not see her so often now: we had never spoken to each other much. (Do you think I was growing up? Or do you think that with Shastri I was having just another dose of childhood?)

  Twenty or thirty people lined up outside the entrance to God’s inner garden: we were all clean and bright: I had not been into this part of God’s own territory before. We were taken round the side of his house into the part of the garden at the back where there was the loggia; this was where I had seen, from the outside, the picture being painted by the girl who might have been Anita Kroll. I wondered where Anita Kroll was now; were we not both, perhaps, being trained to be agents in occupied territory? The boundary hedge of God’s inner garden had been patched up with matting: rugs had been placed on the ground; we sat facing the loggia, within which there had been placed one of God’s empty chairs. Beyond, in the outer garden, we could hear the music of the nightly celebration starting up: what was to happen here, in the nucleus, was to be echoed in the larger cell. There was even a small band of drummers here at one end of the loggia: the style
of the blessing, the transmission of grace, seemed, as usual, to be about to contain some self-mockery: we were both to experience blessing, and to look down on it as if it were some stage show. I thought – God may suddenly pop his head through curtains like a clown.

  In fact when God did appear from the back of the loggia he was smiling and gliding as usual; he turned this way and that in greeting to the lines of people in front of him; it was as if he were a toy; as if he were saying – Gods are after all, are they not, some sort of clockwork toys! He sat in his chair and arranged his robes and looked amongst us with his sad, enormous eyes as if to say – You know which is the joke? which the sadness? which the reality? The drumming began. God’s chosen acolytes were to be led up to him one by one. I did not at first see my friend who was like Lilith. Then I thought I caught a glimpse of her through the plate-glass window. I could not see the girl who might have been Anita Kroll.

  As each acolyte was led forwards to God’s throne the drumming intensified: she or he knelt and bowed down: God moved to the edge of his chair as if he had indigestion: he spoke to the acolyte softly, so that no one else could hear what he said. I thought – Well, God does say different things to different people, doesn’t he? Then God seemed to move forwards almost beyond the edge of his chair; he put his hand round the back of the head of the acolyte as if he were getting a hold of (yes!) a musical instrument: he put the thumb of his other hand on the centre of the acolyte’s forehead and seemed to play it (you have met this image before?) as if he were producing music: he waggled his thumb and fingers this way and that – why do the thumb and fingers have to waggle, do you know? is it because this technique is necessary to produce the single note of pure music? After a time the acolyte in front of God seemed to wilt: it was as if she or he were dissolving into music: were being remoulded; perhaps would emerge again as something indeed emptied, or like a bird from an egg. So then she or he could go out, and fly around, and appear as her – or himself again – as nothing? – or at the bottom of that staircase? I thought – Of course, God’s finger comes down from above that doorway; the loggia is the courtyard containing the angel and Mary. So then, being played, are we not being taken beyond the framework of the picture? After a time one or two of the acolytes began to howl: it was as if the instrument being played were less a cello, more a saw: I thought – Who was that satyr, Marsyas, who was tortured for playing music? The images, as so often, became piled up. I thought – It is not so much that I fear I am being carried away: it is that I know I will have to watch, with cunning, if I am to emerge from this upheaval of bodies as if in a telephone-box.