He collected antique weapons and shortly after his arrival in Targat had founded a sort of homosexual paramilitary association. He had white pants and magnificent blue tunics tailored in Marseilles for a set of twelve-year-old boys, armed them with realistic-looking toy guns, and, with himself as commander-in-chief, staged paramilitary maneuvers in the nearby desert, during which they practiced endurance, withstanding physical and mental pain, working out in the torrid sun, and first and foremost the speedy removal of the little tunics. The two authors were alternately friendly and at odds with each other, and during each of the phases they reciprocally alienated the delicate, sunburnt boys who constituted their domestic help.
It was just such a boy, dressed only in a pair of short, yellow gym trunks, who opened the wrought-iron gate. The front garden was lit with torches and faded at the edges into darkness and tall trees. Polidorio trailed anxiously behind Canisades. They entered a hall with a giant staircase, tall doors facing the garden, men in suits, women in Yves Saint Laurent dresses. Among them more gym shorts, serving food and drinks on silver trays. No sign of the host.
Canisades greeted people all around, Polidorio followed behind him with his arms folded across his chest. Since there were no formal introductions or other old-fashioned courtesies, one was always left to guess whether one was facing a high-ranking deputy minister, a penniless intellectual or a random pervert. For someone like Polidorio, to whom hierarchical structures still meant something, this was tremendously stressful.
The buffet consisted of foods he had never seen before and the names of which he had never heard. On the walls hung paintings in a non-representational style, sawdust had been spread on the floor around the bar, and scurrying between the legs of those present was a little furry animal with a golden collar, an animal which Polidorio could not tell for the life of him whether it was a small dog, a large rat or something else entirely.
Canisades had quickly made his way over to a couple of acquaintances. Polidorio joined the group half-heartedly but did not participate in the conversation. He had taken a glass of champagne from one of the gym shorts, and his attention had been captivated by a woman dressed all in white standing a little ways away. Very slender, very blonde, large breasts, but something about her seemed off. Her gestures were odd. A handful of American officers stood around her, listened to her attentively and laughed a little too eagerly at every sentence she sluggishly recited.
“My colleague Polidorio,” said Canisades, and a hand littered with liver spots extended toward the surprised commissar.
“A pleasure, a real pleasure! I wish my life were as exciting as yours. Why don’t you ever turn up in your smart uniform? Are you afraid you’ll turn my house into a disreputable site?”
Polidorio, who had missed the introductory sentences, shook his head shyly. The liver-spotted hand was apparently Spasski. A large, bald-headed man. There was no denying that he was a charming character all the same. While Polidorio, still feeling flattered, tried to concoct a respectful response (“I read your most recent book,” “This party is as scintillating as great literature,” “I wish my life were as exciting as your books”), Spasski had already turned to someone else and was speaking exceedingly charmingly to that person.
Canisades subsequently introduced his colleague to two or three other groups, but Polidorio quickly had the feeling that he should free his friend from the dead weight that he himself represented. He wandered into the house and back into the garden, stopped here and there in order to look busy, and remained at loose ends. Everywhere the conversations were in full swing. There were none of the awkward silences, the occasional and not-so-disagreeable stumbles in communication, the contemplative pauses between questions and answers he was familiar with from other social situations. All the talk jumbled together maddeningly quickly. When he tried to enter he went unnoticed, sometimes demonstratively unnoticed, and when he himself added a sentence to topics he believed himself to know something about, people turned to him with such offended civility that he lost his train of thought. The assembled company was a single, vague indignity.
The entire evening he wandered around lost, avoiding only the group with the blonde woman, who seemed a bit odd to him. He became increasingly quiet and just listened. He observed.
If there is one characteristic that distinguishes an experienced criminal from a lay person, it is the quality of his perception. He knows immediately where he needs to look, he distinguishes the important from the unimportant, he recognizes the unreliability of human sight. Perception and observation are not natural talents, one can study them and practice… at least that was the nonsense Polidorio had been taught at the police academy, and often when he was bored in a social setting he tried in vain to do just that. He watched conversations and saw speakers exaggerate, listened to nonsense and non-sequiturs, tried for a moment to understand or at least to make a mental note, and only got more and more defensive and spiteful.
“Just to give a ballpark figure, we’re talking about the vicinity of three five. Possibly three seven.”
“A hundred years ago people would have said that, based on the data on increasing traffic volume in London, the city would be drowning in horse shit in 1972. That’s no different than what Paccei is saying now, the idiot.”
“Perhaps the most ingenious man in the southern hemisphere.”
“As soon as an author comes up with some form of literary theory, it always boils down to elucidating a general goal that the author himself is best at accomplishing and has been practicing for years. This is not a theory. It’s nothing more than what bunny rabbits learn when it gets dark in the great forest. And theories by people who don’t write: ridiculous. So in that regard, there are no theories.”
“So-called reality.”
“And when somebody holds a door open for me, I’m immediately under pressure, I feel a sense of obligation. I start to run. But naturally I myself always hold the door. Does that make me a sadist? It just occurred to me this morning. The door-holding-sadist.”
“Ah, Mr Cetrois. Good evening, good evening! On another secret mission? Where is your friend?”
“And by the most ingenious man in the southern hemisphere, I mean, I know ‘Katanga’ from him, you must hear it. He knows all the participants, he can describe the Belgian right down to the ends of her hair, he knows what everyone did, he knows where they live, how many children they have. And we’re talking about the secret service here. He came straight from Cambridge. Law. They laugh! They didn’t take Lumumba seriously and they never learn. He’s already got half the country behind him. I assure you, if there is ever a president of a united Africa… You mustn’t let yourself be blinded by the crude rhetoric of the combatants. This is the pivotal moment, this is the blood beacon, and he is the man. Simply brilliant. And he’s only twenty-nine. Dress warm. Dress warm! Helms has already planted his first agent in his office. You don’t believe it, right? But he has.”
The speaker had a light East European accent. The person facing him, a gray-haired man with a hat, suit and pocket square, didn’t seem to agree. He didn’t want to know anything about an African blood beacon, and had even less desire to hear about peaceful accord. The more desirable progress was, the more he demanded regression, regression though hardship, misery, sacrifice and revolution. And as a result there was no united Africa, the differences here weren’t sufficiently pronounced. There was no clear upper and lower, essentially no upper at all, and no consciousness of upper and lower. Wherever one looked, nothing but societal formlessness, poorly understood structures and half-assed butchery. He corrected himself: pointless butchery. No, such utopias could expect to be realized only as part of the much larger project of the global state, for which one had to rely on Europe. America was too egomaniacal, Russia too broke, and the remainder of Asia had forever been apolitical and the secondary inheritors of Occidental political theories. He assumed by the turn of the millennium, at the latest: a global state, originating in Europe.
At the phrase “turn of the millennium” the person opposite him broke out giggling, and it seemed to Polidorio, who was hearing the phrase for the first time, that it was highly unlikely that by that point there would still be human life on the planet. They continued to argue.
The blonde woman stood alone at the edge of the garden and looked out into the night. One had a view down the entire coastal range. The moonlit crests of waves landed gleaming on an invisible beach. A group gathered around Moleskine paged through one of Spasski’s early works like frisky teenagers paging through a nudist catalog, a drunken fifteen-year-old in yellow gym shorts trailed along behind Polidorio with a giant syringe and several times took the liberty of jokingly pretending that he was going to ram it into his (and other guests’) backsides.
At some stage Polidorio ended up standing next to the young diplomat being treated by the East European contingent as the future president of a united Africa. Gleaming white teeth in a black face, light suit, exceedingly winsome smile. He was in fact tremendously quick in the head, as Polidorio could tell with what was left of his drunken skills of perception, he had a sense of humor, he was ingenious. But what good was it to him? He was still a black. After his first use of hypotaxis Polidorio could no longer follow him.
As the tremulous host, braced by two footmen, stood up on a chair in the garden, all conversation fell silent. The footmen remained cautiously standing next to the chair, but Spasski shooed them away with an imperious gesture. The crowd pressed toward him in expectation of a meaningful performance, from somewhere came spontaneous applause, and Polidorio, who knew how much the acquaintance of this American artist meant to Canisades, drew closer with an eyebrow raised. When nothing more could be heard than the quiet clinking of ice cubes in glasses, Spasski raised his voice. Frailly, monotonously, almost purring, but still in its own way also penetrating, so that even in the furthest corners of the garden nobody had to strain to hear his words.
“It is considered virtuous to be far-sighted!” began Spasski, then pausing as if he were waiting until even the ice cubes had quieted down. “As one of the capabilities given only to man and not the animals, in order to worry about the future, to take preventative action. But the race that emerged from this anxiety, the aged European-American type, is exactly what we fled from to an unconcerned Africa, to a society, to a way of thinking, to an essence that is still in the blossom of its youth. I would like to drink to this blossom. I am glad that you all have come. Never should a murky future darken the luminous present. Look up.” He himself looked up into the night with great pathos. Only a few party guests followed his example, most kept their gaze fixed on the grand gesture, an aged, scrawny arm trembling beneath the starry heaven. “Who among you would not at the moment of death be willing to buy back your life at the cost of the vast majority of humanity? Diderot. If I had to choose between the beauty of the moment and the survival of humanity—I want to state the following. If in the next ten years the lights go out here, as my friends in the Club of Rome never tire of telling me weekly via the newspaper; what is this, philosophically speaking? We could wipe away nine-tenths of humanity and then from those left another nine-tenths and there would still be scum. Indignation’s not necessary. No, we know this. Nine-tenths. And then nothing in the world could stop us from flinging our arms around the neck of the Turin horse, sobbing. Because we are human. And that’s the thing, and I mean it, dear friends, as solemnly as I say it, and anyone who knows me, knows it to be true. Let’s come straight to the point. Liberate ourselves from the conceit of elucidation! Light does not belong in every darkness. We all know the feeling one senses. You toss a couple of copper coins to a starving child and see a glow of gratitude in the coal-black eyes, it shines brighter than a starry sky or any utopia the philosophers devise, and this feeling is, I reiterate, this feeling, this shame, this misery, this poorly veiled sense of superiority—and not rationality—believe you me. Humanity! Humanity. Mr Wallich was right to call the talk of the limits of growth a pile of irresponsible nonsense. We will still have electricity and be happy in 1980. We will still have electricity and be happy in 1990. And in 2000. And in 2010 we will all be dead but still have electricity. Carthage!”
His arm swung around like a gun barrel, pointed at a group of uniformed musicians, and the drum counted to four.
Targat’s youngest commissar took leave of his colleagues using the pretext of having a headache. Beneath the portal of two marble runners Polidorio let out a deep breath.
Let a bomb fall on that place, he thought.
10
The Centrifuge
When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun.
STEPHEN HAWKING
THAT WAS HOWEVER exactly the problem with the camel jockeys. They wanted to fiddle around with the atom and didn’t know how a centrifuge worked. Lundgren hadn’t earned the best grades in physics; in his mind he was the type of person who was better with languages. He’d also been good at music, sports and in religion. But this much he had learned at school: a centrifuge was something that spun around fast. And an ultracentrifuge was something that spun around really fast. With one of those you could separate isotopes, for instance Uranium-235 from Uranium-238. A taller, narrower cylinder with great rotational energy, a device of middling complexity that to a design engineer posed primarily mechanical challenges. Challenges that a gifted auto mechanic could probably overcome. But not a camel jockey. The camel jockeys couldn’t manage it; even the know-how needed for a rotating cylinder was beyond them.
If they had invested the time and effort and the money that they put into torture, human rights violations and fighting Israel, he thought, into educating their auto mechanics instead, they could have built their dim-witted centrifuges themselves. Virtually. Anyone should have been able to build the thing. Even he, Lundgren, could probably have managed it with a bit of practice and a little more attention in physics class. A rotating cylinder, for god’s sake, what was the problem? But these people here couldn’t manage it. Or didn’t want to. Maybe they didn’t want to. Lundgren looked at his watch. Pale-gray hands that glowed in the dark, a gift from his wife. He took a sip of mint tea and put the glass back down on the emerald-green surface of the table. On the opposite side of the street, directly across the way, stood a decaying two-story building. Green paint was flaking off it and a flagpole stood crookedly atop the roof, from which a dark-green scrap of fabric indicated the stillness of the air. The color of the revolution.
Lundgren had seen much misery in the world, and he had figured out at some point what the problem was with the Third World and its inhabitants. Among many other things they considered cerebral activities unmanly. Naturally nobody said it that way. But science stood in fuzzy opposition to the great ideals of pride, honor and razzmatazz. Science was for girlies. You could give a woman a hundred dollars and she would conjure up a sewing shop with eight employees. Give a man a hundred dollars: civil war. And the worst of all were the Arabs. What was in their blood was laziness, intrigue and fanaticism. But contemplation was for women, and women, this was also clear, were known to be too stupid for contemplation. A vicious circle. Lundgren brooded over it, and the longer he thought about it, about what he himself referred to as the vicious circle of the Arabic character, the less strange it seemed to him. Because in the end he was the same way.
What was science? A chicken-breasted crafts project. Run by self-important busybodies in shirts laid out by their mothers, tiny little men with coke-bottle glasses who could barely see as far as the laboratory door and who in condescending falsetto voices issued orders like: Go out into the world and clear away the filth, we’ve already calculated the important things and taken care of them. Physics was, philosophically speaking, a model to describe reality. But it was a false model. Physics was unsophisticated, because it had removed the most important thing, humans and their weaknesses. That’s something the camel jockeys had realized: even the great Nobel Prize winners were incapable of withstanding the
most basic use of force. Science bore no relation to reality, to real reality, the feedback was missing. Espionage had feedback. Espionage was complex, an almost artful process, and like all art it was deception and illusion. An art and a sport and in contrast to science, analogous to life, the magnificent, the great, the erasable, fragile Gesamtkunstwerk of human life, and the only thing that could drive one crazy was when the contact man didn’t turn up. Probably hunkered down at his farm penetrating his favorite sheep having long since forgotten about separating isotopes.
When the contact man didn’t turn up… and the sun. Already on the first evening Lundgren had bought himself a ridiculous straw hat. It barely protected him from the rays that had been emitted by the sun eight minutes prior as the byproduct of a nuclear fusion reaction, just to blaze unrelentingly down onto Lundgren’s brow. But at the café he didn’t dare to sit. Maintain an overview, safety. Basic rule. The electromagnetic rays burned through the straw hat, he looked at the green flag, he looked at the green building, and suddenly the word had disappeared.
A numb feeling like cotton padding clung to his tongue. The word was gone. It was as if he couldn’t remember his own name. He couldn’t remember the name of the thing. The thing that rotated. The reason he was here. Of course, centrifuge, centrifugal. That came right after centaur, central, the center of the solar system. Centrifuge, right. And before that? It kept getting worse. Before that he had thought of mint tea, mint a coin, tea. Mademoiselle, a coin of tea. And baby sheep. But why was he here again? Because of the… extreme centrifuge. The extremely fast speedifuge? After rubbing his temples copiously, Lundgren hit upon virtually. Virtual centrifuge. That wasn’t the right word. Or was it? Was it the right word? And if that wasn’t the right word, how was this going to end? Good day, my name is virtually Lundgren. I have the thing. Yes, thank you, no problem. It was getting ever more idiotic. It was the sun, the fucking sun. The fucking tea. The fucking centrifuge.
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