The Call-Girls

by Arthur Koestler

  ‘To sum up: the brain is a voracious organ. It has to be nourished from the cradle if it is to realize its full growth-potential. It appears that throughout history, most people carried brains in their heads which in the decisive early years had been starved, and thus stunted in their growth. Once this fact is fully understood, the revolution in the cradle will have started. By a crash-programme applying the principles already known to us, we should be able to raise the average level of human intelligence by something like twenty per cent on the IQ scale within a single generation. This would be the equivalent of a biological mutation, the consequences of which I prefer to leave to your imagination …’ After a final giggle, Wyndham sat down.

  Petitjacques jumped to his feet: ‘You want to produce des petits vieux. Little professors with tiny feet and big bald heads. With hypertrophic intellects and atrophic hearts. Can you not understand that our misfortune is to have too much intellect, not too little? That is the existential tragedy of man.’

  ‘How do you cure it? With LSD?’ Wyndham fluted.

  ‘Why not? Anything is beneficial if it opens the windows in your head to the wind – anything which expands the mystique and strangles the logique.’

  ‘How do you reconcile mysticism with your Marxist dialectics?’

  ‘But perfectly. It is the synthesis of the opposites. When you partake of the magic mushroom or the sacred cactus sauce in the sacramental dialectic mood, it is a feast of spiritual gastronomy and you understand the secret of the universe, which can be expressed in a simple motto: “Love, not Logic”.’

  ‘Love, eh?’ grunted Blood. ‘That’s why your baboons carry bicycle chains.’

  Petitjacques smiled with Mephistophelean benevolence: ‘The medium is not always the message. The Apocalypse must precede the Kingdom. Chopping heads is more effective than chopping logic.’

  Nikolai rapped the table with his cigarette lighter.

  ‘Let us take turns,’ he said. ‘Otto wished to make a remark.’

  Von Halder got up and, under the pretext of smoothing his white prophet’s mane, ruffled it even more. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Professor Wyndham shows us the way to Nietzsche’s superman. Perhaps. And why not? As a simple anthropologist I cannot follow Monsieur Petitjacques’s philosophic flight of ideas – what do you call them? Hipsterish, tripsterish, sit-in, drop-out, pop-out or what?’ He paused, waiting for the hilarity which did not materialize, then continued: ‘So I am not going along with Petitjacques, but I am going along with him a short way. As a simple anthropologist I know only a little about the human brain, but if the revolution promised by Wyndham is going to affect only the cortex, the seat of intelligence and cunning, and leave the areas which govern our passions unchanged – then I fear, I very much fear, that your superman will be a super-killer. Because, as I have shown and explained in my last book, man is an animal with a killer-instinct, directed in the first place at his own, his very own species; he is homo homicidus, who will kill for territory, kill for sex, kill for greed, kill for the pleasure of killing…’

  ‘Rot,’ Harriet interrupted. ‘I am only a simple zoologist, but I know enough history to realize that all this talk about the killer-instinct is just fashionable nonsense. Men don’t kill out of hatred, but out of love for their gods.’

  ‘Quatsch,’ said Halder. ‘I have heard all that before.’

  ‘You have,’ said Harriet. ‘But you did not listen.’

  It was time for lunch.

  2

  Between lunch and the beginning of the afternoon session, the Soloviefs went for a walk.

  They followed a lane which climbed gently into the pine-woods, then emerged onto a vast open meadow, with a chain of widely spaced farmhouses strung out until the path vanished into the next forest round the shoulder of the mountain. Though it was July, there were patches of snow higher up on the slopes facing north.

  On farmhouse after farmhouse there were handwritten notices announcing rooms to let with full board. It was the hour of the midday dinner, and Claire watched with fascination the fare being served to the families on the crowded terraces: soup with dumplings; large helpings of pork chops, cabbage and potatoes, followed by chocolate cake, washed down with beer. ‘I can lip-read the sounds of their munching,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t listen. Look at the mountains. Listen to the cowbells.’

  But the sound of the cowbells was blocked out by the juke-boxes and the motor-bikes without silencers, which echoed like machine-guns from the road lower down. The peasant boys had a craze for motor-bikes – big, shiny, pepped-up brutes. They left school at fifteen, mooched about on the farm for a year or two, then half-learned a trade, to become garage mechanics, electricians, plasterers or waiters, hoarding their wages until, at forty, they were able to realize their life’s dream: to open another pension with thirty beds, offering healthy country fare out of plastic packs.

  ‘The doctor’s wife told me,’ said Claire, ‘that six years ago she ordered the first frigidaire which the village had seen. When it arrived, she explained its purpose to Hilda, the next door farmer’s daughter, who worked for her as a daily. Hilda got very excited and asked if she could borrow two ice-cubes and take them down on a saucer to her husband, to put into his beer, but only for a very short while – then she would bring the cubes back. The next morning she came in with red eyes – in her excitement she had slipped on the path, broken the saucer, lost the ice-cubes and spent a sleepless night. Now Hilda has a huge deep-freeze in her boarding house and all the other gadgets which the doctor’s wife cannot afford. She hardly speaks to her.’

  ‘Who hardly speaks to whom?’

  ‘Hilda to the doctor’s wife, of course.’

  They walked on along the blissfully empty lane – the tourists were busy digesting on the terraces of the farms below, spread over flimsy deck-chairs which looked like collapsing from the overload. The summer guests, unlike the winter skiers, nearly all came from those regions of Central Europe where body volume was still considered an index of prosperity. They were not beautiful to behold. The beautiful people used mountains only for skiing. In summer they wore schnorkels, not rucksacks.

  Nikolai and Claire made way for a family which did carry rucksacks and sticks, trudging down the lane. Claire, too, had to stand aside on the verge of the lane, confronted with the sheer bulk of the couple. Two children were gambolling as outriders in front of them. All four stared at the Soloviefs with unfathomable disapproval. When they had gone a few steps past, the woman pronounced the verdict:

  ‘Engländer …! ’

  Nikolai walked a little faster. Claire giggled: ‘That dame looked exactly like a chest of drawers mounted on stovepipes with the top-drawer pulled out… Were they like that when you were taken on vacation as a little boy?’

  ‘Little boys love big bosoms,’ said Nikolai.

  ‘So all American men are little boys,’ said Claire. ‘I am just being silly. I know this transformation is a shock to you.’

  ‘I did love the mountains,’ said Nikolai. ‘And the mountain peasants. They called themselves not farmers but peasants – Bauern. They were proud of it. Official communications were addressed to “Herrn Bauer Moser” or “Herrn Bauer Hübner”. Bauer is still one of the commonest names in their telephone directory – but hardly anybody in ours is called John Peasant, or Jean Paysan.’

  ‘But perhaps as a little boy your view of the Bauern was somewhat dewy-eyed.’

  ‘Perhaps. One has no right to blame them. It was a hard life. Until they made the greatest discovery in their history: tourists are easier to milk than cows. You don’t have to get up at four in the morning.’

  They sat down on a public bench provided by the municipality of Schneedorf, a few steps off the lane. It had a magnificent view and an advertisement for a new deodorant painted on the back-rest. A few steps from them there was a souvenir stall displaying native woodcarvings of stags, mountain-goats and golden eagles copied from Disney comics.

  ‘I am not being se
ntimental,’ said Niko. ‘You think the tourist explosion is just a minor nuisance. But the tourist industry occupies first place in the economy of this country, and of others as remote as the Fiji islands; and in some the annual turnover of tourists far outnumbers the native population. They flood the mountains, the beaches, the islands. They turn the natives into parasites, erode their ways of life, contaminate their arts and crafts, their music…’ Niko was getting steamed up. He hit the ground with his walking stick.

  ‘… You think it’s a minor nuisance, but it is a global phenomenon, spreading global corruption. It is levelling down all cultures to the lowest common denominator, to a stereotyped norm, a synthetic pseudo-culture, expanding like a plastic bubble. Colonialism is dead; now we have coca-colonization, all over the world. Each nation does it to the other.’

  Claire knew that when he got into that mood there was no arguing with Niko. Nevertheless she tried:

  ‘Isn’t there another side to it? People like that chest-of-drawers lady have never before had a chance to travel abroad. Why grudge them their fun?’

  ‘Fun? Do you remember those bus-loads of blue-haired matrons on package tours in Hawaii? Two hundred of them in each package. The organizers treated them like a bunch of battery-reared hens expected to lay a golden egg per day. And they felt just like that, hating it all, the natives who robbed them, the food that gave them diarrhoea, the lingo which they couldn’t speak. Instead of bringing nations closer to mutual understanding, travel spreads mutual contempt.’

  Niko evidently had a bee in his bonnet about it. Claire could not quite understand why, although she knew that the philanthropist in him was always ready to turn into a misanthropist by the throw of a switch. Yet he always took such childish pleasure in travelling in foreign countries. Even the exotic uniforms of the customs officials delighted him.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ he said, ‘that nothing sounds so contemptuous as a tourist calling another tourist a tourist?’

  ‘But we both love being tourists,’ protested Claire.

  ‘Ah!’ said Niko. ‘Because we love looking out of the window of the train. But they travel like registered parcels.’

  Suddenly it dawned on Claire that there was some connection in Niko’s mind between those dumb travellers and the call-girls – between the tourist explosion and the knowledge explosion – and the corrosive fall-out left by both. But pursuing the subject would only get him fog-bound again.

  ‘To come back to Hilda,’ she said.

  ‘What Hilda?’

  ‘The one who used to work for the doctor’s wife, and was an honest peasant woman until she discovered that tourists were easier to milk than cows. You yourself said that one cannot blame them.’

  ‘I was repeating a cliché. Blame is a word which has no place in Burch’s vocabulary. Or in John D. John’s. They say it is meaningless to blame a person for his deeds – or to praise him. You can judge only the chromosomes in his balls, the circuitry in his cerebral vortex, the adrenalin in his arteries, the phobias of his mum, the society in which he lives. And so on – alibis and excuses all the way, right back to Adam and Eve. They have provided even God with an alibi by declaring him dead. Remember Archimedes: “Give me but one firm spot in the universe to stand on and I will move the earth”. We have no firm spot to stand on. In fact, no moral leg to stand on.’

  ‘But we have. You have, and Harriet has, and Wyndham and Tony. That’s why we are here.’

  Solovief stopped to pick up a clump of greyish snow which had escaped the sun’s attention in a crevice, and kneaded it between his palms into a hard ball. He aimed it at a telegraph pole and missed. ‘You know what I mean. To believe is easy. To disbelieve is easy. To disbelieve one’s own disbelief is hard.’

  ‘I know,’ said Claire. ‘But it keeps one going.’

  ‘It keeps one going – like a squirrel in a revolving cage.’

  ‘I think we ought to get back,’ said Claire. ‘I forget who is next on the menu.’

  ‘Petitjacques.’ Nikolai laughed, his anger suddenly gone. ‘If ever there was a frenzied squirrel in a cage, it’s him.’

  3

  Nobody knew, even approximately, Raymond Petitjacques’s age. In successive editions of the International Who’s Who and suchlike reference books his date of birth varied up and down by as much as ten years. If a conscientious editor raised a query, he replied that everybody is as old as he feels. One of his favourite sayings was ‘Epater le bourgeois is old hat. Il faut le mystifier.’ Mystification was as much second nature to him as pedantry to Burch. Harriet claimed that the best approximation to determine his real age was Newton’s inverse square law: Petitjacques’s appearance increased in youthfulness with the square of the distance. From the other end of the room he appeared to be under forty. The closer one got, the more parchment-like the skin became, with a kind of tautness that gave the impression of plastic surgery.

  His impromptu talk had indeed, as Blood had foreseen, the spicy ingredients and mushy consistency of a goulash sprinkled with hot curry. It gave Claire a craving for a toothpick. At the same time she began to be frightened. Petitjacques was preaching hatred in the name of love. As he warmed to his subject, the Mephistophelean charm gave way to bilious malice; a fine spray issued from his eloquent lips; he seemed to be literally spitting venom. In the name of peace he was declaring war against an undefined enemy. This enemy, to which he referred elusively as ‘The System’, seemed to change all the time its character and identity, from a mythological monster devouring its own children to a sociological abstraction somehow related to advertisements for washing machines in the mass-media. This monster appeared to be wearing, at one and the same time, a steel-helmet, a bowler-hat and a mortar-board; he polluted the minds of young sociology students by teaching them History, and of budding sculptors by lessons in anatomy; he was a computerized Fascist Pig with a pre-natal phobia of pubic hair (which, to the embryo, represents the hostile jungle); and he was a shameless hypocrite – ‘the hypocrisy of the system, chers amis, is epitomized by the monstrous segregation of public lavatories for men and women’.

  His talk was interstitched with such self-parodying remarks, yet there could be no doubt that his hatred of ‘the system’ – of Western civilization in all its aspects – was genuine and obsessive. The system had to be destroyed in order to liberate society, and it could only be destroyed by all-out guerilla war. An all-out guerilla war did not require nuclear weapons. Its aim was the disintegration of the entire social fabric, fibre by fibre, until the streets were no longer safe for pedestrians sporting the conventional garbs of the system, until they would no longer dare to turn the ignition key in their cars for fear that it might activate a plastic bomb; nor board an aeroplane, for nobody could tell whether it would reach its destination, or any destination at all. Secretaries in big industrial firms would refuse to use typewriters for fear they might be booby-trapped; prosperous suburbanites would not dare to send their children to school for fear that they might be taken as hostages. The schools would have to close anyway, because teachers trying to teach ‘would be laughed in the face, if not punched in the nose and stripped à poil, to cure them of their pubic phobias’. So-called crimes of violence would mount in curves steeper than a rocket take-off – not only such system-engendered crimes as burglary, but ritualized violence for its own sake, l’art pour l’art. The authorities would be helpless because you cannot stitch and patch up a rotten fabric in total disintegration. When the police hunt for a criminal, they look first of all for a motive; but you cannot hunt down killers who act without a motive, without any personal grudge against the victim who is merely a symbol of the system – not a person, but a thing … ‘Mes amis, you always forget what an extraordinarily remarkable thing it is that you can walk in a dark street past a person who could club you over the head just for the fun of it and never be found out. Why does he not do it? Because he is caught in the social fabric, a tight-woven web, a system, based on a tacit agreement, an implicit co
ntrat social, which guarantees the security of Jean walking past Jacques in a dark street. It is not the police who protect him but the fabric, the tacit contract, for without it every Jacques and Jean would need his own bodyguard. So when the fabric of the system disintegrates into shreds, security disintegrates with it, and law and order all become an idyllic memory of the past. The aim of all-out guerilla warfare, chers amis, is to complete this disintegration of the fabric which is already well on its way …’

  When he had finished – abruptly, with an uncompleted sentence, as if he had suddenly got bored and saw no point in going on – there was an embarrassed silence. Niko was surprised to discover that his tough call-girls were still capable of embarrassment. He glanced invitingly at several participants in turn, but nobody seemed anxious to speak; even Bruno merely shrugged his shoulders and gave a silent demonstration of washing his hands. At last Sir Evelyn, who during Petitjacques’s lecture had pretended to be taking his afternoon nap, hands folded over his bulging stomach, seemed to rouse himself. ‘Mr Chairman,’ he drawled plaintively, ‘I think we have heard all that odious flim-flam before, more than a century ago, from another crop of feebleminded baboons, the Nihilists in the happy days of the Tsars. If M. Petitjacques has ever heard the name of Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoievski, 1821–1881, I would suggest he reads the novel The Possessed, and he will realize that the revolutionary message that he offers us consists of old chestnuts.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Petitjacques, regaining his mocking amiability, ‘you are quoting literature. I shall answer you with Antoine Artaud’s irrefutable statement: “The literature of the past was good enough for the past but is not good enough for the present.”’

  Halder ruffled his mane with a gesture of despair. ‘Programme!’ he shouted at Petitjacques. ‘Your positive programme! Drop-out, pop-out, shoot, hoot, in blinder Wut, is not a programme. You have been pulling legs.’