The Butt (28 page)

But the skeletal anthropologist made no response to this démarche. He swivelled on his heel, squeaked back up the stairs and disappeared into the gingerbread chalet.

The College was derelict but in an anomalous way. Bull dust lay inches deep in the wide corridors, and every classroom had had a rock chucked through its window. There was an air of chronic desuetude – the air musty, drifts of dead flies on all the surfaces. Yet wanton destruction was confined to isolated acts of vandalism: a photocopier broken down into its smallest component parts, steel lockers that had been opened like tin cans, a laptop computer that had been snapped into four equal portions, then neatly stacked on a desk.

Adams allocated one classroom to Tom, the next to Prentice and the one beyond that to Gloria, who hung back, flattening her robe against empty bulletin boards, as the two men ranged along the corridors. Prentice waited outside, smoking against a wall.

Tom pushed four desks together, then unrolled his swag on the capacious platform. He retrieved his shortie suit from the bottom of his battered flight bag. In the boys’ washroom he shaved himself as best he could. He had to bend down low to capture sections of his sunburned face in the single remaining shard of mirror.

Tom placed his hand on Swai-Phillips’s bare shoulder and, concerned, said, ‘What’s wrong with you, Jethro?’

Instantly, the lawyer transformed: his clownish moustache and goatee froze on his strong features. From the bunch of accessories dangling from his neck, he hoisted up his wrap-around shades. From behind this reassumed mask he fired at Tom: ‘Nothing wrong, Brodzinski. I’ve gotta job t’do and I’ll do it, yeah. I’m the chronicler of this community. I haven’t been favoured with the kindest cut, but-that-needn’t-concern-you . . .’ In his haste to appear sane Swai-Phillips’s words leapfrogged crazily: ‘. . . allnecessarytellyouthat’syoumeimpressionsyourfirst.’

He thrust a voice camera in Tom’s face: ‘Campthisman-thenjourneyinsurgencykinduvthing, yeah?’ Tom pushed it aside, and it was replaced with a camera. Swai-Phillips pumped the shutter, while ranting, ‘Importantofpicture AnglojoinsVonSasser’sgreatprojectonthemanspot, right.’ Tom placed a hand over the zoom lens and gently pushed it down. Then he sidestepped the lawyer and entered the house.

A long Formica-topped table was set for dinner with Tupperware plates, brightly coloured plastic beakers, and plastic knives and forks. The room was far larger than Tom was expecting, and there was enough space for three distinct groups of people to have formed. Standing along the walls were Tayswengo women dressed in black togas and sporting discoid hairstyles. Immediately behind each of the place settings were more Tayswengo women, only these were costumed as Bavarian waitresses in dirndls and aprons embroidered with flowers. Their hair had been oiled and twisted into braids. Beyond the table, grouped by a fireplace with pine logs crackling in its grate, were five Anglos: Brian Prentice, Gloria Swai-Phillips, Winthrop Adams and Erich von Sasser. Together with them was Vishtar Loman, the doctor from Vance Hospital.

Tom tried to catch Dr Loman’s eye, but he was deep in conversation with the anthropologist. Atalaya Intwennyfortee was among the Tayswengo women, her lissom figure hidden in the heavy black cloth. She too avoided Tom’s gaze, instead fidgeting with the hem of her robe.

Seeing that Tom had arrived, Von Sasser broke off and addressed the company: ‘Gentlemen, Ms Swai-Phillips, dinner is served.’

Von Sasser took the head of the table, the other Anglos whichever was the nearest seat. The natives hunkered down where they had been standing. The waitresses tripped in and out of the kitchen, depositing dish after dish on the table: sauerkraut, Wiener schnitzel, sausages, boiled potatoes, some sort of broth with dumplings floating in it. The light from the setting sun streamed through the fret-worked shutters, scattering shining heart shapes among the fat-filled platters.

Von Sasser raised his face from his bowl of broth and saw the Galils that Tom had stood by the door. ‘Weapons, Mr Brodzinski? We’ll have none of those in here. This is a peaceful house.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. ‘My restitutional payment for Atalaya – for the Intwennyfortee.’

He got up to remove the rifles but was beaten to it by Swai-Phillips, who scampered in the door and snatched them.

‘I have the ten thousand here as well.’ Tom pulled out the wad of currency from his pocket.

She darted forward, took the rifles from Swai-Phillips and slung them expertly on her shoulders. Then she picked up the pots and departed. In the still evening she could be heard rattling off towards the native camp. Swai-Phillips took the cash out of Tom’s hands and disappeared into a back room.

Deflated, Tom sat down. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. He had anticipated an elaborate ceremony, graceful female dancers, preferably naked, shimmying towards him in a line. Then a tremendous ululation as he was shriven by a prancing makkata. Instead, there was only this odd scene: the Anglos, waited on by fräulein impersonators, stolidly working their way through plate after plate of heavy food, and washing it down with beakers full of dry, light, white wine.

At one point Prentice looked up from his schnitzel and said: ‘I’ve brought the riba–’

Von Sasser cut him off with a wave of his knife. ‘No need to speak of that either,’ he said. ‘Dr Loman will deal with it at the dispensary tomorrow, right.’ The anthropologist picked up a chunk of rye bread and tossed it to the Tayswengo women sitting on the floor. One of them deftly caught this and subdivided it among her companions.

Von Sasser acted, Tom thought, more like a monarch than a social scientist. There was ruthless superiority in his every word and gesture to the Tayswengo, while the Anglos were his courtiers: treated with civility, sometimes, yet no more powerful than those who served them.

As night fell, the waitresses brought in old-fashined brass oil lamps with elegant glass shades. Their soft yellow light welled up, filling the chalet with the distillation of other, more elegant eras. Conversation at the table was general: talk of hunting, rainfall, supply difficulties because of reported bandits along the thousand klicks of track to Trangaden – all matters of predictable importance to an isolated desert community.

Adams, who was seated on Tom’s right, was talkative, unbuttoned even. He was also – Tom was amazed to see – smoking. But then all the Anglos were smoking. Smoking before the food was served, smoking between courses and – in the case of Prentice and Von Sasser – even smoking within them, inhaling food and smoke simultaneously. Meanwhile, from the Tayswengo women squatting along the wall, there arose the squelching noise of engwegge mastication.

When the last helping of Apfelstrudel had been served, the cream pot had done its final round, and each of the diners had ladled out a generous dollop, Von Sasser pushed back his chair, relit his pipe and called for ‘Schnapps! Coffee! Double-quick time!’ The waitresses hurried to do his bidding, their dirndls rusting against the chair backs, their aprons suggestive white patches in the lamplight.

Tom tossed back the first shot of oily schnapps and his glass was immediately refilled. A warm muzziness was creeping over him: there was something almost sexual about this gemütlich scene. Gloria had exchanged her black toga for a high-collared white dress with full skirts, and Tom imagined himself throwing these up and exploring her own suggestive patches.

He was free to lose himself in the wisps and curls of blue and grey, to aesthetically appreciate these subtle brush strokes on the glowing canvas of the chalet’s interior – a painterly rendition of the very timeless present itself, which, from one second to the next, altered irrevocably. Even Von Sasser had acquired an air of benignity. He was no hawk – but an elegant Audobon heron, his streamlined form garbed in silky, smoky plumage.

Even so, when the anthropologist tapped his pipe stem against his coffee cup, Tom understood that this wasn’t only the command for silence; it was also the toastmaster’s gavel, signalling the beginning of a long speech – an oration, perhaps – and that the orator himself would tolerate no interruptions.

To illustrate this contention, Von Sasser snapped open the scalpel case that sat beside his place, withdrew one and used it to sever a wispy tumour from the tobacco fug. ‘A man’s or a woman’s very best intentions count for nothing, yeah, when the result of his actions is harm inflicted on another, weaker person.’ He levelled the scalpel’s tang at Prentice, who quailed, then put it back down.

‘If you ask me who God is,’ Von Sasser declaimed, ‘then this is my answer: you see this moth?’ All eyes fixed on the moth that fluttered by the lamp. ‘Then see its shadow.’ The eyes slid to the wall, where the shadow agitated for a moment, then was engulfed by a larger darkness.

A curious thing was happening: as Von Sasser’s statements grew more and more adamant, so his tone softened. The raucous vowels were quelled, the harsh consonants churned to Mittel-European slush, the rights and yeahs died a death as the meaningless interrogative swoop flatlined.

‘So,’ Von Sasser soothed, ‘you ask me the next logical question: what is this “good” of which I speak? I’ll tell you. The individual, the family, the group, the tribe, the national power bloc – each seeks its own benefit in the exploitation of another individual, family, etcetera, etcetera . . . Who is to be the arbiter, now that the moth’s so dusty? A fascist dictator? Or, as in the white parts of this country and the homelands of our visitors, an elective dictatorship – albeit, one voted in by apathy?’

He relit his pipe and had a glass of schnapps. Peering into his own glass, Tom saw a rainbow whorl supported on the clear fluid. He tossed it back, and his eyes swirled with the spectrum. The buttery flames of the oil lamps smeared, then righted. Tom felt keenly the massive void of the desert surrounding them, a cloud chamber, thousands miles wide, across which trailed Von Sasser’s vaporous fancies.

All but one of the waitresses had joined the women slumped against the wall. Apart from Tom and Prentice, the Anglos were drowsing. During the meal Tom had heard his lawyer’s deranged chattering orbiting the room. Swai-Phillips’s voice fell from the rafters, flew in through the windows, was even thrown up from beneath the floor: ‘He tells it like it is, yeah. He says what he knows, right. Time to lissen up, you bloody buggeraters! Time to foooo-cuss!’ But at last he had crept in and huddled together with the tribeswomen.

Von Sasser resumed. ‘The more tenderly ambitious the commonwealth in the domestic sphere, the more rapacious its foreign adventuring: the standard of Rome speared in the barbarian heart, Cromwell’s mailed fist punched through the Irish kidney, the Belgian neutralists who still run amok here. Who decides what shall be ordained “the good”? Why, those who have the power – we’ve always known that.

‘ “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away, even that which he hath.” The colonized have been taught to turn cheek after cheek, while receiving slap after slap.’

Von Sasser stopped, and Tom wondered where all this was going. Could it be aimed at Prentice, who sat across the table, his face, even in the lamplight, as pale and flat as paper? If so, was it the preamble to even rougher justice than Tom himself had contemplated? The waitress poured him yet another shot, and he injected it into the carburettor of his mouth, where it exploded. Tom gagged, spluttered, headlights bore down on him – from inside his eyes.

Ignoring this, Von Sasser continued: ‘Of course, times change, and, rather than admit that he wants to rip off your bauxite, the white man’s burden has become the Coke can he made from it, which you’re too inconsiderately bloody poor to buy off him. And in their own despotisms of dull, the Anglos abuse their wrinklies, their sickies, their dole bludgers, with a conception of “the good” that reeks of formaldehyde and the morgue. Their utilitarianism – how I bloody despise it! The noble Athenian polis rebuilt – on the never-never – in a general medical ward. Socrates is denied his hemlock and put on a morphine pump – as if that were any kind of death!’

The dirndl rustled by Tom’s ear; the shot was poured. Before drinking it Tom had the temerity to interrupt the anthropologist: ‘Excuse me, uh, Herr Doktor, but what exactly is in this stuff? It tastes kinda funny.’

‘A drop of petrol,’ Von Sasser told him. ‘Only a drop, mind. The desert tribes sniff it, and drink it – it’s a bloody scourge. I insist on all my guests having a little themselves. As a medical man I can assure you that it’ll do you no harm.’

A medical man? Tom was preparing to probe Von Sasser on this, when the anthropologist changed tack: ‘When my father arrived here fifty years ago, he found these people’ – he gestured towards the bundled-up tribeswomen – ‘on the brink of extinction. Winthrop . . . Gloria, Vishtar – they’ve heard this tale many times before . . .’ And besides, Tom thought, they’re beyond hearing.

They were: the fastidious Consul had slumped forward on to the table, while both Gloria and Loman were tipped back in their chairs. Gloria’s didgeridoo snores were a droning accompaniment to her cousin’s continuing jibber: ‘He’s the man, yeah, the number-one big bloke. Hear him!’

‘. . . but I think it’s important for newcomers to know the background to what we do here.

‘As I say, my father came here as a young anthropologist. He had studied with Mauss, with Lévi-Strauss – he was eager to get into the field and make a name for himself. In those days, well’ – Von Sasser dismissed a genie of smoke with a wave – ‘the authorities in Capital City had no more shame than they do now. He easily obtained a permit to work among the desert people. Then, when he arrived – in a convoy of bloody Land Rovers! All heavily laden with canvas tents, picks, shovels, all the gear and supplies he needed for six months in the wilderness! Y’know’ – he leaned forward, digging at Tom with his pipe stem – ‘anthropology itself has always been a kind of imperialism: the noble conquest of authenticity . . . Yes, when he arrived, instead of a state-of-bloody-nature, he discovered that the Belgians had long since rounded up all the able-bodied men, women and even children they could find and put ’em to work in Eyre’s Pit. You’ve seen the pit, yeah?’

‘We, uh, swung by on our way here,’ Tom said. ‘It’s . . . I dunno . . . terrifying–’

‘Terrifying, exactly! And that’s now, when there’s mechanization, and Anglo miners are also down there. Then, well, hundreds – thousands – were dying every bloody month. They were being forced, at gunpoint, to dig out the ore with their bare-bloody-hands.

‘The mining company had shot all the game – there was nothing for the people to eat. An entire generation – maybe two – had already been decimated. The guvvie encouraged this genocide, cynically offering so-called “development grants” for every native inducted into the certain death of the mine. There were no human-rights monitors in those days, Mr Brodzinski. None of the voyeuristic gear of an international community, which in our own era sees fit to come and see such atrocity exhibitions.

‘No, this was the heart of darkness, all right. And my father found out that the indigenous people, most of all, had forgotten its anatomy. The tribal groups – if they’d ever existed to begin with – had been broken up. Isolated mobs of old men and women, and young children, roamed the bled searching for water, feeding on each other’s corpses when they fell.

‘These people had bugger-all. Nothing. No language but a debased Anglo pidgin, no identity except as concentration camp inmates or escapees. They had no songs, no dances, no myths, no cosmology – not even the most rudimentary creation myths, such as are found among remote islanders. There were no rituals or holy men and women, no leaders – or taboos. These benighted people had only engwegge – and death.’

Von Sasser lapsed into silence and relit his pipe. The drawing of the match flame into the high ceramic bowl cast crazy highlights on Prentice’s black button eyes – for he sat in a trance. The other Anglos snored, Swai-Phillips muttered, the Tayswengo squelched their nicotine cuds.

At length, Tom ventured: ‘So, uh, if you don’t mind my asking, what did your father do?’

‘A good question, Mr Brodzinski. I’ll tell you what my papa did.’ The anthropologist’s tone softened still more, to a didactic caress: ‘He taught them, that’s what he did. He distilled all of his study of other traditional peoples, all of their myths and songs and dances, into a new and viable belief system for these terminally deracinated souls. He devised an entire new vocabulary for them, then grafted this on to the stump that remained where their own language had been amputated. Then he taught this to them as well. Of course, such instruction would’ve been impossible for a mere rabble, so Papa gave birth to new kinship systems, while inculcating them with the beginnings of a hierarchy.

‘By the time I was finishing school in Bavaria, the process of wider dissemination was under way. From here, emissaries went out to the north and the west. Attracted by these proud pioneers, the tribes now known as the Inssessitti, the Aval and the Entreati coalesced.

‘My mother . . .’ Von Sasser’s voice stretched, then twanged with emotion. ‘Fair Elise.’ His fingers played a few notes on smoky keys. ‘She was a woman of uncommon intelligence – the most refined sensibilities. She supported Papa to the hilt. Not for her the bloody whingeing that women indulge in today, with their drivel about “sexual fulfilment” and “my career”, making of their menfolk handmaidens with penises!

‘I don’t think my parents spent more than three months together in their entire marriage – which lasted over forty years. She understood the enormous significance of her work, she knew her feelings were of no consequence at all, while the knowledge that somewhere, over here, out in the desert, a young girl – or boy – was being infibulated, was fulfilment enough. When Papa sent her instructions, my mother followed them to the letter.