Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

At the outskirts of the village I met a young man with a long, wet moustache.

‘Excuse me,’ I murmured, ‘excuse me…’

I reached out to him and touched his sleeve. He pulled his arm away indignantly, then dived into a house and slammed the door.

The clouds were breaking up overhead into rags of grey and white and the sun shone through in patches: a tree illuminated here, a ruined house there… The mountainside which I had just descended was now blazing with brilliant, yellow light.

I passed closed doors and shuttered windows. A thin dog came trotting past. It paused to sniff at me, as if wondering whether there was any flesh left on me worth eating.

At the centre of the village there was a square with single shop and a police station, both of them closed and shuttered up. There was a ruined building and some deserted-looking houses. The long, white wall of the monastery formed one whole side of the square. It had barred windows with pale blue stonework around them, and a single, large ornate door.

I hesitated. Where was this? Bosnia? Montenegro? Dalmatia? Istria? Venetia? What alphabet was that above the door of the police station? What language did they speak? I swayed and tottered and nearly fell.

And what religion was it here, I wondered (for I had noticed that geography was the main determinant of religious belief)? Which God did they follow? Should I ask for alms in the name of Allah, or Jesus Christ, or Bogomil, or… who? Some Slavonic god of plenty? To my confused, feverish mind, the question seemed both insoluble and frighteningly important. That dull, persistent aching feeling was pressing heavily against the inside of my eyes.

Which God? Couldn’t I at least know which God?

Help came in the form of a solitary figure in black hurrying across the square. It was an elderly widow, tightly clutching an enormous brown cockerel in both arms.

‘What kind of monastery is this?’ I asked her. ‘Who is it dedicated to?’

I must have spoken something that at least approximated to her own language. She stopped and looked at me.

‘You poor boy! You must go in! The monks are good. They will give you help.’

‘But what kind of monks? Who do they believe in?’

‘They are kind and holy. They’ll help you.’

‘ Please ,’ I grabbed her arm. ‘Please tell me. What do they believe in?’

She stared at me. Something in my face shocked her. She released the cockerel’s neck, so as to free her right hand to cross herself.

‘It is a monastery of the Roman Church,’ she said, ‘but now that it is given over to the Holy Machine, may the Lord bless his name, who knows what church it belongs to.’

The cockerel, red wattles quivering, had twisted his neck round to stare at me with a fierce yellow eye. It suddenly emitted a loud, cold shriek.

‘The Holy… Machine ?’ I mumbled.

‘Yes.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘A great miracle. He is a kind of robot, but God has given him a soul – and not an ordinary human soul either, but the soul of a saint or an angel!’

‘But… I thought robots were… bad…’

‘Yes, of course, and Mary Magdalene was a whore. To God, all things are possible.’

The woman smiled and patted me on the arm.

‘Go in, young man. You’ve got a fever. They’ll get you dry and give you something to eat.’

A sudden eruption of activity and noise made me cower and cry out with fear. But it was just the cockerel. It had worked one of its wings free and was beating it frantically.

‘No you don’t!’ snapped the old woman, grabbing it grimly by the throat.

‘Go in,’ she urged me over her shoulder as she dealt with the offending bird. ‘Go in!’

The rain was starting up again. She hurried on.

Even just the time I had spent standing and talking with the widow had left my body stiff. I hobbled very slowly across the square, only to quail in front of the blue double door. Here was food, warmth, rest. Here more importantly than anything was the possibility of forgiveness that had been the whole purpose of this journey. Somewhere within was that bright, silver being that I so longed to meet. But now I dreaded that encounter.

Very reluctantly I lifted my hand to the knocker. A stab of pain ran through my body. I let the knocker fall.

Thud!

Silence.

Silence.

A cold gust of wind blew the rain across the empty square.

I give up, I thought. Let me just crawl away to some hole in the ground and sink peacefully into oblivion.

I had already turned away from the door when from within came the sound of sliding bolts. The left half of the big door slowly opened to reveal a small, fat, balding monk.

‘I am…’ I hesitated for a moment before I could recall my own name. ‘I am George Simling, an Illyrian. I wondered… I need food, somewhere to sleep. I want to see the Holy Machine.’

‘Come in then, come in.’

And then I found that the closed door was already behind me and I was in a pale, stone-flagged corridor. The monk took my arm. There were many small blue doors down one side. I caught a glimpse of a bright tree glistening in an empty courtyard. Then many more doors.

I felt myself coming to from a labyrinthine dream of mountains, wars and roads… I woke up and remembered that reality was simply this: moving slowly along a corridor with calm blue doors. On and on. That was life. Why bother to open the doors? Why bother? Why not just carry on along here? It would be fine if it wasn’t so cold. It would be just fine.

I came to again. There were voices. Another monk had appeared, this one tall and sandy-haired. The two men were conferring about me. I couldn’t understand the words at first. I think I was trying to listen to them in the wrong language.

A blue door opened. I was a little afraid. But I went up into the sky and looked down from above, as if into a doll’s house.

In a small bare room with a single chair and a single bed, a monk was talking to a pale young man with bleeding feet. (‘Not him again!’ I thought. ‘Why is it always him?’)

‘Take off your wet clothes,’ the monk coaxed gently, ‘We’ll get you some dry things and something to eat, and we’ll dress these feet. Then you must rest. You have a very high temperature indeed.’

Another monk arrived. Another little monk down there in the doll’s house with miniature dressings and a tiny bowl of water.

‘We’ll have to undress him,’ said the first one. ‘I don’t think he can do it for himself.’

‘Are you sure he speaks Croatian?’

‘Yes. Well he spoke it clearly enough when he arrived. His name is George. He’s from the City.’

‘Alright then George,’ said the second monk. ‘We’ll just take off these pants…’

‘NO!’ the young man shouted. ‘No, leave me alone!’

His hand came out to push the monk away. ‘Easy, George, easy!’ said the monk.

Looking down from my high vantage point, I smiled.

‘Silly boy,’ I thought, ‘he thinks he’s going to get raped again. But really this is a totally different situation.’

So when the monks tried again to remove his clothes, the young man did not resist.

‘Blood here too,’ muttered the first monk.

‘My God, what’s happened to him?’

‘Easy, George, easy!’

I closed my eyes and sank into a dream. I was walking slowly past the blue doors. The cool quiet corridor stretched away into the distance. Why must we always open the doors and disturb things? But it occurred to me that even if I never opened any of them at all, there was no guarantee that one of them might not suddenly open of its own accord, suddenly, and without warning…