Will Self - The Butt

‘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.

‘This was true bloody fieldwork: meticulous, slow, painstaking — every step of the way profoundly engaged . My papa was something that was rare enough in the world in those days, and has now totally disappeared: a heroic man — maybe a superman. He had all the skills he needed. He could hunt, he was a crack shot, he could doctor, speak fluent Homeric Greek, and his embroidery was indistinguishable — to an expert — from that of the most refined Viennese seamstresses. He did the dirndls. Even so, this undertaking tested him to his limits — yet he persisted, for year after year.

‘It took him twenty to educate a core group of the natives — the mob that still live here, with me. He called them the Intwennyfortee mob, for he planned ahead, Papa, way ahead. By 2040 he hoped — believed — that this entire land would be under the sway of these new — old traditions. If I’m able to continue the noble work he started for that long, well,’ the anthropologist sighed, ‘perhaps it will.

‘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.

‘He decided that I should go to uni, first to read anthropology, while my brother, Hippolyte, came straight out here to law school in Capital City. If either of us had nurtured any other ambitions — to play at poetry or rebellion, travel the world, perhaps — then we made of them mere arrière-pensées. By our late teens we already knew our destinies: Hippolyte was to become my father’s secret agent, working within the very law itself to undermine the Anglos’ hegemony; while I was to join Papa here, once I’d completed my medical training, then qualified as a surgeon.’

‘A surgeon?’ Tom seized on this inconsistency. ‘I thought you said you’d studied anthropology.’

‘First with the anthropology!’ Von Sasser snapped. ‘Then, next, the medicine. Papa had two vital tasks for me — I was, you no doubt realise, the favoured son. First, I was to infiltrate his bold creative synthesis into the relevant academic journals. Those impoverished dullards!’ he laughed. ‘With their mania for systemization, the ceaseless recycling of mental trash they call knowledge!

‘I agitated these people on my father’s behalf to obtain the necessary peer evaluations. In due course the academic papers appeared that eventually were assembled and published as Songs of the Tayswengo .’

‘But. . you. .’ Tom ventured timorously, ‘you, like, made it up?’

‘Mr Brodzinski — Tom — there was no likeness whatsoever. But then, haven’t the sages of the West also, like, made it up? With their World Spirits, their noble savages, their categorical-bloody-imperatives? Isn’t what passes for the epitome of Western knowledge no less creative — and, if I may be forgiven a little pride — far less well written than the tales Papa and I spun?

‘Ours, Tom, was an instrumental morality, not the “will” of a delusory sky god. Papa — he took the long view. In the subsequent years our literary endeavours enabled Hippolyte to campaign for native customary law to be incorporated into the Anglos’ civil and penal codes, thus ensuring us — the desert tribes — with a steady stream of income.’

‘You mean — my $10,000?’

‘Precisely, Tom. It’s an elegant form of justice, you might say. Certainly more elegant than theirs, which is what? The crudest calculus of human existence — an abacus of beady little lives slid hither and thither by spiritual accountants.

‘What do they want, Tom? Why, you of all people should understand by now. Six billion? Nine? A hundred billion human apes soiling this already fouled little ball of a world — that’s their conception of the good. Is that what they — what you — want?’

This was not, Tom thought, a question that demanded an answer — least of all from him. His eyes smarted, and he could feel the oily residue of the last shot of schnapps slick in his gullet.

Now Von Sasser tilted his beak towards Prentice and hawked: ‘Then there’s the kiddies, eh, Prentice? We mustn’t forget them, must we?’