Henning Koch: The Maggot People

At least in France no one bothered with you. Especially if you were foreign they considered you an irrelevance and this was much better.

In any case the possibilities of going back to England were scuppered by a long, flowery letter from an insurance company, explaining that because of his parents’ invalid insurance policy, there would be no payout on their house. Soon after, a carefully worded letter from the train company expressed sincere regret about flattening his family, then offered a very small amount of statutory compensation.

“Engineering, that’s a good subject,” his father had once advised Michael when the question of his education came up. “An engineer is never out of work.” How uncanny that, in the end, a group of plotting engineers got together, built a train, laid some tracks by his house and maliciously finished him off one evening just as the poor man was looking forward to his cup of tea.

After Michael had gone back to Provence, the electrics in the house started playing up and he worried he’d have to find the money to rewire the place. His bedroom became a particular problem. In its earlier days, the house had been used as a residence for seminarians — young virginal men preparing for ordination, narrowly preferred in those times to a life of digging the sod. He often saw a ghostly figure at night, floating across the room to fiddle with his bedroom ceiling light. As a result, Michael had to change the lightbulb every few days. It irritated him. Was he not entitled to live in a house that had been the legal property of his grandmother, a respectable French woman who had bought the house fair and square at a church auction? Nowadays it was little more than an emanation of humidity and mold. Surely the spirits should be happy that someone was willing to live there at all?

The ghost problem got pervasive enough for Michael to seek advice about it. He went to Alain, the retired village priest, a tiny stooped man with poetical eyes and silvered temples. His grandmother had once been very fond of him; she used to sweep his church for him and polish the candlesticks.

Alain nodded knowingly and tapped the side of his nostril, then whipped out a bunch of dried herbs, set fire to them, and spent the morning walking round Michael’s house, waving the smoke about whilst intoning prayers.

“That should do it,” he said, reposing in one of grandmother’s toxic armchairs. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Well, I am worried about it. I seem to be having terrible luck.”

“It’s not about luck,” said Alain. “This spirit is angry with you for not being a Catholic and for soiling the house with your disrespect. I take it you’re abusing yourself?”

“I don’t really see what business of his it is,” said Michael. “People don’t choose their religion. Some are born in Salt Lake City and they can’t do anything about it.”

Alain did not understand Michael’s comment and put it down to the young man’s confusion. Gently he put his knobbly hand on Michael’s sleeve and said, with a sage nod, as if what he was about to suggest was in some way revolutionary:

“You’re an orphan now, my boy. What you need is to get married… to a nice girl… who does not have the Devil in her eyes.”

After Alain had gone, Michael went to the kitchen, a sort of studio and storage area for junk. He sat there sipping his morning coffee, whilst staring at the big canvas of the mountain, trying to assess how he could improve it. Seized by a notion, he painted a small figure in one of the windows: a woman leaning out, hanging up a garment on a clothesline. As soon as she was there — a tiny black smudge in a corner — he felt she had acquired a life of her own. But who was she? What was she doing in that city among the tiered rooftops? And did she have the Devil in her eyes?

Somehow he felt he might prefer her if she did.

Waking up in the old house had a certain ceremoniousness to it. He lay there listening, feeling himself enclosed as if in a tomb, the shutters excluding every bit of light; yet by the distracted sound of birds idly twittering under the tiles or the whoosh and scrape of incoming swifts, he knew it was morning.

Eventually he got up and, after stepping into a pair of threadbare slippers, dragged himself across the rough stone floor to the window. Opening the shutters was one of the great perks of Provence. The sky, always blue and pristine, surprised him every morning. There was something marvelous about existing on the inside of this bright, oxygenated bell.

In the street he heard mothers scolding their children, also the slamming of pots in kitchens and mouthwatering smells of meat or shellfish being cooked in oil and garlic. When he saw the vivid sky overhead, he had a sense of life happening around him — his place in it more or less that of the alien or automaton, concerned with drinking his coffee, lighting his cigarette, munching his dry bread and cheese and then shuffling off to expel his bodily waste.

There was a measure of humiliation to the whole thing, he thought to himself, sitting there on the cracked seat beneath the sputtering cistern. “I am not an animal, but all I ever seem to do is eat, drink, and shit.”

Whilst indulging in his usual self-flagellation, he saw a large seagull landing on the roof opposite. Flat-footed, it made its way to a crack in the tiles, stuck its beak inside and pulled out a fluffy nestling, then tipped its head back and tossed the little flapping thing down its gullet. All round its head, swifts were darting, screaming, performing aerial displays, zigzagging between chimney pots and clotheslines — fully engaged in the pressing duty of procreation. Very well, they seemed to be saying, we have lost one but we can make another. It was a good Catholic view.

Downstairs in the kitchen, the dripping tap nagged at the piles of crockery left from last night. He had an espresso with plenty of sugar and added his empty coffee cup to the greasy mound in the sink.

After showering under a tepid, limp spout of water that emerged with a vibrating humming sound, like an aged diesel engine, Michael dressed and went out to have breakfast. He stopped in front of the painting and cast another beady eye on the woman in the window.

Possibly because his mind was already on the subject, he was more receptive when he saw the girl crossing the square. A primitive mechanism was set off in his brain. He knew he was powerless to resist because he was the mechanism, he actually heard it groaning into life and felt the emergence of the foolish love cliché, like a cuckoo springing out of its clock.

He stood, one arm extended as if he were a blind man trying to stop himself crashing into a wall.

The girl had also stopped and was facing him with a complex frown on her face.

Between them, in the village square, there was a good deal of bustle. Parents drove their herds of infants across the concrete with much cracking of their whips and loud cries. A group of Chilean immigrants had set up market stalls in a corner, hawking the meat grinders, flour sifters, rolling pins and other historical artifacts that they filched from dying widows and sold to tourists. Chinese merchants were also piling up their defective wares.

Michael was surprised when she steered her steps towards him, threading her way through the busy square until she stood in front of him. He brought his arm down — it seemed the right thing to do.

“I noticed you were watching me,” she said,

“Was I?”

“I was just wondering why?” said the girl, and as she spoke he noticed one of her side incisors jutting out. There was something owlish about it, like a tiny beak; he half-expected seeing a mouse tail hanging out, the remnants of her last meal.