Henning Koch - The Maggot People

He had kept it brief, up against the wall in the vestibule, then paying the jade what she asked — but he knew repentance would be more long-drawn.

He reflected on his long life of struggle, wondering, in spite of all, why he cared so much about people’s stuffing — whether of maggot or flesh? — when patently they were all human beings anyway.

Ah, what a life of melancholy. To be so alone! He thought of his old home in Limerick: the house where he was born, a crumbling unpainted smudge littered with a few sticks of worm-eaten furniture. A smell of dust that could not be got rid of, because the place itself was dust. The larder, stocked with dry beans and unmentionable tins containing nothing that could be eaten, unless his mother applied her utilitarian hand, which she only did at regulated times. The poverty of those days still made him shudder when he thought of it. Splintered floorboards without linoleum. Rats breeding behind the skirting boards, crawling wood lice drowned in the sink in the mornings. His father in his lumpy chair, fiddling with the wireless and solemnly listening to the King’s speech as if it made any difference to him. Outside, the garden with its tall rustling grass they had no mower to cut.

Only the church bells, ringing out for evensong, had moved his spirit back then. He had given his life to it. The Church, the behemoth, this human invention, an enormous whirlpool sucking more and more into itself, like a glutton at a table.

He shook his head to be rid of the memory; but when he peered out of the window at the dreary dark skies, he found it difficult to believe that there’d be some green, bright valley up there, where he’d be welcomed after his death.

You are a murderer and a wanton, he told himself. Who would welcome you?

Reeling with disquiet, O’Hara went to the great Venetian mirror in the hall and stood there studying his face in the mirror. Every furrow, every wrinkle and every twitch spoke of deep un-happiness; an unsmiling aspect in all that he had ever attempted.

You have acted out the iniquities and vices you always secretly longed for. Nonetheless you must take a stand against them.

I will be their inquisitor; I will fry the very gizzards of their apostasy, until their bones crack with loud splitting sounds and their brains come bubbling out of their miserable skulls, I will spill their churning guts; their pleas for mercy shall be as music to my ears .

Strength seemed to come churning back as these dark words rose up in him:

A day will come when people thank me for keeping the human race pure of this filth, this churning, slithering filth that threatens the very backbone of the human project .

Ah, how fine a phrase that is .

The human project .

A shining city on a hill .

A million willing throats pouring out their hearts in sacred song .

By the time he had sponged himself down, brushed his thinning hair, put on his pressed woolen cape and walked down the winding staircase, the long black car was already waiting outside, its engine idling. He settled into the soft leather back seat with a contented sigh. “St. Stephen’s,” he muttered to the driver, who did not answer or move. After a long minute, O’Hara leaned forward and repeated in a stern voice: “I said, St. Stephen’s!”

When the driver turned round, O’Hara’s evening took a decisive turn for the worse. Because the man sitting there in the driver’s seat was not his usual. In fact, he’d been replaced by Brother Paolo — the gluttonous maggot-monk.

“Good evening, Cardinal. We’re waiting for a few people. If you don’t mind.”

At that moment, the doors opened on either side. Giacomo climbed in next to O’Hara, and an anonymous non-speaking type in a dark windcheater got in on the opposite side. He didn’t show O’Hara he was armed; he didn’t have to.

The car accelerated away strongly.

O’Hara was agape for an instant, then quickly found his stride. “What is this? I have a service to attend to, brother Giacomo. I’m expected.”

“It’ll have to wait,” said Giacomo. “We’re invited to a dinner party and we thought you’d like to come. You seem so damned miserable all the time. If you were a dog I’d throw a bucket of water over you, give you a good wash, then a pile of marrowbones. And that’s precisely what I’m going to do — even though you’re not a dog.”

“Although you could be if you want to,” added Paolo from the front.

O’Hara leaned back, puzzled. “Do you not hear I’m expected somewhere?”

“Expected, yes. Certainly expected. But unfortunately, owing to unforeseen circumstances…” said Paolo, without taking his eyes off the road.

“The point is, my brother,” said Giacomo, “You sipped from the sacred well tonight. In ten days or so you’ll be bursting into leaf, if you see what I mean.”

Paolo slowed down the great car and picked up Honey on a street corner.

She got in with a guffawing laugh. “You again,” she said, peering at him. “But I’d know you better if you dropped your pants.”

O’Hara felt his mind spinning and, in the same instant, grew aware of an insistent slithering feeling inside his urethra.

Oh, fucking maledictions!

He tried to speak, but his tongue seemed to have recoiled into the back of his throat. The calamity had come. The locusts were swarming over his pastures. His house was burning. There was also an unexpected feeling, which he analyzed many times after. It was relief. Everything was lost. No longer would he have to carry all that luggage, all those boxes and crates and packages.

No more burdens.

From now on I shall please myself, he thought, looking at Honey and imagining what else he’d inflict on her, next time.

These thoughts were intensely private, of course. To the others in the car O’Hara presented the very picture of a man in the grip of remorse and regret — groaning, wailing, oozing with self-castigation.

Only Honey showed any empathy at all. She turned round and subjected him to a lengthy examination, then said: “If I were you, which thank fuck I’m not, I’d let yourself go a bit. No one minds a guy who likes to get his end away. Most women like it; why don’t you look at it that way? What could be worse than ending up with some bloke who just sits there and reads the frigging newspaper?”

Giacomo hooted with laughter, but Honey silenced him with a glare.

“Very well put,” said Giacomo. “I could transpose what you just said into better language and it would be a perfectly well argued piece of…”

“Yeah, well, I’m not like you. I speak fucking English.”

“Shut up,” O’Hara cried. “All of you. I can’t listen to this, you’re all foul, revolting people without any sense of…”

“I must admit I can appreciate your position,” Paolo cut in. “Being a maggot is not for the fainthearted. That’s why we thought we’d give you a choice.”

Something in Paolo’s voice stopped O’Hara short, made him sink into oblivious silence. The choice to do what? Nothing pleasant, to be sure.

His question was about to be answered.

On the outskirts of Rome the car left the autostrada and, after a few winding roads, turned down a bumpy track into a large walled and gated olive grove. In the middle, where the trees thinned, some twenty or thirty people were waiting for them. There were tables, sofas and cushions. Waiters hovered in the background. A log fire had been prepared earlier; the embers lay deep now and were easily hot enough to transform a human body into a skeleton in an hour or two.

They got out of the car. “If you prefer,” said Paolo, “this will be your cremation fire. As a special favor to you, if you’d like us to, we’ll scatter your ashes over Jerusalem.”