Henning Koch: The Maggot People

She felt something wriggling against her stomach, under her blouse. She unbuttoned herself. What she saw was a surprise, even to her.

A small hole had opened in the middle of her navel.

A fat, orange maggot wriggled out and lay against the lining of her trousers. She almost did not want to touch it. It had two black, glistening eyes and it seemed to be looking at her.

Ariel stood up and slowly advanced towards the sarcophagus where Jesus lay. The women stood aside to let her pass. She opened Jesus’s mouth and placed the orange maggot on his tongue.

Within a few seconds, colour returned to the sallow, pale cheeks. His eyes swiveled and opened. They were light brown, like sandalwood. The speed at which the body refilled itself was nothing short of miraculous.

By the time the women had filed out of the chamber, still singing, Jesus was rising out of his sarcophagus. He stepped out and brushed the dust off his cloak.

His hair had been combed and oiled every week for two thousand years, and his face massaged and moisturized. He looked like a normal man in his early thirties, who hadn’t had his hair cut for a good while.

“Follow me,” said Jesus, who seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He walked briskly to an elevator, which he called down even though it was locked and alarmed. The doors opened smoothly and they all stepped inside.

A few minutes later they were back on the surface, walking through a crowded street in Rome. After the darkness of the caves, the bright streets filled them with wonder. The sun beat down, transforming every crumbling façade, every weather-beaten face.

“What do we do now?” Michael whispered to Ariel. “I don’t know. We follow him.”

They looked at the figure of Jesus in front of them. He was walking briskly, a certain amusement in his eyes as he took in the urban scene: the cars, the aircraft passing over.

They stopped off briefly at a cash machine, which spasmodically spat out money until they had more than they needed.

As they walked away, money lay scattered on the pavement behind them.

“We must leave this place,” said Jesus, “and get to the mountains. I have no business in the city among these empty buildings. We need a large chariot to take us away.”

Quickly they dived into a taxi, asking to be taken to a mobile home showroom on the outskirts of Rome. Within an hour, they had bought a gleaming air-conditioned camper van with a galley kitchen, two separate sleeping cabins at the back, and a bathroom with a small Jacuzzi.

Jesus sat quietly in an upholstered sofa staring out of the window as they drove out of Rome.

“It’s good to be back in the world,” he said, smiling jauntily at them.

“It must be, my Lord, after all the time you spent sleeping,” said Ariel politely.

“Time doesn’t mean a thing. Time is one of your little inventions,” said Jesus. “Please stop calling me Lord, would you? I have no desire for any sort of veneration. Certainly it is true I’m not actually a human being at all, yet I’d prefer it if you treated me as one.”

Michael cleared his throat and said, tentatively: “Ah… Jesus? Would you like to hear some music?”

“Yes. Please. I want music. Of course.”

Michael slotted one of his newly bought CDs into the player. Bob Dylan’s wailing harmonica kicked off, filling the whole bus with the first few bars of Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again .

Jesus tapped his foot to the beat.

Outside, the landscape was changing. The camper was gliding through low-slung hills covered in holm oak and wild olive trees. The days down in the dark had left their mark on Michael’s spirit — and this shadow had given much needed definition to him. Now free again, and with Jesus Christ safely on board, he felt something had been achieved, although it wasn’t quite clear what.

Ariel was in the galley kitchen knocking up some lunch. “Anyone for an omelet?” she called out gaily. She was also very glad to be back on the road.

“Give me wine, woman,” said Jesus. “And a soft-boiled egg.”

And so she did.

That night, after the enormity of recent events, Giacomo had great trouble sleeping. First, he lay for a good while thinking about Michael, Ariel, and Jesus, this improbable runaway trinity. Then, as his thoughts turned to other things, he realized why his life had become unbearable and, as a consequence, he had also become unbearable to himself.

Giacomo had become a weather vane turning in the wind, with no identifiable will or emotion of his own.

In one of his earlier lives he had spent some years in a lovely brick gatehouse to a mansion belonging to the estate of the Dukes of Bedford in Bloomsbury, London. At that time, Bloomsbury was a mature woodland of elm and oak, a peaceful bird-haunted place where one occasionally glimpsed a woodcutter with his nag or a party of horsemen looking for a fox or an otter to kill.

Giacomo had a wife who dressed with great care and strolled through the woods in silk slippers and painted lovely water-colors and spent her time talking to the maid or scrutinizing the quality of the Sunday roast. She was a collector of acorns and beechnuts, from which she made collages; also of shadow puppets, which she cut from sheaves of card he bought for her in Piccadilly.

Mostly they dined with the Duke, whose son Giacomo was tutoring in Latin and French.

Children they could have none, but there are some who believe that children are nothing but peace-shattering horrors. Giacomo and his wife had convinced themselves that this, without exception, was true.

Looking back, Giacomo had always felt this was his golden age.

He and his wife managed their business well. Every month or so a message was brought to their door from Rome, usually by night. Giacomo was not greatly taxed until the Gnostic Church in Rome ordered him to recruit the Dukes of Bedford, first by seducing one of the daughters who, as it happened, was no older than fourteen. Later there was a plot to maggotize the Duke and his oldest son. Giacomo happened to be on good terms with one of the most widely admired women in London, a mistress of a great number of fashionable men and also the finest procurer the maggot church ever had, with skin like milk and an agile, saucy tongue that swiftly brought men to their knees. The Duke was no exception.

His success with the Bedford family did not go unnoticed. Before long, a bunch of ambitious crackpots in Rome had involved Giacomo in a plot to maggotize the King of England. The Pope got wind of it, of course, and Giacomo was hauled before a hanging judge in the Vatican, who sentenced him to immediate termination. His wife was “spared,” an odd term to use in view of the horrific poverty that she had to endure while he slept. She was permitted to stay on in the Bloomsbury gatehouse, but she earned a pittance as a seamstress and supplemented her diet with milled bark and wood sorrel. By the time Giacomo was reactivated about a hundred years later, he could not find her anywhere. He searched all over London, now entering the industrial revolution. The peasants had been transformed into swarming workers, covered in coal dust and with a raging fondness for gin.

Bloomsbury had declined. Mud and filth and weaving factories had spread where once there was greenery. In another three hundred years it would be turned into an urban cesspit filled with buses and drug addicts and Chinese tourists. No one would work there anymore; in fact, no one would work anywhere. This was the popular way of defining prosperity: ancient woodlands and farming communities turned into wastelands of boarded-up factories patrolled by drunks and lunatics, while, on a green hill behind electric fences, a small group of petty princes sat in stone houses and pontificated on the science of wealth creation, also known as economics .