Henning Koch - The Maggot People

No one should live longer than a thousand years. At a certain point it becomes impossible to remember anything at all. Only the hunger remains, the ravenous need to love and be loved, to eat and fill one’s body or lose one’s mind in chemical distraction.

The only thing Giacomo was still properly aware of was his unquenchable appetite. As far as he was concerned, nothing could take away the omnipotence of a fried egg.

Christianity was a ludicrous creed to him now. He was more interested in how to make a perfect hamburger. All the theology, all the doctrinal lisping had become a burden: raving madmen arguing about whose god was the best, like football supporters at a match, shouting abuse at their opponents.

Once an idea had turned into a burden it was time to let it go.

Only the other day he’d been walking along with a bottle of mineral water in his hand. When he tired of holding it he drank the water and discarded the bottle. Afterwards, it occurred to him that although he was still carrying the water in his body, its weight had somehow disappeared.

And like this it was also with ideas: they had to be a part of us.

In 1988 he had tracked down his wife to Berlin, where she was working as a professor at the Humboldt Institute. By this time she’d also developed a multiple personality. Her ego had grown; she was no longer a budding twig but a many-armed tree trunk floating ponderously down a river. She had learned to be skeptical of him, the man who had thrown away their happiness for the sake of personal ambition. Elegantly she showed him the door. His humiliation was crushing: he threw her a last lingering look as he gripped the doorknob.

“Why are you giving me that blank, self-pitying look?” she’d said. “You can’t love what you don’t love, Giacomo. I give you nothing as payment for what you have given me — also nothing…”

“So it meant nothing?”

“Whatever it meant then, is not what it means now. That is all you need to know.”

Those words had festered for many years. But, recently, he had felt them raging in his blood with a new keenness. Giaco-mo had understood that his affection for Michael was largely rooted in his identification with him: Michael was doing what Giacomo ought to have done. Michael had given free rein to his personal ambition, in the sense of allowing himself to feel .

Michael did not want to sleep; Michael wanted to stay in the moment and not lose what he had. In other words he was not behaving as a proper maggot ought to. And this was problematic. Or, as Charles Darwin might have observed, it was an interesting aberration, a mutation that could lead to evolutionary development.

Giacomo had wanted to keep Michael safe and rolled up in a box until, at some point, many centuries into the future, he had the leisure to question him about it. How had Michael, who had no wisdom or experience, known with such certainty what he must do? Giacomo had never had any such conviction. Only confusion, confusion like mist on a heath.

The past leaned over him now, like the shadow of an unknown, possibly dangerous, figure in a doorway. Giacomo was a man suffering “the effects of memory,” as he sometimes put it. And memory could not be revisited. Memory was a reunion dinner at which all the guests were strangers to one another.

Waking from terrible dreams, Giacomo got out of his bed and put on his morning gown, went to the window and parted the curtains. He stared out at the bleak morning, the light drizzling rain.

For the first time in many, many days, he tried to say a prayer.

“Oh Lord…” he began, then stopped. Summoning whatever calm he had left, he opened the bedroom door and shuffled down the long, slightly dirty corridor that ended in a swing-door leading into the kitchen, where he found Günter already sitting on a chair with his ears pricked.

Paolo was at the gas cooker, portioning out a greasy fry-up on large dinner plates.

Giacomo’s eye fell on three buckets of writhing white maggots, lined up against the wall. “What in the world is that?” he said weakly. “Shouldn’t they be kept covered?” He went to the sink, wet a couple of tea towels and threw them over the buckets.

“First have your breakfast,” Paolo muttered. “Then we’ll fill you in on all the details.”

“I had awful dreams,” Giacomo mumbled. “All this trouble is getting the better of me. I think I’m losing my reason. I was back in Bloomsbury all night.”

“Never mind about that. The maggot liaison officer called first thing this morning,” said Paolo. “He’s given us until midday to leave Rome or we’ll be killed.”

Giacomo listened as he devoured his crispy bacon rashers. After he’d stilled his worst hunger pangs, he asked Paolo whether he’d been to St. Peter’s that morning.

“Of course, I went first thing,” said Paolo. “I met Günter on the way. We popped into a favorite bar of mine, had a few artichoke fritters and a couple of espressos, and were slightly delayed as a result. We realized something was wrong as soon as we got there. There were lorries on the west side unloading construction materials. Must have been thirty or forty workers there. They’d screened off the whole area so the tourists couldn’t see what was happening. There was an absolute profusion of security guards everywhere. We went through the cordon and ran into a crowd of maggots who hadn’t been allowed into the crypts. The doors were barred. I demanded to know what was going on. I spoke to the foreman and he took me inside. Paolo stopped. “You won’t believe it.”

“Tell me.”

“They’d chalked a line across the main reception. Anyone on the inside of the line wasn’t allowed to leave.”

Günter gave a little bark of excitement: “There were two men lying dead on the floor. Martyrs. Shot through the head. Very accurately done.”

“The construction workers were drilling holes in the floor and inserting reinforcement rods across the whole vestibule. They put up a sturdy wood partition. Outside I heard the cement mixers churning and grinding.”

“The guards moved us out; a few of them had their guns ready to stop anyone on the other side of the line from leaving.” “Before we knew it there was liquid cement being pumped in.”

“They plugged the entrance, basically. Block by block. Hundreds of tons of cement. We stood there listening to the shouting from the other side of the concrete wall. It grew increasingly faint.”

Günter took over: “When the shouting stopped we heard…”

“Singing,” said Paolo. “They started singing.” He blew his nose and looked at Giacomo. “If I hadn’t been slightly late because of the artichoke fritters, I would have been on the other side of that chalked line. I would have been buried alive like the rest of them. I owe my life to some artichoke fritters; isn’t that ridiculous?”

“Yes,” said Giacomo, who felt curiously unaffected. “It is.”

Günter picked up the thread. “While the wall was being built, we noticed a few brothers waving at us from the other side of the line. They’d brought up fresh maggot from the vaults.” He nodded at the buckets lined up against the wall. “They passed them across when the guards weren’t looking.”

“Their courage was exemplary,” said Paolo. “One of them tripped and fell. He went into the cement, just sank into it like quicksand.”

There was a long silence. Giacomo wondered at his lack of empathy until he reminded himself that empathy was not one of his strengths. “So,” he said. “There must have been a decision from the top to close us down.” He stood up, went to the kitchen cupboard, and started stuffing his specialties — Ligurian pine nuts, Sardinian anchovy fillets, salted capers, dried chilies — into a cotton sack. “We’ve caused too much trouble. They’ll take control and assert proper centralized authority. It’s this whole business of the runaway Christ that’s got the wind up them.”