Henning Koch - The Maggot People

Only when he sat down did the enormity of it overwhelm him. “You know what this means, don’t you? It means O’Hara, the shit, actually put an end to us when he planted Michael in our midst.”

“Oh, that little innocent had nothing to do with it.”

Paolo nodded. “I have to say I agree. But I’d give my eye-teeth to know how he managed to get out of that cell. And find Jesus…”

“And rouse him,” said Günter. “Who would have thought it?”

Giacomo looked at his watch again. “So we have to be out of Rome in just under three hours. Does that give us enough time to pack?”

“Pack what, in the name of God?” said Paolo. “I shall just bring my Bible and my walking boots.”

“The only thing I own is my collar,” said Günter.

“We have to find a suitable container for the maggots,” Giacomo said. “From now on we’ll take one or two every morning.”

Günter yawned. “I’m ready for a little peregrination. The gardens of Bonus Pastor are starting to look a little dull.”

Paolo looked at Giacomo: “And where should we go?”

“I own a nice little monastery in La Spezia,” said Giacomo. “We’ll wait there until Jesus surfaces. His presence won’t go unnoticed. At some point we’ll have to go and see… Him… and persuade… Him… to turn Himself in.”

“Sounds funny, when you put it like that,” said Günter.

“It may sound funny,” Giacomo growled. “But it isn’t.”

He swallowed two maggots as if they were vitamin pills and bid the others do the same. They poured the maggots into large plastic containers, after perforating the lids and placing rotten bananas inside.

At exactly twelve o’clock they boarded a train. Giacomo and Paolo were carrying hefty rucksacks, loaded with food, maggots, and a change of clothes.

A group of unsmiling men at the barrier, obviously Vatican agents, spoke into their walkie-talkies as the train pulled away. Giacomo saluted them, as if making light of their presence. But he quickly brought his arm down. When he looked at his wrist it seemed as if there was a leash clipped to it, a leash effortlessly fed out from an infinite, many-geared spool in Rome.

I’ll never get away from them, he thought.

A few weeks after their departure in the camper bus, Michael and Ariel took stock of their experiences so far. While it could not be denied that Jesus had some sort of power, the Master remained deeply enigmatic to them.

At his bidding, they had driven all over Europe: along valleys, up hills, and through tunnels, across bridges and over plains. No matter how far they drove it was never quite enough for Jesus, who mostly sat at the back of the camper bus drinking goat’s milk (which he was terrifically fond of) and methodically working his way through Michael’s newly acquired CD collection. “Keep going, keep going,” he’d call out, waving his arm. “Farther, farther…”

At first they had been patient. After all, they didn’t know what Jesus was looking for or where he was intending to go.

“But where? Where now?” they’d call out and Jesus, closing his eyes as if in deep concentration, would say, quietly, “Vienna,” or “Zurich.” And so the haphazard journey continued.

It was almost as if Jesus was intent on seeing every motorway in Western Europe. Even ring roads did not escape his rapt interest: Frankfurt, Berlin, London, and Paris were all circumnavigated, and service stations sampled for their cafés and shops.

“Jesus, do you actually like pizza?” Michael asked once, as they sat at a red Formica table one evening on the outskirts of Hamburg.

“Liking or not is unimportant. I need to eat a pizza so I know what a pizza is, and once I know what it is I can then decide if it is good or not,” said Jesus. “But for my part it seems little more than bread and meat. In my day there would have been little call for it, although outside the temple or the market there were usually one or two vendors’ stalls.” He shrugged. “They sold fava beans and chopped herbs or perhaps liver or falafel. People were less prepared to waste money in those days. Every piece had value. But they were fond of tittle-tattle even back in my day; they did not have televisions and not newspapers, either. So they liked to gossip instead.” With an amused smile he held up a celebrity magazine and shook it in the air. “Rihanna,” he said. “She seems a nice little girl; what a pity to give her so much attention.”

At night, when they retired to their bunks, Jesus would lie in his bunk singing along to whatever music was playing on his portable hi-fi. His favorites were Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, and Janis Joplin, but he also had a sneaking regard for early U2 and knew most of their songs by heart.

He seemed impervious to boredom. He could spend all day throwing dice or rearranging some peanuts in a bowl.

There were days when Michael looked at him and thought to himself, “Is this the same Jesus who changed the history of the world?”

Even Ariel, with her customary good humor, found little to entertain her in the garish sweet shops where they spent hours so that Jesus could stock up on magazines and chocolate.

His interest in minutiae was enormous. For instance, he was capable of reading food labels almost infinitely, wanting to know what folic acid was, or emulsifier, E331, Omega 3, and B6.

Tension was building up.

Ariel started snapping at Michael. “Don’t be so bloody presumptuous,” she told him. “The Master has a plan, and we don’t know what it is. Not yet. We have to be patient.”

“But what’s the bloody plan? Eating sweets is not going to do much good, is it?” he protested. “I just wish I could understand.”

Only once did Jesus allay Michael’s doubts. He put his hand on Michael’s shoulder and said, “You think you must do something. But you are a mechanism, my friend. You think work is done by turning the handle. I tell you, this handle you turn with so much energy is not attached to anything; it merely spins in the air, and the machine remains idle in spite of everything you do.”

One morning as they lay in their bunks like sailors becalmed in the middle of some ocean, Jesus opened his eyes and sat bolt upright in his bunk.

“Enough of this,” he said. “Time to go south.”

His words brought immense relief. Immediately the trade winds seemed to stir among their idle sails. They were parked in a truckers’ lay-by just west of Strasbourg, close enough to the nearside motorway lane to feel a slight tremor every time a roaring juggernaut passed on the other side of a narrow skirt of what looked like plastic trees. The landscape on both sides of the motorway was more or less flat to the edge of the horizon and seemed productive only in so far as it was covered in short, green blades of chemically enhanced growth.

Over their heads hung an indistinct gray sky too inert even to produce rain. Its sole purpose was to bathe the planet in a murky, wearisome light.

Michael turned the ignition and hoped there would not be too many detours on the way.

As they headed south, Jesus did not often move from his upholstered sofa by the window. By now he’d amassed a great pile of books and magazines which he flicked through, occasionally looking up and analyzing the scenery outside. Or asking impossible questions. He tended not to be moralistic, but occasionally his sensibilities were hurt by something he saw or read.

Once, while flicking through a copy of Vogue , his face contorted with pain and he said, “So a supermodel is considered more beautiful than other women, is she?” Then frowning, added, “Young women always have beauty because they are loaded with physical destiny. But this beauty cannot be captured on a photographic plate; everybody knows this. The makers — so many makers you have in this world of yours — persevere with the impossible task because they can’t think of anything else to do with their weary hands.”