Henning Koch: The Maggot People

On the floor, wrapped in a sheepskin, lay a woman with a baby at her breast.

Giacomo drew himself up. “Excuse us, young woman,” he said. “We are looking for Jesus.”

The woman tore her eyes away from her child, her lips curled with maternal tenderness. Her face was graceful, with the high cheekbones, dusky skin, and aquiline nose of an Ethiopian. “Everyone looks for him,” she said. “He cannot be found.”

She plucked the child away from her nipple and closed her tunic.

“Where is he?” Giacomo piped.

“At night he goes into the mountains.”

“And in the day?”

“In the day he’s sometimes here and sometimes in the fields.”

Giacomo drew nearer, keeping his eyes on her. “And who might you be?”

Her white, well-shaped teeth glittered in the dark. “I knew him two thousand years ago, and I loved him then as I do now. Who I am is not very important.”

Giacomo stood rocking to and fro, staring fiercely at her as she sat up, wrapping her child in swaddling.

“We’ll be back tomorrow; tell your husband… if husband he is… that we’d like a word with him,” he said on his way out of the chapel.

Paolo and Günter followed him outside with loud groans and sighs. As they emerged they found him hyperventilating and swearing.

“This is exactly what I thought would happen!” he roared as he led them down the hill. “Rank heresy of the first order. The man who led these people here is not Jesus at all. This supposed child of his cannot possibly be his child, can’t you two idiots see that? Jesus is a maggot — any child of his would be a biological impossibility!”

As they descended the hill they saw a procession moving towards them, lit up by torches. At the front, Giacomo saw a tall, lean man surrounded by plowmen and farmhands.

The procession stopped directly ahead of them.

Jesus stood there gazing at them.

“My Lord.” Paolo kneeled, his knees apparently lubricated.

Günter was also submissive, but it was harder for a dog to pay its respects. In his general excitement he forgot to stop wagging his tail.

Jesus immediately walked up to Günter and stroked his head. “Who is this brave man,” he asked, “maltreated by his brothers and sisters?”

Next, Jesus looked at Paolo and touched his forehead. “Welcome, brother, at our table.”

But when he turned to face Giacomo, Jesus’s voice changed. It dropped an octave and there was almost something conspiratorial in the way he addressed him: “So, the orator has come, but we shall not listen to his long-winded songs.” He leaned forward and whispered into Giacomo’s ear: “You must die, my friend; die. Only then will I welcome you.”

Giacomo spent the next few weeks in shock, sitting in an upholstered chair which he placed in the middle of a verdant patch of ground at the foot of Jesus’s hill, with a lovely view of clumps of flowering hazelnut and willow trees studding the banks of the stream. Come rain or shine, he sat in his chair, not caring that it was ripped, sodden, and crawling with insects, the lining spilling out like a white beard.

He stopped shaving, stopped combing his hair. He even stopped washing his tubby body, so that by and by the always slightly disheveled, food-stained Abbot turned into a bit of a spectacle whose odor hung disreputably about him.

When his friends asked what he was doing there, he answered:

“I am looking at the flowers, the clouds, the hills, the river. I need to take time to give myself time. I am doubly removed from contemplation, first by my humanity and secondly by my maggothood.”

His words were complex, and people assumed he knew something they did not.

Paolo had joined Jesus’s entourage. He was usually absent, and whenever he turned up to visit Giacomo, he was bursting with joy like a swelling droplet hanging from a petal.

Günter, on the other hand, spent most of his time lying in the deep bracken under the trees, or rolling on his back among the wild thyme and sprouting ruccola . He inhaled these fragrances with delight. For Günter this was a time of upheaval, not least physiologically. Since their arrival, a pair of tiny feet had started forming under the skin of his groin. Within a week or two the pink toes were pushing through the skin, itching slightly. As they grew, the shins followed, then the knees and thighs, although two hairy hind legs still hung from his hips like appendages fit for a monster of a traveling circus.

“You know the body is all we’ve got. We think with our bodies, we exist through our bodies, and right now I’ve got six damned legs, two of them about as useful as spare assholes.”

Looking at him, one could not be sure what he was: a man wearing a dog’s pelt on his back or some freakish werewolf? And so he kept out of view, ashamed of himself. He still loved to roll on his back like the dog he was, exclaiming as he did so with his great tongue lolling:

“I’ll miss it, you know, the hairiness and robustness of a dog’s body, its stamina, the strength of these teeth I can crack bones with. Humans are bloody pussy willows, aren’t they? Besides, what human being can lie naked on his back like this, rolling his balls around without a care in the world?”

Giacomo listened to Günter absentmindedly, his mind at this time steeped in remembrance of his many years on this Earth. The only good thing that had happened to him was that his memory had come back. Childhood was a very distant pocket of light still illuminating his life with a slightly eerie and preternatural intensity — although Giacomo suspected it was mostly invented. He also recalled the early years, a time of weighty illusions, foolishness, and self-aggrandizement. This had been followed by maturity, a smug era of self-approval. Then his middle years, bursting with denial, confusion, and justifications. Now, at last, like an old mushroom in the forest, he had come to the moment when he must drop his spores.

“I wonder if I’m a toxic mushroom?” he asked himself, suspecting that he probably was a very toxic one.

Günter, always a great observer, liked to lie at Giacomo’s feet watching the old man’s emotions passing over his face like clouds.

“And I also wonder,” said Giacomo with some sadness, “whether anyone likes me. I mean anyone at all.” He looked at his friend. “Do you like me, for instance?”

“I don’t really like people very much; they’re just blobs moving about, getting in your face,” said Günter, who was good at white lies.

About three months into their self-imposed seclusion, Günt-er was still spending his days with Giacomo, occasionally trying his weight on his brand new human legs or shaking the mangy pelt on his lower back like a diabolical cloak grown into his upper body.

Once he’d shed his canine skin and was able to look at his reflection in the river without shuddering at his ugliness, he took his farewell of the old man.

“Why don’t you come, Giacomo? Come to the city with me.”

Giacomo took a long time to answer, keeping his eyes on the lush river meadows. “I’ve decided I’m going to spend the rest of my life here, on this hill, looking at the trees and the river,” he said. “I’m going to have a house built in the meadow. A group of builders and tradesmen will come very soon from Rome to put up a priory here. Then I’ll make a garden with a good carp pond and a dovecote. I’ll recreate the lives of the ancient monks. I’ll spend my time in prayer.” He sighed. “And when the time is right I’ll have myself emptied and buried here with instructions that I’m not to be woken for at least a thousand years.”

“Somehow I don’t really think it works like that anymore,” said Günter. “Just look at what’s happened to me. I’m turning into a man again. Soon these old hind legs of mine will fall off like shriveled twigs. I’ll have to look in the mirror and see whether I’m a Günter, a James, a Matthew, or just plain old Fred. What I mean is there aren’t any maggot people anymore. We can’t go swinishly through the centuries like pigs in clover. We have to face the music.”