Judith (24 page)

‘God said – Well, if I had, they would have eaten it, wouldn't they?

‘Lilith said – But you didn't want them to?

‘God said – I don't know. Then – Do I?

‘Lilith said – I see. Then – We haven't exactly been through all this.

‘Adam got down from his niche in the grotto and went to find Eve. She was dressed-up for the snake as the scarlet woman of Babylon. Adam said – Excuse me, but I've just overheard those two old buggers talking again.

‘Eve said – Why, what are they saying?

‘Adam said – They're saying that if we build a bloody great tower and put a bomb on top, we might think we were getting into heaven, but we'd be destroying ourselves. Or is it the other way round?

‘Eve said – Does that mean they're afraid, or not, of us breaking into heaven?

‘Adam said – I don't know, do you?

‘Eve said – I think they're still just trying to get us out of the garden.

‘Adam said – What they don't seem to know is whether they're talking about a bomb or about our having a child.

‘Now the snake, who had overheard this conversation, got
hold of one or two of his friends and said – I say, chaps, we'd better keep close to the ground for a while.

‘– We already are close to the ground – the cockroach said.

‘– Yes, it has been shown scientifically that you and your species are virtually immune from radioactivity – the snake said.

‘Now Lilith, who had overheard this conversation, because she used to lie with her ear close to the ground, said to God – Do you know what those creepy crawly things are saying now?

‘God said – Yes, because when I created the world I also created language, which produces the opposite of what it intends.

‘– I am not referring to language – Lilith said.

‘– Perhaps – God said – they can put it in inverted commas!

‘– What? – Lilith said.

‘– That bloody great tower! – God said.

‘Now everyone in the garden heard this, because God shouted it at the top of his voice. Then he rushed through the garden as if a bomb had gone off, or he had just got out of his bath.

‘– Has he gone mad? – Adam said.'

‘– Now they say why can't we put it in inverted commas! – Eve said.

‘– But isn't that where we have always been putting it? – Adam said.

‘– I think what they are saying – Eve said – is that it is time for us to have a child.'

The man who was sitting next to me, listening to God's language, had begun to smile from the beginning; and he went on smiling so much that it was as if his face was being pulled out of shape in a wind-tunnel. He had a gap in the side of his teeth; he hung on to one ear; perhaps he felt he might be blown away, or perhaps he was deaf. I thought – It is indeed as if some bomb has gone off (in inverted commas!) and there are all these people leaning against the wind in this enormous hall.
And then after God had left, bouncing off on the shoulders of his acolytes as usual like some target at a fun-fair shooting-range, the man next to me – I remembered how Oliver had been so jealous of him! – did not move for a time; then he blew his cheeks out as Desmond sometimes used to do; then he said ‘There you are then!'

I thought I might say like Lilith or Eve – What do you mean, there I am then?

He said ‘Eve has the last word! So where's the child?'

When he stood he hopped about on one foot because a leg had gone to sleep. He put a hand on my shoulder.

I thought – You mean, you are talking about your child?

I spent the rest of the day with him. What else is there to say? In the afternoon we went for a walk along the beach. There were children digging for turtles' eggs in the sand. The yolks had golden blood that ran down.

He said ‘What else is there to say? The child of Eve wouldn't be frightened of destruction, would it? and so it might not destroy so much. When you're finished with this place, you'll move on.'

We walked so far along the beach that we came to the end of it. There was a rock over which crabs swarmed like flies.

He said ‘There was all that business about not getting rid of the baby. Max rang up someone and he said to her and she said to him – oh, it's too difficult for words! That's just what happened. So here's the baby. I'll try to explain one day.'

Then – ‘I think they had this message for you.'

We turned away from the rock and went into the sand-dunes.

He said ‘I'll go back tomorrow. I'll tell them I've seen you. The baby is due any day now.'

Then – ‘I wish I could tell you what I mean about this. There's a network. It's aesthetic. Do you know Plato's myth about the dark horse and the pathway to the gods?'

I said ‘Yes.'

He said ‘You do?'

I said ‘Yes.'

He said ‘That's all right then.'

At the back of the sand-dunes there was, would you not guess, a small temple. Of course I might have said – Oh, and do you know that dream?

I said ‘What will you do when you get back?'

He said ‘Perhaps I'll write a story.'

I said ‘What story?'

He said ‘Well – all this fits together: although we don't quite know what is going on, as they say, around some corner.'

We were going up, of course, to look at the deserted temple in the sand-dunes.

Then he said ‘Do you know that story of the hags and the child?'

I said ‘Yes.'

We were standing inside the temple in the sand-dunes.

I wanted to say – You do promise, one day, we can come back here? We can stay in that hotel?

He said ‘I have the impression that the child is now being born.'

Those hags that were dismembering the child – they would be eating bits and pieces of it? Do not lovers want to eat bits and pieces of each other? So that they can be alive?

I began to cry. He held me as if he were trying to get his arms right around me, like gravity.

I thought – But if we make love, it will not be to do with any of those old images!

He said ‘Let's go back to the hotel.'

I said ‘Yes, let's.'

When we were walking back along the beach it was as if I had not quite walked before; where were those strings; you can be on your own, can you, with your centre of gravity. What else is grace?

He walked along beside me, not smiling, not like one of those statues with their hands by their sides. I thought—You depended on the sun and moon, you mad archaic statues!

Then – But you mean, some bomb may still have to go off?

When we got back to the grand hotel there was a page-boy in the lobby with a telegram. The telegram was asking Jason to come home at once: his wife was about to have, or there was some trouble about her having, or she had actually started to have, the baby. Well you know more about this than I do, don't you? (Not you!) Jason showed me the telegram. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket. Then he said ‘And everyone is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.' I said ‘Will you be able to get a flight before morning?' He said ‘No, I almost certainly won't.' I said ‘Is that awful?' He said ‘Yes, awful.' I said ‘We can try.' He said ‘Yes.' Then he stretched his eyes and raised an arm as if he were letting something fly away like a bird and he said ‘Good heavens, you don't think, do you, that I really will be able to get a flight before morning?'

It was shortly after this that the crowds began to increase enormously in and around the Garden: this was mainly in response to articles written by Eccleston and others about Anita Kroll. Such articles were for the most part, of course, aimed at being scathing about the Garden: they accused God of being a charlatan and a confidence-trickster: they exhorted the authorities to make an end of the Garden. Of course, such articles greatly increased the Garden's notoriety: people heard the story of someone who was supposed to have been dead and come alive; they flocked to have a look. This was, although it was unlikely that Eccleston and others had thought of this, perhaps one way of destroying the Garden. People's attitudes at this time seemed everywhere to be getting out of control: inmates of the Garden oscillated more and more between hero-worship and rather embarrassed laughter. Outside, there were stories about God himself – that he was indeed going mad: that he was talking gibberish: that he had begun to speak in tongues. And it was true that while he was speaking people had the impression that they understood what he was saying, but afterwards they found it difficult to describe what this was to others or even to themselves. The enormous hall was not
large enough for all the people who came to hear him; his voice was relayed by loudspeakers to other parts of the Garden. In the early mornings, too, the hall began to be so jammed that when you jumped up and down there was not enough room for the bits and pieces to fly off: it did seem, yes, that the time might soon come to get out of the Garden.

God came to an end of his stories (or stories about stories?) about God and Lilith and Adam and Eve: he seemed to want to shock people in a simpler way. He announced that this was what he was trying to do – that people would not change until their patterns of mind were not just preached against (this reinforced pattern) but punctured. He began to tell joke-book vulgar stories about what, he seemed to suggest, were misunderstandings about God and men: the more vulgar and second-hand these became, the more his acolytes closed their eyes and swayed backwards and forwards as if hypnotised. Sometimes, at some of the words, they seemed to flinch; but I thought – This is the ecstasy of St Sebastian, or of Adam in his grotto.

‘The Pope was practising golf shots in his study. Every time he did a bad shot he said – Shit! Missed! – Cardinal Virtue, who was standing beside him, said – Holy Father you should not use such language, or a thunderbolt will surely come from heaven and strike you down! – The next time the Pope played a bad shot he said – Shit! Missed! – There was a lightning-flash and Cardinal Virtue disappeared in a puff of smoke. Then there was a voice from the heavens saying – Shit! Missed!'

This sort of thing was spoken in God's precise, sibilant near-whisper: the same voice as that in which he spoke of someone being hollowed like a flute so that truth could blow through.

People flocked to the Garden by air, by train and bus, by taxi: they arrived with bedrolls and rucksacks. A shanty town sprang up between the area of thatched huts and the sea. The grand hotel filled with newspaper men and film men on the trail of the story about Anita Kroll. The scene became like that
of a gold-rush: in the shanty town at night tiny oil lamps glittered like the eyes of animals: in the grand hotel, one evening, there was a fight. Or it was like one of those gatherings on a hot and dusty plain where the Virgin Mary has appeared and spoken to children: of course, the children can never explain precisely what the Virgin Mary has said: it has just seemed to them to have had some ultimate meaning.

People tried to make enquiries about Anita Kroll: God would not answer questions: sometimes it was given as a reason that he was not well. It seemed to be accepted that God was in some sense ill; but also that he was using this as a means of evading questions. When his disciples were questioned about Anita Kroll they continued to treat the matter as some funny metaphysical riddle: what on earth would be an empirical test that would convince anyone that Anita Kroll had in fact been dead and had come alive? So what was the point of going on with such enquiries? People would believe what they wanted to believe; so why not get on with it. Questioners seemed incensed by this sort of argument; and so they made up the hostile stories that, I suppose, they wanted to make up anyway. There were stories that Anita Kroll had been seen driving with God in the town in the back of a large American car: that God was keeping her in his house as his mistress: that some quite different girl was being trained, to be sprung on the world later as a resurrected Anita Kroll. God himself, on the stage of the enormous hall with his huge sea-like eyes roaming about among the audience, seemed to be saying – Do you not see that this is what I am trying to teach you? truth is not a matter of choice between this or that view of facts; it is not with people who are trapped into thinking like this, but with those who are out of the trap altogether.

God's discourses continued on their bizarre way for some time; all the time he kept saying that what he was saying was beyond the scope of words. Then one morning he came in and sat there and he did not say anything. It was announced that
he was not ill, but that he just wanted to sit there and not speak.

We all went on coming to the enormous hall. God was set down on the stage in his litter: he looked at us and we looked at him: he seemed to be saying – Is it you? Is it you?

The multitudes who had come to the Garden seemed to be waiting for some new miracle – or catastrophe, or farce. I thought – These might be the same thing?

The hostile feelings that had always existed amongst the local people towards the Garden were exacerbated by the influx: it was true now that the condition of the encampments around the Garden might be a threat to health; the television people and newspaper men treated local customs with little respect. All this coincided with a crisis of antagonism between factions within the local community itself. The territory, or enclave, in which the Garden lay had been settled by Europeans in the sixteenth century: a third of the local population were Christians; these from time to time found themselves under attack from the now more numerous but less influential Hindus. There had recently been riots in the town: shops owned by Christians had been smashed and looted. This in turn had coincided with God's discourses becoming increasingly contemptuous of both Christians and Hindus – of what he suggested was the Christians' materialism and the Hindus' lack of it. Both factions could at least come together from time to time in their hostility to the Garden.