The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (16 page)

The canals were full of barges and by the time we reached the great river, we headed a long convoy all flying paper streamers. In the evenings other barge-masters joined us in the cabin while the women were relegated to the galley or to my little bedroom and we drank brandy, smoked our corn-cob pipes and I listened to many discussions of their politics, which seemed mainly to turn on the maintenance of the barges and the arrangements of the adoption-marriages which linked them all together. More than ever I realized their life was a complex sub-universe with its own inherent order as inaccessible to the outsider as it went unnoticed by him. And yet they were somehow frozen in themselves. Even the method of pouring a drink was hallowed by tradition and never altered. One held out one’s glass to the offered jug, then took the jug after one’s own glass was filled and filled the other’s glass, so nobody ever poured out a drink for himself. The community spirit reigned among them to that extent! And in this lack of self, I began to sense a singular incapacity for being, that sad, self-imposed limitation of experience I recognized in myself and must also, like my cheekbones, be my inheritance from the Indians. And yet I knew it was in me and though I felt constraint, I was learning to love that constraint. Nao-Kurai treated me with overt pride, yet more than ever I sensed an undertow of veiled hostility until I wondered if it were simply this – he was scared that, at the last moment, I would get away from him.

So we entered the town of T. again and did the last of our festival shopping in a market full of tinsel, Christmas trees and other souvenirs of a festival we ourselves were too pagan to comprehend. There were posters everywhere advertising a fair that would come to town on Christmas Eve and the church announced it would celebrate Midnight Mass but we would burn our candles only to the primordial spirits of the solstice whose roots lay in the turn of the seasons and the principle of fertility. It was, said Nao-Kurai, the most suitable time for a wedding. This time we took no orders in the town but sailed further up the river a little way to the basin, where it seemed all the barges in the world were waiting for us, garlanded with paper emblems and each one flying a blaze of paper candle-lanterns decorated with phallic symbols in my honour, for tomorrow was my wedding day.

For inscrutable, hieratic reasons, Aoi did not come to my bed that night and the winter moon shone so brightly through the white curtains at my porthole that it hurt my eyes and I could not sleep. At last I went up on deck and found Nao-Kurai, wakeful too, was sitting on a coil of rope beneath a great cloud of pipe-smoke, sipping at a jug of brandy decanted from his big barrel. He seemed pleased to see me, though he did not greet me by name. He fetched me a glass and poured me a drink. I could tell by the way he walked to the galley that he had already been drinking on his own for some time.

For a long time, we watched the moonlight on the water together in silence. Then he began to speak and I soon realized he was very drunk for the words seemed to drift up at random out of a mind which had become a pool of memory in which an idea or two rose up to the surface now and then, like hazy strands of water-weed. As he went on, I became less and less sure that he remembered who I was and by the end of the story I was certain of it. Perhaps he had mistaken me for the eldest boy or for one of the bargees who had come aboard to pay their respects. He spoke the thickest version of the river argot and used many expressions that had long fallen out of common use but I could make out the drift of his story well enough.

‘It was a long time ago – oh! such a very long time ago, it was, before we got to living on the water. And then we used to live in huts made out of down and bits of feather and to make tough enough fabric to keep the weather out we stuck them all together with spit, or so Mama’s mama used to say and she never told a lie. Besides, she was quite old enough to remember everything and she’d been hatched from a parrot’s egg when she was a little girl, oh, yes she had. She said so. She was old enough to remember everything and she was such an old lady when she died of the coughing she was bent right over like a snake eating its tail and she’d eaten snakes herself, you know. I’m coming to that in a moment.

‘She was so bent over when she died a great to-do we had of it to straighten her out enough to fit her into a natural coffin, oh, yes! what a time we had! But all this was such a long time ago, all this when it happened what I’m remembering tonight, it was such a long time ago there was hardly any dark at night and, on the whole, it was a good time, because there weren’t any shore folk, but, then, it was a bad time, because we didn’t know how to make fire, did we. So it was always a wee bit cold and we couldn’t cook nothing, of course, because of not having fire.

‘But it’s a lie to say we didn’t know how to make fire until the black ships came! What a lie! But even so, in those days, the days I’m talking about, we ate nothing but slugs and snakes and crawly things that lived in the water because if we didn’t actually live
on
the water, then, we lived, so to speak, in it. Or rather, there wasn’t much difference in those days, none of your harsh divisions. No day, no night, but light sufficient; no solid, no fluid, but footholds a-plenty; no hard, no soft but everything chewable… everything all at once, just as it should be. Or so my granny used to say. Except it was just a wee bit cold.’

Most of the last sequence issued from his mouth in the weird chant of one who recounts details of a legendary past and I was pleased to find more evidence that my family might derive from the beautiful bird-people of antiquity. The night air chilled me so I took another mouthful or two of brandy. Around us the sleeping boats rocked gently at anchor, each one decorated with paper garlands to celebrate my wedding, and my wife slept beyond the bulkhead behind me, probably nursing her curious doll in her innocent arms. Nao-Kurai rambled on in a drowsy voice, inadvertently flattening notes here and there, which subtly altered various meanings, but I continued to listen because these picturesque ancient survivals were, were they not, the orally transmitted history of my people.

‘Now in those days, the women weren’t supposed to touch the snakes, not with their hands, that is. But one young girl picked off of the floor this head of a snake her father had caught and it spat its venom right up between her legs and she conceived straight off, didn’t she. So she had this snake in her belly and it rattled around and writhed and she got very uncomfortable and said: “Mr Snake, won’t you come out, please?” And Snake said: “All in my own good time.” So she went on doing her chores but the wonder of it was, she never got cold, no matter how hard the wind blew. So Snake said: “That’s because I’ve built my little fire. Don’t you know what a fire is?” And the girl said: “Well, no. Not precisely.” So out pops Snake from her hole with a bit of fire in his jaws and she rubs her hands to feel the glow and jumps for joy and says: “It’s good!” So he taught her the word for “warm”, which she needed to know, see, because she’d never felt like that before.

‘Well, she was just going to eat her dinner, a little bit of lizard, that’s what she’d got for dinner, and Snake says: “Why don’t you toast your bit of lizard over my fire? I’m sure you’ll find it ever so much more tasty.” So she did and it was the most savoury thing she’d ever eaten, much more savoury than all those raw slugs and snails and things. Then they heard somebody coming and Snake slithered back up inside her quick as a flash and all was as it had been before. Except, after that, whenever she was by herself, Snake came out and she toasted and roasted her dinners and kept lovely and warm all winter, too.

‘Now her father and brothers began to prick up their nostrils and lick their lips when they smelled the lovely savoury smells in the hut and they found some bones she hadn’t picked quite clean and chewed the crumbs of meat off them and oh! it
was
nice but they hadn’t the least idea why. But they saw the girl round as a ball and still she showed no signs of going into labour, though when they leaned against her belly, they would have thought it was as hot as an oven if they’d known what an oven was, of course.

‘So, one day, the youngest brother hid in the cabin trunk and saw Snake come out of his sister and a big flame flickered all round the hut and cooked her dinner. “What’s this?” he thought and he jumped out and caught hold of Snake and said: “Show me your trick or I’ll kill you!” But Snake slithered out of his hands and vanished up the sister before you could say “Jack Robinson” and Sister cried and pleaded but it wasn’t any good because
she
didn’t know how to make fire, did she.’

Nao-Kurai spoke more and more slowly and began to leave great gaps between the sentences to be filled by the mournful lapping of the waters against the sides of the barge, while his head slid further down his chest. Somewhere, a tethered dog howled.

‘When Father and the other Brothers came back, Youngest Brother told them what he’d seen so they picked up their big knives and cut Sister open just like you’d fillet a fish. But Snake was sulking and wouldn’t show them how to make fire. They teased him and bullied him and dangled Sister’s head in front of him by the hair so at last he consented to give them lessons. Every day, in the evenings, after supper, he’d rub two sticks together and make the flame and say “See! It’s easy!” But they couldn’t learn, no matter how they tried. They racked their poor old brains and inked their fingers but they could never learn as much as A, B, C, or what spells “cat”, could they. So then they knew it was magic and they killed Snake and cut him into little pieces. Then they each ate their piece and… after that… they could all make fire…

‘… every one of them could
scribble
away in fire in a twinkling, easy as anything…’

With that, his eyes closed and he spoke no more except to mumble, with intense satisfaction, ‘Do anything easy as anything,’ before he passed entirely into a thick sleep. I seized the jug and gulped down a great slug of brandy for I was shaking though not, this time, with cold; I shook with terror and despair. I remembered a story I had read once in an old book about some tribe of Central Asia who ‘made a point of killing and eating in their own country any stranger indiscreet enough to commit a miracle or show any particular sign of sanctity, for thus they imbibe his magic virtue.’ The name of the tribe, Hazara, had once helped me in a difficult crossword puzzle; now the remembered information helped me solve another clue. If the bird-people had wanted the Jesuits’ magic, they would have eaten the priests to get it. As they would eat me.

All at once I filled in the suspicious gaps my lonely sentimentality had refused to acknowledge. Nao-Kurai’s air of furtive triumph after I had accepted his daughter; Mama’s excessive cordiality; their suspicious eagerness to adopt me when they knew, against all appearances, I was really nothing but a feared, mysterious dweller upon the shore all the time, one who had not all his life felt beneath him only the shifting motion of the insubstantial river yet who owned the most precious, most arcane knowledge they could only gain for themselves by desperate measures. And I knew as well as if Nao-Kurai had sung it out that they proposed to kill me and eat me, like Snake, the Fire-Bringer, in the fable, so that they would all learn how to read and write after a common feast where I would feature as the main dish on the menu at my own wedding breakfast. I was torn between mirth and horror. At last I got up, covered my father-in-law with my jacket to stop him catching cold and went silently below, prowling for further evidence.

In the main cabin my brothers and sisters lay sweetly sleeping and the moonlight mixed with festive lantern light slanted through the portholes and shone on their beloved faces. Because, yes, I am not ashamed to say I loved them all, even the dribbling baby who could not speak her name and peed on my lap when I took her on my knee. Mama and my child bride shared the same mattress and when I saw in one another’s arms the old flesh and the young flesh which were, in some sense, interchangeable and whose twinned textures was already part of my flesh, then I fell down on my knees beside them, ready at that moment to pledge myself entirely to them and even to give my own flesh to them, in whatever form they pleased, if they thought it would do them any good. I was almost overcome with trust and good faith. I do believe that I was crying, young fool that I was. And Aoi had her doll beside her; her hand clasped its red dress. It was an inexpressibly touching detail.

Then the child shifted position in her sleep and muttered something. As she stirred, so she uncovered what should have been the scaled head of her baby in its white cap. I saw there was no fish’s head under the lace but the tip of the blade of one of the very large knives Mama used in the kitchen. The boat swayed with the current and Aoi, half-waking, drowsily clutched the knife to her bosom. With great distinctness, she said, ‘Tomorrow. Do it tomorrow.’

Then she turned on her back and began to snore.

Perhaps the knife was involved in some bizarre ritual of defloration. And, again, perhaps not. I sat back on my heels and wiped the sudden sweat from my forehead; then I realized I was not willing to take the slender chance they did not mean me harm. But, all the same, I kissed their cool cheeks before I left, first poor Aoi, who would have murdered me because they told her to, a programmed puppet with a floury face who was not the mistress of her own hands, and then Mama, whose skin I had never tasted before without savouring the odour of the mutton fat base of her cosmetics. I do believe my heart came as near as it ever did to breaking, that night – as near as it came to breaking, that is, before I said good-bye to Albertina, when my heart broke finally and forever.

I had nothing to take with me from the ship except memories. I went outside and said a silent good-bye to the stupefied figure of my father-in-law, who had tumbled from his seat and sprawled beside the brandy bottle that had betrayed him. As I let myself noiselessly over the side down into the freezing water, the candles in the paper lanterns began to gutter and by the time I reached the river bank, they were beginning to go out, one by one.