The Kingdom of the Wicked

The Kingdom of the Wicked

Anthony Burgess

First published in 1985

Per Paolo Andrea, non martire

ONE

I take my title from the name the Jews have traditionally given to the Roman Empire. You may expect to meet all manner of wickedness in what follows — pork-eating, lechery, adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, the most ingenious varieties of cruelty, assassination, the worship of false gods and the sin of being uncircumcised. So you may lick your lips in anticipation of being, as it were, vicariously corrupted at the hands of your author. It is all too possible that the practice of literature is a mode of depravity rightly to be condemned. But, as is well known, literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift: it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing. Let us then, in the interest of allaying the boredom of this our life, agree to our complementary damnations. My damnation is, of course, greater than yours, since I am the initiator and you are merely the receptor of evil recordings. Moreover, you may throw this book into the fire if your disgust becomes too great; I am committed to writing it. Take another cup of wine and accept that we human beings are a bad lot.

       My father was Azor the son of Sadoc, and I am Sadoc the son of, necessarily, Azor. In our family there has always been a feeble alternation of names, grandfather tossing the ball to grandson, and the custom goes back to time's mists. Looking like want of imagination, it probably has more to do with ancient spells, taboos, threats, conditions of inheritance, pacts with gods. I have no legitimate sons, nor have I much respect for tradition, but, were I to be a wave of the on flowing family river and not its ultimate dam, I would feel a certain superstitious fear about breaking the binary heritage. Names in our family, anyway, have always been the dull meat which we have left to others to sauce with sobriquets. My short fat father, in many ways the unluckiest man alive, was called Psilos, tall, Leptos, thin, and, which means primarily fortunate, Makarios. I have been nicknamed in my time Megas, big, and Onigros, donkey, both in reference to an endowment it would be unseemly to specify here. Having spent much of my life as a shipping clerk, headachy with manifests, squinty with the damnable green sea our wicked stepmother beyond the godowns, my spare time consumed in the, alas, overly promiscuous exploitation of the endowment and another activity, more of a passivity, which earned me the nickname Dipsa, I have come, my yapping pack of diseases in tow, to retire far inland. I live in a rundown villa on an upland over a lake in the province of Helvetia, where the agencies of Domitian's bad version of empire leave me alone, save for an annual visit from the tax collector. For him I must convert one of my sheep or goats to sesterces and slaughter another for his entertainment.

       I spend these last painracked days gazing on the misted Alps or else their hoods of snow and setting down what my father, before he died of the bite of a pack of ailments more vicious than my own, imposed as a filial duty — namely, the completion of a chronicle he began with his tale of the career of Yehoshua Naggar or Iesous Marengos. Both these names mean the carpenter Jesus. I write in Greek as he did, though you may be reading me in another language of the Empire. My Greek is not the tongue of Homer or Aeschylus but a sloppy ungrammatical sabir lacking Attic salt and tending to a saccharinity which sets my teeth on edge. This property is not in the writer but in the language. I could have written in Latin or even Aramaic, though my spelling of the latter is shaky. I know also a debased kind of Punic, but the things of Carthage have long gone under the earth or the sea. Whoever translates this, if it is ever to be translated, may be rendering me into the barks of the Goths or the cooings of the Celts, by grace of the alphabet of Rome. Latin itself is too cold and legalistic: even the pornography of Petronius reads like a series of court depositions. I have never had much love of Latin — all, in my life, orders and requisitions and rebukes, cold as executioner's steel.

       Some of you may know my father's book on the giant who claimed to be God's son and thundered or wheedled, according to circumstances, of the new way. This new way my father sought to follow as an ethic while rejecting the theology behind it. I have inherited his scepticism concerning such doctrines as eternal punishment and reward, holding it as monstrous that any human enactment should be deemed worthy of either, and, more than anything, the tomfoolery of physical resurrection and life after death. Who, I ask you, wants to drag his bones out of the earth, reclothed in flesh which, in some foul magic of reversal, is regurgitated by the worms, in order that his eyes may see God, who, unless he is really the Emperor Domitian, is by definition unseeable? Who, I ask you, wants to live for ever?

       We are not important enough for such transfiguration, nor, wicked though we certainly are, are we wicked enough for eternal fire. I have lived enough and am ready any time for the grand quietus. Life has had its moments of keen pleasure but there has been far more pain. The pain, in what you may regard as my perverted theology, is the work of God, and the pleasure, which all God's scriptures ban, is the benison of some demiurge too slippery for God to seize and choke. When Jesus spoke of God's love I do not think he could have been referring to the burly and capricious Jehovah the Hebrews worship in fear, for the scriptural record of his participation in man's affairs shows much vindictiveness but little charity. Jesus was referring, conceivably, to a God who could, as it were, be forced into existing by the pressure of human belief in him, a spiritual counterpart of himself. Or perhaps his God was a metaphor of the only thing that will save the world — the exercise of decency, tolerance and humorous scepticism.

       You will find, I expect, recurring through my narrative the fine phrase una nox dorrnienda, which I take from Catullus. Only the poets seem to be able to lend humanity and sweetness to that rigid language of the law, but the poets have not been well liked by the guardians of empire, unless, as with Virgil, it was empire that they pretended to sing. Ovid was sent into exile for poeticizing about pleasure, and Catullus died too young for the full force of Roman virtus to punish him for singing of kisses. Una nox dormienda means that one final night that has to be slept through after a few score years of pain and its pailiations, of pleasure and disgust after pleasure. This life of the body, perhaps tolerable for a senior clerk in a shipping company, is a torment for the enslaved, the captive, the deformed and the chronically sick, and it has been chiefly these who have drunken most thirstily of the Nazarene doctrine of a new life. Let them believe what their wretchedness bids them believe: they will find the una nox dormienda like the rest of us. In their eagerness to reward themselves and punish their enemies (of which Nature herself is one), they miss the essential truth of the new way, which has to do with the foundation and growth of an earthly society called somewhat extravagantly the Kingdom of Heaven. The members of this society pledge themselves to play what my father called the lusus amoris or game of love, though he considered agape or ahavah a more appropriate term than amor, which sounds like Roman patricians taking exercise after a day in camp or court. The game of trying to love one's enemies is the only practical response to injustice and cruelty. The insight which was responsible for propounding this truth was, one is tempted to think, superhuman. The claim of the primal gamesman of love to be the son of God represents a fine metaphor, but the assertion may contain a literal signification that time, with man's help, has yet to realize.

       I propose, on this grey and unseasonable day of a month that has so far done homage to its presiding goddess Maia with soaked greenery and shrewd winds, the Alps shrouded and the thrushes silent, five dripping ewes and a heavily ballocked ram nibbling forlornly in the scant shelter of my poplar and my arbutus, to begin to set down what I can of the story of the spreading of the ground rules of the love game in the kingdom of the wicked. I shall start with the events that followed upon the supposed death of its founder and end with the terrible time of the Vesuvian eruption which, destroying two fine cities, reminded us all that, though there may be a mother empire and even a mother church, there is an older and more capricious mother who nourishes her children without love and without enmity bids them perish. From the ashes of Pompeii there appears to be no resurrection. When man dies in the body his soul dies too. The temples go down and the tablets and scrolls of the various faiths, and the gods are shown to be impotent. Men, however, must try to live against all the odds and set up rules for living. Nature does not understand these rules, nor do human tyrants. Perhaps what cannot be wholly understood cannot wholly be destroyed. This is a feeble article of faith to begin with, but it helps to push my pen through this exordium and what now follows. Those of you who already yawn at what seems to be a moral tone will get your wickedness soon enough. One never has to wait long for wickedness.

Concerning the resurrection of Jesus, everyone must believe what he can. For my part, I will not accept miracles if the rational lies to hand, and I have no proof that Jesus died on the cross. He was, by all accounts, a man of immense stature and strength with huge lungs rendered the more powerful by the practice of a kind of oratory. He was certainly nailed to a cross by the wrists and feet, his body left to leap like a stranded fish to gasp in what air it could, but when exhaustion came death was still some way off, for those vast lungs, in the control of the muscles of a powerful midriff, still held enough air to sustain life. His legs were not broken, as we know, and the spear that pierced his side seems to have ruptured no inner organ. It was as a whole man that he was removed from that tree of shame, with full vitality in brief abeyance but ready to be restored after a healing sleep. It was no great act of strength for such a colossus to shove aside the stone that served as a door to his tomb, and it was like his humour to replace that stone. To speak of his resurrection, as all his followers did, was to abet no trickery: tombs are for dead men, and when a man seemingly dead is lain in one his lively egress may be termed a resurrection. A prophecy had been satisfactorily fulfilled, the Son of Man or of God had rebuilt his temple after three days in the sepulchre. But if death is defined as the cessation of breathing and the stilling of the heart, with the consequent onset of fleshly decay, then no man has risen from the dead, not even Lazarus. Lazarus's sleep was exceptionally long and sound, and to restore him to animation was an act of thaumaturgy of a kind, but the breaking of the peal of death, even if it were possible, would surely be a blasphemy against the Creator-Destroyer who inexorably stamped it.

       This resurrected or reawakened Jesus appeared to many — first to a common prostitute, next, so some say, to Pontius Pilate in his cups, and then to two of the least of his followers, Cleopas and Zachaeus, the latter a Jerusalem fishmonger who smelt of his trade. Jesus was always close to fishmen, catchers and buyers and sellers, and soon became identified, through typical Nazarene wordplay, with a fish. Cleopas and Zachaeus had been thrown into jail for a brief spell during the Passover that was just ended on a charge of making ugly faces at a Roman decurion. In fact, Zachaeus had been showing Cleopas a bad back tooth that ached and Cleopas had been making a rictus of sympathy. One of the prison guards knew Zachaeus well enough, or at least his fish, and release, though without apology, had, at leisure, followed. The two humble Nazarenes, as the followers of Jesus of Nazareth were beginning to be called, had missed the crucifixion and were in time only to witness the dismantling of the great cross and its two smaller fellows by a Roman workforce, the wrenching out of nails and hurling timbers to the Jerusalem dust with coarse soldiers' cries of Pone in culum, fili scorti and the like. Cleopas and Zachaeus saw also a blind man being led by a boy to the site of execution, a beggar not too sure whether to retain blindness as his trade or consent to have a healing act performed upon him. He had come, in his blessed innocence, to Golgotha or Skull Hill to discuss the matter with Jesus, having heard that he was the centre of attention there. But now, 'God knows best,' he kept saying, 'God wants me blind, all is providential, blessed be the name of the All High. Pity the poor blind, fair gentlemen and lovely ladies.'

       Another beggar, one in rancid rags and with a halo of flies, sidled up to the two, nodding. He lived mostly on stews of fish heads and guts donated by the kindly Zachaeus. He said:

       'Your man's dead and your man's alive again. You missed it all.’

       ‘Alive again?'

       'Shoved him in one of those tombs cut out of the rock and he's not there no more. The corpse got lifted out during the night, bribery, some of those oneeyed Syrian guards will do anything for money, and now the story is he walked out large as life grinning all over his beard and they've got him hidden somewhere. Stands to reason. The priests would get him for coming back to life, which is against the law, and the Romans would nail him up again and make a better job of it next time. That's the story. Of course, it's a trick and a good one, like all his tricks was. He's dead all right.'