The Revolt of Aphrodite (51 page)

“Do you know” said Banubula with breathless coyness “about me?”

“What?”

“That I’m
in
at last,
in
the
firm
?”
He seemed almost on the point of executing a brief dance.

“The firm?”

He gave a whiff of insipid laughter behind his gloves and sibilated. “Yes, the
firm.
Have been now for several months. It’s a post after my own heart and I think I may say that I am giving it everything I’ve got in me.”

“Bravo!” we all exclaimed and I banged his rather portly
shoulder-blade
to register my excitement and approval.

“Co-ordinator of industrial disputes, no less. I share the job with my old friend the Duke of Lambitus, who has left the F.O. to come to us. My word, Felix, you have no idea how delicate and yet how all-embracing it is. Everywhere there is a dispute or a falling off of production or simply tension due to a psychological cause—why, we are there, I with my languages and Lambitus with his courteous diplomatic experience.”

“It must be devastating.”

“It is” said the Count meekly. “It is.”

Caradoc grinned at us and dug Banubula boisterously in the ribs. “Tell them about your latest
coup
”
he said and Banubula was in no way loth to do so. “But I don’t want to bore you with shop. Yet this last case does illustrate the enormous tact and psychological insight we have to bring into play. I’d like to tell you about it, if I may?” Inspired by the raptness of our attention he went on. “Well, just as an example: last year we started having trouble with our German branches in the applied industry sector. It was a queer sort of general malaise, nothing one could really analyse, a lack of heart at the centre of things. And, of course, disputes of one sort or another, mostly idle and foolish disputes for such an orderly and industrious nation.
Julian sent us over as psychological counsellors to study the matter and propose means of dealing with it. Now what really was wrong? Nothing we could see really: to account for the falling off of the statistics I mean. Simply boredom it seemed to us. At any rate it didn’t seem something which salary rises could cure.
And
this
is
where
psychology
comes
in
.”
The Count pointed a long spatulate finger at his own temple and paused dramatically. His eyes twinkled with keen joy, like summer lightning, like fireflies. “Lambitus finally said: ‘The whole thing is this. They are not
enjoying
themselves,
they do not know how to. It is our job to find a way, Horatio.’ We pondered the matter and at last I hit upon a solution. It may seem simple for such a complex people. Baby Balls, that was it!”

“Baby Balls?” I exclaimed. Banubula nodded and pursued his rigorous
exposé
with raised finger. “You are perhaps too young to remember how the British sense of humour was saved and revived after the first World War? By the Baby Balls organised by the Bright Young Things.”

“But what the devil is it?”

“Simply a Ball to which you have to go dressed as a baby, sucking a bottle, and preferably in a pram wheeled by a close friend.”

“Well I’m damned.”

“It worked Felix” he cried. “You would never have believed it. All those huge German business-men crammed into prams, dressed as babies, sucking on their bottles of milk, and waving clusters of coloured balloons. Nothing exceeded in pity and terror the sight of them entering so determinedly into the fun of the thing. We had thought of everything, you see. We had musical chairs, prizes for bobapple, buns and booby traps, cap-pistols and those streamers which uncurl when you blow them and go
wheee
….”

He mopped his face and laughed shyly adding only the vital words: “All Germany laughed and all Germany went back to work and the needle began to mount again on the production board. Do you see the delicacy of the whole operation, I mean?”

To say that our collective breath was taken away would be an understatement. We sat and gaped our humble admiration. The Count himself seemed transfigured by this simple but subtle success. “D’you know,” he went on “we had a special interview with Julian
in which he congratulated us and said that he would see to it that we got an O.B.E. each in the Prime Minister’s next list.” The narration of this great
coup
de
théâtre
had so moved him that there was a long moment of silence while he applied himself to the delicacies of the establishment, giving himself totally, fervently, to the crumpets, and also to the toasted tea-cake. Caradoc gazed upon him with what one might call tears of admiration welling up behind his eyeballs. After so many years of waiting, of doing menial little jobs unworthy of his manifest genius … and at last to find his real bent in the firm. It was wonderful! Benedicta pressed his hand with sympathy and congratulation. Banubula himself was transported—he was quite
beside
himself, professionally speaking. I mean that there was not the slightest touch of complacence in his manner when he added “And this is only one occasion of many,
many
where we have been of vital use to the firm.”

“Tell about the Koro epidemic” said Caradoc who for once seemed generously pleased to let his friend hold the floor.

“Ah that!” said Banubula rolling his fine eyes. “That really did tax us to the hilt. Lambitus was actually ill afterwards and imagined all sorts of things. I wonder if I dare speak of it without indiscretion before….”

He nodded towards Benedicta who acknowledged the delicacy with a smile but spread her white hands in supplication. “Yes, please do. It is fascinating.”

Banubula mopped his brow, poked his handkerchief into his sleeve and sat back. “This will amaze you I think” he said. “It
certainly
took us by surprise. We had not heard of Koro before, which is known as Shook Yong to the Chinese of the Archipelago. In fact the first we heard of it was when Nash, who had been sent out with a group of psychiatrists to stem this epidemic if possible, sent a signal back saying that nothing could be done. It was an S.O.S. if ever there was one. Lambitus and I were at the Savoy Grill when we got orders to move in and set our brains to work on this problem which was threatening to disrupt whole sectors of our work both in
Singapore
and throughout the whole network of islands where we had enormously important sources of raw materials at work for the firm. By morning’s early light then, we were in the air, sometimes holding
hands a bit as neither of us liked air-travel and the journey was bumpy: we were on our way to Singapore. May I have this last one?” He took up the last crumpet on the dish and used it lightly at a baton to punctuate his discourse, pausing from time to time to take a small bite from it.

“Now Shook Yong” he said in a faraway fairy-tale voice “and its ravages are hardly known to us occidentals, and when one first hears of it one thinks it rather far-fetched. But it is real, and it creates mass panics. What is it? Well, it is a belief that those who contract this disease experience a sudden feeling of retraction of the male organ into the abdomen; this is accompanied by a hysterical fear that should the retraction be allowed to proceed, and if swift medical aid is not available, the whole penis will simply disappear into the belly with fatal results for the owner.” He paused for the inevitable smiles. “I know” he went on gravely. “So it struck me at first. But it spreads like wildfire, whole communities get taken with Shook Yong just as our medieval ancestors, I suppose, contracted dancing or twitching manias. It is real, all too real. Now when a community is so afflicted they experience utter terror and in their anxiety to hold on to their own property they grab and pull it to prevent it vanishing: worse still, they often use instrumental aids such as rubber bands, string, clamps, clothes-pegs and chopsticks, and frequently inflict severe bruising or worse damage on the organ. Now what had caused all this trouble, which spread from Singapore like wildfire and gained the remotest corners of the landmass in next to no time, was a rumour set about (perhaps by the Indians) that Koro was caused by eating the flesh of swine which had recently been vaccinated in an attempt to combat swine fever. At once there was an almost complete standstill in the pork sales in markets, restaurants and so on—but those who thought that they might have been exposed to the disease by accident took fright. So Koro or Shook Yong became an epidemic to be reckoned with.
*
Everything was done to educate public opinion by press
conferences
and radio and journalism—but it was all in vain. The Ministry of Health reported that both the public and private
hospitals
were swamped by mobs of yelling patients holding on to their
organs and calling loudly for medical aid. The scenes were
indescribable.
Oriental mass panic has to be seen to be believed. Poor Nash, who had arrived with some severe-looking but orthodox Freudians, was completely out of his depth, and indeed, when we found him, quite pale with terror at all the commotion. He was holding on to his own organ, not, as he explained, because he felt he had Shook Yong but simply because he feared to lose it in the general
mêlée.
I don’t mind confessing that for a while the whole problem seemed to me a bit out of our usual range. They hadn’t explained in London the meaning of these deplorable crowd scenes taking place all over the city. Freud was no help, however much the disease might have suggested an ordinary anxiety neurosis. You
cannot
ask a yelling Chinese to lie down on a couch and give you free associations for the word ‘penis’ when he is holding fast to his own, convinced that it is simply melting away. Worst of all, the telephones were humming from the plantations telling us that the epidemic had already penetrated into the countryside where the people are even more susceptible to mass suggestion than in the towns. We attended conference after conference, Lord Lambitus and I,
listening
to these grave accounts of a world turned upside down; and both of us completely perplexed as to what to do to lend nature a hand. As I gathered that the scourge had already been signalled among the Buginese and Maassars in Coelebes and West Borneo at other periods, it seemed to me that the whole thing would sweep over the subcontinent and perhaps die a natural death in Australia where they have another attitude to the male organ. But it was very
disturbing
all the same. It put us on our mettle. Yet there we were in an unfamiliar world, with the most arbitrary sanitation and precious little ice for drinks, beating our heads, almost our breasts, so worried were we.

“And at every conference the case-histories poured in, collected by devoted and whey-faced doctors. Just to give you a typical one to illustrate what was happening. A fifteen-year-old boy was rushed into the emergency ward of the clinic by his shouting and
gesticulating
parents calling for aid. The boy, they said, had contracted Shook Yong. The youth was pale and scared and was pulling hard on his penis to prevent it being swallowed up. He had heard about Shook
Yong in school and that morning had eaten a little pow, which
contains
some pork, for his breakfast. When he went to the lavatory he saw that his member had shrunk very greatly and concluded that he had contracted the scourge. Yelling, he ran to his parents, who ran yelling with him to the doctor. Here at least he might receive sedatives and reassurance provided he and his parents had reached the stage of evolution when things begin to make sense; mostly however they hadn’t. Well, as I say, Lambitus and I were at our wits’ end to devise some equitable way of ending this intellectual debauch. The Freudians keeled over one by one and even Nash, who had led the rescue group, was sent to hospital for a while and put under heavy sedation. He had, I believe, become prone to the contagious atmosphere which Koro creates, and had almost begun to believe … well, I don’t know. Anyway, everyone seemed privately highly delighted in rather a cruel way. But still we could make no advance on the problem. The season was breaking up, the monsoons were heralded. And now Lambitus, who is a man of iron nerve, quite unimaginative, as you have to be in the higher diplomacy, began to show signs of strain. He spent an awful long time in the shower-room every morning examining himself for signs of Koro. I began to suspect him of
suspecting
…. Well, anyway the situation was desperate. I sat night after night swatting giant moths with a bedroom slipper and
brooding
on the problem.

“Indeed I had reached the point when I had decided that we should return and confess our mission a failure when—how does it happen: Nash would know?—an old memory of my youth came to my rescue. You may know that when I was first engaged to the Countess we went round the world together; she said she wished to see me anew in each continent before deciding whether she would marry me or not—so there was nothing for it. It was a pre-
honeymoon
in a way, and by no means an unfruitful trip. She was an expert botanist, and I was already then working on my comparative folklore of fertility symbols in east and west. We came to Malaya, among other places, and indeed stayed a month on a plantation. From the recesses of these old memories I suddenly resuscitated Tune or Tunk—the small fertility God which is responsible for so much of the overpopulation in these parts and whose little effigy in clay one
sees on cottage lintels. It came to me with the force of a forgotten dream that we might perhaps invoke the little deity’s aid once more to counter the nationwide (so it seemed at the time) retraction of the Malayan penis.”

“Do you remember” said Caradoc suddenly “Sipple’s account of
his
attack of Koro?—it must have been that. In the Nube, a hundred years ago?”

Of course I did.

“It must have been” said Banubula seriously. “It would have been terrible if such an affliction had spread into England. It could topple a Government—I saw it do so. And we couldn’t invoke little Tunc there because nobody believes in him or it. Anyway to resume my account of this strange episode: I woke Lambitus and breathlessly outlined my plan. He was ready to grab at any straw and eagerly backed me up. I obtained some
ex-votos,
some silk drawings
unwittingly
issued by the British Council, and set myself to think. In half an hour I had roughed out a more modern effigy which, if fabricated in mauve plastic (the national colour, by the way), might have charm and appeal for the afflicted.