The Call-Girls: A Tragi-Comedy With Prologue and Epilogue

  THE CALL-GIRLS

  A tragi-comedy with Prologue and Epilogue

  ARTHUR KOESTLER

  Contents

  Prologue

  THE MISUNDERSTANDING

  THE CALL-GIRLS

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Epilogue

  THE CHIMERAS

  A Note on the Author

  The three pieces in this volume, though different in style and setting, are intended as variations on a single theme

  A. K.

  Prologue

  THE

  MISUNDERSTANDING

  Prologue: The Misunderstanding

  The bones of the earth are sticking out of this barren hill. The ancient rocks have faces that sneer at me. The roots of the dead olive trees are like snakes in the white dust waiting to bite into my sandals, to trip me up under my load. Fast vultures sail over our procession, not doves. My blood has dried on the thorns and the black flies have clustered into another crown round my head. Three starved dogs are following us at a distance. Verily a procession fit for a king.

  Father, if you see me, how can you bear it? Almighty you, who made the sun stand still, can you not shift that timber on my shoulder by an inch to get its splintered edge away from my collar-bone to the muscle? It would hurt less on the muscle; I am a healer, I know. But I cannot lay hands on my own body, not even to shift that piece of timber, because it might slip. If I fall, they will flog me again, and I might cry out. Or I might pass water. They say when one is hoisted up one passes water and they laugh. Even my bowels might open. A father cannot let it happen to his son.

  You teased Abraham when you bid him to cut his firstborn’s throat, but you only stopped him in the last minute. Your sense of humour makes my sweat run cold. This ugly play is being performed before empty seats, for your benefit alone. Its only purpose is to make you listen, to wake you up.

  When did you fall asleep, or start to look away? When David went after Absalom? Or earlier on, when Cain slew Abel? You have made a rotten hash of Adam’s seed, almighty you. Often when the night lay heavily on me while the others slept like stones in the moonlight, I wondered whether you yourself were the deaf and dumb spirit who possessed that boy they brought to me when we came down from the mountain. Was it you, disguised as a demon, who seized that boy, and tore him, and shook him with convulsions, so that he had to throw himself into the fire and into water, to make an end of himself? Are you the one who is playing these games with Adam’s seed? Or are you only absent-minded and asleep? Soon I shall know when this stake and I change places, when instead of me carrying it, it will carry me. That will be the test, your trial. Then I shall know.

  I have been flogging myself, harder than the soldiers flogged me, into believing that you were only absent-minded, preoccupied with matters more important than your creation – though what they could be beats me, harder than the soldiers beat me. Perhaps you were also absent-minded when you went into my mother, that tearful woman who keeps getting in my way. If that is the case, and you are only distracted or asleep, I shall pull your sleeve in my pain until you wake up and my purpose is achieved. But if you are that deaf and dumb spirit, then pulling your sleeve will be the gesture of a fool, and dying will be hard. They say it takes three days to die in this way, unless they break your bones to speed it up. It will be hard, and my bowels will open from my lofty height upon this orphaned world, and it will all have been a mockery – you, a mirage formed by desert vapours, and my tearful mother an adulteress.

  Speak, damn you, speak to me as you did on that night on the mountain, and don’t pretend you have more important business to attend to. Have I not told those innocents that you have numbered every hair on their heads, and that not even a sparrow can fall to the ground without your will? Does not Adam’s seed count for more than a host of sparrows? Do you feel that burning splinter in my shoulder-bone? Shift it an inch, you who can shift mountains with your breath.

  The path is getting steeper, we are approaching the top. Soon I shall know the answer. The soldiers curse me without conviction, they keep stumbling and kicking at stones, they are afraid of you, a vicious desert god. The three dogs are still behind us; when I was born, I was visited by three Kings. There is still time, you know, to change my mind; the Governor said so, he will arrange a pardon if I recant. I could recant even when already up. But by then my arms will be broken and roped to the crossbar. The soldiers say that in earlier times it was done with nails, but it was not safe because the man might come loose and fall down. The pain I can perhaps bear, though they all howl like wolves when they are hoisted up, but the healing power will have gone from my broken hands. They were good hands. They healed the sick, raised the dead, cleansed the lepers, cast out devils. And verily, I did these things, no one can deny it. Father, I have worked miracles for you, now it is your turn.

  The path is getting less steep, I can glimpse the top. But the stones roll under my feet to taunt me, the roots keep tripping me up, they have to push and whip me on like a reluctant mule. My royal crown of flies bothers me more than the pain in the bone. The sun is a sword of flame but my eyes are clouded by mist. On the swaying hill-top the women are waiting, three weeping willows. I shall not speak to them, but they will watch what is done to me and witness my defilement. I was never drawn to their hungry flesh. They want the bridegroom to be cradled in his mother’s womb, or in another womb, but it is the same. When the dead rise again there will be no marrying. The pain is so strong that I feel it no longer, but if I fall they will beat me until I hate them and you will have another excuse for looking away.

  If a father turns his back, how shall the son know whether he exists? I know that you exist, but I know your shape no more than that of the filthy spirit which threw the boy into convulsions. In a place high in the mountains there was a village idiot whom the heathens worshipped, a bald, hunchbacked dwarf cavorting in the dust and feeding on dogs’ excrement which the aldermen served him on golden plates. Now I seem to be falling, falling, but ever so slowly, going down. The stake is gone, it did not break my spine, now they can beat me to their hearts’ content, my brow enjoys its dust-bath in the sand, all is blessed peace. They are standing around me, discussing what is to be done, and I am lying prone in white dust and bliss. There is a stranger with them now, a farm boy with round eyes, they are putting that yoke of timber on his naked back. See now I am up again, and had to make no effort, they did it for me, ever so gently. And I am walking again, supported on both sides, walking on air as I walked that day on the lake. Then I was holding up that foolish fisherman of little faith, but now I am being held up by the gentle soldiers who are as brothers to me. So did Abraham carry his son to the place of sacrifice, and both were frightened until you called off the joke. I could not be sure that this was also meant as a joke and I was a little frightened, but now I know. The joke was played by both of us, so half the fault was mine, and I must explain to you just once more why I did it. I have tried to explain it before, but you would not listen. I wanted to die in order to wake you up. That was the only reason. For I thought that you were asleep, or absent-minded or otherwise engaged, and therefore unaware of the abominations and desolation of the world you made. How else could I explain to myself that you have allowed these goings on, that you allowed in your lovingness, allowed in your omniscience, that you let pass in your omnipotence, that men should become worse than beasts, worse than all that crawls and creeps, that the breath you blew into Adam’s nostrils shou
ld become a stink of dragons, and his seed a pollution of the earth? So I had to decide on this course to wake you up. My prayers had been of no avail. I could cure the sick and cast out a few devils, but that universal sickness of mind that has befallen your creation, that was your responsibility. And you did nothing about it. You were asleep. Once I even heard you snore through the sobs of a youth whom the soldiers put to torture.

  So I had to decide on this course, to die in this ugly and painful way, to bring you back to your senses. Is there a father who could not be made to repent by the suicide of his son? Could he watch with eyes of stone while they break his arms and hoist him up to let him rot like a vegetable tied to a stick? I knew that you could not let it pass. You would have to intervene, and then you would clean up this whole mess in your holy wrath, as I cleaned the moneylenders out of the temple. And then there would be no more butchers and no more lambs.

  That is how I planned it; but I could not tell it to those blockheads of little faith. They would not have understood. Because these men chose their path for the love of me, father, not for the love of you. They saw me cure the sick and feed the starving, and this they approved of and understood. But they never understood your devious ways. They were not allowed to make themselves any likeness or graven image of you, and that was a great mistake. They were told that no man can see your face and live, and that was another great mistake. For men cannot love nor understand that which has no shape nor substance, and which has no likeness in their own world. So I had to tell them parables by which to provide the likenesses and images that were missing. I told them that the wine was my blood and the bread my substance, and they swallowed both, and felt that their god was inside them. I could not tell them that I had to decide on this course to make you sit up and remind you of your responsibilities, because that would have made them love you even less. Instead I told them the parable of Jonah, who was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, and told them I would lie three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. I repeated the parable of Jonah several times to rub it into their thick heads, and in the end they swallowed that too and would have me rise again as Jonah rose from the deep and Joseph rose from the well. They have eyes but you hide from them, they have ears but you do not speak to them. So they must live by parables.

  Only one man understood my plan, the Governor. He wondered why I stayed silent instead of refuting the false accusations, but then he understood. He looked through my eyes which to him were like open windows, then turned his back and rinsed his hands, which also was a parable to indicate that this business could only be settled between you and me. So be it.

  Here then is the place; we have arrived. I don’t like these preparations. The soldiers who supported me no longer look kind. They sweat and breathe hard. They are measuring my length. From crown to sandals. They seem to mean business. Now is the time, now is the time, father, to call it off, to stop this frightening make-believe. Abraham is drawing his knife on his son. These men are pressing me down against the stake. It cannot be, they cannot do this to me, it cannot be borne. A voice is howling like a wolf’s, it cannot be mine. And the women look on. The sponge in my mouth is bitter and soothing, dimming the world, a mouthful of sleep. It cannot be true that this is happening to me. These broken hands are not mine. This filth comes not out of me. This rising higher and higher up in white flames of pain happens not to me. I am rising and sinking, turning on a wheel, riding in the belly of the whale. The sun has turned black and darkness fills the air, I must not faint. I must look into his eyes if he has eyes to see. Eli, eli, how can you bear watching this? Thou dumb spirit, vapour of the desert, ignoble absence, thou art not, hast never been. Only a parable. And my own death another parable; they will remember it and twist its meaning. They will torture and kill in the name of a parable. They will fight insane wars for its correct interpretation. They will slay children for the love of a metaphor and burn women alive in praise of an allegory. And thus will your will be done, not mine.

  THE CALL-GIRLS

  A tragi-comedy

  In Memoriam Messieurs Bouvard et Pecuchet

  The characters in this tale are fictitious, but the authors, publications and experiments quoted by them are authentic.

  Sunday

  ‘He ought to sound his horn,’ Professor Burch remarked nervously as the bus rounded a hairpin bend and without further ado was swallowed up by a tunnel, vanishing into the belly of the petrified whale lined with jagged basalt. The tunnel was narrow, and the driver had to creep along in first gear; it looked as if the sharp ridges jutting out of the rock might scratch or break a window at any moment. The engine of the ancient bus made such a racket that the Professor’s neighbour, an apple-cheeked young friar, had to wait, before replying, for the end of the tunnel. ‘They must be experienced chaps,’ he said reassuringly. ‘After all, they do the run from the valley up to Schneedorf three times a day.’

  ‘He should nevertheless sound his horn,’ Hector Burch repeated, but his words were swallowed by a waterfall thundering down the rock-face and vanishing into the precipice under the narrow bridge they were crossing. They entered a second tunnel, which seemed an even tighter fit, and much longer than the first.

  The young Copertinian Brother, Tony Caspari, enjoyed the thrills of the climb immensely, although he felt less confident than he pretended to be. Neither he nor Burch knew that the villagers of Schneedorf, renowned for their juicy humour, called the three tunnels on their road ‘the spiky virgins’, and that occasionally a mail-bus did get stuck in the middle one, which at a certain point had only a couple of inches’ clearance on either side. When that happened, a gang of road-menders – for the road was always on the mend, either after a landslide or a cloudburst – alerted by the protracted hooting which echoed from the rocks, betook themselves to the trapped bus with its trapped passengers. They were armed with long poles – straight young fir-trees stripped of bark and branches – which they inserted under the front or back axle of the bus, as the case might be, and with fierce shouts of ‘Ho-o-oh-ruck, ho-o-oh-ruck’, using the poles as levers, incredibly managed to edge the bus away from the rock-face. It was much the same method which the natives of Easter Island had once used to erect their giant statues – and presumably also the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids.

  In winter the bus mainly brought loads of Fräuleins, bristling with skis and pointed sticks. They occasionally got a little hysterical, although it had been explained to them that the gravel and salt strewn on the icy road made it perfectly safe. The largest contingents of Fräuleins were schoolteachers and postmistresses from England and Sweden. At the start of the season, most of the oafish village lads became transformed into glamorous ski-teachers in red anoraks adorned with blue badges, who, at the arrival of each busload, amiably settled among themselves who should seduce which of the more promising-looking Fräuleins. There were no rivalries or quarrels; the villagers had their ritual ways of sharing out the loot, as they had their fixed ways of exchanging wedding and funeral gifts of fixed amounts in strictly traditional, but eminently practical ways.

  In summer, however, the village assumed a different identity: it became a centre for scientific and cultural congresses. Instead of giggling Fräuleins, the yellow bus brought loads of elderly egg-heads. The present season, which had only just started, was to feature fifteen congresses, conferences and symposia; they were all listed on a leaflet, which Professor Burch had been studying with his usual single-minded concentration before they got into the tunnels. There was to be a Congress of the Society for the Study of Diseases of the Vocal Chords; an International Congress on the Technology of Artificial Limbs; a Symposium on the Responsibilities of Scientists in a Free Society; another on the Ethics of Science and the Concept of Democracy; a seminar on the Use of Solid Fuels in Rocket-Propulsion Systems; a Congress of the European Psychiatric Association on the Origins of Violence; a Symposium of the World Organization of Psychiatrists on the Roots of Aggression;
the International Society for the Quantitative Study of Social Behaviour was to hold a Seminar on Self-Regulatory Mechanisms in Interpersonal Interrelationships; the Swiss Poetry Club was organizing a series of lectures on Archetypal Symbols in the Folklore of the Bernese Oberland; and there were going to be three Interdisciplinary Symposia with titles which contained the three words ‘Environment’, ‘Pollution’ and ‘Future’ in three different permutations.

  The young friar was also studying the leaflet. ‘One wonders,’ he remarked, ‘why the European Psychiatrists and the World Psychiatrists can’t get together when they are discussing the same subject.’

  ‘Different schools,’ Burch replied gruffly. ‘Analytical orientation versus pharmacological orientation. They are at each other’s throats.’

  ‘I remember now,’ Tony said eagerly. ‘I read how they keep excommunicating each other. What a pity.’

  ‘The methods of the Church in dealing with heretics were more deplorable,’ snapped Burch.

  ‘But more effective,’ said Tony, smiling through innocent blue eyes.

  ‘That’s a cynical remark for a member of your Order.’

  ‘But we are trained to be cynical,’ Tony said brightly. ‘Every Friday in the seminar we have to build a bonfire of our illusions.’

  Professor Burch pointedly reached into his briefcase and extracted therefrom the galley-proofs of the latest edition of his textbook on The Quantitative Measurement of Behaviour in its Social and Genetic Aspects. It was mandatory reading for graduate students; by the time it was published, much of it would be out of date, and he would have to start preparing the next revised edition – a frustrating and lucrative business.

  The bus had by now emerged from the romantic but somewhat sinister gorge through which it had battled its way; the mountains on both sides opened up, curving away into softer slopes which irresistibly reminded poor Tony of female bosoms expanding from the cleavage. The sky, which further down had been overcast, changed into the intense, saturated blue found only at great heights. The rest of the world was drenched in varied tints of green: meadows, slopes, pine-woods, grass, moss and fern. There were no cornfields, no signs of cultivation, only the pastures and the woods, displaying their different ideas of greenness.