B007P4V3G4 EBOK (24 page)

'Not those words ... but your foolish erring pains me ... I
forgive you. .
.'

'Of course you forgive me ... that's your job ... better not to
make so much of it, I should say ... do I make much of the fact that I do not forgive, not ever ... though the latter is surely the
better disposition. . .'

10

He got up and he said: I must make haste now, and alas I cannot
do anything for you ... I give you my forgiveness and my
sincerest blessing.'

He approached me ... he stretched out his hands, the bleeding
ones, above my head. I hated his loving humaneness, while I
feared most terribly that he would soil my dark-tressed head I
loved so well with his tepid blood. Dizzy with hatred my fingers
gripped his wrists and I wildly wrenched his red hands downwards
so the joints crunched. He moaned with pain but I did not spare
him. In tepid streams his stigmata bled more rapidly under the
cramped grip of my fingers.

I forgive you ... it is not this blood that flows away that pains
me ... but your erring does so ... how is Our Father to forgive
you this ..

Rage over his forgiveness turned my eyes red, the blood was
raging in my ears. Then, wildly, I broke his stance ... twisting his
arms, pushing him over backwards so that he sank down, miserable in the dripping blood. I mated him with the rage of my
lithe body that jerked over his and humiliated him. And thus I
violated him, with hands that flailed; with feet that trod down;
with tremulous mouth full of fine-marauding little teeth that
tugged at flesh beneath thin-white clothing. He did not defend
himself.

Then sadness and tiredness came over me from this wild, furious
union. My overwrought body lay on his, powerless. My eyes
touched upon the still-deep gaze of his own, dark and benevolent.
And I hated him for his love of humanity.

11

After I had regained consciousness, I saw the dark-deep eyes of the
Devil gleam down in mine. He had laid down my body close to
his so that I heard the blood-beat of his heart. Timidly I looked
around the chamber. 'No,' said Soton, 'he has gone and his filthy
blood has been cleared up ... be calm.'

'Do I never have to see him again? I don't ever want to see him
again ... I hate him so much.'

'No, Heleen, now he will leave you in peace ... not because
you have beaten him so and bitten him ... his profession is to be
tortured in public really ... but in private like that, this he quite
likes too ... but he does see that you remain loyal to me, no
matter what ... I am so pleased about that.'

'At first I didn't ... I was faithless ... do you actually know
that?'

'Yes, my boy, I know ... I stayed in communion with the two
of you ... and at first I was indeed afraid ... he is so easy and so
unremarkable, and with that he has so much influence...'

'I did love him in the past . .

'You see, Heleen, people live and think in tribes ... they have
fatherlands ... you have to stay out of all those ... only live and
think ... despise all fatherlands ... don't be meek in life and don't be
charitable ... then you'll see what beauty you will find ... do you
know, my boy, that you must be everything yourself?'

I looked into his eyes and listened to the ecstasy of his voice.
He laughed. Trembling, sobbing, I knew that my happiness was
approaching.

The Devil bent forward, his mouth down to my he
kissed me, and he called me: 'darling'.

Fritzi Harmsen van Beek

As we were getting in, we hadn't noticed that there was a taxi-pig
in the car, along for the ride as well. And it's questionable whether
we would have said anything about it, had we noticed.

Not very likely, to be honest.

For a start, it's not really advisable, before placing one's life in
another's hands, to embark on comments which the driver of such
a vehicle might take to be unpleasant. Such a taxi-pig might easily
be his friend or, even worse, his little lady wife he had been forced
to drag along everywhere from sheer necessity. But even the one
who is prepared to take such a risk is left with another difficulty, is
left sitting there, gob shut, often until death follows - or else
maimed for life, in any case. For how, for god's sake, does one
recognise a taxi-pig before the driver has started the car?

Am I right, or am I right? An impossibility: as long as no
driving is being done, it is not to be recognised, and as long as it
cannot be recognised one can hardly come trotting out with
objections. There's the rub.

Imagine you said, - Hold on, mate, slowly does it, please. Before
we set off, what's that pink little animal down there in the front; not a
taxi-pig by any chance, is it? - and the chap says how COULD you
say such a thing, that's my own ... (you name it) and if you don't like
it, you'd better take the bus, - so that, from a feeling of self-worth,
you're obliged to get out and make the journey by public transport in
the random company of eighty-five other pigs, and later on you then
hear from others who were less prone to flying off the handle that it
WASN'T even a taxi-pig: it was quite simply the peasant's brother!
There's you looking goggle-eyed when you're just returning, right
brainwashed and almost beyond repair, from the local transport
corporations. Such things, too, are irreparable.

But the taxi-pig I'm talking about right now: we hadn't noticed
it. The notion that it was simply sitting in, somewhere in the front,
of course, this had not entered our heads because we were far too
busy with ourselves and with the beavers.

Those beavers: having to set out on a journey with them is no
joke. It had been for their sakes, more or less, that we had
conceived the plan of going IN COGNITO, so there we were, all
four in the back: the two of them together, clearly recognisable,
and we, as if nothing was up, in our shoddy disguises. And the
driver did look old-fashioned for a moment, but even if he did
cotton on, he never showed that at all.

- And that's how it should be, we even thought, with that
stupid smugness which, on the whole, leads you to sail, eyes
skinned, head-on into disasteration.

Our wayfaring began at once. Bawled out by preposterous
crows, we travelled in stately slow-motion down the garden path,
crunching the sparse gravel festively beneath our huge wheels,
triumphantly leaving behind a clear and meaningful little chain of
deadly exhaust-fume-clouds in our knife-sharp wake. The day was
wintry. And of a similar colour - that colour of gravely isolated,
insufferable, stale bread - were heaven and earth that day: skies
snow-blending with fields, their differences only feebly shored up
by some black stick-and-branch-work.

There we were, travelling quite busily from the word go, really:
leering, refined and brain-dead by turns, sideways at the not
particularly varied perspective behind the car-door windows, and
then again staring, wam-bam, narrowly past the back of the
remarkably detailed head of the driver, on to the road ahead of us,
at the vanishing point ever-running out ahead of us: that head start
in the snow, never to be caught up with, and at the vague
whiteness of the stretch still to be covered which, meanwhile,
passing immediately beneath us, was already being covered in
elegant gulleys of sludge and muck.

So ambiguous, so elevated and yet vulgar at the same time, so
full of mysterious contradictions, shifting inconspicuously - when
all goes well and everything happens without
travel.

It's quite certain we had already gained speed alarmingly when,
in the first bend to the right, sliding like greased lightning across
the imitation leather, we were slammed into the car door on the
left and we began to shout - Hey, you; and the taxi-pig suddenly
said - Yeah, sure. No more than that. Just this: yeah, sure. In a
neutral tone of voice, it is true, but incontrovertibly pig-like.

From fright, we forgot we had those beavers and were IN
COGNITO and had to keep our traps shut if we were not to have fingers pointing at us, in all the villages and God-knows-whereelse, throughout the entire region even, as being debauched halfwits; for, once a rumour like that spreads then there's no stopping
it - and we burst forth in unholy ranting and raving.

And then that cunning, incomparable taxi-pig!

It sat there, motionless, and kept on driving, even gave proceedings an extra dose of the accelerator, and kept its gob shut until
we'd shot our bolts and, unpleasant and delicate, went and sat in
silence and already began to worry about what the catastrophic
consequences of that gasket-blowing might be, and even began to
feel like saying - Ah, well; and - Come, come; and more of the
like, not so much out of shame or regret, but only to salvage the
salvageable.

Then it went and sat staring out ahead of itself, inscrutable,
mumbling so we couldn't make out a thing and we finally ended
up saying - Hey; - What; and then, at last, it could point out its
specially prepared party-piece to us: mounted, clearly visible, on
the dashboard, a nameplate which in white little capitals read
BACKSEATDRIVING?NOTHANKS! - that hurtful, hurtful pig.

There, now: it finally had us where it wanted us.

Marcus Heeresma

Thudding and jarring on its shock absorbers, the man in the
immaculate, off-white, three-piece suit steers the large car through
a gradually narrowing network of unlit, unmetalled streets with
open sewers and crooked, tumbledown hovels. The man appears
immune to the penetrating stench of garbage and excrement. And
yet it must be here, he thinks. It had been explained to him, more
or less, at the club, after all. Again: respectable people, all of them.
Here too, in Peru, things were going to suit him just fine.

The man in off-white works fora European government which
flogs all kinds of things for which no market can be found
elsewhere any more: for lack of parts, because of faulty materials or
defects in an even broader sense, but for which an application can
be found even now, here or in other so-called third-world countries,
or for which applications can be created and such 'creations' must
simply be endured. They're quite simply forced to, the man thinks,
smiling. On pain of being denied the monies set at their disposal
by the delivering country, monies, gathered in by the taxpayers of
those countries and earmarked in principle for all kinds of idealistic
purposes often viewed by others, however, as being impractical. And these monies are often used largely to finance those
'creations' therefore, and to finance the people on the spot who
have to keep the markets open a bit. Ah yes, indeed: business.
Many Latin-American countries, once a year, for goodwill too, sell
a war criminal from stock and for a great deal of money. That's the
way it should be, too, all this.

The man has been here some seven months by now, and trips
such as these have already obliged him a few times to replace the
shock absorbers on his car. But it's worth it no end. And money no
object, of course. At the club, somebody had called him 'one of the
dump-mongers' but, well, the man had been tiddly and, roaring
with laughter, had declared to be dealing in waste himself, too.
'These countries are dumping grounds, after all.' And yet, you
need to be careful where you shout such things about the place. 'Garbage,' the man in off-white mumbles. A glass and a bottle
stand in a holder fixed to the dashboard and the man pours himself
a drink.

Rats, children, pets, the prematurely elderly, people with drab
dog-skin shoot away in the dancing floodlight of the heaving car
manoeuvring its way round the deepest potholes. Hours of driving
through darkness and stench in the damp, hot Lima night have
strung themselves into one until finally the network of stinking
mayhem runs into a dead-end on one of the many garbage tips of
the Peruvian capital - in the night, according to the man, that
trembles sultrily with heat and impending manslaughter.