The Call-Girls (11 page)

‘But we have. You have, and Harriet has, and Wyndham and Tony. That's why we are here.'

Solovief stopped to pick up a clump of greyish snow which had escaped the sun's attention in a crevice, and kneaded it between his palms into a hard ball. He aimed it at a telegraph pole and missed. ‘You know what I mean. To believe is easy. To disbelieve is easy. To disbelieve one's own disbelief is hard.'

‘I know,' said Claire. ‘But it keeps one going.'

‘It keeps one going – like a squirrel in a revolving cage.'

‘I think we ought to get back,' said Claire. ‘I forget who is next on the menu.'

‘Petitjacques.' Nikolai laughed, his anger suddenly gone. ‘If ever there was a frenzied squirrel in a cage, it's him.'

Nobody knew, even approximately, Raymond Petitjacques's age. In successive editions of the
International Who's Who
and suchlike reference books his date of birth varied up and down by as much as ten years. If a conscientious editor raised a query, he replied that everybody is as old as he feels. One of his favourite sayings was ‘
Epater le bourgeois
is old hat.
Il faut le mystifier
.' Mystification was as much second nature to him as pedantry to Burch. Harriet claimed that the best approximation to determine his real age was Newton's inverse square law: Petitjacques's appearance increased in youthfulness with the square of the distance. From the other end of the room he appeared to be under forty. The closer one got, the more parchment-like the skin became, with a
kind of tautness that gave the impression of plastic surgery.

His impromptu talk had indeed, as Blood had foreseen, the spicy ingredients and mushy consistency of a goulash sprinkled with hot curry. It gave Claire a craving for a toothpick. At the same time she began to be frightened. Petitjacques was preaching hatred in the name of love. As he warmed to his subject, the Mephistophelean charm gave way to bilious malice; a fine spray issued from his eloquent lips; he seemed to be literally spitting venom. In the name of peace he was declaring war against an undefined enemy. This enemy, to which he referred elusively as ‘The System', seemed to change all the time its character and identity, from a mythological monster devouring its own children to a sociological abstraction somehow related to advertisements for washing machines in the mass-media. This monster appeared to be wearing, at one and the same time, a steel-helmet, a bowler-hat and a mortar-board; he polluted the minds of young sociology students by teaching them History, and of budding sculptors by lessons in anatomy; he was a computerized Fascist Pig with a pre-natal phobia of pubic hair (which, to the embryo, represents the hostile jungle); and he was a shameless hypocrite – ‘the hypocrisy of the system,
chers amis,
is epitomized by the monstrous segregation of public lavatories for men and women'.

His talk was interstitched with such self-parodying remarks, yet there could be no doubt that his hatred of ‘the system' – of Western civilization in all its aspects – was genuine and obsessive. The system had to be destroyed in order to liberate society, and it could only be destroyed by all-out guerilla war. An all-out guerilla war did not require nuclear weapons. Its aim was the disintegration of the entire social fabric, fibre by fibre, until the streets were no longer safe for pedestrians sporting the conventional garbs of the system, until they would no longer dare to turn the ignition key in their cars for fear that it might activate a plastic bomb; nor board an aeroplane, for nobody could tell whether it would reach its destination, or any destination at all. Secretaries in big industrial firms would refuse to use
typewriters for fear they might be booby-trapped; prosperous suburbanites would not dare to send their children to school for fear that they might be taken as hostages. The schools would have to close anyway, because teachers trying to teach ‘would be laughed in the face, if not punched in the nose and stripped
à poil,
to cure them of their pubic phobias'. So-called crimes of violence would mount in curves steeper than a rocket take-off – not only such system-engendered crimes as burglary, but ritualized violence for its own sake,
l'art pour l'art.
The authorities would be helpless because you cannot stitch and patch up a rotten fabric in total disintegration. When the police hunt for a criminal, they look first of all for a motive; but you cannot hunt down killers who act without a motive, without any personal grudge against the victim who is merely a symbol of the system – not a person, but a thing … ‘
Mes amis,
you always forget what an extraordinarily remarkable thing it is that you can walk in a dark street past a person who could club you over the head just for the fun of it and never be found out. Why does he not do it? Because he is caught in the social fabric, a tight-woven web, a system, based on a tacit agreement, an implicit
contrat social,
which guarantees the security of Jean walking past Jacques in a dark street. It is not the police who protect him but the fabric, the tacit contract, for without it every Jacques and Jean would need his own bodyguard. So when the fabric of the system disintegrates into shreds, security disintegrates with it, and law and order all become an idyllic memory of the past. The aim of all-out guerilla warfare,
chers amis,
is to complete this disintegration of the fabric which is already well on its way …'

When he had finished – abruptly, with an uncompleted sentence, as if he had suddenly got bored and saw no point in going on – there was an embarrassed silence. Niko was surprised to discover that his tough call-girls were still capable of embarrassment. He glanced invitingly at several participants in turn, but nobody seemed anxious to speak; even Bruno merely shrugged his shoulders and gave a silent demonstration of washing his hands. At last Sir Evelyn, who
during Petitjacques's lecture had pretended to be taking his afternoon nap, hands folded over his bulging stomach, seemed to rouse himself. ‘Mr Chairman,' he drawled plaintively, ‘I think we have heard all that odious flim-flam before, more than a century ago, from another crop of feebleminded baboons, the Nihilists in the happy days of the Tsars. If M. Petitjacques has ever heard the name of Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoievski, 1821–1881, I would suggest he reads the novel
The Possessed,
and he will realize that the revolutionary message that he offers us consists of old chestnuts.'

‘Ah,' said Petitjacques, regaining his mocking amiability, ‘you are quoting literature. I shall answer you with Antoine Artaud's irrefutable statement: “The literature of the past was good enough for the past but is not good enough for the present.”'

Halder ruffled his mane with a gesture of despair. ‘Programme!' he shouted at Petitjacques. ‘Your positive programme! Drop-out, pop-out, shoot, hoot,
in blinder Wut,
is not a programme. You have been pulling legs.'

‘You do not understand,' Petitjacques said patiently. ‘Our programme is not to have a programme. You can only advance if you do not know where you are going.'

‘Say that to a General.'

‘With Generals we hold no
dialogue
.'

‘
Quatsch
' Halder said feelingly; and there the discussion ended. For once the call-girls were unanimous in their disapproval – and that, Claire thought, was perhaps the only point in Petitjacques's favour. There was a despair in his clowning, the desperation of the frenzied squirrel, which she found more frightening than Nikolai's lucid awareness of doom.

Solovief was just going to close the session, when Gustav noisily entered the conference room and announced: ‘Telegram for Herr Professor Kaletski.' Having delivered it into

Bruno's eager hands, he performed a semi-military about-turn and left. There was a certain theatrical quality about the scene, and all eyes involuntarily turned on Bruno, as if receiving a telegram were a special event. But Bruno, a monument of imperturbable sang-froid, continued the elaborate operation of stuffing his attaché case with the litter of documents he had been reading during Petitjacques's talk (while politely cupping his ear with his free hand); and only when the operation was completed did he open the cable with a deft movement and a disparaging shrug. He seemed to take in the lengthy message at a single glance, and popped to his feet.

‘One moment, Mr Chairman, before we break up,' he announced in a voice trembling with emotion. ‘I have just received a message which, I venture to say, may be of some interest to the participants of our conference. It has been addressed to me by a personality very close to the President of the United States of America – a personality whose identity I am not at liberty to disclose. The message reads as follows…'

Bruno's glance swept briefly but emphatically round the faces at the table, then along the auditors at the back wall. Claire could not help suspecting that he had engineered beforehand Gustav's dramatic entrance.

‘… It reads as follows,' Bruno repeated. ‘“Professor Bruno Kaletski …” I will spare you the address, which incidentally the sender's secretary seems to have got slightly wrong – Schneehof instead of Schneedorf – otherwise the message would have reached us at the opening session, for which it was obviously intended … It reads: “Am instructed to convey informally Mr President's keen and agonized interest in outcome of your deliberations on quote approaches to survival unquote stop. In these critical days when future destiny of mankind at stake” – the text says “shake” but the intended meaning is evident – repeat: “when the destiny of mankind is at stake, the dedicated efforts of highpowered minds assembled at your conference may signify long overdue commencement of opening new
avenues towards hopeful future stop please communicate soonest possible conclusions reached by your conference which will be given earnest consideration on highest level stop cordially. Signed …” ' Abruptly Bruno sat down, as if to forestall an ovation.

And indeed, in the ensuing silence a faint clapping was heard. It was Miss Carey. One hand raised, she had cast a coy, questioning glance at Dr Valenti and, seeing his encouraging smile, had engaged in this solo performance. It was rather like a demonstration of the old Zen
koan
about the one hand clapping. Everybody left hurriedly for the room next door, where the soothing cocktails were served.

Nikolai did not feel like having more than one cocktail; he and Claire were among the first in the dining-room. They had unfolded their napkins when they saw Blood working his way down the spiral staircase and shuffling purposefully towards their table. He performed a surprisingly convincing imitation of a courtier's bow to Claire:

‘Are humble poets admitted to the Captain's table?'

‘Pray be seated, Sir Evelyn,' said Claire, returning the bow.

‘My acute sense of observation has taught me,' said Blood, lowering himself in slow motion into the chair next to hers, ‘that the prevailing etiquette of choosing one's table at interdisciplinary symposia is inspired by Charles Darwin's highly questionable theory which ascribes the progress of evolution to chance mutations. Those who adhere to this theory choose seats at random. They walk like somnambulists to the first empty chair in sight, regardless of whether their neighbours happen to be neuro-pharmacologists or classical scholars, in the eternal, naive hope of engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue. Needless to say, the dialogue consists in exchanging asinine remarks about weather, health-foods and slipped discs, whereafter they dry up and
lapse into the strained silence of strangers on a train. It all goes to show that the
uomo universale
died with the Renaissance. What we have now is
homo Babel
– each of us babbling away in his own specialized lingo on that presumptuous tower which is due to collapse any minute now.'

‘Rot,' said Harriet, who had just come in, putting her stick under the table and sinking into the remaining empty chair. ‘You are plagiarizing John Donne's “'tis all in pieces, all coherence gone …” He was tearing his hair out just because Copernicus said the earth was not the centre of the world…'

Blood eyed her with undisguised loathing. ‘Begging your forgiveness, gracious lady, Donne was right. Copernicus and his cronies started taking the cosmic jig-saw to pieces, and all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put it together again.'

H.E. decided to ignore him, and turned to Nikolai:

‘What did you make of Bruno's
coup de théatre
?'

Nikolai shrugged; he was using a delicious local bread-roll to model a creature that looked like a dinosaur. ‘It was difficult to take seriously, like everything else coming from Bruno. But that is just his personality. He does have real influence – after all, he is on the Advisory Board and so on. Up there, they do seem to take him seriously. God knows what their criteria of seriousness are.'

‘A bottle of Neuchâtel,
Schätzchen?
Blood said to Mitzie, who was serving the thick pea soup, with chunks of sausage in it.

‘Big bottle?' Mitzie asked.

‘Indeed a full bottle,
Schätzchen.
You should know my little habits by now.'

Nikolai ordered a carafe of the local red. ‘Just who or what is to be taken seriously?' he repeated belligerently.

‘I have the doubtful privilege of having supped with many a politician,' said Blood. ‘It goes with being a call-girl laureate. I was never able to take any of them seriously – I mean as a human being – whatever that means. The power – yes. The person – no. They reminded me of performing
seals in a circus, balancing balls on their snouts – balls filled with dynamite.'

‘You could use the same metaphor for scientists,' said Nikolai. ‘When Einstein proclaimed the equivalence of energy and mass, nobody took it seriously, except as a feat of mental acrobatics – balancing abstract equations in the circus of science. Until he dropped the ball…'