In all of this confusion—like Harry Callaghan—I forget myself sufficiently that I accidentally chat up and make friends with the fine-featured woman sitting opposite me, and it emerges that her name is Beth, and that she is from Herringbone and that she has just left her boyfriend because he was seeing a dancer named Boots on the side. By the time Professor Idlewild has sufficiently recovered himself to break into the conversation, I have even managed to make some forays into the knotty problem of what we will talk about when we go for a drink later in the week. The answer, of course, is politics.
POLITICS IS very much in fashion at Jarndice, because—aside from being a topic specifically frowned upon in Ye Ordinanses—it is also one which provokes lively debate, passionate shouting matches and wildly inconsistent positions, and is therefore ideal for student posturing and social one-upmanship. The flashpoint of the day is the Addeh Katir Problem.
Addeh Katir is a small nation rubbing shoulders with a variety of big ones. It is temperate and tropical both, richly colourful, lush and splendid. A great chain of lakes runs along its spine (the largest of these being Lake Addeh, quietly famous because its water was for many years reckoned to be the last word in tea-making) and this fertile interior is wrapped in sheltering peaks, the eponymous Katirs, which jut eastwards from the Himalayas and have embraced Lake Addeh and its smaller companions as if determined to keep them.
Politically, the best description of Addeh Katir might be that it is broken. There are many failed states, but this one has rather been vandalised. The place has no inherent ethnic tensions owing to the somewhat unique circumstances of its creation: the people of today’s Addeh Katir are descended from assorted thoughtful souls who grew bored with the endless pendulum of massacres and treaties in their own countries, and also with a curious ban on fermented beverages being then imposed by party-poopers of the Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and Hindu faiths, and also by various other sects and cults with a me-too approach to religious prohibition. They therefore hoofed it from what are now China, Tibet, Pakistan and India, and headed to the Katir mountains to hide out and (to be honest) get drunk. Arriving on the shores of Lake Addeh, they found that the entire indigenous population had been wiped out by a variation of rubella to which they were by and large immune.
Thus presented with a nation ready-made, they proceeded to divide the overlarge parcel of land as equitably as they knew how, and set about living as quietly as they could. They selected as their leader a minor noble expelled from his home for unrecorded but minor sins and basically told him not to bug them too much, and he didn’t, and nor did his son, or his son, and so on, a tradition of benign indifference which has endured into the present. Their languages blended together, and so did their genes, and after a few generations they forgot they’d ever been from anywhere else. The British conquered Addeh Katir as a matter of course, looked at the infrastructure and established that the Katiris were quite content to fly any damn silly flag as long as they were allowed to get on with it. Bored ladies and jaded gentlemen of the Raj spent a certain amount of time chasing nubile Katiris up and down wooden staircases and along polished verandas, and that—along with the adoption of English as Addeh Katir’s second tongue—was by and large the full extent of the Imperialist Yoke. The colonial project is considerably less enjoyable when you can’t think of any improvements and the place runs itself so well that you feel rude making suggestions. When the British departed the subcontinent in 1947, there was a brief period of unrest brought about by a cartel of opium traders seeking to move their product along the waterways of Addeh Katir. The reaction of the lake-dwellers was sufficiently emphatic that the project was abandoned.
In 1966, however, the All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group—under the great Developmental Initiative which was begun in that year with a view to raising the entire world beyond the reach of poverty through triumphant large-scale capitalism—made a loan to Addeh Katir. It was a most curious loan in that it was not requested and the nation never drew on it. It sat in an account and accumulated a certain amount of interest. Strangely, however, the incurred debt accumulated interest more rapidly. Thus, in 1986, when the loan was due to be repaid, the bank was in fact owed several tens of millions of dollars in addition to the original enormous amount. Addeh Katir was called to account. The maharaja pointed out that he hadn’t asked for a loan, didn’t need it, had entered into no contract with anyone and had never benefited from the money. The All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group responded that while this argument was not without intuitive appeal, the situation was now ipso facto a counterintuitive matter, in that it dealt with the intricacies of the economic system, which often defied common sense, and that the nation of Addeh Katir had benefited from a perception by investing businesses that the loan was there to be drawn on at need. The maharaja responded that no businesses had invested in Addeh Katir. No businesses, in fact, had been invited to do so. Addeh Katir was just fine, thank you. The All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group got snarky and told the maharaja to pay up. The maharaja, very politely, told the All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group to stick this suggestion in its ear. The All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group alerted the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to the now-obvious truth: the maharaja was a cryptocommunist.
The maharaja was overthrown during an extremely expensive and well-organised insurgency of questionable representativeness and replaced by one Erwin Mohander Kumar, an Anglo-Indian immigrant, former drug-smuggler and noted syphilitic, who under the banner of the Katiri Provisional Authority was detailed to bring Addeh Katir into the economic fold. He immediately signed a document committing the nation to paying its debt, and followed this up by according himself certain seigneurial prerogatives regarding the women of the locality. Addeh Katir collapsed into civil war, but at least there was no danger of it falling into the hands of the communists.
The Addeh Katir Problem of the new semester is a consequence of this sad chapter. Erwin Kumar’s depredations have created a resistance movement. The lakes of Addeh are now home to a kind of buccaneer named Zaher Bey, reportedly a giant warrior, a militarised Gandhi, who has been acclaimed ruler of the islands and of a nation of piratical revolutionaries. This Colossus, clad only in traditional sailor’s trousers and brandishing a great cutlass in either massive fist, absolutely rejects the Katiri debt, and has inspired in the womanhood of Addeh Katir and the surrounding nations a twittering of fraught sexual fascination. A Bollywood film has been released which features a marriageable girl falling into the Bey’s awful clutches, and (through the media of dance numbers, upbeat love songs and demure glances) taming him so as to make of the monster an ideal husband. It is a weird combination of Beauty and the Beast and My Fair Lady. The racy subtext is that the Bey is something of a wild man in the sack, and one of the numbers was adjudged too fruity for domestic circulation, assuring instant distribution in electronic samizdat form through the sprawling internet/sneakernet of southern Asia. The Zaher Bey of this snappy piece of political commentary makes no mention of elections or responsible democratic government, but is not in any sense a diseased maniac with (as now turns out to be the case with Erwin Kumar) a foot fetish. The question under discussion in the halls of Jarndice—where, quite clearly, secret opinion-seekers wait around every corner to rush convincing students to the halls of international policymaking—is whether the mysterious Zaher Bey should be supported as a friend of all mankind or reviled as a terrorist.
Alas, it emerges that Beth believes the latter, and I the former. Our date is a bust, and she leaves me at our table to talk to a portly third-year named Dhugal, with an h.
FURIOUS AND HAIRY in cheap cowboy boots and a chequered red-and-black workshirt, I am the very model of modern disaffected youth. I am the spectrum of discontent, and each colour takes me far less than a whole winter. I wear a baseball cap and low-slung jeans and shout abuse at the smart set. I wear skintight black PVC and white foundation and I
glower and mourn the death of Byron in the back of the bar. From there I discover punk, and briefly have no hair at all, then am mistaken for a fascist by a group of businessmen who proceed to celebrate my bravery and drink my health, and driven by this horror I grow it out again. I go yuppie, briefly, when I get so angry at the world in general that I reject my own generation and its pathetic caring for this vile planet, and then I rediscover radicalism by sexual transmission. My co-revolutionist’s name is Aline.
Aline of the tangled dark hair and the improbable lips; Aline of the Roman nose and the pasta chef’s fingers; Aline of the astoundingly loud orgasms. She corners me after a study group and demands that I account for my ill-considered and old-fashioned views. She pins me to the wall and sets an arm on either side of me to prevent my escape, then lambasts me with referenced and footnoted counterpoints, and when I splutter my best high male affront, she leans closer and parts her lips, and silences me with a lush and frankly erotic kiss. Her mouth tastes of coffee and cigarettes and chewing gum, and she has thought this out (the politics and the kiss) far better than I. I am, however, just smart enough to respond by wrapping my arms around her and making the whole thing my decision, in so far as that is still possible, which is a delusion she allows me to keep. When we come up for air, it is time for dinner, and she knows just the place: an unlikely club tucked between a bank and a post office, a narrow corridor of tables opening onto a smoke-filled lounge at the back. It is called Caucus (definite and indefinite articles denote a bourgeois need to distinguish a favoured locality from one which is accessible to the lumpenproletariat, and hence Caucus—known like a dear friend as Cork—eschews them, and indeed the inadvertent use of articles on sequential occasions can be grounds for suspension or some form of fortfeit) and it is an old and respected bastion of radical opinion. I eat at Cork for months, and Aline feeds me sexual ecstasy and political agony, and I become, if not a man, at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, and there is a bounce in my step, and a swagger, and I grow familiar with the faces around me and gradually even understand something of what they talk about.
The denizens of Cork go by names like Iggy, Quippe and Brahae—this by choice rather than because their mothers called them such things—and they lean heavily towards black jeans and leather waistcoats. They will argue about almost anything, at any time, but mostly they argue about the Global Open Market Agreement (which is not exciting) and the Eurasian Economic Partnership (which is even less so) because these unexciting things govern who is rich and who is poor and who starves and who survives, all of which are rather more interesting.
“GOMA will fall,” Aline asserts one afternoon, “because it depends on constant correction by the government—that’s not an invisible hand, it’s a glass fist, and sooner or later it will shatter and the whole illusion will come—” And surely she intends to say “apart,” but she does not because Quippe, who is meaty and a cheat at cards, flings up his chubby hands and cries out that she is insane, that GOMA is perfectly balanced on the moralistic spike up its own arse, and nothing short of revolutionary surgery will get it off.
“Poppycock,” says Sebastian, and there is silence. Sebastian does not speak on small matters. Like Aline, he is somewhat Italian, and like her also he has served time in the student brigades. He has been struck repeatedly by oppressing policemen and once set fire to a barricade in Amsterdam. Sebastian can quote a string of revolutionaries from Socrates to Lenin to Michael Moore and knows the numbers on any claim you care to make. He knows how much the sea level has risen and which nations are most at risk. He knows the precise atmospheric projections for the next ten years, the next twenty, the end of the century. He knows the GDP of Uganda and the percentage of the total global economy which is derived from drugs and prostitution. He knows all this, or can make it up so smoothly and uncheckably that the difference is moot.
“Revolution,” Sebastian says, as if we should all have known this already, “is reaction. It’s the body politic in spasm. When was the last time you saw someone in the throes of an epileptic fit?”
No one mentions Lay Chancellor Idlewild, but his dandruffed head hangs like a collective hallucination before us.
“So,” says Sebastian, “would you choose that moment to ask the patient about taxation? Or, would they mind holding your newborn child? No? So why on Earth would you imagine that a revolution would be the ideal moment to propound a better way of living?” He rolls his eyes, which by coincidence draws everyone’s gaze to the narrow and very fetching scar which marks his otherwise flawless brow—courtesy of a Dutch riot policeman whom Sebastian later befriended.
“The problem isn’t who is in charge. It’s what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good—makes them human—is ruled out. The system doesn’t care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises. The only revolution which matters,” Sebastian concludes, “is the one where we stand up and do it for ourselves.”
When he doesn’t get much in the way of response, Sebastian shrugs and returns to his magazine and his vodka tonic. Aline picks up the conversational ball and runs for the scoring line. Quippe and the others are still goggling a bit at the idea that revolution might be a bad thing, and she touches down with “. . . and that’s why the means of production [citations, quote] is teleologically orientated towards penetrative modes [citations, data], which entails ambient and inherent injustice on a monstrous scale!” And everyone nods. Aline glances at me and licks her lips, because political discussion leads inevitably in one direction for her, and we leave and go to my apartment. Society may—or may not—be teleologically oriented towards penetrative modes, but there’s no question about Aline.
Sex and politics and a free passport to cool are all a growing boy could wish, and the high is compounded when we demonstrate and shout and flee the myrmidons of the law and steal a policeman’s helmet and mount it over the bar at Cork. When the drunken conga line of victory is over and we adjourn to Aline’s flat, it transpires that the helmet is not all she has stolen. I emerge from the shower to find her nude and wearing nothing but a pair of service-issue handcuffs and kneeling, breathless, on her own bed. Fortunately, she has also stolen the key.
THE PHONE CALL comes the following morning. It is Elisabeth Soames, but she is crying and speaking almost entirely in a foreign language. I try to slow her down. I ask her, very gently and simply, to be calm, and to speak English—or at least I attempt to do this, but some transference has occurred and I cannot actually say anything, because my throat has closed and my mouth is full of salt and water. When I’ve dealt with that, my nose starts running and I find tears on my face. Elisabeth rants at me, or rather she screams and rages in general and I am the person who is witness to it. The whole time, she keeps lapsing into her alien tongue: strange, hard syllables which have no place in my head, which make no sense. And still, perhaps because she is so upset, I cannot stop crying and my throat is raw. At some point in all this, I look for Aline, but she has left for an early lecture. I am not sure whether this is desertion or mercy. I am not sure whether she was here when the phone rang.
Elisabeth is silent for a while, or at least she doesn’t talk. She rasps down the phone, and when I listen I realise that I am hearing my own breathing as well, phlegmy and uneven. We have been doing this for over an hour. And finally I can hear what she has been saying. I can remember the conversation, the endless, circular awfulness of the last sixty minutes, and I know she has not been speaking a foreign language at all. It’s not the words which are the problem, it’s the thing itself. She has been telling me that Wu Shenyang is dead. And with that understanding I lose track of however long it takes until I am standing outside what used to be his house, and she is sitting alone on the kerb, wi
th her feet in the gutter, and that is how I spend my day.