The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

His old friend Professor Chundaprassi was walking slowly up and down, helping himself along with a stick. He nodded to Morilal.

‘May I have the honour and pleasure of joining you, professor, if I do not interrupt a chain of meditation?’

‘You interrupt nothing, my friend. In fact, I was about to ask if you would delight me by joining me, but I feared you might be about to engage in a little mourning.’

‘No, no, I have only myself to mourn for. You possibly know I have been away for some while?’

‘Forgive me, but I was not aware. You recall I greeted you yesterday at the railway station. Have you been away since then?’

Morilal had fallen in with Chundaprassi, walking sedately through the puddles and wet ash; now he stopped in some confusion and gazed into the wrinkled face of his companion.

‘Professor – you are a professor, so you understand many things above the powers of ordinary men such as myself – though even as I say “ordinary men such as myself”, I am conscious of my own extraordinariness. I am a unique being –’

‘Of course, of course, and the point really cannot be too greatly emphasised. No two men are alike! There are a thousand characteristics, as I have always maintained –’

‘Quite so, but I’m hardly talking about a characteristic, if you will forgive my being so disagreeable as to interrupt you when you are plainly just embarking on an interesting if somewhat long lecture on human psychology. And forgive me, also, if I seem to be talking rather like a Dostoevsky character – it’s just that lately I’ve been obsessed –’

‘Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky?’ The professor scratched his head. ‘Naturally I am familiar with the major writing of the Russian novelist … But I fail momentarily to recall which of his novels is set, even partially, in Benares.’

‘You mistake my meaning – unintentionally, I’m sure, since a little sarcasm is positively beyond you. I happen to be in a spot, professor, and if you can’t help, then to hell with you! My trouble is that my ego, or my consciousness, or something, is not fixed in time or space. Can you believe me if I tell you that no more than a couple of hours ago, I was a Belgian dentist at a seaside resort?’

‘Allow me to wish you good night, sir!’ The professor was about to turn away when Morilal grasped him by one arm.

‘Professor Chundaprassi! Please tell me why you are going so suddenly!’

‘You believe you are a white man! A Belgian white man! Clearly you are victim of some dreadful hallucination brought about by reading too much in the newspapers about the colour bar. You’ll be a Negro, next, no doubt! Good night!’

He pulled himself free from Morilal’s grip and tottered hurriedly from the burning ghat.

‘I will be a Negro and be damned to you, if I so desire!’ Morilal exclaimed aloud.

‘Congratulations, sir! You are quite right to exercise your freedom of judgment in such matters!’ It was one of the bathers who spoke, a fat man now busily oiling his large and glistening breasts; Morilal had noticed that he was avidly listening to the conversation with the professor and had already taken a dislike to the man.

‘What do you know about it?’ he enquired.

‘More than you may think! There are many people like yourself, sir, who are able to move from character to character, like birds from flower to flower. I myself, but yesterday, was a beautiful young Japanese lady aged only twenty years with a tiny and beautifully-proportioned body, and a lover of twenty-two of amazing ardour.’

‘You are inventing filth, you fat old Bengali!’ So saying, he jumped at the man, who tripped him neatly but failed to stand back in time, so that Morilal took him with him as he fell, and they rolled together, hands at each other’s throat, down the slimy steps into the Ganges.

He dragged himself out of the river. For a while, as he lay on the bank with his head throbbing, he thought he had experienced another epileptic fit. Something of the chequered past came back to him, and he dragged himself up.

He was lying half out of a shallow stream, under a stone bridge. As he got to his feet, he saw the stream cut through a small country town. The place seemed to be deserted: so empty and so still that it looked almost like an artificial place. Slowly, he walked forward, down the curving street, staring at the small stone houses with their gardens neat and unmoving in the thin sun.

By the time he reached the other end of the street, where the buildings stopped and the fields began again, he had seen nobody. The only movement had come from an old cat, stuffily walking down a garden path. As he looked back the way he had come, he saw that he had just passed an unpretentious building bearing the sign POLICE STATION. For several minutes, he stared at it, and then moved briskly towards it, opened the door and marched in.

A portly man with a grey moustache that drooped uncomfortably over his lips sat reading a newspaper behind a counter. He wore a green uniform. When the door opened, he looked up, nodded politely and put down his paper.

‘What can I do for you, sir?’

‘I want to report a murder. In fact, I want to report three murders.’

‘Three murders! Are you sure?’

‘Not really. I don’t know whether I killed the persons concerned or not, but it must be worth checking. There was a friend of mine, a producer, and my fiancée, and a poor black man in India. I can give you their names. At least, I think I can remember. Then there’s the time and place …’

His voice died. He could see it was going to be difficult. His impulse had been to enlist help; perhaps it had not been a wise impulse. And had he ever been anyone else, or had it all been the product of a fever?

The policeman slowly came round the counter, adjusting his face until it was absolutely without expression.

‘You seem to have some very interesting ideas, sir, if I may say so. You wouldn’t mind if I ask you a question before you go any further? Good. You say you don’t know whether you killed these unknown persons or not?’

‘I – I get blackouts. I am never myself. I seem to work through a lot of different people. You’d better assume I did kill them.’

‘As you like, sir. Which brings me to my next question. How do you mean, one of them was a black man from India?’

‘It was as I said. He was very black. No offence meant – it’s just a fact. Quite an amusing man, now I come to think of it, but black.’

‘His clothes were black, sir?’

‘His clothes were white. He was black. His skin. Good heavens, man, you stare at me – I suppose you know that the people of India are pretty dark?’

The policeman stared at him with blank astonishment. ‘Their skins are dark, you say?’

‘Am I offending you in some way? I didn’t invent the idea, don’t forget! As sure as the good Lord took it into his head to make you and me this rather unattractive pink-white-grey tone, he made the Indians more or less brown and the Negroes more or less black. You do know that Negroes are black, I suppose?’

The policeman banged his fist on the desk. ‘You are mad! By golly, you are mad! Negroes are as white as you are.’

‘You mean the Negroes in Africa?’

‘Negroes anywhere! Whoever heard of a black Negro?’

‘The very word means black. It’s from a Latin root or something.’

‘From a Greek root meaning tall!’

‘You liar!’

‘You simpleton!’ The policeman leant over and grabbed his newspaper, smoothed it out angrily with his fists. ‘Here, this will show you! I’ll make you admit your stupidity, coming in here and playing your pointless jokes on me! An intellectual, I can see!’

He ruffled through the paper. Moore caught a glimpse of its title The Alabama Star and stared up incredulously at the policeman. For the first time, he realised the man’s features were distinctly negroid, though his skin was white and his hair fair and straight. He emitted a groan of fright.

‘You a Negro?’

‘Course I am. And you look at this news item – FIRE IN NEGRO UNIVERSITY. See that picture. See any negro there with black skin? What’s got into you?’

‘You may well ask, and I wish you’d stop grasping my shirt like that – it feels as if you have some chest hair with it, thanks. I’m not trying to play a joke on you. I must be in – well, I must be in some sort of an alternate universe or something. Hey, perhaps you are kidding me! Do you really mean people in Africa and India and so on have skins the same colour as us?’

‘How else could they be any other colour? Ask yourself that!’

‘They were where I come from.’

‘Now, how could they be? Just how could they be?’

‘I don’t know! It’s a matter of history. Some races are white, some yellow, some brown, some black.’

‘Some idea! And you say this arrangement happened in history. When?’

‘I didn’t say that! It happened way back … well, I don’t know when.’

‘I suppose your men originated from different coloured apes, huh?’

‘No, I think it all happened later than that … Stone Age, maybe. … Honestly, now you confront me with it, I must admit I don’t exactly know when the arrangement came about or how. It does sound a bit unlikely, doesn’t it?’

‘Anyone who could dream up the idea of men all different colours – wow! You must be a real nut! I suppose like it’s allegorical, with the good people being white and the bad black?’

‘No, no, not at all – though I admit a few of the white saw it like that. Or did I invent it all, the whole colour question? Perhaps it’s all another facet of my guilt, an awful phantasm I have thrown up from the depths of my mind, where I did the murders. They can’t have any subjective reality, either. Wait! I remember! I’m nearly there! Fyodor Dostoevsky, I’m coming!’

Hurriedly, he punched the policeman in the chest and braced himself for the reciprocal blow. …

He was tramping through the sand, ankle deep even in the main street of this shabby town. In the side streets, the sand climbed almost to the eaves of the shoddy wooden houses. Among the houses were buildings that he identified after a moment’s thought as mosques; they were no more than huts with wooden minarets added. There were Tartars here, moving slowly in their costumes of skin, some leading the two-humped camels of Bactria behind them through the street.

The man with whiskers and a stoop was just ahead of him. Morovitch drew level and looked sideways. He recognised the beetling brow and the haunted eyes, set deep in their sockets.

‘Second Class Soldier of the Line Dostoevsky?’ he asked.

Dostoevsky stared back at him. ‘I’ve not seen you in Semiplatinsk before. Are you with the Seventh Siberian Battalion?’

‘The correct answer to that, operatively, is no. I – well, sir, if I could talk to you for a moment … the fact is …’

‘It’s not a message from Marya Dmitrievna, is it?’ Dostoevsky asked impatiently, his face pale.

‘No, no, nothing so banal. In fact, I have come from the future to speak to you. Please, cannot we go to your room?’

Dostoevsky led the way in a sort of daze, shaking his head and muttering. He was still serving out his exile in Siberia, no longer as a convict but as a humble soldier in the army. His present home, to which he led Morovitch, was of the simplest, a poor room in one of the small wooden houses, containing little more than a bed, a table and one chair, and a round iron stove that could scarcely heat the flimsy room when the cruel winter came round again.

Humbly, Dostoevsky offered the intruder the chair, sat down on the bed himself, and produced some tobacco so that he and the visitor might roll themselves cigarettes and smoke together.

He passed a hand wearily over his face. ‘Where do you say you come from? You’re not – not a Decembrist?’

‘I am from what to you is the future, sir. In my age, my race recognises you as one of the great novelists of the world, by virtue of your profound insight into the guilt always lingering in the human mind. You are one of the supreme artists of suffering.’

‘Alas, I can write no more! The old ability has gone!’

‘But even now you must be gathering together your notes on prison life for the book you will call The House of the Dead. Turgenev will say the bath-house scene is pure Danté. It will be read and remembered long after you are dead, and translated far beyond the bounds of your native Russia. And greater masterpieces of guilt and suffering will follow.’

Dostoevsky hid his face in his hands. ‘No more! You will silence me forever if you speak thus, whether I believe it or not. You talk like the voices inside me, when another attack is coming upon me.’

‘I travelled back to you from the far future through a series of epileptic hosts. Others of my kind travel back through other illnesses – it is a matter of what we specialise in. I plan to travel slowly back through the generations to Julius Caesar, and beyond that … but you are a very important landmark on my way, for you are integral to the whole philosophy of my race, honoured sir! Indeed, you might say you were one of the founders of our philosophy.’

The writer rubbed the back of his neck in discomfort and shuffled his rough boots on the floor, unable to look straight at Morovitch. ‘You keep saying “our race” and “our kind”, but what am I to understand by that? Are you not Morovitch?’

‘I have infested Morovitch. We are parasitic – I am merely distorting his life a little, as I have distorted the lives of those I infested on my way back to you. Ah, the emotions I have stirred! How you would relish them, Fyodor Mikhaylovich! I have been in all kinds of persons and in all kinds of worlds, even in those that lie close in the probability spectrum to Earth – to some where man never formed himself into nationalities, to one where he had never divided into races with different coloured skin, to one where he never managed to gain supremacy over his fellow animals! All, all those worlds, absolutely stuffed with suffering! If you could see them you might think you yourself had created them.’

‘Now you mock me! I can create nothing, unless I have created you. Forgive me if that sounds insulting, but I have a fever on me today, which induces me to doubt somewhat your reality. Perhaps you’re part of my fever.’

‘I’m real enough! My race – you see I use the term again, but I would find it difficult to define it to you. You see, there are more millions of years ahead than you could comprehend, and in those long periods man changes very radically. In my time, man is first dependent on a milk-meat animal he breeds – a sort of super-cow – and then entirely parasitic upon it. Over millennia, he develops an astounding freedom and can travel parasitically back through the generations, enjoying the suffering of all, like a silverfish boring back through the pages of a large and musty volume: a silverfish who can read, sir, if you follow my image. You see – I let you into the secret!’

Dostoevsky coughed and stubbed out his ragged cigarette. He sat uncomfortably on the narrow bed, crossing and recrossing his legs. ‘You know I cannot believe what you say … Yet, tell me no secrets! I already know enough for one man; I’m burdened with knowledge about which I often ask myself, What good is it? And if it is true, as you say, that I have understanding of some of the dark things in the human heart, that’s only because I have been forced – though often I myself was the forcer – to look into the dark things in my own heart. And I have tried to reach truth; you are admitting, aren’t you, that you distort the lives you – well, if I say “infest”, it is your own word, isn’t it?’

‘We get more fun … A couple of days ago, I caused a Belgian dentist to jilt his girl friend. Maybe he even murdered her! We live on the dark passions. The human race always had a morbid tendency that way, you know, so don’t think of us as too abnormal. Most literature is just gloating over the sorrows and sins of others – of which you are one of the supreme and most honoured exponents.’

There were little flies that flipped down from the stained walls and landed persistently on the hands and faces of the two men. Dostoevsky had rolled himself another cigarette and drew heavily on it, looking less as if he enjoyed it than as if he supposed it might defeat the flies. He spoke ramblingly. ‘You have the case all wrong, sir. Forgive me if I criticise by remarking that your attitude seems very perverted and vile to me. I have never revelled in suffering, I hope …’ He shook his head. ‘Or perhaps I have, who knows? But you must leave me, for I feel remarkably ill of a sudden, and in any case, as I say, you are wrong.’

Morovitch laughed. ‘How can millions of years of evolution be “wrong” in any sense? Man is what he is, becomes what he is from what he was. Strong emotions are a permanent need.’ He rose. Dostoevsky, out of politeness, rose too, so that for a moment they stood very close together, staring into each other’s eyes.

‘I shall come back to see you tomorrow,’ Morovitch said. ‘And then I shall leave this ignorant tribesman and infest – well, sir, it will be the greatest connoisseur’s treat possible from our point of view – I shall infest you, and finally gain new insights into what suffering is like. It was so as to apply, as it were, the gilt to the gingerbread, that I called first, so that I may know you inside and out.’

Dostoevsky began to laugh, but it broke at once, changing into a cough. ‘I see you are, as you claim, an illness.’

‘Tomorrow, I will be part of your illness. Goodbye, sir, and thank you for your courtesy and evident disbelief – until tomorrow!’

He turned towards the door, on which the writer had hung a battered painting of a woman. As he did so, Dostoevsky bent quickly down and snatched up the poker from its resting place beside the stove. With a mighty swing, he brought it down across the man’s unprotected head, much as Raskolnikov would one day be described as bringing down the hatchet on the old lady’s head in Crime and Punishment. With scarcely a groan, Morovitch sank to the floor, one arm sprawling out across the crumpled bed.

Dostoevsky put the poker down. Then he began to tremble.

Auto-Ancestral Fracture

For Charteris fingering a domestic thing, the shadowy city Brussels was no harbour but a straight of beach along the endless litterals of his season. The towsers on the skyline lingering spelled a cast on his persistence of vision. He had no interest in privateering among those knuckled spoils. So his multi-motorcade pitched on a paved grind and tried to prefigure the variable geometry of event.

But on that stainey patch grounded among the fossil walls and brickoliths his myth grew and the story went over big what if each ear made him its own epic? The small dogs howled underground bells rang on semi-suits and song got its undertongue heating and the well-thumbed string. Though he himself was anchored deep in the rut of a two-girl problem forgetting other fervours.

Charteris they sang to many resonances and the spring’s illwinds sprang it back in a real raddle of uncanned beat and a laughter not heard the year before.

Some of the crusaders’ cars were burning in the camp as if it was auto-da-fé day, where the drivniks with cheerful shuck had forgotten that the golden juice they poured down the autothroats would burn. Like precognitive mass-images of the nearing future, the reek of inflammation brought its early pain and redness to the fatidical flare. Tyres smouldered, sending a black stink lurching across the waste ground where they all shacked.

You coughed and didn’t care or snow was peddled in deeper gulches to the vein’s distraction. The little fugitive shaggy figures were a new tribe, high after the miracle when the Master Charteris had died and risen again in a sparky way after only three minutes following the multi-man speed death up at Aalter. Tribally, they mucked in making legends. Bead groups flowered and ceded, lyrics became old history before the turning night wheeled in drawn. Some of the girls rinsed underclothes and hung them on lines between the kerouacs while others high-jinxed the boys or got autoerotic in the dicky seats. A level thousand drivniks locusted in the stony patch, mostly British, and the word spread inspired to the spired city.

There lifespendulum ticked upside down and the time was rape for legendermoan: for the hard heads and the business hearts found that their rhythms now worked only to a less punctilious clock and speculation had another tone. War had turned the metrognome off chime in general pixilation to a whole new countryslide upbraided.

What raised the threshold a bit was the Brussels haze. The bombing here had been heavy as the millionaire Kuwaiti pilots themselves flipped in a gone thing and the psycho-chemicals rained down. Life was newly neolithic, weird, and drab or glittering as the hypoglossal towers staggered. Appalling shawls of illusion draped across the people where the grey mattered. Occult lights still veiled the rooftops and aurora borealis clouded the corner of the eye. Jamming their stations signals of new bodies scarcely suspected before or different birds of intent It was a place for the news of New Saviour Charteris to nest.

Many came, some remained; many heard, some retained Food was short and disease plentiful, plague grunted in the backstreets of the mind, and cholera in the capital, but the goodfolk had thrown off the tiresome shades of Wesciv and unhoused cults of microbes and bacteria; this was the spontaneous generation and neutral Pasteur had been wrong. These circadian days, you could whistle along your own bones and the empty plate held roses. In Flanders field, the suckling poppies rose poppy-high, puppying all along in the dugged days of war’s aftermyth. Gristle though the breast was all were at it. So it was gregarious and who cared.

Of these the Escalation was foremost. Among the petering cars they made their music, Bill, black Phil, Ruby Dymond with his consolations and Featherstone-Haugh, plus Army and their technicians who saw that the more sparky sounds reached tape. This day they had escalated to a new format and a new name. They now hit the note as the Tonic Traffic and had infrasound, ground from Banjo’s grinder machine worked by Greta and Flo, who shacked with them and other musicniks.

Through mirror-sunglasses they peered at the oneway world, frisking it for telling dislocations in which to savour most possibility. The flat wind-smoke covered them part-coloured. They had a new number going needling into the new stations to really pierce wax called Famine Starting at the Head. Sometimes they talked round the lyric or with laughter sent it up.

On the Golden Coast cymbals start to sound some place like a magic garden I’m just a demon on the cello. Play the clarinet pretty good too man!

In his tent-cave Charteris with two women heard the noise and distant other flutes in flower-powdered falsetto, but had his own anguish to blow through the stops of strained relationship.

Stranding his pearl underseers to glaub the timeskip of Ange Old’s farce its tragictory of otherwhens and all plausticities made flesh in the mating. Like Him fashioned from parental lobotomy truncated by the mainspring glories of a rain shower slanting through the coral trees where greened the glowing white of landscape. Figures moving dragging dropping enduring in her glowworm eyes the candlesphere of hallucidity she’s the mouth and cheekbox of my hope’s facial tissure to come back like soft evening’s curtains. It’s what I see in her all all the peonies the blackbirds the white-thighs all and if not her all all I see of any voyaging.

Yet Marta has her own unopened chambers of possibility the locked door calling to my quay my coast Bohemian coast my reefs that decimate steamships. On the piston of this later Drake lost in spume rankest alternating

‘Do me a fervour! I try to work on this document of human destiny and you want to know whether or not I took in the slack with Marta last night Why not trip out of needling my alternatives? Get from me!’ The ceiling was only canvas billowing, standing in for plaster in a ruinous convent later old people’s home, which the autobahn-builders had half-nudged out of the way as they drove their wedges into the city-heart. Undemolished now almost self-demolished this wing flew the Charteris flag; here his disciples clustered elbows brick-coloured as plaster peppered down like the dust of crunched hourglasses. As starving Brussels besieged itself for a miracle domestic drama flourinched.

‘Oh entropise human detestiny!’ Angeline was washed and white like concentrate campallour, still calculating against the aftermaths of warcalculus, still by the chemicals not too treblinkered. ‘I don’t want to know if you slacked because I know if you slacked you slackered Marta tonight last night every night and I just damned won’t stand it, so you just damned fuzzy-settle for her or me! None of your either-whoring here!’

‘All that old anti-life stuff snuffed it with your wesciv world – from now it’s a multi-vulval state and the office blocks off.’

‘Your big pronounce! Hotair your views to others, stay off top of Marta, you grotnik!’

‘Meat injection and the life she needs, Angel, pumped in, like the big gymnastic sergeant you sing. She has no impact with frozen actions like long disuse now quickened with the fleetsin for her. If I poke some import all’s love in fair unwar and the sailor home from the seizure! Be pacific!’

‘Sea my Azov! And you messiah on a shemensplash as and when is it, eh? A matlottery! Over my bedboddy! Don’t you kindermarken me mate why how you can come it I don’t know – look at the consolation! Prize her legs a part you’d be licky! Caspian kid! – All dribbled-rabble and emuctory!’

‘I’ll baltic where my thighs thew my honey, I the upand-coming!’

‘You subserbiant Dalmatian! From now on you go adriantic up some mother tree – just don’t profligainst me! Didn’t I the one who moist you most with nakidity remembrane to mem-brainfever pudentically, or if not twot hot hand gambidexter pulping lipscrew bailing boat in prepucepeeling arbor of every obscene stance?’

She now had the big bosombeating act, buckaneering in the dusty half-room before his ambiguity, riding to master and be mastered, knowing he punched her husband in the traffic, gesturing with scatologic to the greyer girl, Marta on the master’s corner couch cuckoobird unsinging. Phantom nets of mauve and maureen joined them like three captured parrot fish, web of twain, chain of time.

‘Did I ever say you were not the sparkiest? Or the bell-ringing belle-blottomed? Sap out of it angelfish and don’t parrot membrain there’s suck a thing as polygam.’

Among the dark hair the branches of her face in tempest

‘Bombastard it’s to be she or me and now’s your moment of incision. Cut it out or cut your rigging!’

But he broadsided advanced grasping her by the united fronter so that when she tugged away the blouse torn buttons Ming like broken teeth and one escampaigning teeter. He laughed in lust and shrouds of anger. She slapped him across his molar plex he a quick one to her companion way and they cavorted in a tanglewords the nettingroll.

For first time Marta brought her unbending mind and body to attention scudded to his rescue from the bedspace where they had seemed and tuckered and with a dexterritory he landed them both judies with squirming gust for keel-whoring and his digit rigid as he had voided mannymoon to squire their accunts and cummerbendle in their scrubberies dualigned by real and pseudoprod tongs and clappers circumjascentedly. In out in out moonlight moonlight.

They lay repanting. Marta said, ‘Oh forgive me, Father, but you gnaw my need to bring me back where the circulation stammers.’

He said nothing in a fluid state. Around lay the pages and quires of the ream of his destinotionary tract Man the Driver in which he tried by shortcuttings from the sparky philosopher to prime mankindly on the better way of awareness.

Angelina said, ‘To think that all your thinking comes to this and you so big in the mind can’t see the world’s slippered across the plimsoll line with you just some damned wandering bump swelling with the warfallout’s megabreath doing two defeated dames in a dungy belgunmaden bad! What’s there of metavision ask?’

Momentarily the roseplink lining parted and he saw with her eyes lavatory life going downheeled all the way as he fledabout of madness and hiveless ones begged him to be for them and be for them the big beatal and endal to some bitter end. Scrambling back, he said to spark himself, ‘I am the grate I am where fools burn for greater light and from me shall come a new order beyond your comprehandling.’

Chance in that room sat also while the ceiling billowed the dark man Cass. He now managed as Charteris agent from the dark English Midlands all his life a self-punitive in a narrow way pinned behind a counterpain in drapershop where having broken out he now netted his advantages at fifty-nine eleven three a yard all right and gaudy as the smiling tout of Saviour Charteris flower-breasted plus other sidelines.

Many-monkeyed in his head he rose now saying, ‘Hail the great I am! Hail chaptered Charteris! All burn for greater light from you. You fisher us a greater net of possibilities and what you photograph is multi-photographed with all possible value.’ He sprawled at Charteris’s pedestal for his idol to claim him; but Charteris cooled: ‘You better go and fix the cascade down to the main Frankfurt route. Under my lid the sign still burns there in a precog frame.’

‘Sure, we’ll skim the menu of possibilities but first you have to speak in Brussels where life’s real looty for us and people know you miracled death’s aaltercation where the carcentinas buckled.’