A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters Read online

  In the fourth place, therefore, acknowledging as we do that the woodworm are God’s creatures and as such are entitled to sustenance even as man is entitled to sustenance, and acknowledging also that Justice shall be tempered by mercy, we submit, without prejudice to the foregoing, that the court demand of the habitans of Mamirolle, who have been so tardy in their payment of tithes, to nominate and set aside for the said bestioles alternative pasture, where they may graze peacefully without future harm to the church of Saint-Michel, and that the bestioles be commanded by the court, which has all such powers, to move to the said pasture. For what do my humble clients hope for and demand except to be allowed to live peaceably and in the dark without interference and wrongful accusation. Gentlemen, I make my final plea that the case be non-suited, and without prejudice that the bestioles be declared innocent, and without prejudice again that they be required to move to fresh pasture. I submit on their behalf to the judgment of the court.

  Bartholemé Chassenée, Jurist

  Conclusions du procureur épiscopal

  The arguments offered by the counsel for the defence have been truly and weightily delivered, and must be accorded great and serious thought, for it is not lightly or at random that the court should hurl the bolt of excommunication, for being lightly or at random hurled, it may, by reason of its particular energy and force, if it fails to strike the object at which it is aimed, return against him who hurled it. The arguments offered by the counsel for the prosecution have also been delivered with much learning and education, and it is truly a deep sea in which it is impossible to touch bottom.

  In the matter raised by the procurator for the bestioles regarding the many generations of woodworm and whether this generation of woodworm summoned before us was the generation who committed the crime, we have this to say. Firstly, that it is stated in Holy Scripture in the book of Exodus that the Lord shall visit the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, and therefore in this matter the court has the power most piously to bring to judgment several generations of woodworm all of whom have offended against the Lord, which would indeed be a mighty act of justice to perform. And secondly, that if we accept the argument of the procurator pour les habitans that the bestioles are diabolically possessed, what could be more natural – in this case more foully unnatural – than that such possession should allow the woodworm to outlive their normal span of years, and thus it might be that only a single generation of creeping things have wrought all the damage unto the throne and the roof. In either case we have been much swayed by the argument of the procurator pour les habitans that the woodworm could not have been upon the Ark of Noah – for what prudent sea captain in his wisdom would permit such agents of shipwreck to board his vessel? – and therefore are not to be numbered among God’s prime creations. What their status in the mighty hierarchy shall be – whether they be partly natural, whether they be living corruption, or whether they be creations of the devil – is a matter for those great doctors of the Church who weigh such matters.

  Neither can we know all of the myriad reasons why God should have permitted a plague of woodworm to infest this humble church. Perhaps beggars have been turned away from the door. Perhaps the tithes have not been paid regularly. Perhaps there has been frivolity inside the church, and the mansion of the Lord has been turned into a place of assignation, whereupon God sent the insects. We must never forget the duty of charity and the requirement to give alms, and did not Eusebius liken hell to a cold place where the wailing and gnashing of teeth are caused by the dreadful frost, not the everlasting fire, and is not charity one of the means by which we throw ourselves upon the mercy of the Lord? Therefore, in recommending the sentence of excommunication on these bestioles who have so vilely and viciously ravaged the temple of the Lord, we do also recommend that all the penances and prayers customary in such cases be required of the habitans.

  Sentence du juge d’Église

  In the name and by virtue of God, the omnipotent, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and of Mary, the most blessed Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the authority of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, as well as by that which has made us a functionary in this case, having fortified ourselves with the Holy Cross, and having before our eyes the fear of God, we admonish the aforesaid woodworm as detestable vermin and command them, under pain of malediction, anathema and excommunication, to quit within seven days the church of Saint-Michel in the village of Mamirolle in the diocese of Besançon and to proceed without delay or hindrance to the pasture offered to them by the habitans, there to have their habitation and never again to infest the church of Saint-Michel. In order to make lawful this sentence, and to render effective any malediction, anathema and excommunication that may at any time be pronounced, the habitans of Mamirolle are hereby instructed to pay heedful attention to the duty of charity, to yield up their tithes as commanded by the Holy Church, to refrain from any frivolity in the House of the Lord, and once a year, on the anniversary of that hateful day when Hugo, Bishop of Besançon, was cast down into the darkness of imbecility …

  Here the manuscript in the Archives Municipales de Besançon breaks off, without giving details of the annual penance or remembrance imposed by the court. It appears from the condition of the parchment that in the course of the last four and a half centuries it has been attacked, perhaps on more than one occasion, by some species of termite, which has devoured the closing words of the juge d’Église.

  4

  THE SURVIVOR

  In fourteen hundred and ninety-two

  Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

  And then what? She couldn’t remember. All those years ago, obedient ten-year-olds with arms crossed, they had chanted it back to the mistress. All except Eric Dooley, who sat behind her and chewed her pigtail. Once she’d been asked to get up and recite the next two lines but she was only a few inches out of her seat when her head snapped back and the class laughed. Eric was hanging on to her plait with his teeth. Perhaps that was why she could never remember the next two lines.

  She remembered the reindeer well enough, though. It all began with the reindeer, which flew through the air at Christmas. She was a girl who believed what she was told, and the reindeer flew.

  She must have seen them first on a Christmas card. Six, eight, ten of them, harnessed side by side. She always imagined that each pair was man and wife, a happy couple, like the animals that went into the Ark. That would be right wouldn’t it, that would be natural? But her Dad said you could tell from the antlers that the reindeer pulling the sleigh were stags. At first she only felt disappointed, but later resentment grew. Father Christmas ran an all-male team. Typical. Absolutely bloody typical, she thought.

  They flew, that was the point. She didn’t believe that Father Christmas squeezed down the chimney and left presents at the end of your bed, but she did believe that the reindeer flew. People tried to argue her out of it, they said if you believe that you’ll believe anything. However, she was fourteen now, short-haired and stubborn, and she always had her reply ready. No, she would say, if only you could believe that the reindeer can fly, then you’d realize anything is possible. Anything.

  Around that time she went to the zoo. It was their horns that fascinated her. They were all silky, as if they’d been covered with some posh material from a smart shop. They looked like branches in some forest where nobody had trodden for centuries; soft, sheeny, mossy branches. She imagined a sloping bit of wood with a gentle light and some fallen nuts cracking beneath her foot. Yeah, and a cottage made out of gingerbread at the end of the path, said her best friend Sandra when she told her. No, she thought, the antlers turn into branches, the branches into antlers. Everything’s connected, and the reindeer can fly.

  She saw them fighting once, on television. They butted and raged at one another, charged headlong, tangled horns. They fought so hard they rubbed the skin off their antlers. She thought that underneath there’d be just dry bone, and their horns wo
uld look like winter branches stripped of their bark by hungry animals. But it wasn’t like that. Not at all. They bled. The skin was torn off and underneath was blood as well as bone. The antlers turned scarlet and white, standing out in the soft greens and browns of the landscape like a tray of bones at the butcher’s. It was horrible, she thought, yet we ought to face it. Everything is connected, even the parts we don’t like, especially the parts we don’t like.

  *

  She watched the television a lot after the first big accident. It wasn’t a very serious accident, they said, not really, not like a bomb going off. And anyway it was a long way away, in Russia, and they didn’t have proper modern power stations over there like we do, and even if they did their safety standards were obviously much lower so it couldn’t happen here and there wasn’t anything to worry about, was there? It might even teach the Russians a lesson, people said. Make them think twice about dropping the big one.

  In a strange way people were excited by it. Something bigger than the latest unemployment figures or the price of a stamp. Besides, most of the nasty things were happening to other people. There was a cloud of poison, and everyone tracked its course like they’d follow the drift of quite an interesting area of low pressure on the weather map. For a while people stopped buying milk, and asked the butcher where the meat came from. But soon they stopped worrying, and forgot about it all.

  At first the plan had been to bury the reindeer six feet down. It wasn’t much of a news story, just an inch or two on the foreign page. The cloud had gone over where the reindeer grazed, poison had come down in the rain, the lichen became radioactive, the reindeer had eaten the lichen and got radioactive themselves. What did I tell you, she thought, everything is connected.

  People couldn’t understand why she got so upset. They said she shouldn’t be sentimental, and after all it wasn’t as if she had to live off reindeer meat, and if she had some spare sympathy going shouldn’t she save it for human beings? She tried to explain, but she wasn’t very good at explaining and they didn’t understand. The ones who thought they understood said, Yes, we see, it’s all about your childhood and the silly romantic ideas you had when you were a kid, but you can’t go on having silly romantic ideas all your life, you’ve got to grow up in the end, you’ve got to be realistic, please don’t cry, no maybe that’s a good idea, here, have a good cry, it’ll probably be good for you in the long run. No, it’s not like that, she said, it’s not like that at all. Then cartoonists started making jokes, about how the reindeer were so gleaming with radioactivity that Father Christmas didn’t need headlights on his sleigh, and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose because he came from Chernobyl; but she didn’t think it was funny.

  Listen, she’d tell people. The way they measure the level of radioactivity is in something called becquerels. When the accident happened the Norwegian government had to decide what amount of radiation in meat was safe, and they came up with a figure of 600 becquerels. But people didn’t like the idea of their meat being poisoned, and the Norwegian butchers didn’t do such good business, and the one sort of meat no-one would buy was reindeer, which was hardly surprising. So this is what the government did. They said that as people obviously weren’t going to eat reindeer very often because they were so scared, then it would be just as safe for them to eat meat that was more contaminated every once in a while as to eat less contaminated meat more often. So they raised the permitted limit for reindeer meat to 6,000 becquerels. Hey presto! One day it’s harmful to eat meat with 600 becquerels in it, the next day it’s safe with ten times that amount. This only applied to reindeer, of course. At the same time it’s still officially dangerous to eat a pork chop or scrag end of lamb with 601 becquerels in it.

  One of the TV programmes showed a couple of Lapp farmers bringing a reindeer corpse in for inspection. This was just after the limit had been raised ten times. The official from the Department of whatever it was, Agriculture or something, chopped up the little bits of reindeer innards and did the usual tests on them. The reading came out at 42,000 becquerels. Forty-two thousand.

  At first the plan was to bury them, six feet down. Still, there’s nothing like a good disaster to get people thinking clever thoughts. Bury the reindeer? No, that makes it look as if there’s been a problem, like something’s actually gone wrong. There must be a more useful way of disposing of them. You couldn’t feed the meat to humans, so why not feed it to animals? That’s a good idea – but which animals? Obviously not the sort which end up getting eaten by humans, we’ve got to protect number one. So they decided to feed it to the mink. What a clever idea. Mink aren’t supposed to be very nice, and anyway the sort of people who can afford mink coats probably don’t mind a little dose of radioactivity on top of it. Like a dash of scent behind the ears or something. Rather chic, really.

  Most people had stopped paying attention to what she was telling them by now, but she always carried on. Listen, she said, so instead of burying the reindeer they’re now painting a big blue stripe down the carcases and feeding them to mink. I think they should have buried them. Burying things gives you a proper sense of shame. Look what we’ve done to the reindeer, they’d say as they dug the pit. Or they might, at least. They might think about it. Why are we always punishing animals? We pretend we like them, we keep them as pets and get soppy if we think they’re reacting like us, but we’ve been punishing animals from the beginning, haven’t we? Killing them and torturing them and throwing our guilt on to them?

  *

  She gave up eating meat after the accident. Every time she found a slice of beef on her plate or a spoonful of stew she thought of reindeer. The poor beasts with their horns stripped bare and all bloody from fighting. Then the row of carcases each with a stripe of blue paint down its back, clanking past on a row of shiny hooks.

  That, she explained, was when she first came here. Down south, that is. People said she was silly, she was running away, wasn’t being realistic, if she felt that strongly about things she ought to stay and argue against them. But it depressed her too much. People didn’t listen enough to her arguments. Besides, you should always go where you believe the reindeer can fly: that was being realistic. They couldn’t fly up in the north any more.

  *

  I wonder what’s happened to Greg. I wonder if he’s safe. I wonder what he thinks about me, now he knows I was right. I hope he doesn’t hate me for it. Men often hate you for being right. Or perhaps he’ll pretend nothing has even happened; that way he can be sure he was right. Yes, it wasn’t what you thought, it was just a comet burning out in the sky, or a summer storm, or a hoax on TV. Silly cow.

  Greg was an ordinary bloke. Not that I wanted anything different when I met him. He went to work, came home, sat around, drank beer, went out with his mates and drank some more beer, sometimes slapped me around a bit on pay-night. We got on fair enough. Argued about Paul, of course. Greg said I ought to get him fixed so he’d be less aggressive and stop scratching the furniture. I said it wasn’t anything to do with that, all cats scratched the furniture, maybe we should get him a scratching pole. Greg said how did I know that wouldn’t encourage him, like giving him permission to scratch everything a whole lot more? I said don’t be daft. He said it was scientifically proved that if you castrate cats they’re less aggressive. I said wasn’t the opposite more likely – that if you mutilated them it’d make them angry and violent? Greg picked up this big pair of scissors and said well why don’t we bloody find out then? I screamed.

  I wouldn’t let him have Paul fixed, even if he did mess up the furniture quite a bit. Later I remembered something. They castrate reindeer, you know. The Lapps do. They pick out a big stag and castrate it and that makes it tame. Then they hang a bell round its neck and this bell-bull as they call it leads the rest of the reindeer around, wherever the herdsmen decide they want them to go. So the idea probably does work, but I still think it’s wrong. It’s not a cat’s fault that it’s a cat. I didn’t tell any of this t
o Greg of course, about the bell-bulls. Sometimes, when he slapped me around, I’d think, maybe we ought to get you fixed first, that might make you less aggressive. But I never did say it. It wouldn’t have helped.

  We used to row about animals. Greg thought I was soft. Once I told him they were turning all the whales into soap. He laughed and said that was a bloody good way of using them up. I burst into tears. I suppose as much because he could think of something like that as because he said it.

  We didn’t row about the Big Thing. He just said politics was men’s business and I didn’t know what I was talking about. That was as far as our conversations about the extinction of the planet went. If I said I was worried what America might do if Russia didn’t back down or vice versa, or the Middle East or whatever, he said did I think it might be pre-menstrual tension. You can’t talk to anyone like that, can you? He wouldn’t even discuss it, wouldn’t row about it. Once I said maybe it was pre-menstrual tension, and he said yes I thought so. I said no, listen, maybe women are more in touch with the world. He said what did I mean, and I said, well, everything’s connected, isn’t it, and women are more closely connected to all the cycles of nature and birth and rebirth on the planet than men, who are only impregnators after all when it comes down to it, and if women are in tune with the planet then maybe if terrible things are going on up in the north, things which threaten the whole existence of the planet, then maybe women get to feel these things, like the way some people know earthquakes are coming, and perhaps that’s what sets off PMT. He said silly cow, that’s just why politics is men’s business, and got another beer out of the fridge. A few days later he said to me, what happened about the end of the world? I just looked at him and he said, as far as I can see all that pre-menstrual tension you had was about the fact that you were getting your period. I said you make me so angry I almost want the end of the world to come just so you’ll be proved wrong. He said he was sorry, but what did he know, after all he was just an impregnator as I’d pointed out, and he reckoned those other impregnators up in the north would sort something out.