Peter Billig
THE FIRST COUPLE
A Saul Vogel Mystery
Daily between 6 and 7 p.m., Vogel is in the world of The Daily Rag and out of this one. It is my guaranteed Vogel-free period, and I call it Ragtime.
Imagine therefore my surprise when one autumn day at 6:23 p.m. I heard him talking. As I entered the parlor to investigate, Vogel was on the phone to his old pal Feigenblatt, the editor of The Rag:
“David, I know your Rag always has the latest news and pictures. But can you give me your word that this particular snapshot was taken only a week ago?”
He listened, thanked, hung up and told me to prepare provisions for an all-night ride.
“What made you sacrifice Ragtime – and bedtime, too?” I asked; we were driving through the night in his Porsche.
In reply, he handed me the day's Rag opened on the headline LINEAR “A” UNRAVELED BY PROVINCIAL GENIUS. There was a picture of a man in his thirties: Mr. Adam Gotteswerk, an amateur from Belleville, deciphers Cretan Linear “A”, which the best linguistic minds were breaking their teeth on.
I recognized Feigenblatt's penmanship.
“This ‘amateur’ has deciphered other extinct languages and wrote books on ancient history where he referred to facts and persons unknown to other historians,” Vogel commented. “Some of the facts and persons, however, have since been confirmed by sources found by later excavations on ancient sites. How does he do it?”
“He must have access to historical and linguistic material unknown to other researchers,” I replied. “He’s eating his way through a secret stash and becoming a celebrity from time to time. Must be talented: he isn't even forty! He is Champollion, Hrozný and Ventris all rolled into one!”
“Yeah, a shocking amount of knowledge in a sinner so young, wouldn't you say? The most interesting thing about the mysterious Mr. Gotteswerk, though, is that this particular picture of him, taken a week ago, is in no detail different from my neighbor Mr. Gotteswerk, as I remember him when I was eight in Belleville 40 years ago! Hasn’t grown a day older!”
“Comte Saint-Germain? Merlin? Nicholas Flamel? Freak of Nature?” I suggested.
Vogel did not replay, lost in thought. I fell asleep, as he is an excellent night-driver.
It was morning as we drove into Belleville, a sleepy hamlet of some 3.000 souls where Vogel had been born; his first visit since he left his parents and town at the age of eight. In passing, he pointed his childhood home out, not seemingly moved. He must have said good-by back then and had no extant concerns to come back to.
We stopped in front of a cozy house further on, overgrown with vine, now yellow-red, and surrounded by a garden of apple-trees, which were proudly displaying their yellow-red bounty.
We pressed the bell and the door opened revealing the man from the photo. Vogel looked at him intensely, as if confirming suspicions, and the linguistic genius exclaimed:
“You are old Doc Vogel's lost son! Young… Simon? You were seven or eight, but I recognize you!”
“And I you, Mr. Gotteswerk.” It was an accusation.
Gotteswerk’s face displayed the feeling we have when something we had been dreading happens at last and we are relieved not to have to wait for it anymore.
“Hello, Saul,” said a female voice of melodious timbre, and a fabulous woman appeared by the host. “Good to see you again, Porsche and all. But how come? We heard you became a drifter?”
“Hello,” said Vogel. “My vagabond chapter is ancient history now. You haven't changed at all, though, gorgeous as ever!” This was sheer and true appreciation. “Last time I saw you, I was eight and you gave me some cookies, Mrs. Gotteswerk.” She wasn’t a day over twenty-five.
“It's Eve. Would you introduce your friend?” Her voice was like music of angelic harps.
Vogel introduced me. As I shook her hand, a current ran between us and we made no effort to withdraw hands until we saw the others' astonishment and felt ill at ease. See you later, my hand said letting go of hers. See you later, said hers letting go of mine.
“I'm preparing breakfast,” she said aloud. “Care to join?”
“By all means,” Gotteswerk motioned us in eagerly enough, but he was not enjoying it at all. I felt that he has taken a dislike to me, and he was worried about Vogel. He escorted us to the parlor, told us to sit and asked Vogel why he had left the parents and chosen to become a tramp. I know all about this, so I stood up and left the room in order to find Eve.
I entered the kitchen and she handed me a cup of coffee, actually expecting me. She got it absolutely right: strong instant with milk and sweetener. I drank and joined in her chores and soon we were performing a dance, each taking care of her/his business, without ever colliding, just touching caressingly whenever we met. Pas de deux d’amour! We might have been rehearsing for years!
Dancingly, the table was set, we kissed and called the others. Vogel and Gotteswerk took the short sides, Eve and I sat together on one long and held hands under the table.
I ate with my left while Vogel was telling Eve the reason for his leaving back then: his parents were so infatuated with each other that he did not want to intrude. That’s manners for you!
Gotteswerk was silent, waiting for the meal to end. He seemed eager to cut short Eve's idyll with me; he made no attempt to separate us, though, but turned to my employer instead:
“Let's talk business, Master Vogel! I recognize that accusing look. You are not the first to notice our agelessness, you know. I bet you don't have a clue as to who we really are!”
“My assistant thought you Merlin the sorcerer, which makes Eve Morgana the witch.”
So that you think of me (said her hand jokingly). You bewitched me, haven’t you? (mine replied) and they laughed together.
“Who do you think us to be, Saul? Ahasverus with missus?” Eve asked.
“I consider you the First Couple: the original Adam and Eve.” Vogel was perfectly serious.
I felt the tension in Eve’s hand. She exchanged glances with her husband:
“I’ve been telling you: we are too conspicuous, Adam! Too long in one place, even if it’s Belleville. And you just have to show off your ancient knowledge and have your face plastered all over newspapers!”
“Sorry,” he replied, “but modern science can finally assure that those peoples, their history and their languages won’t be forgotten. And we are ready, Eve, we can move even today. I found an ideal spot in Costa Rica and have been preparing it for you, darling…”
He was looking intently at her, begging for a sign of appreciation, but she just nodded, not visibly impressed, and re-established our underground activities – on a deeper level.
Gotteswerk was saddened and turned to Vogel:
“The hobo really is a philosopher.” He sounded impressed with Vogel’s marksmanship.
“Thank you, Mr. Gotteswerk, and what is your story?”
“As soon as the turtledoves have cleaned the table.”
The turtledoves got up and did their kitchen-ballet again, served fresh coffee, sat down and resumed their handiwork.
“In your Bible”, Gotteswerk began, “you are told that God created a man, took a rib out of him and shaped a woman around it. Touch here…” he began to unbutton his shirt.
“No proof required,” said Vogel. “I stipulate readily that you lack one rib.”
“And no wonder, young sir,” Gotteswerk spoke to me, buttoning up, “that you can't let go of that lovely knee: Eve’s not a woman, she’s the Woman – a masterpiece by God Himself!”
He was wrong about the knee: I was advanced much further. I removed my hand, though, feeling suddenly like a thief taken red-handed, but she grabbed it and returned it firmly to its proper place.
You’re doing fine (her hand said) and she addressed her husband in an angry voice:
“Lose the crap, Adam, we struck a deal!”
“Just kidding, darling.” He turned to us, a stupid grin on his face. “There is no mention in the Good Book, though, that having created us God quickly figured out that man needs company of another man, and woman – that of another woman: we are a social breed. Consequently, He created a second couple, Adam 2 and Eve 2. Tired or unwilling to create competition for us, His firstborn, He fashioned the second couple, rough and crude… Sorry, but they were your forebears…”
“We have improved on it since,” said Vogel, and I received an affirmation of my worth under the table. I was not able to keep a straight face this time, and Gotteswerk’s grin was gone.
“The Creator forbade us to eat from two trees,” he resumed sternly, “but Eve 2 ate from the Tree of Knowledge and gave to her Adam 2 and to me… and I ate… At that, Eve came…”
“And found you banging Eve 2!” There was pain in her voice and she withdrew her hand, to my chagrin.
“I couldn't resist the urge! It was the apple, I told you a million times, Eve!”
“So you keep saying,” and she returned her hand to its previous assignment.
“Eve took me quickly to the Tree of Life,” Gotteswerk resumed. “She ate and made me eat, too. When expelled from Paradise, the other two died after some time, having sired your line, but we stay alive, deathless, dwelling amid you, trying not to be conspicuous, staying out of the way…”
“Not out of the way of the women,” said Eve, “even though someone had sworn never again.”
“You have been taking your revenge,” he said sadly, and I felt she was using me to get at him.
Of course I am using you, but it is you, her hand declared and I believed it.
“What are your intentions, Saul?” she asked my employer.
“Intentions?” Vogel sounded hurt. “I wanted confirmation of my guess, that’s all, Eve.” “Never heard of you, sir, madam,” I declared, as the host’s inquiring gaze shifted to me.
“One thing, though,” Vogel said. “Did you happen to take anything out of Paradise when you were getting expelled?”
Wasn’t he getting attention now! The hosts exchanged glances and together looked at the window; there was nothing to see except the apple-trees in the garden.
Then Gotteswerk sprang up, and Eve squeezed my hand in an urgent manner: a message will be forthcoming. She stood up and they escorted us to the door. She was humming Underneath the mango tree, a melody from a James Bond movie: I am awaiting you under the apple-trees. Got it, my eyes told her, thus making the separation of hands tolerable.
“I envy you, Mr. Gotteswerk,” I said. “To have met Plato in person! And Jesus! And Napoleon, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan! And to speak all those extinct languages…”
“Never met Plato, met Socrates and Aristotle, and as long as I and Eve can speak, no language is extinct. I expect to be speaking many more you won’t be speaking and to meet people you won’t be meeting,” he snapped, but Eva’s gentle pat on my back told me that she wants me, even though I do not speak Babylonian, Hittite, Minoan “A” or “B” - or even Sumerian.
They walked us to the Porsche.
“I did meet Plato,” she said and kissed me goodbye.
Gotteswerk shook Vogel’s hand who said:
“Take my advice: next time you pick a name, try a humbler one, like… Gottesschmerz?”
We drove away, turned into a side street and Vogel stopped the car even before I asked him to.
“Who does he take me for – an idiot?!” he roared. “Piece of cake to smuggle a pip or two out of Paradise, between the teeth or inside the intestines. Both glanced at the window, only apple-trees there. When stealing apples from the neighbors I always avoided the Gotteswerks', theirs were sour and tart. Now I understand.” I saw a boyish flicker in his eyes: “Let's go a-harvesting!”
“I’d rather harvest alone, Master…”
“I understand: a woman in heat!”
I got out of the car and he handed me a bag through the window:
“Fill herup, Romeo, fill herup.”
I approached the house, climbed the fence and moved under the trees. She was nowhere to be seen, so I stopped and saw red-yellow apples on a branch near my hand. I opened the bag, picked one – and heard her voice from behind:
“It's a wrong tree, silly!”
We embraced and kissed, and then she led me to another tree and plucked an apple.
“For your mouth only,” she said.
I put it in my pocket, and she led me to a corner of the garden where a shed was hidden in the bushes. Inside was a sizable bed.
“Adam never comes here,” she said. “It’s part of the deal. Eat the apple you plucked: it makes a tiger out of a philosopher!”
I am not the kind to kiss and tell, so I break off here. One thing, however: ever made love to a navel-less woman?
It was evening when I came back to the car. Vogel was fast asleep behind the wheel, but he awoke when I began to sing from the bottom of my happy heart:
Imagine therefore my surprise when one autumn day at 6:23 p.m. I heard him talking. As I entered the parlor to investigate, Vogel was on the phone to his old pal Feigenblatt, the editor of The Rag:
“David, I know your Rag always has the latest news and pictures. But can you give me your word that this particular snapshot was taken only a week ago?”
He listened, thanked, hung up and told me to prepare provisions for an all-night ride.
“What made you sacrifice Ragtime – and bedtime, too?” I asked; we were driving through the night in his Porsche.
In reply, he handed me the day's Rag opened on the headline LINEAR “A” UNRAVELED BY PROVINCIAL GENIUS. There was a picture of a man in his thirties: Mr. Adam Gotteswerk, an amateur from Belleville, deciphers Cretan Linear “A”, which the best linguistic minds were breaking their teeth on.
I recognized Feigenblatt's penmanship.
“This ‘amateur’ has deciphered other extinct languages and wrote books on ancient history where he referred to facts and persons unknown to other historians,” Vogel commented. “Some of the facts and persons, however, have since been confirmed by sources found by later excavations on ancient sites. How does he do it?”
“He must have access to historical and linguistic material unknown to other researchers,” I replied. “He’s eating his way through a secret stash and becoming a celebrity from time to time. Must be talented: he isn't even forty! He is Champollion, Hrozný and Ventris all rolled into one!”
“Yeah, a shocking amount of knowledge in a sinner so young, wouldn't you say? The most interesting thing about the mysterious Mr. Gotteswerk, though, is that this particular picture of him, taken a week ago, is in no detail different from my neighbor Mr. Gotteswerk, as I remember him when I was eight in Belleville 40 years ago! Hasn’t grown a day older!”
“Comte Saint-Germain? Merlin? Nicholas Flamel? Freak of Nature?” I suggested.
Vogel did not replay, lost in thought. I fell asleep, as he is an excellent night-driver.
It was morning as we drove into Belleville, a sleepy hamlet of some 3.000 souls where Vogel had been born; his first visit since he left his parents and town at the age of eight. In passing, he pointed his childhood home out, not seemingly moved. He must have said good-by back then and had no extant concerns to come back to.
We stopped in front of a cozy house further on, overgrown with vine, now yellow-red, and surrounded by a garden of apple-trees, which were proudly displaying their yellow-red bounty.
We pressed the bell and the door opened revealing the man from the photo. Vogel looked at him intensely, as if confirming suspicions, and the linguistic genius exclaimed:
“You are old Doc Vogel's lost son! Young… Simon? You were seven or eight, but I recognize you!”
“And I you, Mr. Gotteswerk.” It was an accusation.
Gotteswerk’s face displayed the feeling we have when something we had been dreading happens at last and we are relieved not to have to wait for it anymore.
“Hello, Saul,” said a female voice of melodious timbre, and a fabulous woman appeared by the host. “Good to see you again, Porsche and all. But how come? We heard you became a drifter?”
“Hello,” said Vogel. “My vagabond chapter is ancient history now. You haven't changed at all, though, gorgeous as ever!” This was sheer and true appreciation. “Last time I saw you, I was eight and you gave me some cookies, Mrs. Gotteswerk.” She wasn’t a day over twenty-five.
“It's Eve. Would you introduce your friend?” Her voice was like music of angelic harps.
Vogel introduced me. As I shook her hand, a current ran between us and we made no effort to withdraw hands until we saw the others' astonishment and felt ill at ease. See you later, my hand said letting go of hers. See you later, said hers letting go of mine.
“I'm preparing breakfast,” she said aloud. “Care to join?”
“By all means,” Gotteswerk motioned us in eagerly enough, but he was not enjoying it at all. I felt that he has taken a dislike to me, and he was worried about Vogel. He escorted us to the parlor, told us to sit and asked Vogel why he had left the parents and chosen to become a tramp. I know all about this, so I stood up and left the room in order to find Eve.
I entered the kitchen and she handed me a cup of coffee, actually expecting me. She got it absolutely right: strong instant with milk and sweetener. I drank and joined in her chores and soon we were performing a dance, each taking care of her/his business, without ever colliding, just touching caressingly whenever we met. Pas de deux d’amour! We might have been rehearsing for years!
Dancingly, the table was set, we kissed and called the others. Vogel and Gotteswerk took the short sides, Eve and I sat together on one long and held hands under the table.
I ate with my left while Vogel was telling Eve the reason for his leaving back then: his parents were so infatuated with each other that he did not want to intrude. That’s manners for you!
Gotteswerk was silent, waiting for the meal to end. He seemed eager to cut short Eve's idyll with me; he made no attempt to separate us, though, but turned to my employer instead:
“Let's talk business, Master Vogel! I recognize that accusing look. You are not the first to notice our agelessness, you know. I bet you don't have a clue as to who we really are!”
“My assistant thought you Merlin the sorcerer, which makes Eve Morgana the witch.”
So that you think of me (said her hand jokingly). You bewitched me, haven’t you? (mine replied) and they laughed together.
“Who do you think us to be, Saul? Ahasverus with missus?” Eve asked.
“I consider you the First Couple: the original Adam and Eve.” Vogel was perfectly serious.
I felt the tension in Eve’s hand. She exchanged glances with her husband:
“I’ve been telling you: we are too conspicuous, Adam! Too long in one place, even if it’s Belleville. And you just have to show off your ancient knowledge and have your face plastered all over newspapers!”
“Sorry,” he replied, “but modern science can finally assure that those peoples, their history and their languages won’t be forgotten. And we are ready, Eve, we can move even today. I found an ideal spot in Costa Rica and have been preparing it for you, darling…”
He was looking intently at her, begging for a sign of appreciation, but she just nodded, not visibly impressed, and re-established our underground activities – on a deeper level.
Gotteswerk was saddened and turned to Vogel:
“The hobo really is a philosopher.” He sounded impressed with Vogel’s marksmanship.
“Thank you, Mr. Gotteswerk, and what is your story?”
“As soon as the turtledoves have cleaned the table.”
The turtledoves got up and did their kitchen-ballet again, served fresh coffee, sat down and resumed their handiwork.
“In your Bible”, Gotteswerk began, “you are told that God created a man, took a rib out of him and shaped a woman around it. Touch here…” he began to unbutton his shirt.
“No proof required,” said Vogel. “I stipulate readily that you lack one rib.”
“And no wonder, young sir,” Gotteswerk spoke to me, buttoning up, “that you can't let go of that lovely knee: Eve’s not a woman, she’s the Woman – a masterpiece by God Himself!”
He was wrong about the knee: I was advanced much further. I removed my hand, though, feeling suddenly like a thief taken red-handed, but she grabbed it and returned it firmly to its proper place.
You’re doing fine (her hand said) and she addressed her husband in an angry voice:
“Lose the crap, Adam, we struck a deal!”
“Just kidding, darling.” He turned to us, a stupid grin on his face. “There is no mention in the Good Book, though, that having created us God quickly figured out that man needs company of another man, and woman – that of another woman: we are a social breed. Consequently, He created a second couple, Adam 2 and Eve 2. Tired or unwilling to create competition for us, His firstborn, He fashioned the second couple, rough and crude… Sorry, but they were your forebears…”
“We have improved on it since,” said Vogel, and I received an affirmation of my worth under the table. I was not able to keep a straight face this time, and Gotteswerk’s grin was gone.
“The Creator forbade us to eat from two trees,” he resumed sternly, “but Eve 2 ate from the Tree of Knowledge and gave to her Adam 2 and to me… and I ate… At that, Eve came…”
“And found you banging Eve 2!” There was pain in her voice and she withdrew her hand, to my chagrin.
“I couldn't resist the urge! It was the apple, I told you a million times, Eve!”
“So you keep saying,” and she returned her hand to its previous assignment.
“Eve took me quickly to the Tree of Life,” Gotteswerk resumed. “She ate and made me eat, too. When expelled from Paradise, the other two died after some time, having sired your line, but we stay alive, deathless, dwelling amid you, trying not to be conspicuous, staying out of the way…”
“Not out of the way of the women,” said Eve, “even though someone had sworn never again.”
“You have been taking your revenge,” he said sadly, and I felt she was using me to get at him.
Of course I am using you, but it is you, her hand declared and I believed it.
“What are your intentions, Saul?” she asked my employer.
“Intentions?” Vogel sounded hurt. “I wanted confirmation of my guess, that’s all, Eve.” “Never heard of you, sir, madam,” I declared, as the host’s inquiring gaze shifted to me.
“One thing, though,” Vogel said. “Did you happen to take anything out of Paradise when you were getting expelled?”
Wasn’t he getting attention now! The hosts exchanged glances and together looked at the window; there was nothing to see except the apple-trees in the garden.
Then Gotteswerk sprang up, and Eve squeezed my hand in an urgent manner: a message will be forthcoming. She stood up and they escorted us to the door. She was humming Underneath the mango tree, a melody from a James Bond movie: I am awaiting you under the apple-trees. Got it, my eyes told her, thus making the separation of hands tolerable.
“I envy you, Mr. Gotteswerk,” I said. “To have met Plato in person! And Jesus! And Napoleon, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan! And to speak all those extinct languages…”
“Never met Plato, met Socrates and Aristotle, and as long as I and Eve can speak, no language is extinct. I expect to be speaking many more you won’t be speaking and to meet people you won’t be meeting,” he snapped, but Eva’s gentle pat on my back told me that she wants me, even though I do not speak Babylonian, Hittite, Minoan “A” or “B” - or even Sumerian.
They walked us to the Porsche.
“I did meet Plato,” she said and kissed me goodbye.
Gotteswerk shook Vogel’s hand who said:
“Take my advice: next time you pick a name, try a humbler one, like… Gottesschmerz?”
We drove away, turned into a side street and Vogel stopped the car even before I asked him to.
“Who does he take me for – an idiot?!” he roared. “Piece of cake to smuggle a pip or two out of Paradise, between the teeth or inside the intestines. Both glanced at the window, only apple-trees there. When stealing apples from the neighbors I always avoided the Gotteswerks', theirs were sour and tart. Now I understand.” I saw a boyish flicker in his eyes: “Let's go a-harvesting!”
“I’d rather harvest alone, Master…”
“I understand: a woman in heat!”
I got out of the car and he handed me a bag through the window:
“Fill herup, Romeo, fill herup.”
I approached the house, climbed the fence and moved under the trees. She was nowhere to be seen, so I stopped and saw red-yellow apples on a branch near my hand. I opened the bag, picked one – and heard her voice from behind:
“It's a wrong tree, silly!”
We embraced and kissed, and then she led me to another tree and plucked an apple.
“For your mouth only,” she said.
I put it in my pocket, and she led me to a corner of the garden where a shed was hidden in the bushes. Inside was a sizable bed.
“Adam never comes here,” she said. “It’s part of the deal. Eat the apple you plucked: it makes a tiger out of a philosopher!”
I am not the kind to kiss and tell, so I break off here. One thing, however: ever made love to a navel-less woman?
It was evening when I came back to the car. Vogel was fast asleep behind the wheel, but he awoke when I began to sing from the bottom of my happy heart:
La donna è mobile
Qual pium' al vento,
Muta d'accento
E di pensiero.
Sempre un' amabile
Leggiadro viso,
In piant' e riso
è menzognera.
La donna è mobil’
Qual pium' al vento,
Muta d'accento
E di pensier’,
E di pensier’,
E di pensier’…
“Where are my apples?” he asked.
“She gave one only: for Romeo, but I saved a bite, even though it took enormous effort to stop,” I replied displaying the miserable remnants: the core and thereabouts was all that was left.
Vogel was devouring it with his eyes. I mentioned the raise I had been pestering him about for the last six months. He agreed and, cautiously, I handed it to him.
“A philosopher has to be humble,” he said and ate it up.
“She gave one only: for Romeo, but I saved a bite, even though it took enormous effort to stop,” I replied displaying the miserable remnants: the core and thereabouts was all that was left.
Vogel was devouring it with his eyes. I mentioned the raise I had been pestering him about for the last six months. He agreed and, cautiously, I handed it to him.
“A philosopher has to be humble,” he said and ate it up.
Copyright © Peter Billig 2007
Peter Billig
OCKHAM’S RAZOR
A Saul Vogel Mystery
“Don’t you feel sorry for your own heroes?” Vogel asked, as I finished reading a few of my short stories to him. “You make them feel so much, think so much and suffer so much.”
The reason for the reading was that some of my stories – a hobby until now – were published and received good reviews. More stories were in my head, good ones. I was considering a fulltime author’s career and Vogel wanted to size up the competition: up to this moment, I have been happy working as his associate.
“Master, fictitious characters don’t exist ergo they don’t suffer! They are models of attitudes, that’s all,” I replied as one would reply an illiterate.
At that time he actually was illiterate, having unlearnt the art after running from school and home at the tender age of eight. He was roaming the world as a vagabond until 25 years later he decided to settle down as a freelance philosopher and to secure my collaboration. We set up house in Domicile, a villa in the middle of great woods he bought at the same time.
“I may be an illiterate, nevertheless I sense that writing poses a philosophical problem. Are you familiar with the concept of Ockham’s Razor?”
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, I quoted the medieval thinker. “Beings oughtn’t to be multiplied beyond necessity, but literary characters can hardly be called beings!”
“While listening to your stories I had the same feeling I once had in Greece when in the mountains I encountered an agitated local who said he’d been attacked by a human-size hairy ape with an oversize nose. By putting a rapier to the Greek’s throat, the primate elicited directions to town. I asked the man to show me where. He brought me to a place at the foot of a rock where the alleged ape had jumped him from shrubbery. Behind the trampled bushes, I found an entrance to a cave. There was only one set of footprints, leading from the cave to the bushes: human prints, apes do not wear shoes. They came from the murkiest part of the cave. I did not have the guts to go there. The peasant revealed now that the ape actually was a man with long hair, a monstrous proboscis, a plumed hat, outlandish boots and clothes. We were both puzzled but had no explanation to share. It became one of the mysteries of life, never explained. I have this queer feeling that your stories and that incident are in the same category.”
He gazed at me. It is pointless to reveal treasures of literature to illiterates, I felt.
“Why not check it out?” Vogel said tentatively. “Book us on tomorrow’s flight to Athens.”
“I remember another feeling of the same sort: listening to goodnight stories in childhood,” Vogel resumed onboard the plane to Athens. “Made a great impression on me. I could see and hear the persons, and the events described were lifelike for me. Yesterday, I saw the antagonists and the plots of your stories as vividly as then. Your talent releases the reader’s or listener’s imagination.”
I was flattered: my best review to date. Being on duty, though, I just informed:
“Your Greek described a well known long-nosed literary character, Cyrano de Bergerac, a poet and a French musketeer from the 17th century.”
“A character from a book?”
“Now you come to mention it, not entirely. Rostand based his play on a real person.”
“The plot thickens: a real individual becomes a role!?” Vogel said pensively.
He closed his eyes and thought, sipping his scotch.
The reader may consider it strange that Vogel, a vagrant, could afford to buy Domicile together with the woods. Thanks to his experience with Nature, his sagacity and powers of observation, he designed, patented and got into production two herbal medicines, Gomorrin® and Sodomin®, effective aphrodisiacs for respectively females and males, no side effects. As long as sex remains the main diversion of mankind, the ex-hobo will be able to meet the expense of employing an assistant, driving a Porsche, traveling business class and staying at the best hotels.
In Athens we rented a jeep, bought provisions and spelunkers’ equipment, drove up to Lamia and further north. Here we drove off the road and went on bumpy tracts, which Vogel called donkey paths. Finally, when I was ready to swear there was no intact bone left in my entire body, he stopped the car at the foot of a steep mountain.
While I was unloading rope, helmets, flashlights, backpacks and rations, he hewed at bushes. An entrance to a cave appeared. We went in and scared some bats. There were no prints whatsoever; water, dripping from the ceiling, has obliterated everything. In a murky corner, the powerful flashlights found a corridor leading deeper into the mountain. We entered.
After an hour of uneventful stroll, light appeared at the end of the tunnel and then a cavern so immense that its farther walls were invisible. From above, a soft celadon light was issuing. You had the impression that the ceiling was open, only no sky or sun were to be seen, as if the light originated from another world, governed by different laws of physics: a strange dimension, more dream-like than real.
As we stood agape, we heard a mumble of countless voices, like lamentations of pain, from further ahead. “The threshold of Hell,” I thought but my Master went forward, already having guessed the nature of the realm, which we were encountering. I followed, even though every fiber in my body told me not to.
People appeared in teams small and large, clothed in the queerest of garbs. One group wore medieval suits of armor, another had mendicants’ rags, yet another frocks and suits from the Victorian epoch and the fourth donned modern jeans and T-shirts. There were hundreds of teams nearby and I could see hundreds, thousands of others behind them.
In each group a different kind of action was going on: talking, fighting, getting married, working and lovemaking. No one paid any attention to us or to anyone outside the group.
“Can’t they see us, Master?”
“They can’t see outside their own book. How can you ask, Mr. Writer?”
“I don’t understand!”
“Let’s take a stroll, and you will.”
We walked slalom-like among the countless teams, me not understanding anything at all.
Suddenly, I saw a group, which made sense to me: d’Artagnan receives his marshal’s baton. A Dutch bullet hits his breast; he sinks to the ground bleeding, the baton falling out of his hand. He pronounces his valedictions to his friends and dies, exactly as Dumas wrote in his trilogy about the four musketeers.
“Literary characters! But how come they’re alive?”
“Fictitious characters don’t exist, ergo they don’t suffer,” Vogel quoted. “It’s you bloody authors who call them to life!”
The immobile dead d’Artagnan changed into the youngster he had been before taking off to Paris, and action began exactly by the book, other dead or quiescent persons becoming operational in time for their role in the plot.
“He was just dead. What made him alive again?” I asked, mystified.
“The bloody readers, I figure,” Vogel replied. “The writer creates the individuals; the readers’ imaginative energy keeps them alive. They play their parts as many times as the book is read, waiting for it to become obsolete and forgotten, and themselves to become dormant. Then some scholar reads the text again, making them perform once more. In addition, think of the pitiful fate of the characters from a classic work, read and imagined by millions of schoolchildren. Movies are made, based on literary works, every moviegoer multiplying the torments. One hell of existence, wouldn’t you agree?”
I did not know what to say. He motioned me on. I was identifying the authors and he was making the comments. We saw Balzac’s crowded fields (“a criminal!”), the gallery of suffering by Shakespeare (“a bandit!”), the gloomy meadows of Tolstoy and Hugo (“scumbags!”) and the populous steppes of Dickens (“a gangster!”). I refrain from his remarks concerning the writers, whose output has made a lasting impression on me. Instead, I deem the moment appropriate to pay tribute to Tolkien, Dostoyevsky, Sienkiewicz, Fleming, Waltari, Vonnegut, May, Mrożek and Hašek.
As we were approaching mine, however, the author’s heart began to pound quicker: some of “my” people moved – I was being read! Some were dormant, though, and Vogel pointed them out.
“These are only in manuscripts,” I explained.
“Burn the scripts, and the poor beings will disappear, as if they never had existed! Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” he said.
We left in silence.
“In ancient times, this countryside was called Phthia. Here was one of the entrances to the land of the dead: Hades. A friend of my nomadic days, an ex-professor of classics, who taught me Latin and Greek, told me about Ulysses. In the Odyssey, he visits Hades and meets his deceased friends we saw alive in the Iliad. Was Homer cognizant of this land? Did he visit his characters there?” Vogel mused, as we sped back to Athens.
“How did Cyrano leave the literary world? Why Cyrano and not, say, d’Artagnan?” I asked.
“It might have something to do with the original Cyrano having been a human being. Together with Rostand’s art, it might have made the literary Cyrano so lifelike that he grew to be alive, and he left.”
“So that’s the way out! I have to make my characters more human-like!”
Vogel shook his head:
“Can you fill Rostand’s shoes? You are talented, but my advice is: if you have to write, write nonfiction: a casebook of Saul Vogel’s philosophical exploits, perhaps?”
“That would necessitate a raise,” I replied.
“Let’s negotiate on the plane,” he said and stepped on it, happy to keep his assistant.
The reason for the reading was that some of my stories – a hobby until now – were published and received good reviews. More stories were in my head, good ones. I was considering a fulltime author’s career and Vogel wanted to size up the competition: up to this moment, I have been happy working as his associate.
“Master, fictitious characters don’t exist ergo they don’t suffer! They are models of attitudes, that’s all,” I replied as one would reply an illiterate.
At that time he actually was illiterate, having unlearnt the art after running from school and home at the tender age of eight. He was roaming the world as a vagabond until 25 years later he decided to settle down as a freelance philosopher and to secure my collaboration. We set up house in Domicile, a villa in the middle of great woods he bought at the same time.
“I may be an illiterate, nevertheless I sense that writing poses a philosophical problem. Are you familiar with the concept of Ockham’s Razor?”
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, I quoted the medieval thinker. “Beings oughtn’t to be multiplied beyond necessity, but literary characters can hardly be called beings!”
“While listening to your stories I had the same feeling I once had in Greece when in the mountains I encountered an agitated local who said he’d been attacked by a human-size hairy ape with an oversize nose. By putting a rapier to the Greek’s throat, the primate elicited directions to town. I asked the man to show me where. He brought me to a place at the foot of a rock where the alleged ape had jumped him from shrubbery. Behind the trampled bushes, I found an entrance to a cave. There was only one set of footprints, leading from the cave to the bushes: human prints, apes do not wear shoes. They came from the murkiest part of the cave. I did not have the guts to go there. The peasant revealed now that the ape actually was a man with long hair, a monstrous proboscis, a plumed hat, outlandish boots and clothes. We were both puzzled but had no explanation to share. It became one of the mysteries of life, never explained. I have this queer feeling that your stories and that incident are in the same category.”
He gazed at me. It is pointless to reveal treasures of literature to illiterates, I felt.
“Why not check it out?” Vogel said tentatively. “Book us on tomorrow’s flight to Athens.”
“I remember another feeling of the same sort: listening to goodnight stories in childhood,” Vogel resumed onboard the plane to Athens. “Made a great impression on me. I could see and hear the persons, and the events described were lifelike for me. Yesterday, I saw the antagonists and the plots of your stories as vividly as then. Your talent releases the reader’s or listener’s imagination.”
I was flattered: my best review to date. Being on duty, though, I just informed:
“Your Greek described a well known long-nosed literary character, Cyrano de Bergerac, a poet and a French musketeer from the 17th century.”
“A character from a book?”
“Now you come to mention it, not entirely. Rostand based his play on a real person.”
“The plot thickens: a real individual becomes a role!?” Vogel said pensively.
He closed his eyes and thought, sipping his scotch.
The reader may consider it strange that Vogel, a vagrant, could afford to buy Domicile together with the woods. Thanks to his experience with Nature, his sagacity and powers of observation, he designed, patented and got into production two herbal medicines, Gomorrin® and Sodomin®, effective aphrodisiacs for respectively females and males, no side effects. As long as sex remains the main diversion of mankind, the ex-hobo will be able to meet the expense of employing an assistant, driving a Porsche, traveling business class and staying at the best hotels.
In Athens we rented a jeep, bought provisions and spelunkers’ equipment, drove up to Lamia and further north. Here we drove off the road and went on bumpy tracts, which Vogel called donkey paths. Finally, when I was ready to swear there was no intact bone left in my entire body, he stopped the car at the foot of a steep mountain.
While I was unloading rope, helmets, flashlights, backpacks and rations, he hewed at bushes. An entrance to a cave appeared. We went in and scared some bats. There were no prints whatsoever; water, dripping from the ceiling, has obliterated everything. In a murky corner, the powerful flashlights found a corridor leading deeper into the mountain. We entered.
After an hour of uneventful stroll, light appeared at the end of the tunnel and then a cavern so immense that its farther walls were invisible. From above, a soft celadon light was issuing. You had the impression that the ceiling was open, only no sky or sun were to be seen, as if the light originated from another world, governed by different laws of physics: a strange dimension, more dream-like than real.
As we stood agape, we heard a mumble of countless voices, like lamentations of pain, from further ahead. “The threshold of Hell,” I thought but my Master went forward, already having guessed the nature of the realm, which we were encountering. I followed, even though every fiber in my body told me not to.
People appeared in teams small and large, clothed in the queerest of garbs. One group wore medieval suits of armor, another had mendicants’ rags, yet another frocks and suits from the Victorian epoch and the fourth donned modern jeans and T-shirts. There were hundreds of teams nearby and I could see hundreds, thousands of others behind them.
In each group a different kind of action was going on: talking, fighting, getting married, working and lovemaking. No one paid any attention to us or to anyone outside the group.
“Can’t they see us, Master?”
“They can’t see outside their own book. How can you ask, Mr. Writer?”
“I don’t understand!”
“Let’s take a stroll, and you will.”
We walked slalom-like among the countless teams, me not understanding anything at all.
Suddenly, I saw a group, which made sense to me: d’Artagnan receives his marshal’s baton. A Dutch bullet hits his breast; he sinks to the ground bleeding, the baton falling out of his hand. He pronounces his valedictions to his friends and dies, exactly as Dumas wrote in his trilogy about the four musketeers.
“Literary characters! But how come they’re alive?”
“Fictitious characters don’t exist, ergo they don’t suffer,” Vogel quoted. “It’s you bloody authors who call them to life!”
The immobile dead d’Artagnan changed into the youngster he had been before taking off to Paris, and action began exactly by the book, other dead or quiescent persons becoming operational in time for their role in the plot.
“He was just dead. What made him alive again?” I asked, mystified.
“The bloody readers, I figure,” Vogel replied. “The writer creates the individuals; the readers’ imaginative energy keeps them alive. They play their parts as many times as the book is read, waiting for it to become obsolete and forgotten, and themselves to become dormant. Then some scholar reads the text again, making them perform once more. In addition, think of the pitiful fate of the characters from a classic work, read and imagined by millions of schoolchildren. Movies are made, based on literary works, every moviegoer multiplying the torments. One hell of existence, wouldn’t you agree?”
I did not know what to say. He motioned me on. I was identifying the authors and he was making the comments. We saw Balzac’s crowded fields (“a criminal!”), the gallery of suffering by Shakespeare (“a bandit!”), the gloomy meadows of Tolstoy and Hugo (“scumbags!”) and the populous steppes of Dickens (“a gangster!”). I refrain from his remarks concerning the writers, whose output has made a lasting impression on me. Instead, I deem the moment appropriate to pay tribute to Tolkien, Dostoyevsky, Sienkiewicz, Fleming, Waltari, Vonnegut, May, Mrożek and Hašek.
As we were approaching mine, however, the author’s heart began to pound quicker: some of “my” people moved – I was being read! Some were dormant, though, and Vogel pointed them out.
“These are only in manuscripts,” I explained.
“Burn the scripts, and the poor beings will disappear, as if they never had existed! Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” he said.
We left in silence.
“In ancient times, this countryside was called Phthia. Here was one of the entrances to the land of the dead: Hades. A friend of my nomadic days, an ex-professor of classics, who taught me Latin and Greek, told me about Ulysses. In the Odyssey, he visits Hades and meets his deceased friends we saw alive in the Iliad. Was Homer cognizant of this land? Did he visit his characters there?” Vogel mused, as we sped back to Athens.
“How did Cyrano leave the literary world? Why Cyrano and not, say, d’Artagnan?” I asked.
“It might have something to do with the original Cyrano having been a human being. Together with Rostand’s art, it might have made the literary Cyrano so lifelike that he grew to be alive, and he left.”
“So that’s the way out! I have to make my characters more human-like!”
Vogel shook his head:
“Can you fill Rostand’s shoes? You are talented, but my advice is: if you have to write, write nonfiction: a casebook of Saul Vogel’s philosophical exploits, perhaps?”
“That would necessitate a raise,” I replied.
“Let’s negotiate on the plane,” he said and stepped on it, happy to keep his assistant.
© Copyright by Peter Billig 2007.
Peter Billig
SHIT HAPPENS
A Saul Vogel Mystery
Vogel is always on time unless he has been invited with me. I’m always late. A brainy philosopher, he ought to have accepted that my being late cannot be helped, since it is immanent in my nature.
That afternoon, though, the tuxedoed Vogel stationed himself at my bathroom-door and pleaded for the last half-hour, while I was giving my face a thorough shave:
“Make haste, you moron! Perfection achieved! Federberg won’t even open for us!”
"I'm about finished!" I replied at last into the mirror and felt the razor penetrate my cheek.
I never cut myself so I had to search for the shaving-block to stop the bleeding, and iodine and plaster to dress the cut. As I was rummaging around and uttering profanities, Vogel was always in the way, uttering advice and instructions meant to be helpful, but actually causing me to drop a bottle of iodine on the snow-white front of his shirt.
Now I was haunting his closet-door and pleading with a moron to make haste, while he was changing completely, iodine having penetrated down to his underwear.
At last he was fully clad, but I had to send him dressing again: his shirt was inside out.
The host, Mr. Sylvester Federberg, did open for us, but he was very cross, as he considers even slight slights weighty. A fortnight ago, the old-timer sent me his second (at the beginning of 21st century!) with a box of dueling-pistols! I had not taken my hat off to him in the street. He is a fellow member of Philosophers' Circle, a club for homespun philosophers.
I explained that preoccupied with other matters I must have not recognized Mr. Federberg, for whose person and philosophic wit I have but profound respect. And a friend of my employer's, too! Should this clarification not satisfy Mr. Federberg, I shall oblige him, even though I had no intention of insulting him, but not before a year's time, as I am bound by a contract and, at present, my time and life belongs to Mr. Vogel.
Vogel and Federberg belong to the same faction in the club, and at the discussions there they wage philosophical warfare, together with the less gifted part of their fraction, against the Chairman's faction. Socially, they exchange visits. Federberg shares Vogel's taste for red herring and serves indescribably tasty ones from a source he won’t reveal. Vogel never forgets to ask, but the old fox keeps his secret jealously.
Having heard my explanation, the second bowed and was gone, and a week later Federberg called me on the phone, very apologetic: the morning in question he had shaved off his beard and never thought it could matter. I was just the first not to recognize him…
"So barba facit philosophum[1]," I interrupted, and he laughed and asked me to join Vogel on his visit – a courtesy never extended to me before.
So here we were in the lobby, the host taking our coats. He did not invite us inside where, perfectly visible through an open door, an enormous table was displaying a cozy array of dishes and bottles. Bound on revenge, he kept us hungry and thirsty in the lobby, teasing with the aromas of his renowned cold buffet. I was eager to taste his famous fare for the first time.
“Two hours late, gentlemen! Congratulations!" he said, tapping his watch. "Yes, you phoned and explained, you've been cutting yourselves, bleeding and pouring antiseptics on each other. This I approve of, but you ought to apologize for making me watch television!”
"I apologize sincerely: it was me both cutting himself, bleeding and pouring antiseptics," I said.
"I apologize no less sincerely for not having impounded his razor," said Vogel and sent a greedy glance at the table where the wonderful red herrings were waiting among Federberg's celebrated pâtés, salads and sausages.
"Everything was so slow in that movie that I was falling asleep, only couldn't, the music being so jittery,” the host went on, mercilessly. "This must be an inaction movie: guy kept on shaving for full ten minutes, by the clock," he tapped his watch again, "and wasn't even half-finished."
“Some shave longer,” said Vogel and sent me a meaningful look.
"To get rid of my beard I had to shave for a whole hour, but who wants to watch? Films are for people, not vice versa. Ten minutes of foam, razor and mug. ‘I hope you cut yourself, you asshole!’ I thought and turned the box off. What a waste of time!”
"One can also change the channel,” I said and gazed at the buffet as yearningly as my employer.
"Right you are, change of subject: let's grab some grub!" cried Vogel.
Federberg ushered us in and we all went straight to the table, served ourselves, sat down and began to munch; he must have been fasting too, as a good host should.
"This herring in curry à la Danois is exquisite, Mr. Federberg!" I exclaimed in awe.
"You really like it? I like yours better!" and he showed me the dishes he was truly proud of. A sampling tour ensued, the drinks complementing the foods, and a culinary exchange of tips and advice. Federberg's buffet was as good as the club lore claims, and I was surprised that he thought me a great cook, having tasted my cuisine while visiting Vogel; my contract stipulates that I cook for my employer, his girlfriends and guests, but the host himself does the serving. "You were never there to receive the compliments."
‘You could have praised me later in the club’, I thought, but he disarmed me that he never would have dared to invite me if not for the beard episode: so much he fears what I might think of his cooking.
"In case you don't know, young man, there go myths and tales in the Circle about your fabulous cuisine, and I concur!" he flattered me.
Seeing my obvious satisfaction and forgiveness as to the silly beard episode, he poured champagne for us to his kolbász puszta, a perfect choice – and finally asked me the question he was dying to ask all evening. "Last general discussion in the Circle: how did you manage to provide so devastating an argument for our faction, young man, even though by choice you belong to the Chairman's?"
My contract specifies that I am to provide philosophical assistance to the employer also in the Circle; he pays half my membership fee. But I am a member on my own accord as well, with different opinions and loyalties. Consequently, I contribute arguments to both sides, and whenever I stand up in the aula, I signal on whose behalf I shall be speaking, Vogel's or my own. But when not in general discussion, I hang out in the Circle's bar, together with the Chairman and the rest of my faction, not in the café where Vogel, Federberg and the rest of them reside.
"My duplex situation does not diminish me into two dwarfish philosophers, but increases me into two full-blown ones,” I explain. “I expect to find a counterargument to the one I gave your faction and to give it to mine this time," and I realize that Vogel has not uttered a single word ever since we came in from the lobby.
He has been eating and drinking, but in a mechanical way, his mind elsewhere. Federberg noticed it, too, and looked intensely, and Vogel looked back without seeing him, his soul not wholly inside.
"Don’t take it personally. Unconsciously, he enjoys your food,” I console him. "He gets into this mood when the outside world gives him a philosophical idea. Something we said in the lobby must have set it off."
"But all said in the lobby was a boring story about boredom in order to get you punished for being late." Federberg is looking curiously at his absent buddy. “A very special kind of man! Will he really remember what he ate and drank?”
"That he will when his soul comes back, but he will forget to ask about your red herrings. If I’m right – will you tell me instead?"
"That he will never forget! I’ll tell you, if he forgets, but you will have to give me the recipe for your à la Danois in exchange."
"You're on."
At this moment Vogel reached for the red herring and we followed suit. It was truly magnificent, a whole class better than the one I buy. I feel ashamed for ever having served mine to Federberg and I say so.
The host is happy to hear it. Vogel finishes his herring with a shot of Polish vodka, rises to his feet, blinks and his mental presence is miraculously restored. He notices us and smiles:
"A feast incomparable, Sly, and the herring beggaring description! How about the purveyor's identity this time?" Federberg firmly shakes his head. "No? Keep your little secret, Sly! But tell me: you got time tomorrow? Something you said made me wonder. I'd like you to help me with a little philosophical experiment."
"I'll be delighted, Saul, little experiment or big. Come at ten and stay for lunch."
They shook hands, then it was my turn.
"I'll mail the recipe in a day or two, Mr. Federberg."
"That will be fine. You lost the wager, but I still owe you for the beard episode."
And he told me the fishmonger's address.
Vogel woke me up at nine starting his Porsche and I remembered: a little philosophical experiment. What did Federberg say in the lobby? I reviewed yesterday’s "reel" but it was a boring story about some shaving guy – and then the wonderful abundance of foods and drinks, so perfectly matched and so smoothly consumed! Too smoothly, perhaps, as I had a touch of hangover.
An experiment, that’s interesting. I felt snubbed, as it is my job assisting in experiments, according to our contract. Yet, it is nice to stay in bed a little longer, and he will tell me all about it tonight: the contract spells out that no philosophic gains by either party may be hidden from the other.
I drank my coffee, felt I was yet too choppy to do any sensible work with my head and decided to clean the house instead, a tedious chore and somewhat overdue. Had a drink to pep me up, checked the time – 10:37 a.m. – began to water plants downstairs, in my apartment, and, at once, I upset a favorite euphorbia. Stepped back in horror and knocked a favorite stephanotis and an araucaria over. Had a drink to steady myself, replanted the victims, took out the Hoover to clean the mess, and it went dead. Had a glass, began to fix it and the 230 volts hit me: I had forgotten to unplug. Shaken, I steadied myself with a drink and resolved to go upstairs to spruce up my employer's apartment instead. Began to do his study and a porcelain statuette of shepherdess kissing chimneysweep fell with a spatter. It was Meissen and ugly, but Vogel kept it on the shelf for some sentimental reasons.
I took a tipple and thought the situation over. Obviously, it was one of these days when everything goes wrong. On such days, I drop everything and watch TV. Some force majeure, though, made me challenge this proven wisdom. I went down to the kitchen, fortified myself with a drink and began to prepare supper – and cut my finger to the bone with a carving knife. Dressed the wound, reinforced myself again and burned the other hand while lighting the gas-stove. Reinvigorated myself again, and a massive pot separated from the hook on the wall and landed on my foot.
Enough is enough. I hobbled to Vogel’s favorite armchair in the shared drawing/dining room, sat down – and this solid piece of furniture disintegrated under me!
I was on the sofa, drunk and moaning, when Vogel found me. Have a vague recollection of being helped to bed… I wake up, have one hell of a hangover, my head aches, the finger and the foot hurt, and the rest of my body is covered with bruises and scratches. I drag myself from the bed and shuffle to the drawing room where coffee and breakfast are waiting for me – and Vogel as well.
This is a standard procedure, we do it for one another, both being fond of fine spirits, but there is a touch of guilt in Vogel's face as well as curiosity and inquisitiveness. He hardly waits for me to finish my first cup before beginning to interrogate me as to what had happened. I would rather forget all about it but he makes me spill it all. As I am telling the story of yesterday's woes, he listens intently, inquires about the approximate time of every misadventure and compares the information with some notes. He is getting more and more pleased, so I tell him about the loss of the Meissen figurine, but he laughs it off:
“It was hideous, anyway, and I said goodbye to Clara years ago. You have days like this often?”
“They happen from time to time but never as mean as yesterday.”
“When was the last of such ill-starred days?”
“Your birthday. I smashed crockery, upset things and dropped a bottle of champagne.”
Vogel went to the phone and dialed, while I fortified myself with a large Scotch and a coffee.
“Greetings, Sly," Vogel said into the receiver. "It's about our experiment yesterday. I’d like to know about your frame of mind on this date,” he mentioned his birthday.
He listened, thanked and hung up.
“In the lobby, Sly said something about a guy on TV shaving so long that he wished him to cut himself," he said. "This I associated to your cutting yourself at the same time. Sly confirmed it yesterday: both he and me had been checking watches and getting madder and madder. To cut oneself is, grammatically speaking, a reflexive accident: you do it to yourself against your own will! Psychologically, it may be an unconscious wish to punish or kill oneself, but it might be something else…”
"I see," I butted in, experiencing a lucid interval (scotch is quite effective), "you thought Federberg had sent some mental waves causing me to cut myself?"
"Exactly. Yesterday I asked him to have the same feelings as when he said to the guy on the screen ‘Cut yourself!’, but the moment was gone. I reminded him of what the Chairman had said to him in the last general discussion, and he got furious and vindictive."
The Chairman had aptly labeled one of Federberg's arguments "moronic". Anyone can have a moronic thought, so he kept within our rules, which forbid argumenta ad hominem, but a touchy person like Federberg would feel as being called a retard and take offense.
I told my employer about the duel.
“So that’s why Sly never sent the second to the Chairman: he had made a mess of it with you!” Vogel exclaimed. "He is full of hate for the guy and I made him aim that malevolence mentally at his foe, while I jotted down the time and contents of each broadcast…”
“So why did shit happen to me and not the Chairman?” I protested.
“Of the same reason wherefore Sly’s cut yourself, asshole!’ hit you and not some innocent actor: you are in faze with Sly. Yesterday, Sly started with fairly benevolent malice, wishing the Chairman to break his leg and to fall down a stairs…"
"But I didn't break my leg or fall!" I protested again.
"But the timing and the number of your adventures correspond to his ill wills!"
"This is worthless crap! I should have tumbled down the stairs and fractured my shinbones!"
"How the heck could you fall down the stairs if you were, say, in the john?! If an ill wish can’t be fulfilled, some achievable shit happens: you pee up your pants, get your tool in the zipper, your denture plunges down the sewer…"
"I wear no denture!" I remonstrate again.
"These are waves of bad luck, nothing else. Sly just told me that on my birthday he had lost heavily on the stock market and wished every smiling person he met to drop dead. He felt they were mocking him. By now, you should resemble Jolly Roger! The worst thing to happen to you happened actually to me: you smashed my birthday bottle of Dom Perignon. Yesterday, his last ill wish was that the Chairman break his neck, but the only thing that happened to you at that moment was destroying my favorite armchair!"
"Some employer! Exposing me to mortal danger, even though the contract specifically…"
"Give me a break! I knew that no deep shit would happen to you. You've been under Sly's evil influence from the day you've been born, perhaps even nine months before, but still you walk among the living! He's been irritable all his life! These waves must be responsible for small accidents only, of the cutting, upsetting, bruising and dropping kind. No encounters of the third kind. On the other hand, the contract specifically specifies that you are to assist me in my philosophical endeavors…"
"Give me a break, Master! Where is the philosophy? So far you have proven that a certain old-timer has been trying to kill me in a duel, and not having succeeded used voodoo…"
"Oh, shuttupa your face! You know as well as I do he doesn't realize he's got that power! Imagine instead that somebody is a malefactor to him, and you – his victim – are a malefactor to someone else and so on: a chain involving perhaps the entire mankind. Here is your philosophy!”
“My philosophy from now on will be to keep Federberg happy. I’ll send him the recipe today and offer any recipe he cares to have. I will also…”
“You miss the point, philosopher!” Vogel cries. “I want to find out about this, so I want to start with finding your victim. As I suspect that the waves are not long-range, your victim will probably be found in the city…"
"Of several million inhabitants!" I protest.
"Seventy per cent of whom use the Underground. Position yourself at the main stairs of the Central Station. One has to begin somewhere."
"The contract specifies that I am not to be compelled to morally repulsive acts! You want me to harm an innocent individual. Why don't you do it yourself? You must have a victim, too!"
"C'mon, our fraction is to work on the presentation of Heidegger on Friday. I just don't have the time! We know who your malefactor is, it gives us a head start. And what is a bump on one's forehead or a broken limb compared with Philosophy? It could be interesting to learn what makes a person malefactor for someone and victim for somebody else. Comparing horoscopes of the involved might just give the answer."
Astrology is my dearly beloved hobby and my eyes must have given me away because Vogel goes on, now sure that the fish took his bait.
"Ultimately, you might reveal the malefactor for Mr. S, with whom you have accounts to settle. How would you like to make his life a hell on earth?"
"I'll do it!"
I drove to the city and began at exactly 3 p.m. by sending a strong wish to see Mr. S tumble down the stairs and break his neck. And even though I kept repeating it every fifth minute or so, nothing happened on the crowded stairs. I went on and on, the hours of malevolence dragged on and the rush-hour throng became a trickle. I decided to call it a day and went home.
Vogel was out. I prepared supper knowing that his stomach will make him forget Heidegger.
The phone rang. It was the hospital: Vogel has been hospitalized there and wants to see me.
He was lying in a bed, right leg in plaster, head bandaged.
“I fell down the stairs in the Circle, broke the leg and had a concussion.”
“What time was it?”
He gave me his watch, now smashed. It showed 3 p.m.
“I think I’ve found my victim,” I said. “Any hard feelings?”
“I had, as no one has ever brought me to my knees before. Now I know I was asking for it. I don’t think I’m up to wrestling this mystery out of Nature. Let someone else do it, someone with more guts.”
“Then you should let me publish an account of this adventure. Both the readers and me are sick and tired of your unending successes.”
“Anything to keep you good-humored,” he said.
To keep me amiable, he gave me a raise and asked me to put the sentence ‘Have only nice thoughts’ at the end of this account.
Have only nice thoughts!
Vogel is always on time unless he has been invited with me. I’m always late. A brainy philosopher, he ought to have accepted that my being late cannot be helped, since it is immanent in my nature.
That afternoon, though, the tuxedoed Vogel stationed himself at my bathroom-door and pleaded for the last half-hour, while I was giving my face a thorough shave:
“Make haste, you moron! Perfection achieved! Federberg won’t even open for us!”
"I'm about finished!" I replied at last into the mirror and felt the razor penetrate my cheek.
I never cut myself so I had to search for the shaving-block to stop the bleeding, and iodine and plaster to dress the cut. As I was rummaging around and uttering profanities, Vogel was always in the way, uttering advice and instructions meant to be helpful, but actually causing me to drop a bottle of iodine on the snow-white front of his shirt.
Now I was haunting his closet-door and pleading with a moron to make haste, while he was changing completely, iodine having penetrated down to his underwear.
At last he was fully clad, but I had to send him dressing again: his shirt was inside out.
The host, Mr. Sylvester Federberg, did open for us, but he was very cross, as he considers even slight slights weighty. A fortnight ago, the old-timer sent me his second (at the beginning of 21st century!) with a box of dueling-pistols! I had not taken my hat off to him in the street. He is a fellow member of Philosophers' Circle, a club for homespun philosophers.
I explained that preoccupied with other matters I must have not recognized Mr. Federberg, for whose person and philosophic wit I have but profound respect. And a friend of my employer's, too! Should this clarification not satisfy Mr. Federberg, I shall oblige him, even though I had no intention of insulting him, but not before a year's time, as I am bound by a contract and, at present, my time and life belongs to Mr. Vogel.
Vogel and Federberg belong to the same faction in the club, and at the discussions there they wage philosophical warfare, together with the less gifted part of their fraction, against the Chairman's faction. Socially, they exchange visits. Federberg shares Vogel's taste for red herring and serves indescribably tasty ones from a source he won’t reveal. Vogel never forgets to ask, but the old fox keeps his secret jealously.
Having heard my explanation, the second bowed and was gone, and a week later Federberg called me on the phone, very apologetic: the morning in question he had shaved off his beard and never thought it could matter. I was just the first not to recognize him…
"So barba facit philosophum[1]," I interrupted, and he laughed and asked me to join Vogel on his visit – a courtesy never extended to me before.
So here we were in the lobby, the host taking our coats. He did not invite us inside where, perfectly visible through an open door, an enormous table was displaying a cozy array of dishes and bottles. Bound on revenge, he kept us hungry and thirsty in the lobby, teasing with the aromas of his renowned cold buffet. I was eager to taste his famous fare for the first time.
“Two hours late, gentlemen! Congratulations!" he said, tapping his watch. "Yes, you phoned and explained, you've been cutting yourselves, bleeding and pouring antiseptics on each other. This I approve of, but you ought to apologize for making me watch television!”
"I apologize sincerely: it was me both cutting himself, bleeding and pouring antiseptics," I said.
"I apologize no less sincerely for not having impounded his razor," said Vogel and sent a greedy glance at the table where the wonderful red herrings were waiting among Federberg's celebrated pâtés, salads and sausages.
"Everything was so slow in that movie that I was falling asleep, only couldn't, the music being so jittery,” the host went on, mercilessly. "This must be an inaction movie: guy kept on shaving for full ten minutes, by the clock," he tapped his watch again, "and wasn't even half-finished."
“Some shave longer,” said Vogel and sent me a meaningful look.
"To get rid of my beard I had to shave for a whole hour, but who wants to watch? Films are for people, not vice versa. Ten minutes of foam, razor and mug. ‘I hope you cut yourself, you asshole!’ I thought and turned the box off. What a waste of time!”
"One can also change the channel,” I said and gazed at the buffet as yearningly as my employer.
"Right you are, change of subject: let's grab some grub!" cried Vogel.
Federberg ushered us in and we all went straight to the table, served ourselves, sat down and began to munch; he must have been fasting too, as a good host should.
"This herring in curry à la Danois is exquisite, Mr. Federberg!" I exclaimed in awe.
"You really like it? I like yours better!" and he showed me the dishes he was truly proud of. A sampling tour ensued, the drinks complementing the foods, and a culinary exchange of tips and advice. Federberg's buffet was as good as the club lore claims, and I was surprised that he thought me a great cook, having tasted my cuisine while visiting Vogel; my contract stipulates that I cook for my employer, his girlfriends and guests, but the host himself does the serving. "You were never there to receive the compliments."
‘You could have praised me later in the club’, I thought, but he disarmed me that he never would have dared to invite me if not for the beard episode: so much he fears what I might think of his cooking.
"In case you don't know, young man, there go myths and tales in the Circle about your fabulous cuisine, and I concur!" he flattered me.
Seeing my obvious satisfaction and forgiveness as to the silly beard episode, he poured champagne for us to his kolbász puszta, a perfect choice – and finally asked me the question he was dying to ask all evening. "Last general discussion in the Circle: how did you manage to provide so devastating an argument for our faction, young man, even though by choice you belong to the Chairman's?"
My contract specifies that I am to provide philosophical assistance to the employer also in the Circle; he pays half my membership fee. But I am a member on my own accord as well, with different opinions and loyalties. Consequently, I contribute arguments to both sides, and whenever I stand up in the aula, I signal on whose behalf I shall be speaking, Vogel's or my own. But when not in general discussion, I hang out in the Circle's bar, together with the Chairman and the rest of my faction, not in the café where Vogel, Federberg and the rest of them reside.
"My duplex situation does not diminish me into two dwarfish philosophers, but increases me into two full-blown ones,” I explain. “I expect to find a counterargument to the one I gave your faction and to give it to mine this time," and I realize that Vogel has not uttered a single word ever since we came in from the lobby.
He has been eating and drinking, but in a mechanical way, his mind elsewhere. Federberg noticed it, too, and looked intensely, and Vogel looked back without seeing him, his soul not wholly inside.
"Don’t take it personally. Unconsciously, he enjoys your food,” I console him. "He gets into this mood when the outside world gives him a philosophical idea. Something we said in the lobby must have set it off."
"But all said in the lobby was a boring story about boredom in order to get you punished for being late." Federberg is looking curiously at his absent buddy. “A very special kind of man! Will he really remember what he ate and drank?”
"That he will when his soul comes back, but he will forget to ask about your red herrings. If I’m right – will you tell me instead?"
"That he will never forget! I’ll tell you, if he forgets, but you will have to give me the recipe for your à la Danois in exchange."
"You're on."
At this moment Vogel reached for the red herring and we followed suit. It was truly magnificent, a whole class better than the one I buy. I feel ashamed for ever having served mine to Federberg and I say so.
The host is happy to hear it. Vogel finishes his herring with a shot of Polish vodka, rises to his feet, blinks and his mental presence is miraculously restored. He notices us and smiles:
"A feast incomparable, Sly, and the herring beggaring description! How about the purveyor's identity this time?" Federberg firmly shakes his head. "No? Keep your little secret, Sly! But tell me: you got time tomorrow? Something you said made me wonder. I'd like you to help me with a little philosophical experiment."
"I'll be delighted, Saul, little experiment or big. Come at ten and stay for lunch."
They shook hands, then it was my turn.
"I'll mail the recipe in a day or two, Mr. Federberg."
"That will be fine. You lost the wager, but I still owe you for the beard episode."
And he told me the fishmonger's address.
Vogel woke me up at nine starting his Porsche and I remembered: a little philosophical experiment. What did Federberg say in the lobby? I reviewed yesterday’s "reel" but it was a boring story about some shaving guy – and then the wonderful abundance of foods and drinks, so perfectly matched and so smoothly consumed! Too smoothly, perhaps, as I had a touch of hangover.
An experiment, that’s interesting. I felt snubbed, as it is my job assisting in experiments, according to our contract. Yet, it is nice to stay in bed a little longer, and he will tell me all about it tonight: the contract spells out that no philosophic gains by either party may be hidden from the other.
I drank my coffee, felt I was yet too choppy to do any sensible work with my head and decided to clean the house instead, a tedious chore and somewhat overdue. Had a drink to pep me up, checked the time – 10:37 a.m. – began to water plants downstairs, in my apartment, and, at once, I upset a favorite euphorbia. Stepped back in horror and knocked a favorite stephanotis and an araucaria over. Had a drink to steady myself, replanted the victims, took out the Hoover to clean the mess, and it went dead. Had a glass, began to fix it and the 230 volts hit me: I had forgotten to unplug. Shaken, I steadied myself with a drink and resolved to go upstairs to spruce up my employer's apartment instead. Began to do his study and a porcelain statuette of shepherdess kissing chimneysweep fell with a spatter. It was Meissen and ugly, but Vogel kept it on the shelf for some sentimental reasons.
I took a tipple and thought the situation over. Obviously, it was one of these days when everything goes wrong. On such days, I drop everything and watch TV. Some force majeure, though, made me challenge this proven wisdom. I went down to the kitchen, fortified myself with a drink and began to prepare supper – and cut my finger to the bone with a carving knife. Dressed the wound, reinforced myself again and burned the other hand while lighting the gas-stove. Reinvigorated myself again, and a massive pot separated from the hook on the wall and landed on my foot.
Enough is enough. I hobbled to Vogel’s favorite armchair in the shared drawing/dining room, sat down – and this solid piece of furniture disintegrated under me!
I was on the sofa, drunk and moaning, when Vogel found me. Have a vague recollection of being helped to bed… I wake up, have one hell of a hangover, my head aches, the finger and the foot hurt, and the rest of my body is covered with bruises and scratches. I drag myself from the bed and shuffle to the drawing room where coffee and breakfast are waiting for me – and Vogel as well.
This is a standard procedure, we do it for one another, both being fond of fine spirits, but there is a touch of guilt in Vogel's face as well as curiosity and inquisitiveness. He hardly waits for me to finish my first cup before beginning to interrogate me as to what had happened. I would rather forget all about it but he makes me spill it all. As I am telling the story of yesterday's woes, he listens intently, inquires about the approximate time of every misadventure and compares the information with some notes. He is getting more and more pleased, so I tell him about the loss of the Meissen figurine, but he laughs it off:
“It was hideous, anyway, and I said goodbye to Clara years ago. You have days like this often?”
“They happen from time to time but never as mean as yesterday.”
“When was the last of such ill-starred days?”
“Your birthday. I smashed crockery, upset things and dropped a bottle of champagne.”
Vogel went to the phone and dialed, while I fortified myself with a large Scotch and a coffee.
“Greetings, Sly," Vogel said into the receiver. "It's about our experiment yesterday. I’d like to know about your frame of mind on this date,” he mentioned his birthday.
He listened, thanked and hung up.
“In the lobby, Sly said something about a guy on TV shaving so long that he wished him to cut himself," he said. "This I associated to your cutting yourself at the same time. Sly confirmed it yesterday: both he and me had been checking watches and getting madder and madder. To cut oneself is, grammatically speaking, a reflexive accident: you do it to yourself against your own will! Psychologically, it may be an unconscious wish to punish or kill oneself, but it might be something else…”
"I see," I butted in, experiencing a lucid interval (scotch is quite effective), "you thought Federberg had sent some mental waves causing me to cut myself?"
"Exactly. Yesterday I asked him to have the same feelings as when he said to the guy on the screen ‘Cut yourself!’, but the moment was gone. I reminded him of what the Chairman had said to him in the last general discussion, and he got furious and vindictive."
The Chairman had aptly labeled one of Federberg's arguments "moronic". Anyone can have a moronic thought, so he kept within our rules, which forbid argumenta ad hominem, but a touchy person like Federberg would feel as being called a retard and take offense.
I told my employer about the duel.
“So that’s why Sly never sent the second to the Chairman: he had made a mess of it with you!” Vogel exclaimed. "He is full of hate for the guy and I made him aim that malevolence mentally at his foe, while I jotted down the time and contents of each broadcast…”
“So why did shit happen to me and not the Chairman?” I protested.
“Of the same reason wherefore Sly’s cut yourself, asshole!’ hit you and not some innocent actor: you are in faze with Sly. Yesterday, Sly started with fairly benevolent malice, wishing the Chairman to break his leg and to fall down a stairs…"
"But I didn't break my leg or fall!" I protested again.
"But the timing and the number of your adventures correspond to his ill wills!"
"This is worthless crap! I should have tumbled down the stairs and fractured my shinbones!"
"How the heck could you fall down the stairs if you were, say, in the john?! If an ill wish can’t be fulfilled, some achievable shit happens: you pee up your pants, get your tool in the zipper, your denture plunges down the sewer…"
"I wear no denture!" I remonstrate again.
"These are waves of bad luck, nothing else. Sly just told me that on my birthday he had lost heavily on the stock market and wished every smiling person he met to drop dead. He felt they were mocking him. By now, you should resemble Jolly Roger! The worst thing to happen to you happened actually to me: you smashed my birthday bottle of Dom Perignon. Yesterday, his last ill wish was that the Chairman break his neck, but the only thing that happened to you at that moment was destroying my favorite armchair!"
"Some employer! Exposing me to mortal danger, even though the contract specifically…"
"Give me a break! I knew that no deep shit would happen to you. You've been under Sly's evil influence from the day you've been born, perhaps even nine months before, but still you walk among the living! He's been irritable all his life! These waves must be responsible for small accidents only, of the cutting, upsetting, bruising and dropping kind. No encounters of the third kind. On the other hand, the contract specifically specifies that you are to assist me in my philosophical endeavors…"
"Give me a break, Master! Where is the philosophy? So far you have proven that a certain old-timer has been trying to kill me in a duel, and not having succeeded used voodoo…"
"Oh, shuttupa your face! You know as well as I do he doesn't realize he's got that power! Imagine instead that somebody is a malefactor to him, and you – his victim – are a malefactor to someone else and so on: a chain involving perhaps the entire mankind. Here is your philosophy!”
“My philosophy from now on will be to keep Federberg happy. I’ll send him the recipe today and offer any recipe he cares to have. I will also…”
“You miss the point, philosopher!” Vogel cries. “I want to find out about this, so I want to start with finding your victim. As I suspect that the waves are not long-range, your victim will probably be found in the city…"
"Of several million inhabitants!" I protest.
"Seventy per cent of whom use the Underground. Position yourself at the main stairs of the Central Station. One has to begin somewhere."
"The contract specifies that I am not to be compelled to morally repulsive acts! You want me to harm an innocent individual. Why don't you do it yourself? You must have a victim, too!"
"C'mon, our fraction is to work on the presentation of Heidegger on Friday. I just don't have the time! We know who your malefactor is, it gives us a head start. And what is a bump on one's forehead or a broken limb compared with Philosophy? It could be interesting to learn what makes a person malefactor for someone and victim for somebody else. Comparing horoscopes of the involved might just give the answer."
Astrology is my dearly beloved hobby and my eyes must have given me away because Vogel goes on, now sure that the fish took his bait.
"Ultimately, you might reveal the malefactor for Mr. S, with whom you have accounts to settle. How would you like to make his life a hell on earth?"
"I'll do it!"
I drove to the city and began at exactly 3 p.m. by sending a strong wish to see Mr. S tumble down the stairs and break his neck. And even though I kept repeating it every fifth minute or so, nothing happened on the crowded stairs. I went on and on, the hours of malevolence dragged on and the rush-hour throng became a trickle. I decided to call it a day and went home.
Vogel was out. I prepared supper knowing that his stomach will make him forget Heidegger.
The phone rang. It was the hospital: Vogel has been hospitalized there and wants to see me.
He was lying in a bed, right leg in plaster, head bandaged.
“I fell down the stairs in the Circle, broke the leg and had a concussion.”
“What time was it?”
He gave me his watch, now smashed. It showed 3 p.m.
“I think I’ve found my victim,” I said. “Any hard feelings?”
“I had, as no one has ever brought me to my knees before. Now I know I was asking for it. I don’t think I’m up to wrestling this mystery out of Nature. Let someone else do it, someone with more guts.”
“Then you should let me publish an account of this adventure. Both the readers and me are sick and tired of your unending successes.”
“Anything to keep you good-humored,” he said.
To keep me amiable, he gave me a raise and asked me to put the sentence ‘Have only nice thoughts’ at the end of this account.
Have only nice thoughts!
Copyright © by Peter Billig, 2007.
[1] The beard does define a philosopher.
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Just making my first post at peterbillig.blogspot.com, which seems to be a wonderful forum!
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