"Treason loyalty?!"
"In a sense. . . that is, we were talking in general. . ."
"Did he say it or not?!"
"He did," I whispered, and after a moment of silence they burst out laughing; the heavy one held his belly and bounced in his chair, Dolt wheezed, and the officer (young again) danced around the table and yelled: "He did it! He ratted! He squealed! He sang!"
"Stool pigeon! Tattletale! Stool pigeon! Tattletale!" They crowed, doubled up with laughter.
Only the cremator remained aloof, watching the scene with a sardonic smile.
"Enough!" said Dolt, triumphant. "It"s time for us to go."
The heavy one b.u.t.toned his collar; the young officer, weary but satisfied, rinsed his mouth out with seltzer. They completely ignored me. I was stunned, speechless. Dolt picked up his briefcase and thermos, threw his suit over his shoulder and strode out, arm in arm with the heavy one.
The cremator turned around at the door and pointed eloquently at the plates left on the table. This clearly meant: "I gave you the signs! You have only yourself to blame!"
Only the young man remained, and he was leaving. I stood in his way -- he stopped -- I clutched his arm.
"It was all a game, wasn"t it? How could you!"
"Please sir," he said, trying to free his arm, but evidently too embarra.s.sed to look me"in the eye. "That was the Onion."
"The Onion?"
"That"s what it"s called in the tactical nomenclature. Even our jokes are cla.s.sified. . . code names. . ."
"That was a joke?"
"Don"t be angry, sir. It was no picnic for me either to lie there and snore all that time. But you know, orders are orders. . ." And he shrugged.
"Just tell me -- what was the point of it all?"
"It isn"t all that simple, sir. I mean. . . in a way, it was just a joke, really, for you at least. . . The Professor might have wanted to watch the reactions --"
"My reactions?"
"No, Sempriaq"s. Now if you"ll excuse me, I have to be off. And really, there"s nothing for you to worry about -- you"re in the clear."
He skipped out like a schoolboy, giving the cupboard a tap on his way.
I was alone with the remains of the party: overturned chairs, leftovers, dirty plates, broken plates, crumbs, bottles, wine-stained tablecloth -- a dismal scene. There was someone knocking. But the room was empty. The knocking returned, more persistent. I listened closely. One, two, three, four taps. It sounded like wood -- the cupboard!
The key was in the lock; I turned it and the door slid open by itself. Inside, hunched over, sat Father Orfini. He wore a ca.s.sock over his uniform and held a pile of papers on his knee. He didn"t notice me at first, he was writing something. At last he finished, dotted an i, put a period, then stretched his legs, got off his little stool and stepped out of the cupboard, pale and serious.
12.
"We need your signature on this," he said, placing the papers on the table.
"What is it?"
I had my hands up, as if to defend myself against some attack. The papers lay next to the cremator"s plates, between two wine stains.
"For our records."
"Records? What is it, a confession? Or another joke?"
"It"s merely the minutes of what transpired here, nothing more. Please sign."
"And if I refuse?" I said, easing myself into a chair. I had a splitting headache.
"It"s only a formality."
"I won"t sign."
"Very well."
He gathered up the papers, folded them, put them in a pocket of his uniform, b.u.t.toned up his ca.s.sock -- and was a simple priest again. He looked at me, apparently waiting for something.
"You were sitting there the whole time, Father?" I asked, my face in my hands. All that liquor left me feeling dirty, befouled.
"I was."
"It must have been stuffy in there."
"Not at all," he replied calmly, "it"s fully air-conditioned."
"Ah."
I was too tired even to bother saying what I thought of him. My left leg began to dance. I let it.
"Permit me to explain what happened," he said, standing above me. He waited for me to acknowledge this intention, but when I didn"t respond (only the leg was shaking like some wound-up mechanism), he went on: "That "joke" was in reality the showdown between Dolt and Sempriaq. You were to decide the issue. The recruit was in Dolt"s employ, and Deluge served as witness. Actually, the whole thing was staged by Dolt; all he needed was a suitable actor, someone to play it out to his advantage. He must have heard of you from the doctor. That"s all I know."
"You"re lying," I whispered through my hands.
"I"m lying," he echoed. "Dolt engineered this intrigue entirely on his own. But Deluge got wind of it and informed the Section. Thus, unbeknownst to Dolt, the intrigue had become official, that is, it was now a legitimate operation under the auspices of the Section. The Chief sent me to protocol the proceedings. Unfortunately, the situation has turned out to be much more complex than was antic.i.p.ated. The recruit, you see, tapped the cupboard as he left, indicating that he was aware of my presence. No one else in the room was. Now, the Chief couldn"t have ordered him to tap, since the recruit does not come under his jurisdiction. We must conclude, therefore, that the recruit was acting under orders from higher up. Thus, he was playing a double game, on one hand obedient to Dolt, his superior, and on the other hand in contact with someone superior to Dolt. But why was he told to tap? My orders were to record everything that took place, so I must include the tap in my report. The Chief will read the report and realize that disciplinary action should not be initiated against the recruit for his part in Dolt"s intrigue, since the recruit demonstrated by betraying his awareness of my presence in the cupboard that he was acting under orders from higher up and was therefore not really an accomplice in Dolt"s intrigue. To sum up, the action takes place on three levels: the showdown between Dolt and Sempriaq; the surveillance by the Section, through me, of Dolt, Sempriaq and the others, which was personally ordered by the Chief; and finally, the surveillance of our surveillance, through the recruit, by someone higher up, higher therefore than the Section -- that means the Department.
"And that complicates things considerably. Why did the Department, rather than work directly with the Section, choose to operate in such a roundabout fashion, revealing its partic.i.p.ation in the affair only by a tap on a cupboard? Here we must go back to Dolt. It is conceivable that what he presented to Sempriaq and Deluge as an independent action had in reality been cleared with the Department, and that the supposed intrigue was not to defeat Sempriaq in the debate over the value of Operation Onion, defeat him, that is, in an academic sense, but actually to destroy him, and destroy any of the other members of that "party" who might break the fundamental rule of loyalty by not informing the authorities of his (Dolt"s) intrigue. So the loyalty test presents a new side to the problem, a fourth level. And there is a fifth. You see, there had to be two denunciations: Professor Deluge"s to the Section, and the recruit"s to the Department (obviously, the Department could not have given him the order to tap on the cupboard without having been informed of the intrigue in the first place). Professor Deluge"s denunciation is the more interesting, I think. Both the Department and the recruit acted according to regulations throughout. But Deluge -- Deluge knew what he was doing. If he betrayed Dolt to the Section instead of to the Department, it was because he was so ordered. In other words, he was not really betraying Dolt; he was following instructions, earlier instructions -- also from the Department. But what was the Department after? It already had two people on the case, Dolt and the recruit. Why a third? To see what the Section would do with an unsolicited denunciation? But the Section would have to forward even a nonregulation denunciation to the Department -- which it in fact did, at the same time sending one of its own into the field, namely me. Either way, Deluge is definitely a Department plant. The only one who acted on his own in response to Dolt"s challenge was therefore Sempriaq. Note, however, that he tried to warn you of the intrigue, to tell you that Dolt"s words of advice, that all his confidences were only the lines of a cunning play, of an insidious plot, or -- in other words -- part of a play-plot, a plate. Now any attempt to influence your final decision, any signal or sign in whatever form was expressly forbidden according to the rules set down and agreed to by both parties. (Deluge described them in great detail in his denunciation.) By showing you the plate, therefore, Sempriaq clearly broke the rules. The question is, why? Simply to win? Hardly -- that kind of victory would be declared invalid. Anyway, you were obviously blind to the import of his most ingenious signal. Then too, the cremator had nothing to gain in warning you, if by that very act he automatically disqualified himself. Still, he warned you. Why? Obviously to let Dolt know that he knew of Dolt"s real intrigue with the Department and that he was well aware that the ostensible (first) intrigue was indeed ostensible. But such knowledge could only have been gained with the consent of those higher up. . . It becomes evident, then, that all present (except for myself, hidden in the cupboard) were working for the Department."
"Not me," I said.
"Ah, but you were! Your coffee was sweetened!"
"What?"
"The coffee they threw in your face, remember? The sugar in it made you sticky, and that necessitated a shower, which in turn enabled them to remove your clothes and accustom you to moving about in a bathrobe, and from a bathrobe to pajamas the transition is not so great. . . Besides, the doctor would never have dared to hand you over to Dolt -- without orders. So you see, everyone, yourself included, was of the Department. Do you realize what that means?"
"No."
"If Sempriaq gave up his chance to win by showing you the plate, then there was really no contest. Moreover, if he and the other two, and yourself -- if all of you were p.a.w.ns on the same side, then there was no other side! The joke was not Dolt"s then, but the Department"s! But I see you don"t believe me."
"I don"t."
"Of course you don"t, how could you? After all, why would a Department, and a powerful Department at that, waste its valuable time on practical jokes? Impossible! No, there must be some deeper meaning in all this. . . It was Dolt, remember, who wished to make you the b.u.t.t of his joke, not the Department. The Department mocked everyone! An odd joke, you say? It all depends on the point of view. Usually, when we find something perfect in every respect but perfectly meaningless, we laugh. Yet if it"s on a sufficiently large scale, we don"t. . . Take the sun, for example, its prominences like hair in curlers, or a galaxy with all its wandering garbage -- a grotesque carrousel, isn"t it? And the metagalaxy with all that dandruff. . . Really, how can anyone take infinity seriously? Just look at that incredible jumble they call the zodiac! But have you ever seen a lampoon on a sun or a galaxy? Of course you haven"t -- we prefer not to make fun of such things. The joke, after all, might very well turn out to be on us. . . So we pretend not to notice the indiscriminate way the universe goes about its business; we say that it is what it is, namely everything, and surely everything can"t be just a joke. Anything enormous, immense beyond belief or reckoning -- has to be serious. Size, how we worship size! Believe me, if there were a t.u.r.d big as a mountain, its summit hidden in the clouds, we would bend the knee and do it reverence. So I mustn"t insist that it was all a joke. You don"t want it to be all a joke, do you? The thought that your suffering might be incidental and not intentional, that no one takes an interest in it, not even a s.a.d.i.s.tic interest, for the simple reason that it concerns not a soul but yourself -- surely that"s an unbearable thought. But Mystery offers a way out, a way out of all monstrous absurdities. With Mystery, one can at least hope. . . That"s all I wanted to say. Except that I oversimplified when speaking of the Department. Many threads lead there, you see, but they do not end there. No, they travel further, they branch and spread throughout the Building. It was the Building"s joke, in the final a.n.a.lysis. Or no one"s -- whatever you like. . . And now you know everything."
"I only know that you told me what they told you to tell me."
"And you wouldn"t believe me if I denied that, and you shouldn"t, because even if I did, it probably wouldn"t be the truth. Who knows?"
"Don"t you?"
"After what I"ve just said, you should know better than that. True, I was not actually given any such order. But perhaps my superior was, perhaps he chose that I should carry it out without my knowledge. Or perhaps the choosing was without his knowledge too, in which case he had no choice. Listen: I don"t know what the Building really is. Dolt may have been right. Perhaps there were originally two sides which, locked in mortal combat, eventually devoured one another. Perhaps, too, this is not a madness of men, but of an organization, an organization that grew too much and one day met a remote offshoot of itself, and began to swallow it up, and swallowed and swallowed, reaching back to itself, back to its own center, and now it loops around and around in an endless swallowing. . . In which case, there need be no other Building, except as a pretense to hide its autophagia . . ."
"What are you?"
"A priest, as you know."
"A priest? You turned me over to Major Erms! You only wear a ca.s.sock to hide the uniform!"
"And do you only wear a body to hide the skeleton? Try to understand. I am hiding nothing. You say I betrayed you. But here everything is illusion: betrayal, treason, even omniscience -- for omniscience is not only impossible, but quite unnecessary when its counterfeit suffices, a fabrication of stray reports, allusions, words mumbled in one"s sleep or retrieved from the latrines. . . It is not omniscience but the faith in it that matters."
Would they or would they not want him to tell me this?
Now grown very pale, he hissed with unexpected vehemence: "You still believe in the Building"s wisdom! What else can I say? You"ve seen the men in command, those deaf, wart-covered sclerotic relics at the top! Look here."
He took a small, smooth stone out of his pocket and showed it to me. It was spotted like a bird"s egg.
"Nothing but a stupid piece of gravel! A few spots. . . a little hole here. . . But take a million pieces of gravel like this, a trillion, and an atmosphere will form around them, the wind will blow over them, and cosmic rays will bombard them -- until from out a pile of debris there will crawl forth something we call -- Sacred. . . And who gave the order? Who? It is exactly the same with the Building. . ."
"You mean, the Building is Nature itself?"
"Heavens, no! They have nothing in common beyond the fact that they are both ineffably perfect. And here you thought you were a prisoner in a labyrinth of evil, where everything was pregnant with meaning, where even the theft of one"s instructions was a ritual, that the Building destroyed only in order to build, to build only in order to destroy the more -- and you took this for the wisdom of evil. . . Hence your mental somersaults and contortions. You writhed on the hook of your own question mark to solve that equation of horror. But I tell you there is no solution, no equation, no destruction, no instructions, no evil -- there is only the Building -- only -- the Building --"
"Only the Building?" I echoed, my hair on end.
"Only the Building," he echoed my echo, shivering. "This is not wisdom, this is a blind and all-encompa.s.sing perfection, a perfection not of man"s making but which arose from man, or rather from the community of man. Human evil, you see, is so petty and frail, while here we have something grand and mighty at work. . . An ocean of blood and sweat and urine! One thundering death rattle from a million throats! A great monument of feces, the product of countless generations! Here you can drown in people, choke on them, waste away in a vast wilderness of people! Behold: they will stir their coffee as they calmly tear you to shreds, chat and pick their noses as they outrage your corpse, and brew more coffee as it stiffens, and you will be a hairless, worn-out and abandoned doll, a broken rattle, an old rag yellow and forgotten in the corner. . . That is how perfection operates, not wisdom! Wisdom is you, yourself -- or maybe two people! You and someone else, that intimate flash of honesty from eye to eye. . ."
I watched his deathly pale face and wondered where I"d heard all this before, it sounded so familiar. Then I remembered -- that sermon, the sermon about choking, evil and the Devil, the sermon which Brother Persuasion told me was intended as provocation. . .
"How can I believe you?" I groaned. He shuddered.
"O sinner!!" he screamed in a whisper. "Dost thou still doubt that what may be a harmless conversation or joke on one level doth const.i.tute, on another, legal action and, on yet another, a battle of wits between Departments? Verily, if thou followest this line of thought, thou shalt end up nowhere, since here anything, hence everything, leadeth everywhere!"
"You"ve lost me."
"Treason is inevitable. But the Building"s purpose is to make treason impossible. Ergo, we must make the inevitable evitable. But how? Obliterate truth. What"s treason when truth is but another way of lying? That is why there is no place here for any real action, whether legitimate despair or honest crime -- anything genuine will weigh you down, drag you to the bottom for good. Listen! Come in with me! We"ll form a secret alliance, a conspiracy of two! This will liberate us!"
"You"re mad!"
"No! If we trust one another, we can save ourselves yet. I will restore you to yourself, and you will do the same for me. Only in this way can we be free!"
"They"ll arrest us!"
"All the more reason we should work together! Knowing our cause is lost from the start, we will redeem ourselves! I shall die for you and you shall die for me -- and they"ll never be able to take that truth from us! Think of it! You will be Christ, and I Judas -- since I was ordered to incite you to treason as an agent provocateur. . ."
"What are you saying?"
"You still don"t understand? I"m an agent provocateur because I"m a priest. Only as your agent provocateur am I, a priest, allowed to say what I"ve said here. Of course, we expect you to cooperate. . ."
"How could I possibly cooperate?"
"How could you not? You"re obviously at the end of your rope. Today you denounced an innocent man, a man who was on your side, for Dolt was -- as far as you knew -- on your side when you denounced him. You"ll cooperate all right, if not now, then tomorrow, if not with me, then with somebody else. But then, don"t you see, you"ll be cooperating on the Building"s terms, which means cooperating just for appearances. Don"t do that! Cooperate here and now, once and for all, heart and soul, so that in the foul bosom of Treachery we may bear witness to the blessed birth of Truth!"
"But then you"ll have to inform on me as the man who agreed to join your conspiracy!"
"Of course! And they"ll take it as a false conspiracy, a conspiracy entered into only under orders, not realizing that your betrayal is voluntary, from the heart as it were, and so you, knowing this and acting with that knowledge, will fill the dreadful vacuum, and thus our conspiracy, engineered by the Building to be another false conspiracy, will become Flesh. Will you cooperate now?"
I was silent.
"You refuse?" he asked, and a tear rolled down his cheek.
I sat there, my leg still dancing, and I didn"t see or hear him any longer. Once again I was surrounded by those endless rows of white corridors and white doors, robbed of everything that could ever be mine. It was with the lifeless light of the labyrinth before me that I said: "I"ll cooperate."
His face lit up. He turned away and dabbed his forehead and cheeks with a handkerchief.
"Now you wonder if I"ll really betray you," he said at last. "It can"t be helped. All promises, vows and oaths are worthless here, so I"ll only say this: not today. Also, no recognition signals: they wouldn"t help. Our weapon will be openness -- we"ll make no secret of our conspiracy and they"ll never believe us. Now I"ll go and denounce you to my superior. Meanwhile, act natural, do whatever you would normally do."
"I should go to the Registry then?"
"Would you otherwise?"
"I guess not."
"Then don"t. Get some rest instead, you"ll need your strength. Tomorrow, after dinner, between the two marble caryatids near the elevator on the seventh level, Two will be waiting for you."
"Two?"
"That"s me. Our code names."
"And I"m One?"