Chapter Seventeen
Louis was lying under one of the trees that surrounded the square. Probably taking a nap - he didn’t see me. I walked towards the back of the temple looking for a spot to be alone. But instead of entering another street or square, I found myself looking over a huge field of wheat. The way the wind was playing in it, forming waves, almost made it look unreal.
I stepped over a small fence and began plowing through the plants. A wonderful smell took hold of me. With the earth so near, the sun in my hair and just the sound of the wind in my ears, I finally was able to calm down.
I simply forgot everything and everybody else. I turned around, round and round and threw my head back, letting go of the tension. Arms open wide, I got faster and faster until I stumbled and fell.
As I lay there, spreadeagled amidst the wheat I watched the clouds drifting by. It felt good, the quiet, the sun and the wind. It didn’t take long before I fell asleep. I dreamed about birds and the sea, Mom cooking pasta, a perfect world. Then suddenly Nudjia entered the dream, telling me she was pregnant. I awoke soaking wet.
Damn, this was my girlfriend not some Mom, at least not yet. I loved her and all but a baby?! We weren’t ready for that!
I got up and headed back for the temple. The wind felt good. I calmed down a bit. Although it had just been a dream I also took it as a warning. I decided we definitely needed to buy condoms. As I walked back through the field I suddenly observed a reflection to my far right that had not been there before. It was quite large, like from a flat roof or a metal plate, or even a barn. Whatever caused it blended so well in with the wheat that it only became visible because of the sunlight that it had bouncing into my face.
At first I thought nothing of it; maybe it was just a roof on poles to keep sheep from getting wet - who knows and why should I care? But then I thought: someone might work there. The priest was the only living soul we’d met so far. Yet I recalled Superpops saying something about cops throwing him out of town. I decided to take a look.
It felt so good being in the open. Although I had not much hope in finding someone, I didn’t want to return to the others just yet.
As I approached the reflection, I saw that what caused it was in fact a hothouse set on a rise. Because of the ever-changing shapes the wind was making in the wheat, I hadn’t realized the shape of the landscape. It wasn’t really flat, more like a pizza without topping. I myself had been standing on a rise. The hill the town was built on slightly toppled the others.
From where I stood I was able to oversee the entire valley. Further downhill some fifteen or more hothouses popped up from the wheat. I walked on. The wind was blowing over fractions of what I thought were voices or chicken cackle. As I got closer, I realized I’d guessed right. The chatter of entire chicken-nations escaped the open windows. From time to time human voices tried yelling out over the noise. I couldn’t see inside because of the dirt on the glass.
As I stood listening to the noise, it was as if I got beamed back onto the Italian part of ’La Batte’, the Sunday morning market along the river Meuse in Liège. The vendors were praising their goods: all kinds of meat, stinking fish and cheese while sweaty housewives exchanged the latest news about their grandchildren and what they’d be cooking for dinner.
The image of scattered bicycles in the fields brought me back to reality. So this is where they all went. Somebody did live in this place. I decided to take a closer look.
As I touched the grip of the glass door to open it, all fell silent. Incredible. I hadn’t even changed its position. But then I noticed my shadow on the glass. That was what had given me away. Everything was dead-silent. Even the birds had stopped singing. Only the wind refused to let itself be interrupted from playing games in the wheat. I hoped it wasn’t me who’d put the animals in such a state of shock. Nothing moved.
I didn’t want to keep waiting there forever for someone else to make the first step, so I decided to be the one. I opened the door. A wall of burning heat crashed into me.
As I regained consciousness I felt like I’d been beamed onto another planet. The hothouse was filled with tiny bald half-naked men and women all staring at me. The chicken, less naked, were staring at me, too. The humans looked Asian, Chinese or something. Don’t know about the chicken, though. Suddenly everybody grinned. Well, the chicken didn’t.
I get suspicious when people all act simultaneously without an obvious reason; it reminds me of ‘Brave New World’, a book we once read in school. Although I have to say I preferred these guys to the cult’s amazons. As I said, they were small. And when I say small, I’m talking of a size in between Danny de Vito and a midget. After a short while of checking me out, some of the workers dared to move again. A handful walked over and watched me from up close. They were all completely bald, no hair, no eyebrows, no nothing.
A woman even smaller than the others and of some thirty years of age had her nose sticking up my bellybutton. Before you get the wrong impression; they weren’t dwarfs or anything, just reduced in size like miniature versions.
All of a sudden, she jumped, tore at my hair and said something which sounded like a happy surprise.
All of them laughed “Ha Ha.“ That was all, two Ha’s. Like a tape.
The woman looked up to me and asked in broken English: “You hai’y everywhea?”
“Look lady,” I said, “I come in here and without ever having met each other, you start pulling my hair and asking very private questions. Me having hair crawling all over my body or not ain’t none of your business.”
Besides, I really didn’t think me as very hairy. Compared to her, I guess I was, though.
She didn’t get it. She turned to face the others and spoke a few words, like shortcut sounds and everyone laughed again: “Ha Ha!”
“Good talk,” she said.
Because they all kept staring, I stared back a little. They were quite a sight. They all wore a pair of diaper-like pants. In addition to that, the women had some kind of towel draped over their breasts. The largest barely reached my chest while the smallest one’s chin was barely able to touch my belt. Like I said before, hair was a rarity here.
The chicken, having lost their fear, resumed picking and chattering.
“What now?” I asked her. “We can keep staring at each other for hours or we could slowly get used to each others’ peculiarities by speaking our minds. I, for example, would like to know what is going on here and what you need all the chicken for?”
She stopped staring at my belly and took my hand. Babbling something to herself, she pulled me over to the first row of chicken. Almost like in a factory, when the manager comes checking on his workforce, the chicken had resumed their loud chattering as if their pay depended on it.
From time to time one would stretch its neck and, “Pock, pock, pock. Pock, po…poooOOOCK!” out came an egg.
The worker sitting in front of the chicken would take it from under the bird and examine it thoroughly, holding it up to the sun as if it was a precious diamond. After the examination, which took approximately half a minute a piece, the straight-faced worker carefully returned the egg to the indifferent chicken.
“What are they checking the eggs for?” I asked my bald companion as we stopped next to another hard working chicken assistant.
She replied - this time in perfect English: “A few weeks ago a well dressed but very violent fat man visited our temple. After knocking down the priest with a baseball bat, he entered the sacred chamber, opened the mirror bowl and stole the one-holed egg. As some of the temple’s virgins tried to stop him, he simply took them and with the help of his twin brother, pulled them into the car that was waiting in front of the temple. Then they took off. We haven’t heard from them since.”
This sounded an awful lot like our Russian twin pigs. But they were dead, right?! They’d definitely looked dead to me. Maybe there were more than just two; triplets, quadruplets, who knows. These guys were starting to get on my nerves. First the Russian girls, probably combined with drug-trafficking and now this thing with the Chinamen priests. I decided not to tell what I knew about those guys so as not to scare her even more.
“We were in complete shock and scared to death. He’d violated our holiest sanctum and stolen our most cherished object of praise. What would we do if he’d come back to get more? Not that we would have any – but you never know with crooks. We are peace-loving citizens and don’t want to be involved with all the violence that is spreading all over the world. So instead of going after them to recover the stolen treasure, our priest, after having recovered from the blow to his head, ordered a new search for a holed egg.”
I had met so many strange people lately, all so busy searching for their ultimate wellbeing in the most incredible ways that I didn’t want to comment on this endeavor. Just think of the chances of finding another such devine failure in our universe’s primeval soup.
Talking of fluids, I watched little streams of sweat run down her neck. The place felt like a sauna. My clothes stuck to me like a moist glue. I thought about Nudjia’s skin and the last time I touched her. I missed her. It was a good feeling. Like longing for her and feeling totally free and independent at the same time.
I don’t know what gave me the impression that this woman here didn’t share my kind of luck. Standing next to her in the burning glasshouse, I looked at the rows of chicken and the desperate looking men in front of them. How much I wished for them to find a way back to reality without having to live through the horror of lost time.
“How much chance you think you have in finding what you’re looking for?”
Her answer bored me to death: “God is teaching us patience,” she said, bowing her head respectfully to whomever she had looking down on her.
What on earth has God to do with a holed egg…?
None of my business.
“And your priests, their fate - did you find out something? The kidnapper, did he call you for a ransom or anything?” I still didn’t want to tell her the connection to the Russians.
“No, no calls,” she said, desperately staring at her feet in the dust. “We know nothing, but we pray for their souls each and every new day ….”
The remark didn’t surprise me at all. Most of the religious freaks we’d met believed in some savior far beyond their imagination. What did bother me though was that they all seemed largely to depend on their saviors’ good will.
Why didn’t anybody come up with the idea of undertaking some action themselves? Like the amazons and their near senile husbands waiting for their turn to enter new life through the rejuvenating machine, these people were waiting for their priests to be saved, or to be killed, without doing anything to change the situation. No guts.
Maybe we should be doing something about it, or … No, not again ….
The sun was setting in the West. The workers put each chicken into the little wooden hut in front of which it had been so unsuccessfully trying to fulfill its job.
Then everybody headed back to the town. Most workers on their bicycles. My companion and me on foot.