Elizabeth Costello полностью

What is the truth of his mother? He does not know, and at the deepest level does not want to know. He is here simply to protect her, to bar the way against the relic-hunters and the contu-melists and the sentimental pilgrims. He has opinions of his own, but he will not speak them. This woman, he would say if he were to speak, whose words you hang on as if she were the sibyl, is the same woman who, forty years ago, hid day after day in her bedsitter in Hampstead, crying to herself, crawling out in the evenings into the foggy streets to buy the fish and chips on which she lived, falling asleep in her clothes. She is the same woman who later stormed around the house in Melbourne, hair flying in all directions, screaming at her children, 'You are killing me! You are tearing the flesh from my body!' (He lay in the dark with his sister afterwards, comforting her while she sobbed; he was seven; it was his first taste of fathering.) This is the secret world of the oracle. How can you hope to understand her before you know what she is really like?

He does not hate his mother. (As he thinks these words, other words echo at the back of his mind: the words of one of William Faulkner's characters insisting with mad repetitiveness that he does not hate the South. Who is the character?) Quite the contrary. If he hated her he would long ago have put the greatest possible distance between the two of them. He does not hate her. He serves at her shrine, cleaning up after the turmoil of the holy day, sweeping up the petals, collecting the offerings, putting the widows' mites together, ready to bank. He may not share in the frenzy, but he worships too.

A mouthpiece for the divine. But sibyl is not the right word for her. Nor is oracle. Too Greco-Roman. His mother is not in the Greco-Roman mould. Tibet or India more like it: a god incarnated in a child, wheeled from village to village to be applauded, venerated.

Then they are in the taxi, driving through streets that already have the air of streets about to be forgotten.

'So,' says his mother. 'A clean getaway.'

'I do believe so. Have you got the cheque safe?'

'The cheque, the medal, everything.'

A gap. They are at the airport, at the gate, waiting for the flight to be called that will take them on the first stage of their journey home. Faintly, over their heads, with a crude, driving beat, a version of Eine kleine Nachtmusik is playing. Opposite them sits a woman eating popcorn out of a paper bucket, so fat that her toes barely reach the floor.

'Can I ask you one thing?' he says. 'Why literary history? And why such a grim chapter in literary history? Realism: no one in this place wanted to hear about realism.'

Fiddling in her purse, she makes no reply.

'When I think of realism,' he goes on,'I think of peasants frozen in blocks of ice. I think of Norwegians in smelly underwear. What is your interest in it? And where does Kafka fit in? What has Kafka to do with it all?'

'With what? With smelly underwear?'

'Yes. With smelly underwear. With people picking their noses. You don't write about that kind of thing. Kafka didn't write about it.'

'No, Kafka didn't write about people picking their noses. But Kafka had time to wonder where and how his poor educated ape was going to find a mate. And what it was going to be like when he was left in the dark with the bewildered, half-tamed female that his keepers eventually produced for his use. Kafka's ape is embedded in life. It is the embeddedness that is important, not the life itself. His ape is embedded as we are embedded, you in me, I in you. That ape is followed through to the end, to the bitter, unsayable end, whether or not there are traces left on the page. Kafka stays awake during the gaps when we are sleeping. That is where Kafka fits in.'

The fat woman is observing them frankly, her little eyes flicking from the one to the other: the old woman in the raincoat and the man with the bald patch who could be her son, having a fight in their funny accents.

'Well,' he says, 'if what you say is true, it is repulsive. It is zoo-keeping, not writing.'