Текст книги "The Complete Short Stories"
Автор книги: James Graham Ballard
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Текущая страница: 109 (всего у книги 113 страниц)
The Largest Theme Park in the World
The creation of a united Europe, so long desired and so bitterly contested, had certain unexpected consequences. The fulfilment of this age-old dream was a cause of justified celebration, of countless street festivals, banquets and speeches of self-congratulation. But the Europe which had given birth to the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, to modern science and the industrial revolution, had one last surprise up its sleeve.
Needless to say, nothing of this was apparent in 1993. The demolition of so many fiscal and bureaucratic barriers to trade led directly to the goal of a Europe at last united in a political and cultural federation. In 1995, the headiest year since 1968, the necessary legislation was swiftly passed by a dozen parliaments, which dissolved themselves and assigned their powers to the European Assembly at Strasbourg. So there came into being the new Europe, a visionary realm that would miraculously fuse the spirits of Charlemagne and the smart card, Michelangelo and the Club Med, St Augustine and Saint Laurent.
Happily exhausted by their efforts, the new Europeans took off for the beaches of the Mediterranean, their tribal mating ground. Blessed by a benevolent sun and a greenhouse sky, the summer of 1995 ran from April to October. A hundred million Europeans basked on the sand, leaving behind little more than an army of caretakers to supervise the museums, galleries and cathedrals. Excited by the idea of a federal Europe, a vast influx of tourists arrived from the United States, Japan and the newly liberated nations of the Soviet bloc. Guide-books in hand, they gorged themselves on the culture and history of Europe, which had now achieved its spiritual destiny of becoming the largest theme park in the world.
Sustained by these tourist revenues, the ecu soared above the dollar and yen, even though offices and factories remained deserted from Athens to the Atlantic. Indeed, it was only in the autumn of 1995 that the economists at Brussels resigned themselves to the paradox which no previous government had accepted – contrary to the protestant ethic, which had failed so lamentably in the past, the less that Europe worked the more prosperous and contented it became. Delighted to prove this point, the millions of vacationing Europeans on the beaches of the Mediterranean scarcely stirred from their sun-mattresses. Autoroutes and motorways were silent, and graphs of industrial production remained as flat as the cerebral functions of the brain-dead.
An even more significant fact soon emerged. Most of the vacationing Europeans had extended their holidays from two to three months, but a substantial minority had decided not to return at all. Along the beaches of the Costa del Sol and C™te d’Azur, thousands of French, British and German tourists failed to catch their return flights from the nearby airport. Instead, they remained in their hotels and apartments, lay beside their swimming pools and dedicated themselves to the worship of their own skins.
At first this decision to stay was largely confined to the young and unmarried, to former students and the traditional lumpen-intelligentsia of the beach. But these latter-day refuseniks soon included lawyers, doctors and accountants. Even families with children chose to remain on perpetual holiday. Ignoring the telegrams and phone calls from their anxious employers in Amsterdam, Paris and DŸsseldorf, they made polite excuses, applied sun oil to their shoulders and returned to their sail-boats and pedalos. It became all too clear that in rejecting the old Europe of frontiers and national self-interest they had also rejected the bourgeois values that hid behind them. A demanding occupation, a high disposable income, a future mortgaged to the gods of social and professional status, had all been abandoned.
At any event, a movement confined to a few resorts along the Mediterranean coast had, by November 1995, involved tens of thousands of holidaymakers. Those who returned home did so with mixed feelings. By the spring of 1996 more than a million expatriates had settled in permanent exile among the hotels and apartment complexes of the Mediterranean.
By summer this number vastly increased, and brought with it huge demographic and psychological changes. So far, the effects of the beach exodus on the European economy had been slight. Tourism and the sale of large sections of industry to eager Japanese corporations had kept the ecu afloat. As for the exiles in Minorca, Mykonos and the Costa Brava, the cost of living was low and basic necessities few. The hippies and ex-students turned to petty theft and slept on the beach. The lawyers and accountants were able to borrow from their banks when their own resources ran out, offering their homes and businesses as collateral. Wives sold their jewellery, and elderly relatives were badgered into small loans.
Fortunately, the sun continued to shine through the numerous ozone windows and the hottest summer of the century was widely forecast. The determination of the exiles never to return to their offices and factories was underpinned by a new philosophy of leisure and a sense of what constituted a worthwhile life. The logic of the annual beach holiday, which had sustained Europe since the Second World War, had merely been taken to its conclusion. Crime and delinquency were non-existent and the social and racial tolerance of those reclining in adjacent poolside chairs was virtually infinite.
Was Europe about to lead the world in another breakthrough for the third millennium? A relaxed and unpuritan sexual regime now flourished and there was a new-found pride in physical excellence. A host of sporting activities took place, there were classes in judo and karate, aerobics and tai-chi. The variety of fringe philosophies began to rival those of California. The first solar cults emerged on the beaches of Torremolinos and St Tropez. Where once the Mediterranean coast had been Europe’s Florida, a bland parade of marinas and hotels, it was now set to be its Venice Beach, a hot-house of muscle-building and millennial dreams.
In the summer of 1996 the first challenge occurred to this regime of leisure. By now the beach communities comprised some five million exiles, and their financial resources were exhausted. Credit cards had long been cancelled, bank accounts frozen, and governments in Paris, London and Bonn waited for the return of the expatriates to their desks and work-benches.
Surprisingly, the determination of the beach communities never wavered. Far from catching their long-delayed return flights, the exiles decided to hold on to their place in the sun. Soon this brought them into direct conflict with local hoteliers and apartment owners, who found themselves housing a huge population of non-paying guests. The police were called in, and the first open riots occurred on the beaches of Malaga, Menton and Rimini.
The exiles, however, were difficult to dislodge. A year of sun and exercise had turned them into a corps of superb athletes, for whom the local shopkeepers, waiters and hoteliers were no match. Gangs of muscular young women, expert in the martial arts, roamed the supermarkets of Spain and the C™te d’Azur, fearlessly helping themselves from the shelves. Acts of open intimidation quickly subdued the managers of hotels and apartment houses.
Local police chiefs, for their part, were reluctant to intervene, for fear of damaging the imminent summer tourist trade. The lawyers and accountants among the exiles, all far more educated and intelligent than their provincial rivals, were adept at challenging any eviction orders or charges of theft. The once passive regime of sun and sand had given way to a more militant mood, sustained by the exiles’ conviction in the moral and spiritual rightness of their cause. Acting together, they commandeered any empty villas or apartment houses, whose owners were either too terrified to protest or fled the scene altogether.
The cult of physical perfection had gripped everyone’s imagination. Bodies deformed by years bent over the word-processor and fast-food counter were now slim and upright, as ideally proportioned as the figures on the Parthenon frieze. The new evangelism concealed behind the exercise and fitness fads of the 1980s now reappeared. A devotion to physical perfection ruled their lives more strictly than any industrial taskmaster.
Out of necessity, leisure had moved into a more disciplined phase. At dawn the resort beaches of the Mediterranean were filled with companies of martial art enthusiasts, kicking and grunting in unison. Brigades of handsomely tanned men and women drilled together as they faced the sun. No longer did they devote their spare time to lying on the sand, but to competitive sports and fiercely contested track events.
Already the first community leaders had emerged from the strongest and most charismatic of the men and women. The casual anarchy of the earliest days had given way to a sensible and cooperative democracy, where members of informal beach groups had voted on their best course of action before seizing an empty hotel or raiding a wine-store. But this democratic phase had failed to meet the needs and emotions of the hour, and the beach communities soon evolved into more authoritarian form.
The 1996 holiday season brought a welcome respite and millions of new recruits, whose purses were bulging with ecus. When they arrived at Marbella, Ibiza, La Grande Motte and Sestri Levante they found themselves eagerly invited to join the new beach communities. By August 1996, when almost the whole of Europe had set off for the coasts of the sun, the governments of its member countries were faced with the real possibility that much of their populations would not return. Not only would offices and factories be closed forever, but there would be no one left to man the museums and galleries, to collect the dollars, yen and roubles of the foreign tourists who alone sustained their economies. The prospect appeared that the Louvre and Buckingham Palace might be sold to a Japanese hotel corporation, that Chartres and Cologne cathedrals would become subsidiaries of the Disney Company.
Forced to act, the Strasbourg Assembly dispatched a number of task forces to the south. Posing as holidaymakers, teams of investigators roamed the cafs and swimming pools. But the pathetic attempts of these bikini bureaucrats to infiltrate and destabilise the beach enclaves came to nothing, and many defected to the ranks of the exiles.
So at last, in October 1996, the Strasbourg Assembly announced that the beaches of the Mediterranean were closed, that all forms of exercise outside the workplace or the bedroom were illegal, and that the suntan was a prohibited skin embellishment. Lastly, the Assembly ordered its 30 million absent citizens to return home.
Needless to say, these commands were ignored. The beach people who occupied the linear city of the Mediterranean coast, some 3,000 miles long and 300 metres wide, were now a very different breed. The police and gendarmerie who arrived at the coastal resorts found militant bands of body-worshippers who had no intention of resuming their previous lives.
Aware that a clash with the authorities would take place, they had begun to defend their territory, blockading the beach roads with abandoned cars, fortifying the entrances to hotels and apartment houses. By day their scuba teams hunted the coastal waters for fish, while at night raiding parties moved inland, stealing sheep and looting the fields of their vegetable crops. Large sections of Malaga, St Tropez and Corfu were now occupied by exiles, while many of the smaller resorts such as Rosas and Formentera were wholly under their control.
The first open conflict, at Golfe-Juan, was typically short-lived and indecisive. Perhaps unconsciously expecting the Emperor to come ashore, as he had done after his escape from Elba, the police were unable to cope with the militant brigade of bronzed and naked mothers, chanting green and feminist slogans, who advanced towards their water-cannon. Commandos of dentists and architects, releasing their fiercest karate kicks, strutted through the narrow streets in what seemed to be a display of a new folk tradition, attracting unmanageable crowds of American and Japanese tourists from their Cannes hotels. At Port-Vendres, Sitges, Ban and Frjus the police fell back in confusion, unable to distinguish between the exiles and authentic visiting holidaymakers.
When the police returned in force, supported by units of the army, their arrival only increased the determination of the beach people. The polyglot flavour of the original settlers had given way to a series of national groups recruiting their members from their traditional resorts – the British at Torremolinos, Germans at Rosas, French at Juan les Pins. The resistance within these enclaves reflected their national identity – a rabble of drunken British hooligans roamed the streets of Torremolinos, exposing their fearsome buttocks to the riot police. The Germans devoted themselves to hard work and duty, erecting a Siegfried Line of sand bunkers around the beaches of Rosas, while the massed nipples of Juan were more than enough to hopelessly dazzle the gendarmerie.
In return, each of these national enclaves produced its characteristic leaders. The British resorts were dominated by any number of would-be Thatchers, fierce ladies in one-piece bathing suits who invoked the memory of Churchill and proclaimed their determination to ‘fight them on the beaches and never, never surrender’. Gaullist throwbacks spoke loftily of the grandeur of French sun and sand, while the Italians proclaimed their ‘mare nostrum’.
But above all the tone of these beach-fuhrers was uniformly authoritarian. The sometime holiday exiles now enjoyed lives of fierce selfdiscipline coupled with a mystical belief in the powers of physical strength. Athletic prowess was admired above all, a cult of bodily perfection mediated through group gymnastic displays on the beaches, quasi-fascistic rallies, in which thousands of well-drilled participants slashed the dawn air with their karate chops and chanted in a single voice at the sun. These bronzed and handsome figures with their thoughtless sexuality looked down on their tourist compatriots with a sense of almost racial superiority.
It was clear that Europe, where so much of western civilisation had originated, had given birth to yet another significant trend, the first totalitarian system based on leisure. From the sun-lounge and the swimming pool, from the gymnasium and disco, had come a nationalistic and authoritarian creed with its roots in the realm of pleasure rather than that of work.
By the spring of 1997, as Brussels fumbled and Strasbourg debated, the 30 million people of the beach were beginning to look north for the first time. They listened to their leaders talking of national living space, of the hordes of alien tourists with their soulless dollars and yen, of the tired blood of their compatriots yearning to be invigorated. As they stood on the beaches of Marbella, Juan, Rimini and Naxos they swung their arms in unison, chanting their exercise songs as they heard the call to march north, expel the invading tourists and reclaim their historic heartlands.
So, in the summer of 1997 they set off along the deserted autoroutes and motorways in the greatest invasion that Europe has ever known, intent on seizing their former homes, determined to reinstate a forgotten Europe of nations, each jealous of its frontiers, happy to guard its history, tariff barriers and insularity.
1989
War Fever
Ryan’s dream of a ceasefire first came to him during the battle for the Beirut Hilton. At the time he was scarcely aware of the strange vision of a city at peace that had slipped uninvited into a corner of his head. All day the battle had moved from floor to floor of the ruined hotel, and Ryan had been too busy defending the barricade of restaurant tables in the mezzanine to think of anything else. By the end, when Arkady and Mikhail crept forward to silence the last Royalist sniper in the atrium, Ryan stood up and gave them covering fire, praying all the while for his sister Louisa, who was fighting in another unit of the Christian militia.
Then the firing ceased, and Captain Gomez signalled Ryan to make his way down the staircase to the reception area. Ryan watched the dust falling through the roof of the, atrium fifteen floors above him. Illuminated by the sunlight, the pulverised cement formed a fleeting halo that cascaded towards the replica of a tropical island in the centre of the atrium. The miniature lagoon was filled with rubble, but a few tamarinds and exotic ferns survived among the furniture thrown down from the upper balconies. For a moment this derelict paradise was lit by the dust, like a stage set miraculously preserved in the debris of a bombed theatre. Ryan gazed at the fading halo, thinking that one day, perhaps, all the dust of Beirut would descend like the dove, and at last silence the guns.
But the halo served a more practical purpose. As Ryan followed Captain Gomez down the staircase he saw the two enemy militia men scrambling across the floor of the lagoon, their wet uniforms clearly visible against the chalky cement. Then he and Gomez were firing at the trapped soldiers, shredding the tamarinds into matchwood long after the two youths lay bloodily together in the shallow water. Possibly they had been trying to surrender, but the newsreels of Royalist atrocities shown on television the previous evening put paid to that hope. Like the other young fighters, Ryan killed with a will.
Even so, as after all the battles in Beirut that summer, Ryan felt dazed and numbed when it was over. He could almost believe that he too had died. The other members of his platoon were propping the five bodies against the reception counter, where they could be photographed for the propaganda leaflets to be scattered over the Royalist strongholds in South Beirut. Trying to focus his eyes, Ryan stared at the roof of the atrium, where the last wisps of dust were still falling from the steel girders.
‘Ryan! What is it?’ Dr Edwards, the United Nations medical observer, took Ryan’s arm and tried to steady him. ‘Did you see someone move up there?’
‘No – there’s nothing. I’m okay, doctor. There was a strange light..
‘Probably one of those new phosphorus shells the Royalists are using. A fiendish weapon, we’re hoping to get them banned.’
With a grimace of anger, Dr Edwards put on his battered UN helmet. Ryan was glad to see this brave, if slightly na•ve man, in some ways more like an earnest young priest than a doctor, who spent as much time in the Beirut front line as any of the combatants. Dr Edwards could easily have returned to his comfortable New England practice, but he chose to devote himself to the men and women dying in a forgotten civil war half a world away. The seventeen-year-old Ryan had struck up a close friendship with Dr Edwards, and brought to him all his worries about his sister and aunt, and even his one-sided passion for Lieutenant Valentina, the strong-willed commander of the Christian guard-post at the telephone exchange.
Dr Edwards was always caring and sympathetic, and Ryan often exploited the physician’s good nature, milking him for advance news of any shift in military alliances which the UN peacekeeping force had detected. Sometimes Ryan worried that Dr Edwards had spent too long in Beirut. He had become curiously addicted to the violence and death, as if tending the wounded and dying satisfied some defeatist strain in his character.
‘Let’s have a look at the poor devils.’ He led Ryan towards the soldiers propped against the reception counter, their weapons and personal letters arranged at their feet in a grim tableau. ‘With any luck, we’ll find their next of kin.’
Ryan pushed past Captain Gomez, who was muttering over his uncooperative camera. He knelt beside the youngest of the dead soldiers, a teenager with dark eyes and cherubic face, wearing the bulky camouflage jacket of the International Brigade.
‘Angel…? Angel Porrua…?’ Ryan touched the spongy cheeks of the fifteen-year-old Spaniard, with whom he often went swimming at the beaches of East Beirut. Only the previous Sunday they had rigged a makeshift sail on an abandoned dory and cruised half a mile up the coast before being turned back by the UN naval patrol. He realised that he had last seen Angel scrambling through the waterlogged debris of the artificial lagoon in the atrium. Perhaps he had recognised Ryan on the mezzanine staircase, and had been trying to surrender as he and Captain Gomez opened fire.
‘Ryan?’ Dr Edwards squatted beside him. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Angel Porrua – but he’s in the Brigade, doctor. They’re on our side.’
‘Not any more.’ Clumsily, Dr Edwards pressed Ryan’s shoulder in a gesture of comfort. ‘Last night they did a deal with the Royalists. I’m sorry – they’ve been guilty of real treachery.’
‘No, Angel was on our side…’
Ryan stood up and left the group of soldiers sharing a six-pack of beer.
He stepped through the dust and rubble to the ornamental island in the centre of the atrium. The bullet-riddled tamarinds still clung to their rockery, and Ryan hoped that they would survive until the first of the winter rains fell through the roof. He looked back at the Royalist dead, sitting like neglected guests who had expired at the reception counter of this hotel, weapons beside them.
But what if the living were to lay down their weapons? Suppose that all over Beirut the rival soldiers were to place their rifles at their feet, along with their identity tags and the photographs of their sisters and sweethearts, each a modest shrine to a ceasefire?
A ceasefire? The phrase scarcely existed in Beirut’s vocabulary, Ryan reflected, as he sat in the rear of Captain Gomez’s jeep on the return to the Christian sector of the city. Around them stretched the endless vistas of shattered apartment houses and bombed-out office buildings. Many of the stores had been converted into strongpoints, their steel grilles plastered with slogans and posters, crude photographs of murdered women and children.
During the original civil war, thirty years earlier, more than half a million people had lived in Beirut. His own grandparents had been among them, some of the many Americans who had resigned their teaching posts at the schools and university to fight with the beleaguered Christian militia. From all over the world volunteers had been drawn to Beirut, mercenaries and idealists, religious fanatics and out-of-work bodyguards, who fought and died for one or another of the rival factions.
Deep in their bunkers below the rubble they even managed to marry and raise their families. Ryan’s parents had been in their teens when they were murdered during the notorious Airport Massacre – in one of the worst of many atrocities, the Nationalist militia had executed their prisoners after promising them safe passage to Cyprus. Only the kindness of an Indian soldier in the UN force had saved Ryan’s life – he had found the baby boy and his sister in an abandoned apartment building, and then tracked down their adolescent aunt.
However tragic, Beirut had been worth fighting for, a city with street markets, stores and restaurants. There were churches and mosques filled with real congregations, not heaps of roof-tiles under an open sky. Now the civilian population had gone, leaving a few thousand armed combatants and their families hiding in the ruins. They were fed and supplied by the UN peacekeeping force, who turned a blind eye to the clandestine shipments of arms and ammunition, for fear of favouring one or another side in the conflict.
So a futile war dragged on, so pointless that the world’s news media had long since lost interest. Sometimes, in a ruined basement, Ryan came acoss a tattered copy of Time or Paris Match, filled with photographs of street-fighting and graphic reports on the agony of Beirut, a city then at the centre of the world’s concern. Now no one cared, and only the hereditary militias fought on, grappling across their empires of rubble.
But there was nothing pointless about the bullets. As they passed the shell of the old pro-government radio station there was a single shot from the ground-floor window.
‘Pull over, corporal! Get off the road!’ Pistol in hand, Gomez wrenched the steering wheel from Arkady and slewed the jeep into the shelter of a derelict bus.
Kneeling beside the flattened rear tyres, Ryan watched the UN spotter plane circle overhead. He waited for Gomez to flush out the sniper, probably a Nationalist fanatic trying to avenge the death of a brother or cousin. The Nationalist militia were based at Beirut Airport, a wilderness of weed-grown concrete on which no plane had landed for ten years, and rarely ventured into the centre of the city.
If a ceasefire was ever to take hold it would be here, somewhere along the old Green Line that divided Beirut, in this no-man’s-land between the main power bases – the Christians in north-east Beirut, the Nationalists and Fundamentalists in the south and west, the Royalists and Republicans in the south-east, with the International Brigade clinging to the fringes. But the real map of the city was endlessly redrawn by opportunist deals struck among the local commanders – a jeep bartered for a truckload of tomatoes, six rocket launchers for a video-recorder.
What ransom could buy a ceasefire?
‘Wake up, Ryan! Let’s move!’ Gomez emerged from the radio station with his prisoner, a jittery twelve-year-old in a hand-me-down Nationalist uniform. Gomez held the boy by his matted hair, then flung him into the back of the jeep. ‘Ryan, keep an eye on this animal – he bites. We’ll take him to interrogation.’
‘Right, captain. And if there’s anything left we’ll trade him for some new videos.’
Hands bound, the boy knelt on the floor of the jeep, weeping openly from fear and rage. Jabbing him with his rifle stock, Ryan was surprised by his own emotions. For all his hopes of a ceasefire, he felt a reflex of real hate for this overgrown child. Hate was what kept the war going. Even Dr Edwards had been infected by it, and he wasn’t alone. Ryan had seen the shining eyes of the UN observers as they photographed the latest atrocity victims, or debriefed the survivors of a cruel revenge attack, like prurient priests at confession. How could they put an end to the hate that was corrupting them all? Good God, he himself had begun to resent Angel Porrua for fighting with the Nationalists…
That evening Ryan rested on the balcony of Aunt Vera’s apartment overlooking the harbour in East Beirut. He watched the riding lights of the UN patrol craft out at sea, and thought about his plans for a ceasefire. Trying to forget the day’s fighting and Angel’s death, he listened to Louisa chattering in the kitchen over the sounds of pop music broadcast by a local radio station.
The balcony was virtually Ryan’s bedroom – he slept there in a hammock shielded from public view by the washing line and the plywood hutch he had built as a boy for his Dutch rabbit. Ryan could easily have moved to any one of the dozen empty apartments in the building, but he liked the intimacy of family life. The two rooms and kitchen were the only home he had ever known.
A young couple in an apartment across the street had recently adopted an orphan boy, and the sounds of his crying reminded Ryan that he at least was related by blood to the members of his family. In Beirut such blood ties were rare. Few of the young women soldiers ever conceived, and most children were war-orphans, though it puzzled Ryan where all these youngsters came from – somehow a secret family life survived in the basements and shantytowns on the outskirts of the city.
‘That’s the Rentons’ new little son.’ His sister strolled onto the balcony, brushing out the waist-long hair that spent its days in a military bun. ‘It’s a pity he cries a lot.’
‘At least he laughs more than he cries.’ An intriguing thought occurred to Ryan. ‘Tell me, Louisa – will Lieutenant Valentina and I have a child?’
‘A child? Did you hear that, Aunty? So what does Valentina think?’
‘I’ve no idea. As it happens, I’ve never spoken to her.’
‘Well, dear, I think you should ask her. She might lose something of her elegant composure.’
‘Only for a few seconds. She’s very regal.’
‘It only takes a few seconds to conceive a child. Or is she so special that she won’t even spare you those few seconds?’
‘She is very special.’
‘Who’s this?’ Aunt Vera hung their combat jackets over the balcony, gazing at them with almost maternal pride. ‘Are you talking about me, Ryan, or your sister?’
‘Someone far more special,’ Louisa rejoined. ‘His dream woman.’
‘You two are my dream women.’
This was literally the truth. The possibility that anything might happen to them appalled Ryan. In the street below the balcony a night-commando patrol had lined up and were checking their equipment – machine-pistols, grenades, packs loaded with booby-traps and detonators. They would crawl into the darkness of West Beirut, each a killing machine out to murder some aunt or sister on a balcony.
A UN medical orderly moved down the line, issuing morphine ampoules. For all the lives they saved, Ryan sometimes resented the blue helmets. They nursed the wounded, gave cash and comfort to the bereaved, arranged foster-parents for the orphans, but they were too nervous of taking sides. They ringed the city, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, and in a sense controlled everything that went on in Beirut. They could virtually bring the war to a halt, but Dr Edwards repeatedly told Ryan that any attempt by the peacekeeping force to live up to its name would lead the world’s powers to intervene militarily, for fear of destabilising the whole Middle East. So the fighting went on.
