The Call-Girls (2 page)

In Memoriam Messieurs Bouvard et Pecuchet

The characters in this tale are fictitious, but the authors, publications and experiments quoted by them are authentic.

‘He ought to sound his horn,' Professor Burch remarked nervously as the bus rounded a hairpin bend and without further ado was swallowed up by a tunnel, vanishing into the belly of the petrified whale lined with jagged basalt. The tunnel was narrow, and the driver had to creep along in first gear; it looked as if the sharp ridges jutting out of the rock might scratch or break a window at any moment. The engine of the ancient bus made such a racket that the Professor's neighbour, an apple-cheeked young friar, had to wait, before replying, for the end of the tunnel. ‘They must be experienced chaps,' he said reassuringly. ‘After all, they do the run from the valley up to Schneedorf three times a day.'

‘He should nevertheless sound his horn,' Hector Burch repeated, but his words were swallowed by a waterfall thundering down the rock-face and vanishing into the precipice under the narrow bridge they were crossing. They entered a second tunnel, which seemed an even tighter fit, and much longer than the first.

The young Copertinian Brother, Tony Caspari, enjoyed the thrills of the climb immensely, although he felt less confident than he pretended to be. Neither he nor Burch knew that the villagers of Schneedorf, renowned for their juicy humour, called the three tunnels on their road ‘the spiky virgins', and that occasionally a mail-bus did get stuck in the middle one, which at a certain point had only a couple of inches' clearance on either side. When that happened, a gang of road-menders – for the road was always on the mend, either after a landslide or a cloudburst – alerted by the protracted hooting which echoed from the rocks, betook themselves to the trapped bus with its trapped passengers. They
were armed with long poles – straight young fir-trees stripped of bark and branches – which they inserted under the front or back axle of the bus, as the case might be, and with fierce shouts of ‘Ho-o-oh-ruck, ho-o-oh-ruck', using the poles as levers, incredibly managed to edge the bus away from the rock-face. It was much the same method which the natives of Easter Island had once used to erect their giant statues – and presumably also the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids.

In winter the bus mainly brought loads of Fräuleins, bristling with skis and pointed sticks. They occasionally got a little hysterical, although it had been explained to them that the gravel and salt strewn on the icy road made it perfectly safe. The largest contingents of Fräuleins were schoolteachers and postmistresses from England and Sweden. At the start of the season, most of the oafish village lads became transformed into glamorous ski-teachers in red anoraks adorned with blue badges, who, at the arrival of each busload, amiably settled among themselves who should seduce which of the more promising-looking Fräuleins. There were no rivalries or quarrels; the villagers had their ritual ways of sharing out the loot, as they had their fixed ways of exchanging wedding and funeral gifts of fixed amounts in strictly traditional, but eminently practical ways.

In summer, however, the village assumed a different identity: it became a centre for scientific and cultural congresses. Instead of giggling Fräuleins, the yellow bus brought loads of elderly egg-heads. The present season, which had only just started, was to feature fifteen congresses, conferences and symposia; they were all listed on a leaflet, which Professor Burch had been studying with his usual single-minded concentration before they got into the tunnels. There was to be a Congress of the Society for the Study of Diseases of the Vocal Chords; an International Congress on the Technology of Artificial Limbs; a Symposium on the Responsibilities of Scientists in a Free Society; another on the Ethics of Science and the Concept of Democracy; a seminar on the Use of Solid Fuels in Rocket-Propulsion Systems; a Congress
of the European Psychiatric Association on the Origins of Violence; a Symposium of the World Organization of Psychiatrists on the Roots of Aggression; the International Society for the Quantitative Study of Social Behaviour was to hold a Seminar on Self-Regulatory Mechanisms in Interpersonal Interrelationships; the Swiss Poetry Club was organizing a series of lectures on Archetypal Symbols in the Folklore of the Bernese Oberland; and there were going to be three Interdisciplinary Symposia with titles which contained the three words ‘Environment', ‘Pollution' and ‘Future' in three different permutations.

The young friar was also studying the leaflet. ‘One wonders,' he remarked, ‘why the European Psychiatrists and the World Psychiatrists can't get together when they are discussing the same subject.'

‘Different schools,' Burch replied gruffly. ‘Analytical orientation versus pharmacological orientation. They are at each other's throats.'

‘I remember now,' Tony said eagerly. ‘I read how they keep excommunicating each other. What a pity.'

‘The methods of the Church in dealing with heretics were more deplorable,' snapped Burch.

‘But more effective,' said Tony, smiling through innocent blue eyes.

‘That's a cynical remark for a member of your Order.'

‘But we are trained to be cynical,' Tony said brightly. ‘Every Friday in the seminar we have to build a bonfire of our illusions.'

Professor Burch pointedly reached into his briefcase and extracted therefrom the galley-proofs of the latest edition of his textbook on
The Quantitative Measurement of Behaviour in its Social and Genetic Aspects.
It was mandatory reading for graduate students; by the time it was published, much of it would be out of date, and he would have to start preparing the next revised edition – a frustrating and lucrative business.

The bus had by now emerged from the romantic but somewhat sinister gorge through which it had battled its way; the mountains on both sides opened up, curving away into
softer slopes which irresistibly reminded poor Tony of female bosoms expanding from the cleavage. The sky, which further down had been overcast, changed into the intense, saturated blue found only at great heights. The rest of the world was drenched in varied tints of green: meadows, slopes, pine-woods, grass, moss and fern. There were no cornfields, no signs of cultivation, only the pastures and the woods, displaying their different ideas of greenness.

‘I hate green.' Dr Harriet Epsom, who occupied the seat in front of Burch, had rotated her sturdy neck and shoulders at an angle of a hundred and thirty-five degrees to address this remark diagonally to the young friar. Her shoulders were freckled, burnt, and peeling in strips – which, Tony thought, should not happen to an ethologist, accustomed to the tropical sun. ‘What colour do you like, then?' he asked politely.

‘Blue. Precisely the blue of your eyes.'

‘I am sorry,' Tony blurted out, blushing. Blushing was a terrible habit or rather, as he knew, a physiological reflex, which he could not get rid of, although he was fairly skilled in all sorts of mind-control experiments, from Yoga to auto-hypnosis.

‘Rot. What's there to be sorry about?' snapped Harriet Epsom, or H.E. to her familiars. One of them, sitting next to her and thus in front of Tony, was a Kleinian child psychologist from Los Angeles, who wore her black hair short-cropped, and shaved the back of her neck. Tony could not keep his eyes away. He wondered whether she did it with a cut-throat razor, and was reminded of Mary Queen of Scots.

‘It's just a silly habit,' he said, recovering. ‘Did you get that sunburn in Kenya, or wherever your baboons are domiciled?'

‘Rot. On the Serpentine in Hyde Park. They had a heatwave.'

‘What were you doing in London?'

‘What do you think I was doing? Yawning my head off at a symposium on Hierarchic Order in Primate Societies. I knew what each of them would say – Lorenz and that Schaller
woman, and the Russells and the rest – and they all knew what I was going to say, but I had to go. Why? Because I am an academic call-girl. We are all call-girls in this bus. You are still green, but you might become one in due time.'

‘It's the first time I have been invited to a symposium of this kind,' confessed Tony. ‘I am madly thrilled.'

‘Rot. It becomes a habit, maybe an addiction. You get a long-distance telephone-call from some professional busybody at some foundation or university – “sincerely hope you can fit it into your schedule – it will be a privilege to have you with us – return fare economy-class and a modest honorarium of…” Or maybe no honorarium at all, and in the end you are out of pocket. I am telling you, it's an addiction.'

‘You are pulling my leg,' protested Tony.

‘Maybe this show will be a little less of a circus because it is Solovief's idea, and I am a sucker for his ideas, though some say he's finished. But he always has a surprise up his sleeve, you'll see.'

Dr Epsom rotated her head back into quarter-profile, to resume conversation with her neighbour. ‘I have always been mad about baby-blue eyes,' she remarked audibly. The young woman with the shaven neck said something in a semi-whisper, and both their backs shook with mirth.

After a final climb round two hairpin bends separated by an S curve, the bus suddenly emerged into the village. It stood on a high plateau surrounded by undulating grassland, wooded mountains, and in the distance some glaciers which were visible only on clear days. The village consisted essentially of a spacious square, formed by the white, Romanesque church, the town-hall-cum-post-office, and two massive old farmhouses converted into inns. From the square, three lanes radiated in three different directions. Each started hopefully with a couple of shops and boarding-houses, but after some fifty yards it petered out and became a dirt-track ambling along pastures and farms. The farmhouses were square, squat and solid, built of seasoned, highly inflammable timber, surrounded by balconies with elaborate
carvings, and with a bell-tower to tell the men in the fields that dinner was ready, or to sound the alarm in case of fire. All over the wide open landscape, two or three farmhouses were always clustered together, but at a distance of several hundred yards from the next cluster.

‘Where is the cinema?' Harriet Epsom shouted at the driver as they were crossing the church square – white, sundrenched and empty at this hour.

‘The
Kino
?' the driver repeated, turning round. He had a ginger-coloured, Emperor Franz Josef moustache, twirled and waxed to screwdriver points on a level with his eyes, and spoke a guttural English that sounded like Arabic. ‘The
Kino
is down in the valley. Schneedorf is a backward village, Miss. We have no cinema, only colour television.'

H.E. rotated her head towards Tony. ‘That stage mountaineer is trying to be funny.'

‘I think …' Tony started, but did not get further because the moustachioed driver again turned his head and announced: ‘Gentlemen and ladies, we are now arrived at the Kongress-building.'

And there it stood, improbably, behind another sudden turn, which at the same time was the end of the road. The native building style in Schneedorf had not appreciably altered for the last three or four hundred years, yet suddenly, without warning, they were confronted with this huge, sadistic-looking, glass-and-concrete thing which some Scandinavian architect must have dreamt up in a state of acute depression.

‘How do you like?' the driver asked as the bus came to a standstill.

There was silence in the bus. Then Dr Wyndham's thin voice sounded from one of the back seats with a donnish titter:

‘It rather reminds one of a steel filing cabinet with plate-glass in front, doesn't it?'

The remark caused some mild hilarity which dispelled the after-effects of the spiky virgins and created an atmosphere of camaraderie among the call-girls, while they trooped up
the steps to the concrete terrace in front of the austere building.

‘Here comes our very own Nikolai Borisovitch Solovief,' Harriet shouted as a big bear of a man in a rumpled dark suit emerged from the building and came to meet them with unhurried steps. ‘Our Nikolai,' she added, ‘in full melancholy bloom.'

‘He looks ill,' Wyndham thought sadly, holding out his pudgy hand. ‘You do look flourishing,' he said with enthusiasm.

Solovief thrust his shaggy head forward and looked at Wyndham as if he were examining a specimen under the microscope. ‘He is telling lies as always,' he said in a deep, cracked voice.

‘It is nearly two years since Stockholm, isn't it?' said Wyndham.

‘You have not changed.'

‘I can't afford it any longer,' Wyndham tittered coyly.

The Kongresshaus was the brainchild of an adventurous operator whose life and works remain shrouded in mystery. He was the son of a postman in a lonely Alpine valley destined to take over his father's job, instead of which he ran away to South America and became a millionaire. One rumour asserted that he did it by smuggling arms, another that he ran a chain of brothels where the girls wore dirndls and had to yodel at the critical moment. However, after his first coronary episode, he underwent a spiritual conversion and made his money over to the Foundation for Promoting Love among Nations. The message was to radiate all over the world from the Kongresshaus, built in the Founder's beloved native mountains; but he died before the building was completed. After his death, the Trustees discovered that the Foundation's investments yielded just enough interest to
pay their salaries, and that there was nothing left to promote the message. They accordingly decided that the building could be put to best use by renting it to congresses and symposia, and leaving the promoting of the message to them. Actually, the building was originally called
La Maison des Nations',
but when somebody discovered that this had been the historic name of the most reputed and lamented brothel in the rue de Chabanais in Paris, a change was made. Although the Fräuleins during the skiing season were more lucrative, the villagers took a certain pride in being hosts to several galaxies of celebrities every year. But they had no standards of comparison, and thus did not realize that this particular bus-load was of exceptional quality, including three Nobel laureates and several likely candidates.