YOU DON’T APPLY to be a scapegoat. It’s a calling. A religious appointment, kind of like Céline going to war, or Dostoyevsky finding himself being brought out to the countryside to be hung on the Tsar’s orders. The goat’s at the centre of proceedings but he doesn’t have any say in the matter. There’s no relation to guilt, no crime to answer for, no prelude. And when this fate came our way, why would it be any different? The fact that the trials we endured were inflicted by people we had thought to be lifetime friends was of no avail. Maybe that is even of its essence.
After all, doesn’t the goat know his master? Isn’t he petted, cajoled, fed, fatted, then coaxed out of his stall, held up before the madding crowd swaying in exalted bloodthirsty madness, seeking carnal redemption, and now, eyes bugging with fear, until the scythe descends upon him, or until he is simply burned alive, as the mob reaches the pitch of frenzy?
No one knew in 1999 what was coming, but in retrospect, and perhaps even then, I sensed something had to be coming. I’d been sitting with Tony on rue Montorgueil. We were discussing Tony Blair’s decision to kill hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle purely because one of them had been diagnosed with Mad Cow’s disease, a condition that could not be transmitted to men. And I was asking Tony: “How long do you think this will continue?”
“This being?”
“The madness of cows. The madness of politicians.”
“It will continue until something happens. A convulsion.”
“What would you be thinking if you were an African? Just curious.”
“That Europe has one hell of a lot of flesh to spare.”
“Boomerang baby, coming to your neighbourhood and mine.”
Something had to happen. It took another thirty months. Then a festering wound clawed out of the core of NYC. I recall flying over the Suez Canal, so clear even at 25,000 feet, thinking that blue isthmus, and the shit it has caused. And then and then within days of our return from Madagascar under harrowing circumstances, it happened. On my birthday, more precisely, that I was celebrating in Paris at 11:30 a.m. Paris time by listening to France Informations Radio on the terrace of La Palette, rue de Seine. The commentator was saying that World War III had broken out and that 50,000 New Yorkers were dead. Haemish had been wandering in the quarter, lost, disoriented, seized with vertigo, and he hadn’t even heard the news. He would lose himself in Paris, in Chinatown and finally in Amsterdam where I would find him. Then he’d find himself and everyone else would lose their way.
Yeats had seen the circling falcon in his uneasy dreams. We, of poorer imaginations, would see the reality of the second coming — of a man, also the son of a carpenter, who would declare that the law of Jesus was now obsolete and would choose my birthday to send his message to the world, or more precisely the World Trade Centre Twin Towers. Love thy neighbour had run its course. Extinct. Game over. Now it was “Hate thy neighbour.”
Like the plague, the purge came to us in waves. Hannah, who had lived as a slave in Betsileo land, spoke to me of hery, an ill-wind, that occasionally visited malign energies upon the Betsileo. More often than not, it was an offence to fomba gasy, tradition, that triggered hery, but once unleashed, hery was indiscriminate as to its victims, preferring the malevolent joy of sweeping up both good and less good in its path, the better to leave a memory of what it had done.
In our case, it was Sid who signalled the descent into the Hades. And, after the strangeness of his downfall, and the retrospective inevitability of it, what I recalled, after the violence, and the wretched fate he endured, more than anything was a story his wife Cory told me after he left the planet. When they had fled the city together in his old olivegreen Dodge pickup and were crossing Alexis bridge into the lands west of Williams Lake along the Gold Rush trail. And Sid saying: “Now, nobody knows where we are.”
But, even the recesses of Tsilhqot’in country could not resist hery and later when I went up to Williams Lake to see what kind of place could bring down a man like that, I saw, breathed and smelled hery everywhere. There was no difference between those venal cowboys of Williams Lake eating their hamburgers, and the figures of the Betsileo, who had captured my wife and oppressed her, and made her the lowest of the low, only to resurrect her and turn her into a bride-elect of the great Rakotavao, who one day I would cross in that desiccated village on the RN7 heading down to Tulear and the mines.