Tuesday, May the 2nd, 2006
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Episode four of our new daily serial Testimony Of A Tundist
Just as we divide people into Tundists and Strobs, so with objects. Every different class of thing—plants, implements, landscapes, weaponry, minerals, etc—is split, violently, into the Tund and the Strob. So, for example, with the sub-class root vegetables: turnips, parsnips, and potatoes are, as we say “of Tund”, whereas such loathsome abominations as carrots are “Strobs”. Or consider implements, more particularly that branch of implementa known as kitchen utensils: of Tund, whisks, forks, and cheese graters; Strob, cruets and spoons.
My examples, of course, are far from exhaustive. There is a taxonomy of Tundism which initiates must learn. One of the tests inflicted upon those who seek to wear the Vest is a four-hour question-and-answer session, of merciless rigour, at which students will have a list of disparate and random nouns screeched at them by the Interrogators (usually twelve in number) and must reply, loudly and instantly, “Tund” or “Strob”. Most have to attempt this examination dozens of times before succeeding, and some never do. Countless are the times a glazed and incoherent aspirant will be shouting “Strund!” or “Tob!” after the first ten minutes, only to be led sheepishly from the hall with a sympathetic pat on the head and an injunction to buckle down to further study.
When new objects come into being—inventions, discoveries, exhumations—a Tundist committee is called into session to debate whether to admit the thing to the Tundist pantheon or to consign it to the dustbin of Strob. I was once called to sit on the committee, when a new item of smuggler's headgear was brought to our attention. The session lasted for two weeks, with a bitter division of opinion among the members. We do not rest, you see, until a unanimous decision has been reached and, with two hundred and two Tundists sitting together, there can be grave difficulties. The smuggler's speckled hood, by the way, was finally classified as of Tund.
As he made off, I followed him. I have no talent for landscapes: I will not attempt to describe the surroundings through which, for three and a half hours, I struggled to propel myself in his wake. Not once did he look back. Perhaps he knew I was tailing him, perhaps not. Eventually we arrived at a village, a miserable cluster of clapboard buildings dominated by a round stone tower topped by one of the tallest lightning rods I have ever seen. We had negotiated only a few of the village's foul alleyways when I guessed that my quarry was headed for the tower. Is this the Tower of the Tundists?, I thought. It was not: there is no such structure. My assumption was correct, however. Still without glancing behind him, the vested man vanished into the tower through a doorway. Undeterred, I wheeled myself after him, only to be stopped short by a figure lurking in the shadows of the portal. She was stooping and grey, and she too wore the Vest. Her voice was shrill but kindly.
“I am afraid you cannot enter the tower,” she said.
“I must! I must!” I wailed. Had I had the use of my legs, I would have stamped my feet. Oh, petulant me.
“I am so sorry,” she said, and she meant it. She gently eased the big oak door shut, and I heard her lock it from the inside.
Bribery. Subterfuge. Reckless daring. I had nothing of value to effect the first, and my intellect was not sufficient to cope with the second. As for the third, a woman in a wheelchair who, if I have not mentioned it before, was wracked by influenza and who had eaten only a discarded dough bun in the last two days, was in no fit state to engage in derring-do, to clamber up the walls of the tower and climb in through an upper window, or to obtain a few sticks of dynamite and blast the door open. What else could I do?
I pounded the door with my fist. The shrill grey woman opened a little hatch, at her eye level, and peered down at me, not without sympathy.
“Trap flap moon!” I cried. It was worth trying.
She looked at me quizzically, as if thinking very carefully about what I had said. I had no idea what I meant, but, surprisingly for me, I had correctly intuited the Tundist password—almost.
“Ah,” she said, after a long pause. The key will turn in the lock, she will open the door, they will let me in, I will join them, whoever they are, my eyes and ears and heart and brain and spleen will explode with glory…
“Frap,” she said, “Frap. I really am sorry,” and the hatch was closed again, and my head was ajangle. I went for a roll around the tower, slowly, trying to think. I sensed—I knew—that inside that tower there were at least two people, the man I had followed and the woman who barred my way, and both wore vests that shone with an unearthly glow, and perhaps there were even more of them inside, Glew perhaps, and others I had never seen, and I wanted to join them, I wanted them to welcome me, embrace me, explain to me the hot mystery nestling like an egg inside me, make me understand the tremors which darted through me as the image of that glow settled in my brain, in my heart, in the pit of my stomach, oh, I knew I could not bear to live longer without the succour they could give me. I circled the tower a second time, now seeking other entrances, but there were none.
Close to tears, I steered myself away from the tower, thinking to find a tavern in one of the tenebrous alleys where I could sing a couple of tear-stained ballads in return for a bowl of broth and enough firewater to douse the inferno in my skull. As I entered a particularly ill-starred row of hovels, somebody was maimed, and my luck came in. It happened very quickly: cyclist careering along, sudden appearance of wheelchair rolling dead into the cyclist's path, skewed swerve to avoid collision, cyclist smashes into wall of derelict bakery, crumples to the ground, awful tangle of limbs and flesh and rubber and metal, gash on forehead, wheels still spinning, cyclist passing out.
And me? My eyes were popping out. The cyclist wore a Tundist's vest. Forgive me: there was nobody about. I went over to the bleeding man, reached down to him, disentangled him as best as I could from his mangled bicycle, and then disentangled the vest from him. I tore off my windcheater and blouse, and pulled on the vest. Scrambling back to the tower, beating on the door, this time wearing the Vest, this time saying “frap”, this time the door opening, letting me pass, guiding me in… I found my haven among the Tundists.
Do not imagine that I am—was—a callous wretch. I called for an ambulance, from the telephone in the tower, and the cyclist was nursed back to health within days, and was brought to us on a stretcher, and I sought him out, and told him what I had done, and why I had done it, and he understood, he placed his bruised hand in mine and said he understood. I returned the Vest to him, for of course I was not yet worthy of it. Once safe inside the tower, I had not tried to deceive the Tundists. I told them everything. They had me wait in a room filled with crocuses and dust. On the other side of the tower, in another room, twenty Tundists deliberated. As darkness fell, the shrill grey woman wheeled me to them, through passages loud with the hiss of an extraordinary network of piping, funnels, ducts and cylinders, and as we entered the room, a Tundist with a stovepipe hat and a crimson face moved towards me and announced their decision. They did not cast me out.