Zona (11 page)

In any case the whole idea of the Room is a joke. Perhaps our deepest wish in life is that there could be a place
like this, a Room where our deepest wish comes true. Extrapolating from that, we don’t want to get to the point where we discover that we actually don’t want this Room to exist, that even if it existed we wouldn’t enter it, that even if we could buy ourselves the nicest piece of steak in the supermarket we would save the money instead or spend it on beer and crisps, that even if I did get the chance for a three-way it would turn out that I couldn’t get it up because I felt the odd man out, that it was actually a two-way with a third person (me) feeling superfluous. We want the Room to be external to ourselves, like the football pools or the lottery. We want
it
to do the work, want it to be a window on to another world, not a mirror reflecting back to ourselves the inadequate or shameful nature of our own desires, which probably do not operate on this one vote, once, kind of basis. One’s deepest desire changes from day to day, moment to moment. There were plenty of occasions, in my twenties, when my most intense desire—so intense that it was impossible to see beyond it—was to have a beer, to get to the boozer before last orders, before time was called. Those days are gone but there are still times—when I’m in the cinema, watching a film I’ve wanted to see for ages—when all I want to
do, the thing that I crave with every fibre of my being, is to shut my eyes and take a nap. (‘The eye wants to sleep,’ writes the poet, ‘but the head is no mattress.’)

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that Writer doesn’t want to go into the Room or, in Stalker’s optimistic reading of the situation, is not ready to go in just yet. This reluctance or hesitation is a specifically middle-aged problem. In your twenties there’d be no disjuncture at all between what you thought you wanted and your innermost wish; both would be the same, lying at the same depths within. It’s one of the reasons why middle-aged people are reluctant to take powerful psychedelic drugs. I had the idea that in my mid-fifties I would start taking LSD again, was actually looking forward to seeing that acid ripple of the ground again, but now that it’s only a few years away, the prospect seems altogether less appealing than it did a decade ago. What kind of stuff would tripping unearth? Probably that I had no desire to trip. Even if I waited for a perfect day, for cloudless weather in the sky and in the head, it might turn out that, unbeknownst to me, a dreadful storm was about to brew up in the head, in which case the bright conditions outside would only exacerbate the abysmal depression within, that before I knew it I’d end up in the damp and clammy
meat grinder, putting one foot in front of another in a state of abject terror.

How about Professor, then? Yep, he’s up for it. Well, this is a surprise, especially since he’s got his knapsack back. A while back he was all for calling it a day but now he’s ready to take the plunge. Good man. He goes to get whatever it is he’s been fiddling with but it’s definitely not a crown of thorns. It looks like an absolutely state-of-the-art thermos, far better than the one he’s been lugging around, capable of keeping drinks piping hot or icy cold for thousands of years. What could it be? A soul-ometer, quips Writer, but then Professor drops an absolute bombshell: it’s not a thermos flask, it’s a bomb. What the…? Yes, a twenty-kiloton
bomb.
He’s a secular jihadist, a militant proto-Dawkinsite, declaring war on the believers, on those who have faith in the transformative power of the Room. Professor insists that he’s not a maniac but, at this moment, he looks and sounds exactly like an elderly nutter with a bomb. He and his colleagues back at the Institute decided to destroy the Room in case it got into the wrong hands, to stop people coming here whose deepest wish was to control mankind and enslave the world, the lazy Hitlers and couch Stalins. But then some of his conspirators at the Institute had a change of
heart. They decided that even if it was a miracle it was still part of nature.
⁴²

Quite so. Everything we see in the Zone is conceivably just a part of nature. What seems a miracle is the ground rippling due to some geomorphologic activity that one cannot understand. The disappearing bird is a fluke of the light. The sudden gust of wind, blowing in from nowhere in the midst of a calm day, is a freak gust of wind. Anyway, some of Professor’s friends decided
against blowing up the Zone, but that’s exactly what he’s here to do. Exactly in the sense of probably. He came here with the idea that his innermost wish was to blow up the Zone, to get in and slam the door behind him; to make sure that he was the last to avail himself of its promised magic. But even at this late stage there’s scope for doubt, even now that he’s made up his mind it’s possible his innermost wish won’t let him do what he’s determined he must do. This is one of the lessons of the Zone: sometimes a man doesn’t want to do what a man thinks he wants to do. Besides, there’s no guarantee that the physical destruction of the Room will diminish belief in its power. On the contrary, obliteration might generate more stories about it and heighten the mythical status of the place where it
used to be
until it is brought into re-existence on the site— and by virtue—of its own absence.

Stalker wanders off to consider what, from his point of view, both as a devotee of the Zone and as someone who earns his living from it, can only be very bad news. Then he spins round and tries to snatch the bomb from the Professor. They have an old-bloke scuffle, like an outtake from
Bumfights,
but then Writer wades in and—three times—chucks Stalker back into the murky water with
all the lightbulbs and stuff from the chemistry set floating in it. Strangely, Professor objects to this intervention, even as Stalker comes back yet again, only to be flung into the foreground. Impossible, at this point, not to think of the bit near the end of Don DeLillo’s
White Noise,
when Willie Mink gives a deranged lecture on room behaviour: ‘The point of rooms is that they’re inside. No one should go into a room unless he understands this. People behave one way in rooms, another way in streets, parks and airports. To enter a room is to agree to a certain kind of behaviour. It follows that this would be the kind of behaviour that takes place in rooms.’

Which raises the question of whether, on the threshold of a room that is not just any room but
the
Room, all this talk of blowing the place to kingdom come, all this brawling and scuffling and throwing each other into puddles, is entirely appropriate.

Stalker would be the one to know but he’s had all the fight knocked out of him. He picks himself up again, wants to know why Professor wants to destroy people’s hope. This place that is all that’s left to them on earth, the only place they can come to. Why destroy their hope? The awfulness of what is about to be done revives Stalker sufficiently to make him rush Professor again—only to
get thrown to the ground by Writer, who has grown increasingly angry. (Professor looks like he’s about to have a heart attack—the scuffling has knocked the puff out of him too.) Writer launches into a diatribe against Stalker. He’s a louse, enjoying the power of God almighty. No wonder he never enters the Room—he’s got everything he wants, all the power and mystery. Stalker has rarely looked happy; he has always appeared burdened by the job of being a Stalker, now—with his face bloodied and bruised, his eyes red with tears—he looks utterly dejected. And he’s literally snivelling whereas before he was just acting in a snivelling sort of way. Stalkers are not allowed to enter the Room, he snivels. They can’t even enter the Zone with any ulterior motive. But yes, you’re right, he tells Writer. I’m a louse, I’ve never done any good in this life, I’ve never even given anything to my wife. I don’t have any friends. But don’t take everything from me. Everything has been taken from me, on the other side of the barbed wire, he says. All that’s mine is here, in the Zone. My happiness, my freedom, my selfrespect. I bring people here, people like me—the desperate, the tormented. They have nothing else to hope for. And I bring them here. Only I, the louse, can help them.

Having got so much off their chests everyone simmers
down. Writer is having doubts himself. Why did Porcupine hang himself? Because he came here with mercenary motives. So why didn’t he come back to repent? Because, he understands now, not all wishes will be granted here, only your innermost wish, which, in Porcupine’s case, was for money. Confronted by his true nature, he hanged himself. The truth revealed by the Room is ontological. ‘Each one of us comes into the world with her or his unique possibility—which is like an aim, or, if you wish, almost like a law,’ says a character in John Berger and Nella Bielski’s play
A Question of Geography.
‘The job of our lives is to become—day by day, year by year, more conscious of this aim so that it can at last be realized.’ Unless you’re a paedophile, say, or any one of a dozen other types of sicko. Then the job of your life is to bury that urge, to make sure you never get near the gates of a primary school or anything that might turn out to be the Room.

Another, less dramatic, scenario: what if you got here and went into the Room, believing in it absolutely, and it turned out that you didn’t have an innermost wish, that all the things you thought you wished for you didn’t actually want? You leave the Room, leave the Zone and, unlike Porcupine, nothing happens. Jack shit. Would you con-
clude from this that you were absolutely content, purring on a daily basis like a cat or a dog whose bowl of milk was constantly replenished? Unlikely. Or at least if you
had
been content—without realizing it—now you would most certainly be filled with discontent. You would conclude that the Room did not work. That you’d been sold a pup. That Stalker had not undergone the changes that he went through as Tarkovsky and the much-put-upon Strugatskys reworked, rewrote and reshot the film. You would phone him, demand a refund, threaten to blacken his name, turn him in to the authorities or, at the very least, refuse to recommend him to friends considering a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the much-vaunted Zone. Of course Stalker would have none of it. In the extremely unlikely event that he returned or even answered your calls he would insist that it
had
worked, that it was working perfectly. And so you would be left seething, dissatisfied, cheated, unable to accept that this was your innermost wish, your innermost nature.

They are all back where they were before Professor unveiled his bomb, his stainless steel IED, before the scuffle in this waterlogged place, on the threshold of the Room, whose light can be seen, off to the right. Stalker is on his knees, collapsed on the floor. Writer is holding
forth like a detective who has just solved a difficult case, who has spotted the clues and unravelled the contradictions that escaped the attention of other, less subtle, minds. And he’s not finished. How do we know it’s true, that the Zone grants all your wishes? Who actually said that the Room granted these wishes? One assumes Writer is speaking to Stalker but Professor replies,
He
did, meaning Stalker, as if the whole idea of the Zone and the Room were entirely his invention.
⁴³

Writer is at the edge of the Room and, overcome by his own oratorical prowess, stumbles forward, is about to
fall
into the Room, is about to tumble into having his own innermost wish accidentally realized—more sales than Wilbur Smith, more critical acclaim than Sebald, more chicks than Bukowski—but Stalker pulls him back and they huddle on the ground together. The phone is
ringing again. Writer puts his arm around Stalker’s shoulders. Professor stands up, begins dismantling his thermos-bomb, chucking bits of it into the water, asking the question that is on everyone’s lips—What is the point in coming here?

The purpose of coming here was to get to the point where that question could be asked of oneself rather than someone else. There always comes a moment in the writing of a book when its purpose is revealed: the moment when the urge—Nabokov’s famous ‘throb’—that led one to consider writing it is made plain. Actually there are two moments, or, if it makes sense to put it like this, the moment comes in two phases. First when one realizes that yes, there
is
a book here—however faintly it can be discerned—not just a haphazard collection of jottings and crossings-out clustered round an inadequately formed idea. Since, in principle, getting to that point should be easy, it’s disheartening to find that so much time and energy have to be wasted, that so many pointless detours, irritating obstacles, self-imposed tests and excuses (that voice constantly whispering or crying out ‘Stop!’) conspire to get in the way. But at the point when you realize that there
is
a book, even a short one with little
hope of critical approval or large sales, you see that all those diversions were necessary and inevitable and so, strictly speaking, were not diversions at all (even if the whole journey is, ultimately, no more than a diversion). From that point on—the point that Kafka said must be reached—there is no turning back and, despite setbacks, the going gets generally easier. The next moment comes not when the book is finished—that is better conceived as the last bit of the previous phase—but some time after it is published, when you see it for what it is (weirdly, page proofs always retain some of the glow of how it was intended to be rather than what it is). Then you see that actually those big desires and hopes, your deepest wishes, turned out not to be so deep at all, that actually even to consider life and writing in terms of a single wish is absurd, that there are numerous wishes and numerous books to be written—or, by reference to something mentioned earlier, further extensions (more
rooms)
to be built, more beer to be drunk, and more countries to be napalmed. You wonder if you wouldn’t have been better off summarizing a different film,
Where Eagles Dare,
say, or writing a different book, about tennis perhaps. There’s no Room, or at least this one, this room, wasn’t it. And so one sets off again, trying to find another.

Since we’ve come this far, since we are still on the threshold of the Room and could conceivably sneak in there while these three are recovering from all that scuffling, perhaps I should say what it is that I most want from—what is my deepest wish for—this book. Easy: success. Success that, by definition, will be
enormous
success. If it is published, if someone will deign to publish this summary of a film that relatively few people have seen, then that will constitute a success far greater than anything John Grisham could ever have dreamed of. And that wish, as you can tell, has been granted. As a result the original wish has been updated and upgraded because I’m now thinking that this summary that is the opposite of a summary does have some commercial appeal—in an admittedly niche sort of way—and is actually deserving of serious critical attention, maybe even a little prize of some kind.