Newsletter

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY SAAB VIII

Let me tell you about my Saab.

Max Lavergne

07 May 2024 — 10 min read

Let me tell you about my Saab. We were bone tired, itching uncontrollably, muscles cramping in the cold, summoned to the parlour for the young master's reading of the contraband items he had discovered in the garbage. The siren had sounded in the frigid dark and we had struggled into our uniforms and shuffled down for the assembly, which was military in its regimentation, vicious in spirit and characterised by an atmosphere of murderous camp. It was physically uncomfortable and psychologically upsetting, due to the cold seeping through our sack tunics and also the thick bundles of cinnamon bark and sandalwood the young master habitually strung from the rafters to Pavlov's Dog a fear response from us.

To his performance the young master wore a fitted military-style jacket with a high collar and epaulettes. He relished the theatrics of the reading and had, in previous performances, heightened the mise en scene with the addition of paper skulls glued to the walls and light fittings; his face painted red with a curled brow like a demon; ominous droning music. Today he stood before us with one big drum and a branch from the apple tree. With the list in one hand and the branch in the other, poised to strike the drum, he intoned the list. "Chicken bones", he read in his high, flinty voice. BONG. Chicken bones could be sharpened. "Disposable chopsticks." BONG. Likewise. Anything that could be sharpened was supposed to be placed in a special tin for the hunchback to smash up with a hammer. "Old porridge." BONG. "Pasta - two kinds." BONG. He paused for dramatic effect, his eyes bulging in anticipation of the bombshell he was about to drop. "A full bucket of cooked rice." BONG BONG BONG BONG. Grains were also forbidden from the garbage, because they could supposedly be fermented into biofuels.

We watched him fearfully from the benches. Christopher, the greenskeeper's son, was an unpleasant little creep who channeled his thwarted desires into a gift for woodwork - not a bad result - and had recently made for us six narrow wooden benches which we carried in and placed in three neat rows. Appleby the butler found it difficult to sit on cold marble for long stretches due to a leg injury sustained during a raid, and the Major, who was ordinarily merciless when it came to accommodating our small comforts, had chosen this as an opportunity to indulge in camaraderie. As the young master came to the end of his performance he folded the list up and tucked it into his breast pocket. He looked out at us. His thin, pale face was flushed and his watery eyes shone with a purpose larger than himself. At his tender age he had the limitless energy of a zealot and the cultish attraction to punishment of a genuine, unmanufactured sadist.

"I cannot accept this," he announced. "One of you is working to destroy us all. I now address that individual. I am certain you will continue with your sabotage. I neither fear this nor flatter myself that I will convince you to cease. But be very careful, because from this day forth I will be twice as vigilant and twice as crafty. And I will find you, and when I do, I will destroy you in such ways as your imagination cannot conjure."

We rose shivering from the benches and resumed our duties. I took the servant's staircase up to the third floor where the family's bedrooms were, peered out quickly onto the landing and, seeing no one, scurried across to the fire escape. Pink light was beginning to reach over the horizon. As the most nimble of the serving class I was tasked with collecting the pigeon eggs from the gables and eaves, only accessible by the fire escape, yet as an outdoors servant I was not permitted to walk on the carpet. Thusly I scurried.

I climbed up the thin metal ladder on the outside of the house. The wind howled around me. At the top I hauled myself onto the shallow pitched roof of the East wing and crawled along to where the eaves from the spire hung over. In the shelter underneath the overhang, six little nests clung to the wall, each with three or four eggs. On cool autumn days I liked to spend a late afternoon up here under the overhang, imagining Donna the cook's tits hanging out of her blouse. Once and only once she'd come up with me and let me see them in person and it was like opening a window and the fresh air blowing in. But she was generally a coward for heights.

I opened the insulated metal tin that was slung around my neck and packed the eggs in with shredded paper. A couple of birds landed on the tiles and began cooing in distress, darting from side to side. I grabbed at them half-heartedly. They hopped out of reach with no real fear.

As I turned to crawl back to the ladder something caught my eye. On the far side of the garden wall, a woman was digging. Pushing a long-handled post hole spade into the dusty earth and laboriously levering it out, slowly and methodically, over and over.

I stood to watch her. On the other side of the wall it was dry - basically desert, yellow sand, twigs of trees, occasionally shanty caravans crawling past, knocking at the gate in hopes of trading with the Major, but rarely individuals and never working by the wall. We were supposed to alert the Major via walkie talkie whenever we saw those outside the wall engage in industriousness of any kind. It was, so they said, to avoid any short-term security breaches or long-term fomenting, and we were familiar with the sight of the Major and the young master roaring out of the gates on their European motors clutching brickbats and returning hours later with strange meats and trinkets as trophies. But I knew that the second I sounded the alarm I would have to scurry back down the ladder for roll call, and if I was tardy the riders would test the swing of their brickbats on me.

So instead I sat and watched the woman. She was slender, brown-haired, but faint in the blue-black shadows of the early morning. She dug mechanically. I resisted the urge to characterise her steady rhythm as "evil", or "sinister", and reminded myself that she could just as easily be digging the hole for a domestic purpose - to roast a pig, perhaps - or, indeed, that the hole may have a more tragic designation. In the moments when the Major was neither driving out with a brickbat nor making difficult decisions about which members of the household we could no longer afford to feed, he liked to drink whiskey and become sentimental about US and THEM. "Resist comforting oversimplifications," he would urge wetly, "and instead focus laser-like on the unique and immutable attributes we all possess that make our lives a torment. Things may never improve, but we may at least improve our understanding of ourselves before we die." I hated when he talked about this stuff but he demanded an audience.

The woman was up to her waist in the hole. I wished I had my binoculars on me. We were supposed to have them on us at all times, to remain vigilant in case one of the shanty caravans threw the patchwork tarpaulins off their wagons to reveal a battering ram with which to try to cave in a section of wall and overrun us and so forth. To take control of our water wells, seize our food stores, and the rest of it. We assumed. I squinted at her. Not that we were strangers to deprivation. We had suffering, and plenty of it. The one thing the Major had in steady supply was hardship, laced with humiliation and tinged with contempt. The Major's supply was such a staple that when he was away, out satiating the young master's blood cravings with a raiding expedition, we began to oppress one another. I won't say that it didn't feel good, the chance to wear out a little of your own shoe leather on someone else's neck. It did.

The woman continued. I felt my irritation rise. The idiocy of allowing your industriousness to take this path! It was enough to make you hate all of humanity. Nearly up to her elbows. Her stamina was impressive. I was annoyed that I'd left my binoculars behind, and at the realization that by the time I climbed down and scurried across the landing and descended the staircase and grabbed them and returned to the roof she'd probably be out of sight. I crawled to the very edge of the roof and peered down. What WAS she doing? She had surely passed the depth necessary for an earth oven, and there was no corpse visibly awaiting burial.

As I strained to decipher the woman's motives I heard the rhythmic clank of feet ascending the fire ladder. Abruptly the Major himself was hauling a portly thigh over the gutter and crawling towards me. My heart rose in my chest. "M-morning, sire," I stammered, and then he was sitting next to me, looking down at the digging woman. Pensively he gnawed at a piece of cane sugar with brown and broken teeth.

Nervously I turned my gaze back to the woman. The hole, I should say. She had disappeared now. "The scrape of shovel on soil takes me back to the days of my youth," he rumbled. "The conquests, the ingenuity, the breakneck scrapeknuckle fortitude. Where are your binoculars?" Over the wall, a pair of thin and wiry men disappeared into the hole.

"I left them downstairs," I told him. "Hm!" he grunted in disappointment. As a child I had once seen the Major cut the hand off an insubordinate servant with an antique sword, and for that reason I had no wish to disappoint him. Yet there were other reasons too. Despite the fear he instilled in us, we still yearned to warm ourselves by his approval, to soak in the wordless glow of wellbeing that only a stern father can bestow. We were children to him. I had no death wish - I wanted at least to make it to tomorrow night, when I would creep into the ferns behind the pond to once more relieve Donna's blouse of its duties - but I also felt ashamed at having fallen short of the Major's standards.

The sun was high in the sky. More thin men crept into the hole. "What are they doing, Major?" I ventured fearfully. "They work to blow the wall open with petrol bomb," he rumbled. "At this moment they are filling tanks with ethanol, and when they have finished they will turn our perimeter to rubble and rush in like a torrent. May God have mercy on us." I made a show of rubbing my temples and holding my head in my hands so he would ask if I had a headache but he just stared at the wall with a greedy look in his eyes. "We should do something," I garbled. He didn't take his eyes off the wall. "Oh, and for WHAT," he muttered. "Moths that they are, they come to us from miles around to be dazzled by our flame, and to be burned to death in it. It feels good, you know," he said, gazing at me with the blunt poking stare of smooth-worn psychopath. "A moment to play out your tragic little scene with a thousand watts of power, and then a chance to rest.” He sighed and paused long. “Boy, I'm tired of the smoke in my nostrils."

I began to creep on hands and knees over to the ladder. With one hand I held down the TALK button my walkie talkie. "Don't you think, Major, that we had better ALERT THE HOUSEHOLD?" I said, speaking the latter three words loudly to warn the others without tipping my hand to the Major. He grunted and laid down on the tiles. I thumbed the button again. "The others may want to know that THERE ARE EXPLOSIVES LINING EASTERN WALL?" He didn't respond.

I shinned down the ladder, slid through the window, slipped across the hallway. At the top of the servants' stairs I paused. I heard the groan of the garage doors opening. With a rumbling groan the young master eased out in a gunmetal Hilux, welded and rewelded until its outer skin shimmered demonically in the grey morning light. Behind him followed the greenskeeper's son Christopher, behind the wheel of a piece of shit Ford hatchback, all the windows busted, rusted to hell. They accelerated towards the gate, almost piling into the wood. At the last minute it raised and they squealed out into the desert skidding as they turned to race over to the Eastern wall to visit torture upon the wall tunnelers. I watched as the plume of dust travelled along the northerly wall then arced around the corner. The other servants were dashing across the lawn for their defensive positions now, for all the good it would do them. Even old Appleby was picking his way to a mound of sandbags, leaning heavily on his rifle.

From the other side of the wall we heard screams and the pop-pop-pop of gunfire. Then a thump and a flash. I dived to the floor. Every window in the house shattered as the wall bomb detonated. I dived for the servants stairs and tumbled down, grabbing at railings and missing, until I was back in the parlour. In a daze I stared out at the Eastern lawn. Desert raiders clad in armour made from old tyres and flat-hammered cans poured through the hole in the wall. The servants showered them in bullets and missed each time, emptying their magazines and then running blindly. One by one they were picked off. I watched as a raider with a weed whacker diced the greenskeeper; as an armoured gimp with a flamethrower roasted the fire warden; as Appleby staggered over to the wall and was crushed to death by the falling body of the Major who'd slipped from the roof. I did not see Donna, for which I was grateful.

I tore myself from the window and sprinted to the Major's door. His sprawling chambers led via passageway to the nor'west garage and I stumbled through the dark, ears pounding in the sudden silence, lost and grasping for what seemed like hours but was probably, in actuality, only six to seven minutes, eventually finding the still, cool air perfumed with motor oil and gasoline as I entered the workshop. My eyes focused on the dark mass in front of me, shapeless and camouflaged by a protective tarpaulin, yet still somehow instantly recognisable: the flagship of the Major's fleet, his 1975 Saab 99 EMS. I whipped the cloth away and reverently lowered myself into the driver's seat. As the roller door slowly cranked open I gunned the engine, and as the ravaging horde paused their ravaging to gape at the roar of punishment incarnate I opened the throttle and then I was out over the gravel, through the gate, into the sandy beyond, to work out or not, in search of new walls, new Donnas, new flames to burn up in or die trying. That's how it happened. That's how I got my Saab.