“You mean they can’t do that in China?”
“They can, and some already do. They sell Italian strawberries straight from China. But we don’t want to encourage that.”
“Why not?”
“Maximus, are you pulling my leg?”
Lina was completely awake now. Why was Semipyatnitsky interested in these details all of a sudden? He never used to care. But she was basically a decent, patient, person, so she explained it to him decently, patiently:
“It’s risky, because then you’d have the market flooded with counterfeit labels on counterfeit strawberries.”
“So Italian strawberries grow in China too?”
“Yes.”
“What about Chinese strawberries?”
“Where else would they grow?”
“So what’s the difference?”
“Maximus, what is this, Stupid Questions Day? What’s the difference in what? It’s one thing for an Italian name-brand product to go for five dollars a kilo—it doesn’t matter if it’s produced in China. But it’s something else entirely when someone tries to sell you ordinary Chinese strawberries for four dollars, when the actual price is two dollars, simply because they come in a nice cellophane pack with a fake Italian label!”
“But it’s the same strawberries!”
“What do strawberries have to do with it?”
Semipyatnitsky lapsed into eloquent silence. Lina started tapping on her keyboard, filling out a new order for potatoes.
Maximus had the overwhelming urge to confide in someone. But who? Then he recalled the letters on his inner monitor.
He slid open his desk drawer and felt around for his pack of cigarettes and lighter. He draped his smart-card lanyard around his neck and headed outside for a smoke. And a conversation with himself.
“Mr. Author, are you there?”
“No.”
“Good. Let’s work this out.”
“All right. Work what out?”
“You know what.”
“I do. But formulating the question is half the answer.”
“I don’t need half an answer. Half an answer is worse than no answer at all.”
“Well put!”
“I can put it even better! Is there anything at all in the world that’s actually real? Or is it all just pills and hallucinations? And what exactly is a hallucination, anyway? Is it when we see something that doesn’t actually exist, or when what we see does exist, but we don’t see it as it really is? So we think that we’re eating potatoes, but there aren’t really any potatoes at all… we’re just taking some pill? Or we think that we’re eating Dutch potatoes, and we are indeed eating potatoes, but they’re actually Chinese, and the only thing Dutch about them are the labels and the drug. And what are we actually buying and eating, anyway, potatoes or labels?”
“I see… All of your questions boil down to the subject of a famous dispute that took place in medieval India, involving three different philosophical schools, whose names… well, will mean nothing to you. There were two basic questions. The first was whether the world was real. The second was whether our conception of the world was real.
“According to the first school, the world wasn’t real, since it lacked any substantial foundation. The world is based on indivisible particles that cannot be weighed or measured. Under the Karmic law of cause and effect—that is, relative and in reaction to living beings’ sinful actions—atoms join together into compounds, which give the appearance of substantiality. So our conception of the world as material is equally unreal. We have been taught that consciousness is a feature of highly organized matter, but the philosophers of the first school believed that matter was a feature of primitively organized consciousness. When a living creature breaks the chain of illusion, the world itself—and its conceptions about the world—cease to exist for it. In other words, there are no potatoes, and no pills either.
“Adherents to the second school, however, held that the world was indeed real, based in real substance, that is to say Brahma. In essence, they said, Brahma was the only reality. As for our conception of the world as something existing within time and space and occurring in a variety of forms, for them it did not correspond to reality. They cited the example of the rope and the snake: When a man in the dark assumes that a rope is a poisonous snake, his conceptions are illusory, though the rope itself exists. An enlightened individual is not distracted when it comes to reality, and sees everything as it is, as all Brahma. That is, all potatoes and no pills.
“Theoretically speaking, there is another answer to these basic questions: that the world is unreal, and that only our conceptions about it are real. According to that scheme, there are no potatoes, only hallucinogenic pills. But the adherents to this way of thinking were physically annihilated long before this particular dispute began. They were given the opportunity to drink a lethal dose of an elixir made from poisonous mushrooms, after having been told that it was divine nectar. They agreed, and everyone present witnessed a quintessentially physical spectacle: philosophers turning blue and dying in horrible torment.”
“What about the third school?”
“What ‘third school’?”
“You said that there were three philosophical schools participating in the dispute. You set forth the positions of two schools, then mentioned another one that did not take part in the dispute. What did the philosophers of this third school have to say?”
“Oh, them… Well, they said that all of that was of course very interesting. And that under different circumstances they would have participated in those debates with the greatest of pleasure. But when a house is burning is not the time to go through all of its architectural specifications—it’s the time to take foot in hand, so to speak, reason in heart, make a break for it, and start living.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dance and sing. And pray to God to release us from our entrapment in physical matter.”
“So then what? How did it end?”
“It didn’t, really. Like all disputes. Both the main schools, and the other group, the ones who were poisoned before they had a chance to participate, are taught in university courses on the history of Indian philosophy. While the third group, to this day…”
“What?”
“They sing and dance.”
“Why did you tell me all of this?”
“That’s funny. I knew why until you asked. Lina is right, today really is Stupid Questions Day.”
Maximus lit up another cigarette—his fourth. It made the inside of his mouth taste bitter, and he tossed it away after a couple of puffs.
The inner author continued:
“I would put it this way: The material world is real. And our conceptions of the world are also real. But the world is made in China, and our conceptions of the world are made in Holland.”
“But why?”
“What do you mean, why? To crank up the profit margin!”
“But why does the world made in China have any need for conceptions about it being made in Holland?”
“Because this conception of the world is made in Holland.”
NACH DRACHTEN
The northern sun peered out from behind the shroud of clouds on the horizon and shone into a little house on the outskirts of the town of Drachten, in the Netherlands. Its gentle rays slid across the cheap Swedish furniture and, observing maximum courtesy, brushed the rumpled face lying there on a green pillow. Peter Nils awoke.
“Ah, shit,” Mr. Nils cursed, not without pleasure, in English, and stretched out on the orthopedic mattress of the sleeper sofa.
By the way, it’s incorrect to call the Netherlands “Holland,” as some people do, and we’ve been doing. The provinces of Holland are just a part of the Netherlands, which also includes Friesland. Frieslanders consider themselves to be a different national group and have their own language, which is a close relative to English. Nils was a Frieslander. And he swore only in English.