Fire in the Unnameable Country (14 page)

Come, he is nudged by the elbow and drawn out of the atmosphere of suffering into the hallway where they wait in their torn tees, arms folded, their black skin-hugging jeans folded up to the shins. A hot pestilential draught kicks up his hair, and in the neardarkness a moth kisses the wall.

Outside, Qismis shakes her hanging locks and turns up a sad smile, makes room on the 250 cc handmedown Honda.

Giddyup, calls Imran, and they make dust, as the maw of the night widens to swallow them whole. Two other swarming motorbikes and one scooter follow closely. Though he is four to six years younger, his
desires are like theirs. Recall the characteristic male bravado of that time: shattering beer glasses two-tone grey suits and a spidersilk fedora, the high dawn windows screaming glass with kids in the air who would soon nurse in bed their blood and wounds grey mucus mornings swimming cigarettes in cognac vase, the quiet masculinity of tempered rage, drunken sophistry drawn from a few sacred passed-along volumes of literature, the hooting along and recapitulating every line of every villain, perfectly accented, from American cinema, fighting with the ushers and drawing a blade at the earliest incitement, cutting class, spitting on arresting cops, rolling over geezers, forgetting or mispronouncing the names of their fathers.

Victoria, 1968: the youthful restless hodgepodge capital of a country that either cannot be found on the maps of the world or is referred to as the nameless country, or the British Protectorate of His Majesty George the Mad, Quinceystan in jokes; though in all seriousness it is the unnameable country, though, declared independence from Motherengland a decade ago already. Here, the boy revels in the endless days and makes sacrifice at night to the god of neon-lit brothels and leaded gasoline. His Sisyphus stone is a mother who is still learning the dying art.

The first time, in the scattering dusklight one May, she walked weighed down with boulders in her pockets, rattling them like mountains with her hands buried deep in each side of her dress, into the waves of the Gulf of Eden. The shoreline had been overrun by so many crabs then, not even the call of come all ye and harvest by the Ministry of Natural Resources could help diminish their number. He covered the distance from the carousel to the shoreline with the patter of little feet as fast as his kid's stride could carry him. She smelled like the sea as she lay there, grey and defeated. He helped pick crabs off her dress while someone kissed her and teased her to come out, so deeply had she buried inside herself; and when she finally gasped, she cried like a newborn and the boy thought it would never happen again.

This heat never gives up the ghost, he thinks as he extends his grip tighter around Qismis. Always the heat or the equatorial rain in the unnameable country, which is not like the heat, but falls like a photograph. It's always already a memory. Disappears into the dust faster than you get a chance to soak your nose in it.

Many years from now, he screams over the hum of two hundred and fifty cubic centimetres, I will die far from this place.

I will die here, his mother had declared one day after they had finished painting their flat pale banana yellow, a year or so after Zachariah had disappeared without even a note or a word, with only the air of his unfilled clothes and camouflage uniform left behind as reminders of his existence. His mother never mentioned him again, but the surface never reveals the full extent of an injury. He stopped asking about his whereabouts or hunting for him aimlessly in the streets. Rumours flew that he had been snagged by the Ministry of Radio and Communications, and he had been either eliminated or secreted so deep in its intestines he would never have contact again with non-ministry members. His mother, too, had once worked for them, people said, though she herself denied everything, rejected the whole of her past.

Things begin now, she had said.

Do you mean now, he asked.

Now, she had said.

What about now.

And now, she waited a moment, then cut the air with her hand. and now. and now. and now, endlessly now, she kept beginning again and again.

Until, he had asked her oblivion eyes.

The second time his mother had tried, it had been the noose, a small fragment of which still remained hanging on the metal hook in the ceiling of the living room slash kitchen. Rejected by the sea, she
grew convinced the air, or lack thereof, the imitation of fruit, could salvage misery.

Through the classroom window, the boy watched a branch twist in the breeze, lost in a reverie as it extended through the wall and into the room. Asphyxiated, he ran out of the room through the recognizable narrow streets. He cut her down from the ceiling with his blade, but the five minutes' suffocation slowed her, dealt irreparable damage, left her shrivelled up inside herself.

The kind of mother you have, the matronly upstairs woman Zora had taken him into her home one day to tell, rattling the good chinaware. Her kind of woman is common in our country but still not ordinary. You can never know the reasons she keeps trying.

Do you know.

No, I do not. But the shadow of a lie crossed her face and he persisted as she sipped her tea. Drink yours before it gets cold, she instructed. I don't know if your mother was ever happy, boy, she told on. But maybe once upon a time, one day long ago, when she and your father were young and they were eating oranges near the souks.

The boy tried through intuition to find that place, and near a bridge that bore the name of the executed last governor, he discovered a dampness and an ancient depression in the grass and a seat of orange blossoms, which seemed to verify the old woman's story. On the presumption they were going to market, he showed his mother these things and asked her if they meant anything, but she could honestly not recall their importance.

They came to an alleyway where the boy's back hairs bristled. He envisioned the blade where it always was, in the sock-holster above his right ankle. Qismis put her hands over his eyes and though it was
his protocol never to allow anyone to block his vision, they were her hands. The swish as Imran pulled back the sheet and his sight returned.

Now, my malenky boy genius, behold what I give to you.

They all gazed, and everyone, especially the newer members of the gang, salivated as before them stood a refurbished 170 cc Honda, glistening red, painted new.

Is it not protocol, Imran, asked Abdi, who had recently finished scooter and picked up his first Honda, isn't it true initiates must drive scooters before passing onto the motorbike.

To hell with all that. No scooters for our little guy. A full motorcycle. When they did not immediately assent, he continued: For fuck's sake, his mother is rattling animal from the throat, his father is beastly dead, we have before us a near orphan, more or less, who, if he cannot make a home on a leather seat, will be nothing but a homeless, is it not.

I won't allow it, Imran cut the air with his right hand. He saw a shadow cross the faces of his companions, but it was a silent and momentary lapse of faith in his leadership. He knew they understood: the boy was quiet but useful when he spoke. What strange words he invented when incensed or enervated, when suddenly with his tongue he could leap up from a weak posture with the strength to take on a goonda or a whole group of them. The Dushman, rival motorcyclists, were felled one evening when there swarmed locust around them a chorus of voices ex nihilo.

The verbatim report afterward from a nameless Dushman: It sounded like twenty madmen were howling, what am I saying, forget menwomen, at least fifty of what were ghosts apparitions without shape, howling in all kinds of languages, though the source, I swear, if I recall accurately, though do not quote: it was a boy, no older than thirteenfourteen, if you'll hear me, beinchuts, sisterfuckers if you don't understand me. He was standing off to the side of those motorcycle
cunts, with a hand at his throat, speaking furiously with probably, looking, anyway, like fifty tongues.

Thus was born the myth of the boy whose identity to enemies was as precise as the wind, nameless, I mean. (Know that glossolalia is the term Hedayat has prescribed to a host of phenomena throughout the unnameable country's past, because the gift of the future—and its arrogance—is the ability to cull the past and call it anything it likes.) And thus the Screens, the formal title of the so-called motorcycle cunts we have been following, cast an honorific distant chill in enemies and friends alike.

The boy became more of a curiosity than a legend, and the group worked hard to veil his unique contribution, which allowed them to demand higher payment for security for businesses and individuals, and to rob without implementing actual violence. What use is there for hard metal if the tongue suffices.

Three or four years passed during which they challenged all the adolescent gangs of Victoria, leaving alone only the top-dog elders, who watched nervously and debated among themselves whether to assimilate or exterminate. They looted tourists, they shot, they jooked up and held up five-o'clockers. They stored wealth in an open-sesame cellar down the cold hatch of a butchery adjacent to the largest kebab house in Victoria: British pounds, American greens, diamond studs and lapis lazuli, gold watches stuffed into the hook-hanging slaughter: innards of sheep and goat and cow. They evaded the police in open chases, though by movement they were tracked and identified all and sundry.

They met with disaster, like when a young scooter, no more than sixteen, a recent who had always wanted to be like the older toughs, and who wanted to prove something when they were robbing one day. A circle around him and little jabs to the ego, initiative invisible daggers, you see: so he drank a whole vase of homemade rice liquor in one swipe. He faltered his steps and just when they were teasing that
he would sick now, entire gulf of eden, you'll see, any moment now, like pankha, spin-spinning like a fan, yaars, and a high rising bleating laughter out of one of the older throats, watch this kid, he's got the hero, as another steadied him and let me see aahed into his mouth, when something happened. And what did.

Hai, Imran said, and the others drew closer. Down his throat and blue like a pilot light, he said.

Yes, there, Qismis pointed.

Then instead of bile remnant alcohol or undigested, a fire emerged, unrelenting and huge, and that is how half of Imran's scalp became scorched and how years later, when mediating between the Fraternal Order of Victoria Police and the unyielding kleptocrats and street gangs of the late 1980s, amusingly, he would be known as Gorbachev. The young scooter emitted black flames and that charcoal smell emerged when an animal has turned to meat. Some fragments of cloth remained and perhaps the digits extending from his palms. They forgot his goodname and Hedayat cannot raise it from the hecatombs of their memories. Also. And then. While the Screens gained prominence, the boy, who shall not remain nameless forever, whose name you already know think hard, grew up wanting for nothing, though I prevaricate. Since all stories eventually cross the Rubicon of the love tale, we might as well begin immediately in the name of, beyond good and evil, I mean.

Do you recall the touch of Qismis the night the boy left his mother to die a natural death, thinking she is certain to go sooner than later and it is better this way. Do you remember the raisinscent of her right hand as it gently covered his nose while meaning only to shade his eyes. Of course not, for I did not care for details, but they grow important to the story.

A caveat before we leap: he is guarded, believe me, understands that to craft a life on the leatherseat of a Honda means to give up
certainty, to trade ghar for bahir, home for the outofdoors, and to forget the notion of a repeating woman unless one takes on a brothelmate and makes with her a usually short-lived and generally dissatisfying romance. Unless one is as lucky as Imran. But who is Qismis. And why does she roam with the nervy boys and return in the early mornings with Paris cologne effusing from neck and wrist, with hundreds in her purse, to faceslaps and eye-gouges bishalo jaat, poisoned female of a poisoned family, her mother's guaranteed gaali, and to her father's weak protests she says she is working, leave aside the broom-handle and let her earn a factory income if she can, wife, times are hard.

Qismis is not a fatale kind of girl. She is, believe me, tough, but in discrete, quite inscrutable ways, which: it was she, for example, who spearheaded the burial of Scooter's blackened corpse and she who scrubbed their garage headquarters with lye and then detergent. Half the ideas for robberies or engagements with rival gangs are hers, though whispered Iagian into Imran's ears. So perhaps Hedayat was wrong about his non-fatale judgment, and she does in fact carry several qualities of the stolid movie females she watches with as much intent to emulate as the boys do their cinema villains.

But with Mamun: she watches him curiously, another way, his mouth especially, for that is where his strangeness lies. Not an especially uncharacteristic jaw, not a set of Eastwood or Gable lips, nothing reptilian or psittaciform about the tongue, but watch out when his back is against the wall, and, more often these days, when he concentrates with the intention to dissimulate or argue ten points at once.