Fire in the Unnameable Country (16 page)

For all his recent rebel talk, Nikhil is more the archangel Gibreel, closer to God than the damned Iblis, a follower of directions more than a rebel. He hears the nozzle hooked onto the aperture and then there
is a muffled scream, could have been the beer through the pipes. In the autopsy weeks later, all his organs are discovered drowned, alcohol poisoned, though many had leaked out through skin and poking bones into the pressurized liquids. After that horrid affair, published in all the major papers as a macabre oddity, there were no more rebellions in the Screens.

Dignitaries from around the world—well, a handful of KUBARK information officers from PD Prime, or in everyday language, Uncle Sam's nephews disguised as Eastern European dignitaries—were at the important conference at which the Screens were helping the Taints. The question of the evening: should the unnameable country join the Eastern bloc. It was famous and fateful and would bring the United States into the equation and trigger a twenty-year-long proxy war that threatened to destabilize the whole region, the whole of which begins with a most eccentric speech, reported the world over, in some cases as an exacting example of Communist madness, characterized by others as exciting and inventive. In the beginning, however, it is quite clear Nikita Khrushchev has caught stage fright after realizing on the podium he has misplaced his speech. His chief adviser pleaded sick and refused to accompany him to such a godforsaken corner of the world, and now the great leader of the Soviet republic finds himself without words and suddenly without official manners or the ability to improvise. (Recall that from time to time it will occur to even the most experienced actors, and politicians are no different.)

From under the podium, Mamun cannot know any of these things, he is merely hiding, and the first kick he receives is not meant as anything but an expression of Khrushchev's frustrations. But the leader
realizes lengthening his foot releases a parcel of words out of nothingness, let us not ask by what means divine or otherwise, in a quiet whisper: Ladies and gentlemen of these United Nations.

He looks around the room. No one else seems to have heard them. What dwarf or miracle homunculus was hidden here, but Khrushchev dares not search the podium. A miracle is a miracle unrevealed, and loses all power to bring the people to their reverential knees when the tearing Christ is demonstrated to be a fraud. Nikita Khrushchev invents this justification and continues. The words seem like a right fit for the occasion, so the great leader, sweating underarm boulders and not from the equatorial heat, repeats them as if they were his. Kick kick, another little kick. The last one a little too close to the head. And the words: We have gathered here to discuss the possibility of the unnameable country's role in the greater family of socialist nations of the world.

Surprised, and a little indignant, like a mule realizing for the first time he must be put to work, Mamun Ben Jaloun cannot remove himself from the role of spindoctor and correspondingly supplies words to kicks. Another kick.

The question, of course, is not so simple since the Soviet family must take into account the distinct history and cultures of the people in this region, as must the unnameable country consider our differences.

A pause and a wince. A kick further, though softer, more encouraging.

And: if it is possible for Cuba, Tanzania, it is possible et cetera, and we must declare it would be a great caltilp pahsim, Mamun Ben Jaloun recites, to lose the unnameable country to the capitalist mode of production. It would be a pahsim, Khrushchev repeats, having lost the ability to invent or speak agentially, as bound to the underpodium speech supplier as today's teleprompter politicians are to theirs, a great caltilp pahsim, he says, to which the audience laughs heartily at the neologism, comprehending it to mean an animal of failure, as
newspapers for years afterward would refer to the next government boondoggle as a great possum or walloping marsupial of a mistake out of whose pouch many appended problems would emerge. The last part of the address is rollicking backtongue, which few besides the Screens in the room understood, but within the style of the whole document, it seemed quite fitting. Governor Anwar rises to applaud and the whole room follows. There are hoots and whistles from Imran, which gives him away as an outsider.

The KUBARK agents are the first to dive into the stuffed pastries before taking flight to Washington. Two days later, the newly elected Richard Nixon, having campaigned on the escalation of the Vietnam War to certain victory, sends three lonely Phantoms over Victoria: a school, a mosque, and a hospital are destroyed. The Governor, who, it's true, was edging closer to an official alliance with the U.S.S.R. and was indeed swayed by Khrushchev's speech, but had not yet dove, immediately raised the receiver for the Kremlin. Four hundred and thirty-one people perished, over a thousand were seriously injured, including Zora's niece, her husband, and a baby daughter, while Imran's brother died, as did sixty-four teachers, a roomful of worshippers gathered for Friday prayer, fifty-seven dialysis patients, and so on; but none of our chief characters was lost in that first raid, so the story may continue more or less unabated.

The broader details: The Taints, it turns out, among other street gangs, were posties, mocksters, howdoyoucallit, agents provocateurs, whose purpose was to draw the Screens into a trap. This was no international business conference, and true, the government risked losing face if some major act of violence was to have broken out during the delegates' speeches or the reception afterward, but they benefited from
having taken the risk: Imran was arrested for Nikhil's murder near the roasted crabs, and for the attempted murders of Mamun and Qismis. Some of the others caught wind of Pestilent A's warnings, took heed sometime during the speeches and fled, but most were caught. The last of the three was removed from her beer vat where she silently awaited her signal and was released to a nursery internment, under her mother's watchful gaze, before disappearing three years later after acquiring a false passport. The first, the leader of the gang, was interrogated and tortured for seventy-two days by the vilest means until he revealed the password to the open-sesame cellar. There, all the gang's precious booty was removed, Imran was stripped of his clothing, his mouth stuffed with wool, and left hook-hanging among the eviscerated animals in zero degrees for forty hours before being transferred, hypothermic, hardly shivering anymore, to a holding cell. Luckily, Imran's condition improved, as the police decided instead of wasting him to treat him at the best hospitals our country had to offer, and when recovered, to fashion new clothes, to salary him; most importantly, they gave him title and the respectful position of inspector, to turn him into a spy for them. Thusly, they converted him from gangster-steps to dancing jive at police ballroom events. He would return to save my father's life many years in the future, just you wait.

The fate of Mamun Ben Jaloun, however, is the most interesting. After security forces hauled him out of the underpodium, Nikita Khrushchev himself intervened in his case, stating that he knew of the boy's presence while delivering his speech and could not help but marvel at such a deep interest in politics that would drive a person to such depths. Embarrassed, the Governor quietly transferred him to the care of Grenadier Lhereux, who whisked him out of the reception hall and labelled him an unnameable trespasser to be kept under close watch. Mamun Ben Jaloun was bounced from department to department until several weeks later he found himself in a large room situated with many desks behind
which there lay piled many folders and papers pushed and pencilled and hemmed and hawed over by innumerable employees. They were too busy, or pretending to be too busy, to notice his presence at first, and only near lunchtime did someone look up, pss-hmm, yes, pss-pss, another pair of hawkish eyes, and another, these ones bespectacled, until suddenly the whole room was pss-pssing about the shackled stranger who had been in their midst for who knew how long.

State your name, someone said.

Our hero did as asked.

What do you want, another asked.

Stunned by the question's absurdity, Mamun Ben Jaloun stayed silent.

Ask him if he has had lunch.

No, that's irrelevant, another voice piped up, ask his name again, I've forgotten it.

My name is Mamun Ben Jaloun and I am here because.

Because what, asked the bespectacled man.

Because I'm not certain, I think one of you is supposed to know.

But how are we to know why you are here if you won't tell us.

Because, Mamun faltered, because you're officials, it's your jobs.

The whole room sprang up in a laughter that began and ended exactly together.

Can someone undo my shackles, they've been eating my shins. The pss-pss began again and a collective decision as iterated once more by the bespectacled man, who might have been a higher official: we're not certain, we'll have to confer. And they did not, they remained still.

Just then, a bell sounded and like salivating puppies, they ran over one another's feet out of the single door, bounding left and right through the hallway outside. Mamun Ben Jaloun, whose shackles were too heavy and who was too exhausted by the previous weeks to do anything, remained where he stood.

THE WARDROBE ORDERLY

Difficult to know what a man does unless we watch his exact movements. Today, for instance, we find Zachariah Ben Jaloun trying to scratch his nose by manipulating his moustache, walking with his arms by his side, hardly moving them at all as he strides down the hall of the great and same cathedral-edifice he entered more than two decades ago as an error, where he was tortured, released, from which he departed with his original name, and to which, it is true, he returned by choice or otherwise, and whose staves he has climbed to assume a directorial position.

Today, Zachariah Ben Jaloun removes his handkerchief and sneezes as he passes an interrogation room, and the sound drowns a howling yelping no don't, though the horrors he can suppress by this spontaneous effusion would have stuck needles deep in his conscience many years ago. Or is this Zachariah Ben Jaloun at all. Which is to ask, is this the same man we were following not too long ago, who would read the poems of E.E. Cummings and bite into raw onions for a good cry. The surname is not too uncommon in the continent,
though we must admit it is found more often in its western corner than in its eastern corridors, while there are innumerable Zachariahs everywhere in the world.

What did this Zachariah Ben Jaloun do when informed one day by a peon, sir, there is an eighteen-year-old assigned to the status of unnameable by Grenadier Lhereux himself, captured in the Assembly Hall after the Khrushchev talk, and now floating around the system, drifting from one department to the next. Sir, he says he doesn't know where to go, that he feels quite like a ghost in shackles, sir.

Bring him in, Zachariah Ben Jaloun says, lighting an unfiltered tar-black cigarette. Yes, what can I do for you.

Sir, I have asked several hundred people to undo my shackles but no one will abide by my request. As well, for the past four months I have been eating the scraps that fall from the desks of the employees in the central room, and sometimes I am able to find soda in the refrigerator in the staff lounge, but otherwise I have been starving.

Yes, it is bound to happen. However, none of us has the authority to free your bonds until you have been cleared of all charges.

But sir, I have met with no magistrate or lawyer, there has been no hearing, no case presented against me, and no charges, sir.

That is your problem exactly then. Zachariah Ben Jaloun smokes nonchalantly. You must discover the nature of the charges against you.

Surely we can surmise from these words that before us sits another Zachariah than the one who kept certain human features bound up within the nutshell of his soul, guarded against the arid corridors of Ministry of Records and Sources, against the dead air of shortwave radios peering into trespassing on unsuspecting minds. But twenty years plus is a long time for a man to encounter many changes, to lose and gain many shadows. Let us continue wrestling with the possibility.