Fire in the Unnameable Country (19 page)

He didn't understand exactly why the pavement gave way to polished concrete floors situating desks, open front and combo desks, desks whose lips rose open mouths soiled notebooks pens pencils remainder lunches in schools whose classrooms principals and superintendents could enter and observe on a whim because the walls were blown wide open and lizards now peered and cockroaches scurried out of incisions punctures penetrated walls.

Why did a parched lips hospital appear at a street corner without warning. With broken bread in one hand and a pitcher in the other, a nurse watered a long-suffering resident under natural lighting conditions. Cloudburst, she said as she held up a palm to feel the rain, before slipping under a tarp shielding machines measuring heart rate, blood pressure, brain waves, beeping talking among themselves.

Sunlight, she muttered; she smiled as she stared at the combination sky. Why were scaffolds affixed to incomplete buildings, scaffolds buttressing wooden platforms attached to scaffolds holding scaffolds, why here and there a ladder, perhaps four stories high, leaning against a wall, left without regard for future or former use, why had ditches
and holes been dug by private army contractors about whom my father didn't know, their actual stories hidden by the march and constant growth of
The Mirror
.

Night fell. Mamun Ben Jaloun walked with snail tracks of dried mucus on his face and saltwater streaming from all the unnatural light attacking the retina. He cried and walked sadly along the cluttered walkways of hawkers and bric-a-brac salesmen and little boys selling tea out of thermoses with their female counterparts braided flowers in their hair and with vegetable baskets rested on padded cloths on their heads. High streetlamps and added halogen lanterns provided hardlighting, and in the city centre at night there congregated movable feasts of grilled mutton, dancing girls, village theatre among other rural delicacies imported for the urban and international crowds. Within this mess, my father (or the man I claim is my father) wandered-hic for a long time, watching-hic-hic the ladies fanning themselves while the wind moved their blue dresses of mousseline de soie, as they gazed strangely at the wounded young man with a spasmodic diaphragm. Perhaps he offered his services to a small restaurant that served mouthbreeders to tourists and sold them as delicacies, but Mamun Ben Jaloun's nose was always keen to recognize the smell of the goondas of any new place, and it is likely he soon found a spot behind a bread truck waiting for jettisoned baked goods to land in his outstretched hands whether by chance or the zeal of an accomplice, here, you glottal-strange bastard, catch. And where did he sleep. The streets have their resting places and, if not, one can always claim a spot in a mosque and rest from prayer to prayer.

After a certain length of time—and note that it was not at all uncommon for vagabonds of that era to end up there—Mamun Ben Jaloun realized he had found himself in the district of La Maga where the movie studios were in full swing, and he realized he didn't know when they had started, when a camera here a microphone there or a region of scaffolds had multiplied into certainty, what compass his feet
had followed to this place of shadows without origin. He couldn't tell when the world had begun.

My father hummed softy, and when a syllable burst somewhere behind him, a sound without warning that surprised him/ frightened, he hummed louder, lost his step, stumbled, then started defiantly singing all the notes he knew in order to overcome his fear of these unknown streets, of walking dark streets in his freed prisoner outfit, its longstanding wear and tear, and he thought of what he could be in this movie studio city, actor singer or what, and what name he would call himself. He addressed the second problem first, and decided since movie personnel never used their real names, he would invent an alternative. Shikari, he thought of choosing, or maybe Mamun Shikkok/ too didactic, old fashioned, they would surely say/ Mamun Mamun, then, he thought of keeping it simple/ you're almosting it, he thought/ Mamun M, he decided finally, Mamun M, he said aloud, louder, he said it again, leaped up and clicked his heels, sure of

So my father wanted to be a singer. Did he do it. What did he do. And then. And yet. Hedayat thinks. He remembers. Recall, though I hadn't told you that when he was younger, Hedayat would lie on the family room couch after school and read old magazines featuring his father.

With his glossolalist tongue, yours truly would prater away in a low voice to find all the missing notes in-between entertainment journalism. He would hum, sometimes he would sing juicy lyrics claiming the strangest of things. On one occasion he landed the jackpot, discovered that all of Mamun M's studio performances needed raisins for some reason.

Raisins, why the hell for. Raisins, raisins alone and at every meal: raisins imbedded in rice or as the passive ingredients of a chicken dish or khir or dahi, Mamun would find raisins intolerable: wrinkled palms and fingertips, their ancient, manymonthsearlier touch, the face of Qismis, the smell of her clothing, her hair, would rise up ghostly from the plate, a sense of longing, raisins, absolutely necessary. The literary
force of raisins would seize Mamun's throat, and he would discover early in his career as a playback singer his incapacity to perform without a fistful of raisins first, like a saltpetre gargle for the throat or a kerosene wick to some saccharine gunblast first line of a song. A hit. Which is not to say that for Mamun Ben Jaloun/ Mamun M, I mean/ song stood equated with nostalgia, and the brief memory of his romance with Qismis needed to be rekindled each time he opened his throat to sing. Eventually, the face of Qismis disappeared so that he could no longer recall its contours or its cleft chin, its sharpness which collected prominently at the nose: as if they had been dried out and put to mortar and pestle, she turned into powdered sound, and the flight of one thousand verses he would pen on such diverse topics as the names of the cities of the unnameable country, the open veins of La Maga La Maga, a thief's despair at being forced to rob his beloved's home, the contemplations of a blind vicar, the elegy for a man who turned into a thousand billboards, who performed in English, Quinceyenglish, Somali, and some later translated by Manna Dei into Bengali and Hindi, within the short span of eight or nine years, had nothing at all to do with her.

Then total khatam before thirty: his voice and fame would be reduced to cinders, and after a few failed attempts at rising up the rungs of La Maga Studios as a songwriter, he would be flattened into the impecunious inarticulate role of boom-mike operator: hold it higher, MM, still in the shot, bhai, what a duffer this one. His heart was never in it, and until he would meet my mother.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, too far ahead. Let's back to the right instant. There is work to be done. How did it all begin. Don't you want to know how my father got his big break. He was not discovered in a chic café in the artists' quarters of La Maga and celebrated for his jawline or the shape of his eyes, dragged into the frame of a shot, stand next to her, beta, let us see how the light falls on your ruddy hair. He never possessed the face of an actor. Neither did he stand
in line with all the wretched art school graduates of the unnameable country at the gates of a new production, thronging like an infestation of carpet beetles, waiting to be handed out some minor role in order to be able to place their feet onto the rickety staircase of La Maga Studios while brazen balusters came undone by their collective weight. Know this: they heard him only. In fact, it was only his voice they ever saw. Once imprisoned, always in prison: this guard would not let him pass. He waited all day, however, and as a motorcade carrying the Director made its way inside, took a second chance.

He introduced himself unintentionally with a hiccup, and the hiccups continued. Sir-hic, I am hic-hic to have been hic-cluded in the cavalry, but I was late hicka for my shoe, you see this, he takes off a shoe and removes a bent hobnail holding together some fragments of unstitched leather, and therefore. But this guard was not a sleepy sack of potatoes; he was as large as Pantagruel and a suspicious fellow besides, with halitosis one could sniff-source a hundred metres away.

You are either included, he boomed with his badsmelling tongue, as part of the Director's inner staff or you go to hell.

And yet. Aha: underneath the ogee of his pants flies my father, laughing gleeful, already intoxicated though he has not yet had a spot to drink. The guard does not know whether to follow or stand awaiting the next part of the motorcade. Finally, he waves off the error: where will he go, he thinks, there are many others like me inside, only stronger and larger, he cannot get very far.

The guards inside were indeed larger, each one taller than the previous, but that was their precise weakness, and my father manages to swoop under all their legs and to pass onward. He cranes his neck as he arrives upon an oriel window, oooh aaah, how beauteous, he gawks, not real of course, painted on, papier-mâchéd and cardboarded together last Thursday, but it looks fitting for a grand whereforeartthou Romeo scene. Meanwhile, the hullabaloo is spreading, some
guards are even venturing to leave their posts and running running my father disappears into one of the actors' living-sleeping quarters, dodging a hanging lamp and burying underneath garments that wrap around themselves and the entire room in miles of silk and velvet. Know that he is inside an actress's dressing room and hiding with his fist around a bottle of rum brandy, or what he thinks is, pinched from her furtive collection, drinking gleeful, burping, hiccupping laughing alone about nothing at all and without fear. The fire burns away everything hard palate uvula and tongue to mush, soft palate lips all of it, and only by probing with two fingers is he able to reassure his speaking organs remain intact. By the third sip, the fire opiates, and by the fourth, he is fast asleep, though still hiccupping twice a minute or so.

Fee fi, the actress Sharmilla returns with a tattooed giant, presumably her lover or perhaps a handler, why not both. Whipping her purse into the sea of ochre and azure costumes, she begins to plant kisses on Handler Lover.

Normally acquiescent to her affections, this time he wrinkles his brow, pushes her back lightly, fee fi, and begins to sniff the cloth and pulling at it, uncovering chairs, a bed, among other items of furniture.

Don't hiccup, Mamun Ben Jaloun, or do so: perform only according to the story's needs. Hic-hic.

Wait, I smell something as well, she surveys the air and treads across the folds. What she smells is an opened bottle of austerlitz, her father's gift before graduating into the endless studio, now do not open this, bibi, before twenty-six minimum, and she has managed thus far, and would have kept the promise had not.

Got him, the giant shouts: little rabbit by the scruff of his neck, punching kicking air, awakened rudely and hic-hiccupping, and now to be sent flying out of the film studio boundaries. Loafer from somewhere, the giant gnashes his teeth and lifts Mamun up to eye level.

And without a thought—since all manifestations of glossolalia, as we have noticed, are aleatory if anything, subconscious and prior to thinking—my father launches into a song about floating on the vaulted wind, the seductive weather brought me here and I have turned into a reed, he sings, forgetting to fear the giant's reprisal, leg-dangling above ground, looking the actress sharp in the eyes, but now the storm gathers, so sweetly he sings, do not deracinate, batting eyelashes and hands together pleading please spare me a return on darkening clouds, O beholder of my misfortunes, that Sharmilla raises her hand and touches my father's forehead.

I will take no action against or on your behalf, she says, but you cannot stay here.

Th-hic you, he says, and he bows and bids them goodbye. The giant, he notices, is not so tall after all, since he fits in the studio room with inches to spare above his head, though he is indeed broad as a barrel, and with indecipherable scripture painted all across his body. The actress, if we are to cast in her direction a few meagre words that will no doubt fail to capture her beauty in human presence: no, let us refrain, for already he is outside and walking quickly.

Mamun Ben Jaloun threads the alleyways and passes movie sets and wires and lights strewn about, of simulated rooms in houses blending with fake courtrooms and schools, hospitals and prisons, painted backdrop landscapes under which there lie other landscapes that can be rolled over to reveal still more scenery, and he wonders in which of these places he may house himself for a night's rest.

Is that him: a loud cry from under a streetlamp: a crowd of flashlights, latis or sticks, lathis or kicks, stones for added measure, and my father must take to the wind once again to avoid attack. There he goes: gambolling across the Mediterranean, flying around the world, now in Constantinople, if that is a real place, dangling next from the chandelier of a Central Asiatic palace belonging to a Tartar emperor, boot-hopping
across the Chukchi Sea, knocking over boom mikes and papier-mâché mountains, whole forests and ravines, skyscrapers and monorails. They chase and chase him. And he runs or flies, all the while singing. He sings, which may have helped him travel faster and faster until they were so far in the past he could not see even a single pair of chasing feet or hear a crying throat, no lathis or mobs or Pantagruel guards anywhere.

Exhausted, he fell into the ample lap of a woman with wide parted thighs, sitting on the bare floor of an emptied warehouse containing a single camera situated on a dolly track and on whose rear wall was a blank canvas framed by a white plaster parget border. She was minding her own business, stroking several young dogs, which fled upon his rude entrance. She had a kindly laugh, however, and did not mind the intrusion.

She held my father tightly until he cried like a baby: Tell me your name. She would not let him go until he complied.

And yourself, he twisted in her grasp, held her to the question indignantly by clogging her nostrils with two fingers.