Fire in the Unnameable Country (23 page)

Badsha grew up in the cracked splendour of the Abd family's wealth, the ceilings and walls of which served as the backdrop of his first documentary productions. Quieter than his relatives and few friends, he amused himself by trailing miles of black glossy out of his pockets, though impossible, that would have ruined the tapes, so this way instead: with his thumbs always triggered on the Super 8 pointed in the wrong direction: reels of tape documenting the attempts of polio
children to stagger after years of illness, or of a man lying along a harbour while speaking to the fleas on his shoulder.

Badsha Abd spent his adolescence disappeared into underground places of heat, noise, foul air, and confusion, so it's no surprise we find him followed by the sound of Shidane Shidane, the ghost of Shidane, or threading village after village of blackened parched corpses unburied, shrunken, untouched even by scavenger dogs. The walls of wells collapsed imploded inward, the water buried under stones thirty metres below the earth. Sometimes the stone-baked bodies of women and men frozen in their efforts to scrape with their hands to lift the stones.

In the towns, the documentarians manage to broach water from the reluctant, and to replace their donkeys with less exhausted, sturdier asses of burden. The towns give way to the plains, another village, but this one has a few survivors, a wheezing woman in the grave dimensions of a small hut, behind a courtyard effusing the sweet stench of corpses, newly rotting, side by side. They shoot thirty-five millimetres as she expires. No one offers water, though the thought crosses Mamun Ben Jaloun's mind.

Husks of rifle shells and the odd Jeep drives in from far sands with the oblivion question: you. Do you know, the insignia-heavy man asks, this region is a war zone, but we are a film crew, we have permits, as the air stews Badsha Abd's skin under beige polyester shirt for minutes seconds decades as the crew swims or stands, sits, probably, with hands behind their skulls as directed, on the thirsty ground, under the slicing sky. Murray's men, the crew whispers, just as transistors flare voices make dust electric wiring, they're talking from far.

Who is Murray, no one asks, because legends speak long before him.

Walk, says a man to the reedy man to a man with a nervous jitter until a gun pushes up Badsha of the group and he walks, with others behind him, into a large truck with a weather-beaten tarpaulin cover.

The film crew occupies the truck's perimeter benches gasoline odour old cola can food smells, one occupying soldier per two or three or four crew members. Darkness finds my father and his friends save a dangling light above for the bumpy ride. The ground gives way to reaches of sky or sleep as motorsounds surround them. When my father awakes, the back door is a mouth opening brighter light than even in the unnameable desert of their recent crossing. Then single-file through a two-dimensional hallway through which they have to pass sideways to a high vaulted room guided by fear of the gun barrel at the back of every two or three or four men.

Seat yourselves, commands a voice. Time passes. The air grows foul and full of the smell of bodies in close proximity, as thoughts contracting translucent jellyfish axons in phosphorescent water and whole tribe of grey-bodied young thirsty ghosts of dynamited wells rasping requesting.

A young girl enters with a vase of water floating flower petals, without glasses, and Gibreel, the first recipient, is unsure of what just make with your hands, she instructs, before pouring stream after stream from the vessel to the bowl of his hands cool water, strength, all the marine animals return to thoughts, stifling world of strange bodies become thirsty fellow travellers in a cavernous echo chamber where no new characters enter for so long their gun-toting keepers begin playing cards, laughing, smoking, exchanging sordid details seated around a table near the large doors about their mothers, daughters, sons, girlfriends. Sand begins to fill the room from a hole in the ceiling high above.

Gibreel raises the question first, but must wait until the guards' exchange of insults, throwing hands onto the table, trading cards, comes to a reasonable pause, at which point they are evasive: this time of year in this part of the country makes dustbowls its common feature, they claim. The sand keeps falling, rises to the height of their ankles and the guards secure their guns on the table under towels clean away from
the dust, lift their chairs, whose legs descend to the floor, and lift the table of their game by similar extensions, before continuing to converse and curse several metres higher up than the documentary crew.

Just as Badsha Abd et al are trying to devise a method of rotating the lowest man on a potential human pyramid to compete against racing suffocation, simultaneously declaring futility, defeat, as well as screaming at the guards look at us help us, the sandstorm ceases and the front door opens to reveal an enormous carnivore in desert military costume, whose heaving breaths move the room's dust in swirls and who seems more fearful than being buried alive.

Although his great shadow hides his face, they know him from television, magazines, radio, newspapers as the man that governs the ungovernable interior of the unnameable country, from mere suggestion of his figure, his characteristic war limp, his plodding steps and immense appetite. He sits on a chair that barely supports his weight, at the wide dinner table that just reaches his knees, and on which the girl who served the film crew prisoners water from a vase produces six dozen eggs, a whole head of lamb, whose brains he prepares to consume by making a careful circumference incision of the skull with garden shears, a large bucket of pilaf rice, ten kilograms of alfalfa sprouts, steamed landlorn shellfish resistant to all manoeuvres of cutlery, a pot of chickpea salad with tomatoes and finely chopped cucumbers.

In between the khir and dahi, he notices the diminutive film crew inching closer to the crumbs and remainder shells of his escargot dinner contents that now grace the knee-high sands on the floor of the eating chamber.

The giant watches, bemused by the cautious steps of the starved, parched film crew prisoners whose guards are lost to card hands in their isolated revelry. Harsh bidis and strong drink follow dessert as Mamun Ben Jaloun discovers a forgotten whole mutton roast at the edge of the
table, and then booming laughter, vibration into marrow as the crew asks again, Mr. Giant, if you are listening, some food, if you may. The giant, who hadn't heard the first request due to damaged ears years of exploded cartridge yells in desert sunshine see the faintest scurry in the horizon, fire in the hole, said nothing and watched the crew make a pyramid with knees on backs on knees to the table surface. Then his hardest laughter at the toppled sight of splayed bodies on sand as success after all: they have the mutton.

Tell me, who are you, little men that eat of my table, and why do you molest Epsilante, my home and county.

No one asks his name in turn because they know the man of the many metal lapels on his costume, this Murray whose face is so blinding they are forced to look at his boots under the table or at his pants, the same pair he wore when he cooked all the earlobes, fingers, toenails, gallbladder and viscera of an enemy with sea salt over a gas stove. They fear to look at the mouth of the man who once spoke with it the decree to bring to him the cooked bodies of all the people on the street that had refused to grant him his specially designed, universally acknowledged salute, which required all the limbs of one's body to perform when he passed, and so many limbs and ounces of indeterminable flesh had gathered in his audience at a dinner table with silverware, candelabras, and serving coffins that he had supposedly wept into the collar of his ring-hand man General Gargantua, my one true companion in the world because only you understand my feeling that despite all the moral ignominy and United Nations inquisitions good food should not go to waste/ the film crew already knew Murray.

We are travellers, Mamun Ben Jaloun answers, filmmakers, who have permits, he says as sand falls through the hole in the ceiling and rises higher every moment.

As the film crew eats on the floor, the girl with the water vase with
floating petals returns to pour into their hands one by one. She sits next to my father, who out of the desire to repay her hospitality offers her a bite of his dinner portion. She obliges his request, and asks why the film crew has arrived at this viper's nest, since her giant master is known to have watched others buried by descending sands while he ate meal after meal seated higher above. My father would be frightened if it wasn't for the girl's murmurs like a cat intoxicating preening sounds mewling and soft pawing at his face and hair, the server suddenly soft before him as lips touch lips a key to more urgent caresses, her whispers now, before the giant awakens, before the guards turn their heads from their endless prattle of cards, she says as she points to a corner of the room a mile away.

My father looks up at the towering source of snoring sounds headdown fast asleep on a table far larger than its last appearance, and astonished, he notices the gun-toting guards have turned into hunchedover boulders at the corner of the table, their lifeless guns now also granite, their cards whoosh into the wind through the ceiling has begun again to scatter the sands and the cards, a windstorm in the room and a mile to walk in the desert at your eyelids in your lungs, you worry about the camera equipment as much as your health.

When Mamun Ben Jaloun and the film crew discovered the ladder against the wall that led up to the ceiling hatch, they turn around just in time to see the overturning table, the bellow of the great beast their captor realizing his alcoholic error, the listless boulder guards whose card-playing carelessness has turned them into rocks against better judgment, his underestimation of this Mamun Ben Jaloun and his film crew who are now almost at the ceiling hatch out of his subterranean lair.

The giant is blinded by drunken rage, by the windstorm of a room designed for fearful mystery, and forced to drag feet through sands difficult for even his long strides. The ceiling hatch gives problems for the
first few attempts as ants in a line up a ladder to the prize it finally opens with an ambitious howl into the greater dustbowl than in the room.

Through the ceiling hatch: my father and the film crew fly far from one another in the ragged dust, and against the stronger winds outside at their eyes and senses than in the giant's lair they strive to gather themselves. When Mamun Ben Jaloun finds a wall a lee against the storm, he rests a moment inside his heartbeat.

Love, you ask. We are not at the cemetery of spiderclouds yet, just its premonition: Mamun Ben Jaloun looks around him and sees cirrus wisps cover the wall, the street, sees webs thread the road ahead; my mother and father haven't met yet but the fated spiders of their first encounter have already laid the groundwork.

Mamun the boom-mike operator follows the gossamer threads to the first shopkeep that obliges him a glass of water. The film crew, he describes their equipment and adventure-beaten hide and wear, and of course the bric-a-brac salesman knows, they're leaving the first day of the coming month, staying currently at Sural's hotel, he provides address and direction.

At the hotel, a lot of camera equipment and professional opinions have gathered in the foyer. Abd greets a filmmaker friend he knows from a previous project and the two of them talk about their current movies, which are peripheral scenes, they agree, in the gargantuan
Mirror
that is all the images and has colonized the country since a time no one can remember anymore. Abd shares his thoughts on spiderclouds, which American armaments manufacturers have been working hard to transform into antiballistics weaponry, while his colleague, Rasul, relates his filming of giants in the region. My hypothesis, he says to Badsha, is that eating human flesh makes one physically huge.

Before they part ways, he asks Badsha, where are you going next, and when he hears the response, La Maga, he claps loud, shit, man, he says, and adds that only in a few other cities in the unnameable country
does the movie truly represent its title in theme and form. He talks of a place where mirrors choke streets and of an unnameable resistance exploding reflective labyrinth walls in that place. Rasul tells him that spiderthread is evermore becoming the reason for the American occupation: they want it on all army apparel, he says, from bullet-resistant vests to tank shields; it would change the shape of the soldier from heavy metal klunk to fleet feet on the ground or in the air.

Abd nods, such an inimitable resource, he says.

And so the Americans, Rasul points at the occupation army everywhere in the unnameable country.

While they converse, not too far away, my father continues taking notes of the shopkeep's description, asks what of these spiderclouds. What of them, man, quips the shopkeep. I have never seen anything like them, says Mamun Ben Jaloun. They are everywhere in Epsilante, but especially in darker places, points the seller of sunwarmed cola and sugar biscuits toward an area of gravemounds on mottled soil and serious flowers.

Mamun Ben Jaloun is curious.

SPIDERCLOUDS

Cirrus clouds cover the cemetery grounds where my mother and father first meet. A girl is collecting, basketing the clouds, which are everywhere on gravemounds, thicker between skeletal branches of the cemetery's flora. As for fauna, minnow lizards accustomed to such environments feed on spiders and insects caught in spiderwebs, dart up for quick catches before retreating into shadows. Local lore features these animals in stories; their iridescent skin means fire for short, whether flames of watchout for burn or the softer light of lust love or romance.

Light and shadow in the cemetery. Feminine silhouette against moving clouds and moon soft pulses of light against a body hunched from carrying a basket on its back. Then the girl rises and my father hears the grey sounds, her evocations: arachnids moving in the clouds their nests, spiders like the ones the camera crew has thus far encountered.