Fire in the Unnameable Country (24 page)

Recall the unnameable history: even before John Quincy landed on our shores and sent uniformed others like him into our nation's
viscera, industrialists had appropriated spiderthread into their design and conquest, but age-old methods of spider harvesting have lingered in some communities of our nation.

Badsha Abd's records of dynamited wells are remembered today as well as his footage of traditional methods of harvesting spiderthread, which he collected at my father's insistence that we know of the spiders, but not of their close latticework, microscopic artistry, their sheer proliferation in cemeteries and gardens where people still harvest spiderwebs by hand for design work.

Her eyes haunt, serval's glisten, cat eyes in nightblackness. We needed you tonight, Badsha Abd tells Mamun Ben Jaloun after my father reunites with the film crew at Sural's hotel, takes news of their next spider destination, makes haste at the first opportunity back to the cemetery of spiderwebs to catch sight of her rare harvest. I was occupied, he says to describe his increasing absences. How so.

My father speaks briefly on the cemetery of spiderwebs as a curious scientific phenomenon but reveals few details of the girl his heart.

The camera crew begs Mamun Ben Jaloun to allow night footage of their meetings and of this region's rare methods of dealing and making with spiderthread. So adamant he is and so nervous their encounters will not culminate into even a kiss, he asks Badsha Abd for direction. The filmmaker, however, is too thirsty for footage and in no mood for love. Tell the girl to join the crew; my clothes are tatters and there are spider sanctuaries where we're going.

Night fevers, sleeplessness, biting entrails, Mamun Ben Jaloun is afflicted by involuntary summons of feline eyes by invented names because he does not know the name of the spider harvester. He stalls the crew's departure by any means, citing the importance of gossamer clouds deep in the region's dynamited wells that require filming, as he prepares for his own efforts of the heart with a demonstration. She is
perplexed by his commitment to the camera's focus, its film reel and insect ardour of load, reload, his stories of its ability to catch and retell the world, by his utter devotion to a machine. What do you make, he takes her hand against all judgment. A low wind pushes the cemetery clouds and the light hesitates moonlight sunlight she is talking, touching, moving around a room in which spidersilk leotards are arranged on wax mannequins where her host of silk shirts and ballet shoes are scattered on a hard wooden floor from which rises a skeletal rack, spidersilk shawls, my own design, touch, she tells, and his fingers seem to pass through the fabric as he raises it to her cheek.

The filmmaker in my father is enthralled by the colours and objects before him, by her loom and this dressmaker's esoteric craft, this woman who invokes in him the conviction that the rhythm of all the world is flesh fingers cheek water breath eyelashes touch eyelashes, nose bumps nose, excuse me, they laugh, and hours, days pass in such cases, we will excuse them to their desires and move with Badsha Abd's words: We will move, the director says, when the search party returns with the latest news, I'm due back in the studio tomorrow.

Mist and sand, prickles of light in the distance: when my father and the girl spot the film crew caravan, they are a mile away because they had not thought before the morning's mouthfuls of patisserie they passed between lips open doors to their desires dragged morning into afternoon sun until there were no sheets on the bed anymore because they had been replaced by all the sugar in the house.

Everyone in town knew of the film crew's whereabouts, thankfully, and it was at the borders of Epsilante when they finally saw Badsha Abd's curious circus moving on horses and donkeys as if motor vehicles hadn't been invented. Then the cinematographer and the girl find feet tossing high sands smoke panting fast breaths and furious screaming, lungeing, waving arms, carrying, pushing forward. Someone notices
them running and shouting and sends a man on an animal for them. Thank you, my father looks ahead at the approaching sight, then at the girl with the serval's eyes he has already begun to love.

How did you know, she asks between kisses, how did you know my name.

THE
MIRROR

The young couple employ the documentary crew's journey through desert and mountain and plain territories to understand each other's company, tirelessly conversing, kissing, grooming, cooking together, and bask in wild orchards where arachnids cast nets to catch pools of sunlight that float in their basins long after dark. They bid goodbye to Badsha Abd's caravan of cameras and rare silk only after they become dazzled enough by a place they think deserves their anchor, just as Badsha Abd departed to make ways deeper into unnameable spider sanctuaries. They decided to call La Maga, with its artificial canal recently fashioned to connect the city with the Jubba River rippling water like metal glass, home. I've been here before, my father wanted to say to my mother, but his playback singer's life seemed like another world, and La Maga had been burned and rebuilt by movie sets so many times, he could hardly recognize it.

La Maga. Here, a thirty-degree-angle man leans his whole weight on a pole. He walks the length of a ship and pushes, glides it backward through the artificial canal. Open glass elevators affixed to the outside
of buildings would rise and fall according to people's needs, and it was such a bustling young city that even the President had bought a home there. He would arrive in a long motorcade without warning, and dragging a circus. He was good personal friends with the Director, who had a seat in the Privy Council and called the shots on zoning and the construction of new streets and movie sets in the country. The Director's great project, reflected in his work's title, was a madhouse of mirrors turned country into unnameable maze, which left us bewildered and frightened each time we needed to step outside for basic amenities. Luckily, the nameless rebels, who believed the film was actually a way for the national security forces to team up with the occupation Americans to contain all movement in our country to predictable reflection, broke all the mirrors near my parents' home only to find them replaced with duplicates, which they destroyed. On and on went the tit-for-tat until the time of Hedayat's birth, when the rebels managed to guard sufficient free walking space for people in our neighbourhood to do their daily business.

Recall at that time, Anwar, president of our country, governor of an unnameable region of the world, would sit at the table with his favourite horse, Dulcinea, whom he had acquired by exchanging the doll corpse of Caroline Margarita Quincy as the primary seat of his affections, having at least publicly given up all scientific experiments in necromancy; though it was said that secretly he had driven his researchers to abandon the twentieth-century laboratory in favour of the mercurial occult arts of the European medieval age in hopes of restoring the queen to life. Recall his equine love was more rewarding than the listless rooster romances he would conduct in the shadowy corners of the Presidential Palace with maids and whoever may come, and one that he defended in his mad older years as if it were the sanctified union of husband and wife. He would feed her oats from his own hand and comb her roan coat and braid her hair even in front of
foreign dignitaries; he taught her to sleep curled up next to him in a vast, comfortable bed of straw mattresses. He would ride her, but never for long distances, and only for her own health, and would not allow anyone else to clean up her shit. And he still ruled the unnameable country as if he were an unruly child, with the desire to bestow upon it the order of a perfectly predictable train schedule and the eradication of simple pestilences, two things for which, after all was said and done, one could not fault him. At least during the time of Anwar the Great, people still say, men and women did not fall asleep standing up in the middle of conversations due to the plague of the tsetse fly.

But the internal dynamics of government were less than stable: the Director's encroachment on La Maga, for instance, though it brought down foreign Western investment, drench-drowned the city, was a deviance the Kremlin did not interpret lightly, and within the Privy Council and among his closest supporters, opinions were split and grumbles sounded. Anwar recognized the slow demise of the Eastern bloc; Grenadier Lhereux had been following American economists, who had been predicting it for years, and the President no longer believed in the panacea, as he did in his early years, of delinking from global capitalism. Finally a pragmatist in his autumnal years, he turned to the West, let in the termites of foreign investment and ownership, and watched the walls crumble, or, as it is more apt to say, transform into mirrors. They brought them in frigates, landed on Victoria shores with a million of them, men in uniform that planted them on the streets there, and Benediction was flooded reflective within a week. By the time they got to La Maga, American military boys were such experts at setting up labyrinth-walls they covered the city in less than a day. Though we had heard that the mirrors were no joking matter and that they were defended by the most powerful guns in the world, some people thought it was fun at first. Local goondas tried to make off with a few of them and were arrested so fast, beaten
bloody pulp and stored in vacuum jailcells for so long, most people left the mirrors alone after that.

The rise of Nasiruddin Khan must be noted here, as the spoiled playboy son of a soft-drinks mogul who, after acquiring a French education, came home with a head full of 1968 ideas and wanted to take hammer and sickle to every mirror that Hollywood brought to our country. Joshimuddin Khan's continual pressing, take a job in the family multinational, please take a wife at least, fell on deaf ears, and Nasiruddin Khan, who used to spend five hours a day sculpting his hair with the exact oil combinations and treating his sensitive skin with lotions, became a guerilla. He protested the multiplication of corporate logos, the infinite Americanization of the country, by forming a mirrorbreaking squad that began systematically attacking La Maga's looking glasses. The nameless Hollywood production, which quickly became known as
The Mirror
due to its reflective sets, increased its security personnel, and Governor Anwar provided added protection to its continued growth and capture of the unnameable country.

Mirror-mirrors in the streets, mirrors everywhere; mirrors reflecting growing shrinking focusing, guiding roads, walkways, our thoughts. For as long as I can remember, there was
The Mirror
. And yet. And then. Realize that for years, the nameless rebels also existed, and would silently remove obstructions in people's lives, that for decades they would remain locked in unending combat with the central government committed to allowing the occupation army. What I mean is, though in a few short years the people would make him regret it, President Anwar let the Director film everything.

In the bustling city, the young couple struggled dearly at first, and survived only because of Shukriah's sacrifices, which included pawning off the very dress she wore in Epsilante, as well as the clothes belonging to the twins, passing them off as the finest articles of damask. In a cheap flat above the hosiery store they shared with numerous families of cats,
roaches, and termites, which were more ceaseless and destructive than either, she pursued a regimen of roundtheclock trampling underfoot; where is the spider when you need him.

To add to her responsibilities, Shukriah received word she would have to care for her younger sisters because her cousin, a pharmacist, could no longer support the twins' expenses due to the fact his own health was deteriorating past the point of treatment in the unnameable country. I am going to Argentina, he wrote, where I hope the people's commitment to good food will bestow upon my stomach lining its much-needed revitalization.

The twins arrived bearing gifts of antihistamines and boric acid and incurable hypochondria. In need of immediate employment, Shukriah convinced Mrs. Henry, their landlady and owner of the hosiery shop downstairs, that despite her inexperience she should be employed as a salesgirl. And although her sisters were pre-adolescents in the prime of mischief who offered no escape from their ceaseless babble that began with morning breakfast isn't as good as we used to have in Epsilante, Dada bhai would boil our eggs, Chaya doesn't like poached eggs, and continued into evening with the contest of giggles against schoolwork and television-show humour, Shukriah insisted on homeschooling them before they could afford to send them to primary school.

Meanwhile, Mamun Ben Jaloun's bank account had been frozen since the newspapers had declared his death, and while no next of kin had claimed the enclosed sum—which was not exorbitant (recall the reports of his lavish habits near the end of his playback singing career as well as the sandlot extensions to his home, which was repossessed by the President's cronies)—a complex bureaucratic procedure awaited him in his attempts at solvency.

He tried soon upon arriving at La Maga to visit the Ministry of Records and Sources to reclaim his earnings as a playback singer. Of a recent construction, the architectural influences of the ministry were
clear: straight powerful lines and right angles, very few windows, and bereft of the baroque fanfare that characterized the Ministry of Radio and Communications. A Soviet architect bearing the single name of Rakitin is supposed to have designed the edifice, though the President, as usual, assumed total credit, as he did for all the important buildings throughout the unnameable country, having once taken an architecture degree at the University of Bologna.

Mamun Ben Jaloun heard not a hinge's creak but rather the crinkle of a page turning as he pushed open its front doors, and he had the distinct feeling he was entering a fantastical realm.

The receptionist, who addressed visitors, sat before a desk at the central point between two hallways verging in opposite directions, and sat enclosed in the vicissitudes of a sudoku puzzle, scrawling numbers on the page before him and tearing out clumps of hair, anxiously repeating, It can't be, it just can't, muttering and spitting.