Fire in the Unnameable Country (27 page)

But who was the Director and what did they say of the Director. To us, he had no other name but Smith; we knew he had once worked as a psychiatrist, was originally educated at Columbia University, completed a dissertation on sociopathy some twenty years earlier, and was noted early in his career to have been quite fond of the rhododendron as a flower of memory, a means of inciting yes in his patients and willing them to aleatory remembrance of any moment of their past he wished to probe.

Sometime in the second year of the film, the industrialist Nasiruddin Khan, whose ownership of seventeen soda factories in the continent and whose desire to become an even more ruthless soft-drink manufacturer than Coca-Cola was known to all, began directing some of his expertise with paramilitary forces to the cause of resisting
The Mirror
. Training camps were set up in the Karkaars and our boys began to pretend they were gauchos recruited by Fidel's army while/ our boys began to revive the Battle of Algiers and disguised themselves among the urban masses, to wear women's clothing and hide missiles under dresses, to fire Kalashnikovs and garrotte with fishing lines and onehands behind backs. The Russians supplied weapons, and bombs began to explode
in La Maga neighbourhoods and locals died in droves; and when cameramen also died and gaffer boys were wounded and when the film equipment caught fire.

At first the Director's security forces as well as the police and state army were taken aback; mirrors exploded and liberated forgotten streets, communication devices were stolen, so-called collaborators were interrogated and revealed the moviemaker's macabre secret designs on entrapping not only La Maga but also, in time, the whole unnameable country. The nameless militia posted their men at every street corner and travelled house to house to recruit young boys as looksees and follow-follows. While the resistance now had wide popular support in the city, few residents were happy about the escalation of violence.

This has got to stop, Shukriah said one day as the cockroaches in the apartment began warring against the daddy-long-legs in greater number, or else there will be no sugar for the pancake batter because the roaches will get to it all.

One outcome of the extended conflict was the extreme protraction of your humble narrator's gestation inside his mother's womb. Recall from schoolboy lessons pregnancy for the field mouse lasts no more than three weeks prior to the litter; in
Felis domesticus
, two months at most; in larger mammals, such as the elephant, this period extends to an average of eleven months, while the mother whale must endure it as long as two years. Doctors were baffled, neighbours and friends called hex and foul, while others debated whether the condition could bear possible boon to my health and future life. Let it be known that the shepherdess Shukriah carried me in her womb for no less than eight years, six months, fourteen days, twelve hours, and twenty-one minutes from fertilization onward; add thirty-seven hours if you wish to calculate that figure from the moment of conception.

My mother, however, for all the nauseating discomfort, the backaches and strange dreams, inexplicable desires to eat silt or freshly
blown glass, to drink the pure mucus of the snail, would lapse into bouts of laughter and hysteria during which she would swear she could hear me gurgle and speak in gestus, listen to what he says: He will not come out until this war has come to an end, can you believe it, trickster naughty boy this one.

Tell him to hurry up and get born, my father would mutter in frustration, for the girls, who were now in the early stages of puberty and somewhat slower and more cautious in their physical movements, were swiftly walling themselves into unnameable countries of their own design. They imported construction materials from faraway places, while Mamun Ben Jaloun neither understood nor wanted any part of the punk slogan no future nor the disco injunction to party off the wall, which belonged respectively to Reshma and Chaya, as they had begun to differentiate themselves by dress and hairstyle and musical ethos, and to quarrel ceaselessly about popular figures and issues of which he was totally ignorant. They raspberry-tongued at the everywhere cameras and blew pink bubblegum bubbles into the faces of the film crew, compared notes with friends on the handsome moustaches of the rebels, whose soft absurd shoes of canvas and their ability to disappear into cats' shadows, as well as the size of their rifles. They left pink bubbleballoons hanging in the walls of the flat like bloated frog throats, and it was clear they would not remain a moment longer in the tiny apartment above the hosiery shop than they had to.

All the while, Mamun wished for his wife to return to her regular prior-to-pregnancy self, before she became the garrulous whispering, laughingtoherself woman into which the fetal Hedayat had transformed her. Everything had changed. What in the old days was sure to be the sound of wedding firecrackers or the effusion of Roman candles in the celebration of a birth was now more likely the exchange of shots between the Director's security forces and the rebels or the explosion of a mirror-wall.

Years earlier, when he and Shukriah were close, she would be able to say upon his return home you were in suchandsuchasection in the Archives today, not because the odours would linger on his clothing but because they shared everything then and it was natural to be able to understand the particulars of the other's reality whenever either of them wanted to. Later, during the period of her oracular conversations with her unborn son, Mamun Ben Jaloun felt the tain of a mirror creep up between his mind and hers, as if when she gazed at him she saw only her/ and he was banished from knowing her thoughts in those long eight and a half years. Shukriah, meanwhile, honed her insights to certain prescience and would have been able to travel through the labyrinth of thoughts blindfolded if she had wanted, to distinguish ages and genders and to outline in advance whole stories of magnetized captured minds without the aid of a tape player.

It took years and much entreaty for Mamun Ben Jaloun to acquire a penlight from Supervisor, who reluctantly provided and which enabled our hero to read the names printed on the Archive reels. For many months, his job involved only to identify by the sound quality of the recorded thoughts which magnetic files were chronologically misplaced in row upon row of unending columns. While he knew, because Supervisor had informed him, and as well due to his official wanderings, that the Archives were strictly divided into quadrants, he would often discover that one section ended too soon or another started before expected. Having a penlight did not help with these broader demarcations since the effect of the instrument was deliberately weak and designed only for close inspections of individual files, and he was told repeatedly to clip his nosehairs, to habituate himself to wearing
deafening headphones when not at work so as to keep a clear set of ears for Archives sounds, and, ultimately, to hone his hearing organs.

It was a hard job that started you dawn-early, made you wait outside Supervisor's office with other Archives clerks, holding dearly onto loose articles of clothing or your briefcase if you happened to carry such a piece of luggage, because the ventilation system perpetually; Supervisor had been wrong in saying the breakdown was temporary, though the force of the winds had been fixed down to thunderstorm-levels rather than gale. One could not fraternize with one's co-workers during these minutes in the hallway over tea due to the inclement weather, and spent the time instead pressed flat like a beetle against the wall to avoid being blown away. Then the door would slam open and Supervisor would yell the name of the next man and drag him by the arm into the office as one by one the day's assignments poured in from higher chains of command.

Within an hour, or at most seventy-five minutes, one found oneself curled up, lying down in a maggot shape little comma in the dumbwaiter. To discover a misplaced thoughtreel, the most common assignment for a novice, it was necessary first to recognize the wrong recording in the score: to detect the crinkle sound of that shirt earlier today doesn't belong with the thoughtreel that gives us the sound of unleaded gasoline the first year of its wide introduction in the unnameable country with the adjacent precise recording of the football match. One crept along until homing in on the precise reel until it was possible to pluck out the mistake, before placing it in the right section.

On occasion, while he handled the roundmetal containers, Mamun Ben Jaloun felt dizzy. Other times he experienced strange effects that at first he interpreted as combinations of loneliness and the red-lit darkness of that vast subterranean library. The sounds would vibrate everything, the depths of his entrails. Then an almost-voice, a wilderness cry that
disappeared almost as soon as it arose and returned him to the maze of sounds. In these short moments he felt like weeping from the gut. The transition from sensation to clear sound, the synthetic formation of stories: and truly, this did happen: my father began to feel over time what his wife had always sensed from afar and what he knew rationally to be a fact, namely that living minds were stored in the thoughtreels. At the exact moment of revelation he felt only fear, and trembled under pale sheets in his bed upon hurrying feverish home the first time a thoughtreel sang out to him without the aid of headphones plugged into a magnetic player.

Hark unto me, Mamun Ben Jaloun, for, like you, I too once had life. Recall: limp-handed cluttering to the floor, he had let drop the roundmetal container.

Cover me, he said to Shukriah, as the walls shivered. And she brought him another blanket because all the blood had left his extremities.

What happened, she asked.

I heard the angel of God speaking, Mamun replied.

Shukriah said that was blasphemy and held him tightly, asked again: Tell me what happened today, but Mamun just teeth-chattered. Recall he did not submit at once to the powers of his own understanding. He had never heard voices quite this way and was troubled about his mental health.

A question: did Shukriah not know the details of what terrified Mamun, or was she, by that time, lost mirror-mirror in my head, in the looking-glass world of her own suffering and solipsistic desires to eat silt among other desires. If the latter, then where does the culpritseeking blame-casting finger point: from the womb he would not allow their love to flow as the simple love between a man and a woman not only because he desired all his mother's love but because through her he wanted to siphon all the love in the world.

In the Pits, as the Archives were known among the clerks, there were no friends and many wanderers, like Mamun, sent to gather the errant file that had not been listened to perhaps in twenty years because some higherup inspections agent at the Ministry of Records and Sources demanded. There were also rumours that the Archives hid a priestly caste of silent ghosts, who wandered searching furtively for the one file that would contain within it all the thoughtreels, an infinite and sacred document. It was said the Archives were in fact so vast that some employees had descended below and never ridden the dumbwaiter back up to the surface. Supposedly, they had managed to cultivate edible plants in the dim light because they knew which plumbing pipes to tap for clean water and even farmed rodents for food; they lived in solitude and total custodial devotion to the Archives. Some even claimed that these rogues played mischievous tricks on clerks, that in fact they were the ones who misplaced the files and forced the work onto their shoulders, but let me make clear that no one ever verified the existence of such a cult or discovered material evidence of their occult beliefs or the slightest proof of an infinite thoughtreel that contained all the reels. More common were the whistling ghosts, ordinary clerks who by sound warned others of their presence and reminded them of their discontented solitude. Of these, my father became acquainted with one Simon, a stooping melancholic who happened on occasion to arrive in the mornings at around the same time as Mamun.