Fire in the Unnameable Country (30 page)

In the Presidential Palace, the head of state was so obsessed with personal matters he could not be reached by telephone telex letters or in person. Dulcinea had taken gravely ill, poisoned it was said, by someone close to the leader, though whom it was not known, her hind legs collapsed whenever she tried to raise herself, and she dropped to the floor each time she tried from vertigo, she could not take food and was barely capable of swallowing water. It may therefore be true that
Anwar had no idea of what horrors followed next, that he was therefore not responsible, he himself is not known to have given the orders, but no one in the unnameable country forgave him anyway for what occurred.

Recall, as we often do in the unnameable country: one Wednesday evening the sky fluttered and more than two thousand children were lured outside by a beautiful green precipitation, which fell at first like a drizzle of fireflies and which some of them tried to catch on their tongues. But soon the air grew solid, suffused with fumes so noxious that even the marionettes were knocked flat off their feet, and those who tried to rescue the children and survived later compared the experience to walking through hellfire. The children, and, at first, even some curious adults, thought the sky was just releasing the fake elements of the American theatre war and went out to inspect, to mock, perhaps even to enjoy the novelty. The wounds they suffered, however, were evidence of something purely diabolical, for pouring water onto skin made it worse, and the children screamed as the fire seeped deeper into hidden organs and fizzled for hours like the rock candies of Confectionarayan Babu (who stayed inside his candy shop and was saved and whose shop was spared only by an inscrutable miracle of small things), as it rained this way for hours and dummy houses burned and real buildings met actual demise as the city grew engulfed in a fire that had no cure.

More than five thousand people died, it was said, more than eight thousand were injured in the Night of the Green Rain, and though the General Assembly of the United Nations condemned the American targeting of civilians as well as the use of cruel and unusual instruments of destruction, the Security Council stopped short of defining the event as a war crime. Soon after, the radios broadcast the sad news that Dulcinea never recovered from her mysterious illness, had passed on and just yesterday was laid to rest in a horse-sized ivory-laden coffin
on the palace grounds. Following a period of mourning the President re-emerged into public life with renewed vigour and mirthless desire to avenge the murder of his last great romance, though he did not know to what degree he had lost ground within even his Privy Council, as well as among his closest legislative and judicial supporters, for his selfish absence, and more for his failure to provide adequate words to describe the grief of the nation.

At that time, they said Grenadier Lhereux would assume the helm. Doddering, close to eighty, he carried his teeth in a velveteen box and was rumoured not to be able to perform the day's activities without first bathing several hours in a revitalizing concoction of aromatic herbs, whose exact formula only he knew and whose ingredients were imported from more than a dozen separate countries. But whoever spoke to him concluded at once his mind retained the lucidity of that day in the trenches of Vimy Ridge, where he had risen to the rank of major in an hour's exploits at age seventeen, and that he still possessed the heroic candour reserved for men of a bygone generation.

Lhereux himself would not speak of power so easily, and those plotting the coup understood this, though it was said he would have been content to remain a grey eminence, a hidden organ, invisible functionary of the unnameable country for the rest of his days irrespective of who played leader.

The time has come, Xamid Sultan patted him on the back outside the legislative house under a threatening phlegmatic sky one Friday afternoon, will you do us the honour.

Lhereux provided the response of his life after having lived in the unnameable country for more than fifty years when he said, I am here to observe, Xamid, and one day I will return to Montpellier where my mother still keeps her house and a quaint plum and cherry orchard.

Soon, it became so impossible to demarcate between what was real in La Maga and what was intended to be cinematic action that no one was certain when American soldiers appeared in every corner. They crawled from beneath the sewer gratings and stepped out of the bathroom doors of common citizens, who hadn't noticed them come in without knocking, Sorry, needed to shit pretty bad, ma'am. If asked, they claimed they had arrived only to assist the elderly to cross the street and to prevent women from being assaulted by the rebels, but so far as we are aware, the elderly of La Maga tended to retain an ambulatory spirit until the end of their days and died suddenly in bed without sickness and more out of the conviction their time had come, while no woman had asked any soldier to hold her hand since the rebels were not known to have. Besides, we were more accustomed to uncle big bad's lupine megaphone bursts—We know you are in there, assholeterrorizers; out of that tenement flat or we will blow you out—the scuttling of soldiers distribution of wires and deposition of charges, the huff-and-puff of Major Collin Salt through the conical instrument, which transformed his orders into growling sand, which offered you the mercy of imprisonment and torture or delivered death with a countdown of two more one more minute terrorists the walls fell down on top of you in the middle of breath memory and then you were flattened like so many daddy-long-legs.

The nameless rebels were shyer than the Americans and appeared and disappeared like catless grins, hitting and running still clad in ballet slippers. It was true they died in greater number, but since the night of the phosphorescent green water-resistant fire, it had become nearly impossible to distinguish between the residents of the city and the rebels. Mother's constant reading aloud of the events to her unborn son took a turn of invention as she realized the war was giving no sign of retreat; my father's days were numbered, and that if I was not born soon I might never be introduced to my aunt Reshma before she left for the Berlin art
academy to which she had been accepted. Furthermore, her own body and mind had suffered so much in the recent past she was worried she might not be able to tolerate another year of pregnancy. Thus, events that were too large were shrunk by concave mirrors of speech, while slight victories, such as a minor increase in the availability of grain in the stores, would be magnified exponentially in order to encourage; the war continued and in fact escalated but I swam contented after years of ardour and worry.

My mother coaxed me finally to be born. Having wombed me nine and one-third multiples longer than the giantess Gargamelle, and utterly exhausted by the ordeal, Shukriah wondered if my entry into the world would in any way resemble an ordinary birth or whether I would in fact emerge like Athena from her head or cast within an eggshell, in which case she would have to incubate me further like a swan-maiden. She bellytickled, she teased, she sang loving verses, and still I remained stuck in place, possibly out of nervousness like an actor prior to the first night of performance after many a long rehearsal.

One day, two hours before dawn, La Maga awoke to simultaneous bovine cries emerging from every minaret in the city. What unholy rascals like myself would laugh about many years later found interpretation in observant five-times-a-day-kneelers as the greatest insult; cows on every minaret, can you believe, trained cows who had walked up perilous steps on their own, seemingly, to call the faithful. Like the wooden bomb replete with ribbons of a million obscene messages, Nasiruddin Khan appeared out of the safety of his miniature cola empire to deliver yet another hot message, this one so incendiary one of the ceiling fans overheated and disconnected, falling with a crash and nearly lopping off several heads in the audience. Nearly overcome by the omen of misfortune, the crowd struggled for a moment with the choice of dispersing, but let me say it for why suppress the news when the news.

Nasiruddin Khan silenced the people with a hand: La Maga is not alone in this struggle, all over the world it is becoming impossible to avoid the fact that we are no longer living with airstrikes but a full-fledged invasion, the people are united and they are with you. He began to read a letter from Joe Slovo: our brothers and sisters in South Africa have extended their solidarity, he read aloud that tender document, which pacified the isolated residents of a faraway country and reminded them that there existed a world beyond their mirror-walls and that others too were struggling. Remember, however: on this occasion, the unknotters were ready; if the film cameras were not all but destroyed and the mirrors were cracking, at least the saboteurs, paid informants, spies, and plainclothes provocateurs were gaining strength, and some sources claimed at least a third of the audience that day consisted of hidden organs, eyes and ears, which saw and heard everything.

Following the death of Dulcinea, the President began to dress in garments made of camel hair and to favour eating locusts and raw honey, withdrawing his campaign to discover the perpetrator of his horse's poisoning after appeasing himself with the senseless execution of eighty random men and women hand-picked by the Department and eventually withdrawing into a babble that was less than glossolalia, inscrutable and incapable of effecting any change in the world. He became lost to all, for the first time even to Grenadier Lhereux, who had on every other occasion succeeded in tethering Anwar to the basic realities of governance and washing up every day, and the Privy Council realized it had discovered the miracle it had been searching for and suggested immediately creating for the head of state the docile, sheared-samson position of prime minister without any formal powers, and to choose a new president from the cadre of groomed politicos and military men.

Lhereux instantly regretted refusing the role of the unnameable country's leader when he realized that change was inevitable and considered his retirement and even contacted his mother to ask whether she would not allow him to bring a friend to stay in their Montpellier cottage for a short visit.

The centenarian wrote back insisting that her boy abandon his romantic forays in the dark lands where he had chosen to waste his life and that he shouldn't bother coming home if he did not arrive as he had left it: with his head bowed and as a God-fearing Catholic.

The great grenadier tried not to argue sense and to make the best of the situation. He stood in the balcony of the Presidential Palace where Anwar used to give speeches to scintillated crowds and took a whiff of the sulphurous air. The taste of ash collected on his palate and he realized that all throughout the unnameable country, the same fire burned, just as it had twenty years ago when the British were forced to leave and tried then to rule from afar. He cursed this country and its senseless multitude; he had lived here fifty years and still had not found happiness or understood what its people wanted.

SATAN AND
THE MAROONS

FABLE
OF
YESHUA

Questions push. Curiosity bids us backward in time. The tale of now is the story of every now before now meaning present time. How many strangers have arrived on our shores. Years ago, Yeshua himself came to our country, rumours tell us. My grandfather heard that story first not long after he met my grandmother in the cubicles of the office of the British Intelligence Service in the Heart of Arabia. My grandmother heard it too right after they met.

Did my grandparents go to the movies when they became sweethearts. Recall at that time there was a fire and fanfare show in town: the nameless rebels vs.
The Mirror
. Shoot to shards broken glass and alleyway scuffles erupted daily while the beginning of it all, including and especially the start of the cinema, its origin, which occurred exactly at the same time as a CIA coup placing Anwar in power, disappeared into a cinematic wonderland, the once upon a time of a movie designed for export.