Fire in the Unnameable Country (33 page)

Yes, I am he.

Zachariah Ben Janoun.

In the dark, our hero says nothing about the other Zachariah, already understanding the nature of the trap.

For four years you have been living a lie, a double identity, the nature of which has been carefully documented by the Department of Special Affairs.

Regard, something heavy falls as the shapeless man steps aside. The light moves slowly from the dangling single incandescent lightbulb
at the far end of the cell across the room's dimensions as if crossing the globe. Zachariah sees a folder sitting on a table, which bends and creaks desperately under the folder's large mass of many loose sheets of paper. Our file, or your file, rather, weighs exactly as much as you do, Zachariah, sixty-four point three kilograms, am I correct.

Last time I checked, sir, though the stated figure is ten units under the actual.

Good. You have a respectful demeanour, which will help you in this place, the interrogator paces. The light shifts when he moves and the interrogator's profile changes from prognathous to concave, his arms grow longer-shorter, his hair covers his face before receding into the baldness of his scalp, his shadow bends exceedingly: his body exhibits endless change. Tell us, benjanoun benjaloun, what brought you to choose a second identity.

I was called Ben Janoun, sir, by my supervisor when offered a post at the Ministry of Radio and Communications, and since at the time I was unemployed and to correct a superior during an interview would have meant possible denial of the job, I allowed him and subsequently all others in the Ministry of Records and Sources to refer to me by an incorrect name. For this act I am wholly contrite and submit myself to rehabilitation in a correctional or psychiatric facility.

And yet what you have spoken is the grossest untruth.

Sir.

Yes, the interrogator looks closely at a sheet in the file. He has raised up the heavy folder, which must be very dense because while containing perhaps seven hundred pages it manages to weigh more than sixty kilograms, and the man carrying it, therefore, must be exceedingly powerful because he rests it on a single palm. See here, your date of birth, January suchandsuch, nineteen twenty-four.

That is correct, sir.

And the name, he brings the sheet of paper closer. Through the green faded uniform the man's flesh releases the sweet stench of attar and Zachariah is forced to breathe through his mouth.

Zachariah Ben Janoun, the captive is forced to say, since that is the name he sees.

The female warder who enters the room is wearing the same Chinese slippers as in Gita's collection, the ones she meant to sell as a final alternative, and seeing them on the feet of another drains all her confidence. Already she has fled this place several ways: she has flown through the small chink in the window, she has accompanied the scurrying rats through the unseen holes and they have led her through secret passageways, and she has also transparently moved through the walls, as we know. Always, she has returned to shed deep onion tears.

We are feeding you now, the woman declares, as if bestowing a gift. The tray contains frozen homogenous yellow in a plastic bowl and a grey bun. Wait until it cools, the warder says before exiting.

A day passes, or part of a day. The contents of the tray disappear and no subsequent meals are provided. Over the course of the next four days, however, twenty-four meals find their way to Gita's cell, some of which are inedible, many of which lie uneaten, and over the following week, these decompose without being removed. Rats arrive in swarming numbers. Gita fears rodents less than mosquitoes, fleas and the diseases they carry, as visions of ancient plague, of fever boils genital pustules tumefaction of the lymph nodes leave her hanging on the tips of her fingers upside down from the ceiling. Finally, a man arrives to interrogate her.

Under what pretext did you enter the country, Ms. Nothingatall.

To seek employment, she passes a hand across her clammy cheeks; the fever persists.

And to this effect you found the unnameable country satisfactory interrogation point

Yes, I was awarded a post at the Ministry of Radio and Telecommunications as a collector.

Ah, the man nodded, writing it all down. And there you met Zachariah Ben Janoun.

I did, yes.

I mean, you met Zachariah Ben Jaloun.

A silence akin to Zachariah's at the reminder of the double identity.

What did you think when he first revealed his second name to you; do you think of him as one or the other man when you think of him; be truthful, Gita.

The truth, sir: I think of him as Zachariah, Ben Jaloun is his birth name while Ben Janoun is his name at work.

Do you find it strange one man possesses two names. Might it not be possible you wake up in the morning next to a second man without certainty.

I don't understand the nature of the question, sir.

The interrogator slips a long thin finger deep inside his ear, so deep it disappears all the way to the knuckle. He twists it back and forth as if adjusting a hidden organ. Do you know what you actually discovered when analyzing the last magnetic reel. He effuses a spineless rumbling sound, which might be called laughter and which shakes the building to its foundations. We have so far to go, he speaks through a yawning hole in his head, and there is so much for you to learn.

The following months delivered to Gita all the discomforts one person could possibly live through: putrescence, a decomposing animal a dung-heap smell without any, sometimes faint while close on other occasions. By breathing through the mouth it was possible, but
not for long. Vomit. Cloudy piss. Nowhere to urinate but an ancient overflowing toilet. The coming and going of ghostly cellmates who tarried without talking, looked at her, pointed, disappeared soon after arriving like transient fellow passengers destined for connecting flights. The isolation was difficult, but it allowed for the reordering and play of memory. For months at a time they would leave you with nothing but the walls and a low oscillating hum until shapes rose up and you floated like Yeshua across the surface of the Gulf of Eden, thinking it was the Dead Sea. What is the Fable of Yeshua. And how do they speak of the Fable of Yeshua.

The man arrived again and ordered her gently to descend from the ceiling, where she had taken to roosting, hanging from her fingertips. She crabscuttled slowly before leaping onto the floor. Please have a seat, he pointed to her cot.

She did as he requested and assumed a seated, human form. He asked her to recount the early stages of her relationship with benjalounbenjanoun, and she related in loving detail their brief conversation in the department, quite casual, though I laughed, I recall, and he did not join me but enjoyed the sound, before speaking of their spirited encounter in the market some weeks later.

Talk to me about Yeshua.

What to say, she frowned, but an eyeless man speaking of his life, of which there are many so many maimed and disfigured living corpses.

I am not asking for a comparative demographic study, merely an account of this stranger's story.

It was apocryphal, she said, he told it several ways, forgot parts, filled in gaps, restated the beginning three times, then Zachariah told it again to me as if I wasn't there, and I remembered it back to him later and it was different.

What do you remember. That there were seven and they were accused at the Israeli border of being a danger to the nascent state, of
not being Jews, of being a treasonous cete of badgers and spies, this much one could know. Did you believe it.

She thought for a moment while biting her lower lip. He was an eyeless man who claimed to have been blinded by the border guards. Zachariah, who has served as a border guard, could attest to the everyday cruelty of the profession and so.

Did you believe they were terrorists.

No.

Why not.

Because they were poor men who happened to be black and who merely wanted.

They were not terrorists, then, to you.

I cannot know for certain, but in which way does the matter relate to my imprisonment.

You visited them afterward.

Yes, Zachariah showed a curiosity about their story and wanted to see the spot where supposedly the earth opened up as a tunnel that led to a false body of water that drowned Yeshua the blind Amharic Jew.

You did what then.

We sat with Yoni, who was good, and with her small hands she made us bitter coffee in a hut not larger, Gita pointed to the cell, than this place, and after speaking a while with her and with several of Yeshua's companions, we returned home and made love.

You realize that to fraternize with members of the Brotherhood places you in a dangerous category, especially as a non-citizen of the unnameable country.

As far as I was aware, the unnameable country was not a state but a nameless British protectorate and that as a citizen of the Commonwealth I am under the protection of His Majesty King George the Mad.

You have misperceived your political status as well as ours. Only rotten tongues in the heads of certain intellectual classes or vagabonds
would wag to call us an unnameable country, but soon we will be on all the maps of the world, not just the ones on which you would point and which compassed you here.

How could you know.

We know some things, he said casually.

Just as casually, the tortures mounted. Gita grew ill and her belly swelled so that it became difficult to crawl along or to hang from the wall or the ceiling, and she was forced to recline on the stinking cot for longer periods. In the mornings, she began to desire mud, leaves of raw grass, and sheep's milk straight from the udder. Soon after, there arrived men in her cell who abused her and stripped her naked, and they were also naked and they pierced her. The same questions were asked but worded slightly differently, with the intention that she should forget the order of the past, so much so that it became difficult to remember whether the swelling of her belly happened before or after the arrival of the men, who differed in their odours and the shapes of their bodies. And so we cannot know whether the father of the child born to her some months later, which she delivered howling alone in the presence of three hundred pairs of eyes with the assistance of only a midwife in that very cell, was Zachariah's or another's.

You are ill, the man returns.

My baby, she is twisting her hands into dead branches, and her words consumptive grey.

He is safe. We haven't and wouldn't harm your son. He has done nothing. As for yourself, we have analyzed your records and found you criminally negligent but psychologically incapable of accepting responsibility for your actions. You always were and remain in need of psychiatric care.

When can I go, the faint smell of a raw onion at her nostrils, when can I see him.

Zachariah, you mean.

Yes.

You shall see him upon your release.

What hell finds Zachariah Ben Janoun today. And why did we take up the story of Zachariah Ben Janoun at all. As we just discovered, he may not be my grandfather, but genealogy is a knotted and ambiguous affair, and the greater reasons for telling the story reside in losing oneself to the possibility that one could be wrong about everything. Beyond genealogy, but just barely. There is a thread, I declare, and it is frayed and tenuous: Zachariah Ben Janoun loves Gita, this much is true, but to love an absence, an apparition, is different from the love of an everyday woman of arms and a tongue, of thoughts embraces and actual words. And they take advantage of his love. Who then. How. They. Anonymous skulls, a certain memory of the differentiated curvature of interrogators' snouts, but most physical details are fuzzy.

There was the first, the protean one, you will recall, who lifted the heavy file and darkened the room and changed shape in the light. Then he multiplied into others, spoke in British-accented Plainenglish sometimes, accusing him of harbouring, exactly in the bare dimensions of his cell after being forced into prison overalls, bombs inside his dress. Zachariah denied with poise until the closeness of the torturer, the hatred in his voice, his spittle disgusting mouth made Zachariah weep without an onion to aid.