Fire in the Unnameable Country (34 page)

Abruptly, a second man entered the room in a huff and the two passed inaudible officialdoms, really, is that so, the ruffling of papers, could it be, the Britisher examined his papers again, yes, I do believe. Sorry, chap, seems like I've got the wrong room here, I'm supposed to be examining in fourthreesixone, not room onesixfourthree. And then, like a sheepish professor late for a lecture he dashed off. Insensibly,
however, though Zachariah Ben Janoun was in no position to argue, he returned several weeks later and started a more serious theatre involving Zachariah's friend, Professor, if you'll recall the unname.

Would you like to see him, the examiner held up a hanging lightbulb and pointed it to the corner where Zachariah Ben Janoun hadn't noticed for the always weak light. For the first time, Zachariah Ben Janoun realized he had a companion, as he saw before him, bundled chrysalis and slits for eyes, the sitting face and body, the face hidden by bandages, recognizable by the curly hair. The light fell away and back onto Zachariah's face but the bandaged face, accompanying body, the moan, could have been the professor.

The drama began afresh as a weighty file appeared in a wagon, pushed along by a paralytic, the one with half-a-face hanging limp and sallow, and who dragged his left leg, and whose left hand swung limply by his side. The paralytic took a long time to bring the charges to the fold. He cleared his throat and read them: numerous connections with communist academics, terrorists, and writers, a participant at weekly subversive gatherings, simultaneously a scandal in high and low societies, sometimes played a corrupt woman in yellow or red negligees at parties, a sexual pervert, as you can, heavily reprimanded for misconduct at job as a border guard.

Partway through the recitation, the paralytic fell drooling asleep. A by the way, just to ask: what were Zachariah's rights. Also the vomit: he was drugged so often the mere thought of food made him vomit. He would think of Gita. In these moments, while listening over shortwave, they took advantage.

It was she who led us to you, they would thunder, she who belonged to an internal surveillance team in the Ministry of Radio and Communications and wore the mask of affection to do so.

Such things were known to happen, Zachariah had heard stories of decade-long marriages constructed for the purpose of police
entrapment, but he could not believe. She had been arrested too, after all.

He was a liar, a scoundrel, were you not suspicious of his behaviour for months before his arrest. This latter point Gita could not deny, as the interrogator paced around her. The magnetic tape you studied for years was nothing but a document of a dangerous terrorist imagination, a subversive mind belonging to a person who deceived a whole organization and his friends with a double identity. Zachariah is a very bad man, though he appeared to you sometimes to be good.

The prisoners'dilemma: if Gita confesses the correct untruth and Zachariah confesses, then their collective loss is total and insurmountable, since neither will be returned to the other. If either agrees to the Organs' reality while the other refuses to do so, then the loss is still total since the condemned will prevent reunion. If neither speaks, then the horror continues indefinitely. Gita is told that Zachariah has finally broken and admitted to her part in nationalist conspiracies against the state, of her Communist leanings, of her adultery and other deviant, what was she doing living out of wedlock with a man in the first place. Your cell is an hourglass, they tell her, we have only so much patience, terrorism is a time-sensitive issue, as sand pours in through the ventilation system, choking dust and grey ash: sand fills the cell until it buries the chair on which Gita sits, the cot on which she rests. Gita scurries up the wall and presses flat like a chinch against the ceiling, but the sand is rising, the sign of the hourglass is not a lie, and soon the dust will enter her lungs. Then it starts, perhaps the whole reason we began.

Through her lips a cry. An interruption first, a tickle in the throat: what is glossolalia; does it bear a singular point of origin or is its existence owed to multiple beginnings.

Gita feels a force seize her flattened body and it nearly wrenches out her throat: words words in Server Backslang, tracing backward into old slave Quinceyenglish, fragments somehow in Naga, in Bangla and
minor languages she has never spoken, some languages she has never heard, until the sands force her to recede to the width of a millimetre or less, to the dimension of a sheet of paper against the ceiling, until she screams in Plainenglish. She screams, yes, yes I did whatever you say, I'll sign it, I'll denounce him, just don't anymore.

The snap of a latch and Gita's cell door opens, releasing the dust and the putrescent air. The ventilation shaft whirs to an end. The door remains open and she continues to hang from the ceiling. Accustomed to the darkness and the enclosure she grapples with the meaning of this change, and for two days they do not come even to feed her.

Finally, out of hunger, she descends from the ceiling and edges toward the door, wades through grey knee-deep lunar dust. Fluorescent white tubes in horizontal rows across the ceiling, everywhere a dull plain glow, the swift movement of nurses in uniform through a long corridor extending behind and ahead of her, custodial staff sweeping up the sand emerging out from her room, and patients wheeling about, a large nursery filled with incubators. She searches through the names and sees at the far end, written on a plain white card over a plastic casing, the words Baby Nothingatall.

The warm grasp of a stranger's hand, a smile, it must have been a difficult labour, he had some trouble with jaundice but we've contained.

As if she had only come to the hospital to give birth. She finds herself suckling her child, sharing a room with a menopausal breast cancer patient, eating cakes and listening to American jazz records over the public announcement system while enduring her neighbour's endless descriptions of a childless middle age, excoriated adipose tissue, and the virtues of morphine.

The child's forehead seems to bear a certain resemblance to
Zachariah's, and closer examination makes: children at that age don't keenly assume the faces they will wear in life. She shivers in the balmy equatorial heat. She will not release the child from her clutches, so to palliate her anxieties they place a crib next to her bed.

At night she awakens with screaming terrors and paroxysms, which they suppress with drugs. They occur so often she is connected to an intravenous. Granular residue in her lungs. Tumefaction of her vulva. No explanations or inquiries. Hasty treatment.

She asks one kind nurse, where is the child's father; but the nurse is unaware of any prior history in her case, is unaware of familial connections. She will ask, she ensures.

Months pass and Gita wonders about her flat. No doubt by now it has been seized, probably the landlord has given her up for ghost and rented it to others, no doubt sold all her drawers within drawers within drawers, her clothing furniture bric-a-brac, not to mention Zachariah Ben Janoun's. How long has she been here. Weeks, months maybe.

Not a day less than two years, she is informed by a judge advocate general, who arrives in gleaming epaulets, and behind whom stands a paralytic orderly who pulls a wagon in which is contained a fat green folder holding many loose pages. The judge advocate general motions for the orderly to find the right leaves, sign here and here, and here as well.

The sheer military presence is enough to guide her through the formalities without a moan of protest. She does not look at the pages she is signing or ask about Zachariah, the question does not seem relevant at the moment.

Due to your psychiatric and physical health, the uniformed man informs, you will be unable to perform your previous duties at the Department, but the Ministry of Radio and Communications is aware of your high performance before your decline and will ensure you are awarded some level of employment and will contact you in due time. Until then you can live from a small state stipend. Your belongings,
which were under the possession of the state, will be restored in a new apartment outfitted with sufficient furnishings for yourself and the child.

At 2
P
.
M
. on Wednesday, the Governor received a note on the interrogations of Gita Nothingatall and Zachariah Ben Jaloun. He had followed their entire story with a certain bemused curiosity and was interested to know of the results. Grenadier Lhereux himself delivered the memorandum and was about to relate its contents when the Governor hushed him and drew him down to the carpeted floor of the Hecatomb Office.

Listen, he said, as he turned a knob on the wall near the light switch and pressed his ear to the floor. Come come, he beckoned the grenadier follow suit as he listened closely to drops of grain fall on balances and scales in every marketplace of Benediction, the sounds of peeling oranges in Victoria kitchens, of the slap of sandals on Conception streets to mean the kenning bustle and economic growth, as the love-shouts of anguish and delight in La Maga bedrooms and fields and rooftops found his eardrums suddenly, the sounds in houses of La Maga of fornicating mice and ferrets, and the sounds of birds screwing in the skies above. Included was a thud, a scree of stones sliding a mountainside in the hinterland, and if you tilt your head exactly the right way, Anwar said, everything in our country vibrates inner ear to your toes.

Lhereux, who had never entered the Governor's office and knew of the acquisition and arrangement of the most sophisticated audio equipment because he belonged to a selection of the leader's closest associates, was astonished when he discovered the effects of his superior's successful campaign of bugging the country, which began before Black Organs and independently of
The Mirror
, the two forces that together would turn the nation into an infinitely surveilled movie studio.

So what'll it be, Zachariah, Ben Jaloun or Ben Janoun. The interrogator's head bends in the light and disappears in certain angles as his hands gnarl talons, shadows on the wall.

Zachariah can't bear to look directly into his face, and, besides, he does not know the right answer. They have reproduced his blank verses and have read them aloud so many times, in such perverted rhythms, have questioned and sullied every line with such vigour that he feels only disgust for the name Ben Jaloun, which was for him always the title of a minor poet. But Ben Janoun seems equally duplicitous, a name he used to obtain employment on false grounds at Department 6119, where he could never return for the shame he has no doubt heaped onto a venerable institution of the unnameable country. They do not cajole, they don't have to: he eventually understands.

When he walks cautiously out the doors of the centre and feels the seadrenched air on his face for the first time in more than two years, Zachariah Ben Jaloun rejoins the world as a mid-ranking checkpoint guard, an illiterate with no particular desires and broken in more ways than he can recognize. He is given an address and fifty dollars, taxis along the La Maga streets without particularly knowing what to expect, though he has been told the individual he meets cannot refuse him.

A host of varicose veins and atrophied leg muscles: the journey up three flights of the urine-soaked stairwell proves difficult and on the second turn he must rest. A murder of adolescent boys with long wooden swords in the darkness, wearing dark capes fashioned probably by their mothers.

Who goes, the eldest asks, extending his weapon toward Zachariah's throat.

I am Zachariah Ben Janoun, and I: he reads it out loud.

What business have you here.

No business of yours.

He receives a thrashing until the scream of a foxwhistle and the
appearance of a large matronly woman who tears the boys off him, who rebukes and spanks them until they cry and scatter.

She offers him her scarf to wipe the blood off his head. Rascals, by God, she calls them between gritted teeth, miscreants, vagrants, vagabonds, illiterates, badmash haramzadas and whateverelse: please pay them no notice; true, they will one day grow up to be robber barons but one can occasionally spank their asses red until then.