Fire in the Unnameable Country (39 page)

A castle for the king: recall only Quincy could have ordered the construction of the Peacock Palace by first clearing a natural maze of sorghum at the riverhead near the SS
Nothingatall
's first landing. Bemis, a first-rate mistri of Roman domestic architecture, right-hand gunman from the navy days, designed the house with urgent sands, all the necessary rubble and wood, allusions to conquest, with the roundtheclock
labour of small strong hands fresh off the boat. Walls rose, doors multiplied, sandwiched base and entablature, while the surface of the house front filled with bay window fenestration and saw out onto water with beakhead mouldings of Quincy and Caroline again and again in decorated forms.

There he lived, John Quincy, perpetually dissatisfied, ordered one reconstruction project to another, from full to base to raised to jointed crucks, to enlarge the foundations of a large cottage to an ever-expanding edifice outfitted with abandoned rooms built for purposes long forgotten, hallways with the musty construction odour of plaster paints and pestle-goop, the wood smells of imported Southeast Asian evergreens, busy with hey you sounds of workmen, the buzz of noctilucent hives of insects indigenous to a house whose walls would suddenly give way to empty galleries that resounded the self-enclosed years of construction far from workmen, to arcades in which the sunlight would drizzle through rectangular apertures where the walls failed just to reach the ceiling.

Through this labyrinth house whose hallways the wind roars creature, in which the climate is icicle and pond freeze in some places against all reason, Quincy pulls Amun the one slave to mean many low and dirty past door immediately after door after door. It takes a long time to get outside. They pass a clinic room impossible to look at for all the odour of disinfectant and gauze, what are the wounds. The next chamber features a bureaucratic official searching an office of airborne papers for the right statement at the right time, with the right stamp. He shatters a violoncello. The slave moves on.

Will you look, Quincy points to an open door a room of the palace he had never seen where a young man paces, crying in the adjacent room the words fire in the unnameable country but I was born first, and before me my father, and before him and before him, before him, pacing, tracing rhythm through decay. The maw of the hallway opens
wide into a roomful of rivers of dust and wind winding within walls far apart, governed by the most powerful incandescent bulb whose exact position on the ceiling is too high up to discern. It takes a long time to find the door to the garden and daylight, for the dirigible to appear in the distance.

Quincy was thirsty and though a dead snake dripped fluid disgusting viscera from the high branches of a tree, it was clear fluid to the ignorant eye. Quincy drank and, satisfied, he called for Amun, the greatest shit disturber of all: have him brought to me, he did a crooked smile. Nowtime is festal time, John Quincy smiled as they brought Amun shackled before him. And the auspicious air up there, he gestured broadly: wouldn't you like to feel the breeze on Jupiter, Amun, a right-sized planet for a man of your stature.

And when Amun suggested with silence he was home enough in an unnameable country on Earth, John Quincy threw in the heat on Venus, he suggested why not, hotter even than revolution. John Quincy smiled. Nowtime is festal time, he said again.

Why only me, Amun did eventually, why not all of us on loom and anvil, before donkey and scythe.

No, you, friend, because wouldn't you like to fly to the moon.

Amun did not know it would be impossible to breathe up where he would weigh one-sixth of earth weight, or that a handful of stars weighed more than the whole world, or that if he got into that growling dirigible several days later, he would find himself imprisoned somewhere over the atmosphere. And yet. And then. If not for yourself for enjoyment, why not for the people, Amun: why not see if the unnameable country equals its mapshape. Amun had never seen the whole country on a single piece of paper. All he had seen were slices of forest and local landscape drawn by the Maroons, and he was curious.

BEN
JALOUN BEN JANOUN

On that same patch of earth for many years, people came to see the SS
Nothingatall
, great ship of excoriated dreams that housed raw living shackles and bondsmen, dry bread and brine for scalded throats, of such solid make and form it survived becoming wooden planks metal parts stationed in boxes for many years before being rebuilt and included in an exhibition of the unnameable country's deep past, which also featured John Quincy's pantaloons, his pipe, and smoking jacket.

For years, people have streamed into the Museum of Cultural History with gift bags and brochures, talking spiritedly about its dark history, did you know the slave Amun drank from a perfume vase that has survived all these years. Chic coffee pubs and bars sprang up long ago around the museum. Well-to-do jobbers, young up-and-comers have wheeled children in strollers and enjoyed afternoons gazing at a slave ship while cheerful attendants reported its functional parts, their builders, their histories.

Years ago, the neighbourhood sprouted grey government housing to accommodate employees of departments with ambiguous titles,
imposing buildings with well-watered lawns and grocery service. In an apartment in one such building lived my grandfather Zachariah Ben Jaloun, son of Amun the Glossolalist, Maroon revolutionary, captor of the embalmed Caroline Quincy, Amun: victim first of a shoulder bullet wound before slaver John Quincy's machinations convinced him to get inside a hot-air balloon designed to whisk him stratosphere mesosphere ionosphere out of here prior to siring progeny, Amun, reading verses of E.E. Cummings in the nude while munching raw onions.

Glee and genuine tears from the eyes. Tears and mirthful laughter when the lines call for laughing and the sadder lines pressed into memory by the tears. Peel an onion, read a verse to no one. Disjecta membra: a ceiling fan better at spitting dust and droning on than cooling his small room spilling with books over around and within a little shelf, with a clean little cot in one corner and a pail for washing. The hunchback Aktar delivers a jar of milk each day to his doorstep and is always late to ask for his remuneration. A regular girl calls up, twists her hair round a finger, calls up from the street: you. Zachariah opens his window a yawning touch and hears: do you need your washing done today.

Zachariah Ben Jaloun, border guard between the unnameable country and Somalia and later transferred to La Maga during the British occupation, three hundred miles away from home on either side of things. Zachariah drinks half a thermos of black coffee throughout the morning as he checks the men and the boys for rifles pistols missiles shotguns under the jellabas and panjabis until the afternoon. Muslim women are to be unchecked until February 1944, after the orange harvest, and so the important stories must be put off until then. But he isn't impatient. Orange blossoms on the streets and the smell of the summer light hang on at the nose end of dusk. Only twenty-four years old, an abandoned University of La Maga literary studies major, but Zachariah Ben Jaloun is a minor poet among the café crowd. Just weeks
after publication and already
Orange Blossoms
is a minor thrill among certain Victoria and La Maga readers.
Count me among them, a peeled onion / while orange blossoms fall wounded / from your tree.
Walks with long strides, passes a casual glance left-right, finds the place to sit with a slim volume of E.E. Cummings, munching an onion like an apple in his regular corner stall at the standalone café, weeping softly.

A grey-haired professor approaches, excuse me, are you Zachariah Ben Jaloun, may I have a word, and thanks him for writing verses on orange blossoms. He was lauded by his colleagues when he quoted several lines, and excuses himself for not acknowledging their author at the time.

Zachariah acts embarrassed, but is inwardly elated he has caused happiness in even a plagiarist, and for being recognized. Does he want to join a Marxist reading group, would he care to read some of his poems during a class. No, Zachariah softly declines the first offer, he is not a political man, but a writer in the style of certain modernists for whom poetry is a description of the effects of war on language.

Ah, but therein lies, Professor finds the political, self-evident and buried just beneath, he explains in detail qua qua qua qua, and Zachariah's recent departure from the academy burns bright in him, he rethinks his answer to the intellectual's second question, originally affirmative.

Let's continue with the unofficial biography of Zachariah Ben Jaloun. Their conversation is just one way of beginning, of course, and we were listening only to understand him a little better, to be able to empathize with his condition before we lose him to the maze of power. Be a little patient, but. One mild morning in February, four days after the British Council decreed women must be searched as well before boarding buses and all other public vehicles, someone stops at the train station after others and before more still. Arms out. She stares straight ahead. He looks at her eyes. Grey. Checks for any suspicious signs as
he has been taught, runs his hands down her sides, her front, the lift of her lower back. Nothing. She leaves and he returns to the others, and to the stanza of blank verse that has been circulating his mind all morning. The momentary pause does not escape his notice, but when he turns around, confused, her shape has already dissolved into the crowd.

For the next few weeks, nothing much happens. Zachariah tries to forget those grey eyes and to stamp out the verses, already a few hundred stanzas pregnant in his mind, onto the page. But the blank sheet repulses him. On the one hand the lines feel unready to be written, on the other, the page is unworthy. He thinks, how strange, perhaps I unconsciously intend to spirit the Homeric idiom, or allude to some folkloric tongue. He continues to recite them at work while searching for weapons, quotes them while dragging down a youth carrying a large rifle under his dress onto the floor. He awakes feverish singing them and approaches the blank page with dread, he declares them naked aloud, in between the lines of
The Enormous Room
.

Not to worry, he tells himself, there is always time to write. Something a little meretricious about the near-total absence of his scrawl besides a few jottings in the diary, and his work suffers as he struggles with what might be the reasons, but the professor returns several times, brings friends to the café on occasion, and eventually Zachariah Ben Jaloun discovers himself, with slight embarrassment, reading his poems in front of a larger-than-expected audience.

What are you writing now, they are interested to know afterward at the professor's suburban flat, among clinking glasses of wine, plush cushions, long, thin imported cigarettes, hashish smoke, and American piquant jazz records. They move around him slowly in turn as Zachariah answers their questions calmly while standing next to a thin blue vase shaped like a young girl's throat. Have you considered an academic position. You would need to collect a master's degree but you seem like the type who could breeze by. And then there is the question
of the political in your verses, as the voices drift energetically to the burgeoning independence movement, the growing damage to British colonial troops by radical, the idiot mawslem cows who will never have a hold on the common people's imagination in this unnameable country, and the secular giants will always walk with heavier steps, to the spot searches and the dehumanizing presence of the British military. You have the name of a poet, man. What do you do for a living.

Zachariah Ben Jaloun invents his daily routine as that of a humdrum office worker a paper sorter peon type, shrugs it off as a job. And nothing political about my verses, he withdraws into his shoulders, in fact they're little musings on human relationships and no more. I don't expect ever to take a political job in my life.

But the poet cannot help that, Professor's voice appears beside his ears, a little drunk tonight, flush in the cheeks, always ready in such conversations. Luckily, someone flips the vinyl and a three-fingered virtuoso blues guitarist draws up the crowd to a dance, but rather than accept a young sleepy-eyed woman's invitation, he laughs off her cool touch and retreats into the feint barking night of dogs and a paid-for taxi ride by the professor, who rests his arms on the hood overlooking the passenger seat.

I am sorry we did not get to talk further, but I have these gatherings on occasion; you must enliven them as you have done tonight with your company and your words. Zachariah Ben Jaloun cannot say he hasn't enjoyed the attention or the spot of wine or the cool touch of the sleepy-eyed woman for whose sake he already wishes he had not taken early leave, and promises to attend.

The following morning, he bounds out of bed at least an hour after the sun has shone all the way to the door of his room; he is late, and he is never late. Mahmoud has taken his spot and points nervously that way: the overseer calls him to the officers' den.

Ben Jaloun.

Zachariah's organs fail at the mention of his name: no, but some measure of concern must be cited for he is certain even a minor infraction could result in the loss of the only employment with which he has ever managed to support himself; a poet's income is hardly anything to count on, the small publisher that accepted his manuscript could not afford to advance him much beyond the milkman's uncollected monthly salary, and he pushes out a clambering blank verse from his mind as his superior talks.

Ben Jaloun, this job is not for you. The officer is writing something, and repeatedly pushes papers from his desk as a very small woman, no higher than a grown person's knee, catches them before they flutter to the floor, all the while balancing on her head a tray with several half-filled teacups. He lifts his eyes and catches Zachariah's curious gaze. You may help yourself to a cup, he says. And when Zachariah Ben Jaloun fails to reply or move, he coughs: I have received word you are to be transferred to the general infantry division as a junior troop leader. It is a more difficult position than that of a guard, but more respected, and the pay is higher. I don't believe you will refuse, he raises his eyebrows incredulously.