Fire in the Unnameable Country (4 page)

To an extent, these techniques brought him closer to Lhereux's hopes for a return to the Golden Era of false socialism, since Anwar would speak of even the earliest past as if they were the events of yesterday morning: Recall, Grenadier, when we were young men and we took blue steel to the throats of the British, or when they fired fiftynine shots at me while I was on the podium and not one found my body and then I unbuttoned my shirt and bared my naked chest, come kill me if you will, kill your president and the saviour of New Jerusalem.

Lhereux would smile on these occasions, mutter certainly, yes, I too remember, and at night he would sit by Anwar's bed stroking an old Smith & Wesson pistol of the same variety that he had gifted to Zachariah Ben Jaloun for the purposes of the latter's suicide, because he did not trust even the guards to protect the life of his only true friend in the world.

They're going to make you prime minister, said the grenadier sadly one day, as the light of his body flickered like a cinematic superimposition onto the hard wooden reality of that bedroom.

Anwar had awakened from confounding dreams in which he was racing through the vast corridors of the Presidential Palace with a message whose content he forgot; as he ran he could not decide whether to return to the origin of things or race onward, and he did not
recognize that ancient figure of the soldier who sat in the lamplight, garbed in the faded uniform of another era.

Who the hell are you, he grabbed for the closest weapon the statuette of a Hindu goddess with many arms tongue unfurled blackened face, and when the ebony wood swung through his body Lhereux found himself uninjured and realized he was in trouble.

The diaphanous illness that took hold of Grenadier Lhereux was as slow to take form and as mysterious as my father's colon cancer. The grenadier realized that his time was limited and took to appealing to the President's former obsession, the embalmed figure of Caroline Margarita Quincy, as he secretly hired looksees to find doubles of her image. He conducted a quick and thorough interview process because he felt the cobwebs of rumour shaking and saw another danger approaching. The woman who agreed to play the part for two thousand dollars a week looked exactly like Caroline Margarita at the age she abandoned her husband to join the Maroons, and danced like Salome for a few days. But because the President had conducted such thorough structural analysis of her bones and musculature in his youth, Anwar detected flaws in the seductress's movements, differences in the bending of the wrist and the twisting of the spine that Caroline Margarita's body could never have allowed, and the grenadier found himself humiliated by his efforts, gazing into the half-smiling face of his friend one day, a face that looked as though it had broken from a fever. Neither had time to recollect recent events because Xamid Sultan, the acting head of state, entered the chamber at that instant with three armed soldiers and a stack of papers.

He bowed deeply and spoke in an official language that filled the air with camphor, and by that odour Anwar awoke to a funereal political ceremony: We are offering you the venerable seat of prime minister, sign here, which will allow you to retain leadership while recovering from the death of your beloved horse, and which will allow
the governing council as well as myself, Xamid Sultan, sign on this sheet, the opportunity to guide the country to the other side of this power vacuum.

It was the moment Lhereux had feared and one for which he had tried through all means of trickery to prepare Anwar, but in vain, because the President signed every sheet without a word, without even reading a page. Xamid Sultan inhaled deeply and bowed again, the soldiers relaxed the poses they had maintained during those long anxious minutes, because to enter the chamber of the President was to make one's way into a viper's nest, with cold hidden slither. The enemies exhaled bitter breaths, their clothes breathing scared camphor, and retreated with Xamid Sultan.

It took less than twenty-four hours for the scandal to echo throughout the governing order: the pages did not show Anwar's signature, and, in fact, it could not be agreed whose writing they bore, most likely one of the other members of the governing council. Xamid Sultan, whose hold on Parliament was delicate, was eaten alive by wild accusations of you forged the signatures, while those who defended him took the wrong argumentative line; in this time of crisis one cannot but take such an executive turn as so-called forgery or perjury, since they could not argue the names bore zero resemblance to the famous scrawl they had grown up with and witnessed on all official documents since the start of their careers. He himself had not noticed anything unusual about the sheets as he had walked the vestibules toward the parliamentary hall, which, recall, as everyone knows, had been built right into the Presidential Palace, and it had only filled him with a giddy excitement he could remember from celebrating his mother's second wedding with little capsicum firecrackers as a boy. He had not imagined the President would retain enough of his wiles following the strychnine loss of Dulcinea to effect such a feat as the slow-acting transformation of his signature. He had been certain he and the entire council
had thoroughly constrained him to the bathroom, the dining chamber, and to the bedside company of Grenadier Lhereux, that old toothless. Lhereux, he chewed over his name, but by then it was too late. Blood vessels had begun to contract and the body politic grew aware of the indecision in the highest organs of power. In the confusion, the nameless rebels, who had bided their time and honed their skills fighting in the movie sets of La Maga, but who had in the past several years extended their reach throughout the country and garnered wide popular support, broke through the defences of the Presidential Palace.

Nasiruddin Khan, wearing a hunter's vest, wielding a shotgun he would never have to fire, and chewing on a lit cigar, stayed back while Russian-trained commandos sniped guards, cut fences, scaled walls, and netted the Presidential Palace. For a week, intense fighting flooded the whole country and the rebels managed to kidnap three out of the eight members of the Privy Council, including Grenadier Lhereux and President Anwar. The American military lost fourteen soldiers during their brave attempt to defend against the siege of Victoria, which took them totally by surprise, and the whole of the United States erupted into mourning as moral debates weeded up the television broadcasts whether we should be in this godforsaken part of the world, how many decades has it been, is it about the Gulf of Eden and natural gas resources or defending against the global communist scourge.

As the negotiations between the nameless rebels and the governing party began, Shukriah discovered she was pregnant again. I hope to God this one doesn't talk in the womb; if I hear so much as a peep I'll abort. Mamun M could not agree more; in fact he was uneasy with the prospect of raising another child, especially since the experience with one—while raising two others who were not his by blood but more or
less nevertheless—had exhausted them. Gita wished quiet congratulations, but trenches dug up her forehead.

So dense was the atmosphere and so wrapped up was the family with the world out there that they totally missed the fact that Chaya would quietly vomit in the bathrooms in the earlymorning and bubbling inside her was another great force of multiplication. Like her sister Shukriah, she was able to perceive the slow knotting of cells, to predict their answers, though the outcome of that story, which now is her tears cried onto shouldercloth, I will tell you later.

Unless I tell you now about Chaya and her child. Should I. What you are reading is less a confessional history than a tale of only the necessary portions (of which there happen to be many); besides, Chaya my dear aunt Chaya: what would she think if I. Should I. The question of her child shall hang in the balance of necessity. At the moment I abstain, your honour, dear reader, whomever whatever the hell, from revealing, I shall seven-year-old mum/ look: there the shapes take up their residence, they console, they hide, and in the gloaming, the hundred candlelight of our little home, under the air-raid sirens there arise new suspicions, silences, new sadness, which bears the weight of unrevealed pain, the pleasures of a bow-legged Archives employee who sprang nimbly onto my father's shoulders and perched there one day while Mamun Ben Jaloun was shelving metal receptacles whose contents he himself never revealed to his children, and about which Hedayat has learned with Niramish in Confectionarayan Babu's candy store.

Let me say plainly that for years, my father would bear the weight of another man on his back by himself until a telephone conversation with Ministry of Records and Sources officials would verify the existence of a hunchback on my back, turning me hunched also, he won't let go, he would say, while Shukriah Gita Chaya would suppress laughter, What man father son dear. This man, he would point, here, he would show
them an arm, Gita Shukriah Chaya do you not see, but they would only giggle. But even this story is taking us away from another tale, the one I started with.

Realize that to hold onto his thinashair miraculous lead over the American army through the capture of the highest individuals of the governing council, Nasiruddin Khan would have no choice but to call upon the favour of Alauddin the war magician, who was handcuffed before he was brought secretly to the Presidential Palace through an old subterranean hallway because they were unsure of whether he would be willing to lend his services, or, even if he said he would, whether he would not simply disappear, because they knew so little about him and could not trust him.

In those days, the magician wore a sharp-ended moustache he spent a long time sculpting each morning, and Nasiruddin Khan remarked to himself how ageless was his skin, how anachronistic his whole appearance/ look at those loose pantaloons and the brightly coloured shirts that went out of style centuries ago/ but first he uncuffed, apologized for the necessity of the restraining appliances, and told him what he wanted: within twenty-four hours they will bomb Victoria and the Presidential Palace; we need you, please, to repeat the Miracle of Alexandria: make us disappear from the sight of the American pilots.

Nasiruddin Khan stated his offer, which was so exorbitant it made Alauddin's throat bob up and down, and after an instant's submersion into deep thought, they became partners.

Then Alauddin the Magician immediately got to work on the greatest disappearing trick of his life. For twenty hours, he dictated they gather the most absurd items: ten thousand tons of aluminum foil, eighteen hundred fluorescent lights, Noh theatre masks all bearing the same emotion, forty-two caftans, an ancient sandalwood palanquin. They did not bother asking for a plan when they started canvassing the rooftops
with metal sheets or even stop to think when he requested seventeen thousand kilograms of rancid coconut water and an equal quantity of camel shit. Then he disappeared. Though they had posted two guards outside the door of the room in which he paced from wall to wall and from where he gave orders, the guards were found sleeping, drugged, and they could not find a trace of him anywhere. In fact, Alauddin had actually fled seventeen hours prior and had them believe by the use of a double, who constantly shadowed him and who was the greatest disguise artist on the continent, that the magician was engaged in the task for which he had been advanced half his pay in platinum bars. He realized how doomed was Nasiruddin Khan when he observed the way the cola emperor suspired when he uttered the desperate sum, a fifth of his kingdom's worth, as noted in publications, and in the instant before he said yes, the war magician had already formulated his escape.

In the darkened city that cowered in fear of fire and of the talons that would rend it irreparably, no one noticed a solitary flying rug recede into the distant sky, weighted with enough riches to last the escapee forever. That was how Nasiruddin Khan realized that he had no hope in the world of retaining Victoria. They captured him when he tried to flee to the Karkaars, and his body was sliced into thin vertical steaks and all the pieces sent to the various centres of the nameless rebels, which were by then known. His tenure in the Presidential Palace lasted a grand total of forty-two hours.

CAPSICUM CANDIES

The nameless rebels continued to explode various government outposts, harassed American positions throughout the country, left smashed mirrors everywhere as signs of their continuing resistance. But Xamid Sultan, head of National Security at that time, declared victory against them at a press conference in which he warned neighbouring nations not to harbour the criminal elements that had fled the unnameable country and would no doubt begin to destabilize their own states if not captured and eliminated. Though he insisted the nation was sailing in peaceful weather, it continued to rain metal and combustibles, and a British medical journal placed the loss of life in the last five years due to war at one hundred thousand. Several of the country's institutions survived the changeover in power, most importantly the Ministries of Radio and Telecommunications and Records and Sources, though these would be brought under the folds of a new organization simply entitled National Security Service, located in a submerged building accessible only by various secret doorways known only to its members. The most observant people understood the significance of what the
national media framed as the forward momentum of the country to be something much viler when they began to pitch forward in mid-step, or when each of the only fifteen surgeons of the country were discovered, one by one, to be snoring in the operating theatre.