Fire in the Unnameable Country (53 page)

At that moment, my thoughts became bisected: first, I thought of Q, how I had abandoned her to a stranger, who was my responsibility
because over time he had become my business associate more than her brother. Then I thought of my father. Is this the theatre of his fateful descent during which Mamun M is trampled. Is he among us. The sky was a merciless vulture that day; I recall wishing for a drizzle that was still some months away.

Is that your house, a man beside me pointed, and I saw that he had identified it correctly, and that it had been spared thus far.

How did you, I asked.

Of course that's his house, an old woman beside him said, it's his house, she said again and smiled at me in such a way that I knew it was good, and that to be here was right. Still, I looked at my home with such yearning and wished I could go there and I also wished it was not so hot, because being in the crowd was making everything hotter, though it was not the fault of the people to have gathered in such a large number, the machine was at fault and the commander of the machine more so.

My thoughts came to a close exactly at the moment one man rose above the others. Without a sound he stepped up onto the nose of the bulldozer and though I was not close to him, I could see his green uniform of an American officer and knew that his eyes were blue. He looked at all of us and passed through us like a mute swarm of bees that was sucking all the nectar and leaving colours and numbers at will, gathering and deciphering, and I tried to hide my mind from this man who prevaricated by showing us a singular body and coming after us with so many minds at once.

Something stirred in the crowd as if it had waited to encounter exactly this person, as if he was the day's reckoning or Death himself. He must have been a great man because when he breathed in, we were all forced to exhale because he was sucking it out, and when he breathed out we could not inhale because he would release a windstorm that threw up all the dirt of the road. Were it not asphyxiating to
stand in his presence, I would have thought it a great trick for a pair of lungs to need so much air. And then he began to speak and his voice was moving round and round. He told us to remain calm, but this only agitated the crowd and brought it to reiterate through slogans what it had been shouting all day, which by the parsimonious way of sloganeering it meant only to say that homes should not be exchanged for prisons, and we are prepared to meet metal with flesh if need be to stop you.

Even from the distance, I could identify that the man was the same tourist we had encountered in the forest. He warned us as his subordinates crept up from behind and shadowed him; his voice was calm and it pervaded through all space without the aid of a megaphone; it was not loud, and arrived at our ears several seconds after he moved his lips as if he was very far away. But we understood him over the hum of the bulldozer engine. He said that he was a notable general in the American armed forces, and that we should believe him because he had served in Vietnam once upon a time, and that he had the authority to use everything at his disposal, including fire and earthquake against us, if we continued to interfere with the lawful destruction of buildings in this area.

At that moment the crowd bubbled up with great laughter, for though he had displayed evidence with his great heaving breaths and his beehive mind, at that moment we forgot; he appeared human like any of us, and there were so many of us and he was threatening all of us as with a divine cataclysmic hand, which was invisible. Without passing a clue that he was agitated by our reaction, just as quietly as he rose up onto the bulldozer, he descended, and the engine of the beast began to turn.

The universe was shaking as the armoured bulldozer advanced through the narrow corridor of our street on which houses stand closely packed together on each side, and the bravest of us tried to keep
our word of meeting the metal and attempted to climb onto it; some were crushed beneath its treads, while others managed to get as far up as where the general had been standing, and they were defeated by its inertia, by bullets or by other means. Much of the great crowd, however, could do nothing but retreat some five hundred metres to the souks. There, Jeeps and armoured vehicles were already waiting, and they broke its back and its tail and legs and entrapped it.

When a frightened animal/ but no, that isn't enough, for there was great fury in the moment also for all the senseless wounded houses, and agitation for all the heat, the sand, as well as graver, wooden, mirthless sentiments, which belong not to any individual but to the centuries. Let it be known that the feeling in the crowd must have hardened his throat because Hedayat found himself singing a curious melody in a slow tempo while everything was moving so fast. Everywhere, the sounds were going when Hedayat's throat began fluttering, not loudly, but in tune and in onetwothree-onetwothree waltztime, and as the rubber bullets stung, the real bullets felled, and the gas was searing, he found himself in the throes of a mournful ballad with his talons deep sunken into the neck of the closest soldier who dared, amidst a cacophony that Hedayat's song almost overmastered.

The force of the crowd tore the rifle from the American soldier's hand and Hedayat continued providing the music as the two of them danced death's dance, round and round, each with hands pressed to the other's throat. The talons sank deeper, while the other tried to choke the sounds, and then the soldier's feet began to move involuntarily because Hedayat was still singing, and to the rhythm, because the crowd was also moving, while the melody wound into the guttural quarries of his deepest basso range. It was not unlike Mamun Ben Jaloun as he dashed across the continent, the Indian Ocean, up the Subcontinent, across China, when his father was singing Siberia to the Chukchi Sea, across the miniature world of the endless film studio; yes, it was like that in
a way as Hedayat continued balladeering and hanging on for dear life with his legs up on the chest of the soldier like a very large owl, while the crowd swayed in one direction and in the opposite, until finally he lost the thread, when the other could no longer produce his cry of a slaughtered calf and was only able to weep with his whole body. Then Hedayat released him.

The great crowd dragged the gravely wounded man round and round, so closely packed were we that he did not even sink from the upright, and Hedayat realized the waltz was no longer his and the melody now undulated through the thousands, that all and sundry were swaying to the ballad, and if we were dying it was not for the melody, and if we were falling down at least there was the song.

It was then that I returned to my senses and realized I was close to home amidst the carnage, and that the eggplant and cauliflower vendor Hamid's stall was ruined; Amina, who beaded jewellery, would not have a place to display her wares tomorrow; all the garlands of Abdel-Nasir's flower shop had been shredded; and overhead there now precipitated a cool rain of violets, hyacinths, red roses, and orange blossoms, though the army had diced them into such small shards they were indistinguishable in colour, and they hurt us because we thought of them as glass and shrapnel. The ground was slippery with the blood of so many because the large treaded machines were singing a similar song as Hedayat's, but louder and far more efficiently; for the one near casualty, which would be trumpeted throughout the world, there were five hundred fifty-five to balance the scale, ignoble theirfault people, unmentionables: Adam the woodcarver, flattened by an armoured bulldozer. Belayat Mujumdar, rifled through the forehead by a clean shot. Thirteen others, each with an identical earlier arm wound, not unlike that of Amunji, if you'll recall. Almost near the end of this selected list, and to my father's great consternation, Xasan Sierra, the cigarette vendor, who had tried to remain neutral through the whole proceedings
and was doing nothing but smoking his regular half-carton in his shop. Then the bulldozers were doing another job and the ambulances theirs as Hedayat fled through one narrow street and another while the arrests, beatings, and desertion of friends, family, home, country continued. At dusk, several hundred members of local unions and others of the most committed and the damned were still cordoned into a narrow strip of space, walled in by mirrors, tanks, and bulldozers and pleading for water and mercy in three-four time.

What of Hedayat then. Did they know whose talons. Were there other owls in the crowd that day. Recall he had nearly done the thing for which God identified Cain, despite his best efforts to hide his brother under the earth, the worst and nearly first of all things done in the world. Did Hedayat feel something akin to Raskolnikov's earthly guilt; was he weighted with a hunchback-rendering remorse like his father; what did Niramish feel when.

Hedayat's feet were moving and he realized he was still singing the saddest ballad without the aid of instrumentation or a chorus. It was hurting his throat to go on, but when he stopped his bones continued vibrating to the marrow. The ashes of the day's gruesome carnival lingered on his palate and he spat into the mist, which rose up all around from the remains of the fires. Hark unto: the early dead are already beginning to make the right turns to the Ghost Hospice.

When Hedayat came home, he passed by a group of workmen sitting on the steps up to the apartment, taking a late-afternoon break; their jackhammers and other high-powered equipment blockaded the way. He excused himself, since they peered at him as if he were an intruder, and didn't even ask why they were there.

Upstairs, he was greeted by Gita's cry of terror; he had no idea about his appearance, though he knew his clothes were ruined and his feathers exposed in various places. They asked him where he was wounded and when he replied it was not his blood, they would not
believe him and continued searching. Then, despite his annoyance and abhorrence of its taste, his mother held his neck like a billy goat and fed him a wretched spoonful of castor oil. When Hedayat arrived home, his sisters were playing Ring Around the Rosie/ correction, the Yeas were playing, Nay was sucking her thumb and watching. This was how it had always been, the four of them together and the one by herself.

To say Nehi was torn by or reconciled with her observer's status would be wrong. She had a way of noting the necessary facts, which Hedayat had always found more endearing. The girls spun around in a circle, they fell down at the appropriate moment in the rhyme; truly they loved Ring Around the Rosie. They asked Hedayat to join, but he was exhausted from his own circular motions and encounters that day, with its many hands and bodies; besides, the Yeas had a grazed look of another kind of crowd that was not the one he had been in today.

Nehi appeared beside him. They're knocking down the walls, she pointed before Hedayat had had a chance to see for himself. You're right, he craned his neck to peer at the astonishing disappearance of the storage room–nursery and the appearance of an abyss in its place. The weeks vanished before his eyes as workmen came went through a hole in the universe, or just the front door that remained unlocked the entire time. He stood baffled, unable to do a thing to stop the mineshaft they were building right in their home, which had been zoned by the city to contain an elevator leading directly to the new prison, and which therefore meant that in the future, judge advocate generals, warders, and whoever else who needed access to the penitentiary would have a key to the house and freedom to wander through any of its rooms at any hour.

There were also other worries. Recall, by that time, the reinvigorated love of Mamun M and Shukriah was long over, and cuisine at our home
no longer featured the bountiful fruits of the Indian Ocean or the Gulf of Eden, which, due to my father's dismissal from his job as an Archives clerk and five new mouths (albeit minus one, that of Aunt Shadow) of the Quintuplets, created a tense atmosphere despite Hedayat's furtive material contributions. When he thought about the decline of their second romantic turn, Mamun M threw up his hands with the casual remark that even ghosts die a second death. Unfortunately for him and Shukriah, the deterioration of their passions also indicated an enlarging gulf of understanding; they would grow entangled over the slightest disagreements; she would trip over his feet and instead of the patience she showed in earlier years for his grotesque form, which became even more stooped with the years, she would snap at him mercilessly. When he grumbled under his breath, she would twist the near-inscrutable sounds into reasons for full-blown arguments.

With the years, Mamun M lost much of the humour and grace with which he had seduced her heart; smoking too many cigarettes had destroyed his tenor's voice and prevented him from lightening any situation with a song; and when he ventured outside, he experienced such pain in his liver and in other hidden organs for the passing of Xasan Sierra, whom the machinery that day had wiped clean from the earth without leaving a trace of him even in the mirrors, that Mamun sought the cure of friendship from every vagrant and birdcaller of the souks.