Fire in the Unnameable Country (55 page)

It had been a long time since Masoud Rana and I had leapt deep underground archive of magnetic reels onto a road near my parents' place, if you'll recall our banquet with the animals many stages earlier. I hadn't tested the bootlaces since and the opportunity arose at the sound of Q calling Hedayat through the afternoon sunlight.

At the sound of my name from the kitchen, I flew to her side. How did you, she began couldn't finish for my lips against her lips as I jumped up while embracing her. Our feet flapped so high we lost our breaths floating above the kitchen cabinet dirty dishes fennel broth chickpea salad and blood pudding for the ghosts.

I stayed because I wanted to be near Q and also because of the good time the Quintuplets were having, especially during their games of checkers with the ghosts, whom they thought of as old talking prunes and ensouled oranges, whose citric fluids required daily replenishment. Nehi had the patience to learn the rudiments of chess, though she insisted on playing with the ghosts only if the pieces moved according to her rules, which they allowed. The Yeas had begun to include her in their games, and she even participated in rounds of Ring Around the
Rosie, though not always, and hardly with their volatile ambition to fall down great theatrics, or to repeat the dizzying motions so often that she was left muddy thinking the rest of her day. Then everything changed because the ghosts of the skeletal hunger strikers.

We didn't know at that time why Masoud Rana's great frame was wasting away, but it would grow clear in the scene that began when I called after his immense land porpoise's gait, hard to catch up to those swimming arms that propelled him from one step to step through folds of the cloak of beforedawn. The ocean breezed and the water was talking, but at that moment I felt only the buzz of anguish inside me because I realized Masoud Rana was my friend, because he too had suffered, was suffering. Many years later, when we would become mortal enemies in my mind and play opposites in a great game/ but at that moment he was my friend and I strode across the sands to meet him.

I reached him before the first stone fell from his mouth, when he was just sucking stones. He had them in his hands and he was putting them into his mouth one by one, and I was laughing while he spilled rocks from his mouth for the tears he couldn't cry, I presumed, for he once told me he had never cried, not even while he was being born; I recall responding I was also born tearless, but that I had cried on occasion.

What now, I asked, when he was stopped for a moment. Who hell, I kidded, but there were still only mouthstones falling and falling. Is it her then, I asked outright because it was better to say it simply. Is it for her and me that you, I repeated; because you needn't, I said, but his face.

She, his fingers coursed over the word before he broke down totally as everywhere the Law, he cried without warning, and of course pebbles from the mouth. He continued and spoke of many things at
once, I felt his thoughts meandering in his mind blinked from one to the next idea passing through fluttering eyelids, and I saw them falling out with the stones. He included in his soliloquy the blood we funnelled into bottles for the ghosts, the blinkers, the hunger strikers, the phosphorescent ghosts, and all the others, the strikers, the strike, the Madam who drove three fire hoses to flush out His shit from the stables that had become the Presidential Palace, but only to roost her own anda of oblivion mutatis mutandis, the American air force base that would stand for a century or part of one century, and then he genuflected to raise the beach sand that was for his forehead, and he poured a handful there, and the rocks, recall, that were falling from his mouth as he wailed. When the beshitting Law that plays all-knowing God/ and they are always doing it, he wailed.

Difficult to distinguish what were stones and what were words, and I was laughing because I didn't remember him storing so many pebbles in his mouth, yet they continued to fall, one by two or more down the front of his shirt, and we were walking very far from the car then. In the distance, I could see that Q and the Quintuplets had emerged from the vehicle, and they were advancing toward us, though they were still far away. I said tell me, do you drink the blood that is meant for the ghosts, Masoud. And for as long as it took for the darkness to break and for the dawn to reveal that he had been trailing blood in the sand for a hundred metres from a netted cracked glass gash in his right foot, he buzzed between closed lips and would have continued deliberating like a wild honeybee had I not/ will you give me already, Masoud: what of the blood, man, do you drink it or not.

But only the beshitting Law interested him then, and he began to wail anew: Which peels our fruited hide, Hedayat.

So I met him at that plateau, said yes, friend, for the nectar, and then we are husked.

We had discovered the language that mattered and now I listened
as he spoke: what would prevaricate and break itself, the Law above the law, again and endlessly in order to prove its bewildering strength. He did not speak of the forced volunteer blood drive that he had. He stopped. The wind had picked up by then, and the rocks were still falling from his mouth, but I no longer noticed how many, or perhaps he was swallowing them too.

I wasn't with Masoud when he shot Morris the cop, but he said he killed him; that's what he said in the tsetse fly heat, in the days before Black Organs trailed us cold shadow in every corner and jokes could be passed, I killed a man, he could tell us, and because of his powerful stature, his voice that echoed long after he'd spoken, we believed him murder. But where the body, dead cop, and blood. Masoud Rana would never go to jail, I would, and he would be the source, as I would blame, for four years suffering in prison cell, as I will tell you.

Do you drink the blood, I pleaded his mouthstones anguish in the sand. Maybe Masoud believes he's like a ghost, I thought when he didn't reply, neither living, neither dead. Maybe, I thought, he drinks blood to understand the burden of a cannibal life known to the residents of the Hospice.

Masoud the Generous, Masoud the Wise. And yet I would blame him one day for killing me. Years later, Masoud Rana would claim he had nothing to do with my prison stint a spill blood and cell deep underground. Organs, he would shake his head, Black Organs, brother; today, they're rounding us up on sidewalks in sidewalk cafés, late night busting doors, haven't you heard. Masoud the Great, friend and enemy, teller of tales once upon a time, street storyteller of the Palisades until he settled down and became a Hospice worker forever. Why did he black vomit. Did he drink blood meant for the ghosts, maybe as a vampiric act of empathy for the dead.

Then it happened, for the first time, and another of my transformative firsts, because there was a pause in our conversation and I was
thinking where is Q: Hedayat turned his head backward all the way around like an owl, and his eyes covered more than metres of beach sand, saw beyond the present dimensions of space. All at once there arose many images of the past: the first was of Q and the Quintuplets advancing across the sands that ended at the Gulf of Eden never ended, which was already memory, already in the past, and which belonged to all the weeks, years earlier, each day clear and simultaneous. He was gouging with talons again and this time he was dancing as well, and he felt the heaviness of another emotion, rarefied and black mirthless, which began on the ship of infections and cattlewhips, cast-iron leggings, of slaves with their game of limbo and that demented trip to a secret Caribbean slave harbour in the early twentieth century. Hedayat gambolled across all the years of the unnameable country with his body facing forward and his head turned backward like an owl until he could feel the century vibrating in every hidden organ of his body.

Raskolnikov's terror and his earthly weight were there then, but the other voices were very different and forgave him seething cold, writhing, insisting it was good to do what you did, Hedayat, to have sunk your talons so deeply. I heard them say these things in waves of heated indignation, as together they completed the melody and dance that was the mournful ballad and the waltz.

Was Hedayat's wounded waltz partner the Law. And if so, who was Hamza Alif, clockmaker of La Maga, trampled by a treaded great machine. Or Yahyah Samater, once employed as an Archives clerk, disappeared the same day, vaporized, funtoosh, into invisible air. Who will give the Law unto them. Eventually, there was pitter-patter in the sand as Q and the Quintuplets after all; the girls bounded the final steps with a good clamour that belied their exhaustion. By that time, Masoud Rana's maddened speech was gone and there were no more stones to hatch from between his lips.

But your foot, Q bent to examine.

A scratch, he gave her a laugh.

Nevertheless, she bent closer, she winced, and took into her the pain of that starburst smeared with dried blood and sand.

The Yeas seized upon the moment as soon as the medical assessment was complete, a remaining shard of glass removed, a game, they cried, and would not relent. Their voices bore the collective cry of a far larger crowd.

He can't play, said one and pointed at Masoud Rana.

He has to play, said another.

Of course, added a third before the final fourth voice affirmed with a knowing hum.

Masoud Rana played lame, Q reasoned let us at least wash his feet in the ocean, Nehi sucked her thumb, and I too tried my best to yield to their demand let's play, but it was impossible. Come-all-you, they grabbed our hands and formed an unbreakable circle, and then we were spinning round and round.

HOSANNA

Today I saw a man murdered in the street. How did they kill the man. This is how they killed the man. A bullet kicked up his hair and he bit the grey asphalt as if it was his bread. Hosanna, as they say, and as she was.

Though I didn't know him, I wept for something for the nameless man murdered in our unnameable country. At a man's death they take everything; at a man's death they take nothing, for he finds the singularity of origin and eternal rest. I dug into a nearby bus shelter into the sky and wondered if the bullet had been an Organ's. You didn't hear so much about the Organs these days except that they were everywhere. Closed-circuit television is the most watched station in the country, and some people laugh that we watch ourselves better than they watch us. Tell us, if you can, what we are in that case.

Things changed in four years and I no longer grieve for the past, not for Q or for anyone. I grieved for everyone in that boxhole apportioned space because it was given to me to do. After four prison years, centuries, I watched a man bite the grey asphalt as if it was his bread.

Things happened while I was away. My mother awoke one day to find the guards in our home muttering to one another about schedules and dates and conferring together in the kitchen. It wasn't unusual to find them fraternizing; she had got up earlier than usual and though she wasn't in the habit of speaking to them, their quizzical expressions demanded explanation. We're leaving, they said simply, and by noon, they had packed up all their belongings into trunks large enough to house even the insect-legged chairs on which they had guarded the rooms of our home for so many years Shukriah couldn't remember what it was like before they arrived. She looked at her house without glass partitions, without metal detectors between washroom and kitchen; no more internal security checks, she thought, mystified by the new freedom.

Later that day, my father exited the Ministry of Records and Sources stinking magnetic shit. After so many years of thoughtreels, he thought, I pore it from my balls. He always felt an agoraphobic pang when leaving the barbed wire compound and emerging outdoors after the world got huge in the nine-to-five interregnum, miles of sidewalks such lively children their hopscotch games and companion animals, all the vendors hawking eats sweets and colourful acrobatic toys on the sidewalk. In between indoor and free street feelings, a man emerged from a tinted-window coupe, gripped pistol to my father's right temple and inside the car, please, Mr. Ben Jaloun.

My mother's repeated unanswered requests to the government for an explanation prompted her to join a widows' group, and on weekends, she circumambulated the Presidential Palace with them, beat ladles against pots with them demanding whereabouts and lives returned unharmed. Had her husband not suffered a lifetime already answering to guards in his home who demanded identification to travel between rooms; and what of our suffering, she thought in rage about her bereaved children and her mother. What is a thoughtreel; she too had
listened to Zachariah Ben Jaloun's mind. When would she disappear. Who would beat ladle against pot for her, she wondered.

When my aunt Reshma heard the news, she immediately invited my mother and grandmother to Berlin with the promise she would pay the ticket money. My grandmother, who had never taken a plane, agreed as much for the thrill of flight as for the need to be in a world where her daughter wasn't digging eyes out with fists all her waking hours. You go, Amma, Shukriah wiped boogers tears with tissue, I'll manage the hosiery shop while you're gone. Are you sure, Gita asked, and when my mother returned to weeping streams, my grandmother started packing her bags.