Fire in the Unnameable Country (6 page)

The only individual who had not dreamed a thing and who passed the entire plague year as if it were a single night's dead stone rest was Mamun M. With a yawn, he returned to his idle life in Xasan Sierra's shop, which congregated with the motley neighbourhood jobless crowd, who recounted how they had passed that long time, and some wondered whether such a plague was so bad after all if it had allowed them to see so many splendorous things and if the bad things all vanished like mist at the end. Not unlike life, Mamun M shrugged, drawing heavily on an unfiltered.

He smoked almost as much as Xasan these days and had acquired a deep phlegmatic cough typical of men who gambol from one to another topic of the political, who make nada, talk on talk all day, just
doing adda, he would employ the Indian term if asked, before resuming talking late into night after pulling down the steel grating over the shopfront and wandering over to one of the illegal garage bars all known and being shut down onebyone daily.

One day, while sleeping into the mid-afternoon, Hedayat, blind owl from birth because he was born from having swum clairaudient in mother waters for years while listening to her stories, learning to understand the world without seeing, who was blind enough to get his hands fruitexploded become talons from dangling cluster bombs on boughs near the schoolyard, bursts into his chamber hooting squawking chitti chitti chitti chitti chitti chitti, flapping arms and holding a black envelope that would forever break Mamun M's life of leisure.

You are hereby ordered to report at once to the Archives Department of the Ministry of Records and Sources, sincerely, Supervisor, reads the letter.

For years, Mamun Ben Jaloun has been on extended leave from the Department on grounds of medical invalidity after going mad following the discovery of his father's recorded thoughts, horrified by the implications of wandering dark hallways and corridors of the Archives, of shelving and reshelving metal receptacles of human minds, and he considers claiming sickness as continuing reason for which to forgo the injunction. After the whipping incident, neither Shukriah nor Gita complains about his idle existence, and it would be perfect for saving his life if he is capable of sensing what lies ahead; but as he watches Shukriah waddle up the stairs from the clothing store to the apartment, back down again, weighted more each day with their second child, and he feels nostalgia for his desires in those early years when, while apart, each would cross halfacity's distance to know the other's thoughts. He recalls trying, one day recently, to imagine her mind, shocked to find a haze like telephone static and a labyrinth of endless identical empty rooms guarding the vast arena that separated them, and his steps
growing heavier, his breathing more laborious with the sadness of that discovery.

Mamun M realizes his time at Xasan Sierra's cigarette shop and the concomitant daily routine he has repeated for several years now is nothing but a way to avoid expiating for nearly fifteen years of joblessness. He tries helping Shukriah and Gita in the shop, as he had attempted years ago right after he left the ministry, and they don't protest his presence, in fact welcome it with warm smiles, but when he realizes he's only tripping over feet, his own and theirs, and when a second, more strongly worded letter arrives from the Ministry of Records and Sources, he begins to worry about knocks on the door in the middle of the night.

Nevertheless, I will always claim that when my father returned to the Archives, it was more as self-administered punishment than any other reason. Recall from all reports on the government at that time, Xamid Sultan's hold on the government was tenuous, and while the fate of many interim leaders of our continent is to graduate to an interminable persistent rule, his weaknesses of being a nationalist at heart yet too weak with the cudgel to tribal demands were exposed soon after he assumed the helm. One day he swore it was Friday because he saw it reflected in the mirror eyes of so many of his comrades when he went to address the Parliament about the latest American offer of building permanent navy bases on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Eden, and an air force landing strip in the hinterland plains that he almost. How to say it: recall video replays of the moment of pure fear experienced by the Governor during his mock execution, though he himself had designed the event from start to end. For several months after, Xamid Sultan shuffled from office to office, conducting his affairs like a man with an incubating fever inside and unsure of seeking out a physician's counsel; the slightest whispers pulled him closer into his shadow, and when the appropriate Friday actually came around, he
was almost relieved to see the angel of death turn the corner in front of him and address him by his familiar name, which was known only to his mother and brother, and some would later declare he even smiled when the Mauser was raised to his already bleeding skull.

In the next three months, our unnameable currency, which had been nailed to the British pound for as long as anyone could remember, tumbled to near devaluation, and the presidency exchanged hands five times: Samir Gallili, a Chicago Boy inculcated into the black arts of global finance by the tutelage of Milton Friedman/ no stopping the tenebrous palsy of his hands/ at dinner circus legislature mornings/ lend voice to a crumpled shaky paper/ shot by unknown assailants in his sleep/ Samater Adel-Yaqub, a personal friend of Julius Neyere whom he met while attending the University of Edinburgh, but not the same brand of socialist, more the variety Big Baba liked, as he himself would say/ hoven off his hinges by whispers madness machinations/ given: the tapes were discovered later and the small player also/ possible impossible/ slow measured speech of the Manchurian candidate/ thought of as restitution for the death of the previous by opponent party members; two elections in three weeks/ voter turnout sixty-seven and seventythree percent respectively/ names of the candidates wind-skewed into oblivion, no one will recall/ vanished from even the records of the Archives.

Finally, there rose that steely woman who would inspire the whole country with her cruelty and the imaginative ways with which she would interpret the laws prescribed to her from above. Why was the Madam aside from her flatiron hair fixated by gel and hairspray. What were the days of the Madam, which were also endless but conscribed within a more limited infinity than Anwar's. Who was she to be able to usher an angry God to the unnameable country. Recall that in the Governor's days, Allah had been present in politics, no ceremony began without a bismillah and none ended without a munazaat, but everyone
thought of this as nothing more than the continuation of life, and while people such as Shukriah and Mamun were the exception, they were not ostracized or defeated into submission for living outside matrimonial bounds. Recall, since you may have heard, no woman in my family wore the hijab before 1990, let alone the niqab. No one was stoned barbaric drowned for witchcraft crazy. Remember that the cruelties that followed were different.

It was Maxwell who had wanted it: this much is clear. No one knew when he had arrived and some even claimed that he had disguised himself as a member of Parliament for years, but they surely noticed him one day during a desperate meal when what remained of the original Privy Council was trying to plan what to do now after ek dum fut-a-fut, hosanna, everything down the Thomas Crapper. Then the screeching sound came and they could not help but plug ears with fingers against that offence of metal scraping Pyrex plates: an ox-large man was dividing an omelette into so many delicate little pieces and they watched him and watched him while awaiting his first bite. Eventually, someone gathered the nerve to ask him, astonished, what the hell, to leave, and with the world's longest sigh, which scattered their papers and rattled the windowpanes, without a word he extracted a figurine of Ronald Reagan from his person and drew the string on its back.

The presidential doll began to speak. It informed that before them sat a man who had been granted moral authority by the American government to supervise all affairs within reason in the unnameable country at this time of great crisis, my friends, please bestow upon him all the love you would upon me.

They couldn't get rid of him after that. Recall, as you may have heard, Maxwell was the one who transferred briefcases stuffed with American currency to the smaller religious parties to bolster disharmony and disunity, and years later, would be accused by historians
of concatenating the region into an archipelago. It was he who went around the Parliament with calipers and a ruler, measuring various anatomical parts, looking aah into mouths, insisting that members stand on one foot for as long as their balance held, trying to determine the most eligible leader by means hitherto unknown to us. At last, after insisting on a screaming test of who can voice-shatter tossed Pyrex plates the loudest and the most, he set aside three junior members, out of whom he chose a woman, Wafaa Ifreet, otherwise known as the Madam, to claim the seat of power though Anwar would always rule from afar.

It was widely known among Uncle's Associates that Wafaa Ifreet had marched in support of the first American invasion as well as the continuous bombing of La Maga and Benediction, among other cities, was a more willing supporter of Uncle's strategies than any Manchurian candidate, and had supported the Suppression of Speech Act, which had been used against more than just communists, as had been advertised. It was not surprising to anyone, therefore, that she won Maxwell's throatskill election to lead the unnameable country.

Meanwhile, my father descended into the Archives, whose transformation was immediate to notice: all the sound markers had been displaced due to the Archives' rearrangement. The shelves were being torn up into planks of wood to rot in warehouses, the once vast empty spaces were filled with workmen and their powered instruments, all wielding red lights in their hands and pointing to, barking orders, packing up the thoughtreels in large crates. Years ago, the dumb waiter in Supervisor's office had been replaced with a large service elevator located in a centralized area, and the ventilation system of the long hallway had been fixed and a motorized horizontal walkway added
for ease of transport, while bright eggshell lights now shone overhead and innocuous jazz played through tinny speakers. Supervisor not only recognized Mamun M but even remembered details about his family and personal life, and claimed he and his wife still listened to those old filmi tracks, though no longer on vinyl but on tape.

So what's new, my father asked, anxious to get to the bottom of the mystery of why he was being recalled to this haunted house.

This, Supervisor held up a small two-dimensional object that looked as if it had been created by the most observant watchmaker: the microchip. We are transferring all the old files from magnetic tape to digital.

That was when my father got to experience the sulphurous hum and to see the skeleton of the largest supercomputer in the world, painstakingly being built for the purpose of safekeeping the souls that had until then rested independently in their own magnetic sepulchres but were now about to be stored, for the first time, in a single location.

There would be no reason for the vast space of the Archives, which would be converted into subterranean office space for the new government, and your job, Supervisor turned on his heel and rested. In front of a fountain of welders' sparks, his eyes shone luminescent coals: Your job will be to find a resting spot for the thoughtreels once we have transferred them to the computer server, but in the meantime

For six months my father descended into the Archives with colleagues who also wore wide-brimmed hats, the style of Archives employees, who also carried notebooks, cushions, bagged meals, and suffered from urinary tract disorders caused by the chemicals in the magnetic reels that sometimes caused them to piss in the vestibules because the bathrooms were far away. He travelled to addresses assigned tasks deeper and deeper in the Archives, places where bats roosted overhead and where one day he discovered what appeared by penlight to be the large wings of an unidentifiable prehistoric bird. He
traced the light across its imbricated piscine feathers and wondered whether to gift the fossil wings to his son to complement his talons, but the thought saddened him and he stifled laughter. Who was Hedayat.