by Nihad Sirees
The radio in the taxi was recounting the events of today’s march and every minute or so the broadcaster announced they were going to replay the address the Leader gave on this awesome day. The radio was only broadcasting a meaningless roar, noise in which all sounds get jumbled together, until the voice of the broadcaster emanated from the studio to announce the rebroadcast of the speech every few minutes. I asked the driver to switch off the radio. He wheeled around in disbelief. I repeated my request.
“Please turn off the radio.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes, turn it off.” He said it wouldn’t be his responsibility.
“Your responsibility?”
“That’s what I said, my responsibility.”
He shrugged his shoulders, pursed his lips and switched off the radio. He drove me to the gigantic Party building and parked in a parking lot far away from the guards who were armed to the teeth. I paid him and then asked him to turn the radio back on. He switched it on and I got out. As he drove away my ears caught the voice of the Leader beginning his speech.
CHAPTER SIX
IN ORDER TO GET INSIDE the Party building you have to show your ID card. Several times I told the Comrades at the door that I had come there to reclaim my ID card, which the Comrades had taken away from me at the march. Still for some reason not a single one of them was able to grasp the situation. The one sitting inside the door called for another Comrade and I had to explain the problem all over again. But he didn’t allow me to enter either, calling instead for an even higher-ranking Comrade who showed up in order to resolve the problem but ended up making it even more complicated. After hearing my problem, instead of letting me in he asked who had allowed me to get as far as I had in the first place. When I asked him what I was supposed to have done, he told me I should have waited far outside the building. Finally they allowed me to enter and I walked through the door into a wide interior lobby that was filled with armed Comrades who were all drinking tea out of small glasses and glued to the TV set hanging on the wall airing a video of one of the Leader’s speeches.
Two Comrades showed me the way to the Comrade who had been assigned to my case. We walked to the end of the lobby and then descended a wide staircase that wound around several times. We passed by many other Comrades who were just like them. The Party building teemed with armed men who occupied every space and stood guard outside every door. I saw speakers installed at every corner, broadcasting the Leader’s speech throughout the place, which reeked of cigarette smoke. The fact that most of the Comrades smoked caught my attention; many of them carried a weapon in one hand and held a lit cigarette in the other. As I mentioned they also seemed to like drinking tea out of small glasses. I never fully understood why they loved smoking and tea so much but this was a small matter compared to my discovery of the building and what was going on inside. It was the first time I had ever been inside a Party compound. Passing by I had never thought about what I would see inside or how it would look, mainly because the roads surrounding it were always so crowded with traffic.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs we were at one end of a vast basement corridor that seemed to go on forever. Its walls were plastered with pictures of the Leader and more than one TV set hung from the ceiling with the Leader gazing out of the screen as he gave his speech. A great many Comrades were coming and going in the basement without taking their eyes off the TV screens. I knew we were at least thirty feet below street level but the ventilation was good and I was surprised to see more than one Mercedes parked in alcoves branching off from the corridor. How did those cars get down there? There must be a secret entrance that runs beneath the building from one of the surface streets, but why had the existence of such an entrance never occurred to me before? How could I never have seen it? I would venture a guess that one of the car washes, which are typically located underground, must be a secret entrance to the Party building. I noticed some Comrades whispering to one another when they spotted me; they weren’t stingy with casting spiteful looks my way. As far as they were concerned I was nothing but an unpatriotic traitor. I wasn’t concerned with them or with what they thought of me. No, I was much more preoccupied with that strange world in which I found myself submerged.
At last the two men stopped outside a room, and told me to take a seat on a nearby chair. One of them went inside and the other one stayed there, lighting a cigarette and chatting about me with the guard by the door. I took out my pipe, cleaned it out and filled it with some American tobacco, and then started smoking as I leaned back comfortably in the chair. I was actually enjoying what was going on down in that cavernous basement space. The loud sound booming from the television was the one thing that bothered me but I didn’t let it get to me. My day had been exhausting and chaotic enough to shield me against all forms of the roar. The most important lesson I was to learn today was how to ignore noise. I’d like to take a moment to explain this technique so that any readers who are, like me, highly sensitive to loud noises might also benefit. The technique is quite simple. All you have to do is withdraw inside yourself and listen to your own inner voice and forget all about the annoying sounds that constitute the roar. Sitting in that chair down in that basement outside the room where I was about to be seen regarding the matter of my personal ID card, I started taking long drags on my pipe and then exhaling the tobacco smoke as I listened to my own inner voice reverberate inside of me. I would listen to myself as I talked about things that I enjoy in the world or else responded to specific questions I would ask myself: for example, Do I like springtime in this country? After answering yes or no, I would then demonstrate the soundness of my reply with specific evidence. Do I love this country? Yes. Do I love what’s happening to me presently in this country? Not so much. And so forth and so on.
Talking to oneself may be a sickness but it can be effective in keeping a person from going insane. When I was a young man I used to love to walk the city streets and talk to myself. I would do the same thing as I lay down in bed at night to wait for the angel of sleep to whisk me away. Once I saw someone else walking aimlessly through the streets who was also talking to himself; then he began scolding, berating himself even, laughing and gesticulating the way he might address someone else. I was afraid of becoming like him so I began to monitor myself more closely. Instead of talking to myself I started coming up with stories and narrating them to myself; if I arrived at my destination without getting to the end of the story, I would keep walking, circling around the school or the house or wherever I was going until the story was finished. Only then would I end my walk. I came to realize how talking to oneself can keep a person insulated from his environment and make him more accepting of the world and all its burdens. And so there I was, talking to myself in the basement in the Party building. At that moment nobody would have been able to guess that I was asking myself whether I love springtime in my country or whether I love the country in general. Alternatively, I might describe what I was seeing to myself. The most beautiful description I could come up with there was of how the Comrades held their weapons. I would say to myself: Look at how this one cradles his rifle, as though it were a little child, or how that one waves it around without fear of it bumping against the wall or anything. There was a crouching Comrade who had laid the rifle on his lap while his hands were busy smoking and drinking tea. Another Comrade made me laugh (in secret, of course) as I very carefully watched how he handled his rifle. He had jammed it in the corner where the floor meets the wall and sat his bum down on the firearm, resting the wooden butt between his thighs, straight up his asshole to be precise, and because he wasn’t very well balanced he started swaying this way and that, as if he were scratching his ass with the butt of the rifle. Look, I said to myself, look, he’s getting off on it!
I noticed a small cart sliding along an electric rail coming down the corridor from the same direction we had just come from (that is, from my right) and I thought to myself, What could that be? Are there carts d
own here too? As it approached and then passed by us I could see that it was carrying large piles of the Leader’s picture. The cart continued moving for about fifty yards or so and then veered off toward the right. Don’t miss this chance, I thought to myself. Get up and find out what there is behind that turnoff to the right fifty yards away. I stood up and, to make the Comrade looking after me think I just needed to stretch my legs after sitting for so long, slapped my thighs so he could see I was just shaking out the numbness. Uninterested, he let me go as he continued to smoke his cigarette and drink his tea. I walked as far as the turnoff, twisting my torso in an unnatural way, making movements that resembled Swedish calisthenics and slowing down in order to spend as much time as possible glancing down the corridor. The turnoff led to a gigantic storeroom with a large door as wide as the hallway itself. I stared inside and tried to etch what I had seen in my mind’s eye. Then I walked several paces ahead before turning back, staring down that way once more. Once I had captured in my mind a picture of the storeroom and what it contained I walked on, coming back to sit down in my chair and light my pipe once again. The Comrade guarding me was satisfied that nothing was awry.
I now managed to sketch a clear picture of the storeroom and its contents in my mind. It was spacious, well lit with fluorescent lights, and had no windows. Workers emptied the payloads from those electric carts, which were then neatly arranged into identical piles on metal shelves; no disorder was permitted. Finally I had discovered where the millions of pictures of the Leader in all shapes and sizes came from. The shelves were overflowing with reams of pictures and every shelf had a template at eye level that was a guide to the heaps behind it. I saw dozens of sizes and poses of the Leader; not only did those pictures vary in size but in terms of the pose and medium. In one area specifically for oversized pictures there was a huge one wrapped up in a cylinder; only the Leader’s hair and eyes were visible. Beside it there was another which upon closer examination I could see was actually an oil portrait painted by an artist to look like a photograph. On the opposite wall there were shelves with posters that had slogans and sentences scrawled on them praising the Leader, including one with the slogan that I heard one of the Comrades repeating at the march, “L R, L R, Leader, Leader.” There was a special section for storing the large cloth banners on which calligraphers had inscribed slogans praising the Leader and verses of poetry extolling his intelligence, wisdom and bravery.
After sitting on the chair for another short while, I decided to try and discover what other wonders this level contained, including what turned out to be, without exaggeration, a workshop dedicated to producing propaganda for the Leader. I got up and moved closer to the guardian Comrade who was pouring himself a second cup of tea and asked him, pretending I was suffering from back pains from sitting for too long, “Excuse me, am I allowed to know what or whom I’m waiting for?”
“The Comrade in charge isn’t here yet,” he said, offering me a cup of tea that I refused with a casual flick of my hand. “He’ll be here any minute.”
“But I don’t have time to wait. I’m busy.”
“You can go and come back in the morning if you want.”
“I can’t walk around without my ID.”
“Well, you’ll just have to wait then, another half hour or so,” he said, ending the conversation.
“But I have back trouble,” I told him. “Sitting for too long makes it worse.”
“That’s your problem,” he said, sipping his tea.
I pulled away from him, trying to restore some limberness to my joints, cracking my neck and my lower back. I walked off in the other direction, toward the stairs we had taken down to the basement. I lit my pipe and took some pleasure in smoking, walking thirty yards and then turning around until I saw my guardian Comrade straight ahead of me. He looked at me askance and then ignored me as a number of Comrades gathered around, lit cigarettes and started talking about something else. Before getting bogged down in having to hear their conversation I turned around and walked away from them again.
After fifty or sixty paces, a nondescript door to my right opened and a young man came out to light a cigarette. Apparently they were forbidden to smoke inside. At that moment, before the door could swing shut automatically, I saw what was going on inside. It was not a small room but a vast chamber filled with computers and lots of young men and young women working at them. As the door closed I continued walking, taking very slow steps. The young man was watching me. I approached him and asked if I could use his lighter, which he handed me with extreme courtesy. I relit my pipe. I wanted to say something but he pre-empted me, with greater politeness than any of the other Comrades had shown me, asking, “Excuse me, but aren’t you the writer, Fathi Sheen?”
To encourage him to keep talking, I responded immediately, “That’s right, and you are?”
“I work here, my name’s Nooh. You don’t know me but I know you. I’ve read some of your work.”
“Did you say you work here? Do you mean to say you’re not a Comrade?”
“I’m a member of the Revolutionary Youth but I work here. I mean, I’m not a volunteer. I work for a monthly wage.”
“In computer programming?”
“No, graphic design.”
“What do you design?”
“We design everything. Posters. Pamphlets containing speeches and sayings of the Leader. We touch up pictures of the Leader in order to eliminate imperfections, correcting them and making them more beautiful. Other odd jobs.”
I stood so that I could see the guardian Comrade and he could see me, in case he happened to think of me and wonder where I was. He was immersed in conversation with his other Comrades. Pointing toward where I had seen the motorized cart, I asked Nooh, “So you print the posters and the pictures here, right?”
“Yeah, right here. It’s the most sophisticated press in the whole country. The computers are connected to the press on an internal network and we do amazing work.”
I nodded, and the young man went on, “From this chamber, we upload files of the Leader and his speeches to approximately fifty Internet sites that are specifically about the Leader. We make them,”—and he said this in English—“up to date.”
“Fascinating. You’re doing amazing work. But who’s in charge of all of this?”
“You mean, who decides which pictures to print? There’s a committee that oversees our work. They send us thousands of pictures. We touch them up, crop them and then send them back so they can select the best ones. They might ask for a poster portraying the Leader with a factory or a farm or a mosque or all those things combined in the background.”
“But I mean, who comes up with the sayings and the slogans that you put on the posters?”
Pointing toward another room, he said, “There’s a special team whose members are specialists in psychology and education. Comrades, intellectuals and poets who work twelve hours a day coming up with slogans or writing poetry for the masses to recite at marches, which are then printed on posters or published in the media and online.”
“That is very special work.”
“Indeed. It’s tremendous educational and emotional labor as well because the matter involves affection, that is, the affection the masses have for the Leader. It’s never easy work. There’s a room here specifically for focus groups studying the proclivities of the masses, where they invite various segments of the population to come and have slogans and poems recited to them. They figure out which ones are closest to the hearts of the people. Then they have them memorized, and the slogan the people have the most difficulty with is immediately trashed and erased from the list. The best poems and slogans are those that somebody can remember after only hearing them once.”
“It’s an important consideration in choosing slogans.”
“There are slogans that take a long time to prepare. Typically their role is to convince the masses of a specific issue regarding the Leader but it can be difficult to manufacture this in a simple sl
ogan or in a basic verse of poetry. Sometimes they have to stay up late at night in this room, coming up with hundreds of alternative poems and slogans. From there they’re sent up to a higher committee that works in the Leader’s palace. Almost every proposal gets sent back for editing.”
“What are they supposed to do?” I asked.
“Prime the masses to be convinced of certain changes that are about to be implemented. Or to make them demand some change that is going to happen anyway just so that it can appear as though it happened because of popular will.”
Nooh put out his cigarette, reached out his hand toward me and said, smiling, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Fathi. I’d been hoping to meet you for some time. I’ve heard for a while now how they’ve got too much work in this room and are facing many new challenges and that they’re thinking about asking you to come work with us. I’m glad to see you here because this must mean you’ve agreed. I have to get back inside now. See you later.”
I was astonished by what he said but shook his hand as he left to go back inside. I wasn’t able to say goodbye, though, because I was so shocked by the notion that they wanted me to work with them fabricating the general mood, mobilizing the masses. The horror! Lama had been on to this when I complained to her about Mr. Ha’el’s plan to marry my mother. She had told me, They want you to join them, and they won’t just let you remain silent. They want to put your mind to work on their issues. Instinctively I turned around to head back and bumped into my guardian Comrade who had come just then to bring me back.
“The Comrade in charge is back.”