by Asja Bakić
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Mama finally told the neighbors. “They’re coming for us at eight.”
“We wish you luck,” the old women replied. “There’s no life left here anyway.”
It was harder for the old married couple to accept. Everyone cried.
“Give our love to our family, if you see them,” they said.
“We will,” the parents lied.
At eight in the morning an armored SUV pulled up in front of the building.
“Get in,” the men in the front said impatiently.
The family climbed into the vehicle in silence. As they left the city, the parents didn’t look back. The children, however, turned around here and there to see how the skyscrapers looked from a distance. It seemed to them that the whole city was hunched over like the two old women in their building.
Mama immediately handed over two rings, a necklace, and a pair of crystal glasses to the men. They looked satisfied.
“Will there be enough room for everyone?” Papa asked.
“There will be,” the driver replied.
He had a strong accent.
“Where are you from?” Mama asked.
“Senegal.”
The parents didn’t speak French, so they spoke to the foreigners in English. The men weren’t unkind. They gave the little girls an apple, which helped.
The SUV deposited them at an unrecognizable location, indistinguishable from what they’d managed to glimpse through the car windows. They needed to wait there for a bus carrying the rest of the migrants. The Senegalese men drove off.
Near them, on the muddy road, about ten more people were waiting for the bus. Everyone looked frightened.
“Mama, who are these people?” the older daughter asked.
“People like us,” Mama said quietly. “People who want a better life.”
It grew dark. The bus still hadn’t arrived. The adults got acquainted, chatting with one another, but the children were shy. Their faces were dirty; they looked like little monsters. The girls heard their parents talking with the parents of other children, but they didn’t dare do the same.
“They said we’re going to the west coast on a big boat, but I don’t believe anything until I see it with my own eyes,” one of the adults said.
“You’re right,” Mama said. “Nothing is certain.”
“And food? Will there be food?” a small woman who stood behind the children inquired.
“They promised there would be,” Mama said.
The children feared that west coast and that big boat. Some of them had never seen the sea.
When the bus finally came, there wasn’t enough room. A fight broke out, but eventually was resolved. The women and children took the seats, and some of the men remained standing. The younger girl sat on her mother’s lap, the older on her father’s—this was necessary, otherwise Papa would have had to stand too, and the trip was long. He wouldn’t have been able to stay on his feet.
There were no checkpoints; they drove without stopping. The landscape looked eerie at night. The road was full of potholes. There was virtually no vegetation, as if a large foot had flattened everything growing on the earth in a single step.
“Mama, why is everything so black?” her little daughter asked when she awoke.
“Because nighttime came.”
“But when it’s daytime,” the little girl continued, “it’s still dark. Why?”
Mama didn’t know what to say. She hugged and kissed the child. After a while everyone fell asleep, lulled by the steady rocking of the bus. Sometimes, when they drove over a particularly large hole in the road, the parents would jerk to consciousness, only to doze off again. Time passed; no one knew how long. The children were peaceful, even the youngest. No one cried.
“Ancona!” someone finally shouted.
Everyone opened their eyes as if waking from a hundred-year sleep. A heap of rusted iron, wrecks of old ships—they had arrived. The big, dilapidated port stretched out in front of them. The driver laughed, pleased that everything had gone so smoothly.
“Nice guy,” commented one of the migrants.
The “boat” was really just a desperate-looking dinghy, Marina written along the starboard side. The parents grew anxious.
“This is worse than a raft,” Papa said, but not loudly enough for anyone to hear.
“There’s room for everyone,” the driver boomed. “Don’t worry, Marina has transported all your friends, relatives, neighbors. You’re not the first.”
“Who’s the captain?” Papa asked.
“I am,” the bus driver declared.
The people looked at one another.
“Don’t worry, I know how to fly a plane too,” he reassured them.
The little girls regarded him with amazement. Maybe he’d been the one who’d air-dropped those aid packages, the dry cakes and salty scraps of meat.
Everyone quickly pushed into the boat’s cabin. There was almost no food or drinking water. It reminded the little girls of the damp basement in their building.
“On y va!” they heard one of the two crew members say.
Soon Ancona was just a tiny dot on the horizon. As the European mainland disappeared, the migrants’ fear grew.
“Papa, who lives in Africa?” the older daughter asked.
“Different kinds of people,” her father replied.
“What are they like?” she pressed.
“Good. These are the people who are going to help us.”
“And how will they help us?”
“They’ll give us food and a place to sleep.”
The boat rocked; the sea was rough. Many of the passengers kept going up to the deck to vomit. When the boat’s pitching was especially violent, the younger daughter quietly recited passages from The Belly of Paris. With each crash of the waves, the little girl would enunciate: cabbage, carrots, tomatoes. As if by speaking the words aloud, she could fill her mouth with all those vegetables instead of the stifling air. Only this soothed her.
“Will they give us cake?” she heard her sister ask their father.
“Surely they will.”
“Because they’re good people?”
“Yes, because they’re good people.”
“And are we good people?” the little girl asked.
“Of course we are,” her father replied.
After some time, one of the crew members—a Moroccan, if they’d understood him correctly—came below deck carrying a bag. He requested that each passenger pay whatever they could. Mama gave him the two necklaces she’d taken off her older daughter’s neck. The girl began to shake with fear.
“Think of something nice,” Mama told her.
But she couldn’t.
“Everything will be all right,” the parents repeated to their children.
To prepare for the trip, the little girls had memorized all the African countries and capitals—the only thing they knew how to recite better was food. Had one of the passengers asked them the capital of Senegal, they’d have been impressed, but all of them sat in silence, their heads tucked between their knees. Everyone wondered what that West looked like, what life was like there. Could it really be so much better?
The waves pounded the boat on all sides mercilessly—as if they wanted to turn the passengers’ world on its head.
THE UNDERWORLD
1.
The return trip to Mars was always tough for me, and thus I postponed it for as long as possible. I didn’t like breathing the artificial air. I so rarely got to return to Earth, my birthplace, using the false papers Lev Soldo had obtained for me. I loved it here: I knew exactly where to eat well, where to get a haircut, where to get drunk. But on Mars I didn’t know a thing. The restaurant I frequented there was open around-the-clock and it was always full, as if no one ever slept.
“I hate Mars!” I’d repeat constantly to the waitress, who would tune me out. Why would she have bothered to listen when she thought the same herself? She’d just
wave her hand in irritation and tell me to be quiet. I’d asked her once what she wrote, where she was from.
“Stories. France,” she’d said curtly, continuing to wipe down the counter.
Lev Soldo was waiting for me between the statues of two politicians, pacing back and forth in small steps because they had been set so close to each other. At one time two writers had stood in their place, but they’d been sent to Mars with the rest of us. Moving had been difficult for me. It had taken me a long time to get used to the stronger gravitational force: my muscles had atrophied despite all the precautions I’d taken, and I dragged my feet along the ground slowly, trying not to fall. Soldo ran up to me and supported me under the arm.
“How was your trip?” he asked.
“Terrible.”
“Did you take that decrepit little ship again? What’s it called?”
“Doloroso,” I said. “The captain’s a good guy, just a bad pilot.”
“How’d you pay him?”
“I gave him a book. He knew it was illegal, but demand is high. He’ll make good money on the black market.”
We sat in a café. Soldo told me that some important things had happened in Parliament, that the decision to erase us from the historical record was being reconsidered, but he wasn’t sure whether they had the necessary majority. He brought his lips close to my left ear as he spoke.
“You can’t stay here much longer. They’ve ramped up enforcement since capturing that Lithuanian writer last week. You know they’re monitoring and recording everything. Someone’s bound to recognize you.”
I lied, saying I’d return to Mars in seven days, when in fact I planned to stay here for at least another two weeks.
“I know you’re lying,” Soldo said. “Trust me, you don’t want to get caught.”
In my old apartment, which remained uninhabited, I found some of my things in a box on the floor. There was a table tennis trophy, old photos from a book launch that had escaped the police’s attention, a pair of towels, and a broken watch. I found a silver necklace engraved with my initials behind the radiator: a gift from my uncle for my twelfth birthday, if I remembered correctly.
The bed was still where I’d left it. The dresser had been thrown out; the kitchen was completely trashed. I began to feel nauseous. The radiation on Mars was, they’d explained, closely regulated, but I didn’t believe them at all. I even suspected that the radiation detector they’d given us was defective. I had frequent headaches and bouts of nausea, both on Mars and back here on Earth, but maybe these were just symptoms of my nostalgia, my desire to come home and stay for good.
I sat on the bed and emptied my pockets. In one was a crumpled flyer printed with the phrase Earth may not be flat, but space is. I laughed. Earth was flat; we could see from Mars how flat it was.
All of Earth’s literary refuse had been relocated to the Red Planet. One day, with no explanation, writing had been proclaimed the greatest evil to have befallen humankind, and all literary works and the people who’d produced them had been banished to space, to colonize a planet where there was nothing but desert sand that swirled around you the second you set foot on it. The rocks were beautiful, but with no one to throw them at, they too had eventually become unbearable.
I’d always thought that many people were writers, but I soon realized how few of us there really were. Some writers, maybe because of this, had anticipated their downfall and dedicated themselves to other things. Many, in fact, had suddenly begun to speak about their craft like it was an illness that could be cured. The most rabid anti-literature zealots were yesterday’s passionate readers. I couldn’t understand what had happened to everyone, what evil spirit had possessed them. Lev Soldo had tried to explain that demons had nothing to do with it, that they weren’t possessed, that if they’d actually been so receptive, whatever ideas they’d read would’ve changed them for the better. But he was notoriously misanthropic—for him, everything people did was awful. It couldn’t be otherwise.
Authors who’d been captured were given a chance at exoneration if they promised never to write another word. Many had agreed to this, but some had pointed out the impossibility of making such an oath, given they’d have to sign the document itself.
“And that’s writing, isn’t it?” one author had noted.
Despite feeling relieved during my brief visit home, I still couldn’t sleep without pills; I couldn’t relax. Both on Mars and on Earth, whenever I lay down in bed I felt like I’d piss myself—I didn’t trust my body anymore. I’d lost all faith in my urinary, nervous, and endocrine systems. When you live on a hostile planet, everything is a reminder of your weakness, the vulnerability of your organism. Like you’re sleeping inside a trap.
On Mars I’d met an interesting writer, Alan Lemke. He’d been living in Canada when the deportations began, but his accent had led me to think he was German. He told me that he couldn’t read anymore, that books sickened him. And he wasn’t the only one. Mars was full of bookstores, but people rarely visited them out of a desire to read. While in bed, I thought of Lemke, of his claim that on Earth there would no longer be any writing worth reading, and that the same thing would eventually happen on Mars. We’d debated this briefly, but I knew he was right. One book I constantly read was the correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Ariadna Efron. It did the best job of describing our situation.
Food and supplies were sent to us whenever Earth and Mars were closest together—that was the cheapest way. We’d managed to convince some of the suppliers to smuggle us a few things, on smaller ships that used less fuel. We paid in local currency that was basically worthless on Earth, and in books, whose value had increased exponentially since they’d been banned there.
I watched the moon for a long time, the patches of light and dark I’d grown up with. I waited for sleep to come.
When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed again of Mars. I dreamed that the Red Planet was losing mass at such an alarming rate, much more than its usual kilogram or two per second, that it was literally crumbling beneath my feet. Eventually I stood balanced on a planet the size of a tennis ball. Even in my dreams, I was on unstable ground. I woke up with a start, terrified, and it took me some time to remember where I was. There was no water to wash myself with. Maybe Soldo was right, I thought. Maybe it was time to go back.
I walked around the city with my head down. I resented the crowds of people. Some writers who’d been “cured” had become important officials. It would be horrible if they recognized me, I thought, so I hung my head even lower.
Lev Soldo and I had planned to meet at eight that night in front of the Veronika general store. It was Sunday and the store was closed. He was a few minutes late. As soon as he arrived, he pressed a roll of crisp bills into my hand.
“I can’t take this,” I said. “It’s too much.”
“You have to. I don’t want you always rummaging for books to sell.”
I didn’t argue further; I needed the cash. I put it in my pocket.
“Remember how we used to talk all the time about how stupid humans are?” he asked.
“I remember.”
“And it’s still impossible to talk about anything else. That’s how inexhaustible it is.”
“It’s too much,” I said brusquely.
We were sitting on the grass in a nearby park. The benches there had light sensors that could expose us if we weren’t careful.
“How are you sleeping these days?” Soldo asked.
“Not well,” I said. “I’m plagued by nightmares.”
“What do you dream about?”
“Mars disappearing, disintegrating.”
“That’s all?” he asked. “How is that a bad thing? I thought you hated Mars.”
“If Mars were destroyed, I’d have nowhere else to go. I have no other options.”
“You could always repent,” he said. “That Lithuanian did.”
“I can’t give up writing.”
Soldo looked at me knowingly.
>
“When was the last time you wrote something?” he asked in a serious tone, as if he were inquiring about my health.
I thought about it. Three or four Martian years.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “A long time ago.”
We sat in the dark. Time passed quickly. I’d forgotten how quickly time could fly.
“Doloroso takes off in four days. I think I’m going back then. It’s time.”
“Smart,” he said, lying back on the grass.
We gazed at the celestial bodies above, which I didn’t find particularly exciting.
“Just don’t ask me to guess which constellation is which,” I said.
“I won’t. I don’t know either.”
Both of us were actually looking at Mars. We could identify it easily, and couldn’t stop staring at it. My gaze wandered now and then to the full moon circling above us. It seemed like it might fall on our heads and crush us at any moment.
That would be a pleasant death, I thought.
Mars was really just an abandoned urban development project. No one had said why the corporations had left the hotel complexes, the residential and business sites, half-constructed. Everything had originally been designed for the kind of travelers who already know exactly what to expect before they set off on their trip. I’m talking about truly unimaginative people. The places they dream of visiting probably resemble the places where they live, just slightly farther away. Eventually, all those half-finished buildings had been left to us authors, and their poorly insulated bedrooms had been filled with books and manuscripts overnight. Upon arriving, I’d tried to find my own works, but the arrangement was so haphazard that I’d quickly given up. I complained to Soldo.
“You can’t find anything anymore. The books are lost among the other books.”
He seemed to feel genuinely bad about it.
“I always read dystopian fiction carefully,” I ranted on, “but it never occurred to me that I’d actually experience it one day.”
“I’m planning to visit you on Mars soon,” he said, changing the subject.