It was all irksome yet perfectly usual; however, for those with sharp hearing and an eagle eye, there was something new in this chorus of droning refrain and counter-refrain. And if it was new you wanted, well then, this was really new. Completely off the beaten path, on to something enormous, unimaginable, impossible. Well done, Ram, the bigger it is the better it strikes. For the first time, there was talk of a mythical creature who’d appeared out of who knows what world, who was neither a god like Yölah nor a counter-god like Balis, but a disturbing, solar being, made all of light and reason, intelligence and wisdom, who could teach something totally unknown in the land of Holy Submission: revolution, in harmony and freedom. This teaching refuted Yölah’s hegemonizing brutality, and Balis’s deleterious guile, opposing them with the strength of kindness and friendship. What did it all mean, and who was saying this? A name went around, from crowd to crowd, but no one had caught it properly: Democ . . . Dimuc . . . Dmoc.
There was also talk of a man, a very humble Abistani who walked among the most humble, and who was a sort of herald for the solar being; he announced the Return. “The return, what return?” asked people in the street. The return of a bygone era, when other gods reigned on earth, and other men populated the land. Life was difficult, to be sure, gods and men are hard to get along with and don’t rub along well together either, but nothing, not a thing, during all those millennia of suffering and boredom, had ever managed to destroy hope, and hope was what enabled gods and men to resist their own negation and, sometimes, to accomplish beautiful things—a miracle here, a revolution there, elsewhere an exploit, which at the end of the day meant that life was still worth living. In those days, people used to say, “hope keeps you going” even when times were desperate. Did the Return mean a return of hope? Or rather, the return of the idea that hope existed, and that it might, perhaps, help us to live, we’re just humans, after all, simple mortals, we can’t ask too much of life. It was said that the messenger’s name was Ita the Abistani, and that he already had a first apostle, whose name was Oka the Rebel. In a world born of religion, every messenger is a prophet, everyone who accompanies a prophet is a long-suffering apostle; anyone who quibbles and wonders is a heretic.
The tireless Ram was in his element amid this wonderful commotion. This was his world, and his dream, his plan, was to control it from start to finish. The pieces of the puzzle had long been in place for the final onslaught, but what was missing was the little escape device that would enable him to launch the operation and secure his victory. Ati’s meeting with Sri and Eto would provide it. If a grain of sand can jam the most sophisticated machinery, removing it can relaunch it more smoothly than ever. This was the principle behind Ram’s method: insert a hindrance, remove it, and then the plan will move ahead.
His office had been working on it, diligently and precisely, ever since the day Ati and Koa arrived in A19. What Ram knew about those two itinerant phenomena was strictly nothing: a few hazy remarks dropped by the so-called almighty Ministry of Moral Health and its half-baked subcommittees; a few alerts issued by one of the thousands of supposedly infallible civic observation cells run by the Apparatus—a bunch of obscure bureaucrats who, with their obsessive filing, produced an untranslatable racket—a few insinuations drawn from the vast amounts of piously redacted notes which that unbelievable General Inspection of the mockbas, the rite police, had recorded on the state of the believers’ piety, to which were added two or three clues unearthed in the flood of notes emanating from who knew which sub-bureaus, specialized in nothing, etc. But each clan had its own instruments, firmly concentrated on the subject—and these were the only useful ones. Bri’s clan was well-equipped in that regard, and Ram oversaw personally the perfect functioning of the machinery. Without chance, there could be no grain of sand. Unlike the other clans who invested their colossal fortunes in pomp and brute force, the Bri clan invested in analysis and forecasts, in organization and efficiency, in lab work then tests in the field. Very early on, therefore, Ram had grasped the necessity of following those two spirited eccentrics and nudging them in the right direction. They would prove useful for something. That was how they came upon Toz, directed by a passerby, who was not all that anonymous after all, since he said his name was Hu, and by the mockbi Rog, who by the looks of it was more of a middleman for trafficking clandestine migrants than a saint practicing an honest vocation. They were expected, and their subsequent itinerary had already been set down as their destiny, as willed by God.
End of the first stage. Good old Toz, he had wound them up to perfection, imprisoning them in his warehouse by pretending to be helping them to get away, and they’d fallen for it, and cheered him on. Nice work.
What was interesting was that the two eccentrics did not belong to any clan—they professed anything but Unique Thought, and what was more, they were determined and audacious, as naïve as two big babies. In addition, they each held one important trump card: one of them had known Nas and heard him speak of the existence of the mysterious village, the other was the grandson of a major figure who had marked the history and imagination of Abistan, the mockbi Kho. They would bring to the plan a background of mystico-religious terror that would impress the people and the judges. With players like these, the cabinet could manufacture a clock capable of giving everyone the exact hour of their death.
The micro-plan for organizing a meeting between Ati and Sri before chosen witnesses, without having any collateral effect on the Bri clan, required the intervention of a third person, a particular individual who could satisfy a host of delicate conditions: he must be known to be secretly linked to the Dia and Hoc clans; he must not have ever had anything at all to do with the Bri clan; he had to know Nas, Ati, and Koa, or at least have been in contact with them and know enough about them; and finally he had to be a talented actor. Ram had just such a rare bird at hand: the vendor of services from the Square of Supreme Faith, the spy who had denounced Ati and Koa to Dia’s guards, their shared employer. Ram’s specialists of mental manipulation had finished turning him and were actively prepping him for his first mission, the mother of all missions if ever there was one, in the service of the Bri clan. For the needs of the script, his name would be Tar, a name so common as to sound like a cover, and he would play a prosperous, ambitious tradesman with offices and warehouses in H46. He would have a wife, they’d call her Nef, Ore, Cha . . . or better still, Mia—that suggested a strong-minded woman, cruel and manipulative.
The plan, committed to paper right down to the last comma, consisted of setting up a business relation between the tradesman Tar and the tradesman Buk. The latter, who specialized in the manufacture of basins and commercial dinnerware made of tin, was Sri’s husband. On D-day, Tar would introduce himself and make an offer to buy his production for the next ten years, if Buk would give him a reduced price, as Tar himself had a ten-year contract with a firm belonging in partnership to Dia and Kil, where they rented and sold canteens and portable kitchen equipment to the organizers of pilgrimages and jamborees (they all sailed under Dia’s flag, or that of an allied clan in charge of the media hype, whose famous business slogan was, in case one needs reminding, “Neither too little nor not enough”), as well as to army battalions, clan militias, and local warlords. Buk would be blown away by the offer that had fallen in his lap, and would surely be eager to invite Tar to celebrate their alliance, and before long they were bound to become inseparable friends, in that way businessmen know how to do when there’s a certain urgency. Tar would force the issue if need be, increasing their opportunities to meet. They would visit each other at home, among friends, and give each other presents. Eto and her husband would be invited and they would come if they managed to obtain the authorization to leave the City of God. Mia would be as sweet and thoughtful as could be toward Sri and Eto. When their business and family relations were at their peak, Tar would introduce his cousin Nor (this will be Ati’s role), who had come to visit, both out of affection and also on
business; he would explain that his relative was a prosperous tradesman connected to the Kil group and occasionally the Dia group. In an aside that Mia would arrange, Nor would inform Sri that he had been a friend of Nas’s, that he had met him when Nas was working on the site of the mysterious village the pilgrims discovered, and that Nas had come to him one day to entrust him with a report, asking him to keep it until further notice—and then never came back. Since learning of Nas’s strange disappearance, Nor had constantly been puzzling over what to do with the document, and now just by chance, through Tar, he had found out that the wife of his friend and dinner companion Buk was none other than Nas’s widow. What a strange and wonderful coincidence! And then the very event for which the entire plan had been so carefully made would take place: Nor would give the report to Sri, enjoining her not to tell anyone about it, in keeping with Nas’s wishes, except perhaps her sister-in-law Eto. He would not forget the promise he’d made himself: to tell her how much he had admired Nas, an upstanding individual from whom he had learned that to tell the truth, whatever the cost, is an excellent disposition of the spirit, for otherwise truth would be taken for falsehood; and to denounce falsehood whatever the risk, for otherwise it would be taken for truth. But he would not tell her that he had found her beautiful and charming; that was not done, in the husband’s house.
This would be the end of the performance and the end of the mission for Ati; it would last two hours, the time of a dinner at Buk’s house, including two minutes aside with Sri to give her the aforementioned report, hidden in a rare gift, a sila, a piece of silk from Upper Abistan.
Ati would not know that this film would be followed by the darkest of sequels, and that it would end in a world war. Once the dinner was over, and the report had been transferred, and goodbyes had been said, he would be exfiltrated from H46 and taken back to the camp of His Lordship.
The second episode would unfold in an atmosphere of impenetrable mystery: from deep in a throat trembling with righteous anger, a voice would be heard revealing to the world the unimaginable infamy committed by two great lords of Abistan who were cherished by Abi and the Great Commander. It would bring proof that Dia and Hoc, those snakes, were the leaders of an incredible plot against the Just Brotherhood and, what was an immense, terrible blasphemy, against Abi and Yölah themselves. Those scoundrels had betrayed the Abi Jirga and kept a copy of Nas’s report in their possession and then, driven by their dark designs, they’d had the poor archeologist abducted, whereupon they proceeded to falsify his report by inserting their own conclusions; finally they killed him in that same village where Abi had received his holy Revelation. They then went on to assassinate Koa, the worthy descendant of the mockbi Kho. The Voice would not stop with the facts alone, it would also reveal the ins and outs of the matter: Dia and Hoc were working to achieve nothing less than the destruction of Abistan in the most terrifying way, by calling the truth of the Gkabul into question. This was absolute proof that they were in the service of the Enemy and of Balis.
Nothing could save Dia and Hoc and none of their family would be spared. They would be led by the hundreds to the stadiums and by the thousands to the most sinister camps, extermination camps run by the Regs, who would be relieved to discover that they were not the most vilified in the world, and they might even be glad to have them as companions in their tumbril for the final journey. The Great Commander Duc would be compelled to commit dignified akiri on the Square of Supreme Faith, or to retreat as a hermit to the most inhospitable of wildernesses to expiate his sin, that of having so poorly defended the Just Brotherhood and allowed two snakes to sully the Kïïba and soil the Gkabul.
With a sigh, the Voice would add that His Lordship Bri would never have allowed such a thing; he knows that the truth is the truth and the order underpinning it must never be allowed to weaken, not even for the blink of an eye, otherwise it is no longer order and never will be so again; it is disorder, and the essence of mendacity.
In reality, give or take a few details, everything happened just as the scenario had predicted. No sooner did Ati return to the camp than a letter sent from an anonymous post office was expedited to inform the authorities, some of whom had already been made aware by eminent, discreet individuals whom Ram had put into action, that the Nas report was going around the country like a poison treacherously injected into the people’s blood, and that the Honorable Dia and Hoc were behind the crime, along with others acting as accomplices. A second letter sent from another impossible-to-locate post office provided the investigators with the elements—although they were perfectly obvious—that they had been incapable of seeing with their own eyes, namely that Nor, an accomplice of Tar’s, had given Sri the report, and that Tar had gotten it from one of Dia’s men, who said he’d been commissioned by Nas not long before Nas’s disappearance. The letter explained that Dia and Hoc’s plan was to seize power and proclaim themselves Commander and Vice-Commander. A touch scornfully it added that those useful idiots were in fact none other than pawns in an apocalyptic plan conceived and implemented by the Enemy and Balis, whose ultimate plan was to replace Abi by Democ, and the Just Brotherhood by an assembly of representatives, and in time to make the Abistanis, the sincere worshippers of Yölah, into vulgar Balisians—heretics and free men.
Ram’s cabinet had rehearsed the scenario a thousand times, and proceeded to make all the necessary arrangements in the field. Tar was already in residence and at that very moment was negotiating with Buk to buy several thousand braziers, cooking pots, basins, and other large utensils. The list of those who were doomed to disappear had already been drawn up and the executants were stationed, ready to go into action; one of them (Mia?) had been assigned to help Tar commit suicide point-blank, the very day the report was to be handed over to Sri; the first link in the chain had to disappear before all others so that the last link would be preserved. It was the beginning of the end; the clans would soon embark on a long and merciless war.
Sri, in the matter, would inevitably be in danger. Ati blamed himself for letting his brother Koa die, but he could never accuse himself of having wronged him. When he had put Ati in charge of giving Sri Nas’s report, Ram promised him that she would be delighted to receive this testament from her late husband. Ati must also act in a discreet yet casual manner in order not to antagonize the husband, that was logical. Ati would no longer be there when they came to interrogate the couple, triggering a vast operation of arrests all over Abistan, at every level, from the most humble servant to the greatest lord.
Never in the course of human history, except perhaps in some ancient life, had there been such a grandiose roundup in such a short time. Once it got up to full speed, the machine would quickly reach an industrial phase: arresting and exterminating such quantities of people would no longer be a simple police matter, the question of the logistics would in itself become vital and determine everything.
Ati would never know that the film in which he’d made a brief appearance would go on to have such a colossal end. Naïveté, like stupidity, is a permanent state. Ati had never asked himself these questions—obvious even to a child—and he believed that Ram’s strategy had only one purpose: to enable him to meet Sri without shocking her husband, and to present her with his condolences, and while he was at it, hand her Nas’s report, per Ram’s request. How had the report ended up in Ram’s possession? Had the worthy and Honorable Bri lied to the Abi Jirga and kept a copy to himself? Why, then, would he suddenly release a document he’d kept hidden for so long, and which Ram had said could revolutionize the world? Was the document given to Sri the genuine report? What conclusions did it offer the reader? Why had they chosen Ati to give it to her? Who, really, was this Tar who had driven him to Buk’s house and who behaved at table as if he were his cousin? There was something about him, a sense of déjà vu, that made Ati feel his question was perfectly legitimate. It would seem that beneath his fine prosperous tradesman’s burni there lurked a worthless good-for-
nothing.
One explanation might be that the deaths of Nas and Koa had destroyed Ati’s defenses, and announced his own; and Sri and Eto’s marriages had stifled any secret hope he might still have had of devoting his life and strength to Nas’s widow and bereaved sister.
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