Ank and Cro were very proud to be serving a celebrity. When he got back from H46, Ati had a long audience with Ram, who conveyed congratulations from the Great Chamberlain and encouraging words from His Lordship. By agreeing to give Nas’s report to his widow, without the clan being directly involved, Ati deserved such praise. “The whole matter was a real nuisance,” confessed Ram, “it was putting us in an awkward position vis-à-vis the Abi Jirga and the Just Brotherhood. His Lordship didn’t know anything about it, nor did the Great Chamberlain, they don’t deal with trivial matters, so it fell to me, but we did indeed receive two reports, the official one, which we restored to the Great Commander at his bidding, and another, sent by we don’t know who, some distracted civil servant or a discreet friend with our interests at heart, and we didn’t know what to do with it . . . How could we explain its presence here? What would our friends in the Just Brotherhood think, who had always trusted us? We could destroy it, but was that appropriate, it was a rare document, the report of an archeological investigation at a unique site, an element of our heritage that was all the more precious in that this was the last and only copy, as the others had been burned in the presence of Abi, the Great Commander, and all the Honorables. That was when we came up with the perfectly natural idea of giving it to his widow, it will be a testament, a keepsake for her and her descendants. Anyway, all’s well that ends well, our minds are at rest.”
Ram had a talent for making everything seem clear and simple, and this matter of the second report appearing out of nowhere and leaving again by the back door did indeed require some enlightenment.
Etiquette being what it was, Ati, as a stranger to the clan and a man of modest origins who had neither fiefdom nor fortune, nor high position, could not obtain an audience with such high dignitaries. His Lordship and the Great Chamberlain deeply regretted it. There was no disdain implied, propriety simply had its rules, and besides, Ati was not there to seek honors; but he would have liked to meet these larger-than-life characters, to observe them as they dominated the world, to admire their fine palaces, which he pictured laden with heavy, luxurious embellishments; perhaps, on the contrary, they were overflowing with magnificent, exuberant simplicity.
They philosophized for a long while; times were hard and there were so many rumors weighing upon people’s lives, nothing good could come of it. That they agreed on. Indeed, there was something in the air, more rancid and acrid than ever, an atmosphere of the end of the world which had clung to Abistan from the day of its birth. They both agreed that this dissoluteness was not superficial but belonged to the deeper nature of things—but were they speaking of the same things? Deploying a tone filled with real energy for the future, Ram implied that the country would soon be transformed from top to bottom, rid of its old woes; the new Abistan would need new men, and in that context Ati, if he so desired, could carve out an enviable spot within the clan, for he had that deep sense of freedom and dignity that makes for an outstanding servant of the State. Ati remained silent. He nodded his head and bit his lip; it helped him think. What did he really want, what did he hope for? He questioned his heart and mind . . . but nothing came, a few echoes from childhood, obviously unfeasible. He raised his arms to the sky: he couldn’t think of anything, didn’t want anything. To be honest, he would have preferred to give back anything Abistan might have given him—but what? He had no work, no home, no identity, no past, no future, no religion, no customs . . . absolutely nothing . . . except problems with the administration and death threats from the clans . . . Perhaps he’d be content with some spare time to devote to breathing in the fresh air from the heavens and the aphrodisiacal scents of the sea. He thought he could love the sea, with a true passion, in spite of its capricious, treacherous behavior. Ram was rather optimistic to think that Abistan would change. Hens would have front teeth before then and would be singing in abilang. In truth, nothing and no one could change it, Abistan was in the hands of Yölah, and Yölah was immutability itself. “What is written is written,” or so it said in the Book of Abi, his Delegate.
Ram begged Ati to think about it. “I’ll see you later, I have a lot to do, the change will soon begin to take effect,” he said, getting up, then he added, giving Ati a pat on the back: “Better not to venture outside the camp. You’re at home here.” He was joking but his eyes were shining with a hard, intense gleam, and in his voice there was something of a war chant.
That morning, Ank and Cro had both come into Ati’s bedroom to tell him that Bio was at the door, bearing extraordinary news: “His Excellency Toz has the honor of inviting you to visit his museum,” they said, in unison.
“Museum? What’s that?”
Those poor devils did not know. Like Ati, they were hearing the word for the first time. It was not abilang, because according to a recent decree from the High Commissariat for Abilang and Abilanguization, presided over by the Honorable Ara, an eminent linguist and fierce adversary of multilingualism, which he saw as a source of relativism and impiety, common names deriving from an ancient language that were still in use would have to adopt either a prefix or a suffix, as appropriate, from among abi or ab, yol or yo, Gka or gk. Everything belonged to religion—beings, things, and names, too; it was therefore appropriate to mark them. “Museum” was either an exception, which the edict allowed for or would tolerate for some time yet, or it came from one of the ancient languages, prohibited but still in use in enclaves here and there, and these ancient languages had neither breviaries nor dictionaries. There was also the fact that people still spoke however they liked in private, despite the danger of denunciation by children, servants, or neighbors, and the fiefdom was as private as could be, it was even sovereign.
“Why is this extraordinary? I know Toz, I had coffee at his house in A19, and I lived in his dark warehouse; you won’t know about it because you never leave the fiefdom,” said Ati, pulling on his burni.
“But . . . but . . . he’s never invited anyone to his museum. Just once, at the beginning, for the inauguration, his brothers—His Lordship and the Great Chamberlain—and his nephew, master Ram who runs everything, no one else since then, not a soul . . . ”
Yes, now it was becoming fascinating.
Bio was even more excited; the poor messenger boy thought he might be able to dissolve into Ati’s shadow and go with him into the museum, and see at last what had been going on there for so many years. In the camp they’d always seen the trucks coming and going to the museum, delivering crates, removing shipping material, and shuttling workers hired from faraway cities who, for the time of their employment, bustled about inside the building without ever showing their faces outside.
There really was envy in the air. As he crossed the domain, Ati could see that everyone was full of kindhearted curiosity; their gazes said, “How lucky you are, oh stranger, you are going to see something we shall never see . . . Why you and not us, when we belong to the clan?”
Bio and Ati walked at a good pace for a full hour, which made their legs somewhat heavy, crossing a vast housing estate where, Bio informed him proudly, the technicians for the electric power plant and the waterworks lived, then an industrial zone where there was no lack of noisy, juddering workshops; then they went past wasteland that was solidly fenced off, where His Lordship’s army trained and held maneuvers, in which according to Bio’s mathematical calculations there was enough space to contain at least three villages. Finally they ended up in a huge green expanse, in the middle of which stood a magnificent white building surrounded by an impeccable lawn. Ati would learn later from Toz himself that the building was the fifth copy of an ancient, prestigious, gigantic museum called the Louvre, or the Loufre, that had been ransacked and razed to the ground during the first Great Holy War and the annexation of Abistan by the Lig, the United High Regions of the North. He would find out that the only country that had resisted the forces of Abistan, because they were governed by a mad dictator called Big Brother, who had throw
n his entire nuclear arsenal into the battle, was Angsoc, or Angsok, but in the end it too had fallen and they had drowned in their own blood.
Toz was there, half sitting, half lying on a strange seat, a piece of canvas stretched between four bits of wood. Ati heard him refer to it quite simply as a “chaise longue.” Was it a pleasant way to sit? He would have to try it. Toz was smiling, there was something mischievous in his gaze, as if to say, “I got you there, you and Koa, and I apologize, but as you can see, my intentions were good.” His gaze clouded over and a sort of bitter grimace distorted his face. Ati understood that he was thinking about poor Koa, and that in a way he blamed himself for what had happened.
He patted Ati on the shoulder and nudged him toward the entrance to the building. “Welcome to the Museum of Nostalgia!” And with a wave of his hand he drove away the shadow of poor Bio, who was contorting himself in an attempt to peer in through the slightly open door. What had he managed to see? Nothing: a vast white vestibule, completely empty. The heavy door slammed in his face.
“Come in, dear Ati, come in. Welcome. I have invited you into my secret garden to seek forgiveness for having misled you . . . and also, I confess, because I need your help. The journey through time and the paradox I invite you to visit will help me in my own research, because I’m at a point where I doubt everything, myself included. Let’s sit down for a moment . . . yes, there, on the floor . . . I would like to prepare you for what you are about to see. You don’t know what a museum is, since there aren’t any in Abistan. That’s the way our country is, it was born with the absurd idea that everything that existed before the advent of the Gkabul was false and pernicious and had to be destroyed, erased, forgotten, just like the Other, if he did not submit to the Gkabul. The museum, in a way, is the rejection of this madness, my revolt against it. The world exists, with or without the Gkabul; to deny it or destroy it does not eliminate it—on the contrary, its absence makes its memory even stronger, more present, and in the long run pernicious, as it happens, because it can lead to idealizing that past, making it sacred . . . But at the same time, and you may become aware of this, a museum is a paradox, trickery, an illusion that is every bit as pernicious.
“Reconstituting a vanished world is always both a way of idealizing it and a way of destroying it for a second time, because we remove it from its context to set it down into another, and thus we freeze it in immobility and silence, or we make it say and do something it may not have said or done. To visit that world under these conditions is a bit like looking at a dead man’s body. Look at it all you like, you might even resort to photographs of the man when he was alive, read everything that might have been written about him, but you’ll never feel the life he had inside him or around him. In my museum there are a lot of objects from a certain era—the twentieth century, as its contemporaries called it, and those items have been arranged according to function or the use that was made of them; you’ll also see amazingly lifelike wax reproductions of men and women in their everyday life, reconstituted down to the minutest details, but there will always be something missing—movement, breath, warmth—and so the tableau is and will remain a still life. No matter how great, imagination cannot give life. That chaise longue, for example, that I was sitting or lying on just now, and which surprised you. It belongs to its era, it was made in keeping with a certain concept of life. If I spoke to you of vacations, of leisure, of dilettantism and superiority over nature, which was there to serve mankind, if you knew what that was and could feel all these things in the depth they had at the time, you would see the chaise longue for what it really was, not just a piece of canvas stretched between four bits of wood like you must have thought when you first saw it.
“Once you’ve visited the museum I would like for you to tell me, if you will, what you felt, what sort of thoughts the scenes inspired. I’ve been looking at them for so long that a certain distance has come between us—if there ever was a time when that distance did not exist . . . Sometimes I get the impression I’m visiting a cemetery I came across along the way, I see graves, I read names, but I know nothing about these dead people, who they were when they were alive, and nothing about the place and time in which they lived.
“You have to remember that all this is strictly forbidden by our religion and our government, which is why I built the museum here, in our fiefdom, and not in A19 where I live among the people. And that is also why I deal in the secondhand trade, and more discreetly in antiques, to the great displeasure of my brothers Bri and Viz for a start, who think I’m not maintaining my rank, and also of my young, intelligent, and very ambitious nephew Ram, who has to work extra on my account to ensure my security and facilitate my economic activities, something I pretend not to notice so that he won’t exaggerate . . . Already I’m seen as the godfather of A19 when in fact it’s Ram’s henchmen who control everything around me. I’ve found contentment in secondhand things, in antiques, they’ve enabled me to get away from Abistan and work discreetly on my plan to put the twentieth century into a museum. Well then, on with your visit into the past, into impiety and illusion! I’ll wait for you at the other end; I don’t want to influence you.”
The museum consisted of a series of rooms, more or less vast, each one devoted to one episode of human life that, perhaps for all time, people had identified as a world unto itself, hermetically sealed off and independent from the next one, and therefore Toz had separated the rooms by locked doors; each key was hidden somewhere in the jumble of the room. To get into the next room, the next episode in life, the key had to be found, and there wasn’t all the time in the world, life is movement, it doesn’t wait. By creating this difficulty Toz sought to place the visitor (but who could that be, other than he alone?) into man’s natural state of not knowing his future and always seeking it, in urgency and difficulty.
The first room told the story of birth, from delivery to early childhood. It was like being there, the delivery room was strikingly real, you could almost hear the cries of the mother and the baby’s first wailing. On display cases, tables, or the floor were the banal items belonging to this phase of life: cradle, potty, stroller, baby bouncer, rattles and toys. On the walls were paintings and photographs featuring everyday life: children playing, eating, sleeping, swimming, drawing, while their parents watched over them.
The following rooms were devoted to adolescence and adulthood, divided according to various milieus, eras, professions, and circumstances. One of them made a particularly strong impression on Ati: the vividly realistic model of a heaving battlefield, with muddy trenches, incredible tangles of barbed wire, chevaux de frise, exhausted soldiers mounting an attack. The paintings and photographs revealed other aspects of war—devastated cities, steaming carcasses, emaciated prisoners in death camps, gaunt crowds on the roads fleeing the enemy.
In another room items of leisure and sports equipment were displayed, while the pictures on the wall showed a cinema, a skating rink, hot air balloons, a shooting range, a circus, paragliders in flight, and so on. Play and performance, along with extreme excitement, were the honey of that era. All these things had vanished from Abistan after the Victory and the Great Cleanup, so Ati wondered how and where Toz had managed to find these photographs. And what he must have paid for them.
One dark room was devoted to instruments of torture and death, and another to activities related to the economy, commerce, industry, and transport. Then came a pleasing installation of the kind Ati and Koa had seen in the ghetto of the Regs: a bar counter, an acrobatic waiter running between tables, people drinking heavily, crackpots calling out to very attractive women as they flaunted their tattoos and mustaches and thick builders’ biceps, and at the back of the room that ever-present narrow stairway vanishing into gloom and mystery. On the wall was an etching which had clearly served as a model for the installation: a visiting card glued to the wall said, the text in French: “French bistro: old-fashioned delinquents teasing loose women.”
The last room but one was reserved for old age and death. Death means only one thing, but there were numerous and varied funerary rites. Ati did not linger: he did not feel inspired by the sight of coffins, hearses, crematoriums, funeral parlors, and an anatomical skeleton, who seemed to find his situation rather amusing.
Ati did not see the time go by; he had never been on such a journey, an entire century of discovery and questioning. On his way he remembered how he had felt during his interminable voyage across Abistan, from Sîn to Qodsabad. A living museum over several thousand chabirs, an endless succession of regions, hamlets, deserts, forests, ruins, and lost camps, separated by borders that were invisible but symbolically as hermetic as a padlocked door (particularly if you forgot to validate your circulation visa). That great variety of races, customs, dwellings, utensils, work tools had gradually changed his way of looking at Abistan and at his own life; by the time he reached Qodsabad Ati was another man, he did not recognize anyone and people only recognized him through hearsay—he was the man who’d had consumption, the miraculous survivor from Sîn, Yölah’s protégé. Was that what you were supposed to expect a museum to do? To describe life like a book, to imitate it for pleasure, to transform people? Objects, paintings, photographs, a staged scene—did they really have the power to change people’s vision of life and of themselves?
At the end of the journey Ati found Toz in a vast empty room. Toz explained the symbolism behind it: Ati had entered the museum through an empty room, now he would leave through an empty room: the image of life caught between two voids, before creation and after death. Life is constrained by limits, it disposes only of its time, which is short, and is divided into segments that have no relation to each other apart from those which man drags around inside him from one end of his tenure to the other—uncertain memories of what was, and vague expectations of what shall be. The passage from one to another is not made explicit, it’s a mystery, one day the lovely baby, that inveterate sleeper, disappears, and no one is alarmed, and a turbulent, curious little child, a sprite, appears in its place, which hardly surprises the mother even when she finds herself left with two heavy, useless breasts. Later on other substitutions will occur, just as stealthily: a heavy, worried man will take the place of the slim, smiling young man who had been standing there, and in turn, through who knows what magical trick, the oppressed fellow will yield his seat to a stooped, silent man. It is at the end that the surprise comes, when a dead man, still warm, suddenly replaces the mute, cold old man who was sitting glued to his chair by the window. That is one transformation too many, yet sometimes it is welcome.
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