“Life goes by so fast that you don’t notice a thing,” you’ll say to yourself on the way to the cemetery.
Toz and Ati spent the afternoon philosophizing, their sadness heartfelt. Toz lived in nostalgia for a world he had not known, but which he thought he had managed to reconstitute faithfully as a still life, and into which he would like to breathe life. What would be the point? They agreed that the question was meaningless; the void was the essence of the world but did not, however, stop the world from existing and filling itself up with nothingness. That is the mystery of the zero: it exists to say that it does not exist. In this respect the Gkabul was the perfect response; to the absolute uselessness of the world the only response could be a human being’s absolute, comforting submission to nothingness. Nothing is what one is, nothing is what one shall remain, from dust to dust shalt thou return. As for Ati, he had examined the question in another way, and come up with the notion that the end of the world began at birth, the first cry of life was also the first death rattle. As time went by, with its lot of suffering, he had become convinced that the longer an affliction lasted, the sooner its end would come and life would begin a new cycle. The point was not to wait with one’s head full of questions but to accelerate the process, for to die in the hopes of a new life was more dignified, after all, than living in despair of one’s impending death.
They admitted honestly that Abistan’s great misfortune was the Gkabul: in response to the intrinsic violence of the void, it offered humanity submission to sanctified ignorance, and by pushing servitude to self-negation, to pure and simple self-destruction, it denied the possibility of rebellion as a means of inventing a world on a human scale—which, at the very least, might preserve humanity from the ambient madness. Religion truly is the remedy that kills.
For a time Toz had been interested in the history of the Gkabul. He was born in it, he did not see it, the Gkabul was the air he breathed, the water he drank, and he wore it in his mind the way people wore their burni over their shoulders. But before long he began to feel ill at ease; already at school he realized that public education was a calamity, the source of all calamities, such an insidious thing, as unstoppable and implacable as death. With true enthusiasm on his part, education turned him into a compulsive, vicious little confessor, prepared to swallow dark fairy tales and schoolgirl legends whole, and recite fantastical stanzas, obtuse slogans and offensive curses; and where physical exercise was concerned, he became the perfect perpetrator of all manner of pogroms and lynching. There was no time or attention left for anything else, optional branches such as poetry, music, pottery, or gymnastics. As the son of an Honorable, who would perhaps become an Honorable himself one day, he was, moreover, held to the blindness of the head conductor who is sure of his machine and what he is doing. As he dabbled in the Gkabul, to keep in step and reeducate himself, he lost both hope and hopefulness; the Gkabul was not meant to enlighten the unfortunate, it was ballast to take him to the bottom, and it wasn’t the school’s fault, the poor woman was teaching what she had been given to teach, and she even managed rather well, survivors were rare. It was too late, the Gkabul had spread its hypnosis into the body and the deep soul of the people, into their bodies, and it reigned supreme. How many centuries would it take to undo the spell—that was the only question that was truly worthwhile.
Casual as could be, Toz cleared a forbidden path and boldly set off down it. There was really only one path, the one that went back in time. Since the Gkabul had colonized the present for all centuries to come, it was in the past, before its advent, that one could escape from it. Before our time, humans were not all like this, wild, stubborn beasts filled with bad faith. From time to time Toz got lost along the way, History itself had gotten lost in the maquis, there weren’t any decent trails, they had all been blocked off and covered over. The most hardened historians knew how to work their way back as far as 2084, no further, no more than that. How else, without holy ignorance and the total apathy-inducing possession of people’s minds, could those poor folk have been persuaded that before the birth of Abistan there was only the uncreated, unknowable universe of Yölah? It couldn’t be simpler: just choose a date and stop time at that moment; people are already dead and foundering in the void, they’ll believe anything you tell them, they will applaud their rebirth in 2084. That will be their only choice: either to live according to the calendar of the Gkabul or return to their original void.
The discovery of the past very nearly killed Toz. As cultivated as he was, he did not know that 2083 existed, or that you could go even further back. A round earth is a dizzying tragedy for anyone who ever thought it was flat, with edges. The question “Who are we?” had suddenly become “Who were we?” and as a result one’s self-image changed drastically, was covered in darkness and ugliness; something had broken inside, the cornerstone that held up the universe, so there was poor Toz, as if tossed up in the air, living like a ghost among ancient ghosts. No one knows how to make time linear and coherent again once these qualities have been destroyed in such a way. Toz still didn’t know; he was somewhere between yesterday and today.
After a great deal of effort and research, he managed one day to break the time barrier and go back through the entire twentieth century. It was a miracle; believers, in their lifetime, cannot escape from the phenomenal pull of the Gkabul. Toz was gripped with wonder. He had discovered what every man who opened his eyes would hear as a first truth: before the world there is the world, and after the world there is still the world. He discovered a very rich century which was lacking for nothing—there were hundreds of languages, dozens of religions, an abundance of countries, cultures, contradictions; there was madness, unrestrained freedom, insurmountable danger, already, but there were also innumerable, serious sources of hope, well-oiled machinery, benevolent observers on the lookout for slippages, hardened refuseniks, men of goodwill who were not discouraged by effort but stimulated by it. Life is exuberant and voracious, both in good ways and bad, and it had proved as much during that century. There was only one thing missing, the simply mechanical means to rush to occupy the stars.
Toz also discovered something that all the others had perceived very early on, but which had been minimalized, relativized through heaviness, fear, calculation, the porousness of the air, or simply because the doomsayers were not sharp enough or loud enough: the warning signs of what the world would soon become if nothing were done to put things right. Toz watched as 2084 arrived and was followed by the Holy Wars and the nuclear holocausts; more importantly, he witnessed the birth of the absolute weapon which one does not need to buy or build, the conflagration of entire populations as they are filled with the violence of terror. It was all so obvious, so predictable, but those who said, “Not in our lifetime,” who echoed, “Never again,” were not heard. As in 1914, as in 1939 or 2014, 2022 or 2050, off they went again. But in 2084, it finally worked. The old world ceased to exist, and the new world, Abistan, began its eternal reign upon the planet.
What are you supposed to do when you examine the past and see the danger bearing down on those who came before you in History? How can you warn them? How can you tell your own contemporaries, now, that if they carry on the way they’ve begun yesterday’s tragedies will soon be upon them? How can you persuade them, when their religion forbids them from believing in their own death, when they are convinced that their place in paradise has been booked and is waiting for them like a suite in a luxury hotel?
Toz was astonished to discover the origin of the Gkabul. It was not spontaneous generation. It was simple, nothing miraculous about it—the Gkabul was not a creation of Abi’s, in keeping with Yölah’s instructions, as had been taught with the utmost seriousness and gravity since 2084; it came from far away, from an inner malfunction in an ancient religion which had once brought honor and happiness to many great tribes of the deserts and plains; but its inner workings had been broken by the violent, discordant use that had been made of it ov
er the centuries, and this had been aggravated by the absence of competent repairmen or attentive guides. The Gkabul came into existence because of a lack of care that should have been given a religion which, as the aggregate and quintessence of the religions that had preceded it, sought to be the future of the world.
Those who are sick, are weak, and at the mercy of scoundrels. United in a clique known as “The Messenger Brothers,” a group of adventurers who sensed all around them that the end was near decided to found a new religion on the ruins of the old one. A good idea: they took what was still strong from the old one to add it to the new one. The new religion drew crowds with the novelty of its discourse, its tactical game, its commercial marketing and militarist aggressiveness. Their successors did even better: they revised the major symbols, invented Abi and Yölah, wrote the Gkabul, built the Kïïba and the City of God, founded the Just Brotherhood, and gave themselves the title of chik, which means Honorable (to distance themselves from the vulgar Messenger Brothers). Once they were equipped with potent symbols and a good army, they broke with the old religion, which no longer served any purpose; it was dying off among the elderly and a few benighted scholars who believed in the miracle of Resurrection and the possibility of a Fountain of Youth. Now the idea was to put all that behind them and track down any nostalgic stragglers: they were dangerous, they might want to try to bring back the dead.
“This is all still a working hypothesis; there’s always a lot that is secretive and intoxicating about religion and military strategy—to be honest they’re two sides of the same coin. This requires further thought,” added Toz.
Ati became aware of a strange sensation inside: he felt no interest in a question that had hitherto preoccupied him quite a bit, after all. What Toz had told him about his research into History and his thoughts about life formed an answer in themselves. If he decided to ask the question it was because this was a good opportunity, and he might not get it again.
“Tell me, Toz, I’m sure you’ve read the Nas report . . . Can you tell me about it?”
“Uh . . . I don’t know what to tell you. Those are State secrets, I’m not supposed to know them, I have no official position, other than being His Lordship’s brother, and to be honest it’s very complicated, but in fact, well, here it is: the report doesn’t exist. There’s never been a Nas report, it’s the fictitious element in a fictitious plan . . . which came about gradually. When Nas, who was aware of the danger the discovery of the village represented, got back from his mission, he made an oral report to his minister, just the two of them, in private, and I imagine his boss ordered him not to breathe a word of it to anyone. He’d let him know, he’d see, he’d think about it, was what he would have said. Then Nas disappeared and only then did people start to talk about a report . . . then about the report, and, as is often the case, by virtue of talking about something, you make it reality. The Nas report appeared; people called it THE Nas report. It evoked a whole atmosphere, a legend. At that point, something had to be done, so copies were made of the report that didn’t exist, and they were distributed among the Honorables, with a view to having the Just Brotherhood deliberate what to do. This report, written by someone, who knows, from the Just Brotherhood or the Apparatus, was full of nonsense. The village was said to be an advanced outpost of the Enemy; the famous Democ was hiding there; heretics had founded a community that had pledged allegiance to Balis, and so on. To elucidate the matter I went to the village with a group of experts mandated by the Great Commander; Bri appointed me to be part of the commission, because each clan insisted on having their own representative. With Tat, cabinet head for the Great Commander, presiding, we wrote a technical report that was instantly placed under absolute secrecy, and which in turn became THE Nas report. I won’t be giving anything away if I tell you that we did indeed find troubling things in that village; it looked as if it had been hosting a community that was experimenting with a lifestyle and an administration founded on the free will of the individual. To many of us this was incomprehensible, a good number of us couldn’t see how you could organize your life without first uniting around a leader, a religion, and an army. This story illustrates all that is wrong with Abistan: we’ve invented a world that is so absurd that we ourselves have to be more and more absurd with every passing day just to find the place where we left off the day before; in short, in the end we devised a report that conveyed what frightened us and we didn’t want to hear about. History is dragging us into its madness. The other dramatic consequence is that the affair has divided the Just Brotherhood and altered the balance of power within it, and here in Abistan that automatically means war.”
After so much philosophizing and discussion of current affairs, the two explorers of the Abistani soul have reached the point where they are bound to ask themselves, “And now, what is to be done?”
Toz has a plan he drew up long ago: he will go on doing his research, convinced as he is that it will be useful someday; when men of good will know how to recognize each other and mobilize, they will find the materials he has so painstakingly stockpiled. The rest of the time he will help his nephew Ram; beneath his air of an impenitent plotter who wants to be top dog, he is a reformer, in other words a true revolutionary who pushes through his reforms instead of just singing their praises. In this they have very similar aims: eliminate the Just Brotherhood, dismantle the Apparatus, open the City of God, turn the Kïïba into a multimillennial museum, destroy the absurd myth about this Abi who is supposed to be alive and immortal, raise people’s consciousness, set up an assembly of representatives and a government that will answer to them—now there you have an exalting future to build. The people might die as a result, they hold fast to their gods and their woes, but there will still be children, and they have their innocence, they will quickly learn another way to dream and to make war, we will call on them to save the planet and wage a fierce battle against the smoke traders. There is always the danger that Ram might turn into a horrible top dog, and Toz knows that, so he wants to bring about a transition that will ensure the emergence of tenacious, competent competitors . . . His idea is that if they all want to be top dog, they will cancel each other out, they will be forced to get along to go on doing their very lucrative business, they will eventually understand that losing doesn’t necessarily mean dying assassinated, and winning doesn’t necessarily imply killing the other guy. You mustn’t stop them from dreaming, on the contrary. The most dangerous ones are the ones who don’t dream; they have souls of ice.
. . .
Toz goes on expounding his ideas. They are good, and realistic, but impossible to implement and he knows it. He is trying to convince himself of the fact. The revolution that Ram wants will end in a bloodbath and nothing will change, Abistan is Abistan and will remain Abistan. The Honorables and their sons, who already see themselves as Honorables in the place of their Honorable fathers—they too dream and plot to become top dog. Who would willingly give up his place to the best one? They are all better than the best among them; every one of them is the genius the people have been waiting for.
Suddenly Toz pauses; he realizes he has been talking so much simply because deep down he has nothing to say; in fact he doesn’t believe a single word. He asks, “And you, Ati, what do you want to do?”
Ati didn’t have to think, he realized he’d known what he wanted for a long time, for several months now . . . Ever since his stay at the sanatorium in Sîn, he had not stopped thinking about it. He knew it was a bad choice, irremediable, unachievable, it would lead him to terrible disillusionment, inhuman suffering, certain death . . . but what did that matter, it was his choice, and he chose freedom.
Toz was waiting for his reply: “Yes, tell me, what do you want to do, where do you want to go?”
“Do you think, dear Toz, that Ram would allow me to leave the fiefdom . . . before his revolution?”
“Yes, surely. I’ll vouch for it.”
“Do you th
ink if I asked him to leave me somewhere in Abistan he would do that?”
“Why not, as long as it doesn’t endanger his own plans . . . And there, too, I’ll do everything I can to get him to agree.”
Ati was silent for a moment then said, “Tell me something else, Toz. Not long ago, you asked Koa and me if we knew Democ . . . who was supposed to exist without existing, or vice versa . . . I’d like in turn to ask you a question like that.”
“I remember . . . I’m listening.”
“Have you ever heard of—of the Border? Do you know about it?”
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