Travels in Nihilon

by Alan Sillitoe

  The professor put his briefcase on the table: ‘I leave you in charge, general. I have to go and organize the Northern Sector. I’m a very busy man in these great and stirring times.’

  Richard objected to his appointment, but the professor, with a ludicrous and comic smile, rushed outside into the crossfire and smoke.

  The waiter stood respectfully beside him. ‘Do you require anything else, general?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, waving him away.

  The waiter, in spite of the fact that they were both in civilian clothes, gave a smart military salute, and walked off.

  Chapter 22

  There was a humming in the air. It was pitch dark, but by the light of his luminous watch, Adam saw that it was four o’clock. He had been asleep for only three hours, but was suddenly awake, and no longer tired, in spite of his exertions on the previous day. The warm body of the reception-girl lay beside him, her straight black hair spreading over the pillow like a fully opened fan.

  His one thought while dressing was to write more notes concerning his travels in Nihilon. There was much to record for the intended guidebook, and he considered his present inexplicable wakefulness a good opportunity to get some of it done. But the humming, which he assumed to come from the giant generators at the dam, disturbed him. Opening the window he stepped on to the terrace. The sky was raddled with stars. He looked up the valley hoping to see the actual wall of the dam, but though the whole sky in that direction was lit up, a block of flats hid it from him.

  The generator noise frightened him, especially when he suddenly remembered the story of the dam being unsafe, which he had heard from both the waiter and the pretty girl still sleeping in his bed. The thought of it releasing a ferocious amount of water on to him and thirty thousand others filled his soul with such anxiety that he was ready to vomit. But he fought it back. He didn’t want to believe it. Yet why should they lie to him? Was it merely a complex trick of the town council to make life more exciting for thrill-seeking visitors to Fludd? Nothing seemed strange any more. The previous day’s travel had shattered his standards and expectations, and made him feel both cowardly and ready to do something about his possible doom in the town of Fludd. The fact that thirty thousand valiant people were sleeping around him, and disregarding such danger to their lives, only made him want to get out of the place as soon as possible, for they seemed because of this to be absolutely insane in their passivity, and a positive menace to those, such as himself, who still felt a human twinge of self-preservation. He packed his few belongings into the panniers and, without further looking at his companion of the night, opened the door and pushed his bicycle outside.

  In the corridor he could not find a light-switch, and was unable to remember the way to the lift. When he struck a match and found a switch, no bulb lit up. The match burned his finger, and he was in darkness again. Perhaps there was a power failure, he thought, yet how could this be, with the hotel so close to the largest electrical generating plant in Nihilon?

  He sat on his cicyle, and pedalled along the corridor, his dynamo lighting all in front. Reaching a cul-de-sac, he turned and rode the other way, close to panic, wanting only to get out of the hotel, the town and valley before the dam burst. He told himself that, in spite of all his fears, it might not collapse tonight, but this was only to calm himself so that he would be able to think more clearly if it did.

  Reaching the lift he found that it did not work, which seemed one more reason to hurry out of the place. He steadied his bicycle down four flights of stairs, then along by the silent reception desk to the main front exit, where an old, white-haired, pale-faced doorman slept peacefully on a chair. His face was so gentle and good-natured that Adam suspected he might not really be asleep. A street light came on outside and shone through the glass. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I can’t rest,’ said Adam. ‘I’m going for a ride around the town.’

  ‘I don’t trust sleep, either,’ said the old man. ‘That’s why I woke up. If I trusted sleep and thought it would do me some good, I wouldn’t wake up from it, and that might be better for me, because then I’d live longer – but who cares about that sort of thing in the town of Fludd? Your light hit the corner of my eye, tangled with a vein in the dark, you might say. I don’t trust sleep because then I can wake up for a bit of human talk. Give me a cigarette.’

  ‘I’m going out to buy some,’ said Adam.

  The old man opened the door for him. ‘Don’t be long, then.’

  The streets were deserted, but increasingly well-lit as he came to the edge of the town. Slogans in red paint had been scrawled on the walls saying DOWN WITH THE DAM and FLUDD WILL RISE AGAIN. The main road ascended in hairpin curves up the side of the valley, and he rode the bicycle as far as he could, but had to push when the gradient became too steep. He disconnected the dynamo and walked slowly by the light of the risen moon, as silently as possible in case he should be stopped by pickets and sent back to the hotel. He thought with regret of the warm bed, and the girl he had left lying in it, now feeling foolish at his decision to get out of the valley when in all probability there was no need to. He’d only heard about the dam, and hadn’t actually seen it, yet he felt sure that it existed, but who the hell, he wondered, working himself into a fury as he approached the skyline after an hour’s hard push up a few hundred toilsome metres, had started the irresponsible nihilistic rumour that it was unsafe?

  Be that as it may, it seemed as if a giant, invisible, vicious hand tugged the bicycle from him, threw it on the ground in front, then finished its work by dropping him on top of it. The roar of an explosion shed a sudden orange light, and tried to pull the roof from his mouth. In spite of his previous constant preoccupation with the dam, it was some minutes, while he lay there half-stunned, before he realized that it must have been destroyed. He expected masses of water to churn through the groaning sky and fall directly upon him, and his one impulse was to crawl the remaining few hundred metres to the skyline and get over the crest of the hill, as if he would find safety there. The lights of Fludd in the valley behind were going out one by one. He knew at last that there was no safety in Nihilon, but wondered why he alone out of thirty thousand had survived the disaster? The noise of breaking walls reached him, as more apartment blocks gave way.

  He had pains in his stomach, but was relieved to find that his bicycle had suffered no real damage. There were tears on his face, forced out by shock, and perhaps sorrow at the fate of the inhabitants of Fludd. At the summit of the hill he turned to look back in the first light of dawn, at a sluggishly turning sheet of water where the flourishing town had been. He sat on a rock and wrote a hymn to Fludd, and to his sleeping loved one lost to him forever, thinking that should he come back this way to the frontier, she would not be there to greet him.

  But he recalled once more his far-off promise to meet Jaquiline Sulfer in Nihilon City, and their intention of going home together in a first-class express sleeper. Such a bright lascivious picture calmed him down, and with one last look at the grey lake of Fludd, he turned and pedalled along the road towards the capital, reflecting that travels in a foreign country put you into the way of knowing more about yourself, or clarifying what was already in your heart. Out of your own country, he had discovered, a veritable explosion of the personality takes place, even over the most minor incidents. All you had to do was stay calm in the face of the final threatened disintegration, he decided, stopping to take a bar of chocolate from one of his panniers, and noting how fresh and cool the air smelled as he stood by the roadside to eat it.

  The road gradually descended through open moorland, scenery broken by small fenced-off fields of black earth in which people were already working.

  At the next village was a restaurant, and he went in to get some breakfast. The dining room was full of well-dressed men and their stout wives eating heavy nihilistic meals. There were no seats left, so he sat on a high stool at the bar.

  A dark-haired half-starved young man stand
ing on a nearby chair appeared to be shouting at everyone: ‘You eat too much, I say! But the revolution will cure all that! Honesty and order and progress will make you lean, and you’ll be afraid to eat for fear of choking on your own guilt.’

  This sort of talk in Nihilon sounded exciting to Adam, and he looked up at the young man so as to hear his words more clearly. Several eaters took a moment from masticating to laugh at what he said.

  ‘You are disgusting,’ he went on. ‘You are all fat maggots living off the backs of the people. You gobble such enormous meals while they are sweating in the fields on nothing to eat. You are a herd of rich pigs gluttonizing all day, while they starve even at night.’

  A few of them clapped, but he was obviously not yet in the full stream of his wrath. ‘When the revolution comes, and make no mistake, it will come sooner than you think, you’ll all be set to work, building roads, draining marshes, moving mountains, excavating canals, digging with spades.’

  Several of the eaters groaned. He was getting better. ‘But if I have my way, my own particular way, my own private personal spiteful heartfelt way, I’ll have all of you stood up against a sunlit wall and shot.’ To their cheers and applause he came down, and walked across to the bar. On his way there, some of the more appreciative and enthusiastic diners thrust money into his hands.

  Adam was served with meat, bread, coffee, and Nihilitz. ‘I loathe them so much,’ the firebrand said to him, ‘that I can’t even eat.’

  The barman put a pot of coffee before him: ‘What was that explosion at Fludd?’

  ‘Explosion?’ said Adam.

  ‘We heard a bit of a bang from that direction not long ago,’ said the barman.

  ‘The dam went,’ Adam told him, his mouth full.

  ‘I’d better get on to the local newspaper then,’ said the barman. ‘Anybody survive?’

  ‘Only me, as far as I know.’

  The barman whistled through his teeth and went to the telephone.

  ‘The government’s been waiting to make an example of Fludd for a long time,’ said the firebrand. ‘Those who can live like the people of Fludd are dangerous, unpredictable, proud, sleepy, independent – in a word, revolutionary. But that barman’s wasting his time phoning the local paper. The news is known already. The dam was blown up deliberately.’

  ‘It must have been,’ said Adam. ‘I saw it. There was a great explosion.’

  ‘You saw it, did you?’ said Firebrand, ‘and you’re the only survivor?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, your life isn’t worth that empty plate you haven’t eaten. They’ll kill you. They must have banked on having no witnesses so that they could blame it on Cronacia. You’re a hunted man from now on. You’d better throw in your lot with me.’

  This was bad news, but Adam ordered another breakfast. ‘You see,’ Firebrand explained, ‘I’m the resident agitator at this popular and expensive restaurant. The manager hired me six months ago to make speeches so that the customers, thinking the revolution was coming, would eat more to make up for the hard times that the revolution would bring, if it did actually come. So because people are superstitious his business increased twenty times. Restaurants for fifty kilometres around had to close down. He pays me almost nothing, as you can imagine, but that’s all right, because while I’m shouting about a mock revolution, I’m meanwhile planning and working for the real revolution. No one suspects this – how could they? – but my first blow is due to be struck today, and since you are on the government’s death-list you’d better join me. We aren’t the only two, because there’s street fighting already in Shelp and Nihilon City. The whole country is rising.’

  ‘What did you do before you took this job?’ Adam asked out of genuine curiosity.

  ‘I was a writer working for the National Magazine, and I did very well at that sort of work. The best thing I wrote was a series of articles in praise of nihilistic capitalism. I was made a Hero of the Evolution by President Nil, being the youngest man ever to get that award, so you can imagine how I felt. The only trouble about doing something like that, though, is that you get disillusioned straight away with what you’ve just written. So of course I lost my job because I began to see that nihilism was not the right thing for Nihilon. I became a revolutionary, met other people who had actually formed dissident groups, and for a time I travelled around getting familiar with the country and its terrain. The only maps we had were those in school atlases on a small scale, a rudimentary motoring-map, and a few wild productions from those cartographic maniacs patronized by President Nil.’

  Adam felt in his pocket and, wanting to be liked, even by a mock revolutionary, gave him the map he had taken from the butt of the soldier’s rifle at the frontier. Firebrand grabbed it and put it into his pocket: ‘For that, my friend, you’ll be made Commander of the Second Column in the march on Nihilon. As I was saying, the government is trying to build up a tourist industry here, but we revolutionaries are not going to allow it. We want real factories instead of paper ones. Out with all tourists! Say no to paper factories! Death to cardboard schools! Down with plastic sports-palaces!’

  He grabbed Adam by the shirt front: ‘Listen, in this country a hundred writers have formed an association called the Company of Novelists (CON) and every year they are ordered by the Ministry of War to write a pornographic novel. These are so filthy that they go into a great number of editions. They are translated into all languages, and earn huge amounts of foreign currency, so that the Ministry of War can buy guns and ammunition. Such vile works swamp the home market and keep the people complacent. There are other things I could tell you, so many things. In Nihilon a writer or a filmstar is liable to receive a telegram from President Nil ordering him or her to commit a sexual outrage so that the newspapers can have something to write about. For when the culprits are caught and tried, the case is salaciously reported, though all that happens to the accused is that they are committed to “special exile” for a few months, to some coastal or mountain resort, where they can go on having a good time. Believe me, dear fellow-insurrectionary, this is a terrible country, and I am determined to purify it.’

  ‘But if something’s wrong with it,’ Adam argued, ‘and it certainly seems that something is, then can’t the people alter it without revolution? Aren’t there free elections every five years at which people can vote in a new government if they wish?’

  Firebrand laughed bitterly. ‘Elections? Not any more, my friend. There were, at first, very early on, but the people were in such a euphoric mood of don’t-care and don’t-know, that vast deputations went to the government building and said: “We don’t want any more voting. We’re happy. So after all, what does it matter?” And the government said: “It does matter. It’s democracy. It’s your right to vote. It’s your duty. So if you won’t do it, we’ll vote for you.” And that’s how it’s been ever since. At every general election the people get into great moods of excitement, wondering which way the voting will go, staying up all through the night to hear the results. And then at six in the morning the government breaks the tension by announcing that it has got in once more, after which it declares a public holiday, so that the grateful people, secure in their very own and latest victory, can either go to sleep or continue their celebrations.’

  He jumped up on to his seat again to address everyone in the dining hall: ‘You’ll all hear this. Listen to this, you trough-scum, you bilge-Nihilists, you riddle-headed soulmongers, the country has to wind down and stop. I’m putting the brakes on. The food will choke you when you hear what I’ve got to say.

  ‘In Nihilon a man who has his passport stolen gets thrown into prison. Anyone whose car is rifled is arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. If you were alive after being murdered you’d be accused of negligence. Crime is encouraged in order to facilitate a more equitable distribution of wealth. A criminal is honoured for his attempts to assist in this. I have nightmares about dishonour and chaos, but the revolution will triumph!’r />
  He was now raving, and intermittent applause swept around the restaurant. ‘Nihilism is all for all and one for one, which makes a nation of fatsters out on the grab, and a country of thin men trying to stop them with all the black cunning born out of a congenital yearning for catastrophe. Nihilism is when a good system can’t get the upper hand over the bad, and when the bad won’t totally destroy the good in case something viable should be built out of the ruins. President Nil and human nature hold a perfect balance of chaos, which you all prefer because you can’t bear the thought of honesty and order and goodness in the world.

  ‘Even sabbaths do not exist,’ he shouted. ‘They used to come every seven days, the sabbaths, but now by government decree they come less and less, so that at the present moment they’re running at the rate of about forty a year. Thus are the people cheated of their leisure. But the revolution will change all that. There’ll be a compulsory day of rest every seven days, except for you pigs eating your swinish food, who will have to put up with only one sabbath a year! The revolution will declare war on the gluttons. You’ll regret every centimetre of your fat cheeks when the revolution comes. So prepare for the worst, you pigs. Death to the gluttons! Down with all those who weigh more than eighty kilos!’

  A huge man with a napkin over his chest, and food spilling out of his mouth, came from a table with tears in his eyes. He patted Firebrand on the back when he got down, pinched his left cheek affectionately, and pushed a large banknote into his top pocket. He then shambled back to his table to carry on eating, still weeping.

  ‘You’ll be the first to go,’ Firebrand shouted to him. ‘I’ll remember you, especially. Now, come with me,’ he said in a low voice to Adam. ‘Your life is worthless, but the revolution will save you yet.’

  At the door of the restaurant Firebrand took a hand-grenade from his pocket, and pulled out the pin. ‘This is my starting signal,’ he called in a loud voice so that everyone could hear, and holding it high so that they could see: ‘Long live the revolution!’