Travels in Nihilon

by Alan Sillitoe

  He felt that this might, after all, be a reasonable theme for his talent. To be in the presence not only of an old friend and a fine breakfast, but also of a vivacious and beautiful woman like Mella, put him into such a mood of positive enjoyment that Edgar began to feel the first twinges of jealousy. ‘I would be delighted to write poems for you,’ Adam said, kissing her hand.

  Soon after breakfast, Mella made her triumphant entry into the town, on her mobile platform. Edgar was by her side and, to the rear, on two hastily installed chairs, sat Adam and Firebrand. Because the capture of the town had caused the deaths of so many of her soldiers, she did not make her customary speech in the main square.

  By nightfall the advance of her force, now five thousand strong, had taken them close to the foothills of the Athelstan Alps. Because of aches and pains in all his limbs Adam had expected a warrior’s rest before the final move began, but he was disappointed. Since crossing the frontier he’d hardly had time to pull a comb through his hair, though he admitted by way of consolation that being unwashed and ragged did give him a peculiar and attractive feeling of freedom.

  Chapter 30

  ‘Nihilon is a city of half a million people which stands on the beautiful banks of the River Nihil, and can rightly claim to be the great seat of international nihilism. Its streets are laid out in a chequerboard pattern which gives such ease of control that one machine gun can dominate a thoroughfare two miles long. With twelve such streets running from north to south, and twelve going from east to west at right angles, only forty-eight powerful machine guns are needed to keep the population in perpetual subjection. With the complement of six men to a gun, no more than half a battalion need be on duty at any one time. And because these loyal soldiers are relieved every four hours, a mere brigade of eighteen hundred could keep the city centre locked up around the clock. This Nihilon lock-up force is so trustworthy that even the fiercest and most profound eruption of traditional nihilistic boisterousness on the part of the unpredictable inhabitants can be put down with minimal loss on one side, and none on the other.

  ‘As Nihilists, therefore, the inhabitants of Nihilon City know how far they can go in their celebrations of nihilism. Decades of refinement have taught them to control these outbreaks of liveliness. That is to say, they know when to stop, for a mob that cannot control itself is a danger to the community – it is thought – while a mob that does control itself is a danger to itself. Thus their tainted hearts have properly inculcated into themselves the tradition of therapeutic nihilism. Under the ever-watchful sights of forty-eight machine guns, this is not to be wondered at.

  ‘The police (who are, after all, none other than the citizens themselves, not only in Nihilon but in any country you care to name) keep an ear close and an eye set for those seditious malcontents who talk of orderly progress and cultural enlightenment, human responsibility and social honesty, and the universal fraud of human love – those brainless engines of menace for whom the government is on the look out, and for whom they cannot help but have an inordinate respect. Those who preach order, say the government, would only like to destroy society. Those who talk of progress want to put the country back to an age of barbarism. Nihilism works. It has been perfected through twenty-five years (if not for centuries), and to expound the benefits of law and order in the great nihilistic republic of Nihilonia is the most direct form of treason, for it means nothing less than plunging the honest population of patriotic enthusiastic Nihilists back into the darkest misery of the soul. Nihilists have come on to the earth in order to survive in disorder, not to go mad in regimentation. Therefore Nihilon, under the benign rule of President Nil, has devised the perfect system of regimented disorder as the best way of safeguarding the eternal spirit of its citizens. Life is the great driving-force of nihilism. Strife means Life! Confusion is creative! Security is idleness! Get up and mix! Nihilism is the soul of life. All talk of order and honesty only confuses, and thereby seeks to enslave and crush it.’

  The professor’s commentary on these few pilfered pages from President Nil’s private diary observed that the volatile inhabitants of Nihilon seemed to have moved during the last few months from the desire for therapeutic destruction to a yearning for therapeutic reality, hence the strong indications of the tendency to insurrection, undetected by the authorities who mistakenly but understandably saw it only as the usual calm before one of the periodic nihilistic bouts. This is what the nascent but well-trained opposition had always relied upon, and now that it was definitely coming about, they were taking the opportunity to exacerbate the collapse of power in order to acquire it for themselves.

  The commentary concluded by saying that President Nil’s constant extolling of total freedom had proved a most thorough way of enslaving the populace, tying them to the basic nature of their own lived-out fantasies. The slavery of such nihilism was the logical development of the jungle, the ultimate in raw and naked private enterprise, the flowering mushroom of human nature.

  Richard wandered around the city, unobtrusively passing the hours until taking command of his troops for the march on Tungsten, examining tourist-sites for his guidebook, and careful at the same time to avoid any would-be assassin. Fortunately, no one as yet knew his identity, which he considered due to the adroitness of the insurrectionsists who had chosen him for the job. He admired such people, and hoped he would in no way disappoint them.

  He found his way back to the café with the bullet-proof terrace, and as there wasn’t much shooting in the nearby streets, he thumbed through the papers in his briefcase, one of which informed him that the working people of Nihilon had no trade unions. Instead, the employers had unions, and it was they who went on strike for higher salaries. The workers had been given control of the means of production quite early on, as a matter of nihilistic policy, but the employers still did their usual work because they were found absolutely necessary to the running of industry. The employers prospered on their wages, while the workers got thin on their profits. Thus the employers occasionally went on strike, and when they did, the factory stopped immediately. The government invariably came out in sympathy with their strike, and forced the workers to put the employers’ salaries up. The spiral towards economic disaster continued. The policy of the law-and-order party was, therefore, to reinstate both employers and workers under rational government control, which meant putting a stop to the mad nihilistic capitalism that had so far prevailed.

  When the early evening shooting opened it was particularly intense, indicating that the battle for the capital was by no means over. A young man wearing a soldier’s forage cap, and carrying a rifle, came in from the square and walked up to Richard’s table, laying down a scruffy piece of paper which he asked him to sign.

  Richard saw, while the soldier stood to attention, that it was a request for permission to blow up the People’s Academy of Erotic Arts and Crafts, and all subsidiary departments of it in various provincial towns. So he signed, regretfully, and the soldier departed with a wide smile, and tears in his eyes. Richard has passed the building during the day, and loitered there for a while, hoping to get in, but it was already picketed by young men of the insurrectionary movement wearing white-and-yellow arm bands, and giving out notices saying that the academy had been shut for the good of the people. Richard gathered from an elderly male onlooker that not everyone agreed with this decision. In fact some people had hoped to watch the television screens in the lecture hall when the report on the sexual hook-up in space was shown. But now it seemed as if they would be forced into the embarrassing position of seeing it at home in the bosoms of their families.

  Having signed the order for its destruction, and asked for a plate of food, together with a small bottle of Anihilitz (somewhat stronger than Nihilitz, and only to be drunk while eating), he took out his guidebook-briefing on the People’s Academy of Erotic Arts and Crafts. It commented on the fact that catalogues for this singular establishment were available to the general public, who might apply for them at t
he side door. ‘However,’ the text continued, ‘it has been brought to the notice of the editors that it is inadvisable to adopt this procedure, as cameras are concealed in nearby buildings so that records may be maintained on who makes application to obtain these unique and degenerate books. We are informed that, at times of social unrest, such applicants are liable to interrogation. Travellers, therefore, ought not to avail themselves of this catalogue-service in case possession of it is used in some way to delay their exit at the frontier. Having said this, our representative should endeavour to gain admittance to this establishment in order to describe it for our future readers.’

  Richard now regretted having signed the order for its destruction, and hoped that, by some fluke of inefficiency, it might be spared. He would much rather they had asked him to cooperate in the destruction of NAG – the National Art Gallery, a permanent exhibition by the foremost artist of Nihilon, Dung. His paintings were massive and stylish, vividly coloured and monstrously exaggerated poster-bank-notes of the great Nihilist Inflationary Capitalist Transformation Period to the era of the Good Life. The handbook stated that no one had captured the spirit of the people and the nation so profoundly, and went on to say that Dung’s paintings were works of immense significance and genius. They even merited more asterisks than the genius Anonymous Bosh, whose immense pornographic paintings in the old style had been a star attraction in the establishment now under sentence of destruction.

  Many rooms of NAG were given over to books of laudatory criticism which had been written about Dung and his masterpieces of mock-fiscal art. Countless costly and elaborate volumes, as well as innumerable scholarly exegeses in the form of magazine articles, were racked and filed for the benefit of people and scholars who rarely went there. Entrance to the museum was free, and recorded not by ticket but by the ratchet works of several turnstiles. The portly men on the door, and all the ushers, were paid according to attendance, and consequently could be seen every minute of the day running in and out and round and round in frenzied circles, so that the numbers registered as entering would be as great as possible. In fact so busy were they at this frantic labour that the few people who genuinely wanted to look at the paintings were rudely told not to interfere with the cultural life of the nation, and pushed out of the way if they insisted on doing so.

  It was dark, and the flash of a great explosion filled the sky outside. Richard’s glass of Anihilitz toppled over, and a large crack zigzagged down the bullet-proof glass of the terrace window. When the tremor subsided he wrote in his guidebook notes: ‘The Editors regret to say that the People’s Academy of Erotic Arts and Crafts no longer exists.’

  People who crowded into the café to get drunk were saying that the whole city was now in insurrectionist hands. On rooftops bordering the square, soldiers were mounting anti-aircraft guns. In fact hundreds of them were also being placed on the top floors of buildings all over the city, so that their muzzles were pointing out of the windows, through lace curtains, from specially constructed emplacements among the furniture within. This vast array of ambush-artillery was in readiness for the flight of the Nihilist celebration aircraft that was due to fly over when the Nihilonian space-rocket went into the heavens.

  It seemed unlikely that this project would begin, but the new and honest authorities of the city were taking no chances. Perhaps as a final effort against the insurrection, the aircraft would still take off from some hidden airfield of the northern coast and fly over Nihilon City, even if the space-rocket were prevented from being launched. So law and order had to be ready for it.

  Richard gathered, from the busy conversations, that the celebration aircraft was fitted with four special piston-driven engines, which were tuned to play, like a great symphony organ, the national nihilistic anthem of Nihilonia, and various other compositions, such as ‘Free Enterprise Forever’, and ‘Every Man for Himself’. The pilot could throw the appropriate switch in his cockpit when approaching the city, and the four infernal combustion engines, as well as propelling the aircraft, would begin to play the anthem as he swept low over the tops of the buildings. It was so monstrously loud that there was no possible way of escaping its din. It would fly back and forth over the city for a whole hour, then set off for a circular tour of the principal towns of Nihilon, to make sure that the rest of the country suffered the same fate as the capital.

  Richard, in the rapid flow of his writing, found himself exaggerating the truth of this, and recounting for future readers how a score of airborne concatenators were sent hedge-hopping over the country, their eighty pounding engines programmed to whatever so-called music the diabolical Nihilistic government and its pet composers might devise. His arabesque statements descended into lies too fantastic even to sound feasible, till he found it difficult to stop, realizing with hilarity and helplessness that though he had accepted the task of assisting the apostles of honesty and rectitude, he was at the same time being completely corrupted by the saturating nihilism all around him.

  He wondered whether any of his colleagues on the guidebook were similarly influenced, and while dwelling on this possible misfortune he saw at a nearby table the young man he had met in the suburban café across the Bridge of Suicides. When he lifted a languid hand by way of greeting, Richard beckoned him over: ‘Have you found the insurrectionist general yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the young man, sitting down and swigging freely from the bottle of Anihilitz. ‘You, of course. I’ve been following you for the last few hours.’

  ‘And what do you intend to do about it?’ asked Richard, the revolver bulging comfortably close in his briefcase.

  ‘Kill myself,’ the young man smiled. ‘What else can I do? The government fled to Tungsten this morning, and President Nil has disappeared, so they say. And now the insurrectionists are hunting me.’

  ‘You want me to help you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have another drink, then. You seem an honest Nihilist. Perhaps I could find you a job in my column. I might even take you on to the staff, since I don’t have one yet.’ Such an act might earn him the approval of any world-weary over-subtle insurrectionary. ‘I’ll pay you well.’

  ‘I could only do it for nothing.’

  ‘You’re an idealist already,’ said Richard.

  ‘I always was,’ said the ex-assassin, finishing the bottle of Anihilitz, and calling for another. Beyond the glass, crowds were dancing around impromptu groups of musicians who had come out with their instruments as they had on all former, though not so successful, occasions. Even so, above the noise, full-stop bullets still appeared to be doing their work in reasonably dark corners. A man who came in was regretting to his wife that the NAG building was on fire. Richard was called to the telephone hanging on the wall: ‘Hello? Who’s that?’

  ‘The commander-on-chief.’

  ‘I recognize your voice, professor.’

  ‘The brigade will be waiting at PQ 45 at four o’clock in the morning. Motor transport will take your leading battalion to Tungsten. The attack is set for eleven. Good luck.’ The telephone earpiece clicked.

  When Richard got back to his table the ex-assassin had gone, together with briefcase, gun, maps, and operations orders, and his precious guidebook-notes. It was the disappearance of these last that worried him most. They were slanted against the very roots of the country itself, nihilistic or not, and so he could be held responsible for them even by a law-and-order régime.

  The waiter threw his screwed-up bill on the table, and waited sullenly for him to pay it. ‘The new government will settle that,’ said Richard, opening it out. ‘I’ll sign for it, though.’

  ‘Oh no, you won’t,’ cried the waiter, turning red with rage. ‘You’ll pay now, in cash, you foreign scum, or I’ll telephone the Shooting Squads.’

  Richard stood up. ‘I’m a general in your army, and you’ll be tried for this, when I get back from Tungsten.’

  ‘You’re not a general,’ the waiter scoffed, ‘you’re a tourist and a spy,
that’s what you are, so pay up peacefully. Even our great and noble President Took wouldn’t refuse to settle his bill like an honest man. I suppose you are one of those diabolical Nihilists whose yoke we’ve had to suffer under these last twenty-five years. Well, we know what to do with people like you!’

  He was shouting, and Richard saw that he must pay the seven hundred klipps demanded, which nevertheless seemed outrageously expensive, though he supposed it would go towards repairing the great crack down the bullet-proof glass terrace caused by the premature destruction of the People’s Academy of Erotic Arts and Crafts. ‘Your bill is two thousand klipps,’ said the waiter, coolly writing this new amount in pencil.

  ‘The government has banned bribery,’ Richard cried out, undoing his tie.

  ‘But I still expect a tip, dear friend. How else do you think I’m going to live? The price of bread has already doubled.’

  ‘Doubled?’

  ‘In the last hour. Now that honesty is in, the traders say they must charge honest prices. Everyone has to live. You can’t deny that.’

  Richard put down two thousand-klipp notes, being anxious to look for his briefcase. ‘There’ll be an enquiry about this.’

  The waiter pocketed the money with a good-natured laugh, and made as if to pat him on the back, but thought better of it: ‘Don’t be grumpy, dear friend. The only thing to do is enjoy life, like a good Nihilonian. I can see you’re new to the country. And it is a great country, you know.’ Richard left while the waiter was still talking to himself about the eternal virtues of Nihilon in particular, and human life in general.

  Chapter 31

  Ex-President Took rose from his narrow bed and began to dress. He was seventy-five years old, tall and lean, with a nest of wild white hair which was always difficult to comb, especially first thing in the morning. As the day wore on it became more tractable and, while sweeping between the giant computers, wearing his white overall and holding a long-handled brush, he would stop and take a comb from his pocket. After attempting to run it through his hair he would sigh and go on with his work. The clever young men at the computers had long since given up teasing him about it. In any case, most of them were no longer young, in many ways sympathizing with his plight, for they were just as much prisoners as he.