Fire in the Unnameable Country

by Ghalib Islam

  The broader details: The Taints, it turns out, among other street gangs, were posties, mocksters, howdoyoucallit, agents provocateurs, whose purpose was to draw the Screens into a trap. This was no international business conference, and true, the government risked losing face if some major act of violence was to have broken out during the delegates’ speeches or the reception afterward, but they benefited from having taken the risk: Imran was arrested for Nikhil’s murder near the roasted crabs, and for the attempted murders of Mamun and Qismis. Some of the others caught wind of Pestilent A’s warnings, took heed sometime during the speeches and fled, but most were caught. The last of the three was removed from her beer vat where she silently awaited her signal and was released to a nursery internment, under her mother’s watchful gaze, before disappearing three years later after acquiring a false passport. The first, the leader of the gang, was interrogated and tortured for seventy-two days by the vilest means until he revealed the password to the open-sesame cellar. There, all the gang’s precious booty was removed, Imran was stripped of his clothing, his mouth stuffed with wool, and left hook-hanging among the eviscerated animals in zero degrees for forty hours before being transferred, hypothermic, hardly shivering anymore, to a holding cell. Luckily, Imran’s condition improved, as the police decided instead of wasting him to treat him at the best hospitals our country had to offer, and when recovered, to fashion new clothes, to salary him; most importantly, they gave him title and the respectful position of inspector, to turn him into a spy for them. Thusly, they converted him from gangster-steps to dancing jive at police ballroom events. He would return to save my father’s life many years in the future, just you wait.

  The fate of Mamun Ben Jaloun, however, is the most interesting. After security forces hauled him out of the underpodium, Nikita Khrushchev himself intervened in his case, stating that he knew of the boy’s presence while delivering his speech and could not help but marvel at such a deep interest in politics that would drive a person to such depths. Embarrassed, the Governor quietly transferred him to the care of Grenadier Lhereux, who whisked him out of the reception hall and labelled him an unnameable trespasser to be kept under close watch. Mamun Ben Jaloun was bounced from department to department until several weeks later he found himself in a large room situated with many desks behind which there lay piled many folders and papers pushed and pencilled and hemmed and hawed over by innumerable employees. They were too busy, or pretending to be too busy, to notice his presence at first, and only near lunchtime did someone look up, pss-hmm, yes, pss-pss, another pair of hawkish eyes, and another, these ones bespectacled, until suddenly the whole room was pss-pssing about the shackled stranger who had been in their midst for who knew how long.

  State your name, someone said.

  Our hero did as asked.

  What do you want, another asked.

  Stunned by the question’s absurdity, Mamun Ben Jaloun stayed silent.

  Ask him if he has had lunch.

  No, that’s irrelevant, another voice piped up, ask his name again, I’ve forgotten it.

  My name is Mamun Ben Jaloun and I am here because.

  Because what, asked the bespectacled man.

  Because I’m not certain, I think one of you is supposed to know.

  But how are we to know why you are here if you won’t tell us.

  Because, Mamun faltered, because you’re officials, it’s your jobs.

  The whole room sprang up in a laughter that began and ended exactly together.

  Can someone undo my shackles, they’ve been eating my shins. The pss-pss began again and a collective decision as iterated once more by the bespectacled man, who might have been a higher official: we’re not certain, we’ll have to confer. And they did not, they remained still.

  Just then, a bell sounded and like salivating puppies, they ran over one another’s feet out of the single door, bounding left and right through the hallway outside. Mamun Ben Jaloun, whose shackles were too heavy and who was too exhausted by the previous weeks to do anything, remained where he stood.

  THE WARDROBE ORDERLY

  Difficult to know what a man does unless we watch his exact movements. Today, for instance, we find Zachariah Ben Jaloun trying to scratch his nose by manipulating his moustache, walking with his arms by his side, hardly moving them at all as he strides down the hall of the great and same cathedral-edifice he entered more than two decades ago as an error, where he was tortured, released, from which he departed with his original name, and to which, it is true, he returned by choice or otherwise, and whose staves he has climbed to assume a directorial position.

  Today, Zachariah Ben Jaloun removes his handkerchief and sneezes as he passes an interrogation room, and the sound drowns a howling yelping no don’t, though the horrors he can suppress by this spontaneous effusion would have stuck needles deep in his conscience many years ago. Or is this Zachariah Ben Jaloun at all. Which is to ask, is this the same man we were following not too long ago, who would read the poems of E.E. Cummings and bite into raw onions for a good cry. The surname is not too uncommon in the continent, though we must admit it is found more often in its western corner than in its eastern corridors, while there are innumerable Zachariahs everywhere in the world.

  What did this Zachariah Ben Jaloun do when informed one day by a peon, sir, there is an eighteen-year-old assigned to the status of unnameable by Grenadier Lhereux himself, captured in the Assembly Hall after the Khrushchev talk, and now floating around the system, drifting from one department to the next. Sir, he says he doesn’t know where to go, that he feels quite like a ghost in shackles, sir.

  Bring him in, Zachariah Ben Jaloun says, lighting an unfiltered tar-black cigarette. Yes, what can I do for you.

  Sir, I have asked several hundred people to undo my shackles but no one will abide by my request. As well, for the past four months I have been eating the scraps that fall from the desks of the employees in the central room, and sometimes I am able to find soda in the refrigerator in the staff lounge, but otherwise I have been starving.

  Yes, it is bound to happen. However, none of us has the authority to free your bonds until you have been cleared of all charges.

  But sir, I have met with no magistrate or lawyer, there has been no hearing, no case presented against me, and no charges, sir.

  That is your problem exactly then. Zachariah Ben Jaloun smokes nonchalantly. You must discover the nature of the charges against you.

  Surely we can surmise from these words that before us sits another Zachariah than the one who kept certain human features bound up within the nutshell of his soul, guarded against the arid corridors of Ministry of Records and Sources, against the dead air of shortwave radios peering into trespassing on unsuspecting minds. But twenty years plus is a long time for a man to encounter many changes, to lose and gain many shadows. Let us continue wrestling with the possibility.

  May I ask a question, Mamun Ben Jaloun says, and continues, though the man neither agrees nor disagrees: What is your position in this company.

  I am director of internal communications.

  And what is your name.

  What business is it of yours. Zachariah blows smoke into the boy’s face.

  May I have one.

  The director of internal communications slides his mother-of-pearl cigarette case across the table and even offers his own lit cigarette as fire.

  Because, the boy says, smoking, feeling much better after the first few draws, I feel mirrored in your features, and I have heard stories, though my mother will not verify them and one cannot rely on rumours, that my father works in the Ministry of Radio and Communications. Is that not where we are.

  Yes, Zachariah Ben Jaloun says.

  After this exchange, which does not culminate in ecstatic reunion, the bureaucratic procedure flies more smoothly. Though it is still not discovered what the boy’s charges are, and since it will take several months yet for the offices to confer and compare files from investigations to date,
and to create these if they did not yet exist, Zachariah Ben Jaloun allows Mamun Ben Jaloun to sit in a corner of his office beside the door, to reside there during the day, and to curl up and sleep there at night, sit quietly while people come and go during daytime appointments, or to leaf through the senseless bureaucratic manuals, though many of these are censored in black. At lunchtime Zachariah forces him not to eat the scraps of not any and all employees, but only from his plate. This second arrangement is less than suitable, for it regulates Mamun’s diet in unappealing ways: Zachariah Ben Jaloun prefers cooked onions in just about everything, including in his rice pudding as well as his black coffee. Eventually, since Grenadier Lhereux’s office and even certain lower departments are backlogged and will be so for the foreseeable future, Zachariah Ben Jaloun offers Mamun a job.

  A job, what kind.

  Judging from the nature of your arrest, your youth, and your keenness with words, you can be a wardrobe orderly.

  The claustrophobic sound of the title brings back memories of Khrushchev’s kicks to his shoulders and back, and Mamun isn’t thrilled by the prospect.

  I will pay you a salary, which will be credited against your consumption of foodstuffs, go toward compensating us for your boarding in my office, and even toward the systemic expenses any citizen incurs from being processed as an unnameable for an extended length of time.

  I didn’t know of such costs.

  There are. So what do you say to, and Zachariah Ben Jaloun stated a paltry sum unworthy of mention.

  I don’t seem to have much of a choice, the boy casts his eyes downward.

  One always has choice. Here is the most intolerable assertion to Mamun, which flies against the face of all veritable logic, and by which he feels crushed.

  When he first started in the wardrobe, it was difficult to breathe or to see anything, but slowly, Mamun Ben Jaloun grew accustomed to the cracks of light that flittered in, and when the Director was not looking, it was even possible to hold the doors slightly ajar, just as long as no one was able to tell he was keeping post inside the furniture. The job of an orderly was custodial and secretarial, to provide general assistance, whether to leap out of the armoire at the exact moment and serve tea to interviewees, as you will recall from Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s first trip to the Department, to mop up blood and other effluvia from pre-interrogational tortures, or to retain whole memoranda inside the skull and supply the odd forgotten word or even large chunks of memorized text during the course of institutional transactions that occurred in the room.

  Every day, they come and go and speak of this interned, that interned; due to the high costs of internment in even a wardrobe, the organization’s goal is to intern the subject in his own home at his own expense and to defer the responsibility of internment to many organizations and individuals.

  After three months of good labour, Zachariah presents Mamun a tailcoat and a crisp pair of black trousers, which, he informs, is uniform for his trade.

  Is it possible to have a light in there, not a candle, because that might lead to fire, but maybe an electric lamp.

  Zachariah is stunned by the question. No orderly has ever asked for such a, in fact most prefer the darkness because it offers the correct shade to remember the details of the work and in which to nap during the long horary spans of inaction. But I will inquire with others, he nods slowly with a knitted forehead.

  No no no no, Mamun takes back his request, he does not wish to cause a fuss, especially when he feels he is edging closer to some judgment on his purgatorial condition. Nothing for sure, of course, but he has heard things. Sometimes, when Zachariah Ben Jaloun is away on business on another floor for hours at a time, he visits the officials of the central room, where they cluck away at typewriters and to each other and forget whose thoughts are whose, so that some memoranda will be filled with another individual’s invoice figures. And what strange names they have. Calamity A through to M, and then the letters take off from N onward, but beginning with some other prefix, such as Filibuster, Mylar, or Nanaimo, before the alphabet starts again in other equally strange way. They are nicknames, surely, since what mother would call her son Mylar, no matter how thin or strong he was. Mamun Ben Jaloun cannot say he has become friends with any of the officials, since they still do not always remember who he is, but once, one of the Calamities, a woman called Calamity L, mentions that things are pushing along, the grenadier’s office has been reviewing a transcript of Khrushchev’s speech and is cross-referencing it with eyewitness reports as well as police documents that describe a member of the Screens matching Mamun’s description.

  After the initial bout of fear, our hero is relieved. Even a guilty verdict would be a grateful change. Prison would be worse, surely, in many respects than the life of a wardrobe orderly, but at least his meals would be his, and perhaps there would be no shackles.

  And what of Qismis, he asks, though he realizes that he is lucky enough to have received any information at all about his own case.

  A grumble passes through the office just then, though he is not sure if it is just thunder from the daily stress or a response to his question.

  I am sorry, Calamity L pushes up her glasses, that information is not ready for release or has been classified by higher authorities.

  The months pass, and his longing for the aimless backspeech of his mother, those few errant caresses from Qismis, and much else belonging to his everyday life with the Screens drowns him with memories of the future, which will not, with frustration and hatred for all the hallways and offices and wardrobes of the world, as his case disappears into the annals of institutional memory—a polite way of saying its movements are unnoticeable if they occur at all. And that no knowledge leaks out. The system is porous, Mamun realizes from his conversations with the bureaucrats, but like a cell membrane that selectively allows certain materials to exit its perimeter and not others.

  Flight: a new beginning. The possibility exists, he thinks. The window in Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s office is only three floors above the ground. Outside, there is a courtyard and the gate is guarded, but the darwan is a drowsy guard who may respond well to the sleight of throat. Near the northwest corner of the wall grows a baobab tree with a waterswollen trunk, palmate leaves, and long hanging fruits. On one of the higher branches is situated a large white beehive, and sometimes a man, like an apparition, garbed in loose-fitting all-white clothing, his face covered with a handkerchief, will bring a high high stepladder, which he will climb to inspect the hive. He wonders if. But the lock on the window is too difficult, and who knows whether the beekeeper would help with his very high stepladder.

  Time passes. Two months or perhaps only a day that drags on sixty times as long. Housed in his usual darkness, Mamun provides the whole copy of an interrogation transcript in whispers gauged to travel exactly as far as Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s ears and not to reach those belonging to the deputy chief of Inspections sitting across the desk, complete with every ow ow ow ow ow ow, every wince and hyperventilation and scream, though ask the boy whether he remembers the nature of the case and he will be unable to respond.

  One day, based on his exemplary service, Mamun is offered a reward: Anything you like, young man, call it by name and it shall appear.

  Our hero’s request is simple: A sewing needle, he says.

  When asked why such a trifling object, be bold in your asking, anything I said anything, Mamun Ben Jaloun replies, There are two reasons, sir: the first is sentimental, a sewing needle would remind me of my ailing mother, whom I have not seen for nearly a year, while the second is practical: my trousers have many tears, as is plain to the eye, he shows, and I feel embarrassed to walk about in their condition, though I pass through these halls like a clinking ghost and no one takes notice of me.

  A day later, Mamun receives a small velvet box with a silver needle and black thread to match the colour of his pants. And after a week to the day—he bides his time for the exact moment and to provide himself sufficient occasion
to ward off bubbling fears—he visits the central office and makes his usual rounds, asking all the natural questions, asking the young ones what are your evening plans, though he knows these are shut-ins, not the bottle smashing motorcycle driving late-show cinema types, how is your mother’s health, has your sister married yet, oh she has eloped what an extraordinary turn of events, while to the older ones he inquires what are your aches, would an echinacea pastille not clear up that unsightly skin irritation, the lower back, yes, even for a youngster like myself, quite a vulnerable place on the body, agreed.

  Eventually, he comes around to Calamity L, who is quieter than the others and hides behind a mountain of papers, who is more forward with her responses and unlike most in the office, remembers Mamun Ben Jaloun’s name.

  How now, she greets, nodding up down up down at the sight of his arrival like a pecking hen.

  Just fine, Calamity L, although I have been itching madly at the ears.

  Then scratch, why not, she nods vigorously.

  But I have not explained: the itch resides deeper inside the ear canal.

  Oh, a more difficult issue, then, to do away with.

  Yes, for exactly that reason I was wondering if you could lend me one of your hairpins.