Fire in the Unnameable Country

by Ghalib Islam

  My hairpin, whyever for, she is suspicious.

  But to scratch with.

  She looks me up and down up and down.

  You know, anything, a twig, a pencil, a pencap, would suffice.

  Her voice rises in pitch-volume and the office cabal cranes its many necks, have they all nothing better to do—Mamun’s palms clam up with sweat, his heart races for this is no ordinary request, but he tries to brighten the occasion with a smile, a shuffle, a jingle of his chains.

  Eventually, after a lengthy description of the merits of exactly the hairpin she wears at digging into reservoirs of cerumen, The wax you see is less likely to come out, he gestures with a finger in the ear, and then the scoop in the back of your pin would be perfect for so forth.

  Calamity L removes a single hairpin from her chignon and tweezes it into his hands.

  I’ll remember you by this, he kisses it and bows with grand romantic gesture, drawing winks and knowing glances from all the men, now we see the true nature of the exchange, nods and laughter, as Calamity L flushes and removes her foggy glasses to give them a good wipe-down.

  Before we go further, for the story of the wardrobe orderly is a swift chapter in the life of Mamun Ben Jaloun, and before we realize it will come to a close, we must at least try to decipher the nature of Zachariah’s flight from family and home and his relocation in the labyrinth. But the fact remains, there is less to know than we would imagine; that he is hollow is clearly observable. In the past twenty years, the spongiform tissue of Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s lungs has depleted due to a rare, slow, wasting consumptive illness assisted by his tobacco addiction. In appearance, he is gaunt and his eyes have lost the permanent reflection of the Victoria dusklight that was once his favourite food besides raw onions. Today, Zachariah Ben Jaloun labours over the arrest of eight hundred youths in connection to a treason case, whose thoughtreels are so many, papers so haphazardly stored, and whose trial will so obviously never see the light of day that the matter has leaked even into the international press due especially to the accidental capture of a foreign dignitary’s son vacationing ratpack a whole bunch of them. He was plucked for questions, the mid-level functionary reported to Lhereux. And now, the grenadier asked. The functionary fidgeted for the right words, and made the sign of blackness with his hands.

  As director of internal communications, Zachariah’s job is to cast blame and to localize the problem so that neither the ministry nor the Department nor the Governor’s office falls into disrepute. Bring them out, he orders, and there they appear in the central courtyard one by one like ants or some other colony insect, some clutching their lost teeth, their shrunken bodies enchained to the one before and behind him, stabbed in the eyes by the sunlight, stinking putrefaction or the devil, accustomed to a life of prison cannibalism and every one perplexed by the sudden whiteness of the clouds, the red of the earth, and even by what they are in the clear light of day: a shapeless mass that heaves and sighs and groans together as if its suffering is collective and no individual among the eight hundred remains after the centuries.

  Zachariah observes them and cannot tell them apart. Who is the dignitary’s son, he asks, and no one raises his hand. Has he died, he asks, and they cannot respond. Who here retains the power of speech, he asks, and some noises that might be language appear from somewhere. It may be necessary to eliminate all of them.

  Zachariah Ben Jaloun lights another filterless nasty tar-black cigarette. Once upon a time, it would have been possible to consult in private with an insightful spirit like Gita on such matters, how to weigh one’s conscience against the tasks of pure evil, but with Gita gone and now. He lets fall a sigh. No, he does not regret, no such fragile emotion remains inside his hollow chest, but the images, due to the remnants of his once-writer’s memory, appear now and again to plague or to ask mute questions. With Gita gone. But now wait. What if.

  At exactly that moment, Mamun Ben Jaloun has solved the problem of the difficult lock; one says solved when one means nearly, the devil reveals his details but the execution is another matter: the internal mechanism’s design is as he predicted and a hairpin and needle were the right tools, but the lock itself is old, rusted, jammed. Noises. Not just Zachariah Ben Jaloun down the hall, but others as well. With all his might, Ben Jaloun the son jostles the needle while holding apart with the hairpin the two connective elements that spring shut, and though he has been trying for hours, deus ex machina and a divine click. Hurriedly he pushes up the window, and for the first time in months he breathes the open air. He does not see the apiarist of the baobab tree or the high high stepladder, and while recall his original plan was to unlock his shackles after the window/ but no time now. Our confidence man leaps.

  It takes a very long time for him to reach the ground, for three stories are higher than one thinks when planning escape. As well, a gust of strong wind pushes him up so that it feels for several seconds that he is rising, not falling, and so curious is his descent that even a bee pauses near him in mid-flight to take better notice.

  The pain is greater than any sense of relief or freedom since we should remember Mamun Ben Jaloun is wearing steel leggings and chains, which add to his weight. The hobbling distance to the wall is also vast, and he remains halfway there, looks behind over his shoulders, stops, rests, stares ahead, another halfway to overcome.

  When Zachariah Ben Jaloun returned to his office and found his window unlocked and his son missing, he knew the inevitable had occurred and it would be impossible to take back his mistakes. He stared through the window and watched the back of the limping, full-grown Mamun Ben Jaloun edging closer to freedom, and drew the curtains shut before directing the captain and major of the armed forces, who had accompanied him to gather the boy for the purpose of utilizing his glossolalist tongue, of whose existence the whole Department, whole unnameable country knew, to unlock the mouths of the silent prisoners so Ben Jaloun the father might be able to identify and extract the dignitary’s son and not have to order the execution of all eight hundred prisoners.

  Check the floor below, Zachariah orders. He likes to hide sometimes in the central room and quack with the menial employees; as well, he was in the Assembly Room when arrested and may have gone there since criminals and dogs are apt to return to their own vomit.

  The newspapers demand answers, as does the Belgian government. Fearing an international fall from grace, the Governor publicly orders an internal investigation, which means, more or less, be diligent when burning all relevant files and invent a believable story, the evidence and plausible alibis for the disappearance of hundreds of people, including a foreigner. He designates a committee of twelve, headed by himself, in which the director of internal communications is to play a major role.

  The Governor’s approach to the situation is simple: allude to the constant American bombings and agitation propaganda and declare the necessity to be vigilant against all foreigners, due to their potential role as spies. In the meantime, locate the foreign dignitary’s son or someone of a similar appearance and present his pictures to the press as a captured member of a U.S.-aided contra group. Even his closest advisers are astonished.

  If you will excuse me, Governor, interrupts Grenadier Lhereux, perhaps the only individual with the confidence to speak the truth: it will fly as well as a mountain of cow shit.

  Never in the history of international politics has there existed such a leader, who was placed in power by the Americans, who rejected the West and turned to the Eastern bloc, and who would be ousted and replaced by a democratically elected socialist doctor who would keep a roan heifer in his office capable of supplying nearly all the country’s poor with their daily intake of milk before being replaced by the woman forever known as the Madam. Nevertheless, things proceed according to plan and each committee member is assigned a task: whether to locate the ambassador’s son, destroy the records, begin a public relations war, manufacture the proper lies, or gather consent for the regime’s continued rule. During the
meeting, Zachariah Ben Jaloun has smoked nearly a whole pack of cigarettes. In his twenty years’ service to the organization whose front is the Ministry of Radio and Communications but whose true task lies in the total comprehension and control of the populace by brutal precision, he has learned to suppress his own volition to the extent that to ask what is the nature of freedom and how might I be accountable to such a question has ceased to occur to him. But having witnessed the vigilance of his son—no doubt he is my son, the same broad forehead, high cheekbones, deepseated, thoughtful eyes, his extraordinary efforts to be free—Zachariah feels energized, capable finally of the task he has put off for many years.

  And Ben Jaloun, the Governor says, I have received your report on the missing unnameable. Any word on his whereabouts.

  We are conducting a search, sir, I will keep you abreast of all developments. Afterward, at around midday, Zachariah Ben Jaloun walks the two flights of stairs to his office, and for the first time in many years he contemplates his slim volume of poetry, Orange Blossoms, his epic poem that was never published, his life with Gita, the birth of his son, his return to the Department and his quiet rise up its ranks, his thoughtless rooster romances with twenty or more nameless women, which led to the birth of at least one other child, a daughter Ananya, whom he also abandoned with as much thought as his son.

  They wanted me back and I came, he realizes, not because I had to, but then, what could I have done. Power breaks, and power makes. He thinks of the past. When he reaches his office, he looks into the wardrobe and remembers the months his indentured son whispered to him all the memorized secrets of the documents he was allowed to read and many more he should not have touched, of the precision of his voice, which he inherited from his mother. Gita, he shudders, as the name triggers a small earthquake in his room.

  Recall the unnameable history, alternative possibility you cannot know: it is Zachariah Ben Jaloun, who in ten years’ time would have decided the storage of the thoughtreels in the hulking interior of the SS Nothingatall in the Museum of Cultural History, which would allow for an alternative infamous first encounter by Hedayat and Q with the unnameable country’s past. Instead now. And this, finally. Zachariah Ben Jaloun removes a small Smith & Wesson black revolver, which Grenadier Lhereux presented to him on the fifth anniversary of Anwar’s rule, from the lowest drawer of his desk and raises it up to the roof of his mouth. Outside, all the bees scatter at the sound of the single shot.

  IN THE ENDLESS MOVIE STUDIO

  What were raw onions for Zachariah Ben Jaloun would be raisins for his son.

  Outside the asphyxiating borders of the Ministry of Radio and Communications, my father realized that captivity had compressed all the sad things in the world inside a wardrobe, and at the sheer relief of release from internment, he started crying uncontrollably. In fact, as soon as he got past its gates, which were ajar, and whose darwan could have been a large sack of rice, slumped over like one as he slept, his eyes closed on the job, his right hand around a smooth rifle butt, Zachariah Ben Jaloun paused for a second before the rusty gate, pushed it open as he held his breath. Luckily, the guard continued sleeping, and with a sniffle that nearly betrayed him, my father disappeared into the crowded streets.

  How he managed to unlock his shackles while weeping, fiddling lock and chain with eyes smudged camera lenses, how he avoided re-arrest by the constabulary, to search for and fail to discover even a single member of the Screens or a word of their existence from anyone in the old neighbourhood, why he didn’t revisit his mother and clambered instead, weeping quietly, onto the storage space of the bus that would take him out of the capital and south along the coast of the Indian Ocean to a city called La Maga, to slither out and crawl, all the while sobbing, snotting, wiping his nose on his shirt when it became unbearably suffused with snot, still weeping as he crossed into the dreaming city and the city of expensive taste, so much so that residents complained about the prices of common goods, why does a kilogram of sorghum run three times as high as it does in Victoria, or how come a crate of oranges costs half a week’s salary for the average worker: all these things we can’t know. But the luck of a former Screen should not be doubted.

  Let us follow him to La Maga, where his weeping turns inevitably to hiccupping: what can one say about that blinding city without first mentioning its sister, Benediction, whose blessings from international investors as a model for the whole continent and whose economic success can be measured by the litre and a single word: oil. While we were entrapped in the labyrinth with Zachariah Ben Jaloun and Gita Nothingatall, there were more enterprising young people in the unnameable country, materials engineers, systems designers, architects, and technocrats who were planning on gouging the earth for black gold. Whatever they earned in Benediction, which was, and remains today, hollow, save for its off-coast refineries and saltwater flats housing their employees and the children and wives of their employees, they would come to throw into the confusing glitter of La Maga.

  There had been changes since my father’s internment as a wardrobe orderly, and he wondered about them as they wandered the streets, the pups wearing plastic dolls’ faces that children dragged on shoelace leashes, the dishevelled fountains cracked hairlines along their granite basins where bums bathed in homeless water, the pipes extending out of velocity wounded buildings still smoking the last rocket, not far from expansive flats advertised with faces of the rich and famous. Mamun Ben Jaloun noted signs from last month that alerted residents of future firebombs and walked scorched streets and through burnt houses whose skeletons, indefeasible, featured fresh scaffolds and ladders. Lights and sliders rose out of the twisted road amidst a plinth and rubble. A boy, half a metre high, emerged from a destroyed interior with a bowl in one hand, and he held his other hand up to his face with a murmur a quizzical gaze. Mamun, who himself had just escaped prison, rifled through his pockets, ashamed and searching for a morsel or coins. Suddenly, an older boy came out from inside holding a pistol, and he shouted to Mamun Ben Jaloun, demanding identification. My father, who could produce none and didn’t know whether the gun was real but didn’t for a moment doubt the seriousness of the situation lifted arms in a pose of surrender and insisted over and over he was just a traveller. What is this place, he asked finally after overturning a thousand pockets on his person, managing to convince the guard he was innocent. He wiped common snot from his nose, inquired why is it like this. You mean why is it all burned and stuff, replied the older boy. Yes, why the ruins. They told us we were in a movie and we thought all the guns were fake. Who was fighting.

  The Americans are always fighting.

  The boy laughed and the sound arrived at my father’s ears two seconds after the child produced it, though he stood right next to my father.

  The sky turned a different colour suddenly, and there arose another laugh, faint laughter, distant firecracker burst with a burnt smell that confused Mamun Ben Jaloun and made it hard to recall whether it was night or day. When he remembered it was in the afternoon, he was lower to the ground than he thought, and he got up from his crouch and saw the older boy clutching his ear, defeated. Sonofabitch, the boy swore, and surveyed his bloody ear, and the wounded streets. He shouted names of friends or demons, though, as my father observed, no one else was around except the infant child who had lifted his fists in a defensive posture in a nearby corner. I heard the Director himself was coming today, mumbled the older boy. My father didn’t understand. So much had changed since he had been interned. What’s the name of the movie, he asked, but the kid was distracted now and swore vengeance in harsh tones before disappearing forever into the shadows.

  My father waited a long time before continuing along his way. His original sadness returned and he started hiccupping Qismis again. Time passed and he took no notice of the twenty-four workmen’s hours a day each day on beams extending skyscrapers overhead, the sight of employees labouring exposed to high winds on the eighty-eighth floor or higher.

  He didn’t u
nderstand exactly why the pavement gave way to polished concrete floors situating desks, open front and combo desks, desks whose lips rose open mouths soiled notebooks pens pencils remainder lunches in schools whose classrooms principals and superintendents could enter and observe on a whim because the walls were blown wide open and lizards now peered and cockroaches scurried out of incisions punctures penetrated walls.

  Why did a parched lips hospital appear at a street corner without warning. With broken bread in one hand and a pitcher in the other, a nurse watered a long-suffering resident under natural lighting conditions. Cloudburst, she said as she held up a palm to feel the rain, before slipping under a tarp shielding machines measuring heart rate, blood pressure, brain waves, beeping talking among themselves.

  Sunlight, she muttered; she smiled as she stared at the combination sky. Why were scaffolds affixed to incomplete buildings, scaffolds buttressing wooden platforms attached to scaffolds holding scaffolds, why here and there a ladder, perhaps four stories high, leaning against a wall, left without regard for future or former use, why had ditches and holes been dug by private army contractors about whom my father didn’t know, their actual stories hidden by the march and constant growth of The Mirror.

  Night fell. Mamun Ben Jaloun walked with snail tracks of dried mucus on his face and saltwater streaming from all the unnatural light attacking the retina. He cried and walked sadly along the cluttered walkways of hawkers and bric-a-brac salesmen and little boys selling tea out of thermoses with their female counterparts braided flowers in their hair and with vegetable baskets rested on padded cloths on their heads. High streetlamps and added halogen lanterns provided hardlighting, and in the city centre at night there congregated movable feasts of grilled mutton, dancing girls, village theatre among other rural delicacies imported for the urban and international crowds. Within this mess, my father (or the man I claim is my father) wandered-hic for a long time, watching-hic-hic the ladies fanning themselves while the wind moved their blue dresses of mousseline de soie, as they gazed strangely at the wounded young man with a spasmodic diaphragm. Perhaps he offered his services to a small restaurant that served mouthbreeders to tourists and sold them as delicacies, but Mamun Ben Jaloun’s nose was always keen to recognize the smell of the goondas of any new place, and it is likely he soon found a spot behind a bread truck waiting for jettisoned baked goods to land in his outstretched hands whether by chance or the zeal of an accomplice, here, you glottal-strange bastard, catch. And where did he sleep. The streets have their resting places and, if not, one can always claim a spot in a mosque and rest from prayer to prayer.