by Ghalib Islam
Then the eyeless old man got up and left the two orange eaters on the grass. Why did we interrupt with the Fable of Yeshua when we were talking about Gita and Zachariah. While we were wading through Yeshua’s tale, time has passed for the pair as well: have taken a shining to each other and many significant details have been shared—Gita’s loss of time, sometimes whole hours will go by and I will realize them as minutes; Zachariah’s two names, his inexplicable illiteracy, which he has been trying to treat by eating raw onions.
Gita begins teaching Zachariah Ben Janoun to read again. Excellent, she nods when he does it right, you are making progress. He feels shy to reveal the existence of his blank verses, harder to come by these days, harder to write while exhausting hours at the border or while bedded rootless soil. Night after night, Zachariah descends. Each morning, he surfaces increasingly illiterate but dug up and alive somehow with hope he’ll deliver a complete manuscript to Benjamin Pasha’s secretary.
Who knows whether he still remembers Zachariah, even the professor has possibly forgotten him. He received several invitations, and the most recent communiqué expressed sadness for Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s lack of response; but uncomfortable with his slowness in production and his inexplicable illiteracy, Zachariah never wrote back.
What are you doing, Gita will ask as he paces sometimes from one end of the small flat to the other, staring intently at a certain corner of the ceiling, mumbling with pages in his hand.
Reading, he will say, but it is obvious his mind is elsewhere. And some earlymornings he will leave the house, which eventually has become his house as well, since he resides there more often than in his own flat (which he is renting to a university student and considering releasing altogether), and toward whose rent he now contributes, without returning for a whole day. Sorry, I was running errands he will say, and account for his absence with a kiss, a bag of vegetables, or a gift menagerie, something for the house, he will say. Slowly, however, the pages are ordering themselves and the narrative and prosody are aligning, but at the expense of Gita’s accumulating suspicions.
One day she discovers herself summoned before the desk of the assistant to the vice president of Assembly, and finds it empty. Gita is unsure what to do, and from somewhere in the room there is a cough, and a voice instructs her to occupy the seat before her. With trepidation, she does so, and the meeting commences.
Your name has come up in several quarterly reports as an astute employee, the voice informs, and it is for this reason we are assigning you to an internal task force that will review a single magnetic tape.
A large disembodied eye appears for a moment above the desk and disappears after two blinks.
Sir, Gita tries not to notice, I am a collector, while this seems like the job of an assembler or investigator.
A hissing chorus, like a disenchanted film crowd at an offensive scene. A clap and the sound dissipates.
Never mind them, the voice reassures. We are certain you can complete the task, why would you have been chosen otherwise.
And now, another clap: a tall, thin man sporting coattails and a rigid curling moustache emerges from the wardrobe wielding the tapereel. Take this, he says in the voice that was just addressing her.
Why were you inside the wardrobe, Gita asks, astonished, annoyed. It seems highly suspicious; how can I trust to take this job if my supervisor cannot address me in plain sight.
Her interrogation breaks the mustachioed tall man, please believe me, he confesses behind his watery moustache, when I say I have no authority even to sit at the edge of the chair belonging to the vice president’s assistant, since in fact I am not he but actually his junior secretary, and only because he has taken ill for the past six weeks that I am allowed to enter this office at all. It was his order that I was to deliver this message and all others from inside the wardrobe because he did not want to confuse employees during his absence into thinking anyone but he could play assistant to the vice president of Assembly; it would have been dishonest.
Gita rummages through her purse for a tissue: poor man, she thinks, what a beastly department, and she refrains from demanding an explanation for the disembodied eye or the chorus of hisses.
Stranger events began soon afterward. Gita began to mirror Zachariah’s eggshell-tiptoeing around the issue of his blank verses, and she did not tell him of her new assignment. There was no particular reason why she said nothing, and did not think her silence an indication their affections had soured. Come find me if you can, she may have been saying. Or she may have simply forgotten because it was an unusual thoughtreel assignment.
The reel itself: lighter and thinner than any she had handled, while inside was a new style of magnetic tape, its surface argentine and perfectly reflective, smooth to the touch, though she was careful to handle it with latex gloves, as was natural to her profession. The thoughts began in the midst, so she assumed it had not been edited. There was one prominent voice that branched into a number of secondary, then even tertiary and ancillary voices, which returned to the main voice as if it were the refrain. They belonged obviously to a schizophrenic person, but she could not discover anything unusual about the content. Musings about daily life, a certain mellifluous strain to the thoughts: the affairs of an overworked mind in middle bureaucracy was all.
Sometime early in the long two-year period she reviewed the seventeen-minute-long reel, she noted her discoveries to the visiting supervisor and added, I must not be up to the task, I find nothing of.
Nothingatall, the visiting supervisor sighed her surname, you were chosen for your capacity for seeing thoughts in thoughtreels, an unusual gift that should have led you to discover something important about the contents of this particular tape. Do not tell me you have fallen behind, that others assigned to the task have understood much more than you; the deputy chief of the Department thinks highly of your work and would be disappointed to hear.
Gita burned with frustration and shame, and returned to her desk. Meanwhile, Zachariah Ben Janoun had been sent to the far reaches of Collections, a part of the labyrinth of corridors and interlacing cubicles where the air conditioning was malfunctioning; stalactites had begun to form on the ceiling and it snowed there so often a minor ice age appeared to have graced this office space in our equatorial climate. Employees brought jackets and sweaters, which would otherwise never be worn, and blankets to work. So isolated were these individuals, and so mindless their task, to listen for certain registers of sound and to document these according to their frequency of occurrence, that when one spoke, others echoed the identical words, perhaps forgetting that in the real world one spoke for oneself alone.
Because it was so far from the major arteries of the department, Zachariah was forced to drive a small motorized buggy to the appointed location each morning and to drive back in the evening, each time shooing away the gaggle of employees who would try to hang onto his buggy or clamber onto its tarpaulin roof, why should we walk when you.
Zachariah would begin to relate these events to Gita but she seemed too preoccupied to notice his words or even his caresses. At first their physical desire for each other had been unrelenting. Then a pattern developed, and the regularity of the sexual act allowed them to enjoy the minutiae of tastes and sounds and smells of the other; but some time ago, the mist of platitude had fallen over each of their bodies, and while it was Gita who had noticed first, it hid Zachariah deeper behind himself. Flooded by guilt, he felt the immediate need to confess about the blank verses and thusly to correct the only betrayal against her he could remember; but when he tried she merely turned over and kept sleeping. True to mirror form, she did not reveal the nature of her problems with interpreting the new thoughtreel, or even of its existence.
In the bath, Zachariah brushes his skin with coarse black soap. Zachariah sings in the shower: find me as an onion, he sings/ pulled from fronds, your hair/ and peeled by your mouth and tulips. Find you, he trills minor/ and find me, he ascends major/ O you, he climbs highest
falsetto, dips basso deep to deliver final gusto to the disinterred, inhabitable beloved of his song. In the kitchen Gita dances to someone else’s tune while her boyfriend showers, this guy must have been a musician or something, she thinks, as the melodies in his dead head move her limbs. She dances as she listens to them on headphones. She pauses, rewinds the reel in its player, pauses, listens, starts again from the top as she discovers in its irresolute dimensions of just singing at my job, just chewing on a cud of melody, among the crowded voices that characterize many terror suspects she handles, an addictive form, repeating and won’t leave her, leaves her humming, longing for it even after she peels the headphones off her head. She rubs her temples, I’m listening to someone else’s thoughts, she says softly; she feels icky, as she always does when realizing again that she’s violating a deeper privacy than most people imagine possible. And then. And yet.
A mysterious hum inside her. A guilt-glad feeling, excitement to be frank, thrill, to say it clearer, of touching someone through vast space and time, of handling a life became artifact. Hedayat thinks, he mutters. Could it be, he asks no one, that his grandmother Gita has become enchanted with the man on the thoughtreel whose mind she wrestles with day after day at her job.
It has been known to occur in the Ministry of Records and Sources, and prohibitive regulations generally avert such malignant events: barring special terror cases, no collector or assembler may deal with a single tape for longer than two weeks, but even then it happens.
One night, Gita wakes unexpectedly, rises to slake a parched throat, and finds the waistcoated junior secretary to the assistant of the departmental vice president, mustachioed and a mollycoddle, you will remember, rummaging through one of the deepest drawers of her collection. Appalled, she finds herself unable to speak, only to buzz or to hiss, and only garners the attention of the secretary with the combination of these sounds and the accidental knocking against her coffeetable.
The waistcoated man leaps up and puts a hand to his heart, claiming myocardial infarction you’ll kill me by surprise.
What are you doing here, Gita manages to ask the moment after her own heart has stopped fluttering.
I was given a key to your apartment by your landlord when I informed him who I was in relation to your work and that it was an emergency and I needed immediately to see you.
Why didn’t you simply knock, Gita whispers furiously, feeling a cicada-buzz rising to her throat. And could it not have waited until the morning.
Emergency, he reminded, and shook an index. Then he passed her a padded manila envelope, which from touch she could detect contained another reel, as he rattled off a few important memoranda in a low hiss.
Because the whole event transpired without waking Zachariah Ben Janoun, she did not bother to rouse him, and once again averted having to mention the changes in her occupation. She did not sleep for the remainder of the night. Dawn illumined the bizarre incidents characterizing the last year, and Gita realized that, unaware, a new state of expectancy had taken hold of her: surprises and violations of her privacy were to repeat so long as she did not solve the problem of the thoughtreel. A subsequent resolution, therefore: she should understand the tape at once, since there seemed no way of claiming defeat and returning to an ordinary life. She passed three fingers through Zachariah’s hair and wished for the unknotting of whatever inside prevented him from speaking freely to her. As if her desire was granted, he sighed peacefully, and turned toward her hand, without waking.
Two weeks later, Gita discovered strange patterns in the second magnetic tape, which, she was informed, belonged to the same file and therefore, she assumed, to the identical mind, guided by not one rhythm but many: sometimes terza rima like the Dantean comedies, though she does not know it by that name, other times a hopscotch of dactyls troches, lub-lubbing iambic on certain occasions like a heart, not hidden within the thoughts, but comprising the thoughts themselves. The whole mind, it grows clear to her, or at least the transcribed artefact of the mind on the magnetic reel, is a work founded on rhythm.
At 3:23 P.M. that very afternoon, she is arrested.
Recall: such is the history of the unnameable country: always at the cusp one finds oneself suddenly interned.
An assignment: gather overwhelming evidence from the text and present a report to the General Assembly of the United Nations on behalf of every dead soul of the unnameable country.
Understand: in fact, it was a mortal error on part of both individuals to have kept from the other their respective secret.
Grenadier Lhereux, who would oversee their interrogations at a distance, reviewed the pair’s psychological records well in advance and declared they were the types who would not speak to each other about the matter until too late, and this finding allowed the nascent Department of Special Affairs to continue with their plans.
Gita’s cell is shrouded in half-light, and since she is an especially ordered person her prison-order trousers and overshirt are two sizes too large and must be held up by the straps. After the initial bout of nauseating fear, she passes through the walls of the cell unseen, walks invisible quick through the streets and returns home to the awaiting arms of Zachariah Ben Jaloun. She does not.
Zachariah, meanwhile, arrested at 5:48 P.M. the same day by seventeen Black Organs of the peace, who swoop down on Zachariah Ben Janoun/Ben Jaloun while he stands waiting for her outside the cathedral-edifice where they work, is native to the unnameable country and greater accustomed to the state of exception that has and will forever haunt its borders and corridors, and for many reasons is more resolute: already by the time he arrives at his cell he has put Gita out of his mind and is preparing for survival.
A shadow blocks all the light in the room. It belongs to a man who speaks: Zachariah Ben Jaloun.
Yes, I am he.
Zachariah Ben Janoun.
In the dark, our hero says nothing about the other Zachariah, already understanding the nature of the trap.
For four years you have been living a lie, a double identity, the nature of which has been carefully documented by the Department of Special Affairs.
Regard, something heavy falls as the shapeless man steps aside. The light moves slowly from the dangling single incandescent lightbulb at the far end of the cell across the room’s dimensions as if crossing the globe. Zachariah sees a folder sitting on a table, which bends and creaks desperately under the folder’s large mass of many loose sheets of paper. Our file, or your file, rather, weighs exactly as much as you do, Zachariah, sixty-four point three kilograms, am I correct.
Last time I checked, sir, though the stated figure is ten units under the actual.
Good. You have a respectful demeanour, which will help you in this place, the interrogator paces. The light shifts when he moves and the interrogator’s profile changes from prognathous to concave, his arms grow longer-shorter, his hair covers his face before receding into the baldness of his scalp, his shadow bends exceedingly: his body exhibits endless change. Tell us, benjanoun benjaloun, what brought you to choose a second identity.
I was called Ben Janoun, sir, by my supervisor when offered a post at the Ministry of Radio and Communications, and since at the time I was unemployed and to correct a superior during an interview would have meant possible denial of the job, I allowed him and subsequently all others in the Ministry of Records and Sources to refer to me by an incorrect name. For this act I am wholly contrite and submit myself to rehabilitation in a correctional or psychiatric facility.
And yet what you have spoken is the grossest untruth.
Sir.
Yes, the interrogator looks closely at a sheet in the file. He has raised up the heavy folder, which must be very dense because while containing perhaps seven hundred pages it manages to weigh more than sixty kilograms, and the man carrying it, therefore, must be exceedingly powerful because he rests it on a single palm. See here, your date of birth, January suchandsuch, nineteen twenty-four.
That is correct, sir.
And the name, he brings the sheet of paper closer. Through the green faded uniform the man’s flesh releases the sweet stench of attar and Zachariah is forced to breathe through his mouth.
Zachariah Ben Janoun, the captive is forced to say, since that is the name he sees.
The female warder who enters the room is wearing the same Chinese slippers as in Gita’s collection, the ones she meant to sell as a final alternative, and seeing them on the feet of another drains all her confidence. Already she has fled this place several ways: she has flown through the small chink in the window, she has accompanied the scurrying rats through the unseen holes and they have led her through secret passageways, and she has also transparently moved through the walls, as we know. Always, she has returned to shed deep onion tears.
We are feeding you now, the woman declares, as if bestowing a gift. The tray contains frozen homogenous yellow in a plastic bowl and a grey bun. Wait until it cools, the warder says before exiting.
A day passes, or part of a day. The contents of the tray disappear and no subsequent meals are provided. Over the course of the next four days, however, twenty-four meals find their way to Gita’s cell, some of which are inedible, many of which lie uneaten, and over the following week, these decompose without being removed. Rats arrive in swarming numbers. Gita fears rodents less than mosquitoes, fleas and the diseases they carry, as visions of ancient plague, of fever boils genital pustules tumefaction of the lymph nodes leave her hanging on the tips of her fingers upside down from the ceiling. Finally, a man arrives to interrogate her.
Under what pretext did you enter the country, Ms. Nothingatall.