by Ghalib Islam
To seek employment, she passes a hand across her clammy cheeks; the fever persists.
And to this effect you found the unnameable country satisfactory interrogation point
Yes, I was awarded a post at the Ministry of Radio and Telecommunications as a collector.
Ah, the man nodded, writing it all down. And there you met Zachariah Ben Janoun.
I did, yes.
I mean, you met Zachariah Ben Jaloun.
A silence akin to Zachariah’s at the reminder of the double identity.
What did you think when he first revealed his second name to you; do you think of him as one or the other man when you think of him; be truthful, Gita.
The truth, sir: I think of him as Zachariah, Ben Jaloun is his birth name while Ben Janoun is his name at work.
Do you find it strange one man possesses two names. Might it not be possible you wake up in the morning next to a second man without certainty.
I don’t understand the nature of the question, sir.
The interrogator slips a long thin finger deep inside his ear, so deep it disappears all the way to the knuckle. He twists it back and forth as if adjusting a hidden organ. Do you know what you actually discovered when analyzing the last magnetic reel. He effuses a spineless rumbling sound, which might be called laughter and which shakes the building to its foundations. We have so far to go, he speaks through a yawning hole in his head, and there is so much for you to learn.
The following months delivered to Gita all the discomforts one person could possibly live through: putrescence, a decomposing animal a dung-heap smell without any, sometimes faint while close on other occasions. By breathing through the mouth it was possible, but not for long. Vomit. Cloudy piss. Nowhere to urinate but an ancient overflowing toilet. The coming and going of ghostly cellmates who tarried without talking, looked at her, pointed, disappeared soon after arriving like transient fellow passengers destined for connecting flights. The isolation was difficult, but it allowed for the reordering and play of memory. For months at a time they would leave you with nothing but the walls and a low oscillating hum until shapes rose up and you floated like Yeshua across the surface of the Gulf of Eden, thinking it was the Dead Sea. What is the Fable of Yeshua. And how do they speak of the Fable of Yeshua.
The man arrived again and ordered her gently to descend from the ceiling, where she had taken to roosting, hanging from her fingertips. She crabscuttled slowly before leaping onto the floor. Please have a seat, he pointed to her cot.
She did as he requested and assumed a seated, human form. He asked her to recount the early stages of her relationship with benjalounbenjanoun, and she related in loving detail their brief conversation in the department, quite casual, though I laughed, I recall, and he did not join me but enjoyed the sound, before speaking of their spirited encounter in the market some weeks later.
Talk to me about Yeshua.
What to say, she frowned, but an eyeless man speaking of his life, of which there are many so many maimed and disfigured living corpses.
I am not asking for a comparative demographic study, merely an account of this stranger’s story.
It was apocryphal, she said, he told it several ways, forgot parts, filled in gaps, restated the beginning three times, then Zachariah told it again to me as if I wasn’t there, and I remembered it back to him later and it was different.
What do you remember. That there were seven and they were accused at the Israeli border of being a danger to the nascent state, of not being Jews, of being a treasonous cete of badgers and spies, this much one could know. Did you believe it.
She thought for a moment while biting her lower lip. He was an eyeless man who claimed to have been blinded by the border guards. Zachariah, who has served as a border guard, could attest to the everyday cruelty of the profession and so.
Did you believe they were terrorists.
No.
Why not.
Because they were poor men who happened to be black and who merely wanted.
They were not terrorists, then, to you.
I cannot know for certain, but in which way does the matter relate to my imprisonment.
You visited them afterward.
Yes, Zachariah showed a curiosity about their story and wanted to see the spot where supposedly the earth opened up as a tunnel that led to a false body of water that drowned Yeshua the blind Amharic Jew.
You did what then.
We sat with Yoni, who was good, and with her small hands she made us bitter coffee in a hut not larger, Gita pointed to the cell, than this place, and after speaking a while with her and with several of Yeshua’s companions, we returned home and made love.
You realize that to fraternize with members of the Brotherhood places you in a dangerous category, especially as a non-citizen of the unnameable country.
As far as I was aware, the unnameable country was not a state but a nameless British protectorate and that as a citizen of the Commonwealth I am under the protection of His Majesty King George the Mad.
You have misperceived your political status as well as ours. Only rotten tongues in the heads of certain intellectual classes or vagabonds would wag to call us an unnameable country, but soon we will be on all the maps of the world, not just the ones on which you would point and which compassed you here.
How could you know.
We know some things, he said casually.
Just as casually, the tortures mounted. Gita grew ill and her belly swelled so that it became difficult to crawl along or to hang from the wall or the ceiling, and she was forced to recline on the stinking cot for longer periods. In the mornings, she began to desire mud, leaves of raw grass, and sheep’s milk straight from the udder. Soon after, there arrived men in her cell who abused her and stripped her naked, and they were also naked and they pierced her. The same questions were asked but worded slightly differently, with the intention that she should forget the order of the past, so much so that it became difficult to remember whether the swelling of her belly happened before or after the arrival of the men, who differed in their odours and the shapes of their bodies. And so we cannot know whether the father of the child born to her some months later, which she delivered howling alone in the presence of three hundred pairs of eyes with the assistance of only a midwife in that very cell, was Zachariah’s or another’s.
You are ill, the man returns.
My baby, she is twisting her hands into dead branches, and her words consumptive grey.
He is safe. We haven’t and wouldn’t harm your son. He has done nothing. As for yourself, we have analyzed your records and found you criminally negligent but psychologically incapable of accepting responsibility for your actions. You always were and remain in need of psychiatric care.
When can I go, the faint smell of a raw onion at her nostrils, when can I see him.
Zachariah, you mean.
Yes.
You shall see him upon your release.
What hell finds Zachariah Ben Janoun today. And why did we take up the story of Zachariah Ben Janoun at all. As we just discovered, he may not be my grandfather, but genealogy is a knotted and ambiguous affair, and the greater reasons for telling the story reside in losing oneself to the possibility that one could be wrong about everything. Beyond genealogy, but just barely. There is a thread, I declare, and it is frayed and tenuous: Zachariah Ben Janoun loves Gita, this much is true, but to love an absence, an apparition, is different from the love of an everyday woman of arms and a tongue, of thoughts embraces and actual words. And they take advantage of his love. Who then. How. They. Anonymous skulls, a certain memory of the differentiated curvature of interrogators’ snouts, but most physical details are fuzzy.
There was the first, the protean one, you will recall, who lifted the heavy file and darkened the room and changed shape in the light. Then he multiplied into others, spoke in British-accented Plainenglish sometimes, accusing him of harbouring, exactly in the bare dimensions of his cell after bein
g forced into prison overalls, bombs inside his dress. Zachariah denied with poise until the closeness of the torturer, the hatred in his voice, his spittle disgusting mouth made Zachariah weep without an onion to aid.
Abruptly, a second man entered the room in a huff and the two passed inaudible officialdoms, really, is that so, the ruffling of papers, could it be, the Britisher examined his papers again, yes, I do believe. Sorry, chap, seems like I’ve got the wrong room here, I’m supposed to be examining in fourthreesixone, not room onesixfourthree. And then, like a sheepish professor late for a lecture he dashed off. Insensibly, however, though Zachariah Ben Janoun was in no position to argue, he returned several weeks later and started a more serious theatre involving Zachariah’s friend, Professor, if you’ll recall the unname.
Would you like to see him, the examiner held up a hanging lightbulb and pointed it to the corner where Zachariah Ben Janoun hadn’t noticed for the always weak light. For the first time, Zachariah Ben Janoun realized he had a companion, as he saw before him, bundled chrysalis and slits for eyes, the sitting face and body, the face hidden by bandages, recognizable by the curly hair. The light fell away and back onto Zachariah’s face but the bandaged face, accompanying body, the moan, could have been the professor.
The drama began afresh as a weighty file appeared in a wagon, pushed along by a paralytic, the one with half-a-face hanging limp and sallow, and who dragged his left leg, and whose left hand swung limply by his side. The paralytic took a long time to bring the charges to the fold. He cleared his throat and read them: numerous connections with communist academics, terrorists, and writers, a participant at weekly subversive gatherings, simultaneously a scandal in high and low societies, sometimes played a corrupt woman in yellow or red negligees at parties, a sexual pervert, as you can, heavily reprimanded for misconduct at job as a border guard.
Partway through the recitation, the paralytic fell drooling asleep. A by the way, just to ask: what were Zachariah’s rights. Also the vomit: he was drugged so often the mere thought of food made him vomit. He would think of Gita. In these moments, while listening over shortwave, they took advantage.
It was she who led us to you, they would thunder, she who belonged to an internal surveillance team in the Ministry of Radio and Communications and wore the mask of affection to do so.
Such things were known to happen, Zachariah had heard stories of decade-long marriages constructed for the purpose of police entrapment, but he could not believe. She had been arrested too, after all.
He was a liar, a scoundrel, were you not suspicious of his behaviour for months before his arrest. This latter point Gita could not deny, as the interrogator paced around her. The magnetic tape you studied for years was nothing but a document of a dangerous terrorist imagination, a subversive mind belonging to a person who deceived a whole organization and his friends with a double identity. Zachariah is a very bad man, though he appeared to you sometimes to be good.
The prisoners’dilemma: if Gita confesses the correct untruth and Zachariah confesses, then their collective loss is total and insurmountable, since neither will be returned to the other. If either agrees to the Organs’ reality while the other refuses to do so, then the loss is still total since the condemned will prevent reunion. If neither speaks, then the horror continues indefinitely. Gita is told that Zachariah has finally broken and admitted to her part in nationalist conspiracies against the state, of her Communist leanings, of her adultery and other deviant, what was she doing living out of wedlock with a man in the first place. Your cell is an hourglass, they tell her, we have only so much patience, terrorism is a time-sensitive issue, as sand pours in through the ventilation system, choking dust and grey ash: sand fills the cell until it buries the chair on which Gita sits, the cot on which she rests. Gita scurries up the wall and presses flat like a chinch against the ceiling, but the sand is rising, the sign of the hourglass is not a lie, and soon the dust will enter her lungs. Then it starts, perhaps the whole reason we began.
Through her lips a cry. An interruption first, a tickle in the throat: what is glossolalia; does it bear a singular point of origin or is its existence owed to multiple beginnings.
Gita feels a force seize her flattened body and it nearly wrenches out her throat: words words in Server Backslang, tracing backward into old slave Quinceyenglish, fragments somehow in Naga, in Bangla and minor languages she has never spoken, some languages she has never heard, until the sands force her to recede to the width of a millimetre or less, to the dimension of a sheet of paper against the ceiling, until she screams in Plainenglish. She screams, yes, yes I did whatever you say, I’ll sign it, I’ll denounce him, just don’t anymore.
The snap of a latch and Gita’s cell door opens, releasing the dust and the putrescent air. The ventilation shaft whirs to an end. The door remains open and she continues to hang from the ceiling. Accustomed to the darkness and the enclosure she grapples with the meaning of this change, and for two days they do not come even to feed her.
Finally, out of hunger, she descends from the ceiling and edges toward the door, wades through grey knee-deep lunar dust. Fluorescent white tubes in horizontal rows across the ceiling, everywhere a dull plain glow, the swift movement of nurses in uniform through a long corridor extending behind and ahead of her, custodial staff sweeping up the sand emerging out from her room, and patients wheeling about, a large nursery filled with incubators. She searches through the names and sees at the far end, written on a plain white card over a plastic casing, the words Baby Nothingatall.
The warm grasp of a stranger’s hand, a smile, it must have been a difficult labour, he had some trouble with jaundice but we’ve contained.
As if she had only come to the hospital to give birth. She finds herself suckling her child, sharing a room with a menopausal breast cancer patient, eating cakes and listening to American jazz records over the public announcement system while enduring her neighbour’s endless descriptions of a childless middle age, excoriated adipose tissue, and the virtues of morphine.
The child’s forehead seems to bear a certain resemblance to Zachariah’s, and closer examination makes: children at that age don’t keenly assume the faces they will wear in life. She shivers in the balmy equatorial heat. She will not release the child from her clutches, so to palliate her anxieties they place a crib next to her bed.
At night she awakens with screaming terrors and paroxysms, which they suppress with drugs. They occur so often she is connected to an intravenous. Granular residue in her lungs. Tumefaction of her vulva. No explanations or inquiries. Hasty treatment.
She asks one kind nurse, where is the child’s father; but the nurse is unaware of any prior history in her case, is unaware of familial connections. She will ask, she ensures.
Months pass and Gita wonders about her flat. No doubt by now it has been seized, probably the landlord has given her up for ghost and rented it to others, no doubt sold all her drawers within drawers within drawers, her clothing furniture bric-a-brac, not to mention Zachariah Ben Janoun’s. How long has she been here. Weeks, months maybe.
Not a day less than two years, she is informed by a judge advocate general, who arrives in gleaming epaulets, and behind whom stands a paralytic orderly who pulls a wagon in which is contained a fat green folder holding many loose pages. The judge advocate general motions for the orderly to find the right leaves, sign here and here, and here as well.
The sheer military presence is enough to guide her through the formalities without a moan of protest. She does not look at the pages she is signing or ask about Zachariah, the question does not seem relevant at the moment.
Due to your psychiatric and physical health, the uniformed man informs, you will be unable to perform your previous duties at the Department, but the Ministry of Radio and Communications is aware of your high performance before your decline and will ensure you are awarded some level of employment and will contact you in due time. Until then you can live from a small state stipend. Your b
elongings, which were under the possession of the state, will be restored in a new apartment outfitted with sufficient furnishings for yourself and the child.
At 2 P.M. on Wednesday, the Governor received a note on the interrogations of Gita Nothingatall and Zachariah Ben Jaloun. He had followed their entire story with a certain bemused curiosity and was interested to know of the results. Grenadier Lhereux himself delivered the memorandum and was about to relate its contents when the Governor hushed him and drew him down to the carpeted floor of the Hecatomb Office.
Listen, he said, as he turned a knob on the wall near the light switch and pressed his ear to the floor. Come come, he beckoned the grenadier follow suit as he listened closely to drops of grain fall on balances and scales in every marketplace of Benediction, the sounds of peeling oranges in Victoria kitchens, of the slap of sandals on Conception streets to mean the kenning bustle and economic growth, as the love-shouts of anguish and delight in La Maga bedrooms and fields and rooftops found his eardrums suddenly, the sounds in houses of La Maga of fornicating mice and ferrets, and the sounds of birds screwing in the skies above. Included was a thud, a scree of stones sliding a mountainside in the hinterland, and if you tilt your head exactly the right way, Anwar said, everything in our country vibrates inner ear to your toes.
Lhereux, who had never entered the Governor’s office and knew of the acquisition and arrangement of the most sophisticated audio equipment because he belonged to a selection of the leader’s closest associates, was astonished when he discovered the effects of his superior’s successful campaign of bugging the country, which began before Black Organs and independently of The Mirror, the two forces that together would turn the nation into an infinitely surveilled movie studio.
So what’ll it be, Zachariah, Ben Jaloun or Ben Janoun. The interrogator’s head bends in the light and disappears in certain angles as his hands gnarl talons, shadows on the wall.
Zachariah can’t bear to look directly into his face, and, besides, he does not know the right answer. They have reproduced his blank verses and have read them aloud so many times, in such perverted rhythms, have questioned and sullied every line with such vigour that he feels only disgust for the name Ben Jaloun, which was for him always the title of a minor poet. But Ben Janoun seems equally duplicitous, a name he used to obtain employment on false grounds at Department 6119, where he could never return for the shame he has no doubt heaped onto a venerable institution of the unnameable country. They do not cajole, they don’t have to: he eventually understands.