Fire in the Unnameable Country

by Ghalib Islam

  When he walks cautiously out the doors of the centre and feels the seadrenched air on his face for the first time in more than two years, Zachariah Ben Jaloun rejoins the world as a mid-ranking checkpoint guard, an illiterate with no particular desires and broken in more ways than he can recognize. He is given an address and fifty dollars, taxis along the La Maga streets without particularly knowing what to expect, though he has been told the individual he meets cannot refuse him.

  A host of varicose veins and atrophied leg muscles: the journey up three flights of the urine-soaked stairwell proves difficult and on the second turn he must rest. A murder of adolescent boys with long wooden swords in the darkness, wearing dark capes fashioned probably by their mothers.

  Who goes, the eldest asks, extending his weapon toward Zachariah’s throat.

  I am Zachariah Ben Janoun, and I: he reads it out loud.

  What business have you here.

  No business of yours.

  He receives a thrashing until the scream of a foxwhistle and the appearance of a large matronly woman who tears the boys off him, who rebukes and spanks them until they cry and scatter.

  She offers him her scarf to wipe the blood off his head. Rascals, by God, she calls them between gritted teeth, miscreants, vagrants, vagabonds, illiterates, badmash haramzadas and whateverelse: please pay them no notice; true, they will one day grow up to be robber barons but one can occasionally spank their asses red until then.

  Hoisting him over her arm, she carries him wheezing up to the appointed door. She is bound to be home, the woman says, poor creature, she hardly ventures out. He hears the cry of a small child from inside and wonders where he has come.

  After a very long time, the door opens a crack and the sad face of a middle-aged woman appears. Yes, she seems reluctant to open farther.

  You have a visitor, the matronly woman answers.

  The door yawns open. Zachariah, who has not looked at his own mirrored image in a long time, is astonished by the changes that are possible to notice in hers even at a first glance. Then there is weeping, the exclamations of surprise and ululations of joy, as one can expect. The child has never known a tortured returning father and cries for all the commotion.

  The matronly woman does not leave, so this is the Zachariah I have heard so much about, she says, ah.

  Here, Zachariah had the opportunity to add Ben Janoun, but in an instant, the old name he had abandoned years earlier returned to him when he saw his son’s face. Ben Jaloun, he concluded, my name is Zachariah Ben Jaloun. And what is your name, he bends toward the child.

  Mamun, Gita says.

  Mamun, Zachariah calls, as the child draws back from his outstretched arms with a start and disappears under the folds of his mother’s dress. Zachariah looks at Gita finds it difficult to retain a smile; having borne the youthful appearance of a girl not more than two years earlier, and now, though barely thirty, she appears fifteen years older.

  He himself is scared of his face the first time he gazes into the bathroom mirror/ that grey emaciated hunchbacked thing, could it really be Zachariah Ben Jaloun, why with jowls hanging folds of loose leather. Could he really ring around Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s calves with index finger and thumb. Why is it so difficult to lift a child into his arms, he recalls the introduction, albeit a crying, confused child that evades affection.

  Many words and babble, and already, the inheritance of glossolalia is clear in Mamun Ben Jaloun’s inscrutable sounds spirited speech that scare his parents. They have to remind him to use English or Bangla or Quinceyenglish, to say something they understand instead of venturing into minor languages.

  Zachariah wasn’t given a stipend and, forced to work, returns to the officers’ den where he encounters the same supervisor, who no longer recognizes him and demands identification, Ben Jaloun, he looks at the card, says at the name, yes, I remember, he admits finally. You may ask Major Mahmoud to show you the ropes, he says, as if Zachariah has no training as a border guard.

  Mahmoud himself, albeit older, remains virtually unchanged, and welcomes his old friend with the same vigour. He smokes the same black unfiltered cigarettes and still offers, though Zachariah Ben Jaloun has never accepted. Come now, we’re older, Mahmoud says, what’s the use anymore of denying life’s pleasures. And Zachariah accepts the words and draws a thin, long, dark cigarette out of the case. He coughs, sputters and stares at the same cityscape, he remembers meeting Gita on similar streets as a border guard, of being haunted by her grey eyes. How long it’s been, he blows smoke, measures the strata of geological time. And yet, he thinks, I am here.

  Where am I, he wonders as he looks around at the assistants carrying magazines for film cameras, carrying black bags for portable darkrooms. This border region has become a centre of the historical docudrama they were filming years earlier, he thinks, before he was imprisoned, even before Gita and Department 6119. Mahmoud informed him they had turned Quincy’s so-called Peacock Palace, which had become the Museum of Cultural History, into a film set to record scenes for a segment of The Mirror. What were they filming.

  Zachariah thought of his return home as miraculous, so much like the sensational stories of Yeshua, the blind Amharic Jew who said he and his companions floated on water by God’s grace for days until they felt a false breeze against their faces. People argued it was possible Yeshua knew he hadn’t arrived at the shores of the Mediterranean, but how could he have known he had come to the Gulf of Eden. Yoni didn’t break his heart, others around him did not tell him, and others still did not believe the story.

  JOURNEY TO THE UNNAMEABLE COUNTRY

  Hedayat thinks. He mumbles and groans, imagines, glossolates at all hours while waking or sleeping to the great distress of friends and family, just as he did during the tsetse fly plague. With sleight of tongue, he conjures a past The Mirror claims to know and to have filmed in such detail, one wonders when the cameras crabbing left, trucking right through streets and sidewalks on dolly tracks, casting hard lights sharp shadows, started filming everyday life and movie scenes. Does The Mirror know our history. (Why does Hedayat care.)

  What is history in the unnameable country when year after year the Ministry of Records and Sources comes in trucks during dark hours and cricket buzz when all the kids are in bed. They take away last year’s books to burn because they no longer match today’s truth. Keeners tief texts for their own play and destruction, however, and teachers are traditionally allowed to write to the Ministry of Records and Sources for permission to allow students to build personal bonfires at the end of each school year. Before I called it quits with school, they were teaching us the story of Caroline and John Quincy, slaver and rogue empress, a certain way.

  They were telling us Yeshua’s story is not unlike an older tale of our country, of unmitigable suffering aboard a ship of bodies baking in barrels, hundreds of doomed slaves in prison-containers. The men are destined to be field slaves, John Quincy is wooing Caroline Codite under electric lights in his manor house adjacent to heath flowers rough grass on an evening of crowned appetizers: his chefs have carefully hidden diamond studs for guests to find, meaning right bite broken teeth, indigestion, or the luckiest shit.

  Quincy himself, however, is interested only in the daffodil landscape over which he and Caroline lift briefly together in each other’s embrace, come with me, he grazes at her neck and ear in the warm breeze. He promises her oceans of iridescent animals, taverns in faraway lands where we will share mussels and shellfish and buttered bread, places for dictionaries to teach us to move our mouths in new ways, he holds her above the ground as the clock strikes a strange hour and the gramophone inside the house plays a heartbeat sound.

  Caroline agrees to spend her days a continent away in the house her new husband strews with heath flowers to remind her of their first floating love encounter. The Peacock Palace: its hallways into hallways adjoined to hallways without rooms, but Caroline most enjoys its rooms lifting platforms grinding gears into next-level chambers
, the ones with blue artwork on the walls solid shapes straight lines definitive curves latest rebellions against form and structure. Quincy’s other major purchases: slaves that hew wood, draw water from the well, bake bread, pray for their masters’ health and well-being at scheduled times.

  Some days, Caroline rides a wooden palanquin carried on her slaves’ shoulders, shaded by lace penumbra to new market catch: bodies from the hinterland of the unnameable country that with haggling and chains, yawning maws, sweat and undergarments, are to be sold men women children all into bondage. One night, she dreams of a library of metal containers on shelf after shelf, turns whispers empty hallways onto yet another collection of metal containers. An eyeless man is organizing the receptacles, and she asks him what he is doing. Separating living minds from dead minds, he says.

  Caroline watches the librarian resume his task of placing metal containers from a cart onto the stacks, and assumes the employee of such a serious institution would no doubt disabuse her of opening a metal vessel to see its contents, and though blind he would hear her trespass, so she walks, wanders the labyrinth to find a vestibule free of the eyeless man, but he appears in every corridor, at times in the distance, closer on occasions, in one instance amplified so large she can see streams of black tape emerging from his skull.

  That was when Caroline awoke to her husband’s nearhead, the terrifying tape image a memory. We’re going today, Quincy reminded her with crinkled closer sheets hand at her hair. I know, she recalled their schedule, saw in her mind their steam trip like others aboard the SS Nothingatall to deliver hundreds of barrels of slaves to new masters oceans away: slave children ask prior to the embrace of wooden darkness is the ocean made of metal or glass, are hurried into barrels because an irreducible night neither fog nor end of day is pressing against the body of the craft, because the notes on a lone violin on the shore are becoming faster and more frantic as the sun burns bare slave soles of feet in the harbour encampment.

  Caroline shifts her weight in bed. Already, she does not want to leave the sanctuary of the Peacock Palace for yet another delivery of bondsmen to slavers like her husband, to leave her home where llamas and birds of all colour and shape wander uncaged, her castle with its sherbet fountains and rooms of artists who have taken up residence, who paint in imaginary colours stretching whole hallways, its dancers who spin on toes to the brush-rhythm of their painting compatriots.

  Yet she finds her feet follow a familiar wooden incline, board Quincy’s ship a lazarium of risen bodies same black faces at gunpoint as last journey, she thinks. Into the wooden casing with you, she hears her husband order, into tight container water bags food parcels, into the shipment coffins not thrown into mournful ocean spray on the last trip as coastguards spotted them trafficking human beings in the garbage manner outlawed for many years, she would remind her husband from time to time, astonished at his determination on each occasion to continue undeterred, as if unaware of the century.

  She pouts mirror-mirror in their cabin room, rouging cheeks and sticking colour on dance-evening lips though they are far from appropriate functions and sociality. Her head overheats from such trips, she thinks, as she hears mealtime sounds opened wooden cases of another world, of slaves and ship journeys and soft woollen blankets as her head finds soft damp odour of bedsheets wonders nature of her illness.

  One night during the see-saw ship ride, Caroline dreams a fireimage burning burning, of husband Quincy standing before a cavern crowd along a volcanic perimeter, and she awakes shivering alone, frightened of the image she is sure is situated in the country of their destination, and again she wants only the soft-follicle melodies of so many violins playing roundtheclock in every room of her Peacock Palace.

  Turn around, fever says lips moving husband, man, turn around, Caroline says, frightened of her dream, future light, as she steps onto the deck to talk to Quincy, and breathes the ocean air.

  SATAN AND THE MAROONS

  Quincy turned around at his wife’s delirious behest and his bewildered crew stored his great slave ship at the riverhead near their home. Then the uxorious conqueror sat with a hot meal, lifted spoon after spoonful of revitalizing sauce and meats his slaves pre-chewed for their mistress’s health, so weakened was she by her mysterious vision sickness mastication had become a heavy order.

  Caroline saw a bird shivering light turn distance into wing. It flew flickering wall into room. She saw a future echo: two kids in a candy store overfilling with confectioneries, the fat kid eating chocolate, the owl one with talons for hands glossolating angelic tongue.

  Caroline’s health improved after visits from Bovaire, first-rate healer of the French army, whose regimen of antibiotics upon associating yellow-tinge fever illness with its microbial source lifted her out of bed finally into sitting, window-staring, before returning to a walkabout state enough to spy on the chickenhands standing around, jawing on leaves and stalks. She liked to make friendly with the slaves, to pick nits from their braids and accuse one of infecting the others with insects if discord was the game of the day, while another occasion would find her humming the same tune over and over as if lost in her own thoughts, while in reality she had left her throat on auto while her ears—nearly as keen as Moriah Mahatmama’s, head servant, it should be noted—were honed into the slightest changes of tone inflection pitch of their creole Quinceyenglish.

  While the Passage had infantilized native languages, the slaves found ways to keep mothertongues alive through song and nursery rhymes, and because it was hard to control their speech when they were not wearing their metal plates. The slaves, who knew they were constantly watched, made no mischief in the company of Caroline, whose husband scared, whippersnapper of the cow leather, but it was she who dealt the subtler and arguably more dangerous forms of terror.

  In the days before the Maroons, the children were the bravest, and would pelt Caroline Margarita with walnuts, unseen from the canopy, alone and giggling like squirrels at the ouch-ouch scampering lady. Field slaves would eyesmile and wink, silently making fun of her prissy walk, her lips, which pursed like an asshole when she concentrated, as the soft breeze of rebellion was already in the air, and Caroline’s intuition sensed this subtle shift in the narrative of power, which was plain to see in dreams and in waking life. She befriended young children with candied apples and jujubes, and while their parents tried in vain, she would pry into their dreams by sifting through their babble. All she got was nothing words bubbling phrases cut apart marron cima Cimarron, meaning nothing to her. Older subjects were evasive, would fail even to refer to the nothing words, and would point instead to some distracting bird or imitate the howl of a distant coyote.

  Frustrated, Caroline brought the words marron and Cimarron back to her husband, whose backhairs bristled and whose eyes widened at their mention. He roused his officers, bade come here his overseers, before consulting the Somnambulists seated on their hard wooden chairs in their endless rest perpetual work, in their sleeptalk in a room through which moved other days of other ages, who in their waking dreams saw a future department of desk after desk in rows of thought leeches sucking the life out of unsuspecting citizens of the unnameable country, the chamber of twin chairs where minions of centipedes made love in dark corners, the room with crabs from the far shores of Masoud Rana’s bleeding foot many years in the future, a room of so many spiderwebs Moriah Mahatmamagave up trying to clear them and watched as they consulted scalp to toe the landscapes of Illium and Dictum, Illium with his twisted throat that from birth made him speak slanted stones difficult words. Dictum, on the other hand, always shot straight to the point: they have already gathered outside the estate, he stared at Caroline with cataract clouds that hid the moment and allowed him to understand.

  Quincy heard the news and made a big row about inventory and demanded that the numbers of sleeping and working slaves be counted and rebranded.

  Mouth agape, the overseers swore on his records the problem was so recent it had escaped even Tuesday’
s head count.

  Who and where, Quincy flogged one adolescent red back and behind, and then an old woman begging and toothless. She kept pointing while they stuck pincers into her sides and no one could understand the howling words, though Caroline kept pursing her lips and thinking hard during the proceedings.

  Unpredictable explosive bunch, Quincy laughed; stick a firecracker in the behind of this one, he ordered. While fifty-odd houseslaves gathered in the courtyard, the bottom half of the old woman disappeared into fire, and then the top half one or two writhing moments later.

  Throughout these evil proceedings, Caroline Quincy noted the bubbling-to-surface of her husband’s bloodlust, an energy that differed so greatly from his careful and supine performances in the marital chamber where he would lie next to her for a long time also flat on back, wondering, wandering eight fingers along her ribs, under her shoulder blades, distracted, aloof, alone in his own flybuzzing mind, that she came to understand in which corners of his spirit he stored his youth. She wanted to help. And yet what could she do. In her dreams the daily inquisitions replayed and the non-discoveries—for a week had passed, letters and telegrams had been sent out to nearby estates, none of whom had counted odd figures of missing slaves—until she gathered meaning.

  The assexploded woman, she began.

  Yes, he was listening. The covers of the bed crinkled closer together.