by Reif Larsen
And I read them in that order.”
He stopped. A cavity where drum and voice had once been.
“The small house where I was staying was overrun with books. Thousands of books. My hosts were gracious, as ever, but they had grown weary of these deliveries. Their son, my docent, was doing his best to organize the books, but their sheer volume was already putting them in great danger if the rebels should ever return. I could no longer look my hosts in the face, because I already knew too much about them. From that very first look, I knew them better than they knew themselves. Memory is a weapon too powerful for any one man to yield . . . I have come to realize that forgetting is our greatest gift. This is one memory I shall never have: the memory of how not to remember.”
His face suddenly looked stricken. He tapped his parasol against the barge. The birds fluttered beneath him.
“One day they asked me to leave . . . Of course, knowing them, I already knew such a request was coming. I already knew everything that was coming before it came, because the future always arises from the past. I managed to thank my hosts, and then I fled to the jungle with my books. I did not even pay my respects to my brothers’ graves or the burnt ruins of the monastery. I was too distraught. You can still see these ruins on the banks of the river. But I soon found I had other troubles. After the fire, my skin had become extraordinarily sensitive to the sun. The ash had turned me the most terrible color of white . . . Well, you can see for yourself what I have become. Before, I was dark, almost like a Peruvian. But now . . .” His voice drifted. “Their son, the docent, insisted on coming with me. I forbade him, but he would not hear of it. He was to be the first of what would later become an army. Together, we built a large, five-walled structure by the river—a pentagon. The perfect repository for my books. I thought it would hold all the books I could ever possibly want. I set about writing a hundred letters a day, asking for more books. More books for my African library. I gave gentle instructions for the books they might want to send. Get me Krleža and Slaveykov and Oe, I would write, and the books continued to come, but there were not enough. There were never enough. The more I read, the more I knew I had not read. And so I realized something must be done. I left my library in the hands of my docents and spent one year traveling the world, telling my story, showing my burns. I pleaded for more books. I negotiated the donation of 573 libraries and private collections—in Murmansk, in Bulawayo, in Alta, in Akron, in Havana, in Bangalore. I met with publishers in Madrid, New York, Frankfurt, Milan, London. I asked them to send me anything they could spare. This was the same year I met Alfonso Daneri in Buenos Aires. He agreed to be one of my shepherds. . . .
“You can’t imagine how painful this travel was . . . One year in the world for me was like ten thousand lives lived for other men. I can now easily draw a map of every city in the world. I can recount house numbers, the arrangement of flowers in the windowsill . . . the shape and make of door knockers, mailboxes, linden trees, sewer grates, traffic lights. I can never forget any of it . . . It’s torture, torture . . . I can’t convey the torture. But it was worth it, this pain of remembering. It was worth it for the books. You see, people took up my cause with great enthusiasm. Each of them thought that they, and they alone, were saving my library—and they were right, but what they did not realize is that there were thousands like them, each believing they were making the world whole again. And so: the books came. They came by the crateful . . . by the boatful. So many books . . . fourteen thousand boatloads. As the country collapsed, my library grew and grew. Suddenly the problem became not where would I get the books but where would I put them. I had to build another pentagon. And another. My team of docents grew. I don’t know how word spread, but they came from all over the country. You will meet them . . . soon. I trained them in the arts of classification, and it became their enormous task to organize all of these books.”
“How many books are we talking about?”
“The larger the library, the more uncertain the collection . . . This is the third law of accumulation, as stated by Jarmuch Hovengär. Even I do not know exactly the number of books we have. Of course, we also started to amass many copies of the same book; we had over four hundred copies of Anna Karenina alone. We had thousands of Bibles, all editions, all translations. We continued to accept donations, but I also had to become more selective. At a certain point, I already had most books. So I started to fill out the edges of the collection. I made contacts with liaisons working in different countries, in different languages, and they would ask me what I wanted and I would simply say, ‘Get me one of every book.’ People like it when you tell them this. It turns them into bloodhounds . . . They would send me the most spectacularly rare books for free, to the middle of Africa! For many of them it became a religion.”
“What did people think of it here?” Radar asked.
Funes nodded, as if he knew such a question was coming. “As big as Congo is, there is only one river to the ocean. Stories started about the library, about what kind of place it was—perhaps my docents were the ones spreading these stories. It does not matter. People started to make pilgrimages. First only a couple, but then they came in streams. They came if they were sick. They thought the books held powers . . . They would go inside the stacks and pray. I claimed no power, of course. I was happy for my docents to show them the books and the catalog. As long as they didn’t harm the collection. Many who came to the library claimed they had been cured. Of what I cannot be sure. I did not lead them to this conclusion, but then, I did not dissuade them from believing in it, either.
“And then came the wars. For many years, the river was impassable . . . It was too dangerous, even for me, the Tatayababuku, as they now called me. Kisangani was in very bad shape. Many people died. There was fighting all around. I heard gunshots every night and the collection lay stagnant—only a few books trickled in here and there, through clandestine channels. But the library was never harmed. Even the rebels knew that they could not touch what lay inside. And after the war ended, the local people began to give me books.”
“Why? You didn’t need books.”
“I don’t claim to know the African mind. I have played along, but I have never deceived anyone. The library is part of this country’s history now. It’s a part of the world’s history. And I can tell you, I was the first to get back on the river after the war was finished. Even when the UN would not run their boats, I was there. The people knew who I was. They saw my crates. And my crates gave them hope.”
“So how big is the library now?” said Radar.
“Neither I nor anyone could say for sure. What I can say is that it is by far the largest private collection of books in the world. Over the years, we’ve built sixty-one interlinked pentagons. Each pentagon holds one hundred twenty thousand books, give or take. We’ve carved out the space from the jungle and still we don’t have room . . . We must always build more. Three hundred and fifty docents are under my employ—they tend the collections, fight the collections. Knowledge is transient. We battle the insects, the humidity . . . The books themselves are always expanding. They can never be happy with the space they have.”
“Do any scholars come to use your library?” asked Lars.
“If they came, we would not turn them away. Our location is not the most accessible, I admit, but a library must be open to all who wish to use it. I’m not foolish enough to believe it’s simply about preservation. It is also about use. A library dies without use.”
Fig. 5.8. “La Bibliothèque du Fleuve Congo”
From Radmanovic, R. (2013), I Am Radar, p. 705
“You’re already dead,” whispered Horeb.
“I’m sorry?” said Funes with a smile.
“I said, ‘What of the African authors?’” said Horeb. “Are they in your library too?”
“Of course,” said Funes. “Pentagon forty-eight, sections fourteen and fifteen are devoted t
o African literature.”
“Two sections only?”
“This is not my doing; I’m only the vessel, not the contents,” he said. “But I don’t find it a coincidence that this is the same continent that housed the great library of Alexandria, the closest we have ever come, until now, to a universal library. This continent is where knowledge was born and where it shall die.”
Radar got up, went into the container, and came out bearing a book. He handed it to Funes.
“For your library,” he said.
Funes studied the book carefully. He examined it as a doctor examines a patient, touching the cover, the spine, the tips of its pages.
“I’ve never seen this before,” he said. “It’s quite unusual to find a book I’ve never seen. Per Røed-Larsen. Who is he?”
Radar gestured at Lars. “His stepbrother.”
Lars shook his head. “I have no stepbrother,” he said.
“An author who doesn’t exist?” said Funes.
“Why do you need the author when you already have the book?” said Lars.
12
On the eighth morning, Radar awoke, shivering, entangled in the lingering tendrils of dream panic. In the dream, he had been seated at the dining room table with his parents. They were all very thirsty—none of them had had anything to drink for days and days. The only way to get water was from a small bird, which they passed around and squeezed, pressing their thumbs into the soft tuft of its belly. If you squeezed hard enough, a single drop of liquid would come out of the bird’s beak. It was barely enough to wet the tongue. Radar was caught between the desperation of his own thirst and not wanting to watch his parents die of dehydration. When it came to him, he squeezed the bird and nothing came out, not even a drop. He squeezed harder and harder, until he began to feel bones breaking . . .
He sat up in his cot. He was thirsty. His joints ached. Like Funes, he had inherited a body sensitive to changes in weather. Perhaps a storm was coming. Or perhaps this was the first sign of malaria. Or sleeping sickness. Or any of the hundred maladies, known and unknown, that he might catch out here.
Outside, he could hear the steady throb of Horeb beating his drum. And then he heard something else: a faint beep. An unfamiliar chime. He searched through his belongings and found the source: the cell phone. A battery icon was blinking in the top left corner. The phone was dying. He realized that Lars had not given him the charger. The phone had subsisted this whole time on a single charge and was now signaling its inglorious death.
The phone beeped again.
“What is it?” he said.
He examined the pixelated screen and saw another icon blinking. An envelope. The number 4. Hands trembling, he thumbed at the buttons. The messages must have arrived in the middle of the night, in the middle of his dream.
The first two were from Ana Cristina:
• • •
609-292-4087: Radar! I thought u died or something! When i got your text i literally jumped up n down :) javi laughed at me :O how is congo???? Can’t wait 4 u to get back! My mama and her empanadas will b waiting :) xo ac
609-292-4087: Also lights came back on!!! All of a sudden like they were never off! 4 real so weird! PS what are u writing???? -><-
He read and reread and re-reread the messages. He wanted to swallow this collection of pixelated words and live off their nutrients forever. If his life stopped here and now, he would have no complaints.
He finally flipped down to the third message. It was from a strange number.
• • •
387-33-275-312: MY SON IS BORN. RADAR RADMANOVIC. MOTHER IS FINE. BABY IS FINE. I AM FINE. KAKAV OTAC TAKAV SIN. 73, K2W9
“Tata?” he said. What the hell?
Frantically, he pressed the call button, waiting, praying that somewhere in this jungle there was a cell tower that could propel the call into the stratosphere. The long-distance connection sputtered, clicked, engaged, the heavens parting. A single ring. His cell phone went dead.
“No!” he yelled. “No!”
He cradled the device. He had not even gotten to the fourth message! The words somewhere inside this plastic shell. His father had texted him? From where? And what could this text mean? “My son is born”?
“Lars!” he shouted. He kicked open the mosquito net, tumbled out of bed, and tripped over a bucket of electronics before emerging from the container. “Lars!”
As soon as he stepped outside, however, he sensed a difference in the air. A heaviness. The river was cocooned in a haze, the banks on either side barely visible.
He found Lars drinking coffee by the fire pit. His eyes were puffy. He didn’t look well.
“Do you have the charger for this phone?” he asked, holding up the mobile.
Lars gave him a weary look. He shook his head. “I think I left it in the van,” he said. “I’m sorry. We could probably cook something up.”
“Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”
“I feel a little off. Something I ate, I think. I’m sure it’ll pass.”
Radar drifted up to the side of the ship, where Horeb was drumming. He looked out at the hazy sky.
“It’s foggy,” he said to Horeb.
“That isn’t fog,” said Horeb.
Professor Funes, whom Radar had not seen again since his speech several evenings ago, emerged from the pousser in the shadow of his giant parasol, his driver in tow. They made their way out onto the deck of the barge. The professor did not acknowledge Radar or Horeb as he and his driver spoke rapidly in Lingala, gesturing at the horizon. Radar realized this was the first time Funes had been outside in the daylight since their departure.
The birds flew overhead. Of the thirteen hundred or so that had once made up the original flock, there were only a couple of dozen left. It seemed this last night in particular had taken a toll. The few that remained appeared especially restless, flitting this way and that.
Funes walked to the head of the barge. A few birds dived and tried landing on his parasol, bouncing awkwardly off its dome. He lightly jiggled the umbrella as if shaking off a layer of rain, but otherwise he ignored the creatures.
“What is it?” said Radar, approaching them.
Funes continued speaking with the driver for some time before breaking into a wet, hacking cough. It was a cough that came from deep inside the lungs, a cough that instantly revealed the extent of the decay within. The parasol trembled as Funes doubled over, scattering a few lingering birds into the air. Finally, when he had regained his composure, Funes turned to Radar. His face was blotched in an irregular pattern, like the map of a coastline.
“Smoke,” he whispered hoarsely. “That is smoke.”
By the afternoon the smoke had enveloped them. The air was thick with ash; it smelled as if the sky had been expelled from the inside of the earth. No one on the barge spoke. Otik retreated to the theater wagon and the malaise of his vircator. Perhaps he was trying to beckon the few remaining birds, who now seemed to have little or no connection with the performance and only hung around the barge out of reluctant familiarity. Lars, complaining that he felt unwell, stayed inside the container all day, making little notations into a black book that he kept by his cot.
Radar tried listening to his radio for some news of the smoke, but he heard only the usual hodgepodge of sermons, rumba, and indecipherable mutterings. He made an attempt at jerry-rigging a power cord for the cell phone, but the voltage was not right, and when he connected it to the power source he smelled the telltale scent of burning circuitry. He quickly unplugged the phone, but it was already too late. He would now have to dismantle the chassis and examine the motherboard. This would take hours. He halfheartedly started in, but he found his momentum had been sapped. He couldn’t concentrate. He went up to the bow again and tried joining Horeb’s drumbeat with his radios, but Horeb waved him away.
“I need to speak
alone,” he said. As he said this, a distant drumming rose from the northern bank. Horeb’s head shot up like a rabbit. He listened, then answered on the drum:
“What’re you saying?” asked Radar.
“I’m saying: ‘He is near, he is coming, get ready . . .’”
“Who is near?”
But Horeb had gone back to banging out the same pattern on his drums. Again and again, the mantra was repeated, dismantled, copied, and dispersed into the haze.
At some point, they entered the magical hour when the tropical sun began to tumble from the sky, the story of the day draining away into nothing, light becoming shadow and shadow becoming light. Standing at the stern, Radar reached out and caught a piece of skin floating through the air. It was a page, charred, still warm to the touch. For a brief instant, Radar could almost read the text on its face, but then the paper dissolved in his hands. He looked and saw that the river was full of these ashen pages, floating like lily pads. Pages drifting through the sky. It was snowing in the jungle.
“Ay yeah! Mayee! Ah yeah! Mayee!” called out the sounder.
They came around a bend in the river, and then there it was. The source of all things. The fire. The world was on fire.
He could hear the flames. He could hear them because the pousser had cut its motor and the sounder had gone quiet. They glided toward the fire, which arced up forty, fifty feet into the air, the smoke so thick and black it looked as if it were made of hair. The current began to slow their progress, pushing them away, the river urging them not to come any closer. They reached a standstill, an equilibrium, and for a second it felt as if they were turning back, but then the pousser fired its engines and pressed them forward, toward what Radar now knew could only be the library.