The Pathless Sky

by Chaitali Sen

  Abraham couldn’t get off the subject of Mariam’s grandfather. “He started a war and left the country. He left the mess for the rest of us to clean up. It was a savage rebellion in Sulat. Didn’t they teach you anything about it in school?”

  “A little,” John said.

  “You would be a good candidate for a posting in the militarized zone. Do you know where that is?” Abraham asked.

  John swallowed, his throat tightening. “Northern Sulat?”

  “We send our best reserves there. Would you like to be posted there? Close to your sweetheart?”

  “Are you saying that’s where I’m being posted?”

  “I don’t know where you’re going to be posted. I’m only asking a question. Tell me truthfully.”

  “I would prefer not to go to the militarized zone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s militarized. I’d rather serve in a different capacity.”

  Abraham chuckled. “What exactly do you think the militia does? Give out blankets? Your job is to maintain order. You’ll do that wherever we tell you to do it.”

  “I understand.”

  “But I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to go that shithole either.”

  Abraham dismissed him, throwing the manila envelope into a pile. John stood up and saluted, but before he reached the door he turned around. “Is there any chance I can have the letters, sir?”

  “I don’t have the authority to give you the letters. They go to Document Review.”

  John stood there until Abraham looked up, visibly irritated. “I said you’re dismissed.”

  As he walked back to the barracks, he tried to make sense of the meeting. He had not expected, in return for his loyalty and outstanding performance, to be subject to secret surveillance and veiled threats. He was certain he was being sent to Northern Sulat. Lately the reserves had been talking about the best and worst assignments. There were a few places no one in their right minds wanted to go. The militarized zone was one of them. They said if you were sent to Northern Sulat, you were technically at war. The militia was getting blown up there all the time.

  He wasn’t allowed to call Mariam until Sunday. He was afraid she would be at work and he would somehow have to give her mother a message. Her mother never said anything to him besides hello but still he was terrified of her. He managed to catch Mariam just as she was leaving for work. He told her quickly there was a problem with the mail service and she shouldn’t send any more letters until he was settled at his post. She didn’t have time to ask any questions. He wasn’t able to find out if she’d received any of his letters.

  The morning he was to be given his assignment, he went into the latrine and threw up. No one at his table could eat their breakfast. They had to look for their names on a list pinned to a wall inside their barracks, in the same way some of his professors at Mount Belet posted their scores after an exam. John almost cried when he saw his assignment, a post in the Golpat Desert on the eastern border. The other reserves teased him mercilessly, saying vulgar things about his sisters, saying they must have sucked Abraham’s cock to get him such an easy assignment.

  * * *

  Despite all of his communication, Mariam couldn’t say she had a sense of how John was doing. In his letters, he kept saying how good it felt to be pushed beyond his limits, as if he’d been training for the Olympics. Then there was his strange phone call on a Sunday only to say that there was a delay in the mail service. These days she was hardly at home on Sundays.

  All summer, it had been rumored that the library was about to acquire a large collection of documents from the War Crimes Commission. Currently they were housed at the Governor’s Office until their rightful home could be determined. Mariam followed the story closely. She had never witnessed an archival acquisition and was interested in the process, and she wanted to see the documents. She was too afraid to approach the head of research about it, so she asked her friend Misha if she had heard anything.

  “It isn’t official yet,” Misha said. “It’s all politics, you know, but this is the most neutral place, unless they send the papers abroad. To Geneva or some place like that.”

  “Are they considering that?” Mariam asked.

  Misha smiled. “Of course not. Why would Geneva want them? You’re so simple, Mariam.”

  Misha enjoyed telling Mariam how simple she was. Mariam was sure it was meant to be a compliment, or at the very worst a benign sort of teasing. She laughed agreeably and went on with her investigation.

  “Have you ever seen a collection like this come in? Will we be cataloguing them or is that already done?”

  “It’s all a big mess, from what I hear. Why? Are you interested in cataloguing?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I can pass your name on. You’d be good at it. I for one don’t want to do it. It’s so bleak.”

  A few days later Misha came to Mariam with a stack of bound papers—Rules for Archival Description, Volumes I, II, and III. “It’s official,” she said. “Here’s some bedtime reading.” There were six hundred and seventy-five pages.

  She had to be interviewed, but the head of research already liked her and Mariam had no trouble conveying her enthusiasm for the project. Then there was a two-week training, including background on the War Crimes Commission and how they collected their documents. The training was in part to teach the rules of archival description, which they practiced with a number of dummy documents, but it was also to build an overall context for the project, to give them a sense of its purpose. The most important thing was to give each document equal weight. Every testimony had to be searchable and navigable, and the archivist had to relinquish all preconceptions, all opinions about the war and become completely objective. These documents would reveal the truth of this war for many years to come and had to be catalogued exquisitely.

  She couldn’t write anything about this in her letters to John. Besides the fact that she had signed an oath of confidentiality, it seemed unwise to write letters to a military camp about her cataloguing of war crimes. Her letters were as mundane as ever, and she kept writing them even after he told her to wait until he knew where he was posted.

  After her training, she was given a study room dedicated to her documents. She had to keep the documents locked up and discuss them with no one but the project supervisor until the archives were on the shelves. It was a tiny room, with one small work desk and a wall lined with shelves and boxes. A ceiling lamp flooded the room with yellow light, but if the door was closed and the light switched off, the space filled with an interminable blackness.

  At first she thought she was going too slowly. Each item required several levels of description, and she found it impossible to follow the content of the document and fulfill the myriad descriptive tasks at the same time. She had to read each document many times, more than anyone else, she imagined, because she was so worried about the procedure. In those first few weeks, troubled by the mechanics of archival description, she absorbed little of the war itself. It was months before she noticed that in her waking hours she was constantly interacting with two worlds, the one that was moving in front of her eyes, and the one in her head, looping like images from a slide projector. She saw students reading in their carrels, and she saw people exhumed from concrete burials whose skin and clothing were covered in limestone dust. She saw Misha gossiping with the girls on the reference floor, and soldiers raping women and throwing them into the canal to drown. She saw military squads racing each other to execute whole neighborhoods of people. They were rewarded for clearing neighborhoods, these boys in uniform who were ordered to wander like bands of marauders, and when they were older, if they survived, they had to face the monsters they once were. Mariam imagined the dour court reporter transcribing hours of testimony, and witnesses answering endless questions about one incident in front of a panel of people whose stake
in the truth was unknown. Sometimes she thought these efforts at documentation could elevate human consciousness and put an end to all war. Then she remembered how big the world was, how pregnant it was with war at every moment. This was not the first attempt to understand a war, and none of the historical mining of previous wars had prevented this one.

  If she was already in a fragile emotional state, it was best for her to avoid the work that day. After a while, she found it soothing to stand in the room with the light switched off, to let the darkness envelop her, before reentering a world that was so strangely ignorant of what she had just learned.

  * * *

  John enjoyed the eighteen-hour train journey to his desert post. For the first time in six weeks, he wasn’t surrounded by reserves and had time to think about other things besides drills and postings. He had never been this far south and he stared out the window at the ever-changing landscape. There were mountains dramatically eroding, their slopes left chipped and shredded. The landscape appeared all but barren, but there were a few unexpected pockets of life, grasses tufting up from fissures in the rock and purple, heathery shrubs surrounded by herds of mountain goats bleating at the passing train.

  They got stuck in a tunnel for a few hours. He fell asleep and woke up as the train staggered forward and they emerged from the tunnel to see the sun flashing off crystalline specks on the rock face. The terrain eventually became more feminine, less angular as they traveled further east. When it was too dark to see anything more out the window, he fell asleep again and was awakened by the train conductor. He had to get off the train and walk a few yards away from the platform to meet another reserve like him standing by a military jeep. The kid was talkative. He said the desert was boring as hell. He dropped John off in the middle of the night near an aluminum shack and said, “That’s your barrack. Good luck.” Next to the shack, there was a man sleeping by a dying campfire.

  John turned on his flashlight and went into the shack. There was no one in there and he didn’t know which of the four bunks was his. He went back outside, threw more kindling into the fire and crouched down in the sand until the fire died again. He looked around in all directions into the darkness that went on and on. Then he wrapped himself in his sleeping bag and lay down on his back, looking up for the first time to see the infinite sky dense with stars, the whole universe bearing down on him.

  In the morning he found out the other man sleeping next to the fire was named Sherod. Sherod was a twenty-nine-year-old cook. All through his twenties Sherod had looked for ways to avoid his military service. He thought he’d be long gone from the country by his thirtieth birthday, but things did not work out and here he was, avoiding a prison sentence. He was a fan of American westerns and especially the famous actor John Wayne. Sherod tried to say John’s name with an exaggerated American accent but he could only achieve it by sneering and talking through his nose. “Jaaaan,” was how it sounded. When they weren’t at their posts Sherod drank. Every time he drove into the nearest town for provisions, he mailed letters for John and brought back cheap bottles of moonshine. It burned like acid and John, much to Sherod’s relief, did not drink much of it. They shared the shack with the two night sentries, Tamer and Nasir, whom Sherod strangely nicknamed Flaco and Gordo after some Mexican characters in a western movie he’d seen. Flaco was the thin one, and Gordo a bit fatter though still skinny, and John did not actually know which was Tamer and which was Nasir, but John only ever saw them when they were changing shifts.

  At their posts they were supposed to inspect trucks and other vehicles heading to and from the border, but there was little traffic here, with one road slicing a hundred miles of desert in half. John was given the watchtower, from which he could see for miles the stillness of the desert. On most days the only vehicles that passed were military or commercial trucks with permits to pass through their checkpoint. The few unauthorized vehicles Sherod did intercept were let go with a small bribe and permits that he had forged through a friend. Sometimes Sherod would radio the next checkpoint twenty miles away and tell them to look out for a truck with a false license plate number. Of course that truck would never appear, and just talking about them waiting for it entertained him for hours.

  One morning, before dawn, John heard gunfire and ran from the shack to find Sherod standing over a dead goat. The goat must have fallen off one of the transport trucks and wandered over from the road. Sherod had come upon the little creature bleating mournfully and decided to put him out of his misery.

  It took all day but they skinned and cleaned the animal and dug a pit, and then roasted him right there in a makeshift oven they dug in the sand. Flaco and Gordo abandoned their posts for the feast, and after they ate they sat outside the shack drinking, chain-smoking, stargazing, and conversing. Flaco and Gordo were young, both eighteen. They didn’t seem to know what to make of John. They had never traveled far from their rural homes and had never met someone born and raised in Alexandria. They asked him many questions, which he answered with great care, feeling tremendous pressure to represent the city realistically. He tried to tell them that even he, having grown up in Alexandria, didn’t know everything about life there. He only knew about the life that had been handed to him. Undaunted by John’s vague answers, they kept up their questioning.

  “Are the girls in Alexandria pretty?” Flaco asked.

  Sherod balked. “Idiot! There are millions of girls in Alexandria. How can they all be pretty?”

  “But in general,” Flaco said, standing firm. “Girls from there are prettier.”

  Sherod laughed. “How would you know?”

  “The girls at home look like bulls,” Gordo said.

  Flaco was not one to be thrown off course. “Do you have a girl? Do you have a picture of your girl?”

  “He has a girl,” Sherod said. He grinned and winked. “He sends her letters. She gave him a pocket watch.”

  “It’s not a pocket watch,” John said.

  “Whatever it is, he plays with it at night.”

  Flaco and Gordo were curious. “Let’s see a picture. Is she sexy? She must be sexy.”

  “I don’t have a picture,” John said. None of them could understand why. He couldn’t explain how it never occurred to him to ask her for one. And it wasn’t as if Mariam had spent the last three years snapping pictures of herself. “Anyway, she isn’t from Alexandria.”

  Flaco and Gordo didn’t care. “What does she look like? Tell us.”

  John tried to describe her, the gold flecks in her eyes, and her silky hair, how the ends of it curled just a little at her shoulders. They looked disappointed.

  “What about her tits?”

  John said he didn’t want to describe Mariam’s “tits.” They were all silent for a moment. Then Sherod had a revelation.

  “He hasn’t seen them! You haven’t seen them, have you?”

  The three of them fell over laughing. John took the ridicule, happy to let that be the end of it. In the morning when they were all hungover, only he seemed to remember anything they talked about.

  Sherod had already been in the desert for six months when John arrived, and after three more his military service reached its successful conclusion. He would go home and celebrate his thirtieth birthday. On his last night the four of them drove to the nearest town twenty miles away and drank until they couldn’t see straight. John woke up in the middle of the night next to a girl who looked too young to be on her own, a girl he didn’t remember meeting, and he went down to the street looking for his companions. He walked up and down the street several times, but figuring he’d been ditched he walked into a pub that was still open and asked if there was a telephone he could use. There was one in the back, the bartender said, but it didn’t always work, and they would charge him regardless of whether or not the call went through. They agreed on a cash amount, which John somehow put together with bills tucked inside his socks, before he stumble
d to the telephone hanging on the wall in a back corridor. He had no idea what time it was. He dialed Mariam’s number. It only rang once before she answered. He said he was sorry for calling so late and he didn’t have much time so he had to get right to the point. “Are you awake?” he asked her.

  “I’m awake. Are you all right?”

  “You haven’t written any more letters, have you?”

  “I haven’t sent them. I was waiting for you to tell me where you are.”

  “I’m in the desert. Miles from anywhere. The sky at night . . . Mariam . . . I wish we could lie under it.”

  “Where in the desert? Are you drunk?”

  He straightened up, hoping a more sober posture would improve his speech. “I miss you, Mariam. They took your letters.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They took your letters away from me. I didn’t get to read them.”

  “They took them? You said there was a delay.”

  “It was a bad delay,” he said. He told her to hold on a minute and dropped the receiver. He went to the bar to ask someone to write down the name and address of the pub.

  He hurried back to the phone. “You can write to me at this pub. I’ll tell them to hold the letter.” He read the address to her several times, thinking each time he’d made a mistake. “You got it?”

  “I think so.”

  “It’ll get here. There’s nothing else . . .” He was going to say in the vicinity but there were too many syllables.

  “John, you don’t sound all right.”

  “I’ve been drinking because it’s Sherod’s last night and tomorrow he’s going home. I liked him so much. He was like a friend to me.”