2084

by Sansal Boualem

  The passion for pilgrimage was maintained by never-ending campaigns, a mixture of publicity, sermons, fairs, contests, and various manipulative events orchestrated by the very powerful Ministry of Sacrifices and Pilgrimages. A very old and very holy family, much-loved by Abi, controlled the monopoly of the Hype, the moussim, which they exercised in a manner befitting piety: “Neither too little nor too much” was their commercial slogan, and even children knew it. Many other professions gravitated around the sacrifices and pilgrimages, and an equal number of noble families endeavored to provide their best. In Abistan, the only economy was religious.

  These campaigns were spread throughout the year, with a high point in summer, during the Siam, the holy week of Absolute Abstinence, which coincided with the return of the pilgrims from their distant, enchanting sojourns in one of the thousand and one sites available for pilgrimage all over the country: shrines, sanctuaries, sacred lands, mausoleums, and places of glory and martyrdom, where the people of the believers had won sublime victories over the Enemy. A stubborn coincidence had arranged things in the following manner: all these sites were at the far reaches of the globe, nowhere near roads or inhabited areas, and this meant that every pilgrimage was a long, impossible expedition, taking years; pilgrims crossed the country from one end to the other on foot, along rough, solitary roads, as tradition would have it, which made the return of the old or sick improbable. But in fact this was the true dream of all the candidates—to die along the path to holiness. As if they thought that it might not be such a good thing to attain perfection in one’s lifetime after all; perfection placed so many duties and responsibilities on the chosen one that he would be bound to fail, losing in one fell swoop all that had been gained from so many years of sacrifice. And then how—unless he were to behave as a potentate—could a little saint find pleasure in perfection in a world that was so imperfect?

  No one, not one single worthy believer, ever thought for an instant that these perilous pilgrimages might be an effective way to rid the cities of their teeming masses and offer them a beautiful death along the road to fulfillment. Similarly, no one ever thought that the Holy War might have been waged for the same purpose: to transform useless, wretched believers into glorious, lucrative martyrs.

  It went without saying that the holy of holies of all the saints was the little house of rare stones that was Abi’s place of birth. The hovel was the most pitiful in creation, but the miracles that had taken place there were more than merely extraordinary. No Abistani was without a reproduction of the holy dwelling in his home; it might be made of papier-mâché, or wood, or jade, or gold: all reflected the same love for Abi. No one pointed it out, the people had not noticed, but every eleven years the little house changed its location, this by virtue of a secret arrangement on the part of the Just Brotherhood, who organized the rotation of the prestigious monument out of a concern for equity among the sixty provinces of Abistan. Nor did anyone know that one of the most discreet programs of the Apparatus prepared the reception site long in advance, and trained the local inhabitants in their role as future historic witnesses, whose job it would be to teach the pilgrims what it meant to live in the vicinity of a cottage that was unique in all the universe. The penitents paid them back in kind, they were generous with their acclaim, their tears, and their little gifts. The communion was total. Without witnesses to testify, History does not exist, and someone must begin the story so that others may tell the end.

  The dense network of restrictions and prohibitions, the propaganda, preaching, and obligatory worship, the hurried succession of ceremonies, the display of personal initiative that counted so much in both the assessment and conferral of privileges: all of this added up to create a particular state of mind among the Abistanis, and they were constantly bustling about in support of a cause about which they knew not the first thing.

  To welcome the pilgrims when they returned from their long absence, with their aura of recent holiness; to celebrate them, and ply them with delicacies; to obtain something from them—an object, a lock of hair, just any old relic: this was an occasion and an opportunity which the populace and the candidates for the Bidi would not have missed for the world. Such treasures were beyond price on the market for relics. But what was more, there were wonders to be learned from these beloved pilgrims; theirs were the eyes that had seen the world and reached its holiest places.

  In the weave of routine and sacrament, the Expectation was a trial the candidates endured with ever-increasing happiness. Patience is another name for faith, it is the path and the goal: this was the first teaching, along with obedience and submission, which made for a good believer. And during this period, at every moment, day and night, while God and man looked on, one had to remain a worthy among the worthies. No Expectant would ever survive for one minute the shame of being withdrawn from the most glorious list of candidates for pilgrimage to the sanctuaries. But this was an absurd rumor that the Apparatus liked to keep alive, for no one had ever failed, no one had died of shame, everyone knew that the people of the believers did not harbor any hypocrites in their midst, just as they knew that the vigilance of the Apparatus was infallible; the Indusoccupants were said to have been eliminated before the idea ever came to them to delude anyone. Intox, provoc, agitprop: nothing but a scourge, the people needed clarity and encouragement, not false rumors or veiled threats. Sometimes the Apparatus went too far with their manipulation, they grew careless, even made up bogus enemies whom they then went to great lengths to track down—only, when all was said and done, to find themselves eliminating their own friends.

  Ati nurtured a passion for those long-distance adventurers; at first he would listen ever so casually, so as not to frighten them off or alert the watchman’s antennae, but then he would get carried away by his enthusiasm and begin to question them avidly, like a child, firing off a battery of “whys” and “hows.” And yet he was always left unsatisfied, and had sudden fits of anxiety and rage. Somewhere there was a wall that prevented one from seeing beyond the gossip of these poor wanderers; they were on probation, conditioned to propagate illusions throughout the country. Ati was sorry to think this way, but he was convinced that their frenzied stories had been planted on their tongues by the people deep within the Apparatus who controlled their brains from a distance. What better means than hope and wonder to chain people to their beliefs, for he who believes is afraid, and he who is afraid believes blindly. But this was something Ati would think of only later, in the throes of torment: for him it would mean breaking the chains that bind faith to madness and truth to fear, to save oneself from annihilation.

  In the darkness and tumult of vast, overcrowded rooms he was seized by strange, urgent spasms of pain, shuddering like a horse in a stable that senses danger lurking in the night. The hospital did indeed seem to house death. Panic was not long in coming, and it hounded him until dawn and did not recede until daylight banished the swarming shadows of night and the morning service began in a commotion of casseroles and quarrels. The mountain had always terrified him, he was a city man, born in the warm fug of crowding and close quarters, and here, in his wretched bed, sweating and gasping for breath, he felt he was at the mountain’s mercy, crushed by its mass and severity, oppressed by its sulfurous emanations.

  And yet it was the mountain that had cured him. He had arrived at the sanatorium in a calamitous state, tuberculosis was bleeding him dry, he was coughing up great clots of blood, and the hacking and fever were driving him mad. In one year he had regained a semblance of health. The fresh, chill air was like an ardent fire, ruthlessly consuming the little worms devouring his lungs—that was how the patients liked to depict their ailment, although they knew full well that it came from Balis the Renegade, and that it was divine will that ultimately decided the order of things. The nurses—crude, rough-hewn mountain men—did not think otherwise, and at set times they handed out roughly fashioned pills and emetic concoctions; nor did they forget to renew the t
alismans when new ones came in, preceded by enticing rumors. As for the doctor, who would sweep through once a month without saying a word to anyone, other than to snap his fingers: no one even dared glance at him. He was not a man of the people, he belonged to the Apparatus. There was a great murmuring of excuses as he went by, and a rush to hide wherever possible. The director of the asylum cleared the way for him, slashing the air with his switch. Ati knew nothing about the Apparatus, other than that they had power over everything, in the name of Abi and the Just Brotherhood; Abi’s giant portrait was on every wall from one end of the country to the other. Oh . . . that portrait, it must be said, was the identity of the country. It consisted, in fact, of no more than a play of shadows, a sort of negative of a face: at its center was a magic eye, pointed like a diamond, endowed with a consciousness that could pierce armor plating. It was a well-known fact that Abi was a man, a most humble man, but he was not a man like other men, he was Yölah’s Delegate, the father of the believers, the supreme leader of the world, and in the end, by the grace of God and the love of humankind, he was immortal; and if no one had ever seen him it was simply because his light was blinding. No, truly, he was too precious: to expose him to the gaze of the common people was unthinkable. Around his palace, at the heart of the forbidden city, in the center of Qodsabad, hundreds of well-armed men were massed, aligned to form concentric, hermetic barriers that not even a fly could get through without the permission of the Apparatus. These massive guards were selected at birth, painstakingly trained by the Apparatus, and they obeyed no one else; nothing could distract them, divert them, unsettle them; no compassion could restrain their cruelty. No one knew whether they were actually human; their brains had been removed at birth, which would explain their terrifying stubbornness and haunted gaze. The common people, who never miss an opportunity to find an appropriate name for something they do not understand, called them Abi’s Fools. It was said they came from a faraway province in the south, from a remote tribe bound to Abi by a mythical pact. The tribe, too, had been named by the people, a name which described it well: the leg-abi, for Abi’s legion.

  The safety measures were so excessive that some people thought these unshakeable robots guarded an empty nest, or nothing at all, just an idea, a premise. It was a way of finding entertainment in the mystery; at such levels of ignorance, everyone adds their own bit of folly, but they all knew that Abi was omnipresent, simultaneously here and there, in one provincial capital and in another, in an identical palace that was just as hermetically guarded, and from that palace Abi radiated light and life over the people. This is the power of ubiquity, the center is everywhere, and so, every day, enthusiastic crowds flocked in procession around his sixty palaces to offer him their ardent devotion and costly gifts, and all they asked from him in return was paradise upon their death.

  The idea of representing him in this way, with one eye, was cause for debate, and theories were advanced: it was said he was one-eyed—from birth, according to some, or due to the suffering he endured in his childhood, according to others; it was also said he actually had an eye in the middle of his forehead, and that this was the mark of a prophetic destiny, but equally firmly it was posited that the image was symbolic, signaling a spirit, a soul, a mystery. With such mass distribution, hundreds of millions of copies a year, the portrait might have provoked madness by indigestion had art not endowed it with an ultrapowerful magnetism emitting strange vibrations, and these vibrations filled space the way the spellbinding song of whales saturates the oceans during mating season. At first glance a passerby was subjugated, then before long he was happy, and felt intensely protected, loved, promoted—crushed, too, by the majesty and all it conveyed of formidable violence. Crowds would form before the richly illuminated giant portraits that clothed the facades of major administrative buildings. No artist on earth could ever have produced such a marvel, this portrait was the work of Abi himself, inspired by Yölah—and as all were taught from an early age, this was the truth.

  One day someone wrote something in the corner of one of Abi’s portraits. An incomprehensible word, scribbled in an unknown language, an ancient written form from before the first Great Holy War. People were not only intrigued, they expected a great event to occur. Then the rumor went around that the word had been translated by the Apparatus cipher office; the mysterious wording was equivalent, in abilang, to “Bigaye is watching you!” It didn’t mean anything, but as the name had a pleasing sound, the people immediately took it up, and Abi was affectionately baptized Bigaye. All anyone heard now was Bigaye this and Bigaye that, Bigaye the beloved, Bigaye the just, Bigaye the all-seeing, until the day a decree from the Just Brotherhood prohibited the use of the barbarian word under pain of immediate death. Not long thereafter, communiqué number 66710 from the NeF, the News from the Front, triumphantly proclaimed that the loathsome scribbler had been found and immediately executed along with his entire family and all his friends, and their names had been stricken from the registers all the way back to the first generation. Silence fell through the land, but many people, deep down, were wondering: why had the forbidden word been spelled Big Eye in the aforementioned decree? Where did that mistake come from? Was it the scribe at the NeF? The editor, the Honorable Suc? Someone else? It could not be Duc, the Great Commander, head of the Just Brotherhood, let alone Abi himself: he had invented abilang, and even if he had wanted to he could not have made a mistake, of any kind.

  The fact remained that Ati had regained some color and put on a few pounds. His phlegm was still thick, he had trouble breathing, he moaned a lot, coughed a great deal, but he was no longer spitting blood. For the rest, there was not much the mountain could do: life was hard, everything was in short supply, days were filled with a steady accretion of deprivation, in a manner of speaking. No sooner did you begin life than you were already ruined, and this was natural. So high up in the mountains and so far from the city, the decline was rapid. The sanatorium was a guaranteed end of the road for many—old people, children, the seriously disabled. That’s how it is with the poor, they are resigned to the end, they begin to seek treatment only when life is leaving them behind for good. There was something funereal and grandiose about the way they cloaked themselves in their burni, an ample woolen coat waterproofed with filth and patched in a hundred places, as if they were draping themselves in a king’s shroud, ready to follow death forthwith. They would not take it off, day or night, as if they were afraid they’d be caught out by fate and would have to go naked and ashamed to meet death—which, incidentally, they awaited without fear, and welcomed with a familiarity that was not at all feigned, even obsequious, or so it seemed. Death did not hesitate, it struck there and there and there, and continued on its way. Those who prayed to death merely whetted its appetite, until it gobbled down double portions. Their departure went unnoticed, there was no one to mourn them. There was never a lack of sick people, more arrived than departed, no one knew where to put them all. An empty bed did not stay empty for long, the suffering patients who slept on pallets in the wide windy corridors fought over it bitterly. Even prior arrangements did not always suffice to ensure the succession went smoothly.

  And it wasn’t just penury, there were also the hardships of the terrain, which made people forget the rest. Food, medication, the supplies necessary for the running of the sanatorium were sent from the city by truck—huge shapeless juggernauts, tattooed all over, that were as old as the mountain and feared nothing, or at least not until the first foothills, where the oxygen began to be a bit too thin for their huge pistons—then on the backs of brave and hardy men and mules, climbers who were highly skilled, but execrably slow: they got there when they could, depending on the vagaries of the weather, the state of the trails and ledges, their mood, and the level of tribal bickering, which had the knack of bringing everything on the chosen route to a halt, with immediate effect.

  In these mountains at the end of the world, every step was a challenge to life, and the sa
natorium was as far as one could go along this fatal dead end. Some people, in long gone, obscure days, may have wondered why it was necessary to climb so high and far away into the cold and wilderness to isolate these tubercular patients, who were no more contagious than others: lepers roamed where they liked, throughout the country, as did the pestilent, and those who were still referred to as the terminally febrile—who, it is true, had certain seasons and zones of proliferation. No one had ever died as a result of coming into contact with them or meeting their gaze. The principle of contagion has not always been fully understood; people do not die because others are sick, but because they themselves are sick. At any rate, that was how things stood, every era has its fears, and now it fell to tuberculosis to carry the banner of supreme disease spreading terror among the populace. Then things changed, and other horrible ills appeared, laying waste to luxuriant regions and filling the cemeteries, then those ills ebbed away, but as the sanatorium was still there, impressive in its mineral eternity, consumptives and other bronchitics continued to be sent there instead of being allowed to die at home or nearby, among other sufferers. They would have had a natural death, surrounded by the affection of family and friends, but instead they were crammed into the attics of the world, where they died shamefully, harassed by cold, hunger and cruelty.