2084

by Sansal Boualem

  Ati suddenly had a bad feeling. Had the Vs heard him in his dreams?

  It was with a heavy heart that Ati left the sanatorium, one fine April morning. It was still bone-chillingly cold, but there were hidden pockets of impending summer warmth, the faintest hints, enough to make you want to live again, to run as far as your lungs could carry you.

  It was still the deep of night, but the caravan was ready. Nothing was missing, perhaps just an order. All the travelers had gathered outside the fortress and were waiting patiently; the donkeys were in their favorite position, in pairs, head to tail, dining on the scrawny mountain grass; indolent porters stood chewing on magic herbs under the lean-to, guards sipped scorching tea, fiddling with their rifle breeches with a most military alacrity; and off to one side, cloaked with dignity in their polar pelisses around a blazing brazier, were the commissar of faith and his escort (including the invisible and worrying presence of a V whose mind was telepathically sweeping his surroundings), consulting one another while telling their portable prayer beads. Between two mundane deliberations they prayed noisily to Yölah, and to themselves they prayed to Jabil, the spirit of the mountain. Going down the mountain is not an easy task: it is more dangerous than the ascent, and with the added danger of gravity it is easy to succumb to the lure of vertigo. The old hands, devilishly cryptic, repeatedly told the novices that to run in the direction of a fall is a very human tendency.

  The caravan passengers stood further off, under a collapsed awning, contrite and trembling, as if they were about to head off to an unjust death. Only the whites of their eyes were visible. Their shortness of breath betrayed their extreme nervousness. They were patients who’d recovered and were on their way home, or agents from the administration who had come for some bureaucratic reason that could not wait until summer. Ati was among them, wrapped in several burnis, waterproof with grime; he leaned on a gnarled pilgrim’s staff, and held a bundle with his gear: a shirt, a metal cup, a bowl, his pills, his prayer book, and his talismans. They waited, stamping the ground and thumping their sides. On the horizon the vast sky was ablaze with a blinding, dazzling light, their eyelids were heavy, they had grown used to their slow, twilit existence at the sanatorium. Everything about them—gestures, breathing, vision—had become sluggish, heavy, to enable them to survive this impossible asceticism, clinging as they did above the void at an altitude of more than four thousand siccas.

  He would miss his icy hell; he was beholden to it for curing him and showing him a reality he never knew existed, although it was the reality of his world and he knew no other. There is a certain type of music we hear only in solitude, away from police surveillance and the confines of society.

  He dreaded his return, and at the same time he was eager to be home. It is among one’s kin, and against them, that one must fight; it is there, in the steady succession of days and the thicket of the unspoken that life loses its deeper significance and seeks refuge in pretense and shallowness. The sanatorium had restored his vigor and opened his eyes onto the unthinkable reality that in their world there was another country, and that a border—deadly, impossible to find and therefore impossible to cross—lay between them. What sort of world could allow ignorance to reach such a point that a person didn’t know who was living in his own house, at the end of the corridor?

  It was entertaining to ponder the maddening question: does a man continue to exist if he has been projected from the real world into a virtual world? If so, can he die? What of? Time does not exist in the virtual world, therefore neither does boredom, old age, illness, or death. How could he commit suicide? Would he in turn become virtual, like his new world? Would he preserve the memory of this other world, of life, death, people coming and going, the days passing? Can a world that offers these sensations be virtual?

  But enough of all that: theories, mind games, he’d gone over them a thousand times in his mind, without ever gaining anything other than fear and headaches. And anger and insomnia. And shame, and stabbing regret. What was urgent, now, was to go to find those borders and to cross them. To see, from the other side, what it was they had forbidden by means of such a long and perfect conspiracy; to find out, with terror or with joy, who we were, and what sort of world was ours.

  These were also some of his thoughts that helped him pass the time; waiting was a source of anxiety and questioning.

  Suddenly, out of everywhere and nowhere, from a distant valley, a vast, powerful sound, smooth and harmonious, assaulted the mountain, climbing all the way to the sanatorium: a magnificent, spellbinding chant, its echoes interweaving, undulating, then fading away in a strange, sad, poetic way. Ati liked to listen and follow the languid strains until they vanished into sidereal silence; the beautiful song of the alpine horn!

  The vanguard had left the sanatorium at first light, and now they had reached the foothills, where the first stop was a bric-a-brac between bazaar and desert, shaman’s cave and multi-purpose administrative office, offering multiple services, located far below, over twenty chabirs as the crow flies. Only the alpine horn had enough breath to carry that far. And now it was calling out that the route was clear and passable. The signal they had been waiting for.

  The caravan could depart.

  Every hour the horns on the next foothills would sound to indicate the time and the way, and the caravan’s foghorn would reply that time keeps its own rhythm, in accordance with Yölah’s will; a rhythm that would not, however, try the passengers’ resistance, for they were convalescents with little strength or skill in the ways of the mountain, and poor civil servants who were stiff from head to toe.

  The departure was a moment of great emotion at the sanatorium. Crowded onto terraces, around small openings in the thick stone walls, and on the rampart walks, the patients watched the caravan set off into the dawn mist. They waved and prayed as much for the courageous voyagers as for themselves, still prisoners of their debilitating illness. Pale as they were, wrapped in their threadbare, patched, dirty white burnis, surrounded by a chiaroscuro halo, they looked like a host of phantoms come to bid farewell to the end of something incomprehensible.

  At a bend in the trail, overlooking a sheer ravine, Ati turned around to gaze at the fortress one last time. Seen from below, crowned with a vaporous sky vibrant with light, its hieratic power was impressive, even terrifying. There was a long history behind the fortress; no one knew what it was, but they could feel it. It seemed to have always been there, to have known multiple worlds and peoples, and to have watched them disappear one after the other. Almost nothing remained of all those eras, just a spectral atmosphere heavy with mystery and murmuring, a certain subjacent vanity of things, a few signs carved in stone, crosses, stars, crescents, roughly chiseled or finely drawn, here and there phylacteries bearing scribbles all in gothic accents, or elsewhere, disfigured drawings. They must have meant something, they wouldn’t have been sculpted for nothing, the care taken implied they must be of significance, and there wouldn’t have been such an effort to erase them had that significance not been powerful. During the Great Holy War, the fortress had been on the front line that ran along the Ouâ range, and it was put to use, for its strategic value made it an irresistible objective; it became a fortified town in the hands of the Enemy and then under the people of believers . . . or the other way around; in short, it changed hands more than once. The fact remains that in the end it was bravely conquered once and for all by Abi’s soldiers, as Yölah had ordained. A certain legend had it that there were enough dead bodies in that region to fill every gorge in the Ouâ and cross the rivers as if they were dry. It was possible, after all; the figures they gave were astronomical, the weapons they’d used were more powerful than the sun, and the battles had lasted for decades—it is no longer known how long. It was a miracle that the fortress had remained intact amid the general annihilation. If even half the stories one heard were true, that would mean that wherever we set our feet in this country we step on corpse
s. It was disheartening, one couldn’t help but think that the next time the earth was turned over it would be for us.

  After the war that destroyed everything and radically transformed the history of the world, poverty cast hundreds of millions of unfortunate souls onto the roads throughout the sixty provinces of the empire—gaunt tribes, lost families, or what remained of them; widows, orphans, the disabled, the insane, lepers, victims of plague, of gassings, of radiation. Who could help them? Everywhere was hell. Highway robbers pullulated, forming armies that plundered whatever remained of that wretched world. For a long time the fortress served as refuge for any wanderer who had the strength and courage to confront the steep face of the Ouâ. It became an unsavory place, people came from afar looking for asylum and justice, but found only vice and death. Truly, never was there a worse place.

  But with time, things went back to normal. The brigands were arrested and executed in keeping with the traditions of each region; the machinery of death operated day and night, there were a thousand ways to make it more efficient, but even a thirty-six hour day would not have sufficed to get the daily job done.

  Widows and orphans were housed here and there, and given basic trades to perform. Those who were sick or disabled went on begging wherever the wind carried them, and for a lack of care they died in the millions. It was to make these corpses disappear—for they were stinking up the cities and the countryside and causing countless epidemics—that the mysterious and very efficient guild of corpse collectors was created. Laws were passed to regulate their activity, and the Just Brotherhood promulgated a religious edict attributing sacramental value to something that was above all a matter of public hygiene and corporatist interest. Emptied, cleaned, and restored, the fortress was made into a sanatorium, and those who had tuberculosis were sent there. No one remembers exactly how or why, but it was commonly held that they were the cause of all human woe. People mobilized against them, banned them from the cities, then from the countryside, which had to be plowed again. Superstition vanished with the thaw, but the practice remained, and consumptives were still consigned to the fortress.

  Between the patients and the pilgrims Ati learned a great deal. They came from all four corners of the vast empire. Learning the name of their city, and something of their customs and history, hearing their accents and observing them on an everyday basis: it was all surprising, an incredible education. The fortress offered a global vision of the people of believers in their infinite diversity, each group with its own color and manners, not found in the others. Similarly, they had their own language which they spoke among themselves, in hushed tones, far from foreign ears, with such eagerness that everyone else was burning to know what was being said. But they immediately broke off their discussions: they were cautious. Once Ati had regained some strength, he ran from room to room to fill his eyes and ears and nose, too—for these people had their typical smells, you could follow any one of them just by his or her odor. You could also place them by their accent, their way of walking, their gaze, who knows what else, and before exchanging even two words, there they would be, in each other’s arms, sobbing with emotion. It was moving to see how they sought each other out, as if they were at a crowded market, then went to gather in a shady corner to carry on in their dialect to their hearts’ content. What were they on about all the livelong day? It was words, nothing more, but it cheered them up. It was magnificent, but ever so wrongheaded, according to the law all inhabitants must speak abilang, the sacred tongue Yölah taught Abi in order to unite the believers as one nation; all other languages were the product of contingency, and they were pointless, they divided mankind, shut them off into the particular, corrupted their souls through invention and falsehood. Whosoever utters the name of Yölah cannot be sullied by the bastard languages that exhale the fetid breath of Balis.

  He had never thought about it, but if someone had put the question to Ati, he would have replied that all Abistanis looked alike, that they resembled him, were in the same mold as the people from his neighborhood in Qodsabad, the only human beings he had ever seen. And now it turned out they were infinitely more varied and so different that at the end of the day they were worlds unto themselves, unique and unfathomable, which in a way went counter to the notion of a people, unique and valiant, made of identical brothers and sisters. So the people was a theory, yet another one, contrary to the principle of humankind, which was entirely crystallized in the individual, in each individual. It was fascinating and disturbing. What then was a people?

  The fortress disappeared in the mist, behind the curtain of his tears. This was the last time Ati would see it. He would preserve a mystical memory of the place. It was there, in its walls, that he had learned he was living in a dead world, and it was there, at the heart of the drama, in the depths of solitude, that he had had the extraordinary vision of another, permanently inaccessible, world.

  The homeward journey took nearly a year. From cart to truck, from truck to train (in those regions where the railroad had withstood rust and war), and from train back to cart wherever civilization had disappeared yet again. And sometimes on foot, or on mules, across steep mountains and deep forests. The caravan was at the mercy of chance and of its guides, and it made headway by clinging on wherever it could.

  In the end the voyagers had covered no less than six thousand chabirs, interrupted by endless stops spent fretting in this place or that; there were reunification camps, there were dispatch centers, where huge crowds mingled together, drifted apart, came together again, a constant confusing assembly of milling, teeming throngs, until docile and patient they settled into apathy, to confront time. The caravan leaders waited for orders that did not come, the trucks waited for spare parts that could not be found, the trains waited for the tracks to be repaired and the locomotive to be brought back to life. And once everything was finally ready, there came the issue of drivers and guides, who must be found, quickly, and in the meantime there was nothing for it but patience. Later, when after multiple searches the missing individuals were joyfully located at last, it was only to learn that they were now otherwise occupied. There were all manner of excuses, familiar and novel: they’d gone to bury someone, or visit friends who were ill; they had problems to deal with, ceremonies to attend, sacrifices to catch up on, but most often—and this was the Abistanis’ particular indulgence, for they were devilishly opportunistic—they were busy doing volunteer work to rack up points for the next R-Day, the Day of Reward, giving a helping hand wherever it was needed—here to raise the tower of a mockba, there to dig graves or a well, paint a midra, check a list of pilgrims, provide backup to rescuers, take part in searches for missing persons, and so on. Their good deeds would be validated by a certificate at their local R-Day office, there could be no cheating, it was delivered under oath. All that remained now was to find the high-ranking official who would issue the permit to leave the camp. Obviously, so much wasted time could never be made up, the road wouldn’t allow it; that was another ordeal, as dreadful as they came during the rainy season.

  So it all took a year. With a sturdy truck, roads that were in good condition from start to finish, decent weather, serious guides, and total freedom to maneuver, six thousand chabirs would have taken no time at all, scarcely a month.

  Along with all the others—except the pilgrims and caravan leaders who were a bit better informed—Ati had no idea what the country was like. He thought it must be huge, but what does huge mean if you cannot see it with your own eyes, cannot touch it with your own hands? And what are limits, if you never reach them? The word “limit” itself raises the question: what is there beyond the limit? Only the Honorables, the great masters of the Just Brotherhood, and the leaders of the Apparatus knew these things and everything else; they defined and controlled all of it. For them the world was a small place, they could hold it in the palm of their hand, they had planes and helicopters to dash about the sky, and speedboats to cross the seas and the oceans. You
saw their vehicles go by, you heard them roar, but you never saw them; they didn’t mingle with the people, they addressed them through the nadirs, the wall screens you could find all over the country, and they always resorted to emphatic presenters whom the common people referred to as “parrots,” or to the oft-heard voices of the mockbis confessing the faithful nine times a day from their mockbas, and surely (but no one knew how) they must have used the channel of the Vs, those mysterious beings, formerly known as djinns, who mastered telepathy, invisibility, and ubiquity. It was also said that the masters—but no one had seen this with his own eyes—possessed submarines and flying fortresses, propelled by a mysterious energy, vessels which endlessly probed the depths of the oceans and of the skies.

  Later, Ati would learn that the distance on the diagonal from one end of Abistan to the other was a fabulous fifty thousand chabirs. It made him dizzy. How many lives did it take to cover such a distance?

  When the decision was made to send him to the sanatorium, Ati was half-conscious. He saw nothing as they crossed the country, just fragments of landscape between two dizzy spells or two comas. He remembered that the journey had seemed endless, and that his bad spells were ever more frequent and painful, draining him of his blood, and that more than once he had called out to death to come and rescue him. It was a sin, but he reckoned that Yölah would know how to forgive those who were in agony.

  There was nothing luxurious about these journeys; a nomad’s everyday life consisted of digging vehicles out of the sand, clearing the road, closing gaps, towing, sawing, propping, filling in, dismantling, loading, and unloading. The voyagers helped out, enthusiastically, encouraging each other with calls and cries. The hours between chores were devoted to worship. The rest of the time, while the landscape rolled monotonously by, they counted the hours.