2084

by Sansal Boualem

  There was one thing bothering Ati, but in the long run he was forced to accept the hallucinatory reality before him: the country was empty. Not a single soul anywhere, no movement, no sound, only the wind sweeping along the roads, and the torrential rain, sometimes washing everything away. The convoy was literally sinking into the void, a sort of grayish-black fog streaked here and there with luminous flashes. One day, between two yawns, it occurred to Ati that the dawn of creation must have been something like this, the world did not exist, either as container or as content; emptiness dwelling in emptiness. This gave him a disquieting, troubling feeling, as if that primeval time had returned, and now everything was equally possible, the best and the worst—all one had to say was “I want” for a world to emerge from nothingness and be ordained according to one’s wishes. Ati would have liked to share his thoughts, but he held his tongue, not because he believed his desire might be heard, but because he felt that he himself was in this original state of indetermination, and to utter his wish might act on him first of all and transform him into a . . . toad, perhaps, since the first creatures who ever appeared on earth were toads—slimy, pustular, born of the failed wish of some inexperienced god . . . One must never tempt life, or rush it; it is capable of anything.

  Two or three times over, in the distance, they glimpsed military convoys advancing stiffly, a movement that was hieratic and mechanical but even more than that, stubborn and resolute, like the invincible force that orders great herds on the savannah to surge into action and begin their migration toward life or death—who knows, the only thing that matters is the forward motion and the anticipated encounter. It all gave the impression of a mysterious expedition come from another world. The caravan of trucks, heavily laden with cannons and missile launchers, was dragging in its dusty wake an interminable legion of soldiers, loaded down with equipment. Ati had never seen more soldiers than a truck patrolling in town could carry—a dozen or so, supported by an indeterminate number of casual militia, turbulent and indefatigable, armed with machetes, rods, or truncheons—and this was when there were major ceremonies in the stadiums, such as mass executions or religious services calling for holy war, and during these events the exaltation became trancelike, and then there were more militia than there are ants at the height of summer. Were these soldiers on their way to war, or on their way back? Which war? A new Great Holy War? Against whom, if the only country on this earth was Abistan?

  Ati was further convinced of the reality of war when one day in the distance they saw a military convoy towing an endless column of prisoners, thousands of them, chained together in threes. From that distance it was impossible to make out any details that might have enabled him to give them an identity—but which identity? Were they old, young, bandits, heathens? There were women among them, of that he was sure, he could tell from certain signs, shadows draped in blue, the color of the female prisoner’s burniqab, and they followed far behind, keeping the distance—forty steps—prescribed by the Holy Scriptures so that neither soldiers nor convicts would be able to see them, or get a strong whiff of their musky female smell, which fear and sweat compounded to make unbearably sharp.

  They also met pilgrims, in columns that were just as impressive, trudging along, scanning verses from the Book of Abi, as well as hikers’ slogans: “Pilgrim am I, pilgrim I go, with a hey and a ho, and onwards I go!” “We walk on the earth, we fly in the sky and life goes on, do or die!” “One more chabir, a thousand more chabirs, all in good cheer, may beggars live in fear!” and so on, and always the same formula that punctuated every sentence, every gesture of the believer’s life: “Yölah is great and Abi is his Delegate!” Their bombastic chants resounded in the distance, adding a moving refrain to the silence embracing the world.

  From time to time they nearly stumbled upon a village, an invisible hamlet. Clearly life had never really lingered there; there was absence in the air, and a great deal of parsimony. With so much discretion, there is no difference between a village and a cemetery. Cows grazed in surrounding pastures but there were no cowherds; did they even have any owners? In their childlike gaze was that gray, pale fear that comes of emptiness, solitude, boredom, and too great a poverty. At the sight of the caravan, they rolled their eyes in every direction. That evening their milk would have turned.

  But there are no journeys without an end; it was long in coming. It was not much further to Qodsabad, three days as the crow flies. As they neared their goal, the caravans marked time: it was a deep-rooted habit, they sent scouts to reconnoiter, and an envoy to negotiate a friendly welcome, and so the waiting was put to good use, to recover from the fatigue of the journey, because a mass arrival in a friendly city would be cause for exhausting displays of effusion—one party after the other, nonstop and round the clock. It was important to make a good impression, and to remain vigilant. And one does wonder, after all, when there is a homecoming: will we recognize our loved ones, will they recognize us, after such a long time?

  Something in the air told them that they were approaching a major city; before their eyes the countryside was losing its wild and sovereign aspect to take on the colors of abandonment and depletion, along with the smell of things rotting in the sun; it was as if a blind, evil force were at work, corrupting everything around it—life, the soil, the people—and spitting them back out, horribly damaged. There was no explanation for it; it was a decay that seemed to exist of its own volition, feeding on whatever remained and throwing it back up only to feast on it all over again, and although the first circle of suburbs was still far away, at several dozen chabirs, the poverty here was Pantagruelian. Ati seemed to recall that the air in his neighborhood in Qodsabad was no better, but you could breathe it all the same, because you always feel better at home than at your neighbor’s.

  The caravan Ati had been assigned to at the last dispatch center included civil servants on their way home from a mission; various kinds of stewards; students trussed up in their school burnis, which were long black gowns that stopped a hand’s width from their ankles; they were on their way to the capital to perfect their knowledge of certain very recondite branches of religion. There was also, somewhat off to one side as befits nobility, a posse of theologians and mockbis coming back from a spiritual retreat on Abirat, the sacred mountain where Abi liked to go as a child, all alone, and where he had had his first visions.

  Among the voyagers was a civil servant called Nas, no older than Ati but in fine form, suntanned, on his way home from a dig at an archeological site that was still secret but that was destined to become a celebrated place of pilgrimage. All that was left to be done was to polish up the history behind the place: Nas was in charge of gathering the technical elements that would enable theoreticians from the Ministry of Archives, Sacred Books, and Holy Memories to finalize that history, to stage it and connect it to the history of Abistan as a whole. It was a truly miraculous business: an ancient village had been found perfectly intact. How had it survived the Great Holy War and the ravages that had followed? Why had it not been discovered before now? Unthinkably, this meant that the Apparatus had failed—worse, that it was fallible; it meant that in the holy land of the Gkabul there were people and places who eluded Yölah’s light and jurisdiction. The other mystery was the absence of skeletons in the streets or in the houses. What had the inhabitants died of, who had removed the bodies, where had they been placed?—these were the questions to which Nas had to find an answer. One evening, as they sat talking around the campfire, he let slip that it was rumored among the clerks at the Ministry that a certain Dia, a great Honorable of the Just Brotherhood and head of the powerful Department of Investigations into Miracles, had his heart set on that village: he wanted it in order to serve his personal legend, to lay claim, as his own property, to a pilgrimage of prime importance. Nas went about his task with passion and growing disquiet, because he could see there was a great deal at stake, and that he was smack in the middle of an infinitely complex rivalry be
tween clans in the Just Brotherhood. One day, throwing caution to the wind, he told Ati that the dig had unearthed relics likely to shake the very symbolic foundations of Abistan.

  Ati was drawn by his gaze; it was the gaze of a man who, like him, had made the disturbing discovery that religion can be built on the opposite of truth and so become the fierce wardress of the original falsehood.

  BOOK TWO

  In which Ati returns to his neighborhood in Qodsabad, his friends, and his work, and discovers that the daily routine quickly makes him forget the sanatorium, his woes, and the dark thoughts that had troubled his ailing mind. But what is done is done, things do not disappear simply because we are far away from them; behind sovereign appearance lies the invisible, with its mysteries and obscure menace. And then there is chance, like an architect at work, coordinating everything with art and method.

  Ati had recovered from his illness and his prodigious voyage. If he suffered any aftereffects, they were hardly visible—a waxy complexion, gaunt cheeks, a little wrinkle here, a little necrosis there, some creaking in his joints, an untimely wheezing in his throat: nothing life-threatening, and he did not stand out amid the ambient pallor. Neighbors and friends greeted him warmly and accompanied him as a worthy cohort wherever he went. Reinsertion meant errands, waiting, documents to file and to fetch, arrangements to make; it was easy to get muddled. But eventually all the loose ends were tied up, Ati was home at last, life was back to normal. And in fact he had ended up better off: before, he had been a temporary employee in some vague municipal office, but now he was at the city hall, with a sensitive position in the patent office, where they issued important documents to tradespeople; his job, under the authority of his boss, was to make certified copies and archive them. At that level of responsibility, he had the right and the obligation to wear the green-and-white-striped armband of a basic councilor, and for prayer at his mockba he had a spot reserved in the eighth row. He used to live in a damp basement room that smelled of rats and bedbugs, and which had been the cause of his tuberculosis; now he was granted a lovely little studio on the sunny terrace of a building that was run-down but still solid. Back in the days when water ran through pipes, to the delight of households, the place had been a washhouse, open to the winds and the pigeons, where women came to do the laundry, and while it was drying in the sun they would revel in ribald tales and raucous laughter while observing the world of men milling idly outside the building in the dusty streets below, but eventually a civic committee found out about their Sabbath and the place was raided, requisitioned by a decree from the Bailiff, released from its spell and granted to an honest schoolteacher who spent a great amount of time fixing the place up and draftproofing it until at last it was a cozy nest. He had just died, leaving nothing behind him, neither family nor memory, only a teacher’s illegible scribble and the impression of a retiring individual. Solidarity among believers was a duty, and carried particular weight in the monthly appraisal, but affection and admiration also counted: Ati was a hero in the neighborhood. To vanquish the dread tuberculosis and return alive from so far away was an exploit worthy of a believer whom Yölah looked kindly upon, and so it went without saying that he would be favored. The little he had shared about the sanatorium, the climate, and the journey had sufficed to astound colleagues and neighbors. For people who have never transcended their fear, elsewhere is an abyss. Later, much later, he would learn that his magnificent promotion was not due to the good will of others, or to his exploits, any more than it was to the benevolence of Yölah, but only to the recommendation on the part of an agent from the Apparatus, made in the name of the all-powerful Ministry of Moral Health.

  Then people forgot about him, discreetly, and everything evaporated into mumbling and silence. The duties of religion, para-religious activities, the attendant ceremonies—it all left little time for daydreaming and idle chatter, and people simply refused to indulge in either. It was not so much that they feared they might be rebuffed, or tapped and scanned by the Vs, or taken to task by the Volunteer Law-enforcing Believers or the Volunteer Militia, or even handed over to the police and the justice system, but in truth their deep sense of conformity was just that way, they quickly got bored with anything that distracted them from their religious and para-religious duties and that might in the end make them lose points and expose them to the public condemnation of Yölah. This suited Ati fine, he hoped for nothing better than to resume his life as a good believer who was attentive to universal harmony, and he did not feel he had the strength or the courage to become a committed nonbeliever.

  He displayed a grave vigor in his new life, both in his work at the city hall and at the neighborhood mockba, and he outdid himself in his volunteer service, hopping from one construction site to the next without even taking the time to wipe his brow. There is no better way to forget oneself and everything else than wearing oneself out at work, because something was eating away at his thoughts, and obsessed him. Even when he was dead tired, he could not sleep, so he would prolong his evenings of study at the mockba as late as possible, which greatly flattered the mockbi, his response-givers, and the cantors. Ati explained that he had fallen behind in his studies and devotions during his stay at the sanatorium; the hospital chaplain and his deputies did what they could, but were manifestly lacking in science and penetration: at the first difficulty they would lapse into fairy tales and magic if not downright gobbledygook and heresy. There had also been the disease and the suffering it brought, and death mowing people down as in wartime, and hunger and cold, and homesickness, all of which numbed the spirit and prevented him from understanding everything as he should.

  Where everything else was concerned, Ati did what he could to be elusive and shy away. Things that used to delight him, and which he had taken pride in, now disgusted him: spying on neighbors, telling off distracted passersby, cuffing children, lashing women, joining a dense crowd to run through the neighborhood in a display of popular fervor, swinging his cudgel left and right during his crowd control work at stadium ceremonies, lending a hand to volunteer hangmen in the course of their duties. He could not forget that at the sanatorium he had crossed a red line: he had been guilty of high non-belief, a crime of thought; he had dreamt of rebellion, of freedom, and of a new life beyond the borders; he had a presentiment that some day this madness would rise to the surface and cause untold misfortune. In reality, even simple hesitation is dangerous; one must walk straight ahead and keep on the right side of the shadow without ever arousing suspicion, because then nothing can stop the machine of inquisition; he who falters will never know how he came to be in the stadium, surrounded by all the acolytes that have been found for him, right down to the very last one.

  What Ati once performed so naturally now cost him heavily, and the affliction was worsening. He no longer knew how to say, “Yölah is just,” or “Hail to Yölah and to Abi his Delegate” and seem sincere—and yet his faith was intact, he knew how to weigh the pros and cons, to tell good from evil according to the proper belief, but alas, something was missing to make things right—emotion, perhaps, or stupor, emphasis or hypocrisy, yes, and surely that extraordinary sanctimoniousness without which belief would not know how to exist.

  What his spirit was rejecting was not so much religion itself as the crushing of mankind by religion. He could not remember by what train of thought he had convinced himself that man could only exist and know himself in and through a state of rebellion, and that that rebellion could only be authentic if it turned, before all else, against religion and its troops. Perhaps he had even thought that truth, be it divine or human, sacred or profane, was not man’s true obsession, but that his dream, too vast to be apprehended in all its madness, was to invent humanity and live in it like a sovereign in his palace.

  Over time Ati found some peace, which allowed him to settle into the routine he dreamt of. At last he was a believer like all the others; he was no longer in danger. He rediscovered the pleasure of living
from day to day without worrying about tomorrow, and the joy of believing without asking any questions. Rebellion is impossible in a closed world where there is no way out. True faith is in surrender and submission, Yölah is omnipotent, and Abi is the flock’s infallible shepherd.

  With relief and solemnity Ati greeted the news one morning that the Como, the Committee for Moral Health, would be coming to the city hall the next day for the monthly personnel inspection, and that he was summoned to appear, like everyone else. He felt he had truly reintegrated the community of believers. Until now people had kept him at a certain distance, since he was exempt from saying confession and demonstrating piety; it was generally assumed that in his convalescent state he was not in full possession of his faculties, and could still succumb to delirium and involuntarily offend divinity and its representatives. Upon his return from the sanatorium it had been decided that until he had completely recovered he could be given an audition at his neighborhood mockba, and that they would make a report to the local Como unit. In the Book of Abi, several verses insisted on the necessity for the believer to be master of his words in order to be properly judged.

  The periodical Inspection was, in a manner of speaking, a sacrament: it occupied a signal position in a believer’s life; it was a powerful liturgical act, as important as the nine daily prayers, or Siam, or the Great Thursday Imploration, or the eight holy days of Absolute Abstinence, or the Caesura for boys and the Resection for girls, or the R-Days, the Days of Reward that honored the worthiest believers, and just as important as the long-lasting Expectation, or the Bidi, the incredible Blessed Day which marked the departure of the happy chosen ones on their pilgrimage to the Holy Places. The point was not so much to receive a “rating” from the Como, but rather the fact that everyone took part, including the Como, in what was a consolidation of general harmony in the light of Yölah and the perfect knowledge of the Gkabul, and Yölah knows what is just and what is necessary. Everyone impatiently awaited the Inspection. The result, which was a rating out of a scale of sixty, along with various pertinent remarks, was recorded in a green notebook with purple stripes called the Booklet of Worth, the Bowo, which everyone kept on their person all through their life. It was a moral identity card which everyone displayed proudly: it established hierarchies and opened doors.