In the administrative services, the Inspection took place on the fifteenth day of every month. So many things depended on it, the worker’s remuneration for a start (the rating could increase it by fifty percent, or cut it by half), career advancement, access to social benefits, housing allocation, scholarships for children, birth bonuses, ration cards, inscription on the list of pilgrimages, nomination for R-Days, and all manner of privileges relating to one’s status as a person. Sixty out of sixty was the miracle everyone dreamt of: it would confer upon the laureate the status of a living legend but—naïve aspirants always failed to remember this—such a degree of recognition would turn the recipient into a freak, to be shown off to exhaustion from one place to the next. But not only that, jealous sorts would treat him like dirt and single him out as a renegade. The Inspection evaluated a believer’s faith and morality and, behind the scenes, it provided useful information to the various services of the Apparatus. Its “self-criticism” moment, if properly planned, sometimes led to emotional collapse and elicited spontaneous confessions that could give rise to the most interesting witch hunts. In short, the rating was a master key, opening and closing every door in life. If a deceased person had had excellent ratings his entire life, his family was entitled to request his canonization. No one had ever obtained it, but the procedure did exist, and everyone was encouraged to resort to it by active publicity campaigns launched by the Funeral Company. This planetary monopoly belonged to an influential member of the Just Brotherhood, the Honorable Dol, who was also the director of the Department of National Historical Monuments and Real Property of the State. The powerful argument was that to have an official saint in one’s family meant that every member of the family was guaranteed entry into paradise, and that they would have the possibility to see Abi in person one day, or at least his shadow behind a curtain. The first-class funeral given to candidates for canonization cost a thousand times more than the funeral of even the most outstanding of citizens, and who knows how many zeroes one would have to add in comparison to a worker’s burial—this was how profitable beatification could be for insurers and other gravediggers.
But if the rating was negative six months in a row, and the defendant’s state of health was not the obvious cause of his failing, the matter was referred to the jurisdiction of another institution, the Core, the Council of Reformation. And after a summons in due form the inadequate individual simply vanished. No one knew anything about the Council, but it was often in their thoughts: it was like death, the living have not experienced it and can say nothing about it, and those who have experienced it are no longer with us to speak of it. Of the disappeared person, immediately struck from lists and memories, people would say, charitably or cruelly, “He was taken by the Core, Yölah is compassionate,” or “The Core struck him off the list, Yölah is just,” and return to their devotions. Not knowing staves off fear and makes life easier.
However totalitarian it might be—and perhaps for that very reason—the System was perfectly accepted, because it had been inspired by Yölah, conceived by Abi, implemented by the Just Brotherhood and monitored by the infallible Apparatus, and finally embraced by the people of believers, for whom it was a light on the path to final Realization.
The Core, which consisted of two mockbis and one agent from the Apparatus, was presided over by a rector who answered to the Honorable of the Just Brotherhood, and who supervised the field of activity or the region in question. One of the most important committees was the one that evaluated administrative personnel. In the capital it enjoyed a particular aura, as well as a solid organization, inspiring a string of subcommittees that increased its action in the various services and neighborhoods of the city. They were known by their codes. The committee operating in Ati’s neighborhood, the S21, in the south of Qodsabad, was called Committee S21. What was important was that it had a reputation for being inflexible but infallibly fair. Its president was the venerable Hua, rector emeritus; as a young man he had been a prodigious combatant for the faith.
Ati was very moved to be back in the atmosphere of the holy Examination. In many respects it was a simple formality (all he had to do was answer idle questions and confess to minor delinquencies) but there could be surprises in store, and this was why people were both serene and proud but also tense and anxious. The committee arrived with great pomp in a fine antique sedan driven by an agent from the Apparatus and accompanied on foot by a squadron of athletic militiamen. It was then met by high-ranking officials from the city hall, to the cheering of the crowd and the personnel massed on the square in front of the city hall. Ati did not know any of the Committee members. This was normal: they changed every two years to ensure the quality of the Inspection would not be tainted by prolonged contact between judges and judged, and Ati had been absent for two long years.
While the judges were officiating in the ceremonial hall that had been transformed into an interrogation center, the personnel did what they could to prepare themselves. Some would be revising chosen passages from the Gkabul, others were exchanging information that they had found on the nadirs and in the gazettes, particularly the NeF, about the state of the country; elsewhere they were perfecting their arguments, repeating slogans, fine-tuning their thoughts, polishing their phrases, reciting prayers, holding forth while pacing to and fro, or dozing in a corner wrapped in their burni. It was like the night before a battle; everyone was awaiting their turn to go to the front but was not really worried: they knew that nine bullets out of ten were blanks.
Ati wandered from group to group, trying to see over people’s shoulders and to learn something from the hubbub in the corridors.
His turn came. As he was new at the city hall, he went last. He was introduced by the mayor in person, who had been demoted to the rank of a porter, but in another life he had been a mockbi, and he knew the importance of things. The examining judges were seated on a podium behind a table. On a silk-covered lectern a Gkabul was open to page 333 where one could read the chapter “The Path to Ultimate Realization” and in particular verse 12: “I have established committees, made up of the wisest among you, to judge your acts and probe your hearts, in order to keep you on the path of the Gkabul. Be truthful and sincere with them, they are my envoys. He who attempts to hide or be clever will rue the day, I am Yölah: I am omniscient and omnipotent.”
The files of the city hall employees were stacked on a table, by order of seniority.
The judges had judges’ gazes, and voices that were in keeping with their position; they could be feared, but there was also a sort of human warmth emanating from their persons, an impression that stemmed no doubt from the president’s advanced age and the complacent little air of the assessors. Over their fine woolen burni they wore the green stole striped with vermilion of a Moral Health judge. The rector Hua wore a fluffy jet black bonnet which emphasized the immaculate whiteness of the little tufts of his remaining hair. After glancing quickly through Ati’s file, he said, “First of all, hear my greetings and my prayers, and witness my humility.
“Hail to you, Yölah the just, the strong, and to Abi your glorious Delegate. Be praised until the end of time, to the far corners of the universe, and may your ambassadors from the Just Brotherhood be blessed and justly rewarded for their loyalty. I pray unto you, Yölah, to give us the strength and the intelligence to accomplish the mission you have conferred upon us. So be it according to your law.”
After a pause, he addressed Ati in these terms:
“Ati, may Yölah assist you in this examination of the truth. He sees you and hears you. You have two minutes to prove to him that you are the most loyal of believers, the most honest of workers, and the most brotherly of companions. We know that you were sick for a very long time, far from your home, you fell behind in your studies and your devotions. As Yölah has ordained, as Abi his delegate makes his daily practice, we will show indulgence toward you, this once. Speak and mind you do not prattle, Yölah despises
speechifiers. After your plea, we will question you in greater detail and you will simply answer yes or no.”
The assessors nodded.
In a flash, Ati let the mad thought cross his mind that he had nothing to prove to anyone, but the surrounding reality was too colossal for him to ignore. And how could he go against his education as a submissive believer: not one of the faithful knew how to do that. He took a breath and said:
“To begin with: I join you in extending my humble salutations to Yölah the almighty and Abi his wondrous Delegate, and to you, my good judges, I offer my respectful greetings.
“Great Rector, respected masters, Yölah is wise and just: by placing you in such high office he shows the love he has for you. By bringing me before you, he shows that I am small and ignorant. In a word, you have taught me so very much: that Yölah is a compassionate master—he has touched you with his grace, as your generosity toward me has shown; and that Abi is a living model, for that it is enough to imitate him to become a perfect believer, an honest worker, and a brother to every member of the community. If I am here, having returned alive from the sanatorium at Sîn after an arduous journey, I owe it to Yölah. I prayed to him every day, with every footstep, and he heard me, he supported me from beginning to end. In Qodsabad he did the same, I was welcomed as a true believer, a sincere brother, and an honest worker. This is why I believe I am who you ask me to prove that I am, but I also know that I have a long path ahead of me to better myself. My judgment regarding my little person does not matter, it is up to you to judge me and make me the perfect servant of Yölah and Abi, under the enlightened orders of the Just Brotherhood.”
The committee was impressed, but Ati did not actually know whether he had been convincing or merely eloquent.
Hua, the presiding judge, spoke again:
“In their reports, the mockbis from your neighborhood and your boss at the city hall say that you have shown yourself to be studiously committed to your tasks. Is this out of ambition, hypocrisy, or something else?”
“Out of duty, venerable masters, to bring myself up to date with my devotions, and to be in harmony with my brothers. For far too long illness kept me from my duties and my friends.”
The assessor representing the Apparatus frowned suspiciously and insisted:
“Studying reinforces faith. Do you think it is also possible to study in order to find reasons to denigrate faith? A person who becomes closer to his idol: does he do it to love him better, or to caress him and treacherously strike him down?”
“Master, I cannot believe such people exist, the Gkabul is a light which eclipses even the brightest sun; no lie can hide from it, no artifice can extinguish it.”
“Do your friends and colleagues think the same thing?”
“I am sure they do, masters; every day I see that they are true believers, happy to be living on the path to righteousness and raising their children according to the principles of the holy Gkabul. I am proud to be in their company.”
“Answer yes or no,” said the presiding judge.
“Yes.”
“Would you tell us if one of them was remiss in his duties?”
“Yes.”
“Could you explain . . . would you inflict the proper punishment on him if he was uncovered by a judge?”
“Do you mean . . . kill him?”
“I do mean that, punish him.”
“Uh . . . yes.”
“You hesitated: why?”
“I was wondering whether I would know how to do it. The punishment must be inflicted in a holy way, and I am not agile with my hands.”
The rector Hua began to speak again.
“And now you have one minute to give us your self-criticism. We are listening. And remember we are also looking at you.”
“I don’t know what to say, venerable judges. I am an insignificant man, my faults are those of modest folk. I am fearful, not as charitable as I would like to be, and sometimes I yield to covetousness. The disease that afflicted me for so long also exacerbated my weaknesses, and hardship sharpened my appetite. The study and volunteer work to which I am devoting all my time help me to keep a grip on myself.”
“Good, good, you may go. We will give you a good rating, in order to encourage you on the path of loyalty and effort. Go often to the stadium to learn to punish traitors and loose women, for there are surely adepts of Balis the Renegade among them; take pleasure in chastising them. Remember that it is not enough to believe: you must also act; only in this way is the believer a true believer, strong and courageous.”
And before rising to his feet he added:
“To act is to believe twice over, but to do nothing is to be a nonbeliever ten times over: remember this, it is written in the Gkabul.”
“Thank you, venerable masters, I am the slave of Yölah and Abi, and your devoted servant.”
Ati did not sleep a wink that night. The film of the Examination played over and over in his mind. It was the film of a consensual rape to which he would be subjected every month of every year for the rest of his life. The same questions, the same answers, the same madness at work. Was there any way out? Other than jumping off his roof, headfirst, he did not see one.
Ati could not get over it. Life went on the next day at the city hall as if the previous day had never happened. Force of habit: what else could it be? Everything that is repeated becomes part of the muddle of invisible routine and is forgotten. Who can see how they breathe, blink, think? A consensual rape, repeated day after day, month after month, one’s whole life long: does it turn into a loving relation? A happy addiction? Or is it the principle of ignorance that goes on functioning, now and forever? What indeed can we complain about if we do not know, if nothing belongs to us? Ati would have liked to talk to someone about it—to his boss for example, who was one of the old guard, but the man had other things on his mind, he ordered Ati not to forget to finish copying the previous month’s files and to archive them in the proper order in the proper boxes.
Ati was beginning to think that the only purpose of the Inspection was to keep people in a state of fear, but no sooner did he alight on this theory than he rejected it: nobody looked as if they were afraid, neither of rape nor of the idea that they could be whisked off by the Core; and besides, nobody was trying to frighten them, neither the committees nor the militiamen; all anyone, everyone, was concerned with was pleasing Yölah. How were you to make head or tail of it? Sheep heading for the abattoir are no more indifferent to their fate than men going to their Moral Inspection. Yölah was clearly the strongest.
For Ati it was urgent to determine the status of his reinsertion: had it been completed, only just begun, or had it been judged impossible, once and for all?
Ati had befriended a colleague from work, a man of considerable refinement, who acted as a true guide for him in the prickly undergrowth of the city hall. His name was Koa. He knew everything and then some; he had mastered the art of telling people exactly what they wanted to hear, and everyone reveled in his company. No one could ever say no to him. Given the widespread corruption at city hall—where it was another form of breathing—Koa knew exactly how to behave. He had learned to live in a kind of breathlessness, without ever seeming to lack for air and without ever being offended at the sight of people around him scratching and panting like dogs. He transmitted his art to Ati, and this immediately rid Ati of the acid in his stomach. “It’s all in the breathing,” said Koa, seeing him smile with relief. It is easier not to make enemies when there are several of you: together you can ensure you both have something to fall back on. He said: “With wolves, you have to howl or pretend to howl; bleating is the last thing you must do.” But Koa actually did have one great shortcoming: he was kind, and his kindness was of the incurable sort, compounded by an ineradicable candor that he thought he kept hidden by disguising as cruel cynicism. People went crying to him in order to obtain th
en and there what other people would make them pay top price for and then oblige them to wait for ages. This destroyed the market and ruined colleagues, but since Koa told them what they specifically wanted to hear, people did not bear him a grudge; they would ask him one more time—and it was absolutely the last time—to redirect petitioners to the right door, before they’d even had a chance to shed a tear.
As the days and the discussions went by, Ati and Koa discovered they had a shared passion: the mystery of abilang, the sacred tongue, that was born with the Holy Book of Abi and had become the omnipotent and exclusive national language. They dreamt of penetrating the mystery, for they were convinced it was the key to a revolutionary understanding of life. Both of them, unbeknownst to the other, had come to the same conclusion, that abilang was not an ordinary language of communication, since the words that connected people went through the medium of religion, which emptied them of their intrinsic meaning and instilled in them an infinitely moving message, the word of Yölah; in this respect the language was a reserve of colossal energy that emitted an ionic flux of cosmic scope, acting on universes and worlds but also on an individual’s cells, genes, and molecules, which it transformed and polarized according to the original plan. No one knew how—other than through incantation, repetition, and the loss of free exchange between people and institutions—this language had created a force field around the believer that isolated him from the world, and made him deaf, on principle, to any sound that was not the sidereal, bewitching chant of abilang. In the end, abilang made him into a different being, who had nothing to do with natural man, born of chance and scheming, and for whom he had nothing but contempt and would like to crush under his heel if he could not fashion him after his own image. Ati and Koa believed that by transmitting religion, sacred language changed man fundamentally, not only where ideas, tastes, and little habits were concerned, but also in his entire body, his gaze, the way he breathed, so that the human being that was inside him would disappear, and the believer that rose from the ashes would blend into the new community, body and soul. Never again would he—even dead and reduced to a pulp—have any other identity than that of a believer in Yölah and Abi his Delegate, and so too would his descendants assume this identity even from before their birth and until the end of time. The people of Yölah did not consist only of the living and the disappeared: they also included the millions and billions of believers who would arise in future centuries to form an army on a scale with the cosmos. Another question drove Ati and Koa: if other identities existed, what were they? And two more, subsidiary questions: what is a man without identity, who does not yet know that to exist he must believe in Yölah; and what, exactly, is a human being?
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