No one doubted that the Abistani soldiers the Enemy captured would be subjected to the same treatment. The question which haunted everyone’s mind was this: where did the Enemy take them, and how did he manage to do it with such perfect discretion?
The Holy War is made of many mysteries.
As for the ghetto and its Renegades, they were concrete, and served only one purpose: to keep tight control on the believers in their everyday life. It takes a fox lurking nearby for close watch to be kept on the chicken coop. The chaos that reigned was a protection; it was so perfect that nothing was noticed. People put up easily with regular harassment on the part of the Civics; they could hang around in the street, go up to people and chat with them, remove their burnis, forget prayer time, go into one of those shadowy, noisy places that were unknown in Abistan and where, for a didi or a ril, you could obtain a hot drink, such as ruf or lik, or excellent cool beverages, some of which were greatly appreciated by consumers, the zit, for example, and which had the power to blur one’s gaze and addle one’s mind. In these places, in the back behind a pile of crates and sacks or a filthy curtain, there was always a corridor or a dark, narrow stairway that beckoned and left one wondering where it might lead.
One can’t be sure all this freedom served much purpose, but it was devilishly exciting. The most astonishing thing was that the Regs, who enjoyed so much autonomy in the shambles they lived in, liked to go to Qodsabad, which they referred to as Ur, in order to sell their products and items from the past, (much coveted by the notables), and to bring treats back to their families. They too resorted to the Guild’s tunnels, and paid for smugglers. The Apparatus hunted them down mercilessly, and it went without saying that those who were caught ended up in the stadium the following Thursday, after the Great Imploration. Their execution made for a first-rate show, and was the opening number at festivities. A special police force, known as the AntiRegs, had been created for the purpose, and they knew how to spot these ghostly individuals, to shadow them and catch them as was right and proper. Apparently these creatures, with their long experience of banditry and life in the wilderness, were far more reactive than the believers, who were constrained by too much strict routine. But no one talked about it because it would have destroyed a legend and undermined state security; it seemed, however, that the Vs, whose power knew no bounds, could not identify the Regs’ mental signature; it became muddled with the signature of bats, whose ultrasonic waves were so powerful they saturated the Vs’ radar, jamming it. What was worse, the Regs’ mental flux, if it was trained specifically at a V, could cause inner bleeding that was painful and in any case humiliating for creatures who were otherwise so universally feared, renowned masters of invisibility, ubiquity, and telepathy. These were conjectures, however, topics of conversation, no one had ever seen any Vs, let alone Vs bleeding from their nose or their ears. The fact is that innocent bats periodically fell victim to mass slaughter, in which the population took an active part in order to free the skies from their waves—except that nature had endowed them with another remarkable talent: they could breed faster than lightning. So it was at twilight, when the little vampires were waking up and heading off hunting, that the Hurs left their ghetto and invaded Qodsabad, where accomplices and dogs were waiting for them, and it was at dawn that they swarmed back again, when the sated bats returned to their caves. It’s easy to understand why the Hurs revered the animal.
The army had its role to play in the extermination of the Regs: its artillery, drones, and old helicopters regularly bombarded the ghetto, particularly during major commemorative festivities, when the people of Qodsabad assembled in the mockbas and stadiums were at fever pitch. Stories went around then, too: the army helicopters had dropped their bombs at random, on vacant lots rather than at the heart of the ghetto; on dwellings or shelters, their bombs and shells would have an insufficient charge of powder, they would make noise, wound people, even kill a few but not that many, and so on; there was no end to the speculation. The explanation was that the Guild was militating for a symbolic destruction of the Regs, in keeping with the Gkabul’s spirit of goodness; to be sure, the Regs were abominable creatures, unholy and dirty, but they were also good customers, and they were already prisoners in their horrible ghettos, it wasn’t such a bad idea to spare their lives: so went the Guild’s plea on every floor where they had willing listeners. Between commerce and religion there was always a possibility for complicity, you couldn’t have one without the other. From there to concluding that the Guild was bribing army captains and warning Regs of the raids being plotted against them there was only one step. It was a complex equation: Abistan needed its Regs to live, the way it needed to kill them to exist.
The Qodsabad ghetto had a certain charm, even though it was in a deplorable state: not one single building could stand on its own; there were forests of jury-rigged props and splints keeping it all upright, but only just. Everywhere mountains of rubble told of recent or earlier collapses, and in both cases, of the unjust misfortune that ensued. Children in rags scampered over the ruins, playing or searching for things to sell. Filth had found its realm, and in many places the garbage was heaped to the rooftops; elsewhere it carpeted the ground up to one’s knees. As landfill had reached its limits long ago, this garbage could not be evacuated or burned (the entire ghetto would have gone up in flames along with its inhabitants), and so it piled up in the open air, to be scuttled here and there by the wind; the ghetto rose higher on its rubbish and its embankments. Daytime was often dark as night. There was no electricity, and this added to the sinister sense of confinement, as did the narrow streets, the chaotic urbanism, the destruction, the wailing of alarms, the untimely bombing, the long dreary hours spent in shelters, and everything else that proliferates in a besieged city. It all made life darker, and acted as a powerful curb. Nevertheless, there was a sort of spirit, a culture of resistance, an economy of making do, an entire relentless little beehive of activity that found a way to survive and to hope. Life was just passing by, seeking, clinging, inventing, confronting all sorts of challenges, then starting over again as much as was humanly possible. There would be a lot to say about the ghetto, about its reality and its mystery, its assets and its vices, its tragedies and its hopes, but in fact the most extraordinary thing about it, something no one had ever seen in Qodsabad, was this: the presence of women in the streets, women who could be recognized as human and not fleeting shadows: in other words, they wore neither mask nor burniqab, and clearly no bandaging beneath their smocks. Better still, they were free to go where they liked; they went about their domestic chores in the street, dressed as slovenly as if they were in their bedrooms; they went shopping in public, took part in civil defense, sang as they worked, chatted together during breaks, and, what was more, sat out in the weak sun of the ghetto to brown their skin because they actually knew how to take the time to make themselves look nice. Ati and Koa were so moved when a woman came up to them hawking some item that they lowered their eyes and began trembling all over. It was as if life had been turned upside down; they didn’t know how to behave. The women recognized them for what they were, awkward Abistani lumps who knew only abilang, so they spoke in their patois, a very hissing gibberish, and they accentuated their words with precise gestures, waving the item for sale in one hand and with the fingers of the other indicating the number of rils to disburse, while casting crafty sidelong glances at passersby as if expecting applause. As the conversation could go no further, and Koa had used up the supply of dialect he’d acquired during his language courses in the devastated suburbs, the two friends bought what they could, and after that they did their best to keep the women from approaching them—not to mention the children, who knew how to fleece a sucker in less time than it took their mothers to behead a chicken.
A few Regs in the ghetto understood the sacred language, having dealt with representatives of the Guild and being used to passing through Qodsabad on their little smuggling runs. But what
they knew was limited to commerce, and was expressed through numbers and gestures. The vast majority understood diddly-squat, the sacred language had no effect on them, even if they had the entire Gkabul poured down their ear. Did that mean it only worked on believers? This was inadmissible, the Gkabul is universal and Yölah is master of the entire universe, just as Abi is his exclusive Delegate on earth. The deaf man is indeed he who does not hear.
We have kept it for the end, because the thing is horrifying even to liberated (shall we say doubting) believers: the walls of the ghetto were covered with graffiti that had been drawn with nails, charcoal or . . . more ghastly still, human excrement. Graffiti mocking Abistan, its beliefs and its practices, written in one of the languages that were common in the ghetto. There was no lack of obscene drawings, and they needed no explanation. Here and there on the walls there were graffiti in kabilé that Koa could decipher: out-and-out blasphemy which we will not report. They said: “Death to Bigaye,” “Bigaye is a buffoon,” “Bigaye, king of the blind and prince of darkness?”, “Abi=Bia!” (in habilé, bia means something like: “pestilential rat” or “twisted man” (!), “Long live Balis,” “Balis will triumph,” “Balis hero, Abi zero,” “Yölah is all talk.” Ati and Koa were eager to leave these horrors behind; any memory of them in their minds would single them out to the Vs upon their return to Qodsabad, whose sonar wouldn’t have to scan them for long before the circuit breaker went. Our friends trembled at the thought.
In Qodsabad everyone believed that Balis must have been hiding in this ghetto of death ever since Yölah had banished him from heaven. The great fear among Abistanis, particularly the inhabitants of Qodsabad, was that Balis and his army would escape from the ghetto and run rampant through the holy land of Abistan. Obviously, they would be powerless against Abi, who enjoyed the high protection of Yölah, not to mention his invincible Legion, but they would do a great deal of damage to ordinary people. In the end it seemed as if all this armada around the ghetto, all these controls and so-called lethal bombardments, not to mention the ridiculous blockade, were more to reassure the good folk of Abistan than to prevent the Regs from swarming down onto Qodsabad. The Apparatus were gifted at doing one thing in the place of another and at making people believe the very opposite had occurred.
Let us not forget that Ati and Koa’s little idea was to understand these wooly things that had filled their heads: What was the connection between religion and language? Can religion be conceived without a sacred language? Which comes first, religion or language? What makes a believer: the word of religion or the music of language? Is it religion that creates a special language out of a need for sophistication and mental manipulation, or is it language which, once it reaches a high level of perfection, invents an ideal universe, one which it is bound to make holy? Is the postulate according to which “Whoever has a weapon will end up using it” still valid? In other words, does religion intrinsically turn to tyranny and murder? But it wasn’t some general theory they wanted, the precise question was as follows: did abilang create the Gkabul or was it the other way around? There is no such thing as simultaneity, the egg and the chicken are not born at the same time, one must come before the other. In the case in point, this could not be mere coincidence, everything in the history of the Gkabul showed that there was a plan, right at the start, and the plan aimed to grow and expand. More questions: What about common languages, what did they invent, and what created them? Science and materialism? Biology and naturalism? Magic and shamanism? Poetry and sensualism? Philosophy and atheism? What do all these things mean? And what do science, biology, magic, poetry and philosophy have to do with any of it? Were they not also banished by the Gkabul and ignored by abilang?
They realized that on top of being futile and boring their pastime was dangerous. But what was there to do when there was nothing to do, other than futile, vain things? Which were bound to be dangerous.
And that they were, for sure, they thought, when once again they found themselves one hundred siccas beneath the earth in the cyclopean labyrinth of underground tunnels, and then a few hours later in the old crumbling house at the edge of the cemetery to the south of the “Seven Sisters of Desolation,” just as the owls and bats were silently filling the sky with their furtive shadows. In situations like these, in such cold, gray twilights, it is the entire world that seems to be in danger of imminent death.
To be back in the light of Qodsabad was a relief, a worry, and a source of unspeakable pride. On the one hand, what the two friends had done was nothing special: they had gone on a jaunt to the ghetto, something the agents from the Guild did every day in order to collect their profits, take orders, and, along the way, dally with a Renegade woman, just as, going the opposite direction, little smugglers from the ghetto came every day to Qodsabad to peddle their wares and steal a few chickens. But on the other hand, it was an extraordinary event: Ati and Koa had crossed the border of time and space, the forbidden border; they had left the world of Yölah for the world of Balis—and the sky had not fallen.
The hardest thing for them, at work and in their neighborhood, would be to act naturally and mislead the Civics and the judges of Moral Inspection, when everything inside them, the way they behaved, the way they breathed, now reeked of Sin. Clinging to their burnis and their sandals was the unique, ineradicable smell of the ghetto.
They had brought four earth-shattering teachings back from their odyssey into the forbidden world. 1) Beneath the separation walls there are connecting tunnels. 2) Ghettos are populated by human beings, born of human parents. 3) The border is a heresy invented by the believers. 4) Man can live without religion and die without the help of a priest.
And they also brought back the answer to an ancient enigma: the word Bigaye, so shocking when it was found scribbled by an insolent hand on the ten billion posters of Abi plastered to the walls of Abistan: in the ghetto that word was in everyday use. The culprit must have been a Reg who had wanted to leave a trace of his incursion into Abistan before going back to his burrow. The man who had been arrested and executed was surely some poor fellow they’d plucked off the street at random. By comparison, Koa understood that Bigaye was a slang word that had come from habilé and it meant something like “Big brother,” “Old rascal,” “Great leader,” or “Old buddy.” The expression “Big eye” used in the Just Brotherhood’s decree was wrong, therefore; in any case the word did not exist in any of the languages of Abistan or the ghetto, it probably came from some ancient language, one of those that had become extinct during the Char, the first Great Holy War, when all the inhabitants of the North had been annihilated, given their stubborn opposition to the Gkabul. Ati had concluded that the text etched in stone above the drawbridge at the sanatorium must have been written in that language, because the fortress dated from that era, or even earlier, and the symbol “1984” might refer to something else besides a date. But in all honesty it was impossible to know for sure: the notion of dates, like that of age, did not apply to Abistanis; for them time is all one, indivisible, immobile, and invisible, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning, and today is always today. With one exception, however: 2084. That number was in every mind as a sort of eternal truth, so it was an inviolable mystery, there would be a 2084 in the immense immobility of time, all alone, but how to situate in time that which is eternal? They hadn’t the foggiest idea.
Ati and Koa told each other that they should go back to the ghetto one day to learn some more.
BOOK THREE
In which new signs appear over the skies of Abistan, adding legends to the Legend, a miracle that will incite Ati to embark on a new journey, marked by mystery and misfortune. Friendship, love, and truth are powerful motives to get ahead, but what purpose might they serve in a world governed by laws that are not human?
It was a thunderclap in the drowsy skies of Abistan. Oh, indeed, there was a commotion, and so much repetition! The information went around the country a thousand
times in a short week of seven days—through the nadirs, the gazettes, the NeF, the mockbas—on call twenty-four hours a day—not to mention the town criers who spared neither vocal cords nor megaphones. Upon instructions from Abi, the Honorable Duc, Great Commander of the Just Brotherhood, decreed forty-one days of uninterrupted jubilation. Gigantic prayer meetings and an equal number of votive ceremonies were organized in order to render thanks to Yölah for the marvelous present he was offering his people. A public funding drive was launched in order to collect money for the manufacture of a worthy case for it, and by the end of the week the equivalent of the state budget had been raised. People would have given more had a communiqué from the government not appealed for moderation: something must be kept in reserve.
2084 Page 9
