2084

by Sansal Boualem

  Further away there was something which Ati, like ten Abistanis out of ten, had always dreamt of seeing close up: flying machines. Outside a huge hangar a row of airplanes was neatly parked (one big one, some medium-sized and small ones) and an equal number of helicopters of varying shapes and sizes. He had only ever seen any of these aircraft far away in the sky, dots passing with a quiet roar, and like many people he had eventually no longer known what to think. Were they machines, birds, magic, holograms? Friends, enemies? Is what you see always real, and how were you to interpret those unknown sounds? There was another, smaller hangar, and an impressive parking lot full of cars, carefully arranged—little cars, sedans, trucks, special vehicles. Where did all this materiel come from, from what world, through which channel?

  No matter how hard he stared, Ati could not take it all in. The domain was huge and the car was speeding along; clearly it knew where to go. They stopped a long way from the center, in a residential zone that consisted of several dozen houses, each one more beautiful than the next, surrounded by artistically pruned trees. The driver asked him to get out and follow him into an immaculate white bungalow, number 15. A vestibule gave onto a large central room, with a kitchen, bathroom, and three bedrooms on either side of a discreet corridor; all of it was luxuriously appointed and filled with furniture and paintings and knickknacks of the sort Toz collected with such loving nostalgia. Ati had never dreamt such dwellings could exist, nor that anyone could live there and feel at home. There was nothing of the sort in Qodsabad, people would have been uncomfortable, even unhappy, they liked to feel the earth beneath their feet and have an open view; above all they liked to be in the same room to share bread and hir, to save on heat, to pray and prattle with one voice.

  The driver informed Ati that he would be staying in this bungalow until further notice. In the kitchen two men stood to attention, dressed in neatly tailored white burnis. They were easy to tell apart: one was black, sturdy, with a wide nose, and his name was Ank; the other was short and pale, with slanting eyes, and he was called Cro. The driver, who was white, elegant, intelligent, and went by the name Hek, introduced them in an offhand way as servants. There were two or three of them in every bungalow, he said, they were at the disposition of the guests of His Lordship. Ank and Cro acquiesced and nodded to Ati. “Who is His Lordship?” asked Ati, timidly. The driver answered, full of self-importance, “His Lordship is HIS Serene Lordship . . . the Honorable Bri!”

  After a quick nibble, Ati went to bed and spent most of the night struggling with his thoughts and fears. He felt trapped, and dreaded the worst. Fatigue finally overcame him just as the sun was beginning to rise above the horizon. And almost immediately he was woken by the horn from the mockba, the call to the first prayer. Ati was still trying to recover his wits when Ank came to tell him that a young clerk was waiting at the entrance to drive him to the mockba. Which he did. The mockba was full of people. Everyone had their assigned place: dignitaries in the front rows, followed by high-ranking administrative officials, and so on down to the last secretary; servants and workhands performed their prayers at their workplace, and guards in their barracks. They were very keen not to miss it; surveillance never stopped, and the punishment was the same for everyone, one hundred lashes to the lower back with a stick, and more for repeat offenders. Ati was seated in the wing for guests. The dawn prayer was important, everyone hurried to attend, it marked the end of night and the beginning of day; an entire symbol.

  Later he would find out that His Most Serene Lordship had his own mockba, in the palace, adjacent to the throne room. The mockbi was chamberlain to His Lordship’s mockba, and it was his adjutants who took on the roles of beadle, crier, response-giver, incantator, cantor, and psalmodist. On Holy Thursday, when he was not tired, His Lordship went to the mockba in the camp and led the prayers himself. This was a signal honor for the population of the fiefdom. No one missed roll call. When it came his turn to lead the Great Thursday Imploration at the Great Mockba in Qodsabad, commonly known as the Kho Mockba, he went there in full procession, with an impressive security detail, leaving his territory in a state of extreme desperation. But his return the same afternoon was cause for an even more incredible celebration. When His Lordship was absent for several days, in particular when he went to the Kïïba, where his official cabinet, court, and multiple services occupied several stories, the camp went into hibernation and wept day and night over the master’s absence.

  Once the prayer was over, the clerk drove Ati to a huge building that was near the royal house. “This is the seat of the government of the fiefdom, run by Viz, His Excellency the Great Chamberlain to His Lordship. Ram, his cabinet director and highly valued councilor, is expecting you.” On “highly valued” the young clerk, whose name was Bio, placed a grave stress, which was not the right tone, but perhaps he meant to imply that Ram was more than just valued by his chief, that all he had to do was open his mouth for him to listen. They went in through a service entrance, down a long underground corridor, and came out in a labyrinth of stairways, corridors, and offices where clerks who all looked strangely alike were religiously bustling about; this labyrinth opened onto a vast, luxurious, and very silent corridor that led to the Chamberlain’s office. Ati, whose observational skills had become keener through his experience of danger, noticed that the signage here was in an unknown language, that it was finely wrought, full of delicate flourishes and embellishments, very different from abilang, which at the time of its artificial birth proclaimed itself a military language, conceived to inculcate rigidity, concision, obedience, and a love of death. Truly, how many strange things there were here in the heights of Abistan. What must it be like at His Serene Lordship’s, and all the way up there at the Great Commander’s? Let alone at Abi the Delegate’s place: where he reigned, everything was mystery and incomparable marvels.

  Ati was ushered into a room which was sparsely furnished with a chair, an armchair, and a coffee table. His mission accomplished, Bio withdrew, smiling faintly.

  Might as well relax; Ati sat down in the armchair and stretched his legs. He waited a long time. He had gotten used to this form of torture, which had been abundantly inflicted upon him lately. At the sanatorium, he’d scaled the Himalayas of patience. He had learned to wait; he went into his thoughts and spent the time unraveling them, and this brought on aches in his head and fear in his gut.

  The torture came to an end: a man entered the room—short, delicate, with a friendly air, of indeterminate age, probably in his early thirties. He was wearing a black burni, which was unusual. Ati jumped to his feet. The man planted himself before him, hands on hips, as if trying to seem teasing, and stared at him for a long time, right in his eyes, until suddenly he said with a smile, “So you’re Ati!” and added, slapping his chest, “I’m Ram!” There was something else, deeper, in his gaze, hidden by his fine manners: a coldness, cruelty perhaps, or simply the vacancy which confers such a disquieting gleam upon a gaze.

  “Right, have a seat and listen to me without interrupting!” he ordered, pushing the chair next to the armchair; he sat down, spread his legs, and with his elbows on his knees he leaned toward Ati as if about to share some grave secret.

  “For a start, and I will tell you this without pulling any punches: your friends Nas and Koa are dead—it’s sad, but that’s the way it is. It is so that they will not have died in vain that I have come to ask you to join us in what we’re doing . . . I’ll explain later, but first I have to tell you a few things and let you think about them. Nas committed suicide, that’s the official verdict; the discovery of Mab seems to have upset him profoundly. We hid his death in order not to upset his colleagues at work; the Abigov needs serenity to carry out its difficult mission. It was a mistake, because people imagined the worst scenarios. Why he committed suicide, we don’t exactly know. He left a letter for his wife but it was not explicit, it just says that he’d been beset by doubts regarding his faith and could not live in unc
ertainty and pretense. He was a man of great integrity, and reacted like one. One day he disappeared, leaving his family, neighbors, and colleagues in distress. They searched for him in vain. His wife Sri and his sister Eto were very brave, they struggled to learn the truth, but the tragedy quickly became an affair of State at the highest level, involving the Just Brotherhood—a state secret, in other words. What had been going through his mind—we’ll never know, one day, suddenly, he went back to ‘his’ village, we don’t know why—to think, to check something, to finish some research, hide some evidence—in any case it was there, in one of the houses, that his body was found by workers who had come to prepare the site for the first pilgrims. He’d hanged himself. On his body they found the letter addressed to his wife.

  “In the very detailed report he had filed to his minister upon his return from the initial investigation of the site, Nas had put forward the theory that Mab was not an Abistani village, but that it belonged to an earlier civilization that was far superior to our own, governed by principles that were totally the opposite of those that are the foundation of the Gkabul, the Holy Submission. Worse than that, he is thought to have found clues which led him to believe that the Gkabul, our Gkabul, already existed at that time, in other words before the birth of Abi, our Abi, the Delegate, which is impossible, and that everyone had already denounced it as the gravely degenerate form of a brilliant religion of that epoch, one that History and vicissitudes had placed on a downward path revealing and amplifying everything about this religion that was potentially dangerous. It would seem that this civilization was so damaged by the Gkabul that it died as a result. The planet was nothing more than chaos and violence, and the Gkabul, despite its triumph, did not bring peace on earth. If a single word of this report is true, then it would mean the death of Abistan, the end of the world, it would mean that we are the heirs and perpetuators of that world of madness and ignorance. The report showed how gravely confused Nas’s mind had become; he had reversed the order of things, it is not the revelation of Abi that is dubious but the past beliefs which Abi’s teachings came to refute . . . As the matter was of capital importance, the Great Commander naturally transmitted copies of the report to all the Honorables in order to gather their opinions . . . It stirred up a terrible storm in the Kïïba. They wanted to raze that cursed village to the ground, close the Ministry of Archives, Sacred Books, and Holy Memories, scatter their personnel, arrest all those who might have gotten wind of the story . . . and you were at the top of the list, as you were the one who had spent the most time with Nas when he was on his way home from his investigation, with his head full of strange ideas and, no doubt, a desire to confide in someone. Only the personal intervention of Abi himself extinguished the fire; he remembered having lived in that village, and that it was there that he’d received the revelation of the Gkabul and of abilang. The controversy was suppressed, but not the conflict of interest.

  “In accordance with the rules of our holy religion, Nas’s remains were incinerated and his ashes were scattered in the sea. As he doubted our faith and committed suicide, he could not be buried in the earth of Abistan, sanctified by the Gkabul and the blood of millions of martyrs. After we made sure that they had not been contaminated by the doubts of their husband and brother, we arranged marriages for his wife Sri and his sister Eto to good, honest believers, one a civil servant at the Abigov, the other a tradesman. I say ‘we’ because the decision was made by the Great Commander in the name of the Just Brotherhood. Now that their sorrow is behind them, they lead healthy, happy lives. We will see what we can do, you can meet them if you so wish, if they and their husbands agree to it; they most certainly will, since you were Nas’s friend . . . Eto lives in the Kasbah in the City of God, and Sri is in H46, a quiet neighborhood just next to A19.”

  To give Ati the time to recover, he paused for a moment before delivering the next blow.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, patting him on the shoulder.

  “Mmm . . . ”

  “So I’ll go on, then. As for Koa, most regrettably, he died in the most horrible way. During his flight he fell in a ditch and impaled himself on a stake which tore his side open . . . He bled to death in a sort of burrow where he had gone to hide . . . Some children found his body two days later. The dogs, those scourges of Qodsabad, had begun to devour him. In recognition of the merits of the Grand Mockbi Kho, a beloved friend of His Lordship’s, we have buried him here in the fiefdom. You will be able to go and pray at his grave.

  “Toz informed us of your presence in A19 the moment you got in touch with him. He is a distinguished member of our clan. He’s something of an original—he prefers living in the filth of A19 rather than here among his friends and his own kind. The investigation is ongoing, but it would seem we are not the only ones to show an interest in the fate of Nas, and in yours and Koa’s. Several Honorables feared for their position, or wanted to take advantage of the situation. The Honorable Dia, who was granted a hereditary concession on the pilgrimage to Mab, could not tolerate the slightest doubt about the holiness of any of the pilgrimage sites, let alone that of the very place where the Revelation was born. It is a source of colossal revenue for him, so enormous that it threatens the equilibrium at the heart of the Just Brotherhood; his arrogance knows no bounds. He managed to get Commander Duc and Abi himself to agree to withdraw all the copies of the Nas report and have them burned. At his request a closed-session, white-gowned Abi Jirga was organized. You won’t know what that is: it’s a solemn reunion of all the Honorables, including the Great Commander, at the home of Abi himself, during which everyone pledges to Abi and on the holy Gkabul their absolute submission, which in this case meant a full, total, and loyal execution of the order to destroy the report and erase every trace of it—which, as you can imagine, had regrettable consequences for anyone who might have been in contact with it. I think that that was a mistake and a loss: to silence and hide and suppress is never a solution. I suppose that Nas had realized something was going on at the highest level and that he risked much, so fear compounded his helplessness. Perhaps Dia put pressure both on his minister, who also died in circumstances that were strange to say the least, and on Nas, to refute his findings.

  “So much for Dia, but he is not the only one who’s been plotting. Some of our great Honorables—in particular the terrible and very ambitious Hoc, director of Protocol, Ceremonies, and Commemorations—are not sorry to see His Lordship Bri, the Honorable in charge of Favors and Canonization—and I might mention in passing, leading contender in the order of succession to the Great Commander, whose fragile health is declining by the day—being given a rough time over this business that occurred in his fiefdom—all the more so in that it was in A19, where the City of God is to be found, of which His Lordship is the governor and police chief. Our investigation, led by our best spies and sleuths, has shown that there was a conspiracy: the man who denounced you to the so-called guards works for an organization with ties to that dog Dia, but also to Hoc and his son Kil. We had him kidnapped by one of our most secret organizations so that, should the need arise, we could prevent His Lordship from being implicated. Some skillful questioning got him to confess everything. We worked our way back through the network and stepped up our alarm system to keep us apprised of anything that might be brewing against our clan. We’ve got him close at hand in a secret place and are endeavoring to turn him, and slowly and patiently we’re preparing a response of the sort that the Honorable Dia and his friends will remember for a long time.

  “But anyway, these are internal issues relating to the Just Brotherhood, and they’re none of your business.

  “You are the last survivor, your friends are dead, I understand your sorrow and the terrible solitude in which you find yourself. You have to help us destroy our enemies the way we helped you escape from them, and help us prepare the radiant future that Abistan will know—the sooner the better—when His Lordship becomes Great Commander of the Just
Brotherhood, with the help of Yölah and Abi, may salvation be upon them. Under His Lordship, the holy Gkabul will truly be the only real light in the world, we won’t allow anyone to undermine it with nonsense and daydreaming. Amen.”