2084

by Sansal Boualem

  “And how can I help you? I’m nothing, just a poor fugitive at the mercy of the first assassin to come along . . . If you put me out, I wouldn’t know where to go. I don’t even have a home anymore.”

  Ram’s expression turned mysterious, superior, and friendly, all at once.

  “We’ll tell you at the right time and place. Go and pray on the grave of your friend Koa, go and see Sri and Eto to offer them your condolences—we’ll arrange it for you—take a walk in the park and go and see the sea, it is five chabirs from here, only two if you go through the park. Get some rest and put your mind at ease, you are safe here, you are in our fiefdom for a radius of three hundred chabirs, not even a bird can get in here without my permission. Bio, the young clerk who brought you here, will accompany you everywhere it is allowed, just tell him what you’d like, he’ll know how to arrange it. See you soon!”

  At the door, he turned back:

  “What was said in this room was never said. You and I will not survive a single day if so much as one word of our conversation gets out, even into the corridor. Don’t forget that. May Yölah preserve you!”

  BOOK FOUR

  In which Ati discovers one conspiracy can hide another, and that truth, like falsehood, only exists insofar as we believe in it. He also discovers that the knowledge of some does not make up for the ignorance of others, and that humanity models itself upon the most ignorant of all its members. Under the reign of the Gkabul, the Great Work has been achieved: ignorance dominates the world, and has reached a stage where it knows everything, can do everything, and wants everything.

  On the corner of the kitchen table, beneath Ank and Cro’s watchful gaze, Ati devised a program. It included no less than six points: 1) go pray on Koa’s tomb; 2) take a trip in an airplane and a helicopter; 3) visit His Lordship’s palace; 4) see the sea and dip at least one finger into it; 5) meet Sri and Eto and tell them how much he had loved and admired Nas; 6) have a serious meeting with Toz, and ask him, in passing, why he burst out laughing when Koa, to thank him for his services and hospitality, gave him the letter of congratulations Abi had sent to his grandfather Kho, the mockbi of the Great Mockba in Qodsabad.

  Bio came back the next day with a program Ram had revised downward. He explained that the airport and the palace were extremely sensitive places: no one could get near, no point even thinking about it, it was a zone where you’d be shot on sight if you so much as put your finger through the surrounding fence. No problem for the rest. The organization of the meeting with Sri and Eto would, however, require some time, the problem was complicated, because if they asked the husbands for permission to visit with their wives, they would balk and turn against the women, and to ask the wives directly—women who never left the home of their lord and master—would put them in danger, they would have to tell their husbands and explain why a stranger who claimed to be the friend of their late husband and brother wanted to see them to present his condolences when their mourning had ended long ago and both widow and sister had been wed. But not to worry, Ram had come up with a very innocent plan. Not to worry about that secretive fellow Toz, either, he came to the camp every Thursday to have lunch with his family, his older brother was none other than Bri himself, His Serene Lordship, and his twin brother was none other than Viz, the Great Chamberlain, and his nephew was none other than Ram, the son of Dro, a brother who died under mysterious circumstances a long time ago in one of the worst episodes of the clan wars. The deaths had numbered in the millions all over Abistan, but no one remembered those wars and History had kept no records. Peace was restored one day and what is inevitable about peace is that it erases memories and wipes the slate clean.

  So they headed for the cemetery, which was itself a sensitive zone, because that was where the plots of martyrs, top leaders, and the reigning family were located, carefully closed off and guarded; the reigning family’s plot was on a mound covered in flowers, and that was where His Lordship went to pray once a month. The graves of the common people were open to everyone. The cemetery was perfectly maintained, which was a good sign regarding the values in force in the fiefdom; but in truth everything in the camp was perfect, it really was how Ati imagined paradise. Only two or three things were missing, in the realm of leisure, frivolousness, and other indulgences; the holy Gkabul forbade them in this life, but duly and explicitly promised them in the next.

  Koa’s tomb was in a plot a little ways off to one side, where the dead who did not belong to the clan were buried. It was a very simple grave, in keeping with the funerary traditions in that region of Abistan: a burial mound where a flat stone stood, with the dead man’s name, in this case, “KOA.”

  Ati was moved . . . and full of doubt: he wondered who really lay in this grave. A name is not an identity and a grave is not proof. Ram’s story had so much that was truthful and simple about it that one was left hungering for more. Where was the reality in it all? For the report to have caused turmoil within the Just Brotherhood, that was obvious; the theory of a brilliant civilization surpassing the eternal perfection of Abistan was not an easy pill to swallow; believers are only too eager to think they are the best. And then, besides, there were interests, animosities, ambitions, vices—in short, everything that made man base and unworthy, but still, the brilliant Ram was far too knowledgeable and powerful to be the guardian angel he wished to appear. In fact, everything about him suggested the perfect conspirator who knew how to link one intrigue to the next, how to cunningly weave them together to kill two birds with one stone without ever leaving his office. His purpose this time, if Ati had understood it correctly, was monumental: he hoped, all at the same time, to bring down Dia, humiliate Hoc, ruin his son Kil, overwhelm Duc the old patriarch with such poisonous worries they’d finish him off, and hasten the succession in favor of his uncle Bri—and his own succession—in a near future, and then, without even pausing to catch his breath, to eradicate everything that posed even a distant or marginal threat to the perfect order of the Gkabul. If there were any exceptional men of ambition who held four aces—knowledge, power, intelligence, and madness—in this never-ending game of intrigue and death, Ram was one of them, and no doubt the best.

  Ati roused himself to banish these circumstantial thoughts from his mind, then went down on his knees, rubbed his hands on the ground to cover them with dust, and crossed them over his humbly lowered head, as was done during the Great Holy Thursday Imploration, then began to murmur:

  “Whoever you might be in this grave, oh dead one, I greet you and wish you the best the Hereafter can offer to a man of good will. If, as I believe, you are not Koa, forgive me for troubling you with my words . . . but I must confess and alleviate my sorrow, so allow this unfortunate wretch to address you as if you were him . . . If, as we believe, the deceased are united in the Hereafter, please convey my message to him.

  “Dear Koa, I miss you, and I am suffering terribly. I have so many questions about you, I find it hard to believe you died falling into a ditch, the way that smooth talker Ram would have it, that’s not like you, you were both nimble of body and of spirit . . . and you never lacked for courage, even gravely injured you would have found the strength to make it back to the warehouse, and then I would have done everything possible to save you . . . Or you could, more easily, have knocked at the door at the first house you came to and asked for help . . . People would not have refused to help you, not everything inside them has died under the skies of Abistan . . . As long as people go on having children, finding a roof for shelter, and lighting fires to keep warm, it means they have life inside them and therefore an instinct for self-preservation. I am so angry with myself, dear Koa, it was my idea to split up when we had to flee, I thought that way we’d increase our chance of making it, but in fact I divided it in two and left you with the bad half, I should have gone to the left and let you go to the right . . . On this side there were no obstacles, other than a few dogs sniffing at my ankles . . . When I got to the
warehouse and didn’t see you, I should have gone straight back out to look for you. And what did I do, wretch that I am? I wrapped myself up in my blanket and slept. I’m ashamed, Koa, I’m ashamed, I’m a coward. I abandoned you, my brother, and because of that you died in some dog’s burrow, or murdered by professional killers. I’m not trying to lessen my guilt but I don’t know why I go on hoping, deep down, that you are alive somewhere, maybe held prisoner; it’s a hope without any illusions, now that I know a little about who the Honorables governing this poor world are. I learned that Nas—I wanted so much for you to meet him—is dead too, supposedly. They say he committed suicide in that mysterious village that had no business being in our sacred land of Abistan. I don’t believe that for one second, Nas was a scholar, a coolheaded man who wanted to know and to learn, and he didn’t indulge in dreams and illusions. He was assassinated by the people who were upset by his discovery . . . and he knew that this would happen, he told me so, one night around the campfire. As for me, I’m numb and wandering, full of troubles. But every cloud has a silver lining: from where I stand, at the mercy of the Honorable Bri’s clan, I have a slight chance of learning something about your death, and Nas’s. They want to use me in some plan of theirs, so at some point they’ll have to light my lantern. They won’t show much restraint, either, because they know the end they have in store for me. But I don’t care about my fate, I despair of this world, I have nothing to keep me here, nor do I want anything, not at any price. I’ll soon be with you, dear Koa, and in the Hereafter—with complete impunity, I hope—we’ll continue our adventures and our impossible quest for the truth. I embrace you and will see you soon.”

  Ati bowed down four times, as was the custom, dusted himself off, symbolically to return dust to dust, and went to join Bio, who was off to one side waiting for him, lying under a tree, blissfully chewing on the stem of a daisy.

  “Thank you, dear Bio, for waiting so patiently. Let’s go now, back to the world of the living—those who we are sure are alive; I told my friend Koa what I had to say to him, he’ll think everything over. Since our leader Ram has agreed, you can drive me to the sea. I’ve always thought the sea must exist but I could never picture it for myself. It is hard, believe me, when all you’ve ever seen around you is sand, dust, and struggling fountains. I wonder how you manage in your vast fiefdom, with fresh water running day and night, you waste it as if it fell from the heavens and cost nothing.”

  “It’s easy,” replied Bio with a broad, knowing smile, “we rerouted the river so the flow is just for us, and we have giant cisterns where we stock water, gasoline, and all sorts of other things. Life can never stop here, it has everything it needs.”

  “That’s reassuring, my dear Bio! Let’s go at once to the sea, and let’s hurry, you never know, it might not wait for us!”

  They took the road through the camp, as it was shorter. About their short walk of two chabirs over a flowering lawn, in the shade of the woods, there was absolutely nothing terrifying.

  The sea appeared on the horizon; it was as if it took its source in the sky and came down on earth from there. That was Ati’s first observation, and as he drew closer, the ethereal line of horizon, indistinct and trembling, became sharper, spreading, until it was a colossal, vibrant mass of water filling all the space, overflowing and rising toward him like a tide to stop short at his feet; he felt surrounded. Impossible to escape from the fascination and terror: the sea was the sum of all the opposites, it took only a few seconds to convince yourself of the fact, and then you knew that it could, in a flash, cause everything to shift dramatically, from best to worst, most beautiful to most sinister, life to death.

  That day, for Ati’s first visit, the sea was in a friendly mood, like the sky that covered it, and the wind playing with its little waves. A good sign.

  Ati went courageously to the water’s edge, where it disappeared into the sand. One more step and the miraculous contact was made. Beneath the pressure of his weight, water and sand oozed through his toes, massaging them in a way that was more than merely sensual.

  But what was happening? Everything was moving, reeling, he felt the ground slipping under his feet and his head began to spin, while a faint nausea turned his stomach, but at the same time a wonderful sensation of plenitude spread through him. He was in harmony with the sea, the sky, and the earth; what more could he ask for?

  He lay down on the warm sand, closed his eyes, offered his face up to the rays of the sun and his body to the sea spray, and let himself lapse into a dream.

  He recalled the extraordinary mountains of the Ouâ—the summits, the vertiginous chasms, and the nightmares they had brought on, pure terror but also a feeling of exaltation inspired by the incredible majesty of those hardest of places, emerging from the farthest recesses of time. It was then that an overwhelming feeling of freedom and strength such as he had never known was born in him, and gradually, even as illness tormented him and decimated those around him, that feeling brought him to open rebellion against the oppressive, cowardly world of Abistan.

  The sea, no doubt, would have produced other awakenings, other revolts. Who knows what they might have been.

  “My dear Bio, let’s go back, I’ve enjoyed enough seaweed- and salt-perfumed air for a year, if life wants to grant me that much time. I feel swollen all over and nicely roasted. I have known the immense terror of the mountains, and now I know the enchantment of the sea and the ardor of the sun on salty skin—I’m a satisfied man. It has all made me hungry and sleepy. I’m eager to move on to the next step of my program and meet the two women I do not know but whom I have loved ever since the day the husband of one of them, who was the other’s brother, told me about them. I would have liked to take them with me, to cherish and protect them always, but the Just Brotherhood, in its infinite respect for life, gave them to two strangers, one of whom is an honest civil servant and prisoner of the kasbah, and the other a no less scrupulous tradesman, prisoner of his shop, since they were chosen by those who know all there is to know about integrity and love.

  “So, let’s set off, dear Bio, and tell me a little about yourself, you have a life, I suppose—a family, friends, maybe enemies too, and surely you have dreams, those that are allowed. I would like to know what a subject of His Lordship thinks as he goes about his everyday life.”

  “Thinks about what?”

  “Anything, this and that . . . your . . . your work, for example. What does it consist of, are you happy, what are you going to tell Ram about our fine day out today, and so on?”

  They spent the afternoon telling each other their life stories. Compared to Ati, who did nothing but encounter problems from one end of vast, mysterious Abistan to the other, dragging his friends to their death, Bio led a hazy life, which had neither breadth nor length nor density, nothing to grasp hold of; it was as if he were born for no purpose, and his life was utterly guileless. He burst out laughing when he recited the slogan of the fiefdom: “Worship Yölah. Respect the Gkabul. Honor Abi. Serve Your Lordship. Help your brother. Thus will your life be beautiful.”

  Ram had decided that the meeting between Ati, Sri, and Eto would be as secret as possible; no one must ever suspect that the clan of the Honorable Bri had anything to do with organizing it. The plan he had hatched would become worthless—worse than that, it would turn against the clan. The second reason was that Ati was currently being hunted by all the public and private police in Abistan; he could not take two steps out in the open without being arrested by the one or killed by the other. The fact that he had knocked about the entire country from the faraway mountains of Ouâ, that he had been trafficking in the ghetto, had illegally crossed thirty neighborhoods in Qodsabad to try to get into the City of God, and his ability to disappear from one place then reappear in another had added considerably to his image as a perverse monster. He was Public Enemy Number One, and all the police wanted him as their trophy, without really knowing why, at best the
y just knew a vague fragment of the story, but that hardly mattered, they’d received their orders.

  The common people, like prisoners in a camp, are extremely sensitive, the slightest little rumor upsets them. Just let them hear that there will be a shortage of hir, or that it will cost one didi more, and the country will go up in flames, there’ll be talk of the end of the world, and no one will hesitate to reproach Yölah for abandoning his children.

  In A19 and inside the City of God, the climate was already worse than unhealthy; rumors and counter-rumors ran riot. Spies, propagandists and others who fished in troubled waters were putting on the pressure, the people could do nothing about it, but they wondered what was going on. The Venerable Duc, the Great Commander, said nothing, there was no sign of him in the nadirs. Was he alive, was he dead? What was the Just Brotherhood doing? And where was the government? In an enclosed society the air is unclean, people are poisoned by their own miasmas. The Enemy and Balis were evoked in every conversation, in the end you could not tell one from the other. Anger was unleashed—violent, overwhelming, insatiable; Ram’s agents were painstaking and organized and they did marvelous work, injecting poison at just the right moment, in just the right place, in just the right dose; it was impressive, the beast was reacting exactly the way it would in a lab test. There was talk of other wicked individuals, Honorables and ministers, who figured in every insinuation, no one ever forgot Dia or Hoc, their reputation went before them, nor did they forget the wretched Nam, Zuk, or Gu, who plundered the people and cheated shamefully with the weight and ingredients of the daily hir, let alone the vain Toc, or those madmen in H3, the Hu Hux Hank, or the Honorable Partisans of Total War who spoke of nothing but battles, battalions, and bombardments, Zir and Mos in particular, who were endlessly beefing up their militia and multiplying the training camps, and they never let an opportunity for provocation slip, for they were convinced that wars were won by those who started them. Zir had written a psychedelic memoir about lightning wars, and he dreamt of waging one on a grand scale; his pet peeve was the Qodsabad ghetto, just the thought that the Regs existed poisoned his every waking moment, he had a plan to annihilate the entire place in three days: one day to fill the population with fear, another to smash everything, a third to finish off the wounded and pack up; whereas Mos, in another brilliant dissertation, defended the notion that only permanent, total war, without truce, without interruption, without restraint, was in keeping with the spirit of the Gkabul; a state of peace was not worthy of a nation professing such a mighty faith. It would no longer be necessary to have a motive in order to strike. Did Yölah need any justification to create and destroy? When he kills, he kills, and he has a heavy hand, it is definitive and particularly cruel, and in the end he spares no one. Abi said as much in his Book (title 8, chapter 42, verses 210 and 211): “Beware of closing your eyes and drifting off, that is what the Enemy is waiting for. Wage total war upon him, spare neither your strength nor that of your children, that he might never rest or know joy, or the hope of returning home alive.” He also said, bolstering Mos in his thirst for war: “If you think that you have no enemy, it means the enemy has crushed you and reduced you to the state of a slave happy with his yoke. You would do better to seek out enemies than to let yourself think that you are at peace with your neighbors” (title 8, chapter 42, verses 223 and 224).