2084

by Sansal Boualem

  “The border? Which—ah, that Border. Yes, I know about it. People talk about it the way they talk to silly children about the big bad wolf, it’s a ruse to discourage smugglers and clandestine migrants or vagabonds without permits. They are told the Enemy will come from there one day and slit their throats.”

  “Is there a chance in a million that the Border exists?”

  “Not one in a billion. On earth there is only Abistan; you know that.”

  “Really?”

  “Well . . . there might be an island, here or there, for example, that still falls outside the jurisdiction of Abistan.”

  “And there are ghettos. I saw the great ghetto of the Seven Sisters of Desolation. They call it a ghetto but it’s a country. A small one but a country all the same, and the people who live there are men and women who are perfectly alive and not mutant bats. And there’s a Border there, very well guarded . . . and I’m not talking about the Border of Borders that hermetically seals off the City of God, or of the ones that serve as a pointless separation between the sixty neighborhoods in Qodsabad or the sixty provinces in Abistan . . . ”

  “That’s all nothing, dear Ati, a drop in the ocean, anachronisms, nonsense, demonstrations of incompetence on the part of the Apparatus, who by virtue of playing with fire became intoxicated and laid a grid over everything, with checkpoints. As for the Regs, they are, uh . . . they belong to Abistan. The people and the System need them, they need phantasmagoria like them to channel hatred and anger, and to reinforce the notion of one superior, pure, united race that is threatened by parasites. It’s as old as the planet. So what is your idea, in fact? But I’m afraid I’m beginning to get it . . . it’s sheer madness!”

  “Yes, that’s what it is, dear Toz . . . I would like Ram to leave me off somewhere in the Sîn mountains, in the Ouâ range . . . in a place where that Border has one chance in a million of existing. And if, by miracle, it does exist, I’ll find it and cross it, and I’ll see with my own eyes that twentieth century you so faithfully reconstructed . . . ”

  “It’s madness. How can you believe such a thing?”

  “I have hundreds of reasons to believe it, I believe it because Abistan is based on lies, nothing has escaped its falsifications, and since it has altered History there’s no reason why it might not also have invented a new geography. You can make people who never leave their neighborhood believe whatever you like . . . Since I met you, Toz, I’ve become more and more convinced of this. You believed in your twentieth century and you brought it back to life—there it is, shiny and beautiful in your miraculous museum . . . You know that century, you have seen how the inhabitants had science and technology and certain virtues which, in spite of all the limitations, enabled them to maintain a diversity of views, and to experience it, even when it was painful to them. As for technology, there’s no lack of it in Abistan: where did it come from, since we don’t manufacture it? Isn’t there a border somewhere that means it’s coming to us from the other side? And you also believed, Toz, that men of good will existed in Abistan and that one day they would know how to find each other and mobilize in order to save their country and their souls. You are one of them, and a lot of people think like you in wretched A19, so near yet so far from the City of God. Why wouldn’t I also have my beliefs—that those men from the twentieth century didn’t all disappear in the Holy Wars and holocausts and mass exterminations and forced conversions? Why wouldn’t I see myself as a man of goodwill who has acknowledged the fact and is mobilizing to establish or reestablish a connection between our world and the other one? Yes, why not, dear Toz, why not? I know for a fact, because I was there, at the sanatorium in Sîn, that entire caravans disappeared behind that . . . Border . . . If they’d just gotten lost, they would eventually have found their way and come back, don’t you think? And if someone made up the story about the Border to scare children and smugglers, wasn’t it because they knew the thing had actually existed? And maybe there is a little bit of it left somewhere in the remote icy fringes of the Ouâ. I want to try: I’ve come this far, it’s the only choice left to me . . . Life for me in this world is all over, all I hope and desire is to make a new life on the other side.”

  Toz remained silent. His lip was trembling when he finally replied:

  “I’ll ask Ram. Yes, I’ll ask him and I’ll do everything I can to persuade him. When you’re on the other side, you’ll let me know, somehow or other, and you’ll help me finish my museum . . . and maybe one day I’ll breathe life into it.”

  A very long silence settled over them, until Ati suddenly broke it.

  “My dear Toz, just so I don’t go to my grave without knowing, tell me three things, quickly—first of all, why did you burst out laughing when Koa gave you the letter Abi wrote to the mockbi Kho to thank him for having sent so many young people to their deaths?”

  “The mockbi Kho was a family friend, and we all knew of his immoderate love of glory. He flooded the country with that letter: he had written it himself and given it to the Great Commander to have Abi sign it. On the basis of his work and in the light of this recognition, Bri, as the Honorable in charge of Graces and Canonizations, nominated Kho for sainthood and no doubt will obtain it one of these days; but that sort of thing moves rather slowly. What else?”

  “How did you find out so quickly that we had been attacked by the guards on the Square of Supreme Faith? The question has been bugging me.”

  “As I told you, Ram set up a whole security network around me, and everyone who comes near me is scanned, and is driven away if there’s any doubt. You were my protégés, so to speak, so you were under surveillance . . . who by, I don’t know—your neighbor, her husband, my factotum Mou, who else? It was my agent Der who came to wake me up and inform me that you’d gone and thrown yourselves so rashly into a catastrophe.”

  “And what is that very polished language that is used in the signage in the offices of the Great Chamberlain?”

  “You noticed? Well done . . . It’s the language in which the holy book that came before the Gkabul was written . . . A very beautiful, rich, evocative language. As it had a tendency toward poetry and rhetoric, it was eradicated from Abistan, abilang was a better choice, since it demands duty and strict obedience. Its conception was inspired by Newspeak, from Angsoc. When we occupied that country, our then leaders discovered that its extraordinary political system was founded not only on weapons but also on the phenomenal power of its language, Newspeak, a language that was invented in a laboratory and which had the power to crush all will and curiosity in the speaker. So as the basis of their philosophy our leaders adopted the three principles that presided over the creation of Angsoc’s political system: ‘War is peace,’ ‘Freedom is slavery,’ ‘Ignorance is strength,’ and added three principles of their own: ‘Death is life,’ ‘Lying is truth,’ ‘Logic is absurdity.’ That’s Abistan for you, sheer madness.

  “Bri and Viz criticize my nostalgia for the twentieth century but they are nostalgic for that language and its charms . . . They sometimes write poems and recite them in family circles. But careful, that’s a State secret, it mustn’t leave the fiefdom . . . Have I answered your questions?”

  “Not completely, but there have to be a few secrets for the next life, if it exists and we’re allowed to express ourselves there.”

  EPILOGUE

  In which we will hear the latest news from Abistan, sourced from various media: The Voice of the Kïïba, Nadir 1-Qodsabad Station, the NeF, the bulletin of the VLBs entitled The Hero, The Voice of the Mockbas, The Civic Brotherhood, the Army Journal, etc. These should be read with the utmost circumspection, as the Abistani media are above all instruments of mental manipulation in the service of the clans.

  The news came first of all through The Voice of the Kïïba. In fact, it did no more than echo the communiqué from the Ras, the bureau of the presidium of the Just Brotherhood:

  The Cabinet of the Holy K�
�ïba has informed us this morning that His Most Serene Excellency the Honorable Duc, Great Commander of the believers, president of the Just Brotherhood, exclusive Master of the Lordships scattered throughout the sixty provinces of Abistan, has suffered a slight malaise that will necessitate his absence for a certain period.

  During his absence, the interim Command of the Just Brotherhood will be ensured by His Lordship the Honorable Bri. By formal order of Abi the Delegate, may salvation be upon him, and the entire Just Brotherhood, all individuals and institutions are called upon to obey him faithfully and do everything within their power to facilitate his task.

  Signed: For the Just Brotherhood assembled in an extraordinary session, and on the authority of the acting Commander of Believers, the Honorable Bri, the principal private secretary, Sub-Honorable Tat.

  One week later, Nadir 1-Qodsabad Station broadcast a still image illustrating the following information, a mass execution being held in a stadium:

  We have just heard, and are waiting for confirmation from the Ministry of Morality and Divine Justice, that two hundred and fifty criminals are said to have been sentenced to death by a religious decree issued by the Grand Jury of the Just Brotherhood. We already congratulate our brilliant agents from the Apparatus for unmasking them and confounding them so quickly. If the appeal for clemency they have submitted to the acting Great Commander, His Lordship the Honorable Bri, is rejected, they will be beheaded after the Great Thursday Imploration in various stadiums around the capital. According to sources close to the Kïïba, these criminals are said to have invented the most incomprehensible, despicable, and ridiculous rumor ever heard on the sacred soil of Abistan, namely, that because of a sudden decline in his health the Great Commander Duc was evacuated during the night by presidential airplane to an unknown location designated by one insignificant word, “Abroad,” where he will receive specialized treatment which Abistan could not provide even if it knew how. For shame! What is Abroad, where is it, who is it? No Abistani would hesitate for one second to carry out, himself, the just sentence the Grand Jury passed on those dangerous makoufs. The people unanimously call on the Great Commander to scornfully reject the appeal for clemency. Decapitation is already a great indulgence; scum like this ought really to be impaled, quartered, boiled alive. May Yölah restore the health of our Great Commander Duc and watch over our acting Great Commander Bri.

  In a recent issue, the NeF reported the following:

  According to sources close to the ministry of War and Peace, intense fighting is currently underway in the desert regions of southwest Abistan. Our sources allege that the combat involves free militia controlled by certain milieus with varying degrees of government connections. Is this fighting the confirmation of a rumor which has been circulating for some time, namely that the Just Brotherhood is meeting in conclave to elect the new Commander? According to another source the situation is even more complicated: the Just Brotherhood is said to have split in two and to be holding two conclaves in two secret locations. It is understandable that under these conditions the army, whom many have accused as the cause of all woe, are staying in their camps and barracks. Who are they supposed to obey, if they are receiving contradictory orders? In our next issue we will relay the decisive information that our investigators are obtaining at this very moment from a major government figure. It will no doubt confirm, in greater detail, what a worker at the Just Brotherhood’s airport revealed to us last night, a few minutes before the newspaper went to press, namely that a medical team appointed by the cabinet of the Just Brotherhood had just boarded a jet to fly to this place called Abroad that is the topic of much discussion these days, for the purpose of verifying the demise of our Great Commander and repatriating his august remains. May Yölah greet him in his paradise.

  The Army Journal has posted the following (unsigned) communiqué from General Staff Headquarters:

  In light of the insane flood of rumors endangering Abistan’s stability, the general Command of the army would like to insist upon the fact that the army is at the service of the government and the Just Brotherhood, as they are the supreme institutions of the country, united under the authority of the acting Great Commander, the Honorable Bri. The army forcefully denies the suggestion that intense fighting is under way in any region of the planet; the army’s information services have observed nothing other than the usual, occasionally excessive confrontations between local leaders, or fighting between smugglers and our armed forces, skirmishes between rioters and the forces of law and order, or the settling of scores between rival gangs of delinquents. General Staff Headquarters call on everyone to remain calm and serve only the Just Brotherhood, under the enlightened leadership of the Honorable Bri, acting Commander of believers.

  In the Civic Brotherhood, the despicable paper published by the FAC (Free Association of Civics), a strange long story was dug up. Given the level of crass ignorance displayed by the rag’s piss-artist copywriters, it is clear as day that the text was written by the resident in-house phantom.

  A certain Afr, a bum by trade, who has been repeatedly subjected to beatings by the Civics without ever mending his ways, showed up at the Civics’ barracks in the eighth district of H46 to reveal that two days earlier he had spotted a renegade who has been on the run from his neighborhood, S21, for several weeks, a certain Ati. Intrigued at seeing him so far from his own neighborhood, which he himself came from originally, Afr followed Ati. He was in the company of a stranger, an imposing man. Afr saw them enter the house of an honest tradesman, Buk the hardware dealer. Driven by his light-fingered, impulsive nature, Afr crept into the garden of the house, and through the window he witnessed a strange scene: Ati the renegade was deep in conversation with the hardware dealer’s worthy wife, to whom he was giving a present wrapped in a fine piece of silk. The husband was not in the room, so Afr suspected this must be a crime of adultery. He pictured a double reward for himself at the next R-Day, first for having located and reported a wanted renegade, and second for interrupting a crime of adultery. His day would have been well worth it. The Civics, who know everything because they live among the population and enjoy their complete trust, wanted to get to the bottom of this story, but Ati the renegade and his accomplice had disappeared. Summoned and called upon to explain himself, the worthy Buk protested that he had been framed, and said that Tar had introduced himself as a rich tradesman, there to make an offer for his production of cooking pots and basins over the next ten years, so as to honor his contract with a company belonging to the Honorable Dia, and that when Buk hosted a splendid dinner to celebrate his success, Tar showed up with a cousin of his who was passing through H46, whose name was not Ati but Nor.

  The Civics filed a report to whom it might concern but, as usual, they received neither thanks nor information regarding the further developments of the matter. Later, upon learning that two suspect individuals had entered the City of God and that one of them had been killed in A19 by free guards, they made the connection with the renegade and his accomplice and, in an additional report to the authorities, put forward the hypothesis that the swindlers in H46 and the bandits in A19 were one and the same; consequently, it seemed expedient to them to transfer the file to the Civics in A19. Which is what they did, but the Civics did not get very far with their investigation, as the body of the man who’d been killed by the guards had disappeared. No body, no crime, no case; as for the other individual, he had simply vanished into thin air. Also worthy of mention, because it is regrettable, is the fact that in A19 the prerogatives of the Civics have been limited drastically by an edict from the Honorable Bri, governor and police chief of the neighborhood.

  This is where security in our country stands: a dangerous renegade moves freely from one neighborhood to the next, an honest hardware dealer gets ripped off by fake tradesmen; an individual is killed by unknown guards and his body disappears just when it could have proven useful (it was most certainly seen by children playing in a v
acant lot), and his accomplice vanishes without a trace . . . The highest authorities are not doing a thing, they have not declared a state of emergency, nor have they sent out a search party, nor arranged to have the neighborhoods searched, nor had anybody arrested. A fine thing, Abistani justice. It makes you wonder what the point of being a Civic is in this country!

  As for The Voice of the Mockbas, it has published a call to vigilance that is rather alarming, which reads as follows:

  We have been witnessing a new phenomenon of late that cannot help but be a cause for concern: individuals who arrived from who knows where are spreading throughout the country with a call for greater orthodoxy in the practice of our holy religion. For the time being they are seeking out the small mockbas, because they have little or no surveillance, but these men can only grow bolder and slip through every breach, and God knows there are enough of them in Abistan. It is obvious that these cunning monkeys have a master who has trained them well: they all deliver the same speech, almost down to the very word. Our young believers, alas, seem to appreciate these diatribes, which call on them to take up arms and kill honest folk. With horror we have discovered that these demons wear bombs on their persons which are ready to explode, and the moment they are found out and cornered they set them off. This diabolical defense makes it impossible to conduct any investigation into who they are, where they have come from, or who they are working for. The Association of mockbis calls on its members, particularly those who officiate in small mockbas, to reinforce their vigilance and report to the police any individuals they suspect of belonging to this infernal horde as discreetly as possible. Finally, the Association calls on the VLBs, the Volunteer Law-enforcing Believers, to increase their influence over youths in the streets, for otherwise the Association will be obliged to withdraw permission to deploy their religious police in public places from the VLBs. It would be already more than enough if they practiced at home, on their children. It isn’t enough to have a cat wandering around licking its chops in the house, it has to catch a few mice as well.