Travels in Nihilon

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘I want to start for Nihilon City today,’ he said, stepping out of bed to dress, as another explosion shook the whole building. She looked at him, and regretfully watched his naked body being slowly clothed. ‘There are no trains to the capital. The railway is closed for passengers. Only goods trains can get through, with relief supplies for Fludd.’

  ‘Or troop trains,’ he scoffed, ‘to restore order in Shelp I should think.’

  ‘You learn quickly,’ she said, sadly. ‘Maybe you’re a Nihilist at heart.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ he laughed, fastening his tie.

  ‘I believe in real democracy, and love.’

  ‘Not that I’m a Nihilist,’ he said, kissing her tenderly. ‘I’m an individualist.’

  She drew away: ‘That’s how Nihilism began. Every man for himself. I believe in honesty and co-operation, progress and humanity, goodness and life.’

  ‘Oh, you poor child,’ he cried, feeling older and superior.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It’s true I’m only a boatwoman, but I’m also the daughter of President Took, the last president of Damascony.’

  There was a knock at the door, and a waiter entered with a magnificent silver tray on which was spread an extensive breakfast. While eating, Mella told him that after her father had disappeared (she was a baby at the time), her mother was killed with a rifle in her hands helping to defend the telegraph office in Nihilon City. That was certain. A woman had then put Mella on a lorry bound for a remote village in the mountains whose mayor, knowing who she was, brought her up in the best traditions of Tookist liberalism. But when she was fifteen this man died, and the family began to treat her in true nihilistic manner, as a servant and field worker, gardener and water-carrier. She was even forced into a disastrous marriage with one of the mayor’s idle and vicious sons.

  Luckily, as occasionally happened in Nihilon, the law was on her side, for in Nihilon a marriage licence is granted only for seven years. It then comes up for renewal, like a television licence. Those who don’t choose to renew it mutually (and she didn’t) were no longer considered to be married. She had had no children, though the law in any case said that children born within a year of the marriage lapsing would stay with the mother.

  Free at last of her good-for-nothing Nihilist husband, and having heard of the democratic traditions of Shelp with regard to women, she had gone there, and found that she could only get work as a boatwoman. Already strong after her work in the country, she nevertheless found her new job almost overwhelming, though she preferred it to her recent life of semi-slavery. In time, however, she became more adept in her work than the other boatwomen, and was accepted as their leader, organizing them into as much of a union as was possible in a country like Nihilon.

  At the age of twenty-eight she had met Edgar, and fallen in love for the first time in her life. All that remained for her to do was, with the help of her lover, solve the mystery of her father’s death. She saw no hope of finding him alive, but felt that her sufferings would be more than justified if she could at least discover his grave.

  Although Edgar was fond of this strange and passionate woman, he did not honestly think he was in love with her. ‘I love you,’ he said to her. ‘I really love you.’

  She stood up and undressed, her eyes glowing at him, so that he was obliged to do the same. ‘We’ll stay here all day and all night,’ she said. ‘Perhaps trains will be running again to Nihilon City in the morning.’

  ‘Aren’t there any buses?’ he asked, a forlorn hope as a hardening handsome nipple tipped at his cheek.

  She pushed him on to the bed. ‘None at all. But don’t worry. We’ll go tomorrow.’ His spine trembled with renewed life, and he was soon in no condition to argue. Another explosion seemed to rend the town apart, and he felt her pulling the blankets up and over them.

  Chapter 20

  The ticket collector apologized, and said that there had been a mistake. Instead of having the compartment to herself, she was to share it with another woman. He then demanded a supplement of fifty kricks because, he explained kindly, she would have company all the way to Nihilon City instead of travelling alone as heretofore, and all such extra comforts were provided at nominal cost. Jaquiline said that she hadn’t asked for the extra passenger to be put with her, but on seeing the miserable face of the forty-year-old woman who was to travel with her, she decided not to embarrass her any further. In any case she might be turned into a source of information, and so increase the pages of Jaquiline’s guidebook contribution, and therefore her payment for it. So she gave fifty kricks to the ticket collector, who departed grumbling and swearing because she hadn’t given him anything extra.

  ‘I’m going to Aspron,’ the woman said, as if she had been weeping, ‘which is the hospital city, in case you don’t know, being a foreigner.’

  ‘I hope it’s nothing serious,’ said Jaquiline, offering her a cigarette, which was accepted readily. She was fascinated by this woman, but found the landscape also interesting, and looked out of the window at mountains going up steeply to the south, craggy inhospitable peaks and valleys forming a frontier zone in which lived some of the more primitive peoples of Nihilon.

  ‘Quite serious,’ said the woman, standing up to take off the jacket of her suit, then opening a locker to find a hanger for it. The train moved slowly but comfortably along its wide rails. ‘You see, my fifteen-year-old son has had a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Jaquiline, noticing her trim figure, and indeed how pretty she appeared with her short dark hair and small mouth. Only the faintly worn quality of skin told her age. ‘But why must he be put in a hospital so far away?’

  ‘He’s not in a hospital. He’s at home, staying with my sister. I’m the one who’s going to the hospital. My husband set out a few days ago, but then I had a telegram to say that I must go as well. In Nihilon, whenever a young person has a nervous breakdown, or anything more serious, it’s the parents who have the treatment. I suppose we’ll be in for shock therapy, drugs, and psychoanalysis – in that order. It really is difficult for me to leave my job for three months, because I’m a school teacher, and I shall certainly be missed.’

  ‘Does this sort of treatment work?’ Jaquiline asked.

  She pulled down the basin to wash her face. ‘My name is Cola. Normally it does, certainly as much as if the young person got the treatment. When the parents go back home again they are so changed, and in a sense relaxed, that all seems to be well. Of course, if things go wrong and the son or daughter has another breakdown, then the parents come up for trial, and their psycho-reports and treatment-processes are taken into consideration. One mother and father I know were sent to prison for five years because their daughter was on her third nervous breakdown. But because of good conduct they were released four months later.’

  Not satisfied with a clean face, Cola unbuttoned her blouse and took it off, then removed her underwear so that she was bare above the waist. Her breasts were plump though rather low, and she washed them vigorously while talking. Jaquiline wrote rapidly in her notebook, glancing now and then at her companion’s ablutions, enthralled by her lack of embarrassment at showing her body before a stranger.

  ‘The law is quite lenient in Nihilon,’ Cola chattered. ‘Once can come out of prison after three months even if you are sentenced to twenty years, if you show willing. It depends on how many coarse epithets you manage to shout at the judge during the trial. The secret is, of course, not to get a lawyer to help you if you are arrested on a really criminal charge, because he defends you with reasonable talk, during which time you should be cursing the judges. In every court (I took my school-children to visit one last week) there is a notice above the judges’ heads which says ‘Nihilism is next to Godlessness’ – as if to encourage one to make a stand for innocence or leniency by shouting obscene language in rich and rhythmical patterns. I’ve heard that the police never arrest poets, because even if they commit the most despi
cable crimes they are bound to be free in a few days, and on the lookout for revenge, such are their powers of vindictive and picturesque cursing. Naturally the peasants don’t come off too well in this respect, being tongue-tied and awkward, but some of our rich peasants of the northern mountains, when they’ve killed a neighbour to get his land and feel themselves liable to be arrested, hire a poet to coach them in expletives to hurl at the judges. Some poets earn a good living at this, and the most famous ones are looked out for by the newspapers, who hire them as liars and special writers for notable occasions. In fact the newspapers might even compete to get a really good poet and liar, providing there’s a chance of him becoming less of a poet and more of a liar as time goes on, which there usually is. That’s why our newspapers have such a vast circulation. The laws of Nihilon say that the first duty of a newspaper is to be read, not looked at, which is why there are few pictures. Truth is secondary as far as the editors are concerned.’

  She took off everything below the waist as well – so that Jaquiline wanted to turn away from the spectacle of her most intimate cleansing. She was not quite able at this stage to go on writing in her notebook, for Cola attended to herself with such loving care that she felt soiled from her experiences of the day, and wanted her to finish so that she could do the same, though she didn’t see herself as capable of accomplishing it under the scrutiny to which she had unwittingly subjected Cola. But when Cola was finished and dressed, Jaquiline forgot her embarrassment and gave herself up to the luxury of a similar and thorough wash.

  The train was climbing into the well-wooded foothills, and was by no means so steady on the rails as it had been while travelling along the coastal plain. But they found a vacant table in the restaurant car, and smoked a cigarette while waiting for the first course. ‘This may be the last meal I shall enjoy for a long time,’ said Cola. ‘Conditions at Aspron are not good for those who get sent there for their children’s breakdowns. Apart from bad food, one doesn’t feel much like eating after so many shocks and interrogations.’

  Jaquiline held Cola’s hand to comfort her. ‘I thought it was only psychoanalysis.’

  ‘Not exactly. You are made to talk. As long as you keep talking you are all right, but as soon as you stop it’s the eléctric shocks again. They say you are uncooperative and sullen, psychotic or schizophrenic. Sometimes they try drugs to make you talk, and that’s bad enough. But usually it’s the shock treatment. As long as you can keep talking, though, it’s not too bad.’

  ‘It sounds dreadful,’ said Jaquiline, tasting the soup.

  ‘I like talking to you,’ Cola said. ‘If only you were the one I had to talk to at Aspron. Once I get there I won’t be able to do it so easily.’

  ‘Why do people allow it to be done to them?’

  ‘Oh, because Nihilists like to be humiliated.’

  ‘I should have thought just the opposite,’ Jaquiline said, eating hungrily.

  ‘You don’t know Nihilon,’ said Cola. ‘I’m a Nihilist, but it’s still strange to me. A few years ago there were many child murders in Nihilon, and the government was very disturbed by it, though the people not so much, except those whose children were killed. Most of the murderers were never caught, because the crimes were motiveless. They really were, if you see what I mean. But many of the criminals sent letters to the police or press (whom they considered to be one and the same thing, though I’m not sure that they are at all) saying that they had only committed these crimes in the hope of being executed. But they couldn’t give themselves up because that would pervert the normal course of Nihilistic justice. So the government, caught in the trap of its own philosophy, had to do something about it. President Nil proposed the idea of the execution mat, a place one could go to if the lust for child-murder, or any murder in fact, came upon one. The entrances to these places were well concealed, but the addresses, and the ways into them, could be found by dialling a certain telephone number. So a person could go there, and as soon as the door closed, the ritual of execution began, and stage by stage it became so convincing that after a few hours the person who had entered really believed he was on the way to decapitation, or whatever it was to be. He was reduced to a state of terror, remorse, repentance – though still innocent. At the last moment, when it clearly seemed impossible that he would live, he was read out a personal letter of pardon signed by President Nil, and a letter of forgiveness from the mother of the child he was supposed to have killed. Then he was free, innocent, regenerated, blessed, so we don’t have any such murders nowadays – though there are still many things to put right. Do you like Nihilon?’

  Jaquiline was going to say that she thought it a horrible country, but something made her hesitate: ‘How can I tell? I haven’t been here very long.’

  Cola was disappointed. ‘I hoped you’d say you hated it. I do. There are too many laws.’

  ‘Too many?’

  ‘Of the wrong sort.’

  Jaquiline threw all caution out, and said: ‘If you dislike the idea of going to Aspron, why don’t you run away, and just not go there?’

  Cola’s face turned crimson. ‘How could you suggest such a monstrous thing? No, no, never. Please don’t mention it again.’ They finished the meal in silence, though back in the privacy of their compartment Cola took Jaquiline’s hands and said fervently: ‘Yes, let’s go away together. I can’t face three months in Aspron. Help me, please help me.’

  They lay on their separate bunks and as it grew dark the train ascended loop by loop towards the pass that would take them through to the great central plain of Nihilon. Jaquiline got down and opened the window when the train stopped at a station, to witness the disturbance outside. The platform was short, and crowds of people were trying to get on, though not at the part where her carriage was. She saw them surging left and right, and pushing through the doors of the small station building. Blue bulbs hung from wires and poles, and in the distance the yellower lights of a town straggled up a hillside as if they went into the sky.

  Whistles were blowing, and people were fighting. The train began to move with many would-be passengers still trying to get on. A voice shouted orders from a loudspeaker, but she couldn’t tell what it was saying. Several rifle shots sounded towards the back of the train, as it went faster, and the crowd with a united groan of disappointment appeared to draw back from it.

  Jaquiline’s face was half frozen from the cold mountain wind. She wanted to sleep, but was restless, and knew that it would be difficult if not impossible. She stood at the window, swayed by the train. ‘I can’t get to sleep either,’ Cola said. ‘I keep thinking of how happy my son must be now that he knows I’m going to Aspron because of him. He must be half cured already.’

  ‘But you said you weren’t going,’ Jaquiline reminded her.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Cola, rustling in her sheets, ‘we can get off the train in the morning, when it reaches Agbat. That’s the next stop. We’ll sell our compartment for at least ten times the price of the ticket, then make our way into the hills. I went on holiday there four years ago. The people in that region belong to a tribe called the Gelts, who have fair hair and blue eyes, and love money – though they have none because they sit all day talking about it. So when our money runs out we may have to face cold, hunger, thirst, humiliation, though it will be much better than going to Aspron. You are very kind to share my bad luck in this way.’ She came down from her bunk, and held Jaquiline’s hand warmly. ‘I’m sure we shall be all right. It’s safer in the mountains than in a town. We’d give ourselves away too easily there.’

  Jaquiline wasn’t sure now that she wanted Cola with her while she investigated the tourist attractions of Nihilon City. ‘I want to sleep,’ she said, ‘I wonder if you’d be kind enough to lend me a nightdress?’

  ‘I can’t,’ Cola said. ‘All my cases must have been emptied and repacked with pieces of wood when I left them in the station this morning. I have nothing at all.’

  ‘My things were stolen too,’ Jaquilin
e said, alarmed at such a coincidence. ‘My own cases are full of wood.’

  Cola fell to such heart-stricken sobs that Jaquiline’s sympathy came back. ‘You too!’ she said, when she was able to speak. ‘My luggage is filled with wood because I’m going to Aspron. Tomorrow the police will get on the train, and when they open our cases, they will see that you have to go to Aspron as well.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ Jaquiline cried. ‘There’s been some dreadful mistake. I shall explain everything to them.’

  ‘You won’t be able to,’ said Cola, a little calmer. ‘When the police see wood in our cases they’ll arrest us on suspicion of arson.’ Jaquiline kissed her, as if to thank her for an idea that suddenly came to her: ‘We’ll open the window and throw the wood out.’

  Cola wept again. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying! If they see empty cases we’ll be sent to Aspron for life.’

  ‘Then we’ll throw the cases out as well.’

  ‘That’s worse. No luggage at all means that we’ll be shot on the platform as a warning to others. Let’s accept our fate together in Aspron. It will be better that way.’

  Jaquiline patted her soothingly. ‘All right, my love, if it will please you.’ When Cola climbed back into the bunk, Jaquiline began to undress. This wasn’t nihilism. It was a bad dream. She had no intention of submitting to such barbarous impositions, and remembered the book bought from her police chief friend at the frontier, a volume closer to her heart than ever because it contained a loaded revolver. When the police came, and if they came – for she could not readily believe all that Cola had said – to take her to Aspron, she would shoot them down like the dogs she was fast considering them to be. With her clothes off, she climbed into Cola’s bunk, and they slept the night together, consoling each other for whatever might happen to them on the following day.

  Chapter 21