Republics of the Mind

by James Robertson

  So you can imagine my surprise at finding that the word I was looking for was not there. Or, at least, it was not where it should have been. I can’t now remember what the word was, but that is the least of my troubles. I know it began with a D. I opened the dictionary at roughly the place where the Ds should have been – as a regular user over many years, I have become quite good at judging where the letters fall – and they were not there! I flicked back and forward a bit, but still the Ds did not reveal themselves. The Cs, which would have been a useful benchmark at this point, did not appear either. In fact, the more I flicked, the more I noticed that the letters were completely jumbled up, not in the correct alphabetical order at all. Every time I thought I was getting close to where a letter ought to have been, on the basis of its usually preceding or following another letter, it turned out not to be there.

  This is a pretty fatal flaw in a dictionary. It destroys its utility. But how could this be? It was my own, my old and trusty dictionary. I had had it for several years. I felt that we knew each other intimately. And now, here it was, apparently playing tricks on me. I tried again: the order remained in … complete disorder. I checked the binding of the book, turned it around and upside down and opened it back to front, I even shook it as one might a carton of soup or orange juice – ‘Shake well before opening’ – but nothing would restore it to its original condition, organised on the fundamental, time-honoured and generally accepted principle of a proper alphabetical sequence. How had the dictionary reconstituted itself into this hopeless confusion? And when? I had no idea, but it put me in an intolerable situation.

  I took a bus into town and visited a large bookshop. I went to the reference section, selected a new copy of the dictionary, which was wrapped in cellophane, and carried it to the till. Before the sales assistant took it from me I asked if he would remove the cellophane so that I could check that the contents were in the right order. The man looked at me rather coldly.

  ‘I’m sure they will be,’ he said. ‘If you discover there are pages missing, or wrongly bound, please bring it back. Or if you are dissatisfied with it for any other reason, you can of course return it for a full refund, so long as it is in mint condition.’

  ‘It may be in mint condition,’ I said, ‘but still unusable.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we sell dozens of these every year and we very seldom have them returned as unusable.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘I would prefer to check it now.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He removed the cellophane and handed the dictionary to me, observing me closely. I opened the dictionary.

  A mass of overlapping and unrelated letters seemed to leap at me from the page. It was swimming with illegible text. I felt as though I were suddenly back in front of the old manual typewriter on which I first began to write, when still a child. Sometimes, out of frustration or boredom, I would press down on the keyboard with the spread palms of both hands, so that a clump of keys jammed together half an inch from the point where they would normally strike the paper. Looking at that page of the dictionary reminded me of that tangle of metal and ink-black characters. But this was only a momentary sensation. At once the letters moved before my eyes, their confusion dissolving and reforming with astonishing speed. I turned the page: the same thing happened. I closed the book, and handed it back to the sales assistant.

  ‘It is defective,’ I said. ‘Like the one I have at home.’

  He opened the dictionary and appeared – I suspected him of deceit – to read an entry or two. ‘In what way do you find it defective?’ he asked.

  ‘The letters are in the wrong order,’ I said. ‘In fact, they don’t seem to be in any order. I can’t use a dictionary if I don’t know the order of the letters.’

  He stepped out from behind the till. ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ he said. ‘I think I may be able to help.’ He went over to the reference section and selected another dictionary. He brought it over to me.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is exactly the same dictionary.’ This was obviously untrue. ‘Except,’ he went on, ‘that it is thumb-indexed.’ He removed its cellophane wrap. ‘To locate a letter of the alphabet, you simply insert your thumb at the appropriate cutaway mark, and open the book there. It is slightly dearer, but many of our customers who have difficulty remembering the alphabet find it most convenient.’

  ‘I don’t have difficulty remembering the alphabet!’ I shouted. ‘Good God, man, do you think I’m an idiot? A-B-C-D …’

  I stopped in midstream. My mouth gaped in horror. The assistant stared at me with great equanimity. After a little while I closed my mouth.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I said. He put it in a carrier bag, I handed over the cash, and bolted from the shop.

  On the bus home, I struggled against the temptation to look up the word that had caused all this trouble in the first place. I did not have to struggle too hard, because the truth is, I had forgotten what the word was. I still have not remembered it. But, as I said, that is now the least of my problems.

  When I got home, I placed the dictionary on my desk, flexed my fingers, and prepared to open it. As I was doing this, I noticed that the index finger on my right hand seemed to have altered somewhat. It had become fatter, shorter, and had only one joint. It had, in fact, become more like a thumb than an index finger. I looked at my left hand. The pinkie and the ring finger seemed remarkably thumblike too. I did not like the look of this.

  I went to pick up my new thumb-indexed dictionary. I could not grip it properly. It fell to the floor. Letters spilled out of it in all directions across the carpet. I let out a cry and, falling to my knees, attempted to gather them up. My hands were by now too clumsy for such intricate work. I was wrist-deep in letters. I began to howl.

  The Dayshift

  He was a fat, ungainly man, who never said hello or goodbye to his wife. After twenty-five years there didn’t seem any point. He left his house every morning at the same time without saying goodbye, and he arrived home every evening without feeling it necessary to say hello. Why would he bother? It wasn’t as if he was ever going to find a note on the table saying she’d run off with another man; a miner, a schoolteacher, a car mechanic. He would never find her murdered or imprisoned or the house burnt down. Why else would you say goodbye to someone you knew would still be there when you got back? Why would you say hello when you found things exactly as you had left them? And his wife must have felt the same way, for she never said these words to him either. There were no surprises in their lives.

  He would have been a big man – physically, at least – in any line of work, but over the years his sedentary job had turned the gradual spread of his gut into an overhang of belt-bursting proportions. In summer his office – if you could call the tiny box of glass and breeze-blocks an office – became stifling. Sweat bloomed in great crescents on his shirt, and blotched his neck where the collar rubbed. In winter he seemed unaffected by the cold, and could sit without a coat even on the bitterest of days, immunised by blubber, while shivering soldiers took turns to come in and heat themselves at the miserable paraffin heater in the corner. The season of his discontent was summer, but he endured it without comment, as he did almost everything that occurred in his unremarkable life.

  It was spring now, and not yet too hot, but something was different. Extraordinary events were occurring, and although he still said nothing he could not help observing them.

  His job was to check and stamp the papers of those crossing the border. This had always been his job. In the past the numbers had been small – a mere trickle: businessmen (such as they were), an industrial or cultural delegation, and very occasionally a tourist. Now, with the government in disarray, the trickle had become a steady stream. The entire population seemed to want to see what it was like to step outside their country and back in again. They could hardly believe that to put a foot across a line would no longer be an irrevocable act, a decision that would have the most far-reaching, perhaps devastating c
onsequences for them or their families, or even for the country itself. They seemed almost to be sleepwalking. Or perhaps it was that they weren’t sure they were awake, and took each cautious step as if the ground might vanish beneath them.

  He didn’t understand this need to test the ordinariness of leaving and returning. He was accustomed to ponderously reading the documentation of movement word by word, line by line, and it did not excite him: the passports, visas, permits, exemptions, all the paraphernalia required to authorise foreign travel. He would use one of his stubby, tobacco-stained fingers to follow the text, a deliberate display of his power to keep people waiting. But even as he did this he knew that they were inured to queues, that they found his behaviour tiresome rather than frustrating. They were used to the slow, compelling hand of bureaucracy, indeed their lives could not go on without it, and at this moment of crossing the border they could not proceed without his approval.

  Until now. Now, the people moved in spite of him. They couldn’t care less whether his fat finger traced a set of justifications across an irrelevant piece of paper. They were going anyway. The government had ceased to govern and he was part of that new situation, although at the same time nothing to do with it. Nobody attacked him for the past but on the other hand nobody any longer recognised him in the present. They just kept pushing by in their endless stream, pushing but patient too. They had waited so long, shuffling behind one another; another half-hour before that step across the border was nothing in the scale of things. What was thirty minutes after more than forty years?

  It was becoming embarrassing, him sitting there in his cabin, the people pouring past the grimy little window. He thought about going home but he didn’t want to abandon his post. For one thing, he couldn’t help thinking that his pay might be affected, although it was true the supervisor was not there to check on him. In any case, he had been doing his job for twenty-five years and he had never left early yet. He had never been sick, never been absent except when on holiday. He was utterly reliable. The soldiers used to joke that they could throw away their watches as long as he worked there. That was how he was. Even some of the soldiers had gone, and the rest were keeping a low profile, but he wouldn’t cut short his shift, even though he knew it to be a truly extraordinary day.

  He did think, however, about getting home at the end of it. All these people were pressing through to the other side where there was nothing but wasteland for a mile or two before the first grey town, but he was thinking about heading in the opposite direction. Just wasteland – and yet that was enough for them, to walk on wasteland and turn and see their own country behind them, and walk a little further, and turn again, and come back in. No questions asked. Nobody for whom you had to have your reasons prepared. It would be as if you had done nothing except walk in an empty space.

  He had no desire to go there, none at all. For twenty-five years he’d been able to see into that other country – he could even stroll a few paces and put his feet on its soil if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. He’d never felt a need to go any further than where he was. He was a true patriot. That was why he had stayed in the job – why he’d got the job in the first place. He was trusted to stay put, not to run away. He was responsible. He was rooted in reality, and the idea that he might be seduced by imagination was laughable.

  But now he felt awkward. At first, when he began his shift, he’d tried to inspect the people’s papers, but the man he’d replaced had just laughed at his efforts as he put on his coat to leave.

  ‘What’s the point of that? Do you think they’re going to stop if you tell them their papers aren’t in order?’

  And then – he could hardly believe it – the man had left the cabin and walked straight into the other country himself.

  Of course what he’d said was true: it was impossible to carry out a proper inspection. There were too many people and in their present mood they were not likely to submit graciously to his powers of delay (such as they were). He knew he was only a pawn. It had never, in truth, been the likes of him who had controlled the border, but the soldiers and the police, armed and disciplined. He was there simply to represent the civil authority. These people passing in front of his window did not hold him to account for his part in hindering their movements because they had all been a part of the system, they had all acquiesced, so they could hardly blame him.

  He remembered his first day at the border post, being given instructions by the supervisor. There were files for the different forms, there were sheets to be completed in triplicate, there were different stamps for different permits. He listened and watched diligently until the supervisor – not the same man as the current one, who was twenty years younger than himself – paused and asked him if he understood everything. He thought hard for a moment and then said, ‘What will I do if somebody’s forms are incomplete?’

  The supervisor looked at him as if he were mad.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that. It’ll not happen.’

  ‘But if it does? If there’s ever a problem?’

  ‘It’ll not happen. But if it ever did, well, you would contact me of course. But I’m telling you, that situation is never going to arise.’

  ‘So there’ll be no problems like that at all?’

  ‘No.’ The supervisor’s face was like a stone.

  He nodded. Then he said, ‘It’s just that, if there are never any problems, what’s the point of me checking everything?’

  As soon as he said it he knew it was the wrong thing. The supervisor glared at him.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘who do you think you are? You’re nobody. It’s a great honour, getting trained for this post. It’s not just anybody that gets a chance at it, overseeing who comes and goes at the border. Don’t start off on the wrong foot, asking what the point of it is. I can have you replaced just like that.’ He clicked his fingers.

  ‘I just thought—’

  But the supervisor interrupted him. ‘What do you mean, you just thought? All you need to do is your job, the way I’ve explained it to you. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to worry about what happens if somebody’s papers are wrong. That’s not your problem. You check the papers and if they’re in order you stamp them just like I’ve told you.’

  The room seemed full of anger. The supervisor clicked his fingers again, right in his fat face. That should have shut him up, but he could not help himself. Some dull obstinacy made him speak again.

  ‘And if they’re not?’

  The supervisor’s fist crashed down on the table. ‘They will be! People don’t arrive at the border by accident, you know. They don’t just turn up. All kinds of channels have to be gone through. You’re here to carry out a final check. That’s your job.’

  And so it had turned out. The supervisor (who had moved on to greater things, he supposed – at any rate, one day he was transferred to the capital, and was replaced by the younger man) was absolutely right. In twenty-five years he had never had a problem. The paperwork had always been in order. Other people, in other places, had been doing their jobs as efficiently and reliably as he. That was the system. It had its drawbacks, of course. But it seemed to him that, basically, it worked.

  There was a lot of talk in the papers and on television nowadays about freedom of speech. Countries that had been enemies were now friendly, ideas that had been alien were becoming domesticated. Words developed new implications, or changed their meanings completely. Some of it was obvious, but much was subtle. People took a delight in splitting hairs. One word, they said, could carry a whole range of values. None of these values should have absolute precedence. That way led to tyranny. Back to tyranny, they said.

  Well, it seemed to him that these same people had been silent long enough before. They hadn’t spoken until it was safe to do so. Which implied that what they were saying was dangerous, or had been, to themselves or to society. Surely someone had to decide which values of which words were the true ones? Because it couldn’t be the ca
se that all meanings were of equal value. It suited some people to speak now, but it had suited them to be silent before. Supposing there were things that weren’t right in the future, when they were in charge? Would they speak out or be silent? Somehow he felt their behaviour to be immature, selfish. He mistrusted their mistrust of – well, of certainty. He’d had his doubts as a young man, of course, but he’d grown up. They disliked certainty, whereas for him it was what made things work. The last twenty-five years proved it.

  Most of the people at the border did not even have their papers with them. Their identity papers. They had deliberately left them behind, or decided not to reveal them. That was what they wanted to be – anonymous. He found that hard to fathom. Why would anyone want to be anonymous? They claimed they wanted to be individuals but how could you be without your identity?

  For a while he kept up a pretence of checking the cards and documents that a few people, out of habit he supposed, hesitatingly pushed under the glass at him. But it was pointless – even he could see that. He nodded at these people as if to thank them for their trouble, but also to tell them it wasn’t necessary, that they could go past anyway, that for the moment at least their pictures and names were completely worthless. Then, because it seemed illogical to nod only at those who bothered to acknowledge his presence, he nodded as each person passed through the barrier that was no longer a barrier. Each figure received a curt nod. It was as much of his official duty as he could bring to bear on the proceedings. It seemed to justify his being there. But only a handful of people nodded back. Most didn’t even notice him, or if they did they studiously ignored him. So his nods became shorter, more into his chest. And his eyes lowered so that he would not have to meet the bright eyes of anyone who happened to glance his way, would not meet scorn or laughter or amazement with his own – his own what? Embarrassment? Stupidity? Anger? Fear? He didn’t know what he was feeling, or when a feeling stopped being itself and became something else. And pretty soon the crowd was streaming past, paying him no attention whatever.