Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  She had grown up protected from the world. She had grown up in safety, said Paul – in security, Louise thought, because what her father didn’t know, didn’t understand, was that evil went around, that it crept in everywhere and struck the heart of everything. We don’t need other people – we don’t need anyone, Paul said, and for years Louise had repeated that. We don’t need other people. Now she wasn’t so sure. In the world as it was, all the rest counted just as much, all the others, because for the father and the daughter to be perfectly together, there needed to be justice and the outside needed, would have needed, not to be this dark and wild place that it had become or that it had always been. And the outside, too, crept in; a fatal blurring of inside and outside that was, for Louise, the strongroom between two walls, the room that was supposed to resist everything but that nobody went into, twenty square feet subtracted from the rest of the apartment and their lives, entirely devoted to catastrophe. From the hallway there was no trace of it, but Louise knew it was there, and as in a fairy tale the secret room haunted her dreams. And as in a fairy tale she had to lose everything – her father, her city, and even her reflection; she had to travel the world over and venture into unstable places that ranked amongst the bloodiest, to be able to push open a door that wasn’t a door at all but a wall, one that she had grown up beside, that she could see from her bed. So she was not with the others, with this cohort of sad young people, those who dreamed of somewhere else. She would join them later – much later, if she survived her mission.

  *

  The cities of tomorrow, Albers used to say – Louise had been the only one who paid any attention to her at the end, this woman of superior intelligence, this generous woman who had spent her life, one might say, offering up her mind like food or spectacle to generation upon generation of students – the cities of tomorrow will be deserted and desert cities, cities where nobody goes out after dark and where, all the same, there are always surveillance cameras; or perhaps finished cities, built from the ground up in a matter of weeks – a commercial centre, residential neighbourhoods – but where nobody ever comes to live and the place only looks habitable: no water, no electricity, a project abandoned by developers, cropping up in the middle of nowhere and coming to nothing; or perhaps cities emptied by some toxic outbreak, killing all inhabitants or forcing them out; or perhaps drowned cities, wholly submerged within a reservoir or in an ocean that, due to global warming, due to melting glaciers, was rising, would go on rising. Or cities that were only cities in name because they’d been shelled, bombarded for so long that nothing living had a chance of subsisting there or dared to enter, except perhaps for drones gliding above ravaged roads and buildings and rooms to show us what a world without people looks like, which all the same is the world of people, wholly of their doing and their ill will.

  This was what they hadn’t understood, hadn’t wanted to understand. The cities of tomorrow, Albers said, were ghost cities.

  And it was towards one of these abandoned cities that Louise was headed. Her father had wanted to protect her from everything but there was one thing he hadn’t understood, hadn’t wanted to see: wherever she was, Louise had grown up amongst images of collapse and explosion, ruins and death, debris and flight. She had never been in a room without screens and seeing screens meant seeing destruction. Blank stares and blood-soaked faces, streets closed off like traps, vertical bombardments and horizontal charges – as vast as the world is, there’s still no escaping it.

  And now Louise was crossing the same borders as these men, women, and children fleeing something far worse than any war the world had ever known, beyond death itself, which one would have thought they knew and which revealed itself to be a more subtle state than that; long, desperate lines of the living in whose hearts something had died, or long, desperate lines of the dead in whose hearts something was alive. This ambiguity, the great discovery of the century or the great discovery of Louise who was crossing the same boundaries, the same borders that they were. But alone. And in the opposite direction.

  *

  She’d had to take two planes to get to this country where the frontiers shifted from day to day, expanding and contracting like a distraught heart. From cover to cover, Louise read the special issue of a popular science magazine – the sort that Paul liked. She read it attentively, page by page, as if performing a ritual of sorts. The magazine’s theme was memory. It transpired that our memories are not unique. They live in several places, in the part of the brain that is here (and) now, but also in the part that is both the past and the future, which is the past for the future, and so each memory is twofold. At least. Of course, such a discovery had required a certain violence, which took the form (Louise wasn’t sure she quite understood) of electricity or even light, yes, maybe a simple ray of light aimed at grey matter, in any case intended for perfect darkness, deep within the skull’s thick bone. Yes, it did seem that light, an immaterial pinprick of day, made it possible to activate, to deactivate certain memories; and in this way someone could, here (and) now, relive or resurrect particular shocks, particular brutalities, or forget them or force them to be forgotten, without damaging long-term memory. Thanks to this double positioning, this double life, she thought or hoped she understood, it was at once possible to remember and not to remember. What she, however, was sure she understood was that the memories in question, the ones that had allowed this beautiful, elegant breakthrough, were memories of fear. She wondered momentarily what the pioneers – the mice terrorised by electrocution and subsequently forced to relive this terror, reactivated in their brains by a ray of carefully aimed light – thought of it.

  Why would she come here, why would she inflict that upon herself? A particularly elaborate mourning ritual, a barbaric exercise she would re-enact without realising it. She shut the magazine. Then her eyes. This wouldn’t be in vain, because once these sorts of rites were completed, if they went well, it wouldn’t be unlikely for the initiate to find some sort of presence. Some sort of peace or presence. Maybe those were the same thing. It wouldn’t be any more unlikely for the initiate to die during these rites, she told herself, her eyes still shut, given how incomprehensible, how frequently violent these ceremonies are.

  A very young woman in a war-torn country. A very young woman in a ghost town, looking for the mother she had always been told was dead.

  *

  My dear Paul,

  Forgive me for writing to you. I believe we had agreed not to, but so many years and miles have made me wonder every so often about what I know happened. Every so often, beneath what happened, there seems to have been something else. I think that’s what’s called regret, but I’ve forgotten even that; words are falling from my mind like leaves from a tree, and I won’t deny that it’s a relief. It’s possible to travel the whole world from Elisse hotel to Elisse hotel, without ever experiencing anything that even remotely resembles reality. At the Elisse hotel in Tokyo a maid told me the story, and I think it was true, of a receptionist who killed a guest and took her body out, folded up in her own suitcase. At the Elisse hotel in Mexico City I heard the same story, but this time she was the one who had killed him. All that is of course equally true or equally false. It’s a matter of movement, that’s the only thing I’m sure of. There are all sorts of ways to get from point A to point B. From inside to outside, or from outside to inside, or from the heart to the head, or from the head to the heart, and finally to your hands.

  In short – I’m going around the world. Or against my old impulses. The memories I have are going every which way, too, going strong and then suddenly going rogue. I don’t know whether they’re disappearing or simply living some other life. Somewhere else.

  I came back to Sarajevo because it’s my city, at least that was what I thought; in fact, its war was my city, this war I came to too late, when it made me who I am. It shaped my identity, and, also, in a way, shaped the world we now live in, a world that is, in more than just name, a besieged city. I came back to
Sarajevo and I didn’t recognise anything of mine there. The markets were full of brass shell casings. Engraved on them were landscapes, sometimes in minute detail, sometimes with extraordinary skill, the familiar horizon of the city I was in and which had been the besieged city. These landscapes were distinctive specifically because they were depicted not on a canvas or on a page but on hollow metal, that is, emptied of its force, its death, which were one and the same thing: speed is what makes a projectile fatal. And where did that death, made physical in the form of powder, go? A fired bullet is also a journey. Simultaneously here and there, or almost – this almost which encompasses the duration of this journey is a word that, in fact, takes longer to say than to experience. A duration that’s insignificant; barely a blink, a heartbeat, barely the difference between alive and dead.

  Gleaming shell casings, in all sizes, all calibres – but at this point where was the death they had contained? Death, once contained inside, was now gone and, in a strange trade-off, replaced with an image on the outside. And strangest of all was that these things were everywhere to be found in the markets, that they had to have been made every day, manufactured in the surrounding mountains; or even, who knows, abroad. You see where I’m going here. Survivors or tourists. I don’t see how it can be otherwise.

  What delighted me were the starlings. Their migration routes have changed, because of global warming, I’m told, and when they’re here, it’s a rare and special thing. They take off in flocks, in mathematically perfect clouds. The sight is breathtaking. The world being the way it is, there’s no reason for them not to fly up to Paris soon. Be careful, though, because they shit everywhere, the stench is terrible.

  I’m going to follow them south, I’m going to look for downfall where it happens, I’m going to look for war where it happens: only in the face of risk am I not a danger. To myself. To others. As for the rest, don’t worry; I’m not thinking about you (except when I forget not to think about you). As for the little girl, if I saw her tomorrow I wouldn’t recognise her, or she wouldn’t recognise me, and that is truly the greatest gift you could have given – to me, and to her.

  I’m going to try not to write to you any more. You saved something in me that didn’t deserve to be saved; I destroyed something in you that didn’t deserve to be destroyed.

  Take care,

  Amelia.

  *

  Louise refolded the letter, which she stuck in her passport, as if it were a safeguard, a special authorisation, which in a way it was. The jeep’s jolting kept her eyes from staying fixed on the lines, although it hardly mattered when she knew every word of it with her broken heart.

  *

  The building was rumoured to have served as the CIA’s local headquarters, but Louise figured all that was just talk. With her short hair, dressed like a boy, she looked at the place and saw its naive, old-fashioned fairy-tale charm. In the seventies and eighties, its stance on hygiene and neutrality had made it the rallying point for a burgeoning population of itinerant businessmen, and, according to Albers, this neutrality resulted in desensitised, desensitising architectures – anaesthetising architectures where people ended up losing everything, from a sense of what was good and bad all the way down to their very identities. Paradoxically, those who were there were both safer and less so than they might have been elsewhere. Because of its declared imperialist complicity, since the seventies the Elisse franchise had been a source of resentment and a prominent target of what is still called fundamental anti-Americanism. Threats, bomb alerts, suicide attacks, and vehicle rammings had been recorded throughout the unstable Mediterranean area, and, of course, in the Middle East, where the hotel chain was quickly forced to abandon this unique prototype, an outpost left for local militia and the sand which had an almost supernatural way of slipping in everywhere. The sand was the first thing that Louise saw when she stepped inside, a beautiful, wild image, an American hotel with its name scrubbed away, its roof broken, in which an invisible wind traced shallow channels the colour of the light starting to wane outside, small dunes here and there under the modular furniture, its walls riddled with holes, and, down below, plants starting to overtake the space, quietly snaking up the edifice that their bulk alone would soon prevent from collapsing.

  With her short hair, Louise looked like a boy, but this disguise wasn’t meant to be one, not really; or rather, a strange thing was happening: the women she encountered recognised her for what she was, for one of their own – and kept quiet to protect her vulnerability. But all the men were fooled, and as it was their gaze she had to hide from, she was, as incredible as it might seem, safe, almost. But wasn’t that what they – she and her pale, wilted friend, she and her belittled generation – had been working towards for so long? What she and David had been looking for was peace, a vision of the world built by men and by them deserted. What they had been looking for was the night; what the night did to the city, its parks, its museums. Everything was more mysterious then, everything seemed more honest. They wanted to be cats, shadows, they wanted to escape the constant gaze weighing on everything all the time and seeming to insist that they explain themselves, that they choose sides in battles they had no wish to fight.

  The deeper she sank into the present-day heart of darkness, the wearier the men seemed to be, sand encrusted deep within the grooves of their foreheads, the folds of their skin, grains permanently lodged at the corners of their lips and their eyes, forming tears unable to fall, held captive by their eyelids. Mechanical yet perpetual and perpetually retained tears that could, in these desolate spaces, be an optical instrument. A tool for survival. And what becomes, Louise wondered, of the tears that do not fall? Of the sand that fills the smallest corner and clings to the slightest spot of dampness it finds, that of human bodies: fossils? pearls? And all these men were tired, and all of them were leaning on rifles they’d welded together from three different weapons.

  At first she chose who she talked to based on their face, on something in their features that reminded her of the life she had abandoned, the warmth of the father she had loved more than anyone else in the world; or the way the sunlight made a lock of hair or the cartilage of an ear shine, reminding her of the friend she had had, the witness to her childhood, whom she’d once considered her other half. Then, by dint of unrolling her sleeping bag in the sand, by dint of saying words in a voice she wished were deeper and getting inconclusive answers, she changed. She transformed, she hardened, she let her father’s face and her friend’s face fade away, she stopped thinking about them, she came to trust them to find her at night, in her dreams. Just as this woman she was looking for had known to find her father, who groaned in his sleep then the way these men sometimes groaned now. Now it was their weapons she was using to choose who she talked to. Some rifles, she sensed, made their users wiser than others. A hand, set in a particular way on a rifle butt, could signal seriousness. Trustworthiness. And finally, by forgetting everything she knew in the world, she progressed.

  Her grandfather’s language rose from her heart to her head and, here, proved to be her closest ally. She often cast her mind back to the long-gone man. To the line he’d uttered one day: In a forest, a good friend isn’t half as good as a good knife.

  She found herself wondering whether that could also be true in the desert.

  She found herself wondering whether she could survive the life she had chosen for herself.

  4

  Six propellers and the world was hers. An arid, ragged world of mountains, stripped of any living soul – a world at war where even war hesitated to break out, and so remained abstract. No matter: hers.

  At this point in her life, a period which was to be the last even though she could not possibly know it, Amelia could think of nothing better than hovering and flying. She spent a sizable part of her time mid-air, secluded in a bird’s-eye view. Nothing existed and war existed: this combination, nothing and war, was the only place she felt at home. In risk, she came to love abstraction, and in abs
traction, she came to love risk. She gave no thought to the life she’d abandoned. It wasn’t inconceivable, however, that her life might be giving her some thought. She was doing better, far better than before, but this improvement was entrenched. This improvement entailed a relationship to the world that was more geometrical than human.

  She liked excitement, but of one sort in particular: she liked being outside her own body. She liked seeing everything and nothing, she liked delegating, she liked these invincible extensions of her sight, that is, of herself. Where some were led by their heart, their dick, or their stomach, she was led by her optical nerve. Ever since leaving her family and her city, she had lived in these indeterminate grey areas of specified or unspecified conflict. Either she turned a blind eye to her own taste for violence, or violence, in its diffuse, uncertain, almost unavowed form, was now everywhere, in layers – at times hardly detectable and at others quite intense. It was possible to travel the world from one lawless area to the next, and it was possible to travel the world without ever experiencing anything that even remotely resembled peace.

  That suited her.

  Amelia drew on her expertise – she never talked about art – for the professional crews that called on her services for documentary missions. Amelia’s eye was autonomous, airborne, wholly separate from her – the device’s range was a quarter of a mile – and from any sight she might ever physically possess. The device was wholly freed from all human perspective. Through the drone, Amelia took in the landscape vertically. She only existed in states of extreme division, and this dislocation, this disseverance from herself, was both the symptom of what was wearing her down and the only thing keeping her alive. When the apparatus was mid-air, she guided it but she herself did not see much: only afterwards, once the drone was safely back, did she extract the photos. If she spent enough time at her computer, inspecting her aerial harvest, then it could be said that she spent most of her time in the air. That, too, suited her.