A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  I understood and put the cup down, trying to find the gun in my pocket. I could never have aimed it or even held it up to fire. The room was turning as swiftly as the mask had turned in Muller’s hands. The man held the mask in front of his face for a minute and I imagined him looking out at me. The space around me narrowed to just his voice, which was disturbingly loud.

  “Therefore, no doubt, you are asking yourselves, what connection exists between these disparate facts. What connection between travelers, on the one hand, and, on the other, the preservation of royal and religious artifacts such as this mask? What connection between a humble student of Oscar Weisel, born into a minor branch of the aristocracy, and the mighty code-makers of the Agency who traverse centuries? I will attempt to answer this question for you, gentlemen, just as soon as I have ascertained whether or not the tea service has agreed with you.”

  I closed my eyes. Muller came over and took the gun out of my pocket. He put a thermometer in my mouth. He read it and placed a tablet under my tongue, holding my mouth closed until it dissolved. Seeming satisfied, he went away, commenting to himself under his breath.

  The experience was almost painless, almost soundless apart from a wind chime in a doorway I couldn’t see. It was the most disturbing hour of my life, to be paralyzed in Muller’s living room and at his mercy, as if he had pulled a plastic bag over my head and were waiting for me to choke to death in front of him.

  I opened my eyes a fraction, peering through the tears, and saw him standing over João, holding a cloth over my friend’s mouth. One skeleton taking the life of another.

  I called Muller back and to my surprise he came. I cried out loud. Could feel the salt tears running down my face. I closed my eyes again when he approached. He was ready to talk, holding the mask in one hand. The thing people never understood about Keswyn Muller was that he was always ready to talk.

  “There are certain preparations, Agent Eleven, which have been handed down to us from time immemorial. Advantages to having a history, you may say, which as an overlord of time you may not understand. This infusion is Chinese. It is taken from a particular berry which grows only on a particular island at a particular time of the year. It has helped me out of a number of tricky situations.”

  He pried my eyes open and continued. “Here is the beautiful part, Agent Eleven. You do not have to ingest the flesh of the berry for the effect to occur. As you are discovering, it involves complete paralysis of the conscious nervous system for a period of thirty hours, give or take an hour on either side. If you are careful, or, should I say, if the dispensing officer is careful regarding the dosage, then the recipient may escape with nothing more than muscle stiffness and an acute case of what you term in English, ‘pins and needles.’”

  I tried to ask a question but I couldn’t move my tongue. Muller understood what I wanted to know.

  “In your friend’s case, we have not been careful, I am afraid. I am not breaking any of the rules of our trade, you must understand. A resident spy like this one is despised in every culture, a traitor to everyone. To say the least, he cannot be regarded as human because of the many copies he has seeded in the world. He who lives in a loop, who reproduces himself by himself, is truly the object of repugnance. I know you will say it is not a loop but a spiral, but that is only an excuse. In your case, however, there is no cause for punishment. You have friends with your welfare at heart, whom you may not even know about.”

  “Why?”

  “One word. One word only. Atonement.”

  Muller let me close my eyes again. They were full of tears, as sweet and bitter as any that had ever been shed. I could feel the room disappearing around me. I was dying in plain view in a dim house, ice-cold poison in my lungs.

  “Dr. Muller, I can’t breathe. I can’t bear riddles anymore.”

  “No riddle. No riddle at all. We are making atonement to the abused continent. The Board for Protection finalized this project in April 1945, in the smoking ruins of Berlin. Admittedly, we have taken assistance from certain powers that are willing and able to grant it. But that is not important. No more slave ships, if we are successful. Nor men and women in chains. No colonies, no amputated hands and feet for the sake of rubber in the Belgian Congo.”

  Muller put his hands on my head. He seemed to be combing my hair to one side, as if to prepare me for something.

  He went on after a minute, his voice very quiet. “Weisel was the first to ask, as a matter of historical ethics, why should we protect the past when it has been a laboratory for the subjugation of the Jew, the gypsy, the foreigner, and above all the black man and the black woman? Kallenbach, to give him his due, was the first to understand the majesty of Weisel’s message. Now that technology makes it possible, we at the Board of Protection can translate it into action. We can bring about an end to man’s hundred-thousand-year quest to dominate and play the master.”

  I would have liked to put a thousand questions to Keswyn Muller. I would have asked how one could purify the past of sin without ridding it of impure human beings and their impure action. I would have asked if good and evil weren’t so mixed together in our hearts that not even the finest comb could ever separate them. I would have liked to ask, where finally was the slave without the master? Where was the master without his slave? Were master and servant, black slave and black master, not indistinguishable in the whirl of the cosmos? I would have asked him if he had looked into the mirror lately and seen the blank of his countenance?

  I would have liked to know if Berlin in its year zero was any place to plan a redemption and how a group of conspirators hoped to travel through the centuries and whether it was truly the voice of Shanumi Six I heard in an adjoining room. I would have warned him against meeting the infinite on its own terms. But I was suffocating slowly and surely, in a room full of air, and when I woke up I would drown.

  For the first time in years, I didn’t dream. There were no images, no memories of my father’s face or the touch of my sister’s hand on my forehead. I knew only that time and space were passing around me, swiftly as a torrent, and that in the midst of their infinities was the smallest bubble of flesh, blood, bone in which I travelled.

  I had a quantity of fluid in my chest. I coughed violently and came to, lying on the ground in a narrow chamber. It was hardly lit, rough rock walls on either side which left no space to stretch on the hard floor.

  For a minute I panicked and threshed around. I hit my head against the wall and stopped. Spit was on my hands. I kept still for some time, feeling the pins and needles Muller had promised, hardly relieved to be alive in such a place.

  From some memory in the hot air, the tang of blood and urine, I knew that men and women had lived and died in this enclosed room, leaving no more mark on it than the trace of their fingernails on the stone. It was my fear brought to life, a room from the darkest dream.

  I tried to stand without being able to see where I was and brushed my head against the ceiling. I fell against the gate on one side. It rattled, bars tattered with rust that came off on my hands. I steadied myself on it, my heart pounding at the shock of the collision, and looked into the spectacle beyond.

  There was enough light to decipher the scene, torches burning in niches in the walls. I was in some dungeon that men might have imagined in a far-off century. Along the walls were cells carved into the rock. They were packed like a honeycomb, hundreds in every direction, up and down, to right and left. Staircases looking as flimsy as bits of matchwood rose from landing to landing, cables running along them into the center of the hall.

  It was so quiet you could hear water dripping from an upper level, as bright as a stream. Nobody to be seen. Nobody came when I called, although I could hear the sound of scuttling in the walls.

  I shouted, caught my breath, shouted again at the opposite cells. Then I had to sit down and cough, my lungs turning over in the air filled with a slurry of coal dust,
petrol fumes, and the smell of suffering and death preserved in the rock.

  I got up to find a boy watching me through the gate. He wore a cattle blanket over his shoulders, a liability in the humid air, and a small Geiger counter around his neck. He had laid a bucket at his feet, full of pitch-like oil, burning at a wick. More smoke than light came from it, producing the effect of an oven being opened in front of me.

  The boy sat down and crossed his legs. Then he leant forward and passed a canteen through the bars.

  I stayed kneeling and drank the water, savoring every brackish drop, rubbed the last of it onto my neck. He dropped some raisins on my palm, which I ate. They were shockingly sweet. An orange appeared, which he divided in sections, giving me one and taking one for himself.

  When the orange had been consumed, I returned the canteen. I saw my visitor wasn’t as young as I had thought, sixteen or seventeen, but he had unusually thin arms, covered in mud. He looked me up and down, his expression unchanging.

  “You are the prophet. You have been brought here to bring us knowledge of our destiny. They said that everything that has happened to you since you were thirteen was designed to bring you here. To fulfill your destiny.”

  “Who are they? Who are you?”

  “You know who they are. They are your followers who brought you here and have given you a puzzle to overcome. No need to be angry at them. Look how much they paid me to watch you, to take care of your survival. Think how rich your followers must be.”

  I couldn’t understand the boy’s mumbo jumbo about prophecy. What was prophecy? Who could be a prophet without creating a loop? Indeed, the very concept of prophecy had never made sense to me. But it seemed unwise to contradict my companion. His feelings were obviously sincere.

  In the light of the candle in the bucket, the boy spread a handkerchief on which he arranged his possessions like pieces from a board game: a sealed pack of batteries, green fruit dainties studded with sugar crystals, a magnifying glass.

  I got to my feet, holding onto the bars.

  “Can you let me out?”

  Before answering, the boy put his earnings back into his pockets, stroking his hands thoughtfully as he talked.

  “As the prophet, you must be here for five days. That is your itinerary. Since they brought you, you have slept for three days. You have two days more. Then I have an instruction to let you go so that you can find your true path. Your life is a funnel. First, it was broad and you had a lot of space to move around in. Now you are getting to the other end of the funnel where it is very narrow.”

  “Let me wait outside with you, please. I give you my word. I won’t go anywhere and you can fill my ears with any nonsense you so wish.”

  “It’s not possible. Don’t ask me again or I will stop up my ears. Listen to what I am telling you about the funnel. It is for your own good.”

  I let the bars go and felt myself swaying. “If I am the prophet, isn’t it a good idea to listen to my instructions?”

  “You are wasting your breath. I already know the truth of scripture. By keeping you here I am helping you fulfill your mission. I have instructions. It reminds me that you are supposed to have a glass of orange juice once every six hours, to keep you going. I will fetch it for you.”

  There was no point arguing. Nor did I want to ask questions. I seemed to be the only prisoner in a vast facility, carved out of bedrock, which could only be underground. I had learnt about life in the catacombs. It had been drummed into us from the first day of school. I had been on an excursion to the Museum of the Old World where, beneath the mother-of-pearl dome, the names of the disappeared were inscribed in their billions on a single chip of gallium arsenide. Like anybody with a heart, I had considered how I myself might have behaved in those days and years following the supernova when sisters ate brothers and brothers ate sisters, miniature Geiger counters ticking on their chests.

  I had dreamt of many things as a member of the foreign service. In recent months, I had come to see life itself as a dream set within a dream, but I had never imagined that a trapdoor would open in the midst of my long dream and that through it I would fall into the place I had been taught to dread the most.

  The boy never offered to introduce himself, never tried to get any information from me that he hadn’t already been given. He didn’t volunteer any information either, so that after many more hours in my cell I was no wiser than the moment I woke up. I had been dropped there, into his care, by an invisible hand.

  Indeed, the boy didn’t seem to care about anything beyond the confines of the great prison which it had fallen to him to guard. He didn’t tell the story of how he had arrived or recount his memories of sunshine and rain. He was content to squat by my cell and watch as I drank and ate, one hand on the Geiger counter which hissed on occasion. Keeping to a schedule, he came to rouse me three or four times a day.

  Sometimes in the near dark I could hardly make out what I was eating and the candle would flare up and reveal a yam or sweet potato in its rough sacking, or a deformed beetroot or carrot. There was canned food he opened before handing to me: chickpeas in chalky brine, canned fish, and once a can of tiny peas, the label still readable in Spanish, origin Valencia.

  I piled the cans and leftovers in a corner, where I urinated, and tried to sleep on the stone on the other side. No matter how much I drank my mouth was dry, and my body ached in every quarter, yet I managed to pass out for hours at a time, half listening for the boy’s footsteps in the interior of the prison.

  Sometimes I was awake in the darkness and heard the very rock groaning and straining like a bound giant. The heat and humidity rose to an extraordinary level, bringing out sweat on my entire body.

  I thought of the layers above and below me. The ridge was thirty miles long, honeycombed by endless hot tunnels and shafts, embankments and dams filled with polluted water. Black-skinned miners in their hundreds of thousands had died in these corridors to bring gold and silver, platinum and uranium, to the corporations of the old world, uncountable riches into the hands of their fair-skinned shareholders. It seemed only fair that the same ridge now sheltered their descendants who would emerge to conquer the charred glass of the new world.

  It might have been a day or even two before the arrangements changed. The boy began to sleep outside my cell for hours at a time. He brought an old mattress along and lay on it, his head turned away from me. In the rising heat he had taken off his shirt, revealing a belt filled with keys of various descriptions. I saw his back was covered in stripes.

  Once he took out a mouth organ and, without checking to see if I was awake, blew through it for half an hour. He looked away from me the whole while. I couldn’t recognize a tune of any kind, but the broken music reached out to the depths of the prison around us, as if it were a spell he was casting. His eyes were closed while he played.

  I was almost asleep myself when I saw apparitions surround him. There were a dozen men and women, armed with pitchforks, who bound the boy’s hands. They placed a hood over his head and tied it around his neck, silent and smiling whenever they caught my eye, their faces and arms painted with thick white circles and dots.

  I didn’t utter a word all the while. Nor did the boy, as if the scene had been agreed upon beforehand. The invaders were equally silent, communicating with one another by hand signals. They took the keys from his belt and tried them, one by one, until the gate swung open.

  Three men entered my cell, muscular and nearly naked, reeking of ointment. I stood up to meet them, still stiff on my ankles. They were matter-of-fact in handling the livestock. My hands were tied with rope, which cut sharply into my wrists, and I was hooded from behind. I was pushed out of the cell.

  Through the hood I saw areas of light and darkness, but I could hear the voices of our captors who began to talk. My ears hadn’t adjusted so I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. The party moved in single
file. I was turned this way and that by the man behind me, led down staircases where the roof was low. When I hit my head, the men near me laughed and someone pushed me onto my knees.

  With my hands bound it was necessary to shuffle for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. The pain in my head was shocking. I was far past the point of exhaustion. Not even the occasional kick or slap made me move any faster. My hands were untied when I had to go up a ladder, tied again at the top where the light was brighter and the flooring was made of some kind of wood. I thought I could hear horses moving past in the other direction, their hooves ringing on the floorboards, their voices subdued. I imagined they would be wearing blinkers, blind as I was in this infinite cavern.

  At other times, the going was easier, in an open place where the air circulated and the coaly dust and heat abated. The men and women sang to one another, songs I couldn’t decipher and then, to my astonishment, others which were familiar to me from childhood. Songs about railway trains and reed maidens. Songs about open fields and the liberation of the bondsman…

  In a series of narrow passageways, it became very hot and humid again. Sweat came up on my face and chest as I tried unsuccessfully not to bump into the walls. I coughed and coughed, unable to breathe, and wished I could die on the spot.

  Some time later, the procession came to a halt and my hood was removed. I was near the front of a line of men and women about a dozen strong on an open floor. The boy and myself were the only captives. He was still wearing a hood. I called to him but was pushed away by a young woman with firmly beaded and braided hair. She had triangular earrings and bracelets along one arm.

  The woman didn’t speak, and I didn’t dare speak to her. Indeed, she had a more than stern expression, her forehead furrowed as if she had a headache, keeping her hand so tightly on my arm that her fingernails started to bite. She brought me past a hitching post, where several donkeys were lapping at a trough of opalescent green water. Their brown-and-white bodies stayed upright, tails ticking over their backs, stable as pommel horses. Further on were men squatting on the ground. Using ash and water, they were drawing white circles and dots on one another’s faces and shoulders.