In the Country of Last Things (11 page)

In spite of what you would suppose, the facts are not reversible. Just because you are able to get in, that does not mean you will be able to get out. Entrances do not become exits, and there is nothing to guarantee that the door you walked through a moment ago will still be there when you turn around to look for it again. That is how it works in the city. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense.

I spent several weeks trying to escape. At first, there seemed to be any number of possibilities, a whole range of methods for getting myself back home, and given the fact that I had some money to work with, I did not think it would be very hard. That was wrong, of course, but it took me a while before I was willing to admit it. I had arrived in a foreign charity ship, and it seemed logical to assume that I could return in one. I therefore made my way down to the docks, fully prepared to bribe whatever official I had to in order to book passage. No ships were in sight, however, and even the little fishing boats I had seen there a month before were gone. Instead, the whole
waterfront was thronged with workers—hundreds and hundreds of them, it seemed to me, more men than I was able to count. Some were unloading rubble from trucks, others were carrying bricks and stones to the edge of the water, still others were laying the foundations for what looked like an immense sea wall or fortification. Armed police guards stood on platforms surveying the workers, and the place swarmed with din and confusion—the rumbling of engines, people running back and forth, the voices of crew chiefs shouting orders. It turned out that this was the Sea Wall Project, a public works enterprise that had recently been started by the new government. Governments come and go quite rapidly here, and it is often difficult to keep up with the changes. This was the first I had heard of the current takeover, and when I asked someone the purpose of the sea wall, he told me it was to guard against the possibility of war. The threat of foreign invasion was mounting, he said, and it was our duty as citizens to protect our homeland. Thanks to the efforts of the great So-and-So—whatever the name of the new leader was—the materials from collapsed buildings were now being collected for defense, and the project would give work to thousands of people. What kind of pay were they offering? I asked. No money, he said, but a place to live and one warm meal a day. Was I interested in signing up? No thanks, I said, I have other things to do. Well, he said, there would be plenty of time for me to change my mind. The government was estimating that it would take at least fifty years to finish the wall. Good for them, I said, but in the meantime how does one get out of here? Oh no, he said, shaking his head, that’s impossible. Ships aren’t allowed to come in anymore—and if nothing comes in, nothing can go out.
What about an airplane? I said. What’s an airplane? he asked, smiling at me in a puzzled sort of way, as though I had just told a joke he didn’t understand. An airplane, I said. A machine that flies through the air and carries people from one place to another. That’s ridiculous, he said, giving me a suspicious kind of look. There’s no such thing. It’s impossible. Don’t you remember? I asked. I don’t know what you’re talking about, he said. You could get into trouble for spreading that kind of nonsense. The government doesn’t like it when people make up stories. It’s bad for morale.

You see what you are up against here. It’s not just that things vanish—but once they vanish, the memory of them vanishes as well. Dark areas form in the brain, and unless you make a constant effort to summon up the things that are gone, they will quickly be lost to you forever. I am no more immune to this disease than anyone else, and no doubt there are many such blanks inside me. A thing vanishes, and if you wait too long before thinking about it, no amount of struggle can ever wrench it back. Memory is not an act of will, after all. It is something that happens in spite of oneself, and when too much is changing all the time, the brain is bound to falter, things are bound to slip through it. Sometimes, when I find myself groping for a thought that has eluded me, I begin to drift off to the old days back home, remembering how it used to be when I was a little girl and the whole family would go up north on the train for summer holidays. Big brother William would always let me have the window seat, and more often than not I wouldn’t say anything to anyone, riding with my face pressed against the window and looking out at the scenery, studying the sky and the trees and the water as
the train sped through the wilderness. It was always so beautiful to me, so much more beautiful than the things in the city, and every year I would say to myself, Anna, you have never seen anything more beautiful than this—try to remember it, try to memorize all the beautiful things you are seeing, and in that way they will always be with you, even when you can’t see them anymore. I don’t think I ever looked harder at the world than on those train rides up north. I wanted everything to belong to me, for all that beauty to be a part of what I was, and I remember trying to remember it, trying to store it up for later, trying to hold on to it for a time when I would really need it. But the odd thing was that none of it ever stayed with me. I tried so hard, but somehow or other I always wound up losing it, and in the end the only thing I could remember was how hard I had tried. The things themselves passed too quickly, and by the time I saw them they were already flying out of my head, replaced by still more things that vanished before I could see them. The only thing that remains for me is a blur, a bright and beautiful blur. But the trees and the sky and the water—all that is gone. It was always gone, even before I had it.

It will not do, then, simply to feel disgust. Everyone is prone to forgetfulness, even under the most favorable conditions, and in a place like this, with so much actually disappearing from the physical world, you can imagine how many things are forgotten all the time. In the end, the problem is not so much that people forget, but that they do not always forget the same thing. What still exists as a memory for one person can be irretrievably lost for another, and this creates difficulties, insuperable barriers against understanding. How can you talk to someone about
airplanes, for example, if that person doesn’t know what an airplane is? It is a slow but ineluctable process of erasure. Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear—flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands—and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish. The word “flowerpot” will make no more sense to you than the word “splandigo.” Your mind will hear it, but it will register as something incomprehensible, a word from a language you cannot speak. As more and more of these foreign-sounding words crop up around you, conversations become rather strenuous. In effect, each person is speaking his own private language, and as the instances of shared understanding diminish, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate with anyone.

I had to give up the idea of going home. Of all the things that had happened to me so far, I believe that was the most difficult to take. Until then, I had deluded myself into thinking I could return whenever I wanted to. But with the sea wall now going up, with so many people mobilized to prevent departure, this comforting notion was dashed to bits. First Isabel had died, and then I had lost the apartment. My only consolation had been the thought of home, and now that suddenly had been taken from me as well. For the first time since coming to the city, I was engulfed by pessimism.

I thought about striking off in the opposite direction.
The Fiddler’s Rampart stood at the western edge of the city, and a travel permit was supposedly all you needed to walk through it. Anything would be better than the city, I felt, even the unknown, but after running back and forth between several government agencies, waiting in line day after day only to be told to take my request to yet another bureau, I finally learned that the price of travel permits had risen to two hundred glots. That was out of the question, since it would mean using up the better part of my funds in one go. I heard talk of an underground organization that smuggled people out of the city for a tenth the cost, but many people were of the opinion that it was actually a ruse—a clever form of entrapment devised by the new government. Policemen were posted at the far end of the tunnel, they said, and the moment you crawled through to the other side you were arrested—and then promptly dispatched to one of the forced labor camps in the southern mining zone. I had no way of knowing whether this rumor was true or false, but finding out did not seem worth the risk. Then winter came, and the question was settled for me. Any thoughts of leaving would have to wait until spring—assuming, of course, that I was able to last until spring. Given the circumstances, nothing seemed less sure to me than that.

It was the hardest winter in memory—the Terrible Winter, as everyone called it—and even now, years after it happened, it still stands as a crucial event in the city’s history, a dividing line between one period and the next.

The cold continued for five or six months. Every now and then there would be a short thaw, but these little
spurts of warmth only added to the difficulties. It would snow for a week—immense, blinding storms that pummeled the city into whiteness—and then the sun would come out, burning briefly with a summer-like intensity. The snow would melt, and by mid-afternoon the streets would be flooded. The gutters would overflow with rushing water, and everywhere you looked there would be a mad sparkle of water and light, as though the whole world had been turned into a huge, dissolving crystal. Then, suddenly, the sky would grow dark, night would begin, and the temperature would fall below zero again—freezing the water so abruptly that the ice would form in weird configurations: bumps and ripples and whorls, entire waves caught in mid-undulation, a kind of geological frenzy in miniature. By morning, of course, walking would be next to impossible—people slipping all over themselves, skulls cracking on the ice, bodies flopping helplessly on the smooth, hard surfaces. Then it would snow again, and the cycle would be repeated. This went on for months, and by the time it was over, thousands and thousands were dead. For the homeless, survival was nearly out of the question, but even the sheltered and well-fed suffered innumerable losses. Old buildings collapsed under the weight of the snow, and whole families were crushed. The cold drove people out of their minds, and sitting around in an underheated apartment all day was finally not much better than being outside. People would smash up their furniture and burn it for a little warmth, and many of these fires got out of control. Buildings were destroyed almost every day, sometimes whole blocks and neighborhoods. Whenever one of these fires broke out, vast numbers of homeless people would flock to the site
and stand there for as long as the building burned—revelling in the warmth, cheering the flames as they rose up into the sky. Every tree in the city was chopped down during the winter and burned for fuel. Every domestic animal disappeared; every bird was shot. Food shortages became so drastic that construction of the sea wall was suspended—just six months after it had begun—so that all available policemen could be used to guard the shipments of produce to the municipal markets. Even so, there were a number of food riots, which led to more deaths, more injuries, more disasters. No one knows how many people died during the winter, but I have heard estimates as high as one-third to one-fourth of the population.

Somehow or other, my luck held out. In late November, I came close to being arrested in a food riot on Ptolemy Boulevard. There was an endless line that day as usual, and after waiting for more than two hours in the bitter cold without advancing, three men just ahead of me began insulting a police guard. The guard pulled out his billy club and came straight toward us, ready to swing at anyone who got in his way. The policy is to hit first and ask questions later, and I knew there wouldn’t be a chance for me to defend myself. Without even pausing to think, I broke out of the line and started sprinting down the street, running for all I was worth. Momentarily confused, the guard took two or three steps in my direction, but then he stopped, clearly wanting to keep his attention fixed on the crowd. If I was out of the picture, then so much the better as far as he was concerned. I kept on running, and just as I reached the corner, I heard the crowd erupt into ugly, hostile shouting behind me. This threw me into a real panic, for I knew that in a few
minutes the whole area would be overwhelmed by a fresh contingent of riot police. I kept on running as fast as I could, darting down one street after another, too afraid even to look back. Finally, after a quarter of an hour, I found myself running alongside a large stone building. I couldn’t tell if I was being pursued or not, but just then a door opened a few feet up ahead and I rushed right into it. A thin man with glasses and a pale face was standing on the threshold, about to step outside, and he looked at me in horror as I slipped past him. I had entered what seemed to be an office of some kind—a small room with three or four desks in it and a clutter of papers and books.

“You can’t come in here,” he said impatiently. “This is the library.”

“I don’t care if it’s the governor’s mansion,” I said, doubling over as I tried to catch my breath. “I’m in here now, and no one’s going to get me out.”

“I’ll have to report you,” he said in a smug, prissy voice. “You can’t just barge in here like that. This is the library, and no one’s allowed in without a pass.”

I was too flustered by his sanctimonious attitude to know what to say. I was exhausted, at the end of my rope, and instead of trying to argue with him, I just pushed him to the ground as hard as I could. It was a ridiculous thing to do, but I wasn’t able to stop myself. The man’s glasses went flying off his face as he hit the floor, and for a moment I was even tempted to crush them under my foot.