I rode the track to its terminus at the village of Haran, and emptiness unrolled before me to the far meeting of earth and sky.
– Alastair Pennignten, Voyages in Garamdal
There were two islands visible from the shore, and the larger of these was Chatakdal. Chatakdal was formed in the shape of a camel-ish double-hump, its windswept grasses a pale, parched green, which gave the island a saurian aspect. The other island, Gumeshel, was in the shape of a mesa and lay several kilometers farther out. Roughly the size of a football pitch, it existed chiefly as a blemish on the horizon, visible only in the mornings, before it was swallowed by the midday haze that rose from the sea.
I was staying in a pension in the town of Turgusten, a former fishing village whose (overly aspirational) transformation into an international tourist destination had been arrested by a renewal of separatist activity in the east: A spate of terrorist attacks, including a bloody bombing in the capital, had frightened off foreign visitors, and this late in the spring, when the tourist season should have been ramping up, the country’s southern beaches lay all but empty.
The building boom, funded by speculators from the country’s moneyed northwestern provinces, had given the town an abundance of boxy resorts with fanciful, if appallingly kitsch, names (“The Princess Breeze,” “The Ocean Palace”), but after a trilogy of low seasons these had already begun to fall into disrepair, the decadence manifesting with metaphorical emphasis in the empty swimming pools and cracked, peeling paint of the bright white walls that I passed by each day wandering the beach on my excursions northward and southward along the coast.
With the end of the academic term at the international school and the completion of my teaching duties, I’d come down from the still-rainy capital in search of sun and rejuvenation, and the sea waters, though far from warm, had lost enough of their wintry bite to swim in. I had little else to occupy my time and few people to talk to (an arrangement I’d chosen by design – and which I was coming to regret), and the greater part of my day was given to swimming dilatory laps a few meters from the shore or reading from the crate of novels I’d lugged here with me. The town seemed to be devoid of anyone between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, and the population skewed much older, so that a geriatric torpor prevailed, something my morning swims could do little to combat.
My chief source of social interaction in town was the manager of the pension I was rooming in. Lacking other guests, Hazam, a dark, thick-necked ex-sailor who’d learned Amarguese in the Garamdi merchant-marine had pressed me into service as his evening dinner companion. I’d been reluctant, at first, to foster too close an intimacy with the hotelier, who seemed to wear a perpetual scowl embedded in a perpetual five-o’clock shadow, but dinner was included in the board, and the dishes, prepared by our Daari chef, Musuf, were too good to pass up.
We talked, Hazam and I, chiefly of girls: where we might find them, the strategies for seducing them, how they might be enticed back to the hotel, and the relative merits of women of different cities, different provinces, different nations, i.e. where could be found the prettiest and – a more pressing concern for the two of us – where the easiest.
Although Hazam spoke in a way that tended to wander towards the reminiscent (he was in his late thirties), especially about the (brief) heyday of Turgusten as a tourist destination (“The parties here in the summer, you can’t imagine.”), he was, uncharacteristically for the lothario that he seemed plainly to be – or, at the very least, to have been – restrained with respect to the details of his individual conquests, and this I respected about him. He did not share his conquests to boast, merely because it was the only way to get the point across, and he spoke of the psychology of woman with the detached attitude of a jaded businessman or a long-disillusioned academic, whose aspirations had diminished to the simple exchange of practical knowledge, man to man.
I also found that he was fond of the Amarguese word “fuck”:
This last question (emphasis not mine), he asked of any story I told featuring a woman, however tangentially, and I noticed that his eyes would glaze over with boredom if the story went too long, as if the soul had freed itself of the burden of the corpus, and not till I had announced the story’s end would the light of reason return to his eyes and he asked this question, which seemed, for him, the sole determinant of any anecdote’s worth.
Although otherwise uneuphemisably crude, Hazam arranged our dinners with as much fastidiousness as if they were being held in the officers’ quarters. Each evening, Musuf would lay out a bleach-white tablecloth surmounted with impeccably laid utensils and plates, and Hazam and I would sit at exactly six and twelve. Arranged this way, our prandial conversations had something of the form, if not the content, of salonic philosophical debates. Hazam’s costume at these dinners was a tight starch-white dinner-shirt, which ill-suited him as drastically as it would have a gorilla.
The conversations were not unedifying, certainly not unentertaining, but I tended to reach my limit at about the seventy minute mark, and I would pack off shortly thereafter to escape to a teahouse in the town’s center, where I could do some reading (my chief companion, Alastair Penningten’s volumes-long account of his travels through Garamdal in the years after the revolution), leaving Musuf to occupy Hazam’s time with endless, smoke-ringed games of grimly-contested backgammon.
A week of such debates passed before I saw for the first time a girl who seemed pursuable. Arriving at the teahouse after dinner one evening, I discovered, sitting in a wood-trimmed alcove (the teahouse was centuries old, its beams imported cedar, its brick walls dating to the golden age of the old Garamdi empire), a young university student, perhaps twenty, reading from an oversized book while a metal carafe steamed at her side. She seemed overly serious, or it was a combination of her dress (a slim, gray pullover), her makeup (too much foundation), or her facial expression (unhappy to be studying at this hour), that gave me this impression. Seeing her, I took a moment to judge my chances, felt discouraged, and then decided to talk to her anyway.
I walked up to her and asked her, in Garamdi: What are you reading?
She lifted her eyes and looked at me appraisingly before tilting up the thin cover of her textbook; I saw it was a cheap student’s edition, common in the country.
You’re a student.
I am.
You’re studying for your exam?
I am.
How’s the studying going?
She shrugged her shoulders, paused a beat as if expecting me to ask another question, and then said the Garamdi phrase that meant, “OK.” Her tone seemed to be one of declarative boredom, untinctured even by an explanatory admixture of suspicion.
I’d found in my travels in the country that speaking Garamdi as a foreigner was sufficient entrée to most conversations, and I felt discomposed to have run across someone so unimpressed with my status as a foreigner.
I wonder–, I began tentatively, and then she brought her eyes back down to her book, leaving me stranded, standing, it seemed, for no reason in particular before her small wooden table in this little alcove.
Have a good evening, I said to her.
She hummed a reply.
Humbled, I staggered to a table in the room’s far side and debated leaving town, leaving the country. But I tried to distract myself with the Penningten. I avoided looking at her alcove for some time, but when I did, I found that she’d packed her things and gone.
I own to an abiding fondness for the Garamdi. Beneath their reserve I know them to be a gracious, generous, hospitable and sensitive people. Perhaps too sensitive at times, but if they are, they have good reason to be so. They are the creatures of their precarious geographic location.
Since antiquity, their land has been buffeted by the winds of conquest and empire. From the sea, the Vilinians. By land, the Rusch and the Qushi from the northeast, the Kalam and the Daari from the south. A plethora of peoples have walked their lands, and left their impress: The once-nomadic Daari still till the soil and drift with their sheep in the nation’s far east. The fair-haired Galeni, long assimilated, live on in the sight of an occasional freckle.
– Alastair Pennignten, Voyages in Garamdal
In the mornings, I frequented a cafe near the marina. It was one of those places that are so old-fashioned, so marked by the prevailing style of the time that they were built in, that they seem timeless, its walls painted a sickly, faded lime, reflecting a mania for industrial pigments that had prevailed after the revolution, with furnishings that seemed not to have changed in decades, dull chrome tables and peeling vinyl chairs that spilled out from a pair of perpetually open double-doors onto the concrete landing that preceded the marina. The place had a lively atmosphere because many of the artisanal fishermen stopped here after spending the early hours of the morning working the waters off the coast. Here, old men in fishing caps spent the forenoon holding forth in animated debates, the gravelly rumbling of which formed a pleasant hubbub above my attempts to read the newspaper. These men largely ignored me, a foreigner was no novelty in a town that had once aspired to international tourism, so I drank my coffee in peace and I could concentrate on puzzling out, with the aid of a Garamdi dictionary, the day’s news.
In the capital, I listened to Amarguese radio, picked up the international editions of Amarguese newspapers, and these served to remind me that a world outside of Garamdal existed, but in this town, my world was so diminished that I resembled those subterranean creatures with withered, vestigialized sensory apparati capable of gathering only the information that lay at claw-reach. Two papers, Bahshal (Citizen), a conservative paper which served as an organ of the Nationalist Party, and Republik (Republic), the paper of the leading opposition party, served as my morning reading. What I liked about them most was the charming foreign quaintness of the editorial styles. The editorialists addressed the reader directly, with servantish obsequiousness and a courtly prolixity, something of the air of a vizier addressing his king (Esteemed reader, it has recently come to the attention of this humble columnist that some in our modern and educated country still feel that it is acceptable to denigrate our countrywomen in public. Why just the other day, stepping off the tram, in Peyrana [one of the trendy districts in the capital] I was witness to an episode that outrages common decency…). This was married to the clipped telegrammic prose of its news bulletins (Inflation measured at 10.9% over the past year; Ministry of defense orders more tanks; Heroin ring dismantled in [the city of] Ijif), and these two styles formed a sort of master tutorial in Garamdi reading comprehension.
The morning after my abortive conversation with the girl at the teahouse, I puzzled over an editorial about the role of various eastern dialects in the education system. Among the bulletins, an item about Vilinian provocations at sea, but not until later that day would I understand the news I had skimmed.
Walking back to the pension from the marina, I saw a speedboat racing up and down the shore, its noise all out of proportion with its size. When I reached the pension, I saw Hazam standing out front, watching the shore, his posture tense, static, clenched. I came up to him, and his eyes didn’t shift from the horizon.
“They want to take our islands!,” he practically shouted as I came up to him.
“Who?”
“The Vilinians! Who else?”
“What’re they doing?”
He turned to me: “They are trying to take Gumeshel. Look, you see on the island?” I looked at the island, a squat grey blob thinner than my pinky.
“What am I supposed to –”
“They put their fucking flag on our island!”
I turned back to the island. It would have been reasonable to expect for Hazam’s sailor’s eyes to be better than mine, but a flag flying above the island would have been invisible to anyone who wasn’t part hawk.
I hated asking him straight questions, because he tended to dodge these with the capriciousness of a caged predator, but with effort, I teased the situation from him:
There were dozens of islets in the waters between the Garamdi mainland and the Vilinian home islands, and the status of these tiny islands had always been a point of contention between the two nations. In recent weeks, the new Garamdi government had begun making bellicose formal pronouncements about the islands, declaring that all new maps published in the country would have to clearly indicate that these islets formed a part of Garamdi territory. This seemed largely a ploy on the part of the Nationalist Party to invigorate the electorate during the shaky first days of the accession of their newest prime minister, an opaque provincial governor who’d been selected as a compromise candidate among the party’s internal factions.
The Vilinian foreign ministry, for its part, did not take these provocative statements in stride, responding with a revised map of the eastern Andelman Sea, in which the islands were colored as Vilinian territory. The two sides had been jaw-jawing for weeks by the time I’d arrived at the town, and now, in a spectacularly audacious move the Vilinian navy had made a night-landing on Gumeshel and erected a flag pole on the island, upon which they’d hoisted the Vilinian flag. A press release was sent out. The stance of the Vilinian government had always been that Ikariona (the Vilinian name of the island) was a Vilinian island and had always been such. It was only natural that the Vilinian flag should fly on Vilinian territory.
“The problem with this country is that those fuckers have the balls to use their navy, and we don’t,” Hazam grumbled.
I asked him what he thought the government would do in response.
He shook his head. “Who knows?”
In the decade since the fall of the imperial dynasty and the rise of republican Garamdal, the country has undergone profound changes. Skyscrapers now overshadow the palaces of the former imperial capital, asphalt highways connect the villages of the provincial hinterland. The torch of the revolution, still a fresh memory, is carried on by the Nationalist Party, which has won every election in the country’s history, and whose members maintain a dominant, if unwieldy, majority in the Garamdi parliament.
I find myself one morning sitting in a cramped office in the city of Ijif for an interview with a mayoral candidate put up by the Nationalists. Flush with cash from the party, he has bombarded the airwaves with his presence, and trucks touting his ties to the party blare their messages at the oddest hours along the city’s dusty avenues.
“What does the party mean to you?,” I ask the would-be mayor through my interpreter.
“Ah, sir. Why it is everything. Without the party, we are no nation.”
– Alastair Pennignten, Voyages in Garamdal
That evening, wanting to stretch my legs before dinner with Hazam, I wandered down the beach to the town of B___. The town was smaller than Turgusten and was just large enough to support a cluster of beach bars that adjoined the ruins of an old seafort from the days of the empire, now a crumbling, understaffed museum whose doors had been shackled on each of my attempted visits. The walk was not long, perhaps thirty minutes, along a fresh concrete path that followed the gentle curve of the coast, and by the time I reached town, the sun had already set, the sky’s western edge still a vibrant, dying gold.
The bars outside of the fortress hosted a handful of older couples, grey-haired, white-haired, only their affections seemed unturned by age, gripping each other’s hands with the closeness of young lovers. I saw a girl in a light cardigan drinking alone as she smoked a cigarette and watched the colors of the sky change over the waters. Coming closer, I saw it was the girl from the teahouse.
We recognized each other at the same time, and a moment of mutual surprise passed before she lifted her hand to wave at me. I saw by the smile on her face that she was a little drunk, felt emboldened, and stepped through the cool sand to her table.
Good evening, I saluted her as I approached, exchanging my stranger’s salutation for the Garamdi familiar one.
Good evening to you, she responded invitingly, the smile still on her lips as she said this.
May I?
She shrugged noncommittally, Why not?, and I sat down.
I never got your name, I told her.
Nesla, she answered, offering me a cigarette which I waved off.
How’s the exam studying going? She shrugged her shoulders and said a phrase in Garamdi that meant either: “What exam?” or “What about the exam?,” I couldn’t tell which, and I decided to drop the subject.
I –, I began, and then she interrupted me: Where are you from?, she asked almost demandingly. I hadn’t understood that she’d always be as peremptory as she was being to me now, and I answered her question without hesitation.
When I told her, she looked surprised. I thought you were Amarguese.
I shrugged my shoulders and smiled. I’m sorry to disappoint.
How old are you?
Thirty-one.
She looked at me appraisingly. She had large eyes, the confidence to use them how she saw fit, and a slightly witchy nose that would have marred her face had she been older. On her, I found it fetching. You look younger.
People tell me that. How old are you?
Twenty-four, she said as she picked up a beer bottle and took a swig.
That’s a bit old for a student, isn’t it?
She laughed, surprised by my bluntness. I’m a bad student.
I looked her over. You look like a bad student.
She chuckled, her lips pressed into an “O,” the Garamdi word for “yes.” Oh yes, she said, nodding. I am a bad student.
A waiter appeared, another young man with a haphazardly grown beard. I asked for two more beers and when they came up, she insisted on paying for them.
What are you doing here? She tilted her head the way the Garamdi sometimes do when they ask a question. She meant what are you doing here in this town?
I’m just a tourist.
But why here? There’s nothing here! She swept an arm back, emphasizing how expansively the nothing-here-ness extended.
Maybe I see it from a different perspective than you do. Nobody likes the town that they grew up in.
She shook her head. I’m not from here.
I asked her where she was from, and she told me she was from the capital, explained that she’d been sent down by her parents to study at her aunt’s house. This wasn’t completely out of the norm. The exit exams were a few weeks away, and few students spent the reading period at the university.
Attempting to find a point of commonality, I told her I also lived in the capital.
You’re not a tourist, then. You seem, she pressed her gaze into mine, like a traveller. In Garamdi, she used the literary word, the one that means “wanderer.” How long have you been here in Garamdal?
A year.
What do you think of this country?
I paused to consider how I should answer: I love it here.
I hate this shitty country, she announced, less to me than to the spectacular dusk. I wish I could go somewhere else.
Where?
Anywhere! Somewhere far. She thrust her right wrist into the sky. As far as possible.
I told her I wanted to go to the east.
You aren’t afraid? There are terrorists there. You could get killed in a bombing.
I didn’t recognize the Garamdi word for “bombing” and asked her what it meant. She lifted her arms and threw her hands apart: “Pow!”
“Bombs!”
Yes.
I shrugged my shoulders. One takes risks when one travels.
You’re brave, she assessed with an ironic smile, or reckless. Tell me, are you clever as well?
Very.
What a shame. I hate clever men.
It was my turn to smile. I nodded and told her that I didn’t think that hatred and attraction were mutually exclusive feelings.
She paused to consider this notion seriously. The first time in our conversation that her eyes left mine. Yes, she tilted her head slightly left, weighing the thought, then right, yes, I think that can be true. But it’s always inconvenient to feel more than one feeling towards a person, to feel two, three, or any number of feelings, towards someone. I think it could be the loveliest thing, to have only one feeling for someone. It would be simpler.
Did you have a bad experience with a man who was very clever?
Many.
Many experiences or many men?
Both.
She was gazing at a flock of seagulls that circled the sea fortress.
Perhaps, I suggested, you have a type.
She chuckled again, softly, then shook her head. It’s just the poor decisions that I have made. She brought her eyes back to mine: Now tell me, she pressed a hand on my arm, tell me about the mistakes that you have made in your life…
We drank until it got dark, and I offered to walk her back to Turgusten. As we walked the concrete path out of B___, I offered my elbow, and she looked at it and shook her head, laughing. “No,” she said as she ran off towards the town. “But you’ll visit me at tomorrow?” Before I answered, she’d disappeared into the darkness.
Beyond the cliffs, a scrap of blue scape, the sea. These are the islands of antiquity. The land is arid, rocky, the sun, blinding, punishingly white. It is a barren land, but it has been said that such lands as these are the most fertile soil for poets. The great epicists of antiquity hailed from these parts. Why, perhaps not far from this congeries of misshapen stones, which the archaeologists tell us were the remnants of the ancient city of Mirindar, Imiro Xano recited his masterworks to an assemblage of scribes hunched over papyrus scrolls. How bracing the realization that one walks among the ghosts of legends. One’s pen-hand is humbled, shall any of our own writings survive the merciless weathering of the millennia to come?
– Alastair Pennignten, Voyages in Garamdal
At the cafe the next morning, the day’s papers were alight with reaction to the Vilinians’ claiming of the island. The opinion writers at Republik portrayed the episode as typical Nationalist bungling, while Bahshal urged unity in the face of foreign threat. A spirit of levity and animation seemed to have overtaken the cafe. Old men in fishing caps argued excitedly about what the Vilinians had done. The debates were loud, but there seemed to be no edge of anger to them. Furthermore, the conversations at the tables around me were punctuated with bouts of laughter. The Vilinians were at the very least, an honorable enemy – these were not ungrateful Daari separatists – and they were better respected in these parts than the current suite of Garamdi politicians. A military flare-up, well, such matters were good for the national spirit.
From a pair of tables over, I watched a paunchy middle-aged man speak with one of the older fishermen. The fishermen here were men of the sea, their faces weathered by sun and wind, and as they aged, their features grew gnomic, wizened. This fisherman, who looked to be one of the oldest, had been reduced to a shrunken goblin, but he had a haleness that was the gift of the sea. The younger man (only relatively) was obviously a tourist. It was not difficult to gather from the words that drifted my way that they were speaking about the crisis.
It was the strange rhythm of the conversation that drew my attention. It was the habit of the old fishermen to act as explainers and expounders of the various aspects of the town, or the coastal region, its history, the local economy, the fishing seasons to the town’s visitors. The conversation between the tourist and the fisherman seemed to follow the same didactic schema, but in this instance it had exaggerated into almost a caricature of that pattern. The tourist would ask a short question, and this would launch the old man into an animated monologue, spoken in the tone of harangue, peppered with gesticulation, sometimes lasting several minutes. At the end of each of these speeches, the old man would make a grumbling “hmm hmm” sound, and collapse into an expectant slouch, clearly waiting for the tourist’s next question, which, when it came, would animate him anew. I found the animatronic rhythms of the older man striking, and I searched, almost reflexively, for someone to point this out to, realizing as I turned to do this, that I was thinking of Nesla.
In the country’s east, a growing independence movement among the Daari tribes tests the mettle of republican conscripts. If the Nationalists can administer the remnants of the empire more capably than the deposed emperor, they may gain the legitimacy that they shed so much blood to win in the revolution. If they fail, the nation will be reduced to a rump state, prey to its more powerful neighbors.
– Alastair Pennignten, Voyages in Garamdal
After dinner, I called on Nesla at her aunt’s apartment, a squat, white block of stucco near the town’s central square. Little decoration adorned the apartment building, save a single television antenna and a satellite dish, which jutted in an elbow from the building’s northeastern corner. When I rang the doorbell, it was Nesla who answered and smiling with unexpected delight, she led me by the arm to the living room.
The aunt, Marjina, greeted me excitedly, glad for the opportunity to be hospitable to a foreigner. She was younger than I’d imagined, in her late thirties, and slightly overweight in a way that thickened her arms and her thighs. Her hair, streaked with grey, she kept cropped short, and I wondered idly if she was a lesbian.
We sat in their small, tightly-packed living room, on an L of floral cotton-upholstered couches. Nesla and I shared the floral couch while the aunt, Marjina, sat on the corner sofa chair.
I was offered tea, which I sipped politely and then we descended into an excited hush, broken only by the sound of advertisements coming from the television. I wondered if I was meant to be the one to guide the evening’s conversation.
Marjina broke the silence: So what do you do for a living? Nesla said you’ve travelled a great deal. Are you a journalist?
I shook my head. I’m a teacher.
Ah, she said, “Intellectual.” She used the Amarguese word, which she enunciated in her heavy accent, and turned to her niece, laughing, a private joke.
I was going to protest that I wasn’t much of an intellectual, but she began to assault me with a barrage of questions: Why had I come to Garamdal? What did I think of Garadmi people? How did I like life in the capital? Was it preferable to the south? Had I ever been married? Had children? These questions scarcely slowed until a serial came on the television which diverted their attention. So-called “girls’ stories” were popular in the country. Alongside crime dramas, these constituted the majority of the nation’s televised emissions. The stories were all the same: A young girl from the provinces comes to the big city where she must contend with the challenges of city life, or else a young girl from the big city comes to a small town in the provinces where she must contend with the challenged of provincial life, etc., etc. Eponymously named: Hana, Ijila, or toponymously, Aliyef Tale (I’ve visited Aliyef, the television serial covered all of the city’s wrinkles), they all had the same arc, a girl goes from being an awkward fish out of water in a new place to finding love, to arriving at social triumph.
I observed Marjina and Nesla as they smoked and watched the serial, occasionally exchanging light, hurried words. The conversation with me had stalled now that a more interesting source of entertainment existed. I wondered how long I would have to watch TV with these two. Also, whether this modern-looking aunt was Nesla’s chaperone or enabler. Unsure how to proceed, I elected for passivity, and my eyes wandered Marjina’s home. On the wall above the television there hung a portrait of Hazur Mufendis, the revolutionary, advertising plainly the aunt’s politics.
The show ended. Hana, the doe-eyed protagonist was shocked to run into Aktan, her boyfriend of last season, as she wandered the shuttered of grounds of her childhood school. The season was climaxing, racing to its inevitable cliff-hanger conclusion. The credits rolled. Commercials for laundry detergents and skin creams followed. I hate love triangles, Nesla complained.
But I love them!, Marjina sang as she stood up and arched her back in an unself-conscious reverse back-stretch, then strode to the kitchen where the hiss of a faucet and the clinking of pots seemed to indicate that she was preparing another kettle of tea.
I turned to Nesla, who gave me an expectant look. I was about to say something when, on the television, the news came on, and a jolt ran through me as I saw Gumeshel and a graphic of the Garamdi west coast beside the newscaster. The talking heads introduced a segment about the military crisis.
Footage of Turgusten and of Chatakdal, and then Gumeshel. A map of the coast around Turgusten highlighted the tiny the islands, and a bright red arrow pointed to Gumeshel. A man in military uniform spoke with severity into a bouquet of microphones.
Marjina returned with tea, and Nesla and I shifted quickly apart. I asked the Marjina what she thought of the situation surrounding Gumeshel.
It’s the Nationalists’ fault for spouting their bullshit. Now they put us into a pissing contest with the Vilinians.
You don’t think it was the Vilinian’s fault for taking the island?, I asked.
No. These Nationalists bit off more than they could chew.
But you’re a Nationalist, aren’t you?, I glanced at the portrait of Mufendis, the founder of the Nationalist Party. Wasn’t Hazur Mufendis a Nationalist? Marjina, gave me a look of surprise, and then turned to Nesla, slyly with a look that said “this one.”
Yes... That is true. But Hazur Mufendis was a real man. If he did a thing, it was not to be puffed up. Not to bark and not bite. He was strong. All these men that came after him were shit. She smiled, Actually, I correct myself: All men are shit!
Auntie!, Nesla protested.
I don’t include you in this, Marjina said to me with a pleased, ironic smile. Here, drink.
In the town of Haran, I greet a classroom of eleven-year-olds. Hanging on the wall above the blackboard, a portrait of Hazur Mufendis overlooks with what seems to be pride, the future of the nation. Of the revolutionaries who can be considered the republic’s founding fathers, Mufendis can be said to be foremost, and it is to his legend that the Nationalist’s have yoked their claim to legitimacy.
His is the story of the great men of history. An imperial childhood. Learning to read by firelight in a provincial village far in the empire’s hinterland. A father imprisoned by the imperial secret police. A career as a lawyer and then a revolutionary firebrand. It must certainly be flattering, even posthumously, to have one’s image littered about one’s country with such proselytic, zeal, but I wonder what he would think of the country, or of his party, today.
– Alastair Pennignten, Voyages
Some years ago, before I set off on my travels, I’d found, in an old travel magazine a series of photographs of the Garamdi far east. I suppose these would have been taken around the same time that Penningten had made his travels in the country. A horse-drawn carriage, braving an icy village lane in the wintertime, its wheels replaced with sled-skis, the flanks and legs of the horses frosted with snow; a trio of rifle-toting soldiers wandering a poppy field, the first blooms white against the summery greenness; an old woman hefting an enormous wooden spatula before a clay bread-oven, its embers glowing with demonic intensity; and, most startlingly for me, a young Daari girl, perhaps twelve, in an anonymous village house, cradling a newborn goat in her arms, laughing into the camera. She had dark eyes, exquisite lashes, densely-knitted eyebrows; this thin child, with a face framed by pigtails, seemed a creature out of time, citizen, or subject, of a nation, an empire, that either no longer existed, or had never existed at all. When Marjina asked me, Why did you come to Gardamal?, although I could have given her any number of ready answers that would have satisfied her, none of them could have done justice to the truth, and the only honest answer to give her would have been to point to the photograph (which I have never been able to find again) of that laughing little girl.
*
Nesla and I settled into a sort of simulacrum of courtship. We met in the evenings at the teahouse and stayed until closing, earlier now after the imposition of a curfew that emptied the streets of the town past dark, and making our way back to her aunt’s house, I could kiss her in the shadowed sections of the dark streets, a frisson of danger adding to the pleasure of these episodes. She turned down, nevertheless, any suggestion that we should meet, alone, somewhere in private.
I imagined for her a life in the capital that she seemed reluctant to discuss. I’d asked her what part of the city she’d grown up in, and she’d named a district that I recognized, though it was far from the quarter where I rented my own flat, as one belonging to the slim, perpetually precarious Garamdi middle class. Her father would have been a tradesman, then, or a government bureaucrat, her mother a housewife or a clerk. Inflation, the threat of unemployment, the unseemly press of rural peasants that came into the city every year and made of the capital’s outer districts a zone of poverty, these all were a sort of vague threat to that insecure, anxious class.
I discovered that she read a great deal, and we spent a fair amount of time discussing various Garamdi and Amarguese authors (the Amarguese ones she’d read in translation, her knowledge of Amarguese, in spite of a course in the language at school, no better than her aunt’s). Reading seemed of a piece with her penchant for idleness. She had the soft unself-conscious languor of a person recently discharged from an institution.
How long will you be here?, she asked me one evening.
I couldn’t tell whether this question reflected a shift in her feelings towards me. I had planned only a few more weeks here in the south, before I returned to the capital. I considered telling her that I could stay for her, but I didn’t know how to say this to her, or if it would help if I did.
I read the progress of the crisis in the papers each morning. Although it concerned me, in a way, although it was passing all around me, the thing had an air of irreality. That I was on the ground so to speak made the crisis no less virtual. In the dueling editorial pages of Bahshal and Republik, the Nationalists and their opposition rattled their respective rhetorical sabres. Bahshal’s editorialists condemned “those who would seek to weaken the resolve of our armed forces in the midst of a conflict,” while the opposition, sensing weakness, pounced on the new prime minister “not up to the task,” “an incompetent provincial,” and this partisan squabbling made the thing feel distant, an affair in the capital.
When fishing vessels were banned from operating in the waters off the coast, the cafe became a gathering place for the now disemployed fishermen, whose initial amusement at the situation had spoiled into upset, now that it was beginning to affect their livelihoods. The morning grumbling had begun to take on the air of revolutionary grievance.
There had been an abortive attempt to reclaim the island. It came out in the papers that the Vilinians had fired warning shots in response to the approach of a Garamdi corvette that had drawn too close to the island, and this, the warning shots, had been threat enough, apparently, for the navy to stand down. (“I told you, no balls,” Hazam muttered when I asked him about the episode.)
*
Do you have a girlfriend?
This question Nesla asked me later at the teahouse. The answer was no, and when I asked her if she had a boyfriend, I was surprised when she said yes. A classmate at the university, whom she’d been seeing for a year.
Were you going to tell me this?, I asked her.
I’m telling you now, aren’t I? The look she gave me was completely free of compunction.
I just think, I told her, that it’s quite late to be hearing something like this.
You would have asked me the question earlier if you had been searching for something serious.
I debated with myself whether what she’d just said was true.
Listen, I must explain something. She fiddled with her teacup. A year ago, I was living in a way that was very different from the way that I live now. I had a group of friends who were very political people. Do you remember the demonstrations from last year, in the capital? My friends, they were part of the group that organized them. They were very active, very passionate people, her friends were, she began to explain. She used to visit them in a tiny flat near the university and after she’d fallen in with them, she’d left her parents’ house and moved in with them to join them. Talk, talk, talk, it was all we did. I can’t convey to you how much talking there was in that flat. All of these brilliant arguments and debates, about politics and society and philosophy. She sighed, exasperated: I loved these people, but this talk was all they ever did, and I felt suffocated by it. It was always about how the country had to be reformed. How to resist the party. The actions that we had to take to change things.
She made a point of highlighting, that this group, these friends of hers, was composed of almost all men, that it was only herself and one other girl in the shared flat, and the two were like a captive audience to their unending debates. It wasn’t only the quantity of the debates, but their repetitive quality that wore on her. She began to feel that they were having the same arguments, the same debates, over and over again, repeating the same formulas. All of these brilliant men who had to make their points, and who had to make themselves understood. They couldn’t ever agree, everyone had to be right, or right in their own way, so they just had the same arguments every day. I was drawn to these people because I liked their ideas, but I understood that they would never do anything more than talk, that the only people they would fight were each other.
And yet she felt that she couldn’t leave. I was doing almost all the cooking, the only one doing any cleaning. I felt that I had to take care of them, that if I didn’t, no one else would. Pulled into their world and then kept there by inertia, she slowly distanced herself from the outside world: stopped attending her lectures, skipped, simply failed to show up for, an entire year of exams. There was a period of time when she almost never left the flat.
There is a kind of opposite to loneliness. And I suppose that only a woman can know it. It is this feeling of being surrounded by people and immersed in their thoughts and feelings and prerogatives. It’s their wants, and their desires that we begin to feel, and that we seek to satisfy. I had the feeling that I was dissolving, that I was becoming a kind of non-person, that I was living completely as an extension of this group. It was hideous, this feeling.
And there was another thing: I had the feeling that I was being passed around. Wait—do not say anything. It’s how men are in this country. Or maybe everywhere, I don’t know. But I didn’t like this feeling of being traded around. The sexual aspect, that wasn’t the hardest thing. I feel ashamed of it, but it was the feeling of losing myself that was worse. In a way, the sex merely underlined what had already been happening to me.
You could ask me why I didn’t leave earlier. I don’t know how to express why. It had happened so slowly, this sinking of my life into this situation. The only answer I can give you is the answer of how it felt. It felt impossible to leave. Even if I’d left the flat, they were still my friends. They would still expect me to be with them. I had no other friends My only choice was to be either completely alone or to be with them.
When she met her boyfriend Miishan, she saw in him an escape from that life. A timid rich-boy two years her junior who’d fancied her from afar, he’d screwed up the courage to write her a letter after noting her absence from the lecture-hall. Then, a few weeks later, a second. And after that, a third. She’d let these three letters sit and grow stale in a desk drawer in her room, but one day, something finally cracked. It was the simplest thing to do: a steps one, two, and three, and at the end of these was her escape. She pulled the envelopes out of her desk and looked up the return address in a street map.
When Miishan opened the door for her, he’d found on the landing outside of his flat, a wilted, diminished Nesla, one who was ten pounds lighter than the girl he’d known in class, clinging to a suitcase of dirty clothes as though holding on for dear life.
I had attached myself to one thing, and the only way to leave that thing was to attach myself to another person. It sounds cruel to say this, but I used him to be free. But I had to be cruel, I had to take my own life back.
The relationship had had a run of good months, the necessary months of her recovery—she’d even returned to the university—and then soured. She came, in time, to respect him less and less, and then to begin to hate him. She discovered that the same kindness that he had shown to her, he showed to everyone. He would insist on paying for every round of drinks, every dinner out, with his friends, as though he was afraid to lose their affection if he didn’t continually ply them with alcohol, or meals, or, sometimes, drugs. His was the kindness of a pleader, the generosity of a pleaser. He obliged her every request, even the one to be cruel to her during sex. She willed him silently to resist her, to put up a fight, to show even the faint shadow of a spine. She tried to be unreasonable, and discovered that he would accede even to unreasonable demands. His kindness was a kind of grotesque softness. But one that was strong in its own way, because of how powerfully it had ensnared her—she could find no way to end things with him. How to end a relationship because a man was too kind?
I thought of what the most cruel thing I could do to him was, and then I decided to do it.
I spoke: You slept with someone else.
She covered her face with her hands and nodded her head through her tears.
No, I didn’t I had everything packed. I was all set to go back to my friends. But I couldn’t do it. I took a taxi to the bus station. And then I came here instead.
You don’t love him?
No, she shook her head. I don’t know. I do, partly. I don’t know how to feel only one feeling towards someone. I don’t want to have to think about what my feelings are, or what they should be. Even if I was in love with him, it wouldn’t make me not want to hurt him. Do you understand? Am I cruel for feeling this way?
Could the country modernize? The electrification of the far east, universal schooling, the expropriation of private lands and their redistribution to the peasant farmers, the fruits of republicanism. These are the nation’s hope.
– Alastair Pennignten, Voyages in Garamdal
A warship was moored off the coast.
“It’s a destroyer,” Hazam announced to me as we watched it in the morning light. I’d found him standing on the stretch of beach in front of the pension gazing at the vessel, a dark steel prism, all martial angles. “We’ve got about a dozen of them in the navy.”
At the crest of the taller of the hills of Chatakdal, the Garamdi national flag flapped defiantly in the morning breeze.
“They’ll see how close they can get. These are all our waters. I mean to say, it’s either theirs or ours. There’s no international waters here, you understand? The only way to see whether it’s our waters or their waters is to go there. If they fire on us, it means it’s their waters. If we fire on them, that’s how we show them that it’s ours.”
There was a weariness in his voice that I’d never heard before. War was no good for business, and the Vilinian tourists who might have cushioned the loss of other foreign visitors, he could be sure to write off, along with whatever rich Garamdi northerners would have thought to make a summer holiday in the beaches here, if not for the presence of battleships to mar their tranquil ocean views.
Hazam told me that if the pension went under, he might go home, a village in the east, far in the country’s interior. He recounted to me a little of his hardscrabble childhood. “I never saw the sea until I was nineteen! Pictures, sure. On TV, but never in person.”
Looking out at the sea, he seemed to want to take it in, save it, as if he already anticipated losing it.
“There’s nothing like it, being at sea. Yeah the work was shit, but you never had the land bullshit to deal with. You had the ship bullshit, but it’s not so much, compared to the land bullshit. There was real peace, at sea.”
When I told him that Nesla and I had ended things, giving him as narrow and as abbreviated an account as I could of our relationship, he suggested we make a trip together to a bordel, in the provincial capital, another coastal city further south, two hours away by car. I had no opposition in principle to paying a woman for sex, but it made the thing feel a little sordid to go with another man, or to go with Hazam in particular. What would we talk about, on the long drive back?
And there was another thing: “You said you’d never paid a woman for sex.”
He shrugged. “But you do not pay the woman. You pay the madame.”
The crisis passed with surprising swiftness. Thanks to the eleventh-hour intercession of the Amarguese foreign minister, who it was said, spent twenty-four sleepless hours working the phone lines, the two governments agreed to stand down their navies, and the flag on Gumeshel was removed by Amarguese marines. An arbitration committee sponsored by the Amarguese would be formed in the autumn to determine the fate of the islands.
After the resolution of the crisis, I lost all interest in the news. I returned to my troglodyte existence, that subterranean creature that knew nothing of the outside world. The newspapers that I was accustomed to picking up every morning at the kiosk by the marina, I left unpurchased and returned to the novels and other books that I’d brought with me. I no longer saw Nesla, not at the teahouse, not even on the streets, and though her aunt Marjina treated me generously to tea and beer when I came to look for her, apologizing profusely for Nesla’s refusal to see me, I knew that I wouldn’t come to visit their house again. She’ll come around, I think, Marjina advised, you just have to give it time. Nesla’s absence had as its single consolation, that I began to think about my travels again. I pulled out the road atlas that I’d brought with me, and worked at the itinerary of the grand trip to the east that I’d dreamed about since coming to Garamdal. Hazam provided me with the schedules of bus lines and the phone numbers of cousins scattered all over the east. Musuf extended a gracious invitation to meet his family.
I was lonesome, of course. Most days, I wandered the beach as solitary as the first man, returning to an empty bed that mocked me with its capaciousness. Farther from town, serrated fins of karst hills erupted from the earth and exhausted themselves into rocky outcroppings as they marched to the sea. A few days before I was to leave town, I took a long walk to the north of Turgusten where there was a stretch of the beach that was littered with enormous osseous rocks. When the tides were higher, the waves churned into a boiling froth among these rocks, but at low tide, they formed a striking lunar landscape. When I arrived, I saw a girl in a sunhat sitting on one of the stones. It was Nesla, of course. She turned to me and waved. Without makeup, in a simple bare-armed sundress, she’d shed a decade and looked scarcely older than a child. I saw for the first time that she was faintly freckled, and I thought of Penningten: The fair-haired Galeni live on in the sight of an occasional freckle.
I came up to her, and she spoke first: You’ll walk with me, won’t you?
Tufts of wild grass clung to the rocks around us, and we stepped through these like children wandering the remains of a fossilized giant. She’d recovered her spirits, and her talk was light, untroubled. I told her that I was surprised that she seemed as cheery as she was.
Women are different from men. We’re used to experiencing strong emotions, and recovering from them.
I told her about the trip that I was planning to make to the east.
She seemed excited by the idea. She’d never explored her own country. Would you take me with you?
Yes, I told her. Would you come with me, if invited you?
No… she shook her head, and clasped her hands around her bare arms. I need to be by myself again, she said. Or else she said: I need to be myself again. She brought her gaze out to the sea again, before she could see my smile.
The view before us was breathtaking. The sky, matrimonially blue, the sea sparkling in the morning sun.
One time, Nesla began, we met with each other, and we went for a walk along the shore. We wanted to see the sea in the morning. It was too bright out, and also too warm. It didn’t matter. You looked at me, and you thought that I was very beautiful. You kissed me on the beach.
When was this? I asked.
She looked at me, her freckles shifted into a constellation of amusement and pity that I still hadn’t understood her:
Right now.