When the offensive came, I was reminded of Mahmiin Andeyin’s words to me the previous winter: “Before the summer comes, they will start bombing again.”
This grim pronouncement he’d made late one evening at the Cafe Duneyahsi where he and Yeylan and I were accustomed to spending our evenings. The cafe sat near the university and was usually packed with students late into the night, the press of bodies guard against the cold outside, and the background to our conversations was a perpetually swelling din of undergraduate chatter. Winter nights, the place had a warm, honeyed incandescence, its rooms heated anachronistically by wood stoves (the operation of these was nominally forbidden by municipal decree, but city hall was too incompetent or too riddled with corruption to enforce this injunction — when I set out in the evenings, the air had the faint fragrance of charcoal, burnt pine, attenuated slightly by the sea breeze that blew in from the bay), the windows fogged with steam from the constantly boiling vats of coffee, served by the ladleful.
Yeylan Kotepey, the shy, balding philosophy student had grimaced at the mention of the war, mostly, I think, because I was a foreigner and he may have felt that it was bad form to discuss the conflicts in the country — political, social, the explicitly martial — in front of me, akin to airing the family’s dirty laundry in public. For his part, Mahmiin, bearded, effortlessly handsome, was not the type to shy from political discussion. An economics student, he tended to speak with a self-assured authority that would have been more natural to someone twice his age, an academic brought on to a television panel show or a government functionary giving a press conference, and when it came to political issues, this authority was expressed as a sort of unrelenting moral seriousness that left Yeylan and I feeling vaguely inadequate in every conversation, and if it devolved into that, every debate, that we had with him. If the war had to be discussed, he came at it headlong, refusing to shirk philosophical duty in the service of lesser concerns like putting his friends at ease.
It was my fault that the war had been invoked. Mahmiin and Yeylan and I had been discussing our plans for the spring, and the conversation had strayed, as I brought up some of my travel plans, to the situation in the far east of the country. Unwise to travel far that way, in the estimation of both Mahmiin and Yeylan. The separatists were resurgent and the prime minister had promised to crush the uprising. The previous season’s fighting had brought the separatist cities to heel, and the cities of Ijif, Ef, and Har’a-kal had been restored to government control, but the separatists drew their power from the villages and small towns of the countryside, and from these they continued their raids against any institution with government association. In the eastern cities, policemen were still being fired upon by anonymous snipers, and here and there the occasional schoolteacher was kidnapped and forced to film a denunciation of the government’s occupation.
A foreigner could be caught in the crossfire. And that was without considering what would happen when, not if, the government started to send soldiers back into the countryside.
“It’s not only the terrorists! You must also watch out for the military! They might think you’re a spy!,” Yeylan warned me.
Mahmiin shook his head: “Worse, they’ll take you for a journalist.”
An element of Yeylan’s unease at the turn the conversation had taken was that he had only narrowly avoided military service, and it may have pained him to be reminded that if not for the loan that his family had taken out to bribe a doctor for a medical deferment, he could now be patrolling an icy hillock, bracing for an advancing column of guerrillas, instead of basking in the peaceable warmth of a smoldering wood fire. Such bribes were standard practice in the country, and would not normally have strained the finances of a middle-class family with only a single son, but at the time the bribe was necessary, a new provincial governor had just been elected on an anti-corruption platform, and the governor’s term, although it did not substantially reduce corruption at any level, multiplied greatly, for a period, the transaction costs involved.
Mahmiin expounded on the merits of the separatists’ claims with the detachment of a history professor discussing an obscure war on a foreign continent: “This was all unorganized territory before the revolution. Even if you look at the old imperial maps, they didn’t bother to draw any firm lines in the east. They just labeled the cities and marked the villages, taxed what they could, when they could. It wasn’t imperial land, it was their land [i.e., the separatists’], and lands like that, people like that, were never fitted to a nation-state. For us, now, it is like an unwanted appendage.”
I asked why the government didn’t just give up the land and let the separatists have their own country.
“The government would never give up the cities. They have invested millions into them. We have too many of our own people living there. And there are no half-measures. There is no way to divide the territory that makes sense. You cannot split the baby. So…,” he lifted his hands towards a conclusion that lay outstretched a few inches in front of his chest, “the war will continue until one side loses.” His arguments always seemed to be phrased with a syllogistic certainty that I reflexively attempted to resist with counterargument, but this sentence rang inarguably, almost tautologically, true.
Sensitive to the seasons, I was saddest in the wintertime, and I ached for new colors than those offered by the city in winter, the black wood, wetted by melting snow, that jutted from the abandoned mansions of the city’s historical quarter, or the exhausted ochre of the clay bricks that buttressed the apartments and townhouses that surrounded the university. Even the new apartments across the bay, concrete high-rises which had gleamed white in the summer, had reduced to a dismal gray under the overcast skies of the winter days’ brief stock of lighted hours. “Before the summer comes…,” I remember Mahmiin’s words not only because of the starkness with which he had predicted the war’s next stage, but because they invoked the promise of summer.
*
Because it sat on the sea, spring came earlier to the capital than it did to the east. Snowdrifts clogged the mountain passes that commanded the approach to the eastern provinces, but here in the capital the hyacinths had begun to bloom. When the rainclouds broke, swept away by a gust from the sea, the sunlight that broke onto the bay shone as brightly as a shard of divinity.
By spring I had shed myself of most of my work, but I still tutored a schoolboy for a family in one of the tony apartments across the bay. The kid was bright, well-behaved, dutiful, as easy a student as one could hope for, but he greeted me with a stiff formality that made it difficult to extend a gesture of affection. I would have liked to stroke his head, tousle his hair, squeeze his shoulder, but the soldierly way in which he approached our interactions made such gestures feel out of place, unmanly, and I surprised myself by being too shy to correct this aspect of our relationship. We met twice a week, our language lessons rarely lasting longer than an hour and a half, and for my twelve hours of labor a month, I earned enough to maintain an apartment near the university, to eat from street carts, and to be able to continue having coffee with Yeylan and Mahmiin at the Duneyahsi. My days, free as they were, were given to a kind of ferality, and I tended to wander the city, walking from cafe to cafe, eating when I was hungry, drinking when I was thirsty, reading — or dreaming — when I was bored.
I still wrote of course, although by this time I had long abandoned my dream of translating Kundra. I had had the vague thought that I could devote more of my time to writing, now that I was no longer teaching at the international school, but in spite of the time that I spent in cafes, sitting alone, the words would not come. I carried my notebook with me, but its contents had begun to grow disordered, disheveled, mirroring my life. My job at the international school had given me a sense of structure in my life, but now I was reverting to form.
Accustomed to rising late, I was usually breakfasted at a cafeteria off the cobblestoned avenue that led down from the university’s perch on one of the city’s major hills to the stone quays that rimmed the bay. I tended to arrive long after the breakfast crowd had dispersed but before the arrival of the lunch rush and had the place largely to myself. On the day the news broke, I had been watching the cafeteria’s television, a noiseless device set at ceiling height that I did little to try to interpret most of the time. Sipping my coffee, munching on a sweet bun, my actions a little bleary and automatic, I realized that they’d turned the channel to a news station, and as the images accumulated, my understanding of the situation slowly came into focus, as though I was watching an ambiguous photograph cohere at increasing resolutions into intelligibility. Military trucks turning a curve on a frozen mountain highway, military jets taxiing at an airbase, scenes of street fighting from the year before, the old earthen walls of Ijif, the Kal, the great river of antiquity, as it streamed through Har’a-kal. The cafeteria’s only other patrons were a pair of workmen in concrete-dusted overalls, their eyes glued to the television screen as they ate their sandwiches. I realized that the same set of video clips were being looped, but the images shifted so quickly that they seemed like the erratic thoughts of a deranged world.
“What’s happening?” I asked the workmen.
They looked at me, surprised that I could speak their language. Until the slimmer of the two gained his composure and spoke: “The gloves are off. We’re going to wipe the separatist fuckers off the map.” He made a gesture of sweeping something away.
Seeing the distaste that crossed my expression, the other man broke in, and with a tone that was more politic: “The army means to destroy the terrorists. The separatists, we gave them millions in aid, we developed the roads, the schools, and they have repaid us in blood. That repayment must be responded to in kind. The goal is to root out the murders, the assassins and the kidnappers. You will see…”
The first man broke in: “Where are you from?”
I told him.
“Then you understand that peace in won through strength.”
I grimaced, an involuntary reflex, without answer for a moment.
“Aha! You see. You see.” An excitedly emphatic index finger jabbed twice at my direction.
“Let the foreigner alone,” his partner intervened. “You’ve made your point.”
The pointer turned to his friend. “I am saying he should know. He should know, of all people, the cost of weakness, and the necessity of strength. Do you know,” he turned back to me, “the separatists have been assassinating policemen and government workers? It is one thing to kill a soldier, but these are civilians they are killing. Even a police officer is a civilian. Why shoot him? He’s no soldier.”
The other man broke in. “What my friend says is true. There have been many assaults on government workers.”
“And ask yourself, foreigner, who do the separatists work for? Do you think that the separatists would live better off without access to our economy? They are farmers and sheep herders. Do you think that they do not know that they would be better off with us? If they like their lives in the east, then why do they come here to the west in droves every month and year? They want to be a part of our country and economy. Do you think that they want to be cut off our government money? When we fight, it is to fight for those on all sides who are the good people and who want to be a part of our nation. It is a foreign influence campaign. No one here wants this war. No one in this country. But now that it’s come, we have to fight it.”
*
In the evening I met up with Yeylan by the quay. Inside the metro station, I found him sitting at a plastic table in front of a coffee kiosk, a cup of coffee surrounded by torn sugar packets in front of him, bearing his inner distress with patience, if not quite dignity. He was a full head taller than Mahmiin and me, but he’d curled himself into a diminished crouch.
“You heard the news,” he asked me as we made our way out of the station towards the sea. I told him about the conversation that I had with the workmen at the cafeteria earlier that day, and he listened to my story with some severity.
“I’m sorry you had to listen to those assholes. Well now it will all be rah-rah, the war bullshit. It will be like this twenty-four-seven until who knows when? There’s a ‘war fever’ now, you know?” The wind had picked up, and turbulent sea water sloshed below us against the ancient stones of the quay as we walked along its perimeter.
“I don’t think they were assholes or anything. I was just surprised how quickly they jumped to the party line. It was like a switch had been flipped.” I told him that Mahmiin had been right when he made his prediction in the winter that the government would start attacking before the summer,
“Oh, he said that?” Yeylan sighed loudly. “I don’t remember, but it sounds like something he would say. I try not to think about it too much. The more I think about it, the worse it is. It makes me anxious. If the fighting gets bad, and they need to draw up draftees, maybe my medical certificate will end up being useless, worthless.”
Above us seagulls buffeted by the winds were momentarily suspended in place, and then flapped and dove or rose away from the cross-current. At our left, the quayside shops and restaurants, at our right, the boiling sea. We passed by seaside restaurants readying for the evening, waiters turning on patio heat lamps and dragging down clear plastic patio coverings. Old women, grandmothers or widows, in sunglasses reached their thin arms towards blankets and shawls brought out by the restaurant staff. The world was no different today. Yeylan stepped quickly in his large black coat, a hurried, nervous mass, and I had to ask him to slow down more than once.
“You know that I am not for this war. But the situation has been intolerable for a long time, too long. Those workers whom you talked to, with the attacks that the DNF has made, I don’t believe their views are a minority. The DNF has always made its major attacks in the summer time, and perhaps the military wants to head them off in advance of such an attack.”
I asked him if he believed if a peaceful resolution was possible.
“We tried! We gave them many things! It wasn’t enough. Well, Mahmiin can explain it better than I can.”
He pressed ahead, his eyes on the sea. “I can’t bear it!”
We went to look for Mahmiin at his office in the university. The economics faculty was a stern, boxy building with a flat, concrete facade, built shortly after the revolution in what was considered a modern style, a little out of place amidst the florid, classical buildings of the university. The night porter greeted us with the same gruff expression that he always gave us, a combination of suspicion and grudging recognition, whenever we buzzed in at the front door to look for Mahmiin.
The lights were off in Mahmiin’s office when we entered. We found him sitting in the blue glow of his personal television set, typing up an article on his expensive new word processor, and he asked us to wait a moment while he finished his paragraph. We sat down at the two chairs in front of his desk, like petitioners before a harried provincial governor, and then shifted the chairs around to watch his TV, which he’d muted. Only the state channels were available; he didn’t have a satellite dish, and in any case, it was only advertisements. The window behind him opened out doorwise, and he’d left it slightly open for a bit of fresh air, or else to give the smoke from the cigarettes that he chain-smoked a chance to escape. A distant gas heater vented warm air into the room, and this mixed with the currents of the cool, now-cold, air of the black evening behind him, to give his room delicious sensuous feeling.
“It was not much of a prophecy,” he replied when I reminded him of his prediction at the Duneyahsi, months before. I asked him if there was any hope for a peaceful resolution. If the DNF, the Daari Nationalist Front, the army of the separatists, would try to negotiate a ceasefire.
“Impossible. If the fighting ends, it will only be because of the weather. This campaign will take place all summer. If the DNF retreats across the border, they’ll cross the border [meaning the government would] and start bombing them on the other side as well. And that will create its own set of problems.”
I glanced at Yeylan who stared gravely at the television set.
Mahmiin sighed: “Earlier, it was better. I believe peace would have been possible some time in the past, perhaps ten years ago, before the fighting had gotten too bad. There was a time when the government was attempting to take a softer line; this was after the law was passed to support so-called minority cultures and languages. Well, we all knew which minority group they were referring to. At that time, there were peacemakers in the DNF leadership also, people who had fought during the first separatist wars and believed that armed struggle was the wrong path to take. There was a faction within the DNF that, it was said, was willing to ask for autonomy rather than independence. Supposedly, they would could have given up their demands for an independent state, so long as the region could be self-governing. Perhaps reconciliation was possible at that time.”
He slipped his right hand out the window behind him and ashed his cigarette outside. I asked him why that hadn’t come to pass.
“The mistake that the government made was to try to sideline the DNF. They went directly to the tribal leaders, and, in the cities, to the ammans. They promised to allow minority language broadcasts and schooling, a guarantee of proportional ethnic representation in the provincial government, even a kind of tribal law in the rural regions. Really, everything that the peace faction in the DNF had asked for, but in return they asked the tribal leaders and ammans to repudiate the DNF.”
He took another drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke in the direction of the window.
“When the government started arresting DNF leaders, the ammans and tribal leaders who’d collaborated with the government felt that they’d been used. In the east, the people didn’t see the government’s concessions to minority autonomy as power-sharing or self-governance anymore, if the government could just come in with weapons at any time and disarm their fighters. Do you see? Even if autonomy was being offered, the government was still dictating the terms.”
“So,” I concluded for Mahmiin, “the DNF took up arms.”
“Took up arms again, yes,” he clarified.
I was thinking what to ask next when a voice broke in.
“It’s as though they’re making a spectacle of it. I wonder if it will make the war less immediate, less real.” It was Yeylan, looking at the television set. A report on the war. Some of the same images I’d seen that morning.
“What do you mean by that?” This was Mahmiin.
“Oh, I don’t know. Television, it’s an entertainment device, no?” Here Yeylan lifted a suggestive, but only half-committed hand towards Mahmiin’s little television. “Will people mistake the war for another entertainment? Could the government choreograph it in such a way that people were distracted from its reality and the war was reinterpreted as mere spectacle?”
I could read the skepticism on Mahmiin’s face, and to head off his objection, I made my own, but in what I hoped would come across as a softer tone: “But, television is not only a source of entertainment, right? People watch the news every evening.”
“Oh, it was just an idle thought. I am thinking of the maxim, ‘the story is shaped by its medium.’”
I saw the shift in Mahmiin’s eyebrows as he weighed the idea. “Well, even if it’s only an idea, it may well be one that someone in the propaganda department has had. Yes, they’ll be trying to shape the news presented to the public. To make it seem less ‘real.’ Or perhaps to heighten its reality to a point of irreality.”
*
In the autumn, Yeylan and I had hiked the countryside around the capital. We would take a train from the city out to the countryside and trek from one village to another. Going a mere hundred kilometers away from the city was sufficient to go back in time fifty years. The villages had emptied into the anonymous apartment blocks at the edges of the country’s metropolises.
In the villages, life was insipid, and it was difficult to discern whether a given house was occupied, so little life seemed to emanate from each dwelling. We passed by stone houses with wooden roofs or concrete houses with wooden roofs. Teenage boys past us on motorcycles, and adolescent girls stepped daintily through the towns’ lanes holding their mothers’ hands.
Yeylan was twenty-eight, a year younger than myself, and studied a recondite branch of philosophy called syncretic analytics metaphysics. The reigning mode of philosophical investigation in the country’s universities was the philological-hermeneutic analysis of classical texts, befitting a country in which academic scholarship had reached its height during the middle-imperial period. The prime focus of these ancient texts was a dreamy analysis of consciousness and perception. Its motivating questions were these: What was the difference between a feeling, a thought, and a perception? Between observer and observed, perceiver and perception? A fair topic for philosophical inquiry, but philosophy in the classical period had been intertwined with religion, and the investigations were now weighted with the baggage of millennia of theological speculation. The foreign philosophy that Yeylan read was, in contrast, shorn of all superstition, but also, he felt, of all feeling — it was a philosophy in which language was the favored object of analysis, not reality itself, which, he felt, foreign schools were afraid to confront. Yeylan’s dream was to unite these two paradigms, the foreign, precise, language-based metaphysics, and the dreamy, theological metaphysics of the classical period, into a single system.
He did have some marvelous ideas. Stirring our steaming cups of black tea in a rustic little village teahouse, while we waited for the bus that could take us to the train station, with the fire going beside us, he would opine freely: “I think that we all must choose, or have chosen for us, if we do not spend the time to think on it, the level of reality that we will live at. We can accept a table as a table or we can choose to view it as a cloud of electrons. Human life is the same way. We are only, after all, a bundle of cells and tissues, and whatever biological forces governing the transport of hormones throughout the cardiovascular system of the organism. Or we could reduce even further to the molecules and atoms that make up those cells, and the subatomic particles that compose those atoms, our actions predetermined by physical forces. Even if we rejected such a reduction to our component forces, we might still think of ourselves purely in physical forms rather than in the psychological and narrative form that we experience life.
“It’s all a matter of the choice, isn’t it? What is the level of reality that we shall live at? The physical, the instrumentalist, at an ideational level? Will it be a moral level or an emotional one? Will we choose to live on the animal level, and only rut and propagate our genes. Reality exists on so many levels that we must choose, whether that choice is made explicitly or implicitly, the level of reality that we will live at. I think that is the only choice. The only real choice that a human being can make.”
He smiled genially, tiny apologetic wrinkles crinkling at the edge of his soft eyes. “What do you think? Is it crackpot?”
*
Over the weekend, there was a feeble attempt at a protest, organized partly by some of the students at the university, but Yeylan had been right: The situation had been intolerable for a long time, and the people had little sympathy for the separatist cause. Yeylan and I made it late to the protest on Boulevard of the Revolution, and by the time we arrived, the police presence was already more substantial than that of the protestors. Police officers in riot gear, leaning on the sides of armored police trucks, waved people along with truncheons while they lifted bottles of soda to their lips with the other. “Move along. Move along. Keep moving.” Seemingly lost in the rush of a bustling apathetic crowd, the picketers and poster-bearers shifted uneasily down the avenue. The signs they lifted asked for dialogue and reconciliation, but these were already wilted by the spring drizzle.
An air war comprised the first days of the campaign. The separatists didn’t have any anti-aircraft weapons to speak of, and air strikes against separatist training camps in the hills east of the Kal River kicked off the offensive. The explosions seemed impressive enough from what I saw on TV, but even the prime minister cautioned that they were only the initial phase of the campaign. As the army advanced on the ground, most resistance melted away quickly. There was a thought that the DNF would retreat all the way to the border, and then across it, daring the army to cross. The first flashpoint came at the town of Araf, which greeted the approaching army forces with gunfire, and then others, and within the first week fighting had broken out in a string of villages along an axis between Har’a-kal and Ijif.
The little patriotic pins came out, and flags were unfurled from apartment balconies. My employers made pains to tell me that they didn’t support the war. But it was better to go along and get along these days. I smiled amiably and told them that I didn’t judge them one bit, and had always understood that they wouldn’t support the war, which seemed to soothe their consciences.
In any case, I was already distracted from the war. Earlier that spring, passing by the university, by the stone portico of the arts faculty, one rainy afternoon, I saw a young woman step out of the great entrance door. She looked at me, saw that I had been staring at her, and called out: “You there, with the umbrella, you’ll walk me to the metro, won’t you?”
Unaccustomed to such brazenness, I’d stood helplessly as she advanced towards me and then thrust her arm through my right arm (the umbrella-bearing one) and asked me if I knew where the metro stop was (I did) and told me that I could take her there. We stepped through slick streets, and the patter of spring rain threatened to drown out our conversation. She told me that she was an art student, that she’d always wanted to live in the capital. She asked me how long I’d lived in the country, what it was I did for a living. She gripped me tighter as she said this, and I could feel her breasts through the soft material of her black pullover. I didn’t dare to look her in the face, and she didn’t look into mine either. I had only impression, the perpetual curls of her dark hair, the spidery wisps of her mascaraed eyelashes.
“Why were you looking at me?” she asked. “At the faculty?”
“You caught my eye.”
“How? How was it that I caught your eye?”
I looked her in the eye. She was very beautiful. “You just did.”
At the entrance to the metro stop, I leaned in to kiss her goodbye on the cheek, but this landed instead, because she shifted her head in anticipation, on her soft lips.
“Well…” I said as we separated. “I hope you get home safe.”
She looked at me appraisingly. “What? You won’t even ask me for my phone number?”
“I didn’t…” Backfooted, I stumbled through my response. “I didn’t mean for what I said to be the end of our conversation.” I tried to smile. “But, yes, I would like to have your number.”
“Too late!” she announced crossly, and turned around and descended the stairs into the station.
I lingered a moment, wondering if I should follow in after her, and then when the moment passed, whether I should have done so. I’d turned around when I felt someone stuff a sheet of paper into my coat pocket. “Don’t be a fool,” Iriánè whispered in my ear. “You caught my eye too.”
A few days later Iriánè and I agreed to meet up at the piazza near the old brick watchtower. A sun shower had just broken out when I arrived at the piazza, and the rain fell in diaphanous sheets thats glittered beautifully in the afternoon sunlight. I found her sitting at one of the outdoor tables, contemplating the rain.
“I didn’t think you would come.”
“We kissed didn’t we?”
“All the more reason not to ever meet again.”
The waiter brought out a bottle of wine; it was an unlabeled glass bottle, and he marked the level with a wax crayon. She lifted the bottle and tilted it, examining the sediment.
“Good or bad?” I asked.
“It’s fair. Good enough for an alcoholic, in any case.” And she pulled out the rubber stop and served our glasses, a little more generously than I would have expected.
When she took her glass, she said: “You seem like one of those people who’s thrown out their television. You won’t be swayed by government propaganda. Possibly, you believe in subliminal messaging, you won’t allow your mind to be poison by staring at those tubes.”
I laughed and told her that I did indeed live without a television. “You don’t own one either?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t live without the soap operas. Even if they’re telling me subliminal moral messages.” She lifted her wineglass theatrically. “To the contrary, I need the moral messages. So that I can be a good, dumb housewife someday.”
“You don’t have to be dumb to be a good housewife.”
“The problem is that I’m already dumb. I’m just trying to learn how to be good. Or a housewife.” She looked at me and smiled wryly: “You are thinking… ‘is she as easy as she is dumb?’”
I told her I didn’t think she was dumb.
She asked me if I’d ever been in love.
I told her that of course I had. Many times. “Have you?”
“Yes, once,” she smiled preeningly. “He was forty, and my professor.” I suddenly became aware of the individual components of my facial expression, but tried to look unimpressed.
“Only the once, then?”
She spoke seriously. “It was the love of my life.”
“I’m less interested in your relationship with a former professor than you may think.”
Her eyes fell. “I’m sorry, I know it’s rude to talk about the people one has been involved with. It’s just that I think about it sometimes. I wish I didn’t, I wish I didn’t think about it as much as I do. Listen, I had this idea: I used to think that the way to live was to follow every feeling to its end, to follow every desire to its consummation. I thought that that was the only way to live honestly. After that relationship, I’m not so sure. Or else I think the problem is with trying to live honestly. I realized that one can live honestly, but it’s not the same thing as living well. There are practical considerations as well.” She looked at me. “Like being hurt.”
I asked her if she’d been hurt in the relationship.
She laughed. More at herself, than anyone or anything else. “Yes, but only when he left. That’s the only thing he did to hurt me, the only thing he could do. It was enough. I’m still a little fucked up in the head about it.”
She lifted herself a little bit, and then settled into her seat again. “What do you think about this war?”
I answered noncommittally. What she said about her ex had rattled me, and I kept thinking of what Mahmiin would say. She gazed out at the piazza, a little bit distracted. The rain had lightened, but it still sparkled, here and there. “People in this country are either cynical or apathetic or afraid.”
“You don’t really care about this war, do you?”
I began to stumble over my response.
“No, it’s all right. I don’t expect you to feel the same way about things. You’re a foreigner. You are not involved. Certainly, it's not your battle. Really, it’s not you, not people like you that I’m upset by. It’s just that… oh, I think that in this country, people are very uncaring. Why shouldn’t they care about right and wrong? We’ve been coarsened somehow.”
I explained to her Yeylan’s idea. “It’s the level of reality that one chooses to live at.”
“Yes,” she said, as she clasped her fingers around her wine glass. “Yes, it’s something like that. Yes! You’re right! Shall we live in the elevated realm of moral ideals? Or here in this shitty actual world where everyone must find gainful employment and raise a family. I once had an idea that was similar to that. Here, let me explain it to you: That goodness and evil were not opposites, not opposites along a spectrum, but somehow they are two things that have nothing to do with each other. That a person could be both very good and very bad. Or could be neither. And it’s the first kind of person that I would want to know. Does it make sense?”
I told her that it did.
“Anyway, these are my shitty discoveries. Maybe it’s nothing. I used to think that I must be a genius. Now, I know my ideas are just manifestations of my mood at that time. I was thinking in grief, and I have been grieving for a long time.”
*
A few weeks later the war fever broke. A pair of tanks were destroyed by DNF fighters in a battle outside of Har’a-kal. As tightly controlled as the media was, the incident might have been hushed up, but photographs of the destroyed vehicles were circulating in foreign media, and the military had to admit that the tanks had been lost. This caused a brouhaha that caused the government some consternation.
Mahmiin explained the thing to me. “This is exactly the kind of event the government cannot accept. In this country, we are used to seeing dead separatists, and even dead separatist civilians. We have bombed their villages before, and we will continue to bomb them. But if the separatists really have the capacity to defeat our tanks, or other armored forces, that means not only that the separatists are stronger than we thought, but also that the army is weaker than we believed. By extension, the government is weaker than had been previously supposed. Consider the many failures that this attack implicates: First of all, there was some failure of the intelligence services if they could not anticipate that the separatists would have weapons like these. Secondly, if the separatists can defeat our tanks, how can we ever have more firepower than them? And thirdly, if the separatists, who have only a few rockets can destroy our most modern tanks, how would our armed forces fare against another modern army?”
I asked Mahmiin if it was true then, that the separatists were getting support from a foreign power.
“Yes, I have no doubt that the separatist movement is an endogenous phenomenon, but it is now clear that they are getting military support from a foreign country. The number and kind of weapons that they have been able to acquire suggests to me the involvement of state-level resources.”
Then who was supporting them?
Mahmiin laid out his speculations, and the number of suspect countries soon numbered in the half-dozen.
“Of course these are all only speculations, and the government has been suppressing journalistic coverage in the east, so both lay people and academics have no way to assess the true situation. Since the tank attack, there is now a conspiracy theory that the intelligence service itself has been arming the separatists. The theory goes that the government has been doing this as a way to incite attacks and give itself justification to begin a real assault on the east and clamp down on the eastern provinces.
“Now, this theory is almost certainly untrue. I don’t believe it for the simple reason that no one in the government could be capable of such innovative thinking, but it has given life to a further conspiracy theory, which is that the government itself is the promulgator of the conspiracy theory that it was our own intelligence service that has been arming the separatists. The thinking behind this conspiracy theory is similar to the line of thinking behind the first: It is a way for the government to give the impression to the public that it is in control, and it has the added benefit that it absolves the government of the deaths of those soldiers who were killed in the tank attack. Furthermore, by spreading a lie like this, the government is able to undercut its critics, in the way that it does best, not by telling the truth, but by making up another lie. I must say that this sophisticated theory has one meritorious aspect, which is that it captures the convoluted way in which this government works.”
I once asked Iriánè what she thought of Mahmiin, she’d derided him for being a parasite. Among the country’s middle-class, it was effectively an axiom of folk political theory that any family with any measure wealth had acquired its wealth by profiteering during the denationalization of industries following the establishment of the republic. The riches of the industrialists and commercial barons who arose after the fall of the empire had been won through bribes, political machinations, an irruption of corruption at the dawn of the republic. Because this year zero happened so far in the past, it was the children and grandchildren of the initial grifters who now managed this windfall of misbegotten wealth, but this hardly made them less vilified. For their part, the new regime of the nouveau riche quickly adopted the trappings of the ante-revolutionary upper-class: elite schools, the intonations of the capital dialect, furnishing their homes with a raft of artifacts from the high-imperial period, cementing their separation from wider republican society.
These trappings were what irritated Iriánè most about him, the air of unearned privilege that his elite schooling, his toffish enunciation seemed to gesture towards. In his conversations with us, he slipped reflexively into the insertion of “fashionable” foreign words into his speech, which I had noticed but had never been bothered, but which irritated her immensely.
Of his parents, I knew that his mother was beautiful, and his father, the businessman, was often away. Mahmiin had spoken to me of his father’s womanizing with such little affect that it was impossible for me to determine his attitude towards it.
Iriánè was right that Mahmiin was privileged. Although he spent entire nights working on his homework or on editorial essays that he submitted to various newspapers, he’d never done a day of work in his life. He was only twenty-six, and complained about the students in the classes that he taught at the university, his teaching duties a responsibility that he regularly shirked, with the effortless lack of compunction of the people who have never needed to work. Whereas Yeylan bounced from job to job, his nervousness around people and his utter impracticality rendering him incapable of most forms of employment, and his forays into gainful employment as a tutor for the national university entrance exams, making telephone sales, and also working, once, at a shoe factory ending in predictable disaster, Mahmiin lived a life in which employment existed purely as abstraction.
It could not be said that Mahmiin sailed through life. He seemed always to have different values, higher values, perhaps, than other people did. His manner of speaking, his bearing, gave him an air of abstemiousness that always made friendship slightly difficult — it was as if one had to always stand up straight next to him. Perhaps the only reason he’d become Yeylan’s friend was because it was simply easier to be friends with someone too passive to resist his dourness. Although Mahmiin had friends from his prep school days, they’d left the university and were already working in industries and financial and government positions, and his choice to become an academic left him alone.
He was always serious about the topics he broached, always a bit overbearing. Tragically, his seriousness was viewed by others as self-importance. Whether he thought the great issues of the day were important, or whether he thought he himself was important because he spoke about them, he cut himself off from other people by constantly pressing at things that they had no interest in. Though he was often going with new girls, and would sometimes even introduce them to Yeylan and me, smiling a little rictically whenever he made these presentations, it seemed that this was less because he was the philanderer that his father was, than because, though it was easy for him to attract women with his good looks, his money, and his self-assuredness, no woman, it seemed, could long put up with his intense, moralistic, over-serious bearing.
There were other pressures that I could glean from the time that I spent with him. He often acted as a courier for his father, who ordered him around the city presumptuously. Often he would put us off for drinks or for coffee at the Duneyahsi because his father was sending him across town delivering paperwork to various offices. This duty, he clearly felt beneath him, and yet it was obvious that he did it to stay in his father’s good graces. His goal was to be rid of his father’s influence, and I think one thing that he liked about me was that he saw me as someone who had escaped the influence of my parents.
Entering university, he had discovered the first inklings of true self-doubt. Shielded from the fear of failure by his assuredness in his own cleverness, he had never felt he would make a wrong choice, but in deciding to pursue entrance into academe, he had made the first consequential decision in his life. At the nightclubs he still occasionally went to, he watched his old friends order champagne, his adolescent peers from prep school, the simpletons, the outright morons, the boors, who had fallen into nepotistic sinecures, laying out outrageous sums of money that he himself could not hope to match.
I liked him for what I thought of as one of the occluded aspects of his personality, one which I became acquainted with only after having known him for a long time, and only after observing his interactions with Yeylan: there was in his thinking, sometimes, a dreaminess that softened his cynicism. There lay at the far edge of his thinking, a borderland of fuzziness that admitted of wild notions, possibilities that he was capable of demolishing, which he stayed his hand at. When Yeylan spoke of the possibility of the unity of the experiencer and perception, he probed Yeylan’s ideas as if proving to himself that the weak points were there, but he never brought up whatever arguments he had developed against them, kept these instead, to himself, questioned Yeylan like a schoolboy, with a softness that he never spoke with. “But how do you account for…?,” he might say, and Yeylan, too kind to take advantage of the temporary reversal of their roles, would speak up with almost exaggerated (theatrical) enthusiasm, point of his finger and say: “Why, I have thought of that! You see, when you consider that…, etc., etc.”
Perhaps he felt a certain envy that Yeylan lived in a world of possibilities. Because Yeylan was insufficiently critical in his thoughts, he enjoyed a certain kind of intellectual freedom, while Mahmiin himself would be trapped by the bare facts which delimited his dismal science: statistical figures, the first and second order consequences of a rational account of human nature, and these limitations were bordered, in the country of his thoughts, by his need to keep up appearances, to smile (unconvincingly) in front of his high school friends when they told him of the trips they were making or when they would grouse about the expense of keeping a flat in some chic part of the city, which would remind him of the many arguments that he had (arguments in which he lacked any leverage) with his father over an allowance that had not greatly increased since the time he was in his teens.
*
The summer came. The city was sweltering, and it was choked on exhaust from the cars that crammed the too-narrow avenues and boulevards, which combined with the water vapor from the sea into a faint smog that gave distant buildings a vague uncommitted look. I’d left the capital in previous summers, and while Mahmiin urged me to do so again, going so far as to offer his parents’ summer home up the coast, I opted to stay in the city. Yeylan had escaped to his hometown where he told us he wanted to make a “fresh attack” on his philosophical work. Mahmiin stayed on in the city with me, and he bore the heat with stoical self-discipline, like an ascetic in a hairshirt — he was too much of a rationalist to actually self-flagellate, but you could see that he was the kind of person who, when the whips came out, did not evade opportunities to cast themselves beneath them.
In the mornings I walked to a cafe, before the heat of the city had risen, I would get up early to write. Perhaps it was the martial atmosphere, but I was inspired again. My muse was Iriane herself, about whom I felt I could write inexhaustibly.
She was in my arms in the morning, and I would feel a mixture of chagrin, desire, as I left her to doze. Did she truly have feelings for me? And what were they? She was evasive when I asked her about her own friends.
In the evenings, when the air cooled, Iriánè and I made cool, languid love until we’d formed wet pools of our sweat on each other’s bodies, which we would wait to cool before we began again. Sated in the morning, I felt no desire, and as the heat rose during the day, it stifled my desire, and it was not until the sun had set that I would feel the familiar desire for her once again.
Mahmiin, for his part, had no difficulty maintaining an even running commentary on the war. I saw him every other day, nearly:
“… that was the summer that the DNF reconstituted itself, they were smuggling arms across the border…”
Even with his window open, his office had a smell now, not only the aroma of the expensive foreign cigarettes that he favored (the prep school habit), or the faint, recurrent fragrance of the cologne he sometimes wore, but the pungent odor of his unwashed clothes.
“… it’s because the government was trying to juice the economic figures by promoting throughput rather than productive economic output…”
His beard, which he’d used to keep carefully trimmed, had grown disheveled from late nights spent in the office. They’d censored a couple of his articles, and he was furious at the management at the newspaper for not revealing whether the censors were on the editorial board or from the government.
“They said it was to protect me from the new sedition laws. I took the opportunity to read them myself. They’re quite punitive: five years for undermining the state in wartime, or for comparing the state to a terrorist party. But I’ve carved out a very specific niche for myself in my articles and editorials. I only state facts. That’s still legal in this country, for now at least.”
He hadn’t been a particularly diligent or meticulous researcher before, but the censorship had nettled him, and he made it a point of pride now that his articles be entirely factually accurate. He spent hours now either at the university library or in his office calling various government departments and sources, hounding them for figures.
When my employers left for the summer holidays, out of a sense of patrician guilt or else a fear that I had some reservations about staying on longer as their son’s tutor, they left me with a “summer bonus,” an envelope with an extraordinary sum of cash that would keep me solvent for months. I understood lightly that the couple who employed me were Mahmiin’s parents and that the boy was a young Mahmiin, and I resolved, when he returned, to do something to shake the severity of our relationship. We would be less serious at our lessons, we would go out of doors more. I would hug him, I would tousle his hair.
The fighting had gotten very bad east of Ijif, and the campaign’s progress had slowed tremendously. The army was under-equipped: spending that should have gone to uniforms, supplies, and maintenance had been depredated by corruption. (Or so went the theory in the newspapers, which had turned against the operation.) The army found itself outgunned at times by DNF fighters, or armored personnel carriers broke down at the front and stalled the army’s movements. The whole thing was underlined by a helicopter crash at the makeshift airbase outside of Ef, which, it was said, owed to inadequate maintenance. And there were reports, intimations in the foreign press, that many civilians were being caught in the crossfire. But the government kept repeating its old line: The operation was being done in a way to minimize civilian casualties. It was the DNF strategy to use civilian as human shields, to take refuge in civilian population centers, and to the extent that there were civilian casualties, the DNF was the cause.
Most of my free days were spent with Iriánè. I bought a TV, so that she could watch her soaps when she was staying over at my place. I ended up watching the news about the war every day. Even at their most cynically propagandistic, the news programs gave grim news, and the jingoistic war footage was cut back. The fighting was undeniably grim, and the anchors weren’t trying to hide this fact.
With the money from my employers, I took her to go and see the tombs at Varenỳs. I remember the way she stepped gingerly among the bleached white rocks on the island, her frock-like sundress, the way her thin fingers traced the tesserae at the south wall, where they’d restored the mosaics. At the restaurant on the mainland, drinking had made her merry, and I remember the way that she picked apart the thin-boned fish, gently lifting the tiny vertebrae from her oily plate, and said: “You’re trying to entice me into the life of a housewife.”
Drinking had made her confessional, and she told me the story of her ex.
“Listen,” she said. “You have to understand what happened to him. He wrote an open letter against the war. Not this operation, but the one from two years ago, when they were fighting in the cities. And he got sacked because of it. It’s important for you to understand that he wasn’t my professor when we started. It wasn’t like that. I came to visit him after they made him leave the university. I thought he’d done something very noble, and I just felt that I had to ask him why he chose to do what he did. We were just talking, for the longest time, for weeks, just talking about, not even that business, but about life, about everything. And then one day I was in love with him. It wasn’t his doing. Everything that happened between us, it was spontaneous.
“And it’s a very cruel thing that they did to him. They kept delaying his trial. Now they’re trying to pin the new sedition law on him, because of the letter, you know. He can’t work. He can’t leave the city. What I liked about him is that he really believed in something. Everyone in this country is cynical or apathetic or afraid. It was refreshing to meet someone who had real views.
“I’m sorry, I know it’s rude to speak about him to you. I was just thinking, because of the war and everything.”
She put her hand on mine. “I just had to tell it to someone.”
*
It hardly ever rained in the eastern provinces. The Kalygar mountain range casts a rain shadow that starves the far east of precipitation. At the summer’s end, a few tempestuous thunderstorms muddied the streets of Ijif and Har’a-kal. The Kal, already reinvigorated by the summer’s snowmelt, swelled with the rainfall. The army had crossed the Kal over the summer and some of the camps had been flooded when the Kal overspilled its banks. The quagmire left the army hamstrung for several days in its push to the border, and the cascading effects on the logistical train threatened to hamper the operation up to the arrival of the first snowfall.
I greeted Yeylan at the bus station. He gave me a bear hug and kissed me on the cheeks. He’d gotten a light tan, and he’d lost weight, stood up straighter than before, a genial towering giant. I asked him if the rumors were true that the operation would be over soon. Some of the DNF leadership had been killed in the final push east of Ijif, a grim operation that had bloodied the army’s best battalions. “It’s what they say back home as well. People are through with their spectacle, and the government doesn’t want the fighting anymore. The fighting can’t be sustained if none of the parties involved can benefit. Oh, but I don’t know. Mahmiin would have more to say.”
“You know he said the same thing you did.”
At Yeylan’s flat, we drank warm beer at his kitchen table and unwrapped some of the minced meat pies that his mother had packed. I told him that he looked well, that he seemed to be standing up straighter these days. He smiled sheepishly, and told me that his cousin had taken him to a brothel where he’d met a girl. “She was very beautiful. Very friendly. I think it unblocked the creative flux.” He’d seen her half a dozen times.
Alarmed, I said: “Well, they have to put on the act, right?” The tactlessness of my response stems from the fact that I was worried that he’d invested himself too much into a woman who wouldn’t reciprocate his feelings, someone who could fleece him, if he wasn’t careful — though, of course, there wasn’t much to fleece. I braced myself, for an outburst, but the look he returned to me was as serene as a prophet’s. “I know it, brother, but in that experience I have been restored. That’s enough for me.”
I considered inviting him for a walk, but he’d already sunk into his kitchen chair, his hands splayed genially over his belly, his eyes beginning to glaze over into drowsy slits. I knew that he would let me stay as long as I wanted to talk, either to return the favor of my helping him bring his things from the bus station, or out of a sense of duty as a host or a friend. I made the excuse that I had to go see Iriánè.
*
When I returned to my apartment, I saw that Iriane had left a message on my answering machine. She was apologetic: Listen, she said, she had made a decision. The thing was that, with her professor, they’d set a date for his trial, and it was going to be in a few months. They were going to try him under the new sedition laws. He’d asked her if she could be with him until then.
She told me that she was in love with him. She sniffled. And that I had to understand that she was in love with me too, but that she loved him more. And she was sorry, was that a shitty thing to say? Was that a shitty way to be? She sniffled. She was sorry. But she had to go and be with him.
My feelings—, she didn’t—, it wasn’t supposed to be this serious — she was just trying to follow her feelings. She was sniffling. Did I understand? Listen, that day at the cafe, when it was raining, she hadn’t been trying to toy with me. She was crying into the phone now. She was sorry if she’d ever made me feel toyed with, it was just how she talked. And was that, was that—She wanted me to know that she was sorry.
*
Before I met Yeylan and Mahmiin, I used to wander the city alone, lose myself in the winding streets and alleys, gape at the remains of the old imperial architecture: the spired cardioid domes of the old imperial palace, painted a blue that often shone finer than the sky above it, the pale, celestially pink domes of the city’s temples. My landlady had installed red curtains on the doorway that led out to the balcony from my bedroom, and in the summertime when I left it open, the pink light that streamed in would give my rooms the aspect of a seraglio.
Along the Boulevard of the Revolution, the sidewalks were packed with evening strollers. Off the side streets, one could step into little piazzas that housed only a single superannuated tree that had outlived dynasties, ringed by cafe tables where old men sat gambling over endless games of backgammon. It was twilight, and the sky was the color of salmon, the summer still clung to its luxuriantly long days. I thought of Yeylan on the day that I’d seen him at metro station by the quay, the day the offensive had been announced. The way he’d looked out at the turbulent sea, in his black coat, the wind whipping up his thinning hair. I thought he’d cut a very noble figure then, his disquiet not cowardice, but a lone, defiant sanity in a mad world. It was this image that I returned to as I wandered the streets that evening. I walked restlessly, with only a vague sense of a destination, catching a glimpse here and there, against the darkening sky, above the buildings that surrounded me, of a distant spire that I used to orient myself by in my first lonely months in the city. I stepped out of a narrow side street and found myself on a heavily trafficked avenue. And then I was lost among the crowds.