2084 by Sansal Boualem

Author:Sansal Boualem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2016-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

And so, two weeks before the fateful day, early in the morning, at the hour of the mockba crier, carrying their bundles and armed with richly stamped documents testifying to their condition as honest civil servants on a secret mission to the Ministry of Archives, Sacred Books, and Holy Memories, Ati and Koa crossed the last boundaries of their neighborhood; their hearts were pounding fit to burst, but off they headed, straight for the Abigov. They even had a map, sketched for them by old Gog, the guardian of archives, who seemed to recall that one day, not long before the third Great Holy War, or just afterwards, when he was working as personal messenger boy to the ômdi, his excellency the Bailiff, he had gone with him to the Abigov, and had seen such marvels there, impressive buildings like granite mountains with endless corridors and tunnels that vanished into the subterranean night; indescribable machines, some as noisy as cataclysms and others that were ever so stressful, just blinking and jangling in a sort of never-ending countdown; file sorters and networks of pneumatic tubes more complex than a human brain; industrial presses that spat out the Holy Gkabul and Abi’s poster in millions of copies; and everywhere, on their own or in teams, there were masses of people, all highly focused and stiff in their gleaming burnis: visibly, they belonged to a transcendent species. They were inhabited by a cold wisdom, but perhaps it was just extinguished madness, ash after fire. They did not speak, looked neither to the right nor to the left, each one did exactly as they were told. Life in them was cold, absent, at best residual, in any case very basic; habit had settled in instead and had created a very precise system of automatic interaction. It was these robots who made Abistan work, but they were not necessarily aware of the fact; their sense of smell was not strong enough to sniff out such things, and they never saw the light of day: the religion they served and the rules of the System forbade it. Between labor and prayer they had just time enough to hurry to the tunnels that would take them back to their kasbahs. The local siren sounded only once, and the convoy wouldn’t wait. Outside their routine, from which they never deviated, they were lumpish and blind. If they stumbled or strayed, they were discharged from service and discarded or scrapped. As potential misfits they would worry their colleagues, neighbors, and loved ones, who in turn would become misfits. Through this method of preventing contagion, the ranks thinned rapidly, as worry and awkwardness were epidemics in themselves. That is how things were in Abistan; the country had its destiny, it believed in Yölah and Abi in this faithful, intransigent way, which incited it to believe ever more fervently, ever more blindly.

In the space of only a day or two, the friends had acquired a solid confidence, going from one street to the next as if there were no borders, no taboos, no rules of good neighborly behavior.

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