Fury (28 page)

There were no tourists to be seen. (The flight to Blefuscu had been more than two thirds empty.) Few women were on the street, apart from the surprisingly large number of female FRM cadres, and no children.

Many stores were closed and barricaded; others remained warily open, and people-men-were still going about their daily tasks. Guns, however, were everywhere to be seen, and in the distance, from time to time, sporadic shooting could be heard. The police force was collaborating with the FRM personnel to maintain a measure of law and order; the Ruritanian joke of an army remained in its barracks, although the leading generals were involved in the complex negotiations taking place behind the scenes for long hours every day. FRM negotiators were meeting with the ethnic Elbee chiefs, as well as religious and business leaders. “Commander Akasz” was at least trying to give the impression of a man looking for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. But civil war bubbled just beneath the surface. Skyresh Bolgolam may have been defeated and captured, but the large proportion of Elbee youths who had backed the failed Bolgolamite coup were licking their wounds and no doubt plotting their next move. Meanwhile, the international community was moving quickly toward declaring Lilliput-Blefuscu the world’s smallest pariah state, suspending trade agreements and freezing aid programs. In these moves Solanka had seen his opportunity.

Motorcycle outriders surrounded the station wagon, escorting it to the heavily defended perimeter walls of the parliamentary compound.

The gates opened and the vehicle passed through, proceeding to a service entrance at the rear of the central complex. The kitchen entrance, thought Solanka with a wry private smile, was the true gate of power. Many people, functionaries or supplicants, could enter the great houses of power through their front doors. But to get into a service elevator, watched by white-hatted chefs and sous-chefs, to be borne slowly upward in an unornamented box with silent masked men and women all around you: that really was important. To emerge into an undistinguished bureaucratic corridor and be led through a series of increasingly unpretentious rooms was to walk down the true pathway to the center. Not bad for a dollmaker, he told himself. You’re in. Let’s see if you get out with what you want. In fact, let’s see if you manage to get out at all.

At the end of the sequence of interconnecting, blank backrooms came a room with a single door. Inside were the now-familiar spartan furnishings: a desk, two canvas chairs, a ceiling light, a filing cabinet, a telephone. He was left alone to wait. He picked up the phone; there was a dial tone, and a small label on the instrument told him to dial 9 for an outside line. As a precaution, he had researched and memorized several numbers: that of a local newspaper, the American, British, and Indian embassies, a legal practice. He tried dialing these, but each time heard a woman’s recorded voice saying, in English, Hindi, and Lilliputian, “That number cannot be dialed from this telephone.” He tried dialing the emergency services. No luck. “That number cannot be dialed.” What we have here, he told himself, is not a telephone at all but only the outward appearance or mask of a telephone. Just as this room is only wearing the costume of an office but is in fact a prison cell. No doorknob on the inside of the door. The single window: small and barred. He went over to the filing cabinet and pulled at a drawer. Empty. Yes, this was a stage set, and he had been cast in a play, but nobody had given him the script.

“Commander Akasz” swept in four hours later. By this time Solanka’s remaining confidence had all but evaporated. “Akasz” was accompanied by two young Fremen too lowly to be in costume, and followed into the room by a Steadicam operator, a boom-carrying sound recordist and-Solanka’s heart bounded with excitement-a woman wearing camouflage fatigues and a “Zameen of Rijk” mask: concealing her face behind an imitation of itself.

“That body,” Solanka greeted her, striving for lightness. “I’d know it again anywhere.” This didn’t go down especially well. “What are you here for?” Neela burst out, then disciplined herself. “Excuse me, Commander. I apologize.” Babur, in the “Akasz Kronos” outfit, was no longer the crestfallen, abashed young man Solanka remembered from Washington Square. He spoke in a barking voice that did not expect disagreements.
The mask acts,
Solanka remembered. “Commander Akasz,” the great man-mountain, had become a big man in this very small pond, and was acting the part. Not so big, Solanka noted, as to be immune from the Neela effect. Babur walked with a long, sweeping stride, but after every dozen steps or so, his foot somehow managed to come down on the hem of his swirling cloak, forcing his neck to jerk awkwardly back. He also managed to collide, within a minute of entering Solanka’s cell, with the table and both the chairs. This, even when her face was hidden by a mask! She never failed to exceed Solanka’s expectations. He, however, had disappointed hers. Now he must see if he could surprise her.

Babur had already acquired the royal we. “We are familiar with you, naturally,” he said without preamble. “Who right now is not cognizant of the creator of the Puppet Kings? No doubt you have good reasons for presenting yourself,” he said, with a half turn of his body toward Neela Mahendra. No fool, then, Solanka thought. No point denying what he already knows to be true. “Our conundrum is, what shall we do with you? Sister Zameen? Something to say?” Neela shrugged. “Send him home,” she said in a dull, uninterested voice that shook Solanka. “I’ve got no use for him.” Babur laughed. “The sister says you are useless, Professor Sahib. Are you so? Jolly good! Shall we throw you in the bin?”

Solanka launched into his prepared spiel. “My proposal,” he said, “which I have come a long way to make, is this: allow me to be your intermediary. Your connection with my project needs no comment from me. We can give you a link to a mass global audience, to win hearts and minds. This you urgently need to do. The tourist industry is already as dead as your legendary Hurgo bird. If you lose your export markets and the support of the major regional powers, this country will be bankrupt within weeks, certainly within months. You need to persuade people that your cause is just, that you are fighting for democratic principles, not against them. For the repudiated Golbasto constitution, I mean. You need to give that mask a human face. Let Neela and me work on this with my New York people, on a complimentary basis. Consider it pro bono work on a freedom movement’s behalf “This is how far he was prepared to go for love, his unspoken thoughts said to Neela. Her cause was his. If she forgave him, he would be the servant of all her desires.

“Commander Akasz” waved the idea away. “The situation has developed,” he said. “Other parties-bad eggs, the lot of them!-have been intransigent. As a result we also have hardened our stance.” Solanka didn’t follow. “We have demanded total executive authority,” he said. “No more nambying or pambying. What is needed in Filbistan is for a real chap to take charge. Isn’t that so, sister?” Neela was silent. “Sister?” repeated Babur, turning to face her and raising his voice; and she, lowering her head, answered almost inaudibly, “Yes.” Babur nodded. “A period of discipline,” he said. “If we say the moon is made of cheese, then of what, sister, is it made?” “Cheese,” said Neela in the same low voice. “And if we tell you the world is flat? What shape is it?” “Flat, Commander.” “And if tomorrow we decree that the sun goes round the earth?” “Then, Commander, the sun it will be that goes around.” Babur nodded with satisfaction. “Jolly good! That is the message for the world to grasp,” he said. “A leader has arisen in Filbistan, and it is for everyone to follow, or suffer the needful consequences. Oh, by the by, Professor, you have studied ideas at the University of Cambridge in England, isn’t it. Therefore be so good as to enlighten us on a vexed point: is it better to be loved or feared?” Solanka did not answer. “Come, come, Professor,” Babur urged. “Make your good effort! You can do better than that.” The FRM cadres accompanying “Commander Akasz” began to fiddle meaningfully with their Uzis. In an expressionless voice, Solanka quoted Machiavelli. “ ‘Men are less hesitant about harming someone who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared.’” He began to speak with greater animation, and looked directly at Neela Mahendra. “ ‘Because love is held together by a chain of obligation which, since men are a sorry lot, is broken on every occasion in which their own self-interest is concerned; but fear is held together by a dread of punishment which will never abandon you.’” Babur brightened. “Good egg,” he cried, thumping Solanka on the back. “You aren’t useless after all! So, so. We’ll think about your proposal. Jolly good! Stay awhile. Be our guest. We already have the president and Mr. Bolgolam in residence. You, too, will witness these first bright hours of our beloved Filbistan, upon which the sun never sets. Sister, be so kind as to confirm. How often does the sun go down?” And Neela Mahendra, who had always carried herself like a queen, bowed her head like a slave and said, “Commander, it never does.”

The cell-he had stopped thinking of it as a room-did not contain a bed, and lacked even the most rudimentary toilet facilities. Humiliation was the stock-in-trade of “Commander Akasz,” as his treatment of Neela had amply demonstrated. Solanka perceived that he was to be humiliated, too. Time passed; he lacked a watch by which to measure it. The breeze faded and died. Night, the ideologically incorrect, nonexistent night, grew humid, thickened and stretched. He had been given a bowl of unidentifiable mush to eat and a jug of suspect water. He tried to resist both, but hunger and thirst were tyrants, and in the end he did eat and drink. After that he wrestled with nature until the inevitable moment of defeat. When he could no longer contain himself, he pissed and shat wretchedly in a corner, taking off his shirt and wiping himself with it as best he could. It was hard not to fall into solipsism, hard not to see these degradations as a punishment for a clumsy, hurtful life. Lilliput-Blefuscu had reinvented itself in his image. Its streets were his biography, patrolled by figments of his imagination and altered versions of people he had known: Dubdub and Perry Pincus were here in their sci-fi versions, also mask-and-costume incarnations of Sara Lear and Eleanor Masters, Jack Rhinehart and Sky Schuyler, and Morgen Franz. There were even space-age Wislawas and Schlinks walking the Mildendo streets, as well as Mila and Neela and himself. The masks of his life circled him sternly, judging him. He closed his eyes and the masks were still there, whirling. He bowed his head before their verdict. He had wished to be a good man, to lead a good man’s life, but the truth was he hadn’t been able to hack it. As Eleanor had said, he had betrayed those whose only crime was to have loved him. When he had attempted to retreat from his darker self, the self of his dangerous fury, hoping to overcome his faults by a process of renunciation, of giving up, he had merely fallen into new, more grievous error. Seeking his redemption in creation, offering up an imagined world, he had seen its denizens move out into the world and grow monstrous; and the greatest monster of them all wore his own guilty face. Yes, deranged Babur was a mirror of himself. Seeking to right a grave injustice, to be a servant of the Good, “Commander Akasz” had come off at the hinges and become grotesque.

Malik Solanka told himself he deserved no better than this. Let the worst befall. In the midst of the collective fury of these unhappy isles, a fury far greater, running far deeper than his own pitiful rage, he had discovered a personal Hell. So be it. Of course Neela would never return to him. He was not worthy of happiness. When she came to see him, she had hidden her lovely face.

It was still dark when help came. The cell door opened and a young Indo-Lilly man entered, bare-faced, wearing rubber gloves and carrying a roll of plastic refuse sacks as well as a bucket, pan, and mop. He cleaned up Solanka’s mess unflinchingly and with great delicacy, never seeking to catch the perpetrator’s eye. When he had finished, he returned with clean clothes--a pale green kurta and white pantaloon pajamas-as well as a clean towel, two new buckets, one empty, one full of water, and a bar of soap. “Please,” he said, and, “I am sorry,” and then left. Solanka washed and changed and felt a little more himself. Then Neela arrived, alone, unmasked, in a mustard-colored dress, with a blue iris in her hair.

It obviously preyed on her mind that Solanka had witnessed her timorous responses to her treatment by Babur. “Everything I’ve done, everything I’m doing, is for the story,” she said. “Wearing the mask was a gesture of solidarity, a way of earning the fighters’ trust. Also, you know, I’m here to look at what they’re doing, not to have them look at me. I could see you thought I was hiding from you behind it. That wasn’t so. Similarly with Babur. I’m not here to argue. I’m making a film.” She sounded defensive, taut. “Malik,” she said abruptly, “I don’t want to talk about us, okay? I’m caught up in something big right now. My attention has to be there.”

He went for it, gathered himself and made his play. All or nothing, Hollywood or bust: he would never get another chance. He might not have much of one anyway, but at least she had come to see him, had actually dressed up for it, and that was a good sign. “This has become much more than a documentary film project for you,” he said. “This really goes to the heart. There’s a lot riding on it-your uprooted roots are pulling hard. Your paradoxical desire to be a part of what you left. And, no, I didn’t really think you were wearing the mask to hide your face from me, or at least that wasn’t the only thing I thought. I also thought you were hiding from yourself, from the decision you’ve made somewhere along the line to cross a line and become a participant in this thing. You don’t look like an observer to me. You’re in too deep. Maybe it started out with a personal feeling about Babur-and don’t worry, this isn’t jealousy speaking, at least I’m trying hard not to let it be- but my guess is that whatever your feelings about ‘Commander Akasz’ were, they’re a lot more ambiguous now. Your problem is that