The Silence and the Roar (2 page)

This was all happening just a step away. An organizer stared at me with bloodshot eyes and just as he reached out to shove me along in front of him I held out my arms to stop him. He mistook me for one of those who had tried to sneak away from the march. He didn’t try to stretch out his arms any farther but he didn’t pull them back either; he
just stood there, frozen, and even though he hadn’t asked for clarification, I detected the inquisitive look on his face.

“This is my home.”

“You live here?”

“Yes.”

“So why aren’t you participating in the march?”

“I’m not a government employee and I don’t belong to a union. I’m a writer. Fathi Sheen.”

This piece of information seemed to make him even more hostile.

“Identification,” he demanded fiercely. I showed him my ID and he looked it over. His comrade finished expelling everyone from the entryway and then walked over. He took my ID and read my personal information in silence.

“Fucking cunt traitor,” the first one said with the same ferocity.

I thanked him. The second one handed back my ID and looked at me the way one might look at rubbish. Then they both turned around and stormed off, roughly pushing their way through the hordes to get out. I swallowed the insult and just stood there, calm and silent. I could no longer bear the swelling noise so I moved closer to the bellowing horde that had been shaped into rows. As soon as I took one step outside, the crowd pulled me along, whisking me far away from the entrance to my building.

After two hundred yards the sidewalk became less crowded. I stopped outside a pharmacy to watch the crowd. The pharmacist’s awning shielded me from the sun and a breeze started blowing that dried my sweat. It was a decent spot, one that allowed me to monitor one person who was
particularly raucous. In spite of his weight this Comrade was being carried on someone else’s shoulders as he chanted, toward what must have been nearly a hundred and fifty people, clapping at them while they repeated whatever he had just chanted. I noticed how badly he had been scorched by the blazing sun. Sweat coated his reddened face, the veins in his neck were bulging and taut, his mouth wide open. He shouted slogans; he didn’t just recite them, shouting in a booming voice that shot forth from his iron throat that seemed to have been created for this very purpose.

Some people are born to belong to the ruling party, which loves organizing marches such as this one, people whose corporeal abilities are tailor-made to guide the masses. People like him. If I tried shouting like that I would lose my voice after fifteen minutes, but this Comrade, who I suspect had been carrying on like this from the very start of the march, still had strength and solidity in his voice. The Comrade who has been bearing him on his shoulders this whole time must have a sturdy body that is capable of carrying two hundred pounds for a while, relying on his two hands for balance even as he also strains to yell out the chants at the top of his lungs. Straining like this must make his burden even heavier, and if we add on top of that the heat and his suffocating position, with his head sandwiched between the thick thighs of the man on top of him, and if we add on top of
that
the noise and the clapping and the chants being repeated by a hundred and fifty throats, I do not envy this man who carries a greater load than any bull in the world ever has. All for the Leader.

From a certain angle I could just make out the face of the carrier Comrade. When the procession stopped the chanter was right there in front of me. I felt a kind of lightness watching the carrier’s face squashed between the thighs of the chanter on top, and I say that I felt lightness because there wasn’t even a small bird pressing down on my shoulders. I was standing on the pharmacy doorstep, enjoying the shade with my arms folded across my chest. The carrier was chanting, too: should I say I was amazed or found it strange or was surprised? It wasn’t enough for him to carry his Comrade in that suffocating position; he thought it incumbent upon him to chant as well. A hundred and fifty throats participating in this convoy isn’t enough for the Leader—he needs that one extra throat to chant along. The slogan has a rhythm and the hundred and fifty people were clapping loudly and jumping up and down as they repeated those slogans that were belted out by the man being carried around. Everyone holding up pictures of the Leader started waving them around as some skipped to the rhythm of the slogan, raising the picture up as high as their arms would go.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: in my country slogans are arranged into lines of rhyming poetry. I’m sure that the Party has a research institute somewhere dedicated to drafting and crafting slogans according to the particular needs of the era. The masses, our masses, are raised on metered slogans. Every era has a slogan that is repeated nonstop. A few moments earlier I heard a brand new slogan that had been drafted in order to make the people praise God for having created them during the Age of the Leader. The
man being carried started off his slogan like this, “R … R … Our Leader,” and the crowd would repeat after him, “R … R … Our Leader.” What does that “R” even mean? So long as it rhymed, they would repeat the same line over and over again with ecstatic pleasure. In my country people love rhymed speech and rhymed prose and inspirational metered verse. Just watch how they will repeat phrases that have no meaning whatsoever but that rhyme perfectly well. In the end this means that if the ruler wants the masses to adore him he must immediately set up a center dedicated to the production of new slogans about him, on the condition that they resemble poetry, because we are a people who love poetry so much that we love things that only resemble poetry. We might even be satisfied with only occasionally rhyming speech, regardless of its content. Didn’t someone say that the era of mass politics is the era of poetry? If so, then the reverse is also true, because poetry is geared toward the masses, just as the prose that I am now writing is intended for the individual. This must be why the slogans of the French Revolution weren’t composed as poetry, Mirabeau notwithstanding; rather, prose was the mainstay of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Prose is oriented toward rational minds and individuals whereas poetry directs and is directed toward the masses. It isn’t strange that the curtailment of poetry began in the West. Poetry inspires zealotry and melts away individual personality, whereas prose molds the rational mind, individuality and personality. Finally, I would like to point out that my country still lives in the Age of the Masses, which is why metered speech and rhyming verses are a fundamental requirement in our life. My works
and prose writings are the imaginations of a traitor and a fucking cunt, as the man in khaki was kind enough to remind me a little while ago.

But let’s return to the hundred and fifty people being led by the carrier and the man on top, because the march was on the move again as that noisy human mass started pulling away from my resting spot on the pharmacy steps. A large group of secondary school students approached, all dressed in matching pseudo-military uniforms that we call khaki. They roared even louder than the first group and were led by another man being carried on the shoulders of a volunteer, or perhaps his carrier was an athletic coach, as I’m inclined to believe. The organizer was shouting slogans into a battery-powered handheld megaphone. They were repeating the same slogans but in a more distinct manner, which might have had something to do with the fact that they were educated students, pronouncing the slogan correctly, without mumbling its words, “One, two, three, four, we love the Leader more and more.” I would like to describe this roar for you, if that is even possible for me because the megaphone the student leader shouted through was but one of a total of three assorted noisemakers that were blasting my eardrums at that moment. There were two loudspeakers suspended high above us that I had heard from my house, but now one of them was broadcasting inspirational songs while an announcer with a loud and decisive voice that inspires enthusiasm and affection for the Leader in the hearts of the masses was speaking through the second.

That voice addressed the masses—“O citizens, O citizens”—and then proceeded to describe the affection the
masses have for the Leader—also known as the Boss—and the affection the Leader has for his people. In his opinion, the masses were merely a small fraction of this world that adores the Leader because there are also trees and birds and clouds and … by God, even the stones and the dirt tremble as the Leader’s feet tread upon them. The announcer also declared that the Leader would guide the people to divine victory.

Now I’d like to make a comparison here between the loud speech the announcer made through the megaphone during the march and the sports commentary during football matches that are broadcast on television. Both commentators talk for the sake of talking, just to say something to the audience, to get them riled up to the point of zealotry. Even if the difference between the two may seem substantial, the similarity lies in stirring up the enthusiasm of the masses. While the sportscaster describes what he is actually seeing on the field, our marchcaster describes something that isn’t there at all but strives to make the masses believe in it. The sports announcer must take into account the existence of two competing teams, while there is only one perfectly united team present at our marches, a consummate team that must eliminate all traces of individuality in the crowd and turn all those individuals into droplets in a raging human flood. Any hint of individuality is a threat directed at the Leader’s supremacy—what else would be the point of bringing together those crowds if not the elimination of every trace of individuality? Besides, the formation of these marching torrents of humanity is not merely the aggregation of specks in order to make them flow in a particular
direction; no, the megaphone announcer is rather meant to help bring together the psychological and intellectual flow of the crowd. When he says that human beings and stones and trees all love the Leader, he is addressing every single speck in that crowd; making each and every one of them believe what they are hearing in that moment, without the use of any logic whatsoever; eliminating any judgment about thought or personality or love among the individuals in this human stream; and corralling the raging emotional flood toward the Leader.

The roar produced by the chants and the megaphones eliminates thought. Thought is retribution, a crime, treason against the Leader. And insofar as calm and tranquillity can incite a person to think, it is essential to drag out the masses to these roaring marches every once in a while to brainwash them and keep them from committing the crime of thought. What else could be the point of all that noise? Love for the Leader requires no thought; it’s axiomatic. And the Leader doesn’t ask you to enumerate the reasons driving you to love him so. You must love him for who he is, simply because he is, and any thought given to the reason why might cause you to—God forbid—stop loving him one day because you might find, by chance, for example, that his eyes blink continuously whenever he speaks and that you have disliked that habit ever since you were young, and your love for him may start to diminish, which is, after all, a very grave sin indeed.

Even though I mentioned a reason for these marches, getting the masses out into the streets requires no special occasion. The justifications are always there: the Leader likes
marches and can designate any given day for the people to descend into the streets in some particular city so he can sit back and watch it all on TV. This doesn’t have to take place on the same day in every city. If the occasion happens to be, as it was in this case, the twentieth anniversary of the Leader’s coming to power, the marches must begin a week before the anniversary and end one week afterward. Every city has to come out on a certain day so the television crews can film the marches, air them live and then archive them. Some people say that a copy of the recording is sent to an archive in the Leader’s palace so he can watch them in his spare time.

So we were in the season of celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the Leader coming to power, nothing more. While I stood on the steps outside a pharmacy, under an awning that protected me from the scorching sunshine, the march went on and the noise climbed to a crescendo as pictures of the Leader were hoisted higher above the heads of the masses.

Off to my left I detected an unusual movement and saw three Comrades in khaki uniforms rushing inside a building, shoving everyone they bumped into out of their way. As soon as they went in some secondary school students came running out. They were frightened and easily managed to melt back into the stream of the masses. Some people stopped to watch what was going on inside the building and I moved in to have a closer look. The glare from the sun blinded me at first. I couldn’t make out anything more than the anguished cries of someone being subjected to a violent beating. As I drew closer the scene came into
focus. All three men were pummeling one of those students even as he tried to deflect their punches and protect his body. He knew how dearly it would cost him if he tried to defend himself by actually fighting back. The young man collapsed onto the ground and they proceeded to stomp on him with their heavy boots. After a moment, once the film had completely evaporated from his eyes, I found him staring up at me with tortured and beseeching eyes. How can I describe that gaze? He was imploring me to step in and save him because he wasn’t sure that his friends or the soldiers were going to do anything. He had already lost a tooth. Blood was gushing out of his mouth, staining his face and his neck, then his clothes and the ground they dragged him across. Unmoved, he continued staring up at me even as he was kicked all over his body.

I had spent twenty years trying not to get involved in affairs involving the Comrades, purposefully avoiding them, but the sight of that young man’s beseeching eyes pressed me to do something. Drawing closer, I grabbed the arm of one of the Comrades until he and the other two stopped their stomping. The young man writhed in pain and spat up blood.