Travels in Nihilon (6 page)

A ten-year-old boy dressed in a long-trousered suit, wearing a bow tie, and with his hair slicked flat by grease, lounged under a sign saying WELCOME TO NIHILON, but as Adam rode by a stone caught him painfully on the shoulder. He stopped and shouted: ‘You vicious little bastard!'

The child burst into tears, and hearing the disturbance, a man in a customs officer's cap ran from the house, calling:

‘Anything to declare?'

Adam got back on his seat and rode straight at him, speeding over the rivulet that ran across the road, so that he splashed the man's overalls and sandals as he began to repeat: ‘Anything to declare?'

He went swiftly along the village street towards the main square, his lungs almost bursting in getting clear of this bogus customs man who seemed nothing more than another Nihilon peasant out on the make. If, however, he was genuine, then he could only congratulate himself on having passed through the second and final obstacle into Nihilon so painlessly.

Along one side of the large square was a line of six sky-blue tourist buses. The rest of the space was tightly occupied by a vast crowd of people. Though it was the hottest part of the day, they seemed by and large happy, as if everyone had just eaten an ample and satisfying meal. In the middle of the square, on a raised platform, a young man with long blond hair was about to make a speech. An older man, wearing a dark suit, dark spectacles, and carrying a black briefcase, mounted the platform and began talking to him, as if prompting him on what to say, for the young man listened respectfully.

Adam pushed towards the middle, but couldn't get far among so many people. A young man with a child on his shoulder stood next to him, and Adam asked what was happening.

‘You won't travel far on that bicycle,' the man said. ‘Why don't you get on one of those buses?'

‘I don't want to.'

‘They're going to the front.'

‘He's a foreigner,' said the child from on high.

‘Shut up,' his father snapped. He gave Adam a friendly smile. ‘They belong to War Tours, a very popular holiday organization here that does great business whenever there's an outbreak at the frontier. Of course, they can be expensive, though they cater for all purses. War Tours are cheapest. You just camp on a hill or spur, and are given a bit of a map and binoculars so that you can see what goes on. That's the seven-day tour, and costs a thousand kricks, inclusive. If you take a fourteen-day holiday they drive you close enough to be bombed and shelled, and that's more exciting, but also more expensive. Better still, you can stand in a muddy trench with a rifle and bayonet to beat off an attack. That's an even higher price. But a three-week five-star holiday is best, at ten thousand kricks. You get all the other things plus, at the end of it, the glory of a mass attack over the wire, with the optional extra of an artificial limb after your spell in a tent hospital. Mind you, there's a long waiting-list for all categories, but I'm in the know with the organizers, and I happen to have a few application forms.' He drew a bundle of papers from his back pocket and waved them under Adam's nose. ‘So tell me which tour you want, then I'll fill in one of these and get you on a bus tomorrow morning. You'll have the time of your life, believe me.'

‘It's very kind of you,' said Adam, ‘but no thank you.'

The man's face turned ugly. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I told you he was a foreigner,' said his son.

‘Curse it,' the man said, ‘I haven't sold any this week.' He threw the papers in the air, and they blew in all directions, so that people began scrabbling for them, though on learning what they were they dropped them quickly.

The crowd became silent, sensing that the speech was about to begin. ‘Gentlemen and Ladies,' shouted the young man, bent and twisted, swaying like a crippled sapling. ‘Nihilists! Listen to me. Listen to the greatest news of all time.' For several minutes he mumbled and spluttered, nodding his head and waving his arms, making a few vague references to the goodness of President Nil, and the value of living pure upright nihilistic lives; but finally, ringing clear above all heads, was made a most astonishing claim, directly affecting everyone present:

‘We have abolished …' Even before the last word, cheering and shouts of glee broke from many parts of the square, as if some of the people's secret hopes had been unwittingly leaked out during sweaty and endless days of discussion:

‘We have abolished … death!' he shouted.

Wild cheering caught up those thousands in the sunlight as the speech went on, though it was impossible that everyone heard the final words of his dramatic and historical pronouncement. No one had ever said it before, it seemed, and now, for the first time, such a promise had been made! The whole population was caught up in hysterical and genuine happiness, and even Adam was affected by it, as the marvellous words screamed out clear and plain once more: ‘We have abolished death!' – a message stroking his fundamental nerves as if heaven, or at least a form of it, were really here at last.

A man nearby, with tears of joy in his eyes, took Adam's lapels and held him fast: ‘Oh, my dear friend, it's not the first time. Oh no. It has happened before. We were happy once for three days. A voice of intellect, authority, and youth said that death has been abolished! The whole town went wild with happiness, so that people heard of it in neighbouring villages and came to join in. So much happiness! It went on and on, and the three days seemed an eternity.'

His voice became sad, though his eyes couldn't relinquish their glazed hilarious expectation: ‘But then troops were called to restore order, and drive us back to our jobs. It was all right to abolish death, but we still had to work. In the fighting several people had no way of proving whether that young man up there was right or wrong in saying that death had been abolished because we never saw them again. But the temporary joy of the town at his news was certainly genuine, as it is now.' He walked away, weeping and tearing at his shirt.

The whole mass surged against the platform, though Adam made his way to the edge of the crowd, then to quieter streets on the other side of the square, so that he could continue his journey. The monumental insanity of the young man's pronouncement had for a few moments lifted him into the same wild unseeing happiness as the crowd, his eyes brimming with tears, his head spinning, hands at his temples as if ready for some final ecstatic take-off. But, pedalling through emptier streets, the normal bleak expectant sadness of a poet's life returned.

Chapter 8

It was difficult not to despair when the train pulled out of the station with all her luggage on it. But she bravely fought away the tears, and asked the woman at the ticket booth to direct her to the local police office.

‘You wouldn't buy a return ticket,' said the woman spitefully, ‘so I'm not going to tell you where the police chief lives.'

Jaquiline opened her purse and passed her a two-klipp coin. ‘Three,' the woman said. When Jaquiline gave in wearily, the woman held her hand and commiserated as if they were old friends: ‘What a shock for you. I saw it all. He's done that twice this week already. But don't you worry. He's always brought back. Now, if you go right to the end of this platform you'll see a hut, by the siding. Outside it there'll be a man watering his flowers. That's the chief of police. He's the one to tell your troubles to.'

Jaquiline hurried off without thanking her. Like other frontier stations, it was only busy at certain times, and because the main train for Nihilon City had left, it was almost deserted, though she was annoyed to see several porters standing idly around now that they were no longer needed.

The platform was long, and it took some time to get to the end of it and down to the level of the line. She then walked on the small broken stones, a difficult and painful process in high-heeled shoes, and she was more than pleased when she saw the chief of police's hut a few hundred metres away.

His humble dwelling was surrounded by a flower garden, a square of lavish and brilliant colours, through which a neat path led to the door. A porcine yet kindly-looking man wearing riding boots walked slowly up and down with a watering can. A short way beyond this delightful oasis was the dividing line between Nihilon and Cronacia, bristling with enormous coils of rusty barbed wire.

When Jaquiline waved, the chief of police looked up, put down his watering can, and came towards her. ‘Hello, my dear! I hope you've had a pleasant trip, so far?'

He took his tunic from the fence, threw himself clumsily into it, and buttoned it tight like a corset. ‘Yes,' he nodded hearing her story while they stood on the path, ‘that's an extremely serious complaint. You'd better come inside so that I can make my notes. It's too hot out here.'

It was an amiable and pleasant reception, and so she followed him in without hesitation. Nihilon was at last showing humane tendencies, she thought, if it set the chief of police's office among a grove of such beautiful flowers. The hut was sparsely furnished, with a desk down one side, and a bench opposite on which new books were displayed. She went over to look at their covers and titles: ‘I'm glad to see you're so interested in the printed word,' she said with a smile.

‘The printed word,' he said, looking closely into her eyes, ‘is the basis of Nihilon's civilization. I don't know where any of us nihilists would be without the printed word. The printed word is all-powerful if you are striving for absolute nihilism. It was our first ally, the printed word. As soon as we original Nihilists realized the force of the printed word, we knew that sooner or later we must triumph. The printed word is wonderful in that you can do anything with it. Not only can it be read in secret but it can be shouted into a microphone, or splashed on to every wall. They say that President Nil has a printed word illuminated in a niche in the wall of his bedroom, but nobody knows what it is, and no one dares try to guess. But we all adore him even more for this worship of the printed word.'

During what she considered this pernicious drivel she took out her notebook and examined the display of volumes more closely. They were mostly novels with nonsensical titles, though one book, which she picked up to examine, had blank pages inside. Another was no more than a box with an artificial flower in it. One contained printed pages that resembled a railway timetable, while the most interesting novelty had a gun attached to the stiff cover when she lifted it up, as if showing the author's absolute contempt for the printed word, of which there was not a sign.

‘I have a shop, you see,' said the chief of police. ‘And I sell mainly books and flowers.'

‘Your writers are ingenious,' she smiled.

‘These books are all collector's pieces,' he sighed. ‘I only retail the best. Our writers of Nihilon have no problems. How can they, being Nihilists? There are no rules. They write, and so they are understood. It is automatic, no matter what they write, whether it's history, geography, psychology, pornography, botany, monotony, devilism, syphilism, bigamy, polygamy, or sodomy. You name it, they write it. Half our authors are thin and phthisical, and languish for death; the other half are monstrously fat and slothful, and so are prone to heart attack, high blood pressure, gout and palsy, but with a fantastic built-in drive for life. So if you'd be generous enough, dear lady, to buy one of their books I'd be extremely grateful. And so would they, as you can imagine. Not many cultured foreigners come this way to purchase my wares.'

A large transfer of money would be waiting for her in Nihilon City, so she could afford to be extravagant in face of such extortion which, at this point of her adventures, seemed quite skilful and amusing. ‘I'll buy this one,' she said, appearing to choose at random the volume with the gun inside and paying his price of two hundred klipps.

The back of the hut had an embrasure built into it, out of which pointed a heavy machine gun, mounted on a tripod and pre-aimed at the frontier wire. ‘In Nihilon everyone has several jobs,' he told her, putting the money under a blotter on his desk. ‘Besides being chief of police of this town, I am a bookseller and a gardener. I'm also employed as a frontier guard, so that for every Cronacian spy I kill as he tries to cross into Nihilon, I'm paid three hundred klipps. It's not much, but if I shoot two a week it helps to keep my wife and nine children, as well as my mistress and twelve children.'

‘Twelve?' she exclaimed.

‘Soon to be fourteen, alas,' he said. ‘But never mind. We don't despair in Nihilon. There can't be too many of us, menaced as we are by the barbarian predators of Cronacia.' He went close and looked into her eyes: ‘I love you.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said, stepping back, and realizing that he was short-sighted, ‘I only came here to make a complaint.'

‘I know,' he said, ‘I arranged it. I have all these different occupations, but in my spare time I play God. Perhaps I'll get that job as well, one day, though President Nil has it at the moment.' He put his arms around her and pulled her close to his large chest.

She struggled. ‘Let me go. You must be mad.'

‘Do you think so?' he sighed, kissing her lips. ‘All my life I've wanted to go mad, and I keep trying very hard, as I suppose everyone does in good old glorious Nihilon, but I can't do it. Not yet. I keep trying though, because I hope to. What bliss it would be to go mad. I can't tell you how much I long for it.' He kissed her again, and she slapped his fat unshaven cheek, momentarily checking him.

‘Come away with me,' he pleaded. ‘I'll give up everything for you. Let's go to Perver City. Or if you don't like that idea, I'll even go into Cronacia with you. We can step through the wire.' He ran to the desk and held up a gigantic pair of wire-cutters. ‘The fellow on the other side, who also has a machine gun, won't shoot me, because we have a secret arrangement to let each other cross if things get too difficult. So if you won't come to Perver City, let's run off to Cronacia. I've heard there are wonderful beaches over there. We can sprawl on the sand all day, drinking and making love.'