“Taskin, this is Tyador Borlú. Can you please call me on my mobile tomorrow or when you get the chance and let me know what I might have to do if I wanted to put a case to the Oversight Committee? If I wanted to push a case to Breach. Hypothetically.” I winced and laughed. “Keep this to yourself, okay? Thanks, Task. Just let me know what I need to do and if you’ve got any handy insider suggestions. Thanks.”
There had not been much question about what my terrible informant had been telling me. The phrases I had copied and underlined.
same language
recognise authority—not
both sides of the city
It made sense of why he would call me, why the crime of it, of what he’d seen, or that he’d seen it, would not detain him as it would most. Mostly he had done it because he was afraid, of whatever Marya-Fulana’s death implied for him. What he had told me was that his coconspirators in Besźel might very possibly have seen Marya, that she would not have respected borders. And if any group of troublemakers in Besźel would be complicit in that particular kind of crime and taboo, it would be my informer and his comrades. They were obviously unificationists.
SARISKA MOCKED ME in my mind as I turned back to that night-lit city, and this time I looked and saw its neighbour. Illicit, but I did. Who hasn’t done that at times? There were gasrooms I shouldn’t see, chambers dangling ads, tethered by skeletal metal frames. On the street at least one of the passersby—I could tell by the clothes, the colours, the walk—was not in Besźel, and I watched him anyway.
I turned to the railway lines a few metres by my window and waited until, as I knew it would eventually, a late train came. I looked into its rapidly passing, illuminated windows, and into the eyes of the few passengers, a very few of whom even saw me back, and were startled. But they were gone fast, over the conjoined sets of roofs: it was a brief crime, and not their faults. They probably did not feel guilty for long. They probably did not remember that stare. I always wanted to live where I could watch foreign trains.
Chapter Five
IF YOU DO NOT KNOW much about them, Illitan and Besź sound very different. They are written, of course, in distinct alphabets. Besź is in Besź: thirty-four letters, left to right, all sounds rendered clear and phonetic, consonants, vowels and demivowels decorated with diacritics—it looks, one often hears, like Cyrillic (though that is a comparison likely to annoy a citizen of Besźel, true or not). Illitan uses Roman script. That is recent.
Read the travelogues of the last-but-one century and those older, and the strange and beautiful right-to-left Illitan calligraphy—and its jarring phonetics—is constantly remarked on. At some point everyone has heard Sterne, from his travelogue: “In the Land of Alphabets Arabic caught Dame Sanskrit’s eye (drunk he was despite Muhamed’s injunctions, else her age would have dissuaded). Nine months later a disowned child was put out. The feral babe is Illitan, Hermes-Aphrodite not without beauty. He has something of both his parents in his form, but the voice of those who raised him—the birds.”
The script was lost in 1923, overnight, a culmination of Ya Ilsa’s reforms: it was Atatürk who imitated him, not, as is usually claimed, the other way around. Even in Ul Qoma, no one can read Illitan script now but archivists and activists.
Anyway whether in its original or later written form, Illitan bears no resemblance to Besź. Nor does it sound similar. But these distinctions are not as deep as they appear. Despite careful cultural differentiation, in the shape of their grammars and the relations of their phonemes (if not the base sounds themselves), the languages are closely related—they share a common ancestor, after all. It feels almost seditious to say so. Still.
Besźel’s dark ages are very dark. Sometime between two thousand and seventeen hundred years ago the city was founded, here in this curl of coastline. There are still remains from those times in the heart of the town, when it was a port hiding a few kilometres up the river to shelter from the pirates of the shore. The city’s founding came at the same time as another’s, of course. The ruins are surrounded now or in some places incorporated, antique foundations, into the substance of the city. There are older ruins too, like the mosaic remnants in Yozhef Park. These Romanesque remains predate Besźel, we think. We built Besźel on their bones, perhaps.
It may or may not have been Besźel, that we built, back then, while others may have been building Ul Qoma on the same bones. Perhaps there was one thing back then that later schismed on the ruins, or perhaps our ancestral Besźel had not yet met and standoffishly entwined with its neighbour. I am not a student of the Cleavage, but if I were I still would not know.
“BOSS.” Lizbyet Corwi called me. “Boss you are on fire. How did you know? Meet me at sixty-eight BudapestStrász.”
I had not yet dressed in day clothes though it was after noon. My kitchen table was a landscape of papers. The books I had on politics and history were propped in a Babel-tower by the milk. I should keep my laptop from the mess, but I never bothered. I brushed cocoa away from my notes. The blackface character on my French drinking chocolate smiled at me. “What are you talking about? What’s that address?”
“It’s in Bundalia,” she said. An industrial presuburb northwest of Funicular Park, by the river. “And are you kidding me what is it? I did what you said—I asked around, got the basic gist of which groups there are, who thinks what of each other, blah blah. I spent the morning going round, asking questions. Putting the fear in. Can’t say you get much respect from these bastards with the uniform on, you know? And I can’t say I had much hopes for this, but I figured what the hell else did we have to do? Anyway I’m going around trying to get a sense of the politics and whatnot, and one of the guys at one of the—I guess you’d say lodges maybe—he starts to give me something. Wasn’t going to admit it at first, but I could tell. You’re a fucking genius, sir. Sixty-eight BudapestStrász is a unificationist HQ.”
Her awe was already close to suspicion. She would have looked at me even harder if she had seen the documents on my table, that I had negotiated with my hands when she phoned me. Several books were open to their indices, propped to show what references they had to unificationism. I really had not come across the BudapestStrász address.
In typical political cliché, unificationists were split on many axes. Some groups were illegal, sister-organisations in both Besźel and Ul Qoma. The banned had at various points in their history advocated the use of violence to bring the cities to their God-, destiny-, history-, or people-intended unity. Some had, mostly cack-handedly, targeted nationalist intellectuals—bricks through windows and shit through doors. They had been accused of furtively propagandising among refugees and new immigrants with limited expertise at seeing and unseeing, at being in one particular city. The activists wanted to weaponise such urban uncertainty.
These extremists were vocally criticised by others keen to retain freedom of movement and assembly, whatever their secret thoughts and whatever threads connected them all out of view. There were other divisions, between different visions of what the united city would be like, what would be its language, what would be its name. Even these legal grouplets would be watched without ceasing, and checked up on regularly by the authorities in whichever their city. “Swiss cheese,” Shenvoi said when I spoke to him that morning. “Probably more informers and moles in the unifs even than in the True Citizens or Nazis or other nutters. I wouldn’t worry about them—they’re not going to do dick without the say-so of someone in security.”
Also, the unifs must know, though they would hope never to see proof of it, that nothing they did would be unknown to Breach. That meant I would be under Breach’s purview too, during my visit, if I was not already.
Always the question of how to get through the city. I should have taxied as Corwi was waiting, but no, two trams, a change at Vencelas Square. Swaying under the carved and clockwork figures of Besź burghers on the town facades, ignoring, unseeing, the shinier fronts of the elsewhere, the alter parts.
T
he length of BudapestStrász, patches of winter buddleia frothed out from old buildings. It’s a traditional urban weed in Besźel, but not in Ul Qoma, where they trim it as it intrudes, so BudapestStrász being the Besźel part of a crosshatched area, each bush, unflowered at that time, emerged unkempt for one or two or three local buildings, then would end in a sharp vertical plane at the edge of Besźel.
The buildings in Besźel were brick and plaster, each surmounted with one of the household Lares staring at me, a little manlike grotesque, and bearded with that weed. A few decades before these places would not have been so tumbling down; they would have emitted more noise and the street would have been filled with young clerks in dark suits and visiting foremen. Behind the northern buildings were industrial yards, and beyond them a curl in the river, where docks used to bustle and where their iron skeletons still graveyard lay.
Back then the region of Ul Qoma that shared the space had been quiet. It had grown more noisy: the neighbours had moved in economic antiphase. As the river industry of Besźel had slowed, Ul Qoma’s business picked up, and now there were more foreigners walking on the worn-down crosshatched cobbles than Besź locals. The once-collapsing Ul Qoma rookeries, crenellated and lumpenbaroque (not that I saw them—I unsaw carefully, but they still registered a little, illicitly, and I remembered the styles from photographs), were renovated, the sites of galleries and .uq startups.
I watched the local buildings’ numbers. They rose in stutters, interspersed with foreign alter spaces. In Besźel the area was pretty unpeopled, but not elsewhere across the border, and I had to unseeing dodge many smart young businessmen and -women. Their voices were muted to me, random noise. That aural fade comes from years of Besź care. When I reached the tar-painted front where Corwi waited with an unhappy-looking man, we stood together in a near-deserted part of Besźel city, surrounded by a busy unheard throng.
“Boss. This is Pall Drodin.”
Drodin was a tall and thin man in his late thirties. He wore several rings in his ears, a leather jacket with obscure and unmerited membership insignia of various military and other organisations on it, anomalously smart though dirty trousers. He eyed me unhappily, smoking.
He was not arrested. Corwi had not taken him in. I nodded a greeting to her, then turned around slowly 180 degrees and looked at the buildings around us. I focused only the Besź ones, of course.
“Breach?” I said. Drodin looked startled. So in truth did Corwi, though she covered it. When Drodin said nothing I said, “Don’t you think we’re watched by powers?”
“Yeah, no, we are.” He sounded resentful. I am sure he was. “Sure. Sure. You asking me where they are?” It is a more or less meaningless question but one that no Besź nor Ul Qoman can banish. Drodin did not look anywhere other than in my eyes. “You see the building over the road? The one that used to be a match factory?” A mural’s remains in scabs of paint almost a century old, a salamander smiling through its corona of flames. “You see stuff moving, in there. Stuff you know, like, comes and goes, like it shouldn’t.”
“So you can see them appear?” He looked uneasy again. “You think that’s where they manifest?”
“No no, but process of elimination.”
“Drodin, get in. We’ll be in in a second,” Corwi said. Nodded him in and he went. “What the fuck, boss?”
“Problem?”
“All this Breach shit.” She lowered her voice on Breach. “What are you doing?” I did not say anything. “I’m trying to establish a power dynamic here and I’m at the end of it, not Breach, boss. I don’t want that shit in the picture. Where the fuck you getting this spooky shit from?” When I still said nothing she shook her head and led me inside.
The Besźqoma Solidarity Front did not make much of an effort with their decor. There were two rooms, two and a half at generous count, full of cabinets and shelves stacked with files and books. In one corner wall space had been cleared and cleaned, it looked like, for backdrop, and a webcam pointed at it and an empty chair.
“Broadcasts,” Drodin said. He saw where I was looking. “Online.” He started to tell me a web address until I shook my head.
“Everyone else left when I came in,” Corwi told me.
Drodin sat down behind his desk in the back room. There were two other chairs in there. He did not offer them, but Corwi and I sat anyway. More mess of books, a dirty computer. On a wall a large-scale map of Besźel and Ul Qoma. To avoid prosecution the lines and shades of division were there—total, alter, and crosshatched—but ostentatiously subtle, distinctions of greyscale. We sat looking at each other a while.
“Look,” Drodin said. “I know … you understand I’m not used to … You guys don’t like me, and that’s fine, that’s understood.” We said nothing. He played with some of the things on his desktop. “And I’m no snitch either.”
“Jesus, Drodin,” Corwi said, “if it’s absolution you’re after, get a priest.” But he continued.
“It’s just… If this has something to do with what she was into, then you’re all going to think it has something to do with us and maybe it even might have something to do with us and I’m giving no one any excuses to come down on us. You know? You know?”
“Alright enough,” Corwi said. “Cut the shit.” She looked around the room. “I know you think you’re clever, but seriously, how many misdemeanours do you think I’m looking at right now? Your map, for a start—You reckon it’s careful, but it wouldn’t take a particularly patriotic prosecutor to interpret it in a way that’ll leave you inside. What else? You want me to go through your books? How many are on the proscribed list? Want me to go through your papers? This place has Insulting Besź Sovereignty in the Second Degree flashing over it like neon.”
“Like the Ul Qoma club districts,” I said. “Ul Qoma neon. Would you like that, Drodin? Prefer it to the local variety?”
“So while we appreciate your help, Mr. Drodin, let’s not kid ourselves as to why you’re doing it.”
“You don’t understand.” He muttered it. “I have to protect my people. There’s weird shit out there. There’s weird shit going on.”
“Alright,” Corwi said. “Whatever. What’s the story, Drodin?” She took the photograph of Fulana and put it in front of him. “Tell my boss what you started telling me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s her.” Corwi and I leaned forward. Perfect synchronised timing.
I said, “What’s her name?”
“What she said, she said her name was Byela Mar.” Drodin shrugged. “It’s what she said. I know, but what can I tell you?”
It was an obvious, and elegantly punning, pseudonym. Byela is a unisex Besź name; Mar is at least plausible as a surname. Together their phonemes approximate the phrase byé lai mar, literally “only the baitfish,” a fishing phrase to say “nothing worth noting.”
“It isn’t unusual. Lots of our contacts and members go by handles.”
“Noms,” I said, “de unification.” I could not tell if he understood. “Tell us about Byela.” Byela, Fulana, Marya was accruing names.
“She was here I don’t know, three years ago or so? Bit less? I hadn’t seen her since then. She was obviously foreign.”
“From Ul Qoma?”
“No. Spoke okay Illitan but not fluent. She’d talk in Besź or Illitan—or, well, the root. I never heard her talk anything else—she wouldn’t tell me where she came from. From her accent I’d say American or English maybe. I don’t know what she was doing. It’s not… it’s kind of rude to ask too much about people in this line.”
“So, what, she came to meetings? She was an organiser?” Corwi turned to me and said without lowering her voice, “I don’t even know what it is these fuckers do, boss. I don’t even know what to ask.” Drodin watched her, no more sour than he had been since we arrived.
“She turned up like I said a couple of years ago. She wanted to use our library. We’ve got pamphlets and old books on … well on the cities, a lot of stuff they don’t st
ock in other places.”
“We should take a look, boss,” Corwi said. “See there’s nothing inappropriate.”
“Fuck’s sake, I’m helping, aren’t I? You want to get me on banned books? There’s nothing Class One, and the Class Twos we got are mostly available on-fucking-line anyway.”
“Alright alright,” I said. Pointed for him to continue.
“So she came and we talked a lot. She wasn’t here long. Like a couple of weeks. Don’t ask me about what she did otherwise and stuff like that because I don’t know. All I know is every day she’d come by at odd times and look at books, or talk to me about our history, the history of the cities, about what was going on, about our campaigns, that kind of thing.”
“What campaigns?”
“Our brothers and sisters in prison. Here and in Ul Qoma. For nothing but their beliefs. Amnesty International’s on our side there, you know. Talking to contacts. Education. Helping new immigrants. Demos.” In Besźel, unificationist demonstrations were fractious, small, dangerous things. Obviously the local nationalists would come out to break them up, screaming at the marchers as traitors, and in general the most apolitical local wouldn’t have much sympathy for them. It was almost as bad in Ul Qoma, except it was more unlikely they would be allowed to gather in the first place. That must have been a source of anger, though it certainly saved the Ul Qoman unifs from beatings.
“How did she look? Did she dress well? What was she like?”
“Yeah she did. Smart. Almost chic, you know? Stood out here.” He even laughed at himself. “And she was clever. I really liked her at first, you know? I was really excited. At first.”
His pauses were requests for us to chivvy him, so that none of this discussion was at his behest. “But?” I said. “What happened?”
“We had an argument. Actually I only had an argument with her because she was giving some of the other comrades shit, you know? I’d walk into the library or downstairs or whatever and someone or other would be shouting at her. She was never shouting at them, but she’d be talking quietly and driving them mad, and in the end I had to tell her to go. She was … she was dangerous.” Another silence. Corwi and I looked at each other. “No I ain’t exaggerating,” he said. “She brought you here, didn’t she? I told you she was dangerous.”