In the Country of Last Things Read online

  We both developed a passion for cigarettes. Tobacco is difficult to find here, and terribly expensive when you do, but Sam had made a number of black market connections while compiling the research for his book, and he was often able to find packs of twenty for as low as one or one-and-a-half glots. I am talking about real, old-fashioned cigarettes, the kind that are produced in factories and come in colorful paper wrappers with cellophane on the outside. The ones Sam bought had been stolen from the various foreign charity ships that had docked here in the past, and the brand names were usually printed in languages we could not even read. We would smoke them after it got dark, lying in bed and looking out through the big, fan-shaped window, watching the sky and its agitations, the clouds drifting across the moon, the tiny stars, the blizzards that came pouring down from above. We would blow the smoke out of our mouths and watch it float across the room, casting shadows on the far wall that dispersed the moment they formed. There was a beautiful transience in all this, a sense of fate dragging us along with it into unknown corners of oblivion. We often talked about home then, summoning up as many memories as we could, bringing back the smallest, most specific images in a kind of languorous incantation—the maple trees along Miro Avenue in October, the Roman numeral clocks in the public school classrooms, the green dragon light fixture in the Chinese restaurant across from the university. We were able to share the flavor of these things, to relive the myriad incidentals of a world we had both known since childhood, and it helped to keep our spirits up, I think, helped to make us believe that some day we would be able to return to all that.

  I don’t know how many people were living in the library at that time, but well over a hundred I should think, perhaps even more. The residents were all scholars and writers, remnants of the Purification Movement that had taken place during the tumult of the previous decade. According to Sam, the succeeding government had instituted a policy of tolerance, housing scholars in a number of public buildings around the city—the university gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, the National Library. These housing arrangements were fully subsidized (which explained the presence of the cast-iron stove in Sam’s room and the miraculously functioning sinks and toilets on the sixth floor), and eventually the program was extended to include a number of religious groups and foreign journalists. When the next government came into power two years later, however, the policy was discontinued. Scholars were not evicted from their dwellings, but neither were they given any government support. The attrition rate was understandably high, as many scholars were forced by circumstances to go out and find other kinds of work. Those who remained had been pretty much left to their own devices, ignored by the various governments that had come in and out of power. A certain wary camaraderie had developed among the different factions in the library, at least to the extent that many of them were willing to talk to each other and exchange ideas. That explained the groups of people I had seen in the lobby on the first day. Public colloquies were held every morning for two hours—the so-called Peripatetic Hours—and everyone who lived in the library was invited to attend. Sam had met Isaac at one of these sessions, but he generally stayed away from them, finding the scholars to be without much interest except as a phenomenon in themselves—one more aspect of life in the city. Most of them were engaged in rather esoteric pursuits: hunting for parallels between current events and events in classical literature, statistical analyses of population trends, the compiling of a new dictionary, and so on. Sam had no use for these kinds of things, but he tried to stay on good terms with everyone, knowing that scholars can turn vicious when they think they are being made fun of. I got to know many of them in a casual sort of way—standing in line with my bucket at the sixth floor sink, exchanging food tips with the women, listening to the gossip—but I followed Sam’s advice and did not become involved with any of them, keeping a friendly but reserved distance.

  Other than Sam, the only person I talked to was the Rabbi. For the first month or so, I would visit him whenever I had a chance—a free hour in the late afternoon, for instance, or one of those rare moments when Sam was lost in his book and there were no more chores to be done. The Rabbi was often busy with his disciples, which meant that he didn’t always have time for me, but we managed to get in several good talks. The thing I remember best was a comment he made to me on my last visit. I found it so startling at the time that I have continued to think about it ever since. Every Jew, he said, believes that he belongs to the last generation of Jews. We are always at the end, always standing on the brink of the last moment, and why should we expect things to be any different now? Perhaps I remember those words so well because I never saw him again after that conversation. The next time I went down to the third floor, the Rabbi was gone, and another man had taken his place in the room—a thin, bald man with wire-rimmed glasses. He was sitting at the table and writing furiously in a notebook, surrounded by piles of papers and what looked like several human bones and skulls. The moment I entered the room, he looked up at me with an annoyed, even hostile expression on his face.

  “Weren’t you ever taught to knock?” he said.

  “I’m looking for the Rabbi.”

  “The Rabbi’s gone,” he said impatiently, pursing his lips and glaring at me as though I were an idiot. “All the Jews cleared out two days ago.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Jews cleared out two days ago,” he repeated, letting out a disgusted sigh. “The Jansenists are going tomorrow, and the Jesuits are due to leave on Monday. Don’t you know anything?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The new laws. Religious groups have lost their academy status. I can’t believe that anyone could be so ignorant.”

  “You don’t have to be nasty about it. Who do you think you are, anyway?”

  “The name is Dujardin,” he said. “Henri Dujardin. I’m an ethnographer.”

  “And this room belongs to you now?”

  “Exactly. This room is mine.”

  “What about foreign journalists? Has their status changed, too?”

  “I have no idea. That’s not my concern.”

  “I suppose those bones and skulls are your concern.”

  “That’s right. I’m in the process of analyzing them.”

  “Who did they belong to?”

  “Anonymous corpses. People who froze to death.”

  “Do you know where the Rabbi is now?”

  “On his way to the promised land, no doubt,” he said sarcastically. “Now please go. You’ve taken up enough of my time. I have important work to do, and I don’t like being interrupted. Thank you. And remember to close the door on your way out.”

  In the end, Sam and I never suffered from these laws. The failure of the Sea Wall Project had already weakened the government, and before they got around to the question of foreign journalists, a new regime came into power. The evictions of the religious groups had been no more than an absurd and desperate show of force, an arbitrary attack on those who were incapable of defending themselves. The utter uselessness of it stunned me, and it only made the Rabbi’s disappearance that much harder to take. You see what things are like in this country. Everything disappears, people just as surely as objects, the living along with the dead. I mourned the loss of my friend, felt pulverized by the sheer weight of it. There was not even the certainty of death to console me—nothing more than a kind of blank, a ravening null.

  After that, Sam’s book became the most important thing in my life. As long as we kept working on it, I realized, the notion of a possible future would continue to exist for us. Sam had tried to explain that to me on the first day, but now I understood it for myself. I did whatever tasks needed to be done—classifying pages, editing the interviews, transcribing final versions, making a clean copy of the manuscript in longhand. It would have been better to have a typewriter, of course, but Sam had sold his portable several months earlier, and there was no way tha
t we could afford to buy another. As it was, it was hard enough to maintain an adequate supply of pencils and pens. The winter shortages had driven up prices to record levels, and if not for the six pencils I already owned—as well as the two ball-points I found by chance on the street—we might possibly have run out of materials. Paper we had in abundance (Sam had laid in a stock of twelve reams the day he moved in), but candles were another problem that interfered with our work. Daylight was necessary to us if we were to keep our expenses down, but there we were in the middle of winter, with the sun tracing its puny arc across the sky in just a few short hours, and unless we wanted the book to drag on forever, certain sacrifices had to be made. We tried to limit our smoking to four or five cigarettes a night, and eventually Sam let his beard grow out again. Razor blades were something of a luxury, after all, and it came down to a choice between a smooth face for him or smooth legs for me. The legs won hands down.

  Day or night, candles were needed when going into the stacks. The books were located in the central core of the building, and consequently there were no windows in any of the walls. Since electric power had been shut off long ago, there was no choice but to carry your own light. At one time, they say, there had been more than a million volumes in the National Library. Those numbers had been vastly reduced by the time I got there, but hundreds of thousands still remained, a bewildering avalanche of print. Some books were standing upright on their shelves, some were strewn chaotically across the floor, still others were heaped into erratic piles. There was a strictly enforced library regulation against removing books from the building, but many had nevertheless been smuggled out and sold on the black market. It was debatable in any case whether the library was actually a library anymore. The system of classification had been thoroughly disrupted, and with so many books out of order, it was virtually impossible to find any volume you might have wanted. When you consider that there were seven floors of stacks, to say that a book was in the wrong place was as much to say that it had ceased to exist. Even though it might have been physically present in the building, the fact was that no one would ever find it again. I hunted down a number of old municipal registers for Sam, but most of my excursions into that place were simply to collect books at random. I didn’t like being down there very much, never knowing who you might run into, having to smell all that clamminess and moldy decay. I would shove as many books as I could under my two arms and then rush back to our room upstairs. The books were how we kept warm during the winter. In the absence of any other kind of fuel, we would burn them in the cast-iron stove for heat. I know it sounds like a terrible thing to have done, but we really didn’t have much choice. It was either that or freeze to death. The irony does not escape me, of course—to have spent all those months working on a book and at the same time to have burned hundreds of other books to keep ourselves warm. The curious thing about it was that I never felt any regrets. To be honest, I actually think I enjoyed throwing those books into the flames. Perhaps it released some secret anger in me; perhaps it was simply a recognition of the fact that it did not matter what happened to them. The world they had belonged to was finished, and at least now they were being used to some purpose. Most of them were not worth opening anyway—sentimental novels, collections of political speeches, out-of-date textbooks. Whenever I found something that looked palatable, I would hold on to it and read it. Sometimes, when Sam was exhausted, I would read to him before he fell asleep. I remember going through parts of Herodotus that way, and one night I read the odd little book that Cyrano de Bergerac had written about his journeys to the moon and the sun. But in the end, everything made its way into the stove, everything went up in smoke.

  Looking back on it now, I still believe that things could have worked out for us. We would have finished the book, and sooner or later we would have found a way to get home. If not for a stupid blunder I made just as the winter was ending, I might be sitting across from you now, telling you this story with my own voice. The fact that I made an innocent mistake does not lessen the pain of it. I should have known better, and because I acted impulsively, trusting someone I had no business to trust, I destroyed my entire life. I am not being dramatic when I say this. I destroyed everything with my own stupidity, and there is no one to blame but myself.

  It happened like this. Shortly after the turn of the year, I discovered that I was pregnant. Not knowing how Sam would take the news, I kept it from him for a while, but then one day I was hit with a bad case of morning sickness—cold sweats, vomiting on the floor—and I wound up telling him the truth. Unbelievably, Sam was happy about it, perhaps even happier than I was. It’s not that I didn’t want the baby, you understand, but I couldn’t help being frightened, and there were times when I could feel my nerve fail me, when the thought of giving birth to a child under those conditions struck me as madness. To the degree that I was worried, however, Sam was enthusiastic. He was positively invigorated by the idea of becoming a father, and little by little he soothed my doubts, got me to look at the pregnancy as a good omen. The child meant that we had been spared, he said. We had overturned the odds, and from now on everything would be different. By creating a child together, we had made it possible for a new world to begin. I had never heard Sam talk like this before. Such brave, idealistic sentiments—it almost shocked me to hear these things coming from him. But that does not mean I didn’t love it. I loved it so much, I actually began to believe it myself.

  More than anything, I did not want to let him down. In spite of a few bad mornings during the early weeks, my health remained good, and I tried to keep up my end of the work, just as I had done before. By mid-March, there were some signs that winter was beginning to lose its force: the storms struck a bit less often, the periods of thaw lasted a bit longer, the temperatures did not seem to drop so far at night. I don’t mean to say that it had turned warm, but there were numerous little hints to suggest that things were moving in that direction, an ever-so-modest feeling that the worst was over. As luck would have it, it was just around this time that my shoes wore out—the same ones that Isabel had given me so long ago. I could not begin to calculate how many miles I had trekked in them. They had been with me for more than a year, absorbing every step I had taken, accompanying me into every corner of the city, and now they were completely shot: the soles had worn through, the uppers had turned to shreds, and even though I did my best to block up the holes with newspapers, the watery streets were too much for them, and inevitably my feet would get soaked whenever I went outside. This happened once too often, I suppose, and one day in early April I came down with a cold. It was the genuine article, complete with aches and chills, sore throat and sneezes, the whole parade. Given Sam’s involvement with the pregnancy, this cold alarmed him to the point of hysteria. He dropped everything to take care of me, hovering around the bed like a demented nurse, throwing away money on extravagant items like tea and canned soups. I got better within three or four days, but afterward Sam laid down the law. Until we could find a new pair of shoes for me, he said, he didn’t want me setting foot outside. He would do all the shopping and errands himself. I told him this was ridiculous, but he held his ground and refused to let me talk him out of it.

  “Just because I’m pregnant, I don’t want to be treated like an invalid,” I said.

  “It’s not you,” Sam said, “it’s the shoes. Every time you go out, your feet are going to get wet. The next cold might not be so easy to cure, you know, and what would happen to us if you really got sick?”

  “If you’re so worried, why don’t you give me your shoes to wear when I go out?”

  “They’re too big. You’d flop around in them like a child, and sooner or later you’d fall. Then what? The moment you hit the ground, someone would strip them off your feet.”

  “I can’t help it if I have little feet. I was born that way.”

  “You have beautiful feet, Anna. The daintiest little twinkletoes ever invented. I worship at those feet. I kiss the ground they wa
lk on. That’s why they have to be protected. We have to make sure that no harm ever comes to them.”

  The next few weeks were difficult for me. I watched Sam waste his time on things I easily could have done myself, and the book made almost no progress. It galled me to think that a measly pair of shoes could cause so much trouble. The baby was just beginning to show then, and I felt like a useless cow, a numbskull princess who sat around indoors all day while her lord and knight went trudging into battle. If only I could find a pair of shoes, I kept telling myself, then life could get moving again. I began asking around a bit, questioning people while waiting in line at the sink, even going down to the Peripatetic Hours in the lobby a few times to see if anyone there could give me a lead. Nothing came of it, but then one day I ran into Dujardin in the sixth floor hallway, and he immediately launched into a conversation with me, chattering away as though we were old familiars. I had steered clear of Dujardin ever since our first meeting in the Rabbi’s room, and this sudden friendliness on his part struck me as odd. Dujardin was a pedantic little weasel of a man, and for all these months he had avoided me just as carefully as I had avoided him. Now he was all smiles and sympathetic concern. “I’ve heard talk that you are in need of a pair of shoes,” he said. “If that is correct, I might be in a position to offer you some help.” I should have known something was wrong right away, but the mention of the word “shoes” threw me off. I was so desperate to get them, you understand, that it did not occur to me to question his motives.

  “The thing of it is this,” he rattled on. “I have a cousin who’s connected with the, hmmm, how shall I put it, with the business of buying and selling. Usable objects, you know, consumer articles, things of that sort. Shoes sometimes cross his path—the ones I am wearing now, for example—and I don’t think it would be amiss to assume that he has others in stock at this moment. Since I happen to be going to his house tonight, it would be nothing, absolutely nothing, for me to make some inquiries on your behalf. I will need to know your size, of course—hmmm, not large I shouldn’t think—and how much you are willing to spend. But those are details, mere details. If we can set a time to meet tomorrow, I might have some information for you then. Everyone needs shoes, after all, and from the looks of what you have on your feet now, I can understand why you’ve been asking around. Rags and tatters. It just won’t do, not with the weather we have these days.”