The City & the City (6 page)

It is not uncommon for me to fail to sleep. Sariska and Biszaya were used to sleepily walking from the bedroom to the bathroom to find me reading at the kitchen table, chewing so much gum that I would get sugar blisters (I would not take up smoking again). Or looking over the night city and (inevitably, unseeing but touched by its light) the other city.

Sariska laughed at me once. “Look at you,” she said, not without affection. “Sitting there like an owl. Melancholy bloody gargoyle. You mawkish bugger. You don’t get any insight, you know, just because it’s night. Just because some buildings have their lights on.” She was not there to tease me though just then and I wanted whatever insight I could get, even spurious, so I looked on out.

Planes went over the clouds. Cathedral spires were lit by glass skyscrapers. Recurved and crescent neoned architecture across the border. I tried to hook up my computer to look some stuff up, but the only connection I had was dial-up and it was all very frustrating so I stopped.

“Details later.” I think I actually said it aloud. I made more notes. Eventually, at last, I called the direct line to Corwi’s desk.

“Lizbyet. I’ve had a thought.” My instinct as always when I lie was to say too much, too quickly. I made myself speak as if idly. She was not stupid though. “It’s late. I’m just leaving this for you because I’m probably not going to be in tomorrow. We’re not getting anywhere with the street-beat, so it’s pretty obvious it’s not what we thought—someone would’ve recognised her. We’ve got the picture out to all the precincts, so if she’s a street girl off her patch maybe we’ll get lucky. But meanwhile I’d like to look in a couple of other directions while we can keep this running.

“I’m thinking, look, she’s not in her area, it’s a weird situation, we can’t get any beep. I was talking to a guy I know in Dissident Unit, and he was saying how secretive the people he’s watching are. It’s all Nazis and reds and unifs and so on. Anyway it got me thinking about what kind of people hide their identities, and while we’ve still got any time I’d like to chase that a bit. What I’m thinking is—hold on I’m just looking at some notes … Okay, might as well start with unifs.

“Talk to the Kook Squad. See what you can get by way of addresses, chapters—I don’t know much about it. Ask for Shenvoi’s office. Tell him you’re on a job for me. Go by the ones you can, take the pictures, see if anyone recognises her. I don’t need to tell you they’re going to be weird with you—they’re not going to want you around. But see what you can do. Keep in touch, I’ll be on the mobile. Like I say, I won’t be in. Okay. Talk tomorrow. Okay, bye.”

“That was terrible.” I think I said that aloud too.

When I had done that I called the number of Taskin Cerush in our admin pool. I had been careful to take a note of her direct line when she had helped me through bureaucracy three or four cases ago. I had kept in touch. She was excellent at her job.

“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.

The 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.”