Monument Maker, page 19
Gambling is rife in these last days. Pointless congress even more so. The starved and the dissolute lie entangled in each other in the street. The buildings themselves clamber on top of one another in final copulation, making the city almost unnavigable. Is this the bearing fruit that Fonte talked of? There are escapes; whole families wade through the waters at night, their children held high above their heads. No one knows what becomes of them when they disappear from sight.
Biraggo Fonte is in daily congress with the Yezidis. He has come around, he says. But they too have moderated their plans. We look for reasons, he says. And we are given them. He speaks cryptically, which has become the style. I wonder if perhaps he has exchanged humiliations with the Yezidis. I wonder if perhaps they have all taken the name Khartoum.
19/12/1884
There is much death and suffering in Khartoum. There is nothing to eat and hope lies thin on the ground, crushed beneath the bodies piled up in mounds.
25/12/1884
Christmas in Khartoum is a wondrous thing. At first we thought it a snow that came down across the city; feathery, soft, a miracle from God. Gordon of Khartoum stood in his gown on the roof of his palace and opened his arms to the skies. But it was no snow. Instead a rain of ashes enveloped the city, a macabre display engineered by the Mahdi himself as a mockery of the Nativity. I pictured the remains of families, children, loyal animals, picked up on the wind only to rain down on our heads. These are the Mahdi’s victims, Gordon of Khartoum said, whom God himself has turned to tears.
For dinner, a spit-roasted turkey cock was shared between Gordon of Khartoum, Orphali and myself. I dared not ask if it was the same turkey cock that had been his own humiliation, but I can say that it tasted so. Biraggo Fonte and the “brave Yezidi warriors” refused Gordon of Khartoum’s invite. They were fools. Gordon of Khartoum read us passages from The Book. He talked of Jesus’s lighting out and of his journey alone across the desert. He talked of his temptation on the rock, where he was seen to wrestle with an invisible power. He recalled him in his crib, surrounded by the animals. He talked of the rivers that flow from Eden and he told us that Eden is nowhere to be found, that Eden, in the end, will find us, no matter where we are. That night I stayed at the palace and slept in the arms of a great bliss.
1/1/1885
The New Year brings a diet of rats. The mice are too small to concern ourselves with. Gordon of Khartoum feeds his men on the pith of the trees. He paces the city in an attempt to raise men up. Sentries lie exhausted in the sand. Gordon of Khartoum drags them to the water and awakens them. As in the frozen wastes, there are no doctors in Khartoum any more and the people display their open wounds like stigmata. They sleep standing up on crutches. The streets are awash with excrement, which flows as a final tributary into the Nile. Indeed, the street that leads to the palace has come to be known as the Brown Nile. There is much disease and contagion. Contagion, says Biraggo Fonte, was the plan all along. He claims the Yezidis themselves are infected. With what? I enquired of him. With the future, he said. What of Eden? I asked him. Your man Gordon was correct, he said. You too, he said, must play your part. What have I been doing all along? I burst. Here in Khartoum I have been a faithful player in the show. Now you will require unfaith, player, Fonte spat. All our theology comes to this. Fonte tells me of the fall of Omdurman across the water. He tells me that the Mahdi has the power to melt iron and lead and steel in the furnace of his men’s stomachs. The fort itself was dissolved in the retching of his devils.
Do you remember what you told me of prophecy? Fonte asked me. The words were not mine, I admitted, and I wrestle with their truth. You told me prophecy was a way to make of the future the past, Fonte said. In other words, prophecy is an escape from history. It is a tunnel beneath the ground, a hole in the wire, a secret trapdoor. But you read my palm, I said, yours too. Khartoum is written in our flesh.
What if we could combine the two? Fonte said, and his eyes glinted with a truth that was both far away and just beneath the surface. Look, he said, and he held his right hand up to my face. It was caked in blood and covered in cuts and sores. At its centre there was a weeping wound. Tunnels, he said, holes, he said, trapdoors.
Have you received your humiliation at the hands of the Yezidis? I asked him. We exchanged humiliations, Fonte said, now all our beliefs are brought to nought. But in the clearing we shall found the new garden. The cornerstone is lost, I said to him, stolen by the Mahdi himself. It is he that shall raise a garden. Not so, Fonte said, and his thin smile too appeared as an exit. The Yezidis have the cube. It was they who liberated it from the Abbas. Then they are responsible for Khartoum’s downfall! I burst. Look around you at this abattoir, this horror. Through their subterfuge they have brought incalculable sufferings down upon our heads. Fonte shrugged. In the clearing we shall found the new garden, he said. We are not against Gordon of Khartoum. He chose the spot. We have come to see that the tree survives. You intend a monument? I asked him. He will never be forgotten, Fonte said, merely dismembered and cast across time.
13/1/1885
You come to the end and yet you see, still, that there is no bottom to it, Gordon of Khartoum confessed. We were alone in the book tower. There is no solid ground, he said, and he looked out over the garden and the exotic birds that flitted beneath the nets.
I want to ask you a favour, Gordon of Khartoum said, and he rose and took down a final book from the shelves. I am not a musical man, Gordon of Khartoum said to me while putting on his spectacles. But I have discovered this book of notation. And the words move me. Do you understand music? I lied and said that I did. In that case, Gordon of Khartoum asked me, could you sing this to me?
I was taken aback. I thought to confess my ignorance and be done with it but instead I opened the book. I had no idea of the author or how the music should go. But I could read the words. I cleared my throat and began to sing in a high, contorted voice that was not my own.
This whole world is a hospital, I sang, where humanity in endless throng, and babies also, in their cradles, have been laid low with sickness. For one quakes in his breast with the burning fever of evil lust, another lies ill, in the stench of his own vanity, a third acquires the thirst for money and is thrust before his time into the grave. The primal fall has stained everyone and infected them with the leprosy of sin. Ah! This poison rages also through my own limbs. Where shall I, wretch, find a healer? Who will stand with me in my suffering? Who is my doctor, who will help me again?
Here I paused, in fear that I had done the song a disservice. But Gordon of Khartoum bade me continue.
All my days I will praise your strong hand, with which my plague and laments you have so tenderly brushed aside, I sang, and though it was not melodious to my ears, Gordon of Khartoum seemed contented. Not only in my mortal days, I sang, shall your fame be spread abroad. I will also make it manifest hereafter and praise you eternally there.
When I came to the end, Gordon of Khartoum himself was in tears.
25/1/1885
The Mahdi came by night. I was alone with Gordon of Khartoum when Orphali came to warn us. We are overrun with devils, he said. Gordon of Khartoum stood up and attached his sword to his white uniform. Time has come, he said. There is history to be made. I drew my own sword and followed him out into the darkness. We peered out into the black but could see nothing.
Suddenly a spear came out of nowhere and pierced Gordon of Khartoum through the chest. Another brought Orphali to his knees, vomiting blood. Gordon of Khartoum stayed upright, supported by the spear. Blood trickled from his mouth. He was still alive. Biraggo Fonte emerged from the darkness, followed by the Yezidis, all of whom were wearing peacock feathers in their hair. Their eyes flickered like fires in the darkness.
Fonte approached Gordon of Khartoum. He appeared moved. He stroked his soft cheek. White soldiers are so beautiful, he said. At his signal I raised my sword and took Gordon of Khartoum’s head.
We moved quickly through the slaughter. The Yezidis claimed the eyes of the peacock would render us invisible. All around us men fell. We swept through the battle like the wind. Gordon of Khartoum’s body was our banner, held high above us. His head we placed in the cube. The waters were low and thick with blood. We made our way to Tuti Island using a high sandbank as showers of liquid metal poured from the skies and boats sent up tunnels of thick black smoke in return. Halfway across we surrendered his body to the waters and it floated off without a sound across the waters but not before Omar severed its right hand. Now rest in peace, prophet, he said, before dropping the hand into the waters.
We came to the centre of the island, where the Yezidis had dug a shallow grave. All around it were the silhouettes of the Sun Watchers, their contorted limbs carved in the sand like swastikas or spinning stars. We placed the cube containing Gordon of Khartoum’s head in the grave. We covered it with sand. I was unprepared for what happened next. At Ecco Omar’s instruction all ten of the Yezidis removed their penises from their garments and assembled themselves around the place of the head. Biraggo Fonte followed suit.
Then they looked at me. Will you complete the circle? Ecco Omar asked me, and I stepped forward and took my penis in my right hand. Then we urinated, in unison, on the head of Gordon of Khartoum.
BOOK THREE: APSE
1. HERMITAGE OF BATTLING DEMONS IN AFRICA (2)
Holy Maximilian Rehberg presses on, deeper into Africa. He secretes the ark with the mummified head in the bottom of a well and orders his three wives to tell no one. Then he and The Ostrich make for Ethiopia, where they join a gang of anti-Marxist Somalis engaged in skirmishes with the Soviet-backed Derg. They hold up a train in the desert outside Jijiga, strip it of its Soviet-supplied arms, and roast the communist scum alive inside the sealed carriages. During days off they go hunting for wild dogs. But when Rehberg sees a lion in real life for the first time, an Abyssinian lion with its glorious black mane, he is overcome. The Lion of Judah, he exclaims, before The Ostrich puts a bullet in its head. Africa is the Book of Revelation. Every conflict is a final conflict.
With arms arriving from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Libya and Cuba, there are rich pickings to be had. But they are becoming well known. Their raids become more daring, their executions more theatrical. The theatre of war. The theatre of the desert.
He returns home to find that one wife is dead from fright and two are cowering in terror. The head at the bottom of the well has been speaking terrifying words of incomprehension, the one wife says. At night it has been booming in an echoing voice from the end of the world. What does it say, dammit? The words are alien, the second wife says, the words are furious and full of nothing, she says. She makes a sound like a goat, a sound like a goat with its tits severed and weeping blood. That is what it says, she says. That isn’t saying anything, Rehberg says to her, that is moaning in pain and confusion. Then the head is in pain and confusion, she says. It longs for its body. We are lucky that it does not have legs, or hands, she says, otherwise it would scale that well like a spider and tear our own tits off, she says.
That night Rehberg approaches the well alone. He sits at the rim of the well and he waits. His two wives run off in terror back to their mother (for he married three sisters) and he sits there in the darkness and waits, pen and paper in hand. Then, in a voice like fire unsound, it speaks. In English, it speaks. I am the Lion of Judah, it says. Rehberg is shaken to his core. I am sorry, he says. I am so sorry. But the voice demands his silence. Silence, it says, for compassion to me is unbearable. Christ has proven the existence of The Mighty Fortress, it says. Can you tell me more about The Mighty Fortress? Rehberg asks it. I have no understanding, it says. Make of your heart The Mighty Fortress, it says. I said that, Rehberg says. I am the Lion of Judah, it says. Yield. I speak through you in actions. I am the first stone, forever. I raise stone upon stone, though I am the destroyer of The Tower. I am one stone, eternal, and nothing opposite. I require no belief. My head is as a trophy which I will give to you. The world is not here to be changed, it says. Look, the Lion of Judah says, I change it with my hands. I who have no hands. Look, I come to you from across the years. I who have no feet. How do I worship you? Rehberg asks it. Silence, it says, for belief to me is abhorrent. Then: I am love in the angles. Find, what is most unlikely, it says. Praise, what is most particular. Then I have always been there before. I came here to battle demons, Rehberg says. Smite them, it says. I return as a lion with a bullet in its head to tell you AL is holy. All? Al. What of Love? Rehberg asks it. I believe in Love, he says. The Love of Christ. Your love is in La-La Land, it says. I am the SS, it says, and everything is forgiven. I am the baby Jesus, it says, and everything is forgotten. I am the USSR, and everything is commanded. I am a lion with a bullet in its head, and everything is spoken. Wait, it says, watch! And the red sun rises, at the very edge of the desert. I did that, it says. I who have no hands. The first stone is risen, and rolled away, it says. Every death, it says, is an act of love. Everything is copulating. Have no fear. Make of your heart The Mighty Fortress, which Christ has demonstrated. Then yield, is the law. Now is the time of the Eternal Return, it says. Now. Extinguish me, now, it says. Wait, Rehberg begs it. I have so many questions. Stay a while. I have no hands to hold time, it says. Extinguish me, now. Ravish me, in the moment, is what the Lion of Judah commands. Rehberg knows what he has to do. He takes his dick from his trousers, in much fear and trembling, and he urinates, in a great arcing motion, into the well. There is a hissing noise, like water into fire, and a circle of smoke rises up. With the help of a donkey Rehberg drags a single stone to the mouth of the well and seals it. Then he walks out of Sudan. And deeper into Africa.
He kills the first man he sees, now just another nameless black man in a novel, and crosses the border into Ethiopia. He returns to the war, and to the camp, where he finds that The Ostrich is dead, murdered by a death squad in the pay of the USSR. There is a price on his own head, too. The nameless men that he fights alongside, the ghosts of this tale, usher him into a mud hut with a straw roof situated on the side of a bleak hillock the colour of lurid human shit. There, in the corner, The Ostrich lies, though not upside down, which would have been more fitting, in an improvised coffin made out of reeds. Leave me alone, Rehberg commands the ghosts of this episode, and he fixes the door behind them. He has determined to get to the bottom of death.
The Ostrich has no fingers left. They have been removed during torture and now there is no stone left to hold up the sky. Part of his head is caved in. His feet, in an unwitting reversal, or perhaps not, are blackened and swollen by fire. There is an incision in his side. His eyelids are sewn shut. With a great effort, and a concomitant blinding of himself to the facts, Rehberg hooks his hands beneath the armpits of this stinking corpse and lifts it up and out of the coffin. The coffin topples from its stand as he staggers backwards, across the room, under the weight of this corpse, as in a love embrace. Then the corpse lets go. It lets go of all the liquid inside it, and it empties itself on the floor, all over Rehberg’s clothes, all over his feet and his arms, soaking into his green khaki shirt. But he doesn’t let go, in fact he holds it faster, tighter, he puts his hand to the back of its neck, tenderly, and allows it to empty itself all down his shoulder and the back of his shirt. He holds it there, fast, as if he is nursing a newborn child and bringing up wind.
There is piss, and there is shit, and there is bile, and there are putrefied organs, what a smell, and there is something electric, Rehberg says, as the body becomes hollow, like a rotten gargoyle, on a basilica, something fugitive above and beyond the fact of its contents, something that is charged with life, just as horror is. He speaks to it in a soft voice, it’s okay, he says, as though it were the dead that were in need of reassurance, and why not, when the rest of us are still alive and able. It’s okay, he says, little baby. It’s alright, he says, little man.
Rehberg presses on, deeper into Africa. He comes to a village that has been ravaged by a death squad. At the edge of the desert he can see the smoke from the burning huts, and as he approaches dazed animals appear to him in tragic appeal, their flesh scorched, their bones broken and protruding, their opaque eyes, in a terror of the flesh. In the village there is no one left alive. The men have been decapitated and the same strange matrix of crosses and zeros carved into their chests. The bodies of the women are mutilated and recombined in occult designs like in a painting by Picasso. The children have been burned and eaten by wildlife. This is the work of God, Rehberg says to himself, as he surveys the village with a semi-automatic over his shoulder. But where are all the heads?
In his ongoing confrontation with death he decides to stay the night. He clears out a single hut and bars the door, then he falls asleep and dreams of an endlessly deep well populated by a mass of chattering disembodied heads longing to tear the tits from the women with their no hands. Then he dreams that there is a huge spider perched upon his chest. Each of its countless eyes is a severed head, a severed head that is wailing and crying and begging for compassion and for release from this inhuman hell. But he realises that as soon as he makes a move to free them, to free these severed heads from their place as the myriad eyeballs of the black spider, the spider will lunge, and will bite him, and he will die.
