Mirror

by Amita Basu

Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3a, 3b, 4a, 4b. 5a, 5b

part 4a

Our newspapers had declared Uncle mad. When Uncle became Chancellor, some newspapers changed their minds; others... Well, the enemies within say that all dissident voices were garroted.

Other Nations’ leaders and diplomats had declared Uncle mad and had contemned our Nation for calling such a man ‘Guide.’ When Uncle rose to power, and kept consolidating power, some of these foreigners suspended judgment. They watched Uncle build roads, resupply factories, put shops back in business, put families back in houses, put stone-flinging idlers back to work, repair stone-broken street lamps, cleanse the streets as he’d promised. Many foreigners wrote and spoke praising Uncle. Others merely substituted watchful silence for their contempt.

Our people had declared Uncle mad. Now they studied this man before them: rasping-voiced, flame-eyed, soft-faced. No madman could speak like him, hour after hour. No madman could work for them year after year, as one of them. Now many of our people saw sense.

Perhaps at one of Uncle’s rallies, drunk on light, music and Uncle’s words. Drunk on the community we’d drifted from, we elites, generation by generation, and had forgotten to miss. Perhaps after reading Uncle’s book. Perhaps after reading, in the newspapers, articles by Uncle’s comrades. Intelligent, cultured, glowing-eyed men.

Perhaps after hearing, over the radio sets — manufactured now within our Nation, affordable now by every bootblack — Uncle’s comrades tell us how far our Nation, under our Guide, had leaped in five short years.

Perhaps after leafing through the hardbound, glossy-paged, full-colour illustrated books on Uncle’s private life, curated by Uncle’s photographer and published every Christmas in limited editions. Showing Uncle, dressed always fully, immaculately: even when his companions cavorted, half-naked, in swimming pools.

Entertaining, at his modest mountainside mansion, ladies and gentlemen smiling and tanned in our old National costumes, graceful but plain; buttoned, not zippered. Leading tour parties of schoolchildren around the buildings he’d commissioned for the capital: white-marbled, eagle-surmounted.

Stooping over the hands of diademed princesses. Ably discoursing with foreign premiers and star athletes: Europe’s luminaries lounging on our gardens, under our eagle-emblazoned ancient-modern flag.

Life improved for ordinary people. Gleaming black roads carried, across our Nation, goods from fields to factories to markets. More people began calling Uncle ‘Guide.’

Now Uncle turned to the enemies within. Uncle had laid, for years, before the public, proof positive that the enemies within had cost us the war, had precipitated two decades of misery. At first, the enemies within were handled with unprecedented leniency. They were encouraged to emigrate; this had never been their home, anyway. Our grandparents — who remembered other minorities, suspected of far less, treated far worse, by our Nation and by others, in this century and in others — praised our Guide’s magnanimity. We young people bayed for their blood.

Our Guide enforced peace. He established bureaus to expedite the emigration of the enemies within. The west welcomed them. Uncle welcomed the riddance.

The Nation stood riven. Some of us stood by, weeping farewells to our departing friends. Some of us stood by, straining at our chains, baying for the blood of our fleeing prey.

Uncle had healed old rifts. New rifts formed in the Nation’s soul. So, when the mass arrests began, many felt shocked. So, when the mass cleansings began, most stayed silent.

For our Nation now believed that our Guide was our Nation’s eagle, reincarnated. Soaring a mile high, wings motionless, borne aloft on destiny’s updraft. Seeing farther than mere men, ground-bound, could see. Seeing ten thousand miles ahead, seeing the path our Nation must follow to its Promised Land.

In that land, our people now believed. If the path to that land led through some obstacles — a few hundred thousand people sent away somewhere, a few thousand killed, perhaps — only perhaps they just vapourised: we didn’t have to see them, to think about them, la-la-la — well, then: our Nation trusted that it was necessary.

In the purity of our Guide’s aims, our Nation had faith. In the necessity of our Guide’s means, our Nation had faith.

Our Nation clambered back onto the international stage. We hosted our Olympics. The best Olympics yet. The first modern Olympics. Simultaneously, the first to honour the Games’ three thousand-year old heritage. Other Nations, hemming and hawing at our treatment of the enemies within, threatened to boycott our Olympics. But they all came. They praised our progress and our tolerance. They broke bread with us.

Our armies, shrunk by the Enemies’ diktat, now again swelled in size. The world watched.

We reclaimed the territories that the enemies had snatched from us. Uncle had promised to restore our glory, and more. So, next, under the world’s eyes, our armies claimed new territory. Peaceful invasions: not a shot was fired: though our armed forces stood by, poised.

The world — I mean Europe — had watched us for fifteen years, prostrate, stumbling back to our knees, knocked flat again, noses in mud. Now, when we helped ourselves back to our feet and stood erect — the world, suddenly remorseful, hemmed and hawed and allowed us to have what we’d already taken unto ourselves.

After the last war, the world had snatched away its eyes and cast us away to suffer alone. Now, our Guide had earned back for us our most basic human right. The right to be seen. The right that’s in no Nation’s constitution, for no man dare imagine life without it. It’s a right we’ve earned back. It’s a right we’re willing to go on earning. With our blood. With the world’s. In the Nation’s name, Uncle had overridden our code of right and wrong.

No, not our code. The code that was handed to us as a pacifier is handed to an infant growing every day quieter and thinner. Now, across the Nation, millions rushed to lay at our Guide’s feet, for him to grind, with his heels, into the mud, the code that has kept, for two thousand years, men and Nations bow-headed, eyes cast down.

Prostrating itself at our Guide’s feet, consecrating to our Guide the conscience of sixty millions, our Nation had overridden the old code. Now, our Nation received, from the hands of our own Moses, our own new Code.

For fourteen years, our Guide courted our Nation. The courtship was uncouth: sweat-drenched speeches, beer-hall brawls. The enemies within were handled leniently at first; now they were not. Now, the war at home rages openly: men arrested, books burned, women hiding, civic liberties suspended; the shops of the enemies within shattered, their homes ransacked, their bodies missing, no longer even surfacing like dead rats in the gutter.

Now, after seven years in power, our Guide has led our Nation to the threshold of war abroad. This war will be a blood wedding: the bride dragged screaming to the altar, the current squatters on our Promised Land reluctant to vacate our property.

But all this, he promises, is temporary. For, after the blood wedding — follow our Guide’s finger, where it still points, and see: the thousand-year long fairy-gold honeymoon. Distant and dim. Do you still see it?

Now — as I perch, in Uncle’s mansion, in my bathroom, at the east end of Uncle’s Chancellery’s second storey, on the black three-legged stool that Uncle’s photographer used in modest days as an ersatz tripod, photographing Uncle in various poses and outfits, to select those best supporting Uncle’s speeches — now I wonder: What if this blood wedding is all there will be?

He promises that the war will be easy and quick. He promises that no other Nations will come to the aid of the Nations we march into. He promises that his garden-party diplomacy, and their guilt at the wrongs they’ve done us, will keep out of the war those of the enemies we’re not currently seeking to conquer.

What if he’s wrong? What if the war drags on for years? What if this blood wedding is all there will be?

This, perhaps, is what Uncle fears. This, perhaps, is why our fire-eyed Guide crouches now beneath me, his eyes tight shut as he makes me shit on him, making me his mirror.

‘I won’t touch you,’ Uncle said that first day. ‘But you must look at me.’

Uncle hasn’t touched me. Sometimes, when I’ve hesitated to grant his favour, he’s fallen at my feet and begged me. Still unable to face me. Begging the ground a foot to my left.

I am the priestess who hears my blue-eyed black sheep’s mute confession, utters the Hail Marys on his behalf, and forgives. Forgives what? I know not what. His confession is too terrible to be uttered. It is performed, but the performance is abstract art: I cannot decipher it.

I am the nurse who cleanses her patient in a mud bath and sends him forth into the world: skin scrubbed and shining, effusing lime and pine, fish-hook eyes freshly baited. Sends him forth to do what? I know not what. As a woman, my place is here at home.

Our men venture forth into the world. Men’s work dirties them. We wait, here, to cleanse them.

Of her sons and of her daughters, this is what our Nation requires. To our Nation raped and poisoned, our Guide has restored the obedience of her straying children. Our mother, chronically abused, has become a demanding parent.

What deeds do I forgive our Guide? What deeds do I enable our Guide to stride forth to do? I know not.

Uncle’s mansion, the Conservatory, our capital city — I could walk around in them all day and hear nothing and see I know not what.

I am the mirror that sees him as he sees himself, his own eyes tight shut so that he can go on seeing himself as our Nation does.

I am the niece who saves her Uncle and sends him forth to save our Nation. A Nation demanding: its service riving him, anew every day, into two. I am the healer who makes her riven Uncle whole again. Uncle I watch; Uncle I begin to see.

He sees nothing; he learns nothing. Every morning he goes out and does I know not what. Every evening he crawls home to me to mortify his flesh and cleanse his soul.

The enemies within he’s been handling. Now, he’s arrayed our valiant troops along our borders, to east, and west, and south, poised to handle the enemies without.

The last war ended twenty years ago. Never mind the Victors’ Diktat: we, ourselves, swore: Never again war.

But twenty years is a lifetime. Legions of stalwart men, glossy-uniformed, armed with glinting steel and primeval dreams, follow our Guide’s finger, catch fire from our Guide’s blazing blue eyes, and shoulder their rifles.

* * *

What should I do? Today, I must make him face either me or himself. Today, I must resolve this love triangle.

I’ve been eating as much fruit as possible and as little meat. Lise told me, years ago — and only months ago did I think to ask Lise how she knew — that people who live on fruit pass odourless stool. I can tell you that’s not true: my poop smells of rotten pumpkin. Still, it could be worse.

An all-fruit diet makes me gassy: a warm rotten-pumpkin fart streams into the bathroom, accompanying, like a stoppered trumpet, the crimson-yellow parade.

We’ve both grown used to the smell. You don’t know what you’re capable of getting used to. Perhaps you don’t want to know. It’s easier to judge me, if you don’t know yourself.

In the mirror, I watch myself defiling our Nation’s Guide. I watch unflinching, for I’m not really here. I’m not here, shitting on Uncle, watching as my shit showers over Uncle’s forehead, then slithers down Uncle’s tight-shut eyes. I’ve not been here, evening after evening, these six months.

How could I be? I don’t want to go mad. So I’m in the Park, outside, strolling, neat and safe, pondering philosophically weighty questions.

Why did his Nation make of Uncle a more-than-man? Why wasn’t a man sufficient to lead us?

This question you’d ask only as an outsider dismissing us as adolescents and idolaters. For fifteen years, the men who had been heading the democratic governments imposed by the enemies, oversaw only street fights, emigrations and suicides and made speeches, jargon-laden and pacifist, directed at our enemies far over our people’s heads. For fifteen years, men serving private interests, placating international wrath, failed us. Only then did we turn to our Guide.

Uncle had no choice but to become a more-than-man. To become our chaste golden eagle.

Our Nation had not demanded that its Guide be chaste. That, too, was a need Uncle discerned for himself. That, too, was a need Uncle rose to fill.

Proceed to part 4b...

Copyright © 2023 by Amita Basu