Mirror

by Amita Basu

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

part 5a

All the things Uncle and his comrades, his battalion of officials and his legion of followers have done — what the Code would call wrong — have been done away from the light. We didn’t have to see them. We didn’t have to think about them. We could shut our eyes tight, lean out of our newly whitewashed houses, sniff the frangipani and lilies and roses from the garden that was once our neighbour’s — until we informed on our neighbour, and they deported her and awarded us her garden — la-la-la and dance the evening away to Strauss.

Our Guide has brought us prosperity. He’s stabilized our currency; renormalized our grain supply; distributed meat and firewood as well as radio sets to our needy; and imported, for our wealthy, cars and fur coats.

Our Nation has followed our Guide through his uncouth courtship, through his blood wedding at home. Now, even into war, our people will follow our Guide. They’ve consecrated their consciences to our Guide. They’ll sacrifice — if our Guide bids them — their lives for our Nation.

Our Guide’s peaceful reclamations of old territory and our Guide’s peaceful conquests of new territory were greeted with triumph at home and with respect abroad. Now it’s time to punish the enemies without; now it’s time to conquer our Promised Land.

We stand on the threshold of war. But, perhaps, nobody at home and nobody abroad really expects that war is really coming. Don’t do anything. Play along. Dance along. Shut your eyes. All this will pass. March-march-march, la-la-la.

Nobody wants to see. “You be our eyes,” our Nation bids our Guide.

Nobody wants to see.“You be my mirror,” our Guide bids me.

On our Nation’s behalf, our Guide required of me that I grant him his most basic human right, the right to be looked at. Cast away into a trance that’s lasted, these six months more or less, I’ve complied.

Yesterday, our radios told us that our biggest neighbour to the east attacked one of our radio towers, that they’re begging for war and that war they shall have.

I know that the attack was staged by us. Many of my fellow followers know that, too. But I know what nobody else on earth knows. Now, no more la-la-la. Now, no more march-march-march.

I really am here. Uncle hasn’t vaporized, to be replaced by the Stranger. Uncle is riven in two, and Uncle refuses to see. Our Guide is riven in two, and I must see.

Our armies swell with men bright-faced, fire-eyed: men born after the last war’s horrors, men born into our Guide’s fantasies of the Glory of War. Our factories are producing fewer tractors, more tanks; fewer fur coats, more army coats. Our Guide has dissolved us all into a classless Nation: rich and poor, though we don’t want war, we will, even into war, follow our Guide.

How has our Guide compelled our Nation? Is he a puppy, scared by an eagle, screaming for vengeance, screaming to Fritz the gardener for all the world’s eagles to be shot? Or is he our Nation’s Eagle — soaring a mile high, seeing ten thousand miles ahead, seeing farther than mere men can see: calling to us clear-voiced, guiding us to our Promised Land?

How has our Nation been compelled by our Guide? Has our Nation been moved by a puppy’s screams to shoulder arms and take aim at the eagle, at all the eagles mired in an endless blood wedding? Or has our Nation been inspired, by her eagle’s call, to march through this blood wedding into our fairy-gold eternity?

An eagle would not beg to be shit upon. An eagle does not require to be looked at. An eagle will not tolerate being looked at unless it’s been caught and tamed, its tummy growing flabby.

* * *

What if I told you about the love triangle I’m trapped in? What would you think of him then?

It’s my Guide who taught me to honour my Nation. As my mother. As my lover. What should I do?

Why is he doing this? Which of the five possibilities is true? Unless I know that, anything I do is another blunder in the dark. Can our Nation stand such another blunder?

Should I go show the Nation what Uncle is? Or should I make Uncle open his own eyes?

I’ve drawn it out, as he wants me to, but now I’m almost done shitting. Unless a snatch of breeze disarranges the air, I no longer smell the stink inside. As long as nothing changes — or as long as things change only slowly — we smell nothing, we see nothing.

Jumping out of the ballroom window wouldn’t have done it. Jumping off the third-floor roof won’t do it. Not certainly. And I can’t stand any more uncertainty.

I could clean up, wait till midnight, then sneak out of the Chancellery, the city, the Nation. And play out, privately, with blue-eyed Galzy, who doesn’t like the others, my own private pantomime of ignorant priestess, of terrified nurse.

Perhaps, if I snatch away my eyes, then Uncle will be forced to open his own: to look into a mirror; to see himself; to feel the horror that he refuses to feel, that I refuse to feel. His eyes tight shut, my mind tight shut, the horror hovers unclaimed between us; the horror shuttles silently between us, stranded.

Perhaps, if he were forced to look into his own soul, he’d turn our Nation back from war. Atone for our crimes. Resign. Seek sanctuary in a sanatorium. Leave mere men to lead our Nation.

And will our Nation, god-intoxicated, consent to be led again by mere men? What should I do? What is my duty to my Nation?

Our Guide has become our Nation. My duty to my Nation has become my obedience to my Uncle. What my Nation requires of me — a little favour — must I not perform? Our Guide lives for our Nation, for the good of our Nation. Does he not?

‘Resign’? No. Uncle can’t resign. He’ll have to abdicate. They won’t let him. We’ve all come, in his name, too far to turn back now. They will compel him to stay. To lead them forward.

What if I just leave?

I can’t just leave. How can I leave my Nation prostrate, noses in mud, before a shit-covered madman? If that’s what he is?

If that’s what he is, I must show them. I must show them, behind the more-than-man standing beneath our eagle, the less-than-man that our Guide has shown me he is. He’s made me watch him in the mirror. Now, I must show my Nation what he’s forced me see. They must see that this war, to the threshold of which he has brought them, would be madness. It would be mass-murdering those who made a puppy feel small.

What if I tell them? Nation, Awaken!

A sob chokes me. They’ll all hate me.

But I love my Nation well enough to demand no gratitude, to weather all vitriol. It was Uncle who taught me to love my Nation above myself.

But what if they don’t believe me? Worse: what if they do? What will they do to me, to punish my treason? Punish my heresy?

I’m not allowed to value my life: I am but a cell in the Nation’s body. But I do value my life.

Will they see?

They called him mad, but now they worship him. In his name they’ve committed crimes. To see that the eagle they’ve followed is a puppy would require them to face their own mirrors. To look into their own souls. To see in them... what?

What kind of people feel compelled, when a puppy screams, to shoulder rifles and shoot down from the sky all the eagles?

A Nationful of puppies broken-toothed. A Nation that, twenty years ago, was branded a mad dog. A Nation that’s been, for twenty years, silently screaming.

Can these people bear to face themselves when he can’t?

Won’t they see?

They called him mad, and they worship him in public but, in private, many of them resist. They speak up: risking their own lives. They give the enemies within — those who couldn’t emigrate, those who haven’t yet been vaporized — food and friendship and refuge in their attics, thereby risking the lives of their own families.

Are there not still among my people thousands, perhaps millions, who — if I clambered onto Uncle’s white marble stage and showed them what Uncle has forced me to see — would be able to see, to act, to turn us back from the threshold of a war?

An endless blood wedding. That’s all there will be. This is what Uncle sees. This what the Nation must be made to see.

I try to picture telling them. My heart bolts into my throat, trying to bolt out my mouth. Choking on my heart, I picture telling what I know to just one person whom I know. One friend. One of the forty young people we hosted tonight?

I line them up: women facing men, as at the start of an obsolete country dance. I walk between the two rows. I cast my eyes up and down. For a friend.

Where is a friend? For each of them, I know where he or she lives; her favourite flower; his favourite actress. Of none of them do I know anything that could, under any light, compromise them. Whom shall I tell? Where is a friend?

First, the Guidance dissolved family. Then, it dissolved the church. Then, it dissolved friendship. The Nation demanded total fealty. And total fealty tolerates no other bonds.

I picture myself telling someone. I picture them screaming: What are you saying, Katharyn? This has been going on for six months, and you never said a word? Why, these six months you’ve been merry as the Mad Hatter. And he? He, whom you and I cheered at the rallies? He, our immaculate father? He, our chaste lover? He, our fairy-gold destiny? Are you mad, Katharyn?

I’m thirteen again. Back at the grand rally where, after years of resisting, I found my faith. It’s chilly under the stars: I’ve passed my arms around my neighbours’ elbows. At first, just to keep warm. Then, in the black night, amidst the white-columned temple of light, at last god-intoxicated.

Now, seven years later, in memory, I look up and down that row. Half the people we’ve hosted tonight were there then: we’ve all stayed close to home: we’ve all become one good-tempered, close-knit, blind-eyed, Nationwide family. Now, in memory, I rise above my thirteen-year old body and look around. I watch 100,000 young people, just like me, becoming 100,000 Followers. Ready to do, with their hands and their brains, the work that their Guide told them their Nation required of them.

Ready, now, to do it to me.

Proceed to part 5b...

Copyright © 2023 by Amita Basu