He was expected. News of the Commander’s lookalike had raced ahead of the helicopter shuttle. Here in the Theater of Masks the original, the man with no mask, was perceived as the mask’s imitator: the creation was real while the creator was the counterfeit! It was as though he were present at the death of God and the god who had died was himself. Masked men and women carrying automatic weapons were waiting for him outside the shuttle’s door. He accompanied them without protest.
He was led to a chairless “holding room,” whose single piece of furniture was a battered wooden table, watched by the unflinching eyes of lizards, with thirsty flies buzzing at the moisture in the corners of his eyes. His passport, watch, and airline ticket were taken from him by a woman whose face was concealed behind a mask bearing the face of the woman he loved. Deafened by the strident martial music that was incessantly being played throughout the airport at high volume on a primitive sound system, he could still hear the elated terror in the young voices of his guards—for guerrillas weighted down with weapons were all around him—and he could also see evidence of the situation’s extreme instability in the shifting eyes of the unmasked civilians in the terminal building and in the jumpy bodies of the masked combatants. All this brought vividly home to Solanka that he had stepped a long way out of his element, leaving behind all the signs and codes by which his life’s meaning and form had been established. Here “Professor Malik Solanka” had no existence as a self, as a man with a past and future and people who cared about his fate. He was merely an inconvenient nobody with a face that everyone knew, and unless he could rapidly parlay that startling physiognomy into an advantage, his position would deteriorate, resulting, at the very best, in his early deportation. The very worst was something he refused to contemplate. The thought of being expelled without having come close to Neela was upsetting enough. I’m naked again, Solanka thought. Naked and stupid. Walking right into the approaching knockout punch.
After an hour or more, an Australian Holden station wagon drove up to the shed in which he had been detained and Solanka was invited, not tenderly, but without undue roughness, to get in the back. Guerrillas in combat fatigues pushed in on either side of him; two more got into the baggage hold and sat facing the rear, their guns sticking out of the raised back-window hatch. On the drive through Mildendo, Malik Solanka had a strong sense of déjà vu, and it took him a moment to work out that he was being reminded of India. Of, to be specific, Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi’s troubled heart, where the traders crowded together in this same hugger-mugger style, where the shop fronts were as brightly colored and the interiors as crudely lit, where the roadway was even more densely thronged with walking, cycling, jostling, shouting life, where animals and human beings fought for space, and where massed car horns performed the daily unvarying symphony of the street. Solanka had not expected such crowds. Easier to predict but unnerving nonetheless was the palpable distrust between the communities, the muttering clumps of Elbee and Indo-Lilly men eyeing each other unpleasantly, the sense of living in a tinderbox and waiting for a flash. This was the paradox and the curse of communal trouble: when it came, it was your friends and neighbors who came to kill you, the very same people who had helped you, a few days earlier, start your spluttering motor scooter, who had accepted the sweetmeats you distributed when your daughter became engaged to a decent, well-educated man. The shoe-shop manager next to whose premises your tobacco store had operated for ten years or more: this was the man who would put the boot in, who would lead the men with torches to your door and fill the air with sweet Virginia smoke.
There were no tourists to be seen. (The flight to Blefuscu had been more than two thirds empty.) Few women were on the street, apart from the surprisingly large number of female FRM cadres, and no children. Many stores were closed and barricaded; others remained warily open, and people—men—were still going about their daily tasks. Guns, however, were everywhere to be seen, and in the distance, from time to time, sporadic shooting could be heard. The police force was collaborating with the FRM personnel to maintain a measure of law and order; the Ruritanian joke of an army remained in its barracks, although the leading generals were involved in the complex negotiations taking place behind the scenes for long hours every day. FRM negotiators were meeting with the ethnic Elbee chiefs, as well as religious and business leaders. “Commander Akasz” was at least trying to give the impression of a man looking for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. But civil war bubbled just beneath the surface. Skyresh Bolgolam may have been defeated and captured, but the large proportion of Elbee youths who had backed the failed Bolgolamite coup were licking their wounds and no doubt plotting their next move. Meanwhile, the international community was moving quickly toward declaring Lilliput-Blefuscu the world’s smallest pariah state, suspending trade agreements and freezing aid programs. In these moves Solanka had seen his opportunity.
Motorcycle outriders surrounded the station wagon, escorting it to the heavily defended perimeter walls of the parliamentary compound. The gates opened and the vehicle passed through, proceeding to a service entrance at the rear of the central complex. The kitchen entrance, thought Solanka with a wry private smile, was the true gate of power. Many people, functionaries or supplicants, could enter the great houses of power through their front doors. But to get into a service elevator, watched by white-hatted chefs and sous-chefs, to be borne slowly upward in an unornamented box with silent masked men and women all around you: that really was important. To emerge into an undistinguished bureaucratic corridor and be led through a series of increasingly unpretentious rooms was to walk down the true pathway to the center. Not bad for a dollmaker, he told himself. You’re in. Let’s see if you get out with what you want. In fact, let’s see if you manage to get out at all.
At the end of the sequence of interconnecting, blank backrooms came a room with a single door. Inside were the now-familiar spartan furnishings: a desk, two canvas chairs, a ceiling light, a filing cabinet, a telephone. He was left alone to wait. He picked up the phone; there was a dial tone, and a small label on the instrument told him to dial 9 for an outside line. As a precaution, he had researched and memorized several numbers: that of a local newspaper, the American, British, and Indian embassies, a legal practice. He tried dialing these, but each time heard a woman’s recorded voice saying, in English, Hindi, and Lilliputian, “That number cannot be dialed from this telephone.” He tried dialing the emergency services. No luck. “That number cannot be dialed.” What we have here, he told himself, is not a telephone at all but only the outward appearance or mask of a telephone. Just as this room is only wearing the costume of an office but is in fact a prison cell. No doorknob on the inside of the door. The single window: small and barred. He went over to the filing cabinet and pulled at a drawer. Empty. Yes, this was a stage set, and he had been cast in a play, but nobody had given him the script.
“Commander Akasz” swept in four hours later. By this time Solanka’s remaining confidence had all but evaporated. “Akasz” was accompanied by two young Fremen too lowly to be in costume, and followed into the room by a Steadicam operator, a boom-carrying sound recordist and—Solanka’s heart bounded with excitement—a woman wearing camouflage fatigues and a “Zameen of Rijk” mask: concealing her face behind an imitation of itself.
“That body,” Solanka greeted her, striving for lightness. “I’d know it again anywhere.” This didn’t go down especially well. “What are you here for?” Neela burst out, then disciplined herself. “Excuse me, Commander. I apologize.” Babur, in the “Akasz Kronos” outfit, was no longer the crestfallen, abashed young man Solanka remembered from Washington Square. He spoke in a barking voice that did not expect disagreements. The mask acts, Solanka remembered. “Commander Akasz,” the great man-mountain, had become a big man in this very small pond, and was acting the part. Not so big, Solanka noted, as to be immune from the Neela effect. Babur walked with a long, sweeping stride, but after every dozen steps or so, his foot somehow managed to com
e down on the hem of his swirling cloak, forcing his neck to jerk awkwardly back. He also managed to collide, within a minute of entering Solanka’s cell, with the table and both the chairs. This, even when her face was hidden by a mask! She never failed to exceed Solanka’s expectations. He, however, had disappointed hers. Now he must see if he could surprise her.
Babur had already acquired the royal we. “We are familiar with you, naturally,” he said without preamble. “Who right now is not cognizant of the creator of the Puppet Kings? No doubt you have good reasons for presenting yourself,” he said, with a half turn of his body toward Neela Mahendra. No fool, then, Solanka thought. No point denying what he already knows to be true. “Our conundrum is, what shall we do with you? Sister Zameen? Something to say?” Neela shrugged. “Send him home,” she said in a dull, uninterested voice that shook Solanka. “I’ve got no use for him.” Babur laughed. “The sister says you are useless, Professor Sahib. Are you so? Jolly good! Shall we throw you in the bin?”
Solanka launched into his prepared spiel. “My proposal,” he said, “which I have come a long way to make, is this: allow me to be your intermediary. Your connection with my project needs no comment from me. We can give you a link to a mass global audience, to win hearts and minds. This you urgently need to do. The tourist industry is already as dead as your legendary Hurgo bird. If you lose your export markets and the support of the major regional powers, this country will be bankrupt within weeks, certainly within months. You need to persuade people that your cause is just, that you are fighting for democratic principles, not against them. For the repudiated Golbasto constitution, I mean. You need to give that mask a human face. Let Neela and me work on this with my New York people, on a complimentary basis. Consider it pro bono work on a freedom movement’s behalf.” This is how far he was prepared to go for love, his unspoken thoughts said to Neela. Her cause was his. If she forgave him, he would be the servant of all her desires.
“Commander Akasz” waved the idea away. “The situation has developed,” he said. “Other parties—bad eggs, the lot of them!—have been intransigent. As a result we also have hardened our stance.” Solanka didn’t follow. “We have demanded total executive authority,” he said. “No more nambying or pambying. What is needed in Filbistan is for a real chap to take charge. Isn’t that so, sister?” Neela was silent. “Sister?” repeated Babur, turning to face her and raising his voice; and she, lowering her head, answered almost inaudibly, “Yes.” Babur nodded. “A period of discipline,” he said. “If we say the moon is made of cheese, then of what, sister, is it made?” “Cheese,” said Neela in the same low voice. “And if we tell you the world is flat? What shape is it?” “Flat, Commander.” “And if tomorrow we decree that the sun goes round the earth?” “Then, Commander, the sun it will be that goes around.” Babur nodded with satisfaction. “Jolly good! That is the message for the world to grasp,” he said. “A leader has arisen in Filbistan, and it is for everyone to follow, or suffer the needful consequences. Oh, by the by, Professor, you have studied ideas at the University of Cambridge in England, isn’t it. Therefore be so good as to enlighten us on a vexed point: is it better to be loved or feared?” Solanka did not answer. “Come, come, Professor,” Babur urged. “Make your good effort! You can do better than that.” The FRM cadres accompanying “Commander Akasz” began to fiddle meaningfully with their Uzis. In an expressionless voice, Solanka quoted Machiavelli. “‘Men are less hesitant about harming someone who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared.’” He began to speak with greater animation, and looked directly at Neela Mahendra. “‘Because love is held together by a chain of obligation which, since men are a sorry lot, is broken on every occasion in which their own self-interest is concerned; but fear is held together by a dread of punishment which will never abandon you.’” Babur brightened. “Good egg,” he cried, thumping Solanka on the back. “You aren’t useless after all! So, so. We’ll think about your proposal. Jolly good! Stay awhile. Be our guest. We already have the president and Mr. Bolgolam in residence. You, too, will witness these first bright hours of our beloved Filbistan, upon which the sun never sets. Sister, be so kind as to confirm. How often does the sun go down?” And Neela Mahendra, who had always carried herself like a queen, bowed her head like a slave and said, “Commander, it never does.”
The cell—he had stopped thinking of it as a room—did not contain a bed, and lacked even the most rudimentary toilet facilities. Humiliation was the stock-in-trade of “Commander Akasz,” as his treatment of Neela had amply demonstrated. Solanka perceived that he was to be humiliated, too. Time passed; he lacked a watch by which to measure it. The breeze faded and died. Night, the ideologically incorrect, nonexistent night, grew humid, thickened and stretched. He had been given a bowl of unidentifiable mush to eat and a jug of suspect water. He tried to resist both, but hunger and thirst were tyrants, and in the end he did eat and drink. After that he wrestled with nature until the inevitable moment of defeat. When he could no longer contain himself, he pissed and shat wretchedly in a corner, taking off his shirt and wiping himself with it as best he could. It was hard not to fall into solipsism, hard not to see these degradations as a punishment for a clumsy, hurtful life. Lilliput-Blefuscu had reinvented itself in his image. Its streets were his biography, patrolled by figments of his imagination and altered versions of people he had known: Dubdub and Perry Pincus were here in their sci-fi versions, also mask-and-costume incarnations of Sara Lear and Eleanor Masters, Jack Rhinehart and Sky Schuyler, and Morgen Franz. There were even space-age Wislawas and Schlinks walking the Mildendo streets, as well as Mila and Neela and himself. The masks of his life circled him sternly, judging him. He closed his eyes and the masks were still there, whirling. He bowed his head before their verdict. He had wished to be a good man, to lead a good man’s life, but the truth was he hadn’t been able to hack it. As Eleanor had said, he had betrayed those whose only crime was to have loved him. When he had attempted to retreat from his darker self, the self of his dangerous fury, hoping to overcome his faults by a process of renunciation, of giving up, he had merely fallen into new, more grievous error. Seeking his redemption in creation, offering up an imagined world, he had seen its denizens move out into the world and grow monstrous; and the greatest monster of them all wore his own guilty face. Yes, deranged Babur was a mirror of himself. Seeking to right a grave injustice, to be a servant of the Good, “Commander Akasz” had come off at the hinges and become grotesque.
Malik Solanka told himself he deserved no better than this. Let the worst befall. In the midst of the collective fury of these unhappy isles, a fury far greater, running far deeper than his own pitiful rage, he had discovered a personal Hell. So be it. Of course Neela would never return to him. He was not worthy of happiness. When she came to see him, she had hidden her lovely face.
It was still dark when help came. The cell door opened and a young Indo-Lilly man entered, bare-faced, wearing rubber gloves and carrying a roll of plastic refuse sacks as well as a bucket, pan, and mop. He cleaned up Solanka’s mess unflinchingly and with great delicacy, never seeking to catch the perpetrator’s eye. When he had finished, he returned with clean clothes—a pale green kurta and white pantaloon pajamas—as well as a clean towel, two new buckets, one empty, one full of water, and a bar of soap. “Please,” he said, and, “I am sorry,” and then left. Solanka washed and changed and felt a little more himself. Then Neela arrived, alone, unmasked, in a mustard-colored dress, with a blue iris in her hair.
It obviously preyed on her mind that Solanka had witnessed her timorous responses to her treatment by Babur. “Everything I’ve done, everything I’m doing, is for the story,” she said. “Wearing the mask was a gesture of solidarity, a way of earning the fighters’ trust. Also, you know, I’m here to look at what they’re doing, not to have them look at me. I could see you thought I was hiding from you behind it. That wasn’t so. Similarly with Babur. I’m not here to argue. I’m making a film.” She sounde
d defensive, taut. “Malik,” she said abruptly, “I don’t want to talk about us, okay? I’m caught up in something big right now. My attention has to be there.”
He went for it, gathered himself and made his play. All or nothing, Hollywood or bust: he would never get another chance. He might not have much of one anyway, but at least she had come to see him, had actually dressed up for it, and that was a good sign. “This has become much more than a documentary film project for you,” he said. “This really goes to the heart. There’s a lot riding on it—your uprooted roots are pulling hard. Your paradoxical desire to be a part of what you left. And, no, I didn’t really think you were wearing the mask to hide your face from me, or at least that wasn’t the only thing I thought. I also thought you were hiding from yourself, from the decision you’ve made somewhere along the line to cross a line and become a participant in this thing. You don’t look like an observer to me. You’re in too deep. Maybe it started out with a personal feeling about Babur—and don’t worry, this isn’t jealousy speaking, at least I’m trying hard not to let it be—but my guess is that whatever your feelings about ‘Commander Akasz’ were, they’re a lot more ambiguous now. Your problem is that you’re an idealist trying to be an extremist. You are convinced that your people, if I can use so antiquated a term, have been done down by history, that they deserve what Babur has been fighting for—voting rights, the right to own property, the whole slate of legitimate human demands. You thought this was a struggle for human dignity, a just cause, and you were actually proud of Babur for teaching your passive kinsmen and kinswomen how to fight their own battles. In consequence you were willing to overlook a certain amount of, what shall we call it, illiberalism. War is tough and so on. Certain niceties get trampled. All this you told yourself, and all the while there was another voice in your head telling you in a whisper you didn’t want to hear that you were turning into history’s whore. You know how it is. Once you’ve sold yourself, all you have left is a limited ability to negotiate the price. How much would you put up with? How much authoritarian crap in the name of justice? How much bathwater could you lose without losing the baby?—So now you’re caught up, as you say, in something big, and you’re right, it deserves your attention, but so does this: that you only went this far because of the fury that possessed you all of a sudden in my bedroom in another city in another dimension of the universe. I can’t articulate exactly what happened that night, but I do know that some sort of psychic feedback loop established itself between you and Mila and Eleanor, the fury went round and round, doubling and redoubling. It made Morgen punch me out and it blew you clean across the planet into the arms of a little Napoleon who will oppress ‘your people’ if he comes out of this on top, even more than the ethnic Elbees, who have been, at least in your eyes, the villains of this piece. Or he’ll oppress them just as much but in a different way. Please don’t misunderstand.—I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick’s wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.—I’m not saying that you came here because of me. You were coming anyway, right? It was our big farewell night, and as I remember, it had gone pretty well until my bedroom turned into Grand Central Station. So you’d have been here, and the pulls and pushes of being here would have worked on you whether I existed or not. But I think that what pushed you over the edge was disappointed love. You were disappointed in me and by me, which is to say by love, by the great untrammeled love you were just allowing yourself to begin to feel for me. You had just begun to trust me enough, to trust yourself enough, to let yourself go, and then suddenly the prince turns out to be a fat old toad. What happened is that the love you’d poured out went bad, it curdled, and now you’re using that sourness, that disenchantment and cynicism, to push you down Babur’s dead-end road. Why not, eh? If goodness is a fantasy and love is a magazine dream, why not? Nice guys finish second, to the victor go the spoils, et cetera. Your system is fighting itself, the bruised love is turning on the idealism and battering it into submission. And guess what? That puts you in an impossible situation, where you’re risking more even than your life. You’re risking your honor and self-respect. Here it is, Neela, your Galileo moment. Does the earth move? Don’t tell me. I already know the answer. But it’s the most important question you’re ever going to be asked, except for the one I’m going to ask you now: Neela, do you still love me? Because if you don’t, then please leave, go meet your fate and I’ll wait here for mine, but I don’t think you can do that. Because I do love you as you need to be loved. You choose: in the right corner there’s your handsome Prince Charming, who also, by a small mischance, turns out to be a psychotic megalomaniacal swine. In the wrong corner there’s the fat old toad, who knows how to give you what you need and who needs, so very badly, what you in turn know how to give him. Can right be wrong? Is the wrong thing right for you? I believe you came here tonight to find out the answer, to see if you could conquer your fury as you helped me conquer mine, to find out if you could find a way of coming back from the edge. Stay with Babur and he’ll fill you up with hatred. But you and me: we just might have a shot. I know it’s stupid to make this kind of declaration when just an hour ago I was stinking of my own shit and I still don’t have a room with a doorknob on the inside, but there it is, that’s what I crossed the world to say.”