District: Kirkuk (Gao’s Flame), 2103.
It was still early when the SMS bracelet around Rashid’s wrist vibrated, waking him. The message was brief and precise.
Dear Beneficiary no. RBS89:
Good Benefit.
Today, the first Saturday of the month, is dedicated to ‘eradicating the remnants of evil.’ The Beloved Units will be mobilised throughout the city between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Anyone in possession of audio or audio-visual recordings of the reclassified languages (laser on titanium or carbon fibre) should turn these in to the officially designated droids patrolling immediately. Anyone failing to comply with these instructions will be arrested and promptly archived.
Gao Dong, The Beloved, Loves You.
There was nothing unusual about these messages, not since the Venerable Benefactor, Gao Dong, who currently preferred the title ‘The Beloved’, had made the Memory Office his priority department. For those who don’t follow state politics, the Memory Office is both a security and social service. It functions as a security service by virtue of its core mission: to protect the state’s present from the threat of the past. But what makes it a social service, you ask. This stems from the intimate relationship the government has with its followers, trainees, and admirers—not exactly the relationship between superior and subordinates, rather benefactor and beneficiaries. That was the touch of genius the Venerable Benefactor had brought to all areas of life in the black-gold state of Kirkuk, thirty-five years ago. What he did to protect them all from the threat of the past was itself a service. For instance, he had reclassified all the city’s older languages, the most ancient of which dated back five thousand years, as ‘prohibited’. As beneficiaries, the people were forbidden from speaking Syriac, Arabic, Kurdish, Turkmen, or any language other than Chinese. The punishment for speaking those languages, or reading about history, literature, or art in them was merciless: you were archived. This involved being incinerated in a special device—resembling one of those UV tanning beds that were all the rage in the late twentieth century—your ashes would then be removed to a facility that produced synthetic diamonds, where, just a few hours later, all that had been left of you would re-emerge as a tiny, glittering stone. It was called ‘archiving’ because a crystal can store an infinite library of information locked in its chambers—more secrets than the House of Wisdom—even a traitor’s personal history could be preserved in them. (It was something to do with electrons and vibrations.) Once polished, these crystals would be sent to another factory where they would come to adorn one of the Benefactor Gao Dong’s shoes, or one of his many hats.
Rashid didn’t possess any recordings in any of the languages Gao Dong wanted to strip Kirkuk of, but he spoke three of them fluently. This he couldn’t deny. He’d learnt them from his parents, and he knew something in his bones would compel him to teach them, in turn, to his own children one day, if he had any. But that’s all he felt about the issue. He was no rebel. He knew there were some people who would fight, or even die, for these languages, claiming they held the key to citizens’ real hearts. But these were just rumours Rashid had heard. He’d never met one of these rebels.
A few days earlier a special search-and-raid unit had turned up several discs and tapes, dating back eighty years, on a hillside in Daquq. Information had been leaked by a double agent to the search unit who reported that the artefacts were found to be full of songs—songs that some people in Kirkuk had heard about, but that no one had actually heard. According to the gossip, these had been among the most beautiful, exquisite pieces ever recorded. Songs about the singer’s beloved and the pain of being separated from her; songs about the beauty of nature and the women who go down to the village spring to get water, and lots of other things like that. The times they lived in sounded much simpler, safer and more humane, than our present age.
The discs and tapes were immediately destroyed and a written and verbal order announcing the enforced surrender of all similar material was issued. Everyone in the search unit was transferred to a ‘training session’ in the city’s Great Hall of Benefits. Things like this seemed to happen every two or three weeks. They’d be digging in search of water and come across some old computers; the digger’s claw would scrape against old computer parts or a glimmer of tapes and discs would peek through the disturbed earth. Some people were prepared to pay a lot of money to get their hands on that sort of rubbish—despite the threat of being archived—and several people had already been transformed into little square-cuts for being in possession of ‘found’ music or films, which now graced one of Gao Dong’s waistcoats and lapels. Whenever Rashid thought about the Benefactor’s love of fine costumes, the collars and sashes, the cravats and cummerbunds, he couldn’t stop another image from entering his head: that of a gag. It was because of a slogan he had heard once, or read: ‘History is a hostage, but it will bite through the gag you tie around its mouth, bite through and still be heard.’
* * *
The time was nearing one p.m., and the young man, in his twenties, who called himself ‘Rashid’, considered going out for the day. If he stepped out into the street, he would automatically become ‘Beneficiary no. RBS89’—or ‘RBS’ for short (the number ‘89’ simply referred to the year he was born). But if he stayed in, he could remain unnamed, no one. Under the rule of Gao Dong—who’d come to power in the wealthy city-state of Kirkuk as a result of the Three Month War in 2078—all citizens had been reclassified as beneficiaries. This was because everything His Excellency now did for them, or to them, or on their behalf, in his governmental and military capacity as commander and chief, was to their benefit. His security measures were for their benefit; his purges of camps outside Kirkuk, driving out refugees wanting to share in their spoils, was for their benefit; his war on workers’ unions and their terrorists—all for their benefit. And every citizen prayed for his continued protection, of course.
This is how things stand in Kirkuk today—or rather in what the Beloved Commander calls ‘Gao’s Flame’—in honour of the city’s eternal flame.1 The old districts of the city and the Assyrian Citadel look more or less as they have done for over a century, even though the city has been cut off from Mesopotamia for four decades now, since Gao Dong’s arrival; the outskirts of the city have been developed as the city has expanded, and outside them are the camps, the migrants, and exiled union extremists. Over the years, Gao’s Flame has grown as one of the world’s richest city-states, a place of enormous wealth and investment, thanks to its petroleum reserves, where its citizens enjoyed peace and tranquility. An Assyrian from the city, named Sargon, built the Citadel anew and in each of its seven corners he placed huge gates flanked by winged bulls in the style of those sculpted by the Gods of Arrapha2 thousands of years before. Although the Three Month War had damaged parts of the aluminium-clad Citadel wall, the bulls still preserved their timeless lustre, shining in the sunlight, and staring out into each coming day with dark, wide eyes, their strong, youthful hooves planted firmly into Arrapha’s soil.
In the evenings, the young man known as RBS89—or ‘Rashid Bin Suleiman’ to his family—would meet some friends outside the Citadel at the Prophet Daniel Gate; from there, they would go to the ruined graveyards nearby, to chat and catch up before dusk became night. In the graveyard, some of his friends—not him, of course—would sing songs in the old tongues and recite poems that Gao Dong’s government had specifically reclassified. It was as though these friends were performing some secret ritual, something like a religious ceremony, even though the songs’ lyrics were completely domestic in their subject matter. They had never told Rashid—so he could never be accused of knowing—but these friends had all lost parents and relatives in the Great Benefactor’s arrival—hundreds had been executed by Gao Dong and his purification policies. His friends would sing these simple love songs in hushed, ardent voices, heedless of the danger they faced if the authorities overheard them. ‘The people of Kirkuk had fallen into Gao Dong’s grasp as easily as a butterfly into the hands of a collector,’ his friends would say, ‘because the whole world had changed. The balance of power had tipped towards China, and now Kirkuk, once a solitary kingdom, speaking entirely its own language,3 had become just another outpost.’
One evening, about three weeks before, as the young men and women had gathered in the graveyard, a red government droid hovered towards them. His friends knew what to do, switching seamlessly from the ancient song they were singing at the time, to a Chinese one. They always managed to have a contemporary Chinese song ready, whose melody matched exactly with the ancient one. This was standard procedure whenever a member of the red police came near, and it worked every time. ‘I wish I were a stone / At the base of the citadel,’ they would sing one minute, ‘So that I could be friends / With everyone who visits.’ Then, a second later it would be love song set in modern Beijing. It was a cat-and-mouse game. But listening to them sing that first song, they all sometimes wondered, privately, if something was missing, if something at the core had been stolen away, and if the now they inhabited was impenetrable to it. Whatever it was, it could no longer reach through; instead they all mouthed a set of sounds they didn’t truly understand.
One of the young men gathered there that evening—there is no evidence it was Rashid—failed to follow the normal procedure. While his friends switched effortlessly to a Chinese pop song, this particular youth carried on singing in Arabic, or possibly Turkmen. Indeed he sang louder and louder as the droid came near, inspecting him close-up. He drowned out the singing of the others, many of whom broke away quickly and disappeared. The words were obviously strange to him:
There are three fig trees growing
Beside the wall at the citadel.
But he kept singing them, as if singing them louder and louder would give them more meaning, somehow, or help their meaning reach through to him:
My hands are bound,
A chain is wrapped around my neck.
Don’t yank the chains,
’cause my arms already hurt.
Three weeks later, the afternoon that Rashid received the bracelet text, he decided against going out. It was a Saturday after all, he didn’t need to do anything. Instead he would play with his artifacts. These were not recordings, you understand; they contained no written or spoken or musical examples of reclassified languages. They were merely sculptural objects, with interesting shapes—glittering discs or dull cuboids with spindles of tape inside.
By some strange coincidence, Rashid owned hundreds of them, and also had the means to duplicate them—just as objects, of course, for their aesthetic, sculptural value. He stood in his pyjamas, scanning his shelves, trying to decide which one to play with, when a special detachment of red droids burst through the front door to his house, brushing aside Suleiman Senior, and marching up to his room. Some people have claimed that RBS89 managed to take one of these objects and extract a melody from it, in the time the droids took to break down his door. There is no evidence to support this, nor the claim that RBS89 was singing this melody as he was carried away, or that he danced in his prison cell, singing the same. Similar rumours were spread about the other suspects removed by red forces in the Begler, Piryadi, and Azadi neighbourhoods, in the crackdown that became known as ‘Operation Daniel’.
Even more unfounded is the superstition, circulated in some of the poorer districts, that a melody sung in the face of death resounds louder in that palace of final destination, the glittering Archive. That would imply that when General Woo Shang presented Gao Dong, The Beloved, three weeks later, with a new pair of diamond-studded boots, in his castle on the Euphrates River, one of the tiny gemstones on those boots would still be vibrating, deep inside, with the words of a silly song—‘Take me to the bar./ Take me to the coffeehouse. / Let’s go somewhere fun…’ 4 This is not true.