RELIGION OF THE STONE: WE DON’T KNOW THE WEATHER FORECAST, WE ARE THE WEATHER FORECAST, NOT TO MENTION THAT WE DEVISE OUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM. THE SUN RISES AT THE NORTHERN STATION AND SETS AT THE TRAM BETWEEN TWO GRAPEFRUIT-BREASTS. WE ARE THE CLOUD PRINCES OF GUILE AND RESOURCEFULNESS, THE SONS OF THE EARTH AND OF THE RAILROAD. IT’S THE NEW WORLD HERE. YOU DON’T FUCK, WE FUCK YOU. YOU DON’T EAT, WE EAT YOU. YOU DON’T WRECK, WE WRECK YOU. IT’S THE NEW WORLD HERE. IT’S EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF, AND SHIT FOR ALL. IT’S THE JUNGLE.
No running water these last two weeks for patriotic reasons, apologized the dissident General: “You know it’s difficult to resolve all the problems at once, the mines don’t yield what they used to, and if you’re without water and electricity, it goes to show how much those rascals in the Back-Country have brought the country to its knees, indeed that is the reason why we decided to take up arms, to sort the situation out ourselves, don’t hold it against us, we’ll regain our prestige, but one bit of good news: I am thinking of reopening Mine 15 so the students can work at night to supplement their expenses, they’ve demanded far too many study grants, too bad for those patriots in a hurry to get straight down to it …”
It was with a heavy step that Lucien rejoined the bunch out front of the Tram. Requiem was keen he join the group at all costs. The more there are of you, the more you can deal with assaults. The more there are of you, the more you can seize the initiative to attack. The more there are of you, the more sacks you can carry away. Unlike other mining sites that were chock-full of diamonds, or cobalt, or copper, or bronze, and nothing else, Hope Mine produced all of the above minerals. The region was so rich in deposits that a legend had grown up — and it happens to be true — recounting how the inhabitants of the City-State dug up their gardens, their houses, their living rooms, their bathrooms, their bedrooms, and even the cemetery. Yes, in the cemetery, funerals would sometimes turn festive following the chance discovery of a high-grade stone. They even dug at the station whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, particularly at night, sometimes even with the collusion of the local mayor, who wielded a pickax in his own offices, and busily scoured public buildings from top to bottom. It was said that in a single day dozens of sacks of heterogenite were carted off from huts and other makeshift camps. With such eroded, tampered foundations, houses threatened to collapse at the slightest rain. Will you consent to starve to death when there’s silver, copper, barium, tin, or coal lying quietly under your feet? From the area around Hope Mine to as far as the east side of Vampiretown, the city took on the appearance of an archaeological site. Even the goats and wheelbarrows smelled of the cobalt quarries. The fact remains that the City-State, focus of so many desires, was losing its northern suburbs, bought for a pittance by traders with foreign capital, tourists with multiple nationalities, cousins and nieces of the dissident General, the resurrected of the Second Republic.
To avoid lugging their loads too far, the diamond diggers preferred to wash and sift their sacks of gravel a few sheds away, beside a little river, taking only the diamonds or low-grade dust away with them. The more enterprising ones, audacious and mercenary, slung the sacks over their shoulders, or even hired slim-jims and other desperados, then braved the carjackers and crossed the City-State in search of trading houses run by tourists. There were also the itinerant trading posts, people like Requiem who, with their perfect knowledge of the system, offloaded their products anytime, anywhere.
Only Mortal Combat spoke to Lucien. The others disparaged him.
“Two-bit intellectual.”
In Mortal Combat’s family, the taste for mines and railroads was passed down from generation to generation. His great-grandfather had helped to build the first railroad and had also worked as a miner. His grandfather, a train driver by trade, spent his evenings kicking around the quarries like most of his contemporaries. It was nearly a religion at the time, after the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, mines and railroads, baby-chicks and single-mamas, Tram 83, salsa and rumba, blues, Negro-spirituals, and jazz to please for-profit tourists. His father, likewise: train driver and part-time digger. His sister ran a few baby-chicks and a two-star greasy spoon a hundred yards from the former Coal Mine. His sixth wife traded merchandise. His younger brother, who was studying fine art in Strasbourg, was bringing shame on the country, so the word went. It brought his fellow students and his teachers to tears: the poor guy drew only train tracks, locomotives, diggers with their pickaxes, and the nocturnal dances of inveterate baby-chicks. His other brothers practiced various mining and railroad-related trades, such as welder, driver’s gopher, or hawker on platform 15.
Requiem dallied with Mortal Combat’s grandmother, who worked as a professional witch doctor. She helped all the inhabitants improve their chances of stumbling upon a deposit as long as they practiced the missionary position with her. It was said that the entire Tram, including the for-profit tourists, had practiced the missionary position with her. Her name cropped up in all conversations concerning black magic. She acted as a turntable between the visible world and the invisible world. The tourists queued up to see her. Russian, English, Italian, Canadian, ex-Zairian, Japanese, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, etc. She enabled them to communicate with the dead but also to increase their chances of finding the right stone. And so one saw them, in single file, jostling, shoving, capering, and insulting each other from noon to midnight, each desperately waiting his turn. Thanks to the convex glasses she placed under their faces, they were able to have a little chat with their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, even their ancestors who’d died during the very first expeditions. She told fortunes, healed broken hearts, advised them of potential deposits, predicted world events, including Obama’s victory in the US presidential elections, the Pentecost Martyrs, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the attacks by Somali pirates and their pursuit by the world’s navies, Ribéry’s transfer to Bayern Munich, Zidane’s headbutt, the death of Jonas Savimbi …
They reached their destination at thirty-five after midnight. The scouts went ahead and returned without further delay. In the meantime, he got out his notebook and scrawled: “What will they do with their teeth when there’s no more grass to graze? Man proposes, God disposes. What will they do when the jujube trees grow shears? Will they eat those very shears?”
Meanwhile, Requiem recounted one of his many flings with a pre-nubile girl. They entered the facilities step by step. There was a smell of scorched earth. According to the radio, the Voice of the Tram perhaps, the desperados swore they’d torch any human being entering the facilities, because one of their girlfriends had been caught red-handed sucking off a horde of student-miners. The problem was that they were hated by the whole of the City-State, following their succession of infamies, and they knew it.
Requiem, who was overwhelmed by inebriation, held forth. He even forgot where he’d stashed the weapons. His eight fellow-travelers, the eight beatitudes, begged the Negus to shut up. He harped on about what he called his cult film, The Sicilian Clan, directed by Henri Verneuil. They succeeded in pinpointing the place, and digging up the instruments. 12:52 A.M. They entered the caves. Requiem undressed hastily, urinated without delay, and turned around them six times reciting incantations.
It is said that once diggers are underground they sing songs with magic words, for several reasons: 1) To alert the deities in the event of a cave-in. 2) To shoo away the spirits of those previously entombed in the vicinity and who show up to disturb public order — Mortal Combat shared the opinion that it’s the bodies that procreate the stones: “It requires men to shed their blood so that we can live off the propagated stones.” 3) To find the strength to smash everything. 4) To wish for an abundant harvest from these deities.
A few moments after this ritual, the picks and shovels began their plaintive tune. They’d smoked grass beforehand. This was recommended in the City-State for long, drawn-out jobs. Mortal Combat, his breath stinking of the Tram restrooms, struck hard.
“Go stand guard,” Requiem urged Lucien, before launching into an account of Jean Gabin’s first film. The tunnel walls splintered around them. Dysentery and Los Caballeros, who’d come from Cuba on the trail of their ancestors, piled up the merchandise. Like a captain in the midst of battle, sitting and occasionally standing on a mound, Requiem harangued his troops, larked about, jawed away. He was renowned for this; one of the things that earned him the title of Colonist was his capacity to make you work till you lost consciousness. “Go on, smash it, score a goal, don’t you despair, go on!” Lucien came and went, asking them to strike camp. “It’s noisy,” he said.
“What’s a weapon for?” the Negus retorted. “Let them come, they should learn you don’t climb on the bandwagon, the Neanderthals! RULE NUMBER 20: cocksuckers exist to suffer fuckups. Let them come!”
They were equipped with only a single torch. Real moles, they smashed, bashed, and hounded the stone by intuition. Requiem, who had a fine touch, ran his hands over the earth and rock, and gave directions.
“Left, right, no that’s low-grade, stick with it, guys!”
And to lighten the atmosphere, he recounted his first days in the City-State. A native of the other bit, the former country, he had come to the City-State to bury the pain of his shattered love.
He abandoned his studies for military service around the time the dissident General and his brothers started attacking the country, or what had been the country. Thanks to his ethnic origin, somebody gave him a hot tip. He had nothing to lose because the army was recruiting university students, who would now attend lectures and courses in other climes. One thing led to another, and after much thought, he joined the army without saying a word either to Lucien, his best friend, or to Jacqueline, his wife. He contented himself with sending just a postcard, twelve months after he left. Following service in Israel and Angola, he returned with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
He refused visitors. One day Lucien even undertook to go see him at general headquarters to inform him that Jacqueline, Requiem’s own wife, was going through a rough time, with no money for the rent, no cash, nothing to feed his son, his dying son. Requiem ordered Lucien to be given a beating and incarcerated. “That’ll teach him to stick his nose into other people’s lives,” he’d said.
In the meantime, the dissident rebels attacked and seized two small towns. Requiem was therefore among the officers sent to the various fronts. According to the word on the street, Requiem and his brothers-in-arms, including the notorious child-soldiers, raped, looted, and massacred. There was talk of a soldier, a senior officer, who had sold out. To sell out means providing information to the enemy, siphoning off the men’s rations and embezzling their pay, and sending soldiers to their death by dint of changing sides.
The first rumors of his death arrived one October morning. Jaby, who’d returned to us from this war with second-degree burns, even guaranteed that before his death, the Negus had said that Lucien should take care of Jacqueline. But the same Jaby corrected his assertions. Requiem had actually said: “Lucien has stabbed me in the back!” Several months later, there were echoes that the Negus was still alive. Jaby apologized and claimed he had simply confused his face, explaining, “Over there, when the blood starts running you lose all sense of time, you forget yourself, everyone looks like one and the same person, you shit your pants, you can’t see anymore, and you find yourselves, like Siamese twins, waiting for death, and so when someone buys it, well, you get confused, right!”
In the meantime, Jacqueline had moved into Lucien’s place.
One morning, a man appeared, thin, quite thin, sweating with every step. Face of a shipwrecked sailor. The more jittery ran to hide behind the bar.
“A ghost!” they screamed.
The crowd rushed to meet him, proffered alcohol. He refused.
“What are you looking at me like that for? Leave me the hell alone!”
They understood from his first few words that a whole era was on the turn. He wasn’t dead, he repeated over and over again. He had simply fallen ill, a heart problem. Irregular breathing, nausea, chest pains.
By his own account, ten thousand dollars was the estimated price of curing his diseased heart, including surgeries and hospitalizations, for want of a transplant which would cost the army an arm and a leg and couldn’t be carried out here anyway. The military doctors advised him to return to his family. “Your illness requires the kind of care that cannot be provided here.”
He persisted.
“I’ve lost everything. No question of returning there! Where do you expect me to go? The army is all I have left.”
He dug his heels in, but they forced him to climb aboard a banana locomotive.
Itinerary: “Your hometown!” He got off at the first station, a village of some five thousand souls.
There he found accommodation with a woman twice his age. And so began the roaming, from village to village, to get treatment. The gossip doing the rounds at the time spoke of twenty or so villages whose streets he’d trodden in hope of a cure. To return home with such shaky health was out of the question. He was very much aware of all that was happening on the other side: Lucien and Jacqueline’s life together.
After four years of this contraband life, he returned to the fold. His homecoming coincided with the secession of the City-State, an event hailed by the tourists and other diggers, who excavated even in wartime. A stone rush broke out in the region occupied by the rebels. The stone was all that mattered. Every boy old enough to carry a garbage bag jumped aboard the first locomotive. The girls old enough to peddle flesh followed suit. And were right to do so, given that the Back-Country is unfortunate in having not a single iota of underground wealth. After trying desperately to win back Jacqueline, Requiem decided in turn to make for the City-State.
They dug out seventeen sacks-worth in total. Around five in the morning, Requiem suggested they pack up, two sacks per person. Muscles straining, each managed to hoist his load onto his head, except Lucien. Mortal Combat helped him carry his burden. Five o’clock, time was flying.
Speed was of the essence to avoid getting shot in the back. The Negus led the way, Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, haranguing them.
“I’ll shoot anyone who drops the merchandise.”
Lucien couldn’t take it anymore. He was almost sniveling. Requiem’s friends laughed up their sleeves.
“My notebook!”
He realized he’d forgotten his journal near an old boxcar, where he’d been standing guard. He excused himself to go back there but Requiem was against it.
“Help us first put most of it out of reach. After that …”
They made it out the gate. Lucien put down his load and went back into the complex. Requiem muttered behind his back:
“You’ll get five percent per sack, that’ll teach you to chase other people’s wives.”
“Buy me a dress.”
“Give me your pants.”
“Do you have the time?”
In the distance: first light, music, fatwas, angelus bells, the laughter of the post-adolescent baby-chicks, the single-mamas with spoiled breasts, the Tram busgirls and waitresses, the strike and its students, the desperados and their dogs, the dissident rebels and their desire for rape, the local mayor bringing out his fifteen sacks of heterogenite, the publisher with a single-mama-post-baby-chick, the screeching of the rails, the tragic lamentations of the Railroad Diva, the haze, the melancholy of a life premeditated.