Ink (27 page)

A P
age of
C
rawling
C
haos

burning map of time instead of space: countries are actions, cities dates.

Here Britain, Russia, Italy and France, America and Japan are rivers flowing into the China Sea across the continent of the twentieth century, rivers of troops that meet in Peking, 1900, where the Righteous Harmonious Fists rebel, burning churches, killing nuns and priests, beheading Chinese Christians. Follow the road from there with Boer women and children to the little British village of concentration camps, 1901, down a prison road that stretches from the Caucasus, 1902, to Siberia, 1903, and Josef Stalin walking it, learning the way through pogroms in Kishinev and Gomel, lakes of blood. 1904, another prison camp in the valley of death, Sakhalin now, island of seven thousand Russian convicts freed to fight the Japanese in Manchuria. Rocks in the water: Belgians with baskets of human hands in the Congo; women chained to posts as hostages. 1905 is a little coastal inlet where unarmed men, women and children with their hymns, crosses and banners crash in waves against the Cossack rocks on which a Winter Palace stands. 1906: The mountain range of a British Empire dwarfing rebellions in Natal and Nigeria. 1907: More mountain ranges—Portuguese Guinea and Angola, German West and Southwest Africa, French West Africa; everywhere rebellion and reprisals. The churning sea of 1908 in Macedonia—Serbs and Greeks, Bulgarians and Romanians, torching each other's villages. 1909: An island of Armenian massacre in southern Turkey. 1910: Low hills and hidden valleys— floggings and torture, secret trials and hangings of Greeks and Bulgarians in Turkish Macedonia. 1911: An ocean of republic in China washing away the hated Manchu dynasty, garrisons massacred. 1912: A river of gold and blood, of Tsarist troops killing 170 starving workers in Siberian gold mines on the Lena.

——

1913: The fault line of the Balkans—Leagues and Wars—a chasm opening wider as a Bulgarian captain forces a bishop, two priests and a hundred Thracian citizens into the courtyard of a school and kills them. 1914: The edge of the great continent, the headland of a gunshot fired in Sarajevo that brings down horses on the Marne, and the map is burning to a world of fire and 1915—gas, gas, quick boys—who now remembers the Armenian Massacre?—1916—over the top at Gallipoli and the Somme, men march into machine-gun fire—
and how old are ye, lads?—nineteen—seventeen—krak!—nineteen—eighteen—DOOM!

I pull my mind out of the book, reeling and queasy at the hammerblows of history. I don't even know how I can read it; the words just seem to leap off the page into my head.

“What is this?” I say. “What is this?”

My brother lays his hand upon the page of crawling chaos. I look up and see his smile and suddenly I'm terrified at what this book has done to him, at what I realize it could do to me.

“This is the way the world was meant to be,” he says. “This is history.”

1919—the Winter Palace stormed by sixty thousand men in George Square, Glasgow—
Send the tanks
«/—and the German Soviet Republic stillborn, Rosa Luxemburg falling, flamethrowers in Munich—1920—Whites against Reds in Poland and the Baltic States as Caucasian Republics rise and fall, Armenia carved up by the Turks and Bolsheviks—1921—the million-strong Moplah of Malabar in India rise up, burn and loot, and Hindu heads trim the Muslim kingdoms—1922—
Hail Caesar!
Mussolini reigns and the fasces of the Roman Empire's raised again—1923—Hitler fires his gun in the Burgerbrau beer cellar, shouts:
The German people must be saved!
and Primo de Rivera burns the Spanish constitution—1924—Socialism in Italy: a bloodstained car and a disappeared politician—1925—jihad in the Rif gives young Franco his first taste for blood of the tribesman put to the knife—1926—the Hitler Youth born while the U.S. Marines fight for lumber and rice, banana and sugar plantations of Nicaragua— 1927—the KKK parade in New York on Memorial Day, four hundred black-shirted fascists with them all the way—1928—Ramon Romero, striking dockworker, shot in the head, shot dead, in Puerto San Martin as the child Che Guevara breathes his first—1929—Arabs burn the Torah at the Wailing Wall, attacking Jews in Hebron where the patriarchs lie—1930—riots in India at Gandhi's arrest, more fire, a torchlit glow in the eyes of the Kaiser's son as two
million Nazis cry
Deutschland erwachse, Juda verrecke!—
1931—an Italian flag hoisted in Libya, high as the body of Senussi's defender, and Japanese troops marching into Manchuria—1932—thirteen million votes for Hitler, and Bolivia and Paraguay fight over parched wilderness—1933 and it's Chancellor Hitler. “My God,” I say. “My God, this isn't right. This isn't our world. It's—”

1934 and the Long Knives are out slashing—1935—Mussolini in Ethiopia— 1936—the poet Lorca in a shallow grave—1937—fascists sing at Jarama, open fire and Guernica burns—1938—the Internationals march for the last time in Barcelona, broken like windows in the Night of Broken Glass of shattered businesses as scattered flowers strew Hitler's parade into Austria—
Sieg heil!—
Prague is
lebensraum
, Poland an annex—war rips the world and now there are no years, no empty dates, only an endless Blitz beginning with Trotsky murdered, icepick like a hammer smashing, sickle slashing—tests with Zyklon-B on Soviet soldiers captive at a camp called Auschwitz—oh, but Americans stand proud and preen:
We saved your asses in World War Two after the Nips blew our boats up, sonsabitches!
aye, but a little late, too late, missed the train at the station—all aboard for Birkenau, Dachau and Belsen!—and shivering, freezing, in Stalingrad's snow, the besieged men surrender, so wasted and cold like the boys on the boats on the beaches of Normandy, Christ, dry us off with the firestorms of Dresden, under sheltering mushrooming clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I can't take my eyes off the book but I can see him,
feel
him, standing at my side. I feel a rising panic, as if everything I've ever known is being stripped away.

“There is no Futurism in the
real
world,” says my brother. “You understand? There is no Futurism.”

But what I'm thinking as I read this book is that there is no
future.

A P
ile of
D
eath

Jews murdered in Kielce in Poland and shipped off by Brits to the camps out on Cyprus, and Vietnam starts with the French fighting Ho Chi Minh, empires now foundering, as new states are founded and flounder, in Israel and Palestine-Arabs against the Jews—India and Pakistan—Muslims against Hindus—Gandhi is shot on his way to a prayer meeting—planes out of Egypt to bomb Tel Aviv-Kim Il-sung in Korea, the North against the South, backed by Stalin as Mao takes Peking, and his People's Republic march into Tibet—in the Senate, McCarthy—MacArthur in Seoul—the Argentines worship a dictator's actress
wife but no one mourns the Jewish anti-Fascist writers, actors, poets, tried and shot behind the Iron Curtain where at Stalin's death, the VoPos in Berlin throw weapons down to join the demo—Japanese fishermen in a rain of H-bomb ash, east of the Bikini Atoll—Moroccan nationalists massacre Europeans and Muslims—Soviet tanks encircle Budapest—Hungarian security forces hang from lampposts—Israel in the Sinai Desert—British paratroopers at Port Said on the Suez Canal—peasants conscripted to labor battalions in China's Great Leap Forward—six hours’ rest in twenty-four hours—a dog sent into space to die— and there's no future now for the three thousand counterrevolutionary “rightists” of the Communist Youth League arrested in China as Battista flees the Cuban Revolution, and blacks run from the guns of the Sharpeville shootings and the Dalai Lama flees Tibet, run! new prime minister of the Congo, run! from coup to capture, torture, execution by the followers of Mobutu while on the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall's first bricks are laid, the Cuban missiles aimed, the armed blockade,
Ich bin ein Berliner
, says JFK, then gunshots rip the motorcade, and
We Shall Overcome
, they sing, the followers of Martin Luther King as Liuzzo is shot by the KKK—riots in Watts and the first U.S. combat troops land on Vietnam.

Red Guard vigilantes of the Cultural Revolution tear down all that's old, the palaces and temples, ancient artifacts, the intellectuals, teachers and administrators, children in red armbands murdering their parents—in Vietnam eight hundred tons of bombs fall every day, and Johnson tells the troops to
nail the coonskin to the wall—
Egypt and Jordan attack and lose to Israel in six days—the oil refineries of Suez City blaze—the chief of the South Vietnam police holds his revolver to a prisoner's head and pulls the trigger—bang!—Robert Kennedy—bang! — Martin Luther King—bang!—
Helter Skelter
on a door in blood—
Kill the Pigs!
Make them squeal like the dead babies of My Lai:
well, they might have had bombs strapped to them.
Crazy? Like Bukovsky locked up as insane for protesting the Soviet use of psychiatry on dissidents—British troops in Londonderry shoot to kill on a Bloody Sunday—mercy becomes a luxury as Pinochet seizes Chile, seizes students and professors, union leaders,
allprotesters mustbe tortured orthey will notsing
, he says—the Greeks and Turks fight over Cyprus—the Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh, the Americans evacuate Saigon and the government of Laos falls into—

“Chaos,” I say. “This is bloody chaos.”

My head is spinning as I push the book away into his hands and he takes it from me still open, turning it round to read. He holds it like some maniac minister reading a sermon.

——

What year is it now? What year are we in? Because Franco's still murdering— now it's Basque separatists—yes, those attacks on Spain's government buildings in Lisbon, Ankara, in Rome and Milan, must be proof of conspiracy—Masons, Jews and Communists, ‘cause sure and the Christians are so much better, like the IRA attacking a Peace March or Falangists smashing a Muslim enclave in Christian East Beirut to massacre the families of Palestinian refugees, huddling, naked and shackled, Steve Biko in police custody, dead of brain damage, aye, and it's black and white and red all fookin over as Mengitsu calls for a red terror, purging Ethiopia of
bandits, anarchists
and
feudalists
and the Zimbabwe African People's Union blows an Air Rhodesia passenger plane out of the sky and hunts through wreckage for survivors just so's they can cut their throats, sure and look now, see the marines retreat in Tehran as Islamic militants take their barracks, oust the shah, and Russia advances down into Afghanistan, aye, let's shoot anyone as says
Give peace a chance
, and sell the fookin gun to Contra rebels in Nicaragua to raise blood money for Iran, and when the Argentines invade the Falklands, yes, the Empire Strikes Back, halle-fookin-lujah, sinks the
Belgrano
, tabloids rejoicing: Gotcha! sure and does it fookin matter that there's bodies floating in the water, drifting past a Warsaw priest tortured and killed by the secret police, dumped in the river roaring Tamil Tigers ambushing a convoy of soldiers in Sri Lanka firing machine guns on the demonstrators in South Africa on the anniversary of Sharpeville and it's another body in the water, old man dragged out of his wheelchair, shot, dumped overboard from the
Achille Lauro
— splash!—radioactive cloud from Russia's Wormwood star fallen from heaven like the manna of a UN convoy of food and medicine blocked by Shi'ite militiamen on its way to refugees at Chatila and Bourj al-Barajneh, ‘cause it's not enough, it's never fookin enough, but we've got to have Azeris and Armenians clashing in a fookin noble murderous struggle for national fookin identity, oh but we can't be doing with that, no, so let's gas the fookin Kurds of Halabja, and even as the Berlin Wall falls and a fookin velvet revolution calls, well still there's fookin tanks and tear gas in Tiananmen Square, Armenians murdered in a pogrom in Baku and no one fookin cares about Mandela's plea to stop black killing black, Inkatha and the UDF at war—and Hussein in Kuwait setting the oil alight, vast plumes of smoke turn day to night as Bosnian Serbs bring back the camps and genocide, and those as bring the medicine and food and spread the news can just be fookin murdered in Somalia.

“Fire,” says Seamus. “It's all fookin—”

——

Fire a fookin mortar bomb into a Sarajevo market ‘cause there's no more civilians, no more sanctuary in churches where the Hutus massacre the Tutsis in Rwanda, sure and how safe's a fookin safe haven where peacekeepers stand and watch as Bosnian Serbs take four thousand Muslim men and boys from fallen Srebrenica, eh? Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria brag:
We have slit the throats of seven monks
, aye, and glory be to Allah, cause the Taliban have overrun Kabul, and tourists are the new human sacrifice at Luxor, but it's liberation that they're fighting for, sure, over there in Kosovo against the Serbs or in Omagh with all the fookin courage of a car bomb—liberation?—seventy thousand villagers killed in the Sudan, and those that lived forced to convert to Islam, boys abducted and sold into slavery—liberation, is it?—in Sierra Leone where rebels and mercenaries burn the power station, post office, town hall, UN headquarters, a thousand dead, floating past a frigate sheltering Europeans, floating bodies, arms and hands chopped off.