Nobody Understands History
Translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls
The wind blows in swift, powerful gusts through the entrance of a residential building. The glass door slams shut then blows open again and the influx of air brings in a swirl of twigs. Knocking over a bicycle left leaning against the wall of the yard and sending up a spray of discarded coffee cups and fizzy drink cans, the wind penetrates the building and rams the door of the flat facing the entrance, rattling it violently on its hinges. Between gusts, there is a momentary silence. Something new falls over each time the wind blows. Something new rattles. The air forces its way into the building through every opening and whirls through its empty spaces, as if the interior of the building is its center of gravity. Windowpanes tremble, doors slam, the contents of locked rooms scatter. The building’s inhabitants scurry to close their windows and doors. In the hallway is a motion sensor which activates a light at the slightest movement. As the front door swings open and closed with every gust of wind, making a high-pitched creak that’s accompanied by the pounding bass of the inside doors rattling in their frames, thousands of tiny movements trigger the sensor, and the light in the hallway flicks on and off, on and off, throughout the day. The building is located in the vicinity of a museum commemorating a revolution that took place over twenty years ago and failed after thousands were killed.
In a hotel room in the same city, a woman sits thinking about the future and reading the novel Happy Moscow. In his introduction, the translator recounts an anecdote about a woman — the mother of a well-known German historian named Wolfgang Leonard — who moved to Moscow with her young son in 1935. The lost mother bought a map of the city but found to her amazement that many of the city’s buildings made no appearance, and that the street names on the map did not correspond to reality, until finally she realized that the map dated from 1924. After several days of disoriented wandering, the woman — a communist who was exhilarated to be making Moscow her home — heard that a new map had recently been produced and hurried immediately to purchase a copy. But the new map did not relieve her confusion, as she had hoped; instead, it compounded it. It was a map of a future Moscow that depicted the results of a vast reconstruction and modernization project, boasting grand edifices that were entirely imaginary and streets whose namesakes had not yet been born. And so the mother and son remained lost, drifting between a Moscow of the past and a Moscow of the future. The translator concludes that Andrei Platonov was equally lost when he wrote the novel in the 1930s, floundering between the Bolshevik Revolution’s dark past and its distant promised future.
In front of the museum commemorating the failed revolution, Wind stops and surveys the street before him. Around his neck is a bagpipe that sounds the clarion of history, and Wind blows hard to ensure it is audible amid the noise of the bustling street. He thinks the sound is loud and piercing, but none of the passersby seems to have heard it. He will have to blow harder. He grips the bagpipe and sucks all of the air around him into his chest. He stretches his lungs so wide they’re almost exploding from the pressure, steels himself, then pushes the air through the bagpipe as hard as he can. One passerby feels a slight tremor in her body. She thinks she’s heard something, some fragment of a sound that’s been silenced. A sound that’s distorted and frayed around the edges, like a muffled scream or the grumbling of a throat that’s not human. The passerby listens, puzzled. The message from far away has lost its flaws and deformities on its journey; it is no longer a code to be broken but a cry in a pure language that nobody understands anymore. The passerby turns it right and left a few times, looking for a way in, then abandons it when she fails to work out what it is saying and continues on her way.
The woman sitting in the hotel doesn’t have the strength to go out for a walk in the city. Everywhere she goes is haunted by the ghosts of a future that never arrives. In every city she visits, there is a museum and a memory of an aborted revolution. For a brief moment, the future shines bright, then it recedes into the distance, taking with it the reconstruction plans of which so many people have dreamed, and for which so many have given their lives. Wherever she goes, these glimmers of the future always fade away, leaving only monuments built and ultimate sacrifices made. The woman considers going out to bind her failures to the city’s, but she doesn’t know how. Instead, she returns to the novel she’s reading. The heroine, who is also named Moscow, loves the air and listens to the wind, so a lover encourages her to study aviation, the science of the future. She takes his advice and becomes a skilled parachutist but is dismissed from service after trying to light a cigarette in the air, which her superiors consider a breach of professional conduct. Moscow, who’s looking for a communism of love, ends up in a job at the Moscow Metropolitan Construction Project, and one day, as she stands on some scaffolding, her foot slips and she flies through the air one last time before she hits the ground, her leg shattered beneath her.
There is a large art exhibition showing at the museum. It was inaugurated by the mayor in the attendance of a coterie of ambassadors and celebrities. One of the exhibits is a life-size replica of a bookshop that played a vital role in the revolution by hosting political meetings and discussions. The replica bookshop has been constructed out of wood. It displays old and new books and hosts discussion circles just as the real one did. Shortly after the opening, the attendees of one such discussion are startled by the sudden entrance of dozens of reporters, large cameras in hand. They have come not to photograph the exhibit but to cover the imminent arrival of a man with dyed hair wearing a suit. He enters, picks up the first book he sees and flicks through it, nodding at the guide’s explanation without listening to her. Looking testy, he makes a cursory tour of the exhibit, which is now packed with even more reporters and photographers, then leaves two minutes later, reporters in tow. A murmur of apprehension hangs in the air behind them. The attendees at the discussion watch the official and the army of reporters as they troop to visit another artwork. This official works for a branch of the government headed by the daughter of the ruler whom the revolution of twenty years ago attempted to overthrow.
The museum is composed of two buildings separated by a large plaza. The two buildings obstruct the movement of air, funneling powerful winds into a path leading to and from an adjacent residential area. In the plaza, a group of cleaners are clearing away the debris left by yesterday’s storm. They pile broken branches to one side and sweep up shards of glass from a window accidentally left open, then they take down the flag, which the wind has shredded, and affix a new one to the rope running up the flagpole. The worker hauling on the rope to raise the new flag can still hear the wind. It’s quieter now; it sounds like a long exhalation mixed with a throaty consonant. The worker thinks the air must have issued from some magic throat capable of somehow producing a rolling “r” and a pharyngeal growl at the same time. This low gurgling replays itself inside his ear cavities, as if reverberating from one open space to another, or intimately threading together two moments in time. But the sound of the wind does not come in isolation, because it shakes and rattles whatever it finds in its path. It is both heavy and faint, now growing stronger, now fading amid the other sounds produced by its effects. As the worker hoists the flag, he can hear the gurgling of the wind mixed with the rustle of the surrounding trees, the whisper of dry leaves scudding across the tiled plaza, the metal clink of the ring holding the flag to the pole, and the flapping of the museum flag which flies alongside those of the city and the state.
Nose is a big drinker. She was invited to participate in the exhibition and has come from a faraway country. She doesn’t know what to do so she has decided to take a holiday. As she is strolling through the city she meets Hammer, who invites her on a trip to the mountains. She agrees. Hammer has brought her friends, the Two Things. The Two Things have sex the whole way. Whenever the group decides to stop for a break, the Two Things discover new orifices in their bodies and start having sex using them, to the hilarity of the others. On their way, Stone appears and asks if she can come along with them, and they assent. She doesn’t do much, just sits there saying nothing until someone picks her up and carries her. From time to time, they have fun by standing in a circle and playing catch with Stone. As they cross the road, Hammer is hit by a car and killed. As Hammer’s ghost hovers around them, she sees other ghosts running from tear gas. Shots fly in every direction and droplets of blood spurt from wounded bodies. The ghosts battle on. As Nose swigs from her bottle and scratches her head, wondering what they should do, Wind appears next to the dead body of Hammer. Wind tells them he’s heard of a lost pamphlet which nobody knows about. It was never printed or distributed because by then the revolution had been crushed. Mountain has been looking on all the while, and now he turns to the group and interrupts to tell them that the pamphlet is in the city. He knows where it is, and he offers to take them there. Everybody agrees, and they set off back to the city to look for the missing pamphlet.
Thanks to: Cráter Invertido Collective, Walter Benjamin, Andrei Platonov
