I can’t exactly remember what happened in the days before the blockade was imposed. But I do remember that just as the gates in the mysterious south went down and prices went up a beautiful girl with dark curly hair moved in to the next building. We met on the roof, on one of those evenings full of international people (she was one too). They all told their stories. Kidnapped by mistake in South Sudan. The fall of Saddam. Awful driving from Lima to Phnom Penh; concierges everywhere sending them to absolutely-not-what-we-had-in-
The apartments below were nice, they all said, but not perfect. The host family asked too many questions. They didn’t like the bells ringing that early in the morning and why didn’t someone take that dog with the hurt leg to a vet? The girl said her shower only had cold water and she couldn’t wash her hair. Later, at the buffet table, I told her she could use mine. Nothing suggestive – I would leave the key under the mat when I went out. She smiled and said oh you’re so nice and we swapped phone numbers.
The day after was cold, and the one after that even colder but she didn’t call. Maybe the water had been fixed. We met in the street and she said she had been crazy busy at the office, but let’s hang out tonight, definitely. I got in and scrubbed the splashes of coffee from the tiles behind the stove, bleached the bathroom and swept everything else, and waited.
It actually felt nice that she didn’t call, or pick up her phone when I did. There was time. Neither of us was going anywhere, and maybe, in the middle of a lot of people being penned in together, under siege, something might spark. Being stood up was nothing. Of course she wasn’t sure. She had seen the state of my shirt and the holes in my shoes and thought, caution. Possible dirtbag. She didn’t know the half of it. I found enough flakes of tobacco in the bin for a triumphant joint and then went to sleep.
She didn’t call in the next few days either and I tried to go about as usual. But nothing was happening. Everywhere was shut, or closing and there was no real work to do apart from sit around and read the newspapers. A popular singer divorced her husband of twenty-five years, snuck out of the city and eloped to Central America. There was a larger-than-usual cholera outbreak. Then paper supplies began running low and the newspapers shrank to half their usual thickness. The columnists obliged and wrote half-stories which they filled with slogans and quotations from the great writers and poets of long ago. We followed them into nostalgia, and forgot what had led to the blockade. Old rifts that had dominated the letters pages were healed, and people who had been studiously ignoring each other for years at seminars and conferences now shook hands and shared grim smiles. “This blockade,” they said, again and again, gazing with wounded but defiant eyes into the middle distance. “I can’t believe it’s happening. But then, you never did know with these people.”
Because there was barely any petrol available and no planes flying, the haze that usually covered the city lifted a little. Travelling on the roof of a bus one afternoon with a sullen crowd of labourers and clerks, the mountains suddenly came out. Their sweeping grace and stony indifference stirred something in all of us and someone whooped and screamed into the wind. Everyone laughed; the crowd came to life and we discovered that the roof was packed with friends and fellow countrymen. We told exaggerated jokes and tales of bravado. Fine if the rest of the world wanted to mock us; we would laugh right back and eat our defiance.
In a café that night I heard a man sitting behind me receive directions for picking up a consignment of contraband petrol. I looked at his face as he was leaving and was surprised by how bored he looked. The black market for fuel didn’t take long to get going and the sky choked again. Even the effigies we set fire to burned half-heartedly and I stopped going to the marches.
After the newspapers had stopped coming for two days, I decided to try, really try to begin an affair. I took my shoes to the cobbler and went out to dinner with the curly-haired girl’s crowd and tried to look world weary and knowing. I sold a colleague of hers some hash at a party, and walking home together the next morning through the back streets, we hunted for curios she could take home with her. Later, when she took me to her apartment it was filled with clusters of necklaces, figurines, shells, stones and feathers from all over the world. She went red and said she was glad the agency flew her business class.
Reports came in from the border but they were always the same: lines of trucks waiting on the other side. From Central America the famous singer recorded a song lamenting the plight of her hometown. Stuck in their houses and courtyards, people listened to the radio play it over and over again and dreamed about food and petrol. Here and there others stood in the street or at their windows, looking to the south and muttering, or gazing sadly, or shaking their fists. The mood turned into lethargic mourning. The calls to arms churned out at the printing presses running on reserve fuel at the edge of town sputtered and repeated themselves. From the ranks of the commentators, dissenters emerged, and then a new hard line. The word traitor got slung about.
The girl had adopted the dog with the wounded leg. One day I saw her trying to make it eat some food she had cooked. The dog lay there, unresponsive and oblivious and she looked close to tears. I tried to tell her about a new place that had opened that she might like, but she kept looking at the dog so I said I thought it looked fine and she shouldn’t worry. She said no, she had to find a taxi to take it to the vet’s, now, before their medicine ran out, and then she looked at me. I looked at the dog again. I didn’t have the money for a taxi or medicine and suddenly I was jealous of her, and of the dog. I said I couldn’t help, that I had a meeting. She turned away and I trudged back to my room.
A letter arrived from the south. Apparently they wanted to talk with our leaders about the blockade, but no one was sure. With great effort, we went to the sports stadium and managed a small riot for the news. The leaders retired to their palace for an all-night emergency meeting and the next morning issued a directive forming a citizen’s army to dig a tunnel through the frozen mountains to the north.
She called me to her room again. We sat and she made tea, rearranged the cushions and asked if the lighting was ok to disrupt the silence. When we finally started talking between glances at the TV, we agreed on nothing. She got a place on a helicopter leaving the country the next day. I didn’t ask if she could find a space for me. I watched the helicopter leave and turned to look back at the city fade into the dim of winter. The dog died the same night.
Finally, the tunnel to the north was completed. A crowd was waiting for the first team of porters when they returned and the leaders were on scene to garland them with their fat hands. The next team of porters brought in granite and jewels for the construction of a new palace and a decree has been issued for their names to be inscribed on each brick in recognition of their services to the country. Inside, the portraits of the leaders will hang with their forefathers in the great hall, next to the plush curtains and thick wallpaper.
No one here really understands exactly why the blockade is happening. Just that there is some trouble in the south. People say that they are different to us down there, and that they don’t belong to the country like we do. A long time ago I visited one of their palaces in the south, one that was also built of granite and jewels and I remember not recognizing any of the portraits of their martyrs, poets and freedom fighters. This thought played on my mind for a long time. There was enough gas left at home for a large pot of coffee and a phone call to an old classmate got me a deadline and a word limit. That evening I sat down at my desk to write, unsure of which way I would go.
