Only as they approached the Necropolis proper did the stalls begin to thin out, though even then they did not vanish altogether. And where stores selling better clothes should have been there were mainly holes in the ground and cranes. Had there been more workmen about, the cranes could have been taken as evidence that massive development was under way, but these too had a vintage air, mementoes of busier days. In accordance with the city’s musty festivity, the cranes were festooned with tattered bunting and faded decorations from Christmases or other festivals long past.
At Kevern’s instigation — he didn’t want to be in the car a moment longer — they checked into a hotel in the part of the city once referred to in the fashion and travel magazines as Luxor, in deference to the opulence of the shopping. Luxor was where most of the grand hotels had been, though there was little of the old glamorous traffic in their lobbies or on the streets outside today. Foreign tourism fell off dramatically after WHAT HAPPENED and had never fully recovered. Who wanted to holiday in the environs of Babi Yar? That this was a reciprocal reluctance it suited the authorities to insist. If visitors didn’t want to come and holiday in our backyard, we sure as hell didn’t want to holiday in theirs. Where hadn’t things been done the stench of which remained abhorrent to the misinformed or oversensitive tourist? Nowhere was safe, when you really thought about it. Nowhere was pleasant. What country wasn’t a charnel house of its own history? You were better staying home, if you cared about that sort of thing, with your eyes closed and a cold compress on your forehead. You were better advised to keep to your individual fortress, shuttered and bolted against the movement, in or out, of people, infection and ideas. You contained your own conflagrations, that was the international wisdom, or at least that was the international wisdom as explained by Ofnow. Eventually, we’d all grow less nice in our expectations and things would get back to how they’d been.
In the meantime Luxor retained a little of its old exoticism thanks to the convergence of two accidents of history. Many of the oil rich who had been in the Necropolis, feasting on the decline of the banks (which, by some logic that only the most sophisticated economists understood, made them still richer), and gorging on the best of the new season’s fashions, found themselves, when WHAT HAPPENED happened, between the devil of abroad and the deep blue sea of home. They were conscious, even without the advice of their embassies, that WHAT HAPPENED, no matter that they’d welcomed and in some cases been instrumental in it, might easily happen to them next; but equally aware that the revolutionary fervour sweeping their own countries was an even greater danger to them, as a hated elite who could afford to spend half their lives in foreign hotels. What was spring to some was winter to them. Anxious about staying but terrified to leave, they spent what was left of their lives in fretful uncertainty, and now their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s children resided where they had been marooned, in a sort of melancholy but pampered limbo, some in the very hotels their grandparents had been staying in when the world convulsed. In the absence of anything else to do, they continued to shop, went on raiding the best stores when the seasons and the windows changed, as it was in their blood to do, but the city had ceased to be a centre of fashion, the clothes were shoddier, the jewellery cheaper, and there was nowhere now for them to return to show off their purchases.
It was a new, rare sight to Kevern and to Ailinn — these idly perambulating gold-ringed men in keffiyehs, paler-skinned, Kevern imagined, than their grandparents must have been, but still with those stern, warrior profiles he had been educated to idealise. The noble generosity of the Arab was as much a given in the citizenship classes Kevern had taken at school, as the free spontaneity of the Afro-Caribbean and the honest industriousness of the Asian. As for the chaste obedience of the women, that was still evident in the modesty of their dress.
‘Nice,’ Kevern commented, ‘to see some black.’
Ailinn said nothing.
As black as ravens, they seemed to her, but nothing like so purposeful, covered from head to foot, only their slow eyes and the gold heels of their shoes visible. She noted with amazement the docility of their bearing as they trailed a step or two behind their men, talking among themselves. Some wheeled perambulators, but in general there were few children. Where was the point in children? And where, anyway, were the nannies? How did it feel, she wondered, to live this privileged life of no design, like a protected species which could forage unimpeded for whatever it liked but with no nest to take its findings back to.
Some of the men smoked hookahs in the lounge of the hotel, morose, looking occasionally at their watches but never at their women who sat staring at their jewelled utility phones, bemused, waiting for them to ring or perform some other once sacred but now forgotten function — totems that had lost their potency. The women allowed their fingers idly to play across the decommissioned keypads. The men too were fidgety, their fingers never far from their prayer beads.
‘You should get a set of those, they could calm your nerves,’ Ailinn whispered, as they waited for a porter to take their luggage to their rooms. They were travelling light and could have carried their own, but the porters needed employment and where, anyway, was the hurry?
‘Are you implying I’m a fretter?’
‘You? A fretter!’ she laughed, holding on to his arm, then wondering whether, in such a place, it was disrespectful of her to stand so close to a man.
After he’d shown them to their room the porter took Kevern to one side and asked him if there were gramophone records, CDs or videos he was looking for. Bootleg blues bands, rock and roll, comedy — he knew where to lay his hands on anything. Kevern shook his head. What about books that had fallen out of print, bootleg tickets to underground cabarets, souvenir passports of those who hadn’t got away before WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED happened, belts and badges worn by the hate gangs of the time, incitement posters, pennants, cartoons, signed confessions. .?
Kevern wanted to know who would want such things. The porter shrugged. ‘Collectors,’ he said.
‘No,’ Kevern said. ‘No, thank you,’ remembering the amount of contraband music and words belonging to his father that was hidden away in his loft. It hadn’t occurred to him any of it could be worth money.
The bedroom was, or at least had been, ornate. The bed was a four-poster. The carpet vermilion and gold, the drapes similar, sentimental photographs of famous department stores with queues outside adorned the wall. A large bath sat in the middle of the bathroom on gilded griffin’s claws, now broken and discoloured. It will topple, Kevern thought, if we get into it together. He didn’t like the look of the towels either: though they must once have been sumptuous, each one large enough to wrap an entire bath-oiled family in, they now hung, grey and textureless, over rusted rails.
He went to the window and gazed out towards the park. At school he had read descriptions of the Necropolis written by post-apocalyptic fantasists of a generation before. They were published as an anthology intended as light relief for the pupils, a propaganda joke showing just how wrong people could be when they let their imaginations — and indeed their politics — run away with them. But the anthology was later withdrawn, not because the post-apocalyptics had been proved right, but because the truth was not quite the resplendent rebuttal of their vision it should have been. Kevern remembered the gleaming vistas of technological frenzy dreamed up by one of the writers, citizens of the Metropolis of Zog sitting on brightly coloured tubular benches conversing with their neighbours via bubbles of video speech transmitted faster than the speed of sound by satellite. They had given up talking to one another because talk was too cumbersome. Another envisioned the population living in cages underground, dispersing their seed by means of a carefully regulated system of electronic cartridges which travelled through translucent pipes, along with electricity and water. Otherwise they neither enjoyed nor wanted any other form of human contact. The alternative vision was of devastation — open sewers strewn with the debris of a consumer society that no longer possessed the will or the wherewithal to consume, abandoned motor vehicles with their doors pulled off, electricity pylons which seemed to have marched into the city from the country like an invading army and were now uprooted, bent double like dinosaurs in pain or flat on their backs like. . Kevern couldn’t remember what they were like, only that everything was like something else, as though what had destroyed the city was not disease or overpopulation or an asteroid but a fatal outbreak of febrile fantasy-fiction metaphor.