The Unknown Known
Last night I had a visitor: a colleague from Unknown Unknowns. Now might be a good time to explain about our aliases. We in ‘Hut A’ have, over the years, become theorists and visionaries, but we all started out in Known Knowns, seeing action in various theatres (Chechnya, Thailand, Kashmir), and our aliases are reminders of the way we made our bones on the front line. Again the ‘nuanced symbiosis’: for these names are taken from our coverage in the Anglophone media, and then lightly transliterated. I cannot exaggerate the ineffable reverence, the tender solemnity, with which we murmur our noms de guerre. My visitor, my colleague — his name is of the very best: bold, virile, and self-explanatory. Unlike mine. I didn’t say anything when they gave it to me, but I have grown increasingly unhappy with it. My name’s ‘Ayed’, and it derives from Improvised Explosive Device. But Ayed’s already a name. The little Tajik who limps into the village once a month, to grind the knives, his name’s Ayed…
‘I had a message today, “Ayed”,’ said my guest, ‘from the One Eyed One.’
The tea I was drinking abruptly changed direction and came sneezing out of my nose. ‘Continue, “Truqbom”,’ I said when I was able. As was now my habit, I’d been hoping that the One Eyed One was dead.
‘He asks after UU: CRs/G,C. He asks: “When will the great day come? When will it be, this day?”’
‘… July 29!’ I always imagined that, when I said those words for the first time, they would echo with geo-historical resonance (this, after all, this was a date that would for ever burn in the soul of the West); but it came out as something of a whinny. It was now July 25, and my CRs were still in a pit near a swamp in East Texas.
‘July 29 of this year?’
‘Definitely. I virtually guarantee it.’
‘He understands, “Ayed” — we understand — that there have been setbacks.’
I laughed with unexpected shrillness, and found myself saying, ‘It is so, is it not, comrade, that you’ve never been introduced to my wives?’
And before he could answer I summoned them from the kitchen with a mighty clap of my hands. In they filed. I had spent my lunch hour, that day, sadly gazing into the small pond, or large puddle, under the plane trees behind the wash-huts. And it now seemed to me that my wives resembled four gigantic tadpoles. What would they eventually mutate into?
‘Oh, we’re very advanced here you know,’ I cried. ‘Oh yes. My wives quite often “meet”. Have some purified water, comrade, cooled in my refrigerator.’
He left at once, naturally, stalking off on that noisy tin leg of his. This afforded me some temporary relief, and then of course I gave the wives the rough edge of my tongue.
All night I sat there on the lumpy hassock with my face in my hands. What extraordinary behaviour: my wives most certainly do not ‘meet’! And now I have offended the notoriously sensitive and traditionalist ‘Truqbom’, with his ugly muscles — my patron and my peer.