Unpublished
A dystopia in three acts
I
In the grey dawn, on a grey train, on opposing rows of slippery, grey metal seats, with backrests that are angled slightly away from the aisle, at precisely ninety-three degrees (don't ask me how I know this – incredibly it is regarded a state secret), everyone is reading the latest version of the Book, which is, of course, the only version. This work season, which we are told will last for six weeks (a week longer than normal on account of a shortfall in quotas in the agricultural sector) the cover is red. There is no accompanying illustration; only the title 'Compendium of Fiction and Verse'. There is no issue or volume number on the cover because it is always the first issue.
Inside the covers that, may I politely remind you, have always been red and never any other colour, the text is an imposing wall that almost completely fills every page. The margins barely exist. Even the poetry is presented like this. Sometimes it is difficult to tell where one verse ends and another begins. It is not to your advantage to stare too long at anything in this fucking country. However, I have noticed, in the corner of my eye, some people are scared to lay their fingers on the words. When they hold the book open, they pinch the pages at the edges. I wonder whether analysis is carried out on the phenomenon by government psychologists.
There is no page of contents; no introduction from the editor. How do you go about reading a book like this? It is a collection, so maybe you flick back and forth until you find something that catches your attention. There is nothing to stop you from doing so; no law that you would be found to have broken. Still, you would have to be out of your mind to do it. Say you are walking along a busy street. There are people who have been separate in the crowd, who suddenly become alive with purpose and come together like a knot that has been pulled tight. They gather around you. Everyone ignores them. Nobody says anything, or raises so much as a glance to help you. One of the men (on rare occasions it is a woman who looks and behaves like a man) shows you their badge. They are secret police of some flavour or other, but you already knew that. They ask some general questions; it is never anything too specific. Perhaps your interrogator casually mentions a story that appears early on in the book; some minor detail. To avoid being caught in a lie, you tell them you have not read it yet. No law has been broken; you have done nothing wrong, and yet now there are questions and doubts that were not there before. Maybe they are not spoken out loud but they exist: Why have you not read it? Are you reading from the Book at all? Why would you not read from a collection of fictional work that has been carefully selected for its quality and has been provided to you, by the State, free of charge? If you are reading the book, then what is about the story that made you skip past it?
You must train your mind not to break the social patterns and provide cause for the agents of the State to look deeper into you. Do as I do: Work out how many pages of the Book you need to read everyday. That is your quota. Also, memorise five facts from every story or poem that you can drop into conversations. Just take care not to express your opinions too strongly. Be aware that certain lines and certain characters have been placed there to root out dissidents. Just pick something innocuous that is not open to broad interpretation. Say that you thought the point was well made. You know it is bullshit and they know it is bullshit, but you have forced a stalemate. You survive another day in this glorious shithole of the people. Your colleagues on either side of you at work will not be side-eyeing the stranger in your spot who has always been there, even though he started only a few hours ago.
The train journey to the factory where I assemble boilers is an hour-and-a-half – three hours of the day in total. There is a railway station inside the factory that divides the assembly floor in half. When I get off the train, my calves always ache from where I have pressing my feet against the runnelled floor to stop myself from sliding off the slippery seat. Everyone in this country has very powerful lower legs. It is why we do so well in events like the high jump at the Olympics. It is not steroids, as the Western nations claim. It is our fucking public transport. Ride for a few hours everyday on one of our trains and you also will reap dividends. You too can be breaking world records!
II
I will tell you the importance of Handover Day.
So, it is the end of a work season. You know how I said, this time around, it is a week longer than normal? If you mention this to anyone, you will be met by blank looks.
On the designated day, when you go to your job, there will be men waiting at the entrance to collect the old copy of the Book and give out the new version, which has a different colour cover, so the old book and the new book are easy to tell apart. God will not intervene if you return your old book and it is in a poor condition. They will take you slightly to one side, still in full view, and lash you five times across the palm with a rolled-up belt. You had better hope that you catch the flat of the belt and not the edges. If you do, then you had better hope the person whose blood is already on the belt didn't have anything contagious because now you have it too. I heard the old books are pulped and turned into fertilizer that is used on the state forests.
If you lose your copy of the Book then it is big trouble for you. If they find out you sold it or smuggled it outside of the country, then you will disappear and no-one will ever know what happened to you. If the loss of the book is judged an accident, you will be relocated to an apartment with less appliances and amenities, You will be moved to a worse job, probably working in the fields. Your movements will be restricted. Life will be harder for you.
If you have no job, then you must queue up outside the government bookstore to exchange your copy. Calling it a bookstore is a joke. There are no books on sale legally anywhere in this country. The bookstores are used as dispensaries for propaganda and for the distribution of technical manuals that are issued to people working in certain professions. They are a target for dissidents who want to lay their hands on this knowledge and use it for themselves, or pass it on to our enemies
Sometimes the train to-or-from work will stop between stations. The police will come onboard and go along the rows of seats tearing out a designated section of the Book. Obviously this content has been retrospectively labelled as transgressive. A decision has been made that it should be immediately unpublished. Perhaps the writer of the piece has been found to harbour dissident opinions. Their work must be purged at the earliest opportunity to prevent the spread of the social contagion. None of the stories or poems in the Book are attributed to any author. It is tempting to believe everything is written by State employees, but I do not think this is the case. For one thing, there are signs of imagination. An attempt is generally made to create writing that will engage the reader. Some of the stories are genuinely good. It is a shame they will enjoy only very short lives. Maybe they will be preserved by intelligence services in the West. One time, when a story was unpublished, the final page of the story just before was taken along with it, as collateral damage. There was an elderly man in the carriage who asked if anyone knew how the previous story ended. No-one would even acknowledge the question. It might have been genuine, or it might have been a test. Like many tests in this country, you pass by keeping your head down and saying nothing.
Today on the train, we had been riding half-an-hour and had just arrived at the second station. A man got on. I watched his expression change to a look of horror when he saw the two rows of compendiums all open on roughly the same page. I know the look. Somehow, he had failed to make the exchange for the new edition. If you searched inside his bag, you would find a book with a pale-green cover. He was fucked and he knew he was fucked. When he arrived at work he would have to report the oversight and hope his excuse was good enough.
III
I have a girlfriend. She is either secret police, or she is informing on me. How else is she getting her make-up? She has a drawer full of it – some of it from the West – that she makes no attempt to hide from me. She works at the same place I do. We travel to and from the factory together. Obviously she is not having an affair. She teaches in the school where the children of the workers go. There is a different version of the Book for young people It is handed out to the teachers who use it as an educational aid. In the evenings, my girlfriend sometimes reads parts of it to me out loud, so I am being educated or I am being re-educated. If this is what the children are learning, then their parents are fucked and the entire country is fucked. First you will have a nightmare and then, soon after, a revolution.
When I was still at school, me and my best friend at the time were invited into the home of a stranger we had never met before. He was a creepy guy but he didn't do anything to us. We both left with our arseholes still intact! He lived in a house, so he was probably a government official. In the basement there was a library of all the compendiums. It was an astonishing sight – a rainbow of coloured spines. Even though the room had no windows, it was somehow brighter than the rooms on the floors above where the sunlight entered.
On our way home, my friend suggested we inform on the man. I said to do so anonymously. They will still know it is you, but your trust score will improve because they know you did it for no personal gain. My friend chose the other path where there are short-term rewards but they know you can be bought-off. A few days later there was a new television waiting when he arrived home. But what good is a new television with a better picture and sound if the only thing to watch is State TV? Where is my friend now? Where are his family? I do not know. I have not seen them for years. No-one talks about them. It is like they never existed.
Epilogue
The above text was found inside a copy of the Compendium of Fiction and Verse that was washed up on the banks of the Levélhordozó River, a few miles downstream from the border. The book was tied-up inside a pillow case and was thickly wrapped in cellophane. The blue-grey cover dates it to October/November 1986. The owner of the book is unknown.