The City & the City - China Mieville [18]
The script was lost in 1923, overnight, a culmination of Ya Ilsa’s reforms: it was Atatürk who imitated him, not, as is usually claimed, the other way around. Even in Ul Qoma, no one can read Illitan script now but archivists and activists.
Anyway whether in its original or later written form, Illitan bears no resemblance to Besź. Nor does it sound similar. But these distinctions are not as deep as they appear. Despite careful cultural differentiation, in the shape of their grammars and the relations of their phonemes (if not the base sounds themselves), the languages are closely related—they share a common ancestor, after all. It feels almost seditious to say so. Still.
Besźel’s dark ages are very dark. Sometime between two thousand and seventeen hundred years ago the city was founded, here in this curl of coastline. There are still remains from those times in the heart of the town, when it was a port hiding a few kilometres up the river to shelter from the pirates of the shore. The city’s founding came at the same time as another’s, of course. The ruins are surrounded now or in some places incorporated, antique foundations, into the substance of the city. There are older ruins too, like the mosaic remnants in Yozhef Park. These Romanesque remains predate Besźel, we think. We built Besźel on their bones, perhaps.
It may or may not have been Besźel, that we built, back then, while others may have been building Ul Qoma on the same bones. Perhaps there was one thing back then that later schismed on the ruins, or perhaps our ancestral Besźel had not yet met and standoffishly entwined with its neighbour. I am not a student of the Cleavage, but if I were I still would not know.
“BOSS.” Lizbyet Corwi called me. “Boss you are on fire. How did you know? Meet me at sixty-eight BudapestStrász.”
I had not yet dressed in day clothes though it was after noon. My kitchen table was a landscape of papers. The books I had on politics and history were propped in a Babel-tower by the milk. I should keep my laptop from the mess, but I never bothered. I brushed cocoa away from my notes. The blackface character on my French drinking chocolate smiled at me. “What are you talking about? What’s that address?”
“It’s in Bundalia,” she said. An industrial presuburb northwest of Funicular Park, by the river. “And are you kidding me what is it? I did what you said—I asked around, got the basic gist of which groups there are, who thinks what of each other, blah blah. I spent the morning going round, asking questions. Putting the fear in. Can’t say you get much respect from these bastards with the uniform on, you know? And I can’t say I had much hopes for this, but I figured what the hell else did we have to do? Anyway I’m going around trying to get a sense of the politics and whatnot, and one of the guys at one of the—I guess you’d say lodges maybe—he starts to give me something. Wasn’t going to admit it at first, but I could tell. You’re a fucking genius, sir. Sixty-eight BudapestStrász is a unificationist HQ.”
Her awe was already close to suspicion. She would have looked at me even harder if she had seen the documents on my table, that I had negotiated with my hands when she phoned me. Several books were open to their indices, propped to show what references they had to unificationism. I really had not come across the BudapestStrász address.
In typical political cliché, unificationists were split on many axes. Some groups were illegal, sister-organisations in both Besźel and Ul Qoma. The banned had at various points in their history advocated the use of violence to bring the cities to their God-, destiny-, history-, or people-intended unity. Some had, mostly