The City & the City - China Mieville [59]
They sat me in what they called an Ul Qoma simulator, a booth with screens for inside walls, on which they projected images and videos of Besźel with the Besź buildings highlighted and their Ul Qoman neighbours minimised with lighting and focus. Over long seconds, again and again, they would reverse the visual stress, so that for the same vista Besźel would recede and Ul Qoma shine.
How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border. There were folktales of renegades who breach and avoid Breach to live between the cities, not exiles but insiles, evading justice and retribution by consummate ignorability. Pahlaniuk’s novel Diary of an Insile had been illegal in Besźel (and, I was sure, in Ul Qoma), but like most people I had skimmed a pirated edition.
I did the tests, pointing with a cursor at an Ul Qoman temple, an Ul Qoman citizen, an Ul Qoman lorry delivering vegetables, as quick as I could. It was faintly insulting stuff, designed to catch me inadvertently seeing Besźel. There had been nothing like this the first time I had done such studies. Not very long ago the equivalent tests would have involved being asked about the different national character of Ul Qomans, and judging who from various pictures with stereotyped physiognomies was Ul Qoman, Besź, or “Other” (Jewish, Muslim, Russian, Greek, whatever, depending on the ethnic anxieties of the time).
“Seen the temple?” Dhatt said. “And that there used to be a college. Those are apartment blocks.” He jabbed his finger at buildings as we passed, told his driver, to whom he had not introduced me, to go various routes.
“Weird?” he said to me. “Guess it must be strange.”
Yes. I looked at what Dhatt showed me. Unseeing, of course, but I could not fail to be aware of all the familiar places I passed grosstopically, the streets at home I regularly walked, now a whole city away, particular cafés I frequented that we passed, but in another country. I had them in the background now, hardly any more present than Ul Qoma was when I was at home. I held my breath. I was unseeing Besźel. I had forgotten what this was like; I had tried and failed to imagine it. I was seeing Ul Qoma.
Day, so the light was that of the overcast cold sky, not the twists of neon I had seen in so many programmes about the neighbouring country, which the producers evidently thought it easier for us to visualise in its garish night. But that ashy daylight illuminated more and more vivid colours than in my old Besźel. The Old Town of Ul Qoma was at least half transmuted these days into a financial district, curlicued wooden rooflines next to mirrored steel. The local street hawkers wore gowns and patched-up shirts and trousers, sold rice and skewers of meat to smart men and a few women (past whom my nondescript compatriots, I tried to unsee, walked on their way to Besźel’s more quiet destinations) in the doorways of glass blocks.
After mild censure from UNESCO, a finger-wag tied to some European investment, Ul Qoma had recently passed zoning laws to stop the worst of the architectural vandalism its boomtime occasioned. Some of the ugliest recent works had even been demolished, but still the traditional baroque curlicues of Ul Qoma’s heritage sights were made almost pitiful by their giant young neighbours.