The City & the City: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Neither of the leads about Fulana’s identity turn out to be legitimate; both the legal assistant and “The Pout” are still alive. Meanwhile, no DNA evidence definitively links Khurusch to her. On the Monday after the body is found, Borlú gets a call from a man speaking in a foreign accent. The line is bad, and the man’s Besź is good but strangely old-fashioned. When Borlú asks why the man isn’t calling the information line, he replies, “I can’t,” before adding, “Borlú, shut up.” He explains that he learned that Borlú is the detective working on the case from the newspaper. When Borlú asks where the man is calling from, the man replies that he already knows. It’s true: Borlú can hear that his accent is from Ul Qoma.

Borlú reminds the man that the call he is making is not illegal, and switches to Illitan. However, the man switches back to Besź, grumbling that “it’s the same damn-faced language anyway.” Borlú is desperately trying to think of a way to trace the call, although he’s not sure if it will be possible. The man says that he knows the woman who was killed, whose name was Marya. He is calling because if Marya is dead, it means that he and other people he cares about are in danger. The man continues that he met Marya through “politics.” She lived in Ul Qoma. Borlú begins to deny this, but the man insists. He explains that Marya went “everywhere” in the political underground because “she needed to know everything.” 

Borlú asks how the man learned about Marya’s death, and the man angrily replies, “I saw your fucking poster,” before hanging up. Next to the notes Borlú has made in his notepad, he has written “shit/shit/shit.” Soon after, he leaves the office, and as he walks home he struggles “to see and unsee only what [he] should.” He calls Sariska, the history professor, but hangs up while the phone is ringing, not wanting to make her “accessory to breach.” Instead, he slowly gets through two bottles of wine with dinner while sketching what he knows about the case.

Borlú knows it’s unlikely that the call was a hoax. However, he now faces a dilemma: if he acts on the information the man has given him, he will be in breach, which is “far worse than illegal.” He is tempted to shred or burn the notes from his phone conversation, although he won’t actually do it. He recalls how, when he was a child, he used to “play Breach,” drawing chalk lines on the ground and chasing each other. There is a sect that worships Breach, and although this religion is not technically illegal, it still makes people nervous. By three a.m., Borlú is drunk and unable to sleep.

Borlú calls Corwi’s desk and leaves her a voicemail saying that he likely won’t come in the next day. He says that it’s clear by now that Fulana was not a sex worker, and claims that he’s been talking to a friend in the Dissident Unit, which has inspired him to start looking into unificationists. He suggests that Corwi start this work tomorrow, adding that he will be in touch by phone. He then calls someone he knows in the “admin pool” called Taskin Cerush and asks what he would have to do if he were to “hypothetically” need to forward a case to Breach.

Pausing for a moment of reflection, Borlú concludes that Marya and the informant must both be unificationists. He looks out the window at a passerby who is not in Besźel, and keeps looking. When the train passes, he looks at the passengers, some of whom, frightened, look back.