Read an Excerpt

Rates of Exchange

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

ARR.

I

THE FIRST THING one notices—as Comflug 155 from London, two hours late, dips, touches down, bounces and brakes on the runway, drops its raised wing-baffles, slows, turns, and begins to taxi through the airport lanes toward the long, low, white wooden buildings that have signs on their walls saying slaka—is that a number of armed men stand about at various points on the tarmac. At first, while the plane moves quickly, all these men look alike; then vision through the round bowl of the window improves, and it becomes apparent that they come not just in one kind but in at least two. Some of them are soldiers; they wear a military khaki, high-peaked caps with red bands round them, long flared topcoats with white epaulettes and black, rather baggy leather boots which reach up to their knees in cavalry fashion. There is another kind who are probably militiamen or policemen. These wear a rather dowdier uniform, in darkish blue, flat blue caps with white covers on them, cross-straps of black leather over their chests, and trousers that bulge out wide at the thighs and then taper down to fit into very short black boots. As the plane comes nearer still, it becomes clear that not only uniforms but offices are different too. It is the function of the soldiers to cluster in groups around the various aircraft—the shiny Ilyushins, Tupolevs and Antonovs, and the grey Mil helicopter gunships—that rest on their stands along the airport apron, or on the grass beside it. Each plane has four or five of these soldiers around it; they look serious and attentive. The blue men, the militia, stand at or near the entrance doors to the various white airport buildings. Each doorway has two or three of them beside it, and they look stocky and solid. The two groups stand separately, do not talk to each other, and as the Comflug jet rolls in closer it is clear that the only reason for confusing them is that they all carry well-cleaned black Kalashnikov submachine guns of neat modern design slung on short straps over their shoulders.

Beyond the men and the planes there run the airport buildings, long and low, shining white in the late afternoon sunlight. They are buildings without any architectural conceit and only a modest appearance of functionality; they could be any buildings built for any purpose anywhere. The entrance doors where the armed militiamen stand are evidently kept locked, for no one goes in and out of them; above them one can see a sign in the Cyrillic alphabet, an incomprehensible code, and then another smaller one in the Latin alphabet, saying INVAT. The buildings are two storeys high, and have a flat roof with wooden railings around it; here on the roof are the people, a sizeable, busy crowd of them. The Comflug jet is still moving, and distances are hard to project, but they all seem to be fairly small and stocky people, dressed in a certain Sunday formality—though Sunday is, indeed, the day that this is. The men mostly wear dark double-breasted suits, cut square in the body, and dark ties, and hats or caps; the women are in large full cotton dresses, and look reassuringly round and bulky. They are all modest enthusiasts, looking out over the field and waving, with pleasure but without extravagance, at the plane as it comes slowly in closer to the terminal, or possibly at another one—for, though it is Sunday, the airport seems fairly busy, and a second Ilyushin from some other destination, fat, streaked with curdled lines from flight, its rivets shining, also in the blue and white Comflug livery, with Cyrillic tail colophon, is already following the London flight in off the runway.

The sun shines, the buildings are white, the world is in a state of traveller's suspension. There are some people who will tell you that the world we live in now is converging, that everywhere is turning into everywhere else, that difference is giving way to universal similarity. At this moment, this seems both true and not. Airports, certainly, are everywhere airportlike, operating to much the same functions, expressing much the same signs, displaying the same abstract familiarities. Yet behind such similarities there are always the small differences, things that name the place. The air here has a distinct blueish quality; the airport grass is notably thick and coarse, and has the look of being planted for haymaking; indeed, an old tractor works between the runways. The uniforms of the armed men are not quite the uniforms of the other armed men in other places. Words are visible here and there, and they both explain and estrange; thus the van that has been leading the plane in through the airport tracks has a sign on its roof saying HIN MI, and the grey tanker nosing forward from the camouflaged sheds to the right of the terminal has a sign painted on the side saying BIN'ZINI. The empty blue buses that wait in a short row outside the terminal building, presumably to take the passengers from the plane and deliver them into the new country, are old and bulbous, with ladders up their backs, definitely other, created in a different, more ornate stylistic idiom. The people on the roof are short and stocky. Across the grass and cement, beyond the trees that line the airport perimeter, there pokes into the sky a golden onion, the spire-dome of a church. Over it, in front of the dropping sun, a great bird with white wings is flying. It appears to be a stork; however, vision through the dirtied globe-windows of the plane is difficult, and this could be an optical illusion.

And somewhere beyond the dome, and not too far away, there must be the city itself, which they have overflown and looked down upon only a few moments earlier. It lies in the middle of a wide green plain, not too greatly populated, with a jagged dish of mountains rising up all round it. Right across Europe this has been a wet summer, a summer of what is called unusual weather, now usual. The plain, part-farmed, part-forested, part-bare, shows itself wet to the sky; across it, offered to the air-traveller in glints and flashes, runs one of those wide, twisting, European rivers that could flow either north or south, up to the Baltic or out to the North Sea, down to the Mediterranean or over to the Bosphorus, one of those famous rivers that stays in middle-aged memory from those old World War Two Daily Telegraph maps of advance and retreat, putsch and counter-putsch, as the war in Europe raged. Now it has flooded out from its banks, onto the green of the plain, into the forest-clusters, the stripes of green and brown field, the small huddles of communities which, with dark roofs, rising smoke, and surrounding busy farmyards, patternlessly dot the landscape, and even into the edges of the city itself, where the river tightens and is bridged, where the aircraft comes lower, where the people move.

The city itself seems only modestly big. From the air one sees a big brick power station with high metal chimneys, spurting orange smoke high into the bright blue sky; a distinct industrial section, with factory compounds laid out near the lines of long straight highways converging variously onto the hub of the city; a workers' district, with high rectangular living blocks in faceless contemporary style; many streets of high, square-windowed town apartments of the Continental type; on the streets, with their rows of shade trees, a small amount of traffic, moving quite fast; amid the traffic, many rocking pink trams, towing trailers behind them along metal tracks that glint in the sun. Then a cathedral, apparently unfinished, or having had its top knocked off; next an area of greater complexity, where the river turns round an outcrop, the bridges are several, and a crenellated castle from old storybooks sits up on a rock amid high trees, surrounded by streets that twist and contain old bright-painted buildings. Then a market place, with brightly coloured roofs to its stalls and a central edifice with a high tower; a vast square, surrounded on all sides by governmental-looking stone buildings, and having a pavé so very clean that it shines bright white in the late afternoon sunlight; more apartments, more factories, more countryside, looking lush and flooded, some intensive market-gardening, done under shiny polythene crop-covers, the onion church, the runway lights, the glide into the airport.

Now the plane comes in close to the terminal building, and begins to make its final turn. Out on the tarmac, down below, the armed men, the soldiers, stand and stare up at the big Ilyushin as it moves onto the stand; inside, the passengers, strapped into their highback seats, sit and stare down through the globed windows, at the armed men, and the waving people, and the baggage trucks and petrol tankers moving nearer, and the other planes, neatly arrayed on the apron, and the blue buses, standing quiet by the doors where the sign says INVAT, and the line of trees on the airport perimeter, and the possible stork on the skyline. The red sun shines in through the windows; the interior of the cabin smells, in homely fashion, of dumpling. On the forward bulkhead, green illuminated notices say LUPI LUPI and NOKI ROKI. A faint sound of martial music sounds through the intercom; the passengers sit very quietly. Three Comflug stewardesses have risen from their seats and stand at the front of the plane, by the kitchen area. Some international couturier has conceived them; their heavy bodies are clad in bright green uniforms, they wear a helmet-like headgear which makes them appear to have just got down from a horse. The world outside remains in suspension. The people who wave, wave, wave, the armed men, are not yet real. The notices on the buildings are mysterious hieroglyphics, for the comprehension of others. The eye collects but only partly understands. A life goes on here but one is not of it: people and houses, customs and habits have a shape that makes sense, but there is no sense to it yet. A reality of sorts is here, indeed a historical reality, the sort that Karl Marx promised as the regime of truth; but it is not yet real at all.

Preliminary descriptions exist. 'The airport at Slaka is in open countryside, situated 8km/5mi to the east of the city,' it says in a text, Helpful Hints for British Businessmen, which Dr Petworth, a cultural visitor, sitting in a high aisle seat, peering across two brown-suited bodies and out into life, has in his pocket, 'Buses to the central Comflug office, Wodjimutu 217 (no check-in facilities), are available. Tickets must be purchased in advance from the airport tobacco kiosk, marked Litti, and are not available on board.' Banks, government offices, and state trading organizations are closed on Saturday and Sunday. Only the orange-coloured taxis should be used. The voltage is 110. There have been many wars and battles here. Since the heroic liberation of 1944, about two million dwellings of the workers have been constructed, and per capita floor space is about 102 metres. The castle is particularly worthy of a visit. No vloskan may be taken from the country on leaving. Carefree children play in the sunlit parks, pensioners enjoy their well-deserved repose, and enamoured couples dream of the future. Art has developed here on realistic foundations, and few decadent tendencies have taken root among our patriotic worker artists and writers. Dances by peasants in regional costumes are regularly performed. Numerous marble plaques dedicated to those who fell in the national struggle remind us of those heroic days. Stalls selling flowers of the season delight the streets. The trade unions direct socialistic emulation, and are responsible for the successes of the 'rationalization' movement. Centres which offer 'vacation in saddle' delight horse-loving fans, and large woods invite sportsmen. The work of the expressionist painter Lev Pric, to be seen at the People's Gallery of State Art (Gal'erri Proly'aniii), manifests that world thought-waves of the highest kind have passed through the nation. Especially lovely is the park in the month of May, when the magnolias bloom. An obscure passage in a chronicle by Nostrum, Monk of Kiev, suggests a Mediterranean origin for these people, but this is much disputed.

The flight-handler waving his bats to bring the plane into parking position has, beneath his great headphoned helmet the flat face of a Tartar. The big bird still flies on the skyline; on the roof of the terminal the people continue to wave, wave, wave. Lev Pric is not visible. On the intercom, the martial music ceases: 'Resti stuli, noki fitygryfici,' says a stewardess over the apparatus. The long rows of passengers, who have been sitting in great quietness, stir very slightly. On the tarmac, the Tartar waves his bats; then he crosses them over his chest in a final gesture. There is one last movement from the plane, one last roar of the engine; then it halts. Inside there is stillness, but outside movement: the armed men move forward to surround the plane, and the blue buses begin, very slowly, to move away from the door marked INVAT and come toward them; a flight of steps trundles forward. A great red burst fills the front of the cabin; the stewardess has pushed open the forward door. Unclicking his lap-strap, Dr Petworth, a cultural visitor, begins to rise and reach upward to the laced racks for his hand luggage, staring down the aisle that will lead him towards his new city.

II

Now this Dr Petworth whom we see peering out through the globed windows of Comflug 155, as it halts on the apron at Slaka airport, is not, it had better be admitted, a person of any great interest at all. Indeed, as brilliant, batik-clad, magical realist novelist Katya Princip will remark, somewhat later in this narrative, he is just not a character in the world historical sense. He is a man who is styleless; he wears an old safari suit, its pockets packed with pens and paper, Christmas present socks of a tedious rhomboidal design, and flat earth shoes; there is a certain baldness to his head where, in a better world, hair would be. He is white and male, forty and married, bourgeois and British—all items to anyone's contemporary discredit, as he knows perfectly well. He is a man to whom life has been kind, and he has paid the price for it. No military adventures enter his history, and he has struggled for no causes, taken no part in any revolutions. When the world went to war in the forties, he lay in a cot and played with soft toys; when the young in the fifties rebelled over Suez and Hungary, he played cricket for his school. When the students of the sixties saw the dream of a new Utopia, he quietly completed his doctoral thesis on the great vowel-shift; when the pill came and the sexual world was transformed, he promptly married a small dark girl met on a camping holiday. His service has been all on that most commonplace of battlefields, the domestic front; and he has the baggy eyes and saddened heart to prove it. He has known the Freudian hungers, received, at the age of twenty, a sound education in complicated misery from a bouncy-breasted Swedish girl friend, which still haunts his middle life, felt the desire for change and complication, but never satisfied it. He teaches; that is what he does. And his sole interest here is that he has also travelled much, for the British Council, and has had diarrhoea for that excellent cultural organization in almost all parts of the civilized or part-civilized world.

And it is as a cultural traveller that he now sits here, strapped in an aisle seat of an Ilyushin on the airport at Slaka, waiting to enter the world outside. He has left behind him, two time zones back, under different birdlife and a different ideology, a habitat of sorts: a small office in a Bradford college, lined with books, where he teaches the vowel-shift and the speech-act to students of many nationalities, including his own; a small, fairly modern brick house of faintly rising property values on a bus-route convenient both for the college and the city; in the house, a quantity of contemporary, which is to say already out-of-date, furniture; and a dark wife, contemporary too, a woman of waning affections, bleakly hungry for a revelation, evidently disillusioned, in these therapeutic times, with ... well, what? It is a little shaming to say that he does not quite know, for his instincts are decent; but with him, perhaps, or the role of helpmeet-slave, or the patriarchal enslavement of women in society, or the incapacity of the marital orgasm to make all life endlessly interesting, or her own ageing, or his absences, both symbolic and actual; a small sad wife in Laura Ashley dresses, who writes many letters to undisclosed friends, and belongs to Weightwatchers, who reads horoscopes in old newspapers, paints paintings of no recognizable, or at least recognized, merit in the lumber room, drinks solitary glasses of sherry at odd hours of the day or night, and sits for long hours in a sunchair in the garden, as if waiting—or so it appears to Petworth, as he peers, when he is there and not here, through the curtains of his high upstairs study at the lonely figure in the lounger—to be a widow, who makes him feel guilty when, as then, he is present, and quite as guilty when, as now, he is not.

---

Excerpted from Rates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury. Copyright © 1983 Malcolm Bradbury. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---