Rates of Exchange

by Malcolm Bradbury

  And therefore even in the air, Petworth reflects, a person in the clouds over Munich, or Zü rich (for his geography collapses totally east of the Rhine), the world can subtly turn and change. Down below there are frontiers and fences, Comecons and Common Markets, tariff walls and spheres of influence, politics and ideologies, language barriers and vowelshifts. There are spies and searches, arrests and imprisonments, iron curtains and Berlin Walls, Alps and butter mountains, oil and SALT. The world is divided, and divides more every day; missiles point and cluster-bombs cluster; Reagan and the Born Again are that way, Brezhnev and the Politburo are this. In the air it should not matter; grander detachments, larger objectivities, seem possible. But in the air the borders and barriers function too, in the mind itself; slowly, strangely, consciousness changes, and Petworth can feel the change taking place within himself. Nothing is happening, yet somehow his being is shifting: a Petworth life and a Petworth wife, a Petworth day and a Petworth way, are strangely slipping and disintegrating in his head. Perhaps it has something to do with that popping of the ears at altitude which – the medical men, who say so many things now, say – touches strange glands that make the brain function somewhat differently; perhaps it is the strange hysteria of travel, which changes the sense in which we see the world; perhaps it is Karl Marx who is right, and changes in material condition generate changes in mentality. Whatever the reason, there is no doubt that, somewhere inside him, an old world is beginning to go, a new one beginning to come. The sky has cleared, turned to bright blue, and new landscapes lie below them, by unfastening his seat-belt, and raising himself up a little, Petworth can just see out, to glimpse an extraordinary, high, mountain landscape, a raw cold world of blank icecap, where no roads run, no settlements stand, where peaks glint and stark rock shines, a voided place. It is a place that matches his head, emptying of familiar being; he sits back in his seat and looks around the cabin.

  In the cabin, the other passengers sit, in stiff rows; Petworth looks at them and recognizes their actuality. The men sit in their weighty, pre-synthetic, rather crumpled suits; the women wear large, full-skirted dresses; the clothes are the clothes of convention and duty, not the light sensuous robings of provisionality Petworth has now grown used to, so lightly put on and so easily taken off. These people do not talk much, but when they talk, they talk assertively, poking each other with fingers; the accents are guttural, the words are sharp. Across the aisle an old man holds a beetroot in his lap, and a woman feeds bread to a child; these are peoply sort of people, and they remind Petworth of something – of, he realizes, the people of his childhood, a time when the world appeared remarkably solid, persons massive, individuals whole and complete, reality really real, buildings permanently in place, marriages made for ever, a fact a fact. It is in adult life that one conceives everything to be provisional, to feel oneself in the wrong bodily container, to sense the world as a shifting void; but these people do not seem to look or think like that. Petworth looks up; the heavy stewardess, hair in her nostrils, cake-crumbs round her mouth, stands above him like a severe mother; she is staring down at his groin rebukingly, as if he has committed some disgrace there, as, of course, one always has. ‘Lupi lupi,’ says the stewardess, pointing to the seat-belt; Petworth fastens it up. With reality shaping around him, Petworth decides he needs a fact: ‘English newspaper?’ he says to the heavy face above him. ‘Ah, na,’ says the stewardess, ‘Not available. Only available here is P’rtyii Populatiii.’ ‘All right,’ says Petworth, glad even of a foreign word, ‘I’ll have that.’ ‘Not in English,’ says the lady, ‘You will not like.’ ‘I will like,’ says Petworth. ‘So you want?’ asks the stewardess. ‘Yes, I want,’ says Petworth. ‘So I get,’ says the stewardess.

  P’rtyii Populatiii, when brought, proves very weighty: as much fact as you could wish for. It has a red masthead and heavy black type; evidently the government and party organ, it has photographs of authoritative solidity, showing firm men grouped around tables or under banners in strangely fixed positions. They shake hands in friendship, or they sign things; they are characters in the world historical sense. Petworth unfolds the big rough pages, staring down at the unknown words in their mysterious series, some in the Cyrillic alphabet, some in the Latin, all in the language he does not know. There are no pop stars, no women notable only for their tits, just fixed photographs, seamless text. From the text prod words of faint familiarity: Mass’fin Manifustu sounds recognizable, and Chil’al Ecun’mocu all too understandable. But Gn’oui Prut means nothing, or less: langue without parole, signifier without signified. The text flows, then does not; codes start, but will not unravel. Linguistic anxiety makes Petworth tense, as it does all of us; he reaches into his pocket for oral relief. ‘Na, na,’ says a voice above him; the big face of the heavy green stewardess is staring into his, hairs in her nose, ‘Noki roki.’ ‘Pardon?’ asks Petworth, a man in a chair in the air above Plupno, or perhaps Viglip. ‘You smirk,’ says the stewardess. ‘No,’ says Petworth, looking down at the paper, ‘I didn’t smirk.’ ‘Da, you smirk,’ says the stewardess, snatching the unlit cigarette from his mouth and showing it to him, ‘Of course you smirk. Smirking here not permitted.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ says Petworth. ‘Only permitted is having a sweet,’ says the stewardess.

  The single sweet, wrapped in cheap paper, comes to him thoughtfully, on a little silver tray. It has a sharp acrid taste, the taste of foreignness. Petworth sucks it, and stares on, mentally nudging and prodding at the mysterious system of hieroglyphs packaged so tightly in his lap. Here are subtle grammars, cases, declensions and inflexions, an entire constructed universe that in turn constructs and orders the universe itself. Without it the world would be senseless, and pointless; yet for Petworth it does not mean, it simply is. It ceases to be a closed system; it leaks. As linguisticians like Petworth like to say, information without context becomes redundancy, or noise. There is a noise: the aircraft wheels drop from their casings. There is bright light: the grey sky and the raining have all gone, and the sky is a luminous blue. The engine note changes; the lights flash on the bulkhead; the intercom clicks, and the voice of the captain gives a long message in the language Petworth does not know, untranslated, graceless, cast in the firm tones of socialist realism. The heavy green stewardess comes and lifts up Petworth’s newspaper: ‘Lupi lupi?’ she asks. ‘Da,’ says Petworth, proudly displaying his crotch. Outside the harsh ice-cap has gone, and, craning, Petworth can see something else has come – a cup of jagged mountains, a green plain, a glinting big river, flooded beyond its banks, a steaming great power-station, the web of a city, not far beneath. Then down they come low, over shining polythene crop covers, and the Comflug flight from London, two hours late, touches down, bounces a little, brakes on the runway, then turns, following the van that says HIN MI toward the sign that says INVAT, until the Tartar crosses his bats, the plane stops, the flight handlers push steps toward the aircraft’s side, the stewardess opens the front door, to let in a great rosy circle of light.

  Petworth folds up P’rtyii Populatiii, undoes his lap-strap, rises, steps into the aisle, reaches up to the rack for his dutyfree bag and a large overcoat, quite mismatched to the bright weather outside (but his geography collapses totally once east of the Rhine). Outside, in the sun, the white bird continues to fly toward a city, a new ideological world, a life he can’t yet know, a language he can’t yet speak. ‘Na, na,’ says a voice by his ear; the heavy green stewardess is beside him once more. ‘Na?’ asks Petworth, staring at her; now she is small, and he big. ‘Is not permitted . . . ,’ she begins; but then, her mouth open, she ceases utterance, her eyes staring, her brow furrowed. Petworth, who has taught many a seminar in language acquisition, knows these symptoms at once; the Babelian tragedy has struck, linguistic arrest, translator’s block, has occurred. ‘Yes, not permitted,’ says Petworth patiently, ‘Now, not permitted to do what?’ ‘Vistu ab stuli,’ says the stewardess. ‘Yes, well, try again, I don’t understand,’ says Petworth patiently. Big
Petworth, little heavy green stewardess, they stare at each other for a moment, trapped together on the linguistic interface. Then two large green arms rise up from her body, and her big hands seize his shoulders in a tight grip. For a small woman, she is strong; she turns him a little, shoves him backward, pushes him down; this causes his knees to fold, his buttocks to smack heavily down into the foam-rubber aisle seat where he has been sitting, a pain to run up his spine, his overcoat to fly up over his face. But gesture is language too, indeed is probably language’s very origin. ‘Not permitted to get up from your seat?’ suggests Petworth, removing the overcoat. ‘Da, da,’ says the stewardess, nodding vigorously, and putting the overcoat back onto the rack, ‘Is not permitted to get up your seat.’ And indeed, when Petworth looks round the cabin, he sees this is the universal understanding. For, though the doors are open, the steps ready, the blue buses moving toward them from the door marked INVAT, all his fellowpassengers have remained in their seats, strapped and silent, as if waiting for the next thing to happen.

  IV

  Now perhaps it should be explained that this Dr Petworth who sits with tingling buttocks on the apron at Slaka is, though a linguist, not that kind of linguist who knows many languages. He is competent in some tongues, but mostly dead ones: Old and Middle English, Middle High German, and, if pressed, a little Old Norse, a passable Old Icelandic. But otherwise he possesses no more than that conventional, minimal polyglotism that has, for centuries, taken the English, stammering and nodding, baffled and curious, speaking their own tongue very loudly and slowly in the belief that if spoken like this it will be everywhere understood, into every corner of the world. So Petworth possesses the words for coffee and tea in some thirteen different languages, those for beer and wine in some eleven or twelve, those for please and thank you in some nine or ten. He knows, for examination purposes, a lot of different Eskimo words for snow. Tourist words like museum and cathedral, travel words like customs and check-in, succour words like meal and lavatory, he can usually pick up anywhere with great facility. He knows his Norse from his Igbo; he has as many words of Hopi as he has of Greek. But it is all example and illustration; when it actually comes to learning and speaking to others the language they use and construct life through, Petworth has, to be frank, just as much trouble as the rest of us.

  But this is not all. Petworth also possesses a rich international sub-language – he would call it an idiolect – composed of many fascinating terms, like idiolect and sociolect, langue and parole, signifier and signified, Chomsky and Saussure, Barthes and Derrida, not the sort of words you say to everybody, but which put him immediately in touch with the vast community of those of his own sub-group, profession or calling in all parts of the world – if, that is, he can find anyone who speaks enough English to lead him to them. Petworth may not be a master of languages, but he does know what language in its Ding an Sich, its languageness, actually is. He knows all about how we, as language-speaking animals, language speak. If you ask him about analogic and digital communication, the code of semes, or the post-vocalic /r/, he can tell you, would be delighted to do so. He is an expert on real, imaginary and symbolic exchanges among skinbound organisms working on the linguistic interface, which is what linguists call you and me. In his own mind, he knows whether the mind is, or is not, a tabula rasa before language enters it, though he will not be divulging his answer directly in this book. You may not worry about such things, but there are people who do; indeed Petworth is a valued commercial traveller in an essential commodity, a loyal worker in the service of the one British export that, despite the falling fishing stocks and the rising oil price, the strikes and the recessions, still booms in the markets of the world. The ideal British product, needing no workers and no work, no assembly lines and no assembly, no spare parts and very little servicing, it is used for the most intimate and the most public purposes everywhere. We call it the English language, everyone wants it, and in its teaching Petworth is an acknowledged expert. His books on TEFL and TESOP and TENPP, on ESP and EAP, are jostled for in bookshops from Tromsø to Tierra del Fuego. And this is why he is here, the acrid taste of a sweet in his mouth, a pain in his spine, his bag of lectures tucked under the seat in front, sitting waiting at Slaka airport.

  Yes, Petworths are always needed, for isn’t everything a language? The grammar of airports is a language: this bustle of vehicles, these structured operations, as the grey tankers come under the wing, and the toilet-cleanser comes under the body, and the air-waves crackle and the hand-sets operate. The code of coming and going is a language, though it is the nature of language to function differently in different cultures. So in some societies the opening of a plane door is a signal suggesting to passengers that they may get off. In others, like this one, the same signal may mean something else; for example, that armed men may get on. For this, Petworth notes, peering through the globed window, is what is happening now; up the steps, into the plane, are coming four soldiers, in flared topcoats and boots that come up to the knee in cavalry fashion. Large young men, they have to bend their heads and tilt their weapons to pass under the doorway; their hair under their caps is tightcropped, to show the shape of their skulls, and make them look fierce. Behind them comes another man, smaller and in plain clothes, clothes so very plain that he must surely be a policeman from the state security system, HOGPo. These five stand at the front of the cabin for a while, talking to the heavy green stewardess. Then two of the soldiers, followed by the HOGPo man, begin to walk, their feet thudding on the thin carpet, down the cabin. The passengers do not look up; the cold metal of a sub-machine gun lightly touches Petworth’s hand as they pass him by. They go right down the cabin, and into the forbidden green-curtained area at the end; Petworth turns discreetly, to see the curtain falling behind them.

  When he looks forward again, he sees that the other two soldiers have now begun to walk very slowly down the cabin, side by side. One looks carefully to the left, the other to the right, examining, minutely, the faces of the travellers. Petworth, meanwhile, uneasily inspects theirs. They are young men, with primal-looking unstated features: their eyes are studs, their mouths raw, their expressions unchanging, like those in old photographs, when life was serious and exposures long. They take each row carefully, coming nearer and nearer. Now Petworth, in the service of the English language, has travelled much for the British Council. Once or twice a year, for several years, he has picked up his briefcase and gone afield with his lectures. In the process he has grown used to the hard outward face of modern travel. There are men with guns at Schiphol and Fornebu, Zaventem and O’Hare; soldiers with tanks and troop-carriers will suddenly surround Heathrow. He has walked through metal-detectors on several continents, pushed his luggage through hundreds of X-ray machines that do not harm the film in your camera, seen his lectures indifferently flipped through at innumerable security checks, watched the tablets in his medicine bag tasted by policemen in Dusseldorf and Rawalpindi, suffered, arms splayed, legs grossly apart, body-searches of all kinds, from the aggressive to the intimate, in countries of many ideological complexions. He understands the necessity behind these depersonalizations; airports are dangerous holes in all societies, and terrorists and hijackers, spies and political escapees travel the shuttling air routes, looking for all the world just like any ordinary linguist. The world seems to steam with growing anger and impatience; in some countries some people want an individuality they feel denied, in others a collectivity they feel they lack; some want less of self, others more. These are times when it is hard to know what a person is, and harder to be one; in many circumstances it is wise to be as little person-like as possible.

  This, as the soldiers come nearer and nearer, stand over him, Petworth tries now. The stewardess, standing behind them, says something about him: ‘Passipotti,’ says the soldier. The soldier looks at the document, stares with black eyes at Petworth, through the face into the skull, feels the Heathrow bag, laughs at the clank of bottle, hands the passport back, and pas
ses on. Some three rows behind him, there is a conversation, then a commotion; a moment later the two soldiers walk heavily back toward the front of the plane, between them a neat Burberry-ed businessman in a Western suit, carrying a code-locked leather briefcase, impregnable to all assault save that of being picked up and walked off with. He is an ordinary man, who looks a bit like Petworth; but he is in another story, a story of spies and betrayals, not, thinks Petworth, Petworth’s story at all. The man goes down the steps between the soldiers, whose guns bob on their backs. There is a silence from the back of the plane, from behind the green curtain; there is a noise from the intercom, as the pilot says something in his gloomy monoglot. Slowly the passengers begin to rise, step out into the aisle, put on hats and berets, collect their cardboard boxes. ‘Is permitted?’ asks Petworth, waving at the heavy green stewardess, up the aisle ahead of him. ‘Da,’ she says, nodding. Petworth rises again, collects his Heathrow bag and overcoat, picks up his bag of lectures, jostles along the aisle to the entrance. ‘Thank you,’ he says to the stewardess as he passes her, hair in her nostrils, ‘Have a nice day.’