Inside the room, behind a desk, sits another, very big blue armed man. Near the desk, in a plastic easy chair, sits, under a sign saying NOKI ROKI smoking a sweet-smelling cigarette, a small man in plain clothes, clothes so very plain he must surely be a policeman from the state security system, HOGPo. Both are reading. The big blue armed man, who has a scar down his nose, has the grey letter from the Min’stratii Kulturi Komitet’iii. The man in plain clothes has ‘The English Language as a Medium of International Communication.’ ‘Exchangi amicato,’ says Petworth, standing in front of the desk. The big man rises and walks slowly forward; his eyes are blue, his gunstrap seems too tight for his swelling chest. The plain-clothes man stubs out his cigarette. The blue armed man stops in front of Petworth, looks him up and down. His arms spread wide, he thrusts them forward; suddenly Petworth feels himself seized in a maelstrom or turbulence; his nose is being pushed hard into the leather cross-strap over the man’s shoulders; his breathing is stifled on the thick worsted of his uniform; his hands touch the cold metal of the machine gun on his back; their thighs come together, prodding each other. His groin is being bored, his back being beaten; the man has a sweaty stench; sweat, too, pours down Petworth’s body inside his clothes as these things happen to him. The armed man pushes him backward for a moment, holds him out at arm’s length, like a large doll. His blue eyes stare, around them the creases wrinkle. ‘Camarad’aki,’ he cries, ‘Velki in Slaka.’ And then Petworth is dragged forwards again, into the great fraternal maelstrom. Comrade is not a word he is fond of, never having had one, but ‘Camarad’aki!’ he cries when, breathless, he emerges.
‘Rot’vitti!’ says the plain little plain-clothes man, gaily standing behind the desk with four glasses and a bottle. A full glass of bright clear liquid appears in Petworth’s hand. ‘Snup!’ says the big armed man, raising a glass to him. ‘Kulturi!’ says the plain-clothes man, raising his. ‘Musica!’ says the armed man who brought Petworth here, pretending to bow a fiddle. ‘Exchangi!’ says Petworth, raising his glass and drinking it down, with a choking cry; the local peach brandy is not to be missed. The others are laughing; perhaps the word is senseless, or even obscene, it does not matter. He is in the middle of some great masculine joke; it is, in the circumstances, well worth joining. The four men, two armed, two not, stand in the room and laugh together, in full male roars, like the roars of adults in the living-room when Petworth was a child. After a while, the laughing stops; through the window, Petworth sees the Western businessman, with the code-locked briefcase, being marched by two soldiers towards a black car. ‘Please have good visit, Mr Pitwit,’ says the plain-clothes man, handing Petworth the briefcase, ‘Such interesting books. Do not leave them with any of our people.’ The big armed man gives Petworth a last comradely hug; the other armed man lifts his baggage and guides him from the room. They go down a corridor, back into the customs hall; the big dapper lady turns to watch him go, with his guide, to a door marked OTVAT. Here another armed man, sitting on a stool, unlocks it, and allows them through. The armed man who is his guide puts down his baggage, bows a little, goes back through the door. It closes, a key clicks; the sign on this side of the door says NOI VA.
Sweating, Petworth turns. Beneath him is his luggage tumbled at his feet. In front of him is a long thin concourse, packed with people, too many, indeed, for its confined and narrow area, for they push, jostle a little, tread on each other’s feet. The men are mostly in double-breasted suits, the women are round and bulky. They carry flowers, wave handkerchiefs, and cluster hopefully round the door marked noi va. Faces bob into sight in the turmoil, and then subside again. Beyond the people are long dirty windows, lit by the now fading sunlight; beyond the windows Petworth can see yet more armed men, walking up and down a forecourt to inspect yet more people – who lift luggage, carry flowers, tote backpacks, enter small orange taxis, or wait patiently at a place marked BUSOP, where more battered blue buses with bulbous noses stand with their doors tight shut. And further on still, beyond all the busy people, there is a landscape, of wide hedgeless fields, trees, wooden houses, a small hill; poking up in the middle is the golden onion. And beyond the onion there must be the city, with its lives and realities, cemeteries and cathedrals, ministries and museums, hotels and bars, customs and conversation. He is here, within the gates, come, in his flat earth shoes, to visit.
2 – RECEP.
I
Now this Dr Petworth, whose arrival in Slaka we have just witnessed, is in fact an old and practised cultural traveller. Today, in this late summer of 1981, he stands in the lobby of the airport at Slaka, but really he might be anywhere; year after year he has been coming, coat over arm and bags at knee, through the arrivals labyrinths of airports with wildly different names – Madrid or Helsinki, Tunis or Teheran – but with the same fluttering flight-boards, the same sea of faces, the same incomprehensible, polyglot announcements, emerging, pausing, putting down his luggage, in the firm expectation that his coming will be noticed. He is a person of no great interest, not a character in the world historical sense, a man waiters neglect and barmen save till last; yet he believes that someone will always step forward from the crowd, shake his hand, lead him to the car park, and put him in the way of a familiar plot of days, quite as familiar as the domestic world he has not been sorry to leave behind. He confidently expects to be taken to the city, signed in at some downtown hotel already apprised of his coming, handed to a bellboy, left for a while to shower, shave, freshen and change knickers, be collected again, driven to one of the town’s better quarters, taken upstairs to an apartment, with a good view, a maid holding a tray of drinks, a host in something formal, a hostess in something ethnic; where, in the rooms, the professors come and go, talking of T. S. Eliot, professors who will seize on him, reminisce about the Oxford colleges they long ago went to, say Lacan to his Derrida, Barthes to his Saussure, and discuss, quite as if they had read them deeply and long ago, and not just glanced at them hastily that afternoon in expectation of his arrival, the several books that he has published.
All this Petworth expects, as he comes through the arrivals labyrinth, because he is a man with a sign. From the handle of his briefcase there dangles a puce and magenta tag; it is the identification tag of the British Council, an organization designed to bring scholars like himself to the cities of the world. Between him and the Council, a compact exists. The Council representatives have their responsibilities: meeting and greeting, driving and arriving, tending and mending, liquoring and succouring, showing slides and fixing rides, detaching and onwardly despatching. And Petworth, in turn, has his: coming, meeting, chatting, eating, drinking, talking, listening, walking, imparting and finally departing, on to the next place, so that the cycle can resume again. A simple system, it has always worked well; hotels of modest comfort have always been found, with a booking in his name or one like it. Restaurants of pleasant ambiance have from time to time been frequented. At appropriate times Petworth has been taken to academic buildings, where the stairwells are alive with the smell of disinfectant, been offered coffee or something stronger, introduced to those who in turn will introduce him, then led through long corridors past student posters everywhere much the same, advertising exhibitions of Expressionist art and attacks on the regime, their own or someone else’s, into sudden large lecture halls: where students, their physiognomies, clothes and skin-pigmentation differing somewhat, though by no means as much as you might think, from country to country, according to which one this happens to be today, are stacked in rows to stare at him, look at his tie, and listen as well as they can or they care to while Petworth stands on the podium and divulges, in the complexities of the English tongue, the complexities of the English tongue.
Like the students, the countries differ in detail. Some allow no mention of Jesus, and some no mention of anyone else; some have statues of long-dead scholars in the courtyard and students whose eyes are always on the ground, and some have tanks and armed troop-carriers in the forecourt, and stude
nts whose fists are always in the air. Yet the impression – because it is an impression of lecture rooms, hotels, restaurants and receptions – is always rather much the same. There are moments that do stand out: a certain affair of a suitcase lost in Bogota once; a certain matter of a girl called Irina in Bratislava (but that was in another country, and the wench now has tenure); a meal composed of grass in Kyoto, another of poisoned seafood in Singapore; a notable performance of Hamlet in Belize, a notable performance of belly-dance in Hammamet. As in life itself, familiarity is occasionally fractured and transformed by surprise and variation, sometimes but not usually in the form of pleasure. And today, in Slaka, there is one. For here is Petworth, sweating, red-faced, troubled, fresh from Slaka’s turbulent labyrinth of arrival. He stands in the crowded lobby, his back to a pillar, the busy faceless crowds around him, the meeters and greeters, the pushers and jostlers, clustering round the small white door marked NOI VA. His coat over his arm, his luggage below his feet, his face turns expectantly, this way and that; the puce and magenta tag hangs from the handle of his bag of lectures. The sun diminishes, the armed men walk up and down. But Slaka is the capital of a hardline country of the socialist bloc, a member of Comecon and the Warsaw Pact, suspicious of the Western cultural agencies; as a result, there is, in Slaka, no British Council office or representative at all.
II
Now all this has been explained to Petworth at a very brief briefing, given him by a grey-haired lady smoking Player’s Number Tens from a tiny packet, in a dark old office with high cupboards somewhere high up in the British Council building in Davies Street, London, some ten days before his present journey. It is, this day ten days gone, a very bleak wet day; Petworth, down from Bradford on the early morning train, with visas yet to collect and flights to check, sits damply on a wooden chair, staring at a lithograph portrait of Shakespeare and an old poster for the Berliner Ensemble. He holds a plastic cup of coffee of very murky consistency; a secretary in a ra-ra skirt keeps stepping in and out with files; water from his mackintosh is making a puddle on the Council floor. In Oxford Street, round the corner, the usual ambulances and police cars heehaw; he can see, through the window, the Royal Wedding bunting, dripping rain onto the sheikhs and their spouses who are shopping below. ‘There’s no British Council there?’ he says, shaking the coffee and pondering the impossible thought. ‘No, we’re not represented in several of the socialist countries,’ says the grey-haired lady, dropping ash over a thick file which is, Petworth presumes, his own, ‘They think we spy and bring in bad books, perish the thought.’ ‘How is this tour arranged, then?’ asks Petworth. ‘What we have is a cultural exchange agreement,’ says the grey-haired lady, patiently, ‘It’s directly negotiated each year between their government and HMG. Our part’s minimal, we just arrange your travel out there and point you to the plane. After that, you’re in the hands of their Ministry of Culture. They’ll look after you, rather well, I expect, unless the political climate changes. You know how these things work. They flow when it thaws and block up when it freezes, just like the lav down the corridor.’ ‘I see,’ says Petworth, ‘So money, my hotel, my programme?’ ‘All their responsibility,’ says the lady, cheerfully.
‘Tell me,’ says Petworth, sitting in his puddle, ‘Would you say now things were thawing or freezing?’ ‘Well, thawing, really,’ says the grey-haired lady, ‘Or they wouldn’t have asked you. On the other hand, they are beginning to freeze again. Since Afghanistan and the Reagan hard line and the failure of détente and the collapse of SALT. Actually we’re very interested in your visit, because it’s rather a test of the mood. If it goes well, we’ll hope for more. Or course if it goes wrong, we’ll reassess the whole programme.’ ‘Goes wrong?’ asks Petworth, looking up, ‘How might it go wrong?’ ‘Well, it does happen,’ says the grey-haired lady, opening up the file in front of her and looking into it, ‘Tell me, my dear, you aren’t a bugger, are you?’ ‘Pardon?’ asks Petworth. ‘There’s nothing here about your sexual tastes,’ says the lady. ‘I see,’ says Petworth, ‘No, I’m not.’ ‘Not that we’re against buggers in the Council,’ says the lady. ‘I always thought not,’ says Petworth. ‘One’s all for life’s pleasures,’ says the lady, shaking out the match with which she has just lit a fresh cigarette, ‘The trouble is there’s very high surveillance there, and their security police – they’re called HOGPo, actually – are rather keen on that sort of thing. They find it very good grounds for blackmail. One can hardly blame them, really, they’ve done rather well out of our British taste, as you well know.’ ‘I suppose so,’ says Petworth. ‘Yes, if one were asked to sum up Eastern Europe in a phrase,’ says the lady, ‘one would say it was their buggers listening in on ours. So you’re totally hetero, my dear.’ ‘Well, I am, yes,’ says Petworth, staring down into the gloomy grounds of the coffee. ‘Well, in that case,’ says the lady, ‘do be careful. Practise out of sight, and above all avoid the whores in all the main hotels and nightclubs.’ ‘I will,’ says Petworth. ‘And they’ll undoubtedly give you a guide-interpreter,’ says the lady, ‘Sometimes they’re tough old biddies, but sometimes they go for rather attractive young females. Think of her as totally forbidden fruit, it’s probably a plant. Remember, in this world, everyone reports to someone; them to theirs, us to ours.’ ‘But I don’t,’ says Petworth, ‘And I have no information worth having whatsoever. Except about linguistics.’ ‘Yes, well, we’ll come to that in a minute,’ says the lady, ‘More coffee.’ ‘No, thank you,’ says Petworth, steaming in his chair.
‘Yes, well, now, my dear,’ says the lady, ‘I’m not sure what hotel they’ll put you in, probably the Europa. But do assume as a matter of course that the room is bugged, most of them are. There’s not much you can do about it, except take care. But I always like to hang a towel over the mirror when I get into bed. They photograph through them, you know, and you never are sure what you’ll be doing. Of course nowadays they’ve got these advanced multi-directional microphones that can pick up anything at enormous distances, so if they’re interested in you they can usually find you. But if you’re talking to anyone, or worse, try banging spoons on the woodwork, or run the shower and do it in the bathroom. Better still, go outside. The only real place to chat or make love is in a newly ploughed field, but they’re not always easy to come by.’ ‘I suppose not,’ says Petworth. ‘There are all sorts of ways of getting you if they want you,’ says the lady, ‘But do avoid illegal currency transactions. Everyone will try to buy your Western money, but it’s a crime against the state and they can put you in prison for years. And don’t bring papers or documents out of the country, however compassionate the story; that’s another favourite. Always stick firmly to the titles of your lectures, don’t comment on national events, and try to keep all politics right out of it.’ ‘Well, there aren’t many politics in linguistics,’ says Petworth. ‘I expect that’s why they chose to ask you,’ says the grey-haired lady, ‘But you’d be surprised. If you should get picked up by HOGPo at all, try not to eat anything. They’re particularly fond of drugged chocolates and poisoned cigarettes, for some reason. Of course all these are just common-sense precautions; nothing’s likely to happen to you. Unless they suddenly decide they want to trade someone for someone, or something.’ ‘I see,’ says Petworth, ‘I think I will have another cup of coffee.’
‘Sorry I couldn’t offer you lunch,’ says the lady, ‘I’ve found the most marvellous Indonesian round the corner, but you know our budget’s been cut, like everyone else’s. Georgina, Dr Petworth would love another cup of your coffee. I say, dear, haven’t you had your hair done? I think it’s super.’ ‘Thank you,’ says Georgina, ‘Same again?’ ‘Black this time,’ says Petworth. ‘Well,’ says the grey-haired lady, snapping shut the file in front of her, and smiling at him. ‘I’m sure you’ll have the most marvellous tour there. I was posted there, you know, I loved it. Slaka’s a very delightful city, you know, lots of old buildings and parks and flowers and gipsy music. And you’re perfectly entitled
to dismiss your guide when you’re not working, and get in lots of sightseeing. Incidentally, let me recommend the cathedral. It’s just out of town, but the ikons are marvellous, and I always say you can’t get into much trouble in a cathedral. There’s a lot of very nice craftwork, some of it you can’t bring out, but do watch out for the handmade embroidery. Your wife, you’ve got one, haven’t you, will love it, and you might as well buy masses, since you can’t bring any money out with you, you know. Ah, here’s Georgina with your lovely coffee. And, look, here’s a little booklet you might find useful. It’s not actually for academic visitors, but it’s full of wise saws and modern instances. You know, like the voltages, and so on.’ ‘Well, thank you,’ says Petworth, taking the coffee, and Helpful Hints for British Businessmen. ‘And if you should get into trouble,’ says the grey-haired lady, ‘we’ve telexed the British Embassy to forewarn them about your tour. Of course it’s a very small embassy, Slaka’s not exactly the centre of the world, but there’s a second secretary there named Steadiman who does traffic accidents and a bit of culture. He’ll give what help he can in any emergency. I’ve put the address in your papers, and you’ll find the number in the Slaka telephone book, I expect. If they allow you to see one. Yes, I loved it there, marvellous posting. The only thing was not being able to talk to anyone. When I got back, I just talked and talked and talked, for twenty days. And ate chocolates. As you know, their economy’s weak, and you don’t find many delicacies.’
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