by M J Engh
Grotesque among the pilasters, in rooms designed for cushions and hangings but bare now as new-built prisons, stood the last emir’s gestures toward technological civilization (or was it Arslan’s father who had installed them, or even Arslan himself?): a nonfunctioning air-conditioner, a stereo console with ready-made collection of unplayed records. For the first time there came home to me, exiled in Bukhara, the banal horror of Arslan’s great work. One could not honestly grieve for the loss of future Mozarts—there would have been no more Mozarts in any case; but Arslan had destroyed forever what I, backwatered in Kraftsville, had never known: the whole ebullient and evanescent world of performance. There would be no more concerts.
In Kraftsville, Mr. Bond had left beside my bed his little record player and a stack of records in shabby jackets. Now and again, Arslan had pulled a random disc from the pile and thrust it at me—background music for the sports of the evening. Otherwise they had sat unconsidered, silent, accumulating the dust of that uncleaned room. Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, Fidelio. In Kraftsville I had not noticed. But in Bukhara I remembered and was moved. “Do you think the electricity will ever come on again, Hunt?” Mrs. Bond had inquired anxiously, at a slightly later epoch. “I know he misses those records. It’s the closest thing he’s ever had to a hobby.” Mr. Bond, the self-contained, self-satisfied, the Gibraltar on whose stolid crags my new-born soul had steadied its bruised first footsteps—had he offered me, like Arslan in the woods, drink from the very springs of his own strength? Had he once bowed, as I did now, intently over the music, searching out the rich phrase that should nourish him through another day? And pell-mell, simultaneous perhaps, regret and resentment welled up, and I burned against him, remembering with momentary hatred his lofty shoulders and rock-rough face, remembering Kraftsville with hatred, because he had not been my father.
In Bukhara, the music seemed miraculous to me, the machine no less so. Nightlong I would sit hunched beside it, touching my budding beard with small proxy caresses, while the floating tone-arm softly bobbed and gradually pivoted, spinning great ripples of sound from a flat black circle. The tremendous swag and sway of Verdi, the joyous patternings of Mozart, gave back to my memory now the odor of Arslan’s lust, now the concerned and disapproving eyes of Franklin L. Bond. In the morning there would be coffee, raucously strong; and at midday I would lie flat, spread-eagled on a blank bed, my teeth locked tight and fragments of arias furiously rotating through my brain.
I was lonely. In Kraftsville three people had been kind to me: Mr. Bond with his mute gifts and unseasonable advice, Mrs. Bond with her promiscuous motherliness, Darya with her harmless corruptions. In Kraftsville I had had Arslan, inexorable and close, a surrounding presence in which I struggled warmly. But it was in Bukhara the pale city that I felt the first doomed stirring of desire.
He had not touched me in Bukhara. And at first, thankful, I had shied away from every chance of touch. But I looked now with an abstract cupidity upon those blunt, soiled hands, seeing in them my only hope of human attachment.
As in Kraftsville, so in Bukhara, he purveyed me a girl. I didn’t want her. I was incapable of the simple prophylactic contact with which Arslan’s bachelor officers solaced themselves; and affection for one of Arslan’s poppets was futile, futile. Where now was Darya?
But she was billeted in my room (“Hunt, I have given you a girl”); she was serious, gentle, and persistent. Her name was Chalyu. Dutifully I studied, not the art, but the mechanics, of lovemaking. Two drinks, taken in a period of forty to forty-five minutes, and with her help I could manage it, like a diligent paraplegic lover. It had been better with Darya. I tried to teach her English, which she tried to learn. We talked in a halting pidgin Turki. She was sixteen. She didn’t know where America was. She admired Arslan.
One night she was gone. I sat on the bed and practiced rolling cigarettes while I waited. I had finished seven when he came. He walked straight to the bed, his hands coming out to take my shoulders. “Now, Hunt,” he said.
Rusudan was five months pregnant. It would have been consistent, I thought, for Arslan to retire her from his bed, to put her in storage until the heir was safely born. Instead, he had retired Chalyu from mine. I never saw her again, and I asked no questions. I was busy. For what opened around me now was a new world: Arslan’s Bukhara, the inner sanctum of a universe, the pale city I had seen hitherto through the veils of solitude.
We talked. In the exercise yard, now, he called me, too, to wrestle with him. To me they were desperate battles, fought in fury and shame under the hooting laughter of his troops. He expounded maps to me. He appointed one of his best pilots to teach me to fly. For hours in the dense-aired night he interrogated me on the intrigues of his court. I had become his spy. Under the caravan stars he schooled me in his language, rich and simple as a poem. And when, dizzy and defeated, accepting that I myself must be the traitor, I plunged the knife with all my force, and fell back stricken as Arslan’s veritable blood welled upon his naked side, it was in his own language that he cried furiously, “You dirty little fool, you don’t know how!” Indeed I had done very badly. I had had to get up to get the knife, and by the time I struck he was awake, twisting out of the way. There was plenty of blood to set the palace buzzing again in the morning, but the wound was, as he said, “very inadequate.” I learned that night that I had never before been thoroughly afraid. In the end, when he kicked the broken knife away, he came back to English, leaning over me in one last blaze where I cowered like a quivering hound, jerking his own knife from the tumbled clothes beside the bed. “Next time” (lilting the words) “use a better one.” And I took it from his bleeding hands.
There were gifts. There were recompenses. I had not expected (I had not considered it) that piloting a light plane would be the opening of a new world. A New World. And I understood at last (the realization flashing in and out of existence at first, then steadying, focusing, becoming examinable) something of what that phrase must have meant to Europeans of 1500, to Columbus himself. A New World. As one might say, a new universe. No. A new continuum. No. There was no word, since the beginning of the era (just ended) of multiplication and renewal, so final and whole as world had been.
To fly: the consummation of the most exquisite longings, the reality of the most delicious dreams. The whole globe of the world showed itself to me two-dimensional but enveloped in the perfect third. I bent myself to learn, to be quickly rid of my instructor. To fly—it was by definition to be alone.
It was flying in the dazzling void of the desert air that I came to terms with death. All the mortal hardware that surrounded Arslan had given me a brief mechanical thrill, like that of a carnival ride; the bullet wound in my thigh had been interesting but trivial, disappointing as much as pride-engendering; the bodies in the dump had seemed fraudulent. For the rest, I had poeticized suicidally, misusing Keats to ease my own midnights, and pondering the merits of knife and noose. It was suicide, not murder, I had meant when I dreamed in Kraftsville of shooting Arslan (the most certain suttee), though I had earned my new knife another way. But under all the romantic frenzy my unperturbed and patient self had known that I had other engagements. And the silent slogan with which I greeted the days and the nights—I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead—was as hollow, and as comfortable, as the Now I lay me of my childhood.
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine …
I had smiled at what seemed to me Yeats’ boastful simplicity, the casual implication of daily encounters with extinction. But now, above the Black Sands, in the enormity of the humming air, I had my daily encounters. For the first time I teetered on the knife edge, not merely of possibility, but of temptation. Nothing held me up. Nothing above, nothing below. Sometimes a miniature cloud crawled forlornly along the outskirts of the tremendous sky. Otherwise I was alone. It was only a straining, groaning, quivering, squealing effort, a frantic
laborious whirling, that kept me precariously aloft from moment to moment. It was easy, it was inevitable, for me to lift the plane’s nose into the unbounded blue, until she stumbled and hung, a momentary floating star, and the uselessly flailing propeller growled a new tune, and suddenly hollowed I was falling, backward into the nothing below.
It was enough. “Nobody dies of a stall,” my instructor had taught me; “only of fear.” I tilted the plane’s nose downward … downward … still downward … Whimpers rose in my throat, and my neck and arms prickled helplessly. Against the stiff resistance of my wrists I pushed the plane’s nose still farther in the direction of death. Still downward … And now she caught the air, and I was flying again.
My hands on the wheel trembled. I was running sweat, and in the cold blue sky I was chilly within a moment. I turned the plane and climbed slowly, in wide circles, wheeling my way, with an eye on the fuel gauge, gradually back to Bukhara.
It was to become an exercise. I learned half a dozen ways to stall and recover. I learned to dive toward the scorching sands and pull out when it was almost too late. It was very calming. I looked with new eyes upon death, knowing now what Arslan’s very existence should have taught me; shrugging off, unregarded, the destruction of multitudes, myself among them. Myself among them. There was no more to learn. The door of my death stood ajar, and a touch would open it. Beyond, Arslan’s hands and soldiers’ laughter did not enter.
On foot, once past the towers and foliage of Bukhara, the cloudless sky of Turkistan oppressed me. I would stare at the unqualified blank (the inside of the small end sliced from the cosmic eggshell), trying to remember that what I saw was itself a cloud—not clear space, but a tangle of bewildered light, the blue rays lost and hurtling among thickets of jiggling dust. But it was useless—the polished shell remained; and I was hungry for the buttermilk skies of Kraft County, dawns as rosy-fingered as any Homer could have dreamed, sharp-edged and layered sunset clouds like the stone-made sediments of past ages.
Bukhara was a fever. In the dense shade of the trees, the oven air baked, the furnace breeze seared. It was surreal to pluck a peach from the tortuous branches and bite into that exquisite juiciness, while my eyes ached with drought. Arslan’s deep laugh burst like fireworks bombs. The reports flowed in, the maps were netted with ever finer meshes, Rusudan was approaching her time. He was parched and hard, with gleaming eyes. He would never leave. Here was his home, the root of his nourishment, the hard nest of all his loves.
Who had noticed or cared, in eighth-grade Current History or the labyrinths of the CIA, that the Republic of Turkistan was developing one of the world’s most efficient armies? “It is a question of men, not of money; of morale, not of equipment. This is not wishful thinking, Hunt; I have proved it. Also,” he added pensively, “we were not badly equipped.” It was the Russians who had re-equipped them—not badly, but not well—as their British arms fell obsolete. It was Arslan who had ordained that men outweighed equipment. “It is not important—not for long—that a man should be trained to use this tool or that one. It is important that he should know that he can learn quickly to use any tool.” Supple and proud, they were a far cry from the tindery battalions of most of the third world. And to their suppleness and their pride he had added the crucial third ingredient. “A soldier is alone, Hunt, more alone than other men. Do you understand? Because he lives with death.” The trite phrase was new in his mouth, making him smile with pleasure and knowledge. Yes, as I died with life. “But also, if he is truly a soldier, he is never alone. His army is always with him.” Even unto the end of the world. It was unjust that Arslan’s eyes, brilliant and treacherous, overshadowed his mouth. It was a mouth worth watching, supple and proud. “They are good, Hunt. Good,” he said, and his lips curled fondly about the word, telling me that they were his children, his brothers, his lovers, his creatures. The cadres of the army he had inherited as dictator’s son had been unremarkable—half trained, half experienced, half rebellious, and thoroughly venal. It was not the least of his feats that he had, in that subterranean era before the revolt that made him Premier of Turkistan, infected every one of them (every one, at least, who had survived) with what in the interests of accuracy, might have been called love. I tried to imagine a world in which Arslan’s ruthless enthusiasm was contained in so small a scope: to train—to create, rather, an army that would make him unqualified master of a certain arid acreage in Central Asia. “I had seen the Russians and the Chinese, Hunt. I knew what I must measure myself against.” He was talking about armed forces, and he was serious. First, it had been necessary to neutralize his father’s air force; but his immediate next move had been to take firm possession of his country’s ill-defined borders. He had fought a little, unnoticed war with Afghanistan—a war that could have tempted him into conquest, but had not. Through the vacancy of the Black Sands, where the Soviet Union had been content to leave an uncertainty for future exploitation, he had drawn his emphatic line of fortifications and patrols—and Moscow, startled but sanguine, had given him vodka and confirmed the line by treaty. On the east, he had sat down with relish to some four years of skirmish and argument. That—the Chinese border—had been his recreation. Within the boundaries, bidding East against West for oil rigs and teachers and irrigation projects, stockpiling his silky cotton while the mills went up, he had not neglected his first loves; the army was never idle. Like emirs and sultans before him, he had pacified the tribal Turkmens with bribes. (“My father’s people, Hunt. A difficult people.” Arrogant, irascible, joyous, and cruel, a people dear to his heart.) All other tribes had been pacified Roman fashion. Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellent. The Kurds and Kalmucks, still following their ancient feuds and herds, contemptuous of boundaries, had been corralled, decimated, partitioned, and resettled with staggering speed and thoroughness. The nomads of old Turkistan became part of the growing proletariat of Bukhara and Merv and Khiva, and Arslan’s troops added rural and urban riot control to their list of practiced skills.
So that when his great hour came, unexpected but destined, he was prepared. It was not in vain that he had sworn the oath of blood-brotherhood with Nizam—Argus-eyed Nizam, whose foresight provided the corps of interpreters through whom Arslan’s officers were to command the world’s troops. And the army had shared. The songs that rose from the Kraftsville grade-school gym had been true paeans.
It had been his feast of Persepolis, the single hour of triumph. And if, more moderate for once than Alexander, he had ignited no city (his conflagrations were later, measured and purposeful), he had had no less his accidental sacrifice; it was I who had been consumed in the peripheral blaze of his glory.
And only now I began to understand what lightning stroke had changed Kraftsville from a crossroads bivouac to the capital of the world (for Bukhara could never be more than the capital of Turkistan). He had driven west—the instinct of Timur, the inverse of Alexander—into the physical vastness of his untried conquest, leading his personal army into the heart of mid-America as he had drawn his personal gun in the Moscow conference room. It was not yet a matter of baiting the incipient resistance—there could be no resistance until the conquest was real. It was a challenge, a risk, an exploration; he did not yet know what he had done, nor what he would find. The world (there, there was the rub, the nub—I beat my palm against my brow and cursed like Hamlet over Hecuba) the world had still been free to choose its answer to him.
But driving west on Illinois 460, he had received the answer. Nizam had caught up with him, bringing the confirmation that he could accept from no one else: Moscow was docile, Washington was well in hand; those generals who had shown themselves uncooperative had been rendered harmless. For the first time (perhaps the last), Muzaffer Arslan Khan knew himself the master of the world. The place where he found himself became the universe’s center.
So that the Arslan I first saw—swaggering down the aisle of Mrs. Runciman’s eighth-grade class, face aglow and body afire and the hand that touched
my shoulder vibrating steel—was not, as I had assumed, the normal Arslan of his everyday past or his everyday future; just as the Kraftsville he saw that day, and all that it contained, were illuminated by an incandescence not their own.
Again, again, again; my muscles would bunch, my blood leap, and for the instant it would seem determined that I was about to plunge, simply and physically, for whatever freedom my legs could find. Assaults of escapism, they took me more often and more keenly in Bukhara than they had in Kraftsville. They were pangs of returning life, not spasms of dying (so, at least, I concluded); perceptions of reality, not rejections of it. Between convulsions, I was growing unsteadily more aware that flight was not so much impossible as pointless. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; for where we are is Hell; And where Hell is, there must we ever be. Milton’s Satan was a general; Marlowe’s Mephistophilis knew what it was to march in the ranks.
He moved always with the urgent skill of a professional. His plans were as secret as the wrestler’s in the ring; the movement announced the decision to move. The child was to be born. Rusudan’s plans were elaborate. Yet, “Hunt,” he said, “you will come with me.” I thought it would be to India, where the great camps were—the labor camps where, contrary to all his announced doctrine, the surplus rice crops were grown, the medical supplies mass-produced. There were always problems with those camps, and with the sterilization program that accompanied them—this the overt, even publicized sterilization program, using only surgical methods, that busied his henchmen for a time in India as in China. And indeed we were to visit some of those camps before our journeying was done. But first, out of a pink dawn, our jet tilted downward to the convoluted islands that had been Japan.