This is asking for trouble, all right. These Arabists are truly a frenzied bunch. They have been lobbying passionately for a New Turkic Alphabet made up of Arabic letters. There are fistfights in the hallways with unreconstructed Cyrillicists, and whispers of a campaign to boycott, throughout the Islamic world, any Latin alphabet. (Actually nobody is really too keen on a Cyrillic NTA. Old Czarist albatrosses still hang around the Soviet neck. There is strong native resistance in Central Asia these days to anything suggesting Russification, and that goes even for the look of a printed language. The objections to an Arabic alphabet have to do with the absence of vowel symbols, and no strict one-to-one relation between sounds and characters. So this has left Latin, by default. But the Arabists aren’t giving up. They keep proposing reformed Arabic scripts—mostly on the model of one ratified at Bukhara in 1923 and used successfully among the Uzbeks. Palatal and velar vocalics of spoken Kazakh can be got round by using diacritical marks.) And there is a strong religious angle in all this. Using a non-Arabic alphabet is felt to be a sin against God—most of the Turkic peoples are, after all, Islamic, and Arabic script is the script of Islam, it is the script in which the word of Allah came down on the Night of Power, the script of the Koran—
Of the what? Does Tchitcherine know what he’s doing with this forgery of his? It is more than blasphemy, it is an invitation to holy war. Blobadjian, accordingly, is pursued through the black end of Baku by a passel of screaming Arabists waving scimitars and grinning horribly. The oil towers stand sentinel, bone-empty, in the dark. Hunchbacks, lepers, hebephrenics and amputees of all descriptions have come popping out of their secret spaces to watch the fun. They loll back against the rusting metal flanks of refinery hardware, their whole common sky in a tessellation of primary colors. They occupy the chambers and bins and pockets of administrative emptiness left after the Revolution, when the emissaries from Dutch Shell were asked to leave, and the English and Swedish engineers all went home. It is a period now in Baku of lull, of retrenchment. All the oil money taken out of these fields by the Nobels has gone into Nobel Prizes. New wells are going down elsewhere, between the Volga and the Urals. Time for retrospection here, for refining the recent history that’s being pumped up fetid and black from other strata of Earth’s mind. . . .
“In here, Blobadjian—quickly.” Close behind, Arabists are ululating, shrill, merciless, among the red-orange stars over the crowds of derricks.
Slam. The last hatch is dogged. “Wait—what is this?”
“Come. Time for your journey now.”
“But I don’t want—”
“You don’t want to be another slaughtered infidel. Too late, Blobadjian. Here we go. . . .”
The first thing he learns is how to vary his index of refraction. He can choose anything between transparent and opaque. After the thrill of experimenting has worn off, he settles on a pale, banded onyx effect.
“It suits you,” murmur his guides. “Now hurry.”
“No. I want to pay Tchitcherine what he’s got coming.”
“Too late. You’re no part of what he’s got coming. Not any more.”
“But he—”
“He’s a blasphemer. Islam has its own machineries for that. Angels and sanctions, and careful interrogating. Leave him. He has a different way to go.”
How alphabetic is the nature of molecules. One grows aware of it down here: one finds Committees on molecular structure which are very similar to those back at the NTA plenary session. “See: how they are taken out from the coarse flow—shaped, cleaned, rectified, just as you once redeemed your letters from the lawless, the mortal streaming of human speech. . . . These are our letters, our words: they too can be modulated, broken, recoupled, redefined, co-polymerized one to the other in worldwide chains that will surface now and then over long molecular silences, like the seen parts of a tapestry.”
Blobadjian comes to see that the New Turkic Alphabet is only one version of a process really much older—and less unaware of itself—than he has ever had cause to dream. By and by, the frantic competition between and G has faded away to trivial childhood memories. Dim anecdotes. He has gone beyond—once a sour bureaucrat with an upper lip as clearly demarcated as a chimpanzee’s, now he is an adventurer, well off on a passage of his own, by underground current, without any anxiety over where it may be taking him. He has even lost, an indefinite distance upstream, his pride in feeling once a little sorry for Vaslav Tchitcherine, destined never to see the things Blobadjian is seeing. . . .
And print just goes marching on without him. Copy boys go running down the rows of desks trailing smeared galleys in the air. Native printers get crash courses from experts airlifted in from Tiflis on how to set up that NTA. Printed posters go up in the cities, in Samarkand and Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent. On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way, and Džaqyp Qulan hears the ghost of his own lynched father with a scratchy pen in the night, practicing As and Bs. . . .
But right about now, here come Tchitcherine and Džaqyp Qulan riding up over some low hills and down into the village they’ve been looking for. The people are gathered in a circle: there’s been a feast all day. Fires are smoldering. In the middle of the crowd a small space has been cleared, and two young voices can be heard even at this distance.
It is an ajtys—a singing-duel. The boy and girl stand in the eye of the village carrying on a mocking well-I-sort-of-like-you-even-if-there’s-one-or-two-weird-things-about-you-for-instance—kind of game while the tune darts in and out of qobyz and dombra strummed and plucked. The people laugh at the good lines. You have to be on your toes for this: you trade four-line stanzas, first, second, and last lines all have to rhyme though the lines don’t have to be any special length, just breathable. Still, it’s tricky. It gets insulting too. There are villages where some partners haven’t spoken to each other for years after an ajtys. As Tchitcherine and Džaqyp Qulan ride in, the girl is making fun of her opponent’s horse, who is just a little—nothing serious, but kind of heavy-set . . . well, fat, really. Really fat. And it’s getting to the kid. He’s annoyed. He zips back a fast one about bringing all his friends around and demolishing her and her family too. Everybody sort of goes hmm. No laughs. She smiles, tightly, and sings:
You’ve been drinking a lot of qumys,
I must be hearing the words of qumys—
For where were you the night my brother
Came looking for his stolen qumys?
Oh-oh. The brother she mentioned is laughing fit to bust. The kid singing is not so happy.
“This could go on for a while.” Džaqyp Qulan dismounts, and sets about straightening his knee joints. “That’s him, over there.”
A very old aqyn—a wandering Kazakh singer—sits with a cup of qumys, dozing near the fire.
“Are you sure he’ll—”
“He’ll sing about it. He’s ridden right through that country. He’d betray his profession if he didn’t.”
They sit down and are passed cups of the fermented mare’s milk, with a bit of lamb, lepeshka, a few strawberries. . . . The boy and girl go on battling with their voices—and Tchitcherine understands, abruptly, that soon someone will come out and begin to write some of these down in the New Turkic Alphabet he helped frame . . . and this is how they will be lost.
Now and then he glances over at the old aqyn, who only appears to be sleeping. In fact he radiates for the singers a sort of guidance. It is kindness. It can be felt as unmistakably as the heat from the embers.
Slowly, turn by turn, the couple’s insults get gentler, funnier. What might have been a village apocalypse has gone on now int
o comic cooperation, as between a pair of vaudeville comedians. They are out of themselves, playing it all for the listeners to enjoy. The girl has the last word.
Did I hear you mention a marriage?
Here there has been a marriage—
This warm circle of song,
Boisterous, loud as any marriage. . . .
And I like you, even if there are one or two things— For a little while the feast gathers momentum. Drunks holler and women talk, and the little kids totter in and out of the huts, and the wind has picked up some speed. Then the wandering singer begins to tune his dombra, and the Asian silence comes back.
“Are you going to get it all?” asks Džaqyp Qulan.
“In stenography,” replies Tchitcherine, his g a little glottal.
THE AQYN’S SONG
I have come from the edge of the world.
I have come from the lungs of the wind,
With a thing I have seen so awesome
Even Džambul could not sing it.
With a fear in my heart so sharp
It will cut the strongest of metals.
In the ancient tales it is told
In a time that is older than Qorqyt,
Who took from the wood of šyrghaj
The first qobyz, and the first song—
It is told that a land far distant
Is the place of the Kirghiz Light.
In a place where words are unknown,
And eyes shine like candles at night,
And the face of God is a presence
Behind the mask of the sky—
At the tall black rock in the desert,
In the time of the final days.
If the place were not so distant,
If words were known, and spoken,
Then the God might be a gold ikon,
Or a page in a paper book.
But It comes as the Kirghiz Light—
There is no other way to know It.
The roar of Its voice is deafness,
The flash of Its light is blindness.
The floor of the desert rumbles,
And Its face cannot be borne.
And a man cannot be the same,
After seeing the Kirghiz Light.
For I tell you that I have seen It
In a place which is older than darkness,
Where even Allah cannot reach.
As you see, my beard is an ice-field,
I walk with a stick to support me,
But this light must change us to children.
And now I cannot walk far,
For a baby must learn to walk.
And my words are reaching your ears
As the meaningless sounds of a baby.
For the Kirghiz Light took my eyes,
Now I sense all Earth like a baby.
It is north, for a six-day ride,
Through the steep and death-gray canyons,
Then across the stony desert
To the mountain whose peak is a white džurt.
And if you have passed without danger,
The place of the black rock will find you.
But if you would not be born,
Then stay with your warm red fire,
And stay with your wife, in your tent,
And the Light will never find you,
And your heart will grow heavy with age,
And your eyes will shut only to sleep.
“Got it,” sez Tchitcherine. “Let’s ride, comrade.” Off again, the fires dying at their backs, the sounds of string music, of village carousing, presently swallowed behind the wind.
And on into the canyons. Far away to the north, a white mountain-top winks in the last sunlight. Down here, it is already shadowed evening.
Tchitcherine will reach the Kirghiz Light, but not his birth. He is no aqyn, and his heart was never ready. He will see It just before dawn. He will spend 12 hours then, face-up on the desert, a prehistoric city greater than Babylon lying in stifled mineral sleep a kilometer below his back, as the shadow of the tall rock, rising to a point, dances west to east and Džaqyp Qulan tends him, anxious as child and doll, and drying foam laces the necks of the two horses. But someday, like the mountains, like the young exiled women in their certain love, in their innocence of him, like the morning earthquakes and the cloud-driving wind, a purge, a war, and millions after millions of souls gone behind him, he will hardly be able to remember It.
But in the Zone, hidden inside the summer Zone, the Rocket is waiting. He will be drawn the same way again. . . .
• • • • • • •
Last week, in the British sector someplace, Slothrop, having been asshole enough to drink out of an ornamental pond in the Tiergarten, took sick. Any Berliner these days knows enough to boil water before drinking, though some then proceed to brew it with various things for tea, such as tulip bulbs, which is not good. Word is out that the center of the bulb is deadly poison. But they keep doing it. Once Slothrop—or Rocketman, as he is soon to be known—thought he might warn them about things like tulip bulbs. Bring in a little American enlightenment. But he gets so desperate with them, moving behind their scrims of European pain: he keeps pushing aside gauze after wavy gauze but there’s always still the one, the impenetrable. . . .
So there he is, under the trees in summer leaf, in flower, many of them blasted horizontal or into chips and splinters—fine dust from the bridle paths rising in the sunrays by itself, ghosts of horses still taking their early-morning turns through the peacetime park. Up all night and thirsty, Slothrop lies on his stomach and slurps up water, just an old saddle tramp at the water hole here. . . . Fool. Vomiting, cramps, diarrhea, and who’s he to lecture about tulip bulbs? He manages to crawl as far as an empty cellar, across the street from a wrecked church, curls up and spends the next days feverish, shivering, oozing shit that burns like acid—lost, alone with that sovereign Nazi movie-villain fist clamping in his bowels ja—you vill shit now, ja? Wondering if he’ll ever see Berkshire again. Mommy, Mommy! The War’s over, why can’t I go home now? Nalline, the reflection from her Gold Star brightening her chins like a buttercup, smirks by the window and won’t answer. . . .
A terrible time. Hallucinating Rolls Royces and bootheels in the night, coming to get him. Out in the street women in babushkas are lackadaisically digging trenches for the black iron water pipe that’s stacked along the curbside. All day long they talk, shift after shift, into evening. Slothrop lies in the space where sunlight visits his cellar for half an hour before going on to others with mean puddles of warmth—sorry, got to go now, schedule to keep, see you tomorrow if it doesn’t rain, heh heh. . . .
Once Slothrop wakes to the sound of an American work detail marching down the street, cadence being counted by a Negro voice—yo lep, yo lep, yo lep O right O lep . . . kind of little German folk tune with some sliding up-scale on the word “right”—Slothrop can imagine his mannered jog of arm and head to the left as he comes down hard on that heel, the way they teach it in Basic . . . can see the man’s smile. For a minute he has the truly unbalanced idea of running out in the street and asking them to take him back, requesting political asylum in America. But he’s too weak. In his stomach, in his heart. He lies, listening the tramping and the voice out of earshot, the sound of his country fading away. . . . Fading like the WASP ghosts, the old-time DPs trailing rootless now down the roads out of his memory, crowding the rooftops of the freights of forgetfulness, knapsacks and poor refugee pockets stuffed with tracts nobody’d read, looking for another host: given up for good on Rocketman here. Somewhere between the burning in his head and the burning in his asshole, if the two can be conveniently separated, and paced to that
dying cadence, he elaborates a fantasy in which Enzian, the African, finds him again—comes to offer him a way out.
Because it seems a while back that they did meet again, by the reedy edge of a marsh south of the capital. Unshaven, sweating, stinking Rocketman restlessly tripping out to the suburbs, among his people: there is haze over the sun, and a rotting swamp odor worse than Slothrop’s own. Only two or three hours’ sleep in the last couple of days. He stumbles on the Schwarzkommando, busy dredging for pieces of rocket. Formations of dark birds are cruising in the sky. The Africans have a partisan look: pieces here and there of old Wehrmacht and SS uniform, tattered civilian clothes, only one insigne in common, worn wherever it will show, a painted steel device in red, white and blue, thus:
Adapted from insignia the German troopers wore in South-West Africa when they came in 1904 to crush the Herero Rebellion—it was used to pin up half the brim of a wide-awake hat. For the Zone-Hereros it has become something deep, Slothrop gathers, maybe a little mystical. Though he recognizes the letters—Klar, Entlüftung, Zündung, Vorstufe, Hauptstufe, the five positions of the launching switch in the A4 control car—he doesn’t let on to Enzian.
They sit on a hillside eating bread and sausages. Children from the town move by in every direction. Someone has set up an army tent, someone has brought beer in kegs. A scratch band, a dozen brasses in tasseled, frayed gold and red uniforms play selections from Der Meistersinger. Fat-smoke drifts in the air. Choruses of drinkers in the distance break from time to time into laughter or a song. It’s a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun’s birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with old Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh. . . .
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