The Master of Chaos

by Pauline Melville

  The day after the cheque from the European Union arrived the Babikovs’ apartment was unusually quiet. Having worked out the budget for printing and distributing the magazine, as well as a small fee for their creative endeavours, and, of course a substantial amount for the treatment of their friend, Ivan Persikov’s cancer, the group had been left with two thousand euros each.

  Vasili Babikov was at the tailor’s ordering several new suits. Egor Dudnik was investigating the price of changing his name by deed poll. Shimon Simonov was browsing in his favourite bookshop and Nikolai Pestov was consulting plumbers, regretting only that the money was still not enough to buy the Korsakovs out. Pyotr Stepanovich was dealing with a crisis at the Dostoyevsky Museum. One of the tenants of an apartment in the building had been indulging in some sadomasochistic practices with a young prostitute. Unfortunately, he had left the apartment and forgotten about her. She was bound on his bed with various straps of leather paraphernalia and gagged with gaffer tape. Having managed to free herself, she was hopping from flat to flat pressing the doorbells with her nose in order to get help. Eventually she had burst into the Dostoyevsky Museum, interrupting an American professor of Russian Literature and his fourteen students. The American was demanding his money back while Pyotr tried to explain that Dostoyevsky himself might have appreciated such a scene. Pyotr finally gave in and reimbursed the professor and his fourteen students.

  ‘At least we’ve got rid of the death penalty,’ he shouted after the departing Americans as he tried to disentangle the prostitute from her harness.

  The next day another surprise awaited the writers’ group. Vasili Babikov summoned them to his apartment, where he sat at the table with multiple rolls of roubles piled in front of him. He poured a glass of vodka for each of them.

  ‘Friends,’ he announced when they were all seated. ‘We have received a commission and a massive increase in our funds. Fyodor’s oligarch is apparently determined to spend a short amount of time in prison to boost his credentials as a dissident and as a genuine opponent to the current government in his campaign for the presidency. Apparently, our Midas caught sight of a newspaper photograph of one of the Pussy Riot girls in jail. She was looking demure at a desk in her cell and writing her prison letters, corresponding with some Slovenian radical with an unpronounceable name. Their correspondence contained references to Hegel and Demosthenes. The oligarch was impressed. He has commissioned us to write his prison letters. The letters must be packed with similar intellectual and cultural references. He has paid us handsomely in advance. I’m sure we can conjure up something, gentlemen. After all, it was we Russians who gave the world the word “intelligentzia”!’

  The group stared in astonishment at the bundles of roubles on the table. Then Egor enquired tentatively, ‘And what are we to do about our creative attempts to advance the cause of moderation in our anti-corruption magazine for the European Union?’

  Vasili leaned back precariously in his chair. ‘I think you will find that Midas the oligarch has already bought up all the copies.’

  Egor frowned. ‘But we haven’t written it yet.’

  ‘Exactly. We will explain to the E.U. at some future date that it sold like hot cakes. History has taught us always to remember that pretending is better than believing. In fact, we should drink to the E.U. and its benefits, especially on behalf of Ivan Persikov who is, at this minute, receiving treatment for his cancer, courtesy of the E.U. grant.’

  The group rose merrily to their feet to make a toast. Vasili smiled and raised his glass but before he could say any more Egor scrambled onto his chair and shouted with glee:

  ‘Death to moderation.’ He tossed back his vodka and hurled the empty glass over his shoulder. Everyone in turn followed his example, clambering on their chairs, drinking and flinging their tumblers over their shoulders until they were surrounded by a lake of shattered glass.

  Vasili gestured for them to sit down again.

  ‘Meanwhile, the prison letters must be our priority. There is a demonstration next month and the oligarch is planning to be arrested while attending it. We need to get a move on.’

  *

  Later that afternoon, Nikolai Timurovich Pestov sat at the table in his apartment opposite Mr and Mrs Korsakov. The piles of roubles upon which their eyes were fixed were clearly enough to buy them out. He cleared his throat and spoke:

  ‘Mr and Mrs Korsakov. I have a proposition to make.’

  FABLE OF A MISSING WORD

  The celebration in the Amerindian village of Pakuri was to be held that afternoon. Uncle Horace, speech-maker in chief, stepped out onto the top step of his house and surveyed the scene. It was early morning. Wooden houses thatched with dalibana leaf stood silently on their stilts in the white sand. Uncle Horace had already bathed in the creek at the back of the house, splashing himself with the creek water that vegetation had stained a dark red, the colour of Pepsi-Cola. Now he stood outside his house, the notes for the speech in his hand, hoping to attract attention. Putting on his glasses, he held the notes at arm’s length and made a conspicuous study of them. Uncle Horace was proud to be the most proficient Lokono Arawak speaker in the village. Arawak, a language that harked back to the days before Columbus, was still spoken, although mainly by the elders. But at that hour in the morning there was no-one present to witness his preparations. There was only the sound of the keskidee birds in the trees and the occasional yellow flash as one flew by. Disappointed at the lack of an audience he folded the notes for his speech and replaced them in his top pocket. Then he turned round and went back inside.

  On the other side of the village Lucas Peters swung his legs out of the hammock, jumped to the floor and upturned the hammock to shake out some cassava crumbs. The family party was to celebrate his achievements. He had been to England and returned with a degree in Rainforest Archaeology. His mother’s house where he had been born stood near the edge of the village in the area where the sand came to an end and the grasses, muri bushes and awara trees began. Her house was elevated a foot or so from the ground on uneven stilts. It consisted of one room not more than twelve foot square. The grey wooden plank walls remained unpainted. The bed where his mother slept occupied most of the space. There was barely enough room for his hammock but he only expected to be there for a few days.

  At the age of eighty-one his mother could still manage to make cassava bread and weave hammocks. On Sundays, without fail, she swept out the church. At night when he lay there he tried to hear the words she was saying as she whispered her prayers but they were always inaudible. Lucas was concerned about her. Every now and then her heart jumped and fluttered like a small patwa fish and made her stand still until the heart found its regular beat again. Planting and weeding the cassava farm had become more of an effort.

  When his mother went to bathe, Lucas dressed, pulled on his blue jeans and his heavy bush boots. His black hair had grown long enough to touch the collar of his yellow shirt. He left the house and stood outside next to where the sifter hung on the wall. A white enamel bucket and stack of white plates on a bench dazzled his eyes in the bright morning sun.

  At the age of forty-five Lucas had finally managed to secure enough funds to study at the University of London. During his period away in England he had tried to work out how he could apply his newly acquired knowledge of ancient indigenous farming techniques in a way that would help his own people. Even as a child he had worried about the condition of his Arawak village and fretted over how to make things better. He would lie in his hammock and plan the defence of the village against intruders. Now he wanted to experiment with the idea of reviving the raised field farming techniques that had been used centuries ago. He had ideas too of using solar-powered computers to link Amerindian communities across the country. The important thing is, he thought, to be inventive. Old traditions could be revived, renewed and modernised if only people would use their intelligence and imagination.

  The week after he returned from England the radio station in
Georgetown recorded an interview with him about his degree. The next day, just as the programme was being broadcast, Lucas was in town walking past a house in Camp Street where the radio was on. He could hear a young black girl saying in amazement to her mother:

  ‘Hear the man on the radio, Mummy. You hear how buck man could talk?’

  ‘They still think we are stupid,’ he told his brother when he returned to the village and reported what he had heard.

  Now he watched as his mother made her way back to the house. There was a lightness and spring in her step. She was wearing her best green cotton dress, and checked her white hair with her hand as she walked, to ensure that it was neatly plaited. Mai, as they called her, preferred to walk barefoot even when the sand beneath her feet was burning hot. If there was one place his mother hated it was Georgetown. Whenever she was obliged to go there, she returned home as quickly as possible and headed for the bush. At home she spoke Arawak. The youngsters now spoke mainly in English. They understood Arawak but rarely spoke it. But Mai liked to use her own language.

  It had been Mai’s idea to celebrate her son’s achievement. What this degree business was all about she was not too sure but he had been away for a long time and mixed with a lot of white people to get it. She decided a small party was in order.

  ‘Just a quiet celebration with the family. Uncle Horace can make a speech.’

  By the time afternoon came, Uncle Horace had fixed everything up beneath the coconut trees which shaded his house. A small table, leaning slightly to one side, perched on the sand in front of the house. On it he had laid a white cloth and set out two bottles of vodka with some glasses, jugs of coconut water and a pink hibiscus blossom in a jam jar.

  Lucas was related to half the people in the village. The family started to gather. His two oldest uncles came and shook him earnestly by the hand, almost shyly, not saying anything but nodding their heads with toothless grins. Uncles, aunts, cousins and their children milled around. Auntie Zizi huffed and puffed her way over to Uncle Horace’s house brandishing two bottles of rum.

  ‘Congrats Lucas. Is wha yuh want? Fast and Nasty or Cheap and Sweet? Help yourself.’

  She put the rum on the table and started pouring out glasses of coconut water for the children.

  It was a scorching hot afternoon. Uncle Horace kept himself a little apart from the crowd in order to emphasise the solemnity of his speech-making duties. Gradually, people began to assemble, sitting down on logs, squatting in the sand, brushing grit off the sun-faded wooden benches and making themselves comfortable. Uncle Horace poured himself a vodka and took up his place behind the table. He cleared his throat and waited for everyone to settle down.

  Always on these occasions, Uncle Horace spoke Lokono Arawak. He considered himself to be the master and commander of the language. Younger members of the community consulted him should they ever want to know an Arawak word – which they rarely did. He seldom failed them. When people came to listen to Uncle Horace, the voices of ancestors who had lived there for thousands of years before the arrival of Columbus could be heard again and Uncle Horace was proud to be a conduit to the past in that way.

  He coughed and glared at Auntie Zizi who was still talking loudly. Finally everyone became silent and the only sounds came from a keskidee in the bush and a dog barking somewhere on the other side of the village. The sun blazed down. Uncle Horace swallowed some vodka and began his formal speech:

  ‘Halekwa ha, tu kasakabu . . .’

  Lucas’s brother Mart, wearing his black felt hat, dark glasses and a pendant round his neck came and crouched down beside Lucas. He lifted up his glasses and winked at his brother. They had sat through many of these speeches together.

  Now although Uncle Horace made his speech almost entirely in Lokono Arawak, he had been obliged to use some English words. ‘London University,’ ‘aeroplane’ and ‘Queen of England’ came up frequently. His voice was thin and wavery so that people had to lean forward to hear him. After every other sentence he helped himself to more vodka. Soon he began to list to one side. His pauses became more and more frequent.

  Into one of these pauses, striding across the sand, burst Uncle Tommy. Uncle Tommy was raw Arawak. His mouth was twisted over an upper tooth that protruded from the side of his mouth. He was late because he had just returned from his farm five miles upriver where he had been weeding all day and had not had time to smarten up for the party. He had paddled his canoe as hard as he could to be back in time and now he pushed his way amongst the group to make room for himself on one of the logs. He was barefoot, smelling of sweat and wearing a torn grey vest, with his trouser legs rolled up to the calves of his muscular brown legs. On his head he wore a black and white baseball cap. He listened carefully as Uncle Horace spoke. It was the climax of the speech and Lucas and the Queen of England were making several appearances together.

  When Uncle Horace brought his speech to its conclusion there was a round of applause. He folded his notes and was putting them in his shirt pocket, about to sit down, when Uncle Tommy stood up, made his way to the table and, holding on to the edges of it with his gnarled hands, faced the crowd and began to speak. He spoke pure and unhesitating Arawak from the heart:

  ‘I want to speak because I remember Lucas from when he was a baby. We called him Horotoshi because he had no hair. Calabash-head we called him, or sometimes we called him Potakashi because he looked like an old, bald-headed Portuguese man. His brother we called Korihi because he scampered everywhere like a rat. His mother we called Kaimahu because she was often vexed with them. And now look what Calabash-head has done. He has gone away and studied in some far off place with white people. He has even learned to speak like them. That Calabash-head is now full of learning. I can’t read or write, but he can. Let us all drink to Calabash-head. Pass me some bambeli.’

  People cheered and passed Uncle Tommy a bowl of bambeli. He raised the bowl to his lips, drank it down and turned to spit out the dregs behind him. Lucas’s brother Mart started to tease Uncle Horace:

  ‘Uncle Horace, I thought you supposed to be the chief Arawak speaker. Yuh hear Uncle Tommy? He din use no English words. An he drinkin pure bambeli like an Arawak man, not vodka.’

  Uncle Horace’s face turned an even darker shade of bronze.

  ‘I have to use some English words. The youngsters don’t speak enough Arawak. I have to say some things in English,’ he protested.

  Clearly upset, he threw his plastic cup down in the sand, then took out his speech from his pocket, scrunched it up and threw it after the cup. Turning his head away from people who were staring at him, he stomped off and stood by himself on the edge of the village where the sand ended and the tall grasses began. The sun was beginning to set. Shadows from the coconut tree leaves lay in jagged slashes on the ground in front of him.

  People started to say goodbye and drift away. Mart put his hand on his brother’s shoulder:

  ‘Look at Uncle Horace,’ he said. ‘We better do something.’

  They looked over at where Uncle Horace stood miserably beneath the trees, staring at his feet.

  Lucas stood up. He and Mart fetched Uncle Tommy and the three of them trudged through the sand to where Uncle Horace stood beneath the trees. Lucas faced Uncle Horace.

  ‘Ok. We’ll settle this business about who is the chief Arawak speaker before the sun goes down. I’m going to ask you both a question. He took each uncle by the arm and stood them facing each other as if for a duel. Sensing that some sort of challenge was taking place and curious to see what was happening, a few people returned and stood in a semi-circle around the two men.

  Lucas shut his eyes and bit his lip in concentration:

  ‘Right. Ok. I’ve got it. Which one of you can tell me the Arawak word for . . . padlock?’

  There was a deadly hush under the trees. Both men stared at each other as they racked their brains. Overhead a huge army of clouds was marching across the sky from Venezuela. A long silence ensued. Spots of rain fell. U
ncle Tommy’s mouth twisted up more than ever. His eyes shifted back and forth between the sky and the ground. Uncle Horace stood there stroking his chin. Then Uncle Tommy spoke up:

  ‘We don’ have such a word. The Arawak language existed before white people brought iron. So the word doesn’t exist in Arawak,’ he announced, pleased to have found a way of solving the problem.

  Uncle Horace saw his opportunity and pounced.

  ‘Ah, but you have to be wily. You have to think around this problem. You must ask yourself what is it that a padlock does. A padlock holds on to something tight. A padlock will never let go. It will grip to the death. And what else grips to the death? What is it that has massively powerful front legs with unretractable claws? IT’S AN ANTEATER.’

  Uncle Horace’s chest swelled with triumph:

  ‘So the Arawak for a padlock would be – Baremo Okotu. The Grasp of the Anteater.’

  Spontaneous cheers and applause rose from a few people who had come to see what was happening. Uncle Tommy threw his cap in the air and ceded defeat. Lucas announced:

  ‘I pronounce Uncle Horace chief Arawak speaker of the village.’

  Uncle Horace bowed and shook Uncle Tommy by the hand. Then he said goodnight and strode proudly back to his house as if he were walking through the sky.

  The next morning Lucas walked over to his brother’s house. Mart was outside the house starting work on his carving. He was contemplating the huge block of wood in front of him:

  ‘Wha yuh makin there?’

  ‘I think I’ve found a giant anteater in this block of wood.’ Mart grinned as he wielded his chisel. ‘I goin let him out.’

  THE DREAM OF OCALAN

  A Fable

  That part of the Syrian desert is a plateau of basement rock covered by layers of horizontally bedded sediment forming massive sand plains and dunes. Wind is the sculptor. It shapes the orange dunes into sandy hillocks and chisels out sharp-edged basins lined with dark shadows only to re-arrange everything the next day into an altered landscape of ridges and sand-seas. Nothing is permanent.