Gravity's Rainbow (62 page)

Naturally Tchitcherine gravitates into this crew of irredeemables. Before long, if
it isn’t some scheme of Radnichny’s to infiltrate an oilfield and disguise a derrick
as a giant penis, it’s lurking down in Arab quarters of the city, waiting with the
infamous Ukrainian doper Bugnogorkov of the glottal K Committee (ordinary K being
represented by Q, whereas C is pronounced with a sort of
tch
sound) for a hashish connection, or fending off the nasal advances of Shatsk. It
occurs to him that he is, in reality, locked up in some military nut ward back in
Moscow, and only hallucinating this plenary session. No one here seems quite right
in the head.

Most distressing of all is the power struggle he has somehow been suckered into with
one Igor Blobadjian, a party representative on the prestigious G Committee. Blobadjian
is fanatically attempting to steal
s from Tchitcherine’s Committee, and change them to Gs, using loan-words as an entering
wedge. In the sunlit, sweltering commissary the two men sneer at each other across
trays of zapekanka and Georgian fruit soup.

There is a crisis over which kind of g to use in the word “stenography.” There is
a lot of emotional attachment to the word around here. Tchitcherine one morning finds
all the pencils in his conference room have mysteriously vanished. In revenge, he
and Radnichny sneak in Blobadjian’s conference room next night with hacksaws, files
and torches, and reform the alphabet on his typewriter. It is some fun in the morning.
Blobadjian runs around in a prolonged screaming fit. Tchitcherine’s in conference,
meeting’s called to order, CRASH! two dozen linguists and bureaucrats go toppling
over on their ass. Noise echoes for a full two minutes. Tchitcherine, on his ass,
notes that pieces of chair leg all around the table have been sawed off, reattached
with wax and varnished over again. A professional job, all right. Could Radnichny
be a double agent? The time for lighthearted practical jokes is past. Tchitcherine
must go it alone. Painstakingly, by mid-watch lantern light, when the manipulations
of letters are most apt to produce other kinds of illumination, Tchitcherine transliterates
the opening sura of the holy Koran into the proposed NTA, and causes it to be circulated
among the Arabists at the session, over the name of Igor Blobadjian.

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 into 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.

T
HE
A
QYN’S
S
ONG

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,