Rates of Exchange (6 page)

It is busy and confused in the departure lounge; well-suited businessmen stand waiting impatiently with Samsonite executive cases, fine women walk past in Gucci scarves and tight lamé
trousers, those special exotic airport women one may always see but never have. The flight-boards are fluttering again, in a jumble of letters and digits, a chaos of signs. But, look, they are
settling, out of redundancy is coming word:
COMFLUG
says the board, and 155, and
SLAKA
, and
NOW BOARDING
. He sets aside his
glass; he picks up his briefcase, his overcoat, his yellow duty-free bag; he sets off down the long dreary tunnels of Sunday Heathrow – past moving walkways, now not moving; past bright
advertisements from Smith’s, displaying old Chester and the White Cliffs of Dover, Windermere with a steamboat, Wales with a sheep, the Britain he is not and has scarcely ever been in; past
advertisements for Seiko watches that are programmed to the year 2000, when they will collectively stop. Luggage trolleys with squeaking wheels follow him along the linoleum; great arms prod off
from the corridor into disconnected space; planes like stranded whales stand unmoving beyond the windows; ‘Your Palace in the Sky,’ says an Air India jumbo with Taj Mahalled windows,
firmly trapped on the ground. He enters a lounge where his luggage is taken and X-rayed, by a machine that will not harm the film in your camera; an electronic Aeolian harp is passed under his
armpit and across the secrecies of his groin. In the chairs sit his fellow-travellers, a group unlike the great display outside: men in brown suits, with flat, grainy faces, elderly ladies in black
dresses with small cardboard boxes, several quiet children, a silent stoical baby. They sit without speaking; they rise in neat order when the stewardess comes to lead them down the long bending
arm onto the wet tarmac, where a modernist bus with fizzing doors waits to drive them past catering trucks, police cars, petrol tankers, flights of steps going nowhere, toward the aircraft that
awaits them.

The Ilyushin has been parked like a secret in some distant corner of the airport; two bottle-green stewardesses wait for them to get off the bus. They allow the passengers up the steps two at a
time; in the cabin, two more stewardesses wait to seat them all in careful rows, filling each place in order, as if they are packing a box of persons.
LUPI LUPI
,
NOKI ROKI
says the illuminated sign on the forward bulkhead; a dismal martial music plays through the intercom. The luggage racks are of string, the seats high and stiff.
Petworth straps himself into an aisle seat; between him and the window are two brown-suited men who smell quite strongly of onion. The aisle is narrow; at the back of the plane there is a section
shut off by a green curtain, to which none of the passengers seem to be allowed access. The travellers sit very quietly; the stewardesses check them very carefully; the doors are closed, the
service trucks underneath them slide away. It is quiet in the cabin, and a red bus moves on the road to Hounslow; then the engines fire and roar. An announcement in a language Petworth does not
know comes through the intercom: the plane taxis a little, and then stops, taxis a little more, and then stops again. Then, suddenly, the plane’s body throbs, and there is the great dash into
airspeed; they leap a fence, overarch a wet bus, overfly a wet reservoir and a field of waste; London, that fancy plural fiction, tips crazily into sight through the opposite window. Then it is
gone, the red buses, the big city, the Heathrow strike, the Royal Wedding, the topless saunas, the dark wife; clouds come round, rain runs down the windows, and Petworth is indeed going to
Slaka.

III

In all cultures, Petworth is very shortly to be found reflecting – a man rising into the clouds somewhere above Gravesend or Dover – planes are much the same sort of
thing: long metal tubes containing persons. In all cultures, planes may be overbooked or, like Comflug 155, take off, for whatever reason, late. In all cultures, stewardesses, those couturiered
nurses, may suffer from swollen ankles, menstrual cramps, or shortened tempers exacerbated by repeated encounters with foolish, bleating travellers; in all cultures, airline food seems to come from
the same universal source, stewed in the same universal sauce. Plane travel makes all life alike; yet inside likeness there is difference. Thus, even now, after just a few minutes in the air, there
is something about Comflug that makes it definitely Comflug. The same things that all airlines do have been done, the same grammar of flying followed. So ‘Attention,’ the pilot has
said, just after takeoff, addressing the cabin in several languages, his, Russian, German, and Petworth’s native English, ‘Welcome here please on Comflug 155, destiny Slaka. We shall
flight at a high of ninety-two pornys, airspeed forty vlods an hour. Our delay is because of economic inconsistencies in Britain, so we do not apologize. Through window, notice please grey sky and
raining. For Slaka, forecast very sunny. In disaster, always obedience please your stewardess.’ Yes, it is the same but not quite the same, just as the seats seem just a little narrower and
higher than usual, the stewardesses a little firmer and more given to hair in the nostrils, the passengers a little quieter and rather less mobile.

More familiarities follow; at the front of the cabin a small balletic display has started, conducted by two stewardesses, short fat ladies in high hard hats. ‘Tenti sifti inburdi,’
says, through the intercom, the voice of some unseen female impresario; from behind their backs the two stewardesses have produced brightly coloured cards and are waving them gaily in the air.
‘Plazsci otvatu immerg’nicina proddo flugsi frolikat,’ says the voice; the ladies suddenly rise up onto their toes, put out both their arms, rotate their wrists in a complicated
gesture, and point with sharp fingers at various corners of the cabin. ‘Flattin umper stuli, op immerg’nicina,’ says the voice on the intercom. Magically, the ladies summon up
from nowhere bright plastic tunics of yellow, and draw them over their heads, tying them carefully at the waist. ‘Imper flattin tuggu taggii,’ announces the voice. The two ladies
suddenly turn their backs to the cabin, prod out their dumpy behinds, and give mock-tugs to the rear of their plastic tunics. Then they take off the tunics; ‘Mas’kayii icks’gen
flipiflopa,’ says the voice. The ladies now hold up in their hands curious, clear plastic objects, out of which dangles a yellow hose. ‘Vono icks’gen uskaka por prusori, ot noki
roki,’ says the voice. The ladies put the yellow plastic hoses to their faces, and suck at them erotically. Then, as suddenly as it has begun, the dance collapses; the stewardesses put away
their props and resume their normal duties, walking up and down the aisle. Familiarity breeds familiarity; Petworth puts out his hand and stops one of the stewardesses, overcome by a primal bodily
urge. ‘Ha?’ cries the stewardess, a very heavy lady with hair in her nostrils, looking down at him. ‘Are you serving drinks now?’ asks Petworth, ‘I’d like
one.’ ‘Va?’ says the stewardess, staring down on him severely, as if stewardesses are really not meant to be spoken to, ‘Kla?’

Perhaps it is language that poses the problem: ‘Drinks trolley,’ says Petworth, raising an invisible glass to his lips, ‘Whisky soda? Ginnitoniki?’ ‘Ah, na,
na,’ says the stewardess, looking at him critically, ‘Is not permitted.’ ‘Not permitted?’ says Petworth. ‘Only permitted is a Vichy,’ says the stewardess.
‘Very well,’ says Petworth, ‘I’ll have that.’ ‘Na,’ says the stewardess, ‘No now.’ ‘Oh, when?’ asks Petworth. ‘Another
day,’ says the stewardess, ‘Tomorrow. Now is Sunday.’ ‘I see,’ says Petworth, leaning back in his seat, a man in a chair in the air over Brussels, perhaps, or Paris,
trying to understand what the difference is. It seems to him that in the West, which is where he comes from, flying is invested usually with a sort of magical fictionality, an erotic and
pleasurable texture. Economic forces clearly explain this: capitalist competition requires that a certain happy disguise, a sense of delights available here and nowhere else, be cast over all the
gross and diurnal reality. So, on the planes, stewardesses serve drink and bargain-like commodities, offer smiles and adulterous glances, promises of intimate excess, display made-up faces and nice
legs, utter cries of ‘Enjoy your flight’ and ‘Fly us again sometime’ and ‘Have a nice day.’ Indeed they transmit what a linguist – and perhaps it should be
explained that Petworth, a man in the sky over Dusseldorf, or Strasburg, is actually himself a linguist – calls phatic communion, which is to say non-verbal intercourse, speechless
communication, the kind of thing that babies and lovers, teachers and animals constantly use. But that is under capitalism, and such false allurements and disguises are evidently not necessary on
Comflug, where a more rational economy prevails. So, it seems, drinks are not to be offered, nor food, nor friendship; indeed the stewardesses have now disappeared entirely, apparently behind the
green curtain at the back of the plane, and the rest of the passengers are sitting stiffly, clearly expecting nothing at all.

And therefore even in the air, Petworth reflects, a person in the clouds over Munich, or Zü rich (for his geography collapses totally east of the Rhine), the world can subtly turn and
change. Down below there are frontiers and fences, Comecons and Common Markets, tariff walls and spheres of influence, politics and ideologies, language barriers and vowelshifts. There are spies
and searches, arrests and imprisonments, iron curtains and Berlin Walls, Alps and butter mountains, oil and SALT. The world is divided, and divides more every day; missiles point and cluster-bombs
cluster; Reagan and the Born Again are that way, Brezhnev and the Politburo are this. In the air it should not matter; grander detachments, larger objectivities, seem possible. But in the air the
borders and barriers function too, in the mind itself; slowly, strangely, consciousness changes, and Petworth can feel the change taking place within himself. Nothing is happening, yet somehow his
being is shifting: a Petworth life and a Petworth wife, a Petworth day and a Petworth way, are strangely slipping and disintegrating in his head. Perhaps it has something to do with that popping of
the ears at altitude which – the medical men, who say so many things now, say – touches strange glands that make the brain function somewhat differently; perhaps it is the strange
hysteria of travel, which changes the sense in which we see the world; perhaps it is Karl Marx who is right, and changes in material condition generate changes in mentality. Whatever the reason,
there is no doubt that, somewhere inside him, an old world is beginning to go, a new one beginning to come. The sky has cleared, turned to bright blue, and new landscapes lie below them, by
unfastening his seat-belt, and raising himself up a little, Petworth can just see out, to glimpse an extraordinary, high, mountain landscape, a raw cold world of blank icecap, where no roads run,
no settlements stand, where peaks glint and stark rock shines, a voided place. It is a place that matches his head, emptying of familiar being; he sits back in his seat and looks around the
cabin.

In the cabin, the other passengers sit, in stiff rows; Petworth looks at them and recognizes their actuality. The men sit in their weighty, pre-synthetic, rather crumpled suits; the women wear
large, full-skirted dresses; the clothes are the clothes of convention and duty, not the light sensuous robings of provisionality Petworth has now grown used to, so lightly put on and so easily
taken off. These people do not talk much, but when they talk, they talk assertively, poking each other with fingers; the accents are guttural, the words are sharp. Across the aisle an old man holds
a beetroot in his lap, and a woman feeds bread to a child; these are peoply sort of people, and they remind Petworth of something – of, he realizes, the people of his childhood, a time when
the world appeared remarkably solid, persons massive, individuals whole and complete, reality really real, buildings permanently in place, marriages made for ever, a fact a fact. It is in adult
life that one conceives everything to be provisional, to feel oneself in the wrong bodily container, to sense the world as a shifting void; but these people do not seem to look or think like that.
Petworth looks up; the heavy stewardess, hair in her nostrils, cake-crumbs round her mouth, stands above him like a severe mother; she is staring down at his groin rebukingly, as if he has
committed some disgrace there, as, of course, one always has. ‘Lupi lupi,’ says the stewardess, pointing to the seat-belt; Petworth fastens it up. With reality shaping around him,
Petworth decides he needs a fact: ‘English newspaper?’ he says to the heavy face above him. ‘Ah, na,’ says the stewardess, ‘Not available. Only available here is
P’rtyii Populatiii
.’ ‘All right,’ says Petworth, glad even of a foreign word, ‘I’ll have that.’ ‘Not in English,’ says the lady,
‘You will not like.’ ‘I will like,’ says Petworth. ‘So you want?’ asks the stewardess. ‘Yes, I want,’ says Petworth. ‘So I get,’ says the
stewardess.

P’rtyii Populatiii
, when brought, proves very weighty: as much fact as you could wish for. It has a red masthead and heavy black type; evidently the government and party organ, it
has photographs of authoritative solidity, showing firm men grouped around tables or under banners in strangely fixed positions. They shake hands in friendship, or they sign things; they are
characters in the world historical sense. Petworth unfolds the big rough pages, staring down at the unknown words in their mysterious series, some in the Cyrillic alphabet, some in the Latin, all
in the language he does not know. There are no pop stars, no women notable only for their tits, just fixed photographs, seamless text. From the text prod words of faint familiarity:
Mass’fin Manifustu
sounds recognizable, and
Chil’al Ecun’mocu
all too understandable. But
Gn’oui Prut
means nothing, or less:
langue
without
parole
, signifier without signified. The text flows, then does not; codes start, but will not unravel. Linguistic anxiety makes Petworth tense, as it does all of us; he reaches into his
pocket for oral relief. ‘Na, na,’ says a voice above him; the big face of the heavy green stewardess is staring into his, hairs in her nose, ‘Noki roki.’
‘Pardon?’ asks Petworth, a man in a chair in the air above Plupno, or perhaps Viglip. ‘You smirk,’ says the stewardess. ‘No,’ says Petworth, looking down at the
paper, ‘I didn’t smirk.’ ‘Da, you smirk,’ says the stewardess, snatching the unlit cigarette from his mouth and showing it to him, ‘Of course you smirk. Smirking
here not permitted.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ says Petworth. ‘Only permitted is having a sweet,’ says the stewardess.