Rates of Exchange (9 page)

For the lady looks, and frowns, and is not happy. Petworth senses he must establish that these words at least are worthless and irrelevant: ‘Lectori academico,’ he says.
‘Poy,’ says the lady, reading on. There is, actually an old argument, sometimes used in language teaching, that fear and anxiety can improve people’s language acquisition.
Petworth doesn’t believe it, but something is happening to his own competence now. ‘Lectori academico pri’fissori universitayii hospitalito officay’alii congressi
intemat’yayii colloquiale didactico,’ he says desperately. ‘Moy,’ says the lady, not looking up from the text. It is not easy to tell, from inspecting her expression,
whether any comprehension at all is taking place, though the length of time she is taking with each page makes it seem doubtful. Despite the long delay, the other passengers continue to wait
patiently, casting only the smallest and most oblique of glances at the events at his bench. All look foreign, none look as though they might help; he has no other rate of exchange but his own.
‘Exchangi amicati,’ says Petworth, taking out the grey letter from the Min’stratii Kulturi Komitet’iii, and handing it to the lady. ‘Voy,’ says the lady, taking
it and putting it on the clipboard that rests against her hard, white-shined breasts, which seem clearly designed for this purpose and no other. She stares at it, shakes her head. Only now does
Petworth recall that this letter, too, is in English, and hardly likely to solve his problems.

Petworth looks round, at the walls, at the other passengers, who patiently wait for what will happen next. When he looks back again, the lady is walking away, toward one of a wall of roughly
partitioned offices that lines the room, where men in white shirts and black ties work or stare out at him. She carries both his letter and his lecture on ‘The English Language as a Medium of
International Communication.’ On the bench in front of him flutter his remaining lectures, their pages in disorder, their content in recollection absurd: he tries, a little, to order them,
but the spirit is somehow not there. A few moments later, he sees the dapper lady walking back from the office toward him: she is now accompanied by one of the blue armed men. She takes up her
position on her side of the bench; the armed man, boots squeaking on the tile, comes and stands beside Petworth. The lady now begins to collect up all the papers scattered in front of her, doing it
with a notable neatness, uncreasing the bent comers of the rough and pen-corrected texts, smoothing the covers of the books; this is evidently a culture where care and time are taken. She slips them
into the briefcase in neat and sensible order, closes the top, hands it to the armed man. ‘Da?’ asks the armed man, pointing to the blue suitcase and the Heathrow bag. ‘Da,’
says the lady. ‘Hin,’ says the man, nodding to Petworth to come; the other passengers watch, with some curiosity, but not too much, as Petworth and his escort march off through the
sounding shell of the low-roofed wooden building, the armed man in his thudding thick black boots, Petworth in his pattering flat earth shoes. ‘Exchangi amicato,’ cries Petworth
desperately; the armed man does not respond, but leads Petworth to a small white door, which has a sign on it saying
DIRIG
’
AYII
.

Inside the room, behind a desk, sits another, very big blue armed man. Near the desk, in a plastic easy chair, sits, under a sign saying
NOKI ROKI
smoking a
sweet-smelling cigarette, a small man in plain clothes, clothes so very plain he must surely be a policeman from the state security system, HOGPo. Both are reading. The big blue armed man, who has
a scar down his nose, has the grey letter from the Min’stratii Kulturi Komitet’iii. The man in plain clothes has ‘The English Language as a Medium of International
Communication.’ ‘Exchangi amicato,’ says Petworth, standing in front of the desk. The big man rises and walks slowly forward; his eyes are blue, his gunstrap seems too tight for
his swelling chest. The plain-clothes man stubs out his cigarette. The blue armed man stops in front of Petworth, looks him up and down. His arms spread wide, he thrusts them forward; suddenly
Petworth feels himself seized in a maelstrom or turbulence; his nose is being pushed hard into the leather cross-strap over the man’s shoulders; his breathing is stifled on the thick worsted
of his uniform; his hands touch the cold metal of the machine gun on his back; their thighs come together, prodding each other. His groin is being bored, his back being beaten; the man has a sweaty
stench; sweat, too, pours down Petworth’s body inside his clothes as these things happen to him. The armed man pushes him backward for a moment, holds him out at arm’s length, like a
large doll. His blue eyes stare, around them the creases wrinkle. ‘Camarad’aki,’ he cries, ‘Velki in Slaka.’ And then Petworth is dragged forwards again, into the
great fraternal maelstrom. Comrade is not a word he is fond of, never having had one, but ‘Camarad’aki!’ he cries when, breathless, he emerges.

‘Rot’vitti!’ says the plain little plain-clothes man, gaily standing behind the desk with four glasses and a bottle. A full glass of bright clear liquid appears in
Petworth’s hand. ‘Snup!’ says the big armed man, raising a glass to him. ‘Kulturi!’ says the plain-clothes man, raising his. ‘Musica!’ says the armed man
who brought Petworth here, pretending to bow a fiddle. ‘Exchangi!’ says Petworth, raising his glass and drinking it down, with a choking cry; the local peach brandy is not to be missed.
The others are laughing; perhaps the word is senseless, or even obscene, it does not matter. He is in the middle of some great masculine joke; it is, in the circumstances, well worth joining. The
four men, two armed, two not, stand in the room and laugh together, in full male roars, like the roars of adults in the living-room when Petworth was a child. After a while, the laughing stops;
through the window, Petworth sees the Western businessman, with the code-locked briefcase, being marched by two soldiers towards a black car. ‘Please have good visit, Mr Pitwit,’ says
the plain-clothes man, handing Petworth the briefcase, ‘Such interesting books. Do not leave them with any of our people.’ The big armed man gives Petworth a last comradely hug; the
other armed man lifts his baggage and guides him from the room. They go down a corridor, back into the customs hall; the big dapper lady turns to watch him go, with his guide, to a door marked
OTVAT
. Here another armed man, sitting on a stool, unlocks it, and allows them through. The armed man who is his guide puts down his baggage, bows a little, goes back
through the door. It closes, a key clicks; the sign on this side of the door says
NOI VA
.

Sweating, Petworth turns. Beneath him is his luggage tumbled at his feet. In front of him is a long thin concourse, packed with people, too many, indeed, for its confined and narrow area, for
they push, jostle a little, tread on each other’s feet. The men are mostly in double-breasted suits, the women are round and bulky. They carry flowers, wave handkerchiefs, and cluster
hopefully round the door marked noi va. Faces bob into sight in the turmoil, and then subside again. Beyond the people are long dirty windows, lit by the now fading sunlight; beyond the windows
Petworth can see yet more armed men, walking up and down a forecourt to inspect yet more people – who lift luggage, carry flowers, tote backpacks, enter small orange taxis, or wait patiently
at a place marked
BUSOP
, where more battered blue buses with bulbous noses stand with their doors tight shut. And further on still, beyond all the busy people, there is a
landscape, of wide hedgeless fields, trees, wooden houses, a small hill; poking up in the middle is the golden onion. And beyond the onion there must be the city, with its lives and realities,
cemeteries and cathedrals, ministries and museums, hotels and bars, customs and conversation. He is here, within the gates, come, in his flat earth shoes, to visit.

2 – RECEP.

I

Now this Dr Petworth, whose arrival in Slaka we have just witnessed, is in fact an old and practised cultural traveller. Today, in this late summer of 1981, he stands in the
lobby of the airport at Slaka, but really he might be anywhere; year after year he has been coming, coat over arm and bags at knee, through the arrivals labyrinths of airports with wildly different
names – Madrid or Helsinki, Tunis or Teheran – but with the same fluttering flight-boards, the same sea of faces, the same incomprehensible, polyglot announcements, emerging, pausing,
putting down his luggage, in the firm expectation that his coming will be noticed. He is a person of no great interest, not a character in the world historical sense, a man waiters neglect and
barmen save till last; yet he believes that someone will always step forward from the crowd, shake his hand, lead him to the car park, and put him in the way of a familiar plot of days, quite as
familiar as the domestic world he has not been sorry to leave behind. He confidently expects to be taken to the city, signed in at some downtown hotel already apprised of his coming, handed to a
bellboy, left for a while to shower, shave, freshen and change knickers, be collected again, driven to one of the town’s better quarters, taken upstairs to an apartment, with a good view, a
maid holding a tray of drinks, a host in something formal, a hostess in something ethnic; where, in the rooms, the professors come and go, talking of T. S. Eliot, professors who will seize on him,
reminisce about the Oxford colleges they long ago went to, say Lacan to his Derrida, Barthes to his Saussure, and discuss, quite as if they had read them deeply and long ago, and not just glanced
at them hastily that afternoon in expectation of his arrival, the several books that he has published.

All this Petworth expects, as he comes through the arrivals labyrinth, because he is a man with a sign. From the handle of his briefcase there dangles a puce and magenta tag; it is the
identification tag of the British Council, an organization designed to bring scholars like himself to the cities of the world. Between him and the Council, a compact exists. The Council
representatives have their responsibilities: meeting and greeting, driving and arriving, tending and mending, liquoring and succouring, showing slides and fixing rides, detaching and onwardly
despatching. And Petworth, in turn, has his: coming, meeting, chatting, eating, drinking, talking, listening, walking, imparting and finally departing, on to the next place, so that the cycle can
resume again. A simple system, it has always worked well; hotels of modest comfort have always been found, with a booking in his name or one like it. Restaurants of pleasant ambiance have from time
to time been frequented. At appropriate times Petworth has been taken to academic buildings, where the stairwells are alive with the smell of disinfectant, been offered coffee or something
stronger, introduced to those who in turn will introduce him, then led through long corridors past student posters everywhere much the same, advertising exhibitions of Expressionist art and attacks
on the regime, their own or someone else’s, into sudden large lecture halls: where students, their physiognomies, clothes and skin-pigmentation differing somewhat, though by no means as much
as you might think, from country to country, according to which one this happens to be today, are stacked in rows to stare at him, look at his tie, and listen as well as they can or they care to
while Petworth stands on the podium and divulges, in the complexities of the English tongue, the complexities of the English tongue.

Like the students, the countries differ in detail. Some allow no mention of Jesus, and some no mention of anyone else; some have statues of long-dead scholars in the courtyard and students whose
eyes are always on the ground, and some have tanks and armed troop-carriers in the forecourt, and students whose fists are always in the air. Yet the impression – because it is an impression
of lecture rooms, hotels, restaurants and receptions – is always rather much the same. There are moments that do stand out: a certain affair of a suitcase lost in Bogota once; a certain
matter of a girl called Irina in Bratislava (but that was in another country, and the wench now has tenure); a meal composed of grass in Kyoto, another of poisoned seafood in Singapore; a notable
performance of Hamlet in Belize, a notable performance of belly-dance in Hammamet. As in life itself, familiarity is occasionally fractured and transformed by surprise and variation, sometimes but
not usually in the form of pleasure. And today, in Slaka, there is one. For here is Petworth, sweating, red-faced, troubled, fresh from Slaka’s turbulent labyrinth of arrival. He stands in
the crowded lobby, his back to a pillar, the busy faceless crowds around him, the meeters and greeters, the pushers and jostlers, clustering round the small white door marked
NOI
VA
. His coat over his arm, his luggage below his feet, his face turns expectantly, this way and that; the puce and magenta tag hangs from the handle of his bag of lectures. The sun
diminishes, the armed men walk up and down. But Slaka is the capital of a hardline country of the socialist bloc, a member of Comecon and the Warsaw Pact, suspicious of the Western cultural
agencies; as a result, there is, in Slaka, no British Council office or representative at all.

II

Now all this has been explained to Petworth at a very brief briefing, given him by a grey-haired lady smoking Player’s Number Tens from a tiny packet, in a dark old office
with high cupboards somewhere high up in the British Council building in Davies Street, London, some ten days before his present journey. It is, this day ten days gone, a very bleak wet day;
Petworth, down from Bradford on the early morning train, with visas yet to collect and flights to check, sits damply on a wooden chair, staring at a lithograph portrait of Shakespeare and an old
poster for the Berliner Ensemble. He holds a plastic cup of coffee of very murky consistency; a secretary in a ra-ra skirt keeps stepping in and out with files; water from his mackintosh is making
a puddle on the Council floor. In Oxford Street, round the corner, the usual ambulances and police cars heehaw; he can see, through the window, the Royal Wedding bunting, dripping rain onto the
sheikhs and their spouses who are shopping below. ‘There’s no British Council there?’ he says, shaking the coffee and pondering the impossible thought. ‘No, we’re not
represented in several of the socialist countries,’ says the grey-haired lady, dropping ash over a thick file which is, Petworth presumes, his own, ‘They think we spy and bring in bad
books, perish the thought.’ ‘How is this tour arranged, then?’ asks Petworth. ‘What we have is a cultural exchange agreement,’ says the grey-haired lady, patiently,
‘It’s directly negotiated each year between their government and HMG. Our part’s minimal, we just arrange your travel out there and point you to the plane. After that,
you’re in the hands of their Ministry of Culture. They’ll look after you, rather well, I expect, unless the political climate changes. You know how these things work. They flow when it
thaws and block up when it freezes, just like the lav down the corridor.’ ‘I see,’ says Petworth, ‘So money, my hotel, my programme?’ ‘All their
responsibility,’ says the lady, cheerfully.