Rates of Exchange

by Malcolm Bradbury

  Then he is at the top of the steps, looking down into the new country. Two more armed soldiers stand at the bottom of them, watching the passengers descend. Down he goes, till his flat earth shoes touch the new society, the fresh ideological soil. He pauses, sniffs the fresh, mildly aromatic air; one of the soldiers points him to the bulbous blue bus that stands waiting. Inside are just a few gun-metal seats, occupied by moustached men, old ladies carrying parcels; the smell is of disinfectant. The crowd jostles in; the grey-shined driver presses a button, and the doors hiss and close. Very slowly, the bus begins to move, bouncing on poor tyres past the Ilyushins, the Tupolevs, the Antonovs, guarded and in their places, toward the white terminal and the door that says INVAT. Draped with his luggage, Petworth hangs onto a metal pole and looks out, through the wavy imperfections of the glass, with flat eye, flat mind. There are colleagues of his at home who would regard this country, the ground of which he has just touched with his flat earth shoes, as the model of the desirable future, the outcome to which a benevolent history points; there are others who would see it as the bleak end of things. Petworth, who sees himself as an open-minded man, a voter for modest improvement, only political when roused, has no urgent views, merely a mild irony at the expense of all societies, each with its own fiction of having improved history. The bus bounces, the passengers sway, and not far off is the terminal, where he will, he trusts, be met and attended to, taken off on his tour.

  Hanging on the pole, he feels the usual small disorder in his stomach, the predictable pressure pain from the aircraft in his ears, the familiar gloomy confusion about why he has come to be lonely here, rather than being lonely somewhere else. He is away again, in the state of foreignness, which is a universal country, simply the opposite to home and domesticity. The two worlds both mesh and contend. So, waking at night in Bradford, next to his sleeping dark-haired wife, dreaming, probably, of someone or somewhere else, he will suddenly feel intensely the stupidity of linked flesh, the incompleteness of human bonding, the prison of property, the foolish sameness of days, the hunger for a bigger and less exact world. Waking at night in double-bedded hotel rooms, under duvets for two covering only one, in the central square of some not really apprehended distant foreign city where the trams rattle, nightclub music blurts, and the lights of cars reflect crazily on the ceiling, he will feel the wastefulness of displacement, the tug of domesticity; he will pick up the telephone and, through distant switchboards, place calls to Bradford, frequently not connected, lost amid the spacious buzzes and clicks of international wiring. Domestic and foreign, manic and depressive, never become one; between the states there is all this: the signs in unknown languages, the security checks and body searches, the armed men, the shifting landscapes glimpsed through wavy imperfections in glass; the great tankers saying COMOIL or BIN’ZINI; the duty-free lounges, the safety instruction pamphlets, the gins-and-tonic, the terminals.

  Here is the terminal, white and wooden; before the door marked INVAT, two blue armed men stand, not moving. For a while, the bus doors remain closed; the passengers – the moustached men, the elderly ladies – remain silently in their places; evidently this is a culture where people are used to waiting. Then, inside the building, behind the glass of the door, there appears a girl in a blue uniform, with the word COSMOPLOT on her hat; she unlocks the INVAT door, comes outside, presses a button on the bus side, and the doors hiss open. They go, the passengers off Comflug 155, down the steps, between the armed men, through the door that says INVAT. Inside, as well as out, the terminal is a building of little distinction, its walls and partitions of rough wood, its ceilings of crumpling tile, its floors of worn linoleum. The air has a faint dusty consistency; there is an endless boom of noise from various functions. Some semiotician has designed a system of wordless signs – arrows through squares, crosses in circles, ladders in oblongs – to guide bemused strangers through the labyrinth, the web of partitions and channels Petworth sees ahead of him. More functionally, another blue armed man stands there, pointing his sub-machine gun to help the passegers toward a place where stands another blue armed man, guarding a black line painted on the floor, behind which the passengers from London have formed a queue, long, slow, polite, orderly. From time to time, this armed man waves one of the passengers forward, toward one of a row of small curtained stalls; over the stalls is a sign saying IDENT’NII.

  Groups of green stewardesses go by; an old tractor drags through the hall a row of luggage-laden rubber-tyred barrows. The roar of planes taking off seems to shake the wooden frame of the building. The wait is long, but at last Petworth comes to the black line; the armed man waves him forward into one of the cubicles. He lifts the curtain; the cubicle contains a glass-fronted booth; in the booth sit two more armed men of the militia type, one with his hat off. ‘Passipotti,’ says the man with his hat off; the other man stares beyond Petworth to a mirror hanging behind his back, which discloses him from the unguarded rear. Into the hand that has come through an aperture in the glass, Petworth puts his British passport, blue and hardback; stapled into it is his visa, issued just ten days before at the London consulate of the country where he now stands. In several copies, it bears the formal seal of this people’s republic (Ryp’blicanii Proly’aniii) and a good deal of elegant script in Cyrillic. On each of the several copies is a small photograph of Petworth, showing a blotched and haunted face, caught in that strained expression one assumes behind the curtains of a railway station photo-booth not unlike the place where he waits now, when (flash) one is desperately trying to adjust the stool to the required height and (flash) the train one can just hear departing the platform is probably one’s own. The two armed men look, from photograph to Petworth, Petworth to photograph, image to what passes for reality and back again. Then the man without the hat looks up at Petworth: ‘Dikumenti?’ he says. Since the plane, Petworth has lost his taste for transient linguistic encounters, verbal one-night stands, but words are called for. ‘Professori,’ says Petworth.

  ‘Ah, da, prif’sorii?’ says the hatless man, ‘Prif’sorii universitayii?’ ‘Ja, or da,’ says Petworth, ‘Prif’sorii universitayii linguistici.’ The other armed man leans forward, interrupting. ‘Dikumenti?’ he says. It is now that Petworth recalls another document: a letter, very ill-typed, written in stiff and inaccurate English on rough grey paper, an invitation to himself from his formal hosts in the country, the Min’stratii Kulturi Komitet’iii. The letter has smudged badly in the pocket, and he has scribbled notes on the back; but the hatless man takes it, unfolds it, very carefully, and inspects its contents. ‘Kla?’ he says, passing it to the other armed man. ‘Da,’ says the second armed man. The first armed man picks up the visa again and looks once more at the photograph, then at Petworth. Evidently his face has now acquired the same blotched and haunted expression the photograph depicts, for the first armed man tears a page from the visa, stamps, one by one, the other copies, and then hands the passport and the folded letter neatly back to Petworth through the aperture in the glass. ‘Danke,’ says Petworth, smiling at the wonder of language, its seductive art for linking man to man. He lifts the curtain, steps out of the booth: to find before him another line of waiting passengers, another black mark across the floor, another armed man, another small row of curtained booths. The situation is the same, only the sign above different; the notice here says GELD’AYII. The wait, as before, is long; the queue moves forward slowly. Outside, planes roar, and there is a drumming on the roof presumably from the waiting crowds above. It is not, thinks Petworth, to whom the doors of language seem to be slowly opening, hard to judge what GELD’AYII means. This is a country where balance of payments problems are severe, and currency offences serious crimes against the state; indeed on the plane Petworth has been issued with a document, which has required him to list all the money he carries, and reminded him that the ordinary visitor must change so much foreign currency every day, at the official exchanges, or the offices of the state bank.

  He is ushered int
o the cubicle; inside is another glass booth. In it sit two more blue armed men, one wearing a jacket and the other not, the other wearing a moustache and the first one not. The man wearing the moustache and not wearing the jacket puts his hand through the aperture in the glass and says: ‘Dikumenti?’ Petworth hands in the passport, the visa, the letter, the currency form – a document on which he has in fact written nothing, all his expenses in Slaka being, as he understands it, the responsibility of the Min’stratii Kulturi Komitet’iii. The man with the moustache looks at the blank paper; he passes it to the man with the jacket. ‘Geld’ayii na?’ asks this man, looking at Petworth with some amazement. ‘Na, hospitalito,’ says Petworth, spreading his arms wide. The man without the moustache and the man without the jacket observe Petworth for a moment: then ‘Hippi?’ says the man without the jacket. ‘Na, na,’ says Petworth, ‘Prif’sorii universitayii linguistici, hospitalito officiale.’ ‘Vloskan na?’ says the man without the moustache. ‘Look, dikumenti,’ says Petworth, pointing to the grey letter in the passport. ‘Ha,’ says the man without the jacket, reading, very slowly, the letter, ‘Ka? Congressi internat’yayii?’ ‘Colloquiale didactico,’ says Petworth. ‘Na geldin ab pitti?’ asks the man without the jacket. Petworth thinks he understands; he reaches in his pocket, and takes out a small wad of green and blue paper, samples of falling sterling, brought to buy Scotches on the plane. The man without the jacket counts it, and laughs; the man without the moustache writes something on the currency declaration, tears off the top copy, puts it in a drawer, stamps the remaining sheets, and hands it back to Petworth, together with the passport and letter. ‘Grazie,’ says Petworth, lifting the curtain: to find yet another queue of passengers, another armed man, another black line on the floor, and, instead of a row of booths, a single white doorway, which is marked DONAY’II.

  But the third labyrinth is different; the doorway, when Petworth is allowed to pass through, leads to a place of luggage, with open benches surrounded by waiting passengers; there are no armed men. Instead there is a big dapper lady, in dark blue skirt, white blouse, black tie, inspecting baggage; she works alone, and takes much time to get from passenger to passenger, for she is dedicated, poking severely into every bag, lifting out shirts, interrogating underwear, asking many questions. Petworth finds, on a bench, his own blue suitcase, with its tag saying SLK; he stands by it, he waits. Beyond the walls is a ferment of voices, the roar of a crowd. It is probably the noise of the meeters from the roof, waiting to greet the arriving passengers. Among their number must be an emissary to him from the Min’stratii Kulturi Komitet’iii, waiting there to give him money, take him onward, lead him to his lectures; the end is in sight, or hearing. ‘Va?’ says the dapper lady, reaching him at last, tapping his suitcase. Petworth unlocks it; she probes briefly into the intimate world of his changes of sock, his small case of medicines, his formal suit and spare set of shoes. Then she glances briefly into the plastic bag proclaiming ‘Say Hello to the Good Buys from Heathrow.’ The briefcase, however, does detain her attention. Unlatching it, thrusting its jaws wide, she stares down curiously into the mass of papers and books that are shoved untidily inside. She pokes a little, looks at Petworth. Then she says: ‘Ot.’

  ‘Ka?’ says Petworth. ‘Ot,’ says the lady, putting both her hands out, then turning them over. Gesture is language; this is unmistakable. ‘Ah, ot,’ says Petworth, resignedly, upturning the bag. Its contents spill out, a chaos of papers and paragraphs. Lectures lose their paperclips and disintegrate; script blows across the floor; books fall from the bench and fall flat on their faces in the dust. The books are what the lady attends to first. She lifts them and looks at each one: Chomsky on Transformational Grammar; Lyons on Chomsky; Chomsky on Chomsky; Chatman on socio-linguistics; Fowler on Chomsky and Lyons and Chatman. ‘Pomo?’ she asks. ‘Na, na,’ says Petworth, ‘Scienza, wissenschaft.’ ‘Ha,’ says the lady, lifting one of the books (Fowler’s, actually) and looking doubtfully through it; then she lifts another and inspects it page by page. ‘Ka,’ she says, handing it out to Petworth. There is an illustration of writhing human organs. ‘It’s a speech act,’ cries Petworth, ‘The mouth engaged in a speech act.’ ‘Ha,’ says the lady, setting the books aside, suddenly seeming to find them dull. Instead she turns her attention to the scattered texts of Petworth’s own lectures. She spreads them, ill-typed texts, roughly held together with rusting paperclips, texts that have travelled in many parts of the world, known the extremes of heat and cold, passed before many sorts and conditions of men, along the bench in front of her. Then, going through the tidy piles, she picks one out, lifts it onto her clipboard, and attempts to read it.

  It is probably not one of Petworth’s best, a well-worn, anodyne piece entitled ‘The English Language as a Medium of International Communication.’ Its audiences have, however, been large, and it has been with Petworth for some time, as is the way with lectures. Many changes of thought, refinements of feeling, have been scribbled into its margins: Petworth, the author himself no less, has difficulty in reading it. So, evidently, does the lady. She furrows her brow, turns the pages backward and forward, as if the end might be in the beginning or the beginning in the end; she holds it up by the paperclip and shakes it, as if its meaning might emerge this way. What does come out is a few sheets, which fall onto the floor; she picks these up and looks at them with special attention. It is now Petworth is struck with a professional thought, worth, in less anxious circumstances, a lecture in itself. The written word, it occurs to him, does not simply have a different meaning in a different culture, because of its changed relation to the total vocabulary of that culture; it also has a different weight or status. So in some cultures – like, for example, Petworth’s own – words are expended very freely, readily spoken and fairly easily published; they have a low weight on the market. In other cultures – like, for example, this one now – words are traded more selectively and carefully; hence, according to a familiar economic principle, they have a high value on the market. In such cultures, text can be trouble, books small bombs. Moreover, it is possible for low-value words from one environment to become high-value words simply by changing not the words but the environment – for instance, by putting them in a bag and taking them somewhere in a plane. Hence environment determines the worth of words; this can be seen from what is happening to his own, right now.

  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.