David Lodge - Small World

by Author's Note

  In Central Turkey it is 8.45. Dr Akbil Borak, BA (Ankara) PhD (Hull), is having breakfast in his little house on a new estate just outside the capital. He sips black tea from a glass, for there is no coffee to be found in Turkey these days. He warms his hands on the glass because the air is cool inside the house, there being no oil for the central heating either. His plump, pretty wife, Oya, puts before him bread, goat cheese and rose-hip jam. He eats abstractedly, reading a book propped up on the dining-room table. It is The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. XIV. At the other side of the table his three-year-old son knocks over a glass of milk. Akbil Borak turns a page obliviously.

  “I do not think you should read at breakfast,” Oya complains, as she mops up the milk. “It is a bad example for Ahmed, and it is not nice for me. All day I am on my own here with no one to talk to. The least you can do is be sociable before you leave for work.”

  Akbil grunts, wipes his moustache, closes the book, and rises from the table. “It will not be for much longer. There are only seven more volumes, and Professor Swallow arrives next week.”

  The news, abruptly announced a few weeks earlier, of Philip Swallow’s imminent arrival in Turkey to lecture on William Hazlitt has struck dismay into the English faculty at Ankara, since the only member of the teaching staff who knows anything about the Romantic essayists (the man, in fact, who had originally mooted, two years earlier, the idea of marking Hazlitt’s bicentenary with a visiting lecturer from Britain, but, hearing no more about the proposal gradually forgot all about it) is absent on sabbatical leave in the United States; and nobody else in the Department, at the time of receiving the message, had knowingly read a single word of Hazlitt’s writings. Akbil, who was delegated, because of the acknowledged excellence of his spoken English, to meet Philip Swallow at the airport and escort him around Ankara, felt obliged to make good this deficiency and defend the honour of the Department. He has, accordingly, withdrawn the Complete Works of William Hazlitt in twenty-one volumes from the University Library, and is working his way through them at the rate of one volume every two or three days, his own research on Elizabethan sonnet sequences being temporarily sacrificed to this end.

  Volume XIV is The Spirit of the Age. Akbil pops it into his briefcase, buttons up his topcoat, kisses the still pouting Oya, pinches Ahmed’s cheek, and leaves the house. It is the end unit of a row of new terraced houses, built of grey breeze-blocks. Each house has a small garden of identical size and shape, their boundaries neatly demarcated by low breeze-block walls. These gardens have a rather forlorn aspect. Nothing appears to grow inside the walls except the same coarse grass and spiky weeds that grow outside. They seem purely symbolic gardens, weak gestures towards some cosy suburban lifestyle glimpsed by an itinerant Turkish town-planner on a quick tour of Coventry or Cologne; or perhaps feeble attempts to ward off the psychic terror of the wilderness. For beyond the boundary walls at the bottom of each garden the central Anatolian plain abruptly begins. There is nothing for thousands of miles but barren, dusty, windswept steppes. Akbil shivers in a blast of air that comes straight out of central Asia, and climbs into his battered Citroen Deux Chevaux. He wonders, not for the first time, whether they did right to move out of the city, to this bleak and desolate spot, for the sake of a house of their own, a garden, and clean air for Ahmed to breathe. It had reminded him and Oya, when they first saw pictures of the estate in the brochure, of the little terraced house in which they had lived during his three years’ doctoral research as a British Council scholar. But in Hull there had been a pub and a fish-and-chip shop on the corner, a little park two streets away with swings and a see-saw, cranes and ships’ masts visible over the roofs, a general sense of nature well under the thumb of culture. This past winter—it had been a harsh one, made all the worse by the shortages of oil, food and electricity—he and Oya had huddled together round a small wood-burning stove and warmed themselves with the shared memories of Hull, murmuring the enchanted names of streets and shops, “George Street”, “Hedden Road”, “Marks and Spencer’s”, “British Home Stores”. It never seemed odd to Akbil and Oya Borak that the city’s main railway terminus was called Hull Paragon.

  Inside the Rummidge Airport terminal, in contrast to the sleepy suburb beyond the perimeter fence, the day has already well and truly begun. Morris Zapp is not, after all, the only man in Rummidge who is on the move. Beefy businessmen in striped suits, striped shirts and striped ties, carrying sleek executive briefcases and ingenious overnight wardrobe bags, all zips, buttons, straps and pouches, are checking in for their flights to London, Glasgow, Belfast, and Brussels. A group of early vacationers, bound for a package tour in Majorca, and dressed in garish holiday gear, wait patiently for a delayed plane: fat, comfortable folk, who sit in the departure lounge with their legs apart and their hands on their knees, yawning and smoking and eating sweets. A small line of people standing by for seats on the flight to Heathrow looks anxiously at Morris Zapp as he marches up to the British Midland desk and dumps his suitcase on the scales. He checks it through to Milan, and is directed to Gate Five. He goes to the newstand and buys a copy of The Times. He joins a long line of people shuffling through the security checkpoint. His handbaggage is opened and searched. Practised fingers turn over the jumble of toiletries, medicines, cigars, spare socks, and a copy of Hazlitt and the Amateur Reader by Philip Swallow. The lady making the search opens a cardboard box, and small, hard, cylindrical objects, wrapped in silver foil, roll into the palm of her hand. “Bullets?” her eyes seem to enquire. “Suppositories,” Morris Zapp volunteers. Few privacies are vouchsafed to the modern traveller. Strangers rifling through your luggage can tell at a glance the state of your digestive system, what method of contraception you favour, whether you have a denture that requires a fixative, whether you suffer from haemorrhoids, corns, headaches, eye fatigue, flatulence, dry lips, allergic rhinitis and premenstrual tension. Morris Zapp travels with remedies for all these ailments except the last.

  He passes through the electronic metal detector, first handing over his spectacle case, which he knows from experience will activate the device, collects his shoulderbag and proceeds to the waiting lounge by Gate 5. After a few minutes the flight to Heathrow is called, and Morris follows the ground hostess and the other passengers out on to the tarmac apron. He frowns at the sight of the plane they are to board. It is a long time since he has flown in a plane with propellers.

  In Tokyo, it is already late afternoon. Akira Sakazaki has come home from his day’s work at the University, where he teaches English, just in time to miss the worst of the rush hour, and avoid the indignity of being manhandled into the carriages of the subway trains by burly officials specially employed for this purpose so that the automatic doors may close. A bachelor, whose family home is in a small resort far away in the mountains, he lives alone in a tall modern apartment block. He is able to afford this accommodation because, though well appointed, it is extremely restricted in space. In fact he cannot actually stand up in it, and on unlocking the door, and having taken off his shoes, is obliged to crawl, rather than step, inside.

  The apartment, or living unit, is like a very luxurious padded cell. About four metres long, three metres wide and one and a half metres high, its walls, floor and ceiling are lined with a seamless carpet of soft, synthetic fibre. A low recessed shelf along one wall acts as a sofa by day, a bed by night. Shelves and cupboards are mounted above it. Recessed or fitted flush into the opposite wall are a stainless steel sink, refrigerator, microwave oven, electric kettle, colour television, hi-fi system and telephone. A low table sits on the floor before the window, a large, double-glazed porthole which looks out on to a blank, hazy sky; though if one goes up close and squints downwards one can see people and cars streaming along the street below, converging, meeting and dividing, like symbols on a video game. The window cannot be opened. The room is air-conditioned, temperature-controlled and soundproof. Four hundred identical cells are stacked and interlocked in this building,
like a tower of eggboxes. It is a new development, an upmarket version of the “capsule” hotels situated near the main railway termini that have proved so popular with Japanese workers in recent years.

  There is a small hatch in one wall that gives access to a tiny windowless bathroom, with a small chair-shaped tub just big enough to sit in, and a toilet that can be used only in a squatting position, which is customary for Japanese men in any case. In the basement of the building there is a traditional Japanese bathhouse with showers and big communal baths, but Akira Sakazaki rarely makes use of it. He is well satisfied with his accommodation, which provides all modern amenities in a compact and convenient form, and leaves him the maximum amount of time free for his work. How much time people waste in walking from one room to another-especially in the West! Space is time. Akira was particularly shocked by the waste of both in Californian homes he visited during his graduate studies in the United States: separate rooms not just for sleeping, eating and excreting, but also for cooking, studying, entertaining, watching television, playing games, washing clothes and practising hobbies—all spread out profligately over acres or land, so that it could take a whole minute to walk from say, one’s bedroom to one’s study.

  Akira now takes off his suit and shirt, and stows them carefully away in the fitted cupboard above the sofa/bed. He crawls through the hatch into his tiny bathroom, soaps and rinses himself all over, then fills the armchair-shaped tub with very hot water. Silent fans extract the steam from the bathroom as he simmers gently, opening his pores to cleanse them of the city’s pollution. He splashes himself with clean, lukewarm water, and crawls back into the main room. He dons a cotton yukata and sits crosslegged on the floor before the low table, on which there is a portable electric typewriter. To one side of the typewriter there is a neat stack of sheets of paper whose surface is divided into two hundred ruled squares, in each of which a Japanese character has been carefully inscribed by hand; on the other side of the typewriter is a neat pile of blank sheets of the same squared paper, and a hardcover edition of a novel, with a well-thumbed dustjacket: Could Try Harder, by Ronald Frobisher. Akira inserts a blue aerogramme, carbon paper and flimsy into the typewriter, and begins a letter in English.

  Dear Mr Frobisher,

  I am now nearly halfway through my translating of “Could Try Harder”. I am sorry to bother you so soon with further questions, but I would be very grateful if you would help me with the following points. Page references are to the second impression of 1970, as before.

  Akira Sakazaki takes up the book to find the page reference to his first query, and pauses to scrutinize the photograph of the author on the back flap of the jacket. He often pauses thus, as if by contemplating the author’s countenance he may be able to enter more sympathetically into the mind behind it, and intuitively solve the problems of tone and stylistic nuance which are giving him so much trouble. The photograph, however, dark and grainy, gives away few secrets. Ronald Frobisher is pictured against a door with frosted glass on which is engraved in florid lettering the word “PUBLIC”. This itself is a puzzle to Akira. Is it a public lavatory, or a public library? The symbolism would be quite different in each case. The face of the author is round, fleshy, pockmarked, and peppered with tiny black specks, like grains of gunpowder. The hair is thin, dishevelled. Frobisher wears thick, horn-rimmed spectacles and a grubby raincoat. He glares somewhat truculently at the camera. The note under the photograph reads: Ronald Frobisher was born and brought up in the Black Country. He was educated at a local grammar school, and at All Saints’ College, Oxford. After graduating, he returned to his old school as a teacher of English until 1957, when the publication of his first novel, Any Road, immediately established him as a leading figure in the new generation of “Angry Young Men”. Since 1958 he has been a full-time writer, and now lives with his wife and two children in Greenwich, London. Could Try Harder is his fifth novel.

  And still his most recent, though it was published nine years ago. Akira has often wondered why Ronald Frobisher published no new novel in the last decade, but it does not seem polite to enquire.

  Akira finds the page he is looking for, and lays the book open on the table. He touchtypes: p .107, 3 down. “Bugger me, but I feel like some faggots tonight.” Does Ernie mean that he feels a sudden desire for homosexual intercourse? If so, why does he mention this to his wife?

  Morris Zapp should have been in Heathrow by now, but there has been a delay in leaving Rummidge. The plane is still parked on the apron outside the terminal building.

  “What do you think they’re doing—winding up the elastic?” he quips to the man sitting in the aisle seat next to him.

  The man stiffens and pales. “Is there something wrong?” he says in the accents of the American Deep South.

  “It could be visibility. Looks kinda foggy out there in the middle of the airfield. You from the South?”

  “Fog?” says the man in alarm, peering across Morris out of the window. He is wearing faintly tinted rimless glasses.

  At that moment the four engines of the plane cough into life, one by one, just like an old war movie, and the propellers carve circles in the damp morning air. The plane taxis to the end of the runway, and goes on taxiing, wheels bumping over the cracks in the concrete, with no perceptible increase in speed. Morris cannot see much beyond the plane’s wingtip. The man in the tinted spectacles has his eyes closed, and grips the arms of his seat with white knuckles. Morris has never seen anyone look so frightened. The plane turns again and carries on taxiing.

  “Have we taken off yet?” says the man, after some minutes have passed in this fashion.

  “No, I think the pilot is lost in the fog,” says Morris.

  The man hurriedly undoes his safety belt, muttering, “I’m getting out of this crazy plane.” He shouts towards the pilot’s cabin, “Stop the plane, I’m getting off.”

  A hostess hurries down the aisle towards him. “You can’t do that, sir, please sit down and fasten your safety belt.”

  Protesting, the man is persuaded back into his seat. “I have one of these extended travel tickets,” he remarks to Morris, “so I thought I would go from London to Stratford-on-Avon by air. Never again.”

  At that moment the captain comes on the intercom to explain that he has been taxiing up and down the runway to try and disperse the ground mist with his propellers.

  “I don’t believe it,” says Morris.

  The manoeuvre is, however, evidently successful. They are given permission to take off. The plane halts at the end of the runway, and the engine note rises to a higher pitch. The cabin shudders and rattles. The Southerner’s teeth are chattering, whether from fear or vibration it is impossible to tell. Then the plane lurches forward, gathers speed and, surprisingly quickly, rises into the air. Soon they are through the cloud cover, and bright sunlight floods the cabin. The Southerner’s spectacles are the photosensitive sort and turn into two opaque black discs, so it is difficult to tell whether his fear has abated. Morris wonders whether to strike up a conversation with the man, but there is so much noise from the engines that he shrinks from the effort, and there is something slightly spooky about the opaque glasses that does not inspire friendly overtures. Instead, Morris takes out his newspaper and pricks his ears at the welcome sound of the coffee trolley coming up the aisle.

  Morris Zapp basks in the sun, a cup of coffee steaming on the tray before him, and reads in his copy of The Times of clashes between police and protesters against the National Front in Southall; of earthquakes in Yugoslavia, fighting in Lebanon, political murders in Turkey, meat shortages in Poland, car bombs in Belfast, and of many other tragedies, afflictions, outrages, at various points of the globe. But up here, in the sun, above the clouds, all is calm, if not quiet. The plane is not as smooth and fast as a jet, but there is more legroom than usual, and the coffee is good and hot. As the newspaper informs him, there are many worse places to be.

  “Bugger me,” grunts Ronald Frobisher, stooping to pi
ck up the morning’s mail from the doormat, “If there isn’t another letter from that Jap translator of mine.”

  It is eight-thirty-five a. m. in Greenwich—Greenwich Mean Time, indeed, the zero point from which all the world’s time zones are calculated. The blue aerogramme that Ronald Frobisher turns over in his fingers is not, of course,_ the one that Akira Sakazaki typed a few minutes ago, but one he mailed last week. Another is at this moment in the cargo section of a jumbo jet somewhere over the Persian Gulf, en route to London, and yet another is hurtling through the computerized machinery of the Tokyo Central Post Office, racing along the conveyor belts, veering left, veering right, submerging and resurfacing like a kayak shooting rapids.

  “That must be at least the fifth or sixth one in the last month,” Ronald Frobisher grumbles, as he returns to the breakfast-room.

  “Eh?” says his wife, Irma, without looking up from the Guardian.

  “That bloke who’s translating Could Try Harder into Japanese. I must have answered about two hundred questions already.”

  “I don’t know why you bother,” says Irma.

  “Because it’s interesting, to tell you the truth,” says Ronald Frobisher, sitting down at the table and slitting open the aerogramme with a knife.