Machine

by Peter Adolphsen

  The lake and the forest had long since disappeared and been replaced by arid mountains intersected by rivers. The slowly forming oil meandered through the surrounding minerals and accumulated in pockets – collectively known as the Green River Formation, once oil in serious quantities was discovered in the area in 1948. The small quantity of oil that had once been the heart of a mare, was now located just under one kilometre below ground level, thirteen kilo metres south of the town of Jensen. The area was called the Uinta Basin and belonged to the federal state of Utah in the United States of America.

  The darkness and the silence of underground were broken one day in 1973 when the 3 x 3 slanted, individually rotating, toothed rims of a drilling crown carved their way to the oil pocket. Under high pressure, water was injected down into the borehole, forcing oil up to the surface where it was transferred through a pipeline to Chevron’s refinery in Salt Lake City. At the very moment when our drop of oil was on its way through the pipeline at Walker Hollow an accident occurred there, which cost a worker his lower right arm.

  At the time in question this worker called himself Jimmy Nash, but his original name was Djamolidine Hasanov. He was born in 1948, the only child of Hosni, an oil worker, and Ivana, a shop assistant in the local Produkty; both were Kumyks and residents of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijani SSR. When Djamolidine was ten years old two things occurred which were to shape his future destiny: he was given a racer bike, and the Central Commission for Statistics of the Soviet Union carried out a national census. His father had miraculously conjured up the bike: a brand new Velosipedov with genuine rubber tyres, perforated leather saddle, drop handlebars, toe brackets on the pedals and hand brakes. The frame was pillar-box red with a yellow hammer and sickle on the head tube. From this day onwards Djamolidine spent as much time as possible in the saddle; school lessons were spent pining for the Velosipedov and, as soon as he got home, he would scamper down the stairwell of their block of flats with his bike slung across his shoulder, leap onto the saddle and race around until just before sunset. It was a rule that he had to be back in time for evening prayers and there were no exceptions.

  Djamolidine’s parents were a tad more religious than most people in Baku and insisted that all three members of the family – Hosni, Ivana and Djamolidine – joined in the daily prayers at sunrise and sunset as well as the noon prayer on Fridays. Also, pork and alcohol were rarely allowed inside the door of their allocated flat, which consisted of three rooms plus a bathroom with a sit-in bathtub. Apart from that Djamolidine was free to do whatever he wanted outside in the officially atheist country. He wanted to ride his bike.

  He followed the various roads out of town towards Siazan, Maraza or Alyat. He crisscrossed areas with flamboyant houses, once the homes of rich people in pre-revolutionary times and now the oil districts. There thousands of drilling towers soared, making up a kind of anti-forest complete with abandoned and producing wells to represent dead and living trees respectively, and anti-lakes in the form of oil pools with hardened surfaces. Flares, rusty oil barrels, damaged drill pipes and drilling crowns and a range of abandoned machinery assumed the character of animals and bushes. On Saturdays Djamolidine always brought a packed lunch out to the drilling operation where his father was working. Every week he cut a couple of seconds off the time it took him to ride this distance.

  Nature had blessed Djamolidine with a photographic memory for lists and registers; for example he could reel off the contents page of the popular edition of Lenin’s writings, including pagination, or the Shiite line of imams from Ali up until the present day, including Islamic as well as Christian calendar dates. He soon memorised the names and the order of the road signs for the various routes he took and would, on his way home, recite them out loud or simply visualise them in his head, even spelling their names backwards as he cycled past.

  One afternoon, as he was riding very slowly in order to improve his balance, a Lada pulled in on the square in front of his apartment block. The emblem on the bonnet indicated that it belonged to the Central Commission for Statistics for the Soviet Union. It was a well-known fact that a national census was being carried out this year. One of his school friends owned a sheet of stamps which depicted a census official, an apparatchik in a nice tie, visiting a range of Soviet people: Russians, Mongolians, Turks etc. All the stamps showed the same dark blond official, as a result of which Djamolidine, perhaps subconsciously, had imagined that all census officials would look like that, but his illusions were shattered when the car door opened and a wheezing, black-haired dumpling of a man got out. The two of them briefly made eye contact, the fat man and the boy on his bike, whereupon the official plodded in the direction of the first stairwell. There was a blotch of sweat on the back of his shirt.

  When there was a knock on their door four hours later, the family was ready, their hair wet combed and everyone holding their identity papers. The flat was in the top corner of the block and was consequently the twelfth and final stop on today’s list for ‘comrade Boris Zverev, senior assistant from SCKS’ as he introduced himself. He was clearly in no hurry to leave and only made a brief show of turning down the offer of a cup of tea. Having processed the registration of the family, Zverev made himself even more comfortable on the sofa with a fresh cup of tea and said:

  ‘Even though a census is and indeed should be the epitome of exact, factual truth – one, two, three is an indisputable sequence, isn’t it? – there exists a degree of uncertainty both before and after the census, and that is in choosing what to count to begin with and how to interpret the results afterwards. Both these elements are the antithesis to numbers: selection and interpretation are activities which presume an acting subject, a human being, and all human beings are fallible. However, here in the Soviet Union we are fortunate that the state apparatus, in this instance the Interior Ministry, employs the most refined and rational science to compute these two tasks for us. The principles behind this census . . .’

  At this point Zverev placed his briefcase on his lap and began looking for some documents, but stopped halfway to add: ‘Our task is to count the people, who broadly speaking can be defined on the basis of whatever language they speak. But when is a language a language and not merely a dialect? In real life there are plenty of hybrid and transitional forms, and yet the vast majority speak a clearly defined language. Languages are a product of the dynamics of history. History passes through a series of phases, as you well know, from the hunter-gatherer stage on to feudalism to capitalism, socialism and finally communism. Language development likewise progresses in parallel phases, which are also characterised by an increasing rationality in their construction. After all, we live in the imperfect socialist period where language differences still exist. However, with the arrival of communism, and this is my personal theory, people will naturally, because they are equal men and women of intertwined cultures, acquire a common language, which for historical reasons will be Russian.’

  He said that in Russian. A moment’s silence followed. Zverev, peering around the spartanly furnished living room and then remembering that his hand was halfway down his briefcase, twitched slightly and pulled out the desired piece of paper.

  ‘The peoples of the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics are initially divided into nine groups: Slavs, Finno-Ugrics, Turks, Mongolians, Iranians, Ibero-Caucasians, Latins, Germanics, and Latvian-Lithuanians.’ At this point he turned to consult the paper: ‘The following are Slavs: Russians, Ukrainians, White Russians, Poles, and Bulgarians. The following are Finno-Ugrics: Estonians, Mordvins, Karelians, Udmurts (formerly known as Votiaks), Maris, Hungarians, Finns, Komi Zyrians and Komi Permyaks. The Turkic peoples are Uzbeks, Tatars, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Chuvashes, Turkmen, Bashkirs, Kyrgyzs, Yakuts, Karakalpaks and Kumyks,’ – here he threw a quick glance at the family – ‘Tuvins, Gagauses, Uigurs, Karachays, Khakassins, Altaians, Balkars, Nogais and Crimean Tartars. Mongolians are Buryats, Kalmyks and Koreans. The Iranian peoples are made up of Armenians (often co
unted as a people in their own right, but not in this census), Tajiks, North Ossetians, South Ossetians and Greeks. The Ibero-Caucasian peoples are Georgians, Chechens, Ingushes, Avars, Tsezs (who speak the same language), Adyghes, and Abazars. The Latin peoples are Romanians and Moldavians (who also speak Romanian, but use the Cyrillic alphabet). Germanic peoples are Germans and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Latvian-Lithuanians are, as their name implies, Latvians and Lithuanians. Apart from that there is an appendix concerning Nenets (formerly known as Samoyeds), Veps, Kriashens, Besermyans, Tungus, Telenganas, Kashgars, Talyshes and Yedysans.’

  The family members had not taken in a great deal of Zverev’s first statement; the list of peoples, however, made a huge impression on Djamolidine. The geographic outline of the Soviet Union swirled like a spiral galaxy in his mind as the size of the country finally began to sink in.

  Shortly afterwards Hosni politely escorted Zverev to the door and Ivana sent Djamolidine to bed. Later, as the boy lay in the darkness, he imagined the swell of all the languages in the world spoken simultaneously.

  From that day onwards Djamolidine kept a notebook in his pocket where he would write an entry every time he met a person from a different people. He quickly reached twenty-five different ones and then thirty, but at that point his interest began to fade or, rather, his frustration with the existing system of classification grew, while simultaneously his own attempt at creating a superior one started running into difficulties: for example, should there be specific subcategories for people of mixed race; a boy at his school had grandparents who were Armenian, Azerbaijani, Russian and German respectively, and so ought he to have his own particular subclass? Which would be a subcategory of what precisely? He considered classification according to mother tongue, but that would produce misleading results – for himself, for example, who was Kumyk, but spoke and thought in Russianised Azerbaijani. Nor would religion or geography be workable parameters for classification. Everything can be divided into more and more categories the closer you look at it, he thought, and vice versa, every single phenomenon ticks several boxes when you look at the bigger picture. Likewise there are several names for every single object. Take him, for instance: his full name was Djamolidine Hasanov, but his friends and family normally called him Djamo, and his mother sometimes called him Moli or just Mo. His schoolteacher called him Young Pioneer Hasanov, and in the playground he was known as Djimi or Rat, if anyone wanted to tease him. As a cyclist he wanted to be known as the Vulture from Baku. In addition, everything could be written using different symbols. The three generations in Djamolidine’s family each used a different alphabet: he himself used Cyrillic for writing in Russian and Azerbaijani, his father, Hosni, however, had learned the Latin alphabet in school and wrote in Azerbaijani sprinkled with numerous Russian words and certain Kumyk adaptations. Finally there was Nusrat, his grandfather, who had learned Persian and Arabic at a madrasa in Tabriz before the revolution, and now in his old age used the Arabic alphabet in order to produce a form of Kumyk spelling of his own invention. Both Hosni and Nusrat were able to read Cyrillic letters, but they did not use them for writing. Djamolidine was particularly mesmerised by his grandfather’s flourishes.

  In time the contents of the notebook underwent a barely discernible shift from data collection to musings, which orbited around a basic piece of knowledge he acquired the evening the censor visited them: the world is huge. It triggered a longing to travel abroad, which for the time being could be relieved by the sucking sound of rubber tyres against tarmac.

  Power is a measure of an individual’s or an institution’s ability to influence others in order to achieve its own goals. This involves two things: will and the ability to enforce one’s will, if necessary, by violent means. Only rarely is actual physical force applied, as the implied threat, paired with a clear allocation of roles, generally encourages the weaker part to surrender in advance, frequently without the parties themselves even becoming aware of this process. Power play is the prevailing way for states as well as individuals to behave and is consequently the cement that enables relationships between various entities to be maintained; a kind of existential connective tissue. Power exists in political, economic, sociological, psychological and other situations and the tendency to create structures, through which power can be exercised, can be found everywhere. The larger the power the more complex the structures.

  When Djamolidine in 1962, aged fourteen years and motivated by his desire to take part in competitive cycling, became a member of Komsomol, he joined at one of the lowest levels of what is probably the most complex power structure ever created: the state formation known as the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. This structure was, despite a relentlessly proclaimed equality, hierarchical as few had ever been: at the top was the general secretary and below him the state apparatus with the Ministerial Council, the Supreme Soviet and its Presidium, the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities, the Ministerial Councils of the fifteen republics and the Supreme Soviet, the Soviets of the approximately 150 regions with their associated executive committees and below them the Soviet and executive committees of approximately 5,600 districts and 45,000 villages. All authorities were officially elected from the bottom up, but in reality were appointed from the top by the Communist Party which represented the heart, spinal column and peripheral nerves in a triangular structure consisting of a bureau, a committee and a secretariat – a structure which replicated itself up through the levels of the pyramid starting with local party associations, to districts and regions, to republics and at the very top the Polit Bureau, the Central Committee and the Secretariat of the Central Committee. The military and the police forces, with or without uniform, were the muscles of the structure, and the education systems and various cultural institutions acted as the intestines. In addition there were trade unions, women’s organisations, artists’ unions, the pioneer organisations for children and the aforementioned organisation for young people, Komsomol.

  Having been admitted into his local division, Djamolidine was accepted into a Baku cycling team and was soon afterwards promoted to the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic’s under-16s team as there was no shortage of his talent or motivation. He quickly grasped that the sport of cycling involved much more than merely pedalling uphill on a metal frame with rubber wheels. The presence of other riders turned his attempts to reduce wind resistance into a relentless game. He realised the importance of reading the wheel of the rider in front of him, following the rhythm; he experienced being sucked into a field of possibly a hundred riders, cycling in a fan formation to cancel out the wind and forming part of a breakaway group of leads. When he had been cycling on his own he had been playing a simple game of three-in-a-row; now it was chess or Go.

  His coaches tried to make him cycle laps, but Djamolidine despised this repetitive pedalling that got him nowhere and deliberately rode below his ability.

  ‘I’m a mountain biker!’ he stated, making a defiant stance with his skinny, but sinewy body.

  His teenage years passed with school, training and races for the ASSR team, where he now only just managed to be promoted to the under-18s and did not even come close to being selected for the national youth team, and he was able to hold on to his place purely because he had swallowed even more amphetamines than his competitors at the qualifying races. His talent was, in other words, limited. His life away from cycling was becoming increasingly unfocused and, when the time came for a possible promotion to the senior teams, everyone involved already knew what the answer would be.

  In the period that followed he tried with diminishing ardour to find work as a bicycle mechanic. At home the respect he had once commanded started to fade away as he was no longer seen wearing the colours of the national team, and, in the absence of cycling training camps, he began to feel seriously trapped in his parents’ flat. He tried going out for daylong rides in the mountains, but riding on his own was and always would be a poor substitute.

  Both his paren
ts and the authorities made it clear that finding a job was now a priority and Djamolidine finally saw no alternative to the oil industry. He was hired as a tapper on a state drilling operation. After two and a half years, however, he had become sufficiently fed up with staring at the slow see-sawing counter-weight movements of the pumps to carry out an idea which had been forming in his mind for a long time: escaping from the republic.

  He would ride his bike across the mountains to Iran in order to apply for asylum at the American embassy in Teheran. The majority of the border between Azerbaijani SSR and Iran followed the Arak River. However, towards the south and out towards the coast, the border went through the Talesh Mountains and Djamolidine had heard of a path which would take him as far as the border. As long as he succeeded in getting across the border, he would be able to find his way on the other side easily.

  Once he had completed his preparations his backpack contained the following: one change of clothes in a waterproof bag, identity papers and other documents, one hundred roubles and a little Iranian currency (a 500-rial note and a few coins), a water bottle and ten herbal biscuits wrapped in waxed paper together with a bolt cutter. He was wearing his national cycling team outfit with black weatherproofs on the outside.

  On the evening of the 27th of October 1970, a northerly wind was blowing. At midnight he tiptoed out of the flat, leaving a brief letter explaining to his parents that he would miss them, but that his desire to see the Western world was too great.

  The darkness, the rain, the tailwind and the black garments aided him. He was possibly aided by Allah as well; Djamolidine was not entirely sure if he still believed in him, but as he headed for the border, he did catch himself thinking about the Gracious and the Merciful. Or he might just have been unbelievably lucky: he encountered no officials, Soviet or Iranian, the fences were few and the barbed wire rusty. Nor was the cold any worse than could be offset by the physical exertion.