Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  He was so accustomed to transformations—transformations!?—what else was all life, for God’s ache, but Transformations?—that he scarcely did more than nose dive when he saw on the buckle the etching of an opening rose. Swooping nearer… nearer… even that took till infinity o’clock!—really, really, time was such an inadequate fluid to stage this whole shebang in—he saw the rose was not a rose but the genitals of his female friend, friendly female friend, half open in homely welcome, abud with its welcome and the dew of it.

  Even as he stooped to kiss it, the pattern became just a pattern in the sand, the eternity of sand. “It’s a silly con,” he said, but who spoke? There again went the bells. And he was laughing at or with the Great Illusionist in the sky… Sand… Silly con… Silicon… he—or perhaps she—-had been diddled…

  Of course, laughter was at the heart of everything. He thought, waking (or did someone say it was the other way round?), it had to be laughter. In the Beginning was the belly laugh. The Big Belly Laugh.

  “I’ve never been taken in by its pretensions…”

  “Don’t be taken in by its lack of pretensions either…”

  But who spoke?

  And in the general rejoicing, every wonderfully formed leaf on the oak above them sang. But who really sang?

  And the ants still marched. But who really marched?

  They snoozed first. Then they rolled about and groaned. “Blimey!” Burnell said, surprising himself. Then they both sat up and picked the acorns out of their hair.

  “Christ, what was that stuff?”

  “Ask not Christ but Allah the Merciful.”

  Already it was growing late. The flying woman was gone, the vision incorporating her shriveled. The sunlight lay smoky and aslant across the baked park. The old men were tottering homeward, hands still locked arthritically behind backs, to be bullied by their sons and to gulp down the leftovers of family meals. They’d been in wars, and so knew little of general interest. Their thin voices called farewell to each other—until tomorrow, Ali—until tomorrow—until we meet here…or in Hades…

  The day was gone.

  “Wonderful, wonderful stuff,” Burnell said, on an exhalation of four, wondering what exactly it was he couldn’t remember. He had a raging thirst, and wanted to get back to his hotel. His aching bones craved a bed to lie on, or a bier. Yet he had wit enough to ask Hikmat Haydar if he knew of any other memorable Ashkhabad structure he should inspect, somewhere not logged in the WACH computers.

  “Remember this, my friend. There are many, many possibilities. We do not always see them but they are always there. It’s only sometimes they’re not there. So don’t be deceived. One way or the other, in fact.”

  Burnell repeated his question, with stumbling variations.

  The melon-seller was wheeling his stall away. As he went, his soft bell tinkled. The sound, growing fainter and fainter, reminded Burnell pleasantly of Aleksandr Borodin’s “Steppes of Central Asia,” with the bells of the caravanserai dying away into the all-encompassing distance.

  Dr. Haydar held aloft a celebratory finger, perhaps as a token that at last he had triumphed and could pour assistance like cement over this stiff Englishman.

  “Yes, positively. Something memorably structure to your English taste. Tomorrow I arrive to your hotel early. I come in my brother’s car and I take you to inspect a great Turkmen memorial, the Friendship Bridge.

  “It’s just as you would say it, demotically, ‘worth a prayer, never mind a vision.’ ”

  15

  Makhtumkuli Day

  The railway station was not far from Burnell’s hotel. The station fascinated him. He walked to it while awaiting Dr. Haydar in his brother’s car. From a kiosk there he bought a postcard of the station itself and wrote on it a few lines to Stephanie.

  “Dearest Stephanie, Ashkhabad is a pleasant modern city, situated on the world’s longest irrigation canal. Isn’t the news from Bulgaria awful. Still, the description of that hot thing boring down to the Earth’s core is sexy in its way. Enjoying myself, hope you are. Love.”

  Would Stephanie keep the card, as she had the one from Budapest, supposing it arrived safely? Ashkhabad was farther from Moscow than Moscow was from London. It had hardly been considered by the outside world until the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Burnell could see it was still remote and marginal viewed from Santa Barbara and Humbert Stuckmann’s fabric-filled lair. Did he believe that the future of the world was being shaped in these half-dozen new Islamic nations, or was that just a thought designed to make his own life less marginal?

  These cards he sent from the distant places to which profession and inclination led him had once been mute pleas to Stephanie to think of, and possibly love, him again. Hope—rather like the view of Ashkhabad railway station—had faded with the years. Now the colored cards were little more than boasts, irritants even. Dearest Stephanie, Look where your neglect has got me: bloody Central Asia…

  Of course, there was that other reason for his being here, that other faint hope. This he explained to Dr. Haydar.

  The traffic in the main avenues of Ashkhabad was unusually thick, as Haydar complained when he arrived, an hour late, wedged in the driving-seat of his elder brother’s Volkswagen Golf.

  After the trip the previous day, they were friends. Shedding his usual reserve, Burnell said, having climbed into the little wheeled oven, that he needed Haydar’s help. Some of his most private moments had been stolen from him, to be sold around the world on the black market to EMV addicts. Once he started on the subject, he found it hard to stop. “My most private and precious moments. Not only my learning, my academic skills and experience, also—you’ll understand this, Dr. Haydar, as a married man—my most intimate moments with my wife, now my ex-wife. Years of our life together. Happy times, sacred times, successes, failures. Nobody’s business but ours… Stolen, for others to—to gloat over. If privacy goes, what’s left? In England and Germany there are laws against such things, with heavy penalties…”

  “Shut up will you?” yelled Haydar, shaking a fist out of the window. They were crawling in thick traffic. His anger was directed at a man hooting continuously in the car behind. “Camel-driver!” he shouted. But the road was choked with vehicles, all hooting. “Sorry, Roy, what did you say?”

  “It’s the latest form of vandalism. Mental vandalism. In England, when a man’s private erotic moments were stolen and sold as pornography—as mine have been, alas—lawyers laid down that this was, among other things, defamation of character, since—”

  “Hang up a moment. Curses! You dung beetle!” He halted the car abruptly, avoiding a bump into the car ahead. People were jostling past and between vehicles. They swarmed to where armed police were manning a barricade across the road.

  “Scheiss,” said Haydar, with a sigh. He hit his huge forehead with the heel of one hand. “I am forgotten. You know what today it is? It is Makhtumkuli Day. General Makhkamov will speak in the square as a tribute. We’re trapped. No Friendship Bridge today. Very sorry.”

  “What’s Makhtumkuli Day?”

  “You heard of Makhtumkuli? Or course you do. Schweinhund!”

  “Bloody hell!” The camel-driver behind had rammed into them. They were jerked a meter forward, bumping into the car in front.

  The driver of this car immediately jumped out, full of rage, and ran back, fists in air. On seeing the immensity of Haydar, a quarter of whom was hanging out of the Golf window, he shouted an apology for carelessness and returned quietly to his vehicle.

  “Makhtumkuli,” said Haydar with impressive calm, “is great national poet of Turkmenistan. Poet, humanist, folklorist, truly great man, son of a poet, Azadi, who is still read in this region.”

  Crowds were jostling by, cheerfully on the whole. A middle-aged man in a business suit came up, clapped Haydar on the shoulder, and fell into conversation with him. Burnell stood by, content to watch what was happening. Many of the younger men drifting past were talking into mobile phones.
Who could say if they were conversing with each other?

  Turning back to Burnell, Haydar said, “This is a good man, Seydi, who would like to shake your hand and welcome you to Ashkhabad. He would like to invite you to a meal some time, but I said the food was not to your English taste. He is related to my wife, and is also a silversmith.”

  While shaking Burnell’s hand, Seydi also clutched his arm as if to draw him closer, smiling in a companionable way and nodding his head to express approval of all foreigners. He spoke rapidly. Haydar translated.

  “The dear man deplores your ignorance of Makhtumkuli, of which I informed him. He says the poet was another silversmith, so he particularly admires him. He says the words of the poet are known and sung all over Central Asia. He wishes to recite a verse to you which he hopes will express the forthcoming unity of the world, when Turkmen and British shall join hands.”

  “Very optimistic of him,” murmured Burnell.

  “The verse expresses the unity of Turkmenistan nowadays, as the country itself becomes unified.”

  Seydi struck a recitational pose, raising a hand above his head.

  “Turkmenler bir yereh Baaghlasa beeli,

  Ghoorudar Ghulzumi, deryayi Neeli.

  Tekeh, Yomut, Gookleng, Yaazir, Aleeli,

  Bir dowleteh ghulluk etsek baasheemiz.”

  People passing had stopped to listen. Some nodded their appreciation. Concluding his short oration, Seydi again shook Burnell’s hand, gave a bow and moved off.

  “Well, you see what my friend said about is the various tribes of this country, Gokleng and so on. If all the Turkmens will serve as a single state, and gird on the Belt of Determination, they will make the Nile run dry and also drain the Red Sea. It’s an aspiration.”

  Recalling how the Aral Sea had already been drained, with disastrous effect, Burnell was not greatly taken by the aspiration, but was too polite to say anything. Perhaps sensing his response, Haydar said, in a disgruntled tone, “These things are metaphors, allowed to such poets. Everyone wishes for unity. For this they prize Makhtumkuli. The poetry is not to your taste?”

  It seemed to Burnell a good moment to change the subject.

  “OK, so what are we going to do? I’d say we were stuck here, and likely to cook.”

  “I should have driven the other route. I forget the day. Now we are jammed, obviously. No escape. If we escape, it looks hostile. Rejoicing is compulsory on Makhtumkuli day. So we park the car and go to listen to General Makhkamov’s speech.”

  “Is that—er, safe?”

  “For us? For my brother’s car? Come. We park here during the speech. Men must listen to lies occasionally. It’s a duty when a poet dies, nein?”

  Before they left the Golf under a tree, Haydar removed the spark plugs from the engine and locked all doors. They joined a gathering crowd, among which camels were numbered.

  A considerable crowd had already assembled outside the main mosque, where a railed platform had been constructed. Above the platform hung two large portraits, one of Makhtumkuli, one of Diyanizov. Both men, the poet and the president, wearing square beards and tarbooshes, appeared rather similar, except that the poet looked left, the president right.

  The crowd consisted of men and boys, mostly wearing suits, with keffiyehs slung loosely round their heads. The sun shone down on them, the greatest of Allah’s gifts. People were silent, except for the vendors who moved among them. On the outskirts of the crowd stood a more rural kind of men, dark of visage, turbanned, some with dogs or even small hairy goats on leashes. Behind them, and lining the square, were APCs and American-built tanks, drawn up with their guns pointing into the square. The tank crews lounged beside them, smoking.

  All of which was pleasant to the inner Burnell. That mysterious compartment had registered long ago a saying he read in the pages of the Upanishads; there, the wisdom and insanity of the East had been encapsulated in a parable—which in fact he had completely misunderstood in practical Western fashion—concerning two birds. These two birds, according to Burnell’s understanding, lived in the fruit tree of life. One of the birds ate the fruit. The other watched the fruit being eaten.

  Burnell regarded this as a representation of his own inner life. He wandered, yet something within him was always still. This was, to his mind, a healthful state of affairs. Yet the division—that was more questionable. There certainly was division in the mind. He saw it embodied before him.

  In the increasing crowd, there were no women among all the men. True, a small number of women stood unobtrusively apart, to one side, not laughing as African women would have been, not chattering as English women would have been: rather, conversing sidelong, if at all. Many were veiled, some went in chadors, covered from head to foot. The fashion for the veil had returned at the time of the war with Uzbekistan, when men were away at the front, following these same tanks now aimed at them. Most of the women were observing the word of the Prophet to “draw their veils close around them.”

  The seclusion of women Burnell found most dispiriting. He missed their bright presence in restaurants and shops and, to some extent, on the main streets. He had visited a brothel but felt little more than compassion for the girls imprisoned there.

  Yesterday, a woman driving an open tourer had waved a greeting. He had been too surprised to return the wave, had missed the instant, and she had driven by. She was probably on the staff of a European embassy, possibly Italian. He still carried an impression of her smile, her hair blowing free in the breeze, her naked wrist, unbraceleted.

  And what did these people think, as they struggled for cohesion? Were the poet and the president like the two birds?

  The previous evening, still slightly decayed from his “flight powder” trip, he had walked into the lounge of his hotel. There he found a huge crowd assembled—men again, all men. He had expected it to be a political meeting. No. They watched television. They watched an old American soap opera, “Dallas,” dating back to the eighties of the previous century.

  The immensely rich, immensely immoral characters of the teleplay swaggered across the screen in their fine clothes. Blonde women flaunted their figures, lounged by swimming-pools. The men lied and cheated their brothers. Everyone drank and fornicated and murdered. But they possessed what the watching Turkmen wished for, a generation later: success and wealth. And in the background was something else, oil, promoter of the Dallas greed, which also excited the audience.

  Here was the Satan of which the Koran warned. Here was the universal tug-of-war between materialism and spirituality. The gross pleasures of the West tempted these sons of Allah. They probably, Burnell thought, looked up to J.R. Ewing and the dreadful “Dallas” family as something to aspire to. With all its faults, wasn’t the path of Islam a better way? Which of those two fearsome birds would eventually come home to roost unaccompanied in Turkmenistan?

  Parallel with his thoughts, interwoven with them, went the mellifluous voice of Dr. Haydar, keeping him informed of the situation in the square.

  “You see, this President Diyanizov stands for the development of Turkmenistan as a modern secular state. Could be it’s the influence of his Argentinian wife, as some say. This General Makhkamov who comes to address this crowd supports the president. They’re both of the same ethnic group. But the mullahs wish to follow a much more traditionalist pattern of life. That would mean many restrictions—also many difficulties for us Unbelievers.

  “So we hope perhaps to hear something interesting from the general. Perhaps about which way the struggle goes.”

  “But you said Makhkamov was a liar.”

  “All politicians lie, nein? Luckily, truth is also cunning, and escapes men’s lips by accident.”

  The sun continued to shine. Allah remained merciful, if watchful. A band played, its notes bleached in the fierce sunlight. Then the general appeared, marching purposefully to the platform. A guard of honor saluted.

  Makhkamov was a small thickset man, with a pair of dark piercing eyes which searc
hed the crowd as he ascended the platform, accompanied by two lieutenants. He was clean-shaven and moustached, with a row of medals on his khaki chest. He moved with the military strut of soldiers everywhere who strove to appear more like robots than human beings. Burnell had seen such men before. In his experience they did not last long. But there was an unending supply of them. Like the endless supply of people who admired men who strove to appear more like robots than human beings.

  Haydar translated parts of the general’s long speech into Burnell’s right ear.

  “First he quotes from the poet Makhtumkuli. ‘I said unto my Beloved, “Offer to me such gifts as you have: I’ll not ask for more.’ “ That’s nice. He gives the words heroic interpretation. Now of course from the Koran about enemies: ‘Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.’ “

  “Family squabbles? ‘Dallas?’ “ thought Burnell. “Maybe this strutting general watches old soaps too.”

  “Now he says, ‘Those who fought in the war against a cruel enemy—he means Uzbekistan—you will be rewarded. Those cowards who stayed at home, you will receive not a crust when the time comes.’ Um, the Koran again. “Looks bad. Speaks of ancient enmities. Quotes, ‘Did you suppose that you would go to Paradise untouched by the suffering which was endured by those before you?’

  “He’s cheering up his army by berating the others. He says, well… It’s like ‘our brave heroes, all who took up arms, all who prepared to die for our great nation, all who stood fast against an evil foe—etc… they’re all going to—well, come into high office, he says…’ We’ll see…

  “Now he speaks more largely. Foreign policy. ‘We shall become a great nation in world affairs, guarding our independence under a just God.’ Nothing about economics. More about God. He’s on good terms with—Oh, he says, ‘Your scars will gain you power. We shall be ruled by brave and honorable men.’ It’s what the poet expected. ‘That’s why we still celebrate his birth on this day’…”