Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  He half woke, half dreamed. Outside, a muezzin told Allah’s day away.

  Although he was imprisoned in the seedy little hotel room, his mind wandered. Memory was elusive; it did not keep to one department. Despite what had been stolen, impressions might remain. He might remember a generalized affection for someone he had forgotten. Stephanie, for instance. And Blanche, it seemed. And other women, other friends. Perhaps his longing to be reunited with Steff was really a residual longing to be reunited with his mother. Or with Blanche.

  Such thoughts became as tangled and untidy as an old neglected hedge. He emerged from a thicket of them only when Robert Murray-Roberts looked in on him to say a hasty farewell. Burnell found Murray-Roberts’s fixed notion that he was laid up in bed after too much alcohol and other substances rather offensive, and closed his eyes on the guest.

  Murray-Roberts said impatiently that a car was waiting outside the hotel to take him to the airport. The ambassador had returned overnight and ordered Murray-Roberts immediately to fly to Krasnovodsk to find out why the consignment of Protean cars was being held up at the docks. Both he and the ambassador were convinced that the delay was deliberate, the by-product of England’s unfortunate 18—3 victory over the Turkmeni team.

  He seriously advised Burnell to drink no more foreign piss, as he called it.

  Replying as curtly as feebleness permitted, Burnell explained how he had been stung by a scorpion.

  “There are some strange creatures in the Karakum. I could have told you that. And I don’t just mean the fezzes. You were lucky it wasn’t a sand viper, or you’d be underground by now. I warned you about Hikmat Haydar, didn’t I? What in hell’s name was he thinking of, taking you out there?”

  Defensively, Burnell said it was absurd to come to Ashkhabad and not gain some knowledge of the desert.

  “I don’t know what Madge will say. Anyhow, the desert’s been coming to Ashkhabad. These freak sandstorms are all because the ecology’s buggered up, after they buggered up the Aral Sea. It’ll probably be winter here by the time I’m back from Krasnovodsk, and we’ll all be freezing our arses off. You’re lucky, man, you’re away. I hope you’ve your flight booked.”

  Burnell said he was leaving on the Istanbul flight on the afternoon of the following day.

  Sitting himself down firmly on the side of the bed, Murray-Roberts brought a silver flask from his hip pocket and proffered it. Burnell refused. Shrugging, Murray-Roberts took a swig himself. He said, as if by way of excuse, “I hate flying Turkmeni Airways.”

  Leaning closer to the invalid, he said, “Let me give you a tip, OK? Stay clear of the embassy now I’m away. Someone, I won’t say who, put in a report about your behavior with a woman in a restaurant. They don’t like these things, you know. And you’ve made yourself persona non grata by your association with Haydar. I’m going to speak out of turn so keep this under your bonnet. Haydar’s a drug baron on a large scale, and the law’s closing in on him. There’s also a tax matter with carpets sold to a company in California. Stay clear of him, that’s what I’m saying. We don’t need any more slurs on the character of the British after the football match disaster. He’s gone into gun-running, which is what has got Diyanizov and Makhkamov off their arses. He won’t buy himself out of this spot of trouble.”

  “I don’t believe this, Rob. Haydar’s almost penniless. I happen to know that. He had to borrow his brother-in-law’s car, the Chaika, for the trip to the Friendship Bridge.”

  “Och, away with you, Roy, you’re more of a fool than I took you for! That black Chaika? That’s his, that’s Haydar’s own. He’s a dozen cars or more. You know Mr. Khan’s shop where we were the other evening? Khan’s only the manager. Haydar owns it. Haydar’s probably the very guy who imported your bootleg memories here from Budapest. He’s no friend of yours, let me tell you.”

  “He bloody well saved my life.”

  “He bloody put you in danger. He deals large-scale with Western connections in Hungary. That’s why he’s been tolerated—the poor old country needs a thriving black-market economy. Now he’s turned munitions dealer, that’s too much for the government. He’s selling to the rebel party, the PRICC. So he’ll have to be stopped.”

  Burnell’s response was one of flat disbelief. The two men parted coldly. Murray-Roberts pocketed his hip flask and went off to the airport.

  Doubt sat uneasily on Burnell’s shoulders. Montaigne had claimed that mixing with the world had a clarifying effect on the judgment. In this case, the opposite was true.

  In all his travels, Burnell had yet to visit a country where he had not been told tales of massive corruption and pending arrests: Zimbabwe, Morocco, Brazil, Chile, Hungary, Poland, Ireland, the countries of the Mediterranean: all had similar stirring modern legends. Generally a member of the ruling regime was involved. Well-founded or not, the stories lent a certain glamour to life—and to the teller.

  Sighing, he rose and showered. That there was no room service made him want coffee all the more. He began to gather up his scattered belongings and pack. His apartment in Soss City became increasingly attractive in prospect. He would be due for leave in November; perhaps he would visit Blanche Bretesche in Madrid; he lingered over a vivid image of her parted thighs.

  His thoughts drifted to the discovery of the skeletons in the Sierra de la Demanda; strange how taboos regarding the dead did not apply to the long dead. It was strange, too, how real the appearance of his mother had seemed during his poisoned delirium. Even more curious how she had specifically mentioned a bookstall at the railway station… He had not been to the railway station and was not likely to now: in twenty-four hours he would be in the air, heading westwards.

  Of course it was not really the apparition of his mother. The delirium brought on by the scorpion poison had spawned strange illusions; it didn’t take much to tip the human brain into unreliability. Just supposing she had returned briefly from some unlikely limbo—of course he did not believe that for a moment… Then surely she would have had something of more general interest to tell him, something blatantly less false. Were there liars in limbo? The Gospel story of Lazarus returning from the dead did not relate what he had found there.

  He looked about him rather helplessly, and spotted a pair of dirty socks in a dusty corner.

  Among Burnell’s reasons for a readiness to leave Ashkhabad was the hotel room.

  Burnell thought of the hotel in Budapest, the Gellert, and how it differed from this. This room was functional and he was glad to be here. Nevertheless, its shortcomings were many; it had been built in the dull imperial days of Soviet imposition, when hotel rooms in Turkmenistan were designed to be of precisely the dimension of hotel rooms in Tallinn, Lvov, and Ulan Bator, and formed from the same inferior concrete. So, in this phenomenally dry country, there was damp in the corners, the sound as of apparatchiks being throttled from the inadequate plumbing of the toilet, and the inconvenience of ill-fitting doors. The hotel food was tolerable when available.

  The staff had not been trained. There was a pleasant manager, of a nationality Burnell had not yet fathomed, but he was a timid man who wandered aimlessly about his ground floor, never venturing upstairs. He was probably right to be timid: the previous manager had been a Norwegian, his name still execrated and mispronounced, who had introduced so many new rules in the name of efficiency, that one night aggrieved chefs, experts in halal and horsemanship, had threatened his life with his own knives. He had fled. Rumor had it he now cooked squid at a stall on the docks of Piraeus.

  Over this much-traveled country, there had been no tradition of hostelry in the Western sense. Soviet Communism had discouraged travel; the old comfortably flea-ridden hans had decayed. Under a succession of nervous governments, they had yet to recover.

  The Gellert in Budapest, on the other hand, had always been subject to the demands of travelers. Many of those travelers, who numbered among them bumptious dukes and demanding barons, were people of influence—that class of persons who made
a point at least once in their lives of visiting the great cities of Europe, often accompanied by their reluctant families or mistresses. Even under the imposition of Communism in the twentieth century, such traditions had not entirely died; it had never been impossible to secure an omelette at midnight, or a bottle of Tokay at six in the morning from a Gellert porter. This tenacity of hospitality had much to do with the Hungarian character, and as much to do with the sumptuous marbled ambience of the Gellert itself, the faded red carpets of which had always seemed to presage the august arrival of a British royal or the golden footfall of a Saudi prince.

  These days in Ashkhabad, Saudi princes stayed in the Hilton, under Japanese—American management.

  Burnell stuffed the socks into his bag.

  His intention was to revisit Mr. Khan’s establishment that evening, his last evening, to inspect more stolen bullets. Somehow he never got there.

  His confidence in recovering his memory had been snapped. Thanks to Haydar’s prompt action, he was alive; but the poison in his system had the effect of weakening reality. Reality appeared to him paper-thin. With a vague idea of rethinking his life, he rang the Professor of Philosophy at the university.

  It sounded as if Nastiklof happened to be fortifying his spirits with a bottle of something. “Look here, Burnell, it’s no good talking like that. If you really were stung by a scorpion, which I doubt, it was a mark of an anatomical displacement. Accidents don’t just happen. All’s explicable in terms of quantum mechanics. The very word ‘accident’ is a misnomer. Humans have to fit into—well, be crunched into—an ongoing series of physical events, just as I’m supposed to fit in with the nonsense that goes on in this university, me, a professor, ex-member of the Soviet Academy… Events control everything. Write that down, my friend—‘events control everything,’ not vice versa. It’s hubris to imagine otherwise. Hubris is mankind’s middle name. I’m trying to write a book about it—got interested a publisher in Palermo. We’re biology, Burnell, biology through and through. Think what that means. We are fragile constructs in a hard inorganic universe whose events roll over us. It’s a transitory thing being an organic being, unstable. That’s the word, unstable. Every seven years, our whole systems are renewed, skin, blood, bone marrow, everything—seven years, that’s not so much as an itch in time. OK, so what else is renewed, I ask you? No, not a vehicle license, Burnell, I speak of what?—Why, of the psyche, the human psyche, that—that cul-de-sac of brain which developed in the last half-million years. Psyche has no place in the scheme of things, it just happened to materialize because of the increased complexity of the human brain. Similarly as electronics grew out of the complication of electric disciplines or hamburgers from ham, or Pavlova from Pavlov, or—or defecation from the deaf. So that’s what we carry around with us, a psyche, unlike the cow or the cat. It does us no good, it’s what in my book I call the Hubris Center, it’s a metaphysical growth, it merely allows us to question things like how the universe started and where’s it going to end, and meanwhile should women have the vote or is it bad for us to eat butter or smoke or is there a God or similar rubbish. Wait, there’s some fool at my door… GO AWAY, DAMN YOU! I’m busy slitting my throat!

  “Sorry! As I was saying, the psyche is merely an extension of anatomy, including the anatomy of the brain, and has no practical function but to make us worry about this and that and another. Where we came from, where we’re going to, when the answer in both cases is plainly nowhere. God knows, I worry how long I can hang on here in this lousy rotten job. But you see, the point is—dash, what is the point? Oh, yes, I remember. The point is, Burnell—you sang well in the restaurant, by the way—‘I Know Where You’re Going To’—that the psyche is renewable; like the cells of the anatomy, every seven years comes the cell-by date. Every seven years, we change. A new disc goes in. Your philosophy doesn’t have to be consistent, can’t be consistent, in fact. Didn’t I tell you that the basic human drive is not for pleasure or power, as those old rotters Freud and Adler proclaimed. No, no, the basic drive is to try and find the meaning in life. So don’t you see the answer to your question is it doesn’t matter a toot—I never discovered, by the way, what is a toot—is it the owl’s cry?—whether or not you were visited by your dead mother. The question can’t reasonably be answered because it’s not a reasonable question. She did speak to you; she didn’t. In either case, what she said was all nonsense, and you yourself admit it. Why doesn’t the answer matter? Because it’s just one more ghost worry thrown up by this error in evolution, the psyche. Nothing the psyche devises is to the point, you understand? Because it has no relationship—no viable relationship—with the external world of event. To give an analogy, it’s like my unpleasant situation stuck here in this university, its one real intellect, with idiotic students asking me ghost questions. Now you ring in the middle of the night and ask me another ghost question, you, you, a grown man from the West, with a pleasant singing voice. Mrs. Murray-Roberts, by the way, is a considerable harpy. But of course it’s ridiculous any more to expect philosophical sense from the West. Immanuel Kant saw to that. All I have to say to you is that your psyche simply changed as another seven years were up. It caused you a little pain, which you interpreted as physical and external—this absurd scorpion theory of yours!—and in a little kind of playback episode as discs were changed in the faulty internal computer, fantasy occurred. You thought you saw some gods and some defunct relations and all the rest of the caboodle, as if you had drunk of tarantula schnapps, yes? Such illusions every person plays out in their spatch-cocked brain-boxes in moments when so-called rationality is not all it should be. Not that it should be anything. As I think I explained, there’s only externality, which happens to be so bizarre—so really bizarre, Burnell, damn you—that the tin-pot little human brain—constructed basically from slime, let me remind you—has to make up stories in order to find itself a role of some importance in the scheme of things. Ridiculous! Can you imagine if I started to believe I actually owned this university?—which heaven forbid!—owned it lock, stock, and bottle. They’d put me away, wouldn’t they? In some psychological ward, for having derisions of grandeur. Funny farms all over the known world are packed with loonies who think they’re someone important… Fantasy! Well, old friend, you numbskull, that’s what the human race does with its precious time, forgetting it’s just an animal. To use one of your silly English phrases, it’s too big for its brutes.”

  “Boots,” said Burnell, but the tide of talk continued to wash over him. He put down the phone as softly as possible and faded into sleep.

  In the morning, Burnell was feeling his normal self. He rose, showered, and went down to eat an omelette and yogurt at the “Fast Foot.” His favorite newsboy appeared promptly and sold him the Frankfurter Allgemeine, together with a smudgy local newssheet designed for foreigners and called, with some ingenuity, The Foreigner. Printed in Russian, German, and Japanese, it bore the day’s date.

  The headlines announced “AIRPORT PENETRATED, PRICC SUSPECTED.”

  A ministerial statement was printed without comment. “Police are about to apprehend three young men who made their escape after a dawn infiltration of security at Ashkhabad Airport. Slight damage was caused to the runway. A bomb is believed to be the cause. The men are believed to be members of the right-wing terrorist organization, PRICC, the Party of Renaissant Islamic Counter-Culture. The airport will be closed until further notice.”

  Burnell gave an almost human cry of pain.

  Abandoning his omelette, he dashed into the street and went to the travel office. The office was closed, guarded by two soldiers.

  The air was growing colder. Recalling Murray-Roberts’s warning to stay away from the British Embassy, he turned instead to the German Embassy. This embassy was a grand affair, built, as far as could be determined, of glass and ebony.

  The consular waiting-rooms were already crowded with people nourishing an urgent desire to leave Ashkhabad: Germans mainly, but with a fair demograph
ic sprinkling from the rest of the globe. Joining the queue, Burnell was enveloped in the camaraderie which springs up among those who face shared adversity—in this case having to speak in an hour or two’s time to a desk clerk who was already observed, even at a distance of twenty meters, to be pronouncedly hostile.

  The “Three Young Men” of the official government bulletin had already become legend. Blowing up the airport runway was seen either as an act of barbarism or as a strike against an unpopular president. The consensus of opinion in the queue, however, was that the Three Young Men were Shi’ite fundamentalists of the PRICC persuasion, who saw the airport as a source of Western contamination. Paranoia lent strength to this theory. The airport stood for a point of contact between a pure Muslim state and the pollution of Capitalism, together with all that was unholy. This was the place where German, Japanese, and American jetplanes entered, and where the new Boeing 777 was due to make a maiden landing shortly. Since AIDS and atheism were Western inventions, why not blow up the airport?

  The Turkish lady ahead of Burnell had other ideas. Speaking in a whisper and a sort of multilingual Germanic Esperanto, she told him the bomb was planted by President Diyanizov himself, in order to have a pretext to crack down on his political enemies. Rolling her eyes, she assured him that the city was about to undergo a reign of terror, or, as she put it, a “regiment von terribilitism.”

  “It’s nothing,” said the clerk when, an hour later, Burnell reached the counter and began to speak to him. He was young and highly polished, with a bright color, like an ornament won at a fair. He pushed General Stalinbrass’s faded letter to Burnell back over the fake marble counter, using one immaculate fingertip to do so. “It’s merely a minor disruption, Mr. Burnell. Happens here with the exchange of the weather.”

  He spoke perfect English. Producing from under the counter a brochure entitled “Visit Exciting Ashkhabad!”, he pushed it forward with the same fingertip he had previously used, saying, “Return to your hotel and wait a few days, when the airport will reopen. Meanwhile, enjoy the colorful local scene. Have you visited the famous market, every Sunday? Have you visited the new mosque? Have you purchased a sheepskin hat yet?”