Gravity's Rainbow (59 page)

In the mornings after mess, Tchitcherine will usually mosey down to the red džurt
there, fixing to look in on that Galina the schoolmarm—who appeals to what must be
a feminine linkage or two in his personality . . . well . . . often he’ll come outside
to find his morning skies full of sheet-lightning: gusting, glaring. Awful. The ground
shudders just below his hearing. It might be the end of the world, except that it
is a fairly average day, for Central Asia. Pulse after heavenwide pulse. Clouds, some
in very clear profile, black and jagged, sail in armadas toward the Asian arctic,
above the sweeping dessiatinas of grasses, of mullein stalks, rippling out of sight,
green and gray in the wind. An amazing wind. But he stands in the street, out in it,
hitching his pants, lapel-points whipped rattling against his chest, cursing Army,
Party, History—whatever has put him here. He will not come to love this sky or plain,
these people, their animals. Nor look back, no not even in the worst marsh-bivouacs
of his soul, in naked Leningrad encounters with the certainty of his death, of the
deaths of comrades, never keep any memory of Seven Rivers to shelter with. No music
heard, no summer journey taken . . . no horse seen against the steppe in the last
daylight. . . .

Certainly not Galina. Galina won’t even be a proper “memory.” Already she is more
like the shape of an alphabet, the procedure for field-stripping a Moisin—yes, like
remembering to hold back trigger with forefinger of left hand as you remove bolt with
right, a set of interlocking precautions, part of a process among the three exiles
Galina/Luba/Tchitcherine which is working out its changes, its little dialectic, until
it ends, with nothing past the structure to remember. . . .

Her eyes hide in iron shadows, the orbits darkened as if by very precise blows. Her
jaw is small, square, levered forward, the lower teeth more apt to show when she speaks. . . .
Hardly ever a smile. Bones in her face strongly curved and welded. Her aura is chalkdust,
laundry soap, sweat. With desperate Luba about the edges, always, of her room, at
her window, a pretty hawk. Galina has trained her—but it’s only Luba who flies, who
knows the verst-long dive, the talon-shock and the blood, while her lean owner must
stay below in the schoolroom, shut in by words, drifts and frost-patterns of white
words.

Light pulses behind the clouds. Tchitcherine tracks mud off the street into the Center,
gets a blush from Luba, a kind of kowtow and mopflourish from the comical Chinese
swamper Chu Piang, unreadable stares from an early pupil or two. The traveling “native”
schoolteacher Džaqyp Qulan looks up from a clutter of pastel survey maps, black theodolites,
bootlaces, tractor gaskets, plugs, greasy tierod ends, steel map-cases, 7.62 mm rounds,
crumbs and chunks of lepeshka, about to ask for a cigarette which is already out of
Tchitcherine’s pocket and on route.

He smiles thank you. He’d better. He’s not sure of Tchitcherine’s intentions, much
less the Russian’s friendship. Džaqyp Qulan’s father was killed during the 1916 rising,
trying to get away from Kuropatkin’s troops and over the border into China—one of
about 100 fleeing Kirghiz massacred one evening beside a drying trickle of river that
might be traceable somehow north to the zero at the top of the world. Russian settlers,
in full vigilante panic, surrounded and killed the darker refugees with shovels, pitchforks,
old rifles, any weapon to hand. A common occurrence in Semirechie then, even that
far from the railroad. They hunted Sarts, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, and Dungans that terrible
summer like wild game. Daily scores were kept. It was a competition, good-natured
but more than play. Thousands of restless natives bit the dust. Their names, even
their numbers, lost forever. Colors of skin, ways of dressing became reasonable cause
to jail, or beat and kill. Even speaking-voices—because rumors of German and Turkish
agents swept along these plains, not without help from Petrograd. This native uprising
was supposed to be the doing of foreigners, an international conspiracy to open a
new front in the war. More Western paranoia, based solidly on the European balance
of power. How could there be Kazakh, Kirghiz—Eastern—reasons? Hadn’t the nationalities
been happy? Hadn’t fifty years of Russian rule brought progress? enrichment?

Well, for now, under the current dispensation in Moscow, Džaqyp Qulan is the son of
a national martyr. The Georgian has come to power, power in Russia, ancient and absolute,
proclaiming Be Kind To The Nationalities. But though the lovable old tyrant does what
he can, Džaqyp Qulan remains somehow as much a “native” as before, gauged day-to-day
by these Russians as to his degree of restlessness. His sorrel face, his long narrow
eyes and dusty boots, where he goes on his travels and what really transpires inside
the lonely hide tents Out There, among the auls, out in that wind, these are mysteries
they don’t care to enter or touch. They throw amiable cigarettes, construct him paper
existences, use him as an Educated Native Speaker. He’s allowed his function and that’s
as far as it goes . . . except, now and then, a look from Luba suggesting falconhood—jesses,
sky and earth, voyages. . . . Or from Galina a silence where there might have been
words. . . .

Here she has become a connoisseuse of silences. The great silences of Seven Rivers
have not yet been alphabetized, and perhaps never will be. They are apt at any time
to come into a room, into a heart, returning to chalk and paper the sensible Soviet
alternatives brought out here by the Likbez agents. They are silences NTA cannot fill,
cannot liquidate, immense and frightening as the elements in this bear’s corner—scaled
to a larger Earth, a planet wilder and more distant from the sun. . . . The winds,
the city snows and heat waves of Galina’s childhood were never so vast, so pitiless.
She had to come out here to learn what an earthquake felt like, and how to wait out
a sandstorm. What would it be like to go back now, back to a city? Often she will
dream some dainty pasteboard model, a city-planner’s city, perfectly detailed, so
tiny her bootsoles could wipe out neighborhoods at a step—at the same time, she is
also a dweller, down inside the little city, coming awake in the very late night,
blinking up into painful daylight, waiting for the annihilation, the blows from the
sky, drawn terribly tense with the waiting, unable to name whatever it is approaching,
knowing—too awful to say—it is herself, her Central Asian giantess self, that is the
Nameless Thing she fears. . . .

These tall, these star-blotting Moslem angels . . .
O, wie spurlos zerträte ein Engel den Trostmarkt. . . .
He is constant back there, westward, the African half-brother and his poetry books
furrowed and sown with Teutonic lettering burntwood-black—he waits, smudging the pages
one by one, out across the unnumbered versts of lowland and of zonal light that slants
as their autumns come around again each year, that leans along the planet’s withers
like an old circus rider, tries to catch their attention with nothing more than its
public face, and continues to fail at each slick, perfect pass around the ring.

But didn’t Džaqyp Qulan, now and then—not often—across the paper schoolroom, or by
surprise in front of windows into the green deep open, give Tchitcherine a certain
look? Didn’t the look say, “Nothing you do, nothing he does, will help you in your
mortality”? And, “You are brothers. Together, apart, why let it matter this much?
Live. Die someday, honorably, meanly—but not by the other’s hand. . . .” The light
of each common autumn keeps bringing the same free advice, each time a little less
hopefully. But neither brother can listen. The black must have found, somewhere in
Germany, his own version of Džaqyp Qulan, some childish native to stare him out of
German dreams of the Tenth-Elegy angel coming, wingbeats already at the edges of waking,
coming to trample spoorless the white marketplace of his own exile. . . . Facing east,
the black face keeping watch from some winter embankment or earth-colored wall of
a fine-grained stone into low wastes of Prussia, of Poland, the leagues of meadow
waiting, just as Tchitcherine grows each month now more taut and windsmooth at his
westward flank, seeing History and Geopolitics move them surely into confrontation
as the radios go screaming higher, new penstocks in the night shudder to the touch
with hydroelectric rage, mounting, across the empty canyons and passes, skies in the
day go thick with miles of falling canopies, white as visions of rich men’s heavenly
džurts, gaming now and still awkward, but growing, each strewn pattern, less and less
at play. . . .

Out into the bones of the backlands ride Tchitcherine and his faithful Kirghiz companion
Džaqyp Qulan. Tchitcherine’s horse is a version of himself—an Appaloosa from the United
States named Snake. Snake used to be some kind of remittance horse. Year before last
he was in Saudi Arabia, being sent a check each month by a zany (or, if you enjoy
paranoid systems, a horribly rational) Midland, Texas oil man to stay off of the U.S.
rodeo circuits, where in those days the famous bucking bronco Midnight was flinging
young men right and left into the sun-beat fences. But Snake here is not so much Midnight-wild
as methodically homicidal. Worse, he’s unpredictable. When you go to ride him he may
be indifferent, or docile as a maiden. But then again, with no warning, seized out
of the last ruffling of a great sigh, he could manage to kill you simply as the gesture
of a hoof, the serpent tuck of a head toward the exact moment and spot on the ground
that you’ll cease to live. No way to tell: for months he can be no trouble at all.
So far he’s ignored Tchitcherine. But he’s tried for Džaqyp Qulan three times. Twice
dumb luck preserved the Kirghiz, and the third time he actually hung on and rode the
colt a long time down to a fair kind of obedience. But each time Tchitcherine goes
up to Snake’s jingling picket on the hillside, he carries, with his leather gear and
his bit of scarred tapestry for the horse’s back, the doubt, the inconsolable chance
that the Kirghiz didn’t really break him last time. That Snake is only waiting his
moment. . . .

They’re riding away from the railroad: farther away from the kinder zones of Earth.
Black and white stars explode down the Appaloosa’s croup and haunch. At the center
of each of these novae is a stark circle of vacuum, of no color, into which midday
Kirghiz at the roadsides have taken looks, and grinned away with a turn of the head
to the horizon behind.

Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen. Snake has seen a
lot of changes since Arabia, on route to Tchitcherine, who may be his other half—lot
of horse thieves, hard riding, confiscation by this government and that, escapes into
ever more remote country. This time, the Kirghiz pheasants scattering now at the sound
of hooves, birds big as turkeys, black and white with splashes of blood-red all around
the eyes, lumbering for the uplands, Snake is going out into what could be the last
adventure of all, hardly remembering now the water-pipes at the oases crawling with
smoke, the bearded men, the carved, nacred and lacquered saddles, the neck-reins of
twisted goathide, the women pillioned and wailing with delight up into Caucasian foothills
in the dark, carried by lust, by storm along streaks of faintest trail . . . only
traces spread back in a wake now over these terminal grasslands: shadows damping and
passing to rest among the rout of pheasants. Momentum builds as the two riders plunge
ahead. The smell of forests on the night slowly disappears. Waiting, out in sunlight
which is not theirs yet, is the . . . The . . . Waiting for them, the unimagined creature
of height, and burning . . .

. . . even now in her grownup dreams, to anxious Galina comes the winged rider, red
Sagittarius off the childhood placards of the Revolution. Far from rag, snow, lacerated
streets she huddles here in the Asian dust with her buttocks arched skyward, awaiting
the first touch of him—of
it. . . .
Steel hooves, teeth, some whistling sweep of quills across her spine . . . the ringing
bronze of an equestrian statue in a square, and her face, pressed into the seismic
earth. . . .

“He’s a soldier,” Luba simply meaning Tchitcherine, “and far away from home.” Posted
out to the wild East, and carrying on quiet, expressionless, and clearly under some
official curse. The rumors are as extravagant as this country is listless. In the
dayroom the corporals talk about a woman: an amazing Soviet courtesan who wore camisoles
of white kid and shaved her perfect legs every morning all the way to the groin. Horse-fucking
Catherine, ermined and brilliant, brought up to date. Her lovers ran from ministers
down to the likes of Captain Tchitcherine, naturally her truest. While neo-Potemkins
ranged the deep Arctic for her, skilled and technocratic wolves erecting settlements
out of tundra, entire urban abstractions out of the ice and snow, bold Tchitcherine
was back at the capital, snuggled away in her dacha, where they played at fisherman
and fish, terrorist and State, explorer and edge of the wavegreen world. When official
attention was finally directed their way, it did not mean death for Tchitcherine,
not even exile—but a thinning out of career possibilities: that happened to be how
the vectors ran, in those days. Central Asia for a good part of his prime years, or
attaché someplace like Costa Rica (well—he wishes it
could
be Costa Rica, someday—a release from this purgatory, into shuffling surf, green
nights—how he misses the sea, how he dreams of eyes dark and liquid as his own, colonial
eyes, gazing down from balconies of rotting stone . . . ).

Meanwhile, another rumor tells of his connection with the legendary Wimpe, the head
salesman for Ostarzneikunde GmbH, a subsidiary of the IG. Because it is common knowledge
that IG representatives abroad are actually German spies, reporting back to an office
in Berlin known as “NW7,” this story about Tchitcherine is not so easy to believe.
If it were literally true, Tchitcherine wouldn’t be here—there’s no possible way his
life could have been spared in favor of this somnambulism among the eastern garrison
towns.