Rates of Exchange (7 page)

The single sweet, wrapped in cheap paper, comes to him thoughtfully, on a little silver tray. It has a sharp acrid taste, the taste of foreignness. Petworth sucks it, and stares on, mentally
nudging and prodding at the mysterious system of hieroglyphs packaged so tightly in his lap. Here are subtle grammars, cases, declensions and inflexions, an entire constructed universe that in turn
constructs and orders the universe itself. Without it the world would be senseless, and pointless; yet for Petworth it does not mean, it simply is. It ceases to be a closed system; it leaks. As
linguisticians like Petworth like to say, information without context becomes redundancy, or noise. There is a noise: the aircraft wheels drop from their casings. There is bright light: the grey
sky and the raining have all gone, and the sky is a luminous blue. The engine note changes; the lights flash on the bulkhead; the intercom clicks, and the voice of the captain gives a long message
in the language Petworth does not know, untranslated, graceless, cast in the firm tones of socialist realism. The heavy green stewardess comes and lifts up Petworth’s newspaper: ‘Lupi
lupi?’ she asks. ‘Da,’ says Petworth, proudly displaying his crotch. Outside the harsh ice-cap has gone, and, craning, Petworth can see something else has come – a cup of
jagged mountains, a green plain, a glinting big river, flooded beyond its banks, a steaming great power-station, the web of a city, not far beneath. Then down they come low, over shining polythene
crop covers, and the Comflug flight from London, two hours late, touches down, bounces a little, brakes on the runway, then turns, following the van that says
HIN MI
toward
the sign that says
INVAT
, until the Tartar crosses his bats, the plane stops, the flight handlers push steps toward the aircraft’s side, the stewardess opens the front
door, to let in a great rosy circle of light.

Petworth folds up
P’rtyii Populatiii
, undoes his lap-strap, rises, steps into the aisle, reaches up to the rack for his dutyfree bag and a large overcoat, quite mismatched to the
bright weather outside (but his geography collapses totally once east of the Rhine). Outside, in the sun, the white bird continues to fly toward a city, a new ideological world, a life he
can’t yet know, a language he can’t yet speak. ‘Na, na,’ says a voice by his ear; the heavy green stewardess is beside him once more. ‘Na?’ asks Petworth,
staring at her; now she is small, and he big. ‘Is not permitted . . . ,’ she begins; but then, her mouth open, she ceases utterance, her eyes staring, her brow furrowed. Petworth, who
has taught many a seminar in language acquisition, knows these symptoms at once; the Babelian tragedy has struck, linguistic arrest, translator’s block, has occurred. ‘Yes, not
permitted,’ says Petworth patiently, ‘Now, not permitted to do what?’ ‘Vistu ab stuli,’ says the stewardess. ‘Yes, well, try again, I don’t
understand,’ says Petworth patiently. Big Petworth, little heavy green stewardess, they stare at each other for a moment, trapped together on the linguistic interface. Then two large green
arms rise up from her body, and her big hands seize his shoulders in a tight grip. For a small woman, she is strong; she turns him a little, shoves him backward, pushes him down; this causes his
knees to fold, his buttocks to smack heavily down into the foam-rubber aisle seat where he has been sitting, a pain to run up his spine, his overcoat to fly up over his face. But gesture is
language too, indeed is probably language’s very origin. ‘Not permitted to get up from your seat?’ suggests Petworth, removing the overcoat. ‘Da, da,’ says the
stewardess, nodding vigorously, and putting the overcoat back onto the rack, ‘Is not permitted to get up your seat.’ And indeed, when Petworth looks round the cabin, he sees this is the
universal understanding. For, though the doors are open, the steps ready, the blue buses moving toward them from the door marked
INVAT
, all his fellowpassengers have remained in their seats,
strapped and silent, as if waiting for the next thing to happen.

IV

Now perhaps it should be explained that this Dr Petworth who sits with tingling buttocks on the apron at Slaka is, though a linguist, not that kind of linguist who knows many
languages. He is competent in some tongues, but mostly dead ones: Old and Middle English, Middle High German, and, if pressed, a little Old Norse, a passable Old Icelandic. But otherwise he
possesses no more than that conventional, minimal polyglotism that has, for centuries, taken the English, stammering and nodding, baffled and curious, speaking their own tongue very loudly and
slowly in the belief that if spoken like this it will be everywhere understood, into every corner of the world. So Petworth possesses the words for
coffee
and
tea
in some thirteen
different languages, those for
beer
and
wine
in some eleven or twelve, those for
please
and
thank you
in some nine or ten. He knows, for examination purposes, a lot of
different Eskimo words for
snow
. Tourist words like
museum
and
cathedral
, travel words like
customs
and
check-in
, succour words like
meal
and
lavatory
, he can usually pick up anywhere with great facility. He knows his Norse from his Igbo; he has as many words of Hopi as he has of Greek. But it is all example and illustration; when
it actually comes to learning and speaking to others the language they use and construct life through, Petworth has, to be frank, just as much trouble as the rest of us.

But this is not all. Petworth also possesses a rich international
sub
-language – he would call it an idiolect – composed of many fascinating terms, like
idiolect
and
sociolect
,
langue
and
parole
,
signifier
and
signified
,
Chomsky
and
Saussure
,
Barthes
and
Derrida
, not the sort of words you say to
everybody, but which put him immediately in touch with the vast community of those of his own sub-group, profession or calling in all parts of the world – if, that is, he can find anyone who
speaks enough English to lead him to them. Petworth may not be a master of languages, but he does know what language in its
Ding an Sich
, its languageness, actually is. He knows all about
how we, as language-speaking animals, language speak. If you ask him about analogic and digital communication, the code of semes, or the post-vocalic /r/, he can tell you, would be delighted to do
so. He is an expert on real, imaginary and symbolic exchanges among skinbound organisms working on the linguistic interface, which is what linguists call you and me. In his own mind, he knows
whether the mind is, or is not, a
tabula rasa
before language enters it, though he will not be divulging his answer directly in this book. You may not worry about such things, but there are
people who do; indeed Petworth is a valued commercial traveller in an essential commodity, a loyal worker in the service of the one British export that, despite the falling fishing stocks and the
rising oil price, the strikes and the recessions, still booms in the markets of the world. The ideal British product, needing no workers and no work, no assembly lines and no assembly, no spare
parts and very little servicing, it is used for the most intimate and the most public purposes everywhere. We call it the English language, everyone wants it, and in its teaching Petworth is an
acknowledged expert. His books on TEFL and TESOP and TENPP, on ESP and EAP, are jostled for in bookshops from Tromsø to Tierra del Fuego. And this is why he is here, the acrid taste of a
sweet in his mouth, a pain in his spine, his bag of lectures tucked under the seat in front, sitting waiting at Slaka airport.

Yes, Petworths are always needed, for isn’t everything a language? The grammar of airports is a language: this bustle of vehicles, these structured operations, as the grey tankers come
under the wing, and the toilet-cleanser comes under the body, and the air-waves crackle and the hand-sets operate. The code of coming and going is a language, though it is the nature of language to
function differently in different cultures. So in some societies the opening of a plane door is a signal suggesting to passengers that they may get off. In others, like this one, the same signal
may mean something else; for example, that armed men may get on. For this, Petworth notes, peering through the globed window, is what is happening now; up the steps, into the plane, are coming four
soldiers, in flared topcoats and boots that come up to the knee in cavalry fashion. Large young men, they have to bend their heads and tilt their weapons to pass under the doorway; their hair under
their caps is tightcropped, to show the shape of their skulls, and make them look fierce. Behind them comes another man, smaller and in plain clothes, clothes so very plain that he must surely be a
policeman from the state security system, HOGPo. These five stand at the front of the cabin for a while, talking to the heavy green stewardess. Then two of the soldiers, followed by the HOGPo man,
begin to walk, their feet thudding on the thin carpet, down the cabin. The passengers do not look up; the cold metal of a sub-machine gun lightly touches Petworth’s hand as they pass him by.
They go right down the cabin, and into the forbidden green-curtained area at the end; Petworth turns discreetly, to see the curtain falling behind them.

When he looks forward again, he sees that the other two soldiers have now begun to walk very slowly down the cabin, side by side. One looks carefully to the left, the other to the right,
examining, minutely, the faces of the travellers. Petworth, meanwhile, uneasily inspects theirs. They are young men, with primal-looking unstated features: their eyes are studs, their mouths raw,
their expressions unchanging, like those in old photographs, when life was serious and exposures long. They take each row carefully, coming nearer and nearer. Now Petworth, in the service of the
English language, has travelled much for the British Council. Once or twice a year, for several years, he has picked up his briefcase and gone afield with his lectures. In the process he has grown
used to the hard outward face of modern travel. There are men with guns at Schiphol and Fornebu, Zaventem and O’Hare; soldiers with tanks and troop-carriers will suddenly surround Heathrow.
He has walked through metal-detectors on several continents, pushed his luggage through hundreds of X-ray machines that do not harm the film in your camera, seen his lectures indifferently flipped
through at innumerable security checks, watched the tablets in his medicine bag tasted by policemen in Dusseldorf and Rawalpindi, suffered, arms splayed, legs grossly apart, body-searches of all
kinds, from the aggressive to the intimate, in countries of many ideological complexions. He understands the necessity behind these depersonalizations; airports are dangerous holes in all
societies, and terrorists and hijackers, spies and political escapees travel the shuttling air routes, looking for all the world just like any ordinary linguist. The world seems to steam with
growing anger and impatience; in some countries some people want an individuality they feel denied, in others a collectivity they feel they lack; some want less of self, others more. These are
times when it is hard to know what a person is, and harder to be one; in many circumstances it is wise to be as little person-like as possible.

This, as the soldiers come nearer and nearer, stand over him, Petworth tries now. The stewardess, standing behind them, says something about him: ‘Passipotti,’ says the soldier. The
soldier looks at the document, stares with black eyes at Petworth, through the face into the skull, feels the Heathrow bag, laughs at the clank of bottle, hands the passport back, and passes on.
Some three rows behind him, there is a conversation, then a commotion; a moment later the two soldiers walk heavily back toward the front of the plane, between them a neat Burberry-ed businessman
in a Western suit, carrying a code-locked leather briefcase, impregnable to all assault save that of being picked up and walked off with. He is an ordinary man, who looks a bit like Petworth; but
he is in another story, a story of spies and betrayals, not, thinks Petworth, Petworth’s story at all. The man goes down the steps between the soldiers, whose guns bob on their backs. There
is a silence from the back of the plane, from behind the green curtain; there is a noise from the intercom, as the pilot says something in his gloomy monoglot. Slowly the passengers begin to rise,
step out into the aisle, put on hats and berets, collect their cardboard boxes. ‘Is permitted?’ asks Petworth, waving at the heavy green stewardess, up the aisle ahead of him.
‘Da,’ she says, nodding. Petworth rises again, collects his Heathrow bag and overcoat, picks up his bag of lectures, jostles along the aisle to the entrance. ‘Thank you,’ he
says to the stewardess as he passes her, hair in her nostrils, ‘Have a nice day.’

Then he is at the top of the steps, looking down into the new country. Two more armed soldiers stand at the bottom of them, watching the passengers descend. Down he goes, till his flat earth
shoes touch the new society, the fresh ideological soil. He pauses, sniffs the fresh, mildly aromatic air; one of the soldiers points him to the bulbous blue bus that stands waiting. Inside are
just a few gun-metal seats, occupied by moustached men, old ladies carrying parcels; the smell is of disinfectant. The crowd jostles in; the grey-shined driver presses a button, and the doors hiss
and close. Very slowly, the bus begins to move, bouncing on poor tyres past the Ilyushins, the Tupolevs, the Antonovs, guarded and in their places, toward the white terminal and the door that says
INVAT
. Draped with his luggage, Petworth hangs onto a metal pole and looks out, through the wavy imperfections of the glass, with flat eye, flat mind. There are colleagues
of his at home who would regard this country, the ground of which he has just touched with his flat earth shoes, as the model of the desirable future, the outcome to which a benevolent history
points; there are others who would see it as the bleak end of things. Petworth, who sees himself as an open-minded man, a voter for modest improvement, only political when roused, has no urgent
views, merely a mild irony at the expense of all societies, each with its own fiction of having improved history. The bus bounces, the passengers sway, and not far off is the terminal, where he
will, he trusts, be met and attended to, taken off on his tour.