Rates of Exchange (4 page)

So, if you were to press me about the story of Valdopin, this, or some such fashionable analysis of the same sort, is what I might answer; but really I prefer not to. I am a writer, not a
critic, I like my fictions to remain fictions. No, let me rather recommend that one day you do indeed make the trip to Slaka, city at the international crossroads, capital of flowers and gipsy
music, fine buildings and notable art, lying there in the warm wide declivity between the Storkian mountains, where the vegetation is lush and many pleasures are to be had. Admittedly ordinary life
there can be drab at times; cold winds blow, tourism can be over-regimental, and the shops tend towards emptiness, but what is a holiday without its inconveniences? Flights that way are, it is
true, not frequent, though the state airline, Comflug, operates from most Western capitals. The language can be difficult, for its grammar is much disputed and no two native speakers seem to speak
it alike; but handy phrase-books help with simple transactions, and most young Slakans nowadays have a little English, even if it is only the lyrics of Pink Floyd songs. Currency rules are
irritating, and you must exchange so much a day; but Western tourists have special privileges in the restaurants, and the crafts are notably good. The girls are generally pretty; the same is
sometimes said about the men. And in general the people are lively and warm, the sights well worth seeing, the peach brandy (
rot’vitti
) not to be missed. As the Cosmoplot brochures
say, here definitely is offered another kind of holiday, and when the nights descend and the motor cars swash along bright-lighted boulevards, only a short stroll in this fine old town will
convince you at a start that there is much to be had.

And, if you do go, then don’t omit the Cathedral. Look first at the ikons, which are down in the crypt; entry costs less than a
vloska
. Then go outside again and enter the nave,
avoiding the reconstruction due to recent earthquake damage, and noticing the fine Christ Pantokrator in the drum. The altar is fine, and asserted, somewhere, to be Flemish. But do remember to look
a little to the left of it, or was it the right, for the tomb of Saint Valdopin: first national martyr, bringer of the alphabet, founder of the faith, and source of many and many a legend.

1 – ARR.

I

The first thing one notices – as Comflug 155 from London, two hours late, dips, touches down, bounces and brakes on the runway, drops its raised wing-baffles, slows,
turns, and begins to taxi through the airport lanes toward the long, low, white wooden buildings that have signs on their walls saying
SLAKA
– is that a number of armed men stand about at
various points on the tarmac. At first, while the plane moves quickly, all these men look alike; then vision through the round bowl of the window improves, and it becomes apparent that they come
not just in one kind but in at least two. Some of them are soldiers; they wear a military khaki, high-peaked caps with red bands round them, long flared topcoats with white epaulettes and black,
rather baggy leather boots which reach up to their knees in cavalry fashion. There is another kind who are probably militiamen or policemen. These wear a rather dowdier uniform, in darkish blue,
flat blue caps with white covers on them, cross-straps of black leather over their chests, and trousers that bulge out wide at the thighs and then taper down to fit into very short black boots. As
the plane comes nearer still, it becomes clear that not only uniforms but offices are different too. It is the function of the soldiers to cluster in groups around the various aircraft – the
shiny Ilyushins, Tupolevs and Antonovs, and the grey Mil helicopter gunships – that rest on their stands along the airport apron, or on the grass beside it. Each plane has four or five of
these soldiers around it; they look serious and attentive. The blue men, the militia, stand at or near the entrance doors to the various white airport buildings. Each doorway has two or three of
them beside it, and they look stocky and solid. The two groups stand separately, do not talk to each other, and as the Comflug jet rolls in closer it is clear that the only reason for confusing
them is that they all carry well-cleaned black Kalashnikov sub-machine guns of neat modern design slung on short straps over their shoulders.

Beyond the men and the planes there run the airport buildings, long and low, shining white in the late afternoon sunlight. They are buildings without any architectural conceit and only a modest
appearance of functionality; they could be any buildings built for any purpose anywhere. The entrance doors where the armed militiamen stand are evidently kept locked, for no one goes in and out of
them; above them one can see a sign in the Cyrillic alphabet, an incomprehensible code, and then another smaller one in the Latin alphabet, saying
INVAT
. The buildings are
two storeys high, and have a flat roof with wooden railings around it; here on the roof are the people, a sizeable, busy crowd of them. The Comflug jet is still moving, and distances are hard to
project, but they all seem to be fairly small and stocky people, dressed in a certain Sunday formality – though Sunday is, indeed, the day that this is. The men mostly wear dark
double-breasted suits, cut square in the body, and dark ties, and hats or caps; the women are in large full cotton dresses, and look reassuringly round and bulky. They are all modest enthusiasts,
looking out over the field and waving, with pleasure but without extravagance, at the plane as it comes slowly in closer to the terminal, or possibly at another one – for, though it is
Sunday, the airport seems fairly busy, and a second Ilyushin from some other destination, fat, streaked with curdled lines from flight, its rivets shining, also in the blue and white Comflug
livery, with Cyrillic tail colophon, is already following the London flight in off the runway.

The sun shines, the buildings are white, the world is in a state of traveller’s suspension. There are some people who will tell you that the world we live in now is converging, that
everywhere is turning into everywhere else, that difference is giving way to universal similarity. At this moment, this seems both true and not. Airports, certainly, are everywhere airportlike,
operating to much the same functions, expressing much the same signs, displaying the same abstract familiarities. Yet behind such similarities there are always the small differences, things that
name the place. The air here has a distinct blueish quality; the airport grass is notably thick and coarse, and has the look of being planted for haymaking; indeed, an old tractor works between the
runways. The uniforms of the armed men are not quite the uniforms of the other armed men in other places. Words are visible here and there, and they both explain and estrange; thus the van that has
been leading the plane in through the airport tracks has a sign on its roof saying
HIN MI
, and the grey tanker nosing forward from the camouflaged sheds to the right of the terminal has a sign
painted on the side saying
BIN
’
ZINI
. The empty blue buses that wait in a short row outside the terminal building, presumably to take the
passengers from the plane and deliver them into the new country, are old and bulbous, with ladders up their backs, definitely other, created in a different, more ornate stylistic idiom. The people
on the roof are short and stocky. Across the grass and cement, beyond the trees that line the airport perimeter, there pokes into the sky a golden onion, the spire-dome of a church. Over it, in
front of the dropping sun, a great bird with white wings is flying. It appears to be a stork; however, vision through the dirtied globe-windows of the plane is difficult, and this could be an
optical illusion.

And somewhere beyond the dome, and not too far away, there must be the city itself, which they have overflown and looked down upon only a few moments earlier. It lies in the middle of a wide
green plain, not too greatly populated, with a jagged dish of mountains rising up all round it. Right across Europe this has been a wet summer, a summer of what is called unusual weather, now
usual. The plain, part-farmed, part-forested, part-bare, shows itself wet to the sky; across it, offered to the air-traveller in glints and flashes, runs one of those wide, twisting, European
rivers that could flow either north or south, up to the Baltic or out to the North Sea, down to the Mediterranean or over to the Bosphorus, one of those famous rivers that stays in middle-aged
memory from those old World War Two
Daily Telegraph
maps of advance and retreat, putsch and counter-putsch, as the war in Europe raged. Now it has flooded out from its banks, onto the green
of the plain, into the forest-clusters, the stripes of green and brown field, the small huddles of communities which, with dark roofs, rising smoke, and surrounding busy farmyards, patternlessly
dot the landscape, and even into the edges of the city itself, where the river tightens and is bridged, where the aircraft comes lower, where the people move.

The city itself seems only modestly big. From the air one sees a big brick power station with high metal chimneys, spurting orange smoke high into the bright blue sky; a distinct industrial
section, with factory compounds laid out near the lines of long straight highways converging variously onto the hub of the city; a workers’ district, with high rectangular living blocks in
faceless contemporary style; many streets of high, square-windowed town apartments of the Continental type; on the streets, with their rows of shade trees, a small amount of traffic, moving quite
fast; amid the traffic, many rocking pink trams, towing trailers behind them along metal tracks that glint in the sun. Then a cathedral, apparently unfinished, or having had its top knocked off;
next an area of greater complexity, where the river turns round an outcrop, the bridges are several, and a crenellated castle from old storybooks sits up on a rock amid high trees, surrounded by
streets that twist and contain old bright-painted buildings. Then a market place, with brightly coloured roofs to its stalls and a central edifice with a high tower; a vast square, surrounded on
all sides by governmental- looking stone buildings, and having a
pavé
so very clean that it shines bright white in the late afternoon sunlight; more apartments, more factories, more
countryside, looking lush and flooded, some intensive market-gardening, done under shiny polythene crop-covers, the onion church, the runway lights, the glide into the airport.

Now the plane comes in close to the terminal building, and begins to make its final turn. Out on the tarmac, down below, the armed men, the soldiers, stand and stare up at the big Ilyushin as it
moves onto the stand; inside, the passengers, strapped into their highback seats, sit and stare down through the globed windows, at the armed men, and the waving people, and the baggage trucks and
petrol tankers moving nearer, and the other planes, neatly arrayed on the apron, and the blue buses, standing quiet by the doors where the sign says
INVAT
, and the line of
trees on the airport perimeter, and the possible stork on the skyline. The red sun shines in through the windows; the interior of the cabin smells, in homely fashion, of dumpling. On the forward
bulkhead, green illuminated notices say
LUPI LUPI
and
NOKI ROKI
. A faint sound of martial music sounds through the intercom; the passengers sit very
quietly. Three Comflug stewardesses have risen from their seats and stand at the front of the plane, by the kitchen area. Some international couturier has conceived them; their heavy bodies are
clad in bright green uniforms, they wear a helmet-like headgear which makes them appear to have just got down from a horse. The world outside remains in suspension. The people who wave, wave, wave,
the armed men, are not yet real. The notices on the buildings are mysterious hieroglyphics, for the comprehension of others. The eye collects but only partly understands. A life goes on here but
one is not of it: people and houses, customs and habits have a shape that makes sense, but there is no sense to it yet. A reality of sorts is here, indeed a historical reality, the sort that Karl
Marx promised as the regime of truth; but it is not yet real at all.

Preliminary descriptions exist. ‘The airport at Slaka is in open countryside, situated 8km/5mi to the east of the city,’ it says in a text,
Helpful Hints for British
Businessmen
, which Dr Petworth, a cultural visitor, sitting in a high aisle seat, peering across two brown-suited bodies and out into life, has in his pocket, ‘Buses to the central
Comflug office, Wodjimutu 217 (no check-in facilities), are available. Tickets must be purchased in advance from the airport tobacco kiosk, marked
Litti
, and are not available on
board.’ Banks, government offices, and state trading organizations are closed on Saturday and Sunday. Only the orange-coloured taxis should be used. The voltage is 110. There have been many
wars and battles here. Since the heroic liberation of 1944, about two million dwellings of the workers have been constructed, and per capita floor space is about 10
²
metres. The castle
is particularly worthy of a visit. No vloskan may be taken from the country on leaving. Carefree children play in the sunlit parks, pensioners enjoy their well-deserved repose, and enamoured
couples dream of the future. Art has developed here on realistic foundations, and few decadent tendencies have taken root among our patriotic worker artists and writers. Dances by peasants in
regional costumes are regularly performed. Numerous marble plaques dedicated to those who fell in the national struggle remind us of those heroic days. Stalls selling flowers of the season delight
the streets. The trade unions direct socialistic emulation, and are responsible for the sucesses of the ‘rationalization’ movement. Centres which offer ‘vacation in saddle’
delight horseloving fans, and large woods invite sportsmen. The work of the expressionist painter Lev Pric, to be seen at the People’s Gallery of State Art (
Gal’erri
Proly’aniii
), manifests that world thought-waves of the highest kind have passed through the nation. Especially lovely is the park in the month of May, when the magnolias bloom. An
obscure passage in a chronicle by Nostrum, Monk of Kiev, suggests a Mediterranean origin for these people, but this is much disputed.