Somewhere East of Life Page 23

  As he unpacked his bags in his sparse hotel room, Burnell had a light-hearted feeling that he was on holiday. How fortunate he was, he reflected, to hold such a pleasant job. The mental institution in FAM had consumed his days with activity. He had swum in the fine indoor pool every morning; had attended eurythmy classes injudiciously gauged light levels after breakfast; had tussled with his psychoanalyst before lunch; and had painted, undergone physiotherapy, and even tried anthroposophical and homoeopathic medicines in the afternoon. In the evening, he had avoided TV and EMV and the totality sessions where everyone sat about cuddling each other, confessing or inventing their sins. He had read in the library, creeping up on the conclusion that he was still unprepared for Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. And intermittently throughout the day he had worried about Blanche Bretesche.

  By contrast, his brief visit to Ashkhabad and thereabouts would seem like a rest cure. Only one slight difficulty had arisen so far. Burnell had not been met at the airport, as arranged. There was no sign of a Dr. Haydar, the WACH contact.

  Well, all would become clearer on the morrow. He took a sleeping-pill and got into bed.

  The usual terrible dreams attended him, their force orchestrated by an irregular drip from a leaky showerhead in the bathroom. He woke early and went out into the street to breathe fresh air before the sun became powerful.

  Although it was September, summer reigned supreme, if blowsily, over the capital. He walked along Prospekt Svobody among the crowds. On the road, svelte limousines crawled between horse-drawn carts. On the sidewalks, men in smart business suits with pens and bleepers attached jostled beggars and down-and-outs. He turned into Shaumyana, and sought out the British Embassy.

  The embassy building was closely guarded. Burnell had to hand his passport over and wait for twenty minutes before he was permitted entry. The British shared the building with the Portuguese. The Portuguese Embassy occupied the two lower floors, the British the two upper ones.

  “What’s all the security about, for God’s sake?” Burnell inquired of the Turkmeni receptionist.

  “Oh, you must have just arrived. We had British football team come here last week.” She led him down a corridor to where, in a small partitioned office, a freckled man with a shock of tousled hair sat. He was hemmed in by computer screens, files, boxes, an empty coffee carton, and a desk-tidy stuffed with expended biros.

  This laconic individual rose and introduced himself as Robert Murray-Roberts. “The ambassador’s away. I’m holding the fort. Some fort—more like a fart. Sorry there’s a blip in the air-cond. We’re proud to have you here in Turkmenistan, Dr. Burnell. Saw your face on the AshTV—Ash by name, Ash by nature—but there you were, for all of ten seconds. Tyrant-killer! Splendid stuff1. Anything we can do to help, we will. Unfortunately we’re a bit stretched at present. Just arranging a big exhibition here for next week.”

  “Paintings?”

  “Paintings?” He tousled his hair more thoroughly. “Good God, no. They aren’t too mad about representational art here, or Picasso, portraits or all that, and of course the Fezzes don’t understand abstract stuff. No, we’re going to be promoting the new Anglo-Malaysian car, the Protean. Six of them being shipped over for the show. Come and sit down, if you don’t mind squeezing in, and have a chat. Move that old squash racquet. Got some whisky here, if you fancy a tot. My office is the nearest you’ll get to a pub for many a mile. Glad to see a fellow-Brit.”

  Burnell was cheered up by all this and enjoyed a plastic cup half-full of whisky. Despite his claims to be a bit stretched, Murray-Roberts appeared not to be too busy to chat. Not that Burnell was able to supply a great deal of British gossip.

  “Mother wrote from Inverness to say a Swiss company is buying up a very old-established firm, Scott’s Porage Oats. Terrible, isn’t it?” Murray-Roberts said. “The country’s going to the rottweilers. Anyhow, you had a tough time in Georgia, I gather. Rough wee lot of buggers, aren’t they? What happened to that ikon you were after, the Madonna of Futility, or whatever it was called?”

  “Futurity. There was a good man with me, Jim Irving. He’d been an astronaut, and actually walked on the moon last century. He got me away in a helicopter. I was in a terrible state of shock. This monster, Kaginovich, smashed up the ikon, but Jim gathered the pieces together and I took them to Frankfurt with me.”

  “He walked on the moon, you say? Some trick, eh?”

  “The ikon was broken into four, plus a few splinters. It’s all now in the hands of restorers in Munich. Too bad lives can’t be repaired as easily. Of course most lives aren’t as valuable as a twelfth-century ikon…”

  Murray-Roberts stirred the contents of his desk-tidy with a finger in a meditative way, and began a long speculative ramble about how rich you would be if you were born in the twelfth century and lived till the present day, provided of course you had invested wisely. Burnell said nothing. The whisky was making him feel unpleasantly drunk. It seemed that Murray-Roberts was throwing in a few tips about where to eat locally without catching hepatitis, and then reverting to a fantasy regarding the worth of a mile of London’s West End, if picked up in the twelfth century for a song.

  “Yes, quite,” Burnell said, apropos of very little. “Apart from my WACH commission, I have a private reason for being here. I’m trying to trace a particular EMV bullet, copies of which were sold to this part of the world. Is there an EMV stockist in town, would you know?”

  Looking serious, Murray-Roberts said he could be of no help in that respect. “No way. The Fezzes are pretty hot on EMV. It’s totally banned. They’re not hot on much, but they’re hot on EMV. Entering into other people’s memories goes against some obscure passage or other in the Koran, I’m told. Ever read the Koran? Dull book.” He leant forward. “Ashkhabad is a rum place. Really best to keep your nose clean. And not only your nose, ha ha! Stay away from the women—or boys, if you’re that way inclined. It’s not a peaceful place.”

  “It looks fairly prosperous.”

  “Och, it could be worse, considering where it is, in the middle of a bloody desert, I’m not denying that. They are bravely trying to live down a lot of bad history. The president they’ve got at the moment, Diyanizov, is not too bad a guy. He’s for the development of Turkmenistan as a modern secular state, with plenty of foreign investment from the EU and aid from everywhere. We’re hoping to sell him a Protean. This Protean exhibition only goes ahead next week with Diyanizov’s direct say-so. For all that, foreigners aren’t popular. Quite rightly they fear foreigners will exploit them.”

  “How secure is Diyanizov?”

  Murray-Roberts re-tousled his hair. “You see, you might describe Turkmenistan the way someone described the old USSR at the beginning of their revolution, way back when: “A modern state without a modern idea.” There’s no infrastructure. The banking system is all to cock. Tribalism is rife. Every now and then, whoever’s in charge has to have a little war with the neighbors, just to unite the country against a common external enemy. That comes expensive. So the foreign debt mounts up. Chiefly to the Japanese. The Japs are clever little buggers. One day they’ll own the whole country. Then maybe they’ll even turn the deserts to profit.”

  “Is there much British investment locally?”

  “One thing I should warn you about, Burnell. Lay off the British bit. We’re not at all popular. Better to deal with the Germans. Pretend you’re a Kraut. They’re quite well liked. When their football team played in Ashkhabad, it lost five goals to six. A tremendous diplomatic coup. This bloody English team came out here last week and walloped the Fezzes 18-3.

  “Bannockburn was come again! This embassy was under siege for three days and nights. Local staff stopped coming. The Fezzes set fire to a bungalow owned by some poor bloody Welsh building contractor who’d never seen a goalpost in his natural… I suspect that stupid football match is the reason why my six new bloody Proteans are still waiting to be unloaded from the docks in Krasnovodsk, so just watch your ste
p, laddie… Maybe you’d give a speech at the university about the local antiquities or something. That might help the cause.”

  Before they parted company, Murray-Roberts warned Burnell to stay away from Dr. Haydar, describing him as a petty criminal drug-smuggler. However, Burnell had formed an opinion that Murray-Roberts was slightly paranoid, and probably had been even before the 18—3 English victory. In any case, it was easy to avoid Dr. Haydar, since Dr. Haydar was clearly avoiding Burnell.

  When he had recovered from Murray-Roberts’s whisky, Burnell hired a guide at the tourist center and took a tour of the city. His first impression was of grayness the capital was fighting to live down a sad and chequered inheritance. He had hoped naively for no mystery. One indicator of the confused state of the political mind was the variety of alphabets used on signs and elsewhere, each carrying its freight of different cultures and traditions. He could not but take a Western view of this diversity: even while relishing the hors d’oeuvres of cultures in all their picturesque discomfort, he saw them as standing in the way of an advance toward orderliness and development.

  Burnell’s view might be summarized as Progressive. Progress was a word long in disfavor, yet not entirely banished from court. Progress had conceived of countries with mixed ethnicity as “melting pots;” and precious little melting had actually been achieved; the pots had all too often boiled over. As had happened in the United States of America. Yet to progress on an individual level continued as an inspiration.

  The climate of Ashkhabad scarcely aided constructive thought. Although perched on the edge of winter (for it was said that Ashkhabad lacked the intermediate seasons of spring and autumn), the late summer was still achieving day temperatures of over thirty degrees Centigrade. Burnell had no complaints there; his boyhood holiday in Iceland had confirmed a fondness for high mercury readings.

  He found few antiquities worth more than a condescending glance from WACH. The city had been leveled by earthquakes as well as totalitarianism. A major quake in 1948 had erased a gentler Hshkhabad—once just a Russian garrison town in a thirsty land. Only the little whitewashed houses, set in regular squared-off streets with their backs turned to an uncertain world, had anything to offer an aesthetic taste.

  Burnell sought out a world-weary UNESCO man who drove him to a site beyond the city. Here the Parthians had once gloried and drunk deep in the pantheistic heart of their empire. Little remained to be seen among a general prospect of sand. The Parthians had, not to put too fine a point on it, gone. It was, as the world-weary man put it, “an Ozymandias situation.”

  Yet here too the obsession to rescue the past was in evidence.

  Excavation was in progress, sporadically supervised by the world-weary one. Only a year earlier, a pair of Zoroastrian underpants dating from 200 BC had been found, well preserved in the sand. The underpants were made from the hide of a caracul or Persian sheep. This discovery provoked general rejoicing, as well as an article in The Universal Journal of Archaeology, wherein an expert who had examined the vestment announced that internal evidence proved its wearer had been red-haired.

  After similar excursions, Burnell returned to the environs of the Hotel Ashkhabad and lay on his bed to assuage a headache brought on by heat and whisky. He thought of Blanche, of her excellence and excitement. “We’ve been lovers for years… surely your blood remembers…”

  On his third morning, the sound of firing woke him from a horrifying dream. Burnell sat on the side of the bed and tired to compose himself.

  They’d been after him again, whoever “they” were. A distant muezzin’s cry, electric across the dawn sky, had transformed itself into a scream as his autonomous nervous system was extracted, struggling, from his body, out through his pineal eye. And then—centuries going by—he had had to remember to take every breath. All of consciousness was required for the task. At night, no sleep for him, for if he slept he would not breathe. Giant machines, devised to do his breathing for him, crackled and snapped. So he was thrown up on the shores of consciousness.

  When the shots and a sound of running feet ceased, he went slowly over to the window. Outside lay the avenue, lined with acacias and bathed in the acidic light of another cloudless Central Asian day. He saw no bodies.

  He showered and climbed into an ill-fitting suit which a Sunni tailor had run up for him in forty-eight hours. The suit made him look a little less foreign to curious eyes. Before leaving the room, he locked his suitcase. On the back of the room door, a fire notice urged: “PLEASE EVACUATE YOURSELF ALONG THE STAIRCASES.”

  The elevator of the Hotel Ashkhabad had ceased working, either during a recent war with Uzbekistan or since the visit of the triumphant English football team,

  A penciled note on the elevator gates said “PLEASE DESCEND TOMORROW.” Burnell took the marble staircase and evacuated himself down it to the foyer. A number of men, some with guns at their hips, stood about smoking seriously, as if hoping by that activity alone to bring down the government.

  Since the dining-room did not open until 2 p.m., owing to what was announced as “ALTERATIONS AND REFURNITMINTS,” Burnell went out into the street and headed for what he already regarded as his favorite restaurant. Heat was beginning to bite and smog to thicken. But the tree-lined streets were pleasant; he had been in worse places—some of which, doubtless, he did not remember.

  A Korean company had established a fast-food restaurant, which proclaimed itself to be “Tony’s Fast Foot Café” in neon lettering.

  Entering, Burnell found himself a seat by the window on the first floor, where he could comfortably overlook the busy street. He ordered an omelette, coffee, and yoghurt. By local standards, the Fast Foot was clean and elegant. At eight in the morning, it was already full of customers—all male—most of whom appeared to have settled in for the day. Some played chess. Others argued and smoked. Some just smoked. The chamber reeked like a bonfire.

  A small ragged newsboy, struggling through the customers, brought Burnell a German newspaper. He had learnt fast, and knew Burnell paid well. The Berliner Zeitung was only two days old.

  The most venerable reactor in Bulgaria’s Kuzloduy nuclear power station was melting down through the Earth’s crust, it was reported. Officials from the IAEA in Vienna said there was no cause for alarm. They remained confident that rate of progress was slowing. When the escaping fuel reached the Moho, thirty-two kilometers below the surface, the increased density of material, they predicted, would halt its progress. Danger would arise only if the radioactive material penetrated to the greater temperatures of the mantle below the Moho. Meanwhile, the evacuation of urban Bulgaria and the lower Danube basin was proceeding according to plan. Units of the Grossdeutschmacht were in control. The US Sixty-Ninth Fleet was standing by off the port of Varna.

  Turning the page, Burnell caught the name of Ziviad Orpishurda. A one-paragraph news item announced that Amnesty International was condemning a General Orpishurda for a series of atrocities. Over five hundred men, women, and children had been massacred in the town of Poti on Orpishurda’s orders. So, Burnell thought, the West Georgian army had made it safely to the sea, and to Orpishurda’s home town…

  The yoghurt was excellent. Unsmiling but polite, the Koreans moved among the tables. Josef Stalin had exiled their grandfathers and great-grandfathers here in the 1950s. Stubbornly unintegrated, they still spoke Korean among themselves.

  Scraping the yoghurt bowl, he thought of the Poti disaster. Its reality broke through his protective cynicism. Newspaper reports, TV coverage: they never revealed what was in the hearts and minds of people. Just as well perhaps… He was puzzled by his own pity for Foot and Orphishurda. “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree…” Yep, sure had been a fuck-up somewhere, in limbic brain and legacy.

  Through the smoke-shrouded throng, a broad-built man bore down on Burnell’s table. His powerful face, assembled around a large nose, was working itself up to a smile. Announcing himself as Hikmat Haydar, he bowed, s
natched a spare chair from another table, and sat himself down next to Burnell. He offered a large hand, a good percentage of which Burnell shook.

  Burnell was sparely built. He felt himself fragile beside this mountainous man, whose head sat like a boulder on his frame, reminding Burnell of either Pelion or Ossa. Haydar was wearing an immaculate suit over a bright orange silk shirt open at a hairy throat.

  From his breast pocket, he produced a crumpled business card, smoothing it with a fist before he laid it in front of Burnell for the latter’s inspection. It read

  DR. HIKMAT HAYDAR

  Curator-in-Chief

  Archaeological Intensities Museum

  1 Makhtumkuli Street

  Ashkhabad

  Turkmenistan

  Smiling, Haydar explained, “Is my old card. You see a misprint there. Not “Intensities” but “Antiquities.” Also, I am no longer Curator-in-Chief, unfortunately.”

  Burnell pulled the face of one horribly unimpressed. He said that he had been let down. Dr. Haydar had not met him at the airport as had been arranged via WACH in Frankfurt. His hotel room had not been booked. He had had to make his own arrangements, assisted to some extent by Murray-Roberts of the British Embassy staff. He had been in the city for three days and was preparing to leave. His mission was accomplished, and only now had Dr. Haydar appeared. Why was that?

  Haydar nodded, evidently in full agreement. “It’s typical, wholly. All tourists come here in Ashkhabad and only complain.

  The city is filled with tourists, each with various demands, impossible to deal.”