Gotta dash, Reb. Keep an eye out for my reports on the Tolkien-Iapetus fly-by. Love to Dad and Paddy and the cats, and Hannah, I suppose, and the sprogs. I’ll just close this file and mail it. Love you. Bye now.
12
While Gaby grubbed around in the smoggy streets of Nairobi, Oksana Telyanina had been half-way around the planet on UNECTA’s business. She had also collected a new tattoo; a tiny tree about the size of a thumbnail on the ball of her right shoulder. It symbolized the soul’s search for transcendence and union with the spirit world: the mystical ascent of the apprentice sha-person into a tree to be possessed by the spirit of a totemic animal.
The Elephant Bar’s totemic animal was self-evident. There were tusks behind the bar; plastic replicas, not out of ecological sensitivity, but because the ivory ones had been sold on the black market during a financial crisis six years ago, before Siberians came and turned the Elephant Bar into little Irkutsk. So now there were not only photographs of elephants, paintings of elephants, posters of elephants, batiks and wall-hangings and bamboo screens of elephants, elephant foot stools and tables supported by carved wooden elephants, like Hindu cosmology; there were also icons on the walls, bottles of Stolichnaya on the back bar and little silver pots of caviar all along the counter. At one end a volcanic samovar simmered.
‘Story is: elephant walks out of National Park, which in those days did not have fence round, like now,’ Oksana had explained. ‘Right on to main runway and straight into pissy little Cessna trying to take off. Boom! Shredded jumbo for half kilometre every direction. That is why called Elephant Bar.’
The Siberians in shorts and shades and fur hats with the ear-flaps folded down decided that the women at the table needed their company and sat down with them. Oksana convinced Gaby that it would be a good time to go out on to the airfield and look at the aeroplanes. Time spent looking at aeroplanes is time exceedingly well spent.
The air was warm out on the strip. Little night winged things swooped through the soft gloaming. Runway lights were a glowing path to the main tower a mile distant. Fuel trucks nosed among the parked aircraft like hungry piglets. The night smelled of dust and aviation kerosene.
‘I thought you were taking me to meet men, not jugfuls of vodka and hormones,’ Gaby said.
Oksana shrugged. ‘Not many men in this country at all. Plenty of rides. Few men. If you do get man, you must hold him, hard. I tell you how you keep him for ever. Serbski Jeb. That is how. Serbian fucking. You can do it indoors but outside much better. Make sure ground is soft. You get man. You stake him out, yes? So?’ She mimed a spread-eagle. ‘Good and tight. Then you get on top of him and you ride him. Slow. Very slow. When he seems to come, you slow down, stop him. After half-hour, forty minutes, he is out of his head. Afraid he is dying, afraid he is not going to die, and nothing he can do to stop you. Girl on top. Won’t work other way. You always in charge. He’ll want more, but careful with it, yes? Not for every day. Holidays, birthdays, New Year; keep it special so he will not get used to it. He’s yours for ever, I promise.’
‘How the hell do you know this?’
‘Eight months of snow in Irkutsk. You learn much those long, dark nights by the fire.’
‘It’s not just fucking, it’s everything,’ Gaby said. ‘I’ve been here two months and I want something to happen. Something reaclass="underline" not a report of it, or a press release, or even someone who has experienced it himself. The real thing. I want to see the Chaga, Oksana, that’s all. I am going out of my head with frustration. I want something to happen.’
‘I think maybe your prayer will be answered, Gaby. Something is happening. They have been fuelling up planes all day. Something is coming, very soon, I feel. I do not know what; they will not tell us until the pre-flight briefing, but because of what I am, I can sense things others cannot.’
Oksana fingered a leather amulet on a thong around her neck. ‘Change is coming. Will be rain by morning. I can smell it. My grandfather had a famous weather nose. I have inherited it.’
They walked under the wings of a stubby, barbaric little jet: T-tail, two big turbofans mounted above the wing-roots. It was the same aircraft that was printed on Oksana’s faded sleeveless T-shirt. Two black soldiers came around the aircraft’s nose. They recognised Oksana and nodded without challenging Gaby. They carried their automatic weapons with the brutal ease peculiar to African soldiers, as if they were bags of vegetables. Oksana placed her hand affectionately on the fuselage. ‘This is mine. She is not beautiful, but I love her. Do anything, go anywhere for me. Good as any man. Better, maybe. Does not need Serbski Jeb to keep her true to me.’
A Cyrillic word was spray-stencilled under the cockpit windshield.
‘What does it say?’
‘Is her name. Dostoinsuvo. Means “dignity”. Come, I show you something.’ Oksana opened the hatch. Steps unfolded, alerted by her handprint. Gaby followed her up into the cockpit.
Oksana cleared a mail order catalogue for a Californian New Age store from the vacant co-pilot’s seat. Dostoinsuvo’’s flight deck was a shrine to credit card shamanism. Leather sacks like sun-dried scrotums hung from the cockpit window. The hatch glass had been streakily stained with glass paint to portray images of the Ancestral Tree. Thumbnail icons looked down from between the redundant ceiling switches with the beatific indifference peculiar to Orthodox saints. Colour photocopies of mandalas were gunge-tacked to the back of the flight deck door; crystals of various hues and spiritual properties rested in niches in the command board. The bleached skulls of Oksana’s totemic animals were glued along the upper edge of the main console, which had been sprayed with green car paint that was peeling under the partial pressurisation. Tiny chimes glittered and tinkled in the draught from the air-conditioning vents; the virtual reality helmet was adorned with painted reindeer horns.
‘Is like explosion in magic shop, but I love her,’ Oksana said. ‘She takes me high, to the places of the spirits, and collects the power of the high places on her wings so I can bring it back to earth. Do not laugh, Gaby. You do not feel it, you do not have the power in your genes.’
I am not laughing, Gaby thought. It is the most real thing there is. It is the thing that makes you want to do what you want so bad you would die if you could not do it. But you cannot touch it or hold it, for the moment you start to think about what it is, you turn away from the thing that produces it and you kill it. You can only find it when you do not seek it, you can only see it when you look away from it. It is pure being. Dhyana. It dwells in the cockpit of an An72F at twenty thousand feet as comfortably as in the nested fan-folds of information and video in a complex multimedia news overlay, but it will only come as an uninvited guest.
Oksana slipped her hand into the manipulator glove, flexed it in imagined flight and pointed through the window at the aircraft standing opposite Dostoinsuvo. It was unlike any other on Weelson Airfield: long, low, lean, mean, wings swept-back, nose uplifted to the stars. It seemed to stab the night.
Ts beautiful, no? Beautiful bird,’ Oksana said. ‘Tupolev 161. Executive jet variant of old Soviet Blackjack bomber. UNECTA priority transport. After-burning Kuznetzov turbofans: she will do Mach 2.2 at fifteen thousand metres. Swing wing. Take you anywhere in the world. Of course, they will not let Oksana fly this. For men only. Big macho thing. Penis with wings. But some day, some day, Oksana Mikhailovna will be in captain’s chair up there. My ambition, Gaby. See? Both poor unhappy frustrated women. You with Chaga, me with big supersonic dick. But when we are happy, let us not forget this, Gaby. When we have dreams, and men, do not let them come between us, no? Men come, men go, friendship goes on.’ She held out her hands. Moved by the Siberian woman’s honest inarticulacy, Gaby clasped them in her own hands. ‘Any time you want, any time you need, any time, I will be there. When he is gone – for they all go, in the end – you come to me. I will not go.’