TRAVELS IN THE KIZZELKOOM

 

 

 

t is time for prayer. Some guy comes out on the balcony of the stubby minaret opposite our hotel window. He sounds off – not the usual tape, but a trumpet, cracking upwards at the last, three octaves of broken accidentals.

Sinclair is reading from his goddam guidebook again: ‘Under the edges of the strata of ferruginous sandstone which cap the summit of Nogai-Kala are some caves frequented by owls of a very large size; and the unwary visitor is not unlikely to be upset and rolled down the steep slopes of the hill by the sudden flying out of the birds on his approach.’ He rolls on his bed to face me with one dead-wolf yellow eye. ‘Some times, those, Jay.’

He reminds me of a pustule, of Bolivar being carried through greater Colombia like a pustule, shedding his library, too goddam heavy, the library and the liberator both together.

‘Tomorrow,’ Sinclair says, scuffing at some insect bites and twisting in the styrofoam casing he uses in place of sheets, ‘we go deeper. To what the Chinese called Zhou-Yen,’ and he attempts a sing-song, ‘and the Ayrabs Furruck-al-Ziy’ – reading from the guidebook.

‘What do we call it, Sinclair?’ I ask. ‘And no more mules.’ Sinclair loping along in front, hanging over the mule’s sides like a pair of saddlebags – a pair of saddlebags with thieves bundled in them.

He smiles horribly, and ladling Wisconsin on his Missouri says, ‘Sure don’t hear that mule complain.’

Companion, master, guide, and more than usual today – pustule. With his goddam guidebook, central Asia on fifty kopecks a day or suchlike goddam crap, and never knowing where we go, or where we want to go, or if we have arrived, what language or what country we are in – or even, maybe, are we looking for some other guys, or wanting to be friendly, how should I know, even sell them into slavery maybe, and Sinclair says, ‘It’s all come down, you see. It’s all gone back to how it was, and we’re two flies, or spiders maybe, sidling along the crack where China and the Ayrabs meet the Turks, and then you see, the Mongols,’ and at that word he pauses, like he’s crossing himself, or maybe making an evil-eye sign, or thinking of piles of skulls a hundred metres high, higher than the Golden Gate, a sliding zone that never stops, and I’m quite desperate now, I ask, ‘What we goddam looking for, man?’ – and see his face go bronzy and I soften it all up and add, ‘Sinclair, old man, old friend.’

He sweeps along, as if he’s ordering foreign troops about – ‘And then, young Jay, I have my little theory that when the Greeks got to the river, well – what Greek would ever stop and draw a line, and say – “thus far”? Arriving at the Oxus,’ he rears up and starts poking in his Samsonite, ‘Wherever at that time it may have been, where would they have gone but down it? Meeting, you know, the Scythians, and later on, Chinese. And then voyaging for years, decades, for generations, through Chinese villages. And towns. And provinces. Where the river goes, young Jay.’

‘It goes nowhere, Sinclair.’

He says, impatiently, ‘Other rivers, there’s always other rivers. That goddam river don’t go anywhere, young Jay, because you’re going round the handling of it wrong. It’s already finished. In the West, it flows into the sea. Or out of it. But always going east, you see, they find more rivers. So, one generation, they will reach another sea.’

‘But Sinclair, they don’t want to find another one. They want home.’

‘Home is relative, Jay.’ He turns his samoyed eye on me, he laughs, ‘Jay, home is relatives.’

‘Sinclair, it’s where I want to go. Not my home, necessarily, just someone’s home.’

He dismisses it with a flap of his hand. ‘And truth, Jay? Values? All that Berkeley crap?’

‘Outmoded, Sinclair, and I never graduated.’

‘Graduated? Sure as fuck you didn’t graduate. How could a guy like you graduate when you got your crummy job in the parking lot stacking the young scholars’ automobiles?’

He makes an attitude with a towel, as if it’s a toga. ‘The Romans, now, young Jay, you’ll find them along behind, wherever two Greeks have gone a thousand of your Romans follow – down the road to China too. Or maybe India. Or just stay here, fight in the desert, go to the Urals, what the fuck should I care,’ he finishes irritably. It is very hot. We are covered with blotchy bites, we look fat and white and grey like two flatfish.

Sinclair asks, quite kindly, ‘How’s the shamanism going?’

‘I can’t ease out my long-bones the way they should. The rest is all quite simple.’

‘Visiting the dead? And dying?’

‘A cinch.’

He says, ‘Well, keep on taking lessons. There is a knack to everything – and since we’re here, you should try the “speshaltay of the may-zon”.’ He laughs, and I think, ‘He’s a great man, yes, a pustule, but a great, a very great man indeed,’ and he brings out the stuff he’s hunted for: ‘You see this, Jay? You see it, can you name it? Can you sell it?’

‘It’s a gunsight, Sinclair.’

‘It’s a gunsight, it’s a gunsight,’ he scoffs, and capers round the room. ‘What these guys here would want with gunsights, poor buggers shooting at poor buggers, don’t need a gunsight to sight yourself, you fool.’ He is excited, and he screeches, ‘History, you fool! It’s all come down, you fool. The world is on the move, the movement of the peoples starts again.’ He breathes into my face, ‘Islam is the last. Last night’ – he grips me – ‘Last night I met someone, eyes like walled gardens. They were ready. They inclined their ear. And I put’ – he is delighted, high – ‘and I put my tongue deep, deep into Islam.’

He stands back. ‘You want my reaction, Sinclair?’ I ask.

‘Sure, why not. To you, I’m just a pustule. But you know, I am your teacher. I am a great man, a very great pustule, Jay. And though it hurt to do it, I can lead men, have led men. Outmoded, maybe. But up the hill, not fearing owls.’

I say primly, ‘Islam is obedience to the truth, Sinclair,’ and quietly he says, ‘The truth, Jay, is outmoded. And history is the thing.’

He presses the gunsight against my eye. I can see eyelid. Then blood and tears.

I say, ‘Jesus, Sinclair, what’s in this thing?’

‘The future and the past, dear boy. My history scope.’

‘The present?’

‘I’m having difficulty calibrating that, dear boy.’

I ask, ‘You plan to sell this stuff, then, Sinclair?’

He says haughtily, ‘Not sell the merchandise, young Jay. I sell a look, a peep. Forward or back. The present, Jay,’ he whispers in my face again, his breath smells of walled gardens, ‘The present, Jay, has fallen down into itself. It really doesn’t count.’

‘Sinclair, you don’t need insist with me. It’s the American way, I guess, the present and all that, but if your gadget doesn’t pick it up, it’s all the same to me.’

He looks at me suspiciously. ‘Well, I hope you’re right. The guys round here are funny. On the move. The big religions, all that stuff, come in like earthquakes, like gods with nuclear mowers,’ and he reads from the guide, ‘“when night closed in, this sea without ships and these shores without ports assumed a sadness which was all their own, as a nebulous mist veiled the starlight and spread like a pall over waters whose ripples gave out no gleam of phosphorescence”. Wow, Jay, some writing. Some place.’

‘But Sinclair, everything is coming down. Those communist guys, that fucking trumpeter on the minaret, and countries that aren’t countries, and just go on, we don’t know what the goddam place is called because the guide’s a century old …’ and Sinclair is furious, he shouts, ‘More than a century, you fool. You whine, you whine. Did the Greeks whine, when they were led on and on, deep into …’ he searches for words like where we are now at: ‘People. Things. Villages. Shamans. Where you go down, and there’s an unstoppered jar, and thousands more jars stoppered that you mustn’t touch’, and I’m surprised – ‘Sinclair, only shamans can go down there and back’, and he is silent.

 

 

*

 

 

It is hot. It is cold. We travel through villages, towns once full of walled gardens, grey dust plains, grey mud plains. Sometimes we fly in planes over this landscape of old scarred skin, sitting side by side like two magicians on the same carpet. Sometimes I run along behind Sinclair on his mule, shouting ‘Teach me everything I know, then,’ but the wind blows away the irony, and we are closed in by four winds, one of sand and one of dust, one of mica, one of bronze, and everything the guidebook says falls far below the truth.

I ask Sinclair, ‘You think we’ll sell the gunsight?’ and he replies, all haughty now – ‘Well, you see, my dear young friend, as a gunsight it may not be so hot, but as history – what a portent,’ and I gather that he dropped the fucking thing, or trod on it somehow, and all I ask myself is what the fuck I’m doing here, and knowing truth only so as to submit to it is a poor reward for being dead and going down there, and seeing all the goddam dead and stuff like that, and maybe legions Sinclair has abandoned here among the dunes during his passages, and on the goddam fat bastard goes, and he’s ranting all the time about the commissars we meet, about the guy who played great trumpet on the minaret, about whoever’s ear he got his tongue in, or time as the skin that holds the cosmic organs in, and all that crap I got at Berkeley, and I ask: ‘Sinclair, when you going to let me go?’ and he rages at me, ‘What it is, you got nowhere to go, so I get to take you. A man should travel free, not with some goddam hippy on a string,’ and maybe he is right, for sure as hell I don’t know where we’re going, the places being changed each day, and sometimes Sinclair asking for the ticket in Chinese, and sometimes Arabic and sometimes pure Manhattan, and he’s asking to see imams and gunrunners all the time, but specially if they’ve been what he calls ‘those old commie guys’, and we get ourselves some nasty corners, and one time I have to do a footrace in the desert – the prize is if I lose, castration, and if I win – then nothing, and off you go rejoicing.

And yet, what these guys all see is what I know: that Sinclair is a great man. A very great, a very lasting man. Beside Sinclair, just being dead or living is a pretty trivial thing, and Sinclair says, ‘I am the glue. I am the everlasting gum that puts these broken bits together,’ and one day we find a bar and in the back are all the broken pool cues in the world, and I say to Sinclair, ‘Why don’t you try to mend this fucking lot,’ and he says wisely, that they must go somewhere and then wait their turn.

‘Let me go,’ I say. ‘Let’s go,’ and he says quite gently, ‘I’m not a humanist, you know, young Jay.’ But to show his trust in me, I get to carry the Samsonite with all the money in, that it comes from somewhere I don’t want to ask, and he takes on the suitcase with his dirty socks in, and I think maybe I’ve made a step towards obedience, or it may be truth, and I even think one of those goddam winds that look like walls is maybe a bit opaque, and then they overbook us on some flight, and it’s Sinclair on the mule again, and more melons, tea and these goddam castles built of mud, and piles of skulls a hundred metres high that turn out as pylons or maybe radio-towers as you come up to them. 

And Sinclair is busy squinting at his gunsight, and he shows it to all kinds of guys, some are in suits and some in frocks, and some I’ll swear are Chinese, and some piss down straws, and Sinclair whispers to me that that is real old time, and even in Missouri, in his youth  ...

And Sinclair tells them all he’s not a humanist, and sometimes asks them where the sea is, sometimes which way the rivers flow, and sometimes lets them use the history scope, and sits there like a happy seal and watches as they click it to and fro.

And there are cops and frontiers, and some days we change our money and get copper slugs or little rolls of mud, or perfume on our wrists, and Sinclair coins a slogan, ‘You don’t smell, so we won’t sell’ and for a while it seems he’ll start an advertising scam in Kungrad; on this occasion he is much impressed with all the lovely women, but who knows what the place is called today and besides, as Sinclair says, sensations pall, that’s what they’re meant to do. Kindly he asks me how the shamanism is going, and if I want to start a parlour or a circle when I get back home, and so I tell him how you really need for roasting off your flesh and binding up the bones with copper wire – is lots of coke, but nothing like that here, they sell you nutmeg, and he laughs and says how I’m a ragamuffin, how I live ‘without even ideal wealth, and therefore living on the interest from the capital of your opinion’, and I say that’s very well, but if I’ve nothing much to offer, at least I’ve got something big to hunt. And then he smiles and looks away, and taps the Samsonite with all the bucks.

 

 

*

 

 

And so we travel on, this must be China, even though the guys here do Turkish wrestling, and I see Sinclair ogling them as they oil up with cornseed oil from old UNRA cans. A sadness is heavy here, they do not seem to seek the truth, like me, nor do they have a Sinclair to obey, and even Sinclair seems disturbed, though not downhearted, which he cannot be, so long as I am here. And he sing-songs:

‘These cities were once set out here like jewels along a river. Now, it’s dust. But I shall make these buggers rise again. I’ll make them great.’

‘They’ll get stomped, Sinclair,’ I tell him, but he won’t be stopped.

‘No, Jay, I’ll make them more than great, I’ll make them frightening.’

‘It’s all been tried, Sinclair, and our guys just laughed.’

He’s really angry now, he bangs the history scope down on the floor, and screams, ‘Our side? Our guys? You foolish guy, you foolish friend, it’s all gone down again, it’s dancing off, it’s twirling into dust. Nobody’s got our guys, our good old guys, our side—’ and I must interrupt and say, ‘Sure they have, Sinclair,’ but he rushes on, and says, ‘What you call our side, young Jay, what they most afraid of, real afraid, and not the blacks and not the poor, and not the reds which now there isn’t any, and not the judgement which there may be but who gives a fuck? Eh? I want your answer, seeker after truth.’ His breath is close to mine: it smells of nutmeg.

I’ve no clue, I’ve no idea. It could be anything: the mafia, maybe, or jiggers, a blowout on the freeway, how should I know?

‘The Mongols,’ Sinclair says, and stands back, pleased. ‘I’ll mobilise the Mongols.’ So that is why we came. I’m really moved.

‘The Europeans will just blast them, Sinclair,’ I say. ‘With nuclear cannons.’

He muses. ‘With nuclear cannons, eh?’ And then he brightens, ‘Then we’ll find them something more, maybe,’ but he’s thoughtful. ‘I never thought. So that’s why every general needs a shaman. Thank you, Jay, you done a real good turn.’ He’s really impressed with me, my faith in him is rocked. Over and over he repeats, ‘The Mongols. Blasted with nuclear cannons. Invasion over. The Mongols ... ’

I sidle out the room. I nearly take the Samsonite with all the bucks, but in the end, take nothing. Go out on the street.

Nothing on the street. Just lots of guys waiting. A bookstore selling one familiar book, there must be thousands of them, Central Asia ...  I hide from Sinclair. ‘The gloom of the West Turkestan steppes, which first impresses one so forcibly in the Karakoom deserts North of Aral, seems surpassed by the sadness of the Kizzelkoom  ...  As the vision passes from ghastly-looking ridges of sand that are sprinkled with funereal-looking bushes, over immense stretches of lifeless-looking, bare, clay plains which are lost in a low continuous line of elevations on the horizon, the feeling of novelty aroused by such surroundings is almost overcome by a sense of mysterious awe ...’

I go out on the street, and there’s a group of ragged commissars, they greet me, they are pleased to see a friend of Sinclair’s, they’re delighted – and I break away, I run. I run and as I pass the inn where we were staying, I see Sinclair in a sharkskin suit, he hasn’t seen me but he’s on a high again, he’s gathering his legions. Oh and now he’s seen me and he opens wide his arms, he pops his tongue out and I’m at the door, I run up to him.

And I pass him, and I keep on running.