Modjaji Books 

Summery

A man, Volker, is travelling from Germany to Namibia, along the way he spends time in Charles de Gaulle airport. This is the story of his experiences there, the people he meets along the way and how life, and people, do not contain merely one story but are  made up of many stories. And so these stories enter your life  and then quickly move out of it.

The First Few Pages

Volker walks slowly, and sometimes he walks fast, across the airport concourse, his speed, and the way he moves, depends upon the speed of the other people who also walk there, some walk fast, they almost run, as if they have somewhere to be, others meander, wander, as if they have no purpose, no reason, do we all have no reason, I am born and I die and the reason for being in this airport is that I am alive, I am alive so I may as well be in this airport, walking. Volker has just arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport after a short flight, the journey from Frankfurt to Paris takes one hour and fifteen minutes. Now he walks, sometimes as if he has a purpose, other times as if he does not. He remembers.

I am alone.[1]

The airline is Lufthansa, it is German.[2] Streamlined, almost perfect for Germany can never not be perfect though her history is so bad, does this mean that I am bad, evil, does evil exist without good? Where does Goethe fit into all of this, or Schiller, for that matter, maybe the Ride of the Valkyrie[3] will allow us into a heaven, Thor’s heaven. The C-class section of the Boeing 747 is elongated, semi-dark, it stretches in front of Volker, the aisle is so long I can barely see the end of it, a Boeing is a measurement of the end of the world, I see the end of the world, I am so small, a miniature version of a man, an ant, a velveteen rabbit,[4] I can never be real. On either side of him are seats, there are two sets of seats, one to the right and one to the left, three seats in each set, in each set the seats are joined together at the armrests. On the cloth cover of the armrest that is next to him but for one seat, there is a hole, it is a burn, the edges are black, a cigarette burned the material some time ago when smoking was still permitted on aeroplanes, the edges are frayed. Remember the movie Henry and June, the cigarette smoke that curls from the sides of Uma Thurman’s lips, June’s mouth is sexy, Henry’s too, but June’s? Remember when Anaïs watched the two women have sex; they looked like her and June. Why were cigarettes banned on aeroplanes? I am breathing, breathing in air and I do not care for air. Volker wants to smoke, the burned patch, smoke-filled aeroplanes and scratchy eyes when the flight is a long flight, some East German insomniac chain smokers drinking whiskey. A sign, ON then OFF … SMOKING/NO SMOKING; where is that fucking sign?[5] Volker sits on the fourth seat at the end of the row of seats, he is close to the window. A man wearing a blue track-suit and a white T-shirt sits next to him, he is a large man, he is sweating and drinking water, many bottles of water, on the pocket of his T-shirt are the words ‘Princeton Alumni’. What is he, a professor, a sort-after intellect, I can hear the sound of water following the edges of his throat, is the professor crying? The man in the blue track-suit looks resolutely at the book he holds, but the reading light is not turned on, it is off, it is dark, every few minutes he lifts his head and looks forward, into the distance which only just reaches to the far end of the aeroplane, then he turns his head a fraction to the left and looks out of the window, he appears to be thinking. Nothing is further from self-knowledge than introspection, wisdom is remote, wisdom is intellect …

Charles Grayson Smith, Junior,[6] is a traveller. This is what he now calls himself as he is aware that in the world it is necessary to call oneself something for labels give meaning to the other otherwise meaningless. It is important to have an identity. The word traveller has connotations of doing something, and to be doing something, to be busy, is important, for to do nothing is considered to be both lazy and dangerous. He has not always been a traveller. Once, not that long ago, a few years, he was a professor of economics at Harvard. This university is considered to be the best in the Ivy League category. Whether it is or not, this is not necessary to debate. All we need to agree on is that this university is in America, and because America defines the world, the only world, it is an illustrious university. But unfortunately his life took a downward spiral. He was accused of plagiarism. The woman, the student, who accused him – who can judge her motivation? Was it because he had spurned her sexually – of course he did, he was a homosexual – or was it because she was vindictive, he never gave her very high grades, her work was not interesting or well thought through. Or was it because he really did copy the work of another?

Charles Junior comes from the distinguished, famous some would say, Smith family. His father, Charles Grayson Smith, Senior, is a very successful businessman and a celebrity, within America, that is, actually just Texas, and to be more specific, Houston. With some luck, and a lot of money he borrowed from the Chase Manhattan Bank, before it went under and was rescued by the tax payer, he paid this money back. In hindsight he probably did not have to and so would be wealthier than he is; his success came from oil exploration. He discovered an enormous oil deposit on the farm of an elderly man and woman. This farm was approximately one hundred and fifty miles south of Houston. He bought the farm from them for a handsome figure, and once he had paid the money to them they were able to buy a small house in a secure development somewhere safer. It is never safe to live on a small-holding.

Charles Senior knocked down the farmhouse and drilled deep. He found oil and made a fortune. This fortune was enough to send his children to the best universities, that is the ones who wanted to go to university. The younger son, Bert, did not, he preferred the bohemianism of art college, while the two older siblings, Charles Junior and his sister Sue attended Houston University. They then went on to other more notable institutions. Fortunately for Charles Senior the payment of their education paid off, not because his children were brilliant but because they managed to do fairly well, and because Charles Senior always donated handsomely to the institutions they attended. Soon after graduating from Houston Charles Senior paid for Charles Junior’s postgraduate studies at the University of Southern California, sometimes known as the University of Spoilt Children. This was because, despite Charles
Senior’s protestations, Charles Junior wanted to leave Texas to experience the exuberance and excitement of what he perceived to be the anti-establishment environment in California.

During his time in Los Angeles he experimented with anti-Vietnam war protests and drugs, mostly LSD, but at the same time kept his head and graduated in economics for he knew that there was little future in hallucinations and folk music, unless you were Patti Smith or Joan Baez. After this he left the west coast and went east to Boston. He was accepted at Harvard University as here, once again, his tuition was paid for by the ever increasing wealth of Charles Senior.

At Harvard there was not a lot to distract him, and his father made a large donation to the economics library so he excelled, in fact he graduated cum laude, and was at once offered a post as a junior lecturer in the economics department. He worked in the department for twenty years; soon he was a senior lecturer, then more senior, eventually a professor and tipped to be head of the department. His career was unblemished. He was frequently cited in major journals, his students enjoyed the way he presented his classes, they were more clownish than intellectual for Charles was naturally funny, and yet they also provoked a critical analysis of late capitalism in America (and elsewhere, although there is no elsewhere). He always made them consider other systems of economic development, not merely the accumulation of wealth but, possibly, they could think about an accumulation of satisfaction. They never did.

Unfortunately for Charles Junior his career came to an abrupt end. He wrote an article for the Harvard Journal of Economic Reform (HJER). It was published and acclaimed; people talked about it in the hallways and even in the high-rise buildings of New York City. It established a model for development that was different to the model proffered, and sold, by the IMF; it challenged and irritated, people loathed it or loved it. The student who accused him, who came from somewhere in the Midwest, was extremely adept at Google searches – what else is there to do in the Midwest where the only world without corn fields is on the computer – and she found an article written by an obscure sociologist, Feodor Raskolnikov, who lived, he was now dead, in what was previously known as Leningrad in the Soviet Union. For a long time the article was unavailable to most English-speaking people, but, with the advent of Google Translate, it could now be read by everyone. Exact words, even phrases, were replicated without shame in the article that Charles Junior had written. Plagiarism is a heinous sin in the academic world, in America immense pride is taken in being an individual, work must always be new and unique. So no matter how much Charles Junior argued that no thought is new and that all works are a tapestry of other writings, or that there is no such thing as originality, some people just do the same thing better than others, Barthes is not fashionable, he never really was in the economic sphere, so no one listened. Most free-thinking economists were also outraged that they could be taken in by someone from a formerly communist country. Charles Junior, in his own defence, put forward another translation of the work. This translation was prepared by a linguist who was not employed at Harvard but at Princeton. This translation was very different to the one by Google Translate, but in the end who can doubt Google. So Charles Junior was called before a disciplinary committee and after lengthy debates as to his unblemished career and how much he had contributed to the university it was decided to let him go. He was fired. There were many protests calling for his dismissal, as there were many that called for his reinstatement, but by this time Charles Junior knew that he had had enough. He now wanted to travel the world so he agreed to resign, so as not to leave ignominiously. In addition to his pension, and this was large as he had been working at the university for twenty years, he also received a handsome package. As he was well connected in the economic world, he had made many friends, and few enemies; he knew that in a society where wealth equals power and power equals influence it was better to keep in with all of the above for they might be needed sometime in the future. His package and his pension is therefore extremely well invested. Now he is rather well off, not rich as is Charles Senior, who is very rich, just well off. Also, of this he is well aware, that when his father died his wealth would be bequeathed to him, and his two siblings.

Charles Junior has a bestselling crime book in his hands, but he is not reading it, he is staring into the dark and wondering his future destination. He is flying to Paris, from there he will catch a train to Latvia because he wants to explore what was formally the Soviet Union, he believes that he has some spiritual connection to the remnants of communism, what it is he does not know, and from there he will move on to Mongolia, Ulan Bator has always been somewhere he would like to spend a birthday and soon he will be sixty. He also likes the Mongol look, flat faces and hungry slanting eyes. He may find a Mongolian bride there if he is able, a male bride for he has always, despite being in a liberal environment and hiding his homosexual proclivity, desired young Asian men. He wears a Princeton T-shirt because, although he never attended Princeton, it was given to him by the linguist who did the translation in his defence, so the T-shirt has some sentimental value. When he gave it to Charles Junior he had a wry expression and said, no more Harvard, old boy. Charles Junior does not much like the T-shirt but it is comfortable and a very easy shirt to wear while flying. In the past, when he was a well-known economist, he wore suits and red ties, now he wears a pair of blue track-suit pants.

A Princeton Alumnus, huff. Volker looks ahead, a woman in a blue uniform is walking down the centre aisle of the aeroplane, as he watches her she moves towards him, a man squeezes a woman out of a tube of toothpaste, women, their only role is to clean my teeth, she walks slowly down the stretched out aisle, Volker reaches between his legs and brushes his cock as he leans into his bag, he does not look inside it, he finds his glasses by touch and puts them on, he hooks the black plastic arms over his ears, his eyes are surrounded by black frames, plain black frames, there are no sparkling stones that glitter in them.

[1] All good writers borrow; all remarkable writers steal. Some of these words and lines are stolen from others. The others that come to mind here are Will Self, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Alexander Trocchi, Stewart Home, Peter Beard, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, U2, Michel Butor, Ann Quin and Alain Robbe-Grillet. ‘I am alone’ is from the book The Erasers (or is it In the Labyrinth?) by Robbe-Grillet. This text, however, does not form part of novels known as the New Novel, the Nouveau Roman. This is a modernist novel, the subjective that does not try to be objective.

[2] Flying is a metaphor for ecstasy. Flying is unempirical, so in a society of empiricism flying is not flying for it is referred to only in aeronautical terms (unless you are Antoine de Saint-Exupéry). Lufthansa, the German national carrier, does fly, but not ecstatically; it flies aerodynamically and profitably. It is German. Everything about it is grounded in reality. There is only the empirical and the pragmatic.

1. Lufthansa is the world’s fourth-largest airline in terms of passenger numbers.
2. These passengers travel to a variety of destinations in that the airline operates services to 18 domestic destinations, that is, destinations in Germany, and 203 international destinations spread over 78 countries. These countries cross continents: Africa, North and South America, Asia and Europe.
3. Lufthansa, together with myriad partners, services around 410 destinations.
4. The airline owns over 710 aircraft, including the Boeing 747 that Volker is in, and, when combined with its subsidiaries, it has the second-largest passenger airline fleet in the world.
5. Lufthansa’s registered office and corporate headquarters are in Deutz.
6. The main traffic centre is in Frankfurt, with a second hub in Munich.
7. Lufthansa flies to Windhoek as Namibia is a favourite tourist destination for hungry German hunters.

Should you want to read anything further about this airline log in to Wikipedia.

[3] Goethe, a German writer, and Schiller, a German philosopher, are famous. Goethe loved the more famous Wagner, a German composer, who wrote the four operas that make up Der Ring des Nibelungen. The Ride of the Valkyries is in the second of these four operas and was featured in the movie Apocalypse Now as the Americans napalmed a small village in Vietnam.

[4] The Velveteen Rabbit, also entitled How Toys Become Real, is a children’s novel written by Margery Williams and illustrated by William Nicholson. The book is about a toy rabbit made of velveteen that is given as a Christmas present to a young boy, but then is neglected by him for better, more exciting toys. The velveteen rabbit is told how he can become real by the wisest toy in the nursery. To become real a toy must be adored and loved by the child who owns him (love and ownership go hand in hand). The velveteen rabbit is overwhelmed by this; however, he is also sad as his chances of achieving reality are minimal. One night, after the young boy has lost his treasured china dog, he is made to feel better by the velveteen rabbit. The young boy then comes down with scarlet fever. In order that he recover fully he is sent on a trip to the coast. He is unhappy and does not want to go; he wants to remain in his home. He is soothed when he is given a stuffed rabbit that is of a better quality than the velveteen rabbit; the velveteen rabbit is replaced, and must be burned with all of the other toys that harbour the dangerous scarlet fever virus. Then the velveteen rabbit is magically transformed into a living rabbit by a fairy so as to spare him from this fiery fate. He became the young boy’s best and most adored toy after all. So the velveteen rabbit achieved real greatness.

[5] Paul Bowles wrote: I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. I keep learning, getting wiser, going further into the truth. And now I know that it’s not like that. It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs, it tastes wonderful and I never think of it ever being used up. Then I begin to take it for granted. And suddenly I realise that it is almost burnt down to the end, my fingers burn. And then I am conscious of a bitter taste. And I think that if I am always conscious of this unpleasant disagreeable bitter taste I should give up smoking. And then I realise that living is a habit, like smoking. I always say I am going to give it up, but I just go right on living.

[6] While the names of some real persons are used for characters in the text, these characters appear in a fictionalised setting. There is no intention to suggest that they bear any other than the most superficial similarity to actual people bearing the same names. Any other resemblance to living people is entirely unintended. But don’t invest in any of these characters; they will come into your life, and they will go from it, as quickly as the people who walk and run past you in an airport.