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You will be always damp in Aerograd. You will be always half-blind.
/////: Today the clouds ooze forward, flowing like suspended oil. Their tops limn with cold bronze; their undersides bruise violet-yellow with unspilt snow. Look—I will share with you my tongue. How intimate, how bare, how pornographic. In cypher is safety. These are Ice Eels Speaking Forbidden Words. I like them but they make me sad. Their feathery fronds reach out to me, chill my hands, even down here.
I had a lover once. We never married; married couples are kept under observation. There is a danger inherent to them. When traveling to other Districts or off-air reconnaissance zones, one half of the two must remain at home. The Ossuary believes this reduces the likelihood of membership in subversive clubs, public assembly, defection, undue attachment and suicides. But those are all suicidal acts, in the end.
My lover’s name was Pyotr Duda. He had a son by another woman. I never found out what happened to her. Pyotr made roast gannet stuffed with plums for me when Melancholy Horseheads rolled in—that was his phrase. I can share it because he is dead now. Horseheads pricked him with energy, made him hopeful. He took the bird out of the oven and said:
“Bya, you’ve lost three buttons on that shirt. Also the radio says Yellow District will have a high concentration of tigers tonight.”
We did. We heard their vast paws slapping the clammy sidewalks. Their wine-bright pelts flashed in the gloom. Sometimes they would stop in front of a house and roar. Someone always let them in.
I know the word for a group of tigers was once a streak. But that isn’t right at all. It’s a concentration of tigers. It can only be that.
In Aerograd, when we mean sin, we say tiger.
Fourth: The following words have been excised from the official dialect and may not be used within city limits. Kindly make a note—our lives must seem strange, but there are reasons for everything in Aerograd.
Land, union, summer, counterinsurgent, before, below, beyond, else, desire, revolution, Rose District.
There are others. But we have forgotten them since their outlaw. Guard your talk—old words spring up like weeds and must be cut down.
/////: I have had the feeling for some time that the dialect is changing. I cannot speak about things that happened to me as a child. The words have dropped away or changed completely.
I will give you an example.
When I think of my father, I want to call him by his name, which I know was András Jandza. I want to talk about his collection of extremely antique altimeters, that hung on the wall in green and brass and punctured glass, as though they meant still to give some arcane reading, some sense of yaw and pitch. I want to say my father smoked, and enjoyed blowing the smoke into the clouds outside our window, watching the smoke enter the vapor and push it aside, just for a moment, before the cloud swallowed it up as though it never were. (Clouds That Smoke Back).
But I find I cannot say the word altimeter. I cannot say smoke. I cannot even say my father’s name. In the cypher I can indicate them, spell them intricately, in the diameters of my angstroms. I still know those words, and what they speak of. But I cannot make myself say them. I know that those sad mechanical faces hanging on my father’s wall like game-trophies are called liars now. Smoke is gas. My father should be referred to only as redacted.
Meat is memory. Tiger is sin.
I wrote just before (oh the sweetest and most nearly eradicated of all the exiles!) of tigers. Of concentrations. But only after that night with Pyotr Duda and the roast gannet stuffed with plums did we start calling them tigers. They were something else before. That dark red and black wildness, that sleekness, the teeth. Something else. Not tigers. But the word is gone. Scooped away as cleanly as a mother. Everyone I knew started calling them tigers at the same time. The cafes were suddenly full of feline phrasing. The giraffes, too—oh, we’ve called them giraffes forever. Since before I was born. And they are giraffes as I understand giraffes: black and spindly and tall, four legs, hungry forever. But they were something else, too. Substituted, truth for giraffes.
Someday we’ll call clouds sunlight.
Do you know what the Ossuary calls us? The people of Aerograd. Our Lady says it too, we have heard it in her addresses. They call us Aeromaus. Singular. All our thousands are to them but one small, scurrying mouse in the works of the city. A creature other than them. An annoyance, leaving dirt and disease behind it. And as they say it, it grows toward truth. As they become tigers and giraffes. We huddle close together, a hundred men and women into a single humpbacked shape. You can see them on any street, clusters trailing away like tails. Their dark shapes move like mountains behind the clouds. One day, perhaps, there will be only one of us and one of her.
When they speak, the tigers and the giraffes and the Ossuary and Our Lady, I am almost certain their whole speech is made up of words that mean something other than they are. Even Aerograd. Their tongues are tigers that are not tigers. What is it they are saying that we cannot hear? What did we call the occupation before occupation? What did we call Our Lady?
Fifth: Why do they call it an occupation? Is not the point of an occupation to convert the occupied population into the occupiers’ image? Surely, surely by now we are what we are: Aerograders, Our Lady’s children. Aeromaus, united, Our Lady’s child. We speak her language, we understand ourselves only according to Aerograd, only in how we intersect with this place where we live together along with the tigers and giraffes and propellers and luminous shrimp and clouds and gannets stuffed with plums.
Tradition, maybe. A joke, maybe.
Where we say occupation there is a line through the twenty-five Districts and six levels of Aerograd. On one side of the line stands Our Lady with her beauty and her colors, flanked by her animals, silent, ageless, all those hands, all those mouths. On the other side we sit. No matter how quiet we become, no matter how still, no matter how we change so that the language emerging from us as natural as being born is not our own but hers, but theirs, it cannot be avoided that Our Lady is other than we. She puts out her hands and we disappear into them. She is something unmovable inside us, living there, going about her business in our bones.
We call it an occupation because we are occupied. We are occup
ied because we call it an occupation. We cannot call them countrymen—or at least they would never apply that word to us.
They seem to like the term. Or else it would wither up and fall over the edge of the world with all the rest.
/////: I have heard it said that there is no single Our Lady. Pyotr Duda believed them a species, perhaps thousands, but at least hundreds, in number. He thought that we never see the same one twice. Just as any visiting foreigner (foreigners will never visit) cannot see the variegated clouds, cannot call them by their names, so we cannot see the difference between Our Ladies. We are too used to our own faces. The one who speaks in the Ossuary is not the one who unexisted my mother is not the one that whispers on the radio is not the one who opens the year at the University crowned with steel laurels.
We must have come here from somewhere. The clouds today are pure white puffers. I used to call them Ice Cream But All Vanilla. Now I call them High Seas. We must have come here from somewhere because we are not suited to this environment. We do not have wings, the altitude kills one out of every twenty or thirty of us, our eyes have grown accustomed to seeing in the clouds, but we have no special organ to help us along. Aerograd is a city in the sky, and we are not of the sky. But they—or she—cannot be from the same place that made us. Our Lady came from somewhere else. Perhaps Our Lady does not mean God, but is their collective term for the repeated body they use. Perhaps that is how little influence we have ever had on her, compared with how like her we try to become. Either she never dies or she is multiform. Does it matter?
We were an Academy Town. We were assembled. We must have once been other than we are. Not gas but smoke. Not a liar but an altimeter.
I expect the fifth section of this document to be expunged. I veer too far. To encode with any density is to lose the sense of which is the real message and which the hidden. Have I embedded Pyotr in gannet or did I mean all along to hide gannet in Pyotr?
