GRGR(16) Plot Summary

[Peter Petto]

This is Vaslav Tchitcherine's chapter. Reflecting the glints & glimmers of 
mad scavenger's metallic fasciae, it is a pileup of flashbacks and reveries.

Tchitcherine is a technical intelligence agent of the Central Aero and 
Hydrodynamics Institute in Moscow. But he is on a private mission (or so he 
mostly thinks) in the Zone to liquidate his half-black half-brother Enzian.

The opening flashback is to a pre-war character-forming assignment to 
Russia's Wild East: Central Asia. The initial description of the buildings 
there brings to mind America's Wild West, the movie version -- with all the 
false fronts of a Paramount set. It is a truly wild place, more distant 
from the sun, with tempests of lightning, earthquakes, and sandstorms. Its 
mood is barren and insecure. It is at the edge, perhaps a bit beyond the 
edge, of the Russian empire.

Alongside that Galina the schoolmarm, Tchitcherine is on a mission to teach 
the New Turkic Alphabet (NTA) to the heretofore illiterate nomadic Khazakh 
tribes. It is more than just teaching. It is the mapping of an alien 
alphabet onto an oral culture, with conquest's destructive effect. Actually 
there are three exiles among the natives: Tchitcherine, Galina , and Luba 
-- making this an inverted Jules et Jim -- one guy & two gals -- a romantic 
dialectic of sorts.

Tchitcherine has a sidekick, Dzaqyp Qulan; Sancho Panza educated, and with 
his own agenda. Dzaqyp's Dad is a Kirghiz national martyr, having been 
murdered by Tchitcherine's people during their military conquest of his 
people. The Russian soldiers found a new sport: hunting down the ethnics 
like wild game, sometimes one at a time, sometimes by the hundred. And the 
executions could be as brutal as the sport was ghastly. And so the danger 
is not just from nature. Is Dzaqyp just waiting for the right moment? It 
seems that Tchitcherine's horse Snake is. Snake is methodically homicidal. 
He hasn't (yet?) gone after Tchitcherine, but he's attacked Dzaqyp Qulan 
three times now.

Tchitcherine also has a doper buddy, fellow opiomaniac Chu Piang. As 
detritus from the Chinese Opium War with all the cultural baggage that 
implies, he is a genuine tourist attraction. The situation goes beyond the 
alphabetic level to valency grammar. Chu is the most detailed example of 
Tchitcherine's attraction to undesirable elements.

Tied to Chu is the possible association of Tchitcherine to a half-mythical 
purported connection: Wimpe, the dope jinni. Part dealer, part detail man, 
he can produce vial after vial of exotic narcotics, describing the organic 
structure of each as though it were fine jewelry. Amidst this kaleidoscope 
of drug reveries and quests to quell pain without inducing addiction is the 
dope show: tourists watching Chu, Chu watching tourists; and hints of an 
improper romance with an aristocratic lady that may have landed 
Tchitcherine in exile, here at the edge.

Throughout these flashbacks that recount history there is always an element 
of uncertainty to the retellings. The association with Wimpe couldn't be 
true. Tchitcherine would have been killed, not exiled for that. 
Tchitcherine himself doesn't attribute the exile to romance. He believes 
that it is because of his half-brother Enzian. And so we hear of Enzian's 
birth, as Tchitcherine's Dad goes briefly AWOL in South West Africa during 
a doomed voyage into naval disaster, not unlike the Charge of the Light 
Brigade. These are the seeds for Tchitcherine's suicidal mania, his 
tendency to leap before he looks.

And we enjoy a wonderful pastiche of academic bureaucratic infighting. 
Phonic phun, as each element of the New Turkic Alphabet becomes the field 
of battle for information war. Tchitcherine carries the flag for a 
pre-Prince hanging-man's -noose of a symbol, a glottal G, a voiced uvular 
plosive. This culminates in an incendiary NTA Koran forgery disseminated 
over (Tchitcherine's foe) Igor Blobadjian's signature, forcing Igor to 
cross to the other side of the zero.

Then NTA begins to be appropriated by the people, in the form of graffiti 
incantations that kill the police, and the circle of anarchy is completed. 
The section ends with Tchitcherine and Dzaqyp on a quest to see the Kirghiz 
Light. But before they get there, the witness an ajtys, another cute meet 
in the form of a Kazakh singing duel of increasingly comic insults, a 
rustic opera that begins with jibes at fat horses and ends with thoughts of 
marriage. And in the end the Aquyn sings, a canonical description and 
warning about the Light they are about to encounter.

And Tchitcherine does indeed see the Light, but does not experience the 
prophesized effect. Like his love for Galina, the experience recedes into 
structure. Like his Dad's love for Enzian's mom, he will hardly be able to 
remember it. He is being drawn to the Rocket's light now.