Atdtda34: An unreadable Balkan dog's dinner, 950-954 #1

[Paul Nightingale]

As confirmation of the previous section’s narrative, the child has now
separated Yashmeen (“more and more she stayed at the farm ...”) from Reef
and Cyprian; she is anchored by “chores” as they pursue an “elusive” goal.
Moreover, if the child represents a future that Yashmeen is tied to, Reef
and Cyprian each, as in previous pages, invokes the past if differently. By
the end of the section (954) they are wondering what they should tell
Yashmeen: her continued participation will be dependent on the way they
represent their adventures to her. If they are protective of her and the
child, one should also note that the same passage sees them wondering what
to tell Ratty: following the appearance of “those motorcycle boys” Reef and
Cyprian have become narrators reading the “unreadable”.

At the outset the passage of time is marked, once more, by nature: from
“most of that summer” (950) to “[w]hen the roses were in”. The “tobacco
patches and fields of sunflowers ...” etc are juxtaposed to the “treeless
plain”, fecundity to the barren, with Reef and Cyprian drawn to the latter.
Once again Reef thinks back to what he knows (“one of those Tesla rigs ...
My brother ...” etc) to interpret the oddity: if nature is always already
there, the natural cycle always already in play, there is no before/after of
the kind Slim refers to. Furthermore, if Slim alludes to a puzzle, one that
Reef/Cyprian might attempt to solve, the presence of the tower allows
Reef/Cyprian to remake their relationship to Slim and the locality. This is
a moment they have had to wait for, nature permitting: “When the roses were
in ...” etc.

The “small outbuilding” is seen, as it were, in an establishing shot that
places the viewers at a distance; montage then places them “[i]nside the
transmission shack”, so identified following Reef’s recollection: “what
seem[s] mostly at first to be atmospheric static” then becomes
comprehensible to English-speaking listener, in the process positioning the
reader with Reef/Cyprian. Moreover, that Reef/Cyprian are “visitors”, of
course, indicates a distancing of the process from the locality: this is a
transformation of nature, one that includes a belief in the “voices of the
dead” (951). An explanatory speech by “one of the operators” (950) is
followed “immediately” (951) by Reef’s recollection of “the séance back
there in Switzerland” (ie: “it’s just a con game” on 671), a scene the
reader but not any characters in the current scene can recall (Yashmeen is
also present at the séance, but absent here, of course).

Then, if recollection of the séance has prioritised Reef’s pov, the “massed
mechanical uproar” (951) signals a shift to Cyprian’s pov. If Reef
consistently invokes home and family, Cyprian is rather more aligned with
exile: he “identifie[s] ... immediately” the cyclists and their association
with Theign and “the Trieste station”: in contrast to Reef, Cyprian goes
back in time as a way of undoing the present, to Venice and “trying to
figure out what to do about Theign”.

Reef continues to recall past events as analogous to the present, now Webb
and Kit: Reef, then, is introspective, but Cyprian interacts with others, eg
Gabrovo Slim and Vamos. That is to say, Cyprian belongs to their narratives
as much as they do to his. Consequently, we see Reef marginalised and seldom
named in the text: a monosyllabic “God” (953; another translation, an
utterance similar to “[k]ind of like Omaha” and “five dollars” on 945)
notwithstanding, he doesn’t speak until the top of 954.