Submission

by Harrison Young

  “Where are we going, Excellency?”

  “To the mountains,” said Fawzi.

  “Is that wise?”

  “We have enough petrol.”

  “I understood there was a war going on there.”

  “There is. They say the rebels are winning. I want your opinion.”

  “Why me?”

  “There is no one else to ask.”

  “I thought it was illegal to cross the border.”

  “I am prime minister.”

  “Won’t the Zaathi stop us?”

  “No.”

  “You have friends?”

  They whizzed along the road, and it was several minutes before Fawzi spoke again.

  “So you were right about Maloof.”

  “He’s not a social scientist,” said Philip.

  “More of a practitioner.”

  “What help have you provided?”

  “A little money, grudgingly,” said Fawzi.

  “More when we go ahead with the full census,” said Philip. “How did you make it Ibrahim’s idea, by the way?”

  “His Highness is young and suggestible. Anyway, Maloof would not gain that much from the census. He would have expenses.”

  “Plus opportunities for reconnaissance,” said Philip.

  “Alidar is a small country. What is there for him to learn?”

  “Your feelings.”

  “My feelings?”

  “Treason?”

  “Depends on how you look at it, Cooper.”

  “Stop the jeep.”

  “What?”

  “Stop the jeep.”

  His Excellency obeyed. The heat was immediately oppressive. Philip hopped out onto the road.

  “Drive on. If this is where the prime minister abandons his country, this is where he abandons his legal adviser.”

  “You’ll get lost,” said Fawzi.

  “You are already lost, Prime Minister.”

  “This is not a movie, Cooper.”

  Fawzi did a slow U-turn. Philip got in, but said nothing.

  “What you need to understand, my young friend,” said Fawzi, “is that I have no choice but to promote some sort of ambiguous involvement with the individual you so dislike, who incidentally I do not find particularly attractive either. Suleiman – his master, that is – is not going to stop being a claimant to the throne of Alidar and also of our backward neighbour. He is not going to stop having adherents. I must know what they are up to.

  “As you say, Cooper, Maloof is an entrepreneur. So the best way to keep track of him is to be talking to him about, as you say, ‘a deal.’ The tempo of our discussion, the degree of confidence he exudes, will tell me how his master’s cause progresses. Hence the feasibility study. Hence the census. If necessary, I will feed Maloof such popcorn for the rest of the century, simply to observe the eagerness with which he eats it.”

  “He who eats with the devil must have a long spoon,” said Philip, immediately feeling pompous.

  “As you realise, Cooper, the individual you so dislike is a political entrepreneur, which means that the deals I do with him lack the splendid impersonal quality of the transactions we busy ourselves with at the office. There is this overdramatic word, ‘treason,’ which you mentioned.

  “It is of no consequence if you negotiate with that Dutch firm for three months and then do not award them the contract. But having dinner in Paris with Maloof is not the same. And it is not an activity one can delegate. It is a little like ‘footsie,’ Cooper. Do you know the game?”

  “I know what it is,” said Philip.

  “You can move your foot next to a woman’s – under the table, at a party – and move it away, and nothing has happened. You can do it again, and perhaps nothing has happened. And then, if you keep your foot there for a little longer, and she doesn’t move her foot away, something has happened.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Philip.

  “I have never told Maloof that I know who he is…whom he serves. I have given him what he wants, up to a point, but I have kept the relationship…commercial.”

  “Does he think you know where the money is going?”

  “I would have to be a fool not to have made some guesses.”

  “So he is demanding more popcorn?”

  “Yes, and we will have to deal with that anon, Cooper, but that isn’t my point.”

  “What is your point?”

  “I have not been ‘issued’ a long spoon, Cooper. That is one of your army words, I believe. Alidar is too small for long spoons. It has only barely been ‘issued’ an army. Being a country, after a fashion, it is supposed to have an army. I suppose you would say that having an army is ‘T, O and E to a country.’ What does that phrase mean exactly, Cooper? I hear you use it and I think I know.”

  “Table of organisation and equipment,” said Cooper.

  “Yes, ahah,” said Fawzi. “A plausible country should come equipped with an army, just as it should have a capital and principal products and…”

  “Patriots?”

  Fawzi brought the jeep to a halt. “I believe I have told you, Cooper, that I returned to my implausible country, rather than staying in Cairo and becoming an actor or a playboy, which I could have done – my family had money even then – out of a sense of responsibility. Do me the credit of acknowledging that I did so – and while you are at it, that I work hard at my implausible job, and have not become richer, as I might easily have done. And do please understand that to do my job I must slightly compromise myself. And that is why I have.”

  Philip did not have a good answer.

  “There are many ways to protect Alidar, Cooper. One can create expectations in stronger neighbours, which is what I hope to do by playing footsie with Suleiman – through Maloof – or one can create obligations, which is what Mubarek hopes to do by sending money to terrorist organisations that disguise themselves as centres for the study of the Holy Quran – disguise themselves so poorly, by the way, that even the Saudis do not like to fund them directly.

  “This Suleiman, you know, is not a religious zealot – or so I have been given to understand. He just wants power. He wants to be king, and he thinks he ought to be. King of two countries is perhaps greedy, but one must make allowances for monarchs. Their chromosomes are not their fault. Being rapacious is how their ancestors got the throne in the first place. Mubarek’s father killed his older brother, after all. Mubarek himself appears to be a gentleman, but his son could turn out to be a different proposition. We’ll never know for sure until he ascends the throne, may I be gone before that happens.

  “In the end, Cooper, kings are much the same. It would probably be less awful for Alidar to have a different king than for it to have religious police wandering around the souk looking for women in short dresses to hit with their canes, the way the Saudis do. Which is what Mubarek’s surreptitious funding of shadowy imams could easily lead to. But I am a loyal servant of His Majesty, so…”

  Philip waited for him to finish the sentence.

  “I am tired,” said Fawzi finally, opening the door. “It would be a great favour if you would switch places and take us home.”

  Philip drove the jeep toward town. What to do about the conversation they had just had? The short answer was “nothing.” Philip had the luxury of being an American, as Fawzi had told him the first morning.

  What had Philip been sent to Alidar to do? Make the right friends, Arthur had said. That just begged the question. Was he supposed to be friends with Fawzi or spy on him? They sort of were friends now. What were Fawzi’s intentions? Maybe he wanted Philip to decide for him. Footsie was like that.

  Philip had a vision of himself talking to a girl at a party. New York. Pretty girl. New in town. Not sure she’d taken the right job. Talking too fast. A thread of loneliness. Philip touching her arm to slow her down. Getting her a glass of wine. The hostess seating them next to each other at dinner. Had they played footsie? The girl might have tried to once, come to th
ink of it. Nice girl.

  Philip looked over at Fawzi. The man did actually seem to be asleep. Philip wondered what he was dreaming about. Retirement, probably. The prime minister’s job was absurd.

  23

  Quite unexpectedly, Ibrahim is at my door. My afternoon has been another masterpiece of patience. As I always do when I come in, I have just taken a shower. I suppose I could pretend to be out, but I am sure he knows I am here.

  Some men like women in jewellery, some like them in underwear. What Ibrahim gets, when I open my thick wooden door to him, is a woman in a large white bath towel, with her flaming hair half dried, still getting the water out of her ears.

  “I told my sister I would deliver this,” he says, handing me a package. It’s a book or something. We never do find out.

  “Please come in,” I say. “May I offer you a cup of coffee?”

  His Highness is astonished by my home.

  “No one but me has ever been in here before,” I tell him.

  The walls of my smallish sitting room are entirely covered with paintings and drawings of myself. Perhaps twenty works in all, done by various artists over the past dozen years. Many of them nudes.

  “Excuse me if you find this troublesome,” I say. “Living alone, I had forgotten. Perhaps I should not have asked you in. We can pretend I didn’t, if you prefer.”

  “They are nice to look at,” he says.

  So I go and make some coffee, leaving him to study me.

  When I come back he is sitting, very correctly, on one end of my large, velvet-covered sofa. All of the furniture in my house is comfortable, and made to accommodate men. I cannot stand tiny chairs. His Highness is dressed like a nineteen-thirties British officer, including perfectly polished boots. I sit at the other end of the sofa, and put the coffee on the table in front of us.

  “I was wondering what sort of home you had,” he says.

  “Is this what you expected?”

  “I had no particular expectations. Only curiosity.”

  I say nothing. I have seen him studying me, the past few weeks.

  “It is a form of self-discipline,” he says, “not imagining what you cannot know.”

  “Very few people realise that,” I say. “Good journalists, I believe, train themselves not to guess what the answers to their questions will be. So as to remember to listen.”

  “Do they?” he said.

  I begin to dredge up a useful anecdote, but he speaks before I can do so.

  “Have you had many of them as lovers?” he says.

  “Journalists?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. They tend to be poor. Amusing, but poor.”

  “I am rich, I believe,” he says, “but boring.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, I have never touched money, but we have many nice things.”

  “Your father does have many nice things.” I only mean to agree. I cannot tell you why I said it that way.

  “Excuse me,” he says. “You are correct. My father is His Majesty. I am an ornament.”

  “So am I.”

  “So we have something in common,” he says.

  I say nothing.

  “I wish you were mine instead of Fatima’s.”

  “What would you like to learn?”

  “Everything.” I start to speak but he goes on. “I am twenty-four. I have been abroad for one month. Most of what I saw confused me. I am unable to have normal relationships with anyone except the soldiers in my regiment. I say they are normal because they are sincere. My soldiers respect me. I try to look out for them. But they are Bedouin and I am something else. And I am not any kind of authority on what is normal. I cannot meet young women. When I was abroad, I could not meet young women. Out of respect for my father. My father has given me a job that most people regard with amusement. I let everyone think I take it seriously. Out of respect for my father. I do, in fact, take it seriously. In three years I have built up our army from a ceremonial guard company to regimental size. I know there is going to be fighting soon. But I am unworthy to lead my soldiers to death.”

  There follows a very long silence. My house has thick mud walls, and the windows are double-glazed, with iron bars between the two panes of glass. There are carpets everywhere. No clocks tick. Doing the work I do, I know what comes next. The only question is timing. I let my mind wander.

  If you think of England as a flock of sheep, breeding at random, you can expect superior rams to appear. My father was a very exceptional cluster of genes. He thought that by undressing bombs he could manage violence. Galileo got in trouble for seeing the universe more clearly than the Pope. Newton, being an Englishman, was permitted insight. Luck is useful. My father was blown up. At the age of ten, I knew that this would happen. I could tell by the happiness with which he embraced his work. Ten year olds are not good at averting catastrophe, but they foresee it.

  My mother was by no means stupid, and she saw it clearly too. She married him. Impossible not to marry a man like that, if he proposes. Impossible not to love him, even knowing, as she did, what the end would be. Eventually, she had to leave him. The suspense was poisoning her. Anyway, he was a famous policeman, and I have always had a weakness for men in uniforms.

  Ibrahim wants to have slept with twenty women. He does not want this so as to brag, but because he feels he should have done so, because he thinks that would make him a man. His race is closer to reality than ours. He wishes His Majesty would be less absentminded in the matter of choosing him a wife. His father is engaged in a campaign on which his son has not been fully briefed, as Philip Cooper would say, and while he respects and loves his father, his pituitary gland, or whatever it is that regulates animal destiny, is giving him unmixed signals that there is other business he should be about.

  I am unable to be twenty women. I can only be me.

  I let the towel I have wrapped around me come loose. You can make this happen, if you want it to. I assume His Highness will not object.

  He says nothing right away. And then eventually, “You are better than the pictures.”

  “Ibrahim,” I say, “there is very little to this, except what one makes of it. Like riding a bicycle, or driving your first car. For most boys, it is nothing more than freedom.”

  “I have very little experience of freedom,” he says.

  It occurs to me, as these things do, that intercourse would be a mistake. But having come this far, perhaps I might give him a geography lesson.

  “Will you sit absolutely still?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  So I move closer to him on the velvet sofa. “The first bit of ‘everything’ to understand is that we each have a sort of aura around us, a zone of anticipation that fills the space. When I come close enough to you to enter that zone, you will resonate.” I lean toward him for a moment, and then back away. “Do you feel it?”

  The prince nods.

  “Now, very lightly, and very quickly, I want you to touch me.

  Just with your fingertips. Anywhere you like.”

  He touches my hair. His good manners make me smile.

  So I put my large white bath towel to one side and explain the way women’s bodies work, showing him the principal landmarks.

  “No tattoos,” he says.

  “Some women have them. I do not.”

  “They were once a custom in this country,” he says, “when women were property. I believe they are a voluntary adornment now, among Europeans.”

  “Among stupid Europeans,” I say, letting annoyance surface but also noticing the prince’s command of English.

  My father once told me that prisoners tattoo themselves as an expression of self-hatred. Defiance, he said, but also self-destruction. I do not believe in that sort of thing. Also, I am peeved at the prince for taking control of the conversation. But, of course, the situation has to be making him ill at ease.

  “I met an individual,” he goes on, “during my trip abroad, who told me tattoos
were common in Zaathah as well. They tattooed slaves, he said. He was a very knowledgeable man, and an interesting man, but he was wrong on this point. Tattoos were unique to Alidar, and only employed by royalty. On their women, that is.”

  “How are you so sure?”

  “I asked my father. He knows all the history there is. I will never know as much as he does. You have been in his study, I know. You can see how many books he has. I looked in when the door was open once.”

  I feel a need to get our lesson back on track. I make him touch me everywhere, explaining the effects that can be produced. We do this slowly. He is deliberate to the point of grandeur. If he gets the opportunity to do anything but die, he will be a fine king.

  “Ibrahim,” I say at last, reaching for the telephone on the table beside me, “I can have a girl here in forty-eight hours who is your age, very discreet, and very very nice. I will move into a hotel when she comes.”

  “No thank you,” he says.

  I trust my instinct about not going to bed with him myself. Our situation is complicated. He seems to have got what he wanted.

  24

  Philip took Allison to the desert. It was a surprise.

  Instead of showing up in running shorts he wore old clothes and a straw hat.

  “What’s this?” she said, getting into the jeep without waiting for an explanation.

  “We’re going hunting,” he said.

  She made no reply.

  “You’ll get plenty of exercise,” he said.

  They left the road twenty minutes out of town, went up a gradual incline, then down into a sort of basin, where he stopped.

  “There are some long pants and a shirt in the back seat,” he said.

  Allison began to undress immediately. “Can’t I go naked?” she said.

  “You’ll have to get down on the ground,” he said. “There are plants out here that sting. It is twenty degrees hotter than it is on the beach. And I am responsible for you.”

  “Oh, I like that,” she said.

  Philip tossed her a stick of insect repellent. “Here,” he said. “Around your wrists and ankles, and on your face and neck.”