The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  Randall became for a while as hard to get on with as Jo. ‘Know where I’d be if I’d stayed in the navy, Bobby? Would’ve been roster chief at some base hospital, could’ve just about had my choice, could’ve been running a fucking hospital! Had my own house on base, kid in school. What happened? Fuck, what happened, Bobby?’

  I listened, but knew enough to keep any advice to myself. It might have been hunger that was beginning to mess up poor Randall’s mind. We went three, four, five days without a bite to eat. Hunger gave a hypertonic edge to the sense of smell. The aromas of the street—roast kid, fresh bread, a spiced stew sold in BYO tin cups—curled into the nostrils like a hook devised by a genius of pain. I could pick up the wafty smell of nuts roasting a block away. Walking past a house where something delicious was being prepared, I had to fight down an insane impulse to force open a door and demand a bowlful of food in the name of the Australian government.

  The time came, as it had to, when I was forced to consider the option of outright prostitution. In common with some millions of brothers and (especially) sisters down the centuries, I decided to deny my left hand a clear view of what my right hand was doing. I shuffled down to a big café on Boulevard Pahelvi, stood about looking famished, accepted an offer of hospitality from two well turned-out gents, gobbled down a huge plateful of something, then faced up to the job.

  The job was to be undertaken in a bath-house on the outskirts of town. I was hastened there in a big flash car as soon as I’d finished eating. One of the gents spoke a lavish brand of English, the other spoke not at all. In the warm, stewy mist of the bath-house cubicle, I passed my skinny body into the hands of my patrons.

  ‘Hmm,’ said the English speaker, ‘a very bony fellow you are, ha ha! But you are a nice boy. Shall I call you Robert or Bobs? What is your custom?’

  ‘Bobby,’ I said.

  ‘Ha! Bobby! Hoo, a delightful name!’

  The second man, the taller and more imposing of the two, seemed to be watching on with a certain amount of unease. When the English speaker went to work with soap and lather and practised hands, his friend turned a little away, and frowned. I must have shown some stubbornness, because the tall, silent man suddenly broke his silence and barked out something not in Farsi but in Arabic—I could tell the difference. An argument followed.

  ‘This is for money,’ the English speaker said to me. ‘For money, hokay?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘But you are always fucking boys?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  The tall man glanced at me, then averted his eyes. He spoke in Arabic again.

  ‘For thirty pounds, Kuwaiti pounds,’ said the English speaker. ‘The same as sterling pounds.’

  ‘No,’ I said again, but with a helpless sense of ruining a meal for me and Randall at the five-star Parki Saadi hotel. I didn’t know why I was ruining things. I could probably have survived without too much toiling and moiling. I felt fed up with myself.

  And so it came to an end. A slender boy and two older men standing around in the mist with nowhere to go. We dried ourselves, dressed, I was driven back to town. We parted with a handshake.

  Freshly laundered as I was, I suddenly thought of walking up to the Parki Saadi and asking for work. This was an optimistic plan. The hotel, set on acres of lawn on top of a hill above the town, was the Ritz of southern Iran. It set a standard of luxury that took in such details, so it was said, as a multiple-slice toast-making machine that would have been considered fabulous even in the classiest hotels of Paris or New York. The owner was a wealthy playboy who kept the hotel as a hobby. Down at the market a few days earlier, I had noticed a tall, contemptuous man in Parki Saadi livery walking around the stalls and barking out orders to a squad of lackeys. He, it appeared, was the buyer for the hotel’s table. The grovelling obsequiousness that the stall owners displayed when the buyer stopped before their stalls was very impressive. I would have liked his job, if the hotel thought of offering it to me, but that didn’t seem likely.

  As I wandered in through the hotel’s ornate wrought-iron gates, I decided that I would offer myself as a sort of maître d’, hobnobbing with the English-speaking patrons and asking in an affected British accent if anything at all might be done to enhance the pleasure of their stay.

  Once or twice in life we become, briefly, a project of the angels. They muster about us invisibly, read our thoughts and, for the sake of the amusement it offers them, grant our wishes. I wandered into the gorgeously upholstered lobby of the Parki Saadi in rumpled shirt and trousers, asked the concierge if I might have a word with the manager, and was shown into a classy suite where music was playing softly on a stereo. I outlined my hobnobbing plan while Ahmoud (as the manager insisted I call him) listened with sage goodwill. He asked me if I had a work visa. I said no. He opened a drawer in his desk and handed me a thick wad of fifty, one hundred and five hundred rial notes. I was to travel to Basra in Iraq, obtain a work visa, return to the hotel and commence my career in the hospitality trade. Did I have a suit? Ahmoud’s hand slid towards the drawer once again. Oh yes, I said—I certainly have a suit. Ahmoud rang for the concierge, filled him in on his plans for me and instructed him to show me to the restaurant.

  I left the hotel an hour after my arrival with my pockets full of money and a magnificent three-course meal under my belt. I tottered blissfully back into town, purchased bread, bananas, lollies, apples, rice pudding, cigarettes and beer, and had the whole lot of it spread out on the floor when Randall arrived back at the flat from his own hopeless quest for food and work. He was flabbergasted. And the sum of money I had been given was enough to cover his fare to Basra, too. He could obtain a work visa himself and start work at the hospital. ‘How the fuck did you do that?’ he wanted to know. Later, he requested that I allow him to take charge of the wad of notes. He spoke with tact and sensitivity, but it was pretty plain that he thought the money would disappear if I were left in charge of it. I said ‘Sure’. He wept, and told me that I was a good kid and not really an idiot but just—well, it’d be better, wouldn’t it, if he kept the money safe on the journey?

  It was, I think, a shock for Ahmoud when on my return from Basra he saw the green suit. I’d had it dry-cleaned, but a certain shabbiness had overtaken it. Also, I seemed to have undergone a growth spurt over the months of travel and the trousers, already short, now hung shorter. I recognised that I didn’t entirely look the part, but what I lacked in style I was determined to make up in the sophistication of my banter with the international guests. The guests were mostly French. They would naturally wish to converse with me in their native language. It was therefore necessary for me to learn French in a hurry.

  I found a second-hand French primer in a bookshop on Boulevard Pahlevi, and went to work. It wasn’t long before I’d mastered the present tense of the verb ‘to be’, which seemed to me the heart and soul of the French tongue and almost all I would need to know of the language. ‘I am happy.’ ‘I am sad.’ ‘I am tall.’ ‘I am good.’ ‘I am sick.’ And best of all, the killer application of the verb, ‘I am at your service.’ The French guests, however, in their haughty way, insisted on straying all over the place in their use of the language. I would listen attentively to words vaulting and spinning, then smile my most ingratiating smile and tell them that I was at their service. Eyebrows would be raised, and the guests would sensibly suggest that I speak to them in English:

  ‘Are you enjoying your meal, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I offer you some biscuits?’

  ‘Thank you, no.’

  ‘Will you remain long in Shiraz?’

  ‘A week.’

  ‘Will there be anything else?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  A regular task was to type the menu each day. At this I was adept—I had my own typewriter, after all. But I had not yet learnt how little patience there is in the general
population for the gratuitous flourish. I added quotations and fragments of poems at the bottom of the menu. Hemingway was a favourite. Chekhov didn’t lend himself to pithy quotations so well, and even I was aware that one or two of the Chekhovs were a little too protracted for a menu: ‘Mamma! Are you crying, Mamma? My dear, good, sweet Mamma! Darling, I love you! I bless you! The cherry orchard is sold; it’s gone; it’s quite true. But don’t cry, Mamma, you’ve still got life before you, you’ve still got your pure and lovely soul …’

  One morning after I’d presented the menu to Ahmoud for his okay, he pursed his lips and looked up at me from his desk. He always wore sunglasses. It was not possible to read anything from his eyes.

  ‘What is this part?’ he asked, tapping the quotation with the top of his fountain pen. The quotation that day was, I think, a paragraph from Death in Venice, with Aschenbach expiring on the beach and Tadzio pointing to the sea and the horizon. I’d thought it thrilling, and deep.

  ‘Thomas Mann,’ I answered.

  ‘No more,’ he said, and it was clear that he meant it. Typing the menus became a boring chore after that.

  Small disappointments aside, the job was terrific. I sat reading behind the front desk all day long. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were provided for me. I ate like a king. Whenever I strode across the lobby in my green suit, the porters and cleaners smiled and salaamed. My confidence grew. I became bold enough to flirt with Ahmoud’s wife, a breathtakingly beautiful woman who’d been raised and educated in Paris. She called me into Ahmoud’s office one day when he was off somewhere, and asked me to zip up the back of her dress. She kept a rack of dresses in her husband’s office and it was her habit to change whatever she was wearing a number of times each day. She was holding both hands in front of her, fingers pointing up.

  ‘My nails are wet,’ she said. ‘Hold up my hair. Be careful.’

  Once I’d zipped the dress, the single most exciting experience of my life to that point—the pink bra-strap, the fragrance of her shoulders, the weight of her black sheaf of hair—I stood more or less at attention awaiting further instructions. She was leaning over the desk with her back to me, reading an article in a magazine and wiggling her fingers in the air. I knew I should do something, show some initiative, but was at a loss as to what initiatives were at my disposal. A few weeks earlier, I’d kept my mind off food for hours at a stretch by listening to Gilbert and Sullivan—the only record in the apartment. The refrain of one of the songs went, ‘Faint heart never won fair lady.’ I’d puzzled over the words and had asked Randall for help. ‘Women don’t like it if you act shy. You’ve got to come on.’

  I placed my hand on Ahmoud’s wife’s behind, which was inclined towards me as she bent over the magazine. I didn’t caress her behind—I merely let my hand rest there while I stood beside her, still at attention. She gave no indication, even that I was still in the room. She continued to wiggle her fingers, leaning further forward now and again to turn the pages of the magazine with her elbow. Whenever she moved, my hand registered the exquisite flexing of her muscles. I would have been happy to remain where I was for months or years. Ahmoud’s wife turned and looked at me over her shoulder. It was a lazy look, as if a long and languid process of thought had just concluded. A tiny smile, not quite scornful, played at the corners of her lips. She reached around and took my hand off her behind, then tapped me on the tip of the nose with a single outstretched finger. I silently returned to my desk.

  My head was full of the delicate fragrance of her perfume. I believed myself in love with Ahmoud’s wife and could relieve my longing only by repeating beneath my breath, ‘I would die for you, die for you, die for you …’ My reverie was interrupted by a voice asking in a coolly amused way if I was making progress. It was a tall, graceful man in his early thirties whom I had seen about the hotel quietly handling documents, occasionally making a note in a ledger. He was standing beside me now, studying what seemed to be a sheaf of accounts. He was smiling at the sheaf of papers and only switched the smile to me when he was quite ready.

  ‘A little progress?’ he said.

  ‘At what?’ I asked.

  ‘My assumption is that you are attempting to seduce Parivash.’

  ‘Me? No.’

  ‘Oh, then I apologise for my mistake.’

  He put down the papers on the reception desk and gave his name as Houshang. ‘It’s a beautiful day. Walk with me,’ he said, and slipped on his sunglasses. I followed him out into the hotel’s garden. He didn’t turn around to check that I was following him, even when he began a monologue on flowers.

  ‘Shall we sit here?’ he said, when we came to a rose bower arching over an ornate iron bench. He took off his sunglasses and reached for a rose.

  ‘Parivash will not sleep with you,’ he said softly. ‘She will not sleep with you because you are far too young. Also, she is very faithful to her husband. There it is.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘I will find you a nice American girl. Or a French girl. Do you speak French?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, then ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. A French girl or an American girl. We will go to Persepolis the day after tomorrow.’

  Houshang, as I came to learn, was the drop-by accountant for the hotel. He turned up once every couple of days, confirmed by glancing at the books that Ahmoud was spending much more money than the hotel was taking in, then went back to his job at Iran Insurance in the city. His employment at Iran Insurance was no more taxing than his work at the hotel, so he kept up a third job, as a guide for wealthy tourists visiting the ruins of Persepolis an hour or so from Shiraz. The three jobs helped to keep boredom at bay. Driving with him to Persepolis in his second-hand Buick, he confessed that he was a poet trapped inside the body of an accountant. (This was, I learned much later, not an uncommon complaint of accountants.)

  ‘Very little that Houshang dreams will ever come to pass,’ he said, with infinite sadness. ‘As for the young man Robert, perhaps his dreams will be waiting for him at Persepolis, perhaps not. It all means nothing, nothing. Houshang’s life, Robert’s life, the life of a flower, who could say which means more to God, or less?’

  I quickly understood that my role in Houshang’s life was to pronounce amens, which I did, mostly by nodding or shaking my head or even by sighing. I didn’t care what he believed about his part or my part in the scheme of things. I only cared about the promised American girl.

  All the tourists at Persepolis were women. All the women were French or American. Their husbands were diplomats or oil company executives who had reached that point in their careers (according to Houshang) when movement between sites and cities takes the place of tedious employment at a desk. Nothing was accomplished on these visits to sites and cities; it wasn’t expected. Motion signified everything. The greater the number of conferences attended or ministers visited, the less time spent back in Lyon or Paris or Philadelphia or Washington, the more apparent their dedication. By the time they had reached this career level, they had acquired children, usually two, and the children sometimes accompanied them. Wives often travelled with their husbands but, with nothing much to occupy them, they got fed up and had sex with Houshang.

  My understanding of sex, attraction and seduction was limited, but even I could see that Houshang’s allure—that of the sorrowing poet—would be lampooned to death where I came from. The class of women that Houshang tended were nonetheless dazzled by the sorrowing poet thing, or pretended to be. His line was so corny that when I first heard it, I blushed. It relied on imagery of efflorescence, often bordering on the obscene, and roped in all the great Persian poets. He spoke of the melancholy of the rose, he spoke of transience, he spoke of tenderness. And he unblushingly suggested that the true Persian knows that love is fleeting yet extraordinarily important, and that Western women, despite their liberty and a
mbition knew, too, that love and the rose are fragrant but briefly. ‘Please do not let me embarrass you,’ he would murmur in conclusion. ‘You must say so if you are embarrassed.’ They were not embarrassed. They were delighted, and moved. And in their delight and empathy, they permitted Houshang liberties that were, to me at least, breathtaking.

  His client on that first visit to Persepolis was a tall, graceful woman in her forties, her attractiveness just a fraction marred by an oven-fired look. When Houshang took her off to show her something to do with Alexander the Great, I was left with the daughter, Patricia, teeth strapped into shining steel braces. When she smiled, it was like looking into the slots of a pop-up toaster. But I liked her. She acted as if she had known me all her life, and had an attractive bossiness. She used the word ‘ludicrous’ in every second sentence. ‘My dad’s, like, don’t eat anything that doesn’t come from the hotel kitchen?—which is ludicrous because I’m frankly not even at the hotel for ten hours at a stretch. Robert, your pants are, well, too short for you, did you know? Just stick to jeans, mostly. I met another Australian. You’re not like him.’

  Patricia took it for granted that we would kiss. Her braces made it awkward. The tongue recoils from stainless steel. Standing against a pillar in the blazing heat of the sun, I assumed that she was as embarrassed by this difficult and joyless smooching as I was, and gave her lots of chances to break it off. But no, she seemed delighted. She held her arms around my neck and squeezed with all her might, or else worked her fingers into the flesh of my back through the fabric of the green suit jacket. When she did finally call it off, she became her normal businesslike self. Later, I realised that her enthusiasm had not had much to do with me. She had been practising; ironing out glitches with someone who didn’t matter for the future benefit of someone who did.

  Houshang and Patricia’s mother eventually reappeared, Houshang looking nonchalant, Patricia’s mum a little over-composed. He explained to me on the way back to Shiraz that he normally made love to his clients right there at the ruins. He kept a number of nooks clean and comfy for this very purpose. He complained that making love always left him feeling sad but, as far as I could see, the weight of his sadness rested comfortably on a plump cushion of hearty self-approval.