The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  Wasting no time, I wrote her a letter asking her to meet me in the library after my last class. I handed her the letter as she was leaving. It was the birthday of the Persian poet Saadi, and that seemed propitious. My last class passed in a blur. Dear God, I prayed silently, if you let me have Shayda Ashadi, I will gladly die a painful death at your convenience—after a couple of years with her, say. Or if that’s too much to ask, a couple of months. I waited in the library for Shayda. I barely breathed. My heart had stopped beating altogether.

  Shamshiri wandered in wearing an embarrassed smile. He had the letter I’d written to Shayda in his hand.

  ‘Is Shayda coming?’ I asked, knowing that she would not come, couldn’t come, had been forbidden to come, had fallen into the hands of the mullahs, perhaps had even killed herself.

  ‘Mister Hillman …’ Shamshiri began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mister Hillman …’

  ‘She’s not coming, is she?’

  Shamshiri lifted his hands, shook his head. He gave me the letter.

  ‘Mister Hillman, this is not possible in Iran. This is not possible. She is very sorry.’

  I slumped back to the hotel like a zombie. Honouring the tradition of the broken-hearted in the hour of grievous loss, I cried myself into a stupor and considered dashing my brains out against a hard surface.

  Late in the evening, Houshang pushed open the door to my room. He stood staring at me with his arms folded across his chest.

  ‘Louis called me on the telephone,’ he said. ‘He would have come himself, but he was afraid he would kill you.’

  ‘He can kill me if he likes,’ I said.

  Houshang looked up at the ceiling and sighed. I was sitting hunched on the side of my bed in my Speedos. My proper underpants were drying on the line in the courtyard.

  ‘My poor dear friend,’ said Houshang, lowering himself onto the one available chair after removing my garments from it with an expression of distaste, ‘why have you insulted Miss Ashadi in this way? After all I have told you? Do you know who she is? Of course you don’t. Her father is very wealthy. He is very sophisticated. Otherwise he would have had you beaten very badly. But you have broken his heart. Have I not told you that no Iranian girl will go out with a foreigner unless she has lost her virginity? You have called her a prostitute by asking her to come with you. It is a bad insult to her, and much worse to her father and to her mother. She will never come to your class again. No Iranian girl will come to your class again.’

  ‘I love her,’ I said.

  ‘Then why did you insult her?’

  ‘I only wanted to tell her how I felt.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ said Houshang, ignoring what I considered the most important issue, ‘you are very young. Mister Ashadi has taken this into account. But you must write a letter of apology. I will tell you what to say.’

  And he did. I sat at my typewriter and took dictation. Whenever I objected to the phrasing—I would never myself say, for example, ‘Much foolishness is to be found in the young’—Houshang struck me on the back of the head with his hand. When we were done, he took the letter, folded it neatly, and told me to walk along Pahlevi with my eyes averted twice a day for the next week to show my contrition. I told him I would do no such thing, but he knew me well enough to feel confident that I would.

  He was right about the girls abandoning my classes. The next day, Louis showed me a list of almost forty names—all girls who had withdrawn. They had been placed in other classes. Louis, who took the view that the whole disaster had been about sex, asked me why I didn’t just bang the Peace Corps girls. ‘That’s what they’re here for, Mister! Get wise!’

  My students—the boys—also took the view that the whole business was about sex. Not long after the Saadi’s Birthday Massacre, they invited me to a party. These ‘parties’ (I had been to a couple) were fairly severe trials of your goodwill, unless you were Iranian. Nothing happened rapidly. About an hour before the food was ready, you were invited to sit down and eat. After eating, you sat just where you were for a further hour, singing the praises of your host. As an honoured guest, a singer and a man with a peculiar twanging instrument may sit before you performing some old Persian saga of love and woe, the singer driving you nuts with his exaggerated gestures. All the while, your host is whispering a translation of the saga into your ear: ‘Now come Ali. Very unhappy, he, not liking for his sister to marrying this man, very bad man, face ugly like monkey … Ho!—Ali kill him! Ali cut off his head! Ha! …’ I accepted the invitation, taking it as part of my penance.

  But it was a different sort of party that my students had in mind. Their delicacy had prevented them spelling it out. They took me in a taxi to an area out along the airport road where the city’s prostitutes gathered. This location (I came to know this later) palliated the sensibilities of the city fathers. They argued that since only immoral foreigners and maybe a few vile Arabs would want to associate with prostitutes, business could be transacted on the way to the airport, before the disgusting clientele flew away to somewhere else. But the truth was that the wealthy Arabs and immoral foreigners preferred the classier women found in the city itself; the airport road prostitutes served the ordinary Shirazis, on the cold, hard ground beside the highway.

  We were six in the taxi. My students, as good Muslims, didn’t drink alcohol, but it was no sin to pour Raki down the throat of a Christian. I was drunk by the time the taxi pulled up at a barren area where moonscape desert peaks stood silhouetted against the night. Three or four other taxis were already parked. The rollicking students—high on 7 Up—struggled to push their heads out the windows, calling lewdly to dark, immobile shapes covered head to foot in burkas. Two of the shapes eventually responded. After a few minutes harsh bargaining, the women clambered into the taxi. They quickly mastered the boys with slaps and oaths, then showed their faces to me. It was impossible to see much in the darkness of the taxi, but the driver fetched a torch from the glovebox and shone its beam on to each face. One of the women had perhaps already celebrated a fortieth or even a fiftieth birthday. The other was young and pretty. I attempted to kiss both of them but only succeeded in getting my ears boxed. ‘These ladies don’t want kissing,’ Shamshiri whispered to me. The older woman made a long angry speech as the taxi took off, gesturing towards me with an open hand. Shamshiri was obliged to tell me once more, ‘You must not kiss these ladies, Mister Hillman.’

  We arrived at last at an orchard (so it was explained to me), surrounded by mud-brick walls as high and imposing as those of a fortress. One of the students, Mashid, was the son of the owner of the orchard. Mashid jumped out of the taxi and shouted at the ancient wooden gate that barred our entrance. A voice responded, and the gates were slowly eased open by an old man dressed in rags and patches. Mashid and the old man bickered in the taxi’s headlights, the argument becoming more and more animated. Finally, the old man hobbled over to the taxi and thrust his head in through the window. He studied me sceptically, making clucking noises with his tongue.

  The old man’s objections apparently overcome, we bundled out of the taxi and headed into the orchard. The dark bodies of trees stretched away downhill. A night wind in the boughs filled the air with a sound like waves breaking on a beach. Around a gurgling fountain, the students parleyed with the women over money. Mashid kept throwing up his hands and walking away from the negotiations, only to return with ever-more heated complaints. Shamshiri, maintaining a scholar’s disinterested manner, wandered over to me to ask mildly if I required only one or both of the women. I said, ‘Both.’ Shamshiri returned to the parley, conveyed my message, and a sudden silence replaced the haggling. All eyes were turned to me. Then the students began to applaud and laugh.

  ‘Ho, Mister Illman! Ho ho, Hrobbat!’

  The conference resumed, with more shouting than ever.

  ‘One,’ said Shamshiri, approaching me again. ‘Fo
r two, most expensive.’

  ‘Okay, one,’ I said.

  ‘Which one you like best, Mister Hillman?’

  The two women stood glaring at me—the pretty one and the one old enough to be her mother. I wanted the one who was young and pretty, but did not wish to hurt the feelings of the older one. So I chose the mama, to the surprise of everyone.

  A shed was found for us, the floor covered in rotting apples. The mama hoisted her burka, lay down on the apples and signalled for me to make haste. I made what haste I could, but the Raki had numbed my body and all I could think of was getting back to the hotel and going to sleep. The mama hissed angrily in my ear as I laboured away. My students gathered around and shouted exhortations. At last I was done, and the mama heaved me aside and raced to the fountain to wash herself, trailing a string of curses.

  Once we had returned the women to the airport road, Shamshiri felt at liberty to disclose that Shayda’s father had paid for the evening’s fun.

  ‘That was nice of him,’ I said.

  ‘Now he will tell Shayda that you do this sex with these ladies,’ Shamshiri added.

  ‘What? Why!’

  ‘Shayda will be thinking you are a very bad man.’

  All of the students seemed satisfied with this outcome. They encouraged me to accept the wisdom of the arrangement, patting my back and hugging me. I was mortified and the next day hurried to hear Houshang’s opinion.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said, when I asked him if Shayda’s father had paid for the prostitutes. ‘But maybe.’

  ‘To make Shayda think I’m bad?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Why does he want her to think I’m bad?’

  ‘Miss Ashadi was very upset.’

  ‘Because I wrote her that letter?’

  ‘She is a little bit modern. Perhaps she likes you.’

  ‘Oh, God!’

  ‘It’s better,’ Houshang went on in his languid way. ‘She will go to the university in Tehran. She is going to study sea creatures. She is a modern young woman. We need many modern young women in Iran.’

  Heartbreak is awful, but at least it gives you a reason for living. I went about as a rejected suitor for a month or more. Much of the time, I was in tears. I re-read A Farewell to Arms and relished the final scenes where Catherine loses her life in the hospital. It was a solace to have something in common with Lieutenant Henry. I had loved, I had paid.

  With increasing distaste I carried on with Rasheef’s English lessons. The illustrations in the medical books so dominated them that I couldn’t help feeling that he had no interest in English except as a medium of pornography. I’d been required to write out every colloquial term for the male and female genitalia that I could think of. ‘This is the dick of a man … This is the cock of a man … This is the tool of a man …’ Rasheef would sit at his desk, huddled over the sheet of paper on which I’d written these obsessive messages, struggling to get his lips and moustache around the words. It was not very inspiring work, even allowing for the mild thrill I felt when Rasheef came to a term I’d made up: ‘This is the miggy moggy of a man … This is the winny wunny of a woman …’

  But it was the thug in Rasheef that properly distressed me. I was in his office with him one afternoon, working on the list, when a subordinate barged in, shoving a boy of about twelve before him. The boy stood cowering, head hanging low, while Rasheef and his underling muttered together. Without warning, Rasheef belted the boy on the side of the head, knocking him across the room. I half came to my feet, but was motioned to sit down. The boy trembled over to Rasheef again, and was again belted. The malice that Rasheef radiated kept me in my seat, my legs gone to jelly. He hit the boy about six times, each blow as heavy as the last. Nobody spoke a word. When the boy was taken away, Rasheef looked at me and made a strange face—he seemed to be imitating a sad clown, mouth turned down. I realised that he was imitating me. He sent me on my way with a pitying look—reminding me to return the next day.

  My failure to stand up for the boy who’d been beaten so cruelly made it impossible for me to approach Rasheef when my work visa ran out. Performing a service for him was one thing; asking for his help was more than my stomach could cope with. I decided that I would simply leave Iran. I would make my way to Pakistan, to India, to Ceylon. My old Ceylon plan was still intact: make some money as a journalist, take a boat to Mombasa, another boat to the Seychelles, locate the gentle, bare-breasted women of those islands, relax in the warmth of their love forever. I noticed that I no longer endowed the Seychelles women with anything hectic in the way of libido. It would be enough if they simply cradled my head on their cushiony breasts, whisked away flies, stroked my cheeks with gull feathers. And yet even as I conjured this tender vision, I had ceased to believe in it. Now, I merely yearned for it to exist.

  With my suitcase packed and my green suit freshly pressed, I made the rounds of my friends. Randall, thriving now at the hospital, where even the surgeons deferred to him in moments of crisis, listened to my plans with a frown.

  ‘I was beginning to think you’d got some brains,’ he said. ‘You’ll get slaughtered.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘No, kid, you’ll get slaughtered.’

  Jo, studying me without much interest from behind the reception desk at the British Council, told me that if I had attempted to leave Shiraz without having repaid her all that I owed her, she would have had me forcibly detained. Since I had repaid her, there seemed little point in the telling.

  ‘You should go back to Australia and finish school,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Your parents should jolly well have you fetched back! Honestly, children like you running loose in a place such as this!’

  I attempted to kiss her on the cheek, but she yelped and punched me. Then her self-righteous anger disappeared. Her shoulders drooped and her eyes went silver with tears. ‘Honestly, Robert. Listen to me. None of us should be here. It’s foolish. It’s not an adventure, it’s simply foolish. One hates to admit it. But there it is and here we are. Go home and be sensible. Please.’ She gave me one of the egg and pickle sandwiches from her lunchbag to take with me.

  Houshang, on hearing my news, went straight into sage mode. ‘A journey east or west is taken in one’s own company. Robert in Pakistan remains Robert. We are together with ourselves forever.’

  ‘Thanks for everything, Houshang.’

  ‘You should remain here. Perhaps you could make a marriage with Miss Ashadi.’

  ‘You told me she was going to Tehran to study sea creatures!’

  ‘Who knows? Indeed, who knows?’

  ‘I’m not even a Muslim.’

  ‘Yes, that would be a great difficulty. Besides, her father would punish you severely if you approached her.’

  ‘Goodbye, then.’

  ‘Goodbye my dear friend.’

  We’re fishing in the tailrace. I’m using a heavy sinker to keep my bait on the bottom in the turbulent water that spews from the powerhouse, but my father hardly bothers with a sinker. It’s his theory that trout are canny enough to regard a stationary worm in a powerful current as suspicious. He believes that you should think like a trout to catch a trout, and there must be something in what he says because he has three fish, rainbows, while I have none.

  It’s February, and very hot. The tiny, darting lizards that live along the bank keep to the shadows of the rocks. The ravens in the wattles take awkward leaps to reach branches that are out of the sun. It’s too hot for fishing, as far as I’m concerned, but my father is in a good mood and insists on me being with him. I suit him perfectly when he’s in a good mood. He likes to talk, I’m happy to listen.

  This is Saturday. On Friday, Dad won five pounds in Tatts. The five pounds will help with things a bit, but it means much more to him than that. He had never before won so
much as ten shillings in Tatts, despite buying a ticket every week for twenty years. The win means his luck is turning. More good fortune will follow. I’m happy for him, too, but I can’t help thinking that five pounds doesn’t represent much of a return for the hundreds of pounds he’s spent on tickets up to now. I wouldn’t dream of pointing that out, though. When you live in the care of unhappy and disappointed parents, episodes of optimism mean the world to you. You begin to believe, along with your parents, that things are going to change. But you remain wary, even as you smile.

  One thing I enjoy about my Dad is that he doesn’t lecture me when we’re out fishing. I don’t have the knack that Dad has. My line tangles; I cast into snags; I don’t know the signs and I don’t know how to land a trout even when I hook one. But Dad recognises that I will likely never improve (he’s tried to help, he’s been a model of patience), and leaves me alone.

  Dad never initiates the stories of the green island that I so relish hearing. There’s a protocol. I ask him a question about the war, and little by little we get to the green island. So, on this burning Saturday, I ask the question. The question can’t just come from nowhere. It has to be related to whatever’s going on. Dad might be browsing through the Australasian Post, for example, and I might ask if the women of the green island were as beautiful as the woman in a bathing suit on the magazine’s cover. And he would snort, as if such a comparison were too ludicrous to take seriously, then tell me why a beautiful white girl can never match a beautiful black girl, not ever. Today, I use the weather. If ask him if it was as hot on the green island as it is here, and is that why those women went about naked. Nope, he says, it was hot but not all that hot. Where it was hot, he says, was Palestine. I have a feeling right away that stories of Palestine are not going to include much in the way of naked women.

  But Palestine it is. It appears that Dad, in common with a great many other Australian soldiers, was first sent to the Middle East before being rushed back home to fight the Japs. I hear about the desert, and I’m told that you don’t know what heat is until you’ve stood on parade with the sun baking the back of your neck and the heat of the sand coming right through the soles of your boots. Yep, that was Palestine. That was the Middle East. It can be quite beautiful, too, but Jeez, you wouldn’t want to live there.