The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  Mushtaf didn’t mention what had caused him to be detained with these other desperadoes. He kept himself a little aloof without actually disowning his pals. He looked to me the least candid of the lot. (I was not without some powers of diagnostic insight.) And he seemed to be held in slight contempt by the others. They made faces behind his back, as if he were a fraction too la-de-da for his own good.

  Older Ali made breakfast the next morning: cheese, bread, tea. The cell was equipped as a self-contained dwelling, with a stove, a small refrigerator, cooking utensils. An electric fan kept it cool enough. I knew that these conditions would not apply throughout the whole prison, but I kept my questions for later.

  I offered to pay my way with books, but was refused. Mushtaf, however, was thrilled to bits with my library. He broke into tears when he found a couple by Evelyn Waugh. ‘Here now, you have made me a very happy fellow, Robert. I have had nothing to read for six months. English novels simply don’t come our way.’ He settled down for the entire morning with Put Out More Flags, ignoring the jibes of Hossein, who showed what he thought of novels by rubbing Eros and Civilization along the crack of his bum.

  It was only when Mushtaf had finished the Evelyn Waugh that he became talkative again. ‘I was sure you would ask me that question before long,’ he said, responding to my query about the privileges of our cell. ‘The fact of the matter is that we all have private resources. Otherwise we would suffer the fate of our brethren across the way.’ He gestured, indicating the rest of the prison. ‘But you mustn’t imagine that this spares us every sort of calamity. Hardly. We shall all hang.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh yes. You mustn’t look so shocked. We shall all hang, by and by.’

  ‘But how come?’

  ‘The law, my dear young friend, the law. What other explanation could there be? The law.’

  The others seemed to know what Mushtaf was talking about, and confirmed his prediction with good-natured shrugs.

  I didn’t quite believe what Mushtaf had told me. But on the way to the fountain to wash myself later in the morning, Mushtaf keeping me company, I put good manners aside and asked if the sentences were likely to be delayed for a while yet.

  ‘Yes, for some years. Two years for me, I would hazard. For Hossein, many years yet. He is very wealthy, and his family is very wealthy, too. Ali, two months only, when he comes of age.’

  ‘How can you bear it?’

  ‘My dear young friend, it is our common fate. You may die before me, for all I know. Perhaps from cholera when you reach Pakistan. Do not drink water in the villages. In the cities, sit in the lounge of a big hotel and ask a waiter for a glass of water. He will think you are a guest. But wear proper shoes, not these things, what are they called?’

  ‘Thongs.’

  If Younger Ali were to be hanged in two months, I would still be in the prison. I felt uncomfortable—not nearly as uncomfortable as Ali must have been feeling, but uncomfortable all the same. I was incapable of imagining that life for anyone could reach such a dire conclusion as death on the gallows. No matter what I read of the awful ways in which a life might end, and of the despair of people who know that the end is coming, perhaps in a frightful form—still I didn’t believe it. In fact, I barely believed in death at all. The world was made of feathers. When I saw the little haulier crushed in Istanbul, the feathers blew away, but only for a time. Every disaster could be averted, every fall would be cushioned. People who were starving to death would find food before it was too late. Those flailing in the water, unable to reach the shore, would be rescued. It was not that I was absurdly optimistic. I was simply absurdly conceited. A cheerful, well-mannered white boy would not come to a bad end—the world would not allow it. And this vanity went so far as to overrule the lessons I might take by looking about, east and west.

  This conceit is a mystery to me, even now. I hadn’t grown up as a pampered princeling. Vicious domestic arguments had raged around me; friends would come to school with black eyes and split lips when their dads were on the warpath; my own father would sometimes go berserk, rearing above me with a war souvenir samurai sword, whispering that he was about to cut off my head. I had seen my mother and then my stepmother sobbing inconsolably over the wretchedness of it all. I had seen children pulled mottled from the lakes and rivers of my home town, dead forever. I had woken in the wreck of a big black Humber with other children, alive a few seconds earlier, now torn apart. But I would not believe any of it. Ali would not hang.

  Wives appeared in our cell the next day. They tidied it up, swept the floor, put food on the shelves, presented children to their dads for a kiss and a cuddle, then departed, like shadows. Mushtaf, who had no wife, put Vile Bodies aside and took me out for a tour of the prison. I had seen only a few of the prisoners from ‘across the way’ up close. I didn’t know exactly where they were kept. I didn’t know anything about their conditions. The guards greeted Mushtaf courteously and he responded with a smile and a nod, like a sympathetic noble touring a slum. Beyond a barracks, we came to a village within the prison—round mud huts, a number of larger mudbrick buildings, crude concrete structures that looked like man-made caves. The only apertures in the buildings were the small doors, each fitted with broad, hinged wooden slats, which now swung ajar.

  At the sound of our approach, prisoners began to emerge from the huts and caves. All were dressed in raggedy prison calico; most wore a small cap like a kipar on the crown of the head. They ranged from boys in their mid-teens to wrinkled and stooped old men. They squinted in the fierce light, holding a hand above their eyes. There were no fat prisoners, and a few were almost as thin as the emaciated figures I’d seen emerging from death camps in old newsreels. They stared at me with amazement or suspicion, these true prisoners. Some of the boys thrust themselves forward and studied me boldly, aggressively. Others backed away, averting their eyes. A few older men seemed perfectly aware of who I was and what I was doing in the Zahedan lock-up. Mushtaf spoke with them pleasantly, and they salaamed and shook my hand. One of them ushered me towards a mud igloo in the manner of a conscientious host.

  I bobbed my head to enter the hut and, after my eyesight had adjusted to the darkness, I saw a dozen men squatting around a large earthenware bowl. They were eating from the bowl, using one hand in that dexterous Middle Eastern way to deftly fold strips of bread and scoop up a mush of watery yoghurt. A space was quickly made for me at the bowl; one man after another appealed to me to accept the best of what was left. I took some bread, made it wet and swallowed it down. To take more seemed disgraceful—the men were so ill-nourished that even the small amount I ate might leave a big gap in their guts—but to refuse them when they so insisted would be even worse, maybe. I took some more bread, then mimed a full tummy.

  From hut to hut we went, and at each I accepted bread and mush. In one hut a young man, full of disdain, appalled his comrades by demanding to know what I thought I was doing in Iran.

  ‘He asks why you are here,’ Mushtaf translated.

  ‘In jail?’

  ‘No, unless I am mistaken, his question has to do with your reasons for coming to Iran at all.’

  ‘Just to see things, tell him.’

  ‘I rather doubt he would understand that.’

  ‘Tell him I was working in Shiraz and now I’m going to Pakistan. I mean, when I get out of jail I’m going to Pakistan.’

  Mushtaf translated. The young man jerked his head in contempt. He hissed something rapidly, gesturing towards me as he spoke. The other prisoners remonstrated with him, none so angrily as an old, legless man who shouted up at him from the dirt floor. ‘He says you are a fool,’ Mushtaf explained quietly once we had left the hut. ‘He is a man who hates tourists. He is of the opinion that Westerners come here to laugh at the sorry state of the country. They will shoot him soon, I fear. Pay no heed. His manners need mending.’

  At the back of the priso
n compound we came to two huts with their wooden gates still locked. It was possible to make out faces in the gloom within. Mushtaf spoke quietly through the wooden slats. A guard standing nearby gestured for a cigarette. I had a packet that Older Ali had given me. I lit one for him, and handed him two more. A clamour erupted. Hands reached through the slats. I was about to pass the remainder of the packet to the men, but the guard stood in front of me and shook his head. Mushtaf shepherded me away.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘The prisoners are not permitted to smoke.’

  ‘But we smoke.’

  ‘But not the other prisoners. Especially not those being punished. You cannot flout the rules, Robert.’

  ‘Are they being punished, those men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘They are in jail for smoking opium. They must stay there until they repent. Then they will be sent elsewhere. It is very distressing for them.’

  We visited the barracks. Off-duty guards, who were in fact soldiers, sat around long wooden tables, taking it easy. They seemed happy enough to see Mushtaf, whose manner changed to suit the rougher society. He joked with them, nodding toward me as if I were his idiot nephew. The guards laughed with him, sometimes glancing at me satirically. One beefy man, shirtless, strolled over and struck a body-builder pose in front of me. He took my hand and slapped it on the raised muscle of his arm. The other guards laughed loudly, and laughed again when Mushtaf gave them what I took to be an account of my shock and dismay on learning that my cell-mates were to be hanged. The beefy guard, a man of fine comic temperament, circled Mushtaf’s neck with his huge hands, pretending to lift him towards heaven. Mushtaf joined in by sticking his tongue out and rolling his eyes.

  The tour next took us to the prison kitchen, which was really a bakery. Two mud-brick ovens were fired up, with flat discs of bread being shoved in and out on long, wooden paddles. So far as I could see, the bread strips and watery yoghurt were all the proper prisoners were likely to be fed. The kitchens seemed to be a haven for cripples, with most of the staff blighted in one way or another—missing limbs, a missing hand, a baker with a large healed-over chunk missing from the back of his head and one shoulder. I was offered pieces of meat—kid—being prepared for the guards. A big, lazy dog, as skeletal as the prisoners, followed me about with his tongue lolling out, and sat on my feet whenever I stood still.

  A boy of about nine or ten with his head shaved almost bare scrubbed the concrete floor with a bristled brush, using sand from one bucket and water from another. Whenever he bumped up against one of the other kitchen workers, he would stop work and slump back on his haunches, waiting for the occupied spot to be vacated. He looked exhausted and ill. He didn’t pay any attention to me until he caught sight of my thongs when I pushed the dog away. Then he looked up at my face. His eyelids fluttered, as if he were about to faint.

  Back in the rich folks’ cell, I lay on my mattress with my face to the wall. The tour had left me in a state not exactly of shock but of ugly amazement. Looking back at myself, pole-axed by all the unpleasantness around me, I feel like whispering to that trembling form, ‘Poor baby! Did all the hungry people upset you?’ Because it is difficult to avoid irritation with people like me who, despite knowing what winter is like, wander off into the woods with a pocket handkerchief for a pillow and half a packet of Twisties for sustenance. And my annoyance goes further. I want to use the words that my father might have used, without much in the way of variation: ‘Be a man! Who’s getting hanged here, you or them?’ Or maybe just, ‘Ah for fuck’s sake!’

  As the days passed, I became steadily more aware of the prison’s régime of contempt for its captives. A man went mad one day, and ran stooped and squawking around the courtyard, like a chicken fleeing the axe. When he was caught, he was kicked and then picked up and thrown through the air by four guards, who then picked him up and threw him again, returning him to his cell in instalments of three or four yards. I saw the boy who cleaned the kitchen floor hauled howling to the fountain, stripped and scrubbed with his own bristled brush. An old man carrying an earthenware bowl of bread and yoghurt fell in a narrow place; the guards made him lie on top of the spillage so that prisoners had to walk on him as if he were the ground.

  The prisoners took care to tread lightly, but I could see no sense in such captious cruelty. Later in life, I read of the response of a former SS officer who was asked why Jews leaving trains at death camps were sometimes harried with whips and dogs, when they could have been efficiently hastened to the huts with mere commands. The officer said that brutality from the outset ruled out reflection. No seed of sympathy should be permitted to put down roots. The culture of the Zahedan prison seemed to be guided by a single maxim: Imagine nothing.

  My comrades in the rich folks’ cell faced life as you would face a wall. The wall’s features had become deadeningly familiar, but at least you had something to stare at, a limit to vision. Mushtaf read his way through my library; Older Ali sang hymns in a murmurous tenor; Hossein squeezed lemons, scores of them each day, catching the juice in a big, brass jug; Younger Ali slept face down on his bed all day and all night; Peter built little log cabins out of his collection of ball-point pens.

  One day as I was reading on my bed with my hands supporting my chin, Younger Ali suddenly awoke from his torpor, bounded across the room and erected his forearm in front of my face. He was grinning ear to ear.

  ‘He wants to arm wrestle with you,’ said Mushtaf, rousing himself from his reading.

  ‘Arm wrestle?’

  ‘Yes. You know?’

  ‘Oh, arm wrestle. Sure.’

  Beside himself with excitement, Younger Ali braced himself beside my mattress, gripped my hand and shouted something that probably meant, ‘Comin’ at yuh!’ We struggled, we strove, I won. Because although Ali was a muscley little guy, I had spent all the years from age nine to sixteen chopping wood back home. We had a wood fire, the only source of heat in winter, and all the fuel came from the hills. The favoured wood was red gum, a true bastard to split. So there was some steel in my skinny frame, mostly in my arms and shoulders.

  We wrestled again; I won again. By this time, the interest of the others was roused. They sat around, delightedly puzzled that I should reveal a talent of this sort. In the third round, Ali dug as deep as he could go. His face, a hand’s breadth from mine, glistened with joy. He was completely happy, even in defeat. After losing again, he jumped to his feet and ran around the cell, bouncing off beds and flinging his arms wide in mid-air. Returning to the battle, he grabbed my face and kissed me on the forehead, on the lips, on the chin, wherever he could.

  By his sixth straight loss, he was delirious, and the others began to look concerned. They tried to restrain him, but he shrugged them off wildly. I thought that maybe I should simply let him win, but by this time throwing a round would look bad. We wrestled a seventh, eighth, ninth time. The joy in Younger Ali’s face had undergone a change. He was still happy, but some partition of the mind that separates fun and fever was about to give way. By the look of his swelling eyes and his teeth more bared than smiling, I thought he might attack me. But he didn’t attack. He fell onto his knees and bayed, his eyes rolling back into his head. Hossein and Older Ali put their arms around him and comforted him, whispering into his ear, kissing his cheeks. He was put to bed, and he stayed there for the next two days or so, motionless and silent.

  Experimentally at first, seeing what I might get away with, I walked about the prison by myself. The guards took little notice. They had seen the favoured treatment I had been given. They probably thought I had someone’s approval. I didn’t dare visit the huts for fear that the prisoners would give me their scarce food. I walked about in order not to forget what the prisoners endured. I didn’t trust myself to remember. Or perhaps it was not that I feared forgetting, but that I feared the return of self-interest;
of the normal dreams and desires that seemed obscene beside the suffering of these people.

  How little I understood! The human hunger for comfort, for a few little triumphs, will surely exceed the desire for solidarity with the wretched. If I had known then, as I gazed from a little distance at the scrawny prisoners standing motionless in the sun, how soundly my sympathy would sleep; known how many overflowing plates I would sit down to in the years ahead; how often I would treat a minor headache with easily purchased pain-killers, settle an upset tummy with Dexsal; how regularly, neurotically, I would fret over tiny moles that I feared might bloom into monstrous cancers, over tiny twinges that might signal a cardiac arrest; how common it would become for me to travel the aisles of a supermarket lazily choosing a second and a third and a fourth flavour of fruit yoghurt; how unthinkingly I would voice my disdain for the soulless society of my own country that offered most of its citizens nothing but a quality diet, reliable medical care and shelter from the weather—if I had known this, I would have been sickened. But I was sure that I would remember, if I stared hard enough.

  I walked all over the prison, repeating softly ‘Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget’ … but even as I spoke those words, I dreaded seeing something bad—a prisoner being beaten or humiliated, the unconcerned gaze of the guards at the plight of some crippled old codger struggling to get up from his prayer mat. And I was well aware of the luxury I enjoyed—the luxury of knowing that I would leave the prison.

  It was while I was trapped in this way with my bad conscience that I was compelled to deal with a new dilemma. Older Ali wanted to have sex with me. He asked politely, through Mushtaf. I said no, and Older Ali thanked me graciously for at least having considered the idea. Then he came back with a new proposition. Would I be willing to provide something that stopped short of full-on sex? Again, I said no. But the more I thought about it, the more I questioned my reluctance. The man was going to hang. What would it matter if I used my hand in a mechanical way to introduce into Older Ali’s blood—the blood that ran such a troubled, gallows-haunted course—a little spice? I could do fuck-all else for any of these people who had taken me in and treated me so generously.