Cobra in the Bath

by Miles Morland

  ‘They just did. I can’t think how they got there.’

  ‘Oh . . . but how did they . . . ?’

  ‘Mileso, go and find Brutus and see how he is. He must be feeling lonely. You’ll have to take special care of him.’

  Brutus was the cause of the Kanat disaster. As he grew up he proved to be a particularly energetic dog who was forever scrabbling around the garden doing skid turns in pursuit of crows, rats, mice and squirrels. I never saw him catch anything, but his optimism was as wide as his energy. One afternoon we were sitting in the garden drinking lemonade by the pool. It was hot, and Michael, seeming to me immeasurably grown up, was home for his first summer holidays from Stubbington. It was unusually quiet. Amanda lay in the shade panting.

  ‘Boys, where’s Brutus?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him.’

  ‘Well I hope he hasn’t started straying off into the bundu. Go and take a shufti and see if you can find him.’

  So we did. He was nowhere to be found in the house. He was not in the courtyard. We looked in the dusty dirt road beyond the gates and saw no Brutus there. Michael and I quartered the strawberry beds and the melon patch; we trotted up and down chanting, ‘Brooo-tuss, Brooo-tuss . . .’

  ‘Ma, we can’t find him anywhere.’

  ‘Have you looked in the wild garden. Sometimes he chases things in there.’

  Michael and I rocketed off past the birches to the wild garden. We heard a noise. It was not a bark; it was more like a mew. It was coming from the Kanat. We scurried through the bushes and stepped gingerly to the edge. We peered down. It was too dark to see anything thirty feet or more down at the bottom of the hole.

  ‘Brutus, Brutus,’ we called together.

  We heard a whining and a scrabbling from the bottom.

  ‘Oh poor Brutus. He sounds hurt. We must get him out.’

  We rushed off to report the news to Ma.

  ‘Ma, Ma, Brutus is down the Kanat. He’s hurt.’

  Ma hurried back with us to inspect the situation.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do. We must get the Kanat man. You two stay here and keep Brutus company. I’ll go with Ali to Gulhek to find the Kanat man.’ Ma strode off to the garage, calling for Ali.

  An hour later we ran over to the courtyard when we heard the car coming back.

  ‘He’s still alive, he’s still alive. We can hear him.’

  Ma and Ali got out of the front of the car. A villainous-looking man in faded battledress slid out of the back. He bore a broad-bladed pickaxe in his right hand and had a coiled rope looped over his left shoulder. He and Ali were in hot discussion.

  ‘This way,’ commanded Ma.

  The Kanat man continued to argue while Ali tugged him along by the sleeve of his battledress.

  ‘Is it going to be all right?’

  ‘How’s he going to go down the Kanat?’

  ‘How will he bring Brutus up?

  ‘Shh. Quiet. He doesn’t want to do it at all,’ said Ma. ‘He’s not keen on going down after a dog. I’ve had to promise him a lot of floos.’

  ‘Hurry, hurry,’ Michael and I said together. ‘Listen to poor Brutus.’

  We could still hear the whining and the scrabbling from the bottom of the Kanat but much feebler now than an hour ago. The Kanat man and Ali continued to argue. Voices were raised and arms were waved.

  Ali took Ma off to one side for a hurried conference. ‘Very well, Ali. But not a rial more.’

  ‘Very good, madame.’

  The news of the renegotiated fee was reported back to the Kanat man, who gave a roar of approval and hugged Ali.

  ‘Come on, come on, get on with it,’ said Ma. ‘I’m obviously giving him far too much. Tell him to get a move on, Ali.’

  ‘Yes madame. He going fast now.’

  The Kanat man gave a string of instructions to Ali, who stood there nodding vigorously while looking nervously at Ma. He then tied one end of his rope around a nearby tree, keeping the other end looped around his left shoulder. He returned to the mouth of the Kanat, looked down and spat once on each hand and once down the Kanat. Then, like a spider disappearing into a hole, he hopped over the edge and disappeared. We crowded round to watch the rescue. He was walking down, feet planted against one wall, shoulders just free of the other, while he paid out loop after loop of rope in a kind of jerking motion. He was about fifteen feet below us, almost out of sight in the gloom of the Kanat, when there was an ominous rumbling, crumbling noise. This was followed by a great Persian oath from the Kanat, the rope jerking tight and then going loose and the noise of earth falling accompanied by the solid crump of body hitting ground. A thick cloud of dust wafted out of the mouth of the Kanat. A few more clods of earth fell and then there was silence for a short moment followed by a great wail of pain from the bottom. This was a human, not a canine cry. The noise from Brutus had stopped.

  ‘O madame, O madame. He fall. Lose rope. Kanat break.’

  ‘Yes, Ali. I can see that. Shout down and find out if he’s all right. You might have to go down and fish him out.’

  ‘Yes, madame. No, madame. I shout. No fish.’

  The wailing from the bottom of the Kanat got worse. Ali edged as far as he judged safe towards the mouth and shouted down. Terrible groans and a few gasping words came back.

  ‘O madame. He hurt. He fall when Kanat break.’

  Ma went and peered down the Kanat.

  ‘Ask him if he’s got Brutus.’

  More shouting down the well.

  ‘O madame. Kanat man arm very bad. Arm broken maybe.’

  ‘Yes, yes, Ali. I don’t give a damn about his arm. What about Brutus?’

  Ali shouted some more down the Kanat. Louder groans and angrier noises echoed back from its depths.

  ‘Yes, Ali? Can we get the dog up?’

  ‘No, madame. Kanat man fall on dog. Dog dead.’

  6

  A Persian Education

  The grounds of Mahmoudieh offered unlimited opportunities for adventure, exploration or just messing around and getting dirty. Beyond the walls were mountains, hills and wilderness which stretched from Demavend to the setting sun. The gates from our courtyard opened to the west, from which a bumpy dirt road led up the hill to where it joined another even bumpier road, which ran parallel to the Elburz Mountains. The junction itself was marked by an old mulberry tree the size of an oak. In the late summer the earth around the junction was stained purply-red with blotched mulberries.

  This road led to our local village, Gulhek, a mile and a half away. It had a main street which was a permanent tangle of hooting, jostling cars, buses swaying under cargoes of pyjama-clad passengers, most of whom seemed to be hanging on to the buses outside or sitting on the roof, and enormous growling trucks, buckling under their loads of logs or bales of cotton tied down by the flimsiest of frayed ropes. Animals were everywhere. The side of the road was given over to donkeys. Poor thin creatures with enormous loads contained in carpet bags slung across their backs trotted along while their drivers followed at a shuffling jog, rhythmically tapping the donkeys’ bony hindquarters with sticks. Once, as we were driving through this jumble of activity, Ma saw a donkey limping along on three good legs and one bad under a load of impossible size. Its driver was shouting oaths and beating it.

  Our front drive, Mahmoudieh

  ‘Stop the car!’ said Ma to Petrossian.

  ‘Not here, madame, too much traffic.’

  ‘Stop right now! I want to get out,’ said Ma, her voice rising. It was rare for Ma to raise her voice. The times she did almost always involved animals. She leaped from the car. I followed her nervously. She strode up to the donkey-beater and caught the stick in his hand as it came back to give the donkey another blow.

  ‘Stop that this instant! What do you think you are doing, you horrible man?’

  The startled drover turned round to be confronted by a red-haired English woman shouting unintelligible words at him in a strange language. I looked on aghast. A sudden calm ca
me over the street. Business ceased. People crowded out from the entrance to the bazaar to form a tight circle round Ma and the donkey man, who were trapped like two boxers in a ring of people. I stood behind Ma certain that we would soon be engulfed and trampled by the crowd.

  ‘I won’t have it, do you hear? How dare you beat that poor beast like that? It’s half starved. Can’t you see it’s practically dead? You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  The man stood there with his stick by his side, mouth agape, eyes darting to the crowd and then back to his persecutor. His donkey had meanwhile set off at a limping trot and was making for the bazaar. I could hear a low but rising muttering coming from the crowd.

  ‘Ma, Ma,’ I said in an uncertain voice, tugging at her skirt, ‘let’s go. Please.’

  ‘Quiet, Mileso. Here, give me that,’ Ma said to the donkey man.

  She snatched the stick from his hand and brought it down with a great whap on his right shoulder. She then took it in both hands and snapped it over her knee. A great ‘Aiiii-eeee’ came from the man.

  There was a momentary silence broken only by the drover’s cry and then the crowd erupted in a riot of laughter. They rocked back and forth and tugged at each other’s clothes and pointed while they passed the tale of the white woman with red hair beating the donkey man to the latecomers hurrying up to see what the commotion was about.

  ‘Come on, Mileso.’

  Ma grabbed my hand and marched us brusquely back to the Chevrolet and Petrossian. The crowd parted before her.

  It was shortly after our move to Mahmoudieh that I was put into the American school. Ma took me to the school, where I was introduced to the headmistress, who informed me that I would be joining First Grade. I had no idea what First Grade was but it sounded rather advanced. Ma left me, and I was taken along by the headmistress to a group of three or four classrooms separate from the main school building. She knocked on the door of one and opened it.

  ‘This is Miles. He’s English. He’s going to be joining First Grade.’

  I had not up to then got to know any Americans. I knew they were different: they were aggressive and pushy and spoke English in a strange way and said things like ‘Hi’ or ‘You can say that again.’ My shyness at being left with these threatening people in a school where I knew no one rendered me close to dumb. The classroom had within it fifteen or so boys and girls and was presided over by a smiling blonde lady. She came out from behind the teacher’s desk and took me by the hand.

  ‘Well, greetings, young man. Welcome to First Grade. I’m Mrs Johnson. And what did you say your name was?’

  I stood transfixed beside the desk with my eyes lowered.

  ‘Erms.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that. Now, what was your name? A little louder, please.’

  ‘M-m . . . Miles.’

  ‘Class, this is Miles. He’s going to be joining our little group in First Grade. Mind you-all make him feel at home. Say hello to Miles.’

  ‘Hello, Miles,’ the First Grade chorused, though the welcome of the words was offset by sniggers and nudges. I was sure they were laughing at my accent.

  The children sat in rows on low benches drawn up to low tables. I was placed at the end of one of these rows beside Billy, who was instructed by Mrs Johnson to move over to make room. He did this reluctantly and then turned and muttered something I could not catch to the boy sitting the other side of him. They both giggled. I sat blushing with my eyes firmly fixed on the table in front of me.

  ‘Now, First Graders, we’re real pleased to have a new guy with us so I want you to make Miles feel welcome. Before we go to break in a few minutes, I’d like to tell a little story. Now, when we walk along we have to be very mindful of what is waiting just round the corner, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Johnson,’ chorused the class including me, although, unlike them, I did not have the vaguest idea as to what was waiting just round the corner.

  ‘That’s right, class. We know why we have to be careful. Now, Miles, what is it that is waiting just round the corner that we have to be so careful of?’

  Despite my joining in and saying yes, this was one question to which I did not know the answer. The other children were straining forward with their hands up.

  ‘Yes, Miles? And what do we find just round the corner?’

  What was usually round the corner? It all depended. It could be anything. But I knew one thing you were certain of finding in the northern suburbs of Tehran.

  ‘Er, mmm, a tree, miss?’

  The class howled. They shrieked. They clapped the tables in front of them and turned to their neighbours and repeated in an exaggerated English accent, ‘Ay treeee, miss.’

  ‘Quiet, class,’ said Mrs Johnson. ‘No, Miles, there may be a tree round the corner but that is not what we have to be so careful of. Class, what is it that is waiting round the corner that we have to watch out for?’

  ‘Trouble, Mrs Johnson.’ The First Grade spoke with one voice. ‘Trouble.’

  ‘That’s right, class. Miles, it’s trouble. When we go outside and we walk along we must always be on our guard because we know that trouble is lurking right round the corner, and if we are not on our guard it will catch us.’

  This seemed a puzzling attitude. Half the fun of living in Tehran was finding out what was lurking around the corner.

  First Grade was not a success. I had already learned multiplication and division while First Grade was engaged in cutting up bits of coloured paper. I was taken out of the American school and enrolled ultimately in the British school. This was a much more comfortable and familiar place. To start with its sixteen pupils wore the right clothes.

  Language was not the only reason I felt different at the American school; I dressed differently. Or rather they did. The boys, and indeed many of the girls, wore jeans or long khaki trousers. In my world six-year-old boys did not wear long trousers. Even my nine-year-old brother Michael was not yet in long trousers although he had informed me that he expected to be so next term. At Stubbington, he told me, you wore short trousers until you were five feet tall. Indeed, most of the grown-ups I knew did not wear long trousers any more than they had to; at the first opportunity all the English adults I knew shed their long trousers and got into shorts.

  The American children wore jeans on their bottom halves. These were far too hot for Tehran, and I was glad I did not have to wear denim. And what they wore on top was even odder. Most of them did not wear shirts but turned up to school in vests with round necks and funny short sleeves. These vests – or so I learned from Billy, who after his initial hostility became a temporary friend although the friendship may have been based more on mutual curiosity than a feeling of genuine liking – were called tea shirts. I never found the courage to ask Billy what their vests had to do with tea. The answer was likely to be obvious and I did not like the thought of being on the receiving end of Billy’s ‘Aw gee, Miles, whaddya mean why is this a tea shirt? Don’t you know anything?’

  It was not that the Americans could not afford to dress properly. I noticed that the ones we got to know in Persia had far more money than we did. What I found really bizarre about these tea shirts were their colours. All my underwear was white and my outer garments were grey, blue or khaki. I certainly had nothing in yellow or red. But the tea shirts came in all kinds of bright colours, the jazzy effect often compounded by patterns. I had not previously come across white people wearing bright colours. For people of my age to go to school wearing long denim trousers with a brightly coloured vest on top was to me far more outlandish than the fact that most Persian men walked around the street wearing pyjamas. At least the pyjamas were in sensible colours or discreet stripes.

  However, before going to the British school it was decided I should learn French. I was duly enrolled in the Tehran lycée, a forbidding brick building in a leafy part of central Tehran. When Ma and I arrived, hundreds of children were running around the playground shouting at each other in a language more
foreign than Farsi. We were directed to the headmistress, with whom Ma exchanged words in the unintelligible language and I was led off to the appropriate class for my age.

  This was even worse than the American school. Here I understood nothing. I sat mute at the back of the class. There was one teacher for about thirty children, most of them Iranians whose French was only a little better than mine, so it was easy to avoid attention. The next day and the day after that Petrossian dropped me off, and I went to sit silent and miserable at the back of the class. To my relief school ended each day at 1 p.m.

  On the fourth day I went in through the big main gate, hovered around for a few minutes until I was sure Petrossian had gone, and then slipped out again and sauntered off to spend the next four hours wandering around by myself, dipping in and out of shops and sitting on benches reading Captain Marvel or Popular Mechanics with its detailed reviews of the latest American cars. The places I liked best were stationery shops with their fountain pens, geometry instruments, cloth-bound ledgers, blotting paper, different coloured inks, notebooks of every size, quires of stationery and above all the intoxicating smell of crisp white paper. I don’t know what the owners made of an English seven-year-old mooching aimlessly around their shops for an hour and a half but no one ever bothered me.

  I would return to the lycée just before one o’clock and stand by the gate waiting for Petrossian.

  ‘Good day, Mr Miles?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Petrossian.’

  After a few days of this I came up with another scheme. ‘Tomorrow is a school holiday,’ I announced to Ma.

  ‘Oh really? Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I couldn’t understand what they said but one of the Iranian boys who speaks some English told me. It’s a special saint’s day.’ This worked well so I tried the same trick a few days later. ‘Ma, we’ve got another holiday tomorrow. It’s Republic Day, I was told.’

  ‘Are you sure, Mileso? They seem to be having an awful lot of hols.’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  Later that day Ma took me with her on a shopping trip. We met an Iranian woman who Ma knew.