Cobra in the Bath

by Miles Morland

  ‘What have you got in there?’ asked Michael. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ I said. ‘You go on playing cards and I’ll tell you when it’s ready.’

  I put the bag on the ground and carefully took the lamp out, got the oil, and carefully poured enough into the lamp to half-fill it. The oil poured easily and quickly. It seemed thinner than the oil Aldo had used when he had filled the lamp and it smelled a bit different.

  Michael and Paul had stopped playing cards and were watching what I was doing.

  Finally, feeling very grown up, I got the wick out and dipped one end in the oil, making sure it got good and soaked. I laid this carefully in the grooved spout just as I had seen Franco do and submerged the other end.

  ‘There, now watch this.’

  I carefully lit a match. Tongue between teeth I leaned forward and touched the end of the wick with it.

  FFFFFWHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSHHH HHHHHH!

  A giant gout of flame shot up so high that it ignited the branches that made the roof of the camp. I must have kicked the lamp as I threw myself back away from the leaping fire as the liquid spilled and flamed all over the camp. Smoke and fire were everywhere.

  ‘Quick. Christ! You idiot. You silly bastard. Out! Get out, quick!’ It was Michael’s urgent voice.

  The heat was searing and the flames were moving fast to fill the entire space. We crawled out as fast as we could along the tunnel.

  ‘You bloody fool,’ said Michael. ‘You know what you must have put in your famous lamp?’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘Petrol, you idiot.’

  What to do now was the question. No one had yet appeared. If we could hide in some other part of the grounds, we could then reappear in a few minutes when the fire had been discovered and ask what was going on. That way no one would suspect us.

  Our plan was thwarted by the arrival of Muhammad, Franco’s head gardener, followed by Aldo. Aldo was running. I had never seen him do anything but shuffle before. They were both shouting at us, Muhammad in Farsi, Aldo in Italian. Then other people came rushing from different parts of the garden. Daud, Muhammad’s five-year-old son, with whom I sometimes played, was sent to open the gates on to the street to allow more people in to help. Aldo stood a safe distance from the fire shouting in Italian and otherwise doing nothing. Meanwhile Muhammad sent some people for buckets, arranged hosepipes, detailed others to get spades and told them to shovel earth on to outlying bits of the fire while he set up a human chain between the ornamental pool and the blaze along which buckets raced hand to hand.

  The three of us stood open-mouthed watching the flames, interrupted only by occasional snorts of ‘Bloody idiot’ from Michael.

  We escaped lightly for creating the Great Fire. Fortunately for me, Franco did not believe in people being beaten. Michael was full of tales about the daily floggings that were handed out at Stubbington, and I knew that some of my friends in Tehran got belted by their fathers from time to time, but Franco considered English boarding schools barbaric. Franco liked to treat everyone as if they were a grown-up; I never once saw him angry. He preferred to give you a talking-to.

  As a result of the fire I received my longest talking-to yet about the stupidity and irresponsibility of what I had done. Michael got an even longer talking-to.

  We were the only foreigners in Rustumobad. One day Ma took me aside after breakfast. ‘Now, listen carefully, Mileso, this is something serious.’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’

  ‘You’ve probably heard us talking about all the trouble that’s going on with the government and how unpopular foreigners are.’

  ‘Yes, I know. It’s Mossadegh, isn’t it?’

  Mossadegh did not like the Shah and was thought by everyone who came to the house to be too friendly with the Russians. Mossadegh, I heard, was also very good at ‘getting the bazaar out’. I asked Franco what this meant.

  He gave one of his conspiratorial smiles and said, ‘It’s not the bazaar he gets out, it’s the people who work there – the bazaaris, the big merchants, the people who really count in Iran. If they don’t like the government, then it’s all over for them. That’s why Mossadegh is so clever. He’s very good at getting the bazaaris on his side, and that’s why the Shah is in a difficult position. The bazaaris have had enough of him.’

  I had of course experienced the bazaaris first hand not long ago, when I had been so nearly killed in the riot which stormed past the British embassy in Tehran. After the Shah, the British were the people Mossadegh was most angry at, because we, it seemed, had all the oil in Iran. And after the British came other foreigners – the Americans, the French and the Italians. The result, Ma told me, was that Tehran was not as safe a place for Europeans as it had been when we first moved there. Every week there were stories of Europeans being attacked by mobs and sometimes even killed.

  The puzzling thing was that life seemed to go on exactly as it had before. The parties and the picnics continued. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood the whole time, and I noticed lots of new people arriving. On the days when we were in the city I would often be left to amuse myself in the Tehran Club, which Ma was still helping to run on a part-time basis. A year ago the reading room had seldom had more than a couple of people in it; these days it was packed with people, few of whom looked familiar, all talking excitedly. And despite the danger I had been told of, we seemed to go into Tehran and drive about much as we had done before. I asked Ma why this was safe.

  ‘Well, most days it is. Everything’s just as it was before. Then Mossadegh will be up to his tricks and want to stir things up and get the bazaar out. Those are the days when we have to be careful and you don’t want to show your face in public.’

  ‘But Ma, how do you know the days when he’s going to get the bazaar out?’

  ‘Oh, everyone knows that. The servants tell us days before. We always have lots of warning, and anyone who doesn’t listen to their servants is looking for trouble.’

  Then one day Franco, Ma and I were being driven back to Rustumobad and the main road on the way out of Tehran was blocked. There were people everywhere, spilling out on to the road, jostling and shouting. They were all moving in one direction but they were not running like the people I had seen in the demonstration outside the British embassy.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘Has Mossadegh got the bazaar out? Are we going to be all right.’

  Franco spoke urgently to Ben in Farsi and then turned to me.

  ‘No, it’s not a riot. It’s nothing to worry about as long as we keep our heads down and don’t get out. It’s Ashura. It’s a religious thing. I’d forgotten it had started. I’ll tell you about it when we get home. The next few days are going to be a good time to stay out of sight.’

  When we got back to the house and the gates were closed behind us, Franco explained: ‘Ashura is a special time of the year for Iranians. It’s really just something the Iranians do. Muslims in other parts of the world aren’t very interested in it. It all started 1,000 years ago with this man called Hussein. He was the son of Ali, who was married to Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad himself. So Hussein was Muhammad’s grandson. There was a big battle and Hussein got killed. And – it gets a bit complicated here – the Iranians think that Hussein was a very holy man and most of the other Muslims don’t. So every year, to commemorate the death of Hussein, the Iranians go into mourning, and they take to the streets and beat themselves.’

  ‘What, they beat themselves? No. They can’t do that. Why do they do that?’

  ‘I mean it. You’ll see. Look. The further away from Tehran and into the country you get, the more seriously they take all this. It’s a very big thing here in Rustumobad. That’s why you must not, under any circumstances, go outside the gates while this is going on. They get very strange while this is happening.

  ‘Come and see for yourself what they’re like. Aldo says they are going to be having a procession through the village later this afternoon. We can go down
to the bottom of the garden and have a look. But we must be careful. We don’t want them to know we’re watching. That could be dangerous.’

  When the time came, Ma and I went down to the bottom of the garden while Franco went off to find a ladder. Franco put the ladder up against the back wall of the hammam, and the three of us climbed up on to its roof. At the front of the hammam roof, on the street side, was a low crumbling mud parapet.

  ‘There,’ said Franco. ‘We’ll crawl up behind the parapet and we can crouch behind it so no one can see us. It’s got enough cracks and holes in it. We can see what’s going on through those. But Miles, please, for God’s sake, keep your head down and don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself.’

  We crept up to the wall. It seemed to me that Franco was making a bit of a fuss because what could happen to us up here, where we seemed to be completely safe? I peered down to the street below, usually empty apart from a couple of goats and a pye-dog at this time of day. But today it was packed with figures in black chadors. All the women in the village, who usually spent most of their time indoors, were standing in the street making a kind of keening noise. I could not see any men.

  ‘Franco, Franco,’ I whispered as loudly as I dared, ‘where are all the men?’

  ‘Shhh. Be quiet. Watch. It may be a little time yet. Just wait.’

  Minutes passed. I was getting restless and wanted to stand up.

  ‘Is anything going to happen? Are they coming?’

  ‘Shh. Listen.’

  The women’s keening had risen in tone, but there was another noise coming from the Tehran end of the road. It sounded like shouting, but it was not like anything I had ever heard before. It sounded like ‘Ya-ya-ya.’ Then I saw them. Almost jogging up the hill came a long stream of men. They were naked apart from white cotton loincloths – no shoes, nothing on their heads, their chests and backs completely bare. At first I could not see what they were doing; they seemed to be shouting and chanting and waving their arms in the air. Most of them were holding things.

  As they got closer I could see that many of them had whips. These looked like the cat-o’-nine-tails that I had seen in pirate books, short handles with lots of whippy strands attached to them. They were chanting, ‘Ya-ya-ya,’ and bringing the whips down on their backs. Others were holding knives or pieces of glass, which they were using to cut themselves. They were clawing at their chests with them, and the blood was running down to their legs.

  There were children in the procession, some younger than me, naked to the waist and cutting themselves. And grandfathers, men in their eighties, were stumbling along, chanting, ‘Ya-ya-ya,’ in strange mad voices while slashing themselves till the blood ran.

  ‘Franco, what are they saying?’

  Franco bent towards me, careful not to show himself above the parapet.

  ‘“Ya Hussein, ya Ali.” They go on chanting it over and over again. Shhh now. Watch.’

  The procession was going right past us. The nearest men were no more than six feet away from us. I crouched as low as I could and peered through a crack in the mud parapet. Their eyes were wide open and looked like glass. Everyone stared straight ahead with trance-like glazed eyes. I felt that they were so distant that we could have stood up and shouted and they would not have noticed us. ‘Ma, Franco, look. It’s Muhammad. It’s Muhammad.’

  There, naked but for his loincloth, eyes of glass, flecks of foam on his face, terrible cuts in his chest from which blood was coursing down, the whip rising and falling, thwickthwick, on his back and his arms, ‘Ya Hussein, ya Ali,’ was Muhammad, our gardener, the one who had so coolly arranged things on the day of the fire.

  And next to Muhammad was Daud, his son. Daud was like me, a shy boy, but I considered him my friend. He even spoke a little English. He and I had had several rather formal conversations with him saying politely, ‘You like Rustumobad?’ and me replying, ‘Oh yes. Rustumobad very good. I like.’

  Daud was a year or so younger than I. He was moving with a jerky sort of jiggy step like someone doing a strange dance. His lips had froth on them as he shouted, ‘Ya Hussein, ya Ali.’

  A few days later I saw Daud in the garden. It was as if Ashura had never happened. Muhammad and another man were calmly clearing a blocked drain near the gatehouse when the little door set in the main doors opened and Daud stepped over the lintel to come in. He was carrying what looked like a small wooden tool, which he handed to his father, who thanked him and continued with his work.

  Daud was wearing the loose-fitting robe that all the boys wore. It covered his body down to his ankles so I could not see the state of his chest. I wondered how his mother had treated his wounds and whether she had put dressings on them. I had a picture of his chest covered with a hundred pieces of crossed sticking plaster.

  Daud saw me looking at him and gave me a little smile.

  ‘Salaam alekhoum, Master Miles.’

  ‘Alekhoum salaam, Daud.’

  ‘You are good?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Daud. How about you? You good?’

  ‘Yes. I good.’

  ‘Good.’

  I longed to ask him if I could have a peek. I wondered if he knew I had seen him. But before I could think of how to ask him to show me, he gave me a shy little wave and scampered off through the still-open door into the street.

  10

  Cars and Boats and Trains and Planes

  I was upset that Franco had got the 1951 Chevrolet with the normal boot on it rather than the racy-looking one whose back ran in a straight line from the roof to the bumper. I never knew what this style was called. I called it slideback and I thought it was the smartest thing I had ever seen on a car. It was a feature of several of the new models; Oldsmobile, Buick and Ford all had models available with it. Franco did not share my passion for cars, nor did he appear to have my knowledge, gleaned from hours of hard study of Popular Mechanics or from looking at the new car advertisements in magazines which grown-ups left lying around such as the New Yorker or Time.

  The reason I liked the New Yorker was the advertisements. There were four types of advertisement I liked. First there were the ones for cars. The cars looked sleek and elegant; they whispered their glamour at you from the page. Everything shone, while their lines, particularly those of the 1951 models, were smooth and streamlined. They also looked enormous. I did not have to look at too many New Yorkers before I realised that there was a trick involved here.

  Every advertisement featured the new De Soto or Packard or Pontiac parked, gleaming, starbursts of light reflecting from its chrome trim, on a raked gravel drive in front of a white, porticoed, suburban house. Round the car stood a group of people, rapturous smiles on their faces, silent as the Magi in admiration. They were either a married couple with two children or four adults, two men and two women, with the men looking knowledgeably at the outside while the women gazed open-mouthed at the roominess of the well-appointed interior. But something was funny about the people in New Yorker advertisements. They were tiny. Even the men stood hardly taller than the door handles. I knew from looking at real people standing next to 1951 cars that a grown-up could look over the roof of a car without standing on tiptoe. The people in the advertisements could hardly see into the back seat. Of course the effect of these shrunken people was to make the cars look enormous.

  These were my favourites. Then came the ocean liner advertisements. Ships the size of skyscrapers sliced through the water and across double-page spreads of the New Yorker: the majestic Queen Mary, the world’s largest ship, with her three funnels, and her sister ship the Queen Elizabeth with just two; the liners of the Union Castle Line, the Durban Castle, the Edinburgh Castle, plying their trade from London to Cape Town and back; the mighty P&O ships, which I had gazed on in envy so often in ports on the way out to India and back, where they dwarfed our humble ships of the Anchor Line (no advertisements for the Anchor Line in the New Yorker); the elegant ocean greyhounds of the French Line, whose advertisements showed can
dlelit dining rooms and chandeliered ballrooms; and all the other continental lines, the Holland America, the Norwegian Line, even Spanish and Italian companies. I had done my share of ocean travelling on the Cilicia and the Circassia, but they had no chandeliered ballrooms, no slim, elegant men in double-breasted suits talking to high-heeled women with cigarette holders over a cocktail at the bar. Travelling on these New Yorker ships was something to dream about.

  Next came the airlines. New airliners were being introduced in 1951: the mighty DC-6 to replace the DC-4. The biggest, and only, plane I had been in was the Dakota, or DC-3, which had brought us from Isfahan to Tehran. That had been the most exciting trip of my life, but the Dakota, with its little tail-wheel sitting on the ground, was tiny compared with its distant descendant the DC-6, which in the pages of the New Yorker was so big it seemed to tower over airport buildings. But the DC-6 did not have the skies of the New Yorker to itself. Even bigger, more powerful and the most beautiful piece of machinery in the world was the new Lockheed Constellation. Surely it was impossible for aviation to advance beyond this. Instead of the straight, masculine lines of the DC-6, everything about the Constellation was smooth and flowing, almost feminine, with the top of its graceful fuselage flowing back from the cockpit in a long curve, for all the world like a horse’s neck.

  The mighty Pan American World Airways, in its light blue livery, was the champion of the DC-6; against it was the bright modern red of TWA and its fleet of super-sleek Constellations. They were not the only planes that caught my eye in the pages of the New Yorker. Pan Am had the most exciting of all planes, the giant Stratocruiser, which it operated on the Atlantic route and down to glamorous places in South America like Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. These were so big that they had an upstairs and a downstairs. They had beds where you were tucked in for the night; they had dining rooms on the lower deck where you sat at tables laid with white linen while elegant stewardesses in crisp uniforms poured you champagne. I yearned to fly on a Stratocruiser, to be tucked up in bed at 14,000 feet, as the mighty Pratt & Whitney engines throbbed on through the Atlantic night.