Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  She signed herself: LAURA JOHNSTONE.

  Wint looked up. ‘I’m afraid we couldn’t employ her here. Even if she got a transfer to the Foreign Service, she’d be automatically disqualified through marrying an Afghan.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she just! Finding a job for her’s easy enough. Tom Lorimer would give her one. Mrs Mossaour would grab at any trained teacher. But neither is keen to take on the responsibility of encouraging her to come here and marry this Abdul Wahab.’

  ‘Do you know anything about him?’

  ‘Just that he’s a teacher at Isban College with a salary equivalent to between seven and eight pounds a month. It would be another case of Mrs Mohebzada all over again.’

  ‘I don’t think you can say that. In the first place, this woman’s educated, probably intelligent, and old enough surely to know her own mind. Mrs Mohebzada on the other hand is only twenty-one or so, and mentally is rather dim. I shall admit to you, in confidence, that I’m puzzled as to why a woman enjoying a good standard of living at home – she should be able to run a car and have a flat of her own – should want to come out here. Why can’t she find a fellow of her kind to marry?’ He thought, but was too chivalrous to say it, that likely she was either physically unattractive or mentally awkward.

  ‘Will the Embassy write to her, warning her of the consequences of marrying an Afghan with little money?’

  Strange, thought Wint, how Moffatt, socialistic despiser of snobbery at home and reviler of our mercenary civilization, should so hard-headedly emphasize the importance of money in this instance. It would have been tedious to point out the inconsistency.

  ‘No, Harold, we won’t write to her,’ he said. ‘But I expect we could arrange for her to see someone in London with recent experience of Afghanistan.’

  ‘Anyone in mind?’

  ‘Well, there’s Pierce-Smith. He was here less than a year ago. But of course you knew him.’

  ‘Yes, I knew him.’

  ‘You don’t sound enthusiastic, old man. From what I know of him, he’s a very sound chap.’

  ‘He’s too optimistic.’

  ‘Hardly a fault, surely.’

  ‘Here, it is. He enjoyed every minute of his time here: parties, skiing, riding, tennis; it was like a prolonged holiday. Besides, there’s a tendency for everyone to look back and remember only the pleasant aspects.’

  ‘True. And it could be, Harold, that what is recollected in tranquillity is the truth of experience, whereas the irksome present is full of petty falseness.’ Even as the thought was forming, and being uttered, he wasn’t sure whether it was wisdom or bunkum.

  Moffatt stood up. ‘It won’t do any harm to get him to talk to her. But we’ll get in touch too.’

  ‘Who are “we”?’

  ‘Lan, Mrs Massaour, and myself; and perhaps Josh Bolton.’

  ‘I was wondering if he came into it. He’s an American.’

  ‘He’s a human being, and he’s the expert on the position of women here.’

  ‘I wonder what he’d say if an Afghan went to Mississippi, say, to write about the conditions of Negroes.’

  ‘Josh would wish him luck.’

  Wint too had risen. ‘I wouldn’t get involved too deeply with him, Harold. His visa exists from day to day. He hasn’t the approval, either, of his Embassy. Give my regards to Lan.’

  ‘And mine to Paula.’

  On that wifely note they parted, Wint to sit down again and ponder, Moffatt to go out into the hot noon sun, climb into his hotter car, and drive past the long hedgerow of yellow roses, out of the large gates with the gilt crests and uniformed guards.

  Three

  AS HE motored along the macadam road from the Embassy into the city, Moffatt had to admit that he too, like Pierce-Smith, liked this country and was very happy in it; when he left, his memories, though assisted by Lan’s paintings and his own colour slides, would not be any happier. At the University where he taught English, though his classroom had a mud-brick floor, desks of unseasoned, unvarnished wood, a cracked slippery blackboard, and chalk like stone, and though the books supplied to his classes were insufficient in number and out of date in content, he enjoyed every minute of it. The students were so splendid, not so much on account of their attitude for English, though some did learn quickly and well, as on account of their dignity. Yes, he had to use Wint’s word, though by it he hoped he meant something different – their courtesy, both individual and communal, and their hospitality. He was their teacher and their friend, and he was also their guest, and their sense of fun which showed itself in many ways but especially in questions asked unexpectedly in the middle of a lecture, with the gravity of a priest, as to the precise meaning of certain four-letter words. In his attempts to avoid answering, or to give an answer in academic terms, he would be pursued with a grave, brown-eyed relentlessness. When the episode was over and the lecture was chastely resumed, he was never sure that his leg hadn’t been delightfully pulled; and that uncertainty of course was good for him as a teacher. Such episodes occurred at least once a week.

  He liked the countryside too, so that now, though he was anxious to get home to Lan, he found himself involuntarily decelerating. There were the vines at the side of the road to look at to see how the grapes were ripening; the nomad encampment with its black tents, flock of sheep and goats, camels, dogs, merry children, aloof men, and women with their faces boldly uncovered; the native village, like so many mud boxes flung down higgledy-piggledy on the hillside; the holy man’s tomb, sticks festooned with rags protruding from it like flags of humility; and the tea shop, with its brass samovar, its blue-beaded, hubble-bubble pipe, and its customers, relaxed in the shade, puffing, or sipping out of their small handleless cups, and remarking, no doubt, on the foolishness of the rich foreigner hurrying past in his small, hot, noisy car. Others, he knew, would have seen and smelled only squalor; but though he was well aware of it he felt it was more than redeemed by the mountain sunshine, by the bright green of the irrigated fields, by the trees that dripped like rain, by the tawny hills that crouched all round the great valley, the most distant eternally snow-capped, but most of all by what many called the indolence of the people but which to him, was again, dignity. Possessing it, a man in rags, with less than a sixpence in his pocket, defeated his poverty. All possessed it, so that though all, except a tiny few, were poor, poverty was never here the degradation it so often was in India or Pakistan.

  Why then, it occurred to him as a question Lan might have quietly asked, had he made such a fuss about Mrs Mohebzada, and why was he determined to make so great a one about Miss Laura Johnstone that she would be discouraged from coming here? Surely it was simply that they, brought up in England, and therefore lacking that dignity, must inevitably be degraded and made desperate by the poverty and squalor? He knew many European and American women, married to their own kind, as Wint had put it, and so enjoying an even higher standard of living than they would have at home, who hated living here and counted the days till, their husbands’ terms over, they could return to fresh milk, unboiled water, and television. At the Embassy Katherine Winn, in other things so staunch and intelligent, was an example; and the other women there, especially Mrs Rodgers and Mrs Gillie, made existence tolerable by staying as much as possible with the Embassy compound which, with its flowers and trees and houses planned in English style, had been made to resemble a village at home.

  On the road junction at the entrance to the city the policeman had moved over with the shade until he was now in a position where he could not interfere with the traffic which he was supposed to be controlling; his gestures, usually ambiguous, were now merely somnolent. Under some trees ghoddy drivers and their horses dozed together, sharing the flies. This was the new part of the city, Shahr-i-nau, and many of the houses had been especially built to be let to foreigners. The main street leading to the new mosque was tarred, but most of the side streets, though wide, were of mud, dusty but tolerable now in summer, but in the spring wet season
and the snowy winter, quagmires or ponds. Every street was unnamed and unnumbered, and had at its side the ‘jowey’ or open ditch, which was a complicated means of diverting water from the river into the gardens, but which was frequently used as a dump for rubbish, including, it might be, a dog poisoned with someone’s sly gift of strychnined liver.

  Every house had its high compound wall, in some cases of plain mud, in others of painted mud-brick and wood. Inside, the gardens were usually a pleasant surprise, with grass, flowers, and fruit trees. The gates were kept locked, with a variety of bells, from up-to-date electric systems to nests of tin cans dangling on a wire behind the door. One rang, by pressing the button or, more often, by tugging the piece of wood attached to the wire, and waited until the door should be opened an inch or two, and a pair of suspicious brown eyes, surmounted by a turban or karakul cap, should inspect you, beam if you were recognized, or cloud over if you were not. If you knew the language fairly well you could be admitted quickly, but if your Afghan was as pidgin as the bacha’s English, he might entertain himself by exasperating you for about five minutes before reluctantly letting you in. To add to the difficulty some foreigners kept large fierce dogs which the Moslem servants themselves neither liked nor trusted. Yet crime in Kabul was surprisingly rare, at least as far as it affected the foreign community. A house might be burgled, or a woman whose face, arms, legs, and neck were too provocatively bare might be attacked by some fanatic during Ramazan when tempers were touchy. But generally most foreigners were left in peace, thanks, according to some, to the innate hospitality of the people or, according to others, to the ubiquity and brutality of the police.

  To reach the street in which he lived Moffatt had to pass a small bazaar consisting of a few shops: a baker’s, with the word ‘Cacks’ proudly painted above; a pharmacist’s in which the latest drugs, obtainable only on prescription in Britain, could be bought freely; a furniture maker’s, with labourers outside sawing by hand a great beam of wood into thin boards; and a post office where the regulations were printed in French and the attendant was so Afghan that a customer might have to wait until he had completed his prayers.

  On one side of Moffatt’s street was the public park where on holidays hundreds of men and youths gathered to fly kites. Now on the grass some shrill small boys were kicking a football with bare feet. A number of men slept under trees, undisturbed by the wailing, from the café in the centre, of Indian and Afghan love songs, which went on all day from morning till midnight. Twice Moffatt, unable to sleep through the gigantic ululations, had telephoned the café to request that the volume be turned down. The apologetic owner had agreed, and had obliged, at least for the next four or five minutes. Moffatt had once rushed across to protest in person, only to find that the fault was not the café owner’s, but that of his wireless set, which was so old and defective that the volume control pleased itself – turn it down, and two minutes later it was up again, louder than ever. The solution, the owner had charmingly hinted, was for him to get a new set; unfortunately he could not afford to buy one; if Moffatt had one to spare, then both of them could so easily be made happy. The other solution, to turn the set off altogether, would have meant depriving about ten thousand people of free music; it was unthinkable.

  Outside Moffatt’s gate a small boy squatted, playing a pipe; about him were his six skinny cattle, grazing on the grass that grew in and around the ditch. He grinned in neighbourly fashion at Moffatt and resumed playing. When Sofi, the small zealous bacha, came running to open the gate, he at once shouted to the herdsboy to take his beasts away from Sahib’s door, as their droppings caused a stink; but his shout was more comradely than hostile, and he would have been offended if the boy had obeyed him. Indeed, it was more than likely that after lunch, with the dishes washed and the other chores done for the time being, Sofi would come out, squat beside the boy, and chat with him about country matters. For Sofi too, not so long ago, had lived and worked on the land, in a village about fifty miles from the capital. In three or four years, after saving his wages and all illegal additions to them, such as his percentage of what Abdul the cook fiddled from the household accounts, he would go back home, buy a wife, live at ease while she worked hard, and then, when his wealth was spent, return to seek another job, with the help of the chitties that Moffatt and other employers had given him.

  Sofi was excited that morning. He was in a fidget to tell Moffatt about Mohebzada’s visit but was inhibited, not at all by the knowledge that as a servant he had no right to be concerned, but rather by doubt with whom he should side – Moffatt who was his employer, or Mohebzada who was his countryman. Since he could not possibly endure being left out of it, he did what he usually did, which was to blurt out whatever came into his mind, no matter how contradictory, impertinent, or unhelpful. Laughing heartily, and trying to swell his five-foot nothing into ferocity, he kept pointing to Moffatt and crying that Mohebzada was an Afghan and that Afghans were, the whole world knew, the fiercest and bravest of fighters.

  Genially Moffatt remarked that if he had any more cheek from him he would kick his backside. Far from insulted, honoured indeed, and immensely amused, for not every foreign master could speak the vernacular, Sofi held open the screen door and yelled in: ‘Memsahib, Sahib come.’

  Cool and composed, Lan came into the tiled hall to greet him. She was beautiful in her green silk, high-collared dress, and with jade combs in her black hair. To Sofi’s delight and embarrassment Moffatt kissed her, and hand in hand they went into the large lounge floored with red Afghan carpets and hung with half a dozen of Lan’s paintings of Afghan scenes. All the furnishings were Afghan except for a few ornaments brought from Indonesia.

  He had not been deceived by her composure; it was not a pretence, nor was it merely skin-deep; but it by no means meant that since sympathy or grief or love ruffled the mind – she had learned to dispense with them. He knew that if her heart ever broke, she would be calmly smiling.

  ‘So she went with him?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. She left this.’ She held out to him a snapshot that showed Mrs Mohebzada holding her baby tightly, as if afraid it might be snatched from her.

  He looked at it for almost a minute. She knew more clearly than he did himself what his thoughts were; conclusions which he was afraid to reach she went resolutely beyond. The baby was very dark, in contrast with its fair-haired mother. By gibing so bitterly against racial prejudice, Moffatt more than helped to keep it in existence; he also kept himself infected with it. His rage against poor Mohebzada was really against himself, so polluted. Knowing this his wife loved him all the more.

  ‘Did she forget it?’ he asked, handing the photograph back.

  ‘No. I asked if I could have it.’

  ‘Why, Lan? For God’s sake, why should you want this?’

  She gazed at the photograph. On her small faintly yellow face slowly appeared first a faint blush and then a shy smile. Raising her eyes, she stared at him with that frankness which could see into the secretmost crannies of his mind and yet, flushing out the shames and fears, never leave him resentful.

  ‘I do not see her child, Harold, but ours.’

  Theirs, though, had not yet been permitted to be conceived.

  ‘Whatever it’ll be like, Lan, it won’t be like that. Tell me what happened.’

  ‘Perhaps you should take your shower first. I shall tell you while you are taking it.’

  He grinned. ‘Do you want to drive our Sofi out of his mind?’

  ‘He was assuring me that when we have a child we will not need an ayah; he will look after it himself

  ‘And feed it on bazaar sweets.’

  ‘When you say that, Harold, it becomes very real.’

  ‘What about a drink?’

  ‘After your shower. One sherry.’

  Again he grinned. She was right as usual; he drank too much, out of conviviality he would have claimed, but there was another reason too. He kissed her and murmured: ‘Don’t expect her, Lan, to be sma
ll and dainty and sweet-natured like you. No, she’ll be fat and cross like me.’

  ‘He will be like you, and I shall love him more than my own life.’

  As he stood with his lips against her brow he remembered her young brother in Djakarta, who had not been like her at all, but neither had he been in any way repulsive.

  She felt him shiver and understood why.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lan.’

  ‘Why should you be sorry? I am very happy.’

  ‘This would be as good a place as any for our child.’

  ‘Any place in the world would be good.’

  What he meant was that here in Kabul, with so many nationalities and with the host nation considered unimportant, racial prejudice was not so stark or rife. One glance, even of pity, at the child would enrage and hurl him into a dejection out of which even Lan would find it hard to raise him. Both knew that this ineradicable pride blemished his love for her; often in private she shed quiet tears, and he among his friends got drunk.

  At lunch, for once, they were alone. Sofi, cheerful and clumsy, served them. Several times Abdul the cook looked sorrowfully in, to solicit and obtain approval. Outside, the café radio shrieked and wailed, and in the midst of it was the quieter, melancholy piping of the herdsboy.

  They spoke about Mrs Mohebzada and then about Abdul Wahab who, Mrs Mossaour had telephoned to say, was going to the International School that afternoon to discuss the prospect of a post for his fiancée. She had suggested it might be advisable for Harold to be present, ostensibly as her educational adviser.

  ‘I’ll be there all right,’ he said grimly.

  ‘Not to frighten him, dear.’

  ‘Why not? If it’s the only way to make him give up this scheme.’

  ‘What scheme?’

  ‘First, find a woman who’ll cost him nothing; second, find a job for her; third, live easy on her earnings; fourth, keep taming her all the time until she’s another Mrs Mohebzada.’