Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘Would that be wise of him? Mr Mohebzada isn’t happy to see his wife in such despair. I do not think we should judge without knowing.’

  ‘If you mean knowing Wahab, I’m afraid these fellows are all the same.’

  ‘Sofi isn’t the same as Abdul, and they’re both Afghans. And you think so much of your students.’

  ‘In your opinion then, Wahab is doing it all for love?’

  ‘He may be, Harold.’

  ‘No.’ Moffatt stubbornly shook his head. ‘I’d like to believe it, darling, but I just can’t. If he really loved this woman, he wouldn’t let her come out here. He knows the conditions. You’ve seen Mrs Mohebzada. You’ve heard her.’

  ‘Yes. I agree she is very unhappy.’

  ‘Wahab must know of such cases. According to Josh Bolton, who’s made a study of them, there must be at least a dozen in Kabul at this moment. There was the Frenchwoman who did kill herself.’

  ‘But no one knows why, for certain.’

  ‘Everyone has a good idea. No matter what his own intentions may be, Wahab’s intelligent enough to realize that all the pressures are against him. Unless he’s a very strong-minded character he’ll pretty soon give in to them; and nice though these Afghans are, in many ways, you wouldn’t call them strong-minded under pressure.’

  ‘Love can make a mind strong.’

  ‘What about Mohebzada? Didn’t he love her, to begin with? For that matter, to be fair, doesn’t he still love her?’

  ‘Yes, Harold, we must be fair. He does love her, I think. He was very distressed; they were both weeping.’

  ‘Afghans weep easily, Lan. The point is, he crumpled under the pressure. I’m not blaming him. God knows in the same circumstances I might not do any better myself.’

  She smiled down at her plate.

  Outside, the boy’s piping suddenly became merry.

  After a long pause Moffatt said: ‘So I’m going ahead to persuade him to leave her at home.’

  ‘You will be the first of the pressures, dear.’

  For a moment he felt angry; then, smiling, he put his hand on hers. ‘What should we do, Lan? Wint, as I’ve told you, thinks we should mind our own business. You don’t think that: if anybody’s unhappy or in trouble it’s your business, and I love you for it. But what should we do?’

  ‘We should talk to Mr Wahab, yes, but with open minds; or better, with minds prepared to sympathize.’

  ‘Of course we sympathize.’

  ‘He may surprise us, Harold.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, we may get the feeling that in him at any rate his love for his wife will truly resist the pressures.’

  ‘And if we do get that feeling, do we stop interfering?’

  ‘We do not stop helping.’

  ‘But how can we help, Lan? We can’t even help Mrs Mohebzada. We could pay her fare home, but she’d have to go without her baby, which she won’t do. Surely the best way to help Miss Johnstone is to prevent her from coming.’

  ‘We can befriend Mr Wahab; we can let him see he is not alone in his struggle, if there is to be a struggle; and, most of all, we can welcome Miss Johnstone when she arrives.’

  ‘So you think we should do nothing to stop her coming?’

  ‘What Mr Wint suggests should be sufficient. Mr Pierce-Smith is a warmhearted man. I think he will do his best to dissuade her if he feels she will not be equal to it. You see, Harold,’ she added, with that smile which even to him was inscrutable, so deep a humour did it reveal, ‘even if I were to live in an Afghan house of mud, in a compound of other such houses, and there were many relatives daily troubling me, and there were many restrictions and suspicions, and if I were very unhappy, I should still prefer it, if to escape from it were to lose you. It may be that it is the same with Miss Johnstone and Abdul Wahab.’

  Moffatt smiled too, and for a few moments they were silent.

  Then from somewhere outside, a donkey began to bray its prodigious, prolonged disgust.

  ‘Unfair comment, don’t you think?’ murmured Moffatt.

  ‘Not so unfair, darling,’ she cried, laughing.

  Abdul came rushing along, to see if it was his proud blancmange, of a peculiar purple colour, that they were laughing at. When he saw it wasn’t he went away, hardly assuaged, and left them laughing louder than ever.

  When they began to talk again it was about the kebab dance to be held soon at the International Club to celebrate the opening of the swimming pool.

  Four

  THE International School was in sight of the new mosque with the light-blue dome on top of its high pillar. Proximity to godliness did not here, alas, guarantee cleanliness. Near the school, at a corner no one claimed, was a dump where the servants of all the houses around about threw the daily refuse, including soup cans and hens’ heads. The flies and bluebottles that buzzed there were well fed, numerous, and aggressive. Close by too, making the place a hygienist’s nightmare, was one of those peculiar Afghan public lavatories, consisting of a niche in a wall, with no door, where only the passer-by’s sense of propriety or his disgust kept the shameless squatter private.

  Mrs Mossaour, principal of the school, had protested to every quarter she could think of, using her husband’s influence with the Government which he was adivising on financial matters. She claimed that owing to her energetic complaints the matter had once been mentioned by the king himself. No doubt all those dignitaries and officials, if they could, would have got rid of those abominations to convenience the school; but apparently they could not. In the same way most of them would have liked to abolish the laws whereby a murderer was handed over to the victim’s family for public vengeance, or an Afghan woman would be arrested by the first policeman if she appeared without a shaddry. They seemed to be helpless in the grip of tradition and also of that something else, national pride perhaps, which, not quite so powerful in the poorest, made them all resent their country’s role of beggar on the world’s high road, receiving alms from opulent America and designing Russia. It might well have been, as had been argued more than once at meetings of the Board of Governors of the school, that a small outcome of that national resentment was this inability or refusal to remove dump and jakes from the precints of the school that served most of the foreign community. No Afghan or Russian child attended, but children of twenty other nationalities did.

  Since the nuisances could not be removed, removing the school itself had been considered. Unfortunately, money was sometimes so scarce that teachers’ salaries fell in arrears, and a great deal was invested in improvements to the rented building. Besides, it would not have been easy finding a new site that was central and salubrious. So in the end Mrs Mossaour, tall, stout, fair-haired, and Junoesque, had had to decide, prompted by her dry-witted husband, that there was after all educational value of some kind in those vile stinking heaps. They kept the pampered children of the West aware that here was no suburb of Washington or London or Paris, but the unprivileged East; and no doubt the parents too, usually the ambitious mothers, who drove their offspring up to the gate in expensive cars, appreciated the lesson.

  When the Moffatts arrived that afternoon they noticed, among the cars outside, the red Hillman Minx of Bob Gillie, the British Consul. Though he was the British representative on the Board of Governors, he was seldom known to visit the school itself. He had no children, and took every opportunity to advertise the advantages of being so unshackled; but perhaps he thought that the sight of some hundred and fifty of them, of all sizes and various colours, would be too poignant a test of the sincerity of his reiterated satisfaction.

  In the compound the children were playing before the bell rang to summon them in. English was the language of instruction, with French the subsidiary, but during play others, such as Swedish, Dutch, Javanese, Hindi, Urdu, and Polish, could be heard, shrilly and on the whole amicably commingled.

  As Moffatt and Lan walked along the paved path toward the building, a number of children, catching si
ght of her, came scampering up in affectionate glee. She was their Art teacher and the best disciplinarian on the staff. Classes, rebellious with others, were not only biddable with her, despite her daintiness, but also eager to work. Yet she never so much as raised her voice. As a result she was a favourite with the American mothers, who all shared the belief that a sharp word to Junior in his impressionable and mystical childhood might leave him unadjusted till he attained gray hair.

  Now this clamour of welcome had all the rowdy competitiveness taken out of it by a smile and a few quiet words.

  Mrs Mossaour and Gillie, seated on the veranda in front of the principal’s office, watched the enchanting scene. The Consul, with grunts of wonder, took a brief holiday from fidelity to his own gray-haired, so English wife, and imagined himself married instead to this small, fragile, fascinating Chinese woman from Indonesia. One of the consequences, and by no means the least, of that exchange would have been that his love of clothes, of fine materials and splendid colours, would be fully indulged, at any rate in the exciting privacy of their home; for he could not see this small beautiful princess of a woman going off into Muriel’s shocked giggles at his experimenting with underwear of mauve silk.

  Mrs Mossaour’s thoughts were not so fanciful. She was thinking what a pity it was that Lan, so marvellous with children, might find having a family of her own difficult, if not unattainable, because of the narrowness of her pelvis, but chiefly because of the narrowness of her husband’s views on race. Harold Moffatt, outspokenly liberal, had not deceived Mrs Mossaour, who was the mother of children not the same colour as herself. Moffatt still had in his throat the pride she long ago had swallowed and found after all easily digestible. There were still times, though, when attitudes like Harold Moffatt’s, outwardly for and inwardly against, revived a little of her former anguish and made her wonder bitterly by what freak of nature or quirk of God her son and daughter were darker even than their father. Sometimes, in her bath, she would sit and brood over the whiteness of her breasts and belly; these, like Harold Moffatt, were traitors.

  Mrs Satti, Indian, sultry in a sari of crimson and gold, came out and rang the hand bell. When the playground was empty at last, she remained on the veranda, clasping the bell and gazing along to where the Moffatts had joined the principal and the British Consul, as if she were minded to glide up to them. They were aware of her half-intention and knew its reason. A move was afoot to force her resignation. In a letter to an American parent she had mispelled three words, and other examples of her lack of scholarship were being gathered. She maintained, in her quick, singsong, priestess’s voice, that it was not her bad spelling which was the trouble but the colour of her skin. Counting her, there were three Indian teachers at the school, too many, she contended, for the Americans to stomach. Behind her in the classroom her class was raising a din and probably causing damage. Why should she hurry in to subdue them, when Mrs Moffatt, not white either, was calmly hobnobbing with the principal, while her class too waited? That it was quiet and getting on with the work she had set them to do, did not, in Mrs Satti’s opinion, alter the case.

  At last, however, she went in. No diminution of the hubbub followed.

  ‘She’s lost heart,’ said Mrs Mossaour. ‘It’s been most unpleasant for her.’

  ‘I know Howard Winfield tells me John Keats couldn’t spell,’ said Gillie. ‘But I do think a schoolteacher ought to be able to. Why doesn’t she just resign?’

  ‘I’m not keen that she should, at any rate not till the end of the session. Her contract doesn’t expire till then. If she insisted we’d have to pay her salary, and of course the salary of the teacher replacing her would have to be paid too. That’s to say, if we could find a suitable replacement. After all, even if she can’t spell “believe”, she does have a degree.’

  ‘Indian, I believe?’ said Gillie, with a grin. ‘So, apart from other considerations, you could do with this Miss Johnstone to strengthen your staff?’

  ‘I certainly could. But not, of course, at the expense of the poor woman’s happiness.’

  ‘I hope you do not mind my waiting?’ asked Lan. ‘My class knows what they have to do. You see, I wish to meet Mr Wahab.’

  Mrs Mossaour glanced at Moffatt. ‘By all means, Lan. You know how much we respect your judgment.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have Miss Johnstone on your staff for long,’ said Moffatt, ‘if she married Wahab.’

  ‘How d’you make that out?’ demanded Gillie. Regarding this probable marriage his own mind was open. When Mrs Mossaour had telephoned him that morning he had agreed to come to this interview for two reasons: first, he had been rattled by that silly – and he couldn’t help feeling, sinister – business of the empty cigarette pack in the flower bed; and secondly, when he learned that Wint and Moffatt had been discussing Miss Johnstone at length, without troubling to consult him, although as Consul he was the Embassy official who would be responsible for her, his pride had been jarred. So, though coming had been inconvenient and, to tell the truth, against his inclination, he had nevertheless come and was determined to say his proper share, though he had not yet, five minutes before the expected arrival of Wahab, decided what that say was going to be.

  He waited for Moffatt’s answer, with the appearance of a man requiring justification of a remark just uttered by another, his junior in years and position.

  ‘I’m convinced,’ said Moffatt, ‘that if she married him she’d soon lose heart so much she’d be of little use, even to herself.’

  ‘That’s a hard thing to say. You mean, this fellow Wahab would knock the initiative and spirit out of her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why? Is he a bit of a brute? Do you know about him? Has he a reputation?’

  ‘None of us has ever met Mr Wahab,’ said Lan, gently. ‘We had not even heard of him until yesterday when Mrs Mossaour showed us Miss Johnstone’s letter to Mr Lorimer.’

  Moffatt smiled at his wife. ‘It’s really got nothing to do with Wahab himself, as a person. Whether he’s a good sort, or merely a creep with a scheme for acquiring a wife for nothing who’ll keep him and his family, makes no difference. It’s the situation here that will knock the initiative and spirit out of her, as it has out of every European wife of an Afghan.’

  ‘Every one?’ cried Gillie. He knew Moffatt’s opinion of the Embassy, that, tucked away in its suburban compound, it knew little of what went on in the city. It was an absurd and impudent opinion. Gillie was sure he knew far more than Moffatt did; after all, if he didn’t, it meant he was useless at his job. ‘That’s a wide statement to make. Are you sure of your facts?’

  ‘Sure enough. Whether he’s a rebel or a conformist, no Afghan at the present time in the country’s development can be a suitable husband for any Western woman. The pressures are all against him.’

  ‘Unless he happened to be a very remarkable man,’ said Mrs Mossaour, convinced that no such man existed.

  ‘Or the woman a very remarkable woman,’ added Gillie.

  ‘No, Bob,’ said Moffatt. ‘She’d just take longer to succumb, that’s all; but in the end her surrender and degradation would be all the greater.’

  ‘You seem to feel damned strongly about it, Moffatt,’ said Gillie, with a direct glance at Lan. As he’d expected, she obviously did not agree with her husband, but unlike most wives she was contented to express her disagreement with a smile in which love for him did not aid and abet humiliation. A wife in a million, thought Gillie; and flowerlike though she was, if ardour was needed, he felt sure she had it in plenty.

  ‘And rightly too,’ cried Mrs Mossaour. ‘A wrong marriage is always hell; here, as Harold indicated, it would be hell within hell.’

  Gillie turned his heavy gaze upon her. Frequently her fitness as principal had been debated at meetings of the Board; he had always championed her, on the simple grounds that her qualifications were British. Detractors accused her of being an assiduous disseminator of news never false, but never wholly true; of fo
rming her judgments quickly, delivering with confidence, and thereafter beginning to distrust. They thought her an educator having too many ideas in her head, some alive, some dying, but most of them dead. Challenged once by the American Consul, Chairman of the Board, as to her views on discipline she had flung the gauntlet back at him. No doubt, she had said tartly, he in theory saw love as the perfect guider of children but instinctively felt that strictness was better and in practice, paralysed between theory and instinct, just left the children to grow up according to nature. It had been a devastating reply, much appreciated by Gillie, especially as his brother Consul’s own kids, all four of them, were terrors at home and away.

  Now, remembering all that, Gillie recalled that she too had married someone of different race and colour. Was she agreeing with Moffatt because both of them were actuated by the same subconscious grudge against Miss Johnstone who was about to do what they themselves had done? They would never acknowledge that they themselves had made a mistake, but there was always a danger that some unfortunate newcomer such as Miss Johnstone would produce a fiasco, giving the world a chance to hoot: ‘Told you so!’ True enough, Mrs Mossaour and Moffatt were happy in their marriages, at least so far as any outsider knew. It was an interesting human situation, but the Consul decided that he was neither subtle, nor indeed misanthropic, enough to ponder over and analyse it. Kabul, though, was full of people who were.

  ‘Here is Mr Wahab now,’ said Lan.

  The others came from their thoughts to look toward the gate. A few yards inside it, under an acacia tree in full blossom, a man was standing, with his karakul cap held in his hand as one might carry a nest containing eggs. He wore spectacles; indeed, the sun suddenly glinted on one of the lenses, giving the watchers the impression of the vividest of winks. It was rather a grotesque impression, out of all keeping with the rest of Mr Wahab’s appearance, which was of a slightly comic solemnity. He stood, for instance, with his heels together and his toes as far apart as he could get them; it was as if, in a moment, he were about to spring into some ludicrous dance of sorrow, in which the so delicately held woolly cap and the flashing lens would play parts. From that distance it was not possible to make out if, like the majority of Afghan men of his class, he were handsome, in a jejune way, with brown eyes too melting and full lips too slyly sensual.